The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (20 page)

“Nah!” Shine said. “When I want a quote from you, I’ll just make it up like I usually do. No point in bothering an important columnist when I already know what I want him to say. Besides, this time the words I want are from my old buddy DeWitt here.” he turned to me.

“I don’t think I like my newfound popularity,” I said. “First Inspector Raab, and then the D.A.’s office, and now you.”

“They got to you already?” Shine said. “That’s impossible. I just found out myself, and nobody else has been told, as far as I know.”

“Told what?” Brass asked.

“About the fact that she came to see you before she got killed. I just got it from Clarence at the desk, and he kept it for me.”

I took a deep breath. “As I just got finished telling an assistant D.A. named Silberman, I never met Lydia Laurent. Really.”

“I got that already,” Shine told me. “We’re not discussing Miss Laurent. We’re discussing the late Madam Florintina.”

That stopped me. “Madam—”

Shine looked at me quizzically. “You didn’t know?”

Brass rubbed his thumb along the side of his nose. “Well,” he said. “She’s the astrologer who came by yesterday, isn’t she? She’s dead? How?”

“The usual way,” Shine told him. “Not breathing, heart stopped.”

“Very funny,” Brass said.

“If you think that’s funny,” Shine told him, “did you hear the one about the rabbi and the priest going up the express elevator to the top of the Empire State Building?”

Brass held up a silencing palm. “No humor this morning. I’m not in a humorous mood. How did the lady die?”

“So far they think strangled,” Shine told him. “I haven’t been able to get a look at the autopsy report yet, if there’s anything more than that. She was found at about seven this morning in the passenger seat of an Auburn sedan parked on Thirty-eighth Street between Seventh and Eighth.”

“The garment district,” I said.

“For what that’s worth,” Shine said. “Is it worth anything? Does it tell you anything helpful?”

I shook my head. “Unfortunately, no.”

Shine turned to Brass. “You?”

“Nothing,” Brass said. “But I am feeling set upon by circumstance.”

“You!” I said. “Imagine what Raab is going to do when he finds out I saw this woman yesterday! And Assistant District Attorney Silberman is going to be dreaming up questions never before uttered by human mouth.”

Shine perched on a corner of Brass’s desk. “Okay now, give!” he told me. “What did she want to see you about?”

“She didn’t want to see me,” I told him. “She wanted to see Brass. She settled for me.”

Shine looked at Brass and back at me. “What about?”

“Yes,” Brass said. “I’d kind of like to hear it myself. You didn’t say the lady said anything worthy of note.”

“She didn’t, as far as I know,” I told him.

“What did she say?”

I turned to Shine. “She came to see us about the reward. Did you see the piece in ‘Brass Tacks’?”

“K. Jeffrey’s reward for the missing ladies? Yes, I read about it. I thought he was picking the winners personally. What did she want with you people?”

“I don’t know, but she was one of many. We got over a dozen calls and visitors yesterday.”

“And a few today,” Brass said. “Gloria fielded them in your absence. Some cannot read very well, some cannot comprehend what they read, and some come to me because I am their friend and ‘Brass Tacks’ is the friendly letter I write them every day but Sunday.”

“Which was she?” Shine asked me.

“I think she distrusted Welton and wanted our support to make sure she got paid.” I closed my eyes and concentrated for a minute, and then repeated, as closely as I could, my conversation with Madam Florintina. We reporters get pretty good at recreating what we have heard and seen, so I was sure I got most of it right, or so close as made no difference. Brass and Shine listened intently. When I was done the silence stretched out for a while.

“What the hell was that about?” Shine asked finally. “Did she know anything or didn’t she?”

“Yesterday I would have sworn that she didn’t,” I said, “but today…”

“She wasn’t robbed or molested?” Brass asked.

“She wasn’t molested, if you mean sexually,” Shine said. “As to whether she was robbed, well, we’d have to know what she was carrying with her. She still had her wallet, and there was a dollar and seventy cents in her change purse, and a five-dollar bill hidden in her, ah, delicate undergarments.”

“Did she see Welton?”

“I don’t know. Nobody has thought to ask him, as we didn’t know there was any connection.”

Brass thought this over for a moment and then turned to Gloria. “Get Inspector Raab on the phone. Ask him to drop by. Tell him I’ve got something for him.”

She nodded and headed back to her desk.

“Damn!” I said. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life explaining to cops that I know nothing worth explaining.”

“Why don’t you spend the next half hour typing out a statement detailing your conversation with the madam astrologer,” Brass said. “It will save you some time when Raab gets here. Also make a carbon for me.”

“Astrologist,” I said. “She said she prefers astrologist.”

“Interesting,” Brass said. “I never heard that before. I wonder whether there’s a distinction, or if it’s just a preference.” He was pleased; a new word to add to his word list.

Shine took the battered fedora that city desk reporters are required to own from where he’d tossed it on the desk and jammed it on his head. “If Raab has anything interesting to contribute, pass it on to me,” he said. “I think I’ll go talk to Welton before he’s interviewed by the homicide boys.” He nodded and left.

I went back to my cubicle and made a carbon paper sandwich, rolled it into the typer and began. Having just gone over the events in my mind, it was a snap to set them down in something approaching a logical order. As I typed it out, I remembered more detail. I was able to stretch it to five pages, double-spaced.

Raab stalked into Brass’s office just as I finished copyediting my opus. I paper-clipped the two copies and followed meekly behind.

“Well?” Raab demanded, braking to a stop in front of the desk.

Brass nodded and smiled. “Good afternoon, Inspector,” he said. “Reasonably well, thank you. And you?”

“Very cute,” Raab said. “Why am I here? Miss Adams said you have something for me.”

I dropped the copies of my report on the desk and retired to what I hoped would be a neutral corner.

Brass picked up the copies and tapped them on the side of the desk. “I believe you’re investigating a new homicide,” he said.

“That’s a safe bet,’ Raab said. “We’re running at about three murders a week here in the city. Is this a philosophical discussion about homicide, or did you have a specific case in mind?”

“I believe she called herself Madam Florintina,” Brass said.

Raab thought it over for a second. “Yeah,” he said. “The stargazer. What about her?”

“I’d like to know how she died, what the autopsy report said, what, if anything, you’ve found out about her.”

“Is that all?” Raab asked. “You sure you wouldn’t like to know what the commissioner had for lunch, and who Dewey’s planning to indict next?”

Brass rapidly skimmed the pages I’d handed him and then passed them over to Raab. “I have a legitimate interest,” he said. “DeWitt might be the last person to have seen her alive. Except her killer, of course.”

“DeWitt again, eh?” Raab said, pausing to glare at me before turning his attention to the report. He slowly backed up to the couch and dropped onto it while he was reading. When he had turned over the last page he flipped forward to review part of it, and then turned to me. “Is this all of it?” he asked.

“All,” I said.

“You weren’t expecting her to call?”

“I had never heard of her until I met her,” I said.

“That’s not what I asked, but never mind.” He turned to Brass. “You verify this?”

“How can I?” Brass asked. “I wasn’t there.”

“Did you have any reason to expect her call?”

“Only the innate inability of human beings to understand the written word. As far as expecting Madam Florintina specifically to call, no.”

Raab turned to me. “She remained on the third floor for the whole time?”

“As far as I know,” I said. “If she went anywhere else in the building, she did it while I wasn’t looking. The man at the reception desk could tell you.”

“I’ll speak with him directly I finish with you,” Raab said. “She promised you a story right after she did some chart. What kind of chart? What sort of story?”

“I assume she meant an astrological chart, but I don’t know what sort of story she had in mind. She didn’t say.”

“Did you tell Brass?”

“I gave him a quick rundown on what she said when I came back upstairs. I don’t remember whether I told him that she said she had a story for us, because I didn’t think it very important.”

“You didn’t think her having a story for you was very important?” Raab asked incredulously.

“Everybody has a story for us,” I explained. “When I go into a nightclub with Mr. Brass, the hat-check girl murmurs ‘I could tell your boss some stories if I wanted to.’ The shoeshine boy wants to know how much we’ll pay him for an exclusive on some hot tip he’s heard. When I go to a party, at least five people take me aside and promise me a hot story if I either use their name or promise not to use it, depending. It never comes to anything. And Mr. Brass has it ten times as bad as I do.”

“That’s true,” Brass said. “I don’t remember whether DeWitt mentioned that this woman said she had a story for us; but if he did I would have discounted it. We probably would have both chuckled briefly and gone on with the discussion. I remember once in 1931 at a party—July, I think it was—I was introduced to a woman who didn’t say either ‘What an interesting life you must lead’ or ‘I could tell you some stories you could use, if I wanted to.’”

“So where do you get your information?”

“Usually from the people involved. Although I do have sources all over the city and scattered throughout the rest of the country. When some stranger whom I meet casually at a party or wherever has something of interest to tell me, he or she invariably just takes me aside and tells it to me right then and there, without much preface. Either that or they make a definite appointment to talk to me later in private, if the information is too sensitive to blab to a crowd.”

Raab thought that over, and then turned to me. “So when Madam Florintina said she had a story for you, you paid no attention?”

“Well, I didn’t know she was going to get killed.”

“You think she went from here to see K. Jeffrey Welton?”

“That’s what she seemed intent on doing, so I would think that’s what she did. Whether she actually saw him or not, I couldn’t tell you.”

Brass leaned back and laced his hands together. “Now a couple of facts from you, Inspector. To satisfy my curiosity.”

“What sort of facts?”

“What time was she killed?”

“Late evening. Say around midnight.”

“Whose car was she in?”

“An attorney named Schipp. It had been stolen from him earlier in the evening. He and his wife went to see a play.
Tobacco Road
at the Forrest Theater on Forty-ninth Street. When they came out, the car was gone. A brand-new Auburn Straight-Eight, he’d only had it for about a week. He thinks he parked on Forty-seventh off Eighth, but you know how those things are. He spent an hour looking for the car, thinking maybe he had forgotten where it was parked. But it was gone. His wife is sure it was parked in front of Bitterman’s Costume Shop, and she’s probably right. Not that it matters.”

“How did Madam Florintina die?”

“Strangled.”

“Like the Laurent girl?”

“You putting them together?”

“Do they fit?”

“Lydia Laurent was strangled manually, from the front. Madam Florintina was strangled with some sort of ligature—a rope or a belt or some such. And she struggled, probably scratched her assailant. Her face is bruised, one of her fingernails is broken, and there is someone else’s skin under several of the nails on her right hand.”

“So the killer got scraped up?”

“It would seem so. If we’re lucky enough to get a line on him before the scrapes heal, we might have something.”

“No suspects?”

“Presumably whoever she was going to finger for you and Welton would be a suspect, if she actually named a name. I’d better go talk to Welton.”

“I guess you had,” Brass agreed.

Gloria left for the residence hotel on East 24th Street that she calls home around six P.M., and Brass and I went down to Victor’s Barber Shop to get a trim shortly thereafter. The bi-weekly excursion to Victor’s was a ritual we both observed, although we usually didn’t do it in tandem. It just worked out that way today. Victor, a tall, slender man with a bulbous nose and a mane of silver hair, owned the eight-chair barber shop located off the lobby of the
World
building; it was close, convenient, and a ready source for newsroom gossip.

The walls of Victor’s shop were plastered with the mementos of Victor’s hair management of the famous, the notorious, and the photogenic, as well as visible signs of his pride in being an American. There was a framed photograph of Victor grinning behind his barber chair, with ex-mayor Jimmy Walker beaming up from the chair. It was autographed “To Victor—who really knows how to trim a guy. Your pal, Jimmy.” There were similar pictures of Victor with Governor Lehman; with F.D.R., taken when he was governor of New York; with Babe Ruth; with Grouch and Chico Marx (autographed, “To Victor, you’re a barrel of laughs,—Groucho / I don’t think so, —Chico”); with Dutch Schultz (not autographed); and with a couple dozen other New York notables. Brass’s photo was in a position of honor by the door, as was that of Winston Sanders, publisher of the
World.
Along the wall behind the desk with the cash register were a series of plaques commemorating Victor’s assistance in raising money in war bond drives and war relief charity drives during and after the Great War.

The shop was open from six in the morning until eight at night, ten at night on Fridays and Saturdays, and it always had at least three barbers—no waiting. And one of them was always Victor himself. When the man slept, I couldn’t tell you.