The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  So I took the last file off the last shelf. It came from nearly twenty years before—1955 to be exact. I had expected it to be a 1972 file, considering there were notes on the desk. So either the files from 1955 onward were missing, or she hadn’t done anything for years and got back into the work.

  I couldn’t believe that she had given up until recently, not with the typewriter graveyard behind me. I looked around the room for another place that held files. Then I walked to the center of the room, put my hands behind my back, and frowned at everything.

  This was a room within a room within a room, so secret that it was in the very center of the house, hidden behind what most people would consider the pantry. Dolly Langham wrote under false names, so she hadn’t wanted anyone to know she was doing this work.

  I frowned, then glanced at the panels. In the old mystery novels, paneling—especially from fifty years ago—hid secret passageways. This room itself was a secret, so I doubted I’d find a passageway. But I might find a hidden compartment.

  I surveyed the area, looking for scuff marks, fingerprints, something that jutted out, but I saw nothing obvious. Then I looked at the paneling itself. It had a pattern along the right and left side, but the wall with the files and the typewriter graveyard was configured differently, as if that entire area was built especially for Langham. Wall panels weren’t mass produced fifty years ago; they were crafted by someone, who—if the inside room had been built in the Depression—wouldn’t have questioned the design.

  A decorative frame had been built around the shelves in the center. Then the waist-high shelf that housed the typewriter graveyard jutted out an extra foot, and so did the area below it.

  I went behind the desk, crouched and felt along the edges. I found a small ridge that my fingertips just fit inside. They brushed against a tiny knob. I pressed it, and half of the lower cabinet swung open, silently. A tiny light clicked on, revealing more files.

  The shelves ran across the length of the cabinet, and the files continued to the floor.

  I left that open, then touched the frames on the right side of the entire unit, looking for a similar ridge. I found it, and that long door swung open, revealing a closet. Inside, wigs, make-up, clothing, and the faint scent of mothballs. I peered into the darkness beyond and realized I had been wrong: there was a hidden passageway behind the clothes.

  I pushed the clothes aside, and coughed as dust rose. Cobwebs hung from the opening beyond. I stepped inside anyway and peered. It didn’t appear to be a passageway after all, but more of an extension of this room, like a gigantic walk-in closet.

  But I couldn’t be certain unless I explored.

  It was clear that Langham hadn’t used this closet in a long time. If I could assume that whatever happened to her in that living room happened because of something she had hidden, then I might be safe in assuming the “something” was a recent occurrence, not one housed in mothballs and cobwebs.

  I knew I was making a hasty judgment, but that was all Kaplan had left me time for. Besides, I didn’t have a flashlight. I would have to haul whatever I found into the main room—or trust that there was an electrical switch somewhere back there that I could find easily.

  I closed that panel door, and opened the one on the other side just in case it was something different. As I thought, it was the other end of this “closet,” with more wigs, and clothing, including a few very old furs. The musty smell made my eyes water.

  I pulled out my Polaroid and took pictures of that back area. I also took pictures of the files. Then I took a few pictures of an open file on the desk.

  And by then I was out of film. The Polaroids dried on the desktop as I closed the doors. Then I sat on the Turkish carpet, and looked through the files in the hidden case. The writing style that Langham cultivated had lost popularity, and so had the long yellow journalism stories. They vanished after the war. But she seemed to adapt. There were articles here from The Milwaukee Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Des Moines Register, and more. Many of the longer articles appeared in Saturday Review, Ladies Home Journal, and surprisingly, that new magazine for women, Ms.

  The bottom shelf was empty except for two large manuscripts, in their entirety. As I was about to pull one out, I heard a sound from the outer room.

  I cursed, then carefully closed the cupboard door. My heart was pounding. I had a hunch the person out there was Kaplan, but if it wasn’t, I didn’t want the other investigators to know about this—and neither did he.

  Then I grabbed my pile from the desktop, hurried it over to that chair, and covered the entire pile with my coat. If I left with everything I’d hidden, I’d look like I gained fifty pounds, but that couldn’t be helped.

  The door opened just as my coat settled on top of everything.

  Fortunately, the person at the door was Kaplan, and he was alone.

  He closed the door, then leaned on it. “You find anything?”

  “You know I did,” I said. “How come she kept all this secret?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just looked at it today.”

  “But it’s clearly relevant to your case. You’re going to need it.”

  He gave me a bitter half-smile. “In a perfect world.”

  I felt chilled. “Meaning?”

  “Apparently, she interrupted burglars,” he said with such sarcasm that I didn’t have to ask him if he believed it. He clearly did not.

  “Who made this decision?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said tiredly. “It’s coming from the chief. We’re to wrap up the investigation in a hurry.”

  “What about this?” I waved my hands at the files in the back. “Who gets this?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” he said. “Dolly was the last of the Langhams. We haven’t even looked for a will or contacted her attorney. I have no idea who inherits. I suspect it’s a bunch of charities.”

  “This is her life’s work,” I said.

  That bitter smile creased his face again. “Apparently, she had a lot of different life’s work. Folks around here would say her life’s work was her philanthropy, spending Papa’s money.”

  I thought of the ledgers. “I wasn’t able to go through anything. I just located things. I’d like to come back—”

  “I doubt that’ll be possible.”

  “But you have no idea how much is here, what she has. I certainly don’t. I can’t even decipher most of it. I don’t read shorthand.”

  “Ah,” he said, “the benefits of a law school education.”

  I understood what he meant. If I had been a typically educated woman, I would have known shorthand. But I never was typical.

  “I have some volunteers who can read it. Give us a few days in here—”

  “I can’t, Miss Wilson,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here now. In fact, I came to get you out. The mayor is on his way, and I’m sure the television cameras will follow. I don’t want anyone to know you were even on the premises.”

  “Great,” I said. “There’s more than I can carry.”

  He unzipped that heavy police department jacket of his. “Give me some of it,” he said. “Quickly.”

  I picked up my coat, and handed him the ledgers. I kept the two journals and all of the recent shorthand notes, shoving them inside my coat. We zipped up together, like co-conspirators.

  Which, I guess, we were.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He waited for me near the door, and as we stepped out, he turned off the lights. The room disappeared into a blackness so profound it made my skin crawl.

  The library was empty. Still, I hurried through it, not wanting to stop this time. I waited at that door for Kaplan.

  I clutched my hands around my middle like a pregnant woman. The edges of the journals dug into my stomach, and I wanted
to adjust them, but I couldn’t.

  We went through the same routine—I stepped into the pantry, he shut off the lights, then closed the door. Once it was shut, he moved a few boxes in front of it.

  I could hear voices not too far away. Kaplan paused at the pantry door, peering through it. Then he beckoned me, and we scurried across the kitchen. The voices were coming from the dining room beyond.

  Kaplan led the way down the stairs and out the side door. He looked along the sidewalk, nodded when he wanted me to follow, and walked faster than I liked on the ice-covered concrete.

  My papers and journals were slipping. I shifted my hands slightly, praying that nothing fell as I hurried after Kaplan.

  He reached my car before I did, tried the door, and cursed loud enough for me to hear. He didn’t like that I had locked it. I wasn’t sure how I was going to unlock it without dropping anything. I pulled the keys out of my pocket, adjusted my papers again, and leaned a little on the cold metal to unlock my door.

  I pulled it open. Kaplan reached around and unlocked the back door. He looked both ways, bent over, and opened his jacket. The ledgers fell out along the seat. Then he slammed the door closed and shoved his hands in his pocket.

  I just got in the driver’s side, figuring it was easier than getting rid of my stuff.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said before I could ask any more questions. Then he slammed the driver’s door closed.

  He had returned to the other side of the street before I could get the keys in the ignition. My breath fogged up the window, but I just used my fist to make a hole.

  I didn’t have to be told to get the hell out of there. I pulled out just as a group of large black cars came around the corner behind me.

  I followed the narrow street out of the neighborhood, then pulled over until the windshield cleared. While the defrost was doing its job, I reached around to the back seat. I locked the door, and grabbed a blanket I kept on the floor for emergencies. I used it to cover the ledgers that Kaplan had spilled.

  If we had dropped anything outside the car, I hoped Kaplan had found it.

  Because I wasn’t going anywhere near that place again.

  * * * *

  I got back to the hot line in record time. The hot line was a few miles away, deeper in the city itself. We weren’t far off State Street, which connected the University of Wisconsin with the Capitol. This neighborhood used to be a nice enclave for the medium rich, leaving the very rich to Langham’s neighborhood. Now, the old Victorians here had been torn down or divided into apartments, usually crammed with students.

  The church where we housed the hot line had been abandoned two decades before. I lived in the rectory and used the church proper for the hot line, and sometimes to house women in need.

  On this day, I pulled into the rectory side of the parking lot. I didn’t want the volunteers to see what I had.

  It took me two trips to bring in all of the material. I piled the stuff on my coffee table, then closed and locked my door. I pulled the curtains too, something I rarely did in the middle of a Midwestern winter.

  I took off my coat, put some innocuous papers over the things on my coffee table, and picked up one sheet of the paper covered in shorthand. Then I headed into the hot line proper.

  The passageway between the rectory and the church had no heat, and was cold this time of year. I opened the unlocked door into the church, and inhaled the scent of sawed wood.

  My volunteers, as inept as they were, loved doing the repair work.

  I went down the stairs into the basement and found five women in t-shirts and ragged jeans, discussing the finer points of electricity.

  “Val would never say she’d hire an electrician,” Louise said. She was a tall, middle-aged blond and one of my best volunteers.

  “And yet I will,” I said as I went by. Several women looked up in surprise. Apparently they hadn’t heard me come in. “We’re not going to remodel this place just to burn it down. If we’re at the electricity stage, let me know and I’ll hire someone.”

  “Consider yourself on notice,” Louise said.

  I nodded. Something else to take care of.

  I went all the way back to the main office, where we had our phones. We’d initially had only one line for the hotline and one private line. But our hot line had expanded after some recent publicity, and now, we had three separate desks with phones on them. The calls rolled over to a different line if one was in use. It was an expensive system, but well worth it.

  The afternoon’s volunteers were an undergrad named Midge who had just started a few weeks ago, and one of my old hands—Susan Dunlap, who worked for the phone company.

  “Don’t tell me you’re here on your day off,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “I won’t.”

  She was writing in the log book. We kept a record of each call that came in, the time, date, and what was said. The volunteer signed in at the beginning of her shift, and then, if there were no calls, she read what had been written between her shifts. We sometimes got repeat callers, women who tested us before they confided in us, and the volunteers had to be prepared for that.

  Susan was a middle-aged redhead who had never really lost her baby weight, even though her kids were in high school now. Like Louise, Susan was one of my most reliable volunteers, a main supporter, almost from the beginning.

  Midge was studying at the other desk. She had the secondary phone, not that it mattered. Right now, the phones were silent.

  I hovered until Susan finished writing. Then I asked, “Do you know shorthand?”

  “Doesn’t every woman?” she asked so blandly that at first, I thought she was serious. Then I realized she was making a political statement.

  I smiled. “If so, then I’m decidedly not female.”

  “Me either,” Midge said.

  Susan grinned. “I’m older. Back when I was a girl, they forced us to learn shorthand while they suffocated us in girdles.”

  Midge looked alarmed. But I grinned back.

  “Come with me,” I said to Susan. “Midge, can you watch the phones?”

  “Sure,” she said, frowning at us.

  Susan and I went into the kitchen. It was a marvel, built to serve dozens at church suppers. And unlike the rest of the church, this kitchen had been in good condition when I bought the place. Apparently it was one of the few places that previous tenants had kept up.

  Susan sat at the large table we had in the center of the room. I handed her the sheet of paper.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “I don’t honestly know,” I said. “Tell me if you can read it.”

  I poured us some coffee from the pot we kept on the stove.

  “It’s an idiosyncratic form of shorthand, and it uses some symbols that are pretty old,” Susan said. “But I think I can read it. Something about a—this can’t be right.”

  “What?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Can you get me a legal pad?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I went out to the front office, and grabbed a legal pad from the stack I kept in one of the desks. I brought it and a pad back to Susan. She translated the shorthand into English, pausing over a couple of words, shaking her head the entire time.

  “This can’t be right,” she said again.

  She didn’t say that as if something in the text bothered her, but as if something in her translation did.

  “Show me,” I said as I sat beside her.

  “Okay.” She tapped her pen against the legal sheet. “It starts in the middle of a sentence. Usually when someone takes shorthand, she skips the articles—‘a’ ‘the’—and that’s happening here.”

  She slid the paper to me. Her handwriting was clear.

  …tor
tured family relationships. Rumors he had fathered his stepdaughter’s bastard child. Z denies. Paternity test would prove nothing since Z & stepdaughter share blood type. Other accusations…

  “What is this?” she asked me.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I have more. What couldn’t you translate?”

  She tapped her pen on the word “stepdaughter.”

  “I guessed.” Then she slid the paper to me and used the top of the pen to make an invisible circle around an area. “That means daughter. But the word in front of it—that’s odd. It might mean ‘only,’ but there’s a different way to write that. It might mean ‘half.’ It might mean something else. It’s a symbol I don’t really know.”

  “Why did you settle on ‘step’?” I asked.

  “It’s the only thing that would make sense,” she said. “I mean what kind of man fathers a child on his own daughter?”

  Then she blanched. She had heard enough at the hot line to know there were men capable of that.

  “I have reams of this stuff,” I said. “Can you translate it for me?”

  “I’m not sure I want to,” she said. “I’m not the only one who knows shorthand here.”

  I nodded. “But I trust you.”

  “You trust the others,” she said, still looking at that paper.

  At that moment, Louise came into the kitchen. She was covered in grayish dust. When she wiped a hand over her forehead, she only managed to smear everything.

  “You realize, Val, that there are no female electricians, right? Who the hell are we going to hire?”

  “There’s got to be a female electrician somewhere,” I said.

  She snorted. “Maybe on Mars.”

  I sighed.

  “You’re going to have to break the no-men rule,” she said.

  “And here we have that trust thing again,” Susan said.

  “Did I miss something?” Louise asked.

  “Not really,” Susan said.

  Louise went to the fridge and removed two Cokes and a Hires root beer. She set the bottles on the counter, then fumbled for the bottle opener.