The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

  “And if she ever says ‘okay,’—a natural thing to say, ‘okay’—that means that everything that follows is not true.”

  “And she said ‘okay’ in the phone call.” Brass said.

  “That’s right, she did.”

  He took a deep breath. “How long has it been since you and your mom used this code?”

  “Maybe ten years. I’ve been out of the grift for about that long.”

  “You don’t think it could have been a mistake? Could she have forgotten?”

  “She said it twice,” Sandra said. “She hasn’t forgotten. She was warning me that she was about to tell me a story that I shouldn’t believe. And that means…” Sandra paused.

  “That means,” Brass finished, “that someone else was listening.”

  “Why—” I started to ask, and then stopped. It was obvious: Two-Headed Mary would only have to use the code if a third person were listening. Silly me.

  “But I don’t get the point,” Sandra said. “If she was trying to tell me something, she didn’t get it across.”

  “Well,” Brass said thoughtfully. “If you’re right, she wasn’t trying to convey information to you, beside the happy fact that she is still alive and all right. She was telling the story for someone else’s benefit. So what is it she said? You’re to find this mythical Uncle Andrew and tell him—tell him what?—that your mother is fine. That he should hang on. Hang on to what?”

  “That’s what I asked,” Sandra said. “She didn’t answer.”

  “It’s an interesting puzzle,” Brass said. “And is there anything in the conversation to give us a hint as to where she was, or where she has been? Any other coded messages?”

  “Unfortunately not,” Sandra said. “But there was one other thing—”

  “What’s that?”

  “What she said right before she hung up. ‘Take care of yourself,’ she said.”

  Brass nodded. “Yes? Sounds like a motherly sentiment. Is it another code-word?”

  “It is,” Sandra said. “We’ve always thought it was rather subtle, since it means exactly what it says.”

  “Take care of yourself?” I repeated.

  “Yes. It means that there is danger and to watch out. It may mean to flee—to get out of the situation, whatever it is.”

  “What situation?” Brass asked.

  Sandra’s face flushed and she raised her arms to the sides of her head, her hands balled into tight fists. “How should I know?” she wailed. “I’m only her daughter, why would she tell me anything?” After a second her hands dropped back into her lap and she continued in a very calm, very controlled voice: “I don’t know what’s happened to her, and I don’t know what she is warning me about. I don’t like it and I am afraid.”

  Brass pursed his lips and nodded. “There seems little doubt that it was your mother who called you,” he said. “She was trying to get you to do something, or to make someone else think that you were going to do something. And she was trying to warn you; but of what danger, and from where?”

  Brass stared off into the middle distance, his eyes focused somewhere beyond the makeup table. After two minutes of silence, he turned to her and asked, “Do you live alone?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I ditched my roommates as soon as I could afford to. A girl likes to have some privacy.”

  He rose to his feet. “Come with me!”

  “Where?” Sandra asked.

  “I want to think this out and I’m hungry,” Brass said. “We’ll go to Jimmy’s and I’ll have a steak. If you two aren’t hungry, you can watch me eat.”

  I got up and put my coat on. Eating steak is one of the things I do best.

  * * *

  Jimmy’s Chop House was a late-night bistro on 50th west of Seventh that stayed open until two or three in the morning and catered to late-night people: reporters, actors, producers, song writers, cabaret performers; all the people that the rest of the world considers “interesting” until they try to take out a bank loan.

  It was quarter past midnight when we settled into the table in the far corner of Jimmy’s. Brass excused himself to make a phone call and to say hello to Laverne Taylor, who was singing her usual mix of show tunes and the blues, sweet and low and smoky, and accompanying herself on the piano by the bar. She broke into “Hard-Hearted Hanna,” as Brass made his way back to the table, paused for a sip from the glass of bourbon she kept on the piano, and then took up “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me.”

  Brass and I both ordered a steak and fries and the house salad; Sandra went for the ris de veau, which are sweetbreads and which are a house specialty. Jimmy has a French chef for everything but the steaks. Brass got into a lengthy discussion with Jimmy about wines, and finally ended up ordering a Château Latour-Pomerol, which turned out to be a red wine from Bordeaux. Which turned out to go well with steak—or, I’m sure, without steak.

  The place was nearly empty except for a table of three near the center of the room. Two of the three were fellow writers. One was Dorothy Parker, whose early book, Enough Rope, had been one of the reasons why I thought writing might be an honorable and attainable profession. She made it look easy. It wasn’t until I tried it that I realized just how hard making it look easy was. The other was Robert Benchley, a man who found the humor in the mundane. It was only after the third or fourth belly laugh at one of his essays that you realized that you were laughing at yourself.

  The other man at the table was a stranger to me. Parker seemed unhappy: she was leaning forward with her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. The other man was talking earnestly to her. Benchley was alternating patting her on the back and sipping the highball in front of him. When he happened to look over to our table he waved and then stood up and gingerly walked over; his gait suggesting that the floor was littered with raw eggs and he didn’t want to break a single shell. Either that, or the drink in his hand was not his first.

  “How do, Alexander Brass,” he said as he reached the table and clutched onto the back of my chair for support. “Come stai? That’s Italian.”

  “Really?” Brass said.

  “Indeed. A noble language. I have been studying it. “Quei due uomini con I buoi arriveranno domani.”

  “I can see that,” Brass agreed.

  Benchley nodded. “I am leaving for Italy tomorrow. Today. On a ship.”

  “For how long?” Sandra asked from across the table.

  Benchley refocused. “Oh,” he said. “Miss Lelane. How do. You are talented and beautiful, and you can sing, too. I can’t sing. I am going to Italy for a month. Would you care to cast aside your worldly cares and accompany me?”

  She smiled. “I’d have to give two weeks’ notice,” she said. “And by then you’d have done everything exciting.”

  “Highly unlikely,” Benchley said. “I’ve never done anything exciting before. Mine is a dull life, punctuated by moments of sheer ennui.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard,” she said.

  “Rumors spread by my enemies,” Benchley told her.

  “Are you going to hole up in a villa in Como to write the great American novel?” Brass asked. “More great American novels seem to be written in Italy than anywhere else. Closely followed by Paris, of course.”

  “I am going to Italy to represent our country, if they don’t catch me at it,” Benchley explained ponderously. “I am going to give Mussolini what for. Possibly even what five. I am going to Rome to visit the Forum. I am going to Florence to chat with the old masters. I was going to Venice, but they tell me the streets are flooded.”

  “Have a great trip,” Brass said. “I expect to read about it in The New Yorker.”

  “So does Ross,” Benchley said, waving at the table behind him. “He expects some clever little travel vignettes. I told him he’d take what I gave him, clever or not, and it was a little late to worry about cleverness now. I told him if he wanted clever, he should have hired Thurber. Of course he did hire Thurber, so where does
that leave me?”

  Which identified the other man at the table: Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker; the man who published Benchley and Parker and Thurber, as well as E. B. White and Clarence Day and William Steig and Peter Arno. The man who had already sent me three rejection slips.

  “Ross is trying to talk Dorothy into taking over my job as theater reviewer while I’m abroad,” Benchley told Brass, waving a hand at the scene behind him. “She doesn’t want to. She says that a reviewer must be honest, and she’ll lose the few friends she has left. I told her, nonsense, she hasn’t got any friends, and she called me a nasty name. That’s what I get for trying to meditate-mediate-between friends. You may put that in your column, if you like.”

  “Writers aren’t news,” Brass said.

  “Thank God for that!” Benchley said, and he tipped an imaginary hat to Sandra and wandered back to his table.

  Our food arrived and we ate silently except for an occasional “Pass the salt.” Brass chewed thoughtfully and sipped Château Latour-Pomerol and stared into space. I hoped that he was doing the thinking that he had promised. I tried to do some myself. Two-Headed Mary had called her daughter and told her to give Uncle Andrew an important message. The message was “I’m fine.” We were all relieved to hear that she was fine, but why was that of particular importance to Uncle Andrew? And who was Uncle Andrew? And what was it that Two-Headed Mary had warned Sandra to be careful about? And where was she and where had she been and who was listening in to the conversation and why? It was all unsatisfactory.

  When I ran out of things to think about I took a healthy swallow of wine and a penultimate bite of steak and leaned toward Sandra. “How are your sweetbreads?” I asked.

  “Good,” she said. “Want a taste?”

  I shook my head. “No thanks,” I said. “I don’t eat anything unless I know where it’s been, and sweetbreads are a mystery to me.”

  “It’s veal pancreas,” she told me. “Occasionally they use the thymus gland, but that’s not considered as good. Don’t look surprised,” she added, seeing my expression. “I used to wait tables at a French restaurant when I was getting started. You learn things like that.”

  “That pancreas stuff might mean something to you,” I told her, “but I am none the wiser for the information.”

  She filled her fork with the stuff and offered it to me across the table. “Here,” she said. “Expand your horizons. Taste it!”

  I am not a churl. When a beautiful woman offers me a morsel of food, I take it.

  I tasted. The bit of sweetbread was soft but firm, sort of like a mushroom. The sauce was thick and tasted of mushrooms and a generous amount of garlic. It wasn’t bad. “Thank you,” I said. “I have now learned something new for the day.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “That pancreas, or possibly thymus, whatever that is, is edible,” I told her, “and that stale bread or pieces of rubber eraser would probably taste good in a thick garlic-flavored sauce.”

  She smiled. It was an effort, but she did. “It’s one of the secrets of French cuisine. That and butter and cream and veal bones.”

  “Veal bones?”

  “If you boil them for hours and hours they make a sauce.”

  “I’ll bet they do,” I told her.

  Our waiter cleared away the debris and brought three separate little pots of coffee and three dessert plates of Charlotte Malakoff au Chocolat, which is another of the chef’s specialties, and which, as Garrett says about his favorite unblended scotch whisky, goes down singing hymns.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Brass said.

  “We certainly hoped so,” I told him.

  He ignored me. “A couple of questions,” he said to Sandra.

  “Tell me about the telephone call. Try to remember what you heard, if anything.”

  Sandra looked at him thoughtfully. “I don’t think I can add anything to what I already told you,” she said.

  “Not your mother’s conversation,” he told her, “but any other sounds or noises. Background sounds or sounds on the line. Clicks, buzzes, hums, music, car noises, any cross-talk on the line; anything like that.”

  She nodded. “I see. Let me think.” She stared at the double row of autographed pictures on the wall and her brow furrowed as she tried to remember. “There were clicks,” she said. “And a fair amount of the sort of line noise that sounds like somebody is gargling in the distant background. Does that help?”

  “Probably not,” Brass said. “But the more facts you collect the better the chance of something useful being among the collection. What about when you hung up? You say no operator came on?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long did you wait?”

  “At least a couple of minutes.”

  “Did you get a dial tone?”

  “No, I never did. The phone just stayed dead. Does that mean anything?”

  “Probably that the circuit didn’t go through one of the new automated exchanges. I doubt if we can tell much from that, but it’s another item for the list.”

  “Not a very long list,” Sandra said, staring down into her dessert. “I mean, she’s still alive, and that’s something. But I wish I knew what’s going on.”

  Brass reached over and squeezed her shoulder, which she seemed to consider reassuring. “We’ll get there,” he told her. “Now let’s consider the message itself. Not as you heard it, but as the unknown listener heard it. What was she telling him? What did he learn?”

  “That I have an Uncle Andrew,” Sandra said. “Kindly old Uncle Andrew.”

  “More than that. Mary managed to convey that she has been trying to get in touch with Uncle Andrew, but has been unable to.”

  “Yes,” Sandra agreed. “And where does that get us?”

  “Patience,” Brass said. “I’m sounding this out as I go along.”

  “Maybe,” I suggested, “there’s something that she was supposed to do for this person, but it hasn’t been done, and when this person found out it wasn’t done she invented this Andrew so she could blame it on him.”

  Brass looked at me thoughtfully. “Very good, Morgan,” he said. “But I think you have it backward.”

  “Just don’t ask me to repeat it,” I said.

  “What do you mean backward?” Sandra asked.

  “I think it’s fairly clear that your mother is being held against her will,” Brass said.

  “You mean she’s been kidnapped?”

  “Something like that. But certainly not for ransom. We would have had the ransom demand long since.”

  Sandra nodded. “What then?”

  “Probably knowledge.”

  “What,” I asked, “are you talking about?”

  “I think she knows something that the kidnapper wants to find out, or else she knows something that the kidnapper doesn’t want anyone else to find out.”

  “If this kidnapper is the same person who killed the girl in the park, why doesn’t he just kill her?” I asked.

  Sandra gasped and brought her napkin to her face.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s okay. I mean, he hasn’t killed her. We know she’s alive so far. If she just could have been a little more informative in that phone call…”

  Sandra looked at me and her eyes filled with tears. She dropped the napkin and pulled a large handkerchief from her purse and wiped her eyes severely, and then wiped them again. And then she gave up and put her head in her hands and cried.

  “Very good, DeWitt,” Brass said, glaring at me.

  “No, no,” Sandra said. “It’s not his fault. He just said what I’ve been thinking. My mother is out there somewhere—out in the world—and she needs my help. And I can’t figure out what the hell she’s talking about! A hell of a daughter I am!”

  Brass patted her on the back tentatively, at which she burst into tears again so he withdrew his hand. Comfort was not what Sandra wanted right now; she wanted her mother.

  Brass stared
into space. “Every good con man,” he said speculatively, “or con woman, always has an ace in the hole. No matter what hand was dealt to Two-Headed Mary, she had that old ace in the hole to fall back on. You know that.”

  It took about a minute for Sandra to reduce her crying to a bad case of sniffles and raise her head. She wiped her eyes and her nose and took a deep breath. “That’s the saying,” she said. “Always keep that old ace in the hole. But what ace are we talking about? What’s her ace?”

  “My guess is that it’s ‘Uncle Andrew,’ “Brass told her. “I know I’m doing a lot of guessing this evening, and that’s no way to build a logical case. But one must work with what one has. This makes sense. It may not be right, but I’ll bet it’s a close approximation.”

  “What?” I asked. “What makes sense?”

  “I was just remembering what we were taught in the war,” Brass said. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

  I nodded. That was one of Brass’s favorite quotes, and he dragged it out at every opportunity. But, in this case what did it mean?

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Brass counted on his fingers. “One, Billie Trask disappears, with or without the company’s money. Two, Two-Headed Mary disappears. Three, Billy Trask’s roommate, Mary’s friend, Lydia Laurent is murdered and her body dumped in Central Park. Now, although the people are all connected, we have no proof that the events are related. But that’s where I’m putting my money.”

  “And four,” I added, “Madam Florintina becomes at one with the universe.”

  “That’s right,” Brass agreed. “That’s part of the pattern.”

  “Madam who?” Sandra asked.

  “An astrologist,” Brass told her. “She came to see us. DeWitt talked to her. Then she was killed.”

  Sandra turned to me. “What did she say?” she asked.

  “She wanted to know everybody’s birth dates,” I told her. “She was after the reward.”

  “Oh,” Sandra said. “I heard about that. All the gypsies are talking about it. K. Jeffrey and Lucky Lady offering that reward. There was some talk the show was going to close, but I guess if he can put up two thousand dollars, they must be doing all right.”