Читать книгу Murderer's Vanity - Footner Hulbert - Страница 7

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To go back a little, when Lee got home late Saturday night he had found a note on the hall table of his apartment in Jermyn’s painstakingly formed characters: “Call TR 7-7616 whenever you get home. This party called twice.” Lee knew it to be Stan Oberry’s home number, and Stan promptly answered the call.

“Did I wake you up?” said Lee.

“I expected it,” said Stan. “The phone is right beside my bed, and my business goes on for twenty-four hours a day.... Look, Mr. Mappin, one of my men has contacted C in a big way.”

“Quick work!”

“They’re together now. It’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship. C has offered my man a half share in an act he’s putting on, for five hundred dollars. My man says the act looks bonafide, but C does not. This is a man I can rely on. He says if he goes into partnership with C he can find out all there is to know about him, past and present, if it’s worth that much to you. Maybe you’ll get your five hundred back too, but he doesn’t guarantee that.”

Lee considered. “C” was Boris Fanton. When Lee thought of Judy’s pale, unhappy face, his mind was made up. “Okay, Stan, I’ll put up for it.”

“Right, Mr. Mappin. My man has already learned a good bit about this bird, but I won’t repeat it over the phone. Reports Monday. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Stan.”

Nothing happened on Sunday. On Monday morning Lee stayed home to receive Stan’s reports. They were delivered by messenger about ten. With them came a covering letter from Stan, written on plain paper and signed with a cipher. Each of Stan’s operatives was given a number. Lee smiled at the elaborateness of these precautions, but admitted it was a part of the thoroughness which Stan applied to every detail of his business. Stan wrote:

Having learned that A and B’s firm, [Blair and Middlebrook] were doing a very large business, and were short of office help, I succeeded in getting one of my young men employed there on Saturday as a filing clerk. I have not yet been able to contact any of the servants in A’s home but have my lines out. Number 38 has scraped acquaintance with a maid in B’s house, and something ought to come of that. 38 is a very attractive young fellow. In the case of C, [Boris Fanton] we have been more successful than we could have expected in so short a time. Reports enclosed.

On top was a voluminous communication from the filing clerk in Blair and Middlebrook’s office, signed Number 34. The whole of the firm’s correspondence was open to this operative, and he could also keep tab on Blair’s and on Rafe Deshon’s business engagements by consulting their desk calendars when they were out of their offices. Lee learned everything they had done on Saturday morning, but it threw no light on their private lives or secret thoughts. Blair had lunched with business associates at the Biltmore. He was picked up when he left the hotel, but his trailer lost him in the traffic. Rafe Deshon had been driven direct from the office to Wanamaker’s store. It was significant that he only walked through the store and hailed another taxi in Fourth Avenue. Evidently he knew he was being trailed or suspected that he might be. Stan’s man had been unable to get a taxi in time to follow him further. In respect to Deshon’s home, Number 38’s report was as follows:

I outfitted myself with a small stock of notions as suggested, and watched the house on Sutton Court Saturday morning until I saw B leave and afterwards Mrs. B. The servants of course always feel freer when the Mr. and Mrs. are out of the house. There are only women servants here. I went to the service door, and by good luck the bell was answered by a maid who was neither a good-looker nor downright ugly. A pretty girl wouldn’t have any truck with a pedlar, and an ugly woman always gets suspicious when a man makes up to her. This one was just right; wasn’t accustomed to attention from men, and fell for me in short order. Her name is Stella and she’s the parlor-maid. When I saw I had her going, I gave her the full charge; told her I’d been watching her go in and out for weeks past, and had only bought the pedlar’s outfit for an excuse to make her acquaintance; and I had a good job as truckman for the A. & P. and Saturday was my day off. She swallowed it whole. I kept her going until the cook called her back into the house, and then I made a date to come back in the afternoon, and I talked to her again, and then I found she had two hours off Saturday night between 7 and 9 and I persuaded her to take in a movie with me. Well, we went to a theatre in Fifty-ninth Street, and I delivered her safe home on the stroke of 9. On this first date I was careful not to ask her a single question; however, like all house servants, her principal topic of conversation was the Madam and the Master and I got an earful.

Two pages of servants’ gossip followed, which Lee skimmed over rapidly. There was little in it for him since he was already acquainted with the situation in the Deshon household. Notwithstanding the popularity of Mr. and Mrs. and all the adulation lavished on them in the press, the servants had a low opinion of their employers. Obviously Rafe and Peggy had one face for the world and quite another for those who worked for them. Hateful quarrels were described. Yet the servants liked their jobs because it gave them prestige to be working for such well-known people. It did not surprise Lee to learn that both master and mistress were dependent on drugs to obtain sleep. Once Mrs. Deshon got an overdose and a doctor was called in to revive her. She despised her husband, etc., etc. There was one significant piece of information that Lee made a note of:

On two occasions lately a man about forty years old, trim-looking and a flashy dresser, was seen loitering in the quiet dead end on which the house faces. To the servants he had the appearance of an East Side gangster. B knew him. Once when B came out of the house the man followed him. They didn’t recognize each other openly, but they were seen to get into a taxi together at the corner.

Number 38 concluded his report by saying:

On Sunday Stella wasn’t allowed out because the Madam was entertaining. She has Thursday afternoon and evening off, and I have a date with her. Sometimes when the family is dining out, she gets a couple of hours off extra in the evening, and if that happens before Thursday she promised to give me a call.

Lee wrote a memorandum to Stan Oberry to instruct 38 to find out if the maids were ever allowed to have callers in the house. He was to use every endeavor to get inside the house without arousing suspicion, and he was told to make up to the other servants particularly to the cook, who appeared to be the boss. He was to find out if Rafe had a typewriter in the house, and if he was ever seen going out at night to post a letter.

The remaining report, signed by Number 17, presented another picture of the seamy side of life in the upper brackets.

I presented the letter of introduction that was furnished me to a certain party, and as a result I was put up as a guest in the Heterodyne Club. This is good for two weeks. It is C’s regular hangout in his off hours. While I was waiting for him to turn up I talked with various members. I was posing as the son of a wealthy man in Omaha, Neb., who wanted to get into the radio game. I spent freely in the club house. Boris Fanton’s name came up and I soon learned that he wasn’t popular there. One said that Fanton was hell to women, but I couldn’t get anything specific out of this member. Nobody knew anything about Fanton’s antecedents before he joined the club last fall. He is considered to have the perfect male voice for radio and owing to that has gone ahead fast.

He came in after his last broadcast. There was some general conversation, and after Fanton got me placed, he separated me from the others. “Money” was the magic word, but he was smart enough not to show his hand right away. I posed as a dissolute kind of fellow as regards women, and this recommended me to Fanton. He likes to be regarded as the modern Casanova who regards all women as fair game, and I encouraged him. He said I was a man after his own heart.

We talked about radio. Fanton told me of an act he was putting on. It’s a serial play taken from a popular novel. He said he had his cast engaged and had secured a sponsor; all he needed was five hundred dollars to square the publisher of the novel. Said he had put every cent that he has into it. He said he could get the money in an hour, but only by parting with a half share of the act, which he didn’t want to do. He didn’t ask me outright for the money, but he gave me the opportunity to say that I would come in. He’s slick all right. He said he wouldn’t take a cent from me until he had shown me the contracts, and let me hear the script rehearsed. As soon as I got home I called up the boss, and after a couple of hours word came back from him to go ahead with it.

I met Fanton at the Roosevelt at noon on Sunday and we had breakfast. Afterwards we went to the studios and he showed me the whole works. I acted like a man from Omaha of course, to whom it was all new. After I had watched and listened to a couple of programs, Fanton got his little company together in an unused room, and they read me the script. It sounded all right to me and the contracts looked okay. I believe that this act will go on whatever may happen to Fanton. He’s got too good a job with the studios to try to pull anything raw just now. So I agreed to go in with him and we shook hands on it.

By evening Fanton and I were like lifetime buddies. Every now and then in an innocent way, I would try to find out something about his past, but he always blocked it. He must have come of a fine family and had a first-rate education in order to speak so well. I gather that his family chucked him out long ago. He said he had been right up against it before he landed in radio. He has undoubtedly gone under many aliases; he said with a laugh that he had never given his real name to a woman but once in his life, and he had regretted that ever since. I asked him in a simple way what was his real name, and he answered Boris Fanton; that he had had it changed by act of legislature. I don’t believe this.

We took a couple of blondes to dinner Sunday night. I was hoping to get Fanton drunk, but he’s too cagey. We were supposed to go home with the girls, but I managed to get out of this without exciting suspicion, and as for Fanton, he wasn’t going to let me out of his sight. So him and I went to his place to drink and chin. This is a little furnished, walk-up flat; parlor, bedroom and bath in an old building at —— West Forty-seventh Street. Fanton referred to it as a crummy place, but said he preferred to live there because there were no doormen or elevator boys to keep tab on him. I noticed that he did not have his name under any bell in the vestibule. It’s the third floor rear.

While we were sitting talking, there was a knock, and Fanton went to answer it. The flat has a little hall and I could not see the entrance door from where I was sitting. The moment Fanton got to the door, a woman opened up on him like a cork blowing out of a bottle: “Liar! Cheat! Thief!” and so on. Fanton pulled her inside quick, and shut the door to keep her from arousing the other tenants. He clapped a hand over her mouth; I heard him hissing at her: “Be quiet, for God’s sake! I’ve got a man here!”

She wrenched herself free of him. “It’s a woman!” she cried. “And I’m going to have a look at her!” She came to the parlor door. When she saw that it was a man, her face changed and she had nothing to say. The door to the bedroom was just behind her. Fanton hustled her in there and closed it. But I had time to give her the once over. She was a blonde in her early thirties, already a little faded and pinched. Of course no woman is at her best when she’s in a rage; her hair was sticking out straight. She wore a navy blue silk suit with a little jacket piped with red. Over her arm she carried a light tweed coat, grey herringbone pattern. Little blue straw hat tipped over in front with a bunch of white flowers on top. I had a glimpse of Fanton’s face over her shoulder and it was murderous.

There was another door between bedroom and parlor and I tip-toed over to it, and laid my ear against the crack. I could hear pretty good; that is, I could hear everything she said because she was excited; Fanton was more cagey and I had to guess at what he was telling her. I couldn’t repeat exactly what I heard; it was all too broken and confused, but here is the story I pieced together from it.

Fanton married this woman some years ago, and they had a child. This was in South Carolina; the town was not named. Fanton called her Nell or Nellie and she addressed him as Charlie. She had money, and Fanton ran through it. When it was gone he left her. When she pleaded with him to come back for the child’s sake, he laughed in her face and told her they were not legally married; that he had a previous wife living. She believed him at the time and took her child and went away to hide their shame as she thought. She changed her name. She went to Baltimore because there was something the matter with the child and she thought she could get the best treatment there. The child died in Baltimore. She accused Fanton of being responsible for the kid’s death. Afterwards the girl got a job in a big department store in Baltimore, and she still works there, at the neckwear counter. The name of the store is Hutzler’s.

Just lately she had exchanged a couple of letters with Fanton. I couldn’t get this part exactly. Apparently he told her he wanted a reconciliation, and she was all for it. But somehow she had discovered that he was lying to her again and so she had come to New York hotfoot to face him with it. The girl has something on Fanton, something big, but when she threatened him with exposure he shut her up so quick I didn’t get the particulars.

That was the situation. The girl was still crazy about Fanton even while she cursed him, and he set out to smooth her down. I couldn’t hear much what he said, but I could tell from his silky tone that he was swearing to her she was the only woman he had ever loved, and the poor fool believed it and stopped crying. Anybody but a lovesick woman would have known his voice was false as hell. He succeeded in explaining everything away. She wanted to spend the night with him, but he told her he had to take the midnight to Boston. I heard this. He persuaded her to return to Baltimore. She is to get her things together and return to New York next week. He promised to write her Tuesday with full instructions. He kept telling her they must keep their plans secret. Finally he got her out.

Naturally when he came back he was anxious as to how I had taken all this. I laughed like a fool and clapped him on the back and made out that I had once been through a similar experience with a woman. I took the attitude that any trick was justifiable in getting ahead of a woman. He pumped me to find out how much I had overheard. I made out it was only the opening words. He was satisfied that I was a nitwit and not dangerous to him. He made light of the whole business of course, but his hand shook and his eyes were murderous. He couldn’t get a grip on himself. Among other things he said: “She turned up a few days too soon.” Then feeling he had given too much away, he added with a laugh: “Damn it all, I’ll have to move to a hotel where she can’t get by the desk.”

I have another date with Fanton for twelve o’clock, Monday.