The Winter of Her Discontent (30 page)

“Four dead husbands,” whispered Olive.

I raised an eyebrow. “It makes sense that a girl that popular was bound to cross the wrong person at some point, but why would this person come after all of you?”

“There's more,” said Zelda.

“I figured there had to be.”

She talked to her Ferragamos. “We all have dead husbands.”

Something about the way she said it ruffled the hairs on the back of my neck. “That's rotten luck. So let me guess: whoever your pen pal is has been led to believe that you're bad luck. So they tell you to beg off your boyfriends because they think that by doing so they can keep them alive.”

“Doesn't make much sense, does it?” said Izzie.

“It certainly doesn't,” I said. “I'm as superstitious as the next gal, but it seems to me that if someone is willing to cut down Paulette to keep her out of a relationship, they better have more of a reason to do so than because they think you guys are black widows.”

“We live in senseless times.” Olive's peepers were wide and innocent, like a porcelain doll's glass marble eyes. “People have killed for much less.”

“I'd like to believe you, but I can't. What aren't you telling me?”

Zelda's worried eyes coasted over to Izzie and Olive. Neither of them were willing to speak for her. She was on her own. “Olive married her high school sweetheart right before he shipped out. Two weeks later he was dead.”

“His name was Bobby,” said Olive.

Zelda took a deep breath before continuing. Even though it wasn't her story, it affected her all the same. “When he died, the air force provided her with his pension and his insurance.”

“I didn't want it,” said Olive. “All I wanted was for him to be alive.”

“Of course,” said Zelda. “No one's saying otherwise.” She swallowed. “One of Bobby's friends starting writing Olive not long after Bobby died. It started as a condolence thing, but the letters began to get more personal, and she knew he wanted something more than to talk to a dead friend's wife. Olive was torn—”

“No, Zelda—let me.” Olive sat up straighter in her bed and released Izzie's hand. “I knew this man would likely die too. There were articles at the beginning of the war about how the pilots had the most dangerous jobs and that the mortality rates were expected to be the highest in the air force. I felt for this man who probably had only a few months left and didn't have someone back home to write to him or to tell him he was missed. He was scared and lonely, and all he wanted was what Bobby had had. Within a few weeks we were talking about getting married. I didn't love him, but I felt responsible for him, so when he came home on leave, I did as he asked and we went to city hall. He was dead a month later.”

“And once again,” said Zelda, “the money came.”

Olive's eyes lost their empty innocence. Her entire face was pleading with me to understand. “I was living with Paulette and Izzie at the time, and I think we all began to realize that we could do the same thing—befriend these men, give them what they needed, including a wife. We started going to the USO dances, the Canteen—wherever we were likely to meet pilots. We offered to write to friends, broth
ers, and cousins—made it known that we were happy to become pen pals.” She paused and licked her lips. “You have to understand how much we were all struggling then. Even Paulette was barely making a living wage. The war had been hard on the theater—nobody knew how long it would last and what people would be willing to see. I was in two shows that closed before they opened. We were living hand to mouth.”

I felt sick. They weren't just marrying men for their allotment money; they were banking on their dying so they could get their hard-earned cash. “How did you get involved in this?” I asked Zelda.

She didn't answer me. It wasn't hard to imagine what had happened: a few visits to the Canteen, Izzie's emotional sermon about how much the men needed Zelda, and the next thing she knows she's living in their brownstone, wearing fancy rags, and preaching their gospel.

“And if they hadn't died?” I asked. “What would you have done then?”

“Some of them didn't die,” said Izzie. So that's how it was: none of them were capable of predicting who would die, so they married as many men as they could to increase their odds. And I would bet dollars to doughnuts they hadn't anticipated what they would do when some of these men came home.

Lucky for them, it looked like it would be a while before they had to find out.

“What went wrong?” I asked.

“Everything was going well,” said Olive, “Until Paulette's Michael died.”

“Roger,” said Zelda. “His name was Roger.”

“She was out in California and had just been tapped for a small part in
The Gang's All Here
when she got the first letter.”

“What did it say?” I asked.

Now that Olive had decided to tell me the truth, it came out in a rush of words that moved so fast her mouth became dry and she had to pause for a drink of water. “That she was being watched. That the
writer knew she'd been married before and knew Paulette planned on doing the same to another man. It was clear this person had been following her for a while. They threatened to tell the press she was a bigamist, threatened to ruin her career for accepting money that wasn't rightfully hers. When neither of those threats caused Paulette to return the money to Roger's family, the letters changed tone. She would be hurt if she didn't stop what she was doing. She might even die.”

Olive paused and for a long, quiet moment we took in what must've happened.

“She moved here to get away from the threats. She was convinced that everything would stop once she left California. And it did for a few weeks, but then she discovered another letter.”

“And eventually,” I said, “whoever was threatening her made good on their word. How did her killer find out about the rest of you?”

Izzie stepped forward to answer the question. “They probably followed us to the Canteen. Who knows?”

“So why not just stop? If you're all being threatened, if someone killed Paulette and ran Olive down, why not give this person what they want and stop playing this game?”

More silence. Olive picked at her engagement ring. Zelda looked at her feet, at the expensive shoes that had saved her the day Olive was hit. Izzie nibbled on a carefully manicured nail, no doubt polished that morning at a Fifth Avenue salon that called her madam and served her champagne as she waited. Money, they all did it for money and nothing—not even fear of death—made them willing to give it up.

“Why bring Ruby into this?” I asked. It was hard to keep the venom from my voice. I wanted to announce how sick I felt, but I knew the moment I did, their cooperation would end.

“We work as a group,” said Olive. “The more women who participate, the more men we help.”

And the more money they could expect to roll in. They must all pool their allotment money and any insurance dividends so they
could still receive income even when their pick had the nerve to stay safe and healthy. That's why they lived together.

It was hard to be more disgusted with Ruby than I normally was, but here I was wondering if it was possible for her to sink any lower.

“We're not bad people, Rosie,” said Olive.

“Of course not.” The venom was there now. I couldn't fight it anymore.

“The men who died were going to die whether we married them or not. They were glad to give us something in return. They were grateful for what we gave them.”

“And what about the men you're still married to, the ones who haven't bothered to die yet? What are they getting from you? A few letters? A quick roll in the hay? At least the whores in Hell's Kitchen admit what they are and what their going rate is. Your men don't even know the score until they're six feet under.”

“That's not fair!” said Izzie.

“Maybe it's not. I don't know. I think I better go.” I picked up my pocketbook and started toward the door.

“Will you help us?” asked Zelda. I turned back to her. Her eyes were wide, and I swore I saw the tiniest bit of regret in them. What would she undo: conning these men or convincing her friends to tell me about it?

“Ask me tomorrow,” I said. “Right now I'm tempted to let whoever this is kill the lot of you.”

I
TOOK A CAB HOME.
I was too numb to board the subway and be part of the evening bustle. And I couldn't stomach the thought of watching enlisted men take their last ride before they were shipped out to God knows where. Once home, I stumbled drunkenly through the lobby and up the stairs. Light was visible beneath Ruby's closed door. I was tempted to bang on it until the entire house filled the hallway to bear witness to what she'd been up to, but I didn't have the strength. It wouldn't matter anyway. Ruby never cared what other people thought, and nothing I could say would change that.

“Hiya, stranger,” said Jayne. I lingered in the doorway for a full minute while she watched me. When I couldn't bear the distance anymore, I rushed to her side and collapsed in her arms. The waterworks began the moment I touched her. “Shhhhh…” said Jayne. “What's the matter? What's happened?” It took me ten minutes to get under enough control to tell her the story. Jayne listened in silence, punctuating my tear-soaked sentences with a brush of my hair and a squeeze of my hand. “It's horrible,” she said when I'd finished. “But it's not your fault. You didn't do anything.”

She had hit upon the crux of my misery: I could've been one of them. If I kept listening to them, how far was I from falling down the slippery slope that led to a loveless marriage and insurance dividends?

“All this time I thought they were good people, and here they were taking advantage of these men. What could make them think that was all right?”

This was the side of war none of us wanted to acknowledge, that maybe the country our men were fighting for didn't deserve that degree of sacrifice. We weren't all good people. We sold forged bonds, collected for phony charities, and gave soldiers venereal disease in record numbers. We preyed on the grieving with overpriced funerals and the hungry with black market meat that wasn't what it claimed to be. We could be worse than the enemy, at least as cruel. I certainly wouldn't have risked my life for us.

“What are you going to do?” asked Jayne.

“What I want to do is nothing. But what I need to do is find out who the killer is, for Al's sake.”

Jayne left the bed and went to the closet to retrieve our booze bottles. She paused in her activity just long enough to click on the radio: 434 missing were added to the army casualty list; meat shops were reported bare all over the city; and a priest, smuggling $87,000 in cash and an untold amount in valuables, had died on a train. Even our clergy couldn't be depended on to be good people.

“You know…” Jayne's voice faded as she focused on finishing mixing our drinks. “It makes sense that it's a family member.”

“Who's a what?”

Jayne handed me my drink. “The killer.”

We were back there.

She sloshed gin over the rim of her glass and carefully wiped the excess clean with her finger. “Logic wants us to think it's a jealous ex-girlfriend, right? But think about what Paulette actually did. She married a man for his allotment and his benefits, money that should've gone to his family. If they were depending on that cash, it would be pretty difficult to swallow Paulette getting all that dough.”

I nodded as quickly as she spoke. “And it would be even worse when they found out she was getting married again.”

“Or if they found out she was already married.” Jayne took a long swallow of her drink. “You said all this trouble started after one of Paulette's husbands died. Maybe it was someone in his family who snapped.”

“Do you think the answer could be that obvious?”

Jayne toasted me with her half-empty glass. “It's about time something was.”

 

It took her a little while, but Zelda was able to come up with a name for me. “His name was Roger Armstrong. He was from Norman, Oklahoma.”

I scribbled the name on the pad by the phone. “And it was after he died that Paulette started getting the letters?”

“Yes.” Zelda fell silent, and I tried to read in the hiss of the line what she was thinking. “I want you to know: I've been married only once. It wasn't just about the money. I would've been quite happy ending up with him.”

“Fortunately, you don't have to find out if that's true.”

“If I had just met him, if I'd been through one of those whirlwind courtships without any thought of the outcome, things still would've turned out like this. None of us killed these men. We didn't take anything that they didn't want to give us.” Her voice was choked with tears. She needed to convince me as badly as she needed to convince herself.

On the surface, she was right. Just like the contractors who were growing fat from the war, and the black market dealers who would be able to retire on what they made, what Zelda and her friends had done was nothing more than taking advantage of an awful situation. It was the inhumanity of their actions that chilled me, the way they sought out men who were going to find themselves in the most dangerous positions, and instead of waving away the right to their money, they saw it as payment for a job well done. A marriage no matter how tragic wasn't a job, and the only payment they should've wanted to accept when it ended was the memory of the time they'd shared with a man they loved.

That was the problem: love didn't enter the equation.

“You didn't have to take anything,” I told her. “Did it ever occur
to you where your husband's money would've gone if he hadn't married you?”

She stuttered. “No.”

“Well, I bet it occurred to someone. Maybe even whoever it was who bumped off Paulette.”

“Are you going to help us then?”

“I'm going to help someone who's been led to believe that they have to do the wrong thing in order to make the right thing see the light, but no—I don't see that there's anything I can do to help you.”

 

Four phone calls and twenty minutes later I had a number for the Armstrong family of Norman, Oklahoma. There was only one of them, thank God.

“Ready?” asked Jayne.

I nodded and asked the operator to connect me. I was going to have a hell of time explaining the long-distance charges to Belle.

“Hello?” An older woman's voice answered the line.

“Is this Mrs. Armstrong?”

“One moment please.” The phone was put down, and the voice summoned another. There was a polite distance in the way they spoke to each other, not as relatives talked but the way an employee addressed an employer.

“Yes?”

“Good evening, Mrs. Armstrong. My apologies for calling so late. My name is Rosie Winter and I was a friend of your daughter's some years ago. I was wondering if you might be able to tell me how to reach her. We lost touch and it's very important that I speak to her again.”

“I'm afraid you must be mistaken, dear. I don't have a daughter.”

I hadn't anticipated that. Perhaps this was a Mrs. Armstrong, Sr. “Are you Roger Armstrong's mother?”

“Yes I am. I was.” The wound was still fresh. I could hear it in her voice. “Roger's not with us anymore.”

“I know and I'm sorry.” My tongue had become too fat for my mouth. “How is his brother?”

“Roger was an only child, dear. What's this all about?”

“I seem to have made a mistake is all. I met someone once who I thought might've been related to him.”

“It could've been Paulette,” she said. Although the grief remained, her voice became increasingly tender. I could picture her staring at a photograph of the two of them, her fingers gently trailing the outlines of their faces. “That was his wife. Lovely girl. Looked a lot like the family. More than one person said they could've been kin.”

“I'll bet that's who it was. I'm sorry for bothering you.”

“She's gone now too. It seems like all the young people are.”

I couldn't think of a response. I put the blower in the cradle and held it in place just in case the power of her grief forced it up again.

“What happened?” asked Jayne.

“Roger was an only child, and now his mother gets to spend the night confronting his ghost thanks to me.”

“I doubt a day goes by that she doesn't have to deal with that, Rosie. You know what it's like. If you hadn't reminded her of him today, a photo might've or a lost sock or who knows what.”

I followed Jayne back to our room and slumped onto my bed.

“Maybe it wasn't a brother or sister,” said Jayne. “Maybe it was the mother.”

“I don't think so. A housekeeper answered the phone. If Mrs. Armstrong has the bees for servants, I doubt she's so desperate for cash that she'd want revenge on someone.”

“Maybe it wasn't the money. Maybe it was the principle.”

“No, she mentioned Paulette. You can't fake that kind of adoration.” I lay on my bed and Churchill joined me, wrapping his body around my arm. “I should've known it couldn't be that easy.”

Jayne picked up a copy of
Screenland
with Veronica Lake on the cover and aimlessly flipped through the pages. The cover teased an article called, “Why I Won't Be a Furlough Bride.” “So now what?” she asked.

“We could ask Olive and Izzie to tell us the names of every man Paulette ever had contact with.”

Veronica shook her head in disagreement. Jayne concurred. “Assuming they know who they were, that could take a lifetime.”

Churchill had had enough of my companionship and left my side. “Or we could wait and see what happens. Clearly, whoever this is has their eye on Ruby.”

Jayne froze mid–page flip. “Should we tell her what's going on?”

I closed my eyes and wished away the whole awful day. “Why should we tell her? If Ruby was willing to get involved in this scheme to begin with, she deserves to be scared for a while.”