The Bronze Mermaid Read online

  Paul Ernst

  The Bronze Mermaid

  1

  AT about nine-fifty that June night I sipped the last of my coffee at the Auberge de Marseilles, wadded my napkin and tossed it to the table, and asked for the dinner check.

  It had been an excellent dinner. The Auberge de Marseilles is a French trap on West Fifty-third Street which is mildly distinguished in the neighborhood by being really French. The proprietor is a worried-looking little man, in appearance not unlike a Parisian Noel Coward gone to seed. Mama is blond and shaped like an hourglass with the emphasis on the lower oval, and she wears pin-striped blue suits. The customers tend to enter with broad grins, Gallic grins, embrace Papa and Mama, and then sit down in businesslike manner with napkins hanging bib-fashion from a corner tucked into their collars. The food is superior save when a bunch of étrangers comes in. Then somehow it becomes atrocious; the Auberge does not cultivate new trade.

  All of which has little to do with anything, I suppose, except that my tortuous course seems to start at the Auberge that night.

  Mama came up with short-legged enthusiasm as I rose, and waddled with me to the hat-check counter. A lovely night, was it not, monsieur? A night for amour. I said yes and tossed my check at the girl. She handed out my straw hat, and I went to the street, and the night really was kind of lovely, it really was carpentered for couples strolling two by two, and I had one of those dangerous moments that a bachelor of twenty-nine occasionally experiences when he forgets how well off he is. I sighed and gave a panhandler fifty cents before snapping out of it. I debated chasing after him and retrieving it, but went on east instead. Toward Madison Avenue and my apartment.

  The Auberge is far west on Fifty-third, almost at Eighth Avenue, so I had a nice walk ahead of me. I went slowly, enjoying the June balminess, and my mind had never been farther from business than when I crossed Seventh, ducking a taxi driver who was indolently improving his marksmanship. And then on the east side of Seventh I saw the girl.

  Even in a poor light she was noticeable—about five-three and wearing a tan linen suit that was honored by what it encased, with a nice young face that might not have launched a thousand ships but could certainly have set a few tugboats to whistling. If the night was lovely, and if the night was made for amour, the night could have gone a long way without producing better than this.

  She came into a better lighted strip of crowded sidewalk and turned east on Fifty-third ahead of me, and I noted several other things. The first was that she moved with a strange sort of unobtrusiveness, not slinking exactly, but certainly not inviting inspection. The second was that she seemed familiar. So much so that I inched up speed and tagged along.

  I rather expected her to pop into a taxi at any minute; she was not a pedestrian or subway girl—that suit looked expensive. She was not seeking companionship; her swift and preoccupied stride showed that. And there was nothing along this street to go to at night except a few night clubs which were not of the better sort.

  She crossed another more brightly lighted strip, and I saw the dark-blond hair beneath the small, tipped hat, and I saw the short upper lip that frequently revealed a glimpse of very nice white teeth, and I saw the tilt of the small nose—and I gaped at the girl and really did start to follow her. Because I knew then that I had seen her before, and in circumstances guaranteed later to provoke curiosity about her.

  I had seen her in the tag end of a fine case of hysterics, about an hour after she’d been found lying bound and gagged on a handsome parquet floor.

  I guess, about now, I should identify myself. My name is Sam Cates and I work for the Home Protection Insurance Company in New York in a rather unclassified way. I started with them as an adjuster when I was twenty-three, after leaving the Marine Corps to its own devices and my kneecap, which was shot up enough to warrant replacing most of it with some sort of metal ending in -ium.

  I went along as an adjuster for several years and then I was present at the scene of a fire one time and noticed something that others didn’t. The fire had been in a shoe store, destroying much of the stock and damaging the rest, and the thing I saw was a burned fragment of leather shoelace.

  This seemed unremarkable—part of a burned shoelace in a burned shoe store—but it was far from the counter where laces were displayed, and a check of all remaining shoes in the house with leather laces revealed that they had their full complement.

  I called the arson squad, and the other shoelace was found in the proprietor’s pocket, and the story came out: Candle hung by a leather lace not so apt to burn through prematurely, kerosene-soaked waste beneath the candle, fire hours later when the flame hit the lace directly and severed it and when the proprietor was innocently home in bed.

  The Home Protection Insurance Company thought that was nice and began sending me around on other doubtful cases. I was often dismally shown up by the more professional noticers on the police force, but all in all my noticing average stayed high enough to satisfy the company. On my office door is, Claims & Adjustments, Samuel B. Cates, and I still do adjusting but more often I do plain, prosaic nosing.

  So I am adjuster-noticer-investigator for the Home Protection Insurance Company, and I am five feet ten and weigh a hundred and seventy-two pounds and my hair and eyes are brown and I am white, single, and like it.

  It was in my untitled role of snooper that I was sent to Senator Keppert’s apartment an hour after the Duysberg diamond was reported stolen.

  Senator Keppert you know about. He is sixty or so, three times returned to Washington from his silk stocking New York district, widowed ten years ago, married again seven years ago to the wealthy and much younger—and very much prettier—Beatrice Salsbury of society-page fame.

  Senator Keppert has a daughter, Marylin, and a niece as the sole remainder of his family. The niece, Ellen Keppert, is his dead brother’s child—though she is hardly a child now. Not with those strategic curves. She works for Mrs. Keppert as social secretary, and also for her uncle when he’s in New York; and the work is pretty special in each case.

  The Keppert name is a big one, and the doings of anybody wearing it are the reporters’ meat. Even the doings of the niece.

  It was certainly meat about Ellen Keppert and the Duysberg diamond.

  Marylin, the daughter, twenty-four, had come home at two A.M. with her fiancé, Howard Denham, to find her cousin Ellen trussed up with clothesline on the foyer floor and trying to bleat through a washrag stuffed in her mouth. Released, Ellen told of two rough-looking men who had come to the door, slugged her when she opened it, tied and gagged her, and then ransacked the place. The bedroom of Beatrice Keppert, the Senator’s wife, was the section most ransacked; and here a wall safe hung open and the Duysberg diamond and several other less notable pieces of jewelry were gone.

  Now the Duysberg diamond is no Hope or Kohinoor; it is smaller than a host of stones with no names, getting its label more for its lurid past and historical significance than for its size. But the thing is worth a conservative sixty thousand dollars as merchandise, and more than that as a collector’s item; and when the Home Protection vice president phoned that it had just been rudely abstracted from the Kepperts’ apartment, I got over there fast.

  I met Marylin Keppert, a plump, brown-eyed, quiet girl as surely destined for a neat suburban home, four children and a deep-freeze as if she’d been the daughter of Joe Doakes instead of Senator Keppert.

  I met her cousin, Ellen Keppert, a tawny blonde, less handsome possibly than Marylin but to me at least a lot more attractive. Purely as a type, you understand; not attractive to me personally.

  Later I met Senator and Mrs. Keppert, he a tall, fine-looking elderly man with platinum-gray hair, she a vivacious woman of thirty-eight
or -nine but looking—and occasionally acting—a good deal younger. All those looks and all that money—the good Senator had certainly caught himself a prize.

  To get back to business…

  I saw the cut in Ellen’s pink scalp where one of the nasty men had slugged her. I saw the wall safe in Mrs. Keppert’s bedroom, a vulnerable tin can in which nothing of real value should ever have been placed. I heard the story: two men, clothesline, gag. I listened to Ellen’s final hysterics; and I looked at Sergeant McKeough of the New York Police, and he looked back at me, and I whistled a merry tune.

  I don’t like to seem crabbed and suspicious; I trust the average citizen as far as I can throw a small rhinoceros; but I didn’t quite buy that story of Ellen Keppert’s.

  There was no reason for doubt that a fellow could put his hands on.

  A couple of thugs could slide into even a building as exclusive as this. Servants could have gossiped about the big stone being in the apartment instead of in a bank vault where it belonged. And the servants, incidentally, had not been suspiciously dismissed for the evening; they lived out and were always gone at such an hour.

  Again—why would one of the Kepperts steal their own diamond? Mrs. Keppert had half the money in Manhattan with a fence around it. The Senator was above suspicion. Marylin, and, to a lesser extent Ellen, could get any sum in reason just by asking for it; they didn’t have to raid the Home Protection Company.

  Still, I just couldn’t quite believe that yarn about the theft of the stone—the other stuff taken with it was comparatively negligible. I kept my doubts to myself; you don’t push people like the Kepperts around without a lot of perfectly wonderful reasons for it. I went in rumpled mental condition back to my office and reviewed the case and reviewed it and could find no holes in it, and finally said the hell with it, it wasn’t my sixty thousand, anyhow.

  And a month later I see Ellen Keppert walking in what seemed to me a furtive manner along Fifty-third Street at a point where nothing was open at ten o’clock at night save a few second-rate night clubs.

  Was it odd that I followed her?

  Just after you cross Sixth Avenue on your way toward Fifth, you pass a five-story, small office and loft building, an anonymous old box with the ground floor lowered a couple of feet. An iron railing separates the sidewalk from the small drop, and there are three steps down and at the end of the steps is a small but heavy oak door as full of iron nailheads as a Texas sky is full of stars. A brass plate has simply the numerals, 50. In white rubber engraved upon the black rubber doormat is more amplification. Club 50.

  Ellen Keppert stopped in front of the steps and looked down at the iron-studded door. She took a step toward it and then a step back, like a kid balancing on the edge of a chilly pool and not quite able to decide on the plunge. I waited, and saw her finally lift her chin and walk down and inside.

  The Club 50 was the best of the places along here, I will say that. It was good enough so that Ellen might just possibly visit it, with a suitable escort, of course, of her own volition. But she did not seem to be entering it in any spirit of pleasure tonight, and she did not have any kind of escort, suitable or otherwise.

  I gave her several minutes and then, when I’d judged she would be through the reception room and into the supper room, I went in, too. And found I had not judged correctly. Miss Keppert was still alone, and still in the reception space.

  This was a room about twenty-five by twenty with a telephone switchboard and booths to the right and the hat-check counter to the left. Beyond the counter was a small room with a bar for waiting customers. Beyond this was the door to the big main room of the Club 50. Ellen Keppert was near this, peering in as if looking for someone.

  She turned before I could back out the street door again. There was nothing to do then but go on to the hat-check counter and deposit my straw. After that I went toward the supper room and Miss Keppert, staring at her as if trying to place her.

  “Ellen Keppert,” she said, with one fine eyebrow up a fraction of an inch to show me what she thought of my acting. “We met a month ago at my uncle’s apartment.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Yes, of course. How are you, Miss Keppert? I hope you haven’t any more unpleasant experiences.”

  “Not till now,” she said, smiling. Attractive even when she was harpooning you. “And how are you, Mr.—?”

  “Cates,” I said. “Sam Cates. Home Protection Insurance Company.”

  “That part I remembered. Whose home are you out protecting at the Club Fifty?”

  “Not mine,” I assured her. “I am homeless. A waif. Now I’d better run along before your partner for the evening finds us talking and gets jealous.”

  “Five will get you fifty that you know I have no partner.”

  Well, she knew I’d followed her. I shrugged. “I could see you had none when you turned in here, but I supposed you were going to meet…”

  “No,” said Ellen Keppert. “No one. Mr. Cates, I wonder if you’d mind being a paid escort for the evening?”

  “It’s a little out of my line,” I murmured.

  Ellen looked as if she might say caustically, “I wonder.” She didn’t like me. She didn’t like my presence here. And I thought now that I felt, under her irony, a considerable amount of agitation.

  “Fifty dollars,” she said.

  “Why do you want an escort?”

  That was stalling and she knew it. “I think it’s plain enough. I want to go in there—” she inclined her pretty, tawny head toward the supper room—“and it’s awkward without a man.”

  “Why do you want to go in there?”

  “To see a girl about a mermaid,” she replied, which was as good a way as any of telling me it was none of my business.

  I offered my arm with exaggerated gallantry. “I would be pleased and proud. Even for twenty-five dollars.”

  “I never ask for cut rates,” Ellen said. She smiled nicely for the benefit of two couples that had just come in, and she took my arm and we entered the supper room.

  I don’t know how many second-string night clubs like the 50 there are in New York, but I am sure there are a lot. Room not quite big enough, tables not quite big enough and too close together, orchestra not quite good enough, dancing space not quite commodious enough, entertainers not quite deft enough and clothed enough.

  At a little after ten there were some tables vacant, and all these had large Reserved signs on them, one of which came down promptly at the appearance of a five-dollar bill. “I’ll meet expenses, too, of course,” Ellen murmured out of the side of her pretty mouth.

  We went to our table and sat down, and I looked across at Senator Keppert’s favorite niece. She was as well composed as a Rodgers song, as calm as water in the bottom of a quarry, and as beautifully turned out in her summer linen as any other girl there in full dinner dress.

  Yet there was that feel of agitation under all the looks and taste and attractiveness.

  “What are you really here for?” I asked. I have no conversational tricks to make the customers talk, and anyway I’ve found that direct questions, in not too belligerent a tone, get some amazingly direct answers on occasion. Not on this occasion, though.

  “To see a girl about a mermaid,” Ellen repeated.

  “Okay. You don’t have to answer questions. You don’t even have to talk, of course. You’ve paid for an escort and you’ll have an escort, and that’s that. But questions and answers are as good a way to pass the time as any, don’t you think?”

  She shrugged and smiled, and I liked that short upper lip revealing a glimpse of white beneath the carmine. I liked just about everything connected with her, and I wished that she were just a girl and this was just an evening and we were just one of those June-balmy couples.

  “So you came here alone, with no arrangement for a man to squire you,” I said.

  “I thought I might meet someone I knew,” said Ellen. “And I did, didn’t I?”

  “In a way—the way you might kno
w the cop on the corner.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you can dance better than the cop on the corner,” said Ellen. “He’s so—so solidly foundationed.”

  “Of all the people you are acquainted with,” I said, “I am about the last you wanted to see here or anywhere tonight. Correct?”

  “Did I say anything like that?”

  “Yet you take me on as escort.”

  Ellen’s face became childlike in its candor. I winced.

  “You didn’t quite believe the story about our diamond, did you? So you have been trailing me…”

  “I have not,” I said hotly. The accusation that I was a professional bloodhound was annoying. “I happened to see…”

  “And trail.” She nodded. “Here. To the Club Fifty. So I got the idea that the best way to keep an eye on you while you were keeping an eye on me was to have you right across a table from me.”

  “Why keep an eye on me?” I asked, feeling inadequate.

  Ellen sighed. “I’ll confess, Mr. Cates. I took the diamond. I needed some pin money and my poor old step-aunt, who hasn’t sold a violet for many a rainy night now, couldn’t give it to me. So I hit myself on the head, tied myself up, picked the wall safe in Beatrice’s room, and hid the diamond by hanging it with the other prisms on the chandelier. I’m here now to dispose of it.”

  “With me to watch while you do it.”

  “You’re my alibi. If anything should come out later, how comforting to be able to say, ‘Why, Mr. Cates, of the Home Protection Insurance Company, was with me every minute of the time.’”

  I stared at her—winsome as a blue-ribbon kitten and, I’d wager, as unethical as a six-cent nickel. “For a watered-down Scotch and soda I’d believe you.”

  She caught our waiter’s eye. It wasn’t difficult; he’d glanced at her approvingly when he seated us, and had been glancing frequently ever since. “Two Scotches and sodas.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  She laughed, and it was delightful, and she was still nervous underneath, I thought. I was beginning to wonder by now if any sense of perception I’d once believed I owned was not illusion.