Too Soon Dead (28 page)

“Good. Can I interest you in
A Girl’s Life
?”

“Is that a magazine?”

“It’s an autobiography, and I want to add another chapter. Have dinner with me tonight and help me decide what the subject should be.”

“I think I can work you in,” I said.

“Eight o’clock at Pietro’s?”

I paused for a quarter of a second before I said yes to show her I wasn’t easy. We chatted about this and that for another minute, and hung up.

Pietro’s is a small steak and spaghetti house in the West Forties. Dark wood walls, subdued lighting, quiet, friendly service, good food. It’s the perfect place to meet a lover for a romantic dinner. It would also be the perfect place to meet a city commissioner for a bribe payoff, or a professional killer to arrange the elimination of your spouse. It’s all in how you look at it.

Elizabeth, my beautiful Elizabeth, was waiting for me at the bar when I arrived ten minutes early. My heart beat faster when I saw her and I stammered when I spoke. She broke into a wide smile when I came in and hugged me. She was wearing a black pleated skirt and sweater with a sort of tan (café au lait, she told me) jacket with large black buttons and an oversized black beret. “Simple yet elegant,” I told her.

“Expensive yet costly,” she said. “It’s Balenciaga.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s what every shop girl will wear,” she said, “if she marries rich. And buys her clothes in Paris.”

We sat at a table in a corner in the back and Elizabeth ordered dinner, since she knew more about it than I did and spoke Italian:
fichi con prosciutto
(a plate of figs with thin slices of Italian ham over them, another reason for leaving Ohio) to start; house salad and
spaghetti alia bucanier
for her, in honor of my being a buccaneer, she said; a spinach salad, a rare T-bone, and
spaghetti con aglio e olio
for me, in honor of my being hungry. We talked about many things during the meal. We held hands.

“I can’t get over it,” she said, staring into my eyes over dessert—a piece of cheesecake for me and a warm zabaglione for her. “I never tire of looking at you.”

“I like looking at you,” I told her, “among other things.”

She smiled. “It’s funny, I’ve known you for all of two hours spread over two days, and I feel like we already share all the secrets in the universe. I care about you so much, sex isn’t important. We could just wander through Central Park holding hands and I’d be wonderfully happy.”

For a minute I enjoyed the image, and then a random thought hit me and I suppressed a sudden impulse to laugh, but not quite well enough.

She frowned. “Are you laughing at me?”

I shook my head.

“What, then?”

“A stray thought; it’s unimportant.”

“Tell me!”

I told her: “I have resolved to be honest with you, whatever the cost. It just occurred to me: in you I have every man’s dream—a beautiful nymphomaniac. And now you tell me you love me so much you don’t want to sleep with me. Just my luck!”

Elizabeth stared at me for a moment, then broke out into quiet giggles. Thank God! It could have gone either way. “Am I beautiful?” she asked.

“Helen of Troy had nothing on you, babe,” I told her. “‘Were you not the face that launch’d a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’”

“They can’t blame that one on me,” she said, hiding her face behind the napkin. “I was elsewhere at the time.”

She lowered the napkin and smiled at me. “Can we go up to your place?”

“What?”

“After dinner, can we go up to your place? So we can be alone and I can show you that sex isn’t totally unimportant.”

“I live in a rooming house,” I told her. “I’d have to sneak you in. We’re supposed to keep the door open if members of the opposite sex are in our rooms. The landlady has been known to patrol the corridors, protecting the chastity of her female residents. It wouldn’t be practical. I’ll move tomorrow.”

“What a nice offer,” she said. “But you won’t have to. Usually we can go up to my place. Park Avenue and Seventy-third. But for some reason Daddy’s in town. It’s the family place, a great big duplex penthouse apartment, but nobody ever uses it but me and sometimes my brother. Except now, of course, when the fates are conspiring against us.”

“Doesn’t your father know that Congress is in session?” I asked. “Why isn’t he in Washington doing his little bit to soak the poor?”

“I don’t know,” she said seriously. “He’s been acting strangely the past few weeks. Worried. He thinks your boss is plotting against him.”

“Really?” I asked. Was she being Mata Hari or was I? What was the masculine form of Mata Hari—Mato Haru? Was this turn of conversation just a coincidence? I tried looking nonchalant and not feeling guilty.

“Really,” she said. “But that’s not it. Daddy always thinks that anyone who isn’t for him is plotting against him. And some of those who claim to be for him, too.”

“Ah!” I said.

“And sometimes he’s right,” she added.

“It’s the constitutional duty of every American citizen to plot against their elected representatives,” I told her. “It’s a sacred trust. But the usual target is the president, not a senator. Ask Father Coughlin.”

We fought over who should pay the check. She insisted that, after all, she had invited me, and I cited the commandment handed down by Moses that a man should pay when he takes out his date. We compromised: she paid for me and I paid for her. Since mine was more expensive, I put down the tip.

“Perhaps we should go to my room and chance the landlady,” I said.

“Perhaps we should,” she agreed.

Perhaps we did.

* * *

It was almost eleven when I arrived at the office the next morning, after stopping at Danny’s for a cup of coffee and a couple of doughnuts to go. Brass had not yet arrived. Gloria was at her desk, and Inspector Raab and one of his minions were sitting in a pair of the pseudo-Louis chairs across from her. Raab looked relaxed the way a fighter looks relaxed in his corner between the rounds. His minion, the well-dressed young detective first grade I had seen at Dworkyn’s studio, was in an attitude of frozen attention, like a praying mantis. “Well,” I said, taking off my topcoat and hat and hanging them in the closet. “Good morning, Inspector. What gives?”

“You’re doing me a favor,” Raab said.

“I am?”

“Actually, Miss Adams is, in Brass’s name.”

I looked quizzically at her, and she smiled at me. “We are sending a radiogram facsimile to London even as I speak,” she said. “At Inspector Raab’s suggestion.”

“Why are we doing this?” I asked.

Raab shifted in his seat and the chair creaked alarmingly. “We traced Dieter Vogel this morning,” he said. “His furniture and equipment were brought by the moving company to the secondhand store which had purchased them. Herr Vogel himself boarded the
Europa
shortly before she sailed yesterday, bound for Bremen.”

“A wise man who manages to flee before he’s being pursued,” I said.

“Perhaps he’s just visiting the old folks at home,” Gloria suggested.

“I’ve suggested to the British police that he be held for questioning,” Raab told me. “He’ll be taken off the ship when she docks at Southampton.” Raab fished in his pocket for a box of cough drops and popped one in his mouth. “I’m having the
World
send a radio facsimile of that photograph of Vogel to New Scotland Yard. The New York City Police Department doesn’t have the equipment.”

I nodded wisely and went to my cubicle to begin sorting the morning’s mail. A few minutes later Brass came in and heard about the absconding Vogel. “Interesting,” he said. “If he didn’t know you were after him—and how could he have?—then why did he run?”

“If you get any ideas,” Raab said, getting up and reaching for his hat, “pass them on. I got to get back to catching the bad guys.”

About an hour later I went in and stood in front of Brass’s desk. Brass was staring out the window and fingering an ivory letter opener supposedly carved from the tusk of a narwhal and given to him by the Grand Duke Fyodor Androvitch, whom Tsar Nicholas called cousin and who now ran Balalaika, a small bistro on the East Side that had great borscht and pretty good blinis. “Is there anything I can do more useful than answering letters?” I asked.

He swiveled in his chair and looked up at me. “I think not,” he said. “We await events.”

“What events?”

“I don’t know. I know what I want, but I’m not sure how to best make it happen.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out one of the pictures of Vogel and his, I suppose, girlfriend posing in a doorway. “Cathy came by last evening,” he said. “She has to be careful coming to the office because she’s now staying with Heidi. She wanted to look over our dirty picture collection to be sure she was right. She recognized three of the girls from the pictures and the boy who was with Suzie Frienard; they all work at the clinic. She also saw this picture.” He tapped it with his finger. “The building that Vogel and his chubby inamorata are standing in front of—that’s the Mainard Clinic.”

“I see,” I said.

“Do you?”

“I see that all the pieces are interconnected, but I’m not sure how.”

“The missing piece of the puzzle is somewhere inside the Mainard Clinic,” Brass said.

“So Cathy is looking for it? Just what is she looking for?”

“Possibly a room, possibly a photograph collection, possibly clinical records; I don’t know. But Cathy is under strict instructions not to actively look for anything. I don’t want her body to be fished out of the Hudson.”

“So how are we to find it, whatever it is, without looking?”

“That’s what I’ve been considering,” Brass told me.

“It would seem that von Mainard himself is a piece of the puzzle,” I said. “Do you want me to see what I can find out about him?”

“Ah!” Brass said. “A sensible question.” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and smoothed it out on the desk. “Herr Doctor Erich von Mainard is an Austrian national. He received his medical degree from the University of Munich in 1911 and served as a medical officer with the Austrian Army during the World War. After the war he published a paper on the use of certain drugs to alleviate the symptoms of shell-shock. He went into private practice as a psychoanalyst in Vienna until 1926, when he had a feud with Dr. Sigmund Freud over the use of drugs, specifically an alkaloid derived from the
Rauwolfia serpentina
plant, in his practice—von Mainard’s, not Freud’s. Freud said that the unconscious should be neither examined nor controlled by psychopharmacology until much more was known about the working of the brain. He felt that perhaps someday severe psychoses would be treated by psychoactive drugs, but that neuroses were best handled by analytic psychotherapy. Von Mainard called Freud a “busybody know-it-all who practices Jew medicine,” and moved to Berlin. He set up a successful clinic for alleviating the stress of the wealthy. He came to New York about a year ago and opened his clinic here. I’m not sure whether the one in Berlin is still operating.”

“Yes,” I said, “but what does he have for breakfast?”

“I think we’re going to have to go find out,” Brass said.

I
t was two o’clock Friday morning, and Brass and I were standing in front of the Mainard Clinic on Seventy-ninth Street between Park and Madison, planning a felonious entry. The Packard sedan was parked just in from the corner of Madison Avenue, with Garrett in his chauffeur’s disguise feigning sleep in the front seat. To make our felonious plans feasible, since neither of us had the requisite skill, Brass had brought along a felon: a thin, short man in his forties with bunchy muscles, a bony face, and almost no hair named Alphonse “Shoes” Mallery, who shyly admitted to being something of an expert in these matters.

I had been with Brass earlier that day when we went looking for Shoes. He was at the third place we peered into, a piano lounge called the Abigail Room in the Hotel Quincy, drinking club soda and playing chess with the hostess, a blonde named Vicky, who wasn’t busy hostessing yet, it being only three in the afternoon.

“I’m in,” Shoes said when Brass explained our needs. “It would be something, having you owe me one for a change.”

“I dislike asking you to commit a crime,” Brass said, at which Shoes almost spilled his drink.

So here we were contemplating the front door of the clinic, a wide wooden door with an iron gate up five steps from the street; the window to the left of the front door, which was crisscrossed with iron bars; and the side door of the clinic, which was down a short alley and looked to be solid iron with a window barely big enough to peer through. There were no windows facing the alley. Cathy, who had drawn us a plan of the interior, as much as she knew it, that morning before she went to work, had volunteered to try to leave the front door unlocked for us when she left, but Brass had nixed the idea as too dangerous for her.

Making his decision, Shoes went up to the front door and rang the bell. “Much better to find out if there’s anyone inside while we’re still outside,” he explained.

“At two in the morning?” I whispered.

“Especially at two in the morning. And don’t whisper. Don’t yell, but don’t whisper. Whispers carry.”

“I knew that,” I said in a weak approximation of my normal voice.

After a minute of ringing, there was still no sound from inside. Shoes, working with several small devices that looked to my untrained eye like dental implements, had the gate opened in under a minute. The front door took a bit longer. He stepped inside and shone a small flashlight around the edge of the door. “No alarm,” he said. “Put your gloves on and come on in.”

We pulled on our black cotton gloves, Woolworth specials at ten cents the pair, and sidled past Shoes into the hall. Shoes closed the door behind us, leaving it subtly ajar in case we had to make a hasty retreat, and we shone our flashlights around the hall, carefully keeping the beams away from the window. To our right was a large waiting room fixed up with carpeting, comfortable couches, and high-backed easy chairs to look like a living room. Past it was the reception room, where Cathy spent her day greeting Dr. von Mainard’s wealthy patients. There was a staircase ahead of us to the left, and a hallway straight ahead, going to the back of the building, with rooms off to each side.