Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

The phone dinged, and Gloria reached around Brass’s desk to pick it up. “It’s the lobby,” she told Brass. “A group of Germans wants to come up to see you.” Since our incident with the three thugs, lobby security had instructions to check with us before letting people on the elevator. It was either that or hire two large bodyguards to stand at the door.

  “What group?” Brass asked.

  Gloria relayed the question. “It’s the Verein for Whosis and Whatsis,” she told him.

  “Send them up,” he said.

  There were five of them this time: the four originals and their leader, who had obviously been released from jail. They paused to bow politely to the ladies as they came in the room, and then turned to face Brass, a clump of five middle-aged European intellectuals standing at attention, hats clutched in front of them. “We have come to give you thanks,” Grosfeder, the stout journalist, announced.

  Max von Pilath took one step forward. “I am owing you much thanks,” he said. “I am not ungr-gr-grateful.” With that the entire group marched forward to crowd around Brass’s desk, right hands extended. Brass stood up and gravely shook hands with each of them, and they each took a step back at the completion of the ritual.

  Brass looked them over. “Obviously Mr. von Pilath has been released from jail,” he said, “and obviously you think I had something to do with it. Much as I would like to take credit, I think you should save your thanks for Inspector Raab of the New York City Police Department.”

  “But this inspector,” von Pilath said, “you t-told him of my innocence, yes? And he listened to you, yes?”

  “I told him I thought you were innocent, yes, but he made up his own mind.”

  They all chuckled, possibly at the idea of police inspectors having minds of their own.

  “It is as I said,” Grosfeder said. “In this country journalists are of some account. They are not locked up when they disagree with the authorities. It is the freedom of the press.” They bowed to the room at large and turned to leave. Before they had taken a step Schulman turned back and thrust his chin forward, pointing his beard at Brass. “You should use your admittedly great skills to write columns about the travail of the workers, Mr. Brass,” he said, nodding his head for emphasis. “You must grant that the capitalist system has been shown to—ergh—”

  Grosfeder’s large hand came up and grabbed Schulman by the collar and pulled him out of the room, his hands waving in the air.

  23

  The bird had flown. Inspector Raab went to call on Vogel late that Monday afternoon, and his studio was empty, deserted, cleaned out. A lady in the office across the hall told Raab that movers had come early that morning to take everything away and that Vogel, “such a nice man, always so polite,” had told her he was going away for a while. He didn’t say where.

  “And I don’t even know what he looks like,” Raab said. It was a little after five Tuesday afternoon, and he was in his usual corner of the couch in Brass’s office, a cup of coffee in his hand and annoyance in his voice. “You saw him, Brass; describe him to me.”

  “Gloria’s better at describing than I am,” Brass told him. “But it isn’t necessary. I can do better than that.” He fished in his drawer and came up with a manila envelope, which he skimmed across the room to Raab. “Can’t you trace him through the moving company?”

  “I’ve got two men on that right now,” Raab said, opening the envelope and shaking the contents onto the couch cushion. “What are these?”

  “The negatives of those photographs were in the Bird folder. The World photo lab just printed them up for me.”

  “More information you’ve been withholding?”

  “I didn’t mention them before because they weren’t relevant.”

  Raab scowled. “Someday, just once, I wish you’d let me decide that. Just once.”

  He switched on the table lamp by his side to better stare at the photographs. I peeked over his shoulder. There were eight pictures, all taken on a New York City street, judging by the background: a couple of Vogel in a suit, three of a plump but attractive girl in the sort of skirt and blouse that makes you think of European peasants, and three of both of them standing together.

  “That’s Vogel?” Raab asked. “Who’s the girl?”

  “That’s Vogel,” Brass affirmed. “I don’t know the girl. She’s not one of the young ladies in our exotic picture collection.”

  “I’ll take these two,” Raab said, stuffing the one of Vogel alone and the one of the girl alone in his pocket. He tossed the other two back on the desk. “You want a receipt?”

  Brass shook his head. “My gift to the NYPD.”

  Raab pushed himself to his feet and jammed his hat on his head. “I’m meeting Colonel Schwarzkopf at Luchow’s in an hour,” he said. “I was kind of vague about what I wanted to talk to him about over the phone, but I think he got my drift. And I think he has something to tell me if I ply him with roast beef and dark beer.”

  The phone rang in the outer office as Inspector Raab left, and a few seconds later Gloria stuck her head through the office door and pointed to me. I returned to the little cubicle I call an office and picked up the phone. Gloria had already patched the call through to me.

  “Hello?”

  “Morgan the Pirate?”

  For a second I didn’t know who it was. I think I didn’t really believe she’d call. “Elizabeth?”

  “I’m so pleased,” she said. “You can recognize my voice from all the other girls that pester you with phone calls.”

  “They all call me Mr. DeWitt and try to sell me subscriptions to The Saturday Evening Post.”

  “How’s your sales resistance?”

  “Wonderful. I now have twelve subscriptions.”

  “Good. Can I interest you in A Girl’s Life?”

  “Is that a magazine?”

  “It’s an autobiography, and I want to add another chapter. Have dinner with me tonight and help me decide what the subject should be.”

  “I think I can work you in,” I said.

  “Eight o’clock at Pietro’s?”

  I paused for a quarter of a second before I said yes to show her I wasn’t easy. We chatted about this and that for another minute, and hung up.

  Pietro’s is a small steak and spaghetti house in the West Forties. Dark wood walls, subdued lighting, quiet, friendly service, good food. It’s the perfect place to meet a lover for a romantic dinner. It would also be the perfect place to meet a city commissioner for a bribe payoff, or a professional killer to arrange the elimination of your spouse. It’s all in how you look at it.

  Elizabeth, my beautiful Elizabeth, was waiting for me at the bar when I arrived ten minutes early. My heart beat faster when I saw her and I stammered when I spoke. She broke into a wide smile when I came in and hugged me. She was wearing a black pleated skirt and sweater with a sort of tan (café au lait, she told me) jacket with large black buttons and an oversized black beret. “Simple yet elegant,” I told her.

  “Expensive yet costly,” she said. “It’s Balenciaga.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s what every shop girl will wear,” she said, “if she marries rich. And buys her clothes in Paris.”

  We sat at a table in a corner in the back and Elizabeth ordered dinner, since she knew more about it than I did and spoke Italian: fichi con prosciutto (a plate of figs with thin slices of Italian ham over them, another reason for leaving Ohio) to start; house salad and spaghetti alia bucanier for her, in honor of my being a buccaneer, she said; a spinach salad, a rare T-bone, and spaghetti con aglio e olio for me, in honor of my being hungry. We talked about many things during the meal. We held hands.

  “I can’t get over it,” she said, staring into my eyes over dessert—a piece of cheesecake for me and a warm zabaglione for her. “I never tire of looking at you.”

  “I like looking at you,” I told her, “among other things.”

  She smiled. “It’s funny, I’ve known you for all of two hours sp
read over two days, and I feel like we already share all the secrets in the universe. I care about you so much, sex isn’t important. We could just wander through Central Park holding hands and I’d be wonderfully happy.”

  For a minute I enjoyed the image, and then a random thought hit me and I suppressed a sudden impulse to laugh, but not quite well enough.

  She frowned. “Are you laughing at me?”

  I shook my head.

  “What, then?”

  “A stray thought; it’s unimportant.”

  “Tell me!”

  I told her: “I have resolved to be honest with you, whatever the cost. It just occurred to me: in you I have every man’s dream—a beautiful nymphomaniac. And now you tell me you love me so much you don’t want to sleep with me. Just my luck!”

  Elizabeth stared at me for a moment, then broke out into quiet giggles. Thank God! It could have gone either way. “Am I beautiful?” she asked.

  “Helen of Troy had nothing on you, babe,” I told her. “‘Were you not the face that launch’d a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’”

  “They can’t blame that one on me,” she said, hiding her face behind the napkin. “I was elsewhere at the time.”

  She lowered the napkin and smiled at me. “Can we go up to your place?”

  “What?”

  “After dinner, can we go up to your place? So we can be alone and I can show you that sex isn’t totally unimportant.”

  “I live in a rooming house,” I told her. “I’d have to sneak you in. We’re supposed to keep the door open if members of the opposite sex are in our rooms. The landlady has been known to patrol the corridors, protecting the chastity of her female residents. It wouldn’t be practical. I’ll move tomorrow.”

  “What a nice offer,” she said. “But you won’t have to. Usually we can go up to my place. Park Avenue and Seventy-third. But for some reason Daddy’s in town. It’s the family place, a great big duplex penthouse apartment, but nobody ever uses it but me and sometimes my brother. Except now, of course, when the fates are conspiring against us.”

  “Doesn’t your father know that Congress is in session?” I asked. “Why isn’t he in Washington doing his little bit to soak the poor?”

  “I don’t know,” she said seriously. “He’s been acting strangely the past few weeks. Worried. He thinks your boss is plotting against him.”

  “Really?” I asked. Was she being Mata Hari or was I? What was the masculine form of Mata Hari—Mato Haru? Was this turn of conversation just a coincidence? I tried looking nonchalant and not feeling guilty.

  “Really,” she said. “But that’s not it. Daddy always thinks that anyone who isn’t for him is plotting against him. And some of those who claim to be for him, too.”

  “Ah!” I said.

  “And sometimes he’s right,” she added.

  “It’s the constitutional duty of every American citizen to plot against their elected representatives,” I told her. “It’s a sacred trust. But the usual target is the president, not a senator. Ask Father Coughlin.”

  We fought over who should pay the check. She insisted that, after all, she had invited me, and I cited the commandment handed down by Moses that a man should pay when he takes out his date. We compromised: she paid for me and I paid for her. Since mine was more expensive, I put down the tip.

  “Perhaps we should go to my room and chance the landlady,” I said.

  “Perhaps we should,” she agreed.

  Perhaps we did.

  * * *

  It was almost eleven when I arrived at the office the next morning, after stopping at Danny’s for a cup of coffee and a couple of doughnuts to go. Brass had not yet arrived. Gloria was at her desk, and Inspector Raab and one of his minions were sitting in a pair of the pseudo-Louis chairs across from her. Raab looked relaxed the way a fighter looks relaxed in his corner between the rounds. His minion, the well-dressed young detective first grade I had seen at Dworkyn’s studio, was in an attitude of frozen attention, like a praying mantis. “Well,” I said, taking off my topcoat and hat and hanging them in the closet. “Good morning, Inspector. What gives?”

  “You’re doing me a favor,” Raab said.

  “I am?”

  “Actually, Miss Adams is, in Brass’s name.”

  I looked quizzically at her, and she smiled at me. “We are sending a radiogram facsimile to London even as I speak,” she said. “At Inspector Raab’s suggestion.”

  “Why are we doing this?” I asked.

  Raab shifted in his seat and the chair creaked alarmingly. “We traced Dieter Vogel this morning,” he said. “His furniture and equipment were brought by the moving company to the secondhand store which had purchased them. Herr Vogel himself boarded the Europa shortly before she sailed yesterday, bound for Bremen.”

  “A wise man who manages to flee before he’s being pursued,” I said.

  “Perhaps he’s just visiting the old folks at home,” Gloria suggested.

  “I’ve suggested to the British police that he be held for questioning,” Raab told me. “He’ll be taken off the ship when she docks at Southampton.” Raab fished in his pocket for a box of cough drops and popped one in his mouth. “I’m having the World send a radio facsimile of that photograph of Vogel to New Scotland Yard. The New York City Police Department doesn’t have the equipment.”

  I nodded wisely and went to my cubicle to begin sorting the morning’s mail. A few minutes later Brass came in and heard about the absconding Vogel. “Interesting,” he said. “If he didn’t know you were after him—and how could he have?—then why did he run?”

  “If you get any ideas,” Raab said, getting up and reaching for his hat, “pass them on. I got to get back to catching the bad guys.”

  About an hour later I went in and stood in front of Brass’s desk. Brass was staring out the window and fingering an ivory letter opener supposedly carved from the tusk of a narwhal and given to him by the Grand Duke Fyodor Androvitch, whom Tsar Nicholas called cousin and who now ran Balalaika, a small bistro on the East Side that had great borscht and pretty good blinis. “Is there anything I can do more useful than answering letters?” I asked.

  He swiveled in his chair and looked up at me. “I think not,” he said. “We await events.”

  “What events?”

  “I don’t know. I know what I want, but I’m not sure how to best make it happen.”

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  He opened his desk drawer and pulled out one of the pictures of Vogel and his, I suppose, girlfriend posing in a doorway. “Cathy came by last evening,” he said. “She has to be careful coming to the office because she’s now staying with Heidi. She wanted to look over our dirty picture collection to be sure she was right. She recognized three of the girls from the pictures and the boy who was with Suzie Frienard; they all work at the clinic. She also saw this picture.” He tapped it with his finger. “The building that Vogel and his chubby inamorata are standing in front of—that’s the Mainard Clinic.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “Do you?”

  “I see that all the pieces are interconnected, but I’m not sure how.”

  “The missing piece of the puzzle is somewhere inside the Mainard Clinic,” Brass said.

  “So Cathy is looking for it? Just what is she looking for?”

  “Possibly a room, possibly a photograph collection, possibly clinical records; I don’t know. But Cathy is under strict instructions not to actively look for anything. I don’t want her body to be fished out of the Hudson.”

  “So how are we to find it, whatever it is, without looking?”

  “That’s what I’ve been considering,” Brass told me.

  “It would seem that von Mainard himself is a piece of the puzzle,” I said. “Do you want me to see what I can find out about him?”

  “Ah!” Brass said. “A sensible question.” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and smoothed it out on the desk. “Herr Doc
tor Erich von Mainard is an Austrian national. He received his medical degree from the University of Munich in 1911 and served as a medical officer with the Austrian Army during the World War. After the war he published a paper on the use of certain drugs to alleviate the symptoms of shell-shock. He went into private practice as a psychoanalyst in Vienna until 1926, when he had a feud with Dr. Sigmund Freud over the use of drugs, specifically an alkaloid derived from the Rauwolfia serpentina plant, in his practice—von Mainard’s, not Freud’s. Freud said that the unconscious should be neither examined nor controlled by psychopharmacology until much more was known about the working of the brain. He felt that perhaps someday severe psychoses would be treated by psychoactive drugs, but that neuroses were best handled by analytic psychotherapy. Von Mainard called Freud a “busybody know-it-all who practices Jew medicine,” and moved to Berlin. He set up a successful clinic for alleviating the stress of the wealthy. He came to New York about a year ago and opened his clinic here. I’m not sure whether the one in Berlin is still operating.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but what does he have for breakfast?”

  “I think we’re going to have to go find out,” Brass said.

  24

  It was two o’clock Friday morning, and Brass and I were standing in front of the Mainard Clinic on Seventy-ninth Street between Park and Madison, planning a felonious entry. The Packard sedan was parked just in from the corner of Madison Avenue, with Garrett in his chauffeur’s disguise feigning sleep in the front seat. To make our felonious plans feasible, since neither of us had the requisite skill, Brass had brought along a felon: a thin, short man in his forties with bunchy muscles, a bony face, and almost no hair named Alphonse “Shoes” Mallery, who shyly admitted to being something of an expert in these matters.

  I had been with Brass earlier that day when we went looking for Shoes. He was at the third place we peered into, a piano lounge called the Abigail Room in the Hotel Quincy, drinking club soda and playing chess with the hostess, a blonde named Vicky, who wasn’t busy hostessing yet, it being only three in the afternoon.