Halo in Brass

  HOWARD BROWNE

  HALO IN BRASS

  Halo in Brass, copyright © 1949 by Howard Browne.

  Copyright renewed 1977 by Howard Browne. All rights reserved.

  This book was originally printed in hardcover by Bobbs-Merrill in 1949.

  Cover by Joe Servello

  Published September 1988

  Dennis McMillan Publications

  Missoula, Montana

  Distributed by

  Creative Arts Book Company

  833 Bancroft Way

  Berkeley, California 94710

  FOREWORD

  In 1946, Bobbs-Merrill brought out the first Paul Pine novel, Halo in Blood. It did well with both reviewers and readers—so well, in fact, that I developed delusions of grandeur, quit my job as magazine editor, and set out to seek fame and fortune as a free-lance writer.

  And damned near starved to death.

  Bobbs-Merrill had given me a contract and a thousand-dollar advance (big money in ’47) on the next book, but only if I agreed to get it to them in time for their Spring 1948, list. By the time I’d moved my family from Chicago to Burbank, California, bought a home there and settled in, I had five-count ’em, five-weeks to write a complete novel from scratch. Even worse, I hadn’t the slightest inkling of a plot to start with.

  The novel turned out to be Halo for Satan and I did meet the deadline. Meeting it put a sprinkling of gray in the plentiful supply of hair I had at the time, came close to ending my marriage, and left me with a bad case of writer’s block that took months to break.

  But I did get something else out of the experience. A device—a gimmick if you will. In short: turn out mystery novels in which the least likely suspect is not the killer, but somebody impossible to suspect!

  While I tried to bring off such a device in Halo in Brass, it is not one I’d use in today’s market. It is built around lesbianism and reflects the attitude toward homosexuality that was prevalent in and before 1949—an attitude shared by Pine and the circles he moved in. And admittedly shared, at the time, by the author as well; otherwise he would not—and could not—have written the book.

  However, aside from that, I believe Halo in Brass is as good a novel as I was able to write back then. Whether it holds up forty years later is something I must leave for the reader to decide.

  Howard Browne

  Carlsbad, California

  March, 1988

  FOR MY EDITOR HARRISON PLATT

  . . . PATIENCE, CAJOLERY, AND THE KNOUT

  CHAPTER 1

  ALMOST the first thing Mrs. Fremont said after I was seated on the edge of her lounge chair was that Laura had always been a good girl. She tried to sound aggressive about it, in case I had picked up the wrong idea somewhere along the line and needed to be straightened out.

  “Nothing else than just being thoughtless, Mr. Pine. Away from home and busy with her work and new friends and all. Youngsters kind of take their folks for granted sometimes.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  “Course I’m a mite surprised Laura’s not more thoughtful. Pa and I done our level best to give her a good Christian raising and she’s always been a credit to us. But she was always kind of . . . well, headstrong I guess you’d call it.”

  “High-spirited,” I suggested,

  We were sitting in a small airless parlor and beaming across at each other. They were Mr. and Mrs. Charles J. Fremont, both in their sixties, frail-bodied, skin filled with thin shallow wrinkles and yellowing a little like the linen in an old maid’s hope chest. Both were in their Sunday best, both sincere and troubled and too proud to let a stranger see how deeply they were troubled.

  They sat side by side on a rust-colored mohair sofa with carved trimming in dark walnut to match the rest of the overstuffed, massive-legged pieces jammed into the small square room. It was a room that had become hostile and aloof from not having visitors come into it more often. The local pastor would make the grade once in a while, but hardly anyone else.

  A nine-by-twelve Wilton rug with a border of angry-pink roses covered most of the varnished oak floor, looking as stiffly glazed as a section of new linoleum. Above the couch a pastoral print direct from a mail-order house covered an oblong segment of pale-tan wallpaper featuring a green climbing vine. In one corner the shelves of a whatnot stand were crowded with bits of ivory and glass and porcelain that gleamed dully in the half-light. Old-fashioned green shades were drawn behind russet draperies to shut out some of the solid dry heat of a prairie afternoon.

  Mrs. Fremont was doing the talking. She was one of those small birdlike females who are active in church socials and the local chapter of the Eastern Star, and who work up quite a reputation for strawberry preserves. She would go into her eighties and die with patient resignation, knowing in advance that the wings would fit and the harp would be in tune.

  “Then, too,” she went on, her words sturdy with their Midwestern twang, “Laura always was so pretty.” She sighed gently and fumbled at the heavy gold wedding band on the proper finger. “Sometimes being pretty can kind of turn a girl’s head. Don’t you think so, Mr. Pine?”

  I bit back a yawn and rolled my thumbs and said she was certainly right about that. Any minute now she’d run down on the small talk and we could get around to the problem at hand.

  “Clara,” Charles Fremont said unexpectedly, “this gentleman’s likely in a hurry. Tell him what we got to say.”

  It surprised me into staring at him. Up till now his share in the conversation had been held down to breathing and knuckle popping. He was a tall gangling man who wore a necktie as though it were a hangman’s noose and who would never be really at ease without a plow to lean on.

  His was the correct idea, but it was wasted on Clara Fremont. Her thin colorless lips got even thinner. “Now, Pa. We’re just visiting. We don’t want Mr. Pine to think we’re not neighborly.” She unlimbered a bright quick smile, showing chalk-white teeth the dentist had probably overcharged her for. “It was real nice of you to come all the way to Lincoln this way, Mr. Pine.”

  “I needed a few days off,” I said. “And Nebraska is just far enough from Chicago to make it a nice drive.”

  She believed me, although that hardly seemed possible.

  “Well, I certainly do hope you can find Laura for us without going to much trouble. Not only because of the money, I mean. Although I must say five dollars a day does sound real reasonable. Pa and I both thought it would cost a mint to hire a detective.”

  “I take on more than one case at a time,” I said gravely. “That way it works out fine.”

  “Well, I must say Pa and I are real grateful for what you’re doing. We know Laura’s a grown-up girl now and got her own life to lead. But . . . Pa and me, we worry . . . In a big city like Chicago that way. If she’d only write . . . even a post card. Almost a year since we heard . . . ”

  Her voice began to fall apart and two tears spilled Over and started a crooked path through the thin layer of rice powder on her wrinkled cheeks. The old man squirmed a little and popped another knuckle and looked at the wall over my head.

  It was all in a day’s work. “Usually,” I said, “I do pretty well at finding people. But I’ll have to know some things to start.”

  Mrs. Fremont (lucked her head long enough to dig a small square of cambric from the bosom of her shirtwaist and pat her eyes. When she looked up again her faded blue eyes had a new brightness and her voice was up off the canvas. “We’ll tell you anything we can, Mr. Pine.”

  I fished a cigarette from behind the display handkerchief in my breast pocket and lighted it. Mrs. Fremont looked almost shocked at having tobacco burning in her parlor, but I figured being a private detective at five dollars a day should at least entitle me to smok
e on the job. I peered around for an ash tray, ready to give odds I wouldn’t find one. Mrs. Fremont got up and found a small white saucer with a state seal printed in the bowl part and SOUVENIR OF DENVER, COLORADO in blue letters across the bottom. I thanked her and put it down on the starched lace antimacassar covering the arm of my lounge chair and dropped the used match in it. No match ever looked lonelier.

  They were watching me, waiting for the big city detective to get out his bottle of fingerprint powder and enlarging glass. I blew smoke through my nose as a substitute for something startling and said, “Exactly how long ago did Laura go to Chicago?”

  “Almost two years, Mr. Pine.”

  “Any certain type of work she expected to get into?”

  “An office secretary. She was good at typewriting and shorthand and bookkeeping.”

  “Uh-hunh. She go to college?”

  “Two years of business college. We couldn’t afford it to be the university here in Lincoln. She went through high school with the highest grades in all her classes. Just wonderful in play acting, too. The loveliest speaking voice you can imagine.”

  “I see. Laura have a lot of friends?”

  “Well, I should say so! House was always just full of girls. Hardly a night one of them didn’t stay over.”

  “You checked with any of them, Mrs. Fremont? They might be getting mail from her.”

  It was a new idea to her and she frowned over it before slowly shaking her head. “She wouldn’t be writing to them. Most all her friends got married and Laura stopped seeing them. Married folks don’t mix much with the single ones. You know how that is.”

  “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Fremont.”

  For some obscure reason the remark interested her. “Don’t tell me a nice-looking young man like you’s not married.”

  “No,” I said. “This dent in my nose came from high-school football.”

  It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t even bright, but it was broad enough for almost anyone to understand. Yet it went past the Fremonts like a rifle bullet. Nothing changed in the old man’s labored study of the wall, while his wife beamed at me in a politely baffled way.

  I dropped cigarette ash in the souvenir saucer and said gently, “What about your daughter’s boy friends? Any of them waiting for her to get tired of the big city and come home to a church wedding?”

  “ . . . No.”

  A reply from her that short made me blink. I hadn’t missed the brief hesitation ahead of it, either. This might be an angle worth digging into. I got out my pick and shovel and went to work.

  “That sounds a little unusual, Mrs. Fremont. I mean, a beautiful, talented girl like Laura?”

  “She didn’t have no time for boys.” Her voice had taken on a falsely bright quality. “Laura was bound and determined she was going to be a business girl. I guess studying and boys don’t work out together.”

  “I see.” I saw everything—and nothing. “Couldn’t she have found office work here in Lincoln? Seems like a sizable town. Couldn’t it be she was interested in some young man, Mrs. Fremont? Maybe it didn’t work out for some reason she didn’t tell you about. That might explain why she went to Chicago.”

  She was shaking her head before I had finished. “That wouldn’t be it at all,” she said stiffly. “Ever since high school Laura wanted to go to some place like Chicago or New York. She always would say this town wasn’t big enough—that everybody knew your business.”

  That last part made no particular sense as far as I could tell. The picture I was getting of Laura Fremont had nothing in it the neighbors could do much with even in a smaller town. I blew more smoke through the same nose, crossed my legs the other way and rubbed my hand thoughtfully around on my kneecap.

  “You say it’s been two years since she went to Chicago?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She stopped writing when?”

  “This last January.”

  I ticked the months between off on my fingers. “Little over eight months then?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Up to then you heard from her regularly?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You still have those letters?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Before I go, I'd like to look them over. And I’ll need a picture. The latest one you can find.”

  She had started to get up, but my last few words dropped her back onto the couch again as if all the strength had suddenly run out of her. Her mouth came open a little and she made a weak kind of mewing noise that finally got loud enough to be words. “There . . . I’m . . . There isn’t any . . . any picture.”

  I blinked at her. The silence was as heavy as the bottom of a glacier and getting heavier. Even the old man had managed to get his eyes off the wall and was staring at her. I got rid of my cigarette, took out my handkerchief and mopped the back of my neck and put it away again. What at first had seemed one of those simple little cases, no headaches and no night work, was beginning to take on distorted lines. The kind of lines that had to be followed but could lead to unexpected and uncomfortable situations.

  This business of no pictures, for instance. That wasn’t right. Everybody has his picture taken at one time or another. Especially a girl, unless she looks like the Witch of Endor. If not a studio portrait then at least a picnic snapshot or one having fun at the carnival.

  I said slowly, “Why not, Mrs. Fremont? Was your daughter camera shy?”

  The silence had lasted long enough for her to pick up the pieces. “We had lots of pictures of her,” she said in a faraway voice. “Only . . . ”

  “Only what, Mrs. Fremont?”

  “She took them away. All of them. I didn’t know until one day I was looking through the albums. I can’t understand why she’d take them—all of them—that way.”

  Neither could I. But I didn’t say so. Saying so would only have dimmed the trust in me shining out of those faded blue eyes. Instead I said, “If there isn’t, there isn’t. Maybe if you’d describe her it would do as well. Height, weight, color of hair and eyes.”

  She took a stab at it. Leaving out the glowing adjectives, Laura Fremont was about five-feet-eight—taller than I expected, judging from her parents—light-brown hair, blue eyes, a hundred and forty pounds. Evidently a nice solid hunk of girl, corn-fed and full of vitality.

  I finished making notes on the back of an envelope and Mrs. Fremont went off somewhere and unearthed a thin packet of letters. The red ribbon around them in a double loop had a glazed look and GILLEN’S CANDIES printed on it in white letters that were beginning to flake off. The envelopes bore Chicago post-office cancellations over a period of thirteen months, the last one dated the middle of January of the present year. Number one showed a return address: a YWCA on North Dearborn Street, an underhand toss from Chicago’s Loop. The remaining seven gave 1682 North LaSalle Street as her residence.

  Very quickly I went through the enclosures looking for information. For what I wanted, they were a waste of time. No names or addresses of friends, no employer or company identified by name. Nothing but flowery descriptions of the city and the titles of movies she’d seen and full details on how she cured a couple of bad colds. Guarded letters, carefully vague, deliberately worded to say nothing and to say it at length. Nothing but the two return addresses. Those I could have had by calling the Fremonts long distance.

  I put the addresses down on the same envelope with Laura’s dimensions and handed back the letters. “That’s fine,” I said with as much heartiness as I could dredge up. “A couple more questions and I’ll be on my way.”

  The old lady seemed to sense my disappointment. “Anything at all, Mr. Pine,” she quavered.

  “Did your daughter have a job already lined up in Chicago, or did she go at it cold?”

  “She just up and went,” Mrs. Fremont said. “She was awful confident, Laura was. She was that way all her life, almost. She’d up and look people right in the eye and go straight ahead. Nothing fluttery about her,
I tell you!”

  I couldn’t tell whether she was proud or regretful. I said, “Any of her Lincoln friends ever move to Chicago? People she might look up when she got there for old time’s sake?”

  She thought about it before shaking her head no. “Not that I know about, Mr. Pine. You think of any, Pa?”

  He pried his gaze off the wall and clawed at his cheek while turning the question over in his slow mind. “Well now, there was that Rehak girl, Clara. Didn’t she go to Chicago awhile back?”

  Two spots of color began to glow in Clara Fremont’s aged cheeks. She glared at him. “You know how that girl turned out, Charles. Laura wouldn’t go near her!”

  It dried him up in a hurry, but there could be something in what he had said for me to get my teeth into. I said, “Laura’s letters weren’t much help. I’m going to need any lead I can get. Tell me about this Rehak girl. Parents still in Lincoln?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know.” There were new lines in her face now—lines that were tight and bitter and angry. In the dim light of the shadowy room I could see her lips trembling ever so slightly.

  I got out another cigarette and rolled it around in my fingers. “I don’t like to insist,” I told her. “But I’m the one who has to find your daughter. The trail can start anywhere. I don’t work for a newspaper. What I find out when I’m working stays with me until my work is done. Then I forget it—all of it, Mrs. Fremont. I’d like you to understand that.”

  “No.” Just as firmly and just as flatly. “It wouldn’t help you. I know my daughter and I know her.”

  She meant it, too. I sighed and put the cigarette in my mouth and lighted it. “I guess that does it, Mrs. Fremont. I’ll do what I can and keep you posted.” I stood up and smiled my professional smile to indicate the interview was over.