The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes (32 page)

The operation had been scheduled for a Sunday. On Monday, Welton had announced that Billie had disappeared, along with the weekend’s box-office receipts. Mary went to see Welton on Thesday to tell him that she knew something was wrong with his story, and he’d better produce Billie alive and well. And don’t try anything silly, she had added, because she had deposited a tell-all letter with a friend, to be opened if anything happened to her.

K. Jeffrey’s idea of not trying anything silly was to grab Mary and thrust her into a dungeon in the depths of his theater. He told her he wasn’t going to kill her, just keep her imprisoned until he could figure out a safe way to let her go. What he was really trying to figure out was to whom she had given the incriminating letter. She kept herself alive by allowing him to slowly drag more and more information out of her about what she knew—which was very little, but she was a past master at instant improvisation—and who the friend with the letter was.

“He told me everything,” Mary said, refilling her coffee cup from the large silver urn. “As it happened. He told me about killing Lydia, Billie’s roommate. She knew about the abortion, which was a great shock to him, but she wasn’t sure who Billie’s seducer was. Her words: she called him ‘Billie’s seducer.’ She told him that she knew that Billie couldn’t have taken the money, and she was going to go to the police to clear Billie’s name. So he waited for her in her room, and when she came home from a date he spent the rest of the night trying to talk her out of telling anybody. She wouldn’t listen, so he killed her.”

“And left her naked in the park?” I asked.

Mary nodded. “You should have seen him when he told me about it,” she said. “He was so pleased with himself that he could hardly hold it in. It was about then I decided that he was probably going mad.”

“At least he was getting used to killing,” Brass said. “He must have killed the doctor already.”

“I guess so,” Mary said. “He carried the girl’s body into the park about three o’clock in the morning, talking to it all the way so that if anybody overheard he would think they were lovers. Then he took her clothes off and left her there all neatly arranged, or so he said. When he got back to the theater he had the bright idea of taking a set of women’s clothes from wardrobe and some identification from a purse that had been around for a couple of years and go back and plant it by the body.”

“That’s sick!” Pearly said.

“Was he trying to make it hard to identify her?” Brass asked.

“I think he was trying to be funny. He laughed a lot when he told me about it. I think that was another reason he kept me alive: he had to tell someone about his cleverness, and what better than the woman he was eventually going to leave entombed in the sub-subbasement of his theater. If he closed the trapdoor, nobody would even know that there was anything down there.”

Gloria nodded. “Like that French story—
Phantom of the Opera
,” she commented.

“Except that I wouldn’t be sneaking around behind the scenes,” Mary said. “I’d be starving to death thirty feet below ground.”

“What about Madam Florintina?” Brass asked.

“She knew,” Mary said. “Or, at least, K. Jeffrey became convinced that she knew. She came at him with a lot of crap about birth dates and sun signs and then said something about having done a chart for Billie, and that the child would have been born in Ares, and she could really use the reward money, and he figured he’d better kill her. So he did.” Mary took a deep breath. “Which was when I realized that I had to do something more constructive than sit on my duff and wait to be rescued, or he’d kill off half of Broadway before he got stopped. So I called my lovely daughter.”

“Isn’t my little Filly something?” Pearly Gates asked proudly, squeezing her hand. “She just goes and upsets this maverick’s whole scheme from that little tiny room, and she wasn’t even scared.”

“I was scared to death,” Mary said. “But I wasn’t going to let that son of a bitch see it.”

“How’d you get him to let you make that phone call?” Sandra asked. “I was so damned relieved to hear your voice, and then so damned scared when you wouldn’t tell me where you were and you hung up on me…”

“Well, I finally let him work the name of my ‘friend’ with the letter out of me. I told him it was my brother, Andrew, and that if I didn’t call him once every two weeks—I would have made it once a week, but it was already more than a week since he had grabbed me—he was supposed to open the envelope and read the letter and take it to the police. I was going to call the Professor, who I knew would pick up on the tale I was telling and do something—I had no idea what—to get me out of there.” She reached over and patted the professor’s hand. “And so you did, my dear.”

The Professor smiled. “We’ve been in tighter spots than that, old pal. Why I remember once in Cleveland—but that story will wait.”

“But Welton thought he was wise, and he wouldn’t let me call anyone but my daughter. Who, luckily, went to Alexander Brass for help.” She turned to Brass, “That was a nice mention you gave me in your column, by the way. And thanks for not blowing the gaff.”

“My pleasure,” Brass told her.

“My little Filly ain’t going to spend her time standing in front of theaters collecting for no war orphans no more,” Pearly said. “I’m going to teach her the oil business. And I think she’s probably going to teach me a thing or two while we’re at it.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Brass said. He put his coffee cup down and leaned back in his chair. “You know, Professor,” he said, “I’m sorry we queered your play with the big store operation, but I guess you’ll find another location.”

“What’s wrong with the one I have?” the Professor asked. “I imagine the police have a lot more to ask Welton about besides the location of the place he was apprehended.”

“But won’t the two cops who took him into custody say something?” I asked.

The Professor smiled. “I doubt it,” he told me. “They weren’t exactly real cops. They sort of worked for me.”

“Oh,” I said. I refilled my coffee cup. Maybe I should write a book about a confidence man.

Or, then again, maybe not.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller, Richard A. Lupoff, and Keith Kahla, who each in their own way contributed to the completion of this book.

Michael Kurland is the author of more than thirty books, but is perhaps best known for his series of novels starring Professor Moriarty. The first volume,
The Infernal Device
, was nominated for an Edgar Award and the American Book Award, and received stellar reviews, including this from Isaac Asimov: “Michael Kurland has made Moriarty more interesting than Doyle ever made Holmes.” It was followed by
Death By Gaslight, The Great Game, The Empress of India
and
Who Thinks Evil
, published over a period of more than thirty years.

Kurland is also well known as a science fiction writer, and is the author of
The Unicorn Girl
, as well as the bestselling T
en Little Wizards
and
A Study in Sorcery
, fair-play detective stories set in a world where magic works. He has edited several Sherlock Holmes anthologies and written non-fiction titles such as
How to Solve a Murder: The Forensic Handbook
. He lives in California.

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