The Hardboiled Mystery Megapack

by John Roeburt

  The face of Johnny Devereaux appeared on the Monitor’s screen, and simultaneously too, on some twenty-two million American screens, as estimated in the last audience survey.

  The Host wore a dark blue shirt to insure a better picture, a more subtle harmony of photographic light. The powder was thick on his forehead and on his opaque cheeks. There were round beads of sweat on the powder, like agates of light. He sat at a desk, in a setting that suggested a luxurious office, perhaps truly his own. There was a terra cotta figure of a leaping dancer in prominent arrangement on the desk. The objet d’art, somewhat mystifying to the studio personnel and to Johnny Devereaux, marked the difference between the set designer, Julian, and other men. Against the back wall were rows of books. Crime books, all of them; the precis of this quasi-documentary entertainment. The bookcases were plywood, and not the customary cardboard. A fixed property this, to be used every week. The show was popular, even great, and the happy augury was that it would outlast all others.

  The Host moved to a case and found a book. He was awkward, a stranger to his own feet, very nervous about the chalk marks on the floor below him. Coming back, he overstepped a chalk mark, and half of him was momentarily lost to the frame. He fixed a smile on his mouth, while his brow furled in stormy concentration. When he spoke, it was by rote, a mechanical and efforted talk utterly without the sincerity and syrup of the standard-brand Narrator. Here and there in the eighty-odd word narration that advertised the promise of this evening’s tale of blood, greed, and the Furies, Devereaux paused, fumbling, and his eyes were frantic as they consulted the giant script on the off-stage cue cards.

  The heraldry done, there was a screen dissolve, and the Number Two camera filled the screen with a medium close shot of a man of prodigious amiability. He was holding a bottle in his hand. His eyes were lighted and his voice fervent, and for sixty seconds now the frame was a tabernacle, and the bromide in his hand was God’s Own Remedy for aches and pains, any and all.

  The amiability over, the drama unfolded. It was a brooding tale, part authentic, and the most taken from the Scripter’s imaginary file. The story was a compote of larceny and little people, a small misdeed that inexorably pushed its perpetrator into the greatest of all crimes. An ironic surprise in the O. Henry manner closed the story. After an appropriate musical comment taken from the Peer Gynt Suite, Johnny Devereaux returned on-screen for a didactic minute that pointed up the moral of this and every story, to wit: Crime Does Not Pay. This done, the man of prodigious amiability came back, looking even rosier than before, and with an even greater piety.

  Soon a red button flashed the half-hour on the big clock. The show was now in limbo; a cadaver ready for critical dissection by the Agency Men. A burst of grips and electricians spilled onto the studio floor, to dismantle the sets, inventory and store the props. The actors hurried to the dressing rooms. Up in the Control Room, the tired technical crew and Director moved somnambulistically, like men who found creation akin to nightmare. In a back row of guest chairs, two Account Men looked significantly to each other, in the sign talk of espionage.

  On an end chair, a guest who looked alien to it all was groaning back into his shoes. He had one foot aloft indecorously, exposing a great toe through a hole in his sock. This man was moon-faced, with thin, long strands of white hair that threaded over a glossy bald dome and pressed into the nape of his neck. He was Sam Solowey, of the Solowey Detective Agency. An amused Solowey, as his expression showed; the indulgent elder who had given thirty minutes to the carnival antics of children.

  His feet encased again, Solowey started for the winding steel staircase that led to the lower studio floor and Devereaux’s dressing room. But he changed his mind before the steep descent. He could abide Devereaux the cop, the tough cop. But Devereaux the actor, the wroth actor chafing in the thralldom of grease paint, make-believe and nostrums, was too much of a tax. An hour with this new Devereaux was an annihilation.

  Solowey hurried across the floor to the elevator.

  Part 2.

  She was at his side, across the wide floor, weaving through the pack, matching his great steps. In the labyrinth where the dressing rooms were, he felt her fingers in his arm. They were urgent in his flesh, and Devereaux didn’t have to guess their message. Help, the fingers were a cry for help. Through the sixteen network weeks, the Crime File series up to now, this actress had sought to engage him as Devereaux the cop.

  She was stuffed into corsets, big-bosomed and top-heavy, splashed with paint, a dowdy demimonde. But this was only stage illusion; the make-up she still wore from the character role just completed. Nina Troy was a lady with a figure more in womanly balance, perhaps thirty, with the chaste appeal that stings men into egotism and exhibition. Devereaux knew; he’d many times watched Nina Troy and roving males, in the Artist Lounge, in theatrical cafes. And he’d thought of her for himself, in his lonely corner; a cocktail and laughing talk. But there never was laughter in her look at him, never the promise of casual moments and the relaxed man-woman raillery between colleagues in a profession. Always only this seeking need of him, the fingers in his arm. He was always Devereaux the cop to Nina Troy, he told himself irritably. A faceless automaton, a police badge, and a legend.

  He freed his arm, not gently, then paused, grasping the knob of his dressing room door to look squarely at her. He imagined her ghostly behind the bright paint; he saw the constriction in her throat, the dark hells in her eyes. He stared hard and long, and the world careened to a grinding halt. He was going back in time, to a time ago that was only yesterday. The face turned up to him, and the begging eyes, was someone else. A younger face, sensitively etched and incomparable. The face of Jennifer Phillips.

  * * * *

  It had begun like this, like now, the grave still in his heart. The girl, and the outcry. Help me, Johnny Devereaux; you, only you. Only Johnny Devereaux, tough cop, great man of legend.

  Devereaux pressed his lips tightly. The reminiscence made him sick, he was sick with it. Great Man of Legend! The legend of his twenty years as a policeman was his trap. He was victim to his own legend. The pulsing beauty of Jennifer Phillips, the outcry and the open countenance, but behind it and beneath it, the cancer eating her away, transmuting her into something gross, and chicane, and murderous. His emotions had been caught, and his heart too in the web. But in the end, in the end revelation, he had remained a cop, a tough cop. He had survived his own death, that more than one death, and had remained a cop. He had turned his back to Jennifer Phillips, and walked away. He had left her poised on the edge of the world, and walked straight away.

  Sixteen stories to the ground, and a spiked iron railing in the Pit. I see her now, in my mind’s eye. I see her impaled on the iron railing spikes.

  * * * *

  Devereaux’s look narrowed. A remembered situation this, so poignantly remembered. Tough Cop and Cavalier; the congenital male grateful for the touch of feminine fingers, fashioning his own crown of thorns. It could happen again to a lonely bachelor in his forties, a man of gland and muscle, yet unloved, celibate. The feel of his flesh could close his eyes. He could be mobilized as a strong man, but made the dupe. Told half-truths that covered motive, used, and jackassed. Women were enigmas to him, their viewpoint elusive, and their reality. They were an ideal to him, perhaps too much. He could not see them finally as beings, only human, touched with sin, and folly, and frailty.

  The image of Nina Troy, washed and in her own clothes, on the arm of an escort in the lounges and the cafes, flitted before him again. Svelte, with a body that had found its true season, and a curve to her mouth. Devereaux nodded to himself. He could be made the fool, even again. The situation was the same as that earlier one, and worse luck, the outcome could be too! The apprehension made him shiver. Where was wisdom and insight, he wondered, and the leaven of experience, when a man took sum only of a face and a figure, and his own melancholia.

  He opened the door to his dressing room, and regarded Nina Troy for a solemn m
oment. Then a slow smile played on his mouth. It was something less than fellowship, but Nina Troy warmed to it.

  “I’m terribly sorry to be such a pest,” she said.

  Devereaux said quietly, “Devereaux the cop. Maybe all this time your approach was wrong, Nina.”

  She didn’t understand it. It had no meaning on its face, and anyhow her mind was stunned by its own burden.

  She said, “An idea takes hold of you, and it grows crazily.”

  Devereaux said presciently, “Your idea that in the whole world, I was the fellow to tell it to.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Only you. I became obsessed with it. I couldn’t help embarrassing you, as I have.” Her look seemed genuine to Devereaux. “It is something you radiate, Mr. Devereaux. No, not Mr. Devereaux. Johnny. A force, a sureness.”

  “I’ve got keys to the Riddle of the Universe.”

  The irony was lost on her. “Concerning you tonight, so shamelessly, I couldn’t help myself. I tried to, but I just couldn’t. My fear; I’m so frightened!”

  Devereaux said, “Not now. Not here. Let’s first get out of the make-up.” He smiled. “The way we look, I’ll get it all confused with fiction. Especially with an actress of your talents.”

  She smiled to this, and then said self-consciously, “Don’t think me the fool. I’m not always so foolish, so compelled.”

  Devereaux said, “A highball and sandwiches, after we’re dressed. I know a lonely corner. I’ve got a lease on it.”

  It made no sense to her. Her thoughts were on one track, racing with a speed that already wearied Devereaux. Talk, in a leaping torrent, was the tableau for the evening ahead. Her talk, self-centered, and woeful; he would only be the instrument, the acoustics. A moody tale told to Devereaux the cop. Devereaux the man would still be in his lonely corner, munching his sandwich and sipping his drink, utterly alone.

  He watched her hurry down the corridor to her dressing room. Her walk had grace, and poetry—or was it only the mote in his eye, he wondered.

  * * * *

  Inside his room, he grimaced into a square mirror set with electric bulbs. The face grimacing back was a paste of sweat and powder. The eyes were abnormally deep and gutted; an effect wrought by the shadows painted on for maximum picture quality.

  Devereaux glowered at himself. Eye shadow and powder, public self-caricature and odium—at one thousand dollars a week. He disliked the work, despised it in fact, but the money held him. It was the horn of plenty for a detective, first-grade, now retired. It was insurance against wind and drought and old age, and the open sesame to a life he coveted. Books, and travel, white sands, and infinity. And the time also, long postponed, when he could leisurely read Tolstoi’s War and Peace. A whimsical notion, but the symbol of his self-dissatisfaction. He’d abandoned the book at twenty, with a vow one day to resume with it. Between then and now, bulked a busy quarter-century of detectiving.

  Devereaux sighed and filled his fingers with cold cream. He looked at his reflection again, before applying the cream, and had a sadistic moment with himself.

  Eye shadow and powder, he was thinking. And pristine bachelorhood. How much more did it need to complete his emasculation!

  He threw the blob of cold cream at his image, and watched it slide down his cheeks to his chin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Part 1.

  Devereaux sat in his lonely corner. There was talk, in a relentless assault, that gave him the sensations of the whiplash. He heard her, but his mind was slow to it. He heard her, substantially enough, but with a Third Ear, in an analytical inspection of the welter.

  Her story, in its substance, sounded improbable, counterfeit, too glib; a piece of fakery nicely fabricated by a supreme actress. Or was he allowing his own abiding skepticism to get in the way, Devereaux wondered.

  He stared at her. The actress paint was gone; she wore her own face. There was beauty of a kind, in the small hollows of cheek, the tight clear skin, the wide brow and the large eyes. The social make-up that he could see, wasn’t much. Lip rouge, a thin trifle only, a trace of powder, and no more. A shade austere, even to a detective who liked naturalism in women. She looked colorless to his eye; there were no facial artifices to bemuse him in this hour of sound and travail. Even her dress slighted him, slighted Devereaux the man. It was severe at the neck, unfeminine in its fall, and drab in color. He’d seen her other times, here in this same café, in more vivid decoration.

  She said, “Not for myself. I’m anxious for my son. It’s for him, his future. His pride and self-respect, Johnny. I don’t want him hurt!”

  It was a summary to all her talk, and by her persuasion, the nub of it all. This last was said believably, with a correct measure of emotion. The Mother holding her child in innocence and in close shelter. Suffer the blow, but not one hair of my boy’s head!

  Devereaux looked at her. There was a flame in her eyes now; the fear was gone. The mouth and jaw had a faintly comical set to them. But her self-characterization had sudden solidity, and the figure captured Devereaux. She was the great lady in bronze, the Mother of Sons, with a great belly and breasts and giant thighs. She stood majestically on a high pedestal, high over the head of Man, in a Museum. On a buttock, like a brand, was the sculptor’s name, Lachaise.

  Now it was Devereaux’s time to talk. He began tentatively, with only incidental point. Later, the core of her problem. Right now it awed him, for its size, and for its impact on him. And for its portent too.

  “About your son,” the detective said.

  “His name is Barry. He’s five. And sweet!”

  “Where is he now?” Devereaux asked.

  “Away. In boarding school. In Wilton, Connecticut.” There was stress in her tone, and she added, “Home’s the place, I know. With me. For his needs, his great needs. But it’s a fine school, the very best. A progressive curriculum, teachers with understanding.”

  Devereaux smiled. “You don’t really need to justify…”

  Her gaze was level, and her eyes were dry. “There are costs, and I work to meet them. Plays, rehearsal time—I’m on roller skates. I do TV, and I also have a running part in a radio soap opera. Living with me, Barry’d have no life; so very little of me, of my time. He’d hate it; he’d be bored. But I have a sense of guilt nevertheless. The awful separation!” Her eyes moistened just a little. “I visit Sundays. I try to make the one day do for seven.”

  “It’s rough, I can understand,” Devereaux said, settling closer to her problem. “I think I’ve got the picture; what eats you.”

  “Destroys me, Johnny!”

  Devereaux nodded. “Your son’s legitimacy. The question of how legal was your marriage.”

  “My son’s legitimacy. I only care about that.”

  “They go together,” the detective smiled. “If your marriage can be proved, then…”

  “Oh, of course,” she said. “I’m a ninny. Prove the marriage, and there can be no question!”

  Devereaux thought for a while. “You have the marriage certificate?”

  She nodded and then said impressively, “Locked away. In my safety box.”

  “I’ll want it,” Devereaux said.

  A waiter came over to dally aimlessly for a moment. The toasted chicken sandwiches were uneaten, and the drinks were high in the glasses.

  Devereaux said, “Another round of the same.” The waiter showed a small perplexity, and then went off with a look that said he was long inured to eccentrics.

  The detective’s tone was solemn, as if more nearly oriented to the crisis that now engaged them mutually. A marriage in question, questionable legitimacy of a boy-child, and a missing father. A marriage done in haste, shadowed by certain ceremonial improprieties, and now threatening to stigmatize a child. Stigmatize the Mother too, Devereaux reflected. A bastard child…then an unwed Mother.

  Devereaux said, “This job of finding the man you married. It’s nothing simple, Nina. It’s been tried before.”

  “I know,” she s
aid in a lost voice. “I know, Johnny.”

  “The Tiger Man.” Now the detective was distant, his mind hard on details that had not been told in Nina’s story. The Tiger Man, Rocky Star, was a thorny police problem of long standing. A police problem in Metropolitan New York, and in the world around. A champion pugilist, at the pinnacle of fame, and vanished from sight. A total disappearance, as if The Tiger Man had blown away into the atmosphere. A fevered police search, but no eventuality, or even a clue. Case unsolved; and then the acrimony of the press, and the barbs of the consecrated who had idolatrized their champion.

  A shadow crossed Devereaux’s face. The memory had dimmed, and the file had fallen into dust, but the sense memory was even now acute. Never his assignment or case, yet the blow to police morale had cost him too. Every success of the Department, and every failure, had been his sun and frost, and his only life.

  His gaze fixed on Nina again, in the great preoccupation of a clairvoyant wishing into a deeper dimension than ordinary surface. Find The Tiger Man, was what she wanted of him. Find a man who could not be found; this wraith in the Universe, this man of mist. Find The Tiger Man; do the impossible!

  Devereaux returned to the things she had told him. They were assembled in his mind now, in orderly catalogue. He could remark on them.

  “I have a predecessor, you said.” There was a slight curve to the detective’s mouth. “Your champion before my conscription tonight. I didn’t get his name?”

  “Brett Carter. Brett’s a friend, a good friend.”

  “He was mysteriously beaten, you said.”

  She nodded gloomily. “Last night. Morning, I mean—4:00 A.M.” The fear was back in her eyes. “What happened to Brett was on my account. Brett swears no, that he has any number of personal enemies, but I know the brutality was on my account! For what he was attempting to do for me.”