The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

  We tried to plan for the various possibilities. We couldn’t stop the action too soon; unless the killer actually made an attempt, we would have no proof to give the police. The desk was solid oak and had a well that the Professor could quickly dive into. Several brawny men were positioned nearby; one behind a strategically placed screen. And it would help that there were no real customers; anyone that came in that the crew didn’t recognize was probably an enemy.

  Brass and Sandra and I went to hide in a little office in the wall to the side of the Professor’s desk. It was the original director’s office of the defunct firm, and had a one-way glass window. As long as we kept the lights low, we could look out but no one could see in.

  * * *

  It was two hours before he showed up, and then we almost missed him until it was too late. Perhaps we were so cocky in knowing that it was all a stage setting, that we forgot that other people can play parts. He was dressed like a Western Union delivery boy, with freckles and black horn-rim glasses and a shock of red hair sticking out from under his Western Union cap. He sauntered in and sauntered toward Andrew Cuttingham’s desk, and we thought nothing of it because we did have a phony Western Union boy in the crew. Our Western Union boy was out getting coffee, but we didn’t realize that.

  It was Brass who spotted him. “The shoes!” Brass yelled, “Patent leather!” And he was out of his seat and at the door in one dive. I scrambled behind, not sure where I was going or why, as Brass leaped for the desk.

  The Western Union boy was pulling a revolver—one of those great big old long-barreled .44s—out of his belt as everything turned to slow motion, and I felt like I was charging through molasses, unable to move fast enough to grab him before he fired.

  The Professor was under strict orders to dive under his desk, but he dove across it instead, his hands grabbing for the gun. There was a deafening boom, and a spurt of flame, and the Western Union boy was down, with Brass and two other, larger men on him, and the Professor was holding his hand to his chest and looking surprised, and the blood was spurting out from between his fingers.

  The Western Union cap was pulled off, and the red wig, and the glasses, and lying there, under a coat of stage makeup and artfully applied freckles, was a quiescent K. Jeffrey Welton.

  The Professor sat and said, “Goddamn!” Sandra was at his side, opening his vest, pulling off his bow tie, unbuttoning his shirt.

  “You’ll live,” she told him, “you old idiot. But I’d better get a bandage around that.”

  21

  I went into the men’s room and pulled the roller towel from the wall and cut off the part that had been used. Sandra used the clean part to wrap the Professor’s chest. The bullet had grazed the right side of his chest, but hadn’t penetrated, and once he was wrapped and the blood had stopped flowing, the Professor insisted that he was fine. But Brass and Sandra both insisted that he go to the hospital by ambulance just in case, so he acquiesced. Two burly policemen appeared from somewhere and took charge of Welton. Brass stuck the revolver in a paper bag, and suggested that we take it and Welton right Uptown to Inspector Raab, and the cops agreed. Since they were without a squad car, we used the Professor’s large black Lincoln Town Car, which was parked at the curb. Welton was completely silent for most of the ride, but as we pulled in front of the station house he broke out laughing.

  “What’s so damn funny?” one of the cops barked, and if he hadn’t I would have, although I don’t think I would have had as effective a bark.

  “I was just picturing my brother Edward’s face when he hears about this,” K. Jeffrey said, and then he clammed up again.

  Inspector Raab looked surprised for the first time since I’ve known him when we came through the squad room door with a handcuffed Welton in tow. “What’s this?” he asked.

  Brass explained, and handed Raab the revolver-filled paper bag.

  “Very good, very good,” Raab said. “It’s okay, boys,” he told the two precinct cops, “we’ll take it from here.” They saluted and left, and one of Raab’s detectives escorted K. Jeffrey over to the holding cell.

  “Where is Mary?” Brass demanded.

  Welton smiled through the bars. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “You might as well tell us where she is,” Raab said, “Make it easy on yourself.”

  Welton laughed. “Oh, come on, Inspector,” he said. “What possible interest could I have in making it easy for you? In the fullness of time, I might have a few things to tell you about my brother, Edward, but about myself, nothing.”

  Raab growled.

  “Foxy will know,” Brass said. “And he might be interested in escaping an accessory to kidnapping and murder rap.”

  We left Welton smiling in his cell and headed to the theater. Foxy was behind the ticket window in the lobby. “Well, gentlemen?” he said as we approached. “Mr. Welton is not here yet.”

  “And he won’t be,” Raab said, reaching through the bars in the ticket window and grabbing Foxy by the collar, “but we can arrange for you to join him if you like!”

  “What the hell—” Foxy reached up and tried to pry Raab’s fingers loose. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Raab let go. “You just stay there,” he said. “We’re coming around.”

  We entered the office and loomed over Foxy. When he understood what had happened, he gulped and sat down. “Murder?” he said. “The boss has been killing people? I didn’t know, honest to God!”

  “You and your wife searched an apartment in Brooklyn for him,” Brass said. “And you tried to get into a Park Avenue apartment.”

  “Sure we did. They were addresses Welton found in Mary’s handbag. So what? We didn’t kill nobody.”

  “What the hell did you think was going on?”

  “I thought he was manipulating things. K. Jeffrey is always manipulating things. Hell, the whole family is always manipulating things. Like when he got that girl pregnant, he moved her out of the chorus smooth as a greased rabbit.”

  “And then?” Brass asked.

  “And then she ran off with his money. Serves him right, I told him, for leading the poor girl on when he had no intention of marrying her.”

  “You’d better stick to that story,” Brass told him. “What about Two-Headed Mary?”

  Foxy stayed belligerently silent.

  “Talk!” Raab said. “You’re looking at at least a decade in Sing Sing right now, you want to try for two?”

  “Aw come on, Inspector,” Foxy said. “I didn’t do nothing. Whatever Welton did, he didn’t ask for my help.”

  “Two-Headed Mary,” Brass repeated.

  Foxy considered. “Maybe I did hear some strange noises coming from downstairs,” he said.

  “Downstairs?”

  “This place has three cellars, one below the other, that I know of. I’ve never been past the first cellar, but there might be something down there.”

  Raab took Foxy by the collar and pulled him out into the hall. “Let’s go see!”

  Foxy led the way, his patent leather shoes thumping the way down the wooden steps, insisting with each step that he’d never been down this far before, and that he had nothing to do with whatever we found down here, and that he hoped Two-Headed Mary was all right because, personally, he’d always liked the doll.

  The first cellar was full of stored costumes and equipment and flats from shows that were long since defunct. The second cellar had a collection of empty booze bottles of various types and sizes that someone had collected during Prohibition, along with rolls of rubber tubing and coils of copper tubing and two big copper kettles.

  The trapdoor to the third cellar was hidden under a couple of large boxes piled innocently near the far wall. When we moved the boxes we saw that the door had a bright and shiny new padlock on it. “I ain’t got the key,” Foxy whined. Brass found a length of iron pipe and snapped the hasp. We lifted the trap and clambered down the stairs. There was another door, a steel
door this time, with a Yale lock. A spill of light showed from under the door.

  “Mary!” Brass yelled. “Mary, are you in there? It’s Alexander Brass!”

  “It’s about goddamn time!” Came a muffled soprano bellow from inside.

  “Stand aside!” Raab ordered. “I’m going to shoot the locks.”

  “Wait a minute,” Brass said. “That’s a steel door. If you just smash the lock it might take a battering ram to open.”

  Raab paused. “Well then.”

  “Welton wouldn’t want to carry the keys around with him,” Brass said. “I’ll bet they’re around here somewhere.”

  We fished around the area for about a minute, getting our hands dirty, but didn’t find a key.

  “Don’t hurry or anything,” came the call from the other side of the door.

  “We can’t find the key,” Brass called.

  “Where’s that son of a bitch Welton?” Mary called.

  “He’s under arrest.”

  “I’ve never in my life thought that I’d be pleased to hear those words about anyone,” Mary called. “But by God it’s good to hear that!”

  Brass kept up his thumping and prodding at the wall, and finally one of the bricks jiggled slightly at his thump. He worked it back and forth until he could pull it out, and he peered into the space. “There’s a cavity, but it’s too dark to see anything,” he said. He reached into the cavity. With a satisfied “Hah!” he pulled his hand out and brandished his find. “A key!” He fit it into the lock and, after a twist, the door swung open on well-oiled hinges.

  The room inside was fitted out as a Spartan bedroom, with a bunk bed and beat-up wooden chair and table, an aged tin sink in one corner and a toilet behind a curtain in the other corner. There was also a small bookcase half-full of books and a reading lamp. Two-Headed Mary was standing to the left side of the door with a white terrycloth bathrobe clutched around her. “I warn you, I’m going to kiss everyone in sight when I come out,” she said. “And then I’m going to have a good cry.”

  * * *

  Two weeks later the excitement had died down, except in the New York papers, which were happily running stories like:

  CHORINE REVEALS LOVE TRYST WITH KILLER

  PRODUCER

  Startling Details of Love Nest Revealed

  JEANETTE WINTERS, a dancer in Fine and Dandy, the long-running Broadway show starring Sandra Lelane, is the third girl to come forward and reveal that she has had a long-time relationship with producer K. Jeffrey Welton. The attractive, long-legged blonde described for this reporter the secret trysting place that…

  We were gathered for breakfast that Monday morning in the Professor’s Park Avenue apartment. The Professor had a bruised rib and had lost a fair amount of blood, but he was healing well, and as long as the wound didn’t get infected, he’d recover with no problems. Mary and her Texan were sitting next to each other on the couch and holding hands, and it was a lovely sight to see.

  Gloria had returned from Baltimore with a letter Billie Trask had written to her friend Jemmy that pretty much told the whole story. Men who are plotting evil should remember that most girls have one real close friend from whom they have few secrets. The facts, as related in Billie’s letter, were pretty much what Brass had deduced. She had written it right before going with K. Jeffrey to visit Dr. Pangell and have her “condition” seen to. K. Jeffrey had promised to marry her in six months, but he told her that he couldn’t do it now because his family would cut him off. When the show was running in the black, and he didn’t need his family’s money, they’d tie the knot and do it right. And Jemmy, Billie promised, would be maid of honor.

  But Billie had been found a week ago under three feet of earth in Dr. Pangell’s backyard; dead, as far as the post-mortem could tell, from exsanguination—Pangell had punctured something he shouldn’t have, and they couldn’t stop the bleeding.

  Two-Headed Mary had been Billie’s other confidant. She had gone to Mary for advice when K. Jeffrey insisted on the abortion. “I told her to have the kid and leave the creep,” Mary told us. “I told her when she got involved with the creep that she was making a mistake, but she didn’t listen. Girls in love don’t listen to good advice; that’s why there are so many little bastards running around.” Mary had taken Pangell’s name so she could look him up and make sure that at least he was a real doctor. “He was real,” she said, “but he wasn’t very good.” She had stuck the scrap of paper with the doctor’s address on it in her special hiding place so she wouldn’t forget it. She didn’t bother writing the name down—she already knew the name.

  The operation had been scheduled for a Sunday. On Monday, Welton had announced that Billie had disappeared, along with the weekend’s box-office receipts. Mary went to see Welton on Thesday to tell him that she knew something was wrong with his story, and he’d better produce Billie alive and well. And don’t try anything silly, she had added, because she had deposited a tell-all letter with a friend, to be opened if anything happened to her.

  K. Jeffrey’s idea of not trying anything silly was to grab Mary and thrust her into a dungeon in the depths of his theater. He told her he wasn’t going to kill her, just keep her imprisoned until he could figure out a safe way to let her go. What he was really trying to figure out was to whom she had given the incriminating letter. She kept herself alive by allowing him to slowly drag more and more information out of her about what she knew—which was very little, but she was a past master at instant improvisation—and who the friend with the letter was.

  “He told me everything,” Mary said, refilling her coffee cup from the large silver urn. “As it happened. He told me about killing Lydia, Billie’s roommate. She knew about the abortion, which was a great shock to him, but she wasn’t sure who Billie’s seducer was. Her words: she called him ‘Billie’s seducer.’ She told him that she knew that Billie couldn’t have taken the money, and she was going to go to the police to clear Billie’s name. So he waited for her in her room, and when she came home from a date he spent the rest of the night trying to talk her out of telling anybody. She wouldn’t listen, so he killed her.”

  “And left her naked in the park?” I asked.

  Mary nodded. “You should have seen him when he told me about it,” she said. “He was so pleased with himself that he could hardly hold it in. It was about then I decided that he was probably going mad.”

  “At least he was getting used to killing,” Brass said. “He must have killed the doctor already.”

  “I guess so,” Mary said. “He carried the girl’s body into the park about three o’clock in the morning, talking to it all the way so that if anybody overheard he would think they were lovers. Then he took her clothes off and left her there all neatly arranged, or so he said. When he got back to the theater he had the bright idea of taking a set of women’s clothes from wardrobe and some identification from a purse that had been around for a couple of years and go back and plant it by the body.”

  “That’s sick!” Pearly said.

  “Was he trying to make it hard to identify her?” Brass asked.

  “I think he was trying to be funny. He laughed a lot when he told me about it. I think that was another reason he kept me alive: he had to tell someone about his cleverness, and what better than the woman he was eventually going to leave entombed in the sub-subbasement of his theater. If he closed the trapdoor, nobody would even know that there was anything down there.”

  Gloria nodded. “Like that French story—Phantom of the Opera,” she commented.

  “Except that I wouldn’t be sneaking around behind the scenes,” Mary said. “I’d be starving to death thirty feet below ground.”

  “What about Madam Florintina?” Brass asked.

  “She knew,” Mary said. “Or, at least, K. Jeffrey became convinced that she knew. She came at him with a lot of crap about birth dates and sun signs and then said something about having done a chart for Billie, and that the child would have been born in Ares, an
d she could really use the reward money, and he figured he’d better kill her. So he did.” Mary took a deep breath. “Which was when I realized that I had to do something more constructive than sit on my duff and wait to be rescued, or he’d kill off half of Broadway before he got stopped. So I called my lovely daughter.”

  “Isn’t my little Filly something?” Pearly Gates asked proudly, squeezing her hand. “She just goes and upsets this maverick’s whole scheme from that little tiny room, and she wasn’t even scared.”

  “I was scared to death,” Mary said. “But I wasn’t going to let that son of a bitch see it.”

  “How’d you get him to let you make that phone call?” Sandra asked. “I was so damned relieved to hear your voice, and then so damned scared when you wouldn’t tell me where you were and you hung up on me…”

  “Well, I finally let him work the name of my ‘friend’ with the letter out of me. I told him it was my brother, Andrew, and that if I didn’t call him once every two weeks—I would have made it once a week, but it was already more than a week since he had grabbed me—he was supposed to open the envelope and read the letter and take it to the police. I was going to call the Professor, who I knew would pick up on the tale I was telling and do something—I had no idea what—to get me out of there.” She reached over and patted the professor’s hand. “And so you did, my dear.”

  The Professor smiled. “We’ve been in tighter spots than that, old pal. Why I remember once in Cleveland—but that story will wait.”

  “But Welton thought he was wise, and he wouldn’t let me call anyone but my daughter. Who, luckily, went to Alexander Brass for help.” She turned to Brass, “That was a nice mention you gave me in your column, by the way. And thanks for not blowing the gaff.”

  “My pleasure,” Brass told her.