Helda stared at the little envelope, unable to force a word past her paralyzed tongue. It was marked PRIVATE, and it was addressed to Mrs. Ernst Schroeder.
In her husband’s handwriting.
Chapter Forty-four
When Abe Pritzker phoned on Wednesday morning, Louise was hoping he would take her back to Ellis Island for a second talk with Mrs. Oakley. The lawyer had other plans. He needed her to smooth the way at his initial meeting with Professor Oakley. But first he wanted an introduction to Lawrence Smoot, one of the friends he hoped would provide Masako with an affidavit to bring before the Alien Enemy Hearing Board.
So, now they sat in Smoot’s large office. When the Columbia professor and Arthur Shelton had visited the Oakley apartment the previous week, the fastidious Smoot might have stepped out of a Macy’s display window. But today silvery beard stubble covered the lower part of his face, his eyes were bloodshot, and his skin seemed too large for his bones. Something more than the attacks on Pearl Harbor must be eating at Lawrence Smoot, Louise thought.
Then, it hit her: Oh, it had been like that between him and Arthur Shelton. Of course, Professor Smoot was grieving over the art dealer’s death. Louise shook her head at her own naiveté. She should have tumbled to that relationship right off.
Despite his obvious distress, Professor Smoot readily agreed to vouch for Masako. Abe explained the procedure. The Board would need to be assured of Masako’s lack of interest in Japanese militarism, of her plans to remain in the United States, as well as of her favorable reputation as artist and teacher. While Smoot jotted notes, Louise poked around his art-filled office. On one of the bookcases, among dusty textbooks and oversize art books, she came upon a five-by-seven snapshot in a mosaicked frame.
It was a holiday snap, a happy group posed in front of…was that a camel? Professor Oakley, the tallest person, dominated the photo, wearing camp shorts and shirt. Louise almost chuckled. The professor Louise knew was a distinguished gentleman; but, in his younger days, with that black beard and those muscular legs, he’d qualify as what the girls called “a dreamboat.” He had his arm around a plump, pleasant-looking lady wearing a flowered skirt and large sun hat.
That must be his first wife, Virginia, Louise thought. It seemed odd to see the professor with any woman other than Masako. If she didn’t have the evidence right in front of her, she wouldn’t even have been able to imagine it. A thinner Lawrence Smoot and another lady, who was squinting into the sun, flanked Oakley and his wife.
Oh—she recognized that other woman: Lillian Bridges, younger, more beautiful, stylish even in her sand-colored safari suit.
“Happier times, my dear.” Smoot’s mellifluous voice sounded right in her ear.
Louise jumped. She hadn’t realized he and Abe were finished. The professor took up the photo and sighed. “If only we could make time stand still,” he said. “Just for a bit.” Then he turned the photo toward Abe and pointed. “Here’s the person you were asking about—Lillian Bridges. You can catch her at Robert’s this evening—she mentioned she’d drop by with some flowers. I’m sure she’ll be more than happy to write up a statement for Masako.”
Louise had called Professor Bridges yesterday evening to ask her about keeping Masako’s paintings from the studio on Bleecker Street. There’d been no answer, and she had to admit she’d let it slip her mind. Next to that soignée, self-assured lady, she felt like some little bumpkin who just rode the hay wagon into the big city. Shame on you, Louise chastized herself. She’d secured the studio key from Professor Oakley, but she couldn’t organize moving the paintings until she had Miss Bridges’ agreement to house them. She’d just have to remember to call her this evening. Masako would be desolated if the FBI got their hands on those paintings, too.
***
When Louise and Abe left the humanities building, the temperature had plummeted and an icy mist that wasn’t quite rain fuzzed Columbia’s lofty evergreens and columned buildings. Everything appeared slightly out of focus, and the cold sliced right through Louise’s nylon stockings. She added boots to her mental list of things she needed if she stayed in New York.
Hatless, as usual, Abe noticed her shoulders shivering and her teeth chattering. He slung an arm across her back. “We’ve got to get you warm, sweetie-pie.”
Louise wiped her damp cheeks with gloved fingers. Sweetie-pie?
He bundled her into the gray Ford sedan he’d parked on Morningside Drive and, heading downtown, navigated the slick streets of the West Side, parking with a flourish in front of a delicatessen restaurant across Seventh Avenue from Carnegie Hall. What Abe insisted would be a life-saving elixir turned out to be a bowl of the best chicken soup Louise had ever tasted, and it warmed her up just fine. She swallowed every drop of that soup, and all the little round dumplings, too. Abe called them matzoh balls.
“Delicious. Just what I needed. Thanks.” She sat back, smiling a little as a waiter delivered steaming mugs of coffee. How nice it would be to have nothing on her mind except having lunch, maybe taking in a piano concert across the street. With Abe.
“I know a couple of East Side delis that do it better. But this is closer to the Oakleys’.” The lawyer’s mind had obviously returned to the case. “Is the professor well enough to understand the recommendations available to the Board? His wife’s immediate release is probably too much to hope for. I’ll be jockeying for parole under the sponsorship of an upstanding citizen, so he should be thinking about who might be appropriate. Unfortunately, internment for the war’s duration is also a possibility.”
“He can understand.” Louise nodded tersely. Back to business.
“Of course,” Abe continued as he spooned sugar into his mug, “given who her father is, there is a more unsettling possibility—repatriation.”
Repatriation? Louise bit her lip. “Surely they wouldn’t pack Mrs. Oakley off to Japan.” She recalled their conversations at the kitchen table. Suddenly her nerves were on the alert. What had the Japanese woman said about going back to Japan?—she feared what might be done to her there.
Abe shrugged. “I hate to say it, but she’s valuable property to the Feds.”
“Property? What a thing to say!”
“That’s how they think of her—human collateral. Prime material for a high-ranking prisoner exchange, probably for some embassy muckety-muck stranded in Tokyo when war broke out.” Abe took a slurp of coffee. “I have the feeling Bagwell is going to play Mrs. Oakley’s situation for all he can get—it could make his career.”
“But that’s outrageous!” Louise heard her voice grow shrill. The small restaurant was beginning to fill up; several people turned to stare in her direction. She lowered her tone and reached across the table to grab Abe’s wrist. “You can’t tell Professor Oakley about this.”
Abe raised a skeptical eyebrow. “From what you’ve told me about your boss, it sounds like Oakley’s a man who won’t settle for a sugar coating.”
“Generally not.” Louise sipped at her coffee, thinking furiously. Abe was right about the professor; he had listened with great attention to everything she said. Professor Oakley would be angry if he found they’d withheld information. “At least let me explain that part. I’ll know just how far to push him.”
Abe stood, reached for his coat on a wall hook. “You got a deal on that one, honey.”
Chapter Forty-five
“Where’s Perroni? And Brenner?” McKenna looked around the squad office. Patsy Dolan was holding down his usual place, the broad chair at the head of the conference table that had also seen its share of card games and deli sandwiches. Two of the younger guys, Dawson and O’Connell, balanced their butts on the wide window sill, jawing over the Giants’ chances in the playoffs. That left almost half of McKenna’s inner circle missing.
“Dunno where Brenner is, Lute, but, Perroni, he joined up.” Dolan made a half-ass salute that would never h
ave been tolerated in McKenna’s old unit.
“Shit!” There went one of his best men.
“Yeah—him and his cousin went in together. Doris told ya this morning—don’cha remember? And when she brought the coffee, she dumped his notes in your box there.”
McKenna rubbed his midsection, trying to remember back. That fatty pastrami on rye wasn’t sitting well. Neither was Masako Fumi Oakley’s second refusal to come to the detention center visitor’s room that morning to talk to him. What a cockamamie situation! Just when the FBI gives the go-ahead, the subject digs in her heels.
And, she’s in Federal custody, so there’s not a damn thing he could do about it.
Oh, yeah. Back to this morning. While Doris had been yakking, he’d been flipping through some tabloids he’d picked up at the newsstand on Grand. Just like the Cap had warned, the yellow press had jumped on the Fumi story. Miss Ward’s Times piece had stuck to the basic facts, but these scandal rags had spun their juicy stories out of thin air. One had the lady using her art studio as a sake-soaked academy for Jap assassins. Another featured a headline that read “Pansy Murder Laid to Hot-blooded Nip.” Readers—and there were a lot of ‘em—would be calling for Mrs. Oakley’s head on a stick. He wondered if Bagwell knew about those stories.
Then he wondered if maybe the G-man had planted them.
“Notes, notes.” McKenna grabbed a fistful of papers from the in-box on his desk, checking for Perroni’s blocky handwriting; the young detective had been investigating several loose ends.
Okay, here was something. The number Hermann Rupp had called about the picketing job was a pay phone—no real surprise there. Telephone company was tracking down the exact location.
And this on Smoot: in good standing at his university, tenured, generally well-liked by students and colleagues, recently published a paper in a journal of Asian Art.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. As nothing else leapt out of the stack, McKenna pushed away from his desk and called Dawson and O’Connell to the table. “I wanna go back to the victim, see if we’ve missed anything. How about Shelton’s rooming house on West Fifty-first? Anything interesting turn up there?”
“Nothing, Lute.” Dawson shook his narrow head. He was a small man with a shock of chestnut hair and the look of an overgrown schoolboy, especially when he grinned. His current expression was more of a rubber-lipped frown. “Everybody we could get to talk agreed they hardly ever saw Shelton—course, it’s mainly theater and restaurant workers who keep odd hours themselves.”
McKenna nodded, not surprised. On first inspection, he’d decided Shelton only used the cheap room to store his extensive wardrobe, clean up, and sleep whenever he wasn’t spending the night in Lawrence Smoot’s bed. He wasn’t the only transient who patronized the rooming houses, bars, and cafés west of Seventh Avenue and Broadway. The district had earned the nickname of the “Faggy Fifties” because it was full of young pansies kicked out of the house, secret homosexuals eager to mingle with their own kind, and refugees from America’s heartland who saw this part of the city as the only place where they could let their hair down and be themselves.
Shelton’s mother had said it best, when McKenna had made the sad call to inform the art dealer’s parents of his death. In sorrowful tones, she told him, “Arthur was too sensitive for Muncie. He just never fit in here.”
I’ll bet he didn’t, McKenna had thought at the time. That conversation, as well as the shabby, lonely room, had convinced him that Arthur Shelton’s real life centered on his gallery. The solution to his murder would, too, McKenna bet. He rubbed his hands and addressed his team. “Okay, what about the murder weapon? Who’s on that? Dolan?”
“Nothing going there.” The sergeant looked like a frog who’d just lost his best friend. “I got twelve men on it. We extended the search out another four blocks in all directions. Shrubbery, trash cans, sewers, you name it. Nothing. We sure it’s one of them paint pots?”
“Brush pot. Or something similar in shape”—McKenna cupped his hands like they were encircling a quart milk bottle, moved them up and down about nine inches— “A jade brush pot is unaccounted for. Doc Lefevers found a particular pattern of bruising on Shelton’s forearms. Looks like he tried to fend off an attack with a heavy, rounded, blunt object. He might’ve turned to grab the hammer he was using on the packing crates and that’s when the killer clonked him a good one.”
McKenna turned his gaze toward O’Connell. He’d assigned the big redhead the task of questioning all the letter writers who’d been at Shelton about the Jap show—all except Tiffy De Forest. McKenna wanted to save that little lady for himself. “Anything?”
“No, Lute. These are society types and it was Friday night. They all have alibis from about a hundred people at dinner parties and charity balls. Even the opera.”
McKenna belched, immediately felt better, then nodded. He hadn’t really thought this line of investigation would turn up anything, either, but you had to be thorough. That was police work. Gayle used to say it was like searching for lice with a fine-tooth comb.
All that didn’t explain Brenner’s absence, but he’d probably be here soon. The sergeant often rushed into a meeting a few minutes late. To convince everyone how busy he was, McKenna sometimes thought.
Speak of the devil…Sergeant Brenner came through the door, out of breath, clutching his side. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “Sorry I’m late, Lute. Finally took the stairs—that goddamn elevator is so slow.”
Brenner didn’t quite hide his smirk. Busting to tell something, McKenna figured. The sergeant was an ex-beat cop with a good eye for detail. He was also ambitious. McKenna couldn’t blame him. Brenner had a young wife and a couple of kids that would keep him out of the war for a while. He’d take advantage of the opportunities provided by the many detectives caught in the draft and go as far as he could. No sin in that, as long as he did good police work.
“Whadda ya got?” McKenna reared back and crossed his arms.
“The door-to-door boys just dredged up a guy on Fifty-seventh Street—apartment across from the Shelton Gallery—reported seeing someone arrive by taxi around seven p.m.”
“Got an ID on this someone?”
Brenner grinned. Took his time answering. “It was an Asian woman.”
“Is that a fact?” McKenna heard his own voice as a deep echo, like they were in a cave instead of the squad office. This was the last development he would have predicted. He glanced around. Dolan and the two younger detectives were looking from him to Brenner with barely concealed excitement.
Not so fast, McKenna thought, this case just doesn’t have the feel of…done. “Did the witness see the Asian woman go into the gallery?”
Brenner just couldn’t lose the smirk. “He saw her disappear under that green canopy and head toward the entrance. She caught his interest ‘cause she wasn’t dressed for the street. She was wearing some kind of silky loose pants with a trench coat over. Seemed upset.”
“And then…” McKenna sat forward, all ears.
Brenner shrugged. “The guy was frying fish. He went back to the kitchen to have his dinner and doesn’t remember looking out front again.”
“Okay.” McKenna got to his feet, tapped a pencil on the tabletop. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. Brenner, you take Mrs. Oakley’s photo back to your witness—see if you can get a positive ID Dolan, you’re on the cab companies. Find that trip sheet.” McKenna spread his hands and asked the air. “Is there a doorman in the Oakley’s building?” He answered himself, “Yeah. Sure there is. Dawson, you’re on him.”
Chapter Forty-six
A middle-aged woman with pinched cheeks and graying hair arranged in small, precise curls bustled into the overheated meeting room of the America First headquarters. In the gloomy illumination provided by a frosted-glass ceiling light, Cabby immediately pegged her as a timid old maid, prob
ably a society-family discard who’d been forced to eke out a living on a small inheritance. What other type would wear such heavy horn-rimmed glasses or that ancient blue serge dress, probably very nice in 1930, now with shiny seat and elbows? When the woman crowded in next to her, ignoring the many other vacant chairs, Cabby changed her assessment.
“You haven’t been to one of our meetings before, have you, dear?” Innocuous words in a cultivated accent, but the underlying tone, and the look that accompanied them, could have come from a longshoreman on the Brooklyn docks. Whoever she was, this woman was no lightweight.
“This is my first.” Cabby chose her words with an uncharacteristic degree of care. She lifted her wrist to glance at her Timex, as if she didn’t already know it was exactly 7:43. “I’m interested in hearing Mr. Fairchild, but he seems to be late for his own lecture. Does this happen often?”
The gray-haired woman settled several bags on the floor and then rifled her purse for a sac of pink mints. “Not often, but I am beginning to have my doubts about our leader’s dedication to the cause.”
“Oh? Really?” Cabby responded, breathing in a powerful mix of peppermint and mothballs.
“Well, yes.” Her neighbor raised surprised eyebrows. “You haven’t heard about the kerfluffle last Friday evening?”
“No-o-o.” Cabby mentally filed away the word “kerfluffle” for future use. “Tell me.” Her fingers had that familiar reporter’s itch. If Fairchild failed to show, his absence could make for a more interesting story than the one she’d expected.
From the depths of her purse, Cabby’s neighbor plucked a folded green paper, opened it, and waved it as prelude to answering, “Well, this past Friday evening a hundred of us gathered at the Metropolis Club for a dinner meeting. Mr. Fairchild was to speak on ‘The Yellow Peril and the Danger to Civilized Mankind.’”
“The Yellow Peril. Oh, my, yes,” Cabby replied, when it became clear that a response was expected. A hundred, huh? There couldn’t be more than thirty in the hall tonight.
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