Curtain for a Jester

by Frances Lockridge

  “You weren’t home last night,” Martha said. “This leg of lamb I was going to do yesterday—there’s a limit to legs of lamb, Mrs. North, even in the refrigerator.”

  “I know,” Pam said. “Why don’t you take it home, Martha? Before it does?”

  To this Martha said, “Yes’m,” but over it she shook her head. Pam shook her own; this was no way to save for Florida, and only a few days left. Pam bathed and dressed, and now she could not make her mind forget murder. It was about that that Phoebe James wanted to see them, of course; wanted so insistently to see them. She took a cab to the Westminster, which is a residential hotel of some elegance. She was a few minutes early, but Jerry was not appreciably late. He looked, however, like a man who has spent a day at the office and for this, seeing Pam—who looked like a lady dressed for tea, although hatlessly—apologized mildly. He also said that it would be nice to have a little time at home, some time.

  They were announced, rode up in an elevator which (a little gratuitously Pam thought) provided a cushioned bench. They went along a carpeted corridor and rang the indicated bell, which responded musically with chimes. A uniformed maid opened the door for them, took their coats, preceded them across a foyer into a long room. Mrs. Phoebe James, who wore a black dress, and was very grave, came toward them, down the room. She’s very handsome, Pam North thought. The velvet voice said it was wonderful of them to have come. “I know I’m imposing on you,” Phoebe James said, and merely smiled and shook her head slightly when this was denied. She said that she was having tea, but that there were alternatives; said she knew most people didn’t expect tea when asked to tea; said, “Forbes keeps telling me—” and put a long-fingered brown hand up so that the fingers for an instant covered her eyes. She swallowed. She said, then, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’d love tea,” Pam North said, quickly.

  “I—” Jerry said, and just perceptibly hesitated.

  “Wouldn’t,” Phoebe James said, and suggested whiskey. Or a cocktail? Jerry, so urged, chose a martini. Mrs. James rang and they waited. She rose from a deep chair—all the chairs were deep, as the carpet was deep. The apartment inclined to wrap itself around its occupants. She walked to a window and said that they must see her view, and they saw her view, which was New York from height, lighted and so spectacular. “People are so much smaller,” Phoebe James said, and turned away as the maid brought tea, a pitcher holding more than one martini, a chilled glass. “Thank you, dear,” Phoebe James said, and looked at the tray, found it complete. “We’ll ring if there’s anything more.”

  She poured tea, then, not hurrying as the maid walked the long length of the room and out of it. She handed a cup to Pam, watched while Jerry filled his glass. She put her own cup down on a little table, and did not drink from it.

  “Forbes and I were in love,” she said, then, and spoke as if the sentence, in its simplicity, had for some time been formed in her mind. She did not look at them when she spoke, but did so immediately she had spoken.

  “It’s an odd thing to say to people who are almost strangers,” she said. “I assume a great deal. Demand a great deal.” She looked from one to the other. Then she smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t have a character say it that way,” she said. “Not so—barely. I’d write in—oh, little gasps. Little verbal gasps.” She looked directly at Jerry. “You know,” she told him. He nodded his head.

  “Only,” she said, “it was as simple as that—as final. I’m—well, I’m almost fifty.” She shook her head. “I’m quite fifty,” she said. “Forbes was older, a few years older. I’ve been married twice. And so—Forbes and I were in love. And now it’s a story I tell to strangers.”

  She sipped from her teacup, finally.

  “A story told to strangers,” she repeated. “That would make a title, wouldn’t it? Probably it has.” She put the cup down, very gently. She said, “Damn! I—I always listen to the words. It’s a trick of the trade. But I wouldn’t have written it the way it was. Lovers—they’re always young, aren’t they? In their twenties, or thirties at most. Or very dewy and in their ’teens and hesitant—so prettily hesitant, so God-damn hesitant. People in their fifties wear slippers and sit by fires, and kiss each other on foreheads and worry about the younger generation.” She stopped.

  “I’m not very coherent,” she said. “I am usually quite coherent. Your cup is empty, Mrs. North.”

  Pam looked at her cup. Surprisingly, it was empty. “It’s dry work listening,” Phoebe James said, and Pam held out the cup. As she filled it, Phoebe James’s hand was entirely steady.

  “Why did he die?” she said. “I have to know. You see why I have to know. All this was so you would.”

  “We don’t know,” Pam said. “How could we know, Mrs. James?”

  “I want—” Mrs. James said, and sipped from her cup. “I want you to help me find out. You’ve found out things like this—things about murder. You’ve—”

  “Wait,” Jerry said. “We’re not detectives. We’re just people who—” He paused. “Who know a detective,” he said. The truth, he thought uneasily, is so seldom convincing. “That’s all, really,” he added, weakening it further.

  “I’m not,” Phoebe James said, “suggesting you are for hire, Mr. North. But—I’ve thought recently I might change publishers and—”

  “No,” Jerry said. “Oh, we’d like to have you. Who wouldn’t? But—no.” He paused. “Not on this basis,” he said, and uneasily realized that, so, he left a door not quite closed. Or not, at any rate, quite locked.

  “The police won’t find out,” Mrs. James said. “Or, not if it’s a certain way. They—well, they won’t be allowed to. Unless somebody else finds out enough to make them. I’m going to find out. If you won’t help me—” She stopped. “Forbes Ingraham was your friend too,” she said. “He was fond of both of you, and he wasn’t fond of a great many people. Last night he was alive. He laughed, remember? He held that cigarette holder in his left hand and gestured with it in a certain way he had. He spoke in a certain way—used certain words. His mind was a kind of light. Today, somebody switched the light off. Like that—click—out.” She raised her teacup, but seemed not to know she had done so, and did not drink from it. “You can’t not care,” she said, and spoke very slowly.

  “It isn’t that,” Pam said. “It isn’t that at all. But, what can we do? That the police—”

  “I know a great many of the people Forbes knew,” Phoebe James said. “I know more about them than the police can ever find out—from what he said, from what I’ve seen, and listened to. Even if the police tried they couldn’t—”

  “Wait,” Jerry said. “You said something like that a minute ago. That the police won’t try. They won’t be allowed to, you said. That simply isn’t true. What did you mean by that, Mrs. James?”

  “What is your friend?” she said. “A lieutenant? A captain?”

  “Acting Captain.”

  “And over him, inspectors and chief inspectors and a commissioner, and over the commissioner—all the men who run the city. The men who sell protection, collect from the rackets. Suppose your friend is the most honest cop who ever lived. You think he can’t be stopped? Taken off the case? Sent to some sort of Siberia? So that it can all be covered up.”

  “What?” Jerry said. “What do you think they’d want covered up?”

  (Whatever we say, we’re getting into it, Pam North thought. And—she knows it. Pam considered. I guess, she thought, we’re pushovers at heart. Unconsciously, she sighed.)

  “Can’t I get some hot tea?” Phoebe James said. “Because—you’ll at least listen. I know you’ll listen.”

  “Well,” Pam North said, and looked at Jerry. “I think this time I’ll have a drink, Mrs. James. A martini, I guess.”

  The maid was rung for, instructed.

  “Have you,” Phoebe James said, “heard of a man named Matthew Halpern? A labor leader? He’s been indicted for embezzling union funds. Last night at the restaurant, he was the man F
orbes saw at the bar.” She looked at them. “You did know that?” she said.

  “We heard that today,” Pam said. “Bill Weigand told us. He’s our detective.”

  “Forbes was Halpern’s attorney. Forbes talked about it to me. Generally—about what it meant, why he got into it. Because, it was outside his usual practice, of course. His usual practice—well, it was with people like me. That’s how we met. But you know that, Mr. North. Everybody like us knew that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Halpern is being framed,” Mrs. James said. “Forbes was certain of that. By racketeers—gangsters, really—who are trying to take over the union. So they can turn it into a racket. And—Forbes has been digging into it. I don’t know what he’s found out. He didn’t tell me that. Perhaps he found out too much and—”

  The maid returned. Phoebe James waited until she had gone out again.

  “Perhaps what he found out was dangerous,” Mrs. James said. “I don’t know. If he could manage it, Forbes would have done whatever he could to break up the racket. If men like that killed him, they’ll have protection. The police will protect them. Things are done that way. If—”

  “Not,” Pam North said, “by Bill Weigand. If you think—”

  “An acting captain,” Phoebe James said. “Just an acting captain. What—”

  Chimes sounded melodiously. The maid appeared at the far end of the room, but Phoebe James said, “Never mind, dear,” and went into the foyer. She returned at once, not alone. Nan Schaeffer wore the mink still, loose on her shoulders. She was not surprised to find the Norths there. She held out a hand to Pam, then to Jerry; she maintained the fiction of a smile on stiff lips. This was prearranged, Pam thought; Mrs. James was very sure of us.

  “The four of us,” Phoebe James said. “The four of us can—”

  The office was small and bare and hot; the hot air smelled and tasted of dust. If, as charged, money was leaking from the union treasury into Matthew Halpern’s private pocket, he was using none of it to provide amenities—here, at any rate. He sat at a plain desk, in a wooden chair, on a felt pad; he was coatless, his shirt open, showing a corded neck.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, not for the first time. “You won’t get anything different.”

  His voice had harshness in it, as if it had long been strained. He had shouted, Bill Weigand thought, in too many echoing halls, perhaps too often in damp winds on street corners. Fog rasped in his voice.

  “You were there, Mr. Halpern,” Bill Weigand said. “When you heard Mr. Ingraham had been shot, you got out in a hurry.”

  “She didn’t say he was shot,” Halpern said. “Something about his being hurt. Hurt bad.”

  “All right,” Bill said. “All the more reason. You didn’t stay around to see if you could help.”

  “There were plenty without me,” Halpern said.

  Bill waited.

  “O.K.,” Halpern said. “I didn’t want to get mixed up in anything. A guy gets hurt, chances are somebody hurt him. A guy who just sits at a desk, anyway. That’s the way I figure it.”

  Probably, Bill Weigand thought, on the basis of experience. He nodded his head. He waited.

  “I’ve been framed once,” Halpern said. “It didn’t look good, captain.”

  “You think it made it look better to get out?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe I moved too quick.” He took a cigar out of the top drawer of his desk, bit off the end. “Want one?” he said, clearly on second thought.

  “Not right now,” Bill said.

  “You been shot at much, captain?” Halpern asked, and flicked a kitchen match with a broad thumb nail.

  “Now and then,” Bill said. “Goes with the job, Mr. Halpern.”

  “Yeah,” Halpern said. “Suppose it does. They tried to get me last night. Hear about that?”

  “I heard somebody did. Yes.”

  “Same pack of rats thought up this other deal,” Halpern said. “Guess they figured it wasn’t working out right, what with Mr. Ingraham in it. Figured to hurry things up.”

  “If you know the men—” Bill said.

  “Sure,” Halpern said. “Point them out and what? Twenty guys show up and say they was all playing tiddlywinks. Anyhow, I didn’t. Didn’t see them to know them, and wouldn’t have known them anyway. Just who hired them. They ain’t nice boys, captain. They’re racket boys. Somebody gets in the way—bang!”

  “You think Mr. Ingraham might have got in the way.”

  Halpern looked at Bill Weigand with eyes narrowed in his broad, roughly reddened face.

  “See that, huh?” he said. “Could be. Could be they figured he was getting something on them. Maybe he was—maybe we both were.”

  “You thought of that this morning? Thought it was a good place to get out of?”

  “Could be,” Halpern said. “No point in making it too easy for the rats. Like the fellow says.”

  Bill Weigand waited to hear what the fellow said. He was not enlightened.

  “Tell you what,” Halpern said. “Ill give you the setup. You want to listen? Can’t make you believe it, but you want to listen?”

  “Well,” Bill Weigand said, “that’s what I came for, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t, Halpern said, have to take his word for it. But this was the way it was—did the captain know much about the union?

  “Go ahead.”

  It was a union of men who weren’t particularly skilled. They didn’t get the wages of skilled workers. They got better wages now than they had ten years ago. That was about all anybody could say. Halpern had helped organize the union, he had been its president for the past ten years. “I make a little more than the boys. Not a hell of a lot more.” The union was, now, affiliated with the Federation. It had a contract; it had another contract coming up for negotiation. “We’re getting the squeeze, the way things are. More than most.” But to take the squeeze off, to bargain for what they could get, that was what the union was for—what Halpern and the other officers were paid for.

  Since the signing of the previous contract, they had slowly been building up funds to be used if, the next time, they “had trouble.”

  “What these newspaper guys call a ‘war chest,’” Halpern said.

  The money came slowly, out of low wages. It hadn’t built fast; it wasn’t large yet.

  “Year ago, maybe year and a half, these rats tried to move in. Wanted to get a shakedown going. I knew it and some of the others. Some of the boys they fooled—got ’em believing I was too old for the job, not tough enough with the bosses. That sort of crap. Trouble was, they didn’t get enough of ’em thinking that. So they pull this frame.”

  A shortage appeared in the union funds. Halpern did not deny that; he admitted he could not put his finger on the men responsible. He admitted, too, that they had made it look bad. “Looked like I’d been milking the fund. Misappropriation of union funds, they call it. Grand larceny, the indictment says. They hang it on me, they get me out, they take over.”

  Forbes Ingraham was representing Halpern. He had men going into it. He—

  “Wait a minute,” Weigand said. “Why Ingraham? It’s out of his line. Didn’t you know that?”

  Halpern had not, he said, known anything about Forbes Ingraham, one way or another—not at first. Ingraham had got in touch with him, indirectly. “First I thought he was just a shyster. Kind of ambulance chaser, like the fellow says.” But he had asked around; learned of the status of Schaeffer, Ingraham and Webb, gone to see Ingraham.

  “Figured when I saw the setup it was way out of line for us. Where’d we get that kind of money?”

  But he had talked to Forbes Ingraham. And, he had been told to forget about the fee.

  “Seems like he just didn’t like rats,” Halpern said. “Said New York was his town and he didn’t want rats taking it over, and you had to start somewhere. Funny sort of guy, wasn’t he?”

  “No fee at all?”

  “That was his idea. I couldn’t
see it that way, so he says, all right, we could make it a hundred bucks.”

  “He was getting places?”

  But Matthew Halpern shook his big, gray head at that. He said, “Nope,” to that.

  “You mean he wasn’t?”

  “What I mean, captain—why tell you if he was? See what I mean? These guys are in the rackets. So, they got protection. I don’t say anything about you—far’s I know you’re an honest cop. But—you see how it is. If we got anything, we wouldn’t want to tip anybody, would we?”

  “I think you’re making a mistake, Mr. Halpern.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mr. Ingraham’s dead.”

  “Yeah. The firm ain’t, is it? I don’t know where I stand, but could be we can pick up the pieces.”

  “If the pieces are around, these ‘rats’ you think killed Ingraham didn’t get anywhere, did they?”

  “Listen,” Halpern said. “I don’t know who killed Ingraham. Maybe some babe got jealous. All I know is what I was doing there. That’s what you wanted to know, ain’t it.”

  “Right,” Bill said.

  “O.K. I got there about eleven, maybe a few minutes after. This dame went in to tell Ingraham I was there and comes running out, saying he’s hurt. I left. I wasn’t out of that place you wait in.”

  “Not then,” Bill said.

  Halpern looked at him.

  “Mr. Ingraham probably was dead when you went in,” Bill Weigand told him. “Probably had been for fifteen minutes or so.”

  Halpern stood up behind the desk. He was a very big man; he had been a powerful one. He still was powerful enough.

  “You getting at something?” he asked, and the rasp was rougher in his voice.

  “There is another way into the offices,” Weigand said. “You didn’t know that, Mr. Halpern?”

  “Through the—” Halpern began, and stopped.

  “Right,” Bill said. “Through the other office-the one Mr. Schaeffer occupied before his death. You did know about that, apparently.”