The Association

What grim motive was behind the terroristic frightening of those beautiful New York models, and behind the murder that accompanied it? I, Austin Green, had two dangerous reasons for wanting to find out . . . .

*****

September, 1945...

ONE: Models

Johnny Walnut said; "I'm telling you, Austin, this doll is something. You can take your million-dollar models and throw them all together and you ain't got nothing that can touch her."

I regarded him with amusement. He was a funny little man with red hair and the sharpest-pointed nose I've ever seen. A photographer, and a good one, he preferred to freelance rather than take a job, although he could have commanded an excellent salary.

"I like to take pictures of what I want, the way I want to take them," he told me once, and I believed him.

"Take it easy, Jimmy," I said, winking at Henry Gaylord, my agency manager. "You'll blow a fuse. To hear you tell it, this tomato is super-extra. I'd almost think you were gone on her if I didn't know that you regard women as strictly from hunger."

He grinned, the red climbing up his pinched cheeks until it reached his oversized ears and colored them. "I wouldn't know about that." He'd lowered his voice. "You see, the way I feel about this Terri . . . all I want to do is sit and look at her, like you would look at a statue or something."

"Bring her around," I said. "We could use something like that. Most of the girls nowadays have been walking around in moccasins so long that they shuffle like an Indian."

He grinned. Henry Gaylord said in his worried voice, "Now, Austin, don't be hasty. This girl probably just fell out of that tree that grows in Brooklyn. If you have Johnny bring her in, she'll get big ideas and—"

"She wouldn't come anyway," said Johnny. "I don't get it. I told her I knew you— kind of building myself up, you know—and she acted sort of scared."

"Maybe," said Henry slowly, "she belongs to this model association. If so, we don't want any part of her."

I swung my chair around to look at him. "Model association? What's that? Do any of our girls belong?"

He shook his head. "It isn't that kind of an association. In fact, I think it's some kind of racket. The cheaper jobbers and ready-to-wear houses that have one and two girls are bothered. I was talking to a friend of mine in the trade the other day. It seems he has to hire the girls they tell him to—or something might happen to his business."

"Nuts."

Henry shrugged and looked appealingly toward Johnny Walnut. "Austin's so used to being the head of the great Green Agency that he can't imagine anyone who isn't afraid of him."

"It isn't that," I said. "It's just that that kind of talk doesn't make sense. Sure, I know there are chiselers around town who would move into anything that looked like they could squeeze a dime out of, but those girls, modeling in the ready-to-wear trade, aren't making enough to attract any kind of a rat. Someone's been kidding you. Now, you both get out and let me work."

THEY went and I proceeded to forget all about Johnny and this Terri Hall. I probably would never have thought of the name again if Johnny hadn't been waiting at the bus stop three nights later when I paused in the hope of picking up a cab.

His face lighted when he saw me and he pulled a big old-fashioned hunter-case watch from the pocket of his sagging vest.

"Hi, Austin. Where you headed?"

I said that I was going home. I was tired of arguing with girls. To those of you who see the photographs of my models on advertising or magazine covers, it may seem that it would be fun to argue with some of the models once in awhile, but when you put in eight hours, six days every week, coping with their temperament, satisfying their whims, temporizing with advertisers, photographers and the like, you get very tired of women.

"Look," he said in his small, eager voice. "It's early, not four-thirty yet. They're having a little show for some out-of-town buyer down at Inga's House of Style. That Terri Hall that I was telling you about. She's working down there. You can get a look at her without her knowing."

I shook my head. "Uh, no..."

"Please, Austin... tell you what I'll do. I'll handle those Radford pictures you've been after me to take, if you'll come down. It won't take half an hour... Hey, taxi!" His arm had gone up and signaled a passing cab which slid to a stop before us.

Johnny had the door open, was shoving me inside and giving the driver a Twenty-second Street address. I shrugged and settled back in the seat. It was easier to go along than it was to argue.

The building before which the cab stopped was an old one, housing a succession of lofts and small show rooms. The one on the third floor into which Jimmy piloted me was no different from a hundred others scattered through New York's sprawling garment center.

Around the showroom were scattered a half-dozen buyers from little chains of ready-to-wear shops from all across the country. It was no different from crowds that you could see at one of these places any time a new line was being shown, but the girl who came through the far door was decidedly different.

I didn't need the tug which Johnny Walnut gave my coattail to know that this was the girl we'd come to see. I watched her instinctively, as a trainer might size up a horse. Models were my business, after all.

She was beautiful, but to me that was of secondary importance. It was the way she walked, the little extra touch that she gave to the clothes she wore.

A little difference is big in models.

THE outfit she was modeling was cheap and badly designed, but on her it looked as if it might have come from Sak's. She wore almost no make-up, yet her skin looked as smooth and soft as a peach.

"What did I tell you!" Johnny whispered gleefully. "Some dish, what?" Before I could stop him, he'd stepped forward and caught the girl's arm as she was about to disappear through the door to the fitting room. He led her, protesting, toward where I stood and I felt every eye fin the room turned in our direction. As they reached me, Jimmy was saying, "Snap out of it, sugar. This is Austin Green. His agency is almost as large as the Powers outfit. You can't afford to miss a chance like this."

I could tell by her face that his words excited her, but under the excitement there was something else that seemed very like fear. "I... I'm not supposed to talk to anyone," she said.

I stepped to meet them. This girl intrigued me. Mostly I have to fight shy to keep from meeting them. Here was one who hesitated at meeting me.

"How do you do?" I said as Johnny introduced us. "I wonder if you'd be interested in calling at my office in the morning. It's on—"

"Oh, but I couldn't."

I stared at her. "Well, in that case," I started to turn away.

But Johnny caught my arm. "Wait a minute, Austin. Don't go."

I turned back and as 1 did so a squat man came through the fitting-room door. He was so broad that he seemed to be almost as wide as he was tall. His face was broad and flat, and his eyes protruded a little as if someone had squeezed his neck too tightly.

"Get out of here." He was talking to the girl, his voice so low that it barely reached my ears.

I took a step forward and he snarled at me, "Keep out of this, Mac," and putting out a thick hand, shoved against my chest.

I hit him without thinking about it. I have never liked being pushed around, and I certainly didn't like this squat man. I hit his jaw, and it was like hitting a piece of iron, sending pain back along my arm in knife-like waves. He put his head down and bored in. I sensed rather than saw the heavy arms, clutching out at me, and knew that if he ever folded me into their bear-like grip, he would smash my ribs and perhaps shatter my spine.

I danced away from him. I'd boxed in college but I'd not had on gloves since. I realized anyhow that this was more than a boxing match, much more. This squat man, charging toward me with his guttural half-animal noises, was a killer. I could see it in his popped, red-rimmed eyes.

I had to stop him, and it had to be with my fists. I concentrated on the man before me, forgetting the startled buyers, the girl and Johnny Walnut. He kept rushing me, his big arms swinging, but it wasn't the blows I feared. I feared that he'd back me into a corner, and wrap those arms around me.

My fists thudded against his head and face, battering it into a red smear. An ordinary man would have fallen, but this grotesque creature kept coming. One of his eyes was closed and blood from a cut over the second eye ran down to blind him partly.

This helped. If he could have seen clearly I don't think I'd have ever escaped. As it was, I can take no real credit for knocking him out. It was Jimmy Wabash who ended it, and the weapon he used was a bronze statuette of a model which sat in a little niche between the windows.

HOW long it was between the man's first charge and the cracking blow against the back of his head which put him down, I'll never know.

He fell forward onto his face, and I thought that he was dead. I wasn't certain that I wasn't either. My chest felt as if it were circled by a band of iron which would not allow me enough air in my tortured lungs. My arms were so weary that I could hardly hold up my puffed, broken hands.

Johnny was excited. "Did he hurt you, Austin? Shit, did you hit him with everything in the book!"

"Everything but a statue," I said wryly. "It seems that's what it takes. Lucky you were around to swing it."

His mouth twisted. "I'm sorry, I couldn't seem to move, couldn't get going."

"You came through in the pinch," I said, feeling one cheek where one of the squat man's wild blows had nearly laid the bone bare. "That was like fighting an ox. We ought to buy his contract and put him in the Garden."

Someone seized my arm, and I thought for a moment that the ox had friends who wanted to carry on the fight. I swung around, ready. Instead I found myself facing a little guy in a gray pin-point stripe suit. His shirt and tie were lavender and matched. His hair was sleek and very black and he looked worried.

"What have you done? What have you done?" He was treating my arm as if he thought it were a pump handle.

I shook him loose. "Take it easy."

He was almost crying. "Rocco won't let me operate. He'll wreck the place, he'll—"

I judged that the man on the floor was Rocco.

"At the moment he won't wreck anything," I said. "We're lucky if he isn't dead."

"You can't kill him," the lavender-shirted one moaned. "Oh, that this should happen to me." He swung about and went tearing away into the cutting room.

I looked at Johnny. "What is this, a den of lunatics? Is the guy dead?"

"He's breathing."

"Then let's call an ambulance and get out of here. We don't want to be mixed up in a brawl in police court." I looked toward the girl, whom I'd forgotten, and found that she was staring down at the battered man on the floor.

"Look, sister, who is he?"

She raised her eyes. They were big and very dark and the most beautiful I'd ever seen. "He's... Rocco."

I lost my temper. After all, I'd taken something of a beating myself. Every muscle in my body ached. "Rocco! Rocco? What is this?"

"He runs the association."

I said, "So what? You act as if you were scared to death of him. My girls belong to a union and they—"

"This is different." She was whispering as if she were afraid that someone would hear her. "We... we can't quit. Something would happen, acid would be thrown. It happened to one girl..."

I STARED at her, not believing my ears, but I had to believe the fear that was mirrored in her face. It was a real, a living thing that gave her a tragic quality hard to describe.

"Look," I said, and my voice was softer, for I found that I suddenly had the impulse to put an arm around her shoulder, to comfort her, to tell her not to be afraid. "This is utterly silly. If everything that you say is true, all we have to do is to call the police, to tell them what you know, and Mr. Rocco will go away for a long, long time where he won't throw any acid or anything else."

"No, no. I don't dare. I can't talk to the police." She was crying openly now. "They'd get the other girls if I did."

"Who would?"

"I don't know. That's the trouble. We've never seen them, never seen anyone but Rocco."

I looked helplessly at Johnny.

He said, "We can't leave her here. That ape will kill her when he comes to."

"If he ever does."

"He will," said Johnny. "No bronze was ever cast that would crack that skull. I'll take her home with me. I've got a sister up in the Bronx. In the morning, we'll decide what to do. Will you give her a job?"

I nodded. "Why not? With some training, and—"

"See?" said Johnny, putting his arm around Terri Hall's slender shoulders. "You've got nothing to worry about, baby. Six months with the Green Agency and you'll be a big shot. You'll laugh at asses like that Rocco."

She shuddered. "I can't go. I—"

"You're going," he said, peeling off his own topcoat and throwing it around her shoulders. "You're okay now, baby, nothing to worry about. Nothing at all." He turned to me. "Coming?"

"Go ahead," I said. "I'm going to find a phone and turn over my little beauty to the cops. We'll see what happens then."

Two: No Chance

HENRY GAYLORD came into my office almost as soon as I arrived, and put a copy of the morning paper on my desk. "I thought you might be interested in this." He pointed to a story in the right-hand column, headed: PHOTOGRAPHER FOUND MURDERED.

It still didn't ring any bell until I read on down and found Johnny Walnut's name. Then I looked up with a start.

"When? How?"

Gaylord said, "It's all there." He was a big man, soft and good-looking in an over-stuffed sort of way, and his face glistened a little now in the shaft of morning sun. "His sister heard an awful racket about one-thirty in Johnny's dark-room. She tried to get in, but the door was locked, and she called the police. When they arrived they broke down the door and found Walnut's body. He'd been beaten to death."

I started, and a picture of the squat Rocco leaped into my mind. "A girl," I said. "Does it say anything about a girl?"

Gaylord looked at me as if I had suddenly gone crazy. "Why, yes, it seems that Johnny brought a girl home with him last night, according to his sister. They put her in the spare room, but when the police looked, she was gone."

I swore under my breath and reached for the telephone, thought better of it and grabbed my hat.

Gaylord said sharply: "You have appointments with—"

"Take care of them," I flung back over my shoulder, for I was already halfway to the door.' "You'll have to run things. I don't know when I'll be back."

*****

CAPTAIN LUNDON and Inspector Rolf of the homicide squad said, "But of course you can see him. He's over at the morgue." They took me over to the morgue and showed me Johnny Walnut, or what was left of him.

Lundon said, "Poor bastard! Whoever did it must have hated him. Only a man crazed by hate would have beaten him up that way."

"I know who did it," I said, turning away. The sight of Jimmy's broken body sickened me.

They both stared at me. Lundon was a little man, not much bigger than Johnny had been, and they looked something alike. He screwed up his gray-green eyes and asked: "Who?"

"I don't know what his name is," 1 told them, "but I called the police about him last night. He and I had a fight in one of the garment lofts on Twenty-Second Street, and he was knocked out. The ambulance came and took him away, but he must have been released. His name is Rocco something or other."

The two men looked at each other, then at me; and Lundon shook his head. "Sorry Mr. Green, but that's out. The man you're talking about is Rocco Grimes. He's a small-time chiseler and former fighter. As soon as we heard about this missing model, we started checking up on him. Walnut had told his sister about the fight, but we're out of luck. Rocco couldn't have killed Walnut because Rocco was still at the hospital, being patched up, at the time of the murder."

I stared at them, not believing my ears. Then I turned and looked at the broken man on the wheeled table. It was so obviously Rocco's work. This was the way he would like to kill a man, breaking him to pieces until the flicker of life went out of his victim. I turned back. "Look, wouldn't it be possible that this Rocco could have slipped away from the hospital, killed Walnut and slipped back in, thus establishing an alibi? I've read of such things, and—"

"You'll find," the police captain told me, "that they happen much more often in movies than they do in real life. However, we checked very closely on this one, and we're certain that Rocco didn't leave the hospital; nor was he in such good shape to kill anyone. You gave him a very thorough beating, Mr. Green."

"Not as much as I'd have liked," I said, grimly. "Look, this model association, or whatever it is, that Rocco is connected with. I'm certain that they killed Walnut and kidnapped the girl. Aren't you going to do anything about it?"

Inspector Rolf spread his hands. "What can we do? We've been interviewing girls and manufacturers all morning and we can't get a straight answer out of any of them. They're lying, we know it, but they tell us with a straight face that they never heard of such a thing. Why, Hillard Wilton, the man who owns the loft where you had your fight yesterday, swore that he'd never seen Rocco before and that he had no idea who he was. Don't think we're giving up, but—"

"I'm not giving up," I said, sticking my jaw out and realizing even as I did so that this was silly. Here were two police officers. I knew they were honest and yet they admitted that this had them stumped.

But inside of me was a burning anger. I'd never felt quite like that before and I couldn't explain it even to myself. I'd liked Jimmy, but I knew a great many people whom I liked as well. Why then should I butt my head against something which was none of my affair? Could it be the girl? Was I worried about Terri Hall?' That didn't make sense. I'd seen her only once. She was beautiful, yes, but in my business, beautiful women are a dime a dozen. I'd go back to my office and forget the whole thing. Sooner or later the cops would find Johnny Walnut's murderer. They always did.

I said goodbye to the two officers and headed uptown, but I didn't go to my office. I went on up to the Bronx.

JOHNNY WALNUT'S sister was a thin- faced, tired-looking woman in her late thirties. Her hair had the same gritty, sandy look that Johnny's had, and her nose was almost as pointed. It gave me a turn to look at her.

"I'm Austin Green," I said, as she showed me into the small, dark living-room. "I came out to see if there was anything I could do to help!"

That wasn't quite true. I'd come out to ask questions, but after one look at her, I couldn't bear to bring up the subject of the murder.

She brought it up herself. "Johnny would have been proud to have you here," she said. "He thought you were a great man, one of the greatest."

This was embarrassing and I fumbled for words, not knowing quite what to say. She saved me the trouble. Words came out of her with a rush. I guess it was a relief to have someone to talk to.

"The girl killed him," she said. "Oh, I don't mean that she beat him herself, but it was on account of the girl. Ever since he saw her first he's been kind of screwy. I don't know whether he was in love with her. I don't think Johnny was ever really in love the way most boys are; at least he never had any girl friends. He was always nuts about pictures, taking them, cutting them out of magazines, anything."

I said, weakly, "I know he was. A great guy."

"In his way." She nodded. "Kind of screwy, but good-hearted. I—" She broke off and I thought for a minute she was going to cry. "It was pretty terrible, seeing him, after... after it was over."