Lydia

by Howard Fast

  “Where did you get that from?”

  “His friend, Sadie Klinger. Also, Gutterman’s History of the Berlin Theatre. Also—”

  “Go on, go on,” I told her. A moment or two later, I recalled that Sadie Klinger was the designer at the Sunday-night dinner party at the Sarbines’.

  “Married, Berlin, nineteen twenty-seven. Wife died of cancer. One son—killed in an accident. Nothing but bad luck, Harvey. He also happened to be Jewish, so he had to get out of Germany. Left there in thirty-seven. England, penniless. A hard year, then coproducer of Lemon-Yellow, which was a hit.”

  “Penniless coproducer?”

  “That’s the way it says, Harvey. America in thirty-eight. Producer, coproducer eleven plays since then. Do you want the names?”

  “No. Any business dealings with Sarbine?”

  “No. At least, I haven’t dug any up. I’ve only been on this a few hours.”

  “Enemies? Bad business dealings?”

  “Nothing yet. I’ve called a few people. They speak well of him. Sweet, gentle, generous—words like that.”

  “Women in his life? Things like that?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Harvey,” she protested, “give me some time.”

  “I know, I know—I think you’ve done wonders, Mazie. I just don’t have any time. This whole thing is slipping away.”

  “What whole thing?”

  The phone rang then, so I didn’t have to explain. It was Jack Finney, the director—another guest at the Sunday night dinner party. He explained that Helen Sarbine had said something about our company carrying the policy on the necklace, and that he had called the company and had asked to talk to whoever was in charge of the Sarbine-necklace investigation, because he had some information on the subject, and they had switched him to me.

  I asked him to hold on, while I gave Mazie a kiss that she tried to dodge and that caught the edge of her ear, and told her to carry on.

  “You’re sick,” she said. “You got a dame on the phone, and all of a sudden you’re kissing me. You’re absolutely sick. Do you want any more on Gorman?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then you wait until tomorrow. I’m going home.”

  When she had left, I said to Finney, “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you have anything on the necklace?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Why don’t you talk to the cops?”

  “Because I don’t have what they’d be interested in, and I don’t like cops. Do you want to talk?”

  “My tongue is hanging out. Where can I meet you?”

  “You’ll have to come to me. I’m in rehearsal now—the Romberg Studios, on Second Avenue and Ninth Street. It’s a rehearsal hall, one flight up. We break for food at six, and I’ll have an hour or so then and we can eat together and talk. If you want to come now, come right up to the hall.”

  Ten minutes later I was in a taxi headed downtown, and by five-thirty at Ninth Street and Second Avenue. It seemed to me to be a curious and out-of-the-way place to rehearse a play, but I learned subsequently that the Romberg Studios were in constant demand and that a great many plays indeed were put into rehearsal at the lower end of Second Avenue. The building was what they call a three-story taxpayer, and the room in which the play was being done was an empty barn of a place, about thirty-five feet square. One side of the room had tall windows, which barely kept out the noise and roar of Second Avenue, and on the other side there were a dozen folding chairs. The floor was marked with chalk, and the props consisted of half a dozen additional folding chairs and a bridge table. At another bridge table, Jack Finney sat with a straw-haired girl, both of them with open scripts. Of the seven actors in the cast, four had scripts, so I judged that the play was still in its very early stage.

  Finney himself was short, square and redheaded—an eager, energetic and quick-speaking man of about my own age, give a year or two in either direction. He had sharp, restless eyes that picked me up and identified me the moment I entered the room, and he got over to me with a sort of sliding, tiptoe walk, and let me know that if I’d take a seat by the wall and wait a few minutes, he’d close the scene and make it an early break. That was good enough. I had never seen a rehearsal before, and for the next ten minutes I sat fascinated, watching seven characters tearing at each other’s skin and souls and hearts, each trying to outdo the next in a parade of degradation.

  “It’s an interesting play,” Finney said to me when at last they broke. “It may not make you feel good, but it makes you think about yourself.”

  “If you want to think about yourself.”

  Finney shrugged. We went downstairs then, and found a corner table in a Jewish dairy restaurant that occupied part of the same building. Finney ordered potato soup—a specialty of the house—and blintzes with sour cream. I had the same. All our talk up until then had been about the play and the theater. When the soup came, Finney observed that I was not like any detective he had ever seen or read about.

  “I’m not a detective. I’m a confessor to petty thieves.”

  “That’s an interesting way to put it,” Finney said. “I suppose all you’re really interested in is the necklace?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well I don’t really know anything about the necklace—except in a peripheral sense.”

  “I was hoping you had it and were prepared to turn it over to me.”

  “That’ll be the day. No, I don’t know where the necklace is, but I do know who killed David Gorman—sort of.”

  I thought about that for a while. “Sort of. How do you know who killed someone, sort of?”

  “I haven’t any proof.”

  “I still think you should go to the cops.”

  “I don’t want with the cops, Krim. If you want to listen to this, listen. I don’t want to sit with this. You got a stake in the necklace, and in some way this connects with the necklace, so maybe you’re interested.”

  “Sure I’m interested,” I told him. “But let me level with you. I want the necklace, not Gorman’s murderer. But if you give me information connected with Gorman’s murder or death or whatever it was, I must pass it on to the police.”

  “Murder.”

  “Whatever it was, I must pass it on. I can cover up on larceny to get property back, but not on murder. I can’t walk around with murder information.”

  “How about murder speculation?”

  I shrugged. “Well see. Why don’t you tell me about Gorman—whatever you have.”

  “All right. You see, David was a friend of mine and like a father to me, and I cared about him. He gave me my first break as a director. He had faith in me. He taught me things. He was a gentle and decent human being. I don’t know how much you know or may have heard about Broadway producers. There are all kinds, but Dave Gorman was the honest kind. I can tell you about plays that play to capacity audiences for two seasons, and in the end, the investors come out with twenty cents on the dollar. Not with a Gorman production. Backers were paid off and they made money. Actors were treated like human beings, and he had taste and common sense, which are two very rare ingredients in the theater. I don’t want to give you a lecture on the theater in New York—it can be a very rewarding thing but mostly it’s a miserable, stinking jungle. So we lost something when we lost Dave Gorman.

  “Now after that dinner party on Sunday night, my wife and me, we got into a cab with Dave, and he dropped us off. Nothing unusual that I can think of, but he said something about the necklace. I don’t remember what; I think he asked me would my wife, Jean, like one of the same? A diamond necklace, that is. She replied that if she had it, she’d sell it and we could all retire on what it would bring. Dave said something to that—I think he said maybe not. I wasn’t listening particularly.

  “That was Sunday. The next day, the day before yesterday, he called me and said he wanted to talk to me about the necklace. Not what about it—just tha
t he wanted to talk. And then he said something strange—did I think Mark Sarbine was a German? Because being an American, I would have a better ear for an accent than he did. Did I tell you about Dave? He was a German Jew—and had a bad time there before he got out. I heard that from others, not from him. So when he asked me about Sarbine, I began to think—you know, it’s one of those things, a very slight accent, if you don’t listen for it, you don’t remember it. I didn’t know Sarbine very well—I had only met him once before—but he’s one of these people who get something out of theater associations, and he invited Jean and me through the Hartmans, who are heavy backers of this show. They were also there, you remember. So I couldn’t say whether I thought Sarbine was German or not.”

  “But you remembered an accent?”

  “I think so,” Finney said. “I’m not sure. But I could not get to see Dave on Monday or on Tuesday. God help me, I’m one of those sons of bitches who are always too busy. There’s nothing so egotistically busy as a director on the make, which is what I am. I called him back on Tuesday to break an appointment we had for dinner, and I made another appointment to have lunch with him on Wednesday, today. So I only talked to him on the phone, and he said something to me which I took as a curious joke of some kind at the time. He said—I believe these were his words—‘If Sarbine does not murder me first, I see you tomorrow, Jackie.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, and when I pressed him, he said that he had made some foolish inquiries and he should have learned to keep his mouth shut and mind his own business, and he would tell me about it at lunch the following day. He asked me one thing, did the name Von Kesselring mean anything to me? I said no, should it? He said, no, thank God, that it was an older sickness than any I knew. Then he laughed and said something about the kind of nonsense an old man talks. Then, this morning, he started to cross the street and he was killed.”

  “By Sarbine?”

  “I don’t know,” Finney sighed. “If I go to the police, what do I tell them? That Dave made some crack about Sarbine killing him? Does it mean one damn thing?”

  “I don’t know.” The potato soup and the blintzes lay heavily on my stomach. I was irritated at having come down here for no more than a wild tale like this. “I don’t know,” I said. “Hundreds of people are killed every year by hit-and-run drivers. It’s part of the general idiocy of the world we inhabit. Maybe Gorman was killed that way. How do I know?”

  Finney was watching me with interest. “You know, Mr. Krim, you’re not touched, are you, not one goddamn bit. You really don’t care about who killed Dave Gorman or whether he was murdered or not.”

  “Should I care?”

  “I suppose not,” Finney replied softly. “Who are you to bleed for someone else’s hurt? You never knew Dave.”

  “We don’t know each other,” I said. “We just met tonight. I’m no angel of justice. I’m just a guy trying to earn his dollar—and a very small dollar it usually is. What do you think you want me to do? Find your friend’s killer—if there is one?”

  Finney shook his head.

  “You have more brains than I have, Mr. Finney. If that weren’t the case, I’d be directing the play and you’d be wearing out your shoe leather trying to turn up a necklace. Do you think Gorman stole it?”

  “That’s a stupid thing to ask!” Finney exploded.

  “All right—so it’s a stupid thing to ask. I ask stupid questions.” He reached for the check, but I beat him to it. He insisted that he should take the check, since he had invited me down there; and I wanted to tell him to go to hell, but restrained myself, put down a dollar for the tip, and then paid the check at the cashier’s desk. Finney remained seated at the table, staring after me morosely.

  I began to walk uptown on Second Avenue, playing with pieces of the puzzle in my mind and also trying to convince myself that I was not a bastard. In neither case was I successful, and finally I took a cab back to the office.

  After six, you sign in downstairs. In the offices, no one except the cleaning women was present, and I shivered a bit as I walked past the rows of empty desks to my own little cubicle. I had never liked that office, but I liked it least when it was empty.

  At my desk I thought about things some more, and then I called Lucille Dempsey, the librarian. What I least desired to face now was an evening alone. She had one foot in the tub, as she informed me. She asked me what she could do for me?

  “Hold my hand, because the shadows of night are closing in. I will be happy to take you to a movie or the theater or the ballet or whatever your heart desires.”

  “Too late, Harvey. I have a dinner date for tonight.”

  “That’s the story of my life, isn’t it? You got a minute now?”

  “Harvey, I am standing here with a towel around me and a tub waiting and a date due at seven forty-five.”

  “I’ll make it a quick one. You know the answer to everything. How do you connect a German refugee to diamonds?”

  “Is this a gag, Harvey?”

  “I’m deadly serious, believe me.”

  “Well, some of them brought diamonds with them, Harvey. You know that. If you have to get out of a country quickly, you want something small but valuable to carry—diamonds, postage stamps. Are you leaving us, Harvey? Even if you’re not, I am leaving you. Good-by now.”

  I put down the phone, and sat there with the single green light burning over my desk, and brooded. I had sometimes thought of having a sign made, “He broods best who broods alone.” But it’s not strictly true. I had found a piece that almost fit, but it had to be squeezed, and finally I put through a call to Chelsee College, Seavey Hall, and finally the house mother, Mrs. Bedrich.

  Of course she remembered me. “You’re that nice Mr. Harvey.”

  “Mr. Krim,” I told her. Still, it was pleasant to receive any sort of a compliment today.

  “You know, I have been thinking about you,” she said, “because that other man you sent up here today left something to be desired. I mean as far as his manners were concerned. He kept asking questions, and when one of the girls showed him a picture of Sarah, he claimed he gave it back to her, but another girl insists that he put it in his pocket—”

  “What time did he leave there?” I interrupted.

  “Well, you know that—”

  “I don’t know that and he was not from our company. Please, when did he leave there, Mrs. Bedrich?”

  “I just don’t understand you, Mr. Harvey.”

  “I’m only asking when he left there, Mrs. Bedrich.”

  “About two o’clock.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and broke the connection. I started to leave the office, but then turned back and called Lieutenant Rothschild, and said to him:

  “Listen, Lieutenant, we’ve never been blood brothers, but will you do one favor for me, please?”

  “What favor, Harvey?”

  “Will you meet me in ten minutes at 626 Park Avenue?”

  “No, I won’t. I’m on my way home.”

  “Please,” I insisted. “I’m begging for this. I’m begging for one lousy favor.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re going to kill their maid, Lydia, and they’ll probably do it tonight.”

  “What kind of a crazy half-wit are you, Harvey? I am sick and tired—”

  “I’m begging. What do you want me to do, get down on my knees?”

  There was a long silence then, but I could make a good guess at what was going through the lieutenant’s mind. Then he agreed. He said he’d meet me there, but that it would be closer to twenty minutes than ten, since he had things to clean up before he left.

  He was humoring me, not troubled or concerned, but humoring me, and I said to myself, “The hell with him or what he thinks or whether he is humoring me or not!”

  Then I called the Sarbines’ apartment, and I said a small prayer of thanks as Lydia answered the phone.

  “This is Harvey Krim. Are you alone on the wire?”

  �
��Yes. I think so.”

  “Where?”

  “In the kitchen.”

  “Sarbines at home?”

  “In the living room. They have a man there with them.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “What happened? What’s different?”

  “How do you know?”

  “The hell with how I know! They’re watching you. What else?” The wire clicked. Someone had picked up an extension. In an accent as raw as hers, I said, “Honey child, we had this here date a week ago.”

  “I’m staying in,” Lydia whined. “I ain’t going out with you again—nowhere. So you just stop calling, you hear—”

  The extension clicked again, and Lydia said, “They’re going somewhere, I think. They had a trunk brought up from the basement.”

  “What kind of a trunk?”

  “A steamer trunk.”

  “Is there a bolt on the door to your room?”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask why. Go in there and bolt it. Stay there until I come, fifteen minutes.”

  “But why?”

  “You little fool, stop asking why. Look in the refrigerator if you want to know why. Now do as I say. Will you?”

  A pause—and then she agreed.

  My hand was trembling as I put down the phone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HOMER CLAPP was off duty, and the night doorman at 626 Park Avenue was regarding Lieutenant Rothschild nervously. I have observed that it doesn’t matter who you make into a cop, or what his former race, creed or condition was; he will turn into the race of cops, and it will be in his walk, his eyes, and his manner—and unmistakable. Lieutenant Rothschild was unmistakable, and as I appeared, he fixed me with a cold and angry stare and informed me that he had been waiting three minutes for me. “And you were in such a goddamned hell of a hurry!”

  I couldn’t see what he had lost. It was a pleasant and balmy April evening, and it was not that I was late but that he was early.