False Negative (Hard Case Crime)

by Joseph Koenig

  “I’d ask who was driving the truck that ran into her,” Jordan said, “but a truck wouldn’t have done so much damage. Who slugged her?”

  “Not a slugger. A switch hitter with lefty power.”

  Jordan looked at him sharply, and Pixley winked back.

  “Hub Chase.”

  Jordan examined the photos together, and again one by one, trying to put Carla Bianchi together again. Without evidence he’d stipulate that she’d once been good-looking. Suzie Chase’s husband didn’t seem the type to bust up a plain woman.

  “Not that he admits to anything. He says,” Pixley said, “her brains were scrambled, he was in the sack with someone else when she got it, a young lady whose reputation he’s protecting, stand-up guy that he is.”

  “What does Francesca say?”

  “He came into the nightclub with a bunch of players from the Yankees around one a.m., last Friday. She didn’t know him from the batboy, but was ga-ga for pinstripes. Hub was rude, crude, lewd, and drunk as a skunk. He pawed her every time she came to the table, which she didn’t object to—they’re both agreed on that—till someone pointed out he was a bush leaguer out on the town with the big club. When he slipped her his number, she gave it back to him. His teammates called it a night at three, but he was still hanging around when she knocked off an hour later. He didn’t take it like a gentleman when she turned down his kind offer to escort her home. The rest you see for yourself.”

  “Why haven’t I read about it anyplace?”

  “No charges were filed,” Pixley said. “Did I mention the Yankees are picking up the tab at the plastic surgeon’s, and resodding the Police Athletic League ballfield at Macombs Dam Park?”

  “It’s not something that stays swept under the rug. Why did—?”

  “Why’d someone give me the pictures?”

  “Why bring them to me? I cover murders, not near misses.”

  “I’m trying to help you with a murder.”

  “I get my help from the dictionary,” Jordan said. “I’m not a real detective. I’m a writer, that’s all I do.”

  “Close enough. I’ll show you more.”

  Jordan stopped him. “Is Carla Bianchi white?”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s hard to tell from the pictures. Her face is so distorted, she barely looks human.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “It’s the first question a real detective asks before taking a case.”

  Pixley looked uncomfortably at Jordan, who didn’t explain. No one had to know he’d dug into the story of a Negro girl and been rebuked by his editor. Let Pixley think he was the kleagle in the Klan’s Atlantic City klavern. As long as he got the facts straight, spelled everyone’s name properly.

  “I’m surprised you care,” Pixley said.

  “If she’s colored, I can hardly leave it out.”

  “Why not?” Pixley said. And when Jordan wouldn’t give in: “Unless she’s passing, she’s a white girl. The Mermaid Room wouldn’t employ a Negro waitress.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  Pixley shook three pictures out of a small envelope. They were portraits of a man about 25 years old, full face and profile, blandly handsome despite a crushed flat top. Around his bull neck a placard certified a New York police department photo shoot. He was glaring boozily at the camera, challenging it, thought Jordan, or the whole damn world, an expression teased out of the color portrait of his new Fleer’s baseball card. Jordan didn’t want to run into him in a dark alley even when he wasn’t holding a bat.

  The third photo was a negative print. On closer inspection Jordan saw that it was an X-ray of a hand. One thing stood out, a ring on the third finger. Pixley pointed to a hairline crack in the knuckle behind it. “Hub’ll be late for spring training.”

  “Francesca’s lucky to be alive.”

  “Don’t try to tell her,” Pixley said. “Reconstructive surgery can only do so much. It won’t bring back something special she had. She was rara avis, a small-town girl in New York to make it on her looks who actually got somewhere. She had a bit lined up on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts on TV that she can kiss goodbye.”

  “You make it sound like you’ve seen her.”

  “I shoot contestants for the Miss America pageant,” Pixley said. “A friend of mine in New York—if you must know, he’s the source for these photos—he helps models put together their portfolio. He told me he’d never done a girl as fresh and lovely as Francesca. I’m something of an authority on beautiful women, and I’ve never shot anyone quite like her.”

  “I’ll quote you.”

  “I’d rather that you help me find buyers. The Sporting News and the Erie papers might take a flyer, but they’d barely cover the postage. If Hub is charged with murder, the glossies will throw serious money around.”

  “If he is, I’ll call you.”

  “Why wait? Today he’s just a thug who beat up a pretty girl. God knows there’s no market for that. Put a New York Yankee rookie on death row for murdering his beauty queen wife, and we’ll make out fine.”

  “I don’t know for certain that he killed her,” Jordan said. “I’m not recommending him for the chair on what I have.”

  “Of course you know. You know, I know, anyone who reads between the lines of the story knows, as well as some who don’t. What’s stopping you? Does Hub Chase get the opportunity to hurt more women because you don’t have the courage of your convictions?”

  The little man was giving him hives. Pix was out to make a shameless buck. What noble cause sent Adam Jordan racing to crime scenes, harassing witnesses, and pestering Satchmo Armstrong? Suzie Chase’s killer had remained an abstraction while Jordan assumed the role of avenging angel. Pixley, no angel himself, attached a name to that abstraction, and proposed cashing in on the evidence. Jordan felt transparent.

  The percolator bubbled, and he smelled Savarin. The civilized thing was to invite Pixley to join him in a cup. But what did they have to talk about when the conversation moved away from brutalized women, psychopathic ballplayers, and corrupt dreams?

  “I should go,” Pixley said. “I have a shoot, and need to prepare.”

  “With a bathing beauty?”

  “Well, you can’t have a banana split without the cherry.”

  “Next one, give me a call. I wouldn’t mind watching over your shoulder.”

  Pixley looked at him blankly. “Why?”

  Jordan went for the papers, but there were no good murders, or arrests for old ones, or developments in cases he was keeping an eye on. He drank more coffee, found a Philadelphia station on the radio, and got back into bed. He couldn’t think of anything to think about except for the one thing he was always thinking about even when he was thinking about something else. Aside from the dismal episode with Mollie, he hadn’t gotten laid in months. His last date was a vague memory, as was the last woman he’d intentionally made smile. He might give Mollie another try. At least she was someone he’d already slept with, though he couldn’t say he’d broken the ice. What was the worst that could happen? She’d come up with a new way to tell him to drop dead?

  He was working out an excuse for calling when the radio got his attention. “Hard-hitting, hard-luck Hub Chase, the Newark Bears’ outfielder who lost his wife to a savage murderer,” had been traded to Philadelphia. Jordan tuned out some static. The Athletics had acquired the Yankees’ top minor league prospect for two Double A pitchers, cash, and a bush leaguer to be named later. A steal, Jordan was thinking. No mention was made of Hub’s arrest in New York. Lucky for Hub that Francesca hadn’t died, or the Yankees might have exiled him to Washington.

  Next up was the “tragic death of Charles R. Stolzfus, prominent Atlantic City developer, and guiding light behind the Miss Jersey Shore Beauty pageant. Just forty-seven years old, and in robust health, Stolzfus succumbed to a massive heart attack in the Regency suite of the New Excelsior Hotel, whose rebirth he had overseen. Survivors include his wife, Pauline, an
d six children by a previous marriage...”

  Jordan recalled Stolzfus, from a Sunday feature that had been spiked by his editors, as a bluff, outsize man who smoked Cohibas and cloaked his massive bulk in custom-tailored three-hundred-dollar suits. Something Jordan had left out of the story: Everyone he spoke to had whispered that the developer was asking for trouble if he didn’t slim down. It hadn’t done much for his blood pressure when Stolzfus was indicted by an Atlantic City grand jury for accepting payoffs from a mob-controlled contractor at the Excelsior, the largest hotel to go up on the Boardwalk in half a century.

  “Stolzfus was a controversial figure who left behind the twelve-story Excelsior as his monument.” More like his piggy bank, Jordan said to himself as he went back to figuring out a story to hand to Mollie. But his train of thought was derailed, and plans for getting laid had to be sidetracked.

  Wasting time till the afternoon papers arrived wasn’t so different from turning blue trying to find out how long he could hold his breath. When the Evening Bulletin truck pulled up at the corner store he was waiting on the curb. The driver tossed him a copy, and he gave it a quick read before the Standard News Corp. van came by with the suburban dailies. He lugged them home with a six-pack of Yuengling, charging upstairs when his phone began to ring.

  “Adam, hey Adam, how’s it hanging?”

  “Oh, crap.”

  “This is how you say hello to your meal ticket?”

  It was when the meal ticket was Greenie Greenstein. “What do you want?”

  “And a fine good day to you. Matter of fact—”

  “No, no, no,” Jordan said. Fact and its variants were distinctions of slight concern to Greenstein. “Just tell me why you called.”

  “I’ve got something for you.”

  “I have all the dope I can smoke,” Jordan said. “I don’t use pills, wouldn’t touch a greenie if you paid me.”

  The puns and double entendres that he purged from his writing he saved for Greenstein, who mistook him for a wit. Greenstein was his most active source for information and marijuana, but with so-so reliability, addled by the green Dexedrine pills that gave him purpose as they ate through his brain.

  “I should only have somebody looking out for me like I look out for you. I heard you’re on the unemployment line.”

  “Heard it in the joint?”

  “It doesn’t matter where. What I’m presenting on a silver platter is the sweetest scandal of this or any other year.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Jordan said.

  “An hour wouldn’t begin to do it justice, all the ramifications. We’ll blow the lid off Atlantic City.”

  “What is it? An exposé on the high price of bad dope?”

  “I’m not comfortable talking on the phone,” Greenstein said. “Buy me lunch.”

  “My inclination to be jerked around isn’t what it was. See you later.”

  “Wait. The story’s about Chuckie Stolzfus, how he died.”

  “I already know how. He had a bum ticker.”

  “That doesn’t explain what made it stop.” When Jordan didn’t bite: “He was in the arms of a woman other than his wife at the time.”

  “Why should I care?”

  “The woman whose arms they were, ask her.”

  At the coffee shop in the Columbus Hotel, in a corner where the winter twilight didn’t reach, Jordan watched a young couple jab their fingers at a menu like it was a tout sheet. Greenie Greenstein, thinner than Jordan remembered, had assumed an unhealthy patina that underscored his nickname. Often Jordan told him to take better care of himself, but the words entered one ear, gathered speed through the porous brain, and exited the other. The girl sitting across from him was a Negro in a red coat. Jordan went to the booth scuffing his soles. It was bad etiquette to sneak up on a Dexedrine user, whose overworked heart might follow Stolzfus’ example.

  Greenstein’s double-take let Jordan know he wasn’t the only one worse for wear. “Cherise,” he said, “move your tuches.”

  The girl slid over, and Jordan dropped down on a cushion so warm Cherise might have been running a fever. Greenstein used a napkin to wipe his nose. His eyes were red, and his teeth were mottled. Jordan smelled his breath across the table.

  “Being out of a job agrees with you?”

  Jordan shrugged. Any other answer would provoke a self-pitying story from Greenstein about tough times, and what Jordan could do to help. “Did you order?”

  “Cherise is watching her figure,” Greenstein said. “Steak is all she eats. I’m watching it, too. The same for me.”

  The waitress brought coffee. Greenstein struggled with a sugar packet. Cherise tore it in her teeth, and emptied it in his cup.

  “Greenie, do the introductions.”

  “We need to talk percentages. This is a major scoop. I have to protect myself.”

  “Excuse my friend,” Jordan said to the girl. “I’m Adam Jordan.”

  “After all the work I’ve done, I’m coming in as a partner,” Greenstein said. “Whatever you get, half goes to me.”

  Greenstein looked at Cherise, who dumped two more sugars into the cup. He raised it to his lips sloshing coffee in his lap. “Ow,” he said. “And a share in the byline.”

  “Write the story yourself.”

  Jordan left a quarter on the table. He was sliding out of the booth when Cherise caught his hand, hers as hot as the seat. She said, “I don’t care what’s goin’ on ’tween you two, but I’m sure not doin’ the dishes ’cause we don’t have money for the check. Put up some cash, then you can go on with your squabblin’.”

  “I know you from somewhere,” Jordan said.

  “I never saw you before in my life.”

  “You look familiar.”

  “I hear it a lot even from folks who don’t think we all the same.”

  Greenie looked up from sprinkling cold water on his thigh. “You’re both right.”

  “Don’t be thinkin’ you seen me walkin’ the streets. I ain’t a party girl either, don’t bring men for good times in hotels. You never saw me workin’ the Excelsior, ’cause I wasn’t there before that night. Never saw me noplace till now.”

  “My mistake,” Jordan said. “Tell me what went on with Stolzfus.”

  Greenstein slapped his hand against the table. “Clock’s running.”

  “I do modeling.” Cherise unfolded a page torn from a glossy magazine, and reinforced along the creases with Scotch Tape, a picture of several generations gathered around a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. Jordan recognized a composition lifted from the Saturday Evening Post except that the family was Negro, SEPIA in block letters in an upper corner. A girl snatching a drumstick might have been Cherise at fifteen. “Mr. Stolzfus was a big cheese in the Miss Jersey Shore pageant. Miss Lily White Jersey Shore. But there was things he could do for me.”

  “Do for you how?”

  “He had a finger in plenty pies, some for colored.”

  “Forty-five seconds,” Greenstein said.

  “How old are you, Cherise?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “You look eighteen,” Jordan said, “almost.”

  “Was no big deal, him bein’ fat and old. He made me laugh with his jokes, listened to my problems, didn’t bother me with none of his. You the type of man I steer clear of, pretty face and all. Nothin’ funny about you.”

  “He doesn’t care if you like him,” Greenstein said. “All he likes are facts. He’s married to them, he worships them. Adam Jordan never takes a fact in vain, so help him God. Give him the facts, just the facts, ma’am, like that cop on the TV says.”

  “Some men,” Cherise said, “get to where they got everything, but ain’t satisfied. Can’t be a new toy they lookin’ for, they already broke ’em all. Idea comes to ’em I’m what they lacking to find the, you know, fountain of youth. But my time’s valuable, like Greenie’s is to him. It’ll cost ’em.”

  “What did it cost Stolzfus?”

  “You don’
t know?”

  “If I’m going to sell your story, you have to spell out everything, even if some of it’s embarrassing.”

  “Don’t embarrass me the least little,” Cherise said. “Rest of his life is what it cost him, poor man. Game we was playing was too much for his heart. I’d show you, but it could happen again.”

  “She’s not kidding,” Greenstein said.

  “He had his pick of gorgeous girls,” Jordan said. “Why you?”

  “White girls. He’d been down that road plenty times. Wasn’t no fountain at the end.”

  “This is where the story gets good,” Greenstein said.

  “Forgot my place,” Cherise said to Jordan. “Where was I?”

  “Going to the Excelsior with Stolzfus.”

  “Took the roundabout way,” she said. “He promised he’d wine me and dine me. I got dressed for a feed at a fancy restaurant, but then his driver came and brought me around the back of the hotel, put me on a freight elevator. Mr. Stolzfus had these old clothes laid out on the bed like for a handkerchief head, you know, Aunt Jemima. After he called the room service, he asked me to put ’em on.”

  “What’d I say?” Greenstein said. “He was a freak.”

  “Been with freakier freaks,” Cherise said. “Man like Mr. Stolzfus ain’t hard to understand. Crazy for black women. Only use he have for a white girl is to be his wife and give him kids.”

  Jordan said, “I remember where I saw you.”

  “Don’t know what you been smokin’, but how about sharing some?”

  “Don’t be cute, Cherise,” Greenstein said. “I’m cute enough for both of us. Where does he know you from?”

  “You so observant,” she said to Jordan, “tell him yourself.”

  “I caught you at the Ruckus Room dancing behind Louis and the All-Stars.”

  Greenstein slapped the table again. “That’s time.”

  “Did you know Etta Lee Wyatt?” Jordan said. “Or were you called in to replace her when she went missing?”

  “Ain’t nobody’s replacement. I worked the Ruckus before Etta Lee. Still there after she left.”