The Man Who Never Returned

by Peter Quinn

  “Nothing?”

  She gave another dismissive wave. “With the launch of Snap, he’s directly challenging Life with a magazine plugged into the power of television. He’s also in discussions, highly confidential at this stage, to bring one of the studios under his control. Where others see the parts, he perceives the whole. He intends his publications to pulse with the immediacy and intensity of television, and his network to convey images and information with the authority of print. ‘Pan-pollenization’ is the term he’s coined.”

  “Birds and bees have the copyright, no?”

  She exhaled, this time making no attempt to direct the smoke above his head. “Mr. Wilkes is a genius.”

  “He shares that opinion.”

  “He’s not a humble man. There’s no need. He alone is ready to seize this moment. Do you realize that last year 4,000,000 babies were born in the U.S.?”

  “I have an iron-clad alibi in every case.”

  “I’m serious.” A frown creased her forehead. “That’s the largest population increase in American history. The census experts project over the next twenty years our population will swell from 165,000,000 to 220,000,000. Mr. Wilkes’s competitors barely seem to notice. If they do, they’re at a loss what to do about it. They tinker at the fringes of their businesses and will either miss or be capsized by this wave. We alone are building an organization that will be carried on the crest. History is like that. It rewards perfect timing above all else, punishing equally those who are too early as well as too late.” She rested her cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Where’d I hear that before?”

  “‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.’ It’s from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.”

  “I’m more partial to Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson.”

  “Then try the movie version of Julius Caesar. It’s playing at the Trans-Lux. Marlon Brando as Marc Antony is, well …” Her voice trailed off. “What a presence.” She reached down and took hold of the cigarette, tapped it with her index finger, rapidly, as if it were a telegraph key. Western Union wire for Mr. Brando. Bravo.

  “We were talking about the quote.”

  “Yes, the quote. Mr. Wilkes has an updated version. It’s in his book of quotes. Privately printed, but I can get you one. Every executive has a copy. It might help you understand better how the Crater case fits into all of this, as a trigger, a device to affect a single synchronized effort—a fusion, if you will—whose long-term implication for global communications will be as momentous as the H-bomb is for geopolitics.”

  “And your job is to run Wilkes’s version of the Manhattan Project?”

  “If you care to use that metaphor.”

  “It belongs to Wilkes. August 6th, the tenth anniversary of Hiroshima.”

  “Yes, that was his idea. Brilliant and typical. My job is to see that it all comes together. Editor and publisher of the magazine, newspaper staffs, director and producer of the television show, studio representatives—all report to Mr. Wilkes through me. I control and coordinate every aspect, creative, financial, promotional, editorial.”

  As to Dunne’s employment, she explained, Mr. Wilkes wanted an arrangement that didn’t involve ISC. She produced a contract from her briefcase. Payment over and above reimbursements for expenses would be in installments: first upon signing the contract; second in three months, at which time he was to submit a full report of his findings and advise whether he was confident of producing results in time for Snap’s launch; final payment to follow the outcome of the investigation.

  “Mr. Wilkes hates to haggle.” She detached a check clipped to the contract and placed it on the desk. “Here’s installment number one. I trust it’s adequate.”

  Made out Pay to the Order of Fintan Dunne and signed by Wilkes, the amount was blank. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What you mean by ‘adequate.’”

  “I don’t understand.” She crushed the smoldering remnant of her cigarette with several hesitant pokes. “Decide for yourself. That’s why the check is blank.”

  “The amount isn’t inadequate, only the notion we do business his way. I avoid contracts. Nothing but legal flypaper that gets gummed up with lawyers and lawsuits. I’ll bill you when I’m done.” He pushed the check toward her. Pully’s friendly advice had been to avoid complications. Advice worth taking. “Shake on it.”

  “I need to let Mr. Wilkes know before …”

  “If I recall correctly, you’re the project manager. You ‘control and coordinate every aspect.’ That includes hiring and firing the help no?” He took hold of her limp hand and pressed it.

  She tightened her grip. “All right, as long as you understand what the deadline is, it’s a deal. There’s a lot at stake for me as well as the company. If Crater proves a bust, I need to be able to move ahead with the other options.”

  “Understood.”

  “Mr. Wilkes said to assure you the organization’s resources are at your disposal.”

  “If they were worth anything, Wilkes would have unearthed Crater twenty-five years ago. Less noise and fewer people, the better.”

  Glancing at her wristwatch, she let out a yelp. “I’d no idea of the time. I’ll be late for my weekly staff meeting. Better run along.”

  “Try a cab.”

  Another frown rippled across her forehead. She shoved the materials on the desk back into her bag. “Don’t be so literal.”

  “I take people at their word till they give me a reason not to.”

  “You always find a reason, I suppose.”

  He helped her into her coat. “No, not always, but close.”

  She handed him her card. “If there’s anything you need, call my office.”

  He rang for Mulholland. No answer. He lay on the bed and switched on the radio. No more big bands. All the worthwhile entertainment had either gone off the air or, like Jack Benny, was moving to television. He found a music station. “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” was followed by “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Thanks, but no thanks. He put on his coat, exited the back of the hotel, crossed Madison and ate lunch by himself at Schrafft’s. Instead of returning to his room for a nap, he went for a walk. Chance for some exercise as well as to help rid his overcoat of its lingering mothball scent.

  Along 59th Street, the faces of bundled-up pedestrians were half-veiled by hats and scarves. A city full of people in disguises. If Crater was still alive, a remote possibility but real, he might be half a world away. Or maybe he never left the city. Maybe he was the sixty-ish-looking gent walking this way, gloved hand covering the lower half of his face. One of several hundred thousand suspects. Like looking for a particular blade of hay in a stack of it.

  South on Seventh Avenue, he passed the Park Central Hotel where gambler and gangster Arnold Rothstein was shot, another famously unsolved crime, though not one to resonate in people’s hearts and minds and help them regain a “measure of confidence in the future.” The Roxy Theatre on 50th Street, one of the grandest of the movie palaces when it opened the year before Rothstein got shot, was shut. An ice show was being dismantled and the lights were out. Had a faded, worn look, as though it wouldn’t be long before the Roxy followed Rothstein into the Great Beyond.

  The walk warmed up most of him, but his feet were cold as he stepped into the lobby of the Taft Hotel. Back in the Rothstein days, it was the Manger Hotel. Vice squad dubbed it “House of a Thousand Hookers.” The perfectly ordinary tourists and businessmen moving through the lobby indicated that those days were long past. He checked the listings in the Standard. The Rivoli was featuring a revival of The Big Sleep. Hollywood gumshoe bunk redeemed by that impossible-to-fake magic between Bogart and Bacall. He’d seen it twice already. Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan were in Bad Day at Black Rock at the RKO, Ida Lupino and Howard Duff in Women’s Prison at the Palace.

  Always ha
d a liking for Ida Lupino, especially after he saw her in High Sierra. Lovely face and understated manner, as good an actress, he thought, as Bette Davis. But never got the breaks she should have. Mulholland’s motto: It all comes down to luck.

  The prospect of revisiting the Palace put him off. Last time he was there was sometime between Rothstein’s murder and Crater’s disappearance, probably around when Miss Renard came into the world. He was still a cop and the Palace, now a second-tier movie house, was the pinnacle of the country’s vaudeville circuit, home to the hottest acts, Durante, Burns & Allen, Milton Berle, stuff you could now catch on television. He decided to go to Radio City and catch William Holden in The Bridges at Toko-Ri. Roberta insisted Holden reminded her of him. He didn’t see it. Holden was younger, sleeker, better groomed.

  He bought his ticket and went in. The cavernous theater seemed even larger half-deserted. Didn’t care for the movie—a thinly disguised Navy recruiting film dressed up with a cameo by Grace Kelly as a faithful, self-sacrificing officer’s wife and a pudgy, aging Mickey Rooney as brave-hearted buffoon. On the way out of the men’s room, he glimpsed the janitors taking a break in a storage area. They sat watching television among a squad of giant toy soldiers, props left over from the Christmas show.

  Outside, a slap of cold wind was momentarily refreshing. He stood and lit a cigarette beneath the marquee on Sixth—or as the city wanted it referred to, the Avenue of the Americas, an alias designed to escape the tainted memory of the El and the Tenderloin, with its working-class saloons, dance halls and cat houses. An old trick of the municipal magicians. Call Fourth Avenue Park, make Ninth into Columbus above 59th, change the name, turn the old new, make the past disappear.

  In the middle of the avenue, a thick column of steam billowed from the abbreviated smokestack poking through the canvas tarp covering a temporary worksite. War or no war, the souls of dead comrades vanish like smoke. Stay around long enough and the city becomes a ghost town. Not uninhabited, like those busted and deserted places out west, but filled with new faces. Those who came before, forgotten; buildings and people alike replaced, replaceable. More departed souls and structures each day, until the ghosts outnumber the living.

  The cigarette half-finished, he tossed it overhand into the gutter. Squat brick structures on the other side of the avenue were of a piece with the Els and the low-slung areas along the East River, places like Drydock Street where he’d been born, now wiped away by housing projects and highways. Soon the wrecker’s ball and bulldozers would take care of the row of buildings across the way, decayed and shabby as an old man’s teeth, an affront to the soaring prominence of Rockefeller Center, the smiling future proclaimed by the shimmer and gleam of the glass towers to the east.

  Close eyes: wet, dreary morning in 1930 or ’31, around when Crater went missing. A train pulls into elevated stop at Sixth Avenue and 34th. Pretty, olive-skinned girl sits catty corner across the car, glances up from beneath a red rain hat. Open them: winter’s dusk a quarter century later. Sixth Avenue El went in ’38, the Ninth Avenue line in ’40, Second Avenue in ’42. And the girl, what happened to her? Husband/boyfriend/lover goes away to war and never comes back? Or does, and they marry, have babies, and disappear into one of those new developments on Long Island?

  Newspapers were unanimous that the Third Avenue El would go soon, though Transit Workers Union boss Mike Quill was issuing brogue-rich threats to halt what he labeled a “businessman’s swindle designed to clear out the working class and small shop owner in order to make way for corporations and the rich.” Hard to imagine Manhattan without an El roaring above, like a cyclone passing overhead. The splintered light beneath was as much a part of the place as snow in Central Park, belch of fog horns in the harbor.

  “Our city’s progress is unstoppable,” the Standard quoted Mayor Wagner as saying. “It’s the heart and soul of New York.” Lungs were another story: daily dose of exhaust from autos, trucks, incinerators, fumes from heating oil and coal, two million people smoking umpteen million cigarettes a day. He lit another cigarette. Too many too early left a stale, metallic taste. Still brought an unchanging comfort, reliably filling the empty moments.

  Jeff Wine was wrong when he’d called it a “yesterday city.” Not dying but changing, as it always did, becoming something different from before. Call it progress, if you want, even though the alterations weren’t always improvements. It was those who never left, citizens of the perpetual cycle of demolition and construction—houses, buildings, theaters erected, altered, demolished; neighborhoods rising, falling and being redeveloped; famous and infamous celebrated, cheered and consigned to oblivion the ones stuck in the yesterday city—who had to adjust to being unmissed missing persons, has-beens living in a town populated with ghosts. Either that or pull a disappearance á la Judge Crater, in which case, if you’re somebody worth missing, people might care what happened to you: Be remembered for disappearing, while everyone who stayed around was forgotten. There was an article or book in that for some historian or philosopher to write.

  Back in his room, Dunne phoned Miss Renard’s office and asked the secretary to tell the clipping morgue at the Standard to send him everything they had on the Crater case. Polite and cooperative, the secretary called back almost immediately. “Miss Renard would like to speak to you. Please hold.” A full minute went by. A reminder of who’s employee, who’s employer? He gave her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was just busy. After several more seconds, she picked up.

  “Sorry, Mr. Dunne, I was on with Mr. Wilkes. Third time today he’s called to say how pleased he is you’ve signed on, or at least given us a handshake.”

  “Now that I have, call me Fin.”

  “Easy to remember. Rhymes with sin.”

  “Or gin. And you?”

  “Friends call me Nan.”

  “Nan it is.”

  “I’m phoning because a colleague canceled our dinner plans. You free?”

  “Tried to reach Mulholland earlier but couldn’t, so yeah, Nan, I am.”

  “How about 8:30 at the Coral? It’s close to you, on 59th between Madison and Park. I’ll be in the dining room, in the rear.”

  “See you there.”

  Dunne dialed Louis Pohl as soon as he hung up. He was direct. “Back for more, Pully.”

  “You’re pushing it, Fin. What’s it this time?”

  “One last favor for a semi-disreputable stepchild. Background check on Adrienne Renard, assistant to Walter Wilkes.”

  “On the basis of one last favor, I’ll see what I can do.”

  The front door of the Coral opened on a dim, narrow barroom filled with noise and smoke. The main source of light was a large fish tank behind the bar, green and glowing, its inhabitants floating serenely above a seabed of pink pebbles and white coral fragments. A pair of tan-skinned, slick-haired bartenders in puff-sleeved shirts worked with acrobatic concentration to keep up with the drink orders of the crowd packed two-deep at the bar.

  Dunne threaded his way to the back. The frozen face of the maitre d’ standing guard behind a bamboo lectern melted into something close to a smile when Dunne mentioned Miss Renard. He led the way through a spacious room more dimly lit than the bar. Along the walls were semi-circular booths facing out on generously spaced tables, each with a small candle and a bowl shaped like an oyster shell, an orchid floating in it. Hubbub from the front was audible but unobtrusive, a busy, lively background noise.

  Adrienne Renard was in a rear booth. Her black dress was cut low enough to be alluring without making an out-and-out invitation. She raised her martini glass. “I got a head start.” Her hair framed her face the way it had the previous night. Dunne sidled in beside her and ordered a double Scotch on the rocks, which the maitre d’ had a waiter deliver promptly.

  “Hemingway says a good café has the same aura as a church.” She turned to him, scanning the room as she did. Except for a few threesomes, the tables were occupied by couples, heads leaned in, hands extended, sometimes t
ouching. Fingers folded around the stem of her glass in a prayer-like gesture, she glided it sideways and made a gentle collision with Dunne’s. A mixture of candlelight and shadow wavered across her profile. “A toast to the Church of Saints Sin and Gin.”

  Dunne needed no explanation of the congregation: executives from the nearby advertising agencies who’d called their wives to let them know that once again an important piece of last-minute business had come up, and they’d be late. A decade after war’s end, their rise into well-paid positions and comfortable suburban lives was not without its stresses. The officer corps of the nonstop, nationwide advertising campaigns driving postwar prosperity, they had to seize and hold the public’s attention for a lineup of clients that included the makers of cars, cosmetics, refrigerators, TVs, cigarettes, soap, and toys and clothes for those 4,000,000 new toddlers, as well as drum up support for a growing number of vote-seeking politicians.

  The question they faced was how to avoid being smothered by the vexing demands of constantly pumping up sales and the numbing predictability of marriage and work. The answer: find an activity more compelling and pleasurable than a weekend round of golf which could be indulged without upending an entire career.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “Isn’t Wilkes in charge of mind reading?”

  “You’re thinking I’m not very different from the other women in this room. It’s stamped on your face. The male smirk.”

  “You’re reading what isn’t there.”

  “I read faces like gypsies read tea leaves. Except they’re guessing. I’m not.”