Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  The apartment was on the second floor of a well-kept-up brownstone; there was a fairly new carpet runner on the floor of the hallway and the stairs, and the apartment doors had been freshly painted in that color that is known throughout New York City as landlord green.

  At first our knocking produced no response. Then, finally, we heard some banging noises from inside, as though someone had dropped something or knocked something over. And then a girl’s voice yelling, “Go away! Can’t you let a girl sleep?” It was a sweet voice, a singer’s voice, even yelling through a door. It sounded like it belonged to the sort of girl I would like to know. Fox was a lucky man. Had been…

  Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere in the world except standing outside that freshly painted green door waiting to tell the girl with that voice that she was now what in my hometown would be known as “the Widow Fox.”

  Brass knocked again. “Mrs. Fox?” he called. “This is Alexander Brass, from the World. I’d like to speak to you for a minute.”

  There was a profound silence from inside the apartment. Then all at once we heard the chain being taken off the door, and the door swung open. She was young and blond and slender and beautiful, and her eyes were full of sleep. She wore a sheer nightgown of some sort, over which she had wrapped a man’s terry cloth bathrobe. She stared at both of us, and we said nothing. Then, with no inflection in her voice, as though she were discussing the weather, she said, “It’s Bill. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Even Brass was startled, something I had seldom seen before. “Has someone been here before us, Mrs. Fox?” he asked.

  “Call me Cathy. I’ve been asleep all morning. It’s just—when I heard your voice… Then, he is dead? Not just in the hospital or something?”

  “I’m sorry,” Brass said. “He is dead. Murdered. William was. doing a job for me, and he was killed. I am so very sorry.”

  Cathy wrapped the bathrobe more tightly around her and stepped back from the door, and we entered the apartment. “He appreciated that, you know,” Cathy said, closing the door and walking ahead of us down the short hallway to the living room.

  “What?”

  “Being called ‘William.’ Everyone insisted on calling him ‘Billy.’ He thought nobody took him seriously. He was pleased that you called him ‘William,’ but no one else would, so he was willing to settle for ‘Bill.’ We had long talks about it. It seemed so very important.”

  Her voice remained quite calm, almost flat, but when she turned around we could see two lines of tears running down her face. “Please sit down,” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

  I settled into an ancient, well-worn brown couch that took up much of one wall of the small living room. Brass sat on a straight-back wooden chair under a framed front page of the New York World that was hung on the opposite wall. “This is my associate Morgan DeWitt,” he said, waving his hat in my direction. “We don’t exactly know what happened. Yesterday I asked William to follow a man for me. I didn’t know who the man was, which was why I wanted him followed, but I had no reason to think that the request was dangerous. This morning your husband was found dead in an apartment in Yorkville. He had been hit on the head and his throat had been cut. The police have no idea why. Neither do I. He was unconscious when he died, so he didn’t suffer.”

  That last line was pure hokum. Brass had no way of knowing whether Fox was conscious or not when he died. But I was not going to correct him.

  Cathy looked from one to the other of us. “Whose apartment?” she asked.

  “It was rented by some sort of commercial organization,” I told her. “The police are checking on that now.”

  “I see,” she said. “Who was he following?”

  I left that one for Brass. “A fat man who had some strange photographs,” he said. “I don’t know who he is. That’s why I had Fox following him.”

  Cathy didn’t say anything for a long time. She was staring out the window, but I doubt if she knew that. “You were one of his heroes,” she said, turning to look at Brass. “You and Franklin Roosevelt and Babe Ruth and George Gershwin.”

  Brass took an envelope from inside his jacket and handed it to Cathy. “I never paid him for all the work he did for me,” he said. “Here, please take this.”

  “I thought the newspaper paid him for all that,” she said.

  “Not entirely,” Brass said. “I employed him to do some freelance work for me: legwork, writing, that sort of thing. And I owed him some back salary. This is it.”

  Cathy weighed the envelope in her hand. “This is very nice of you, but he would have told me,” she said. “Except for that last day. You don’t have to—”

  “I do,” Brass said. “I have to. If you need anything—anything—call me.”

  Cathy put the envelope on the coffee table. “Where do I go to see about his body and… whatever?”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Brass told her. “You won’t have to do anything until there are decisions to be made, then I’ll consult with you. Is there anyone out of town who should be notified?”

  “Oh my God!” Cathy said, sitting up and putting her fist in her mouth. When she took it out a few seconds later I could see the tooth marks on her knuckles. “His parents,” she said. “I’ll have to call them. How awful for them.”

  “They’ll get whoever did this,” Brass said.

  Cathy stared at Brass for a minute. “I’ll tell him,” she said. “When they catch his murderer, I’ll go out to his grave, and I’ll be sure to tell him.”

  6

  A chilling rain was falling when we left Cathy Fox’s apartment and, as usual in New York, those who didn’t want to get wet outnumbered the available taxicabs. We tried to flag down an empty cab for a few minutes, and then Brass and I buttoned our overcoats, pulled down our hats, turned up our collars, and started across town on foot. Silently we crossed the avenues together. There was nothing to say.

  It was after one o’clock when we arrived at the office. Gloria was eating lunch at her desk: an egg salad on rye with a cup of tea from Danny’s on the corner. She waved a note at Brass as we came in. “You’re wanted,” she said.

  “By whom at the moment?” he asked, unbuttoning his coat and hanging it carefully on a wooden hanger, which he then took into the small storeroom, where it could drip harmlessly. I fished up another hanger and did likewise, not to be outdone in neatness by the boss. My hat was a sodden mess, but I put it on a shelf in the firm expectation that it would reblock itself as it dried.

  “Mr. Sanders has called four times,” Gloria said. “He wants to see you as soon as you come in.”

  “King Winston called himself?” I asked. “Personally?” Winston Sanders was the publisher of the World, known as “the King” by those who owed their weekly paychecks to him, and in my five years working for Brass in the World building I had seen him only twice, both times in the lobby as he strode toward his private elevator.

  “The first two times his secretary called, the last two times it was he,” Gloria said.

  “Well,” Brass said. “Most intriguing. I guess I’d better go upstairs and see what he wants.” Brass, as he had told Inspector Raab, did not work for the New York World, but the World Features Syndicate, of which Sanders was the president, carried both of Brass’s columns.

  “While I’m gone I have work for both of you,” Brass said. He turned to Gloria. “You heard what happened?”

  “Yes,” Gloria said. “People have been popping in here all morning keeping me up to date.”

  “We have just returned from visiting Mrs. Fox,” Brass told her. “You know, it’s odd the way things come around. I once did a column on her.”

  “I know,” Gloria said. “Cathy Wild, née Karen Welikof. The moxie girl. She’s singing at a club in the Village called The Stable. Mostly show stuff: Gershwin, Cole Porter, some Noel Coward. She’s supposed to be very good.”

  “Yes,” Brass said.

  “I see that we’re reserving those pictures for
now,” Gloria said.

  “That’s so,” Brass agreed. “How did you know?”

  “None of my informants knew about them, so I assumed that you hadn’t mentioned them to the police.”

  Brass nodded. “You’re worth every penny I’m paying you,” he said.

  “Oh,” Gloria said, “considerably more than that.” She took a dainty bite of her sandwich.

  Brass removed the list of names of those people whose naked bodies had graced our collection of photographs from an inner pocket, uncreased it carefully, and laid it on Gloria’s desk. “The folders for these people are on my desk,” he said. “Find out where each of them has been for, say, the past two weeks. Make sure to tell whomever you talk to that you’re from the World; we’ll see if that provokes any reaction. Divide the names between you as you like. Also, see if Schiff identified those last two names.”

  “He did,” Gloria said. “Their folders are on top of the others on your desk. The photographs were quite, ah, instructive.”

  “You looked?” Brass asked.

  “Of course. I look at everything that comes into this office. It’s my job. I am a newsman, after all.”

  “You are,” Brass agreed. “And better than most. I’m glad you’re so unflappable,” he added. “Perhaps I should show you the rest of the photos when I get back. Your feminine eye might see something that our masculine ones overlooked.” She smiled the smile of an ice princess. “I’m sure I will find different areas of interest, she said. “You men are so easily distracted by the sight of naked flesh.”

  “Some naked flesh is more distracting than others,” Brass told her. “I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, and it does nothing for me.” With that Brass went off to his meeting.

  Gloria and I stared at the list of names. I went into Brass’s office and retrieved the folders, including the two new ones. To the original six names we now added Homer Seinbrenner and Fletcher van Geuip.

  Seinbrenner was the boss of B&S Distilleries, a company that did very little distilling, but imported much of the booze that thirsty New Yorkers sloshed about. When a Gothamite obeys Noel Coward’s injunction to put his scotch or rye down and lie down, it is probably a scotch or rye supplied by B&S in the glass. The company had retreated to Canada during Prohibition and restricted itself to selling to rumrunners (or, presumably, scotch or rye runners) and letting them break the law. Or so Seinbrenner claimed.

  Van Geuip—pronounced “gee-whip” with a soft g—was a writer of books about his own adventurous life. He traveled everywhere there was a track wide enough for a mule to carry him, and when he arrived he shot anything that moved. His books were full of passages like: “Ubo, my native bearer, handed me my elephant gun and I calmly took a bead on the elephant and brought him down. ‘You brave man, pemba,’ Ubo gushed, the awe showing in his expressive brown eyes.” When I read things like that I can’t help wondering what pemba translates to, and what the elephant thought about it.

  “How do you want to split the list up?” I asked Gloria.

  “I’ll take Suzie Frienard,” she said. “Aside from that, it doesn’t matter; take whom you want.”

  “That’s okay with me,” I told her, “but just for my information, why do you want Suzie? Don’t you think I can handle a woman?”

  “Do you think you can handle a woman?” Gloria enquired sweetly. “But that’s not it. If I call her, it’s an item for the society page. If a man calls her, or asks about her, her husband is liable to think the paper is trying to investigate him, and we’ll get no cooperation.”

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” I said, knowing when to beat a graceful retreat. I took the first four names and went to my little cubical with them.

  Bertram Childers

  Gerald Garbin

  Ephraim L. Wackersan II

  Pass Helbine

  Definitely names to conjure with. I got busy with my conjuring. Senator Childers was a snap. His Trenton office was happy to tell me that he had been in Washington for the past two weeks, but would be back in New Jersey, at his estate in Deal, tomorrow, and would be pleased to be interviewed by someone from the World if I would just call them to set it up first.

  Judge Garbin didn’t give interviews, his clerk told me. But when I asked him for the judge’s schedule for the past two weeks, the clerk read it off to me out of his desk diary without pausing to inquire why. I guess they’re used to odd requests from the press. The judge had been presiding over a complex civil case involving airplane parts for the past week. The week before that he had sat in judgment on the Florence Maybelle murder case. I had almost gone to sit in on that one myself. Mrs. Maybelle, twenty-nine, had been accused of murdering her husband, Roy, sixty-seven, a boating tycoon, for his money. She claimed that she thought he was a burglar. When called to the stand she had shed a lot of tears and shown a lot of leg, and been acquitted by the all-male jury, one of whom proposed marriage to her before she left the courtroom.

  Ephraim Wackersan was more of a problem. He didn’t believe in telephones, so the only one in his Sixth Avenue store was in the order department. The chief order-taker, a grimly efficient-sounding woman, assured me that he was there, that he arrived every day well before the store opened at 8 a.m. and remained until well after the store closed at 6 p.m. But could she really know that? He could have snuck out without his order department knowing a thing about it, or so I had to assume. I would reserve that one and go inspect the premises in person if Brass deemed it necessary. Onward to number four.

  Pass Helbine proved difficult to find, and even more difficult to pin down. He wasn’t in his New York office, and his secretary was vague about when he had been in. He wasn’t at his Long Island estate, and his housekeeper said that he and the third Mrs. Helbine were in and out regularly, and she really couldn’t keep track.

  I started calling the Helbine Houses—the six flophouses that Helbine had painted and refurbished to give the bums a clean place to sleep at a dime a flop. The desk clerk at the first one I called suggested that I call another one, which I did. Helbine was there, serving dinner in the dining room. He came to the phone and yelled “Hello!” into the mouthpiece.

  “Mr. Helbine? My name is Morgan DeWitt. I’m with the New York World. Could I have a minute of your time?”

  “Now?”

  “If it’s convenient.” I shifted the earpiece to my other hand. I really hate talking on the telephone.

  “It isn’t convenient, but then it never is,” his voice boomed. “What do you want?”

  “My paper wants to do a piece on you. ‘Two Weeks in the Life of a Philanthropist.’”

  “You want to follow me around for two weeks?”

  “No. We feel that it wouldn’t be spontaneous if we were with you. We’ll just go with your last two weeks—whatever you did for the last two weeks. That is, unless there’s something you’d rather not have us write about. We’ll just interview you and whoever you’ve been with for the last two weeks. And we’ll have to take pictures of the places you’ve been, of course.”

  I could hear that strange telephone sound that I always thought of as the static between the stars while he thought this over. “My life is an open book,” he said finally. “I am essentially a public man.”

  “That’s a wonderful attitude, Mr. Helbine,” I said. “If you could just tell me where you’ve been the past two weeks—what places you visited, who you talked to.”

  “Well now,” he said. “I’ll have to make a list. I couldn’t even tell you, right off, where I had lunch yesterday. Give me a day or so; I’ll have my secretary type it up for you. Sort of a reverse itinerary, you might call it.”

  “You haven’t been to any place especially exotic, have you?” I asked him. “I mean, if you took a flying trip to Europe or South America, I don’t know if the World would spring for sending me and a photographer in your footsteps.”

  He laughed, a hearty haw-haw, us-boys-around-the-campfire-together sort of laugh. “No, nothing
like that. Just dull old New York City and my Long Island estate, if I remember correctly. Call my secretary tomorrow. I’ll have it typed for you.”

  “On behalf of the New York World and our two million readers, I thank you,” I told him.

  “Of course,” he said. We both hung up. One thing about dealing with very rich people, particularly when they consider themselves philanthropists or industrialists or art collectors or have some other hobby that the rest of us can’t afford: they expect other people to be interested in their lives. I understand that the Kings Louis of France, from number thirteen onward, used to have people come into their bedrooms in the morning and sit in a sort of gallery to watch them get up and go to the bathroom. It was considered a great honor to be invited, or you had to buy a ticket, I forget which. Maybe both.

  Someone was crying; the sound came clearly into my small cubicle. I got up and went to the outer office. Cathy Wild Fox née Karen Welikof was standing in the middle of the floor in front of Gloria’s desk clutching in one hand a cloth coat with some sort of fur collar, and in the other the white envelope that Brass had given her. She was holding the envelope out to Gloria, who had stood up on her side of the desk, and was trying to say something, but only incoherent sobs were coming out.

  Gloria and I helped Cathy to the leather couch that stretched along one wall of the office, and I took the coat and envelope from her hands and stuffed the oversized white handkerchief from the breast pocket of my jacket into them. Gloria knelt on the couch next to Cathy and took her head in her arms like a mother holding a child. “There, there,” she said. “You’d better stop that sobbing. Your mascara is running, and you’ll get the hiccups.”

  Cathy buried her head in the handkerchief and took many deep breaths and then blew her nose three or four times, wiped her face, and looked up. Her mascara was all over her face, her lipstick was smeared, and her eyes were red and puffy, and she looked beautiful.