Come Hell or Highball Read online

“That’s right,” Lillian said. “Chisholm told us absolutely everything.”

  I looked at Mother. “Alfie a flat tire and an embarrassment? That’s yesterday’s news, of course, but I didn’t know you felt that way.”

  “Aren’t you sad?” Lillian asked.

  “Why should I be? He was a hideous husband.”

  “But now you’re poor.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “How can you speak in such a laissez-faire fashion?” Mother said, pronouncing faire like fay-yuh. She had been taking private French lessons. I suspected her tutor was a native of the Bronx. “Lola, you are to assume an attitude of correct decorum this instant. I arrived home after an exhausting journey—the Italians do not know how to cook, oh the things we were forced to consume—to learn that everything has gone to the underworld in a handbasket.”

  “The underworld?” I massaged my forehead.

  “Do not goad me, child. Your husband is dead—”

  “I told you as much in the telegram.”

  “—Chisholm Woodby has taken up residence in Amberley, and now Olive Arbuckle’s husband has been murdered.”

  “You think that’s all my fault? And back up a bit. Amberley? How did you know my—the—house’s name has been changed?”

  Mother and Lillian exchanged a sly glance.

  “What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “It is time you knew, Lola,” Mother said. “For the duration of our Continental tour, Lillian has…”

  The lemon wafer turned to sand on my tongue.

  “Chisholm and I,” Lillian said in her Miss Priss voice, “have been corresponding. We have an understanding.”

  “An understanding? You’ve—you’re letting that prig, that absolute prig, romance you? Right under my nose, without even telling me? He’s my brother-in-law!”

  Lillian pruned her lips.

  “It is not as though we intentionally hid anything from you, Lola,” Mother said. “Only days before we set sail in March, Mr. Woodby requested my permission to write to Lillian, and hear of her impressions of Europe.”

  An awful thought struck me like a thunderbolt: If Lillian married Chisholm, Folie Maison, or Amberley, or whatever you called it—my house—would be hers. She’d probably redecorate the entire place in shades of puce.

  “Oh, I wished to ask you, Lola,” Mother said, “have you had the pleasure of making Mr. Raymond Hathorne’s acquaintance? He is in the soda pop business. Such a delightful, interesting man—”

  “Interesting?” Lillian said. “Mother, he was as dull as arithmetic.”

  “No, no, he was très charmant—”

  Mental note: Ask Mother exactly how much she’s paying that French tutor of hers.

  “—when we met him at the captain’s table during our voyage home. I was ever so impressed with his—”

  “Bank account?” Lillian said.

  “Lillian! No. With his character.”

  Was it possible that Mother was already attempting to reel in another big fish for me?

  “I have no interest in meeting new gentlemen,” I said. The briefest image of Ralph Oliver flickered in my mind’s eye.

  “Of course not. You are in mourning, and a proper duration of time must pass. But on the other hand—” Mother toyed with her bracelet. “—it never hurts to sow seeds, dear. And I got the distinct impression that Mr. Hathorne is not only on the wife hunt, but also not completely opposed to … unconventional sorts of ladies.”

  “You’re unconventional, Lola,” Lillian said. “Unconventional figure, unconventional face, unconventional habits, unconventional—”

  “Oh dear me, look at the time,” I said. I could’ve sent a few barbs in Lillian’s direction, but she’s so green. Life will knock the wind out of her sails eventually. One hopes. I grabbed a fistful of lemon cream wafers. “I really must be going.” I made tracks across the carpet.

  “But you haven’t told me where you are living,” Mother said. “At a hotel?”

  “Yes. The Ritz.”

  “How can you afford it?” Lillian asked

  “Lola,” Mother said, “you can always come home.”

  When pigs fly.

  * * *

  Berta had made ham and pea soup in my absence. The apartment was fragrant, even homey—assuming you averted your eyes from the leopard-skin pillows and the naughty art books.

  “Good heavens,” Berta said when I came into the kitchen. “You look as though you have encountered a specter.”

  “Worse. My family.”

  “Oh dear me. I thought you were out shopping.”

  Berta knew all about Mother and Lillian. But when I told her about Lillian and Chisholm’s courtship, her jaw fell.

  “Come,” she said. “Have some soup. I have already walked the dog.”

  “You walked Cedric?” I sat at the table. “I didn’t know you were on speaking terms with him.”

  “Hmph.”

  Berta ladled soup over the scandalous picture in the bottom of the bowl. I dug in. Berta did the same. Cedric watched us from his cushion in the corner. A square, crackerlike object lay untouched in the bowl beside him.

  “I purchased a box of Spratt’s Puppy Biscuits at the market,” Berta said, “but he refuses to go near them.”

  “Well, of course not. He wasn’t raised in a barn.”

  “He is spoiled.”

  “He’s pedigreed. There is a difference, you know.”

  “He will need to mend his ways, or he will starve. At any rate, I have been thinking.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “We should visit the harlot again and ask her to tell us more about the film reel. Since we are not having good fortune in finding Sadie Street’s address, we must, as Thad Parker says, sniff out a new trail.”

  I supposed harlot meant Ruby Simpkin. “All right,” I said.

  * * *

  We arrived backstage at the Frivolities around nine o’clock. I was dog-tired, and hoped we wouldn’t see Ralph Oliver under a heap of chorus girls again. Mr. Oliver had nothing to do, of course, with the fresh coat of lipstick I’d applied, or the way I’d slipped into a frothy peach Coco Chanel dress. A lady’s got to keep her morale up. Not for the fellows. For herself.

  Once again, we found Ruby perched at her mirror in the dressing room.

  She twisted to face us. The muscles around her mascara-clumped eyes looked tight. “I was hoping you two would show. I read about, you know—” She leaned in. “—Arbuckle. Dead. In the evening paper. I didn’t know how to reach you, see, and I was hoping you got the film before the shamuses started crawling around his house.”

  I swallowed. “We didn’t find it,” I said.

  “What?” Ruby wailed.

  A couple of chorus girls looked over.

  Ruby lowered her voice. “What do you mean, didn’t find it? Where the heck is it?”

  “Well, we found it. But we didn’t get it.” I explained how I’d seen the film reel in the safe, and how it had disappeared at some point during the evening.

  Ruby lit a cigarette.

  “But we have a lead,” Berta said.

  Lead? Berta was certainly picking up Thad Parker’s lingo like a sponge.

  “What sorta lead?” Ruby asked.

  Berta told her about the two calfskin weekend bags, and how Hibbers had seen the film reel in one of them. “Do you know either Sadie Street or Eloise Wright?”

  “No,” Ruby said.

  I was pretty confident she was telling the truth.

  “It might help things along if you told us what’s on the film,” I said. “Then we might be able to deduce whether it was Sadie or Eloise who stole it.”

  “Tell you what’s on it? No way.”

  “But whatever is on that film was, maybe, enough to make someone commit murder.”

  “Listen, you agreed to get my film reel, and instead you’ve gone and lost track of it! It could be anywhere. Anyone could be looking at it.” Ruby seemed small and terrified in her skimpy
costume. “I’ll give you more dough,” she said. “Five thousand.”

  Berta opened her mouth; I shot her a firm glance.

  “No,” I said, “we’ll stick to the original deal. Simply tell us what’s on the film, for Pete’s sake.”

  “If I told you that, you’d be in hot water, too. Just like me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ruby spun back to the mirror and started brushing on more rouge. “Just find it, okay? And if you ask me about what’s on it one more time, I’m putting the fritz on the whole deal.” She was acting tough, but her voice shook. “Now, scram. I gotta get ready for the next number.”

  I jotted down the telephone number of Alfie’s love nest on a scrap of paper from my handbag. I placed it next to Ruby’s rouge box. “Ring me up if you change your mind,” I said.

  13

  “Whatever is on the film is incriminating not only to Ruby,” I said to Berta once we were outside. “It’s somehow incriminating to anyone who knows what’s on it.”

  We walked down Forty-second Street. Theatergoers bustled along—ladies in furs and lipstick, fellows in dark suits and fedoras—chattering and pushing. Marquees with white lightbulbs lit up the air, and garish billboards advertising plays and revues studded the sides of buildings. In the street, horns beeped and cabbies yelled. The stale, tangy odor of the subway wafted up through sidewalk grates.

  “I told you that harlot was lying about why she wanted the film reel,” Berta said. “I had fancied it was one of those saucy French films. But it must be, instead, something quite different.”

  I dodged around a couple of soused sailors. “I’ve got it—maybe it’s a crime or something. Caught on film.”

  “That is possible. If the criminal’s identity was evident on the film, then whoever saw the film would therefore be in danger.”

  “Not to mention whoever is looking for the film would be in danger.” I shivered despite the springlike evening air. “Berta, we aren’t Thad Parkers by any stretch of the imagination. We’re only a couple of ladies who need to pay the rent.”

  “Self-doubt doesn’t suit you, Mrs. Woodby. It is terribly aging.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “And we are as clever as Thad Parker. True, Thad is in possession of a gun at all times.…” Berta tightened her grip on her handbag.

  “That’s just it.” The crowd pushing along the sidewalk felt hostile. I lowered my voice. “The murderer could be right here, and we’d be none the wiser. I suppose we’ve got our wits, though, haven’t we?”

  “Indeed, we have. What is more, we have a sense of purpose, which is a quality that Thad Parker is at times sadly lacking.”

  We did have purpose in spades—if keeping yourself in an apartment and out of prison sufficed.

  * * *

  I slept until noon the next day. I struggled upright on the sofa, my back feeling like a rusted steel trap, and looked around the sitting room. “Cedric?” His little doggy bladder couldn’t have lasted this long.

  “In the kitchen,” Berta called.

  I wrapped myself in Alfie’s paisley robe and staggered through.

  “I walked Cedric already,” Berta said. She was munching a raisin bun at the table. “You appeared to need the extra sleep, seeing as you were sleeping with your mouth so wide, I feared flies would buzz in.”

  Cedric sat at Berta’s feet, staring up at her with steadfast attention. Well, not at her so much as at her raisin bun.

  “Have you been feeding Cedric table scraps?” I asked.

  “Good gracious, no.”

  I poured a cup of coffee for myself from the percolator. When I sat down, I noticed several magazines, one newspaper, and London Lowdown, the latest from Frank B. Jones, Jr., on the tabletop.

  “I visited the newsstand and the bookshop when I took Cedric out,” Berta said.

  “So I see.”

  “These publications cost me nearly one dollar, all told. I added the exact amount in here.” She waved a small notebook, upon which she’d printed Business Expenses. “We must do things properly.”

  “Are Thad Parker’s further adventures really a business expense?”

  “His insights are most illuminating.”

  “Okay. And maybe it’s because I haven’t had enough coffee, but I don’t quite see what those magazines have got to do with business.”

  “Research.” Berta held one up. It was an issue of Motion Pictures Weekly. The cover featured a photograph of some film star with Vaselined eyelids and a wavy bob. The lettering read TEN CENTS, AGNES AYRES, WILL THE MOVIES SOON COST TWO DOLLARS? and WHAT MATRIMONIAL LOVE MEANS BY FRANCINE KERGSTALL. “Utter rubbish,” Berta said. “Page after page of harlots displaying their anatomies.”

  I’d had a few sips of coffee by now, and understanding began to glimmer. “You don’t think they’d actually print Sadie Street’s home address in one of those pulp packets, do you? Why, she’d be swarmed by fans if they did. Not to mention reporters.”

  Berta’s eyes flashed. “Perhaps we shall uncover a lead. Unless you have a better idea?”

  I sighed. “Fine. Hand one over.”

  Berta slid over a copy of Movie Love, along with a raisin bun and the butter dish.

  I devoured one raisin bun after another and thumbed through the magazines, inspecting them for any mention of Sadie Street. “No address,” I said, “but she is quite the most talked-about girl at the moment. I had no idea. These columnists make her out to be a kind of wholesome, girl-next-door sort. Doesn’t really line up with what I made of her.”

  “Nor I.”

  There were columns about new pictures, glamour photographs, and articles that relayed stars’ beauty secrets, slimming diets, and romantic ruminations. Quite a bundle of pieces on Bruno Luciano, too. He had burst onto the scene only in the last year. It seemed the Latin Lothario enjoyed his beefsteak medium-rare, had his suits shipped from London, was devoted to Colgate’s Rapid-Shave Cream (as long as they paid him to say it, I supposed), and slept only on silk sheets.

  Yep. That sounded about right.

  “Listen to this,” I said. “This says that the head of Pantheon Pictures, George Zucker, discovered Sadie Street when she was working at the perfume counter of Wright’s Department Store on Fifth Avenue. Says she was a sweet, humble shopgirl, working to pay for her sick little brother’s operation, when George Zucker saw her angel face, gave her his card, and invited her to his film studio in Queens for a screen test.”

  “Wright’s Department Store?” Berta frowned over the top edge of her newspaper. “The store of Eloise Wright’s husband?”

  “Yes. The plot thickens.”

  Berta was reading the New York Evening Observer. HIGH SOCIETY MURDER was emblazoned across the front page, with the subtitle MOTION PICTURE STARS QUESTIONED IN PORK AND BEANS KING’S DEATH.

  “Perhaps now is not the proper moment to show you this, Mrs. Woodby,” Berta said.

  “Don’t tell me it’s Ida Shanks’s column.”

  Berta pushed over the newspaper, folded open to the society page.

  I bit the bullet (well, I actually bit into my fourth buttered raisin bun) and scanned the column. Ah, lovely, my mention came first: “Which monumental society matron”—Ida, bony-hipped as a mule, never could resist a dig at my figure—“has forgone mourning to partake in scandalous parties that end in murder?”

  “That one has an axe to grind,” Berta said.

  “It’s because we grew up together, in Scragg Springs. Attended the same schoolhouse, even, up until my family moved away to New York. Imagine my surprise when I ran into her again here in New York, with a herd of society reporters outside some gala or other. It was awkward, let me tell you. I’d come along in the world. She had, too, I suppose. I mean, she’s got a newspaper job, and she attended a ladies’ college in Illinois or someplace.”

  “Envious,” Berta said. “Exactly like a girl in my village in Sweden—”

  Not another one of these tales.

  �
�—named Lotta. Scrawny little creature. Envious of my figure. All the lads liked me, liked my baking. Lotta could not bake, and she looked like she could not bake. Arms like drainpipes.”

  I carried my plate and cup to the sink. “Shall we go up Fifth Avenue and stop in at the perfume counter at Wright’s Department Store? Maybe someone there can tell us where to find Sadie. And while we’re at it, we could go and hunt down Eloise in the Foundations Department.”

  “Fine. But no shopping. We must keep our finances under control.”

  “Shopping? Who, me?” I said.

  * * *

  An hour later, our taxicab rattled to a stop on Fifth Avenue. I’d left the Deusy parked on Longfellow Street to avoid circling about for a parking spot. I paid the driver while Berta scribbled the fare amount in her business expenses notebook.

  Wright’s Department Store was several floors high, built of white stone, with lots of arched windows and brown-striped awnings. We pushed through one of the brass revolving doors.

  Inside, the first floor was taken up by the food hall and the cosmetics department. The store was jammed. Voices echoed against vaulted ceilings, shoes clattered on marble floors, and if you squinted, the place looked like a swaying ocean of hats.

  Wright’s food hall peddled Belgian chocolates, caviar in tiny glass jars, tinned foie gras, funny little pickled things (these were meant to go with cocktails, but everyone pretended, ever since booze was outlawed, that they were hors d’oeuvres), biscuits in ornate tins, fragrant teas and coffees, and candies pretty enough to wear as jewelry.

  “Hold your horses, would you?” I said, nudging Berta. I stopped in front of a wall of gorgeously wrapped chocolates.

  But Berta hadn’t felt my nudge, and she was swallowed up in the crowd.

  I hesitated. It would be tough finding her again in this throng. On the other hand, I hadn’t had good chocolate in at least a week.

  “Torn?” a male voice said in my ear.

  I turned to see Ralph Oliver’s crinkle-cornered gray eyes. “Following me again?” I said. “I’d think it would grow wearisome.”

  “Not at all. It’s one adventure after another with you, Mrs. Woodby. I was just starting to think you were getting a little boring—”

  “How dare you?”