The Corpse Steps Out

by Craig Rice

  “He must have done it,” Nelle said, “he’s a murdering bastard if there ever was one.”

  Malone said, “Let me think.”

  “Go ahead and think,” Helene said, “We’ll watch.”

  The waiter appeared out of nowhere. “Perhaps now,” he began.

  “Look here,” Jake said sternly, “the minute we’re ready to order, we’ll send you a telegram.”

  “You’re breaking his heart,” Helene said sympathetically.

  “Listen,” Nelle said suddenly, “could we bluff him?”

  “Possibly,” Jake told her, “but it’s my hunch he’d just keep on coming back with that menu until we gave in and ordered.”

  Nelle’s retort was brief, appropriate, and highly colored.

  “Couldn’t we tell St. John we’d found Paul’s body,” she said more calmly, “and that we knew he’d killed him, and that if he didn’t give back the letters and forget this audition, we’d tell the police?”

  “Wonderful,” Jake said. “Can’t you see how the police would love it? What murder? Where’s the body? Who did it? Prove it. Where’s Paul March? Gone to Honolulu along with his luggage. And even if we could prove there had been a murder, St. John knows that to try to prove it would drag the whole story into the open, letters and all.”

  “Well,” she said unhappily, “it was the best I could think of. How are you doing, Malone?”

  “It seems to me,” Malone said, mopping his face, “the best thing for you to do is play along with him. Go ahead and put on the audition and somehow delay the signing of the contract just as long as you can.”

  “What good will that do?” she asked.

  “If Goldman signs the contract first anyway, St. John will be up a tree very nicely. With the contract signed with Goldman, St. John can’t turn up the letters without destroying a valuable property for his agency, which would put him in the soup. His one chance is to get his contract signed first, just as quick as the Goldman option expires.”

  “That’s right,” Jake said.

  “So,” Malone went on, “you play along with him tomorrow, and I’ll fly up to Brule tomorrow and try to locate Goldman and get his contract signed before St. John can make his move. Apparently you won’t have anything to do with the contacting of Goldman, and St. John’s stunt will just fall through.”

  “And the letters?” Nelle said.

  “I said, he won’t be able to use them without destroying a valuable property for his agency. There’s only one thing he’ll be able to use his letters and his damned personal-management contract for.” Malone described it briefly.

  “Malone,” Helene said, “you’re superlative.”

  He bowed. “All depending,” he said, “on whether I can find this guy tomorrow. I think I can. Anyway, by God, I’ll try.”

  “And I hope,” Jake said sternly to Nelle, “this will be a lesson to you.”

  “It has been,” she promised. “I’ll never write another letter, even to a vox-pop column. Now where’s that waiter? I’m hungry.”

  They looked around. The waiter was nowhere to be seen.

  “Probably gone out to dinner,” Helene said.

  Malone looked at his watch. “Probably gone home to bed.”

  Nelle looked apologetic. “I hope you didn’t have anything planned for this evening.”

  “Just to get married, that’s all,” Jake said crossly.

  Malone laughed politely. “That’s very funny.”

  Jake’s fingers tightened around the neck of the ginger-ale bottle. “I’ve had enough. The next person, male or female, who say that to me, gets his face shoved down his neck. And when I say that, I’m not being funny!”

  Chapter 12

  Jake began what he was to remember later as one of the most terrible days of a lifetime by meeting Nelle and Helene for breakfast at Ricketts. The two girls were waiting for him when he arrived, exchanging confidences like lifelong friends.

  “Anything happen on Erie Street last night?” he asked Helene, sliding into his chair.

  “Not unless you count Molly waking me at three this morning to come downstairs and drink beer,” she reported. Adding, “It was terrible beer, but I met a lot of interesting people.”

  A black-haired waitress came and took their order.

  “Eight-thirty is a lousy time for breakfast, if you ask me,” Nelle grumbled, “audition or no audition.”

  “You’re showing up at St. John’s office at ten,” Jake reminded her. “You’re going to be a nice mild little girl and keep your temper, too. I’ll meet you there. First, I’ve got to deliver a copy of your contract to Malone, so he can fly up to Brule with it.”

  Nelle said, “I hope to heaven he finds those guys.”

  “He will,” Jake said confidently. “When Malone starts out to do something, he does it. St. John will probably get his contract signed, sealed, and delivered at one second after six, official Western Union time. But in the meantime Malone will have the other contract signed before six. St. John’s contract won’t be worth the match to set it afire.” He hoped it was true.

  “Isn’t he wonderful!” Nelle said. “If it weren’t for Tootz, I’d cut you out, Helene, and marry him myself.”

  “You couldn’t do it,” Jake said. “It’s bad enough to be your manager.”

  She frowned. “But Jake. Even if St. John doesn’t get away with selling me to Givvus, suppose he still makes me sign the personal-management contract?”

  “He can’t do it,” Jake said. “He’s got your letters, sure. He can hold them over you, sure. But he can’t do more than bluff. Because he knows that to use them would ruin you as a radio property, and after all, no matter who you’re sold to, you’re his agency’s property. Your show is the backbone of the whole damn radio department, of which he’s the head. No, he can’t use those letters and he knows it.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I know damned well I’m right. You go through this audition today like a good girl and behave yourself. And then when this is settled, maybe Helene and I can find time to get married.”

  “Maybe,” Helene said gloomily.

  “I’ll give you a special wedding present to make up for all this,” Nelle said. “I don’t know what yet, but something.”

  “How about the Michigan Avenue Bridge?” Jake suggested.

  He managed to keep them from talking about the audition until breakfast was over. As he called for the check, Helene lit a cigarette, looked reflectively at the litter of cigarette stubs, matches, and crumpled cigarette packages in the ash tray, and laid her lighted match in the center of it. A sudden blaze leaped up. The black-haired waitress came running.

  “Don’t mind her,” Jake said, in a whisper that could be heard clearly across the street. “She’s a pyromaniac. A firebug. She’s all right every other way, but she’s a pyromaniac.”

  “Yes,” Nelle added in an equally stentorian whisper, “we have to watch her every minute.”

  Helene busied herself with her compact and pretended not to hear.

  “Only last month,” Jake finished, “she burned down the railway station in Oshkosh, and it cost us a fortune to hush things up.”

  As they waited for the change, they could see the black-haired waitress talking in low tones to the other waitresses, who stared with scandalized and fascinated eyes at Helene.

  “See,” Jake said, “now you’re famous. That’s what having a press agent means.”

  Helene closed her compact with a snap. “You’re going to be sorry for this,” she prophesied gloomily.

  A few minutes after ten, Jake walked into the ornate reception room of the agency. Malone was on his way north with the contract. Helene was to meet him at the studio later in the morning.

  “Is Mr. St. John in?”

  The pretty girl at the desk looked up. “Oh Mr. Justus. Thank God. You’d better go right in.”

  Jake went down a long corridor, stopped before a desk where a blonde secretary busied herse
lf with pages of reports.

  “’Morning, dear. How does your boss feel this morning?”

  The blonde girl looked up grimly. “He was peevish when he came in. It’s his bunions again. They’re always worse on hot days like this. I tell him it’s the shoes he wears, but he can’t seem to find any that help, poor man. And then Miss Brown came in. She doesn’t seem to feel so good either. You’d better go on in.”

  Through the glass door he could hear Nelle’s voice raised to shrieking pitch.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head, “no, she doesn’t seem to feel so good.”

  He opened the glass door just in time to have a script, thrown from across the room, catch him full in the face.

  “Pick that up, Nelle,” St. John said coldly.

  Jake closed the door. “Is everybody happy?”

  “Jake, tell him to go to hell.”

  “Go to hell,” Jake said agreeably, reaching for his cigarettes.

  “I asked you to pick up the script, Nelle,” St. John said.

  Jake started to reach for the script, but Nelle was ahead of him. She picked it up, tore it very slowly and deliberately into shreds, dropped the shreds on the floor, and ground them under her slender heels. Then without a word she stalked out, slamming the door with a bang that set all the windows rattling.

  “Nelle don’t like the script, eh?” Jake said, lighting a cigarette.

  “That’s my impression,” St. John said crisply. He scowled. “She ought to be made to come back and close that door properly.” Jake wondered if St. John had ever taught school.

  “It’s none of my business,” Jake said easily. “Fight the script out between you. But if you want to get a good job from her this afternoon, go a little easy. Nelle has to be pampered a little.”

  “She’s had too much pampering,” St. John said nastily. “That’s the whole trouble with her.”

  Jake sat down on a corner of the big desk, swung one long leg back and forth, and said very casually, “It’s still none of my business, but why don’t you leave Nelle’s show with Goldman, who won’t buy anything else, sell some other show to Givvus, and have two big shows on the air instead of one.”

  “Givvus also won’t buy anything else,” the agency man said.

  Jake looked very intently at his left shoe. “In that case, why go to all the bother of holding an audition for him?”

  “Purely a formality,” St. John said.

  Jake nodded. “Well, I said it was none of my business. A job is a job to me. Let me know what you want Nelle to do, and I’ll see that she does it.” He looked up at the pale, narrow face across the desk and thought what fun it would be to muss it up.

  “I appreciate you co-operation,” St. John said. “Let’s go on to the studio. I trust Nelle will be there when we arrive.”

  “She will be,” Jake said, hoping it was the truth.

  St. John called the blonde secretary, gave orders regarding a dozen or more small details of the day’s activities, reached for his shoes under the desk, and put them on with a wince. For the barest moment Jake saw him as a tired, exasperated man whose feet hurt.

  They rode to the studio in silence.

  Nelle was there, so was Helene. St. John looked at the latter disapprovingly.

  “This is supposed to be a secret audition.”

  “Miss Brand is my confidential secretary,” Jake told him. He went on into the control room. Schultz was there, gloomily gnawing an apple.

  “What’s this secret audition about?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Jake said. “Agency doing.”

  Schultz grunted.

  Oscar Jepp’s enormous bulk suddenly darkened the room. “Who the hell wrote this script?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Jake said easily. “Maybe St. John wrote it himself.”

  Oscar snorted. “I don’t think anybody wrote it. I think it was found floating up the Chicago River in a beer bottle.”

  He rounded up his cast and went into the studio. Helene came into the control room and sat down by Jake’s side. Rehearsal got under way.

  It was worse than any rehearsal Jake could remember, and that, he reflected, was saying a great deal. There was no single line of the script that met Oscar Jepps’s approval. Lou Silver had had to break a date with a new girl friend to attend the audition, and he hated everybody. There was an obbligato passage in Nelle’s first song which she foozled on every attempt. The sound-effect man’s wife was in the process of having a baby, and whenever a sound cue appeared in the script, it developed that the prospective father had gone to phone the hospital. Bob Bruce had a bad hang-over.

  During the first half-hour, Nelle burst into tears and walked out of the studio. Through the loud-speaker, Jake could hear Oscar saying anxiously, “Don’t worry, she’ll sing it all right when the times comes.”

  During the second half-hour, Bob Bruce went through a brief period of being unable to pronounce “broadcasting” any other way than “croadbasting,” and demoralized the entire cast.

  After a horrible hour, a timing rehearsal was called, and it was found that the show ran six and three-quarter minutes overtime.

  St. John and Oscar retired for a profane and vituperative session of shortening the script, and Jake sent downstairs for coffee and sandwiches for the cast. He looked for Nelle, found her distractedly pacing the hall. Helene slipped an arm around the singer’s shoulders.

  “I suppose I’ll live through this,” Nelle said unhappily.

  They strolled into the reception room. Someone had left an early American lying on one of the chairs. Jake picked it up, glanced at it.

  Two Hurt in Plane Crash

  “Oh God,” Jake said. “It couldn’t be!”

  Chicago Lawyer Slightly Hurt

  In Crash Near Madison

  John J. Malone, prominent Chicago attorney, was cut and bruised in the crash of a private plane near Madison, Wisconsin, early today. The pilot is reported in a serious condition. The accident occurred when …

  Chapter 13

  “Pull yourself together,” Jake said. “He still may be able to make it.” He hoped his voice carried the conviction that he didn’t feel.

  “But if he doesn’t,” Nelle said desperately, “if he doesn’t—” She paused, frowned. “I could do this. I could do such a lousy job of the audition that Givvus wouldn’t buy the show for marbles.”

  “You could,” Jake said, “but it probably wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Givvus might insist on another audition, which would mean we had a little more time.”

  “I doubt it like hell,” Jake said. “He’s heard you on the air. St. John said the audition was a mere formality. And anyway, baby, I don’t think you could do it. I hate like the devil to compliment you, but I don’t think you could do that bad a show.”

  She smiled at him wanly.

  “Don’t worry,” Helene said vaguely and helpfully.

  Oscar appeared in the reception room, his round moonface shining with sweat. “Script’s ready.” He wiped his brow. “This is awful.”

  “At least there haven’t been any fights in rehearsal,” Jake said consolingly.

  Oscar nodded. “That’s what worries me. They aren’t really putting their hearts into it.”

  Jake started to follow him to the studio. A page boy touched his arm.

  “A lady to see you, Mr. Justus.”

  Essie St. John was waiting by the elevator, her homely face pale with anxiety.

  “Jake, where can we talk? I mustn’t be seen here.”

  He opened a door leading out of the reception room, led her into the seclusion of the stairway.

  “Jake, I had to warn you.”

  “Of what?” Jake said stupidly.

  “I don’t know what. That’s the trouble. You must think I’m nuts. But John’s up to something. I can tell. That nasty, pleased way he acts when he’s up to something.”

  Jake nodded. “It’s all right, Essie. I know all about it. He is up to something, but h
e isn’t going to get away with it.”

  Her cape slipped aside and as she moved to retrieve it, Jake caught the outline of an ugly bruise on her shoulder.

  “Essie, why don’t you leave him?”

  “I would if I could,” she said dully. “Jake, he’s told me again and again that if I do, he’ll divorce me, and bring all sorts of horrible things out in court. He can do it, too.” She patted aimlessly at her hair. “I couldn’t help going out and having a little fun once in a while. You don’t blame me, do you? But he knows all about it, and I don’t dare leave him.”

  Jake patted her arm a little awkwardly.

  “Someday. I’ll decide to shoot him,” she said in a tired voice.

  “I’ll buy you the gun,” Jake promised.

  She smiled weakly. “I’ve got to know how things turn out today. But I don’t dare let him know I’m here.”

  “Wait in the little girls’ room,” Jake said. “I’ll send Nelle in to tell you about it, when it’s all over.”

  He gave her elbow a reassuring squeeze and walked back to the control room.

  Rehearsal dragged on dispiritedly. Oscar Jepps went through all his tricks: was by turns insulting, cajoling, enraged, unhappy. None of them did any good. It was midafternoon when he looked up at the clock and announced, “Dress rehearsal.”

  Dress rehearsal was not quite so bad as Jake had expected, though Nelle went to pieces on the obbligato passage.

  In the interval that followed, St. John slipped away to usher Mr. Givvus into the sanctity of a client’s room down the hall, where he would listen to the audition in peace, privacy, and a restful atmosphere. The sound man went to phone the hospital. Schultz went out to buy a chocolate bar. Lou Silver went to make a date with the studio hostess. Bob Bruce went to put cold water on his forehead. Nelle came into the control room, sat down at the black-and-chromium desk, and laid her head on her arms.

  “Jake, I’ll have to do a deliberately bad job. It’s the only way.”

  He laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “And it kills me to do it, Jake. You’d understand why. But the rest of the gang wouldn’t. Oscar and Lou and Bob, and even Schultz. They’d always remember I’d done a lousy job of an audition.”