Swing Town Mysteries Dorie Lennox Box Set

by Lise McClendon

  “What’s yours?”

  “We’re running on that theory,” Richards said. “But we plan to keep an open mind.”

  “Good luck.”

  Stewart squinted at her. “With the investigation,” she added.

  The telephone rang. Amos, summoning Dorie to the police station to have a powwow with him and her uncle. He was whispering because he was in the station, he said, but he sounded excited, as if some new information had come to light.

  She saw the cops to the door, then waited three minutes for them to get in their car and drive away. More conversation with Richards and Stewart might be injurious to her sleep patterns.

  At police headquarters, Dorie drove around for ten minutes, looking for a place to park the Packard. Finally, she paid two bits to an attendant at a lot across the street, even though it was highway robbery, a scam run on people late for court. Getting a parking ticket, when you were already in dutch, was not recommended. You didn’t want to be hunted down like a dog.

  And Dorie was already in dutch, as any visit to these hallowed halls reminded her. She felt her blood run cold as she mounted the granite steps, same as each time she visited her parole officer. Anyone who has been behind bars must feel the same. Or underground and batty like Gwendolyn, screaming her head off in the closet. Bone-crushing, heart-stopping panic.

  Ahead, two uniformed policemen opened the big brass-trimmed doors like hotel doormen.

  “Doria Lennox?”

  She stopped on the top step, squinting. Had she missed an appointment with Wilma Vunnell? No, she’d just been. Were things so bad inside that her uncle had arranged an escort? She shivered in her wool jacket in the cool wind. “Did Captain Warren send you?”

  The two uniforms came toward her, letting the doors swing shut behind them. She stepped back down the stair.

  “We have a search warrant for your vehicle,” the cop said sternly, producing a folded sheet of paper with court stamps on it. Her mind raced as her body went rigid with anger and fear. The policeman was big, the kind who played football without a helmet. “Take us to your automobile and we can get this taken care of.”

  The other cop took her upper arm in his paw and didn’t let go. The footballer with the warrant made a “This way, madam” motion, as if they were going to a fancy dress ball. She turned, by force, to head back down the steps, across the street to the parking lot, and back to the beat-up black Packard 120. She hadn’t gotten any repairs done since the chase last year, the fender still bashed. Joe Czmanski had fixed the light so it functioned, but she’d never put the glass back over it. It hadn’t looked too good before, and now it looked dusty and sad.

  “What’s this?” the escort cop asked. He poked his finger through a hole in the trunk.

  “Was there when I bought it. Ask my uncle, Captain Warren. He bought it for me at a sheriff’s sale.”

  “Getaway car,” the cop said. “My cousin got one for fifty bucks.”

  “My uncle paid twenty-five. Hey, you can let go of me.”

  The cop sized her up. He released the clamp on her arm. She felt the blood pulse down through her fingers.

  “What’s this about? Did Mrs. Vunnell send you?”

  “Received a warrant, all I know.”

  “I’m on probation. I wouldn’t carry anything in my car. I don’t know who told you that.”

  What had she said to the widow? Something about a gun. But she’d been joking. The widow had to know that.

  The other policeman had his head inside the front seat, rummaging through the glove compartment. He straightened, clutching something with his handkerchief.

  “What have we here, Miss Lennox?”

  “Wha— “

  She stopped, now seeing the object the cop held high like a piece of rotten meat. The gunmetal gray was unmistakable, the barrel round and long. She stared at the pistol, dumbstruck.

  The policeman closed the car door. “I’d say we done our duty, wouldn’t you, Griff?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  The big paw circled her arm again with the righteous strength of democracy. It squeezed a squeak out of her throat. “It’s not mine. I don’t own a gun.” She made herself take a breath, her head swimming with cells, blackness, shame. No, be smart, she told herself. Don’t be a dunce.

  Griff looked at her expectantly. Her stomach turned a back flip and she blinked hard to clear her vision. “I want my lawyer.”

  He smiled. “There’s a good girl.”

  The cell was like any other cell: square, dim, and confining. That was the purpose of a cell, to confine, to restrict, to hold. Dorie felt her throat shut down as she tried to breathe, sitting on the edge of the cot with her arms wrapped around her sides. Be brave, she told herself. This will pass. But the words bounced off the shell of her consciousness. She couldn’t fool herself, even if the people on Charlotte Street thought she was brave and hard.

  She lay back on the cot and stared at the ceiling with its water stains and mildew spots. She closed her eyes and was back in booking, the flashbulb in her eyes. Hours ago, although time had taken on a strange quality, elastic and free. It was the only thing that was free around here. At first, there had been company, lots of it— cops, Amos Haddam, more cops, matrons.

  No lawyers. Amos called, but none had appeared. It was Friday night. Late now. Getting a lawyer to come down would be hard. Still, she had done so much for the firm.

  Her eyes flew open. Amos wouldn’t call the firm, would he? Vanvleet & Wintraub was Amos’s biggest client. But Louie Weston worked there. Louie Weston, who was the cause of all this. Louie, who flew airplanes, and wanted more than kisses in return. Louie— the cause of all Arlette’s troubles.

  And her own.

  No. She’d brought on her own misery. She had no one to blame. No one had forced her to stab the jerk. She had wanted to. And now the only lawyers she knew were his colleagues. Dutch Vanvleet had gone on semi-retirement after the trouble with his son. So who was running the place, old Wintraub? She shivered on the cot. Not Louie.

  She closed her eyes again. For a second, she savored the moment when she’d switched out her blade and stabbed Louie Weston in the gut. The switchblade served to scare off people, to keep them away from her. It worked most of the time. Louis Weston had been too drunk to stay away. She smiled to herself. No, she’d poked him. She had. She’d poked him good.

  Then came the blood, and the remorse set in. She’d known on the spot that he would make things bad for her. And she’d been right. He’d pressed charges. No one had believed her story that he was grabbing and pawing her. In fact, her lawyer— some low-rent Johnny she’d found in the phone book— hadn’t even let her mention it during the brief hearing. She’d spent a week in stir and gotten six months on probation.

  The door at the end of the hallway clanged open. Dorie sat up on the cot. She bit her lip, then made herself stop. Amos Haddam stepped up to the bars, a sorry look on his face.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He grasped one of the steel bars that separated them, grimacing at it. “Seems like only yesterday,” he said. “There’s trouble with Vanvleet.”

  She waited.

  “No one will come down until morning.”

  “Who put that pistol in my car?” she said, standing, angry now. “Does it have any marks?”

  “They’re not saying.”

  “What about Herb? Can’t he find out?”

  “He’s gone for the weekend. He took your aunt to the Ozarks to see the leaves.”

  “What?” She sat down on the hard cot.

  “They left at noon today. No way to call him.”

  “But you called and said he wanted to have a meeting.”

  He looked at her sideways. “I never called you.” Amos walked a few bars back and forth. “Some of these boys want you for the chauffeur. They think it’s bloody convenient.”

  “Those two that came to see me, I bet.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Two dicks named
Richards and Stewart.” She stood up. “Do you think they planted it?”

  “Cops?”

  “Why not? You think Reed’s got all the bad apples out of the barrel? You think none of them are taking some on the side? And what about Wake’s man, the one Arlette scared off?”

  Amos looked at her funny. “Arlette?”

  She waved off the subject. “We’re getting close to Wake. We know things about him, and he’s scared.”

  Amos Haddam put his hands deep in the pockets of his old brown suit and looked at his shoes.

  “What?”

  “I went to see him at the church this afternoon,” Amos said. “He wasn’t there. But the choir director, man named Nolan, had nothing but good things to say about him. He’s foul, no doubt about that, especially with the ladies. But I’m not sure I can connect him with the brownshirts.”

  She jumped to her feet, grabbing the cell bars inches from him. “Amos! He’s a Nazi— a sympathizer. He’s using this front, this Hallelujah Chorus, to drum up business and make money for the cause. He’s sly about it; he gets into their underpants first. Like Thalia. Do you think it’s her voice he’s after? He’s a fascist, Amos. You know he is.”

  Haddam looked up at her. “I don’t,” he said quietly.

  “What if they’re responsible for Gibson Saunders’s murder, too? What if the German American Bund and the Kluxers got together to create a little havoc? You’ve seen those posters: THE JEWS MUST GO, THE POPE MUST GO, DEMOCRACY MUST GO. Then the KKK and the swastika right next to each other. It’s a brotherhood, Amos. They may not hate the same folks the same way, but they’re a white brotherhood. You know that.”

  “What I don’t know, Dorie,” Amos said, his voice still calm in comparison to her shriek, “is if Barnaby Wake is involved. I don’t want to set off half-cocked. This is a climate for accusation and defamation. I don’t want to be a part of that. I could be wrong and ruin a man’s life. Wake just doesn’t seem the type.”

  “The type?” She stamped her feet in frustration. “Those are the most dangerous ones, don’t you see? The ones that look like preachers! Amos, what’s wrong with you?” She lunged at the bars. “Are you in love? Has your brain gone soft?”

  Haddam looked up slowly, flushing from his neck into his cheeks and ears. She watched him go from cool to simmer in seconds. She ran her hands through her hair. She had to get out of here. What the hell was going on? Who was Amos talking to? When she looked over at him, he was turning his back to her. He walked toward the door, hands still in his pockets.

  “Amos, wait!” She rattled the bars. “I didn’t mean that. I like Gwendolyn! Is she all right? Wait, Amos, wait!”

  The door closed with a metallic echo. Dorie lowered her forehead to the cold iron. Her chest filled and released air just like she was alive and breathing, just as if she had a future, just as if she wasn’t alone and powerless and afraid. Behind her eyes, tension mounted. In her heart, a battle felt ready to burst with torpedoes.

  She would have liked to cry. That would have been something.

  Painstakingly, she licked her finger and picked up the crumb of bread from her blanket, placing it on her tongue. The faintness she’d felt earlier had passed, helped by the small hard roll the matron had brought when she complained. Hours had passed, observed only by the beating of her heart. Or had they? What had happened to her sense of time?

  Dorie lay on the cot, under the thin sheet and blanket, still as death. She held her breath for as long as she could, making the blood pound in her ears. She’d done that as a kid, made herself blue in the face if nobody was paying attention to her. It was childish. No one noticed it back then, either. She let out the air and closed her eyes. At least it made her feel alive.

  Sometime past midnight (announced by the matron as she clomped by), Tillie’s voice came to her. For a moment, Dorie thought it was Thalia’s, their sugar-fine airs so similar. Then Tillie laughed. She always laughed at the end of “Lavender Blue.” Sometimes she sang the nonsense words as “Tillie Tillie,” holding her petticoat with tiny fingertips and dancing around the room. When she sang them right, “dilly dilly” always made her laugh. So funny, “Like a pickle,” she said. “A purple pickle.”

  She let the singing wash over her. Once she tried to fight Tillie, to tell her to rest, to stay away, but now that her small voice came so infrequently, Dorie lay still. She might be crazy. So be it.

  When I am king, dilly dilly, you shall be queen. Yes, Tillie Mae, if lavender can be green, then it can be a pickle. Why not? Anything is possible.

  A smile fixed itself to her face as the music faded away. A short song, a silly one. Tillie had wanted to be somebody’s queen, to be cherished and adored. What happened to the wishes of lost children? Were they stored somewhere— for someone else to discover and hold on to like a wilted flower, past its prime but still fragrant? What did lavender smell like anyway— someone’s lost dream?

  Dorie hoped lavender could be green in heaven, for the towhead’s sake.

  ‘Twas my own heart, dilly dilly, that told me so.

  Chapter FIFTEEN

  THE MATRON NUDGED HER FORWARD through the doors of the courtroom. The clock on the wall said it was just after nine o’clock. Light poured in gray and dull through the high windows. So it was morning. Saturday? She’d assumed she would mold in stir all weekend.

  Dorie looked around the room for a familiar face. The courtroom, high-ceilinged and wood-lined, with a big yellow chandelier, was nearly empty. It smelled like lemon wax and shoe polish. Up front, a gray-haired judge sat stoop-shouldered at his desk and frowned down at two men. One— the defendant, she guessed— in a rumpled blue suit, was short, round, and mostly bald. His lawyer wasn’t anyone Dorie recognized, but his air of bored superiority pegged him.

  The matron sat her down in a seat and lowered herself between Dorie and the aisle. She was a big woman with a hard, bloated face and wore a blue scarf over her dark hair. She hadn’t bothered with handcuffs.

  “Don’t I get a lawyer?” Dorie whispered to the matron.

  “Shush.”

  Up in front, the man in the wrinkled suit mumbled something. The judge hollered, “Speak up, man! I’m deaf in one ear!”

  The attorney nodded at his client.

  “It was an accident, Your Honor. I had too much to drink and she was just there, in the street.”

  “What is his plea, counselor?” the judge demanded.

  “Guilty, Your Honor.”

  The judge banged his gavel and rattled off plans to sentence the gentleman at a future date, then let him go without bail. Rumpled erupted in delight, shaking the hand of his lawyer as if Oliver Wendell Holmes had just made legal history.

  Another case came up, a streetwalker dressed in a hotcha number, dispatched quickly. The judge was in no mood to chat, even to curvaceous chippies.

  How, Dorie wondered, was she to explain to him that she had no lawyer and that she was innocent and that the gun had been planted and that her probation was almost up and she really had been good despite His Honor’s stupid employees? How?

  Her name was called by the bailiff. She slumped lower in the chair. The matron hit her with a plump elbow. “Get up.”

  Dorie drew herself up. She felt the trembling as she walked toward the judge and wondered if it was because they were trying to starve her in Jackson County Jail. As if she could smell the fried eggs and bacon at the Top Hat on Franklin, where they put something magic in the grease.

  “Miss Doria Lennox, you are charged with a parole violation,” the judge read. Even in his bored impatience, he sounded like a stern father. She searched his face for kindness. What did that look like in an old man— warm eyes, a gin-blossom nose, a turkey waddle? This one had none, all sharp angles and bloodshot eyes.

  “Where is your representation, young lady?”

  The words stuck in her throat.

  He smacked his lips. “Counsel. Your lawyer. You have a lawyer?”

  “I— no, I don’t
have a lawyer.”

  The judge stared at her over his glasses. “What they get you for the first time, then?”

  “Oh. Ah …” Dorie looked down at her hands, clasped in front of her. Could you phrase a rollicking good stabbing in a way that sounded remorseful? She was a gentle person, wasn’t she? Except for a few moments when the anger roiled up and took control of—

  “Your Honor!”

  The doors in the back of the courtroom swung shut as the man stumbled forward down the courtroom aisle as if propelled. He straightened, collected his dignity by tugging on his camel-hair jacket and pushing back his blond hair. “I represent this woman.”

  Louis Weston didn’t look at his client as he walked deliberately toward the judge. He spoke as he walked, a swagger in his step and a shit-eating smile on his mug.

  “I represent Miss Lennox in this matter, Your Honor. Louis Weston, sir, of Vanvleet & Wintraub. We had a case last month, I recall, the man with the horse.” He smiled his winning smile, strutting down the aisle. The judge actually seemed to chuckle.

  “Yes, Mr. Weston,” the judge said. Amused, he still gave the lawyer a gimlet eye. “Can we carry on here, or are you due on the golf course?”

  “Carry on, Your Honor,” Louie said. He had the most charming blue eyes. As he turned them on Dorie, they dropped in temperature a few degrees.

  She looked away. Why had he come? He would send her away and she’d never get out. She’d be up the river for weeks, months. Maybe years. The blood drained from her head and she tilted toward the judge’s desk. A hand caught her, Louie’s hand.

  “Are you all right, young lady?” the judge asked.

  “Probably ate some jail food this morning,” Weston joked. The judge harrumphed. The proceedings entertained someone at least. Dorie took a breath. The stars spinning around her head dimmed.

  “Get on with it, counselor.”

  Weston cleared his throat. “Your Honor, Miss Lennox was initially convicted of assault and battery. She has been on probation for the last five months, with only three weeks to go until the end of her parole. She was directed to steer clear of any sort of weapon for the duration, but yesterday a firearm, a pistol, was found in her automobile. She hasn’t had any other trouble during her probation, and she has met successfully with her officer. She claims the gun isn’t hers. She would like to plead not guilty, Your Honor.”