Too Soon Dead (3 page)

“I don’t know what kind of insurance you think I’m giving you. These pictures,” Brass said, poking at the nearest one with his finger, “pictures like these—they can’t be used for anything even if they are real. At least not by me. You do realize that?”

“Of course,” the fat man said. “You being an honorable guy. But you don’t get it yet.” He leaned forward, putting his chubby palms on the desk. “The tale I’m offering you is not these old guys humping the broads, no matter who they are. It’s where they came from. It’s who took the pictures—and why.”

“Who did?” Brass asked. “Didn’t you?”

“Gracious sakes, no,” the fat man said. Honest, that’s what he said. I didn’t expect it either. “Gracious sakes, no.” Perhaps he had been an altar boy.

“Gracious sakes, no. But I think I know who did. At least, I know who knows who did. And that tale may well be worth telling.”

“How did you get the pictures?”

“That would be telling.” He stood up. “I must go now. You will be hearing from me shortly.” He gestured toward the pile of photographs on the desk. “Keep those,” he said. “Don’t show them around. Don’t tell the cops. And don’t try to find out who I am. That could be trouble for both of us, if you go nosing around. Even me nosing around is liable to create some waves, and I got a sensitive nose. Give me time to get some more info. Maybe a couple of days—maybe a couple of weeks. I’ll be in touch.” The fat man headed for the door.

Brass pushed himself up from his chair. “I make no promises,” he said.

“I’ll be in touch,” the fat man repeated over his shoulder.

Brass watched the door close behind the fat man and then picked up the in-house phone and jiggled for the operator. “Give me the city desk, will you?” he asked.

“Ben? This is Brass. Any legmen loose at the moment?” He stared thoughtfully into space. “Billy Fox? Good. Can I have him for a couple of hours? No—no trouble, just a tailing job. It may be a story, I can’t promise. Thanks. Stick him on the phone.” Brass drummed his fingers on the table. “William? This is Alexander Brass. I want you to tail someone for me. Find out who he is and where he goes. But don’t let him know. Lose him if you have to. Right. Bring whatever you find out up here to me. I can’t promise a story, but I’ll give you a buck-an-hour bonus and I’ll stand you to dinner. Right. He’s headed down in the elevator right now. Fat man in a blue double-breasted. Not very neat. You can’t miss him. Just run down three flights and pick him up in the lobby. Okay. Good luck.”

While Brass was talking I went over to the table and took a look at the pictures, leafing through them one at a time. There was little to attract the connoisseur of smut to them. Were it not for the prominence of some of the practitioners, they were trivial and repetitious examples of the art. The only conclusion I reached was that stout elderly men should not allow themselves to be photographed in compromising positions; they looked ridiculous. One of them was actually young and handsome, and fairly athletic-looking. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Three of the oldsters also looked like they were having fun; the remaining few looked grim, as though it was a difficult job, but somebody had to do it. The girls—and each fellow seemed to be with a different girl—were uniformly young, well built, and happy-looking.

I tossed the pictures back on the desk as Brass got off the phone. “If this is the latest thing in calisthenics,” I said, “it ought to sweep the country.”

“What do you think of our friend?” Brass asked.

I shook my head. “He’s using you for something.”

“So he intimated. But what are his goals, his motivations? What, if anything, does he see in these pictures besides couples coupling? Is he a simple blackmailer? But then, why give me the pictures?”

“I give up,” I said.

Brass handed me the photographs. “Go down to the morgue and see if you can identify these men. I’m pretty sure about two of them, but I’d like it verified.” He tapped the picture of the handsome young man. “In this case,” he said, “I think the identity of the lady is what will interest us.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t think of that.”

“I thought it was obvious,” Brass said.

I grunted and headed for the door.

T
he research department of the
New York World
, which we experienced newsies called “the morgue,” a huge room punctuated by two rows of pseudo-Greek columns, took up much of the sixth floor. It was the domain of Michael Fredric Schiff, a skinny old man with large ears, a thin, pointed nose and chin, oversized, arthritic knuckle joints, and an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that had happened in the world for the past half century. Schiff guarded his rows of file drawers full of clippings and photographs with the zeal of a mama bear guarding her cubs, and he always seemed to be able to go right to any required bit of information. After thirty years in this country he still spoke with a vaguely middle-European accent. The rumor was that he had been a college professor in his native land, but had been forced to flee when he was caught in the bed of the daughter—or, some said, the wife—of an anti-Semitic government official.

Schiff kept the room cold, probably to discourage loitering, and wore a dark brown wool sweater with a row of tiny buttons, keeping all but the top one buttoned so that just the knot of his tie peeked out. He sat behind his battered oak desk and peered at me as I posed the problem to him.

“Let me see the pictures,” he said, pulling over a swinging-arm desk lamp and snapping it on. “I might be able to save you some time.”

“I’m not sure if I should show them to you,” I said.

“You might as well,” he said. “They’re going to end up in here sooner or later anyway.”

“I doubt that,” I said. “These are—different.”

“Oh,” he said. “Like that. We’ve got those in here too, my boy. Listen, you see that cabinet?” He pointed to a dark corner of the room.

“Which one?”

“Never mind which one. It is sufficient for you to know that it exists: a cabinet full of pictures that would shock a Swiss pimp.”

“Are they particularly unshockable?” I asked him.

“So it is believed where I come from,” he told me. “But if you don’t want me to see your photographs—”

“Here,” I said, passing them over to him.

He examined each one carefully, dragging a magnifying glass out of the top drawer to take a closer look at a couple of them. He said, “Hah!” He said, “Humm.” His expression gave no indication that he thought anything in the pictures the slightest bit unusual. He went over to the bank of filing cabinets near the hall door and began pulling drawers out and leafing through the files, pausing to pull up an occasional picture and compare it with one of those in his hand.

After a couple of minutes Schiff returned to his desk and, taking a thick, stubby fountain pen from his shirt pocket, printed a list of names on a sheet of yellow paper. “I have numbered the pictures in pencil,” he told me, “very small, on the back. Here are the names to go with the pictures; all but two. That is, I have identified all but two of the people, who are, let us call them, the primary subjects of interest in these pictures.” He held up one from the back. “I assume that in this one, while you might like the name of the young man with the large member, what you are primarily interested in is the woman’s name.”

“Mr. Brass assumes the same thing,” I told him.

“Good. It’s on the list. Leave these two pictures with me, and I’ll see what I can do about putting names to them.” He capped the fountain pen. “A notable assemblage. I assume that these photographs were taken for purposes of blackmail. Is that so?”

“I don’t know,” I told him.

Schiff folded the yellow sheet neatly in half and handed it and the pack of photographs to me. He shook his head. “Imagine that it was ingestion instead of fornication that was taboo,” he said. “Then people would have illicit trysts with ham sandwiches, and elderly men would be held up to ridicule for lusting after young, shapely Bartlett pears.”

I put the photographs in my pocket. “And sharply dressed men would accost you on street corners,” I suggested, “offering hamburgers.”

“Just so,” he agreed. “With not
too
French, french fries.”

* * *

I pulled the morgue file on each name on his list and took the assortment back upstairs to Brass. He was swiveled around in his chair facing the typewriter and staring with murderous intensity at the blank page. It would not be a good time to interrupt him. I left the files and the photos neatly on a corner of his desk and retreated to my own office to ponder the possibilities. There were six names on the list:

Bertram Childers
Gerald Garbin
Ephraim L. Wackersan II
Pass Helbine
Suzie Frienard
Stepney Partcher

It was quite an exclusive group of photographer’s models. Bertram Childers, senior senator from New Jersey, was regarded as a long-shot Republican contender for president in the next election. He couldn’t beat Roosevelt—hell, nobody could beat Roosevelt—but if FDR happened to have a heart attack, or was caught in bed with a teenager of either sex, or was proven to have Jewish blood or be a secret agent of the pope—a couple of dozen letters a week came into the paper accusing him of one or both of these high crimes—then Childers had a good shot against anyone else the Democrats could run.

Gerald Garbin, naked playmate number two, was a judge of the New York State Superior Court, and had a reputation for strictness and severity. Felons sentenced by Judge Garbin could expect to spend an extended time away from home.

Ephraim L. Wackersan, Junior, president and son of the founder of Wackersan’s Department Store, our number three, was a stickler for cleanliness and uniformity. His employees were checked every morning for personal hygiene and grooming. Hair on men had to be kept short, and on women, long. No facial hair was permitted.

Number four, Pass Helbine, millionaire philanthropist, was working on his third marriage, but aside from this exercise in sequential polygamy—a minor character flaw in this day and age, when, as Cole Porter puts it, “Anything Goes”—his life was the stuff of which hagiographies are written. The six Helbine Houses, where a down-and-out citizen can get a good meal, a shower, and a place to sleep for a dime, and if he doesn’t have a dime he can wash dishes, are models of philanthropic endeavor.

The woman, Suzie Frienard, was an attractive blonde who had not yet seen her fortieth summer and looked even younger. Were it not for the extreme youth and vitality of her partner, one might have thought she was just one of the girls. From the view of her charms in the photographs, I certainly wouldn’t kick her out of bed. Her husband, Dominic Frienard, was a major contractor in the New York City area. It would be hard to walk more than ten blocks in any direction without walking over or past Frienard-poured concrete.

The last person on the list, Stepney Partcher, was the senior partner of Partcher, Meedle and Coster, a very political law firm. The file had little about him, since the firm employed a public relations expert to keep all of their names out of the papers. What these six people had in common, besides wealth and a presumably inadvertent appearance in smutty photographs, was not revealed in their files.

The staccato sound of Brass pounding the keys of his Underwood wafted its way through the door of my little office. Can sound waft? Well, I guess it can now. We novelists bring life and vigor into language. Can I call myself a novelist when I haven’t been published? Can I call myself a novelist when I haven’t yet finished a novel?

Brass spent a long time every day staring at a blank sheet of paper, but when he actually started typing it usually went pretty fast. When he was done he’d let it sit for an hour or two, and go over it with a blue pencil, and give it to Gloria to make sure it didn’t contradict any obvious facts or natural laws, or anything he’d written previously. Gloria has an eidetic memory, which means that she never forgets anything she sees or hears, as though her other attributes weren’t frightening enough. Then she passes it to me to type a final draft to send down to editorial.

Brass claimed not to be a perfectionist, and he affected a low regard for his own prose, but he regularly achieved the sort of subtle turn of phrase that would sneak up on the reader and whack him on the back of the head when he wasn’t looking. Brass’s description of Senator Burnside as having “delusions of adequacy” got Brass denounced on the Senate floor. I particularly admired his recent description of singer Bessie Elliot as wearing a red silk dress that was “just too tight enough.”

While Brass typed I concentrated on sorting through the mail. The letters fell into about six standard categories as well as “too nutty to deal with” and “the boss better see this one.” It all got answered except a portion of “too nutty to deal with,” which was too nutty to answer. The six standard categories would receive versions of six standard but personalized form letters.

My favorites were the letters from convicted criminals explaining, usually voluminously and in pencil, why they were innocent. Brass was one of the six members of the Second Chance Club, a group that worked to free people wrongly convicted of major crimes. The only problem was that everyone whose freedom had been curtailed by the court thought himself innocent, and wrote to Brass to prove it.

Gloria and I shared the pleasure of typing the replies to the rest of the mail. When the backlog got too big, Brass would get one of the city-desk reporters who needed some extra money—and they all always needed extra money—to help us cut it down. Billy Fox, the reporter who was out following our fat friend, was one of the regulars at the old L.C. Smith typer in the hall.

One time I pointed out to Brass that H.L. Mencken, a fellow newsy who worked for the
Baltimore Sun
before going off to found his own magazine, was reputed to have an all-purpose reply that he used for his mail: a postcard with a rubber-stamped message that read, “Sir or Madam, you may be right.”

“Mencken does not suffer fools gladly,” Brass had replied. “A habit that makes introspection difficult.”