Death Was the Other Woman Page 11

  I knew that all these flower shenanigans were really in aid of one thing: forcing time to go by more quickly until I found out what Lila Dempsey wanted with Dex.

  I thought about rapping on the door and letting Dex know I was back, but once I was done with my flower arranging, I opted instead to “catch up on my typing.” Dex might appreciate the gesture.

  I was only through about half a sheet of rat-tat-tat when Dex came out of his office, pulling the door closed behind him. My typing had alerted him to my presence.

  He just looked at me for a moment. I looked back at him.

  “So is it the wife?” I asked.

  “It is.”

  “What does she want?”

  He shot a look over his shoulder at the closed door before answering. “Wants me to find someone.” He dropped his voice still lower. “Says he’s missing.” Dex added this with a dramatic roll of his eyebrows. “And she wants some water.”

  Of course. The one day the water pitcher was stuffed with flowers, I needed it to serve actual water. “I’ll get her some,” then, “if I guessed who she wants found, would I be right?”

  Dex pointed at me and winked. “You would,” he said. “Nice flowers,” he added as he headed back into his office.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I’D EXPECTED some slightly older but no less dramatic version of Rita Heppelwaite, all sizzle, some steak, and lots of makeup and jewelry to go with it. Lila Dempsey couldn’t have been more different. If anything, she was slightly younger than Rita—somewhere between twenty-five and a well-preserved thirty—with golden hair and skin so pale you got the feeling that if the sun were illuminating her from behind, you’d see right through her.

  She was wearing a crisply cut gray suit of light wool with a cream-colored blouse beneath. The skirt stopped an inch or so below her knees. Below that, her calves were trim and her ankles slender. On another woman, the suit might have looked severe, even masculine. On Lila Dempsey though, it just seemed to enhance a delicate femininity. She looked like a blue blood; there were just no two ways about it.

  As I brought the water into Dex’s office, I could see that she also looked anxious. There were small bags under her slate gray eyes, and it looked as though she’d been crying. She had Dex’s handkerchief in her hand. I was glad to see that it looked like a clean one. She’d threaded the hanky through her fingers nervously, plucking at it occasionally, as though reassuring herself it was still there.

  She stopped talking the moment I came in, so I dropped off her water as quickly as I could, then skedaddled under her “thank you” and got back to my desk.

  There was no question of eavesdropping this time. Unlike the brace of flatfoots the day before, Lila Dempsey was potentially a paying customer. We got few enough of those that both Dex and I took special care not to mess up when one was around.

  When Lila Dempsey left the office, it felt like déjà vu all over again. Only this time, it wasn’t Harrison Dempsey’s curvaceous mistress who Dex escorted to the door, but his coldly beautiful wife. And like that other time, as soon as the door had closed behind her and we heard her footsteps retreating toward the elevator, Dex came over to my desk and made like he would have plunked himself down on the edge of it, but for the makeshift vase stuffed with flowers that had taken the spot where he usually perched his behind.

  “What’s with the posies?” he asked.

  “You bought ‘em,” I replied. “Brucie had been released from the hospital by the time I got there.”

  “Well, that’s good,” he said. “And high time I bought you flowers anyway. A man oughta do that for his secretary every once in a while.”

  “Cut the chitchat,” I said pointedly. “You know I’m dying to find out what she was doing here. So spill already.”

  Dex grinned, but didn’t keep me in suspense any longer.

  “You’re gonna like this, kiddo,” he began. “She said she heard I was doing work for Dempsey, so she figured she’d bring me some more business.”

  “Working for Dempsey?”

  “Right. I could have corrected her, told her I was actually working for her husband’s mistress. …”

  “But I take it you did not?”

  “You take it right. But strictly speaking, I did not tell a lie.”

  “But strictly speaking, you didn’t tell the truth either. You ever think about going into politics?”

  Dex added a shrug to his smirk.

  “So why did she want to bring you more business?”

  “She says her husband is missing.”

  I felt my eyebrows arch.

  “That’s what I thought,” Dex said. “But she said he usually checks in every few days when he’s out of town.”

  “I take it he didn’t check in?” Dex shook his head, and I went on. “OK, what else?”

  “Well, there’s not much more, really. She wants me to find her husband.”

  “Man, this Dempsey is one popular egg.”

  “Another twenty-five bucks a day. Plus expenses. So listen, get Mustard on the line. I’m gonna need a car for a couple of days. She wants me to go to San Francisco, since that’s where Dempsey is supposed to have gone.”

  “A car?” I asked. “For what?”

  “San Francisco,” Dex replied, as though I hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Can’t you steam up there? It’s a lot quicker to go by sea, for one thing.”

  “I know that. I told you: she’s paying expenses. That’s a car, for one. And I’ll need to get around once I’m there and … never mind, Kitty. I’m not having this conversation again. Just get me a car, OK?”

  I sighed but gave in. He’s my boss after all. “OK. But do you think you’ll find anything there?”

  He shook his head. “Absolutely not. But that’s what she’s hired me to do, and I’m doin’ it. I gotta earn my twenty-five a day, right?”

  “Plus expenses,” I added.

  “Plus expenses,” he agreed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MUSTARD SOUNDED PREOCCUPIED when I got him on the phone. Not like his usual jovial self at all. He didn’t even joke with me when I told him I needed to arrange a car for Dex’s San Francisco trip. He just made the arrangements and told me he’d have it brought around. He was going to be busy, he told me, and there’d be no one in his office for the rest of the day.

  As I hung up, I realized Id forgotten to ask about Brucie. I was going to call Mustard back, then decided it could wait. I’d see her myself when I got home.

  There was something about Brucie that didn’t feel right to me. Not about the woman herself—she seemed sweet and lovely—but about her situation. I had the feeling that Mustard and Brucie hadn’t been entirely forthcoming about the details of why she needed a place to stay.

  I thought back to Mustard’s first call about her. Mustard had said he had a friend who was in a jam. But the nature of the jam had never come up, nor had anything beyond her recent widowhood. There was a story there; I was sure of it. I just didn’t know if I’d ever hear the details.

  Rain was threatening when I hit Spring Street. It was gray, and a wind was kicking up the branches of the big trees that lined the street and the bits of detritus on the roadway. It felt like the world was holding its breath; like this was the beginning of something that would only get bigger.

  I hurried toward Angels Flight before the sky opened up. The hat I’d popped onto my head when I’d dressed in the morning had nothing to do with keeping off rain. The big bouquet of flowers I carried wouldn’t suffer from getting wet, but it probably wouldn’t help them after a hard day of getting dragged around either.

  At the station house, I coughed up the five cents for the ride up. What with my trip out to the hospital on top of staying up so late the night before, I was pooped. Plus, I reasoned, Dex had scored another job today; no matter that we both thought it slightly pointless, I’d be getting paid for sure.

  Marjorie was in the foyer polishing the dark wood of the hal
l table as I came through the door. I love the smell of the polish—have loved it since girlhood. There are moments in my upbringing I can’t think about without pain, but the smell of Marjorie’s beeswax furniture polish brought back everything that had been right about my childhood. When I thought about it, most of the good memories were tied in to Marjorie and the house; very few of them centered on my father, who’d spent those years preoccupied with making money and mourning his dead wife, my mother.

  Viewed in a certain way, you could make my father’s life a warning sign for your own: be careful what you worry about; life is brief, and fate has a short temper and no sense of humor at all. Boiled down, my father’s life had been without purpose, perhaps without use. All those years building something that had failed in the end. All those years mourning someone who mourning could not bring back.

  If I were very honest, I would identify the resentment built into those feelings, because during all those years, there I’d been. Starving not for silks or steaks, but for a loving hand on my head, a reassuring word. Until his death, I’d never lacked for the things that money could buy, but in other departments, I was forced to go without.

  “Why, those are lovely flowers, Miss Katherine.” Marjorie looked up from her polishing as I entered. “Who gave them to you, if I may ask?”

  “That’d be something,” I said, taking a whiff of the big bouquet and imagining the beau who would give them to me. “But no, they’re for Brucie. Is she in her room?”

  “You said she was in hospital, miss.” Marjorie looked honestly confused.

  “She was. Last night. But I went up there today, and they told me she’d been released. I just figured she’d come back here.”

  Marjorie shook her head.

  “I guess … I guess I’ll just put these in her room then. OK if I grab a vase?”

  Brucie’s room was unchanged from the day before. The bed unslept in, her trunk and boxes in disarray after our preparations for going to the Zebra Room. That all seemed much longer ago than it actually was.

  I left the flowers in a vase on the bureau and, as an afterthought, added a note. “Let me know when you get in,” I scratched, “even if it’s really late.”

  I was oddly disappointed at not seeing Brucie. The little bit of contact we’d had made me realize how much I missed having women of my own age in my life. Women to share laughter and secrets. I hadn’t had that at all since I’d left school so abruptly two years before.

  This thought made me realize something else: seeing my old friends was within my reach. And I had a sudden yearning to see them. Dex was going to San Francisco in the morning. He didn’t know it yet, but when he left he’d have a passenger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I GOT TO THE OFFICE an hour earlier than usual, a small valise in one hand. It was the sort of case I would have used to spend the weekend at the house of a friend when I was at school. I hadn’t used the case for a while.

  I’d gotten in early because I wanted to be sure to catch Dex before he left. I just managed it. He looked as though he’d only stopped in at the office to pick up the car and get everything he needed for his trip. When I came in the door, his hat was on his head, and he was doing something with his jacket. It was hard to tell if he was coming or going, but I was betting on the latter.

  “Where are you off to?” he asked, a light lift to his eyebrows.

  I nodded, extending the valise slightly. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Coming with me?” he repeated. “Look Kitty, I don’t need a driver or a babysitter.”

  “I know, Dex, but I’m not babysitting this time. And I won’t be any trouble at all. But I have oodles of friends in the city, and I haven’t seen them for a long time.” Dex seemed to hem a bit. And then he hawed, so I pressed on. “It’s not like you’ll need me in the office while you’re gone. And when we get there, you can just drop me off and then pick me up when you’re ready to come back to Los Angeles. …”

  I might have continued in this vein, but Dex held up a warding hand. “All right already,” he said. “I get the message. Sure, you can come. Why not? And you’re right; it’s not like there’ll be anything to do at the office. Anyway it’s a long drive. A bit of company couldn’t hurt anything.”

  And so we drove. The rain that had threatened the day before had come and gone unseen in the night, and the air felt clean, the usual city dust subdued for the moment by the big street cleaner in the sky. Mustard had secured an almost-new Packard for Dex’s trip, and the big car seemed anxious to cover miles, to get us quickly to our destination.

  When I attended school in San Francisco, a trip like this by car wouldn’t have been possible. You could have done it, but the trip would have taken a long time, winding your way through the variously finished roads that made up California’s El Camino Real. It would have been barely thinkable to do the whole drive in less than a couple of days, and all of my trips to and from school had been done either by train or steamship. Now the new highway ran up the coast all the way from the Mexican border almost to Canada. We weren’t going that far, so we didn’t need all of it, but the parts we did need were impressive. If I hadn’t already known this was the grandest highway in the country, signs along the way let me know. I believed them too. I’d never seen anything like it.

  I started the trip with the best of intentions to keep Dex company, but the Packard just purred up the highway, the whitewalls humming over the pavement, while Lorenz Hart crooned gently about tencent dances on the radio. All of these things worked against me, and before very long, I was snoozing away on my side of the deeply upholstered front seat. I didn’t wake up until that peaceful rhythm came to an abrupt halt.

  “Where are we?” I asked Dex groggily, noting the ocean in front of the angled parking spot and not a lot else in sight.

  “The last sign said Bradley,” Dex said, “but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot here. C’mon, kiddo. Let’s see if we can find some lunch.”

  I looked around again, and sure enough, a diner sat neatly across the road from the ocean. Incongruous when we entered: orange vinyl banquettes, a jukebox, black-and-white linoleum floor, and a view that would stop a millionaire’s heart. It was easy to imagine you could see clear to Japan.

  We grabbed a booth with a view of the ocean, though truly most of them had one. We weren’t sitting there long before a waitress approached us with tired-looking menus that had each seen more than their share of grease. She was wearing a faded yellow uniform with a skirt just short enough to show us legs so heavily veined that it was easy to imagine that there were no shoes that would provide relief from endless days spent on her pins.

  “Travlin’ through?” she asked, her eyes never leaving Dex’s.

  “Does anyone ever say no?” he replied.

  She nibbled the end of her pencil as though thinking. “Not so much,” she said finally. “At least, not if I don’t know their face.” She didn’t add that she’d like to get to know Dex’s face better. She didn’t need to. I’d seen him have that effect on women before.

  “You have menus there for us darlin’?” he asked amicably. She passed them over, and he asked for coffee, looking at me while he did so.

  “Sure. Coffee sounds perfect,” I said, and the waitress looked at me as though slightly surprised, as though she were noticing me for the first time.

  When the coffee came it was good and black. I tried not to notice the slight chip on the rim of my cup. It wasn’t the kind of place where noticing would make any difference.

  Dex ordered a Denver omelet, and I opted for a slice of cherry pie. After sitting in the car for hours on end, I wasn’t feeling very hungry.

  When our food came, Dex hit his omelet solidly, while I picked at my pie. It’s not that it wasn’t good. It was just fine, in fact. But the events of the last few days were catching up with me, and my brain was tired of thinking about it all. But while Dex cleaned his plate with the last of his toast, I brought it up anyway.

/>   “Brucie never came home,” I said, moving a bit of pie from the extreme left of my plate to the extreme right, then using the tines of my fork to squeeze a big chunk of cherry left in the middle.

  Dex looked up from his plate tidying. “Whadjamean?”

  “You know she paid for a room at my house, right?” Dex nodded. “And Mustard had dropped off all her stuff. But yesterday I went to the hospital to see her, and like I told you, no Brucie. So I figured I’d see her when I got home, but no Brucie there either. And I checked her room before I left this morning—she hadn’t been back.”

  Dex looked concerned while I spoke, but when I’d finished, he said, “Why are you telling me this?”

  Why? It was a good and reasonable question. One I didn’t have an answer for. “Well, for one, she’s injured. But it’s more than that. She’s something to Mustard. I can see that. You noticed it at the club too, when they were dancing. But Mustard hasn’t said what.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t, would he?”

  I nodded agreement. He would not. For one thing, Brucie had been a widow for less than a month. For another … well, he was Mustard. That seemed reason enough on its own.

  “And … I don’t know. I just… I just have a funny feeling about the whole thing. Like there’s something the two of them aren’t telling me. About Brucie’s past, I mean.”

  Dex looked thoughtful while the waitress refilled our cups with coffee. He didn’t speak until after she was gone.

  “She was Ned Jergens’s wife, right?”

  I nodded. “I thought it looked like you recognized her name when Mustard introduced you. Who was Ned Jergens?”

  “He was Chummy McGee’s right-hand man.”