Victory Garter, page 1
Victory Garter
A Maggie Sullivan Mystery
M. Ruth Myers
Copyright ©2020 by Mary Ruth Myers
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Contact
www.mruthmyers.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Tuesday House
Cover Design by Cheri Lasota of Author’s Assembler
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
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Further Reading: Ration of Lies
Also By M. Ruth Myers
About the Author
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to members of my Facebook book club. Your love of all things Maggie, and your eagerness for another adventure in her world kept me going in this pandemic year.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Stephen Grismer of the Dayton Police History Foundation, Inc. for helping me plot Mick Connelly’s career path. We had fun.
CHAPTER ONE
I was in the city’s most exclusive country club, seated across from the city’s most exclusive madam. Her name was Mrs. Salmon and she’d asked me to lunch.
“You once told me my money was as good as anyone else’s,” she said when our rheumy-eyed waiter, who was eighty if he was a day, had shuffled out of earshot. “Does that still stand?”
“As good as anyone else’s, and better than most.” She’d helped me once after thugs who worked for a crime boss ran me off the road. I don’t forget favors.
“Well, then, Maggie. I need the services of a private eye.”
With her perfectly coiffed copper hair and understated makeup, Mrs. Salmon looked like all the other matrons in this bastion of money and breeding, except, perhaps, that her beige silk suit was cut a shade better and conveyed a shade better quality than the get-ups around us. She realigned her water goblet with the whiskey sour glass next to it, frowning at the starched white linen beneath them.
“I’ve heard just about everything in this job, so don’t be shy,” I encouraged as her silence lengthened.
“Shy.” She chuckled. “Been a long time since I’ve been accused of that.” Lifting her bouillon cup, she took a small sip and patted her lips with her napkin. “Here’s the thing, Maggie. A girl who worked for me until a month ago or thereabouts got run over last week. Nice girl. Sweet. The cops have written it off as an accident. I don’t think it was. I want you to look into it.”
It was my turn to buy time while sorting my thoughts. I sipped some bouillon. My martini tasted better.
“You think someone murdered this girl?”
Mrs. Salmon nodded.
“Why?”
Two women stopped to exchange pleasantries with my hostess. Their looks at me conveyed not altogether approving curiosity. The little blue hat that topped my brown curls had cost a fortune by my standards. By theirs, it was what their husbands’ secretaries might wear.
“Charlotte left me because she was going to get married,” Mrs. Salmon continued as they moved on. “That’s not unusual. A fair number of my girls leave to get married. It’s what they all hope for, I think. Some, anyway. They know from the very beginning that if they want to leave, all they have to do is give enough notice and pay a fee for the upkeep and training they’ve had.” She made a dismissive gesture.
“You don’t want to know my business particulars. It’s just that in this case...” She turned the stem of the sour glass between her fingers. She swallowed half an inch. “Charlotte was marrying into a very wealthy family. The young fellow she was engaged to was crazy about her, but I’d be surprised if his family felt the same way.”
I let my gaze drift to the room around us and listened to the clink of china and the soft hum of conversation. A world untouched by the war still raging in Europe and the Pacific, it seemed.
“Are you saying you think she might have been murdered? That someone in his family killed her?”
“They wouldn’t dirty their hands. They’d hire someone.”
The very idea was fanciful. Mrs. Salmon didn’t strike me as someone given to fancy, which made what she was suggesting even harder to swallow.
“Surely there would be easier ways of achieving the same thing. Buy her off, for one.”
“And risk having her go right to Jack and tell him? He’d be guaranteed to dig in his heels. She was staying at his family’s house, supposedly so they could all get better acquainted before the wedding. She called me right before she was killed. She was sobbing. Close to hysterical. She asked could she come to me, that she needed someplace she’d be safe. Ten minutes later, maybe fifteen, she was dead.”
In that new context, sitting here amidst decorum and elegance and the other trappings of influence, her words were chilling.
Midway between the kitchen and our table, our waiter was inching toward us with our main course. As if she, too, wanted to sidestep the tension of what she’d just told me, Mrs. Salmon turned her head to watch his approach.
“By the time he gets here, my veal chop will have aged into beef,” she predicted.
“I suppose Uncle Sam’s taken all the younger waiters,” I said.
“I suppose. I thought when Eisenhower and all those men landed at Normandy this stinking war might be ending soon, but that was nearly a year ago.”
I didn’t know how to answer, so I finished my martini. Her veal arrived still veal, and my minute steak bore traces of warmth, if only slight ones. It had been so long since I’d enjoyed any kind of steak that I was truthful when I pronounced it delicious.
“So, will you do it? Just have a look?” Mrs. Salmon resumed. “All I ask is that you find out what you can from the cops, Jack and the people in that house. If there’s nothing to it, well, I’ll eat crow. But I want to know.”
Before I could answer, a woman stopped at the table to ask Mrs. Salmon if she was going to the bridge group on Saturday. When they’d chatted a moment and the woman moved on, I dabbed at my lips.
“Do you mind if I ask how you managed to become a member here?”
Mrs. Salmon chuckled. “I think your real question is whether they know how I come by my money.” Her eyes danced. “A surprising number of the men who form the bedrock of this place – and approve new members – are customers, or have been. I’m discreet. I give to the right charities. To the women I’m a wealthy widow who made shrewd investments and is something of a benefactress to young women coming to town for musical training.”
“Wow.” I couldn’t quite hold back a grin.
“So, returning to the matter at hand?”
“I’ll take a few preliminary pokes. If that doesn’t turn up anything I deem worth following, I’ll let you know and that will be that. Agreed?”
“Seems fair enough. And you won’t identify me as the one who hired you when you talk to the cops?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
“I don’t. I haven’t had any trouble with the police since the year I opened. But there hasn’t been any trouble at my place that required them to deal with it, either. If I stick my head up, call attention to the kind of business I run, the chief of police is such a boy scout he’d probably feel compelled to investigate, maybe even close me down.”
As much as I liked Chief Wurstner, I couldn’t dispute it. He was fair and known for running a police force that was incorruptible, but he also went by the book.
“I’ll need some particulars.”
In the course of the meal, she gave them to me. The dead girl’s name was Charlotte Littlefield. She’d been engaged to Jack Barrett, second son in a family that, if not among the wealthiest in the city, was well up there. The current head of the family, Simon Barrett, was more investor than active participant in the family business, according to Mrs. Salmon.
“His wife’s in a wheelchair. She had polio, back before we entered the war, I think Jack said. There
“Had that changed?”
“I don’t know. She’d called a couple of times after she moved out, eager to tell me things she’d been doing. Until that last time, there’d never been any hint.” She gave her head the resigned shake of a woman who’s seen too much of human nature. “I tried to talk her out of the engagement, Maggie. It’s one thing if a girl who worked for me marries a nice, solid businessman. He can just say she was a singer, or was studying music before they married, and his acquaintances are perfectly satisfied. But marrying into a family like the Barretts, whose doings make the social columns and whose chums like any excuse to gossip about a newcomer, well... Charlotte’s background was sure to come out, and I find it hard to believe Jack’s family would grin and bear it.”
As much as I agreed with her, I couldn’t see them stooping to murder.
I thought for several minutes. She’d mentioned an older brother. Had he made some sort of play for the girl? Or had someone said something, done something, she’d misinterpreted?
“Are both brothers the age where they could be wearing uniforms?”
“I know what you’re wondering, and yes.”
She paused to return the nod of two men who were leaving. I wondered how many of the men who frequented this ritzy country club also patronized her establishment.
“You’re wondering how the Barrett boys got out of the draft,” Mrs. Salmon said bluntly. “The older one, I’m guessing, was deemed vital to the war effort. He has the day-to-day running of much of the family business, according to Jack. Some sort of industrial solvents, I think.”
“What about Jack?”
“He has a bone disease. Makes them brittle and prone to breakage. One leg’s already snapped a couple of times. He walks with a cane.”
Our waiter took our plates away. As we awaited his return with coffee, I asked the question that throughout most of the meal had floated topmost in my mind.
“Does Jack believe what happened was anything besides an accident? Why are you the one asking me to nose around rather than him?”
“Jack, last time I talked to him, was still numb to the point of paralysis. When the police found her handbag, she’d listed him as the one to notify in case of an accident. They called him to identify the body, which he did.” She turned her head to the side, her jaw tightening. “Apparently when she landed, it was full on her face. The only way he could really tell it was Charlotte was that she was wearing her Victory garter.”
CHAPTER TWO
Back in my office I sat at my desk staring at the notes I’d made about the hit-skip death of Charlotte Littlefield. I’d turned thirty-one not quite two weeks ago, and I’d been doing private eye work for ten years now. I’d seen plenty of ugliness by so-called human beings toward other human beings in that time, but two things about Charlotte’s death gnawed at me in a way that surprised me.
One was the force, and presumably speed, with which the car must have hit her to leave her features smashed beyond recognition. Had the driver been drunk? It wouldn’t be the first time someone in the swanky neighborhood where it occurred came home from lunch soused. But the person at the wheel would have to be blind drunk to hit her so directly. Or, as Mrs. Salmon believed, it would have to be deliberate.
I made a note to check about skid marks.
Sadder than that, however, and more poignant, was what Mrs. Salmon had told me about the Victory garter the girl was wearing, the item which in the end identified her.
“The girls all wear the lapel pins too, like everyone else wears, when they go out,” she’d explained. “Thing is, they don’t go out a lot – just to get their hair done or shopping or if some of them go to a matinee. They don’t go to teas or meetings like other young women their age. Their socializing’s at the house. So one of them hatched the idea of getting special garters made up, with a flat rosette on the garter big enough for a Victory V-pin.
“It sounds kind of silly telling you, but they’re proud of those garters. It makes them feel like they’re showing their support of the war effort same as everyone else, and they get compliments from the men on them. I guess Charlotte had kept on wearing hers.”
It had been her connection to the only family she had.
***
A stroll of half a dozen blocks from my office would allow me to do the preliminary work I always found prudent with a new case. It was a nice day for strolling. I went up St. Clair, then west on Third, and dropped down half a block to the front entrance of the Dayton Daily News.
The hit-skip that killed Charlotte had been recent enough for me to find what had been written about it in back copies at the front counter. There wasn’t much. Because it occurred at almost mid-afternoon, it was too late that day for anything but a small item at the bottom of the front page in the late edition. It reported that a woman had been killed by an auto, along with the street and approximate time. Anyone who had seen it occur was urged to call the police.
A longer story on an inside page the following day gave Charlotte’s name and age, along with a description of the stolen car thought to have been used. Again, anyone who might have seen anything connected to what was being termed an accident was urged to come forward.
The day after that, there was a bare bones obituary. Charlotte Littlefield, age twenty-two, died unexpectedly. It gave the date. It said services would be private. That was all the notice her passing merited, because she was a prostitute, not part of polite society.
Just for a minute I experienced some of the same indignation that had caused Mrs. Salmon to hire me. I shook it off and took half a dozen deep breaths. Then I went outside and crossed Ludlow so I could cut through the Arcade. I wasn’t in the market for the fresh or cooked meats, baked goods or every other food under the sun sold from the stalls and carts beneath the Arcade’s block-wide glass dome, but I was in the market for information I might get at a building called Market House which sat across from the Arcade on Main Street.
Market House was a narrow, pretty white building with row upon row of architectural ornamentation that brought to mind icing piped onto a cake. It housed the top brass of the police, the detective section and some specialized units. A municipal courtroom occupied the top floor.
It was the detectives that interested me as I went up the stairs. When I stuck my nose in the room that housed them, Lieutenant Freeze, the head of homicide, was at his desk. That might be good luck or bad luck. It all depended on his mood.
Freeze’s dark hair was shot through with gray. He was thin, and not bad looking in a wadded-up-and-tossed-in-the-clothes-hamper kind of way. His eyes grew wary as they noted my approach.
“We’re fresh out of stiffs. What do you want?”
“Your sunny disposition to brighten my day? To sell you dancing lessons?” I sat down in front of his desk. At the neighboring one, a chunky blond detective named Boike who was Freeze’s prime assistant looked up from stacks of papers and nodded a greeting.
“Actually, you’ve already answered one of my questions, telling me you’re not working on any homicides,” I said.
“And I don’t need you trying to turn something into one, so if that’s what you’re here for, go away.”
“Just wondering about the odds a case the X-Squad’s still looking at might be headed your way.”
The X-Squad was a specially trained unit that investigated traffic accidents. Freeze groaned and reached for an Old Gold. We had a history, and it hadn’t been the best. These days we occasionally managed a truce the size of a postage stamp, but we still got each other’s goat.
“You’re here to do exactly what I said – poke your nose in something and insist foul play was involved.”
“The fact it happened a week ago and Traffic hasn’t signed off on it yet suggests they might have some doubts.”
“Yeah? Why don’t you ask Mick Connelly? I hear he’s in Traffic now.” Freeze stood and motioned for his second-in-command to do the same. “If it’s the hit-skip down where the millionaires nest, all I know is the car involved was stolen from a doctor at Miami Valley. And before you ask, he was in the Emergency Room working on a heart attack victim when the hit-skip happened. Nurses and another doc or two working right alongside him. According to a nurse who left work with him, he was mad as a wet hen when he got to the parking lot and his car wasn’t where he’d left it. She had to give him a ride home.”
