Maximum Moxie, page 12
“Maybe a new pair of stockings.”
I laughed.
Escaping Mrs. Z’s apartment to sink his teeth into passing ankles was the cat’s favorite pastime. It was also his only exercise if girth was any indication.
Jolene closed the newspaper section she’d been reading and traded it for another.
“You must be working today, wearing a suit. You won’t get so busy you forget to buy an ornament for the tree, will you?”
“Nope. Scout’s honor.”
Every year Mrs. Z let us put a Christmas tree up in the downstairs alcove where male visitors could wait. Now and then somebody bought an actual glass ornament to supplement the paper chains and snowflakes we constructed for its trimmings. This year I’d promised I would. We would put up the tree tomorrow when people got back from church.
Saturday morning was the only time of the week when we got to use the kitchen. I cut some bread and lowered the side of the toaster to put it in, enjoying the homey feeling that simple act produced. It was early yet. There were only the two of us. Jolene was up because she was a farm girl and had grown up milking cows or some such. I was up because I had a list of things to do. I thought about the topmost item on that list: Tabby Warren.
If I could find a listing for her in the telephone book, I’d try to get her to talk to me for two minutes. My previous dealings with socialites didn’t make me optimistic. She probably wouldn’t give me the time of day, or more likely her butler or whoever ran her household wouldn’t. Still, it was worth a try.
It was also smart to have a fallback plan.
“Jolene,” I said as mine took shape, “has anyone who works at your club ever worked anywhere around Fifth Street? The west side, I mean?”
Jolene was a cigarette girl. Her bubbly nature probably made her a natural. She’d worked at supper clubs as well as places that featured only dancing and drinks. All had been respectable, and each was nicer than the last.
She wrinkled her nose.
“I don’t think there are any clubs on that end. It’s too near the train station. Well, there’s Lance’s, of course, but I don’t know anyone who’s worked there. Somebody may have mentioned working in a pub down there as a bouncer, but I can’t remember who. There might be places over by Wayne that call themselves clubs, but you know what that part’s like.”
Wayne was a cesspool ranging from bad to worse. Pickpockets. Hookers. Dope and drunks. A storefront mission or two struggled against overwhelming odds.
“You want me to ask around?” Jolene offered.
“I’d appreciate it. I need to find someplace I can show a picture and find out if anyone recognizes it.”
Chances they would were probably slim. Which brought me back to Tabby Warren.
I told myself I wouldn’t resort to using Seamus’ name to wangle a chat with her. I hoped I wasn’t fibbing.
***
Somewhat to my surprise, Tabitha Warren was listed under her own name in the telephone book. Did that mean she hadn’t married? Whatever the answer, she’d be more receptive to talking to me if I waited until ten o’clock. Half past would be even smarter.
I dropped my laundry off since I’d neglected to do it on Thursday. I drove to the hat shop where I’d eluded my pursuer in the brown car. The same car I’d found last night in Pauline’s garage.
What did the dimpled secretary have to do with Tremain’s disappearance? If anything. According to Collingswood, she had insisted she didn’t know how the sheet of engineering jargon came to be in her desk. Maybe she hadn’t believed there was really a risk she’d get caught. Maybe she’d trusted someone she shouldn’t have. Whatever the explanation, there was no doubt the brown car behind her house was the one that had followed me.
I went to Rike’s and picked out a fancy glass Santa Claus for our tree. Even though the clerk wrapped it in layers of tissue and put it on wads of the same stuff inside a box, I decided it might be smart to drop it off at Mrs. Z’s rather than have it rattle around in my car, so I did.
There was a phone message for me. It was from Nan’s friend in Terre Haute saying her guests had arrived. One worry less. I’d said not to use names and she hadn’t.
Since the place where Daisy Brown lived didn’t have a phone, I went over there to make sure she’d made it home safely from her previous night’s work. The muted sound of her singing met me as I knocked on the door.
“Who is it?”
Good. She was taking precautions.
“Maggie Sullivan.”
The door opened. Daisy wore a floral patterned apron with a bib. A smudge of flour decorated one eyebrow.
“I’ll bet you stopped to see if I was dead,” she said cheerfully. “Well, I’m not, and I just finished frosting some orange rolls I turned out, so come on back.”
My stomach gave an unseemly gurgle. I followed half a dozen steps to her kitchen. It was big enough for a two-burner stove and a sink and small Frigidaire. A drop-leaf table too small to accommodate anything but a single chair was shoved into one corner. The leaf was up and the tabletop held two batches of rolls that looked as if they were bound for customers.
“Here. Try one.” She passed me a plate of extras. “Go on, sit in that chair. Just move my grocery list. Would you like some tea?”
I declined the tea and praised the roll. The frosting with flecks of orange peel was enough to make me swoon.
“Did anyone come around while you were working last night?” I asked.
“Nope. Not ones that work there or ones that didn’t belong either. I made good and sure before I came out. But then that business you saw night before last, that was unusual. Now and again some of those girls who type have to come in at night, if the bosses are in a hurry on something. Nobody walks them to the trolley stop, and I’ve never heard a peep about one of them getting bothered.”
Daisy hustled pans into the sink as she talked. My ears went up. The C&S owners had given me the impression no one came in after hours except the two of them and Gil Tremain. And of course Daisy. Now I was more than a little curious.
“Have any of the typists been in lately? I understand Mr. Tremain and some others were working on something special when he disappeared.”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded as she turned the water on and sifted in washing soda. “Two came in last week the same night. I think they came in separate but they left together. Another night one of the others was in. That poor girl nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw me. I guess maybe nobody told her I was around at night.” She chuckled.
“Which girls?”
“I don’t know names, and the first two all I saw was their backs. The one I scared, I kind of think she may be new.” She attacked a muffin tin with her Brillo pad. “Has big, sweet dimples.”
TWENTY-FIVE
I’d gone from killing time before I could call Tabby Warren to deciding another visit took priority. Pauline’s nocturnal visit to C&S had come shortly before Gil Tremain and the final version of what he’d been working on both went missing. A page from that work had turned up in her desk. A car that had followed me sat in a shed behind Pauline’s house. At last a few things were beginning to hook together.
Most places look better by daylight. The Meadows house was no exception. I could see now that it was better maintained than the shed in back. The white paint was still in good shape. Shutters on the second story gleamed dark green as did the rail surrounding the wide front porch. Rose bushes had been pruned to prevent winter kill. I rang the bell.
After a minute the door opened and I was face to face with Pauline. Her eyes were so swollen from crying they could only flinch a little at seeing me.
“Go away!”
Her voice was shrill. She tried to close the door. I had considerable experience at blocking such attempts. My shoulder was ready. It pushed the door wider, Pauline gave way and I stepped inside.
“We need to talk, Pauline.”
“No! I don’t want to talk to you. Go away!”
“My guess is that somebody else is at least partly to blame for the pickle you’re in. Tell me who, and I’ll do what I can to help you.”
“No! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Pauline, what is it?” A woman appeared from another room, wiping her hands.
“She’s some kind of detective! Mr. Collingswood hired her.”
“I think you better leave.” A man had come in behind the two women. “Our daughter doesn’t have a dishonest bone in her body. You go back and tell those men who fired her that.”
His neatly mended tan shirt and filled-out shoulders suggested a laborer with a good job, maybe at Frigidaire or as a plumber. He was pushing a sleeve up in a probably unconscious signal that nobody messed with his family. His wife had slipped an arm around Pauline. I held one palm out in an effort to diffuse their ire.
“Look, she seems like a nice girl. I think she may have gotten dragged into something she didn’t realize was serious. Somebody she trusted may have used her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a good chance Pauline could end up in worse trouble than she’s in right now. I may be able to stop that from happening — but only if I get some answers. Starting with that car with the bunged up fender out back.”
“What does Bud’s car have to do with anything?”
Pauline spoke for the first time since her parents had joined us. She looked completely confused. Maybe my theory wasn’t as sound as I thought, but something was going on here. I waited for someone to say something that would nudge me in a better direction. They didn’t.
“Who’s Bud?” I asked.
“Our son,” said Pauline’s father. “Her older brother.”
Was I going to end up helping one of their children only to harm another?
“I need to talk to him too.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?” I hoped they wouldn’t tell me he was dead. In jail or an excuse with holes enough for me to take a picture through would be better.
“He’s in Canada. Was, anyway. We got a letter yesterday saying they were shipping out to England.”
“He’s on an air crew.” Pauline’s pride overcame her anger at my presence.
“Maybe... maybe we should sit down,” her mother suggested. “Is that alright, honey? It doesn’t sound like this woman’s come to hound you. Maybe there’s been some sort of misunderstanding.”
Pauline resisted briefly, then nodded and took the nearest seat she could find, the end of the couch. Her mother sat next to her on the arm. She nodded with strained politeness toward a chair across from them.
“You too, Miss.”
“Maggie,” I said. “Maggie Sullivan.”
Pauline’s father stood protectively behind the two women. His arms were crossed.
“When did your son leave home?”
“Two months ago. He got tired of sitting and waiting for Washington to declare war, so he went up north and enlisted.”
“Who else drives the car?”
“Nobody. None of the rest of us knows how. At first we were lending it to his cousin — just until Bud came back — but the idiot didn’t have it a week before he smashed the front fender. That did it. Nobody touches that car until Bud gets back.”
“When did your nephew bring it back?”
His tongue traced the inside of his cheek in thought.
“Been a month at least. Maybe more. Why?”
“Daddy, I - I drove it once. After.”
“What?”
Pauline flinched at his thunderous tone. Even her mother’s face gave a small tic. Her arm crept around the girl’s shoulder.
“Bud had been teaching me how. To drive, I mean. He’d let me take the wheel a bunch of times. Not downtown or anything; we were being real careful. He was teaching me the rules, too, so I could get my license, only — only then he went off to Canada...”
“Pauline Veronica Meadows, what have you done?”
Her swollen eyes began to leak tears.
“Nothing bad, honest! But one day last week I was so awfully busy at work. They had two of us typing away on a report about some big project a group of them have been racing around like ants over since I started there. I’d hurried so on the last two pages, afraid I’d miss my bus, that on the way home I started worrying I might have missed a line or a word.”
She swallowed.
“I’d done that once before, left a word out. The men — they add things up above sometimes, or in the margin with an arrow. And another time I messed up a footnote. Mr. Collingswood’s so strict about that. I was worried I might lose my job if I made another mistake. So that night, after you’d gone to bed, I-I slipped out to the shed and took Bud’s car, and drove to work to check.
“I went really slow, Daddy, and there’s not much traffic at night. I know I should have told you, but I was afraid you wouldn’t let me. I’m sorry.”
He exhaled, accompanied by a sound in his throat. It was one I’d heard my own father make. It meant they wanted to shake you over your foolishness, but wouldn’t.
“So that’s where they got that fool idea about her taking something,” he said in relief. “Somebody, the watchman, I guess, saw her sneaking in at night—”
“I didn’t sneak!”
“It’s not unusual for the secretaries there to go in at night to work,” I soothed. “But I’m starting to think somebody may have used that fact to make Pauline a scapegoat.”
That was a long way from saying the girl was completely innocent. The fact her brother’s car had followed me had yet to be explained. I was, however, prepared to believe she honestly might not know how the page of calculations had come to be in her desk.
“Was anyone else at the building that night?” I asked.
Pauline dabbed at her eyes with a fresh hanky. I wondered how many she’d already gone through that morning.
“Mother, could I have some tea? With lots of sugar?”
The expression she wore as she turned to her mother was a plea for more than tea.
“Of course, honey. Miss Sullivan? No? You come too, Dad. You can get back to fixing that piece of linoleum.”
When the two of us were alone, I looked pointedly at Pauline, awaiting her answer.
“There’s a woman who comes in to clean. I didn’t know about her. She scared me to death.
“Then when I got into my car — Bud’s car — to leave and I turned on the headlights, I saw Mr. Scott in the parking lot. He was talking to somebody.”
TWENTY-SIX
Pauline pressed her hanky tightly between her palms.
“Is this going to help me?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said slowly.
Would Frank Scott try to implicate a typist in the disappearance of valuable documents unless he was behind it himself? But why would he be, when he himself stood to make a pretty penny from the very deal that disappearance was thwarting?
“What about the mistake you thought you might have made?” I asked as Mrs. Meadows appeared with tea for her daughter. Did you get it corrected?”
She broke into a smile.
“I hadn’t made one after all. Everything was exactly right. Thanks, Mother. I know I look a mess, but I’m not feeling nearly so weepy.”
Her mother patted her shoulder, gave me a nod, and left.
Unfortunately, Pauline’s after-hours trip to the building, on top of the page from her desk compounded her appearance of guilt. Her swollen eyes and the smile of pride that had flashed over the correctness of her work suggested a different story.
“Tell me about the person Mr. Scott was taking to. Was it a man or a woman?”
“I couldn’t see. They were in a car. The other person, I mean. I’d come in and out the front, which is what the girls all say you should do because there’s a light there. This car was parked at the side door. I’d... forgotten to turn my lights on until I’d backed up — it’s different driving at night than it is in the daytime, isn’t it? So when I did — turn the lights on — all at once the other car was there. Not close, though, which was lucky. Mr. Scott turned around and I saw it was him, but I don’t know who it was he was with.”
I remembered how dark it was at the side door. Handy for running in to retrieve something from your desk, I supposed. But likewise a good choice if you didn’t want to be seen.
“Was it someone dropping Mr. Scott off, do you think?”
Her forehead wrinkled in thought.
“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure I saw another car farther back. I didn’t really notice, though. It all happened in a second or two, it seemed. Turning my lights on, and Mr. Scott straightening up and looking around.”
“He was leaning into the car?”
“Like when you talk to someone. The driver. That’s the side he was standing on.”
It wasn’t the smartest spot for a clandestine meeting, right in your own back yard.
“Then what?”
“Then I came home. I was already headed back to the street by then, and really concentrating and I honestly can’t even remember driving home. I was just so glad when I got here.”
I had to smile at her woebegone sound.
“Driving gets easier. Don’t give up on it.”
I sat forward, resting my arms on my knees.
“Look, I don’t care a bit how you answer this next thing. I won’t tell. How did you get into the building? I know they lock up at night.”
She was drinking some tea. A hum of pleased importance escaped her. She glanced around and lowered her voice.
“The girls who work there have two keys they pass around. Promise you won’t tell. I don’t want to get them in trouble. Mrs. Hawes has a key that we’re supposed to sign for if we know we’ll need to come in, but she makes you go through a whole rigamarole, especially if the girl needing it happened to get on her bad side that day. Sometimes she makes a girl come back two or three times because she claims she’s busy and can’t be interrupted. Then you have to sign for it, and sign it in again the next morning.
