City of Sharks

by Kelli Stanley

  “That’s part of your job, isn’t it? Screen the manuscripts for Alexander?”

  “It wasn’t at first, not until Niles felt he could trust me. He really does work hard, you know, and most of the submissions are sent directly to him. Some come through agents, the kind who take a few dollars up front. Every day I stamp ‘rejected’ on ten or more books. Thousands of people want to write, Miss Corbie. Many of them aren’t beyond the fifth grade.”

  Louise opened her purse and pulled out two envelopes and a sheet of folded paper.

  “I’ve brought what you asked for. The two letters and a list of the people who’ve threatened us.”

  Miranda took the rubber-banded bundle and ran her eyes over the list. Five names.

  “Both men and women, I see.”

  “That shouldn’t surprise you.”

  Miranda looked up at the blonde, holding her eyes.

  “I need more information. Your daily routine during, before, and after work. Names of people you were friendly with in your former job, in secretarial school. And former boyfriends—men you’ve dated, men who might be jealous.”

  The blonde started to slide out from the booth, skin drawn tight over sharp-edged cheeks.

  “I must go. I can’t be late.”

  Frozen face, blond hair immaculate, tears wiped and dried. But dry white hands clutched her purse like a life preserver, and fear drowned the blue in her eyes.

  “Who is it, Louise? Who are you afraid of? Jerry? Smith? Niles?”

  The secretary gripped the edge of the Formica countertop. Words tumbled out.

  “I couldn’t bear it if this is someone I know. I’ve worked with Niles for four months—Roger’s a friend. Jerry is—Jerry, but not a murderer. Sylvia is too weak to be a threat to anyone but herself. No, Miss Corbie, you should look to the list.” She shuddered, tremulous. “There is no one else.”

  The blonde hurried through the double doors of Fong Fong, the bright Grant Street sunshine momentarily blinding.

  Louise Crowley was too scared to stay, too scared to run, too scared to go to the cops.

  Determined to find a stranger behind the threats to her life.

  Miranda nodded to herself, sipping the last of the melted ice and cherry Coke.

  Louise Crowley was protecting someone.

  Six

  Miranda’s feet sank in the quicksand of the plush Pinkerton carpet.

  New brunette at the front desk, hair upswept and piled high in an attempt to mimic the latest Vogue, billowy white silk blouse tied with a scarlet bow at the collar.

  The girl raised a complexion colored and harmonized by Dorothy Gray, all to the tune of South American Red. One lip sneered.

  “Mr. Jennings is not available, Miss. If you care to leave a card…”

  The tone suggested that any card Miranda might care to leave would be dog-eared and sweat-stained. Miranda smoothed the tight-fitting navy skirt over her hips and raised a hand to adjust the beret, brushing back her auburn hair.

  “Ask him to phone Miranda.”

  “As I said, Miss, if you care to leave a card…”

  Miranda’s lips twitched dangerously. “And as I said, ask him to phone Miranda. I just saw him a couple of hours ago. He doesn’t need my card.”

  The receptionist raised a plucked eyebrow disapprovingly. She was all of twenty-two or twenty-three.

  “Miranda…?”

  Miranda leaned forward, gloved hands placed flat and square on the top of the desk.

  “Corbie. I’m right down the hall. The name’s on the door. But then again, maybe that wig on your head is making it difficult to think.”

  The brunette blanched and then turned red. “Why, I never—”

  Miranda pivoted from the doorway. “Exactly, sister.”

  She strode through the hall and around the corner. Allen would see her later and maybe the Pinkerton files would find something in Louise Crowley’s past, something from Olympia, Washington, that followed the blonde to San Francisco.

  Something to tell Miranda what—and whom—she was hiding.

  * * *

  Miranda turned the page of the Big Chief notebook and frowned at her scribbled notes.

  MOTIVE was underlined three times.

  Sylvia Alexander? Maybe. The letters read more like a sick fantasy than an actual threat. And yet … a shove, a car, a box of chocolates. No fantasy there.

  She wrote SYLVIA: JEALOUSY? Stared at the blue ink and followed with ROGER ROSCOE, HOWARD CARTER SMITH, NILES ALEXANDER, JERRY ALEXANDER, EDITOR/EMPLOYEE, WRITER? Miranda quickly added OPPORTUNITY in a separate column, writing the same list underneath, with NILES, JERRY, and ROGER ROSCOE at the top. Question marks for everyone else.

  MEANS …

  Not Jerry, not for the hit-and-run, not unless he hired someone, and that wasn’t his style. Women were the goal line, bedded, bruised and personally conquered. Hiring someone else to kill or injure his father’s secretary was too passive, too indirect, almost a feminine touch.

  Miranda’s frown deepened, and she wrote SYLVIA? at the bottom of the list.

  Sylvia Alexander seemed capable of fantasy but not reality, not the kind that could command a powerful car and drive it over a sidewalk without hitting a brick wall. Hell, she could barely command her way out of the Sky Room.

  Was it a pose, Sylvia’s helplessness? Or was she a neurotic snowbird, brittle and breakable, capable only of writing venom but not acting it out?

  Miranda tapped the fountain pen against her lips, brow wrinkled in thought.

  Sylvia may be fragile but her husband wasn’t, not Niles Alexander, a would-be literary tycoon bloated with his own delusions. Add a Shakespeare-quoting novelist who squires and screws said publisher’s wife, a scion star running back who graduated from Sally Stanford summa cum laude, an exposé writer who looks like a lumberjack and five little pigs, all of whom wanted to go to market with a book …

  She picked up the list of rejected writers Louise had given her and studied it.

  MILLICENT PRYNE

  RANDAL B. BRANDT

  ANASTASIA DECKER

  IDA WINEGARDEN

  GEOFFREY HUTCHINSON, ESQ.

  Decker was housed at the Oceanic Hotel, Bente’s run-down, low-rent hovel, frequented by strippers, queers, hophead musicians, and a few Communists, though Bente’s own politics were ever-evolving, especially after Trotsky’s assassination and the Molotov Pact.

  Pryne lived in a boardinghouse on Haight, Winegarden in West Portal. Randal B. Brandt lived at the Benson, an alliteratively irresistible choice despite the paddy wagon’s nightly visits and the stench of sour laundry. Geoffrey Hutchinson, Esq., gave a law office on Turk.

  None of them sounded like a sure candidate for the Napa Valley State Insane Asylum.

  Miranda leaned back in the black leather chair and tipped out a Chesterfield from the pack on the desk.

  Five names on a sheet given to her by a client she knew was lying.

  They all lie to you, Corbie. Sooner or later. Just a matter of what kinda lie. And most important? You gotta figure out why …

  Charlie Burnett, her old boss, deep in the cups and serious, tricks of the trade. The bastard taught her even after he got himself iced and damned her soul to hell as a private detective, solving his murder, transformation from bait to shamus. Goddamn Charlie Burnett …

  Miranda stretched and walked to the window, smoke from the Chesterfield curling into an arabesque.

  She’d follow her client tonight. Find out what kind of lie she was telling.

  And whether it was a lie of omission or a lie of duplicity, Louise Crowley was young, alone, and in trouble. She needed help, needed protection. Needed someone to watch over her …

  Miranda exhaled, watching a White Front rumble by on the way to the Ferry Building, flower sellers wrapping dahlias. Someone threw in a nickel at Tascone’s and punched “In the Mood” again.

  Last case in San Francisco, maybe the last case ever, Miranda Corbie, Private Investig
ator, reinvented and reimagined. Miranda Corbie, the same and not the same, child of Pacific Street in a torn muslin dress, Mills girl dancing the Charleston, English teacher in Salinas and Red Cross nurse in Spain, the woman who finally found herself, found her soul and lost it all, all, buried deep, a death so complete that it became her life, no Johnny, no Johnny, no Johnny. Then Rick and Burnett and James and Sally Rand, and a license in her wallet and she emerged, reborn, the same and not the same, dark and light and shining like the Phoenix … like the City, her city, her very own.

  And before the sad good-byes, before the fond farewells, before she wrote Rick or called Gonzales or bought Gladys the new hat she’d been eyeing or sublet her apartment to Bente or sent a message to her old man that he’d be on his own, no more vitamin B shots and rye-soaked sprees … before she threw back a final shot with Allen at the Rusty Nail, before she dropped a C-note on No-Legs Norris and spun the last wheel at the Club Moderne, Joe Morello crying like a baby, boutonnière wilted and brown … before anything else, she made a promise to Louise Crowley, to the piece of folded, worn paper in her wallet.

  The same promise she’d made to Eddie Takahashi, to Pandora Blake, to a waitress in Reno and a little girl named Susie Hampton.

  Light tap on the frosted glass.

  Miranda stiffened at the noise and looked up quickly, watching the office door open wide.

  Roger Roscoe stood in the doorway, hat in his hand.

  * * *

  “Miss Corbie? Are you otherwise engaged or may I take up a few minutes of your time?”

  He held a brown bowler in long, nervous fingers, wore brown corduroy trousers and a dark green sweater under a tweed jacket. She waved him toward one of the hard-backed chairs in front of her desk.

  “I’ve got a few minutes. Have a seat, Mr. Roscoe.”

  “Thanks.” His angular body stretched awkwardly over the wooden chair. His eyes met Miranda’s, and he smiled as if sharing a secret.

  “I knew you’d want to talk to me about last night. In fact, I was just in the office and Louise wasn’t—well, not quite as open as she normally is. Downright reticent, in fact. I attribute this change to advice from you.”

  “Mr. Roscoe—”

  “Please. Call me Roger. I agree, it’s far safer to treat everyone as a suspect, though I’m not accustomed to the cold shoulder.” He pulled a silver cigarette case out of his breast pocket. “Mind?”

  Miranda shook her head. He struck a match and inhaled the Lucky. She nodded at the gold Gump’s matchbook.

  “In the market for Oriental antiquities? Your royalties must be better than you led me to believe.”

  He followed her eyes to the matchbook in his hand and laughed.

  “Niles is friends with the Gump family—we often have receptions and parties at the store. My royalties are sadly not such that I’m contemplating a Persian carpet or a jade Buddha.”

  Miranda crushed out her Chesterfield stub in the ashtray. “To address your initial comment, yes, I’ve advised Louise to be careful.”

  “To trust no one?”

  “If that’s what it takes to save her life.”

  He nodded. “I’m glad. As I told you, I’m worried about Louise and what these attempts or whatever they are portend. The sooner this is cleared up, the better for all of us. Writers are like the lilies of the field, Miss Corbie—or Miranda, if I may. We toil not, nor do we spin, except in our own little minds.”

  “Louise said you work very hard.”

  “And so I do. I work more at being a writer than actually writing. But never mind. You said you had a few minutes, let’s not waste time on philosophy.”

  The teeth flashed again, showcasing a dimple in his thin right cheek and chin. Roger Roscoe had charm—and knew how to use it.

  “Thanks for being so cooperative.” She pulled the Big Chief tablet toward her and opened it to a blank page. “Is Roger Roscoe your real name?”

  The novelist gave a short laugh. “I’d like to tell you that my true name is Percival Snodgrass, but alas, my parents—both dead, by the way—were Roscoes and succumbed to the temptation of alliteration. My middle name, believe it or not, is Rodney. My dust jacket copy reads ‘From the pen of R. R.’—Niles thinks I’ll be more successful as an abbreviation.”

  Miranda scratched a note and asked, without looking up: “Address?”

  “The Ford Apartments, 957 Mission Street. At least until something better comes along.”

  “Live there long?”

  Roscoe sucked at the Lucky Strike and blew a stream of smoke over Miranda’s head.

  “A year. Nothing’s come along yet.”

  “So it should take you maybe ten or fifteen minutes to walk to the Monadnock every Friday afternoon before dining at the Palace.”

  The novelist blinked. He reached toward the desk and tapped the cigarette in the ashtray.

  “‘A hit, a very palpable hit.’ You’re not a lily, Miranda, though you’ll forgive me if I describe you as a rose.” He grinned. “I visit Louise and remind Niles of my existence at least once a week. As I explained last night, I’m hoping he’ll let me out of my contract, and my strategy—unsuccessful to this point—is one of ubiquity. In short, I’m hoping to irritate him enough to let me go without alienating the already paltry sum I collect. A difficult task, to be sure. I then eat a modest dinner at the Palace to keep my chin up. My jacket photo is in the Library of Congress, after all.”

  Miranda turned back a few pages. “So why were you at Alexander Publishing the day before yesterday—a Monday—when Louise received the chocolates?”

  The lanky author sighed dramatically and uncrossed his legs.

  “Have you any idea how difficult it is to stare at a blank page? To give shape and form and mass and direction to the impulses and thoughts and feelings in your head and then craft a narrative out of them? Poets have it easy—they work in outlines these days, no sonnets, no long-form story-poems, except for MacLeish and Benét and a few other holdovers. No, prose is the undiscovered country, the land of wilderness and broken dreams, where you are expected to either be a good writer or a good seller, and God help you if you try to do both.”

  Miranda smiled.

  “I’m not an author, obviously, but I do have a degree in English. I’m not unfamiliar with the pitfalls of publication—nearly everyone who has ever written anything of importance has suffered something, Mr. Roscoe, so you’re in good company. I assume your appearance here on Monday was due to—what, officially? Frustration? Boredom?”

  “Both. I’m trying to break into a new market—the crime story, as I explained last night. I’m hoping a detective thriller will give me both commercial and literary success, in the way it has for Chandler and Hammett. Cain’s an academic, he can live on tenure, but he’s not a bad model to follow, either. Anyway, since I live so close to the office I drop in when the mood strikes, and I thought I’d add another day’s worth of irritating Niles to my weekly schedule. Plus, I’d missed the Friday before—my annual medical checkup. I’m fine, by the way.”

  “So Sylvia Alexander is not a factor in when and how often you choose to appear at the office?”

  His dark complexion reddened for the first time. He angled forward, cigarette in his hand, blue eyes on hers.

  “I love Sylvia. She deserves better than Niles, but she’s incapable of leaving him and he knows it. I’d like nothing better than to catch the bastard in a compromising position—thus securing my freedom and potentially Sylvia’s in one swoop—but Louise isn’t that kind of girl.”

  Miranda spoke quietly. “Does Sylvia know that?”

  The writer’s voice was taut. “No. Not exactly.”

  “How long has she been taking cocaine and heroin?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, shut it again. Leaned forward to rub out the Lucky in the Tower of the Sun ashtray.

  “You’re a better detective than I gave you credit for. She’s been using both since I’ve known her.”

  “Was she
a nerve case before the hop?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. She—Niles sends her to sanitariums, practically one a year.”

  “So Alexander basically employs you as his wife’s baby-sitter?”

  Anger flashed across his thin, dark face. “I’m no baby-sitter. Sylvia is a fully functioning woman, I assure you.”

  “No assurance necessary. She’s functional enough to be jealous of a pretty young girl—maybe even enough to try killing her.”

  The novelist stood up stiffly, no flash of white teeth, no smile. “I thought you were a sympathetic soul, Miss Corbie. I was wrong.”

  “I’m sympathetic to my client. Everything and everyone else is open season. Sit down, Mr. Roscoe, this isn’t the Mercury Theater and you’re not Orson fucking Welles.”

  The words hit him and he winced, blinking. He sank back in the chair, knees together, breath heavy. A church bell on Mission tolled three.

  Miranda said dryly, “So we understand one another. Here’s the question: the husband not only OK’s the affair, but makes sure you’re taken care of for taking care of his wife. Doesn’t that make canceling your contract even more awkward?”

  Roscoe’s cheekbones burnished red.

  “The publishing business is full of awkwardness. When a book is rejected or reviewed badly, you take it personally. When your publisher bestows time and money on another writer instead of you, you take it personally. My relationship with Sylvia—and the very slight pecuniary allowance Niles allows me for squiring her places—is merely one small wrinkle in an old hag’s face.”

  He pointed the last words at Miranda. Her lips rose at the corners.

  “‘A rose by any other name,’ Mr. Roscoe. What the hell did you expect when you walked in here?”

  “Not this.” The smile was strained. “But I’m a brave man, Miss Corbie. Let’s finish and get it over with.”