Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Michael Kurland

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Coming Soon from Titan Books

  ALSO BY MICHAEL KURLAND

  THE ALEXANDER BRASS MYSTERIES

  The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (February 2016)

  THE PROFESSOR MORIARTY NOVELS

  The Infernal Device

  Death By Gaslight

  The Great Game

  The Empress of India

  Who Thinks Evil

  Too Soon Dead

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783295364

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783295371

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First Titan edition: November 2015

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 1997, 2015 by Michael Kurland. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  To Jack and Stephanie and Edith and Max and Mary and Madeleine and Morgan and Rusty and Sybil and all who love them

  INTRODUCTION

  My father was a reader. He read everything from historical novels to detective stories to encyclopedias, even a few science fiction novels and an occasional racing form. And I grew up reading through his library, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, The Saint Meets the Tiger, Adventures in Time and Space (the Healy & McComas anthology that turned me on to science fiction—still a great book), The Three Musketeers, and whole shelves of wonderful fiction and essays from the 1930s. When I decided that I wanted to become a writer, at the age of 10, the people I wanted to emulate were Cole Porter, Samuel Hoffenstein (“the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn”), Noel Coward, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, and especially Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. (And, I must admit, Mark Twain and Gilbert and Sullivan, but I digress.)

  In my imaginings I would have an apartment on Central Park South, right across the way from George, or possibly Ira Gershwin, and spend the days in happy banter with Benchley, Thurber, Parker, and the staff of The New Yorker. In the evenings, if I wasn’t attending the opening of a new Sam and Bella Spewack play, I would sit down at my Underwood Standard and type out deathless prose. If only I had a time machine. And, of course, modern antibiotics.

  The Alexander Brass novels are the offspring of my love affair with the 1930s. I have him as a columnist for the New York World, a fine newspaper which, in real life, died in 1931 over an inheritance dispute, and which had a sign over the city editor’s desk: “Never write down to your readers—anybody stupider than you can’t read.”

  The title of the second book, The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes, comes from a 1930s era toast my mother taught me:

  Here’s to the girls in the high-heeled shoes

  That eat our dinners and drink our booze

  And hug and kiss us until we smother

  And then go home to sleep with mother!

  Perhaps a bit non PC for today, but certainly heartfelt.

  In the tales of Alexander Brass I have tried to recreate the feel, the atmosphere, of what it was like to be alive in the 1930s, to be part of a generation that was forced to grow up fast in the middle of a great depression, and who developed that rarest of talents, the ability to laugh at themselves.

  MICHAEL KURLAND

  12 February 2015

  1

  It was about eleven in the morning when I arrived at the New York World building. Mel the elevator boy worked at telling me a complicated joke as he took me up to the sixteenth floor. Something about Mussolini and the Ethiopians. If there was a punch line, he lost it without noticing somewhere between the eleventh and twelfth floors. I chuckled appreciatively as he stopped and pulled the elevator door open. It was the least I could do.

  I brushed the last touch of March snow off my gray tweed topcoat and kicked the last trace of March slush off my black wing-tips before I pushed open the door to Brass’s outer office. A fat man I’d never seen before stood in front of the reception desk, shaking his chubby forefinger at Gloria. “Oh, no,” he said in a surprisingly high voice, “I can’t talk to you.” He raised a pair of fleshy pink hands in shock at the suggestion. “Either I get to see Mr. Brass himself or I go peddle my papers somewhere else, little lady. I don’t talk to anyone but Mr. Brass. Personal.”

  The fat man could see, but he could not observe. Anyone who would call Gloria Adams “little lady” would call Jack Dempsey “buddy.” The description was technically accurate: Gloria stood about five-two in her stockings, and she was certainly a lady; but the connotative content of the phrase was all wrong. Strangers meeting Gloria for the first time became tongue-tied searching for the proper salutation. “Madam” sprang to mind, and was immediately rejected. “Your Royal Highness” was formal enough, but wide of the mark. Most people, speechless, would merely bow or curtsey, although a few especially perceptive foreigners had been known to kow-tow. Foreigners have a sense of the fitness of these things that we Americans lack.

  Gloria was in her late twenties, and cold and blond and beautiful. Looking at Gloria, one knew instinctively that she was possessed of knowledge that the rest of us could merely guess at, and that this knowledge ennobled her and made her immune to human emotion. I thought of her as the Ice Princess, and sometimes dreamed—ah! the things I dreamed. After reading either too much or too little of the works of Dr. Freud, I had decided that the reason I found her so attractive was probably the result of something that happened in my childhood that I didn’t want to know about. But I digress.

  I crossed the room and tossed my pearl-gray fedora onto the peg reserved for it, and turned to Gloria, who was smiling a welcoming smile sweetly up at me. The smile that said this is your job. And welcome to it. Then she turned off the smile. “This is Mr. DeWitt,” she told the fat man, indicating me with a slight nod of her head. “Perhaps you could explain it to him. He is Mr. Brass’s personal assistant.” Which was not exactly accurate, but was close enough for New York jazz.

  I took my topcoat off and hung it with due care under the hat, while look
ing our guest over thoughtfully. He used the same time to look me over, and I could only hope that he was getting more enjoyment out of his view than I was out of mine. I saw a man who looked to be around forty, of medium height, overweight in all directions, with a pasty-faced complexion that suggested that sunlight was not his favorite form of illumination. He was not drastically obese, but his fat was the loose sort that looks like it has been laid on with a trowel.

  The buttons on his soiled white shirt were pulling away from the buttonholes, and the shirttail had come out around the sides. His belly pushed out the fabric so that it hung over the top of his pants, obscuring the belt. The jacket of his double-breasted blue serge suit may have been his size at one time, perhaps ten years ago when lapels that wide were still in style, but today it would resist strongly being buttoned across his wide front. His hair was long on the right side, and the strands were combed over the balding top in a vain effort at concealment. All in all he was not the sort of man a well-brought-up young girl would bring home to Mother.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked, doing my best to sound stern and friendly at the same time, since I wasn’t sure in which direction I would have to lean.

  “He wants to see Mr. Brass,” Gloria said.

  “I want to see Alexander Brass,” the plump person said half a beat behind her. “I don’t want to see no one else. I don’t want to talk to no one else. And Mr. Brass will want to see me, I bet.”

  “If you want to see Mr. Brass,” I told him, “you’re going to have to talk to me. That’s the way it is. Nobody sees Mr. Brass unless they talk to me first. Especially if the nobody is somebody that Mr. Brass doesn’t know. My name is Morgan DeWitt. What’s yours?”

  The fat man cocked his right forefinger and pointed it at my nose. “Listen, you,” he said. “No names. I didn’t ask you to throw your moniker at me, did I? I came all the way to see Alexander Brass, ’cause I got something for him. But it’s personal, see. But he wants what I got, you can bet on it. And if he don’t, there are other newsies in town.”

  I noticed a fleeting smile pass Gloria’s lips. She was probably thinking how Brass would react to being called a “newsy.”

  In any other office, in any other business, the man would have been out on his ear by now. But Alexander Brass had a syndicated column to write every day. “Brass Tacks” paid the salaries of Gloria Adams, his researcher, fact-checker, and general know-it-all; and myself, his right-hand man, general gopher, and do-it-all; as well as that, of Theodore Garrett, Brass’s personal cook, handyman, and bouncer, and assorted other assistants, researchers, interviewers, informants, and supplicants as the need arose. It was the reason the New York World supplied Brass with this fancy suite of offices on the sixteenth floor. It paid the rent on the twelve-room penthouse apartment at 33 Central Park South that Brass called home, and allowed Brass to indulge his taste for old books, expensive booze, and toys of all sorts. The latest being the Packard sedan that I had just picked up at the showroom. Other parts of the world might be depressed, but the offices of Alexander Brass in the New York World building on Tenth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, Manhattan, were doing fine. And “Brass Tacks” was the reason why. Oh, there were a few other things, like “After Dark,” the weekly column appearing in forty-six cities other than New York that fulfilled its readers’ worst fears—or best fantasies—of what life in Gomorrah was really like; like “Alexander Brass Speaking,” the half-hour radio show that went out on transcription to—at last count—137 stations around the country; like his fees for speaking engagements, which were exorbitant.

  But “Brass Tacks” was the heart of it all. Nine hundred and fourteen newspapers in the United States and Canada expected “Brass Tacks” to titillate their readers over breakfast every day but Saturday with cleverly phrased gobbets of fascinating facts concerning the great, the rich, or the merely notorious. And to explain to them in a simple and fascinating way the issues of the day, and tell them what to think about this and that. And fascinating facts of the sort that make news are seldom volunteered by those whom they concern. Instead they come from some of the most unlikely people. Our motto was “You never can tell.” Which was why the desk in the lobby had instructions to let anyone up who looked even reasonably kempt, provided only that they were not foaming at the mouth or waving a sharp-edged object about. Usually they talked to Gloria. She was a good listener. Men had been known to confess to major crimes just to see if they could get her to look impressed. So far no one had, to the best of my knowledge. And I kept track.

  On the other hand, there were a lot of nuts in the world, and Brass had his share of enemies. The fat man looked like an unlikely candidate for homicidal maniac of the year, but, like I said, you never can tell.

  “Give me a hint,” I told the fat man. “Something I can take inside to tell Mr. Brass. If you’ve got something good, you don’t want to take it anywhere else. Mr. Brass is the best newsy in town.”

  The fat man thought it over. “You got an envelope?” he asked.

  Gloria opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a business envelope.

  “Nah,” the fat man said. “Bigger.” He made an indefinite-sized box with his hands.

  Gloria produced an eight-by-ten manila envelope, one of the kind where the flap ties closed with a string. The fat man took it and turned his back on us for thirty seconds. Then he used the stapler on the desk to staple the flap shut and held the envelope out to me. “Give this to Mr. Brass,” he said. “Tell him to open it private-like. Then he’ll see me. And don’t you open it!”

  I examined the envelope. “Well, it’s too skinny to be a bomb,” I said. “And it doesn’t wiggle around, so it’s not a poisonous viper.”

  “What are you talking about?” the fat man demanded.

  “You’d be surprised. We had a bomb once. I’m still waiting for the poisonous viper.”

  I took the envelope in to Brass, who was sitting in his office with his feet up on his giant desk, staring out his window at the Hudson River, which flowed beneath his feet, give or take a few blocks, filling much of the available view. “Good morning, Morgan,” he said without looking around. “It’s a gray day. Did you get the automobile?”

  “I did, Mr. Brass,” I told him. “It’s in the garage on Ninth Avenue. You’ll have to arrange with the garage manager to get a permanent parking space.”

  “I thought I had two,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “The Cord and the Lagonda are in them.”

  “Ah!” Brass said. He swung his feet down off the desk and swiveled around to face me. He was shorter than I by a couple of inches—I’m about five-ten; lighter than I by a few pounds—quite a few, actually; I’m about one-sixty, and built solid without too much extra flesh on me, but Brass has one of those slender bodies that look like they were made to wear tuxedos. He had sported a brush mustache for fifteen years, until the day, two years ago, that Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany; now he was clean-shaven. I had told him that I couldn’t see the resemblance, but he shaved anyway.

  “I have been staring at this sheet of paper for the past hour, and I am not inspired,” he said, indicating the Underwood typewriter on his desk, with its sheet of white paper still pristine around the roller.

  “You were staring out the window when I came in,” I said. “Inspiration doesn’t write your columns, perspiration does.”

  He glared at me, but since I was quoting him—something he had said recently in an interview to a writer’s magazine—he didn’t reply.

  “I have something for you,” I told him, extending the large manila envelope toward him. “Wait until I leave the room to open it.”

  He eyed the envelope suspiciously. “Why?” he asked.

  “I’m not supposed to know what’s in it,” I told him.

  Brass shook his head. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I have no secrets from you. At least, none that could be contained in this.”

  “I agree,” I sa
id. “But the gentleman who handed it to me to give to you insists that you open it in private. Incidently, he won’t give his name.”

  “What does he look like?” Brass asked.

  I described him while Brass stared thoughtfully at the little ivory Chinese god on one corner of his desk and weighed the envelope in his hands.

  “It doesn’t sound promising,” Brass said when I was done. “I would prefer that he were well tailored and well spoken; then he might have something I’d want to see.”

  “You want a diplomat bringing state secrets,” I said.

  “Of course,” Brass agreed. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. A nice, juicy murder might be fun.”

  “Not for the victim.”

  “There is that,” I agreed.

  “Well,” Brass said, “I might as well open this. Stand across the room; that should satisfy the requirements.”

  “I’ll even turn my back,” I said. “Let it never be suggested that we journalists are not honorable.”

  “Heaven forfend!” Brass agreed, slitting open the envelope as I turned and walked over to face the Pearson landscape on the far wall. I was particularly fond of the castle in the right-hand corner of the picture. I had always wanted to be somewhere where I could look at a real castle.

  There was something more than a moment of silence.

  “Son of a bitch!” Brass said, sounding at least surprised, and possibly awed.

  I turned around. Brass almost never cursed, so whatever was in the envelope was probably worth a view. He had put whatever-it-was on top of the desk and was staring down at it. “Let me guess,” I said. “It’s a nude picture of Marie of Rumania.”

  “I’m not sure who the woman is,” Brass said.

  “What?”

  “Come look at this.”

  I crossed around to his side of the desk and looked down. There was a photograph of a man and a woman lying on what appeared to be a large, fluffy rug. To be more precise, the man was on the rug, face up, and the woman was straddling the man. There was no clothing in sight. They both seemed to be enjoying themselves. Perhaps they were playing Find the Pony. The camera had been above them and to one side, so that the man’s face—among other things—was clearly in view. The woman was almost as clearly visible, except that her face was in shadow.