More whodunits, p.5
More Whodunits, page 5
“So, when do you want to do this?” Brass asked.
“No time like the present,” Mittwick said. “They got to come and get me. I got a bag packed downstairs.”
“You think you’re in trouble already?”
“Listen,” Mittwick said. “The Dutchman has this guy working for him: Havasack, they call him. His real name’s Berman. Abbadabba Berman. He’s a math wizard of some kind.”
“This guy’s name is Abbadabba, and he has a nickname?” Brass asked.
“Everybody’s got a nickname,” the Toad said. “Everybody in the rackets, anyway. It’s a thing.”
“I guess so,” Brass said.
“Anyway, this Havasack, he’s been working the track. Something to do with changing the odds or something. But he just came back to the city and, to have something to do, he decided to go over the Dutchman’s books. That was two days ago. The Dutchman, he was laughing about it. He said anybody as was stealing from him, they’d better watch out. But you may think he was kidding, but believe me, he wasn’t kidding.”
“So you’ve been skimming, and you figure that this Havasack is going to find you out?”
“I been taking a little off the top,” the Toad agreed. “I figure there’s a good chance he’s already found out. Like I said, he’s some kind of math wizard.”
“You’re a brave man, stealing from the Dutchman,” Brass said.
“Hell, I didn’t figure on getting caught,” said the Toad.
Brass spiraled down the iron staircase and crossed to the pay phone by the stage door. When the operator came on, he dropped in his nickel and looked on the little card for Deputy Commissioner Mapes’s phone number. “Canal three-four-three-six,” he told the operator.
“That is a local exchange,” she told him, each word carefully enunciated, each syllable rounded. “You may dial that yourself.”
Brass sighed. “I would, but this pay phone has no dial.”
“All our pay phones without dials are being replaced,” she informed him.
“Perhaps,” Brass said, “but this one hasn’t been yet.”
“I will get that number for you,” she said in her rolling tones, “but in the future, please remember that you can dial numbers on local exchanges yourself.”
“Oh, I will, I will,” he assured her.
An assistant picked up the phone, but the deputy commissioner came on immediately. “Brass,” he said, his gravelly voice booming into the phone. “I’ve been waiting for your call. What’s the story?”
“Sammy’s going to sing to the Committee,” Brass told him. He filled Mapes in on those parts of the story that concerned him, and suggested that he get a few plainclothes men in an unmarked car over to the Knickerbocker Theater as soon as possible.
“I’ll issue a subpoena for him,” Mapes said. “That way we can hold him in protective custody.”
“The more protective the better,” Brass agreed. “Pull around to the stage door. Mittwick is edgy, and may have good cause.”
Sammy the Toad came slowly down the spiral staircase, Ellen, still in her Misinformed costume, hanging on to his arm, her feathered headdress brushing along the underside of the spiral. “You’re going to be okay, baby,” she said, trying womanfully not to cry. “Let me know where they take you, and I’ll come see you right away, I promise.”
“That might not be such a good idea, kid,” he told her bravely. “When they get me out of here, I’ll find a way to send for you. But it’ll be a couple of months.”
“I don’t know if I can wait that long without you, my darling,” she sobbed.
A few minutes later a large, unmarked touring car pulled up to the stage entrance and three large men in dark blue double-breasted suits got out, a tommy gun cradled in each of their arms. Sammy spun up the spiral staircase and was in the upstairs room with the door bolted before you could say “subpoena.” It took Brass and Ellen together to lure him out.
“Come with us,” the officer in charge said. “We’ll take care of you.”
“Where are we going?” Mittwick asked. “Where are you going to take me?”
The officer looked around. “No disrespect,” he said to Brass, with a nod to Ellen, “but it would be better if I didn’t say.”
“I quite agree,” Brass said. “Mittwick, these gentlemen will keep you safe until after you testify. After that, I’ll make sure they don’t forget their promise to get you away to someplace safe.”
“Yeah, well, okay, Mr. Brass.” Sammy shook hands with Brass, kissed Ellen firmly, grabbed the hefty suitcase he had stashed by the door, and got into the car. “Thanks for what you’ve done for me, Mr. Brass,” he said. “I won’t forget it.” The car pulled away.
Brass sighed. “Come on, Ellen,” he said. “I’ve got my car around the corner. Get into something resembling street clothes, and I’ll take you home.”
“Say, Mr. Brass,” she said. “I’m grateful for what you’re doing for Sammy, and all. But I don’t know if it would be right, I mean so soon—”
“Take you home,” Brass said, smiling a sad smile, “and leave you at the door. Honest.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I guess that’s okay, then.” And if she sounded slightly wistful, neither of them mentioned it on the drive home.
* * * *
It was three days later that Deputy Commissioner Mapes called Brass at his office. “If I give you something,” he boomed into the telephone, “can you keep it under your hat?”
“I have a very large hat,” Brass assured the deputy commissioner.
“And when the time comes,” Mapes continued, “you’ll remember how to spell my name?”
“My word,” Brass agreed. Which is, after all, largely how a column like Brass Tacks comes to be written: confidences kept and names spelled right.
“Meet me downstairs in ten minutes,” Mapes told him. “There should be a large envelope waiting for me at the city editor’s desk. Bring it down with you, if you don’t mind.”
It was closer to twenty minutes before the large open touring car pulled up in front of the World building. Brass clambered into the back seat, joining Deputy Commissioner Mapes, a burly man with a round face and a thick black mustache. “Sorry I’m late,” Mapes said. “McWheeter kept me with last-second instructions and suggestions. The man can fidget and fuss more than two cats in a kettle.” He beamed at Brass and waved the chauffeur onward. “Ready to fight crime?” he asked with a chortle as the car pulled out into traffic.
“Is that what we’re doing?” Brass passed Mapes the bulky manila envelope the city editor had given him.
Mapes held the envelope up with his left hand and tapped it with his right forefinger. “In here,” he said, “are the photographs of forty-two members of the city government who might be the mysterious ‘Mr. Big.’ We’re going to spread them out before Sammy the Toad and see if he is able to point to one and say, his voice ringing with sincerity, ‘That is the man to whom I’ve been paying three thousand dollars a week’!”
Brass took his silver cigarette case from his jacket pocket and waved it in Mapes’s direction. Mapes shook his head. “I’m a cigar man,” he said.
Brass selected a cigarette from the case with a care that suggested that one was somehow different from the others. He went through the routine of tapping it and lighting it and putting the case away. “McWheeter’s not going to be able to put away Dutch Schultz, or Luciano, or Rothstein, or any of the other top, ah, liquor importers; you know that, don’t you?”
“Are you suggesting that this is all an exercise in futility?” Mapes grinned. “Then you don’t understand its true purpose.”
Brass leaned back in the seat cushion. “Enlighten me,” he said.
“Roosevelt’s going to be running for president this next election, or the one after,” Mapes said. “And Walker might be thinking of moving up himself. And the people who vote—even the ones who are in favor of booze—aren’t fond of the murder and mayhem that’s accompanying its delivery these days.
“This investigation is serving the dual purpose of convincing the voters that Roosevelt is a crime-busting governor, and pointing out to the rum runners that we don’t give much of a damn about bathtub gin or Canadian rye, but we don’t approve of the killings that go with it.”
“At last,” Brass said, “an honest and cynical explanation that I can understand.”
“Don’t quote me,” said Mapes.
Brass puffed on his cigarette. “Where have you got the Toad stashed?” he asked.
“Brooklyn,” Mapes told him. “Out by Prospect Park. A hotel called the Staunton Arms. We have the whole eighth floor.”
“Any problems?”
“Not a hint.”
They chatted about this and that as the touring car crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and headed down Flatbush Avenue. As they turned right along Prospect Park Mapes pointed down the block. “There’s the hotel,” he said, “and—damn! Steve, pull over!”
“What is it?” Brass asked, looking up at the building looming ahead of them as the chauffeur pulled the car over to the curb. There, about two-thirds of the way up the side of the building was a figure leaning out of a window. No—he wasn’t leaning out, he was hanging out. And then, silently and, it seemed to those watching, in slow motion he fell, disappearing from view behind a shorter building in front.
“Shit!” said Mapes with feeling.
“Sammy Mittwick?” asked Brass, already knowing the answer.
“Any odds you want,” Mapes said.
The two of them were out of the car by now and racing toward the hotel. As they ran, they could see heads appearing in the upstairs windows around the wide open one. “Yup, it’s the eighth floor,” said Mapes. He stopped for a second to stare up at the open window, where the bottoms of the curtains had been pulled outside and were flapping in the wind. “Mittwick could sing,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “but he couldn’t fly.”
* * * *
Brass and Mapes ran into the lobby of the hotel to find everything normal: bellmen lounging, room clerks scribbling, elevator men staring mutely out of their cages; even one lone cop strolling unconcernedly across the lobby. Mapes pulled out his badge and waved it in front of him. “I’m Deputy Commissioner Mapes,” he shouted. “You—” he pointed to a room clerk, “call the local precinct. Tell them somebody was just pushed out of a window here, and to get here in force.”
“Who? What? Wha—?” the room clerk stuttered.
“Never mind, just do it. You—” he pointed to the cop “—take the front door and don’t let anybody in or out, especially out. Get someone to cover the back door.”
“Yes, sir,” the cop said, saluting.
“Somebody’s head is going to roll for this,” Mapes said, running for the elevator. “I just hope it isn’t mine.”
Just as Mapes and Brass entered one elevator, another opened and four cops came boiling out. Mapes yelled at them, barking instructions for them to cover all the remaining exits and stay in place until told otherwise. They disbursed and Mapes snapped “Eight!” to the elevator operator.
“I guessed,” the man said, slamming the door closed and putting the elevator in gear. “What’s going on?”
“A man was shoved out a window,” Brass told him.
“No way,” the operator said. “With all them cops up there?”
“So you would have thought,” said Brass.
The door opened on the eighth floor to a corridor full of moiling policemen. Mapes brought them to order with a couple of shouted instructions and ran down the hall to where an open door led into one of the hotel rooms. Inside were a few more confused-looking cops and a wide open window, the curtains pushed outside and flapping in the wind. “What the hell happened?” he demanded.
* * * *
Sergeant Dickson was the ranking cop there, and he told the tale. “About an hour ago a call came through from McWheeter’s office. Says this broad named Ellen is the Toad’s girlfriend, and she has the okay to come by and bring him some clothes and stuff—maybe stay half an hour. You know.”
“Of course you checked to make sure the call was authentic,” Mapes asked, smiling tightly.
“It had to be,” Dickson offered. “Who else knows the guy is here?”
“Okay. And?”
“And she shows up and goes into his room. ‘Sweety,’ she says, ‘I’m here.’”
“And of course you searched her before she went in?”
“Her and the bag she brought with her,” Dickson said, sounding aggrieved. “Full of clothing. Like an extra suit for him, and a negligee thing lying on top; all pink and stuff.”
“Okay. And?”
“And nothing. And that’s it. About ten minutes later we hear this scream and go busting into the room. And it’s empty, and the window is wide open. We look down, and there’s the Toad lying in the alley, all broken up.”
“So where’s the girl?”
“That’s what I sez, Commissioner. Where’s the girl? She was nowhere to be found. We looked in the closet and under the bed and everything.”
“No bathroom?”
“It’s down the hall. She never left the room.”
“This the only door?”
“That’s it.”
“So she just disappeared?”
“Not only that, she left all her clothes behind.”
“How’s that?”
Dickson pointed to the bed. There was a skirt and a blouse and a pair of shoes and crumpled up white stockings.
“Shouldn’t leave shoes on the bed,” Brass commented. “That’s bad luck.”
Mapes glared at him, and then turned back to the sergeant. “There’s people from the local precinct coming,” he said. “I want this room gone over from side to side, top to bottom. I want this hotel gone over with a fine tooth comb. Check the identities of everybody in the hotel, staff and guests. I want to know what the hell happened in here.”
Sergeant Dickson left the room, and for the first time Mapes and Brass were alone. “If you saw what I saw,” Mapes told Brass, his voice pitched so that it wouldn’t carry, “I want you to shut up about it.”
“You mean when the Toad went out the window?” Brass asked.
“Yeah, that,” Mapes said.
“You mean the fact that the hand that let go of him from inside the window came out of a blue sleeve?”
“Yeah,” Mapes said softly, “that.”
“For now,” Brass said. “You’ve got my word. Here’s something you should think about.”
“What’s that?”
“When you saw him fall, did he scream?”
Mapes considered. “No,” he said.
“And the police outside the door busted in a couple of seconds after hearing the scream, and the girl was gone.”
“So?”
“So, who screamed?”
Ellen Benchman, the only possible suspect, turned out to have an invincible alibi; at the time of the defenestration she was in rehearsal for a Gershwin song that they were switching into the show. And besides, when the cops that had been on duty took a look at her, they agreed that she wasn’t the “Ellen” they had let into Mittwick’s room.
And there the story lay for ten years.
* * * *
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Brass asked the Two Step Kid that night at the Hotsy Totsy Klub. “You dressed up like a woman and high-heeled your way into Mittwick’s room.”
“What makes you think so, Mr. Brass?” Finter asked.
“You’re the loose end,” Brass said. “You were following me, so somebody put you onto it. And it was right after I talked to McWheeter on the phone. You didn’t follow me to the hotel, because you were there first and I didn’t know where it was. But somebody else knew, and sent you.”
“Put me in a dress and you can take me anywhere,” the Kid said, with a high-pitched laugh. “My only worry was that someone would notice my knobby, and very unfeminine, knees. But I guess those white stockings covered them up pretty well. Let’s assume it was me, Mr. Brass, just hypothetically. Then what?”
“Hypothetically, I’ve always wondered how you got out of that room.”
The Kid considered. “Well it was, hypothetically, like this. I went into the room with the valise in front of my face so Mittwick couldn’t tell I wasn’t the fair Ellen, and when he got close I sapped him with this equalizer I had up my sleeve. Then, with him lying unconscious on the floor, I changed clothes.”
“Into what?”
“Into a cop’s uniform which I had in the valise, turned inside out so the cops couldn’t tell if they searched it. But all the guy did was stick his hand in and poke around. I think he was embarrassed by the nightie.”
“So that’s it!” Brass exclaimed.
“That’s it,” the Kid agreed. “I dumped the Toad out the window, then got next to the door and let out a scream. The cops come rushing in, and I’m right behind them; except I was coming from behind the door. Then I went down the stairs, and I was outta there. Oh yeah, and it was me you saw in the lobby.”
“You were the cop Mapes told to guard the front door?”
“Hypothetically,” the Two Step Kid agreed.
The blonde he’d been dancing with had emerged from the powder room and was weaving her way across the room toward our table. The Two Step Kid got up. “I guess I should go now,” he said. “This is all between us, right?”
“Who’d believe me?” Brass asked. “How did Dutch Schultz find out where Sammy the Toad was being kept?”
At that the Kid did break out laughing. “He heard it on the radio, Mr. Brass, he heard it on the radio.”
“What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t the Dutchman I was working for, Mr. Brass, it was Mr. Big.”
“So there was a Mr. Big.”
“Yeah. You knew him. His name was McWheeter.”
“Son of a—”
“How true, Mr. Brass, how true.” And with that the Two Step Kid held his arm out for his beautiful blonde lady and sashayed out to the dance floor.
“No time like the present,” Mittwick said. “They got to come and get me. I got a bag packed downstairs.”
“You think you’re in trouble already?”
“Listen,” Mittwick said. “The Dutchman has this guy working for him: Havasack, they call him. His real name’s Berman. Abbadabba Berman. He’s a math wizard of some kind.”
“This guy’s name is Abbadabba, and he has a nickname?” Brass asked.
“Everybody’s got a nickname,” the Toad said. “Everybody in the rackets, anyway. It’s a thing.”
“I guess so,” Brass said.
“Anyway, this Havasack, he’s been working the track. Something to do with changing the odds or something. But he just came back to the city and, to have something to do, he decided to go over the Dutchman’s books. That was two days ago. The Dutchman, he was laughing about it. He said anybody as was stealing from him, they’d better watch out. But you may think he was kidding, but believe me, he wasn’t kidding.”
“So you’ve been skimming, and you figure that this Havasack is going to find you out?”
“I been taking a little off the top,” the Toad agreed. “I figure there’s a good chance he’s already found out. Like I said, he’s some kind of math wizard.”
“You’re a brave man, stealing from the Dutchman,” Brass said.
“Hell, I didn’t figure on getting caught,” said the Toad.
Brass spiraled down the iron staircase and crossed to the pay phone by the stage door. When the operator came on, he dropped in his nickel and looked on the little card for Deputy Commissioner Mapes’s phone number. “Canal three-four-three-six,” he told the operator.
“That is a local exchange,” she told him, each word carefully enunciated, each syllable rounded. “You may dial that yourself.”
Brass sighed. “I would, but this pay phone has no dial.”
“All our pay phones without dials are being replaced,” she informed him.
“Perhaps,” Brass said, “but this one hasn’t been yet.”
“I will get that number for you,” she said in her rolling tones, “but in the future, please remember that you can dial numbers on local exchanges yourself.”
“Oh, I will, I will,” he assured her.
An assistant picked up the phone, but the deputy commissioner came on immediately. “Brass,” he said, his gravelly voice booming into the phone. “I’ve been waiting for your call. What’s the story?”
“Sammy’s going to sing to the Committee,” Brass told him. He filled Mapes in on those parts of the story that concerned him, and suggested that he get a few plainclothes men in an unmarked car over to the Knickerbocker Theater as soon as possible.
“I’ll issue a subpoena for him,” Mapes said. “That way we can hold him in protective custody.”
“The more protective the better,” Brass agreed. “Pull around to the stage door. Mittwick is edgy, and may have good cause.”
Sammy the Toad came slowly down the spiral staircase, Ellen, still in her Misinformed costume, hanging on to his arm, her feathered headdress brushing along the underside of the spiral. “You’re going to be okay, baby,” she said, trying womanfully not to cry. “Let me know where they take you, and I’ll come see you right away, I promise.”
“That might not be such a good idea, kid,” he told her bravely. “When they get me out of here, I’ll find a way to send for you. But it’ll be a couple of months.”
“I don’t know if I can wait that long without you, my darling,” she sobbed.
A few minutes later a large, unmarked touring car pulled up to the stage entrance and three large men in dark blue double-breasted suits got out, a tommy gun cradled in each of their arms. Sammy spun up the spiral staircase and was in the upstairs room with the door bolted before you could say “subpoena.” It took Brass and Ellen together to lure him out.
“Come with us,” the officer in charge said. “We’ll take care of you.”
“Where are we going?” Mittwick asked. “Where are you going to take me?”
The officer looked around. “No disrespect,” he said to Brass, with a nod to Ellen, “but it would be better if I didn’t say.”
“I quite agree,” Brass said. “Mittwick, these gentlemen will keep you safe until after you testify. After that, I’ll make sure they don’t forget their promise to get you away to someplace safe.”
“Yeah, well, okay, Mr. Brass.” Sammy shook hands with Brass, kissed Ellen firmly, grabbed the hefty suitcase he had stashed by the door, and got into the car. “Thanks for what you’ve done for me, Mr. Brass,” he said. “I won’t forget it.” The car pulled away.
Brass sighed. “Come on, Ellen,” he said. “I’ve got my car around the corner. Get into something resembling street clothes, and I’ll take you home.”
“Say, Mr. Brass,” she said. “I’m grateful for what you’re doing for Sammy, and all. But I don’t know if it would be right, I mean so soon—”
“Take you home,” Brass said, smiling a sad smile, “and leave you at the door. Honest.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I guess that’s okay, then.” And if she sounded slightly wistful, neither of them mentioned it on the drive home.
* * * *
It was three days later that Deputy Commissioner Mapes called Brass at his office. “If I give you something,” he boomed into the telephone, “can you keep it under your hat?”
“I have a very large hat,” Brass assured the deputy commissioner.
“And when the time comes,” Mapes continued, “you’ll remember how to spell my name?”
“My word,” Brass agreed. Which is, after all, largely how a column like Brass Tacks comes to be written: confidences kept and names spelled right.
“Meet me downstairs in ten minutes,” Mapes told him. “There should be a large envelope waiting for me at the city editor’s desk. Bring it down with you, if you don’t mind.”
It was closer to twenty minutes before the large open touring car pulled up in front of the World building. Brass clambered into the back seat, joining Deputy Commissioner Mapes, a burly man with a round face and a thick black mustache. “Sorry I’m late,” Mapes said. “McWheeter kept me with last-second instructions and suggestions. The man can fidget and fuss more than two cats in a kettle.” He beamed at Brass and waved the chauffeur onward. “Ready to fight crime?” he asked with a chortle as the car pulled out into traffic.
“Is that what we’re doing?” Brass passed Mapes the bulky manila envelope the city editor had given him.
Mapes held the envelope up with his left hand and tapped it with his right forefinger. “In here,” he said, “are the photographs of forty-two members of the city government who might be the mysterious ‘Mr. Big.’ We’re going to spread them out before Sammy the Toad and see if he is able to point to one and say, his voice ringing with sincerity, ‘That is the man to whom I’ve been paying three thousand dollars a week’!”
Brass took his silver cigarette case from his jacket pocket and waved it in Mapes’s direction. Mapes shook his head. “I’m a cigar man,” he said.
Brass selected a cigarette from the case with a care that suggested that one was somehow different from the others. He went through the routine of tapping it and lighting it and putting the case away. “McWheeter’s not going to be able to put away Dutch Schultz, or Luciano, or Rothstein, or any of the other top, ah, liquor importers; you know that, don’t you?”
“Are you suggesting that this is all an exercise in futility?” Mapes grinned. “Then you don’t understand its true purpose.”
Brass leaned back in the seat cushion. “Enlighten me,” he said.
“Roosevelt’s going to be running for president this next election, or the one after,” Mapes said. “And Walker might be thinking of moving up himself. And the people who vote—even the ones who are in favor of booze—aren’t fond of the murder and mayhem that’s accompanying its delivery these days.
“This investigation is serving the dual purpose of convincing the voters that Roosevelt is a crime-busting governor, and pointing out to the rum runners that we don’t give much of a damn about bathtub gin or Canadian rye, but we don’t approve of the killings that go with it.”
“At last,” Brass said, “an honest and cynical explanation that I can understand.”
“Don’t quote me,” said Mapes.
Brass puffed on his cigarette. “Where have you got the Toad stashed?” he asked.
“Brooklyn,” Mapes told him. “Out by Prospect Park. A hotel called the Staunton Arms. We have the whole eighth floor.”
“Any problems?”
“Not a hint.”
They chatted about this and that as the touring car crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and headed down Flatbush Avenue. As they turned right along Prospect Park Mapes pointed down the block. “There’s the hotel,” he said, “and—damn! Steve, pull over!”
“What is it?” Brass asked, looking up at the building looming ahead of them as the chauffeur pulled the car over to the curb. There, about two-thirds of the way up the side of the building was a figure leaning out of a window. No—he wasn’t leaning out, he was hanging out. And then, silently and, it seemed to those watching, in slow motion he fell, disappearing from view behind a shorter building in front.
“Shit!” said Mapes with feeling.
“Sammy Mittwick?” asked Brass, already knowing the answer.
“Any odds you want,” Mapes said.
The two of them were out of the car by now and racing toward the hotel. As they ran, they could see heads appearing in the upstairs windows around the wide open one. “Yup, it’s the eighth floor,” said Mapes. He stopped for a second to stare up at the open window, where the bottoms of the curtains had been pulled outside and were flapping in the wind. “Mittwick could sing,” he said, shaking his head sadly, “but he couldn’t fly.”
* * * *
Brass and Mapes ran into the lobby of the hotel to find everything normal: bellmen lounging, room clerks scribbling, elevator men staring mutely out of their cages; even one lone cop strolling unconcernedly across the lobby. Mapes pulled out his badge and waved it in front of him. “I’m Deputy Commissioner Mapes,” he shouted. “You—” he pointed to a room clerk, “call the local precinct. Tell them somebody was just pushed out of a window here, and to get here in force.”
“Who? What? Wha—?” the room clerk stuttered.
“Never mind, just do it. You—” he pointed to the cop “—take the front door and don’t let anybody in or out, especially out. Get someone to cover the back door.”
“Yes, sir,” the cop said, saluting.
“Somebody’s head is going to roll for this,” Mapes said, running for the elevator. “I just hope it isn’t mine.”
Just as Mapes and Brass entered one elevator, another opened and four cops came boiling out. Mapes yelled at them, barking instructions for them to cover all the remaining exits and stay in place until told otherwise. They disbursed and Mapes snapped “Eight!” to the elevator operator.
“I guessed,” the man said, slamming the door closed and putting the elevator in gear. “What’s going on?”
“A man was shoved out a window,” Brass told him.
“No way,” the operator said. “With all them cops up there?”
“So you would have thought,” said Brass.
The door opened on the eighth floor to a corridor full of moiling policemen. Mapes brought them to order with a couple of shouted instructions and ran down the hall to where an open door led into one of the hotel rooms. Inside were a few more confused-looking cops and a wide open window, the curtains pushed outside and flapping in the wind. “What the hell happened?” he demanded.
* * * *
Sergeant Dickson was the ranking cop there, and he told the tale. “About an hour ago a call came through from McWheeter’s office. Says this broad named Ellen is the Toad’s girlfriend, and she has the okay to come by and bring him some clothes and stuff—maybe stay half an hour. You know.”
“Of course you checked to make sure the call was authentic,” Mapes asked, smiling tightly.
“It had to be,” Dickson offered. “Who else knows the guy is here?”
“Okay. And?”
“And she shows up and goes into his room. ‘Sweety,’ she says, ‘I’m here.’”
“And of course you searched her before she went in?”
“Her and the bag she brought with her,” Dickson said, sounding aggrieved. “Full of clothing. Like an extra suit for him, and a negligee thing lying on top; all pink and stuff.”
“Okay. And?”
“And nothing. And that’s it. About ten minutes later we hear this scream and go busting into the room. And it’s empty, and the window is wide open. We look down, and there’s the Toad lying in the alley, all broken up.”
“So where’s the girl?”
“That’s what I sez, Commissioner. Where’s the girl? She was nowhere to be found. We looked in the closet and under the bed and everything.”
“No bathroom?”
“It’s down the hall. She never left the room.”
“This the only door?”
“That’s it.”
“So she just disappeared?”
“Not only that, she left all her clothes behind.”
“How’s that?”
Dickson pointed to the bed. There was a skirt and a blouse and a pair of shoes and crumpled up white stockings.
“Shouldn’t leave shoes on the bed,” Brass commented. “That’s bad luck.”
Mapes glared at him, and then turned back to the sergeant. “There’s people from the local precinct coming,” he said. “I want this room gone over from side to side, top to bottom. I want this hotel gone over with a fine tooth comb. Check the identities of everybody in the hotel, staff and guests. I want to know what the hell happened in here.”
Sergeant Dickson left the room, and for the first time Mapes and Brass were alone. “If you saw what I saw,” Mapes told Brass, his voice pitched so that it wouldn’t carry, “I want you to shut up about it.”
“You mean when the Toad went out the window?” Brass asked.
“Yeah, that,” Mapes said.
“You mean the fact that the hand that let go of him from inside the window came out of a blue sleeve?”
“Yeah,” Mapes said softly, “that.”
“For now,” Brass said. “You’ve got my word. Here’s something you should think about.”
“What’s that?”
“When you saw him fall, did he scream?”
Mapes considered. “No,” he said.
“And the police outside the door busted in a couple of seconds after hearing the scream, and the girl was gone.”
“So?”
“So, who screamed?”
Ellen Benchman, the only possible suspect, turned out to have an invincible alibi; at the time of the defenestration she was in rehearsal for a Gershwin song that they were switching into the show. And besides, when the cops that had been on duty took a look at her, they agreed that she wasn’t the “Ellen” they had let into Mittwick’s room.
And there the story lay for ten years.
* * * *
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Brass asked the Two Step Kid that night at the Hotsy Totsy Klub. “You dressed up like a woman and high-heeled your way into Mittwick’s room.”
“What makes you think so, Mr. Brass?” Finter asked.
“You’re the loose end,” Brass said. “You were following me, so somebody put you onto it. And it was right after I talked to McWheeter on the phone. You didn’t follow me to the hotel, because you were there first and I didn’t know where it was. But somebody else knew, and sent you.”
“Put me in a dress and you can take me anywhere,” the Kid said, with a high-pitched laugh. “My only worry was that someone would notice my knobby, and very unfeminine, knees. But I guess those white stockings covered them up pretty well. Let’s assume it was me, Mr. Brass, just hypothetically. Then what?”
“Hypothetically, I’ve always wondered how you got out of that room.”
The Kid considered. “Well it was, hypothetically, like this. I went into the room with the valise in front of my face so Mittwick couldn’t tell I wasn’t the fair Ellen, and when he got close I sapped him with this equalizer I had up my sleeve. Then, with him lying unconscious on the floor, I changed clothes.”
“Into what?”
“Into a cop’s uniform which I had in the valise, turned inside out so the cops couldn’t tell if they searched it. But all the guy did was stick his hand in and poke around. I think he was embarrassed by the nightie.”
“So that’s it!” Brass exclaimed.
“That’s it,” the Kid agreed. “I dumped the Toad out the window, then got next to the door and let out a scream. The cops come rushing in, and I’m right behind them; except I was coming from behind the door. Then I went down the stairs, and I was outta there. Oh yeah, and it was me you saw in the lobby.”
“You were the cop Mapes told to guard the front door?”
“Hypothetically,” the Two Step Kid agreed.
The blonde he’d been dancing with had emerged from the powder room and was weaving her way across the room toward our table. The Two Step Kid got up. “I guess I should go now,” he said. “This is all between us, right?”
“Who’d believe me?” Brass asked. “How did Dutch Schultz find out where Sammy the Toad was being kept?”
At that the Kid did break out laughing. “He heard it on the radio, Mr. Brass, he heard it on the radio.”
“What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t the Dutchman I was working for, Mr. Brass, it was Mr. Big.”
“So there was a Mr. Big.”
“Yeah. You knew him. His name was McWheeter.”
“Son of a—”
“How true, Mr. Brass, how true.” And with that the Two Step Kid held his arm out for his beautiful blonde lady and sashayed out to the dance floor.
