Ab and I got along better now than when I’d worked with him. I’d started part-time at Rike’s when I was sixteen, emptying trash and running errands, then working full time as a floorwalker and eventually in loss prevention. That was at the bottom of the Depression. Ab hadn’t been the only one who thought it was wrong to give work to a woman when so many men with families couldn’t get a job. Now he hired me on a retainer to run background checks on potential employees.
“What have you heard about the trouble up the street?” I indicated with my head.
“Trouble?”
His eyes snapped to full attention.
“At Lagarde Jewelry. I saw police cars in front. One belongs to the homicide boys.”
“Homicide! Maybe there was a robbery and something went wrong.” He fingered a bushy mustache. “Word would have filtered up by now, though, don’t you think?”
“You’d think.”
When an accident or a fire occurred nearby, customers came in chattering. The news rose from street level through all seven floors faster than the store’s escalator.
“You wouldn’t happen to be working on something involving the place, would you?” Ab crumpled his napkin on the table.
“I’m hoping Lagarde can give me some help with something I’m working on. I understand he’s an expert at spotting copies.”
“That he is. We even had him take a look at something we got in once. It might have been while you were still here.”
We left the restaurant. I knew by his direction we were headed back to his office.
“Let’s ask Vivian if she’s heard anything.”
She was his secretary, and in our absence she’d heard there were police cars in front of Lagarde Jewelry. That was all.
“If I get wind of anything, want me to give you a call?” Ab asked as he walked with me to the stairs.
“I’d appreciate it. I’ll be out a lot, though, so I may stop in to see you.”
I took my leave and stopped on the way downstairs to chat with a clerk or two I’d worked with. I spent some time in the book department, then in hats. My hope was that the cop cars down the street would have disappeared by the time I left, allowing me to mosey down the street and stick my nose in.
When I went out the Ludlow Street exit and glanced that way, Freeze’s unmarked car was gone but two patrol cars were still in evidence. Pretending to study a window display of ladies fashions, I debated my next move. Did I dare stroll down and shoot the breeze with the uniforms? I took a peep and got my answer. A blocky figure had appeared and now stood talking to a pair of beat cops.
Boike.
I swung my gaze back to the fashion display just as the detective glanced around. And possibly saw me.
For the next several minutes I studied the clothing on the mannequins before me avidly. Especially the hats. I mulled over the shoes. I looked up at the hats. I shifted position and pursed my lips thoughtfully. All the while, I watched the glass. When I was starting to hope the coast might be clear, I caught sight of Boike’s reflection.
“You never struck me as the type to drool over dresses,” he greeted.
“Are you kidding? If I was rolling in dough, I’d have a closet full. Is Freeze letting you off to go shopping these days?” I looked in the direction of the patrol cars. “Oh, jeez. Were you at that jewelry store? Did somebody try to rob the place?”
His manner switched from curiosity to alertness.
“What do you know about it?”
“Just that there’s a fancy one down there. Some Frenchie name.”
“I don’t suppose anyone there’s ever been a client of yours.”
“No. I worked here before I hung out my shingle. Used to walk past... was there a robbery?”
Boike relaxed some.
“Nah. A stiff in the alley.”
“Somebody who worked there?”
He clamped his mouth shut.
“Come on, Boike. Can you at least tell me if it was the same as the girl who got strangled behind The Canterbury?”
Boike considered. He was more reasonable than his boss. A sense of fair play was probably telling him I had a right to know that much.
“Only in that they’re both dead,” he said. “Anyway, it’s starting to look like that girl behind the hotel got killed by her boyfriend. He hopped a freight out of town around then. We’ll probably never know if he meant to kill her or they had a fight.”
Did his answer mean the new body in the alley belonged to a man? That the victim hadn’t been strangled? That the victim hadn’t been an employee of the jewelry store?
Maybe it only meant two people were dead.
* * *
Having worked at Rike’s meant I knew exactly where every pay phone was located. As soon as Boike left I bolted inside to the nearest one. With luck I could talk to the jewelry store before he got back and told anyone he’d seen me. If Freeze was down there, he was likely to put the kibosh on anyone except cops answering phone calls.
“Lagarde Jewelry,” a subdued voice answered. A female voice. Good.
“Oh, hello,” I fluttered. “I talked to Mr. Lagarde last week about a bracelet that’s been in our family for ages, and he said I should bring it by so he could look at it. If I stop by in half an hour or so, will he be available?”
“I’m... afraid not.”
The strain in the voice made me ninety percent certain.
“Tomorrow, then?” I asked brightly.
Silence.
Maybe this was the first time she’d had to break the news. Maybe she’d had to break it so often it was taking its toll.
“Mr. Lagarde...” She cleared her throat. “Mr. Lagarde passed away over the weekend.”
TWENTY-ONE
The murder of the jeweler and the hotel scrub girl were connected. I was sure of it. Even though it would spare The Canterbury further scrutiny, and mean my client was no longer suspected of murder, I didn’t buy the idea that Polly had died at the hands of a boyfriend who’d skipped town. Her death, and Lagarde’s, had something to do what now appeared to be definite breaches of the hotel safe.
I drove back to my office, but I didn’t go in. Instead I walked a block and a half to where I knew I’d find a ragged towhead kid selling papers.
“Hey, sis.” He broke into a gap-tooth grin at sight of me. “You been sick? I ain’t— haven’t seen you.”
“Working someplace else for a week or so, early and late.”
“And you missed me, huh?”
Heebs was ten or eleven. He lived on the streets. He was smart as a whip, and always pestering to be my assistant.
“Yeah, Heebs, I did. Got a job for you too, if you’re interested.”
“You know it. What’s the story?”
When it wouldn’t expose him to anything dangerous, I occasionally found a task for him and paid him a pittance. I gave him a dime to cover the two papers left in his sack. If he still got a chance to sell them after we’d talked, it was okay by me.
“I need you to find out who uses the alley behind a hotel called The Canterbury.”
I told him where it was. As long as he’d knocked around on his own, he knew more about who slept in certain doorways and dug through certain trash cans than I did. What he didn’t know, he could learn by asking a pal, who might have to ask his own pal, but eventually I’d get what I needed
“How much you going to gouge me for?” I asked.
He grinned again.
“Ah, sis, you know I’d do it for nothing. You can give me whatever you want.”
“A buck when you deliver. I’ll stop by tomorrow.”
* * *
My building didn’t have a doorman in a fancy uniform, but it did have an elevator. The thought of riding up to my fourth floor office sounded appealing, what with all the running up and down stairs I’d been doing at The Canterbury. Before I reached it, the metal gate banged close.
“Wait, please,” I called.
My hand hit the button to keep the
car from starting up accidentally.
It didn’t budge.
The grill didn’t open, either.
A pruned faced woman stared back at me from the other side.
“You’ll have to wait for it to come back,” she said primly. “You’ll bend my sign.”
“Nice to see you, too, Maxine.”
She and her husband owned a sock wholesale place down the hall from my office. Maxine didn’t like me much. It was mutual. Her sign, mounted on a wooden stick, wasn’t quite as wide as the elevator, but it was good-sized. KEEP OUR BOYS HOME, it said.
The fact she was an isolationist didn’t surprise me. The fact she was willing to stand on a street corner waving a sign did. She was dressed in black and her hat had a veil that could be pulled down, the uniform of women across the country who took part in the so-called Mother’s Movement. They spit on members of Congress who didn’t share their views and had hanged one Senator in effigy.
“You do know the Selective Service Act passed, don’t you, Maxine?”
“If we stop that nasty Mr. Roosevelt from being elected again, it won’t matter. And we will. We’ll defeat him. Mrs. Lindbergh’s on our side and she knows what it’s like to lose a son!”
Letting a count’s flunky keep me out of a hotel elevator was one thing. I wasn’t going to put up with the same treatment in my own building. My hand hadn’t budged from the button. Maxine still held the folding gate stubbornly closed. Since she was twice my age, it didn’t seem fair to tussle with her physically. Not when I had a better idea.
“Since you asked so nicely, I’ll let you have it all to yourself,” I said.
Releasing the button, I raced for the stairs. One floor up, I sidetracked to the elevator and hit the UP button that would make it stop and open its doors. Then I ran some more.
By the time the elevator arrived on four, I stood, somewhat out of breath, directly in front of it. My outstretched arms, braced on the wall at either side, blocked Maxine’s exit.
“We can play this game all day, if you want,” I said. “Or, if you have better things to do, you can ride back down and come up the stairs like I did.”
The woman looked ready to have a conniption. Finally her hand smacked the DOWN button and the car descended.
It took her longer to get up the stairs than it had me. When I caught sight of the top of her sign bobbling into view, I went down the hall to my office. Nobody had fixed the window shade yet. It still hung drunkenly. I thought of whacking it off with scissors. Then I had a better idea. Since the cops apparently were looking elsewhere for Polly’s killer, this seemed like the perfect time to visit the neighborhood where she’d lived.
* * *
“Polly Bunten? I already told the police every lick I know. Ask them.”
The sloppy old biddy who’d been Polly’s landlady started to slam the door. I blocked it with my hip.
“I’m asking you.” I shoved my license under her nose. “But if you don’t feel chatty, there are people at City Hall I can have a swell talk with about what a safety hazard your place is.”
It didn’t look much worse than some of its neighbors. Houses along the narrow street southwest of the bus station hadn’t seen paint since the bottom dropped out of things. Roofs had patches. Porches sagged.
“I do the best I can,” the woman sniveled. Her dress had stains on it. Yellowish particles clung to the wrinkled handkerchief she brought out. “I’m a widow—”
“Yeah, fine. Show me Polly’s room.” If I could find out about the boyfriend Boike had mentioned, maybe I could start connecting some dots.
“It’s rented again.” The landlady fell back a step as I stared. “Rent was due Saturday. I’ve got to eat, don’t I?” she said defensively.
I had trouble prying my jaws open.
“What did you do with her things?”
“Sold ’em to a second hand place. Polly was always borrowing milk for her brat, and she sure isn’t going to pay me back now, is she? You got any more questions, ask the woman down at that brown house.”
She slammed the door while I stood stunned by the revelation Polly Bunten, whom Francis had described as a kid, had a child herself.
* * *
“I’m trying to find out about Polly Bunten,” I said to the woman who opened the door at what I’d finally determined must be the “brown house”. From directly in front, patches of color were visible along the corners and in a sheltered strip under the stoop roof.
The woman’s face drooped at mention of Polly. She looked thirty, but was possibly younger.
“Who are you? Why are you asking?” she asked warily.
“My name’s Maggie Sullivan. I’m a private investigator.” I heard her breath catch. “The couple who own the hotel where Polly worked asked me to see what I could find out about her. If she had family and that. They’d like to do whatever they can.”
Her sweater was darned in a dozen places, but she was as tidy as the landlady had been slovenly. Her hand stroked the head of a toddler who peered around her skirt.
“I’m Bess,” she said after a moment. I guess you might as well come in.”
Her small front room was a tidy as she was. An older boy pushed a long wooden block around, making train noises. At a gesture, I sat on a daybed that served as a couch. Bedding was folded on one end.
“Could I get you some tea?” Bess plucked nervously at the arm of her sweater.
“No thanks.” It was clear she didn’t need hospitality depleting what little she had in the way of groceries. “I could sure use some water, though.”
That seemed to relax her.
“How old are the boys?” I asked when she returned from the kitchen. I didn’t spend much time looking at kids.
“Two and three. The one on the floor’s my brother’s boy. He and his wife moved in when he lost his job. They both work part time now. I watch the kids.
“It’s nice someone cared about Polly. Asking after her family. I don’t think she had any, though, except for Ella.”
“Her little girl?”
She nodded.
“Looked like a fairy princess, and sweet as they come. Polly would carry her over wrapped up in a quilt. We’d put her on one of the daybed cushions down on the floor there, so Polly could slip in and pick her up when she got home. Most of the time the little mite didn’t even wake up.”
Bess sighed and cuddled the toddler who’d crawled into her lap.
“I’d have loved to keep her after - after Polly died. But we barely get by as it is. The police... well, I guess that awful old woman where Polly lived told you they’d been around asking questions. They sent for a woman from a home where they take tots like Ella. I guess if Polly’s employers wanted to send some money there, for her to have a dolly or something, it would cheer her at least.
“Oh, and maybe they could take this.” Jumping up, she took a snapshot from on top of a cheap clock that sat on a cabinet and handed it to me. “It may help Ella remember her when she gets older.”
I looked down at the image of an incredibly pretty young woman.
“Who took this?”
“Some friend of Jerry’s – her boyfriend.” For the first time since I’d met her, she teared up. “There’s no way to reach him. Let him know what happened. He took it into his head that if he went to Iowa or one of those places out there, he’d find work. Had a cousin or something. Polly just about cried her eyes out.”
“When did he leave?”
She dabbed at her eyes with a fresh white hanky.
“Two, three weeks ago? About when Polly started her job.”
Well before she’d been killed then.
“Are you sure?”
Bess nodded. “Like I said, Polly just about cried her eyes out. They both did.”
TWENTY-TWO
“Yeah, that was Jerry’s girl. I never knew her name,” said a customer who’d come up to pay for a bar of Lifebuoy soap as I was showing the owner of a neighborhood grocery store Polly’s
picture.
The store was a block from where the dead girl had lived. It stuck to the basics: Bread, butter, eggs. And milk. If Polly had gotten milk for her little girl, I’d figured she’d most likely come here.
“When was the last time you saw Jerry?” I asked.
The man, a big fellow in a flannel shirt and overalls, rubbed a stubble of beard as he squinted in thought.
“Two weeks ago last Friday. Payday. I was headed to a joint I like for a beer before I went into work. I’m on night shift. Place I go to, the back of it’s so close to the tracks you could practically spit on the trains. I was cutting though that way, and there was him and the girl with their arms wrapped around each other. I started to call to them – you know, kid. Then I saw they was both crying like their hearts would break.”
“Any idea why?”
It was the first real information I’d unearthed since leaving Bess’ place.
“Not right then. Jerry was trying to give her some money, but she said no, he’d need it to get by. He shoved it in her pocket and said he wanted her to have it in case the baby got sick. Then a freight came rolling toward us and I couldn’t hear any more. He kissed her real hard and turned and ran and grabbed for a boxcar. I tell you, I held my breath for a second, but then I saw him haul himself in.”
The grocery store owner was so caught up in the tale that his lips were parted.
“And you’re sure that was two weeks ago?”
The customer laid his bar of soap on the counter along with some money. He rubbed his stubble again.
“Wasn’t this last Friday, and the one before that, my wife’s family was all packed in our place celebrating her sister’s birthday. So yeah, two weeks.”
* * *
I made the rounds of three beer joints. What I picked up there confirmed the story of the customer with the soap. Jerry hadn’t been seen in two weeks or more. He’d been heading west to find work.
Polly’s boyfriend wasn’t the one who’d killed her.
I went to my office to think about who had.
Whoever it was, it now seemed all but certain that Polly had died because she’d seen something. Something to do with the hotel safe. When I’d tossed my hat on the rack, I took out the list of hotel employees I’d left there on Saturday.
Shamus in a Skirt Page 9
