Death Was the Other Woman

by Linda L. Richards

  I nodded. “Sure. What’s she want you to do?”

  “You could probably guess, kiddo. She’s got a boyfriend… .”

  I rolled my eyes at the euphemism. Dex caught it and grinned again.

  “Well, what else would you call it? Anyway, she’s afraid the boyfriend is stepping out. She wants me to follow him for a few days and give her a report.”

  “The usual stuff.”

  Dex smiled and stretched, then eased himself off my desk. “Precisely, my dear. The usual stuff. So I’ll need a new bottle of Jack and a good car. Can you make that happen?”

  “Can’t you just take a Red Car?” I asked, knowing full well that managing a tail from a streetcar was asking a bit much. And if I hadn’t known, Dex’s look would have set me straight.

  “Let me know when the car is ready to roll,” he said. “Meanwhile, I’ve got some paperwork to do in my office.”

  Paperwork, I thought, when Dex’s door closed behind him.

  That would be his version of pointless clacking. And what it really meant was the heel of the bottle of bourbon in his office— now that he had some loot, he wouldn’t need to hoard his stash—and maybe forty winks while I got things ready.

  I groused a little about the car, but only to myself. We’d been a while between clients, and I always thought about expenses, even if Dex seldom did. Still, as soon as the door clicked shut, I got on the blower.

  “Hey, Mustard,” I said, when he answered the phone. “Dex just bought a case. He needs a decent heap for a tail.”

  I’ve known Mustard as long as I’ve known Dex, which is to say about two years. Word is, they were in the army together, though neither of them has told me so. The other thing no one has told me is why he’s called Mustard. Is it his name? I mean, it could be. I think “Mustard” can be a name. What confuses me is that his hair is a sort of dirty ginger color. When pressed, I think you could say his hair is the color of mustard.

  And Mustard smokes a lot of cigarettes. In fact, he smokes them end to end. As a result, the index and middle finger of his left hand are—you guessed it—mostly the color of mustard. And I’ve never actually seen him eat, but it may well be that he just loves the condiment so much that he puts it on everything.

  I do know that Mustard is as sunny as Dex is dour. Dex calls Mustard a fixer. I’m not entirely sure what he fixes, though I suspect it has something to do with horses and dogs and maybe bootleg whiskey. For Dex though, Mustard fixes everything. Like today, Dex needed a car, so Mustard was the man to call. He’d fix it.

  “Couldn’t convince him to do it in a Red Car, eh?” I could hear the laughter in Mustard’s voice. He knows all about the back-and-forth Dex and I do about spending money.

  “It’s for a tail, Mustard. He needs a car.”

  “OK. Sure,” he said, humoring me. “You want me to have it dropped by the office, or will Dex swing over and pick it up?”

  I considered briefly. Having it dropped off would mean an extra charge. However, considering the amount of whiskey Dex had already consumed on this cold but sunny morning, plus the amount he was now consuming in celebration of getting another job, I figured I’d better have the car dropped off. No sense in taking the chance of Dex getting waylaid on the way to the garage.

  “Have it dropped off, please. And if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, it would be great if there was a new bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the passenger seat.”

  Mustard didn’t bother hiding the laugh this time—he knew what all of that meant—but he promised the car would be waiting downstairs by midafternoon.

  Now understand, my boss isn’t just a pointless lush. As much as I watch out for him and sometimes even baby him, he can be a capable guy, though he has some very real challenges.

  Like a lot of boys, Dex went off to war when he was eighteen. The Great One. Unlike a lot of those boys though, Dex came back. There’s something in that combination that’s made him not right. Something that’s damaged him, like a shiny Ford that’s been fixed after a fender bender. It might look OK on the outside, but it never works in quite the same way again.

  For a while after the War he went back to Canada, to the small town on the Ontario border where he’s from. Things didn’t work out at home, so he slid over to Buffalo, where he got a job as some kind of deputy. He’s never told me the whole story, but I’ve been piecing things together. Things between him and Mustard. Things I hear when Dex is on the phone. Even things he tells me when he’s been into the sauce and is waiting for a job. He talks at times like those, but he talks in half thoughts, as though to himself. I have to put two and two together then. It’s possible that sometimes I come up with six.

  From being in the War, Dex knew how to handle a gun, knew how to use it on a man. He knew how to wait real quiet for a long time in order to get a job done. And he knew—and this part is important—he knew how to stay alive. Police work seemed like the only kind of thing he could do. Somehow—and I don’t really know how—that didn’t work out. So he came out to L.A. at the same time a lot of other people were coming here, and he hung up his shingle: Dexter J. Theroux, Private Investigator.

  A little over two years ago he caught a big case that, as near as I can figure, he concluded quickly and almost by accident. But that led to a lot of work, which led him to hire me to answer his phones and do his paperwork. And we’ve been getting along pretty well ever since.

  About half past three, Mustard’s guy showed up with the heap. The kid gave me the keys and smiled on his way out the door when I tipped him a quarter.

  I poked my head into the office after the kid had gone. “Your car’s ready,” I said. Dex was sitting behind his desk, not even pretending to read the newspaper. His expression was morose, and the glass on his desk was empty but for the ice I’d picked up for him on my way to the office in the morning. Disappointment on the rocks.

  “What is it?” His eyes focused on me slowly and he didn’t get up. He was clearly half cut. Maybe more than half.

  “What is it?” I repeated. “It’s a car. What do you think?”

  “No, I meant is it a Ford? Or a Packard? Or what?”

  “Geez, Dex, I don’t know. It’s a car. I guess it’ll be black. Whaddaya want?”

  He grunted and lapsed back into looking morose, having hit a high of mildly interested for about thirty seconds.

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

  It took him a few seconds to refocus.

  “Plan?” he said, looking honestly confused. I choked back a stub of impatience.

  “Yeah. Remember? Rita Heppelwaite? The boyfriend? You wanted a car. And there’s someplace you’re supposed to be. You didn’t tell me where.”

  He pulled himself out of his slouch and took a stab at sitting upright. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed deeply, as though something was causing him pain. I knew, however, that it was not actual pain. I’d been down this road before. I breathed a small sigh of my own and took a step back to watch.

  As expected, a minute or so later Dex hauled himself up, straightened his tie, popped his fedora onto his head at almost the usual angle, put on his jacket, rummaged around a bit for his piece, gave it up, and headed out the door.

  I followed fairly closely behind him, pausing only to grab my hat, coat, and handbag, grab his holstered gun off the coat-rack in his office, and lock the door behind me before I scurried down the hall as quickly as my sensible-but-still-ladylike heels could carry me.

  Though we rode down in the elevator together, Dex didn’t say anything to me, not even when I passed him his gun. I held his jacket while he put on the holster, but he continued to seem lost in whatever dark thoughts he’d been wrestling with in the office.

  When we located the car Mustard had dropped off, I broke the silence. “You know I’m driving, right?”

  He looked at me—bemused or annoyed, I couldn’t quite tell—then said very succinctly, “I did not know that,” while he shook his head. “What gave you that idea?”


  “Well…” I smiled, shrugged, and held up a fob. “I’ve got the keys, for one thing.”

  “Ah,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Right, Dex. Which confirms why I’m driving. You didn’t even realize you didn’t have the keys ‘til right this second, did you?”

  “I don’t need a babysitter, Kitty.”

  I did not correct him on the name, just this once. Though I’ve always disliked being called Kitty.

  “You don’t need a babysitter,” I agreed, “but you do need a chauffeur.”

  “Can you even drive?”

  I looked at him with more patience than I felt.

  “Dex, you taught me.”

  “Right. Well… well… who’s gonna answer the phones?”

  “You mean, who’s gonna tell your bill collectors you’re in Chicago?”

  That sigh again. “Get in,” he said finally, walking around to the passenger side.

  “Where we going anyway?” I asked, as I started up the huge black car.

  “Lafayette Square.”

  “You didn’t need a car to go to Lafayette Square. A Red Car would have gotten you there easily.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” he said dryly, something that was especially funny since he’s a lot older than I am. “We’re starting at Lafayette Square. Buckingham Road and Saint Charles Place, to be precise. From there, I’m not sure. But it’s gonna take a car. Now pipe down already. If you’re gonna drive, drive. Otherwise I’ll take it from here.”

  “As you wish, sire,” I quipped, as I started the car and got it rolling. “We’re on our way.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I WAS NOT RAISED TO WORK in an office. Quite frankly, I wasn’t raised for commerce at all. For the first two decades of my life I had more delicate concerns. My mother died when I was very young, and my father instructed those charged with my care that I was to be brought up to be the mistress of a large house, hostess to the dinners that would further my someday husband’s business concerns, and needless to say, to be the mother of this same mysterious husband’s children.

  My father was from a different era. Sometimes I thought his expectations for me weren’t modern at all: more 1830s than 1930s. Not that I ever said anything. Not that I would ever have dared, which is sort of the point, if you follow.

  I was carefully schooled and gently reared, as they say, and from the age of seventeen to the very end of my father’s life, I seldom saw my childhood home on Bunker Hill.

  I was in San Francisco in my final year at Mrs. Beeson’s Finishing School for Young Ladies when I got the news that I’d become an orphan. I was twenty-one at the time, and feeling very much as though my wings had grown beyond the point where the small school could contain them. My best friend, Morgana Cleverly, and I had applied to go to Vassar in the next school year. Morgana’s mother was a Vassar girl, and my father liked the fact that Morgana had family in the Hudson Valley, near campus. It had made him feel more receptive to the idea of my living on the other side of the country.

  I didn’t think that having a country between us would change things very much: there were times when San Francisco may as well have been the moon. I’d seen little of my father in the three years I’d been at Mrs. Beeson’s, often spending weekends and even some holidays with Morgana’s family in Pacific Heights. And my increasingly infrequent trips home had become less and less comfortable. When I saw him, Father was preoccupied, distant. He always seemed to have a lot on his mind.

  I wonder now, should I have pressed him in those days? I have a good mind, and Mrs. Beeson’s was the best school of its kind in the West. “Nimble” was what Mrs. Beeson called my mind, and though it wasn’t always a compliment, I knew it meant I was anything but stupid.

  So what if I had pressed Father? Would he have allowed me to help him? And if he didn’t let me help him, would seeing how much I cared have changed the outcome? Would he have seen something in me—something different—that would have altered the course of events, the course he ultimately chose? Those are not good questions, I know, if one wants to go forward with a clear heart. Sometimes it’s difficult to turn your mind away. Your good mind. Your nimble mind. And sometimes it hurts your heart. And it’s moot, of course, because I didn’t do any of those things. Maybe I should have had some kind of foresight. But I did not.

  It was October 29 and I was in Mrs. Sedgewick’s music class. It was Elvira Cheswell’s turn at the bench, and I was helping her practice the scales. A big part of the curriculum for senior girls at Mrs. Beeson’s was working with the younger ones. Mrs. Beeson said it straightened our backs, got us ready for the idea of giving of ourselves, something she felt was important for young women of our station. A philanthropic spirit would be necessary, she told us repeatedly, both for women of position and for our likely role as mothers. When Mrs. Beeson wasn’t around, the older girls teased that what she really had in mind was cutting her own expenses: with what was in essence a whole class of teaching assistants, she was likely required to fill several fewer places on her staff.

  On that October day, Mrs. Beeson herself came to the door of the music room and asked to have a word with me. The look on her face put me in mind of all kinds of things. What had I done? Some report not handed in? Some weekend misadventure with my friends that had gotten back to her ears? Yet there had been nothing so significant that even its discovery would cause a personal interview.

  So, lesson one: we make these things be about ourselves. In truth, it had nothing at all to do with me. Though what she told me changed my life.

  “It’s your father,” Mrs. Beeson said, once I was seated in her office.

  “My father?” Nothing she said could have surprised me more. Or so I thought.

  “Yes, my dear. Your father.” She cleared her throat delicately. The throat clearing and that quiet “my dear” put me on sudden alert. “Miss Pangborn, I just don’t know how else to say this, dear. Your father … your father has passed to the world beyond.”

  It took me a full minute to understand what she’d said. A minute when she said nothing at all to me, just sat primly behind her desk with her hands in her lap and watched as I sorted through her words for the sense beneath them.

  The world beyond.

  At first I was envisioning some sort of business trip— perhaps to the Far East—but I couldn’t recall him telling me about anything like that. And then, of course, it hit me. She’d told me in a ridiculous way, but how else should she have said it? “He exited this world by attempting to fly out of a window from the top floor of the Pangborn Building”? Or “He could not face what he’d created”? Or, really, a lot of other things. All of them would have been true. Bottom line: the stock market crash of 1929 was more than a crash for me; it was the day I lost, in a certain way, my innocence, and—and this leads me back to Dex—the day when phrases like “financial reality” would begin to have meaning for me, because they certainly never had before.

  It’s uncharitable of me, but I’m still angry with my father. It was not very good planning on his part. In so many ways. For instance, how could he wager everything on one bad bet? Didn’t he ever hear about too many eggs and a single basket? Most important, of course, how could he make this decision? How could he decide that no father at all was better than one who was a financial failure? My biggest fear: that the reality of his fatherhood didn’t enter his mind at all.

  He lost everything. You’ll have gathered that already. The Pangborn Building—all eight stories of beaux arts beauty— was gone in a heartbeat and renamed almost as quickly. All of the companies that had fueled the need for a Pangborn Building? Gone. The automobiles, the cottage in Malibu, the motor yacht, and of course, all the money needed to do things like buy food and pay for private girls’ schools, all gone, gone, gone.

  Later I found out that my father must have had some kind of inkling, because he had done one tiny thing to protect me. At least I tell myself it was to protect me; it’s possible he had other reasons. I try not
to think about that.

  Unbeknownst to anyone other than his lawyers, he’d transferred the title of the house on Bunker Hill to Marcus and Marjorie Oleg, the husband-and-wife chauffeur and housekeeper who had been with us as long as I could remember. He’d done it a full year before he died. I hope he did it to ensure I’d at least always have a roof: he knew very well that Marcus and Marjorie wouldn’t turn me out.

  And they didn’t: they let me keep my old room with the private bathroom Father had installed when I became a “young lady” and needed my privacy. But there was no money for anyone. And suddenly even Marcus and Marjorie were out of jobs, and things were very difficult. Like some weirdly arranged family though, we’ve all worked together to get through. The two of them have taken in boarders—it’s a big house—and I contribute what I can when Dex remembers to pay me. It’s really not a bad life, but as I said, it’s not the life I ever envisioned when I was at Mrs. Beeson’s. Not the one that was envisioned for me. And Vassar, of course, was suddenly out of the question.

  It was while I was selling Mother’s jewelry at a scary little pawnshop at First and Alameda that I met Mustard. He did not work at the pawnbroker’s, of course. He was just there, no doubt fixing something, when he overheard the part of my plight I could bring myself to tell the man pawing at Mother’s things. I was hoping to get enough to at least pay for my father’s coffin. I must have been quite pathetic.

  “For crissakes, Lou.” It was Mustard, behind me. I hadn’t noticed him before. His suit was well made and dark, with a fine stripe that was even darker. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had a solid look about him. Not fat, but you got the idea he hadn’t missed a lot of meals either. “She just told you her father died, and she’s trying to scratch enough together to buy him a proper funeral. You can give her more than that.”

  “Yeah, well.” Behind his wicket, Lou scratched at himself. I could see that all that scratching had rimmed his nails in black. “These days everyone’s got a dyin’ dad, Mustard. You can’t believe every sob story you hear, y’know.”