The War Against Miss Winter (8 page)

He frowned and strained to answer the question. “Probably
Journey’s End
.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a peach.”

W
HILE
J
AYNE HUNTED FOR A
powder room, I cornered the butler who’d greeted us at the door and asked him for two things: a cab to the depot and the name of his employer. He and the rest of the household staff had been hired for the night by a service. The only information they’d been given was the location of the event, the time it would end, and what food and drink to serve.

Ten minutes later Jayne and I were in a taxi on the way to the station. Our driver was a chatty fellow who smelled like a still, so rather than briefing each other on what we’d learned, we concentrated on keeping the cabbie alert and attentive. The train was no more conducive to conversation; apparently every sailor on the East Coast had been visiting his family and was due to return to the Brooklyn Navy Yard that night. By the time we returned to the Shaw House, it was nine o’clock. As we approached the building, a lumbering shadow left the steps and darted up the street.

Dinner was long over, so we scammed a couple of rolls, two pieces of pie, and a pot of coffee from the kitchen and smuggled them up to our room. Churchill greeted us at the door with a disenchanted mutter that quieted as soon as I offered him half of my Boston cream.

“Cat food,” I told Jayne. “Remind me tomorrow that no matter what else I do, I must buy cat food.” I shut the window Jayne had left open for Churchill and surveyed the feline’s damage. He’d littered the newspaper-covered radiator with his pellets and sprayed the curtains with enough liquid to turn the white fabric yellow. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the room was so cold his urine had frozen.

“I hate you,” I told him.

“At least he went on the newspaper,” said Jayne.

“Shhh,” I said. “Don’t say a word about it. The minute he figures out you liked something he did, he goes out of his way to do the exact opposite.”

Fortunately, gin doesn’t freeze, so within ten minutes Jayne had made us cocktails, I’d cleaned up the excrement de cat, and the three of us were sitting on my bed huddling for warmth. Once the hooch had diminished my desire to kill and the weak coffee had restarted my heart, I pulled out Fielding’s obit and spread it on the bed before us.

“So what did we learn?” I asked.

Jayne fished out her olive. “Rich people serve cheap booze.”

“Do tell me you gleaned more than that.” I leaned forward and put my elbows on the bed so I could better examine the newspaper.

“I got an audition.”

“Isn’t that a pip?”

“What do you want me to say, Rosie? Everyone there was talking theory, and when they weren’t doing that they were trying to pump up their own productions. The only thing I learned about Fielding is that nobody knows anything about him and I believe that’s the rap we started with.” She emptied her glass and replaced it with a coffee cup. “What about you?”

Churchill spied the dinner rolls and batted one of them down the bed. “For starters, I got confirmation that it’s a script that’s missing. According to Lawrence Bentley, Fielding was a recluse and word is he had a pile of unproduced plays.”

“Great, finding
one
of them is hard enough.”

I tore the remaining roll in half. I would’ve killed for some butter. All of us would’ve. “It gets better. Bentley received a mailed invitation to today’s shindig, and I’m willing to bet most of the other theatrical muckety-mucks did too.”

Jayne rubbed her eyes. “He just died. I mean, the mails are good, but how on earth could you print an invitation, post it, and get it to someone in two days?”

“Crystal ball maybe?” I dipped the roll in the coffee. It hung limply before disintegrating in my hand. “Needless to say there was no host’s name on the invitation.”

“What about the household staff? Maybe they know something.”

“I’m a step ahead: they were hired for the day and they don’t know by who.”

Jayne lay back on the pillows. “Wow. Anything else?”

“I think Lawrence and Ruby are finished.”

Jayne smiled in spite of herself. “Does she know?”

“I hope not.” I smoothed the newspaper. “So here’s what we know: someone, who was not Raymond Fielding, hired me to find a missing play of Raymond Fielding’s, then bumped off the man he was impersonating but, before he did that, invited every director and writer in New York to a party to honor the victim. The question is why?”

Jayne poured herself some coffee and refilled my cup. “Let’s start at the beginning: the murderer wants the play. According to the paper, Fielding’s house was broken into twice, but we don’t know if anything was taken. If something was, that may be why Fielding hired Jim.” Jayne gestured with her cup. A dollop of coffee breached the rim and landed on my quilt. “The ringer gets wind the play is missing and panics because he wants it for some reason. He knows Fielding doesn’t have it and he knows Fielding hired a detective, so he visits you to see if you’ve learned anything.”

I shook my head. “You’re forgetting all kinds of important things. Sometime between when the play went missing and the ringer came to see me, two men croaked. If Fake Fielding wants to find this thing, it doesn’t make sense that he’d kill the only two people who might know where it is.”

“Oh.” Jayne stretched her legs. “Maybe Fake Fielding isn’t our murderer, but he could still be the host of the party. Maybe he thought a writer or director might know something about the play, so he brings them all together hoping one of them might spill.”

It was an interesting idea if not entirely plausible. And if he was our host, couldn’t he have been in disguise? “Do you think he was there tonight?”

Jayne shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

I tried to remember if there was someone there who didn’t fit, but each face I recalled had the same arrogant artiness of every writer and director I knew. “What could be so important about a play that he’d go to these lengths to try to find it?”

Jayne examined her ring and scraped something off its surface. “Maybe it’s worth a lot of money.”

“Plays are only worth something if they’re a manuscript and the writer’s dead.”

“Well…”

I cut her off with a shake of my head. “Long dead. Shakespeare dead. No, this can’t be about dough unless the play was scrawled on the back of twenty large.”

A knock sounded at the door. With the speed of a cheetah, Jayne slid the martini glasses under my bed and I tossed a pillow onto Churchill.

“Come in,” I said. Ruby peeked her head around the door. Her presence was as welcome as a Burma Shave billboard at the Grand Canyon. “Oh, it’s you.”

She bared her fangs. “Great to see you, too. Tony’s on the phone for you, Jayne.”

My eyes rose to the ceiling as Jayne exited with a squeal. “What I meant was I’m glad it’s you because if it was Belle we’d have to worry about the cat.” On cue, Churchill climbed out from under the pillow. He stretched his limbs—one by one—with a flicker that ended with his left foot, then jumped off the bed and retreated under the dresser. “Close the door, would you?” She did as I requested, only instead of stepping out into the hall first, she lingered in the room like a bad stink. “Do you need something, Rube?”

Her hand disappeared into her pocket and removed a small piece of paper. “You had a phone message.” She tossed the scrap onto the bed. “Congratulations.”

“It’s only a phone message, Ruby. It’s not like I got mail.” According to her perfect penmanship the end of the world was upon us. “The drought is over: I’m being offered a lead.” An unfamiliar feeling bubbled
in my belly until I couldn’t help but smile.

Ruby leaned against the door. “Good for you. You’ll want to make sure to tell Belle.”

“Tell her? I’m going to sing the news while accompanying myself on the harmonica.” I read the note a second time and felt my enthusiasm wane. I might’ve been offered a part, but it was for Dull and Dramatic’s war drama. Worse, the company producing it was People’s Theatre, a group that had been around since the WPA Federal Theatre Project. They were known for producing experimental shows and politically charged pieces, which meant I’d been drafted for eight weeks of misery.

I forced a smile. I had a job. I didn’t have to leave the house. This was good news. Sort of.

Ruby sighed heavily to remind me she was still in the room. I wasn’t sure what it would take to get her to leave, but I suspected it involved gunfire and air-raid sirens.

“What’s on your mind, Rube?”

Her eyes drifted to the floor. “We lost our backers.”

“That’s a kick—I’m sorry.” Backers were the funding sources big shows depended on to mount. If they lost faith in you and pulled out, you lost the show, an increasingly common occurrence since the war. “I’m sure something will come through.”

She lifted her head and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “Oh, I’m sure it will. It’s certainly not the show’s fault. You know how backers can be.” I didn’t, but I nodded my understanding all the same. “I can’t help but be disappointed though. I was depending on this show.”

If Ruby was looking for empathy, we were all out. “Surely Lawrence has other pots on the stove.”

A glaze fell over Ruby’s eyes, flimsy like crinoline. It had never occurred to me that she felt normal human emotions. I’d assumed her home planet forbade it. “Lawrence and I have decided to discontinue our relationship.” It didn’t take a grammarian to crab that Lawrence was the noun acting out the verb in that sentence.

I wasn’t a mean person by nature, even when pushed to my limits, but being in a better place than Ruby made me forget myself. I wanted her
to envy me. I wanted her to feel as I’d felt every day since we met. “Now that you mention it,” I said, “Lawrence was acting peculiar.”

The tips of her eyebrows bent downward until it looked as if someone had drawn twin black slashes on either side of her nose. “You saw Lawrence?”

“Didn’t I mention it? I ran into him this afternoon at Raymond Fielding’s wake.”

“Raymond Fielding died?” Ruby’s face widened in shock.

I fluttered my eyelashes to confirm I’d been crowned one of the elite. “Did you know him?”

“Of course.”

I fought a sneer. “Anyway, Lawrence was quite charming, though you’re probably better off without him. I wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with a man who was so…comfortable pitching woo with other women.”

Instead of rising to my bait, the long-suffering Camille forced a bright smile across her face and changed the topic as if it was summer drapes on the first day of fall. “I hope Lawrence will be very happy. But enough about him; I was wondering how your job’s going. It must be fascinating working for a detective.”

The little bit of guilt I felt for teasing Ruby stripped me of self-editing. “Things aren’t so good. My boss died and I was, until this moment, on the dole.” I looked at the paper again and wondered if this wasn’t a cruel joke. I didn’t get parts when I needed them. The only time I was ever cast in anything was when I was already cast in something else.

“I’m sorry to hear that. His name was Jim…something, right?” asked Ruby.

“McCain.”

She nodded as though she’d known the name all along. “How did he die?”

“Heart attack,” I said. “Why do you ask?” Her lips quivered as she sought a response. The fog left my brain. “Are you looking for a job?”

Ruby’s mouth popped into a no-shaped
o
, but instead of sounding her denial, she nodded.

“Gee, I wish I could help, but like I said, I’m on the shelf.” If anyone else at the Shaw House came to me looking for work, I would’ve combed the ladies help-wanted ads until I found something for them. My lack of desire to help Ruby wasn’t so much a personality issue as disbelief that she needed my assistance. If I’d had half as much work as her, I wouldn’t have had to take another job until 1954. “There’s always the Navy Yard. I hear they’re dying for women.” The papers were filled every day with pictures of women doing their part for the war effort. While I admired the gumption these Rosie the Riveters showed, there was no way I was giving myself over to some mind-numbing nine-hour day whose only reward, aside from the paycheck, was an
e
for effort.

Ruby gasped. “I couldn’t possibly do that.”

I figured as much, but the offer was an easy way to measure her desperation. “You might want to ask the other girls. There’s always somebody who’s leaving a job or knows about one that’s opening up.”

Ruby’s face turned sour. “This isn’t the sort of thing I want to spread about. I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us.” I nodded my consent and Ruby stomped out of the room. Before I had time to contemplate why the universe was rewarding me and punishing her, Jayne breezed back in and took me by the hands.

“What’re you doing on Friday?” She pulled me to my feet and swung me around in an awkward waltz.

“I don’t know.” The question had a suspect feel to it. “Why?”

“We thought you might want to go out with us. Dancing.” She changed directions and tempos. We tangoed toward the windows.

“By
we,
do you mean you, me, and Tony? Or you, me, Tony, and some fix-up you aren’t going to tell me about until I get there and I’ve no choice but to stay?”

She tried to spin me, but her arms couldn’t reach over my head. “Tony says he’s a nice guy.”

I broke free of her grip and sat on the radiator. “Oh sure, a nice guy with a rap sheet.”

“When’s the last time you had a date?”

“Today as a matter of fact. It’s January sixth and it’s mine all day.”

She tried to pull me to my feet again, but I turned my keister to lead and remained glued to the radiator. “Come on, Rosie. It’ll be fun. You need a night on the town.”

“Things are looking up for me and I’m not about to spoil them by getting blotto with some Johnson brother.”

Jayne fished the martini glasses out from under the bed and deposited them on the night table. “Your boss was murdered, some thug trapped you in his office, and the guy who gave you an impressive wad of cash to find a play turned out to be an imposter and possibly a murderer. If that’s your idea of things looking up, I’d hate to see your bad day.”

I pulled the scrap out of my pocket and waved it at her. “I got a job.”