Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook

by Collins, Max Allan

  As he slipped the pint back in his topcoat pocket, Bodie’s rheumy eyes narrowed in their deep shadowy holes; his lumpy face was the color of tapioca, his cheeks sunken to further emphasize the skull beneath the decaying flesh. Sitting up, pretty Ruth, with her big bedroom eyes, one of which drooped drunkenly, again gave me the once-over, like I was another entrée on the cafeteria serving line.

  “My wife and I are having a private conversation,” Bodie said acidly, then cocked his head. “Do I know you, sir?”

  “Yes,” I said, sitting down, “from a long time ago, on the West Side of Chicago. But we ran into each other at Riccardo’s last June.”

  The thin line of a mouth erupted into a ghastly array of brownish teeth and sporadic gaps. “Heller’s Books! You accompanied that lovely young actress.”

  Ruth smirked and snorted derisively, as if compared to her Marilyn Monroe was nothing. Smoke came from her nostrils like dragon’s breath.

  “Yes,” I said, “the lovely young actress you humiliated and sent from the room in tears.”

  He waved that off with a mottled hand. “That was for that sweet child’s benefit. Cruelty was the kindest gift I could give her.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.” He patted the bulging briefcase before him. “This is poetry, my poetry, not sentimental drivel, but the work of a serious artist, a distinguished outcast in American letters—hated and feared, an isolated wanderer in the realm of intellect. If I were to encourage the amateurs, the dilettantes, even ones like Miss Monroe, whose skin shimmers like pudding before the spoon goes in, I would lessen both myself and them.”

  Ruth cocked her head toward me, rolled her eyes, then winked. She was pretty cute, for a drunk; but I would have had to be pretty drunk, to want to get cute.

  “What’s your name?” Ruth asked. Her eyes added “Big Boy.”

  “Nate Heller.”

  “You’re from Chicago? What brings you to the Village?”

  “Ben Hecht asked me to look your husband up.”

  That got Bodenheim’s attention and elicited a bitter smirk. “Does my ex-friend wish me to make another cross-country pilgrimage for a twelve-dollar stipend?”

  “He’s got a publisher interested in reprinting some of your sex books.”

  Ruth’s eyes sobered up and her smile turned from randy to greedy. But the crooked thin line under Bodenheim’s sweet-potato nose was curling into a sneer.

  “My novels may indeed be inferior to my poetry—I am nothing if not brutally honest with myself where my literary prowess is concerned—but they are hardly ‘sex books.’ They are not gussied-up pornography, like Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare. Despite certain flaws, those novels sparkle with social satire and a genuine—”

  “Whatever they sparkle with,” I said, “there’s a publisher willing to pony up a couple grand for the privilege of putting naked women on the covers.”

  Ruth’s eyes were dancing with dollar signs, but Bodenheim was scowling.

  “The last time I allowed a cheap pulp publisher…when was it, five years, eight years ago?…they bowdlerized the text, even while presenting my work with the sort of sensational gift-wrapping to which you refer. I won’t have my work simultaneously exploited and censored!”

  I leaned forward. “I don’t know anything about that. I would guess the last thing this publisher would want to do is trim the dirty parts. So I wouldn’t worry about your literary integrity.”

  Bodenheim froze, his sneering smile dissolving into a hurt, surprised near-pout. “Why, Heller’s Books—you don’t like me, do you?”

  “I wasn’t paid to like you. I was paid to find you, and deliver this message.” I patted my chest. “I’ve got the contracts in my inside pocket, if you want me to leave ’em with you. The publisher’s right here in New York, you can talk with them, direct. Ben doesn’t want any finder’s fee, he just wants to see you make a buck or two off your ‘prowess.’”

  “I don’t understand who you are,” Bodenheim said, bewildered, the murky eyes suddenly those of a hurt child.

  “I’m a private detective.”

  “I thought you were a literary man…your father…”

  “Ran a bookstore. Me, like the man says on TV, I’m a cop. In business for myself, but a cop.”

  “You deal in violence,” Bodenheim said quietly.

  “Sometimes.”

  Now a look of sadistic superiority gripped the ravaged face. He leaned forward, gesturing with the foul-smelling corncob. “Are you aware, Heller’s Books, of the close connection between the art of murder and the murder of art?”

  “I can’t say as I am.”

  “Artists are not killed overnight. They are murdered by being kept alive, as poverty, the unseen assassin, exacts from them one last full measure of agony.”

  “Is that right.”

  “When the arts go down to destruction, the artist perishes with them. For some of us, who do not sell our souls to Mammon, the final resting place is Potter’s Field. For others it is Hollywood.”

  “Ben’s just trying to help you out, old man. Why in hell, I don’t know.”

  “Why?” Fire exploded in those cloudy eyes. “Because I am the closest thing to a conscience that Ben Hack’t has or ever will have.”

  I snorted a laugh. “What do you use for a conscience, old man?”

  He settled back into the chair and the eyes went rheumy again; he collapsed into himself and said, very quietly, “My own crushed life sits beside me, staring with sharp, accusing eyes, like a vengeful ghost seeking retribution for some foul murder committed at a time of delirium and terror.”

  “I don’t mean to barge in,” a male voice said.

  He was a good-looking kid in well-worn jeans and a short-sleeve, slightly frayed white shirt; he had the open face, wide smile, dark-blond pompadour and boyish regular features of the young Buster Crabbe; same broad shoulders, too, only he wasn’t as tall, perhaps five eight at most. He only seemed clean-cut at first glance: then I noticed the scars under his left eye and on his chin, and how that wide smile seemed somehow…wrong.

  “Joe,” Ruth said warmly, “sit down! Join us.”

  “This is something of a business discussion,” Bodenheim said, tightly.

  “Don’t be silly, Bodie,” she said. “Sit down, Joe.”

  Joe sat down, next to me, across from Ruth. He was eyeing me suspiciously. I would have sworn the kid was looking at me through the eyes of a jealous boyfriend, but that would be impossible. After all, Ruth was married….

  “Joe Greenberg,” he said, offering his hand, wearing that big smile, though the eyes remained wary.

  “Nate Heller,” I said. His handshake let me know just how strong he was.

  Bodenheim said, “Mr. Greenberg is a dishwasher here at the Waxworks. It’s a career he’s pursued with uncommon distinction at numerous establishments around the Village.”

  “Nice to meet you, Joe,” I said. “If you’ll excuse me, I was just going…”

  I began to rise but Ruth touched my arm. “Stay for just a little while. Joe, Mr. Heller has wonderful news. A publisher wants to bring some of Max’s books back out.”

  Joe’s grin managed to widen, and words streamed out: “Why, Max, that’s wonderful! This is a dream come true, I couldn’t be happier for—”

  “It is not wonderful,” Bodenheim said. “It is, like you, Joseph, possibly well-meaning but certainly insulting.”

  “Max, don’t say that,” Joe said. “You and Ruth are the best friends I have around here.”

  “Look,” I said, “do you want me to leave the contracts or not?”

  “My old friend Ben is not aware,” Bodenheim said, with strained dignity, ignoring Joe, who was looking quickly from husband to wife to intruder (me), “that I am currently engaged in the writing of my memoirs for Samuel Roth, publisher of Bridgehead Books.”

  “That’s swell,” I said. “Sorry to have bothered you…”

  Again, I began to rise and Ruth stopped me, h
er brown eyes gazing up, pitifully beseeching. “Mr. Heller, what my husband says is true, he’s been going in and writing every day, but the pay is meager. We don’t have enough to even put a roof over our heads…we’ve been sleeping in doorways, and it’s a cold winter…”

  Bodie seemed to be pulling down pay sufficient to afford whiskey.

  Joe leaned forward, chiming in, “I told you, Ruth—you and Max are welcome to stay with me…”

  Now it was Ruth leaning forward; she touched Joe’s hand. “That’s sweet, Joe, but you just have that one small room…it’s an imposition on you…”

  Joe squeezed her hand, then with his other hand stroked it, petted it. His mouth was moist; so were his eyes. “I’d love to have you stay with me…”

  “Leave her alone,” Bodenheim spat, “or I’ll kill you!”

  Joe removed his hand and his face fell into a puttylike expressionless mask. “You hate me, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” Bodenheim said, and withdrew his pint and refilled his coffee cup.

  “What if I let you two take my room,” Joe said nobly, “and me move in with my friend, Allen.”

  And he nodded toward a skinny redheaded busboy with glasses and pimples who was clearing a table across the room.

  “I’ll pay the rent,” Joe said, “and when you get on your feet, and get your own place, I’ll move back in.”

  “I once warned a girl named Magda,” Bodenheim said as if latching onto a stray thought just floating by, “against the possibility of falling into the hands of some degenerate in whom the death of love and the love of death had combined into a homicidal mania. She was strangled in a hotel bed.”

  Joe was shaking his head. “What are you talkin’ about? I’m tryin’ to be nice….”

  Ruth said, “Oh, Bodie, don’t you see? Joe’s our friend. Don’t say such cruel things.”

  “Today,” Bodie said, patronizingly, “when the world is falling apart like scattered beads from a pearl necklace that once graced the lovely throat of existence, the bestial side of man’s nature is revealing itself…blatantly.”

  “Now you’re insulting me!” Joe said. “I know when I’m being insulted.”

  “The indignation of fools,” Bodenheim said grandly, “is my crown.”

  I’d had enough of this touching scene. I got up, saying, “I’m in town till Monday. At the Lexington. If you change your mind, Max, give me a call.”

  As I left, Joe moved around to where I was sitting, nearer to Ruth, and he was leaning forward, speaking quickly, flashing his most ingratiating smile and issuing the best words he could muster, about how his good intentions were being misinterpreted, while Bodenheim sat uncharacteristically silent, frozen with contempt, a sullen wax figure in the Waxworks cafeteria.

  6

  By the time I got back to my hotel, a message from Max was waiting at the front desk. It had been written down faithfully by the hotel operator: “Mr. Heller—my lovely companion has convinced me to come to my financial senses. Please be so kind as to bring the book contracts tomorrow afternoon between 3 and 4 o’clock to the following address—97 3rd Avenue, near 13th Street. Fifth floor, room 5D.”

  I showed the desk clerk the address. “Where is that?”

  “Lower Fifth Avenue,” said the clerk, a boy in his twenties wearing a mustache to look older. “Pretty rough neighborhood. On the fringe of the Bowery.”

  So I was going to make it to the Bowery, after all. What trip to New York would be complete without it?

  I spent the rest of the evening in the Lexington bar making the acquaintance of a TWA stewardess, the outcome of which is neither germane to this story nor any of your business; we slept in the next morning, had a nice buffet lunch at the hotel, and I took her to Radio City Music Hall, where How to Marry a Millionaire was playing, one of those new Cinemascope pictures trying to replace 3-D. My companion was lovely, as were the Rockettes, and Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall; but Marilyn made me ache in so many places. She always would.

  My new friend caught a cab to the airport, and I grabbed one to the Bowery, where I asked the cabbie to wait for me with the meter running. He warily agreed, and I entered a shambling five-story tenement that looked to be the architectural equivalent of Maxwell Bodenheim himself.

  I went up five flights of spongy, creaky stairs, glad I was wearing a topcoat; the building wasn’t heated. A window on the fifth floor offered a sweeping city view, more worthy of a postcard than a dingy rooming house; the Third Avenue El was just below. Apartment 5D was at the end of the hall, on the right, the numbers hammered haphazardly into the wall next to the gray-painted door, which had no knob, simply a padlocked hasp.

  There was no answer to my repeated knocks. I considered saying to hell with it—so Bodenheim wasn’t here, so what? How reliable was a boozehound like Max, anyway?

  Pretty reliable, if money was waiting—and I had the feeling his brown-eyed soul mate wouldn’t have missed this appointment if even fifty cents were at stake, let alone several thousand. The tiny hairs on the back of my copper’s neck were tingling…and was it my imagination, or was there a stench coming from that room that drowned out the disinfectant and cooking smells and mildew and generally stale air? An all too familiar stench, worse even than Bodie’s corncob pipe….

  On the first floor I found the pudgy, fiftyish, groundhog-pussed operator (“Not the super! I’m the lessee! The operator!”) of this grand hotel. His name was Albert Luck, which was something his tenants were all down on.

  “So you know this guy in 5D?” Luck demanded, just outside his door, squinting behind thick-lensed wireframes as if my face were tiny print he was trying to make out; he wore baggy pants and suspenders over his long johns. “This guy Harold Weinberg, you know him?”

  “Sure,” I lied.

  “Son of a bitch Weinberg sneaks in and out like a goddamn ghost,” Luck said. “I can’t never catch him, and he padlocks the place behind him. If you’re such a friend of his, maybe you wanna pay his goddamn rent for him. He’s behind two weeks!”

  “How much?”

  “Ten bucks.”

  “Five a week?”

  He nodded. “Five’s the weekly rate; it’s eighty-five cents a night.”

  “I’ll pay the back rent,” I said, “if you give me a look around in there.”

  “Can’t. It ain’t my padlock on the door.”

  I showed him a sawbuck. “Wouldn’t take much to pop the hasp.”

  “Make it twenty,” he said, groundhog eyes glittering, “to cover repairs.”

  Soon I was following him up the stairs; he wore a plaid hunter’s jacket and was carrying a claw hammer and a heavy screwdriver. “Tenants like your friend I don’t need…. This ain’t a flophouse, you know. These are furnished rooms.”

  It took him two tries to pop the latch off. I let him open the door, just in case it was a situation where I wouldn’t want to be leaving any fingerprints.

  It was.

  The blood splashed around in the eight-by-nine-foot cubicle was mostly on one wall, and the ceiling above, and on the nearby metal folding cot, and of course on the body of the woman sprawled there on her stomach, still clad in the frayed yellow dress, splotched brown now, the same dried-blood brown that, with the smell of decay, indicated she had been dead some time; this happened at least this morning, maybe even last night.

  She had been stabbed in the back, on the left, four times, over her heart and lungs, deep wounds, hunting-knife-type wounds, and from the amount of blood that had soaked her dress and painted the wall and ceiling with an abstraction worthy of Washington Square’s outdoor art displays, I figured an artery had been hit. Another slash, on her upper left arm, indicated an attempt to ward off a blow. Her face was battered, bloodied, and blue-gray with lividity.

  “Sweet lord Jesus,” Albert Luck said. “Who are they?”

  “That’s Ruth Bodenheim,” I said, and then I pointed at the other body. “And that’s her husband, Maxwell.”

  Max w
as on the floor, on his back, feet near his wife’s head where it and its ponytail hung down from the side of the bed. The poet’s eyes were wide, seeing nothing, his mouth open and, for once, silent, the flesh as slack on his dead face as if it were melting wax; he had been shot in the chest, a small crusty blossom of brown and black on his dingy white shirt, bloodstain mingled with powder burns, near his tattered tie. His loose black suit coat was on, unbuttoned, open, and his arms were spread as if he were trying to fly, a sleeve torn and bloody with an apparent knife gash. A book lay near him: The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson; his reading had been interrupted by his killing.

  “I better call the cops,” Luck said, his eyes huge behind the magnified lenses.

  “Keep your shirt on, pops,” I said, taking a look around.

  A small table near the bed, slightly splashed with blood, had the empty pint bottle of whiskey and a wine bottle with a label that said Blackberry; also, a pad and pencil and some scribbled lines of poetry obscured by blood spatter. A window nearby opened on an airshaft. On a small electric stove sat a three-gallon pot of beans, cold; resting nearby was Bodie’s corncob pipe and a half-eaten bagel.

  In one corner was Bodenheim’s worn leather briefcase, the repository of his art; leaned up against it was a tool of a more recent trade: a crudely lettered beggar’s sign saying, I AM BLIND.

  No sign of a gun, or a knife.

  “I’m callin’ the cops,” Luck said.

  “What does this Harold Weinberg look like?”

  Luck frowned. “He’s your friend.”

  I gave him a hard look. “Refresh my memory.”

  The landlord shrugged, said, “Good-lookin’ kid, pile of greasy hair, talks too much, smiles too much.”

  I touched under my left eye, then pointed to my chin. “Scars, here and here?”

  “That’s him.”

  I got my wallet out and handed him a C-note. “I wasn’t here, understand? The rent was overdue and you got fed up and popped the latch, found them like this.”

  Luck was nodding as he slipped the hundred in his pants. “Okay by me, mister.”