Swing Town Mysteries Dorie Lennox Box Set

by Lise McClendon

“Not just following, is it?”

  “What’s she gonna do?”

  “It’s not her I’m worried about.”

  Whether Amos could bully any of these boozers wasn’t in doubt. But she worried about a real fight. Amos was hardly a prizefighter. Bad breath would knock him flat. He hadn’t mentioned his gun. And Dorie under orders to be easy pickin’s. The parole officer’s words this afternoon irked her. Mrs. Vunnell, what did she know about street life? She sat there so calm and all-knowing, like a fat Chinese Buddha. The weeks at the gym had made Dorie quicker, lighter on her feet. Her knee felt stronger than it had in years. But still she was naked without her blade.

  She patted the empty pocket of the blue suit and sighed.

  The suit had been worn only once that summer, at the funeral of a bachelor at the boardinghouse. Sad, really, how little they missed him, a nondescript shadow of a man. He’d gone suddenly. Something about his guts. Everyone picked at their food for a week, until Mrs. Ferazzi burst into tears. They had all felt bad about the bachelor, but it was relief to go back to Poppy’s scalloped potatoes and corned beef hash.

  Thalia was doing a shimmy as the song ended, running her hands down her hips. Her thin red dress barely concealed her figure. The skinny fella reached for her hand and pulled her down for a peck on the lips.

  The way men reached for Thalia, the way she responded so eagerly, so gratefully— it grated on Dorie. Made her feel hollow and edgy. She picked up her glass and took a gulp of whiskey. She knew what it was. That dry summer again.

  As the music ended, the girl tossed back her hair, a corn-tassel blond, and smiled her pussycat smile as the men clapped and whistled. This went on for a long minute, until Thalia looked toward the door. She straightened, her smile fading.

  The man standing at the back of the room was dressed in a somber gray suit and a darker shirt, which made him look solid, like granite. His hair was also dark and slick. The expression on his moderately handsome face was pure fury. His eyes blazed at the girl, nostrils flaring. His chest rose and fell as if he was barely containing himself. Then, suddenly but deliberately, he took a deep breath and unclenched his fists. He smiled and said her name.

  “Who’s that?” Dorie whispered. Amos hitched his shoulders. The man looked as hard as the neighborhood Italians, but different. Fairer complexion, slighter build, slender hands. Irish hood, or politician. Or both.

  Thalia was heading toward him, pausing for her clutch and jacket at the table. The man who had been buying her drinks grabbed her wrist, but she shook him off, complaining in her mewing way. The man at the door took her jacket, turned her around, and helped her into it. He smoothed back her hair from her face and took her arm.

  “Let’s go,” Amos said, on his feet.

  By the time they were down the stairs and out on the sidewalk in the cool October air, the girl was in the backseat of a light green sedan. The man climbed in next to her. A driver in a cap sat at the wheel.

  Amos took off toward their car. The skirt of the blue suit was too tight to run in, a liability Dorie had not tested until now. Amos turned to hurry her. She hiked up the skirt, but it was awkward with only the bottom half of her legs working. The Packard was half a block down, near the skinny man’s Pontiac.

  “Shake a leg,” Amos said as she slipped behind the wheel, fishing her keys from her handbag at the same time. “They’re around the bleeding corner already. I thought you were a track star. Never saw anybody waddle so slow. Me first, with lungs so damp, they could fill a fish tank.”

  Damn blue suit. She concentrated on making the turn, avoiding two large coupes on Holmes. The green sedan was up ahead, turning left onto Grand. The night was clear and starry, with little traffic. She felt her mind snap and the corners of her mouth turn up. This was why she liked this job, the jolts of adventure. You paid in hours of tedium, but it was worth it.

  At least they’d been at it together. The girl would look at them, smile, stick out her pink tongue. She’d thumb her nose and laugh; she’d wiggle her fanny to Amos. She was hardly inhibited by their presence. The Commander’s wishes had little effect on the girl. Girl? Thalia Hines was twenty-one and, as she enjoyed pointing out, had reached her legal majority.

  Between them, they’d had a few dull nights watching the girl drink and carouse and go home with— was this number four or five? She’d stayed in one night in the last eight.

  “There. Right,” Amos said, pointing at a dark intersection where the sedan had disappeared. “Step on it or we’ll lose them.”

  Dorie downshifted and made the turn in time to see the sedan turn left at the bottom of a hill. “Are they trying to shake us?”

  The side street was lined with trees and hedges shielding the view of the houses beyond. At gaps in the shrubbery, mansions peeked through, brick, Tudor, stately and rich. The kind of people who have chauffeurs and big green sedans. Like Thalia. But this wasn’t her neighborhood. The car disappeared into a driveway.

  “Park there.” He pointed out a spot under a large tree drooping gracefully over the narrow street. “Douse the lights.”

  She cut the engine and lights and rolled to a stop under the tree. Leaves crunched under the tires. The tree held on to its weathered foliage, making the spot shadowed and cold. A house was obscured by more trees and shrubs, but a sliver of lawn stretched out in golden streaks of lamplight.

  “This it?”

  “Next one down. Go check the gate, see if there’s a name. Stay in the shadows. These neighborhoods have a thousand eyes.”

  She pried open the car door as quietly as she could. Amos frowned at her. “Give me that jacket.” He held out a hand impatiently until she stripped it off and handed it to him.

  The door creaked noisily and she left it ajar. Tiptoeing across the pavement and into the grass, she stuck to the shadows, working her way to the first driveway, a long, snaky strip of blacktop. She shivered in the thin navy shell, her summer tan faded from her arms. She skipped into the next batch of shadow.

  The air smelled of leaf mold and wood smoke. The bark on the trees rippled roughly under her hand. The house squatted on the front lawn, visible through the trees, a low-slung modern building, windows lit up from inside. Framed against the glass, Thalia stood next to a sofa, across from the man. He gestured, jaw flapping, pointing at her. He walked in a circle, agitated, then pulled the drapes shut with a jerk.

  Dorie took off her shoes. The ground, laced with roots, was bumpy through her thin socks. The night was dark and moonless. Heartless, she thought, like Thalia honey. She looked back at the car. Amos was smoking a forbidden cigarette. Why did he tempt fate like that?

  She reached the driveway, weathered and potholed brick. There must have been another, older house here once. This one couldn’t have been five years old. She peered down the drive but saw nothing but blackness beyond the modern house. On either side of the driveway sat crumbling brick columns topped with limestone. The left one listed to the south. She squinted at a metal plaque: 101.

  The house was only twenty yards away. Amos was still smoking.

  She stuck her shoes under one arm, dashed along the shadows of trees, bouncing from one to another, until she was on the narrow porch. Inside, voices. The man’s loud and strident, then Thalia’s, low and soft. In the shadows of the porch, she felt for the mailbox. There was the doorknob. She felt the box and put her face right up to an ordinary mailbox hanging by the door. No name on it.

  The voices stopped. Maybe they’d moved into the kitchen, or the bedroom, or maybe they were making up. Easing the lid up, she felt inside the mailbox. There were two letters. Holding the lid open, she tried to read them in the dim light. But it was too dark, even with the dull glow through the curtains.

  Eenie, meenie, minie, moe. She chose the smaller of the two, dropped the other back inside, and set the lid down silently.

  In seconds, she was back in the car. Amos had the window open.

  “See anything?”

  She pulled the lette
r from her pocket. Breathless from her run, another waddle in the tight skirt, this time in damp socks, she wiggled back into her shoes.

  “From the mailbox? I never— ” He stared at it. “This is going out.”

  “To who?”

  Amos slipped a fingernail under the flap and tore it open. He pulled out a small piece of stationery and unfolded it. “Turn on the lamp.”

  Lennox flicked on the dome light. “What’s it say?”

  “Bloody thank-you note. On church stationery.”

  “Can I see?”

  She took the card. “Dear Mrs. Morgan. The blessings of the Creator and all his sheep on you for your generous contribution to the chorus fund. Please allow me to show my gratitude in person at your earliest convenience. Call me on my private line at Hancock 7-1122. I look forward to speaking to you very soon. Your servant, B. Wake.”

  “Turn off the lamp. Somebody’ll call the cops.”

  The front of the card had a gold crest with— Amos snapped off the light.

  “What church is it?”

  “One of those big ones down on the Plaza.”

  “You know this Wake?”

  “Not yet.” Amos coughed and rolled up the window. “You want a snooze first?”

  She put the card back in the envelope and set it on the seat between them. “How long we staying?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  A car passed on the street, very fast. They didn’t have time to duck. She ran her hands over the steering wheel. “Can I put my jacket back on?” Amos looked out the back at the passing car. She slipped her cold arms into the jacket, buttoning it up. Sometimes Amos would play word games or tell her stories about England before the war, the first one, but it didn’t seem likely tonight. He’d been subdued all week, quiet, as if waiting for something to happen, a letter to come, a draft notice, a telegram. A bundle of waiting, twitching and sneaking cigarettes and rubbing his bloodshot eyes.

  “Did you check the mail before you left?” Amos asked suddenly.

  “Expecting something?”

  He shrugged.

  “From England? Nothing yet?”

  Amos tightened his jaw and squinted into the dark street. The Blitzkrieg— the Blitz for short— they were calling it, nightly German raids, shelling London. It’d been going on most of the summer and now, in October, good news was hard to come by. His mother refused to leave— at least that was what she’d said in her last letter, a month or more before.

  “But that’s good news. No news and all that.”

  “Some truth to that. Almost fainted today when I saw a Western Union boy in the neighborhood.”

  “She’s too busy to write. Helping people.”

  They sat silently for half an hour, neither close to sleep nor particularly alert, either. Dorie had nothing and everything on her mind: blue suits and naughty girls, Roosevelt and Willkie, airplanes and bum knees, Hitler and Mussolini. The news these days kept them all thinking, wondering, worrying.

  She had worried about these long stakeouts, waiting for Thalia to finish her dallying around, worried that the time would be hard on her, that she would think too much about the past and things she could never change. She’d spent the summer checking out reckless spouses and would-be soldiers and corrupt accountants. No time to think about herself.

  The stakeouts hadn’t turned out to be so bad. Amos seemed more worried about the future than fixed on the past. None of the things that haunted her last year had come to bear, no dreams, no voices, not even longing for male companionship. The work kept her sane; she was sure of that. Even with parole and all those indignities, she had her work. She let her head rest on the back of the seat and sighed. Would it last?

  “The third termers make you sigh like that?”

  “What?”

  “The ones what think giving Franklin a third term is making him our own Hitler. You’ve heard about them.”

  “Be hard not to. That parade last week went right by the office, with the elephants from the zoo draped with huge signs: ‘No Third Term.’ “

  Amos chuckled. “If Willkie only knew the huge Republican road apples them elephants leave behind.”

  “I hear Willkie leaves them, too. Giant turds, everywhere he goes.”

  Amos erupted again, laughing and coughing, then wiped his eyes. “Sweet Jesus. I’m going to wake the dead.”

  “You shouldn’t be smoking.”

  “You think anything can hurt lungs like mine?”

  “Want another?”

  He looked tempted but shook his head. “Too much racket.”

  They were quiet again, another half hour. She lit a cigarette and checked her watch. It was nearly one o’clock. Amos slumped in his seat, pulled his hat down, and closed his eyes. “Short one. Wake me in ten,” he said.

  The patrol car stopped next to them twenty minutes later. Amos was still dozing. Dorie rolled down her window.

  “Move along,” the cop said, shining his flashlight in her eyes, then on Amos. “Is he drunk?”

  “No, sir. Just tired.”

  The cop’s light moved down her neck and arm, then back to her face. “What’s your name?”

  “Am I doing something illegal, Officer?”

  Amos woke up with a snort, his hat falling forward over his face.

  “Oh, I’d be willing to bet on it. We got laws against your kind.”

  “My kind?” She batted her eyelashes at the cop. He was a blockhead, with cropped hair and brains to match. Her voice sweetened like she’d just swum in peach cobbler. She gasped, then giggled. “You don’t think I’m that kind of a girl, do you? Really, I am quite flattered, Officer.”

  Amos leaned down to peer at the cop. “Thank you, sir. We’ll be getting along now.”

  The policeman stared at them for a moment, grumbled a few words, then rolled up his window and drove off. He stopped at the corner and waited for them to leave.

  “Wordplay gets you nowhere with that type,” Amos chided. “Look smart.”

  “Leave Thalia here?”

  “We’ve been rousted.”

  “What’ll we tell the Commander?”

  “Turn the key, girl. We’re busted.”

  Chapter TWO

  THE MANSION LOOKED LIKE IT belonged in France more than in the wooded hills of Kansas City. The kind of place you see in picture books, a fairy-tale castle, big and safe and magical. As if it had survived attacks by angry serfs, its stone walls unassailable, its secrets safe forever in gilded velvet boxes. Tall stone walls, manicured sloping lawns, spotless circle drive— for people with romantic lives, people unlike Dorie Lennox. When you lived in a cramped apartment over a drugstore, fairy tales seemed important. All grown up, she hardly remembered them.

  She’d never been to France— Nazi-crushed Vichy France now— but a visit to the Hines mansion was almost as foreign. She’d been here every morning this week, and still it felt odd, a world apart. The stone building sat in watery shadow under tall trees, as if the builders had known nothing could warm the facade. In the circle drive, a green sedan was being washed by the chauffeur. He’d found a spot of dappled sunshine and rolled up his white shirtsleeves over muscular arms. Water from the garden hose sluiced down the cement into the expanse of grass yellowing in the autumn sun.

  Amos wore his brown suit again. Maybe he’d slept in it. Dorie wore tan trousers, pressed quickly in the kitchen that morning. No more blue suit; it would have to wait for another funeral. Lennox shivered at the thought as they were ushered into the drafty front hall by the maid. The smell of funerals hung in the air at the Hines mansion.

  The maid disappeared. The high ceiling, complete with wood beams, soared above a winding staircase with a mahogany railing and gray-carpeted steps. They wouldn’t be going upstairs. The Commander had taken over the library as her bedroom several years back. What about the bedrooms up there? What were they like— gilded paper, ruffles, thick rugs?

  She hadn’t slept well. It was after two o’clock when she got
back to the boardinghouse. She’d lain awake, waiting for something to happen. What was it? Not the six cigarettes that had passed the time. Something was in the air, like a dark cloud or an unanswered prayer.

  “Any mail yet?” she asked Amos. “At the office?”

  “No.” He paced around a marble-top table, running his fingers along the cool edges. Her question seemed to set him off, and she regretted it. It was driving him crazy, with his mother under attack.

  Amos cleared his throat noisily, and she squinted at him. Here it comes.

  An explosion of coughing. It sent him looking for a bathroom. He’d been doing so well since last fall’s bout in the hospital. Hang in, she thought. Don’t leave me here alone.

  She drew her arms close to her chest. The stone, the walls, the spotless floor, the tabletop— all conspired to freeze her to the core. How did people live in this icebox? Why wouldn’t Thalia escape whenever she could? She could still see Thalia in ruby red satin, singing to those googly-eyed men.

  Thalia honey, whose hips saw more action than General Pétain. Poor Philippe. His reputation as a French military genius had died a quick death.

  Dorie pressed her shivering lips together. She felt suddenly anxious and ready to bolt. She squeezed her arms until they hurt and listened for Amos’s coughing. She stood stone-still until the man, a stranger, appeared in the doorway to a dim hall.

  “Good morning,” she forced herself to say. His sudden appearance made her stomach leap, but she tried to hide that. She rubbed the backs of her arms to warm them, then let them fall at her sides again.

  The man stepped out into the bluish light coming from a high window on the stairs. He was slight, with thinning dark hair, but youthful, early thirties, she guessed. Taller if he stood straight. His eyebrows pointed like halves of a roof come apart. He took off rimless glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief as he examined her for a long minute.

  “You’re the detective,” he said finally. His voice was deep, almost a rumble.

  “Yes.” A tingle of relief: He was human. Silly idea. She strode closer, stuck out her hand. “Doria Lennox. Pleased to meet you.”