“I need your help, Miss Rimbert,” I said. I told her that I was an old friend of The League for Cultural Advancement, having attended their lecture series at Town Hall recently. I praised the fine work of The League in encouraging the basic arts among the Negro population of our great land. I made the bridge to Rebecca slowly, introducing myself as an old friend of her last employer.
“Rebecca often speaks of Mr. Hess,” said Luella. “She was quite upset when she lost her job with him.”
“I have good news for her. Mr. Hess wants her back.”
“How wonderful!”
“Where can I reach Rebecca, Miss Rimbert?”
“She’s got herself another job,” said Luella. “One moment, please.”
She gave me the address of a certain James Zimper who lived on Riverside Drive, in the Eighties. I hung up and took a cab across town, feeling the dullness settle in a cloud around my brain. The routine of skip-tracing is monotonous for the ferret. The time comes when you operate out of a mechanical drive, your brain creating fresh ideas out of the impact of the last thought. You move like an automaton, patiently and doggedly, hoping for the sudden spark that might explode into something real and good.
Could Rebecca be that spark?
CHAPTER 6
A cooperative doorman under the canopy of a place called Warwickshire Arms helped me find Rebecca. She was on one of the benches across the drive, rocking a pram gently to and fro as she sat reading under a tree. The book was Dreiser’s American Tragedy, in the pocket edition.
“Rebecca?” I asked, from a polite distance.
She put the book down slowly and removed her glasses to smile up at me. She was in her fifties, a delicate woman with small, sharp features that gave her face an odd, almost birdlike look. She was dressed in the accepted costume for upper-class nurses. On her it looked good.
“You wished to speak to me?” she asked. Her voice was cool and sweet, with traces of flawless schooling and carefully contrived diction. “I’m afraid I don’t know you, sir.”
“I’m a friend of Sigmund Hess.”
“Oh?” Her face seemed to blossom with fresh friendliness. Her smile was brightly white against her coffee-colored skin. She looked fifteen years younger when she smiled. “Please sit down, sir?”
“Conacher,” I said. “Steve Conacher. I’m a detective, Rebecca.”
“And a friend of Mr. Hess?” she asked, with no show of malice, but smiling her doubt at me. “I don’t seem to remember his having any detective friends, Mr. Conacher.”
“You knew every one of his friends?”
“I most certainly did.”
“In that case, you can call me an acquaintance. I’m one of the Cumber store detectives.”
“What can I do for you, sir?” Her attitude reflected an inner calm that would be tough to upset. She was as smooth as a dowager serving tea. She opened a decorative gold watch that hung on her uniform. “I haven’t much free time. The child must be brought upstairs soon.”
“I won’t hold you up, Rebecca. Only a few questions.”
“About Mr. Hess?”
“I want to know where he is.”
“I wish I could help you, Mr. Conacher.” She sighed and shook her head sadly. “But I haven’t the vaguest idea where he can be found.”
“You were with him until the day he moved out of the brownstone?”
“I stayed in the house for a week after he left.”
“Where did he go?”
“He moved to The Carrillon Hotel.” She watched me make a note of the name. When I was finished, she added: “But you won’t find him there any more, Mr. Conacher.”
“He skipped out of The Carrillon? When?”
“I would say he stayed there for approximately two weeks.”
“And after that?”
“I haven’t the foggiest notion,” said Rebecca. The baby began to cry and she clucked at it and handed it a rattle until the yammering subsided. “You see, I wanted to locate Mr. Hess myself. There are still a few of my personal belongings left in the house. Nothing very important, really, but I’d like to get in and remove them one of these days.”
“Better make it soon, Rebecca. The house is sold.” I gave her the name of the real estate outfit and she was very grateful to me. We discussed the mechanics of Hess’s moving out. She gave me the name of the warehouse that would store his furniture. She seemed anxious to cooperate with me, but troubled by the lack of time at hand. She kept looking at her watch and the baby.
“Not much time left, Mr. Conacher. Could you come back to visit with me tomorrow, perhaps?”
“I’d prefer finishing my questions now. It’ll only take a few more minutes, and I’ll talk fast.”
“Very well.” She smiled. “Ask away.”
“Tell me about Mr. Hess,” I began. “He do much entertaining?”
“Quite a bit.”
“People from the store?”
“Oh, yes. He has many friends.”
“Lady friends?”
“Some,” she said with a meaningful smile. “But he’s not a very successful man with the ladies, Mr. Conacher. He’s what I’d call a permanent bachelor.”
“Can you remember his most recent lady friends?”
“There were several. A girl who worked in his department in the store. And another one, named Martin. Lila Martin.”
“She came to the house?”
“Occasionally.”
“Alone?”
“Once in a while, yes. But more often, Miss Martin came as a member of a party. Mr. Hess is quite a party-giver. He loves to have people around him as often as possible.”
“How often would that be?” I asked. “Once a week?”
“Sometimes more than that.”
“And who were his regular visitors?”
“It would be hard to say,” said Rebecca thoughtfully. “Mr. Hess has no really close friends.”
“Not even a few?”
“There were card games, once every so often,” she said. “He would ask several of the men in the store to come and play. They played poker, long games that lasted into the wee hours. Occasionally, on a weekend game, I’d even serve breakfast.”
“Who were the players?”
“Let me see now.” Rebecca considered the question with great care before answering. “I can recall Mr. Gonzalez, Mr. Frall, Mr. Kutner, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Harding. Do these names mean anything to you at all?”
“Which of them was Mr. Hess most friendly with?”
“Mr. Gonzalez. He’s a jewelry buyer in another department store.” She shook her head sadly and held up her hand. “I should correct that, Mr. Conacher. Poor Mr. Gonzalez died of a heart attack a few weeks ago, just before Mr. Hess decided to sell his house.”
I crossed Gonzalez off my list. We discussed Hess more intimately. She told me that Hess seemed nervous and tense recently. He had always suffered from a sort of asthma, a sickness that got worse whenever he was upset. She knew enough about her ex-boss to describe his symptoms as psychosomatic, occurring with a disturbing seizure whenever he seemed deep in worry or despondency.
“You think Mr. Hess left the city for the asthma?” I asked.
“It’s possible. The poor soul was really tortured by it.”
“He ever mention where he might go?”
“He talked some about Puerto Rico.”
“He ever go there?”
“Once,” said Rebecca, “about three years ago. Mr. Hess loved it down there. He often said that if he ever was able to retire, he’d spend the rest of his days in Puerto Rico.”
“You’ve been very kind,” I said, shaking her hand and ending the interview. “If Mr. Hess should get in touch with you, I wish you’d call my office.”
“But why should he get in touch with me?”<
br />
“I don’t know,” I told her, “but you never can tell.”
The big shadows were graying the streets when I grabbed a cab and rolled downtown to The Carrillon. It was a fabulous dump, one of the most modern hotels in town, with room rates that would stagger a tycoon. Luck was with me. An old friend of mine from Chicago had the job of house dick here. He was Spence Varmus, one of the best eyes in the trade a decade ago. Right now, Spence was content to live out his middle-age in the lobby of The Carrillon. I found him under one of the decorative palms, sucking at his perpetual cigar.
“I read about Chuck Rosen,” he said sympathetically. “Too bad about Chuck. He was a smart apple, one of the brightest boys I ever knew.”
I took him into the bar and blew him to a beer and gassed about the old days for a time. Spence would have been content to stay with me all night this way, but I managed to arrive at the task at hand, finally. I explained that I was on the prowl for Sigmund Hess, after which Spence took me to the desk and ran through the records for me. The books revealed that Hess had stayed in this dump for a little over a week. He checked out suddenly, at ten o’clock of a Thursday night.
“Isn’t that a queer hour to take off?” I asked.
“It isn’t normal,” Spence said. “Most people usually wait for the morning to check out. Either after breakfast or after lunch.”
“Where did he go, Spence?”
“That won’t be easy.”
“Let’s take a crack at it.” I held him at the desk. “You don’t recall the man, do you?” I asked. “Ever see him around?”
“Don’t be funny, Steve. Why the hell would I be talking to the clientele?”
“Never hurts to ask, does it?”
“Let’s ask Harry, the doorman,” said Spence. “You’ll get more out of him on a thing like this. The records show your friend Hess had two trunks, a steamer and a small one. Maybe Harry recalls the character.”
So we talked to Harry. Harry made a few intellectual faces at us, trying to cooperate, but getting nowhere. The trail was cold. And dead.
I checked the cab stations nearby, interviewing one cabby after another in an effort to locate the hack that had taken Hess out of the neighborhood. Spence shared the load with me, aware that these men could be mines of information on occasion. We had little to coax them into memory. Our only lead was the time of day. A cabby would remember two trunks on a ten o’clock checkout at night. We skirted the block, diligently questioning each parked cab in view. When we returned to the canopy, Harry had found our man.
“Jake says he took the load,” said the doorman.
“I’m positive I had the guy,” said Jake. He described the two trunks accurately and remembered that his fare was a fat man who seemed to be in a hell of a hurry to get away from The Carrillon. “I took him across town,” Jake remembered. “Took him to a dump on the East Side. The exact address I can’t remember. But I know the house. Hop in and I’ll drive you over.”
So I was off again, in Jake’s hack, through Central Park and out to Fifth and over beyond Lexington to a neighborhood of strange complexity. The streets here abounded in a mixture of the new and old in architecture. Great apartment houses towered alongside dismal tenements. An occasional warehouse decorated an otherwise residential street. But, for the most part, the area was poor, in the stark and barren way that only a New York street can reflect poverty.
Jake rolled his cab to a stop before a fairly respectable-looking tenement.
“He went in there,” he said.
“And the trunks?”
“I helped him carry them up the steps.”
“Anybody come out?”
“I didn’t wait,” said Jake.
“Sit tight,” I told him. “I should be right out.”
I skipped up the stone steps and into the small square lobby. It was decorated with a marbleized wall, an effort of the landlord to bring a hint of cleanliness and neatness to his house. On the right, a line of copper mailboxes shone in the gloom. Somebody had polished them recently. I ran down the list of names slowly, taking my time over each of them, looking for everything and nothing.
And, suddenly, I found everything.
The name Rebecca Sanders was lettered on one of the slots.
I ran back to Jake.
“Take me to Riverside Drive,” I shouted, and gave him the number of the house where Rebecca worked.
CHAPTER 7
The doorman at the Warwickshire Arms said: “Mr. and Mrs. Zimper just went out. The maid’s up there alone.”
I slipped him a bill and took the elevator to the seventh floor and rang 708.
Rebecca opened the door.
She seemed surprised to see me. But behind her astonishment I thought I recognized a touch of resignation. Nothing, however, affected her perpetual good nature. She smiled at me nicely and showed me into the living room. The baby was in a playpen near the window. She dropped a few toys into the enclosure and kissed the kid and came back to where I was standing.
“You know why I came back?” I asked.
“I have a fairly good idea.”
“Mr. Hess was with you for a while?”
“Please sit down,” Rebecca said quietly. “I don’t want you or anybody else in the world to misunderstand what happened to poor Mr. Hess. In the first place, I got this job just about two days after I left his employ. On my days off, I would go back to the brownstone and pack my things and take part of them away with me, a little at a time. On one of those trips, I ran into Mr. Hess again.”
“In the brownstone?”
“Not quite,” said Rebecca slowly. “It was in the street, near the entrance. However, he begged me to come back into the house and talk to him. I couldn’t refuse him. You must remember that I’ve worked for him many years and consider him a good friend as well as an employer. When I saw him that day, on the street, I was quite alarmed.”
“What frightened you?” I asked.
“The way he looked, Mr. Conacher. The poor man was sick, positively ill with fear.”
“He told you he was afraid?”
“He did indeed.”
“Of what?”
“A man,” said Rebecca. “He explained that somebody was after him. He told me that he was living at The Carrillon, but would have to move out of there at once. Whoever it was that wanted to frighten Mr. Hess had done a fine job, believe me.”
“Did Hess mention the name?”
“He told me nothing about his pursuer.”
I held her there. “The man was chasing him?” I asked. “Or threatening him?”
“Mr. Hess didn’t say,” Rebecca said. “He only told me that he was going mad trying to escape this person. He looked pale and distraught, absolutely weak with fear. I had never seen Mr. Hess in this condition before. Oh, he had been through spells of nervousness in the past, to be sure. But this was a different sort of nervousness.” She shivered a little and closed her eyes. “Of course, I had to help him.”
“Why did he return to his house?”
“He thought he might hide there.”
“But he changed his mind?”
“I talked him out of it,” Rebecca said.
“You suggested that he live in your furnished room, was that it?”
“That was exactly it. I had rented the room only as a small retreat for my idle days. Mr. Hess was perfectly welcome to use it if he wished. After all, my home is here with my employers. And living in my room, Mr. Hess might have a good chance to escape his mysterious nemesis.”
“So he lived in your place,” I said. “Until when?”
“He was not there on last Sunday afternoon, on my day off.”
“He just disappeared?”
“Exactly that. Mr. Hess left a short note, explaining that he must move again.”
“That was all
?”
“Not quite.” Rebecca gave me the full strength of her honest eyes. She was leveling with me all the way. “The note said that he must move, don’t you see? The man who followed him had caught up with him once more, I suppose.”
“And you have no idea who that man might be?”
“If I did, I should certainly tell you, Mr. Conacher.”
“You have the note?”
“Unfortunately, no. I destroyed it.”
“I want you to do me a favor, Rebecca.”
“Anything at all to help poor Mr. Hess.”
“Does he know you’re working here?”
“I gave him my address and phone number,” Rebecca said. Her loyalty to Hess was something for the books. Not even his mother could have fought so hard to protect him. She was stirred now, moved by the memory of his dilemma, her eyes dampening with sorrow for him, her thin hands knotted in her lap. “I told him to get in touch with me if he ever needed me.”
“But you haven’t heard from him?”
“Not a word.”
“I’m going to ask what I did when I saw you the last time,” I said. “I want you to remember that I’m a detective. I can help Hess. If he should call you, try to find out where he is, Rebecca.”
“I’ll do as you say, Mr. Conacher.” She took me to the door, holding me there for a last long minute. “Is he in trouble?”
“I won’t know,” I said, “until I’ve found him.”
I went back to the office to check my mail. There was some stuff from Ohlmasti’s agency in Chicago, the rest of the report I had ordered on all the Chicago characters now working in Cumber’s. I spent the next hour wading through Ohlmasti’s records. He wrote in a lousy prose, repeating lots of the junk to make the report look heavy. It was a habit of Ohlmasti’s to make stupid statistics appear important by using fifty words to describe a five-word event. The scuttlebutt on Vivian Debevoise, for instance. Ohlmasti had tracked down a roommate of Vivian’s who reported that Vivian and Wilkinson were burning with love for a long period of time, before Wilkinson hit the bigtime. The Debevoise doll had a background of commercial experience that made her a fit secretary for anybody in an executive post. She also had a lurid background of bundling in every job she held, always favoring the upper-bracket types of masculinity.
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