Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  “Have you ever noticed that breakfast is the most idiosyncratic meal of the day?” Brass asked me as the waitress pulled away. “Most people, however adventurous they are at lunch or dinner, eat the breakfast of their youth.”

  “Really?” I asked. “I always ate cornflakes for breakfast at home.”

  “While others,” Brass continued, pouring cream in his coffee with studied concentration, “of the sort who go on the stage, write novels, or swindle widows and orphans for a living, will change their eating habits entirely. It’s one of the sure signs of the degenerate personality.”

  “And everything I have become I owe to your splendid example,” I told him.

  “I warned you when you took the job,” Brass said. “Do you have the pictures?” he asked.

  I touched my jacket, over my heart. “Securely buttoned down.”

  “Keep them so until we get back to the office. Did Mitchell have anything interesting to say about them?”

  “They’re not composites,” I said. “Aside from that, nothing that seemed particularly helpful.” I told him what Mitchell had suggested.

  “Write it up and stick it in the file,” Brass said. “You never know.”

  “You never know,” I agreed. “What happened last night after we left?”

  “More reporters showed up. A sharp-eyed detective spotted MacArthur of the Mirror taking down a couple of photos that were pinned up in the front room, so the police took them all down and are holding them as evidence. The police are working on the theory that the killer was a jealous husband or boyfriend, or possibly a father that didn’t like what his daughter was doing for a living.”

  Our food came, and I thoughtfully poured syrup over my pancakes. “Do they really believe that?” I asked.

  “I doubt if they really believe anything,” Brass said. “But it is a possibility that they have to check out. I did discover one thing of interest before I left.”

  I started to say, “What’s that?” and got as far as “Wha—” when Bobbi appeared at the booth. She was not as flamboyantly dressed as when I met her last evening, but she didn’t need flamboyance to make an effect. She was wearing a green wool skirt and sweater that made me want to compliment the sheep. I didn’t stare.

  “Hello,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.” She tucked her handbag, a black contraption large enough to hold King Kong and all the little Kongs, under the seat and slid in next to me. “I’m glad you ordered breakfast without waiting. I’ve been up at Herm’s apartment.”

  “You went back?” I did stare. “Why?”

  “I had an idea,” she told me. She turned to the waitress and said that Brass’s poached eggs looked good, which they didn’t after the way he’d been poking at them, and she’d like some sausage and potatoes with the eggs. Then she turned to Brass. “Good morning,” she said.

  “What sort of idea? And good morning to you,” Brass said. “Did you sleep well?”

  “What a bed!” she said with a wide smile and a joyous wriggle. “And what a bathtub! You could swim in it. I did swim in it. Can I stay there tonight?”

  “I told the manager you’d be there two weeks,” Brass said. “You don’t have to rush off.”

  “Two weeks! Say, that’s great! I leave for Pittsburgh in two weeks, first stop on a four-month tour of Ardbaum’s red circuit.” She looked thoughtful for a second, and then leaned forward. “Say,” she said to Brass, “you planning to visit during these two weeks?”

  Brass wiped his mouth with his napkin and took a drink of coffee. He leaned forward. “Let me make something clear, Miss Starr. If I want to proposition a girl, I do it before I rent the hotel room, not after.”

  “Okay, okay,” Bobbi said. “It wasn’t such a dumb idea. Not all men are knights in shining armor, you know.”

  “From my reading of history,” Brass said, “even the knights in shining armor weren’t. But my ego won’t let me try to attract women with anything beyond my native wit and charm. No baubles, no limousines, no suites in fancy hotels. I rent the room you’re staying in by the year in case of need. It’s much cheaper by the year. The last person before you to stay in it was a writer named Scott Fitzgerald, who was in from the coast for a week. He drank, and talked about his wife, Zelda, who’s somewhere out West, and complained about the size of the advance his publisher was offering him for his next book. I did not make a pass at him.”

  “Say, don’t get upset,” she said. “Men not making passes is something new to my experience, and I have to get used to it, is all. It’s okay. I like it.”

  “Fair enough,” Brass said.

  “What’s the red circuit?” I asked her.

  “The Ardbaums run two circuits, the red and the blue,” she said. “Different cities, is all. And maybe for the red circuit a girl can get away with wearing a few less garments in her act. Not all the way down to pasties and a G-string—the Ardbaums don’t go for that—but pretty close.”

  “I see,” I said. Life presents an endless vista of educational opportunities.

  She reached into her purse and took out a file card. “Here,” she said, extending it across the table to Brass.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s what I went uptown for.” She turned to me. “I got to thinking last night about how we searched the room and everything, looking for those pictures that I kept telling you Herm wouldn’t have taken…”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And those two numbers that were missing.”

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “What two numbers?” Brass asked.

  I explained about Dworkyn’s dating system and the two files that were gone.

  “Ah!” Brass said. “The police missed that—at least while I was there.”

  “Well, I got to thinking,” Bobbi said, “and I remembered that Herm keeps cards on his clients—the ones he does darkroom work for as well as the magazines—so he knows what number file the negatives are in. And this—” she waved the card in her hand like a tiny flag “—is the file card with those numbers on it.”

  Brass took the card and looked at it reverently, and then passed it to me. It was a three-by-five file card, of the sort you can buy in stationery stores for a nickel a pack. On the upper left was printed in big block letters in a neat hand—Herm’s, I assumed—BIRD. Under it, neatly under one another, slightly indented from the name, were the entries 3526, 3588, and 3597, and on the right side of the card, across from the other numbers, one more entry: C516.

  “Do you know who Bird is?” Brass asked.

  “No idea,” Bobbi said. “I don’t know any of Herm’s clients, except that I’d see them around, you know.”

  “I understand,” Brass said.

  “The two files that were missing were 3588 and 3597,” I said. “I wonder what 3526 was, and what C516 means.”

  “Oh, I brought them along,” Bobbi said. “I thought you might want to see them.” She reached into her handbag with both hands and pulled out a folder. “They’re not very exciting,” she said, passing it to Brass. “The C stands for contact sheet. When Herm develops—” she paused to gulp twice “—developed thirty-five-millimeter-roll film he would print a contact sheet, which is like all the pictures are fitted onto one eight-by-ten sheet and the client can pick the ones he wants enlarged from that.”

  “Yes, I am familiar with the concept,” Brass said. He opened the folder, pulled out the contact sheet, and squinted at it. “A girl who seems to have no clothes on,” he said. “Not unfamiliar subject matter. But she seems to be alone, which is original.”

  “Herm sometimes did nature studies,” Bobbi said. “But he doesn’t even have a thirty-five-millimeter camera, so these aren’t his.”

  “I can’t make out much detail; I’ll have to have the pictures blown up,” Brass said. “Let’s look at the rest of this stuff.” He dumped the rest of the folder’s contents onto the table and we stared down at a selection of glassine envelopes holding four-by-five-inch negatives. Brass counte
d them. “Eight negatives,” he said. He held one of them up to the light. “People,” he said, “with their clothes on. Standing, looking at the camera. Not art, just a snapshot. Probably someone’s family.”

  “The rest of them are all like that,” Bobbi said. “I would have printed them for you, but it would take too long. Are they any good to you?”

  Brass passed them to me, and I held one up. There’s something very strange about looking at negatives; it’s like you’re looking at people and things inside out. It makes it very hard for me to tell what I’m seeing.

  “I can’t tell what information they have for us until I have them printed,” Brass said. “I can have that done at the newspaper. I don’t think you should go back to that apartment for anything else.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” Bobbi said. “It gives me the creeps.”

  Breakfast continued, and we talked about various things. No more about her brother or our other problems, but mostly about life in what Bobbi called “the show-all business.” Brass got Bobbi talking, and kept her going. He was gathering material, although much of what she told us couldn’t be printed in any of his current markets. She told us stories about life on the road that made me feel that I knew nothing whatever about life or how it is lived. I would have to tear up my manuscript and start again, and write about real people: dancers and strippers and singers and comics and jugglers and magicians—real people.

  Brass had an acquisitive look in his eyes as he listened to Bobbi’s stories. Occasionally he would throw in a story himself, just to keep the ball rolling, but mostly he listened. Some of Bobbi’s stories meandered and had no proper end, and some jumped from here to there with abandon, but that’s what life is like. Bobbi didn’t know she was telling stories, she was just relating her life to us. She sat there with her post-breakfast pastry and coffee (“One thing about being a dancer, a girl doesn’t have to watch her weight.”) and talked.

  “It’s true what they say about company managers,” she said, chewing her Danish and staring at the picture of Whistler’s mother-in-law on the wall as she talked. “One time in Cleveland—this would have been May or June a couple of years ago, I guess… No, wait a minute—it was thirty-three, June of thirty-three—we are playing the Alhambra Theater and not doing too well. June is always slow, and besides, nobody has any money, not even fifteen cents to get into the show.

  “The company manager, Benny—no, Bernie—comes backstage one evening right before the late show and tells the girls it might be a good idea if they show a little more skin during the specialty numbers. Just a little, and just for this one show, he says, so he can see if he likes it.”

  She took a sip of coffee. “Well, there’s always girls who are eager to show it all, if they got any excuse, so Bernie gets what he asked for. The audience likes it, except for one guy in the front row who is sitting there with his arms crossed and an expression on his face like he has just sucked a lemon. Right next to him is sitting Bernie, who is deadpan, and one cannot tell what he is thinking. It turns out that the guy next to Bernie is the head of the Ohio Legion of Morality and Decency, or some such, and Bernie has invited him to come to the show, in the fond hope that he’ll find it immoral and indecent. There is a passel of reporters waiting in the lobby to hear what this guy has to say. If he pans the show loud enough, we’ll be playing to packed houses for the rest of the run.”

  “And did he?” Brass asked.

  “Oh, my, yes. And the chief of police threatens to close us down if we don’t clean up the show, which we have already done because the skin show was for one night only. It costs Bemie a twenty to get the chief to make this threat, but he comes through like a gentleman and the box office does not suffer. But then the morality guy comes back the next evening, and this time there’s no Bernie and no reporters. The day after that he is there for all four shows. And the day after that. It turns out he has developed a crush on Princess Alice, which is not her stage name, which is Fifi Delite, but is what we call her because she is so high-falutin’ she dislikes having to breathe the same air as the rest of the girls.

  “Anyway, this gent, whose name turns out to be Lester, and who is a bank manager when he isn’t being moral and decent, can’t take his eyes off Alice when she does her number. I mean, there are a good number of men who can’t take their eyes off Alice, but not like Lester. Alice’s turn consists of coming out in an evening gown and slowly singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” while removing the gown and getting ready for bed—her set is a bed and a dressing table. When she is bereft of her gown and most of her undies, she slips into this nothing of a nightie, slides into bed, and blows the lights out.”

  “Sounds like a provocative act,” Brass commented.

  “It sure provokes Lester,” Bobbi said. “He works up his nerve to ask her out after the last show on the third night, and proposes to her that night. A week later he marries her. The good people of Cleveland, at least those good people who Lester is accustomed to associating with, are not amused. Lester loses his job at the bank, and his mother, with whom he is living, gives him the boot. So he and Alice move to New York and Mrs. Ardbaum gives him a job as accountant for the red circuit, which, incidentally, pays more than he was getting at the bank. The princess gives up burlesque and goes into radio. She does specialty voices for the daytime dramas. Mostly little children and dogs.”

  We finished our coffee and left the restaurant, Bobbi heading for Seventh Avenue to shop for working clothes, and Brass and I office-bound.

  14

  Inspector Raab was stretched out on the couch in Brass’s inner office when we arrived, his head on one armrest, his feet sticking out past the other. Gloria put her finger to her lips as we came through the front door and led us in to look at the sleeping beauty. Then she gestured us back out to the outer office, closing the door behind her. “Poor man needs his sleep,” she said.

  Brass glared at his closed office door. “Presumably he has a home,” he griped. “Why can’t he sleep there? I need my office.”

  Gloria smiled sweetly at him. “You used to be able to write anywhere,” she said.

  “I can still write anywhere,” Brass told her. “That’s not the point. You can’t just let every Tom, Dick, and Harry wander into my office and sack out on the couch. He didn’t even take his shoes off!”

  “Well, I’m sorry!” Gloria said. “It was my idea. He came in here looking for you, and I didn’t know how long you’d be, and he said he’d wait, and the poor man looked like he hadn’t slept since Groveley Day, so I told him to take a nap on the couch until you got here.”

  I carefully hung my raincoat on a wooden hanger. “Groveley Day?” I asked.

  “Just never mind,” Gloria said. “Sit here,” she told Brass, swinging the typewriter up from its compartment in her desk. “Write your column. Let the man sleep.”

  Brass transferred his glare to Gloria, and then sighed a long-suffering sigh and sat behind the desk and rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. He stared into space for a minute and then poised his hands above the keyboard. A determined look came into his eye. He was going to prove to us that he was no sissy, that he didn’t need his overstuffed chair, his large desk, his shelves of reference books, his river view to write his column: He could write it anywhere. He typed a word. He paused for thought. He typed another word. He stared at the closet door. A smile formed on his lips and he began to type in earnest.

  Gloria sat on the couch, a steno notebook in her lap, writing something. I worked my way around to the back of the desk, subtly, so as not to disturb Brass, to see what he was typing. It was:

  I am writing these words on the typing machine in my reception room, as my office is in use at the moment. But that’s O.K. As master novelist Charles Dickens once said, “It is a far, far better thing I do…” Lying on my office couch as I write these words, fast asleep at a quarter to noon, is a detective inspector of the New York City Police Department, Homicide Squad. He is taking a short nap, and
he deserves it. He has been up all night. He may have been up for several nights, I’m not sure. Homicide Squad detectives do not punch time clocks when they’re working on a murder, and neither does their boss.

  Brass might have to suffer, but not silently. Twenty million people were going to know of his stoic heroism tomorrow morning over breakfast. I tiptoed away to my tiny office and sat down.

  I worked on answering letters for about twenty minutes, when I heard the inner office door open, and Inspector Raab bellow, “Why the hell didn’t somebody wake me!”

  Brass came into the hall. “Oh, have you finished your nap?” he enquired. “We didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “How thoughtful,” Raab said. “Come in here, I want to talk to you.”

  Brass returned to his office, and I was about two steps behind him. Raab was adjusting his tie, using the window as a mirror. “Coffee?” Brass asked Raab.

  “Nah, it puts me to sleep.”

  Brass settled in behind his desk and gave his chair a couple of easy twists from side to side. He leaned back. “I assume you came here for something other than to use my couch,” he said. “Not that you’re not perfectly welcome to sack out here any time you feel the need.”

  Raab pulled a chair up to the desk and settled into it. “Perfectly friendly,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I want to keep this perfectly friendly. You and I have known each other for a long time. You’ve said nice things about me in your column. I’ve given you tips, when I could.”

  “True,” Brass agreed. “And I you.”

  “And now you’re hiding something from me, and I want to know what it is.”

  Brass shook his head. “We’ve been through this, Inspector. If there was anything I could tell you, I would.”

  Gloria came in and closed the door behind her. She stood there by the door, clearly prepared to referee if it came to a slugging match.