The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (27 page)

“I still don’t understand what you want me to do,” Brass said. “I can’t go to my contacts in what you call the ‘underworld’ and ask them if they have any stolen bonds.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Edward said. “A note arrived today, with instructions.”

“A note?”

“That’s right.” He turned to his brother. “Kasden, have you the note?”

K. Jeffrey took an envelope out of his desk drawer and flipped it to his brother. It was a regular plain white business envelope, with nothing to distinguish it from a million others. Edward carefully took the message from within and unfolded and passed it to Brass.

Brass took it gingerly in both hands, one at each corner, and examined it closely. I peered over his shoulder.

It was a regular sheet of white bond paper, which had been folded in three to put in the envelope. The message on it was made up of individual words that appeared to have been cut out of a newspaper and pasted onto the paper. It said:

I
HAVE YOUR BONDS
,

GIVE
$
10,000 TO
A
LEXANDER
B
RASS

USED MONEY

HE WILL BE TOLD WHERE TO GO.

C
RIMINAL AT
L
ARGE

The dollar sign, the ten and the three zeros were cut out separately. “Criminal at Large,” which I assumed was meant to be the signature, had been cut out as one piece. The “Alexander Brass” was also one piece, and was in a different typeface.

“My name is from my byline on ‘Brass Tacks’ in the
New York World
,” Brass said. “But the other words are from a different newspaper.”

K. Jeffrey leaned over to stare at the note, looking interested. “Which one, do you suppose?”

“
Variety
, I think,” Brass said. “Yes,
Variety
, the type style is unmistakable. And besides, ‘Criminal at Large’ is that Edgar Wallace show that ran a couple of years ago.
Variety
did a piece this week on the box-office gross of different sorts of shows since the stock market crash.” Brass continued to stare thoughtfully at the paper. “Symmetrical, isn’t it? Ten thousand out, ten thousand in.”

K. Jeffrey nodded. “Does that mean anything?”

“Probably not.”

“Something else?” Edward asked.

“Doesn’t the wording strike you as being a bit odd?” Brass replied.

“I don’t know,” Edward said. “How do blackmailers usually write?”

“Odd in what way?” K. Jeffrey asked.

Brass folded up the paper and handed it to K. Jeffrey. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe it’s my imagination. Besides, as your brother says, who knows how blackmailers usually write?”

“Will you do it?” Edward asked.

Brass nodded. “I’ll go as far as listening to whatever the person who wrote the note has to say. If it doesn’t involve any undue danger, or too outlandish a rigmarole, I’ll do the exchange for you.”

“Good,” Edward said. He took a thick envelope from an inside pocket. “Here is ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills,” he said, handing it to Brass. “You’d better count it so there is no room for error. If you can get the bonds back for less, I’ll pay you ten percent of what you save. And don’t let them cozen you. I won’t go a penny higher.”

“I’ll try not to be cozened,” Brass told him.

We took a cab back to the office. It wouldn’t do to get mugged on the street with ten thousand dollars of someone else’s money in your pocket. It was a couple of minutes shy of three-thirty when the elevator deposited us on the sixteenth floor. Brass walked through to his office to put the envelope stuffed with hundreds in the new and improved wall safe that had recently been installed near his desk. He called, “How did it go?” to Gloria at her desk as he passed.

“You’re on for a thousand, and you have the wrong idea about the South,” she said. “The coloreds don’t want to associate with the whites, and that’s why they have their own drinking fountains and waiting rooms. This is the gospel according to Mr. Simmonds. And you have a visitor.”

After a moment of twirling knobs and slamming of a safe door, Brass returned to the outer office. “Who?” he asked. “And where is he?”

“Mr. ‘Just call me Pearly’ Gates. There are, apparently, a few names he wants to call you. He’s out having a bowl of soup at Danny’s. He hasn’t eaten all day, he’s so upset, so I sent him over there. He’ll be back any time now.”

“Upset about what?”

“I’ll let him tell you. You’ll be amused.”

“Hmph,” Brass said, and retreated to his office.

I gave Gloria a rundown of our day so far, and she was properly impressed. “Goodness,” she said, “Mr. B. has pulled all kinds of stunts since I’ve been here, but that’s a new one; an intermediary in a blackmail payoff to conceal the attempted bribery of a city official.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said.

“That has long been one of my functions,” Gloria told me. “To make sure that the boss is aware of just what it is that he’s doing when he gets involved in some of his little projects. He tends to get overenthusiastic.”

The office door opened and an angry and determined Pearly Gates bulled his way through, swinging his ten-gallon hat belligerently in front of him to sweep any resisting molecules of air out of the way. He stopped in front of me and clamped the hat back on his head. “You’re back!” he bellowed. “And it’s about goddamn time!”

“Sorry,” I said. “Did you have an appointment?”

“Don’t fuss around with me, son, I’m not in the mood. Where’s your boss?”

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” I said. “Have a seat.”

He glared at me. “Don’t you tell me what to do!”

I left him standing there glaring at the space I had occupied, and went back to Brass’s office. “Pearly’s here,” I said, “and he’s pawing at the ground and breathing fire.”

Brass took a deep breath and shook his head. “I wonder what this is about,” he said. “Here—” He fished in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk and tossed me a leather sack that looked like an oversized sausage. “It’s a homemade blackjack I took away from a fellow once. Come back in with Pearly and stand somewhere close to him. If he looks like he’s about to draw his six-shooter, let him have it on the back of his head: once, not too hard.”

I turned to go retrieve Pearly, but there he was, stomping down the hall on his own. I barely had time to stick the cosh in my belt under my jacket as he stormed into the room. “You didn’t want me to hire a private detective, did you, Mr. Brass?” he thundered, making it sound like a hanging offense. He advanced to the desk and set his hands on it, palms down, the better to lean across the desk and glare at Brass. “You were afraid of what I’d find out, weren’t you, Mr. Brass? You didn’t tell me the truth, did you, Mr. Brass?” Each time he said “Mr.” he spat it out as though he couldn’t stand the taste in his mouth.

Brass moved back in his chair to put a little distance between himself and the angry Texan. “Sit down, Mr. Gates,” he said, speaking calmly, clearly, and precisely, spacing his words so that each hung separately in the air; a sign that he was getting pretty annoyed himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’d like to. Sit down, calm down, slow down, and elucidate.”

Gates breathed hard for a minute, like a bull waiting for the right moment to charge, and then he abruptly dropped into the chair beside the desk. “I do not like being gulled and hoodwinked, Mr. Brass,” he said, panting to catch his breath.

“Nor do I, Mr. Gates,” Brass told him. “Now, what’s the story? Who is gulling you, how, and why?”

“You trying to pretend you don’t know? You must think I’m pretty damn dumb!” Gates snapped.

Brass stared at the beefy, angular Texan. “Just what is it that you are accusing me of?” he asked flatly. “Assume, for the sake of argument, that I don’t know.”

“You advised me not to hire myself a private detective to look for Phillippa. Now don’t say you didn’t!”

“I did so advise you,” Brass said.

“You admit it!”

“I declare it. So what?”

“Well, then, you’re part of the goddamn scheme, aren’t you? You didn’t think I’d hire myself a private eye, but I did, and now I know everything, and you might think you’re going to get away with this but you’re not.” He was talking along there pretty fast for a Texan; just a little more acceleration and he’d be about where a New Yorker is when he’s talking normally. But Pearly made up in intensity what he lacked in speed. He leaned forward on the desk, his elbows jutting out to the sides. “I ought to just call the police, or maybe I ought to just whale the daylights out of you myself!” He reached under his jacket, and I sidled closer with the cosh; but he was just going for a wad of folded-up papers in his inside pocket. He picked one stapled together set out of the wad and unfolded it and sort of hurled it the six inches over to Brass.

“There’s the report from that there private detective agency that you didn’t want me to hire,” Pearly said. “It’s their preliminary report. You hear that?
Pre-lim-in-ary.
That means there’s more stuff coming.”

Brass took the report and smoothed it out on his desk blotter. I leaned over to get a look at it.
J. J. WINTERBOTHAM DETECTIVE AGENCY
, read the letterhead,
WE NEVER SLEEP. OFFICES IN MOST MAJOR CITIES & MIAMI
.

Pearly continued to glare at Brass, as Brass read the document. There were three pages. I was reading it upside-down and at an angle, so I couldn’t make out much of the typewritten text. Finally Brass looked up. “I hope you didn’t pay much for this document,” he said.

Gates scowled. “Why? What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s superficial, biased, and inaccurate.”

“It’s wrong? Is that what you claim?” Pearly grabbed the report and held it above his head as though it was a football and he was contemplating a forward pass. “Well, it ain’t!”

“Not entirely,” Brass admitted.

“My Filly is a confidence trickster-and her name ain’t even Phillippa!”

“That’s true,” Brass said.

“So, you admit it!” Gates plopped the report back down on the desk.

“It’s not a question of admitting anything,” Brass replied. “I thought it was Mary’s job to tell you, not mine. If she preferred to give you a—ah—gentler version of what ‘Two-Headed Mary’ stood for, why should I have interfered? The question between us, you and I, was what happened to her and where she was, not what her past had been.”

“It says here on this paper, which I paid fifty dollars for if you want to know,” Gates said, thumping his index finger on the report, “that the woman known as Two-Headed Mary—and the Winterbotham people couldn’t find out her real name but that it’s not Phillippa—stands in front of theaters and bilks people of their money. That she really lives in Greenwich Village, not on Park Avenue at all. That she has a daughter who’s most probably in jail.” With each “that” he prodded the document again with his finger.

“And it says here,” he added, picking the report up and shaking it in Brass’s face and then slamming it down again, “right here in black and white, that she has told so many versions of her past history that it’s impossible to find out which is the true one.” Gates picked the report up between thumb and forefinger and turned it over so he would no longer have to look at its hateful message.

“Is that all?” Brass asked calmly.

“All? All?” Pearly Gates collapsed in his chair, beyond words.

“So Two-Headed Mary runs a small scam,” Brass said. “I can’t see what you’re so upset about. So she didn’t tell you. Did you tell her about the Ten Spot Oil Exploration Syndicate? Or the Grand Lacey Oil Company? Or the Mount Feather Oil Well Company?”

There was an extended silence, and then Gates lifted his head. “Where’d you get that guff?” he asked, a slight growl in his voice.

“Reporters love to tell stories,” Brass said. “Especially stories they can’t use in their paper. Sid Moscowitz of the
Dallas Morning News
knows all about you. He’s just hoping he can prove enough of it to use it some day.”

“That sonabitch!”

“The only difference between you and Mary, as I see it,” Brass told him, “is that you’ve made a great deal more money at cheating people out of their nickels and dimes than she has.”

Pearly sat up, his face red. “I ain’t never done nothing illegal,” he growled, losing his grammar. “And anybody what says I did is a lying sonabitch.”

“You mean you’ve never been caught,” Brass said. “Well, neither has Mary.”

“Each of them companies was perfectly legal and above-board.”

“And the fact that they all came up with dry holes, and the producing wells were somehow all assigned to the Mariposa Oil Company, which you own all by yourself—”

“Goddamn bad luck.”

Brass shook his head sadly. “Listen, Pearly, I have no interest in showing your less-than-honorable side to the world. Why can’t you give Mary a little slack—at least until she shows up and is able to tell it her way?”

Gates slammed his open hand down on the desk. “Cause she’s trying to con me, is why! And I ain’t gonna sit here and be conned! And as far as I can see, you’re part of it!”

“What are you talking about?”

Pearly fished back in his pocket for more papers and drew one out. “You don’t know nothing about this?” he asked in an inquisitorial growl, attempting to fling it across the desk. It fluttered to the floor and Pearly had to bend down to retrieve it, which ruined a fine dramatic moment for him.

Brass took the paper and stared at it for a long moment. Then, without a word, he passed it to me.

It was typewritten. Three lines:

If you want to see your wife again
Get together $10,000 in small bills
We will inform you where to deliver the money

“When did you get this?” Brass asked.

Gates set his face in an angry grimace. “You going to sit there and pretend that you don’t know?”

Brass stood up behind his desk. “It sounds like you’re accusing me of something, Mr. Gates. Be precise. Exactly what is it that you think I’ve done?” he asked in the calm, measured voice he used when he was exceptionally furious. “Kidnapping or extortion?”