Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  Bertram Childers

  Gerald Garbin

  Ephraim L. Wackersan II

  Pass Helbine

  Suzie Frienard

  Stepney Partcher

  It was quite an exclusive group of photographer’s models. Bertram Childers, senior senator from New Jersey, was regarded as a long-shot Republican contender for president in the next election. He couldn’t beat Roosevelt—hell, nobody could beat Roosevelt—but if FDR happened to have a heart attack, or was caught in bed with a teenager of either sex, or was proven to have Jewish blood or be a secret agent of the pope—a couple of dozen letters a week came into the paper accusing him of one or both of these high crimes—then Childers had a good shot against anyone else the Democrats could run.

  Gerald Garbin, naked playmate number two, was a judge of the New York State Superior Court, and had a reputation for strictness and severity. Felons sentenced by Judge Garbin could expect to spend an extended time away from home.

  Ephraim L. Wackersan, Junior, president and son of the founder of Wackersan’s Department Store, our number three, was a stickler for cleanliness and uniformity. His employees were checked every morning for personal hygiene and grooming. Hair on men had to be kept short, and on women, long. No facial hair was permitted.

  Number four, Pass Helbine, millionaire philanthropist, was working on his third marriage, but aside from this exercise in sequential polygamy—a minor character flaw in this day and age, when, as Cole Porter puts it, “Anything Goes”—his life was the stuff of which hagiographies are written. The six Helbine Houses, where a down-and-out citizen can get a good meal, a shower, and a place to sleep for a dime, and if he doesn’t have a dime he can wash dishes, are models of philanthropic endeavor.

  The woman, Suzie Frienard, was an attractive blonde who had not yet seen her fortieth summer and looked even younger. Were it not for the extreme youth and vitality of her partner, one might have thought she was just one of the girls. From the view of her charms in the photographs, I certainly wouldn’t kick her out of bed. Her husband, Dominic Frienard, was a major contractor in the New York City area. It would be hard to walk more than ten blocks in any direction without walking over or past Frienard-poured concrete.

  The last person on the list, Stepney Partcher, was the senior partner of Partcher, Meedle and Coster, a very political law firm. The file had little about him, since the firm employed a public relations expert to keep all of their names out of the papers. What these six people had in common, besides wealth and a presumably inadvertent appearance in smutty photographs, was not revealed in their files.

  The staccato sound of Brass pounding the keys of his Underwood wafted its way through the door of my little office. Can sound waft? Well, I guess it can now. We novelists bring life and vigor into language. Can I call myself a novelist when I haven’t been published? Can I call myself a novelist when I haven’t yet finished a novel?

  Brass spent a long time every day staring at a blank sheet of paper, but when he actually started typing it usually went pretty fast. When he was done he’d let it sit for an hour or two, and go over it with a blue pencil, and give it to Gloria to make sure it didn’t contradict any obvious facts or natural laws, or anything he’d written previously. Gloria has an eidetic memory, which means that she never forgets anything she sees or hears, as though her other attributes weren’t frightening enough. Then she passes it to me to type a final draft to send down to editorial.

  Brass claimed not to be a perfectionist, and he affected a low regard for his own prose, but he regularly achieved the sort of subtle turn of phrase that would sneak up on the reader and whack him on the back of the head when he wasn’t looking. Brass’s description of Senator Burnside as having “delusions of adequacy” got Brass denounced on the Senate floor. I particularly admired his recent description of singer Bessie Elliot as wearing a red silk dress that was “just too tight enough.”

  While Brass typed I concentrated on sorting through the mail. The letters fell into about six standard categories as well as “too nutty to deal with” and “the boss better see this one.” It all got answered except a portion of “too nutty to deal with,” which was too nutty to answer. The six standard categories would receive versions of six standard but personalized form letters.

  My favorites were the letters from convicted criminals explaining, usually voluminously and in pencil, why they were innocent. Brass was one of the six members of the Second Chance Club, a group that worked to free people wrongly convicted of major crimes. The only problem was that everyone whose freedom had been curtailed by the court thought himself innocent, and wrote to Brass to prove it.

  Gloria and I shared the pleasure of typing the replies to the rest of the mail. When the backlog got too big, Brass would get one of the city-desk reporters who needed some extra money—and they all always needed extra money—to help us cut it down. Billy Fox, the reporter who was out following our fat friend, was one of the regulars at the old L.C. Smith typer in the hall.

  One time I pointed out to Brass that H.L. Mencken, a fellow newsy who worked for the Baltimore Sun before going off to found his own magazine, was reputed to have an all-purpose reply that he used for his mail: a postcard with a rubber-stamped message that read, “Sir or Madam, you may be right.”

  “Mencken does not suffer fools gladly,” Brass had replied. “A habit that makes introspection difficult.”

  I’m still not sure how that applies, but now I answer Brass’s fan mail with no further complaints. Which, I suppose, was what he had in mind.

  I waited a full five minutes after the typewriter had stopped clacking before I returned to Brass’s office. His column, triple spaced on yellow copy paper, just like he was a real working reporter, was in the wire basket. Brass was staring out the window at one of the day boats making its way up the river toward Albany.

  “What’s the column on today?” I asked.

  “Nightclubs,” he told me, still staring down at the Hudson River traffic. “The solid citizens of the Midwest never tire of hearing about nightclubs. Set the most innocuous story in a nightclub and it acquires sinful innuendo by proximity.”

  For Brass, as for most New Yorkers, the Midwest was an area full of corn and cattle, with an occasional buffalo, where nothing of note ever happened, which began on the other side of the Hudson and continued to the Pacific Ocean. I did not suffer from this character flaw, having parents and a sister in Ohio.

  Brass turned to face me. “Fox isn’t back and he hasn’t phoned in,” he said. “It’s almost four o’clock.”

  “Perhaps he followed the subject to somewhere in the Midwest,” I suggested, “and the last stagecoach has already left.” Brass stared at me with the expression of someone who has just discovered a new but not very interesting insect in his soup. “Perhaps,” he said.

  “So,” I said, hastening to change the subject, “what do you think of our list of distinguished perverts?”

  “Perverts?” Brass raised an eyebrow. “They’ve been caught in the act of performing perfectly normal sex acts with reasonably attractive partners of the opposite sex. If there is any perversion involved, it would be with the photographer. Although I suspect he had a commercial motive. The fact that publication of these pictures would cause each of the subjects insupportable embarrassment is a comment on our vestigial Victorian social mores, not on the activities portrayed.”

  There was nothing to say to that, so I did so. Brass handed me the pictures. “Wrap these in something and put them in the safe,” he said.

  “Schiff still has a few of them,” I said, going over to open the safe. “There are two subjects he couldn’t identify. What about the files?”

  “I want to look them over. Tomorrow morning you can return them and see if Mr. Schiff has satisfied our curiosity.”

  4

  I live on West Seventy-fourth Street between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues. The neighborhood used to be, so I understand, mostly Italian with a smattering of Irish
. Now added to the mix are a heavy sprinkling of out-of-work actors and dancers with a soupçon of starving writers, composers, and poets. Of course, “out-of-work” is an unnecessary modifier in this year-of-the-breadline 1935. Actors and dancers have one advantage over the rest of the population: They’re used to being out of work, it’s their usual condition. They call it “between engagements,” but that doesn’t make it any easier to pay the rent.

  My room is on the third floor front of a five-story brownstone rooming house which was a private residence once, several ages ago. Faded signs of its former glory can be discerned in the scrollwork on the baseboards and the walls; in the ornateness of the long disconnected gas fixtures still in some of the rooms; and in the interior doors, meant to separate dining room from drawing room from library in the long ago, but which now have multiple layers of paint welding them shut. My room is large enough for my belongings and my needs. The furniture: bed, night table, dresser, stuffed chair, wooden chair, table, and a sort of abbreviated wardrobe in the corner big enough for two suits and a bathrobe, all came with the room. I have added my clothing, a couple of framed photographs, and a 1911 Underwood typewriter that I got at an auction for three bucks. I could afford a new one, what with my steady employment with Alexander Brass, but that wouldn’t make me a better typist or a better writer. The typewriter, which works fine, sits on the table, which sits by the window so I can look out while I try to write.

  I got up the next morning at six-thirty, as usual, so I could spend two undisturbed hours at the typewriter before I had to leave for work. One of the advantages of working for Brass was that he never got to the office before eleven, and all that he asked of his employees was that they were there when he arrived. I always tried for ten, so I would be sure to be there by ten-thirty. I showered in the communal bathroom and by seven was sitting at my ancient machine.

  The love that I felt for Melinda transcended passion, and took me to another level of reality. Colors were shifted in their spectra, sounds were selectively magnified, and the Earth was tilted to the right. Everyday events were embodied with mystic significance. A trip to the grocery store became an odyssey through alien streets to an incomprehensible land. I could read portents of our relationship in the empty candy wrappers and crumpled cigarette packs that littered the sidewalk in front of her door. From behind drape-covered windows people peered out and whispered, “Melinda and Percival were meant for each other.” Pigeons strutted about the street muttering, “Melinda and Percival, could there be a doubt?” I was sure there were no heights to which our love could not ascend, if only I could somehow manage to make Melinda aware of my existence.

  I stared at the passage I had just written and realized that the words I had given to my fictional hero Percival exemplified two facets of my own life. First, that I knew absolutely nothing about sex, aside from the mechanical details, and even less about women; and second, that I was perhaps vaguely bitter about this fact. I wasn’t interested in sex as sex, I told myself, but in the act of love—the coupling of two minds to create a finer, greater whole. (And what would Dr. Freud say about that particular construction?)

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t done my share of adolescent fooling around in the rumble seat of an old flivver or the last row of the Valley Grande movie house with a girl who was as curious about these powerful emotions and desires as I was. But Mary Beth had, to my eternal regret, been able to curb both her desires and my own. And my romantic experiences since this lovely but strong-willed young lady had been nil.

  Not that I didn’t know love. I was constantly falling in love. I didn’t exactly fall out of love again, but merely allowed the newer love to supplant the older. Sometimes the loves lasted as long as a week or two, sometimes no more than a couple of hours. Usually—hell, invariably—the object of my affection was innocent of any knowledge of my feelings and thus of the need to reciprocate. It was my firm belief that the entire rest of the human race, both sexes, was secure, self-assured, and confident, and that I was the world’s only schlemiel—a word that I picked up from my next-door neighbor, Pinky, a retired circus clown of the Jewish persuasion. Pinky pointed out that if there was a word for it, there were probably other people doing it, but this failed to cheer me up.

  This makes me sound like the Innocent of the World, in the running for the Candide prize when next it should be awarded. But it wasn’t lack of knowledge that hampered me; three years working for Alexander Brass and listening to the stories that he printed—and the ones he couldn’t print—has given me insight into the “tangled web we weave when e’re we practice to conceive,” as a noted English actress put it. Anatole France said that a critic is like a eunuch in a harem: He sees the trick done nightly, and he hates himself for not being able to perform. Well, I sometimes sympathize with that eunuch.

  While I was staring at the page of ardent text in my typewriter and wondering whether to place it on the pile of manuscript pages that was slowly growing on a corner of my desk, or in the wastebasket, my telephone rang. I was the somewhat harassed possessor of the only private phone in the building. There was a pay phone in the second-floor corridor that even Mrs. Bianchi, the landlady, used. But when Brass wanted me outside of office hours, the need was often urgent, and he wanted to be able to get me. The boys and girls in the building kept the hall phone tied up for hours arranging their professional and personal lives. So Brass paid for the phone in my room and I had a constant fight to keep my neighbors from using it without seeming actively hostile.

  I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Brass,” Brass said. “Be downstairs in five minutes. I’m picking you up in a cab.” He hung up.

  I pulled out my hunter pocket watch—the legacy of a deceased uncle—and snapped it open. It was five minutes to eight. This was definitely an unBrasslike hour to be up, much less to be picking me up in a cab. I pulled the blinds from the window and looked outside to reassure myself that the world hadn’t ended during the night, or that Fascist goon squads were not setting up machine-gun posts on the corners. All seemed tranquil.

  I put my tie and vest on and shrugged into my jacket. A Checker Cab was pulling up as I stepped out the door four minutes later. Brass pushed open the back door and I climbed in. Brass, as always, was immaculately groomed—dark red bow tie perfectly butterflied below his chin, every hair in place. This was particularly impressive considering that it was two hours before he usually got up. Brass was out until at least two every night, associating with the sort of people who make New York the City That Never Sleeps, and supply such good copy for his column. Then he goes home to make notes for his column. Sometimes he even writes it before he goes to bed. In bed by four, up by eleven makes a man wealthy and wise if he writes about the playgrounds and playmates of Gotham. Healthy, we don’t worry about here. Some day we’ll move to the country to get healthy.

  “Who are we rescuing this morning?” I asked as the cab pulled away. Brass’s hasty excursions were usually to rescue some Gothamite who had gotten himself into a scrape with the law, or with one of the outlaws with which the city abounds.

  “Too late,” Brass said. “He’s beyond rescuing.”

  I looked at him, awaiting an explanation, but Brass just stared out the window.

  We went through the park at Eighty-sixth Street and turned right on First Avenue. On Eighty-second Street we turned down toward York Avenue and I saw a cluster of police cars, both marked and unmarked, in the street ahead of us. We stopped in the middle of the block, just before the police cars, and Brass told me to pay the driver. By the time I had handed the cabby a couple of quarters and told him to keep the change, Brass was out of the car and headed toward the trio of uniformed cops standing in front of one of the tenements. I had to scurry to catch up.

  The officers recognized Brass. Very few cops on the island of Manhattan wouldn’t recognize my boss. He liked to write up the heroic exploits of the uniformed force, even as he castigated the arrogance and graft of their bosses. And h
e was always good for a ten-spot if one of the uniforms brought him something interesting in the way of information.

  “Mr. Brass,” a thin cop with prominent ears said, nodding to us as we approached.

  “Henderson, isn’t it?” Brass asked.

  “That’s right, sir. Go on up. The inspector’s expecting you.”

  As we started up the steps a black station wagon pulled up to the curb. The writing on the door panel said, office of THE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER: CITY OF NEW YORK. I Suddenly had a strong feeling that I knew what we were going to find upstairs.

  The tenants of the building were in the corridors, clustered about the staircase. They were in various stages of grooming and dress, having put aside whatever they were doing to share in the vicarious excitement of the police investigation. On the landing two flights up we found Inspector Raab.

  Inspector Willem Raab was a large, florid man with a round face and a body that was getting rounder with every passing day. But under the excess poundage was a solid, muscular frame that had served him well during his thirty years on the force. Originally Dutch or Flemish, or one of those European seafaring peoples, he had jumped ship in New York when he was seventeen and promptly been arrested for beating the crap out of someone who had tried to pull the Murphy game on him. When he got out of jail a week later the officer who arrested him asked him if he wanted to join the force. “They needed men with a lot of muscle, a sense of moral righteousness, and not too many brains,” he was fond of explaining. If so, he had cheated them. As chief of the homicide squad for the past seven years, he had shown a high degree of intelligence as well as the tenacity of a bulldog.

  “Brass,” the inspector said, making it sound like an expletive.

  “Inspector Raab. Where is he?”

  The inspector stepped aside. “Through there. Don’t touch anything.”

  There were eight or ten doors along the corridor, stretching on both sides of the landing. The first door to the right of the landing was open, and we went in. It was the front room of a three-room flat, kitchen ahead and to the right, and bedroom to the left. Two men from the fingerprint squad were inside the apartment dusting various surfaces.