Death Was the Other Woman (10 page)

ON THE WAY HOME
in the car, Dex was unusually hard on himself. I'd never seen him take himself to task for anything. Not really. But he did so now and it was frightening.

“What was I thinkin'?” he said very seriously. “I'm investigating something and I make a party of it? I know better than that.”

Mustard and Dex were in the front seat. I sat in the back alone, for the moment forgotten. I was staring out the window hard and trying not to think about poor Brucie, something that was made all the more difficult by the bloody spot on the backseat I avoided looking at.

The heat had burned off the day, and all that was left was the warm sweetness I'd noticed earlier. Only now the promise I'd felt had fled. The sweetness felt cloying, and sour on my tongue. Funny how a shooting could change your whole perspective.

“Hell, Dex, you don't even know that's what it was about,” Mustard said. “You don't know anything.”

“Yeah, well, I got an idea, don't I? I go into the club asking questions, and we get shot up on the way out. That doesn't happen every day.”

“Is that what you were doing?” Mustard said. “Asking questions? Of Lucid Wilson?”

Dex stared straight ahead and grunted.

“Ker-riste,” Mustard said with some heat. “Well, I guess you must have asked the right questions.”

“Or the wrong ones,” Dex said quietly.

Mustard took his eyes off the road for a moment and looked at Dex closely. It was a while before he spoke again.

“That too,” he said finally.

By the time they dropped me off on Bunker Hill, it was almost three o'clock in the morning, and I knew it was possible that Marjorie would already be up. Wednesday was her baking day. She had to get up practically in the middle of the night so that the bread we'd enjoy over the coming week would be ready for table by breakfast.

As much as I loved Marjorie, I hoped not to run into her now. And never mind the fact that I didn't feel like giving explanations. I needed to be in the office in a few hours. I needed to sleep.

I had barely gotten into my room, thankful that I'd managed to come home without alerting anyone, when I heard a soft knock on my door.

“Come in,” I called quietly, not surprised when Marjorie popped her head in. She looked half embarrassed to be checking on me and half just plain relieved. And maybe there was another half—though that would be too many—that looked disappointed or angry or some other parental emotion I didn't have a name for.

“Good to see you,” she said, the fear and relief in her eyes contradicting her calm tone. The worn cotton housedress told me that my fear had been correct: Marjorie was dressed for baking day. No matter what I would have done, those sharp ears would have heard me if she was already awake.

I didn't stop her as I usually do when she started straightening things here and there in my room. I knew it was a hard habit for her to break. Maybe too hard. And I could see it was a way of working off the excess energy she'd built up worrying about me.

“It's good to be home.”

“Mrs. Jergens?”

“In the hospital.”

“Oh, dear.” Marjorie looked genuinely concerned. “Nothing serious, I hope?”

“Not as serious as it could have been, I guess,” I sighed. Then I gave in. I knew she'd get it out of me eventually. Besides, who else would I have to tell? “A gunshot wound.”

“A gunshot wound,” she repeated. As always, most of Marjorie's thoughts remained unstated, but I could see her eyes run over me, checking my apparent safety as carefully as a mother's hands would have done. “Oh, dear,” she said again. “How awful. Was there . . . was there an awful lot of blood?” I followed her glance and saw there was some blood on the dress I was wearing, the lovely ivory dress.

“There was, yes. But we took her to the hospital, and they fixed her all up. I imagine she'll be back here in a day or two.”

“Do you think ...” Marjorie ventured. “Do you think that's a good idea, Miss Katherine? Perhaps she's a dangerous sort.”

I smiled through my tiredness. “She might be at that, Marjorie. This situation tonight though wasn't her fault. She wasn't being at all dangerous either. And she does seem very nice.”

“I'll give you that, miss,” Marjorie sniffed. “But I say she'll bear watching.” By now my room was fully tidied, and Marjorie stood before me, rubbing her hands together gently. A nervous gesture, I knew. There was more she wanted to say. More she
could
have said, but I knew she wouldn't. Nor was there anything
I
could say to make things entirely right. The fact was, there had been a few minutes there when I was actually in danger. And there was no sense trying to hide that from Marjorie. The blood on my dress told its own story. As much, I knew, as the fear in Marjorie's eyes.

Before she let me get to bed, Marjorie insisted I give her the dress so she could try to soak the bloodstains out of it. “It's a lovely garment,” Marjorie sniffed primly. “It'd be a shame to see it ruined.” I knew that for Marjorie there was more at stake than the future of a single dress. Washing the blood away—saving the dress—was something she could actually do to make things right. Something, in a way, she could do to save me.

I was too tired to argue, and she was right in any case. Doing the work now would probably save the garment. But with uncharacteristic darkness, I thought if all that had been ruined this evening was a single dress, we would be lucky indeed.

IN THE MORNING, I
was especially glad that Angels Flight is always free on the way down. I wouldn't have liked to spend the nickel, but forced to go down all those stairs on foot, I would have been a danger to myself and others.

There was no sign of Dex at the office. It wasn't a surprise but it was a question. Dex was always late. It made me wonder what he did in the morning when he didn't come in. Did he wander in the park? Do some secret charity work? Or was it possible that every morning he found the idea of another sunny day too difficult to face?

I was having a hard time facing the day myself. I told myself that the single Kir Royale I'd consumed had not gotten me drunk and was not now causing a hangover. Still, I'd felt better, though it likely had more to do with the total four hours of sleep I'd managed to get than any champagne concoction I'd sipped at.

When Dex breezed into the office at around eleven, he looked a lot better than I felt. His shirt was crisp and clean, he had on a new collar, he was shaved within an inch of his life, and his shoes were shined.

“What's with you?” I asked.

“Whadjamean?” he asked, all innocent-like as he perched himself on the corner of my desk in his usual fashion.

“You look ...” I'd started to tell him he looked normal, then realized this might not be the most politic thing to say. “You look rested, I guess. Or something.”

He laughed, a self-conscious sound. “I feel ... I dunno . . . clearer today than I have for a while, Kitty. It's awful that Mrs. Jergens was shot; don't get me wrong. But I can't help but think that bullet was intended for me. Not for my shoulder either. When I got home last night I got to thinking about. . . well, about a lot of things. About life and death and how very short it all can be. This morning when I woke up, it just felt good to be alive.”

I didn't say anything for a moment. What was there really to say? My usually morose and sodden boss seemed oddly renewed. And I knew I should have been happy, but it was like the earth had shifted beneath my feet. There are certain things— and certain people—that are just meant to be the way they are. You
count
on them being thus. And I hadn't counted on this new development. Rather than pursuing this line, I opted to retreat onto safer ground: the business at hand.

“I've been thinking about those girls, Dex. The ones at the Zebra Room I told you about last night.”

“When we were dancing?” he said, his eyes laughing. I looked away. A lighthearted Dex would take some getting used to.

“Right. When we were dancing.”

“It all sort of fits, doesn't it? If what those girls said is right, Harrison Dempsey was a marked man,” Dex said. “And it doesn't sound like much of a stretch that whoever he owed money to might have wanted to bump him off.”

“It's not good business though,” I said.

“How so?”

“Well, you don't get paid if you go around icing everyone who owes you money. I mean, do that enough and you end up with no one at all to pay you back.”

Dex stroked his chin and stretched out his legs in a way that told me he was thinking. Then he said, “OK, point taken. Still someone chilled him off—”

“Maybe
chilled him off,” I pointed out. “The police didn't find a body, and his wife says he's not missing.”

“Well, someone was dead, that much we know. We saw that for ourselves.” He thought some more. “So what have we got? A body that may or may not have been Dempsey. A possible attempt on my life that got a friend of Mustard's clipped. A client that doesn't want her money back. What do you figure that adds up to, kiddo? What do you figure our next move should be?”

I looked at him searchingly for a moment, trying to determine where he was going with all of this, because I knew he was drawing me to a path that led someplace.

“We leave it alone?”

He nodded slowly, his pale blue eyes bright.

“Right. We leave it alone.”

IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON I
ditched out to see Brucie. Dex said it was OK. It was another slow day and we even had a bit of cash, plus he felt kind of responsible for what had happened to her, so he said he didn't mind if I went.

“In fact,” he said, before I left, “take these four bits, and buy her a nice mittful of posies from me.”

I took a Red Car to the hospital, which was about a forty-five-minute trip. It made me realize at least one of the reasons Dex was so resistant to taking streetcars: with all those stops, it could be slow. Another reason was that you couldn't control who you shared the ride with. At various times between downtown and the hospital, I had to sit next to or near a couple of squalling babies, an old man with the smell of a three-day drunk and seven days unwashed on him, and a woman who coughed so hard, I feared she'd dislodge something vital.

I spent the time trying to read the paper, trying to drown out the coughing and the squalling and the smell of the drunk, and looking for some mention of either gunplay outside a Wilshire hotel or the discovery of an unidentified body with mysterious holes in it the night before. There was nothing about either one.

I arrived at the hospital with an armload of floral material, only to be told that Mrs. Jergens had left the hospital just half an hour before. I was glad, because that meant Brucie had pulled through just fine. But I would have been gladder still if I didn't have another forty-five minutes of streetcar to look forward to before I got back to the office. I thought about going straight home and seeing Brucie for myself, but decided against it. It had been nice of Dex to let me have part of the afternoon off, but, I reasoned, he might have need of me back at the office.

I was right.

It was after three when I got back. I saw that the door to Dex's office was closed, and I heard the mumble of voices—one male, one female. Lila Dempsey. I'd hoped to make it back before she got there, but the streetcar had made that impossible. And I hoped like hell that she'd found Dex in good condition— which seemed like a good bet, all things considered.

I found a dusty water pitcher in the back of one of the filing cabinets—it must have been used by the office's previous occupant, we didn't have a lot of use for water pitchers in our operation—and filled it in the bathroom, plunking the flowers into it unceremoniously and setting it on the edge of my desk. I poked at them a bit, trying to remember the floral arranging I'd learned at school. That felt like a lifetime ago though, and the faint skills I'd gained seemed to have fled. No matter what order I put them in, the flowers came out looking tired and wrong. I kept at it, knowing there was some formula that I'd seen others use. Some secret combination that would bring the whole thing to extravagant life. It eluded me.

I knew that all these flower shenanigans were really in aid of one thing: forcing time to go by more quickly until I found out what Lila Dempsey wanted with Dex.

I thought about rapping on the door and letting Dex know I was back, but once I was done with my flower arranging, I opted instead to “catch up on my typing.” Dex might appreciate the gesture.

I was only through about half a sheet of
rat-tat-tat
when Dex came out of his office, pulling the door closed behind him. My typing had alerted him to my presence.

He just looked at me for a moment. I looked back at him.

“So
is
it the wife?” I asked.

“It is.”

“What does she want?”

He shot a look over his shoulder at the closed door before answering. “Wants me to find someone.” He dropped his voice still lower. “Says he's missing.” Dex added this with a dramatic roll of his eyebrows. “And she wants some water.”

Of course. The one day the water pitcher was stuffed with flowers, I needed it to serve actual water. “I'll get her some,” then, “if I guessed who she wants found, would I be right?”

Dex pointed at me and winked. “You would,” he said. “Nice flowers,” he added as he headed back into his office.

I'D EXPECTED
some slightly older but no less dramatic version of Rita Heppelwaite, all sizzle, some steak, and lots of makeup and jewelry to go with it. Lila Dempsey couldn't have been more different. If anything, she was slightly younger than Rita—somewhere between twenty-five and a well-preserved thirty—with golden hair and skin so pale you got the feeling that if the sun were illuminating her from behind, you'd see right through her.

She was wearing a crisply cut gray suit of light wool with a cream-colored blouse beneath. The skirt stopped an inch or so below her knees. Below that, her calves were trim and her ankles slender. On another woman, the suit might have looked severe, even masculine. On Lila Dempsey though, it just seemed to enhance a delicate femininity. She looked like a blue blood; there were just no two ways about it.

As I brought the water into Dex's office, I could see that she also looked anxious. There were small bags under her slate gray eyes, and it looked as though she'd been crying. She had Dex's handkerchief in her hand. I was glad to see that it looked like a clean one. She'd threaded the hanky through her fingers nervously, plucking at it occasionally, as though reassuring herself it was still there.

She stopped talking the moment I came in, so I dropped off her water as quickly as I could, then skedaddled under her “thank you” and got back to my desk.

There was no question of eavesdropping this time. Unlike the brace of flatfoots the day before, Lila Dempsey was potentially a paying customer. We got few enough of those that both Dex and I took special care not to mess up when one was around.

When Lila Dempsey left the office, it felt like déjà vu all over again. Only this time, it wasn't Harrison Dempsey's curvaceous mistress who Dex escorted to the door, but his coldly beautiful wife. And like that other time, as soon as the door had closed behind her and we heard her footsteps retreating toward the elevator, Dex came over to my desk and made like he would have plunked himself down on the edge of it, but for the makeshift vase stuffed with flowers that had taken the spot where he usually perched his behind.

“What's with the posies?” he asked.

“You bought ‘em,” I replied. “Brucie had been released from the hospital by the time I got there.”

“Well, that's good,” he said. “And high time I bought you flowers anyway. A man oughta do that for his secretary every once in a while.”

“Cut the chitchat,” I said pointedly. “You know I'm dying to find out what she was doing here. So spill already.”

Dex grinned, but didn't keep me in suspense any longer.

“You're gonna like this, kiddo,” he began. “She said she heard I was doing work for Dempsey, so she figured she'd bring me some more business.”

“Working
for
Dempsey?”

“Right. I could have corrected her, told her I was actually working for her husband's mistress. ...”

“But I take it you did not?”

“You take it right. But strictly speaking, I did not tell a lie.”

“But strictly speaking, you didn't tell the truth either. You ever think about going into politics?”

Dex added a shrug to his smirk.

“So why did she want to bring you more business?”

“She says her husband is missing.”

I felt my eyebrows arch.

“That's what
I
thought,” Dex said. “But she said he usually checks in every few days when he's out of town.”

“I take it he didn't check in?” Dex shook his head, and I went on. “OK, what else?”

“Well, there's not much more, really. She wants me to find her husband.”

“Man, this Dempsey is one popular egg.”

“Another twenty-five bucks a day. Plus expenses. So listen, get Mustard on the line. I'm gonna need a car for a couple of days. She wants me to go to San Francisco, since that's where Dempsey is supposed to have gone.”

“A car?” I asked. “For what?”

“San Francisco,” Dex replied, as though I hadn't been paying attention.

“Can't you steam up there? It's a lot quicker to go by sea, for one thing.”

“I know that. I told you: she's paying expenses. That's a car, for one. And I'll need to get around once I'm there and . . . never mind, Kitty. I'm not having this conversation again. Just get me a car, OK?”

I sighed but gave in. He's my boss after all. “OK. But do you think you'll find anything there?”

He shook his head. “Absolutely not. But that's what she's hired me to do, and I'm doin' it. I gotta earn my twenty-five a day, right?”

“Plus expenses,” I added.

“Plus expenses,” he agreed.