Too Soon Dead (12 page)

Gloria turned to Cathy. “He’s writing his column as he speaks,” she said. “You can tell by the similes. Any second he’s going to branch out into onomatopoeia.”

“Tell us about Mae West,” Gloria said.

“She was having dinner quietly in a corner with two very pretty young men.”

“Good for Mae!” Gloria said.

“She told me she’s writing a play.”

Gloria nodded. “She writes a lot of her own material.”

“She’s going to produce it herself,” Brass said.

“I can guess what it’s about,” I said.

“You’d be wrong,” Brass told me. “Miss West thinks that love, in all its infinite varieties, is worthy of respect and public inspection. Her play is a love story about homosexual men.”

“It’s a
what
?”

Brass smiled at me. “But of course you knew that.”

I was speechless. Brass broke my silence by saying, “I have to put out a column to support this ménage. I won’t mention Miss West’s proposed story line or it will never make it to opening night.” He gathered the paperware detritus from lunch on the desk and tossed it in the wastebasket. “While I do that, I have jobs for the three of you.”

I took out my notebook and put it on my lap and fished in my pocket for a pencil.

Brass considered for a moment. “Before I give you your assignments, I want to state a few ground rules. We are going to take this very seriously and proceed very carefully. You must at all times consider your own safety and the necessity of keeping the identities of our athletic friends in the photographs a secret.”

“You’re worried about our safety?” I asked him. “Are you buying what those krauts were saying?”

“No,” Brass said. “I’m buying the death of a reporter who thought he was just following a harmless fat man. And you would hone your writing skills more if you think of ways to insult people that do not involve racial or national epithets. How would you like it if someone called you—whatever the hell you are?”

“Sorry,” I said.

“The pictures must not be discussed—must not be mentioned—outside of this office. We’ll have to come up with consistent cover stories for whatever investigating we do. Gloria, you and Cathy will spend the next few days getting complete background workups on each of our subjects. Start with the files from the morgue and work outward from there. Talk to friends, business associates, the hired help, anyone who might know anything.”

“What are we looking for?” Gloria asked.

“A good question. What we really want to know, we can’t ask. I don’t know what you can ask that will lead us where we want to go. Past or present lovers or mistresses or girlfriends, if you can find out without making any waves. Any place they go, any people they see, any signs that they’re being blackmailed; although what those signs might be, I can’t suggest.”

“If any of them have accounts at the Manhattan Bank,” Cathy suggested, “we could ask Mr. Mergantaler to look over their checks. From the way he treated me, I have the feeling that he would do just about anything you asked.”

“A good idea,” Brass said. “Start by making up a list of twenty names that include our eight, for a little protective coloration, and find out how many of them have accounts at Mergantaler’s bank. Don’t go further with it until I tell you.”

Gloria nodded.

“You’ll type up your reports daily, when you can, in this office. If you can’t for any reason, you will wait until you can. Whatever you find out is to be kept here and nowhere else. We’ll put everything we have about this case in the special file every night.”

“The special file?” Cathy asked.

Brass got up and went to the closet, which held his liquor cabinet. “As I wander through the various levels of New York life,” he said, opening the closet door, “picking up information here and there for my column, I find out many things that I can’t print. Some items I don’t have enough information on yet or can’t yet prove, like grafting politicians, cops on the take, or other examples of city, state, or federal malfeasance. If stories like that ever come together, I will use them. Some of it, like husbands cheating on their wives or wives cheating on their husbands; or the criminous secrets of certain notorious hoodlums, told to me in confidence at a corner table in Momma Lenora’s on Sullivan Street; or the drunken revelations of several famous poets and writers in the back room of The White Horse Tavern in the wee hours of a Sunday morning—these are secrets for the ages which should be recorded but not revealed for decades to come.”

He fiddled with two of the shelves in the closet, and a section of the right-hand wall opened on silent hinges to reveal a four-drawer file cabinet set into the wall. “This file cabinet is supposed to be fireproof,” he said. “But I hope we never have to make the experiment. It’s not exactly burglarproof, but it is hard to find. The assumption is that a burglar would go for the safe, which should take a while to open, after which he’ll be too anxious to get out of here to go banging on closet walls.”

“It’s like one of those movie serials,” Cathy said. “‘Radio Men From the Moon’ or something. They leap out of windows yelling ‘Into the air!’ and fly off with this gadget strapped to their backs. They always have secret cupboards that conceal the controls.”

“Controls to what?” Gloria asked.

“You know. Flying things that look like sausages and can see inside your house and blow up if you touch them. That sort of thing.”

“I’m afraid I cannot reach the heights, of imagination to which the writers of those movies ascend,” Brass said. “If I leap out of the window I will fall to my death, and you couldn’t repeat what I’d be yelling in mixed company.” He closed the closet wall and the closet door and returned to his desk.

“About our subjects,” I said. “I think what we should look for is intersections. Things that they might have in common. Do they, for instance, all play golf at the same country club, or all use the same barber?”

“Another good thought,” Brass said. “Okay. Gloria and Cathy, you two work up the files on each of our notables. Look for points of correlation between them, anything that will give us a handle.”

“What about me?” I asked.

Brass fished the packet of pictures out of his pocket and tossed them across the desk to me. “There’s a man named Southerland Mitchell,” he said. “Used to work for the
Daily Graphic.
He invented the composite picture. Started ‘recreating’ crime scenes and ‘love nests’ by staging the scene and grafting the heads of those involved onto the bodies of his actors. They were very big on love nests. He left the
Graphic
and now has a studio on MacDougal Alley, where he takes pictures of loaves of bread and calls it art.”

“What kind of bread?” I asked.

“Kosher rye,” Brass told me. “He also knows more about the technical side of photography than anyone else in the city. Take the pictures to him and tell him I want to know everything there is to know about them. Withhold nothing from him of what we know about the pictures if he asks, but he won’t. He is one of the most essentially uncurious people I have ever known.”

I stuck the pictures in the inside pocket of my jacket and buttoned the little tab that I never button that closes the pocket.

“On your way back,” Brass told me, “check in with Inspector Raab and see if there’s anything new and look in on our German friends to see what they’re up to. And, in your copious free time after that, check out any photographic studios within a couple of blocks of that house.”

“What will I do with one if I find it?”

“See if our fat friend works there. If you find him, do your best not to alarm him.”

“You think he works in a photo studio because he had those pictures?” I asked. “That’s a long shot.”

“It has a good chance of running in the money,” Brass said. “Remember his hands?”

I pictured the fat man and remembered his hands. “Chubby,” I said. “Ink-stained.”

“Not ink,” Brass told me. “The stain was heaviest on the little finger and ring finger of his right hand. Just where he’d get it if he was a little careless while developing trays of prints in a darkroom.”

“Son of a—gun,” I said.

I
took the Sixth Avenue El to Eighth Street, trotted down the stairs, and walked a few blocks south to MacDougal Alley.

Greenwich Village has been a hangout for those folk that the bourgeoisie are pleased to call “bohemians” for the past fifty or sixty years. A hundred years before that it was the habitation of the city’s free Negroes, another distrusted minority. These days the Village is a mix of aspiring artists, actors, poets, writers, musicians, models, and, in the evenings, tourists. Men and women of all ages, classes, and previous conditions of servitude—who can’t afford to go directly to Paris—come to Greenwich Village from all over the country to carve out for themselves a career in the arts. And the tourists come from all over the country to gawk at their cousins who have settled here and been debauched by their arty brethren.

The Village, an essentially communal place, welcomes deviants of all flavors, and judges people only on their manners, not their mores; but there’s actually very little debauching. There are, in the little clubs along Bleeker Street that the ordinary tourists never get to see, men who dress like women and men who act like women, women who dress and act like men, and more variations on the theme than most people believe possible. But almost all of them knew what they were before they left Kansas or Texas to find a place that allowed them to be who they were despite what they were.

Since I arrived in New York I have spent many evenings in the Village, listening to jazz in small, smoky nightclubs or arguing about world affairs or the state of the theater in small, overheated coffeehouses.

MacDougal Alley is two blocks long and neither intersects nor parallels MacDougal Street, which terminates two blocks away. Located in the heart, or perhaps the liver, of Greenwich Village, MacDougal Alley is a street of mostly two-story houses that was actually once merely an alley, providing the back entrances to the buildings that front the streets on either side. The houses along MacDougal Alley were the carriage houses and stables for those buildings. Now, although not nearly as fine looking as they were when they sheltered horses, they provide inexpensive lodging and studio space for artists and writers.

Southerland Mitchell had his entire two-story house to himself: the downstairs for living and the upstairs one large and very cluttered studio. When I pushed the doorbell, I could hear a loud clanging noise from somewhere in the back of the house. It must have been two minutes before Mitchell opened the door and peered out suspiciously at me. He was a tall, angular, extremely thin man with unkempt hair, rumpled clothes, and a large head, on which rested a pair of oversized tortoiseshell glasses. “What are you selling?” he asked.

“Mr. Mitchell? I’m not selling anything—”

“What religion are you espousing?”

“No, I’m not doing that either. I’ve come—”

“Then why are you bothering me?”

I sighed. “I’m trying to tell you. I’ve come from Alexander Brass. He wants you to do something for him.”

He stepped aside. “Come in. I’ve very little time and much to do, but that seems to be my usual condition. If Brass has something important—did you say this was important?”

“It is, very,” I assured him.

“Come this way.” Mitchell led the way past his bedroom, living room, and kitchen to a back stairs leading up to the studio. The room took up the whole floor, but as the building wasn’t very large, neither was the studio. But it was full of so many things that the first impression was of overwhelming space and clutter. The first objects I noticed as I entered were a plaster horse’s head; a three-foot-high model of the Eiffel Tower; a papier-mâché duck the size of a person; five or six doors set into frames, with no walls, going nowhere; and a model of the zeppelin
Hindenburg
, six feet long, suspended from the ceiling.

Across the room was a comparatively clear space under a skylight, on which was a wrought-iron bench of a design that looked as ethereal as wrought iron is capable of looking. On the bench, wrapped in some sort of diaphanous gauze, sat a slender, long-legged, dark-haired girl. When she saw that Mitchell had not returned alone, she jumped up and rushed to get her robe from a chair by the window.

“Molly,” Mitchell said, “this is…” He turned to me. “Who are you?”

“Morgan DeWitt,” I told him.

“Morgan DeWitt,” he repeated. “He claims to work for Alexander Brass, but I haven’t asked to see his credentials.”

Molly crossed the room, her right hand extended, her left holding the robe closed. “Mr. DeWitt,” she said. “I’m Molly Masker.”

“My pleasure,” I said, taking her hand.

“Excuse Southy’s rudeness,” she said. “It’s his defense against an onrushing world. He doesn’t mean it.”

“I do so.” Mitchell pushed aside a box of grapefruit-sized marbles, three light stands, and a giant cardboard cutout of a bottle of cheap domestic wine to reveal a car seat. “Sit down.” he said. “Do you want some tea?”

“Ah…” I said.

“We have a variety of excellent teas from far and distant places,” Mitchell said. “Molly thinks that coffee is bad for me, so she is introducing me to the delights of tea. We scour the docks for incoming ships from the Orient and ask for exotic teas. Sometimes we have a hard time convincing them that it is really tea we want, but occasionally we acquire packets of tea seldom seen east of Suez. Or would that be west of Suez? Where exactly is Suez, anyway?”

“Egypt,” I said.

“Ah,” Mitchell replied, nodding.

“He drank, I’d say, twenty cups of coffee a day,” Molly said. “And he’d forget to eat for days at a time. Look at him!”

“I am naturally slender,” Mitchell said.

“I’d like some tea,” I said.

“If I hadn’t come along they could have used him for a course in anatomy without bothering to dissect him,” Molly said. “I’ll make tea. Is Darjeeling okay?” She clattered down the stairs when I assured her that Darjeeling was fine.

Mitchell looked fondly after her. “She became my model about six months ago,” he said. “And now she is my life.” He transferred his gaze to me. “You wouldn’t believe this, but I used to be a surly and unhappy man.”