False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (12 page)

“Something bad might have happened to her,” Jordan said.

“Nothing good happened,” Armstrong said. “Never does. You mean by bad?”

“She may have been killed.”

“Gonna say why?”

“Another girl was murdered on the beach here several weeks ago. Etta Wyatt was going to the beach when she disappeared.”

“Colored girl, the other one?”

Jordan shook his head.

“Ain’t no connection, ’cept they girls.”

“The other girl was ambitious, out to make a name for herself. I think Etta Lee was, too. They had more in common than you might suspect.”

“Ambitious women got one thing in common,” Armstrong looked at Jordan to say that it wasn’t necessary to spell it out, and seemed to change his mind. “Handful of trouble for any man fool enough to want ’em.”

“Who wanted Etta Lee?”

“Seen what she looked like, boy? How she moved? Asking the wrong question.”

“What’s the right one?”

“Who didn’t? Damn—!”

Blood on Armstrong’s lip was running into a corner of his mouth. Jordan watched him pluck tissues out of a box, ball them against the wound.

“I’m not looking to dig up dirt on your musicians,” Jordan said to him. “But shining a light on a mess is the best disinfectant.”

“Be shining a light on yourself, too,” Armstrong said. “You want disinfecting, or just the bright light?”

“It’s what writers do—”

“Never cleaned up none of mine—Forget it, wasn’t you.” Armstrong put down the clipper. He sopped up more blood, and examined the tissue before throwing it away. Then he turned
around. “Ambitious women, they ruthless. ’Nother word you’ll find in Mr. Webster’s. Don’t look scandalized, you didn’t know women use their loveliness in ways got nothing to do with love. Figure it give ’em power over men, when it’s the other way ’round. The gals that dance for me, too many of ’em like that, even the ones straight out of church. Etta was worse’n most. Was also my best dancer, only one wouldn’t be doing mankind better service on her back. Tried to straighten her out, but she wouldn’t listen, ’cept to the lying voice inside her head.”

“Who was she involved with?”

“Bad publicity’ll kill the All-Stars,” Armstrong said. “Promoters believe I’m transporting loose women, they’ll ask us to stay ‘way. I wouldn’t tell you who she was sleeping ’round with, even if I knew ’em all. Ones I do know, trust Pops they didn’t harm her. Been messing with showgirls twenty, thirty years. They ain’t provoked to murder in all that time, they never will.”

“I don’t think they were. I’d like to talk to them, and hear what they can tell me about her.”

“Weren’t even in town when that white woman got herself killed. What more do you need to hear?”

“They might have gotten closer to Etta Wyatt than you know. She could have introduced them to her friends, or to someone who knows someone...”

“Don’t come to me with suspicions. Colored band on the road got all the suspicions we can use, hang over us like a, you know, black cloud. Write ’bout suspicions, might as well be shouting out for people to invite us not to come to their city. Got proof, tell the police. Got suspicions, keep ’em under your hat. Son, playing for the public is my whole life. All I ever done. What I do three hundred nights a year. I ain’t gonna connive with you to put an end to it. Have to find out what happened on your own. Try bugging folks knew the white girl you
know
was murdered. Be better for everyone, you take that approach. It’s the best I got for you.”

Pelfrey had been released from the hospital, but wasn’t home. Jordan tried him at the office. A woman with a central European accent handed over the phone after asking who he was.

“Your secretary sounds like Dietrich,” Jordan said. “Lucky dog.”

“Hitler’s big sister, you mean,” Pelfrey said. “Helga’s a visiting nurse who comes by twice a week to see if I’m alive, and to clean out my infections if I am.”

“You’re getting back to your old self. That’s good.”

“My old self didn’t whistle when he exhaled. His lungs hadn’t been nicked by a knife. I hope you’re better with the facts than you are sizing people up.”

“You’re divorced, aren’t you?” Jordan said. “Not many close friends. Bet I’ve got that right.”

“What’s that got to do with—?”

“Nothing,” Jordan said. “Remember the body found on the sand here? There’s a new wrinkle that’s going to land the case on your cover. Another woman’s disappeared on her way to the beach. A dancer with one of the top name acts to come through Atlantic City.”

“What name’s that?”

“Louis Armstrong.”

“Stop right there.”

“Don’t you need to hear the rest?”

“I know the rest. The missing dancer is colored—”

“Sexy light-skinned girl, twenty-one or so. I can get all the pictures you want. Publicity shots of her and Armstrong together, and alone wearing next to nothing.”

“I can’t use them.”

“That’s nuts.”

“I can’t use
her
,” Pelfrey said. “We don’t do Negro cases. If somebody kills Armstrong, that’s different. Unless the killer is Negro, too, and then we wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.”

“You’re passing up a terrific story.”

“Murdered Negroes don’t sell magazines. The public doesn’t think they’re worth the two bits cover price.”

“Enlighten them, why don’t you?”

“Get off your high horse, Jordan.
Real Detective
isn’t in the business of changing anyone’s thinking. Our readers want confirmation that the world is a dangerous place for decent, narrow-minded white men and women like themselves. There’s fewer of them for each issue. They’re dying off, and we can’t replace them because their children would rather watch TV than read. I’m not going to chase them away faster by mocking their ideas. I’d like to live in their world, too, where Negroes kill mostly each other and the occasional white woman who sparks animal urges. I don’t know what your politics are. I’m a...at Christmas my conscience sends a check to the NAACP. One place I don’t care to see integrated, though, is a police morgue.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted to use a case like that.”

“Don’t tell me what not to tell you. What else have you got?”

“A big, fat nothing.”

“I have something that might interest you,” Pelfrey said.

“Who’s the victim?”

“I am,” Pelfrey said. “Till I find a new managing editor. Mine just quit. Ever do magazine work?”

“I’ve sold a few pieces to the Sunday supplements.”

“Editing’s the other side of the coin. It’s being an English teacher for disagreeable semi-literates who can’t draw a sober breath when you need to double-check a fact. Pays sixty-five a week with no chance of advancement unless the next crazy bastard with a knife does a better job of killing me.”

“What about vacations and holidays?”

“Why are you asking about a vacation? You haven’t started yet.”

“Benefits?”

“You get advance copies of the magazine every month. Plus all the pencils, paper clips, and typewriter ribbons you can steal. It’s a unique opportunity. What do you say?”

“Try me again later,” Jordan said. “After I’ve cut another notch in my belt.”

The drumming was primitive and heavy-handed, jazz gone insane. Jordan came awake straining to shut it out. He was in bed, pretty sure it was his own, mid-morning light at the edge of the blinds. What wasn’t clear was why someone was at his door so early. Thinking was hard. It was easier to find out who was there and send him away. The ice-cold floor was a crime against his toes. He stopped to look for socks.

“I woke you, huh?” Pix Pixley said.

“What do you think?”

“It depends,” the photographer said, “on whether you usually greet visitors with nothing on but blue argyle.”

Jordan went for his clothes. Pixley waited in the living room eyeing the typewriter buried under news clippings, the books and manuscripts in erratic piles on the floor. He inspected the furnishings and the paint job, and went to the window to take in the pallid view. “Just as I imagined,” he said.

“Why were you imagining my place?”

“It’s how I get a read on new people, by conjuring how they live. When I do their portrait, I know what props are essential to the shot.”

“Is that why you woke me? To take my picture?”

Pixley shook his head, a little rueful. “No, I want to show you someone else’s.”

“It couldn’t have waited?”

“I couldn’t. Why should I?”

Jordan had ready answers. Some were winners, but it was too early to argue. “How’d you know I live here? I don’t give out my address, and I’m not in the phone book.”

“You are—in the reverse directory. I’d be lost without it,” Pixley said, but didn’t say why.

He shook a handful of pictures out of an envelope, and laid them flat beside the mess on the floor. Jordan turned a light on a gruesome rotogravure, black-and-white glossies of a young woman—a Negro, he thought at first, but maybe not—her sad, shamed face made grotesque by a beating. It was impossible to tell what she had looked like before. Both eyes were swollen shut. A cheekbone was several times the normal size. The other had been crushed and the pieces displaced, an earthquake under the skin. Jordan flipped over the pictures, and Pixley said, “Looking for a police photographer’s stamp?”

“There’s no identifying mark.”

“They’re copies.”

“Where’d you get them?”

“You have your contacts. I have mine. For all we know they’re the same.” Pixley laughed a little boy’s mischievous laugh. “You know I won’t give them up.”

“Okay, who am I looking at?”

“Name’s Carlotta Abigail Bianchi, 23-years-old, formerly of Erie, Pennsylvania, most recently of the Bronx, Carla to her friends, Francesca to diners at the Mermaid Room in the Park Sheraton Hotel, where she’s a waitress.”

“I’d ask who was driving the truck that ran into her,” Jordan said, “but a truck wouldn’t have done so much damage. Who slugged her?”

“Not a slugger. A switch hitter with lefty power.”

Jordan looked at him sharply, and Pixley winked back.

“Hub Chase.”

Jordan examined the photos together, and again one by one, trying to put Carla Bianchi together again. Without evidence he’d stipulate that she’d once been good-looking. Suzie Chase’s husband didn’t seem the type to bust up a plain woman.

“Not that he admits to anything. He says,” Pixley said, “her
brains were scrambled, he was in the sack with someone else when she got it, a young lady whose reputation he’s protecting, stand-up guy that he is.”

“What does Francesca say?”

“He came into the nightclub with a bunch of players from the Yankees around one a.m., last Friday. She didn’t know him from the batboy, but was ga-ga for pinstripes. Hub was rude, crude, lewd, and drunk as a skunk. He pawed her every time she came to the table, which she didn’t object to—they’re both agreed on that—till someone pointed out he was a bush leaguer out on the town with the big club. When he slipped her his number, she gave it back to him. His teammates called it a night at three, but he was still hanging around when she knocked off an hour later. He didn’t take it like a gentleman when she turned down his kind offer to escort her home. The rest you see for yourself.”

“Why haven’t I read about it anyplace?”

“No charges were filed,” Pixley said. “Did I mention the Yankees are picking up the tab at the plastic surgeon’s, and resodding the Police Athletic League ballfield at Macombs Dam Park?”

“It’s not something that stays swept under the rug. Why did—?”

“Why’d someone give me the pictures?”

“Why bring them to me? I cover murders, not near misses.”

“I’m trying to help you with a murder.”

“I get my help from the dictionary,” Jordan said. “
I’m
not a real detective. I’m a writer, that’s all I do.”

“Close enough. I’ll show you more.”

Jordan stopped him. “Is Carla Bianchi white?”

“Huh?”

“It’s hard to tell from the pictures. Her face is so distorted, she barely looks human.”

“What are you getting at?”

“It’s the first question a real detective asks before taking a case.”

Pixley looked uncomfortably at Jordan, who didn’t explain. No one had to know he’d dug into the story of a Negro girl and been rebuked by his editor. Let Pixley think he was the kleagle in the Klan’s Atlantic City klavern. As long as he got the facts straight, spelled everyone’s name properly.

“I’m surprised you care,” Pixley said.

“If she’s colored, I can hardly leave it out.”

“Why not?” Pixley said. And when Jordan wouldn’t give in: “Unless she’s passing, she’s a white girl. The Mermaid Room wouldn’t employ a Negro waitress.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

Pixley shook three pictures out of a small envelope. They were portraits of a man about 25 years old, full face and profile, blandly handsome despite a crushed flat top. Around his bull neck a placard certified a New York police department photo shoot. He was glaring boozily at the camera, challenging it, thought Jordan, or the whole damn world, an expression teased out of the color portrait of his new Fleer’s baseball card. Jordan didn’t want to run into him in a dark alley even when he wasn’t holding a bat.