by Craig Rice
“Alter we’d found the body,” Malone said, “she still had smudges on her hands. But the brass snake-charmer, as von Flanagan calls it, had been washed clean. She couldn’t have washed it off for fingerprints without washing her own hands in the process.”
There was a silence while they thought that over. Malone began thinking of the evening ahead, free from murders and other worries.
Maggie called, “Malone, someone to see you—”
Marty Budlicek appeared in the doorway, smiling. Malone noticed a new suit, a new shirt, a new tie, a haircut, and a new gleam in his eye. “Malone, all day yesterday I wanted to tell you. When you telephoned me at my brother’s in Waukesha, I wanted to tell you. Last night here at the office, I still wanted to tell you.”
“All right,” Malone said. “Tell me now.”
“That man,” Marty Budlicek said, “that McGinnis. I wanted to tell you when I read about the murder. I saw that man who was murdered, coming up. I saw that McGinnis coming up and going down again. I didn’t know him, but they showed him to me at the police station and I knew I had seen him. That’s what I wanted to tell you, that I knew it all the time.”
Malone was quiet for a moment. Then he rose, took Marty Budlicek’s hand, and shook it firmly.
“This, Budlicek,” he said solemnly, “is a great occasion in my life. And you are entirely responsible for it. It’s the first time in my entire life that I’ve ever actually bribed anybody—to tell the truth!”
Turn the page to continue reading from the John J. Malone Mysteries
Chapter One
The room he was in managed to be pink and green without being downright offensive. John J. Malone looked around warily, took out a cigar, wondered if he dared smoke it in such delicate surroundings, regretfully decided not, and put it into his pocket with a deep sigh.
Across the large room from him was a picture, a picture in a golden frame. Automatically the little lawyer found himself humming a line of a song he remembered from sometime, somewhere.
Pretty as a picture,
In a pretty frame—
Malone sighed again, but it was an entirely different kind of a sigh. He’d seen the subject of the picture any number of times before, with a succession of variations, in the colored advertising pages of magazines catering to the would-be luxury trade. Different poses, different surroundings, but always the same girl, the same exquisite face, the same delicate, half-secretive smile.
There was always the same ornately carved golden frame, and under it the same slogan that gave renewed hope to countless thousands of feminine readers, in fine, graceful script across the page—“Pretty as a Picture”—and the signature, in the same delicate script, “Delora Deanne.”
In spite of the picture, Malone was unhappy. He wanted that cigar, and badly. This had been one of those mornings when the mere act of waking had been painful, exasperating and just plain terrible, to the point where he wished it was also unnecessary. His bones felt as though they had been disjointed and then put together by an amateur with a do-it-yourself kit. His stomach felt full of damp concrete, and some practical prankster had evidently left a dead horse in his nose and a bad-tempered bumblebee in each ear.
But a voice over the telephone had said that Delora Deanne was most anxious to consult with Mr. Malone regarding an urgent legal matter, and he had been on his way as though he’d been pursued by a jet-propelled demon. It hadn’t been just a little problem that involved unpaid office rent, back salary for Maggie, his secretary, an overdue bar bill and a bank account that had already passed zero on the way down. Nor was it the fact that his best and oldest friend, Jake Justus, had just become a television producer with no shows on the air as yet but with a hopeful eye on the Delora Deanne account, and that this visit of his might prove a valuable introduction. It was that any moment now he was going to become one of the favored few who had met the real-life Delora Deanne face to lovely face.
Now, however, after twenty minutes of waiting, he looked once more around the green-and-pink room with its soft satin furniture, and began to wonder when he was going to be in the undoubtedly enchanted presence of the being who was the model for beauty-seeking American womanhood, the idol of American manhood, the inspiration for many of Malone’s favorite secret dreams, and certainly the greatest cosmetic saleswoman since Cleopatra sailed the Nile.
Delora Deanne! It would be the seraphic yet somehow voluptuous face, haloed by hair the exact color of fresh-minted gold, or perhaps it would be the hair alone in a soft cloud (Delora Deanne Sunshine Tint), the kind of cloud that Malone occasionally dreamed of walking through barefoot at dawn. Or it would be the slender, yet joyously curving body, rosy and still somehow pale, discreetly half-seen through misty, wind-touched veils (Delora Deanne Contour Classes), or the perfect, bare dancing feet on posy-studded grass (Delora Deanne Special Foot Make-Up), or the pair of slim, rose-tipped hands cupped to hold some rare and priceless gem (Delora Deanne Manicure Magic).
Or it would be Delora Deanne’s beguiling, caressing voice from some loud-speaker, “You too can be as pretty as a picture,” a voice that hinted, ever so slightly, at some remote foreign ancestry, possibly a Hungarian grandmother.
Put them all together and they spelled a lot of cold cream sales, and a lot of excellent ideas which John J. Malone preferred to keep strictly to himself.
Plus, of course, the possibility—probability, if all went well—of a wonderful, extra-super, triple-colossal television spectacular for Jake Justus to produce.
Again he hummed a bar or two of the tune which had been running through his head ever since his unhappy waking. Where had he heard it? He tried hard to remember. Probably in some thoroughly disreputable place the night before.
A voice behind him said, “I take it you’re John J. Malone?” and the little lawyer jumped almost guiltily, got up fast and turned around.
It was not the voice that had haunted him, heard softly over the radio, nor was it the high-pitched twang that had yipped at him nastily over the telephone earlier that morning to make the appointment. No, it was just a voice, midwest prairie with a faint touch of Chicago overtones, a serviceable voice, to be used solely for the purposes of communication.
The woman who went with it was also serviceable, and as midwestern as an acre of corn. If she had been the moving, smiling original of the dream Delora Deanne he knew so well, that would have been one thing. If she had been phenomenally and spectacularly deformed and ugly, that would have been another and, in its way, every bit as enthralling. But the woman who stood before him was neither. Her face was just that, a face, with the usual components of eyes, nose and mouth, put there in their proper places for the ordinary and useful purposes of eating, breathing and seeing. Even her eyebrows, usually such helpfully expressive clues to emotion, said nothing; they were just there and that was all there was to it.
Her practical-looking hands were clean and wore a standard-color nail polish, her medium-sized feet appeared to be free from corns and bunions. Her figure was not overweight or underweight, but just standard size, and covered with a medium-blue dress that might have cost six ninety-nine in Gold-blatt’s basement, or seven hundred and fifty at a salon, and probably had cost forty-nine-fifty at Marshall Field’s. Her hair, dressed neatly in no particular style, was just plain hair color.
She was neither likable nor disagreeable, friendly nor hostile. Malone did his best to look gallant and said, “You—are—”
“Hazel Swackhammer,” the woman said, and sat down. “I am also Delora Deanne.”
Malone sat down too; reminding himself firmly that more than just an introduction to the model who posed for Delora Deanne—for there had to be one—was at stake. There was his office rent to be considered, there was Jake’s still unborn TV show. He settled down to making friends with the brains behind the beauty.
“My dear lady—” He took out the cigar again, decided the hell with the green-and-pink walls, and lighted it. He murmured something flatterin
g about being extremely pleased, and looked around for a place to put his burned match. The lusciously soft carpet was a mossy green, engagingly sprinkled with pale pink and white posies, and he finally put the match in his vest pocket.
“My dear lady,” he began again, in what grateful clients had complimented as the perfect cell-side manner, “what seems to be your difficulty?”
“Scandal,” Hazel Swackhammer said. “Someone is trying to involve Delora Deanne in scandal, and consequently ruin me.”
Two more lines of the song came back to him.
—but she stole my bottom dollar,
And she scandalized my name.
She told him the detailed story of Delora Deanne, from a recipe for homemade lotion learned from a New England grandmother, through the mixing of ingredients in the back room of a small-town Iowa drugstore, to the perfumed perfection of the little marble building that was the heart of Delora Deanne Cosmetics.
It was a businesslike story, told in a businesslike manner. Malone admired it, but he thought wistfully of the story as told on the radio and on the printed page and that, with any luck, Jake would tell on television, a story that had its beginning in the dreamy South. Magnolias and moonlight, soft whisperings, and an occasional glimpse of shadowy, secret gardens. The little lawyer caught himself on the verge of a quiet sigh, then mentally kicked himself for being a sentimental slob, and told himself firmly to stick to business.
“This,” Hazel Swackhammer said. She handed him a small batch of clippings from newspaper columns, hinting that an unnamed beauty (very obviously Delora Deanne) was up to a lot of nonsense which, if not actually nefarious, illegal, and quite probably unchaste, was at least highly indiscreet.
“But,” she said, “that is not all.”
Malone felt a sudden and uncomfortable impulse to flee, client or no client, Jake or no Jake, Delora or no Delora. For days afterward, he claimed to have had a premonition all along.
“That,” she went on, “is not the awful thing that made me send for you this morning.” She rose, and Malone rose with her. She caught his last, yearning glance toward the picture and said, “Of course. Everyone does. But you shall.”
Malone blinked and said, “Perhaps an introduction—”
“Simplest thing in the world,” she said. “Advertising conferences go on in spite of everything, and they’re all here this morning. All except one, that is.”
Malone gave his head a brisk little shake in the vain hope that at least a few of his confused thoughts would find out where they belonged, and settle there. He had a grim feeling that the damp concrete in his stomach was beginning to harden now.
Hazel Swackhammer led the way into an adjoining room, this one gray, mauve and restful. Soft, pale-violet chairs were drawn up around what appeared to be a polished conference table. The man at the far end rose to his feet and Malone recognized the crisply waving dark hair, the handsome face with its smiling mouth, the dark eyes and long eyelashes that would have looked well on Delora Deanne herself, as belonging to a casual night-club acquaintance he recognized as Otis Furlong.
“Hello there, Malone,” Otis Furlong said. “I suppose you want to meet Delora Deanne.” He smiled and nodded to his right. “Gertrude Bragg.”
It was the face of the pictures, the face of Malone’s dreams, framed in the silken cloud of pale gold hair, but attached to a slightly dumpy body that rose from a pair of piano legs.
“The feet,” Furlong said, “Louella Frick.”
The little lawyer glanced instinctively under the table, at the pair of dainty, high-arched, slender feet in expensive beige suède sandals with fragile heels, then ran his gaze upward over a small chubby woman who looked at him through thick glasses astride a freckled nose and said, “It’s a pleasure,” in a voice like a discontented mouse.
“Eula Stolz,” Furlong said. “Torso and legs.”
Just torso and legs was too much of an understatement, Malone thought. It should have been at least The Torso, and The Legs. If only there had been a face in keeping, he would have stopped thinking about his troubles and his premonitions right then and there.
She said, “Hello,” through her nose, and closed a small, pinched mouth.
“And, the voice,” Furlong finished. “The voice. Rita Jardee.”
Rita Jardee, a red-haired, haggard and skinny woman who seemed to be hurrying toward middle age, said, “Delighted, Mr. Malone,” in the mellow voice that held him and untold thousands spellbound every Saturday night.
“Unfortunately,” Furlong said, “the hands, Eva Lou Strauss, are missing this morning. Late again, I suppose.”
A thin little sandy-haired man with rimless glasses spoke up from the other end of the table and said, “A composite. Otis, who takes our photographs, is a genius.” He added, “I’m Dennis Dennis, copywriter.”
Malone muttered something and was destined to wonder forever what it had been.
Jake. The Delora Deanne show. He was going to have to break this very gently to Jake. The beauty of Delora Deanne was to have been the irresistible lure to draw the eyes of goodness knows how many millions to their television screens. Now, this!
Or was it possible that a composite could be made to appear on television? He hadn’t the faintest idea. Probably not. But he clung to the faint hope as though it were a life raft.
Dennis Dennis nodded toward Hazel Swackhammer and said, “We must remember the brains, mustn’t we?”
Hazel Swackhammer lifted the left side of her upper lip in what, on any other face, and in any other circumstances, would have passed for a smile, and said, “My office is this way, Mr. Malone.”
The office was exactly suited to her. Four walls, two windows, a filing cabinet, a desk, a desk calendar, four chairs and an ash tray. Everything perfectly practical and utilitarian, and precisely in its place.
The woman standing by the desk was tallish and vaguely beautiful. Vaguely and dreamily. Her hair was dark and soft and cloudy, her dark blue eyes looked as though she ought to be wearing glasses. Even her smile was vague, perhaps a little confused.
“Myrdell Harris,” Hazel Swackhammer said.
“How do you do, Mr. Malone.” The little lawyer recognized the voice he had heard over the phone. There was nothing dreamy nor vague about it. “Mrs. Swackhammer’s executive assistant. Do you need me, Mrs. Swackhammer?”
“No,” Mrs. Swackhammer said. “I do not.”
The door closed gently behind the executive assistant—Malone suspected her employer’s name for it was “secretary.”
Hazel Swackhammer unlocked a desk drawer, took out a box and laid it on the desk. “This,” she said, pointing to it, “came in the mail this morning.”
Malone recognized the satiny white box with its silver lettering as having come from a fashionable and fabulously expensive Michigan Boulevard shop which had cost him more money in the past than he was ever going to confess to anyone. There was something ominous about it, resting there on the plain green blotter of the desk. He didn’t want to open it, and he knew he was going to.
There was a pair of pale lavender suède gloves inside, so very beautifully designed and cunningly made that he could guess in an instant at their cost. But he wasn’t interested in design nor cost right now. Because the gloves were not empty.
The damp concrete in his stomach began to turn rapidly into ice. Slowly, very slowly, he reached down and began to slip off the gloves until he recognized the magnificently embalmed hands that had once been Delora Deanne’s, slender, graceful, ringless, and even now, lovely.
Chapter Two
It was quite a little while before John J. Malone spoke, in fact, before he even dared to try. Carefully, and with hands that were almost steady, he replaced the cover on the satiny white box, and stood staring at it as though it might suddenly spring at him.
Hazel Swackhammer sat down behind her desk and gazed fixedly at a blank spot on the wall.
“Tell me,” Malone said, as soon as he felt reasonably cert
ain that his voice would sound normal again, “why haven’t you informed the police about this?”
She turned her head to look at him as though he were a slightly retarded child. “Newspapers,” she told him. “I have to consider the reputation of Delora Deanne.”
The little lawyer scowled and gestured toward the sheaf of newspaper clippings she still held in her hand. “It seems to me,” he said coldly, “that Delora Deanne’s reputation is already being chopped up in pieces for the benefit of the reading public.”
The look she gave him indicated that she didn’t quite like the way he’d phrased that. On second thought, he realized that he didn’t quite like it himself.
“I sympathize deeply with you,” Malone said, hoping he sounded as if he meant it. “Indeed I do. But you have a certain duty as a private citizen.”
This time, her look told him exactly what she thought of her duty as a private citizen, as compared to her duty to the already imperiled reputation of Delora Deanne.
Malone relit his cigar, and this time he dropped his burned match on the brown linoleum floor. “Furthermore, you’re overlooking something,” he said, as gently as he could. “The rest of—” he indicated the satiny white and silver box—“this person’s person.”
“Eva Lou Strauss,” she said, without any expression on her face. Perhaps, Malone thought, if it had been the Delora Deanne pretty-as-a-picture and irreplaceable face, there might have been, not actually an expression, but at least a faint shadow of anxiety.
“You want her body found,” Malone said sternly and righteously. “The rest of her body. Her people will want to give it proper burial. And you want her murderer to be punished.”
“As far as I know,” Hazel Swackhammer said, “Eva Lou Strauss had no people.” Her further silence made it plain that finding and punishing murderers was definitely not her business. After a while she said, as though just faintly annoyed, “I suppose it must be murder.”