Louise's Lies

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘Are you all right, Louise? You haven’t eaten much,’ Phoebe said.

  ‘I’m fine. I ate lunch late,’ I said, folding my napkin neatly next to my plate so I could use it again at our next meal.

  Phoebe and I cleared the table and took the dishes into the kitchen, where Dellaphine’s brown hands were already submerged in hot water and suds scrubbing the pots and pans. I grabbed a dishcloth and lifted a skillet from the drain board to dry it. Phoebe left to join the men in the lounge. At last I allowed hot tears to surge down my cheeks. It was impossible to hide my feelings from Dellaphine anyway. She was the one person in the house who knew how I cared about Joe.

  ‘What is it, baby?’ she said, still scrubbing the dishes. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Joe,’ I said. ‘He’s gone, maybe for a long time, and I have no idea where.’

  Dellaphine nodded. ‘I know, Miss Phoebe told me. Mens be doing that a lot these days.’

  ‘He didn’t call me or leave me a letter or anything.’

  ‘Mr Joe would have told you if he could.’

  ‘He could be in awful danger.’ Like millions of others, I thought. Except for those of us here on the United States mainland. I mean, we all carefully blacked out our homes at night, the Civil Air Patrol watched the skies like hawks, and on all our coasts private boat owners patrolled the seas. But everyone knew our country was safe. There was no way the Germans had the resources to get anything but a few submarines, which they could no longer spare, across the Atlantic. They didn’t have even one aircraft carrier! The Japs might have bombed Pearl Harbor, but an amphibious landing on the west coast was beyond their resources. When a reporter asked Admiral King what he’d do if the Japanese came ashore in Oregon, he cracked, ‘Get the Oregon Highway Patrol to arrest them.’

  No, here at home our main worry, apart from the safety of loved ones overseas, was the discomfort of rationing. More Americans were working and making good money than in a generation. Girls had good jobs, even colored girls like Madeleine. Even women with children went out to a job every day! I fretted about what would happen after the war when the men came home. Would there still be good jobs for someone like me? Or would I need to go husband hunting?

  By the time I was done drying the dishes my head was pounding so hard I couldn’t think. I went up to my bedroom to take some aspirin and sponge off my face. There was no way I could join the others in the lounge and pretend to be interested in the news. As if mirroring my feelings, the weather was worsening again. The thermometer outside Phoebe’s kitchen door registered at sixteen degrees. An awful storm was brewing in the Atlantic and the entire country was worried about the President again. The USS Iowa should be approaching the eastern coast by now. Surely a battleship as new as the Iowa could ride out a winter storm, even a bad one, couldn’t it?

  I couldn’t possibly go to sleep yet.

  Back downstairs in the hall I swathed myself in my coat and scarf before peeking into the lounge.

  ‘Louise,’ Phoebe said, spotting me in the doorway. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out for a walk. And I may stop for a drink somewhere. I’m terribly restless. Don’t wait up for me.’

  I was out the door before Phoebe could remind me how inappropriate it was for me to go out for a drink at this hour by myself. Bowing my head into the wind, I crossed Pennsylvania Avenue to the filling station on the corner. It was closed, but the pay telephone booth next to the single repair bay glowed dimly. I closed the door behind me and picked up the receiver, depositing a nickel and dialing Joe’s apartment. His roommate, Ken, answered the telephone.

  ‘I thought you’d call, Louise,’ he said. ‘Joe wanted to talk to you before he left but he knew you were at work and he just didn’t have time.’

  So Joe had thought about me. I grabbed on to that thought and clung to it.

  ‘What can you tell me?’ I asked.

  ‘Dearie, I don’t know anything myself. I don’t know where Joe’s gone or how long he’ll be gone. He did give me his share of two months’ rent in advance, but said he didn’t know about after that.’

  ‘What luggage did he take?’

  ‘His big suitcase, a carpetbag and his briefcase.’ That awful scratched-up ancient leather briefcase he carried around. I’d thought of getting him a new one for Christmas before I’d settled on a fountain pen.

  ‘He must be going overseas, then. Lisbon, maybe?’

  ‘I just don’t know,’ Ken said. ‘Don’t assume the worst. He might not even leave the country.’

  ‘If you hear from him, will you let me know?’

  ‘Of course.’ There was no ‘of course’ about it. Only if Joe told him to call me would I hear from Ken. It all depended on Joe’s assignment.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Try not to worry.’

  I hung up the receiver and left the booth. The last thing I wanted to do was go home. I wanted a drink. A cold martini, not a warm one from the bottle of gin stashed in my room. Just then a bus drew up to the bus stop a few feet from the telephone booth and idled. The driver looked at me expectantly. He must have thought I was waiting for him. I noticed the destination sign read ‘Massachusetts Ave’ and I thought of the Baron Steuben Inn. It was meant to be. I’d return to the scene of Floyd Stinson’s murder for my martini. It would take my mind off Joe.

  The Baron Steuben was exactly as I remembered it, except that tonight it was packed with customers despite the cold weather. A middle-aged man with his sleeves rolled up was behind the counter with Cal. The owner, maybe? Capitalizing on the bar’s notoriety? Every stool at the bar was taken and every table occupied. It looked as if I’d have to stand to drink my martini. Then I spotted Mavis Forrester’s ash-blond hair. She sat at her usual table near the blazing fire with her book and a drink, but this time the drink was whiskey, not coffee. The bar must have gotten its ration. I caught her eye. For a few seconds I swear she cast her eye around the room, as if hoping there was somewhere else I could sit, but then she gave in and beckoned me over.

  ‘Returning to the scene of the crime?’ Mavis asked.

  ‘I suppose. I wanted a drink and was nearby.’

  Cal came up to our table. Notoriety suited him. He looked almost healthy, very thin but without the dark circles under his eyes and the sheen of sweat above his lip I remembered.

  ‘Mrs Pearlie?’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see you again. What can I get you?’

  ‘Martini, with a dash of vermouth, no olive,’ I said.

  ‘And you, Miss Forrester? A refill?’

  ‘Please,’ Mavis said, pushing her glass across the table toward him. ‘Jack Daniel’s.’

  Cal picked it up with a flourish and went back to the bar.

  ‘He looks much better than the last time I saw him,’ I said.

  ‘It’s shocking that he wasn’t arrested for not reporting Floyd Stinson’s corpse as soon as he saw it,’ Mavis said. ‘You’re pals with that policeman, Royal. You should know why he wasn’t.’

  ‘Cal was so terrified, and the sergeant felt he wasn’t strong enough to stab Stinson so deeply.’

  Mavis unsnapped the clasp of her pocketbook and pulled out a pack of Luckies and a cigarette lighter, gold by the looks of it. ‘Want a cigarette?’ she asked.

  ‘No thanks, I don’t smoke.’

  She shrugged and lit hers, inhaling deeply. Mavis was dressed casually, in the same corduroy slacks and fisherman’s sweater she wore when I’d first met her. But she still wore the diamond and ruby ring I’d noticed earlier. It was some ring. I wondered where she’d gotten it. She wouldn’t have inherited it from her mother, a cleaning woman. Maybe she did have a sugar daddy, as Harvey Royal had suggested.

  Cal brought us our drinks. I sipped my martini. It wasn’t the best one I’d ever had, but it would do.

  ‘So,’ Mavis said, flicking her cigarette ash on the floor. ‘Just how cozy are you and Sergeant Royal?’

  ‘Cozy is not the word I would use. We’re friends.’

&
nbsp; ‘How did you get to be friends with a worn-out cop? I wouldn’t think he’d be part of your set.’

  Curious as I was about Mavis, I found myself getting increasingly annoyed at her attitude.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I asked. ‘If you must know we met several months ago. How is none of your business.’

  She raised her eyebrows and nodded slightly. ‘You’re pricklier than I thought. OK, truce. Did you hear that Al Becker ran for the hills? Do you think he killed Stinson?’

  ‘I know Al ran.’

  ‘Did that surprise you?’

  ‘Yes. I liked him. I didn’t think he had anything to do with the murder. I guess I was wrong.’ It was all I could do not to ask Mavis if she was visiting Al the evening I passed her walking on the Taft Bridge.

  ‘Al did have an innocent, simple demeanor.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Not well. Just from seeing him here in the bar. Oh, and I ran into him on the street a couple of times. His building is not far from a restaurant where I often meet friends. The restaurant’s around the corner from the Wardman Park Hotel. Al lived in an apartment building across the street.’

  I clutched my martini glass stem so hard I was afraid I might have cracked it. To hide my response I took a sip from it.

  ‘Across the Taft Bridge?’ I asked. ‘That’s quite a way from here.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s the Bistro Français,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of it? It’s worth the bus ride. There’s no veal these days, of course, but the coq au vin and the onion soup are delicious.’

  Right then I knew I’d be searching out the Bistro Français as soon as I could. If she dined there as often as she said, then the staff should remember if she’d been there yesterday evening after I saw her walking across the Taft Bridge on my way back from Al’s. That would answer my question why she was in his neighborhood, so far from her apartment. Oh, I’d accepted that Al had murdered Floyd Stinson. Otherwise why would he have run off? But finding where Mavis was headed that night would end any speculation that she was involved.

  For a few minutes we sat in silence, sipping on our drinks, while Mavis finished her cigarette. She smoked it down to the filter before dropping it on the floor with the other one and crushing it with her foot. I almost made a snarky remark about her carelessness with floors that were not her own, but didn’t want to antagonize her. The woman interested me. She’d been so unmoved when Stinson’s body had been found behind the bar Saturday night. And she was oddly unconcerned with what anyone thought of her.

  ‘Want another?’ she asked, eyeing my empty martini glass. ‘It’s on me.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, curious why she was asking. I’d have thought she’d want me to leave so she could get back to her book.

  Mavis raised her empty glass and caught Cal’s eye, and nodded toward me also. This would be at least her third drink, which seemed like too many on a weeknight, especially for someone as reserved as she was.

  ‘Since you and Sergeant Royal are such great pals, I guess he told you about my past. He ran a background check on all of us, you know. Since I work for the government, like you, my life story is in my personnel file for the police to see.’

  I was surprised she’d bring up that topic. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  Cal brought us our drinks. After he left the table she leaned toward me, her perfect hair swinging forward, hiding her face. ‘If you tell anyone, anyone at all, about my family, or rather my lack of a decent one, you’ll regret it,’ she said. Then she leaned back in her chair and lit another cigarette.

  I decided not to lie to her. I figured she would know if I did.

  ‘I would never reveal any information given to me in confidence,’ I said, ‘about anyone. Ever.’ I wanted to tell her it was my job to keep secrets, but couldn’t, of course.

  ‘So you know my mother was a cleaning lady and that I’m fatherless. I wouldn’t want that to get out; people still care about such things. I have a good job and respectable friends and I don’t want them to know.’

  ‘Of course. I understand completely.’

  ‘How could you know what it is like to grow up on the very bottom rung of society? To live in one room in an alley tenement? I got a scholarship to a Catholic high school and spent all four years alone. No friends. No invitations to dances or birthday parties. It gave me plenty of time to study, though, and I graduated valedictorian. That offended everyone, including the teachers, but they could hardly deny it to me. And then I got a good job at the Library of Congress. Good enough so I could forget where I came from. Then the war came. Bad luck for the men who left to be cannon fodder, good luck for me. I kept getting promoted to take their places. And I have a regular civil service position, not a contract for the duration. I’ll keep my job even when the men come back.’

  ‘I do understand,’ I said. ‘My family owns a fish camp in coastal North Carolina. I worked there every weekend and summer during school and again after my husband died. It took an hour-long bath and a lot of cologne to erase the smell of fish from my body. I went to junior college because a great aunt left me enough money for tuition, but I only had one real friend there. She was Jewish, so we were both outsiders.’ Unlike Mavis, my contract was for the duration of the war. I didn’t want to lose my job after the war. I envied Mavis’ civil service job.

  Mavis inclined her head slightly, as though giving me some credit for my working-class upbringing.

  We were interrupted by a man with a drink who stopped by our table. He was presentable, dressed in a decent suit and I guessed about fifty.

  ‘Girls,’ he said, ‘there aren’t any stools at the bar, and I wondered if I could join you?’

  Mavis didn’t even pretend to be polite.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you cannot. But you can borrow this chair and take it somewhere else.’ She lifted her coat from the empty chair sitting between us and shoved it toward him. The man, completely nonplussed, just stared at her, then moved away in search of more amiable companions, dragging the borrowed chair behind him.

  ‘You don’t mince words,’ I said to Mavis.

  She shrugged. ‘Why bother? He’s a nobody.’

  We sipped our drinks. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I remember once when I had to go to work with my mother. Her boss, the housekeeper, insisted that I sit in a chair in the kitchen the entire day. I was seven. I had to ask the housekeeper’s permission to use the bathroom. I was a reader even then, so I had a library copy of Doctor Dolittle with me. No one believed I could read it until I read a few paragraphs out loud to them.’

  Mavis stuffed her book into her pocketbook and picked up her mink.

  ‘I need to go,’ she said. ‘Work tomorrow.’

  She casually strolled through the bar, turning quite a few heads despite her age.

  I still had most of my second martini to drink, but I noticed a party of four standing up near the door, right where cold air would be blasting at them, staring at me. I could take a hint. I left the table to them and went over to the bar, where I was able to grab an empty stool.

  ‘Want me to top off your drink?’ Cal asked, as he wiped down the counter.

  ‘No thanks, two is my limit. I’ll just finish this one.’

  ‘I saw you talking with the ice queen,’ Cal said.

  ‘You mean Mavis? She is a bit glacial.’ I reminded myself of her background. I expected she had to be tough as an old boot to pull herself up from her origins the way she did. ‘How often does she come in here?’

  ‘Oh, a couple of times a week. She likes to sit by the fire. She’s not my favorite customer. She never tips, and she always grinds her cigarettes out on the floor so that I have to clean them up. She tells me I need to remember to leave ashtrays on all the tables, and I do. I can’t help it if the patrons move them around. I mean, she could grab one from another table, couldn’t she? I think she enjoys watching me mop.’

  Cal’s boss called out to him and he went to
the other end of the bar. The man who’d asked to join Mavis and me at our table seized that chance to edge up to the bar beside me to try his luck again. ‘Miss,’ he said, ‘can I buy you another drink?’

  ‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m just finishing this one and then heading home. Work tomorrow.’ Really, since coming to Washington I’d gotten more attention from men than I thought possible. At thirty I was no longer young, either. But Washington was full of young and not-so-young unattached men – and girls, for that matter – eager to have fun, away from home and the watchfulness of families, neighbors and church. Who would know if they drank and stayed out all night? But the social scene was booby-trapped, for girls anyway, by damaged reputations, unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease. Girls could still be ‘ruined’ for life.

  ‘Perhaps I could drive you home?’ my would-be suitor asked me. At least he was polite and not standing too close to me.

  ‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m not interested.’ He gave up with grace, shrugging and turning around to lean on the bar.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I get it.’ He sipped on his drink. ‘Do you come here often?’ he asked me, but in a purely conversational tone this time.

  ‘No, this is just my second time.’

  ‘It’s always full of Germans,’ he said. ‘You know when the German embassy was open this was its local bar. Not for the big shots, you know, but for the rest of them. And for German-Americans, too. They served German beers and liquor, schnapps and such. All that changed when the war came. Some guy who worked at the embassy before the war was murdered here a few nights ago. Makes you wonder.’ My new acquaintance drained his glass, set it down on the counter and drew on his coat. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. I nodded back at him and he was gone.

  Yes, it did make me wonder. Just how much Floyd Stinson’s murder had to do with his job at the German embassy. And if Al Becker killed him, did that have something to do with his years at the embassy? Or Stinson’s work for OSS? I thought again about Harvey Royal’s theory that someone in the bar that night was the actual murderer. A customer who killed Stinson in the storeroom, then came into the bar afterwards to see what Cal did when he found the body. And stayed to see what happened. If this was true, then didn’t either the killer or Stinson need to have a key to the back door to get inside the bar before it opened? And why were they meeting in the bar’s storeroom?