“So I hear. Do you know if your husband owed Sam any money?”
She sighed, clearly frustrated. “Charlie could have. My husband makes a lot of money, Jack. He just signed the first million-dollar contract in the history of television. But he gambles like a drunken sailor drinks. It’s a . . . sickness. It’s the only thing we’ve ever fought about.”
“But did Charlie owe Sam any money?”
“I have no idea. Charlie is very secretive about his gambling.”
I shifted in the seat. “Candy, I need to talk to Charlie. Do you know where I could find him?”
“What time is it?”
I checked my watch. “Ten forty-five.”
“Well, his morning show over at NBC started at ten thirty. He’s on till eleven thirty. Why don’t you go catch him over there?”
CHAPTER NINE
LIFE’S A GAMBLE, RIGHT?
The RCA Building at Rockefeller Center was known as the Slab, thanks to its big broad, flat north and south facades, and its ability to be massive and thin all at once. The seventy-floor structure was home to the National Broadcasting Company, whose soundproofed, air-conditioned quarters included twenty-seven broadcast studios (for both radio and televison), assorted offices and other facilities that consumed most of ten floors.
Home to Mid-morning Mazurki, 6B was the second-biggest of the studios. By the time I got there, the studio audience was streaming out, guided by pages wearing uniforms suitable for a Victor Herbert operetta. I had no trouble moving through the exiting audience and past the bleachers into the studio itself, a high-ceilinged chamber with a lighting grid above and big boxy cameras on dollies below, as well as microphones on booms and lights on stands and milling guys in suits wielding clipboards, plus all sorts of technical people in the kind of jumpsuits you see on airfields, right down to the headphones.
Just past this chaos was a strikingly simple set on a platform up off the floor maybe six inches: a desk at left and several chairs at right in front of a curtain on which was pinned a big Hirschfeld caricature of the cigar-smoking comedian, who happened to be sitting at that desk, in the flesh, shuffling a deck of cards.
Nobody asked who I was; I was in a suit and tie—having checked my trench coat and hat in the lobby—and looked like I knew what I was doing, which I did: I was intruding upon the star of Mid-morning Mazurki, whose sleep-eyed countenance somehow seemed simultaneously amused and doleful.
The hot lights were off and the room was cool as I walked onto the set and right up to Mazurki at the desk, like he was a loan officer at a bank and I was some poor schmuck who needed a down payment for a Buick.
He glanced up and a sleepy smile formed under the thick, wide mustache; a cigar shorter than a pool cue was confidently angled downward from full, sensuous lips. Its richly fragrant scent permeated the air.
“I know you,” he said, in a melodious and oddly soothing baritone, and then he returned to shuffling the cards, which looked small in his big hands.
I pulled up one of the guest chairs, or actually a modern approximation of a chair made out of polished steel and lightly padded wood with nubby orange upholstery.
The large-framed Mazurki wore a black sportscoat, a white shirt and a black tie; he might have been a mortician, or maybe a paid pallbearer—in any case, this was an unlikely wardrobe for a wacky comedian.
But then Mazurki was an unlikely comedian. His satiric, surrealistic sense of humor had brought him out of local radio in Philly to the big time of New York and national radio and TV.
Consensus was the guy was an eccentric genius—one of the few reasons buying a TV set was a good idea. In a broadcast landscape where most humor was rehashed vaudeville and Catskills schtick, Mazurki had a hipster sensibility given to great verbal humor, with an offbeat intellectual edge—from prissy poet Bruce Birdthrob of the impossibly thick Coke-bottle glasses, to ridiculous lederhosen-sporting German disc jockey Ludvig Von Schnitzel, Mazurki did the kind of sly, wry humor that made a smart viewer feel you were in on the joke.
On top of that, Mazurki was a master of silent comedy, perhaps the best since the days of Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. On Charlie’s show you might see gorillas in tutus dancing to Swan Lake, or witness an overenthusiastic used-car salesman slap the hood of a car and cause it to fall to pieces.
“I know how you did the bit with the guy eating his lunch,” I said.
“Hmmm,” Mazurki said, as he dealt himself a hand of solitaire. There was plenty of room on the desk, which had only a glass ashtray, a big, bulky microphone whose wires disappeared down a desktop hole and a stack of note cards.
“You were sitting at a tilted table on a tilted chair,” I said, “with the camera adjusted to an angle that made everything seem on the level.”
“I like that,” he said, actually looking up at me, a child’s smile blossoming under the mustache. We might have been old friends. “On the level. That’s a good way to put it.”
“Then when you began taking items from your lunch box, they all rolled down and off the table, olives, an orange, an apple, a pear. And when you poured milk from your thermos, it shot off at angle, missing the cup you held.”
He laughed softly. “None of the reviewers figured that one out. Good job. Would you like a cigar? These are wonderful cigars, you know.”
“No thanks. But one thing I can’t work out—how the hell did you manage blowing smoke from a stogie in that underwater gag?”
He put a black jack on a red queen, shrugging a little. “That wasn’t smoke. It was another milk gag.”
I snapped my fingers. “You filled your mouth with milk before you went under!” And it looked like smoke when he expelled it.
He beamed at me, the cigar angling upward. “What did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t, but it’s Jack Starr. You think this format will work?”
He took a drag on the cigar, exhaled a small dark cloud of smoke. One eyebrow lazily raised itself, like an old man doing a push-up. “Talking to guests? Maybe. It’s cheap and easy. NBC likes cheap and easy. Anyway, I can still do my crazy sketches, and I get to fill in for Sid Caesar next summer.”
“That’s more your speed, Charlie. All right I call you ‘Charlie’?”
He was studying the cards, the cigar drooping. “It must be. It’s my name.”
“Why aren’t you heading for your dressing room? Show’s over.”
“Oh.” He gave me a lazy smile, putting a red six on a black seven. “I’m waiting for the stagehands.”
“The stagehands?”
“Yeah. When they finish up, we always play a few rounds of poker. Small stakes. Dime, quarter, half-dollar.”
“A few rounds?”
He shrugged and studied the possibilities the cards were offering him. “Nobody’s in this studio again till three. We’ll be out of there by then.”
“And nobody minds you tying up the staff like that?”
The smile grew as wide as the mustache. “Oh, no. I’m a star. They like me around here . . . for now. The ratings will have their own opinion, but. . . have we met, Jack?”
“No.”
He frowned at me genially; he had the distracted air of an absentminded professor. “And yet I know you.”
“You’ve met my stepmother, Maggie Starr.”
His cigar went erect. “Now there’s a wicked stepmother any boy could love.”
I shifted in the uncomfortable would-be chair. “You might have seen me at Hal Rapp’s Halloween party, the other night.”
His eyes left the cards to study me, disappearing into slits under eyebrows that were small replicas of the mustache. “You weren’t in costume. I went to some trouble, you know.” He gestured to his full head of Brylcreemed black hair. “Think it’s easy stuffing all this under a bald cap?”
“I was in costume, sort of,” I said. “I came as a detective. But I cheated a little, because I am one.”
Black four on a red five. “With the city?”
“With th
e Starr Syndicate. My official title is vice president, but I’m really the in-house troubleshooter. If our talent gets in a jam, faces a lawsuit or whatever, I do my best to keep ’em out of trouble.”
“So, then I take it Sam Fizer was on your talent roster.”
“That’s right.”
His expression took on a rumpled sympathy. “I guess that shouldn’t be held against you.”
“It shouldn’t?”
“No.” He gestured with open hands, the remainder of the card deck in one of the massive mitts. “How can you anticipate suicide? Sam always seemed cheerful enough.”
“It wasn’t suicide, Charlie. The papers say it was, but they’ve been fed a line. That was murder, which is why the cops kept you and your wife and everybody else at the party until damn near sunup.”
He looked past me, appearing even more distracted than usual. “. . . I might know why.”
“Why what?”
His eyes shifted to mine; no smile, no expression at all, really, a betrayal of the serious human being behind the mask of distraction.
“Why Sam killed himself,” he said. “We played poker every week, Sam and I and some other stellar citizens. He’s been losing, really losing. I think he owed a gentleman named Carmichael at least fifty thousand, maybe more. And I use the term ‘gentleman’ loosely, in the men’s room door parlance.”
“Tony Carmichael is Tony Carmine, Charlie. And Tony Carmine is part of the Calabria mob.”
“I met Frank Calabria, once,” Mazurki said absently, still working at solitaire, my Carmichael/Carmine info apparently no revelation. “He stopped by the dressing room after my wife’s opening night at the Copa. Very charming. Dresses well.”
“How charming is Carmichael?”
His half smile was wider than most full ones; again the cigar angled skyward. “Not that charming. I’ll play poker with just about anybody, but I have to wonder where Sam Fizer bumped into that specimen.”
“Tony Carmine is a big-league bookie—one of his specialties is championship fights. That’s no doubt how Sam met him—Sam took the boxing aspect of Mug O’Malley seriously, you know.”
Mazurki nodded, eyes on the cards. “I knew Sam, casually, for years. Loud but harmless. These last five or six months, he’s not shown much restraint with his gambling. I’m no one to judge—I lost ten thousand playing gin last week—but Sam never bet that kind of money until lately.”
“Not until he and his wife went bust over her playing Bathless Bessie in Tall Paul.”
He glanced up, both black eyebrows lifting. “Is that why they split? Interesting. But if Sam had killed himself, these gambling debts might be the reason.”
I shook my head. “Sam Fizer was a wealthy man. He made a small fortune off his strip over the years.”
He beamed at me, the sleepy eyes providing an ironic edge. “I’m sure he did. Look at me, Jack. I signed a million-dollar contract with the network two months ago, and I’m up to my eyeballs in debt. The cards hate me lately, but I don’t give up on a love affair that easily. Still, it can give a man . . . pause.”
“How can you sign a million-dollar contract and be broke?”
“I didn’t say I was broke. This is a five-year contract and they don’t hand it all to you in a laundry basket in cash. And I have a business manager who has his own ideas about where my money should go, and an ex-wife with her own point of view, and a present wife also with her own ideas. Uncle Sam has been making noise about wanting his share, too, greedy bugger. It can get . . . tricky. For example, I eat at Sardi’s at least three times a week. Very expensive. Do you know why I continue eating there, at such prices?”
“I couldn’t guess.”
He shrugged elaborately. “If I stop, they’ll expect me to pay my bill. I owe them seven thousand and change.”
“How can you live like that?”
“How could I live any other way? The cards will warm up to me, Jack. Plenty of time—I’ll live forever. I have the formula.”
“Which is?”
“All it takes is three steam baths a day, lots of good brandy, twenty superior cigars and working all night. You should try it, boy.”
“I’m on the wagon, so your health regimen doesn’t suit me.”
“Pity.”
“How much did you owe Sam Fizer?”
Both eyebrows went up as he gave me the endless smile again under that infinite mustache. “Twenty-five thousand. Interesting thing is . . . I know Sam could have used it, to help pay off Mr. Carmichael, if nothing else. But Sam never pushed. Never called me about it, never took me aside at his poker party to suggest I pay up before betting any further. He couldn’t have been nicer.”
“That sounds unlikely.”
“Doesn’t it?”
I leaned forward. “I have an idea for a comedy sketch, Charlie. It’s a spoof of murder mysteries. Can I try it out on you? If you want it, it’s no charge.”
“Shoot.”
“Stop me if you’ve heard it. . . . There’s this comedian who has a beautiful actress wife. An obnoxious cartoonist puts the make on the comedian’s actress wife. She’s as faithful as she is beautiful, the actress wife, so she sends the cartoonist packing, but doesn’t tell her comedian husband, who’s known to be jealous and to have a real temper bubbling below his placid surface.”
Solitaire had lost his attention. “This isn’t so funny.”
“We aren’t at the punch line yet, Charlie. As it happens, the cartoonist has an archenemy . . . a comic strip term, archenemy, but it fits . . . and that archenemy is also a cartoonist, who we’ll call Cartoonist Number Two. As chance would have it, the comedian owes Cartoonist Number Two a lot of money. So the comedian, a very tricky, clever guy, almost a magician the way he stages things, comes up with a stunt. . . . The comedian murders Cartoonist Number Two, staging an obviously phony suicide, framing Cartoonist Number One.”
“Two birds,” Mazurki said, nodding, “one stone.”
“What do you think? Any potential?”
He tapped the big cigar into the glass tray. “Not for comedy. You should try Jack Webb. He’s in Hollywood. Planes are leaving regularly.”
“Did you know Rapp put the make on your wife, Charlie?”
His face took on a stony blankness now. “I did. I heard about it.”
“She doesn’t think you know.”
“But I do.”
“And you did nothing about it? Why would you attend Rapp’s Halloween party, if he’d tried that kind of garbage with Candy?”
His expression warmed up; he couldn’t have looked more genial. “Because that low-life one-legged son of a bitch is the creator of Tall Paul, and my wife is starring in the musical based on Tall Paul, meaning said son of a bitch was throwing the party with the cast as special guests. For appearance’s sake, to lend some support to my wife, I attended. As Henry, the boy mute. Since I was required to stay mute about the situation, that seemed in keeping.”
“And you just let Rapp get away with it.”
He chuckled; he had lost this round of solitaire, and was gathering the cards for another shuffle. “Jack, you’ve seen my wife. She’s a living doll. If I really took time out to thrash, much less murder, every man who makes a pass at her, I wouldn’t have time left to do the important things, like doing television shows and appearing in movies and playing cards and making passes at Can-dace myself, which I’m glad to say she considers a compliment, coming as they do from her husband.”
It did seem a stretch—bad temper or not, Charlie Mazurki was a grown-up who swam regularly in the murky waters of both Manhattan and Hollywood, and the notion that he would frame a guy for murder over making a clumsy pass at Candy Cain seemed thin at best.
And a guy running up the kind of stupid debts Charlie was, killing Sam Fizer to get out of a mere twenty-five grand worth of IOUs? Ridiculous.
“I don’t think you did it,” I said, rising. “But be ready for Captain Chandler of Homicide to come back around, with another l
oad of questions.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“You mind if I make a comment, apropos of not much?”
His cigar had gone out; he was relighting it. “Why not?”
“You’re not that funny off camera.”
He released smoke through a big grin. “No one’s paying me to be.”
I went back to the office but had the elevator boy (who was in his fifties) stop at the third floor, and the landing off of which my apartment was. Half a Lindy’s corned beef/pastrami and Swiss on rye was waiting in my fridge, as well as half a serving of cole slaw and another half of potato salad.
I was in the process of washing all of that down with a Coke when the phone rang in my bedroom. The apartment was laid out boxcar fashion, kitchen in back, bedroom after that, living room beyond. The bedroom had warm yellow walls and Heywood-Wakefield furnishings plus some framed ersatz Picasso prints I picked up in the Village. A small desk served as a second office area, and that’s where the phone was.
When I saw the white flickering light that meant it was the house line, I sat and picked up the receiver. Then my right ear was treated to Bryce’s arch tones, still tinged with resentment: “Do you expect me to hold down the fort alone?”
“That’s what holding down the fort usually means,” I reminded him. He was Maggie’s assistant, not mine, and I didn’t pay him and I didn’t have to put up with him.
“You have half a dozen calls this morning. Are you coming in?”
“Give ’em to me,” I said, and he sighed as if I’d tried to borrow a C-note, and I jotted the names down and sometimes a précis of the message. Four of the callers were Starr Syndicate business that could keep.
Two weren’t.
“When did Captain Chandler call?” I asked.
“Late morning.”
“And this call from Tony Carmine?”
“That just came in. He’s rude. He called me ‘honey.’ “
“Maybe he meant it in a nice way.”
“He didn’t.”
So I called Captain Chandler’s office and he was in, the receptionist connecting us immediately.
Strip for Murder Page 15