by John Roeburt
“They ought to take pictures of you,” I said. It seemed the proper thing.
“Oh, they do, sir, all the time.”
And then I was across the reception room and pushing inside through a swinging door upon which the shadow of the mobile was cast, its darts and cones and cylinders spinning slowly in an unfelt wind.
* * * *
It was bedlam. Shirt-sleeved men sprinted back and forth shouting instructions. Strobe lights glared briefly, stark white, then faded. Wall partitions were being wheeled back and forth across the huge barn of a room, squeaking and teetering. But in the confusion you could see that each impermanent set had three walls and usually one or more female occupants.
Minsky would have given his eye teeth for all this pulchritude but I felt like a man who’d been struggling for ten days through desert sands, crying for water—and suddenly found himself inundated by a tidal wave. There was blonde hair, red hair, brown hair and black. Big girls, small girl, in-between girls. Girls wearing towels, bikini suits, spangles and G-strings, open vests, shorts or leotards. There were bosoms almost bare and bosoms barely supported and bosoms supported not at all but barely covered, sort of. There were curving thighs and sandaled feet and feet on spike heels and in hip-high leather boots. Altogether, square miles of posturing flesh.
Two chesty females in costumes mama never would have approved were staging a hair-pulling match before the camera on Set One. A dame in chains and a loose vest and not much else stared at the camera on Set Two, cringing before a background of minarets and towers painted on paper walls. Set Three was a studio beach, but the two girls thereon wore snips of cloth which bore the same relationship to the bikini bathing suit that the bikini bears to what grandmother wore on her trip to Atlantic City. A lone male model, apparently somewhat bewildered and wearing a tattered French Foreign Legion costume, was surrounded by a harem on Set Four.
Set Five was a boxing ring or wrestling ring, as the occasion demanded. Right now a tall and well-put-together representative of the fair sex, her skin oiled to look sweaty, was astride an unhappy-looking little man and in the process of spread-eagling him and pinning him to the canvas. The camera man darted in close and squawked, “More chest, more chest,” then scrambled back to his camera. Strobes glared, the camera clicked, the strobes faded. Someone flung a large towel in the oily amazon’s direction as she leaped to her feet and soon she was busy scrubbing the grease from her body.
The little man stood up, looking happy now. He supplemented his shorts and sneakers with a satin robe and smiled at me. “Nice, hey? Some set-up. Nice.”
“What do you do when the postal inspectors come around?” I said.
“Oh, God,” he cried. “Don’t tell me you’re a new inspector?”
“Nope. The name’s Jason Chase and I’m looking for Mr. Wompler.”
“I’m Wompler, but there’s some mistake here. When the girl said Chase…”
“You were expecting my brother, Ken.”
“You’re his brother? Well, now. His brother.” Wompler was about five-six and a hundred-thirty pounds sopping wet, but if the gals still go for the ectomorphic type, he was handsome. He had wavy brown hair which he was busy combing now, wide-spaced eyes, gaunt cheeks and a lower lip currently on the verge of a pout.
“It’s about Ken’s wife,” I said.
“I’ll bet you’re wondering, hey?”
“Why should I wonder?”
“I mean, me modeling. The model didn’t show up, the male model. Had to take his place, like in the old days before we had a big studio. Audrey, come here.”
The amazon ambled in our direction like a female John Wayne, hitching up her abbreviated shorts self-consciously. She was my height, which is an even six feet, with long tawny hair hanging down to her shoulders but in need of a brushing at the moment. She had muscles across her shoulders and on her arms and thickening her long thighs like a strenuous ballet dancer’s, but her face seemed almost demure. Nature had endowed her for this occupation but I guessed she’d rather model lingerie.
“Audrey,” Wompler said, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Jason Chase.”
“How do you do?” said Audrey in a small voice, offering me a large limp hand.
“Audrey here used to be a lady grappler until she found she could make good money modeling as a lady grappler but not really grappling.”
Audrey blushed a furious scarlet. “It was a living,” she said.
“But she was afraid it would ruin her face, so she came here,” Wompler told me, then declared abruptly, “Ours is an audience of the frustrated and neurotic. Wompler Publications caters to all kinds of screwballs. But don’t think all we do is this junk. Hush is different.”
“Sure,” I said.
“We tell the truth in Hush! Hence the name, see? It’s uncensored. We’re shooting for a million paid circulation with that one. As soon as we hit it, I’m going to sell all the cheesecake books and go classy. Office on Fifth Avenue, with plush carpets. No modeled pictures but the real thing, politics and nudists and socialites and subversives. You get the idea?”
“Hush,” I said.
“You got it.”
“About Ken’s wife,” I said. “I was wondering if we could talk somewhere.”
“I got an office back here.”
Wompler led the way and I heard Audrey padding after us in her sneakers like Mary’s little lamb.
I followed Wompler into an office which contained a desk and two chairs. Audrey stood until I offered her my chair. She smiled so hard I thought she’d spit out all her teeth.
“Now then,” Wompler said. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s not for me. Can I talk?”
“Audrey, you mean? You can talk. My right arm, Mr. Chase.”
“Listen, Wompler. My brother Ken went along with you because he had no choice. But there’s a limit. You keep jacking up the ante with no end in sight.”
“We all must have our little joke,” Wompler told me and grinned. Audrey grinned in sympathy. I didn’t. “Exactly what do you want, Mr. Chase?”
“The negative. And all the prints.”
Wompler considered this and shrugged. “Are you kidding?”
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be in town, Wompler. It depends. But while I’m here I’ll have nothing to do but make things uncomfortable for you. Every hour. Every day. Unless you come across.” I kept telling myself I wasn’t very good at this sort of thing. It was the most feeble kind of bluff. It was bluff of the laughter-producing and throw-that-bum-out-of-here variety.
“Why didn’t you say so?” Wompler asked me. “Why didn’t you say you wanted it stopped? The blackmail.” He shrugged again. “So I’ll stop. You got any other problems?”
I studied him and saw nothing. I stared at Li’l Audrey. “The negative,” I said.
But Wompler shook his head. “Oh, no. We’ll let your brother Ken take care of that. I want to know I get out of this cleanly. You understand?”
It was reasonable. It was so reasonable it made absolutely no sense at all. I nodded and said, “I’ll tell Ken.” Wompler stood up and we shook hands. He offered me a cigarette and lit up for himself and Audrey. “Care to look through some of our sheets before you go, Mr. Chase?”
“There’s something else.”
“So I’m listening.”
“What was your business with a girl named Phyllis Kirk?”
“Oh, God,” said Wompler. “Don’t tell me you too? Half the cops in New York saw me about Miss Kirk this morning. The lady wants to do a story for Hush, so sure I’m interested. She calls me once or twice and makes an appointment to come up here and see me. This morning she’s supposed to come. But the cops get here instead and tell me last night she was murdered.”
Audrey smoked her cigarette daintily and just looked at us.
“What kind of story was she going to do?”
“It’s a tragedy,” Wompler told me. “I mean, her dying like this. It was the kind of
story could jack circulation up over a million with a little luck. You know, wrap a band around the magazine with big letters—The Truth Behind The Kincaid Investigations! She could write it too, that girl. You know what she did for a living? She worked for this professor, this Coleman Kincaid at the University.”
“She said she’d write the story for you?”
“She said if the price was right.”
“What did you offer her?”
“I’m not sure I should…”
“If the police know,” I lied, “I’ll know.”
“One thousand dollars.”
“She agreed?”
“She said she wanted to talk about it. I said fine.”
“I guess you know the Kincaid papers are loose,” I said.
“Loose?”
“Stolen. Why she was killed, Wompler.”
Wompler appraised me with suddenly shrewd eyes, curtained behind wisps of cigarette smoke in the still air of the office. He started to say something, then changed his mind and waited for me to continue. Audrey just watched and waited. You could hear the sounds of the models and cameramen outside, the frenzied noise behind the cheesecake pictures.
“Only trouble is,” I said, “they’re useless to whoever took them. They’re coded, did you know that? You’ve got to know the code to understand the papers.”
“Where do you fit in all this?” Wompler asked.
“I happen to know the code,” I said. Naturally, it was a lie. Jo-Ann knew the code, and Dr. Kincaid. No other living person. But Jo-Anne’s conscience would be itching to do something if the police didn’t find Phyllis Kirk’s killer soon. I didn’t know how Wompler figured in the set-up if at all, but he was my only lead. So I let him think I knew. It might make things a little safer for Jo-Anne, if and when.
“That’s interesting,” Wompler admitted. “Maybe you can do a story for me?”
“No, thanks. I’m not even sure Phyllis Kirk agreed to do it.”
“Now wait a minute. Are you calling me a liar?”
“Not necessarily.”
“I got nothing to hide.”
“She was a scientist with a trust to keep. It doesn’t figure.”
“So that makes me a liar?”
“I’ll draw my conclusions,” I said easily. “You can draw yours.”
“I think you better get out of here.” Wompler’s face had drained white. The pouting lower lip began to tremble. It must have been a signal for Audrey, who stood up and said, still ladylike, “You’d better go. His blood pressure, Mr. Chase.”
“Well,” I said cheerfully, “I’ll tell Ken what you said. He’ll be pleased.”
“You just keep away from this place,” Wompler said, almost pleading. “Calling me a liar!” I sneered at him and thought, Julia really had tumbled down if she had gone for this bird.
“Go on,” Li’l Audrey said, flexing her muscles prettily. She made one hell of a bodyguard.
I marched out of there and back past sets One through Four, almost reaching the door. Almost but not quite.
“Jason! Oh, Jason Chase.”
It was one of the girls in the harem set, waving at me and bouncing in my direction. I squinted as a strobe unit flashed off to the right. “Julia?” I gasped.
“I don’t look that old, do I?”
Well, she did look like Julia. She wore her hair in the same long bob, an anachronism which didn’t seem to disturb the harem photographer. She was not quite as plump and curved more subtly. You could tell it was real, all delightfully real, because what little material covered her breasts did not support them, and beneath was a long stretch of curves and skin clear down to a pair of black, spangled panties, and the flashing legs below them and the painted toenails. She reached me half-trotting and said, “I’m Stephanie, silly.”
Julia’s kid sister. Brother, it suddenly occurred to me I’d been in jail a long time. Stephanie used to wear bobby sox and was just beginning to draw whistles from the younger set of college boys down near Washington Square where the Grujdzaks lived when I lost Ken’s fight with the law and said goodbye to all my friends.
“Pop would never approve,” I said.
“It’s a long story,” Stephanie told me, then raised a slim finger to her lip and added, “Don’t tell on me. Please.”
“Not me,” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Maybe we’ll trade stories, if you’re all through at the harem for today.”
“All through.”
“Take you home?”
“Just let me change, Jason.”
Then she was gone and I stood there facing the dressing room with my mouth open. This was coincidence, too? It just couldn’t be. Or could it?
I meant to try and find out.
Chapter Six
“I see you still don’t like subways.”
“Hate ’em,” I said. We’d climbed back to the street near Washington Square, were crossing it now and watching the old men in overcoats and scarves feeding peanuts to the pigeons.
Stephanie wore one of those nubby coats pinched tight at the waist and flaring below it. A beret perched jauntily atop her head. “I don’t want you to think it’s too awful,” she said. “Me modeling like that.”
“Fifteen bucks an hour minimum, isn’t it? Even Pop shouldn’t complain about that.”
“Jason. Pop isn’t so bad. You two never got along, did you?” Her lips worked, as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether to go on talking. Then she blurted, “It isn’t the money. I used to do free-lance modeling for ad agencies, at the same pay. I don’t need this.”
“So?”
“So…I can’t tell you all of it, Jason. Julia’s in trouble, bad trouble. I’m trying to help her.”
“She ask you to?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you, Steffy?”
“I’m nineteen. Be twenty next month. St. Patrick’s Day.”
“And you know all about the birds and bees?”
“Jason,” she scolded me, then smiled impishly.
“Look, I know about the trouble. Ken is being blackmailed because of something Julia did. Julia asked you to help her because Ken is probably driving her nuts about it, at meals and between meals and every time he sees her. What’s Julia got on you, though?”
“She’s my sister.”
“Still, you shouldn’t mess with things like blackmail. And what would Pop do if he found out?”
“He mustn’t, Jason. Ever. Emma knows all about it, but she’s different.”
Emma was Pop Grujdzak’s unmarried sister, living with the Grujdzaks in lieu of a mother. She’d always had a kind of maiden-aunt crush on me although she wouldn’t admit it.
“You bet she’s different,” I said. “She’s a human being.” We crossed the street from the square and cut across the cobblestones to a narrow lane hemmed in and darkened by the drab bulks of four-story walkups. Come summer, the sidewalk artists would display their canvases here, but right now they were freezing in their cold-water flats and blowing on their hands so they could paint and the only people on the street were hurrying as fast as they could go. Including us.
She got her arm under mine and we were walking by the rows of tenements which seemed pasted there against the bleak sky. Pretty soon we reached one that looked like all the others, except there were curtains in most of the windows and Venetian blinds in some and no cracks in any of the glass you could see.
“Well, here we are,” Stephanie told me. “Thanks for the trip home, Jason. Will I see you?”
“You going to forget about Wompler?”
“I…I’ll ask Julia.”
I rubbed my cold-numb hands together and said, “Pop?”
She shook her head. “Out, I think. Aunt Emma would love to see you.”
Stephanie’s soft voice and her frankness and that contagious grin of hers were like an unexpected taste of Florida sunshine there in Greenwich Village in February.
I had to check with Jo-Anne and Guido Isaac before the day was over, but they could wait a few minutes and so could Ken. “You,” I said, “are on.”
Upstairs, I could smell Aunt Emma’s cooking even before we reached the door. Hungarian goulash was her specialty and this smelled like specialty day.
There was Emma, now, standing in the doorway, her more than ample bosom effectively blocking a view of the apartment, her gray hair bunned behind her head, her eyes twinkling and maybe smarting some and her wide mouth with no lipstick broadening into a grin. “Jason!” she said, her voice high but flat. Stew ladle and all, her hand went to her bosom and clutched the flowered fabric of her print housedress. “Jason, this is a surprise.” But then she was scowling and saying, “You know Pop doesn’t want you around here. He doesn’t even want to see his son-in-law, let alone you.”
“I’ll be in and out like this,” I said, snapping my fingers.
“Any coffee?” Stephanie said.
“Any stew?” I added.
“Oh, you,” said Emma, and melted, and moved aside to let us in. They had the same old enamel-topped table and four chairs in the front room, which was the kitchen, with three burners on the ancient gas stove fit and the magic aroma of Emma’s cookery wafting up from three chipped porcelain pots. The steam radiator was thunking away in a corner and still needed adjustment. My coat joined Stephanie’s in the closet and she came back to the kitchen wearing a black velvet skirt and a white jersey blouse which clung slightly as she puttered around the kitchen, in a coltish young-girl way, preparing the coffee.
I sat down at the table and stretched my legs out long and comfortably. I was getting a glow just looking at Stephanie.
Then the door opened and Pop Grujdzak stamped in out of the hallway.
“Down here on a call,” he rasped, “and I thought some java… Chase! What—”
“Coffee,” Stephanie said lamely.
I pushed the chair back and stood up. The ceiling light gleamed on Pop Grujdzak’s bald dome as he removed his hat and said, “You can just get your coat.”
“We met by accident uptown,” Stephanie said. “Jason took me home, that’s all.”
“It isn’t all. I warned him. Why must he bother both my girls, you tell me that? The Good Book says…”
