Death Was the Other Woman (2 page)

“What is it?” His eyes focused on me slowly and he didn't get up. He was clearly half cut. Maybe more than half.

“What is it?” I repeated. “It's a car. What do you think?”

“No, I meant is it a Ford? Or a Packard? Or what?”

“Geez, Dex, I don't know. It's a car. I guess it'll be black. Whaddaya want?”

He grunted and lapsed back into looking morose, having hit a high of mildly interested for about thirty seconds.

“So what's the plan?” I asked.

It took him a few seconds to refocus.

“Plan?” he said, looking honestly confused. I choked back a stub of impatience.

“Yeah. Remember? Rita Heppelwaite? The boyfriend? You wanted a car. And there's someplace you're supposed to be. You didn't tell me where.”

He pulled himself out of his slouch and took a stab at sitting upright. He ran his hands through his hair and sighed deeply, as though something was causing him pain. I knew, however, that it was not actual pain. I'd been down this road before. I breathed a small sigh of my own and took a step back to watch.

As expected, a minute or so later Dex hauled himself up, straightened his tie, popped his fedora onto his head at almost the usual angle, put on his jacket, rummaged around a bit for his piece, gave it up, and headed out the door.

I followed fairly closely behind him, pausing only to grab my hat, coat, and handbag, grab his holstered gun off the coat-rack in his office, and lock the door behind me before I scurried down the hall as quickly as my sensible-but-still-ladylike heels could carry me.

Though we rode down in the elevator together, Dex didn't say anything to me, not even when I passed him his gun. I held his jacket while he put on the holster, but he continued to seem lost in whatever dark thoughts he'd been wrestling with in the office.

When we located the car Mustard had dropped off, I broke the silence. “You know I'm driving, right?”

He looked at me—bemused or annoyed, I couldn't quite tell—then said very succinctly, “I did not know that,” while he shook his head. “What gave you that idea?”

“Well...” I smiled, shrugged, and held up a fob. “I've got the keys, for one thing.”

“Ah,” he said thoughtfully.

“Right, Dex. Which confirms why I'm driving. You didn't even realize you didn't have the keys ‘til right this second, did you?”

“I don't need a babysitter, Kitty.”

I did not correct him on the name, just this once. Though I've always disliked being called Kitty.

“You don't need a babysitter,” I agreed, “but you
do
need a chauffeur.”

“Can you even drive?”

I looked at him with more patience than I felt.

“Dex, you taught me.”

“Right. Well. . . well. . . who's gonna answer the phones?”

“You mean, who's gonna tell your bill collectors you're in Chicago?”

That sigh again. “Get in,” he said finally, walking around to the passenger side.

“Where we going anyway?” I asked, as I started up the huge black car.

“Lafayette Square.”

“You didn't need a car to go to Lafayette Square. A Red Car would have gotten you there easily.”

“Thanks, Mom,” he said dryly, something that was especially funny since he's a lot older than I am. “We're starting at Lafayette Square. Buckingham Road and Saint Charles Place, to be precise. From there, I'm not sure. But it's gonna take a car. Now pipe down already. If you're gonna drive, drive. Otherwise I'll take it from here.”

“As you wish, sire,” I quipped, as I started the car and got it rolling. “We're on our way.”

I WAS NOT RAISED TO WORK
in an office. Quite frankly, I wasn't raised for commerce at all. For the first two decades of my life I had more delicate concerns. My mother died when I was very young, and my father instructed those charged with my care that I was to be brought up to be the mistress of a large house, hostess to the dinners that would further my someday husband's business concerns, and needless to say, to be the mother of this same mysterious husband's children.

My father was from a different era. Sometimes I thought his expectations for me weren't modern at all: more 1830s than 1930s. Not that I ever said anything. Not that I would ever have dared, which is sort of the point, if you follow.

I was carefully schooled and gently reared, as they say, and from the age of seventeen to the very end of my father's life, I seldom saw my childhood home on Bunker Hill.

I was in San Francisco in my final year at Mrs. Beeson's Finishing School for Young Ladies when I got the news that I'd become an orphan. I was twenty-one at the time, and feeling very much as though my wings had grown beyond the point where the small school could contain them. My best friend, Morgana Cleverly, and I had applied to go to Vassar in the next school year. Morgana's mother was a Vassar girl, and my father liked the fact that Morgana had family in the Hudson Valley, near campus. It had made him feel more receptive to the idea of my living on the other side of the country.

I didn't think that having a country between us would change things very much: there were times when San Francisco may as well have been the moon. I'd seen little of my father in the three years I'd been at Mrs. Beeson's, often spending weekends and even some holidays with Morgana's family in Pacific Heights. And my increasingly infrequent trips home had become less and less comfortable. When I saw him, Father was preoccupied, distant. He always seemed to have a lot on his mind.

I wonder now, should I have pressed him in those days? I have a good mind, and Mrs. Beeson's was the best school of its kind in the West. “Nimble” was what Mrs. Beeson called my mind, and though it wasn't always a compliment, I knew it meant I was anything but stupid.

So what if I had pressed Father? Would he have allowed me to help him? And if he didn't let me help him, would seeing how much I cared have changed the outcome? Would he have seen something in me—something different—that would have altered the course of events, the course he ultimately chose? Those are not good questions, I know, if one wants to go forward with a clear heart. Sometimes it's difficult to turn your mind away. Your good mind. Your nimble mind. And sometimes it hurts your heart. And it's moot, of course, because I didn't do any of those things. Maybe I should have had some kind of foresight. But I did not.

It was October 29 and I was in Mrs. Sedgewick's music class. It was Elvira Cheswell's turn at the bench, and I was helping her practice the scales. A big part of the curriculum for senior girls at Mrs. Beeson's was working with the younger ones. Mrs. Beeson said it straightened our backs, got us ready for the idea of giving of ourselves, something she felt was important for young women of our station. A philanthropic spirit would be necessary, she told us repeatedly, both for women of position and for our likely role as mothers. When Mrs. Beeson wasn't around, the older girls teased that what she really had in mind was cutting her own expenses: with what was in essence a whole class of teaching assistants, she was likely required to fill several fewer places on her staff.

On that October day, Mrs. Beeson herself came to the door of the music room and asked to have a word with me. The look on her face put me in mind of all kinds of things. What had I done? Some report not handed in? Some weekend misadventure with my friends that had gotten back to her ears? Yet there had been nothing so significant that even its discovery would cause a personal interview.

So, lesson one: we make these things be about ourselves. In truth, it had nothing at all to do with me. Though what she told me changed my life.

“It's your father,” Mrs. Beeson said, once I was seated in her office.

“My father?” Nothing she said could have surprised me more. Or so I thought.

“Yes, my dear. Your father.” She cleared her throat delicately. The throat clearing and that quiet “my dear” put me on sudden alert. “Miss Pangborn, I just don't know how else to say this, dear. Your father . . . your father has passed to the world beyond.”

It took me a full minute to understand what she'd said. A minute when she said nothing at all to me, just sat primly behind her desk with her hands in her lap and watched as I sorted through her words for the sense beneath them.

The world beyond.

At first I was envisioning some sort of business trip— perhaps to the Far East—but I couldn't recall him telling me about anything like that. And then, of course, it hit me. She'd told me in a ridiculous way, but how else should she have said it? “He exited this world by attempting to fly out of a window from the top floor of the Pangborn Building”? Or “He could not face what he'd created”? Or, really, a lot of other things. All of them would have been true. Bottom line: the stock market crash of 1929 was more than a crash for me; it was the day I lost, in a certain way, my innocence, and—and this leads me back to Dex—the day when phrases like “financial reality” would begin to have meaning for me, because they certainly never had before.

It's uncharitable of me, but I'm still angry with my father. It was not very good planning on his part. In so many ways. For instance, how could he wager everything on one bad bet? Didn't he ever hear about too many eggs and a single basket? Most important, of course, how could he make this decision? How could he decide that no father at all was better than one who was a financial failure? My biggest fear: that the reality of his fatherhood didn't enter his mind at all.

He lost everything. You'll have gathered that already. The Pangborn Building—all eight stories of beaux arts beauty— was gone in a heartbeat and renamed almost as quickly. All of the companies that had fueled the need for a Pangborn Building? Gone. The automobiles, the cottage in Malibu, the motor yacht, and of course, all the money needed to do things like buy food and pay for private girls' schools, all gone, gone, gone.

Later I found out that my father must have had some kind of inkling, because he had done one tiny thing to protect me. At least I tell myself it was to protect me; it's possible he had other reasons. I try not to think about that.

Unbeknownst to anyone other than his lawyers, he'd transferred the title of the house on Bunker Hill to Marcus and Marjorie Oleg, the husband-and-wife chauffeur and housekeeper who had been with us as long as I could remember. He'd done it a full year before he died. I hope he did it to ensure I'd at least always have a roof: he knew very well that Marcus and Marjorie wouldn't turn me out.

And they didn't: they let me keep my old room with the private bathroom Father had installed when I became a “young lady” and needed my privacy. But there was no money for anyone. And suddenly even Marcus and Marjorie were out of jobs, and things were very difficult. Like some weirdly arranged family though, we've all worked together to get through. The two of them have taken in boarders—it's a big house—and I contribute what I can when Dex remembers to pay me. It's really not a bad life, but as I said, it's not the life I ever envisioned when I was at Mrs. Beeson's. Not the one that was envisioned for me. And Vassar, of course, was suddenly out of the question.

It was while I was selling Mother's jewelry at a scary little pawnshop at First and Alameda that I met Mustard. He did not work at the pawnbroker's, of course. He was just there, no doubt fixing something, when he overheard the part of my plight I could bring myself to tell the man pawing at Mother's things. I was hoping to get enough to at least pay for my father's coffin. I must have been quite pathetic.

“For crissakes, Lou.” It was Mustard, behind me. I hadn't noticed him before. His suit was well made and dark, with a fine stripe that was even darker. He wasn't a tall man, but he had a solid look about him. Not fat, but you got the idea he hadn't missed a lot of meals either. “She just told you her father died, and she's trying to scratch enough together to buy him a proper funeral. You can give her more than
that.”

“Yeah, well.” Behind his wicket, Lou scratched at himself. I could see that all that scratching had rimmed his nails in black. “These days
everyone's
got a dyin' dad, Mustard. You can't believe every sob story you hear, y'know.”

“Look at her, Lou. She's just a kid. What are you? Seventeen?”

I pulled myself to my full height. “I'm twenty-one,” I said truthfully, though I saw the look of doubt in his eyes.

“Aw, never mind. It looks like nice stuff.” Then to me, he said, “Is it good stuff?”

“I... I don't know, honestly, sir. I would imagine so. My mother was from a good Baltimore family, or so my father always told me.”

“Your mother's dead, too? Ker-riste, Lou! Sorry, miss. Listen, Lou, what were you offerin'?”

“Fifty bucks,” Lou said defensively, scratching again. “For the lot.”

“And how much is the funeral?” Mustard asked, looking at me.

“One
hundred
and fifty.” I think by then I was probably close to tears.

“Listen, kid, Lou's going to give you two hundred.” I gasped, and if I wasn't mistaken, Lou gasped too. “But you keep this ring.” Mustard slid a piece that I knew had belonged to my grandmother toward me. It was ebony and emerald set in white gold. “It doesn't look like it's worth much anyway,” though he kind of grinned when he said it.

“That's just crazy,” Lou snorted from behind his window. “I ain't gonna do that.”

“What's crazy, Lou?” Mustard looked straight at the pawnbroker. I would have sworn I saw Lou shrivel slightly.

“Nothing,” he muttered, opening his cash register and counting out the money, then writing out the pawn slip. He did it with ill grace, but he did it. “You owe me for this one, Mustard.”

My savior smiled while he watched me stuff the cash into my handbag. “Come on, kid, I'll buy you a coffee,” he said, when the transaction was complete. He walked toward the door and held it open for me. I must have hesitated. “Don't worry, I ain't gonna bite. I've got a proposition for you.” Another hesitation. He laughed. “It's not that kind of proposition. You'll see. C'mon.”

In truth, I felt inclined to trust the man, though I didn't have to work hard to imagine Mrs. Beeson's face as I preceded him out the door. He was definitely
not
our sort of people, was what she would have said. Though, in my new world, I was no longer sure who “our sort of people” were.

The coffee shop was clean, and the coffee good, if stronger than I was used to. It was just after noon and I hadn't had breakfast, so when my companion offered me a bowl of soup, perhaps I didn't hesitate as long as I should have. He didn't order anything to eat, but when mine came, I started right to work on the chicken-and-noodle concoction, the cook's special of the day.

Mustard sat back and smoked while he watched me eat, a grin all but hidden on his face. He didn't say much about my obvious hunger except, “For a skinny kid, you sure can pack it away. I like to see a broad eat.”

I put the spoon down neatly on the plate under the bowl and looked fully into his gold-rimmed gray eyes. “I'm not a broad,” I said, tightly but with, I hoped, some authority.

He raised his eyebrows and just looked at me for a full ten seconds that might have been a minute. Then he laughed, and I could tell he wasn't laughing at me. “You know, you're right, kid. I'm sorry. You're not a broad at all. What's your name?”

“Kate . . . Katherine. Katherine Pangborn.”

He sat back in the booth and whistled, the cigarette he'd put down in the ashtray forgotten for the moment. “No kid-din'? Are you
that
Pangborn?”

I shrugged. Nodded. I probably was. “William Pangborn was my father.”

He whistled again, then reapplied himself to his previously neglected cigarette. “Sheesh.” For a moment he seemed lost in thought. “Sad times,” he said, exhaling a column of smoke at the ceiling, then crushing his cigarette in the ashtray.

I nodded again, then went back to my soup. It was delicious, and I honestly didn't know when I'd see food this good again. Marjorie did the best with what she had for our meals, but she usually didn't have much. Things were that tight.

Mustard waited until every speck of the delicious soup was gone before he told me what was on his mind.

“Look, a buddy of mine—a shamus, see?—his business is doing real well, and he could use a secretary.”

“Shamus?”

“P.I., you know. Peeper. Gumshoe,” he explained.

I looked at him cautiously and waited.

“You think you could do that?”

“Do what?” I said, honestly perplexed.

“You know . . . secretarify.”

I shrugged.

“Do you type?”

I shook my head.

“Take shorthand, maybe?”

Another shake. I wasn't even exactly sure what shorthand was, but I knew I couldn't take it, and if I could, I didn't know where I'd take it to.

He looked surprised. “Well, what
can
you do?”

I laughed. A gentle laugh but heartfelt. There was a lot I could do, really. In a flash I realized how useless all of it had become. “I can play the piano. I can make a souffle. I can organize a dinner party for twenty-four and ensure there are no conflicts in the seating arrangements.” I paused and contemplated my nails before I went on. “I can do needlepoint. I can crochet. I can ride a horse. And I can knit when called upon.” I looked at my companion and smiled. “But knitting is certainly
not
my strong point. I know what clothes to wear for every situation ...” Then I added, almost as an afterthought, “And I know what sort of clothes
you
should wear, as well.”