Come Hell or Highball Read online

  Berta clucked.

  “When I telephoned the store to complain,” I said, “I learned that Alfie had an apartment in Washington Square. Nine Longfellow Street, apartment B.” The address had lodged in my memory like a splinter.

  “The scoundrel!” Berta said. “If, of course, you do not mind me saying so.”

  “Be my guest.”

  That discovery had been nine years into my joke of a marriage. I don’t think I’d even been stung. Merely relieved, because a love nest meant that Alfie wouldn’t take girls to our Park Avenue place. Later, when looking for an extra button in Alfie’s highboy, I’d noticed the key. But I’d never actually been to the love nest. Not yet.

  * * *

  I found Longfellow Street. Quiet, narrow, lots of leafy trees, brownstones all in rows. Respectable, but not Park Avenue.

  Berta scowled. “Washington Square is where the bohemians live.” She pronounced bohemians the same way one might say plague of locusts.

  I motored slowly along, squinting up at the house numbers, until I spotted 9.

  I parked the Duesy at the curb. We loaded our arms with luggage and trudged inside and up a dim, creaking stair. We stopped outside the door marked B.

  A slice of yellow light shone beneath it.

  “Alfie must’ve left the light on the last time he was here.” Dandy. Another bill I wouldn’t be able to pay.

  I fished the key from my handbag, and Berta, Cedric, and I bundled through into a tiny foyer.

  Cedric growled.

  I stared through into what appeared to be the sitting room.

  A man stared back.

  He was bent over a side table. It looked like he’d been in the middle of rifling through a stack of newspapers and magazines.

  My scream lodged in my throat. Luckily, Berta wasn’t having the same kind of trouble. She let rip a bloodcurdler. Cedric bounced and yapped.

  “Ahhh!” Berta screamed. “Police! Help! Police!”

  The man straightened. He wore a dark rumpled suit and a gray fedora. His eyes were shaded by his hat brim, but I saw a firm chin and a sheen of gold-red stubble. “What do you think the police’ll do?” he said. “You’re breaking and entering. And would you make that dog shut up?”

  I picked up Cedric and stepped in front of Berta. “Who the heck are you? And I’m not breaking and entering. I—I own this place.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Own it. Don’t you mean rent? I found a copy of the lease under a sofa cushion.”

  “Right,” I said. “Rent. I rent it.”

  “And you live here?” He swept a hand around the sitting room.

  Only then did I take in the low-slung, white velvet furniture. The cream-and-black striped wallpaper. The taxidermied zebra head mounted on the wall. The several reprehensibly executed female nudes in gilt frames. The furry white rug—polar bear?—on the hearth.

  “Interesting taste in decoration,” the man said.

  I had no business noticing him. His tallness, his bright agate-gray eyes, those farmhand’s shoulders. I was a widow of less than a week, for Pete’s sake. But his fedora was tilted down at an intriguing angle, and he had an Irish gangster’s swagger. If a lady didn’t notice him, she needed to schedule a trip to the eye doctor.

  He quirked his lips. “Also kind of interesting that there aren’t any ladies’ clothes in the bedroom. Well, except for a few unmentionables that I’m not so sure are yours.” His eyes slid down my frame. “They were kinda small.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I have, Mr.—”

  “Oliver. Ralph Oliver.”

  “I have, Mr. Oliver, a good mind to smack you with my handbag, but seeing as it’s genuine Florentine leather, I think it’s rather too good for you.”

  Berta piped up. “I could smack him with my handbag, Mrs. Woodby. It is very durable.”

  “Shush,” I whispered.

  Ralph chuckled. “It wasn’t an insult, Mrs. Woodby—”

  “How do you know who I am?”

  “—since not every fellow likes to cuddle up to broomsticks.” He was looking at my hips again. “Some of us like a girl with a little volume.”

  I almost threw a hatbox at him. At the same time, I had a vision of him sweeping me into his arms—I’d glimpsed taut muscles under that rumpled suit. “What, precisely, are you doing in my husband’s apartment, Mr. Oliver? It appears that you’re searching for something. Looking for recompense for a debt, perhaps?”

  “What do you mean? Woodby was low on sugar?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know how my husband left me in the lurch.” Phooey. I was tearing up.

  Ralph shoved his hands in his trouser pockets. Why does weeping make men so nervy?

  “Okay, okay. I’m a private detective,” he said, and sighed.

  “Like in a dime novel?”

  “Sure. Like in a dime novel. Just looking into a small matter concerning your late husband.”

  “What kind of matter?”

  “Not at liberty to say.”

  “Are there more debts? Wait, it’s a kid, isn’t it? No, wait—a long-lost nephew!”

  “Nothing like that, Mrs. Woodby. And stop crying, all right?” He sauntered toward us, reaching inside his jacket.

  “Gun!” Berta shrieked. “He’s got a gun!”

  Ralph held up his hands. “No gun. See? Only my card.” He passed it to me, and then dodged around us to the front door.

  “I saw a gun in there,” Berta grumbled.

  The door slammed. Ralph was gone.

  I stared down at the card.

  RALPH OLIVER

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

  7 PLINY STREET, SECOND FLOOR

  Berta stared at the card, too. “Mr. Woodby was in some sort of trouble,” she said. “Why else would a private detective be here?”

  “Alfie was always in some kind of trouble,” I said. “Do you think there’s any whiskey and ginger ale in this apartment?”

  4

  I woke the next morning facedown on Alfie’s white velvet sofa. I was fully clothed, and my tongue felt and tasted like a delicatessen pickle.

  But a heavenly scent drifted on the air, an olfactory Hallelujah Chorus of cinnamon, butter, and yeast dough.

  I sat up. The left side of my bob clung to my cheek, and the other side flipped out. My eyes were scratchy from failing to remove my makeup last night, after two and a half gin and tonics in the kitchen. (There had been no whiskey or ginger ale in sight.) And Cedric was prancing around in the foyer, an urgent look in his eyes.

  I almost called out, “Hibbers!” Then everything came flooding back.

  I shrugged into Alfie’s Burberry trench coat, pulled on some oversized galoshes, leashed Cedric, and clumped downstairs and out into the sparkling spring morning. Once Cedric was finished, we went back up to the kitchen.

  The love nest’s kitchen was a cramped, yellow-tiled space with white cupboards and drawers from floor to ceiling. An enamel cookstove-oven combination, a zinc sink, and a table took up most of the floor. Two windows overlooked a brick wall. A wood-encased radio sat on the windowsill. Berta had placed a bowl of water on the floor for Cedric. Cedric found it, and lapped. Droplets went flying.

  Berta was pulling a tray of cinnamon rolls out of the oven. She saw my hair and face, and assumed a quietly appalled expression.

  “Did you enjoy sleeping in a real bed?” I asked.

  “No, not especially. I had no choice but to remove all of the bedding. Luckily, I had packed a small quilt in my suitcase.”

  I pictured her suitcase. How had she fit a quilt in there?

  “That bedroom is outfitted like the fifth tier of hell,” Berta said. “Mirrors on every surface. All that black satin.” She shuddered. “And the lavatory is still worse. What sort of person would place a mirrored drinks cabinet by the bathtub?”

  “That could come in handy. Is there any coffee?”

  “In the percolator.” Berta transferred rolls onto plates.

  I found two coffee cups.
True, they were painted with a Byzantine design of reclining nudes. But they’d do. “Did you go to the market this morning?” I asked, pouring coffee.

  “Do you think Mr. Woodby kept flour and sugar in this den of sin?”

  Berta’s hair was braided into the Swedish bun she always wore. She wore a clean, pressed dress, too. How had she found time to iron a dress?

  I passed her a coffee cup, being careful to turn the Byzantine design away.

  She sat. “You do not serve me, Mrs. Woodby. I serve you.”

  “Seeing as I owe you three months’ worth of wages and I have no idea how I’m going to pay for anything ever again, I ought to be serving you, Berta. And since I’m no longer your employer, please, call me Lola. We’re equals.”

  “Hmph.” Berta sipped coffee. “A Society Matron like you, without money?”

  “Don’t call me that.” I sank into a chair.

  “Why, it is like a chicken without its feathers.”

  “You mean I’m, what? Cold? Plucked?”

  “Pathetic.”

  I stuffed a piece of cinnamon roll into my mouth. Maybe Berta was right. Here I was, holed up in my deceased spouse’s lair of iniquity, smothering my anxiety with baked goods. No house, no money; I probably needed a plan. Because if I didn’t figure out how to pull myself up by my bootstraps soon, I’d be living in my parents’ house and having daily tea parties with whole flocks of Society Hens.

  I swallowed. “I wasn’t always, you know—”

  “Wealthy?”

  “Right. I grew up in a little town in the Middle West. It had only one paved street, running down the middle. The rest were dirt. I lived there until I was seventeen, which was when my family moved to New York and my father started working on Wall Street.”

  In 1910, the Duffys of Scragg Springs, Indiana, had become the DuFeys of New York, New York. My parents, Eula and Virgil, keep this fact hidden like a contagious rash. Along with the embarrassing details of Father’s patent farm machinery dealings.

  “If you were not always wealthy, then you might not be opposed to finding employment,” Berta said.

  “Well, yes. Once I think of what I’m cut out for.”

  “Did you attend school?”

  “Public school in Scragg Springs, and then for one whole year here in New York I attended Miss Cotton’s Academy for Young Ladies.”

  “Ah. Finishing school. Then you might teach piano or singing, or watercolor painting. Or flower arrangements.”

  “I wasn’t really a … gold-star pupil at Miss Cotton’s.” I had almost been expelled. Twice. Once for sneaking a cigarette with my friend Daisy outside the servants’ entrance, and once for shortening my hemline three inches. That, of course, was back when the distinction between my legs and ankles was crystal clear. “Music wasn’t really my—”

  “Tin ear, yes. I thought so.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “No need to be ashamed.”

  Berta was taking this Equals thing and running with it. “I could make a pretty penny if I wanted to, you know.”

  “Oh?” Berta served herself another cinnamon roll. “I hope that you do not mean to become a lady of the night? You are too old for—”

  “No!”

  “What about the offer for employment you received yesterday?”

  “What offer?”

  “From Miss Simpkin. The red-haired harlot in the cemetery.”

  “Are you crazy, Berta? I can’t steal from my friends!”

  “She said she would pay you. Beggars cannot be choosers.”

  “Wait.” I narrowed my eyes. “You want me to do the—the job for Ruby Simpkin so I can pay you your back wages. Is that it?”

  “Of course. And so we can eat. And—” Berta looked around the kitchen. “—purchase some proper kitchen equipment.”

  “Kitchen equipment? What about clothes?” What about whiskey and ginger ale?

  Berta sniffed. “There would be nothing improper about setting up a small, discreet business of … retrieving things.”

  I snorted. “A discreet retrieval agency?”

  “Yes. My uncle Sven, in Sweden, he used such an agency once to find his missing bride.”

  “Did he find her?”

  “Indeed, snug in the bed of his groomsman. Poor Uncle Sven always smelled of fish—he was a fishmonger. The girl could not bear it. The important point is, although the bride refused to go home, Uncle Sven still had to pay the finding agent.”

  “Sounds like a detective agency to me.”

  “You would make a fine detective, Mrs. Woodby.”

  “Who, me?”

  “I have noticed you are equipped with an especially fine eye for detail, as well as a cynical view of mankind.”

  Was that a compliment?

  There was a thud on the front door. Berta and I both jumped. My coffee sloshed, and Berta dropped a piece of cinnamon roll on the floor. We stared at each other.

  Another thud. Then, a key—scritch, scritch—in the latch.

  Cedric was too busy eating fallen cinnamon roll to bark.

  “That’s it!” I jumped up. “If it’s that rotten Irish detective again, why, I’ll sock him one.”

  But it wasn’t Ralph Oliver. It was a small natty fellow with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and surly lips.

  “Who in Sam Hill are you?” His beady eyes flicked from my hurricane hair to my maraschino toenails.

  I drew myself up. “I might ask the same of you. How did you find yourself in possession of a key to my abode?”

  “Lady, I don’t know what language you’re speaking, but I own this joint. I’m the landlord, and Woodby ain’t paid up in two months.”

  I deflated. “Landlord?”

  “That’s right. You one of Woodby’s hotsy-totsy girls, huh?”

  “I am his wife.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they all say.” He craned his neck. “Who’s the pudgy dame?”

  I turned. Berta loitered in the hallway that led to the kitchen. “My cook. But she doesn’t speak English.” I shot Berta a significant look.

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” the landlord said, “and trust me, I don’t even wanna know. Tell Woodby he’s gotta pay up by next Friday, or I’m taking all his junk and throwing it in the street, and then I’m changing the locks. Ya follow?”

  “Quite.”

  He scuttled off.

  I turned to Berta.

  “Discreet retrieval agency?” she said.

  I rubbed my temples. “Just this once.”

  * * *

  The Frivolities was a wildly popular revue that had been running for three years straight, seven days a week in the Unicorn Theater on Forty-second Street. I’d never been myself, since if I want to look at a scantily clad lady, all I need to do is take a gander in the bathroom mirror.

  Driving in New York City is a recipe for a bad mood, so Berta and I took a taxi to the Unicorn at nine thirty that evening, well after the show had started. We found the stage door in a side alley.

  Berta eyed the rubbish bins and prowling cats and clutched her handbag to her bosom.

  I had a sort of creepy-crawly feeling myself. But nobody else was around, except the cats.

  I tried the stage door. Locked. So I did what any dime-novel gumshoe would do, and rapped out “Shave and a Haircut.” The door squeaked open. After bribing the weedy doorman—he seemed to take us for outraged wives come to wreak revenge on offending chorus girls—Berta and I made it inside.

  “How much did you bribe him with?” Berta whispered.

  “Five dollars.”

  “Five! These are business expenses, Mrs. Woodby.”

  “Lola,” I corrected.

  “You must learn to be more moderate.”

  Why was Berta speaking as though we were in this for the long haul?

  Backstage was stuffy, and it reeked of smoke and greasepaint. Leggy girls costumed as feathery birds, angels, top hats, and Egyptians buzzed around.

  Berta cheeped
into her palm.

  “It’s all right,” I whispered. “They’re only doing their jobs.”

  “Their jobs? In Sweden, a young girl would be cast off forever if she wore such things.”

  “Are you sure you’re from Sweden, and not the Middle Ages?”

  A blonde in a silvery costume darted by.

  “Excuse me,” I said to her.

  She stopped. “Yeah?” She snapped chewing gum and eyeballed my matronly black suit.

  “Could you tell me where I might find Ruby Simpkin?”

  “Whatcha want her for? You ain’t that lady who said Ruby tricked her son into promising to—?”

  “What? No. I—she asked me to meet her.”

  The blonde jerked a thumb down the corridor. “Number three.”

  Dressing room number three looked like it had been bombed. Chorus girls dashed to and fro, getting ready, by the looks of it, for a number in which they were sequined ducks. Sparkly costumes were flung over chairs and exploded from garment racks. Makeup counters were framed by hot yellow lightbulbs. The counters were strewn with lipsticks, powder puffs, eyebrow pencils, coffee cups, magazines, and brimming ashtrays.

  I spotted a red head of hair at one of the makeup counters. We picked our way over.

  Ruby was applying lollipop-red lipstick. She lifted her eyes to meet mine in the mirror. “Oh,” she said. She screwed the lipstick down and popped its cap on. “You came. Both of you.”

  “Miss Simpkin,” I said, “I—we, actually—have decided to take you up on your offer about the, um—”

  “Hold on a minute,” Ruby said. “I’m not in the next number, so wait’ll the rest of the girls clear out.”

  A man yelled out in the corridor, “‘It’s a Ducky-Duck World’! Places, girls, ‘It’s a Ducky-Duck World’!” All the chorus girls except Ruby stampeded out of the dressing room, leaving us alone.

  “It’s my hair,” Ruby said. “Sam—he’s the director—says it clashes with those lousy duck costumes.” She wore a jester’s costume, with a purple-and-yellow harlequin bodice, and purple high heels. “So. Changed your mind about my offer, huh?”

  “Well, yes. I—”

  “Let us first discuss the fee,” Berta interrupted.