The Fires of Spring (50 page)

Not even Mona Meigs conformed to Morris Binder’s clear-cut definitions. If David had ever known a bad girl, it was Mona. Yet the first rule of Clay’s magazines was that if a girl—any girl—opposed a bad man, she automatically became good. And Mona had opposed Max Volo from the first. But there was something else that lifted Mona from any classification of bad. David knew that of all the people he had met in the world—Old Daniel, Marcia, Doc Chisholm, Vito—Mona was the only one who had a chance of being an absolutely first-rate person. If only she could establish herself on the stage or in the movies she would show living greatness to the world. For she was great, hard, fiery great. And the petty categories of good and bad seemed, when applied to her, terribly inconsequential.

David spoke of this to his new boss, and Morris Binder laughed. “We live in two worlds,” he said. “Ninety-nine per cent of our experience falls in the world of Tremont Clay’s magazines. Newspapers, radio, novels, plays divide things into hard and fast symbols. Read the headlines!
Beast Murders Beautiful Singer!
I know probably five thousand murders intimately. Apart from a half dozen insane men, who are always very gentle killers, the so-called beasts are amazingly complex. They love their mothers, are kind to their sisters. They give money to the Red Cross. They also abandon pregnant girls and steal from their employers. They’re like you and me, but when they do a notable thing they’ve got to be labeled.
Beast
is a good, short word that fits into headlines. That’s why we use it.”

“And the other one per cent?” David asked.

Morris Binder closed his eyes and drummed on the desk with his letter opener. “You ever listen to Beethoven’s
Eroica
? How complex that is. An ode to Napoleon, that master murderer. Yet the music is noble to the point of rapture. You know Raskolnikov? What do you think of him? Or that black beast, Othello?” He opened his eyes and leaned far back in his heavy chair. Deftly he spun the steel blade into the air and watched it bite into the oak desk. “What about Rigoletto, Violetta, Quasimodo, McTeague, Eustachia Vye, Marcus
Aurelius, Fra Lippo, Alexander Hamilton? Or yourself? Or me?”

The gargantuan man, slobbering out of his clothes, breathed heavily and studied David carefully. “That’s the world that matters. The world where people glitter like diamonds with a million facets. Where people are like pearls, luminous as nacre on the surface but each with a speck that would destroy it if you were looking only for specks.”

There was a moment of quietness, and David returned the fat editor’s inquisitive stare. Now David was certain that Morris Binder worked his life away on the dirty magazines because of some secret compulsion. But when the Westfield murder erupted across the front pages, he wasn’t so sure.

Mom Beckett had a low opinion of writers. She had befriended or lived with some dozen scriveners and they had dedicated their books to her. She had not bothered to read them. “Not a damn one of them,” she explained to David, “ever so much as left me a cent. What you want, if you’re a woman, is a man in wholesale.”

“What do you mean?” David asked. He sat with his elbows propped on the restaurant table, listening to the provocative woman as she talked of the old days.

“I mean like wholesale furniture or wholesale food,” she explained. “Wholesale men think big, and they get you things for half price. Two-thirds of the money I got stashed away came from wholesale men. I like men that think big.”

“But you also like Claude, don’t you?” David probed.

“Him!” Mom laughed, jerking a manicured thumb at the cashier’s stand where thin Claude had his beard hidden behind a book. “Why, you couldn’t help likin’ that helpless guy.” She looked at the frail poet with the tenderness of a mother watching an ill-favored child.

“Why don’t you marry him, Mom?” David asked.

“Oh, no!” the big woman winked. “When a woman marries, she’s lost! Suppose we was married and the Chinese cook quit. I say, ‘Claude, cook up some stew,’ and he like as not says, ‘Darlin’, I’d like to but I got a headache,’ and where the hell would I be? As it is, I’m boss, and if that filthy Chinese bastard quits on me, I know I got me a cook in reserve, because this way if Claude don’t cook he knows he goes out of here on his ass.”

And yet David noticed that no one on MacDougal Street was more excited than Mom when some great figure in the
world of letters came sniffing into the restaurant looking for Claude. David could spot them as soon as they came down the steps from the street. Incredulously, they would peer into the dingy restaurant and ask tentatively, “Does the poet Claude …”

“He’s in the kitchen,” David said.

“The kitchen?”

“Yes, he’s whipping up an Irish stew. Hey, Claude!”

Through the swinging door the frail, bearded man would appear with a towel wrapped about his waist. There would be halting introductions and then Claude would throw aside the towel and talk quietly with his visitor. It might be a college professor or a famous editor. Often they would find the stuffy air of the restaurant confining, and they would go into Washington Square and sit upon the benches. Then Mom would bellow, “All right, Dave! Hop out there and finish that stew.” That’s why the food was so bad at Mom Beckett’s. Claude was an abominable cook, but the people who took over for him when he left to talk in Washington Square were worse.

Once David asked, “Mom, why don’t you cook?” and Mom replied, “Not this one! I long ago learned that the only work in this world too hard for women was what they call women’s work. You know, cookin’ and washin’ and scrubbin’ and liftin’ pots and pans all day. I like men’s work, like keepin’ track of money or sittin’ on your fat tail and givin’ orders.”

Later, when Claude and his visitor returned from their abstract discussions, Mom would say graciously, “I’d be honored in the extreme if you would permit me to take you out to dinner. The food here is lousy.” And they would leave the dingy restaurant and the bootleg gin and the foul stew and David would watch them do down MacDougal Street, the big, proud, happy woman, the cave-chested poet, and the distinguished visitor.

It was four-thirty on a drowsy July afternoon when Morris Binder’s ticker flashed the news that Oliver Banks Westfield had been murdered. The immense editor shifted his three hundred pounds quickly and grabbed a telephone.
“World?”
he shouted with a burst of energy that David had thought impossible. “Carey? Give me the dope on Beatrice Westfield. Yep. I have a theory. If it works out, you get the story. Call me back.”

He struggled from his chair and heaved his massive body toward a file of old magazines. Thumbing through them hurriedly failed to disclose what he sought. He closed his eyes and stood very still for more than a minute. Then he said, “Of course!” and went to a steel file where he searched furiously. As he worked a big grin broke over his face, “Sure, that’s it!” he repeated to himself.

Returning to his chair he cried, “Harper! Bring me the other phone.” With ponderous arms he brushed aside his manuscripts. “Operator. Get me the police in Miami.”

Word sped through Clay Publications that Morris Binder was working on another murder. Miss Adams dashed upstairs, thin and fiery with excitement. “Take care of yourself,” she warned the hulking man, and something in the proprietary way she spoke betrayed to David that she had long loved the sweating editor. Then Tremont Clay himself appeared.

“Is that the Oliver Banks Westfield of National Trust?” he asked.

“The same,” Binder replied without looking up.

“God! We can run this story for years!” Clay cried in real excitement. “Wall Street! Long Island! Is there an orgy angle?”

“Maybe,” Binder puffed as he placed another call to the police in San Francisco.

“Who did it?” Clay asked, licking his lips.

“His wife,” Morris Binder grunted.

“Unh-unh!” Miss Adams interrupted. “Ticker says his wife has been in Los Angeles for the last three weeks.”

“She did it,” Binder replied stolidly. Then Carey at the
World
called. Binder listened attentively for several minutes and observed, “That’s the way I remember it, Carey. Well, nothing definite yet. But if I were you I’d get a lot of stories ready on Beatrice Westfield. Sure I know she’s in L.A. But she murdered her husband, all the same.”

Next came a flurry of telephone calls to other parts of the United States. As the sticky evening wore on two police inspectors came into the office and smoked cigars. Tremont Clay, greatly excited by the poisoning of the great banker, sent out for sandwiches and coffee. He was already drafting headlines for
Sex Detectives: “Did Oliver Banks Westfield Play Once Too Often?”
He laughed at himself and said to one of the detectives, “Everybody who gets murdered should be named Oliver Banks Westfield! What a beautiful name!”

At ten Morris Binder got the phone call he was expecting. It was from a small town in Illinois: “Yes, a ham actor
named Chester Gates was registered at the hotel. Arrived Thursday. Practically no money. Wouldn’t admit anything, either. But he did have a picture of Beatrice Westfield in his wallet. Sure we’ll hold him, but what for? Murder! Cripes a’mighty!”

“There it is,” Morris Binder announced as he slumped back in his chair. “Beatrice Westfield had this two-bit Chester Gates poison her hubby. Better have the L.A. cops pick her up.”

The chief inspector leaned forward. “Do you think, Mr. Binder, that she’ll talk?”

“Of course not!” Binder snapped. “But Chester Gates out in Illinois will. All you got to do is prove she played him for a sucker. Now to do that all you have to show Chester is that the fair Beatrice went west to shack up with Tom Barnley.”

“Did she?” the inspector asked.

“Sure she did.” Then Carey from the
World
called back. The huge editor snarled at him, as if the day had been too long, “Sure it’s safe! You say yourself that Tom Barnley and Chester Gates were in the same show. Sure Beatrice Westfield kidded them both along. Sure Chester’ll yap his head off when he finds out he was just the stooge for Barnley.”

Morris Binder banged the phone down on the desk and took a deep breath. The inspector started to ask additional questions but the gigantic editor brushed them aside. “Wrap it up,” he advised. “Pour the full heat on little Chester. I’d arrest Tom Barnley, too. He’s innocent, but it’ll get your face in all the papers. Play this case for all it’s worth, Inspector, and you’ll be chief one of these days.”

Slowly the office emptied. The ticker was turned off and Tremont Clay asked, “How do you do these things, Morris?”

The fat man grinned at his employer. “I never forget anything,” he said.

Miss Adams whispered to David, “It’s about the sixth case I’ve seen him solve. Sits right in that chair and figures them out!”

“Why does he stay on a two-bit job like this?” David inquired.

Miss Adams became ashen gray. “Don’t you know?” she asked.

But before she could speak Morris Binder rose from his chair and indicated that she should go home. “Thank you very much,” he said quietly, and David again had the sensation that these ill-matched people were lovers. The immense
man smiled down at the sparrowy woman and said, “Good night.”

When Miss Adams had left, David began turning out the lights. Behind him he heard his huge boss puffing heavily, as if the day’s exertions had been great. “How did you guess about Chester Gates?” David asked.

“Murder’s my hobby,” Morris Binder replied, wearily slamming down the lid on his chaotic desk. Breathing heavily, he slumped back in his chair for a moment and droned. “There’s one rule to go by. If a wife is murdered, work on the assumption that it was her husband. If a man is murdered, always assume it was his wife. That’s a safe bet, because no two people can live together for long without having a hundred reasons for murder. And then,” he added with a chuckle, “if the wife happens to be in L.A. when the murder is done in New York, don’t be a bit worried. Just figure out who she got to do it for her. It’s really very simple.”

“But how did you hit on Chester Gates?” David persisted.

The last light was turned out, and from the hallway shone the dismal glow of a single small bulb. Tediously, Morris Binder snapped on a desk lamp and protestingly pushed up the top of his desk. His fat hands fumbled for a batch of pictures. The top one showed Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Banks Westfield at a lawn party. They happened to be staring at each other in boredom. Behind them stood several actors from a New York hit. With his fat forefinger Morris Binder pointed at Mr. Westfield. “That’s the look of murder,” he said. “That bored look.”

“But he’s the one that got killed!” David argued.

“What does it matter?” Slowly the tired editor closed his desk and turned out the light. Then he coughed a couple of times. “Ugggh. Ugggh. I want you to believe, Harper, that two years ago I saw that picture in the paper and thought, ‘There’s a shot I can use some day in
Great Crimes
.’ But I couldn’t have told you which one was going to be done in.” He closed the door of the office and mused, “I hope to heaven one of those men in the background turns out to be Chester Gates. I have a hunch it will.”

On the narrow stairs David was inspired to say, “You ought to be on the police force, Mr. Binder.”

The huge man chuckled. “Yes, I should. I suppose they’ve told you why I’m not.”

David was about to ask why, but at the foot of the stairs he saw thin Miss Adams, waiting in the shadows. She looked
particularly drab in a gray tweed jacket, but there was a great light in her eyes as she almost pleaded. “Come, Mr. Binder. We’d better hurry.”

The city of New York captivated David, as it should any young man with imagination. Mom Beckett’s was only nine blocks from where he worked, so each morning he walked along Third Street and watched Italian families haggling over business details. He grew to enjoy the fat women shouting at their little men, and for the first time in his life he realized that he was a fairly big man.

At Lafayette Street there was always a bustle of cargo and men moving it. At Tremont Clay’s, huge trucks delivered round cores of cheap pulp paper for the insatiable presses and took away the same paper fouled up with stories of crime and passion. Idle policemen watched the traffic, and old men with beards gathered at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. There was vigorous life on all the streets.