Most of the time the women took turns, but since Polly was new, they’d been letting her finish up on the lobby and lounge so she didn’t have to learn the kitchen part yet.
If that didn’t confirm my theory that the girl had seen someone coming out of Tucker’s office, it certainly strengthened it.
* * *
For once I was able to avail myself of the hotel’s luxuries, sleeping late and enjoying a room service breakfast after my bath. Their oatmeal wasn’t quite up to McCrory’s.
Since I wanted to be in place well ahead of when Count Szarenski and his muscle usually collected his passport, and had several things to ask Tucker if I came across him, I got downstairs shortly before nine. Nick Perry was just going out the front door.
Something clicked. Perry had been out early the day I’d witness his row with Lena. Maybe he just liked a morning walk, but even that could be worth knowing.
“Shove this somewhere.” I thrust the book with which I’d planned to while away time into Smith’s startled hands. “If Count Szarenski goes out, tell me what time and which direction.”
The old bellhop nodded.
Perry was half a block away by the time I reached the street. A good distance for following. Mercifully he showed no inclination to head for a trolley or flag a taxi.
After walking another block, he glanced back. I studied a shop window. Perry moved with the swift stride of a man who knew where he was headed. He didn’t look back again.
The better part of town began to give way to inexpensive clothing stores, dry goods shops and small cafes. I’d been behind Perry long enough he might notice me if he looked back again. Crossing the street I went into the entry of a place that repaired vacuum sweepers. I pulled a rolled up cloche from my purse and put it on, then shook out a thin muslin shopping bag and dropped my purse inside. I’d packed the quick-change for when I tagged after the count. Unless a man was up to no good and exceptionally jittery, it wouldn’t occur to him I might be the same woman he’d seen earlier.
Now I stuck to the side of the street across from Perry. I closed the gap between us a bit; paused to look in a shop window; repeated. The man I was watching halted. He looked up as if checking numbers. He turned up a set of steps into what I could see, as I moseyed up my side, was a secondhand store.
It didn’t strike me as the sort of place the finely dressed Mr. Perry would buy clothing.
“Hey, I need shoelaces. Got any gray ones?” I asked, ducking into a shop that advertised leather repair. Its small window held a display of creams and brushes and gave a dandy view of the place across the way.
“Gray? Never heard of gray shoelaces,” frowned the white-haired proprietor. He wiped his hands absently on a leather apron. “Got black, or how about these nice tan ones? They’d go good. What length?”
“Four eyelets. I’m sure I’ve seen gray.”
He walked to the back of the narrow space where he bent to talk to a woman doing something with glue. The smell of it stabbed at the space just above the bridge of my nose. As the shoe repairman made his way back, Nick Perry emerged from the secondhand store. He hadn’t stayed long and he wasn’t carrying anything.
“Wife says she’s never heard of gray shoelaces,” the old guy reported.
“I guess I better take these tan ones, then.”
I wanted Perry to get down the street some before I went out. By the time I’d paid for the shoelaces, he was well on his way, and by the looks of it headed back to the hotel. I trotted across to the secondhand store.
The inside was dusted and polished. Displays here and there were done nicely enough to grace the windows at Rike’s. A middle-aged woman who was perched on a stool at a display case smiled and murmured a greeting. She returned to writing prices on tags.
The top of the display case held a far-from-new cash register. The glassed in part below held assorted jewelry. It was a cut or two above the dime store kind, to my untrained eye, but from the prices indicated on each piece, far from real.
It was early for customers, but I took a fast turn up and down the aisles. No one else was in evidence. At the back, a curtain hid what was probably storage and a washroom. No rustle of boxes met my ears; no footsteps. I went back up front.
“Oh, gee, you don’t have that pin that looked like a bird anymore.”
“Like a bird?”
The woman writing out price tags looked up. Bending my knees, I pretended to search the display case.
“It was here last week. That guy who just left didn’t buy it, did he?”
The woman frowned in perplexity.
“Why, no. He bought a rhinestone bracelet.”
TWENTY-FIVE
“Guy you need to talk to’s named Punchy MacKenzie,” Heebs told me between selling papers.
“Got his name ’cause he mixes whatever dribbles he finds in liquor bottles together to get him a drink. Doesn’t sound safe to me, what with TB and such.”
“You’re right about that.”
By the time I left the secondhand store, I’d lost sight of Perry. Whether he’d returned to the hotel or gone somewhere else, the purchase he’d just made was interesting enough. I’d decided if I took a cab back to the hotel parking lot and then drove, I could touch base with Heebs and still be back to watch for Szarenski, so I had.
“This Punchy sober enough of the time for me to trust what he says?” I asked.
Heebs grinned and paused to sell another paper. He dropped the pennies he’d gotten into his money pouch with fleeting disappointment. No tip.
“The kid that gave me his name says he is. Says Punchy usually tries to get fed at the soup kitchen on Fifth the other side of Bainbridge. The one by that church with the busted window. Gets in line around five.”
He conducted another business transaction. This time the customer let him keep the whole nickel. Thanked him, too.
“Look for a skinny guy with a gold tooth.” Heebs indicated an eyetooth. “He must be tough if nobody’s knocked it out to sell it, huh? You need a bodyguard?”
I stuffed the dollar I’d promised plus a little extra into his pocket and winked.
“That’s your prime time for selling the evening edition. I’ll manage. If anyone gets out of line, I’ll mention your name. That should make them back off.”
The sound of the kid’s laugh made my steps lighter as I walked away.
* * *
I’d parked my DeSoto in the hotel lot and was reaching to turn the ignition off when I spotted the count and his aide de camp leaving the hotel. I thanked whatever saints might still listen to me that I hadn’t missed them. Once the two were safely past, I got out and followed.
This round of fox and hound moved more slowly than the one with Nick Perry. Count Szarenski had a cane, but he didn’t lean on it much. He merely moved with deliberation.
The positions of the pair interested me. Bartoz walked one step behind the older man and at his right elbow. Close enough to exchange a few words, but not like equals. Was it some remnant of their culture? Or... was Bartoz protecting the old man? I realized he was making frequent checks of their surroundings, albeit subtly.
Their activities weren’t the kind ordinarily associated with danger. They went to a bank. I watched through the window. As nearly as I could tell, no money changed hands. Their next stop was the post office. Even if I got out my hat and shopping bag, the chance of being recognized was too great for me to risk following.
A woman with a seamed face started up the steps. She had some unstamped letters in her hand. I touched her sleeve.
“Excuse me. That fellow with the cane who just went in, he’s my uncle. If he picks up a package it’s going to spoil the surprise we’ve got planned for his birthday. If I wait over there, could you let me know if he does?”
She nodded and smiled.
A short time later Szarenski and Bartoz came out. I was well past the entrance, turned away and pretending to powder my nose so I could use the mirror in the lid of my compact to wa
tch. The count’s shoulders looked to me like they were slumped. When the pair had gone on, I snapped the compact closed and went inside.
The woman I’d talked to was folding half a dozen stamps she’d bought into a piece of Cut-Rite. She noticed me and her eyes twinkled in conspiracy.
“He went to the counter. I think he asked about mail, but they didn’t give him anything.”
“Oh, good.” I puffed out my cheeks, dramatizing relief. “The party’s not spoiled, then.”
* * *
Count Szarenski was waiting for something. That was my guess if he was making these same stops every morning, which, judging by the schedule Tucker had described, he was.
Package?
Letter?
Maybe. Except...
The only thing you got at a bank was money.
Nick Perry, on the other hand, had picked up a rhinestone bracelet on his morning rambles. Could the two men be allied in some way I was missing? Or were they two different trains on parallel tracks?
I wanted to find out more about Perry. I wanted to find out more about Count Szarenski. And I knew a woman who could probably do a pretty good job of wrecking trains.
TWENTY-SIX
Rachel Minsky slid a three-page form across the table to me. We were in a booth at a working-class restaurant on Watervliet that served cabbage rolls, which Rachel said were Hungarian. The dark beer we were drinking while we waited wasn’t half bad. Apart from a waitress, we were the only women, but no one in the noonday crowd so much as ogled us. It strongly suggested Rachel was known here.
“You mind telling me why you wanted a bid sheet for a construction project? And why couldn’t you pick it up at my office?” she asked.
Rachel looked like a porcelain doll: pointed chin, a cloud of dark hair, pulp magazine bosom. The suit she had on had set her back more than I paid for a month’s rent. A trio of minks chased each other around her neck. She could have fit right in with the guests at the Canterbury, except, perhaps, for the fact that she was a Jew. And ran a construction company. And, somewhere—ever so discreetly—carried a gun.
She was the black ewe in a family that otherwise ran to bankers and lawyers and women who stayed home. Plenty of people claimed she was crooked. I trusted her.
“I need a form that looks semi-official if nobody reads too closely. I’m kind of short on time, and I figured if you’d meet me for lunch it would save some.”
“And?”
“And I thought if I plied you with liquor, I might pry useful information out of you,” I said.
“A man here and there has tried that.” She cocked her head. “Are your intentions pure?”
I grinned.
Rachel’s eyes were dark as an abyss. As dangerous to misjudge, too. Right now they suggested amusement. She took out a tortoiseshell lighter and matching cigarette case.
“What kind of information you need?”
“Didn’t you tell me once your people were Polish?”
“My family, you mean? Way back when. My mother’s side had been here ten, fifteen years before she was born. My father was a toddler when his folks came over.”
“You know much about the politics there?”
“Apart from Hitler taking over? Not really. Near as I can tell, their history’s pretty much been fight, lose, get gobbled up by some country, then repeat the whole thing with another country gobbling them. Why?”
“I need to find out about a man named Szarenski. Whether he’s really a count, for starters.”
She was fitting a cigarette into a long gold holder. Her head snapped up.
“He’s real, all right. War hero. He fought against the Nazis when they rolled in, then joined an underground group. Home Army or some such. The Germans burned his estate, killed a relative – brother, son.”
She shrugged off her display of knowledge.
“My father and brothers talk about things over there at Shabbat dinner. The women start talking kids. I drift in and out.” Lighting the cigarette, she jutted her jaw to the side so the smoke she expelled didn’t reach me. She studied me thoughtfully. “Don’t tell me something you’re working on involves Szarenski.”
“Not directly.”
I paused while the waitress served our cabbage rolls. When we were alone again, I outlined the situation, omitting the fact I had my eye on the count as a suspect.
“The mere fact he would come here instead of a bigger city seems... odd.” Rachel rocked the paw of a dead mink back and forth in her fingers. “It would be kind of fun knowing something my brothers don’t. Let me see what I can find out.”
* * *
Before putting Rachel’s nifty form to work, I wanted to pursue another idea. Suppose, I thought, that no jewelry ever appeared to be missing from the hotel safe because the thief replaced the stolen item with a fake? With a copy, or even a random piece like the rhinestone bracelet Nick Perry had purchased that morning?
I wasn’t sure how such a scheme would work, especially if the replacement didn’t match what was taken. Given that I didn’t have many other ideas at the moment, if I walked around this one and poked at it, it might start to take shape.
My first walk-around was that Lagarde, known for his excellent copies, had been mixed up in it. Maybe even unwittingly. Maybe something made him suspicious. At any rate, he had to be gotten out of the way.
With Lagarde dead, whoever was getting into the safe would need to find someone else to make copies. Hunting another reputable jeweler meant the risk of attracting attention. Which was why I pulled the DeSoto into a parking place down the street from a theatrical supply place.
“Hey, good-looking. Long time no see.” The owner of the place straightened from the carton of greasepaint he was bending over and shot me a grin.
“How’s tricks, Skip?”
“I could teach you a few if you’re free for dinner.”
“Your wife might object. Anyway, how do you know I couldn’t teach you a few?”
He had a laugh that filled a room and a barrel chest to go with it. Today he sported red suspenders.
“Ah, Maggie. You break my heart every time you come through the door. Are you here to change how you look, or hunting gossip?”
I ducked a bevy of feather boas that hung from the ceiling.
“I’m here to avail myself of your wisdom.”
On the other side of the velvet curtain behind him there was a snort. His wife, sewing sequins on a special order and chuckling, probably. I’d met them when a wealthy woman hired me to check the background of a young actor who was showing interest in her granddaughter.
“When someone around here needs a fancy necklace that looks like diamonds and such for a play or a girlie show, where can they buy that? Or get it made?”
Skip cocked his head and leaned on the display case in front of him. He eyed me shrewdly.
“Now that is a popular question today.”
“Who else has been asking?”
“Not one of our regulars. Well-dressed gent. Came in right before noon.
“He claimed he was manager of a new show arriving in town. Told me one of their trunks had gone missing between here and Indianapolis, and he wanted to make sure they had the bijoux needed for a ballroom scene.”
“He happened to mention which theater?”
“Nope.”
“Name of the show?”
“Nope?”
“Give you a card or maybe an address where you could reach him?”
“No on both.”
“Where did you send him?”
The shop owner stared at the case where his elbows rested. It held smoke pots, flash powders, spirit gum and a jumble of other things, all of it piled so densely only he, and maybe his wife, knew where to find things. When he lifted his head, concern had pressed lines in his face.
“I’ll tell you, but the fellow I sent him to... I’ve only met him a time or two. He strikes me as shifty. Claims he doesn’t make copies, just glues on chunks of colored glass he b
uys by the box like we do feathers and gloves and I don’t know what all. I’ve never heard anything, except a house manager here and there grumbling he played fast and loose with his billing. But—”
“Thanks for warning me, Skip. I’ll watch my step.”
“His name’s Rose. Delbert Rose.”
He wrote down an address, which I tucked in my pocket.
“The man who came in asking before me, what did he look like?”
“Dark hair, mustache, medium build. Might have been downright handsome except for a couple of brown moles right above the bridge of his nose.” He indicated one side.
It wasn’t Perry. I thought a minute.
“Could the moles have been fake?”
Skip blinked, then nodded slow appreciation.
“Yeah. You’d think I’d pick up on something like that. The mustache, too. It wasn’t the walrus type, but it wasn’t a skimpy little Hitler type, either. Putty... spirit gum...”
As plain as the nose on your face, I thought. Or the moles, which would be the only thing people would remember about a man who wanted to change how he looked.
TWENTY-SEVEN
My immediate impulse was to pay a visit to Delbert Rose, who turned bits of colored glass into stage jewelry and was possibly shifty. Sticking with a plan I’d hatched earlier might yield more useful information, though.
I drove to the address I’d found in the phone book for the woman Nick Perry claimed was his great-aunt, or rather for her late husband. It was a big place, three stories of gray stone and more than twice the size of its neighbors. Stone gateposts anchored a black iron fence whose double gate stood open. Size, style and a mounting block to one side of the gate suggested it had been here long before its neighbors.
After leaving the theater shop, I’d used a pay phone to check on the recital the occupant of the house was supposed to be attending with Nick and Lena. It would last, I’d been told, at least another forty-five minutes, “followed by refreshments”.
Shamus in a Skirt Page 11
