The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (9 page)

As Florian finished taking food orders Gloria stood up and I opened my notebook to a clean page. Gloria
pinged
on a water glass with her fork in the time-honored way of making noise at a dinner table. “On behalf of Mr. Alexander Brass, I thank you all for coming and sharing what you know about Two-Headed Mary with us,” she said as the chatter died away. “As you must know, she has been missing for over a week. Let me start with the big question: Do any of you think you know where Mary might have gone?”

They looked at one another.

“Did you try her apartment?” Gilly asked. “She lives somewhere on the Upper West Side. Maybe around Ninety-second and Riverside.”

“Did she tell you that?” Gloria asked.

“I, well, I think so.”

“I thought she came in every day from Connecticut,” Aud said. “You know, New Haven or Bridgeport or someplace.” They kicked that around for a while, Suze (rhymes with booze) swore that Mary had told her that she had a penthouse apartment in the east 70s, but she couldn’t remember just where. No one mentioned Eastern Parkway, or anywhere else in Brooklyn. Evidently Mary liked to keep her home life well separated from her professional appearances.

The discussion segued into other aspects of the secret life of Two-Headed Mary. Apparently she really did help the girls out with a five-spot or occasionally even a ten if one of them needed it, and she was a good listener and she gave good advice when asked.

“She got Billie Trask her job,” Honey added, “after Billie hurt her leg. She talked Welton into giving her a job at the box office.”

“Yes, yes,” Didi “Knees” said. “But look where that got her.”

A mixed chorus of “boo,” “hush,” and “shame on you,” sounded from around the table. “Billie didn’t take that money,” Trixie said positively. “I used to room with her before she moved in with Liddy. If Billie had accidentally left this restaurant with this spoon”—she held up the long spoon she was eating her parfait with—“she’d worry about it all night, tossing and turning, and then come back and confess the next morning. Honest she would!”

Didi frowned. “But I heard her boyfriend made her do it.”

“And I heard,” Maxine said, leaning forward and whispering in a stage whisper that could be heard in Cincinnati, “that that wasn’t what her boyfriend made her do at all—and it wasn’t because she hurt her leg that’s he had to quit the chorus!”

“Why Maxine, you little bitch!” Trixie said. “She might have been in trouble—that kind of trouble—or she might not, but if she was, it could have happened to more than one of us at this table—and don’t say it couldn’t!”

“If the girl was pregnant,” Honey asked, “then who took the money?”

“There is nothing that says that you can’t be pregnant and a thief,” Jane said, “if you’re going to be a thief.”

“She was no thief!” Trixie insisted.

I decided that I’d better bring the conversation back to the subject before it got away from us entirely. “So Mary helped her with her problem,” I suggested, “whatever it was?”

“She liked helping chorus girls,” Maxine offered, “because she had a daughter who was in the chorus.”

“That’s right,” Didi agreed. “Such a sad story.”

“Sad?” I asked.

“The kid died,” Didi explained. “Right after she got offered a principal spot in the
Vanities.
”

“Name was Ruby,” Maxine said. “She was hit by a Fifth Avenue bus. Mary didn’t show it much—she was a real trouper—but she was terrible broken up. Wouldn’t ride buses any more.”

“I thought the kid got TB and died,” Dossie offered, “like Camille.”

“The kid’s name is Lenore and she’s not dead. She married a drummer and moved to San Francisco,” Terri contributed. “Mary was real mad about it. She said she wouldn’t have minded so much if the guy was a violinist or even a piano player. But drummers aren’t dependable.”

None of the girls seemed particularly bothered by the constantly changing stories of their benefactor. They ate, drank, and were merry until almost two in the morning, and I filled up sixteen pages of my notebook with what I like to call my shorthand. None of them was sure just when she’d seen Two-Headed Mary last, although we pretty much pinned it down to a couple of days before she disappeared—or at least before her disappearance was noticed. They all agreed that she had not seemed worried or upset, had not behaved noticeably different, and had not indicated that she was going anywhere.

I went home and hung my suit up, washed my face, and dropped into bed. I slept soundly until about nine, an hour later than usual, and spent an hour at my aging Underwood to begin my new novel. I had decided to let the old one mature, or possibly rot, with the other dozen or so partials I had done over the past couple of years. The new one was to be a historical fantasy in the mode of James Branch Cabell, Talbot Mundy, or Edgar Rice Burroughs—take your pick. Since my imitations of life read like fantasy, I’d see what I could do with the genuine article. My working title was either “The God King” or “Dancing in Babylon,” I hadn’t decided which. At the end of an hour I had a beginning:

It came to pass that in the sixteenth year of the Stewardship of Khassam the Observant there was born to the merchant Lufar in the city of Bazra the Eternal a boy child, which was named Sindbad.

Some there are who teach that the measure of a man’s life is taken from his first breath; and all the good or evil, pain or joy, triumph or woe, that shall befall him is already cast in immutable lines upon the tablet of his existence, as the words of a play are written for the actors. If this were so, and if the actor could read his part before the play commenced, which of us would choose to see the curtain rise?

But this is mere conjecture.

And conjecture it would remain, at least until tomorrow morning. I pulled the page from my patient Underwood and put it in the manuscript box, covered the machine, shrugged into my jacket and topcoat, donned my hat, and trotted off to the office. After the usual badinage with Gloria, I dropped into the chair in front of my office typewriter, reflected on how life was just one damn typewriter after another, and typed up my notes from last night. I left them on Brass’s desk along with a chit for $37.40 in expenses. Maybe he could find something useful in them.

I was clipping items of interest from last week’s
Variety
and
Billboard
magazines and arranging them artistically by subject for pasting into our scrapbook, when Brass came in at ten-thirty. Don’t be misled, Brass’s interests are broader than showbiz and glamour; we also clip the
New York Times
and the
Daily News
and the
Wall Street Journal
, and save two years’ worth of back copies of the
American Mercury
, the
Nation
, the
New Republic, Harper’s
, the
Partisan Review
, and random issues of various other magazines that catch Brass’s eye from time to time.

At 10:45 the intercom buzzed three times, the signal for Gloria and me to go into the inner sanctum.

Brass was standing behind his desk and glaring at the door as we entered, a sign of annoyance. Legend has it that when he was truly peeved he stood
on
the desk, but that may be apocryphal; at least I had not seen it in my four years with the firm. He waited as we approached. When we reached the edge of our side of the desk, he sat down and smiled up at us.

“Thirty-seven dollars and forty cents,” he said, indicating a small pile of money on a corner of the desk.

“Ah!” I said.

It had been the final sign of Brass’s trust in me when, after I worked for him for two years, he had given me fifty dollars in expense money to keep in my wallet, to be used to pay for useful information and renewed by chit whenever it was depleted. The trust in question did not involve the money as such, I handled much larger sums for Brass almost from the day of my employment. It was trust in my judgment as to what constituted useful information. Gloria, I believe, kept a hundred, which she seldom needed to use: men told her things just to see if they could make her smile or frown—laugh or cry was out of the question.

“Go on, take the money,” Brass directed. “Just remember in the future, if I’m going to entertain a dozen chorus girls, I’d like to be there to enjoy it. Unless, of course, you got something I can use out of the discussion. But I don’t see anything of even passing interest in these notes.”

I picked up the bills and stuffed them into my wallet. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“You spent thirty-seven dollars of my money, and discovered that Two-Headed Mary is indeed kind to chorus girls, sympathetic to their problems, and willing to help them out when they are in need. Good. But we knew that. You found out that Two-Headed Mary might have been responsible for getting Billie Trask the job from which she either stole or didn’t steal a large sum of money. Someone in the police department would probably like to know that, but it’s nothing I can use.”

He paused to take a breath. “Further, you’ve found that Mary claims to live in four different places, none of them the right one; has five different daughters, two of them dead, none of them the one we know; has a boyfriend on the police force, a husband in the navy, and a dog which is, at different times, a schnauzer, a dachshund and a St. Bernard.” He riffled through my notes. “And then there’s her past. She told one of your young ladies that she used to be in the chorus herself; Florenz Ziegfeld having personally picked her out for the 1916
Follies
when she was just a girl. That was, of course, between or among her careers as a nurse, a high-wire performer, and one of the girl riders in the
Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.
”

“She does seem to have a dislike for telling a story the same way twice,” Gloria offered. “Maybe it has something to do with her years involved in the big con. Maybe she likes to keep in practice.”

Brass shook his head. “When you’re on the grift you’re prepared to lie,” he said, “but you don’t make a fetish of it. It’s too hard remembering what you said to whom. The idea is to make up a believable story and stick to it.”

“Maybe she’s practicing for the Olympics,” I suggested. “Freestyle prevarication, skeet-shooting, and leaping to conclusions.”

Brass eyed me speculatively before transferring his gaze to the Pearson landscape on the wall behind me. “This does add an interesting new dimension to the problem of finding out what happened to her,” he said.

“And then, of course, there’s the sister that she has been visiting—the one her daughter claims doesn’t exist,” I added.

Gloria and I maintained a discreet silence while Brass pondered further.

“I take it back,” Brass said. “This information is possibly useful. It establishes a pattern that we might not have realized. It may be of great importance in finding her, or finding out what happened to her.”

“A pattern of prevarication,” Gloria said. “Where does that get us?”

“Before we can find Two-Headed Mary,” Brass explained, “it may be necessary to discover just which Two-Headed Mary has turned up missing.”

Brass has a knack for saying things like that: they seem to make sense, but when you try to work them around in your mind the sense tends to stay just beyond your grasp. I thought that one over. “I think I get it,” I said, “but didn’t they all go missing at the same time, since they’re all in the same body?”

“Consider the possibilities,” Brass said. “She may have had to suddenly leave the country, or at least the New York area. She may be hiding out from someone. She may have been kidnapped. She may be using a different persona in the furtherance of some goal or scheme, possibly connected to her having been on the grift. Or she may have been—or appeared to be—so dangerous to someone that she’s been eliminated.”

“You think she’s been taken for a ride?” I asked.

“It’s a possibility.”

“I thought gangsters avoided killing women.”

“That’s because so few women are threats or business rivals. But I don’t insist that it was gangsters. There is no class of society that is exempt from committing murder.”

“It might not be anything as serious as you’re thinking,” Gloria offered. “Maybe she just went on vacation without realizing that anyone would miss her.”

Brass shook his head. “In that case, she would have read my column, or someone would have pointed it out to her, and she would certainly have called her daughter or someone on the Street, or possibly called me directly at the newspaper.”

I refrained from pointing out that there are cities where “Brass Tacks” is not available, people who choose to read papers that don’t carry “Brass Tacks,” and people who wouldn’t read “Brass Tacks” if it were thrust before their eyes. Brass would not have thought that to be constructive criticism and at the moment, jobs are not that easy to get, even for people with my wit and tact.

“If what happened to her was the result of actions or threats by a second party: abduction, mayhem, concealment, voluntary or involuntary incarceration, then it becomes relevant to discover just which Two-Headed Mary her adversary believed he was acting on. Consider the possibility that one of Two-Headed Mary’s blithely told fantasies resulted in her disappearance,” Brass said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“There are many possibilities. Suppose Mary told someone that she was really the daughter of John D. Rockefeller. And suppose that person kidnapped her and is now sending ransom notes to a very puzzled Rockefeller household. Or suppose she professed to know the location of some fabulous treasure, and someone took her at her word and won’t believe her protestations of prevarication.”

“Suppose she told someone she was Anastasia, the Tsar’s daughter,” Gloria suggested, getting into the spirit of the game, “and she’s been abducted by Bolsheviks.”

“Suppose she’s been arrested on Tenth Avenue for being drunk and disorderly, and she’s serving two weeks on Rikers Island,” I said.

Gloria glared at me.

“Unlikely,” Brass said.

I tried again. “Suppose the rapture came, and she’s been wafted off to heaven.”