by Paul Ernst
He squinted sourly at me with that one, and I said, “Last night you told Ryan that you’d come to the Fifty to get a story for your column. You said that Checckia had called you and said he might have an item for you. You went back to his office—at an awkward moment for such a trip—and he told you the story hadn’t jelled yet, but to stick around. He said it was—or would be if it developed—about a ‘night club entertainer and a dame.’”
Bohr nodded, eyes sharp and businesslike now.
“You told Ryan that you never did get your story, and had no idea what it was about. That was true?”
Bohr bristled. “Certainly it was true.”
I spread my hands placatingly. The pompous little ass! “What I meant—You get around a lot, and I was wondering if any previous knowledge you had picked up might have given you a hint of whom he was talking about.”
“No hints. No notions. ‘A night club entertainer and a dame.’ How many thousand entertainers are there in New York? How many thousand dames, from sixteen to sixty, who might get tangled with one?”
“There aren’t thousands of entertainers working for the Club Fifty,” I said. “And this would be a dame with a name.”
“You have some idea who Checckia might have meant?” he shot at me.
“None whatever. That’s why I’m bothering you.”
“But there was a diamond mixed up in it,” he murmured. “A large and valuable one. Insured by your company.” His nose twitched like that of zoo cat confronted by fifteen pounds of horse meat.
“Yes. Though that has nothing whatever to do with the murder of Rose Rosslyn.”
“Oh, of course not. ‘An entertainer and a dame.’” Bohr made little tents of his fingers, tip to tip. “Of course the story still may break, in spite of last night. Checckia still may give it to me—though I’d imagine he would keep his mouth shut quite tightly for quite a long time in view of what has happened.” He grew surprisingly genial. “If he does talk, you want me to tell you who he names? Is that why you came to see me?”
“You catch on quickly, Mr. Bohr.”
“That’s my job,” he said. “Agreed. I’ll get in touch with you if Checckia talks. Now…”
“Now I’ll be on my way and stop taking up your time. I know you’re a busy man. And thanks, in advance.”
“Don’t mention it.” Bohr waved and bent to his typewriter again, as if that were to be his taskmaster for several hours.
I got my hat from the servant, and the moment the door had closed behind me I ran for the elevator. It was down and I didn’t bother ringing. I took the stairs, going down five flights faster than you—or I, till that moment—would have thought possible.
The light was flashing on the lobby switchboard when I skidded around the corner from the stairs, and the man who had tried to keep me from phoning up to Bohr was just dialing a number. He looked up in annoyance as he concluded, and then looked with no annoyance at all at a twenty-dollar bill I waved at him.
I touched his headset and he stared at the bill, and there wasn’t a soul in the lobby to witness what went on.
He took the bill, I took the headset.
“Gar!” came Bohr’s excited, high-pitched voice. “Herb. That story you dragged me over to hear last night—damn you!”
Checckia’s voice came, smooth, innocent. “What do you mean, damn me? I had it in mind to do you a favor—”
“You had it in mind to use me as a club,” said Bohr furiously. “You’ve done it before, in other cases. The Swadeneir divorce, for one.”
“Now, Herb…”
“You think I’m dull-witted? I can put two and two together. The Keppert diamond turns up last night. What do they call it? No matter… And Ellen Keppert is there. And she was the one the diamond was ‘stolen’ from, or was in on it in some way. And you have this story that may break.”
“Now, wait a minute, Herb…”
“Ellen Keppert is the dame you meant. The entertainer? There’s only one good candidate around your crummy little joint. Larry Mansfield.”
“Herb, you’re off the track en…”
“You’ve got the goods on Keppert and Mansfield. You made her bring the diamond… Why, hell, you even had Allen Siltz there to examine it for you, make sure it was the real thing and not a paste replica. Was he going to buy it, too?”
“Herb…”
“Ellen brings her diamond or I get the story. That’s the threat you use with her. And whose patsy does that make me? It won’t work, chum.”
Checckia’s voice was no longer smooth. “Listen, you little bastard, if you print anything about Ellen Keppert and Larry Mansfield you’ll be the sorriest…”
“I won’t print anything till I get some facts, of course. You can provide those later, sweetheart, when the hunting season is over. In the meantime, I want in. You understand?”
The light winked out. Bohr had hung up. A light on an incoming line began winking savagely. Checckia was trying to call Bohr back. It kept on winking, the fellow at the switchboard kept on plugging in Bohr’s number, there was no answer.
I nodded to the recipient of my twenty, and went my way. I had fairly well proved who was the blackmailer now. Checckia. For the moment at least I ruled Howard Denham out; I couldn’t fit him and his ten thousand dollars in at all, so I let him lay. It was all Gar’s, as I’d been kindly informed by Bohr.
It was entirely incidental that at the same time I’d sent the columnist haring off after the wrong “entertainer” to fit the “dame.” I hadn’t had any idea of trying to help Ellen when I went to see the man. Had I? A girl like that?
Thinking of a girl like that, I went into a drugstore and latched onto a phone booth after trampling on several elderly women and clergymen to get it.
“Miss Ellen Keppert,” I said, when I’d got my number. “Ellen? Sam Cates. May the Home Protection Company buy you a dinner tonight?”
She came down Forty-ninth Street looking like the answer to Why is Man? She walked like dancing, with her shoulders back and her arms swinging with her stride. She didn’t have on a hat tonight, and her hair was free and caught the light in its undulations. She was smiling a little, and her upper lip revealed a flash of nice clean whiteness.
“Hello, Home Protection Company,” she said, coming up to me. Several nearby males stared as if considering invoking the Sherman Anti-trust Laws against me.
“Hello, Duysberg,” I said.
She laughed and took my arm. “Oh, forget the diamond. You got it back, didn’t you? And how’s your head tonight?”
“You can hardly see the lumps,” I told her. If she was a jewel thief, she was shore a cool and purty one. “Would a frail little thing like you go for a steak?”
“Try me. When you see the way I snap at one you’ll probably move to an adjoining table for safety’s sake.”
We went to Stearns’, a block away on Third. They have steak thick enough to shoe an elephant and tender as a bride’s glance. The place has linoleum for tablecloths and unless you’re known you have to wait an hour to get in, and it’s so noisy that you could plot to assassinate the President and not be heard at the next table.
I was known, so we got in. We fought our way through blue smoke to a corner table, and I ordered wine. They don’t serve hard liquor; you come to Stearns’ to eat.
Ellen fluffed out the tail of her suitcoat and touched the nape of her pretty neck to make sure no hair was out of place, and smiled at me again. As if she rather liked me. I hoped she did. I hoped she liked me enough to talk a little…
“Penny for ’em,” said Ellen.
“You’ll get ’em for free,” I said.
She leaned her elbows on the table and leaned her chin on the laced backs of her hands. She batted her eyelashes at me. “Gee! Go on. I can hardly wait.”
“Steaks first,” I said.
The steaks came, and Ellen had an appetite as healthy as the rest of her. We ate and we conversed. I told her about my job, and how I’d come to get it. Sh
e told me about herself.
Seemed she was—not the poor relation, exactly—but at least the poorer one. Her father, Senator Keppert’s brother, had been the one who stayed contentedly white-collar while the other one went first into law and then into politics, winning for himself a lot of fame and a fair amount of fortune. Nothing overwhelming, I guess; it wasn’t till he married the second time—Beatrice Salsbury—that he’d moved into the ranks of the really wealthy.
Before then Ellen’s mother had died and then her father, with her uncle taking her into his home and life. She’d been eleven, then, and he had treated her like his own daughter, Marylin.
“Beatrice later was just as sweet,” Ellen said. “What Marylin has I have, too, if I want it. I’d do anything for Beatrice.”
Including stealing her diamond, I thought, trying again to steel myself against this winsome delinquent.
“What does she think of this Rosslyn business?” I asked.
Ellen winced. “She—wonders. No, Home Protection, not about the diamond. But why I was at a place like the Fifty at any time, let alone on a night when someone is murdered.”
“She’s not the only one,” I said. “I wondered, too.”
She glanced sharply at me—“You mean you did wonder, and don’t any more?” I took a bite of steak and said nothing.
“I believe Beatrice suspects I went there with Howard Denham. Which is why she wonders. After all, Howard is Marylin’s man.”
“And you didn’t even know Denham was going to the Fifty last night.” I nodded.
“Why—no—I didn’t.”
I shouldn’t have looked at her; it threw me off.
“Uh—what’s your idea of Denham?” I asked, trying to get impersonal again. “I mean, for Marylin. Think he’s a nice Joe?”
“I know he’s a nice Joe. He doesn’t ring that certain little bell for me, but I like him very much, and Marylin loves him to pieces, and I thing she’s a lucky girl to get him.”
“Oh?” I looked at the menu for dessert for us, and, still looking at it, I said, “Why was the base off the mermaid?”
“What?” said Ellen, puzzled. Then she smiled. “How you do skip around, Sam! You mean the little figure I wanted to get from Rose?”
I nodded. “Peach cobbler all right?”
“Peace cobbler sounds fine. Why, I think Rose took the base off because it was bulky and ugly.”
“And because it had Sea City, New Jersey, on it?”
Ellen stared. She’d quit smiling.
“Want to tell me any more about the mermaid? And Dick Rosslyn? And maybe Denham?”
She moistened her lips. “I’ve told you everything I…”
“Ellen, I went to Sea City today.”
She kept looking at me, eyes guarded by their long dark lashes.
“I talked to the proprietor of the Sea City Ledger, who printed the story of Dick’s death last year, and who mentioned in it that a woman had been seen around with him before the smash-up. I talked to a man named Marvin Bailey, who runs a roadside inn called the Ring and Rose.”
“Why should I be concerned with…”
“Bailey wasn’t saying anything. He could have been paid not to talk, or threatened, maybe. Anyhow he was keeping very quiet about a place called the Crescent Motel. So I went to the Crescent.”
The waiter was at our elbow. “Peach cobbler,” I said. And Ellen watched my lips move and then looked at the waiter and the way he slid the menus under his arm when he went off.
“The man at the Crescent definitely had been scared. Maybe paid off, too, but certainly scared. Especially when I asked to see the registration cards for last June.
“So it seems Dick Rosslyn met a girl at Sea City last year, or went there with her. They rented a motel cabin and for a week were together except for a few hours evenings when he danced at the Ring and Rose. Then he died. Quickly. The girl got out of there. In the absence of anyone to give orders, Dick’s things were sent to his sister at the Fifty. Or maybe just to ‘Manager, Club Fifty.’ There were some pictures and stuff, and Checckia got hold of them. Since then he has been blackmailing the girl. The last demand was a lulu—for the Duysberg diamond.”
“You can’t prove any of this,” said Ellen, voice oddly small and breathless.
I shrugged. “Probably legal proof could be picked up without too much trouble. But it doesn’t matter. Unless it ties in with Rose’s murder. Then it would matter a great deal.”
“I—I’m sure it doesn’t—”
“I’d like to be the judge of that myself. Ellen—you were the girl with Dick last June?”
I saw the pulsebeat in her white throat, and then the slow, painful color came, washing up over it and over her face. And I was undone. I didn’t care what the facts said; I didn’t care about anything but how I felt. And that was that anything this girl might have done must have had a good reason for it. Maybe she’d planned to marry Rosslyn, and his death interfered. Maybe she’d taken the diamond to try to protect her uncle rather than herself.
It would seem that she had done a furtive thing. But she was not a furtive kind of girl. That was all I knew.
“Aw, baby,” I said, “don’t look like that.” I think I felt worse than she did. “I’m not trying for an indictment, I only want some information so I might be able to help…”
“I’d like to go home now, if you don’t mind, Sam,” she said.
“If you’d just tell me a little…”
“Please. I’d like to go home.”
I took her home. There was a lot more I wanted to ask—but I told myself that slow tide of dull red had answered enough, so I took her home. I didn’t seem to have good sense where this girl was concerned; certainly I lacked what is laughingly called resolution. Whether a few future events might have been changed had I been tougher with her, I don’t know. Probably not.
9
IT WAS still quite early; too early for the musicians to have got to the Club 50—till nine or so the joint just served dinners. I got Dodge Duffy on the phone.
“Cates?” he said. “Oh, yes. Cates. Buzzing around last night. Ryan’s sidekick.”
I said I wished I was. Then, “I called to ask—who’s the fellow sitting next to Barkasy on the orchestra dais? The hot trumpet player.”
“Not too hot,” said Duffy. “Name’s Hallwig. Bob Hallwig.”
“Where does he live?”
“Why?” said Duffy.
I counted ten. I guess it wasn’t enough. “Because I want to take flute lessons from him. Goddammit, a civil question ought to get a…”
“Okay, okay.” I could fairly see him run his fingers through his crowning glory. That wavy hair—how he loved it. “I just don’t want him to turn up late tonight, that’s all.”
The address turned out to be that of a faded hotel not far from where I was phoning. Robert Hallwig was on the fourth floor and I went up without announcement from the desk. I heard stirrings behind the door when I tapped, and then it was opened and the trumpet player looked out at me. He was in tuxedo pants and shirt, with the black tie around his neck but not tied yet. His trumpet case was on his bed, closed.
I had only half-noticed Hallwig last night. He was a tall, cadaverous individual with fingers ten inches long, and he’d sat on the dais as if half-asleep until time to lift his horn. Then he had come to life.
“Yeah?” he said. He stepped indifferently back to his dresser and started tying the black bow tie as I came in.
“Sam Cates,” I said. “Insurance adjuster. I was at the Fifty last night.”
He nodded, and tied the bow with the expertness of long habit.
“Nasty bit of business,” I said.
He looked at me via the mirror. He was slicking his hair back now. He had a thin spot on top of his head. This was deftly covered by hairs left extra long.
“It put you fellows in something of a spot. As witnesses, that is.”
He ground out a cigarette that had been smoldering in a tray on
the dresser top, and lit another.
“Did you know Dick Rosslyn, the dancer who got killed in an auto accident last year?”
He turned to look at me this time. His eyes were dull to the point of apathy, but not lacking in intelligence. “You have a right to ask questions?”
“Not police authority,” I admitted. “But investigating is my line, in a way. And I have reasons for wanting to see this cleared up.”
Hallwig stepped to the chair over the back of which hung his dinner jacket. He put the coat on and faced the mirror again while he shrugged into it.
“I knew Dick, a little. Not at the Fifty—he crashed before I got chained to Duffy’s galley bench—but at a couple of other places. He was a good dancer and a nice guy.”
I was disappointed. I’d wanted to ask if Hallwig had any idea whether the dead dancer’s effects had been sent to his sister or to Checckia. I asked anyway.
Hallwig picked up his trumpet case. “If Dick had stuff at the place where he was working when he got killed, the manager there would probably just send it to his former place of employment. Chances are he wouldn’t know any other address to send it to. Except maybe Dick’s agent. If he had an agent.”
I nodded and said, “To change the subject a bit—this guy, Barkasy, the bull fiddle player who sits next to you—”
“Ah, the sixty-four-dollar question.” The dull, indifferent eyes stared into mine. “Anyhow, I guess Ryan would call it that.”
“Ryan?”
“He asked it of me this morning. For about an hour, in a dozen different ways, but all the same question.”
“All right, I’ll ask it, too. Did Barkasy, at any time you know of during Mansfield’s number or the Misses Club Fifty number, leave the orchestra and go back down the dressing rooms corridor?”
“No,” said Hallwig, settling a black Homburg on his long, narrow skull. “He did not. And I would have known, since I practically rub elbows with him.”
“You’d swear to that?”