The Corpse Steps Out

by Craig Rice

  “Jake, I said I should have seen this coming. Anyway, I heard from him today. He sent me a note. Offered to sell me the letters. You can imagine,” she said with feeling, “just what would happen if Tootz should ever know about this.”

  “Tootz,” Jake said, “or your adoring public.”

  “Oh, the hell with the public. Can’t you think of anything else at a time like this? Well anyway, Jake, I wasn’t going to kick in, not to that rat. I was going up there between shows and scare the everlasting Goddamned living daylights out of him, and get my letters back without giving him a dime. I’d have done it too,” she added thoughtfully, “if some bastard hadn’t gotten there first and shot him.”

  Jake said scornfully, “Who would want to shoot him?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Nelle asked, just as scornfully.

  He tried to think of an answer to that one, couldn’t, and asked instead, “What did you do with the letters?”

  “I didn’t do anything with them. I didn’t find them.”

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t find them?”

  “I said what you heard. They weren’t there.”

  He murmured, “Good God!” under his breath, and snapped his cigarette out the cab window.

  “Jake darling, I looked everywhere. I did everything but tear the paper off the walls. Those letters weren’t anywhere in the place.”

  “But it don’t make sense,” he said stupidly.

  “Either he hadn’t really kept them and was just trying to bluff me, or else somebody else has them now.”

  Jake inquired loudly of an unanswering and possibly disinterested providence why he had ever taken on the job of managing Nelle Brown.

  Just the same, he looked at her with reluctant admiration. Between broadcasts she had gone to bluff a blackmailer into giving back the foolish letters she had written him, and had found the man dead. She had walked into what must have been an agonizingly familiar room and stumbled on the murdered body of a man she had been wildly in love with only a few months before. (Or had she found him alive and left him dead?) Whatever had happened, she had done a magnificent job of the rebroadcast, as smooth as though nothing, not even the most trivial thing, had disturbed her.

  Nelle Brown chose that moment to hurl herself at his shoulder, bury her head in it, and begin to cry, noisily and childishly.

  “He used to be so sweet to me, Jake. Just sweet. Good-for-nothing louse if there ever was one. Can’t you imagine what it was like, walking in there tonight? It was wintertime when—remember? I used to stop in there and he’d have a fire going in the fireplace, and he always took my galoshes off for me, and I’d watch the snow going down past the window. Everything looked just the way it always did, with the little chromium ash tray on the end table, the one we got with cigarette coupons. And he was there on the kitchen floor, dead. All bloody, Jake. I used to be so happy with him. Remember how awful it was when Joe McIvers had him fired, and he told me that it was all just so he’d get the job of producing the show? He hadn’t really cared about me, he just wanted my show to do. Remember how you sat up with me for three nights in a row, and how we thought I’d never get sobered up for rehearsal, and that terrible Turkish-bath place you took me to? I could have sworn he was in love with me. Oh, Jake, he couldn’t have said some of the things he said and not meant them.”

  Jake held her very gently for a few minutes and let her talk on and on, until at last she sat bolt upright and said in a calm, perfectly clear voice, “I wonder where in hell those letters are now.”

  He looked at her and shook his head wearily. No, he would never quite understand her. No one ever would.

  “And all that money, Jake. Where did he get all that money? I didn’t give it to him.”

  “Somebody did,” Jake said thoughtfully. “Why? Nobody would lend him that much.” He considered it for a minute, and said, “He sold the letters to somebody else. Or he was blackmailing somebody else and somebody shot him. Or—but why shoot him and then not take the money back?” He sighed. “He was blackmailing somebody we will call A, and somebody we will call B came in and shot him. This gets too damned complicated, Nelle. You must have shot him yourself.”

  “Go to hell!”

  He said slowly, “Aside from the problem of the letters, you may have been seen going there tonight. Or somebody may remember you used to spend a lot of time with him last winter. I jumped to the conclusion you’d shot him the minute I saw him, and it’s just possible, baby, a jury of twelve good men may jump to the same conclusion.”

  “No, Jake! Oh no!”

  “It does happen to people,” he told her calmly. “And even if that eventually doesn’t come about, you may still get messed up in a nasty, sordid murder case, and you know what happens to people in radio when they get into things like that. Remember what happened to Annette just because she was named as corespondent in a very ugly divorce action. Swell little actress, Annette, and not a director in town will touch her with a ten-foot pole.”

  “I know,” she said reflectively. “I paid Annette’s rent for her last week, and only God knows what she’s eating on.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s an old, old saying, baby. It might have happened to you.”

  “And Tootz,” she said, her voice suddenly strained and harsh. “Tootz. If he knew. Oh, Jake, that would be awful. Jake, that mustn’t happen.”

  “It may, when the police start nosing around in their horrid, inquisitive way,” Jake told her.

  “Jake, I shouldn’t have called the police when I found him, should I?”

  He leaned back against the cushions and talked emphatically to heaven about Nelle Brown.

  “Hell,” she said, “nobody could be that stupid, at least I know I’m not.”

  “The police will find out about it soon enough,” he said, “and without our help, too. Just pray they don’t learn that either of us dropped in there tonight, and you also might pray that whoever has those letters is a friend of yours.”

  “What do you mean, Jake?”

  “I mean that conceivably somebody murdered March for them in order to do the blackmailing himself. In which case this affair might run into money.”

  “Money,” Nelle Brown said scornfully. “Who the devil cares about money?”

  He reminded her briefly and untactfully that there had been days when she would have sold the flowers off her grandmother’s grave for the price of a cup of coffee and a hamburger.

  She ignored him, and said, “But if whoever has those letters is a friend of mine—”

  “Then Paul March may have been murdered to get you out of a jam.” He looked at his watch. “Listen, baby. We’ll cope with those things later. Right now, you’ve got to go to Max’s. Everybody from the show is going there, and you’re expected. You’ve got to give the impression that you don’t know what’s happened. Does Tootz think you’re coming home tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Date with Baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, when Baby shows up, send him home as soon as you can. I’m not going to let you out of my sight until this breaks.” He tapped on the glass, told the driver to take them to Max’s. “I’ll get you out of this somehow, but you’ve got to do exactly as I tell you, every blessed minute.”

  “I will, Jake.”

  He felt agreeably sure he could depend on that.

  At Max’s, he paused a moment in the doorway. “Chase up to the little girls’ room and wash your face. I’ll be waiting for you right here. For the love of Pete, hide that damn handkerchief until you get a chance to burn it.”

  “Yes, Jake.” Her voice seemed almost too docile.

  Jake decided to stop worrying. Luckily, Max’s was the best place for her to be seen tonight. It was a comfortable, informal, noisy restaurant and bar, where the cast of the Nelle Brown Revue usually gathered after the show. Everyone would remember that Nelle Brown had been there; everyone would remember that she had been her usual lighthearted self. (He hop
ed!)

  Oscar Jepps paused on his way to the bar. “Where the hell have you two been all this time?”

  “Riding around Grant Park in a taxi,” Jake said.

  Oscar laughed appreciatively, shaking a collection of chins. “That’s very funny.”

  There was nothing, Jake reflected, like telling the truth if you wanted to get a reputation as a wit.

  Then Nelle returned, no sign of tears on her serene face. The pale-green handkerchief was stuck outrageously through her bracelet, innocent of any stain.

  “Washed it,” she whispered impishly.

  They were greeted by an uproar of welcome from one end of the big room. There was much confusion of rearranging tables, shifting chairs, and ordering drinks, but when everyone had settled down again, Jake was right at Nelle’s side, where he had intended to be.

  He sipped his rye slowly and looked around the room. You couldn’t, he reflected, heave a brick in any direction without hitting a radio artist. (And why not?) There was Bob Bruce, big and blond and handsome (his good-looking face was the trial of his life). McIvers, looking as though he never got enough sleep (he never did); Lou Silver, a little, shiny-haired man, showing off before a heavily mascaraed brunette; a stranger with glasses and a red mustache (they never did find out who he was); the pale, fastidious, Boston-accented John St. John and his homely, brown-haired wife who could be such amazingly good fun (Jake remembered the week end of Oscar’s house party and had the grace to blush); a rather nice-looking blonde in a tight blue dress, and, on the other side of Nelle, the inevitable Baby.

  There was, to Jake, a curious unreality about it all. There was the usual talk, the usual patter, the usual drinking, the usual attempts to put Essie St. John under the table. While only six or eight blocks away there was that crumpled body on a kitchen floor. He remembered how many times the man who lay dead had been with them at Max’s, with everyone trying to be nice to him for Nelle’s sake. Last year’s Baby, Jake thought grimly.

  He looked slowly around the table. Had one of them slipped over to that shabby apartment between broadcasts and killed a man? But which one of them, and why? Or had it been Nelle after all?

  Chapter 4

  “How did you get to be a radio star?” the red-haired stranger was asking Nelle.

  One of the penalties of being a radio star, Jake reflected, was that everyone asked you how you got to be that way.

  Nelle simpered ever so slightly, and said, “Well, I used to sing in the choir in the little Nebraska town where I was brought up, and one day—”

  “Hell’s bells,” Oscar growled, “couldn’t Jake write you a better story than that?”

  “He has,” John St. John said dispassionately, “several, in fact. Why don’t you write the true one someday?”

  Jake grinned and said, “I might,” and wondered what would happen if he ever did. Nelle had been the daughter of a cheap entertainer in a fifth-rate dive. A few years in public school and a ratty home in a one-room basement apartment from which she was chased to the neighborhood movie whenever her mother had “company” constituted her childhood and education.

  “How did you get into show business?” the red-haired stranger persisted.

  Nelle looked him straight in the eye and told him she had been born backstage and had played little Eva at the age of six. The red-haired stranger looked interested but skeptical, and Jake remembered that Nelle had been adopted by the boss of a traveling medicine show at the age of twelve. He had seen pictures of her: a thin, rather attractive, leggy child, with a mass of curly hair, and immense, hungry eyes. Two years later, professing to be sixteen, she had turned up in the chorus of a second-rate burlesque company.

  A long way from that to the Nelle Brown Revue. Jake sighed deeply, ordered another rye, and reflected that if this murder story broke the wrong way, Nelle would zigzag right back to a second-rate burlesque company.

  “Let’s not talk about me,” Nelle was telling the red-haired stranger, her eyes wide and dewy. “Let’s talk about you.”

  The tableful of Nelle’s friends cheered raucously, and the stranger lapsed into a discouraged silence.

  “The truth is,” Oscar Jepps said, “when Nelle was seventeen she got to be a movie extra, and that’s how the whole thing started.”

  He neglected to add that when Nelle was seventeen her life included some five years in more-or-less dubious show business and a marriage that had ended abruptly when her husband shot it out with the police of Kansas City. But the curious stranger appeared to be satisfied.

  John St. John chose that particular moment to ask, “Did you ever find your script, Nelle?”

  Nelle gave several minutes to discussing the undiluted whatsisname who could have stolen her script out of the studio before the broadcast, making it necessary for her to mark up another one at the last minute. She implied that whoever would have done such a thing had a maternal parent who was African, illiterate, unwashed, and unwed.

  The red-haired stranger looked a little startled.

  John St. John lifted his left eyebrow a trifle and muttered something about the inexcusable carelessness of leaving a script in the studio. Jake repressed an impulse to ask him whether his pale hair had been parted by an architectural draftsman or a certified public accountant.

  Someone sent for another round of drinks.

  The mascaraed brunette leaned across the table and asked, “Miss Brown, didn’t you used to sing with Dick Dayton’s band?”

  Nelle nodded. “Almost a year. That’s where I met Jake, he was managing Dayton. Dayton was a big success and I was a big success, and so we split up.”

  McIvers broke his usual morose silence. “Eighteen months ago I had Nelle all ready to sign on the dotted line. Her own show, her own name headlined, and enough money every week to choke a horse. And then she went and got married.” He looked sadly into his glass.

  Jake wondered why so many agency account executives appeared to have been marked by some great personal tragedy. The only real tragedy he knew of in Joe McIvers’ life was that his pet sponsor, Papa Goldman, liked to fish, and Joe didn’t.

  The red-haired stranger whispered to him confidentially, “Miss Brown is married?”

  Jake nodded. “Henry Gibson Gifford.”

  The stranger’s eyes grew appreciative. “Socialite millionaire. I know who he is.”

  “Not a millionaire any more,” Jake reminded him.

  The stranger looked meditative. “Sixty, isn’t he?”

  “Young in heart,” Jake said, wishing the man would go away.

  “Talking about Tootz?” Oscar Jepps asked amiably, taking his plump hand off the arm of the blonde in blue.

  Jake nodded and wished the red-haired stranger onto Oscar.

  “Handsomest man of his age or any age in the city of Chicago,” he heard Oscar mumbling. “Best-dressed man in America. Most beautifully tended white hair and mustache in the civilized world.”

  Jake recalled a bright-eyed and glowing Nelle confiding in him that Henry (though even then she called him Tootz) was so sweet, and she adored him. Of course she was marrying him for his money. She’d be a fool not to, wouldn’t she? But he was such a lamb. She’d want to marry him if he didn’t have a dime in the world. Jake had told her at the time that she could think up the sweetest stories.

  Oscar was explaining to the red-haired stranger that Nelle would probably never have returned to radio if Gifford and Company hadn’t failed, leaving Tootz with nothing except the shirt on his back, and a mortgage on that.

  “But didn’t Henry Gibson Gifford lose his mind after the crash?” the red-mustached stranger asked in a whisper perfectly audible two blocks away. Three people managed to kick him under the table as he reached the last word.

  “He has delusions,” Oscar murmured. The shadow of a grin crossed his cheerful, moonlike face.

  Everyone began talking about the night’s broadcast.

  Five drinks later, the red-haired stranger remembered something he had wa
nted to ask Nelle for a long time.

  “How did you get to be a radio star?”

  At that point Nelle was warmed up to answering, “I’ll tell you, if you’ll tell me how you got to be such a dope.”

  The stranger was squelched again.

  The party went on talking about the broadcast. Jake found he was pleasantly able to answer questions and remarks without annoying his mind about what he was saying. He heard St. John’s chilly voice address the young man next to Nelle as “Baby” and noticed the frown that crossed the young man’s face.

  He felt a little sorry for Baby. What the hell was his real name, anyway? Oh yes, Macy McKee. No wonder Nelle called him Baby. A little different from the usual men in Nelle’s life. Young—a little too young for Nelle, he thought—a newcomer to Chicago from somewhere in the East. Not a bad actor, either. Oscar had praised his work, and no one was a better judge. Well, his affair with Nelle would give him a chance to show what talent he had. By the time it broke up, he ought to be established as an actor. Jake wondered if the boy knew that.

  That reminded him of the current mess Nelle was in.

  “Don’t forget to chase Baby home,” he whispered to her.

  She nodded, and about three drinks later the young man was gone.

  From Jake’s point of view, it was not a successful party. Perhaps, he told himself, because he was staying too sober. Or perhaps because he was trying to pick a likely murder suspect from the group around the table.

  He managed a warning glance at Nelle, cleared his throat ever so little, and asked casually, “Anyone here seen Paul March lately?”

  For an instant it was as though mass paralysis had struck the party. (Though, he decided later, that might have been shock at his tactlessness in mentioning Paul March in front of Nelle.)

  In the breath of time before several people murmured, “No,” and several others hastily changed the subject, he thought that Essie St. John, Oscar Jepps, Joe McIvers, St. John and the red-mustached stranger all turned pale and looked guilty. He wondered if he’d turned pale and looked guilty himself.