Stewart Sterling

Crime Confidential

He was tall for his age — which was seventeen — and good looking in a dark-eyed, brooding sort of way. The brooding part was that though he smiled a lot to show his nice, even, white teeth he almost never smiled with his eyes because he was studying you to see if you thought his smile was as dazzling as, say, Vic Mature’s.

That was how you could tell he was stage-struck — or maybe it’s TV-struck, these days. He wanted to be an actor, the worst way. That was the way he made it, finally.

I will call him Ciro because that was the name he liked to be known by, though he was originally tabbed with just plain John. It’s the least I can do for him now, the way things worked out. I had a small and thoroughly unintentional part in getting him famous after a fashion, so naturally I want to give him the billing he deserves.

This began a few years back when I was mixed up in — possibly embroiled in is a more accurate description — radio and also in television in its growing pains stage. One night, after a half hour of what our sponsor called Thud-and-Blunder, I came out of the control room to congratulate Miss Carol Bruce who had just done a swell job on the show. I had to stand in line to do it because Ciro was in there ahead of me, giving out with his handsome smile and watching with those brooding eyes to see what impression he was making on her.

A Request

Just as I came close enough to hear him tell Miss Bruce he was planning to be an actor himself, she caught sight of me. In nothing flat she’d turned him over to me and had slid away. Ciro tried the smile on me and asked if I could help him get started in radio.

“Any experience?” I asked.

“I can tap dance,” he said.

“Acting, I mean.”

“I can read off a script as well as anybody else.” His tone said he didn’t think it would be much of a trick for a man of such obvious distinction. He handed me a card with Ciro S — printed on it. At the bottom, in one corner, was his phone number and in the other it said: Dancer — Juvenile Lead.

All I could do was tell him how to get an audition from the casting directors and pass along the standard advice to go to a good school of acting and learn something about the trade.

He thanked me and said he would certainly do that, and I would be hearing from him.

I didn’t, though. If he came around to the studios or the agencies for an audition, he must have been pretty bad. Or maybe they didn’t need any tap dancers just then. I forgot all about Ciro and his toothy smile. I probably never would have thought about him again, except that one day recently the sponsor of that Thud-and-Blunder program wanted me to do him a small favor.

He wanted to see a special show, put on by the Police Department at their theatre down on Centre Street in New York. I made the arrangements, met him at the Coffee Pot on Broome Street at eight-thirty ayem. The lineup begins at nine sharp.

Unwilling Actors

It’s quite a show, even though the stage is bare of scenery and the auditorium itself is just a high-ceilinged room with rows of armchairs, like the high school gym in your home town when parents are invited to watch some amateur student production. But there the resemblance ends: the performers at Centre Street are more reluctant than any amateurs who ever got panicked by stage fright.

Maybe it’s because these actors have to come out on the bare stage all alone and stand against the glaring white wall under the bright spotlights that shine straight in their eyes and do their stuff at the mike, knowing in advance the audience won’t be giving them any applause whatever.

There is a sort of prompter, a master of ceremonies, in a blue uniform; this particular morning he was an assistant chief inspector.

The audience began to file in. They were all solid-looking citizens with dead-pan, expressionless faces and watchful eyes. Though they came in groups of three or four, there was none of the chitchat and buzz-buzz you hear in a regular theatre before the lights go down and the curtain goes up. These men were quiet.

There was no curtain to go up, anyway. The A.C.I. read off a name from the list on the stand before his microphone. A door in the far wall opened, and a cop pushed out a short, pudgy shmo who shambled over to the four steps at the side of the stage and halted.

“Come on. Snap it up, Francis. We haven’t got all night.” rasped the loudspeaker.

Francis went up the steps, shuffled across the stage. It was only about twenty-five feet wide, but he made it look as if the twelve feet to the mike was the last lap in a potato sack race.

That one was a repeater; he knew the ropes. He answered questions haltingly, blinked at the strong light, denied nothing of the charge the inspector read to him. He was a sex offender and was due to take a long vacation at the state’s expense. But whatever he had to go through when he got up to the Stone School. I had the feeling he was sure it couldn’t be as bad as this ordeal of having three hundred detectives give him the cold and scornful up-and-down.

The Hider

There were six of these solo performers before the door opened to send out a John Somebody-or-other who had been picked up on charges of being a hider. My companion asked what kind of a crook that was, but I was too astonished to answer. The hider was Ciro.

He didn’t tap dance his way across that barren stage but he didn’t stumble or shuffle along, either. He took the steps two at a time, strode briskly to the microphone, and showed his lovely teeth in that smile which put in play only the lower half of his face.

The assistant chief inspector read the charge:

“John—, charged with concealing himself on business premises not owned by him and remaining there after closing for purposes of committing grand larceny. How about that, John? Did you do that?”

“I certainly did not.” The words came clear and firm without hesitation or mumbling. “The accusation is utterly false.”

The hollow voice of the loudspeaker asked. “Weren’t you picked up carrying a case of brandy out of that bar and grill on Van Nostrand at three-thirty this morning?”

“I was,” answered my tap-happy acquaintance. “But I had no intention of stealing it. I am well known in that cafe—” he straightened his bow tie carefully — “and I have every intention of paying for the liquor I took out of there.”

The blandness of the guy threw even the inspector a little. “Well... uh... how’d you happen to be in that bar at three-thirty in the morning?”

“I walked in some time during last evening,” Ciro answered, making an airy, offhand gesture. “Around one, I should think it was. I sat in one of the booths with a couple of my friends. We had a few brandy highballs, and I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I remember I woke up under the booth table, all the lights were out, and everyone had gone!”

It got a laugh, the first one of the day, from the assembled dicks.

“First time such a heavy sleep ever overtook you in somebody’s place of business, John?”

“No.” Ciro hung his head. He bit his lower lip. He scowled. His voice became subdued. “It happened once before, up on City Island.”

A Good Bad Actor

“Yeah,” agreed the hollow tones of the loudspeaker. “That time you were drinking Scotch and you had sixteen quarts of Scotch in that Navy duffel bag you just happened to have with you when the officer on the beat accosted you.”

“I guess I’m—” Ciro’s voice broke; it was as well done as any part I’d ever heard played on a soap-opera — “I’m apt to go off the deep end when I’ve had a few too many, that’s all. I needed money to help me finish my training. That’s why I did it.”

“What kind of training are you taking, John?”

Ciro raised his chin proudly. His eyes flashed. “I’m attending the De Coursey College of the Stage,” he said in the perfect, pear-shaped tones of the cultured juvenile lead.

“Well, well,” said the inspector unfeelingly. “Perhaps the judge will arrange it so you can complete your studies upstate. Last time all you got was a suspended sentence. This time it might be different. Next prisoner.”

As Ciro marched, not so briskly then, off the stage, my companion commented:

“There’s a guy who looks like a real bad actor!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered. “Kind of corny, of course. But every hamateur has to get a start somewhere.”

It’s a tough way to break in, though.

Content

Stewart Sterling
Crime Confidential