She saw the expression on my face. Her eyes danced and she laughed. “Then my agent called me and told me Schwerner was auditioning for ‘Love Among The Falling Stars’ and I stuffed my mental hats into a mental hatbox and went away singing. I didn’t get the part. I read miserably and it wasn’t right for me to begin with. But I forgot all about selling hats.”
“You’ll get your break, Maddy.”
“Of course I will. And I’ll need it, Ed. I came to New York ready to take Broadway by storm. I was the best damn actress in the country and it was only a question of time before the rest of the world figured it out for themselves. And I was lousy, Ed. I’m not too good even now. Hayes and Cornell have nothing to worry about.”
Her eyes were challenging. “And suppose I don’t get that damn break, Ed? Then what do I do? Sell hats?”
I shook my head. “Meet some lucky guy and marry him. Live in a house and make babies. It’s better than selling hats.”
“Uh-huh.” A smile that was not altogether happy spread slowly over her face. “It’s funny, Ed. I had an offer not long ago.”
“That’s not funny. You should get lots of offers.”
“This one was different. He wasn’t a jerk or a square or a Philistine. He was a hell of a nice guy. Thirty-six years old, associate editor at a properly respectable publishing house, with a yen to buy one of those wonderful stone houses in Bucks County and fill it with children. He was a good talker and a good listener and good in bed. God, I’m talking like a successful actress, telling one man what another one’s like in bed. I hate me when I talk like that. But you know what I’m driving at, Ed. He was nice. I think you would have liked him — I know I did, and he wanted me to marry him.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Nope.”
“How come?”
She closed her eyes. “I thought about being married,” she said softly. “And I thought about waking up every single morning with somebody else in bed with me. And I thought maybe one day I’d want to take a trip somewhere, or maybe I’d get sick of the house and want to live someplace else, or I’d meet some guy and get an itch to go out with him and find out what he was like. And I thought that I’d have to pass up all these things, and how it would be, being tied to one man and one home and one way of life that you live with until you die. So much freedom out the window, so much responsibility around your neck like the albatross in that poem everybody had to read in the tenth grade. And I thought, God, you’d have to love somebody a hell of a lot to put up with such a load of crap. And I just didn’t love him that much. I loved him, but not enough.”
I didn’t say anything. The oval face was a mask now. The eyes were opaque. A good actress can conceal emotions, just as she can portray them.
“So here I am,” she said. “Free and white and twenty-seven. That’s not so young any more, Ed. Pretty soon some other nice guy’ll ask me to follow him to the nearest altar and I won’t love him enough either and it won’t be so important any more and I’ll say yes. I’m a tragic figure, Ed. Too old to play games and too young to admit it. It’s a hell of a thing.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “Here come the steaks,” she said. “Now we can stop talking.”
The steaks came and we stopped talking. Conversation is the wrong accompaniment to a meal at McGraw’s. The meat has to be approached quietly, reverently. Talk comes later. We attacked the steaks like tigers. They were black with charcoal on the outside and raw in the middle and nothing ever tasted better.
Afterward she had Drambuie and I had cognac. I leaned forward to light her cigarette, then put the match to my pipe. I watched her draw the smoke deep into her lungs and let it escape slowly between slightly parted lips. She used very little lipstick. Her shade was a very dark red.
“What time is it, Ed?”
“A few minutes past nine.”
“God! That late?”
“I didn’t pick you up until quarter of seven. It took us another fifteen minutes to get out of your apartment. We had to wait for a table. Two drinks before dinner, a leisurely meal—”
“The time flew.” She sighed. “Well, I suppose it’s time for the business side of things. You have questions to ask me, sir. Want to ask them here or go elsewhere?”
“Elsewhere sounds good,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”
“Obviously a very exclusive and most expensive cafe in the east Fifties, of course. That’s what I should suggest. But I’m going to be a considerate young lady and a forward wench at the same time. Let’s go back to my apartment.”
“Fine.”
“After all,” she said, “you’ve been there before.”
She lived in a third-floor loft on West Twenty-fourth just east of Eighth. Her building had been condemned years ago and it wasn’t legal to live there, but Maddy and the landlord had taken care of all that. According to the lease, she used the loft to give acting lessons and didn’t live there at all. The landlord paid the trustworthy firemen so much a month and everybody was happy. Maddy would go on living there until the building came down around her little ears.
A rusty machine shop took up the ground floor of the old brick building. An ancient palmist and crystal-gazer named Madame Sindra held court on the second floor. We climbed to the third floor on an unlit and shaky wooden staircase. I stood by while Maddy unlocked the door.
The apartment inside looked as though it belonged in a different building in a different part of town. The living room was huge, with a false fireplace along one wall and a massive studio couch on the other. All the furniture was expensive-looking, but Maddy had picked it up, a little at a time, at the University Place auction houses and she made a few dollars go a long way. There were a few bookcases, all of them crammed with paperbacks and covered with Moselle bottles topped with candle-drippings.
Now she waved small hands at everything. “Be it ever so affected, there’s no place like home. Sit down, Ed. Relax. I don’t have a thing to drink, but relax anyway.”
I sat down on the couch. She kicked off her shoes and curled up next to me with her legs tucked neatly under her pretty little behind. “Now,” she said. “Fire away, Mr. London, sir. Be a devastatingly direct detective and detect like mad. I’ll oblige with all my heart.”
I took Sheila’s picture from my wallet. I looked at it and she peered over my shoulder.
“Who’s she?”
“Her name’s Sheila Kane. Does it ring a bell?”
“I don’t think so. Should it?”
“Just a hunch,” I said. “Somebody thought she might be a show biz nut one way or another.”
“An actress?”
“Maybe. Or some outsider in the theatrical in-group. Or the guy who told me this has rocks in his head, which isn’t impossible. I had an idea you might have run into her somewhere.”
“The name doesn’t sound familiar.” She tossed her head. “But then one meets so many exciting people in this mad and wonderful life—”
I laughed. “Give it a good look,” I suggested. “You might have met her without an introduction. Make sure.”
She craned her neck to look more closely over my shoulder and her soft black hair brushed my face. I could smell the sweetness of her. She wore no perfume, only the healthy vibrance of a well-scrubbed young woman. Which was enough.
“No pony tail,” she said suddenly. “Her hair loose and flowing. And this must have been taken awhile ago, if it’s the same gal. She didn’t look so damned Betty Co-ed when I saw her. And her name wasn’t Sheila Kane.”
“Are you sure?”
“Almost. Gosh, you’re excited, aren’t you? It’s nice to see a real detective in action.”