One O'Clock Jump

by Lise McClendon

  On the front page, a headline read LONDON, PARIS black OUT. She scanned the other stories, Roosevelt again trying to calm the jitters, Ambassador Kennedy sending missives back from London about Neville Chamberlain, Hitler buttoning up Poland. Another story about the track. No byline, but it had to be Russell. This time, the city was considering annexing the land around and including the Blue Valley Racetrack. Owner Floyd Wilson was said to be opposed. She decided the time had come to find out something about Palmer Eustace. She got up and dropped a coin in the pay phone in the booth at the back of the store.

  The operator at the Kansas City Star was a little miffed by her asking for “a reporter named Russell.”

  “Last name or first name?”

  “Not sure. How about the city desk?”

  In a moment, a gruff voice announced the city desk. “Is Russell there?”

  “He’s not around till deadline. Whatcha got?”

  “Just want to talk to Russell. When is deadline?”

  “Three o’clock. Check back then.”

  When she got back to the counter, the soda jerk set down the huge malted in front of her, the frosty glass brimming with creamy chocolate. He had put whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top. He laughed at her expression of awe.

  “We aim to please,” he said, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Couldn’t help noticing your hand there. What’d you do to it?”

  Lennox spooned whipped cream and malted into her mouth. “Clumsy, that’s all,” she said.

  “Funny, you know,” the boy said. “My neighbor had the same thing happen. Broke the same two fingers just last week.”

  “You don’t say.” The malted was delightful, cool and sweet. It had been ages since she’d sat down long enough for one.

  “He’s just an old man, full of wild stories. I bet he just fell down, too. Or slammed ‘em in his door.”

  “What did he say—a pixie jumped on his hand?”

  “That’s close. He says a midget broke them.”

  She set down her spoon. “A midget?”

  “Ain’t that rich? ‘What,’ I says, ‘is the circus in town?’ “

  “Was it?”

  “Hell, no. The man’s off his nut.”

  “Could I bother you for this man’s name? It’s just curiosity.” She held up the bandaged fingers. “Fellow war hero.”

  The soda jerk squinted at her, then shrugged. “No skin off my nose. His name’s Grady. Lives next to me on Olive. Little green shack with big lilac bushes in front.” He slapped his rag on the counter and leaned in. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. He’s off his nut.”

  She finished half her malted and paid the soda jerk, and tipped him, too. As she got up, a group of kids came in, laughing and talking, carrying schoolbooks. Lennox paused at the end of the counter, turning to the soda jerk.

  “Say, you ever hear of a Rose Schmidt who lived around here? Or an Edna Klundt?”

  “Nope, sorry,” he said.

  Lennox thanked him and turned to go. A girl in a too-tight cotton dress and saddle shoes stared at her, mouth hanging open, like she’d never seen a woman in trousers before. Small towns. Lennox smiled and the girl blinked her round blue eyes. Down the street, at the Packard, Lennox stopped. She should go back and question that girl. It wasn’t the trousers. It was the names. She knew something.

  But back inside the Starlite Fountain, the girl was gone.

  Lilacs were a favorite on Olive Street, but there was only one green shack. She knocked at the door with her left hand. After three knocks, a short old man opened the door, his slumped shoulders making it difficult for him to look up at her.

  “Mr. Grady?” She introduced herself. “Your neighbor boy at the fountain told me about you. I think we have something in common.” She held up her broken fingers. “A midget did this to me.”

  The old man brought up his broken hand, streaks of purple bruises covering it. His splint looked more professional than hers, but the crippling looked worse.

  “Who was he?” Grady croaked. “I never did nothing to nobody.”

  A state of grace she had no claim to. “Mine wore little leather gloves and rode in a black sedan.”

  “That’s him, the little fucker.”

  She smiled. “My sentiments exactly, sir. Could I ask what he said to you?”

  “Made no sense.”

  “Like what?”

  Grady looked at her for a moment, then over his shoulder into his house. “Can’t ask you in. Place is a dump.” He stepped outside and shut the door. “Come over here.”

  He shuffled across the dried grass toward a wooden bench set under the lilac bushes. She sat down carefully. It was a primitive affair, but it held her. The old man lowered himself, stretched out his legs.

  “Nice day.” He looked at the cloudless sky. “Fall’s really coming now.”

  “You were going to tell me what he asked you.”

  “Oh, Lordy, yes. Wanted to know about some money. Something he called ‘the Truman money.’ They tore up my place looking for it. I never heard nothing about it—that’s what I told him, but he broke my fingers anyway.”

  “Do you know why he might ask you that?”

  “Haven’t a notion. Loony little shrimp. Those tiny hands.” He stared at his own big, battered hands. “Who’da thought it.”

  “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Grady. Have you lived here all your life?”

  “Oh, no. I worked the railroad, moved around a lot. Settled here after I retired, to be close to the family. Wife died about ten years back. I was a conductor. Saw all the West. Something in those days.”

  She was silent a moment. “You never had anything to do with Harry Truman? Worked for him or anything?”

  “Voted for him, I did. He’s a war hero.”

  She tried to think. “Have you ever heard of a man named Georgie Terraciano?”

  The old man shook his head. “One of them Italians? Al Caponee?”

  “Sort of. From Kansas City. Did you ever know a girl from here named Rose—Rose Schmidt?”

  “I knew some Schmidt’s in Illinois. But not here.”

  “How about Palmer Eustace? That mean anything?”

  “Nope. That the midget’s name?”

  She shrugged. Could it be? “How about Floyd Wilson?” He shook his head again. What else should she be asking? What was she missing here? What connected her to this old man besides a nasty midget? She stood up. “Well, thanks for your time, Mr. Grady. Someday we might find that midget.”

  He struggled to his feet. “You have my permission to pinch his little balls off. You can tell him it’s a message from Ed Grady.”

  “Okay, Mr. Grady. I’ll remember that.” She said good-bye and ducked her head to find her way out of the bushes, back to the car. Might as well go back to the city now. She’d go talk to Russell at the Star, bargain for more information. Call Tulsa. Maybe she’d go talk to Amos again. They might come up with something together. She paused at the street, then turned back. Mr. Grady was framed by the huge bushes.

  He peered through the leaves. “Forget something?”

  “One more name, then I’ll go.” She stepped back toward him. “Does the name Edna Klundt mean anything to you?”

  He blinked, ran his tongue over his dry lips. “O’ course. She’s my granddaughter.”

  They sat on the bench as Mr. Grady told her the sad story of Edna. Named after him, she had been a favorite grandchild, pretty and attentive. But after the crash, her father took off for California and never came back. Mr. Grady’s daughter, Louise, struggled to keep the family together, but Edna ran off to Kansas City when she was seventeen. Word was, she came to no good. Louise remarried. She hadn’t been visited by a midget, but her husband had scared off a couple of heavies with his shotgun last week. Edna hadn’t been heard from in more than seven years, and her family feared she was dead. Grady showed her a picture of a pretty girl of ten or eleven with sweet bowed lips, a large nose, and a short neck. Her hair, Ed said, was strawb
erry blond. Disappointment struck; it wasn’t Iris. Lennox squinted at the round cheeks. She saw something there. But what?

  Lennox drove back to Kansas City with Edna’s last known address and a warm feeling for an old man who wanted nothing more than to see the lilacs bloom in the spring and that a certain midget got what was coming to him.

  In town, she drove by the address, a boardinghouse near Troost, now boarded up. Another dead end. What did Edna mean to Iris? Were they together in this—whatever this was? Is that what Iris’s warning had implied?

  Lennox killed a couple hours in the Kansas City Public Library, a much bigger affair than Raytown’s, but just about as helpful. Librarians were scarce and city directories no help. Schmidt’s were too common, Klundt’s too few.

  Out on the street again, she found her car being ticketed by the city’s finest. The cop gave her a stern lecture on driving with her lights broken out. Told her she should be ashamed of herself for the way the Packard looked. She assured him she was.

  She drove south to the Kansas City Star at Eighteenth and Locust. The outside was impressive, but inside, the low rumble of machinery and ever-present coating of grease meant business. She found the city editor, who told her Russell was still not in. Then he blew cigar smoke in her face. She decided on another tack: the morgue.

  “No, you can’t go back and look yourself. Some floozy off the street. Are you kiddin’, sister? We don’t even let the blasted reporters back there.”

  The Star’s morgue was cheerier than the city’s, but just as poorly lit. The basement clipping library was run by a man of Ed Grady’s age named Folsom. A most unwilling old bastard.

  Lennox tried smiling more, but her face hurt. “What else are you doing? Come on, how about a buck or two?”

  “Look, go away, okay, girlie? I don’t want your filthy money. I got work to do, and I can’t do it with you here sitting on my desk.”

  “Mr. Folsom. I’m a busy person, too. I can understand that. Maybe I can help you, get you some lunch?”

  “I had my goddamn lunch. Breeze off, chickie.” He was a wiry little man, straighter in posture than Grady, but with the same white tufts of hair over his ears.

  She watched him work his old lips. “Did you know Ernie Hemingway when he worked here?”

  “Just another son of a bitch reporter,” he grumbled. “Nothing special.”

  She was trying to remember how much money she had in her wallet, when Harvey Talbot rounded the doorway from the hall, head down, and stopped dead when he saw her. He worked his hand through his hair.

  “What are you doing here?” Harvey said.

  “Bothering me,” Folsom replied. “Get rid of her, would ya?”

  “Sure, but—” His voice was soft, almost breathy, so unlike the way he’d acted the first day she met him, brash and unstoppable. “Did you want something out of the morgue?”

  “Dance marathons,” she said. “I thought there might be something on Iris.”

  He took her arm. “Come on.”

  Spread out on Talbot’s desk were six articles, some with pictures. They dated, he said, from 1930 to 1933. Iris Jackson wasn’t mentioned in any of them.

  “How about as Rose Schmidt?” Lennox asked.

  He shook his head. “But look at the pictures.”

  The newsroom was a huge open room with a low ceiling, filled with wooden desks and scattered with newsprint, clacking with the sound of typewriters. Most of the desks were empty. Still no sign of Deadline Russell. She leaned over Talbot’s desk, bringing her face close to one grainy photograph after another. In one, four couples danced, arms hanging limply at their sides, heads resting on each other’s shoulders. In another, a girl lay flat on the floor, a doctor checking her pulse. Lennox peered closely at a couple who held up a trophy, smiling after all that dancing. Buck teeth—no, not her, unless she’d been to a bunch of dentists.

  “Don’t they keep the original photos?” she asked.

  “Yeah, way back in another part of the morgue.”

  She picked up a clip with a photo that had only a caption. In it, a girl danced alone. Presumably, her partner had given up the ghost and she had gone on without him. She was barefoot, wore a simple shift dress, and had one hand on her stomach, the other held out, as if holding a partner’s hand. She smiled for the camera. A ratty square of paper was pinned to the hem of her dress with the number 12. The caption read:

  This plucky marathoner participating in the popular Muehlebach Hotel dance event has captured the fancy of many onlookers, including Democratic leader John Lazia, left. The dancer’s partner collapsed due to exhaustion five days ago—on Day 3—but the lass refuses to quit. She is going all the way, she told a reporter. The grand prize in the “Endless Starlight” Muehlebach marathon is $500.

  “Which one’s Lazia?”

  Talbot leaned over her shoulder and pointed to a man in a dark suit, with slicked-back hair, rimless glasses, and a big grin, standing by the bleachers, clapping. Yes, the neat clothes, the specs, just how Herb had described him.

  “Is that her?”

  “The clerk said it was at the Muehlebach.”

  She stared at the fuzzy, smiling face of the dancer, then shut her eyes, picturing Iris that night in the ladies’ lounge. The same smooth skin, the same facial shape, but the hair was different, dark and stringy. She looked thinner, scrawny even. But she’d been dancing for a month. The date of the clipping was July 12, 1931.

  Lennox bored into the grainy photograph. What was she missing? There, the earrings, the gold hoops! Iris still had those; she’d been wearing them that night in the satin dress. Lennox felt her heart race. It had to be her.

  She set the clipping back on his desk. “When was Lazia killed?”

  “Thirty-four. Is it her, then?”

  “I think so. Do you think she and Lazia were an item?”

  Talbot rubbed his unshaven chin. “Because he’s in the picture?”

  “She had a lot of fancy underclothes from Emery-Bird-Thayer, old things. Like somebody bought them for her. Her sugar daddy.”

  “Anybody coulda bought them. Her mother.”

  “Not this kind of underwear. I keep stumbling over Lazia’s name. Georgie worked for him back then.” Lennox looked up. “Can you get Lazia’s file?”

  It took Talbot fifteen minutes to go back to the morgue and return with the fat file of clippings about John Lazia. On top of the stack were the stories about his sensational daylight murder on Armour Boulevard. A photograph of his wife at the funeral, along with numerous city and county officials, and, yes, Pendergast, too, caught Lennox’s eye. Other clippings, other photos. She scooted them over to Talbot.

  “Recognize any of those people?”

  While he frowned at the photos, she picked up the next clipping, Lazia’s obituary. He had been on a number of boards and committees of a civic nature, parks and streets and planning. The board of directors of the Boy Scouts. Now that was fitting. Probably helping an old lady across the street when he was chilled off.

  “Here’s Harry.” Talbot pushed over the photograph. A shot through a car window showed Mr. Truman, then just a candidate for the Senate, his head bent reverently.

  Lennox looked up at the reporter. She hadn’t told him about the Truman money, whatever it was. How was Harry Truman connected to Lazia? Was it politics, or was it something deeper, more bent?

  She looked back at the obituary. At the bottom, a boldface poem had been inserted, courtesy of Mrs. Lazia.

  Wherever you are, my lost lamb,

  There will be stars burning.

  One of them, twinkling high

  Above your head, is me.

  My love that sputters and flares but never goes out.

  Steady, love. Take care, my lamb.

  We’ll be together soon.

  “Look at this.”

  She pushed it across the desk, swung it upright for him. He put a finger on it and frowned.

  “Here. This poem or whatever it is. That’s
what Iris said in her phony suicide note. Same lines. She was writing it for her lost love, John Lazia.” Lennox felt a surge of excitement, then tried to bring it down in order to think. “You aren’t going to write about this now, are you?”

  “This doesn’t prove he was her man.”

  “Look at that picture, Talbot.” She pointed at the marathon shot. “Must have gone over good with Mrs. Lazia. Look. He’s nuts about her.”

  “I have to talk to you, Dorie.”

  “We are talking.” She laughed, looked around the newsroom again. Several rows over, greasy Russell stared at them over his typewriter. She waved and he ducked his head. Iris and Lazia, the lost lamb. Edna and Rose. She felt giddy.

  She looked back at Harvey. He seemed tired and his eyes were hot. “Not now, Talbot.”

  Russell punched his typewriter keys, hunting and pecking. Lennox stood in front of his desk, tapping one foot. The reporter didn’t look cleaner or dirtier than he had the other day. Same shirt, same sweat. She was glad for the distance.

  Finally, he stopped, one finger poised in midair, and cocked his head.

  “Howdy, Russell. Remember me?”

  He looked her up and down. “What do you want?”

  “You sound suspicious, Russell.” Lennox smiled. He was wearing the rope belt again. Tops on the news hawk’s guide to glamour. “Can I sit down?”

  She pulled a chair over from another desk and sat down at the end of Russell’s. He pushed back from his desk and folded his hands, squinting at her. “What’s going on?” A glance in Talbot’s direction, also squinty.

  “Information, Russell. That’s all.” She looked at Talbot. He stood over the clippings about the dance marathon, staring at them. “Don’t tell Harvey,” she whispered.

  “Tell him what?”

  “I’m trying to find out some information on one of the partners at the Blue Valley Racetrack. You’ve been writing about it. A lot.”

  “No more than any story.”

  “What’s your interest? You think it’s a scam or something?”