Frayne’s eyes, of that cold blue of a particularly cold winter sky, had gone to triangular slits. They always did, when he was musing on murder.
Murder, it so happened, was his hobby. It was more than his hobby. It was food and drink to him. It was what made his blood keep on pumping and his brain keep on throbbing. It was his life.
“Lamont?” he suddenly asked.
“Alibi looks on the square, Geogan says. Vince says he left Baa-Baa’s apartment at about four in the morning, after one of their merry rows. He stopped in an apartment on the ground floor, where a party was going on, and had a few drinks. Seven or eight witnesses to that. Coming back to make it up with Baa-Baa when the maid answered his ring, he says.”
Frayne nodded and tucked his racket under his arm, starting briskly for the clubhouse.
“Let’s go, Don.”
Four minutes and fifty seconds later, after having shed tennis flannels and taken a shower and changed into street garb, they were roaring through traffic in Frayne’s private roadster, that had the fastest engine made in America under its hood.
II
Baa-Baa Jackson?
You should ask, as the phrase has it.
Back in the days when Italian table d’hôte dinners, including wine, were fifty-five cents; back when drinks were two for a quarter and name your brand; back before the self-starters could always be counted on to do their stuff; back before the affair at Sarajevo that is said to have precipitated the War To End Wars — back in nineteen hundred and twelve, to be explicit — a little girl had come out of the South.
The newspapers had said she came out of the south anyway — and so did she — although two or three catty souls averred that she had been born and reared and raised up in Herkimer County. They said, furthermore, that Ike Schubel, the New York musical comedy man, had found her in the station of this same up State town. She had, they added, been serving coffee, and pie, and sandwiches from under circular glass cases, in the station restaurant.
Maybe yes; maybe no. Mr. Schubel, at least, had seen her innate possibilities. She had had a more than fair figure; she had had a voice with exactly the correct touch of throatiness; she had had, also, very large black eyes and very natural light golden hair. And that, in itself, as Mr. Schubel stated, is always something to telegraph home about.
Briefly, he hadn’t done any telegraphing. He had signed her on the spot for his next production, and he had taken his two bags from the waiting train. He had caught the next train for Tammany Town, with Baa-Baa in tow.
So the story goes, when it is told by those two or three catty people.
Her first appearance, which nobody noticed, it must be admitted, was when she went through the motions with the rest of the chorus in “Little Fleecy Lamb.”
Just how long she would have kept on kicking up her legs, in company with twenty-three others, can never be definitely ascertained.
Appendicitis was quite fashionable that season, and the second female lead came down with it. She could afford to, having recently annexed what is now known as a big butter and egg man to attend to the tedious task of seeing the landlord on the first of the month.
This little lady had been singing a song that Ike Schubel had thought would be a wow. So had the lyric man and every one else. Only it hadn’t been. That was why they hadn’t been so grieved at the outbreak of appendicitis. They could chuck the number, now, and let it go at that. One salary saved.
But the girl with the golden locks and dark orbs had pleaded to be given a tryout. Just once.
“It costs nothing,” was how Mr. Schubel had argued down the opposition. “Let her she should try it once.”
That is the true history of how “I Want to Be Somebody’s Baa-Baa Lamb” came to be the greatest song hit of the period.
No one can dope it out, for many have tried and all have failed, yet it happens to be a fact that certain personalities have been able to put over certain things that other equally colorful personalities have flopped on completely.
Baa-Baa Jackson, from that night, was made.
She didn’t have to have appendicitis to break her contract with Ike Schubel; she merely told him to go to hell.
She had quit “Little Fleecy Lamb” for the protection of a great big wolf — one of the Wall Street variety. He had given her very pleasant pastures in which to gambol, including an imported car with a liveried driver and some rather lavish articles of jewelry. She seemed to have had a proper eye for precious stones from the start, too.
Baa-Baa, in short, had gone from one gilded cage to another, for the lady tired easily and seemed to find no difficulty whatsoever in discovering playmates who were not precisely poverty stricken. That is to say, during those first five or six years while the so-called bloom of youth still lasted.
But she didn’t seem to mind her descent in the social grade, so to speak. There were still plenty of suckers, even if they didn’t spend quite so lavishly. She wanted, as the years rolled on, a good time more than anything else. So, at least, she said. Apparently she was having one, according to her standards.
She was still known, at the present period, in every night club in town, and when her escort happened to be a particularly generous one the host always asked Baa-Baa to get up and do her stuff. Sing her once famous “I Want to Be Somebody’s Baa-Baa Lamb,” in other words. She could always get a kick out of that. She had been getting a kick, recently, out of Vince Lamont.
He had not in any form or fashion, by any remote possibility, been another of her “protectors.” Not Vince. In fact, he rather wasn’t averse to having ladies take him under their wing. The minute you gave a dame even a lousy nickel, was his ironclad axiom, right from then you lost all her respect.
Vince was another lily of the field who neither toiled nor did he spin. Not in legitimate pursuits, anyway. He was a race track tout; a fixer for a few big gamblers; a go-between in an occasional important bootleg deal.
His interest in Baa-Baa, rumor had it, was because business had been a bit slack, and because Miss Jackson had been in funds. A wealthy South American coffee planter, Broadway gossip ran, had presented her with a perfectly good check for ten grand, not a month previously, when he had sadly taken the boat back to his tropical shores after having enjoyed a hectic few weeks of her hospitality.
III
Inspector Frayne was reminding himself of this gossip, anyway, as his car zoomed along down town. Inspector Frayne, incidentally, knew more about New York and the various characters in it than any man living. He had been born there. He loved the place as if it were his own flesh and blood. He found it highly profitable, also, to know as much as he could of what was going on in the miracle city of the world.
Don brought the car to a halt before an old apartment on West Fifty-Seventh Street. It had been a grand apartment in its day, perhaps, but its day had been in the ’80’s and ’90’s. A five story affair, with only two flats on a floor. Big rooms but dark rooms, running the length of the building and known as the railroad type, with only the front and rear getting any light to to speak of. There was no elevator, no hallway attendant. A seedy place for seedy people.
There was a little knot of loiterers before the steps, as well as an officer in uniform. The latter cleared the steps with a sweep of his night stick, as Frayne descended, and stood rigidly at salute:
“Morning, sir.”
“Morning, Harrigan,” said Frayne pleasantly, leaving the cop flushing with pleasure at having his name remembered.