False Negative (Hard Case Crime) (24 page)

He dozed for half an hour, twenty minutes after that. By a quarter past six he was up for good. He smoked a cigarette, lit another, got out of bed and into his suit, drank a glass of juice listening to the news. He poked Cherise, and she stopped snoring long enough for him to tell her he was leaving for work. At nine, when he called from the office, she asked why he’d sneaked out. She planned to kill the afternoon seeing the sights.

An hour later he tried Pixley in Atlantic City. “When’d you get back?” he said.

“After you left the gallery I ran into a young fan who asked for pointers. I gave her what I thought she needed, and caught the train. All in all New York was an enjoyable, profitable experience.”

“I have another one for you,” Jordan said.

“Who’s the victim?”

“I am, if you won’t help.”

“I’m so tired of murder,” Pixley said. “Tell me more.”

“A friend of mine’s got show business ambitions. She’s not bad-looking, has talent, but she’s spinning her wheels.”

“Par for the course.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong. The big talent agencies, the bookers, the producers want to see pictures before they bring in a girl for an audition.”

“Unless it’s a cattle call,” Pixley said, “she can’t do without a good portfolio and professional portraits.”

“Give her the full treatment,” Jordan said. “On me.”

“Oh, I know who we’re talking about,” Pixley said, “the delightful girl you brought to my opening. Mollie, isn’t that her name? I’ll be happy to shoot her for you.”

“Right name. Wrong girl. I’m sending Cherise.”

“Who’s she?”

“A friend from Missouri Avenue.”

“A
Negro
girl?”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

“For
me
, Adam? I can’t imagine what problem you mean. I’ve always wanted to capture a young black woman in my view-finder. When can I have her?”

Cherise blocked the way into the kitchen when Jordan returned to the apartment after work. “What are you doing in there?” he said.

“Keep out. I’m busy.”

He reached around her into the refrigerator for a Knickerbocker. “Where’d you go today?”

“Saw the A&P on Third Avenue, the butcher on Fifty-sixth Street, the greengrocer on Second and Sixty-first.”

It wasn’t the most shocking discovery that she knew her way around a hot oven. But until he heard her lecture at Princeton it would be hard to top. She was sending a message about her intentions that was as ominous as an announcement that she was pregnant—something else it might be a good idea to start worrying about.

“I didn’t send for a cook.”

“Didn’t send for me at all.”

“There’s only about a million restaurants in New York.”

“We’ll get to ’em all in time,” she said. “This is something I want to do for you.”

He’d planned to surprise her with the photo shoot, put her
on the train back to Atlantic City before she knew what hit her. Now he’d have to tell her flatly that he didn’t want to play house.

“What did you do at work?” she said.

“The usual.”

“More dead bodies?”

“Uh-huh. Have you thought about what you’ll do when you’re home?”

“I just got here.”

“You have to keep your eye on the ball all the time, Cherise.”

“Like you?”

“Damn right.”

“Thinking ’bout who’s gonna turn up murdered tomorrow?”

“Something else, too,” he said. “I told a photographer about you. He wants to see you in his studio.”

“How’m I gonna pay you back for everything? There’s not enough hours in the night.”

“He expects you tomorrow afternoon.”

“Don’t worry about me missing my beauty nap,” she said. “I don’t mind sleeping in.”

“You’ll nap on the train. The studio is in Atlantic City.”

“I see.” She raised the lid on a pot, turned a spoon disinterestedly.

“He’ll have you looking like a movie star.”

“When I’m feeling like one of your corpses?”

And how did you put a happy face on that? “A chance like this doesn’t come along every day.”

“Nobody asked you to plan my life, thanks just the same. Wasn’t moving in permanent,” she said. “That don’t mean there wouldn’t be good times till things fall apart the way they do. Being comfortable around someone’s like drinking cream that you got to lap it all up, every drop, before it goes sour. It ain’t that I don’t ’ppreciate what you done. Been given worse for a goin’-away present—black eyes, a kick in the pants, a ride to the police station one time I lost my head. Thanks for everything,
and for nothing.” She turned down the heat. “Getting rid of me to be with your other girl?”

After saving her life how did he tell her he was afraid?

“Bad timing, Cherise, that’s all.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

Fat chance.

Tom Flynn, over a liquid lunch at Mulcahy’s on East Forty-third, said it was his first time in New York since V-J Day.

“I was thirty-seven years, ten months, six days old when Selective Service called my number. My old man and old lady hadn’t waited till the wedding, they’d have saved me the worst two years of my life at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook.”

Jordan rubbed his eyes. An hour of Flynn had put him into a mild coma. If he had to listen to war stories, it would be lights out.

“I was on a sixteen-inch gun crew watching for Jerry subs trying to sneak into the harbor, but we never practiced with live ammo. The sound those guns made would’ve thrown the city into a panic. If we had to shoot, we’d’ve taken out Coney Island.”

Jordan signaled the waiter. Flynn talked faster. “You haven’t asked what brings me to see you. I need work.”

“You left the
Bulletin?”

“It left me.”

“What about your girlfriend, the stockholder?”

“The stockholder’s daughter,” Flynn said. “She left first. She said she was saving herself for Eddie Fisher. What I’ve got in mind, I used to cover Philadelphia for Pelfrey. I’d like to try my hand full time, move into South Jersey, too, since you’re here.”

“There aren’t enough good killings to make it pay.”

“Business picked up after you left.”

The waiter brought the check. Jordan put money on the table. Flynn’s hands remained in his lap.

“Sunday morning, a party boat out of Margate hauled in a
body off Absecon Light. It took the coroner’s office two days to decide it was a woman’s. She’d been strangled before she went in the water. Dr. Melvin found rope burns on her throat, and across her shoulders, and she was wearing handcuffs on her wrists and ankles. He said—you know Doc Melvin?”

Jordan put down two more singles.

“Sex games, he said. Football’s
my
game,” Flynn said. “Baseball a little less so since DiMaggio hung ’em up. If Doc Melvin says she was playing games, who’m I to say it was something else? I figure it’s right up your alley.”

He pulled clips from his jacket, and arranged them between the wet spots around his glass.

“Name’s Anita Paulette Coburn, 21, originally from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, late of Kentucky Avenue, Atlantic City, an aspiring model, and whatever else pretty young girls who are up for those games aspire to.”

“How do we know?”

“From the parents,” Flynn said. “They’d reported her missing after being contacted by a roommate, and supplied dental records for the ID. She was something of a wild child who ran away from home a dozen times before she was fifteen, when the Coburns said the hell with it and had her declared an emancipated minor. She’d been to Hollywood to try to break into pictures, and New York, and Miami, where she was picked up for loitering for immoral purposes. Mrs. Coburn said she had dreams of being Miss America.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Flynn sucked ice out of his glass, and chewed it. “Not me.”

“Give me more.”

“You were a newspaperman,” Flynn said. “I don’t have to tell you the best part of the story often doesn’t make it into the paper. According to the autopsy, when they examined the corpse they found two dollars with it.”

“She was floating in the ocean. How—?”

“Doc Melvin told me it wasn’t the largest jackpot he’s removed from a corpse.”

Jordan wanted to view Anita Coburn’s remains, to smell the awful smells, talk to her grieving parents, and write her story himself, to present her murder to his readers as what it was rather than a processed commodity, twenty-five cents for a dozen in every issue.

“The cops linked her to the other girls?” he said.

“What other?”

“Mrs. Chase. Etta Wyatt. The killings follow a pattern.”

“I don’t know those names.”

“They got him for just one?”

“Got who?”

“You tell me,” Jordan said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Have you looked inside the magazines recently? We don’t use unsolved cases. That hasn’t changed since Pelfrey.”

Flynn ground the ice between his teeth. “I didn’t think anybody cared much who killed them. I thought it was about sex games, two bucks stuffed inside a two-dollar whore.”

Out of politeness Jordan wouldn’t ask if Flynn was like that himself, which of his interests beyond football and baseball had soured his relationship with the stockholder’s daughter.

“Read a couple of stories, Tom. It won’t kill you. Learn our style, write a piece on spec, and then we’ll see.”

“Sure,” Flynn said, “that’s what I’ll do. Meanwhile, can you spot me twenty till I’m back on my feet?”

In a new stack of flimsies Jordan found a squib on the “apparent sex-slaying of Anita Coburn, the former Miss Lehigh Valley, and Miss Silver Queen Corn, who stole judges’ hearts with a virtuoso turn on the six-string ukulele. The doomed beauty had been slated to make her professional debut on a variety card at the Alcazaba Theater in Atlantic City.” Jordan would be hard-pressed
to explain why a gruesome killing made him homesick, but suddenly he was starved for a Boardwalk corn dog.

On Friday at five he made a dash to the west side ferry. By ten he was carrying his bag from the train station at the Atlantic City Convention Center with no place to go. Was there an emptier feeling than to return alone to a city you’d stopped calling home?

A cabbie had a deal at the Bonacker Hotel: Beachfront room with continental breakfast, private bath, and a girl for fifteen dollars. Jordan checked in to the Columbus, and hurried out again to stretch his legs. He kept to the Boardwalk till he was back at the Convention Center, then went away from the ocean along Mississippi Avenue. The early show was breaking at the Alcazaba, and he stood back from the mob pouring onto the sidewalk. Television was driving a stake through Hollywood’s vitals, but you wouldn’t know it from the stampede under the serpentine lights.

For a dollar they’d seen two movies, and a stage show—Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham, Honi Coles, jugglers, and a ventriloquist with an ebony dummy. Anita Coburn was slated for the bottom of the bill. Edged in black her photo had a place of honor inside the glass showcase.

Jordan ducked under the marquee for a closer look. Anita, in a silver bathing suit, glanced back over her shoulder mimicking the famous Betty Grable pin-up from the war. Anita Coburn did not have Betty Grable’s great legs. What she did have were mounds of blonde hair, and a heavy-lidded smile, the come-hither look mocked by a ukulele dandled against her thigh. A girl who knew how to take a terrific picture. The studio name in the lower left corner was obscured by the black border. Jordan’s breath was misting the glass when a heavy hand spun him around, and he was face to face with the goon who’d tossed him from Beach’s office. The hand on the goon’s elbow belonged to his boss.

“Like her?” Beach said. He sent his man to the curb where a black Packard Patrician was idling with another thick-necked lug at the wheel. “What are you doing here?”

“Thought I’d catch a show.”

“No refunds,” Beach said. “The beauty queen’s been canceled.”

“Who killed her?”

“Let’s think about it. Thirty years ago, Houdini headlined a magic show at the Alcazaba. He was hogtied, locked in cuffs and chains, wrapped in a strait jacket for good measure, and lowered head first into a tank of water. In five minutes he was free. Of course, he was the world’s greatest escape artist.”

Under the flashing lights Jordan saw Beach as alternately black and white, never both, neither for long. “Anita Coburn didn’t tie herself up and jump in the ocean.”

“It doesn’t take a magician to know what crosses a man’s mind the moment he sees a girl like her.” Beach tapped the glass over her picture with a ruby ring. “Most of us are too civilized to act on it. Take Narvin for instance.”

“Who?”

Beach turned his head toward the car. “Put him in the company of an attractive young lady, he becomes protective. He treats her like the Queen of Sheba. Another friend—I won’t mention his name but you’d recognize it from the sports pages—goes to the other extreme. When he’s taken with a woman, he can’t keep his fists to himself.”

“It’s a peculiar way of showing affection.”

Beach shrugged. “There are men that show their feelings with ropes and handcuffs. They don’t always stop there.”

“Friends of yours, too?”

A scowl flashing in the crazy light was briefly a smile.

“Every murderer I read about in the papers has a neighbor who says, ‘...but he was a churchgoer, a scoutmaster, salt of the earth. He was kind to his mother, and loved animals. Who’d’ve
suspected—?’ I could be best friends with murderers, but how would I know? What do I know about anyone?”

The quotes were accurate, but often culled from the files. The personable killer down the block was a comfortable character for citizens who didn’t like being told that they lived among friendless monsters whose only human contact came in stalking their victims.

“Why was a white girl playing the Alcazaba?”

“I’ve got a bit of Narvin in me,” Beach said. “I’m also protective of the fair sex.”

“Why did you need her there, Beach? To keep her on hand till you sold her to friends you don’t really know? How much do you get for a white beauty queen?”

“I’ve given you all the help you’re going to get.”