The James Michael Ullman Crime Novel

by James Michael Ullman

  Farrar seemed on the verge of an angry reply. Then he relaxed. “That’s an astute observation. Yes, I have a theory, but I won’t voice it I don’t want you to junk your story to play detective, checking out what’s probably another dead end. You stick to Irene. Your deadline’s only a few days away now and that rough draft of yours will take a lot of revising to turn it into something I can print in Metropolis.”

  “You’re not firing me?”

  “You expected me to? Sorry, but if you leave it’ll be voluntarily. I’ve invested too much time and money in you to drop you now. Anyhow, if you revise along the lines I’ve indicated I think you’ll have a fine story. You’ve done a superb job of reporting. Just settle down and turn out a final draft that’s better balanced, with less sensationalism and more enlightenment. I’ll expect to see your final draft Monday morning.”

  “Okay.” I picked up the manuscript and rose. “Sam, this theory of yours…”

  “Do a good job, and maybe I’ll confide it to you, even if you won’t confide in me. And as for the forty bucks—okay, dammit, I’ll pay it.”

  * * * *

  From Metropolis I drove downtown and took an expressway to the South Side, exiting on a ramp into a residential neighborhood. There I circled a block, cut through an alley and turned the wrong way on a one-way street. The odds were against a squad car spotting me, and the maneuver would make it tough for anyone to follow without my noticing. Finally I turned onto a busy street, went through a red light and checked the rear-view mirror again.

  The coast seemed dear. I headed out to suburbia for another talk with Joanna.

  Joanna’s story was that she had met Irene early in November, 1951. At the time Joanna was living in a small hotel, a hangout for call girls. She was at the bar one night when Irene walked in with a fat little man in a rumpled business suit. The man left to make a phone call. Joanna, seated next to Irene, said, “Excuse me, honey. But you been working for him long?” Irene seemed flustered. Her dress was incredibly tight and in atrocious taste, and her movements were pathetically awkward.

  “No. You know him?”

  “Quite a few of us do. He runs a so-called advertising agency. How’d you meet him?”

  “I answered an ad, in a newspaper.”

  “For a receptionist, right? No experience needed, but must have pleasant personality and enjoy meeting people. Only it turned out what he really wanted was a girl to entertain customers after hours. What’s he paying you?”

  “A hundred a week.”

  “Confidentially, a girl with your attributes could do much better on her own. He’s a greedy crumb. The only reason he hired you was to cut his overhead. For what you’re doing, he used to pay some of us as much as a hundred a night.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t apologize. Honey, I don’t know why you got into this business, and if I were you I’d get out of it But if you insist on making a living this way, wise up and get what you can while you still have your looks.”

  “I’d like to,” Irene confided, “but I don’t know how.”

  Irene was sincere. Wide-eyed, the neophyte awaiting instructions, she stared at Joanna.

  “For one thing,” Joanna said slowly, “wear better clothes. For another, go to a charm school. Learn to walk and hold a cocktail glass. Then make the right connections, sit back and wait for the phone to ring.”

  “That sounds complicated. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  No, Joanna reflected, you probably wouldn’t. And any one of a thousand leeches in this town could get you in his clutches. In ten years, you’d be cadging drinks on Skid Row.

  “I meant what I said. I don’t think this life is for you. But if you’re really serious, I could give you a few pointers. Such as first, get rid of him.”

  The adman returned, rubbing his hands. “Drink up, Irene. The client’s hotel is right down the street. I’ll introduce you and then…”

  “I think,” Irene said, “I’ll stay here.”

  Joanna got Irene a room in the hotel, enrolled her in a charm school, and helped her select a wardrobe. For the next year, she and Irene were part of a small network of high-class call girls.

  Joanna had already vowed to leave the business before she was thirty and while she still had her looks. The call girls life, so easy when she entered it, revolted her now. She was afraid of winding up diseased, alcoholic and broke, and she saved her money. Irene, though, was a big spender, particularly for clothes. Her taste didn’t improve much, but at least now the clothes fit properly since they came from good shops. Irene also drank a lot and was a big eater, habits about which Joanna warned her often.

  For professional purposes Irene adopted the first name “Norma.” Joanna called herself “Mavis” then, and they both used a variety of last names, all false. As “Norma” Irene became a favorite with the ring’s customers. Opportunities for theft and blackmail abound for a call girl, but somehow men sensed that these notions never occurred to Irene, who remained incorruptibly honest. If a conventioneer passed out in her arms with a thousand dollars in his wallet, it was still there when he awoke.

  Nevertheless, despite the good money she was earning, Irene confided to Joanna one day that being a call girl was a dirty, dangerous business, and maybe she’d made a mistake getting into it. Thus she was ripe for a change when she met Nalon in a hotel hospitality suite maintained by a trade show exhibitor.

  Irene went there because instead of a legitimate model the exhibitor wanted a girl who’d go all the way if it meant clinching the deal. Nalon arrived early, sober and scowling. He declined a drink, talked business briefly and then got up to leave, but he stopped when he saw Irene. She walked in from the next room in pink tights and a brief halter, holding a tray of samples of the exhibitor’s products.

  Entranced, Nalon stared. Irene was at the full bloom of young womanhood then, with long legs, full hips, a reasonably flat stomach and large, firm breasts. Her carriage, thanks to the charm school, was regal. Every man has his physical ideal and apparently Nalon saw his in Irene. He dropped his sullen air, smiled, took her elbow and led her to a corner, where they exchanged a few words. Then Nalon walked out, but Irene spent the next weekend in his apartment. Monday morning she told Joanna he had offered to install her in the Skyline Towers, rent-free, and she’d accepted.

  Joanna tried to dissuade her.

  “You,” Irene said, “are getting out of this business yourself, aren’t you? Well, this is how I’m getting out. Ill have my expenses paid and the only man I’ll have to worry about is Gabe.”

  “Gabe,” Joanna said, “will just coop you up for a few years and then dump you for someone younger. Where’ll you be then? You’ll have such a taste for fancy things that you won’t be able to live like ordinary people. Be smart, save some money and go home, wherever that is, and meet some nice man and marry him. You’re still young enough.”

  “I can’t go home. Anyhow I like Gabe. He’s rich and important—you have to admire a man like that. And don’t worry, I’ll keep him interested in me. I’m looking forward to it, I need a nice rest.”

  Relatively speaking, Irene did get a nice rest. To Nalon, she was just another convenience he availed himself of now and then, like the portable bar in his limousine. His demands on her time weren’t great, and she could shop, lounge around, or sit in the park all she pleased. Irene liked the park, where she’d read or tickle infants under the chin while the mothers looked on.

  Joanna left the call girl business herself and spent a lot of time in Irene’s apartment, discussing her own future and trying to persuade Irene to educate herself for something, anything, so she’d be capable of earning an honest living. Irene couldn’t have cared less, but she did help launch Joanna’s career. Joanna had been looking for a little business to buy. Her only training had been secretarial and she was afraid to invest her savin
gs in a business she didn’t know anything about. She mentioned to Irene once that real estate was a good field for a woman.

  “I’ll talk to Gabe,” Irene said. “He’ll find you a job somewhere, so you can learn the business and see if you like it. I’ll tell him you’re a widow I met in the park…”

  Gabe wasn’t fooled. He surveyed Joanna and drawled, “You’re an ex-hooker, aren’t you? One of Irene’s old playmates? Well, what the hell, if it makes Irene happy I’ll go along.” He telephoned someone and placed Joanna as a secretary in a city-wide real estate firm. A year later Joanna was promoted to the sales force, and when she felt she knew the business well enough she moved to Hilldale and opened a firm of her own.

  Of course by then Nalon had dumped Irene by summoning her to his office one day, ordering her to move out of Apartment 201, and handing her ten thousand dollars in U.S. Treasury certificates.

  “Here. It’s enough to build a stake for a lifetime if you know how to use it, but that’s your problem. It’s also the last money you’ll ever get from me. It’s been fun, kid, and goodbye forever.”

  Irene was stunned. She’d become quite comfortable during her life with Nalon. Bored, but comfortable. She liked being around him and until the day he sent her packing, he’d given no hint he was tired of her.

  Tearfully, Irene poured all this out to Joanna. “Why?” she wailed. “He didn’t even tell me why…”

  “Honey,” Joanna said quietly, “look in a mirror and you’ll see why. All that rich food and booze—you’re twenty pounds heavier than when you moved in with him. Already, you’ve got a little second chin. Let’s face it, you’re not the package he bought any more, so he just went out and bought a new package. You going back to the old life?”

  “I couldn’t do that. Not ever.”

  “Well, at least you’ve got ten thousand dollars. I think that was pretty decent of Gabe, he didn’t have to give you a cent. What’ll you do now?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll think about it…”

  She thought about it for nearly two years, while Joanna nagged her to get a job and stop wasting her savings. Then Sonny Nightingale came along, and from there I knew the story all too well.

  Joanna had told me a lot about Irene’s life.

  She told me something else too. She’d seen Irene’s envelope—and something in it.

  Joanna mentioned the incident during our first interview.

  “It was,” she said, “not long after Irene broke with Nightingale. I took her for a ride in the country one Sunday afternoon. She seemed so blue that I went up to her apartment with her afterward. I glanced into the bedroom; the envelope was on the bed, with a lot of stuff strewn around it. I didn’t pay much attention until Irene ran in and began scooping the stuff back into the envelope. I got the impression there were some photographs, and maybe some letters. But one thing I did get a good look at was an old copy of a newspaper. It was the Ox River Bugle.”

  Ox River was a small town about a hundred miles west of the city.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. Irene was so secretive about her past that it stuck in my mind, a newspaper from a place with such a strange name. I asked, ‘Is that where you’re from, Irene? Ox River? And what’s all that stuff?’ She said, ‘No, I never lived there, and this is something personal I can’t discuss.’”

  “An old copy of the Bugle?”

  “Yes. It was yellow and brittle, but I didn’t see a date.”

  “Good grief. The solution to the whole case could be buried in the back files of that newspaper, just waiting for someone to find it…”

  “It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, wouldn’t it? I mean, we don’t know why she saved that newspaper. Whatever story she wanted to save, it could be about someone whose name wouldn’t mean anything to us.”

  “True, but I’m going to look at every issue of the Bugle printed until the time Irene broke with Nightingale…”

  * * * *

  The next morning I drove to Ox River and learned that the Bugle, a weekly that used to come out every Thursday, had gone out of business in 1962 when its founder, owner and editor died. A job shop bought the printing equipment and the paper’s name, circulation list and back files were acquired by the Central City Observer, a daily published in the county seat At the Observer, I was told the Bugle’s back files had been donated to the Central City Public Library. The librarian was very helpful.

  “Right over here.” She led me to a remote corner of the building. “There you are. Bound volumes of the Bugle running all the way back to 1924. The only years missing are 1949 through 1951.”

  “What happened to those?”

  “It’s the strangest thing. A man took some of those volumes to a desk to read. I turned my back to quiet some children and when I looked around the man was gone. That night I discovered those three volumes of the Bugle were gone too. He must have just carried them out.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Saturday afternoon.”

  That would have been less than forty-eight hours after Irene’s murder.

  “What’d he look like?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t see too well, and he had his back to me anyhow.”

  I started out. She asked: “Don’t you want to see those back copies?”

  “No thanks. I don’t think what I want is there any more.”

  * * * *

  The Ox River constable was a sociable old guy. We drank beer on his front porch and I told him I’d received an anonymous phone tip that Irene Bowser, the woman murdered back in the city, may have lived in or near Ox River from 1949 to 1951. He took me around and introduced me to a number of leading local citizens but nobody recalled Irene or anyone like her, either as a resident or a visitor, and after all that was a long time ago, wasn’t it…?

  I’d followed that lead as far as I could alone. Back in the city, I phoned Kells and told him I had reason to believe Irene had some involvement with Ox River between twelve and fifteen years ago.

  “Pass the tip on to Moberg,” I suggested, “either yourself or through Deuce. Take my word for it, it’s a legitimate lead, and if the tip produces results, Moberg will probably give the Express a nice exclusive.”

  “Thanks. And by the way, you were right about Jax. I called a buddy of mine in the state’s attorney’s office. He says Jax is supposed to be working on a bank swindle and that he has nothing to do with the Bowser case.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Joanna seemed more nervous than usual. As I flopped onto the bench beside her she lit one cigarette from another, tossed the old one away and asked, “Well, how did your editor like your story?”

  We were in the outdoor mall of a shopping center miles from Hilldale. Soothing music floated down from a battery of loud-speakers, and around us housewives dragged children in and out of stores. It was one of those days when a brisk wind moved puffs of cloud across the sky.

  “He didn’t. He wanted more emphasis on Irene herself, more explanation of her character.”

  “All along, I’ve told you that. The single and salient fact that best explains Irene is she was stupid.”

  “Stupid?”

  “Yes.” Grimly Joanna expelled smoke. She wore a prim blue dress and sat with her knees jammed together, one hand holding down her skirt “It wasn’t her fault she didn’t have a high I.Q. And at the end she tried to straighten herself out. She got an honest job, paid her debts and led a decent life. But it was stupid of her to become a call girl, stupid to tie up with Nalon, stupid to vegetate while Nalon’s ten thousand frittered away, and stupid to pin her last hopes for marriage and babies on a crumb like Nightingale. I warned her about him too, but a lot of good it did.”

  “Uh-huh. My editor also wants more about Irene’s background before she became a call girl.”

  “Al
l I know is she was born in Iowa. As I told you, she didn’t like to talk about it, but her parents died when she was very young and she grew up with an aunt and uncle somewhere in Missouri. They ran a lodge, and Irene made the beds and waited on tables. She didn’t get along too well with them, so she left Missouri and came here.”

  “That’s not what she told Nalon and Nightingale.” From Kells, I’d learned details of the statements given to the police by the two men who had lived with Irene. “She told both of them she was born and reared in San Francisco; and that her father owned a fleet of fishing boats and went broke in the Depression.”

  “Irene,” Joanna said emphatically, “was never in San Francisco in her life. She never saw a fishing boat either—she just wanted a glamorous history. Call girls do that. I used to say I was born in Capetown and went to Vassar. The truth is I was born in Oshkosh and went to secretarial school in Milwaukee.”

  “I guess you’re right. The San Francisco police haven’t come up with a thing on Irene. But where’d she live in the city before she met you?”

  “First, in a boarding house on Hanover Street. I dropped her off there in a cab once—she wanted to pay some back rent. But you can’t find the place now. It’s in the section torn down for the new junior college. Then she moved to a hotel at Nineteenth and State, where she lived when I took her in.”

  “I’ve already checked it—nobody there remembers her. She ever say why she took the job with the advertising man? The guy who really started her as a prostitute?”

  “No. She said she had a couple legitimate jobs here as a waitress, and always quit or got fired when the boss got fresh. I guess she was down to her last dime, but I don’t think the adman asked her to do anything she didn’t know how to do already.”

  I shook my head. “It’s the same old story. Once more her history comes to a dead end. The only decent lead is the old copy of the Ox River Bugle. The fact that someone stole some back issues two days after the murder is pretty damn suggestive. The police are still checking all the law agencies around the town…”