He got as far as the cigarette machine before a woman poked her head out of the kitchen and said, “Sit anywhere, Hon.” He followed her back through the swinging doors while she looked at him as if he’d tied a handkerchief over his face and shown a gun. “Anywhere,” she said, “does not include here.”
Flashing his press card, something he never did when he was working on the paper, he felt like a high school kid buying beer with a phony license.
“I don’t suppose you’re the restaurant critic,” the woman said. She grabbed a Pyrex pot, and brought Jordan to the booth with the best lighthouse view. “I’m Horty Miller.”
Her hair was the color of the coffee she put in his cup as he began adding cream. He couldn’t guess her age. She wasn’t old, a tired woman who had quit being young when she ran out of steam. She lit a Herbert Tareyton from his Lucky, and coughed trying to fill her lungs. “I was beginning to think no one gave a damn Suzie’s dead,” she said.
When he was a young reporter Jordan hated interviewing the friends of murder victims. Homicide’s collateral damage, they’d suffered enough without being laid bare. But most wanted to talk, to set the record straight about a loved one caught up in a horrific crime, or else to cry on the public’s shoulder. The others he peppered with questions sharpened in previous tragedies to elicit the heart-tugging narratives his readers demanded.
“Did you know Mrs. Chase well?”
“I’m sorry. Who?”
“I asked if you were good friends with Mrs.—”
“Are we talking about the same person?”
“How many Susannah Chases are there at the Rusty Scupper?”
“Ours wasn’t married.” Horty Miller puffed her cigarette, and waited for Jordan to admit his mistake.
Jordan didn’t make mistakes with questions. Those that went off-track brought answers that didn’t always make for the stories he tried for, but occasionally provided headlines. He tasted his coffee while he waited for another shoe to drop.
“She never told me about being married,” Horty said. “She was a bright girl, Suzie. You wouldn’t think she’d forget having a husband.”
“She was separated from Mr. Chase.”
Horty shook her head. “It wouldn’t have helped.”
“What wouldn’t?”
“Being separated. It’s a disqualifier right off the bat, beautiful as she was.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Suzie was in Atlantic City to be Miss America,” Horty said. “She was a former Miss Teenage Garden State and Miss Monmouth County. The next step was Miss New Jersey. She wanted to be a dancer, or a flight attendant if that didn’t work out for her. Married women aren’t allowed into the pageant. If she was ever somebody’s wife, she didn’t mention it at Rusty’s.”
“She was working here to support herself while she competed in beauty contests?”
“She was learning to dance, to sing a little, to apply makeup and work on her posture and smile, what they call her presentation. Every waitress, hostess, counter girl, if she’s not too bad-looking, the restaurant’s just a second job.”
Jordan turned around in his seat.
“We’re out of beauty contest material at the moment,” Horty said. “Girls like those don’t fall off trees, you may have noticed. We’ve got a summer waitress studying shorthand, and two that are starting up a door-to-door skin care business. Suzie was our only Miss America candidate.”
“She never let on there might be a husband in the background?”
“Suzie had her share of admirers, and some she was more inclined toward than others. I’d have to see her husband to know she wasn’t passing him off as a good friend.”
“She had lots of good friends?”
“You saw how she looked.”
“Not before she died.”
“Her picture ran large in your paper,” Horty said. “A girl that looked like her, how bad could she be starving for men?”
“Who were they?”
“Think I kept tabs?”
Jordan shook his head, but said, “Let’s say you’d wanted to.”
“I’d take notice who picked her up after work, which would be mainly older gents in youngish clothes with promoter written all over them. The line formed on the left.”
These were not questions he would have asked working for the Press. They were scattershot, and produced answers that weren’t useful to a news story. A homicide detective might lead with them. But Ed Pelfrey didn’t pay more for solving a case than for writing it from clips. Jordan didn’t know what he’d do with the information Horty Miller gave him, but he wanted to hear everything she knew.
“Did you get any names?”
“The state police, they didn’t bother here,” she said. “How come it’s a reporter doing all the asking?”
The question was as good as those he had for her. Her anger wasn’t for him. Not too much.
“I don’t know that Suzie got all their names, and some she did get, who’s to say how real they were? Miss America’s that kind of business. You get forty-eight...I almost forgot there’s some from the territories...you get that many gorgeous young girls together in their bathing suits that you can make a buck off of in addition to something else you might want from them, names get lost.”
“What do you remember of the last time you saw her?”
“I can’t tell you exactly what I did last night.” Horty poked a finger against the side of her head. “I’m sorry for not being more helpful. I figured when the reporters came, they’d want to know did she like good music and how many kids did she want. They wouldn’t need me to break the case.”
Jordan nodded. He hadn’t thought he’d have to solve the murder either.
“Was there one man in particular interested in her?” he said. “Did she sign with a manager, or tell you someone had made a proposition—a proposition to advance her career?”
“If there was, she kept it to herself.”
A girl with a soiled apron over her waitress outfit smiled at Jordan as she tapped Horty on the shoulder.
“We need you in back,” she said. “Now. One of the ovens keeps flaming out, and Pasquale, he’s ready to quit on the spot.”
Jordan sipped his coffee. Horty Miller was wrong about the Rusty Scupper’s staff. The girl had his vote for Miss Congeniality.
“Got to go,” Horty said to him. “If you want to talk more, come around any time in the next thirty years.”
“Thank you for your help, Miss Miller.”
“It’s Mrs. Miller,” she said. “I got made a proposition once, too, to advance my career.”
Always in Jordan’s mind were the things he planned to do if he ever found time. Now the time was his, and he was afraid of becoming lost in it. A talk with Hub Chase about his late wife might eat up several hours. But if Chase was smart (or at least not flat-out stupid) he was far from Atlantic City, where he would be hounded by the police, and one out-of-work reporter with time on his hands.
Jordan went home for a beer and to type his notes. His handwriting was illegible code, and today he seemed to have forgotten the key. He put together a rough typescript of his conversation with Horty Miller, and then compared the new information to what was in the clips, and studied the pictures that ran with them in the Press.
Suzie Chase was too good-looking to be Miss America. Miss Americas were the breed standard for the earnest wholesomeness Jordan believed was best left to kindergarten teachers, homecoming queens, and rodeo cowgirls for whom high-breasted, long-legged sauciness were professional poison. He imagined her as never having an awkward moment or looking less than enticing, from the genus of the magical creatures he’d worshipped in high school, but whose magic ran out on a cold beach at twenty-two. The credit line for all three photos was PixleyPix. Pictures of murder victims usually came from the reporter, who obtained them from the family. He wondered if someone at PixleyPix knew the Chases and could give him a lead to finding Hub.
PixleyPix
Photographic Agency, Inc. was in the yellow pages with an address on New York Avenue. On the eighth ring the phone was lifted from the hook. Jordan heard it bounce against a bare floor, and then an unintelligible mutter before, “Pix.”
“My name is Adam Jordan. I’m trying to—”
“I know who you are,” a man said. “What can I do for you?”
“I don’t know who you are,” Jordan said.
“Charles Pixley.”
“I’m following the Chase killing in Little Egg Harbor. Where did you get your pictures of Susannah Chase, Mr. Pixley? Were you acquainted with her?”
“Call me Pix. Actually,” he said, “I’m acquainted with Rollo.”
“Who?”
“Roland Peter van Pelt,” Pixley said, “only don’t call him that without putting up your dukes. He’s a fair newshound himself. Not as aggressive as you in ratting a story, or what I’d call a literary stylist, but improving. He told me how he got your job. The Press gave you a raw deal, Jordan. Even Rollo thinks so.”
Jordan didn’t care what van Pelt liked to be called, or how to defend against him, or Pixley’s opinion of his abilities as a reporter. He didn’t care that van Pelt’s name put him in a lousy mood, and was very aware of it.
“You haven’t answered my questions.”
“You didn’t let me,” Pixley said. “Rollo figured the Press would pay well for shots of the dead girl’s roommates at their place, and he lobbied to use me instead of a staff shutterbug. The girls were blech. I looked around the apartment, saw the photos, and swiped them. Naturally, they’ll be returned—”
“They were credited to you.”
“All it means is PixleyPix provided them for the Press.”
“Do you have others they haven’t run?”
“Two,” Pixley said. “McAvoy’s saving them for the next break in the investigation.”
“What are they?”
“One’s Mrs. Chase with her husband on their wedding day. Not many people know she was married. I’ve got her in a white gown with him in his baseball flannels making their vows at home plate. The other is her in a swimsuit. There’s something to see.”
“At a beauty contest?”
“On a beach rubbing suntan oil on her legs. She’s not wearing a regular bathing suit,” Pixley said, “but one of those skimpy two-piece jobs from France. A bikini.” He pronounced it by-kini. “You can just about see what she had for breakfast.”
“I’d be interested in seeing them.”
“I’ll bet.” Pixley’s laugh was good-natured and lascivious.
“How about a preview?”
“My studio isn’t far from the Press. Drop by some time, and I’ll show you what I have.”
“Give me ten minutes,” Jordan said.
In eight he was a block from the Central Pier, looking up at a cast-iron-front building with Doric colonnades flaking in the salt air. He climbed the stairs to a jumpy Latin beat. On the second story, outside an Arthur Murray dance studio, he stopped to listen to the music and watch a conga line snake around the room.
One floor up a burst of light forced his eyes shut. They opened on a kaleidoscope of various shapes and colors, settling on the most interesting of them, a pink ball above an inverted triangle. As the other shapes fell away the ball was defined as the head of a man, the triangle as his torso. He wasn’t a big man, and the large, round head seemed to grow out of his narrow shoulders. The impression was of a baby who had grown in size without changing form, soft features differentiated inconclusively between adult and child, male and female, so the baby had raised a sparse moustache to ease the confusion. Blond hair falling over one eye caused Jordan to think of a Hollywood celebrity, though the name wouldn’t come. Reaching carefully for his hand, afraid of crushing it, he was seized in a leathery grip.
“I’m Pix.”
“Adam Jordan.”
Jordan went ahead inside a loft half the size of a city block, mostly empty space enclosed by white walls, rough wood planking, filthy windows under a stamped tin ceiling. A photographer’s screen was the backdrop for a banana split in a sparkling silver bowl. Beside it was a Hasselblad 2¼-inch camera and flash.
“Don’t let me interrupt.”
“The hard part’s done,” Pix said. “Shooting ice cream’s tricky. You have to construct the perfect sundae, set up the shot, and get the picture before the project turns to slush. This was a commercial job for Paolo’s Boardwalk Creamery. Now for the payoff.”
A corner of the loft was done up like a small apartment with an unmade bed, bookcase, and kitchen area. He rinsed a couple of spoons in a hand basin and brought one back for Jordan.
“No thanks.”
“Sure...?”
Pixley didn’t go more than 120-130 pounds. One thing Jordan knew about him. He didn’t do many shoots of banana splits.
The walls were hung with his best work. No ice cream, but plenty of artsy landscapes Jordan didn’t think were any good, dinghies, terns skimming the waves, and several of the sun coming up over the lighthouse at Barnegat that lacked a shrewd eye. There were portraits of children behaving cutely, and of animals, cats more than dogs, and pretty girls on the boardwalk. No nudes. Jordan looked at the stunted man meticulously blotting whipped cream from a corner of his mouth, and figured if there were any nudes they probably wouldn’t be of pretty girls.
A series of Negro children on fire escapes filled the space around two windows, along with Chinese kids cooling off under a fire hydrant and Jewish boys with ritual fringes and sidelocks. One wall was covered by panoramic views of the beach between the Central and Steel Piers. A nighttime scene of a corpse leaking blood onto the running board of a big Packard limousine was more to Jordan’s taste.
“Like it?” Pixley asked him.
“It’s a great shot.”
“Unfortunately it isn’t mine.” Pix looked up from the silver bowl. “Weegee’s my idol.”
He faulted Jordan for preferring Weegee’s work, and was fishing for an apology. The apology, Jordan thought, should come from Pix for not taking better pictures. Pix was a sly sentimentalist with the camera. His idol’s noir sensibilities were absent from the walls.
Jordan had an idea that the little man’s personality was a product of the same gene responsible for his grip. His stature and shapelessness were a disguise, but he was too damn peculiar not to be appealing. Watching him put away the banana split like it was steak, Jordan remembered the celebrity whose name had eluded him. Not a movie star—a literary sensation. Truman Capote.
On top of a file cabinet were a jumble of photos which he spread out for Jordan to see. In addition to the three pictures of Suzie Chase that ran in the Press were two that were new. Pix had described the wedding scene without mentioning that the man marrying the Chases between the foul lines was an umpire. Hub was a lug with the shoulders of a lumberjack, and a mafia hitman’s five o’clock shadow. A hitman crazy for his bride. The shot of Suzie in her bikini went a long way toward explaining why.
Suzie Chase was the wrong kind of beautiful. Jordan knew that she would never have made it to Miss America, probably gone no higher than a Miss New Jersey runner-up. She wasn’t what the organizers wanted to parade before the public as a queen. She exemplified something that was not regal—was, in fact, the opposite—the blatant objective of any competition among beautiful women that would interest Jordan. If it were up to him, every contestant would be Suzie Chase. Pix handed him a magnifying glass to examine the picture of the girl in the tiny swimsuit.
“What do you think?”
“You know what I’m thinking,” Jordan said.
“She’s dead, don’t forget.”
“I saw her dead. I’m not thinking about her dead.” Jordan frowned at Pix, who couldn’t suppress a smile. Invited to ogle a murder victim, he’d been set up to play the necrophile.
Pixley looked back as though he’d been misunderstood. “I’m glad you see it my way.”
Jordan didn’t know which wa
y that was.
“What a waste,” Pix said.
Jordan didn’t take the bait. “How’d you get the shot?”
“Stole it—it’s part of the job. I’ve cut head shots out of high school yearbooks, swiped the only photo a seventeen-year-old widow had of her husband killed at Inchon. I could have had more of Mrs. Chase if I wanted to make a pig of myself. Like I told you, these will be returned.”
“Did the roommates talk to you about her?”
“I was there for pictures. I posed the other girls in the kitchen to make them comfortable with me. After that, I had the run of the place.”
“Where are the photos?”
“I threw out the negatives without developing them,” Pix said. “They aren’t pretty girls. Not bright either. Cows—dairy cows. They didn’t know Susannah Chase was married, and accused Rollo of spreading lies. Those kind of girls.”
Jordan wondered what made him an authority on girls.
“Do you know anything about Hub?”
“Rollo’s seen him play. He says he’s a natural hitter with a short, sweet stroke.”
“Before you return the photos of his wife,” Jordan said, “make another set of prints. Girls like her, they don’t—”
“Fall off trees?”
“Get murdered every day.”
“I should hope not.” Pix went back to the banana split. When he finished, Jordan watched him lick the bowl. “What are the chances you’ll get to write the case?”
“It depends on the cops.”
“It isn’t fair a twenty-two-year-old girl is dead for being beautiful,” Pix said. “Is there something—anything you can do to help them find her killer?”
“You’ve got ice cream on your nose,” Jordan said.
“I’ve got one from the Pine Barrens,” Jordan said. “Am I poaching on someone else’s territory?”
“His tough luck if you are,” Pelfrey said. “Shoot.”
False Negative (Hard Case Crime) Page 5