“Good work. Gal,” the chief said; and then, just like him, he takes all the pleasure out of it. “Now that you’re in for promotion, suppose you step around to that grill and pay the guy for that plate-glass window you busted.”
(1934)
Murder in Wax
He always called me Angel Face. Always claimed I didn’t have a thing inside my head, but that the outside was a honey. When he began to let up on the ribbing, I should have known something was wrong. But I figured maybe it was because we had been married four years—and didn’t tumble right away.
One morning no different from any other, the pay-off comes. Everything is peaches and cream and I’m trying to make up my mind between my green and my blue with the whosis around the neck when the doorbell rings. The guy looked like a taxi-driver. It turned out he was.
“I’ve come to collect that dollar’n a half your husband owes me, lady. He knows where my stand is, he shoulda squared it long ago.” And then to cinch the argument he flashes Jackie’s cigarette case at me, the one I gave him the Christmas before. “I’m sick of carrying this around for security, it ain’t worth a dime at the hock shop. The only reason I trusted him in the first place was on account of the dame he was with that night is a very good customer of mine. My stand is right outside her door—”
Plop went my heart! “Be right back,” I said, and dialed Jackie’s office on the phone. “Why, he quit last Saturday,” they told me. This was Wednesday. I took a look in the closet where his valise was. It was locked but when I lifted it by the handle it weighed a ton. It had everything in it all ready, all set to move out. So she’d put the Indian sign on him, had she? I went back to the door again hooking my blue up and down the back.
“You’re getting your dollar fifty,” I said, “and you’ve also got a fare all the way up to where that lady lives. Step on it.”
East Fifty-fourth Street, a couple of doors down from that big beer garden on the comer of Third. “Sure I know her name,” he said, “it’s Boinice. I hear ‘em all call her that whenever she’s with anybody in my cab.” The other half of it was on the mailbox—Pascal.
No one saw me go in, and the elevator was automatic. She was having breakfast—bromo-seltzer and a cigarette—and if he called me Angel Face, I wonder what he called her. Helen of Troy would have been homely. She had one of those faces that only happen once in a hundred years.
“Who’re you?” she snapped.
“Jackie Reardon’s wife,” I said, “and I’ve come here to ask you to give me a break.”
It was no use though. I found it out that night when I tried to tell him. The coffee I got in my face wasn’t hot enough to scald me, luckily, and I didn’t even mind hitting the floor over in the corner of the dining nook. It was when he snatched up his valise and went for the door that it hurt. I beat it inside, fixed up the purple mark on my jaw with powder, jammed on a hat, and caught up with him at the subway station. “Jackie, listen to me! You’ve got to listen to me!”
“All right, I forgot,” he said, and tried to pass a couple of sawbucks to me. I let them fall and the wind carried them down the tracks.
All I could say was, “Not tonight, Jackie! No, no, not tonight! Don’t go near her, you’ll get in trouble. Wait over until tomorrow, then go if you have to. But not tonight, Jackie, stay away—” His train came roaring in and drowned out every sound. I saw his lips say, “So long, kid,” and then him and his valise and his train all went away and left me there calling out, “Don’t go there, Jackie, you’ll get in trouble!” on the empty platform.
I went back and bawled from then until midnight. I killed the gin he’d left behind him, from midnight until dawn; and slept from daylight until it was almost evening again.
By that time the papers were on the streets with the big scare-heads—PLAYGIRL FOUND SLAIN. My hunch must have still been
Murder in Wax I 65
with me from the night before. I signaled from the window and hauled in a batch of them. Sure enough, Bemice Pascal, 225 East Fifty-fourth street, had been found shot to death in her apartment at about nine the night before. They’d caught up with Jackie less than half an hour later at Grand Central, trying to powder out on the Montreal train—alone. With two tickets on him and the key to her apartment. His valise was back at her place, where he’d left it in care of the doorman while he went upstairs.
I sank to my knees, held my head in my hand and went wading down the column with swimming eyes. What a set-up! He’d shown up at 8:30 the first time, asked the doorman to mind his valise, and gone ahead up without being announced—she’d given him the key, hadn’t she? The doorman had never seen him come down again. The next time the doorman had seen him the body had already been discovered and Jackie was being brought in from the outside, by the homicide men who had picked him up. Quickest pinch in years, raved the papers and the bureau.
A time-table, left in her place with the 9:40 Montreal train underlined, had tipped them off. There was one every night, but they didn’t wait for the next night to make sure. Her things had been all packed, too, you see.
“Oh, you fool, you fool!” I groaned and banged my head against the windowsill a couple of times.
Two days later they finally let me at him.
“You didn’t do it,” I said. “I’ll get you a good lawyer.”
“You stay out of this,” he said. “I don’t want you dragged into it. I’ve done you enough dirt without that.”
“I’m your wife, Jackie. You don’t have to tell me, I know you didn’t do it.”
“She was dead when I let myself in,” he said, “and the radio was playing Nobody’s Sweetheart Now. I remember that. That’s all I remember. I lost my head I guess. I beat it down the emergency staircase and slipped out while the doorman was out front getting a cab for someone. I got into one myself around the comer and drove around and around in a daze. Then I made for the train—”
“You’ll get your lawyer, Jackie,” I promised him.
My brother-in-law in Trenton turned me down flat. I had the diamond engagement-ring Jackie had given me five years before, though. And my wedding-ring was platinum. That went, too. I got Westman for him. You spell his name with dollar marks.
“I like the case,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of it much, but that’s why I like it. Hold on tight.”
I liked the looks of it even less than he did—after all, Jackie was my husband, not his—but I held on tight.
The trial opened in the middle of a freak heat wave that had got its dates mixed. At 90 in the shade, with a perspiring jury ready to convict the Angel Gabriel if they could only get out of there and into a shower bath and a cranky judge who hated his own mother, he didn’t have a chance.
It was a mess all the way through. The State’s proposition was that she’d agreed to beat it to Montreal with him; then when she changed her mind at the last minute for some unknown reason, he’d killed her in a fit of jealous rage. The gun was her own, but it had been found at the bottom of the elevator shafts—and she’d died instantly with a hole between her eyes. Soundproof walls, no shot heard. The doorman had seen him go up at 8:30; he was the last person he’d seen go up there; he’d known him by sight for months. And about everybody else in New York seemed to chip in their say-so after that—the State had them stepping up and stepping down all day long.
“Do something,” I kept saying to Westman, “do something!”
Westman drew nothing but blanks. The night doorman, who’d come on duty at six, was obviously greased—or so he said. Then when he went out after the day doorman, who might have been able to mention any callers she’d had earlier in the day, that gentleman had chucked his job two days after the murder and gone home to Ireland or somewhere without leaving any forwarding address. He dug up a former colored maid of hers who would have been a walking card-index of the men in Pascal’s life, and just as he had her nicely subpoenaed and all, she got mysteriously knocked down by a speeding car at 135th and Lenox and had a fi
ne funeral. All wet, all wet.
I sat through it day aft«r day, in the last row behind a pair of smoked glasses. The jury came in on the 21st with their shirts sticking to their backs and stubble on their jaws and found him guilty.
I keeled over and a court attendant carried me outside, but no one noticed because people had been passing out from the heat the whole time the trial lasted.
It was nice and cool when he came up for sentence, but it was too late to do any good by that time. Jackie got the chair.
“So my husband goes up in sparks for something he never did!” I said to Westman.
“Ten million people think he did, one little lady thinks he didn’t. You can’t buck the State of New York.”
“No, but I can give it a run for its money. What do you need for a stay of execution?”
“New evidence—something I haven’t got.”
“No? Watch me. How long have we got?”
“Week of November Eighth. Six weeks to us, a lifetime to him.”
At the door I turned back. “The five centuries, I suppose, was to pay for the current they’re going to use on him.”
He threw up his hands. “You can have the retainer back. I feel worse about it than you do.”
I took it because I needed it. I’d been living in a seven-dollar-a-week furnished room and eating corn flakes, since I’d retained him. Now here was the job—to separate the one right person from the 6,999,999 wrong ones—or whatever the population of New York was at the last census—and hang the killing of Bernice Pascal on him so that it would stick and give my Jackie an out.
Six weeks to do it in. Forty-two days. A thousand hours. And here was the equipment: five hundred dollars, a face like an angel and a heart like a rock. The odds? A thousand to one against me was putting it mild. Who could stand up and cheer about anything so one-sided?
I just sat there holding my head in my hands and wondering what my next move was. Not a suspicion, not a hunch, not a ghost of an idea. It was going to be tough going all right. I couldn’t figure it out and the minutes were already ticking away, minutes that ticked once and never came back again.
They let me say goodbye to Jackie next day before they took him upstate. He was cuff-linked, so we didn’t have much privacy. We didn’t say much.
“Look at me. What do you see?”
“You’ve got a funny kind of light in your eyes,” he said.
“It’s going to bring you back alive,” I said, “so never mind the goodbyes.”
When I got back to the room there was a cop there. “Oh-oh,” I thought, “now what?”
“I been looking all over for you,” he said. “Mr. Westman finally tipped me off where I could find you. Your husband asked us to turn his things over to you.”
He passed me Jackie’s packed valise, the one he’d taken up to her house that night.
“Thanks for rubbing it in,” I said, and shut him out.
I never knew what punishment shirts and socks and handkerchiefs could hand out until I opened it and started going through it. His gray suit was in it, too. I held the coat up against my face and sort of made love to it. The cops had been through the pockets a million times of course but they’d put everything back. A couple of cards from liquor concerns, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, his silver pencil clamped onto the breast pocket.
Being a Sing Sing widow already, I spread them all out in front of me in a sort of funeral arrangement. It was when I started smoothing out the coat and folding it over that I felt something down at the bottom—in one of the seams. He’d had a hole in the lining of his side pocket and it had slipped through, out of reach. But when I’d worked it back up into the light again, I saw the cops hadn’t missed much. It was just a folder of matches.
I put it down. Then I picked it up again. It wasn’t a commercial folder of matches. There wasn’t an ad on it. It was a private folder, a personal folder. Fancy. Black cover with two gilt initials on it— T.V. You can pick them up at the five-and-ten at a dime a throw; or at any department store for two bits. Just the same, it belonged to one single person and not to any hotel or grillroom or business enterprise of any kind. T.V. It hadn’t been Bernice’s because those weren’t her initials.
Where had he gotten hold of it then? I knew who most of his friends were, she’d been the only dark horse in his life, and none of their names matched the two letters. Just to check up, I went out and called up the firm he’d worked for.
“T.V. there?” I asked off-handedly.
“No one by those intials works here,” the office girl said.
It was when I went back to the room again that the brain-wave hit me. I suddenly had it. He had picked them up at Bemice’s apartment after all, he must have—without their being hers. Somebody else had called on her, absentmindedly left his matches lying around the place, and then Jackie had showed up. He was lit up and, without noticing, put them in his pocket and walked off with them.
Even granting that—and it was by no means foolproof—it didn’t mean much of anything. It didn’t mean that “T.V.” had anything to do with her death. But if I could only get hold of one person who had known her intimately, I’d be that much ahead, I could find out who some of the rest of her friends were.
“T.V.” was elected. Just then I looked over in the corner and saw a cockroach slinking back to its hole. I shivered. That—and all the other cockroaches I’d been seeing for weeks—did the trick. I got an idea.
First a folder of matches, then a cockroach. I dolled up and went around to the building she’d lived in—225.1 dug up the superintendent. “Listen, I want to talk to you about 3-H,” I said. “Have you rented it yet?”
“No,” he said, “and God knows when we’ll be able to. People are funny about things like that, it was in all the papers.”
I made him take me up and I took a look around. The phone was still in, disconnected, of course. The phone books were lying on the floor in the clothes closet. Everything else was gone long ago.
“Nice roomy closet you have here,” I said, fluttering the leaves of the Manhattan directory. Then I put it down and came out again. You have to have good eyes to be able to see in a dim closet. Mine are good.
“I’ll make you a proposition,” I said. “I’m not at all superstitious, and I haven’t got much money, and I don’t like the brand of cockroaches over at my place. You haven’t got an earthly chance of renting this place until people forget about what happened and you know it. I’ll take it for exactly one quarter of what she was paying. Think it over.”
He went down, phoned the real-estate agents, came back again, and the place was mine. But only for six weeks; or, in other words, until just around the time Jackie was due to hit the ceiling—which suited me fine as that was only as long as I wanted it for anyway.
The minute the door had closed behind him and I was alone in the place, I made a bee line for that clothes closet and hauled out the Manhattan directory. I held it upside down and shook it and the card fell out, the one I’d seen the first time. It was just one of those everyday quick-reference indexes ruled off into lines for names and numbers that the phone company supplies to its subscribers.
There were two or three penciled scrawls on hers. Probably had so many numbers on tap she couldn’t keep them all in her head. An3rway there it was—
Ruby Moran — Wickersham, so-and-so Gilda Johnson — Stuyuesant, such-and-such Tommy Vaillant—Butterfield 8-14160.
This was getting hotter all the time. Butterfield is a Gold Coast exchange, Park Avenue and the Sixties. But the cream of the crop don’t sport store-bought monogrammed matches—that’s tin-horn flash. Which meant that this guy, whoever he was, was in quick money of some kind and hadn’t caught up with himself yet. Which meant some kind of a racket, legitimate or otherwise. Which meant that maybe she had known a little too much about him and spoken out of turn, or had been about to, and therefore was now sprouting a lot of grass up at Woodlawn. At the same time, as I said before, it didn’t necess
arily have to mean any of those things, but that was for me to find out.
As for the police, they’d had such an open-and-shut case against Jackie that it hadn’t behooved them to go around scouting for little things like folders of matches in the seams of a suit he hadn’t been wearing when they arrested him nor unlisted numbers on reference cards hidden away in the leaves of a phone book. It took a little party like me, with nothing behind her face, to do that much.
I went out, thought it over for awhile, and finally went into one of the snappy theatrical dress shops on Broadway.
“Show me something with a lot of umph” I said. “Something that hits your eye if you’re a him and makes you see stars.”
The one I finally selected was the sort of a bib that you wore at your own risk if the month had an “r” on the end of it. It made a dent in the five hundred but that was all right. I wrapped it up and took it, and everything that went with it. Then I found a crummy, third-class sort of bar near where I lived and spent a good deal of time in there building myself up with the bartender and pouring a lot of poisonous pink stuff into the cuspidor whenever he wasn’t looking.
“Why no,” he said when I finally popped the question, “I couldn’t slip you anything like that. I could get pinched for doing that. And even if I wanted to, we don’t have nothing like that.”
“I only wanted it for a little practical joke,” I said. “All right, forget it. I never asked for it. I haven’t even been in here at all, you never saw me and I never saw you.”
But I paid for the next Jack Rose with a ten-dollar bill. “There isn’t any change coming,” I said. When he brought the drink there was a little folded white-paper packet nestled in the hollow of his hand. I took the drink from him without letting it touch the counter.
“Try this,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, and sauntered up front, polishing the bar. I put it in my bag and blew.
Darkness at dawn : early suspense classics Page 9