Falling Angel

by William Hjortsberg

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Have you seen him at all in the past fifteen years for starters?”

  Simpson laughed. “Last time I saw Johnny was the day after Pearl Harbor.”

  “Why is that so funny?”

  “It’s not funny. Nothing about Johnny was ever very funny.”

  “Then how come all the laughter?”

  “I always laugh when I think of how much money I lost when he walked out on me,” Simpson said. “It’s a whole lot less painful than crying. Wha’s this all about, anyway?”

  “I’m doing a story for Look on forgotten vocalists of the forties. Johnny Favorite is at the top of the list.”

  “Not my list, brother.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “If I spoke to just his fans, I wouldn’t get a very interesting story.”

  “The only fans Johnny had were strangers.”

  “What can you tell me about his affair with a West Indian woman named Evangeline Proudfoot?”

  “Not a damn thing. This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “Did you know he was involved in voodoo?”

  “Sticking pins in dolls? Well, it figures; Johnny was a weirdo. He was always into something strange.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Oh, let’s see; one time I saw him catching pigeons up on the roof of our hotel. We were out on the road someplace, I can’t remember just where, and he was up there with a big net like some kind of Looney Tunes dog catcher. I thought maybe he didn’t like the chow in the place, but later, after the show, I dropped by his room, and there he was with the damn pigeon all split open on the table, poking through the guts with a pencil.”

  “What was that all about?”

  “That’s what I asked him. ‘What’re you up to?’ I said. He told me some fancy word I can’t remember, and when I asked him to put it in English, he said he was predicting the future. He said it was what the priests in ancient Rome used to do.”

  “Sounds like that ol’ black magic had him in its spell,” I said.

  Spider Simpson laughed. “You said it, brother. If it wasn’t pigeon guts, it was some other damn thing, tea leaves, palm readers, yoga. He wore a heavy gold ring with Hebrew characters all over it. As far as I know, he wasn’t Jewish.”

  “What was he?”

  “Damned if I know. Rosicrucian, or some damn thing. He carried a skull in his suitcase.”

  “A human skull?”

  “Once upon a time it was human. He said it came from the grave of a man who murdered ten people. Claimed it gave him power.”

  “Sounds like he was putting you on,” I said.

  “Could be. He used to sit and stare at it for hours before a performance. If that was a put-on, it was a damn good one.”

  “Did you know Margaret Krusemark?” I asked.

  “Margaret who?”

  “Johnny Favorite’s fiancee.”

  “Oh, yeah, the debutante society girl. I met her a few times. What about her?”

  “What was she like?”

  “Very pretty. Didn’t talk much. You know the type, lots of eye contact but no conversation.”

  “I heard somewhere she was a fortuneteller.”

  “That may be. She never told me mine.”

  “Why did they break up?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Can you give me the names of any of Johnny Favorite’s old friends? People who might be able to help me out with the story.”

  “Brother, aside from bonehead in the suitcase, Johnny didn’t have a friend on earth.”

  “What about Edward Kelley?”

  “Never heard of him,” Simpson said. “I knew a piano player named Kelly in K.C., but that was years before I ran into Johnny.”

  “Well, thanks for the information,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  “Anytime.”

  We both hung up.

  NINETEEN

  I dodged chuck-holes on the West Side Highway up to 125th and drove east along Harlem’s Rialto, past the Hotel Theresa and the Apollo Theatre, over to Lenox Avenue. The neon sign was dark in the window of Proudfoot Pharmaceuticals. A long green shade reached all the way down behind the front door, and Scotch-taped to the glass was a cardboard sign that said CLOSED TODAY. The place was locked up tight.

  I found a wall phone in a luncheonette in the next block and looked up the number. There was no listing for Epiphany Proudfoot, only one for the store. I tried but got no answer. Thumbing through the directory, I located Edison Sweet’s number. I dialed the first four digits and hung up, deciding a surprise visit would be more effective. Ten minutes later, I was parked on 152nd Street across from his building.

  At the entrance, a young housewife with two small children bawling underfoot was struggling with a shopping bag and fumbling in her purse for the key. I offered to help and held her bag as she opened the front door. She lived on the ground floor and thanked me with a weary smile when I handed back the groceries. The kids clung to her coat, snuffling runny noses, and stared up at me with wide, brown eyes.

  I climbed the stairs to the third floor. There was no one else on the landing, and when I bent to check the make of the lock on Toots’ apartment I found the door was not quite shut. I pushed it all the way open with my foot. A vivid red splash stained the opposite wall like a Rorschach test blot. It might have been paint, but it wasn’t.

  I closed the door behind me, leaning my back against it until the lock caught.

  The room was a mess, furniture thrown about haphazardly on a carpet waved with wrinkles. Someone put up quite a fight. A shelf of flowerpots lay overturned in the corner. The curtainrod was bent in a V and the drapes sagged like the stockings of a hooker on a week-long drunk. Amid the wreckage the TV stood intact. The set was switched on and a soap opera nurse discussed adultery with an attentive intern.

  I was careful not to touch anything as I stepped over the upended furniture. The kitchen showed no signs of struggle. A cold cup of black coffee sat on the Formica tabletop. It seemed very homey until I looked back into the living room.

  Beyond the babbling TV, a short, dark hall led to a dosed door. I got my latex surgeon’s gloves out of the attaché case and rolled them onto my hands before turning the knob. One look in the bedroom made me want a drink badly.

  Toots Sweet lay on his back on the narrow bed, his hands and feet bound to the posts with lengths of cotton clothesline. He would never get any deader. A crumpled, bloodsoaked flannel bathrobe draped his pot belly. Beneath his black body, the sheets were stiff with blood.

  Toots’ face and body were badly bruised. The whites of his open, bulging eyes were yellowed, like antique ivory cueballs, and stuffed into his gaping mouth was something resembling a fat, severed hunk of bratwurst. Death by asphyxiation. I knew that without waiting for the autopsy.

  I took a closer look at what protruded from his swollen lips and suddenly one drink wasn’t going to be enough. Toots had choked to death on his own genitalia. Outside, in the courtyard three flights down, I heard the happy laughter of children.

  No power on earth could have made me lift that matted bathrobe. I knew where the murder weapon came from without peeking. On the wall above the bed, a number of childlike drawings had been daubed in Toots’ blood: stars, spirals, long zigzag lines representing snakes. The stars, three of them, were five-pointed and upside down. Falling stars were getting to be a habit.

  I told myself it was time to pack up and leave. No percentage in sticking around. But my snooper’s instinct made me look through his dresser drawers and check out the closet first. It took ten minutes to go over the room, and I didn’t find anything worth looking at twice.

  I said goodbye to Edison Sweet and closed the bedroom door on the sightless stare of his bulging eyes. My tongue felt heavy and dry in my mouth when I thought of what was stuffed in his. I wanted to check out the living room before I left, but there was too much dirt strewn about and I was afraid of leaving heelprints. My b
usiness card was no longer on the TV. I hadn’t turned it up among his things, and a fresh paper bag in the kitchen meant the trash went out earlier. I hoped my card went with it.

  At the front door, I squinted through the peephole before letting myself out. I left the door open a crack, just the way I found it, and peeled off my rubber gloves, shutting them inside the calfskin case. I paused at the top of the landing and listened to the silence below. No one was using the stairs. The housewife on the first floor might remember me, but there was nothing I could do about that.

  I made it down the stairs without being seen, and when I left the building, the only ones around were a group of small children playing hopscotch in the courtyard. They didn’t look up as I passed.

  TWENTY

  Three straight shots settled my nerves and put me in a philosophic frame of mind. It was a quiet neighborhood bar called Freddie’s Place or Teddy’s Spot or Eddie’s Nest, something along those lines, and I sat with my back to the TV and thought things over. Now I had two dead men on my hands. They both knew Johnny Favorite and wore five-pointed stars. I wondered if Toots’ front tooth was missing like the doctor’s ring, but didn’t want to know badly enough to go back and look. The stars maybe were a coincidence; it’s a common design. And maybe it was just by chance that a junkie doctor and a blues piano player both knew Johnny Favorite. Maybe. But deep down in my gut I had a feeling that it was tied in to something bigger. Something enormous. I scooped my change off the damp bar top and went back to work for Louis Cyphre.

  The drive out to Coney Island was a pleasant distraction. Rush hour was still ninety minutes off and traffic moved freely along F. D. R. Drive and through the Battery Tunnel. I rolled down my window on the Shore Parkway and breathed the cold sea air blowing in through the Narrows. By the time I reached Cropsey Avenue the smell of blood was gone from my nostrils.

  I followed West 17th Street down to Surf Avenue and parked beside a boarded-up bumper-car ride. Coney Island in the off-season had the look and feel of a ghost town. The skeletal tracks of the roller coasters rose above me like metal and timber spiderwebs, but the screams were missing and the wind moaned through the struts, lonesome as a train whistle.

  A few odd souls wandered about Surf Avenue looking for something to do. Sheets of newspaper blew like tumbleweed down broad, empty streets. Overhead, a pair of sea gulls hovered, scanning the ground for discarded scraps. All along the avenue, cotton candy stands, fun houses, and games of chance were tightly shuttered, like clowns without makeup.

  Nathan’s Famous was open for business as always, and I stopped for a hot dog and a cardboard cup of beer under the boldly lettered billboard façade. The counterman looked like he’d been around since the days of Luna Park, and I asked if he’d ever heard of a fortuneteller named Madame Zora.

  “Madame who?”

  “Zora. She was a big attraction here back in the forties.”

  “Beats me, bud,” he said. “I only had this job less’n a year. Ask me something about the Staten Island Ferry. I ran the night food concession on the Gold Star Mother fifteen years. Go on, ask me something.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “Can’t swim.”

  “So?”

  “Afraid of gettin’ drowned. Din’t wanna press my luck.” He smiled, showing me four missing teeth. I stuffed the last of the hot dog into my face and wandered off, sipping beer.

  The Bowery, situated between Surf Avenue and the Boardwalk, was more a circus midway than a street. I strolled past the silent amusements and wondered what to do next. The gypsy community was more clannish than all the Ku Kluxers in Georgia, and I knew I would get no help from that direction. Leg work. Pound the pavement until someone turned up who remembered Madame Zora and was willing to talk about it.

  Danny Dreenan seemed like a good place to start He was a retired bunco-steerer who operated a run-down wax museum near the corner of 13th Street and the Bowery. I met him in ‘52 when he was fresh out from a four-year stretch in Dannemora. The Feds tried to make him on a stock-option swindle, but he was just the fall guy for a pair of Wall Street shysters named Peavey and Munro. I was working for a third party who was also a victim of their grift and had a hand in cracking the case. Danny still owed me for that one, so he put me wise when I needed some knockdown on the q.t.

  The Wax Gallery was housed in a narrow, one-story building sandwiched between a pizza stand and a penny arcade. Out in front, in foot-high crimson letters, it said:

  SEE:

  HALL OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTS

  FIFTY FAMOUS MURDERS

  ASSASSINATION OF LINCOLN AND GARFIELD

  DILLINGER IN MORGUE

  FATTY ARBUCKLE ON TRIAL

  EDUCATIONAL! LIFELIKE! SHOCKING!

  A henna-haired harpy not a day older than President Grant’s widow sat in the ticket booth, playing solitaire like one of the mechanical fortunetellers in the penny arcade next door.

  “Danny Dreenan around?” I asked.

  “Out back,” she grunted, sneaking the jack of clubs from the bottom of the deck. “He’s working on a display.”

  “Mind if I go in and talk to him?”

  “Still gonna cost you two bits,” she said, nodding her ancient head at a cardboard placard: ADMISSION … 25˘.

  I dug a quarter out of my trousers, slid it under the barred window, and went inside. The place smelled like a backed-up sewer. Large, rust-colored stains blotched the sagging cardboard ceiling. Warped wooden flooring creaked and groaned. In glass-fronted display windows along either wall, wax mannequins stood stiffly at attention, an army of cigar-store Indians,

  The Hall of American Presidents came first: identically featured chief executives dressed in the discards of a vaudeville costume shop. After F. D. R. it was all murderer’s row. I walked through a maze of mayhem. Hall-Mills, Snyder-Gray, Bruno Hauptmann, Winnie Ruth Judd, the Lonely Hearts killers; all were there, wielding sashweights and meat saws, stuffing dismembered limbs into trunks, adrift in oceans of red paint.

  In the back I found Danny Dreenan on his hands and knees inside a show window. He was a small man wearing a faded blue workshirt and salt-and-pepper wool slacks. A turned-up nose and sparse blond mustache gave him the expression of a frightened hamster. His habit of blinking his eyes rapidly when he spoke didn’t help any.

  I tapped on the glass and he looked up at me and smiled around a mouthful of carpet tacks. He mumbled something unintelligible, put down his hammer, and slipped out through a small crawl-space in the back. He was working on the barber shop slaying of Albert Anastasia, Lord High Executioner of Murder, Inc. Two masked killers pointed revolvers at the sheet-draped figure in the chair, while the barber stood calmly in the background waiting for another customer.

  “Hiya, Harry,” Danny Dreenan called cheerfully, coming up behind me where I didn’t expect him. “Whaddya think of my latest masterpiece?”

  “Looks like they’ve all got rigor mortis,” I said. “Umberto Anastasia, right?”

  “Give the man a free cigar. Can’t be too bad if you guessed it right off.”

  “I was over by the Park Sheraton yesterday, so it’s fresh on my mind.”

  ” ‘S gonna be my big new attraction for the season.”

  “You’re a year late. The headlines are as cold as the corpse.”

  Danny blinked nervously. “Barber chairs are expensive, Harry. I couldn’t afford no improvements last season. Say, that hotel sure is good for business. Didja know Arnold Rothstein got knocked off there back in twenty-eight? Only it was called the Park Central in them days. Come on, I got him up front; I’ll show you.”

  “Some other time, Danny. I see enough of the real thing to keep me satisfied.”

  “Yeah, I guess you do at that. So what brings you out to this neck of the woods, as if I didn’t know already.”

  “You tell me, since you know all about it.”

  Danny’s eyes were going like insane semaphores. “I don’t know beans about it,” he stammered. “But I
figger, if Harry comes to see me, he’s gonna want some info.”

  “You figured it just right,” I said. “What can you tell me about a fortuneteller named Madame Zora? She worked the midway here back in the early forties.”

  “Aw, Harry, you know I can’t help you there. I had a Florida real estate scam going in them days. It was Easy Street for Danny Dreenan back then.”

  I shook a cigarette from my pack and offered one to Danny who wagged his head negatively. “I didn’t think you could finger her for me, Danny,” I said, lighting up. “But you’ve been around a while now. Tell me who the old-timers are. Put me wise to someone who knows the score.”

  Danny scratched his head to show me he was thinking. “I’ll do what I can. Problem is, Harry, most everybody who can afford it is off in Bermuda or someplace. I’d be lying on a beach myself if I wasn’t up to my neck in bills. I ain’t complaining; after the joint, Brighton Beach looks good as Bermuda any day.”

  “There must be someone around. You’re not the only one open for business.”

  “Yeah, now you mention it, I know just the people to send you to. There’s a freak show over on 10th Street near the Boardwalk. Ordinarily, most of the oddities would be working the circus this time of year, but these are old people. Semiretired, you might say. They don’t take vacations. Going out in public is not their idea of a lot of laughs.”

  “What’s the name of this place?” I asked.

  “Walter’s Congress of Wonders. Only it’s run by a gent named Haggarty. You can’t miss him. He’s all covered with tattoos like a road map.”

  “Thanks, Danny. You’re a fund of valuable information.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Walter’s Congress of Wonders stood on 10th Street near the ramp leading up to the Boardwalk. More than any of the surrounding attractions, it had the look of an old-time carnie midway. The front of the low building was festooned with bunting, below which hung large primitive paintings of the exhibits inside. Simple as cartoons, these vast canvases depicted human deformity with an innocence that belied their inherent cruelty.