17-Murder Roundabout

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Happen to know offhand whether a girl named Williams, Cynthia Williams, has made any recordings?” he asked Clement Brothers. “An actress of some sort she is, I understand.”

  “Does skits with three others at a place called ‘The Bottom Drawer,’” Brothers told him. “Haven’t caught the act myself. Offhand, I’d doubt she’s on a platter. No TV work I’ve heard of. All I can suggest is, ask her agent. Why?”

  Because I’m chasing a moth of theory, Heimrich thought of telling Clement Brothers. A most improbable moth.

  “Oh,” he said, “I’m collecting voices.” It was not much better. “Happen to know who her agent is?”

  “Yes,” Brothers said. “The husband of the girl you’ve just been watching. Widower now. Ralph Weaver in person.” He had turned more light on in the viewing room. He looked at Heimrich in the better light. He said he’d be damned.

  XIII

  The clerk at “The Record Mart” was courteous and diligent, for all he wore a beard. He did not think so; he was afraid not. He consulted records and was sure not. He knew The Bottom Drawer, of course. Charming people. Especially Cynthia, the blond one. But not, so far, on records. No, he was sure that Cynthia Williams had not made a record on her own. If Captain Heimrich wanted a record of that sort, Nichols and May made delightful records. Rather the same thing, in a way. If Captain Heimrich—

  Heimrich thanked the bearded youth for his trouble and found a Manhattan telephone directory. No listing for The Bottom Drawer. He used a dime again, and Information informed. He dialed and waited and finally got, “Bottom Drawer.” He gave his name. Table for two for that evening? Sorry, they didn’t usually reserve tables. People took their chances. The first show at nine. The second show at eleven-thirty. Usually more room then. The address was on Second Avenue in the Twenties. All right, they’d try to hold a table; make an exception to the rule. Try to.

  Heimrich left the booth. He waved a taxi and got a taxi and said, “Hippodrome Garage,” and, in not much more time than it would have taken him to walk there, was at the garage. And near it a sidewalk telephone booth stood unoccupied. Heimrich went into the booth. He put a dime in the slot and gave his charge number and got a dime back. He dialed “904” and the rest of it and Susan Heimrich said, “Susan Faye Fabrics. Get down, you beast. It’s not for you. Get down!”

  “Give him my best,” Heimrich said. “Or let me talk to him.”

  From the shop on Van Brunt Avenue, Colonel said “woof.”

  “You spoil him,” Susan told her husband. “I just told him it wasn’t for him. But all right.”

  Heimrich waited while the receiver was placed in the vicinity of a canine ear. He said, “The lady told you to get down, Colonel. Get down.”

  Colonel said, “Woof.” It was, Merton Heimrich thought, a disappointed woof. But Colonel was, constitutionally, a disappointed dog.

  “It’s cooler here,” Susan said, when Merton Heimrich made his suggestion. “It’s probably unbearable there. There’s what I’d do with the boy, because Colonel isn’t enough. It’s very sudden, dear. I’ll have to go home and change and do something about Michael.”

  “TV at the Thompsons’,” Heimrich said. “It’s a little after four. You can catch the five-ten. We’ll drive back. Call it a party, darling.”

  “Surprise party, heaven knows,” Susan Heimrich said. “So unlike you, dear.”

  Colonel said, “Woof.” He seemed to be more distant. A dog hears a familiar and loved voice and is only told to get down. Nothing good ever happens to a dog.

  “He’s pouting,” Susan said. “Of course I’d love to, as you know perfectly well. Where?”

  Heimrich looked, through the glass of the booth, across the street. “The Algonquin,” he said. “It’s cool there.”

  It was cool in the Algonquin’s lobby at a little after six-thirty. Heimrich sat at a table and looked at his watch and had several times to crane his neck before Susan walked into the lobby. She wore a green linen dress and carried a white sweater for emergencies and looked cool and, Heimrich thought, lovely. She gets younger-looking all the time, he thought, and better-looking, and lumbered from his chair and went, a hippopotamus, to meet his wife. There are many small tables in the lobby of the Algonquin, and Merton Heimrich lumbered carefully among them. Four people suddenly knotted in his path and he sidestepped lightly.

  Sometimes he moves like a dancer, Susan thought. And he is so certain he can’t dance.

  The table Heimrich had left was occupied by a man with a distinguished beard, who was looking at his watch and, from time to time, craning his neck. They found another table, and Merton Heimrich tapped another bell. They had, he told her, until a little before nine. Susan said, “A daiquiri, I think.” Heimrich said, “Extra dry martini, please,” and was looked at in surprise by his wife. “House of Lords,” he added, and her surprise increased.

  “It’s a different day,” he told her. “A not very logical day, probably. I want to borrow your ears, my dear. To see if you hear a fluttering.”

  “Martinis,” she said. “And cryptic utterances. A very different day. What fluttering?”

  Of a theory, he told her—of a theory as fragile as a moth. He told her what the theory was.

  “Complicated,” she said. “And, I’d think, very chancy. A noisy car. A key which might, so far as that went, not have been used. You might have missed all of it. Then a lot of trouble gone to for nothing.”

  “Trust it wouldn’t be missed,” Heimrich told his wife. “Confidence in police thoroughness. With guidance to be supplied if it became necessary, naturally. A little finger pointing.”

  Susan said “hm-m-m” and sipped daiquiri.

  “A concoction,” she said, after a moment. It was not entirely clear whether she referred to a drink or to a theory. Heimrich chose the latter interpretation.

  “I may be concocting it,” he said, and, being not quite in time to stop himself, added, “Naturally. But murder is sometimes concocted. Sometimes, probably, got away with if it is concocted well enough. If there are enough red herrings provided. If the picture is enough obscured. Given an obvious, but false, focus.”

  “If metaphors are sufficiently mixed,” Susan said, and sipped from her glass. “Too large a cast?”

  Certainly there was that. Murder is commonly a lonely occupation. But bit players may be taught lines; kept in the dark as to the intent behind the lines.

  Susan said “hm-m-m” to that, and finished her drink. Merton Heimrich tapped the bell again. “I don’t know whether—” Susan said, and was told the drinks were small and time ample.

  They dawdled through dinner, which was blue points and rare roast beef and admirable. They talked of other things. The Thompsons had been glad to take young Michael for the evening; for the night if it came to that. “Of course,” Susan said, “he’ll want educational TV. And Bobby wants Westerns. Sometimes I’m worried about our boy, darling.”

  “He wants to be a quarterback,” Heimrich said. “And a pitcher. And to win at Forest Hills. The monster?”

  Colonel is sometimes so referred to behind his back. The monster was on his cable. He had tried to hide when he realized what was impending. He had been unsuccessful, as he was at so much. Except, Heimrich noted, at knocking people down.

  It was difficult to get a cab at eight-thirty. They had forgotten it would be. “Country cousins,” Susan said. They got a cab and bucked lights to Second Avenue. It was almost nine when they went down badly lighted stairs to The Bottom Drawer, which, reasonably enough, was in a basement.

  It was a long, dim room, cluttered with small tables. There were electric candles on the little tables and the candles seemed rather to add to than to lessen the obscurity. But waiters found their way among the tables. At the far end of the room which had once, Heimrich thought, been no more than a storage basement for the loft building above it, there was a shallow stage, barely above the floor level. It was lighted but unoccupied. The light from the stage fell on the table
s nearest it, and on those who drank at the tables. There, several tables had been pushed together for a group and, unexpectedly, the men in the group wore dinner jackets.

  The man who met them inside the doorway was also in dinner jacket. He looked around the room, obviously not expecting to see anything, but willing to go through motions. He shook his head sadly. He was afraid not. Not that he was not sorry. A little later—

  “I telephoned,” Heimrich said. “Whoever it was said he would try to hold a table. My name’s Heimrich.”

  “We don’t make reservations. I’m afraid—Heimrich, you said?”

  Merton Heimrich had.

  “Perhaps we can manage to wedge—” He looked around the room again, this time as if he really looked. Heimrich also looked, his eyes accustomed to the dimness. He said, “Over there?” and pointed, and the man, who was softly heavy, looked where Heimrich pointed—looked at a table for two against a wall, midway down the long room.

  “Thing is,” he said, “we have regulars. But—” He looked at the watch on his wrist; he consulted the ceiling. “All right,” he said. “I do remember now. I did say we’d do what we could, Captain.” Then, more loudly, he said, “Roy,” and when a waiter turned he gestured toward the table against the wall.

  It was very warm in the room. Roy waited as they sat, Heimrich with his back to the stage. Roy said, “What’ll it be, folks?”

  There was a minimal amount of gin in Heimrich’s tall glass, but an abundance of tonic water. He looked across the table at Susan and raised his eyebrows. She tasted her rum collins and held thumb and forefinger a measuring quarter of an inch apart. Then she said, “What is it, dear. You’ve thought of something?”

  “Wondered about something,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes. Susan waited and sipped a watered drink. “I called this afternoon,” Heimrich said, his eyes still closed and he was, Susan thought, listening to his call of the afternoon as he told of it. “Called here. Tried to make a reservation. They don’t make reservations. I gave them my name, I’m pretty sure. That was a mistake, naturally. But—I’m also pretty sure I didn’t say I was a captain of anything. Don’t as a rule.”

  “No,” Susan said, when he paused but still kept his eyes closed, going over it in the quiet behind closed eyelids. “You almost never do. Unless it’s very official, of course. It would be like saying this is Mister So-and-So?”

  “Of course,” Heimrich said, “our ample host may call everybody ‘captain.’ In most of the cabs I took today the driver called me ‘Mac.’ On the other hand, we may have been expected. I asked around about the girl in a place or two—Charlie’s friend, a man in a record store. Charlie’s friend spoke of a grapevine. Remember the one a couple of years ago which spread into everything, however much we cut it back?”

  “It still does,” Susan said. “Undaunted.”

  He opened his eyes.

  “It could be,” Heimrich said, “that I was expected here. That wouldn’t be too good if the theory’s any good. It might be very much too bad. It might—”

  But then the lights on the tables dimmed even further and there was a moderate hush in the long room, which had before rustled with voices. Heimrich turned partly in his seat so that he could see the stage.

  A tall and handsome Negro carried a microphone standard onto the stage and put it down stage center. He raised both hands, admonishing to silence. He leaned down to the microphone and spoke into it, in a deep baritone and with solemnity. “Welcome,” he said. “Welcome all to The Bottom Drawer.” Then piano music came from off stage, and to the music two girls cart-wheeled from right and left, whirligigs with lovely legs. They came upright on either side of the tall man at the microphone.

  One of the girls was blond, and her hair, which had swirled excitedly with her movements, settled softly to her shoulders, which were bare. She raised hands to smooth down the ash-blond hair. (Words echoed in Heimrich’s mind. “So soft, so lustrous,” the words were.) But the blond girl on stage had said nothing.

  The other girl had black hair, fitting smoothly to her head. In the light from a suffused spot her face was strangely white.

  As the girls settled in mid-stage, a man came on from stage right. He had shaggy hair, with bangs to his eyebrows. As he walked toward the others at the mike, the piano took, briefly, the tempo of rock and roll. The shaggy man carried newspapers under his arm. “Read all about it,” he told the dark girl, and handed her a newspaper. “Everywhere there is a crisis.” He handed a newspaper to the blond girl. “Read all about it,” he told her. “Everything is getting worse.” He handed a newspaper to the tall Negro. He said, “Lead us, brother. Lead us.”

  The music quickened to patter tempo.

  The Negro held the paper up and turned pages. He began to sing. “Headline on page twenty-two,” he sang. “Utopia is overdue. Turning to page twenty-nine, Klansmen form a picket line.”

  At that, the other three put their newspapers above their heads, forming them into hoods. They marched around the singer at the microphone. They chanted, “Catch a nigger by the toe. If he hollers, beat him low. Down with nasty Federal courts. Interfering with our sports.”

  They stopped and formed a semicircle around the microphone.

  “Everywhere there is a crisis,” they sang together. “Every time they throw the dices.”

  They took turns, then, in pattering, with the appearance of reading from the papers—with faster and faster fluttering of newspaper pages—satirical comments on the happenings of the past week. Sometimes their comments seemed, to Heimrich, pointed with wit. More often they seemed to be telling each other, and the audience, private jokes. At the lines which seemed to him most obscure, the audience laughed most loudly—laughed with a kind of eagerness, as if laughter were a contest.

  “Perhaps,” Susan said across the table, “we’re not really in the know. All this must be funnier than it is.”

  The four pattered through the news for almost ten minutes. After part of it, Heimrich turned from the stage and to his drink.

  “The blond one’s the girl,” he said. “What do your ears say?”

  “Contralto,” Susan said. “Rather good. Better than what she’s doing, probably.”

  “And that,” Cynthia Williams said, her voice deeper, throaty, “is what we find in the bottom drawer.”

  The lights went out on the stage. There was, from it, the shuffling of feet. A spot came on after seconds and was focused on the blond girl. “The other afternoon,” she said, “I was a privileged woman. So privileged I was asked to a literary party. A real literary party. To welcome Miss Hermione Belcher—the

  Hermione Belcher—who has come all the way from England—at least I think it was all the way—to bring us culture. And you know how we all need culture. It was something like—”

  The spotlight went off; the full stage was lighted. It was furnished, now, with two wooden chairs. The blond girl stood in front of one of the chairs. “Perhaps,” she said, “just a soupçons of sherry. If you sweet people have soupçons in this dear young country.”

  Her voice and her accent were entirely unlike what they had been before. The voice was higher; the accent very British.

  She was various women then, as she moved alone around the stage. She seemed, moving so, to be moving among many. She was a clubwoman from Westchester, devoted to the higher things. She was a member of a garden club—“You’ll just have to imagine the hat, darlings”—who had taken a wrong turning on her way to the party; had expected to be among delphiniums.

  For ten minutes Cynthia Williams, alone on the stage, was on a crowded stage. Gently, she parted clustered people, so that she could move among them. She joined a group, and became a group. She was a girl from the Middle West at her first New York party, and wide-eyed with wonder; she was a girl from the Deep South, who had read a book. She was, again and then again, Hermione Belcher, looking on through alien eyes at the odd performances of natives. She was Hermione Belcher for the final time when the ligh
ts went off and the stage was dark again.

  “She’s good, I think,” Susan said. “Almost very good. Did you ever see Ruth Draper, Merton?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nor I,” Susan said. “She did this sort of thing for a good many years. Father told me about her—how, when she was on the stage alone, there were many on the stage. How you could see the others, even with your eyes open, knowing there weren’t any others. This girl has something of that, hasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I take it your ears say Yes.”

  “I think so. She’s quite good, I think. And, although she probably doesn’t think so, very young. There’s a feeling of naïveté, isn’t there? Or am I imagining that?”

  “I think there is,” Heimrich told his wife. “I couldn’t find the word for it.”

  “That would fit, wouldn’t it?”

  “It could.” He smiled across the table. “You always want the young to be innocent, don’t you? They’re not, you know.”

  The stage lighted up again. The four came on it, in procession, the dark girl leading. They acted a little play; they were four from the outlands, visiting an exhibition of modern art, and commenting on pictures they seemed to see on the bare walls of the stage. Their comments were ribald; as the sketch continued, the dialogue crawled with double meanings. Most in the audience chirped recognition, triumph of discovery in their chirpings, their sophistication eager.

  But a middle-aged couple got up from a table near the center of the room and the man slapped bills down on it. They walked between tables toward the door and seemed to draw into themselves as they walked, avoiding contact.

  “Stalk is the word for it,” Susan said. “ ‘They stalked out.’ I always wondered how it was done.”

  “Just plain nasty, if you ask me,” the woman—who was tall, rather angular—said as she passed the Heimrichs’ table. “How decent people …”