The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

  “Intimate?” I took a deep breath. “As far as I know, I do not know, and have certainly not been intimate with anyone named Lydia anything,” I told Raab. “I’d like to help, but there you have it.”

  “How did this girl die?” Brass asked, “and what makes you think she and DeWitt were, as you say, ‘intimate’?”

  “I don’t insist on the ‘intimate,’” Raab said. “But he knew her all right.”

  Brass looked at me. “Did you?”

  I shook my head. “Like I said, I don’t think so.”

  “That ain’t what you said,” Raab said.

  “Let’s hear it,” Brass told Raab. “What have you got, and why are you harassing my assistant?”

  “Is that higher or lower than an apprentice?” I asked Brass.

  “No,” he said.

  “This don’t qualify as harassing,” Raab said. “If I want to do any harassing you could tell the difference. Easy.”

  “Well then, put your cards on the table,” Brass said. “We’re at an impasse here. You say DeWitt was intimate with this girl and DeWitt says he doesn’t even know her. My bet would be that he doesn’t know her. You want to raise me?”

  “We’ll see.” Raab turned to Gloria, who was standing silently in the doorway. “You got something to write on?”

  Gloria disappeared for a second and reappeared with a steno pad. “Will this do?”

  “Yeah. Give it to DeWitt. You got a pencil?” he asked me.

  I fished one out of my pocket. “Sure thing,” I said. “We apprentice assistants always carry writing implements about with us. What’s the game?”

  Raab got up and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’ll dictate, you write.”

  “My shorthand isn’t very good.”

  “I’ll speak slowly. You write it out.”

  “Ah!” I said. “Stylomancy.”

  “Stylo-what?” Raab demanded.

  “Handwriting divination. Stylomancy. You’re going to tell me that I’m going to marry a tall blond girl who’s four-foot-nine with dark brown hair and have three children, one of each.”

  Raab snorted.

  “Not a bad construction, stylomancy,” Brass said. “From ‘stylus.’ Is it yours?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him. “I think I heard it somewhere. Isn’t that the word?”

  “There are several words for the analysis of personality or the telling of fortunes by studying handwriting,” Brass told me. “I like steganomancy, from a Greek root meaning ‘secret writing.’” He swiveled around to look at Raab. “Did you know you were practicing steganomancy?”

  “I’ll stegano the pair of you down to the precinct house if you don’t shut up and let me get on with this,” Raab rumbled.

  “Sorry,” Brass said.

  “Words are his passion,” Gloria told the inspector.

  Raab glared at Gloria, shifted his glare over to Brass, and then fixed his gaze on me. “Write this,” he said. “‘My favorite joints in New York are the Stork Club, Sardi’s, and the Copa.’”

  I scribbled on the pad. “Is that it?” I asked.

  “You got that? Under that print the alphabet,” Raab said.

  Brass and Gloria were watching this operation quizzically, but they were not half as puzzled as I. I did as directed and handed the steno pad to Raab. “What now?”

  Raab stared at the writing for a moment, comparing it with something in a small manila evidence envelope he was holding concealed in his hand. After a minute he looked at me almost benignly and ripped out the page and stuffed it and the envelope into his vest pocket. “Now I’ll tell you a story,” he said, lowering his bulk back down onto the couch. He pulled the cigar out of his jacket pocket and ran it over and under his fingers like my Uncle Jake used to do with a fifty-cent piece before he made it disappear or turned it into an egg.

  “I thought you gave up smoking, Inspector,” Gloria said.

  “I’m not smoking,” Raab replied. “I’m holding a cigar. It’s very soothing to hold a cigar. When I get upset, I can chew on it. When I get really upset I can crush it between my fingers.” He studied the cigar for a moment, ran it around his fingers one more time, and then put it back in his pocket.

  “An elderly gentleman name of Defevre went to sail his model boat in Central Park Sunday morning. You know the sailboat lake?”

  “There’s a rowboat lake,” I said.

  “This one is small,” he made a gesture with his hands as though he were holding a basketball. “Maybe a hundred feet across. Around Seventy-fourth Street on the east side of the park. A concrete-lined oval; sort of like a giant bathtub. There’s a club that sails model sailboats there.”

  “I know the place,” Gloria said. “There’s this little sort of clubhouse where they store their boats right by the lake. Elegant miniatures of sloops, schooners, even some square-riggers. Most of them are handmade by the club members. I went to watch them sailing when Mr. Brass mentioned the club in a column about three years ago.”

  “Why so I did,” Brass agreed.

  Raab nodded and plowed on. “Defevre was out there at first light. To catch the morning breeze, he said. He arrived at the park somewhere between five-thirty and five-forty. Sunrise was at five-thirty-eight. Sometime later—he estimates it was around six-fifteen—he doesn’t carry a watch, only a stopwatch to time his boat—his dog, Marat, started barking at something in a nearby clump of bushes. Defevre thought the dog had lost his toy, so he got his boat pole—this sort of long pole with a hook on the end that they use to push the boats around—and poked under the bushes. He pulled out a shoe; a woman’s shoe. The dog kept barking. Defevre pushed his way between the bushes and found a clear space in the middle. The other shoe was there, lying atop a neat pile of clothing. Next to the clothing, supine on the ground, was the naked body of a young woman. Defevre and Marat ran to the nearest park entrance, where Defevre flagged down a passing patrol car. The officers in the car called it in on a police phone box and followed Defevre back into the park. The body was right where he said it would be.”

  Inspector Raab took the cigar back out of his jacket pocket and stared at it wistfully for a moment, and then stuck it back. “Now here’s where it gets interesting,” he said.

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Where do I come into it?” I asked.

  Raab eyed me with the benevolent gaze of a bear eyeing a ham sandwich. “Patience,” he said. “By one of those coincidences by which the Almighty makes it difficult for transgressors, the officers in the patrol car had just questioned and released a member of the army of the unemployed, whom they had seen flat-footing it down the street with a suspicious bundle. The bundle contained what seemed to be a complete set of women’s clothes, from top to bottom, inside to out, and the bum in question was not a woman. The bum, name of, ah”—he paused to consult his notebook—“Lupoff claimed to have found them in a garbage can on Seventy-third Street. But the clothing was fairly new and fairly expensive; not the sort of thing that anyone tosses out these days. Even someone well-off enough to buy new clothes every year has a relation or a charity to pass the old ones on to.”

  Raab paused and turned to me. “You want to change your story?” he asked.

  “I haven’t told you a story,” I said, giving him my best look of bewildered innocence. Which was surprisingly difficult, considering that I truly was both bewildered and innocent.

  “So,” Raab continued, “when the detectives from Homicide North arrived—a pair of bright lads named Bracken and Yarrow—they examined the clothing by the body and determined that the garments probably belonged to a larger woman. Which of them is such an expert on women’s clothing I refrained from asking, although I would hope it is Bracken, who is a married man. At which point the precinct officers told them of the second set of clothes, and they went to speak with the bum—Lupoff—who was awaiting his fate in the backseat of the patrol car. After protesting his innocence and making several comments on the state of the economy and the habi
ts and customs of the police, Lupoff agreed to lead the detectives back to where he had found the garments.

  “The detectives went to the garbage can in question and examined it. They discovered a few items that Lupoff had missed; among them a small purse containing two dollars and twenty-three cents and a calling card, but no identification.

  “So,” Raab continued, “the homicide boys were in the odd position of having one dead, naked female body and two sets of female clothing. It occurred to them that the murderer might have placed the wrong clothes next to the body to mislead the investigation, so they tried a shoe from each pair on the dead girl’s foot. They had something of a problem as the body was in full rigor, but it did seem as though the shoes from the garbage can”—he consulted his notes—“a pair of black pumps, fit better than the brown open-toe flats found by the body. This seemed to confirm their earlier observation about the clothing.”

  “Two sets of clothing,” Brass commented. “That’s a new one.”

  “We assume,” Raab told him, “that the killer meant for the girl’s real clothes to be on a garbage scow headed out to sea by now, and supplied the alternate wardrobe so we wouldn’t hunt around. But just why he went to the trouble, that we don’t know yet. The clothing doesn’t seem to tell us much.”

  “How do you know the girl’s name?” Brass asked.

  “It was printed in indelible ink on the back of the dress label.”

  “The garbage-can dress?”

  “Yeah. I guess it told us that much anyway. The other name—Yency—was written on an identification card in a wallet in the pile of clothing by the body. We don’t know whether it means anything or not. But Lydia Laurent is this girl’s real name.” He turned to me. “She was a hoofer in Fine and Dandy at the Royal Theater. Is that where you met her?”

  “I didn’t meet her,” I said. And then it hit me. “Wait a minute! We talked to some dancers from several of the musicals the other day, but I don’t think any of them were named Lydia. I can tell you in a second.” I fished in my jacket pocket for my little notebook and flipped the pages. “Here it is. No-none of them were named Lydia.”

  Raab took the notebook and stared at the page. “‘Terri, Maxine, Aud, Dossie, Vera, Yvette,’—what were you planning to do, set up a harem?”

  “It was all very moral and approved by the Legion of Decency,” I told him. “Miss Adams was chaperoning.”

  “They were there at my instructions,” Brass said, which was nice of him, considering. “We were trying to get some background on Two-Headed Mary.”

  “Two-Headed—oh yeah, the old-lady scam artist who has come up missing.”

  “She wasn’t so old,” I told him.

  Raab looked at me blankly.

  “I did a mention of her in my column,” Brass said.

  “Yeah, I saw it. Did you find anything?”

  “Enough about her past to write a book,” Brass said. “But much of it was contradictory, and most of it, apparently, would be fiction. Nothing as yet that would give us a lead as to her present location.”

  “She’ll turn up,” Raab predicted. “One way or another.”

  Gloria walked across the room and sat on the wooden chair we keep on the side of the desk next to the wall. “You know, we must have seen her,” she said quietly.

  “Two-Headed Mary?” Brass asked.

  “No. This girl—Lydia. When we went to the show on Thursday, she must have been in the chorus.” She turned to Raab. “Lydia was alive on Thursday?”

  “She was killed a few hours before she was found—say late Saturday night,” Raab said. “Strangled. Manually. By somebody with average-size hands, but powerful.” Raab eyed my hands thoughtfully. “From the front,” he added. “The killer was watching the girl’s face as she died. And his face was the last thing she saw.”

  I pictured the girls I had seen in that long room and wondered which she was. Lydia. Something clicked in my memory. “Liddy!” I said, slapping the side of the chair.

  “What’s that?” Raab demanded.

  “A girl named—something out of Shakespeare—Ophelia, no, Viola. That’s it.”

  “Another name? Is that the name you knew her as?”

  “No, no. I didn’t know her. But I remember a girl named Viola—I’m pretty sure it was Viola—came up to me backstage and said that her friend Liddy might know something useful, but Liddy had already left, so Viola was going to find her. I gave Viola my card and wrote something on the back. ‘Sardi’s,’ I think, because that’s where we were meeting the other girls.”

  “You think ‘Liddy’ is Lydia?” Brass asked.

  “If the inspector has my card in that envelope, and it says ‘Sardi’s’ on it, I do.”

  “She might know something useful about what?” Raab asked.

  “Two-Headed Mary.”

  “Damn!” he said. “What’s Two-Headed Mary got to do with this?”

  “She’s missing,” Brass said. “We’re looking for her.”

  “A lot of people are missing,” Raab said. “There are a couple of hundred missing persons reports filled out every week in Manhattan.”

  “Is DeWitt right?” Brass asked. “Is it his calling card you have in that envelope? Does it have ‘Sardi’s’ written on it?”

  Raab took the envelope from his pocket and slid the card into his hand. “That’s it,” he said, holding it up. “With ‘Sardi’s ASAP’ written on the back.”

  “I forgot the ASAP,” I said.

  “You damn near forgot the whole thing,” he said. “Will this Viola remember you?”

  “Probably,” I told him. “If not, the girls on that list will.”

  “Well,” Brass said, “are you satisfied?”

  Inspector Raab leaned back and stared at the far wall. “No,” he said. “The person who killed Lydia Laurent is still walking around and I don’t know who he is. No, I’m not satisfied.”

  “Was the girl raped?” Brass asked.

  “The medical examiner thinks not. There were compression marks on her wrists and ankles, so she was probably tied up before she was killed. But she was not raped and not battered.” Raab grimaced. “Merely strangled.”

  “Tell me,” Brass asked. “Aside from your moral outrage, this isn’t the sort of case that would usually get the head of Homicide North questioning suspects. Just what are you doing here?”

  “Trying to spare your amanuensis here the embarrassment of having to come down to the squad room,” Raab said.

  “Bull,” Brass said. “Try again.”

  Raab sighed. “You won’t use this until I tell you it’s okay?”

  “My word. I will probably never use whatever you tell me at all, at least not directly. I am a columnist, not a reporter.”

  “Yeah,” Raab said. “The master of indirection. Well anyway, Lydia Laurent was the roommate of Billie Trask.”

  “The girl that disappeared with all the money,” Gloria said.

  “That one,” Raab agreed.

  “A missing persons case?” Brass raised an eyebrow, a gesture he must have practiced in front of a mirror to get just that level of disdain in it. “As you just said, there are a couple of hundred every week.”

  Raab took his cigar out of his pocket and jammed it into his mouth. “It’s political,” he said. He took a wooden match from another pocket and struck it against the sole of his shoe. He stared at the flame for a moment and then took the cigar from his mouth and carefully blew out the match. He looked around for an ashtray.

  “Here,” Gloria said. “Let me take that for you.” She removed the match to the wastebasket under Brass’s desk.

  Raab jammed the cigar back in his pocket. “Thanks,” he said. He leaned forward and regarded Brass thoughtfully. “There’s more to this case, this Trask business, than is out there in the papers.”

  “You mean the Daily Mirror doesn’t know more than the police department about this?” Brass asked. “Won’t Winchell be surprised!”

  “Yeah, well…
there was some other stuff missing from the box-office safe.”

  “What sort of stuff?”

  “That’s not clear, at least not to me. But pressure’s being put on the commissioner to find the girl, and he is pushing it down the line. So when the Trask girl’s roommate turns up dead, it is of more than usual interest.” Raab pushed himself heavily to his feet.

  “Will you keep us informed, Inspector?” Brass asked.

  “About what?”

  “Your progress on this case. And if we find anything helpful, I’ll let you know.”

  “Yeah, I’d appreciate that,” Raab said. “If you want to go on looking for Two-Headed Mary, that’s your business and good luck to you. But my assumption is that the Lydia Laurent killing had to do with the Billie Trask disappearance. And you’d do better to keep away from this Billie Trask case. Hell, I’d like to keep away from it myself.”

  “What if they’re connected?” Brass asked.

  “Connected? Now wouldn’t that be something.” Raab eyed Brass speculatively. “Do you know something, or are you just talking?”

  Brass shrugged. “Two women disappear. The same girl knows both of them, and she turns up dead. Don’t you think there’s a connection?”

  “Damn!” Raab said. “I hope not!”

  9

  Inspector Raab stopped in the outer office long enough to jam his hat on his head and throw his overcoat over his arm, and then strode down the hall to the elevator. As he got on, K. Jeffrey Welton, boy producer, got off.

  “Say,” K. Jeffrey said in the sort of stage whisper that can be heard from the topmost balcony, “wasn’t that Inspector What’s-his-name?”

  “Raab,” I said.

  “That’s the one. Homicide. What was he doing here?”

  “He and Mr. Brass have a regular Monday morning Parcheesi game.” I opened the office door wide to let him pass through. “Then they sit around drinking Ovaltine and decoding secret messages with their Little Orphan Annie decoder rings.”