by Vicki Delany
The bell over the door of the Red Spot Diner tinkled as I opened it, and I was hit by the scent of greasy fried food, strong coffee, and fresh baking. My hair blew in the wind created by the big fans mounted on high shelves. In the middle of the afternoon, the popular diner wasn’t completely full. Waitresses in red dresses and white aprons adorned with huge red polka dots carried laden trays to the tables or whisked away used dishes.
The tiles on the floor were black and white, the walls painted a fresh bright white, and the curtains a cheerful red. Matching red vinyl covered the seats of the stools lined up at the counter. Pictures of fun-loving people enjoying all the Catskills have to offer hung on the walls.
“On your own, hon?” a short, round middle-aged woman asked me. Her thick black hair was tied behind her head in a tight bun, the bags beneath her eyes were a tired purple, and the lines on her face were deep. She wore a white blouse with a giant red bow at her throat and a full red skirt. This was Mrs. McGreevy, Lucinda’s mom. Clearly she didn’t recognize me.
“Yes, I am.” I nodded to an empty stool at the counter. “That’ll be fine.”
“Help yourself,” she said.
I crossed the room and hopped onto the high chair. The man on the stool next to me put two-dollar bills onto the counter, slapped his hat on his head, and left. At the end of the counter, near the kitchen door, a selection of pies and cakes were arranged under glass domes, looking absolutely delicious. I plucked a menu out of its stand and opened it. My intention in coming here had been to have a cup of coffee. The moment I walked through the door, I realized I was starving. Meals were usually hit-and-miss in my life these days. More miss than hit sometimes.
“Coffee, hon?” asked the smiling waitress gripping the full pot. “Or you can have a soda or shake if you’d rather, and we do a killer egg cream.”
“An egg cream would be great. I haven’t had one of those since I left New York.”
“Best in the Catskills, right here. You wanting lunch?”
“Yes, I will. Let me have a look at the menu. I was hoping to have a chance to say hi to Lucinda. Lucinda McGreevy. Is she in?”
“I’ll get her. Be right back with that egg cream.” She bustled off, yelling, “Egg cream, and make it snappy. Lady don’t have all day here. Lucinda, you’re wanted!”
I had time for no more than a quick glance at the menu before the kitchen door swung open and Lucinda came out, wiping a handkerchief across her brow. The waitress jerked her head in my direction, and Lucinda broke into a grin. “Hi there, stranger. Didn’t think I’d see you until September.”
“I came into town on an errand and couldn’t pass up the chance for an egg cream.”
“Best in the Catskills.”
“So I’ve been told.” I nodded to the vacant stool next to me. “Do you have a minute?”
“No, but when did that ever matter?” She came around the counter and hopped onto the seat with a satisfied sigh. “That feels good. Dare I hope you’re looking for a job? One of the line cooks up and quit yesterday. He got a better offer.”
“Lucinda, what are you doing? We have customers.”
“It’s okay, Mom. I need to sit down sometime.”
“You can sit in September,” her mother said.
The door opened, the chimes tinkled, and Mrs. McGreevy gave her daughter a disapproving frown before turning to greet the new customers. Mrs. McGreevy’s English was excellent, but despite her Scots-Irish married name, the accent was full of memories of her home city of Naples. Lucinda had taken directly after her mother and was a true Mediterranean beauty, with smooth olive skin, huge dark eyes, and thick black hair cut in a stylish bob.
“One egg cream.” The waitress put a tall triangular-shaped glass in front of me, with a long-handled silver spoon as well as a pink straw next to it. Chocolate syrup dripped down one side of the glass and the milk foam threatened to spill over the rim. “Whatcha havin’, hon?”
“A hot turkey sandwich with a side of fries would be great,” I said.
“Comin’ up.”
“I heard someone was murdered at your place,” Lucinda said. “That’s awful. Did you know him? Was he really murdered, or was it an accident?”
“No, I didn’t know him, not personally. He was just a guest. I mean, he was a guest. Not someone I knew. As for murdered, that would seem to be the case, and that’s why I’m here.” I dipped the spoon into the glass and scooped up the chocolaty liquid and a topping of milk foam off the top and tasted it. As good as I expected. Maybe even better. I popped the straw into the glass and took a long delicious sip.
When I could talk again, I said, “Tell me what you heard and from who. From whom?”
“Whom.” Lucinda pointed to herself. She was wearing the diner’s waitress uniform but had pulled a gray cook’s apron over it. “I was waiting tables at breakfast while at the same time trying to help the single remaining cook in the kitchen. Dave Dawson and Chief Monahan came in around ten thirty, eleven. Dave said they’d been up all night investigating a murder at Haggerman’s. Dave might have been up all night, but I doubt the chief had.”
“Is Dave Dawson the deputy?”
“Yes.”
“He talks?”
She grinned. “I know what you mean. Dave’s a good guy, but he doesn’t say much when the chief’s around. He’s not allowed to. Chief Monahan likes to be the one doing all the talking.”
Her tone was not teasing. Lucinda did not like Norm Monahan. “What did they say about that?” I asked. “About us?”
“He, the chief I mean, not Dave, said the dead man had been a communist.”
“He told you that?”
“Not me. I’m a waitress. He wouldn’t talk to me. Bunch of road workers were here. Regular guys, local. They start work early and then come in for a late breakfast, so they’re often here when Monahan is. They take that booth in the middle of the room.” She half turned on her stool and pointed toward it with her chin. “Talk loud, eat lots. Tip well. Monahan, on the other hand, talks loud, eats lots, and does not tip well. Dave Dawson doesn’t talk loud, never eats much, and always tips well. His wife, June, works at the paper in the advertising department.”
The business of the diner swirled around us. People left, people arrived. Food and drinks were served, used dishes taken away. Mrs. McGreevy cleared tables and glared at her daughter every time she passed.
“Monahan told the road crew communists are in the area, so they’d better be on the lookout. Those guys are generally pretty sensible. One of them said he didn’t think communists ever took vacations, and they all laughed. And so Monahan had to put the guy in his place, and he told them he’d found evidence that the dead man at Haggerman’s was a communist. The FBI were on the case, and they’d be relying on him, Monahan personally, to help them out, seeing as he knows everything that goes on around here. Not a lot of people put much stock in anything Norm Monahan says, but mention of the FBI shut the naysayers up fast enough. The place was full, Elizabeth. I don’t know why, but the breakfast rush was late today. Thirty people must have heard what Monahan said. Might as well have put it on a billboard outside of town.”
I groaned. The waitress put a loaded plate in front of me. The hot sandwich was piled high with turkey, the top slice of white bread thoroughly smothered by dark gravy, the thickly cut potatoes brown and crisp.
“So yeah,” Lucinda said, “half the town’s checking under their beds for reds.”
“Tell me about Chief Monahan.” I grabbed the bottle of ketchup from the metal container the waitress had put in front of me and drenched my fries. “Not hard to tell you don’t like him much. Why?” I stuffed a forkful of white turkey meat, gravy-soaked bread, and delicious gravy in my mouth. I closed my eyes and chewed happily.
“Good?” Lucinda asked.
“Oh yeah.”
“Monahan’s dad, Norma
n Sr., was the chief here for a lot of years. He was a popular guy. Tough but fair, they always said. I remember Chief Monahan Sr. dragging one or another of my brothers home by the ear plenty of times.” She chuckled.
Lucinda was the only girl in her family of six children. Her parents had started the diner when they were first married, and all the kids grew up working in it. Her dad died a few years ago, some of the brothers moved away, some started their own tourist-related businesses. Only Lucinda and her mom still worked here regularly.
“His son, Norm Jr., not so much. Neither tough nor fair. Everything I know, Elizabeth, is secondhand, understand? My brothers are all respectable family men now, most of them anyway, so we don’t need any more ear-pulling. We have to call the police now and again when we get a bunch of drunken college kids in here who won’t leave, but Dave usually takes those sorts of calls.”
I dragged a ketchup-laden french fry through gravy and popped it into my mouth. “What do you mean by not fair? Is Monahan on the take?”
Lucinda glanced around. No one was close enough to us to overhear, but she dropped her voice, not taking any chances. The counter waitress had disappeared into the back. “You hear a lot of gossip in this place. I’ve found over the years that when folks are sitting in a booth with their friends, having a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea, they sometimes forget they’re out in public. I’ve heard he can be bribed, and the big hotel owners know how to get on his good side.”
“By good side, you mean pay him off, I presume. About what?”
“Keep scandals at the hotels out of the papers. Run troublesome workers, or those who just want a fair shake, out of town. Did he suggest that if you helped him out, he’d hush up that death you had?”
I thought back to last night. “Not at all. The opposite, if anything. He’s the one who called in the FBI, almost right away. Hard to keep that under wraps. He said he wasn’t going to bother the guests, but he wasn’t subtle about questioning the staff.” I had a sudden thought. Could it be possible Monahan was attempting to make Haggerman’s look bad for the benefit of another hotel or hotels? As a favor to a friend? I filed that thought away.
“The smaller-business people,” Lucinda said, “people with shops in town or managers of the cheaper hotels or the bungalow-colony owners, think Monahan’s lazy, always looking for the easy way out. Dave does his best, but it’s hard to get the police in this town to pay much attention to a shoplifting of a candy bar at a concession stand or a broken window on Main Street. From what I’ve seen when Monahan’s here, and he comes in several times a week, it’s not necessarily that the big hotel owners are bribing him, although that’s possible, but that he wants to be their pal. He wants to be the big man in town, like his father was. His father worked for our respect. Norm doesn’t want to go to any trouble. Did he speak to your mother when he was at your place?”
“No. My mother doesn’t have much to do with the actual running of our hotel. Why do you ask?”
“I would have thought he’d want to meet her. Maybe have the photographer from the paper take a picture of him with her. Something to splash across the front page.”
“You mean with a headline like ‘Broadway and Film Star Olivia Peters and Chief Monahan Smile at Location of Vicious Murder’?”
“You laugh, Elizabeth, but that’s exactly what I mean. The publicity’s the point. Our chief doesn’t get nuance.”
“I’ll warn Olivia to be on the lookout for him.” I scraped the last of the gravy off my plate; the fries and egg cream had disappeared long ago. Now that Lucinda had mentioned my mother, I realized that no one had bothered to ask her about her brief conversation with Westenham the afternoon before he died. If he’d said something significant, she would have told me. But the police didn’t know that. Other than poking around our staff quarters, the cops weren’t doing much at all. Was Monahan as lazy as Lucinda believed he was, or was he confident the FBI were on it? The FBI hadn’t been back to question anyone, least of all my mother. They must be directing their investigation elsewhere. If so, that was good news for the resort.
“Pie?” Lucinda asked.
I patted my belly. “That was so good, but I can always find space for pie. Is that lemon meringue I see?”
“It is. My mom and a friend of hers make all the desserts and pastries themselves.” Lucinda lifted her hand and beckoned the waitress. “Two slices of lemon pie, please.”
“Nothing like mom-made pie,” I said. “Not that I’d know. A kitchen is as foreign an environment to my mother as the Sahara, and Aunt Tatiana never made American-style pie. We had plenty of cakes, though. Her Russian honey cake, rum balls, and syrniki are what childhood memories are made of.”
“What’s syrniki?”
“A bite-sized cheesy fried cake much like a round pancake. Aunt Tatiana always served them with a strawberry jam-like sauce to dip them in. You should consider serving them here. Lots of eastern Europeans come to the Catskills.”
Lucinda glanced at her mother and smiled softly, her eyes full of love. “As far as my mother’s concerned, if it’s not Italian it’s not worth making. Or eating. We serve American food here, because the diner was started by her and Dad, and Dad knew what visitors want in a diner. When they got married, she begrudgingly learned to make hamburgers and tuna casseroles and things like that, because she loved my dad, and my dad had good old American working-class tastes. Mealtimes were interesting in our house. For Thanksgiving we always had turkey and lasagna.”
Once the pie was delivered along with fresh forks we both dug in.
When I came up for air, I said, “Back to the subject at hand. We have a dishwasher named Francis Monahan working at Haggerman’s. Might he be a relative of the chief?”
“Skinny guy, average height, early thirties?”
“Yes.”
“That’s Norm’s oldest son. He has another son who’s with the police in the city.”
“Francis is a dishwasher. Not a particularly prestigious job for the chief’s son.”
“Francis is on the slow side, Elizabeth, and he speaks with a slight stutter when he’s nervous. Which is most of the time. He’s older than me, but he’s the same age as my oldest brother, so he came to our house sometimes. Francis had a tough time in school. The other boys bullied him mercilessly. He’s slow, he’s awkward, he can’t express himself very well, and he cries easily. Makes an attractive target for a pack of schoolboys.”
I thought of the smooth college-student waiters slapping each other on the back and laughing when Francis had dropped a tray in the kitchen, and others jeering at him after he’d delivered my supper.
“Francis was the absolute apple of his late mother’s eye,” Lucinda said. “People say a lot of negative things about Norm Monahan, but no one ever says he didn’t adore Kathy, his wife, or he wasn’t a good father to his two boys. So, yeah, Francis works as a dishwasher. He couldn’t get a better job, even if he was capable of holding one. Not with a dishonorable discharge from the army.”
“Really? What was that for?”
She shrugged. “No one knows for sure. Lots of rumors floating around. Theft’s the most believable. He did some time in military jail in Europe at the end of the war, I heard.”
I finished my pie. It had tasted as good as it looked. “Let’s change the subject. What’s Tony doing this year?”
Antonio Baracaldo was Lucinda’s fiancé.
“He’s working at an employment agency, but he’s not happy with it. He wants to learn how to manage a business, but so far most of his job consists of picking up staff at the bus or train stations and dropping them off at the hotels. And sometimes taking them back again. My mother’s getting tired of asking when we’re going to make wedding plans. I’m not getting any younger, you know.” Lucinda was the ripe old age of twenty-four. “We’re hoping we can make some decent money this summer, enough to get us out of here. Nei
ther of us want to stay in Summervale.” She lowered her voice and peeked guiltily over her shoulder. “Don’t tell my mom. Other than a murder, how’s things going up on your mountain?”
“Good, I guess. We’re full, which is what we want, right?”
The waitress ripped a piece of paper off her pad and began to pass it to me. Lucinda intercepted it. “This is on me. One night when I can get some time off, if ever that happens, ha ha, I’ll come up to Haggerman’s to catch a show. Maybe I can snag Tony and we can go dancing.”
“You’d be very welcome.” In season, the diner’s open from seven a.m. to midnight, seven days a week. Like everyone in the Catskills, Lucinda and her mom had not much more than eight or nine precious weeks to earn most of a year’s income. “One more thing before I go. The newspaper office is next door. Do the paper’s reporters ever come in here?”
“Sure. Best egg cream in the Catskills.”
“So I’ve been told. They’ll be writing up the death at Haggerman’s, particularly if they can add the suspected communist angle. Anything I should know about them?”
“It’s a family-owned paper, and the editor in chief’s the son and grandson of past editors. The paper’s been around a hundred years or more. I wouldn’t expect any trouble from them, Elizabeth. The paper’s pro-Summervale, as you’d expect. They won’t report on anything that makes the town look bad, particularly not at the beginning of the season. Although, I have to add, they are a newspaper, and selling papers is what keeps them in business.” She shrugged. “If they have to balance the interests of the town with reporting a viable story, I can’t say which way they’ll lean.”
I hadn’t thought to ask Jim for the name of the reporter who was dealing with our story.
“They have a new junior reporter this year,” Lucinda said as though she’d read my mind. “Junior as in low ranking, not age.”
