Falling Angel Read online

  “Plastic surgery?”

  “Yes. His head was swathed in bandages for his entire stay. I wasn’t the one who changed the dressings and so had no opportunity to see his face.”

  “I know why they call it ‘plastic’ surgery,” I said, fingering my boiled-potato nose.

  The doctor studied my features professionally. “Wax?”

  “A war souvenir. It looked fine for a couple years. The guy I worked for had a summer place on the Jersey shore down at Barnegat. I fell asleep on the beach there one August and when I woke up it had melted inside.”

  “Wax is no longer used for that procedure.”

  “So I’m told.” I stood up and leaned against the table. “Give me what you can about Edward Kelley.”

  “It’s been a long time,” the doctor said, “and people change.”

  “How long, doc? What was the date of Liebling’s departure from the clinic?”

  “It was 1943 or ‘44. During the war. I can’t remember more precisely.”

  “Having another amnesia attack?”

  “It’s been more than fifteen years. What do you expect?”

  “The truth, doc.” I was beginning to grow impatient with the old man.

  “I’m telling the truth, as best as I can recall.”

  “What did this Edward Kelley look like?” I growled.

  “He was a young man then, mid-thirties, I would guess. Be in his fifties now, in any case.”

  “Doc, you’re stalling me.”

  “I only met the man on three occasions.”

  “Doc.” I reached down and took hold of the knot in his necktie, pinching it between my forefinger and thumb. Not much of a grip, but when I lifted he came up to meet me as easily as an empty husk. “Save yourself some trouble. Don’t make me squeeze the truth out of you.”

  “I’ve told you all I can.”

  “Why are you shielding Kelley?”

  “I’m not. I hardly knew him. I —”

  “If you weren’t such an old fart, I’d bust you up like a soda cracker.” When he tried to pull away, I jerked the knot in his tie a touch tighter. “Why wear myself out when there’s an easier way?” Dr. Fowler’s bloodshot eyes broadcast his fear. “You’re in a cold sweat, aren’t you, doc? Can’t wait to get rid of me so you can mainline the junk in your fridge?”

  “Everyone needs something to help him forget,” he whispered.

  “I don’t want you to forget. I want you to remember, doc.” I took him by his arm and steered him from the kitchen. “That’s why we’re going upstairs to your room where you can lie down and think things over while I go out and grab a bite to eat.”

  “What do you want to know? Kelley had dark hair and one of those thin moustaches Clark Gable made popular.”

  “Not good enough, doc.” I bullied him up the stairs by the collar of his tweed jacket. “A couple hours’ cold turkey should refresh your memory.”

  “Always expensively dressed,” Dr. Fowler pleaded. “Conservative suits; nothing flashy.”

  I pushed him through the narrow door of his spartan room and he fell forward onto the bed. “You think it over, doc.”

  “Had perfect teeth. The most engaging smile. Please don’t go.”

  I closed the door behind me and turned the long-handled key in the lock. It was the kind of key grandmother used to keep her secrets. I dropped it in my pocket and went down the carpeted stairs, whistling.

  SIX

  It was after midnight when I got back to Dr. Fowler’s place. A single light burned in the bedroom upstairs. The doc wasn’t getting much sleep tonight. It didn’t trouble my conscience. I devoured an excellent mixed grill and sat through half a double-feature without a pang of remorse. It’s a heartless profession.

  I let myself in the front door and walked back through the dark hall to the kitchen. The refrigerator purred in the shadows. I took a bottle of morphine off the top shelf to bait the hook and started upstairs, guided by my penlight. The bedroom door was locked up tight.

  “Be right with you, doc,” I called, fumbling in my pockets for the key. “I brought you a little taste.”

  I turned the key and opened the door. Dr. Albert Fowler didn’t say a word. He was propped against the pillows on his bed, still wearing the brown herringbone suit. The framed photograph of a woman was clutched to his chest in his left hand. In his right he held the Webley Mark 5. He was shot through the right eye. Thickened blood welled in the wound like ruby tears. Concussion drove the other eye halfway out of its socket, giving him the goggling stare of a tropical fish.

  I touched the back of his hand. It was cold as something hanging in a butcher shop window. Before I touched anything else, I opened my attaché case on the floor and put on a pair of latex surgeon’s gloves I took from the snap-front pocket inside the lid.

  Something was wrong with the whole setup. Shooting yourself through the eye seemed an odd way to go about it, but presumably medical men are more informed in these matters. I tried to picture the doc holding his Webley upside down with his head bent back as if he were administering eye drops. It didn’t add up.

  The door was locked, and I had the key in my pocket. Suicide was the only logical explanation. “If thine eye offend thee,” I muttered, trying to put my finger on what was out of place. The room looked exactly the same, military hairbrush and mirror at attention on the bureau, an undisturbed assortment of socks and underwear in the drawers.

  I picked the leatherbound Bible off the bedside table and an open box of cartridges tumbled out onto the throw rug. The book was hollow inside, a dummy. I was the dummy for not finding the bullets earlier. I picked them off the floor, groping under the bed for strays, and put them back inside the empty Bible.

  I went over the room with my handkerchief, wiping everything I had touched during my initial search. The Poughkeepsie police wouldn’t exactly be charmed by the idea of art out-of-town private eye bullying one of their prominent citizens into suicide. I told myself if it was suicide they wouldn’t look for prints and kept on wiping.

  I cleaned the knob and the key and closed the door, leaving it unlocked. Downstairs, I emptied the ashtray into my jacket pocket, carried it to the kitchen and washed it, stacking it with the dishes on the drainboard. I put the morphine and the milk carton back in the icebox and went over the kitchen carefully with my handkerchief. Backtracking through the cellar, I wiped the banisters and doorknobs. There was nothing I could do about the hasp on the lean-to-door. I set it in place and pushed the screws into the spongy wood. Anyone doing his job would spot it right away.

  The drive back to the city provided plenty of time for thinking. I didn’t like the idea that I had hounded an old man to his death. Vague feelings of sorrow and remorse troubled me. It was a bad mistake locking him up with a gun like that. Bad for me because the doc had a lot more to tell.

  I tried to fix the scene in my mind like a photo. Dr. Fowler stretched on the bed with a hole in his eye and his brains spread across the counterpane. There was an electric lamp burning on the bedside table next to the Bible. Inside the Bible were bullets. The framed photograph from up on the bureau was locked in the doctor’s cooling grip. His finger rested on the revolver’s trigger.

  No matter how many times I went over the scene there was something missing, a piece gone out of the puzzle. But which piece? And where did it fit? I had nothing to go on but my instincts. A nagging hunch that wouldn’t let go. Maybe it was just because I didn’t want to face my own guilt, but I was sure Dr. Albert Fowler’s death was not suicide. It was murder.

  SEVEN

  Monday morning was fair and cold. What was left of the snowstorm had been hauled off and dumped in the harbor. After a swim at the “Y” across the street from my place in the Chelsea Hotel, I drove uptown, parked the Chevy at the Hippodrome Garage and walked to my office, stopping to buy a copy of yesterday’s Poughkeepsie New Yorker from the out-of-town newsstand at the north corner of Times Tower. No mention anywhere of Dr. Albert Fowler.
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br />   It was a little after ten when I unlocked the inner-office door. The usual bad news across the street: … NEW IRAQ ATTACK ON SYRIA ALLEGED … GUARD WOUNDED IN BORDER INCURSION BY BAND OF THIRTY … I phoned Herman Winesap’s Wall Street law firm, and the machine-tooled secretary put me straight through without delay.

  “And what might I do for you today, Mr. Angel?” the attorney asked, his voice smooth as a well-oiled hinge.

  “I tried calling you over the weekend but the maid said you were out at Sag Harbor.”

  “I keep a place there where I can relax. No phone. Has something important come up?”

  “That information would be for Mr. Cyphre. I couldn’t find him in the phone book either.”

  “Your timing is perfect. Mr. Cyphre is sitting across the desk from me this very moment. I’ll put him on.”

  There was the muffled sound of someone speaking with his hand over the receiver and then I heard Cyphre’s polished accent purring on the other end. “So good of you to call, sir,” he said. “I’m anxious to know what you found out.”

  I told him most of what I’d learned in Poughkeepsie, leaving out the death of Dr. Fowler. When I finished, I heard only heavy breathing on the other end. I waited. Cyphre muttered, “Incredible!” through tightly clenched teeth.

  I said: “There are three possibilities: Kelley and the girl wanted Favorite out of the way and took him for a ride, in which case he’s long gone. It could be they were working for someone else with the same result. Or Favorite was faking amnesia and engineered the whole setup himself. In any case, it adds up to a perfect disappearing act.”

  “I want you to find him,” Cyphre said. “I don’t care how long it takes or how much it costs, I want that man found.”

  “That’s a pretty tall order, Mr. Cyphre. Fifteen years is a long time. Give a guy that kind of lead and the trail is bound to be cold as ice. Your best bet would be the Missing Persons Bureau.”

  “No police. This is a private matter. I don’t want it dragged out in the open by involving a lot of nosy civil servants.” Cyphre’s voice was acid with patrician scorn.

  “I suggested it because they’ve got the manpower for the job,” I said. “Favorite could be anywhere in the country, or abroad. I’m just one man on my own. I can’t be expected to accomplish the same results as an organization with an international information network.”

  The acid in Cyphre’s voice grew more corrosive. “What it boils down to, Mr. Angel, is simply this: Do you want the job or not? If you are not interested, I will engage someone else.”

  “Oh, I’m interested all right, Mr. Cyphre, but it wouldn’t be fair to you as my client if I underestimated the difficulty of the project.” Why did Cyphre make me feel like a child?

  “Of course. I appreciate your honesty in the matter, as I do the enormity of the undertaking.” Cyphre paused, and I heard the flick of a lighter and the intake of his breath as he set fire to one of his expensive panatelas. He resumed, sounding somewhat mellowed by fine tobacco. “What I want you to do is get started right away. I’ll leave the approach up to you. Do whatever you think best. The key to the whole operation, however, must remain discretion.”

  “I can be discreet as a father confessor when I try,” I said.

  “I’m sure you can, Mr. Angel. I’m instructing my attorney to make you out a check for five hundred dollars in advance. That will go in the mail today. Should you need anything more for expenses, please contact Mr. Winesap.”

  I said that five hundred would certainly take care of things, and we hung up. The urge to crack the office bottle for a self-congratulatory toast was never stronger, but I resisted and lit up a cigar instead. Drinking before lunch was bad luck.

  I started by calling Walt Rigler, a reporter I knew over at the Times. “What can you tell me about Johnny Favorite?” I asked, after the prerequisite snappy patter.

  “Johnny Favorite? You must be kidding. Why don’t you ask me the names of the other guys who sang with Bing Crosby in the A&P Gypsies?”

  “Seriously, can you dig anything up on him?”

  “I’m sure the morgue has a file. Give me five or ten minutes and I’ll have the stuff ready for you.”

  “Thanks, buddy. I knew I could count on you.”

  He grunted goodbye and we hung up. I finished my cigar while sorting the morning mail, mostly bills and circulars, and closed up the office. The fire stairs are always quicker than the coffin-sized self-service elevator, but I was in no hurry, so I pushed the button and waited, listening to Ira Kipnis, C.P.A., rattle off figures next door on his adding machine.

  The Times Building on 43rd Street was just around the corner. I walked there, feeling prosperous, and took the elevator to the newsroom on the third floor after exchanging frowns with the statue of Adolph Ochs in the marble lobby. I gave Walt’s name to the old man at the reception desk and waited a minute or so until he appeared from the back in shirt sleeves with his necktie loosened, like a reporter in the movies.

  We shook hands and he led me into the newsroom where a hundred typewriters filled the cigarette haze with their staccato rhythms.

  “This place has been gloomy as hell,” Walt said, “ever since Mike Berger died last month.” He nodded at an empty desk in the front row where a wilted red rose stood in a glass of water on the shrouded typewriter.

  I followed him through the clatter of the rewrite bank to his desk in the middle of the room. A fat manila folder sat in the top wire basket of the desk tray. I picked it up and glanced at the yellowed clippings inside. “Okay if I hang onto some of this stuff?” I asked.

  “House rules say no.” Walt hooked a forefinger into the collar of the worsted jacket draped over the back of his swivel chair. “I’m going out to lunch. There’s some 8-by-12 envelopes in the bottom drawer. Try not to lose anything and my conscience’ll be clean.”

  “Thanks, Walt. If I can ever do you a favor —”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah! For a guy who reads the Journal-American you come to the right place for your research.”

  I watched him slouch between the rows of desks, trading wisecracks with the other reporters and waving to one of the editors in the bullpen on his way out. Seated at his desk, I had a look through the Johnny Favorite folder.

  Most of the old clippings were not from the Times, but from other New York dailies and a selection of national magazines. Mainly, they were about Favorite’s appearances with the Spider Simpson band. A few were feature stories, and I read through these with care.

  He was an abandoned child. A cop found him in a cardboard box with only his name and “June 2, 1920,” the date of his birth, pinned in a note to his receiving blanket. His first few months were spent at the old Foundling Hospital on East 68th Street. He was raised in an orphanage in the Bronx and was on his own at sixteen, working as a busboy in a series of restaurants. Within a year, he was playing piano and singing in road-houses upstate.

  He was “discovered” by Spider Simpson in 1938 and soon was headlining with a fifteen-piece orchestra. He set an attendance record for a week’s engagement at the Paramount Theatre in 1940 that wasn’t equaled until the Sinatra craze of ‘44. In 1941, his records sold over five million copies, and his income was said to be better than $750,000. There were several stories about his injury in Tunisia, one reporting that he was “presumed dead,” and that was the end of it. There was nothing about his hospitalization or return to the States.

  I sorted through the rest of the material, making a small pile of the stuff I wanted to keep. Two photos, one a studio glossy of Favorite in a tuxedo, his Vaseline-bright hair pomaded into a frozen black wave. The agent’s name and address were rubber-stamped on the back: WARREN WAGNER, THEATRICAL REPRESENTATIVE, 1619 BROADWAY (THE BRILL BUILDING). WYNDHAM 9-3500.

  The other glossy showed the Spider Simpson orchestra in 1940. Johnny stood to one side with his hands folded like a choirboy. The names of all the sidemen were written in beside them on the print.

  I borrowed three oth
er items, clippings that caught my attention because they didn’t feel like part of the package. The first was a photo from Life. It was taken at Dickie Wells’s bar. in Harlem and showed Johnny leaning against a baby grand, holding a drink in one hand and singing along with a Negro piano player named Edison “Toots” Sweet. There was a piece from Downbeat, dealing with the singer’s superstitions. The story claimed he went out to Coney Island once a week whenever he was in town and had his palm read by a gypsy fortuneteller named Madame Zora.

  The last item was a squib in Walter Winchell’s column dated 11/20/42 announcing that Johnny Favorite was breaking off his two-year engagement to Margaret Krusemark, daughter of Ethan Krusemark, the shipping millionaire.

  I shuffled all of this stuff together, got a manila envelope out of the bottom drawer, and stuffed it inside. Then, on a hunch, I dug out the glossy of Favorite, and called the number in the Brill Building stamped on the back.

  “Warren Wagner Associates,” answered a perky female voice.

  I gave her my name and made an appointment to see Mr. Wagner at noon.

  “He has a luncheon engagement at twelve-thirty and can only give you a few minutes.”

  “I’ll take them,” I said.

  EIGHT

  “When you’re not on Broadway, everything is Bridgeport.” This blue-ribbon wisecrack was made to George M. Cohan in 1915 by Arthur “Bugs” Baer, whose column in the Journal-American I read every day for years. It might have been true in 1915. I can’t say, not having been there. That was the era of Rector’s and Shanley’s and the New York Roof. The Broadway I knew was Bridgeport; a carnie street of shooting galleries and Howard Johnson’s; Pokerino parlors and hot dog stands. Two old dowagers, Times Tower and the Astor Hotel, were all that remained from the golden age “Bugs” Baer remembered.

  The Brill Building was on 49th and Broadway. Walking up from 43rd, I tried to remember how the Square looked the night I saw it for the first time. So much had changed. It was New Year’s Eve of ‘43. An entire year of my life had vanished. I was fresh out of an army hospital with a brand-new face and nothing but loose change in my pockets. Someone had lifted my wallet earlier in the evening, taking all I owned: driver’s license, discharge papers, dogtags, the works. Caught up in the vast crowd and surrounded by the electric pyrotechnics of the spectaculars, I felt my past sloughing away like a shed snakeskin. I had no identification, no money, no place to live, and knew only that I was heading downtown.