“She’d love you for that, Chick. But then, she’d love you anyway, because you’re pretty. That’s her problem.”
“I’m beautiful, not merely pretty. Haven’t you read my notices?”
“Beautiful I reserve for the champagne types. Did you know she was once Mrs. Walter Powers?”
“Ho boy, the plot sickens. Who divorced who?”
“Whom. She did the suing, but she was too entrenched in the part for Walt to drop her.”
“You sure have done a lot of thinking about this, Christy.”
“Well, the evening papers quoted some lieutenant as saying the murder could only have been committed by someone in the theater at the time, and that he suspects a member of the cast.”
It also told me why Jaffee was so free about letting us go. He plants that line with the press, then sees who jumps.
I turned down Christy’s invitation to a bash over at the Dakota and put her in a cab after dinner.
It was almost nine o’clock, and I decided to check in with Jeepers at the Waldorf. That, however, turned out to be impossible, because she had never checked in at the Waldorf. I went from the hotel operator to the desk clerk and finally to Ron Dugan in Security. No Miss Jordan. So I had picked a hotel with four entrances and she turned one of them into an exit. Why?
Since the cops had already given the club a toss looking for me, I figured it was safe to go in the back way through the kitchen. When I walked into the office, I was surprised to find Mrs. Mangerton there. She was typing away on an old manual typewriter that must have been used by Richard Harding Davis.
“I brought it from home, so there’s no charge,” she tells me.
“What are you going to do with the calculator, turn it in for an abacus?”
She doesn’t answer and goes on clickety-clicking with the machine. Then I spot the note on my desk: Call Steve Kozak. The typewriter lady tells me “an hour ago.”
Steve is a good friend. He has another title: Sergeant, Vice Squad, New York Police Department. He’s the kind of guy who lets friendship interfere with his work, thank God.
“What’s going on this Walt Powers job?” I ask him when he gets on the line. Normally Steve is a great comeback artist, but this time his voice is dead-serious.
“Chick, you got big trouble. They picked up your girl friend.”
“I could have predicted that, because she didn’t follow orders. Jaffee can’t do much. She didn’t leave the city, did she?”
“Chick, they’re holding her for Murder One.”
“For Powers? That’s nuts. She—”
“Not just for Powers, Chick. For a guy named Sigmund Kraft over in Brooklyn.”
Mrs. Mangerton’s clicking made hearing difficult, so I told her to quit for the day and had Steve repeat what he had just said. It came back just like the original, word for word.
Jaffee’s strategy had been to turn everyone loose and then hit them one by one on their home turfs. When one of his goons is climbing the stairs of Kraft’s Bensonhurst roominghouse, who is descending but the lady in my life? The bull escorts Jeepers back to Kraft’s room and they find him very dead with a knife in his back. Just to round out the scenario, Steve tells me that they also found a wastepaper basket in which paper had been burned.
“It’s still nuts. Jeepers wouldn’t kill anyone — at least, not over a part.”
“Oh, you’re onto that angle.”
“What angle?”
“Jaffee’s motive theory. A guy named Tibbs told Jaffee that Powers was working on a new format for the show and that meant someone was going to get killed off in the script.”
“From what I hear, McKittrick, Groves, and Owens had more to lose.”
“Maybe, but they weren’t at a Bensonhurst roominghouse this evening.”
“Who says? Jeepers could have come after the killing.”
“That’s her story. She claims Kraft approached her at the studio and told her he had something important for her, and gave her his address. When she got there, she found him dead, and decided to fade.”
“What could a maintenance guy, a sweeper, have that was so important?”
“A carbon copy of Powers’ script revision, maybe. Jaffee figures it this way: Powers finished his rewrite, but he dumps the carbons. Tibbs says he always worked that way because the original would be so blue-penciled after rewrites that the carbon would be useless. The only reason there is a carbon is because the network uses pre-carboned sheets. You know, the original and the copy bound together with a carbon in the middle.”
“Yeah, I have them here.”
“Do you want the rest, Chick? You sound awful.”
“I feel awful. Shoot.”
“Okay. So Powers decides to give your girl friend the ax, and he takes her to lunch to hand her the bad news. While Powers is out, Kraft empties the wastebasket, sees the carbons, and decides to make some points with Jeepers by telling her about her impending doom. So he saves them.
“When Powers and the girl get back from lunch, she takes advantage of the first part of the show being on tape, goes into Powers’ office, stabs him, then bums what she thinks is the only copy of the script. Then old Sigmund sees a chance for blackmail instead of points-making, and he lays it on her. When she goes to his place to pay off, she just repeats the afternoon’s performance.”
“Blackmail — she wouldn’t—”
“She had three one-hundred-buck bills on her, but I guess it wasn’t enough.”
“You know, you said ‘theory,’ and that’s all it is, Steve.”
“Would you believe the lab reports show that the papers burned in Kraft’s wastebasket were the carbons of the papers burned in Powers’ office?”
“No prints on the knives?”
“Nope.”
“How about alibis for McKittrick, Groves, and Owens?”
“They all say that they were at their apartments, but with no corroborating witnesses.”
“I thought Jaffee had us all tailed?”
“What do you think he has working for him, an army? He was going to pick ’em off one by one later this evening. Chick, it looks open and shut for Jeepers. Man, does she mean that much to you? You may have to face it in the end, pal.”
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Steve’s parting words were that Jaffee had a warrant out for me as accessory.
I called Ted Summers at home, gave him the fill-in, and he said he’d see what he could do. Bail for Jeepers was definitely out, he thought.
I switched over to the house phone and told Nibs, the night barman, to bring back lotsa vodka.
I’m on the think like never before. I’ve had people double-deal me. I have made wrong bets on humans and been hurt. But I can’t sell short on the Jeep. I start doing a reconstruct inside my head. It’s my mental viewing room, where I sometimes look at the day’s rushes. I see the set, the cast, Powers’ office. All pieces and bits that won’t edit into a story line. It won’t because they have cast the wrong girl as heavy. Or have they? If only she had told me about Kraft, I could have bought him off.
Then two things hit me at once. Kraft said he had something to show her. But when did he say it? Before or after Powers’ murder? The second idea is dangerous, because if Jeepers did it, it would hang her. I decided to play it that she was innocent and that I could prove it.
On Mrs. Mangerton’s desk is a little card file with the names and phone numbers of all our dealers in office supplies. I let the fingers do the walking and after a ten-minute phone conversation with a very polite guy, I felt I had half the battle won.
I called Ted Summers back and gave him the plan. At first he said Jaffee would never agree to getting everyone back to the studio, but he doesn’t know Bullethead like I do. Jaffee would fill Shea Stadium with live goldfish to turn me in for a couple of years. Ted called back and was surprised the lieutenant had agreed. I wasn’t.