Halo in Brass

by Howard Browne

  He dropped into his chair, trembling, and the room was as silent as a mausoleum. Into the silence I said:

  “I’ll tell you why I came out to see your wife today, Griswold. Her background before a year or so ago is as cloudy as my future. Before her marriage she was friendly with three women that I know of. One was Ellen Purcell—and Ellen Purcell was murdered. Another was Mary Conrad and Mary Conrad was murdered. The third was Bonnie Field—and Bonnie Field was murdered. All three were shoved by a woman. I know that because of the lace torn from the woman who killed Mary Conrad, and because last night Bonnie Field was shot to death with my gun while I was in a car with her. I got a head full of bells out of it myself, but before I blacked out I managed to grab hold of the killer. They were the real thing, Mr. Griswold, no padding there at all.

  “There’s more. Bonnie Field was not Grace Rehak, although she knew Grace and had agreed to impersonate her long enough to find out what I was up to. When she saw I wasn’t buying it last night, she flashed the headlights to signal Grace I wasn’t so stupid as I looked and for her to come out from behind whatever she was hiding behind and talk to me herself. W hat Bonnie overlooked was that her failure to convince me meant she had to die too, since I now must know that she could lead me to Grace Rehak. And die she did.”

  I stopped and drank and got off the desk to put out my cigarette. Eve Griswold had turned to stone again and a hell of a lot I cared. I walked around in a tight circle and wondered how long a man could wave his tongue before it fell on one of his feet.

  “One nail left,” I said, “and it’s got to be hammered in with the rest of them. Another friend of your wife's, Mr. Griswold, is Stuart Whitney. As soon as Eve Shelby married you, Whitney’s own financial position was given a healthy boost. To a dime-store cynic like me that spells blackmail—which can only mean your wife has done something to pay blackmail for.”

  Griswold glanced once at his wife’s stricken face. He got out of his chair like an old man. Nobody could look at him. He went over to the liquor and poured out a small amount and drank it and stood there staring at the glass without seeing it.

  “Mr. Pine,” he said. His voice croaked. “You have accused my wife of killing three women. You have intimated her real name is Rehak, with a past so foul she must pay blackmail to keep me from learning about it. I tell you now, sir, I believe none of this. I am a wealthy man. Every cent I have, everything I own in the world, will go if need be to clear her of your charges.”

  It sounded theatrical enough to be phony, as a mixture of grief and sincerity so often does. Eve Griswold put her face in her hands and her shoulders shook under the figured white material. If somebody had shot me dead at the moment, cheers would have rocked the room.

  I said, “Before you start calling in defense attorneys and writing checks, let me finish this up.”

  Something in my voice got through to him. He stared hard at me for a long time, trying to get past my expression. Then he went back to his chair and sank into it and waited.

  I leaned against the desk and picked up my glass. “All along,” I said, “one angle kept popping up that held the key to this whole stinking mess. I kept pushing it away and that was my mistake. The angle is this: every one of the three dead women was, or had been, a Lesbian.”

  This time the silence was in hunks thick enough to throw at a passing cat. Susan Griswold stopped in the middle of lighting a cigarette and looked at me thoughtfully. Even Blauvelt’s fingers left off tapping his knee.

  “Let’s assume,” I said, “that the killer is a Lesbian, as were the women she killed. Let’s take it a step farther and say that the killer is either Grace Rehak or Laura Fremont. That means if we can find out which of the two is a Lesbian, we’ve got our murderer. All right?”

  Nobody said it was all wrong, or even partly wrong. I rubbed a finger along the side of the tall glass in my hand and continued to grind out the words.

  “Laura Fremont is a small-town girl, from a decent family and no evil companions. Grace Rehak is from the same small town but there the similarity ends. She came from the wrong side of the tracks and ended up in a joy house run by a Lesbian named Bertha Lund. Of the two, then, it seems a reasonable bet that Grace Rehak is the one to turn queer.

  “Both girls come on to Chicago. Laura takes a room at the YWCA and makes a few friends. Let’s say that she’s still got hay in her hair and wouldn’t know a Lesbian if one bit her in the leg. She shares a room with one of them, a girl named Mary Conrad. Mary makes a pass at her and Laura gets sore and moves out. This time she takes an apartment with another girl from the same crowd Mary runs around with, a girl named Ellen Purcell. One night Laura comes home and finds Ellen murdered, a stocking around her throat and scratches on her belly. A murder between Lesbians, with jealousy the motive.

  “Laura Fremont is petrified with fear. She’s sure the cops will think she did the job and send her to the chair. She doesn’t even stop to pack a bag, simply runs out into the night and disappears. She changes her name, her appearance and her whole personality. She stops writing to her folks because she’s afraid the cops will catch up with her through them. She gets a job singing in a small night club, goes from it to a bigger and better spot as a singer—and ends up marrying a millionaire.”

  Lawrence Griswold wasn’t an old man any longer. One more minute and he’d have his wallet out and start showering me with green affection. His wife had her eyes on me too, but her expression was too mixed to classify.

  “Just to tuck in the last loose end of this section of it,” I continued, “let’s clear up the blackmail angle. Stuart Whitney knew Laura Fremont. He saw her again after Ellen Purcell was murdered and Laura had taken on her new identity. He recognized her and—when she married money—started bleeding her to keep her secret.”

  Whitney looked lazily up at me. “You’re nuts, Pine, completely nuts. Eve Griswold will tell you as—”

  “Save it,” I growled. “I want to get this over before my throat gives out.” I drank the rest of my drink and rested the glass on my knee and opened fire again.

  “Grace Rehak is the killer we’re after. When she strangled Ellen Purcell, during a lovers’ quarrel, she began to worry that Laura Fremont might be able to clear herself and the cops would hunt for the real killer. So Gracie changed her name and personality and dived for cover. Everything went along fine; the cops scratched around on the case and threw up their hands, as cops will do when the going’s tough and no one to prod them. And then the Fremonts hired me to find their daughter.”

  I left my place at the desk and went over and made another drink, more to be doing something besides talk than because I needed it. I came back, stepping over Stu Whitney’s feet, and said:

  “Bertha Lund got word to Grace Rehak that I was after her. It scared her into trying to cover her trail. She killed Mary Conrad, then figured maybe cunning would work better than violence. So she talked another old friend into passing herself off on me as the real Gracie in hopes of finding out why I was hunting for her.

  ”But that backfired, so Bonnie Field had to die to prevent my getting the truth out of her. But by now I had all I needed. I knew who Grace Rehak was and where to find her. It was only a case of laying a hand on her shoulder and pushing her into the arms of the cops. Only she didn’t know that I knew—and she doesn’t know it even now.”

  Captain Blauvelt lumbered to his feet, his yellow eyes burning like candles behind glass. “Where is she, Pine?" he said in his purring voice.

  "Right here in the room." I said, and. bit down hard on my teeth.

  Blauvelt’s eyes moved from me to Eve Griswold’s pale and lovely face, from it to the small cold smile on Susan Griswold’s lips, from there to Ruth Abbott. And there they stopped. For a long frozen moment there was no sound in the room—and then Ruth Abbott cried out. “No l" and slumped from the chair in a dead faint.

  Blauvelt took one almost sinuous step toward her before I said, “Not her. No."

  He turne
d slowly, confused and not caring for it.

  “You passed one woman up,” I said. “Grace Rehak is—Stuart Whitney!"

  The small gun was out of his pocket and coming up before the last word was out of my mouth. I threw my glass at him but it went over his shoulder.

  A gun roared. No small gun could make that much noise. Stuart Whitney folded in the middle like an oiled hinge and hit the carpet with his face. The gun fell out of his hand and slid all the way under the couch.

  Les was still tilted back in his straight chair. Only now there was a heavy police revolver in his hand, smoke curling up from the muzzle. He blinked up at us. “I been putting in a little extra time on the target range,” he said.

  CHAPTER 24

  CAPTAIN BLAUVELT rode back to town with me in the Plymouth. For the first mile or so he had little to say, just sat there and puffed on his pipe and looked out at the clean sun on the hedges, trees and an occasional unguarded lawn.

  He bent finally and knocked ash into the dashboard tray. “What put you on her, Pine?” He grunted. “I mean on her strong enough to pull the kind of stunt you pulled.”

  I swung the crate around a curve in the crushed-stone roadway. “How many words do you think I can get through my throat in one day?”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Listening don’t hurt me none.”

  “Okay,” I said, sighing. “I was in his—her . . . all right— in Grace Rehak’s apartment last night while she was entertaining Ruth Abbott, her queer girl friend. Grace and I had a few words and when I started to leave I tossed his—Gracie’s, damn it!—cigarette lighter into her lap. It went between her legs and hit the floor. That, Captain Blauvelt, sir, was a clue. You know what a clue is, of course.”

  He hated to say it but there was no other way to find out. “Meaning what?”

  “From a book,” I said. “Huckleberry Finn. Seems Huck put on a woman’s dress and tried passing himself off as a girl. He ran into an old woman and she dropped something into his lap and Huck clapped his knees together to catch it.

  The old girl pointed out to him that while it’s instinctive for a man to do that to hold something, a woman will just as instinctively spread her legs and catch it in her skirt. With Stu Whitney it worked exactly the opposite. But it didn’t register until Les frisked me this afternoon. He shoved his hat between his knees and held it so, leaving both hands free to do his job. And right there several unrelated pieces of the puzzle began coming together.”

  Blauvelt settled a little lower on the seat and struck a match. “Might as well let me have them too.”

  I made the turn south into Sheridan Road before answering him. “Well, like when I was at Whitney’s apartment last night, I caught the smell of acetone. Women use the stuff to take polish off their nails. The polish was still on Ruth Abbott’s nails, but none on Gracie’s, of course, since she was now back to being a man—after shooting Bonnie O’Flynn and conking me on the head less than an hour earlier.

  “And another thing: Gracie, as Whitney, came to my office yesterday only a minute or two after I had written Mary Conrad’s name on my calendar pad. He—she—must have seen it there and realized Mary could ruin her. Whitney rushed to his apartment, got into a dress and a wig, I suppose, and hurried over to Mary’s apartment and strangled her. The scratches on her belly were left there by blunt fingernails. Women’s nails are seldom trimmed straight across that way. It all fits in, Captain.”

  He grunted and said nothing more for several blocks. But he was still chewing things over in his mind, for a little later he said, “The whole cockeyed business of her trying to be a man don’t make sense to me. You can’t hope to make a thing like that stick for long before you make a bonehead move and give yourself away.”

  “You’re forgetting something,” I said. “To all intents and purposes, Gracie Rehak was a man. A lot of masculine women ‘cross over’ and take on the personality, manner, character and clothing of a man. Except for a few physical differences they are men. Hell, you read every so often of some case where a guy has been married for years, held down a job and is highly respected by his neighbors—and then he gets in an accident or something and it turns out he’s a woman.

  “Same way with Gracie Rehak. She probably was on the edge of crossing over for a long time; then she killed Ellen Purcell and was forced to hide out. What better way than by becoming a man—the one thing she’d wanted to do all along.”

  When we were back in Chicago, I turned west on Addison Boulevard on the way to the Sheffield station. Not until then did Blauvelt have more to say.

  “Worked out all for the best, at that,” he rumbled. “Nobody gets hurt except people who don’t count anyway. Awhile there I figured I might have to go to bat against I don’t know how many millions. I wouldn’t of liked that one.”

  “Four people with their lives snuffed out,” I said. “Five counting the kid back in Lincoln, Nebraska. But I feel better now that you’ve pointed out they don’t count.”

  He looked at me narrowly out of his sleepy yellow eyes. “Don’t get noble on me, brother. A bunch of lousy perverts.” He leaned out the window to spit and the subject was closed.

  While he was getting out in front of the station, I said, “My .38. Do I get it back or don’t I?”

  He leaned a hand the size of a meat platter on the window ledge and cleared his throat. It sounded like a manhole cover falling off the roof. “You’ll get it, mister. I ain’t throwing away that ballistics report on it, neither. A guy like you is gonna get into trouble again sometime.”

  I reached for the gearshift, then let loose of it. “One thing more, Captain. How did you know where to find me this afternoon?”

  The edges of his ears reddened. “Well now, I guess we’ll have to charge that one up to Les. He’s been putting in some of his extra time practicing tail jobs, y’see, and when we left your place around noon, he wanted to stick around and make sure you didn’t take a powder.”

  I grinned, and after a moment he grinned with me. I said, “Another six months and you’ll be working for him, Captain.”

  He was still standing there lighting his pipe when I turned the corner.

  CHAPTER 25

  WHEN I got down to the office the next morning about eleven, the elevator man gave me a package he had signed for. I pushed up the window to let in some of the bright morning air and let out the smell of yesterday’s cigarettes and sat down to open the parcel.

  1 My gun. The boys at the laboratory had failed to clean it after firing a test bullet, but then Blauvelt had mentioned l they were Shorthanded down there. I spun the cylinder and I pointed it at the girl on the Varga calendar and said, “Bing, you’re dead,” and dropped it into the middle drawer.

  It took better than half an hour and three tries to get the letter written. I folded it over and was reaching for a blank envelope when the inner office door opened and Mrs. Lawrence Griswold was standing there.

  She had never looked lovelier. She was wearing tobacco brown under a loose tweed coat that reached to her knees. The collar of a white blouse lay neat and trim at her neck and her blonde hair brought along its own light.

  “Have a chair,” I said, not getting up. “You’re looking well this morning.”

  She sat down in the customer’s chair alongside the desk and put a rather large brown leather bag on the corner. She was neither frowning nor smiling and her dark-blue eyes were as deep as the Pacific two hundred miles off the coast of Japan.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I slept well.” She let her eyes stray around the ten by twelve room. “So this is what a private detective’s office is like.”

  “Uh-hunh. Not that it always looks this good. Today is the day they changed the sawdust on the floor.”

  She didn’t smile. I hadn’t expected her to. She opened her bag and took out a square French enamel case and a cigarette out of that. I held a match for her and she dropped the case back into the bag and left the bag open.

  We sat there and looked at
each other for a long time without speaking. Finally she took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “I want to know why,” she said simply.

  “I thought you would,” I said. I picked up the letter I had just finished writing and shook out the folds and held it out to her, my elbow resting on the desk.

  She took a long time reading it, although there weren’t more than a dozen lines. She folded it back in the original creases and slid it back across the blotter.

  “Then you knew all along I was Grace Rehak,” she said slowly.

  “You had to be,” I said. “Just as Stuart Whitney had to be Laura Fremont. Everything pointed that way. There were any number of things in her background to show she was a Lesbian—a Lesbian who was consciously preparing to switch over to the male side of the ledger. Her mother gave me some of those leads without knowing it. Laura’s destroying all pictures of herself before leaving home was one, her taking on a phony name when moving in with Ellen Purcell was still another. She might have gone on thinking about doing it but not taking the step if she hadn’t killed Ellen during a paranoiac rage. Fear of the law pushed her over the line.”

  She rubbed some of the ash from her cigarette into the tray and looked past me out the window at the warm sunlight shimmering there. Her eyes were quiet and thoughtful and a little sad.

  “I’d like you to know one thing,” she said. “I had no idea Stuart Whitney was Laura Fremont—or even that he was a woman. A few months before I married Larry, Stuart and I met at a bar in the casual way people do. There was something vaguely familiar about him but nothing to make me think of a girl I had only known slightly a long time ago. It wasn’t until I was married that he hinted of knowing what I had been . . . back in Lincoln.”

  She stopped to smooth a fold in her dress and think her thoughts. From far off a siren’s scream rose, held and faded, letting in the sound of city streets again like distant surf on a rocky shore.