The Bronze Mermaid

by Paul Ernst

  It had hit the morning papers after I had talked to Ryan in Barkasy’s room last evening. Two suspects arrested in what the boys had begun to call the Club 50 murders. Edward Barkasy, and Robert Hallwig.

  There was a lot of space used up, because the two murders had got much play before, but there was not actually a great deal in the accounts. Lieutenant Ryan, of Homicide, had booked these two as material witnesses. Nobody pinched as yet actually for murder. Ryan hadn’t told too much, but there was a feel in it. You knew that Ryan thought he’d got somewhere.

  Ellen had, of course, read all she could about it. I’d read and reread, and then had gone to Ryan, who reluctantly imparted some information, so I was a couple up on her.

  “What has he got on them, Sam?” she asked. “Do you know?”

  “He has quite a little on them,” I said. “Particularly Barkasy. But nothing that I’d call conclusive. And I guess nothing that he would, either, or he’d have charged Barkasy with murder and quit fooling around.”

  I told her the story as I’d got it from Ryan and also as I’d been able to fill it in for myself.

  “The room that was torn up. Barkasy’s. You read about that, and about the smashed bull fiddle?”

  She nodded.

  “The fiddle was important. Rather, its position on the floor, and what was over it, were important. I noticed myself, and got the same hunch Ryan did, but I didn’t follow it out as far as he did. Score one for Ryan.”

  “What was its position and what was over it?”

  “It lay near the window, between Barkasy’s dresser and closet, front down, with the bashed-in back staring up at you. Over the neck of the thing had been thrown at random two of the mess of shirts tossed around the place, and over these a topcoat from the closet.”

  “So?” said Ellen.

  “Whoever broke into that room thought he knew definitely two things: what it was he’d find—and where he would find it. In the bull fiddle. He went right to it, like a homing pigeon, and looked there. He was positive it would be there. And it wasn’t. He got so furious he slammed the fiddle down and put his foot through the back, partly to make sure that in looking down through the f holes he hadn’t missed what he was after, but mainly because he was so damned mad. After that he started through the rest of the room, dresser first (shirts on top of the fiddle), closet next (topcoat on top of the shirts), drapes and furniture last. I don’t think he ever did find what he was after. Neither does Ryan. But the indication that the fiddle was the first thing in the room to be searched, points the finger squarely at Barkasy’s moon-faced noggin.

  “Barkasy, Ryan points out, sits right next to the curtained doorway at the Fifty. He can’t help seeing anyone going backstage. The rest of the orchestra can see, too, if they happen to be paying attention. But Barkasy can’t miss. He’s like a doorman.

  “Now. For about a year you have been coming occasionally to the Fifty and going back to see Checckia. From the start, Barkasy must have been curious. You are not the type to frequent the Fifty, nor are you the type to get chummy with Checckia back in his office. Pretty soon Barkasy remembers seeing you at least once with Dick Rosslyn… You did meet him there, didn’t you?”

  Ellen looked at her hands. “There were several meetings.”

  “Okay. Barkasy doesn’t have to be a mental prodigy to catch the idea that Checckia has something on you and Dick. Something pretty priceless. Something big enough for blackmail. This is a juicy plum and Barkasy wants it but doesn’t know how to get it.

  “Comes the night when Rose Rosslyn walks in looking furious and shaken, and goes directly to Checckia’s office. She tears into Checckia, having just learned from your phone call about the mermaid how Checckia has been using her dead brother’s name. It was then, Ryan thinks, that Checckia, knocked off-balance by Rose’s sudden knowledge, closed his safe door and forgot to secure it. Did Rose notice that? Ryan’s guess is that she did, and that she stole into Checckia’s office later, realizing she had a chance here to go through the safe. And here comes another point to prop up Ryan’s ideas. Remember the curtained doorway?”

  “Yes. Too well,” said Ellen.

  “Would you say the curtain fitted tight from one side of the door to the other?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, it doesn’t. There’s about an inch crack between curtain and doorjamb on the orchestra side. I noticed that and asked Barkasy about it later. He said the curtain fitted so nobody could see back into the corridor. I marked him down as just another average, unobserving citizen, and let it go at that. But Ryan noticed, and asked, and did not mark it off. Barkasy, to his notion, was lying. Barkasy kept glancing back over his shoulder through that crack to see what was going on in the corridor. When Checckia went in, he glanced back. When Checckia came out, he glanced back. And it was after one of these exits that Barkasy glanced—and saw Rose steal across from her dressing room and into the office. After the same thing he wanted? Could be.

  “Larry Mansfield was singing, and the full orchestra was not playing accompaniment. Barkasy wasn’t, for one. He slid from his chair and back into the corridor. He opened Checckia’s door and there was Rose at the safe. He closed the door and jumped for her, and she grabbed up a gun from Checckia’s desk. Barkasy got her wrist and twisted, and the gun went off.

  “That wasn’t in the picture. Death. Barkasy jackrabbited out of there, leaving Checckia to inherit the mess. He slipped back into his chair, behind the big bull fiddle, in the darkness outside the spotlight. And in the darkness, knowing hell would pop any minute, he slid the blackmail stuff through an f hole into his bull fiddle, to hide it.”

  Ellen’s blue eyes were dark with thought and concentration. “No,” she said after a moment.

  “Huh?” I said. “What do you mean, no? I think it’s a good story.”

  “The man next to him,” Ellen pointed out. “Hallwig. Barkasy couldn’t get out of his seat without Hallwig knowing.”

  “Ryan thinks Hallwig does know. Like this—Barkasy, to keep Hallwig quiet, offered him half of what he might get out of you in the future. Then Hallwig decided he wanted it all. He’d seen Barkasy put the envelope, or whatever, into the fiddle. So yesterday he went to see Barkasy, pretending to be cockeyed drunk. He left Barkasy, came back, and went upstairs to get what was in the fiddle. He found out there was nothing there. Or in the rest of the room. Finally, driven out by Barkasy’s appearance, he went home, gulped a glass of straight liquor, and really was cockeyed when the cops came.”

  Ellen looked at the people starting to wander to the floor as the music began again. “What do you think of the story?”

  “It sound plausible as hell,” I said. “It could have been that way right down to the last detail. The fact that Hallwig—or whoever it was—knew exactly where to look first, is a strong point. The fact that Barkasy could see back into the corridor, and later said he couldn’t, is also a strong point.”

  “You didn’t think so,” Ellen said.

  I shrugged. “I wrote him off because I just didn’t see how he could possibly have got back to Checckia’s office without some of the orchestra noticing he’d left the stand. Surely Hallwig! Then comes this scramble yesterday in Barkasy’s room, with the excellent chance that Hallwig was the scrambler. That makes it different.”

  “Lieutenant Ryan hasn’t charged Barkasy with murder.”

  “He hasn’t anything definite. Just ideas. He can hold Barkasy and work him over—and boy, he will!—but unless Barkasy gives him a lot more than he has now, Ryan will have to let him go.”

  “Barkasy hasn’t admitted anything yet?”

  “He hadn’t talked a syllable’s worth as of seven o’clock this evening. He says if anything was in that fiddle, he didn’t know it. He still swears he didn’t notice there was a crack between the curtain and the doorjamb, it was news to him when Ryan pointed it out.”

  “And Hallwig?” said Ellen.

  “Even dumber than Barkasy. He doesn’t know nuttin’ a
bout nuttin’. And Barkasy, he insists, did not leave his place by the doorway. Not even for a few seconds.”

  “There must be evidence around if Barkasy is guilty.”

  “If there is, Ryan will find it,” I said, looking at the couples on the dance floor.

  “The main thing being—those pictures.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But we can only hope on that. And wait on the rest. There’s nothing to be done for a little while.”

  The music was soft and smooth and thoroughly top-notch. So was Ellen. Her eyes met mine and she smiled a little and we both got up; and someday I’ll write an essay on how Ellen can dance. It will be titled, “The Way All Women Should Dance.”

  We drifted along, and her hair smelled clean and sweet, and Barkasy and Hallwig and Rose and Dick and Checckia were a long way off. From me, that is. I knew they weren’t a long way off from Ellen; the threat of those missing pictures was blacker than ever, now, with murder added to inflate beyond measure the inevitable publicity. But she kept that smile in place and pretended there was nothing on her mind but a pleasant time.

  “I still haven’t collected the fifty you promised me for being your escort the other night,” I said.

  “You think it was worth it?” she said, following deftly when I fumbled a step. She could even follow mistakes.

  “Certainly it was worth it! I can give recommendations from half the rich, elderly bags in New York.”

  “I’ll bet!”

  It was nice then just to be wafted by the music. I watched the orchestra absently, wondering how much it would cost to hire them sometime just for Ellen and me. They stopped for a minute and the flurry of clapping indicated that I was not the only one enjoying myself. They changed music on their racks, and the guitar player set down his git and picked up a banjo; this number, it developed a moment later, was a toned-down version of “Oh, Susannah.”

  They finished it, and down went the banjo and up came the guitar again, and a lot of clapping produced one more encore for that round. I wasn’t clapping, however. I was looking at the guitar player. Two instruments. Well, just about everybody in a good modern band plays several instruments. It wasn’t that, exactly. It was…

  “Something?” Ellen asked, looking up quickly.

  “Why?”

  “You aren’t exactly breaking me in two—I don’t think I’d break easily. But your arm is pretty tight.”

  “Well, yes, something,” I admitted. And I kept us near the players for the rest of that last dance, and when the music stopped and the musicians got up to stroll out for a cigarette or whatnot, I went to the guitar player. “That was swell,” I said.

  “Why, thanks.” He was about my age, with a sharp profile and quick, dark eyes. “You play?”

  “I wish I did,” I told him. “But I don’t. I’m as ignorant about music as a Hottentot about nuclear physics. As you’ll know from this question. Do you have more than one guitar?”

  He stared, then laughed. “Well, I should hope so! I make my living on that box. Suppose something happened to it? I should lay off till it gets fixed up?”

  “Do most of the fellows have more than one instrument?”

  “Of course. Up to half a dozen. We each have our favorites, but we have to have spares.”

  “Even,” I said, “a bull fiddler?”

  He laughed again. “Freddy—that’s ours—has three. They say he rents his hotel room just for the fiddles. Sleeps outside in the hall, himself.”

  I thanked him and turned to Ellen, and we went back to our table. Her eyes were glowing.

  “Barkasy?” she said. “You think he would have two?”

  “It looks like there’s an awfully good chance of it.”

  “If he does have two, where do you suppose the second fiddle is?”

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “It could he in any warehouse in town. Or some friend could be keeping it for him. Or it could be in a hock shop…”

  I sat there twiddling my fingers, and Ellen was perceptive enough to say nothing, realizing that I was attempting that abnormal process called thinking.

  “If what we want is in another fiddle, Hallwig is cleared,” I mused out loud. “To a layman a bull fiddle is a bull fiddle. To a musician they must be as different and individual as people. Hallwig, a musician, would never make the mistake of seeing Barkasy slip something into one fiddle and then going into Barkasy’s room and breaking open another one. He’d know at a glance that it was the wrong fiddle.”

  “Unless he thought Barkasy had taken it from one and put it into the other.”

  “Why would Barkasy do that?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Ellen. “There wouldn’t seem to be much point to it.”

  I picked it up again. “Let’s say Hallwig is cleared. He is an honest man. He says Barkasy never left the dais, so Barkasy never left the dais. That clears Barkasy, too. Yet it does seem that there was something in the fiddle, and somebody else knew it. How? Maybe somebody else put it in there to hide it in the later commotion when Barkasy and the other musicians weren’t around. Somebody like me, who wouldn’t know one of the damned things from another.”

  The orchestra was coming back in. I watched Freddy, the bull fiddler. He sat down behind his instrument, almost hidden by it, till the leader raised his baton. Then Freddy stood up, and the music started, and he began to plunk.

  “When I was a kid,” I said, “I used to lay sheet music on the strings of our grand piano. Made an interesting, plinky sound. But not one you’d care for if you were a real piano player.”

  That, not unnaturally, left Ellen behind. She blinked.

  “It’s like this,” I explained. “You slip something into the sound box of a bull fiddle. An envelope, we’ll say, with some pictures in it. Mightn’t it dull the sound just a little? Or maybe flutter a little? Enough for the professional who’s playing the thing to notice it and not like it?”

  She wasn’t behind now. She nodded, eyes intent. “So here’s Barkasy,” I concluded. “Something’s in his bull fiddle and he doesn’t know it. All he knows is that it’s slightly off—a faint vibration picked out by certain notes, perhaps. He has a spare to cover just such emergencies. What would he do with it?”

  “Take it to a musical instruments repair shop? Yes! Sam, that’s…”

  “Whoa, beautiful,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe how far from the truth a logical seeming train of thought can sometimes land you.”

  “But this is such a lovely train! I don’t see how it can be wrong.”

  “Well, we’ll ride it for a while. But—what repair shop? How many are there in a city this big? We could be a week just locating it.”

  Ellen shook her dark-blond head. “It’s a big city, but a small profession. I’ll bet there aren’t a lot.”

  She won.

  We went to the dais when the orchestra quit next time, and I collared Freddy. He was a genial soul; musicians tend to be nice children unless they are harassed.

  “Where would you go to get the best possible repair job on a bass viol?”

  He repeated my question. “Where do the professionals go? There’s only one place this side of Philadelphia, as far as I’m concerned. All the guys take their work there.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Venuccia and Sons. On Twenty-fourth between Second and Third Avenues. The joint’s so dinky you can hardly get into it without falling over something. They’re cranky and independent, and you never know if they’ll take a week or six months. But, boy, they’re good!”

  We had no desire for dancing any more. We went out and I got a cab and gave the driver the Keppert address. But inside, with the cab moving off, I looked at Ellen and found that she was looking at me.

  “It’s too late,” I said. “Early to be going home, maybe, but too late for anything else. It’s after one o’clock.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt just to ride past and see where the place is,” Ellen said.

  “It’s outta the way,” th
e driver protested, when I told him to coast along Twenty-fourth between Second and Third.

  “I know,” I said, “but we’re in no hurry.”

  At Twenty-fifth and Second Avenue he turned west and when we got to Third Avenue and turned to come back east on Twenty-fourth, Ellen’s hand moved over into mine and she watched one side of the street while I watched the other. We needn’t have been so methodical; the place stuck out like a stop sign—the only shop in the block with its lights on. Ellen’s hand tightened in mine as we saw this.

  “We’ll get out here,” I told the driver as we reached the corner.

  We waited till he’d driven off, and then we turned and walked back. It was in the middle of the block, with fading gilt letters on its dusty window. Venuccia & Sons. We peered in and saw someone move across an inner, lighted doorway and disappear. We went to the street door.

  “Look,” Ellen breathed.

  Near the lock the wood of door and jamb was splintered. Somebody had wedged a pinch bar in there and with one heave had forced the lock.

  I tried the door. The remnants of the lock held, so I rattled loudly. Again a shape appeared in the inner doorway, this time coming forward toward the street. A youngish man who looked as if he hadn’t taken much time to comb his hair, scowled out at us and made signs to go away, the place was closed. I took a card out of my case and flashed it at him through the door glass.

  He couldn’t read it, of course. He scowled again, and opened up.

  “Insurance adjuster, Home Protection Company,” I said, showing him the card in the better light. “I see you’ve had some trouble here.”

  “Yes, we’ve had trouble,” he snapped. “Who called you so soon?”

  “Nobody called. We were walking past and I saw the busted door lock and the lights on at this time of night, so I turned in.”

  He looked at Ellen, who certainly did not appear to be the standard companion for a business call. “Home Protection Company? We’re not insured with you.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I told him. “We all pool our interests pretty much when it comes to investigation. But I don’t want to pressure you. I can get a report from you here and now and we can start working on it at once, or I can run along with my friend and a man can be sent to you in the morning. Just as you please.”