Swing Town Mysteries Dorie Lennox Box Set

by Lise McClendon

  Yes, little sister, we are all one-oh, and ever more to be so.

  TWO

  WHAT’S THE HOLLERING ABOUT, THEN?”

  The rheumy eyes of the old man in the tollbooth protruded, alarmed. Lennox marched up to him, holding the camera behind her leg. A couple of cars came from the north now, business as usual.

  “You have a telephone?” She could see very well that he did not, his solitaire game strung out across the dirty green felt of his podium desk. He shook his white head.

  “Well, the cops might be out.” She took a step back, reconsidered. “You saw the woman, the one before me?”

  “The blonde? Uh-huh.”

  “Did you see anyone else?”

  The man wiped his dry lips with blunt fingers. “Darker’n inside a cow’s stomach. City thinks we don’t need no lights after midnight. What’d the damn city ever know?”

  “You work here every night?” He said yes. “Ever see that woman before?”

  “Can’t say as I have. Not many on foot, neither. You two were the most we’ve had in three weeks, since that steamboat got snagged upriver and people come to waggle.”

  Lennox backed away.

  “So what happened, then? Where is she?”

  “Jumped.”

  “Pretty gal like that?” He shook his head. “Shame.”

  An overcoat of guilt hung on her as Lennox drove back downtown to police headquarters. She had failed. She’d let the woman get away, and kill herself. At the tall desk in the wood-paneled lobby a desk sergeant was talking to a man in a gray suit. Lawyer or reporter, too happy otherwise. She waited for them to quit laughing. She didn’t feel like joining. Finally, the sergeant looked up.

  “Help you, miss?”

  “A jumper. Going into the river.”

  “A brodie, huh?” The policeman sighed. Red-faced Irish, the name Bannon on his desk plate, he eyed the gray suit. A “Get lost” look, but the man held his ground, one elbow on the wooden counter. The cop ignored him then and picked up his pen.

  “All right, your name, miss.”

  She thought about using a different name. Georgie Terraciano probably didn’t want cops involved. But to use another name, that caused problems. They would think she was hiding something. All she wanted really was for them to look for the body. Iris deserved that.

  “Doria Lennox.”

  Something in the way she said her name made them both frown at her. They stared as if only a second before she’d been a mere slip of a girl but now she was more.

  “And what did you see, Miss Doria Lennox?”

  The cop was being overly polite, no doubt because of the suit. Was he some reform lawyer working overtime? Their expressions were cool, calculating.

  “A woman jumped off the Hannibal Bridge. About fifteen minutes ago. I was driving across and saw it.” A plausible reason to be walking across the Missouri River in the wee hours of the morning didn’t come on short notice.

  “About one o’clock?”

  “I wasn’t watching the clock.”

  The cop scribbled on his ledger. “And you were just driving across the bridge. Don’t know the woman?”

  “No, sir.” Amazing how the “sirs” just came out around uniforms, how the old habits came back.

  “See her enough for a description, then?”

  “Bleach blonde. Curves, you know, so I guess she wasn’t too old.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “Blue dress, a gabardine jacket.”

  “You see her face?”

  “No, sir.”

  “All right. Your address, then, Miss Lennox.”

  She gave it to him, the boardinghouse on Charlotte Street, then said, “You know Herb Warren?”

  “Captain Warren?”

  “He’s my uncle, that’s all. He’s not on shift now, is he?”

  The cop straightened, as if the captain were watching. “No, miss, I don’t believe he is. But I’ll leave him a message you was in, and reported the jumper.”

  “That’s okay.”

  But the cop wouldn’t wait, not with an opportunity to look good to Captain Warren, now when half the cops in Kansas City had been found dirty and fired. Uncle Herb wouldn’t be one of them; he had taken her in after Beloit, and there was nobody squarer. Kansas City was desperate for the honest man. Amos had lost two operatives to the new police chief. Roger and Willard were fighting crime the newfangled way, with a badge, so she got her first solo tail. Iris Jackson, a woman who went almost nowhere but work—what could be easier? She’d been so proud, and now this. She felt hollow, like somehow she had run the woman off the bridge. That her clumsy oxfords and the twenty-five dollar Packard had made the woman desperate.

  She was just outside the door when the suit caught up with her. “Miss Lennox?”

  He was younger than she’d thought, not thirty, pale, with dark hair. His suit fit badly, with cuffs too short and pants too big. His white shirt was dirty and spots decorated his maroon tie.

  “Talbot’s my name. I’m at the Star.’”

  “My condolences.”

  He stuck out his hand, but she headed down the steps. She had nothing against the Kansas City Star. They’d helped bring down the Pendergast machine. Putting Boss Tom behind bars had changed everything for the city, even, if you counted Roger’s and Willard’s departure from gumshoeing, led up to her losing Iris Jackson off the Hannibal Bridge.

  “Can you give me some more details about that jumper? Because, see, I got this idea. Now don’t laugh. It’ll sell some papers. You say she jumped at about one o’clock. So how about ‘One O’clock Jump.’ Like the Count Basie tune.”

  “They pay you for these flashes of brilliance?” She walked around to the driver’s side of the Packard. Talbot was at her side before she could open the door.

  He put his hand over hers on the door handle. “Aw, come on. Give me something. You were just driving across? Where were you going? Do you live on the other side?”

  The sudden touch made her flinch. “You heard where I live. I told the cop everything. I’m tired and I want to go home. If you don’t mind.”

  Talbot threw up his hands and grinned. “You know,” he said as she closed the door, “you’re pretty when you’re mad.”

  Lennox tried not to smile. Her eyes felt scratched raw. He stood there in that ridiculous suit.

  “Then I must be goddamn Jean Harlow.”

  She climbed the stairs of the boardinghouse to the third floor, the worn flowered runner muffling her footsteps. The old house was solid and plump, a kerosene lamp burning on the hall table. Her room was warm, full of the smell of cauliflower from the evening meal she’d missed.

  On the edge of the bed, in the dark, she tried to reconstruct what had gone wrong. She pulled the bottle of gin from behind the dresser and poured a glass. She smelled the wild juniper, cracked the window to let the odors escape.

  The little book Amos had given her, the one she’d read through almost three times and still couldn’t make a dent in, sat under the pleated shade of the bedside lamp. She riffled through the pages to a postcard that held her place. From Arlette, comrade in crime. In Chicago now. News from Arlette was vague but regular. Just hearing that Arlette was alive and kicking made the week.

  Out the back window, a light shone in the brown boardinghouse across the alley, its tidy vegetable beds surrounded by looping wire. Someone was playing the piano. The sound of the music rose and fell on the humid night air, a jumping song. Reminded her of a record her father had sent, years ago, before he quit her for good. She listened for a minute to the boogie-woogie syncopation; then the hollow feeling returned, and she turned away, drinking the gin.

  She licked the rim of the glass, thinking about a second. But there was no sense tempting fate. What had happened to Verna could happen to her. She put the bottle back in its hidey-hole and washed out the glass at the sink.

  Over the bed, next to the photograph of Amelia Earhart on the wing of her Electra, the framed pho
tograph of the last race hung askew. She put it right. The clipping was faded now, encased in its simple wood frame. In the starting crouch, Dorie Lennox, sprinting champion: hair pulled back, tendons in her neck taut, a slingshot ready to shoot.

  The old house creaked and shuddered, settling in the night air. She lit a cigarette from a pack in the back of the cupboard, then paced. The music from outside was saccharine; it grated on her, pulling her out of the thing that held her together, the will to forget. She pulled a hard drag off the cig. Something was creeping onto her memory plane, something from Verna’s old diaries. Lennox used to read them every night, trying to figure out what had made her mother tick, until they made her crazy and Uncle Herb made her put it all away.

  A name. Myrna? She paced, two steps to the door, turn. Melva. That was it. She sucked on the fag until it burned her fingers; then she stubbed it out in the sink. She debated for half a second, then sunk to the ratty throw rug, pulled out the box from under the bed, blew off the dust.

  It took three tries to find the right book. Nineteen thirteen, an unlucky year for Melva. Sixteen, in trouble with a man who wouldn’t marry her, Verna’s cousin had found no comforting shoulder, no kindly friend, so ended it all off the Atchison bridge.

  Her mother had told her every gruesome detail. If there was something Verna had wanted to teach you, you learned through brutal repetition of the facts. Thank you, Verna. The lesson stuck, despite a strong tendency to forgetting. Also lessons about bridges, rivers, snakes, men. And especially kindness.

  She slammed the diary shut and pushed the lot back into the dusty cave. Reading Verna’s acid thoughts made her too alive. She was gone, never recovering from Lennox’s fall from grace and Tillie’s death, drinking herself into oblivion. The end was mercifully swift, in a car on a dark road.

  Lennox lay back down, took a deep breath to exorcize Verna. Had Iris found the world as unforgiving a place as Melva had, a place where no one cared? Was she so low, so afraid of living?

  Lennox tried to feel an inkling of release for Iris. Desperation must have overwhelmed her—no. It felt so wrong. It was cowardice, weakness, to throw it all away. These vices were always there, inside of everyone. But not to act on high on bridges. Only to give a nod to late at night, with gin and piano notes floating in your head.

  She climbed into bed and closed her eyes. Imagine that final moment when the earth slipped away, when nothing held you up but your own decisions. How sharp the focus would be just then. How clear the world would be. She knew the tug of the end of pain. The end of complicated problems. It was a drug that could turn you inside out. She let the black tingle of relief settle into her bones, her toes, fingers, chest, neck, until she drifted into sleep.

  By the sound of it, the banging had been going on for some time. Lennox opened her eyes, looked at her wristwatch: 10:00 A.M. The sun streamed through the window facing the street, a yellow spear of light. She closed her eyes again, felt the black hollowness of the dream. Something about talking, struggling on a bridge, over a river.

  “M-m-miss Lennox! Are you sick? Miss Lennox.”

  On her feet, tucking in her wrinkled blouse, she braced herself for the police. She opened the door. Luther stood there, half-frantic, his jittery eyes trying to focus on her.

  “M-m-miss, you’re not sick, are you?”

  “Just tired, Luther.” There were no cops behind him. Maybe they waited in parlors now that Pendergast was gone.

  Luther stuttered and spit. Someone here to see her? Why Mrs. F. had sent him up to her was a mystery. The poor man lived off the kindness of Mrs. Ferazzi and others. His tattered red brocade smoking jacket had a mock elegance but smelled.

  “M-m-m-man. In the, in the, in the—”

  “Parlor?”

  Luther nodded. “M-m-miz F. said you missed breakfast. Said to see if you was around at all.”

  “All right. Come in a minute and I’ll see if I have a cookie for you.”

  “Oh, n-n-no, miss. Can’t come in, no sir, no sir.” His eyes widened in panic. She found three crackers in waxed paper. He took them, then stood staring over her shoulder.

  “What is it?”

  “You read books? I used to read b-b-books. All the, all the—”

  He stared at the volume of Kafka by the bed. “You want to borrow it?” She crossed, returning to place it in his hand.

  Luther looked stunned, then gave her a toothy smile as he pressed the crackers and book to his chest and ran down the stairs. It would serve Amos right if a man who’d lost his mind could fathom that book.

  She shut the door and went to the small mirror. She combed her dark brown waves, arranged the three blond streaks that crowned them, clipped them into a barrette, washed her face. Changing into a clean blouse, she put on lipstick and went downstairs.

  As her foot hit the front hall’s scuffed oak, she heard the hacking cough from the parlor. Amos Haddam stood hunched by the velvet-draped window, newspaper under his arm, bent over in a fit. From the back, dark hair graying, shoulders thin and wasted, he could be an old man. His pasty complexion was what you’d expect from an Englishman who’d taken the brunt of a canister of mustard gas and was too stubborn to die.

  Smothering his cough, Haddam turned to see the girl silhouetted in the doorway. The plainness to her features was a plus in their line of work, and although her pale cheeks often looked unhealthy, he was not one to lecture on pallor. In her light hazel eyes was a quick anger. And sorrow he knew he looked too hard for. It was a curse.

  Because sadness always led to Eugenia. He’d been thinking about her too much lately, a bad habit. Very unhealthy. Her memory fed on him, his grief the last of her. It must be the worsening cough. Eugenia’s memory made being ill somehow romantic, as truly pathetic as that truth was.

  Lennox had done something new with her hair. Her ever-present trousers looked slept in. But where had she gotten those ridiculous shoes? Bloody hell, he thought, she’s gone fashion plate.

  She moved toward him, edgy but confident, her gait favoring the right knee. She held that half smile, as if she wasn’t particularly happy about your presence.

  Then he remembered the newspaper under his arm and his irritation returned. She saw it on his face, he understood. A last thought of Eugenia, her own watery death like this one. He pushed aside the vision of Eugenia’s innocent face and slapped the paper against his palm.

  “Sleeping Beauty arises at last. Were you going to tell me about this?”

  She opened the newspaper he held out for her, the morning Star. A huge headline about the fighting in Poland blared across the top. But down at the bottom, a headline read MYSTERY LADY TAKES ONE O’CLOCK JUMP. The woman had not been identified yet, but she had been witnessed by one Doria Lennox, of the city, as “a bleach blonde with curves.” Damn him. He’d put her in it. She should have been more polite. There was a recap of the decade’s history of jumpers, some forty-two. A bad decade.

  She folded the newspaper and handed it back. Amos’s face was lined and pale, but his dark, hot eyes fixed on her. The high patrician forehead topped with thick, loose hair made him look like a duke who’d lost his shirt. What she’d gone through last night had left her strangely calm this morning.

  “She jumped off the bridge.”

  “I can bloody read that much, ducks.”

  Lennox stared him down, then steered him into a chair by the window. In the dining room, a small group huddled around the radio, listening to war news.

  “All right. Let’s have it,” he said.

  “There’s not much to tell. After work, she went to a late-night place called the Chatterbox, over on Fifth. She wasn’t in there more than ten minutes. She came out, walked straight to the bridge, and took a leap.”

  “Just like that? No phone calls, no messages in bottles?”

  “I don’t know what went on inside the Chatterbox.”

  Amos rubbed his forehead. “And then you called the paper?”

  “I reported it to the cops. I
thought about calling you, but it was late. I figured you’d tell me to report it, too. You being so straight-out.”

  His frown relaxed. “Just ask any of the famous KC coppers. You didn’t mention Vanvleet, or that you were working on a case?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But Herbert’ll know.”

  “He’ll find out.”

  “Well, hell, you did nothing wrong.”

  Lennox looked at her plain nails. She supposed this was his apology for jumping all over her. “What will Vanvleet say?”

  “What can he say? Oh, he’ll blow hot air, but you did your job—you followed her. That’s what they wanted, not some hero’s antics.” Amos stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket. “I just wish they were flat-footed with us.”

  “About Iris?”

  He looked out the window. The parlor felt crusty and neglected. The upright piano sat silent, a maroon fringed scarf draped over the closed lid. A portrait of an iron-haired lady dressed in black silk frowned down on them.

  “This is no bloody girlfriend watch,” Amos said. “Not with Vanvleet involved.”

  “Isn’t he on the level?”

  “He’s represented these Italians, and plenty of other gangsters, charged with all sundry crimes against the Volstead Act. Or gambling or girls. Not a one went to prison, while plenty o’ poor ol’ mothers with ten children got locked away for making a bathtub full o’ hooch.”

  “Georgie was a bootlegger?”

  “Doesn’t matter anymore. But since Pendergast got locked away, things’ve changed. Maybe Georgie’s feeling the heat. He’s got his hand in all kinds o’ tills, legal and not.” He gave a little cough and cleared his throat. His face went crimson. “You got water around here?”

  Lennox hurried to the kitchen, nodded a good morning to Poppy and her daughter Frankie, who were working on the dishes, then grabbed a clean glass off the drain board. She sloshed a little water on the carpet as she returned. Amos was still red, holding off the fit. He gulped it down.