The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  Still, what woman says no when she gets a phone call from the Madison Police Department, asking for her presence at the site of a murder?

  A sensible one, that’s what my volunteers would have said. But I have never been sensible.

  Besides, the call came from Detective Hank Kaplan who, a few months ago, had learned the hard way to take me seriously. Unlike a lot of cops who would’ve gotten angry when a woman out-thought him, Kaplan responded with respect. He’s one of the new breed of men who doesn’t mind strong women, even if he still has a derogatory tone when he uses the phrase “women’s libbers.”

  The house was an old Victorian on a large parcel of land overlooking Lake Mendota. Someone had neatly shoved the walk down to the bare concrete, and had closed the shutters on the sides of the wrap-around porch, leaving only the area up front to take the brunt of the winter storms.

  And of the police.

  Squads and a panel van with the official MPD logo on the side parked along the curb. I counted at least four officers milling about the open door while I could see a couple more moving near the large picture window.

  I parked my ten-year-old Ford Falcon on the opposite side of the street and steeled myself. I was an anomaly no matter how you looked at it: I was tiny, female and black in lily-white Madison, Wisconsin. Most locals would’ve thought I was trying to rob the place rather than show up at the invitation of the lead detective.

  I grabbed the hot line’s new Polaroid camera. Then I got out of the car, locked it, and walked as calmly as I could across the street. I wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves, so I stuck my hands in the pocket of my new winter coat. At least the coat looked respectable. My torn jeans, sneakers, and short-cropped afro was too hippy for authorities in this town.

  As I approached, a young officer on the porch turned toward me, then leaned toward an older officer, said something, and rolled his eyes. At that moment, Kaplan rounded the side of the house and caught my gaze.

  He hurried down the sidewalk toward me. He was wearing a blue police coat over his black trousers and galoshes over his dress shoes. Unlike the street cops on the porch, he didn’t wear a cap, leaving his black hair to the vicissitudes of the wind. He was an uncommonly handsome man, with more than a passing resemblance to the Marlboro Man from the cigarette ads. I found his good looks annoying.

  “Miss Wilson,” he said loud enough for the others to hear, “come with me.”

  He sounded official. The cops outside started in surprise, then gave me a once-over.

  A shiver ran down my back. I hated the scrutiny, even though I knew he had done it on purpose, so no one would second-guess my presence here.

  “This way,” he said, and put a hand on my back to help me up the curb.

  I couldn’t help it; I stiffened. He let his hand drop.

  “Sorry,” he said. He knew I had been brutalized by a cop in Chicago. While that experience had made me stronger, I still had a rape survivor’s aversion to touch.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “I’ll show you,” Kaplan said. “But we’re going in the back. Did you bring your camera?”

  I held up the case. I had wrapped the strap around my right hand.

  “Good,” he said. “Come on.”

  He walked quickly on the narrow shoveled sidewalk leading around the building. I had to hurry to keep up with him.

  “So,” I said, as soon as we were clear of the other cops, “you guys don’t have your own cameras?”

  “We do,” he said. “You’ll just want a record of this.”

  Now I was really intrigued. A record of something that he was willing to share; a record of something that they didn’t want to record themselves? Maybe he had finally decided that I should photograph a rape victim immediately after the crime had occurred.

  Although Kaplan didn’t handle the rape cases. He was homicide.

  The narrow sidewalk led to another small porch. Kaplan pulled on the screen door, and held it for me. Then he shoved the heavy interior door open.

  A musty smell rose from there, tinged with the scent of fall apples. I had expected a crime-scene smell—blood and feces and other unpleasantness, not the somewhat homey smell.

  To my right, half a dozen coats hung on the wall, with a variety of galoshes, boots, and old shoes on a plastic mat. This was clearly the entrance that the homeowner used the most.

  “When should I start photographing?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you when,” Kaplan said, and led me up the stairs.

  We stepped into a kitchen that smelled faintly of baked bread. I frowned as Kaplan led me through swinging doors into the dining area. A picture window overlooked the lake. The view, so beautiful that it caught my attention, distracted me from the coroner’s staff, who clustered in the archway between the dining room and living room.

  Kaplan touched my arm, looking wary as he did so. I glanced down, saw an elderly woman sprawled on the shag carpet, arms above her head, face turned away as if her own death embarrassed her. This area did smell of blood and death. The stench got stronger the closer I got.

  I couldn’t see her face. One hand was clenched in a fist, the other open. Her legs were open too, and looked like they had been pried that way. A pair of glasses had been knocked next to the console television, and a pot filled with artificial fall flowers had tumbled near the door.

  The coroner had pulled up the woman’s shirt slightly to get liver temperature. The frown on his face seemed at once appropriate and extreme for the work he was doing.

  I moved a step closer. He looked up, eyes fierce. His mouth opened slightly, and I thought he was going to yell at me. Instead, he turned that look on Kaplan.

  “Who the hell is that? Control your crime scene, man. Get the civilians out of here.”

  “Sorry,” Kaplan said, sounding contrite. “I turned in the wrong direction.”

  He touched my arm to move me away from the crowd. I realized that he had play-acted to convince the coroner and the other police officers that my appearance in that room had been an accident.

  But it hadn’t been. Kaplan had wanted me to see the body.

  “This way,” he said in that formal voice, as if he thought someone was still listening.

  He led me back into the kitchen, then opened a door into a large pantry. Canned goods lined the walls. A single 40-watt bulb illuminated the entire space.

  My stomach clenched. I had no idea what he was doing, and I wasn’t the most flexible person around cops.

  He pulled the pantry door closed, then moved past me and pushed on the far wall. It opened into a book-lined room with no windows at all. Mahogany shelves lined the walls. The room was wide, with several chairs for reading and a heavy library table in the middle, stacked with volumes. Those volumes were half open, or marked with pieces of paper.

  Beyond that was another open door. Kaplan led me through it.

  We stepped into one of the prettiest—and most hidden—offices I had ever seen. The walls were covered with expensive wood paneling. A gigantic partners desk sat in the middle of the room. The flooring matched the paneling—no shag carpet here. Instead, the desk stood on an expensive Turkish carpet, of a type I had only seen in magazines. The room smelled of old paper, books, and Emerude. I couldn’t hear the officers in the other part of the house. In fact, the only sound in this room was my breathing, and Kaplan’s clothes rustling as he moved.

  An IBM Selectric sat on the credenza beside the desk. Behind it stood a graveyard of old typewriters, from an ancient Royal to one of the very first electrics. Above them, files in neat rows, with dividers. The desk itself had several open files on top, and a full coffee cup to one side. I wanted to touch it, to see if it was still warm.

  “This is what you wanted to show me?” I asked.

  �
��I think you’ll find some interesting things here,” he said, nodding toward the floor. Against the built-in bookshelves in a back corner, someone had placed dozens, maybe hundreds of picture frames.

  I crouched. Someone had framed newspaper and magazine articles, all of them from different eras and with different bylines.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Her life’s work,” he said.

  “Her,” I repeated. “I’m not even sure whose house this is.”

  He looked at me in surprise. “I thought you knew everything about this town.”

  “Not even close,” I said.

  He sighed softly. “This house belongs to Dolly Langham.”

  “The philanthropist?” I asked.

  He gave me a tight smile. “See? You do know her.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “Some of my volunteers kept trying to contact her for help with fundraising for the hot line, but she never returned our calls or our letters.”

  A frown creased his forehead. “That’s odd. She was always doing for women.”

  I frowned too. “I take it she’s the woman in the living room?”

  “That’s the back parlor,” he said, as if he knew this house intimately. Maybe he did.

  “All right,” I said slowly, not sure of his non-response. “The back parlor then. That’s her?”

  He closed his eyes slightly and nodded.

  “You’ve caught this case?” I asked. “It’s yours entirely?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and he didn’t sound happy about it. “This is a big deal. Miss Langham is one of the richest people in the city, if not the richest. Her family goes back to the city’s founding, and she’s related to mayors, governors, and heads of the university. She’s important, Miss Wilson.”

  “I’m getting that,” I said. “Why am I here?”

  “Because,” he said, “cases like this, they’re always about something.”

  “Yes, I know, but—”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t know. There’s the official story. And then there’s the real story.”

  I froze. Cops rarely spoke to civilians like this. I had learned that from my ex-husband, who had been a Chicago cop and who had died, in part, because of what had happened to me.

  “You think the real story is going to get covered up,” I said.

  “No,” Kaplan said. “I don’t think it. I know it.”

  I glanced around the room. “The real story is here?”

  He shrugged. “That I don’t know. I haven’t investigated yet.”

  He was being deliberately elliptical, and I was no good with elliptical. I preferred blunt. Elliptical always got me in trouble.

  “Why am I here?” I asked.

  “I need a fresh pair of eyes,” he said.

  “But the investigation is just starting,” I said.

  He nodded. “So is the pressure.”

  I let out a small breath of air. So, he had a script already, and he didn’t like it. “You want me to photograph things in here?”

  “As much as you can,” he said. “Keep those pictures safe for me.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “And Miss Wilson, you know since you were once a cop’s wife, how things occasionally go missing from a crime scene?”

  “Oh, I do,” I said. “You want to prevent that here.”

  He shook his head, and gave me a look he hadn’t shown me since the first time I met him. The look accused me of being naïve.

  “You know, Miss Wilson, I find it strange that you don’t carry a purse. Most women carry bags so big they can fit entire reams of paper inside them.”

  My breath caught as I finally understood.

  “I prefer pockets,” I said, and stuck my hands inside the deep pockets of my coat.

  “You are quite the character, Miss Wilson,” he said approvingly. “I think you might have a couple of uninterrupted hours in here, if I keep the doors closed. Is that all right with you?”

  Inside a room with no windows, only one door, a phalanx of cops outside, and a dead body a few yards away. Sure, that was Just Fine.

  “You’ll be back for me?” I asked.

  “Most assuredly,” he said, and put his hand on the door.

  “One last thing, Detective,” I said. “Who found this room?”

  A shadow passed over his face, so quickly that I almost missed it. “I did. No one else.”

  So no one else knew I was here.

  “All right,” I said. “See you in two hours.”

  He nodded once, then let himself out, pulling the door closed behind him.

  I felt claustrophobic. This room felt still, tense, almost as if it were waiting for something. Maybe that was the effect of the murdered woman in the back parlor. Maybe I was more tense than I thought.

  That would be odd, though. I had training to keep me calm. I went to medical school until I couldn’t find a place to intern (honey, we don’t want you to take a position away from a real doctor), and then I went to the University of Chicago Law School. I got used to cadavers in medical school, and extreme pressure in law school, and somewhere along the way, I had accepted death as a part of life.

  I let out a small sigh, squared my shoulders, and pulled off my coat. I opened it, so that the inner pockets were easily accessible, and draped it on one of the straight-backed chairs near the door. Then I grabbed the Polaroid and put it around my neck.

  I didn’t know where to start because I didn’t know what I was looking for. But Kaplan had asked me here for a reason. He wanted me to find things, and to remove some of them, which meant that I shouldn’t start with the books or even the framed articles.

  I started with the files.

  I walked behind the desk. The perfume smell was strong here. Dolly Langham had clearly spent a lot of time at this desk. The papers on top were notes in shorthand, which I had never bothered to learn. I was certain one of my volunteers at the hot line knew it, however. I stacked those papers together and put them in a “Possible” pile. I figured I’d see what I found, and then stash what I could just before Kaplan came back for me.

  I opened the drawers next. The top held the usual assortment of pens and paperclips, and stray keys. The drawer to my right had a large leather bound ledger in it.

  The ledger’s entries started in 1970, and covered most of the past two years. The most recent entry was from last week. There were names on the side, followed by a number (usually large) and a running total along the edge. That much I could follow. It was the last set of numbers, one column done in red ink and the other in blue, that I couldn’t understand.

  Kaplan had to know this was here. He had to have looked through the desk; any good investigator would have.

  I took the ledger and placed it on my coat.

  Then I went back and searched for more ledgers. I figured if she had one for the 1970s, she had to have some from before that. I didn’t find any in the drawer—although I found a leather-bound journal, also written in shorthand, with the year 1972 emblazoned on the front.

  I set that on the desktop along with the notes, and continued my search.

  The desk, organized as it was, didn’t yield much, so I turned to the files behind me. They were in date order. The tab that stuck out had that date and a last name. I opened the oldest file, and inside found more handwritten notes, and a yellowed newspaper clipping. The byline—Agnes Olden—matched the name on the outside of the file.

  Someone had scrawled 1925 on the clipping, which came from a newspaper I’d never heard of called The Chicago Star. The headline was Accuser Speaks!

  Dressed in an expensive skirt and a shirtwaist blouse with mullion sleeves, Dorthea Lute looks like a woman of impeccable reputation instead of the fallen woman all ass
ume her to be. For our interview, she sat primly on the edge of her chair, feet crossed demurely at the ankles, hands clasped in her lap, head down. She spoke softly, and when she described the circumstances of her accusation, she did not scream or shout or cry, but told the tale with a calm tone that belied its horror.

  I scanned as quickly as I could, trying to get the gist of the piece. Apparently this Dorthea Lute accused one of Chicago’s most prominent citizens of “taking her forcibly and against her will” in the “quiet of his own home.” Friends and family said that she was bruised, and “indeed, witnesses saw her wearing her arm in a sling. She had two black eyes, and a purplish bruise that ran from her temple to her chin.”

  I closed my eyes for a brief moment. This was an account of a rape, and the interview was conducted with the “accuser,” who—of course—had been accused herself of using her body and her “wiles” to “improve her standing in the world.” When that didn’t work, she accused this prominent businessman of “the most vile of crimes.”

  I thumbed through the file and found no more clippings, just more notes. Then I grabbed the next file. It had the same byline, and featured an interview with the family of a young girl who died brutally at the hands of her boyfriend. File after file, interview after interview, all written in that now-dated manner, trying to make each event, each sentence into some kind of crime in and of itself.

  I replaced those files and grabbed another from the next row. This came from the Des Moines Voice, another paper I had never heard of, and came from 1933. The content of the file was similar to the others, with the shorthand notes, the scrawls, but the byline was different. This one belonged to Ada Cornell. Cornell had the same kind interest in crimes against women.

  Only these files also contained carbons of the original news piece.

  I was intrigued.

  The next shelf down had stories from the 1940s, and many of them came from different communities. The bylines all differed but the files remained the same.