by Craig Rice
Jake said stiffly, “I don’t think that was very funny.”
“But I wasn’t being funny,” Helene said, in a voice like a hurt child. “I got a check for it, too.” She reached for her purse, opened it, and pulled out a long, narrow slip of green paper. “Zabel Publications” was printed on the top. The voucher stated that the twenty dollars had been paid to Helene Justus for a poem, “Toella.” It was signed Quarles Zabel.
“But when?” Jake began helplessly.
“I wrote it this morning,” Helene said. “And I remembered Miss Williams had spoken of Whither. So I took it to Mr. Zabel and he liked it and he bought it. He’s a very charming man.”
“You—met—Mr. Zabel?” Wildavine said. Her voice sounded as though Helene had remarked casually that she’d just had a conference with the Archangel Michael. Even Peter Kipp looked impressed.
“Why, yes,” Helene said. “I looked him up in the directory and phoned him, and made an appointment.”
Wildavine slumped down on a chair. She looked stricken. For just a divided second, Malone didn’t quite like Helene. Jake said suspiciously, “What is this poem?”
Helene said, “Would you like to hear it? It just happens I memorized it.” She clasped her hands in her lap and recited, like a small girl saying “The Night Before Christmas” at a school benefit.
Toella
period
alone
with weep
weep
the world
you and you laugh
comma
comma
and laughs.
She stopped, smiled, and looked around for praise.
Wildavine gasped and said, “Magnificent! What tragic emphasis! What movement! What a feeling for emotional form!”
“Oh, thank you!” Helene said. She beamed. “I told him all about you, too. He wants to meet you. He wants to see all your poems.”
“Me!” Wildavine said. “Mr. Zabel?”
“In fact,” Helene said, “I took the liberty of making a sort of tentative appointment for you, for tomorrow morning at ten. If you can make it, that is. I told him about that simply wonderful poem you recited for us, and I even quoted a little of it to him. I hope you don’t mind. He was very impressed, and he wants to buy it.” She beamed. “Ten o’clock, at his office.”
Wildavine just said, “Oh!”
Malone took the liberty of pouring himself another glass of the sour red wine. He retracted everything he’d been thinking about Helene.
He had just a faint suspicion, though, about that poem—He’d never heard of Helene writing poetry. Certainly, not like that poetry.
Jake was silent. He looked stunned. Helene looked pleased, proud, and just faintly mischievous. Peter Kipp was stamping up and down the room, declaiming that the magic fire of poetry should never be entombed within the magnificent trees of the forest, ground to pulp and rolled into sheets. “What is ink?” he demanded. “A rank poison.”
“Especially this red ink,” Malone muttered, emptying his glass and kicking it under the couch.
“Words have wings,” Peter Kipp said. Inspired, he poured himself another glass of wine and went on. “Words are winged things. O words! O wings! O things!” He was composing again.
Madame passed her plate to Zora for more spaghetti. Jake was still silent and stunned, staring at Helene. Malone had had enough. Besides, he was hungry. He rose, walked over to Wildavine, pulled her into a corner, and said, as lecherously as he could, “I want to speak to you. Alone.”
Wildavine’s eyes widened and brightened. She glanced around, everyone seemed to be busy. She led Malone through a door into the next room, a duplicate of the one they’d just left, save that the colors were brighter. She closed the door and bolted it. “This is Zora’s studio,” she murmured. “But Zora won’t mind.” She lighted the candles on the table, and an incense burner. Malone sniffed and sneezed. She sprinkled a little perfume on the candles. Malone remembered he was a gentleman and muffled the next sneeze. “Glasses,” he whispered, “bring me glasses!” She brought him two empty jelly tumblers as though they were chalices, and he pulled a half pint of rye he’d brought along for emergencies out of his left-hand pants pocket.
She coughed a little over the rye, and half knelt on the floor. “You said—you wanted to speak to me—”
“I want to ask you something,” Malone said.
“Yes?” she breathed. “Ask me—anything.”
Malone asked, “What the hell were you doing in the St. Jacques bar the night of the murder?”
She said, “Oh,” and fled toward the door. Malone grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her back again. She curled up on the farthest corner of the couch, looking frightened and wild-eyed.
“Pull yourself together, baby,” Malone said. He reached over, took one of her shivering hands, and warmed it between his own. “Because I’m your friend. I’m not going to tell the police anything, I’m not going to tell anybody anything, I promise.” He began working on the other hand. “Please trust me. You’ll tell me everything, won’t you, baby?”
She nodded and said, “Bertha—”
Malone waited just long enough and then whispered, “Yes. Go on.”
“I haven’t any money,” she whispered, “and there’s always so many things. The rent and the grocery bill every month, and subway fares and stamps and things—a nickel here and a nickel there. I do a little typing, by the page, but I don’t type very fast—though I’m very accurate—and I have about a hundred dollars a year from my grandmother’s insurance. I was named for her. And Bertha had so much money, and she liked me. You see,” she paused a moment, “Bertha liked girls, not boys.”
Malone said gently, “Go on, baby.”
“Only I never—she never—well, we never—” She paused again. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” Malone said, “and I’m not surprised at that.”
“She admired my poems,” Wildavine whispered. “I wrote a lot of them about her. And she kept lending me money and telling me I didn’t ever need to pay it back. And—well, about other things—I always could find excuses. You know what I mean. I’d always have good excuses, too, for asking for loans, and she’d write back letters pretending to believe them, and then send my letter and a carbon copy of hers to her trustee. But she began to get terribly difficult. Insistent. You know. Or else, no more loans, and all the other ones paid back.”
Malone lighted a cigarette, held it to her lips, and said, “And so?”
“She got this young man to marry her,” Wildavine said, “so people wouldn’t talk. Because they were talking, a little. I don’t know where she found him. He was a professional dancing partner or something. I know she hired him to marry her. They were going to go on a big honeymoon tour. I was terribly broke, Mr. Malone. I had to borrow a hundred dollars. So I wrote her. She wrote back a letter, saying no. Then she called me up. It was the day she was married. She read me a copy of the letter over the phone—I hadn’t received it then. Then she said she was sending the copy of it, with my letter, to her trustee, unless—” She paused. “You know what I mean. Unless.”
“I know,” Malone said.
“I didn’t know what to do. I was desperate. Finally I just said yes. She was very happy. She said she was going to cancel her reservations and spend her honeymoon here in New York, so she could see me every day. And she made a date for me to come up that night. She said she’d get rid of her new husband somehow. And she’d have the hundred dollars for me.” Malone said quietly, “And?”
“Well, I went there,” Wildavine said. “I didn’t know what else to do. I felt terribly scared, I thought about running away and all sorts of things. I called up from the lobby and there wasn’t any answer. So I went into the bar and got a drink and waited. I kept calling and calling, but there still wasn’t any answer. Finally I just gave up and came home. Of course, I never got the hundred dollars.” She drew a long breath, and said, “That’s all.”
&nbs
p; “It’s enough,” Malone said.
She looked up at him, expectantly and hopefully. “Was that all you asked me here for?”
Malone wanted to say, “Yes,” and go away. His conscience objected, violently. He’d lured her in here under false pretenses. She had given him confidences which, while they might not be very helpful, had been interesting. Besides, she was damn near pretty, in the candle light. Malone whispered hoarsely, “No, it wasn’t,” and reached for her. She gave a pleased and muffled little scream.
Later, when he was leaving, he paused at the door. “I forgot to mention,” he said, “don’t tell anybody, but I’m a private detective working on this case for a client. I have a fat expense account, and I’m supposed to pay for any information I get. Your name won’t ever be mentioned, and you can just forget the whole case, but your evidence has been very helpful and valuable. So, well, here—”
He shoved one of his remaining hundred-dollar bills into her hand. “Good night, cutie,” he said, turning the doorknob. “Maybe you’d better put on some more lipstick. Your friends may be wondering where you are.”
He lurched down the stairs. Let Jake and Helene go home by themselves. Right now, there were just two things he wanted in the whole world. One was a steak. The other was a saloon.
30. Good Reason to Find a Murderer
When Jake finally put his arm around Helene, led her to the door, and said, “Well, we’d better be going,” Peter Kipp was posing between the two lighted candles and declaiming something loud and furious, of which Jake could only catch the occasionally reiterated word “Helene” and “Whither.” It was, Peter explained, a congratulatory poem. He was composing orally.
Madame looked up from a plate of bread and butter and gave out with her second remark of the evening. “Decomposing,” she said.
Wildavine had been sitting on a corner of the couch, since her return to the room, pink-cheeked and silent. She looked a little surprised. Zora had been washing dishes in the hand basin. She came out to tell Jake and Helene good-by and come back soon. Wildavine rose.
“Thank you for a lovely evening,” Helene said, clasping Wildavine’s hand. “A wonderful evening. I’ve had such a nice time. And don’t forget to keep that appointment with Mr. Zabel in the morning. Ten o’clock. Because he’s looking forward to it so much.”
Wildavine’s eyes grew moist. “Oh, I love you both,” she said, “you’re both such marvelous people.” Over her shoulder Jake could see Madame, otherwise unobserved, filching the last olive from the bowl on the table and shamelessly holding the jug of dago red to her lips. “Don’t worry,” Wildavine said, “I’ll be there.”
Peter Kipp swooped at the door, struck a pose, and said, “Good-by is good-by is farewell is farewell is good-by—”
Jake said, “Good night,” loud, and all but threw Helene at the stairs. He didn’t speak again until they were safely in the taxi. Then he said, “Give me the lowdown. Has she really got an appointment with that guy?”
“Naturally,” Helene said. “You don’t think I’d lie about a thing like that?” She laid her head on his shoulder and said, “Jake, I wish I had a drink.”
“There’s liquor at home,” Jake said sternly. He slid his arm around her. Temptation began to tickle him. Maybe Helene could make an appointment for him with Mr. Zabel of Zabel Publications. No! God forbid! He’d peddle his own canoodlings.
“Jake, there’s the loveliest little bar, around the corner on Fourteenth Street. Oh!”
He kept on kissing her until they were well past Fourteenth Street. Then he said, “I’m very suspicious about that poem.”
“It may be the only poem I ever wrote,” she said indignantly, “but I’m very proud of it. Jake, darling, on Twenty-sixth Street—”
“—there’s the loveliest little bar,” Jake said. “We’re going home, remember? Where did you steal that poem?”
“I didn’t steal it,” she said. “I took it out of a hat. Honest to goodness, I did. To be perfectly truthful, it was your hat.”
“Not that poem,” Jake said.
“That poem,” she said. “I wrote all the words on little pieces of paper and put them in your old gray hat, and then I picked them out one at a time. I wrote the punctuation out in full, that’s how it happened to get in. Jake, on Thirty-fourth Street—”
“We aren’t going there,” he said firmly. “Helene, how did you happen to pick the words you dropped in the hat?”
“Why,” she said innocently, “I took them out of a quotation. ‘Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.’ Jake, tell the driver to turn left on Forty-second and stop just past the—”
Jake did no such thing. He said hoarsely, “But the title?”
“Oh, that,” Helene said. “It isn’t a title, it’s a dedication. To Ella. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. She wrote the quotation, only of course she couldn’t have known it was going to be a quotation when she wrote it. Only I liked it better spelled the other way. Toella. I thought it was cute. Toella. A touch of the occult, and a nice feeling for movement.” For two cents, he would have smacked her. She said, “Well, anyway, I sold Wildavine’s poem for her. He’s going to pay thirty dollars for it, he told me so. And she probably needs it. And he’ll probably buy more of them. Jake, we might go to El Morocco.”
Jake gave in. They settled for the Silver Dollar Bar, on Seventh Avenue.
He slid up on the bar stool beside her and ordered two double ryes. Then he glanced at Helene. Funny that she was wearing that old blue dress and the polo coat. Hardly stepping-out clothes. He noticed too, seeing her for the first time in a bright light, that she wore practically no make-up. Oh, well, she’d probably had her reasons. You never could tell about Helene. He reflected that she was the only woman in the world who could look so graceful perched on a bar stool. The only woman in the world who was so beautiful. The only woman in the world period. “Helene,” he said, “there’s something I want to tell you—” Not about the book, though, not yet. Not here in the Silver Dollar Bar. That had to wait till they were home. “It’s about murder,” he said.
“Whose?” Helene asked. “Gloria Garden’s? Bertha Morrison’s? Or just any old murder that happens along?” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. After all, Jake had things to explain. Maybe he was going to explain them now. “Go on, darling. Tell me.”
“Not a real murder,” Jake said, looking into his glass. “An abstract murder. Like this, Helene. A person murders another person. That’s a terrible thing, for the person who gets murdered, and for his relatives and friends. But it’s more terrible for the person who docs the murder. See? Because a person who murders another person usually does it for some specific gain, and the specific thing invariably turns out to be something else from what the person thought it was.”
“You’ve had enough to drink,” Helene said, a wifely gleam in her eye. “Let’s go home.”
He waved her away. “What I mean is this,” he said. “In an abstract sense, of course. Suppose a person knows about a murder. Suppose he goes out to try and find the murderer, for some selfish reason of his own. He’s making a murderer of himself, that’s all. Maybe he’s just curious and doesn’t have any selfish motive. It’s still all wrong. Because in the first place it isn’t any of his business, and in the second—maybe you’re right. Maybe we’d better go home.”
Helene slid off the bar stool and said, “There’s one damned good reason for finding a murderer, even if you’re just an interested bystander. That’s to keep him from murdering someone else.” She waited until he’d paid the check, and then added, “You can do that two ways. One, by finding the murderer. Two, by finding his next intended victim and sticking around.”
One of several million reasons why he was in love with Helene, Jake thought, was that she always knew what he was trying to say, even when it wasn’t said very well. He tried to think of ways to tell her that, but none of them sounded convincing. “You’re so understanding” didn’t really cover t
he ground, and “I love you” was trite. He finally managed to explain what he meant by kissing her in the taxicab, from Forty-seventh Street to Fifty-first, through two stop lights. They inquired at the hotel desk about Malone. He hadn’t come in yet. Malone was all right, Jake said firmly. Malone could take care of himself. He closed the door to their suite and said, “Helene, I have a confession—”
She kissed him lightly on the forehead and said, “I’ll be right back, darling. Make yourself a drink.” She vanished into the bedroom.
Jake made himself a drink and then left it untouched on the end table. He had to tell her the whole business, now. The book. His series of failures. Everything. What he’d learned about the murders, and what he hadn’t succeeded in learning. Then they’d call up the Pennsylvania Railroad and make two reservations on a train for Chicago, and everything would be all right again. Except for the thought Helene had planted in his mind. A reason for finding a murderer was to keep him from murdering someone else. It was a disquieting thought. Did he possibly know enough, in the confused and unmatched facts he’d stored up in his brain, to save another life? If he did—but he wasn’t sure.
Helene came back into the room. She had on an ice-blue satin housecoat that rustled around her knees and left her pale shoulders bare. Her corn-silk hair was brushed out and hung, shining, showering over her shoulders. Her gold-colored ostrich mules appeared and disappeared at the hem of her skirt like kittens playing tag. “You didn’t finish your drink,” she said reprovingly, picking it up.
“Helene, listen,” Jake said, half desperately. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. It’s that—”
The telephone rang. Jake swore and picked it up. A female voice said, “Mr. Justus? Just a minute please.” He waited, and Arthur Peterson’s voice said, “Hello?”
“What the hell do you want,” Jake snapped, “at this hour of the night?” It was only one o’clock, but still—