The Corpse Steps Out

by Craig Rice

  The picture was one that held Jake, Helene, and Malone at the door for a moment. Helene looked at the lovely girl, remembered the passionate intensity of Nelle Brown’s voice over the radio, singing some ballad of suffering and despair, remembered the stories Jake had told her of Nelle Brown’s life, and decided that either her eyes were lying outrageously or Nelle Brown was a gigantic hoax.

  But at that moment Nelle Brown greeted them in the voice that no one in the world could have duplicated. Henry Gibson Gifford rose and welcomed them with the grace and charm of a visiting ambassador.

  It was to be, Jake had reminded Helene and Malone in the elevator, purely a social call. Bigges, the butler, brought in cocktails, and Henry Gibson Gifford led a discussion of the situation in Europe, on which he spoke with informed authority. Then he and Helene spoke at length of the Russian ballet, about which both of them seemed to know a great deal, while Jake and Nelle quarreled over a song in the next week’s broadcast, and Malone stared moodily out the window. Then Henry Gibson Gifford noticed the little lawyer’s apparent boredom, and brought the talk around to celebrated criminal cases of the past decade.

  He was, Jake thought, one of the most charming and well-informed men he had ever known.

  It was Helene who remarked that the day had been almost perfect as far as the weather was involved. Their host sighed deeply.

  “I should have liked to take a walk,” he said sadly, “but I didn’t think it was safe, even with Nelle.”

  Helene looked up inquiringly.

  “They’re beginning to close in on me,” Henry Gibson Gifford informed her confidingly. “My enemies.”

  “Oh,” Helene said. It was the best she could think of at the moment.

  “It’s extremely tiresome to be followed all the time,” he confided, “especially by such very unpleasant-looking men. But they will do it.” He sighed again.

  “But usually you feel perfectly safe when Nelle is with you,” Jake said.

  The man shook his head. “Not today. I have felt a sense of foreboding all day. Very unpleasant. Perhaps it will pass. I hope that it will.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Helene said encouragingly. “I feel the same thing ever so often, and it always passes.”

  Nelle looked at her gratefully.

  “Do you?” Tootz asked hopefully. “And are you ever followed?”

  “Often,” Helene assured him.

  He smiled happily and for a while they talked of Steinbeck, of the situation in China, and of the trends of modern drama.

  At last she rose and smiled at Henry Gibson (Tootz) Gifford. “I’m going for a drive with Jake and Miss Brand and Mr. Malone,” she announced.

  Tootz smiled. “Go ahead.”

  She went to get a wrap, and they rose to leave.

  “I’m glad you don’t mind my horses,” Tootz said to Helene.

  She was startled for only an instant. “Mind them! I adore them!”

  He was extremely pleased. “I suspect sometimes Nelle really doesn’t think I ought to have them in here. But there isn’t any other place for them. And they will come here, no matter what I try to do about it. This really isn’t just the place for them. But I don’t mind.” He paused and said almost defensively, “I like horses.”

  “I do too,” Helene said.

  “Sometime you must come up and tell me about your horses,” he said.

  “I will,” she promised.

  For a few moments they discussed Henry Gibson Gifford’s horses in a manner so matter-of-fact that Jake caught himself looking about the room to see if they were really there. Then Nelle said good-by to the white-haired man with such gentleness and affection that Jake felt his throat growing strangely hard, and they went into the elevator.

  “Well,” Helene almost growled on the way downstairs, “why the hell shouldn’t he have horses in his living room if he wants horses in his living room?”

  “How long has he been like this?” Malone asked.

  “Ever since the—no, not since the night when the stables burned. That was part of it. Everything happened at once. He lost all his dough, and the stable burned with all his horses in it, and he was sick for quite a long time, and I sold the Nelle Brown Revue, and we thought he was well again, and then the horses started coming up to the living room.”

  “He used to have horse races down on the Drive,” Jake added, “and the gang at the studio used to bet on them and then call him up to find out who’d won. He used to get sore as hell about the motor traffic getting in the way. But after he began to be followed by the little dark men, he gave that up. Now he just keeps the horses in his living room. I don’t think they get enough exercise myself.”

  “Tough,” Malone murmured laconically.

  “Why?” Nelle asked almost angrily. “He’s happy. Sure he has a few delusions, but nothing that bothers him, except that he doesn’t like being followed. He won’t stir out of the apartment unless I’m with him. But he’s contented there. He doesn’t even mind being left alone in the apartment, not at all. I phone him every little while when he’s alone, and he parks right by the phone so he’ll hear it ring if I call, and nothing bothers him. The horses are no trouble. He likes horses.”

  “I mean it’s tough on you,” Malone said.

  “Hell’s bells,” she said, “I like horses myself.”

  They got into Helene’s long sleek car and began driving south.

  Malone, in the back seat, tossed his hat on the floor, lit a fat black cigar, and said, “Nelle, just how did Tootz’ delusions begin? I want to know how it all happened.”

  She stared at him. “Why?”

  “Nothing important. I just want to know.”

  Nelle scowled. “Well. Well, it was like this. We were out at the Maple Park place when it happened. Everything. One day we were rich and the next day we didn’t have anything. Tootz took it all terribly hard and terribly quietly, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do,” Malone said, “and go on.”

  “Then the stables burned. They found out what caused the fire; nobody set it, like the newspapers hinted. It was awful, Malone. All those horses, trapped in there. Tootz wanted to go in and Bigges and a fireman held him, and finally he realized that he couldn’t and he just stood there and looked at the stables burning and it was awful, and then Bigges and I took him in the house and he acted like he didn’t know what was going on, and Bigges and I brought him down to the apartment so he wouldn’t see where the fire had been or smell it, and we got him here and he sort of fainted.” She paused and looked at the ceiling.

  “Go on,” Malone said sternly, “the rest of it.”

  “Well, I called a doctor, and he said it had just all been too much for Tootz and he needed to be kept quiet for a few days, but he was going to be all right.”

  “The doctor thought he was going to be all right?”

  “Yes. He just needed quiet and some rest. And he left me a prescription for some sedative, and I ran out to the drugstore to get it, and I realized I had twenty dollars in my purse and that was all we had in the world. So the next morning I called up McIvers and I said, ‘Do you think you could still sell my show to Goldman?’ and he said, ‘He’d buy it in a minute, do you really mean it?’ and I said I did, so he got hold of Goldman and I went down to the office and signed the contract, and then I realized I’d need someone to look after things for me and I remembered Jake used to manage Dick Dayton so I got hold of him right away.” She paused again.

  “Boy!” said Jake admiringly, “that’s breath control!”

  Malone said, “Get back to Tootz.”

  “Well, the day I signed the contract—” she paused, took a long breath. “I was so pleased because we were going to have a lot of money, and I rushed home and showed Tootz the contract and said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ and he was so pleased. And that very night he said something about ordering oats, and I said, ‘For what?’ and he said, ‘For the horses, these horses,’ and sort of waved his hand, and he went o
n talking and I ran out in the pantry and said, ‘Oh Bigges, he’s gone crazy, what shall we do?’ and Bigges said he’d been afraid something like that might happen, and ever since then Tootz has been like that and Bigges has helped me take care of him.”

  “And the men following him?” Malone asked.

  “That was later. Quite a lot later. It was one day when he’d been for a walk and he came back and said two men had followed him. And we thought it was really true, because he seemed so positive, and after all, a lot of people had lost money when he failed. So I went out with him after that but I never saw anybody, and after a while I realized there wasn’t anybody. And since then, he’s refused to go out unless I was with him. But Malone, he isn’t really crazy.

  “I mean, not so he ought to be put somewhere. He’s happy, and nobody follows him when I’m with him, and he loves his horses. And except for those two things, he’s as sane as anybody.”

  “Of course he isn’t crazy,” Helene said gently. “He’s just different.”

  “Oh Jake,” Nelle wailed with sudden anguish. “If Tootz should ever find out anything about this!”

  “He won’t,” Jake assured her. “Malone here is going to fix everything for you.”

  “Sure,” Malone said, “no trouble at all. Part of our regular service.”

  “Are you really, Malone?” she asked.

  “I’m going to find out who murdered Paul March, if that’s going to help any,” he told her, “and then I’m going to find where your letters are and get them back. Does that make you feel any better?” He spoke with serene confidence.

  “It helps,” she said. “How are you going to do it?”

  “That,” the lawyer said, “is the only part I hadn’t figured out yet. Where can we get a drink?”

  Helene mentioned an address on Oak Street and said, “Who might have wanted to shoot this guy, Nelle?”

  “Anybody who knew him,” Nelle said, promptly and bitterly.

  “Let’s narrow the field,” Malone said. “What do you know about his private life?”

  “Practically nothing except that I used to be in it.”

  The lawyer grunted in disgust.

  “You know,” Jake said suddenly, as Helene swerved the heavy car into Oak Street, “it ought to be possible to pick up any amount of dope about him at the place where he lived. Nobody ever had a private life in that place. It’s like living in a zoo.”

  “We could question all the people in the building,” Helene suggested.

  “Thus advertising the fact that we knew there had been a murder,” Jake said witheringly.

  They were silent while Helene performed an almost incredible feat of parking the car.

  “Well,” she said, “why don’t you move in there and just tactfully ask questions?”

  “That’s no go,” Jake said. “Everybody there knows me. They’d suspect something was up.”

  “Well then, damn it,” she said crossly, “I will.”

  They stared at her.

  “Helene,” John J. Malone said, “you’re colossal.”

  “I’ll move in,” she announced, “and get acquainted with everybody in the place—if you don’t believe I can do it, watch me—and I’ll dig up secrets in Paul March’s life he didn’t even know he had.”

  “It might work,” Jake said slowly. “Yes, it might work.”

  Nelle Brown stared at Helene with wide, puzzled eyes. “But Miss Brand. You don’t know me from Adam’s off ox. Why should you go to all this bother for a person you never saw before?”

  Helene looked at her affectionately. “Maybe I like the way you sing and wouldn’t like to have you off the air,” she said. “Or you might put down that I liked the way you kissed Tootz good-by. Anyway, let’s all go in and buy a drink.”

  Chapter 9

  About an hour later, Nelle phoned her apartment, learned that Henry Gibson Gifford was tucked in bed and sound asleep for the night.

  “Curfew won’t ring for hours yet,” she reported, coming back to the table. “Let’s think of a place where it would be more fun to do our drinking.”

  Helene thought of half a dozen with no trouble at all. They moved to one of them.

  “Mr. Malone, who shot Paul March?” Nelle asked.

  “Can’t you get your mind off that?” Jake groaned, “And nobody ever calls him Mr. Malone.”

  “Could you get your mind off it?” she asked.

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Tell me how you got to be a radio star,” Helene said to change the subject.

  Jake groaned again. “That line is out of last night’s show.”

  Nelle ignored him. “Well, I was educated in a convent in Quebec, where—”

  “Not that one,” Jake objected, “the one where you were born on an old planetarium in Louisiana.”

  “You mean planetation,” Nelle said, pronouncing it just like that. “The Quebec story’s prettier.”

  “The other is more fun.”

  “Well,” she began again, “one day when I was singing in the choir in Ottumwa, Iowa,—”

  “How does it feel to skyrocket to fame?” Malone interrupted.

  “Don’t use that phrase; I don’t like it,” Helene said. “Before you can skyrocket to fame, someone has to set a match to your tail.”

  For a full five minutes everyone pretended not to know her.

  “If I knew where those letters are, I’d feel a lot happier,” Nelle said.

  Jake sighed. “There she goes again. All right Malone, where are the letters?”

  “For that matter,” Malone said, loosening his collar and wiping a glistening brow, “where’s the corpse?”

  “What good is a murder without a corpse?” Helene inquired. “How can you habeas a corpus if you can’t find the damned thing?”

  “Your legal terminology is a little confused,” Malone said severely, “but your intentions are doubtless good.”

  “She needs a drink to help her think clearly,” Jake said, and signaled to the waiter.

  Malone leaned on the table and stared at Nelle. “Who knew that March was trying to blackmail you?”

  “Nobody but Jake.”

  “How did March communicate with you?”

  “A note,” she said. “I got it at rehearsal yesterday afternoon. It was just a few words on a scrap of paper, written in soft pencil and stuck in an envelope. A Western Union boy brought it.”

  “How much did he ask for?”

  “Only five hundred dollars,” Nelle said, “but it was too damned much.”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “Knowing your vivid imagination, I bet those letters are worth a lot more than that.”

  “What did you do with the note?” Malone asked.

  “I stuck it between the pages of my script, then as soon as I could leave rehearsal I took it to the little girls’ room, tore it in small pieces, and dropped it down the john.”

  “It didn’t occur to you,” Jake said, “you were destroying a piece of evidence that could have sent March to the jug for extortion.”

  “I thought I was being wonderfully clever,” she said sadly.

  “I suppose it was in his writing?” Malone asked.

  “Oh yes. And anyway, he signed his name to it, in full. Yours forever, Paul March.”

  “Did anybody handle your script except yourself?”

  “Not until I’d destroyed the note.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jake said foggily. “Nelle. Your script. Remember? It was lost.”

  Her slender eyebrows formed a pair of question marks.

  “Lost,” he repeated. “Just before the broadcast. We never did find out what happened to it.”

  She said very slowly and thoughtfully, “Yes, I remember. But Jake, that was after I’d torn up Paul March’s note. I know that.”

  Jake said, “Hold up everything for a minute and let me think.”

  There was an anxious silence. Several minutes and two drinks later he looked up, his brows knit.

&n
bsp; “He’s coming up with something,” Helene murmured hopefully.

  He ignored her. “Nelle, you said the note was written in pencil. I’ve been thinking of the kind of paper those scripts are printed on. Do you suppose stuff could come off on them?”

  “Out of them maybe,” Nelle said crossly, “but not off on them.”

  “Damn you, this is serious. Isn’t it just possible that if you stuck that note between the pages of the script, and the note was written in pencil, enough impression of it came off on the script so that someone holding it up to a mirror could read it?”

  “That’s a little involved,” Malone said reflectively, “but I see what you mean. A kind of transfer process.” He paused. “But if that were true, then anybody might have known about the blackmail note—anybody who happened to pick up the script.”

  “Which means anybody connected with the broadcast,” Jake said. “And if that’s why the script disappeared, it’s a cinch nobody stole it just to get Paul March’s autograph.”

  Malone sighed. “Nothing that leads anywhere,” he said. “If somebody killed March to get those letters and blackmail you, there’s nothing to do but sit tight until you hear about it. On the other hand, if somebody killed him to get the letters and protect you, you’ll also be hearing the news soon.”

  “If it’s the latter, what do I do?”

  “Burn up the letters and keep your mouth shut.”

  “But,” Nelle said, turning pale. “Suppose I should be accused of murdering Paul.”

  “Don’t worry,” the lawyer said confidently, “I could get you an acquittal on the first ballot.”

  “That’s not what I’m thinking about,” Nelle said anxiously. “It’s Tootz. It would be so awful if he knew about this. I don’t care about being arrested, I don’t even care about the program and my reputation. But Tootz mustn’t find out about it, ever, ever, ever. Or Baby. It would be as bad if he found out.”

  “Why?” Jake asked. “Why Baby?”

  Nelle looked at him crossly. “Can’t you imagine what Baby might think if he knew I’d had a love affair with Paul, and then was accused of murdering him? Baby is a timid guy anyway.”

  Jake said, “Hell, I’ve had enough of this. Let’s go to the Colony Club.”