The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

I left him standing there glaring at the space I had occupied, and went back to Brass’s office. “Pearly’s here,” I said, “and he’s pawing at the ground and breathing fire.”

  Brass took a deep breath and shook his head. “I wonder what this is about,” he said. “Here—” He fished in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk and tossed me a leather sack that looked like an oversized sausage. “It’s a homemade blackjack I took away from a fellow once. Come back in with Pearly and stand somewhere close to him. If he looks like he’s about to draw his six-shooter, let him have it on the back of his head: once, not too hard.”

  I turned to go retrieve Pearly, but there he was, stomping down the hall on his own. I barely had time to stick the cosh in my belt under my jacket as he stormed into the room. “You didn’t want me to hire a private detective, did you, Mr. Brass?” he thundered, making it sound like a hanging offense. He advanced to the desk and set his hands on it, palms down, the better to lean across the desk and glare at Brass. “You were afraid of what I’d find out, weren’t you, Mr. Brass? You didn’t tell me the truth, did you, Mr. Brass?” Each time he said “Mr.” he spat it out as though he couldn’t stand the taste in his mouth.

  Brass moved back in his chair to put a little distance between himself and the angry Texan. “Sit down, Mr. Gates,” he said, speaking calmly, clearly, and precisely, spacing his words so that each hung separately in the air; a sign that he was getting pretty annoyed himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’d like to. Sit down, calm down, slow down, and elucidate.”

  Gates breathed hard for a minute, like a bull waiting for the right moment to charge, and then he abruptly dropped into the chair beside the desk. “I do not like being gulled and hoodwinked, Mr. Brass,” he said, panting to catch his breath.

  “Nor do I, Mr. Gates,” Brass told him. “Now, what’s the story? Who is gulling you, how, and why?”

  “You trying to pretend you don’t know? You must think I’m pretty damn dumb!” Gates snapped.

  Brass stared at the beefy, angular Texan. “Just what is it that you are accusing me of?” he asked flatly. “Assume, for the sake of argument, that I don’t know.”

  “You advised me not to hire myself a private detective to look for Phillippa. Now don’t say you didn’t!”

  “I did so advise you,” Brass said.

  “You admit it!”

  “I declare it. So what?”

  “Well, then, you’re part of the goddamn scheme, aren’t you? You didn’t think I’d hire myself a private eye, but I did, and now I know everything, and you might think you’re going to get away with this but you’re not.” He was talking along there pretty fast for a Texan; just a little more acceleration and he’d be about where a New Yorker is when he’s talking normally. But Pearly made up in intensity what he lacked in speed. He leaned forward on the desk, his elbows jutting out to the sides. “I ought to just call the police, or maybe I ought to just whale the daylights out of you myself!” He reached under his jacket, and I sidled closer with the cosh; but he was just going for a wad of folded-up papers in his inside pocket. He picked one stapled together set out of the wad and unfolded it and sort of hurled it the six inches over to Brass.

  “There’s the report from that there private detective agency that you didn’t want me to hire,” Pearly said. “It’s their preliminary report. You hear that? Pre-lim-in-ary. That means there’s more stuff coming.”

  Brass took the report and smoothed it out on his desk blotter. I leaned over to get a look at it. J. J. WINTERBOTHAM DETECTIVE AGENCY, read the letterhead, WE NEVER SLEEP. OFFICES IN MOST MAJOR CITIES & MIAMI.

  Pearly continued to glare at Brass, as Brass read the document. There were three pages. I was reading it upside-down and at an angle, so I couldn’t make out much of the typewritten text. Finally Brass looked up. “I hope you didn’t pay much for this document,” he said.

  Gates scowled. “Why? What’s the matter with it?”

  “It’s superficial, biased, and inaccurate.”

  “It’s wrong? Is that what you claim?” Pearly grabbed the report and held it above his head as though it was a football and he was contemplating a forward pass. “Well, it ain’t!”

  “Not entirely,” Brass admitted.

  “My Filly is a confidence trickster-and her name ain’t even Phillippa!”

  “That’s true,” Brass said.

  “So, you admit it!” Gates plopped the report back down on the desk.

  “It’s not a question of admitting anything,” Brass replied. “I thought it was Mary’s job to tell you, not mine. If she preferred to give you a—ah—gentler version of what ‘Two-Headed Mary’ stood for, why should I have interfered? The question between us, you and I, was what happened to her and where she was, not what her past had been.”

  “It says here on this paper, which I paid fifty dollars for if you want to know,” Gates said, thumping his index finger on the report, “that the woman known as Two-Headed Mary—and the Winterbotham people couldn’t find out her real name but that it’s not Phillippa—stands in front of theaters and bilks people of their money. That she really lives in Greenwich Village, not on Park Avenue at all. That she has a daughter who’s most probably in jail.” With each “that” he prodded the document again with his finger.

  “And it says here,” he added, picking the report up and shaking it in Brass’s face and then slamming it down again, “right here in black and white, that she has told so many versions of her past history that it’s impossible to find out which is the true one.” Gates picked the report up between thumb and forefinger and turned it over so he would no longer have to look at its hateful message.

  “Is that all?” Brass asked calmly.

  “All? All?” Pearly Gates collapsed in his chair, beyond words.

  “So Two-Headed Mary runs a small scam,” Brass said. “I can’t see what you’re so upset about. So she didn’t tell you. Did you tell her about the Ten Spot Oil Exploration Syndicate? Or the Grand Lacey Oil Company? Or the Mount Feather Oil Well Company?”

  There was an extended silence, and then Gates lifted his head. “Where’d you get that guff?” he asked, a slight growl in his voice.

  “Reporters love to tell stories,” Brass said. “Especially stories they can’t use in their paper. Sid Moscowitz of the Dallas Morning News knows all about you. He’s just hoping he can prove enough of it to use it some day.”

  “That sonabitch!”

  “The only difference between you and Mary, as I see it,” Brass told him, “is that you’ve made a great deal more money at cheating people out of their nickels and dimes than she has.”

  Pearly sat up, his face red. “I ain’t never done nothing illegal,” he growled, losing his grammar. “And anybody what says I did is a lying sonabitch.”

  “You mean you’ve never been caught,” Brass said. “Well, neither has Mary.”

  “Each of them companies was perfectly legal and above-board.”

  “And the fact that they all came up with dry holes, and the producing wells were somehow all assigned to the Mariposa Oil Company, which you own all by yourself—”

  “Goddamn bad luck.”

  Brass shook his head sadly. “Listen, Pearly, I have no interest in showing your less-than-honorable side to the world. Why can’t you give Mary a little slack—at least until she shows up and is able to tell it her way?”

  Gates slammed his open hand down on the desk. “Cause she’s trying to con me, is why! And I ain’t gonna sit here and be conned! And as far as I can see, you’re part of it!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Pearly fished back in his pocket for more papers and drew one out. “You don’t know nothing about this?” he asked in an inquisitorial growl, attempting to fling it across the desk. It fluttered to the floor and Pearly had to bend down to retrieve it, which ruined a fine dramatic moment for him.

  Brass took the paper and stared at it for a long moment. Then, without a wor
d, he passed it to me.

  It was typewritten. Three lines:

  If you want to see your wife again

  Get together $10,000 in small bills

  We will inform you where to deliver the money

  “When did you get this?” Brass asked.

  Gates set his face in an angry grimace. “You going to sit there and pretend that you don’t know?”

  Brass stood up behind his desk. “It sounds like you’re accusing me of something, Mr. Gates. Be precise. Exactly what is it that you think I’ve done?” he asked in the calm, measured voice he used when he was exceptionally furious. “Kidnapping or extortion?”

  “You don’t think that I think this is a real kidnapping, do you?” Gates asked. “You can’t continue to pretend that this note is real now that I know?”

  “What do you know?”

  Pearly started to blurt out something, but then he paused and took a deep breath. “Two-Headed Mary, the woman I knew as Philippa, is a confidence trickster,” he began.

  “That might be so,” Brass acknowledged.

  “And you knew it when I came up here last week.”

  “That is so.”

  Pearly thrust his chin forward. “So this whole thing is a confidence trick, and you two are in it together!”

  “Really? And just what would my part in it be?”

  “For one thing you told me not to go to a private detective, that’s what.”

  Brass leaned on his desk, his face inches away from Gates’s. “And how did we cleverly plan that you were going to come see me?”

  “You know, that piece in the paper—”

  “That piece in two hundred and six papers in the United States and Canada? I must have wanted to con you pretty badly. And all that for a cut of ten thousand dollars? What do you suppose my share will be? How many people do you figure are in on this con, Mr. Gates? All of Greater New York, or is it merely Manhattan? Or perhaps just the theater district? They all know Two-Headed Mary’s story, and delight in telling it to passersby. Or so I am told.”

  Brass sat back down, and Pearly stared at him for a long time. Or at least he stared in his direction, what he was seeing, I don’t know. “What about the money?” he said finally.

  “What money?”

  “The ten thousand. What about that?”

  “Someone’s attempting to extort money from you. Mary is missing. Possibly she has been kidnapped. If so, the note may be from the kidnapper, or it may be from someone who knows she’s missing and is trying to pull a fast one. But I’m reasonably sure that it’s not from Mary, which is what you obviously suspect.”

  “And you’re not involved?”

  “My word of honor.”

  Gates leaned forward. “Then why did they tell me to deliver the money to you?”

  This time the silence was palpable. You could have touched it, molded it, cut it with a knife. I looked at Brass; Brass looked at me. “There’s a certain pattern developing here,” Brass said, “that I’m not sure I like.”

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “Crooks using me as a go-between. Once that gets started, no telling where it will end. Winchell seems to enjoy that sort of thing, but I don’t.” He turned to Pearly. “You said ‘they.’ Who are ‘they’?”

  “The kidnappers or whatever. They called me at the hotel. Said if I wanted to get my Filly back I should give you the ten thousand dollars in small bills.”

  “You keep saying ‘they.’ Was there more than one?”

  “Well, there was just one fellow on the phone, but the note says ‘we,’ don’t it?”

  “Whoever it is just wants you to think there’s a gang. That last line, ‘we will inform you where to deliver the money,’ that was cribbed from the Lindbergh baby kidnap note.”

  Pearly thought that over for a moment. “You think it was the same guy that did that one? But Bruno Hauptmann is in prison.”

  “Whoever else it is that sent this note, it’s not the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby, whoever that really was,” Brass said. “There’s an outside chance the Lindbergh kidnapper really was Hauptmann, but they never proved it. But this isn’t related. I think it’s someone with a strange sense of humor.”

  “This whole deal is pretty strange,” Pearly said. “I guess I really never thought it was you, but I ain’t never come across nothing like this before.”

  “Tell me about it,” Brass said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Everything you can think of that might relate. How you got the note, how they got in touch with you, everything.”

  “The message you’re looking at came this morning,” Pearly said. “Stuck in my mailbox in the hotel. No envelope or nothing, just the paper folded up. It was there when I came down for breakfast. I don’t like eating in my room, so I always come down to the dining room for breakfast. Then after breakfast, when I went to my room, the phone rang. A man’s voice said, ‘Have you got the money?’ I said not yet but I can get it real quick, and some stuff about is my Filly all right and can I talk to her and like that. And he said, ‘Get the ten thousand and give it to Alexander Brass. We’ll tell him how to deliver it. Then you’ll get your Filly back.’”

  “That’s it?” Brass asked.

  “Then he hung up. It was right then that the Winterbotham man came to my room with the report. I tell you, that floored me. I thought the whole thing was a con. Then I thought maybe it was serious. I had all kind of thoughts. Maybe her meeting me and everything was a con from the beginning. Maybe she just married me for my money, you know. People do that. But she had this great apartment and everything. I didn’t know what to think. I still don’t.”

  “What are you going to do?” Brass asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know. What should I do?”

  “I can tell you this,” Brass said. “She married you because she cared about you. It wasn’t a con.”

  Pearly looked at him intently. “You sure about that?”

  “That’s the way I hear it.” Brass said. “Morgan, you heard the Professor. What do you think?”

  “Who’s this Professor?” Pearly asked.

  “A man she used to work with,” I told him. “Lives in the same building she does on Park Avenue.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Were they—”

  “Just business partners, no more,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “She told him she loves you,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “I guess I should tell you,” Brass said to Pearly. “Her daughter heard from her recently.”

  “Daughter?” Pearly repeated.

  “Yes. She’s not in prison, she’s never been in prison. She’s an actress currently in a Broadway show, and a damn good one.”

  “Oh.” Pearly thought that over for a second. “What did my Filly have to say?”

  “It was over the telephone. She sounded like she was being held captive. I think she may be in great danger.”

  “So her daughter’s an actress,” Pearly said. “Must be a cute little thing.” He dug into his jacket pocket and came out with two thickly stuffed envelopes held together with rubber bands. “Here,” he said.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s ten thousand dollars in small bills.”

  Brass took the envelopes and held them in both hands as though he were weighing them. “I should tell you that I’m not sure paying this will do any good.”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Pearly said.

  18

  Pearly was now convinced that we were fighting on the side of truth and justice, and he wanted to stay and back us up, “with fists or guns, as the occasion warrants,” but Brass convinced him to go back to the hotel and await developments. After Pearly left, I went back to the cubicle that I call an office and pretended to work, but I was waiting for the phone to ring. Gloria was at her desk, copyediting tomorrow’s column, but I warrant she also was waiting for the phone to ring. Brass pretended to read some of the out-of-tow
n newspapers he had delivered every day, but if you ask me he, too, was waiting for the phone to ring. It did ring several times, but none of the calls was from a strange man telling us where to bring twenty thousand dollars. Once I went into Brass’s office to suggest to him that it might be two separate sets of crooks, and he snorted. “Always glad to amuse you,” I said, and stalked back to my hovel.

  About six o’clock he called Gloria and me into his office. There was a pad of lined yellow paper on the desk by his side, and the desk top was littered with sheets of the yellow paper on which he had drawn intricate designs along with clusters of indecipherable words. He had been thinking.

  “I’ve been pulled into the middle of this,” he told us. “And I don’t like it. If it wasn’t that, if I’m right, Two-Headed Mary is alive only at the sufferance of a man who has lost all sense of reason and who is going around killing women, I’d turn the whole thing over to Inspector Raab right now. The next move is his, we have to wait for his call, but there are some loose ends we can clear up while we’re waiting.”

  “You know what’s behind all this?” I asked.

  “I have a good idea of who, and I believe I know some of the why, but not all—not enough. And I don’t yet know what to do about it.”

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “That will await events,” Brass told me. “You’ll know soon enough.”

  “I don’t even know what I don’t know,” I said. “Two women disappear, two other women are murdered, and three of them know each other, sort of, and the fourth is a fortune-teller.”

  “Astrologist,” Brass corrected.

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said. “If she could tell the future, how come she didn’t know enough to stay away from whoever killed her?”

  Brass shrugged. “If astrology worked,” he said, “we could cut the police department down to four strong men and an astrologer to tell them who to arrest. If the occult forces were reliably available to anyone, the world would wear a different face. But, unfortunately, spiritualism, astrology, palmistry, tarot card reading, and all the other myriad forms of necromancy must be lumped together as, at best, unproven, and their practitioners as nans, poseurs, charlatans, or bunco artists.”