The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes by Michael Kurland Read Free Book Online Page A

see—well—”
    Sandra tightened her grip on his hands. “A couple of weeks?”
    “Well, something like that. But, I mean, she’s been away a lot recently, so we didn’t worry about it.”
    “What do you mean ‘a lot’?” Sandra demanded.
    “She told me she was staying with her sister who was sick,” Schreiber explained. “Which is why I wasn’t surprised.”
    “Surprised at what?”
    “When you came by yesterday—but it wasn’t you. Was it?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    The field marshal interrupted. “It’s my fault, Miss Lelane. This young lady came by yesterday and said she was you. She said Mrs. Bain had asked her to drop by and pick up some belongings.”
    “And you let her go up?” Sandra asked Schreiber. “Normy, really!”
    Schreiber gestured with his shoulder, his hands being occupied. “Ponce, here, Ponce the brilliant, passed her through.”
    Field Marshal Ponce lowered his head. “I’m real sorry, Miss Lelane. Mr. Schreiber wasn’t around, and I’d never met you, and she seemed right. I mean, I knew you were a glamorous Broadway star, Mr. Schreiber talks about you all the time, and this lady was certainly glamorous. And she said she had a key.”
    “Let’s go upstairs,” Brass interrupted, “and see what this glamorous star was up to.”
    Schreiber led the way to the elevator, leaving Ponce to return to his gilded lectern. The elevator operator, a short, thin elderly man with big ears, stared intently at the front of the cage while he manipulated his gilded levers. The discreet elevator man is the employed elevator man.
    “Could your mother be staying with her sister?” Brass asked Sandra.
    “She doesn’t have a sister,” Sandra said, glaring at Schreiber’s ear as the super studiously avoided her gaze.
    Brass examined the outside of the door to Two-Headed Mary’s apartment carefully before he let Sandra put her key in the lock. Then she opened the door and stepped into the small entrance hall, the three of us close behind her.
    Sandra paused in the doorway and sniffed the air. “Perfume,” she said. “Cheap perfume. Eau de tart. And that comic-operetta Falstaff downstairs thought the dame was me!” She clicked on the light switch by the door, took two steps forward and stopped. “What the hell?”
    The clothes closet in the entrance hall had been emptied, and coats, hats, galoshes, and umbrellas had been strewn about the hall floor, along with a darts set, a Shirley Temple doll, and a croquet mallet. Past the entrance hall was the living room, which would require some work before it could be lived in again. Books had been pulled off the bookshelves that took up the wall to our left, cabinets had been opened and emptied onto the floor, cushions had been removed from the oversized couch along the back wall and tossed in a corner, closets had been dumped. The telephone, one of those ornate instruments called a “French phone,” was on the floor in front of its little table inside the living room door; the body sprawled to the left and the handpiece to the right. Brass picked up the phone, united its two halves, and replaced it on the table. “I take it this is not an example of your mother’s housekeeping,” he said.
    “Mom is fanatically tidy,” Sandra told him. She crossed the living room to another door and disappeared down a hallway. After a moment she reappeared in the doorway. “They’re all like this,” she said, “all the rooms. Why the hell would anyone…” She disappeared back down the hallway again.
    Schreiber stood in the living room doorway and was staring angrily down at the mess in front of him. “This is an outrage!” he said firmly. He raised his voice. “An outrage!” He bellowed into the other room, “Don’t worry, Miss Lelane, I’ll call the police. Then I’ll send a crew up to clean this mess. Don’t worry about a thing.”
    “Not just yet, please, Mr. Schreiber,” Brass said, coming over and putting a hand on