by Peter Quinn
Mulholland led the way into the library, a long windowless room lined on two sides by shelves of deluxe leather-bound books with gold-lettered spines, the kind to be displayed rather than read. Hands in his pockets, rocking gently on his heels, he stood with his back to the small, newly-stoked fire burning in an ancient-looking marble fireplace. The maid reappeared, and Mulholland addressed her for the first time. “Usual for me, Lena. Scotch on the rocks for Mr. Dunne here.”
“Lots of ice,” Dunne added. “Please.”
Above the mantle, in an ornate, gilt frame, was an oil portrait of a man in a powdered wig leaning against an old-fashioned, hand-operated printing press. He had the same serious, haughty mien that wig-wearers in old paintings usually wore, with one difference: the painter made no effort to soften the raw unattractiveness of his subject’s features—crossed eyes, sloping nose and undershot jaw.
Dunne stood next to Mulholland with his back to the fire. The heat radiated pleasantly against his pant legs. The maid served their drinks and left. Mulholland posed his glass in a toast to the two full-length portraits on the wall opposite the mantle and tipped it toward the younger of the figures: a lean officer in campaign hat and jodhpurs, with a swagger stick beneath his arm. In the background, artillery fired toward a line of trenches. “Our hero, Mr. Walter Wilkes.”
Dunne looked up at the portrait. “Didn’t know he was in the AEF.”
“Let’s just say he didn’t give Alvin York any competition. His pop got him assigned to the general staff. Suffered a severe groin wound. Bad case of the clap contracted while leading a frontal assault on a Parisian brothel. Frogs gave him the Order of the Purple Cock, third class. General Foch himself pinned it to his crotch.”
“This the pop?”
“How’d you guess?” Mulholland stepped in front of the second portrait: a stout gentleman, in top hat and frock coat, with right hand tucked, Napoleon-style, into the front of his coat. Instead of a swagger stick, he had a newspaper beneath his arm.
“Wilkes the Elder. Son of a blacksmith in some shit-ass backwater, he ran away, landed a job as a messenger for a printer, eventually graduated to typesetter and set up his own company on Maiden Lane. Within a decade, he handled most of the printing for the city’s brokerages. Became an investor himself. His knack at buying at the bottom, selling at the top, which some said rested on the inside dope his printing business gave him access to, earned him the title ‘the Merlin of Maiden Lane.’ Started his own newspaper, the Standard, and before long was buying papers all over the country.”
Mulholland raised his glass once more. “When the old man died, he was said to be the seventh richest man in America. Walter has moved up to sixth. Not exactly a rags-to-riches saga, although he likes to pretend otherwise.” He consumed half his drink in a gulp. “Oh well, as long as the checks don’t bounce, blessed be Wilkes the father, the son, and their unholy enterprise.”
“And who’s dog face?” Dunne turned and pointed at the portrait over the mantle.
“Him? Another thing you’ll get from the horse’s mouth.” Mulholland pressed a button below the light switch. A shelf of tall volumes turned out to be a panel that slid back to reveal a television. He turned a dial. A pinprick of light appeared and expanded in a flash like an H-bomb explosion from the newsreels. “Millionaires are like precinct captains. Everything got to be done their way. Lucky for me, unlike the local precinct, this house has a TV.”
President Eisenhower’s press conference from earlier in the day was on the screen. He was being questioned about the confrontation with Red China over the Straits of Formosa.
“Now here’s the prescription for making sure John Q. Public gets a good night’s rest: a daily dose of Ike.” Mulholland left on the news conference but turned off the sound. He dropped into a worn leather easy chair, picked up the newspaper from the table next to it and turned to the TV listings. “Let’s see. What’s your preference? ‘The Pinky Lee Show’ or ‘Teen Bandstand’?”
“That’s the choice?”
“Fifteen minutes, it’ll be ‘Liberace.’ Wilkes keeps us waiting long enough, Bishop Sheen will be on. There’s a guy knows how to keep an audience awake. If he could play the piano like Liberace, he’d probably put the whole country in the pope’s pocket.”
The maid came back in. “Follow me, please, Mr. Dunne. Mr. Wilkes is waiting.”
Mulholland flipped the page of the newspaper. He didn’t look up. “I’ll be here when you get back.”
Dunne put his barely touched drink on the mantle and trailed the maid up the stairs and down a thickly carpeted hallway to a set of double doors. She knocked gently and stood back. A voice, high and feminine, called out, “Come in.”
The walls of the semi-circular foyer were painted with a continuous woodland scene, green hills, cypress trees, grape vines. A satyr playing a flute romped across a field. Nearby, a raven-haired girl clad in a long, wispy, see-through veil, outline of breast and thigh clearly visible, was about to enter a forest. The way her body was drawn, its curve and flow, were hauntingly familiar. He’d seen her before. But where? She looked backwards, over her shoulder, with playful, inviting eyes: follow me.
Beyond, in the middle of a large room, was a bed that reached beyond king-sized to emperor- or sultan-sized. Recessed lighting left the corners of the room in shadow and bathed the bed with soft illumination. A silver-maned figure in a blue silk robe sat up against a curved oak headboard, foulard handkerchief flowing out of monogrammed breast pocket. A telephone and buzzer rested beside him on a rubber mat, their black cords snaking over the left side of the bed. The tray across his lap, supported by a short metal frame, served as a desk. He scribbled with such furious concentration on the papers in front of him that the brass-colored point of his purple fountain pen sounded a nervous, hurried scratch.
A young woman snugly fitted in a gray skirt and white blouse stepped from the shadows carrying a crystal goblet. Reaching over, she placed it on the tray. “Your water.” She perched on the right side of the bed and crossed her luxuriously lengthy silk-hosed legs. Left swayed atop right, Broadway-style kick, in a minor key, toe of black high heel pointing alternately to floor and ceiling. Her blonde hair was shaped to follow the line of her finely sculpted jaw. Full, glossy, ruby-colored lips that parted in a smile.
Wilkes stopped writing, sipped from the goblet and peered over the top of his glasses, eyes filled with enough mild surprise to sustain the pretense that he was unaware anyone had entered. “Ah, you must be Fintan Dunne. I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”
Too far away to shake hands, Dunne made a small, awkward bow, blushing at its unintended resemblance to the formal kowtow of those forlorn Japanese diplomats and generals who surrendered on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri. Neither Wilkes nor the blonde seemed to notice.
Head down, as he tended once more to his papers, Wilkes said, “By now, I suppose, you know who I am. This is Miss Adrienne Renard. Her services are various and invaluable.” Her gaze focused on Wilkes, Miss Renard seemed about to say something, but didn’t.
“Indulge me a moment more, Mr. Dunne.” Wilkes hurriedly signed the bottom of a half-dozen pages and shuffled them off to Miss Renard. “That’s it, closed for the day.” He twisted the cap back on his pen, dropped it on the tray. Miss Renard put the papers in a manila envelope, which she slipped under her arm.
“Please, be seated.” The words were more command than invitation. He pointed to a yellow-canvas director’s chair at the foot of the bed. Standing, Miss Renard put her knee on the edge of the bed, leaned across and lifted the tray. Her breasts, firm, plump hemispheres cradled in a lacy white brassiere, were visible through the unbuttoned top portion of her blouse. She stopped beside Dunne’s chair on her way out of the room.
He looked up into her blue eyes, deep set above chiseled cheek bones. Eyes like those of the girl on the foyer wall. But more intense than inviting: Look but don’t touch.
“I trust we’ll get the chance to talk.”
Late twenties, early thirties, he guessed. Too much makeup. “Hope so.”
“I’ll do my best to see it happens, Adrienne. First, I must convince Mr. Dunne to sign on.” Wilkes’s words sent Miss Renard on her way. The door closed with a soft thud. “Very talented girl,” he said, “and in a very great hurry. One must be careful never to let one’s haste get ahead of one’s talents.” He straightened his shoulders and shook his head sideways, as if to clear it. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Mr. Dunne.”
“Mulholland made it seem urgent.”
“Ah, Mulholland. Tough, impolitic and, thanks to those attributes, useful in certain situations. He has a low opinion of most everyone, myself included. But he’s an admirer of yours. According to him, when it comes to private investigators, you walk on water.”
“I prefer swimming.”
Wilkes either wasn’t amused or wasn’t listening, and he began explaining that his reason for being in bed was an old back injury inflicted in France when he was thrown by a horse escorting artillery to the front. Dunne resisted asking about the wound Mulholland alleged. Annoying but not life-threatening, the pain came and went.
Though laid up in bed, he was obviously a large man, with more resemblance to his substantial father in the portrait in the library than to the svelte young officer he’d once been. He had that jowly, self-satisfied aspect common to industrialists, bankers and cabinet secretaries; the red, blustery face of someone who’d either spent a good deal of time outdoors or was an indoorsman with high blood pressure.
Wilkes went from the specifics of his back problem (“the copulative act is an effective way to relieve such distress”), to generalizations about disease (“easier to prevent than treat”) and staying healthy (“keep to a diet of fish, grains, fresh vegetables, blackstrap molasses, moderate amounts of wine, vigorous exercise”), to a discussion of vitamins and hydrotherapy. Chin up, he swept the room with his eyes, as if addressing an audience. Before long, through a union of natural healing and well-funded research, he saw no reason why science couldn’t extend the human lifespan indefinitely.
As he listened patiently, Dunne realized that Mulholland hadn’t been exaggerating: with Wilkes, it was all straight from the horse’s mouth, everything delivered with identical authority and certainty. “America’s Authentic Voice” was the motto on his newspapers. Plenty of critics and rivals disputed that, foremost among them intellectuals, professors and “respected” journalists at “reputable” newspapers who disdained Wilkes’s publishing recipe of natural cures and fads (healthy bodies, especially female, were heavily featured), crime, scandal, sex and a high-powered paranoid patriotism. But none of them put a dent in his huge circulation and advertising revenues.
Over the years, Dunne had heard Wilkes described both as a genius and as a puffed-up nonentity whose supposed abilities were the product of the high-priced public relations firms he hired to build and maintain his myth. What mattered in the end was that he remained very, very rich, and as long as the money lasted, it would be taken by most as presumptive evidence of his genius.
Off in the corner, a radiator made a low hiss. Fishing in his pocket for his cigarettes, Dunne realized he’d left the pack on the bar. Instead, he came up with the horse-headed stirrer.
Wilkes segued from health and exercise to the importance of timing in human events (“history punishes equally those too early as well as those too late”), a parade of goosed-up generalities routinely transcribed by well-paid, kiss-ass editors and served daily to the reading public.
“That’s why I’ve asked you here, Mr. Dunne. You’re a doer, not a bystander, a kindred soul. So let’s get to business. I had a careful check done before I asked you here. A most interesting career. Someday you’ll have to tell me all about it.”
“Not much to tell.”
“Self-effacement, I find, is a trait shared by many men of action.”
Could be, though Dunne found it was a talent for relentless self-promotion that most often got people ahead, whether men of action or not. He nodded, as if in agreement.
Wilkes went off on a new digression: the incompetents in Washington—”men of no action”—and the present occupant of the White House, another in a succession of “chickens-in-chief,” same cowardly refusal to use nuclear weapons to save the French from defeat by the Communists in Vietnam previously on display in Korea.
His emphatic monotone had the grave agreeability of a statesman addressing the nation or a radio huckster selling laxatives. “Know when the moment is right, then act decisively. I live by that axiom, Mr. Dunne. It’s served me well. And now the time …” He plucked the handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped the trail of spittle collected on his lower lip, like a trumpet player about to give it his all “… has come to find out what happened to Joseph Force Crater.”
For the second time in the space of a few hours, Dunne considered that he might be the victim of an elaborate practical joke. “Joseph Crater? You mean, Judge Crater?”
“None other.”
“The one who went missing?”
“‘Into thin air,’ as they say, inaccurately in Crater’s case. The day he vanished was thick with heat and humidity. A great unsolved mystery. The greatest, until now.” The broad smile on his face indicated Wilkes had hit the high note he was after. He tucked the handkerchief back in his pocket with a flourish.
Crater was more of an over-used punchline than an unsolved mystery. Elevator stops at a floor. Nobody is there. One occupant to another: Must have been Judge Crater. Ha, ha. Bell boy parades through hotel lobby barking an urgent message: Judge Crater call your office. It drew fewer and fewer laughs each passing year. On the odd chance he’d heard wrong, Dunne asked again, “Judge Crater? Who disappeared twenty-five years ago?”
“Twenty-four and a half, almost to the day. The public announcement was made nearly a month after he disappeared. As a Tammany sachem, former assistant to a U.S. senator, and recent appointee to the State Supreme Court by Governor Roosevelt, who was already conspiring to seize the presidency, Crater was a veritable Noah’s Ark of political secrets. His disappearance was highly convenient for some.”
“Bet it sold a load of newspapers.”
“We offered a $20,000 reward for information on his whereabouts, a king’s ransom in those first days of the Depression. Responses poured in from all over the country. Most were fanciful. A few seemed helpful. In the end, none panned out.” Wilkes lowered his head. The memory of failure, no matter how long ago, seemed to weigh on him. “It was widely regarded as ‘the crime of the century.’”
“Till the Lindbergh baby was snatched.”
“I suppose.”
The search for Crater proved mere prelude to the three-ring circus that enveloped the Lindbergh kidnapping. Led by the Standard, with Wilkes as ringmaster, a troupe of rabid reporters, show-biz radio announcers, and eager-to-be-famous lawmen wrung the last lurid drop from the baby’s disappearance and the trial and execution of the man convicted of the crime. Read all about it. The whole world did. Shepherds in the Pyrenees and fishermen in the South Seas checked each night to make sure their children were safe in bed and not the prey of the fiend who snatched the golden child from his crib in Hopewell, New Jersey.
“Even if people remember Crater, what makes you think they’ll care?”
“Because they’ll be reminded they should. A vital principle in my business and, perhaps, the most basic. Remember Floyd Collins back in 1925? A no-count hillbilly explorer gets trapped in a Kentucky cave for four days and the whole nation is riveted. Why? How many thousands have been lost in caves before and since without the world giving a hoot? But once the Collins story was made into headlines and radio echoed his plight across the airwaves, the particular was transformed into the universal, a single drop made to represent the sea of misfortune in which, to one degree or another, we all swim. Even the sainted Mr. Lindbergh, who came to depict himself as the innocent victim of a prurient and invasive
press, wasn’t above being hired to fly photos of the attempted rescue to New York.
“Once a story becomes news, everybody wants to be part of it. But news isn’t every saporous event that occurs. No paper or periodical, no matter how voluminous, has room to cover that. To paraphrase the motto of one of our more pretentious metropolitan journals, we can only print the news that fits. News, then, isn’t merely what happens, it’s also what’s published, headlined and, if need be, published over and over again. That’s been true for a century now, and been made more true by radio. We have yet to measure the real impact of television, but it will be nothing less than vast.”
Dunne sucked on the stirrer as if it were a cigarette, then dropped it back into his pocket. “In my business, the trick is to know the difference between tough and impossible. If there’s ever a parade of impossible cases, Crater would be grand marshal.”
“Just as there are no uninteresting stories, only dull, unimaginative reporters and editors, there are no insolvable cases, only lazy, incompetent investigators.”
An acid taste rose at the back of Dunne’s throat, the sour dislike of desk-ensconced civilians oblivious to the muddle of deceit, uncertainty and delusion present in even so-called cut-and-dried cases. The radiator’s hiss sounded like air leaving a tire. Inflated expectations that brought him north, the notion of being back again—amid a top-priority investigation, cops half-resenting, half-welcoming his presence—sagged and lost shape.
The red button on the phone next to Wilkes pulsed with mute urgency. “Excuse me. I must take this.” Wilkes listened for a moment before starting to dictate an editorial attacking “the cowardly retreat in the face of Red Chinese aggression.”
Dunne closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with thumb and forefinger. He saw stars, zigzags of light, flares bursting in black sky. He thought, Roberta must be at the dance lesson by now, knees bent, back, forward. Felipe, the Cuban dance teacher, takes her hand, announces to the class, Watch Mrs. Dunne, class, her timing is perfect. She glistens with perspiration. He offers to escort her to her car.