Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  They were photographs of naked women. No; they were all photographs of the same naked woman in a variety of poses. Unlike our previous collection, there was nobody else evident in any of the pictures, and the poses didn’t seem particularly erotic. The pictures were fairly grainy and seemed to have scratches or lines running through them. Then I realized what I was seeing: the lines weren’t on the photograph; they were on the girl. “She’s been cut!” I said.

  “Whipped,” Brass said. “Whipped and beaten. Use the glass.” He pushed a large magnifying glass across the desk and I got up and retrieved it.

  “Where did these come from?” I asked.

  “They’re blowups of the contact sheet Bobbi Dworkyn found in her brother’s files,” Brass explained. He unwrapped his sandwich and turned back to contemplate the passing garbage scows.

  I studied the photographs through Brass’s magnifying glass and reached two conclusions: that it was the same girl we had recently viewed on a slab in Jersey City, and that she was alive when these pictures were taken. She didn’t even seem particularly unhappy, morose, or angry. She was just standing passively with her arms raised or leaning forward or with her leg up on a chair displaying the inner thigh, the clear intent being to document her cuts, slashes, and bruises.

  “Somebody was beating up on this girl,” I said. Brass turned to stare at me without saying anything.

  “And now she’s dead,” Inspector Raab said without bothering to look up. “Can we assume there’s a connection? Don’t all speak at once.” He had covered his shirt and tie with the butcher paper his sandwich had been wrapped in, and was eating the sandwich without raising his head. I decided not to mention the strong possibility that he would choke on a meatball if he didn’t sit up.

  Gloria came in about ten minutes later. Brass had the original batch of pictures on the desk and was slowly going through them and comparing them with the new group. Gloria smoothed her skirt and sat in the chair next to the desk. “It’s just started to rain,” she said. “I understand you’ve had a hell of a morning.”

  “We’ve been to New Jersey,” Brass told her. “This seems to be our month for going to New Jersey. We went to Jersey City and examined the body of what had been an attractive young girl.”

  “So you said over the phone,” Gloria said. “What killed her?”

  Raab sat up and crumpled the butcher paper in a ball and threw it at the wastebasket. He missed. “She was fished out of the Hudson,” he said. “Couldn’t have been there long, not as long as a day. But she’s been dead two or three days, which means…”

  “Which means what?” Gloria asked.

  “I’m not sure, but it’s strange. Somebody’s been warehousing a corpse, which is a dangerous and unlikely thing to do. She was beaten and whipped, but that was at least a week before she died. The pictures we have here, pictures taken while she was still alive, were taken shortly after the beating. The bruises hadn’t had time to develop yet. And the other mutilations to the body, they were done after she was dead. Which is even odder. As far as what actually caused her death, there were no obvious fatal wounds, so we’ll have to wait for the postmortem.”

  “You have pictures of the same girl when she was alive?” Gloria asked.

  “They’re from the Dworkyn collection,” Brass said. “Which is why we’re assuming that this is all related.”

  “Some kind of strange sexual deviate?” Gloria suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” Raab said. “Too many different things happened to this poor girl. It would take a clan of deviates, each with his own particular deviation. Although that, itself, is not outside the bounds of human possibility.”

  Brass leaned forward and laid out six photographs across the front of his desk, slap, slap, slap, one at a time, like a gin rummy player laying out his hand. “One more piece of the puzzle,” he said.

  Inspector Raab and I came up next to Gloria and stared down at the exhibits. Two pictures from the original collection, given to us by Dworkyn, and four of the new ones. Just then a copy boy came in with an envelope holding the newly printed photographs of our Jersey City expedition. Brass went through them and picked out two, which he added to the six.

  Raab straightened up. “Son of a—” he said. “It’s the senator!”

  Brass looked from one to the other of us. “Are we agreed?” he asked. “The girl whose corpse showed up in the Hudson River this morning is the girl who is sharing an intimate moment with Senator Childers in these two photographs?”

  Inspector Raab put a finger on one picture contemplatively, and then shifted it to another. “Romans, six, twenty-three,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “‘For the wages of sin is death,’” Raab said.

  “Don’t get mystical,” Brass said. “The wages of everything is death. Some of us just have to wait longer to get paid off.”

  22

  Inspector Raab stared glumly at the litter of photographs in front of him and then raised his eyes to gaze out the window behind Brass. He pushed his chair away from the desk. “Well,” he said, “only one thing for me to do now.”

  We looked at him. Brass made a grunting sound that could have been a question.

  “Retire,” Raab said firmly. “If I put the paperwork in today it’ll go through in a week or two, maybe—I can stretch the investigation for a couple of weeks; slow, methodical work is good police work—and then Johnson or O’Farrell will have the pleasure of arresting a United States senator.”

  “You think Childers killed that girl?” Brass asked. “That’s kind of a leap.”

  “We don’t have enough to hold him now, although if he were a regular citizen we’d certainly bring him in for questioning. I’m not even sure that you can arrest a United States senator. I think they have immunity.”

  “That’s only on the floor of the Senate,” Brass told him.

  “Yeah, well, I’d have to go into New Jersey and get some local police chief to agree to help me. And Childers owns most of New Jersey and rents the rest. But it for sure looks like somebody’s going to have to ask him something. First he’s photographed with the girl, then pictures are taken showing that she has been truly and thoroughly beaten, and then she turns up dead. During this time a photographer who is somehow involved with the first set of photographs and a reporter who was following that photographer for reasons of his own are both killed. There are men who like to beat women, some for sexual satisfaction, and others just to show what big men they are. Is Childers one of them? If he has a record of it, it’s certainly been suppressed. Money and power buy a lot of suppression. But I can ask a few questions of the New Jersey State Police. Their chief, Colonel Schwarzkopf, is a good guy. They might know something. I’ll do that. They may tell me off the record; they may not. I wouldn’t want to bet my house that Childers killed the girl, but neither would I want to bet my front porch that he didn’t. As for Fox and Dworkyn, perhaps he was eliminating witnesses. I don’t say he killed them himself, but he could have had it done. There’s no question about that. You have a better suggestion?”

  “Who took the photographs?” Brass asked.

  Raab slumped in his chair and stared at the ceiling, silently thinking that one over. We silently watched him. After a minute he sat up. “Those middle photographs—the ones that show her alive but whipped and contused—where’d you get those?”

  A smile crossed Brass’s face. “Contused,” he said. “Right off a police report. I like it.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a business card. “We have no proof yet, but this gentleman may have had something to do with it.” He flipped the card across the desk.

  Raab picked up the card and examined it while Brass explained where it came from and why the name “Vogel” was of interest.

  “I knew we should have spent more time questioning that stripper,” Raab said. “Bird, eh?” He tapped the card. “Vogel. Also a photographer. Also lives in Yorkville. And you saw him at a party at Senato
r Childers’s estate. The connections are getting inescapable. It would be pushing the bounds of coincidence if Herr Dieter Vogel were not the bird in question. And yet another reason to wonder about the senior senator from New Jersey.”

  Raab stood up. He had come to a decision. “I’ll take those pictures,” he said. “Not the first set; the ones from the Bird folder. We will ignore the fact that you’ve been withholding evidence—”

  “Come on, Inspector,” Brass said. “We didn’t know they were evidence of anything until we had them blown up, and then you saw them at the same time I did.”

  Gloria smiled sweetly. “Is this the thanks he gets for letting you sleep on his couch?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I read the column,” Raab said. “We’ll discuss that some other time.” He gathered the photographs and stuffed them into his pocket. “I’ll pull this Vogel bird in and see what he has to say about taking pictures of the dead girl.” He reached for the telephone, but then pulled his hand back. “I guess I’d better set this up in person,” he said. “Then if anything goes wrong, I know who to blame.” He grabbed his hat and headed for the door.

  “Well,” I asked Brass after Raab had cleared out, “what’s your vote? Did Childers do it?”

  “There seems to be a confluence of events around Senator Childers,” Brass said. “But when a cyclone hits a barn in Kansas, you don’t blame the barn.”

  I paused for a moment to admire the rustic metaphor. “Then you think he didn’t do it?”

  Brass drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk. “It remains to be seen whether Senator Childers is the barn or the cyclone,” he said.

  “Do you think Vogel is our missing pornographer?” Gloria asked.

  “He probably took the pictures of the girl after she had been damaged,” Brass said. “Dworkyn filed them under his name. But how did he get them? We don’t know. And even if Vogel brought Dworkyn the first batch of pictures, we don’t know whether he took them or not, and if so, what the circumstances were.” He raised an arm and pointed it in the general direction of the wall safe. “You think he did that?” he asked me. The door was still hanging at a strange angle from the body of the safe, and the wall around it showed minor battle scars. Brass had ordered a sturdier replacement from the Ouiga Safe Company, but it would be another week before they could install it.

  “Not himself,” I said. “He wasn’t one of those three men. But maybe he sent them.”

  “Why?” Brass asked.

  I stated the obvious. “To recover the pictures.”

  Brass shook his head. “It won’t do,” he said. “If he took the pictures, he had the negatives. If they were being used for blackmail, the threat is in no way diminished if I have copies. He must have known I wouldn’t use them.”

  “Not everyone is as aware of your honesty and rectitude and high moral principles as we are,” I said. “But I see what you mean. The people most likely to have wanted the pictures badly enough to send a trio of thugs to retrieve them are the subjects.”

  Gloria stretched and turned around in her chair. “But they would have to have known that we had the pictures,” she said. “How would they have found out?”

  “Whoever killed Dworkyn tortured him first,” I said. “Probably to discover what he did with the pictures.”

  “And on that happy note,” Brass said, “I have a column to write. And I have nothing in mind. Nothing. Considerations of murder and mayhem, when you have a reason to take them personally, can drive all lesser thoughts from your mind.”

  “Tell the world about Senator Childers’s idea of what the ideal dinner party should be,” Gloria suggested. “The bourgeoisie always like hearing about how their betters live and frolic.”

  “That’s what caused the French Revolution,” Brass said. “That reminds me,” he turned to me. “Just when did Childers call me a son of a bitch, and how did you happen to overhear it?”

  “I met his daughter, Elizabeth, and we got friendly,” I began.

  “So that’s what they’re calling it now,” Gloria said. I glared at her, and I think my ears turned red. She said, “Oops, sorry,” and shut up.

  Brass stared at me patiently. “Your relations with Bitsy Childers are your business,” he said, “but anything you know about her father should be shared.”

  He was right. I paused for a few seconds to think of a way to say it, and then decided, what the hell, tell it like it was. I took a deep breath and plunged in. “Senator Childers caught us being friendly in the pool house,” I told Brass. “And he was very mild about it. I sort of expected an explosion, but it didn’t happen. He is not a normal father. A while later I was standing behind the pool house, and he and Bitsy were inside and I heard him yelling at her. But it wasn’t what he caught her doing with me that he was angry about; it was that she might be telling me things about him, which I would pass on to ‘that son of a bitch’ you. She said she wasn’t. He just about told her that, in that case, she should see me again and get me to talk about what you know about him and what you’re doing.”

  “Well,” Gloria said. “I wonder what secrets little Bitsy knows that her dad is worried about her telling to random partners—sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

  “I like the girl,” I said. “I don’t care what her reputation is, or how much of it is true, and I imagine a lot of it is.”

  “Are you going to see her again?” Brass asked.

  “I hope so,” I said. “She’s supposed to call.”

  “Well, don’t pump her about her father; he might hear about it. Whatever she might know, we can get at some other way.”

  “Let me make something clear,” I said, perhaps less mildly than I intended. “I have no intention of interrogating Elizabeth about anything, unless and until I get a compelling reason to do so. I’m sure she knows many interesting things about her father, but I doubt if any of them have anything to do with our concerns.”

  “Don’t get upset,” Brass said. “I was just telling you not to do what you’re insisting you won’t do. Just be careful not to tell her anything about what we’re doing, or what we suspect.”

  I got up and glowered across the desk. “If you don’t trust me—”

  “And for God’s sake don’t take offense,” Brass said. “We haven’t got time for that now. Men have been known to tell their inamorata secrets that were better untold. That’s how Mata Hari had a career.”

  “She got shot,” I said.

  “Right,” Brass said. “Now get out of here and let me attempt to work.” I went home.

  Pinky came back from his gig at the children’s hospital around eight o’clock, and I talked to him. My subject was women; specifically senators’ daughters. A very polite clown, Pinky pretended to be interested for over an hour before announcing that he had to go to his room.

  When I returned to the office around ten-thirty Monday morning, Gloria and Cathy were there, but Brass was not. Cathy was looking pleased with herself.

  “Morning,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “I,” Cathy announced, “just got offered a job.”

  “You have a job,” I said.

  Gloria was sitting behind her desk. She smiled up at me. “That was her job,” she said, “getting this job.”

  I propped myself up on the edge of the desk, leaned forward, and smiled back. “You lost me,” I said.

  “My new friend Heidi suggested I might like to work at the Mainard Clinic, where she works,” Cathy explained. “I led into it very gradually so she has no idea that it wasn’t her own idea. I told her I was a nightclub singer, but I wasn’t doing very well. She was very sympathetic. According to Heidi, I can make a lot of money at the clinic. The tips are very good.”

  “I’ll bet,” Gloria said.

  “I never realized I could be sneaky like that; it felt funny. And then I realized it’s what girls do with men all the time; I just never did it to another girl before.”

  Gloria nodded. “The ancient art of lett
ing men think they’re making the decisions,” she said.

  “Isn’t Dr. von Mainard her uncle?” I asked.

  “In name only,” Cathy said. “When an old man goes out with a pretty young girl, he’s either her uncle or he’s a dirty old man. We called them ‘sugar daddies’ at the Hotsy Totsy Club.”

  “I thought Wackersan the department store prince was her sugar daddy,” I said. “Isn’t Heidi the girl in the photograph with Wackersan?”

  “She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. If she isn’t, I’ve taken the wrong job.”

  “You’ve taken the job?”

  “I had an interview with Dr. von Mainard yesterday at his office.”

  “Sunday?”

  “One has to work Saturday and Sunday in the clinic, as a lot of their patients are important men who can only come in on the weekend.”

  “Just what is your job?” I asked.

  “I’m to be the receptionist,” she said.

  “I’ll bet that’s not where the good tips are,” Gloria said.

  Brass came in, nodded hello to all of us, and went through to his office. We followed in a couple of minutes, giving him enough time to sit down, twirl around in his chair a couple of times, and check the traffic on the river.

  “Cathy has got herself a job,” Gloria told him. “At the Mainard Clinic.”

  “Very good,” Brass said. “So your new friend Heidi works for her uncle?”

  Cathy explained about uncles and sugar daddies.

  “Wonderful,” Brass said. “So she’s an employee as well as a niece. I wonder if Mr. Wackersan ever visits the clinic.”

  “I wonder if it has a room with a skylight,” I added.

  “Be cautious,” Brass told Cathy. “If there’s anything to discover about the clinic or the doctor, let it come to you. Don’t take chances. If these people are involved, they’re very dangerous.”

  Cathy nodded. “Believe me,” she said, “I’m too scared to do anything silly.”