You Might As Well Die (30 page)

“So?”

“So, the New York City Mounted Police doesn’t use Clydesdales. I just realized I’ve never seen even one.”

“That doesn’t prove—”

Dorothy rolled down the window. “Officer! Officer! Please help!”

Half a block away, the policeman stopped, turned his horse around and cantered back to the Rolls-Royce.

“This is absolutely unnecessary.” Houdini glowered.

“What’s that smell?” she asked the magician.

“Horseshit.”

“Smells like five hundred bucks to me,” she said.

The mounted policeman rode up to the car. “Is there a problem here, lady?”

“Yes,” Dorothy said, and reached out to scratch the horse above its muzzle. “Do any officers ride a Clydesdale? Even one?”

“That your emergency?”

“Yes,” she said sweetly, patting the horse.

Houdini turned away, trying to remain unrecognized.

The policeman shrugged, evidently happy to talk. “Nah, no Clydesdales. Morgan horses and quarter horses, usually geldings. Need a calm, relaxed horse for walking through crowds and loud traffic. Clydesdale is too big, too unruly.”

“Thank you, Officer. I wish I had an apple for your horse.”

“No feeding the horse, miss.” The policeman yanked the reins and ambled away.

She turned to Houdini and held out her hand, palm up. “Five hundred dollars, please.”

“I never agreed to such a wager,” he muttered.

“You shook on it!”

“I never verbally agreed,” he said, turning away. “Look. People are going into the lawyer’s office. The auction is beginning.”

He hastily opened the door and stepped out to the curb. He held the door open for Dorothy.

Was Houdini—perhaps the wealthiest performer in the United States, maybe the world—trying to weasel out of their bet?

“I guess you were right,” she said as she got out. “I do smell horseshit.”

“O
h, you’re going to pay for this, Mr. Brown Oxford,” wheezed Rudy the shoe-shine man. He and Benchley were carrying his large, heavy shoe-shine stand down the sidewalk.

“Please,” Benchley gasped. “Don’t call me Mr. Brown Oxford. It’s sweet old Bob. We’ve known each other for years.”

“Sweet old Bob, huh?” Rudy huffed. “Does that mean SOB?”

The stand was a large wooden platform, with two chairs mounted on the top and a footrest in front of each chair. Benchley and Rudy had carried, struggled and weaved it through pedestrians for nearly three blocks. Benchley’s forearms were burning, and he knew he was going to feel it in his back the next day.

They shuffled to the corner of Midge MacGuffin’s quiet street.

“Okay,” Benchley puffed. “Just down this block here.”

“This block here?” Rudy cried. “No, no. I can’t put my stand on a residential street. I don’t even have a permit to put it anywhere but where it was. What did you get me into?”

“Rudy—”

“No,
sweet old Bob
! I’m putting it down here. I can’t go another step.”

He set down his end of the stand. Benchley, realizing he wasn’t going anywhere without Rudy’s help, dropped his end of the stand onto the sidewalk with a thud.

“Be careful, Brown Oxford! That’s my livelihood you’re throwing around there.”

“Sorry,” Benchley said.

He climbed into one of the chairs and peered along the sidewalk to get a look at Midge’s house. From up on the shoe-shine stand, he had a clear view to the MacGuffins’ front stoop.

Yes,
he thought,
this is a good vantage point after all, and not at all conspicuous.

“Oh, you want a shine now?” Rudy said, exasperated, still catching his breath.

“Would you?” Benchley asked, though he didn’t like pushing his luck with Rudy. “It would look strange if I just sat here reading the newspaper.”

Rudy shook his head and mumbled to himself. But he fished out his shoe-shine polish, brushes and rags from a drawer in the bottom of the stand.

As Rudy started cleaning his shoes, Benchley uncapped a fountain pen and used it to poke two holes into a newspaper. He held it up and found he could look through the holes and see directly to Midge’s house. Perfect!

“If you’re trying not to look strange,” Rudy said, “then you might want to turn your newspaper right side up.”

Benchley saw that Rudy was right—he was holding the paper upside down. As he turned it around, Bert Clay walked right past the shoe-shine stand. Benchley jumped in his seat.

“What the—?” Rudy cried as the toe of Benchley’s brown oxford came within an inch of his chin.

Benchley hurried to bring the newspaper up in front of his face—but it didn’t matter. Clay hadn’t noticed them. He was hurrying toward Midge’s house. And he was carrying a large new suitcase.

Midge opened the door before Clay even reached the stoop. He disappeared inside.

“There,” Rudy said, relieved. “All done. That’ll be two bits,
sweet old Bob
.”

“Give me another,” Benchley said. He couldn’t leave yet. Not now.

“Another shine?” Rudy asked. “I just shined them. You got some fine shoes, but they are not going to get any shinier !”

Benchley felt bad for Rudy, but someone had to keep an eye on Midge and Clay. He stood up. “I’ll shine
your
shoes, then. Just keep a lookout on that house—”

Rudy held up a weather-beaten hand. “No, sir, thank you very much! I don’t want you touching my shoes or my polishing equipment. Sit down,” he sighed. “I’ll give you another.”

Benchley sat down.

 

Robert Sherwood stood outside the box office of the Spotlight Theater. He had attended countless plays on Broadway, and as the film reviewer for
Vanity Fair
, he had seen dozens upon dozens of silent pictures. But he had never been to a girlie show before, and he felt a certain thrill about it. He had heard about the titillating Dance of the Seven Veils, which could bring an audience to its knees. And there was a sinuous dancer who covered herself in nothing but a boa constrictor. Another used origami butterflies to astounding effect....

The box office opened and a few men quickly got in line. Sherwood took his place behind them. An unusual crowd for a Sunday near lunchtime. The men cast furtive looks away or simply stared ahead. Sherwood paid his fifty cents to a bored attendant in the box office, and then strolled into the theater.

Inside, the lobby was poorly lit and smelled of mold. The auditorium itself was quiet and almost as dark as a cave. There were no ushers to show him to his seat, so he picked one at random halfway to the stage. He had to wait a few minutes before the show started, as the five-piece “orchestra” tuned up. He counted the number of people (all men, of course) in the audience: seven.

Finally, the orchestra struck up a brassy, saucy tune, the lights went up, and a short chorus line of five girls danced out. They wore high-hemmed, low-cut, sequined flapper dresses, which shook with much more excitement than the dancers themselves did. Most of the bedraggled girls, Sherwood thought, looked like they’d just woken up.

Five girls onstage, five players in the orchestra, and seven people in the seats—the performers outnumbered the audience ! Sherwood thought.

He identified Viola easily, thanks to Dorothy and Benchley’s description. She must have run out and bought a new platinum blond wig. She looked terrific, but what a frightful dancer! He’d seen dancing bears with better timing.

He sank in his seat. This girlie show was not all it was cracked up to be.

He had a peculiar wish that he’d stayed and kept an eye on Viola’s mother. At least that big woman was interesting.

 

Dorothy and Houdini sat silently on folding chairs in a cavernous unheated room on the ground floor of Snath’s dilapidated office building. This was a far cry from the fancy auction that Benchley had described.

Dorothy looked around. The large, hollow room was grim, both in appearance and in atmosphere. The walls were a dull, pallid gray. They had once been painted some neutral color, she figured, but that had faded years and years ago. When the cold draft whispered through, lacy spiderwebs fluttered at the corners of the cracked ceiling. Only a dozen stragglers occupied the hundred or so empty metal folding chairs, occasionally making an echoing screech on the marble floor.

Abraham Snath, Esquire, appeared and stalked toward the front of the room. He wore the same type of impeccable black suit she had seen him in previously. His face, however, was even more drawn and sharp than before.

Snath, his large hands tightly gripping the sides of the podium, stood surveying the small audience. His face clearly showed disgust and even anger. Dorothy followed his disdainful gaze around the room at the other bidders—most of these folks looked like they belonged at a racetrack, not at an art auction. These weren’t rich, high-society art connoisseurs. These were shrewd sharpers and hagglers looking for a bottom-dollar bargain.

She took a quick glance at Houdini. He had put on a “disguise”—a large handlebar mustache—to avoid being recognized. He continued to avoid looking at her or speaking with her. She wondered why he still came along, if he was so angry about her figuring out his disappearing-horse trick.

At the podium, Snath gathered himself and spoke in his smoothest, deepest voice. “Good afternoon, and welcome to another fine auction brought to you by the Snath Art Emporium. Today, we will delight you with prized, one-of-a-kind offerings by the artistic genius, and untimely deceased, Ernest MacGuffin.”

Dorothy wondered whom Snath meant by “we.” He was the only one at the podium.

Snath lifted up a painting and put it on an easel. Dorothy had seen it before, upstairs in the lawyer’s own office. It was the “genre work,” as he described it, of two gunslingers. MacGuffin had done it as a “rush job” for
Old West Magazine
, as Dorothy recalled, and had earned only a hundred bucks for it.

“This is one of MacGuffin’s finest, and most . . . accessible works,” Snath said, choosing his words with care. “Shall we start the bidding at eight hundred?”

The lawyer hadn’t even supplied the bidders with paddles. They were simply left to raise a hand—but no one did. No one moved a muscle.

“Eight hundred dollars for this spectacular, unique work of art?”

Snath stood there through a long, uncomfortable silence.

Finally, a man yelled out, “Seven hundred.”

A few people snickered. Snath ignored the bid as well as the chuckles. “Eight hundred for this provocative, historic painting? Who will make the first bid?”

The man who bid before spoke again. “I’ll give you seven hundred, final offer.”

More laughs from the audience. Snath was compelled to answer the man. “I’m afraid you misunderstand. The bidding is supposed to go up, not down.”

“I understand perfect,” the man said. “Seven hundred. Take it or leave it.”

Snath chose to ignore him. “Eight hundred—”

“Six hundred!” said a hard-voiced woman at the back of the room.

“No, that is not how it’s done—” Snath said, clearly losing what little patience he had.

Houdini raised his hand. “Five hundred. I’ll give you five hundred in cash, right now!”

Dorothy elbowed him hard. “If you’re handing out five hundred, I’m first in line.”

Snath’s face colored from gray to purple. He finally burst out in rage. “You brainless, toothless morons! You pathetic cretins! For the last time, the auction price goes up, not down!”

The man who had made the first bid stood up. “Who are you calling a moron? The price is what the market will bear! And the price for that piece of crap is currently five hundred and falling.”

“Get out!” Snath screamed, as his carefully slicked-back hair came undone. “All of you, get out! Be gone from my sight! You dull-witted, unsophisticated dunderheads! This auction is over!”

The bidders got to their feet to leave. Dorothy and Houdini stood, too, but they took their time. They watched Snath out of the corners of their eyes. He pulled out a pile of a dozen or so other canvases, which he’d kept out of view behind the podium. Then he grabbed the cowboy painting off the easel and added it to the stack. Cursing to himself, he carried the stack of canvases in his arms and ducked through an archway at the front of the room.

Once he was out of sight, Dorothy and Houdini quickly followed him through the archway. They found themselves in a wide hallway. A door at the end of the hallway stood open, and milky daylight beamed in. They heard a clatter and another bitter curse and went quickly to investigate. Houdini was about to rush through the open door, but Dorothy held him back. She crouched by the door and peeked out.

Snath stood in a wide, dirty alleyway. On the stained concrete at his feet was the pile of MacGuffin’s paintings. Snath searched his pockets and pulled out a gold flask. He poured the contents of the flask on the paintings. Dorothy detected the smell of cheap, sweet brandy. Then Snath put the flask back in his jacket and pulled out a box of matches. He struck one against the brick wall. It blossomed into flame.

“Here’s to you, Ernie,” he spat bitterly. “Wherever you are, I hope you’re burning, too.”

He flung the match onto the pile of paintings. It ignited the vapors of the alcohol and—
voom!
—burst into a cloud of flame. Snath staggered backward from the flare.

R
udy was in the middle of giving Benchley’s shoes yet another shine when Bert Clay emerged from Midge MacGuffin’s house.

“It’s him!” Benchley said to Rudy.

Rudy turned to look.

“Don’t look,” Benchley said, whipping up the newspaper and gazing through the peepholes.

Clay walked quickly and purposefully, a man on a mission. As he approached, Benchley could see the determined and almost angry look on his face. And Clay no longer carried the suitcase. He must have left it inside Midge’s house.