Authors: William Hjortsberg
The 1-2-3 Hotel was on 46th between Broadway and Sixth, name and address all in the same package: 123 West 46th. Elaborate finials, gables, and dormers crowned an otherwise unpretentious brick building. I went in and gave the desk clerk my business card, wrapped in a ten-spot. “I want the room number of a man named Louis Cyphre,” I said, spelling it for him. “And you don’t need to say anything to the house dick.”
“I remember him. Had a white beard and black hair.”
“That’s the party.”
“Checked out over a week ago.”
“Any forwarding address?”
“Not a one.”
“What about his room? Rented it yet?”
“Wouldn’t do you any good; been cleaned top to bottom.”
I stepped back into the sunshine and headed toward Broadway. It was a beautiful day for walking. A Salvation Army trio, tuba, accordion, and tambourine, serenaded a chestnut vendor under the Loew’s State marquee where new “Lounger Seats” were promised for the grand reopening Easter Sunday. I savored the sounds and smells, trying to remember the real world of a week ago when there was no such thing as magic.
I used a different approach with the desk clerk in the Astor. “Excuse me, I wonder if you might help me out. I was supposed to meet my uncle in the coffee shop twenty minutes ago. I’d like to phone him, but I don’t know the room number.”
“What’s your uncle’s name, sir?”
“Cyphre. Louis Cyphre.”
“I’m terribly sorry. Mr. Cyphre checked out this morning.”
“What? Back to France?”
“He left no forwarding address.”
I should have chucked the whole thing right there and taken Epiphany for a Circle Line cruise around the island. Instead I phoned Herman Winesap downtown and demanded to know what was going on. “What the hell is Louis Cyphre doing at Hubert’s Flea Circus?”
“What business is it of yours? You were not hired to follow Mr. Cyphre. I suggest you stick to the job you’re getting paid for.”
“Did you know he was a magician?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t that fact intrigue you, Winesap?”
“I have known Mr. Cyphre for many years and fully appreciate his sophistication. He is a man with a wide range of interests. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least that prestidigitation was among them.”
“In a penny arcade flea circus?”
“Perhaps it is a hobby, a form of relaxation.”
“Doesn’t make sense.”
“Mr. Angel, for fifty dollars per diem, my client, yours too, I might add, for that price he can always find someone else to work for him.”
I told Winesap I got the message and hung up.
After a trip to the cigar stand for additional dimes, I made three more calls. The first, to my answering service, yielded a message from a lady in Valley Stream with a missing pearl necklace. Someone in her bridge club was suspected. I didn’t write down the number.
Next, I called Krusemark Maritime, Inc., and learned that the President and Chairman of the Board was in mourning and not available. I tried his home number and got some flunky who took my name. I didn’t have to wait long.
“What do you know about it, Angel?” the old brigand barked.
“Some. Why don’t we save it. I need to talk to you. Soon as I can get there’d be as good a time as any.”
“All right. I’ll call downstairs and tell them to expect you.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Number Two, Sutton Place was the building where Marilyn Monroe lived. A private driveway curved off 57th Street, and my cab let me out under a pink limestone vault. Across the way, a row of four-story brick townhouses was marked for doom. Stark whitewash crosses were crudely brushed on every window like a child’s painting of a graveyard.
A doorman festooned with more gilt braid than an admiral hurried to assist me. I gave my name and asked for the Krusemark residence.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “Elevator on the left.”
I got off on the fifteenth floor, stepping into a spartan walnut-paneled foyer. Tall gilt-framed mirrors on either side provided an infinity of foyers. There was only one other door. I rang the bell twice and waited.
A dark-haired man with a mole on his upper lip opened the door. “Mr. Angel, please come in. Mr. Krusemark is waiting for you.” He wore a grey suit with tiny maroon pinstripes and seemed more like a bank teller than a butler. “Right this way, please.”
He led me through large, luxuriously furnished rooms with views of the East River and the Sunshine Biscuit Company over in Queens. Precisely arranged antiques suggested those period display rooms at the Metropolitan. These were rooms for signing treaties with quill pens.
We came to a dosed door and my grey-suited guide knocked once and said: “Mr. Angel is here, sir.”
“Bring him in where I can see him.” Even through the door’s thickness, Krusemark’s husky growl reverberated with authority.
I was ushered into a small, windowless gym. The walls were mirror-covered, and the multiple reflections of stainless steel body-building machinery gleamed endlessly in every direction. Ethan Krusemark, wearing boxer shorts and a skivvy, lay on his back under one of these shining contraptions, doing leg presses. For a man his age, he was pumping a lot of iron.
At the sound of the door closing, he sat up and looked me over. “We’re burying her tomorrow,” he said. “Toss me that towel.”
I flipped it to him, and he wiped the sweat from his face and shoulders. He was powerfully built. Knotted muscles bunched beneath his varicose veins. This was one old man you didn’t want to fool with.
“Who killed her?” he growled at me. “Johnny Favorite?”
“When I find him, I’ll ask.”
“That danceband gigolo. I should have deep-sixed the bastard when I had the chance.” He smoothed his long silver hair carefully back into place.
“When was that? When you and your daughter snatched him from the clinic upstate?”
His eyes locked on mine. “You’re way out of line, Angel.”
“I don’t think so. Fifteen years ago, you paid Dr. Albert Fowler twenty-five thousand dollars for one of his patients. You gave your name as Edward Kelley. Fowler was supposed to make it look like Favorite was still a vegetable in some forgotten ward. Up until a week ago he did a pretty good job for you.”
“Who’s paying you to dig into this?”
I got out a cigarette and rolled it between my fingers. “You know I won’t tell you that.”
“I could make it worth your while.”
“I’m sure you could,” I said, “but it’s still no dice. Mind if I smoke?”
“Go right ahead.”
I lit up, exhaled, and said: “Look. You want the man who killed your daughter. I want Johnny Favorite. Perhaps we’re both interested in the same guy. We won’t know unless we find him.”
Krusemark’s thick fingers curled into a fist. It was a big fist. He punched the flat of his other hand and a noise like a board snapping echoed in the gleaming room. “Okay,” he said. “I was Edward Kelley. It was me paid Fowler the twenty-five Gs.”
“Why did you use the name Kelley?”
“You think I’d use my own name? The Kelley business was Meg’s idea, don’t ask me why.”
“Where did you take Favorite?”
“Times Square. It was New Year’s Eve 1943. We dropped him off in the crowd, and he walked out of our lives. So we thought.”
“Let’s take that one again,” I said. “You expect me to buy that after paying twenty-five grand for Favorite you lost him in a crowd?”
“That’s the way it happened. I did it for my daughter. I always gave her what she wanted.”
“And she wanted Favorite to disappear?”
Krusemark pulled on a terrycloth robe. “I think it’s something they cooked up together before he went overseas. Some kind of hocus-pocus they were fooling around with at the time.”
“You mean black magic?”
“Black, white, what difference does it make? Meg was always a funny kid. She played with tarot cards before she could read.”
“What got her started?”
“I don’t know. A superstitious governess; one of our European cooks. You never know what really goes on inside people’s heads when you hire them.”
“Did you know your daughter once ran a fortunetelling parlor at Coney Island?”
“Yes, I set her up in that, too. She was all I had, so I spoiled her.”
“I found a mummified human hand in her apartment. Know about that?”
“The Hand of Glory. It’s a charm supposed to open any lock. The right hand of a convicted murderer, cut off while his neck is still in the noose. Meg’s has a pedigree. Came from some Welsh highwayman named Captain Silverheels condemned in 1786. She bought it in a Paris junk shop years ago.”
“Just a souvenir of the Grand Tour, like the skull Favorite kept in his suitcase. They seem to have had similar tastes.”
“Yeah. Favorite gave that skull to Meg the night before he shipped out. Everybody else gave their girl a class ring or a varsity sweater or something like that. He picks a skull.”
“I thought Favorite and your daughter had broken things off by then.”
“Officially, yes. Must have been some game they were playing.”
“Why do you say that?” I flicked an inch-long ash onto the floor.
“Because nothing changed in their relationship.”
Krusemark pressed a button next to the door. “Like a drink?”
“A little whisky would taste good.”
“Scotch?”
“Bourbon, if you’ve got it. On the rocks. Did your daughter ever mention a woman named Evangeline Proudfoot?”
“Proudfoot? Can’t place it. She might have.”
“What about voodoo? Did she talk about voodoo?”
There was a single knock and the door swung open. “Yes, sir,” asked the man in grey.
“Mr. Angel will have a glass of bourbon, ice only. Some brandy for me. Oh, and Benson?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Bring Mr. Angel an ashtray.”
Benson nodded and closed the door behind him.
“He the butler?” I asked.
“Benson is my private secretary. That’s a butler with brains.” Krusemark mounted a mechanical bicycle and began methodically pedaling imaginary miles. “What were you saying about voodoo?”
“Johnny Favorite was mixed up in Harlem voodoo back in his skull-giving days. I wonder if your daughter ever mentioned it.”
“Voodoo was one she missed,” he said.
“Dr. Fowler told me Favorite was suffering from amnesia when you took him from the hospital. Did he recognize your daughter?”
“No, he didn’t. He acted like a sleepwalker. Didn’t say much. Just stared out the car window into the night.”
“In other words, he treated you like strangers?”
Krusemark pedaled for all he was worth. “Meg wanted it that way. She insisted that we not call him Johnny and that nothing be said about their past relationship.”
“Didn’t that strike you as odd?”
“Everything Meg did was odd.”
I heard the faint chiming of crystal outside the door an instant before Benson knocked. The butler with brains wheeled in a portable bar. He poured me a drink and a snifter of brandy for the boss and asked if there would be anything else.
“This is fine,” Krusemark said, holding the tulip-shaped glass under his nose like a blossom. “Thank you very much, Benson.”
Benson left. I spotted an ashtray next to the ice bucket and stubbed out my smoke.
“I once heard you tell your daughter to slip me a mickey. Said you picked up the art of persuasion in the Orient.”
Krusemark gave me an odd look. “It’s clean,” he said.
“Persuade me.” I handed him my glass. “Drink it yourself.”
He took several healthy swallows and handed me back the drink. “It’s too late for playing games. I need your help, Angel.”
“Then play straight with me. Did your daughter ever see Favorite again after that New Year’s Eve?”
“Never.”
“You sure of that?”
“Of course I’m sure. Do you have reason to doubt it?”
“My business is doubting what other people tell me. How do you know she never saw him again?”
“We had no secrets. She wouldn’t hide a thing like that.”
“You don’t seem to know women as well as you do the shipping business,” I said.
“I know my own daughter. If she ever saw Favorite again, it was on the day he killed her.”
I sipped my drink. “Nice and neat,” I said. “A guy with total amnesia, doesn’t even know his own name, wanders off into a New Year’s mob fifteen years ago, vanishes without a trace, and then suddenly shows up out of the blue and starts killing people.”
“Who else did he kill? Fowler?”
I smiled. “Dr. Fowler was a suicide.”
“That’s easy enough to arrange,” he snorted.
“Is it? How would you go about arranging it, Mr. Krusemark?”
Krusemark fixed me with a steely buccaneer’s stare. “Don’t go putting words into my mouth, Angel. If I wanted Fowler knocked off, I would have had it done years ago.”
“That I doubt. As long as he kept the lid on the Favorite business he was worth much more to you alive.”
“It was Favorite I should have had put away, not Fowler,” he growled. “Whose murder are you investigating anyway?”
“I’m not investigating anybody’s murder,” I said. “I’m looking for a man with amnesia.”
“I hope to hell you find him.”
“Did you tell the police about Johnny Favorite?”
Krusemark rubbed his blunt chin. “That was a tough one. I wanted to point them in the right direction without implicating myself.”
“I’m sure you came up with a good story.”
“I came up with a dandy. They asked if I knew what sort of characters Meg was romantically involved with. I gave them the names of a couple fellows I remembered hearing her mention, but I said the only really big romance in her life had been with Johnny Favorite. Naturally, they wanted to hear more about Johnny Favorite.”
“Naturally,” I said.
“So, I told them about their engagement and how weird he was and all that stuff. Stuff that never got into the papers back when he was a headliner.”
“I’ll bet you laid it on good and heavy.”
“They were looking to buy; selling it was a snap.”
“Where did you tell mem they could find Favorite?”
“I didn’t. I said I hadn’t seen him since the war. Said the last thing I’d heard was he’d been wounded. If they can’t trace it from there, they ought to look for other work!”