The War Against Miss Winter (21 page)

“We need to know what you know,” I said.

He exhaled a thin line of smoke that hovered above his head like a question mark. “You’re tooting the wrong ringer.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” My foot traced a circle on the sidewalk. “Why did Jim marry Eloise?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Jayne put her hand on his arm. “Can’t because you don’t know or because you’re not allowed to say?”

Al’s eyes landed on her hand and lingered there. “Can’t ’cause I don’t know.” He backed away from her touch. “Look, me and Jim were business associates—that’s all. Agnes knew loads more about him than I did. I didn’t even know he was hitched till he died.”

Agnes—of course! If there was one person in this world who knew Jim, it was his secretary and mistress.

The dimmed streetlights simultaneously shut off. A mechanical wail pierced the night. It was an air raid siren. In tandem, we all looked at the sky for enemy planes that might be flying in the vicinity. Spotter station lights danced across the blank canvas, their beams capturing nothing.

Al crumpled the cigarette package and shoved it into his pocket. “You two want to end up dead, that’s your business. From here on, I’m out of this.”

“Al…,” I said.

“I mean it. Don’t come running to me.”

“All right, break it up,” said a high-pitched voice. We were held hostage by a flashlight’s globe. “There’s a drill on,” said a boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, though his demeanor made it clear he wanted to be taken as older. He was the neighborhood’s warden, assigned the precious duty of making sure blackout blinds were pulled, lights extinguished, and streets cleared of anyone who didn’t have a reason to be there. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I’m hailing the ladies a cab,” said Al. On cue a hack with dimmed headlights pulled up. “We done here?”

“Absolutely,” I said, then I followed Jayne into the backseat.

I
GOT UP EARLY THE
next day and left in ample time to see Agnes and still make my twelve o’clock rehearsal. I’d thought about calling her first, but something told me a personal visit would be more effective. Separated by miles of phone lines, Agnes would find it easy to change the topic or wallow in her grief (not that she wasn’t entitled). I needed her to focus on Jim in life not death.

I took a cross-town bus and stopped and bought Agnes a houseplant on Orchard Street, at a shop overflowing with carnation crosses dyed red, white, and blue. Although it was early to me, the city was alive with people trying to use the war to inspire others to act. Next door to the florist, a group of coeds adorned with the unit patches of their boyfriends begged me to consider donating any extra clothing I might have to Bundles for Britain. At the storefront next to them a furrier had replaced his goods with a sign requesting donations of old coats so that he might make warm vests for the merchant marines. And across the street, in a more dubious attempt at patriotism, mannequins were modeling military-style jackets and urging me to buy them, because, “even if he’s 4F, he can dress like a hero.”

My plant and I arrived at Agnes’s Lower East Side apartment just before ten. The windows surrounding hers had service flags with blue stars on them, signifying husbands and sons gone to war. Only Agnes’s window was bare. As I rang her bell, her drapes fluttered. I stepped back onto the stoop to assist her in making me and plastered a smile on my face. She cracked open the door and in her weakest voice asked, “Yes?”

“It’s me.” No recognition showed in her eyes. “Rosie. Rosie Winter?”

“Rosie?” her weak, tinny voice echoed. Slowly, she opened the door its full width, and I was greeted by the sight of Agnes in a bathrobe with
no makeup and an unruly head of hair that hadn’t seen shampoo for several days.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Oh, you know…” Tears welled in the long red-stained corners of her eyes. She plugged her ducts with a tissue before rivulets could stream down her cheeks. “Please, come in. This is a lovely surprise.” She looked down at herself and seemed to notice for the first time that she was in a robe. “I should change.” Her eyes flew about the room, trying to identify where one did such things. “I’ll be right back.”

As she disappeared up the stairs, I entered a dark, unkempt living room and busied myself by making a pile of newspapers on the sofa. Still evident vacuum tracks and a lingering scent of pine hinted that there was a time when the joint was much more orderly. I circled the room, eyeballing her collection of knickknacks. There was something very odd about the place. While a mess, the furniture was higher end than one would’ve expected on a secretary’s salary. And the colors were the dark, brooding sort one would expect in a man’s den rather than the home of someone like Agnes. By a window sat a reproduction Chippendale chair and a small table loaded with slicks. I lifted their edges and uncovered a year’s worth of
The Saturday Evening Post
,
Dime Detective
, and a songbook put out by the International Workers of the World.

No wonder Jim didn’t seem to belong in Eloise’s apartment. This was his home.

I peeked around a corner and found a kitchen in disarray. Dirty dishes towered above the sink. Unfinished meals rotted on the counter. A coffeepot sat cooking on the stove, though the burning smell made it clear its liquid had long since evaporated. I clicked off the burner and moved toward what should’ve been the dining room. Instead of housing a table and chairs, our office furniture formed a barricade that made it impossible for anyone to enter.

Agnes’s footsteps banged overhead. She was on her way back down.

I rushed back into the living room and assumed my place on the couch. Upon her return I remembered the plant and thrust it toward her. She gave it a dazed look, as though she worried the world had changed
so much in the past few weeks that people now donned flora instead of hats and purses. “It’s for you,” I said. “A gift.”

She accepted the plant and tears again bubbled from the corners of her eyes. “That’s just lovely of you, Rosie. So lovely.” She sighed back her sobs and ceremoniously deposited the plant on the front windowsill. “It’s funny; I feel like a widow and yet I haven’t gotten one flower or note acknowledging the role I played in his life. This is the first…” Again the tissue was thrust into the corners of her eyes. “It means a great deal to me that you see me as more than just another mourner.” She stared at the plant and came to some silent conclusion about it. She lifted the philodendron and wiped away the dust beneath it before carefully centering the plant on its chosen spot.

I sank into the sofa and the room filled with its aging melody. “I’m sorry to see you’ve been doing so badly, Agnes.”

She shrugged and turned the plant until the side with more growth faced us.

“You need to give yourself time, but you can’t let Jim’s death rule your life. He wouldn’t have wanted that.”

She sniffled and returned the tissue to its previous purpose. “Someone has to grieve.”

“People are—lots of people. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about him, and I know a number of his former business acquaintances are lost without him.” My comparison felt trite and cruel. I barely knew Jim; who was I to think I could barge into what was left of Agnes’s life and demand she assist me? Where had I been when she desperately needed someone around? “You can’t stop living because he has. What if you’d died instead of him? Would you expect him to wallow around the house not eating or sleeping or bathing?”

She thought about it a second too long, and I realized that, to Agnes, there was a direct correlation between the display of grief and the depth of love. She would mourn forever if it meant that her relationship with Jim would be validated as more than a mere affair.

I patted the couch and urged her over to me. “You’re still young, Agnes. There are plenty of men out there who would appreciate knowing
you. Jim’s death isn’t your end.”

“I guess.” She sank onto the pile of newspapers beside me, her feet dangling inches off the ground. In her feigned resignation I found a black ugly core of despair I’d been dodging for weeks. Who was I to tell Agnes to go on with her life? I had nothing.

Focus, Rosie.

“Why is Jim’s office furniture in your dining room?”

Her head popped toward the entrance to the room in question. “Oh. You saw it.”

“It’s kind of hard to miss.”

She bit her lip and turned her head away from mine. “I didn’t want her to have it.”

“Her?”

Agnes rubbed the sofa’s arm. It was made of a plaid fabric that hid decades of stains and cigarette burns in bold, dark stripes. “His wife.”

“How did you get it all here?”

“I paid some movers. Friends of my brother’s.”

“Did you take the files, too?”

She looked at me like a small child caught in a lie. “Yes.” Her face drooped while she hunted for a rationale. “It’s all that’s left of him.” Her fingers walked the distance between fabric lines. “Have you seen her?”

Was I being insensitive if she was the one who brought up the topic I most wished to discuss? I decided no, especially if I pretended that jawing about Eloise McCain was the last thing I wanted to do. “Uh, yeah. I’ve seen her once or twice.”

Agnes inhaled sharply. “And how is she?”

“Fine, I guess. It’s hard to tell. She’s a very cold woman.” Agnes nodded enthusiastically, urging me to go on. I paused to feign reluctance. “I was a little surprised by her lack of grief. It doesn’t seem like she’s behaving as a wife should.”

A smug smile lit across Agnes’s face. She leaned back on the sofa and spread her arms until it no longer looked like she was sitting on the furniture so much as conquering it. “I’m not surprised. She didn’t love him. She never did.”

“Then why did they get married?”

Agnes scooted closer to me. The grieving lover left and was replaced by the office gossip I adored. “Do you know who Cromwell Fitzgerald was?”

I thought back to Jim’s funeral, when the man with the wine-stain birthmark had given me an earful. “The steel manufacturer?”

“And Eloise’s father. He was a very influential man in this town. At his height, he had the entire police force in his pocket. Fitzgerald hated what the unions were doing to his business. Whenever rumors began that there was a strike on the horizon, he’d call the police commissioner and fifty men would be sent over to break up any organizing and arrest anyone Fitzgerald felt was a troublemaker.”

I was so busy hanging on her every word that I forgot to breathe. “On what grounds?”

Agnes shrugged. “What did it matter? Most of it was trumped up, which the officers knew and ignored.”

“How does Jim fit into this?”

“How do you think? Jim was a cop, and when he figured out the force was nothing but a puppet for Fitzgerald, he was outraged.” I tried to picture Jim as an idealistic young man and couldn’t. “Instead of forgetting what he knew and keeping his nose clean, he went straight to the top and wrote a letter to the commissioner, believing the guy didn’t know the score. A few days later, Jim was called in for a meeting, and when he showed up, it wasn’t just the commissioner waiting for him but Fitzgerald and a couple of goons from the force who Jim knew were turncoats. They railroaded Jim into believing he had only two options: continue down his current path and suffer the same fate as the union or shut his head, leave his job, and disappear with his reputation intact.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

Agnes smiled. “There was one other condition. Fitzgerald had a daughter who needed a husband fast. If Jim took the more pleasant path,
he would also have to take a wife.”

There it was—the thread that finally tied them together. I plucked it from the air and worked it around my fingers. As I did, I conjured Lieutenant Schmidt’s smug, swollen face blathering on, the night I’d found Jim’s body, about how Jim had been a corrupt cop. It had to look like that. One didn’t blast the boss in one breath and marry his daughter in the next. “I don’t understand why Fitzgerald selected Jim to marry Eloise, though. He seems like the last person he’d want to marry his daughter.”

Agnes opened a crystal candy dish nesting on the coffee table. She plucked a handful of Starlight Mints from their resting spot and offered me one, which I gladly accepted. The room filled with the sound of sticky cellophane. “That was the point. He wanted to punish them both.”

“Why?” I asked.

The candy clicked against Agnes’s teeth, then lolled across her tongue like a beach ball tossed in the surf. “Eloise scandalized the family by…” She lowered her voice to a whisper, for whose benefit I couldn’t guess. “Let’s just say her son wasn’t conceived with the benefit of marriage. By making her and Jim get hitched not only did she have to suffer the scandal she’d created, but she wouldn’t be allowed to marry the kind of man she wanted to end up with.”

“Someone with money and a reputation.”

“Exactly.”

I tried to imagine Eloise being so meek that she obeyed her father’s every command. Hadn’t she always been the queen bee? “Something isn’t adding up here. How could Fitzgerald force his daughter to marry someone?”

Agnes snorted, which propelled the candy into her throat. She pounded on her chest until the projectile was dislodged, then coughed as insurance that the blockage was really gone.

“Are you all right?”

She waved me off. Relief turned her face from red to white and I knew that a single Starlight Mint had just confirmed for Agnes that she really did want to live. “I’m fine. What was I saying?”

I bit my own stale candy in half, then pulverized it into tiny bits. “You were explaining to me how Cromwell Fitzgerald could force…” Something was niggling me, something else the man with the wine-stained birthmark had said. “Wait a second—someone at Jim’s funeral told me there was a rumor that years ago Eloise was up on murder charges and ended up escaping the rap.”

Agnes couldn’t have looked happier if I’d just told her Eloise was the one who’d been iced. “Even with all her money, people still talk about it.”

“Talk about what?”

Agnes shook her head, and suddenly she was no longer my peer but a much older woman with more experience of the world than I’d ever have. “Edgar’s father was an artist, someone Eloise was head over heels for. She became pregnant and expected him to marry her. When things didn’t go her way, he turned up dead two days later.”

“Wait a second—I thought Raymond Fielding was Edgar’s father?”

“Who?”

“The playwright.”

“Never heard of him. According to Jim, the guy was a painter. Eloise was the prime suspect in his murder, but apparently her father bought her way out of a trial and a potential prison sentence. In exchange, she had to do whatever he asked, including ending her painting career and marrying whomever he wanted. If she didn’t do as he ordered—forever—she’d be cut off from the family fortune.”

I followed my train of thought to the window. “So we have the reason for the marriage, but I don’t see why Jim would’ve stayed. He didn’t like Eloise, so why keep up the charade for all these years, especially if he knew what she’d done? I would’ve left her the minute the old man turned cold.”

Agnes cracked open the mint. “Let’s just say that she made him an equitable business deal. Cromwell Fitzgerald may not have known it, but some of the money he gave his daughter was being used to help prove the innocence of wrongly accused union members. McCain and Son couldn’t have existed without it.”