The Brass Rainbow

11

Before I dropped in bed, I called my part-time answering service. Weiss might have heard I was looking around and tried to contact me. It was a forlorn hope. In Chelsea people are wary of the telephone. There was no message from Weiss, but a lady had called once: no name and no number.

I set my alarm for one o’clock and collasped in the bed. I thought about the nameless lady, but not for long. Marty would have left her name. I thought about Weiss. Where was he? How was he keeping on the loose? Almost three days with half the New York police looking for him. Someone had to be helping him. I went to sleep thinking that $25,000 buys a lot of help.

The telephone woke me up. My head said I had slept an hour. The clock said it was almost noon. I fumbled with the receiver and managed to mumble something like “Hello?”

“Mr. Fortune?” a woman’s voice asked. Her voice was low and throaty.

“I think so,” I said. “Let me check.”

“You’re working on the murder of Jonathan Radford?”

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

I put down the receiver and went into the bathroom. I doused sleep and morphine hangover from my head in cold water. I came out, lighted a cigarette, and picked up the telephone.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“My name is Agnes Moore,” she said, low and quiet. “I’d like to talk to you. There could be money in it.”

“What about Radford?”

“We’ll talk. Come to 17 West Seventy-sixth Street. Top floor.”

She hung up. I finished my cigarette. Then I took a shower. I wondered if Sammy Weiss had found a devious way to contact me. Someone had to be hiding him. On the other hand, I’d be careful where I walked. When I was dressed, I went out and to the subway.

At Seventy-second Street a thin haze hung over the Park like damp smoke, and lights were on in the tall buildings even in the early afternoon. The feel of more snow was in the air, and it was not so cold. Number 17 on Seventy-sixth Street was the usual brownstone. I rang. The door buzzed to let me in.

The stairs were carpeted and clean, and the wood of the walls shined as I went up. The door of the top apartment was painted black, and had an elegant brass knocker. I used the knocker. She answered at once.

“Come in, Mr. Fortune.”

She was just over medium height. She wore a loose red kimono that swept the floor. Her dark hair was cut short in Italian curls, and her round face was pretty in a scrubbed, mannish way. She was around thirty, give or take, and she looked as if she had just stepped from the shower.

I went inside warily and braced for action.

“Sit down,” she said.

The living room was large for the West Side. The furniture was good and expensive, but oddly impersonal. It looked like a matched set bought complete by someone who had said, “Wrap up the room and send it home.” A model room in a good department store with none of the clutter that piles up after a time of living.

I sat. “How do you know about me, Miss Moore?”

“I have friends, and you’re easy to spot.” She nodded at my empty sleeve.

“What friends? Maybe Sammy Weiss?”

“I don’t know Weiss, and what friends doesn’t matter. I want to talk about the murder, isn’t that enough?”

Her low voice was strong. It reminded me of someone else: Misty Dawn, or Deirdre Fallon, or Morgana Radford. I was collecting contralto females. Maybe it was the New York winter.

“How do you fit with Jonathan Radford, Miss Moore?”

“Close,” she said, and laughed. “I was his girl friend, or lover; you name it how you like.”

Her diction was good, but an uneducated past lurked behind her voice. She was relaxed, but there was a hardness in her that comes from growing up fast where life was not easy. I knew now why Jonathan Radford had become a night owl, and where the long business trips had taken him-to this apartment.

“Full time, or do you do something else?”

“I make my living acting. I support myself, but Jonathan liked me, and I liked him. He set up this place. He made life nicer for me, and I made it nicer for him. Check?”

“Check. Why the cloak-and-sneak, then? You were both adults.”

“It wasn’t so undercover. He came on the hush-hush only when he was involved with business and family in town here, and when I wasn’t living here. We’d meet for a few good hours. But when he was freer, or officially out of town, and when I could stay here a while, we’d spend a week or more here.”

“Why don’t you live here? Husband?”

She reached for a cigarette from a gold box. She lighted it, stood up, and went to a home bar. She glided in the red kimono. She poured a snifter of Remy Martin cognac and looked at me. I nodded. She poured one for me, handed it down, and sat down again. “I’d say that was my business. I want to hire you to find who killed Jonathan, not tell you my life history.’”

“A husband is my business if he’s the jealous type.”

She smoked, drank. “Okay, I buy that. I’ve got no husband and no jealous boy friends. I don’t live here because I have a lot of men friends I need in business. If they had known about Jonathan, it would have scared them off. In show business it helps a woman to be unattached and have a cozy place where men relax.”

“Was that why Jonathan was discreet, too? To cover you?”

“Hell, no. That was for his family and business associates. We made nice music, but we had different lives. We agreed on no strings and no public hand-holding. He never asked me what I did away from him, and I respected his problems. I didn’t fit into his public life. I’d have told some Senator he was a crook, and asked an ambassador if his wife was as frigid as she looked.”

“Why do you want to hire me?”

“His family will read the will, bury him, and forget him. They won’t care who killed him, the family goes on. Well, I care who killed him. I want the killer to take a big fall. For your record, I’m not in his will. He left me plenty, but in cash in my hands, so I didn’t have to kill him. I was in my other place all Monday morning. I can’t prove it; I was alone.”

“Okay,” I said. “The cops have Weiss convicted. If you want to rent me, you must have some other ideas.”

“One. A man named Paul Baron was trying to extort money from Jonathan over something Jonathan’s nephew had done.”

“Extort? Not collect a debt?”

“Extort is what Jonathan said.” She drained her brandy. “The nephew was mixed up in a racket with some B-girls. He set up dates between rich guys he knew and the girls. He got paid. Baron had pictures, checks, witnesses.”

It makes a man feel good to have guessed right. I hadn’t liked the gambling debt all along. Maybe there had been a debt, but only as a wedge for some kind of setup. It sounded like some cute variation on the badger game. That fitted Baron’s M.O.

“Jonathan pays, or Baron goes to the cops,” she said. “Jonathan was purple. He said he wouldn’t even talk to Baron. The last time I saw him, Saturday, he said Walter could rot.”

“He must have changed his mind, at least about talking to Paul Baron,” I said. “How did you meet him in the first place?”

“I worked a TV show with George Ames. I met Jonathan. Bang!”

“Did Jonathan mention anyone else in the blackmail besides Baron?”

“No, but there had to be some girls, right? And it sure looks to me like the nephew and his girl had plenty to lose.”

“Did Jonathan ever mention a Carmine Costa?”

“The guy he had closed up in North Chester? Sure. That was another of Walter’s little games.”

“Did he say anything else about Costa? Was there trouble?”

“Just that he closed him down.”

“All right,” I said. “Now do you want to tell me who told you about me?”

“No one. I’ve been sort of watching Jonathan’s apartment. I saw you. You’re easy to describe. I found out.”

“I’m still working for Sammy Weiss, too.”

“Just find that killer. That’s all I want.”

She became silent. I watched her stare at a big chair to my right. His chair, I figured. It was the first hint of sentiment I had seen in her. She came out of it:

“How much will you want now?”

Jonathan had left her plenty, according to her. I said, “A hundred a day and expenses. Three days now.”

She gave me a stare. I saw that she knew it was steep for a small-timer like me. But she went to her desk and came back with three hundred-dollar bills. She wanted the killer bad. She also wanted something else.

“Keep me out of it, right?” she said.

“If I can,” I said.

I left her drinking more brandy and looking at that big chair.

On the subway I felt a lot better. I had three hundred dollars, a client, and some real motives for murder. Money had been a thin motive for the Radford crowd, but the threat of dirty publicity, a messy trial, and jail wasn’t so thin. Only the Radfords still all had alibis.

I liked Paul Baron more, and now he had a solid motive. Maybe Jonathan had changed his mind about seeing or talking to Baron because he intended to blow the whistle. Costa was right: Jonathan Radford had been real power. Paul Baron might have realized that he had bitten off more than he could handle, and had needed to cover up. Baron’s alibi was pure smog. Both his witnesses were probably involved in the blackmail up to their girlish smiles.

All the way to my office I thought about calling Gazzo with my new information, but I wasn’t sure I had enough, so when I got to my desk I called my answering service first.

It was my day. When a case begins to crack, it sometimes opens up everywhere at once. My service had a message this time. Sammy Weiss had called at last. He wanted to see me now. He had given the service an address.