by P. N. Elrod
“But for a lady, not a man. If you took a break in the work, they might have slipped in for a look. Maybe they thought you had your own secret to hide.” Wasn’t that the truth? “But when you showed the second body to a witness who helps you dig it out, they had to shut us down.”
“Which they did not.”
He was probably thinking about retribution again. I was all for it, but we’d have to be careful. “If Brogan Trucking is connected to the victim—you ever hear of Fleish Brogan?”
“No, but the name suggests a rich heritage. Fleish is German for meat, and if one is not referring to Saint Patrick’s nephew, Saint Brogan, then the surname might be connected to bróg, which is a kind of boot or shoe, leading us back to Marnucci and Sons by way of Ireland. Would the appellation ‘Meat Boot’ be some cruel joke on the part of his parents?”
“I’m getting out now. You can stop at the next corner.”
He kept driving, his mood having improved to judge by his faint smirk. “Very well, please, if you would, who is Fleish Brogan?”
“He is what the press and public call a gangster, or was the last time I heard the name. We need something more current about him than a trucking firm address or a shop where one of his dead pals bought shoes seven years ago.”
“Where do we obtain that?”
“At a newspaper, of course. I know people.”
“Good lord, do you? You amaze me, Mr. Fleming.”
“The next corner, pull over. I mean it.”
But he kept going, wearing the smirk all the way through Queens and across the Queensboro bridge into Manhattan.
* * * * * * *
* * * * * * *
The traffic at this time of night was about the same as it would be in Chicago, just more of it in a narrower space and no one stopping unless it was inconvenient to someone else. Barrett was not intimidated by the crowds. I asked him how long he’d been driving. He asked if I meant cars or carriages, because while it was appropriate for a gentleman to drive a car it was not gentlemanly to drive a carriage.
So I told him to forget it and stuck to giving directions. How Escott could stand the guy was a mystery.
It had been less than two full years since I’d last seen these streets. Little had changed about them, but I was sure as hell different. Familiar landmarks like diners and bars—lots of the latter—no longer held their original appeal. We passed the entrance of a building where I’d rented a flat, and I could not summon any nostalgia for its previous importance in my life. It was a place where I slept and changed clothes. I’d not made a home there. After Maureen vanished, it turned into a cross between a waiting room and a jail cell.
I’d spent most of my time either in a boozy fog from drinking or half blind from a skull-breaking hangover while recovering from the boozy fog. It was astonishing that I’d not been fired, but plenty of others in my former profession had been in a similar state, making it hard to pick me from the herd. I did notice when they got chosen over me to go after stories; it was always after those lunches where I’d slugged down a more than just a couple beers with my sandwich.
The way things were at my paper I could see I wasn’t going to get out of dog watch duty chained to the city desk phone without a lot more effort and cutting back on the drink. Younger, faster, hungrier kids were sweeping in and making the job look easy. I had to compete with them.
It got harder to interview people, too. I’d once been able to grab the facts concerning some luckless schmuck’s life-destroying disaster, dash off the hard news, and move to the next without a second thought.
Maureen had changed that. Being in love opens your eyes to a lot of things, including the fragility of happiness. When she disappeared, I became the luckless schmuck with my own private life-destroying disaster, and no one wanted to read about it.
One too many bad nights followed by worse mornings and even I wised up that I was killing myself. Before I was too far along and turned into a male sob-sister with a bad liver, I packed what I wanted, sold or gave away the rest, and bought a ticket out of town.
Chicago had been recommended to me as a good place to start over. It was closer to my mid-western roots than New York, and I had a few names to look up for help finding a job. I could not have predicted that I would be taking a train straight to my own violent demise or that anything good could have come from it.
Going back to my old paper felt like trying to pull on old clothes I’d long outgrown. None of the drinking buddies who’d passed for friends back then had expected anything of me. That I’d done well wouldn’t matter; they weren’t the type to offer applause.
Anyway, I wasn’t here to impress people. A few years back it might have mattered, but not anymore.
I pointed out the building we wanted, which was on the left. We were in the far right lane. “Take the next corner, circle the block, and come back on—”
Barrett gunned the motor, speeding up to pass a car, and made a surprise U-turn in front of it, hauling the wheel around sharply. The startled driver gaped as we skidded by, facing him. Barrett smiled and waved, having a whole five inches to spare between car bumpers. The other guy found his horn and cursed if I read his lips correctly, but by then Barrett hit the brakes with enough well-timed force to get the back wheels to lock and slide in the turn. The Studebaker spun sideways into a parking space, its nose pointing the wrong way on the one-way street, perfectly parallel to the curb—which we did not so much as nudge.
Damned show-off.
There’s never a cop when you want one. On the other hand, Barrett would have simply whammied—pardon me—influenced him out of writing a ticket.
“Where to now?” he asked, getting out.
I did not further startle the gawking passersby on the sidewalk by popping him one in the nose.
We took an elevator up to the city room, which was mostly deserted. Only one bored guy hovered by the phone, waiting for someone to call in a last minute story. Unless they changed the schedule, it was just a few minutes to deadline for the morning edition. As Barrett and I walked in, a sweaty copyboy ducked between us, moving as though his life depended on it. Considering the temper of some editors I’d worked with, that might well have been the case.
The bored guy was not a familiar face. He didn’t ask if I needed help, not wanting to delay his own exit. When I’d put in my time on that desk I’d also grown incurious, an undesirable quality for a newsman.
I heard the seductive clatter of typewriters coming from the small offices on the other side of the room. Those were partitioned off and had doors, but no ceilings. You could tell which ones had occupants from the cigarette smoke rising toward the lights.
“Done!” a man shouted, followed by a rattle as paper was yanked from a roller, and another copyboy bolted from the office with his prize. A moment later the triumphant reporter appeared in the doorway, lighting a cigarette in celebration. He was in shirtsleeves, but had kept his hat on. “I beat you, Izzy,” he called out to the office next to his.
“You beat Clapsaddle, not me,” a woman called back. The sound of typing continued as she spoke.
“Then Clapsaddle is going to miss his deadline.” He pulled on a coat and overcoat and sauntered out, not waiting for a reply. Just as well, none came.
Desmond Clapsaddle was the man I’d come to see. He knew more about the New York underworld than he was allowed to print, though some of his pieces read like a gossip column as he nimbly wrote his way around libel suits. His work was heavily peppered with “allegedly” and “you-know-who” and “the accused” and so forth. Most people could follow his broad hints easily enough. I’d been one of them, but that hadn’t gotten me into his circle of cronies and contacts where I could have done myself some good.
I’d not liked him much, but between the two of us, Barrett and I could get him to talk about Fleish Brogan. All it would take was a drink.
Or maybe not.
Peering in his office, I found Clapsaddle sprawled on a battered couc
h, hat over his eyes. When I breathed in to say hello, the air was thick with the ripe fumes of stale booze from his sagging mouth. He snored away with the kind of wholesale gusto that only the truly unconscious can achieve.
At his desk a pint-sized young woman hammered on his typewriter. Her round little rump was perched on two phonebooks so she could see what she was typing. The desk and chair were set up for the long bones belonging to Sleeping Beauty.
She had short dark hair, a cute figure—at least from this angle—and was focused on her story.
“Excuse us, Miss,” began Barrett, who shouldered in next to me.
“Almost there,” said the girl, not stopping. “I got another minute to deadline. . .”
She suddenly ripped the paper clear, grabbed a few sheets from a pile, and spun the chair around, holding the story out. She adjusted quickly that neither visitor was who she expected.
“Copyboy!” she shouted past us.
Another one butted in between, grabbed her papers, and shot out again.
She gave us a closer, less distracted look, fixing on me with surprise. “Fleming?”
“Hello, Izzy, how’s tricks?”
Isabelle DeLeon squealed and shot off the chair, jumping on me. In self-defense I had to catch her. She was a little thing, not more than five feet, and built light. I was afraid of breaking her and took it easy, but it was nice to be hugged like that. Out of all the people at this paper, I’d missed her.
She pulled away. “Golly, Chicago’s done you a world of good. You look younger.”
“It’s the suit, I had it ironed.”
“Some suit. When did you turn into a clothes horse? What are you doing back here and” —she aimed her bright brown eyes at Barrett— “who is your friend?” She patted her hair and stood up straighter, which did not increase her height by any significant fraction.
I made introductions. Barrett had his hat off. I’d not bothered as this was the city room. He said he was enchanted, bowed, and kissed the back of her fingers, and got away with it. Izzy was startled for all of two seconds, then took on a big smile.
“A gentleman,” she said. “Fleming, you’ve moved up in the world. How did that happen?”
“It’s a long story I don’t have time to tell. We came to ask Clapsaddle a thing or three.”
“Good luck.” She gestured toward him, then crossed her arms.
Desmond Clapsaddle’s snoring continued, unbroken by our intrusion.
“He’s not waking up tonight, is he?” I asked.
“If he runs to form, he’s not waking up till Wednesday.”
“What happened to him?”
“Some party at the Algonquin. It went on all weekend. When I walked in tonight he was like that, but left his notes on the desk so I could do his story.”
“What?”
“We have a deal. He starts a story, I finish it, and he passes me cash under the table. I’d kill for a byline, but money talks, and we all keep our jobs.”
That sounded like Clapsaddle. He could write like a demon when he was sober, but had ways to beat deadlines when he was not.
Izzy had been one of those younger, faster, hungrier kids who had come in about the time I was deciding to leave for Chicago. If I’d been less broken-hearted about Maureen, I might have asked Izzy out. Somehow that had never happened.
“What are you doing back here?” she demanded. “You can’t be looking for work if you’ve got a suit like that, and what’s with this coat? Is that vicuna?” She fingered the sleeve.
“Plain old wool,” I said. It was good wool, though. “Mr. Barrett and I are here to settle a bet.”
“Uh-huh. You came all the way from Chicago to look up Clapsaddle because of a bet? Pull the other one, Fleming, you never could lie.”
“I could pull ’em both, it won’t make you any taller.”
She was used to my cracks, and likewise I was used to her reaction, which was a backhanded swat to my chest. “Don’t sass me—ow! Sheesh, Fleming, you got on a bulletproof vest?” She rubbed her knuckles.
“Actually,” said Barrett, stepping forward, hat in hand, “we drove in from Long Island. I’ve an estate there.”
I don’t know what they called it in the eighteenth century when it came to giving a girl the eye, but that’s what Barrett was doing. He wasn’t throwing any influence on her, but he was clearly interested.
“An estate? Impressive.” Izzy returned the interest.
At some point I’d have to remind him that dating a reporter could be bad for his personal privacy. I got between them. “Izzy, if you’re covering Clapsaddle’s beat, then maybe you can help.”
“What do I get out of it?”
She was, rumor had it, from some backwoods swamp-filled southern state where fried alligator was the blue plate special, but her accent, manner, and way of thinking were now pure New Yorker.
“I buy you dinner. A nice one.”
“That’s it?”
“We buy you dinner,” said Barrett, pushing around me. ="0"A very nice one.”
“How can a girl refuse? Okay, what’s your big emergency? Let’s get the business part out of the way.”
“I’m needing current news on Fleish Brogan and if he’s connected to Brogan Trucking,” I said.
“Is that all?”
“And if he was involved with the sudden disappearance of a well-heeled man seven years ago.”
“You mean Judge Crater? He’s under the boardwalk on Coney Island. Everyone knows that.”
“That was eight years ago. This would be August, 1931.”
“It’s before I got here, but there might be something in the files. Lemme see what Clappie’s got.”
She was either highly confident of Clapsaddle’s unconscious state or had earned a place in his inner circle. No one outside it called him that to his face without collecting a shiner.
Izzy opened a file drawer with “1930-34” on the label and scrounged toward the back, pulling out a fat folder. “Here’s his stuff from August.”
She dropped it on the desk and flipped through yellowed clippings of old stories and his weekly column. A column headline popped out as she got to the bottom of the stack, and she read it aloud.
‘Graft’ Endicott—Another Judge Crater?
Naomi Endicott, wife of criminal attorney—you may draw your own sense of irony from that descriptive—Griffin “Graft” Endicott, has filed a missing persons report with the police. Her wayward husband has been gone for three weeks, and the lady is in need of butter and egg money.
According to my sources, Endicott made a forty-thousand dollar withdrawal from their joint bank account in the first week of this month, leaving his better half high and dry with whatever pocket change she could find under the sofa cushions.
The withdrawal and subsequent vanishing of Endicott follows close on the heels of his being subpoenaed by our fair city’s DA. One may conclude that this is not a case for trial but rather a case of cause-and-effect.
The famously flamboyant Mr. Endicott, who cannot stand to read a paper unless his name was mentioned in it at least twice, has not sent so much as a postcard to his nearest and dearest in all this time. It is this reporter’s opinion that if he knows what’s good for him, the jolly fellow will continue to be missing indefinitely.
Of course, I must mention that You-Know-Who, leading the pack of Endicott’s cantankerous clients, must also want an appointment with the bunked barrister; five minutes would be enough for Y-K-W to encourage him to take a long walk off a short pier.