The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (17 page)

“The mark was from Cleveland, he owned a dry-goods store, we took him for closer to thirty thousand, and we blew him off in Jersey City. But you got the cackle bladder right. Mom always said we had more luck that we deserved on that one.”

“Well,” the Professor said. “I guess it is you.”

“I guess it is,” she agreed.

“It’s nice to see you, kid. The last time you came around you were—what?—thirteen?”

“I think so. Maybe fourteen.”

“Then you got high-hat on your mom and moved out, the way she tells it.”

“That’s pretty close.”

“You always had a mind of your own,” the Professor said, raising his glass with the green liquid. “To you, my dear, and to your mom.”

“Thanks,” she said, touching his glass with her own.

I took a sip of my scotch. “So,” I said, “you’re the Professor. It’s good to meet you.” I looked from one to the other. “I’ve heard a lot about you, what with this and that.”

The Professor leaned forward and stared at me as though he wanted to memorize my face, and then he leaned back. “Is he with it?” he asked Sandra.

“His boss is,” Sandra said.

“Alexander Brass,” the Professor said. “I know him. I could like him if I took the time. He is with it.”

“With what?” I demanded.

“The con,” Sandra explained. “The grift. The Professor wants to know if you’re one of us—of them.”

“Boy, you could make a fortune in the grift,” the Professor told me, continuing to examine my face. “I haven’t seen anybody with such an innocent-looking phiz since Sweet Billy McFine left the business.”

“I thought I looked jaded and hard,” I said. “I’m disappointed.”

“Not much call for jaded and hard,” the Professor said. “Innocent will take you far.”

Sandra took the Professor’s hand and squeezed it in her fist like a small child clinging to her daddy. “Where’s my mom?” she asked.

“Honey, I wish I knew,” the Professor told her. “She hasn’t been around here for more than two weeks.”

“Straight?”

“Straight. She was working this cowboy mark, using the apartment right below this one for the convincer. We keep it here for such purposes. Very elegant and posh, it is. We were setting him up for a golden wire store, ’cause he thinks he knows about horses, being from Texas, when she decides she’s in love with him and ups and marries him. Well, if it were anyone but Mary I would have thought she was working a con of her own, and been real unhappy. But I know she’s on the up and up, and we’re not out much sugar, so what the hell. Then she goes away.”

“I thought you’d be retired by now, living on that land you own in Florida,” Sandra said.

“Ah, my child, I went to visit that portion of Florida to which I have title in fee simple, as it were, and discovered that the fee was not the only thing that was simple. The land is underwater at high tide. Likewise at low tide. It is, to put it concisely, a swamp.”

“You were swindled?” Sandra asked incredulously.

“Is there no bottom to the depths of human depravity to which some people will sink? Yes, I was had.”

“What did you do?” I asked, picturing a gunfight at ten paces on the streets of Coral Gables.

“I sold the property for three times what I paid for it; but that’s not the point. The event taught me a great lesson.”

“Which was?”

“When you go up against a real estate salesman wear both belt and braces, and keep your wallet in a buttoned pocket; they make gritting seem honest and respectable by comparison.”

“So you’re still at the game?” Sandra asked.

“Like Harry Lauder, I’m making my fourth and last farewell performance,” the Professor said.

“How’d you rope Mom back into it?”

“It was a sort of mutual lassoing,” the Professor said. “We were having dinner together one night and we got to talking over old times. And we decided to give it one more spin, just for the hell of it.”

“You mean you talked Mom into it.”

“I suppose she missed the thrill of the chase. Like an old fire horse answering the bell one last time—”

“You mean you talked Mom into it.”

The Professor sighed. “Yes, I suppose I did.”

“Mom is not old,” Sandra said.

“It was just a simile. Mary is assuredly not old. It is I for whom the bells of age are tolling.”

“You’re not old, either, Professor. And you won’t be too old when you’re a hundred and twenty—dead or alive,” Sandra told him.

“Thank you, my dear. But, is that right? You have no idea where your mother is?”

Sandra nodded and looked glum.

“That’s right, Professor,” I told him. “We’ve been looking for her for the past week. Didn’t you see the mention in ‘Brass Tacks’?”

“Brass’s newspaper column? I saw it. Doesn’t mean I believed it. Unlike Will Rogers, I know nothing whatever that I’ve read in the papers.”

“Weren’t you concerned when Mom disappeared?” Sandra asked.

“No, child. You see, I had no idea she had really disappeared. I assumed she was off with her new husband and hadn’t bothered informing her pals on the Street.”

“But when he came here looking for her?”

“I thought perhaps they had had a spat. I wasn’t prepared to discuss with him anything that Mary might not have already told him, and I had no idea of just how much that might be. There are some things, I think, that she wouldn’t wish him to know.”

“That’s so,” she agreed.

The Professor looked at me. “May I assume that nothing of what we say here will get printed in Mr. Brass’s column?”

“Nothing that we hear from you will get used in a column without your permission unless we hear it from someone else. And even then we probably wouldn’t use it. As the boss says, if we couldn’t keep secrets, we wouldn’t hear any.”

“Understand then that you have my blanket non-permission to ever print anything you hear from me. Ever,” the Professor repeated. “Any time.”

“I understand,” I told him.

“You know,” the Professor said thoughtfully, turning back to Sandra, “there was another man around asking for your mom a few days ago.”

“When?” I asked.

“Who?” Sandra asked.

“Manders, the super, told me about it,” the Professor explained. “The man didn’t exactly ask for Mary, he said he was here to pick up her bags. He had a note.”

I sat up. “Did Manders give him the bags?”

“There were no bags to give, as far as I know. Mary kept very little stuff of her own here. A change of clothes, perhaps; clean underthings. He didn’t give the office, and Manders thought it sounded funny, so he told the man to have Mary call the building and explain what she wanted. She never called.”

“What office?” I asked.

“The office,” Sandra explained, making the gesture at her throat that I had seen her make downstairs. “It’s a signal we use. If you’re wearing a tie, it’s straightening the tie. If you’re not, it’s coming as close as you can with what you have, making some gesture that won’t be noticed by anyone not in the know. Why it’s called ‘the office’ I don’t know. Do you know, Professor?”

“Lost in the mists of pre-history, my dear,” the Professor said.

“When I gave the Professor the office in the lobby, for example—”

“—I know that she was ‘in the know’ or ‘with it,’ as we say,” the Professor finished. “So, even though I didn’t recognize her, I brought you both up to my apartment for a private chat.”

“There are other signs,” Sandra said. “Like”—she made a brushing gesture with the fingers of her left hand on her right sleeve—“keep away. Or—”

The Professor smiled broadly. “Now, now,” he said. “Mustn’t give away all our little secrets at once.”

“He’s annoyed,” Sandra told me. “He always smiles like that when he’s annoyed. He used to get annoyed at me a lot when I was a child.”

“Nonsense,” the Professor said. “You were a natural.” He leaned back and started telling stories about life on the con. I think he was trying to make up for having shown that he distrusted me, or perhaps he was just trying to make me feel at home. Sandra broke in occasionally with her reminiscences, grifting as seen through the eyes of a little girl. They were having fun, and I was getting an unexpected education in the art of the swindle.

We talked for another hour or so, and I learned a lot more about the life of a professional con man, but nothing useful about Two-Headed Mary. We did go down to the apartment below to see whether she had left any clue to her whereabouts, but no soap.

Sometime around noon the Professor invited us to stay for lunch: blintzes smothered in last-of-the-season peaches with just a touch of cognac. Sandra accepted; I declined. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I thought they should be alone together for a while to talk over old times and life with Two-Headed Mary before she grew her second head. Mostly I think it was that I was enjoying myself too much. I could see how people could be swept along by the Professor, believe whatever he told them and do whatever he asked. He walked me to the elevator door and told me to come back anytime, but call first. “And bring along Mr. Brass,” he added. “I’d like to talk to him.” He gave me his card, which, I noticed claimed he was Septimus Vogle, Managing Director of the Continental Aerodrome Consortium. I didn’t ask.

I picked up a ham and Swiss on rye toast, lettuce and mustard, no mayo, half a pickle, and a cardboard container of milk at Danny’s and brought them back to the office. After typing a report on our meeting with the Professor and sticking it on Brass’s desk, I settled down behind my own desk with a copy of this morning’s
World.
Brass’s short piece on K. Jeffrey’s reward was in today’s column, sandwiched between a whimsical description of the tiny performers at Professor Huber’s Flea Circus on 42nd Street and an item headed “A Brief Panegyric to the Silent Screen.” He tries to use at least one obscure word in every column to enrich his readers’ vocabulary. “Brass Tacks” is an educational experience for the reader, will he or nil he.

I draped a napkin about my knees, and mused over the item as I munched my ham on rye.

MATINEE MARY is still among the missing, and her friends on Glitter Boulevard hope nothing evil has happened to her. Jeff Welton, producer of that Broadway boffo
Lucky Lady
, is offering a two-G reward to locate either her or Billie Trask, the box-office wench who disappeared with the weekend’s receipts a couple of weeks ago. Word around town is that the two ladies know each other and their disappearances may be connected. “I don’t think Billie took the money,” Welton told this reporter. “She isn’t that kind of girl.”

That’s two big ones, boys and girls, for distribution among those with word of either of the absent Broadway ladies. First come, first served. Read the Advert elsewhere in the
World
for details.

Brass used Broadway slang in his Broadway items to give the reader a feeling of being in the know. Broadway characters tend to speak with a unique kind of careful illiteracy, and the show business had a language all its own; but I’ve never heard this newspaper version of the slang spoken on Broadway, or anywhere outside of Brass’s and Winchell’s columns. As Brass explained it, it was what readers had come to expect so it was what he gave them. I think that Brass and Winchell made it all up between them.

Brass was playing it with a light touch. He could have gone in for dark suppositions: “After the Central Park murder this weekend of chorine Lydia Laurent, friend of the missing pair, fears of foul play have saddened, and perhaps frightened, the close-knit theatrical community…”

Gloria came in around three, carrying two small paper sacks. She went through to Brass’s office and placed them on his desk. He stared at them through narrowed eyes. “Any problems?” he asked.

“I had to go ten dollars higher than I expected,” she said, sounding disgusted. “I must be losing my touch.”

“I doubt that,” he said. “Was there anything?”

“Nothing that shouted out,” she told him. “Maybe on a closer examination.”

He sighed. “Well, let’s take a look.”

“What are we looking at?” I asked, standing in the doorway.

“I’ve just been visiting the apartment on East Fifty-fourth that was shared by the dead girl, Lydia Laurent, and Billie Trask,” Gloria told me.

“The missing girl,” I said brightly.

“Just so,” Brass said.

“And from a trip to the Royal Theater, where the chorus girls each have individual lockers. My guess was right,” Gloria told Brass. “The police didn’t search Lydia’s locker at the theater. Either they didn’t know it was there, or they didn’t think it was worth the trouble. They may have been right. If there’s anything worth looking at in either of those bags, I can’t see it.”

I elbowed past Gloria and dropped onto the couch. “How’d you get in?” I asked her.

“The locker, I popped the lock. The apartment, I gave the super a ten.” She turned to Brass. “I’m sorry, it shouldn’t have cost a dime, but the super knew he had something, with the police crawling around, and he said some guy from the
Mirror
was there yesterday and gave him a twenty to get in.”

Brass leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “I don’t believe it,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “I didn’t believe it myself. I must be losing it.”

Brass smiled and shook his head. “Nonsense! Some people’s avarice is greater than their concupiscence, no matter what the lure, and there’s nothing to be done about it. What I don’t believe is that a reporter from the
Mirror
paid the super twenty dollars.”

“So, when you said you had to go ten dollars higher than you expected,” I asked her, “you meant that you expected to get in for free?”

She looked at me with the look that froze mercury. “Of course,” she said.

Brass leaned forward and picked up one of the bags. “Who was the reporter from the
Mirror
?”

“I asked the super. He didn’t know. A little, skinny man with a big nose and bad teeth. That doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve seen at the
Mirror
.”

“There wouldn’t be anything at the apartment worth taking a picture of,” Brass said. “Or am I wrong?”

“No, just an apartment. Cleaner than many, but it didn’t have much furniture to get in the way. Those girls lived a frugal life.”