Authors: Thomas Mallon
Bandbox (25 page)
“Yeah?” said Cuddles, cocking an eyebrow—a gesture that had once supplied Harris with a bigger dose of reality than any well-reasoned lecture from Spilkes. At this unexpected reprise of it, Harris’s eyes nearly glistened. If there were any justice in the world—if Cuddles hadn’t betrayed him by
losing interest
—the two of them would be back in his own office right now, huddled around the bottle of Stoli as if it were the last grenade in their foxhole.
“Turn Max loose on the kid,” Cuddles calmly advised. “Readers want to imagine ravishing Rosie on a pile of money. They don’t want us telling them she’s got a social disease.”
“You know,” said Harris, after some hesitation, “it scares me to hear you thinking like an editor.” He waited some more. “Tell me what’s so damned important about this Shepard kid. Why are
you
so interested in a mother’s tears?”
For much of the day Cuddles had been wondering that himself. Maybe the question required a head doctor: Was he really trying to find his
own
lost carcass? Or was he just hoping that here, somehow, might lie the opportunity to crank himself back to life in front of Becky? All he knew for certain was that the story had stuck to him even before Stanwick and Spilkes began confabulating about it this morning.
“Norman and Max have their reasons,” said Cuddles. “That should be enough for you. Me agreeing is only like some exception proving a rule.”
“I don’t follow you,” said Harris.
“I don’t either,” replied Cuddles. “Just do the story. It’s a good one.”
Maybe it was, thought Harris. Maybe they should go ahead and find the kid and thereby stick it to Boylan and the whole NYPD, so busy taking graft they had no time to concern themselves with the nation’s missing young men, its future Lindberghs being swallowed up by urban evildoers. Harris felt himself warming to the idea. He tried picturing his readers like those folks who sit around the radio until the trapped miner is pulled free. They’d be watching their mailboxes waiting for news of John—no, the magazine would call him Jack, or even better,
Shep
. Maybe there
was
something here. And besides, who knew how many chances against Jimmy he had left?
“Okay,” said Harris. “We’ll do it, but if it fails, it was your call.”
Cuddles smiled. “Delighted to know my head’s still worth platter space.”
“Now lend me two bucks,” said Harris, who took the cash and went back to his office, leaving Cuddles to reflect that he might as well get fired over something instead of nothing.
From the boss’s office, he soon, almost nostalgically, heard a clatter of hangers and some good-night bellowing: “And while he’s at it,” cried ’Phat, pulling his topcoat from the closet, “tell Stanwick to find my goddamn moose!”
To guard against using it in a moment of romantic desperation, Daisy had rarely taken, or even allowed herself to know, any man’s phone number.
But this was a moment of
real
desperation, and she thanked her stars as soon as she located the number for Chip’s horrible rooming house on a crumpled piece of paper inside an old purse. Dialing with the tip of a trembling fingernail—which even now she could see needed new polish—she prayed that Chip’s huge Norwegian landlady wouldn’t pick up and yell at her about the lateness of the hour.
“Yeah?” said a rough male voice instead.
“May I please speak to Mr. Brzezinski? It’s an emergency.”
“Sure, lady,” said this other tenant. “It’ll be a pleasure to wake him.” He went off to bang on Chip’s door down the hall. The whole sordid place came back to Daisy as she heard the footsteps and knocking through the phone. At last Chip took the receiver on his end.
“Listen, Mabel, I told you to stop—”
“Chip, it’s Daisy.” At the sound of her own name, she burst into self-pitying tears. “He’s dead!” she cried. “Please come over right away! I need you!”
Chip’s thoughts, few and far apart tonight, began to multiply; they required a moment’s collection. He’d heard that this judge of hers wasn’t on the level. If there’d been a rubout, did he want to be around while the countess decided whether to call the cops?
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“Yes—except for the body!” said Daisy, with a gasp. “Please take a cab!”
Chip liked to hold as many markers as possible, and this one, he realized, might be worth plenty. Maybe riding off to the damsel in distress would net him some piece of juicy, damaging information on Harris, which Chip had always suspected Daisy of possessing. Of course, like everyone else, he had a soft spot for her; that
he
was all she had to call at a moment like this struck even Chip as sad. Some Valentine’s Day.
“Give me ten minutes,” he finally said.
It took him no more than that to get from Ninth Avenue to Beekman
Place. On the third floor, Daisy stood, shaking, behind her apartment door, which was open a few inches but still chained. As soon as she let him in, even before he could spot the twisted form under a sheet on the Murphy bed, a narrative flood started to pour out of her:
“I knew I’d be alone tonight, but I didn’t mind: I had things to do.” (Remembering the bottle of Wyeth’s Sage Tea and Sulfur Compound, with which she’d been planning to dye her hair, she moved to hide it from Chip’s sight.) “The judge had told me he’d be attending a Bar Association dinner, which did sound a bit unlikely for Valentine’s Day, but as you know, dear Chip, I don’t believe in being a clinging vine. I knew he really had some business at Lindy’s, and I wouldn’t pry into it.” More tears began escaping, but she managed to continue: “I never open the door these days, not with all the suspicious characters who have been coming around—a jurist makes so many enemies! But I recognized the voice, even the knock, and I let him in.”
At this point she sat down in a club chair and gave way to sobbing.
“Right,” said Chip, as he wondered, given her emotional state, whether the two of them might not wind up knocking off a piece before the cops showed up to haul away the judge. He looked over at the sheet but couldn’t see any blood. They must have strangled the poor bastard. Where’d she hide when they did? And why’d they let her go? “So they forced their way in behind him …,” he said, encouraging her to complete the story.
Daisy, looking perplexed through her tears, asked: “They?”
“Whoever did this to the judge,” said Chip.
“The judge is at Lindy’s.”
“Then who—?” With more exasperation than squeamishness, Chip lifted the sheet on the Murphy bed, revealing the contorted form of Siegfried von Erhard. No wounds of any kind were visible, not even at the neck; in fact, were Siegfried lying face up instead of
down, Chip was pretty sure there’d be evidence the newsstand owner had died smiling.
“It didn’t happen often,” said Daisy, who was calmer now. “But sometimes when his wife was cross, preoccupied by the business and being a bit of a scold, he’d come here for a sympathetic female ear, a softer touch. He’d tell Hannelore he was going out for a bottle of milk. She’d be sleeping when he got back. Perhaps they had some unspoken understanding. You know, in today’s modern world—”
Even the Wood Chipper, whose ear was not the best, realized that Daisy, too, now talked like a magazine. It happened to a lot of people in the trade. He decided to stop listening to her and get down to business. Having once seen his father do what had to be done with a corpse in far worse shape than Siegfried, he went about dressing the news slinger, starting with his socks. “Don’t worry,” he told Daisy, “we’ll find some spot to set him down in. Someplace they’ll find him fast. It’ll look like his heart blew a gasket while he was out for a walk. Which is pretty much what happened, no?”
Chip nicked a dolly from the basement of Daisy’s building and trundled Siegfried’s still-warm remains (covered by a
Bandbox
garment bag that Daisy had around) almost twenty blocks south. He unzipped his cargo at the darkest point between two streetlamps, remembering Daisy’s suggestion that he put a quart of milk not far from Siegfried’s right hand—a consoling fiction for Hannelore’s benefit.
THE DAILY NEWS,
FRIDAY, FEB. 17, 1928, P. 7.
MAG PUTS CRIME SCRIBE ON TRAIL OF MISSING HOOSIER
Yesterday afternoon, Jehoshaphat (“Joe”) Harris, editor-in-chief of the embattled “Bandbox,” announced the assignment of novelist-cum-crime-reporter Max Stanwick to investigate the disappearance of John Shepard, an Indiana subscriber not seen since the night of January 18th, when he appeared as a guest of the magazine at a party in publisher Hiram Oldcastle’s Park Avenue penthouse.
“Shep was like some Horatio Alger kid and Frank Merriwell all rolled into one,” said Harris, fighting back emotion in his midtown office (see NEWS foto, facing page). “We thought—did I say that?—we
think
the world of him, and are sure he’s destined for great things once he’s back among us.” Harris insisted that if he had known about the young man’s disappearance sooner, he would have cancelled his recent trip to the British Isles.
“In an age of fair-weather friends and high-speed trends,” the editor-in-chief declared, “our subscribers are loyal to us, and we’re loyal to them.” Recent circulation and ad figures—see the NEWS’ Business Page—cast some doubt on the fidelity of “Bandbox” ’s readers and advertisers, but Harris was having none of it when confronted with the numbers. He would say only that the
deployment of Stanwick’s imagination and investigative skills would lead to the safe return of young Shepard, who had apparently been in the middle of a spontaneous trip to New York.
Asked to comment on the Hoosier’s disappearance, Captain Patrick Boylan, speaking for the police commissioner, told the NEWS: “Yes, we got a report only the other day about this young fellow of no fixed address who left a suitcase and an unpaid bill at one of the city’s YMCAs—the sort of thing that happens a dozen times a week. We’ve been told that a trunk was sent from Greencastle, Indiana, to New York a few days before Mr. Shepard went missing, but so far nothing has turned up.”
Boylan speculated that the young man “may have taken off from the city just as impulsively as he came here,” and suggested, if that was the case, that he “call his mother.”
As for Joe Harris, the captain said, “If he really wants to help our Missing Persons squad, he’ll assist them in finding Mr. Waldo Lindstrom.”
Lindstrom, the magazine’s most popular cover subject, has reportedly jumped bail after a recent arrest for possession of narcotics. Giovanni Roma, proprietor of the Malocchio restaurant and a crony of Harris’, allegedly sold him the dope. Other “Bandbox” staff and associates have recently been nabbed for plagiarism and a drunken assault on the nation’s Chief Magistrate.
One observer of the magazine industry expressed surprise that in the midst of such troubles, Harris would let himself be distracted by “some woe on the Wabash.”
Reading the story behind his desk at 8:00
A.M.
, Harris scowled, annoyed that the circulation figures and Boylan’s skeptical quotes had been thrown in. Stanwick
was
, in fact, pursuing Lindstrom, if only in connection with Shep, and he was also looking for the trunk the cops
had been unable to find. Max had pledged not to show his face in the office until he’d located both “the fled flit and the vamoosed valise.”
Harris turned the page with an angry snap. He made breakneck progress through the rest of the paper, pausing only to read, in its entirety, a small obituary of Siegfried von Erhard—run as a professional courtesy of the newspaper fraternity. The small type took note of Siegfried’s birth in Dusseldorf; his peacetime service in the Kaiser’s army; and his unsuccessful butter-and-egg business, which had collapsed just before his proud emigration to this country in 1914. The notice declared that the vendor’s death had come from a coronary suffered only a block from his home in Kips Bay. His spouse, Hannelore, was his only survivor.
Well, thought Harris, that fishwife frau had driven the poor guy to an early grave.
Actually, thirteen floors below, Siegfried had just, in a manner of speaking, returned to work. Having kept the newsstand shut for two days, Hannelore was opening its scissor-gate and removing the counter displays of pipe cleaners and Life Savers in order to make room, beside the cash register, for her husband’s ashes. She turned the urn so its Iron Cross wouldn’t face customers, and then she sighed. Life had to go on. She had been thinking this same thought half an hour ago, while soaking her Post Toasties in the last of the milk Siegfried had gone out for Tuesday night. Right now she was rereading his obituary, though keeping one eye on the stenographer thumbing through an unpurchased copy of
Harper’s Bazaar
.
“This is a newsstand, not a ‘view stand’!” cried Hannelore, already back in form.
Preceded by Mukluk on his pink leash, Betty Divine entered the Graybar lobby. She was earlier than usual. Thanks to Joe, her sleep
patterns were all off. During his nights at the Warwick, he got up half a dozen times to pace; and when he stayed home in Murray Hill, he’d call her after midnight or before five to rehash his anxieties about Hi and Jimmy. This morning, never expecting Hannelore to have reopened, Betty had bought her paper at the corner. Startled by the retracted scissor-gate, she approached the newsstand to pay her respects: “Mrs. von Erhard! Shouldn’t you be giving yourself a little more time?”
“Thank you, Miss Divine,” said Hannelore, bowing her head to a depth befitting conversation with an editor-in-chief. “But Siegfried would have wanted me back to normal as soon as possible.”
Betty missed two or three words of this, but heard Mrs. von Erhard tap her wedding ring, with a sort of prideful affection, against a glazed urn that looked quite a bit like a beer stein. After a moment Betty understood that Siegfried now resided within it.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.
“Few have been so kind as you,” replied Hannelore.
“And I’m sorry to hear that,” said Betty, who wondered how Mrs. von Erhard expected the pity normally due a widow when for years she’d been tearing into potential mourners, like that poor girl eyeing the
Bazaar
.
