The Girl Is Murder (3 page)

“I don’t want your help,” he’d told Uncle Adam. A rift had grown between them in the months since Pop’s return. When I asked about it, Aunt Miriam dismissed it as a momentary difference of opinion.

“Come on now—it’s not charity,” said Uncle Adam. “I’ve seen you do amazing things with nothing more than a phone at your disposal.”

“I’m doing this on my own, Adam.”

“Art—this is foolish. You can’t do this on your own. Your leg—”

“Is the least of my problems.”

“I’ve got a name and a reputation. It will take you years to build that up.”

“Your name isn’t my name anymore, remember?” Pop had changed our surname years before, when he’d first joined the military and didn’t want to stand out.

“You know that doesn’t matter.”

“God damn it—I said no!”

Everything in the room stopped. I thought Aunt Miriam’s bulging brown eyes were going to launch right out of her head. Instead, she turned her gaze toward me as though focusing on the child was the balm she needed to survive this moment.

“Go to your room, Iris,” she said. She wasn’t a woman you said no to even if there wasn’t pot roast involved. I slinked away, up the stairs and presumably out of earshot, though really I lingered just beyond the turn of the hallway wall, unseen to anyone downstairs. To increase the realism of my exit, I stomped my feet on the wooden floor, then stretched a leg across the hall and kicked a door closed to further simulate that I was safely shut in my room.

“Think of Iris,” said Aunt Miriam after she was sure I was gone. “She was so happy at her school. There’s no reason to uproot her now.”

I fought a grin. Thank God for Aunt Miriam, I thought. There was still hope. There was no reason I had to stay with Pop. I could live with Adam and Miriam, attending classes at Chapin as though nothing had changed.

“I
am
thinking of her. She’s not your child; she’s mine.” Pop had paused, the breath in his chest rattling. Even though he’d been in New York since January, his injury still seemed fresh in those days, the pain warranting a series of pills he kept stashed on his bedside table. He hadn’t yet given in to the prosthetic leg. His pants leg hung empty and he hobbled around the house on crutches, only moving when he absolutely had to. “I want you both out of this house.”

“You must be reasonable, Arthur,” said Aunt Miriam. “You can’t rely on Ingrid’s inheritance to last forever.”

Pop laughed. It wasn’t a joyful sound. Like a burned marshmallow, it was so charred around the edges that you couldn’t enjoy the part of it that should’ve been sweet. “You think there’s money, Miriam? There’s nothing left. But don’t you worry—Iris and I will be fine on our own. We don’t need your
husband’s
help.”

“Let’s go, Miriam,” said Adam. From my hiding place I could see him open the front door. Aunt Miriam didn’t join him.

“Let us make this right.”

“And how are you going to do that? By going back in time?”

A sob escaped me, but I don’t think anyone heard me. First Mama, then Uncle Adam and Aunt Miriam. Was I going to lose everyone who mattered to me?

They left after that. For a long time I stayed in the upstairs hallway, wondering if anything would be gained by going to Pop and telling him that I wanted to stay with Adam and Miriam. I’m not sure what stopped me; maybe it was the fear that I would lose him, too. Eventually, I fell asleep on the hard wooden floor. In the morning I awoke in my own bed in my new room with no memory of how I got there. Pop never said a word about it.

Now, in his office, Pop cleared his throat until it sounded like a growl building in his chest. “If you want to hire my brother, hire my brother, Mr. Wilson. That’s up to you. He might work faster, but you know as well as I do that he won’t be as discreet and he’ll charge you twice as much.”

Someone thumped his fingers on the desktop, playing a tune of indecision. Was it Mr. Wilson, or Pop regretting his words? “Tell you what,” said Mr. Wilson. “If you can get me something in two days, I’ll return the money to you. Otherwise, I’m taking my business elsewhere.”

Pop exhaled heavily, his lips momentarily knocking together and making the
pfft
noise that horses pulling carriages in Central Park made by way of greeting. “That’s very generous of you, Mr. Wilson. Very generous. I’ll be in touch.”

Mr. Wilson turned and started toward the door. I leaped to my feet and jumped across the parlor, landing on the sofa with a thud. By the time he opened the door and joined me, I had a copy of
Calling All Girls
on my lap and the dull air of a fifteen-year-old who couldn’t care less what the adults were up to.

Mr. Wilson saw me, tipped his hat, and left the house.

Pop joined me a few minutes later. His tie hung loose about his neck, and the furrows in his face, the ones that he’d had since he returned from Pearl Harbor, seemed deeper. His limp was exaggerated, as it often was when he’d worn the prosthetic for too long. It didn’t fit him right, but he didn’t want to spend the money to get it fixed. The military would’ve done it for him, or so Mrs. Mrozenski claimed, but Pop acted like he would rather die than ask them for anything.

He picked up my magazine and looked at the cover, shaking his head at the picture of Joan Leslie holding up a U.S. flag.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“She was in
High Sierra
with Humphrey Bogart,” I said.
She played a cripple
, I almost added. I’m not sure what stopped me.

“What’s a sub-deb?” he asked. He was referring to the subtitle of the magazine,
The Modern Magazine for Girls and Sub-Debs.

“Kind of like a debutante.”

That didn’t seem to clarify things for him.

Pop had been only eighteen when he married Mama, nineteen when they had me. Responsibility had aged him—at least that’s what Mama always claimed—but he was a handsome man. Back in our old apartment there’d been a picture of him in uniform on the fireplace mantel, and more than one of my friends had feigned a swoon at the sight of his broad shoulders and delicate features.

Where was that photo now? I hadn’t seen it since we moved.

“How long have you been home?” asked Pop.

“Not long.” He was wondering how much I’d heard. I turned the page of the magazine and focused on an advertisement for a powder that would take the sheen off my nose.

“What did you do today?”

“I started public school, remember?” It came out snottier than I’d intended. I tried to soften it with a smile.

“That’s right. And how was it?”

Awful
, I wanted to say.
I was robbed and ridiculed. I don’t belong there. Don’t come crying to me when I start wearing tight sweaters and smoking.
But Pop looked so defeated by what had transpired with Mr. Wilson that I couldn’t bear to bring him down even further. My complaints could wait. “It was all right.” I turned another page of
Calling All Girls
, trying to appear nonchalant, and landed on the beginning of “Mystery at the Lookout,” a new serial by the author of Nancy Drew. “What did that guy want?”

“His money back. He wanted me to prove that his wife was cheating on him.” Pop became an officer in the Navy when I was ten years old and visited us only a handful of times each year for the next five. Each time he came home, it was like I was meeting him for the very first time. If there was anything positive to come from not knowing my father for so long, it was that he never really learned to be a father. He lacked the filter that most adults possessed, the one that told them to clam up in front of the kids.

“And you couldn’t prove it?” I asked.

He smiled, deepening the creases on his face. “I tried. But I’m starting to think I’m too slow for the detective business.” He thumped his thigh, just above where his leg ended and the wood began.

“He’s giving you a second chance, though, right?”

“You were listening.”

I froze. Boy, howdy—I hadn’t wanted to let him know that. “He’s a loud talker.”

He raised the knot on his tie. “It doesn’t matter. He’s right. If I can’t get what he needs in two weeks, I certainly won’t accomplish it in two days. He should just call Uncle Adam and be done with it.”

This was the most Pop had spoken to me in weeks. Like I said, he didn’t know how to be a father, and while that meant he sometimes told me things he shouldn’t, it also meant he often avoided me so he wouldn’t give away that he didn’t know
what
to say to me. “I thought you were only doing missing persons,” I said.

“Unfortunately, not enough of them are missing.” His eyes twinkled at the joke. Mama used to say he had a wicked sense of humor, but I rarely saw signs of it. I just assumed it was something he’d lost along with his leg. “We need money, Iris.” Just as soon as he said it, he seemed to recognize that it wasn’t an appropriate thing to tell me. He approached me, put his hand on my head, and ruffled my hair. I had a feeling that it was something he used to do when I was very small, but the memory was too far away for me to be sure. I stiffened at his touch. “But don’t you worry about it. Your pop’s taking care of things. I’ve got to go out for a while tonight.”

“Dinner’s going to be ready soon.”

“You’ll have it without me. Tell Mrs. Mrozenski I’m sorry I can’t join you.”

Tell her yourself
, I wanted to say, but my heart wasn’t in being disobedient. “All right.”

He tweaked my nose with his finger. “Don’t forget to do your homework. You don’t want to rot your brain reading romance magazines.”

I waited until Pop was out the door and out of sight to break the news to Mrs. Mrozenski. She was hunched over a large pan of sizzling cabbage, alternating between stirring the food and mopping her brow with a dishcloth. As she worked she danced to a tune only she could hear. Her feet were surprisingly nimble for a woman who had to be twice Pop’s size.

“You hungry, Iris?” she asked as I ducked into the kitchen.

“I’m getting there.” I was still getting used to her kitchen. Gone was the electric refrigerator we’d had on the Upper East Side. In its place was an icebox that leaked so often it had warped the floor beneath it. And the stove used coal—
coal
—to make its heat, burping a thick black fog that coated the porcelain surface and turned everything white to gray, including underwear we’d hung to dry on the line behind her house. Bins of coal sat outside the back door, where Pop retrieved it each morning to make sure Mrs. Mrozenski had everything she needed to run the cooker.

“Pop can’t join us tonight,” I said.

“Oh.” She frowned at the pan. “He leave something for me maybe?”

It was my turn to scowl. “Like what?”

“Like an envelope?”

Money. He was late on the rent. That was why he was skipping dinner.

“He must’ve forgot,” I said.

Her face relaxed. “Of course. Is no problem. I call you when it’s ready?”

“Sure.”

For a while I lazed by the radio, listening to
Captain Midnight
and trying not to think about the rent. Pop had lost jobs before; I knew that. It had happened twice that I knew of right after he had started up his company that summer. He couldn’t follow people quickly. He was never going to be able to chase someone down. His busted pin meant that he did his best work behind a desk and on a phone, only that wasn’t the kind of work that paid well. And well-paying jobs were what we needed.

It was funny how aware I’d become of money in the past few months. We were never rich before, at least not compared to my friends, but I’d never wanted for anything, either. There was always cash for comics and candy, new dresses and new movies. I didn’t wonder how tuition was paid, food bought, rent kept up to date. It just was. It was shocking to go from a world where everything was provided without effort to this constant awareness that everything I did—even the air I breathed—felt like it came at a cost. At first I resented it because I believed Pop had caused it. If he hadn’t been injured, if he hadn’t left the military, if he hadn’t come home, things wouldn’t have had to change.

And maybe Mama wouldn’t have killed herself.

I shook the thought out of my head. Mrs. Mrozenski turned on her phonograph and a polka platter began to compete with the noise of the radio. The smell of frying onions signaled that dinner was minutes from being ready. I had homework to do—an essay on what it meant to be a citizen that would take me a half hour at most—and then the whole evening stretched before me with nothing to fill it. I don’t know what made me do it—the boredom, the loneliness, the forced cheer of the polka music—but I got up and went into Pop’s office.

It was rare that I went in there. Pop never told me I couldn’t, probably because it never occurred to him that he should, but the space was so much his that merely crossing the threshold felt like a violation. He had only two rules: don’t disturb the paperwork on his desk and stay out of the locked cabinet that sat to the left of his chair.

The first one was easy to disobey, provided I memorized the exact order things had been in when I’d found them. The second one I had no choice but to respect. After all, the cabinet was locked. How could I do anything but stay out of it? Besides, I was pretty sure I knew what he kept inside it: his gun. He had to have one, right? All the detectives in the movies did. It seemed like precisely the sort of thing you hid in a locked cabinet.

Mr. Wilson’s file was still sitting on top of the desk. I sat in Pop’s chair and opened the folder. In his chicken scratch he outlined Mr. Wilson’s first visit to him and described, in detail, why the man was concerned that his wife was being unfaithful. Pop had tried to follow her on three different occasions, and while he didn’t write down the results of that work, it wasn’t hard to read the outcome in the description of the places he visited: Upper East Side hotels one entered by climbing long flights of stairs. Pop didn’t stand a chance catching Mrs. Wilson red-handed. He probably hadn’t been able to catch his breath.

The job looked pretty easy to my eyes. All the man wanted was evidence of what he was already certain was going on: a photograph, confirmation from a witness, a description of the man his wife was keeping time with. No wonder Pop had failed. Even if he had been able to follow Mr. Wilson’s wife, he would’ve drawn attention to himself. A man with an obvious limp could expect two responses: pity or a rude attempt to ignore him. Either way, Mrs. Wilson had to have noticed him the first time he appeared on the scene.