So, had her assurance she’d tell all been the bunk? And was Misty in mink planning to hop from my two-seater onto the sidewalk and up into her town house, leaving me at the curb with the same stupid expression on my puss that she created in most males on the planet?
I’d already made up my mind that this was a manipulative, selfish, dangerous little dame whose considerable charms would best be kept at arm’s length. I was not about to be seduced by the likes of this nasty little piece of business. Not unless she gave it some real effort, anyway. . . .
Turned out that what got left at the curb was my convertible, as she led me up the eight steps into the old brownstone where she and Sam Fizer had once dwelled in connubial bliss, which if you were Sam married to Misty it probably had been, at least for a while, and if you were Misty married to Sam it probably hadn’t ever been, unless connubial bliss was a synonym for “living hell.”
I soon found myself sitting in a long, narrow room with a bookcase wall that was bare but for some stacked magazines on lower shelves, and other wine-colored walls that had bright square patches of assorted sizes where a vast array of framed items— from paintings to photographs—had once obviously hung. This had been Fizer’s studio—I’d been here more than once—and it ran the length of the building, with windows at either end, curtained now, though the cold overcast day wasn’t trying very hard to get in.
Fizer had stripped the room of his possessions, from books to drafting tables, leaving behind only a brown leather couch, which faced a fireplace built into the bookcase wall, a low-slung mahogany coffee table with a glass top (and nothing on it but some Philip Morris cigarettes and an ashtray) and here and there a few incidental chairs.
Misty had excused herself to freshen up. I heard water running and soon gathered she was either bathing or showering. A full half an hour later she entered this shell of her husband’s studio wrapped up in a white terry-cloth robe that came down past her knees. Her hair was a nest of black moisture-pearled curls, making her a lovely Medusa, and she smelled great—soap plus a gentle spritz of Chanel No. 5. She’d taken time to touch her full mouth with scarlet lipstick, but otherwise she again wore no makeup.
She came bearing drinks—a glass of dark liquid on ice in one hand, and a wineglass of, well, wine in the other.
“Coke, right?” she said.
“Right.”
“Permanently on the wagon.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Good for you,” she said. “But I need my daily dose of grapes.” And she swirled the clear liquid in the glass.
“I thought you didn’t drink, either.”
“Wine isn’t drinking. It’s in the Bible.”
“So is crucifixion.”
She giggled at that and curled up next to me, sitting sideways with her legs tucked under her. This was cozy well beyond the scope of our relationship, which was limited to a couple of conversations, after all. Somehow I managed not to get indignant.
“Is the whole house like this?” I asked, nodding toward the bare bookshelves.
She had an earthy grin, and shared it with me. “You mean, like the movers were just here and left a few pieces behind? No, this one’s the worst. . . but I like the couch, and the fireplace. My bedroom—we always kept separate bedrooms because Sam snored—is fully furnished. His bedroom is stripped, though there’s a guest room that’s as it was, and the dining room he left alone. But you saw that when you came in.”
“Everything that said Sam Fizer, he took with him.”
“Right. Awards and photographs and artwork and furniture from before we were married and . . . and why should I stop him?” She sipped wine. “I was married to him for three years and’d had more than enough of that fat little man and his big fat ego.”
“You’ve really moved past your grief,” I said, and sipped the Coke.
She stared blankly past me, as if Fizer were standing before her. “I didn’t wish him dead. If I could blink and bring him back to life, I. . . probably would. But he’s been a pain in the keister these past five or six months, and I’d be lying if I said I weren’t relieved.”
Her frankness revealed a self-centered, even cruel streak, not unusual in a woman going the showbiz path. But I found her candor almost as attractive as she was.
And she was attractive, though in an odd way. From a theater seat, she’d look pretty, even lovely; and I bet cameras just loved her. But close up, right next to her, her features took on a cartoonish aspect, just an edge of caricature about the angle of the thick, carefully plucked dark eyebrows, the long dark lashes, the big blue eyes, the pert nose, the lush yet angular mouth that Rapp himself might have drawn.
These attributes, and the ones from her neck down, had made her perfect for the Tall Paul musical, the personification of Bath-less Bessie, despite her smelling like Chanel, not offal.
“Are we here to snuggle?” I asked her. Her terry-cloth-covered shoulder was against mine. “Or can I play Sam Spade again and ask you some questions?”
Her lips pursed in Marilyn-kiss manner. “Which would you rather do?”
I grinned at her. “I hardly believe my own ears, but I came here to play detective, not house.”
She smirked fetchingly. “Not even doctor?”
“If you’d like a physical, I’ll be glad to give you one. But sooner or later, you’re going to be answering questions about why you and Hal Rapp, in the middle of his Halloween party, spent fifteen or twenty minutes in his bedroom last night. And about why, after hearing your husband had either killed himself or been killed, you decided to hang around at Hal’s, spending the night there, and much of the next day.”
She shrugged, not looking at me. “I told you—I showed you the damn blanket: I slept on the couch.”
“You and your late husband slept in separate rooms, too. But I’ve got a hunch one of you tiptoed in to see the other, time to time.”
She frowned. Sighed like an irritated child. “I take it back. You’re not funny.”
“Oh, but I’m a riot. I’m Olsen and Johnson and the Ritz Brothers wrapped together, with Milton Berle and Arnold Stang tossed in. But you know who isn’t funny? Captain Chandler of the Homicide Bureau. And you know where you won’t want to snuggle? In a cell at the Tombs.”
She swallowed. She sat up, folded her arms, and did not snuggle. Again, she put her feet up on a coffee table, and displayed the admirable gams and the red-painted toenails and her casual insolence.
“Okay, party pooper,” she said. “Ask your stupid questions.”
“What kind of relationship do you have with Hal Rapp?”
She gave me a look like I’d just passed wind. “He’s a horrible man, don’t you know that? Just as bad or worse than my late husband.”
“And yet you spent last night in his Waldorf suite.”
She gestured vaguely about the room. “Yeah, and I spent three years in this dump with Sam Fizer. Haven’t you put two and two together yet, Sinatra, and come up with why the lady is a tramp?”
I rearranged myself on the couch, sitting on one of my legs and looking right at her. I did admire her frankness. “What are you saying?”
She rearranged herself, too, sitting like an Indian now. Arms folded again, her manner businesslike, she said, “I have a little talent and Fm pretty enough and I have the kind of body most men would kill the Pope in Macy’s front window to get next to.”
“No argument.”
She pointed to her terry-cloth-swathed breasts as if they were an exhibit. “This body may hold up another ten years, with the next ten not bad, but then after that? I’ll be the best-looking grandma around, assuming I wind up married with kids, and my husband will be damn lucky, but how will I compare to the twenty-year-old actresses and singers and dancers who’ve come along, or even the thirty-year-old variety?”
I shook my head. “You have plenty of talent. You don’t need to shortchange yourself—I’ve been around the theater and seen some rehearsals, and—”
She held up a red-nailed hand: stop. “I know my limitations. I had a chance to step out of the chorus line at the Copa and marry a celebrity. So I did. In the beginning Sam Fizer was sweet and charming and nice. Physically, repulsive, I grant you. But he had things I wanted, and I had things he wanted.”
“What went wrong?”
She shrugged; the dark wet locks flicked water at me. “When we were first married, Sam said he’d help me on my showbiz career. He even got me a bit part in one of the Mug O’Malley B movies. And he and I did some radio shows together, got our pictures in the papers attending openings and big sporting events, celebrity-couple sort of thing. But then Sam started talking about me retiring from show business, and us starting a family. That wasn’t what I signed on for.”
“No?”
“No.” She gestured to herself like a ringmaster. “I ask you— was this body designed for children?”
“I’ll take the Fifth.”
She shook her head firmly, flicking more droplets. “No kids for me, anyway not until I’ve made enough of a name for myself that I can afford the risk of being out of the limelight for a year per kiddie, not to mention the possibility that pregnancy would ruin my figure. My mother, back in Bear Springs, weighs two-twenty-five, and is two inches shorter than me. How do you think she looks in a terry-cloth robe?”
“I’ll stick with the Fifth.”
The big dark blue eyes were sparking. “My father is sixty-two and still working the farm, and eking out an existence, and I say, ‘No thank you.’”
I took a sip of Coke, put the glass back on the table, let the moment pass.
Then I asked, “So where does Hal Rapp come in?”
Her eyes and nostrils flared. “Are you kidding? Surely you know his reputation.”
“Humor me.”
She leaned forward, grinning like a construction worker at a passing filly. “Jack, Hal is the biggest letch in a universe filled with letches. Does that surprise you? Haven’t you seen his strip? Bosomy bare-legged babes half falling out of their blouses?”
“Yeah. I gathered he liked girls.”
“Wow, Sam Spade has nothing on your deductive skills.” Again she shook her head, and again water drops tickled me. “Hal has an out-of-control libido. Sam used his celebrity to bag one good-looking chorus girl . . . yours truly. But Hal? He uses his fame to take advantage of gullible girls, to convince well-stacked impressionable females that if they’d just be nice to him . . . I’ll let you interpret ‘nice’ . . . he could help them get ahead in their careers.”
“A funny-pages variation on the old casting couch.”
She grunted a non-laugh. “Exactly. And when this Tall Paul musical came along, filled with young women enacting the fantasies of his own strip, Hal took full advantage.”
“Full advantage of . . . you?”
She waved that off. “I slept with him three times over a period of a week, the week before I was cast in Tall Paul, He’s younger and more attractive than Sam was, even with that wooden leg, and he can be funny, obviously, and charming.”
“It was a brief affair, then?”
She goggled at me. “Affair? More like a business transaction. God knows how many other girls in the cast and the chorus he bamboozled into his bedroom. My guess is, if he’d carved notches in that wooden leg? He’d be hopping around by now.”
I watched her sip her wine, then asked, “Did Sam know you’d slept with his worst enemy?”
“He confronted me about it, on the phone, and in person, tracking me down at Sardi’s once, and outside the St. John Theatre, another time. Furious—spittle flying. But I denied it. And Hal denied it. But Sam knew Hal well enough to see through it— he knew how his old assistant operated.”
“Must have driven your husband crazy.”
She nodded emphatically. “I’m sure it did. But Sam should’ve kept his part of our bargain—he has friends on Broadway, he has friends in movies, in television; Sam could have got me a part in some play or film or show.”
“And Hal, at least, made good on his promise.”
Another emphatic nod. “That’s right. I put out, and I got the part. Quid pro quo, Latin for you scratch my back . . . Don’t look at me funny, Jack. I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. I’ve used the gifts God gave me to better myself. Pretty soon there won’t be any Sam Fizers or Hal Rapps in my so-called love life—I’ll be successful enough to sleep only with good-looking schmucks like you, who don’t have anything to offer me in exchange but a good time.”
A sadness in her eyes, in her general expression, had softened the caricature-ish quality of her features; for a moment I glimpsed the girl from Bear Springs.
“Okay,” I said. “So much for past history. Let’s move up the calendar—to last night. Why did you spend fifteen or twenty minutes alone with Rapp in his bedroom?”
Her eyes showed white all around. “Well, it wasn’t a tryst, believe me! Rapp got his three nights of me, and that’s all he gets.”
“What was it, then?”
She took another sip of wine—a thoughtful one. “I’d had a call from Sam, first of the week. He told me he was getting ready to start official divorce proceedings. And I wasn’t going to get a dime from him, no alimony, no nothing. He seemed confident, and I told him, ‘I put in three years as Mrs. Sam Fizer, and I expect my damn combat pay!’ . . . Seemed funny at that time. Little cruel, I guess, now that he’s gone. . . .”
“Why was he confident he could wriggle out of alimony payments?”
The dark blue eyes went wild. “He was filing against me—divorcing me . . . and Sam said he’d be naming Hal Rapp as correspondent!”
“Ouch.”
She wiggled a hand. “I said to Sam, ‘You’re bluffing,’ and I thought he probably was—Hal and I had been very discreet, and our affair . . . well, like I said it wasn’t really an affair. Barely lasted a week. But we’d been careful.”
“So last night you sequestered Hal in his bedroom to warn him?”
“Yes—the party was my first chance to talk to Hal since Sam called about the divorce. I got him in there to ask him if he’d told anybody about it, done any manly bragging. He said no—he didn’t kiss and tell.”
“Who says chivalry isn’t dead.”
“But Hal did have another concern.”
“Such as?”
She chose her words carefully: “Sam said, in passing, just gloating and being nasty? That he ‘really had Hal now.’ ”
I squinted at her, like I was driving through fog. “In what sense?”
She opened a hand. “That’s about all he said. I got the feeling Sam meant he had something incriminating on Hal—like maybe names of girls in the cast that he’d fooled around with, dates, photographs. Some of those girls are underage, you know. Sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds whose parents signed permission slips so they could perform on Broadway.”
“There’s a reason they call ’em jailbait.”
She nodded, saying, “On top of that, I wasn’t the only married gal on Hal’s list, I’m sure. The scandal would be horribly damaging.”
She was right—as sexy as Tall Paul was, it coasted on its veneer of cornpone humor that, despite the underlying acid satire, gave the strip a home in family newspapers coast-to-coast. If Rapp were exposed as a raging satyr, despoiling innocent Broadway dancers (was there such a thing?), his fall would be as meteoric as his rise.
She was saying, “I told Hal what Sam had said, and Hal told me not to worry about that, that Sam couldn’t have anything on Hal Rapp that Hal Rapp couldn’t top where Sam Fizer was concerned.”
“What did Hal mean?”
“He never explained. He just didn’t seem too worried about anything Sam could do to him.”
I kept coming back to it: both Rapp and Fizer had insisted to me that the other man would soon no longer be a problem. . . .
I said, “And this took fifteen or twenty minutes to discuss?”
“It did.” She was frowning in thou
ght. “We went back over the handful of times we’d been together, where we’d been together, when we’d been together, trying to figure out whether we might have been seen or in some way compromised. You try to think back about something you did five or six months ago, Jack, with any precision or clarity . . . and good luck!”
I shifted my position on the couch. “All right. So why stay overnight at Rapp’s?”
She sighed. “After the police finished with all the questioning, God, it must have been three or four in the morning . . . I simply collapsed on that couch. Hal was actually very sweet. He brought me that blanket; got me some hot milk. I slept till about one o’clock this afternoon.”
“But you didn’t get up and just fold your blanket and go home.”
She shook her head. “No. Hal and I went back over everything again—what had been a divorce-court matter before was something rather more serious now.”
“Right. Murder.”
“Or suicide.”
“Murder, Misty. You were eavesdropping when Hal and I talked—you heard.”
“I heard,” she admitted.
“And once Sam was a murder victim, you and Hal had to start all over and compare notes again.”
Her half a smirk had no humor in it. “I guess you could say that.”
I gave her a serious, searching look. “You don’t plan to lie to the police, do you? Deny that you and Hal were, however briefly, an item?”
Again she shook her head, emphatically. “No. We did make sure we would tell the same story, but . . . that story was true.”
I arched an eyebrow at her. “I’m pretty familiar with those suites at the Waldorf.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So I know that there’s a door off the bedroom onto the hall— it’s often used for maid service.”
Her pretense that this was an insignificant point was crumbling. But she still managed: “Right. . . and?”
“And Hal could’ve slipped out that door, sent your husband to Comic Strip Heaven and slipped back in.”
Her grin mocked me. “Don’t be silly.”
“You’d be his alibi. An embarrassing alibi, to be sure, but an alibi. You two could’ve cooked up the whole phony suicide. Sam and whatever it was he ‘had’ on Hal would be gone forever; and you would be a wealthy, very undivorced widow.”
Strip for Murder Page 12