He left the paper behind him on the chair. I sat down and opened it. I wasn’t going to do any reading, but I wanted to think behind it. And then I saw her name. The papers had been full of her name for weeks, but this was different; this was just a little boxed ad off at the side.
AUCTION SALE
JEWELRY, PERSONAL EFFECTS, AND
FURNITURE BELONGING TO THE LATE
RUBY ROSE READING
MONARCH GALLERIES SATURDAY A.M.
I dove at the window, rammed it up, leaned halfway out. I caught him just coming out of the door. “Burns!” I screeched at the top of my voice. “Hey, Burns! Bring that hundred and fifty back up here! I’ve changed my mind!”
* * *
—
The place was jammed to the gills with curiosity-mongers and bargain-hunters—and probably professional dealers, too, although they were supposed to be excluded. There were about two dozen of those 100-watt blue-white bulbs in the ceiling that auction rooms go in for and the bleach of light was intolerable, worse than on a sunny beach at high noon.
I was down front, in the second row on the aisle. I’d gotten there early. I wasn’t interested in her diamonds or her furs or her thissas or her thattas. I was hoping something would come up that would give me some kind of a clue, but what I expected it to be I didn’t know myself. An inscription on a cigarette case maybe. I knew how little chance there was of anything like that. The D.A.’s office had sifted through her things pretty thoroughly before Chick’s trial, and what they’d turned up hadn’t amounted to a row of pins. She’d been pretty cagey that way, hadn’t left much around. All bills had been addressed to her personally, just like she’d paid her rent with her own personal checks, and fed the account herself. Where the funds originated in the first place was never explained. I suppose she took in washing.
They started off with minor articles first, to warm the customers up. A cocktail shaker that played a tune, a makeup mirror with a light behind it, a ship’s model, things like that. They got around to her clothes next, and the women customers started ohing and ahing and foaming at the mouth. By the looks of most of them, that was probably the closest they’d ever get to real sin, bidding for its hand-me-downs.
The furniture came next, and they started to talk real money now. This out of the way, her ice came on. Brother, she’d made them say it with diamonds, and they’d all spoken above a whisper, too! When the last of it went, that washed up the sale—there was nothing else left to dispose of but the little rosewood jewel case she’d kept them in. About ten by twelve by ten inches deep, with a little gilt key and lock. Not worth a damn, but there it was. However, if you think an auctioneer passes up anything, you don’t know your auctioneers.
“What am I offered for this?” he said almost apologetically. “Lovely little trinket box—give it to your best girl or your wife or your mother to keep her ornaments or old love letters in.” He knocked the veneer with his knuckles, held it outward to show us the satin lining. Nothing in it, like in a vaudeville magician’s act. “Do I hear fifty cents, just to clear the stand?”
Most of them were getting up and going already. An overdressed guy in my same row across the aisle spoke up. “You hear a buck.”
I took a look at him and I took a look at the box. If you want it, I want it, too, I decided suddenly. A guy splurged up like that don’t hand a plain wooden box like that to any woman he knows. I opened my mouth for the first time since I’d come in. “You hear a dollar and a quarter.”
“Dollar-fifty.”
“Two dollars.”
“Five.” The way he snapped it out, he meant business.
I’d never had such a strong hunch in my life before, but now I wanted that box, had to have it. I felt it would do me some good. Maybe this overdressed monkey had given it to her, maybe Burns could trace where it had been bought.
“Seven-fifty.”
“Ten.”
“Twelve.”
The auctioneer was in seventh heaven. You’re giving yourself away, brother, you’re giving yourself away! I warned my competitor silently.
We leaned forward out of our seats and sized each other up. If he was giving himself away, I suppose I was, too. I could see a sort of shrewd speculation in his snaky eyes. They screwed up into slits, seeming to say, What’s your racket? Something cold went down my back, hot as it was under all those mazdas.
“Twenty-five dollars,” he said inexorably.
I thought, I’m going to get that thing if I spend every cent of the money Burns loaned me!
“Thirty,” I said.
With that, to my surprise, he stood up, flopped his hand at it disgustedly, and walked out.
When I came out five minutes later with the box wrapped up under my arm, I saw him sitting in a young dreadnaught with another man a few yards down the street.
So I’m going to be followed home, I said to myself, to find out who I am. That didn’t worry me any. I’d rented the room under my old stage name of Honey Sebastian (my idea of a classy tag at sixteen) to escape the notoriety attendant on Chick’s trial. I turned up the other way and hopped down into the subway, which is about the best bet when the following is to be done from a car. As far as I could make out, no one came after me.
I watched the street from a corner of the window after I got home, and no one going by stopped or looked at the house or did anything but mind his own business. And if it had been that flashy guy on my tail, you could have heard him coming from a block away. I turned to the wrapped box and broke the string.
* * *
—
Burns’ knock at my door at five that afternoon was a tattoo of anxious impatience. “God, you took long to get here!” I blurted out. “I phoned you three times since noon.”
“Lady,” he protested, “I’ve been busy, I was out on something else. I only just got back to Headquarters ten minutes ago. Boy, you threw a fright into me.”
I didn’t stoop to asking him why he should be so worried something had happened to me—he might have given me the right answer. “Well,” I said, “I’ve got him.” And I passed him the rosewood jewel case.
“Got who?”
“The guy that Chick’s been made a patsy for.”
He opened it, looked in, looked under it. “What’s this?”
“Hers. I had a hunch, and I bought it. He must have had a hunch, too, only his agent—and it must have been his agent, he wouldn’t show up himself—didn’t follow it through, wasn’t sure enough. Stick your thumb under the little lock—not over it, down below it—and press hard on the wood.”
He did, and something clicked—and the satin bottom flapped up, like it had with me.
“Fake bottom, eh?” he said.
“Read that top letter out loud. That was the last one she got, the very day it happened.”
“ ‘You know, baby,’ ” Burns read, “ ‘I think too much of you to ever let you go. And if you ever tired of me and tried to leave me, I’d kill you first, and then you could go wherever you want. They tell me you’ve been seen going around a lot lately with some young punk. Now, baby, I hope for his sake—and yours, too—that when I come back day after tomorrow I find it isn’t so, just some more of my boys’ lies. They like to rib me sometimes, see if I can take it or not.’ ”
“He gave her a bum steer there on purpose,” I pointed out. “He came back ‘tomorrow’ and not the ‘day after,’ and caught her with the goods.”
“ ‘Milt,’ ” Burns read from the bottom of the page. And then he looked at me, and didn’t see me for once.
“Militis, of course,” I said, “the Greek nightclub king. Milton, as he calls himself. Everyone on Broadway knows him. And yet, do you notice how that name stayed out of the trial? Not a whisper from beginning to end. That’s the missing name, all right!”
“It reads that wa
y, I know,” he said undecidedly, “but she knew her traffic signals. Why would she chuck away the banana and hang onto the skin? In other words, Milton spells real dough, your brother wasn’t even carfare.”
“But Militis had her branded—”
“Sure, but—”
“No. I’m not talking slang now. I mean actually, physically. It’s mentioned in one of these letters. The autopsy report had it, too, remember? Only they mistook it for an operation scar or scald. Well, when a guy does that, anyone would have looked good to her, and Chick was probably a godsend. The branding was probably not the half of it, either. It’s fairly well known that Milton likes to play rough with his women.”
“All right, kid,” he said, “but I’ve got bad news for you. This evidence isn’t strong enough to have the verdict set aside and a new trial called. A clever mouthpiece could blow this whole pack of letters out the window with one breath. Ardent Greek temperament and that kind of thing, you know. You remember how Schlesinger dragged it out of Mandy that she’d overheard more than one guy make the same kind of jealous threats. Did it do any good?”
“This is the McCoy, though. He came through, this one, Militis.”
“But, baby, you’re telling it to me, and I convince easy from you. You’re not telling it to the grand jury.”
I shoved the letters at him. “Just the same, have ’em photostated, every last one of them, and put ’em in a cool, dry place. I’m going to dig up something a little more convincing to go with them, if that’s what’s needed. What clubs does he own?”
“What clubs doesn’t he? There’s Hell’s Bells—” He stopped short, looked at me. “You stay out of there.”
“One word from you—” I purred, and closed the door after him.
* * *
—
“A little higher,” the manager said. “Don’t be afraid, we’ve seen it all before.”
I took another hitch in my hoisted skirt and gave him a look. “If it’s my appendix you want to size up, say so. It’s easier to uncover the other way around, from up to down. I just sing and dance—I don’t bathe for the customers.”
“I like ’em like that.” He nodded approvingly to his yes-man. “Give her a chord, Mike,” he said to his pianist.
“ ‘The Man I Love,’ ” I said. “I do dusties, not new ones.”
After a few bars, “Good tonsils,” he said. “Give her a dance chorus, Mike.”
Mike said disgustedly, “Why d’ya wanna waste your time? Even if she was paralyzed from the waist down and had a voice like a frog, ain’t you got eyes? Get a load of her face, will you?”
“You’re in,” the manager said. “Thirty-five, and buy yourself some up-to-date lyrics. Come around at eight and get fitted for some duds. What’s your name?”
“Bill me as Angel Face,” I said, “and have your electrician give me an amber spot. They take the padlocks off their wallets when I come out in an amber spot.”
He shook his head almost sorrowfully. “Hang onto that face, girlie. It ain’t gonna happen again in a long time.”
* * *
—
Burns was holding up my locked door with one shoulder when I got back. “Here’s your letters back. I’ve got the photostats tucked away in a safe place. Where’d you disappear to?”
“I’ve landed a job at Hell’s Bells. I’m going to get that guy and get him good. If that’s the way I’ve got to get the evidence, that’s the way. After all, if he was sold on her I’ll have him cutting out paper dolls before two weeks are out. What’d she have that I haven’t got? Now, you stay out of there. Somebody might know your face and you’ll only queer everything.”
“Watch yourself, will you, Angel Face? You’re playing a dangerous game. That Milton is nobody’s fool. If you need me in a hurry, you know where to reach me. I’m right at your shoulder, all the way through.”
I went in and stuck the letters back in the fake bottom of the case. I had an idea I was going to have a visitor fairly soon, and wasn’t going to tip my hand. I stood it on the dresser top and threw in a few pins and glass beads for luck.
The timing was eerie. The knock came inside of ten minutes. I’d known it was due, but not that quick. It was my competitor from the auction room, flashy as ever—he’d changed flowers, that was all.
“Miss Sebastian,” he said, “isn’t it? I’d like very much to buy that jewel case you got.”
“I noticed that this morning.”
He went over and squinted into it.
“That all you wanted it for, just to keep junk like that in it?”
“What’d you expect to find, the Hope diamond?”
“You seemed willing to pay a good deal.”
“I lose my head easy in auction rooms. But, for that matter, you seemed to be willing to go pretty high yourself.”
“I still am,” he said. He turned it over, emptied my stuff out, tucked it under his arm, put something down on the dresser. “There’s a hundred dollars. Buy yourself a real good one.”
Through the window, I watched the dreadnaught drift away again. Just a little bit too late in getting here, I smiled after it. The cat’s out of the bag now and a bulldog will probably chase it.
* * *
—
The silver dress fit me like a wet compress. It was one of those things that break up homes. The manager flagged me in the passageway leading back.
“Did you notice that man all by himself at a ringside table? You know who he is, don’t you?”
If I hadn’t, why had I bothered turning on all my current his way? “No,” I said, round-eyed, “who?”
“Milton. He owns the works. The reason I’m telling you is that you’ve got a date with a bottle of champagne at his table, starting in right now. Get on in there.”
We walked on back.
“Mr. Milton, this is Angel Face,” the manager said. “She won’t give us her right name—just walked in off Fifty-Second Street last Tuesday.”
“And I waited until tonight to drop around here!” he laughed. “What you paying her, Berger?” Then, before the other guy could get a word out, “Triple it! And now get out of here.”
The night ticked on. He’d look at me, then he’d suddenly throw up his hands as though to ward off a dazzling glare. “Turn it off, it hurts my eyes.”
I smiled a little and took out my mirror. I saw my eyes in it, and in each iris there was a little electric chair with Chick sitting strapped in it. Three weeks from now, sometime during that week. Boy, how they were rushing him! It made it a lot easier to go ahead.
I went back to what we’d been talking about—and what are any two people talking about, more or less, in a nightclub at four in the morning? “Maybe,” I said, “who can tell? Some night I might just feel like changing the scenery around me, but I couldn’t tell you about it, I’m not that kind.”
“You wouldn’t have to,” he said. He fooled with something below table level, then passed his hand to me. I took it and knotted my handkerchief around the latch-key he’d left in it. Burns had been right, it was a dangerous game, and bridges were blazing and collapsing behind me…
* * *
—
The doorman covered a yawn with a white kid glove, said, “Who shall I announce?”
“That’s all been taken care of,” I said, “so you can go back to your beauty sleep.”
He caught on, said insinuatingly, “It’s Mr. Milton, isn’t it? He’s out of town tonight.”
You’re telling me, I thought. I’d sent him the wire that fixed that, signed the name of the manager of his Philly club. “You’ve been reading my mail,” I said, and closed the elevator in his face.
The key worked, and the light-switch worked, and his Filipino had the night off, so the rest was up to me. The clock in his two-story living room said four-fifteen. I went to the sec
ond floor of the penthouse and started in on the bedroom. He was using Ruby Rose Reading’s jewel case to hold his collar buttons in, hadn’t thrown it out. I opened the fake bottom to see if he’d found what he was after, and the letters were gone—probably burned.
I located his wall safe but couldn’t crack it. While I was still working at it, the phone downstairs started to ring. I jumped as though a pin had been stuck into me, and started shaking like I was still doing one of my routines at the club. He had two phones, one downstairs, and one in the bedroom, which was an unlisted number. I snapped out the lights, ran downstairs, and picked it up. I didn’t answer, just held it.
Burns’s voice said, “Angel Face?”
I exhaled. “You sure frightened me!”
“Better get out of there. He just came back—must have tumbled to the wire. A spotter at Hell’s Bells tipped me off he was just there asking for you.”
“I can’t now,” I wailed. “I woke his damn doorman up getting in just now and I’m in that silver dress I do my numbers in! He’ll tell him I was here. I’ll have to play it dumb.”
“Did you get anything?”
“Nothing, only that jewel case. I couldn’t get the safe open, but he’s probably burned everything connecting him to her long ago.”
“Please get out of there, kid,” he pleaded. “You don’t know that guy. He’s going to pin you down on the mat if he finds you there.”
“I’m staying,” I said. “I’ve got to break him down tonight, it’s my last chance. Chick eats chickens and ice cream tomorrow night at six. Oh, Burns, pray for me, will you?”
“I’m going to do more than that,” he growled. “I’m going to give a wrong-number call there in half an hour. It’s four-thirty now. Five that’ll be. If you’re doing all right, I’ll lie low. If not, I’m not going to wait. I’ll break in with some of the guys and we’ll use the little we have—the photostats of the letters and the jewel case. I think Schlesinger can at least get Chick a reprieve on them, if not a new trial. If we can’t get Milton, we can’t get him, that’s all.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 42
