Number twenty-two Elysian Avenue turned out to be a three-story brownstone shaded by wide green maples. The carved-oak door with the polished brass fixtures and the beveled glass windows hung with white lace curtains all said money in a fine, full-throated voice. The operator hadn’t given me an apartment number or any such thing, and anyway the curtains were the same all the way up, so I figured the whole place belonged to Miss Night. Pretty swanky digs for a single young woman, if it was all hers.
I stepped off the curb and up the wide steps, businesslike, and gave three solid knocks on the door. Waited. Knocked three more times, and waited again.
Nothing.
I stole a quick look up and down the wide sidewalk, decided the coast was as clear as it would ever be, and crouched down. I poked open the brass mail-slot and peeked inside. I could just make out a heap of neglected envelopes on the polished cherrywood floor. A good bet no one had been home in days, maybe quite a few of them in a row.
I straightened up and walked quickly around to the side of the place. Sure enough, I spotted a narrow alley cutting into the block between the buildings, no more than a rough brick passage lined with rusty trashcans. I slipped along it, thinking how rich people’s trash stinks as much as anyone’s, maybe worse. Finally I came to the low back stoop. My luck was in—the back door had a nice mullioned window with four rectangular panes. One last glance up the alley assured me no one had noticed what I was up to. I slipped my hat over my elbow, turned my back on the door, and gave a sharp jab of my arm. One of the lower panes shattered with a secretive plinking of glass. I swept the last razor-y shards out of the frame with my hat, shook the slivers away and dropped the old fedora back onto my head, then reached through and unlatched the door.
The kitchen I found myself in was big but didn’t look like it’d seen much use. Copper pots hung from wooden pegs on the wall over the spotless gas stove, and the only dirty things in the large sink were a flock of crystal glasses with rusty wine stains in the bottoms. Not much of a cook, my Miss Night, but a real party girl. No domestic help, either—none that had been by lately, anyway.
Beyond the kitchen was a well-appointed dining room—large table dressed in lace, crystal chandelier dangling above, silk flowers in china vases in the corners, antique felt-patterned paper on the walls. More for show, I guessed. I wondered how long it had been since anyone had actually eaten a meal in this room. At least as long as it’d been since anyone cooked in that kitchen.
I bypassed the living room and headed upstairs where I figured I had the best chance of finding what I’d come looking for. People who entertain the way Miss Night did clearly don’t put their lives on display in their kitchens and living rooms—not their real lives.
Bedrooms are another matter.
The first one I found looked to be the master bedroom, but I could tell right away it wasn’t Miss Night’s, and never had been. Pictures stood in heirloom frames, the king-sized four-poster bed was all made up with dark velvet covers. There was a primness to the place that spoke of much older occupants.
I took a gander at some of the photos in the silver filigree frames. Some were society shots—a good-looking couple at various points in the second half of their lives, rubbing elbows with folks who came from money or had big names, or both. I recognized at least one former mayor, a couple of state senators. The other shots were family stuff and pretty soon I confirmed what I’d guessed. This was mother and dad’s room. I found several pictures showing the elder couple with the lovely Miss Night, everything from her christening to what looked a lot like the debutante ball I’d been searching for. Best I could tell, the photographic excursion down memory lane stopped around five years back—around the time that picture we’d found in the paper had been taken. And I noticed something else, too. A subtle layer of dust coated every horizontal surface in the room. The whole thing had the feel of a museum display. That set me to thinking, but I wanted to dig a little more before I put my notion to the test, so I abandoned the old folks’ room and tried to track down Miss Night’s.
Evelyn Night’s bedroom—it couldn’t have belonged to anyone else, I was pretty damn sure of that—was on the third floor. A tad more modest than the master bedroom, but still bigger than my whole digs. Somewhere between midtown and here the rain had let up and now the afternoon sunshine streamed white and bright through the two large windows. It shone on walls the color of eggshells, walls hung with a dozen or more photos, all in shades of gray, most in smart silver frames that wanted polishing. The bed was dressed up in satin and silk with tasteful trims of lace and looked like no one had slept in it for a good long time. Across from it sat a polished wood dressing table dominated by a tall oval mirror, ivory-handled hairbrushes and whalebone combs sitting neglected like shells on a beach. But two items particularly grabbed my attention. One was a large wedding picture—the old couple from the master bedroom—in a solid black border, with stubby votive candles on either side. A silver plate fixed to it glinted with two engraved names, and a date.
The other object that’d snagged my eye was a long porcelain pipe engraved with pretty oriental designs and sporting a little brass bowl near one end. I’d never spent much time with the hop heads who haunted the southwest side near the bad part of Chinatown, but I knew an opium pipe when I saw one.
So dope was her thing after all—or one of her things, anyway. But if she’d abandoned this expensive toy here whenever she’d abandoned the house, maybe she’d moved on to something else. In any case, the puzzle was coming together in my head and it made a sorry kind of sense.
I forgot about the black frame and the pipe and took a look at some of the other pictures. Some showed that older couple, or them with the girl my client had been. They looked like holiday snaps, shots from the boardwalk on the shore and various other all-American resorts, but also photos from more exotic locales, Paris and Tuscany, Venice and Crete. The rest were a lot like the one in the paper, the one that’d sent me this way in the first place—Miss Night with various other moneyed girls, and swank young men in pricey suits. A couple of the girls turned up over and over, and so did one of the fellas. Something about him snagged my attention, and I found myself looking back over all of the images he’d shown up in. In every picture he gave an over-enthusiastic grin that was more of a leer, and in every picture where he turned up he had a long arm draped around Miss Night’s shoulders, or wound around her waist like a boa constrictor. Like he wanted the world to know he owned her. I didn’t recognize the kid, but there was a glint in his dark eyes, a certain set to his sharp jaw, a severity to his widow’s peak, that had a familiar stink to it. Even if I’d still had that one clear shot of Mister Dapper, I knew the clown in the photos wouldn’t look like him in any blood-relation kind of way. The attitude this kid radiated … it wasn’t the same as Radamanthus’s, but he sure as hell wanted it to be. Ditto the pinstripe suit, cut to be a cheaper imitation of Mister Dapper’s high-toned duds.
I took one of the photos off the wall and tucked it under my arm. I didn’t figure anyone would miss it anytime soon.
After a quick glance around, I spotted what I needed—a phone crouched on the nightstand. I picked it up and dialed Cora’s number at the Trib.
“Well hello, detective. Missing me already?”
“Every minute,” I answered. “Look, can you do me a favor when you have some time?”
“It’ll cost you lunch.”
Another time, I might have chuckled at that, but just then I wasn’t feeling all that jovial.
“I need you to look for an obit for me,” I said, and gave her the names and the date I’d seen engraved in silver on that black frame. “When you get it for me, can you give me a call at my office? I guess I’ll be back in an hour so. Better make it two. You still got my card?”
“Right in my pocket book,” Cora said.
I hefted the picture I’d pilfered from the wall, thinking about the laughing girls, the leering man. “Thanks, Cora. You’re a pal.”
“And don’t forget it,” Cora said, and hung up.
Five minutes later I had the picture out of its frame and tucked under my coat and was out on the street a few blocks from twenty-two Elysian Avenue, hailing a cab.