The Winter of Her Discontent (2 page)

“A
L'S IN THE HOOSEGOW?” I
asked Ruby.

“The what?”

“The clink. The slammer. The Big House. The pen.”

“If those are synonyms for jail, then yes, I suppose he is.” Ruby was back to her usual self, her chin high and haughty, her voice clenched with irritation that she should be lowered to speak to me at all.

“Why didn't you get us?” asked Jayne.

Ruby twirled her dark hair around her finger and examined its ends with much more interest than she was giving to us. Her hair was rolled in the front and loose in the back—a style the slicks claimed was the new look but which could make even Ginger Rogers look homely. “I was about to use the phone, and he was more than happy to leave a message.”

“He who?” I asked.

“
He
didn't say and
I
didn't ask.”

Jayne jumped off her bed and pushed Ruby out of the doorway. I abandoned
Astonishing Stories
and followed her to the hall, where the public phone teetered atop a small marble-topped table. Jayne picked up the blower and asked the operator for Tony B's exchange.

“Are you sure you want to talk to him?” I asked.

Jayne shrugged. Tony wasn't just Al's boss; he was Jayne's boyfriend. A few weeks before he'd promised her he was going to go straight, or at least as straight as a lifelong gangster could go. It quickly became apparent, though, that he had no such intentions, and
Jayne had decided that the best way to tell him how she felt about his reneging on his promise was to give him the cold shoulder.

As soon as he came on the line, her voice grew hushed, her one-sided conversation impossible to penetrate. I paced the hall as they jawed, trying to remember if anything seemed odd about Al. Sure, he hadn't said much, but Al never did. He was his usual big, brooding self.

I rapped myself on the noodle. I'd missed an opportunity. I hadn't seen Al for weeks, and here he shows up, gift in hand, trying to tell me something I was too dense to pick up on. How did I miss it when the signs were so clear?

Jayne disconnected.

“What's the wire?” I asked.

“Tony says it's true. The coppers picked Al up twenty minutes ago and took him to the 19th Precinct.”

“Who did he supposedly bump?”

Jayne took a deep breath. “His girlfriend.”

“Al had a girlfriend?” When I'd first met Al, he'd just finished a three spot for writing bad checks. He'd turned to the sordid hobby as a way of getting money to keep some chippy in the lifestyle she'd become accustomed to. As far as any of us knew, when Al got three to five, she got lost. “Who was he seeing?”

“Beats me,” said Jayne. “But whoever she is, she was found the night before last, beaten to death.” I shivered at the thought of this nameless woman as bruised and bloody as the meat he'd brought me. Al couldn't have done that. He may have made his living roughing people up, but he wasn't a killer.

Was he?

As much as I liked Al, I didn't really know him. He was a nice guy who'd done me a good turn, and while that might qualify me as a character witness, it would hardly vindicate him.

“What can we do?” I asked.

Jayne's lips pursed; her forehead wrinkled. “Tony said we should stay out of it.”

“You're kidding me, right? Is that supposed to mean he's guilty? Tony's helping him? What?”

Jayne shrugged. “I don't know—he just said jail's the best place for him right now.”

“Unbelievable.” Tony had implied before that he didn't hold Al in the highest esteem, but I couldn't believe he'd just let him rot in the pen. I marched back to our room and grabbed my coat.

“Where are you going?” asked Jayne.

“To see Al.”

“What about Tony?”

“What about Tony? Look, Jayne, Al came here tonight for a reason. He needs my help and I'll be damned if I'm going to miss the opportunity to do him a turn a second time.” I tied on my red wool snood and wrapped my scarf around my neck. “You coming?”

Jayne shifted her weight from one leg to the other. She had only recently started to stand up for herself, and you could constantly see her brain doing battle between what was easiest and what was right. “All right,” she said, “just give me a minute to fix my hair.”

 

Here's how it was: the month before, Jayne and I got in a little too deep trying to find out who killed my former boss—private detective Jim McCain—and the aforementioned playwright. Before he died, Jim had a feeling I was going to put my nose where it didn't belong, so he asked Al, who owed him a favor, to tail me just to make sure I stayed out of trouble. I didn't, not because I was trying to be difficult but because trouble has a way of following me. Rather than abandoning me as a lost cause, during those dangerous, difficult weeks, Al went without sleep, food, or a decent cigarette in order to see to it that Jayne and I were safe. I wasn't exactly appreciative of what he was doing for us; I resented his being assigned as our protector, and so I stupidly tried to lose him. Al played along, but at a crucial moment when it looked like Jayne and I were going to become red splotches on a white wall, he stepped in and saved us.

In other words, we owed him. Big time.

Jayne and I hoofed it to the Christopher Street subway station and caught a rattler uptown. Rush hour was over and the subway had a dim, sleepy quality to it that left the other passengers hunched and silent. Someone had abandoned that day's
Times
on a seat, so we huddled together and combed the pages for any mention of murder. There was plenty of it to choose from, though the deaths the paper spoke of were in North Africa, Europe, and the South Pacific. The new casualty numbers were out: 435 army, 71 navy. The list of names of the dead and wounded from New York snaked down the page, seven column inches of grief.

Jayne, sensing my focus, turned the page and adjusted herself so I could no longer read over her shoulder. I stared at the back of the paper. Even the “Amusement News” wasn't so amusing. Orson Welles had passed his army physical with flying colors. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was trying to get Mickey Rooney out of the draft.

“Anything?” I asked Jayne. She was dwarfed behind section A, looking like a child trying to play grown-up.

“War this, war that. Wait.” She stabbed her index finger into the fold. “Actress Found Beaten to Death in Upper West Side Home.” Jayne pulled the page closer to her face. “Her name was Paulette…” She squinted, trying to make out a surname lost in the previous reader's greasy fingerprint. “Monroe.”

“No!” People seated near us turned to see what I was yammering about, and I smiled an apology their way before turning back to the paper. Prior to our arrival, Paulette Monroe had rented our room at the Shaw House until her big head and bigger career outgrew our humble abode. She'd done great things on Broadway before moving out to California and starting in the pictures. Her success at that point hadn't been terribly impressive, though she did have a heck of a lot more to brag about than I did.

“I thought she was in Hollywood,” I whispered.

Jayne waved me away and continued reading the article. “She was just cast in Walter Friday's show. He's doing some new musical called
Goin' South
. She must've come back for that.” Walter Friday
used to be a producer whose name guaranteed success. You never cared what play he was doing or what actors were attached; knowing it was a Walter Friday production was enough to make you want to be involved. Unfortunately, he'd fallen on hard times lately, and a number of incidents involving booze, broads, and bad investments had taken him out of the spotlight. Last fall there'd been rumblings that he was about to make a comeback with a big show and some even bigger backers. Everyone was dying to be part of it.

Jayne pulled away from the paper long enough to look at me. Sure it was cold, but we were both thinking it: if Paulette was dead, Friday would be looking for another lead actress.

“Focus,” I told her. “Al first, audition later.”

 

We made it to 153 East Sixty-seventh Street and told the dame at the desk we were Al's sisters. She gave us the up and down—me tall and brunette, Jayne tiny and blond—and came to a silent conclusion that even if we were lying, we didn't look dangerous. She told us to wait in the chairs until an escort could be found to take us to a meeting room. Jayne and I slumped side by side into seats well worn by a thousand other keisters. We entertained ourselves by eyeballing that evening's parade of thugs, ladies of the evening, and the newest criminal type: the draft dodger. The papers were full of stories of men who claimed religious and moral reasons to sit out the war. Some of them were genuine, but many others turned out not to be part of the faith they thought excused them or took the government's money making weapons at munitions factories but didn't think such willing participation should extend to the battlefield. It was pointless to lock them up for lies and hypocrisy. Society had a way of taking care of men like that.

“I don't like this place,” whispered Jayne. An unwashed gentleman handcuffed to a chain on the wall licked his lips at the sight of my pal. Her coat, which had been perfectly normal when we left the house, suddenly became too small to cover both her gams and her guns.

“Imagine how Al feels.” I was still trying to wrap my noodle
around the idea that Al could kill someone. He was an imposing guy, but that was the point—you sent him to remind people of the damage he could do, not to actually do the damage.

Al would clear this up. There had to be a simple explanation for all of this.

“This way, ladies,” said a bull in a blue uniform. He checked our names against a clipboard and silently led us down a cement block corridor. We arrived at a small room that grew smaller with each passing second. The elbow directed us to sit on one side of a table and with a wagging finger announced the rule of the hour: under no circumstances were we to touch the suspect.

Al joined us five minutes later.

He still wore his street clothes, though now they seemed too big for him, an impossible feat given that the average parachute wouldn't have been large enough to cover him from head to toe. His hands were cuffed in front of him like some sort of flipper, and as he entered the room he waved to our escort in such a way that it was clear he'd already mastered the art of functioning in bracelets.

I was relieved to see him, and I expected him to be relieved to see us. I hadn't let him down. While I may not have been wise to what he wanted when he'd stopped by earlier that day, I was here now.

If gratitude were gasoline, Al was running on empty. He joined us at the table and half-whispered, half-growled, “What are youse doing here?”

“We're here to help.” I matched his volume and pushed my chair forward. “I'm sorry I didn't catch on that something was wrong before, but I'm here to make it right. Just tell me what to do.”

He shrugged in response. It wasn't the answer I was hoping for.

“It's a mistake, right?” I asked. “You're here because of some mix-up?”

He held my gaze just long enough to let me know that the only mistake I'd made was in coming to see him. He signaled to the guard at the door. The copper deposited a cigarette between Al's lips and touched the tip to a ready lighter.

At least he had a friend. That was good to know.

“Tony know you're here?” he asked, the cigarette clenched between his teeth.

“He seems to think it would be better if we didn't visit you—if no one visited you,” I said. Al didn't react to the news. Either he agreed with Tony or he knew better than to disagree. “Know why that might be?”

He traced a series of initials engraved into the wooden tabletop. “When the meat's gone bad, you don't want to keep it in the icebox next to today's milk.”

I smiled at that. It was a rare day when Al used metaphors. “Is there someone we can call for you?”

“Tony's taking care of all that.”

“Can we get you cigarettes? Magazines? A deck of cards?”

“I got everything I need.”

“Come on: there's got to be something—”

His eyebrow rose, chastising me for thinking I was capable of doing anything but regretting my actions after the fact. “What's done is done. I'm not your responsibility, see?”

“We're not here because we feel responsible.”

“Then why are you?”

“We're your friends. You did for us and now we want to do for you.”

He laughed, and his bound hands took hold of the cigarette and ashed it on the floor. “You don't owe me nothing. Our account is clear.”

“Who was she?” asked Jayne.

The eyebrow remained raised, his eyes locked on hers. I'd often wondered if Al was sweet on Jayne, but seeing him now it was impossible to imagine him having affectionate feelings toward anyone. “She was nobody,” he said.

“Nobody?” My stomach rolled with the word. If Al could so easily strip a murder victim of her identity, could he have also taken her life? “Did you do it?”

His eyes wouldn't meet mine. The silence I could take, but his
refusal to look at me felt like a deception. What was he keeping from me? I reached across the table and took hold of his square chin.

“Hey!” said the guard.

“Did you do it?” I asked Al.

He lifted his head and stared at a spot just above me. It was an actor's trick. To an audience, seated at a distance, it would look like you were meeting their eyes. His tiny peepers were muddy, the life that should've been behind them strangely absent. A smile peeked out from the corners of his mouth, at once self-effacing and mocking. “I'm here, ain't I?”

The guard grabbed my arm and wrenched it away from Al. “I said no touching.”

I grabbed air. “I got it.”