The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Sure,” Lizzy said, and pointed to one of the reception room chairs. “Why don’t you sit down there and catch your breath, Bessie? I can listen and file at the same time.” She picked up the first file, opened a drawer, and dropped it in place. “What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s not a what, it’s a who,” Bessie said. She pulled the chair around so she could see Liz and sat down, crossing her thick ankles. “It’s Miss Jamison.”

  Lizzy flushed guiltily, thinking of the information she had given to Verna. “What about her?”

  “I’ve just come from the Beauty Bower. Beulah was already working on her when I got there. On Miss Jamison, I mean.” Bessie puffed out her breath and fanned herself with a hankie. “She was dyeing her brown. Transforming her from platinum to brown, right there in front of my eyes.”

  “Brown!” Lizzy exclaimed. “Gracious sakes! Why in the world would Miss Jamison want-”

  Bessie held up her hand. “Wait, there’s more, Liz. Lots more. In fact, you might as well hear the whole thing, start to finish.”

  It took a little while for Bessie to tell the whole story, which she did in one long sentence, from Miss Jamison’s purchase of Beulah Trivette’s red wig and the blond-to-brown coloring job she got on her hair to Leona Ruth Adcock’s tale about the baldheaded man with shiny leather shoes (who might or might not have been a special agent for Mr. J. Edgar Hoover), who had shown up at Leona Ruth’s front door the afternoon before, introducing himself as Mr. Gold (although Miss Jamison said he was really Mr. Diamond, Frankie Diamond) and asking if she had seen a platinum blonde and a girl with short dark hair.

  “I haven’t actually laid eyes on Miss Lake myself,” Bessie added breathlessly. “She had already hidden herself away in her bedroom when I went over to say hello after they arrived. But I’ll bet a nickel that she’s the one with short dark hair-except that by this time, she’s probably wearing Beulah’s old red wig. She’s in disguise. Both women are hiding out.”

  Lizzy stared at Bessie. Why, this was the very same story that Verna had told her on the phone the afternoon before, although Verna hadn’t said anything about her caller looking like a special agent. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  “Do you think Mrs. Adcock is right?” she asked tentatively. “That this fellow is a policeman?” She looked down at the folder in her hand, realized that she’d gotten so caught up in Bessie’s story that she hadn’t filed it, and opened a drawer.

  “I have no idea,” Bessie said. “But whoever the man is, Mr. Gold or Mr. Diamond or whoever, I’m here to tell you that he scared the stuffing out of Miss Jamison. She almost fainted when Leona Ruth described him. And it wasn’t any stunt, either. She got white as a sheet and Beulah and I had to make her sit down. She is scared to death of him.” She narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. “There is something truly fishy going on over at Miss Hamer’s house, Liz. I think we ought to find out what it is. How much time do you take at noon?”

  “An hour, usually. But Mr. Moseley is driving to Montgomery and he’s given me the afternoon off.”

  “That’s good,” Bessie said with satisfaction. “But an hour ought to be way more than enough time for us to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “To walk on over to the Old Alabama Hotel and get a quick bite. I know it’s more expensive than the diner, but if we just got a sandwich and split it between us, it shouldn’t be any more than a quarter apiece. I would’ve asked Verna, too,” Bessie added, “but she wasn’t in the office when I stopped. Mrs. Cole said she was out running an errand.”

  Lizzy frowned. “Why do you want to go to the hotel?”

  “Because Mr. Gold told Leona Ruth that he’s staying there,” Bessie replied. “If that’s true, then he ought to be taking his meals there, wouldn’t you reckon? I thought, if we could get a good look at him, we might be able to tell whether he’s a special agent or-” She stopped.

  “Or what?” Lizzy asked, thinking of Verna’s guess that he was one of Al Capone’s henchmen. Both seemed equally improbable to her.

  Bessie sighed plaintively. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not a good idea. I just have this feeling that somebody ought to be doing something to find out who this man really is and why Miss Jamison is so deathly afraid of him. I can’t think of any other way to do it-and I certainly can’t go to the hotel by myself.”

  Lizzy understood why. Nobody thought twice of a woman eating by herself at the diner, where she could sit at the counter and talk to Myra May or Violet or Euphoria while she enjoyed her meal. But it would be odd for a woman to eat in the Old Alabama dining room unless she was traveling or with someone. Still-

  “I’m not sure why we should care who he is,” Lizzy said, stalling for time. “What business is it of ours?” She dropped another folder into the drawer. Then she realized that she’d put an “E” folder into the “L-R” drawer, and took it out.

  Bessie leaned forward, her lined face intent. “Well, for starters, if he is a policeman or a special agent looking for those two women, it stands to reason that they are criminals, doesn’t it? Leona Ruth said that Miss Jamison looks like a gun moll to her-and she is no doubt spreading that very same thing all over town, right this minute.” She leaned back and folded her plump arms. “You know Leona Ruth. When she gets through with Miss Jamison and her friend, nobody in Darling will have a blessed thing to do with them, regardless of who they are.”

  Lizzy understood this, too. In Darling, there were the facts, and then there were the facts according to whoever was telling them, which might or might not be the same thing and usually wasn’t. If Leona Ruth was telling folks that these women were gun molls, that’s exactly what people would believe. Even if they were totally innocent, their reputations would be completely destroyed.

  She opened the “E-K” drawer and put the file into the right place. “I wonder how Mrs. Adcock knows what a gun moll looks like,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Maybe from the movies?” Bessie hazarded. “To me, Miss Jamison didn’t look much like a criminal, but of course you can’t always tell. Anyway, there’s Miss Hamer to consider. If those two women are criminals, she could be in danger.” Bessie turned down her mouth. “I was even thinking that we might ought to have a talk with Sheriff Burns about the situation.”

  Lizzy didn’t think much of Roy Burns. She’d had a few dealings with him when Bunny Scott was killed, and it was her impression that he liked to wear the badge but wasn’t much of a crime fighter. He had taken over the job of Darling police chief when Chief Henny Poe had retired and the Darling town council decided they couldn’t afford to replace him. But Sheriff Burns and his deputy, Buddy Norris, could usually handle what crime there was in Cypress County, which was mostly tempers getting out of hand at the Watering Hole or the Dance Barn, and cow and chicken rustling (there was more of that, now that so many were short of money), and moonshiners out in the piney woods. Most people didn’t really consider moonshining a crime, though. Somebody had to do it, or nobody would have anything to drink. The preachers liked it, too, for it gave them something to preach against besides lying, stealing, skipping Wednesday night prayer meeting, and committing adultery.

  Lizzy thought about Verna’s theory. “And if the man isn’t a policeman or a special agent? What if he is-” She let the sentence dangle.

  “That makes it easy,” Bessie replied cheerfully. “If he’s not a policeman, we can stop fretting about Miss Jamison and her friend being criminals. We don’t have a thing to worry about.”

  Lizzy didn’t point out that this wasn’t exactly logical. But she had the feeling that, if the baldheaded man was a gangster instead of a special agent, they had something else to worry about. Anyway, now she was curious. She wanted to see him for herself. And Bessie was a Dahlia, after all. Dahlias stuck together.

  She glanced up at the Seth Thomas clock on the wall over the Chamber of Commerce certificate, its copper-colored pendulum swinging back and forth. It was almost eleven thirty, and Mr. Moseley wou
ld be leaving for Montgomery at any moment.

  “I’ll finish this filing,” she told Bessie. “After Mr. Moseley leaves, we can go.”

  A little later, Lizzy put on her yellow straw hat and locked the office. Then she and Bessie went down the stairs and out onto Franklin Street, which ran east and west along one side of the courthouse square. The dusty streets (the Darling Women’s Club were still lobbying for pavement but with tax revenues falling, it looked like a lost cause again this year) were busy on this midday Monday, and loud with the noise of people going here and there and doing this and that. From the opposite side of the square, on Dauphin, an ooga-ooga horn blurted, several automobiles chugged loudly, and a hammer pounded sharply and irregularly-Mr. Dunlap repairing the sagging awning of his five-and-dime. A train whistle sounded from the rail yard several blocks to the east, where in years past, great stacks of cotton bales had waited for shipment to the textile mills. Now, between the drought and the growing recession (some newspapers were even beginning to call it a depression), there were far fewer bales and almost no corn, and the rail cars mostly hauled lumber from the Bear Creek sawmill north of town. Still, some people had plenty of money, as Lizzy recalled, as she saw Bailey Beauchamp’s lemon yellow Cadillac cruising west on Franklin. It turned the corner and bumped to a stop in front of the Darling Savings and Trust, where Lizzy intended to go, just as soon as she and Bessie had finished their little chore.

  But not everybody drove a late-model auto. Next door on the west, tied to the wooden rail in front of Hancock’s Groceries, stood a brown mule hitched to an Old Hickory farm wagon, patiently flicking flies with its tail. Many of the farmers drove horses and wagons when they brought their butter and eggs and honey to Mr. Hancock to trade for tea and coffee and flour and salt. Next to the mule was an old black Model T Ford that had been made into a truck by pulling out the back seat and the window and adding a big wooden box. And next to that was the old green Packard that belonged to Mr. Howard, who was leaning against the fender with a cud of tobacco in his cheek, waiting for Mrs. Howard to do her week’s grocery shopping. On the backseat of the Packard was a crate of live chickens and a small goat.

  Lizzy and Bessie turned left on Franklin in front of the Dispatch office. Looking through the window, Lizzy could see Charlie Dickens hunched over his typewriter, his green celluloid eyeshade pulled down over his eyes. She was uncomfortably reminded that she needed to get her column finished tonight, if she intended to meet tomorrow’s deadline. She was thinking of this when Bessie grasped her arm.

  “Liz, that must be him!” she exclaimed in a half whisper, pointing. “Mr. Gold! Or Mr. Diamond-depending on who you believe.”

  The man who had just crossed Franklin Street paused in front of the diner, took off his hat, and mopped his bald head with a handkerchief. He was of medium height and wore a light gray three-piece suit and gray hat. He put his hat back on, pocketed his handkerchief, and glanced back over his shoulder with an air of caution, as if to make sure he was not being followed.

  Lizzy pulled in her breath and peered, trying to get a good look. This was the man Verna suspected of being a member of the Capone gang-or was he a government agent? “It looks like he’s going into the diner,” she said.

  Bessie’s grip tightened and she pulled Lizzy forward. “No. He’s heading for the telephone booth. He’s going to make a phone call!”

  The booth was a new feature in town, and the only one of its kind. It was said of Mr. Whitey Whitworth, half owner of the Darling Telephone Exchange (Myra May and Violet owned the other half), that he had more money than sense, and that the phone booth was a good example.

  The year before, Mr. Whitworth had taken a trip to Atlanta, where he had seen his very first telephone booth on the sidewalk in front of the National Bank of Georgia. All you had to do was plug enough nickels, dimes, and quarters into the three slots at the top of the phone and you could call anybody, anywhere in the country, maybe even the world, if the person you were calling in France or Italy or wherever had a telephone and you knew the number. He had been so fascinated by the way the pay telephone worked and the cheerful clink-clink-clink of the coins dropping into the coin box that he had spent all of three dollars making long-distance calls to his whole family.

  And when somebody told him that big-city folks had been using outdoor telephone booths since before Theodore Roosevelt built the Panama Canal, he had decided that it was high time Darling had one, so that people who came to town and discovered that they needed to telephone their homes or businesses wouldn’t have to pester the merchants on the square to use their phones. And if a citizen of Darling didn’t have a phone at home, by golly, he or she could walk the few blocks to the square and use the pay phone. Mr. Whitworth thought it was bound to be a paying proposition.

  At first, people thought it was a joke. They said that the phone booth looked like a privy and they wouldn’t be caught dead going into it right out there in front of God and everybody on the town square. But it wasn’t long before they got used to the convenience, and sometimes you’d see two or three folks lined up, waiting for their turns. To make a call, you simply picked up the receiver, cranked the handle for the operator (who was on the other side of the wall, in the Exchange office behind the diner), and gave her the number you wanted to call. She connected you and told you how many coins to drop into the slots so you could start talking. She listened for the sounds of the coins you put in, and told you to go ahead with your call. When you were finished, you hung up and waited for the operator to call you back and tell you how much more money you owed. (Nobody ever tried to leave the booth without paying the rest, because there was a note on the wall that said that the switchboard operator would send somebody out from the diner to collar the cheapskate.) The new arrangement had proved to be so popular that Mr. Whitworth was planning to install a pay telephone in the lobby of the Old Alabama Hotel, so that hotel patrons would have access to a private phone, since there were no phones in the rooms.

  By now, Lizzy and Bessie were close enough to get a good view of their quarry-a little too close for Lizzy’s comfort, actually, especially if Verna was right and he was one of Al Capone’s boys. But Mr. Gold paid no attention to them at all. He paused in front of the phone booth’s folding glass door, put his hand into his pocket, and took out a leather coin purse. He dumped his change into his palm, counted it, and then-apparently deciding that he didn’t have enough coins to make his call-turned and went into the diner.

  Lizzy and Bessie followed as Mr. Gold stepped up to the counter and took out his wallet. “Gimme some change for the pay phone,” he said to Myra May, and put down two dollar bills.

  “You won’t need all that if it’s a local call,” Myra May said pleasantly, as she rang up a no-sale on the cash register. She was wearing khaki-colored trousers, a green knit polo shirt, and a bleached cotton apron. Violet had embroidered the words The Darling Diner across the apron’s bib in purple and red embroidery floss.

  “It’s long distance,” Mr. Gold said. He frowned, cocking his head. “I can make a long distance call from that phone out there, can’t I?”

  “Sure thing,” Myra May said, and slid eight quarters across the counter. She grinned as he took the change and paused, glancing up at the chalkboard that displayed the noon menu. “You look like a hungry fella,” she added. “The dinner special today is fried chicken. Mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, a biscuit, and your choice of pie. Thirty-five cents, includes coffee. That phone call can wait till you have yourself something to eat, can’t it?”

  Mr. Gold took a large pocket watch out and consulted it. “Don’t have to make it until noon,” he said. “Yeah, why not? Fix me up with the special, baby.” He slid onto one of the red leather-topped stools, took off his hat, and put it on the counter beside his elbow. His bald head glinted.

  Lizzy leaned over to Bessie. “Why don’t you get a table for us,” she suggested. “And keep an eye on that man. I’m going to visit the washroom.”


  But instead of turning right when she got to the back of the diner, Lizzy turned to the left, pushed open the door, and stepped into the Darling Telephone Exchange. She didn’t have a very clear idea of what she was going to do. But she knew that there must be a way to find out who the man was calling. Since Myra May was working the counter and Violet was still in Memphis, one of the other girls-Olive or Lenore-had to be on the switchboard. Lizzy knew the rules, but she was hoping that maybe she could talk the operator into not flipping the switch so she could eavesdrop on-

  She didn’t get to finish the thought. She stopped inside the doorway and stared at the operator’s back.

  “Verna!” she exclaimed, in great surprise. “Verna Tidwell, is that you? What in the world are you doing here?”

  TWELVE

  Verna Makes a Phone Call

  Verna had learned to be a telephone operator a few years before, when Mrs. Hooper needed extra help and she needed extra money, but she didn’t usually spend her lunch hour-or any hours-at the Darling Telephone Exchange. But being on the switchboard at noon was part of the plan she had mentioned to Liz, a plan that she had sold to Myra May the evening before.

  At eight o’clock on Monday morning, as usual, Verna opened the probate office. Located on the second floor of the courthouse and to the right at the head of the stairs, the office had a reception room divided by a long wooden counter, with the public area on one side and three wooden desks and chairs on the other: one for Verna, one for Coretta Cole, and the third, behind a low partition, for Mr. Earle Scroggins, the elected probate clerk, just in case he should happen to drop in, which he didn’t, usually.

  Mr. Scroggins was a fat, jovial man with a bulbous red nose and twin white mustaches that curled up on the ends. He wore red suspenders and a bow tie and owed his reelection for three consecutive six-year terms as probate clerk to the goodwill of the friends who, in their turn, called on him for important favors, usually (but not always) legal. Mr. Scroggins owned a cotton gin on the south side of town and a cottonseed oil mill over by the river, and (although he was always careful not to miss the monthly meetings of the county commissioners) did not see much point in spending a lot of time in the office, especially since Verna took such good care of everything.