Halo in Brass

by Howard Browne

  “Dug it up yourself, hunh? What other leads you got?”

  “This was the first,” I said bitterly. “I hope the others turn out different.”

  He lowered the chair legs back to the floor, dug under his coat and brought out a cigar with a gaudy band and a mottling of unripened leaves running through it. Not a Corona —not by a long way. He hit off the end and spat it on the floor and used one of my matches to light what was left. It smelled like a plumber’s candle. In the silence I could hear men moving around in the other rooms and the murmur of voices.

  “That wind’s sure a bitch,” Blauvelt said conversationally. “Listen to her! Like to blown us into a streetcar on the way over.” The match followed the cigar tip to the floor. “Quite a broad, that Conrad. You get a good look at her?”

  “I kept from drooling, if that’s what you’re after,” I said harshly.

  “Kind of cute in a filled-out way,” he observed, smirking. “Man’s going to look at a naked woman no matter she’s dead or not. Real nice skin and stacked pretty too. She must’ve drove the boys wild—but she’s worm food now. You got here when?”

  “Three-thirty or a little after.”

  “She got it before three is my guess,” he went on dreamily. “Doc might change that but not by much. Let’s see your hands.”

  I had expected that. I put them, palms up, on the table in front of him. He took a pencil flash from a vest pocket and gave my nails a going over. He sighed finally and clipped the flash next to his fountain pen and leaned back to putt on his cigar.

  “Didn’t make you for a Ripper,” he admitted. “Not that that would keep me from looking. Not even a little honest dirt under them.”

  Before I could answer that the way it deserved to be answered, one of the plain-clothes men strolled into the kitchen. He was a thin-faced, bored-looking number, with a pair of heavy-lidded eyes that would miss seeing anything smaller than the virus of the common cold. He drooped against the refrigerator door and said carelessly, “We uncovered a little something, Captain.”

  “Don’t mind Mr. Pine here, sergeant,” Blauvelt said with exaggerated politeness. “You'might say he’s working our side of the street. Trot her out, Les.”

  Les straightened long enough to bring up a cupped hand and reverse it above the table. A torn segment of black lace floated down to land lightly between Blauvelt and me. “Laying right under one of her hands,” Les drawled. “Nothing we could find that it come off of. Renaldi thinks it’s the trimming on a slip or a brassiere.”

  My face ached from my effort to keep it relaxed. Blauvelt reached out, felt the material, sniffed at it, let it drop back on the table. “Well, well,” he said brightly, almost too brightly. “That kind of makes another woman the killer. Conrad puts up a fight, say, and tears the other dame’s clothes some.” He poked a long forefinger thoughtfully at the lace. “Only I’d like it a lot better had you pried this out of her hand, ’stead of finding it laying around loose. What else you got, Les?”

  The other man’s loose features twisted into a smirk. “Starts getting on the crummy side, Chief. Turns out this Conrad babe was a Lesbo. Queer as a set of purple teeth.”

  That jarred me all the way down to my socks. And of course both cops would be watching me. I reached for a cigarette and made a production of lighting it, getting my indifferent look back again.

  “Well now,” Blauvelt purred. “So she wasn’t for the boys after all. Seems a pity, don’t it?” He scratched the base of his thumb and blinked his yellow-green eyes like an oversize tiger digesting a native. “Who put you on to that, Les?”

  “I checked with the boys downtown on a hunch,” Les admitted smugly. “It showed on her record—what little record there was. Probation on a shoplifting charge, and a nolpross on a con-game beef. But she’s been tied in with a bunch of Lesbos for years.”

  Blauvelt clucked his tongue and looked at me through the smoke screen I was building. “How much of this means something to you, Pine?”

  “None of it.”

  “This girl you was hired to find—-she one of them, too?”

  “I started working on this job only a few hours ago, Captain.”

  “Now you know that ain’t what I asked you,” he said reproachfully.

  “It still answers your question,” I said. “The girl is missing and that’s all I can tell you about her.”

  “Well now, this lets you know a little more and you’re welcome to it. But you did say she used to room with Mary Conrad. So now it turns out Conrad was queer. Kind of seems likely this here Fremont girl is that way too, wouldn’t you think?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was remembering what Mrs. Fremont had said about her daughter's attitude toward the male population of Lincoln. There were other things the old lady had said, and I was bringing them out and making a pattern of them. I began to feel on the sick side.

  Captain Blauvelt sucked at a tooth and watched me over his cigar. “Not much question about it any more that a woman pushed Conrad. Not after hearing this. Still going to hunt up Laura Fremont, Pine?”

  “I don’t see why not. I was hired to find her.”

  “You private stars get tangled into some mighty smelly cases, I guess.”

  I shrugged and said nothing.

  “Bring her around to see me, Pine. When you locate her.”

  “If I locate her,” I said. “And you’re taking a hell of a lot for granted if you try to tie her in with this killing. As I heard it, Mary Conrad was mixed up with a number of Lesbians. Any one of them might have strangled her in a jealous rage. Why single out someone for the job who knew her for only a short time—and that all of two years ago?”

  The captain looked at Les and Les looked back at the captain. Blauvelt picked up his bottle and emptied the rest of the beer into his glass and drank it down. He sat there holding the glass and watching me burn.

  “We’ll need your prints,” he said finally. “For elimination purposes, you understand. One of the boys will take them on your way out.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Then I’m not riding over to the station?”

  “Not on a piddling little murder like this one. Drink your beer.”

  “No, thanks.” I flipped my cigarette into the sink. “No more questions?”

  “Guess not. Why don’t you go home?”

  “I had thought of it,” I said. “How about my gun?”

  He looked at the short and deadly length of it there on the table at his elbow. He pushed it delicately along the porcelain toward me, using his thumbnail. “Your gun don’t interest me, pal. She was knocked off with a silk stocking. Pick it up.”

  “Nylon,” I said. “You hardly ever see silk these days.”

  He leered again. “Not much you didn’t take a good look!”

  I put the gun away and the three of us walked into the living room. The prowl-car men were gone but the lab crew was still hard at work. One of them did a fast job of taking my fingerprints and handed me some gasoline on a cloth to clean away the excess ink. When I left, Captain Blauvelt was still wearing a trace of his leer.

  I came very close to telling him what he could do with it.

  CHAPTER 12

  LASALLE STREET, in the sixteen hundred block, was part of a lost neighborhood taken over largely by lost people. Up and down its length were cut-rate liquor stores, dingy restaurants with hectographed bills of fare stuck in fly-specked windows, and dirty-fingered little stores where a bell rang when the street door opened. But mostly there were cheap apartment buildings and seedy hotels with high-toned names and rooming houses that catered to old men with nothing left but limp pensions.

  I parked the car around a corner and came back through the wind, a driving gale now, to 1682. It had been a private residence once upon a time: two floors of frame construction set back from the sidewalk, with a wide veranda, a gabled roof, dormer windows and a gingerbread trim—all of it painted an unlovely green too many years before.

  I climbed three wooden steps
to the porch and looked at a sun-yellowed APARTMENTS card behind the glass of a bay window. Farther along the porch a cane-bottomed rocker jiggled in the wind. It didn’t appear to have been sat in recently.

  There were no bell buttons in sight and only a rusty hinge where once had been a knocker. I pushed open the street door and entered the cool funereal silence of a dim hall with wallpaper the color of mildew and tobacco-colored carpeting underfoot. Two doors, closed, were in the left wall and across the way a set of double rollback doors where once had been the dining room and might still be for all I knew. A bowlegged table against one wall held a few pieces of mail strewed along its surface.

  No sign of life. No sound except the whine of wind and the muted slither of traffic. Nothing but a smell that was an accumulation of smells. And in the middle of it all, one lean corpse-weary private detective earning his daily bread.

  I knocked on the blotched varnish covering one of the single doors.

  Springs creaked, heels hit the floor, a throat was cleared, the door opened about a foot.

  In years he was no more than nineteen, wearing unpressed trousers and a not very white shirt open at the collar and two buttons missing. A limp cigarette hung from the corner of a crooked mouth filled with petty meanness. He had thick black hair that had been slept in, narrow eyes loaded with suspicion, cunning and distilled hate, a thin tubercular face the color of boiled pork.

  He said, “What’ll it be, Jack?” in a voice built for profanity.

  I said, “Miss Fremont.”

  He blew out some smoke without removing his cigarette. The smoke went into my face. That made no difference to him. “No one here by that name.”

  “I’ll talk to the manager,” I said.

  “No manager. My old lady owns the joint. What d’ya want?”

  “Call her. She might let you listen.”

  I was looked at, up and down, with a curled lip added for ballast. “Don’t let’s crack wise; Jack. I don’t owe ya nothin’.”

  “No wonder the vacancy card’s in the window,” I said. “A doorman like you could be quite a liability.”

  His gray face turned a mottled pink. It was no improvement. I slid my foot ahead just as he heaved against the door. It hit and snapped back, catching him on the shoulder. The cigarette fell out of his face, striking the doorknob and giving off a shower of sparks.

  His eyes were hot as a cobra’s breath. I leaned on my side of the door and grinned at him. “Let’s not wear out the act, Junior. I want a word with the right party and I’ll be here until then. Believe me.”

  From somewhere behind him a door opened and shut and slippers flapped along the floor. A woman’s voice, high and stagy, said, “To whom are you speaking, Gilbert dear?”

  Gilbert muttered the word I had expected all along and retreated a few steps. My foot absently nudged the door, swinging it open, letting me see most of the room and the woman in it.

  She was a tall number, lean as the top-rail of a backwoods fence. Her hair had run the gantlet of dyes until it was now no color at all and she wore it in stiff waves worse than outright disorder. She had a collection of sharp-edged features in a puffy gray sliver of face balanced on a thin neck filled with stringy muscles. A quilted green bathrobe was wrapped around her, with a once pink nightgown trailing to mules with white pompons and runover heels.

  She stood with her head tilted back, looking at me along a pointed nose like Catherine the Great inspecting a peasant from the wrong side of the Urals. Her smile was an impersonal thing, although she was trying to make it worth a duel in the gray dawn.

  She said, “How do you do? I am Cornelia Van Cleve. Was there something?”

  She treated the letter R like a vaudeville Englishman with a cold. I clawed off my hat and moved it around in my hands. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Van Cleve. I was inquiring about Laura Fremont.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no one here by that name.”

  “I know,” I said. “She moved out some months ago. Her folks haven’t heard from her since and are starting to worry.” I looked past her and smiled my dimpled smile. “I could come in and tell you about it.”

  She brought up a hand slowly, light glinting on flaking red nail polish, and touched the hair at the base of her neck. Some women can knock your eye out with that gesture. But not this woman. “I’m afraid the apartment isn’t very tidy, Mr.—”

  “Pine,” I said. “I know how it is. I didn’t get a chance at the breakfast dishes myself.”

  Gilbert was still in my way, glaring at me. I started in, forcing him to move or get stepped on. He turned in a tight circle and stalked over and dropped on a metal day bed along one wall. It held a tangle of gray sheet and thin blue blanket.

  Mrs. Van Cleve closed the door and suggested I might find the couch just the thing for sitting purposes. I picked my way through a collection of mismatched and unattractive furniture coated with generations of dust and soft-coal smoke until I reached the couch. It had a coarse brown tapestry cover and loose springs in the wrong places but was probably more comfortable than the floor.

  She sat down across from me, arranging the robe and nightgown to show me a scaly length of shinbone. Her smile was as sharp as the prow of a cruiser and about the same shape. Above and behind her a sick-looking canary moved sluggishly in a dull brass cage on a tall thin brass pole. The room smelled of old vegetable dinners. I scratched my knee.

  She Was still playing lady of the manor but her expression said she’d be willing to take time out for a little backstairs gossip. “Laura Fremont, did you say? I’ve had this place for seven years, Mr.-—Pine, I believe you said?-—and there’s been no girl here by that name. I’m so sorry.”

  In the dusty silence a spring creaked in the day bed across the room where Gilbert sat with his back propped against the wall. I tapped my fingers gently on the sofa arm and tried to see past the sharp features and bored-duchess expression on the woman across from me. There seemed no reason for her to lie to me, but the reason could be there just the same.

  “Think back a little,” I said doggedly. “Tall for a girl, light-brown hair, a hundred and forty pounds. Blue eyes and more than likely pretty. But not a clinging vine. Moved out last January. Maybe she had her own apartment; maybe she shared it. Might even have had a little trouble over the rent or something—although I’m only guessing on that.”

  More silence. But this time it was silence filled with electricity. Mrs. Van Cleve’s hands lifted, jittered, fell back in her lap. Anger struggled with fear in her eyes and in pinched lines about her thin beak of a nose. Her mouth opened and closed twice before anything came out of it.

  “Why—why—you must mean that horrible, horrible Fairchild woman!” she moaned. “It was in January that Gilbert’s heels hit the floor hard and he was off the day bed. One of his feet struck something a glancing blow, sending it skittering along the carpet. He took three fast steps that brought him to the center of the room. His face was red now and filled with bitter fury.

  “Copper!” he spat. “Just one more wise flatfoot tryin’ out a cute new twist! You guys don’t ever let nothin’ lay, do ya?”

  I saw what it was his foot had hit against. A dime-store plate, crusted with stains of blueberry pie. I didn’t see the fork anywhere. Maybe he had eaten it along with the pie.

  I looked from the plate to Gilbert and back to the woman again. She was sitting as stiff as a cement pretzel, her mouth still open but no words coming out.

  It seemed my turn to say something. “The Fairchild woman is the one I had in mind, Mrs. Van Cleve. How do I get in touch with her?”

  Her jaw snapped shut and her eyes got a little wild. Gilbert brought up a hand suddenly and rubbed the palm hard against his shirt front. “A big laugh!” Still loud, still filled with windy anger, but underneath the loudness and the anger was a whining note. “Whyn’t you monkeys lay off, for Chrisake? Okay, so she got a sock wrapped around her neck and you guys took her out and buried her someplace. We told the captain w
hat we could and that shoulda ended it. What else d’ya want?”

  There was a cigarette in my mouth and I was through lighting it before I knew what my hands were doing. I scowled at the match and blew it out and bent what was left of the stick. I got up to take a Chinese-red ash tray off a table and carried it back to the couch. They watched me without moving and without a word.

  I said, “Tell me the story, Mrs. Van Cleve. Once more and all of it.”

  Gilbert was still in the way. “The story ain’t changed none, copper. Just kind of shove the hell off, hunh?”

  I looked at him the way a homicide cop looks at people who get underfoot. “We never did write you off on this caper, Junior. Now I see why.”

  He made a strangled sound and his right hand balled into a fist and came down hard against the side of his thigh. I kept on looking at him. He turned sharply and went back to the day bed. He kicked the pie-stained plate clear across the room' on the way. It hit the baseboard beside the door and spun like a coin and fell over.

  Mrs. Van Cleve hadn’t so much as turned her head while this was going on. I blew out some smoke and crossed my legs and said, “You were going to tell me about it, madam. As I understand it, you found the body.”

  “It was horrible!” she said suddenly. “I never did trust that Louise. Ellen was so quiet and polite, while the Fairchild woman never had anything to say. Just sneaked around with that better-than-anybody expression and her nose in the air. And then one night she choked Ellen to death with a stocking and went out and never came back!”

  “Louise Fairchild did the job? You’re sure of that?”

  “Why, of course!” The question startled her. “She never came back, did she?”

  “What was Ellen’s last name?”

  “Purcell. I told the captain all about—”

  “And when did this happen?”

  “In the night sometime. I told the captain—”