Too Soon Dead (16 page)

“No, it’s a Catholic children’s hospital up in the Bronx. A few of the boys are going up on Sunday and do a few routines on the lawn, I guess it is. Then we’ll visit the kids who can’t get out of bed. That reminds me, I’ve got to pick up a gross of balloons; I’ll be making balloon animals all day.”

“A Catholic hospital? I thought you were Jewish.”

He looked at me. “Shhh!” he said. “Don’t tell the children!”

I ripped the knot out; first attempt a failure. “I guess that was a stupid thing to say,” I said, readjusting the tie around my neck.

“Let me tell you,” he said. “Aside from the fact that children is children, whatever their labels, there’s the fact that clowns is clowns. I’ve worked with Irish clowns, French clowns, Italian clowns, German clowns, Mexican clowns, and, let’s see, a few Baptist clowns—they like to do what they call ‘Bible clowning’—and a Chinese clown or two. I’ve worked with giants and fat ladies and little people—they like to be called little people—and people born with monstrous deformities who make their livings being stared at. I’ve worked with a lady clown or two, and a couple of Negro clowns. When we play the south, we put them in blackface and the locals don’t notice. And in all of the forty years I was with it, nobody I worked with ever gave a damn about my race, religion, sex, nationality, or any other damn thing except my act.”

“The circus seems to be ahead of the rest of the country,” I said.

“Damn right,” Pinky agreed. “Except for the trapeze artists. If you can’t do at least one somersault in mid-air, you can’t sit at their table. You want me to tie that for you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Come on,” Pinky said. “I know this great knot.” He stretched his hands apart: “Big!”

“I’m sure,” I told him. I looped the knot around, and this time it came out right.

“Mine would’ve looked better,” Pinky said. He got up. “I gotta pack. See you later.”

I left the house and walked into the park. It was windy and overcast, but it wasn’t raining. I put on my raincoat anyway, because I like the coat and will wear it at any excuse. It’s a war surplus officer’s trench coat, and I like to think it makes me look worldly and sophisticated. Perhaps it does.

I sat on a bench and stared at the skyline. A flock of pigeons settled in front of me and waited expectantly. I found a piece of tissue paper in the pocket of the trench coat, so I ripped it into small pieces and tossed them amid the pigeons. They pecked at the bits of paper for a while, but then started looking at me out of the corners of their eyes and muttering to each other, so I got up and moved on.

I arrived at Lindner’s at about ten-fifteen. Brass came in at about ten-thirty-five and sat opposite me. “Good morning, DeWitt,” he said. “Did you settle our princess in last night?”

“I saw her register, but I didn’t go upstairs with her,” I said. “I assume she made it all right. She didn’t show any signs of wanting to skip.”

Our conversation paused while Brass ordered poached eggs with two slices of bacon and a glass of what the waitress swore was indeed fresh-squeezed orange juice, and I ordered pancakes and ham.

“Have you ever noticed that breakfast is the most idiosyncratic meal of the day?” Brass asked me as the waitress pulled away. “Most people, however adventurous they are at lunch or dinner, eat the breakfast of their youth.”

“Really?” I asked. “I always ate cornflakes for breakfast at home.”

“While others,” Brass continued, pouring cream in his coffee with studied concentration, “of the sort who go on the stage, write novels, or swindle widows and orphans for a living, will change their eating habits entirely. It’s one of the sure signs of the degenerate personality.”

“And everything I have become I owe to your splendid example,” I told him.

“I warned you when you took the job,” Brass said. “Do you have the pictures?” he asked.

I touched my jacket, over my heart. “Securely buttoned down.”

“Keep them so until we get back to the office. Did Mitchell have anything interesting to say about them?”

“They’re not composites,” I said. “Aside from that, nothing that seemed particularly helpful.” I told him what Mitchell had suggested.

“Write it up and stick it in the file,” Brass said. “You never know.”

“You never know,” I agreed. “What happened last night after we left?”

“More reporters showed up. A sharp-eyed detective spotted MacArthur of the
Mirror
taking down a couple of photos that were pinned up in the front room, so the police took them all down and are holding them as evidence. The police are working on the theory that the killer was a jealous husband or boyfriend, or possibly a father that didn’t like what his daughter was doing for a living.”

Our food came, and I thoughtfully poured syrup over my pancakes. “Do they really believe that?” I asked.

“I doubt if they really believe anything,” Brass said. “But it is a possibility that they have to check out. I did discover one thing of interest before I left.”

I started to say, “What’s that?” and got as far as “Wha—” when Bobbi appeared at the booth. She was not as flamboyantly dressed as when I met her last evening, but she didn’t need flamboyance to make an effect. She was wearing a green wool skirt and sweater that made me want to compliment the sheep. I didn’t stare.

“Hello,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.” She tucked her handbag, a black contraption large enough to hold King Kong and all the little Kongs, under the seat and slid in next to me. “I’m glad you ordered breakfast without waiting. I’ve been up at Herm’s apartment.”

“You went back?” I did stare. “Why?”

“I had an idea,” she told me. She turned to the waitress and said that Brass’s poached eggs looked good, which they didn’t after the way he’d been poking at them, and she’d like some sausage and potatoes with the eggs. Then she turned to Brass. “Good morning,” she said.

“What sort of idea? And good morning to you,” Brass said. “Did you sleep well?”

“What a bed!” she said with a wide smile and a joyous wriggle. “And what a bathtub! You could swim in it. I
did
swim in it. Can I stay there tonight?”

“I told the manager you’d be there two weeks,” Brass said. “You don’t have to rush off.”

“Two weeks! Say, that’s great! I leave for Pittsburgh in two weeks, first stop on a four-month tour of Ardbaum’s red circuit.” She looked thoughtful for a second, and then leaned forward. “Say,” she said to Brass, “you planning to visit during these two weeks?”

Brass wiped his mouth with his napkin and took a drink of coffee. He leaned forward. “Let me make something clear, Miss Starr. If I want to proposition a girl, I do it before I rent the hotel room, not after.”

“Okay, okay,” Bobbi said. “It wasn’t such a dumb idea. Not all men are knights in shining armor, you know.”

“From my reading of history,” Brass said, “even the knights in shining armor weren’t. But my ego won’t let me try to attract women with anything beyond my native wit and charm. No baubles, no limousines, no suites in fancy hotels. I rent the room you’re staying in by the year in case of need. It’s much cheaper by the year. The last person before you to stay in it was a writer named Scott Fitzgerald, who was in from the coast for a week. He drank, and talked about his wife, Zelda, who’s somewhere out West, and complained about the size of the advance his publisher was offering him for his next book. I did not make a pass at him.”

“Say, don’t get upset,” she said. “Men not making passes is something new to my experience, and I have to get used to it, is all. It’s okay. I like it.”

“Fair enough,” Brass said.

“What’s the red circuit?” I asked her.

“The Ardbaums run two circuits, the red and the blue,” she said. “Different cities, is all. And maybe for the red circuit a girl can get away with wearing a few less garments in her act. Not all the way down to pasties and a G-string—the Ardbaums don’t go for that—but pretty close.”

“I see,” I said. Life presents an endless vista of educational opportunities.

She reached into her purse and took out a file card. “Here,” she said, extending it across the table to Brass.

“What’s this?”

“It’s what I went uptown for.” She turned to me. “I got to thinking last night about how we searched the room and everything, looking for those pictures that I kept telling you Herm wouldn’t have taken…”

“Yes,” I said.

“And those two numbers that were missing.”

“Yes?” I asked.

“What two numbers?” Brass asked.

I explained about Dworkyn’s dating system and the two files that were gone.

“Ah!” Brass said. “The police missed that—at least while I was there.”

“Well, I got to thinking,” Bobbi said, “and I remembered that Herm keeps cards on his clients—the ones he does darkroom work for as well as the magazines—so he knows what number file the negatives are in. And this—” she waved the card in her hand like a tiny flag “—is the file card with those numbers on it.”

Brass took the card and looked at it reverently, and then passed it to me. It was a three-by-five file card, of the sort you can buy in stationery stores for a nickel a pack. On the upper left was printed in big block letters in a neat hand—Herm’s, I assumed—
BIRD
. Under it, neatly under one another, slightly indented from the name, were the entries 3526, 3588, and 3597, and on the right side of the card, across from the other numbers, one more entry: C516.

“Do you know who Bird is?” Brass asked.

“No idea,” Bobbi said. “I don’t know any of Herm’s clients, except that I’d see them around, you know.”

“I understand,” Brass said.

“The two files that were missing were 3588 and 3597,” I said. “I wonder what 3526 was, and what C516 means.”

“Oh, I brought them along,” Bobbi said. “I thought you might want to see them.” She reached into her handbag with both hands and pulled out a folder. “They’re not very exciting,” she said, passing it to Brass. “The
C
stands for contact sheet. When Herm develops—” she paused to gulp twice “—developed thirty-five-millimeter-roll film he would print a contact sheet, which is like all the pictures are fitted onto one eight-by-ten sheet and the client can pick the ones he wants enlarged from that.”

“Yes, I am familiar with the concept,” Brass said. He opened the folder, pulled out the contact sheet, and squinted at it. “A girl who seems to have no clothes on,” he said. “Not unfamiliar subject matter. But she seems to be alone, which is original.”

“Herm sometimes did nature studies,” Bobbi said. “But he doesn’t even have a thirty-five-millimeter camera, so these aren’t his.”

“I can’t make out much detail; I’ll have to have the pictures blown up,” Brass said. “Let’s look at the rest of this stuff.” He dumped the rest of the folder’s contents onto the table and we stared down at a selection of glassine envelopes holding four-by-five-inch negatives. Brass counted them. “Eight negatives,” he said. He held one of them up to the light. “People,” he said, “with their clothes on. Standing, looking at the camera. Not art, just a snapshot. Probably someone’s family.”

“The rest of them are all like that,” Bobbi said. “I would have printed them for you, but it would take too long. Are they any good to you?”

Brass passed them to me, and I held one up. There’s something very strange about looking at negatives; it’s like you’re looking at people and things inside out. It makes it very hard for me to tell what I’m seeing.

“I can’t tell what information they have for us until I have them printed,” Brass said. “I can have that done at the newspaper. I don’t think you should go back to that apartment for anything else.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Bobbi said. “It gives me the creeps.”

Breakfast continued, and we talked about various things. No more about her brother or our other problems, but mostly about life in what Bobbi called “the show-all business.” Brass got Bobbi talking, and kept her going. He was gathering material, although much of what she told us couldn’t be printed in any of his current markets. She told us stories about life on the road that made me feel that I knew nothing whatever about life or how it is lived. I would have to tear up my manuscript and start again, and write about real people: dancers and strippers and singers and comics and jugglers and magicians—real people.

Brass had an acquisitive look in his eyes as he listened to Bobbi’s stories. Occasionally he would throw in a story himself, just to keep the ball rolling, but mostly he listened. Some of Bobbi’s stories meandered and had no proper end, and some jumped from here to there with abandon, but that’s what life is like. Bobbi didn’t know she was telling stories, she was just relating her life to us. She sat there with her post-breakfast pastry and coffee (“One thing about being a dancer, a girl doesn’t have to watch her weight.”) and talked.

“It’s true what they say about company managers,” she said, chewing her Danish and staring at the picture of Whistler’s mother-in-law on the wall as she talked. “One time in Cleveland—this would have been May or June a couple of years ago, I guess… No, wait a minute—it was thirty-three, June of thirty-three—we are playing the Alhambra Theater and not doing too well. June is always slow, and besides, nobody has any money, not even fifteen cents to get into the show.

“The company manager, Benny—no, Bernie—comes backstage one evening right before the late show and tells the girls it might be a good idea if they show a little more skin during the specialty numbers. Just a little, and just for this one show, he says, so he can see if he likes it.”

She took a sip of coffee. “Well, there’s always girls who are eager to show it all, if they got any excuse, so Bernie gets what he asked for. The audience likes it, except for one guy in the front row who is sitting there with his arms crossed and an expression on his face like he has just sucked a lemon. Right next to him is sitting Bernie, who is deadpan, and one cannot tell what he is thinking. It turns out that the guy next to Bernie is the head of the Ohio Legion of Morality and Decency, or some such, and Bernie has invited him to come to the show, in the fond hope that he’ll find it immoral and indecent. There is a passel of reporters waiting in the lobby to hear what this guy has to say. If he pans the show loud enough, we’ll be playing to packed houses for the rest of the run.”