Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

“It didn’t happen often,” said Daisy, who was calmer now. “But sometimes when his wife was cross, preoccupied by the business and being a bit of a scold, he’d come here for a sympathetic female ear, a softer touch. He’d tell Hannelore he was going out for a bottle of milk. She’d be sleeping when he got back. Perhaps they had some unspoken understanding. You know, in today’s modern world—”

  Even the Wood Chipper, whose ear was not the best, realized that Daisy, too, now talked like a magazine. It happened to a lot of people in the trade. He decided to stop listening to her and get down to business. Having once seen his father do what had to be done with a corpse in far worse shape than Siegfried, he went about dressing the news slinger, starting with his socks. “Don’t worry,” he told Daisy, “we’ll find some spot to set him down in. Someplace they’ll find him fast. It’ll look like his heart blew a gasket while he was out for a walk. Which is pretty much what happened, no?”

  Chip nicked a dolly from the basement of Daisy’s building and trundled Siegfried’s still-warm remains (covered by a Bandbox garment bag that Daisy had around) almost twenty blocks south. He unzipped his cargo at the darkest point between two streetlamps, remembering Daisy’s suggestion that he put a quart of milk not far from Siegfried’s right hand—a consoling fiction for Hannelore’s benefit.

  38

  THE DAILY NEWS,

  FRIDAY, FEB. 17, 1928, P. 7.

  MAG PUTS CRIME SCRIBE ON TRAIL OF MISSING HOOSIER

  Yesterday afternoon, Jehoshaphat (“Joe”) Harris, editor-in-chief of the embattled “Bandbox,” announced the assignment of novelist-cum-crime-reporter Max Stanwick to investigate the disappearance of John Shepard, an Indiana subscriber not seen since the night of January 18th, when he appeared as a guest of the magazine at a party in publisher Hiram Oldcastle’s Park Avenue penthouse.

  “Shep was like some Horatio Alger kid and Frank Merriwell all rolled into one,” said Harris, fighting back emotion in his midtown office (see NEWS foto, facing page). “We thought—did I say that?—we think the world of him, and are sure he’s destined for great things once he’s back among us.” Harris insisted that if he had known about the young man’s disappearance sooner, he would have cancelled his recent trip to the British Isles.

  “In an age of fair-weather friends and high-speed trends,” the editor-in-chief declared, “our subscribers are loyal to us, and we’re loyal to them.” Recent circulation and ad figures—see the NEWS’ Business Page—cast some doubt on the fidelity of “Bandbox” ’s readers and advertisers, but Harris was having none of it when confronted with the numbers. He would say only that the deployment of Stanwick’s imagination and investigative skills would lead to the safe return of young Shepard, who had apparently been in the middle of a spontaneous trip to New York.

  Asked to comment on the Hoosier’s disappearance, Captain Patrick Boylan, speaking for the police commissioner, told the NEWS: “Yes, we got a report only the other day about this young fellow of no fixed address who left a suitcase and an unpaid bill at one of the city’s YMCAs—the sort of thing that happens a dozen times a week. We’ve been told that a trunk was sent from Greencastle, Indiana, to New York a few days before Mr. Shepard went missing, but so far nothing has turned up.”

  Boylan speculated that the young man “may have taken off from the city just as impulsively as he came here,” and suggested, if that was the case, that he “call his mother.”

  As for Joe Harris, the captain said, “If he really wants to help our Missing Persons squad, he’ll assist them in finding Mr. Waldo Lindstrom.”

  Lindstrom, the magazine’s most popular cover subject, has reportedly jumped bail after a recent arrest for possession of narcotics. Giovanni Roma, proprietor of the Malocchio restaurant and a crony of Harris’, allegedly sold him the dope. Other “Bandbox” staff and associates have recently been nabbed for plagiarism and a drunken assault on the nation’s Chief Magistrate.

  One observer of the magazine industry expressed surprise that in the midst of such troubles, Harris would let himself be distracted by “some woe on the Wabash.”

  Reading the story behind his desk at 8:00 A.M., Harris scowled, annoyed that the circulation figures and Boylan’s skeptical quotes had been thrown in. Stanwick was, in fact, pursuing Lindstrom, if only in connection with Shep, and he was also looking for the trunk the cops had been unable to find. Max had pledged not to show his face in the office until he’d located both “the fled flit and the vamoosed valise.”

  Harris turned the page with an angry snap. He made breakneck progress through the rest of the paper, pausing only to read, in its entirety, a small obituary of Siegfried von Erhard—run as a professional courtesy of the newspaper fraternity. The small type took note of Siegfried’s birth in Dusseldorf; his peacetime service in the Kaiser’s army; and his unsuccessful butter-and-egg business, which had collapsed just before his proud emigration to this country in 1914. The notice declared that the vendor’s death had come from a coronary suffered only a block from his home in Kips Bay. His spouse, Hannelore, was his only survivor.

  Well, thought Harris, that fishwife frau had driven the poor guy to an early grave.

  Actually, thirteen floors below, Siegfried had just, in a manner of speaking, returned to work. Having kept the newsstand shut for two days, Hannelore was opening its scissor-gate and removing the counter displays of pipe cleaners and Life Savers in order to make room, beside the cash register, for her husband’s ashes. She turned the urn so its Iron Cross wouldn’t face customers, and then she sighed. Life had to go on. She had been thinking this same thought half an hour ago, while soaking her Post Toasties in the last of the milk Siegfried had gone out for Tuesday night. Right now she was rereading his obituary, though keeping one eye on the stenographer thumbing through an unpurchased copy of Harper’s Bazaar.

  “This is a newsstand, not a ‘view stand’!” cried Hannelore, already back in form.

  Preceded by Mukluk on his pink leash, Betty Divine entered the Graybar lobby. She was earlier than usual. Thanks to Joe, her sleep patterns were all off. During his nights at the Warwick, he got up half a dozen times to pace; and when he stayed home in Murray Hill, he’d call her after midnight or before five to rehash his anxieties about Hi and Jimmy. This morning, never expecting Hannelore to have reopened, Betty had bought her paper at the corner. Startled by the retracted scissor-gate, she approached the newsstand to pay her respects: “Mrs. von Erhard! Shouldn’t you be giving yourself a little more time?”

  “Thank you, Miss Divine,” said Hannelore, bowing her head to a depth befitting conversation with an editor-in-chief. “But Siegfried would have wanted me back to normal as soon as possible.”

  Betty missed two or three words of this, but heard Mrs. von Erhard tap her wedding ring, with a sort of prideful affection, against a glazed urn that looked quite a bit like a beer stein. After a moment Betty understood that Siegfried now resided within it.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.

  “Few have been so kind as you,” replied Hannelore.

  “And I’m sorry to hear that,” said Betty, who wondered how Mrs. von Erhard expected the pity normally due a widow when for years she’d been tearing into potential mourners, like that poor girl eyeing the Bazaar.

  “That nice Mr. Montgomery,” said Hannelore. “From your gentleman friend’s magazine? He has been an exception.”

  “Oh,” said Betty. “Then he’s back.”

  “No, still at home under the weather. But so kind as to send a telegram to my apartment when he heard the news.”

  “He’s very thoughtful,” declared Betty. She was running out of things to say, but Mrs. von Erhard more than kept up her end with some chatter about Siegfried.

  “There was nothing old-fashioned about Mr. von Erhard, you know. Back in Dusseldorf he was the first one to put air tires onto his bicycle, and over here he saw to it that we were the earliest in our building to have a radio. So, you understand, I couldn’t have him moldering
under the weeds up in Woodlawn. It didn’t seem twentieth-century. Whereas the Rose Hill Mortuary and Crematorium are right up-to-date.”

  Betty was losing the auditory thread, since Hannelore was not only talking fast and with her accent, but addressing some of her remarks to what was left of Siegfried himself. Launching into a description of her husband’s fiery, up-to-date Dämmerung, the news vendor remarked to Betty, and reminded Siegfried, that “Mr. von Erhard’s remains were untouched by human hands. While the soul ascended to heaven, the ashes proceeded straight from the furnace to the urn. Via a stainless-steel spout,” she explained. “The ‘Felicity Shunt,’ the Rose Hill man told me it’s called.”

  With Mrs. von Erhard tapping the urn again, Betty had missed nearly all of the last few sentences, and misunderstood her to say “publicity stunt.”

  “Yes,” said Hannelore, no longer tapping, and looking straight at Betty now. “How Siegfried got here has been written up in the newspapers.” She meant a recent article on Rose Hill’s modern methods, but having heard “publicity stunt” and then, more clearly, this last business about a write-up, Betty concluded that Hannelore had been trying to draw attention to the newsstand by means of a feature about Siegfried’s new dwelling place here on the counter. She recoiled, and pretended that Mukluk was tugging on his leash. “I should be getting upstairs. My sincerest sympathies, Mrs. von Erhard. I hope that Siegfried will be happy here.”

  “Danke,” said Hannelore, back in her forelock-tugging mode.

  Betty and Mukluk walked off to the elevator bank—followed closely by Chip Brzezinski, who did a fast skulk past the newsstand to avoid the Widow von Erhard’s notice. He entered the elevator, returned Betty’s smile, and took a position at the rear of the car. Mukluk, always overexcited to be on board, yapped so loudly that Chip imagined trying to squeeze the thing into the shaft once someone got on at another level and created a gap in the flooring.

  As they ascended, Chip looked over Betty’s shoulder at her Daily News, which she had open to the story of Bandbox’s search for John Shepard. Though he could see only the back of her head, Chip assumed she was concentrating on the article, especially Joe Harris’s quotes, whereas in fact she was looking over the top of the paper, toward nothing but the metal gate of the car, and continuing to marvel, distastefully, over Mrs. von Erhard’s conversation.

  “A publicity stunt!” she muttered, louder than her poor hearing let her realize.

  The elevator operator just smiled, but Chip—hearing the remark, and seeing the back of Betty’s head shake from side to side while she seemed to be reading about Harris’s hunt for that awful hick kid—was prompted to remember Max Stanwick’s recent remark to Spilkes: I invented Mrs. Shepard. Trying to suppress his excitement, he managed to put two and two together and come up with three grand—the salary he’d be able to command from Cutaway once he told Jimmy Gordon this whole “search” was a big con designed to increase the circulation of his dying rival.

  39

  An impending strike by the city’s tailors concerned Jimmy more for its potential effects on his own closet than on the fashion pages of Cutaway. The latter had already been sketched and photographed for the next several months, but Andrei, his personal, high-end Russian threadsman, was Bolshy enough to walk out with all the poor Jews down on Seventh, leaving the gray silk suit he was making for Jimmy in some uncuffed limbo until who knows when. So, having planned to spend Friday in the city but out of the office, Jimmy decided he would drop in on Andrei prior to boxing a few rounds at the Athletic Club, after which he’d head back to Garden City on a mid-afternoon train. With Joe so satisfyingly on the run, he could afford to spend a few hours shoring things up at home.

  Informed of Jimmy’s absence by the Cutaway receptionist, Chip felt like he’d been thrown on the rack. Now he’d have to spend the weekend holding down this giant canary of information he’d swallowed in the elevator, a frustration that would get all the worse when it combined with his nervousness that some cop who’d noticed him deposit Siegfried on East Thirty-second Street might still show up at his door.

  “Have you seen Siegfried?” All morning long the question lilted across the fourteenth floor, as one person after another reported making a stop at the newsstand and spotting the tall ceramic urn. Daisy owed him big, Chip decided once again, as he listened to this chatter. And he wanted to collect: any dirt on Harris—and he felt sure she had some—would be ice cream atop the slice of pie he was ready to serve Jimmy. But Daisy, claiming a cold, hadn’t returned to the office since Siegfried’s amorous demise.

  What a bunch of weak sisters, thought Chip: Newman absent with his drunkard’s shattered nerves; Paulie out with the flu. But waiting for Jimmy made Chip feel like an invalid, too. By 3:30 he could take no more: he left the office and went across town to Penn Station to get a train for Long Island. Jimmy was now grand enough to be unlisted from the latest phone book, but once Hazel went out for lunch, Chip had found she still had his Garden City home address in her file box.

  He arrived in the fancy suburb as it was turning dark. Walking up Stewart Avenue past some huge mock-Tudor spreads, he figured Jimmy would trade up to one of these before long. For now, though, his future boss could be found in a modest frame house whose sidewalk Chip paced four or five times before deciding he’d get arrested for casing the joint if he couldn’t bring himself to ring the bell.

  “Well, hello!” cried Jimmy’s wife. “This is certainly the day for unexpected visitors!” She told him to come inside, where she was letting her sons spoil their supper with cookies and milk. Chip remembered her from two Christmas parties ago. Prettier than she should be; sweeter, too. She made him feel even more thwarted and angry.

  “He’s in his den,” she said, “behind that door on the right. I’ll let you take yourself in there, since my hands are full with these two.” She laughed, tilting her head in the direction of the noisy boys.

  Now that he was here, Chip didn’t care if he interrupted Jimmy clipping his toenails or talking to his bookie. He strode up to the door of this “den” and knocked twice. A moment later it was opened—by Paul Montgomery.

  “Welcome to dry land,” Jimmy called out from a chair at the far end of the room.

  Chip looked perplexed.

  “He means congratulations on deserting the sinking ship,” Paulie explained. “Guess we know what that makes us!”

  Chip wanted to bust him on the beezer. Why wasn’t he home sick in bed?

  Jimmy broke the silence. “And what are you selling, Brzezinski?”

  Unable to answer in front of a third party, Chip just looked at Paulie, who was wearing the suit he’d had made in London; all day Tuesday he’d been waving around that swatch of fabric, bragging.

  “We’re trying to decide,” said Jimmy, “whether I can run Montgomery’s article about getting his suit made if I cut Joe a check for his trip expenses. It’s a little unorthodox, but it might keep Oldcastle’s lawyers away.”

  “It’s your call, boss!” said Paulie.

  Chip finally spoke. “Oldcastle’s lawyers are going to have more than that to worry about!”

  “Right,” said Jimmy. “Joe’s payoffs.” He smiled over his part in their disclosure.

  “Payoffs nothing!” yelled Chip. “He’s now in on the biggest fraud since Aimee Semple faked her kidnapping!”

  Jimmy waited a minute, pretending to be unexcited. “Tell me more,” he then said.

  “Can I sit down?” asked Chip.

  “You can even have a drink,” said Jimmy.

  Chip declined, but he could feel those mere words welcoming him to the company of gentlemen. His future had finally stretched itself out like a red carpet.

  “This John Shepard business is a fake,” he said.

  Jimmy smiled again, but managed to keep his teeth hidden, as if they were his cards in the negotiation. He was going to make Chip earn it. “I’m listening,” was all he said.

  Without further interruption, Chip proceeded
, until his narrative had covered both Betty’s muttering about a “publicity stunt” and the “I invented Mrs. Shepard” remark from Stanwick to Spilkes.

  “So,” said Jimmy at last. “They’re going to try and ‘rescue’ the kid, like Tom Sawyer from the cave, to make readers believe the magazine would do the same for them, be their selfless friend in a cutthroat world.”

  “This is a disgrace!” opined Paulie. “Think of how Joe’s always priding himself on the ‘real journalism’ they run.”

  “Oh, shut up, Montgomery,” said Jimmy Gordon. “If this thing is a fake, it’s the best idea Joe’s had in six months.”

  “It’s pretty ingenious all right,” said Paulie.

  “But is it a fake?” Jimmy wondered, as he looked toward his bookshelves and tried to figure things out.

  “Of course it is!” shouted the Wood Chipper. Had he given away this bonanza for nothing? Was Jimmy going to say, Thanks, I’ll think about it, and just let him go back to the city?

  “Well,” said Jimmy. “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll set Mr. Montgomery to find out if it’s true or not. That’s your first assignment, Paulie, after the article about your suit. Expose the story behind Joe’s story.”

  Paulie gave him a thumbs-up.

  “What about me?” asked Chip, with more menace than he could conceal.

  “You’re going to hope like hell that Paulie succeeds,” said Jimmy. “If he finds out this story’s a phony, it’s the coup de grâce for poor old Joe. You’ll be a rat with a new ship—the jolly, bobbing Cutaway.”

  Chip’s expression turned so hopeful that he would have looked almost sympathetic to anyone seeing him.

  “And we won’t keep you in the hold,” promised Jimmy. “We’ll let you scurry right up the masthead—long tail, twitchy little snout, and everything.”

  “Welcome aboard!” cried Paulie.

  Chip smiled so wide he didn’t care if his two cracked molars showed. For the first time in eight hours he didn’t feel like hitting somebody.