As she sauntered away, I noticed something was written on the back.
"What's that she wrote?" J. J. asked, curiously craning his neck. "Plaza-3367."
Jack slapped down a dollar bill, picked up the check, folded it neatly, and tucked it into his breast pocket.
"What's Plaza-3367?" I asked. "An address?"
The little boy turned to Jack. "For a lady shamus she sure is slow."
Jack grabbed his fedora and rose from his stool. "Take it easy on her, kid. Where she came from, they do things different."
"Oh, I get it!" The boy faced me. "You're from Canada or something, huh?" "Or something," I said.
"Come on, gang. Let's blow this joint." Jack began to herd us toward the door. J. J. skipped ahead. I was right behind.
"So what's Plaza-3367 really?" I pressed. "A clue?" Jack's eyes were laughing. "You could call it that." "Excuse me?" I said.
J. J. swung around. "Jeez, Mrs. McClure, it's a cinch!" he announced loud enough for half the diners to hear. "The waitress gave him her phone number!"
Jack turned the boy back around and pushed him through the front door. "Okay, kid. I think she finally got it."
I followed the pair onto Third Avenue's crowded sidewalk and noticed the busy newsstand on the corner. Reaching up, I tapped Jack's cement-like shoulder. "Hey!"
"Easy, baby. Don't go getting jealous on me—"
I rolled my eyes. "I'm trying to tell you that I just changed my investigation strategy."
Jack put the fedora back on his head and gazed down at me. "To what?"
I pointed to the newsstand. "Didn't J. J. say he works at that newsstand?"
"Yeah, he did."
"So we should speak to his boss. He might have some more coherent idea of what happened to his mother."
"Think so, huh?" Jack's eyebrow arched. "That's what I thought, too." He grabbed my arm. "Come on."
WE SPOKE WITH Mac Dougherty, the newsstand owner who employed J. J. He was thirty-two and blinded in one eye from a grenade battle in Germany's Hurtgen Forest. Jack had been one of the commanding officers in the field. He clearly thought the world of Jack, but he said he'd never met J. J.'s mother. The only things he knew about the woman were what J. J. had mentioned to him—she was a schoolteacher who taught uptown.
Jack mentioned the possibility of J. J. staying with him, but Dougherty shook his head.
"Wish I could," he said. "But the wife and I, we already got four mouths to feed and one on the way in a two-bedroom flat. We're full up. And anyway, J. J. has a place all to himself now, says he can take care of himself."
I was about to argue but bit my tongue. This was 1947. A man like Mac Dougherty, half-blind, his head already half-gray, had probably grown up fast in the middle of the Depression. J. J.'s situation wouldn't look the same to him as it did to me.
Jack pulled me to the side. "Okay, baby, what's your next move?"
I chewed my glossy red lips. "We need to find this Frankie Papps. If he's the woman's boyfriend, then he either has a clue to where she went, or else he had something to do with—" I glanced back to the newsstand, made sure J. J. was out of earshot. "I hate to say it, but this Frankie person might have had something to do with 'disappearing' the boy's mother."
"And how will I find Frankie?"
"Phonebook?"
"I'll save you some time, doll. Frankie wasn't listed. Probably didn't even have a phone."
"What about your cop friends? You used to be on the police force, didn't you? Before you joined up and went off to fight the Nazis."
"No record for a Frankie Papps. No driver's license, either—not under that name."
"What do you mean that name? Are you saying—" A mechanized roar suddenly drowned out my words. I felt the vibrations of the girders around me and realized a train was passing on the elevated tracks overhead. I waited for the noise to subside. "Are you saying he was using an alias?"
"It's always a possibility, isn't it?" Jack folded his arms. "Come on, baby, what's your next step? We haven't got all day."
"You mean night, don't you?" I glanced around. Everything seemed real enough—the roar of the el train, the snap of high heels on pavement, the rank smell of leaded gasoline, the coolness of the dappled shade beneath the raised subway tracks. "This is all just a dream, isn't it?"
"It's more than that and you know it. Come on, honey. Think’
"Okay. I guess we should search the missing woman's residence next, look for leads there." "Bingo."
A minute later, Jack was herding us again—this time we were heading downtown. Despite the slight limp from his old war wound, Jack guided us smoothly through the crowds, maneuvering our little group around men in fedoras, ladies in hats and round-toed pumps.
The Big Apple's blocks were lined with restaurants, bars, and stone stoops leading up to residential buildings— places that looked much the same as they had during my own years working in the city. But there were other sights, too, things I'd never seen in my time: an antiques store with a wooden Indian chief standing guard, a barber shop with an old-fashioned candy-striped pole, a rustic food stand with fruits and vegetables displayed in wooden crates, and the kind of corner drugstores that had lunch counters and soda jerks.
I noticed sidewalk shoeshine booths, too, and a hardware store with a dozen cast-iron potbellied stoves sitting out front. At the sight of them, I stopped and pointed.
"Why in the world would a New Yorker need one of those?"
A wood- or coal-burning stove might be useful in the country to warm a small unheated cabin, but this was the middle of Manhattan.
Jack laughed. "Cold-water flats, baby. We still got 'em back here."
J. J. Conway's residence turned out to be one of them. His building was a six-floor brownstone walkup—although we didn't have to walk up. J. J. and his mom were renting a basement apartment.
We moved along a dimly lit hallway, then down an even more dimly lit stairwell. There were only four doors along the basement corridor. J. J. pulled a key from the pocket of his wrinkled gabardine slacks, stepped toward the door marked B2, and froze.
"That's funny," he said.
"What's funny?" I asked.
"Door's already opened."
I looked at the knob and lock. They were intact and unmolested. There was no break-in here. Someone had used a key. I began to hear sounds inside the apartment. Someone was loudly opening drawers, one after another. I put a hand on J. J.'s shoulder.
"Maybe it's your mom. Maybe she's come back."
The boy stared up at me like a hopeful puppy. "You think so?"
I moved forward, my hand reaching out to push the door all the way open, but I was suddenly jerked backward by a sharp tug on my elbow.
"Jack! What are you—"
"Stay quiet," he whispered, glancing down. "Both of you." His long left arm marshaled us behind him while his right hand dipped into his double-breasted jacket.
"What are you doing?" I whispered.
"You blew the call, honey." He pulled his .45 free of its shoulder holster.
"Wow." At the sight of Jack's gun, J. J.'s eyes went wide. "Lemme see!"
"Shhh." I grabbed J. J.'s small shoulders and maneuvered him behind me. "Jack, what's going on?"
"Those aren't the sounds of some dame moving around her own apartment, baby. Someone's tossing this place."
"Tossing?"
"Ransacking it."
Jack held his gun with two hands. As he slowly pushed the door open with his foot, he brought the weapon level in front of him, quickly sweeping the room with the sight until—
"Don't move!"
Jack stepped into the apartment.
"Stay here," I whispered to J. J., then followed Jack in.
The basement room was small, dark, and sparsely furnished—a threadbare sofa and a scuffed wooden table with two unmatched chairs. The only natural light came from two barred windows high on one wall. A black potbellied stove stood off to the side, near a small white sink. Next to it
, a line of cupboards and a closet stood with their doors wide open, their contents scattered. Through the open bedroom door I noticed a dresser with its drawers pulled out.
Jack's large body was closing in on a young man now stepping out of the bedroom. The intruder had olive skin, dark hair, and his frame was just about as skinny as the living room's floor lamp. He stared at Jack with hard eyes, his hands holding a pillowcase stuffed with bulky items— presumably stolen from this apartment, but I couldn't imagine what there was of value to steal.
"Drop the bag," Jack commanded, "and put your hands up."
The young man didn't obey; he just kept moving away from the PI. The intruder didn't appear armed, either, and I couldn't imagine Jack would actually shoot an unarmed young man.
Jack took a step closer. "Do you speak English?"
The young man said nothing. And then, in an explosive motion, he swung the bulky pillowcase at Jack's gun. Jack reared back and in the second it took to regain his balance, the young man vaulted for the apartment's front door. Out in the hall, J. J. stuck his leg out. The burglar tripped, sprawling across the cold concrete. He got up a split second later.
By now Jack had recovered. "Stop!" he yelled. "Stop or I'll shoot!"
The young man didn't stop—but he didn't get away clean, either. During his fall, the pillowcase had spilled its contents, and he didn't have time to gather anything up. He raced for the stairs. Jack stepped into the hall, leveled his gun at the intruder's leg, and fired. The shot just missed, lodging into the back wall while the intruder disappeared into the stairwell.
Jack followed with surprising speed, forcing his bad leg to move faster than it had on Third Avenue's sidewalk. I kicked off my peep-toed pumps and ran after him. By the time I reached the front steps of the apartment house, however, Jack was already holstering his weapon.
"Where did the guy go?" I asked between deep breaths.
"Getaway car." "What?!"
"He sprinted a block"—Jack pointed up the avenue— "then jumped in the back of a black Packard." "Did you get a license plate?" "Half of it."
"The getaway car makes no sense. I mean, for a bank robbery maybe. But that apartment's not exactly Fort Knox. What could there be to steal that's of any real value?"
Jack folded his arms. "Good reasoning, baby. What else do you think? What did you notice?"
"The door wasn't damaged. The burglar had a key."
"Or he was an expert at picking locks."
"But why that lock? Why not any other apartment?"
"Let's go."
Jack led me back to the basement where we found J. J. on his hands and knees in the hallway, stuffing items back into the pillowcase. We brought the case and J. J. back into the apartment and spread the almost-stolen booty on the scuffed wooden table.
I expected to see cheap things that could be pawned— clothes, hats, shoes. What I saw instead left me gaping in confusion: tarot cards, a Ouija board, a large purple fur-lined cape, books about fortune-telling and seances, a cheap crystal ball, a costume jewelry tiara, and one more thing—
"Oh, my God. I don't believe it." I picked up the polished steel dagger. On the hilt was a familiar embossed design— the same design I'd seen on the wrought-iron gate of the late Miss Timothea Todd's Larchmont Avenue mansion.
I ran my hand along the raised lines of the five-pointed star with the fleur-de-lis at its center. "It's exactly like the one Leo Rollins handed me beside the highway. Except this one's brand-new. It isn't an antique."
"Not yet," Jack said.
"Who's Leo Rollins?" J. J. asked.
I glanced up at Jack.
"Nobody, kid," he replied. "Did you get a look at the bag man?" J. J. nodded. "Did you know him?"
"Nope. Never saw him before. Did you shoot him, Mr. Shepard?"
"Naw," Jack said. "Too many bystanders." "Awww, too bad!"
Jack pointed at the occult items spread out on the table. "So what's with all the fortune-telling gewgaws?"
"You said exactly what I was thinking," I murmured.
Jack smirked. "Ain't that a switch."
"This is my mom's stuff," J. J. said.
I frowned. "I thought you said your mother was a schoolteacher."
"She is," J. J. said. "But about a month ago, she said she hit her head and now she can see weird stuff, like promotions of the future."
"Don't you mean premonitions of the future?"
J. J. rolled his eyes. "That's what I said, didn't I? Mom told me she can talk to dead people now. You know, ghosts and stuff."
I exchanged a glance with Jack (sounds familiar, huh?), then picked up one of the occult books on seances, which included illustrations, case histories, and step-by-step instructions on conducting them.
"My mom said the books were going to help her learn more about her new abilities and help her get better at using them. Some other people were helping her get better at it, too."
"People?" I shut the book. "What people?"
J. J. shrugged. "She never told me. But she did practice an awful lot with the crystal ball and the Ouija board."
I examined the items, one by one, but there were no clues to where they came from—no names or addresses. I pulled Jack aside. "The best lead is still the boyfriend."
Jack nodded. "So how are you going to find him?"
"I'll bet I can find a clue in here somewhere..." I paused and tried to think like a woman—not a stretch since I was one. "J. J., where do you and your mom sleep in this apartment?"
"I use this sofa." He pointed. "And Mom uses the bedroom."
I went into the small room and began to search it. The burglar had already tossed the drawers; the contents were scattered on the bed and floor. I looked for an address book or letters or a diary—and came up with nothing. I searched a worn handbag but found only white gloves, tissues, and an old lipstick.
Finally I located what would have been the contents of the woman's lingerie drawer and started pawing through her underthings. "Got something!"
"What, baby?" Jack moved in.
I held up a small gift box. I opened it and found a business card and a velvet-lined jewelry box with nothing inside. Jack watched me closely. "Now what, baby?"
I went to J. J. "What was in this jewelry box?"
"Pearl earrings," the boy said. "I pawned them for twenty dollars, to pay Mr. Shepard."
I fingered the small cream-colored card. "BROADWAY'S BEST JEWELRY," I read. The address was near Times Square and the Theater District. "Happy Birthday! Love, Frankie."
I waved the card at J. J. "The earrings were a gift from your mom's boyfriend? Frankie Papps, right?"
J. J. nodded. "My mom's had a lot of them. Boyfriends, I mean, but she's been with Frankie the longest—almost six months now."
I exchanged glances with Jack and waved the card again. "I think we should talk to this jeweler."
Jack gave me a nod of approval. We finished up with the apartment search and then Jack told J. J. to pack a bag with his clothes and underwear and anything else he might need for a little trip.
"Where am I going?" he asked.
"Don't give me any lip, kid. If you want me on your case, then just do as I say."
Jack took us back up on the street, hailed a cab, and had the driver take us to a building on Second Avenue. He left us on the stone stoop for a few minutes while he walked upstairs to have a word with somebody. When he came back down, his previously grim expression appeared a little lighter.
"Come on up," he said.
We walked up three flights and paused by the open front door of a plump, middle-aged woman wearing a housedress and glasses. She had a kind face with a gently creased olive complexion and black curls threaded with gray.
"This is Mrs. Dellarusso," Jack told J. J. "She says she'd be very pleased to look after you."
'That's nice, but I don't need lookin' after," J. J. whispered.
Mrs. Dellarusso smiled and bent down closer to J. J. "You don't want to taste my spaghetti and meat
balls? Or my fresh blueberry pie?"
J. J.'s eyes went wide. "Blueberry pie?"
"Sure. And with ice cream, too. And you can listen to any show you like on my radio."
"You have a radio?"
Mrs. Dellarusso stepped back from the doorway. "Come on in and look."
J. J. glanced at Jack. "Just for a minute ..."
A minute later, J. J. was shoveling blueberry pie and ice cream into his mouth. Then he checked out the big bedroom Mrs. Dellarusso said could be all his for as long as he wanted—the one with a large window looking out on Second Avenue.
"Jiminy crickets, what a view! You can see all the way down the block!"
When it was finally decided that J. J. was going to stay with Mrs. Dellarusso until Jack could find his mother, we headed for the door. I noticed Jack handing the woman something and realized it was the twenty dollars J. J. had paid him for his PI services.
'That should help with the food and the rent for the boy," Jack said quietly.
"You don't need to give me anything, Mr. Shepard," Mrs. Dellarusso insisted. "Not after what you did for my son."
But Jack pressed the money into her hand. "Who's the woman's son?" I asked as we descended the stairs.
"A young sergeant I knew over there. I just made sure she got his last letters and personals, that's all."
"Was her only son? You mean he—"
"Caught a round in the guts. Bled to death in the field."
I thought of my own son and felt the air go out of my lungs. In almost the next second, I reconsidered the bright look in the woman's lined face when she first laid eyes on the scruffy, smudged-face J. J. Conway.
"You did a nice thing there," I told Jack when we reached the building's small, tiled lobby.
He shrugged it off. "Had to stash the kid somewhere. I knew somebody sent that burglar. I figured whoever wanted that junk was going to come back for it again."
The Ghost and the Haunted Mansion Page 12