“Help? What kind of help?”
“Background. The reasons for Mike’s running away.”
“He was in trouble.” The old man’s mouth pursed and twitched nervously. “Do you have to know that Mike was a thief?”
“I didn’t like that crack the last time you said it.”
“But it’s true, Conacher.” There was no malice in his voice, only a faint stirring of pity. “Mike had the soul of a highway man.”
“He stole money from you?”
“Money and jewelry.” Yorke closed his eyes as if to recreate his last picture of Mike Smith. “He had the run of the place. Like my own son. But he became involved with a woman. Then he chose to rob from me. When I discovered the thefts, he ran away.”
“The woman,” I said. “What was her name?”
He shook his head irritably. “Marge. Marge something-or-other.”
“And Mike beat it because he figured you’d turn him over to the police?”
“He was wrong, of course. I wouldn’t have exposed him, the fool.”
“Mike’s pretty sensitive. I can understand his running.”
“It was the bitch,” said Yorke, cracking his knuckles. “She ruined him, Conacher.”
“Let’s forget her for a while. Let’s assume that Mike ran for cover. What would he do to earn a living? The way I see it he was the sort of artist who must carry on in his profession. That idea gave me a small grain of encouragement. Yesterday I went up to the Inger Syndicate. Buzz Dillon gave me a line on Mike.”
“A line?”
“Buzz Dillon’s an old friend of Mike’s. We sat around and chewed the fat for a long time. Buzz took me back to the early days of Mike’s career as a cartoonist. You recall his work? His very early stuff?”
“Vaguely.”
“You don’t remember his specialty?”
“Not offhand.” The old man struggled only briefly with the problem of recollection, dismissing the mental chore with a weary shake of his head. “What are you getting at, Conacher?”
“Just this. Mike Smith used to fancy himself a caricaturist.”
“Of course. I recall his work now.”
“Could these be from his pen?”
I pulled out the clippings I had gathered from the theatrical section of the New York Herald Express. They were typical pen-and-inks, portraits of stage personalities done in a smooth and fluid line and finished in a highly stylized technique. They were signed “Vicki” in a feminine scrawl, done with a crow-quill pen.
The old man peered down at the work.
“Amazing,” he whispered.
“You recognize the style.”
“It’s unmistakably Mike Smith’s. But the signature?”
“A phony. A front. Mike’s using somebody to market for him. Maybe it’s the girl he ran away with—Marge.”
“Then you can locate Mike through these clippings?” Luke Yorke flushed suddenly, stimulated by the drawings in his hands. “You should be able to track him down in a hurry now.”
“I’ll do my best,” I told him. “We’re halfway home, if my luck holds out.”
“You don’t know her last name?”
“I never knew it.”
CHAPTER 2
The man behind the desk was Starubing, the Theatrical Editor of the Herald Express. He was a tired and caustic type, long bored with his career and anxious to telegraph his disgust to every passing stranger. He thumbed through his files and came up with a blank to match his expression. He reshuffled the cards and sneered at them, as though he might squeeze the information out of them by showing them his snide nature. He got nowhere with the filing cards.
“I know the girl,” he said. “Flashy-looking blonde. Drops her art work on my desk and stands by with her pretty mouth shut. Shy and retiring type of artist. Says not a word. Pretty, too. But she doesn’t need her bumps, not with the stuff she peddles. Best goddam caricaturist since Ralph Barton. Recall Barton’s work?”
I nodded. “You don’t know the blonde’s last name?”
“Never bothered to ask.”
“I thought you said she was pretty?”
“I forgot to mention I haven’t time for them,” he said with a bored little laugh. “Show business can be slow business if you pause to wrestle every passing doll.”
“It figures.” He was beginning to stir on his seat, already bored with me and my problem. He’d be brushing me off in a minute or two unless I roused him. “How do you pay off the artists?” I asked.
“In Japanese yen,” he said.
“I mean the mechanics of it, Starubing. Were the checks made out just to ‘Vicki’?”
“Who gives a damn?” Starubing waved his hands at the cloud of stink he had created with his cigar stub. “Now who in hell gives a damn about a thing like that?”
“It might be a help if I knew.”
“Why don’t you visit the accounting department?”
“Because I was sent to see you, friend. If you’d take your head out of your work for another minute, I’ll be able to leave you to your knitting.”
“I’ll tell you a few trade secrets about cartoonists,” Starubing said with a groan. He slapped the newspaper down on his desk and wheeled my way in his swivel chair. “They’re a bunch of jerks—all of them. They rarely move above the high school level in their thinking and their doing. Money? They take their checks any way they can get them. This Vicki dame undoubtedly took hers just that way—made out to Vicki, period. You want an intimate portrait of her soul? Take a walk over to see my little pimpled friend, Gus. Over there. Gus considered Vicki an important element in his dream world. Gus drooled whenever she walked into the office.”
The pimpled youth named Gus responded with the reflexes of a trained hunting dog. He massaged the edge of his long nose when I mentioned her name.
“What a dolly,” he said, his voice ripe for cracking. “What a bim.”
“You knew her well?”
“Well?” he asked himself. “I wish I did.”
“When was she last in here?”
“Two weeks ago Tuesday,” he said without a pause. “She had a couple of two column jobs for us.”
He ferreted in the art file, anxious to show me some of her work. He stepped behind a row of metal cabinets and yanked out finished samples of Vicki’s drawings. He handed them to me one by one, running his dirty finger over each of them to point out the flawlessness of the art.
“Draws like a fool, that doll,” said Gus. “Look at that pen line. You don’t find stuff like this around much.”
“How about the girl? What kind of a dame is she?”
“Terrific. She’s stacked like a—”
“Never mind the verbal strip tease. Let’s discuss her personality. She talk much?”
“Nothing,” said Gus. “Quiet type of dolly.”
“Never discussed her art work?”
“Come to think of it, no.”
“Did she ever discuss anything?”
Gus made an attempt to rub his nose off his face while groping for an answer. His inner man struggled with the last memory of his dream girl. But he could give me nothing but a long sigh of regret.
“Listen, mister, I didn’t really know her that well, see?”
“Who did? Anybody up here? On the paper?”
“Nobody I know. But she must have had plenty of guys on the outside. One look at her pair of—”
“She never came up here with a man?”
“Not here.”
“She never mentioned a man?”
“Didn’t talk much,” Gus said. He shook his head with a certainty that made his prefabricated bow tie bobble on his bony neck. “But what a broad. What a number. It was always hard to figure this bim as an artist, if you get what I mean. She looked more like a bed bunny, a—”
&
nbsp; “Skip her love life,” I said. I flipped the drawings, searching for a clue to her address. The sheets were blank. “I’d like to find out where she lived.”
“Didn’t Starubing tell you? He must have her address in the files.”
“He said she picked up her money. You never mailed her any checks.”
“That’s right,” said Gus, open-mouthed. “Never thought about it before this minute.”
“What happens to her drawings? These old drawings of hers?”
“They hang around. Sometimes the artists pick them up. Sometimes they don’t give a damn. Then we auction them off for the Herald Express Boy’s Town Party, twice a year.”
“Vicki picked hers up?”
“When I reminded her. But she won’t be back here now. Never.” He stole a furtive look over his shoulder at Starubing. “Big brain over there decided to cut out all art on the theater pages. Cutting the budget. Robbing the screwy paper of what little class it had. All we’ll get now is his lousy critical junk.”
“When did he lower the boom?” I asked.
“Last month.”
“What happened to Vicki? She selling to anybody else?”
“Not that I ever saw. Not too many papers go for the caricatures these days.”
Dead end. There are about twelve thousand commercial artists in the city of New York, a conglomerate crew, who sell their wares in all manner of ways. The business of creating and selling artistic merchandise is a mad, merry-go-round routine. The freelance trade includes letterers, layout men, designers, cartoonists, illustrators and a host of smaller fry who peddle their efforts in the smaller corners of the business world. No statistician has yet measured the breadth of the artistic landscape. Finding a loose, itinerant caricaturist would not be easy.
“Suppose you wanted her?” I asked the youth. “Suppose you really needed her? How would you go about getting her?”
“Brother, I could want her in a big way.”
“Keep it clean, Casanova.”
“It isn’t easy. You don’t know that doll.”
“You’re a sex-mad fool,” I laughed. I reached into my pants with an elaborate gesture, letting him see the fin in my hand, waiting for him to focus on it. I dropped it near his skinny hand. He didn’t touch it. But he was nibbling at it with his underpaid eyes. “It’s all yours, Gus. I said I need to locate Vicki for a client of mine. Nothing serious. Nothing wrong. But I’ve got to reach her. Let’s you and me decide how.”
“A dick?” he asked himself. “May I ask why?”
“You may not. Let’s put it this way. Pretend Vicki is your wayward sister. Where would you go to find her?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“A hangout? A restaurant?”
“Maybe,” he meditated. “There’s the Pen and Pencil, over on Forty-Fifth Street. The cartoonists hang out around there a lot. Also Danny’s Hideaway, on the same block.”
“Now we’re moving. Where else?”
“We just stopped moving.”
“A club?”
“There’s a cartoonists’ club, too. Also an illustrators club. She could be a member.”
I made a note of his suggestions. I fingered the sheets on which Vicki had drawn her last job. She used a fine, slick paper, the professional Bristol that all successful pen and inkers favored. On the reverse side, the brand name of the paper challenged me. It read CHUBBUCK’S SPECIAL—P and I.
“You know this brand of paper?” I asked.
Gus studied the name, rubbing the answer out of his pimpled proboscis. “Chubbuck’s is an art store—over on Sixth Avenue. Big dump.”
Chubbuck’s was bigger than big, a department-store type of art-supply emporium, complete with all the modern gimmicks for satisfying the professionals and wooing the dilettantes. I used their phone booth first, checking the Cartoonists’ Club and the Society of Illustrators. They had no record of any member named Vicki.
I found a helpful clerk in the paper department, a supervisor who knew most of the steady customers in the trade. He questioned his staff, but could find nobody who remembered the startlingly beautiful, blonde.
But the man in the mail order department proved a real help. He checked the orders for the past two months for me. And he pulled the name out of the old file.
“Miss Vicki Mailer?” he asked. “Out on Long Island?”
“It could be.”
“It had better be. She’s the only Vicki on my list.”
“She buy much?”
“Much, but not often. Her last order came in two months ago. Three dozen sheets of Bristol.”
“She paid by check?”
“That’s right. Her check was drawn on The Freeville National Bank, out in Freeville, on Long Island.”
I knew the little town well. Many summer afternoons found me squatting in a rented outboard and moving slowly up and down the winding canals in search of flounder and weakfish. And once, in the dim past, I remembered an expedition in the area with Mike himself. He had always favored the sea and the sand, building a boyhood dream about a picturesque cottage on a high green bluff where the sea winds sang. Mike was an incurable romantic. Would he pick Freeville as a hide-out? Would he move toward his adolescent fantasy? My mind told me that the road to Long Island’s south shore might be productive.
I left Chubbuck’s under a fresh burst of energy, anxious to follow through. Sometimes a skip-trace can end in such a panic of enthusiasm. Sometimes the leads and tips fall into a semblance of order, so that the brain is wooed by the precise meshing of the theoretical gears. But something more than simple logic carried me on my way. Mike Smith might need me at the end of the line. My heart told me that he could be in serious trouble; that his purposeful disappearance was born out of panic and hysteria and fear.
At half past nine I hauled my convertible out of the garage and headed over the Triborough Bridge, fighting a winter head wind that whistled around the canvas and sneaked through the cracks to chill my ears. A light snow feathered the highway, rimming the dead lawns and edging the stark, bare trees with a phantom lace. The wind moaned high. Traffic crawled, what little there was of it. The commuters had long since steered their cars for home and the shelter of suburban garages. Now only the brave and the desperate rode the icy highways.
An hour later I turned off Southern State Parkway and rolled down the main street of the little town. The address of Vicki Mailer was Chadwick Lane, a tiny street that wound through the marshes and held the small cottages favored by summer residents. In the ghostly light of the wintry landscape, the lonely homes seemed asleep and dreaming of fairer weather. Only the die-hard lovers of creek and clam would live here through the winter.
And only one cottage shone with life.
But there were two police cars parked before it.
A local cop jumped out of one of them when I pulled up near the driveway. He came at me puffing and blowing the snow out of his eyes. I waited for him to arrive.
“Looking for somebody?” he asked.
“Vicki Mailer.”
“What for?”
“I’m delivering her living room furniture.”
“Funny feller,” the cop said. He parked his dumpy frame solidly in the driveway, adjusting it so that I’d have to detour to get around him. “You can’t go inside.”
“Something wrong?”
A man came out of the house. He was dressed in an oversized coat that made him look like something out of a bargain-basement clothing department. He felt his way cautiously down the porch steps. He made the rest of the distance slowly, barely moving his bulk for fear of slipping. He was blowing on his hands when he arrived at my side.
“Feller wants to see Vicki Mailer,” the first cop said.
“Who?” asked the big man. He looked at me belligerently, blowing on his hands as he spoke. The smell from h
is breath belonged in a cesspool foundry. “What for, buddy?”
“Business,” I said.
“What kind?”
“Personal.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“New York, by way of Southern State Parkway.”
“Funny feller,” the first cop said again. “He tells jokes all the time.”
“Get back to your car, Willis,” said the big man. “I can handle him. You don’t want to be standing around in the cold. You’ll freeze your big ears off.”
The window on the porch glowed with light, a small and decorative lamp of the antique variety found in gift shoppes. Through the window, I could see two other men, both of them engaged in idle conversation. The scene began to blossom into something out of a bad television script, complete with yokel cops against a background of suburban mystery.
I followed the big man into the garage. It was warmer here, out of the cut of the wind. He lit a cigar and puffed it a couple of times. Then he went to the wall and flipped on the light switch. Up close, he had a face full of inquiry, horn-rimmed glasses and a dirty chin. His mustache glistened with the fine ice of arctic weather. He kept licking at the fringes of hair that drooped to his upper lip.
“Now,” he said gruffly. “Be a good guy and answer me straight, will you?”
“Maybe I’d better see a lawyer first.”
“No need for a lawyer. Give me straight answers and everything’ll be okay. Your name, for instance?”
So I told him. I informed him that my name was Steve Conacher and I was in Freeville to locate a skip-trace subject. I pulled out my card and handed it to him. He blew his nose and nodded at it. He tried to smile, but couldn’t quite make it.
“You ever see this Mike Mailer?” he asked.
“Not lately.”
“You know him?”
“I used to know him. He’s an old friend of mine.”
“It figures,” he told himself. “Anyhow, I can check you, all the way out of New York. All the way out.” He studied me for a brief pause, making up his mind about me. He added me up and found the sum satisfying. “You been in the skip-trace line long, Conacher?”
“Five years.”
“You got a couple of hot leads, I suppose? I got to hand it to you skip-trace boys. You get the leads and move in. This Mailer now, you’re sure he’s your boy?”
Kiss and Kill Page 19
