Louise's Lies

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘Thank God,’ Royal said.

  Dickenson eased the coupe on to Massachusetts Avenue. Across the street the abandoned German embassy loomed black over its neighbors, mansions where some light seeped out from behind blackout curtains. Before the war the Germans held gay parties and dinners there almost every night. Rumor had it that the third floor was the center of a vast German espionage center and that it was packed with radio and electronic equipment. Now the Swiss minded the place, part of their role as a ‘protecting nation’ for the property of the European nations at war with each other. I’d heard that Hitler had promised the Swiss he wouldn’t invade if they safeguarded German embassies around the world.

  We swung around Thomas Circle, passing the statue of Martin Luther that had been donated to the nearby Lutheran church by the German emperor William I in 1884.

  Exiting on Vermont, we turned west on ‘K’ Street and headed toward my boarding house. It was slow going. Since the headlights were shaded, Dickenson could only see a few feet in front of the car. The heater blasted but barely made a dent in the cold. When we got to my corner Dickenson pulled over to the sidewalk.

  ‘You can let me out here too. I can walk to my place,’ Joe said. ‘It’s not far.’

  Royal turned around in his seat and faced us. ‘Don’t say a word to anyone about any of this,’ he said. ‘Not your roommates, not your work colleagues, nobody. I want official, signed statements from everyone who was in that bar tonight before the reporters and gossips get wind of this murder, and I want those statements to be accurate. Tomorrow’s newspapers have gone to press already, so there won’t be any headlines until Monday. Then the vultures can do what they want. Got it?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  Royal looked at Joe. ‘I know Mrs Pearlie can keep her mouth shut, but can you?’

  ‘I can vouch for him,’ I said. Both Joe and I had plenty of experience keeping secrets.

  TWO

  Joe and I stood on the sidewalk holding hands and watched the police car slowly disappear down the street. Then we went into each other’s arms and our lips met. The warmth of our kiss was a rare moment of comfort in an icy, frightening world.

  I’d been attracted to Joe instantly. He was already living at ‘Two Trees’ when I’d arrived fresh off the train from Wilmington, North Carolina almost two years ago. I was struck immediately by his dark good looks, his modest self-confidence and his education. It wasn’t long before I learned that he wasn’t what he pretended to be, a Czech refugee teaching Slavic languages to soldiers who’d soon find themselves on battlefields in Europe. He worked for the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish charity, helping Jewish refugees escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Other than that I knew little about him.

  It wasn’t wise for me to be in love with Joe. I knew instinctively that he was one of the good guys, but his Czech accent and refugee passport instantly aroused suspicion during wartime. So I hid our love affair from everyone, including my housemates and my superiors at work, to protect my place at Phoebe’s and my precious job at OSS. Without my Top Secret clearance I’d be just another government girl.

  ‘I’d better get on home,’ I said, pulling away from him.

  ‘Me too,’ he answered. ‘Or we’ll be found frozen solid here, wrapped in each other’s arms, in the morning.’

  After dropping off Mrs Pearlie and her friend, Patrolman Dickenson pulled out on to Pennsylvania Avenue. ‘District HQ?’ he asked Royal.

  ‘Yeah,’ Royal said, rubbing his knees. He had to make his report and request a crime scene team for tomorrow morning before he could go home and take some laudanum. At the office he could down two double bourbons and toss back a couple of aspirin tablets to kill his pain. That would have to do until he could get home.

  This was quite a case he’d happened upon. A corpse hidden under a bar? It sounded like one of those depressing movies filmed mostly in the dark so you couldn’t tell what the hell was happening. Thank God tomorrow was Sunday. He’d have a quiet day to case the scene and interview the bar patrons. They could all be just bystanders, or they could be suspects. They could be telling the truth or lying in their teeth. Except for Louise Pearlie. He knew she would tell him the truth. He could count on her description of everything that had happened since she and her friend had entered the bar. That was something.

  I turned my key in the front door of ‘Two Trees’, my boarding house near Washington Circle, south of ‘K’ street. Inside I pulled off my gloves and stuffed them in my pocket but kept my coat on. It had been a long time since dinner, and since I saw a light on in the kitchen I went down the hall toward it. I found Madeleine, our colored housekeeper’s daughter, filling a hot-water bottle at the sink.

  ‘How was the movie?’ she asked.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Very good.’

  ‘It’s late,’ she said.

  ‘We stopped for a drink afterwards.’ At a dive with a corpse behind the bar. But I couldn’t talk about that.

  Madeleine, wrapped in a yellow chenille bathrobe with pink daisies strewn all over it and with a knitted watch cap snuggled on her head, screwed the top back on her hot-water bottle. ‘My crowd wanted to go out tonight, but all the colored clubs were closed. All we could do was get a hot dog and come home.’

  Madeleine treasured her evenings out. She and her mother got on OK, considering they shared a bedroom in the basement, but their bedroom and the kitchen were the only parts of the house they were free to spend time in. It was hard for an educated twenty-year-old girl with a good paycheck to settle for such a restricted life. As far as the DC Housing Authority was concerned Madeleine had adequate housing. No one would rent an apartment to a colored girl anyway.

  ‘How are Ada and Phoebe?’ I asked her. My fellow boarder and landlady had been down with the flu for a couple of days.

  ‘Better. But we need someone else to get sick,’ Madeleine said, ‘so we can keep the heat on.’

  After Madeleine went downstairs to her room I searched the pantry for a snack. Most everything in it was organized carefully for future meals. And I didn’t dare touch anything that was rationed. In the end I found a half a packet of saltine crackers and a tin of sardines. Sardines were among the rare swimming creatures I would eat, so I added both crackers and sardines to a plate. Since the heat was on upstairs I took the plate up to snack in bed.

  While I munched I thought about the remarkable evening I’d just been through. Of all the bars in DC, Joe and I had stopped in the one with a dead body hidden behind the counter! Kept secret for hours by the barkeep, a kid so scared and so puny it was impossible to think he had put it there. How long were Joe and I in the bar before the body was found? A half an hour, at most? Some of the others must have been there for hours. And if Cal was to be believed, the corpse was behind the bar when he opened earlier in the evening.

  And then, of all people, it was Sergeant Royal who was running the case. He should be retired by now, what with his age and terrible knees, but the lack of young men to join the police force kept him on the job. I liked the man despite his crustiness, but I’d just as soon forget the circumstances of our acquaintance. There was a murder then too, but I’d made a serious mistake I didn’t want OSS to know about, and Royal recruited me to help him investigate it by threatening to tell my bosses about my blunder. That incident had ended well for me, but I’d still rather not be reminded of it.

  I edged Ada’s door open and carried her breakfast tray into her room. ‘How do you feel?’ I asked her. ‘Can you eat anything? I brought tea and toast.’

  ‘I think I can,’ she said, scooting up in her bed. Ada was fashionably dressed even when confined to her sick bed. She wore a pink-flowered flannel nightdress with a matching quilted bed jacket. Her peroxide blond hair was tucked under a pink sleeping turban. But her sallow skin and bloodshot eyes showed the effects of three days of the flu.

  ‘I didn’t have any fever this morning,’ she said, tentatively biting into her toast. ‘So I guess I’m on
the mend. How is Phoebe this morning?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I said, sitting down on the edge of her bed. ‘Dellaphine just took her a tray.’

  ‘This toast tastes so good,’ Ada said. She slurped her tea. ‘And the tea, too. I wonder when I can go back to work?’

  ‘The doctor said he’d come by tomorrow to check on both of you,’ I said. ‘I guess he’ll tell you then. But you know all the hotels’ public areas are closed. And it’s seventeen degrees outside. I don’t think you’ll be leaving the house for a while.’

  Ada was a clarinetist with the Willard Hotel house band. She couldn’t work until the city allowed the lounges and ballrooms to reopen.

  ‘I guess I’ve got some leave, then,’ she said. ‘Unpaid, though.’

  ‘You can afford it,’ I said. With so many young men overseas, bands were paying good money to musicians, even women, who could keep their dance bands swinging. Washington was packed with throngs of government girls, office workers, soldiers and sailors who wanted to drink cocktails and dance to the latest tunes whenever they could.

  ‘Done?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Can I have some real chow soon?’

  ‘If you feel like it I don’t see why not. I’ll bring you some lunch later. And the newspaper, once everyone downstairs has read it. Do you want a book? I’ve got a couple I can lend you.’

  ‘I don’t think so. But you can hand me my manicure kit; it’s on the bureau. My nails are a mess.’

  I met Dellaphine in the hall carrying Phoebe’s tray, which looked as though she’d been able to eat something too.

  ‘Phoebe’s better?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, praise be.’ Dellaphine said. ‘Did you know Miss Phoebe’s momma died of the Spanish flu? In 1918. I’ll never forget it. This sickness ain’t near as bad. I hear most everyone lives through it.’

  Dellaphine was Phoebe’s colored housekeeper and cook. She’d been with Phoebe’s family since she was a fourteen-year-old kitchen maid, and moved with Phoebe to her home when Phoebe married Milton Holcombe and set up housekeeping. Her loyalty to Phoebe was so powerful she refused to go with her husband when he quit his job as the Holcombe butler and driver to join a jazz band. Madeleine spent time with her father when he was in town, but Dellaphine adamantly refused to see him. To her it was purely stupid to leave a kind white family where a person could work a whole life and be cared for through sickness and old age. Ironically Madeleine worked for the Social Security Administration, but Dellaphine couldn’t be convinced that it was for colored people too or that there would be any money left by the time she needed it. She was lighter-skinned than her daughter, like milk chocolate was to bittersweet, and so thin she could wrap her apron ties around her waist twice before tying them.

  Mind you, Phoebe was just as loyal to Dellaphine as Dellaphine was to her. After Milton died under suspicious circumstances, the stock market took most of the Holcombe money and the Holcombe sons joined the military, the two women joined forces to open a boarding house. All of us knew Phoebe would brook no lack of respect toward Dellaphine, and since most boarding houses in Washington were crowded to the rafters and served no meals, even Henry Post, our crankiest boarder, learned to say please and thank you to Dellaphine.

  ‘Let me take that,’ Dellaphine said, reaching for my tray. ‘You go on and see Miss Phoebe.’

  I poked my head inside Phoebe’s door.

  Phoebe was sitting up in bed wrapped in a faded wool bathrobe, flipping through Reader’s Digest. I often had to remind myself that Phoebe was only in her forties. Ada and I had talked her into growing her hair a bit and exchanging pin curls for finger waves but couldn’t induce her to dye her greying hair. She still applied her lipstick so her mouth looked like a rosebud and wore cloche hats and skirts below her knees. It was as if she’d frozen in time in 1929, when the Depression hit and her husband died.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  ‘Much better,’ she said. ‘I may live. How are things going in the house? I hate to leave Dellaphine with all this work.’

  ‘We’re fine,’ I said. ‘Milt made pancakes for breakfast and Henry even helped clean up while Dellaphine fixed the breakfast trays.’

  Phoebe snorted. ‘Henry? Cleaning up?’

  ‘In a manly sort of way. He took out the trash.’

  ‘What about Sunday dinner?’

  ‘I’m going to help. It will be fine. Don’t worry, just get well.’

  Phoebe, her housekeeping worries relieved, leaned back against her pillows.

  ‘So did you have fun last night?’

  I remembered last night again. The freezing weather, the empty streets and the welcoming fire at the Baron Steuben Inn. Then the shocking discovery of a bloody corpse behind the bar. I wondered when Sergeant Royal was going to take my statement. I’d like to get it over with. I didn’t see how Joe or I could contribute to the solution of the murder. Floyd Stinson had been dead for hours before we even entered the bar.

  ‘Louise?’

  ‘Oh, Phoebe, I’m sorry, my attention wandered.’

  ‘I can see that. I was just wondering how Madame Curie was?’

  ‘Marvelous,’ I said. ‘Greer Garson was just as good in it as the reviews said. It was worth about freezing to death to see.’

  After I finished helping Dellaphine wash the Sunday dinner dishes and bring down Ada and Phoebe’s lunch trays, I went into the lounge, where Henry and Milt were deep into the Sunday newspapers. Henry had the Times-Herald, of course; he hated Roosevelt almost as much as Cissy Patterson, the newspaper’s editor, did. The rest of us were New Dealers and read the Post.

  ‘Want the funnies?’ Milt asked, holding the section out to me. He was handling the newspaper deftly, spreading it out over the coffee table so he could turn the pages one-handed. He’d lost his left arm in the Pacific and had been discharged from the military.

  ‘Please,’ I said, taking the pages and settling into a chair next to the fire. The lounge window was patterned with a spider web of frost and the sky was iron grey. Once Ada and Phoebe were well we’d have to turn the heat down again, but until then we were cozy and warm. It seemed almost like a prewar winter Sunday, what with the Woodies ads advertising the usual Christmas gifts of wallets and perfume.

  My mood plummeted when Milt passed me another section of the newspaper. The murder of a gangster, shown spread-eagled across a sidewalk near Union Station, headlined the crime section. As I had expected, there was no mention of the corpse behind the bar of the Baron Steuben Inn, but I was sure that, lurid and bloody as Floyd Stinson’s murder was, it would dominate the page tomorrow. I wondered how well Sergeant Royal was doing with his interviews and what, if anything, he’d discovered at the crime scene today. I checked my watch. I hoped Royal would come take my statement today. I thought he would, if he wanted to finish his interviews before tomorrow. I wanted to get our meeting over with. For a second I had an urge to call Joe and ask if he’d spoken to Royal today. But the telephone in the hall was the only one in the house and I didn’t want Milt and Henry to overhear me.

  ‘Some coffee would taste good right now,’ Henry said. He looked at me pointedly. I pretended not to notice. Just because I was the only girl in the room didn’t mean it was my job to jump up and fix coffee.

  ‘I’m going to ask Dellaphine to fix us some,’ he said, moving to get up.

  Milt looked up from the classified ads. ‘Dellaphine has Sunday afternoon off, you know that,’ he said. ‘And she’s been taking care of Mother and Ada.’

  ‘That daughter of hers could help around here more,’ Henry said.

  ‘Madeleine doesn’t work here,’ I said, as calmly as I could. ‘She has a regular job just like you do. She just lives here. Besides, she does help out.’

  ‘I’ll make us some coffee,’ Milt said, rising to his feet. ‘I need to learn how to do these things.’ He left the room. Henry went back to his newspaper while I concentrated on not saying something rude to him.

  The tele
phone in the hall rang. Milt answered it.

  ‘Louise,’ he called out. ‘It’s for you.’

  Maybe it was Sergeant Royal. But when I picked up the receiver I heard the voice of Miss Alice Osborne, my boss at the Morale Operations branch of the Office of Strategic Services.

  ‘Louise?’ she said. What was this about?

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I answered.

  ‘When you come to work tomorrow bring an overnight bag. We may need to spend a night or two here in the office.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. Neither of us spoke another word. Our work was Top Secret. And that wasn’t just a couple of words stamped on a few file folders. Even other branches of OSS, or army and navy intelligence, didn’t know what we did. The Morale Operations unit produced ‘black propaganda’ designed to damage the morale of the enemy. We lied, essentially. We considered an operation a huge success when it was published in Allied newspapers as if it was the truth. Any leak could ruin weeks of work. I wondered if there was some kind of crisis at hand, or if the branch was just so short-staffed we needed to spend twenty-four hours a day there to get everything done. Miss Osborne and I couldn’t discuss anything over the public telephone line. I’d just have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

  THREE

  Sergeant Harvey Royal limped into the Baron Steuben Inn and dropped heavily into a chair. He edged out of his coat and scarf and pulled off his gloves. This was a hell of a way to spend a cold Sunday morning. At his age he should be drinking coffee and listening to the Redskins game, looking forward to Sunday dinner at his niece’s home.

  ‘Dickenson, do you have my notebook?’ he asked, rubbing his hands to warm them up.

  His assistant handed him his notebook and pencil. Royal took them from him and flipped the book open. He looked around the room. The crime scene team was wrapping up. A dozen spent flashbulbs were scattered on the floor. Royal spotted the police photographer packing up his gear. ‘You,’ he said, ‘pick up all these damn bulbs before you leave.’