Even the hole in the fence did not represent freedom to Harold. He was held by an invisible leash that prevented him from moving outside to the mundane but wider avenues of the world and assuming his true identity.
It came back to me with enormous force now because, with slight variations, it had happened once before, in another age, when I was known only by my surname and the Goodis Estate, floating in the waters of Oceanus, was called Circe’s Isle.
Mom Knows Best
James Yaffe
My mother always wanted me to be a professional man. It didn’t matter to her what kind of profession. Any kind would do, as long as it was really “professional,” and absolutely not “business.”
“Your uncles are in business, your cousins are in business, your Papa was in business, and none of them ever made a cent of money,” Mom always said. “Except your Uncle Max, and he don’t count, because God forbid you should ever turn out to be such a physical and nervous wreck as your Uncle Max and your Aunt Selma.”
And so, even when I was a small boy in the Bronx, Mom saw to it that I got some professional training. She gave me chemistry sets for my birthday; she made me take violin lessons; she even encouraged me to work my childish charms on a distant cousin of ours who was a lawyer. And finally, Mom got her wish. Today I am a professional man. But I’m afraid this fact has never given Mom any satisfaction. You see, she didn’t exactly expect me to become a policeman.
From the very beginning she raised objections. All sorts of objections, every day a new objection—but most of them were smokescreens. Her antagonism to the life of a policeman really boils down to two points. One: the work is dangerous. “All those gangsters and dope fiends and bookies and hatchet murderers and other such goniffs you have to deal with,” she says. “Isn’t it possible that you could get hurt some day?”
Two: she thinks the job is beneath me. “Always it was my ambition that you should take up something that needs a little intelligence and brainpower,” she says. “But this detective work, this figuring out who killed who, and playing cops and robbers like the kiddies in the park, this is no work for a grown-up man. For all the brains it takes, believe me, you might as well be in business with your uncles.”
And there is simply no way of talking Mom out of this opinion, of convincing her of the dignity and difficulty of my profession. Even though I’ve done pretty well for myself, even though I’m in plainclothes now and chief assistant to Inspector Slattery, Mom still makes fun of me. And with justice. Because to tell the truth, this cops and robbers business is child’s-play—for Mom. Figuring out who killed who is an easy job—for Mom. With her ordinary common-sense, and her natural talent for seeing into people’s motives and never letting herself be fooled by anybody (this talent comes from her long experience with shifty-eyed butchers and delicatessen store clerks), Mom is usually able to solve over the dinner table crimes that keep the police running around in circles for weeks.
In fact, I might even go so far as to say that my chief value to the Homicide Squad lies not in the strenuous investigating, manhunting, and third-degreeing I do all week, but in the revealing conversations I have with Mom every Friday night, when she invites my wife and me up to the Bronx for dinner. Take last Friday night, for instance.
Shirley and I got to Mom’s apartment at six. Mom gave us the usual glass of wine, and we sat down to the usual roast chicken dinner (which is really unusual, because who can equal Mom’s roast chicken?). For a while, the conversation ran along the usual lines. Mom told us about the ailments and scandals of everybody in the neighborhood. Then she gave Shirley advice on how to shop for groceries. Shirley is a Wellesley graduate with a degree in psychology, so naturally Mom is convinced that she’s incapable of understanding the practical affairs of life. Then she lectured me on wrapping up warm in this damp weather. Finally, after bringing in the noodle soup, she asked me: “So how is the work going, Davie?”
“Nothing very interesting, Mom,” I said. “Just an ordinary everyday murder case. Three suspects. One of them must be guilty. It’s just a question of working on them long enough till the guilty one cracks.”
“And so far he hasn’t cracked yet, the guilty party?”
“Not yet, Mom. But he will, all right. We’ll sweat it out of him.”
“And out of yourselves, while you’re at it!” Mom sighed. “This third degree, it’s harder on the policemen than it is on the crooks. If you men only would stop a minute and use your heads, look at all the tsouris you’d save. Believe me, there isn’t a single one of you that don’t need a mother to look after you.”
“It’s not a question of using our heads, Mom. It’s patience, pure patience. I’ll tell you about the case, and you can judge for yourself. You see, this girl was killed in a hotel downtown. A sort of high-class low-class hotel, if you know what I mean. Very sporty, expensive crowd. Stage people, gamblers, radio and television people—a pretty flashy assortment. And blondes. The place is full of platinum blondes. With no visible means of support. Maybe they call themselves dancers—only they haven’t stood on a chorus line for years; maybe they say they’re models —only they never get any closer to a magazine cover than a million other readers.
“That’s what this dead girl was. A genuine platinum blonde who used the name Vilma Degrasse. Usual career—quit high school at sixteen to go on the chorus line. Quit the chorus line five years ago—to move into the hotel. Been living there ever since, in two rooms on the fifth floor. Her and a steady stream of admirers. All male—”
“And to make a long story short,” Shirley cut in, “last night one of them killed her.”
Shirley is always taking it on herself to make my long stories short. This doesn’t bother me much—when I married Shirley, I knew I was getting a superior-type woman—but it never fails to get a rise out of Mom.
She rose now. “Well, well, isn’t that interesting?” she said, turning to Shirley with a sweet polite smile. “So you’re working on the case too, are you, Shirley dear?”
Shirley smiled right back at Mom, just as sweetly and politely. “Not at all, Mother. I’m just trying to help David cure himself of his terrible habit of talking on and on and never getting to the point. It’s something he picked up in his childhood, though goodness knows from whom.”
“Now here’s our three suspects,” I interrupted quickly, as I saw a gleam coming into Mom’s eye. “At ten o’clock last night the girl was escorted into the lobby by a gentleman—middle-aged banker of this city, named Griswold. Very unhappy about having his name mentioned in the papers. They were seen coming in by the clerk at the desk and by the elevator girl. The clerk is a gray-haired, seedy old man named Bigelow. The grumpy type. When I questioned him this afternoon, he complained every two minutes about how he’d been standing on his feet behind that desk for four hours, and how the management don’t even allow him to have a radio to help pass the time, and how the Assistant Manager is always poking around to make sure the clerks don’t hide any magazines or newspapers under the desk, and so on and so on. And all the time this Bigelow was blowing beer fumes into my face. Unpleasant character, but just the same I think he’s telling the truth. No apparent reason to lie.
“The elevator girl is Sadie Delaney, a talkative dark-haired Irish girl. Not married yet, built on the large side, but very cheerful and hearty, always doing special favors for people in the hotel. A good witness, too—cooperative and bright.
“So anyway, Sadie took the Degrasse girl and old Griswold up to the fifth floor, said good night to them, and rode down again. She passed the time with Bigelow about ten minutes, then she got a buzz from the fifth floor. She went up and found old Griswold waiting for the elevator and looking very mad. She took him down and said good night again, but he didn’t answer her. He went stamping out of the lobby—”
At this moment there was an interruption as Shirley finished her noodle soup. “Oh, Mother, that soup was delicious,” she said. “It’s such a pleasure to taste your cooking
. You know, that’s really what you do best in the world.”
“Thank you, with kindness, darling,” Mom said. “But that’s how it was with all the girls in my day, so I can’t take any special credit. Even if we was too poor to go to college, we always learned something useful. We didn’t fill our heads with a lot of meshuggene ideas that are no good to anybody—like so many of the young girls nowadays.”
I saw that Shirley was getting ready to answer this, so I took a deep breath and hurried on with my story:
“A minute later, enter Suspect Number Two. This is Tom Monahan, the hotel handyman. He was just going off duty, but he told Sadie that Miss Degrasse had called him earlier that day to fix a leak in her bathtub, and he was afraid she’d be mad if he didn’t do it before she went to bed. So Sadie rode him up to the fifth floor and rode down again. No sooner did she get down than she heard another buzz from five. She went up again and found Tom. He said he had knocked on the girl’s door, got no answer, so he figured she was asleep already. He’d fix the bathtub tomorrow. Down he went with Sadie, and straight home from there.
“Now Sadie and Bigelow chatted for about twenty minutes in the lobby. They talked about the big prizefight which was on that night, and how brutal it was, and what a beating the champ was taking. Their chat was interrupted by Suspect Number Three.
“This is young Artie Fellows, playboy about town, theatrical angel, and general no-good, who’s been showing up to see the Degrasse girl a lot of nights this last month. He was in evening clothes. Just left a party at the home of his young fiancée he’s going to marry in June. Sadie rode him up to the fifth floor and left him there. Five minutes later, the buzzer started ringing loud and long. She rode up again and found Fellows looking green. He told her he’d just entered the girl’s apartment with his key—the key she gave him—and found her lying dead on her bed. Well, the house dick was called, and a doctor and the police, and it was finally decided that somebody stunned her with a blow on the back of the head, administered by a bronze candlestick, her own property. And then, when she was stunned, this somebody smothered her to death with a pillow. We found the pillow on the floor next to the body. It was all rumpled up, and there were teeth marks and saliva stains to show what happened.”
“Somehow,” Shirley said, “I find it hard to feel much sympathy for a cheap, unrefined girl like that. Usually such people get what they deserve.”
“Not always,” Mom said, in a musing voice, as if she were talking to herself. “There’s plenty people running around in this world that maybe ought to get themselves smothered. Not enough to kill them maybe—just a little bit smothered, to teach them a lesson.” Before Shirley could say a word to this, Mom turned to me very calmly and said, “So go on with the case, please.”
“Well, the first thing we did, of course, was to question the three men. Here’s what they tell us: Griswold was cagey at first, but finally he came out and admitted that he and the blonde had an argument after they got into her apartment. She told him she was through with him, she’d found another gentleman friend who was younger and richer—young Fellows, most likely. Griswold says he was mad when he walked out, but claims he didn’t kill her. Says he left her very much alive, turning on her television set to listen to the big prizefight. She was a great sports fan, especially if there was lots of blood. Well, so much for Griswold.
“For a while the handyman Tom Monahan looked like our murderer. We discovered a funny thing. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the bathtub in the Degrasse girl’s apartment. So finally Monahan came out with the truth. He and the blonde were carrying on a little flirtation—he’s a big husky good-looking fellow, and she wasn’t what you’d call particular. Monahan made up that bathtub dodge as an excuse to go up and see her. But he sticks to his story about knocking on the door and getting no answer. Incidentally, we asked him whether he heard the television going inside the room. He says he didn’t notice.
“As for Artie Fellows—he still claims he came into the room and found her dead. What’s more, he corroborates Griswold’s story about the television. The television was on full blast when he came in, he says. In fact, this struck him as an especially gruesome touch, what with that blonde lying dead on the bed.
“So that’s the set-up, Mom. It’s got to be one of those three. It can’t be anybody else who lives in the hotel, because we’ve checked up on everybody—it’s a small hotel, not many tenants, and they’ve all got alibis. And it can’t be anybody from the outside, because the clerk and the elevator girl didn’t see anybody else come in or out. In other words, it’s strictly a routine job. Griswold, Monahan, or Fellows, take your choice. Eeny-meeny-miney—!”
“You forgot Moe,” Mom said.
This remark struck me as slightly senseless, but I gave Mom a sharp look anyway—because her senseless remarks have a way of turning out to contain more sense than you’d expect. “What do you mean by that?”
“Never mind what I mean by that,” she said. “Time for the chicken.”
I was forced to control my curiosity while Mom served the chicken. When she finally got settled again in her place. I reminded her where we had broken off in our conversation.
“So now you’ve got those three men in your police station, is that it?” she said. “And you’re beating them with rubber hoses?”
“Mom, how many times have I told you, we don’t use rubber hoses. Modern police methods—”
“All right, all right, so you’re psycho-annihilating them. Whatever it is, I’m positive it don’t make no sense. The way you’re handling things with this Platonic blonde—”
“Platinum blonde, Mother dear,” Shirley said.
“So I said it.” Mother gave Shirley a sharp look, then turned back to me. “What’s holding you up on this case, I’d like to know? Why are you wasting your time with third degrees? A bunch of schlemiels! Why don’t you arrest the one that killed her?”
“Because we don’t know the one that killed her! In a few hours—”
“A few hours, phooey! A few years is more like it, the way you’re going. So stop using your fists and your lungs, and start using your brains. That’s the big trouble with the world today, too many fists and lungs, not enough brains. Listen, I wouldn’t be surprised if you never even bothered to ask yourself the four most important questions.”
“What questions, Mom? We’ve asked a million of them.”
“Eat your string beans, and I’ll tell you. Conversation at the table is fine, but a young man has got to have his daily supply of green vegetables.”
I blushed a little, as I always do when Mom treats me like a small boy in front of Shirley, but I obediently started in on my string beans. And Mom started in on her “four most important questions.”
“The first question,” she said. “This Tom Monahan, the handyman. Has he got a wife?”
“Mom, is that one of your mysterious questions? Why, that’s the first thing we found out. No, he doesn’t have a wife. So if you’re looking for a jealousy angle, you’d better—”
“String beans!” Mom said, pointing her finger imperiously. “It’s my turn now to do the thinking, please. If you don’t mind, the second question. How come this Platonic blonde—”
“Platinum, Mother,” Shirley said.
“Thank you, thank you,” Mom said. “Such an advantage, isn’t it, to have a daughter-in-law that speaks such good English and isn’t afraid to let the whole world know about it. So Davie, how come, I was asking, this Platonic blonde didn’t have any lipstick on when she got killed?”
This question actually amazed me a little. “Mom, how did you know she didn’t have any lipstick on? I didn’t say anything about—”
“You said that the pillow she was smothered with had marks on it from teeth and saliva. But you didn’t mention any lipstick marks. A lady gets a pillow pushed over her face, believe me, she’s going to leave lipstick marks as a result from the experience. Unless she didn’t have any lipstick on! So how come she did
n’t?”
“I don’t know how, Mom. She was getting ready to go to bed, so I suppose she washed her lipstick off. Is it really important?”
“Only to smart people,” Mom said, patting me on the hand with a sweet smile. “The third question. When this playboy found her body, this Artie Fellows, the television was going full blast, is that right? So tell me, please, what program was on the television then?”
“Mom, are you crazy? Who cares what program was on the television? It’s a murder we’re investigating, not the television schedule—”
“In other words, you don’t know what was on the television then?”
“As a matter of fact, I do know. Fellows just happened to say so. A musical program, some concert orchestra playing classical music. He noticed it because the music was very soft and sad, and he says he’ll always think of it as Vilma Degrasse’s swan song. Very romantic, Mom, but will you tell me what the hell that’s got to do—”
“Swearing I don’t like,” Mom said, quietly but firmly. “Such language you can use in your station house with the other policemen, but in my home you’ll talk like a gentleman.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I mumbled, avoiding Shirley’s eye.
“Fourth and last question,” Mom said. “This hotel where she got killed, it’s not located in such a swanky neighborhood, is it?”
“Mom, what does it matter—?”
“Do you answer me, or don’t you?”
“It’s a mixed-up neighborhood. The block that this hotel is on is very swanky and modern-looking. But right around the corner is Third Avenue, with all those tenement houses and dirty little bars where the bums hang out. All right, Mrs. Sherlock, does that help you? Is that the significant piece in the jigsaw puzzle which makes everything else fit together?”
Mom smiled quietly, unperturbed by my sarcasm. “If you want to know—yes, it is.”
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