Swing Town Mysteries Dorie Lennox Box Set

by Lise McClendon

  She knocked again, harder. “Miss Fox? My name is Dorie Lennox, I’m a friend of Wendy Hines. I’d like to talk to you.”

  As she raised her fist to knock again, the door opened suddenly. Harriet Fox wore a faded flowered housedress and slippers, her dirty blond hair uncombed. A thin, skittish woman with a pale, sickly complexion. The apartment smelled of camphor.

  “Miss Fox?” Dorie stuck out a hand. The woman shook it, then wiped her hand nervously on her dress. She told Harriet her name again, and the name of the detective agency.

  “You said you were a friend of Wendy’s.” She started to close the door. “You lied. You said you were her friend.”

  Dorie put her foot out and held the door. Harriet was angry, but her strength was gone. “I am her friend. Because I want to find her and bring her back to Eveline Hines before it’s too late. You know Eveline is dying?”

  Harriet blinked. “She’s been dying for years.”

  “She’s close now. We need to find Wendy. Can I come in?”

  Harriet frowned but stepped back to open the door.

  The musty apartment had the look of a much-lived-in furnished walk-up: scuffed linoleum, one sprung chair covered with a tattered plaid blanket, a moldy cooking space with a sink and ancient icebox, a sagging bed in a curtained alcove. The walls were covered with torn paper in a gray chicken pattern. The only window faced the street and was covered with grime.

  Harriet Fox sat down on the upholstered chair and looked at her hands. Dorie pulled around the solitary dining chair from the table to face the woman.

  “I guess you talked to my mother,” Harriet said flatly.

  “She gave me your telephone number and I tracked you down from that.”

  Harriet nodded, resigned to whatever fate held. Dorie watched her rub the back of one hand with her fingers, then the other. “What do you want?”

  “I want to know if you’ve seen or heard from Wendy in the last month. Since the twenty-first.”

  The woman shook her head. “We were supposed to go to lunch a couple days later, but she never showed up. I called the house and the maid said nobody’d seen her for days.”

  “Would you say you were Wendy’s best friend?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She was kind of secretive. Never passed on gossip, hated for people to talk about her. Made her pretty quiet. Not the best type of friend.”

  She watched Harriet. Mousy and afraid— of what? Did either she or Wendy have any friends? The two of them must have been a regular Laurel and Hardy routine.

  “Do you know any of her other friends?”

  She shook her head.

  “None? You didn’t meet any of them?” Another shake. “Did you work on projects with her?”

  “Projects?”

  “Charity work, political campaigns, that sort of thing.”

  “We both belonged to a Ladies Aid through Grace Episcopal.”

  “Did she have any particular friends there?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “You don’t belong anymore?”

  “No!” she cried, suddenly nervous. “And Wendy, well, she’s gone, isn’t she?”

  “Do you have any idea where she might have gone? Did she have any reason to leave town that you know of— boyfriends, trouble of any kind?”

  “She never said. Unless she’s visiting her relatives back east.”

  “How did she meet Julian?”

  “In New York City. He was traveling, business with his father. I’m not sure what Wendy was doing exactly, working somewhere. A couple years later, they got married. I had the idea it was a match made by the parents somehow, that she was talked into it.”

  Harriet’s voice was weakening. By the end of the speech, she was winded and doubled over, as if the effort had depleted her. A little groan came out of her.

  “Are you okay?”

  “It’ll pass.” But she blinked hard; then her eyes rolled back in her head. Dorie jumped up to catch her as she rolled off the chair, but by some miracle, she caught herself. A light sweat had broken out on her forehead and she pushed strings of damp hair away from her face.

  “Are you sure you’re all right? Do you have some juice? Can I call your mother?”

  “No!” Harriet’s eyes widened in either anger or fear. “I mean, she wouldn’t care.”

  Dorie sat again, leaning toward the woman. “Is she the reason you’re out here in Independence?”

  “Technically, I suppose.” Harriet laughed bitterly. “But it is really my own fault.” She leaned back in the chair, tilted to one side. “I could drink a little water.”

  Dorie Lennox, aka Gunga Din. She fetched more water than an Arab. The tap ran brown, then finally cleared. She carried a small cup of water to Harriet Fox and stood over her while she drank it. When she finished, Dorie said gently, “You haven’t done something to yourself, have you?”

  Harriet shook her messy hair and pinched her lips. “Not that I haven’t thought about it.”

  She took back the cup and set it on the table. “Did you sing for Barnaby Wake, Harriet?”

  The woman looked at Dorie and beyond, eyes wide like a deer’s, her face expressionless. Then Harriet began to rock in her chair, back and forth. Back and forth. Dorie closed her eyes, the sight so pathetic. When she looked up again, Harriet had streaks of tears on her cheeks.

  Dorie walked to the girl and put hands on her shoulders to still the rocking.

  “How far along are you?”

  Harriet gulped. “Four and a half months,” she whispered.

  “Harriet, this is important. Did Wendy know?”

  “No. No one knew.”

  “Not even Barnaby Wake?”

  “No one. Except my mother.”

  Barnaby Wake: philanderer, fascist, worm. Her anger belonged to him today. But that feeling wouldn’t help Harriet Fox.

  Dorie looked around the depressing apartment. More than a personal crusader, Harriet needed a square meal and some fresh air.

  “Put some clothes on, Harriet. We’re going to get us some lunch.”

  Gwendolyn held the telegram in one hand while she wrapped an arm around a hot cup of tea Amos had poured for her, cuddling it like a baby. Amos had worked out a deal with the dentist downstairs for hot water. He skipped the milk in his tea but heaped an extra spoonful of sugar and stirred. Since Gwendolyn had come to town, his system had never been so clean. “Who is this Kuhn?”

  “Fritz Kuhn. A brownshirt. German American Bund. Did you hear about their big rally in New York last year— at Madison Square Garden?”

  Gwendolyn shook her head. The bird’s nest she called a hairdo needed help. A good brushing at the very least.

  “American Nazis, lots of ‘em. The mayor of New York, La Guardia, said it was their right to say whatever they believed. The Bill of Rights, freedom of speech. So there were thousands of brownshirts and Jew-haters of all stripes.”

  “Sounds disgusting.”

  “By all accounts, it was. This man— a Jew— jumped on stage, he was so angry. The brownshirts beat him and kicked him and the police had to save him.”

  “Barnaby Wake is his relation?”

  “By marriage, it appears. And shares his beliefs, if you trust this.” He took the telegram from Gwen and read it again. “Says he was run out of town.” He frowned.

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “Hard to know at this distance. Running a person out of town usually means he was about to be arrested. Or worse.” He looked up at Gwen; she was frowning hard into her cup. He tried to make his voice light. “And if Leonard thinks I’m paying him fifty bucks for this …”

  “Does it mean he’s doing Nazi business right here? In Kansas?”

  “Missouri,” he corrected. “It’s our job to find out. You might not want to come along on this, Gwendolyn. Nasty business.”

  She blinked hard, took a gulp of tea. She didn’t argue.

  “What happened to Fritz Kuhn?” she whispered a minute later.


  “Put in prison. Nobody took them seriously for years. Walter Winchell used to call them ‘ratzis.’ Then what Kuhn had been saying started to come true. He did have thousands of followers. He went to Germany and chatted up Adolf. Called Roosevelt a Red.”

  “Mr. Roosevelt? But he’s a saint. He’s saving us.”

  “The government tried to deport Kuhn. Finally got him on tax charges, like Al Capone. He tried to run to Germany when the war started, but they nabbed him.”

  “And his followers?”

  “Still running around. Just not so bloody vocal.”

  “But not around here? It’s so pleasant. Peaceful.” He looked at her drawn, frightened face. He thought about the pictures he’d seen in Life magazine, the ones showing the Nazi groups still finding friendly pastures out in the prairie somewhere.

  And fragile, innocent people like Gwendolyn caught in their ugly thoughts and ways. Who said war didn’t make victims of us all?

  “How about a trip to the beauty parlor, love? Get your hair done?”

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  HOWIE DUNCAN WAS THIN AND dark, with a squirrel face and a tendency to jitter his foot and crack his knuckles— and the only Bureau man Amos Haddam knew. He was an ex-policeman who’d joined Hoover’s boys after the Union Station massacre. His partner on the Kansas City police force had been killed in the shoot-out to rescue Pretty Boy Floyd’s cohort Frank Nash from the government’s clutches. Amos had caught up with Duncan as he was going to a late lunch and now sat across from him at the greasy little diner in the Scarritt Building.

  “Buy you a sandwich?” Amos asked, trying not to be too ingratiating, and failing. “Piece of pie?”

  “Never eat here. That’s an order,” whispered Howie. “Stick to coffee.”

  Duncan rubbed the spoon the waitress brought him on his shirttail, polishing it until it shined. He dumped four cubes of sugar into his cup and stirred methodically. By then, Amos was half-done with his own burned Java. He thought of Gwendolyn at the salon all by herself. He hoped she wasn’t afraid, that there was no screaming, and that the ten he’d slipped the hairdresser had been enough to keep Gwen busy for several hours.

  “So it’s this fella we’re watching for a client,” Haddam began. “Corrupting a young girl, we think. Well, we know about that.”

  “How young? Turn him in.”

  “She’s twenty-one.”

  “Tough luck.” Howie grimaced at his coffee. “What’s the name?”

  “Barnaby Wake. Has that Hallelujah Chorus?”

  “Never heard of him. He been in dutch around here?”

  “Don’t know. He’s been in the area only a year or so. We just got word he might be connected back east to Fritz Kuhn and the Bund.”

  Howie wrinkled his nose. “Peeeuw.”

  “Any way to find out if he’s been at that line of work out here?”

  “You can ask the espionage boys.”

  “Think they’d tell me anything?”

  “Nope. Cloak-and-dagger, sunup to sundown and into the night.” Howie moved closer. “They just added more spook-fighters. Got nearly seventy-five now. Like the war was going on right here.”

  “Here— at the Bureau?”

  “They travel around some, but, yeah, here. They’re hot on America First. Think they can tie it to Hitler. Lucky Lindy won’t be so lucky when the Bureau gets done with him.”

  Amos raised his eyebrows. “He appears to have a screw loose.”

  “Or is blind in both eyes. Some of these folks, well-meaning people, God-fearing, churchgoing— they are being taken down the river. They come back, most of them, but without their wallets.”

  “Or their good names. What about brownshirts? Any talk around here?”

  “Nothing I heard. But those boys are closemouthed, even inside the Bureau.” He pointed a finger at Amos. “St. Louis, that’s what I heard. That’s where those people are swinging.”

  Amos put down his coffee cup. He was disappointed, as he usually was, with the information from Howie Duncan. He took his last shot. “Anybody in that unit who might talk?”

  “As much as any cigar store Indian.”

  Amos twirled his cup on the diner’s scratched tabletop.

  “Hey, listen,” Howie said with sympathy. “I’ll pry a little. I love trying to get those stiffs to talk. I can’t promise anything, though.”

  “Thanks, Howie. What would Chief Reed say?”

  “He’d say forget the fascists, hunt for Reds. But he don’t work for us anymore.”

  “Couldn’t you take him back?”

  “Guess not. He’s yours to fight the corrupt ways of the Kansas City Police Department, until the end of time.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Amos Haddam didn’t dawdle. He paid for the coffees and left a tip, then took the streetcar down to the Country Club Plaza, where he and Gwendolyn had discovered a small tearoom that catered to society matrons and bridge club ladies. He bought himself a plain ham sandwich, and a fancy cucumber one for Gwen, and dropped it by the beauty salon in Westport.

  Gwendolyn sat under a huge hot blower, her cheeks rosy and eyes bright. She waved as he held up the sandwich. He set it on the counter as a strange feeling washed over him, mingled with the smell of permanent-wave lotion. What was it— hope, fear, love? A bit of each? It held him, this tumult of emotion he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with, until he swallowed hard, making it go away. His eyes were burning from the chemicals.

  He raised his hand, a small wave, and ran out.

  That evening was the dullest of the week. No one complained.

  The pall of Saunders’s killing hung like black crepe. Amos volunteered to take Thalia again, and Gwendolyn would tag along and do the driving. The night was cut short when Thalia went to dinner with one of her girlfriends and the friend’s parents, then straight home afterward. Amos didn’t mind. He was suspicious, of course. They waited half an hour for her to emerge from the mansion again, her plain dress exchanged for a torch singer’s.

  But she didn’t show. Haddam called from his apartment and was given the report that Thalia was in the bath and not to be disturbed.

  Dorie, too, found solace in hot water. The third floor of the boardinghouse was unnaturally quiet. The twin sisters, Norma and Nell, had gone out to a polka concert. Carol, still the “new girl,” despite three months’ occupancy, was also out. Dorie used too much hot water, washed her hair, and went to bed early. Hard on the nerves, this calm, she thought as her eyes fell shut.

  The cops were plainclothes detectives typical of the Kansas City crop of the Pendergast era: distracted, shady, and not too sharp. They’d been parked at the curb when Dorie pulled the Packard into what she was beginning to think of as her very own spot in front of the Boston Building. How they recognized her, she wasn’t sure, but they’d hopped out of their unmarked sedan immediately.

  The morning’s meeting with Mrs. Hines had been canceled. The quiet was becoming habit-forming, a sleeping potion. Not that she’d been twiddling her fingers here in the office, contemplating the sins of Thalia Hines or weighing the pros and cons of Wendell Willkie.

  No, she had company. These boys in blue, up early to nab her in the office. Richards was the older man, sweaty and red in the face from the hike up the stairs. Stewart looked like he’d recently completed toilet training.

  “Following up on the homicide on the bridge,” Richards explained, dropping into the chair and letting the boy stand. Dorie sat behind the battered metal desk and fiddled with a pencil. “Could you explain to us what you saw?”

  “It’s all in the report. I don’t know anything else.”

  Richards nodded, flipping open a notebook. He mopped his forehead with a large white handkerchief. He was close to her uncle’s age, with a paunch and more hair, black with a little gray. “You said you saw the gun. Can you describe it?”

  “What happened to O’Brian? He was at the scene.” The younger man s
hook his head, saddened by her unwillingness. Nice pantomime.

  “We’re following up, Miss Lennox,” Richards continued. “The gun?”

  “A pistol of some kind, a revolver. I couldn’t see it well. And frankly, I don’t know much about guns.”

  “So it was not a shotgun or a tommy gun? You’re sure.”

  “Looked like a pistol. Did you find a weapon?”

  “Not at liberty to say.” He crinkled his eyes in an attempt at a smile.

  “Then what?”

  “Sometimes,” Stewart said suddenly, his voice surprisingly deep, “the type of weapon tells us which group to focus on.”

  “So if it was a tommy gun, then that means gangsters?”

  “Correct.” Stewart was short and blond and heavily freckled. She imagined him growing old and even more boring, entertaining his cat with love songs.

  “So what does a pistol mean?”

  Richards shrugged. “Means we look elsewhere.”

  “Have you found any enemies of the chauffeur?”

  “Miss Lennox. I prefer asking the questions.”

  “And I prefer having answers, but, like you, I don’t.”

  Richards and Stewart exchanged a look. She felt her temper rise. “Is there anything else?”

  “You were following the car because you were acting as a bodyguard that night? For Miss Thalia Hines?”

  “Not really a bodyguard. I was just watching her, to report to her mother.”

  “So you were armed?”

  “No. I didn’t have a gun.”

  “Or any other weapon.”

  “No. What is this about? I’ve told you fellas this a dozen times, to O’Brian, to Assistant Chief Michaels. To Mrs. Hines, who seemed to think I was a hero.”

  Richards blinked girlishly. “And were you— a hero?”

  “They did their damage. They’ll probably make another attempt to snatch Thalia, when things have died down a bit. Or maybe make a grab for some other girl.”

  “So that’s your take,” said Stewart, folding his arms. “A botched kidnapping.”