The Blonde Died Dancing (13 page)

“Yes… I didn’t know it was you. I’m sorry, I might have hurt you badly.”

“Even if you had known it was I, you still would have hit me, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

We sailed at each other, Leone and I. Then she said, “I wish I could prove to you that I destroyed all the tapes I found.”

“I’m not worried,” I said. “I know you won’t be blackmailing me. Pleasant conversation, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it? Let’s break it up, shall we? I have to get back. Aren’t you going to eat your sandwich?”

“No, I don’t want it.”

“I don’t blame you. I feel slightly nauseous, too. Hester, you will destroy them, won’t you? The tapes you found?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

We paid our check.

There was a phone message waiting for me when Leone and I returned to the school. The girl who was spelling Leone at the reception desk handed me a slip of paper. I was to call the number on it. It was Steve’s office phone.

I said, “How long ago did this call come in?”

“Just a few minutes ago.”

“Hester,” Leone said, “you can use one of my phones here.”

I smiled sweetly and turned down the offer. Leone’s curiosity about me would have to go unsatisfied for a while longer. I used a phone booth in the hall. I caught Steve just as he was leaving. Another few seconds and I would have missed him. I could tell from his voice he was excited.

“I think,” he said, “I’ve got the dope on the guy Stubby killed.”

“Walter,” I said. “Yes?”

“There’s a story in the August 19th paper, last Aumahler resurrection shopping mall gust. A Walter F. Stone, aged forty-six, fell-five stories from a window in his office at 923 West Twenty-third Street. He died instantly. He lived at the Waller Hotel. There were no known relatives. How does that sound to you, Connie?”

“The date’s right… August. And falling from a window… that’s right, too.”

“I’m going down to that office address. There might be someone around there that knew him.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Do you think you should?”

“This is more important than anything I could accomplish here. It might even prove I’m wasting my time here. What’s that address?”

“923 West Twenty-third.”

“See you there, Steve.”

“I’m leaving right away.”

“So am I.”

I stepped out of the booth and went back to Leone at the reception desk. She was alone but busy. I interrupted her; she was faintly annoyed. When she heard what I had to say she was vividly annoyed.

“Something’s come up,” I told her. “I’ve got to get away. Can you get a substitute for my four o’clock?”

“I shouldn’t.”

“But you will, of course. Since I’m such an intimate acquaintance of yours now.”

“You will be back for your seven and eight o’clocks.”

“If I can.”

“No, you’ve got to. Look, Hester, Mr. Bell knows what goes on around here. I can cover you for one hour, but if you miss tonight, too, he’s going to start asking questions about you. You don’t want that, do you?”

“No. All right, I’ll be here.”

I outran the closing doors of an elevator. I snatched a cab from a gent who couldn’t have been going anyplace special. The cab driver was a career man. He got me way out west on Twenty-third Street just as Steve came hurrying down the block.

Number 923 was a large, dowdy building. There was a carpenter shop on the ground floor, but the proprietor hadn’t spent any of his talent on the premises. We went into a vestibule at the right of the place. There was a battered old name case hanging on the wall without enough letters left to spell the tenants’ titles completely. No attempt at all had been made to spell Walter F. Stone.

We rode the rickety self-service elevator up to the fifth floor and we found what we were looking for, found more really than we had expected to find. The Bartons were getting lucky, and it was a nice change.

The words “Merry Toy Company” were most prominent on the crinkled glass of the office door. In the right hand bottom corner was the name Walter F. Stone. Beneath it was the name Frank Stubbs.

“Frank Stubbs,” Steve said. “Stubby.”

“Stubby,” I said, “killed his business partner.” Steve tried the door; it was locked.

I followed Steve into the office of a twine company that was in business next door. An unhappy, rather ill-kempt lady stenographer frowned at us. I guess the twine business wasn’t booming, and Steve and I probably didn’t look as if we used much twine.

Steve said, “Hello.”

That didn’t get him any place.

He said, “The Merry Toy Company next door…” Miss Sour said, “Out of business.”

“Mr. Walter F. Stone…”

Miss Sour brightened a bit. “Dead.”

“His partner, Frank Stubbs…”

Miss Sour shook her head and shrugged.

“Is there anybody here who might know about him?” Miss Sour didn’t answer immediately. She was looking at my hair and thoroughly disapproving of it. Finally, she said, “Try the carpenter downstairs. He’s the janitor for this building.”

“Thanks,” Steve said. “Do you enjoy being in twine?” Miss Sour just glared at him.

The carpenter business seemed to be in better shape. Mr. Apel was an affable man. He didn’t disapprove of my coiffure. In fact, he looked mostly at me while he talked to Steve, telling him all he knew about Frank Stubbs.

He didn’t know a great deal about him. Stubbs kept coming around for the next two or three weeks after his partner’s death. But he certainly hadn’t tended much to business. He spent most of his time across the street in that bar there. His partner’s death seemed to have upset him badly. Before that he had been a nice enough fellow, not especially friendly, but pleasant. The two men seemed to have had a going concern up there until a few months before the accident. The boys had fallen behind in their rent then. When Mr. Apel came to think of it, the two partners stopped seeming to be happy together. Business must have been really bad at the end there, Mr. Apel decided.

Steve wondered if Mr. Stubbs had left any forwarding address.

He hadn’t.

We thanked Mr. Apel and wished him luck.

Steve suggested that we have a drink or two across the street at the Ferry Bar. The title obviously referred to the nearby Hudson River Ferry to New Jersey, but the bar’s owner must have been a joker or extremely naive. However, the place itself was heavily masculine, catering apparently to the dockworkers in the neighborhood. There was a free lunch counter, but its doubtful delicacies hadn’t been disturbed for quite a while, the crackers not even dusted.

The long bar was gleaming, though, and the three sets of gay, shining beer taps made me wish I liked beer. Steve had a beer and I had Bourbon and water. There were just a few men at the bar, silent, strong men.

It wasn’t until our second drink that Steve got our bartender talking to us about Frank Stubbs. His beginning was a little discouraging, but then he warmed up to the subject at hand. He knew Frank Stubbs… Stubby, all right, all right. Stubby owed the bar some money.

“So anything,” the bartender said, “I can tell you that’ll help you locate that lug, I’ll tell you.”

Steve said, “You didn’t like the guy?”

“At first I did. He used to come in here at least once a day. Sometimes with his partner, sometimes not. He never asked for credit then, never got drunk, all in all a good customer.”

“That,” Steve said, “was when the toy business was good?”

“Well, the partners seemed to be doing good. I don’t know about that toy business.”

“You mean it was just a front?”

“Well, now, I’m not one to go around pointing my finger at folks. They probably done some legitimate business in the toy and novelty line. But I think, from little things I heard, that they had something else going. Don’t ask me what.”

Steve thought about that a moment. He said, “The docks? The pier rackets?”

The bartender didn’t deny this.

I said, “You mean the union rackets, Steve?”

“I was thinking more along the line of their being fences for some of all that loot stolen off the docks.” The bartender didn’t deny that, either.

Steve said to him, “I’m right. Right?”

“Well, now… sometimes in this neighborhood it don’t pay to be too right.”

“I know what you mean. Was it after his partner’s death that Stubbs changed? And you stopped liking him?”

“It happened slow. He spent more and more time here, less and less in his office. He had this lady friend that used to join him along about five, six o’clock. They got to closing up the place together. She’d try to get him to go easy on the stuff, but she usually ended up blind herself.”

“What was her name?”

“Harriet was all I knew her by.”

“She wasn’t his wife?”

“I never got that impression.”

“Did they live together?”

“I couldn’t say about that, either. I never did know where either of them lived. But this Harriet was crazy about him, I could see that. She was kind of a sad thing. All the time it was… ‘Yes, Stubby, dear… yes, dear, yes…’ To her Stubby was the brains of the world, a guy who couldn’t go wrong.”

“Was he nice to her?”

“Well, I never seen him do her any physical damage.”

“When did they stop coming in here?”

“Six, seven weeks ago. It finally got so we had to close the door on them. It wasn’t only his drinking. He’d try to borrow money from anybody, everybody, strangers even. Not just drinking money. Big money… fifty, a hundred, two hundred. People just laughed at him. Our customers don’t have that kind of dough. Finally, he got to be such a nuisance we told him to stay away.”

Another bartender, tying a clean apron on himself, had come into ear-shot. He said, “Who you talkin’ about, Len?”

“That Stubby guy. Remember him, George?”

“Remember him? Can I forget him? He owes me thirty dollars.”

Len said, “This fellow is looking for Stubby.”

“Yes,” Steve said. “Do you know where he lives now?”

George shook his head. “And a good thing for him I don’t. I been around to see that Harriet friend of his a couple times. But she knows he owes me, so she won’t say where he is.”

“Where does Harriet live?”

“862 West Twenty-fifth. At least she did three weeks ago. I haven’t been around there since. I give up on the money.”

“Know her last name?”

“Kroll.”

“Harriet Kroll,” Steve said. “862 West Twenty-fifth Street, this city. If I get a line on Stubbs from her, I’ll let you know.”

“Do that,” George said. “And, listen, you play it smart. Tell Harriet that you owe Stubby money, that you want to pay.”

“I’ll try that,” Steve said. “And thanks to both of you.”

“It’s nothing,” Len said.

“A pleasure,” George said.

862 West Twenty-fifth Street
was a rooming house. Its exterior was shabby and beat-up, but there was a hint of somebody’s pride about the place. The windows were clean; they had curtains. The tile floor of the vestibule bore signs of scrubbing.

There were no mail boxes or bells in the vestibule. Its inner door was unlocked. The hall beyond was dark and narrow. A feeble lamp on the wall table at the foot of the staircase was the only light. There was some mail, more of it stale than fresh, on the table. Steve leafed through it. There was nothing for Harriet Kroll. “Yes?” a voice said.

“Are you the landlady?” Steve asked.

“Yes,” she said.

She was a big, strong-looking landlady. There was belligerence hovering behind her flushed face. She might like us, she might not, but it wouldn’t take her long to decide. You were either in or out with this lady in a very short time. I had the feeling that she had called a lot of cops in her day.

Steve said, “Is Miss Kroll in? Miss Harriet Kroll?” The landlady snorted and said, “No.”

“Have you any idea where she is?”

“Where she always is. In some bar someplace, her and that friend of hers, getting drunk.”

“That friend of hers,” Steve said. “A Mr. Frank Stubbs?”

“A Mrs. Clara Zeigler,” the landlady said acidly. “They have a room here.”

“When might they be back?”

“When there’s nobody left to buy them a drink, no sooner.”

“Do you think,” Steve asked, “they might be drinking in the neighborhood?”

“If there’s anybody in the neighborhood that’ll still buy them a drink.”

“Well,” Steve said, “we’ll look around.”

We thanked the landlady and we went out into the deepening dusk. We were walking toward Ninth Avenue when, prompted by the time: of day, an unpleasant thought stopped me in my tracks. I told Steve about it, about my session at the studio with Wendell Kipp, his threat to expose my masquerade as Hester Frost, dancing teacher.

Steve said, “You really think he’d go to Bell about you?”

“I don’t know. But if he did, Mr. Bell would tell Mr. Bolling… and when Mr. Bolling caught up to me… I’d rather not think about that.”

“It could be embarrassing.”

“Only embarrassing? Don’t comfort me. It would tip off to Bolling that you were the Waltzer, that’s all. I’d better keep my date with Kipp.”

“I don’t like his attitude toward women.”

“Steve, it’s only a cocktail date. I’ll be safe. You know the Wellington bar… it’s so respectable, dull even.”

“Gee, kid! I hope you won’t be bored!”

“Now, don’t be… Steve, I might be able to find out something about Kipp. And maybe about Anita and Stubbs…”

“I’m going to find out about Stubbs. From Harriet.”

“You’re going to stay around here?”

“I’ll research the bars for Harriet and Mrs. Zeigler. If I don’t find them, I’ll wait outside their rooming house for them.”

“Listen, after my date with Kipp…”

“Let’s call it an appointment with Kipp.”

“… I have to go back to the school. I’ve got to teach tonight to keep Mr. Bell off my neck.”

“All right. If I’m not home, I’ll still be here.”

“See you at home or here. Steve… control yourself now. Don’t come down to the Wellington. If Kipp sees you again…”

“I’ll control myself. And listen, you drink ginger ale! Don’t let Kipp get you loaded. You just make sure you can remember everything tomorrow morning. God, what murder can make a man do! I’m throwing you to the wolves!”