actors are the only ones that ever use the tiny front room, except when Henry Frobisher is producing a play and then Nellie gets grand and installs a secretary who is usually some unemployed actor working for peanuts on the chance that Nellie will get him a job with Frobisher, which, of course, she never does.
The first room was empty when I opened the door and walked in, which wasn’t unusual because most people who make the rounds have learned that Nellie doesn’t show till after lunch unless she’s very busy and that’s practically never. By waving aside the stale cigarette smoke laced with gin that hung from the ceiling like portieres, I could make out Nellie leaning over her desk and I started to walk back to her.
I guess I must have said something silly, like “Boo! you pretty creature.” I usually do, but it didn’t make any difference whether I did or not because Nellie didn’t hear me. Nellie couldn’t hear me. Nellie was dead.
CHAPTER TWO
I JUST STOOD THERE STARING at her. She was flopped across her desk and had filed herself about as neatly as anything else in that rats’ nest on her old-fashioned country editor-type filing spindle. I could see the heavy wrought-iron base of the spindle jutting out around the edges of her right breast. There wasn’t much blood, which is probably the reason I didn’t start heaving, because in the army I developed sort of a thing about blood.
Nellie alive and kicking is nobody’s dream girl. She’s a chiseler, an agent, a sharpie with a shady buck. She’s fat and sloppy and although she undoubtedly owns another dress, I don’t remember ever seeing her in any but this mottled grayish-green job which bitchy actors are apt to swear stopped being a dress years ago and now just grows on her like moss. But all the same, I was kind of fond of her.
I felt for her pulse, which wasn’t—and that’s all. I’ve done enough of those where-were-you-on-the-night-of bills in summer stock to know better than to start juggling bodies around now.
Lying open and almost hidden under one pudgy arm and doing its bit toward helping her hair sop up the blood was Nellie’s Youth and Beauty Book, which was, besides the phone and spindle, all of Nellie’s office equipment. In it she kept all the names of actors and producers she knew, listed her appointments and stuffed it full of letters and bills. She must have had it refilled every year because it always had the same tooled leather cover.
Falling into the old first-act routine, I slid the book out from under her arm and looked at the page for today. As I figured, my name was down for an eleven o’clock appointment. There were three other entries ahead of mine. One I knew very well: Maggie Lanson. She was to be there at eleven, too. Nellie was supposed to have been at Chez Ernest, the chi-chi dress place at ten. The other name I couldn’t recognize. There were just initials for the last name. It was Bobby LeB. and he had an appointment for ten-thirty. That was all for the morning, but in the afternoon she was to see Henry Frobisher at his office at three-thirty, and she had a dinner date with a little ingenue around town I knew, as who didn’t, named Libby Drew.
Suddenly the phone rang. That was the cue for me to start blowing up in my scene and almost closed me before I opened. I had moved the corpus—at least the arm—when I pulled out the book, and I didn’t want to get in any jam. My name was in that book and there was nobody around to knock some sense into me, and the damned phone kept ringing and ringing and I couldn’t bring myself to answer it. Suddenly I got a load of a scene behind a gauze scrim I didn’t want any part of—me sweating under a lot of blinding lights with all the Irish character actors in town waving rubber hoses at me and shouting, “Who done it, Runch?” and me not being able to tell them. When I play that scene I want to have a few of the toppers.
Then the montage began. You know, lots of presses running and front pages flying at you like bats out of hell and banner heads screaming “Actor Slays Agent” and “Fiend Convicted.” If only the phone had stopped that ringing or I had stopped that nonsense of thinking I was playing the lead in some crappy whodunit at the Rialto and done what I should have done, everything would have been all right. At least for me. But no…Once a ham always a ham. So I picked up the Youth and Beauty Book and stuck it under my coat—still like in reel two—and copped a sneak.
The hall was empty. I had another brain wave and walked back up to the tenth floor and got on the elevator there and rode down. The only stop was the fifth floor where two polo coats got back on.
I did a walk-not-run out onto Forty-fourth and aimed west. I didn’t want to pass Sardi’s or Walgreen’s again because by this time I had worked myself up to such a point that if somebody had said Boo! to me, I’d have waved aside the black mask and asked for that final cigarette.
CHAPTER THREE
I WALKED UP EIGHTH AVENUE for a couple of blocks trying to decide what to do. The Forty-second Street fleabags didn’t seem to solve anything, though in all the books, ticket stubs seem to be wonderful alibis—except that the people that use them for alibis always seem to end up in the last chapter behind the eight ball. Which is where it looked like I was going to end up without costing me forty cents, either. Of course, I shouldn’t have taken the Youth and Beauty Book.
And then I thought of Maggie Lanson. Even if her name hadn’t been in the book for an eleven o’clock appointment, sooner or later I would have thought of Maggie Lanson. She is the only other person I know of in the world that feels the same way I do about most things. We are, as she is wont to say after a couple of slugs of pernod, sympatique.
She’s exactly my age, thirty-two, and was terribly pretty about ten years ago but the pernod hasn’t helped that part of it much. She’s quite rich, mostly from an early husband she divorced about seven years ago, and she tries to be an actress when she thinks of it. That was how I first met her. We were in the same show, my one hit, for six months right after her divorce. I guess she felt she had to have something to do nights.
I don’t know if I thought she would be able to tell me who had done Nellie in. Maybe she was early for her appointment or maybe she didn’t keep it at all—which wouldn’t be unusual. And if she did maybe she knew this Bobby LeB. She knew the most alarming collection of people. Anyway, Maggie was the only person in the world I wanted to see.
Her apartment, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and one of the Sixties, is on the fifth floor, and there is a buzzer system and a work-it-yourself elevator. I had a key because she didn’t mind my dropping in if I was in the neighborhood—whether she was there or not—provided I called up first and emptied the ash trays when I left. I dialed her number in the corner drugstore (only in that section of town they are called “chemists” or “apothecaries”) before walking over, but there wasn’t any answer so I went up to her apartment and let myself in.
It’s a nice apartment if you don’t mind stripes. Mostly gray and yellow stripes and lots of flowers. But the chairs are comfortable and the Capehart works and there’s generally plenty to drink. A big living room with a practical fireplace, a foyer, bedroom and bath and a minute kitchenette in which ice cubes are the only thing she knows the recipe for. I poured myself a mahogany Scotch because by this time it was two minutes after twelve, which made it legal as far as I’m concerned. Then I sat down and started thinking about how soon what had happened was going to hit me and what a jerk I was not to leave that damn book in Nellie’s office and call the cops. I took out the Youth and Beauty Book. The blood had dried on its edges, and on the page that had been open were a few squiggles in an unpleasant shade of brown that had been painted with Nellie’s own blood—her hair having been the paintbrush—when I pulled it out from under her.
It was a sort of hammering with a couple of low moans thrown in, all kind of muffled. It would go on for a minute, then stop for a few, then start again. At first I thought it was only that I should have watered my drink, but when it came the third time I knew it wasn’t the Scotch and it wasn’t me—it was in Maggie’s bathroom. So I got brave by finishing off the Scotch and, making with a bookend, walked over to the bathroom door.
As I was in this far, I might as well shoot the works. I grabbed the bookend even tighter and started to open the bathroom door, only there wasn’t any doorknob.