Miss Kopp Investigates

by Amy Stewart

  The question of whether Norma was to support the household or be supported was thrown into sharp relief when Fleurette traipsed back over to Bessie’s house to find her in the kitchen, staring down at a dozen eggs and three russet potatoes.

  She wasn’t just staring at them: she was glaring at them, her chin down and her arms folded across her chest.

  “Whatever have they done to offend you?” asked Fleurette.

  “They’re not pork chops, or green beans, which was what I intended to feed you for supper,” Bessie said.

  Fleurette looked at the clock. It was only four o’clock on a Saturday. The markets were open. This must’ve been Bessie’s way of saying that she didn’t feel well enough to do her shopping.

  “I’ll go,” she offered. “There’s plenty of time.”

  “Oh no, it isn’t the time,” Bessie said. “It’s . . .” And then she started to sniff, and to put a handkerchief against her eyes, and although Fleurette understood that a pregnant widow shouldn’t be expected to have a dry eye for months, she did wonder how the pork chops, or lack of them, brought this on.

  Fleurette pulled out a chair and nudged Bessie into it. “You could turn the kitchen over to us, you know,” she said, although she quaked at the thought. “Constance is an awful cook and Norma will put cabbage, potatoes, and sausage on the table seven nights a week, but we’d manage.”

  Bessie smiled into her handkerchief. “It does me good to stay busy. It isn’t that. The trouble is . . . Oh, I hate to tell you, after everything you girls have done . . .”

  “Now I’m getting worried and you have to tell me,” said Fleurette.

  Bessie sighed. “All right. I went over to Belsky’s just now and . . . well, our account is past due. Mr. Belsky said he hated to bother me about it at a time like this, but he hasn’t been paid in months, and . . . Oh, Fleurette, he said it in front of everybody! I didn’t know what to say. I just ran out.”

  “How could he speak to you like that, after what you’ve been through? Of course the accounts will be paid. We just have to sit down, and . . .” Fleurette realized that she didn’t really know what needed to be done. Where was Constance, at a moment like this?

  “He said he hadn’t been paid in months. Since August, he said.”

  “But that’s impossible! Wouldn’t you have known?”

  “Francis never talked to me about money,” Bessie said, “but something strange did happen over the summer. He used to give me an allowance to run the house. I’d buy groceries, small things the children needed, all of that. But then he stopped. He wanted me to go on charging to our accounts, and he said he’d go around and pay them all himself once a month. I told him that didn’t seem easier at all. How would I know how much I had left to spend? But he insisted on doing it this way.”

  “And he never said why?” Fleurette asked.

  “Oh, I tried to get it out of him,” Bessie said. “We had such a fight about it one night. I said that it made me feel like he didn’t trust me to handle a weekly allowance. He said that I should trust him to take care of the family. It was just awful. We just didn’t talk about it again after that. We couldn’t.”

  “So you had no idea what was owed when he died?” Fleurette said. “I wish you’d told us.”

  “Well, I knew we’d have to reckon with some bills, but I was waiting for you girls to get settled next door. I thought surely I’d have another month or two to sort it out.”

  “How much do you owe?”

  Bessie sunk her chin into her hands. “It’s over twenty dollars. All I could think to do was to come back here and see if we had anything at all that I could pass off as supper for tonight.”

  Fleurette stood up and looked around for her coat. “I’ll go and see what I can do.”

  Bessie started to object, but Fleurette said, “I had a little put away before all this started. And now I’ve got my seamstressing. Give me your grocery list and I’ll take care of it.”

  Bessie sighed and wrote out a list. “Please don’t bother your sisters with this. I just want a night to think about it. I can’t imagine why Francis would’ve done a thing like this. I’m just . . . I’m not ready to answer any questions about it yet.”

  Fleurette snatched the list away. “There’s no reason to tell them at all. It’s probably some sort of book-keeping mistake. I’ll speak to Mr. Belsky and sort it out.”

  Bessie stood and smoothed her apron. “You’re right. I’m making too much of it. Do you suppose you could pick up some rolls at Penfield’s too, if there are any left?”

  * * *

  IT WAS THE first bit of shopping Fleurette had done for Bessie, in all the weeks she’d been living under her roof, and it came as a relief to find another way to be of use. She would make a payment against the account, arrange to pay the rest a week at a time, and return home with a fat parcel of pork chops. If only all their troubles could be so easily undone.

  But their troubles, she was about to learn, went quite a bit beyond the price of pork chops.

  At the butcher’s—Belsky & Son, where Bessie had traded for fifteen years—Mr. Belsky (the elder) weighed the chops and, as he did so, asked the name on the account.

  “Kopp,” Fleurette said.

  Mr. Belsky looked down at her, one bloodied hand on the scale.

  “Francis Kopp? Are you a relation?”

  “Sister,” said Fleurette.

  Mr. Belsky eyed her a minute more, his heavy gray eyebrows furrowed, jowls hanging down like a hunting dog’s. “Sister of the deceased,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Fleurette said, steadying herself.

  He wrapped the chops and tied them with string. “Did Mrs. Kopp send you?”

  “I’ve come to make a payment on the account,” said Fleurette.

  With the news that she could pay, his countenance changed, and he gestured for her to follow him to the register. He looked around first to see that no one was listening, then leaned over the counter and said, in a low voice, “Like I told Mrs. Kopp, the account’s been delinquent for six months. I didn’t like to tell a widow that, but the longer we let it go on, the worse it’ll be for her.”

  “It shouldn’t have gone on this long.”

  “Well, it wasn’t easy for anyone, with the war on, and we just knew your brother would catch up again when it was all over. But now . . .”

  “But now he never will,” Fleurette said. “I don’t blame you. Only I can’t imagine why my brother couldn’t pay his butcher bill. How much is owed?”

  Mr. Belsky made a great show of paging through his ledger, but Fleurette suspected he knew the sum to the penny.

  “Twenty-three dollars and seventy-eight cents,” he said, and showed her the page, with Francis’s name at the top and sums going down a column in ever-increasing amounts.

  “I’ll buy the chops myself,” Fleurette told Mr. Belsky, “and pay you five dollars a week on the account, starting now.”

  Mr. Belsky frowned and looked over his page of figures again. “The last time I saw Mr. Kopp, I told him that the war was over and it was time for him to pay the balance in full.”

  “If only Mr. Kopp were here to pay that balance,” Fleurette said, “and to meet his third child, to be born in July. I don’t suppose Mrs. Kopp told you, but it’ll be apparent in a few weeks.”

  Mr. Belsky went as red as his blood-smeared apron and rushed back to the meat counter to wrap up half a pound of liver. “With my compliments,” he muttered. “Five dollars a week will do just fine.”

  The baby—as yet unnamed, unseen, and not yet definitively fixed in Fleurette’s mind—was nonetheless earning its keep. Fleurette took note of that.

  She would’ve returned home shaken but nonetheless pleased at having sorted out one of Bessie’s small difficulties, except that she soon learned that the difficulty was not so small. Francis owed money all over town. At Penfield’s—the bakery—and at the green grocer, and even at the druggist and the dry goods store, every account was delin
quent. Hawthorne’s business district was only a few blocks long. It was not at all difficult to walk up and down the street and tally the damage.

  Taken together, over two hundred dollars was owed. Out of kindness to Bessie, not one of the merchants had sent a bill to the house—but they were all eager to be paid.

  Fleurette walked as if in a dream from one shop to another, putting down a dollar here, two dollars there, against every past-due balance.

  What, exactly, had Francis been doing with his earnings if he’d stopped paying his bills? If the merchants knew, they weren’t telling. All anyone would say was that the war had been difficult, that they didn’t want to trouble a widow, and that the Kopps had been customers of such long standing that they were willing to be patient.

  By the third or fourth such conversation, Fleurette stopped asking for an explanation and approached the matter coolly, as a business transaction. She had no more need of condolences.

  It occurred to Fleurette, as it often had since her brother’s death, that he would miss everything from now on. He would miss watching Lorraine turn into a young woman, and Frankie Jr. grow into the very image of his father. He would miss his third child entirely. He wouldn’t see Europe at peace again, after talking of nothing but the war for the last year of his life. He would not, for that matter, even see spring again.

  The world would just continue to turn without him. Whatever the next week brought, or the next year or the next decade, Francis would not be a part of it.

  And now this. He wouldn’t live to see his debts retired. He wouldn’t know that it was Fleurette, the perpetual thorn in his side, the young and irresponsible one, the one who defied him and argued with him—he would never know that it was she who went door-to-door, reaching into her purse, making one small payment after another against all that had been lost.

  13

  MR. WARD SAID, “You’re back at the Metropolitan this week. This time I’ll be your accomplice.”

  “Why, what’s Petey doing?” Fleurette asked. She didn’t like the idea of working with anyone but Petey. The two of them had their methods, their unspoken agreements, their secret signals.

  “Petey has the night off,” Mr. Ward said. “Mr. Thorne is an old friend of mine. He wants me to handle this one myself.”

  “And what kind of man is Mr. Thorne?” asked Fleurette, already thinking of her wardrobe.

  “The kind who likes pretty girls,” said Mr. Ward. “Do yourself up.”

  * * *

  FLEURETTE DID HERSELF up. She couldn’t even walk out of the house in her full regalia: although her dress was well-hidden under a plain wool coat, her satin evening slippers had to be buried at the bottom of a carpet bag, along with stockings, a very fetching velvet turban with a peacock feather tucked into the brim, a full complement of face powders, lip-sticks, and hairpins, and a handkerchief soaked in a rather scandalous perfume called Narcisse Noire, a gift from a client who complained that his wife didn’t appreciate Parisian style. She intended to tuck it into her bosom when she arrived at the hotel and remove it again before she returned home, in the hope that her sisters wouldn’t smell it on her.

  With these and many more accoutrements, she arrived at Mr. Ward’s office a full hour before they were due at the Metropolitan and busied herself with her preparations in his bathroom. While she put herself together, Mr. Ward lounged at his desk, his feet up, the sports page folded over his knee.

  “Come out here and help me pick a pony,” he called, just as Fleurette was rolling her stockings on. Her dress hung on a hanger behind her: she’d step into it again after she finished with her powders and paints.

  “There’s no racing this time of year,” she called back.

  “There is in Havana. Say, have you ever been to Havana? The ponies run all year long. We could catch a steamer tonight.”

  This was to be the banter between them for the next hour, she could see that. He wouldn’t be so brutish as to barge in on her when she was in a state of undress, but he certainly seemed to want to hear from her while she was in such a state.

  “What if I read the names aloud and you tell me the one you like? Girls seem to have a knack for picking the right horse just from the name. How does Naturalist sound to you?”

  “Unseemly,” said Fleurette.

  “What about Lottery?”

  “Too risky.”

  “Mother-in-Law?”

  “You made that one up.”

  “It’s right here in the paper if you want to come see for yourself.”

  They continued in this manner until she emerged, ten minutes ahead of schedule, in a state of simmering allure. She wore a slim, wine-colored dress of Georgette crêpe so translucent that it had practically no neckline at all: if not for the glittering sprays of beadwork, it would almost disappear. The ensemble was designed to move and shift and show a bit of collarbone here, a protruding hip bone there. She’d piled her hair up high but loosely because she knew how it brought out her eyes. She wore Mr. Packard’s emerald pin as a pendant, hanging low from a long chain. That little flash of green against her burgundy dress spoke of something Fleurette had only sensed in the air since the war had ended—a bit of carelessness, a touch of defiance, a note of hedonism, in the way women were about to start dressing themselves.

  She was exactly right about that. In her slouchy, sheer, bejeweled state, she was, in fact, a woman of the coming decade, not the one fading into the past.

  Mr. Ward knew just how to respond to the sight of a woman emerging from her dressing-room: he turned once, started, turned again, jumped to his feet, sent his pipe flying, tumbled over his chair, and regained his footing with the comic grace of a dancer.

  “Miss Kopp, you’re going to break up half a dozen more marriages just walking down the street,” he said, “including mine, if you’ll have me.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Will this do for Mr. Thorne?”

  “It will if he survives the shock,” said Mr. Ward. “I wonder if the Metropolitan keeps a doctor on staff.”

  “Is he terribly old?” Fleurette asked, a little disappointed at having gone to all the trouble. Any twenty-one-year-old is attractive to a man of advanced years. Why bother dressing up?

  “It isn’t that he’s terribly old, it’s just that you’re so terribly beautiful,” said Mr. Ward. “Let’s not keep that dress waiting any longer.”

  He whisked her down the stairs and into his automobile. In fact, the hotel was only seven or eight blocks away, as nothing was very far in Paterson’s downtown. But they’d need an auto if they had to get away quickly. Besides, Fleurette was too sumptuously attired: she’d attract attention. Mr. Ward brought her in through the kitchen entrance, as usual, and in a matter of minutes the two of them were standing in front of room 513 at the Metropolitan.

  It was always Petey who knocked, so Fleurette waited for Mr. Ward to do so. Instead he fumbled in his pocket for a key.

  “Why do you have the key?” said Fleurette. “Isn’t he here already?”

  “He’s downstairs,” said Mr. Ward. “We have to conduct a bit of business first. I’ll send him up and give you two a minute to get settled, then I’ll be right in with the camera. Isn’t that how Petey handles it?”

  “More or less,” Fleurette said, a little uncertain.

  Nonetheless she followed him into the room. It was just like all the others: the same heavy curtains, the same good thick carpet, the same two chairs around a little round table, the same settee at the foot of the bed. She found the sight of it comforting: the rooms had grown familiar to her, and she felt every inch the professional as she paced around, making little adjustments.

  “Petey likes us to sit here,” she said, indicating the settee, “with my back to the camera, of course. When you come in, he’ll look over my shoulder, like this.” Here she took Mr. Thorne’s position and made an expression of mock surprise at the intruder.

  “That’s the face that convinces the judges,” Mr. Ward said. “I’ll send
him up in two shakes. Say, did we settle on a name for you this time?”

  In all her excitement over her costume, Fleurette had forgotten to choose a pseudonym! What did it matter, as long as it was one she could remember? “Gloria Blossom,” she said. It was a name she’d used before, but not with Mr. Ward. She’d used it on a clandestine case with Constance during the war. No judge would recognize it.

  Mr. Ward bowed. “Miss Blossom. It’s a crime to keep you waiting.”

  “Then hurry,” she said.

  The wait was longer than she expected. There were no books or magazines with which to pass the time. She would’ve read Mr. Ward’s racing sheet if she had it. She thought to step into the powder room and touch up her hair, but she’d left her combs and creams in Mr. Ward’s automobile. So she waited and watched a little clock on the bedside, as ten minutes passed, then twenty, then thirty.

  At last a key rattled in the door, and a sweaty and inebriated Mr. Thorne stumbled in. “He said you’d be waiting for me!” the man shouted, before the door fell shut behind him. “Gloria, is it? I knew a Gloria once. Now, come over here and tell Billy all about the time we met, because like I told Jack, I don’t remember a thing about that night.”

  Mr. Thorne was an absolutely enormous man, as tall as Constance and twice as broad. Fleurette never would’ve agreed to be alone with him if she’d seen the state he was in. What had Mr. Ward been thinking, pouring drinks into him before allowing him upstairs?

  “I don’t believe we have met before,” Fleurette said mildly, trying to stifle her alarm. “You and I are here to do a job. If you could take a seat here—”

  He grinned at her and took her hand. “Let’s both take a seat.” Before she could pull away, he dropped down to the settee, forcing her off-balance and very nearly yanking her into his lap.

  In the scramble—Mr. Thorne reaching clumsily for her and Fleurette fighting to regain both her balance and her dignity—her hair came undone. Down it fell, the pins and combs springing loose.