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

Schreiber’s shoulder. “No police yet. We’ll tell you when. And please, as a favor to Miss Lelane and her mother, don’t tell anyone about this. We’ll keep it our secret for now.”
    Schreiber glared pugnaciously at Brass. “Will we?” He asked. “And just who are you?”
    “My name is Alexander Brass, and this is Mr. DeWitt. We’re friends of Miss Lelane.”
    “It’s all right, Normy,” Sandra said, appearing in the doorway. “Mr. Brass is right. Let’s not make a fuss about this.”
    “If you say so,” Schreiber said, but he clearly was not convinced. He stared about him indecisively for a moment and then made up his mind. “I’ll be downstairs,” he said. “I’ll see you again before you leave.” He tiptoed around the debris and left.
    “I think Field Marshal Ponce is in for a hard time,” I opined.
    Brass crossed the room and squatted amid the pile of books that had been pulled from the bookcase. “Mary—you don’t mind if I keep calling her Mary, do you?—had quite an eclectic taste in her reading,” he said, picking up some of the books at random and looking at them. “Jane Austen, Dos Passos, Shaw, Cervantes, Mark Twain, Edgar Wallace, Dorothy Sayers, Dawn Powell…” He cleared a space and sat on the floor. He was lost in the world of books, and it would be some time before he emerged. Brass treated books with the same reverence with which he treated women; and if there was anything he held in higher regard than books or women, I had not noticed it in the four years I had worked for him.
    I followed Sandra back into the interior of the apartment as she stalked from room to room surveying the damage. There were eight or nine rooms, including a dining room, two bedrooms, a butler’s pantry, and a maid’s room with its own bath off the kitchen. I was gaining more respect for Brooklyn. “Swell digs,” I told Sandra.
    She glanced at me. “Not at the moment,” she said.
    Sandra went through the rooms slowly, touching this and that, straightening an occasional object, checking some of the things to see if they were broken, and cursing under her breath when one of them, an oversized cup that, for some reason was in her mother’s bedroom, proved to be cracked. None of the rooms had been spared the vandal’s touch, and no object was too small to have been dumped onto the floor.
    The door to the other bedroom was closed, and I had a momentary queasy feeling opening it, remembering that the last time I had viewed a ransacked apartment there had been a corpse behind one of the closed doors. But this one was merely a continuation of the established theme, two dressers with drawers pulled out and piled by the bed, and a tangle of sheets, pillowcases, clothing, and cosmetics on the bed. “Your room?” I asked Sandra.
    “A long time ago,” she said. She went over to the bed and stared down at the jumble. After a moment she reached down and retrieved a much-worn stuffed animal of indeterminate species, and clutched it to her chest. “Binny,” she said defensively, eyeing me as though she thought I was going to protest at a grown woman clutching a stuffed toy. “It’s my Binny.”
    “Your Binny?”
    “That’s a good sign,” Sandra said.
    “Of course it is,” I agreed. We continued our perusal of the wreckage.
    “She was looking for something,” Sandra said as we rounded back to the living room. “But she didn’t find it.”
    Brass was still on the floor, leafing through the pile of books. “Something small,” he said. “Whoever did this looked through all the books, and you can’t hide anything large in a book.”
    “You could cut out the inside and glue what’s left of the pages together,” I suggested. “I’ve seen that.”
    Brass looked pained. “But still,” he said, “some of the books that have been examined are quite slender.”
    “Perhaps she merely looked at the shelf behind them,” Sandra suggested.
    “No,” Brass said. “Watch.” He got up and stuck