Louise's Blunder

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘1943 Guide to Hiring Women’, Mass Transportation magazine, July 1943.

  It was quiet inside the house. If anyone was home they must be napping, which sounded like a wonderful idea to me. If I couldn’t fall asleep I could finish Hungry Hill.

  Just in case Phoebe was asleep I tiptoed up the stairs, my shoes in hand. When I got to the second floor landing a voice called down to me from the third floor. It was Milt.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called out.

  ‘Hush!’ I said. ‘You’ll wake up your mother!’

  ‘She could sleep through a hurricane,’ Milt said from the top of the stairs.

  She probably could, especially if she’d taken a Nembutal. Milt’s head poked around the banister.

  ‘I’ve got some new records’, he said. ‘Come listen to them with me.’

  I didn’t have the heart to turn him down. I’d never been in the men’s attic bedroom before. Joe had shared it with Henry before he left for New York. We often communicated by knocking on a metal pipe that passed through our rooms. A pang of sadness struck me. Joe would never live here again. I clung to the thought that when – or if – he returned to the District he’d find lodging that would permit us a few hours of privacy occasionally. It occurred to me that one reason I postponed visiting him in New York was the chance that we’d never have an entire weekend to ourselves again, and we’d be even unhappier than we were now!

  The attic room was more attractive than I expected. The dark ceiling beams were high overhead and a ceiling fan turned slowly under them. It would get too hot in summer to sleep there – Joe and Henry always moved to the porch. A curtain separated Milt’s sleeping area from Henry’s.

  Milt was sprawled out on a double bed propped up on pillows and cushions. He was dressed in khakis and a plaid sport shirt but his feet were bare. Today’s newspaper and a couple of western paperbacks were spread out around him. A half empty bottle of bourbon sat on a table next to the bed, which also held a lamp and a record player.

  ‘Come into my lair,’ he said, and tossed me a couple of pillows. I sat cross-legged at the foot of his bed.

  ‘You look comfortable,’ I said, ‘like a sheikh in his tent.’

  ‘So where are the dancing girls?’ he asked. He seemed to me less angry than he had been this morning. That might be the bourbon, though.

  ‘Want a swig?’ he asked, passing me the bottle of bourbon.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, taking the bottle and swallowing a couple of gulps.

  ‘My goodness, the lady likes her liquor,’ he said, taking the bottle back from me and taking another pull himself.

  ‘Have you been up here all day?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Hiding out from my mother and Henry. But I just started drinking an hour or so ago.’

  ‘You’ve made quite a dent in that bottle in an hour,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t full when I started.’ Milt raised the bottle to his lips and then offered it to me again.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Henry was pestering me about when I was going to get my Purple Heart and I couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘Henry admires you,’ I said.

  ‘He admires soldiers,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t know me from Adam. I’m not a hero.’

  ‘I think most of us think anyone who has been through what you have is a hero,’ I said.

  Milt, cradling his bottle of bourbon, regarded me with a speculative expression on his face.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m an expert at it,’ I said.

  ‘This isn’t a war wound,’ he said. ‘I won’t be getting a goddamned Purple Heart for it. Some of my buddies and me lifted a case of beer from a Quonset supply hut when we were on leave and tried to outrun the MPs in a jeep. We “borrowed” the jeep by hot-wiring it, by the way. We hit a huge pothole and I got tossed out of the jeep and landed in the road. My buddy who was driving backed over me. Goodbye arm. And you know what? Not only am I not getting any medals, but I’m afraid my discharge papers are going to read “dishonorable”. Fat chance I’ll get a job with that hanging over my head.’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ I said. ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t start,’ he said, swigging from the bottle again. ‘It was just an accident, right? My glass is half full, right? It could have been my right arm, right? Look, I heard all that from the chaplain about a hundred times.’

  ‘You didn’t listen to him, did you?’ I said, getting off the bed and smoothing down my skirt.

  ‘Don’t go,’ Milt said, sitting up and swinging his legs off the side of the bed. ‘We haven’t listened to the records yet. Please.’

  Until now I had thought of Milt as just an unpleasant complication to my life at ‘Two Trees’. But now I caught myself feeling sorry for him.

  ‘Stop drinking?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, corking the bourbon bottle and setting it on the floor beside him.

  I sat back down on the bed while he cued up the needle on one of his new records. We shared a compatible half hour listening to the Mills Brothers and Glenn Miller. I almost offered to go down to my room and get some of my Carter Family records, but he probably disliked hillbilly music.

  ‘So how should I tell Mother?’ Milt asked, returning to the subject of his accident. ‘And what do I tell Henry about the Purple Heart?’

  ‘If it were me, I would lie,’ I said.

  Milt was shocked by my answer. ‘It didn’t occur to me that you would suggest such a thing,’ he said.

  ‘The truth would upset your mother terribly. You had an accident and you’ve paid for your poor judgment in full. It could have happened to any number of sailors on a shore leave toot. You were thousands of miles away fighting a war where you could have been killed any day. It’s nobody’s business what happened but yours.’

  ‘I really don’t have to tell her?’

  ‘Hell no.’

  ‘What about Henry? He’s pestering me to death for all the heroic details.’

  ‘Henry is a jackass. Make something up and then forget about it. After the war is over he’ll go home and be out of your life.’

  Milt looked at his empty sleeve. ‘I guess it could be worse,’ he said.

  ‘It can always be worse,’ I said.

  Sunday morning, while Phoebe and Dellaphine were at church, Ada and I were making biscuits for us all when Henry poked his head through the door. ‘Phone call, Louise. It’s Joe, long distance.’

  I felt the heat rush into my face and prayed Ada and Henry wouldn’t see how thrilled I was. I think Ada knew our feelings for each other, but Henry was purely ignorant and I wanted to keep it that way.

  ‘Say hello to Joe for me,’ Ada said, smiling widely as she said it. She knew. But I could count on her to keep our secret. Lord knows I was keeping a big one for her.

  ‘Don’t tell Henry,’ I said, wiping my hands on a dishtowel.

  ‘What do you take me for?’

  Henry was in the lounge reading the Sunday Washington Times-Herald when I reached the telephone table in the hall. I was afraid he could hear me so I cupped my hand over the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ Joe said. Oh God, I wished he wouldn’t call me that!

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘I miss you.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Can you talk?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Listen, Louise, I don’t have a room-mate. No one knows you in New York. Come visit me, please! We can be alone and no one will know. Please!’

  I glanced toward the open lounge door. Henry had turned on the radio to the news.

  ‘I would love to, Joe. I would love to!’

  ‘There’s a train that leaves Union Station at five minutes past six every Friday. Send me a telegram and I’ll be waiting for you at Grand Central at eleven. Please come.’

  ‘I’ll manage it somehow,’ I said.

  I could tell by the to
ne of his voice that he was surprised.

  ‘Really! When?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Soon.’ I could tell everyone I was visiting my parents in Wilmington.

  ‘Until then,’ he said.

  After I hung up the receiver, heart pounding, Henry came out into the hall.

  ‘Was that Joe?’ Henry asked. ‘Does he know yet when he’ll be back in the District?’

  From his oblivious expression I figured Henry didn’t hear the gist of our conversation.

  ‘No, not yet,’ I said.

  ‘If Milt stays here, I suppose Joe’ll have to find someplace else to live when he does get back,’ Henry said.

  ‘I suppose he will.’ I shrugged, hoping to give the impression that Joe’s housing dilemma didn’t matter to me.

  I told Ada and Phoebe that I was walking over to a filling station for a cold Coke from their red ice chest. I got the Coke, but then I ducked around the corner into the alley where I’d arranged to meet Sergeant Royal. He was already waiting for me, sitting on a wooden box smoking a cigarette.

  He pulled another box up to his as if it were a chair cozied up to a fireplace and asked, ‘Won’t you join me?’

  ‘Lovely weather today, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘So nice for an afternoon stroll.’

  I sat down and stretched out trousered legs. He offered me a cigarette and I refused.

  ‘So, what did you find out?’ he asked.

  I crossed my arms. I was determined to get myself out of this.

  ‘Something very interesting,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘On one condition,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry, Mrs Pearlie, I don’t do conditions.’

  ‘I want you to leave me alone from now on.’

  ‘I can’t promise that. I might need you again.’

  ‘You must have other people who can run your errands for you.’

  Royal grinned and shook his head. ‘Not without attracting the attention of my superiors,’ he said, ‘and not as smart as you are. Listen, Mrs Pearlie, Paul Hughes was murdered. Don’t you feel any responsibility to help find his murderer? And if not responsibility, curiosity?’

  I waited until two chatting women pushing baby carriages strolled well past the opening to the alley to answer him.

  ‘I don’t want to lose my job,’ I said.

  Royal turned his cigarette lighter, an ancient Zippo with most of the plating worn off, around in his hands.

  ‘Let’s compromise,’ he said. ‘You tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you more about the case. And I won’t report you to your bosses. I reserve the right to ask you to help me again. But you can say no.’

  ‘Sounds as complicated as an international treaty,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all I got,’ he said.

  ‘OK,’ I said. I waited again, until a family that looked like mother, father, daughter and daughter’s kids, all dressed in Sunday clothes, passed by the alley. They seemed quite somber. Daughter’s husband must be in the military. Or deceased.

  ‘The covers you provided me worked wonderfully,’ I said. ‘I went to the Western Union office and completely convinced one of clerks that I was a policewoman. She gave me the return address associated with the telegram Mrs Nighy received, the one that was supposedly from Hughes’ mother.’

  Royal gripped my arm with excitement. ‘You went to the address, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but it was a disappointment. It’s the address of a tiny news and sundries shop,’ I said. ‘It’s run by an old Russian guy. He lives in the apartment upstairs. So it seems that whoever sent the telegram just picked an address nearby.’

  Royal covered his mouth with his hand, thinking. ‘Let’s say that Hughes had a girlfriend. When he became ill, she sent a telegram to Mrs Nighy pretending to be his mother. Using a phoney address on the form, an address that just happened to be occupied by your elderly Russian shopkeeper. Maybe she passed by it every day. But Hughes was determined to get back to his boarding house and his work. So he left his girlfriend’s place before he should have, collapsed, hit his head and fell into the Tidal Basin and drowned? I just don’t believe it. Why would all his identification be missing? That points to homicide. But if there is a girlfriend, what, if anything, did she have to do with his murder?’

  I thought of ‘G’ and the meeting he had with Hughes on Sunday, when Hughes was supposed to be at his mother’s but wasn’t. Was ‘G’ a girlfriend? Or a barber? Or a bookie? Or was ‘G’ a person related to Hughes’ work at OSS? And why did Major Wicker want me to check out the files Hughes was reading? Did Hughes’ death have anything to do with those files? Why did OSS send Hughes’ personnel file to the Limited file room? If it was so clear to Royal that Hughes’ death was a homicide, why had OSS hushed it up? Was it just to keep the police and the FBI out of OSS business? If so, were the OSS still investigating, despite what they said?

  I couldn’t tell Sergeant Royal about ‘G’. I just couldn’t. It was my responsibility to lead him away from anything that might involve OSS.

  ‘You seem sure that Hughes had a girlfriend, and that his weekends away from Mrs Nighy were to spend time with her,’ I said. ‘But you don’t know that; there could be another explanation, couldn’t there?’

  ‘Oh,’ Royal said, ‘he had a girlfriend all right. I told you I had some information for you.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘I put an advertisement in the personal section of the newspaper pretending to be a private detective looking for a philanderer. I asked if any landlord in the District rented living space to a man who might be using it sometimes to meet a girl.’

  ‘You must have gotten hundreds of responses,’ I said.

  ‘Not at all,’ Royal said. ‘How many rooms in the District are occupied part-time? The Housing Authority would slap the owner with a fine in a minute.’ True, I thought. At ‘Two Trees’ we worried that someday the Housing Authority would find out that Ada and I had our own rooms and insist that Phoebe house two more women.

  Royal popped a couple of aspirin, dry, before continuing.

  ‘So I called them all, and by God, a woman who runs a residential hotel not that far from Mrs Nighy described Hughes down to a T. Said he called himself Anderson. This Anderson told her that his business brought him to town often and that he was tired of trying to find a hotel room. And then she told me that a girl visited him regularly.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘So he had a girlfriend. What does that have to do with his death?’

  ‘I don’t know. But this hotel is just a few blocks away from Mrs Nighy’s.’

  He pulled out an Esso map of Washington to show me. I knew the neighborhood fairly well myself. It was just a few blocks from Rose’s and Peggy’s apartments. The area was teeming with government employees lodged in private homes, apartments and hotels.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘this hotel is not that far from Mrs Nighy’s, way to the northwest of the Tidal Basin. If he was taken ill there he wouldn’t be traveling by way of the Tidal Basin to get home. He must have been coming from somewhere else.’

  ‘And the Tidal Basin is across the street from the streetcar terminus at the Bureau of Engraving,’ Royal said. ‘And the Western Union office and the return address of the phoney telegram are within walking distance.’

  God, I thought, how could anyone solve a puzzle like this with so many pieces missing?

  ‘So Hughes could have been coming from anywhere,’ I said.

  ‘Just about,’ Royal said. He folded up the map and tucked it into his pocket.

  ‘Remind me why you want to find the girlfriend?’

  ‘The more we know about Hughes’ life the more likely it is we can find his murderer. She might know what he was doing over the weekend and where he was.’

  ‘How are you going to find her?’ I asked.

  ‘This is where you come in,’ he said.

  I didn’t even object. But I did check my watch.
>
  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go soon.’

  ‘Go over to that hotel,’ he said. ‘Snoop around. First make sure that Anderson was Hughes. I’ve got a copy of his government ID picture. Don’t ask me how I got it, I can’t tell you. Ask questions if you can. People don’t suspect women much.’

  ‘I’ll go when I can,’ I said. ‘Maybe at lunch tomorrow.’

  I stood up and brushed the wrinkles out of my dress. Royal handed me the passport-sized photo of Hughes. He stood, but his bad leg buckled and he had to brace himself against the wall of the alley.

  ‘I hope the war ends soon,’ he said. ‘I can’t do this much longer.’

  I just barely made it to my desk by nine o’clock, the last possible minute I could arrive at work without being reported for tardiness to my boss. In fact, Mr Shera found me shortly after I sat down to organize my day.

  ‘Louise,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I answered, ready for him to assign me some mundane dusty task amongst the files.

  ‘You’re wanted by Mr Lewis again,’ he said. Shera looked annoyed that I had been drawn away from my work yet again.

  So I found myself hustling across ‘E’ Street and up the three flights of steps in the main OSS building. Lewis’s disapproving secretary was not at her desk. I knocked on Lewis’s door. Major Wicker answered.

  Major Wicker showed me to one of the club chairs.

  ‘Mrs Pearlie,’ Wicker said. ‘I have one more little job for you. Take your lunch hour so as not to arouse suspicion.’ He handed me a scrap of paper with an address on it. The address of the residential hotel where Paul Hughes lived under his other identity!

  So OSS had been following the same line of inquiry as Sergeant Royal. And this must mean that they too were suspicious of Hughes’ ‘accidental’ death, even though OSS had accepted and disseminated the story inside the agency. Interesting. Did OSS agree with Royal? Did Wicker believe too that Paul Hughes had been murdered?

  ‘It seems,’ Wicker said, ‘that Paul Hughes lived another life. He rented a room as a Mr Anderson. I want to know why. Poke around. Find out what you can. People are less reserved with a girl than they are with a man.’