“Red Dog? What a fascinating and most unusual alias. I’m not doubting he is a highly skilled confidence artist, Mr. Williams. But is he a murderer? I fancy”—and here she coughs a little, as though what she is saying doesn’t really count—“I fancy that if someone discovered what Mr. Glazer was doing, he would smile and find another . . . another mug. You see, I am au fait with the language of the criminal world! But I don’t think Mr. Glazer would be concerned to murder his unmasker. Now if it had been Colonel Townsend—but Eric was convinced his scoundrel was American.”
“One thing about Townsend: it’s not the only name he uses. Maybe not the only nationality, either.” I tell her what I know about my client, and what I don’t know—which is a whole lot more.
“So either he is an American assuming a British accent, or an Englishman who can speak with a strong American accent,” she says. “Now I incline to the latter. I would be able to tell if his British accent were spurious, but I doubt whether poor Eric could have detected a false American accent. Our job is to find out who he really is. And whether he murdered Eric.”
“The cops have arrested Eric’s murderer. It’s an open-and-shut case, Oglesby says.”
“But don’t you think, Mr. Williams, that if a Negro of Mr. Leyden’s size had come into the pavilion, the number of witnesses would have been very great? Most Negroes are boycotting the Fair because of its very unfair anti-African policies. The few that show up are instantly remarkable.” She fiddles with the catch on her handbag for a minute, then says, “I’m assuming that they arrested Mr. Leyden because he was with Eric at the . . . the speakeasy where you and he played poker. I’m wondering whether Colonel Townsend was there Monday night as well.”
“Can’t tell you, lady. I had other fish to fry.”
I don’t see any need to tell her about my fish, but it came in the form of an anonymous letter suggesting that the dame who’d cold-bloodedly laid me in that orphanage thirty-nine years ago was in town wanting to see me. Well, I figured I have a score or two to settle with any dame who’d leave her kid to the kind of treatment I got, but when I showed up at that place down on Cottage Grove, it was a bust. The orphanage was gone, see, and there was a gas station and a furniture store on the spot, but no dame waiting to meet me.
“But you know,” I say to Miss China Doll as the idea comes to me, “now I have to wonder if someone was getting me out of the way deliberate. No one’s going to mess with the kid with me around to see fair play done, so they had to ditch me. If it wasn’t Leyden, then it had to be either Townsend or Red Dog.”
She shakes her head. “I doubt very much that it was Mr. Redmond—or Mr. Glazer, as I suppose I should say. How hard it is to keep track of all these people and their different names! Mr. Glazer is so like—well, like a man in my village at home. If you stopped him from trying to defraud you, he wouldn’t hurt you—just give you a cheerful bow and move on to someone else. But Colonel Townsend, now he is very like—well, another, much uglier man, who did try to murder a man once. No, if I had to choose from among the men with whom poor Eric associated here in Chicago, it would be Colonel Townsend.”
“Why’d Townsend want to kill the kid?”
“If I knew that, Mr. Williams, I would be at the police station, not in your room. But no one is asking that question about Mr. Leyden. No, they arrested him without even really thinking.”
She paused. “The first thing to do is to find out who Colonel Townsend really is. I can do that readily through friends at the British Consulate. Perhaps you could use your knowledge of weapons to find out about the gun that killed my nephew. Was it recovered? Did it have Mr. Leyden’s fingerprints on it? And do they know where Eric was killed? Perhaps you can talk to men in the police department or the newspapers, maybe even go to the speakeasy yourself. Why don’t you come to my hotel tomorrow for lunch so that we can compare notes?”
She gathers her scarves together and flutters out the door. Now, I’m flopping in a part of town where they take dames like that apart and put them together in their soup. So I follow her down four flights of stairs and make sure she gets into a cab without being molested. Don’t go thinking that makes me a softy. Just common sense. If she’s right, and it’s a mighty big if, then she’s going to help me nail a guy who sucker-punched me. So it’s in my interest to keep her in one piece, see.
After I get back to my room and commune with my flask, I start to wonder if she’s playing me for the biggest sucker of all. So I call my friend Reuben Levine over at the Chicago American and ask him to cable London, get his pals there to say whether this Palmer dame really knows the head of Scotland Yard, get someone there to cable back a description of her. I’m tired of Brits waltzing into my life pretending they’re person X—Maitland-Townsend, say—and popping up in Chicago as Y—Miss Palmer, say.
7
At the Century of Progress
Reuben Levine pulled his chair closer to Sally Rand’s. “You what?”
“I stayed late after my show Monday night. I do sometimes, just to have some privacy. If I leave right away, I waltz into a crowd of mashers. Well, Monday I must have fallen asleep, because the pavilion was deserted and the Fair was closed when a loud noise woke me up. Now are you interested, or am I still just a crazy exhibitionist?”
Levine threw up a hand. “Sorry! Sorry I once wrote that about you, Miss Rand! I must’ve had some cheap bootleg and it went to my brain.”
Sally Rand beamed at him and tapped his arm with an ostrich feather. “Listen, I know Sam Leyden didn’t kill that kid because I saw the guy who dumped the body.”
Levine sat bolt upright. “You . . . what? Who was it?”
Sally shrugged. “I couldn’t make him out that clearly. After all, I was seeing him by moonlight. Which was definitely not romantic. But he was a white man—that much I’m sure of. And I bet I’d know him again.”
“Why are you coming up with this story now?” Levine asked.
“Because I only just found out that they arrested Sam for the murder. I don’t care what all those sharks do to each other, but Sam Leyden helped me load my horse onto the boat the first night I came here. He’s always willing to help a working girl, and one good turn deserves another.”
After the reporter left, the dancer called out, “How’d I do?”
“You were perfect, my dear.” Miss Palmer emerged from behind the famous fans and helped Race Williams to his feet. “And now I think you’d better let Mr. Williams stay near you for protection until we flush our murderer.”
“Who do you think it will be?” Miss Rand asked.
“I’m assuming either Colonel Townsend or Mr. Redmond—Mr. Glazer, I mean. But we could be surprised. It might be someone who is a stranger to both of us.”
8
Race Williams, to himself
I straighten up from my position behind the dancer’s costumes and try to brush the dust from my knees. “Miss Palmer likes people to think she’s a lady, so she won’t say we have a bet on the action. I think it’s Red Dog Glazer; she’s betting on the colonel.”
Not that I’m going to reveal the stakes in front of Sally Rand, however much her curves appeal to my eyes. No, that all came up in Miss China Doll’s and my luncheon conversation. I showed her my cable: “There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands,” the head of Scotland Yard said, “and Miss Palmer is the best of the bunch.” She seemed tickled I’d suspected her of masterminding an international criminal gang, but in my line of work you see plenty of stranger things.
So we get down to brass tacks. I go to the speako last night and talk to some of the boys, but everyone is clamming up, and that gets me suspicious. I’m the outsider, see, the tough from New York, and they’re going to protect their own from me. Townsend is an outsider too, but Red Dog is a hometown boy, and that makes me think they’re protecting him. Where is he? I ask, and pretty soon the bouncer is trying to show me the outside of the door. So I leave
and nose around the alley in back, and I see some signs of blood, all right.
In the morning I go back to Reuben Levine at the Chicago American and get the lowdown on the police investigation. It seems pretty clear they nailed Sam Leyden without looking too hard for evidence. There was a big punch-up at the speako Monday night. From what the reporter says, no one knows who started it or why, but the smart money is on my client, Maitland-Townsend, trying to get ugly with Red Dog. The kid gets in the middle of it, trying to break it up, the Negro turns ugly, and the next thing they know, the boy is dead. I tell all this to the Palmer dame, and suggest the kid got plugged by mistake.
“I fear not, Mr. Williams,” she says, throwing her scarves all over the table for some poor waiter to come and sort out. “You see, I have received some definitive information from New Scotland Yard.”
And damn me if the dame hasn’t collected all our fingerprints from the first night we ate dinner with her and the kid at the hotel! She bribed the waiter not to clear the table, came back and collected our water glasses, packed them up as neat as you please, and shipped them back to home-sweet-home. And it turns out that Townsend-Maitland’s real name is Thorndike. He’s the son of a man Palmer hounded out of her home village fifteen years ago, and he and his old man have been bearing a grudge against her all these years.
So when they run into her nephew out in the jungle and see what a sap he is, well, they promptly set out to rob him of his life’s savings. But they’re not content with that: they lure him and the Palmer dame to Chicago.
“You see,” Miss Palmer says, “I found an anonymous letter in Eric’s room when I searched it last night. I knew some kind of missive had brought him here, because whenever I queried him, ‘Why Chicago?’ he unconsciously patted his breast pocket. As you know, all personal papers were missing from his pocketbook when his body was found, but I knew what a careless young man he was and hoped he might have left something in his luggage. And although the search took me some hours, I was ultimately rewarded. He had put an earlier missive in his trunk when he left England. I recognized the type—an e badly out of alignment—from a similar document I had received myself, so I knew the same hand was drawing us here for no good purpose.”
And that’s when my blood goes cold. Because that was the same type on the letter that lured me down to Eighty-Ninth and Cottage Grove on Monday night.
So the dame sees I know something, and I see she’s got the same correspondence, and the upshot is this: the person who’s wrong about who’ll show up to croak Miss Rand has to show the other their letter first.
Levine’s scoop merits an early-afternoon extra, and long before Miss Rand is ready to load her horse onto the boat and head for the pavilion, we’ve got every reporter in America wanting to ask her questions. I sort them out, let her put her spiel on the radio, and make the others go away: Miss Rand is an artiste and needs her rest before she performs, see.
Of course Oglesby comes nosing around, but I tell him she’s asleep. “I need to talk to her,” he says. “If you don’t let me question her, I’ll arrest her as a material witness in the murder.”
“You and who else? You got Leyden under lock and key. You’re too right to make a mistake, like confusing a white man and a colored, or an Englishman with an American, so what do you need Miss Rand for?”
He don’t like it, and he threatens to come the heavy over me, but Miss China Doll flutters her scarves over him and he vamooses. But we can be sure he’s going to have a front-row seat at the “Streets of Paris” tonight, my goodness, yes.
It all works out according to plan. We get Sally and her horse loaded on the boat, she makes her entrance at the pavilion right on schedule, begins her act, and the crowd goes wild. They don’t care that reporters have flown in all the way from New York City and Los Angeles to see if someone kills her mid-dance.
At the height of her performance, a shot sounds out above the band, and so does a woman’s scream. I muscle my way to the center of the melee. Miss Palmer is sitting next to the colonel, all right. She beaned him with her handbag as he was taking aim. She stunned him for a minute, but he’s got his hands around her throat now. Ladies in the mob are screaming. I knock them out of my way and take a shot, cool as you please, that sends him to the deck. Then Oglesby shows up and tries to show some authority.
Townsend-Maitland-Thorndike isn’t dead yet—I couldn’t get a clean shot at him without winging Miss China Doll in the bargain. He’s writhing on the floor, calling Miss Palmer every name in the book.
“You bitch! You got my father by a dirty trick, and now you’re trying to get me, too! Yes, I killed that precious nephew of yours, and I wish to God I’d killed you, too. Hounding my father out of town, costing him his commission, leaving us to a life of poverty while you lorded it over creation. Well, you smug old biddy, your mother talked about you plenty. Plenty, I mean, and I heard it all from my father. I bided my time, but . . . but. . . .”
And here his howls became incoherent and mixed with the great rattle of death itself.
Miss China Doll is looking mighty pale, but she is trying to ignore my client’s outburst. Instead, she’s breathlessly thanking people for retrieving her everlasting scarves. Miss Rand? Well, she just keeps dancing through it all.
Of course, the cops don’t like having to let Leyden go. They never want to give up a body once they’ve got it locked up. And when it’s the body of a Negro labor agitator, it just about takes an act of Congress. In the end, though, they release him to his niece, the hotel maid. I think I saw Red Dog in the crowd earlier, but he’s melted. I never do learn whether Townsend-Maitland-Thorndike really had anything against him, whether he actually did get taken in by Red Dog’s booze-factory scam. After Miss Palmer and I go off to share our mail, I have to guess my ex-client just wanted some excuse to bring me to Chicago.
Miss Palmer—well, she leaves for England and I go to Union Station for the train to New York. I hope to God I never see her again, or Chicago either. I belong in the great city. I plan to stay there.
9
Miss Charlotte Palmer
On the Twentieth Century Limited, Chicago to New York
Letter to Mrs. Ben (Chlotilde) Milder
The Vicarage, St Clement-sur-Mare
England
10 June 1933
I know I will never mail this letter, but writing to you has become the easiest way for me to organize my thoughts during this long trip to Chicago—by far the longest journey of my life, for it has taken me back in time, as well as exhausting my spirit in the present.
I had buried my past so deeply that I came to believe myself remote from the passions that actuate others. It is certainly true that strong passion impedes judgment; perhaps I judge more accurately than most because I have subdued such violent emotions within myself. Forty years ago it was a far different story.
My mother told me the baby had died shortly after birth. I was prepared to stay in America and raise him, far from the censorious eyes of her village intimates, giving her full permission to say I had drowned or disappeared in some other way, but I suppose my situation was far too shocking for her.
“A lady must never show either shock or surprise,” she often told me. So the shock she felt was something she kept buried deep within herself. Or perhaps it was her rage at my having stepped outside her tight bonds of confinement that led her to act as she did.
She must have stolen my baby from his cot while I was still too weak to notice what she was doing, and taken him to the orphanage. She translated poor Robert’s last name into English and told the nuns the boy’s name was Williams, that the mother had died in childbirth—I suppose that had been her hope for me!—and the nuns gave him the first name Race as a representative of the human race.
Thorndike insinuated himself into the homes of numbers of old ladies during the Great War, and Mother’s mind tended to wander in those days. She very likely shared her—and my—secret with him.
Robert had disa
ppeared before he knew I was expecting a baby. He was an itinerant showman who took shooting galleries around the country to different fairs. At least his son inherited his marksmanship! And perhaps my instincts as an investigator. The loner detective on the edge of society—not the life one would choose for one’s child. I had planned to look for Robert Guillaume once I got back on my feet, to show him his son and see if he wanted to make a life with us, but thinking my child dead, I saw no point in searching for his father.
Race and I had no touching reunion such as you find in novels or motion pictures. He is angry with me for abandoning him. “You’re a better investigator than that,” he said, “to take the word of your mother, an old lady who wants you and your kid dead. You looked at the death certificates last week and saw that no child named Palmer or Guillaume had died that winter. Well, if you’d really wanted to know, you would have looked years ago, before ever leaving Chicago in 1894. In the end, your conventional English morality made it convenient for you to believe your mother and return to your cozy little village.”
Perhaps he is right.
“O cleanse thou me from secret faults,” says the Psalmist in this morning’s lesson. “Keep thy servant from presumptuous sins, lest they get dominion over me.” I hope when I return to St Clement-sur-Mare I can remember the havoc my secret faults have wrought in others’ lives, and try not to judge too presumptuously when I see the failings of my fellow men.
Note
“Murder at the Century of Progress” was first published in the Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Summer 1999. The story had originally been commissioned—I can’t remember by whom—for a collection of stories each involving two detectives. The commissioner turned down my contribution, because it didn’t include V.I. Warshawski. However, I had set my heart on a story set in the 1933–34 World’s Fair—the Century of Progress. The history of Sally Rand at the fair, and her support of African-Americans and of all out-of-work people, merits a bigger story than I gave her. I also wanted to bring Race Williams back onto the mystery scene. He was the first of the hardboiled detectives, created by Carroll John Daly in 1923.
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