The Girl Is Murder (4 page)

What Pop needed was someone who could blend in, whose age and appearance meant they were easily ignored. Someone who could sit in a hotel lobby looking like a bored little rich girl waiting for her parents, and nobody would think twice about her.

Uncle Adam was right when he told Pop he couldn’t go it alone. But maybe it wasn’t
his
help Pop needed—maybe it was mine.

By the time Mrs. Mrozenski called me into dinner I had a plan: I was going to help Pop.

CHAPTER

3

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER I was on my first stakeout, outside the Wilsons’ Upper East Side apartment building. I’d passed it a thousand times in my former life, had even been inside it once while visiting a friend after school. Now I took up space on a bench across the street. Just as I took on the posture of a bored, privileged young woman, familiar voices rang out: Bev and Bea, or—as they were usually referred to in the halls of Chapin—the twins. Blondes with blue eyes and perfect ski-jump noses, they were identically clad in Chapin’s plaid skirts and white blouses. As they headed for home they were exchanging the day’s gossip, their voices rising and falling with amusement as they relayed who said what to whom. I slouched down on the bench, hoping they wouldn’t notice me.

“Iris?” said Bea.

I straightened up as though it wasn’t them that had caused me to slouch, but exhaustion they’d just shaken me out of. “Bea? Bev? It’s so great to see you.”

If they found it strange to find me loitering on a bench at twilight, they didn’t admit it out loud. Instead, they surveyed me for a moment as though they weren’t certain what to say next. Compliment my clothes? Nope, no hope of that. Tell me they missed my witty comments during English Lit? Doubtful.

I decided to help them out of the tight spot. “I’m waiting for my aunt,” I said. “We’re having dinner.”

“How lovely,” said Bev. “Isn’t this funny—we were just talking about you today.”

“Oh, really?” I stood up. For some reason I wanted to be on the same level as the two of them. Even though we were all the same height, I felt smaller. Maybe it was their school uniforms. Strange as it seemed, I missed the brief skirt and scratchy blouse and how they magically made me one of them rather than the outsider I felt like now. Wasn’t it funny how a uniform, which was designed to create conformity, could make me feel so special? I bet Pop must have felt the same way when he shed his military duds and rejoined life as a civilian.

“Yes,” said Bea. “We were just asking Grace if she’d heard from you.”

In the weeks after we’d moved to the Lower East Side, some of the Chapin girls had attempted to stay in contact with me, chief among them Grace Dunwitty, my former best friend. She called me every other day and invited me to spend my weekends at her apartment, where I could forget the Orchard Street house while we passed our time pasting pictures of Deanna Durbin into our scrapbooks and slept beneath Grace’s pink canopy.

The visits meant I had to endure Grace’s endless questions about our new life. She must have thought years of sharing lunches and sleepovers meant I owed her something:
Do you miss having money?
(I guess.)
What’s it like to have a father with only one leg?
(I’m not sure I know what it’s like to have a father, period.)
Do you miss your mother?
(What do you think?) They were logical questions, ones I might’ve asked myself if I had the courage, but—boy, howdy—I resented how easily Grace asked them, how she made no attempt to hide her curiosity, how different she made me feel from everyone else. And so eventually I stopped making an effort to ride the subway uptown, stopped responding to her invitations, rejected offers to meet me halfway between her world and mine. On the Upper East Side I was the girl whose life forever changed when her mother had killed herself. But in our new home, I could just be Iris Anderson, daughter of an injured vet, a man who’d bravely endured Pearl Harbor.

“She said she’s tried calling you,” said Bev.

“I’ve been awfully busy,” I said. “New school and all that.”

“You have to tell us all about the Lower East Side.” She made it sound like some exotic destination she was thinking of visiting if she ever got her passport in order.

“There’s not really much to tell,” I said.

“Oh, come now,” said Bev. “What are the people like?”

Just like you
, I almost replied.
Only without the money.
“I’ve kind of kept to myself,” I said.

“It’s probably safer that way,” said Bev.

“And how is public school?” asked Bea.

“Swell.” I could see they weren’t buying it. And why should they? We’d spent years mocking the kids who went to public school. “It’s so strange being around boys,” I added. I could tell that piqued their interest.

“What’s it like?” asked Bea.

“More nerve-racking, I guess.”

“Could you imagine getting to eat lunch with boys every day?” Bea said to her sister.

“I don’t think I’d like it,” said Bev. “I like going to an all-girls school.”

“Don’t be such a prude,” said Bea.

“I’m not. Besides, it’s not just boys Iris is around, it’s colored boys, right?” She lowered her voice when she said it, as though admitting I went to school with kids of other races might cause me to contaminate their neighborhood.

“There are Puerto Ricans and Italians, sure.”

“Well, be careful,” said Bev.

I wanted them to go on their way, but it was clear I was going to have to be the one to end the conversation.

I looked off into the distance, where a woman wearing a hat festooned with a peacock feather was stepping out of a cab. “There’s my aunt,” I said. “I better go. Tell Grace I said hello.”

“We will,” said Bea, and then she took her sister by the arm and left. I waited until I could no longer see them before reclaiming my seat on the bench.

A breeze ruffled the pages of the
Archie
comic I’d brought along to occupy myself. With the wind came the aroma of early fall and something else—Mama’s perfume. I turned, half expecting to find her behind me, but the air was empty. In our new house there was never any fear of stumbling upon her—after all, she’d never been there in life. But here on these streets, where she used to shop and visit with her friends, my mother’s voice carried on the wind, her heels click-clacked down the sidewalk, her apartment keys jingled at their peculiar frequency. Was this why Pop had moved us? Not because of money, but to escape her memory?

Stop it
, I told myself.
Focus on the task at hand.

According to Pop’s notes, Louise Wilson left the house every Tuesday night at seven for a Veterans of Foreign Wars Ladies Auxiliary meeting, or so she said. Lately she’d returned late in the evening with some new excuse about organizing clothes for Bundles for Britain or losing track of the time while knitting socks for soldiers and exchanging gossip. Once Mr. Wilson had gone to the church where the group was allegedly meeting, only to find its lights turned off and no sign of the dozen or so women Mrs. Wilson claimed came to every meeting. On another occasion, he followed her all the way to the Waldorf, where she disappeared inside before he was able to determine which direction she’d turned.

He had provided a photo of her that I’d struggled to memorize in the hours when Pop wasn’t home. In it she stood beside her husband, her hands meekly folded in her lap, her smile tight and toothless. Her side was glued to Mr. Wilson’s, as though she only represented half of the whole the two of them formed. She could’ve been attractive, but the years had softened her figure in a way my own mother had constantly fought against.

I continued to feign boredom on my bench, flipping through the
Archie
comic book but not reading what was on the page. My attention was riveted to the apartment building, where the uniform-clad doorman was tipping his hat as a woman exited the revolving door.

Was it her?

She asked him something, and he replied in a strong, clear voice, “Six-forty-five, Mrs. Wilson.” She paused in the light leaking from the front windows and wound her watch. Then, with a smile at the man, she continued on her way up the street.

Bingo! I followed twenty paces behind, splitting my attention between her and the shop windows. If she turned to look back, I’d pause at the nearest display and pretend to examine what it had to offer.

My ploy wasn’t necessary. She seemed to be in her own little world, moving forward with single-minded purpose to get to her destination. I used the time to examine her. It was a game Mama and I used to play—she would pick a random stranger as we waited for a cab or walked in the park and make me list three things I could tell just by looking at them.
Appearances are everything
, she would tell me when we stopped playing.
Remember that.
Mrs. Wilson’s nails were freshly painted. There was cat hair on her coat. Her heels were expensive, but worn. They didn’t strike me as the kind of pumps you donned to see a secret lover.

But then if she had a lover, she probably wasn’t planning on keeping them on for very long.

I blushed at the thought. What made me such an expert on s-e-x? I couldn’t even say the word out loud without spelling it.

Mrs. Wilson turned the corner, then another one. No Waldorf this night. We were headed toward the Plaza Hotel. I held back long enough for her to enter the building. I pretended to chew a wad of gum and swung my arms with the sort of entitled boredom most visitors to this address regularly demonstrated. As I walked into the lobby, I offered the doorman a sneer for his trouble.

I surveyed the room for Mrs. Wilson. She was already gone.

How was that possible? I’d only been seconds behind her. Hardly enough time for her to make it into the Palm Court, or one of the other restaurants that fanned off from the main lobby. My gaze landed on the closed powder room door. That’s where she had to be. If she was meeting someone, she would want to freshen up beforehand.

I sauntered through the door and found her standing before the long row of mirrors, a tube of bright red lip cream in her hand. We both ignored each other as I disappeared into a stall and pretended to do my business.

When enough time had passed, I flushed the toilet, left the stall, and washed my hands. She had switched from makeup to hair care. She removed her hatpin, peeled off her straw hat, and used her fingers to fluff the slightly matted mess it had left behind. My own reflection danced in the glass. There was a time when I thought I might be pretty—perhaps even on my way to beautiful. Mama had been. With her blond hair and pale eyes, she cut a striking figure no matter what she wore or whom she accompanied. I hadn’t been blessed with her coloring, but I was fortunate enough to not, in the words of Grace’s mother, look too Jewish. I had asked my mother what she meant and she’d laughed it off as the insensitive words of an insensitive woman. But now in the flattering lighting of the Plaza’s powder room, I could see hints of ethnicity. I was growing darker with age, my features slightly coarse, as though all of Mama’s delicacy had vanished when she died.

Mrs. Wilson’s reflection smiled at me. I tucked my hair behind my ears and smiled back.

I left her to her work and returned to the lobby, selecting a seat that would give me a good view of her when she finally returned. Instead of reading the comic, I pulled a camera from my purse and pretended to fidget with it. This wasn’t Pop’s preferred instrument of surveillance, a 1930s Leica he used because he claimed there was no better camera on the market. Instead, I had the small Brownie camera I’d gotten for my fourteenth birthday, a gift from Uncle Adam that took serviceable pictures, provided you were no more than ten feet from your subject. I stared through the viewfinder and pretended I was interested in capturing the ornate ceiling, then an impressionistic landscape in a gilded frame, then the pattern in the thick Oriental rug. Just as I came up from my study of the fleur-de-lis pattern, Mrs. Wilson entered the lobby and took her seat opposite me.

I continued to click away, then frowned at the camera as though I were uncertain how to operate it. She busied herself with a copy of the newspaper that had been discarded in the lobby, dividing her attention between the headlines and the elevator bank across the room from us.

“Togo Resigns as Japanese Foreign Minister,” screamed her newspaper. “Fuel Rations May Be Widened to Cover Midwest.”

I decided to shift positions. If whomever she was waiting for was coming from the elevators, I needed to be closer to them if I was going to catch them on film. I tucked the comic under my arm and shouldered my pocketbook. Then I continued clicking the camera, capturing a poodle being herded across the lobby by the concierge and a floral display that prominently featured small American flags among its more fragrant offerings. The elevators dinged open and an assortment of people exited into the lobby.

I glanced toward Mrs. Wilson, waiting to see which of the men—if any—might catch her fancy. My money was on a fellow in a blue pinstriped suit. He was about her age and looked a little like Robert Young, if Robert Young had jowls. I got ready to take his picture. Her hand dashed into the air and she waved at the exiting crowd. Instead of Robert separating from the pack and heading her way, a young serviceman did, greeting her with a wide grin while he bisected the lobby in three easy strides.

They embraced and I captured their union three times, making certain to get the man’s face in every shot. After their chaste meeting, they disappeared into the Oak Room, presumably to get a drink. Would this be enough to satisfy Mr. Wilson? So far all I had was proof that his wife wasn’t where she claimed to be and that she was keeping company with a member of the opposite sex, neither of which seemed like evidence that she was having an affair. After all, this could just be a friend in town on leave whom she decided to get together with. Without telling her husband. In a hotel.

On second thought, maybe this
was
bad.