by Brad Latham
It was a good three minutes before he could weave his way through, and another few seconds were wasted as he sped across the great carpet of the lobby, searching for a phone booth, the booth that he was sure would contain the crabbed body of Jabber-Jabber Jacoby.
Suddenly he saw him, off in one corner near the elevators, mouth moving galvanically, as he poured a rush of emotions into the shiny black mouthpiece of the pay phone. Cops were arriving, probably called in by a frightened patron, and Lockwood slowed his pace to a walk, not wanting to awaken their professional interest by hurrying. As he neared his quarry, he heard one word, “jewelry,” and then Jacoby spotted him, muttered a quick “Call you back later,” and hung up.
“I need to talk to you, Jacoby.”
“Got no time, gotta get to Muffy Dearborn. She’s my client, gotta talk to her, she’s gonna be upset, lemme past, I gotta talk to her, I tell ya,” the words spilled out of Jacoby like a gusher.
“My name’s Bill Lockwood. I’m here to speak to Miss Dearborn about the robbery of her jewels.”
“I know who you are. You’re The Hook. Everybody knows you, but it won’t do you no good. I gotta get to her, I’m a busy man, I’ve got pictures to take care of, editors to service, critics to talk to…,” his mouth worked as fast as an actor in a Pat O’Brien–Jimmy Cagney beauty from Warner’s.
“Okay. I’m coming with you.”
Jabber-Jabber looked up at Lockwood, considered for a moment, then resignedly lifted and dropped his shoulders. He was used to acquiescing to power, from clients, from newspapermen, probably from anyone bigger than himself, which was practically everyone. “This way,” he said. “But they won’t let you in.” Lockwood shrugged and followed the little man into the elevator.
Jabber-Jabber was mistaken, a not uncommon thing for him. A quick punch of the doorbell and the door to Muffy’s crowded, noise- and smoke-filled suite was opened by Raff Spencer, the quizzical expression on his face as he viewed Jabber-Jabber changing rapidly to pleasure as he locked in on the presence of The Hook. Raff looked fresh and impeccable, casually elegant, as if the fight of a few minutes before was already ancient history.
“Well, I’ll be—come in, come in, have a drink!” He motioned Lockwood to enter, entirely oblivious to Jabber-Jabber as the black-suited press agent scuttled past him.
“You’ll have to excuse us a bit,” he smiled. “Muffy, as you might expect, is a little upset at the direction her opening night has taken.”
He understated it, to say the least. Muffy had taken center stage in the luxuriously appointed room, eyes alternately flashing and filling with tears. “How dare he! If I ever see Mister Jock Bunche again, I’ll claw his eyes out! Me! Upstaging me! This was my opening night! The biggest night of my career! All the critics, all the columnists! Agents! Producers! This could have meant a movie career! Musicals! Comedies! Drama! Instead, I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life!”
Immediately, Jabber-Jabber was all over her, though at an obsequiously respectful distance, sending out clucking sounds, reassuring noises, tiny squeals of persuasion. “It’s okay, believe me! There was never an opening night like this! I’m telling you, the whole town will be talking about it tomorrow!”
“Talking about it! They’d better not! I want you to silence the newspapers—right now!”
“That’s not what I mean! The newspapers are already silenced. If news got out about this fight, the Persian Room could lose its liquor license, and none of the papers would want to see that happen. Listen, would I lie to you? That you don’t have to worry about.”
“What about—uh—freedom of the press?” wailed Muffy, undoubtedly concerned about that amendment for the first time in her life.
“Right! Freedom! That’s what the press’s got. And they got the freedom to kill any story they want, and believe me, with all the tabs this place has lifted for half the newsmen in the city, it’s got nothin’ to worry about!”
“So if there’s no mention in tomorrow’s newspapers about the fight, how will I get all this publicity you keep jabbering so annoyingly about?” An imperious cutting edge sounded for the first time in Muffy’s voice, and Jabber-Jabber automatically went into a cringe. And then bounced back, displaying the capacity for attack that all press agents develop over the years—either that, or, as failures, drop out of the business.
“Simple!” he cried, almost dancing in his enthusiasm. “Word of mouth! It’s the best publicity anyone can possibly get. The whole town’s gonna be excited about this, the big fight, your boyfriend, a big tall handsome guy, tangling with your ex, they’re gonna be talking and talking, believe me.”
“If they’re anything like you, they certainly will.” She was still upset and angry, and Jabber-Jabber made an easy target, almost a willing one. “But I’m an artist! What good could all that possibly do me?”
“You’ve got to understand publicity, Miss Dearborn,” Jabber-Jabber almost crooned in his raspy voice, excited about possibly the only thing he did understand. “They’ll come because of all the noise, sure, about the ruckus, the donnybrook, the supper club massacre, and they’ll be lookin’ for something like that again, but you’re an artist. You’re a winner, I know that, believe me I’ve been around, you’re a future star. You’re going to be the biggest of them all! And once the music begins, and they hear your voice, and they put it together with your face and your hair, and—excuse me, but it’s true—the sensational streamlining of all the rest of you, they’ll come outta here talking again—only this time it’ll be about you, about what you can do with a song, and how you should be the biggest star Hollywood’s ever had!” He stopped, out of breath, eyes big with hope.
His hope was fulfilled. Muffy was more than mollified, though allowing virtually none of it to show, as befitted her patrician upbringing. “Oh. Well, that sounds all right then.”
Raff walked up to her. “Darling, I’ve someone I want you to meet. Bill Lockwood—The Hook—meet Muffy Dearborn.”
Muffy barely gave him a glance. “How do you do, Mr. Lockwood. Raff, what are we going to do? Will there be a show tonight after all?”
“Don’t worry your pretty head about it, my dear. And please pay a little closer attention. The Hook here is a special man in my life. Has been on at least two occasions,” Raff smiled, as Lockwood shot a look at him, puzzled.
“That’s right. On two occasions. Each time he’s done me quite a good turn.”
“I don’t remember our meeting before this evening, Mr. Spencer.”
“Call me Raff. Please. Just Raff. No, we’ve only met once. Tonight.” Raff turned toward Muffy. “I was in a spot of trouble with your former gallant’s crowd, and Bill Lockwood here, known, for very good reason, as ‘The Hook,’ stepped in and did a few of them up brown, lightening my load considerably.”
Muffy looked puzzled.
“He punched a few of them out—including dear old Jock. A real smasheroo, that. I paused for a moment or two in my own endeavors to watch Brer Bunche go into a recumbent pas d’ un on the parquet, little yellow birds cuckooing above his muzzy head,” Raff smiled, addressing this latter sentence as much to Lockwood as to Muffy.
“Good. He deserved it!” Muffy looked pleased in a slightly mischievous, little-girl way.
“You haven’t asked me about the other time, Muffy, my pet, so I’ll press on as if you were all agog. Many years ago… no, not so many years ago, my young beauty, since you were already striding the earth, or at least crawling about it, whenever your Nanny gave you a bit of freedom…. Some years ago, this man saved me in quite another way. Can you guess how, Mr. Lockwood?” Raff asked, his teeth flashing.
“I’ve my suspicions.”
“Ah! His fists fly, but his words come forth more slowly!” Raff exclaimed affably. “Then let me tell you.”
He drew the two of them off into a corner, away from the elegant crowd of friends and well-wishers who were filling the room with conversation, and their own gullets with the finest in cav
iar, hors d’oeuvres, vintage champagne, and twelve-year-old whiskey.
“I was, as you know, Muffy, in the Lafayette Escadrille, that idiotic legion of even more idiotic American youths, during the Great War, popping bullets at the Jerries while trying to figure out what I, Mr. Spencer’s boy, was doing up there in the blue of the sky and the black of the ack-ack bursts,” Raff began.
“And then one day the ack-ack got me, and I fluttered to earth, and found myself in the middle of the Fighting 69th. At the moment they’d been given a few days off from winning the war, and, like myself, were trying to find ways of disposing of all that lovely lucre we were earning, money that so much of the time just couldn’t be spent, what with all the flying shells and bullets and so forth. Nasty inconvenience, that.
“So, like sensible men, they got to playing poker, and like a sensible man, I joined them. Only they were more sensible than I, it turned out, and I was down to a very few shekels, and not at all happy about it, when suddenly an event came up that put everything to rights.
“Excuse me—drink?” Raff asked, as he stopped a waiter, who was passing by them with a liquor-laden tray. Lockwood took a Canadian and soda, and Raff did the same, then, after a lusty swallow, continued.
“The First Marines were laying about during this brief lull in the fighting and were up to their usual mischief, of course. Going on about their vaunted eliteness and so forth. Well, the Fighting 69th wouldn’t take this lying down, and when the Marines suggested a fight to decide who indeed was who, the 69th took up their gauntlet and attached it to the sturdy left hand of this feller here.”
By now a sizable group had formed around the three of them, the vitality of Raff’s voice attracting them initially, and the tale he told drawing them in. They all stared at Lockwood, then at Raff, waiting to hear the rest.
“Well, as one might have expected, the other man was a huge brute of a fellow, all scar tissue and muscle and body hair. Looked like a Tarzan gone wrong. We later found out he’d been a pro—a middleweight contender, before he got himself into a little trouble and hotfooted it into the Army.
“Well, he stepped into the ring first, and you should have heard the merry hooting and hollering, all from the Marines, of course. And next our friend here, Billy Lockwood, stepped into the ring. And then you should have heard all the hooting and hollering. Once more, unfortunately, all from the Marines. As I’ve said, Lockwood wasn’t exactly a John L. Sullivan in those days, as far as physique went. Lean, stringy arms, not much chest, long, skinny, whisper-light, really, and a little bit callow-looking, too, if the truth be told. Have your ears burning, don’t I?” he laughed, amiably clasping Lockwood’s shoulder.
“Well, I sat there, and my mouth dropped, and I saw myself, at the advanced age of nineteen, about to make that fabled overhill trip to the poorhouse. I looked at the Judases who’d gotten me into this fix, but their eyes were on the ring, faces tight with hope and fear, mostly the latter. They believed in their man, sure, but when they saw him up there, stacked against King Kong, they began to turn slightly atheistic—Hookwise, that is.
“I won’t describe the first round. Mostly because I didn’t see much of it. Had my eyes squeezed tight, you see, hoping that if I didn’t see it, it wouldn’t really happen. But every once in a while I’d involuntarily open them—the opposite of a blink, I suppose, since my eyes had been shut—and there The Hook would be, posterior to canvas. And I’d wince, and close my eyes all over again.
“Second round? Not much better. Oh, a pop here and there onto the bruiser’s jawbone, a bit of a cuff at his breadbasket, but nothing harmful, and meanwhile for every tap The Hook registered, the Marines’ bullyboy poured in twelve.
“And so it went. This was to be a ten-round fight, and it was a miracle that it went into the third round. And then, of all things, into the fourth round, and then the fifth. And around the sixth, a curious thing began to happen. The Marine started to look puzzled, like a great ape encountering a tiny Pekingese who wouldn’t stop yapping at him. By the seventh round, he began to seem a little weary of the whole thing, while this one here,” he patted Lockwood, “just kept coming after him, tappa-tappa-tappa, hands never stopping, rattling in topside, broadside, and a hair above below-decks, just like that eminence Queensbury allows.”
Raff stopped for a moment, for the first time aware of his audience. They were hanging on every word, all except Muffy, who stole occasional approving glances at the image reflected in the mirror that hung directly across from her. He took another gulp of the whiskey, and a second, and then, refreshed, resumed his tale.
“Well, you can imagine by this time the Marines were getting a bit restive, and there was just the slightest amount of flutter beginning to stir in the hearts of the rest of us, the ones who had put their money on this then wet-behind-the-ears stripling. Oh, you should have seen him. Just a mass of bruises he was, blood and perspiration coursing around and over his lumps like rivers at floodtide. But still he kept on coming, and for the first time the pride of the United States Marine Corps began backing up.
“As you can imagine, by the ninth round, his handlers were giving the battling behemoth holy hell, urging him to thump The Hook into the floor, and then go back to his cage. Well, he tried. They’d pepped him up, and he came out like a young boy turned loose in a soda fountain. Two quick punches to the chin later, and he wasn’t looking quite so merry. And since he’d piled up all those early points, he decided to further his career by going into more clinches than Garbo and Gilbert.
“Tenth round. Last round, too, you’ll remember, if you were paying any attention at all. Well, the mauling Marine was all set to step off into a safe and dreamy two-step, but his partner wasn’t having any. He kept shaking him off and sending in those stinging little punches, until finally King Kong lost his temper and hauled off and knocked him—well, I’m not too hot at geography, but I’d say it was somewhere off beyond Singapore.
“That was it, I thought, and I was standing up, back to the ring, all set to find the nearest bridge most suitable for jumping off, when I heard a roar from the crowd, and Lockwood was up again, somehow. I wish I could confess to a deeper sense of humanity, but I have to admit that I turned and stood there, rooted, watching to see Goliath take the final measure of David. And as Goliath approached, the earth cleaving with each crash of his feet, David reached into his little bag of tricks, and came forth with—no, not a sling, not a stone, but a hook. A left hook it was, and he propelled that hook onto the jutting jaw-bone of the gargantuan gyrene, and it was all over, just like that. And Lockwood had himself his nickname, and I—and just in the nick of time, too, for a three-day pass in Paris was calling—I found myself fiscally sound once more. Cheers. And thanks. Twice.” And he lifted his drink in a toast to The Hook as the crowd murmured approval, looked The Hook up and down, then resumed their own conversations. All, that is, except for a brunette on the edge of the crowd, whose intense gray eyes, Lockwood noticed, remained riveted on him. She was simply dressed, her full, rounded breasts straining against her high-necked black gown.
Raff Spencer placed a friendly hand on his shoulder. “And what brings you here, oh mighty marauder?”
“I’m from the Transatlantic Underwriters company,” Lockwood said, his gaze moving from Raff to Muffy and fixing there. “My company insured your jewels, and I’m here to do what I can to find them.”
Muffy’s eyes flicked open slightly. She appeared to have been caught off guard. “Find them? How? They’re gone! They’ve been stolen! So what makes you think you can find them?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say I think I can,” he answered. “Hope I can is more like it. That’s my job. I’m an insurance investigator. Insurance companies hire people like me to save them money. Sometimes we save it by finding what has been lost or stolen,” he watched her face for another sudden change of expression, but there was none, “And sometimes we save it by proving that the claim is a fraud, trumped-up; that is to say, the beneficiary of the
policy is discovered to be trying to benefit in some way from the loss or destruction—or even the supposed loss or destruction of what he’s insured.”
“It sounds like a fascinating job, Mr.—uh—Hook,” said Muffy, sounding less than fascinated. She waved at a couple of friends, and wordlessly mouth-pantomimed, “I’ll be right there,” smiling and shrugging helplessly as she did so.
“It can be,” he replied, unbothered. “Mostly it’s just a kind of dogged thing, plugging along after one lead and another.”
“Uh, Mr. Hook, is it? Would you mind? I have some friends to attend to,” Muffy smiled insincerely.
“Certainly,” said Lockwood, “I understand. I will be wanting to talk to you again, though.”
“Of course,” Muffy responded, already moving away, her mind elsewhere.
Lockwood turned to Raff. “What do you know about the theft?”
“Absolutely nothing, old boy. I’d been out for a bit of a stroll while Muffy went off to rehearsal and her usual shopping spree, and when I returned, dear Muffy was already talking to the police—some detective named Brannigan.”
“Jimbo Brannigan,” Lockwood interjected. “A lieutenant from the Midtown Precinct. He’s a good one.”
“So he seemed. A bit of a character too, I’d wager. At any rate, that’s all I know; the rest is hearsay—heard from Muffy’s ruby lips, that is.”
“Were you with anyone during your walk?”
Raff looked surprised, then laughed. “Oh, I’m a suspect, am I? I daresay I could dig someone up,” he offered, with a careless smile.
The woman in black was still staring at Lockwood, her eyes unwavering. “Who is she—that woman off by herself, in the black gown?”
