Jimmy and Fay (16 page)

“And what, precisely, would you be looking for?” he asked.

“I don't know. Precisely. Never developed a taste for it myself. Have you?”

He closed the dumbwaiter and sent it upstairs. “I sampled quite a bit of it when I was in Cuba. Most days, it was all we could lay our hands on, what with the war and all. As for quality, well, memorable it was not, but it did what we wanted it to do, and I counted us lucky to have it.”

He went to one of the taller stacks of shelves, kicking a short stool in front of him, and climbed on it. “Let's see. I believe this is where I moved the more exotic specimens.”

He pulled down a wooden crate and then got down a second. “If you can tell me what you're needing this for, perhaps I can make some suggestions. Or perhaps we could sample three or four.”

I pulled out a dusty fifth of dark Bacardi's and said, “I'm looking for something that will tempt a rum drinker.”

“Yes,” he said. “If I'm not speaking out of turn, could it be that you're referring to that unctuous Limey scribbler Dunbar who recently graced us with his presence?”

Unctuous.
That was another one for my list.

Malloy took out two more bottles. “This, they say, is a higher quality of Bacardi than the one you've got there. At least according to the invoices, you pay more for it. I've found that I cannot tell the difference, but it's been so long since I tasted either, we should not take my word for it. Now, where are the glasses? Ah yes, here.”

He produced a couple of glasses, cut the seal around the neck of the bottle with his knife, and thumbed the cork out. I poured. We tasted.

“Arch,” I said, “are you married?”

If the question surprised him, he didn't show it. “I was. In Ireland. She died.”

I said I was sorry to bring it up and he said, “No, that was a long time ago, and I suppose her passing is the reason I left and why I'm here. Let's try that one you've got.”

We did and he was right. I couldn't tell a difference.

“Did you like being married?”

“Most of the time. I'd do it again if I could find a woman who'd have me, but that's increasingly unlikely. Now, this third bottle, it is something different entirely, a rarity in my experience.”

As Arch cut the seal, I saw that it was a square clear bottle filled with greenish-amber hooch. After he wiped the dust off, it had a warm inviting look. The label was Spanish.

Arch said, “I believe the proper term for this is rum infused with absinthe. I've heard of it but not sampled.” He wiped out our glasses and poured. It had a strong sharp smell, and the first taste numbed the tongue. Arch said that he needed another small sip before he could render a judgment. I passed. This would do for my purpose.

“Yes,” he said, holding the glass to the light, “just a touch of the Green Fairy. I'm guessing that your inquiries about the late Mrs. Malloy have something to do with the romantic straits in which you and the lovely Miss Nix find yourselves.”

Straights
? That didn't seem right. Another word to look up. I tell you, listening to Arch was an education. “That's one way of putting it,” I said. “I've done something to put her back up and I can't figure what it is.”

“I'd tell you that I'd ask Madam Reneau, but she won't talk about Connie. She thinks of the girl as a daughter.”

Madam Reneau was Marie Therese, and I knew he was right.

“But I can give you one small piece of advice. You say you've done something to anger her. I certainly did many things that angered Mrs. Malloy in our few years together, but as I look back, it seems to me that more often than not, it wasn't that I did or said something to cause the dustup. It was that I had
not
done something. So perhaps you should approach it from that direction. Is there something you promised to buy for Connie, or a thing that you said you'd do and then, inexplicably, forgot about?”

I picked up the square bottle and said that I couldn't think of anything like that. Still, I worked on it, and as things turned out, Arch was right.

Back in the office, I put the rum on the liquor cabinet to one side, behind the gin but close enough to the lamp to catch the light. I called the bar and told them to send up a bucket of ice, seltzer, ginger ale, and four glasses. Connie brought them. I was going to say that I was sorry for raising my voice, but she was still giving me the silent treatment, so I just told her to put the stuff on the cabinet and to send Dunbar up when he arrived.

She nodded and left without saying a word, and that got me steamed all over again. I took the dirty picture book out of the safe, put it on my desk, and turned it over. The thing was held together by two thick copper staples that were easy enough to pry apart with a letter opener. I took off the back cover and lifted the pages out over the staples. The shot of the girl on top of the Empire State Building was still the one with the best look at her face. I tucked it and the one of her in the diner under my blotter and locked the rest of the book back in the safe.

I can't say why I took such care with it. The thick heavy paper that the pictures were mounted on had something to do with it. That and the clarity of the photographs and the careful printing of the text meant that somebody had put a lot of work in on it, and so the craftsmanship made me think it might be valuable and not something you'd just throw away. That got me wondering about this Oscar Apollinaire again, assuming he was the craftsman in question. I really wanted to talk to him.

But that was for later. First I needed to talk to Saxon Dunbar. I found his card and called his number at 21.

He picked up on the first ring. “Talk to me.”

I told him who I was and said that I'd come into possession of something he wanted to see. He said he'd be there in twenty minutes. It took him twice that because it was Friday night.

When he walked into my office, Dunbar had an extra bounce in his step and a mean twinkle in his eye. He found me with my sleeves rolled up and sitting at my desk with a brandy, reading Winchell's column in
The Mirror
. The liquor cabinet was behind me off to one side. He perched on the other side of the desk and made a production out of fitting an oval cigarette into a black holder and lighting up. I found an ashtray in a drawer.

I said, “Last night, you told me that somebody called you and said they knew about dirty pictures of Fay Wray. Is that right?”

“Yes, and that you had been engaged to arrange their return.”

“Have you heard from them again?”

He shook his head.

“I don't think you're going to. What they told you, it's about half right. Now, for reasons that I won't go into, I couldn't say anything yesterday, but today things have changed. This is the way I heard it. Yesterday morning these guys, the ones who called you, sent some pictures to Miss Wray at her hotel and put the squeeze on the studio to keep 'em out of circulation. They said they had dozens maybe hundreds of copies and they wanted six Gs for them. RKO lawyers weren't sure what they should do, so they contacted the cops on the quietus, and one of the boys in blue suggested they all talk it over here at my place. Now, here's where they lied to you. The girl in the pictures, it ain't her.”

I pulled the photographs out from under the blotter and passed them across the desk. He picked them up, gave them a quick look and then a second before he tossed them back, disappointed.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “Any imbecile can see that's not her.”

“That's what the lawyers said, but Miss Wray was still upset and wanted the studio to pay up. Last night they put her off. Asked me to look into it and I did. Today they got her calmed down and she agreed there was nothing to worry about. If the guys call back, they'll tell 'em to shove off. And that's it, I guess. Except I'm out the six hundred bucks I would've pocketed for being the go-between.”

He jammed the half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray, spraying tobacco and ash all over my desk.

I took a sip of brandy and said, “Of course, I couldn't say anything last night, but I remembered what you said about being Miss Wray's friend and my friend. Now I don't know how you handle your business since most of the time I can't figure out who you're writing about when it's ‘Who was that man who was spotted coming out a certain Broadway Baby's digs on Fortieth Street?,' but I figure it would not help your reputation if you named names and got it all wrong.”

He shrugged and fired up another smoke. “But it is such a juicy morsel and it's been months since I mentioned Rastus. Shit, shit, shit. But perhaps the evening's not a total loss. What's a man got to do to get a drink around here?”

I asked what he took. He said he'd have a taste of that rum. Make it neat. I poured a double.

When I gave him the glass, he smelled it, smiled, and sipped deeply. I topped off my brandy and put my feet on the desk.

He eased back in the chair. “You said they asked you to look into the pictures. Did you find anything?”

“Yeah, the guy who runs the back room at the Eltinge Theatre burlesque show said he bought 'em from a hophead photographer. Said this guy comes in every now and then when he's hard up with sets of pictures, usually girls and girls. Said they always sold fast and he got a buck apiece for 'em, if you can believe it. Times like these and guys will fork over a whole dollar.”

Dunbar shrugged again. “Takes all kinds. But if only they'd been real. Imagine that! Then six thousand is peanuts.”

“My guess is that some guy who knew about the movie saw the pictures at the Eltinge and figured he might be able to bluff the movie people.”

Dunbar squinted at the pictures and said, “He certainly got them to look good. If he'd just found a girl who looked more like her, then I could do something with them. I see more of this lookalike material out in California. Short films, too, even some that are the genuine article. You wouldn't believe what some of the bitches who are on the cover of
Photoplay
did when they were working their way up, if you know what I mean.”

“No kidding.”

And he went on teasing me without naming names. I think he was disappointed that I didn't press him on it. He was working on his second drink when I went into my spiel about how I'd been thinking about what he said about everybody else having good booze after Prohibition ended, and I hoped he'd give me a nod or two in his column. By the time I poured his third, we were chummy as hell.

“Funny thing,” I said, “the guy at the Eltinge told me that this hophead photographer finds his girls just like the movie director in
King Kong
.”

Dunbar said, “What do you mean? Haven't seen it.”

“In the movie, this guy Denham is looking for a girl to star in his picture but it's going to be real dangerous, see, and so he can't get any real actresses to go out into the wilderness with him so he goes out looking for any pretty girl who's so broke she'll take the job, and he finds Ann Darrow, that's the girl's name, trying to steal an apple. Well, this guy, this photographer, he finds girls by hanging around the places that help dames, like that wayward girls outfit, what's it called?”

“The Mary Wilcox Foundation, aptly named I must say. If there was ever a wayward girl, it was her.”

“What do you mean?” I said. It wasn't what I was expecting to hear.

“Oh, this is a nice one,” he said after another drink. “You know who Mary Wilcox was, don't you?”

“Sure, the high-society dame. She died a few months ago, right?”

“That's her. Wife of Peter Wilcox, upstanding pillar of the community, one of the city's most powerful bankers, hobnobs with Pierpont Morgan, etcetera, etcetera. Everyone thinks that he started the foundation because of the business that the Seabury investigation uncovered, and that may be true enough, but he named it after his wife because she was the upper crust's own Miss Roundheels, a real Flaming Youth.”

His eyebrows arched. “A few years ago, she cut quite a swath through the city's eligible bachelors. It lasted until her husband got wind of it and had her committed upstate. The public story was ‘nervous exhaustion,' brought on by her tireless good works, but the woman was a raging nymphomaniac.”

“No kidding?”

“I know all about it, of course, but the family did a magnificent job of hushing up all the young sports who could have blabbed. Threats, bribes, plum jobs, you name it—whatever it took.” He drank and sighed. “Another wonderful story that I must take to my grave.”

After Dunbar had bid a sad farewell to his absinthe-infused rum, I put the pictures back into the book, fixed the staples, and stashed it in the safe. About twenty minutes later, my phone rang. It was Abramson, the kid the RKO lawyers left at the Pierre. Sounding breathless and excited, he said the extortionists had called. I asked what they said.

“They want the money. I told them we have it but I couldn't do anything. They're going to call back in an hour and I can't reach anyone. What do I do?”

I said I'd be right there.

Chapter Fourteen

In the lobby of the Pierre, I checked the bellboys' station for the kid I talked to but didn't see him. He found me before I got to the elevators, and by the smile on his face, he had something. He rode up to Miss Wray's floor with me but didn't say anything until we were alone in the hall.

“A buddy of mine works the service entrance where the regular deliveries are handled. Mostly it's just the usual business stuff with messengers. He said they were twice as busy yesterday just taking care of Miss Wray's flowers. But he did remember the guy who brought in a package, on account of the guy making a big deal out of it being ‘personal,' and it had to be handed to her and nobody else. Of course, they told him it didn't work that way and he left it with them.”