The traces of brillhart, p.1
The Traces of Brillhart, page 1
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
THE EARLY TRACES
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
THE LATER TRACES
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 3
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1960, 1988 by Herbert Brean.
DEDICATION
For Helen E. Brean with love.
THE EARLY TRACES
“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.”
—Conan Doyle: A Case of Identity
CHAPTER 1
ONE NIGHT, A LITTLE LATE
I first knew Achille Robert Sinclair III for about two months, when we were both fourteen years old. That puts it back a little more than twenty years. My father had died and my mother and I moved to Columbus, because she had a brother there who could help us a bit, and presently I was introduced into the high school and enrolled as a freshman. This was after the spring semester had started and a thoughtful teacher made a point of finding out where I lived and introducing me to a boy who lived not too far away, so I’d have a friend. That was Archie Sinclair, as he got to be known later.
At the time he was known by his full first name, which is French and was so pronounced: Ah—sheel. Perhaps you can imagine what the other boys did with that, especially since the bearer of it was a gawky youngster with bad coordination, pipe-stem legs, and a chinless, eager, thick-spectacled face.
For the best part of two months Archie and I walked to school almost daily and he asked me over to his house quite a lot; he was a lonely, friendless boy. I asked him over to my uncle’s too, but that wasn’t very good because my uncle ran a truck garage which was right behind the house and quite often the drivers’ language got a little frank. Not seriously; my aunt wouldn’t have put up with that. Just profane for Archie. He was that kind of boy.
Archie lived in a house which was not enormous but after you got in it you realized it was bigger than the neighborhood average and much more expensive. There were oil paintings with lights illuminating them even in the daytime, and often a fire in the library fireplace and always a maid around someplace. Usually she brought us cookies and milk. Archie had a room with all sorts of things in it—snowshoes and skis, two chemistry sets, a lot of books, a saxophone he played with fair success, and assorted baseball gloves and footballs. Except for the saxophone, he never used these things much. Occasionally we took gloves and a ball out in the big back yard and tried to play catch, but he never knew what to do with them; maybe it was his eyes, which were weak and blinky.
Other times we stayed in the house and fooled around with the chemistry sets or talked about the books we liked. But that wasn’t very good either, for while in school Archie had a great inferiority attitude and was quiet and timid, when he got home, where he could tell the maid what to do or command all his games and radio and chemistry sets, he got a little overbearing. Youngsters sense the meaning of these things fast and I soon realized that he was an unfortunate boy—spoiled, ineffectual and wistful. But realizing that didn’t make him any better company.
Then March came and with it warm weather and baseball, and I tried out for a freshman team and made second base. After that, between homework and baseball, I didn’t have any time for Archie and we lost track of each other. Before school ended that summer he disappeared and they said he had been sent to Europe. He wasn’t around the following fall and I forgot him.
A few years ago a bunch of us came back on a Sunday night from a weekend out on the Island and stopped at this girl’s apartment for bacon and eggs. Someone got fooling around on the piano, and I noticed that the sheet music included a song called “A Dollop with a Trollop,” which was quite popular then. I also noticed that the composer was Achille Robert Sinclair III, and I knew I was hearing from my one-time friend. But that dropped from my mind too, and Archie Sinclair stayed forgotten until this recent night, twenty years after I last saw him. This is when the story really begins.
* * * *
After spending considerable time in this business, I’ve learned a few things and one of them is that the best thing you can do at the end of each day is to go over your notes and type them up. After a long session of interviewing, you are likely to feel that tomorrow will be time enough. It isn’t. If you go over your notes soon after you make them, you remember little things you had no chance to write down at the time—the lilt of a phrase, exactly how someone looked when he did something; in brief, the sharp, telling detail that makes the ultimate article eloquent, if it is ever going to be.
That is why I was sitting in the office on this February night, hunched over a typewriter some four hundred feet above the neon glow of midtown Manhattan, which was intermittently visible through the high-flown gusts of snow whirling outside the window. I’d started work at 7:30 that morning at the Medical Center. I had spent the day with a courteous, very intent Chinese doctor who, in the opinion of his peers, was closer to achieving the restoration of life to a newly dead body than anyone had yet managed to be.
I was going to write an article about this for the magazine I work for and I knew toward the end of the day that what I was seeing and learning was going to make the main part of the story. That was why I was so anxious to get it all on paper—while I could still remember just how the three little rhesus monkeys had looked and how one of them, two hours after he had surely died, had opened his blank eyes and extended that tiny hand. It had twitched and the miniature movement had been hopeful, but uncannily frightening. Life had somehow supplanted death, an eerie reversal. When I left, there was still a chance he might live for the next twenty-four hours at least, even though he had been dead for two.
So I sat before a typewriter and the gooseneck reading lamp that illuminated it, trying to remember each detail, and trying to forget that because of a girl named Twit-Twit I had not paused for dinner or even a sandwich. I looked at my wrist. It was 10:40. I was seventy minutes late, for I had said I would be there at 9:30. There were six more pages of hieroglyphic notes to plow through and transpose into orderly typescript. And I was hungry.
I plowed on. It was a quiet place to work; the only sound except for the typewriter’s sporadic rattle was the wet snow’s whisper at the window and an occasional crack of the pane when a gust hit it. Aside from the pool of illumination cast by my lamp, the only light on the entire thirty-second floor was the glow of the night light near the elevators down the hall. I thought of Twit-Twit and the Dolans, whom I was meeting at Eddie Condon’s. And how they were sitting over drinks and probably food as well, or at least were where they could order it. In any case, they would be listening to some good music.
I got up impulsively and walked down the dark hall to the water fountain, drank long, and came back. As I did, I heard a scuffle of footsteps in the other hall at the other end of the floor—the building policeman, prowling. And wondering what an idiot like myself was doing up here at this time of night when the rest of the town was beginning a relaxing weekend.
As I worked on, I began feeling resentful. You would think Twit-Twit might get a little worried. She could at least call and see if I was still here. After all, an elevator could have dropped, or I could have been hit by a taxi. But the phone did not ring. The building policeman kept walking around, checking empty offices. I heard him stumble as he went down the nearby stairs to the floor below.
I finished another page of notes and thought how quiet it was. And dark, except for the one lamp. It occurred to me that perhaps Twit-Twit had called and left a message and the operator had never notified me because she wouldn’t know I was here. I lifted the telephone and waited. The phone was quiet. So was everything else. The watchman was gone; the switchboard had long since given up. The wind rattled the window again suddenly, and still hoping that an operator might answer I looked out of it, waiting. That is how I saw the dark reflection in it. Someone was standing silhouetted in the dimly lit doorway behind me. He must have been standing there for quite a while, for I hadn’t been typing for a couple of minutes, yet I had not heard him at all. It wasn’t Tom Dolan, who might have come up looking for me, because Tom never stood anywhere silently. And it wasn’t the building policeman. The reflection showed a coat and hat.
I sat still, phone to ear, repressing my first impulse to leap around and demand, “What the hell are you looking for?” But I began to feel mad at the alarm he was causing me. I studied the reflection in the dark window appraisingly. Either the glass distorted it or he was remarkably tall and thin.
I turned. He was tall and thin. I said, “Well?” and he came
“Hello,” he said. “Did I startle you? I didn’t want to interrupt your phone call.”
I took a breath and let it out. “Who are you looking for?”
He said, “William Deacon. Aren’t you him—or he?”
Nobody calls me by my full name any more.
“Who are you?”
“Archie Sinclair.” A thin, long hand swam into the lamp’s pool of light offering itself to be shaken, a hand as clean and white as a cavern fish.
There was a wall light switch behind me and my fingers found it. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said in the new flood of light. It was indeed Archie. I shook the hand, and associations came flooding back.
Friendship is a skill that I am poor at. It isn’t that I undervalue friends. But I believe that most friendship is approximately one half interests and sympathies in common, which is what friendship should be. The other half is happenstance. If you are forced to spend three days with a stranger of reasonably decent tendencies on train or shipboard, you become “friends.” For three days. But the human personality is dynamic, and two personalities continue being friends only so long as they maintain the same parallel relations to each other. That is why genuine lifelong friendships occur so seldom. Certainly it had not occurred between Sinclair and myself. Now we were strangers, long grown into heaven knew what different patterns, and yet constrained to observe a forgotten relationship with a semblance of cordiality.
“Hello, Archie,” I said.
“I’m glad you remember me.”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s been a few years though. Sit down.”
“Thanks.” He removed the black Homburg and loosened the long black coat that gave him the look of a Balkan conspirator. He was still inches taller than I, and the nose was still a pallid thin peak between eyes that were squinting little knots behind the porthole-thick glasses.
“I’m really sorry to interrupt. I stood in the doorway, wondering whether to go away.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m curious as to how you found me, though. I’m seldom here at this time of night.”
“I knew you’d be here,” he said. “You had to be. It was time I got some sort of break.”
That’s nice, I thought. But I was a little bothered. Whatever had happened to him, I didn’t want to listen to a tale of woe and self-pity, or be tapped for fifty bucks. I had work to do and what was left of an evening to get to.
I said, “What do you mean, exactly?”
“Well, I was walking past the building and I thought about you. I asked the night elevator man if you were in and he said he wouldn’t know but that someone was still working up on that floor. I knew it had to be you.”
“I don’t get the logic.”
He took out cigarettes, offered me one and, when I shook my head, lighted one for himself. It was late but he was going to stay awhile. Or so he thought.
“I’ve kept track of you over the years,” he said. “I’ve read your articles all the time in the magazine. You get around a good deal, and I’ve noticed you seem to cover a lot of the crime stories and murder mysteries.”
“Maybe you’ve also noticed I don’t solve them.”
“That’s not the point. The point is—well, I won’t bore you with the story of my life since we were kids.”
Thank heaven for that. Now if Twit-Twit will only call and give me an excuse—
“For some few years I’ve been living here in New York. Quietly. I’m in music.” I remembered the Dollop-Trollop thing. “I’ve written a few songs and one clicked.”
“I know. Very clever tune.”
“Thanks.” He looked genuinely pleased. “Well, I said I’d try not to bore you. I also do arranging for television, and some off-Broadway shows. And I’m engaged to be married. But that’s all beside the point. The point is that—that something has been happening to me lately.”
“I see.” Then, because I had to, “What, exactly?”
“That’s why I thought of you. I don’t have many friends—none I feel like confiding this to, if you know what I mean. And anyway, musical people aren’t very good at practical advice. And I need practical help.”
He hadn’t changed much at that. He still felt entitled to call the maid whenever he needed something. I looked at my notes. Two pages left to go. I looked at my watch. After eleven.
“That’s when I thought of you,” he went on, and perhaps what I thought showed in my face; he came to the point rather fast. “Do you know of a guy named Brill Brillhart?”
“I guess not.”
“He’s a one-time band leader and A and R man—”
“A what?”
“A and R man. That stands for artist and repertoire. The guy in a recording company who decides what singer or what band will record what songs, and how the arrangements will be made.”
“I should have remembered.”
“Brill was a Jack-of-all-trades in music. He sang, he arranged, had a band—”
“And he was once on a TV panel show that had something to do with identifying tunes.”
“You’re right. You remember him. Sort of a big burly guy, quite handsome, really. He certainly appealed to women. Curly hair and all that.”
“I remember what he looked like on TV. What about him?”
“Well.” He looked at the window where the whispering snow was beginning to pile on the sill outside. “Brillhart’s dead.”
“Too bad.”
“Sure. But he’s—he haunts me.”
I suppose it was the way he said it. For I knew instantly what he meant: not haunted in the way that a name or a face or a scent can haunt you. He meant haunt in the sense of a ghost. The return of the dead. That alarmed me. Not because I believe in ghosts but because I believe in neurotics. I’d rather not be confined with one at the top of a deserted building late at night.
“It began about a week ago,” he said. “I was in P. J. Clarke’s, having a drink. At the bar, before dinner. There were two fellows and girls at a table in the back. I heard one of the girls say, ‘Brill? You don’t mean Brill Brillhart?’ And the other girl said, ‘Sure. I got a wire from him today. He’s been out on the Coast doing a musical. He’s flying back tonight and wants me to have dinner with him on Friday.’”
Somehow that dry, querulous voice evoked the original scene. I could hear the girl announce her date, a little proudly.
“Well?”
“But he’s dead, you understand,” said Archie Sinclair. “Brillhart’s been dead for two months.”
“Then they were talking about another Brillhart. Why not? Brillhart’s not a completely rare name. Or maybe he has a brother.”
“Maybe he had a brother. But they were talking about the right one. I know. Look. It jarred me at the time but I thought like you do. It must be another Brillhart. Then the next night I went to a preview at Warner’s. Inez Low was there.”
“That dame who used to sing with bands?”
“Sure. Every band in the country. I don’t know her at all but I’ve known of her for years. She was married to Brillhart once. In fact, I think she still is, though they’ve been separated quite a while. I heard her tell someone Brillhart was coming back to New York. She said he’d done this musical for Twentieth Century for a lot of money and it seems he still owes her something on their separation settlement. I gather Inez wants to collect.”
“So what the hell,” I said.
“What do you mean, what the hell?”
“What’s the point?”
“The point is what I told you. He’s dead. I know he’s dead. And these people talk like he’s alive and is going to walk in the room any minute. Why should they?”
“That’s easy. You’re wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“You’ve made a mistake.”
“Oh, no, I haven’t.” He shook his head. “I’ve made no mistake. Brillhart’s dead; that I know. But wait. Last night I took Mary to a party at Kim Winter’s.”
“You get around. I know of Kim Winter. Who’s Mary?”
“The girl I’m engaged to. And I know Kim because I did some arrangements for her once. She sings, you know. After a fashion. Well, it turns out one of the girls who was at Kim’s was the one I’d heard in Clarke’s. The one who was having dinner with Brillhart on Friday. I think she’s a singer, too. A kid.”
