Lost Among the Angels (A Mercy Allcutt Book) (5 page)

      Another shrug. “I don’t have no money.”

      “Business off lately or something?”

      “A little.”

      Business? I could feel my brow furrow in confusion. I don’t like being in a state of confusion. “What business? Do you mean to tell me that you work, too, Miss Houser?”

      She eyed me in puzzlement. “How come you call me Miss Houser? My name’s Barbara-Ann.”

      Mr. Templeton snickered.

      Undaunted—I might not want to be perceived as snobbish, but I believe children deserve to be treated as politely as human beings. I mean adults—I said, “May I call you Barbara-Ann?”

      “Dunno why not. Everybody else does.” She had an entire repertoire of shrugs, I noticed. The one she executed for me this time told me she didn’t give a hang what I did. Because I still felt sorry for her at that point, I didn’t resent it.

      “But what kind of business are you in, Barbara-Ann?”

      “Cadging coins on street corners,” she said promptly.

      Goodness gracious sakes alive. “Don’t you go to school?”

      Another incredulous look, as if Barbara-Ann hadn’t met anyone as stupid as I for a long time. “It’s summer. There’s no school.”

      “Ah. Of course.”

      “You look like you could use a bath, kiddo,” Mr. Templeton observed, tugging on one of her mangy braids.

      “Yeah. Well, we don’t have no hot water.”

      “You don’t need it in this weather,” observed Mr. Templeton. “Do you have any water at all?”

      Barbara-Ann heaved a huge sigh. “It was turned off a week ago.”

      “But I thought your mother was still working.”

      Yet another shrug. “Yeah, but she’s got expenses.”

      “I’ll bet she does.”

      I tutted in sympathy and reproof. Mr. Templeton only sneered at me again. Beast. For such a basically attractive man, he could be remarkably insensitive. Not that the two qualities have anything to do with each other; I just mention it.

      “Okay.” He unhooked his leg and stood up, again blocking my view of the child.

      I foiled this attempt to keep me in the dark by rising and moving out from behind my desk, skimming around Mr. Templeton, and taking myself to Barbara-Ann’s chair. I positioned myself behind
that
and put my hands on the top rail of the chair back. Let him try to ignore me
now
. Barbara-Ann twisted to look up at me, as if she wasn’t quite sure she wanted me there, and I smiled down upon her with sympathetic understanding. Not that I understood a thing, but I’d be cursed if I’d allow Mr. Templeton to thwart my effort to gain enlightenment.

      He smirked at me, but spoke to the child. “Well, I’m sorry about Babs, Barbara-Ann, but I don’t know what I can do about it.”

      I was about to protest, but something in the look he shot me made the words dancing on my tongue shrivel up and die unspoken.

      “You’re a P.I. now, ain’t you?” Barbara-Ann said, frowning. “Don’t P.I.s find stuff?”

      “Yeah, I’m a P.I., but I work for money. You have any money? I doubt it, since you’re Babs’s kid.”

      “I got two dollars and thirty-one cents.” The child spoke proudly. “That’s all I got, and I earned it my own self.”

      “Sorry, kiddo. I make twenty-five big ones a day plus expenses.”

      Her shoulders slumped.

      I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Mr. Templeton! How can you turn this child away like that? She’s lost her
mother!
”

      “Her mother was lost long before last Saturday, Miss Allcutt.”

      “But that’s not Barbara-Ann’s fault!”

      “Sorry,” he said, frowning at me. “I don’t work for free. Can’t afford to. Gotta support myself and pay for my secretary. You’d better go to the police, kiddo.”

      “No police,” the girl muttered.

      This time it was Mr. Templeton who shrugged. “Well, then …” He held his arms out, palms up, as if to say,
too bad.
He’d probably have added an unsavory modifier between the
too
and the
bad
.

      Barbara-Ann stood up, looking small and defeated. “I figured as much. Thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

      Before she could get away, I said, “Wait! I’ll help you!”

      Both Barbara-Ann and Mr. Templeton looked at me as if I were out of my mind. I was beginning to resent this lack of confidence on their part.

      “You?” Barbara-Ann said. “What can you do?”

      “You?” Mr. Templeton said. “Don’t be an ass!”

      I tackled Mr. Templeton as the more culpable of the two. Virtually vibrating with indignation, I said, “I can
try!
That’s more than
you’re
willing to do!”

      Mr. Templeton rolled his eyes in overt contempt. Then he walked back into his office and slammed the door. The noise made me jump. Barbara-Ann was made of more impenetrable stuff. She merely looked at the door as if she were accustomed to having doors slammed in her face. My heart went out to her, and I knelt before her. She shrank back. Imagine that. She was unmoved by a man’s rage and discommoded by a woman’s sympathy. What a wicked world!

      “Listen, Barbara-Ann. I don’t have much experience with this sort of thing, but I’ll be happy to help you.”

      “How?”

      “How?” She had me there. “Well, I’ll think of a way. Why don’t you sit down again and tell me everything you think might be useful. Is that all right?” I smiled brightly.

      In spite of the expression of grave doubt on her face, she sat again. And, of course, she gave one of her characteristic shrugs. “Guess it can’t hurt,” said she.

      It wasn’t an overwhelming vote of confidence, but it was enough for me. I grabbed my pencil, newly sharpened only that morning, and a stenographer’s pad, filled with clean sheets of lined green paper, which I’d found in the top drawer of my desk, and I set to work.

      Barbara-Ann had given me her name and address, the address of the Kit Kat Klub, her mother’s description, and I was totally engrossed in jotting down details and pertinent facts—or those facts I hoped were pertinent—when the office door opened. I looked up to observe a middle-aged, slightly overweight man with squinchy little eyes standing there. He hesitated and appeared uncomfortable, and not, if I were to hazard a guess, merely because of the heat.

      “May I help you?” I smiled brightly.

      The man eyed Barbara-Ann dubiously. She slid off her chair. “Guess I’ll go now. You want to know anything more?”

      “I believe this will do for now. I’ll … um … begin searching this afternoon after work.”

      The look she gave me shouldn’t be available to children her age. It told of too much experience, as opposed to my total lack thereof, and of the kinds of experiences one didn’t necessarily ever want to have. My heart, which was entirely too soft, twanged again.

      “Come by the office tomorrow, dear, and I’ll give you a report.”

      “Okay.”

      “Oh, but wait a minute!” I reached into my bottom drawer, withdrew my handbag, found my little money purse, and rooted in it for a dollar bill. “Here, sweetheart. Take this and get yourself a bath and something to eat. Will you do that?”

      She eyed the bill as if she’d never seen one, which might have been the case, and muttered, “Gee, thanks.”

      And Barbara-Ann left, I suppose to cadge coins at street corners, whatever that meant, although I hoped she’d get herself a meal and a bath as well. I turned my attention to the man.

      He’d removed his hat, revealing a sparsely furnished head glistening with perspiration, and he stepped aside, wiping his glowing face with a handkerchief as the little girl walked past him, still staring at the dollar bill. I rose and repeated, still smiling, “May I help you, sir?”

      “Well …” His voice trailed off.

      Well what? I wanted to ask. He was visiting a private investigator’s office. I assumed that meant he needed our services. I dropped my voice to one of understanding and compassion. “Are you in trouble, sir? Do you need help?”

      Stuffing his handkerchief into his breast pocket and holding his hat in front of him not unlike a shield, he said, “I don’t know …”

      “Would you care to take a seat?” I gestured at the chair beside my desk. He eyed it as if it were a coiled serpent. His attitude was beginning to annoy me.

      “Are you the investigator?”

      “I’m his secretary. Perhaps I can take your name and find out a little about your case.”

      He looked dubious.

      Just then Mr. Templeton’s door opened, Mr. Templeton appeared in the outer office, and the other man’s entire attitude altered. From his initial skepticism, he generated gratitude. From wariness, he displayed relief. From a posture of acute discomfort, he visibly relaxed.

      He said, “Are you the investigator?”

      Mr. Templeton strode forward, smiling and holding out his hand. “Ernest Templeton, at your service.”

      “Thank God,” the other man breathed.

      “Come into my office, and have a seat. We can talk in private.”

      “Thank God,” the other man repeated. “I thought maybe she was the P.I.” The emphasis he placed on that
she
was most unpleasant. I didn’t like his little piggy eyes, either.

      And they went into Mr. Templeton’s office together. Before he closed the door in my face, Mr. Templeton winked at me.

      I looked upon the phenomenon that transpired in front of my very desk with open-mouthed astonishment. As the door to Mr. Templeton’s office clicked shut and the murmur of masculine voices started up behind the wall, I realized that
this
constituted my first really and truly important new experience.

      I had learned then and there, and without the possibility of doubt, that men don’t trust women to have brains and the ability to use them. Certainly I’d read such contemptible theories before that point in time. And, in a way, my father’s attitude of superiority toward his wife and daughters and his attempts to “protect” us were probably born of the belief in masculine superiority. But this … this unwillingness of one man to put his confidence in a woman (me), and his palpable relief when a man (Mr. Templeton) showed up to rescue him from said woman, was the first tangible, overt demonstration I’d received thus far in my life. I didn’t like it.

      And I decided there and then that I would solve the mystery of Babs Houser’s disappearance. Even if it meant descending into the depths of the corrupt and putrid underside of Los Angeles society.

      I’d feel a lot more comfortable sleuthing in that putrid underside if I had a sidekick. Preferably a large and burly one with a background in boxing. At that point in time, however,
I
was supposed to be the sidekick, at least in my own mind. I’d already deduced that Mr. Templeton didn’t consider me anything other than a secretary, curse him.

      But I’d show him.

      At least I hoped I would.

      * * * * *

      Later on that same day, after work, I was contemplating an evening of investigative work with a sort of sick pounding in my chest. Before I’d left the office, I’d asked Mr. Templeton about the location of both Barbara-Ann Houser’s home (“It’s a rat-trap apartment building on Figueroa and Ninth”) and the Kit Kat Klub (“It’s a low-class speak off of Hill”). The notion of visiting either location all by myself in my Boston clothes and with my Boston manners and accent gave me a sickish feeling in the rest of my body that went along almost too well with the sick pounding in my chest.

      Now, as I sat down to take an informal dinner with my sister and her husband and one of their friends, a gentleman named Francis Easthope who worked with Harvey, I must have appeared troubled, because Chloe asked, “What’s wrong, Mercy? Hard day at the office?” She laughed a little to emphasize the fact that she thought I was nuts for actually wanting to work for a living.

      “Oh, do you have a job, Miss Allcutt?” Mr. Easthope asked. He was a very pleasant gentleman, although a trifle too handsome for my own personal comfort. He was tall and exceptionally well-groomed, with smooth dark hair, huge brown eyes that I’d heard my sister call “bedroom eyes,” and a tidy, clipped moustache. Chloe had told me he was a very nice man, but he made me nervous, due to the aforementioned handsomeness. I don’t know what it is, but whenever I’m around a man I find particularly attractive, I get nervous.

      Unless it’s Mr. Templeton, and then I only want to bash him. 

      Mr. Easthope also knew everything there was to know about feminine fashion, if one were to believe Chloe, and I saw no reason to doubt her. I thought that was kind of strange, since most of the men I’d met didn’t give much of a hang about ladies’ fashions, but I guess Mr. Easthope’s interest made sense, as he designed clothes for the motion pictures. He’d asked the question out of genuine interest, too, and I discerned not a hint of censure or titillation in it.

      Smiling at him to let him know I appreciated him, even though his magnificent physiognomy made my heart go pitter-pat and I’d have preferred speaking to a plainer man, I said, “Yes, indeed. I’m working as a secretary for a private investigator in the Figueroa Building.”

      His eyes opened wide with interest. “A private investigator? You mean like Sherlock Holmes?”

      My mind’s eye quickly compared Mr. Templeton to Sherlock Holmes, and I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “I don’t believe Mr. Templeton and Mr. Holmes have much in common except their line of work, but yes, I guess so.”

      Mr. Easthope pressed a finger to his chin, half-closed his eyes, and mused for a moment. “Templeton. Templeton. Now where have I heard that name before?”

      I’m sure I didn’t have a single clue. To help him along, I said, “He used to be a policeman.”

      The eyes popped open and the finger shot into the air. “That’s it! Mr. Ernest Templeton? Is that his name?”

      “That’s the one.” I was curious now. “Do you know him?”