Too Soon Dead (7 page)

“When you’re right, you’re right,” I said, knowing when to beat a graceful retreat. I took the first four names and went to my little cubical with them.

Bertram Childers
Gerald Garbin
Ephraim L. Wackersan II
Pass Helbine

Definitely names to conjure with. I got busy with my conjuring. Senator Childers was a snap. His Trenton office was happy to tell me that he had been in Washington for the past two weeks, but would be back in New Jersey, at his estate in Deal, tomorrow, and would be pleased to be interviewed by someone from the
World
if I would just call them to set it up first.

Judge Garbin didn’t give interviews, his clerk told me. But when I asked him for the judge’s schedule for the past two weeks, the clerk read it off to me out of his desk diary without pausing to inquire why. I guess they’re used to odd requests from the press. The judge had been presiding over a complex civil case involving airplane parts for the past week. The week before that he had sat in judgment on the Florence Maybelle murder case. I had almost gone to sit in on that one myself. Mrs. Maybelle, twenty-nine, had been accused of murdering her husband, Roy, sixty-seven, a boating tycoon, for his money. She claimed that she thought he was a burglar. When called to the stand she had shed a lot of tears and shown a lot of leg, and been acquitted by the all-male jury, one of whom proposed marriage to her before she left the courtroom.

Ephraim Wackersan was more of a problem. He didn’t believe in telephones, so the only one in his Sixth Avenue store was in the order department. The chief order-taker, a grimly efficient-sounding woman, assured me that he was there, that he arrived every day well before the store opened at 8 a.m. and remained until well after the store closed at 6 p.m. But could she really know that? He could have snuck out without his order department knowing a thing about it, or so I had to assume. I would reserve that one and go inspect the premises in person if Brass deemed it necessary. Onward to number four.

Pass Helbine proved difficult to find, and even more difficult to pin down. He wasn’t in his New York office, and his secretary was vague about when he had been in. He wasn’t at his Long Island estate, and his housekeeper said that he and the third Mrs. Helbine were in and out regularly, and she really couldn’t keep track.

I started calling the Helbine Houses—the six flophouses that Helbine had painted and refurbished to give the bums a clean place to sleep at a dime a flop. The desk clerk at the first one I called suggested that I call another one, which I did. Helbine was there, serving dinner in the dining room. He came to the phone and yelled “Hello!” into the mouthpiece.

“Mr. Helbine? My name is Morgan DeWitt. I’m with the
New York World.
Could I have a minute of your time?”

“Now?”

“If it’s convenient.” I shifted the earpiece to my other hand. I really hate talking on the telephone.

“It isn’t convenient, but then it never is,” his voice boomed. “What do you want?”

“My paper wants to do a piece on you. ‘Two Weeks in the Life of a Philanthropist.’”

“You want to follow me around for two weeks?”

“No. We feel that it wouldn’t be spontaneous if we were with you. We’ll just go with your last two weeks—whatever you did for the last two weeks. That is, unless there’s something you’d rather not have us write about. We’ll just interview you and whoever you’ve been with for the last two weeks. And we’ll have to take pictures of the places you’ve been, of course.”

I could hear that strange telephone sound that I always thought of as the static between the stars while he thought this over. “My life is an open book,” he said finally. “I am essentially a public man.”

“That’s a wonderful attitude, Mr. Helbine,” I said. “If you could just tell me where you’ve been the past two weeks—what places you visited, who you talked to.”

“Well now,” he said. “I’ll have to make a list. I couldn’t even tell you, right off, where I had lunch yesterday. Give me a day or so; I’ll have my secretary type it up for you. Sort of a reverse itinerary, you might call it.”

“You haven’t been to any place especially exotic, have you?” I asked him. “I mean, if you took a flying trip to Europe or South America, I don’t know if the
World
would spring for sending me and a photographer in your footsteps.”

He laughed, a hearty haw-haw, us-boys-around-the-campfire-together sort of laugh. “No, nothing like that. Just dull old New York City and my Long Island estate, if I remember correctly. Call my secretary tomorrow. I’ll have it typed for you.”

“On behalf of the
New York World
and our two million readers, I thank you,” I told him.

“Of course,” he said. We both hung up. One thing about dealing with very rich people, particularly when they consider themselves philanthropists or industrialists or art collectors or have some other hobby that the rest of us can’t afford: they expect other people to be interested in their lives. I understand that the Kings Louis of France, from number thirteen onward, used to have people come into their bedrooms in the morning and sit in a sort of gallery to watch them get up and go to the bathroom. It was considered a great honor to be invited, or you had to buy a ticket, I forget which. Maybe both.

Someone was crying; the sound came clearly into my small cubicle. I got up and went to the outer office. Cathy Wild Fox née Karen Welikof was standing in the middle of the floor in front of Gloria’s desk clutching in one hand a cloth coat with some sort of fur collar, and in the other the white envelope that Brass had given her. She was holding the envelope out to Gloria, who had stood up on her side of the desk, and was trying to say something, but only incoherent sobs were coming out.

Gloria and I helped Cathy to the leather couch that stretched along one wall of the office, and I took the coat and envelope from her hands and stuffed the oversized white handkerchief from the breast pocket of my jacket into them. Gloria knelt on the couch next to Cathy and took her head in her arms like a mother holding a child. “There, there,” she said. “You’d better stop that sobbing. Your mascara is running, and you’ll get the hiccups.”

Cathy buried her head in the handkerchief and took many deep breaths and then blew her nose three or four times, wiped her face, and looked up. Her mascara was all over her face, her lipstick was smeared, and her eyes were red and puffy, and she looked beautiful.

“My God,” she said. “I’m sorry; I couldn’t help it. How do I look?”

“Like a chipmunk who’s trying to disguise herself as a raccoon,” Gloria told her. “Come with me; I’ll fix you up.”

The two girls disappeared down the hallway into Brass’s private washroom. I hung up Cathy’s coat and put the white envelope down on the table and sat on the couch. The coat smelled of face powder and perfume, and I found myself thinking of all that Fox had lost.

I suddenly found myself very upset. I was sniffling. Luckily I had another handkerchief. I blew my nose just as Cathy and Gloria emerged from the bathroom. I was glad that they hadn’t seen me. A man should never be seen crying.

The puffy redness was still evident on Cathy’s face, but the mascara and other externals had been repaired. She came over to me and put out her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t intend to make a scene. I’ll have your handkerchief cleaned.”

I took her hand. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll just give it to the woman who does my washing. My laundry is usually so dull that she’s been feeling sorry for me. A lipstick-smeared handkerchief will cheer her up.” I was still holding Cathy’s hand, and I quickly let it go before anyone else noticed.

Cathy smiled, which was quite an achievement, all things considered. “I wanted to see Mr. Brass,” she said. She indicated the envelope on the table with a wide, expressive gesture using both arms, as though the envelope had suddenly become a hippopotamus. “I can’t take that.”

“What’s the matter with it?” I asked.

Gloria picked it up. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s some money that Brass left Mrs. Fox to pay for some work Billy did, ah, a few days ago,” I improvised. I restrained myself from saying what I thought: that Brass had stuck fifty or a hundred dollars in the envelope to help assuage the guilt he felt because Fox had died while working for him. Hell, I didn’t blame him.
I
felt guilty myself, and I hadn’t done anything.

“It’s not, you know,” Cathy said.

“How’s that?”

“It’s a gesture. Bill never earned that. It’s a wonderful gesture, but I can’t let him do it. I can’t take that.”

Gloria slipped open the envelope and took out the bills inside. “Some gesture,” she said, fanning them like a bridge hand. “So that’s what McKinley looks like.”

I took a look and then got up and leaned toward them, drawn to the bills like I might be drawn to a precious stone: How often does one get to see such a magnificent sight? There were twelve bills in the fan: 2 five-hundred-dollar bills and 10 hundred-dollar bills. “That’s two thousand dollars,” I said cleverly.

Gloria looked at me. “Very good!” she said. “Next week we’ll start you on simple fractions.”

Cathy reached out and touched the fan of money, and then drew her hand away. “You know, I get five dollars a night for singing at the club,” she said. “I sing three nights a week. That’s fifteen dollars a week. And dinners; they feed me on the nights I work.”

Gloria stuffed the money back into the envelope and laid it gently on the table. “That’s not so bad, kid,” she said.

“I know,” Cathy said. “A lot of people get by on less. It’s what I want to do, and I’m lucky to be doing it. Now that Bill is dead, the men are going to start—touching—me again, but I guess I can handle that.”

“Touching you?” I asked. “The customers?”

“No, the bosses. Wherever I work there always seems to be at least one boss who thinks he has the right to touch me. Bill put a stop to that. But now he’s gone.”

“I know what you mean,” Gloria said. “All men are wolves.” She gave me a dirty look because I was the only available man.

“Isn’t that a good reason to take the money?” I asked her. “It will mean you won’t have to work any place where they don’t treat you with respect. It will mean you can take voice lessons. Not that I think you need them,” I added, realizing how that might sound. “But I’ve heard that all singers always want to take voice lessons.”

“You think I should take the money?” Cathy asked. “Even though Bill did nothing to earn it except get killed? And I’m sure he wasn’t planning to do that.”

“I think Mr. Brass wants you to have the money,” I told her. “I think he can afford it. I think he will be offended if you turn it down. I think he regrets that there is nothing else he can do to pay Fox for what happened except to give you money.”

“But that’s almost two years’ salary!” Cathy said.

“Not for Mr. Brass,” I said. “The amount he gives you has to be meaningful to him, even if it seems overwhelming to you. Otherwise there’s no point to it.”

“That makes a certain amount of sense,” Gloria said. “Listen, kid, keep the money. If you try to give it back to Brass, he’ll probably burn it.”

“Oh, no!” Cathy said. “That would be horrible!”

W
e worked hard and long to convince Cathy to keep the money. She felt, as best she could express it, that having a husband get murdered was a hell of a way to earn two thousand dollars. If Brass was really going to burn it, then she would take it and give it to charity. I told her that Brass already gave enough to charity, which was true, although some of his charities wouldn’t have made the Bishop’s List. Finally we convinced her that Billy—William—would certainly want her to keep it, and that Mr. Brass wanted her to keep it, and so she should keep it. Gloria stuffed the bills back into the envelope and pressed it into her hands, and she clutched it to her bosom and started to sob quietly. Gloria kept talking, ignoring the tears, and I figured that Gloria must know what she was doing, so I joined in. We were deciding for her just how and where to do the keeping.

She shouldn’t walk around with that much money, we decided; she might be robbed. And she’d better not leave it at home; she might be burglarized. And she couldn’t trust banks, which could close, or move to Albania, and what could you do about that? Gloria and I came up with some esoteric solutions. I suggested that she fill her kitchen and living room with cans of tuna fish, spinach, and condensed milk; then at least she could always eat. Gloria held out for buying the biggest, best damned diamond ring she could for the money. “And don’t mind the imperfections, as long as you can only see them under a microscope,” Gloria said. “Imperfections are between you and your jeweler; as far as the world is concerned, it’s the size that counts.” We had Cathy giggling, and her tears had just about dried up when Brass came through the door, and in an instant all our good work flew out the window.

Cathy turned to face Brass and the tear ducts opened. She thrust the envelope full of cash out in front of her. “Oh, Mr. Brass,” she wailed, “I can’t take this!”

Brass took a second to focus on her, and another second to think about what she’d said. Then he reached out and took the envelope from her hands. “All right,” he said. He patted her on the shoulder, and then walked through the room and down the short hall to his own office.

When I was eight years old I was knocked out of a rowboat by a medium-sized bass that I was trying to land. That was the last time I was quite this startled. At least this time I wasn’t wet. The three of us formed a tableau for a minute: Cathy standing as she was and sobbing, and Gloria and I too stunned to move. At least I was; the expression on Gloria’s face was hard to read. I have never actually seen Gloria surprised at anything, and a lot of surprising things have happened in that office.

The intercom buzzed twice, the signal for Gloria to go into Brass’s office instead of answering, and so she did. Cathy turned to look at me, and then suddenly burst into fresh sobs and threw herself on the couch. I sat beside her and patted her on the shoulder and tried to think of something clever to say.