Too Soon Dead (13 page)

I shook my head sadly to indicate the quality of my disbelief.

Mitchell smiled to show me how completely he had become the new, nonsurly Mitchell. “What can I do for Alexander Brass?” he asked.

“I have some photos to show you,” I told him. “Mr. Brass wants to know everything about them.”

“What sort of everything?”

“Everything you can find out about how and where the pictures were taken. He says that you can tell whether or not they are composites, but aside from that I don’t know what information it’s possible to get from a picture.”

“That depends on the photograph,” he said. “Let me see them.”

I unbuttoned my inner jacket pocket and handed him the packet of pictures. He leafed through them. “Good lighting for indoors,” he said. “It looks diffuse, but with most of it coming from directly above the subjects. Let’s get a better look.”

He threaded his way across the room to a table that had a strong light mounted above it and a six-inch magnifying glass on a sort of swivel arrangement to the side. I tried to follow in his footsteps but I had to work my way around a five-foot stuffed panda that miraculously appeared in my path. When I arrived at his side, he had the light on and was peering through the glass at one of the photographs. He spent a couple of minutes on it before progressing to the next one. By the time he was on the fourth photo, Molly was clomping back up the stairs with an oversized China teapot and three white mugs.

“We should let it steep for a couple of minutes,” she said, clearing a place for the teapot on top of an old iron safe that was standing ajar in the middle of the room. “What have you there?”

“Photographs of men and women with no clothes on doing what men and women tend to do when they have no clothes on,” Mitchell said without looking up.

“When I have no clothes on, I tend to strike a pose,” Molly said, promptly striking a pose that would have been very interesting if she had no clothes on.

Mitchell worked his way through the photos, while Molly poured the tea and passed us each a mug. I picked up a stack of oversized prints from a stuffed yak’s back and looked through them while I was waiting. They were shots of Molly Masker in a variety of unusual locations. In many of them she had no clothes on, and she did indeed look very interesting.

“What do you think?”

I almost jumped. Molly had come up behind me without my noticing, and was peering over my shoulder. “Very nice,” I said. “I think you’ve got a lot of nerve, posing nude in Wall Street, and at—is this the Parthenon?”

She giggled. “Yes,” she said. “And—” She flipped through some of the prints. “This is the Taj Mahal; and this is the Eighty-sixth Street subway platform—downtown; and this is the Empire State Building observation deck.”

I stared at the photos. “Don’t you ever get arrested?” I asked.

Southy Mitchell called me back across the room. The photos were spread out across the table like leaves on the strand. “Here’s what I think,” he said.

I took out my notebook and turned to a blank page and wrote “dirty pictures” across the top.

“First, they’re not composites. There has been no cutting and pasting of body parts to achieve an unnatural whole. All the shadows are right, and that’s where even the best composite gives itself away. I don’t say nobody could have done it. I could have. But they wouldn’t look just like this; they’d have to be subtly different.
These
pictures are not composites. Now, what else? They were all taken in the same location, but I guess you’ve noticed that. The lighting comes from above, and not from a point source. I’d guess a fairly good-sized skylight. The camera was, probably, a four-by-five with a fast lens. The depth of field is impressive. It must have been one of the faster films, because there couldn’t have been that much light, but it’s a very fine-grain film. The developing was done by someone who knows his business, and knows what he’s after. Here, look—” He grabbed one of the pictures and held it out to me. “The guy is sort of sitting up, so nothing is in shadow, and the whole picture is clear and of even density.”

“I see,” I said.

“Now look at this one. The face was in shadow, so the plate was developed longer to bring it out. See how the rest of the room is slightly overdeveloped?”

“I see what you mean,” I said.

“That’s about it,” Mitchell said. “The paper is a fine-grain stock. German. Don’t see much of it over here.”

“German?”

“If I wanted to repeat myself,” Mitchell said fiercely. “I would have bought a monkey!”

“Sorry,” I said.

Molly wrapped her arms around Mitchell’s neck. “Southy, what on earth does that mean, you would have bought a monkey?”

“I have no idea,” Mitchell said. “I say what comes into my head. I figure my subconscious knows what it’s doing, and doesn’t need any help from me.”

“I worry about you,” Molly told him. “If you weren’t a genius, you’d be a nut.”

“Maybe I’m both,” Mitchell suggested, reaching up and taking her hands in his.

I felt that I was in the way, or would be shortly, so I gathered up the pictures. “Thank you, Mr. Mitchell,” I said.

“Call me Southy,” he said, working his right hand free of Molly and thrusting it out. “All my friends do.”

“You have no friends,” Molly said.

“Shut up,” he demurred.

I shook his hand and left his house, waving good-bye to Molly as I headed for the stairs. I walked over to the east side, took the subway up to Seventy-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue, and walked the half block to the 23rd Precinct.

Inspector Raab was not in his office, and the hired help had nothing of interest to tell me. Von Pilath was still being held on suspicion, and none of the detectives on the case had any other suspicions they were willing to share with me. From there I walked over to the Eighty-second Street home of the Verein für Wahrheit und Freiheit, and couldn’t get through the front door. Nobody answered the ring at the
Verein
apartment, so I rang some bells at random, but nobody buzzed me in or yelled at me. I decided that the bell system was out of order, and was debating throwing pebbles up to the third-story window, if I could find any pebbles to throw, if I could reach the third floor, if I could figure out which window belonged to the
Verein
, when a window to my left was pushed open with a hearty shove and a heavily muscled young man with close cropped blond hair leaned out. “Yes?” he asked. “What you want?”

“I would like to speak to someone from the Verein für Wahrheit und Freiheit,” I told him, giving the German pronunciation my best shot.

“They are not here,” he said. “They are all left.”

I almost said, “How far left?” but realized that would take me down linguistic paths that I did not wish to travel. “Thank you,” I said instead. “When do you think one of them will be around?”

“It is hard to say,” he said. “Come back then!” And he slammed down the window.

I can take a hint.

It was only about ten after five but I was hungry, so I decided that the next stop was dinner. I went into Bavaria Haus Restaurant on Eighty-sixth Street and was served bratwurst and kraut by a fat man in leather shorts. While I was eating I borrowed a Manhattan phone book and looked up photographic studios. There were six within ten blocks. I jotted the addresses down in my notebook and decided that I could probably handle the strudel for dessert.

It was a little after six when I left the restaurant. Most of the stores along Eighty-sixth Street seemed to be still open, so I thought I’d try scouting out a few of the photo studios. There were four movie theaters farther along Eighty-sixth Street, so maybe the stores stayed open late to catch the after-theater crowd. “Wasn’t that W.C. Fields just irresistibly funny, dear? Let’s buy a pot to go with the dishes we got at the theater.” Could be.

The closest photo studio, on Lexington Avenue just off Eighty-sixth, had a window full of wedding pictures that did nothing to encourage thoughts of marriage in passersby. In one the bride was smiling, but the groom looked trapped; in another the groom was grinning, but the bride looked like she was in shock. In several both bride and groom were smiling at the camera as though it were a painful duty.

The door dinged when I opened it to go in, and donged when I closed it behind me. For a while it seemed as though the ding-dong had attracted no one, but then a man pushed aside a curtain leading to a room in back and came up to the counter. He was thin, with a thin face, dressed in a black suit and white shirt with a black bow tie around a high collar of the sort that I thought had gone out of style twenty years ago. “Yes?” the man said.

“Are you the owner?” I asked.

“I’m the only,” the man said. “I’m the owner and all the help wrapped into one package. What can I do for you? I should warn you that if you’re selling anything, you’re wasting your time in here.”

“I’m not selling anything,” I told him. “I’m looking for a photographer that took some pictures of my kid. We want to get some prints made, my wife and I, but I don’t remember the man’s name or address. My wife thinks that his studio was somewhere here in Yorkville.”

“Look on the back of the picture,” the man said. “The studio’s name and address will be rubber-stamped on the back.” He turned to go back behind the curtain.

“We lost the pictures,” I told him. “There was a fire. My son died. Five years old. My wife would really like to see if we can find that photographer.”

That stopped him. He turned around. “I’d like to help you, but what can I do if you don’t know the name or address?”

“The photographer was heavy,” I told him. “You might almost say fat. He was about this tall—” I indicated the height with my hand “—and balding, with his hair, you know, combed over the bald spot. He wore a double-breasted blue suit that seemed a bit too small for him.”

“That sounds like Hermann,” the man said. “But he does not do baby pictures. Most decidedly he does not.”

“My wife talked him into it,” I said. “We met him at a party.”

“Well,” the man said. “It may be Hermann.”

“Hermann who?” I asked. “And where is he?”

“A few blocks from here. His studio is on Eighty-third Street and First Avenue. Third-floor walkup; he has no street trade. I don’t know the address, but it’s the second or third building east of Second on the south side of the street. Hermann Dworkyn.” He spelled it for me.

I thanked him and left, feeling exhilarated. I can understand the rush thieves and confidence men get doing their job. I had fooled this man—okay, I had lied to this man—and felt very good about it. I hoped it was because the lying had accomplished a necessary and worthwhile goal, and not because I enjoyed sin for its own sake. I thought of De Quincey’s essay on murder, where he decried it as leading to lying and Sabbath-breaking. Could the reverse be true?

The hallway of 428 East Eighty-third Street, the third building in from the corner of Second Avenue, was the entrance to a building that had seen better days, but not recently. The front door closed but didn’t lock. The inner door had so many coats of paint on it that it didn’t quite close, and several of the outer coats were peeling so that a motley of colors showed, mostly shades of green, except for one layer of dark brown. There was a separate, large mailbox, with D
WORKYN
S
TUDIOS
neatly calligraphed on its face, screwed into the wall next to the regular mailboxes.

I went up two flights to the door that had similar calligraphy on the front. I could hear voices, faintly, from inside. There was a small sign pasted above the door buzzer that said
RING
, so I did. After a minute I rang again. In case the buzzer was broken, I knocked. Nothing. I put my ear to the door. I heard a man speaking and, after a second, a woman answering. There was something familiar about the voices, but I couldn’t pin it down. I knocked again.

A woman came up the stairs and headed down the hall toward me. She was somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties, wearing a black, tight-fitting dress that was a bit shorter than most and heels a bit higher than I would have expected. She wore no jewelry around her neck or pinned to the dress, but her arms were covered with silver bracelets that jangled when she walked. In face, form, and dress she was much better looking than the building deserved. “You want to see Herm?” she asked.

“I would very much like to see Mr. Dworkyn,” I told her.

“That’s Herm. The bell don’t work; it broke a couple of weeks ago and the landlord—” She shrugged to say everything necessary about landlords. “And if he’s in the darkroom, he can’t hear you knock.”

“I thought I heard someone inside,” I said, “but maybe I was wrong. Maybe he’s gone home. It’s getting kind of late.”

“This is his home,” she said. “He got some prints for you?” She took a key from her little black-with-a-diamond-studded-catch clutch purse and inserted it in the lock. “Come on in. My name is Bobbi—with an
i.
Who are you?”

She pushed the door open and I told her my name and followed her into what once was a fairly large living room. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the room, but I could hear the voices much clearer now, and I recognized them: Lamont Cranston and Margot Lane. It was the voice of the Invisible Shadow, narrating one of his half-hour adventures over the console radio in the far corner. The room was full of lights and props, including a king-sized bed, a sofa, a love seat, an ottoman, and a portable wall with two portholes in it. The various articles of furniture were all shoved against the far wall, except for the bed, which was in the middle of the floor. Behind the bed were a couple of flats painted to look like the corner of an elegant bedroom, the sort you’d find in a château in France. An ornate dressing table was against one of the flats, and the whole area was full of artfully arranged drapes and casually distributed puffy pillows.

“Hey, Herm, it’s Bobbi—I’m back!” the lady in black yelled. “Put your pants on; we have a customer!”

She saw my expression and chuckled deep in her throat. “It’s not what you think,” she said, “whatever that may be. It gets very hot in the darkroom when Herm’s working in there, so sometimes he works in his shorts.”