Don't Call Me Madame

by Kane, Henry

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi. Come in.”

  Richard V. Starr, beneath his golf-tan, betrayed anxiety.

  The three locks snapped shut. Starr said, “This way.”

  He led Chambers to a recreation room where a billiard table sat in the middle and an ebony bar ran the full length of one wall.

  “What are you drinking?”

  “Scotch, please. On the rocks.”

  Starr made the drink. Chambers said, “Thanks.”

  Starr’s drink was already made. It was a big one. The guy was hitting it up. A huge snifter glass was half-full. Like Goldie Dorn, Richard V. Starr favored brandy.

  “Your health,” Chambers said and sipped.

  “Health.” The big snifter glass came up and through it Starr’s face was hideously distorted. He drank, said, “Sit down, won’t you?”

  They carried their drinks to comfortable chairs.

  Starr said, “I’m going to have to wash some dirty linen.”

  “That’s my business,” Chambers said.

  Starr drank, put away the glass on a cocktail table.

  “Read the papers?”

  “Always do.”

  “Did you today?”

  “I did.”

  “That thing down there at the Hotel Shirley?”

  Chambers shuddered. “That’s one crazy son of a bitch of a weirdo out there walking the streets.”

  “I’m afraid that weirdo … he’s my son.”

  “No.” A groan. “Oh Jesus, no …”

  Starr leaned across to the cocktail table, took a cigar from a silver humidor. He lit it and a fragrance filled the air.

  “Dirty linen,” he said.

  Chambers said nothing.

  “I got married while I was still in college,” Starr said. “So was my wife still in college. I was Princeton, she was Radcliffe, we were both twenty years old. She was Edith Goddard of the Goddards. You know the Goddards I’m referring to?”

  “I think so.”

  “Came over on the Mayflower and all that shit. High society, old society, the robber barons that built the railroads, flower of American aristocracy, DAR and all that crap, you know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Edith was the last of the line. There was Edith Goddard and her mother Nancy Goddard and that was it with the Goddards. The old buzzard, dead now, fiercely resented me. I was not what she had planned for her high-society Edith, but her plans became radically changed when she learned that the apple of her eye was five months pregnant when I asked for the apple’s hand in marriage. You with me?”

  “With you,” Chambers said.

  “The girl was high-society but also high-neurotic. We got married, she gave birth. Our son’s name is Anthony. It figured to be a lousy marriage, and it was. Here I can skip a lot of the dirty linen. Suffice it to say that after ten years of marriage we were no longer sleeping together but we lived together because of the boy.”

  Silence.

  Starr smoked.

  Chambers drank.

  “The boy grew up,” Starr said. “A brilliant kid, an absolutely brilliant lad, but, with that kind of mother — and perhaps with this kind of father — extremely neurotic.”

  “Extremely neurotic,” Chambers said, “like how? Can you tell me?”

  “I want to finish with Edith first. It’ll explain it.”

  “Please.”

  “During the latter part of our marriage, although as I said, er, we had separate bedrooms, she did not take on any lovers although she damn well knew she had my full consent to do so. In time, I found out why.” He puffed the cigar vigorously and thick blue smoke surrounded his face like a mask. His voice came through it. “She had a lover — and her lover was her son. More. She was addicted to cocaine, and I learned she had addicted the boy to the drug.” He blew away the smoke. His face was visible. “She had corrupted him and there was nothing I could do about it short of open scandal. He was grown by then, of course, and I didn’t want him in the middle of a public imbroglio. I loved the boy and I hoped, if I played it smart, played it cool and easy, in time he’d break out of the incestuous relationship and make a life of his own. Do you understand?”

  Chambers nodded.

  “They didn’t know I knew about them, and I let it go that way.” Starr bent to his brandy, drank, put the glass back. “About his peculiarities now, his neuroses — very little showed. He had high periods and low periods, sort of manic-depressive, but most of the time it was manic, possibly because of the stimulation of the cocaine. He was a nervous kid, but most often he was full of fun — witty, intelligent, brimming with humor. But there was something in his adolescence — he was perhaps fourteen or fifteen then — that was psychotic.” Starr puffed up the smoke again to hide his face. “We had an estate in Jersey at that time, there are some wild woods in Jersey. We used to hunt small game; he was a hell of a good shot. But when he wounded a little beast, and thought he was unobserved, he would make sure he was dead by slitting his throat, and then he would rip open the stomach and eat at the entrails. Like an animal in a jungle. Atavistic. Some kind of primitive throwback. Oh, there I put my foot down. I put a stop to that! And I thought it was over for all time.”

  Starr stood up. He took a cue from a rack and talked while shooting balls into pockets. “A brilliant kid. Magna cum laude at Yale, he was the salutatorian at graduation, but that week, that very week of graduation, there was a gory murder in a ghetto of New Haven. A prostitute’s throat was cut, her stomach was slit from vagina to breastbone, and she was eviscerated. An unsolved murder to this day, but not unsolved for us, not for Tony’s mother and father, not for Edith and Richard V. Starr.”

  He laid the cue on the table. He paced.

  “He came home and told us. A compulsion. An irresistible impulse. Jesus Christ, you didn’t have to be a doctor to know this kid was way out, terribly sick. I wanted to have him quietly committed, put away in an institution. Either they’d keep him for the rest of his life, or, if ever they let him out, they’d have to assure us he was cured. But she wouldn’t have that. She cried, she begged, she pleaded. She would take him out of the country. She would stay with him, close on top of him all the time. It wasn’t as though he were some sort of raving lunatic. He was hale and hearty, perfectly rational, brilliantly objective. He had been overcome by a passing madness. He said he realized the enormity of his crime, he knew it would never happen again. And she begged, pleaded. For his life. That he wouldn’t be incarcerated in a nuthouse for the rest of his life. What the hell could I do? I’m only human. I loved the boy. I gave in.”

  Starr drank his brandy. He lit a fresh cigar. He sank into his chair. “We arranged for a divorce, put it through. That was seven years ago — the kid was twenty-one then. They moved away, settled in London; she kept in touch with me, and, discreetly, I had my own people keeping an eye on them.” He shook his head. “No good. There was one of these murders in London. but she got him out fast. They traveled. They traveled the world; home base was London. But now and then, in remote places, like Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Belgrade, there was another of this same type of sex murder, but she quickly moved him out, to another city, another country. There you have it, Peter?”

  “Do I?”

  Chambers drank Scotch and over the rim of the glass observed his client. A strong man, strong teeth biting into the cigar, jaw muscles working. An obscure, intricate man, was he throwing horseshoes, working a pitch, playing out recondite angles? Who in hell knows with Richard V. Starr?

  “Climax,” Starr said. “Edith Goddard Starr died a month ago in London, and Tony Starr is here in New York.”

  “He’s been in touch with you?”

  “No. Remember the guilt thing in him. He’s rejected his father; hell, remember he was my wife’s lover.”

  “Then how do you know he’s here?”

  “Her lawyer — who’s now his lawyer — informed me. Harry Epstein. Used to be on the Criminal Court bench. I’m sure
you know Judge Epstein.”

  “I know him very well.”

  “An estate to be settled. There’s a huge estate. She was very rich in her own right.”

  “Um,” Chambers mumbled. The kind of riches that were the riches of the Goddards (or of the Richard V. Starrs, for that matter) were far beyond his ken.

  “Now this thing that happened,” Starr said. “This thing at the Shirley, this precise type of insane murder. Tony Starr is here in New York. I have no idea where in New York he is, but I know — and now you know — who killed this woman, who ripped her open, who disemboweled her, and remember there’s no mother now to hold him in check, to rush him out of the city, to soothe and placate him. Jesus, her very death — the total, irrevocable loss of the one person in the world he could cling to — must be driving him haywire.” He stood up from the chair, pacing again. “I tell you there’ll be more of these goddamn murders unless we get hold of him.”

  “That’s what you want of me? To get hold of him?”

  “That’s what I want. Jesus Christ, he’s my own flesh and blood, the poor bastard. That’s what I want, for you to get him before the cops get him. I want you to bring him in — to me! That way I can have him adjudged insane and committed to an institution where they can take good care of him. If the cops lay hands on him first, an insanity adjudication won’t be that easy; you know how psychiatrists on the witness stand can swing both ways. There are plenty of sex killers languishing in murderous jails rather than in hospitals where they belong. Jesus, my own flesh and blood, the poor bastard. Let him live out his days in comfort, the poor crazy son of a bitch.” And now he was at the pool table again. He racked up the balls. He took up the cue and struck them. Expertly he ran off nine balls, then laid down the cue. A bit of nervous energy had been drained off. His jaw muscles were relaxed.

  “About your fee …”

  “Whatever you say,” Chambers said and it was crafty. Whatever Richard V. Starr would say would be more than he would say.

  “Sixteen thousand dollars,” Starr said. “Bring him in and I’ll pay you sixteen thousand dollars.”

  Chambers gulped down his Scotch. Sixteen thousand dollars was an inordinate amount of money for this kind of job no matter how difficult it might prove to be — but why that odd figure? He could not, of course, peer into the unconscious of his client’s mind. Richard V. Starr had only recently closed a deal for sixteen million. Sixteen thousand was but a tenth of a hundredth of that figure, but the initial numerals were still strong within the psyche of Richard V. Starr.

  “And as to your day-to-day expenses …”

  “Forget it,” Chambers said. “We’ll include that in the fee. Now what does he look like, your son? Do you have a picture or something?”

  Yes I have. Excuse me.” Starr went out of the room and returned with a color photo which he handed to Chambers. “It was taken six months ago. Edith sent it.”

  Chambers looked at a picture of a dark young man with regular features. There must be hundreds of thousands like that in New York City, nice-looking dark young men with regular features.

  “May I keep this?”

  “Certainly.”

  He put the picture in his pocket. He took his glass to the bar and embellished it with Scotch. He sipped thoughtfully, put down the glass. “Looks like the one lead is Harry Epstein.”

  Starr shrugged, lifted his hands helplessly.

  “Will he cooperate?”

  “I don’t know,” Starr said.

  “I got to get to him. But quick.”

  “It’s all yours now, my friend.”

  “May I tell him?”

  “I beg pardon?”

  “Look, Mr. Starr, Judge Epstein doesn’t figure for a loose mouth. If I’m going to dig anything out of him, I’m sure going to have to supply him with a damn good reason. The truth is the damn best reason I can think of. But unless you consent …”

  A frown laddered the high forehead and the knuckles of a fist rubbed at the strong chin. Again he shrugged, and again the hands came up helplessly. “Epstein’s close mouth works both ways. Anything you tell him won’t go any further, I’m sure. On the other hand, I don’t know how much progress you’ll make with him no matter what you tell him. I wouldn’t depend on Judge Epstein for a resolution of this thing.” He was pacing again. Finally he said, “Okay. If you want to work that side of the street, give it a try.”

  “I’ll be working other streets, and I’ll be reporting to you.”

  “You may tell Epstein whatever you wish. I’m a firm believer in the delegation of authority. I selected you for this job — it’s your job. Use whatever methods you like.”

  “Right. Thanks.”

  “And the quicker it’s done, the better it’ll be — for everybody.”

  “I wouldn’t figure on quick if I were you, even if I do get a lead out of Epstein. If your kid is the guy who did that thing at the Shirley, he’s going to be watching out for himself pretty carefully.”

  “That’s what I’m paying you for, my friend. I want him before the cops get him.”

  Chambers looked at his watch. “The old boy’s a family man, figures to be home now. May I use your phone?”

  NINE

  HARRY Epstein lived at 875 West End Avenue, and in the taxicab Peter Chambers chain-smoked cigarettes like the prototype of a candidate for lung cancer. Jesus, what a hell of a deal for Richard V. Starr, and what a powerhouse the guy was, holding up strong despite the occasional flickers of anxiety. Delegation of authority. You do the job. You’re going to earn yourself sixteen thousand dollars, do your job, it’s all yours, I wash my hands of it — which is the meaning of delegation of authority. Bring him in before the cops bring him in — that’s your job.

  He took out the picture, looked at it, put it back. A nice-looking kid, Anthony Starr, but a loon loose on the streets, and the thing at the Shirley didn’t figure for a one-shot. There was no mother around now to protect him, to ride herd on him; hell, the very fact of the mother’s death, the bereavement, was likely to shake up an already shook kid and further aggravate whatever the hell his aggravation was. If Richard V. Starr — tycoon, cool sophisticate, debonair man-about-town — was correct in his estimation of his son, the kid was a way-out nut, and the present conditions would doubtless make him nuttier. Unless the cops caught up with him quick, or Peter Chambers did, a pleasant-looking, innocuous-looking, nice-looking dark young man could wreak a hell of a lot of havoc in New York City.

  The cab drew to a curb. Chambers paid and got out.

  Epstein was apartment 12A, and Epstein himself answered the ring.

  “Ah. Good evening, Peter.”

  “Good evening, Judge.”

  Judge.

  Judge is like General. Maybe Major. Not Sergeant or PFC.

  A judge retired from the bench is like a general retired from the army: the title sticks to the person like a freckle on the skin.

  “This way, Peter.”

  “Thank you, Judge.”

  Epstein guided him to a book-lined study.

  “A drink, perhaps?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “You said urgent.”

  “I believe so.”

  “Please sit down.”

  “Thank you.”

  They sat in facing chairs.

  Epstein leaned over to a pipe-rack, took a pipe, filled it, tamped it, lit it, and produced evil-smelling fumes. He was a little man with a seamed face, a bald head, and a sepulchral voice. He was nearsighted and wore heavy-rimmed thick-lensed glasses behind which his eyes swam like fish in a bowl.

  “Now then,” he said.

  “Anthony Starr,” Chambers said.

  “Tony?” The eyes closed. The fish disappeared from the bowl.

  Chambers waited till they reappeared. “Tony,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “May I?”

  “Please.”

  Chambers told the story told to him by Richard V. Starr. He omitted the
deeply personal angles involving the physical relations among father and mother and son, but told fully about the murder in the Hotel Shirley and about the longtime aberrations of Tony Starr.

  Epstein listened patiently, politely, attentively.

  And when Chambers was finished, he said, “What do you want?”

  He said it coldly.

  There goes the ballgame, Chambers thought. There goes at least this part of the ballgame. “I want to know where I can lay my hands on the guy.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How can I get in touch with him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh now come on, Judgie. Let’s play fair. Tit for titty, as it were. I let my hair down for you …”

  An ominous chuckle. “I have no hair to let down, Mr. Chambers.”

  “I’m speaking figuratively, sir. Not literally.”

  The little man receded into his chair and puffed his pipe.

  “I believe,” he said, “that without transcending the proprieties I can acquaint you with certain of the facts of this matter.”

  “Mm,” Chambers said.

  Judge Harry Epstein, Chambers knew, was a stickler for the proprieties, for law and order, for the court decisions, for the hidebound statutes, for all the tight, narrow (properly protective?) legalistic amenities.

  “Mm, mm, mm,” Chambers murmured encouragingly.

  “Tony Starr, Edith Goddard Starr, an immense amount of money there,” Epstein said. “The boy in his own right is worth a couple of million. Edith’s estate, conservatively — thirty million. Let’s put the whole package together as thirty million. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Chambers said.

  “The boy has no will.”

  “No will,” Chambers said.

  “And has refused to make a will. Death is remote to young people, and wills smack of death. Perhaps superstition, perhaps eccentricity, young Starr has no will.”