by Craig Rice
“The Blue Cat Club. Eight-thirty,” Helene quoted. “We’ll just happen to drop in accidentally at quarter to nine. I just want to see what she looks like, Malone.”
Malone lit a cigar and said, “I make no promises. I have important business to attend to.”
“What business?”
He considered telling her. There were good arguments both ways. If he did, she would insist on coming along and helping, which might lead to well-nigh disastrous results. On the other hand, it would take her mind off Jake. Still, he would have to tell her about Abner Proudfoot and the five hundred dollars and the poker game. She might, of course, be a great deal of help. However, after all he’d had to say about keeping out of the affair, to confess that he’d accepted the job of finding Bertha Morrison—“It’s a secret,” he said stiffly. “I can’t tell.”
Helene sniffed. “I’m not even curious,” she said. “It just happens I have important things to attend to myself. And neither you nor Jake are going along.”
“Wait a minute,” Malone said. He’d seen that light in her eyes before. Usually it spelled t-r-o-u-b-l-e. “What kind of important things?”
“It’s a secret,” she said coldly. “I can’t tell.” She glared at him, her eyes a nice mixture of frost and flame. Then she said, “An early dinner. We’ll meet here.”
“Wait,” Malone said. “Where are you going? Wait, I’ll go with you—”
But by that time, she was gone.
15. “Whither?”
Malone went into the coffee shop and consumed a double portion of country-fried ham and eggs, with fried potatoes and a side order of pancakes. That, he decided, would hold him till dinner, which was only a couple of hours away. Then he bought the latest editions of all the newspapers in the lobby, went into the bar, slid onto a barstool, and said automatically, “Bring me a double rye.” Life seemed very complicated and much too difficult to get along with. Jake and Helene keeping secrets from each other. Jake making a date with some girl, and Helene insisting on turning up, quite by accident, at their meeting place. A murder of an especially unpleasant nature, a pathetically bereft bridegroom with a bad hangover, and an inexplicably missing bride. A gloomy guy who hired him, Malone, to find the missing bride and prove her innocent of the murder, one way or another, and paid him a handsome retainer. Then a crooked poker game, rigged by the gloomy guy (Malone mentally called him by a more explicit name) to win back the retainer. And now—what?
The double rye was slid in front of him. Malone looked up and recognized the thin, melancholy bartender with the Boston accent. The bartender recognized him in the same moment and looked just faintly alarmed.
“What’s this doing here,” Malone snarled. “I distinctly remember ordering a double-gin-and-beer highball.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the bartender said. “I’m very sorry.” He started to take away the double rye.
“Leave that there,” Malone snapped. “For a chaser.”
The bartender seemed to have a little trouble making the gin-and-beer highball, but he finally arrived with it, shuddering. Malone growled at him wordlessly, waited until he was again buried in a secondhand back number of New Directions, and then poured the gruesome mixture into the nearest cuspidor. He set the empty glass back on the counter, began sipping his rye, unfolded the newspapers, and looked at the headlines.
REPORT MURDERED WOMAN IDENTIFIED
(New York Times)
SLAIN BEAUTY WAS ARTIST’S MODEL
(New York Herald Tribune)
WHO KILLED LOVELY GLORIA GARDEN?
(Journal-American)
MODEL SLAYING NOT SEX CRIME POLICE SAY
(Daily News)
MURDERED MODEL WAS MODEL UNION MEMBER
(PM)
Malone sighed, finished his rye, and began reading.
Gloria Garden had been a gorgeous girl, judging from the slightly undressed photo on the front page of the News, the portrait in the Herald Tribune, and the reproduced cigarette ads in PM. Otherwise the newspaper stories didn’t tell him a great deal. It was just the same old stuff. Some small-town girl grew up beautiful, and came to the big city to make hay out of it.
The newspaper stories didn’t tell him anything about Bertha Morrison, except that she was missing, and he knew that already. “Dennis Morrison, husband of the missing woman, was reported in a state of near collapse.” Malone grinned wryly. Near collapse! That reporter should have seen Dennis Morrison when he was tucked in bed, sometime yesterday. “Police are searching for Bertha Lutts Morrison—” Malone knew that too, and he crossed his fingers that the police wouldn’t find her before he did.
The melancholy young bartender tiptoed up and whispered, “Was your drink quite satisfactory, sir?”
“It was terrible,” Malone said. “Bring me another, and don’t forget, a double rye for a chaser.” He glanced once more at the newspapers and wadded them into a ball which he sent rolling down the bar, overturning the luckily empty beer glass of a customer who was absorbed in reading the day’s Racing Form. “You’d better give me two of them at once. I feel an attack of melancholia coming on.”
“Yes, sir,” the bartender said. He forgot the chasers, slopped over the glasses in his haste to shove them across the counter, and hurried back to his stool where he hid behind The Southern Review. Malone disposed of the gin-and-beer highballs in the cuspidor, waited thirty seconds, and then roared, “Service!”
The young bartender raced back the length of the bar, realized his oversight, poured out two double ryes fast, noticed what had happened to Malone’s newspapers, said, “Would you care for something to read, sir?” plucked a magazine at random from in back of the cash register, shoved it at Malone, and fled.
Malone glanced at the magazine. It was covered in expensive violet paper, and its title was Whither? The Poetry of Tomorrow. The little lawyer sighed, turned to the title page, sat bolt upright, and bawled at the bartender, “Hey! You!” By the time the bartender had skidded to a stop in front of him, Malone had remembered the axiom that indirect questions brought forth direct answers. He scowled and said, “Bring me a double brandy and a double vodka.” He scowled a shade deeper and added, “Chasers for the rye.” While the bartender was unsteadily pouring them, he said, “Where did you get this magazine?”
“That? Oh,” the bartender said. “A lady left it here.”
“When?”
“Night before last.” He spilled a half ounce of vodka on the bar, and Malone mentally warned himself not to light a cigar within three feet of it.
“Make out my check,” Malone said. He disposed of the vodka, the brandy, and one of the double ryes, in the cuspidor, while the bartender was bent over the adding machine. By the time the harassed young man turned back, he was sitting nonchalantly behind an array of empty glasses. “Now,” Malone said grimly, taking the check, “I won’t stand for any nonesense. In Chicago, when I ask questions and a bartender don’t answer them, do you know what I do?” He paused, wondering just what he would do. “Tell me about this lady who left the magazine here night before last.”
“She didn’t really come in to get a drink,” the bartender said. “She came in to use the telephone. She bought a thirty-cent highball and sat drinking it for an hour and a half. Every few minutes she got up and tried a number on the house phone. She seemed a little upset. Finally she got up and went out, and she left her magazine on the bar. I stuck it behind the cash register with a bunch of other junk.”
“You have a fine memory, and a fine critical sense,” Malone said. “I’ll remember you in my will.” He signed the check with a flourish, and glanced again at the inside page of the magazine where was written in pencil, Wildavine Williams.”
“You can have the magazine,” the bartender said.
“A lovely thought, but I insist on paying for it,” Malone told him. He laid a half dollar on the bar and immediately regretted the impulse.
“Oh, thank you,” the bartender said. He leaned forward and lowered his v
oice. “Mr. Malone, tell me. Just as a matter of sociological research. Do you really carry a gun?”
“Four of them,” Malone said, patting himself. He leered across the bar and added, “Usually, I carry a knife in my teeth, too.” For the rest of his stay in New York, he reflected, he’d find another bar. A sudden pang of homesickness for Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar seized him, a pang that was intensified when the girl at the telegraph desk informed him that the hundred dollars had arrived. Malone changed the check into twenty-dollar bills and stood in the lobby, fingering them in his pocket. Six forty-five. A train. He could pay his hotel bill, his bar check, buy a ticket, and still arrive in Chicago with enough to stake him in a friendly little game at one of Max Hook’s joints. He’d be home again.
But there was the problem of Jake and Helene. It had to be straightened out, somehow. And he’d taken on a job. Finding Bertha Morrison and proving her innocent of murder. Then there was that small matter of Abner Proudfoot and the poker game. Finally, before he left New York, he had a little score to settle, on Helene’s account, with a dame named Wildavine Williams.
16. Social Significance
“Pretend we just happened in here to buy a drink,” Helene said, “and everything will be all right.” Malone hoped so, but he wouldn’t have made a bet on it. He didn’t like the situation, he didn’t like the exterior of the Blue Cat Club, and he had a premonition he wouldn’t like the interior of it any better.
Jake had been pleasant, polite, absent-minded, and hurried during dinner. Helene had started out by being a shade too bright and gay, and had ended up doing a creditable imitation of the sphinx. Malone had managed to preserve an air of normality—and missed most of his dinner—by keeping up a spirited conversation, almost entirely with himself. No one mentioned the murder, Gloria Garden, the missing Bertha Morrison, or Dennis. Jake had excused himself at eight-thirty. A business appointment. He’d be back early. Helene had waited fifteen minutes, then called a taxi. Malone had made a feeble protest which was not only overruled, but scarcely heard. Now, they were at the threshold of the Blue Cat Club. “I just want to get a look at her, that’s all,” Helene said. She added firmly, “Don’t be jittery, Malone.”
“I’m not jittery,” Malone said in an indignant tone, putting a match in his mouth and trying to light it with his cigar. His stomach felt as though it were harboring a nervous octopus. He tried to imagine a girl that Jake would make a date with, when he could have been with Helene, and failed. He mentally pictured Salome, Cleopatra, Madame du Barry, and the brunette adagio dancer at Chez Paree, and then he gave up. His imagination was fairly vivid along such lines, but it refused to go as far as conjuring up a girl who could come between Helene and Jake or, for that matter, Helene and anybody. He was prepared for anything by the time he entered the Blue Cat Club, including a lady hypnotist. He wasn’t prepared though, for Wildavine. Neither, from the look he saw on her face, was Helene.
She picked a table in the brightest-lighted and most conspicuous part of the room, and said, “Let them notice us first.” She sat down and slid her white wool cape off her shoulders. The white-and-gold jersey dinner dress she had on under it made her look like a particularly well-dressed angel. “And look as if you were having fun, damn you, Malone.”
Malone glanced again at Wildavine and said gloomily, “If you ask me, we might as well go home.”
Helene said, “Sssh!” She smiled at the waiter, ordered two champagne cocktails, leaned her elbows on the table, and managed to look gay, entertained, and animated. “Malone, if she were really homely, I could understand it. There’s something fascinating about terribly homely women. But she isn’t. She’s just ordinary plain. And dowdy.”
“Stop being catty,” Malone said. “I think she’s beautiful and fascinating.” He glanced again at Wildavine. She was wearing a yellowish-brown tweed skirt, and a blouse printed with monkeys, palm trees, and bananas. Her stringy brown hair seemed to have collapsed on her shoulders from sheer exhaustion, and her thin damp bangs looked as though they were tired of being pushed out of her eyes. A coat that matched her skirt had been thrown over the back of her chair, it had a worn tan caracal collar. Her face was bald of make-up, and her rimless glasses were slightly askew on her nose. “Fascinating,” Malone repeated, “and wonderfully well dressed. Now if you could only get hold of clothes like that—”
“Shut up,” Helene said. “Those are probably all the clothes she can afford, and nobody’s ever told her about hair-dos, powder, and lipstick.”
Malone looked sharply at Helene, at the white-and-gold dress, and flawlessly brushed and shining hair, the lovely and exquisitely made-up face. Suddenly he realized where Helene had been going when she’d left him in the morning, and how she’d spent the day. That white-and-gold dress was new, and it had probably taken a lot of shopping to find. And the hair and complexion job must have used up four hours in one of the best beauty parlors. He realized something else. Helene had spent that time, trouble, and money to make herself more beautiful than the girl Jake was meeting. Now, seeing Wildavine Williams, she was sorry that she’d done so. Not because of Jake, either. “Come on, Malone,” Helene said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Malone half rose and then sat down again. “You got me down here, and now you’re going to stick it out. I never thought you’d turn out to be such a sissy, afraid to meet a girl because she’s more interesting than you are.”
Helene said between tight lips, “You don’t know what I mean.”
“Oh, yes I do,” Malone said. “And the chances are she won’t even notice what you have on, or how you look. She probably likes that suit and thinks her hair beats anything Charles of the Ritz ever turned out. Besides,” he added, “don’t look now, but we’re being observed, and I think they’re going to join our party. He’d seen Jake’s face turn pale, then red, then white. He’d observed Jake leaning across the table and whispering something that could only have been, “Psst! My wife is here.” He noticed Wildavine looked startled, then puzzled, and finally worried. Just as Jake pushed his chair back, Malone leaned across the table and said, “So what do you really think of the Cubs’ chances in the World Series?”
Helene smiled at him brightly and said, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
Jake said loudly, too loudly, “Well, imagine running into you here! Helene, this is Miss Williams, a business acquaintance. Miss Williams, this is Mrs. Justus, my wife. And Mr. Malone.”
Helene beamed and said, “What a delightful coincidence! Do join us.”
Wildavine Williams blushed, said, “Well—” and sat down.
“Miss Williams is a poetess,” Jake said, pulling up a chair.
“What a fascinating hobby!” Helene said. Wildavine looked at her as though she’d said, “What fun it must be to poison babies!” Helene added hastily, “I meant, avocation.”
“Poetry is not an avocation,” Wildavine said. “It is a directive.”
“Exactly what I’ve always maintained,” Malone said. “I can see that we see eye to eye, cutie. And what are you drinking?” She didn’t seem to know, and nobody else seemed to care. He ordered more champagne cocktails.
“I wrote a poem once,” Helene said, a reminiscent gleam in her eye. “It began, ‘I wish I were an angleworm, a little wiggling angling worm—” She broke off suddenly, as though Jake had kicked her under the table.
“That’s very interesting,” Wildavine said. “It displays a remarkable exposition of the subconscious desire to return underground, and a nice feeling for movement.”
“Exactly what I thought at the time,” Helene said happily. “Would you like to hear the next verse, about how the angling worm meets his mate, under a cabbage root?”
Jake said quickly, “Miss Williams’ poems are different, Helene.”
“And how magnificently different,” Malone said gallantly and enthusiastically. He lifted his glass. “Let’s drink to the magnificent difference of Miss Williams’ poems.” He drained
off the champagne cocktail, sneezed, and said, “Do you mind if I call you Wildavine? I feel as if I’d known you always.”
“Please do,” she said. Her thin cheeks reddened a trifle.
“I feel that we have a great deal in common,” Malone said. “Tell me, do you know a magazine called Whither?”
“Oh, of course,” she gasped. “Who doesn’t?” There was an awed pause in which no one even whispered, “Not me.”
“I buy it every week,” Helene said brightly, after the pause had gone on long enough.
“You must be mistaken,” Wildavine said. “It only comes out four times a year.” She turned to Malone, obviously a kindred spirit. “If Whither would only print one of my poems, I’d know I was a Success. I’ve been trying for four years, and I always get back such lovely letters, but nothing ever comes of it.” She turned back to Jake, a prospective kindred spirit. “You know, of course, about Whither. The Zabel Publishing Company.”
“Naturally,” Jake said. He did know the Zabel Publishing Company. It was second from the top of the list he still meant to send his book to.
“Well, Whither is old Mr. Zabel’s love child,” Wildavine said. She tittered, and said, “You understand, I mean a spiritual love child.”
“We understand, a spiritual love child,” Malone said, wondering how a magazine of verse could be anything else.
“He edits it himself,” Wildavine said, “and reads every word that’s submitted. Though the Zabel Publishing Company prints hundreds of books, Whither has a very limited, but devoted circulation. But he’s refused everything I’ve offered him, even my last poem, a lovely, simple little thing that I call ‘Caravan over a Brooklyn Unlimited Lamppost Good night.’” She sighed deeply and looked persecuted.
“It sounds wonderful,” Helene gasped. “I can’t imagine how he turned it down. I’d love to read it!”
Wildavine brightened and said, “I’ll recite it to you. It just happens that I memorized it.” She leaned back, closed her eyes, and looked as much as possible like a chromo of Saint Cecilia at the organ.