Читать книгу I Found Him Dead! - Gale Gallegher - Страница 4

SHE sat on a bench in the reception room, genuine honey blonde and beautiful. I guessed her age at thirty-five, but she was playing it younger. The round baby-neck blouse, the glowing, artless make-up, the natural-tint nails were all too carefully right. She wore a six-carat diamond but no wedding ring. She glanced up when I opened the door and her blue eyes met mine levelly for a moment. I knew that behind that carefully cool, appraising glance there was fear.

Without speaking, I went through to the inner office closing the door. Patsy Higgins, my secretary-assistant, was tucked between her typewriter and the monitor switchboard. She made frantic signals toward the waiting room. I got the general idea and nodded. Then Patsy closed the little information window between us and the reception room, so our visitor outside wouldn’t hear.

I dropped my sassy new spring sailor hat with my purse on the file cabinet and glanced quickly over the mail. Patsy waited impatiently, finally thrust a new record card under my nose.

Dawn Ferris, it said. Actress. Home address: 502 East 88th Street, Manhattan. Business address: Radio City.

“That’s her,” Patsy babbled. Patsy’s unprogressive parents never heard of orthodontry, so her projecting front teeth resulted in a lisp when she spoke and an expression of childish surprise at all times. However, she is a good kid and, at that moment, radiated sheer ecstasy.

“I recognized her voice, Gale. Right away. The minute she came to the window and asked to see you.”

“She’s not our first customer,” I said with deliberate, bubble-bursting flatness.

“But she’s Dawn Ferris, the radio actress. I listened to her in the summertime when I was on vacation from school, and Mamma still hears her every day.”

“The Katharine Cornell of the ether!”

“Gale!” Patsy was outraged. “In the first place, she’s Ann Preston, Woman Physician. That’s ten-thirty every morning. And she’s Laura in The Uphill Way, at three in the afternoon, except week ends. Once you hear her . . .”

Bobby-sox stuff, I thought, listening to Patsy rave because a real live radio star had walked into the office. “Hold on to your emotions, Patsy,” I said lightly. “Skip tracers can’t afford them.”

“But she . . . she’s in trouble.”

Patsy was appealing personally for a friend in distress. “It had better be good,” I said. “Dragging me away from Maxine’s before my nails were dry.”

Patsy looked approvingly at my manicure with a lacquer optimistically called Rosy Future. My long oval nails were Patsy’s special envy. She approved the color, assured me they were thoroughly dry, and reported on the morning’s phone calls.

I was only half listening to her. It was my turn now to think of the woman in the reception room. Patsy really had something. I rarely rated visits from prominent actresses. They didn’t lose the kind of things that the Acme Investigating Bureau, G. K. Gallagher, principal, hunted down.

That look, with fear gnawing at the edges, was still there when I opened the door again. She was gazing straight ahead, as though her thoughts—and her terrors—fastened on some invisible point in the future. When I spoke her name, Dawn Ferris rose swiftly, recovered her poise practically in mid-air. Her professional smile blotted out the fear.

“I . . . must have been daydreaming.” Her voice was deep, modulated, resonant. “I hope Miss Gallagher hasn’t been detained. I’m due at the studio at two.”

“I’m Gale Gallagher.”

“Oh!”

I was used to the flash of surprise. People expect me to be fat and fifty, the police-matron type. Dawn Ferris murmured apologies for her mistake as I led her past Patsy into my private office.

We’d done a nice job partitioning our small office space. There was the plain, bird-cage size reception room, the utilitarian inner office, and then my office. I had spread myself on that. It was finished in three tones of brown, my favorite color, with highlights of yellow, and I think it’s becoming to me.

Seated at my desk, the wide window overlooking Fifth Avenue behind me, I can face my clients and also see my pride and joy on the opposite wall—an original Thomas Benton landscape. The picture is a kind of quiet friend. In a crazy way, I like to think that it and I together listen to the stories—the sordidness, the heartbreak, and all the trouble poured out in that room—and still keep our perspective. It made a fine backdrop as Dawn Ferris faced me across the desk, the light from the window full upon her. She smiled, an easy, tender, but somehow desperate smile.

She said, “I heard about you from Roy Selig, my agent. You handled some work for him.”

“Oh, yes, I remember that case. The young actor who got discouraged and left town. Then Mr. Selig landed him a movie contract on an old screen test, and couldn’t find him. It isn’t often I get a chance to hunt people down to—give them good news.”

“I suppose not. Roy said you were very resourceful and followed every angle.”

“Nice of him to recommend me.”

“But he didn’t. He merely happened to mention you. I mean, he didn’t send me here. Nobody knows I came. It mustn’t become known. Only . . . I need . . .”

She hesitated as if she were not sure what she needed, like a patient who believes she has some dreadful disease but when face to face with the physician doubts the reality of her fears. For a moment she looked past me through the wide window to the towering buildings of Manhattan. “I want you to find a little girl.” She spoke the words flatly, as if it were a first reading at rehearsal and she were trying them on for size.

“Miss Ferris,” I said, “this sounds like a police case. We trace persons who run out on hotel bills, flighty wives who traipse off with the milkman, husbands who duck financial responsibility; but children—lost children . . .”

She leaned forward on the desk, her slim white hands clasped together tightly. “You don’t understand. This girl is—my daughter.”

“Your daughter—you lost her?”

“Miss Gallagher.” She hesitated, looking straight at me. “I . . . I gave her away,” she finished, so softly it was almost a whisper.

She was in trouble. No amount of make-up or acting ability could hide that. But a woman, I was thinking, doesn’t give up her child, not if she can help it, not for any reason. I’m not a mother. My own mother died when I was born, so I never had that kind of love. I did have the wonderful sweeping love of my father, Patrolman James Patrick Gallagher, one of the finest men in the New York Police Department. It was he, I always say, who gave me my start in crime. But this mother love—I was still sure about it even if I didn’t know it firsthand—was something one didn’t part with easily.

Something of my emotions must have shown in my face because Dawn Ferris said, “I suppose you can’t understand how a mother with half a heart could give away a child. But—it was a different world in 1933.”

“Fourteen years,” I said slowly. “And only now you’ve decided to look her up?”

“I haven’t any right, even now, because that was part of the bargain. You see . . . I gave her for adoption.”

That was different, but it still rasped in my mind even though I realized I had none of the details, none of the reasons. Probably it’s my background. I grew up in a section of Manhattan that would now be called a low-income neighborhood. We had a little house, but all about us were old-law tenements, crowded and dirty. For most of our neighbors it was a struggle to pay the rent. Yet the women kept their kids. In and out of marriage, they kept them.

“If your child was placed for adoption, with your consent, through legal channels . . .” I was trying to be impartial, “you forfeited all right to her. Agencies will not reveal names of adopting parents. And after fourteen years . . .”

“I realize all that. I was resigned to it. It was my loss. I’m not proud of my personal history, Miss Gallagher.”

I offered her a cigarette. She took it. I held the match for her, then lit my own.

“So many things have happened,” she said. “A whole set of things, and all at once. For one, I—I’m to be married next month . . . to Geoffrey Wilton.”

“Geoffrey Wilton.” The name sounded a buzzer in my mind. “I seem to remember something recently—in Time magazine.”

“He formed a new theatrical producing company. He’s an engineer by profession, and made plane parts during the war.” Shadows of anxiety clouded her eyes. “I haven’t told him about my daughter. It wasn’t only that I was ashamed, but it’s been so long that I considered it a closed book. Sometimes I feel as if it all happened to someone else.”

“So whatever your reasons for reopening this thing, you can’t tell him about the girl now.”

“How could I explain at this late date? I’ve known him two years. I . . . we . . . love each other.”

“Does he know you were married? Or—were you?”

She nodded quickly, almost eagerly defensive. To the world Dawn Ferris was an adult woman, a successful actress, but within herself a frightened child, the fear more fully revealed as she began talking rapidly.

“I married Eddie Wells in Topeka in 1931. I was twenty and doing a single in roadhouses. We teamed up, Eddie and Ethel Wells.” She smiled, brightly reminiscent for the moment. “We made a fairly good double, and got some bookings on the five-a-day. But vaudeville was dying and things went very badly for us. Soon I realized it wasn’t merely the times. It was also Eddie.” She hesitated, then added softly, “He was emotionally unstable.”

I would have bet she didn’t know that phrase in 1931. “Unstable—in what way?”

She continued carefully, as though putting certain thoughts into words for the first time. “He wanted everything he saw, like a greedy child. Always chasing a rainbow—in the next town. He was completely dishonest. I don’t mean that he was a thief—Eddie didn’t have the courage to steal. He knew every angle to beat a board bill, promote a loan, or dodge a creditor. He was constantly in debt, constantly in trouble.”

Eddie Wells sounded like the subject of most of my searches—the skip tracer’s delight. I let Dawn continue, though the first quick brightness vanished. She went on with a visible effort, her mouth pinched at the corners, making little lines in her neck that showed her age.

“Then I was going to have a baby. I stayed in the act as long as possible. Eddie couldn’t get bookings as a single on the road, but he thought things might be better in New York. We hitchhiked east.” She looked at me with that quick level trick she had. “Do you remember the depression, Miss Gallagher?”

I shook my head. That was after Dad died. I was tucked in a convent school all through those years.

“Then you don’t know fear,” Dawn Ferris said flatly. “Now, with money in the bank, I can’t really believe that anyone in this city could starve, but we almost did.” The truth of it was in her eyes. “We lived in a miserable furnished room and were always behind in the rent. It was years before I could hear footsteps on stairs without shivering. There was never enough to eat—frequently nothing at all. The baby was almost due and I’d had no medical care. Eddie disappeared and had been gone for two weeks. I wasn’t sure he’d ever come back. . . .”

Watching her closely, I was trying to vision this sophisticated, perfectly groomed creature as the starving wife of a no-good chiseler. She realized the contrast, filled in the picture.

“I was very young and really inexperienced. I was hungry and desperately frightened when a girl in the house told me about Dr. Wurber.”

Famous last words! How many Dr. Wurbers there had to be in the world!

“He had a private nursing home in the West Sixties. He placed babies with only wealthy or prominent families, especially those who wanted infants in a hurry without too much red tape. The baby had to be legitimate and healthy.”

She shivered slightly, remembering. “Dr. Wurber was a horrible little man, but he said he would keep me at the hospital for that last month, feed me—which was so terribly important—deliver the baby, and give me two hundred dollars.”

The old traffic in lives.

“What did I have to give her?” She went on. “Birth in a charity ward—and after that, what? We were broke, homeless. I had no people. This way she’d be taken care of. She’d have wealth, security; and a family to love her.”

I tried to keep my emotions out of this. I was getting as bad as Patsy. “You had to have your husband’s consent.”

“I got that. Dr. Wurber found Eddie—strange how he could do it so quickly. He was a singing waiter in a beer garden out near Freeport. He went very sentimental when the doctor approached him. He actually cried, but he agreed to sign the papers—if I’d split the two hundred with him. I did.”

The lines of her scarlet lips were tight. “Dr. Wurber said the baby was a girl, but I never saw her. He assured me it was easier that way. I never saw Eddie again, either.”

I walked to the window, looked down at the taxis and busses crawling on the street below. You still haven’t any answers, Gale, my girl, I told myself. She hasn’t yet said what she came here to say. She’s dodging, trying to get away—from something. I could hear it in this carefully edited version of her life, see it in the nervous motions of her hands as she took a handkerchief from the large purse on her lap.

“I never saw him again, but Eddie kept track of me. I don’t know how; but then he was always amazingly efficient when he chose to be. At first I went into burlesque. It was the only job open.” Her mouth curved, disdainful of her memories. “For one season I was billed as the gun moll of a notorious gangster. I changed my name twice, but somehow Eddie always knew, and let me know it. He asked for money—small amounts, then.”

“Did you send him any money?”

“No, never. I answered only one of his letters. That was in 1937, after I got my big break in radio. I was in Chicago when somebody discovered my speaking voice. I studied drama, landed my first good radio parts. As soon as I could afford it, I got a divorce on the grounds of desertion. It was his next letter that I answered. I told him I was free and asked him to leave me alone. I did get fewer letters, but the demands were bigger. In 1942 I came to New York under contract for the two big spots I have now. I didn’t hear from Eddie again. I thought I was really free.”

How many times have I heard that line! I thought I was free. I thought I could put the past behind me. Only you never can. You and the past are one.

“And now Eddie,” I said, “has decided to return.”

“I had a letter from him last Monday.” She fumbled in the smoothly expensive purse, handed me a dog-eared envelope, with a Grand Central, New York, post-office cancelation. The envelope was addressed in an old-fashioned, flowery script, to Dawn Ferris, care of the broadcasting company.

“That his handwriting?” I asked.

She nodded. “Eddie has very little formal education. He told me he learned that shaded script from a calling-card writer in a carnival. He likes showy things and considers himself an elegant dresser. His shoes might have no soles, but the uppers would be shined, and probably yellow.”

I got the general idea as I opened the letter. The cheap stationery bore the imprint of a Los Angeles hotel I had never heard of. The careful, shaded handwriting, in violet ink, filled the page and came out evenly at the bottom. I figured it had been recopied several times.

Sweetie:

You will no dobt be suprized to here from me agin and know I am back in the Big Town. I had a war job in L.A. and did alright. I herd you on the radio and you are swell. You dont owe me nothing and woulden go for that old times sake routine and I woulden ask but it’s not for me I’m asking. We had a kid and that makes us still pardners and thats why I have to see you and talk to you on account of her. Meet me Fri. aft. five oclock in the Comodore lobby.

Your

Eddie

I folded the page, returned it to the envelope. Dawn moved uneasily in her chair. I said, “I seem to catch an overtone of blackmail.”

“I didn’t know what it was, or what he wanted. I didn’t answer it. I put in a wretched week waiting for him to turn up at the studio or the apartment. Without the extension number, it’s practically impossible to call me at the studio, and I have an unlisted number at home, but I was afraid to answer the phone. Eddie always seemed to know—how to reach me.”

“Did he show?”

“No word, no letters. Nothing. I began to breathe easily. Then—last Friday—something happened. I know it sounds crazy. But . . . a little girl was kidnaped. You must have read about it. Little Bette Alexander.”

I’d read about it. Read every detail. Followed that case as if I’d been hired for it. All my life, I followed every big crime as if it were my own particular problem. Dad taught me that. He wanted a son who would grow up to make his mark on the Force. I was a girl, but he treated me as a boy . . . almost. Every big murder, every major crime—as long as it wasn’t too bad—he’d tell me all the details and how he’d solve it if he were a detective instead of a cop.

So I knew about Bette Alexander. How she disappeared from her family’s estate on Long Island on Friday afternoon. How the police had received only one note from the kidnapers and were still waiting for that bid for final contact.

Dawn Ferris sat very straight in heir chair. “Miss Gallagher, I can’t be sure, but—Bette Alexander may be my little girl.”

This honey-haired woman, who called herself Dawn Ferris, paced the floor of my office as she talked, spilling out the story of this notion that had become an obsession in her mind. Now I could relax; she was really getting to the core of her visit.

“I didn’t actually believe it at first,” she said. “It was only . . . something familiar about the little girl’s picture. Then as I kept looking at the picture in the paper, it began to seem much more real—more certain. The face—the features—were so familiar. I got out an old picture of Eddie, the earliest one I had, and compared them. They could have been brother and sister. As if that weren’t enough, the paper gave Bette Alexander’s birthday, Miss Gallagher. It was the birthday of my little girl. Do you see? I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t dreaming. Can you understand? This was my little girl.”

She caught hold of herself. “I wasn’t deliberately trying to believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. But this girl was gone—nobody knew where. She might be murdered. I’ve walked like this”—she indicated her path through my office with a sweep of her hand—“for three nights. I’ve been trying to talk myself out of it, but I can’t. It’s too much . . . too perfect for coincidence. It couldn’t . . .”

“Dawn,” I used her first name deliberately, “sit down. You can’t let it beat you . . . even if you’re right. And in spite of all you say, the chances are a thousand to one you’re wrong.”

She sat down slowly, crossed her legs, lighted another cigarette. Then she opened that big purse, drew out a newspaper clipping and a small glossy photograph. “Look at these.”

The clipping I’d seen before. It showed a reproduction of a painting of Bette Alexander, done by John Bartley Crane, the society artist. A tilt-nosed, freckle-faced girl with peaked eyebrows and a firm little chin, a gamin in an Abercrombie and Fitch riding habit.

Then I looked at the photograph and it looked right back at me, bold and impudent. A slim young fellow in a dark coat, ice-cream pants, and a bow tie, with a skimmer tucked under his arm. A young fellow with a tip-tilt nose, winged brows, and a look in his eyes Dad would have called devil-may-care. A pouty, buttonhole mouth and a weak chin robbed the eyes of their promise, but the face was still unusual.

I moved the photograph and clipping close together for comparison. The man and girl looked exactly alike except that the girl’s mouth had wide, generous, well-formed lips. It could have been Dawn Ferris’s mouth and chin.

Dawn was leaning over the desk.

“You see?” She was almost childishly eager for confirmation. “It can’t be coincidence.”

“I’ve known of more extraordinary coincidences,” I stalled. “You’ve lived with this bottled up inside you for days. When the kidnap story broke, your mind began to make things fit. You could be right. But you aren’t really thinking in terms of facts. . . .”

Patsy, in spite of her flightiness, always keeps files of major cases. I pressed the buzzer and asked for the folder on the Alexander case. It wasn’t much—only newspaper clippings. Yet they made it simple, on the surface at least, to tear Dawn’s theories to shreds.

“Bette Alexander is not an adopted child,” I told her. “Theodore Alexander, the father, left his entire fortune in trust for that youngster when he died six months ago. The mother only gets an income. Would a man leave all that to an adopted child and not mention in his will that she was adopted? Of course, adopted children share equally with what the law calls issue, but this isn’t a question of equality. Bette Alexander inherited the works.”

Dawn didn’t answer. She kept looking at me as though she realized fully this was only what it said in the paper—it made no difference in her mind.

“Further,” I persisted, “you tell me that your child’s adoption was carried out in complete secrecy. If that is so, how could Eddie know where she was?”

She shrugged. “How did Eddie ever find out anything?”

A shaft of sunlight fell across the Benton landscape. It was such a peaceful scene, so remote from the inner turmoil of this woman. A mere glance fortified me, reduced the risk of emotional contagion.

I began making notes on my scratch pad, things she had mentioned. Names. “This Dr. Wurber,” I said. “Have you contacted him since that time?”

“He still has that house in the Sixties, but apparently isn’t there very often. I called several times. He has a service to take messages. That girl asked if I wanted an appointment, but I couldn’t bring myself to make one. You see, I couldn’t be sure . . .”

“And you knew he wouldn’t tell you, even if you were right,” I finished. “Besides, you didn’t want him to know who you are now.” She nodded bleakly and I went on. “How about Eddie? Any idea how to reach him? How about cronies in New York? Or former haunts?”

“I don’t know where he stayed. I don’t think he’s got any cronies. He isn’t the type who keeps friends.”

I tossed my pencil down. “This isn’t our kind of case, Miss Ferris. The FBI and the police are working on the Alexander investigation. Go to them. If your hunch is right, you should go to them.”

“I can’t and you know it,” she shot at me. “It means ruining everything on a chance. I don’t want to wreck my life—twice.”

Her hands tightened on her purse and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. I concentrated on those two pictures on the desk. Tears baffle me. I don’t cry over important things—only movies and books—so I can’t judge the emotion fairly. But after that first moment’s hesitation, instead of crumpling, Dawn sprang to her feet, releasing a soft wave of perfume and a flash of the fight that brought her from burlesque performer to finished actress in ten years.

Suddenly—surprisingly—I found myself liking her. The look of determination on her face was interesting. The kind of look you would have expected on the face of Ann Preston, Woman Physician. Maybe phony, put on like her lipstick, but she was carrying the thing off. You had to admire her for it. I was about to say I’d consider handling the case, but she was ahead of me.

“I’m not asking you to investigate the kidnaping, but your business, Miss Gallagher, as I understand it, is tracing missing persons, people not involved with the law.”

“More or less,” I agreed airily, “that’s how I make a living.”

“Then I want to engage your services to try to locate for me the baby girl born to Edward and Ethel Wells on May fifth, 1933.”

“And just incidentally,” I added, “I might become involved in the Alexander kidnaping?”

“All I want,” she said slowly, “is for you to tell me—prove to me—that I’m wrong. I want to know that Bette Alexander is not my child. I want to know just that much.”

She laid her hand flat on the desk, then moved it slowly. Two crisp thousand-dollar bills looked up at me. My first astonished reflection was that such big bills didn’t get around enough to be worn limp. I got my breath and said, “It’s a bit over my usual fee.”

She smiled. “It’s not a usual case. Will you hunt for her?”

“I’d hunt elephants,” I said, picking up the bills, “for the proper fee.”

Dawn sat down again on the edge of the chair, took a lipstick and large compact from her purse, and drew on a fresh mouth. She glanced up at my words with a touch of triumph. “It’s such a relief to know someone else is with me on this. You can’t imagine what it’s been like.”

“You can’t imagine how we may get involved,” I said, making out the forms for her signature. “Suppose Eddie is in this—even helped engineer it? Would you be willing . . .”

“If that’s the case,” she spoke slowly, as she signed the agreement, “we’ll—find some way to handle it.”

She said it curiously, as though she already had a plan. She was putting the lipstick and compact in her purse. It was only an instant that the big bag was tipped toward me. Yet I spotted the glittering object inside. She pulled the zipper closed. “Then I’ll hear from you, Miss Gallagher?”

“Give me a couple of days,” I said.

She moved toward the door with buoyant professional grace. Watching her, I wondered why Dawn Ferris carried a nickel-plated automatic in her purse.