Ed McBain - Downtown

Judy Jordan sat alone on the stage.

Sat on a wooden plank stretched across several stacked cinder blocks.

Head bent, studying her script.

Looking blonde and beautiful and serene and quite regal.

“I want her first,” Felix said, and stood up.

“No,” Michael said.

He said it quite softly.

Almost whispered it, in fact.

There was no reason for Felix to have obeyed him.

But he sat down at once.

Michael walked up the aisle to the front of the theater. He climbed the steps onto the stage. Judy was absorbed in the script, probably trying to dope out all its inherent metaphors and allegories. He walked directly to her.

“I’m looking for a good criminal lawyer,” he said.

Her head jerked up.

“Because I’ve been accused of murder,” he said.

She started to rise.

He put his hands on her shoulders and slammed her back down onto the makeshift plank and cinder-block seat, which was undoubtedly a metaphor for a medieval bench.

“Remember me?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Hello.”

She was playing a woman in a movie about the French Resistance. She was really a Nazi spy and he was the wounded American soldier who had fallen in love with her and been betrayed by her. It was now his painful duty to turn her over to the authorities. He had come to take her away. She still loved him. She was looking up at him wistfully, her blue eyes wide.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“Comme ci comme ça.” he said, in the French he had learned in Vietnam. “El tu?”

“Not very good,” she said. “I saw it on television.”

“Oh. And what did you see, Miss Parrish?”

“My name is Judy Jordan,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s not what I thought would happen.”

“What did you think would happen?”

“Charlie said he was playing a joke on a friend of his.”

“By Charlie...”

“Charlie Nichols.”

“You call your father by his first name, do you?”

“My father?”

“Yes, Charlie. You call your father ‘Charlie?’ ”

“No, I call my father ‘Frank.’ ”

Michael looked at her.

“Isn’t it true that you call Charlie ‘Daddy’?” he asked.

“No, I call Charlie ‘Charlie.’ ”

“Look, Miss Jordan, I happen to know that Charlie Nichols is your goddamn father. So please don’t...”

“No, Frank Giordano is my goddamn father, which is where I got the name Jordan, from Giordano, and I really don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I am talking about a photograph of you and Charlie Nichols...”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh, inscribed ‘To My Dear Daddy, With Love,’ and signed Judy Jordan, who is you, Miss Jordan, Miss Parrish, Miss Giordano, whoever the hell you are!”

Nodding, Judy said what sounded exactly like, “I remember Mama.”

“Good,” Michael said at once. “Who is she?”

“Who?” Judy said. “ I Remember Mama is a play. I was Christine in a revival. Charlie was Papa.”

“What?”

“Yes. In the play. My father.”

“In a play?”

“Yes. I Remember Mama. And at the end of the run, I signed a photograph...”

“To My Dear Daddy...”

“Yes, With Love.”

“Referring to...”

“Yes, the characters in the play. Also, it was an inside joke, in that Charlie and I were sleeping together at the time.”

“I see.”

“Yes. Charlie was my first lover.”

“I see.”

“Yes. I was seventeen. I was a virgin at the time.”

“So he wasn’t your father.”

“No, that would have been incest. Also, my own father would have shot him dead if he’d found out.”

Michael wondered if her own father had now belatedly if messily shot Charlie dead. He also wondered if Judy even knew that Charlie was dead. He decided not to mention it. From seeing a lot of cop movies, he knew that this was an old cop trick. You did not mention that someone was dead. You waited for the suspect to trap himself by mentioning that the last time he’d seen So-and-So alive was Thursday, and then you yelled, “Ah-ha, how did you know he was dead ?”

“I am really sorry,” Judy said. “When I saw on television that they’d accused you of murdering Arthur Crandall...”

“Oh, you saw that, did you?”

“Oh, yes. I was shocked!”

“But I didn’t murder Crandall, you know.”

“Well, of course you didn’t.”

“In fact, I didn’t murder anyone. ”

“Well, I’m not too sure about that.”

“You can take my word for it. And please don’t change the subject. The reason the police think I killed Rainey...”

“Who?”

“... is that you and Felix Hooper stole my goddamn identification and...”

“Yes, but that was for a joke.”

“What joke? What do you mean?”

“The joke Charlie was going to play on his friend.”

“What friend?”

“He didn’t say.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he needed someone’s identification to play a joke on a friend of his. He said it wouldn’t really be stealing...”

“Oh, it wouldn’t, huh?”

“In that he would return the stuff to its rightful owner the moment he was through with it.”

“And just how did he plan to do that?”

“He said he would mail it all back.”

“And you believed him, huh?”

“Not entirely. But a thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

“What do you mean?”

“Charlie paid each of us a thousand for the job.”

“You and Felix.”

“Yes.”

Which accounted for two thousand dollars of the check Crandall had cashed on Friday. But where had the other seven thousand gone?

“I was the one who picked Felix for the part,” Judy said. “He was very good, didn’t you think?”

“Yes, excellent,” Michael said.

“Yes, he’s a very good actor. I still owe him the thousand, but Charlie hasn’t paid me yet.”

Nor is he likely to, Michael thought.

“So as I understand this,” he said, “you were supposed to steal my identification...”

“Well, borrow it, yes. And your money, too.”

“Why the money? If all you needed was my...”

“In case you went to the police. So it wouldn’t look as if we’d been after your I.D. Actually, it was the best improv Felix and I ever did together.”

“The best what?”

“Improvisation. Picking up a stranger in a bar, and then...”

“You mean I was chosen at random ?”

“Well, not entirely. Charlie gave me the nod.”

“What nod?”

“To go ahead.”

“Go ahead?”

“Yes. He was sitting at the bar, listening to everything we said...”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And he gave me the okay, just this little nod, you know — do you remember when I looked down the bar?”

“No.”

“Well, I did. To get his okay. The nod.”

“To get his permission, you mean, to steal my goddamn...”

“Well, it was only for a joke, you know.”

“A murder was committed!”

“Well, I’m sorry about that, but Felix and I had nothing to do with it.”

“Where does Crandall fit in?” he asked.

“I have no idea, but he’s a very good director and I’m glad it wasn’t him you killed.”

“I didn’t kill anyone, goddamn it!”

“I don’t like profanity,” she said at once. “And if you want to know something, I’m beginning to find you enormously boring and a trifle sinister. If the police made a mistake, you should go to them and correct it, instead of breaking the concentration of someone who’s trying to master a very complex role.”