Eight Faces at Three

by Craig Rice

  There was still the little hiding place behind the cheap Venetian mirror, where they had once left notes for each other. She lifted out the mirror, ran her fingers carefully along the ledge, while purplish dust accumulated on her finger tips. Nothing there. Nothing but one discarded hairpin, dust-covered and rusted. She held it a moment on the palm of her hand, staring at it, and recognizing it as her own. Had it been there all this time?

  But the thing she had come to find, the thing she must find, the reason for her terrible errand, was nowhere in the shabby room.

  Was she being watched?

  She stood, breathless, listening. There was the faint dripping of water from the cold-water faucet in the kitchenette. (Hadn’t that faucet been fixed in all these months?) It sounded like the slow, remorseless, inexorable ticking of a clock.

  There was so little time left!

  Again she held herself back from headlong flight. Too much depended on her now. So much? Everything! Surely, she told herself, it was not so terrible a thing to do. Worse things had been done in this world, and bravely, too. Yes, even she herself had done them.

  She was not only fighting for herself. There were others to fight for, she remembered them one by one, while slowly the courage she had lost came back to her.

  There was no other way.

  She went into the kitchenette, knelt on the floor, and carefully, methodically, began searching the dead man’s pockets.

  Chapter 2

  The tall thin man in the little control room of the broadcasting studio stretched his long legs uncomfortably under the black-and-chromium table, absent-mindedly mussed up his red hair with a carelessly straying hand, and tried to focus his tired mind on the implications of what had just been said to him.

  The forty-seventh broadcast of the Nelle Brown Revue had ended in a burst of applause from the studio audience. He forced his thoughts back over past events: Schultz, the control engineer, had made a final twisting of dials and switches, grabbed his hat, and gone hurrying off to get a sandwich between shows. Joe McIvers, from the advertising agency, had popped out of the booth like a cork out of a bottle to phone the sponsor. The usual procession of actors, musicians, sound men, and assistants had filed out of the studio.

  Then Nelle Brown had blown into the little glass booth like a small tornado, her face dead-white against her deep-rose dress, her eyes smoking with fury. She had kicked the door shut, cursed the apparatus that kept it from slamming, and said, “Jake, I’m being blackmailed.”

  There had been a pause while he stared at her, before she lit a cigarette, took one long puff, stamped it out below the NO SMOKING sign, added, “I’m damned if I will!” and vanished.

  The import of what she had been saying began to take form in his mind. Suddenly he sprang to his feet. Part of the duty of a press-agent manager, he told himself, was to keep one’s client from being blackmailed.

  What the devil had happened to Nelle Brown this time?

  There was no sign of her in the corridor. He stopped a page boy.

  “Miss Brown, sir? Try the reception room.”

  She was not in the reception room.

  “Nelle? I saw her beat it down the elevator.”

  He caught the next elevator. It was crowded and stopped at every floor like an old-fashioned milk train. Nelle was nowhere in the lobby, nor in the bar nor the restaurant nor the cigar stand.

  Jake Justus, press agent, manager, and ex-reporter, wondered again why, with untold billions of people in the world, everything had to pick him to happen to.

  He lit a cigarette and tried to think. Nelle hardly ever left the studios between broadcasts. Could she possibly have gone home? But why the hell should she do that?

  He might try it anyway, if he could manage without alarming Tootz, in case she hadn’t gone home.

  He stepped in the cigar stand, called Nelle’s apartment. No one answered. He stood holding the receiver a long time, finally put it down, and methodically called every place Nelle might have gone.

  After half a dozen calls, it was apparent that she had vanished into the very thinnest of air.

  Damn it! he had to find her. He looked at his watch and frowned at its reminder of only forty minutes left until the rebroadcast for the West Coast.

  Just at that moment, the idea came.

  It was almost impossible. No, by God, it wasn’t at all impossible. That was the one person most likely to be blackmailing Nelle. Why the devil hadn’t he thought of it before, instead of wasting all this time? He ran out to the curb, hailed a taxi, gave the driver an address on Erie Street, and told him for Pete’s sake to make it snappy.

  The taxi stopped before a long, dark building. Jake told the driver to wait, bounded up the steps into a many-cornered hall, and climbed the unlighted stairs to the second floor. The air resounded with riotous tumult from one of the apartments, a very devil of a row. He grinned. He’d gone to a few parties in that building himself! For a moment he wished he didn’t have the rebroadcast to attend. Not that he knew the people giving the party, but that would make no difference. Then he remembered his errand, and stopped grinning.

  He knocked at a door marked 215 and waited. There was no answer. He noted a light shining through the transom and knocked again, louder. Hard to hear anything, with that infernal racket going on. He gave one last, violent pound and the door, slightly ajar, fell open.

  Nelle was not there. No one was in the room.

  He went in slowly and cautiously, wondering what to do next. Then he saw it in the kitchenette, crumpled on the floor—the man Nelle Brown might have come to see, the man who might have been blackmailing her—a dark huddle on the linoleum, in a little pool of blood.

  The man was dead. Shot, Jake thought grimly, and not half shot. Nothing could be done for him now.

  He stood there a moment, one hand twisting the shabby green curtains of the kitchenette. The thought of calling the police rose to his mind and was instantly dismissed.

  Blackmail or no blackmail, why had she done it?

  He reminded himself this was no time to spend thinking it over. Nelle might have left some trace of herself. Moving quickly and carefully, he looked through the room. There was nothing.

  At last he went cautiously through the dead man’s pockets, found no souvenir nor reminder of Nelle Brown. There was a surprisingly fat packet of twenty-dollar bills in the dog-eared wallet, and Jake scowled. Where the devil had all that money come from? The man had been broke, hungry broke, a week ago. Now, here was a fistful of folding money. Jake felt a pang of sympathetic regret. For all the man had been a rat, it was a damn shame he wouldn’t have the spending of all that money, after being broke so long!

  Oh Well, as long as there was nothing of Nelle’s in the place.

  He looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes to the re-broadcast.

  He gave the room one last, hurried look, saw that he had left no trace of his own visit, left the door slightly ajar just as he had found it, and raced to his waiting taxi.

  “—and step on it, fella!”

  The driver nodded, shot down the street, and immediately became hopelessly embroiled in a traffic jam.

  Where was Nelle Brown?

  Jake Justus cursed himself as the stupidest of all stupid fools. Why hadn’t he gone there to look for her in the first place? Why hadn’t he managed to find her, wherever she had gone? Or, failing to find her, why hadn’t he gone back to the studio and arranged for a double for the re-broadcast?

  Now they would all be in the soup, unless someone had had sense enough to rise to the occasion, which he doubted. Again he took out his watch. Six minutes now. What would they do? Probably throw in a substitute program of sorts, and the sponsor, dear Mr. Goldman, would have a litter of leopards. Hell would be calm and quiet compared to what was going to pop. How was he ever going to get Nelle out of this mess?

  The taxi dumped him out at the door with less than a minute to go.

  He raced across the lobby, dived into a waiting elevato
r, and gasped, “Late. Nelle Brown rebroadcast.”

  The elevator operator, used to emergencies, nodded, slammed the door, and the car shot upward without a stop.

  The elevator stopped at the studio floor and Jake stepped into the reception room just as someone turned on the loud-speaker. A voice, warm and rich and dramatic, calm as a lake at early evening, and absolutely unmistakable, filled the room.

  “Golden Moon … over the midnight sky.…”

  Relief flooded over him in a great, almost unbearable wave. He leaned against the wall a moment, catching his breath.

  Of all the silly things to have imagined! Just because one of Nelle Brown’s ex-sweeties managed to get himself shot, he’d practically had Nelle strapped in the electric chair. The idea of Nelle Brown murdering anybody! She probably hadn’t even been near the place.

  He slipped into the control room, mopping his brow. Schultz grinned sympathetically, waved him into one of the uncomfortable black-leather-and-chromium-piped chairs.

  There she was, standing beside Bob Bruce the announcer, her face upturned, singing. There was not a tremor, not even the faintest suggestion of a tremor, in her voice.

  Wherever she had gone between broadcasts, she had returned safely and in plenty of time. Not one shining wave of her golden-brown hair was disturbed; her exquisite, flowerlike face—though as pale as it had been before—was newly powdered. Her deep-rose dress was fresh and unwrinkled.

  But her handkerchief!

  Her immense, pale-green chiffon handkerchief that she passed nervously through her hands as she sang had an ugly stain in one corner.

  It had not been there when she left the studio.

  Even through the heavy glass of the control-room window, Jake Justus could see that it was blood.

  Chapter 3

  Jake told the taxi driver to go around Grant Park until further orders, and to close the glass partition. Then he turned to Nelle, huddled in a corner. “Paul March had it coming to him, but why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said sullenly.

  He carefully unfolded the green chiffon handkerchief across her knee so that the stain showed darkly. She snatched it back from sight.

  “What did you do with the gun, Nelle? I hope to heaven you pitched it in the river.”

  “I never had a gun. I didn’t shoot him.”

  He swore wearily and at length, without repeating himself.

  “Jake, please believe me.”

  “I don’t give a damn if you shot him or not. My job is to keep you out of trouble, and I’m going to do it. Don’t forget your contract is up for re-signing. It’s none of my business whether or not you shot the guy, but will you please tell me where you got the gun and what you did with it, and who might have seen you going there, so I’ll know just what I’ve got to do first?”

  “But I didn’t shoot him, Jake. You’ve got to believe me. I was there tonight, yes. That’s right. But I didn’t shoot him.”

  “You said that before,” he said glumly.

  “I went there. I’d written him some letters, last winter.”

  Jake asked, “Just how bad were they?”

  “Well—pretty warm. He was a—oh, skip that. Anyway, he kept them. I should have known this was coming when he called up and tried to borrow money from me.”

  “Did he succeed?” Jake asked interestedly.

  Her answer was brief, vituperative, and profane.

  “Well,” he said mildly, “I didn’t think you would.”

  “I don’t mind loaning money to a friend, but not to a skunk. Not after the way he treated me.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Jake said, “but go on. He had your letters. He tried to borrow money from you. Take it up from there.”

  “Jake, I said I should have seen this coming. Anyway, I heard from him today. He sent me a note. Offered to sell me the letters. You can imagine,” she said with feeling, “just what would happen if Tootz should ever know about this.”

  “Tootz,” Jake said, “or your adoring public.”

  “Oh, the hell with the public. Can’t you think of anything else at a time like this? Well anyway, Jake, I wasn’t going to kick in, not to that rat. I was going up there between shows and scare the everlasting Goddamned living daylights out of him, and get my letters back without giving him a dime. I’d have done it too,” she added thoughtfully, “if some bastard hadn’t gotten there first and shot him.”

  Jake said scornfully, “Who would want to shoot him?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Nelle asked, just as scornfully.

  He tried to think of an answer to that one, couldn’t, and asked instead, “What did you do with the letters?”

  “I didn’t do anything with them. I didn’t find them.”

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t find them?”

  “I said what you heard. They weren’t there.”

  He murmured, “Good God!” under his breath, and snapped his cigarette out the cab window.

  “Jake darling, I looked everywhere. I did everything but tear the paper off the walls. Those letters weren’t anywhere in the place.”

  “But it don’t make sense,” he said stupidly.

  “Either he hadn’t really kept them and was just trying to bluff me, or else somebody else has them now.”

  Jake inquired loudly of an unanswering and possibly disinterested providence why he had ever taken on the job of managing Nelle Brown.

  Just the same, he looked at her with reluctant admiration. Between broadcasts she had gone to bluff a blackmailer into giving back the foolish letters she had written him, and had found the man dead. She had walked into what must have been an agonizingly familiar room and stumbled on the murdered body of a man she had been wildly in love with only a few months before. (Or had she found him alive and left him dead?) Whatever had happened, she had done a magnificent job of the rebroadcast, as smooth as though nothing, not even the most trivial thing, had disturbed her.

  Nelle Brown chose that moment to hurl herself at his shoulder, bury her head in it, and begin to cry, noisily and childishly.

  “He used to be so sweet to me, Jake. Just sweet. Good-for-nothing louse if there ever was one. Can’t you imagine what it was like, walking in there tonight? It was wintertime when—remember? I used to stop in there and he’d have a fire going in the fireplace, and he always took my galoshes off for me, and I’d watch the snow going down past the window. Everything looked just the way it always did, with the little chromium ash tray on the end table, the one we got with cigarette coupons. And he was there on the kitchen floor, dead. All bloody, Jake. I used to be so happy with him. Remember how awful it was when Joe McIvers had him fired, and he told me that it was all just so he’d get the job of producing the show? He hadn’t really cared about me, he just wanted my show to do. Remember how you sat up with me for three nights in a row, and how we thought I’d never get sobered up for rehearsal, and that terrible Turkish-bath place you took me to? I could have sworn he was in love with me. Oh, Jake, he couldn’t have said some of the things he said and not meant them.”

  Jake held her very gently for a few minutes and let her talk on and on, until at last she sat bolt upright and said in a calm, perfectly clear voice, “I wonder where in hell those letters are now.”

  He looked at her and shook his head wearily. No, he would never quite understand her. No one ever would.

  “And all that money, Jake. Where did he get all that money? I didn’t give it to him.”

  “Somebody did,” Jake said thoughtfully. “Why? Nobody would lend him that much.” He considered it for a minute, and said, “He sold the letters to somebody else. Or he was blackmailing somebody else and somebody shot him. Or—but why shoot him and then not take the money back?” He sighed. “He was blackmailing somebody we will call A, and somebody we will call B came in and shot him. This gets too damned complicated, Nelle. You must have shot him yourself.”

  “Go to hell!”

&n
bsp; He said slowly, “Aside from the problem of the letters, you may have been seen going there tonight. Or somebody may remember you used to spend a lot of time with him last winter. I jumped to the conclusion you’d shot him the minute I saw him, and it’s just possible, baby, a jury of twelve good men may jump to the same conclusion.”

  “No, Jake! Oh no!”

  “It does happen to people,” he told her calmly. “And even if that eventually doesn’t come about, you may still get messed up in a nasty, sordid murder case, and you know what happens to people in radio when they get into things like that. Remember what happened to Annette just because she was named as corespondent in a very ugly divorce action. Swell little actress, Annette, and not a director in town will touch her with a ten-foot pole.”

  “I know,” she said reflectively. “I paid Annette’s rent for her last week, and only God knows what she’s eating on.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s an old, old saying, baby. It might have happened to you.”

  “And Tootz,” she said, her voice suddenly strained and harsh. “Tootz. If he knew. Oh, Jake, that would be awful. Jake, that mustn’t happen.”

  “It may, when the police start nosing around in their horrid, inquisitive way,” Jake told her.

  “Jake, I shouldn’t have called the police when I found him, should I?”

  He leaned back against the cushions and talked emphatically to heaven about Nelle Brown.

  “Hell,” she said, “nobody could be that stupid, at least I know I’m not.”

  “The police will find out about it soon enough,” he said, “and without our help, too. Just pray they don’t learn that either of us dropped in there tonight, and you also might pray that whoever has those letters is a friend of yours.”