False Negative (Hard Case Crime)

by Joseph Koenig

  “Shut up, Cherise,” Greenstein said. “Let me handle this.”

  “You were friends with her?”

  “Close enough that she told me her problems. Whatever you make of that.”

  “You’re giving it away for peanuts like you always do,” Greenstein said. “He wants two stories, it’s two deals. We’ve got him over a barrel.”

  “You heard what Greenie say, I want double.”

  Greenstein shook his head. “We do.”

  Cherise raised Jordan’s arm over her shoulder, slid under it, and snuggled against him. She rubbed her cheek against the back of his hand, then looked into his eyes. “What this strange white man doin’ at our table, dear?” she said. “Friend of yours?”

  “Give me crap, Cherise,” Greenstein said, “I’ll double that.”

  “I’m trying to tell you what you want to know,” she said to Jordan, “but it hard to concentrate, him makin’ threats on my body.”

  “I’ll do worse to your body than threaten it,” Greenstein said.

  “Gettin’ so I can hardly think,” she said to Jordan, “he upsettin’ me so.”

  “Damn you, Cherise, quit playing games.”

  “You should go,” Jordan said to him. “Phone me later.”

  “I’m not leaving till we come to an understanding.”

  “Understand this,” Cherise said. “You don’t go missing yourself, I’m callin’ for the hotel detective to come see what you hidin’ in your pockets.”

  Greenstein’s chair scraped against the floor. “When my steak comes, wrap it in a napkin and bring it to my place, or you’ll really be in shit.”

  The chair tipped over as he stormed off. Cherise slid onto Jordan’s lap, then continued out of the booth. She set the chair upright, and sat down again on the other side of the table. “Where were we?” she said. “Oh yeah, talkin’ money.”

  “No,” Jordan said, “the subject was Etta Wyatt.”

  Cherise snapped open her purse. She propped a mirror against a water tumbler, and put on her face. A face that wasn’t cheap or naïve. A serious face just this side of hard. Not an easy fit, but the right one. Jordan saw what Stolzfus had seen in her, although not why Stolzfus hadn’t made her over the way she was now. Even a man who wasn’t crazy only for Negro women would see it.

  “Why do you want to know about her?” she said. “Mr. Stolzfus was more entertaining.”

  “You’re as much entertainment as I can use.”

  “Freakish yourself,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like Greenie say—said, you’re queer for facts.” She snapped her compact shut, and put it away. “I can use a drink. Call the waitress over.”

  “You don’t need me.”

  “She’s ignoring us. I want a whiskey sour, and it’d be nice if you had something yourself. Don’t have to look like Christmas comin’ twice, like Mr. Stolzfus did when we was together, but try and act like you’re enjoyin’ a business lunch with your new partner.”

  He signaled to the waitress, who didn’t seem to notice. He waved again, and got the back of her head. Cherise arched an eyebrow, and he called loudly for service, snapped his fingers until the waitress came.

  “Did you know Etta Lee before she started dancing with you?”

  “You still didn’t tell me why you’re interested.”

  “It shouldn’t make a difference to you.”

  “You’re wrong about me. Everything makes a difference. Think you can shut me out like that waitress was doing—you’ve got another think comin’. Etta Lee was killed, wasn’t she?”

  “You can put me closer to finding out.”

  “The story’s going to make you rich?”

  “Down the road, maybe.”

  “What’s in it for me? Crumbs off your plate?”

  “I’ll give you twenty dollars in advance. There’ll be more when I interest an editor, and when the check is in my hands.”

  “That’s a lot of trust you’re askin’ from someone just met you. Gotta do better than twenty, or Greenie’ll find a writer can afford top-notch murder.”

  Their drinks came. She pulled the cherry out of her whiskey sour, and drank off an inch, came up for air licking her lips. Behind the new face the old one flickered, and he glimpsed others that she’d also abandoned. Then she bit into the cherry like a lascivious little girl, an expression that didn’t serve her well. With each fresh look he made less of her. That she was black was the smallest part of it.

  “Another?”

  “Won’t do to get me drunk,” she said.

  “I’m not trying to.”

  “Didn’t say nothing about not trying.”

  He reached for his beer. Cherise clinked her glass against it. “Cheers. Mr. Stolzfus dropping dead is still in your price range.”

  The steaks arrived with a hamburger for Jordan. “How many times were you with him?”

  “Enjoy your lunch.”

  Jordan nudged his plate out of the way. He put his notebook on the table.

  “Four times.” Cherise cut into her steak. “No, make it three. First time don’t count because he acted normal, nothin’ he wanted but the satisfaction comes with helpin’ a poor colored girl realize her dreams.”

  “You had no idea about him?”

  “Wrong ideas. He was dignified as a judge.”

  “Did you always have to dress—?”

  She nodded. “But not every time like Beulah. Once, he had me in my canteloupes from the Ruckus Room. Thought he was askin’ for a command performance, but he just wanted to be the loyal subject of the queen of the islands. Thank God he didn’t expect a cannibal. Where I draw the line.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Think I got an imagination like that?”

  “Why didn’t you tell him to get lost?” Before the words were out he was trying to take them back, but Cherise pounced on them.

  “Queen of the South Sea Isles pays better’n snitching for a magazine writer startin’ down the road.”

  He poured his beer, drank it watching her eat.

  “He was on the lookout for new girls,” she said. “Was one of his old girls that introduced us. Let him have her every way but upside down, but put up her back at dressing like a fool. Was the opposite with me.”

  “You always saw him at the Excelsior?”

  “Steak’s a little chewy, but don’t taste bad,” she said. “Have Greenie’s. I’ll bring him your burger.”

  Jordan blocked the plate with his hand.

  “You sure?” she said. “Mr. Stolzfus was all the time trying to get me to a vacation house he had. I never went. Knew I was safe at the hotel.”

  “Why wouldn’t you feel safe in the country?”

  “Don’t you listen? The man was strange. Was gonna have a Halloween party, only it wasn’t Halloween, invite all his friends there. People from business, and entertainers, racketeers who owned the clubs. One singer, name’s so big it’ll cost extra. Some jockeys from the track, ballplayers, you name it.”

  “Which ballplayers?”

  “Not from the Negro league, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Where was his country house? Did he say?”

  “Wasn’t a country house. A beach house. Mr. Stolzfus was crazy for the beach.”

  “Give me someone who’ll back up your story.”

  “Have to trust me.”

  “An editor won’t,” he said. “What about the girl who introduced you to Stolzfus?”

  “Can’t—”

  “I know. She costs more.”

  “C.O.D.”

  He looked inside his wallet at close to fifty dollars. Cherise put two fives aside for the check, and slipped the rest in her purse. Thirty-eight dollars was highway robbery for a source. But he was almost ready to sit down at the typewriter. Cherise would never be in his pocket again.

  “Gettin’ a steal,” she said. “Two cases for the price of one. Etta Lee made the introduction. Mr. Stolzfus was her main suga
r daddy.” She picked up some stringbeans with her fork. “Somethin’ the matter? Look like you got a bad taste in your mouth, and can’t spit.”

  “A dead killer won’t sell as many magazines as a live one.”

  “Never no pleasin’ you, is there?”

  “Was Stolzfus capable of murder?”

  “Everybody’s capable,” she said, “apart from me ’n you, and I ain’t sure about you. Mr. Stolzfus in no position to complain you’re spreadin’ lies about him.”

  “I still need a second source. Who would he have invited to the beach house?”

  “My memory could be better on it.”

  “You’re not getting another red cent.”

  “The racketeer, I remember his name.”

  “What about the ballplayer?”

  “On the tip of my tongue,” she said. “It’ll come.”

  “When?”

  “By the weekend. At a nicer place ’n this.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Pelfrey wasn’t feeling himself (wasn’t feeling much of anything, thanks to his pain pills) when he returned to work. Unedited manuscripts were heaped on his desk, a reminder that Lou Segar had quit and not been replaced. Envelopes stuffed with wire service flimsies had toppled off the pile onto his chair. Pelfrey swept them onto the floor, and let himself down, clutched the armrests while the office whirled around him.

  Tacked to the wall was the roster of unsolved cases that his reporters were watching, more than 3,000 at last count, crimes of sufficient gore and ingenuity to merit coverage in his magazines, 3,000 victims of horrific death, and for each one a killer avoiding arrest. Pelfrey had a permanent knot in his stomach knowing that an army of murderers walked America’s streets. Some day he would retire to write the book that would sum up his career. He wouldn’t focus on his most memorable cases, but on a society infested with killers. Already he’d decided on a title: The Homicidal Maniac Next Door. He often wondered what 3,000 murderers were up to, what was going through their minds while he worried about them.

  At a quarter to nine a gray-haired woman in a gray wool suit came into the office. Pelfrey swallowed another pain pill.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be at home,” she said, “or back in the hospital? Your color’s dreadful.”

  “I feel better having something to do.”

  She patted his hand consolingly. Hers was sandpapery, cooler than room temperature, how he thought her body must feel to Dwight Turner, the president of Turner Men’s Group, whose secretary Helene Bryer had been before she began sleeping with him thirty years ago, and been named publisher.

  “The magazines have been going to hell without you,” she said.

  “I’m here to...” he stopped to let the room go around again. “To fix them.”

  Mrs. Bryer smiled thinly as Pelfrey dared her to mention again how sick he looked. If she did, he might be persuaded to go off to recuperate, and she’d be left with no one to get out the magazines, which would die.

  “Circulation is down three percent since the June issues,” she said. “If Mr. Turner doesn’t see a turnaround, we’ll have to fold one of the titles.”

  “We’re being eaten alive by TV,” Pelfrey said. “People would rather sit on the couch with one eye open than read.”

  “Our format is stale. Find a fresh approach.”

  “The facts are the facts. There’s nothing I can do about them.”

  “You can get better writers.”

  “Good writing intimidates the readers. We’d sell more if we had prettier girls on the cover. The models we’re using scare away customers.”

  “Beautiful girls are expensive,” Mrs. Bryer said.

  “You’re telling me?”

  Helene Bryer turned a sharp eye on Pelfrey, but couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. One reason she kept him in charge of the magazines despite falling readership was his seriousness. If he wanted to be funny, he’d also be out of a job.

  “We can’t afford them,” she said.

  “They don’t have to be Hollywood starlets, but we can improve on the dogs...uh, Plain Janes we have now. Hire fashion photographers to shoot them in their underwear, and we can forget about declining circulation.”

  “Unclothed women on the covers of his magazines embarrass Mr. Turner in front of his friends. Besides, if we show too much skin we’ll be taken down from news racks in the Bible Belt. Use real news photos. What we sacrifice in sales, we’ll save on models and photographers.” She had more to say, but Pelfrey’s color was worse. “You look awful.”

  “I never felt better.”

  She stepped out, and Pelfrey went to the art department. Alejandro de Costa, Turner Publishing’s art director, was examining slides of a handsome young couple exchanging marriage vows for the cover of the lead confession title, Modern Love. Pelfrey picked up the contact sheet from a Real Detective shoot, pictures of a man with a three-day growth holding a filleting knife to the throat of a girl whose eyes bulged with fright, the pop-eyed girl cowering from a hunting rifle, a tire iron, a tree limb, a broken bottle, a two-by-four. Circled with a red crayon was the pair grappling for a .38, the action incidental to the girl’s tight red sweater. De Costa would airbrush pimples from her forehead while Pelfrey decided which story in this month’s lineup the picture best illustrated, and wrote a cover line.

  De Costa put down the slides. The way the art director looked at him, Pelfrey had an idea that he was being sized up to model for a funeral scene as the corpse. He returned to his office, and began blue-penciling a manuscript, a lovers’ lane rape-slaying identical to hundreds he’d used before. Often he wondered if the writers weren’t sending the same stories every month, running them through the typewriter to change names and locales.

  He’d lost track of the time when Mary Glenny told him that she was going home and hoped he felt better tomorrow. Pelfrey muttered goodbye without looking up. Anyone seeing him alone in an empty skyscraper wrestling copy into readable English wouldn’t believe it more than Mary or Mrs. Bryer did, but he’d never felt happier.

  The heat went off. The elevator operator stuck his head in to say that he’d have to walk down eighteen flights if he didn’t leave now. Pelfrey buttoned his cardigan, told the elevator operator he’d see him in the morning.

  Pelfrey lived nearby on Third Avenue. The El ran by his windows almost close enough to touch, but it wasn’t the noise keeping him away from his apartment, it was the quiet. He’d been alone since his wife announced that she was leaving him, and asked him to be a sport about it. Her lawyer found a B-girl and the photographer who shot Pelfrey and the B-girl together in bed, the B-girl wearing hoop earrings and not much else. The pictures won his wife an uncontested divorce on grounds of adultery. Nine years later Pelfrey was still paying alimony. In his desk were the negatives of the B-girl and himself. When he had the right story he’d use one for the cover of Real Detective.

  At 9:30 he went home, and thawed dinner. He started on another manuscript, but couldn’t get settled. When his wife left she took most of their friends. His closest acquaintances were writers, faceless voices on the phone. The long distance operator put him through to a New Jersey exchange.

  “It’s Pelfrey,” he said. “I’ve got something to keep an eye on. A couple of little girls, twin sisters—”

  “Rita and Rina Pulaski, eleven years old,” Jordan said, “vanished while walking home from Grover Cleveland Elementary School in Sea Isle City. Last seen with the school janitor, who’s got a county record for exposing himself to children.”

  “When did we talk about it? My memory’s shot. These damn pills—”

  “I caught the case from the United Press while you were in the hospital,” Jordan said. “What’s the time?”

  “After ten. Too late to call?”

  “No, it’s a treat to get away from the typewriter. I’ve been at it all day.”

  “Which story are you working on? I forgot that, too.”

  “It’s not for you,” Jordan sai
d. “I’ve been working on and off on a book, mostly off, for years.”

  “The great American novel?”

  “A novel. If I ever finish, I’ll find out how great.”

  “I’ve been thinking about starting a book myself,” Pelfrey said. “That’s as far as I get.”

  Jordan hated to talk about writing, a subject on which everyone but the practitioners was an authority. But a 10 p.m. call from a man he scarcely knew wasn’t about literary theory. What did it cost to lend an ear? He liked Pelfrey, and he owed him. And he could make use of a character with no one but a stranger to cling to late at night. “Thinking’s the hard part.”

  “The dick books are shot. I figured I’d hang on till I retire, but I don’t see them lasting five years. I’m the last of the Mohicans. There’s no future here, not much of a present.”

  “Get out while the getting’s good, why don’t you?”

  “It’s not something to brag about, but—”

  He didn’t sound like a braggart. What he sounded like was a career criminal copping a plea.

  “I love the magazines. Editing them’s what I want to do forever. You’re just starting out,” he said, “but you’ve got the knack. When we go under, it’ll be a terrible waste of talent, yours and mine. In the meantime, we can pray.”

  “That they don’t fold?” Jordan said.

  “For big murders to keep them going longer.”

  Pelfrey replaced the receiver, and felt under the desk for his pencil, which had rolled onto the floor. He almost had it when the phone rang, and he pulled his hand away. “What did you forget?”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t die.”

  Was it necessary to point that out? He’d misjudged Jordan, who was as flaky as his other staffers without the excuse of being a souse.

  “...so I can have the pleasure of killing you myself.”

  The connection was too clear for long distance, the voice deeper than Jordan’s, and with a rasp. He felt a twinge in every one of his stab wounds. “Who is this?”

  “Fifteen years I lost on account of you. You and your damn magazine turned the jury against me. You know who I am.”

  He was too angry to admit being afraid. If Morris Wing wasn’t able to finish him while driving a blade into his body, what could someone on the phone do?