Shamus in a Skirt

by M. Ruth Myers

  The dead plant in my office had long ago become part and parcel of my decor. The sagging window shade was entirely different. When I opened the door, the sight of it still hanging listlessly irked me as much as it had the first time the shade refused to roll up. I turned my back on it and its perkier neighbor, divided the mail I’d brought in between desk and wastebasket, and located Sarah O’Neill’s phone number.

  “This is Maggie Sullivan,” I said when she answered. “I came by asking questions about your cousin yesterday. How’s your little boy?”

  “He’s... better, thanks.”

  “I thought it would be less disruptive if I called instead of coming over again.” It was a nudge to encourage her to cooperate now. I didn’t give her long enough to speak. “There’s something I forgot to ask when I was there.”

  “Yes?”

  Talking to me didn’t appear to be the highlight of her day.

  “The boy you remember Nick palled around with — the son of a chauffeur or gardener — what was his name?”

  The silence lasted so long I thought she was going to hang up, but she didn’t.

  “I can’t remember. Honestly. I saw it in the paper six or seven years ago — he’d been arrested for something. I recognized it then, but now....”

  “Why was he arrested?”

  “Not for murder or anything dreadful like that. It just caught my eye because of the name. It had something to do with a house, I think.”

  “Uh...”

  “Couch? No. Draper? No.”

  I got what she meant now.

  “Butler?” I suggested. “Cook?”

  “No... but I do think it might have to do with a kitchen.”

  “Baker? Lamb?” A thought stabbed into me. “Rice?”

  “Yes! That’s it! Colin — no, Kevin — Rice!”

  * * *

  I called to see whether Freeze was out of his meeting. Boike answered and told me he was. Five minutes into my visit, Freeze held up a hand.

  “You’re telling me the dead bum in that flophouse is the same guy who disappeared from the fancy hotel?”

  “Yep.” I sat back in my chair.

  “Based on nothing except the say-so of the butterball who owns the place and one of his waiters?”

  “And one of the bellhops, who’s a sharp old bird. He picked the same man out of the photos. And he’d told me when I first asked that the man who’d vanished had callused fingers.” I clasped my hands around my knees and leaned forward. “I’ll bet he told your men too. And I’ll bet the coroner told you about the stiff from the flophouse having new underwear.”

  Freeze shook out the match he’d just used. He took a draw on his cigarette.

  “Lots of do-good groups collect socks and underwear. Give it out at the missions. Anyway, the guy wasn’t a homicide.”

  “Philippe Lagarde was, and a clerk who came in early heard him arguing with someone — even got a look at whoever it was. Remember how she described him?”

  “How did you—?” Freeze shot a suspicious look at Boike, who was jotting down notes at the desk to his right, then at another lackey who leaned on the edge of it. He started to reach for a file, then recited from memory. “Medium build, pair of moles by one eyebrow.”

  “And a medium mustache.”

  Freeze flipped the file open.

  “Clerk never mentioned a mustache.”

  “Somebody else who met him did.” Reaching into my purse, I took out the envelope with the photographs I’d taken the day before. “And if you show the clerk, she’ll tell you it’s him.”

  I flipped the one Skip had doctored onto his desk. Freeze bent over it with interest. Suddenly his expression sharpened.

  “Is this your idea of a joke? Someone’s drawn on this.”

  “Yes. And here’s the original. This is how he looks when he doesn’t stick on his disguise. He’s a guest at The Canterbury.”

  Boike and the other guy crowded closer to look.

  I laid it out for them: How Nick Perry had gone into Skip’s hunting someone to copy jewelry; his local roots; his youthful safe cracking. Freeze squashed out the stub of his cigarette.

  “Long way from enough to charge somebody with murder,” he said sourly. “If that cuckoo you’re working for had reported thefts from his safe, it might be different.”

  “They reported a dead girl stuffed in a trash can. She scrubbed floors in the middle of the night, Freeze. Down on her knees where she wouldn’t be seen until she popped up when Perry was going in or out of the room with the safe. He didn’t want a witness, so he killed her.”

  “You theorize.”

  Frustration drove me out of my chair. I rounded it and gripped the back to control my anger.

  “What about the Lagarde case? A witness saw Perry arguing with him the day he was murdered. Doesn’t that at least suggest a motive? A possible one, worth exploring? It gets you off the hook if I’m wrong.”

  Giving him the satisfaction of hearing me raise that possibility stuck in my craw, but time was running out at The Canterbury. Lily Clarke was leaving on Sunday. Unless I could stop it, her diamonds would be gone before then, and the Tuckers would be ruined.

  The phone rang. Freeze answered, listened a minute, then thanked someone. He jotted something on a notepad next to the phone and tore off the top sheet.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. He reached for the suit jacket draped on the back of his chair.

  “I’m not done.”

  “Miss Sullivan, we have things to do.”

  “Does the name Kevin Rice ring a bell?”

  Freeze was bullheaded, but waving the red flag in this direction might get his attention. The name didn’t register, so he looked at his two assistants. Boike nodded.

  “Yeah. From when I worked robbery-burglary. He was a fence. Got sent away for a couple of years.”

  Freeze stood up, shrugging into his jacket.

  “So?” He was looking at me.

  “So he and Perry were pals as teenagers. So every couple nights since Perry’s been at The Canterbury, he’s dropped things out the hotel window to Rice. Nights they don’t play that game, the two of them meet in a bar on Cass. Rice gives Perry something. Rice runs a used book store on Wayne, south of Fifth, a swell spot for dealing in stolen goods in case his stretch behind bars didn’t turn him into a choirboy.”

  Freeze stared, the cigarette in his lips forgotten as the match in his fingers burned down.

  “South of— what were you doing in a place like that?”

  My patience snapped.

  “Having tea. Contrary to what you think, Freeze, I don’t spend my time with my feet on my desk eating bonbons while men toss information into my lap. I was following Rice.”

  The flame of the match reached his flesh. He swore and dropped it, batting it off the edge of his desk before it set any papers ablaze.

  “There may be a thing or two there worth looking into if nothing else pans out,” he relented. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  I don’t know what prompted my next actions. Maybe it was letdown over Freeze’s lukewarm response to my carefully connected dots. Or the contrasting memory of Connelly’s belief in my abilities. Or simply my festering knowledge that by not doing something right, I was doing wrong. Whatever the reason, I drew several breaths, started my car, and set out to do what I’d been avoiding all week.

  Actually, I’d been avoiding it since my father’s death.

  And so I drove, devoid of the mix of comfort and loss I usually felt, back toward my old neighborhood. Past the house I’d grown up in. Past the one where Wee Willie had lived, and still did with Maire and their rambunctious brood. I stopped in front of the narrow, two-story blue house I hated.

  For several minutes I sat in front of it, drowned in emotion. Finally shame at my selfishness drove me up the walk. I turned the doorbell. I waited. The door opened.

  There stood Maeve Murphy.

  My father’s paramour
.

  “Maggie!” The word was little more than a whisper. She leaned against the doorjamb. “Oh, Maggie, lamb. Not a day’s gone by I haven’t prayed you’d show up like this.” Her eyes were damp.

  She was still pretty. Trim. Her black hair showed the scattering of white to be expected in someone the age of my parents. The only thing she no longer had was the merriness I’d associated with her.

  “I expect you’ve come for your dad’s pipes,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you come in?”

  I shook my head.

  She smiled sadly, studying me with longing. “I won’t be a minute.”

  When she was out of sight, I sagged against the nearest post of her small front porch. I’d adored Maeve once. When our paths crossed at church or parish functions, she would talk to me, ask what I liked best in school, how I got this scrape or that. Wee Willie’s mom and Billy’s wife Kate had chided me for biting my nails to the quick. My own mother was indifferent. Maeve had used a different strategy.

  “You’ve such lovely hands, Maggie,” she’d said one day after Mass. “You should fix them up pretty and show them off. Here’s emery boards for smoothing down your poor nails instead of chewing, and some pretty pink polish. Shall I put some on now?”

  And she had, our hands resting on a gravestone as she’d filed and fussed and showed me the best way for brushing on color. For the first time in my life, I’d felt pretty.

  Then, several years after my mother died, I’d overheard gossip. Yes, my dad acknowledged when I confronted him, the couple of times each week he went out in the evening, he went to see Maeve. They were friends. He liked talking to her.

  In my eyes, she’d become not so much a harlot as a thief. She’d stolen part of him from me. She’d taken part of the only person who’d ever loved me.

  “I’ve cared for them the best I knew how.”

  Her voice startled me. I wondered how long she’d been standing there with the familiar old canvas valise, the sight of which made my throat swell.

  “I rubbed saddle cream into the bag and the bellows, and opened the lid of the box he kept the reeds in,” she went on. She cradled the valise against her as tenderly as Sarah O’Neill had cradled her fussing baby. “He used to do that. Open it up so the reeds could get some moisture from the air and not dry out.”

  She held out the bag.

  “I hate giving this up, to tell you the truth. It’s like letting go of the last little part of him.”

  “Thanks. For keeping it.”

  I turned to leave.

  “Maggie — will you come back sometime? For tea or a whiskey? There are things I’d like to tell you.”

  “No.”

  I’d gone a couple of steps when her voice reached out to me a final time.

  “He never loved any woman except your mother, Maggie. You need to know that. As long as she was alive, the two of us never — we were never together.”

  I nodded. I knew it wasn’t enough, but it was all I could manage.

  * * *

  Maybe my stop at Maeve’s would count as some sort of penance and Sylvia would keep our appointment. I clutched at the thought as I walked into Pixies. Given my failure to spur Freeze to action with the evidence I already had, the prostitute was starting to look like my last hope.

  The restaurant was a plain but cheerful little place with ruffled chintz curtains framing windows that let in lots of light. Tables and chairs were knotty pine glistening with varnish. They didn’t serve liquor but they had several daily specials, and soups and sandwiches as well as desserts. It was too far south on Main to attract the downtown crowd, but I’d been there a few times.

  I arrived five minutes early. The bulk of the lunch crowd had already thinned out, and continued to leave, which was maybe why Sylvia had chosen this time. She came in right on the dot.

  We almost didn’t recognize each other. When we’d met, I’d been inside a car on a dark street, and she’d been decked out for business. Today her face was scrubbed clean of makeup. Her hair was brushed smooth and pulled back in a small knot at the nape of her neck. In her tan dress and sweater she fit right in here.

  I smiled. She seesawed a thumb on the handles of her purse. After an endless second, she joined me, sitting shyly on the edge of her chair.

  “I used to meet my sister here sometimes.” She avoided my gaze. “Before her kids got older and.... I guess she didn’t want to explain an aunt like me. Now and then I come here by myself.”

  “It’s pretty,” I said.

  She nodded. A bruise that wasn’t very big but looked as though it might be fresh decorated her left cheek.

  “Bartholomew give you that?” I guessed, hoping that was the name the other hooker had used as a threat.

  Sylvia’s mouth curved with amusement. “Yeah. Got sore when I told him I wasn’t about to go off in a car with some one-eyed heebie-jeebie I’d never seen before. It does Bart good to get a little backtalk now and then. He never smacks very hard.”

  “I’m sorry, all the same. Thanks for coming.”

  “It eases my mind, telling someone. I knew I should when I heard the police had been around asking questions. That miser who runs the hotel said if I did, I’d just get myself in trouble. I knew how the cops look down on girls like me, so it was easier to just go along....” She halted. “You’re not police. You said last night.”

  “That’s right.” I gave her a card. She looked at it for a minute, then turned it face down as the waitress came. We ordered.

  “So what did you notice about the man at the hotel?” I asked when we’d regained privacy. “What did you think you should tell the police?”

  “It may not amount to a hill of beans.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “It’s just that he had a visitor that night. A visitor with a quart of booze.”

  The man who’d died at the flophouse had met his demise through a combination of pills and liquor. A fact which might have occurred to Sylvia as well. I fought to keep from shouting out too many questions, from pushing her, from leading her.

  “What did he look like?”

  “The man who died? I only caught a glimpse of him, when he was letting his visitor in—”

  “Not the man who died. The visitor. What did he look like?”

  “Oh. Well, first of all, he was a she. The visitor was a woman.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Our coffee arrived as I sat speechless. Sylvia added cream from a pretty blue pitcher to hers.

  “Why don’t you tell it your way,” I said. “I’ll try not to butt in too much.”

  Sylvia stirred her coffee, organizing her thoughts.

  “There’s a customer who looks me up every couple of weeks. He always wants to go inside. For the privacy. The hotel’s a dump, but the sheets are clean. Look it, anyway.” She shrugged. “We’d finished, so I left his room to use the toilet down at the end of the hall and head back outside. A woman was coming up the stairs. Something about her caught my eye.

  “See, I know most of the girls who work around here. Recognize them, I mean. I didn’t recognize her. She had a quart of whiskey in her hand, and I saw another one peeking out of a bag she had over her shoulder. Well, that one might not have been whiskey, but it was some kind of liquor, and that’s a lot of booze. It made me curious, so I sort of ambled along to where she went.”

  “And she went to the room of the man who died?”

  Sylvia nodded. “Who is he? Why are you trying to find out about him?”

  “Nobody seems to know who he was. A couple of strangers gave him a place to sleep for a few nights. He took off without saying why or where he was going. The police weren’t interested, so they hired me to find out whatever I could. The people he stayed with are concerned he might have had family.”

  Plenty of men had hit the road or the rails these past ten years, when businesses closed and jobs dried up. Some, like Polly’s boyfriend, had left seeking opportunities. Others could
n’t face the shame of not feeding their families. It was common enough that she accepted my explanation.

  “Did you see her go into the mystery man’s room?”

  “Yeah.” She smiled at my ‘mystery man’. “Dawdling along like I was, I was worried she’d notice me, but she didn’t look around once.”

  Sylvia paused as one of the daily specials slid in front of her.

  “Isn’t that pretty? The way they serve it? With that little bit of green on the side.” She looked down shyly. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

  “You earned it. And let me give you the money I owe you, too.”

  She had manners, and a wistfulness about her that made me wonder what had driven her to the way she earned her livelihood. She tucked the money into her purse and took a bite of her veal patty.

  “So the woman knocked on the mystery man’s door,” she resumed, “and he opened it, but not a whole lot — like he was wondering who it was. She said something to him. I couldn’t hear what. I could see his face, though, and he looked kinda pleased and surprised both. He let her in and the door closed. I used the toilet and that’s all I saw.”

  I let her enjoy her meal awhile before I began with my questions.

  “When you said you knew all the girls who worked around the hotel—”

  “I meant hookers. Yeah.”

  She looked me squarely in the eye.

  “And that’s what you think she was?”

  Whatever Sylvia needed to see in my face, she found it. She considered a minute.

  “She was trying to look like one of us,” she said at last, “but she didn’t. Her face was painted up like the side of a barn, but her hair was all smooth and brushed. Her outfit was right, if you know what I mean, but it looked like it came from Rike’s or Thal’s or someplace nice.”

  My pulse quickened. Why would a woman try to disguise herself as a prostitute and visit a man at a cheap hotel? Why would she go to his room with two quarts of liquor, only to have him subsequently turn up dead from drinking too much?

  Maybe she really was a prostitute, a better class one. After all, John Doe had stayed at The Canterbury before checking in at a flophouse. He’d had money. Maybe he’d gone there to punish himself....