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

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  Yet the thought of him just discovering that hidden room today didn’t ring true. He had known all along that it was there.

  “So she took you into her private office before,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I’d seen her go in it once, but I’d never gone in myself. I just thought she had some paperwork stored in the back of the pantry, until today.”

  “What made you get me?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I guess I always figured you and her as kindred spirits.”

  I started. Had he known what she was doing? “Why?”

  “The stubborn independent streak, maybe,” he said. “The willingness to go against female norms. The way that you both believe men are unnecessary.”

  “I never said that.” I sounded defensive. I liked men. Or, at least, I used to.

  “She never said it either. It was just the attitude—don’t help me, don’t do for me, there’s nothing you can do that I can’t do.” He shook his head. “She was a cussed old broad.”

  His voice broke on the last word.

  He loved her. He really should not have been in charge of this investigation, and yet he was. I doubted he would have been able to relinquish it to anyone.

  And yet, because he loved her, he couldn’t go along with the fake investigation. He had to know why, and it might cost him his career.

  I almost said something to him, warned him, but it wasn’t my place. It angered me when he told me what to do; I was certain my warning him would make him just as angry as it would have made me.

  So I decided to approach the entire idea sideways. “Do you know what she was working on?”

  He took a deep breath, ran a hand over his face, and sighed, clearly gathering himself. “You mean besides the charities.”

  I nodded.

  “No,” he said. “But you do.”

  I got up and took the Polaroids out of my pile. Then I held them before showing them to him. Showing them to anyone almost felt like a betrayal of her trust—this woman I hadn’t known, and hadn’t met, who was, as Kaplan had so astutely seen, a kindred spirit.

  I even knew why she had avoided the hot line. She didn’t want—she couldn’t, really—draw attention to her secret life. Besides, she had called us before we approached her. She was afraid we would figure out who she was.

  “Here’s the problem,” I said before I put the Polaroids in front of him. “She’d been doing a mountain of investigative work, and she’d done it for decades—longer than you and I have been alive. Any one thing from her past could have killed her.”

  I carefully laid each Polaroid in front of him, explaining them all, the secret closet, the hidden shelves, the pen names, the meticulous notes that we hadn’t even really begun to explore.

  “Jesus,” he said when I was finished, and the word was a half-prayer, half-reaction. “Jesus.”

  I hadn’t even told him what she had been working on. I only touched the old cases, because I wasn’t familiar with most of them, not yet.

  “Why would she do this?” He picked up one of the pictures, the one that showed the wig, the different clothing. “Her father was still alive through much of this. He never knew?”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Kaplan said more to himself than to me. He looked up, his gaze open and vulnerable. “It doesn’t—”

  Then his mouth dropped open. He closed it, and shook his head slowly.

  “I should listen to myself,” he said. “I said she was like you. She was, wasn’t she? She had the same background and there was no way in hell she was ever going to be someone’s victim.”

  “Not the same background,” I said softly. “It’s never the same.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said with more heat than I expected. He thought I was belittling his realization. “You know what happened. Is it important? Did it get her killed?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not even sure when it happened. In the teens, I think. I can’t tell you much more. She used to call here, so it falls in my confidentiality rules.”

  “Which won’t hold up in court,” he said fiercely.

  “I know,” I said. “I’d give you names and dates if I had them. She’s gone, after all, and I’d love to find out who killed her. But she never gave names, and she didn’t give a lot of details that would ever help us find who hurt her.”

  Damaged her, damn near destroyed her. “Hurt” was such a minor word in the context of what happened to Dolly Langham and the power of her reaction to it.

  “Names?”

  I nodded.

  His eyes narrowed. “So give me what you do have. The recent stuff. Logically, that would be what got her killed. If nothing else, it’ll give me a place to start.”

  I was shaking my head before he even finished speaking. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “I don’t like any of this,” he said. “Just tell me.”

  So I did.

  Somewhere in the middle of the discussion, partly because I couldn’t stand his expression, and partly because I didn’t want to answer questions I knew nothing about, I went up to the vestry for the translated papers.

  Louise was still there, looking ragged.

  “A man called you earlier,” she said, as if I had done something wrong.

  I nodded.

  “Your cop friend?”

  I picked up the papers from the out basket. “Thank you,” I said.

  Then I went down the stairs again. My cop friend. Were we friends? I wasn’t sure.

  I let myself back into the rectory. It smelled of toast, bacon, and coffee. Kaplan wasn’t sitting on my couch any longer. He was in my kitchen, scrambling eggs in my best cast iron pan.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I haven’t eaten anything except cookies all day.”

  “I don’t mind when someone else cooks.” I looked at the clock on the stove—it was the middle of the night. I should have sent Louise home.

  Kaplan divided the eggs between two plates, then added bacon and toast. He handed me a plate which I gladly took. I was hungry, and that surprised me.

  I set the papers on the table as I sat down.

  He sat across from me, but didn’t read. Not yet.

  “She did this for almost fifty years,” he said, “and never got caught before.”

  “We don’t know that,” I said.

  “If she did, she got out of it.”

  I nodded slightly, a small concession.

  “How could she get caught this time?” He believed her then. Or what little we knew about her investigation. Maybe the fact that he was supposed to cover up her death lent credence to everything.

  “Maybe the disguise didn’t work for an elderly woman,” I said. “Or maybe someone recognized her voice. We probably won’t know.”

  He had already cleaned his plate. I had barely touched mine.

  He picked up the papers, then went into the living room to read them. I finished eating and cleaned up the kitchen.

  It felt both strange and natural to have a man in my house again. To have a cop in my house. A benevolent cop. I need to stop thinking of every cop like the man who hurt me and remember how much my husband Truman had cared about the people around him. Truman was like most of the cops I had known. I needed to keep that in mind.

  When I finished the dishes, I went into the living room. Kaplan had rolled up the legal sheets and was holding them in his left hand. His right elbow was braced on the arm of the couch, and he was lost in thought.

  “What am I going to do?” he asked as I sat down across from him. “I’m a detective in a small city. I have orders from the chief of police to close this quickly. I don’t think h
e’s involved, but I’ll wager whoever is has money and clout and the ability to close the cases that he believes need closing.”

  “I know,” I said softly.

  “Sometimes,” he said, not looking at me, “you learn to close your eyes. But this….”

  He let the words trail off. Then he raised his head. His eyes were red-rimmed.

  “They killed her. They killed her to keep her quiet, and she worked her whole life to make sure the full story got told on cases like this. They silenced her, and she didn’t believe in silence. Hell, Miss Wilson, she’s going to haunt me if I let them get away with it. Even if she’s not a real ghosts, she’ll haunt me. Just her memory will haunt me.”

  “Val,” I said.

  He blinked, and focused on me for the first time.

  “Call me Val,” I said. I didn’t need to explain why.

  “Val,” he said softly. Then he sighed. “I won’t have a career if I go after this. I might not live through the week.”

  He wasn’t exaggerating. I’d seen worse over the years.

  “But I can’t let it drop,” he said.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “You might not have to.”

  His breath caught—just a moment of hope, a small one, and then I watched that hope dissipate. “It won’t work. Anything I do—”

  “I’ve had a few hours longer to think about this than you have,” I said. “And there’s something pretty glaring in the evidence that Miss Langham gathered.”

  “Glaring. Something that’ll convince the chief?” he asked. Then before I could get a word in edgewise, he added, “Even if the evidence is rock-solid, I can’t do anything. Hell, for all I know, there are judges involved and city officials and—”

  “Hank,” I said quietly. “This gang, this ring, they operate across state lines.”

  His mouth opened slightly. Then he rubbed a hand over his chin.

  “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, you’re right. Hell, I won’t have to even tie this to Dolly’s murder. I just have to quietly hand it to the right person.” Then he smiled. “And I just happen to know some good men who work for the FBI.”

  * * * *

  I wish I could say it was easy. I wish I could say it all got resolved in the next few days. But I can’t, because it didn’t. It took nearly a year on the orphanage case, and most of the time, Kaplan was out of the loop.

  Which meant I was too.

  And that made me uncomfortable. I didn’t trust the FBI on the best of days. But I had to continually remind myself that this wasn’t my case or really, my business. Although if they didn’t stop it, I promised myself I would find a way.

  Eventually, the Feds arrested a lot of people and more quietly resigned, and the regional papers had a lot of articles that were vague and unsatisfying, because someone deemed the details too graphic for publication.

  Langham’s case got closed quickly. Kaplan and I decided that it was better to assume her death was caused by the most recent case, and to get the ringleaders for that. However, I know that Kaplan is still quietly investigating. He’ll never be satisfied until he knows what really happened.

  But for now, the official story stands: Langham’s death inside her own home was caused by burglars she interrupted. What got taken? No one knows exactly, but it turned out that the house had two secret rooms that probably dated from Prohibition—or so the papers speculated, without proof, of course. The rooms had books and desks, but there were empty cupboards, except for clothing that apparently belonged to Langham’s father’s various mistresses.

  Whatever had been in the drawers of the desk and the cabinet behind one of the desk, well, the burglars had clearly made off with all of that.

  In the middle of the night. With police escort.

  If you could call Kaplan a police escort.

  That part wasn’t in the papers, of course. And the neighbors never seemed to notice the two police officers—one tiny and dark, and the other who looked like he was from central casting. They arrived at one a.m. on two consecutive nights, parked in the driveway, and carried boxes of documents out to a squad car.

  No one questioned it, no one remembered it, and no one even knew about those rooms for nearly two months after the investigation closed, when the heirs—the administrators of seven local charities—got their first tours of the place they had now held in trust.

  Then the story broke open again.

  By then, no one even mentioned the cops dealing with that late-night crime scene. No one mentioned the boxes.

  Boxes that moved from one secret room to another—although my room wasn’t exactly secret: just forgotten. It was the closet off what had been the choir room. There were even a few musty robes balled up in the corner. I didn’t move them. I just locked the closet door, then locked the choir room door, and wondered what I would do with my treasure, what I would do with another woman’s life work.

  Kaplan asked me not to worry about it, not yet.

  I didn’t worry about it, but I decided it was time to join the female half of the human race. I signed up for a shorthand course at Madison Area Technical College, starting in January.

  And that would have been the end of it, except for one rather strange conversation, late on a Saturday night, two weeks after Langham’s death.

  I found myself alone with Helene, our second oldest volunteer, the one who irritated me, the one who had given Dolly Langham her nickname.

  That night, Helene wore a blue dress over a girdle that had to hurt like hell, her perfect stockings attached at the thigh with clips that she would have been appalled to know I had seen as she sat down. She had played the organ at Langham’s funeral, and stood graveside like a supplicant.

  I had pretended I hadn’t seen her.

  But that night, in the silence of the phone room, about eleven p.m. when Langham’s drunken calls usually came in, I said, “You knew who it was from that first call, didn’t you?”

  I watched Helene weigh her response. An old secret versus a new one, the sadness at the loss of a friend, the weight we both felt in the silence.

  After a long moment, she nodded.

  “You knew what she had been doing all these years too, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “The charities? Of course,” Helene said.

  “The writing,” I said.”

  Helene peered at me. Then sighed. “I thought she had quit decades ago. I would have told her to quit if I had known.”

  So Helene suspected the truth: that Langham’s death was caused by her work, not by burglars.

  “Who hurt her so badly?” I asked.

  Helene shook her head. “Does it matter? They’re all dead now.”

  The words were so flat, so cold. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “A couple of them committed suicide. After their disgrace.”

  I frowned. She shrugged, then slid the log book of all the calls toward her, to do her night’s reading.

  “Their disgrace?” I asked.

  “Different for all of them, of course,” she said as if she were discussing the weather. “You know how it is. They come to Madison for graduate school or to work in government, and then they go home to Chicago or Des Moines. And then the press finds some story—true or not—and hounds them. Just hounds them.”

  She smiled just a little, her hand toying with the edge of the log.

  “Those tearful interviews with the female accusers. Readers used to love those.”

  Then she stood up, nodded at me, and asked me if I wanted coffee. As if we were in the basement of a still functioning church. As if we weren’t discussing the unsolved murder of a woman who had been Helene’s friend for decades.

  A shiver ran through me, and I looked at my half-finished room, that still s
melled of sawed wood.

  Sob sisters.

  The things we did to live with our pasts. The things we did to cope with the violence.

  The things some of us did for revenge.

  ALLIGATOR IS FOR SHOES, by C. Ellett Logan

  People’ll knock off anything. That’s what I was thinking as I waited on the porch of the big, obviously faux country house, not in a rural area at all, but behind tall brick fencing and ferocious iron gates in a suburb of Atlanta. Before I could bang the bronze armadillo-shaped knocker, a rangy man with skin as wrinkled as alligator hide appeared in shorts that seemed to billow without a breeze, black socks, and those rubber shoes they stick you in at the spa.

  “Um…I’m Nonni Pennington?” Not used to sounding professional, since this was my first job (unless you count marrying up), the end of my statement came out like a question—an affectation I thought I’d shed after high school ten years ago. I cleared my throat and continued, “Mr. Shelbee is expecting me.” Mr. Shelbee was Chef Clyde, the Citchen Critter’s star, who’d become famous cooking unusual dishes featuring game or farmed exotic animals.

  “That’s right,” the man said and turned back inside. I followed.

  After a few paces in his wake I yelped, “What is that?”

  “That would be simmering fish heads,” he replied. “For stock.”

  I wasn’t talking about the smell, only, God knows, it was awful. Frozen in mid-flight on top of an armoire in the foyer loomed a stuffed bird with its splayed talons pointing at my head.

  My guide, unmoved, continued across the dining room as I scurried to keep up.

  A voice from the next room called out, “Emmett, why are you hollering?”

  The back of Emmett’s bony hand stopped me beneath the archway to the kitchen, its frame gleaming with intricate wood carvings of fruit and fowl.

  “Chef, that P.I. my daughter hired for us is here,” Emmett said. “Should we come in?”

  We must have gotten the nod, because in tandem we entered the kitchen. I noticed a red brick floor and a cozy fire in an eye-level hearth directly across the room, right below a stuffed ’possum on a shelf, its tail artfully draped.