Too Soon Dead

by Michael Kurland

  “A newspaper, Mr. Wackersan. The New York World.”

  “And you want to do a story about Wackersan’s?”

  I took out my notebook. “Not exactly, Mr. Wackersan. We would like to do a story about you.”

  “Me?” Junior tried not to look pleased. His father cast a long shadow from which he had yet to emerge. He bubbled over to his desk and sat down. “What do you want to—that is, what sort of thing are you doing?”

  “My editor is thinking of running a series, ‘Great Men of New York.’ We’ll cover important political figures like Mayor LaGuardia and Governor Lehman, and figures from the sporting world like Babe Ruth and Gene Tunney; but we feel that the world of commerce is too often overlooked. We want to include profiles on Mr. Macy, Mr. Gimbel, and yourself.”

  Wackersan leaned back in his chair and looked stern. He sank into deep thought for fifteen or twenty seconds and then nodded slowly. Wackersan’s Department Store was not in the league of Macy’s or Gimbel’s, or even Wanamaker’s or McCreery’s, but Wackersan was prepared to overlook that. “What would you like to know?” he asked me.

  I flipped open the notebook to a blank page. “What is an average day like in the life of Ephraim Wackersan?”

  It was over an hour later that I left Wackersan and Wackersan’s, and five pages of my notebook had been filled with the angular scratchings that I call my shorthand. I actually used a form of Pitman that I learned in high school, but it was so erratic that if I didn’t transcribe my notes within a day or so I would start to lose words. After a couple of weeks I would have no idea what I had written.

  The notebook contained a lot of facts about the day-to-day life of Junior Wackersan, but whether I had inscribed anything of interest to Brass, I didn’t know. It didn’t much interest me. I found out that Wackersan, Jr. arrived at the office at precisely 7:45 in the morning and left no earlier than 6:30 in the evening every day but Saturday and Sunday. He worked only a half-day Saturday, and he took the Lord’s Day off. It was this punctuality, more than anything else, to which he attributed his success. That was lucky because, as far as I could determine, he did nothing else of any value for the store.

  Wackersan had the enlightened social and political outlook of Caligula or Phillip II of Spain. He was appalled at the creeping Bolshevism that was taking over the country. “Agents of foreign powers,” he told me solemnly, “have infiltrated the work force. They are causing worker unrest throughout the country, demanding things like employee bathrooms and shorter work weeks. In my own store some employees have been heard to complain that twenty-five cents an hour is too low a wage!”

  I wondered who heard them, and how much an hour he was getting, but I kept my mouth shut.

  All Wackersan’s female employees were single, and of good moral character. “Married women should not work!” Junior told me. “A married woman’s place is in the hearth and home.” But Wackersan was not unsympathetic to the needs of newlyweds. Any Wackersan female employee who got married got a five-dollar bonus as she got fired.

  There’s more, but I don’t want to repeat it and you don’t want to hear it. I typed it all up that evening for Brass to go over, and it’s still in the file for future generations to see how big business thought in the fourth decade of the twentieth century.

  Pass Helbine’s secretary, a cute blonde named Charity with one of those fluffy hairdos that looked like a yellow cloud had descended around her ears, had a list prepared for me of all Helbine’s activities for the past two weeks, which was what I’d asked him for over the phone. She didn’t think jokes about her name were funny, and she had no idea where he was. I went from one Helbine House to another until I finally caught up with Helbine at the Helbine Gallery of Fine Art on Twenty-third Street. They were setting up for a one-man show of the work of a new young artist Helbine had discovered, and Helbine was overseeing the hanging of the pictures. A slender man with intense eyes stood by the door as I came in. He wore the tweed jacket with patch pockets that artists and writers are required to own and was puffing on the curved briar pipe that is one of the other guild regulations. “What do you think?” he asked, turning to me and waving his pipe toward the group hanging the pictures.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “Do you think they have any idea what they’re doing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea what they’re doing.”

  “They’re hanging my paintings on the wall for the one-man show which Prince Helbine is giving me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re the artist.”

  He stuck out his hand. “Aaron Berkman,” he said. “Are you a friend of Helbine’s? If so, I meant ‘prince’ in only the nicest way. As in, ‘What a prince of a fellow he is.’”

  “Morgan DeWitt,” I said. “I’ve never met Helbine. I work for a newspaper.”

  “You’re not an art critic,” Berkman said. “I know all the art critics. Besides, you’re not dressed for the part. That’s Helbine over there.” He waved at the wall upon which his paintings were being hung. Helbine was a slender man with an aristocratic nose who looked much better in his clothes than out of them. He was directing a trio of very well dressed men and one very expensively dressed woman who were doing the hanging. “Well, what do you think?” Berkman asked.

  “I am not an art critic,” I told him. “I know nothing about art, and I don’t even know what I like.”

  “Good man,” Berkman said. I looked at the wall, which stretched the length of the gallery, about thirty feet. Seven paintings had already been hung. Their subjects were men and women interacting in restaurants, bars, around a chess table in the park, and various street scenes, sketched out with blotches of color that brought them more vividly to life than if they had been meticulously rendered with tiny brush strokes. They were exciting and alive, caught in the act of living, and I liked them. I guess I did know what I liked.

  Helbine was directing the hanging of painting number eight at about belly-button level, a contrast from the one before, which was about seven feet off the floor. The entire row of paintings zigzagged like that: some high, some low, a few somewhere in the middle. “Won’t they be sort of hard to look at?” I asked Berkman.

  “The point exactly!” he told me. “Helbine wants my paintings to be ‘artistically arranged to demonstrate the ebb and flux of the universe.’ I told him—I tried to tell him—that the paintings are the art, not the wall, and the paintings should be at eye level, easy to see.”

  “What did he say?”

  “The prince? He said, ‘Don’t be silly.’” Berkman shook his head wryly. “So here I stand not being silly.”

  “They’re your paintings,” I said.

  “It’s Helbine’s money,” Berkman replied. “As he has pointed out to me at every opportunity.”

  I turned and studied the wall. “I like your work,” I told Berkman. “What do you call this sort of art?”

  Berkman thrust his hands into his jacket pockets. “I call them my paintings,” he told me. “But if you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about, say something like: ‘The vibrant palette of primary colors slathered on canvas in oil creates an effect that leaps off the canvas and assaults the eyes like Basin Street jazz assaults the ears.’ That’s a quote, son.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll memorize it. What does it mean?”

  Berkman shrugged.

  Helbine stepped back to survey his wall, and I decided that now was as good a time as any to speak to him. I stepped forward. “Mr. Helbine? I’m Morgan DeWitt from the New York World.”

  He swiveled on one heel and stared. I had the feeling that he was looking down at me from a height, even though he was a couple of inches shorter than I. Sometime I’d like to figure out how he managed that. He stared silently for long enough for me to start feeling nervous, like a rabbit in the eye of a circling hawk, and then he spoke. “Yes,” he said. “On the telephone. I remember. You’re the chap who wants to follow me around.”
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br />   “Not exactly,” I told him. “I want to talk about where you’ve been, not where you’re going.”

  “Ah!” he said. “That’s right. The last two weeks. I called up your publisher, you know. Personal friend. Asked him why he hadn’t called himself to warn me of what you planned to do, find out if I had any objection, that sort of thing. He told me you don’t even work for the paper. You work for that columnist fellow—what’s his name?”

  “Alexander Brass,” I said.

  “Him,” Helbine agreed. “So you lied to me.”

  “No, sir,” I told him. “I work for Mr. Brass, Mr. Brass works for the World Syndicate, his column is published in the World. Explaining that over the phone would have been an exceedingly roundabout way of getting to the same place.”

  “Hmph!” Helbine said. “I had Charity make you up a list of my peregrinations for the last two weeks. Did you get it?”

  “I did, and I thank you. Since you didn’t peregrinate to foreign shores, you have remained within our budget. Can you spare me a minute?”

  Helbine sighed a mighty sigh. “It won’t be just a minute, will it? It never is. Come over here.”

  He strode before me to the far corner of the large room, where there was a card table topped with bottles, glasses, and buckets of ice. “A little refreshment,” he said. His right hand went out and hovered over various bottles, finally pouncing on one and bringing it forth. “Champagne,” he said. “Duc de Richelieu Estates Reserve. Only twenty cases of this come into the country each year, and they go right from the ship to my wine cellar. I am a distant relative of the Duc.”

  “I see,” I said.

  He popped the cork with his thumbs and poured the effervescent grape juice into three slim glasses. “You don’t,” he said. “It takes years to develop a truly discriminating palette. And an extensive wine cellar.” He turned. “Berkman!” he yelled. “Come over here, fellow, and join us in a libation.” The seignior being chummy with his peasants.

  “My aunt Pru,” I told him, “to whom I am distantly related because she lives in Petaluma, California, makes very good grape jam. She wins awards at the state fair.”

  He looked at me, unsure whether I was kidding or not. “There is only one jar of it in New York,” I continued. “It is in my cupboard. Would you like me to bring it over? We usually have it on white bread with peanut butter.”

  I took a glass of champagne from his hand before he had a chance to throw it at me and gulped it down. “Good stuff,” I said. The conversation deteriorated from there, and I may not have made the sort of impression on him that I had intended to make.

  17

  I left Helbine before one of us annoyed the other beyond repair and returned to his business office, in which he kept his secretary. Charity needed to be coaxed into talking about her boss. But once I had assured her that a reporter never reveals his sources, she talked as though it were her sacred duty. An hour with her told me more than enough about Helbine’s habits, intentions, pretensions, activities, philanthropies, eccentricities, likes, dislikes, and inanities, along with a master’s thesis on the way he treated his employees. Except for confirming that this was not a man whom it was delightful to know, I spotted nothing helpful in the pages of shorthand notes; but I was merely the journeyman scribe. Interpreting was a job for a master newsy like Brass.

  I stopped for an egg salad on rye and a Dr. Brown’s ginger ale on the way uptown. When I got back to the office Gloria and Cathy were sitting across from Brass, who was scowling at them from over a stack of files he had spread out on his desk. He turned the scowl to me. “Well?” he said. “I hope you have something.”

  “Not that I know of,” I told him. I took out my notebook and read from it all the points of possible interest in the recent lives and political philosophies of Messrs. Wackersan and Helbine. It took most of ten minutes. “I’ll type it up for the file,” I said, “but I don’t see that any of that gets us anywhere.”

  “Nor do I,” Brass said. “Cathy has assembled everything that is known about the eight people on our list.” He waved a hand over the jumble of files. “And if you can find anything of value in them, I’ll fry my hat and eat it.”

  “The straw hat, I hope,” I said, pulling a chair over to join the group. “Felt is bloating.”

  “I tried,” Cathy said. “I’m sorry. I’ll keep looking.”

  “Nonsense,” Brass said severely. “You found everything there is to find in the morgue and did some very clever follow-up. We now know that three of our subjects went to Harvard, but five did not. Two of them belong to the same club; two others go to the same clinic; two of them go boating on the Hudson, but they belong to different boat clubs. The only two that we’ve established know each other are Fletcher van Geuip and Judge Garbin; they were childhood friends. Van Geuip was in New York last week, back from an expedition to British East Africa, and he stayed with Garbin for three days. But then he left for Borneo.”

  “I’ve been to see Suzie Frienard,” Gloria told me. “She is incapable of planning a murder. She is almost capable of planning a lunch. She is uncertain about things. She changes her mind. Her husband, on the other hand, is capable of murder in a very direct and immediate fashion. Had he found out about that picture he would have beaten poor Dworkyn’s door down, beaten Dworkyn to a pulp, and broken all the furniture. If he suspected that we had copies of the pictures, he wouldn’t hire anyone to blow the safe—he would stride in here and demand them, breaking everything in reach. Then he would calm down and apologize and pay for the damage.

  “When I left her I went to see Stepney Partcher, but he has no interest in talking to the press. I had to settle for his secretary. Partcher, Meedle and Coster does not want any sort of publicity. Stepney Partcher turned down the job of corporation counsel in the Hoover administration because he wanted to stay out of the public eye.”

  “Wouldn’t want to hog the limelight,” I said.

  “If Partcher were ever to decide to kill someone, he would take a year to plan it, and the method would be particularly precise and bloodless. He washes his hands twelve times a day. He makes luncheon appointments for twelve-oh-seven, and that’s when he arrives.”

  Brass slapped his hand on the desk with a sharp crack, like a small firecracker going off. “We’re getting nowhere,” he said. “Let’s hope the senator’s gathering tomorrow gives us some sort of break.”

  “What sort?” I asked.

  He glared at me and then turned his chair around to stare out the window. When he showed no sign of turning back, I left the office and headed down to the Blind Harlequin, a Greenwich Village restaurant, coffeehouse, and hangout, for dinner and a discussion of the state of the novel with two friends of mine who were real, full-time, professional writers.

  Bill Welsch writes short stories for the war pulps and the detective pulps, and started selling regularly to Black Mask about a year ago, joining the exalted ranks of such as Dashiell Hammett, Erie Stanley Gardner, and Raymond Chandler.

  Agnes Silverson produced hard-boiled detective stories under the pen name Charles D. Epp. Her series character, Dagger Dell, was “a private eye with a nose for mayhem,” to quote the blurb on her latest opus in All-Detective Story Magazine. She had to use a man’s name on the stories because the editors wouldn’t buy hard-boiled tales under a woman’s byline. She was in her late thirties, and had been married once, as she would admit if pressed. But she would speak no further about the experience, not even as to whether she was currently separated, divorced, or widowed, except to occasionally refer to her erstwhile husband as “that cornucopia of shit I was once married to.”

  Bill Welsch was maybe forty, and had done all of those things that writers use to pad out the author’s biography on the flap of the book. He had been a captain in the Army Flying Corps, with three confirmed kills to his credit and a hand that had a great scar running across the back and would no longer close into a fist. He had been a starving writer in Paris in the twenties, when tha
t was the thing to do; had been kept by an Italian countess in her villa outside of Florence (which didn’t make the book jacket); had been a private detective in Chicago; and had written advertising copy for an agency in New York. One day he read an issue of Air Aces magazine and said, “It wasn’t like that at all.” So he wrote a story to tell what it really was like, and he’s been doing it ever since.

  The two of them were making a good living writing, and they were both very good at it. I liked their stuff. It wasn’t highbrow literature, but they told fast-moving yarns that made the reader want to turn the page. I couldn’t understand why they were wasting their talents writing for the pulps. That night, over a late-night slice of cheesecake and cold coffee, I asked them.

  Welsch looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m not wasting my talent,” he said. “Hell, that is my talent.”

  Silverson stared into her glass of amaretto, or whatever Italian soda she was drinking that night, and said, “I wrote a novel once—a real novel. Full of deep insights into the way people live and make love and hurt each other. I was nineteen. It was dreadful.”

  Welsch leaned across the table and waved his finger at my nose. “You should examine your literary prejudices,” he said. “There are no better stylists working today than some of the Black Mask boys.”

  “And girls,” Silverson added.

  “And girls.”

  Agnes grabbed my arm. “For God’s sake, Morgan,” she said, “we have high hopes for you. Don’t become one of those stuffed-shirt Establishment novelists!”