The Girl Is Murder (7 page)

I threw the ten-dollar bill beside his good leg and did as he said.

CHAPTER

5

I DIDN’T LEAVE MY ROOM again that day. Instead, I lay on the bed, trying to figure out how things had gone so wrong. Didn’t he see how much I could help? I couldn’t fathom that it wasn’t obvious to him.

I didn’t sleep at all that night. Not even my baby blanket helped.

What did I think would happen? That he’d embrace me and thank me for helping him. Then he’d school me in the detecting business and we’d become close—better than close—not just sharing everything with each other, but comfortable enough in each other’s presence that when there were silences they wouldn’t cause my stomach to churn with anxiety.

I would tell him everything. Stories about the boys I was interested in. How mad I was at Mama. And he’d do the same, opening up about that awful day at Pearl Harbor and his own grief when he found out Mama was dead.

Everything would change between us because of this one little photograph.

And maybe it still could.

I wasn’t going to go away without a fight. I knew he needed me, and if he was too stubborn to see it because of whatever danger he thought I was at risk for, that was his choice. I’d become the best detective I could be on my own, and then I’d show him exactly what he was missing out on.

“Do you want to go see a movie tonight?” Pop asked two days after he’d sold my photos and ended my detecting career.

“No, thank you.”

“It’s the new Ginger Rogers film.”

“I have homework.”

“I thought you already did it.”

“Then I guess you thought wrong.”

I could see the hurt in his eyes. And the truth was, I did want to go to the movies. But I thought my rejection of him would get me what I wanted, so I was determined to stand firm.

In the meantime I spent every waking moment learning to be a detective. When I wasn’t at school, I read detective comics, listened to the spy serials, and made sure I was always in earshot of Pop’s door during those times when clients came to meet with him. When he wasn’t home, I sneaked into the office and studied his notes from earlier cases, not just the ones he’d taken since coming home from Hawaii, but those he’d worked on with Uncle Adam years before, when they used to have an agency together. He filled folders with carefully typed descriptions of his environment and the people he observed. Like Mama, he found volumes of useful information in the clothes people wore, their behavior, and the places they chose to go. He could read guilt and suspicion in the choice of a hat or a misplaced verb. It was amazing stuff.

I went through his collection of props and tools: hats that hid his face in shadows, street and phone directories, city maps, picklocks, counterfeit IDs, and uniforms used by utility workers. Other things were more unusual and, I suspected, had come from his time in the Navy. For his camera, he had dozens of different parts that could improve an image under the worst of circumstances. He had tiny recorders that he could leave anywhere to capture a conversation. And there were other gadgets that I couldn’t even guess at the purpose of.

But you could only learn so much by observing fictional detectives and Pop’s collection of props. The best education would only come from watching Pop at work. The catch was, I had to do it without him knowing.

I’d already mastered the art of eavesdropping on him. Instead of just doing it when clients came by, I began to do it when he was the only one in the office. Much of his job was done by telephone. I had no idea what a good actor he was, how he seamlessly donned a new identity, complete with a new voice, and confidently asked for information that should’ve been denied him. He could be shockingly personable when he needed something.

“Good afternoon,” he began one call as I huddled on the other side of the door vent. “Is this Gloria Armour? I’m so glad I reached you. I know you probably don’t remember me, but this is Jack Gaviston. I met you through Bill.” There was a pause. “I’m flattered that I made such an impression on you. I ran into Bill the other day and he was telling me that you knew the best way to get in touch with Randall Smythe.”

There was a lot to learn from this brief exchange, even if I didn’t know the details of the Smythe case. Pop knew that by implying that Gloria wouldn’t remember his fictional alter ego, she would insist that she did just to get out of a potentially embarrassing situation. Hoping to cover up her own lie, she was then eager to tell Pop whatever she knew. After all, if she didn’t, he might suspect she was bluffing.

It was a brilliant scheme, and from what I could tell, it worked almost every time.

There were real connections that Pop relied on, too. He had friends at the phone company, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the utility offices who could call up phone extensions, addresses, and other information in a matter of hours. He always opened his requests with questions about how their families were doing, displaying a remarkable skill for remembering spouses’ names and the pursuits of various children he’d probably never met. He seemed to understand that the best way to get people to want to help you was to show them that you were interested in them.

I tried to put what I had learned from Pop to practical use during my time at school. I trained myself to sit in a classroom and take in every detail about the students around me: what did they wear, who was sitting where, what could I tell about them from the choices they made? I studied those who seemed to be looked up to by everyone else, those who could get away with things, and those who could not. I began to know the people around me intimately. It almost made up for the fact that I had no real friends.

The person I watched the most was Tom Barney. He’d returned to school a week after his arrest, appearing no worse for wear. When he came back, so did his bounty, or at least part of it. The purses and wallets he’d stolen, including my own, were turned over to the front office, where those of us who’d been victimized were invited to retrieve them. I did so, though, like everyone else, I found my purse empty and my money long gone.

From the little I was able to pick up in the halls, Tom had been sent to a juvenile detention center for the duration of his absence and was let back into P.S. 110 on a probationary basis. I was fascinated by someone who could rob his peers and so easily slip back into the school without showing a hint of remorse for what he’d done. Maybe everyone else was willing to let bygones be bygones, but I wanted him to know how much he’d upset me. I didn’t have the courage to just go up to him and confront him, though. Instead, I watched him from afar, biding my time in the same way I was biding it with Pop. Someday Tom might talk to me again, and when he did I’d give him a piece of my mind.

In the middle of September, as I sat in the lunchroom longing for the clock to move faster, I was greeted by Suze. “Hey, baby girl. Long time no see.” I hadn’t seen her since that first day in the girls’ bathroom, and I responded to her reappearance with a mixture of relief and fear. Here, after weeks of being ignored, was a somewhat friendly face. At least I hoped she was friendly.

“Hi,” I said.

She peeked under the table and took in my skirt. It was pencil cut, conforming closely to the curve of my hips. Pop had bought it for me as a peace offering. “Nice rags.”

“Thanks.”

“So what’s tickin’, chicken?”

In front of me was the notebook I was using to write down all the details I was trying to recall after giving myself one minute to look around the room. It was a way of testing my memory, and I believed that after two weeks of doing it, I was already becoming much better at analyzing my environment.

But it wasn’t the kind of thing that you could share with someone. Even I knew it was kind of weird.

“Just homework,” I said.

“You do a lot of homework, don’t you, baby?”

I nodded, uncertain if I’d just damned myself by agreeing with her.

“How come you were staring at my friends?”

Had I been? I followed her gaze to a table near the back wall, where a group of girls in tight sweaters and heavy makeup were conversing with dark-skinned Italian boys with slick ducktails and chains that joined their pocket watches to their waists. How had I missed that Suze was there? What kind of detective doesn’t make note of the one person she knows by name?

“I wasn’t staring at anyone,” I said.

“You sure about that? Rhona said you’ve been watching Tom since he sat down.” She cocked her head toward the table, where Tom Barney sat with the blonde.

“I didn’t mean to stare,” I said. “I was just thinking and that’s where my eyes landed.”

“It’s okay, baby. No harm. You were just making Rhona nervous, you dig? I told her you were copacetic.”

I thought about telling her what Tom had done to me, but it occurred to me that telling her he’d robbed me wasn’t going to help me stay in her good graces. I mean, she knew he was a thief, right?

“Heard from your pop?” she asked.

That’s right—I’d led her to believe he was off being a soldier. “Not a word. What about you? You heard from Bill?”

She beamed, my earlier infraction completely forgotten. “Got a letter yesterday. Course most of it’s blacked out.” She pulled a note from her cleavage and unfurled it. Thick black lines crossed out much of what Bill had written to her. Either he was too free with his information or the war censor was still trying to get a handle on what should be considered sensitive information. “He couldn’t even tell me where he is.”

“It’s to protect them,” I said. “Just in case the wrong person gets ahold of the mail.”

“Who’s going to be reading my mail?”

“You never know,” I said.

She looked back toward her friends. Despite their tough exteriors, they looked like they were having fun.

She knocked on the table with a closed fist, bidding me farewell. “I better evaporate, baby. Be good. Remember: no staring.”

“I will,” I said.

DESPITE MY PROMISE, I couldn’t give up watching Tom. Now that I knew he was part of Suze’s crew, I found myself watching all of them whenever the chance arose. There was no one at P.S. 110 more alive than them, no one more fascinating. The boys were strangely feminine, almost not boys at all. They paid attention to what they wore and moved liked cats, their long graceful limbs working at a pace that seemed slower than everyone else around them. And the girls seemed so old and wise, as though they’d lived a hundred lives before this one and somehow managed to retain the knowledge from those previous lifetimes.

They were a different species than the kids I’d known at the Chapin School. But they were also a different species than most of the students at P.S. 110. In fact, the rest of the school seemed to view them as outsiders, but they didn’t seem to care. They were outsiders by choice, not because someone else had put them in that position. I envied that they didn’t need to belong. I suppose that’s how it was when you had a group. You didn’t need to be accepted by anyone else; you had already found your people.

I had to face it: there would be no group for me. The groups I might’ve been welcomed in—like the one for Jewish students—I didn’t want to join, and the ones I used to belong to were no longer available.

“You had another phone call,” said Mrs. Mrozenski one afternoon just after I’d arrived home from school. “Grace wants you to telephone her.”

It was the third time Grace had called since I’d run into the twins uptown the night I’d followed Mrs. Wilson. Each time I took the message and pretended like I was going to do it right away.

“She say you no call her back before.”

“I have, she’s just never home.”

“She just called, so she must be home now.” Mrs. Mrozenski glanced toward the party-line phone that sat on a table just outside the kitchen. There was a second phone in Pop’s office—a private line intended for business only.

“I’ll call her from Pop’s office,” I told Mrs. M. She raised an eyebrow. “It’s about a boy, so I think she wants a little privacy. Pop won’t mind.”

I shut myself into the room and sat at Pop’s desk, but I never lifted the receiver. What would I say to her?
I go to a school I hate filled with people who only ever talk to me to tell me to stop staring at them. Pop and I barely speak because he thinks my wanting to be a detective is some childish fantasy. Oh, and we’re so broke he frequently ducks our landlady so she won’t ask him for the rent money. How are you?

No, there’d be no telephoning Grace.

I couldn’t deny how lonely I was, though. I needed friends before I permanently became that strange girl whose name no one remembered.

The next day I decided to do something about it. I arrived at school early and went straight to the newspaper office. Just like the first time I visited there, Paul and Pearl were working alone. They didn’t seem surprised to see me. At least Paul didn’t. Pearl was so wrapped up in her work that I couldn’t tell if she was even aware of my presence.

She was the one I wanted to talk to, but it was clear that as long as her brother was there, that wasn’t going to happen. So instead I directed what I’d come to say to him.

“Remember me?” I asked him as I entered the room.

“Sure. I was wondering if I’d ever see you again. What happened? I thought I was going to show you how to make prints.”

“Something came up.” I looked toward Pearl. She licked the end of her pencil and pushed up her glasses. “Is the Jive Hive still around?”

“Every Saturday,” said Paul. “Has your schedule opened up?” His tone didn’t escape me.

“I’m sorry if I seemed rude that day. It’s just when you’re new …”

“You’re not sure who’s shrewd and who’s square. It’s all right.” He tossed a look Pearl’s way. She was still looking at everything but us. “If you do want to go, you’re welcome to join us. There are some potent people I could introduce you to.” Us? Did that mean Pearl would be there? “How ’bout you join us this weekend?”

“That would be swell,” I said. “I’ll see you on Saturday.”