False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (16 page)

“I’ve never seen him embarrassed.”

“Makes two of us,” she said. “Told me it was me they wouldn’t serve.”

As an ice-breaker it ranked between a missing woman and a murder.

A waitress dropped off menus. Cherise caught her wrist, and had her recite the specials. “Gettin’ off cheap,” she said to Jordan.

“What did you learn?”

“Not a goddamn thing,” she said. “Figured I could play you for a meal. Don’t want to watch me eat, settle the bill before you leave.”

He ordered for both of them, lit a Lucky.

Cherise patted his hand. “You sweet, know it?”

“Compared to what?”

“Don’t be sulking. Truth is, I got plenty for you. Had to be sure you in control of your ’motions, you don’t hear what you like.”

“What don’t I want to hear?”

“Hold your horses.” She shook a cigarette out of the pack, tapped the end against the back of her hand. “Us two, me and Etta, have the same booking agent. Slipped my mind till I was at his office. Her picture’s next to mine on the wall, ’long with his other clients, big stars, too. Be glad you weren’t there when I brought up her name.”

She put a cigarette between her lips, leaned close, and touched the tip to Jordan’s, blew smoke past his cheek.

“Was his opinion Etta was a rising talent. Could sing and dance, tell jokes that’d make you run home to change your pants. Even play soprano sax passable well, and some clarinet.”

“Where do I find him?”

“Uh-uh. He can make things hard for me. Has a lawyer’s license, but more money comes in from entertainers he books into the clubs, and providing girls for private parties.”

“You mean prostitutes.”

The smoke went into his face. “I worked some of those parties.
Etta brought me to one where I met Mr. Stolzfus. Nobody said nothing about turning tricks. I was there to dress up the room, to
look
available. Anything else, I was on my own. Our agent was gonna supply the girls for Mr. Stolzfus’ party that didn’t happen.”

“Is he a Negro?”

“He’ll let you think he is.”

“I don’t get you.”

“Ain’t read his birth certificate. Wouldn’t be the first white person I know passing for black.”

Jordan placed his notebook on the table, uncapped his pen.

“Never knew nobody like that?” She stopped to let him get something down on paper, but started talking again as doodles filled the margins of the page. “Ain’t making it up. There’s white folks’ll do anything to make a dollar off of Negroes—even be one. Some get to feeling that’s who they are, heaven knows why. It’d be unkind to tell ’em to go back to what they were before.”

“He didn’t send Etta to private parties to crack jokes.”

“Etta knew the ropes, and was okay with it. Was nobody she wouldn’t go to bed with if she thought it’d help her career.”

“What about someone who couldn’t do anything for her?” Jordan said. “Did he stand a chance?”

“She didn’t let herself be in love, that’s what you’re getting at. Never took her eye off the ball.”

“Speaking of which,” Jordan said, “last time we talked you mentioned a baseball player. His name was on the tip of your tongue.”

“Must’ve swallowed it.”

“Hub Chase,” he said. “Sound familiar?”

She shook her head. “Don’t mean I never ran across him. Not everybody at the parties’d give out their right name.”

“His wife was murdered a few weeks before Etta disappeared. She was also young and ambitious.”

“What was
her
name?”

“Susannah. Suzie Chase.”

“Miss Monmouth County? Miss Phillie Cheesesteak the year before? Redhead with a build like that Jane Russell?”

“You know her?”

“Knew who she was. Gorgeous girl like her, if you’re in the business of being beautiful in Atlantic City, you heard of Suzie Chase.”

“Did you see her at any of the parties?”

“Her husband was on the guest list, remember?”

“They were living apart.”

“Wouldn’t be the first gent with a beautiful wife looking for something not so beautiful. Same goes for the beautiful wife.”

“What’s in it for her?”

“Find the right man, she could put those parties—put Miss Phillie Cheesesteak behind her.”

“I can’t prove it, but I think her death is connected to Etta’s disappearance.”

“Be a special story, huh, two beauties for the price of one?”

“Without Suzie’s killer, Etta isn’t worth anything, even if I found out what happened to her.”

“How’s that?”

“No one who reads my magazine gives a damn when a Negro girl is murdered.”

Her toe barked his shin as she uncrossed her legs. He gave her a moment to make a stink, but what she said was, “Don’t I know?”

“Not that I’m close to cracking either case.”

“Nothing more I can do for you.”

“Let me talk to your agent.”

She shook her head. “He’s an important man. Ain’t got time for jawing with a lowly magazine writer.”

“Getting important people to let down their hair is what lowly writers do.”

“Ain’t got no hair,” she said. “Shaves his head clean.”

“Give me his name.”

She stubbed out her cigarette, looking past his shoulder. “Here come our drinks.”

Jordan didn’t turn around, afraid that when he looked back she’d be gone.

“Try Beach,” she said.

“What?”

“Sound like you long-lost friends.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Didn’t think so, ’less you knew him before he was colored,” she said. “Beach, that’s his name.”

“What’s his first name?”

“He lost it along with being white, and everything goes with it. Beach is all. Just Mr. Beach.”

“Please hold for Mrs. Bryer.”

The crackle of long distance introduced a woman whose measured delivery nearly concealed a Bronx twang. “Mr. Jordan, this is Helene Bryer.” An imperious woman, dry and menopausal, though Jordan was damned how he knew so much about her from just six words.

“I’m president of Turner Publications. Ed Pelfrey spoke highly of you.”

“He was very kind,” Jordan said. “I’m going to miss him, really am. What can I do for you?”

“Since his death the magazines have been more or less running themselves.” A second of open air left Jordan to consider that Mrs. Bryer was attempting a cordial tone rather than fighting a weak connection. “No obvious candidate to replace him has emerged. To be brief, I’ve called to offer you the position of editor-in-chief of
Real Detective.”

“I don’t know the first thing about magazine editing.”

“Expectations will be modest at first.” The dry voice with overtones of umbrage, Helene Bryer informing him that he’d let Pelfrey down. “It’s not a great leap from writing. All editors have made it.”

“It’s not for me,” Jordan said.

“Ed didn’t mention that you were closed-minded. You haven’t heard what we’re paying and the generous benefits that go with it.”

“I’m a reporter. I’d rather make errors than correct them.”

“Feel free to make all the errors that you like,” Mrs. Bryer said, “and then to catch each one.”

“As the new man on the staff, I’m the least qualified.”

“On the contrary, it’s your strongest qualification. The others are hacks telling stories the same way they’ve been doing it since the Coolidge administration, which for many of them is the last time they drew a sober breath. You haven’t picked up their bad habits—not on the printed page. I’ve read some of your pieces. You’re the best of the bunch by far.”

“I’m flattered,” Jordan said. “It doesn’t change my thinking.”

“I have no one else, please believe me. If you turn me down, I’ll be forced to fold the magazines. Forty writers, dozens of stringers and photographers, an art director and an editorial assistant will be out of work. You’re being unconscionably selfish in not accepting my offer. Also short-sighted. The job pays ninety-five hundred. If that’s not enough, assign yourself all the freelance work you can handle, and take home a good deal more.”

Jordan said, “Crap.”

“Not at all. It’s an opportunity that may not come your way again. You’d be foolish to turn it down.”

“That’s what I was trying to say. When do I start?”

He was up half the night, unhappy about letting a woman he didn’t know sell him a bill of goods over the phone, deciding on a graceful way to back out. Drifting off to sleep, he pictured himself in a green eyeshade prodding tortured copy into brilliant prose while a receptionist with Jane Russell’s curves poured coffee. An apartment in a swank midtown tower came into focus, high-ceilinged rooms done up in Danish Modern with spectacular river views. All that was missing was Adam Jordan, who was squandering his talent in a city where the major celebrities were beauty contestants and a high-diving horse.

In the morning he told his landlord that he’d be gone by the
weekend. Cherise called an hour later while he was pushing his sofa out the door.

“Can’t wait to have grandkids, so I can tell ’em about the time I had the Ship ’N Shore at Tarrantino’s,” she said.

“Hold off on a family till you try the cheesecake at Lindy’s in New York.”

“Want to return the favor first. I told Mr. Beach about you. He set aside time to talk.”

“He knows what I’m after?”

“Save your questions,” she said. “Find him at 373 Mississippi Avenue, fifth floor. Be there at 4:45, he’ll squeeze you in.”

“Squeeze me between what?”

“First thing to ask.”

The tile minarets of the RKO Alcazaba dominated the 300 block of Mississippi, which it shared with a Chinese wet wash at 371 and a Negro barber shop at 375. Under the marquee Jordan watched serpentine lights hop to a spastic rhythm around strips of peeling paint. The girl in the ticket booth was doing her nails with one eye on a paperback novel. The Alcazaba was fine for summer napping in air-cooled comfort, but television left little reason to stay open the rest of the year.

Gilt filigree in the tilework hid the outline of a door. Behind it a red Exit sign floated in the caramel-flavored darkness. Jordan was starting upstairs when he was frozen by the screech of tires, the amplified prelude to a crash that rocked the building. He squeezed the banister till Lou Costello’s frightened yawp drew laughs from the spare audience on the other side of the wall.

A dentist’s pebbled glass door filtered the fifth-story light. More spilled over an orthodontist’s transom, puddling in an alcove where a guitar, bass, and piano offended Jordan with a leaden rhythm-and-blues riff.

Alone in an office Jordan saw a man drumming his hands on
a bare desk. A beret had a tenuous hold of his slick scalp. He had no sideburns or facial hair aside from a single eyebrow that did the work of two. At the final beat he reached over to a turntable and flipped the record. Jordan recognized the new side from the intro—Big Mama Thornton’s hit, “Hound Dog.”

“You don’t care for Negro music?” the man said.

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s all over your face.”

“I wouldn’t call it a Negro record, Mr. Beach. ‘Hound Dog’ was written by a couple of Jewish boys in Los Angeles.”

Beach looked at him gravely. Since when was a Los Angeles Jew disqualified from being Negro?

“It’s a lousy tune,” Jordan said, “and the lyric is moronic. Big Mama’s hardly Bessie Smith. Oh yeah, and her band stinks.”

“Ofays don’t know shit about music,” Beach said.

Jordan let go of the notion that he would straighten out this strange man on a number of subjects besides music.

“I’m here to talk to you about something more important.”

“Nothing is, man.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. About Etta Lee Wyatt, though—”

“A so-so voice, but you should see the way she moves.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“Girls like Etta come and go. A pretty dancer-singer with a second-rate sound is an A-number-one candidate to vanish.”

“No one vanishes,” Jordan said.

“Don’t they?”

“They leave a body behind.”

Beach shut his eyes, concentrating on the record. Jordan listened along with him. The ponderous beat was an anchor against the breezy sophistication of swing, and the modern jazz that came from it. It seemed presumptuous to tell a stranger, especially a Negro, a white one in particular, that his taste in black music was retrograde and crude.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“I don’t recall. We spoke right before she took a powder.” Beach’s eyes remained closed, his head bobbing. “I needed a young brownskin gal for a party that was right up her alley.”

“Where?”

“Newark? Beach Haven? I’d have to check.”

“Was the customer white or colored?”

One eye opened, fixed on Jordan. “Colored wouldn’t have use for a black girl. Couldn’t afford white if I trucked ’em in. The customer put in a call for two chicks, personable and clean, affectionate with gentlemen and with each other, if you get my meaning. I sent Etta with an older gal that’s been with me for years.”

“What went on there?”

“You’d have to ask the other girl.” Beach nudged the beret back on his head. Jordan noticed a jagged scar in the shiny smooth skin. “And she knows better than to talk to strangers.”

“I thought you were a theatrical booker,” Jordan said.

“All my girls are theatrical. Nothing real about them.”

Beach opened his other eye, pulled back his cuff, and examined the time with a glance for Jordan that said only a fool would waste a precious commodity. “TV, Vegas, the new music, they’re destroying the variety business. Nobody twists my girls’ arms, forces ’em to do this, that, the other thing the customer wants ’em for. They need to eat while I find ’em stage work, there are compromises they have to make. My customers are successful people, not perverts, names you’d know from the papers, but not the headlines. Are they a little kinky when it comes to women? Who ain’t? They want black women for whatever floats their boat? Who don’t?”

“What happened at that party? You know a damn sight more than you’re letting on.”

“Cherise said you were smart,” Beach said. “Shows how much she knows men. One of my best earners goes missing, my other girls are afraid to go out on jobs, and you think I’m covering
up? Find out who messed with Etta, and I’ll deal with him. Then you got a story.”