Murder for Madame Read online

  “Mr. Fanchon is not home,” he said politely.

  “I’ll wait.”

  “But I do not know when he returns.”

  “I’m in no hurry, Buster.”

  “You made an appointment?”

  “He wants to see me.”

  “You will stay here in the hall, please?” he asked. “I cannot allow you inside. You understand?”

  “I’ll stay put out here.”

  “A drink, perhaps?”

  “You can haul out a Scotch, mebbe?”

  He nodded pleasantly and disappeared through the doorway to the living room, a fading white shadow in the gloom beyond. He came back at once with a small decanter of liquor, a glass, and the appropriate ice and soda. He made me comfortable on the couch, hauling over a small coffee table for the refreshments. He stood by for a tentative moment, watching my face for a sign of some further need.

  “You wish anything else, sir?”

  “Some information, if you can give it to me.”

  “Perhaps I can help.”

  “Where’s your boss tonight?”

  “That I cannot say. Dinner, perhaps.”

  “He didn’t eat at home?”

  “Uptown,” said the boy. “Mr. Fanchon said he would go uptown. Dinner, perhaps.”

  “Where does he usually eat?”

  “You know Cassetti’s?”

  “I know enough to stay away from there,” I said.

  The little Philippine boy enjoyed the joke with me. Cassetti’s was a tycoon’s paradise, one of the most exclusive caviar and crumpet corners in the big town. Once, long ago, I had been seduced into a lunch at the place by a college girl with fancy tastes. It took me a week’s salary to fill the hole in my exchequer.

  “Is he eating alone?” I asked.

  “Always,” said the boy. “Mr. Fanchon always eat his meals all alone. He does not like to be disturbed with the business troubles when eating. This is always the way with him. Even here.” He looked at his watch and started away. “I would say another fifteen, twenty minutes, and Mr. Fanchon will be home again. It is always the same when he eats his dinner at Cassetti’s.”

  I sipped the Scotch and strolled the vestibule, examining the small exhibition of modern paintings and finding them only colors and lines that did nothing to my fevered brain. I was impatient to see Eric Fanchon, to put him down in my book, on the right page, in the correct chapter of my volume of theoretical conclusions. But more than anything, I wanted a short interval in his living room. I walked to the rear of the small lobby and listened to the sounds of the house, the distant noises that would relay important information about the houseboy. There was a stirring far down the hall, toward the rear of the mansion. The kitchen? He would be in the kitchen, of course, munching on his evening meal, or frittering with one of his household chores.

  I advanced into the living room. It was a long and narrow oblong, typical of all houses of this vintage. The size of it sang to me through the pictures on the walls, dozens of them, of all sizes and shapes, completely filling every available inch of space. The pictures themselves were lost to me, shadowed and dull because the thin light from the vestibule could not illuminate them. But I was not looking for an art session. I paced the room quickly, starting on the street side and moving rapidly down the right wall toward the huge marble fire place.

  I found Larry Fanchon there.

  He was framed in a small picture, a photograph that had been mounted in a gilt and leather stand, as large as an oversized filing card, but much more interesting. I lit my cigarette lighter and studied his face. He was a thin and bony sort of youth, built on fragile lines. He had the look of a student, a somber and thoughtful mien complemented by broad-rimmed glasses that added age to his anemic face. His head reflected nothing but restraint and dignity, yet he was handsome in a bloodless, soupy way. He would look at home behind the desk in a big company’s executive office. He was a caricature of a youthful business tycoon. I searched for some hint of his father’s larded personality. I found nothing but a vague touch of Eric Fanchon in the short and classic nose, as straight and firm as an exclamation point.

  I was deep in the study of Larry Fanchon, when the lights went on, suddenly. And when I turned, the fat man was standing in the doorway, his hand still upraised at the wall switch. He was frozen in the pose, every part of him but his butter ball face. He showed me his annoyance by the tilt of his heavy brows, lowered over his pitted eyes in a frown calculated to render me a useless pulp.

  “The detective again,” he said. “Or are you playing a different role tonight? A thief, perhaps?”

  “Your houseboy let me in, Fanchon.”

  “Certainly not into this room?”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “You should spread a few magazines in your vestibule if you expect people to wait for you out there.”

  “I expect guests to do as they are told.”

  “Then take my name out of your guest book.”

  “It will be a pleasure,” Fanchon said, and came out of his pose at the wall switch, across the room to my side. He pointed delicately at the picture in my hand. “That photograph,” he said. “Are you quite finished with it, or would you like it as a souvenir?”

  “No thanks,” I said, and handed it to him. “I didn’t come down here to swipe your boy’s picture, Fanchon.”

  He carried the picture to the mantel and set it back in its accustomed place, making a production out of the placement of it.

  “And what did you come here for?” he asked finally.

  “To make small talk.”

  “You were not satisfied last night?”

  “Not quite. Things have happened since Haskell Moore was discovered swinging from a beam in his studio.”

  “Things?”

  “Odd things. Interesting things. Things that involve your son.”

  “Ridiculous,” he breathed. “You’re talking nonsense when you make such insinuations.”

  “Maybe I am. This kind of nonsense would be meat and fish to certain friends of mine in Homicide.”

  He gave me his turtle eyes in an insolent stare, as fixed as a snake on a rabbit but twice as mean, until he found me unmoved by them. Then he gave up the game and marched to a sideboard and produced a box of cigars. He lit one, bit it, spat the crumbs, and dumped his meaty frame in the softest chair in the room, close to the fireplace. He waved me into the one opposite him.

  “Perhaps we had better talk this thing out so that it makes some sense,” he said. “Sit down, my friend.”

  Now I was his friend. I said, “I haven’t got time for a long bull session, Fanchon. You know why I came down here. You must know.”

  “I do not like to rush,” Fanchon said. “Or guess. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Your son.”

  “Why? What has he done?”

  “Nothing, yet. But he’s wide open for a trip to headquarters. He could be a suspect in the killing of Mary Ray.”

  Eric Fanchon coughed and gagged on the cigar. His face went livid under the strain of the paroxysm.

  I said, “I’ve got proof that your son hired a hood to break and enter Haskell Moore’s studio today.”

  “A hood?”

  “Your boy hired a gangster by the name of Sailor Schenk, a two-bit crook. Your boy hired him to recover a work of art, a certain picture that Moore painted not too long ago. Do you know what the picture contained? Let’s not waste time with subterfuge, Fanchon—I’ll tell you all about it. The picture was a composition involving a young woman on a couch. The young woman is nude, and she is luscious. The young woman is obviously reclining in a brothel, awaiting a customer, who is about to enter her bedchamber for reasons that are as obvious as the leer on his face. The painting itself was done recently—it is one of the last works of Haskell Moore. It’s a pretty crumby pain
ting, Fanchon. But the subject, the model, the girl in the painting is anything but crumby.”

  “The girl? What girl?”

  “Games,” I said. “Stop with the games. You know the girl. Her name is Joy Marsh—and your son is nuts about her.”

  “My son in love with a—a whore?”

  “I said nothing to indicate that, Fanchon. I described a painting. Joy Marsh was the model for that painting. Does that mean she’s a whore? Suppose she had modeled for him as a mother, with an infant in her arms? Would that mean she’s a mother? What makes you think that Joy Marsh is a whore?”

  He began to pace the room, his hands in his pants, puffing and blowing at the cigar. “See here,” he said finally. “What difference does it make what the girl is? I’m sure you’re wrong about Larry. I don’t know why he hired a thief to take a certain picture from Haskell’s studio. The fact remains that your news has shocked me. I’d like to meet this thief and talk to him. I’d like to question him more about his facts. He must be lying. He could do Larry a great damage if such a lie is circulated.”

  “The damage is done,” I said.

  “Done? What do you mean?”

  “Sailor Schenk is down at Police Headquarters right now.”

  “Are you sure?” Fanchon shouted. He bounced my way, alive with a fresh torment. “I must see him at once. He must not be allowed to circulate such nonsense. It could do Larry a great injury.”

  “Get yourself a lawyer and hustle downtown,” I suggested. “The last time I saw the sailor, he was soft enough to spill his guts to the city dicks.”

  Eric Fanchon ran out of the room in a burst of frantic speed. I heard the sound of the dial from somewhere deeper inside the house, the library, probably. I walked out quietly through the vestibule and crossed the street, and stood once again, on a plant, squinting back at the mansion through the misted air. There would be movement across there soon.

  A light blinked on upstairs, and a few seconds later it went black and dead up there. I kept my eye on the big black sedan parked before Fanchon’s door. And after a short wait, the fat man came down the stone steps, working his tubby frame into a raincoat as he ran. But I was no longer watching Fanchon.

  There was a new interest in the street scene before me. Behind Fanchon, another man ran toward the car. He was tall and lean and dressed in the conventional monkey suit of the career chauffeur. He had a small head, square-cut and blunt, and the pattern of his movements was familiar to me. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew them well. They would be pig-eyes, bright and mean and intensely evil.

  They would be the eyes of the man I had seen in Tim Coogan’s bar.

  CHAPTER 19

  Anita and Rose shared a flat in the neighborhood of Tiny’s place. The approach to their den of pleasure bore an air of quiet respectability, and the rooms were decorated in the common-sense décor of two college girls. Anita herself greeted me at the door and welcomed me with the good grace of an experienced hostess. Without her French heels and out of her usual costume, she was short and dumpy. Her figure had seen slimmer days not too long ago, and her face, barren of make-up, showed signs of lard under the chin and wrinkles close to her humorous eyes.

  “Welcome to the nest,” she said, and got me a fast drink.

  “Where’s Rose?”

  “Business, natch.”

  “Don’t you gals play here?” I asked.

  “Not a chance,” Anita said with a laugh. “We’re back on the switchboard now, detective. We’ll probably stay on Barchy’s board until the stink blows over. You didn’t come up here for games?”

  “I came up to ask questions, Anita.”

  “You and that police dick,” she said. “I got enough questions to last me a month of Sundays.”

  “I missed Doughty’s routine,” I said. “But maybe my questions are different.”

  “So ask them.”

  “Who killed Mary Ray?”

  “Jesus! You’re at least faster than the dick.” Anita chuckled, throwing her head back and tossing her hair, as skittery as a young horse in an old pasture. “It took him an hour to get to that one. So I’ll give you the same answer I gave him. I don’t know.”

  “You have a few ideas, maybe?”

  “The crackpot artist, I figured.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was a halfwit. What more do you want?”

  “Did you ever hear him threaten her?”

  “I don’t listen where I’m not wanted. But they had fights.”

  “How often?”

  “What do you want—a schedule? Once in a while they yelled a little.”

  “You didn’t care for him?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Anita yawned. “He was cracked in one direction as the feller says. He liked to put you in pictures, I guess. The reason I think he was nuts is from the way he painted pictures. But he was a harmless crumb. Listen, sometimes it’s better when that type character only paints you.”

  “You saw the pictures he put you in?”

  She nodded. “He paid off for the posing. Who the hell cares what an artist paints? Do I look fussy?”

  “I’ll save that one for later,” I said. “But how about the other gals who posed for him. Did they like it?”

  “I only heard Joy Marsh complain. But that was maybe because Joy shouldn’t pose in the first place. The kid is too fussy.”

  “How about the others? Who were they?”

  “He had all kinds, from the whole switchboard, from what I hear. He had Joy Marsh and Rose and Tiny and two fresh kids we got in a little while back. Helen and Mabel, from down South. They were real hot, Moore told me. They really posed.”

  “And Mary knew about these girls?”

  “I guess so. Why not?”

  “Did he go for any of them?”

  “Are you kidding? That Moore guy was a whack when it came to girls. He made passes at anything he could lay his dirty hands on. He was all the time trying to get the girls up to his studio to pose for his dirty pictures.”

  “Who were his favorite models?”

  “He used me a lot. Also Rose.”

  She said it unblushingly, like a legitimate hat model bragging about an overload of work in the finer uptown modistes. But the way she said it indicated that she might have been proud of her figure when she went there. Or it could have been the fee he paid her. She had her hands on her hips in the attitude a model might strike when displaying a fancy gown. And her face matched the gesture. She was trying to tell me, with her eyes, that she was good enough to be painted. Even by a crumb like Haskell Moore.

  “He paid well?” I asked.

  “He sure paid through the nose. The top rates.”

  “And no passes?”

  “At me? Never. I would have broken his dirty old arm if he tried.”

  “Who else shared your sentiments?”

  She considered the question. “Tiny couldn’t stand him, either.”

  “Did Tiny ever pose for him?”

  “I don’t know. He had a bad crush on Tiny, but she brushed him off fast. The way I heard it, he wanted Tiny for something special, because she’s such a big girl. Why is it you little characters always make a big play for the tall ones?”

  “I like ’em all sizes,” I said, pinching her cheek in a brotherly sort of way. “Tell me more about Tiny.”

  “I shouldn’t talk,” Anita said with a hint of surliness. “Tiny was my discovery, you know. I brought her up here from the Palms, in Brooklyn. But she went high-hat as soon as she made dough. She stopped going around with her old girl friends. She turned snotty.”

  “I gather you and Tiny don’t get along?”

  “I can take her or leave her alone. So I leave her alone.”

  “She’s in the big-time dough now?”

  “She’s making plenty. She�
�s big and she’s hot, from what some of the boys say. That’s what’s making her the loot, brother, not her personality. But what she’s got, the boys want. So she can get high prices and pick and choose the customers. Listen, she’s got Barchy himself on the string, from what I hear. She’s also got Noonan.”

  “Who’s on top?”

  “Ask Tiny. They both can pay off heavy sugar for wrestling.”

  “And she can handle them both?”

  “Why not? She’s got plenty of time for office hours.” Anita winked. “If you were getting a C-note an hour, would you make time for them both?”

  “If I got that kind of dough, I’d be a hell of a lot fussier.”

  “You don’t live in this business with that attitude, brother. When you’re making the dough, you take ’em on and pile up the bank account. It happens only a little while, just after you come into the trade. You got to be smart to make it last. And Tiny’s smart.”

  The phone rang and she answered it the way any business woman would take a business call. She wrote down an address and checked it carefully before she hung up.

  “I got a call to make,” she said. “Anything else you want to ask me, ask it quick because I need to get dressed. It’s a party over on the West Side, a bunch of some kind of salesmen. Business. You know.”

  “Let’s play it all over again,” I said. “You have any theories about who killed Mary?”

  “You’re a stubborn little guy.”

  “How about Joy Marsh?”

  She paused in her dressing. She fiddled with the brassiere and clipped it tight. “Joy Marsh? Maybe. She’s a smart little girl.”

  “Smart enough to murder a good friend of hers?”

  Anita shrugged. “You asked me my opinion. You got it.”

  “Did you ever hear Joy say anything against Mary?”

  “Listen, the kid is smart, that’s all. Maybe she had her reasons. The point is, I don’t know them, but they could be possible. When I think of somebody doing a murder, I think of someone with brains. So Joy Marsh has brains, that’s all.”