Odd Partners

by Mystery Writers of America

  Rayne’s room didn’t make sense. Clothes still hung in the closet. Personals were still spread out across the top of the dresser: lipstick, powder compact, hair brush. If she had gone, she’d taken nothing other than the matching red dress and high-heeled shoes she wore on stage when she sang at the Rumpus Room.

  At the bottom of the wastepaper basket next to the dresser lay a little wooden figurine of a bird. I plucked it out. The woodpecker had made it. Everyone in the building had a custom-made, wooden sculpture of an animal. That’s how the woodpecker saw us all. Animals.

  Where was Rayne’s suitcase?

  We found it under the bed. I reached under and dragged it out. My brother and I opened it. Inside lay a small parcel wrapped in pale pink paper and bound in a bow. It had the dimensions and weight of maybe a coloring book. The kid’s fourth birthday present.

  Mister Ridge sat on the end of the bed and took a final inhale on the cigarette. I dropped it to the floor, and he stamped it out with his heel.

  As he looked up, he caught sight of a mirror, a little shard of reflection that hung on a nail. Ridge saw himself. Immediately I rose to cover his eyes. My brother did, too. With both of us in the way, he couldn’t see himself no more. Mister Ridge didn’t like looking in mirrors. He didn’t like being reminded he was alone.

  We dropped away after a few moments, and he stared instead at the photograph pinned to the wall.

  He had a moment of clarity.

  The story everyone had been buying had been that Rayne had pulled out and moved on—the bride on the wind. The story was wrong. She wouldn’t have walked out without taking the photo.

  Mister Ridge had a second moment of clarity. He wondered how he had known about it, how he had known it was pinned to her wall. He hadn’t ever been inside her room before.

  For a moment, he remembered my brother and me tightening our grip around a neck.

  He hoped we hadn’t strangled her.

  He really did.

  II

  “She was an overnight girl,” O’Neill said. “She’s over you in a night and gone the next day. We cats see them come and go all the time.”

  He gripped his glass of gin with annoyance. He had powerful arms and strong hands with big fingers. And if he had laid any of them on the angel, we’d have broken all of them.

  The drummer lost himself in thought. He drummed those big fingers on the table.

  I smoked a cigarette.

  The late afternoon sun had no chance of entering the Rumpus Room—no windows. The club didn’t open until nine, but the bar was open to musicians. Musicians lived outside the clock.

  O’Neill’s drumming slowed to a faint, unsteady, no-tempo tap of his index finger.

  “Our world is changing, my friend,” he said. He was almost talking to himself. He took another drink. Tight grip.

  Mister Ridge remembered my brother and me taking a tight grip around a neck. He remembered the struggle, and then the relaxation at the slump. As I’ve said, my brother has a temper. Sometimes, all I could do was to join in and help out. It was better that way for Mister Ridge. It was better for all of us.

  “It’s this new music,” O’Neill said. “It’s been bubbling away for a couple of years, and now it’s starting to bubble over.”

  He meant that popular music, that upbeat blend of country and blues the radio stations were all pushing, with those three-minute slices of cheerfulness the kids were all loving.

  “You’ve noticed our crowds are getting smaller, and that they’re not getting any younger?”

  We had noticed.

  “This is the bottom of 1959,” he said. “I started playing back in the ’20s. I can’t play that young music. I only know the old music; the old grooves are the only ones I understand.”

  He drank another mouthful.

  “One day, you and me, we’re gonna be gone, man. Just like the girl.”

  * * *

  —

  The band played again that night, but it wasn’t the same without the girl. Hooper, the bass player, filled in on vocal duties. He was adequate, but it was like comparing lemonade to liquor. The word was put out for a new singer, a new girl, someone as good as Rayne. You may as well go try and catch a falling star.

  * * *

  —

  “Why is Staines called the woodpecker?” asked a man seated on the staircase.

  Mister Ridge had just come in the front door of our building. It was after three in the morning.

  The man climbed to his feet and held out a badge: DETECTIVE FULTON, 19TH PRECINCT. He was left-handed.

  He was called the woodpecker because he was a conceptual artist and his medium was wood. He spent all day up on that top floor of his with few ideas and a lot of lumber. Whittling it, sawing it, nailing it, maybe even eating it, who knew what conceptual artists got up to in the middle of the night?

  “You’re Ridge, ain’t you? The piano player?”

  Detective Fulton had two fingers missing from his right hand. He reported that Frobisher had put in a phone call to the police the night Rayne disappeared. Apparently, the building super actually had been concerned about her disappearance.

  “You had a thing going on with the songbird, didn’t you?” Fulton poked a half-finger. “Frobisher told me. He said he saw you two come in and out together a few times.”

  Mister Ridge didn’t deny it.

  The detective wanted to look in our room; apparently, detectives also lived outside the clock. We had nothing to hide that hadn’t already been hidden. We took him up to the fourth floor and let him in. He looked under the bed and in the closet. He opened drawers. He picked up some sheet music and remarked that his sister could play. He never said what.

  The detective’s hands were rough and old, the fingers callused. There was no music in those fingers, no art, no passion, only the cold of winter.

  “If you ask me,” he said, “I’d say your songbird was murdered.”

  We damn well did ask.

  He showed us, up in Rayne’s room.

  Across the floor ran a faint, parallel set of scuff marks, about two feet apart. They ran out into the hall, went along to the stairs, and then disappeared.

  “Your songbird didn’t walk out of this room,” the detective said. “She was dragged out.”

  * * *

  —

  Mister Ridge heard Rayne in his sleep. She was singing “Summertime” again. He tossed. One note was wrong. It was flat.

  He woke up.

  There was no singing.

  He felt nauseous, and it wasn’t from the hit of the sweet syrup we’d given him an hour earlier. It was from the memory of our grip. An intense grip. Around a throat. The struggle, and then the slump.

  On the bedside table stood the little wooden figurine of the bird. It was on/off red in the neon from across the street. Next to it stood a little wooden wolf.

  * * *

  —

  Detective Fulton returned in the morning with two burly uniforms, and the three flatfoots got their hands all over everything: picking up, pulling out, prodding, and poking. They looked in all the rooms and under all the beds. They opened every closet and pulled out every drawer. They made so much commotion that the woodpecker came down out of his lair and sniffed angrily.

  And they found nothing.

  There were two rooms to every floor. The second on ours was retained by Carnaby, a traveling bible salesman who’d been out of town for a week. His was a room stacked full of the Good Word.

  The floor above us, the fifth, the top floor, was the woodpecker’s domain. He lived in one room and used the second as his studio. We’d heard he’d knocked a doorway-sized hole through an adjoining wall to link the two.

  Rayne’s room was on the floor below us, the third.
She shared the floor with O’Neill.

  One of the rooms on the second floor lay vacant, and the other was the domicile of old man Norwood: an Englishman, a writer, a veteran of the Great War, and a drunk. His hands were covered with cat scratches, and he’d been drunk since 1933. He didn’t even know there were other floors above him. His cat was a Persian named Ramses.

  There were two rooms on the ground floor: Frobisher had the one with the connecting office, and the second was full of lumber, which belonged to the wunderkind on the top floor, whose only real claim to the arena of the arts was that he had once given Jackson Pollock a cigarette on 42nd Street.

  The cops didn’t find Rayne. Their dirty fingers found nothing more than eighty odd years of dust, a half-chewed copy of The Naked and the Dead, bad plumbing, and Frobisher’s photographic studio in the basement. He took pinup pictures down there; we all knew that. And Frobisher was missing. Apparently, there were laws against taking photographs of naked women with their legs spread open. How about that?

  * * *

  —

  We played “Summertime” that night as an instrumental. It gave my brother a chance to show off. He was good with that. Nobody wanted to sing it, anyhow.

  Why the wrong note?

  It had been eating me. Why would a dream sing one note off-key? What kind of subconscious message was that? What was Mister Ridge’s mind trying to tell us?

  * * *

  —

  “Have you seen Frobisher?” the woodpecker asked. Apparently, woodpeckers didn’t sleep, either. It was after two in the morning, Mister Ridge had just come into the building, and he was at the foot of the stairs.

  We hadn’t seen Frobisher. No one had. And the police would have liked to.

  My brother and I helped the woodpecker carry some lengths of wood up to his studio; ordinarily, it was one of Frobisher’s duties. Mister Ridge offered. We hadn’t been up to the top floor, and we wanted to look.

  On the way up the stairs, the woodpecker answered the question that everyone who had ever entered the building had wanted to know: Why wood?

  “I lived in Paris for two years and learned how to paint,” he explained. “I came back to New York and rented a studio in Queens. I painted pictures of everything: sunsets, sunrises, naked women reclining, tables laid out with fruit, leather-bound books, and smoldering candles. And every time I finished a picture, do you know what my biggest problem was? How to frame it. Big frame? Small? Plain? Ornate? I undertook a journey of discovery to find the perfect picture frame and, after many months, I discovered what I had been truly looking for: The frame itself. The wood. It had been right there all along. Wood is natural, malleable, beautiful, and honest. You see, the frame is the most important part of the picture; it captures whatever you put inside it. It keeps it. It has more power and potency to capture and retain perfection than any pretty picture of a canal in Venice, haystack in a field, or bowl of rotting fruit on a table. From that day out, wood became my medium. I had found my artistic truth.”

  The man was truthfully nuts.

  And his studio smelled of soap.

  His studio had the same dimensions and layout as our room, only it was stripped of furniture and was a forest of timber, with great abstract chunks of it laid about. And about the only thing these objets d’art looked truly in danger of capturing and retaining was wood rot. And yes, there was a hole in the wall leading into the neighboring room.

  We left him.

  Mister Ridge went back down to the third and to Rayne’s room. Her door was open. He went in and sat on the edge of her bed.

  He stared at the photograph of the little girl.

  He felt nauseous.

  I clawed the edge of the bed. My brother did, too.

  Mister Ridge knew he’d seen the photo before; he knew we’d been in Rayne’s room before he had supposedly gone into her room for the first time.

  The sweet syrup don’t make the world so clear, or so fluid, or ordered.

  He remembered a neck. He remembered my brother and me strangling.

  He closed his mind to it.

  He remembered Rayne’s face; her dark eyes. He wanted to remember that. Nothing else.

  What had we done with her body?

  He went back up to our room, and my brother and I did the thing with the needle. Mister Ridge took the hit. He lay on the floor and remembered her eyes. Her dark eyes. And her voice. And the taste of her lips. And the next morning she sang “Summertime” again. With a wrong note.

  III

  “I figure it’s either you or the drummer.”

  Mister Ridge didn’t recognize the voice. He rolled onto his back; we were still on the floor of our room. The first stabs of daybreak slid through the window.

  A man lit a cigarette—two fingers missing. He was seated on the edge of the bed. He blew out the match and tossed it onto the floor.

  It was Detective Fulton.

  “Both you and the drummer knew her,” he said. “You both worked with her. You were both intimate with her.”

  How did he figure that?

  On the floor next to my brother lay the needle and the other tools of the sweet syrup: the spoon, the cigarette lighter, the bootlace we used for a tie-off, and a little puffy ball of dirty cotton wool. My brother quietly hid the equipment in his pocket.

  “You put a woman like that in a building with a bunch of men like you and, sooner or later, you’ll kill each other. Or her.”

  Why?

  “Because a woman like that never gives a man what he wants.”

  I wanted to give the detective a smack in the mouth.

  “O’Neill has a rap sheet. He did a nine-month stretch back in the ’30s on an assault charge. But my money is on you.”

  Fulton pointed a half-finger.

  “Six years ago, a wife beater was strangled in San Francisco. You were in the picture: a close friend with a passable alibi. The wife still speaks highly of you. The file is still open.”

  Like I said, my brother had a temper.

  “And you’re a heroin user. Most of you jazz heads are.”

  The half-finger was still pointing.

  “Why did you kill the girl?”

  My brother and I helped Mister Ridge into a sitting position. He wanted another hit of the sweet syrup, but it wasn’t a sensible course of action in the present company.

  “I also know that Carnaby, that bible peddler across the hall, peddles more than just the word of the Lord to the people. I’ve had people watching him since April. Did you know he disappeared off the map a week ago? I suspect he knew we were closing in. And Frobisher’s reporting the songbird’s disappearance gave us the probable cause to walk in and take a look through his sock drawer. Did you know that half of those bibles he’s got stacked up in his room are hollowed out?”

  We didn’t.

  “Is that what happened to the girl? Did she get caught up in his narcotics racket?”

  She knew nothing about Carnaby.

  Fulton shut up. Something had snagged his attention. He put his cigarette into his mouth. He got off the bed and walked over to the closet; the door was wide open, with Mister Ridge’s meager assortment of attire on display.

  Fulton ran two fingers and a thumb up the spine of the doorway.

  The closet was a walk-in kind. You could hang your clothes, throw in your hat and shoes, with room enough for a couple of boxes and odds and ends.

  “Would you say that all the rooms in this building are identical in their layout?”

  They appeared to be.

  “How come the bible peddler’s room don’t have a closet?”

  This thought was significant enough to propel the detective out into the hall and over to Carnaby’s door. He unlocked it; he had Frobisher’s master set of
keys.

  He went inside and over to the wall where the sunflower hung. He ran his hands over the wall’s surface. He found hinges. It wasn’t a wall. The door and frame to the room’s closet had been removed and a board had been put in their place to conceal the closet’s opening; suitably wallpapered over and with the picture hung. The detective’s hands sought a way to open it.

  We had followed. We knew what he was looking for: Carnaby’s drugs.

  “The songbird was just a distraction,” he said, intimately running his fingers across the green wallpaper.

  We didn’t think so.

  “A nickel and dime murder to fill up my time sheet. No one really cares what happened to her.”

  We did.

  “Carnaby’s narcotics racket is what we’re really interested in. The girl was just a pretty little thing that could hold a note.”

  My brother grabbed the detective and slammed him against the wall and went for his throat. I had no option but to help; within a second, the detective would collect his senses and his hands would start fighting, or going for his gun.

  My brother and I did the strangling thing.

  Struggle.

  Hold.

  Hold tight against the struggle.

  Hold long.

  Slump.

  Release.

  Mister Ridge didn’t like what we had done.

  We dragged the detective’s corpse away from the foot of the wall and we opened it. We knew how. We knew where the groove lay.

  Hidden inside Carnaby’s closet lay a cornucopia of pharmaceutical delight: Benzedrine, laudanum, reefer, Turkish opium, the sweet syrup, and who knew what else?

  And Frobisher.

  Mister Ridge had forgotten about that.