The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (13 page)

“So,” Raab continued, “when the detectives from Homicide North arrived—a pair of bright lads named Bracken and Yarrow—they examined the clothing by the body and determined that the garments probably belonged to a larger woman. Which of them is such an expert on women’s clothing I refrained from asking, although I would hope it is Bracken, who is a married man. At which point the precinct officers told them of the second set of clothes, and they went to speak with the bum—Lupoff—who was awaiting his fate in the backseat of the patrol car. After protesting his innocence and making several comments on the state of the economy and the habits and customs of the police, Lupoff agreed to lead the detectives back to where he had found the garments.

“The detectives went to the garbage can in question and examined it. They discovered a few items that Lupoff had missed; among them a small purse containing two dollars and twenty-three cents and a calling card, but no identification.

“So,” Raab continued, “the homicide boys were in the odd position of having one dead, naked female body and two sets of female clothing. It occurred to them that the murderer might have placed the wrong clothes next to the body to mislead the investigation, so they tried a shoe from each pair on the dead girl’s foot. They had something of a problem as the body was in full rigor, but it did seem as though the shoes from the garbage can”—he consulted his notes—“a pair of black pumps, fit better than the brown open-toe flats found by the body. This seemed to confirm their earlier observation about the clothing.”

“Two sets of clothing,” Brass commented. “That’s a new one.”

“We assume,” Raab told him, “that the killer meant for the girl’s real clothes to be on a garbage scow headed out to sea by now, and supplied the alternate wardrobe so we wouldn’t hunt around. But just why he went to the trouble, that we don’t know yet. The clothing doesn’t seem to tell us much.”

“How do you know the girl’s name?” Brass asked.

“It was printed in indelible ink on the back of the dress label.”

“The garbage-can dress?”

“Yeah. I guess it told us that much anyway. The other name—Yency—was written on an identification card in a wallet in the pile of clothing by the body. We don’t know whether it means anything or not. But Lydia Laurent is this girl’s real name.” He turned to me. “She was a hoofer in
Fine and Dandy
at the Royal Theater. Is that where you met her?”

“I didn’t meet her,” I said. And then it hit me. “Wait a minute! We talked to some dancers from several of the musicals the other day, but I don’t think any of them were named Lydia. I can tell you in a second.” I fished in my jacket pocket for my little notebook and flipped the pages. “Here it is. No-none of them were named Lydia.”

Raab took the notebook and stared at the page. “‘Terri, Maxine, Aud, Dossie, Vera, Yvette,’—what were you planning to do, set up a harem?”

“It was all very moral and approved by the Legion of Decency,” I told him. “Miss Adams was chaperoning.”

“They were there at my instructions,” Brass said, which was nice of him, considering. “We were trying to get some background on Two-Headed Mary.”

“Two-Headed—oh yeah, the old-lady scam artist who has come up missing.”

“She wasn’t so old,” I told him.

Raab looked at me blankly.

“I did a mention of her in my column,” Brass said.

“Yeah, I saw it. Did you find anything?”

“Enough about her past to write a book,” Brass said. “But much of it was contradictory, and most of it, apparently, would be fiction. Nothing as yet that would give us a lead as to her present location.”

“She’ll turn up,” Raab predicted. “One way or another.”

Gloria walked across the room and sat on the wooden chair we keep on the side of the desk next to the wall. “You know, we must have seen her,” she said quietly.

“Two-Headed Mary?” Brass asked.

“No. This girl—Lydia. When we went to the show on Thursday, she must have been in the chorus.” She turned to Raab. “Lydia was alive on Thursday?”

“She was killed a few hours before she was found—say late Saturday night,” Raab said. “Strangled. Manually. By somebody with average-size hands, but powerful.” Raab eyed my hands thoughtfully. “From the front,” he added. “The killer was watching the girl’s face as she died. And his face was the last thing she saw.”

I pictured the girls I had seen in that long room and wondered which she was. Lydia. Something clicked in my memory. “Liddy!” I said, slapping the side of the chair.

“What’s that?” Raab demanded.

“A girl named—something out of Shakespeare—Ophelia, no, Viola. That’s it.”

“Another name? Is that the name you knew her as?”

“No, no. I didn’t know her. But I remember a girl named Viola—I’m pretty sure it was Viola—came up to me backstage and said that her friend Liddy might know something useful, but Liddy had already left, so Viola was going to find her. I gave Viola my card and wrote something on the back. ‘Sardi’s,’ I think, because that’s where we were meeting the other girls.”

“You think ‘Liddy’ is Lydia?” Brass asked.

“If the inspector has my card in that envelope, and it says ‘Sardi’s’ on it, I do.”

“She might know something useful about what?” Raab asked.

“Two-Headed Mary.”

“Damn!” he said. “What’s Two-Headed Mary got to do with this?”

“She’s missing,” Brass said. “We’re looking for her.”

“A lot of people are missing,” Raab said. “There are a couple of hundred missing persons reports filled out every week in Manhattan.”

“Is DeWitt right?” Brass asked. “Is it his calling card you have in that envelope? Does it have ‘Sardi’s’ written on it?”

Raab took the envelope from his pocket and slid the card into his hand. “That’s it,” he said, holding it up. “With ‘Sardi’s ASAP’ written on the back.”

“I forgot the ASAP,” I said.

“You damn near forgot the whole thing,” he said. “Will this Viola remember you?”

“Probably,” I told him. “If not, the girls on that list will.”

“Well,” Brass said, “are you satisfied?”

Inspector Raab leaned back and stared at the far wall. “No,” he said. “The person who killed Lydia Laurent is still walking around and I don’t know who he is. No, I’m not satisfied.”

“Was the girl raped?” Brass asked.

“The medical examiner thinks not. There were compression marks on her wrists and ankles, so she was probably tied up before she was killed. But she was not raped and not battered.” Raab grimaced. “Merely strangled.”

“Tell me,” Brass asked. “Aside from your moral outrage, this isn’t the sort of case that would usually get the head of Homicide North questioning suspects. Just what are you doing here?”

“Trying to spare your amanuensis here the embarrassment of having to come down to the squad room,” Raab said.

“Bull,” Brass said. “Try again.”

Raab sighed. “You won’t use this until I tell you it’s okay?”

“My word. I will probably never use whatever you tell me at all, at least not directly. I am a columnist, not a reporter.”

“Yeah,” Raab said. “The master of indirection. Well anyway, Lydia Laurent was the roommate of Billie Trask.”

“The girl that disappeared with all the money,” Gloria said.

“That one,” Raab agreed.

“A missing persons case?” Brass raised an eyebrow, a gesture he must have practiced in front of a mirror to get just that level of disdain in it. “As you just said, there are a couple of hundred every week.”

Raab took his cigar out of his pocket and jammed it into his mouth. “It’s political,” he said. He took a wooden match from another pocket and struck it against the sole of his shoe. He stared at the flame for a moment and then took the cigar from his mouth and carefully blew out the match. He looked around for an ashtray.

“Here,” Gloria said. “Let me take that for you.” She removed the match to the wastebasket under Brass’s desk.

Raab jammed the cigar back in his pocket. “Thanks,” he said. He leaned forward and regarded Brass thoughtfully. “There’s more to this case, this Trask business, than is out there in the papers.”

“You mean the
Daily Mirror
doesn’t know more than the police department about this?” Brass asked. “Won’t Winchell be surprised!”

“Yeah, well… there was some other stuff missing from the box-office safe.”

“What sort of stuff?”

“That’s not clear, at least not to me. But pressure’s being put on the commissioner to find the girl, and he is pushing it down the line. So when the Trask girl’s roommate turns up dead, it is of more than usual interest.” Raab pushed himself heavily to his feet.

“Will you keep us informed, Inspector?” Brass asked.

“About what?”

“Your progress on this case. And if we find anything helpful, I’ll let you know.”

“Yeah, I’d appreciate that,” Raab said. “If you want to go on looking for Two-Headed Mary, that’s your business and good luck to you. But my assumption is that the Lydia Laurent killing had to do with the Billie Trask disappearance. And you’d do better to keep away from this Billie Trask case. Hell, I’d like to keep away from it myself.”

“What if they’re connected?” Brass asked.

“Connected? Now wouldn’t that be something.” Raab eyed Brass speculatively. “Do you know something, or are you just talking?”

Brass shrugged. “Two women disappear. The same girl knows both of them, and she turns up dead. Don’t you think there’s a connection?”

“Damn!” Raab said. “I hope not!”

Inspector Raab stopped in the outer office long enough to jam his hat on his head and throw his overcoat over his arm, and then strode down the hall to the elevator. As he got on, K. Jeffrey Welton, boy producer, got off.

“Say,” K. Jeffrey said in the sort of stage whisper that can be heard from the topmost balcony, “wasn’t that Inspector What’s-his-name?”

“Raab,” I said.

“That’s the one. Homicide. What was he doing here?”

“He and Mr. Brass have a regular Monday morning Parcheesi game.” I opened the office door wide to let him pass through. “Then they sit around drinking Ovaltine and decoding secret messages with their Little Orphan Annie decoder rings.”

K. Jeffrey squinted at me. “Very funny, you are. I want to see Brass. Tell him I’m here, would you, old man?” He stripped his overcoat off and draped it and his hat over a chair.

“Sure thing, old man,” I said.

I left Walton contemplating the framed pencil sketch of Aaron Burr on the wall behind Gloria’s desk and went through to Brass’s office. Brass was in the midst of expounding on trite phrases to Gloria. He was against them. He paused when I came in and looked expectantly at me. “If it isn’t one thing it’s another,” I told him. “The other just came in and wants to see you. His name is Welton.” Brass took a deep breath and made a beckoning gesture, which I interpreted to mean “bring him in,” and so I did.

Welton smiled at Brass, grinned at Gloria, and slouched into one of the chairs opposite the desk. “That inspector that was just here,” he said to Brass. “Did he tell you about the girl they found? The dead one in the park?”

“Yes,” Brass said.

Welton nodded. “So I think it’s time, and I think I’d like you to be the one to do it.”

“Time for what?” Brass asked.

“I’d like you to announce it in ‘Brass Tacks,’ because everyone on the Street reads your column, especially the Thursday one. So you should probably put it in Thursday.”

There was a common myth on the Street, as the guys and dolls of Broadway call their home; one that Brass neither denied nor encouraged, although it was not strictly true. The belief was that all the really important stories about Broadway, all the straight dope about who was doing what to whom and with what and for how long, appeared in the Thursday “Brass Tacks.” The truth was that stories appeared when they appeared; Brass wouldn’t dare hold up a hot item for fear that fellow scribes Winchell, Runyon, or E.P. Adams would beat him to it. He might make a point of doing a Thursday follow-up on one of the big stories or adding a smattering of Broadway color pieces under the catchall heading “Heard on the Street” to the Thursday column, but that was all. Nonetheless the sale of the
World
went up an extra two or three thousand copies in Manhattan on Thursdays.

Brass stared steadily at Welton and, when no further words were forthcoming, sighed and said, “What am I announcing in ‘Brass Tacks’? And why?”

K. Jeffrey bounced to his feet, impatient with we lesser mortals who lacked his rapid and incisive grasp of the flow of events. “My reward,” he explained. “I think, with all this happening, it’s time. First, you know, the Trask girl flees, then Two-Headed Mary disappears, and now this dead girl.”

“You think there’s a connection?” Brass asked.

“I don’t know,” K. Jeffrey said seriously. “But Broadway is a small community and everybody in it knows everything about it, or thinks he does. Since you did the piece on Mary, the rumors have been flying. The people on the Street are connecting Mary’s disappearance and the flight of Billie Trask. I hear things.”

“That’s interesting,” Brass said. “What sort of things?”

“I hear around that Mary was married recently, to a big spender from the Great Plains, and she left town to get away from her husband. I hear around that Mary was involved in some sort of confidence scheme in Kansas City, and one of the victims has come looking for her with fire in his eyes and a big fist. I hear that Billie Trask didn’t flee with her boyfriend, as the police think, but fled with Two-Headed Mary to get away from the aforementioned boyfriend. These are the sort of things I’ve been hearing, but you know how gossip goes in this town. The stories seem to be mutually exclusive, and the truth very well might lie in an entirely different direction. I don’t know. I know that Two-Headed Mary was friends with Billie Trask, and the dead girl, Lydia, was Billie’s roommate, so it does rather seem that the disappearances and the murder may be interconnected in some twisted fashion.”

“I take it that the police are no closer to catching up with Miss Trask and your money?” Brass asked.

“So it would seem,” Welton said, grinning. “Which has seriously annoyed my brother, Edward. The pride of the family has come down here from Fall River just to stir up the police.”