by Craig Rice
The Corpse Steps Out
Craig Rice
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
Cast of Characters
NELLE BROWN, a torch singer singed by an old flame
PAUL MARCH, the corpse who wouldn’t stand being just a home body
JAKE JUSTUS, a press agent with a harrowing job—keeping his client out of the news
JOE McIVERS, an advertising man whom adjectives failed when he found what his job could include
BOB BRUCE, who realized a radio announcer’s nightmare: lost in a True Life Drama with no script
OSCAR JEPPS, a radio artiste who couldn’t worry about blood when someone might steal his thunder
LOU SILVER, a monotonously unsuccessful wolf.
JOHN ST. JOHN, a collector of unholy writ who met an unsaintly end
ESSIE ST. JOHN, a refugee from a marriage not made in heaven
“BABY” McKEE, an incredibly sincere lover
HELENE BRAND, a dazzling blonde with a frazzling capacity for involvement with the police
JOHN JOSEPH MALONE, a legal beagle
“TOOTZ” GIFFORD, a flat-broke but unbowed extycoon who kept invisible horses in his drawing room
MOLLY COPPINS, a luckily unscrupulous landlady
GIVVUS, a soap manufacturer found dead on a park bench reading a story on vice-cleanup
DANIEL VON FLANAGAN, a policeman with a pathetic longing to get away from it all on a mink farm
GOLDMAN, a candy maker who feared a corpse on his program might cause unfavorable consumer reaction
Chapter 1
Everything in the big, shabby room was painfully familiar. Not one thing had been changed in the months since she had seen it last. There were the same faded tan curtains at the window, one still hanging a little askew; the same pictures; even the same discolored spot on the wall over the fireplace.
She stood for one moment, listening. Nothing stirred. Yet for that moment she had found herself waiting for someone to speak.
It was a room she had never thought to see again. Certainly not on such an errand. Suddenly she shuddered, one hand grasping a sharp corner of the mantel for support, remembering the last time she had seen it, when she had walked out swearing it was the last time.
Involuntarily her eyes turned toward the floor of the kitchenette. The light from a tarnished bridge lamp reflected on the little pool of blood that seemed like a shadow reaching out toward the room. Once more she resisted an impulse to turn and flee.
Was someone watching her?
No, that was impossible. She had shut and locked the door. There was no one, could be no one, save herself, alive in the room.
Yet everywhere she turned, she could feel eyes following.
Suddenly she noticed that the tips of four pale fingers showed beneath the dingy green curtains of the kitchenette. For an instant, she clung to the mantel, fighting back the waves of weakness and nausea that threatened to engulf her. What if she should faint, here in this room, alone with that thing in the kitchenette? What if someone should come in and find her here?
For the barest breath of time, she decided in favor of flight.
But she knew there could be no escape from the things she still had to do. It was the voice coming from the radio set that reminded her. Suddenly she was aware that it was still going on. All this time the radio had been going, dance music, voices, crazy rhythms, singing, laughter.
Had it been turned on, she wondered, an hour before?
She detached her fingers slowly from the edge of the mantel and walked over to the window, telling herself that right now in ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million rooms, loud-speakers were still turned on, families still gathered before their radio sets. Not so very long ago switches had clicked and listeners had settled back in their easy chairs to wait for her voice. Right now, out on the Pacific coast, more listeners were eyeing their clocks, making ready to tune in on the rebroadcast.
Now, between broadcasts, there was the thing she must do.
One long indrawn breath, her eyes closed, and then she walked slowly around the room, carefully avoiding the soiled green curtains of the kitchenette, reassuring herself with the touch of familiar objects, the look of familiar things.
Suddenly a voice, deep, warm, chocolatish, came from the loud-speaker.
“You’re nobody’s sweetheart now.…”
She wheeled to stare at the object of wood and wire, and, as she turned, a grotesque flicker of light momentarily transformed the finger tips below the kitchenette curtains into living, curling, and then uncurling things.
“It just don’t seem right, somehow,
That you’re nobody’s sweetheart now.…”
With one quick frenzied movement, she clicked the singing thing off in the middle of a word.
In the unsuspected silence, the harsh, indisputable ticking of a clock reminded her that she had very little time left. At the sound of it, her strength seemed to return. All at once she ceased to be the great radio star, the photographed and glamorous personality, the wife of a well-known socialite, the protected darling of the fan magazines. She was back in her childhood again, back in the days when every mouthful of food depended on resource and cunning, when each day’s living had to be fought for with desperation. She could still fight, she reminded herself, with the same cunning, the same desperate frenzy.
Resolutely she wrenched her eyes away from the kitchenette and began searching the room, hurriedly, frantically, but still with a sort of disordered efficiency. No one in the world—no one alive in the world—knew that room better. She searched the imitation spinet desk, with the long cigarette burn still showing on the veneer, remembering with a little shudder the night it had been made there. Nothing in the desk but newspaper clippings and unpaid bills. The chest of drawers in the closet was only a confusion of soiled shirts and socks. She hunted through the bookshelves, filled with inexpensive and unread editions of standard classics, and pulled out one book after another, shaking it, reaching behind the rows. She felt under the pillows of the double bed that disguised itself as a studio couch, extended experimental fingers under the mattress.
There was still the little hiding place behind the cheap Venetian mirror, where they had once left notes for each other. She lifted out the mirror, ran her fingers carefully along the ledge, while purplish dust accumulated on her finger tips. Nothing there. Nothing but one discarded hairpin, dust-covered and rusted. She held it a moment on the palm of her hand, staring at it, and recognizing it as her own. Had it been there all this time?
But the thing she had come to find, the thing she must find, the reason for her terrible errand, was nowhere in the shabby room.
Was she being watched?
She stood, breathless, listening. There was the faint dripping of water from the cold-water faucet in the kitchenette. (Hadn’t that faucet been fixed in all these months?) It sounded like the slow, remorseless, inexorable ticking of a clock.
There was so little time left!
Again she held herself back from headlong flight. Too much depended on her now. So much? Everything! Surely, she told herself, it was not so terrible a thing to do. Worse things had been done in this world, and bravely, too. Yes, even she herself had done them.
She was not only fighting for herself. There were others to fight for, she remembered them one by one, while slowly the courage she had lost came back to her.
There was no other way.
She went into the kitchenette, knelt on the floor, and carefully, methodically, began searching the dead man’s pockets.
Chapter 2
The tall thin man in the little control room of the broadcasting studio stretched his long legs uncomfortably under the black-and-chromium table, absent-mind
edly mussed up his red hair with a carelessly straying hand, and tried to focus his tired mind on the implications of what had just been said to him.
The forty-seventh broadcast of the Nelle Brown Revue had ended in a burst of applause from the studio audience. He forced his thoughts back over past events: Schultz, the control engineer, had made a final twisting of dials and switches, grabbed his hat, and gone hurrying off to get a sandwich between shows. Joe McIvers, from the advertising agency, had popped out of the booth like a cork out of a bottle to phone the sponsor. The usual procession of actors, musicians, sound men, and assistants had filed out of the studio.
Then Nelle Brown had blown into the little glass booth like a small tornado, her face dead-white against her deep-rose dress, her eyes smoking with fury. She had kicked the door shut, cursed the apparatus that kept it from slamming, and said, “Jake, I’m being blackmailed.”
There had been a pause while he stared at her, before she lit a cigarette, took one long puff, stamped it out below the NO SMOKING sign, added, “I’m damned if I will!” and vanished.
The import of what she had been saying began to take form in his mind. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. Part of the duty of a press-agent manager, he told himself, was to keep one’s client from being blackmailed.
What the devil had happened to Nelle Brown this time?
There was no sign of her in the corridor. He stopped a page boy.
“Miss Brown, sir? Try the reception room.”
She was not in the reception room.
“Nelle? I saw her beat it down the elevator.”
He caught the next elevator. It was crowded and stopped at every floor like an old-fashioned milk train. Nelle was nowhere in the lobby, nor in the bar nor the restaurant nor the cigar stand.
Jake Justus, press agent, manager, and ex-reporter, wondered again why, with untold billions of people in the world, everything had to pick him to happen to.
He lit a cigarette and tried to think. Nelle hardly ever left the studios between broadcasts. Could she possibly have gone home? But why the hell should she do that?
He might try it anyway, if he could manage without alarming Tootz, in case she hadn’t gone home.
He stepped in the cigar stand, called Nelle’s apartment. No one answered. He stood holding the receiver a long time, finally put it down, and methodically called every place Nelle might have gone.
After half a dozen calls, it was apparent that she had vanished into the very thinnest of air.
Damn it! he had to find her. He looked at his watch and frowned at its reminder of only forty minutes left until the rebroadcast for the West Coast.
Just at that moment, the idea came.
It was almost impossible. No, by God, it wasn’t at all impossible. That was the one person most likely to be blackmailing Nelle. Why the devil hadn’t he thought of it before, instead of wasting all this time? He ran out to the curb, hailed a taxi, gave the driver an address on Erie Street, and told him for Pete’s sake to make it snappy.
The taxi stopped before a long, dark building. Jake told the driver to wait, bounded up the steps into a many-cornered hall, and climbed the unlighted stairs to the second floor. The air resounded with riotous tumult from one of the apartments, a very devil of a row. He grinned. He’d gone to a few parties in that building himself! For a moment he wished he didn’t have the rebroadcast to attend. Not that he knew the people giving the party, but that would make no difference. Then he remembered his errand, and stopped grinning.
He knocked at a door marked 215 and waited. There was no answer. He noted a light shining through the transom and knocked again, louder. Hard to hear anything, with that infernal racket going on. He gave one last, violent pound and the door, slightly ajar, fell open.
Nelle was not there. No one was in the room.
He went in slowly and cautiously, wondering what to do next. Then he saw it in the kitchenette, crumpled on the floor—the man Nelle Brown might have come to see, the man who might have been blackmailing her—a dark huddle on the linoleum, in a little pool of blood.
The man was dead. Shot, Jake thought grimly, and not half shot. Nothing could be done for him now.
He stood there a moment, one hand twisting the shabby green curtains of the kitchenette. The thought of calling the police rose to his mind and was instantly dismissed.
Blackmail or no blackmail, why had she done it?
He reminded himself this was no time to spend thinking it over. Nelle might have left some trace of herself. Moving quickly and carefully, he looked through the room. There was nothing.
At last he went cautiously through the dead man’s pockets, found no souvenir nor reminder of Nelle Brown. There was a surprisingly fat packet of twenty-dollar bills in the dog-eared wallet, and Jake scowled. Where the devil had all that money come from? The man had been broke, hungry broke, a week ago. Now, here was a fistful of folding money. Jake felt a pang of sympathetic regret. For all the man had been a rat, it was a damn shame he wouldn’t have the spending of all that money, after being broke so long!
Oh Well, as long as there was nothing of Nelle’s in the place.
He looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes to the re-broadcast.
He gave the room one last, hurried look, saw that he had left no trace of his own visit, left the door slightly ajar just as he had found it, and raced to his waiting taxi.
“—and step on it, fella!”
The driver nodded, shot down the street, and immediately became hopelessly embroiled in a traffic jam.
Where was Nelle Brown?
Jake Justus cursed himself as the stupidest of all stupid fools. Why hadn’t he gone there to look for her in the first place? Why hadn’t he managed to find her, wherever she had gone? Or, failing to find her, why hadn’t he gone back to the studio and arranged for a double for the re-broadcast?
Now they would all be in the soup, unless someone had had sense enough to rise to the occasion, which he doubted. Again he took out his watch. Six minutes now. What would they do? Probably throw in a substitute program of sorts, and the sponsor, dear Mr. Goldman, would have a litter of leopards. Hell would be calm and quiet compared to what was going to pop. How was he ever going to get Nelle out of this mess?
The taxi dumped him out at the door with less than a minute to go.
He raced across the lobby, dived into a waiting elevator, and gasped, “Late. Nelle Brown rebroadcast.”
The elevator operator, used to emergencies, nodded, slammed the door, and the car shot upward without a stop.
The elevator stopped at the studio floor and Jake stepped into the reception room just as someone turned on the loud-speaker. A voice, warm and rich and dramatic, calm as a lake at early evening, and absolutely unmistakable, filled the room.
“Golden Moon … over the midnight sky.…”
Relief flooded over him in a great, almost unbearable wave. He leaned against the wall a moment, catching his breath.
Of all the silly things to have imagined! Just because one of Nelle Brown’s ex-sweeties managed to get himself shot, he’d practically had Nelle strapped in the electric chair. The idea of Nelle Brown murdering anybody! She probably hadn’t even been near the place.
He slipped into the control room, mopping his brow. Schultz grinned sympathetically, waved him into one of the uncomfortable black-leather-and-chromium-piped chairs.
There she was, standing beside Bob Bruce the announcer, her face upturned, singing. There was not a tremor, not even the faintest suggestion of a tremor, in her voice.
Wherever she had gone between broadcasts, she had returned safely and in plenty of time. Not one shining wave of her golden-brown hair was disturbed; her exquisite, flowerlike face—though as pale as it had been before—was newly powdered. Her deep-rose dress was fresh and unwrinkled.
But her handkerchief!
Her immense, pale-green chiffon handkerchief that she passed nervously through her hands as she sang had an ugly stain in one corner.
It had not been there when she left the studio.
Even through the heavy glass of the control-room window, Jake Justus could see that it was blood.
Chapter 3
Jake told the taxi driver to go around Grant Park until further orders, and to close the glass partition. Then he turned to Nelle, huddled in a corner. “Paul March had it coming to him, but why did you do it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said sullenly.
He carefully unfolded the green chiffon handkerchief across her knee so that the stain showed darkly. She snatched it back from sight.
“What did you do with the gun, Nelle? I hope to heaven you pitched it in the river.”
“I never had a gun. I didn’t shoot him.”
He swore wearily and at length, without repeating himself.
“Jake, please believe me.”
“I don’t give a damn if you shot him or not. My job is to keep you out of trouble, and I’m going to do it. Don’t forget your contract is up for re-signing. It’s none of my business whether or not you shot the guy, but will you please tell me where you got the gun and what you did with it, and who might have seen you going there, so I’ll know just what I’ve got to do first?”
“But I didn’t shoot him, Jake. You’ve got to believe me. I was there tonight, yes. That’s right. But I didn’t shoot him.”
“You said that before,” he said glumly.
“I went there. I’d written him some letters, last winter.”
Jake asked, “Just how bad were they?”
“Well—pretty warm. He was a—oh, skip that. Anyway, he kept them. I should have known this was coming when he called up and tried to borrow money from me.”
“Did he succeed?” Jake asked interestedly.
Her answer was brief, vituperative, and profane.
“Well,” he said mildly, “I didn’t think you would.”
“I don’t mind loaning money to a friend, but not to a skunk. Not after the way he treated me.”
“I don’t blame you,” Jake said, “but go on. He had your letters. He tried to borrow money from you. Take it up from there.”