Don't Dare a Dame

by M. Ruth Myers

  “No. Somebody sent by a man who doesn’t like some questions I’m asking, I think.”

  “Last time we talked, I got the impression you might be scratching around a politician.”

  “Yes.”

  “Care to share a name?”

  “Only if you and Pearlie promise not to get involved.”

  “You’re a big girl. You don’t need us.”

  “That’s the kind of wiggle I’d do to keep from making a promise.”

  Her smile spread in a slow line with no hint of a curve except at the ends. No matter what else it conveyed, it always held a hint of challenge.

  “Very well. We won’t poke in unless you invite us.”

  “It would complicate the little dance he and I are doing.”

  “What’s the dance?”

  “One where he needs to prove he’s smarter than I am.”

  Rachel grinned.

  “Does he know you’re leading?”

  Her drink arrived. The waiter asked if I wanted another. With some regret I decided against it.

  “Cy Warren,” I said as we settled in again.

  “Swallowtail Properties. Commercial landlord. He doesn’t build much, and when he does, the projects are smaller than we generally handle.”

  Rachel’s company built small apartment buildings, private schools, offices for doctors and lawyers.

  “Any whispers of his being crooked?” I asked.

  “None that I’ve heard. Like me to make a few discreet inquiries of people I trust?”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Anything else that Pearlie or I could do to be useful?”

  “I could use a driver tomorrow.”

  I was pinching bits from the cherry that decorated my old fashioned, easing them into my mouth, which was still too sore for much wear and tear. My empty stomach didn’t have much sympathy for my mouth. Rachel eyed me shrewdly.

  “What have you eaten today?”

  “An egg. Coffee. Getting back on my feet.”

  “Sure you are.” She knocked back her Gibson and stubbed out what remained of her cigarette. “Come on. I’ll give you a ride home.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll take a taxi.”

  “A while ago you said we were friends. It’s what friends do. Just let me make a phone call first.”

  On the way out, she noticed me favoring my side, but made no comment. She said we needed to make a stop on the way. It turned out to be at a good-sized building I’d never seen. One wall had a string of symbols I thought might be Hebrew, and two spotless delivery trucks were pulled up next to the door.

  Rachel got out. When she returned, she shoved an open pasteboard box in my lap. Inside were a spoon and what looked like a squat, wide-mouthed vacuum bottle of stainless steel.

  “Catering place,” she said briefly. “The owner’s a friend. He makes the best chicken soup you’ll ever taste. Things in it are matzo balls. Good for what ails you.”

  Thirty-four

  Rachel was right on all counts about the soup. The next morning I felt considerably better. By the time Pearlie picked me up, the other occupants at Mrs. Z’s had left for their jobs, which was how I’d planned it. My mouth hadn’t looked quite as swollen when I checked the mirror, and my lips weren’t as sensitive. I figured I was up to oatmeal.

  Pearlie let me off at the door nearest McCrory’s lunch counter. He sauntered in ten minutes later to check on my progress. When he saw I was just about done, he brought the car around and helped me in. He argued some when he let me out in front of my building.

  “Sure you don’t want me coming up with you?” he asked for the third time.

  “Nobody’s going to jump me in the middle of the day. Except maybe you and Rachel.”

  “Okay. Twelve-thirty then.”

  “Thanks, Pearlie. Don’t forget to give that Thermos back to Rachel, and tell her the soup was first-rate.”

  Heebs was supposed to check in with me. He might have stopped by to tell me something while I was laid up, but in any case I wanted to pay the kid for his week’s surveillance. And I wanted him away from Cy Warren.

  In the meantime, while I still wasn’t up to running foot races, I could make phone calls. I got out the list of beer joints Connelly and Seamus and I had brainstormed. Most wouldn’t be open for business yet, but they’d be sweeping out, washing glasses, overseeing deliveries for another day’s trade.

  “Oh, hi. Could you take a message for Neal Vanhorn?” I bubbled when somebody answered. “This is the dry cleaners. He left a ten dollar bill in the pants he dropped off. We thought he might want it.”

  “Who?” said a voice on the other end. “Honey, this is a bar.”

  “Oh, I know. Neal said he had a swell time there.” I gave what I thought was a giggle. Giggles had never been my strong suit. “I figured if he got the money back, he’d be spending some of it there.”

  “Sorry, don’t know any Neals.”

  “He’s kinda new, visiting or something. Maybe if I described him....”

  I did. After repeating the same act half a dozen times, I still hadn’t had any luck, although one guy had generously offered to come fetch the money and hold it for Neal in case he came in.

  Someone knocked at my door. I leaned back and let my hand dangle conveniently close to the pocket under my chair as I called a greeting, but it was Heebs. He looked up from closing the door and stopped in his tracks.

  “Holy smokes, Sis! Someone roughed you up bad.”

  “Yeah, but I shot him,” I said to allay his dismay.

  He came toward me, all traces of his usual sauciness vanished.

  “Was it Cy Warren’s mugs did it?”

  “Nah,” I lied. “Some girls have a fan club. The one they started for me is people lining up to break my nose. Learn anything on that black Dodge?” I’d asked him to keep an eye peeled for the car Pearlie and I had boxed in.

  Still eyeing me solemnly, Heebs sat on the edge of a chair. He shook his head.

  “Nobody ought to punch a woman like that, Sis. On the Dodge, what I learned is whoever drives it must not be pals with Cy. If you got the tail number right, then I didn’t see it, not even once. I went past a couple of times in the evening, too, when I knew they were having meetings.”

  “Heebs—”

  “Thought you might like this, though.”

  Reaching into his pocket, he brought out a torn scrap of paper and gave it to me with a flourish. Penciled on it were a dozen license plate numbers, each followed by the kind of car that wore it.

  “Started keeping track of them the first day I was down there,” he said proudly. “Ones parked in back of Cy’s place and ones that parked along the street but people went in. A check mark means they were there more than once. Two marks means they were there most every day.”

  “Nice work, Heebs, but you took too much risk, snooping around in the alley. They might have spotted you, gotten suspicious.”

  He grinned, more aware than was good for him that he had an aptitude for my kind of work.

  “Guy’s got to walk back where he came from when he’s done selling papers, and he’s got to find somewheres in an alley to relieve himself now and then.”

  I started to chuckle, but gasped and pressed an arm to my side.

  “You’re good, Heebs. No question. Most of all, your malarkey. But you have to scram. You’re making my ribs hurt. I’ll give you a buck to run some errands for me, though, if you’re willing.”

  “No need to give me lettuce to do you a favor, Sis.”

  I did, of course. Mixed in with my phone calls to bars earlier, I’d called a second-hand shop called The Good Neighbor. The woman who ran it appreciated some help I’d given her and she’d been more than willing to lend me a canvas cot for a couple of days. Having a place to stretch out would help me manage until I was back to full speed. By the time I’d made more unsuccessful calls about Neal, and Heebs had returned with the cot set it up with me explaining how it went together, I wa
s more than ready to give it a test run.

  Clarice had included a blanket when she sent the cot. Folded under my head, it made a good pillow. I closed my eyes, but my brain kept working.

  Where was Neal?

  Who was the little girl?

  Why hadn’t the black Dodge that had followed me several times shown up on the list from Cy Warren’s headquarters?

  Could the latter anomaly have anything to do with the fact Alf’s neighbor claimed she’d seen two cars the night he was murdered? If there had been two cars....

  That was as far as I got before falling asleep.

  ***

  “There ... and there.” As Pearlie drove slowly down Percy, I indicated the spots where Dillon’s Drugs and the menswear store owned by Cy’s father once had stood. “It would have been put out somewhere behind those two buildings.”

  That wasn’t necessarily the only place a kid might have seen what she thought was a clothing dummy carried out. Still, the stinging of my stitches told me it was the right place. Pearlie continued to the end of the block where he stopped to let a mailman cross with his bag. I thought of Wee Willie making his rounds somewhere, and wondered if he cut up any on his route. At the end of the next block, which was shorter and the last block on Percy, we turned into the alley and started back to get a view from the rear.

  “Kids have good eyes. Need a feel for how far away the girl could have been,” Pearlie observed.

  I nodded. He’d brought Rachel’s big Buick this afternoon. It was comfortable as an easy chair. I was sitting across from him instead of in back the way Rachel did when he drove.

  “Alley angles some. Can’t see the back of those places.”

  “Until you get about here,” I said a moment later.

  It was his turn to nod.

  “And she would have been on the second or third floor, maybe the attic.”

  Even as I thought aloud, Pearlie was already squinting up at the houses that backed on the alley. I tried to dismiss the unsettling thought that his measure of how far you could see might be how far you could see to draw a bead on someone.

  “What about the other side of Wayne?” I asked. “Could someone see from there, do you think?”

  “Never smart to think when you can check.”

  We spent more than an hour surveying the area and debating lines of sight. After our first few passes, our attention focused on a single block of houses on the street north of Percy. They all backed on the alley, and though Pearlie expressed doubts about those farthest from the old drugstore, we agreed all the houses there were a possibility. I thought the house kitty-corner to the drugstore but on the other side of Wayne was a possibility too, and maybe a house or two on either side as well.

  “Not unless there was a hotel there. Something high like that,” Pearlie said.

  The houses on the corner were well maintained, but they looked old enough to have predated the flood. So did the ones in the block that was my primary interest. Most of them were two story; a couple were three. We drove down the street in front of them again. The one behind where the drugstore had stood was painted white. The one next to it was pale green.

  “What next?” asked Pearlie.

  He meant driving directions.

  “Next I find someone who knew the families who lived in these houses back then,” I said.

  Somewhere in the course of this ride-around I’d hatched an idea where to start.

  Thirty-five

  Pearlie dropped me off at Mrs. Z’s around four. It was early enough the other girls wouldn’t be home yet to pester me with questions when they saw my puss. The day had used up most of my energy. I hadn’t realized how much breath stairs required until halfway up when I felt myself getting lightheaded. I gripped the bannister and lowered my head to get blood going.

  “Maggie?”

  I’d forgotten that Jolene left around this time to get to the club where she worked as a cigarette girl. She bounced down the stairs toward me.

  “Oh jeez, Maggie, you got beat up. Here, sit down.” She took my arm and sat down beside me..

  “It didn’t just happen,” I said. “I’m okay — just get a little short of breath sometimes because I’ve got some ribs taped.”

  Her blonde curls bobbed wisely.

  “It squishes your lungs so you can’t breathe. Then you faint. Happened to me too. When I was a kid I got kicked by one of the cows. Good thing it wasn’t my head, huh, although my brother used to claim that it was when he thought I was acting dumb. Anyway, my folks were scared it might have busted something inside me, so they bundled me into the truck and drove me in to the doctor...”

  It always intrigued me wondering how long Jolene would be able to go on without pausing for breath. She should have been an opera singer, but they didn’t pack as many words in.

  “... and all the jouncing around coming home didn’t seem to hurt quite as bad as I remembered, although since I’d blacked out going I didn’t remember much. But then after a few days, when I started running around, I kept fainting. Head out to the henhouse and boom — I fainted. Run down to the barn to help feed the pigs and boom — I fainted. Well, Dad said no daughter of his was going to faint, not when any fool could see that everything else about me was working just fine. He told Mom to get out her sewing shears and cut those bandages off my ribs, and she did, and they didn’t hurt any worse and healed just fine, and I never fainted again.” She cocked her head as an idea struck her. “Want me to run get my scissors and cut yours?”

  I managed not to laugh, mostly because I knew it would hurt like sin.

  “I don’t want to hold you up right now, Jolene, but thanks. I just might take you up on it in the morning.”

  She got up to leave.

  “And hey, when people ask how you got that cut lip and bruises, tell them you got in a car wreck. They’ll believe that quicker than saying you fell down some stairs.”

  It was a sad day when Jolene concocted a better fib than I did.

  ***

  Jolene’s coaching came in handy the next day when I called Billy.

  “One of the girls told me you’d called about me a couple of times, but the cough syrup I was taking made me so woozy I was afraid to try and make it down the stairs.” I coughed for effect. “Thought I’d better call and let you know I was on the mend so you didn’t think I’d died or something.”

  “Well, I don’t mind telling you, you had us worried. Mick said you had a bad cough, but it wasn’t like you to be laid up for a week if it was no more than that.”

  “Trouble is, the friend who gave me a lift down to get the cough syrup got in a wreck, so I got banged up, too. Nothing serious. Didn’t go through the windshield or anything.”

  He made concerned noises and I reassured him. I hung up in fine spirits. Genevieve had been home the previous evening, and she’d cut my bandages off. As Jolene had predicted, my ribs didn’t feel any worse without bandages. It felt glorious breathing again. On top of that, no bandages meant I’d been able to take a bath. This morning I’d walked to the trolley and ridden it to the beauty shop I used sometimes, and got a shampoo while my stitched lip stayed nice and dry.

  By afternoon I should be up to driving. I had an idea how to locate the little girl who’d lived somewhere around Percy Street. The sooner I did, the sooner I could warn her she might be in danger.

  ***

  Wee Willie Ryan lived in the same white frame house his parents had lived in when we were kids. I swallowed the river of memories that wanted to come as I walked from my car to the door. It was late afternoon and the air had the sort of bite that makes kids tuck their cold fingers under their armpits and ignore its sting on their cheeks so they can keep playing.

  “Maggie!” Willie’s wife Maire burst into a smile the instant she saw me. Then she got a look at my face and her own face fell. “Jaysus, Maggie, are you still scrapping with people?”

  We shared a chuckle. Maire had chestnut hair, with cheeks and lips as pink as rose
buds. She’d been a year behind Willie and me in school, and got into more trouble than she deserved for being an avid onlooker at most of our hijinks.

  “How’ve you been keeping, Maire?”

  “Better than you, by the looks of it.”

  “Car accident. Nothing serious. Look, I apologize for barging in when you’re probably busy fixing dinner—”

  “It’s in the oven, and you’d better stay for some. Go on. Have a seat.”

  A cute little girl of four or thereabouts had been peeking round the kitchen door. Three boys, two older, one just a toddler, thundered in past her.

  “Ma, where’s our ball?” asked the tallest.

  “Same place it always is. Say hello to Miss Sullivan.”

  The little girl had joined the bunch. They chorused as instructed, then ran to retrieve a softball from a pretty dish that looked like it had been meant for a more genteel purpose.

  “I want to throw,” the little girl begged as they started out.

  “Girls don’t play ball,” said one of the older ones.

  A tiny foot snaked out and sent him sprawling.

  “Ma, Kathy tripped me!” he howled.

  “And why’d you torment her with nonsense about what girls do and don’t do? Let your sister play too or put the ball back. And if it comes near any windows, you won’t see it again until spring.”

  They clattered out.

  “That girl shows promise,” I said.

  Maire’s eyes rolled heavenward. “Out of the four of them wouldn’t you just know she’s the one most like her father?”

  “If I can just have a word with Willie, I’ll be on my way.”

  “You won’t escape that easy, but I’ll tell him you’re here.” She stepped into a small hall and raised her voice slightly. “Will, Maggie-the-devil’s here.”

  Irish girls named Maggie are a penny a dozen. There’d been three of us in my class, and at least that many in all the others. To keep us straight, the nuns added last names. Our peers preferred nicknames. I wasn’t sure who’d given me mine.