by Helen McCloy
Aimlessly she strolled up Fourth Avenue to Park and then crossed to Fifth where the shop windows were more interesting. California women dreamed of vacations in Manhattan, yet, here she was, in one of the world’s greatest luxury markets, without a penny to buy any of these lovely things!
That cape of ginger chinchilla in Revillon’s window. She had never had chinchilla—only mink—and ginger chinchilla was so much more distinguished than that old commonplace silver chinchilla. As she came to Cartier’s window she was almost faint with desire. That gorgeous diamond and sapphire necklace—just the thing for her coloring, but there wasn’t one chance in a million that she would ever possess it now. And oh, dear, here was Plummer’s with those adorable Royal Worcester coffee cups!
The shop windows lured her farther uptown than she had intended. She had gone several blocks beyond the Waldorf when she turned to retrace her steps. Even the little shops on the cross streets proved enticing. Tweed and leather, linen and lace, and rich, gaudy Siamese silks…
There on one corner of 57th and Madison stood a tall man looking up at a building across the street from him. There was something vaguely familiar about the noticeable profile under the shadowing hat brim. Suddenly she realized who it was. That psychiatrist who worked with the police. Basil Willing.
She thought he didn’t see her. He was standing quite still on the street corner, his intent brown eyes raised to the sky now as if he were trying to read a riddle in the clouds. A dreamer, she decided. Lazy, too. Just loafing on street corners, not working at all. He would never solve the mystery, of Amos’s death or even the lesser mystery of Amos’s identity. In movies murder cases were solved either by blunt, brutal policemen or by gay young amateurs who danced and drank their way through their cases exchanging merry quips with the prettier among the female suspects. Basil Willing didn’t fit either stereotype.
She watched him covertly as he finally turned and began to walk uptown. It seemed to her that there was indolence in every one of his slow, controlled movements. He wasn’t hustling. He wasn’t even walking. He was just strolling, as if he had all the time in the world. Vera’s lips contracted away from her white, rodent teeth in a sly smile. She reflected, “It’s later than you think…much later.”
She went on down Park Avenue, her own step brisker, as if the very sight of Basil’s leisurely progress had made all thought of sauntering distasteful to her.
She walked through the modern version of the old Peacock Alley remembering the ancient jest about the first Waldorf—”exclusiveness for the masses.” There used to be another gag too—something about putting your boots outside the door at night and finding them gilded instead of blacked the next morning. Well, she wouldn’t be here long enough to test that one….
She was on her way to the desk to give up her rooms when an inspiration came to her, full-fledged and complete at its birth. A daring idea, but—nothing venture, nothing have, and she did want to stay at the Waldorf.
She changed direction and hurried toward the elevators.
The maids had been in her rooms. Everything was in order. A lesser hotel wouldn’t have service as prompt and thorough as this. She sat down at the writing desk and drew a sheet of hotel notepaper toward her. She smiled a little as she remembered Sam Karp. “Fly at once—all is discovered.” Pretty crude that, but the same thing could be done with more subtlety. You didn’t have to wait for exact information when you knew something queer was going on. You could just bluff. And wouldn’t it be amusing to blackmail the blackmailers who had taken so much from Amos?
She began to write.
Dear Tony,
Since I saw you this morning, I have learned the whole truth about Amos and everything else. Thank you for your promise of nine thousand dollars. I shall expect an additional check for the same amount when you receive this note.
Sincerely,
Vera
Even the police could hardly call that a blackmail letter if ever it came to their attention. It didn’t say a word about the additional check being the first of many payments for her silence about what she had discovered, did it? But Tony wasn’t stupid. He would get the idea. And he wouldn’t dare show the letter to the police anyway.
She wrote a similar note to Gus anticipating an additional check of eighteen hundred and seventy-five from him. She addressed both envelopes to the homes of the recipients—there were so many nosey secretaries in offices.
She was so pleased with herself that she sat still for a few moments savoring her self-satisfaction, and it was then that a further inspiration came to her. She drew another sheet of paper onto the blotter.
Dear Philippa,
You had better come here to see me sometime tomorrow afternoon. I am sending the same invitation to Maurice Lepton.
That was really subtle. No district attorney could do a thing in court with a letter worded that way and yet—the meaning would be perfectly clear to Philippa. She could get hold of some money without appealing to Tony. Didn’t she have those marvelous emeralds?
Dear Mr. Lepton,
You had better come here to see me sometime tomorrow afternoon. I am sending the same invitation to Philippa Kane.
There was none of the literary artist in Vera. When she found a useful phrase she would use it over and over again in the same letter and she would have worded the same invitation in exactly the same way to a dozen or more people without bothering to vary each letter with little personal touches.
Down in the lobby again, she bought stamps for her four letters and dropped them in the mail chute. Then she drifted toward the Sert Room, her heart lighter than it had been for days while she tried to decide whether she would have a martini or a daiquiri before luncheon.
Basil Willing was perfectly well aware of Vera’s covert observation as he stood at the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue. At the moment he was not particularly interested in Vera. He could only hope that she would not come nearer and force an exchange of insincere civilities which would distract him from the subject of his thoughts.
This was the street corner where Amos had stood with Meg that spring evening two years ago when something had stirred him so deeply that he had nearly relapsed into alcoholism. Such relapses were always a sign of psychic disturbance. What was there about this busy, commonplace street corner that had affected Amos so powerfully at that moment?
A passing pedestrian he recognized? No, Meg had said he was looking up at the building directly across the street. A face at a window? You’d wave and smile if it were someone you knew well. You’d turn away hastily if it were someone you didn’t like. Amos had done neither. He had just stood and stared in a kind of trance. What could it have been? Something that was still here on this winter afternoon two years later?
The building on the opposite corner of Madison was an ordinary-looking structure with a drug store at street level and several floors of small shops and offices above. It was neither old nor new, low nor high, shabby nor luxurious. It might have stood for the prototype of the usual building in this section of New York. But once, at least, there had been one thing about it unusual enough to catch the eye of a casual passer-by. Was it something that had significance only for Amos himself or something that anyone might notice?
Perhaps it was a mistake to study the façade of the building with such scrupulous attention to every detail. Perhaps it would be better to glance at it suddenly, as Amos himself must have done. Then perhaps the little oddity or discrepancy would stand out from the mass of irrelevant detail.
Basil allowed his eyes a moment’s rest by gazing at the mottled cloud patterns. Then he cast a single, swift glance at the building and saw it at once—the little, off-beat detail seemed to leap out at him.
On the fourth floor there was a sign with two lines of print annoyingly off-center:
HORTENSE
HAUTE COUTURE
It was bothersome as a picture hung crookedly on a wall. The Western eye, trained to read from left to right, started with the lower line
, which was really the second line, and then had to move up in an unaccustomed diagonal for the next line which should have been the first. Haute Couture Hortense. It was confusing and stupid. It must have been bad for business.
There was a great deal of arty affectation in advertising typography—proper names without capital letters, script that should have been print, type face of such fancy design it was almost illegible, trade names that were misspellings of real words, since you couldn’t copyright a real word. But there was always some purpose in all this, either aesthetic or commercial. Basil could see no purpose at all in this asymmetry. There seemed only one explanation. Hortense had had a partner. The sign had originally read: Blank and Hortense. The other name had been just long enough with the addition of an “and” to fill in the blank space before “Hortense” and make the two lines even. The partner had died or resigned. Hortense hadn’t had enough money to order a new sign. She had just had the partner’s name with its “and” removed from the old sign and left the thing clumsy and off-center.
Suppose it was the asymmetry of the sign that had caught Amos’s eye? Why would he stand still and stare at it? Did the name Hortense have some special associations for him? Or had he seen the sign before, when it was intact, and was it the missing name which he remembered that had significance? That seemed more likely. Your eye would slide over a familiar name without pausing, even if that name was important to you. But you would pause to stare and think, if you were trying to recall the name no longer there, if you were vaguely aware that you had seen the sign before when it meant something more to you than it did now.
There was no reason to believe that Amos had recovered his memory that evening two years ago. So, if the missing name had something to do with his unknown past, he might not have remembered the missing name consciously when he saw the sign. He might not have had the slightest idea then why the sign disturbed him. But because the memory was there, buried in the darkness of the subconscious mind, that memory had stirred in its sleep. The impact of that unconscious recognition would reach his conscious mind as a feeling of distress and malaise apparently without source or reason, yet poignant enough to make him long once more for the narcotic of alcohol.
Musing on these possibilities, Basil crossed the street at a leisurely pace. Like many men with quick minds, he hated physical haste—scramble and bustle and rush. He strolled along the sidewalk past the drug store until he came to the entrance of the building. A self-service elevator took him to the fourth floor and there, directly opposite the elevator, was a door painted jade green with a sign exactly like the one outside:
HORTENSE
HAUTE COUTURE
He opened the door and found himself in a shabby waiting room. Manhattan’s black dust had taken its toll of the once-white paint and a pathway was worn down the center of the green carpet. The presumption of haute couture became a little pathetic. This was a struggling seamstress who must have a hard time competing with the miracles of mass production.
She came through the curtains before he could ring the bell on the reception desk. She was little and old and poor, in a tight black dress with shears and pincushion dangling from her belt. She was surprised when she saw her visitor was a man.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” said Basil. “But I’ll only take a minute of your time. Didn’t you have a partner a few years ago?”
“Yes.” Her manner was curt now she realized there was not going to be any profit in this transaction.
“How long ago?”
“Six years.”
“What happened to her?”
He could see the words forming in her mind: What business is it of yours? But she didn’t say them. She wanted to get this unprofitable interview over as quickly as possible and get back to her work. Argument would only prolong it, so she answered quickly, “She married and went back to Scotland.” She turned toward the curtains again as she said it, but Basil’s voice halted her.
“What was this partner’s name?”
Suspicion dawned. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m looking for a man who lost his memory. I have reason to believe he may have known her.” Basil wondered if this would be enough, or if he would have to go into a long explanation and produce credentials.
It was enough. After one shrewd, comprehensive glance at his face and his clothes, she decided to take him on faith. “The firm name was Girzel and Hortense. That was her real name: Girzel Stuart. I took Hortense as a trade name because my real name is Hannah and Hannah don’t sound much like haute couture. Of course Girzel don’t either but it’s kind of classy because it’s different. Scotch.”
Basil unfolded a clipping from last Sunday’s book review section of the Times. It was a really clear picture of Amos and it had reproduced well. The caption folded over so it didn’t show.
“Did you ever see this man before?”
She looked at it steadily for a few seconds. “No. Never.”
“Without the beard?” Basil laid a finger over the lower part of the face.
“Wait a minute. Is he an actor? I think I seen him on TV.”
“That’s quite possible. But I want to know if you ever saw him in person.”
“No. What makes you think I did?”
“I had an idea he might have known your partner, Girzel Stuart.”
“If he did, I never saw them together. Girzel wasn’t much of a girl for the men. She had this boy back in Scotland she’d promised to marry before she came over here. They wrote letters every week.”
“One more thing: was there any great shock or tragedy in her life when you knew her?”
“Only tragedy was we weren’t making enough money here, but that was no shock. We both knew dressmaking on a small scale is a dead duck these days, but we didn’t know any other trade and we hoped that maybe in this neighborhood we’d pick up enough customers who liked everything done by hand without having to pay too much for it. Our mistake. I’m down to mending and altering now.”
Basil took his leave and went down to the street again, turning the puzzle over in his mind. Had it been another “Girzel” that Amos had known? Had he noticed the sign in its original form, Girzel and Hortense, some time before he lost his memory, just because Girzel was a name that already meant something to him? And because it was an uncommon name he wouldn’t expect to see anywhere? Then after he lost his memory and became Amos Cottle the imbalance of the lettering on the sign caught his eye and disturbed him deeply but inexplicably because far below the conscious level he recalled the missing name which reminded him of another Girzel who was part of the life he was trying to escape when he lost his memory, a Girzel who was the “G” of the wedding ring and the thimble. Perhaps that other Girzel was at the very heart of the shock or tragedy that had driven him into escape through amnesia in the first place. That would explain why the mere subconscious suggestion of her name had so much emotional impact that it drove him into the nearest bar after two years of rigid abstinence.
In his own office on lower Park Avenue, Basil telephoned the officer in charge of the Missing Persons Bureau at the Police Department whom he had known for many years.
“I understand you’ve been going through your files, looking for a record of some unsolved disappearance that would fit Amos Cottle’s previous identity.”
“Right, but there doesn’t seem to be a thing. I think that guy came here from Mars in a flying saucer six years ago.”
“I’ve been piecing together a few small clues and I’m beginning to get a picture of the sort of man Cottle was originally. I’d like you to try a little experiment. Forget all about Amos Cottle and look for this other man just as you would if it were a routine disappearance.”‘
“Okay. Let’s have your picture of him.”
‘‘The man you’re looking for was probably in his thirties. He had a weakness of the spine that made him inactive physically. You can safely assume that his initials were A.S., that he came from the Middle West origina
lly, that he became an alcoholic about seven years ago, that he was a doctor or a medical student, that on June 10, 1948 he married a woman of Scots origin whose first name was Girzel and whose maiden name began with the letter M, who liked to sew, who had pale brown hair, straight and shining with bronze highlights, and who died about seven years ago, probably under shocking circumstances—accident, suicide or even homicide.”
“Did you say ‘small clues’? Hell’s bells, we’re going to crack this case in a few hours! Doctors and medical students can’t live anywhere without leaving all sorts of records and no one can die without leaving a record. We’ll get onto it right away—hospitals, medical schools, medical societies. If he was a full-fledged doctor, he’d have to have a license to practice in New York and if his wife died here there must be a death certificate made out for some woman named Girzel. Maybe there are hospital records of a patient with that name or motor vehicle records of an accident. Wonder if either of them had a car? And what about income tax and social security? Thank God, it’s an uncommon name like Girzel, but even if it were Mary we have enough clues with the initials and the fact that he was a doctor or a medical student. You’re sure of that?”
“I’m sure.”
“Are you sure this man’s disappearance was reported six years ago?”
“That’s when he disappeared, but I’m not sure that it was reported.”
“Why wasn’t it?”
“You’re looking for a man who either had no close friends or who lost them when he became an alcoholic. A man who was both consciously and unconsciously running away from something, probably something pretty horrible.”
At home that evening Basil reread Lepton’s now famous review of Amos Cottle’s last book. There was one passage that held his attention for some time.
…Edgar Wharne, the principal protagonist in Passionate Pilgrim, is a young undergraduate at the University of Chicago who is expelled for raping and nearly strangling a young Hawaiian girl student. This difficult subject is handled with the most sensitive delicacy and a compassionate awareness of the stark tragedy inherent in human compulsions which leaves the reader breathless. Wharne doesn’t resent being expelled from the University. He even accepts his jail sentence with a noble resignation. But he is troubled by the subtle change in the attitude of his former friends toward him when he comes out of jail. There is a pathetic little scene where he invites them all to a cocktail party in his shabby rooming house and nobody comes, except one homosexual reporter who arrives drunk. Wharne is bitterly aware that he has been rejected by the smug hypocrisy of his snobbish, middle-class friends, but even then his spirit is valiant enough to turn resolutely to the future. Wharne gets a job as a bartender in a South Side dive and this gives Cottle an opportunity to show us fascinating vignettes of the tramps and prostitutes who frequent the bar—all warm, earthy, salty characters filled with sly humor and the grace of an infinite compassion, unlike the middle-class hypocrites who have deserted Wharne.