Carolina Crimes

by Karen Pullen

  I thought back. The café next door to the market had been closed and dark. Of course the windows upstairs, where the café owner, her son, and her boarders lived, were still lit. The filling station on the corner was closed and the nearby movie theatre marquee was dark.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t see anything unusual.”

  “Then,” Bennett said, turning another page of his notebook, “it looks like you were the last person to see Mr. Metz alive.”

  “Excuse me?” I wasn’t sure that I had heard him correctly. I thought he was investigating black market racketeering. “What do you mean?”

  Officer Bennett looked up from scribbling in his notebook. “Mrs. Pearlie, Mr. Metz was murdered last night. His colored boy found him when he came to work this morning.”

  “Louise, he was stabbed with a butcher knife,” Ada said, leaning forward in her chair. “Can you imagine? It was buried right in his chest. Isn’t that awful?”

  “Oh no,” I said, swallowing a gasp of shock, “That’s terrible!”

  “Poor man,” Phoebe said. “More coffee?” she asked the police officer.

  “No thank you, ma’am. And please, Miss Herman,” Bennett said to Ada, “let me finish here. You can gossip after I’ve left.”

  “Of course,” Ada said, subsiding into her seat.

  “Mrs. Pearlie, it’s early days in our investigation yet, but we’ve gone over the last twenty-four hours of Mr. Metz’s life pretty thoroughly. Our doc figures Metz died before midnight. Mrs. Jane Jones, who owns the café next door, was doing paperwork at her desk upstairs when she saw you enter the back door of the Western Market after it closed, right about when you said you did. She saw you leave around fifteen minutes later. She worked for two more hours at her desk and saw no one else go inside, and didn’t see Mr. Metz leave. She thought nothing of that. He often stayed late or slept on a cot in the storeroom.”

  “Someone else must have come later,” I said.

  “Not that she saw, ma’am. Now, the filling station owner, Mr. Pete Cousins, went into the market by the back door, before you. About eight. Several people leaving the café noticed him.”

  “Really, officer,” Phoebe said, “this is uncalled for. Surely someone could have slipped into the store after Louise left. That Jones woman couldn’t have been looking out her window the entire time she was working at her desk.”

  Bennett ignored her. “When Mr. Metz’s stock boy—” and here he consulted his notes “—Sid White, arrived at seven-thirty this morning, he found Metz dead.”

  “How terrible,” I said. “But you can’t think I had anything to do with this.”

  Bennett closed his notebook and stuffed it into his pocket. He looked at me with light blue, inquiring eyes. He didn’t seem to be accusing me of anything, but he struck me as a man who wouldn’t stop asking questions until he got answers.

  “Mrs. Pearlie, do you have anything to add to what we’ve discussed?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. I hardly knew the man. I mean, I just bought a couple of pounds of sugar from him.”

  “I need to collect your fingerprints now. To compare to the ones on the butcher knife. There were several sets.”

  Both Phoebe and Ada protested.

  “Not right here in my lounge,” Phoebe said.

  “It’s all right,” I said to them. “I don’t mind. I never touched that knife, so this will clear me.”

  “But you’re not a suspect, surely.” Phoebe said.

  “We need to identify every fingerprint we can on that knife handle,” Officer Bennett said. “And you’re right, of course. If your fingerprints aren’t on the knife, that clears you.”

  “See?” I said to Phoebe and Ada. “It’s okay.”

  A small black leather case sat at Bennett’s feet. He lifted it onto the coffee table. Open, it revealed a tidy collection of bottles, brushes, rollers, and fingerprint cards. Ada and Phoebe couldn’t help but lean forward to watch. Bennett rolled my fingers in ink and pressed each finger onto a card, then handed me a cloth to wipe my hands.

  I didn’t tell Bennett that I’d had my fingerprints taken when I swore my loyalty oath early in 1942. I preferred that he know as little about me as possible.

  “If you think of anything else, please come around to the station,” Bennett said.

  “Certainly,” I said.

  Phoebe showed Officer Bennett to the door.

  I wanted a martini in the worst way.

  * * * *

  I loved Dellaphine’s fried chicken, which was a good thing, since we had it for dinner twice a week. I could live happily with less beef to eat, as long as I could get chicken and plenty of potatoes and vegetables from our Victory garden. Most Americans, like Henry, our male boarder, who sat scowling at his dinner plate across from me, missed fresh beef badly. Tongue and oxtail weren’t good substitutes for steak.

  It was just the three of us at dinner—me, Phoebe and Henry. Ada had gone to her gig at the Willard Hotel, where she played clarinet in the house band. Joe, our other male boarder, was in New York City on business.

  “You know, Louise,” Henry said, spearing a crispy chicken drumstick from the platter, “you’re probably the main suspect, being the last person who saw Metz alive.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Henry,” Phoebe said. “I’m sure the police don’t suspect Louise of anything at all. Someone must have gone to the market after Louise left and killed Mr. Metz. The police just want to know if she saw anyone.”

  It was so stupid of me to have bought that sugar. Because I wasn’t just any government girl. I worked for the Office of Strategic Services, America’s spy agency, in the Registry, where all the OSS documents were filed. I had Top Secret Clearance, and I didn’t want to lose it. Which I might if my name hit the newspapers associated in any way with a murder. I hoped Officer Bennett could solve this case quickly and keep my name out of it.

  After dinner Phoebe and Henry went upstairs to their rooms, so I wandered back into the kitchen looking for company. And maybe some gossip.

  Dellaphine was drying the last of the dishes. Her daughter, Madeleine, still dressed in the neat blue suit she’d worn to work at the Social Security Administration, sat at the kitchen table reading the evening newspaper. Madeleine was the first colored girl I knew personally who wasn’t somebody’s maid or cook. I admired her.

  “Want the funnies?” she asked, sliding them across the table to me when I sat down.

  “Sure,” I said, flipping through the section looking for Brenda Starr, girl reporter.

  Dellaphine joined us with a tall glass of iced tea adorned with a sprig of mint from our garden. “Miss Phoebe said you were the last person to see Mr. Metz alive,” she said. “Except the murderer,” she added hastily.

  “Looks like it,” I said. “The police don’t seem to think I’m a suspect, though.” I tried to laugh, but the sound emerged as a halfhearted squeak.

  “I heard that that butcher knife was real deep into his chest,” Dellaphine said. “A woman couldn’t have done it.”

  Madeleine looked up from her newspaper. “You don’t need to worry, Miss Louise. They’ll arrest the colored boy, they always do.”

  “Madeline,” her mother said. “I didn’t raise you to talk like that.”

  “Please, Momma, you know Sid was working off his mother’s debt,” Madeleine said. “For practically no pay. He hated that man. Why look for the real killer when there’s a Negro with a motive so handy?”

  Officer Bennett didn’t seem to me to be the kind of person who’d arrest just anybody to solve a crime, but I didn’t like coming between Dellaphine and Madeleine when they argued, so I kept my opinion to myself.

  “What debt did Sid’s mother owe Mr. Metz?” I asked instead.

  “He gave credit for groceries during the Depression,” Dellaphine said. “Lots of folks would have gone hungry otherwise. They weren’t all colored, neither.”

  Madeline rolled her eyes. “All those poor folks are paying h
im back with interest now. And then some. When the police find his book, I bet you a Hershey’s bar that his murderer is listed right there.”

  “His book?” I asked.

  “He kept a ledger with the names of everyone who owed him,” Dellaphine said.

  I wondered if that book contained the names of people who bought black market sugar. My name. Ada’s.

  When I got upstairs, I mixed myself a martini from the pint of Gordon’s gin and bottle of vermouth I kept in my dresser drawer hidden under my panties and slips.

  * * * *

  Saturday morning after the breakfast rush, I pushed through the café’s swinging doors and found Mrs. Jones sitting alone at a booth drinking a cup of coffee and scribbling in a notebook. I slid onto the bench across from her. As soon as she saw me, she flushed bright red. She patted her face with her hands, worn from years in the café kitchen, to cool off her cheeks, and then tucked her dyed auburn hair behind her ears.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t be angry.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “You had to tell the truth.”

  She dropped her pencil onto the opened notebook and rubbed her temples. “We’re out of coffee. Would you like some tea? Cocoa?”

  “No thanks. Have you heard anything more from the police?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet. It’s all so terrible. Mr. Metz was a good man. After my husband died I didn’t know how I’d survive. And I had a son to support. Without the credit for groceries he gave me, I couldn’t have kept the café going. For years he wouldn’t let me pay anything, just wanted to eat his meals here for free. Now I could pay him in full, but he wouldn’t let me. Just said he wanted his meals here every day like always. He sat right at this booth.” She patted the bench beside her. “Three times a day.”

  “I hear not everyone thought so well of him,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It’s hard to like a man you owe money to.”

  When she reached for her coffee cup I noticed the gold circle on her left ring finger. “When did you get married?” I asked.

  She smiled happily. “Just last weekend,” she said. “Do you know Tom? Tom Murray? He rented one of my rooms on the third floor. He works for the bus company. We’ve been keeping company for almost a year, and, well, we’re so happy now. And he’s good to my son, treats him like he was his own.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “So I guess you go by Jane Murray now?”

  “I still answer to Jane Jones. That’s how the customers know me.”

  * * * *

  On my way back to the boarding house, I passed the rear of the Western Market. The back door was ajar. Curiosity got the better of me and I slipped inside.

  “Come to see the blood?”

  I started at the voice, my hand over my heart. “You frightened me.”

  “Didn’t intend to,” the colored boy said. He was about sixteen years old, I guessed, clad in loose denim trousers and a pressed white oxford shirt with ragged cuffs. He wielded a mop with a thick rag head.

  “You’re the fourth sightseer that’s snuck in here today. Sorry, there’s no blood, I done washed it away already. Officer Bennett said I could.”

  “You’re Sid.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I noticed a dented tin bucket at his feet. The water in the bucket was a rusty brown. I felt my heart clutch.

  “Yes, I cleaned up his blood. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Every night of the last two years I’ve prayed to Jesus to be released from this job, and now I’m free, and here I am cleaning up the place.” He shook his head and set to mopping the floor again. “It just seemed wrong to leave things such a mess. But after I leave tonight I ain’t coming back.”

  I sat on a crate of cabbages and watched him work.

  “Why didn’t you quit?” I asked. “There are so many good jobs open now.”

  Sid stopped mopping and glared at me. “Don’t you think I wanted to?” Sid’s voice shook with emotion. “I could get a job at a factory and pay Mr. Metz what my momma owed him in a month. But no—he said I had to work it off for $10 a week instead. Until her debt was paid.” Sid gripped the mop handle so tightly I could almost hear the wood crack. “God, I hated that man!”

  “Sid,” I said, “you might want to think twice about saying you hated Mr. Metz…”

  “Why? Because I might get arrested for murder? Since my fingerprints were all over that butcher knife?” A broad grin split his face. “Ma’am, I got the best alibi in the world. I told that cop and he already checked it out.”

  “The best alibi in the world?” I wondered.

  “Rich white men!” Sid laughed out loud. “I was moonlighting at Mr. Lee Nelson’s house on Dupont Circle Thursday night. Fetching drinks and emptying ashtrays for him and his poker buddies. I was there until four o’clock in the morning.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “Mr. Metz’s book is missing too,” Sid said. “Did you know?”

  “The ledger,” I said. “The one that lists the people who owed him money.”

  “That’s right. Whoever inherits this dump won’t be able to collect nothing from nobody.”

  * * * *

  “I would like to know why this is any of your business.” Pete Cousins stabbed a squeegee into the pail of water at his feet. I’d found the filling station owner cleaning his station’s front windows. “Why should I answer your questions about Elmer Metz?”

  “Because I was the last person who saw him alive, except for the murderer, that’s why. Because I bought a pound of sugar from the man and I’m a government girl and don’t want my name in the papers,” I said. “I don’t want to lose my job.”

  “Oh.” He dipped his squeegee into the bucket and drew it over the expanse of glass with long, sweeping strokes. “Well then, I suppose I can tell you what I told the police. Yes, I did go into the market last night, to have it out with him.”

  “Have what out?”

  “For years now, I been giving him free gas, oil changes, antifreeze, because he issued my family credit for a few groceries during the bad times. I got sick of it. I paid him twice over. But he had the gall to take out the ledger and show me what I owed him and there was nothing credited to my account. Said the free gas was just interest, that I still owed him the balance.”

  He flung the squeegee on the ground and shoved his hands in his pockets. “And no, I didn’t go back later and kill him,” he said. “The police took my fingerprints and they’ll find out it wasn’t me because I never touched that butcher knife. But I’ll tell you something I didn’t tell the police. If you mention it to anyone, I swear I’ll call you a liar.”

  “What?”

  “I took the ledger. Wrestled it right away from his greedy self. Burned it up in that incinerator over there.” He pointed to a metal barrel, singed with black, on the edge of his property. “So no one can say all the folks who paid off their debts in kind still owe any money.”

  I shook my head, wishing he hadn’t done that. I’d hoped to find a clue to Metz’s killer in that ledger.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Everything okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, collecting myself.

  I was good at keeping secrets. That’s why I’d risen in the Office of Strategic Services from clerk to Research Assistant. But I didn’t see how I could stay silent about this. A man had been murdered. And I suspected who’d done it.

  * * * *

  Sunday morning early I knocked on the back door of the café. Mrs. Jones opened it a crack.

  “Yes, Mrs. Pearlie? What is it? I’m checking stock right now and it’s not a good time for a visit.”

  “We need to talk,” I said, “about Metz’s murder.”

  She shrugged and opened the door. The café’s kitchen was spotless. She pulled me up a stool, and I joined her at a wooden table deeply scored by years of chopping meat and vegetables.

  “My husband and son are at the fish market this morning,” she said. “Tom is going to
quit his job and help me run the café.”

  “That’s nice.” I ran my hands across the deep scars on the table. “After all these years in this kitchen you must wield a butcher’s knife pretty well. As well as any man.”

  “Sure can,” she said, grinning and flexing her biceps like a boxer.

  “You know, of all the people I talked to about Mr. Metz, you were the only person who said anything kind about him.”

  She shrugged. “He wasn’t what you would call likeable. But my son and I would have wound up in a hobo camp if it weren’t for the store credit he gave me.”

  “For which you fed him for free every day. Paid him in kind.”

  “It was the least I could do.”

  “There’s more than one way for a woman to pay a man in kind.”

  She clapped her hands over her mouth to muffle her shocked cry. When she could speak her voice broke.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “It was a guess, really. I thought of how much Metz’s murderer must have despised him, and the filling station guy mentioned paying him ‘in kind’, and I realized a woman had more than one way to pay a debt.”

  “Twice a week I left my bed at night and went to him on that awful cot in his storeroom,” she said. “He didn’t care that I hated him. After the war started, when the café started making good money, he wouldn’t let me pay him back. I had to keep…screwing him.”

  I flinched at the nasty word, but she’d had to do a nasty thing. I felt terribly sorry for her.

  “I was desperate. Thursday night I confronted Metz with a check in my hand, and told him it was over. He laughed at me. Said he’d tell Tom everything if I didn’t keep sleeping with him. How could I do that? Tom would notice if I left our bed.”

  I reached for her hands and held them. She let me grip them for a second, then pulled back, a defiant look on her face. “I killed him, okay? I’m telling you because I can see from your face that you won’t turn me in. The police don’t suspect me. They haven’t even taken my fingerprints.”

  She was right. I wouldn’t tell on her for killing such a louse. What good would hanging her for murder do? She had a husband and a son who needed her.