Grand Central Noir

Timetable for Crime – by Marcelle Thiébaux

Summer 1937

A CLOUDBURST FLOODED MANHATTAN before dawn. The unmarked van pulled up to the Vanderbilt entrance of Grand Central Terminal. Two men ducked out. They unlatched the rear doors, clambered in to hook up rollers, slid the coffin out of the van and dumped it on the sidewalk.

They dragged the coffin along the wet pavement and heaved it onto a wheeled trolley. Ready to load. The northbound funeral train for the Cemetery ran at noon. The scam had to be set up by then.

Jaxon and his brother jumped back in the van. They lurched around the corner in a screech of wet tires heading for the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey.

Twenty minutes ago they’d made a mistake and it cost them time. Under the deluded notion there was a goods-delivered platform, they'd driven around, realized they were lost and had to go back to Vanderbilt Avenue.

Rayette Debs stood with her umbrella in the pouring rain on the corner of Vanderbilt and 42nd Street. She eyed the van with the botched paint job take off. They’d kept her waiting an extra twenty minutes.

She watched Jaxon at the wheel but didn’t give him a sign. Dark glasses hid her eyes. A black scarf swathed her hair and covered the low-cut neck of her black outfit. Long legs, black stockings and little French heels. She carried a valise tied with a strap, and a stylish lizard cosmetics case.

Rayette walked over behind the stack of crates to the coffin. She studied it. English oak, varnished to a gleam, with handles and mountings of brass. No name plate. Rayette laid a gloved palm on the lid, and smiled, satisfied to feel the death within.

It was Rayette who had tipped the brothers off. She'd overheard something big at the Nifty Nail Parlor on Stagg Street, Jersey City, where she had a job refilling nail-polish bottles. She didn’t know how to do manicures and her bitchy boss wouldn't let her try. Rayette didn't plan on going back.

Rayette had put two-and-two together from what she gleaned. A hefty amount of jewels and money were stashed in a Gifford Avenue apartment where a high roller lived with his girlfriend. Rayette found their names, and checked when the two swells would be out on the town, drinking and clubbing all night. The brothers broke in the apartment and got a much bigger heist than they expected. They also got a big surprise that could've wrecked the operation. The man and his girl came back early, giving the burglars no choice but to take out the suckers. Six shots with a.32 revolver. That left them with two problems. Two bodies.

Rayette prodded the brothers to come up with a brainstorm. What could be more public and crowded than Grand Central? Didn’t the songs and the patter go like that? When you had a zillion bodies all jammed together, people said, This is like Grand Central. What was one more body, or two?

Rayette had gone over to Grand Central and surveyed the layout. “Leave it to me,” she told Jaxon. “First we need a box.” They drove out to a mortuary supplies warehouse in Lodi, New Jersey, and bought a fancy oak coffin. Acting like it was for Rayette’s grandmother. They stowed the two bodies, minus the corpses’ four hands, which Jaxon hacked off and wrapped in a shower curtain.

Rayette turned on her French heels to get in out of the rain. She made for the terminal’s front portals on 42nd Street. Gateway to America. She didn’t glance up at Mercury on the façade, walking on air in his little winged hat. She focused on the job at hand. Finding the right fall guy for the brothers. Then Jaxon said, him and her could turkey trot.

She made her way down the ramp to the Ladies area of the waiting room, bypassed the free toilets and paid for a private stall with a mirror. She tucked on a gray wig and fixed her makeup. She donned the glasses some old bat had left behind at Nifty Nails. Rayette had taken them, in case they came in handy. They gave her a headache but she put up with it.

In her grandma disguise, Rayette found the baggage room and checked a travel kit packed with the kind of stuff a man would carry on a trip. Mennen’s shave cream, toothbrush and Ipana, socks, underwear, shirt and ties. Folded racing sheets, sports pages, help-wanted ads. A west coast timetable with the LA trains circled in grease pencil. Padded in some Fruit of the Looms was the.32 shooter.

She zipped the baggage check in her purse. Still in the old-bat glasses, Rayette took a pew-like bench in the waiting room. Hidden by pots of greenery, she settled down with a Bible until the Newsreel Theatre opened.

When it was time, Rayette paid for another private toilet stall and changed-hosiery, wig, cosmetics and a douse of Evening in Paris perfume from Woolworth’s. She examined her bag for cigarettes and crossed the Main Concourse, transformed and unrecognizable.

Inside the terminal, railway travelers began arriving from every side. Dozens of them, hundreds, thousands, all with their eyes fixed on the big clock. Rayette had her timetable in her head.

She navigated the expanse of the Tennessee marble floor, not bothering to look up at the stars reeling across the cerulean-blue painted sky. She'd seen them already. Head lowered, she skirted the information kiosk with the big clock and made for Track 17.

The Grand Central Theatre and the Newsreel Cocktail Lounge across from Track 17 had just opened this summer. These additions to the terminal were wildly popular. Travelers waiting for trains passed the time in the bar and little movie house, catching news, shorts and cartoons.

Rayette ignored the newsstand stocked with magazines, candy bars, tobacco and gum, tour brochures for Pan Am flights and steamship cruises. She had what she needed and didn’t want the fat blonde at the stand to remember her.

She did a fast inspection of the sandwich board with today’s movies. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor honeymooning in France. Adolf Hitler sending truckloads of prisoners to a new concentration camp at Buchenwald. Cartoon clips from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. No heists or murders. Just more of the usual.

Rayette stepped into the bar. Nice place. She didn’t see any cops. Polished brass rail, red barstools, tables, the alcove with easy chairs in leatherette. It was cheery with the clatter of glasses and talk. She took note of the morning drinkers. Besides the shifting crowd of transients and long-distance travelers, the cocktail lounge drew a core of regulars – northbound commuters and newsmen from the neighborhood papers, The Daily News, The Sun, The New York World-Telegram. The newsmen bragged about the great pix they’d got the night before with their Speed Graphics, and hoped to get when the 20th Century Limited came in again at five. Hollywood celebrities and the world’s most beautiful women got the red-carpet treatment in the Biltmore Room when they breezed in on the 20th Century.

Big-shouldered Eddie Kromer was one guy who didn't need a timetable, didn't own a Speed Graphic and had no reason to watch the clock. He wasn't going anywhere. His jacket was thin for the cold June they were having. He had on a rumpled maroon tie, gray slacks, and like some of the newsguys, a fedora shoved back on his head. His shock of curly hair fell over his forehead and grew down on his neck. It was eight weeks since his last haircut.

Chain-smoking at the bar, Eddie gaped with religious awe at the bright-lit altar of bottles. Whisky in jewel colors. He thought of asking the barman for more credit, picturing an amber glassful before him like a lovely elixir of oblivion. He needed a drink and yearned for a girl. Just one girl. Bonnie. She’d crushed his heart. She'd left him for a guy with more money, more paunch and a lot less hair than Eddie, and this old dude was twice Bonnie’s age. More than anything, Eddie Kromer needed a job. His prospects selling Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedias door to door did not shine bright as a way of winning back Bonnie’s attention.

Bonnie was a traveling stenographer on the luxurious 20th Century Limited. She took dictation for rich moguls on the coast-to-coast run. This one money-czar was now taking up her time, and Bonnie made that clear to Eddie.

Eddie moped. When the next 20th Century came in, he'd go look for Bonnie as she stepped off the train with her steno pad, prettier than any movie star. He’d reason with her. He was edgy. With the buzz of talk, the Newsreel Cocktail Lounge had the feel of suspended action, of something waiting to fall and break and define the situation.

That was when the girl walked in. A lot of heads turned to appraise the newcomer and Eddie's head swiveled too.

She was young, between a waif and a voluptuous waking dream. A stunner. A beautiful madonna in little French heels with chartreuse stockings. Tousled bobbed hair the color of rosé wine. She wore a trim black suit, the plunging throat showing off a curve of creamy bosom. She parked the valise on a corner chair. She sat beside it, unbuttoning and peeling off her long chartreuse three-button gloves, pinching the fingertips, drawing finger by finger in a leisurely striptease that had every man's eyes riveted as she bared her tapered white hands.

Rayette looked over the men at the bar for the one who'd suit her. She went over to join Eddie, not taking a barstool but standing close to his side. She beamed him a touching smile that got right to him. He let himself breathe her smell, flowery jasmine mixed with girl-sweat.

Eddie said, “Hi,” and fell right into those gray velvet eyes, soft as the fur of a Persian feline the color of locomotive smoke.

“I could use a drink,” said the girl, ever so faintly.

“This is the place,” said Eddie. “What can I get you?”

“A double Cutty Sark,” she breathed, her voice trailing into sweet melancholy. “On three or four rocks.”

Before gentlemanly Eddie could ask the barman for credit the girl smiled at him.

“I’ve got money,” she said in the breathy voice of a little girl playing at being a big girl, and pulled a couple of dollars from a tiny bulging green change-purse. Enough for two drinks. The barman set a brimming glass for her on a cocktail napkin with a movie-projector logo. And a drink for Eddie.

Flummoxed, Eddie introduced himself.

“How do you do, Eddie,” said Rayette. “I’m Madelyn Burns.”

“Hello, Madelyn.”

“I’d like it if you joined me,” she said innocently. “It’s a little confusing here.” Her lips were full, a glossy pink and turned down with sadness. “Why don’t you bring your drink over, Eddie, and share my table?”

“Sure,” he said, not because it meant anything, but she seemed to need protection, and seemed to be from some very small town. If he was surprised he wasn’t showing it, and carried both drinks to the corner table where she’d left the black lizard bag and the valise. The long green gloves lay discarded on the table, as if this weren’t New York where you never took your eye off your valuables.

“You got to be careful of your things in the big city,” Eddie said. He would have added, You look like you need somebody taking care of you. But he held back on this, which he judged too personal.

From there on, they hit it off. They traded a lot of talk, how he'd had a run of bad luck, and she said she had too. They smoked, drank, exchanged details. So many details were similar. Wasn't that a coincidence? Inevitably, they got to know each other well.

Gratified, maybe surprised that she welcomed him so readily, Eddie realized he was used to thinking of himself as a gentlemanly nice-guy and so her friendliness did not seem hard to believe.

“You know what?” said Rayette. “Let’s see a movie. Wouldn't it be fun?”

“Well, sure, great idea.” And Eddie thought that in the dark Newsreel Theatre he might hold her hand or even get his arm around her. They found two plushy seats way in the back row. They gazed at the screen with the luminous clock overhead for passengers catching a train, which neither of them was.

The next newsreel brought gasps from the audience. Platinum-blond bombshell Jean Harlow was dead of uremic or maybe platinum poisoning. Shots were shown of Clark Gable in a lip-clinch with Jean looking platinum as hell.

Eddie slipped an arm around his movie date, and they sat entwined in the dark. Eddie was surprised at what a nice girl Madelyn was to him. Eddie Kromer kissed her on the mouth, which was sweet as juicy fruit, and she was taking hold of him in one of her silky paws in a moment that granted him a supreme ecstasy such as he could compare to nothing,

“Cigarette?” she whispered. “Here, have one of mine. They’re imported.” She offered her pack from the lizard satchel. He lit hers, and one for himself. Amazing aroma. Fragrant. He inhaled deeply, and at the same time uttered a choking gasp, which could have sounded like a passionate seizure of bliss at being clutched in a longed-for embrace. No one heard his horrible throttled gagging since Eddie and Rayette were way in back and the audience was still moaning about poor Jean Harlow.

There are poisons easy to apply. Fast killers. A strong solution of prussic acid could be pressed to the mouth and nose and the inhalation prove fatal. An inhaled cigarette infused and saturated with prussic acid, also known as hydrocyanic acid, caused instantaneous death. Rayette knew this was the quickest of poisons, and had heard it left no traces. She had solved Eddie's unemployment troubles for good.

“Honey,” Rayette murmured. “I’m going out to the Ladies.” With a tender hand, she slipped the claim check for the man's travel bag in Eddie’s breast pocket. Eddie Kromer neither felt nor heard a thing, since he was already slumped in death. On the screen, the next newsreel showed Amelia Earhart climbing into her twin-engine Lockheed Electra with co-pilot Fred. The voice-of-God reported her lost, maybe around New Guinea.

It wasn’t until the New York City Police came into the Theatre that they found Eddie with an arm draped on the valise with the strap around it, and by now the valise began to leak. Four men in blue grabbed the young man apparently dozing in the Theatre's back row. They roughly shook him. Yanking the valise from him, a cop snapped, “We’ll take that, buddy, and we have some questions for you.”

Eddie Kromer, 28, wasn't taking questions and he wasn’t waking up. In the breast pocket of his good jacket, the police found a baggage claim that they quickly matched up with the travel kit in the checkroom. The kit contained a.32 pistol and a bill of sale for one oak casket. That casket had been retrieved from behind a pile of crates out in the rain near Vanderbilt Avenue. It held the bodies of a man and a woman, both dead of gunshot wounds to the head and chest. The hands had been cut off, and were found in the leaking valise. Everything fit, but the killers had overlooked one thing. A thin gold ankle bracelet on the female corpse was engraved: Madelyn Burns.

“Christ in a manhole,” muttered one of the cops. “This is something big, and we got the guy who did it.”

“I don’t know,” said his partner, who had a tough baby-face and stubborn dimpled chin. “It looks to me like we got a whole new bunch of questions.”

Satisfied she’d got what she wanted, Rayette Debs looked less waiflike in the mirror of her paid toilet stall. In her final trip to the Ladies, she pulled off the rosé wine wig and stuffed it in the lizard satchel with her other props. Together with the cash and jewels. She decided she’d earned them getting those two losers off the hook, and she was already tired of Jaxon. She didn't think she’d ever be seen in Grand Central again.

She walked out across Vanderbilt Avenue and Madison, over to Fifth, and on through the rain-driven streets until she reached Sixth Avenue. She raised her dainty umbrella and a gloved hand. Before long a taxi stopped. The driver glanced without interest at the girl with cropped black hair.

Rayette got in. The two brothers would be waiting for her at the ferry landing in Jersey City. They expected she'd be on the Christopher Street Ferry. Rayette had other plans.

“Newark Airfield.”

The cabbie grunted, noting his fare's strange gray eyes. They reminded him of a snarly gray cat. Or the dirty roiled-up Hudson River. Then he drove through the tunnel and forgot her looks.

In her lizard bag Rayette had a timetable for the Pan American flights to Florida. In a few hours she'd board the flying boat called the American Clipper. By early morning the plane would circle down for a landing on Dinner Key near the Miami Guard Station. The passengers would applaud and sing “A Happy Landing.” They always did. One passenger wouldn’t trouble herself with clapping. She’d smile.