by John Roeburt
Outside, a weak sun struggled with the cold February air and pale, harried subway folk were being disgorged by the kiosks onto the chilly sidewalks. I walked east.
The building in which Ken lived was a couple of blocks north of the Waldorf Astoria. A liveried doorman admitted me with a patronizing smirk which said my trench-coat and hatless head rated the front entrance only by a whisker or because the old lady had fixed him a good breakfast that morning.
The sixth-floor hallway sported an ankle-deep carpet of green and paler green walls and a green-tinted ceiling. It was like swimming in the Gulf Stream, except that the doors were starkly white. No. 602 belonged to Kenneth Chase.
But Mrs. Kenneth Chase answered the door.
“Jason,” she said.
I couldn’t shut my mouth, either. She’d hardly changed at all, not unless you counted the faint, disillusioned lines etched on either side of her mouth. She was a small brunette, round enough so you’d want to reach out and touch but not so much that you’d call her plump. Her hair was pulled back in a long bob and the wide eyes were dark brown and enormous and looked completely without guile, but she could out-guile Lucrezia Borgia if she set her mind to it. She wore a peignoir which seemed to be made of countless layers of tinted smoke, and a lot of men seeing her like that would wish for a stiff wind.
“Come on in, Jason. Ken’s already left for the office.”
“I wanted to see him.”
“Well, have one drink with me, for old time’s sake?”
“It’s nine o’clock,” I said. “In the morning.”
Julia grinned. “Coffee, then,” she said.
She gave me barely enough room to walk by her, my elbow stirring the smoky peignoir. She smelled of musky perfume and whisky. She closed the door behind her and leaned against it, grinning at me. She didn’t have a load on, but she was well under way. I wondered how she’d be by cocktail time.
“Let me look at you, Jason.”
I removed my trenchcoat. “How’s your sister?”
“Stephanie? Oh, all right, I guess. I don’t see too much of her.”
“Julia, I ought to go down to Ken’s office.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter. Don’t you have a maid or something?”
“Quit last week. Good ones are hard to find. Something bothering you, Jason?”
“Nope.”
“I can tell.”
“Well, Julia,” I said, “What the hell do you think? I went off to jail to earn us a hundred thousand, so you married the guy. My brother.”
Julia smiled and sat down on a sofa which was squat Chinese Modern and expensive. “I’m glad you still feel that way about me.”
“I don’t feel any damn way at all about you.”
Julia trickled three ounces of whisky from a decanter on the cocktail table into a water tumbler and drank it like tea. When I had known her, she would take an occasional nip, that was all. “Sit down, Jason. I’ll get the coffee.”
“I just had some. Julia, I ought to—”
“Be going now? Jason, I believe you’re afraid.”
So I snorted and plopped down next to her on the Chinese Modern, crossing my legs primly. Suddenly Julia’s arms looked for and found each other behind my back and Julia’s face floated toward mine, the lips wet and slack and very red, and Julia’s voice scratched out “Jason Jason Jason” on a broken record.
She is going to kiss me, I thought, and this was one hell of a note, my sister-in-law. But she didn’t make it. Instead, she started to cry, not like Jo-Anne after she had found Phyllis’ body, but loud and blubbery and drizzling tears on my shoulder.
“It was a mistake, Jason,” she blubbered. “A stupid mistake. I should have waited, I should have realized Ken would be like that, wanting me only because you already had me. He doesn’t love me at all—he couldn’t love anyone but himself, ever, except as part of himself like his feet or his hands.”
“Hey, take it easy,” I said. “I don’t want to hear this—”
“You were no good for me, he said. You were shiftless. He took you in and gave you a job or you’d still be wandering. You didn’t take any rap for him, like you told me. It was all your own fault, everything. You were no good. First he took me out just to cheer me up, then more, then every night, and he kept on lying and I’m weak, Jason.” Still crying, still drunk, she shrugged her white arms and fleshy smooth shoulders and stood up, the peignoir parting and partially falling from her creamy body.
Maybe it was in my eyes, the way I felt, the way I couldn’t help staring at her as if she were something not entirely clean, although beautiful. She whirled and let herself fall to the sofa, shaking with sobs. “He doesn’t love me,” she said. “He doesn’t even make love to me now, Jason. I’m human. I’m a woman. He’s unfaithful. He flaunts it and says why don’t you get a divorce? But Pop won’t take me back home…and I have no other place to go.”
I stood up and put on my trenchcoat. I wanted to scrub myself with wire brushes. I said, “Why won’t he take you back?”
“Me? Because I loved a convict—and married a convict’s brother.”
“Is that the whole of it? Or does Pop recognize what you are? Tell me, have you stuck to your own vows?”
“Jason, I wanted to wait for you. Oh, I did want…”
“I mean your marriage vows.”
“You’re taking his side. Come here and touch me, Jason. That’s all I ask. Just touch me, and then say what you want.” She rolled over and propped herself up on one elbow, the peignoir clutched in a white-knuckled fist in front of her breasts.
Hell, she’d twisted the knife in me while I was behind bars. I turned and headed for the door.
Chapter Four
“I want to see Mr. Chase,” I told the receptionist half an hour later. I didn’t recognize her, nor any of the other employees in the outer office of Chase Construction and Management Corporation. Apparently Ken had made a complete housecleaning after the D.A. had settled for the younger of the two Chase brothers.
“Have you an appointment?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I made it more than two years ago.”
Brown eyes widened. “Would that be Jason Chase, sir?”
“You’ve got it,” I admitted, then watched her flick the intercom nervously.
“It’s your brother!” she cried. “I mean, Mr. Jason Chase to see you, sir.”
I’ll grant him this—he didn’t make me cool my heels. A moment later I took a deep breath and opened the door marked KENNETH LAMAR CHASE, President.
Ken is big, my height or a little taller. You’d call him self-indulgently handsome, with a look of slight, socially acceptable dissipation in the eyes and around the petulant, down-drooping mouth. His hair is gray at the temples but otherwise black as my own.
He came around the big oak desk in a hurry, favoring his game leg with more of a limp than was necessary, his face thawing slowly into a big smile which exploded into booming laughter when he reached me. He whacked my back soundly with a slab of a hand. “Jason, boy!” he said, still booming, “Let me look. There, hold it. Stand back. The same. The very same boy, my brother. It almost makes me want to cry.”
The first and last time I had seen Ken cry was twenty years before in Vermont—when he had been fifteen and I had been ten. The snow had come down that day clean and white, not dirty gray like in the city, mantling the mountains with a dazzling, sun-brilliant cloak by midafternoon. Ken had stood at the top of the slope, anxious on his skis, leaning forward and bending at the knees as we’d been taught. “Track,” he hollered, and “track, here I come!”
Then came one of those crazy impulses which sometimes strike a ten-year-old boy and make him uniquely dangerous. I’d reached out with both hands and shoved against Ken’s bright plaid mackinaw and yelled, “Look out below!” and then, horrified, watched Ken tumble down the long steep slope, skis twisting and spinning like the spokes of a wheel, kicking up a great spr
ay of white snow as he rolled and furrowed and fell down-slope. He wailed all the way down and was still wailing when I reached him.
The doctors did what they could, but he’d had a nasty double compound fracture of the right leg, the bones jutting through his blue ski-togs so white and sharp I got ill and threw up. He walked with a limp after that and I used to carry his books to school, and fight his fights for him, and bring him things when he wanted, them—like hot drinks in bed even long after he had got well. I must have looked so mournful when it happened, our folks hadn’t even touched me or scolded me or anything. Sometimes I used to wish they’d whaled the tar out of me, so I wouldn’t have to go on expiating all the rest of my life.
“Hello, Ken,” I said now, bringing myself back to the office. “I came to see you.” Of course I came to see him. It didn’t have to be said. Ken always made me self-conscious and unsure of myself.
“Will you use the money to go into competition with me, Jase boy? Construction could stand some young blood. Shot in the arm, you know.”
“No. I came to see you about that. The money.”
“No mix-up, is there? I—”
“Uh-uh. I got it. I don’t want it.” Those were the words, four of them. Take the rap for him and lose two years and accept no payment so maybe you can even things out some and put the shoe on the other foot. I didn’t feel good saying it, though. Indifferent.
Ken thumped my back again and ran his tongue around the first layer of a cigar before he poked it into his mouth and set fire to it. “Always the joker,” he said.
“Not any more. Not in twenty years.” I’d learned about jokes. So had Jo-Anne, I thought sadly. Back at school I had kept trying to tell her, warn her.
Ken was talking. “What then? Isn’t it enough?”
“Plenty.”
“Julia? You’re bitter about Julia?”
I shook my head.
“You agreed to take the money then, Jason. Two years ago.”
“I grew up.” I pulled the check from my pocket and tore it without looking at it, letting the pieces flutter to the floor and scatter there.
“I don’t consider this final,” Ken told me. “I’ll write another any time you say. I am sorry about Julia, Jason. One of those things.”
“You should be sorry.”
“She knew what she was doing. She made up her own mind—”
“Oh, hell, come off it,” I said. “I’m not talking about that. I mean Julia herself. You ought to divorce her, if that’s what she wants.”
“She doesn’t want. Not really. You saw her, Jason?”
“Ken, you haven’t changed at all. But Julia. Julia’s changed.”
“I’ll admit she’s a candy-eater and has put on a few pounds, but…”
“I’m not talking about that.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She didn’t have to say a word.”
“That she was unfaithful, perhaps? That I love her as much as when I married her a year ago, but she went to bed with another man who’d planned the whole thing and got pictures and is blackmailing us now? Did she tell you that?”
More blackmail? “No,” I said. “She didn’t tell me.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you either, Jason. I shouldn’t bother you. You’re all mixed up. You’ve got your own problems.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Well, there are two sides. If he’d stop bothering us, though, I’m sure everything would be all right again. Everything would be fine.” Ken rolled smoke around in his mouth and stared at the glowing tip of his cigar. “I shouldn’t tell you all this.”
“What’s his price?”
“Whatever he needs. It changes. It never stops. I’ve got to pay him, Jason. The scandal. The disgrace. I have a private detective on it, but…” Ken suddenly slapped the desk with a broad palm. “Tell me, Jason. Now that you’re out, what are you going to do?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Then come to work for me.”
“You can shove it,” I said.
“Now wait a minute. I don’t mean for the construction company. You’ve had enough and I don’t blame yon. I mean that you could work on this thing, this awful shakedown ruining Julia and me. Put the fear of God into him, Jason. You’re big and strong. You’re no cripple.” Ken limped around the desk and sat down. The heel of his right shoe was built up to support a twisted leg.
“You mentioned a private detective,” I said.
“It’s not personal with him,” Ken pleaded. “He acts strictly within the law. It’s just another fee to him. But you—I mean, you could get those negatives for me if anyone could.”
“I’m a convict,” I said. I was thinking of Pop Grujdzak. “If I sneeze in the subway they’ll get me for spitting.”
“Blackmail is illegal, don’t forget. He won’t go crying to the cops.”
“Who is he?”
“Then you’ll do it?”
“I’m just asking.”
“His name is Wompler, Wilson Wompler. A publisher of magazines. Girlie-sheets, I believe. You know, Giggle and Vamp and those things for perverts. You’ll do it?”
“I don’t know. I want you to understand this, though. We’re even, Ken. Finally even. Your leg, my two years. If I do it, it’s a favor. Understand?”
“Anything you say.”
“Good,” I told him. I looked down at the torn pink scraps on the floor. “Better get rid of that garbage.”
* * * *
Ten minutes later I was downstairs in a drugstore, making myself at home in the phone booth. The information operator gave me Coleman Kincaid’s number in Putnam County and it was Jo-Anne who answered the phone. The Putnam County sheriff was allowing plain-clothesmen from New York to guard the Kincaids and Jo-Anne around the clock. She didn’t know if she’d do anything foolish or not. It depended on what I meant by foolish. I didn’t like the way she said that and figured she’d stay under lock and key only so long. I could call the number Phyllis Kirk had scrawled on the last page of the Kincaid papers and try to beat Jo-Anne to the punch, though.
Except that I had another call to make first. To a certain Guido Isaac. A runt who’d have trouble making five-five in elevator shoes. He’d been a kind of fringe figure, half-participant, half-spectator, in the heyday of the rackets, and had since and more recently been tempered by taxpayer justice up the river. One inmate there had found Guido Isaac a convenient outlet for suppressed aggressions, until one day I took the guy’s side and knocked said inmate’s teeth in. After that, Guido had sworn there was no favor he wouldn’t do me, especially since I spent a few days in solitary for my ruckus. So now he was out and I was out, and I was thinking maybe he could help me after all.
“Hey, Guido,” I said. “You’ll never guess.”
His voice almost jumped through the phone at me. “Jason! But you don’t have to check. Like I told you, I’m going honest. Don’t you worry.”
“You’re okay,” I said. “But Guido. There’s something. A guy named Wilson Wompler. Right. Find out about him. If he’s been in numbers or the rackets or anything, I want to know.”
Chirped Guido Isaac, “My pleasure.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll call you in a day or so, then we’ll get together for a beer.”
Call three was that Plaza number. I dialed it and scowled back through the dirty glass at the middle-aged woman who threatened to burst her corset stays with impatience while she waited for the phone. It buzzed twice in my ear and a sing-song voice sang, “Good afternoon. Wompler Publications.”
“Which publications?” I gasped.
“Wompler Publications,” she sang again.
“That wouldn’t be Wilson Wompler?”
“Giggle, Vamp, Peek-a-boo, Keyhole and America’s newest expose magazine, Hush. Wilson Wompler, publisher. Whom did you wish to speak to?”
I asked her where they were located and got the answer and hung up. I sat there staring at the phone unt
il the middle-aged woman began to rap on the glass with her knuckles. Wilson Wompler was blackmailing my brother Ken because, allegedly, Wilson Wompler had gone to bed with Ken’s wife and could prove it. It was Wilson Wompler’s business phone number which Phyllis Kirk had written down some time before she had been murdered. Coincidence? Probably, although it meant Mr. Wompler had his thumb up to the elbow in a couple of dirty pies. It looked as though the long arm of coincidence, if such it was, was driving me closer to Mr. Wilson Wompler with every breath I took.
“Sorry, lady,” I told the middle-aged woman as I accordioned the booth door toward me and stood up.
This Mr. Wompler I’d have to see.
Chapter Five
Wompler’s office was located east of Broadway on 44th Street. Loft space vied with dingy office suites in a ten-story structure which could use a sand-blasting on the outside and a lot else on the inside. The lobby was only a waiting room for the elevator, which had one of those old grille gates and an ancient operator with psoriasis or some nameless disease disfiguring his face. “Wompler,” I said and we were on our creaky way up.
I went left down a peeling hallway to a double smoked-glass door which bore the legend Wompler Publications and under it a list of cheesecake magazines with only HUSH in capital letters.
The inside surprised me. Like Chippendale furniture in a tenement on Double Fifth Avenue, or lace curtains on the window of a garage. There were good reproductions of Utrillo and Matisse on the walls and a mobile hanging from the ceiling and amorphous amoebas of carpet on the floor, each supporting a modern furniture grouping in the large waiting room. And there was a receptionist who looked as if she’d stepped right off one of Wompler’s magazine covers.
“I don’t have an appointment,” I told her, “but I think Mr. Wompler will see me. The name is Chase.”
Smiling at me, the receptionist leaned forward to display more cleavage than the Breen Office considers digestible for the great twelve-year-old audience, plugged a line on her monitor board and announced me. A moment later she said, “Mr. Wompler is shooting a story now, sir. Set Five. He says for you to go right in.”
