A Brush with Deceit - Chapter One

WHERE IS THE KEY?

Something about this seemingly open-and-shut case lingering in his slush pile for months nagged at him, like a persistent splinter in his heel.

He strode, deep in thought, among the unending throngs crowding noisy, smelly, vibrant 1928 New York, past shops and stalls with cornucopias of vegetables, fish, meats, and countless other goods spilling out onto the sidewalks. He rambled along rowdy Forty-Second Street, and headed down to the decrepit but strangely stimulating wharves, where workers loaded and unloaded masses of crates and people. And still the question went unanswered. 

He recalled the time many years before, when he was a young boy, delighted with the longed-for gift he’d just received from his uncle. He circled the smokestack with his fingertip and twirled the red wheels of the hand-painted Marklin clockwork locomotive, the flickering flames of the candles on the tree reflecting across the neatly pinstriped cab and tender. But something was amiss.

“Where is the key?” he asked, as he dug through the train’s block-printed box. He looked up at his mother, suddenly alarmed. 

She turned to his uncle. “You forgot the key?” she said under her breath.

“It was the last one they had,” his uncle said, despairing, trying not to look at his nephew. “I didn’t realize how… I’m sure you’ll be able to find him one.”

He set the train down on the hardwood floor and futilely willed it to move of its own accord. Everything was perfect, the noble little train was spellbinding, it was all he’d wished for. Except it was a clockwork locomotive, and with no key to wind it up, the clockwork mechanism couldn’t be set in motion, the magic of the toy couldn’t be realized.

“They were all the rage in Manhattan,” his uncle offered. “And it wasn’t cheap, I can tell you that.”

“Tell your uncle thank you, Michael,” his mother said, “I’m sure he went out of his way to get it for you.”

He sat back and looked at the train. One small thing. Just that one little thing, that stupid key, and the train could come to life. He looked up at his uncle, wiped a tear from his cheek with the back of his hand as he forced a smile, and said “Thank you, Uncle,” then gently rolled the locomotive into its imaginary roundhouse under the tree.

Now here he was again, trying to force himself to accept a less-than-perfect conclusion, and it wouldn’t do. 

Detective Michael Galetsky turned on his heel and headed back in the direction of his precinct station, where he was scheduled to interview a witness in the case. Increasing crime in the city kept him busy, even busier now that he’d moved from four years on a regular beat to his own desk, facing a full docket of challenging cases. At the moment, he was immersed in foiling a bond scam and hammering down a mob offshoot instigating a war on the docks. But he’d decided, in spite of his superior’s admonition, to take a side track and see where this case led. 

The father and son were already there waiting for him. He adjusted his black tie, rolled up his white shirt sleeves, and took his seat across from them. Built like a boxer, of average height, the muscles of his broad face taut, Galetsky was prepared for whatever the day would bring.

“Now, just relax, sonny,” he said to the boy, as he aligned the pages of his clipboard on the table in front of him. “I don’t have a beef with you. Just have a few questions.”

“Petey saw it too?!” the boy blurted out. “We all did!”

“Why are you digging this up again, Detective, now that we’ve finally put it out of our heads?” said the boy’s father, standing behind his son, patting his shoulder. “It doesn’t seem so difficult a case to me. People get battered every day in this city with all the traffic crowding the streets. What makes this any different?”

“It’s not every day a man gets run over and some thug shows up, grabs only what’s clutched in the dead man’s hand and skedaddles,” Galetsky said. “Didn’t fleece his pockets, steal his gold pocket watch, the ruby on his finger, nothing. What do you say to that, sonny, that what you boys saw? Do you remember?” 

The boy glanced up at his father. “Sure, I remember.”

“What do you remember?”

“He had money in his hand. The old — the old dead man I mean.”

“You sure it was money?”

“Why else would that man wanna take it?”

Galetsky took a bill from his shirt pocket and held it up. “Now, if this dollar was yours, I’m sure you’d hold it in your hand out where everybody could see it too, wouldn’t you?”

“No sir! I’d keep it in my pocket.”

“Aaah, he was a doddering old stiff,” the father whined, “shouldn’t have been crossing the street without somebody holding his hand. I saw him when I stopped at Ward’s sometimes for lunch. I remember the time he argued with the waitress, said she brought him the wrong food, when she said it was exactly what he ordered. Then he couldn’t find the money to pay her. Maybe he was holding a ticket to see the Yanks play, or the receipt for his laundry. Who knows? Ask me you’re wasting your time and the city’s dime on a dead end, Detective. But of course it’s your case.”

Galetsky cast a cold eye at him. “Thank you, Mr. Larkspur,” he said, as he jotted Check Ward’s in his notes. “Now tell me, sonny, this thug — that is, the man who took what was in the old man’s hand, what did he look like?”

“I just remember he had a cap like mine, turned backwards like that jockey’s.”

“About how old do you think he was? Fifty?”

“No! Twenty, thirty maybe, all’s I know.”

“I guess you didn’t see the car that hit the old man, did you?”

“Sure did. It was just a, a black flivver, nothin special.” He looked up at his father again.

“You heard the tires or brakes squeal, like it tried to stop?”

“No, sir, all’s I heard was a big thump like a tree fell or somethin, and next thing the old man comes right into our marbles, with blood all over and everybody screaming, and Petey —”

“Christ’s sake, Detective!” the father jumped in, “don’t you have enough now?”

“Mr. Larkspur —,” Galetsky started. “Here, sonny, take the dollar for your trouble. You be sure to keep it in your pocket now, where it belongs.”

“Gee, thanks!”

The boy and his father hastily exited the room, while the detective sat quietly reenacting the scene in his mind: Senile Mr. Stewart stumbling along the street, maybe still aware enough to navigate the traffic, but the speeding car appears out of nowhere, his life is torn away in a split second as the car slams into him, his body slides across the street into the circle of boys playing marbles, blood everywhere, the young thug runs up, looks into his face to make sure he’s dead. And then that curious thing — he snatches something from the dead man’s hand and flees. Answer that, and maybe the case will come to life. 

Something incriminating? An address? A name? Where was he going? Galetsky glanced up at the door, and continued writing. Do we have anything on Xavier Larkspur? 

He donned his jacket and steered his own black Model T down to Ward’s Five & Ten, where he took a seat on one of the round green stools with its chrome pedestal bolted to the floor and ordered a hot dog and Coca-Cola. The air in the place was clouded from something left too long on the griddle, maybe a fried egg, and he pulled out his large white handkerchief just in time to muzzle his sneeze.

“Now where was I?” he said to the lady waiting on him, a sturdy woman in a white uniform and black hairnet. “Oh, the last time you saw Mr. Stewart.”

“It’s been a while, sir,” she said. “I don’t remember the last time, exactly. I see so many customers, you know, although he was a hard one to forget, with his whining about the food, the prices, and then after he left there was always so much cleanup to do. Never left a tip, either, I can remember that.” 

“Did he ever say anything about being in danger?”

“Danger? No. To be honest, he didn’t really talk about much at all, just complained mostly. Oh, and to fret about his wife.” 

Galetsky nodded. “She died three years ago. What did he have to say about her?”

“Just if Irene was here, she’d do this, if Irene was here, she’d do that. You know. That’s how I put up with him, I felt bad for him, missing his wife and all.”

“How often did he come in?”

“Every Wednesday morning,” she said, “eight o’clock on the dot, there he was in his same old seat. Why — the very one you’re sitting in!” 

The detective shifted uncomfortably. “Every single Wednesday?”

“Can’t say he ever missed one that I remember and I’ve been working here over five years.”

“Let’s see now,” Galetsky said, looking through his notes, “Mr. Stewart was mur — that is, died, on a Friday. That was last October, on the seventh. So if what you say is true, he was here two days before that, on the fifth.” 

“Oh. I do remember now, yes, that was the last time I saw him, that Wednesday, because it was in the Saturday paper they said a man was killed crossing the street. Then the next week they finally identified him, I remember telling Cassandra — that’s our cook — about it, showed her the picture, and told her how it was the old man who always came in on Wednesdays. And I told her —” She looked up at the ceiling, as something seemed to shake loose in her cranium. “Yes, I remember he said something as he left that puzzled me. Now what was it?”

“Try to remember, ma’am.”

“He said — was it? — oh, yes, he was looking at the card he was holding in his hand, and he said ‘What a coincidence. What a damn coincidence.’ I wondered what he meant by that.”

“What kind of card?”

“Oh, you know, our customers leave their business cards on our counter all the time. Free advertising.”

“You don’t remember what name was on the card, I suppose?”

“No sir, I’m afraid I don’t.”

Galetsky jotted what a damn coincidence in his notes and picked up the business card jammed under the sugar dispenser next to him, from a tailor on Forty-Third Street he happened to be familiar with. He studied it a moment, and laid it back on the counter.

“Know a man named Xavier Larkspur?”

“No. But if he was a customer, I wouldn’t know his name unless he told me.” She turned and called through the serving window “Cassandra? Do you know somebody named — what was the name, sir? — Larkspur? Sorry, sir, she doesn’t know him either.”

Back at his station desk, Galetsky again looked over the brief obituary. Gustavius Stewart was co-owner of the Stewart & Evelyn Tire Company, bankrupt in 1918. His wife, the former Irene Phipps, who died in 1924, was originally from Boston. As with Mr. Stewart, none of her side of the family were mentioned, except a brother, Ernest, residence unknown. The Stewarts had one child, a daughter who died young. If this Ernest couldn’t be found, and no other family showed up, the Stewart home would eventually be turned over to the state. And the killer, or killers, would never be found. Larkspur’s opinion aside, he decided it wouldn’t hurt to tap the city’s dime a bit more and pay Mr. Stewart’s Upper East Side home a visit.   

That afternoon, he climbed the short steps cut from blocks of fine Vinalhaven granite and rapped on the door with the brass boar’s-head knocker. The black iron hand railings, ornamented with swirling leaves and vines, were in dire need of paint, with islands of rust in the depressions where water collected. Two of the windows above were boarded up with weathered wood. He knocked again, and got no answer.

The door was unlocked, and he walked in to find the place vacant, with trash scattered on the floor and the pungent smell of stale cat urine hanging in the air. The only usable furniture in the living room was a ramshackle couch settled in front of the cold fireplace. Dark rectangles, left by whatever had been hanging there, adorned the papered walls, forming a kind of broad cubist mural. Was Mr. Stewart really living in this squalor? With no relatives and no one to care for his personal effects, why was the house virtually empty? Looters?

The bedclothes in the first bedroom on the second floor were in total disarray. Two suits with fine layers of dust on the shoulders hung in the closet, and three pairs of worn black leather shoes were piled on the floor. The dresser drawers revealed only rumpled clothing and a miscellany of cufflinks, tie pins, watch chains, and Mr. Stewart’s rolled Brown University diploma. 

Prominently displayed on top of the dresser was a burnished gold trophy with a football player cradling a ball as he evaded an invisible linebacker. A little bracelet made of seashells hung from his neck. But it was what was next to the trophy that most drew his attention. Leaning against a small musical jewelry box was an old card-backed photograph of two teenage girls standing in shallow surf, dressed in swimming dresses popular thirty years before, their blousy tops drawn tight at the waist, and short, wider skirts above their leggings.

The pretty girl on the left was casting a coquettish smile at someone near the photographer, while the other seemed about to ask her a question — did she like a boy or not, or maybe commenting on her tangled hair. More notable was the fact that the left third of the picture had been carefully torn away. On the reverse he read “Cape. Aug. ‘91 Irene, Molly and —.” The third name was lost. He slipped the photo into his jacket pocket, picked up the jewelry box and out of curiosity tried to turn the crank, but the spring was wound too tightly. 

The second bedroom was conspicuously tidier, but he found nothing of consequence there, so he continued on to the third floor, a small garret with an angled ceiling. Dusty old books and business papers littered the floor, along with more discarded pieces of furniture. There was a small desk, and next to it — rather unsettling — a rickety rocking chair in which sat a black Steiff bear, its yellow glass eyes staring up at him. 

“Why hello there,” he said to the bear. “Guarding something are we?” Tucked away behind the rocking chair was a small wooden crate. “Mind if I have a look?” He knelt beside the crate, when he heard a movement somewhere in the building. Rats, possibly? Looters?

He stopped and listened. Yes, there it was again. He drew his revolver and crept halfway down the stairs, when a figure suddenly dashed across the hallway below him.

“You there! Stop!” he called out. “Stop I say! I have a gun!” The man stopped short at the top of the first flight of stairs. “Galetsky, City Police,” the detective said, continuing down the steps until he stood in front of him. The man was short and gaunt, in faded dark clothes that hung on him like spaghetti on a fork. Curled strands of his black hair stuck to his forehead. “You Ernest Phipps, by any chance?”

“I am,” the man said after a long pause, his face absent any emotion as he conspicuously avoided Galetsky’s eyes. 

The detective holstered his gun. “I wondered if I might find you here. I’m investigating the death of Gustavius Stewart. Your brother-in-law?” Phipps stared at the banister’s pineapple-shaped finial cap and said nothing. “He was your brother-in-law, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill him?” Was Phipps humming to himself? It was so faint Galetsky couldn’t be sure.

“No.”

“Were you living here with him before he died?”

“No.”

“I see. So you came here after he died — saw the obituary?” The corners of Phipps’s mouth curled into an incongruous smile, as though he’d just recalled a joke. “I was hoping maybe you could help me out here, Ernest. I could use any information you can give me. Any enemies you know of? Family squabbles, bitter rivalries? All right, let’s try another way. You got along with him all right, your brother-in-law, didn’t you?”

“No,” Phipps said, but his mind seemed to be on some other plane, and he was still humming a strange tune Galetsky had never heard.

“Why not?” Phipps threw a quick glance at him, as though he’d just realized the detective was speaking to him. “Why didn’t you get along with him?”

“I needed money.”

“Ah. Money. But he still gave you some, didn’t he?”

“No! They told me to go away.”

“And where was that? Where did you go?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Where were you, then, Ernest,” Galetsky said, “the day Mr. Stewart was killed?”

Phipps continued staring at the finial, as if it could somehow save him from this barrage of questions. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“You don’t know.” Galetsky gripped his gun. “You killed your brother-in-law, didn’t you, Ernest? You killed Mr. Stewart to get his money.”

The humming ceased. His face flushed as his lips thinned, his eyes darted back and forth like a cornered animal’s. “I wanted the pictures,” Phipps said. “I just wanted the pictures.”

“Pictures? What pictures? Photographs you mean?” Galetsky glanced again at the dark rectangles on the walls. “Prints?” No answer. “Paintings?” Now Phipps looked up at him, his dull eyes suddenly suffused with light. “Paintings, eh? Mr. Stewart painted them?”

“Gus? Paint them?!” Phipps laughed so hard tears filled his eyes.

“He collected them, then,” Galetsky said, unnerved. 

“No!” Phipps said, still laughing to himself. “She did.”

“Irene, you mean? What did you do with them?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Phipps said. His laughter subsided as his smile collapsed. “They weren’t here.” 

“Where are they now, these paintings?”

“I — don’t know.”

“I see. Turn around, Ernest,” Galetsky said, “and don’t try anything, the gun’s loaded.” As the detective reached out to put his cuffs on him, Phipps suddenly whipped around, popped open the switchblade in his hand, and slashed it across the detective’s chest, slicing away the bottom half of his tie and cutting a streak across his shirt. In one motion, Galetsky twisted Phipps’s knife hand and planted the heel of his shoe on his kneecap. Phipps dropped to the floor with a grunt, as the knife clattered across the floor and the liberated half of the tie fluttered down through the stairwell. The detective quickly cuffed him.

“Why are you hurting me?” Phipps cried.

“You? You almost hurt me, you sewer rat. That was my favorite tie. We’re going for a ride. It’s been a long day.”

After getting Phipps situated in a cell, Galetsky tossed the upper half of his eviscerated tie in a trashcan and slumped into the chair at his desk in front of a pile of new assignments. Unfortunately, with success came more work.

As he dropped his head into his crossed forearms, he caught sight of an older report an assistant had left for him. It was an urgent bulletin issued by the state mental hospital the past October, regarding an escaped inmate. Ernest Phipps had managed to slip away from his ward unnoticed — the special ward for the criminally insane.

“October first, six days before Stewart was run over. Well, that didn’t take long,” Galetsky said to himself. “Too bad they can’t all come together this neatly.” It still didn’t explain, though, what Gus Stewart had in his hand that he’d thought was so important. Maybe Larkspur was right, maybe it didn’t matter after all.

He sighed and picked up one of the more pressing files, but as he started in on it he stopped, took the photograph with the two girls from his jacket pocket and propped it against his white ceramic coffee mug. It was the one on the left. Irene. He couldn’t shake her enigmatic smile from his mind. Who was Molly? And why was someone else — and their name — torn away?