“Crane just telephoned to tell me they hadn’t been able to contact the fellow who wrote the letter yet.” Finklestein sat on the arm of an overstuffed chair and leaned on his gold-headed cane. “The fellow’s name is Mannie Grant and Crane thinks he is some kind of a burglar. He and the girls are to meet him at dinner tonight at the Café Monmarte. If he likes their looks, he’s going to come over to their table.”
“I hope they get hold of him,” said Bolston.
“You bet! His evidence sounds important. But I think we better get busy on some of the other angles.” The attorney tugged his notebook from a pocket, thumbed the pages. “Where’s Mr. Woodbury?”
Bolston lifted a cradle phone and said, “Mr. Woodbury, please.” The phone clicked, and Bolston said, “Ron, could you come in for a minute?”
Finklestein repeated to Woodbury what Crane had told him. He listened without comment.
Finklestein resumed, “It’s up to us to get going on this business, and there’s plenty we can do.” He looked at his notebook. “We’re working on the four important pieces of evidence against Mr. Westland. Pieces one, two, and three are the keys, the missing pistol, and the telephone call which didn’t come from Miss Martin.
“Fourth is the shot. A family named Shuttle, in the apartment below, heard it. They said it was around 12:20 A.M., when Westland admits he was in his wife’s apartment, but I think there is something phony about it. I wish you two would look into it. Could you go over and talk to the Shuttles tonight? Maybe their clock had stopped or something.”
“We’ll be glad to,” said Bolston.
Pocketing his notebook, Finklestein rose from his chair. “Tomorrow morning then,” he said jauntily. “I’ll be seeing you in jail.”
CHAPTER V
Monday Night
Brass Buttons gleamed as the Negro doorman slammed the taxi door and escorted them along the red rug under the canopy. Miss Martin and Miss Brentino left the two men as they stepped inside the Café Monmarte, disappeared through a door marked: “Dames.” An orchestra throbbed in the distance. The cloakroom girl smiled at Williams, handed him his check.
“Watch out for those French chorus girls,” she said.
“They better watch out for me, honey,” Williams replied.
A gangplank with a silver rail extended upward in the direction of the music. Canvas with blue portholes painted on it to represent the side of a ship, stretched on either side of the opening. Black letters on a life ring spelled, Normandie. A tall woman in a gray gown with purple orchids on the left shoulder was having trouble with the gangplank’s bottom step. She stumbled, fell into Crane’s arms, and asked, “Have you seen my husband?” She smelled of jasmine.
Crane said, “No.”
“Good!” The woman struggled out of his arms and lurched toward the door marked, “Dames.”
“This seems to be quite a place,” said Williams.
Miss Brentino appeared first. Her rounded ivory shoulders contrasted with her supple black satin evening gown, cut extremely low over smooth breasts. Her figure was slender, but still voluptuously feminine; her face, with its curving jaw line, was exquisite; her hair was as glistening black as a crow’s wing. Her large eyes were mocking. William Crane felt she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.
Miss Martin, behind her, was quite pretty and wholesome in a soft green evening dress which accentuated her red hair. She wore a white ermine cloak, a square-cut emerald ring.
“You have a reservation?” the plump headwaiter asked at the top of the gangplank.
“Mr. Williams’ party,” Crane said.
“Ah yes.” The waiter’s manner became ingratiating. “Mr. Williams of New York.”
Behind him, they edged between crowded tables. The orchestra was at the far end of the gaudily decorated room. Many couples were dancing on the oval floor, their faces only half visible in the soft indirect light. The music was unobtrusive, stringy.
For a second a waiter blocked their passage. At a table to their right a chemical blonde with carmine fingernails and a naked back was holding a glass of whiskey to the lips of a stout man in a gray suit.
“Come on, Daddy,” she urged, “have anozzer teeney dwink.”
The stout man pushed the glass away. “Baby, I got to think of my wife and kidneys.”
Silver and glass gleamed faintly on an empty table beside the dance floor. The fat headwaiter pulled out the chairs quickly and said to Crane, “Will this be all right, Mr. Williams?”
Crane said, “This is Mr. Williams.”
“It’s all right,” Williams admitted, “but see that we get plenty of service.”
Two waiters held the chairs for the ladies while the headwaiter accepted four menus from an assistant. He reverently laid these in front of the four. “Will you have cocktails?”
Williams ordered two bacardis without grenadine for the ladies, Scotch-and-soda for himself, and a dry martini for Crane. “Make ’em all double ones,” he said expansively.
They agreed on hors d’æuvres, clear soup, lobster thermidor, soufflé potatoes, and French chicory salad. Miss Brentino and Miss Martin both insisted they would rather have sparkling Burgundy than champagne. Crane ordered two bottles of Chauvenet Red Cap put in ice buckets.
The fat headwaiter repeated the order with satisfaction to his assistant. “If there’s anything else you would like to have, Mr. Williams,” he added, “we will procure it. Mr. Gavin, the manager, said we were to take good care of you.”
Williams waved a negligent hand. “O. K. If we want any little thing at all, I’ll let you know.”
While they were eating the hors d’æuvres Crane watched the orchestra to see what sort of a place this was. He saw very quickly that it was a high-class place because the orchestra was terribly bored. In a low class place the orchestra works hard, but it does not seem to enjoy playing. In better places the orchestra works hard and seems to enjoy playing. But the really high-class place orchestras do not work hard, and their members are very bored and sometimes play with their eyes half closed, as though they wished they were asleep or somewhere else, which, no doubt, they did.
When Crane saw the first saxophone player had his eyes closed, he knew it was a good place, and he prepared to enjoy the food.
They were finishing the soup when Miss Martin leaned her shoulder against him. Her perfume was sweet and heady. She said, “I’m so thrilled. Do you think that Mr. Grant will actually meet us?”
Crane said he didn’t know.
Without warning, the music stopped. Brilliant lights illuminated the room. The dancers, blinking, searched for their tables as though they had suddenly awakened from a dream. In voices loud and excited, the women called to friends, talked animatedly to escorts. The men walked stiffly, squared shoulders holding out starch-covered chests, chins held high by rigid collars.
“I don’t know what Grant has to tell us,” Crane said, “but his testimony will be damned essential—” he was a little drunk, but he managed to get the “essential” out pretty clearly—“if we want to get Mr. Westland out of his jam.”
Emily Lou closed her eyes. “We just have to.…”
The chicory, which they ate in the American style with the lobster course, was as crisp as new currency. The French dressing was freshly made; it no more than suggested a garlic nubbin and was miraculously without sugar. They drank a great deal of the sparkling wine.
“I can read Italian,” Miss Brentino remarked, “but not French.” She was looking at the wall across the empty dance floor. “What does that sign say?” Her low voice made shivers run up and down Crane’s back.
The sign was on the front of the elaborately painted representation of the Hotel des Deux Anges. Crane translated, “Rooms by the day or hour.”
He added, “I think that hotel is a little wicked.”
“It’s modern,” said Miss Brentino. Her face was reposed, almost cold and almost sullen, but Crane felt there was passion in her curved lips. He
said, “I could go for you in a gigantic way—in fact, I do.”
Her liquid eyes were mocking. “You mean: ‘Rooms by the hour’?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t care,” he said earnestly. “For you I’d even take one by the day.” He drained his wineglass.
“I’m sorry.” Her face was suddenly unguarded. “I like detectives, but my spare time is all booked.”
“Woodbury?”
She nodded.
Williams was telling Miss Martin of dope smuggling in San Francisco. “So I grabbed the Chink by the pigtail like you would a cat,” he was saying, “and I trun him so far out in the bay they had to send a coast guard cutter after him.”
Miss Martin saw the other two looking at her. “Mr. Williams has had the most exciting life,” she exclaimed. “He’s been telling me how he stopped dope peddling in California. He had to kill four men.…”
“Aw, they don’t count.” Williams adjusted his butterfly tie. “They was just Chinamen.” He pretended embarrassment.
They finished with cheese and toasted water crackers. Crane had brandy; the ladies, cointreau; Williams took Scotch and soda.
As he seated a small man and a buxom blonde with too much paint on her face at a small table directly across the floor, the fat headwaiter bowed to them. The orchestra filed back onto the low platform. A spotlight experimentally flashed on and off the dance floor.
“I guess they are going to have the floor show now,” Williams said. The blonde, who had white feathers all over the upper portion of her dress, seemed to be giving him the eye. He winked at her. She looked away. The orchestra began to play, “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” in tango time. Williams said indignantly: “Christ! They’ll be making a rumba out of the ‘Rock of Ages’ next.” After the piece was finished, a round little Jew with a cane came out and sang, “I Kiss Your Hand, Madam,” the way Al Jolson would a Mammy song. Finally, in a recitative chorus, he intimated the girls about to appear were the beauty queens of Paris, that only to see them would make the Americans say, “Ooo, la! la! Some keeds, eh?”
When the girls kicked out onto the dance floor amid a blare of trumpets, William Crane saw they were French, all right. Or, at least, they were formed along more liberal lines than American chorus girls. While the band played noisily, they marched solemnly around the floor in gorgeously colored costumes which got scantier and scantier and scantier until a plump black-haired girl appeared with nothing on except some white fur mittens. These she used in the manner of a fan dancer with a fan, but the effect was startling. She walked, quite pleased with the sensation she was making, by Crane’s table, stopped, daringly waved one hand at the party and said:
“Allo, Meester Weelums.”
Williams was not too drunk to blush. “What the hell!” he said.
Both the girls giggled. “A friend?” asked Miss Brentino.
“I swear…”
Crane asked, “Say, who are you, anyway? Maxie Baer?”
“All I did,” Williams said, “was to have the chief of detectives get our reservations here for us. I worked with him on a lot of jobs in the old days, but I never saw that girl in my life.” He gulped some water. “Not that I wouldn’t…”
“Now I see why we’ve had all the attention,” said Crane. “I was beginning to think you were a millionaire playboy.”
The parade had finished and two men in the blue costumes of French railway porters were tossing a man, cleverly made up to represent a stuffed figure, about the floor. They threw him in the air, they dropped him, they twisted his arms, they slapped him; but the dummy remained inert until they turned their backs. Then he kicked one of them. Finally, in a rage, they seized the dummy, thrust it in a box, slammed the lid and goose-stepped out with it.
Hollow handclapping filled the room. The orchestra slowed to a moaning tune, and a player, his eyes closed, drooled blue notes from a cornet covered with a silvered derby. From the side danced a red-headed girl in checker-board rompers. Powder had been dusted on her bare legs; her face was painted like a gaudy German doll. Blue veins squirmed on her dead white thighs. She looked at Williams, sang:
“I can’t give you anything but love, ba-hay-bee
That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, ba-hay-bee.…”
Four men in well-fitting evening clothes strolled down the gangplank at the far end of the room and paused at the bottom to watch the girl in the spotlight. The dark eyes of one of the two younger men surveyed the room, paused for a second at Crane’s table in bold appraisal of the two girls, and then passed by. Finally he nudged the stockier of the two older men, and three of them started towards the dance floor, leaving the other younger man behind. A warning palm upraised, the fat headwaiter stepped in front of them, but the thick man elbowed him out of the way. The three continued their leisurely progress along the edge of the dance floor their backs making somber patches in the square of light on which the redhead in rompers was singing:
“Diamond bracelets Woolworth
doesn’t sell, ba-hay-bee.”
The three men in evening clothes halted in front of the small table occupied by the big blonde with the feathers and her companion. The small man was eating; he looked up; surprise half-mooned his eyebrows; then with absurd haste he attempted to scramble to his feet. The thick man pulled a blue-black pistol from under his arm and shot him in the face. The blonde yelled with horror, her feathers ballooned as she dropped sideways out of her chair. The bullet went low and tore away part of the small man’s jaw. He clapped both hands to the wound, bent over forward, dripping blood on the tablecloth between his fingers. The thick man shot him twice through the top of his head.
A scream skyrocketed from the mouth of the redhead in the checker-board rompers. One of the men shook a warning finger at her.
“Shut up, tutz,” he said, “or I’ll tear them panties off you.”
The redhead froze into outraged silence. The orchestra was stopping one instrument at a time, the tempo getting slower and slower as on an unwound phonograph. Finally only the drummer, his eyes fixed on the dead man, moved an unconscious foot on the pedal of the bass drum.
The young man who had stayed by the gangplank threaded his way through the silent tables towards his companions. A square-jawed man with a large party started to rise as he passed. The young man narrowed his dark eyes; the square-jawed man sat down.
Williams had his revolver in his lap. “The bastards!” he was saying. “The bastards!”
“Wait a minute,” Crane kicked him under the table. “Do you want to get us all shot?”
The men, with the young man from the gangplank, walking backward, marched to the kitchen doors. A waiter scuttled out of their way like a frightened crab. The first man stopped to hold the swinging door for the others, then, still not hurrying, he disappeared.
As though someone had turned on a radio, the room was engulfed with sound. Women spoke shrilly … chairs scraped … “I’ll be God-damned!” a man behind Miss Brentino’s rigid figure kept saying. Two waiters pulled the big blonde from under the dead man’s table and carried her towards the gangplank. There were dust circles on the white feathers. A ring of men and women formed around the corpse; other diners made for the gangplank. The red-headed singer had her hands over her breast. “My Gawd!” she said in a strident voice. “Ain’t nobody going after them?”
Lips were the only touch of color on Emily Lou Martin’s face. Her eyes were terror-stricken. She said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Miss Brentino said quickly, “Come on.” She led Emily Lou away, one bare arm around her waist.
Crane and Williams went over to look at the dead man. He was lying with his face pillowed in his arms, like a schoolboy fallen asleep over a Latin grammar. The tablecloth had soaked up most of the blood. Presently someone threw another cloth over the body.
A dowager with jade earrings asked the plump headwaiter, “D’you know who he was?”
The headwaiter adjusted the cloth to cover the bl
oodstains. “His name was Mannie Grant.”
CHAPTER VI
Tuesday Morning
His discolored teeth projecting in an ingratiating smirk, Guard Percival Galt said, “Here’s Mr. Westland, Warden.” He gave a convulsive jerk of his body, a sort of epileptic bow, and hurried away.
“Everything all right, Warden?” Robert Westland asked.
With a porcine grunt, Warden Buckholtz heaved himself from the swivel chair behind his mahogany desk. The dollar dimples appeared on his cheeks. “You bet,” he said. “Your partner, Mr. Bolston, paid me last night on his way home.” He waddled to Westland and laid a pudgy hand on his shoulder. “Your partner’s a mighty fine fellow.”
Westland dipped his shoulder from under the hand. “Anybody with ten thousand dollars is a fine fellow.”
Warden Buckholtz was deeply hurt. “That’s no way to talk when I’m just trying to help you.” He shook his head sadly. “I have to protect myself in case something should happen to me.”
“Sorry,” Westland said. “I’m edgy today.”
The warden inclined his body towards the Assistant Matron’s office. “Some of your friends are already there.”
Emily Lou Martin was wearing a gray squirrel coat with a plum-colored orchid pinned on the front. Westland said, “Dear!” He kissed her and then glanced around at the others. “Where’s Dick and Ron?”
Attorney Finklestein snapped open the lid of his gold watch. “They’ll be along any minute now.”
Westland looked at William Crane, who was sitting with Williams on the window sill. “What’s the news? Did you catch up with M. G.?”
In the jail yard naked trees shivered in the wind. An angry black cat’s-tail of smoke lashed back and forth above the kitchen chimney. Someone had brushed the cobwebs from the room’s windows.
Crane shook his head. “He was dead when we caught up with him.” He described the events of the preceding day.
“It was so exciting,” Emily Lou exclaimed. “We nearly got shot.”
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