Face of the Enemy

by Beverle Graves Myers

  The woman raised a finger. “I’ll have you know we waited all the way through Waldorf salad, chicken cordon bleu, then coconut cake and coffee, and he never came! Do you call that dedication?”

  Cabby shook her head vigorously, as she reached for the green flier and gave it the once-over. Instead of handing it back, however, she folded it between two fingers and tucked it under her arm. After a moment, it found a new home in her jacket pocket.

  The woman sat back, oblivious. “And, then, only two days later, the Japanese attacked Hawaii…” Abruptly, she bowed her head, her expression stricken. “Followed by Mr. Roosevelt’s war declaration—horribly misguided.”

  Horribly misguided? Cabby swallowed a gasp.

  “I am simply terrified,” her neighbor went on, “that Roosevelt will next declare war on Germany. As dear Mr. Lindbergh has reminded us, we have only a one-ocean navy and cannot win a two-ocean war. Joining the hostilities against Germany would be a sorry overreaction.”

  The hostilities against Germany? Cabby blinked. “But, what if Hitler declares war on us first?—”

  “Then it will be all that Mr. Churchill’s fault!” Miss Peppermint whispered. “He and President Roosenberg are thick as thieves—oh, here’s our speaker. Finally!”

  Following her neighbor’s lead, Cabby rose to her feet and applauded as Nigel Fairchild paraded down the center aisle. The silver-haired man waved as if his audience filled the room and hung over nonexistent balcony railings. Cabby had a close view of his face as he stopped to wring Miss Peppermint’s hand. Though his lips smiled, the rest of his features were set in an expression of bitter disappointment.

  Fairchild may have arrived, Cabby thought, but he sure ain’t a happy man.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  In the hushed, fifth-floor corridor of the apartment building, Louise inserted her key in the Oakleys’ lock and jiggled it when it stuck. “After insertion, you must pull back a fraction of an inch,” Professor Oakley had instructed. She’d had no problem earlier in the day. Was it Abe Pritzker standing so close behind that made her fingers shake?

  As Louise finally convinced the key to turn the lock, the door flew open from inside.

  “What the—” She jumped back, smack into Abe, who caught her around the waist. He seemed to be making a habit of that.

  Lillian Bridges’ cheeks were flushed, gray eyes bright with anger. Instantly, however, her expression changed to relief. “Oh, Nurse. I’m glad you’re here. Robert has been waiting. Then she turned toward Abe. “You must be the lawyer. Sorry for the reception—I thought you would be more police.”

  Abe hustled Louise into the apartment foyer. “Police?”

  “Yes! Some damned detective is harassing Robert about Arthur’s murder. You must do something.”

  Louise made an abrupt move toward the sickroom, but Abe held her back. “What detective?”

  “Lieutenant McKenna—a real…hardnose.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Abe frowned, then sucked his teeth. “And who are you?”

  Louise jumped in. “This is Professor Bridges. I should have introduced—”

  “Don’t be silly.” Lillian clutched Abe’s overcoat sleeve with both hands. “The police rang the bell not five minutes ago, insisting on seeing Robert. Three officers. I begged them to wait until I could summon George Wright, but” —she drew herself up and smoothed her silver-threaded dark bob—“my words went unheeded. Now Mr. McKenna has tossed me out of Robert’s room and that nurse in there is next to useless. Do hurry.”

  She started down the hall. After trading glances, Abe and Louise followed. “What’s McKenna questioning the professor about?” the lawyer asked.

  “Masako,” Professor Bridges threw over her shoulder. “He wants to know where she was the night Arthur was killed.”

  At the door to the sickroom, a uniformed nurse in a drooping cap slipped out with a half-full glass of juice on a kitchen tray and closed the door behind her. Her expression revealed neither concern about the police confronting her patient, nor any interest in who these new strangers might be. Louise glared at the woman’s retreating back. Obviously not a nurse in Kitty’s league.

  Or her own.

  Lillian Bridges attempted to push through the door, but something prevented her. When Abe added his shoulder, they popped into the dimly-lit bedroom only to be stopped by a young man in a double-breasted gray pinstripe suit. He held up his palm like a traffic cop. “Didn’t I tell you to stay out, ma’am?” Then he registered the newcomers. “Who are these people?”

  “Who are you?” Abe countered.

  “Sergeant Brenner. Answer my question.”

  Louise left Abe to deal with the sergeant and did a slow burn as she looked around. The room smelled of fever, dying roses, and human waste. Bedpans and vases both needed to be emptied. She’d have a talk with the Registry.

  Then she caught sight of Robert Oakley, who looked even sicker than yesterday. Nonetheless, Lieutenant McKenna had drawn the red leather club chair right up to the bedside and was firing questions one after the other. Behind him, a dumpy older detective applied a pencil to a small notebook. At an exclamation from Abe, McKenna sent the group at the door a sharp glance.

  Oakley saw them, too. He struggled to sit up.

  “I’m here, Robert,” Lillian Bridges called, but Oakley trained his gaze on Louise. “Is that you, my dear? Have you seen my Masako?”

  Evading Brenner and the disgruntled lady professor, Louise darted across the room to take the professor’s hot, clammy hand. “Not since yesterday. But she’s all right. Abe…Mr. Pritzker here…has been calling to check on her.” Louise dipped a washcloth in a basin of tepid water on the nightstand. Wringing out the wet cloth she mopped her patient’s face and forehead. Taking a deep breath, she turned to McKenna.”Is this really necessary? I can’t emphasize enough how dangerous it is for him to be distressed.”

  McKenna turned his sober gaze on her and raised a big hand. “We’ll be out of here sooner if you don’t interrupt.”

  Brenner had gone out of the room for a moment. He came back to deliver a few words in his boss’ ear. With a pained grimace, his expression impassive, McKenna shifted his weight in the chair. He addressed Abe. “Okay, Mr. Pritzker. Since you’re here, ya might as well stay. But keep it quiet, okay?” He aimed a finger jab at Professor Bridges. “And that goes for you, too, lady. Any more outbursts and it’s twenty-three skidoo. You got that?”

  Lillian Bridges pressed her hands to her mouth, eyes wide with an emotion Louise couldn’t identify. Anger? Alarm? She and Abe drew closer to the bed. Louise had to wonder just how long the lawyer could keep his own mouth shut.

  McKenna renewed his questions. “Admit it, Professor Oakley,” he prodded. “Your wife was angry at Shelton for shutting down her show.”

  Oakley plucked at the sheets with agitated fingers. “You still suspect her of murder?” With mammoth effort, he rose to one elbow. “Have you seen Masako’s paintings? They celebrate life, not death. Just take a look in the living room.”

  McKenna opened his mouth, but Oakley wheezed on, “Oh, no, you can’t look at her paintings, can you?—your men ripped them off the wall.” Tears flooded his eyes as he fell back. “Who knows what you’ve done with them.”

  Louise whispered, “Settle down, professor.” Then she glared at McKenna in frustration. If she had MD instead of RN after her name, she’d give all three policemen the heave-ho.

  McKenna paid her no attention. “Don’t go making any assumptions about what we did or didn’t do. I understand the FBI confiscated some art, but my guys didn’t touch a thing. In fact, we pulled every string possible trying to keep the Feds from getting the paintings at the gallery.”

  He fell silent for a moment, looking over a small notebook, and the strains of a swing tune filtered through the open doorway. The agency nurse
must have turned on the kitchen radio—way too loud. Louise shook her head. When they got the police out of here, she’d chase that lazy cow from the apartment. She threw Abe a pleading glance, but all the lawyer offered was a shrug. Professor Bridges still had her hand to her mouth. Her knuckles were white.

  McKenna slapped his notebook against his palm. “Let’s quit pussyfootin’ around, Oakley. Do you still claim your wife was here last Friday evening?”

  “Claim? I said so, didn’t I? Where else do you think she’d be?”

  “The whole evening?” McKenna sat forward.

  Wheezing breath. “Of course, the whole evening!”

  “You wouldn’t maybe have been asleep—at least part of the time?”

  Louise didn’t like the sound of this. Of course the sick man drifted in and out of sleep.

  Oakley turned his head restlessly on the pillows. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered feebly, barely moving his lips.

  McKenna levered himself out of the chair. He traded glances with the older detective. Louise could read his expression: Why do they always think they can get away with this stuff?

  Now looking down on her patient, McKenna asked, “If your wife was here the whole evening, how come we have a witness who swears he saw an Asian woman get out of a cab in front of the Shelton Gallery at 7:15 the night Shelton was murdered?”

  Robert Oakley bolted upright. “She was here. I told you she was here, and she was!” He coughed, hard, and began to wheeze.

  Louise watched his face turn from porcelain white to beefsteak red and was horrified to see a glob of rust colored sputum hit the white sheet.

  “That’s it,” she ordered. “Everybody out.” When McKenna didn’t move, Louise stepped nose to nose with the detective. “What are you trying to do—kill this man? Get out. Get out all of you!”

  The lady professor gave a moan and wrung her hands.

  Abe edged in and began backing McKenna and his men toward the door. “Surely, Lieutenant, you don’t want to be liable for Professor Oakley’s death?”

  Even as she turned her attention back to Oakley, Louise recognized the threat of potential litigation.

  “And, remember…” Abe continued his slow advance as the cops retreated. “Mrs. Oakley is not the only Asian woman in Manhattan.”

  “Yeah, counselor.” McKenna halted, an overcoated mountain of determination. “But—not only do we have that witness, Sergeant Brenner here tells me we’ve just located the cab driver who picked her up in front of this very building and drove her to the gallery. The doorman downstairs confirms that he hailed the cab for Mrs. Oakley around seven o’clock.”

  Lillian Bridges sucked in a deep breath, and Louise’s heart sank as McKenna drove his point home.

  “So you see, counselor, there’s no doubt about the identity of the woman at the Shelton Gallery at the time Arthur Shelton was murdered. It wasn’t just any Asian woman. It was Masako Fumi Oakley. No doubt at all—it was her.”

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Wednesday night, several hours later

  Louise shivered in the darkness and moved closer to Abe, hoping his lanky height would block the raw, salt-tinged wind that blustered off New York Bay. Damn this thin Kentucky coat, anyway.

  It was a chilly, starry night on the Battery. Gulls cried. Flags flapped. Mooring lines creaked in the choppy black waves. Across the Bay, the massive buildings of the immigration center hunkered on Ellis Island, yellow window lights shining in regimented rows. To the left, the great Statue dwarfed the buildings.

  When they’d left the Oakley’s apartment on their way back to Brooklyn, Louise had impulsively asked Abe to take her to the Battery. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted there. Another look at Ellis Island, she told him.

  But it was more than that. It had something to do with freedom and justice. Trust and friendship.

  Detective McKenna’s eyewitness evidence against Masako Oakley replayed in her head. Over and over. Slow, fast, then slow again. It was like watching the newsreel of that dreadful Hindenburg crash. Her faith in the Japanese woman’s goodness, and in her own judgment, threatened to collapse in flames, just like the doomed airship. She couldn’t forget now that she’d dismissed Masako’s argument with Arthur Shelton as a minor tiff. She’d kept it from McKenna, hadn’t even told Abe. Now this…

  Louise squeezed her arm under Abe’s, staring at the distant walls that confined Masako and the other foreigners who’d been picked up. She’d always prided herself on understanding what made people tick, and, despite all, she just couldn’t believe Masako Oakley had killed Arthur Shelton. It went against every ounce of intuition she possessed. Did the police have the same agenda as the FBI?

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Abe’s deep voice rumbled.

  “I was just thinking…” she answered slowly, “well…it’s the easy way out, isn’t it?”

  “What is?” He gave her one of his disconcerting smiles, and she swallowed hard.

  “For the authorities, I mean—framing Mrs. Oakley as a killer.”

  “Framing? That’s a pretty strong accusation. And, you’ve got to admit that McKenna’s evidence could make for a powerful case against her.”

  “She’s Japanese. With no family here except her seriously ill husband. Nobody will care if they just ram—”

  “Listen here, Louise.” He placed his hands on her shoulders, turned her toward him. “You can’t let emotion blind you to the necessity for a thorough police investigation and whatever results it turns up. And…let me remind you, please, it’s not my job to defend Masako Oakley against a murder charge. I don’t want there to be any confusion about that. I’m not a criminal lawyer. My job is to guarantee her equal protection under the law. The Fourteenth Amendment applies to every person, citizen or not.”

  “Equal protection won’t matter a damn if she’s sent to the electric chair,” Louise shot back.

  Abe squinted down at her and smiled again. “Well, well. Aren’t you the little spitfire?”

  Louise drew herself up to full height and squared her shoulders. Her eyes were level with his loosened necktie knot. She stepped back. “Don’t patronize me, Abe Pritzker.” Turning away, she gazed out at the onion-domed fortress. Tears sprang to her eyes.

  This was a far cry from her first visit to the Battery on a sunny afternoon last September. Preston’s strong arm had encircled her shoulders as she took her first-ever look at Lady Liberty. Under the clear blue sky, the bay had spread out like an undulating green lawn plowed by luxury liners and squat tugs that reminded her of the toy boats her brothers had sailed on the lake at Cherokee Park. She and Preston had slathered hot, salty New York pretzels with mustard and made plans for the future.

  No ocean-going liners tonight. That sort of luxury travel was over for the duration.

  So was Preston. For the long, long duration.

  She should have known it wouldn’t work. The tall, dark-haired cardiology fellow she’d first met at the Kentucky Baptist Hospital had seemed like a fairy-tale prince. Intelligent and self-assured, but funny, too, and always ready to head downtown with a group of nurses and interns for a show or a hamburger. Then, later, whiling away the summer evenings on her porch swing, meeting her parents. She could never have imagined that Dr. Preston VanDyke Atherton would crumble under his mother’s disapproval like an earthen dam in a raging river flood.

  Her fiancé’s mother had turned up her patrician nose after one meeting over luncheon at the Atherton mansion: no son of hers was going to marry a nobody nurse—from Kentucky of all places. Not even if her son had lured that nobody to Manhattan with a one-carat tiffany-cut diamond and the promise of happy ever after.

  Louise suspected that Pres had been forcefully reminded of the possibility of disinheritance. Within days of his hasty, strained apology, he had taken off to London to volunteer in t
he British Army Medical Corps, and Louise had found herself alone in this strange, overwhelming metropolis. She could never go home now, not without a wedding ring.

  She lowered the hankie from her dripping eyes. It was simply the chill wind that made them tear, she told herself.

  Abe had moved away, to purchase a sack of roast chestnuts from a vendor at a charcoal brazier. Their delectable aroma mixed with cigarette smoke and permeated the crisp air. Farther along the railing, a thin sailor in a navy peacoat stared out to sea, smoking one cigarette after another. Several yards beyond, an Italian family crowded around a middle-aged woman, who keened as she held out pleading arms toward Ellis Island. The woman’s eerie lament sounded in one endless, wordless vowel. Was it her husband who’d been detained? Her son? Perhaps her father?

  Louise stared for a short moment. Then she pulled her gaze away, feeling like an interloper. Abe was back. He held out the chestnuts. “Peace offering?”

  She nodded, sliding her hand into the warm sack, burning her fingers.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, Louise,” he said. “I have no desire to ‘patronize’ you. It’s just that, you know, that magnolia skin, Georgia-peach beauty of yours is so at odds with what turns out to be a truck load of intelligence and determination—”

  “Oh, Abe, stop it! This is no time for flattery. I just want to make certain Mrs. Oakley gets a fair shake. And I won’t rest until—”

  “Okay! Okay!” He stepped back. “All business, huh? So, hear me, now. I’ve asked around about that cop, McKenna. He has a reputation as a straight-shooter. I can’t see him framing anyone. The Federals, on the other hand…they’ve pulled some pretty smelly deals, especially where organized crime is concerned. Over the years, Hoover has proven himself more interested in results than in above-board procedures. Now that we’re at war, his goons will feel even more justified in cutting corners.”