The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes

by Michael Kurland

  “What office?” I asked.

  “The office,” Sandra explained, making the gesture at her throat that I had seen her make downstairs. “It’s a signal we use. If you’re wearing a tie, it’s straightening the tie. If you’re not, it’s coming as close as you can with what you have, making some gesture that won’t be noticed by anyone not in the know. Why it’s called ‘the office’ I don’t know. Do you know, Professor?”

  “Lost in the mists of pre-history, my dear,” the Professor said.

  “When I gave the Professor the office in the lobby, for example—”

  “—I know that she was ‘in the know’ or ‘with it,’ as we say,” the Professor finished. “So, even though I didn’t recognize her, I brought you both up to my apartment for a private chat.”

  “There are other signs,” Sandra said. “Like”—she made a brushing gesture with the fingers of her left hand on her right sleeve—“keep away. Or—”

  The Professor smiled broadly. “Now, now,” he said. “Mustn’t give away all our little secrets at once.”

  “He’s annoyed,” Sandra told me. “He always smiles like that when he’s annoyed. He used to get annoyed at me a lot when I was a child.”

  “Nonsense,” the Professor said. “You were a natural.” He leaned back and started telling stories about life on the con. I think he was trying to make up for having shown that he distrusted me, or perhaps he was just trying to make me feel at home. Sandra broke in occasionally with her reminiscences, grifting as seen through the eyes of a little girl. They were having fun, and I was getting an unexpected education in the art of the swindle.

  We talked for another hour or so, and I learned a lot more about the life of a professional con man, but nothing useful about Two-Headed Mary. We did go down to the apartment below to see whether she had left any clue to her whereabouts, but no soap.

  Sometime around noon the Professor invited us to stay for lunch: blintzes smothered in last-of-the-season peaches with just a touch of cognac. Sandra accepted; I declined. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I thought they should be alone together for a while to talk over old times and life with Two-Headed Mary before she grew her second head. Mostly I think it was that I was enjoying myself too much. I could see how people could be swept along by the Professor, believe whatever he told them and do whatever he asked. He walked me to the elevator door and told me to come back anytime, but call first. “And bring along Mr. Brass,” he added. “I’d like to talk to him.” He gave me his card, which, I noticed claimed he was Septimus Vogle, Managing Director of the Continental Aerodrome Consortium. I didn’t ask.

  12

  I picked up a ham and Swiss on rye toast, lettuce and mustard, no mayo, half a pickle, and a cardboard container of milk at Danny’s and brought them back to the office. After typing a report on our meeting with the Professor and sticking it on Brass’s desk, I settled down behind my own desk with a copy of this morning’s World. Brass’s short piece on K. Jeffrey’s reward was in today’s column, sandwiched between a whimsical description of the tiny performers at Professor Huber’s Flea Circus on 42nd Street and an item headed “A Brief Panegyric to the Silent Screen.” He tries to use at least one obscure word in every column to enrich his readers’ vocabulary. “Brass Tacks” is an educational experience for the reader, will he or nil he.

  I draped a napkin about my knees, and mused over the item as I munched my ham on rye.

  MATINEE MARY is still among the missing, and her friends on Glitter Boulevard hope nothing evil has happened to her. Jeff Welton, producer of that Broadway boffo Lucky Lady, is offering a two-G reward to locate either her or Billie Trask, the box-office wench who disappeared with the weekend’s receipts a couple of weeks ago. Word around town is that the two ladies know each other and their disappearances may be connected. “I don’t think Billie took the money,” Welton told this reporter. “She isn’t that kind of girl.”

  That’s two big ones, boys and girls, for distribution among those with word of either of the absent Broadway ladies. First come, first served. Read the Advert elsewhere in the World for details.

  Brass used Broadway slang in his Broadway items to give the reader a feeling of being in the know. Broadway characters tend to speak with a unique kind of careful illiteracy, and the show business had a language all its own; but I’ve never heard this newspaper version of the slang spoken on Broadway, or anywhere outside of Brass’s and Winchell’s columns. As Brass explained it, it was what readers had come to expect so it was what he gave them. I think that Brass and Winchell made it all up between them.

  Brass was playing it with a light touch. He could have gone in for dark suppositions: “After the Central Park murder this weekend of chorine Lydia Laurent, friend of the missing pair, fears of foul play have saddened, and perhaps frightened, the close-knit theatrical community…”

  Gloria came in around three, carrying two small paper sacks. She went through to Brass’s office and placed them on his desk. He stared at them through narrowed eyes. “Any problems?” he asked.

  “I had to go ten dollars higher than I expected,” she said, sounding disgusted. “I must be losing my touch.”

  “I doubt that,” he said. “Was there anything?”

  “Nothing that shouted out,” she told him. “Maybe on a closer examination.”

  He sighed. “Well, let’s take a look.”

  “What are we looking at?” I asked, standing in the doorway.

  “I’ve just been visiting the apartment on East Fifty-fourth that was shared by the dead girl, Lydia Laurent, and Billie Trask,” Gloria told me.

  “The missing girl,” I said brightly.

  “Just so,” Brass said.

  “And from a trip to the Royal Theater, where the chorus girls each have individual lockers. My guess was right,” Gloria told Brass. “The police didn’t search Lydia’s locker at the theater. Either they didn’t know it was there, or they didn’t think it was worth the trouble. They may have been right. If there’s anything worth looking at in either of those bags, I can’t see it.”

  I elbowed past Gloria and dropped onto the couch. “How’d you get in?” I asked her.

  “The locker, I popped the lock. The apartment, I gave the super a ten.” She turned to Brass. “I’m sorry, it shouldn’t have cost a dime, but the super knew he had something, with the police crawling around, and he said some guy from the Mirror was there yesterday and gave him a twenty to get in.”

  Brass leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I didn’t believe it myself. I must be losing it.”

  Brass smiled and shook his head. “Nonsense! Some people’s avarice is greater than their concupiscence, no matter what the lure, and there’s nothing to be done about it. What I don’t believe is that a reporter from the Mirror paid the super twenty dollars.”

  “So, when you said you had to go ten dollars higher than you expected,” I asked her, “you meant that you expected to get in for free?”

  She looked at me with the look that froze mercury. “Of course,” she said.

  Brass leaned forward and picked up one of the bags. “Who was the reporter from the Mirror?”

  “I asked the super. He didn’t know. A little, skinny man with a big nose and bad teeth. That doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve seen at the Mirror.”

  “There wouldn’t be anything at the apartment worth taking a picture of,” Brass said. “Or am I wrong?”

  “No, just an apartment. Cleaner than many, but it didn’t have much furniture to get in the way. Those girls lived a frugal life.”

  “And the case isn’t big enough to give that kind of play. Just one more kid buys it in the big city. Nobody from the Mirror gave the super a twenty,” Brass said. “If there wasn’t anything worth shooting, there wasn’t anything worth paying more than a finit for.”

  “That was my thought,” Gloria agreed.

  “The descriptio
n sounds like the man that was with the pseudo-Sandra out in Brooklyn,” I volunteered.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Brass agreed. “Was the apartment turned over?”

  Gloria shook her head. “No. Neat and clean. Twenty dollars or no twenty dollars, the super insisted on standing in the doorway and watching while the guy looked over the apartment. Wouldn’t let him take anything away.”

  “He let you take stuff away,” I said.

  She smiled at me and nodded. It was not worth discussing.

  “Well,” Brass said, “let’s see what you got.” He upended the paper sack he was holding, dumping its contents in a pile on the desktop.

  “That’s what came from the apartment,” Gloria told him. “It was pretty well gone over by the police, the super said. I don’t know what they took away.”

  Brass poked at the pile with his finger. There were three or four unpaid bills, a half-dozen envelopes that looked like personal correspondence, a bracelet, a pair of earrings, and a book: Wine from These Grapes by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The bracelet was a circle of heavy links of what appeared to be gold with what appeared to be a diamond set atop each link. The earrings were small circles of some green stone. “I hope that whatever the police took away was more inspirational than this batch,” he said. “Are they all the belongings of Miss Laurent?”

  Gloria separated the collection into two small piles. She pointed to one pile. “Laurent.” The other. “Trask.” She dumped the other bag onto the Laurent pile: two lipsticks, a compact, a pair of stockings, a tube of Dr. Fogler’s Fine Liniment, a box of aspirin powders, and two photographs: one of an older woman and the other of a young boy and a dog of indeterminate age. “I didn’t see any point in leaving anything in the locker,” she said, “although I doubt if any of this stuff means anything to us.”

  Brass took the envelopes, which were in the “Trask” pile, and sat on the couch. “Did you read through these?” he asked Gloria.

  “No. I just dropped them in the bag. I’d feel funny reading them. They might be very private.”

  “Were they hidden?”

  “Not really. They were in the drawer with her underwear, in a sort of net that she used to keep worn hose. It’s the sort of thing girls with roommates do to keep some things private.”

  “Um,” Brass said. “The police didn’t find them, but I doubt if they poked too thoroughly through the girl’s worn stockings.”

  “The police should hire some female detectives,” Gloria said.

  Brass nodded. “That will be a long time coming.” He sorted the envelopes into two piles, by return address: three from a Mrs. Jacob Trask of Hagerstown, Maryland, and three from a Jemmy Brookes of Baltimore, Maryland. “I think our interest in what happened to Lydia Laurent and how she died must override any considerations of personal privacy,” he said. “And it seems likely that whatever happened to Billie Trask is related to what happened to Miss Laurent. We are voyeurs in a good cause.”

  “Oh, I know,” Gloria said. “And besides, we’re newspaper men, and we’re paid to be nosy. Other people pay us to be nosy for them.”

  “Very nicely said,” Brass told her. “I may use it in a column.” Although Brass felt free to use in his column anything he heard that wasn’t being told him in confidence, he was scrupulous about giving credit. Famous, infamous, or unknown, it didn’t matter. If you said it, your name got attached to it in the column. I had been mentioned three or four times myself. Gloria must have given up counting some time ago.

  Brass looked at one of the envelopes with Mrs. Trask’s return address. “Dime store,” he said. “Presumably from the girl’s mother.” He examined one of the other trio, holding it up to the light and rubbing it between his fingers. “Personalized stationery of reasonable quality,” he said. “A return address in Baltimore. And the postmark bears that out.” He sniffed the envelope. “Faint odor of, ah…”

  “Jasmine,” Gloria said.

  “Very good, thank you. Jasmine. We can assume that ‘Jemmy’ is female. Well, let’s see if we have anything useful.”

  Brass read the letters slowly and thoughtfully, starting with the ones from Billie Trask’s mother, and then passed them along to Gloria, who passed them to me. I read them out of a sense of duty. After all, I was a newspaper man, it was my job.

  The mother’s letters dated to before Billie had her accident and left the chorus. They were loving and chatty and full of back-home gossip, with a hint of something deeper. Toward the end of that first letter, Mother Trask wrote:

  …Your poppa asked me the other day if I was hearing from you, and of course I told him I was cause I don’t want to lie to your poppa. He kind of grunted, you know what I mean, and that was that. But he never even asked before. Maybe if he asks again I’ll show him some of your letters. Not the one where you say as how you forgive him, although I’m glad of that, but you know he never can admit he’s done anything wrong and never will…

  Forgive him for what, I wondered. But then I decided I was glad that I probably would never know.

  The letters from Jemmy Brookes of Baltimore, Maryland, placed her as a close friend of Billie Trask. One was possibly interesting, in view of what we knew:

  Ma Chere Bil—

  C’etait bonne to hear from you enfin. Oui, Doddie told you right, Jule popped the question, and we plan to get hitched just as soon as he can get a job. He doesn’t want me to work after we’re married, so I’ll have to quit the sec pool, which believe you me won’t be much of a hardship. He ses that a man should support his woman, which is kind of Victorian, ses I, but sweet with all of that. But with jobs being the way they are—or, say, the way they aren’t!!—it may be a while. You’ll be my maid of honor on the big day, whenever it may be.

  Je do so worry about you all alone in the big city. Although I’m glad that you’re not quite so alone anymore-and I don’t mean votre roommate, although she sounds like a nice girl.

  I’d watch out for this one, tho. I know you’re a big girl and can take care of yourself and not do anything you don’t want to do. But he sounds like a big boy whos had a lot more practice with girls like you than you have with guys like him. And like you said, sometimes being with a guy can make you want to do what you dont want to do, at least until it’s done and it’s too late.

  I promise to come up to visit some time when I have the bus fare. I’m looking forward to see you on stage, even if it is only in the chorus. After all, Jimmy Cagney started in the chorus, and look at him now—Public Enemy #1. You have a great future ahead of you kiddo.

  Love n stuff

  Jem

  Which shows, I suppose, that it doesn’t pay to predict. Billie was not exactly public enemy number one, but she was spending the present hiding out from the cops, and a good part of her future would probably be spent in a home for naughty women somewhere Upstate. Unless Brass was right and she was innocent. But he just said things like that to provoke a reaction. It’s like the joke that Pinky told me about the man who went into Ratner’s on 2nd Avenue and ordered a bowl of borscht. The waiter tells him, “Don’t have the borscht today, it’s not so good. Have the schav instead.”

  “But I don’t want schav,” the man insists, “I want borscht.”

  “In good conscience I cannot serve you the borscht today, it just isn’t up to our standard.”

  “I don’t care about your standard, I want the borscht!”

  “Trust me—”

  “You won’t bring me the borscht? Then bring me the manager!”

  So the manager comes over and listens to the story. “Ordinarily,” he tells the man, “the customer is always right. But today I happen to know that the borscht is truly not as good as it should be. Have the schav.”

  So the man gets up and storms out of the restaurant. The manager turns to the waiter and says, “You think he came in here to eat? No, he just wanted to argue.”

  That’s Brass. You may think he came in to eat, but he just wants to argue. What makes it reall
y irritating is his habit of being right.

  Brass poked further into the detritus of a girl’s life and took up the bracelet from the Billie Trask pile. He tossed it up and down in his hand a couple of times, and then stared closely at it. “Well!” he said.

  Gloria pulled one of the upright wooden chairs closer to the desk and sat down. “You noticed,” she said. “The police probably thought it was costume junk, but it’s not.”

  “Not,” Brass agreed. He opened one of the lower drawers to his desk and rummaged about in it until he found a jeweler’s loupe, which he stuck in his eye. “Very good workmanship,” he said, peering at the bracelet. “By the weight I’d say it was gold, and fairly solid, and there’s a jeweler’s mark inside the catch.” He reached over and ran one of the stones along the nearest window pane. It scratched the glass. “Well,” he said again.

  “If the earrings are real also,” Gloria said, “you’re looking at at least a thousand dollars.”

  “That’s what I would say,” Brass agreed.

  “Maybe it was some stage-door Johnny,” I suggested.

  “If so her girlfriends should know of it, and presumably so should the police,” Brass said. “But we’ll ask around.”

  “Her boyfriend?” Gloria asked.

  “Which would be a strong indication that the girl is innocent of the theft,” Brass said. “If she has a boyfriend who can give her gewgaws like these, then she presumably could have gotten any small sum of money she needed from him—and we have no indication that she was in need of any large sum of money. And the story that they were in it together is unlikely. The boyfriend wouldn’t connive at stealing box-office receipts worth less than the jewelry he gave her.”

  “Unless the jewelry was stolen,” I suggested. “Maybe the boyfriend was a burglar.”

  “What a thought,” Brass said. “We’ll have to check the stolen jewelry hot sheet.”

  “My kind of job,” Gloria said.

  The phone rang at the small switchboard in the outer office—the only place it does ring—and Gloria picked up the receiver on Brass’s desk. “Alexander Brass’s office,” she said. “Who?” she said. “I’ll see,” she said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s the desk downstairs,” she told Brass. “There’s a Madam Florintina wants to see you about the reward.”