Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  “Well!” I said. “And who is her new friend?”

  “Her name is Heidi,” Gloria said. “She is the niece of Dr. Erich von Mainard, a special guest of the senator’s. That’s him over there.” She pointed to a thin man with a long face, close-set eyes, and a carefully manicured beard that came to a point several inches below where his chin would have been if he’d had a chin. I have no evidence that he didn’t have a chin, but I’m training myself to be a careful observer and report only what I know.

  “What sort of doctor is he?” I asked.

  “He runs a clinic in New York City,” Brass said. “The Mainard Clinic, as a matter of fact, specializing in diseases of the affluent.”

  “He could certainly build up a clientele around here,” I said.

  “Take a careful look at his niece,” Brass said. “Look her over carefully, take your time, and see if anything occurs to you.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “But if I’d known I was going to be forced to stare at beautiful women, I never would have taken this job.” I crossed the room to the bar in the next room and got myself a scotch and soda and then headed back. I stared at Heidi as I passed. I didn’t have to be too subtle; she must have been used to men staring at her. Her complexion was a pale white with a hint of red at the cheeks, her chin was noble, her nose was straight with an aristocratic flare at the end, her shoulder-length blond hair softly framed her perfect oval of a face. Her dress was artfully designed to emphasize what it was concealing, but her body needed little emphasis. I could go on like this, but you get the idea.

  Dr. von Mainard, he of the pointed beard, had stalked over to Brass while I was contemplating his niece, and was giving him the lowdown on the Mainard Clinic. I think he expected Brass to whip out a pad and pen and take notes for his next column. “It is our psyche that responds to and directs our physical body,” he was saying with a controlled intensity, his eyes bright with the fervor of a true believer. He spoke with the overly precise pronunciation of the well-educated European. “It is the repression of physical emotion, Mr. Brass, that curls up inside the stomach of our psyche and sours the spiritual food with which we nourish ourselves. Modern society forces us to accept too many of these repressions, which do us great harm and prevent us from achieving our potential.”

  “Indeed,” Brass said, taking a step backward as von Mainard continued to advance as he spoke.

  “At my clinic we remove these repressions and allow the psyche, and thus the persona, to become whole.”

  “Fascinating,” Brass said.

  “You must come and visit us. I, myself, would be delighted to give you a tour and—why not?—a session so that you can see of yourself how powerful this can be. I insist.”

  “I’ll call you,” Brass said.

  Dr. von Mainard, his missionary work done, brought his heels together, bowed, and stalked off to convert someone else.

  Brass took a deep breath. “My psyche needs refreshment,” he said, artfully removing a glass of wine from a passing tray.

  Brass and Gloria turned to me and waited patiently while I took a thoughtful sip of my drink.

  “She’s a lot prettier than he is,” I said.

  “Nothing else?” Brass asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “Except for the fact that she sure as hell doesn’t look anything like her uncle, I don’t see whatever you see.”

  “I didn’t see it either,” Brass said. “There is some advantage to having a woman around to appraise other women.”

  I looked expectantly at Gloria.

  “Picture,” Gloria said, “that paragon of department store magnates, Mr. Ephraim L. Wackersan.”

  “Junior,” I said. “I’d rather not,” I said.

  “Picture him naked, lying on his back, his eyes crossed in concentration, with a young woman, also naked, straddling him somewhere around the midsection.”

  “You mean…” I said. “Heidi—”

  “I mean Heidi,” Gloria said.

  I slowly turned for another look. A minute or so later I turned back. “It could be,” I said. “It could very well be.”

  “It is!” Gloria said.

  I thought it over for five or six seconds, but nothing clever occurred to me. “Well, what are we going to do about it?” I asked Brass.

  “Cathy is doing what has to be done,” Brass said. “She seems to have a talent for making friends. Man, woman, or small animal, they all love her.”

  “What is she telling Heidi?”

  “Whatever is appropriate. She is, of course, omitting the fact that she came here with us. Cathy is very bright and highly motivated. She’ll manage.”

  “And then what?”

  “That depends on what Cathy discovers,” Brass said.

  A few minutes later Senator Childers and his wife entered the room têtes-à-têtes with Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. A thin-faced man with dark, deep-set eyes and a Leica camera with a flash gun came in with them and, as Lindbergh and Earhart circulated through the rooms, he scrambled about, taking pictures of either or both of them standing with some eager patron of the senator’s.

  We stayed where we were, unobtrusively eyeing Cathy and Heidi. It would have been wiser to ignore them on the slight chance that Heidi would notice us watching, and we couldn’t see anything anyway, but there you have it. After a while Lindbergh’s circuit brought him to where we were standing, and someone introduced him to Brass. He stuck out his hand. “You’re the chap who writes the column about nightclubs and showgirls,” he said.

  Brass shook his hand. “I have occasionally touched on other subjects,” he said.

  “Yes, I remember,” Lindbergh said. “Politics and foreign affairs.”

  “Occasionally,” Brass admitted.

  Lindbergh shook his head. “You should stick to nightclubs and showgirls,” he said, and moved on.

  Several flashes had gone off while the two great men had met, and the thin-faced photographer came over as Lindbergh pulled away and handed Brass his card. “If you want some prints, suitable for framing…” he said, and then continued in Lindbergh’s wake.

  Brass stared after Lindbergh, the card in his hand and a tight smile on his lips. “Framing,” he said as though it were a dirty word. Then he glanced down at the card. He looked at it intently for a long moment and passed it to Gloria. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he said.

  Gloria stared at the card. “Well, well,” she said. “The long arm of coincidence is certainly beating us about the head and shoulders today.”

  I took the card and looked at it.

  “So he’s a German, and a photographer, and he lives in Yorkville, close to the scene of the action,” I said. “You’re going to be seeing coincidences under every rosebush if you’re not careful. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

  “How’s your German?” Brass asked.

  “Heil, Hitler and gesundheit, and that’s about it,” I told him.

  Gloria leaned close and smiled up at me. “Vogel,” she murmured, “is German for bird.”

  “So?” I said.

  She continued smiling.

  “Oh!” I said. I handed the card back to Brass. “Bird. As in the name on the Dworkyn folder. I see what you mean.”

  “Good,” Brass said.

  “We seem to be making progress,” I said. “What do we do now?”

  A waiter came to the doorway of the dining room and artfully stroked a dinner gong. “We eat dinner,” Brass said. “Then go home. Tomorrow we’ll consider the possibilities.”

  21

  Sunday I slept late. While I was asleep a ten-year-old Jersey City boy named Kappy Osterman and two of his friends rowed out into the Hudson River to fish. They pushed off at 6 A.M., having absorbed from their elders the ancient wisdom that it is necessary to sneak up on fish in the dark. At six-forty, as the sun was rising somewhere behind the Manhattan skyline, Kappy hooked onto something that would provide him with after-dinner conversation for many decades to come. “It was awful,” he
told his mother a couple of hours later, after the police sent him and his friends home. “Fish-belly white, but it wasn’t no fish. It was a arm. A human person’s arm.”

  By quarter past seven the Jersey City police had fished the arm, and the body attached to it, out of the Hudson. At ten o’clock they called the New York City police. At quarter to eleven Brass called me.

  It was shortly after noon when the unmarked New York City police car pulled up in front of the vaguely Gothic, redbrick building that housed the Jersey City morgue. Inspector Raab got out of the front seat and Brass and I emerged from the back. Captain Niall McVinnie of the Jersey City Police Department, a squat, powerful-looking man in an immaculate blue uniform plastered with gold braid, was waiting for us at the curb. He shook hands with Inspector Raab. “Glad you could come, it being a Sunday and all.”

  Raab introduced Brass and me, and a mighty frown crossed the captain’s brow as he shook our hands. “Newspapers,” he said, turning to Raab. “Did you have to bring the newspapers?” He turned back to Brass. “Not that it isn’t much of an honor to meet yourself, Mr. Brass, but we could do without the newspapers at the moment.”

  “I am not a newspaper,” Brass told the captain. “Not even a newspaper reporter. I am under no obligation to write about whatever I see here.”

  “Calm yourself, McVinnie,” Raab said, slapping the captain on the shoulder in a gesture of solidarity. “I asked Brass and DeWitt to come along because I thought they might be able to help. You want us to take jurisdiction, don’t you?”

  “I want you to take this goddamn body out of here. Just because it was a Jersey City lad that hooked onto it in the river doesn’t make it a Jersey City killing. We’re having enough troubles with the citizens’ groups right now, and with the local papers having a sporting day over the department’s troubles. I could sure do without adding a mutilated body to their list of incidents.”

  “I assure you I will not write anything detrimental to Jersey City or its police force,” Brass joined in. “I don’t want to do anything to add to your troubles.”

  Brass was being less than ingenuous. He wouldn’t write anything at all about Jersey City because, even though it was just across the Hudson, Jersey City could be Mars as far as readers of the New York World were concerned. But the mention of his troubles took the captain’s thoughts away from the implausibility of the head of New York City’s Homicide North and a major newspaper columnist crossing the river on a Sunday to view an unidentified floater. He shook his head sadly as he led the way up the front steps. “Four of me own lads,” he said. “Who would of thought it?”

  “I’ve heard the story. Did they do it?” Brass asked.

  “There don’t seem to be much doubt,” McVinnie said. “They were caught leaving the loft building at four in the morning with their arms full of fur coats; the tools used to go through the floor into the fur vault were right where they’d dropped them and had their fingerprints all over—and the mothers’ sons were wearing nothing but their long johns at the time.”

  I tried unsuccessfully to suppress a grin. “They robbed a fur vault in their underwear?”

  McVinnie nodded, his face a cloud of indignation. “Burglarized,” he corrected me. “It’s not funny. They thought that if they were spotted it would be harder to identify them. Whatever is the world coming to?” He held the door open for us and we went past him into a cold, dark corridor. What little light there was came through a frosted-glass panel in a door at the end of the corridor. We headed toward the light.

  The sign painted below the frosted glass read: OFFICE OF THE CORONER—HUDSON COUNTY, NEW JERSEY. From inside came the murmur of subdued voices. We went in.

  There was a desk facing the door, and a couch to the right of the door. Five chairs were pulled up to the desk, and six men were playing stud poker on the desktop.

  The dealer looked up as we entered. “McVinnie,” he said.

  “Charlie,” the captain acknowledged. “This is Inspector Raab, NYPD; and these are a couple of New York newspaper fellows come to help.”

  Charlie nodded. “Charles Drier, Drier’s Full Service Funeral Home. I’m also the coroner. Let me finish this hand and then I’ll take you all inside for a viewing.”

  There was a minute of intense concentration before one of the policemen took a pot of something over two hundred dollars with a pair of tens up and one in the hole. Then the coroner gathered the cards, dropped the deck in the middle of the table, took his money off the table, and stretched. “I’ll be back shortly,” he told the other players. “If you’re going to mark the cards while I’m gone, don’t use mustard; it makes them sticky and hard to deal.”

  “As if we didn’t know who’s been sticking his little finger in the mustard,” one of the cops said, reaching for the deck.

  Drier led us into an inner room, and through that to a metal staircase which let out a thunderous ringing as we tramped down one flight to the basement. He pushed through two more doors and turned the lights on in a large, white room with metal tables and oversized file drawers set into the far wall. “Refrigeration’s been acting up,” he said, “but it seems to be all right now.” He crossed the room and pulled open one of the drawers. “Haven’t autopsied her yet. Doc won’t be here until Tuesday.” He pulled the white sheet down, revealing the object under it that had recently been a woman.

  Brass and Raab moved forward to stare down at the body. I stayed a little back, but I looked. What had caused us to give up our Sunday and cross the river was Captain McVinnie telling Raab that the corpse had been “mutilated.” His description of the hacking done to the body reminded Raab of the corpse of a certain defunct photographer, and so he had called Brass, and Brass me. And so we were staring with interest at the body of a young girl, and McVinnie was wondering why we cared, and nobody would tell him.

  The girl was blond, in her early twenties or even younger, and had been very good looking. This was no longer so. Her body was pale white, blotched with brown and crisscrossed with welts. My impression was that she had been thoroughly beaten, as well as slashed at with a whip or belt. It didn’t appear to be nearly as severe as the torture poor Hermann Dworkyn had suffered, but she couldn’t have enjoyed it. For a couple of minutes nobody said anything, and then Raab turned to the coroner. “Do you mind if we turn the body over?” he asked.

  “I don’t mind if she don’t mind,” Drier said.

  Between them Raab and Brass flipped the body over. The back showed a regular pattern of parallel stripes as though the girl had been whipped by someone who was practiced and precise at his job. I stepped closer to get a better look, recognizing in myself a growing callousness toward dead bodies. I suppose this was good if I was going to keep running into them.

  After a minute they returned the body to its supine position. Brass took the bag I was carrying, opened it, and pulled from its depths a roll film camera with a bellows lens and a flash gun. He turned the dead girl’s face sideways, stepped back, and took four flash pictures from varying distances.

  “Say,” McVinnie said, “what’d you do that for? You’re not going to use them pictures—”

  “You know I couldn’t do that if I wanted to,” Brass reassured him, tossing the camera, the flash, and the spent bulbs back in the bag. “The public isn’t ready for photographs of corpses in their morning papers. This just might help identify her, that’s all.”

  “Yeah,” McVinnie said. “I guess that’s right.”

  “I would say we’ve seen enough,” Brass said, drawing back from the table.

  “Yes,” Raab agreed. “I think we can take this problem off your hands, Captain. If you’ll bring the remains over to our side of the river, I’ll tell the ME to expect it.”

  “I’ll get the complete paperwork to you tomorrow,” Captain McVinnie said. “But I’ll sign ‘one unidentified white female, deceased’ over to you right now. Charlie, if you’ll take one of them fine hearses of yours and deliver the body to the morgue at Bellevue H
ospital sometime in the next couple of hours, I’d appreciate it.”

  “Fine,” Drier said. “Who do I bill?”

  We stared at him. He looked back unabashed. McVinnie sighed. “Bill the department, Charlie.”

  We returned to Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel and headed uptown to the World building. Raab dismissed his driver and came upstairs with us. Brass tossed me the roll of film and I took it downstairs to the photo-processing department and gave it to the on-duty man, who promised to call as soon as he had prints. I went out to pick up some sandwiches since we hadn’t eaten lunch. I had to go about six blocks to find a joint that was open on Sunday, but that’s the great thing about New York. At any time of the day or night there’s always someplace. I got meatball sandwiches on kaiser rolls from a little luncheonette on Tenth and Sixty-fifth that catered to cabbies.

  When I returned to the office, Raab was lying on the couch and Brass was in his desk chair, his back to the room, staring out at the river. I put a sandwich on Brass’s desk and on Raab’s chest and flopped into an armchair next to the couch. Neither of them moved. I stared from one to the other. “Well,” I said, “what do we know?”

  Raab raised his head from the couch cushion to look at me. “Too damn much,” he said. He let his head drop back down.

  “I’ve called Gloria,” Brass said without turning. “She was home. She is coming up. We are going to share information with Inspector Raab. He is not happy about this, as there is nothing he can do with the information at the moment.”

  “What information?” I asked.

  Brass swiveled in his chair and picked up a handful of eight-by-ten photographs from his desk blotter. “Here,” he said, tossing them in the general direction of my chair. “These were on the desk when I got here.” There were twenty of them and they scattered to twenty separate destinations around the room.

  I retrieved them. “Good toss,” I said, pulling one from under the couch, but I was speaking to Brass’s back; he had already returned to analyzing the traffic patterns on the Hudson River. I dropped back down in my chair and examined the pictures.