Shirley

by Howard Fast

  “But you take her word that they were trying to kill her.”

  “Larry,” Burton said softly, “I don’t have a brain in my head. They weren’t trying to kill her. The little one had a gun with a silencer. Nothing could have been simpler than to kill her right here. They took her because they wanted her and needed her. They wanted her alive.”

  “And Seppi and the knife?”

  “You know, Larry, before I opened the door, I heard her giving it to this Seppi. She called him every name under the sun—and he’s a hophead, as stable as nitro. He may have just flipped and decided to go for her.”

  “You questioned him, didn’t you?”

  “About who he was working for—and he swears he doesn’t know any names. A tall, skinny kid and a guy who looks like an ex-pug. That’s all I got out of him. I never asked him if he was supposed to kill her. I just took it for granted.”

  “What does that add up to?” Cohen asked. “Kidnaping? For what? It’s not as if there’s any mystery about this Shirley Campbel. We checked her through the plastics place back to Morris High School in the Bronx. Four years there—eight years at two public schools. The mother was an alcoholic who worked intermittently. The father was some miserable bum who took off before the kid was born. The kid’s life adds up to the same dreary history that this city is full of—poverty, the gutter, relief—”

  “Just don’t feel sorry for her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s nobody to feel sorry for.”

  “Lieutenant, what is there about this kid that’s gotten under your skin?”

  “She’s a human being—that’s enough, I think. Look, Larry—never mind her. I know her, you don’t. I want to ask you something else. Did you ever know a crook or a con man who was really smart?”

  Cohen thought about it for a while. “Is there a point to this?” he wanted to know.

  “An important point, I think.”

  “Then the answer is no. I’ve met some crafty ones, some shrewd ones—but smart, no. None of them are smart.”

  “All right,” Burton nodded. “That’s my experience—and I have twenty-five years of it. Your master criminal is a myth. Someone should do a study of the criminal IQ—it would average out like ninety-five or less. When they pull a job and it works, it’s luck, pure luck. But when it doesn’t work and you take them in and you hear how they planned the job, it’s enough to make your hair stand on end. They reason like eight-year-olds. And when they make their plans, such plans are not connected with reality. I am not going to get into the argument about whether your criminal is always or almost always a schizoid paranoiac; you can’t accept that in your line of work. But whether he is or he isn’t, his approach is schizoid—that is, when he plans a crime and not when he stumbles into one. He plans like an idiot.”

  “Lieutenant, did you pull me away from my dinner to lecture me on the criminal mind?”

  “I did.”

  “What in heaven’s name does it add up to?”

  “Just this, Larry. Now follow me. You’ve heard of the old identity switch—you know, I’m your long-lost son or daughter. It’s a favorite workhorse in television and the films.”

  “I don’t watch television.”

  “I do, so take my word for it Well, it’s nonsense. It couldn’t work. You have a son, a wife, a daughter—you know them. Nobody’s going to push a ringer on you and con you. But to the criminal mind, reality, is no yardstick. It concocts an idiot plan to replace one person with another. Pictures are gotten of the person to be replaced. Then someone is found who matches the pictures. Then this person has to be brought into the scheme. Do you see?”

  “I follow you,” Cohen nodded. “But it’s pretty farfetched, isn’t it?”

  “So is crime, all crime.”

  “But this is entirely your own conjecture.”

  “I know that. And if you want to conjecture up another premise that will fit the facts, I’m with you.”

  “You know, Lieutenant, I had guests in my home. I excused myself to return an urgent phone call from you, and my guests are still in my home, and I’m down here in an apartment on Minetta Street, discussing the schizoid personality of the habitual criminal. It’s as illogical as the so-called criminal act.”

  “Why don’t you ask what I was calling you about so urgently?” Burton said.

  “All right. What were you calling me about?”

  “Just this. When I showed you those pictures, your first reaction was that you knew her.”

  “That’s a normal reaction when you see a picture of a pretty girl.”

  “Come off it, Larry,” Burton said tiredly. “I left my dinner too. You must have meant something when you said that.”

  Cohen shrugged and nodded. “If you say so. Got the pictures with you?”

  Burton took the pictures out of his pocket and handed them to Cohen, who stared at them thoughtfully.

  “Well?”

  “You know something,” Cohen said, “I can understand why I thought that I knew her. It rings a bell somewhere, but what bell I don’t know, and it rang a long, long time ago. It suggests a kid, not a woman.”

  “How old a kid?”

  “Oh—maybe eight, maybe nine.”

  “Fourteen, fifteen years ago. Where were you then?”

  “Still in college. I took time out for the war.”

  “But you came home, vacations, summers. You saw family and friends of the family. You come from a pretty rich family, don’t you, Larry?”

  “Well—not really rich.”

  “Rich enough to know the rich?”

  “Possibly. My father was a successful lawyer. He knew a lot of people.”

  “Is he alive?”

  Cohen shook his head. “But my mother is.”

  “All right, mother. How about your wife—is she from New York?”

  Cohen nodded.

  “Aunts? Uncles? Partners in your father’s firm?”

  “There were seven partners in the firm. Four are still alive. But you can’t be serious, can you?”

  “I’m serious. We’ll make up a list of everyone you can think of who might conceivably have been connected with you fifteen years ago, and who therefore might know that girl in the picture. And then we’re going to see them, one by one, and jog their memories into activity.”

  “Lieutenant, this is sheer fantasy. It’s like buying a ticket in a lottery. It’s grasping at straws.”

  “That’s a part of my work,” Burton agreed. “Grasping at straws.”

  “Aren’t there regular methods? Why don’t we print the picture in the papers?”

  “I don’t think they’d like that. They might decide that the only thing to do is to kill Shirley. And I don’t want her killed. I’m a fat, middle-aged cop, Larry, and I’m past sentiment, but I never met a girl just like that before, and I don’t want her killed, not if I can help it.”

  8. Santela

  The Leland was a shabby, once genteel hotel on West End Avenue in the nineties. Unlike those midtown hotels that had descended to something only a little better than flea traps and catered to anonymous transients for two or three dollars a night, the Leland managed to maintain a certain dignity out of its impressive size. Built twenty-five stories high in the last flush days of the nineteen-twenties, it managed, like a very tall man gone to seed, to present an outer appearance of character that was lacking within. Its population consisted of a number of very old ladies who were easing their long, changeless days with the conveniences of hotel living; a number of middle-aged single men who maintained a dubious existence on the fringes of business, the smaller rackets, the race tracks and Broadway, and who challenged the world and polluted the atmosphere daily with cheap cigars; and an assortment of transients ranging from legitimate tourists pushed uptown by a shortage of rooms downtown, small businessmen who maintained offices there, chiropractors, masseurs, etc., to people like Joey Santela, who wanted a quiet place where no questions would be asked.

/>   As with a human being, a hotel reaches a turning point in its existence when it stops asking questions and in a spirit of resignation accepts whatever may come; and this resignation was something that Shirley recognized as she entered the Leland with Flint and Soames. Shirley’s experience was narrow, limited and youthful, but like so many who cut their teeth on the hard bones of New York, she had a sense of things in her bloodstream that a hundred years of normal adult experience might not equal. She was not sophisticated, but enormously knowing.

  Her sense of shock, horror and repugnance had been driven down to the lowest possible median by the time she was twelve, and her innocence was not based on isolation or ignorance, but on an unwillingness, born out of long observation, to sit in judgment. Her sense of taste was uncritical but unerring, and amid the endless laminations of New York City life, she had her own compass and her own dictionary and guidebook. She rated the Hotel Leland much as it should have been rated, and before she ever saw Joey Santela, she knew a good deal about him.

  He answered the door of the suite himself. He was a vaguely handsome, dark man in his forties. His thinning hair was jet black, maintained that way by steady application of coloring, and there was the carefully applied shadow of darkening on the scalp beneath, the most pathetic vanity of the balding man. He was dressed with care and precision in a dark suit, white shirt and silk tie with maroon stripes, and he wore glasses with heavy black frames. Imitating various styles with various success, all that emerged was vanity, and this was something that Shirley recognized immediately. He was a vain man to the point of illness.

  He smiled with pleasure when he saw Shirley. Soames had called from the lobby below, and Santela was prepared to welcome a volunteer rather than a conscript.

  “Come in, come in, my dear,” he said to her, and then after she had entered, Soames and Flint behind her, he walked around her with slow, mincing steps, studying her with the greatest of interest.

  “Amazing,” he said softly. He had an inclination to lisp. “Amathing,” it came out. “It’s an astonishing resemblance—absolutely astonishing. Twin sisters—that’s what one would think, twin sisters, even to the way you comb your hair.”

  Shirley watched him thoughtfully. “He’s a nut,” she said to herself. “Just remember that, Shirley. You are stupid, or you wouldn’t be here. Just being here is the stupidest thing you ever did, and you’ve done some stupid ones. But don’t ever be stupid enough to forget that he’s a nut.”

  “Walk across the room, my dear,” Santela said.

  Shirley obediently walked across the room. Flint and Soames dropped down onto the couch.

  “Marvelous! Marvelous walk! Absolutely marvelous!” And then he spun on Flint and demanded, “Where did you leave the car?”

  “In front, boss.”

  “In front! In front! What do you think I got there—last year’s compact? You think I won it in a lottery? You know that Buick cost more than a Cadillac?”

  “I know, boss.”

  “Then put it in the garage! Now!”

  Flint nodded and left. Soames sprawled on the couch, a thin smile on his pink cherub face.

  “Stupid people,” Santela said. “Sit down, Miss Campbel. We are cursed with stupid people. Are you hungry-thirsty? A drink, perhaps? Scotch, rye, bourbon, you take your choice, please.”

  “No, thank you,” Shirley said.

  “Ah—the voice! The voice! I was waiting for the voice!”

  “It’s the first time anyone ever did,” Shirley said.

  Santela cocked his head forward, an attitude of listening intently, his lips pursed, his horn-rimmed glasses in his hand. “Go ahead, go ahead,” he urged Shirley. “Don’t stop speaking, Shirley—please.” He was on a first-name basis with her immediately.

  “That’s a novelty, coming from a man,” Shirley said. “Do you want me to recite? A peach in the garden grew, blessed by the sun and washed by the dew, and it grew and it grew and it grew and it grew.”

  “Well—”

  Soames applauded. Santela turned to him and said, “I don’t like that, Al. What’s serious is serious.”

  “I’m sorry, Joey.”

  “Suppose you get into the habit of calling me Mr. Santela. You’re supposed to be an actor. If you want to do something properly, then make it a habit.”

  “I said I was sorry, Joey.”

  “Mr. Santela.” He walked over to Soames, and stood there, staring down at him. “Well?”

  “Whatever you want, Mr. Santela.”

  “OK. Now I want to be left alone with her. Take a walk. Buy yourself an ice-cream soda.”

  “I don’t drink ice-cream sodas,” Soames said angrily.

  “Then buy a drink. Go shoot some pool. Go to the movies. Do whatever you want to do.”

  “What about tonight?”

  “I want you back here by midnight. I want you to get some sleep. We’re going in there tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. We’re going to pull this off tomorrow—and then we’re going to move. I already have the reservations set, three tickets to Brazil on Pan American’s midnight flight. I spoke to the old man about it today.”

  “You spoke to the old man about it?” Soames was bewildered, petulant, distressed. Shirley watched him with interest. She had the sensation of being in the middle of a poorly structured drama, in which none of the characters knew exactly what role they were to play. Soames, she had decided, was totally unstable—wild temper and petulance, and adoration of wealth, and a nervous greed that ate at his very vitals. Santela was obtuse, insensitive. She had known all too many men like him, an inward concern, a self-absorption that created a separate world as he conceived it and required it.

  “You spoke to the old man about it,” Soames repeated. “What in hell do you mean, you spoke to the old man about it?”

  “A little faith, Al,” Santela grinned. “A little faith and a little trust.”

  “The hell with faith and trust! I put everything I got into this!”

  “Just what did you put into it, Albert? You were living in a cheap, lousy little furnished room when I picked you up. You hadn’t worked in six months—and you were in the claws of—”

  “Just don’t go into that!” Soames cried shrilly.

  “But you trusted me, and I gave you the best,” Santela continued mildly. “I brought you here. You have been living like a king, a two-bedroom suite in a fine hotel, new clothes, fine food—not to mention the companionship—the friendship of someone like myself. Is that something to brush aside lightly? And all because you trusted me?”

  “Oh my God,” Shirley thought. “When I become a girl ranger and pick them, I pick them right.”

  “You did trust me,” Santela persisted softly.

  “So I trusted you.”

  Santela reached into his breast pocket. “Here are the tickets to Brazil. Look at them.”

  “I don’t have to see the tickets. I take your word about the tickets. But if we take off tomorrow night, what about the will—what about the seventy million?”

  “Albert, Albert, you’re so like a child in so many ways.” Soames stiffened with anger, and Santela continued quickly, “No, no—I mean that in the best way. The innocence of a child, the sweetness of a child—”

  “I’m not here and I don’t believe it,” Shirley told herself; and for the moment, it appeared that they had forgotten her presence entirely.

  “—the trust of a child. Oh, I had some hopes of the big bundle, the biggest bundle of all. Everyone dreams of that great big bundle, and you were quite right to go along with me. You trusted me, I think, because I deserved your trust, and I deserved your trust because I proved to you that I was a mover. You know how often we discussed the fact that the world is divided into those who are moved and the movers. I proved I was a mover, didn’t I, Albert?”

  “Go on. I’m listening,” Soames said.

  “But you are innocent of many things in the world, Albert—your youth
and your ingenuousness accounts for that. The litigation of the will of a man like Morton Still-man is a tremendously complex and time-consuming thing. Yes, I think we might have pulled it off if everything had gone smoothly, if he had been persuaded to accept Shirley here in full faith, if she had in the course of time won his confidence completely. But that stupid swine, Flint, spoiled that. Two of his hired thugs are dead, and that junkie Seppi is in the hands of the police. And something much more important is in the hands of the police—the two pictures of Stillman’s daughter. How long before they are recognized by someone? How long before they appear in the newspapers? And once that happens, all bets are off, and we’ll be lucky to end up outside of jail. As the saying goes, Albert, half a pie is better than none.”

  “I don’t see half a pie,” Soames muttered. “I don’t see a quarter of a pie.”

  “But you will. You will, Albert. I had a long talk with Mr. Stillman today. He still gets about, still lives at home, but he is very sick, very sick, poor man, and his time on this earth is short. I told him I had been in touch with his daughter, and it was pathetic, Albert, utterly pathetic to see how desperately he wanted to see her again before he passes away. He’s a sentimental man, and it hurt me to tell him that his daughter did not want to see him. Yes, it hurt him too.”

  “Why did you tell him that?”

  “So that he would want to use persuasion, and what better persuasion exists than money? There are no walls that money cannot crumble. I told him that his daughter was hurt—hurt because he had denied her a heritage that was rightfully hers. Of course he was shaken by this, deeply shaken. He pleaded with me to bring his daughter to him. He said to me, ‘Joseph, if anyone can persuade her to come to me, I know that you can persuade her. I am not asking too much, Joseph. I am not asking for the sky. I am not even asking for her to return and live here. I am only asking to see her for a few hours, to talk to her and to look at her. I am a dying man, Joseph. Is that too much for a dying man to ask?’ You may believe me, Albert, it was very touching. Don’t you find it touching, Shirley?” addressing this last to her.