He had barely slipped through the foyer when Mrs. DeVogt accosted him. “Mr. Greengrass, what happened to you?”
“Sorry. I had an accident.” He began to edge past her, but she pursued him.
“But your face. Look at you!” She waved a finger in disapproval.
Max gazed into the gilded convex mirror at the foot of the staircase. High on his forehead, an abrasion was forming a crusty scab. His left eye looked swollen and purple. A wet skullcap, his hair stuck to his scalp. In the distorted glass, his bruised face seemed to be streaming away from him.
Ignoring Mrs. DeVogt’s prying, he said, “Yes. Will Gretta be with us for dinner tonight?”
“Dr. Condon’s office is just around the corner.”
“Will Gretta—”
“Why are you talking about Gretta in your condition? No, she’s with her mother. She’s caught the catarrh again.”
“Will she be back tomorrow?”
“She said she has to take Miss Goelet’s picture.”
“I’ll just go and patch myself up, then.”
He managed to pour some water from the jug and splash his face before toppling onto the bed. Then he plunged into a paralyzing sleep. In the distance, he heard Mrs. DeVogt tapping at his door, and he tried to swim back to consciousness, but he hadn’t the strength. When he woke a dozen hours later, he found himself curled in a fetal position on the bed, wearing his borrowed boots.
Clean clothes improved his appearance considerably, but he still looked as if he’d been in a barroom brawl. His entire left side felt stiff and bruised.
His mind was racing. Should he tell Parnell about the murder? Where was Gretta? How might he break the terrible news to her, yet still probe for information?
He wondered how deeply she had cared for Mourtone. The more intimate they had been, the more likely she was to know why Martin wanted to meet him at Stephenson’s. Yet, the more distant their relationship had been, the happier Max would be. He prayed she knew everything, and he prayed she knew nothing at all.
At the breakfast table, where he consumed three eggs, ham, several hot rolls, and two cups of coffee, he fended off the other boarders’ questions.
“What wall’d you walk into?” Danny teased.
He forced a laugh. “Hazards of the trade.”
“You may want to try another profession, Mr. Greengrass,” Mrs. DeVogt said.
“Who else will have me?”
“See a doctor or we’ll punish you,” Belle said. Despite her light tone, her eyes shone with real concern.
Outside, Swarms looked him over too. “Now you’ve got Belle mooning all over you. She’s a nice little package. I ought to get rolled too.”
“Nothing like that, Danny. A bunch of street arabs.”
Swarms looked skeptical. “I’d get those scrapes cleaned out chop-chop. You don’t want to croak and leave me alone with all that gash.”
Max couldn’t help feeling testy when Danny talked like that. Gash. Birds. Hot numbers. Now that the actor was squiring his sister around, Max felt damned uncomfortable about Danny’s wisecracks. At the same time, he was pissed at Faye. He couldn’t have an ordinary conversation with his closest pal any more. Somehow his sister had shimmied in between them. Who could he let his hair down with now? “What about the love of your life? Don’t I know her?”
Danny grabbed his chest in a heart-rending gesture. “Hey, just kidding. When I’m at the table, I’ve got blinders on. I couldn’t tell you how either of them’s built.”
Max’s irritation dissolved. “My ass. You may be human … I suppose.”
An evil grin crept onto Danny’s thin lips. “Faye’s got a little surprise cookin’.”
“Crap.” He looked heavenward. “ Just strike me dead now. One big bolt.”
Max knew that Gretta’s studio occupied a street-level storefront at the corner of West 25th Street opposite Madison Square Park. The great stores were opening by the time he began the brief hike uptown. In the window of B. Airman’s on Sixth Avenue and West 19th, a mechanical butterfly dipped and soared around a draped, headless dummy. Revolving electric stars cast their rays on a mauve silk gown, the material glittering with pinpoints of light.
Along the Ladies’ Mile, shopgirls in their French heels and tin collars ogled the latest in silver and jewelry. Knots of well-dressed men seemed to have no other occupation than gazing at young women whose felt hats were adorned with ostrich plumes and snowy egret feathers. Women in alpaca capes fluttered across the sidewalk. A flash of plum-colored silk always drew hoots and applause from sports draped over the windowsills of their exclusive clubs.
As he walked north, then east, his intoxication with the city was more than a distraction; its rhythms matched his own internal, jittery beat. The women, the goods, the noise of the delivery wagons, the cursing, shouting drivers, the sumptuous architecture brought on a nervous excitement he loved for itself alone. Faceless in the infernal uproar, he felt some unnameable thrill, a release into nothingness.
The thought of his mission, so close now, suddenly filled him with dread. His message was truly terrible, he felt its weight more completely now, and yet he had to deliver it. At first he hung back in Madison Square Park, letting his eye run over the stores across the broad confluence of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Auction rooms, china houses, millinery and dry-goods establishments filled the block. In the center a canvas awning displayed the legend ST. REGIS PORTRAIT STUDIO.
A soft bell tinkled when he pushed open the door. The interior was draped in rich damask. On the walls, three Japanese woodblock prints hung in a cluster. A fringed divan upholstered in an Ottoman pattern gave the waiting room a harem-like air. Behind a low desk, a woman with kohl-smeared eyelids presided.
“I’m looking for Gretta,” he said softly. The decor seemed to demand whispering.
“You must be Martin,” the woman replied, smirking.
“No, no. I’m Max Greengrass, another friend.”
“Ah.” She looked at his battered face more carefully, considering whether to announce him.
“We’re both at Mrs. DeVogt’s.”
“I see … I’ll get her.”
Bickering voices drifted out. Finally, Gretta appeared, an annoyed expression on her face. When she noticed his scrapes and bruises, her features softened.
“Mr. Greengrass. Your head. Your eye. Did you bump into something?”
“This? No. Something bumped into me. Is there somewhere more private?”
“What is it? Can’t it wait ‘til dinner? We have a client waiting.”
Her brusque tone snapped him out of his reverie. “Sorry. This can’t wait.”
“Oh. Violet, would you excuse us, please?” She rolled her eyes in the receptionist’s direction.
Finally, he was able to speak directly. Yet he couldn’t quite pull it off. “There’s been a very bad accident. I need to reach … Martin’s parents.”
Her color drained away, and she grasped his hand. Her scent, her hair, the proximity of her luxuriant body made his heart race at exactly the wrong time. “How bad is he?”
Stepping away, yet still caught in her tense grip, he said, “It’s very bad. I’m sorry, I didn’t intend to say….”
“He’s dead, isn’t he? Was he run over? Oh, God, I have to set the lights for Gertrude. Mrs. Swanson will be here in ten minutes.”
He had assumed she would introduce him to the Mourtones and help him get an interview with the father. At the very least, the family would confirm that Martin was missing. “Can’t you leave for the day?”
“Oh, my God. Is he actually dead? You have to tell me.” She dug her fingernails into his skin.
“Please, come with me. It’s too complicated to talk about here.”
“I can’t, I can’t! I’ll lose my job if I walk out now! I have to go back in a minute.” Her desperation confirmed his suspicions: she couldn’t live without her weekly wage. What about the genteel Staten Island country club, the tennis and bicycle expeditions? He sensed her panic, her fear of losing a single dollar, and his heart sank. What could he do about it?
“You’re not giving me a choice.”
“No, I’m certainly not! Just tell me.” She pushed him away and smoothed her skirt.
“I went to meet him at a bar called Stephenson’s. About the note you gave me? When I got there he’d been shot.” He withheld the phrase “in the head” just before it passed his lips.
“Uhh,” she gasped, hunching over as if she’d been struck in the stomach. “Oh my God, it’s not … it can’t be … uhh … he’s definitely… . There’s no question?”
“No, no question as to that. I’m sorry to be the one … telling, saying this … unspeakable thing.”
“M’mm.” She nodded slowly. Her long fingers stroked her shirtwaist buttons. “Well, we have a client coming… .” Instead of leaving, she sank onto the ottoman. “I have to prepare the plates. May I have some water?”
He found the receptionist, who directed him to a sink in the back. She drank thirstily. “Thanks. So nice of you.” Her smile, a polite tic, lit her face, her beauty disembodied, dreadful. To his amazement, she gathered herself and stood.
“You ought to come with me, Gretta.”
“Where? What difference does it make now?” Her eyes vacant, she twined her hair around her finger.
As she turned away and headed back to the studio, her movements took on a mechanical quality. Max went to her, certain she was in shock. He touched her elbow and she turned around, staring at him as if were a stranger. “Will you be all right?”
She offered a weak smile. “It’s impossible.”
“You should go home. I’ll take you.”
Still she shook her head, apparently intent on returning to the studio. Now, the practical side of his nature got the upper hand. “Would you write the Mourtones’ address down, please?”
Like an automaton, she drifted over to the desk and scratched out the numbers. She handed the note to him and offered a peculiar smile.
“I’ll see you later?”
She nodded, but gestured for him to leave. For a moment longer he waited, hoping she would change her mind, but she turned and went back to the darkroom, her straight back disappearing behind the curtains.
He had no choice but to plunge back into the streets. He took a horsecar up Fifth Avenue to 42nd Street, then got out and walked along the reservoir’s massive walls, gathering his thoughts. Spattered blood on a wall. Mourtone flung back at that vertiginous angle. His rubber mask of a face. The cawing, chattering street arabs. Were they still creeping up behind him? Were they crouching behind that shiny Victoria? In that sliver of an alleyway? Ridiculous. He shook his head, as if he could drive the wraiths from his mind.
One step followed another. How much to tell Martin’s parents? Should he even present himself as a reporter? No, let them talk first, and then find the right moment? Was that possible?
Horsecars and carriages thundered over the paving stones, but once he took a few steps off the main thoroughfare a voluptuous quiet took hold. Block after block of fine brownstones stretched out before him, and hardly a soul on the street. The glass roof of a conservatory peeked out from behind a fence. An immaculate brougham stood waiting beneath a porte-cochere. Ornamental ironwork, freshly painted and jet-black, ran up stone stairs to doors with highly polished brass fittings. The sumptuous peace was what he relished most of all.
Finally, he came to the Mourtones’ address, its entrance a street-level Ionic colonnade. The brownstone building, actually three older structures joined into one, possessed an intimate quality despite its grandeur. A dense growth of ivy curled a story above the front door’s awning. In between the second and third floors an iron balcony supported a row of potted trees. Even though he knew they were well-off, he hadn’t imagined the Mourtones living on such a scale. Their standing intimidated him, he hated to admit it, but he focused his mind on his terrible task.
After he explained his mission, a manservant led him past a grand marble staircase, through a drawing room decorated with Watteau-style paintings set into wooden panels, and finally to the library, its carefully arranged bookcases filled to the brim with fine bindings. A painted frieze, garlands of roses, ran under the cornice. The richly colored rugs, the brocade curtains, the Second Empire furniture, the electric lighting all conspired to create a mood of splendor and contemplation. He couldn’t help resenting Martin for having been born into such a velvet cocoon.
In a few moments Martin’s father, a thin man with a drooping white moustache, closed the door quietly behind him. He looked far more the aesthete than the insurance baron.
“You say you know where Martin is?” Sagging blue pouches swelled beneath his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Mourtone. I did see your son last night. …”
“Where is he? His mother is frantic. We contacted the police when he didn’t come home, but they’re in a fog as usual.”
“I was supposed to … I did meet him at a bar on Bleecker Street.”
“Bleecker Street?” The man was clearly dazed, and exhausted as well.
Max could barely get the words out. He was afraid the senior Mourtone might crumble before his eyes. “Last night. Before I got there, someone shot him. He was dead by the time I showed up.”
Mourtone flinched, his head jerking as if he’d been slapped. “How do you know? Maybe he was just hurt? Did you get a good look at him?”
Max spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “I’m very sorry. Yes. I did. He’d been shot, and there was no doubt. He’s definitely gone.”
Dazed, Mourtone sat down on the edge of a sofa. “You have to be certain. What am I supposed to tell his mother?”
“I can’t imagine … It’s a terrible tragedy. Here is my card. If there is anything I can do to help you….”
For a moment Mourtone stared dumbly at Max’s identification. In a bitter tone, he said, “You’re a reporter? Don’t think you’re putting this in your scurvy paper. This is hard enough.”
Then he let go a feral noise, a grunt, a growl, a moan combined, an animal expression of grief. How strange coming from such a neat, elegant man.
“I appreciate your distress, but it’s my job.” Max had never made this statement with a greater sense of shame. For an instant he saw himself, a permanent harbinger of horror sailing into the future.
Recovering a bit, Mourtone whispered, “Do me one simple kindness then. Where is the body?”
“That’s the other part. I don’t really know. He’s … the body is lost.” The empty chair, perfectly lined up under the empty table. The missing liver-colored hat. The ashtray a clean cup of air. The shape of absence. Dread crept bone by bone up Max’s spine.
“What? Lost? What do you mean? A second ago you said he was dead. Now you don’t know where he is?” Mourtone’s voice shook with rage. “Are you some kind of extortionist?”
“It’s a complicated story.” In short strokes, he explained that he had returned to Stephenson’s with Detective Stout, and that Martin’s corpse had vanished.
Mourtone set himself at the edge of an upholstered chair. “I told him to stay out of those blind pigs.”
“Well, Stephenson’s isn’t actually….”
Mourtone rocked slowly, chewing on his lips, talking to himself. “He’s dead, he’s actually dead? You wouldn’t make this up, no … it’s inconceivable. No, it’s not. He wanted to do this to us, he always wanted to….” His eyes glazed, he stared at Max. “What do you want from me? Why did you come here?”
“Well, I was the only one who saw—”
“Your newspaper, that’s why, isn’t it?”
“I thought I might quote you,” Max admitted. “All in good taste.”
“Ah, good taste. My son is murdered in a black-and-tan, you’ll smear it all over your greasy rag, but you’ll exercise good taste?”
“I liked Martin,” he mumbled, groping for sympathetic ground. “I thought it would be better than the police—”
“But the police don’t know anything about it, do they? All they have is your cock-and-bull story.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s true. I understand your distress.”
“Don’t suppose anything, whoever you are.” Straightening up, Mourtone eyed Max contemptuously. His lips unpeeled in a sardonic smile. “So it’s your word against mine, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can’t prove he’s dead, can you? Why should I accept your account?” Ashen, clearly exhausted, Mourtone was rallying.
“He’s missing, isn’t he?” Max reasoned.
“Possibly. Maybe not.”
Now Max saw a glimpse of the insurance magnate beneath the aesthete’s milk-white skin. Mourtone’s voice no longer wavered. “We won’t see a word of this in your precious paper, of course. In fact, we won’t allow it. You say you saw Martin, shot, in this Stephenson dive? I will insist I saw him afterwards. Your paper could get sued for libel, couldn’t it? Dragging a decent family’s name through that rag of yours. Not to speak of the damage to a grieving mother, assuming you have any human feelings. I think your recklessness, once it was exposed in court, would result in a nice stiff fine and drive you out of your so-called profession for good.”
Mourtone had made his priorities crystal-clear. Dying was in poor enough taste. Expiring in Stephenson’s was worse than death itself. The threat of legal action, given the insurance executive’s resources, sounded all too convincing. Max kept his mouth shut and let him go on.
“On the other hand, we could cooperate.”
“How?”
Mourtone kept Max waiting while he poured whiskey from a cut-glass decanter. When he passed the reporter his drink, his hand shook. Liquor splashed on the carpet, but Mourtone either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“Sit down. Let’s work this out to our mutual advantage.”
Max sensed that Mourtone had used that phrase a thousand times while trimming his clients, but the scotch went down warm and smooth. “With all due respect,” Max reminded him, “you’ve already reported Martin as missing to the police. It’s a matter of public record now.”
Actually, Max had no interest in placing a squib about a missing society swell. The real story involved Martin’s murder and what he had known about the Midnight Band’s activities. And that information had probably died with him … unless Gretta knew more than she had admitted.
“Yes, but it won’t be public knowledge unless you print it. You can help our family instead of causing us pain. Don’t report the incident now. I can advance you some expenses. Meanwhile, you can keep looking… .” His voice shaking, he faltered. “Looking for him, in my employ. You saw him last. You’re a reporter. Find the boy.”
Rapidly, Max sorted out this arrangement’s merits and dangers. If the offer was high enough, he could use the money to wipe out his debt to Sim Addem. He’d have breathing room for once in his life. What had Billy Webster said? Look at Scott, the theatre critic, licking the cream off his lips. Just a little on the side … how could anybody survive on Bennett’s crumbs?
With MacNamara the bartender wandering in deepest, darkest Baltimore and the black man disappeared down a Thompson Street alley, Max had no story. So taking money not to write an article he couldn’t publish anyway made perfect sense. He didn’t see much of an ethical issue. Well, there might be one, but it was convoluted enough to ignore. And how would Stan Parnell ever find out? Still, he felt nervous. He had never before taken money on the side. But wasn’t it the way of the world? He couldn’t decide, so he stalled.
“What do I do if I find him?” Carefully, he avoided the words “body” or corpse.
“That’s precisely what I’ll be paying you for. Have some decency, for Godsakes. I have a heartbroken woman upstairs. Do you want to kill her? How much? Two, three hundred?”
Stunned by the offer—he could live for months on that kind of mazuma—he still hesitated. What if it cost him his job, was it worth it? But who would ever find out?
Mourtone wanted nothing more than to bury his son and the sorry circumstances of his demise. Two or three hundred? He went cold. The butterflies in his stomach fluttered and died. With that kind of dough he could not only pay Addem, he could live like a king for a while. Get the whole bill of fare at the Waldorf, lamb in mint sauce, canvasback duck, Lobster Victoria.
When he looked up at the Venetian painted ceiling, certainly plundered in Europe by Mourtone’s architect, he wondered if he could do better. “Five. And if there are expenses later on, you’ll advance me?”
“Would you like cash now?”
Suddenly, a febrile excitement gripped him. He allowed himself a single word. “Naturally.”
“We’ll want to work with Police Superintendent Byrnes. He’s a solid man, completely discreet.”
Superintendent Byrnes was renowned for finding and returning the possessions of the better classes. It was almost magical how he could put his finger on a pearl pendant or a gold ring the day after it was stolen. Of course, all the reporters knew how he did it, by making deals with every dip in the city, parceling out zones in which he would tolerate pickpockets, the badger game, faro, stuss, and every twist on banco known to man. In return, the underworld granted him a cordon sanitaire, the Dead Line starting just above Wall Street. The financial district, with its immense store of stocks, bonds and bullion, and its well-heeled brokers, traders and practitioners of the darker financial arts, had become the safest place in the city.
Max didn’t even blink when Mourtone handed him Howe and Hummel’s business card. “First, go to these lawyers, and they’ll make other contacts. Do you know this firm?”
He had to suppress a laugh. In the previous year’s most celebrated trial, Howe and Hummel had defended Hattie Adams against the Reverend Dr.
Charles Parkhurst’s charges that she was running a police-protected bordello. In order to gather evidence, the minister had entered Adams’s establishment incognito, observed a can-can demonstration, and engaged in a game of naked leapfrog. On the stand, Charles Gardner, the private detective who had accompanied the Reverend Dr. Parkhurst, admitted playing the frog.
“Who doesn’t?”
“You know where they’re located?”
“Down opposite the Tombs.” In a sense, wasn’t he being paid to find Martin, rather than to keep anything out of the paper? He wasn’t taking a bribe at all. Why not take a job on the side, when half the time he raced around town for Parnell and had his copy tossed back in his face? Wouldn’t it be sweet to commandeer a Hoffman House table? He could set off a wine spree, stand the house at the mahogany-paneled bar, and take drinks in return, his right leg secured on a brass-plated foot rest. Or he could take Gretta to Delmonico’s or Sherry’s. Imagine having the simoleons to do that! He felt giddy.
A pleading note crept into Mourtone’s voice. “Maybe you saw someone else … it was dark in there, wasn’t it? I can’t tell his mother, you understand, until it’s certain. She had rheumatic fever when she was young.”
“It’s a terrible thing. I’m sorry.” What barren words, inadequate noises.
Mourtone closed the tall doors behind himself.
The insurance magnate didn’t return to the library. Instead, his manservant handed Max an envelope and then led him to the door. Proud and ashamed all at once, he slipped the money into his inside jacket pocket. His fingers kept migrating to the thick packet of bills. There they were, real to the touch. In the muffled quiet of the East Side streets, it was all he could do to keep from whooping out loud. He’d never had more than twenty dollars in his pocket in his life. Five hundred dollars, and he’d negotiated the price up from three hundred! Yes, he felt a twinge of guilt, but a flood of newly found self-respect washed it away. Why not lick some cream himself once in a while?
On his way downtown he deposited $400 in his account at the Madison Square Bank. The rest he kept in small bills. No one had to know why he occasionally dipped his hand into his inside pocket or why he was gliding across the sidewalk, lighter than air.