Halo in Brass

by Howard Browne

  By the time that was done the aroma of coffee filled the apartment. I sat at the kitchen table and drank three cups—black and laced with molasses rum—over the morning paper, reading Dick Tracy for information and the editorial page for laughs. I was in the middle of an article that pointed out the Republican Party was not dead but sleeping, when the phone rang in the living room.

  It was Sam Wilson, at the desk. “Lady down here wants to come up, Mr. Pine.” He sounded faintly outraged. “I told her you just got in and was tired, but she—”

  “Who asked you?” I growled. “She give her name?”

  A silence while he put a grubby paw over the mouthpiece to ask her. “A Miss Pinkerton, Mr. Pine.”

  It sprung my jaw for a couple of seconds, then I got it. “Okay.” I sighed. “Tell her to come up.”

  I opened the door while she was coming down the hall. She was wearing a party dress under a soft gray-fur stole and she had done something with her hair that got my red corpuscles out of bed in a hurry.

  “Pinkerton!” I growled, letting her in. “Next thing you’ll be wearing a deerstalker hat and carrying an enlarging glass. Partner!”

  Susan Griswold let the wrap slide from her shoulders and dropped it across the lounge chair. “Nice,” she murmured, surveying the room. “I thought private detectives lived in one room and hung their socks on the radiator to dry.”

  “They let me do janitor work to pay the rent,” I said. “Sit down; you can stay long enough to have one drink.”

  She was carrying a small bag about the size of a business envelope, that glittered under the light. She sank down on the couch and crossed her legs under the wide skirt of the ankle-length moss-green dress and took out a cigarette case in white gold and a lighter in the same metal.

  “I saw you there tonight,” she said matter-of-factly. “You did all right, too. You must crash a lot of parties with that technique.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I’m real cute. Scotch or Irish?”

  Her forehead wrinkled. She looked about sixteen, dressed for her first ball. “Who?”

  “Not who,” I said, sighing. “Which? Scotch whisky or Irish whisky?”

  She considered the question as though it was important. “Scotch, I guess. Not too strong, please. Liquor makes me unpredictable.”

  “You don’t need liquor for that. Not you. Sit still.”

  I returned to the kitchen and gulped down the rest of the coffee in my cup and made a couple of plain-water highballs and carried them back into the other room. Susan Griswold was standing at the window, the blind up, smoking her cigarette and looking down into Wayne Avenue. She came back to the couch, sampled the drink I handed her and wrinkled her nose. “I’ll never really like to drink,” she said.

  I looked at my strap watch. Eleven-forty. “How did you find me?” I asked, sitting down next to her and putting my heels on the edge of the cocktail table.

  “I—I tailed you. Isn’t that what it’s called?”

  “I’ll be damned! And I never suspected a thing!”

  She dimpled. “You’re kind of disappointing as a detective. I wasn’t ten feet away from you while you were getting your hat at the checkroom out there. You seemed awfully grim about something. You look quite handsome when you’re grim.”

  “Tut—tut. I was thinking.” I looked at the bare. gracefully rounded arm next to me. It had a few freckles and a platinum wrist watch about the size of a dime set in a bracelet only money could buy. “What were you doing out there?”

  “Oh, I had a date. Dave Chalmers took me but he passed out. He always does. I sent him home in a cab.”

  “Who’s Dave Chalmers?”

  “They live across the road from us. He’s nice except when he drinks too much—which is most of the time. Why are we talking about him?”

  “Search me.” I beat down an impulse to pat that nice rounded arm and hoisted my glass and drank. She watched me gravely, even a little disapprovingly. I said, “That’s quite a stepmother you got there, Miss Griswold. We hit it off fine.”

  “Don’t feel so good about it,” she said witheringly. “The line forms on the left.”

  “I’m surprised at you,” I said, pained. “A nice girl talking like that.”

  “Oh, be still!” she snapped. “I’m not a child.”

  She sucked on her cigarette and blew twin streamers of smoke from her freckled nose to prove it. I chewed back a smile and stretched my legs and listened to the wind take a two-fisted smack at the window. I said, “You still haven’t told me what you were doing out there. Or was it your date’s idea?”

  “Mine,” she confessed. “I knew Father and Eve were going. I wanted to keep an eye on him.”

  “A wasted evening, huh? Outside of one remark she made, they seemed to get along all right.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” Her expression was troubled now and I suddenly realized it had been troubled all along despite her. efforts at covering up with a pretense at light chatter: “Right after you left they got into some kind of argument and she flounced out. I suppose she took a cab and went home. Father was pretty much upset. He evidently told Miss Abbott she could go, too, because Mr. Whitney and she left a couple of minutes later.”

  “And,” I said, “you walked out and left your poor old father all alone in that den of iniquity. Weren’t you afraid another blonde might get him?”

  She bit down on her teeth and I thought she Was going to heave the glass at me. “You don’t believe me, do you?” she grated. “You think I’m just a busybody or afraid he’ll leave all his money to her. What do I have to do to convince you it’s not that way at all? What do I have to do to prove I l—love my father and I can’t just stand idly by and let her—?”

  “Okay, okay,” I said hastily. “You’re going to save him from himself and I think it’s admirable. You may be misguided but you sound sincere. Only, where do I come in?”

  She gulped from her glass and leaned over to set it on the table near my feet. Some of the angry color left her face. “I told you why, on the telephone earlier this evening. You’re trying to find out something about Eve yourself. I told you how I know that, and when you asked me for a picture of her I was sure. We both want the same thing—that’s why I said we should work together.”

  “Maybe we don’t,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned she may be exactly what she claims to be—a former canary named Eve Shelby who managed to take advantage of our American way of life by marrying a millionaire. If it turns out that way my interest in her ceases abruptly.”

  “And if she’s somebody else—the somebody you think she might be—then what?"

  I shrugged. “She might be either one of two different people. In case she’s number one I’ll tell my client where to reach her—as I was hired to do. If she’s number two I’ll ask her where I can find number one. I hope that’s clear to you. It is to me.”

  “And that’s as far as you’ll go, is that it?” she demanded icily. “Even if she’s the one who murdered Mary Conrad and this other girl you mentioned on the phone?”

  I swished the contents of my glass in a small whirlpool, getting a musical note from the ice cubes. “Why not make up your mind, Miss Griswold? When I tried to sell you on the idea of tossing her to the buttons this afternoon you almost blew a fuse. Now you’re bawling me out for letting her get away with it.”

  “When I bawl you out you’ll know it,” she said hotly. “Father would put every nickel he’s got into getting her off if she was accused now. We’ve got to get such complete proof that he knows what she is. Then we can go to the police.”

  “And why will I help you get the proof?”

  Her eyes got very wide. “Well, my goodness, you’re a detective, aren’t you?”

  “Not that kind of a detective. Murders are police business and they kick the lungs out of anyone who gets in their way. I wasn’t hired to dabble in a murder case and I’m not going to be hired to. Not even by you.”

  “It seems
to me you’re in one whether you like it or not!”

  I blew out my breath. “I’m not in over my head, if that’s what you mean. It’s not a question of solving the case to keep the law off my own neck. That’s happened a couple of times to me in the past and I didn’t like it. Not at all, Miss Griswold, believe me.”

  She eyed me narrowly, thought of something and played it as a trump. “What if I should tell the police you let me leave Mary Conrad’s apartment this afternoon? That would put them on your neck!”

  “It would bruise yours a little, too,” I pointed out. “Don’t get out of your depth on this business, Miss Griswold. If your stepmother is as bad as you’re trying to make out, she’ll slip up one of these days and you’ll have her.”

  While she was picking up her glass I took a quick glance at my wrist watch. I still had time for a shower and a change of clothing, provided I could get Susan Griswold out the door sometime during the next fifteen minutes or so.

  I swallowed some more of my highball and watched her watch me. Finally I said, “If you want to help me find out what I want to know about Eve Shelby Griswold, that’s fine. But I won’t promise to give you the facts about her if I manage to get them. If she’s killed somebody and the proof is thrust into my hot little hand, then the cops are going to get it. Not on your account but because I don’t cover up for murderers. If you’re interested in that kind of one-sided deal, well and good and you’re in the firm and can sit behind my office desk on Easter Sundays. But if what I learn about her indicates that her mistakes are minor and in the past, provided there are any mistakes to begin with, then you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine. Period. That’s the contract I’m offering you. Sign it or tear it up and go home so I can get to bed.”

  She rubbed the edge of her glass slowly back and forth against the point of her chin, her eyes distant, thinking over my offer. Presently she moved her shoulders in a faint shrug. “If that’s the way it’s got to be . . . all right.”

  I finished my drink and stood up. “Can I freshen your glass?”

  She shook her head. I went back to the kitchen and refilled my order. When I got back she was lighting a fresh cigarette with the stub of the old. I dropped down beside her and put my head back and stared at the ceiling.

  “This Whitney you mentioned,” I said dreamily. “Stu Whitney, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. He’s the man I mentioned while we were at Mary Conrad’s apartment this afternoon.”

  “What’s her interest in him? Or is it the other way around?”

  She stirred slightly, bringing her shoulder against mine. Barely touching, but I was aware of it being there. “Both, I think,” she said quietly. “I don’t know much about him except he’s always underfoot. He made a play for me right after Eve brought him into the family.”

  I grinned. “How did he make out?”

  “How do you think?” She sniffed. “He reminds me of something that’s crawled out of an abandoned oil well.”

  “Seems to have plenty of money.”

  “Well, don’t ask me where he gets it. Not honestly, if I know anything.”

  I took a pull at my Scotch. “You must know something about him if he’s around all the time.”

  “Well, he’s got an apartment at the Barryshire,” she said. “That snooty apartment building on Barry, just off Sheridan Road. I’ve never gone there and I don’t intend to.”

  I said, “Your stepmother and Whitney just friends, or does he hold her hand when Pop’s not looking?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” she said stiffly. “If there’s anything like that between them, they manage to keep it a deep secret. Matter of fact,” she added thoughtfully, “I’ve seen her draw away when he happened to brush against her.”

  I looked down at her arm where it touched mine. “You mean even casually, like this?”

  Susan Griswold met my eyes but she did not draw away. Her lips twitched in what could be a smile if somebody insisted. “You think you’re tough,” she murmured. “Hard and fast and funny. Especially funny. Like the end man in a burlesque show!”

  “You mean a minstrel show,” I said.

  She wasn’t listening. We went on staring into each other’s eyes. Hers were darker now and very lovely. She didn’t mention how mine looked. Her lips were parted slightly. The light shone on them. The low-cut bodice of her evening dress moved unevenly. I leaned down and kissed her. Her lips were cool and not surprised—and then they were warm and clinging and one of her hands moved up and slid softly across the back of my neck.

  You never know how long it lasts. She pulled away almost violently and some of her drink spilled on the rug. She slumped back against the upholstery and caught her lower lip with her teeth and didn’t look at me. Outside, the wind whimpered and the trees rustled their leaves like the whisper of many voices.

  She said clearly, “That didn’t mean a thing. I hope you know that.”

  “Sure.”

  “I invited it and I got it. I don’t know why I invited it and it won’t happen again. Please remember that.”

  “Sure.”

  Her head jerked around and she glared at me. “Oh, go to hell!”

  Abruptly we were laughing. She put down her glass and got a handkerchief from her bag and dried her hand where some of the drink had Splashed. She said, “You’re crazy but I like you. Now that we’ve made a deal and I’ve had my kiss, I’d better be running along.”

  She took a final drag at her cigarette and rubbed it out and stood up. I went over to the door with her and reached for the knob. She laid a cool palm on the back of my hand, stopping me.

  “I think they’re up to something, Paul,” she said tensely. “My stepmother, Stuart Whitney, Ruth Abbott. I think they know what you’re trying to do and they’re scared. I could see it in their faces just before they left the Tropicabana.”

  “Don’t start imagining things. Who is this Ruth Abbott?”

  “I told you about her. Eve’s frozen-faced social secretary. I think she’s in love with Stu Whitney. Serve them both right if she is I”

  “How you talk!”

  She took away her hand and I opened the door. She moved past me, the soft gray fur of her wrap brushing my arm, then turned quickly and pulled my head down. Her lips hadn’t cooled any. I reached for her but she slipped away, leaving me with the door.

  “Good night, Paul,” she breathed.

  The elevator door clanged and she was gone. I closed the door and took the glasses into the kitchen and rinsed them out along with my coffee cup and the percolator. While I was putting them in the cupboard I caught the reflection of my face in the glass. The silly grin on it belonged to me.

  I got out my handkerchief and wiped my lips and stared at the lipstick smears. Susan Griswold’s lipstick. I wondered what I had done to deserve it.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE WIND was still at it. Nothing moved along the walks except shadows. Shadows that swooped and crept and retreated, like ghosts afraid of shadows.

  Farwell Avenue, here, was twin rows of small neat apartment buildings, none higher than three floors. I stood in the shadows of a passageway and watched the street. An occasional window showed a glimmer of light but most of them were as black and empty as the lifeless sockets of a skull.

  Time passed with dreary reluctance. Only the wind hurried. A tree groaned in the parkway near me and somewhere a loose shutter banged monotonously. I took out a cigarette and rolled it around in my fingers, unlighted, until it fell apart. I pulled the collar of my topcoat higher around my ears. I took off my hat and reshaped the crown and jammed it back on.

  Headlights turned the corner at Lakewood Avenue and came slowly east along the street toward me.

  It wasn’t the Cadillac after all. A Buick sedan this time, and last year’s model at that. It passed me and nosed into a parking space a couple of doors farther down. found it too small and backed out again. Another twenty feet and it slid gently along the curb, its two wire parking
guides strumming musically against the concrete. The headlights blinked, then died, and almost immediately the parking lights came on.

  I shifted my position just enough to keep the car in sight without being seen myself. Both taillights glowed brightly red, like danger signals. The car doors remained closed.

  Some time passed. A car went by with a soundless rush and turned into Sheridan Road a block to the east. A tiny flame flickered briefly inside the Buick as a cigarette was lighted. Nothing now but the wind and the shadows and the lights on the waiting car.

  Five minutes went by. A gloved hand appeared at the window beside the wheel and dropped the stub of a cigarette into the street. The wind seized it and carried a streamer of sparks into oblivion. I patted the bulge under my left arm and continued to lean against the passageway bricks.

  Again a flame came to life inside the car and died quickly. She was on her second cigarette now. She might wait until it had burned down, but no longer than that. She would be impatient and on edge and beginning to doubt.

  I drew my hat down to keep it from sailing and stepped out onto the walk. The tree shadows did their best to hide me. I eased over to the curb and along it to the rear of the Buick. Nobody yelled at me, no windows slammed up in any of the buildings, no night sticks drummed against the walks.

  I stood near the car’s right rear wheel and peered through the glass. She was alone. I could make out her head and shoulders. She was wearing a hat with a heavy veil, like a new widow on her way to the funeral. The lights on the dash were turned off, leaving the interior too dark for me to decide if there was something familiar about her.

  Another step and I was able to look at the floor between the seats. Nobody was crouched there with a gun in his teeth. My hand was on the door release before she saw me standing there. She started visibly and shrank back against the opposite door. I tried to open the door and found it locked.