Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  “A few blocks from here. His studio is on Eighty-third Street and First Avenue. Third-floor walkup; he has no street trade. I don’t know the address, but it’s the second or third building east of Second on the south side of the street. Hermann Dworkyn.” He spelled it for me.

  I thanked him and left, feeling exhilarated. I can understand the rush thieves and confidence men get doing their job. I had fooled this man—okay, I had lied to this man—and felt very good about it. I hoped it was because the lying had accomplished a necessary and worthwhile goal, and not because I enjoyed sin for its own sake. I thought of De Quincey’s essay on murder, where he decried it as leading to lying and Sabbath-breaking. Could the reverse be true?

  The hallway of 428 East Eighty-third Street, the third building in from the corner of Second Avenue, was the entrance to a building that had seen better days, but not recently. The front door closed but didn’t lock. The inner door had so many coats of paint on it that it didn’t quite close, and several of the outer coats were peeling so that a motley of colors showed, mostly shades of green, except for one layer of dark brown. There was a separate, large mailbox, with DWORKYN STUDIOS neatly calligraphed on its face, screwed into the wall next to the regular mailboxes.

  I went up two flights to the door that had similar calligraphy on the front. I could hear voices, faintly, from inside. There was a small sign pasted above the door buzzer that said RING, so I did. After a minute I rang again. In case the buzzer was broken, I knocked. Nothing. I put my ear to the door. I heard a man speaking and, after a second, a woman answering. There was something familiar about the voices, but I couldn’t pin it down. I knocked again.

  A woman came up the stairs and headed down the hall toward me. She was somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties, wearing a black, tight-fitting dress that was a bit shorter than most and heels a bit higher than I would have expected. She wore no jewelry around her neck or pinned to the dress, but her arms were covered with silver bracelets that jangled when she walked. In face, form, and dress she was much better looking than the building deserved. “You want to see Herm?” she asked.

  “I would very much like to see Mr. Dworkyn,” I told her.

  “That’s Herm. The bell don’t work; it broke a couple of weeks ago and the landlord—” She shrugged to say everything necessary about landlords. “And if he’s in the darkroom, he can’t hear you knock.”

  “I thought I heard someone inside,” I said, “but maybe I was wrong. Maybe he’s gone home. It’s getting kind of late.”

  “This is his home,” she said. “He got some prints for you?” She took a key from her little black-with-a-diamond-studded-catch clutch purse and inserted it in the lock. “Come on in. My name is Bobbi—with an i. Who are you?”

  She pushed the door open and I told her my name and followed her into what once was a fairly large living room. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the room, but I could hear the voices much clearer now, and I recognized them: Lamont Cranston and Margot Lane. It was the voice of the Invisible Shadow, narrating one of his half-hour adventures over the console radio in the far corner. The room was full of lights and props, including a king-sized bed, a sofa, a love seat, an ottoman, and a portable wall with two portholes in it. The various articles of furniture were all shoved against the far wall, except for the bed, which was in the middle of the floor. Behind the bed were a couple of flats painted to look like the corner of an elegant bedroom, the sort you’d find in a château in France. An ornate dressing table was against one of the flats, and the whole area was full of artfully arranged drapes and casually distributed puffy pillows.

  “Hey, Herm, it’s Bobbi—I’m back!” the lady in black yelled. “Put your pants on; we have a customer!”

  She saw my expression and chuckled deep in her throat. “It’s not what you think,” she said, “whatever that may be. It gets very hot in the darkroom when Herm’s working in there, so sometimes he works in his shorts.”

  “I didn’t—” I said.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “But most people would. Guy who makes his living taking art pictures, working in his underwear. He doesn’t do that when any of the girls are here. He’s very proper. But very relaxed-like. Otherwise the girls would get uptight.” She went over to turn off the radio. “No wonder he couldn’t hear us, with this thing blaring.”

  “Art pictures?” I asked.

  “You know, it’s funny,” Bobbi said. “Usually the guys get more uptight about taking their clothes off than the girls.” She turned and yelled, “Herm! You okay in there? Come on out!” Then she turned back to me. “Yeah, art pictures. You know—like those.” She pointed to the near wall, which was full of thumbtacked-up photos. I walked over to examine them.

  “Herm!” she yelled again. “I got two suitcases downstairs. I left them with Selma. You want to bring them up for me? Or should I give the Harris kid a quarter?”

  The pictures were the sort found in girlie magazines; ladies in various stages of undress, reacting to the camera as though it were an intruder or a Peeping Tom. Some of the girls looked coy, some looked shocked, and some looked inviting. The people who publish these sort of pictures like to refer to them as “art studies.” They were mildly erotic without being actively pornographic, and no illegal or illicit activity was shown, although several were suggested. In the pictures with men in them, the men were not even touching the women, although they were posed to look as though they might at any second. The magazines that used this sort of photography were sold under the counter in drugstores across the country, and at least half of the titillation was in the act of buying them.

  Bobbi jangled across the room and opened a door which led to a short hallway and several other doors. “Shit!” she said. “He ain’t here. If he was in the darkroom,” she indicated the right-hand door, “the little red light would be on.”

  “Maybe I should go,” I said.

  “Nah!” Bobbi said, recrossing the room. “Sit tight. He’s probably out stuffing his face. And he has a lot of face to stuff. He won’t be long.” She went out the front door and a few seconds later I heard her knocking on a door down the hall and calling: “Mrs. Harris, is your son Larry at home?” She negotiated with the son, who sounded like he was about fourteen, to retrieve her suitcases, and returned to the apartment-studio.

  “I just got back from Philadelphia,” she confided to me, sitting on the bed and kicking her shoes off. “I was working a club date. Well, it was more like what you call a ‘smoker.’ A lot of husbands who’d left their wives at home, sitting around in this small room watching me take my clothes off.”

  I moved away from the wall of photos and sat in a straight-back chair near the bed. “Is that what you do?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’m an exotic dancer. When I’m working the circuit I’m billed as “Celeste the VaVoom Girl,” or as “Celeste with her Mystical Dance of Love,” depending on which routine I’m doing. I’m a headliner. But when I’m working club dates I don’t use that name, ’cause it would lower my price if it became known that a headliner was working club dates.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “What do you want to see Herm about? He take some pictures for you?”

  “Actually,” I told her, “I’m not sure. I have some photographs that he might have taken, and I want to talk to him about them.”

  “Let’s see them,” Bobbi said. “I can probably tell you. I know his style. He’s a perfectionist, you know. Everything has to be just right: costume, lighting, makeup—everything.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “I don’t have the pictures with me.”

  She looked at me as though I’d said something odd, which I suppose I had. I decided on an explanation that was as close to honest as I could manage. After all, if Herm was our man, he’d know about the pictures.

  “A man whom we think may have been Mr. Dworkyn showed my boss some pictures,” I said. “We’d like to talk to that man, so I’m w
aiting to see if Mr. Dworkyn is him.”

  “I like men who say ‘whom,’” Bobbi said, shifting over in the bed. She patted the blanket. “Come sit next to me.”

  Here was the invitation I’d been waiting for for years. An attractive woman—a very attractive woman—wanted me to sit next to her. On a bed. “Ahhh,” I said. I didn’t move. I tried, but I seemed to be incapable of motion.

  “What’s the matter?” Bobbi asked. “Don’t you like girls? I can usually tell, but sometimes I misjudge. It’s all right, nothing to be ashamed of. I’m just disappointed, is all.”

  “No, no,” I said. “It’s not that. It’s just, well… what if Herm comes home?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” she said. “He’s my brother, not my husband. The only thing he’d do is maybe take pictures.”

  I thought of the photographs in my breast pocket. “Really?” I asked.

  She thought about it for a second. “Nah, not really. Not unless there was a market for them. Besides, he knows I’d kill him.”

  “Has he ever taken pictures like that—you know, with two people mutually engaged?”

  “Mutually engaged? I like that. You talk good.” She shook her head. “Not so far as I know, and I’d know. He loves to show off his pictures, talk about them. He’s proud of his art. Sometimes one of the magazines will want pictures that show more skin, or more action, and he won’t do it.”

  An adolescent boy with more than his share of acne pushed his way through the door lugging two suitcases. Larry dropped the suitcases on the floor inside the door. “Here you are, Miss Starr,” he said.

  “Thank you, Larry,” she said, hunting for a quarter in her purse and tossing it to him.

  “Thank you, Miss Starr,” he said, raising his hand in an undefinable gesture and exiting.

  “Miss Star?” I asked.

  “It’s my stage name,” she said. “Celeste Starr, with two r’s.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “‘Roberta Dworkyn’ wouldn’t pull in the customers,” she said. “I’d better put the suitcases inside.” She got up.

  “Let me help.” I retrieved the two suitcases, and realized that Larry was stronger than he looked. Celeste Starr did not pack light for an overnight smoker in Philadelphia.

  “This way,” she said, leading me toward the back. “I’m just staying with Herm temporarily until I can get another place. The last place I was in, over on Thirty-seventh and Lexington, had a fire. It wasn’t bad, but I moved out the next day. I have a thing about fires.” She entered the little hallway and opened the door on the left, opposite the darkroom. I was a couple of steps behind her, trying to maneuver the suitcases around some furniture.

  “This is the room I’m—oh shit!” she said. “What the hell happened in here?”

  I put the suitcases down and peered over her shoulder into the room. There was a single bed in one corner, and a bureau next to it, and three wooden five-drawer file cabinets across the room. The bed had one of those large comforters on it. On the comforter was a great pile of papers, envelopes, and glossy photographs. Similar detritus was distributed about the floor. Every drawer in the file cabinets and the bureau had been pulled open. On the bureau was a pile of lady’s undergarments—stockings, brassieres, panties—all stirred into one large, colorful, exotic mess.

  Bobbi walked gingerly into the room. “Someone’s been pawing through my underwear,” she said. “While I was stripping for those perverts in Philadelphia, some perverted asshole in New York has been fondling my brassieres. And those are my working bras; they cost eight bucks apiece!” She sounded as if she was close to tears.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  She turned to me and put her arms around me with a sort of convulsive motion. Her nose was pushed against my shoulder, and various parts of her body were snug against various parts of my body. “You don’t think what?” she asked.

  The proximity of her body did strange things to my thought processes. It took me a moment to remember what I hadn’t thought. “I don’t think whoever did this was particularly interested in your undergarments,” I told her. “They’ve put more effort into messing up the pictures. My guess is they were looking for something.”

  She clung to me for another long moment, and then let go and turned around. She considered the mess in front of her. “You’re right,” she said. “These are Hermann’s files. He’s going to be pissed when he sees this.” She tiptoed across the floor, doing her best to avoid the pictures, and started putting her underwear away. “I’ll bet it’s that kid from across the street. What’s his name? Grossberg—something like that. Herm caught the kid sneaking onto the fire escape so’s he could watch the girls during shoots. He even brought his friends up. I think he was charging them a nickel a peep. Herm painted the windows black. Maybe the kid was taking his revenge for loss of income.”

  I didn’t think it was the Grossberg kid. I had a horrible feeling that I didn’t want to share with Bobbi just yet. If I was wrong, there was no point in frightening her. I hoped I was wrong. “Maybe we should check the other rooms,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Take a look, will you? I want to finish cleaning up this mess.”

  There were three other doors along the hallway. The first was Hermann’s bedroom. There was a large, unmade four-poster bed against the wall, and two dressers against the other wall beneath the two windows, which looked out on the building across the courtyard. There were two separate piles of clothing on the floor, and several piles of various camera accessories on the dressers and the floor between them. Two suits were hanging in the closet, the door of which was standing open, and several pairs of shoes had been tossed onto the closet floor. It was a mess, but a mess that had been created by its occupant. On the near dresser was a framed snapshot of a man and woman at the beach, holding hands and smiling at the camera. The woman was Bobbi, and the man, presumably Hermann, was the gentleman who had given Brass the dirty pictures. Well. That, at least, was settled.

  The middle door was the bathroom, a spotless and sanitary refuge. After having seen Hermann’s bedroom, I assumed that his sister was responsible for cleaning the bathroom. Or maybe they had a housekeeper. Photostudiokeeper?

  I opened the door to the darkroom. It was a dark room. The spill from the hall light revealed little. I felt around the inside wall near the door for a light switch, and finally found it higher on the wall than I had expected. I flipped it on.

  The room was large, it had probably been the master bedroom, and there were cabinets and sinks along the walls. The windows had been painted over and covered by black drapes. There were two enlargers and several pieces of equipment I didn’t recognize placed strategically about.

  Hermann was there. He had been there for some time. He was tied to a chair in the middle of the floor, naked, with one of his sister’s black silk stockings stuffed into his mouth. He was dead, but judging by the gouges and slashes on his face and body and the blood on the floor, he had been a long time dying. His knees had been tied to the sides of the chair, forcing his legs apart, and it looked as if a good bit of his torment had been aimed at his genitals. Blood flowing from the various wounds had formed a clotted sheet of red, purple, and black down his body. In some places patches of skin had been removed; in others the skin was partially cut away, and hung grotesquely from his body, leaving blotchy views of interior things that should be seen only by surgeons.

  I managed to make it to the bathroom before I threw up.

  12

  I haven’t had much practice puking, so I don’t do it very well. I was fascinated to find that, even as an involuntary act, it required effort and concentration to do it right. It was a couple of minutes, perhaps longer, before I realized that Bobbi was standing in the bathroom doorway watching me with a critical eye.

  I moved my head from over the toilet bowl to the sink and grabbed a couple of towels to clean myself up. “Sorry,” I mumbled. I was desperately trying
to remember whether I had closed the door to the darkroom before stumbling into the bathroom.

  “Here,” she said. “Let me do that. I’ve had a lot of practice.” She soaked a towel in hot water and briskly rubbed my face with it with the professionalism of a mother cleaning up a three-year-old. “You didn’t eat anything since you got here,” she commented. “Been drinking? You faked me out.”

  “No,” I said.

  She turned me around. “Here’s a comb. What the hell happened?”

  “You do this a lot?” I asked, waving my hand vaguely at the sink.

  “Sure,” she said. “The johns at the clubs I work. The ones that wait for the girls after the show. They drink too much, they grope you, they promise you a night of fun, then they upchuck on you. It’s a sort of ritual.”

  I took a couple of deep breaths and stood up to look in the mirror and comb my hair. “Is there a telephone in the apartment?”

  “In the front room. The fancy French-looking phone by the bed doesn’t work—it’s a prop—but there’s a pay phone by the window.”

  “A pay phone?”

  “Yeah. The models spend their lives on the phone, and Herm got tired of paying for it. You need a nickel?”

  “No, I think I’ve got change.” I took her hand and led her out of the bathroom. The darkroom door was closed, thank God. We went through into the front room. “Bobbi,” I said, “sit down. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

  She dropped onto the bed. “Why, Mr. DeWitt,” she said, “this is so sudden. Shall we have the honeymoon before or after the marriage? Or perhaps instead of?”

  “Bobbi—”

  “Paris, Vienna, Hoboken; the choice is yours.”

  If there was world enough and time… “Bobbi, listen to me! Your brother is dead. I have to call the police.”

  She stared at me as though I were speaking a foreign language that she could almost understand. The words were there, but the content—“My brother… Herm… where…?” She started toward the rear door, but I stopped her and held her. “He’s in the darkroom. You don’t want to go in there.”