Too Soon Dead (2 page)

On the other hand, there were a lot of nuts in the world, and Brass had his share of enemies. The fat man looked like an unlikely candidate for homicidal maniac of the year, but, like I said, you never can tell.

“Give me a hint,” I told the fat man. “Something I can take inside to tell Mr. Brass. If you’ve got something good, you don’t want to take it anywhere else. Mr. Brass is the best newsy in town.”

The fat man thought it over. “You got an envelope?” he asked.

Gloria opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a business envelope.

“Nah,” the fat man said. “Bigger.” He made an indefinite-sized box with his hands.

Gloria produced an eight-by-ten manila envelope, one of the kind where the flap ties closed with a string. The fat man took it and turned his back on us for thirty seconds. Then he used the stapler on the desk to staple the flap shut and held the envelope out to me. “Give this to Mr. Brass,” he said. “Tell him to open it private-like. Then he’ll see me. And don’t you open it!”

I examined the envelope. “Well, it’s too skinny to be a bomb,” I said. “And it doesn’t wiggle around, so it’s not a poisonous viper.”

“What are you talking about?” the fat man demanded.

“You’d be surprised. We had a bomb once. I’m still waiting for the poisonous viper.”

I took the envelope in to Brass, who was sitting in his office with his feet up on his giant desk, staring out his window at the Hudson River, which flowed beneath his feet, give or take a few blocks, filling much of the available view. “Good morning, Morgan,” he said without looking around. “It’s a gray day. Did you get the automobile?”

“I did, Mr. Brass,” I told him. “It’s in the garage on Ninth Avenue. You’ll have to arrange with the garage manager to get a permanent parking space.”

“I thought I had two,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “The Cord and the Lagonda are in them.”

“Ah!” Brass said. He swung his feet down off the desk and swiveled around to face me. He was shorter than I by a couple of inches—I’m about five-ten; lighter than I by a few pounds—quite a few, actually; I’m about one-sixty, and built solid without too much extra flesh on me, but Brass has one of those slender bodies that look like they were made to wear tuxedos. He had sported a brush mustache for fifteen years, until the day, two years ago, that Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany; now he was clean-shaven. I had told him that I couldn’t see the resemblance, but he shaved anyway.

“I have been staring at this sheet of paper for the past hour, and I am not inspired,” he said, indicating the Underwood typewriter on his desk, with its sheet of white paper still pristine around the roller.

“You were staring out the window when I came in,” I said. “Inspiration doesn’t write your columns, perspiration does.”

He glared at me, but since I was quoting him—something he had said recently in an interview to a writer’s magazine—he didn’t reply.

“I have something for you,” I told him, extending the large manila envelope toward him. “Wait until I leave the room to open it.”

He eyed the envelope suspiciously. “Why?” he asked.

“I’m not supposed to know what’s in it,” I told him.

Brass shook his head. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I have no secrets from you. At least, none that could be contained in this.”

“I agree,” I said. “But the gentleman who handed it to me to give to you insists that you open it in private. Incidently, he won’t give his name.”

“What does he look like?” Brass asked.

I described him while Brass stared thoughtfully at the little ivory Chinese god on one corner of his desk and weighed the envelope in his hands.

“It doesn’t sound promising,” Brass said when I was done. “I would prefer that he were well tailored and well spoken; then he might have something I’d want to see.”

“You want a diplomat bringing state secrets,” I said.

“Of course,” Brass agreed. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know. A nice, juicy murder might be fun.”

“Not for the victim.”

“There is that,” I agreed.

“Well,” Brass said, “I might as well open this. Stand across the room; that should satisfy the requirements.”

“I’ll even turn my back,” I said. “Let it never be suggested that we journalists are not honorable.”

“Heaven forfend!” Brass agreed, slitting open the envelope as I turned and walked over to face the Pearson landscape on the far wall. I was particularly fond of the castle in the right-hand corner of the picture. I had always wanted to be somewhere where I could look at a real castle.

There was something more than a moment of silence.

“Son of a bitch!” Brass said, sounding at least surprised, and possibly awed.

I turned around. Brass almost never cursed, so whatever was in the envelope was probably worth a view. He had put whatever-it-was on top of the desk and was staring down at it. “Let me guess,” I said. “It’s a nude picture of Marie of Rumania.”

“I’m not sure who the woman is,” Brass said.

“What?”

“Come look at this.”

I crossed around to his side of the desk and looked down. There was a photograph of a man and a woman lying on what appeared to be a large, fluffy rug. To be more precise, the man was on the rug, face up, and the woman was straddling the man. There was no clothing in sight. They both seemed to be enjoying themselves. Perhaps they were playing Find the Pony. The camera had been above them and to one side, so that the man’s face—among other things—was clearly in view. The woman was almost as clearly visible, except that her face was in shadow.

The picture looked pretty much like what it was—a pornographic photograph—and nothing exceptional along that line. The girl was attractive as far as I could tell—and I could tell pretty far—but the man was, if anything, a bit chubby and a bit old for that sort of thing. I couldn’t understand what had provoked Brass’s reaction. I peered closely at the photograph.

I whistled thoughtfully between my teeth as I realized what Brass had noticed. “Son of a bitch!” I said.

“
G
o retrieve the fat gentleman and bring him in here,” Brass ordered. “And stay in here with him when you return—I don’t think a private conversation would be useful.”

“Gotcha, boss,” I said.

“And don’t call me ‘boss,’” he told my back just as I reached the door. “And for that matter, you would do well to expunge ‘gotcha.’ The next great American novelist will probably not be a vulgarian.”

He was hitting me where it hurt, but I didn’t wince visibly as I closed the door. When, fresh out of Western Reserve College and even fresher in New York, I had applied for the job with Brass, I had told him that my ambition was to be the next great American novelist. The next day, when he called me back, he had simultaneously offered me the job and strongly advised me not to take it. “It can’t do you any good as a writer,” he had said, “and it may destroy your talent and ambition.”

“Jobs are not that easy to come by at the moment, Mr. Brass,” I had told him. “And I’ve never had any strong desire to become a lumberjack, or a coal miner, or a missionary, or any of those other jobs that writers are supposed to get so they can put it on the back of their book jackets. I’ve always thought that to learn writing one should be around writers.”

“This isn’t writing that goes on here,” he had told me, “this is plumbing and mortising with words. This is a literary yard-goods store, not a fashion house.”

“On the contrary, sir,” I had told him. “You have a terse, cleaft style that I’ve always admired.”

“Style!” He had shaken his head. “You start on Monday.”

And so I had. That was in September 1931, about three and a half years ago. I’m still at it. And I still admire Brass’s style. And I still haven’t written the Great American Novel. Oh, I’ve started it a few dozen times. As a matter of fact, I just started it all over again last week. I had about six pages done now.

They call me Percival. I was born in a monastery in Brooklyn Heights. My mother, in an ecstasy of misplaced zeal, had joined the Order of Supplicants of St. Sebastian while she was carrying me, lying about her sex and possibly a few other things. The monks, being an introspective and essentially incurious crew, effected not to notice. Those few who did notice kept silent for reasons of their own.

That’s how this version begins. I can’t decide whether to call it
The Supplicant
or
The Uncivil War
or
Money Well Spent.
Perhaps, as I understand they do with babies in primitive societies, I should refrain from naming it until I’m sure it’s going to live. Maybe I should give it another fifty pages or so.

The fat gentleman was sitting in one of the four cane-bottom chairs in the reception room, shifting his weight impatiently from side to side. The chairs are French, done in the style of Louis XIV, or XV, or whichever Louis was into furniture. They’re copies, but they were copied so long ago that they’re antiques in their own right by now. They were given to Brass by a mobster named Francis “the Chin” Capitello in return for a favor Brass had done the mobster involving Capitello’s daughter Isabella and a trombone player named Sid. Brass had not considered what he did a favor for Capitello, but for the daughter, and he hadn’t wanted a reward, and he didn’t like the chairs much anyway, but there you have it. And if the fat man broke the chair he was sitting on, Francis “the Chin” would never understand it.

“Mr. Brass would like to see you,” I told him.

“I thought maybe he would,” the fat man said, pushing himself to his feet. The chair creaked, but it held. He marched into Brass’s office with all the grace of an indignant goose, and stopped in front of the big desk. He glanced down at the envelope, which was neatly centered on Brass’s desk blotter. “I thought you’d see me,” he said. “Send your errand boy out of here so’s we can talk.”

Brass leaned even farther back in his swivel chair and examined the fat man, who stolidly met his gaze.

“Mr. DeWitt stays,” Brass said. “If you want to talk to me, talk. If not, get out.”

The fat man took a half-step backward and raised his hands in a mock gesture of warding off physical attack. “Sure, sure,” he said. “If you trust him in this kind of business…” He looked around him. “Got a chair?” he asked.

I pushed a solid wooden chair over to the desk, and he plumped himself into it. Pulling a reasonably clean white handkerchief from his breast pocket, he mopped his face. “Let’s get down to business,” he said.

“Start with your name,” Brass told him. “I always like to know to whom I am speaking.”

“Not part of the deal,” the fat man said. “You don’t have to know my moniker for us to conduct business.”

“Just what kind of business is this?” Brass asked. “Why did you give me that picture, and what do you expect me to do about it?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” the fat man replied. “You did recognize the john, of course.”

Brass repositioned the envelope slightly with two fingers. “The man in the photograph has a superficial resemblance to Senator Childers,” he said. “But I don’t know how that resemblance was achieved.”

“Superficial, hell,” the fat man said, sounding annoyed. “It’s him. You know it’s him.”

“That’s just what I don’t know, sir,” Brass said. “I don’t know the provenance of that photograph. Perhaps it’s a clever composite. Perhaps it’s merely a chance resemblance. Perhaps it’s an actor made up to look like the senator. I don’t know. Do you?”

“It’s no composite,” the fat man said. “I got the negative—I could tell. A chance resemblance? Hell, it would have to be his twin brother. An actor? What would be the point?”

“What
is
the point?” Brass asked.

The fat man sat upright in his chair. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I bet I’m going to find out. I have some ideas.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a rubber-band-wrapped packet of photographs, which he tossed on the desk. There were, perhaps, thirty of them. “Take a look at these,” he said.

Brass took them up and shuffled slowly through them, examining each one closely. Three of them he peered at for a long time before going on. “Very, ah, imaginative,” he said finally, looking back up at the fat man. “Why are you showing me these? I won’t pay you anything for them. If you try selling them to anyone else, you might get some money, but you might be buying a lot of trouble.”

The fat man grinned. “I’m not selling you anything,” he said. “I’m making your life more interesting.” He leaned forward and pushed several of the photographs toward Brass with a pudgy forefinger. “A United States senator, a big-shot lawyer, and a judge. All playing bury-the-pickle with girls who are certainly not their wives, whatever else they may be.”

“And the others?” Brass asked. “There are photographs of seven or eight different men here.”

“I haven’t found out yet,” the fat man said. “Judging by the company which they are in, I figure they are important persons. I figure you can look them up for me. I figure you won’t be able to resist doing just that.”

“Is that what you want from me?”

The fat man shook his head. “I want you to hold these pictures for me until I come back for them. Then we can exchange information. You can tell me who these other gents are, and I can tell you where these photos came from. Or then again, I might not. You might say I’m buying insurance.”

Brass leaned back and put his hands together in front of him, fingertip to fingertip. “I see,” he said.

“I thought you would,” the fat man said, “you being such a wise guy.” He leaned forward. “I don’t know enough about those pictures yet, but I intend to find out. I’m leaving them with you as a sort of insurance policy. You can’t use them unless I tell you more about them. Like you said—they might be faked. Although we both know they’re not. So I’ll come back and tell you more about them. Or I won’t. Depending.”

Brass stared into space somewhere over the fat man’s left shoulder. “I don’t like being used,” he said. “It goes against my policy. If I let one punk use me once, there’ll be a line of them outside the door tomorrow.”

The fat man waved his hands in front of him like a first-base umpire trying to decide whether the runner was safe or out. “You offend me,” he said. “I see this as a sporting proposition. In return for temporarily sticking some pictures in your desk drawer for a while, an act which costs you no sweat, and maybe taking a glom through your photo morgue, you get a shot at a story that could be right up there with Fatty Arbuckle.”