Tough Cookie (Maggie Sullivan mysteries)

by M. Ruth Myers

  It was a name I hadn’t gotten from Hill or Wildman. A woman’s name at that. A woman who ran a construction company, which made it more interesting.

  “Inherited it from an uncle, I think,” Keefe was saying. “Or maybe she bought it. Some scandal about the uncle or cousin or whoever owned it before her going to jail.”

  Most likely she just owned it, then. Had someone running it for her. But women often picked up more than men did, because too many people took them for dim, or forgot they even were in the room. Meaning Rachel Minsky could be exactly the source of information I needed. I thanked him and let him help me into my coat.

  “One word of warning, Miss Sullivan.” He settled the coat on my shoulders. “If you go to see Rachel Minsky, don’t turn your back on her. She’s a tough cookie.”

  Then again, so was I.

  Seven

  “My cousin from Peoria?” Matt Jenkins snorted as I slid into the booth across from him at the Red Fox Grill. “Remind me not to have offspring if there are cankers like you on the family tree.”

  “Figured you’d guess who it was if I said that.”

  “And you didn’t want Stutzweiler to know who you were because you intend to wheedle some kind of information out of me that you shouldn’t have.”

  “Enjoying that bonus you got?” I asked as a waitress set a cup of vegetable soup and a grilled cheese sandwich before him. I ordered a bowl of the soup while Jenkins’ eyes twinkled behind wire-rimmed glasses. He was edging thirty and a halo of red-blonde curls circled the increasingly visible top of his head.

  “Glad you asked, because seeing as how I’m flush, Ione and I thought we might treat you to some music at the Carousel Saturday night,” he said.

  He checked to make sure his big Speed Graphic and other camera gear were safely out of range of any spills and bit ravenously into his sandwich. Good thing he was slim since he always attacked food as if he were starving.

  “Ione’s anesthetically boring cousin is going to be in town again and you can’t find another chump to make up a foursome,” I said shrewdly. “Forget it, Jenkins. He rattles on like a jalopy. The rest of us end up needing toothpicks to keep our eyes open.”

  “The Carousel, Mags. Table at the front. I hear the drummer’s really great.”

  I growled and Jenkins knew he’d won. Lance’s Carousel was the hottest music spot in Dayton.

  “Now, what do you want me to risk my job to find out this time?” Jenkins asked.

  “You won’t be risking anything. I just want to know if you remember anything about a businessman named Draper who disappeared about four months ago.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Skipped town, by all accounts. Owing people money.”

  “‘By all accounts.’ You mean it could have been foul play?”

  “That’s what I want to find out. I’ll check back copies at the library, of course, but your pals in the newsroom hear rumors that don’t make it into print.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, his merry eyes now sharp as tacks.

  “These last few years, more than a few men just closed their doors and walked away. Most of them probably owed somebody.”

  We ate in silence, aware some of those men had jumped in the river, or maybe put a gun to their head. The past ten years had been rough. One man in four without work. Families out in the street. Lines a mile long outside soup kitchens. New Deal programs had put people to work, but too many still were in need and too many businesses still were on the skids.

  “There wasn’t an obit,” I said. “But the cops get unclaimed bodies, and your boys on the police beat might remember some around the time in question, or maybe heard hints about someone conning investors and then taking off.”

  “And that’s what he did? Pulled a con?”

  I shrugged. The less Jenkins knew about some details of my work, the better it was for everyone. Among other things, it confirmed this tidbit or that if he got the same information.

  “I’ve heard several stories. Could be sour grapes. He’d apparently been a reputable businessman for years.”

  “You say Draper’s his name?”

  “Harold Draper. Dealt in commercial real estate. Big projects by the sound of it.”

  “Yeah, okay. You usually ask for a lot worse.”

  Sometimes Jenkins and I had to put a fence between our two jobs, but other times we chatted over that fence. I wanted to ask what he knew about Wildman and his gun-waving sister, but that would give him an idea who’d hired me on this. Besides, I knew of a better source.

  “Oh, there is one other thing,” I said. “When’s the best time of day to catch Tilly Sweeny?”

  He almost choked on his last bit of soup.

  “Why in hades would you want anything to do with that misery?” he asked dabbing his lips with his napkin. “Most of us stay as far away from her as humanly possible.”

  Tilly was second-string to the woman who wrote the paper’s society column. She dug up dirt and was said to be good at it. Some of Tilly’s dirt got washed a little and sprinkled in at the end of the news on society parties, but she wasn’t the one who got a by-line on the column, and she resented it.

  “Perhaps I want to reach out to the lonely,” I said, crossing my hands on my breasts like the saints in pictures that had decorated my schoolroom walls.

  “Uh-huh.” Jenkins gave me a withering look and shrugged into his camera gear. “Or perhaps you need to dig in mud so disgusting decent folk would be overcome by the fumes. She comes in around ten. If you want anything close to reliable information, you’d be smart to catch her before she gets a snootful.”

  “Which is?”

  “When she goes to lunch. And she goes early.”

  Eight

  There were two men left on my list of Draper’s reputed investors. One was out of town and the other one couldn’t see me until Monday. That left Rachel Minsky. A sugary male voice informed me she could see me at four o’clock.

  That left me some time to trot to the public library and go through back issues of the two daily papers. I started five months back, which would cover a few weeks before Draper disappeared, just in case anything caught my eye that might have spurred him to take off. By the time I had to leave for my appointment I hadn’t found anything, and I hadn’t learned much except that Wildman’s sister was Dorothy Tarkington and that she’d been picked up for drunk driving. If I’d through she was able – drunk or sober – to drive a big truck, I’d have put her down as the one who’d bashed her brother’s Cadillac last night, but I didn’t.

  My little DeSoto couldn’t hold a candle to Wildman’s limousine when it came to plushness, but it had a heater and it started reliably in even the worst weather. It also held the road well, which proved handy on the icy streets surrounding Rachel Minsky’s construction firm. The office was in an industrial area. A sign half as big as the front identified a single-story wood building as MINSKY BUILDERS. A coal yard and a warehouse sat across the way while another warehouse flanked one side. A large fenced-in area filled with machines and stacks of lumber and pipe occupied the remaining side.

  Some trucks were pulled up by the fence along with a big black Buick. I figured the Buick belonged to Rachel Minsky. Climbing two steps I stamped snow off my shoes and went inside. It was a no-nonsense place. A counter holding several fat ledgers separated people who came in from three desks and their occupants.

  “I have an appointment with Miss Minsky,” I told a fellow wearing a sweater and corduroy jacket who came to help me.

  “Talk to him.” He jerked a thumb toward a young squire whose hair shone with Brylcreem.

  The young guy’s starched collar looked out of place beside the sturdier wear of three other men who bobbed around, spindling papers, writing on clipboards and fielding phone calls. His desk had a blotter and orderly trappings. He looked up as I started over.

  “Miss Sullivan?” It was the overly cordial voice from the telephone. He rose elegantly to his feet and hurried to
lift a gate in the counter, beckoning me through. “You’re a few minutes early, but that’s all right. You can go on back. Second room on the right. I’ll let Miss Minsky know that you’re here.”

  The place wasn’t near as swank as the Hulman Building. A single bulb provided weak light in the narrow hall. The walls were sheets of plywood. The door of the second room on the right was closed.

  As I knocked, something hit the wall on the other side. A hard throw. If it was meant as a welcome, I had some meeting ahead. I walked in.

  “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!” spewed a short woman standing behind a cherrywood desk. Her fists were planted on her hips.

  She was my age, or near it, with a shape that would have made men drool if she’d been two inches taller. Some probably still did. She was so intent on a document lying before her that she hadn’t noticed me.

  “Interesting choice of words for Jewish person,” I said.

  Her head snapped up. At first glance she looked sweet and doll-like. A cloud of soft black hair floated above a pointed chin. But a pair of dark eyes sized me up with military shrewdness.

  “What’s wrong with it? He was a good Jewish boy. Who the hell are you?”

  “Maggie Sullivan. I made an appointment....”

  The phone on her desk jangled. She snatched it up. After listening a moment she banged it back down.

  “That miserable little pig turd.”

  Her secretary, I guessed. He’d waited to tell her I was on my way back, knowing full well I’d catch her off guard.

  Her lips thinned into what the unwary might take for a smile. “Doesn’t like working for a woman. Doesn’t like working for a Jew.” She flounced into her chair as if onto a throne. “You’re here. You might as well sit.”

  The dark rose suit she wore had come from the top floor of Rike’s, or the needle of an equally expensive dressmaker. She wore a gold pin on the lapel. Garnets decorated her ears.

  “A private dick.” She tossed aside the card I gave her. “I don’t like cops. No reason I’d like a private one any better. What is it you want?”

  “Harold Draper,” I said. “I’m told you had dealings with him.”

  She fitted a cigarette into a short gold holder. Using a match from a can on her desk she lighted it deftly. She blew some smoke out, regarding me through it.

  “A lot of people had dealings with Harold Draper. So what?”

  “So one of them hired me to find him.”

  “Oh-ho.”

  I’d never met a woman so sure of herself. It came through in the lazy rotation of her chair left and right. In the way she leaned back. In how at ease she seemed – garnets and all – in the Spartan office where maps of the area stuck to paneling that was only a cut above plywood and rolls of what looked like blueprints overflowed an open cabinet. If she was curious who my client was or what I wanted with Draper, she gave no hint.

  “What can you tell me about him?” I asked.

  “What I’m guessing you’ve already heard. He turned out to be a crook. Took off with his investors’ money. Made fools of people who thought they were smart. Why come to see me?”

  “I heard you invested in Champion Works.”

  Her lips thinned again. This time it might really be a smile.

  “I did – but I started to smell a rat.”

  “And?”

  “I got my money back.” Her amusement was unmistakable now. “I was very polite.”

  “Anything you can tell me about Draper’s personal life?”

  “We didn’t belong to the same country club,” she said drily.

  “Who else got sucked in by Draper’s scheme? Or who have you heard might have been?”

  She shrugged. “I’m a Jew. I’m a woman. I’m not part of the gossip chain.”

  “And even if you were you wouldn’t tell me, because you don’t like anything resembling a cop.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She tilted her head.

  “Maybe I heard something the owner of a nightclub called The Mademoiselle. That he’d invested.” She measured my reaction.

  “Thanks.”

  She turned back to the document on her desk and I walked out. When I reached the front office I spoke to one of the men who worked at the counter.

  “Could I make a phone call? Might save me a trip back.”

  He lifted one with a long cord and turned it toward me. I called Mrs. Z’s. I should still be in time to catch Jolene before she left for her job as a cigarette girl.

  “Hey, Jolene, it’s Maggie,” I said when she came on. “I need information fast. Didn’t you tell me once that one of the clubs you used to work at was The Mademoiselle?”

  “Wow, you got some memory!”

  “What are chances the man who owns it could have put ten grand or so into a big investment deal?”

  “Herbie?” she shrieked with laughter. “About as likely as Santa Claus being real. I’m still friends with the bartender there, though. Want me to give him a call?”

  Five minutes later I walked back into Rachel Minsky’s office. This time I didn’t knock. I slammed the door behind me to get her attention. Her head shot up.

  “What the–?”

  “Herbert Warner, sole owner of The Mademoiselle, doesn’t have ten bucks to invest in anything except booze – and he usually runs a week behind paying for that.”

  Anger simmered in her expression. She didn’t say anything, just sat nodding to herself and glaring at me.

  “You’re fast,” she said at last. “Impressive.”

  “Why’d you lie to me?”

  “To test you. Make you chase your tail a little. I don’t like someone I don’t know sticking their nose in my business.”

  “Draper is my business.”

  Rachel shrugged. We locked gazes a full twenty seconds. Her eyes were as dark as pools of water at midnight, the surface luminous while something dangerous lurked in the depths.

  “Don’t turn your back on her,” Frank Keefe had cautioned.

  I didn’t intend to.

  Rachel Minsky wasn’t going to give me anything useful. I started to leave.

  “I might have misstated it, saying he was a good Jew,” she said. “Your Jesus fella. The rabbis of the time didn’t think so much of him. It might have been interesting to see him in action, though.”

  Was this a glimpse of how her mind zig-zagged, or did she like to keep people off balance? My hand reached for the doorknob.

  “He had a partner, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Draper. He had a partner.”

  Eight

  Cozy as Mrs. Z’s was, Finn’s pub felt more like home. It was the closest thing I had since selling the house I’d grown up in to pay my dad’s medical bills. Most who came there were regulars, and whenever you walked through the door someone seemed glad to see you. Grainy photos of carts pulled by ponies, kids playing in front of thatched roof huts, and wild landscapes running down to the sea all whispered longingly of a distant shore. The tables were worn but polished. Behind the bar Finbar Quinn and his wife dispensed dark stout and whiskey and hard cider.

  On Fridays, if you got there early enough and knew to ask for it, you could also get brown bread and stew. I was hankering for the brown bread. When I stepped through the door, though, another Battle of the Boyne was underway. I stared.

  Billy Leary and Seamus Hanlon were shouting at each other. At least Billy was shouting. Seamus rested a foot on the bar rail, placidly sipping a Guinness. Their uniforms marked them as cops; their unbuttoned jackets and collars showed they were off duty. The two of them were thick as thieves and had been my dad’s best friends. I’d grown up with the three of them laughing at our kitchen table while my mother ignored them all or took to bed with one of her headaches. Up until now I’d never before heard the two of them exchange a cross word.

  “You’re a damned fool!” Billy howled, red faced.

  “It’s my money. I reckon I’ll do with it as I want,” Seamus said stolidly.<
br />
  They weren’t quite Mutt and Jeff, but they came close. Seamus was tall and gaunt with a long, battered face that slewed to one side. Billy was short only by comparison, slightly plump, but mostly round in the face. His thick shock of hair was nearly all white now, and his blue eyes ordinarily twinkled.

  Billy caught sight of me. “Come talk some sense in him, will you? He’s fixing to end up his days in the poor house!”

  “What in the name of Pete are you two scrapping about?”