The War Against Miss Winter (2 page)
Read The War Against Miss Winter Online
Authors: Kathryn Miller Haines
Tags: #actresses, #Actresses - New York (State) - New York, #World War; 1939-1945 - New York (State) - New York, #Winter; Rosie (Fictitious Character), #Mystery & Detective, #Winter; Rosie (Fictitous Character), #Historical Fiction, #World War; 1939-1945, #New York (N.Y.), #Fiction, #New York, #Mystery Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Historical, #War & Military, #New York (State), #General
“That wasn’t his. I found it in the mail.”
“Sure, doll. Whatever you say.” He tucked the pamphlet into his notebook and scribbled a note. “So what does a man with no money and bad politics do? The cowardly thing, sure, but he does it all the same. Maybe he’s thinking twice about it, worried he won’t follow through, so he ties his hands to make sure once he’s up there, he can’t change his mind.”
I straightened up. “And how did he get up there? You think he jumped into the noose after he bound his hands? Or maybe he flew?”
The lieutenant stood and smoothed the pleats at the front of his food-stained pants. He was a chubby man and no amount of fussing was ever going to make his pants lay right. “I’m going to be straight with you.” He punctured the air with his cigarette. “Jim McCain was a lowlife and everyone who knew him was a lowlife too. As far as my department’s concerned, this is a suicide and anyone who wants to challenge that’s going to look like a fool.”
I tried to meet him eye to eye but came up woefully short. “What did Jim ever do to you?”
He tapped out his ashes on the desk. “He was a crooked cop and a rotten detective. Instead of arguing with me maybe you should be looking more carefully at him.”
I
SAT IN A WINDOW
booth at Frankie’s Diner and watched as the meat wagon came and left. When I was certain the coppers were gone, I returned to the office and locked the door behind me. Churchill greeted me with a quiet murmur and tangled himself about my legs until one of us couldn’t move without the other. Jim’s door remained open, his lights blazing an eerie gold. I couldn’t stomach the thought of going back in there. Instead, I sank into my chair, picked up the blower, and asked for Agnes’s exchange.
To say Agnes was devastated was like saying the Germans were stubborn. The woman wailed and keened until her voice disappeared. Then her grief penetrated her breathing, turning each exhale into an extended moan of dismay.
“I’m so, so sorry, Agnes,” I said during the rare moments she was silent.
Her voice returned, deep and raspy, with a shake to it that warned she still had enough tears to sink a U-boat. “Why, Rosie? Why?”
“I don’t know.” Churchill took refuge in the space between my legs. His tail snaked up my calf like the straps of a Roman sandal.
“He was a good man, wasn’t he?”
“Sure. A real upstanding guy.” I wanted to comfort her, but I was growing increasingly removed from the emotion of what had occurred. I transferred her pain to a stage where Agnes became a Norse queen mourning the loss of her mate. Everything was easier to cope with if you imagined it set afire and adrift at sea.
A rustling on her end signaled that a handkerchief was making its
way down her face. “I know he loved me. Just the other day he talked about leaving his wife. We were going to run away and get married in Acapulco. Did I tell you that?”
“Yeah.” She’d told me a similar story dozens of times before, with only the geographic location of their nuptials changing. I had no doubt Jim had made these promises, but I also believed Agnes knew in her heart how empty they were.
“He was supposed to come over Christmas night. I made pork chops. I traded my sugar coupons for the extra meat and everything. I was so mad when he didn’t show.”
My head weighed eighty pounds. The only way I could keep it up was by propping it on my hand. “You couldn’t have known that he was dead.”
Her voice pitched upward. “I even called his house. I spoke to his wife. I wanted to know if he was there with her instead of with me.”
Jim never talked about his wife; I knew he had one only because Agnes had told me. I assumed she was either ill or never existed to begin with, and I preferred the latter because if Agnes had spoken with a living, breathing woman I’d have to too.
“What did his wife say?” I asked.
“That she had company and couldn’t be bothered about this right now. I was so upset I hung up on her.”
“Do you have any idea why he came into the office on Christmas?” I asked.
“Who knows? A client maybe? You know Jim, he’s always willing to work around someone’s schedule if money’s involved.”
I put my thumb and index finger to my nose and pinched away her use of the present tense. “Do you think Jim made someone mad? Somebody who might’ve put the curse on him?”
Agnes sniffled. “I don’t know, Rosie. I—” The word was swallowed whole and I imagined her squeezing her eyes shut as I would press my fingers together to keep a drink of water from leaking from my hand. “There’s nothing we can do, is there? Bad things keep happening and we just have to accept them.” I didn’t respond. The war had taught us
that we were powerless. No amount of talking about it could change the situation. “I’ve got to go.”
She disconnected and I stared at the horn. As rough as that call was, the next one was going to be much worse. I didn’t want Mrs. McCain to hear the news about Jim from someone like Lieutenant Schmidt, but I had no idea how to tell a total stranger that her husband was dead. I practiced it like a line in a Chekhov play, and when I was able to say it without my lips quivering, I located Jim’s home number in the directory and asked the operator to connect us.
“Hello? McCain residence.” A woman whose foreign accent reduced the number of syllables in every word she said answered the phone.
“Mrs. McCain?” I asked.
“Mrs. McCain no here. Home soon. Leave message?”
While I hadn’t thought Mrs. McCain would be fresh off the boat, I certainly didn’t expect Jim to have the bees for servants. “Is this Jim McCain’s house? The detective?”
“Mr. McCain no here. Leave message?”
I cleared my throat and put my fingers to my temples. I may not have been Emily Post, but I had a sneaking suspicion you didn’t announce a death through a phone message. “This is Rosie Winter. I work for Jim. I need Mrs. McCain to call me at the office as soon as possible.”
“Mrs. McCain no home.”
I increased the pressure on my skull. “Yeah, I got that, but I need her to call the office. Tell Mrs. McCain to call Mr. McCain at the office.”
I had eight phone calls in the next hour. One was a wrong number, three were potential clients, and four were people Jim had been assisting through various legal wrongdoings. To each I explained we were closed until the new year and, no, Jim couldn’t be reached until then. By the time the phone rang for the ninth time I was halfway into my coat.
“Hello, McCain and Son.”
“Jim McCain please.” A woman’s voice, smooth like porcelain, erupted
on the line.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“Who is this?” she echoed.
“This is Jim’s assistant. How can I help you?”
The porcelain turned to barbed wire. “Well,
Jim’s assistant
, demanding to know who someone is is not an appropriate way to greet someone.”
“I did say hello.” The hair on my neck rose, ready to do battle. “And might I suggest that when you’re hoping to talk to someone, it’s best to try to butter up the person who answers the phone; otherwise they might accidentally hang up on you.”
“How dare you talk to me like that!”
I seized rage and let it submerge my grief. “Look, sister, you’re the one who started it.”
“And I’m going to be the one to finish it. Put my husband on the line and when you’re done with that, why don’t you use the time to figure out where you’ll be working next?”
The coat sleeve I hadn’t put on dropped to my side like a broken wing. “Mrs. McCain?”
“I’m waiting. Put Jim on the phone.”
I sank into my chair and dropped my head until it hit wood. “Actually, I’m the one who called for you, not Jim.”
The sound of paper being wadded into a ball rustled across the line. “I’m not interested in Jim’s indiscretions. If you’ve called to confess something, you’re wasting both of our time.”
Try as I might to feel bad for this dame, her attitude made it impossible for me to muster sympathy. What kind of woman could have no contact with her husband since Christmas without sounding the least bit panicked? Jim was no saint, but I liked to believe that if this broad took a powder, he would’ve at least pretended he was concerned.
She cleared her throat. “Are we done,
Jim’s assistant
?”
“No, we’re not. In the first place, my name is Rosie Winter, and in the second, I’m not calling to confess anything.” I picked up a pencil and squeaked its eraser across the desktop.
She overemphasized each word she said. “Then. Why. Did. You. Call?”
“Jim’s dead.”
Everything went quiet on the line. Churchill paced the length of my desk, then leaped to its top. He batted at my pencil until I stopped its squeaking, then lay flat on his belly, waiting for his prey to resume its activity.
“Oh,” Mrs. McCain said at last. In the distance a bell rang at her house. Frantic footsteps rained across an unseen floor followed by the maid’s voice, tinged with hysteria, declaring, “Police, missus. Police.” Mrs. McCain cleared her throat again and her voice grew softer, not from emotion but from a greater distance between her and the phone. “Thank you for calling.”
I stared into Jim’s office and tried to imagine him sitting at his desk, smoking down the remnants of a cigar he’d decided would measure the minutes until it was time for him to dust for the day. “I’m so, so sorry. If you need anything—anything at all—please let me—“
She cut me off. “I think I can manage things from here. Have a pleasant evening.”
I left the office at 6:30 and headed toward the IRT at Times Square and Forty-second Street. The dimout had been in effect since September, and already the city’s skyline was disappearing as light after light was extinguished from the tall buildings that dominated midtown. The mercury hovered just above zero, making the last night of the year the coldest on record. Early New Year’s Eve revelers wearing brightly colored paper hats atop their wool caps prepared the area for that night’s big bash while streets made barren by the gas and rubber rations turned white from a light snowfall. Stark signs plastered on shop windows and phone poles ordered us to close our heads for the duration:
HE’S WATCHING YOU. THE ENEMY IS LISTENING—KEEP IT TO YOURSELF—HE WANTS TO KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW. THE SOUND THAT KILLS: DON’T MURDER MEN WITH IDLE WORDS.
I
burrowed deep into my coat and kept my gaze rooted to the sidewalk. The darkness, the events of the day, and the posters combined to turn everything into a threat. An overflowing trash can was the final resting place for a dismembered corpse. A noisemaker spun prematurely was a woman’s scream. Even my own footsteps became the frantic footfalls of a hatchetman fast on my heels.
Think of something else, I told myself. I tried to remember a book I’d read recently, but the only stories I could recall were from
Terror Tales
and they made poor companions. I hummed a few bars of a song only to discover that my choice of tunes was “I’ll Never Smile Again,” which I cut off in mid-verse in case it should prove true. I decided the only safe distraction was the bard and so I plumbed my mind for the little bit of Shakespeare I’d committed to memory. A ditty from
Macbeth
rose to the surface and allowed me to momentarily root around a Scottish castle as I intoned: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death.”
That did it. I decided to stop thinking altogether.
At last I made it to the station and followed the stairs down to the turnstile. The platform held a handful of people other than me, and from the looks of them they were all recent releases from Bellevue. Incandescent globes illuminated the underground world in a sickly yellow haze while a corroded pipe leaked an irregular stream of water that whispered
pling pling pling
, then paused before resuming its meterless argument. A shadow darted in and out of my periphery. Each time I turned to identify it, it became lost in the pillars.
The Seventh Avenue local arrived ten minutes late. I took a seat at the rear of the last car and spent the bulk of the ride replaying every conversation I’d had with Jim over the past week. He wasn’t depressed. Even the IRS thing had been a giggle to him. Clearly there was trouble at home, but Agnes had been the antidote for that. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw Jim hanging from the closet, a breeze swinging his body, his unseeing peepers suddenly registering the person who stood before him.
Bad things keep happening and we just have to accept them.
Boy
had Agnes hit it on the nose. I had nothing left, not even the ability to change things. I opened my eyes and found an enormous man half-hidden behind a newspaper, his tiny, close-set eyes boring twin holes into my skull.
I
EXITED THE
C
HRISTOPHER
S
TREET
station and disappeared into the growing foot traffic just in case the creep with the petite peepers decided to tail me. He didn’t, as far as I could tell, but that didn’t stop me from shadowing two merchant marines for a block and a half. By 7:00 I was safely at the George Bernard Shaw House, or, as I called it, the Home for Wayward Actresses. It was a rooming house at West Tenth Street and Hudson in the Village that had once been a popular hotel for seamen and remained a fine example of Civil War architecture, since the current owner was too cheap to bring it up to twentieth-century standards. Some starlet who married well had financially endowed the joint at the turn of the century and made it possible for mugs like me to enjoy a cheap roof over our heads provided we followed her career path.
On any given day you could walk into the house and find singers warming up in the parlor, dancers using the banister as a barre, and a half dozen women talking to the walls as they tried out lines they had to have down for auditions and rehearsals. Evidence of the work we did was everywhere. The parlor table was littered with back issues of
Variety, Radio Stars, Cue,
and
Photoplay
. A bookcase teetered from the weight of scrapbooks filled with reviews. The piano sagged beneath copies of the latest Broadway scores, and the radio blasted programs the twenty women I roomed with prayed would be their big break.
As I entered the building, I passed the wall of shame where our den mother, Belle, had hung past and present residents’ 8 x 10s in lieu of wallpaper. While the Shaw House was long on entertainment and short on costs, it did have its downsides. Since our rent was subsidized, we
were expected to follow a slate of house rules. In addition to having to work in the theater a certain number of times each year, our comings and goings were monitored more closely than they would be at Attica. And there were so many restrictions regarding what we were allowed to have in our rooms that it was easier to pass around a list of what could be there than what couldn’t.
I entered the lobby on my tiptoes and scanned the room for Belle. I had a week left before I reached the six-months-with-no-work mark; after that, I was out on my keister. My plan was to avoid her until I got work or she got religion. Fortunately, it appeared the house had been vacated for the night. Everyone but my best pal and me had taken jobs ringing in the New Year with the troops at the Stork Club, the Stage Door Canteen, and the new Rockefeller Center. The gigs promised cold, hard cash and fleeting romance. While I loved the green stuff, I didn’t want to surround myself with men who were ready to ship out and leave everyone else behind. Why spend the end of the old year confronting the thing I was trying to forget about the new one?
“Rosie!” Jayne ran down the stairs, flung her arms around me, and squeezed me so tight I thought she’d dislocated my shoulder. My best pal was a petite blonde with the body of a Parisian vase and the voice of a two-year-old. She was a nice person and a hard worker, which, combined with her looks, made every director who crossed her path want to help her career. The last fellow got her all the way to Broadway and even paid the press to puff about the discovery of the new “it girl.” Review after review heralded her comic timing and bombshell good looks, but then one critic who shall remain nameless dubbed her “America’s squeakheart” and soon all the others followed suit, forgetting her merits and focusing only on her voice. The truth was, her pipes were pitched too high to carry well in a theater, sentencing Jayne to spend the rest of her career modeling, dancing, and playing children in Texaco Star Theater radio productions.
“Belle around?” I asked in a stage whisper.
Jayne mimicked my attempt at being covert. “She’s out for the night.”
I gave her a more generous hug. “How was your trip?”
“You tell me.” She held up her right hand and wiggled a block of ice that was so large I was surprised she hadn’t hired a bellhop to help her drag it around.
I rocked her finger so the light played off the stone. “Will you looky here…. When’s the big day?” Jayne was dating one of mob boss Vincent Mangano’s lieutenants, a thug named Tony B., who’d taken her to the Adirondacks for a few days. He was a wrong number, but I had to admire his impeccable taste in overpriced gifts. In the last few months he’d showered Jayne with enough shiny baubles to turn her into a constellation.
Jayne freed her hand from mine. “It’s not an engagement ring. It’s a promise ring.”
“And what did you promise him?”
She winked at me. “That I wouldn’t lose the ring.” She took me by the hand and led me up to our room. Our living space was smaller than a cattle car and dominated by a radiator that, courtesy of the fuel shortage, was there for purely decorative purposes. We both lacked domestic skills and it showed: clothes burst out of cupboards, lingerie peeked out of overstuffed bureau drawers, and a lopsided dime-store Christmas tree winked on the window ledge.
Still, it was home, and I loved it.
Jayne disappeared into her closet and emerged with two overflowing martini glasses we’d won at Dish Night at the Roxy. “Ta-da!”
“Keep ’em coming until I tell you otherwise.”
She sat beside me on the radiator and clinked my glass. “Happy New Year.”
“That remains to be seen.” I tipped a sip of liquid courage. “I decided to go in to work this afternoon and I found Jim McCain dead in his closet.” I drained the drink and fished out an olive.
Jayne shot up. “What?”
As I told her about the events of that day, Jayne’s face became a tide-pool of shifting eyebrows, pursed lips, and bitten cheeks.
“Oh, Rosie,” she said when I’d finished, “I don’t even know what to say.”
“How about this year will be better than last?”
“It has to be. Poor, poor Jim.” She put a finger to her kisser and bit her nail.
“Anyway, if I can be completely selfish for a moment, this means I’m unemployed. So if I do get booted out of this place, I won’t have enough dough for a new one.” Even if I did, there was no guarantee I could find an apartment. Along with its other pleasantries, the war had brought a housing shortage to New York.
“So nothing’s come through for you yet?”
I shook my head. “Nope. I’m behind the eight ball.” The war was making everything difficult, even acting. Ticket prices had gone up, plays closed faster than predicted, and rationing had just about killed touring productions and the small barn theaters many of us depended on to get through the lean times. The lights on Broadway had even become victims of the dimout. It was a running joke among my friends that if you were lucky enough to get a big break, you had better show up before sundown if you wanted to see your name on the marquee.
I took a deep breath and readied myself to utter the unspeakable. “I think it may be time to accept that my acting career is over.”
“Close your head.” Jayne pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and waved it at me. “Someone named Peter Sherwood called. He wants you to come to an audition.”
“For what?”
She squinted at the scrap and deciphered her hieroglyphics. “It’s actually for two shows. A musical revival.”
Since the war it had become vogue to bring back shows from twenty years before, as though by resurrecting the past we could collectively forget the present. “And the other show?”
“Something called
The Ghetto
.”
“Gee, I wonder what that could be about.” When companies weren’t reviving junk from two decades prior, they were doing their darnedest to milk the war for all it was worth. Neither option appealed to me. I couldn’t muster the smiles for the shows that ignored the war and couldn’t find the emotion for those that didn’t.
“It could be a great show, a great role,” said Jayne.
“Somehow I doubt that. Who the deuce is Peter Sherwood anyway?”
She shrugged. “Who cares? Maybe he saw you in something.” Getting a personal invite to an audition was a boon, but it didn’t change the fact that it was for a turkey of a play. “Did you see the reviews for Ruby’s show?”
“No, and I prefer to keep it that way.” Ruby Priest was the house’s latest success story. Normally I cheered other actresses’ success, but Ruby’s personality was such that you couldn’t help but hope she’d fall through a trapdoor and never be seen again.
Jayne leaned against the window. “She’s going to be unbearable.”
“She’s already unbearable. Now she’ll have reason for it.”
Jayne laughed and the laugh turned into a hiccup. She got both expulsions under control and celebrated by finishing her drink. “Don’t be mad,” she said.
“What am I not being mad about?” I narrowed my gaze. “Was that the last of the booze?”
“No.” The hiccup returned and she put a hand to her mouth to suppress it. “I tried out for Bentley’s new show.”
“I think that’s great. You need to aim higher than lousy musical reviews.” Lawrence Bentley, an actor turned writer, was the new golden boy of Broadway. His shows were sentimental schlock that usually communicated a highly unsubtle patriotic message or, at the very least, reinforced ethnic and religious stereotypes. Since Pearl Harbor, the public had eaten the stuff up. His scripts were in such demand that on any given night he’d have two shows running, each vying for the same unimaginative audience.
“Thanks,” said Jayne. “I just know something good is going to happen for both of us.”
“I certainly hope so.” A sound I intended to be a laugh came out a squawk. “I’ve got to tell you, pal, between Jim and not being able to get work…I don’t think I’ve ever been this low.” My eyes burned as new tears tried to find old exits.
Jayne stood and ceremoniously deposited her glass on the radiator. “That’s enough bad for tonight. Get dressed. We’re going out.”
I mopped at my face. “I’m not up for a night on the town. I want to ring in the new year quietly, just me and some giggle juice.”
Jayne took my hand and attempted to pull me to my feet. “Oh no you don’t. If you stay in, you’ll spend the whole night dwelling. That’s no way to end the year.”
“I won’t dwell. I never dwell.”
“Rosie.” She tilted her head in a way that recalled every evening I’d spent in our room feeling sorry for myself. It had been a bad year.
I shifted my gaze to the floor. “And besides, tonight might be the night…”
“You hear from Jack?”
When thoughts like that went through my head, they seemed rational and wise. When someone else uttered them, I realized my folly. Jack Castlegate—Broadway’s favorite leading man and the fellow I once thought would play Romeo to my Juliet—had shipped out right after Thanksgiving and I’d yet to hear a peep from him. Sure, you could blame the war—and I blamed it for a lot these days—but at some point I had to accept that if a man let my birthday, Christmas, and New Year’s pass without sending me so much as a hiya through V-mail, there was a very good chance the relationship was over.
“Even if I wanted to go, I can’t. I’m on the nut. I’ll be lucky to eat this week.”
Jayne squeezed my hand. “It’ll be my treat.”
I took a deep breath and forced a smile. “All right,” I said. “I’m yours for the night, but I get to set the rules. Wherever we go better have cheap booze and a big band.”