Louise's Blunder (5 page)

‘Sounds lovely,’ I said. Since Joe left there wasn’t anyone at my boarding house I could really talk to. I was fond of Ada and Phoebe but I had little in common with them. Joan was a swell friend but her crowd had all gone to college and had family money. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable around them.

Rose squeezed my arm. ‘So you’ll come?’

‘Yes, I’d love to.’ Finally, something to look forward to!

‘Here,’ Rose said, digging around in her purse and pulling out a little pad in a leather case with a tiny pen attached. She scribbled something, tore it off the pad and gave it to me. ‘Here’s the address, see you Thursday!’ Rose lived in the Potomac House Apartments, a big complex in Foggy Bottom. I could walk there in good weather.

Like much of the District, Foggy Bottom had become more like a barracks for government workers than a true neighborhood. It was studded with apartment complexes and nearly every row house or cottage took in boarders. Mrs Nighy’s little cottage, where Paul Hughes boarded, was just across the street from Rose’s apartment building.

‘Thank you,’ I said, tucking the address into my own pocketbook. ‘What time?’

‘Seven,’ she said. ‘We break up around nine thirty. We working girls need our sleep, you know. Lord, there’s my bus!’ Rose dropped my arm and took off running, waving her hat to keep the bus driver from leaving her behind.

Henry was waiting for me by the gate.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him.

He took my arm. ‘It’s Phoebe,’ he said. ‘I wanted to warn you before you came inside.’

‘Is she ill?’

‘No,’ he said, glancing back at the house. ‘But her nerves are real bad. Milt was more gravely wounded than he told his mother. He’s OK. He called Phoebe from Walter Reed this afternoon. He’s been there for a week already and this is the first time she knew he was even back in the country.’

I found Phoebe inside the lounge. She sagged on the davenport, with her head propped against a cushion and a hand shielding her eyes. Ada sat close to her holding her free hand.

‘Phoebe,’ I said. ‘I just heard about Milt. I’m so sorry! He is going to be all right, though, isn’t he?’

Phoebe turned to me. Her eyes were dilated. Nembutal. I didn’t pass judgment. I’d popped a few of her pills myself. ‘He’s going to be just fine,’ she said. ‘He’s completely healed. I’m just so upset he didn’t tell me how badly hurt he was! He still won’t tell me exactly what happened.’

‘Phoebe, he didn’t want you to worry. You couldn’t do anything for him, not when he was in the hospital in Australia,’ Ada said.

‘I know,’ Phoebe said.

Henry came in with the drinks tray. This was the second weekend night we’d had drinks before dinner. When we’d first come to ‘Two Trees’ Phoebe only permitted cocktails on an occasional Friday night or a special occasion. And tonight there was a bottle of bourbon on the tray instead of sherry. I’d rather have had a Martini, prepared from the Gordon water I hid in my dresser drawer, but I accepted a tumbler of bourbon from Henry. I liked it, it went down smoothly. If my parents only knew how fond I’d become of a cocktail after work! I didn’t know a soul in Wilmington who drank liquor, at least not in public.

Over the next few minutes Phoebe’s color returned and she visibly pulled herself together, sitting up and smoothing her hair. ‘Milt won’t let me visit him in the hospital,’ she said. ‘He said some of the injuries on the ward are terrible and he doesn’t want me to see them. I should be able to pick him up soon and bring him home to recuperate.’

‘If his injuries were that serious he might not be sent overseas again,’ Henry said, refreshing his glass of bourbon. ‘He could be stationed here instead. You know, there’s plenty of critical desk work to do.’

Ada and I couldn’t help but glance at each other. Maybe it was selfish of us, but the housing situation in the District was a nightmare. It seemed that one of us would have to leave ‘Two Trees’.

‘I’ve been thinking, Phoebe,’ Ada said. ‘Milt can have my room. I have a friend I can stay with for a while.’

‘Or I could sleep on the davenport,’ I said. Which didn’t solve the bathroom problem. Milt wouldn’t want to share the second-floor bathroom with Ada and me. If he stayed at home more than a couple of weeks Ada and I might both have to move. The thought made me ill. I’d come to think of ‘Two Trees’ as my home. I knew Ada felt the same.

Phoebe shook her head firmly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Milt insists you keep your rooms. He’s going to share Henry’s space on the third floor. I have a plumber coming to install a shower and a real toilet in the box room.’ Until now the men on the third floor had to make do with a chemical toilet and the bathtub in the basement next to the boiler. I wondered where Phoebe got the money for the renovation.

Ada and I shared a glance of profound and grateful relief. I had a second bourbon. ‘I’m looking forward to getting to know Milt,’ Henry said. ‘I want to hear all about his war experiences.’

Dinner that night was glorious beef! Hamburger steaks cooked medium rare with mushroom sauce, rice and salad made mostly from the greens in our garden. With fresh yeast rolls and real butter. And a honey cake. Dellaphine must have known we needed a decent meal and squandered our ration points. We’d pay for it later in the week with minced Spam croquettes.

I helped clear the table and as I stacked dishes near the sink for Dellaphine to wash, she whispered to me. ‘Guess who is paying for the bathroom in the attic?’ she asked.

‘Who?’

‘Mr Henry!’

‘You’re joking!’

‘No, don’t that beat all?’

‘He’s sweet on her, I’ve said it all along, haven’t I, Momma?’ Madeleine said. She’d come in late from work and was just now eating her dinner at the kitchen table.

‘Yes, you did, honey,’ Dellaphine said.

‘And you pooh-poohed me.’

Dellaphine shook her head. ‘I know. Now, Miss Phoebe said she would pay him back after the war when she cashed in her war bonds.’

‘She won’t need to if she marries him,’ Madeleine said.

I was so incredulous I could hardly speak. Henry and Phoebe married! Surely not!

Dellaphine filled up the deep sink with hot water. Suds mountained up and she plunged her hands up over her elbows in it, scrubbing the dishes and pots and pans from dinner. I found a dishtowel and dried the dishes as she stacked them on the drainer.

Madeleine plunged her fork into her honey cake, scraping the plate with her fork to get every crumb.

‘I swear,’ Dellaphine said, ‘if Miss Phoebe marries Mr Henry I’m leaving. Though I ain’t worked or lived anywhere else but here.’

Madeleine brought her plate over to the sink. ‘You can live with me, Momma,’ she said, ‘and retire. I’m going to get an apartment after the war.’

Dellaphine turned to her. ‘Now don’t you go thinking that way,’ she said. ‘All these jobs is going to go away after the war. Or the soldiers coming home, white men, will take them. Colored women won’t be retiring or getting their own apartments in my lifetime.’

‘Social Security isn’t going away, Momma,’ Madeleine said. ‘And white men won’t want to do my job.’ She patted her mother on the arm and trotted down the steps to the room she shared with her mother on the daylight side of the basement.

‘I worry about that girl,’ Dellaphine said, her arms on her skinny hips as she watched her daughter go down the stairs. ‘Her plans is too big, that’s all there is to it.’

I worried too, but mainly about myself. Madeleine was right, Social Security wasn’t going away after the war and men wouldn’t want to type Social Security cards, not at a colored girl’s salary. But my job was different. Would OSS even exist after the war? Would I be able to find work in the District? That reminded me of my parents’ constant urging for me to find a second husband to support me. But the only man I was attracted to, one Joe Prager, I knew nothing at all about except the little that he told me, if that was the truth. And wouldn’t he go home after the war, either to England or to Czechoslovakia? I didn’t want to remarry just anyone who would have me to avoid moving back to my parents’ house. I hadn’t forgotten Dora Bertrand’s promise to help me go to college after the war. Dora had a PhD in anthropology and taught at Smith. We had become friends when we worked in the same section. But since OSS had been reorganized I had seen her rarely. Would she still be eager to help me?

When I read women’s magazines like
Good Housekeeping
, all the advertisements suggested women spend their war bonds after the war on homes, good china, furniture or a silver service. Assuming that all us working girls were going to set up housekeeping with a husband who’d pay the bills after the war.

Me, I was more interested in my own apartment, a car or perhaps college.

I swear I would wait tables at Childs before I would go home to Wilmington and my childhood bedroom.

Detective Harvey Royal leaned up against a cherry tree to take the weight off his bad knee as he smoked a cigarette. He’d rounded up a couple of police officers to circle the Tidal Basin looking for any evidence that could be linked to his victim. If his victim had actually drowned in the Tidal Basin, then where was his hat? Every man over the age of eighteen in Washington wore a hat.

Royal had worked for the District Metropolitan Police for over forty years – he’d be retired now if it weren’t for the war – and he’d not yet heard of an accident victim without anything in his pockets, even if it was only a pocket comb. The only reason for the victim to be stripped of his identification would be because he was murdered and the murderer wanted to hide the victim’s identity as long as possible.

Had the corpse floated into the Tidal Basin from another watery location? The Tidal Basin was a reservoir that flushed the Washington Channel, the long harbor that separated the District from the fill lands of Potomac Park. The park contained two golf courses, a polo field and the grounds of the new Thomas Jefferson Memorial, all surrounded by hundreds of those damned pink trees.

The Basin’s inlet gates, located on the Potomac, opened to admit water at high tide twice a day. The force of the water flow closed the outlet gates, which opened on to the Washington Channel. As the tide ebbed, the process reversed, keeping the Channel clear of high water and sediment. The gates were navigable and certainly wide enough to admit a floating body to the Tidal Basin. Royal just didn’t think this was very likely. For one thing it had never happened before that he knew of.

One of his policemen bicycled up to him, then the other. They each had a bag of debris that had washed up on to the shores of the Basin. Royal instructed them to dump it all on the ground. Several single shoes, all small, probably children’s shoes lost when children waded in the shallow part of the Basin. Lots of candy wrappers and empty cigarette packets. Two model sailboats, one quite large and new. Nothing that looked like it had belonged to their victim. Royal had hoped for a hat. That would prove that the victim had actually drowned in the Basin, not elsewhere.

‘Thanks, boys,’ Royal said. ‘Go on back to the station. Put the sailboats in the lost and found and throw the rest away.’

After his men had cycled off Royal pulled copies of a photograph out of his jacket pocket. It was the least distressing photograph of the corpse that the police photographer had taken. It wasn’t like he could do a house-to-house search for someone who might have known the victim, since there were no houses in the vicinity. But there must be some regulars in the area and he meant to find them.

He needed to take his car because of his knee so he climbed into the front seat and turned south for the short drive to the Jefferson Memorial.

The Memorial had only been open for a month. The statue inside was painted plaster. The final bronze statue would have to wait until after the war. A number of people were wandering around the open-air monument, and of course a few soldiers were guarding it.

Royal approached the ranking soldier, a corporal, and showed him his badge.

‘Did you know a man’s body was found in the Tidal Basin on Monday?’ Royal asked him.

The corporal shifted his gun at ease. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I heard about that.’

‘I’d like to show you a photo and see if you recognize him.’

‘Sure,’ the corporal said, ‘but since the Memorial opened I’ve only been here twice.’

‘Are there any regular guards; you know, people who are here every day?’

‘Not really; our sergeant rotates our assignments all over the District.’

‘Take a look at the picture anyway, would you?’

‘Sure,’ the soldier said, taking the picture from Royal.

‘Man,’ the soldier said, ‘are you sure he drowned? That’s quite a wallop he took on his head.’

‘We don’t know when he got it,’ Royal said, ‘but it sure could have helped him along.’

‘Don’t know him,’ the soldier said. ‘But I can take it back to my HQ and give it to my sergeant. He can make sure everyone gets a look at it.’

‘That would be very helpful,’ Royal said. ‘Here’s my card. If someone thinks he’s seen this man, please have him call me.’

‘Sure thing.’

Fat chance, Royal thought, resting his knee back in his car, that in a spot so teeming with people every day someone would recognize his victim. But there was one more place he might find an answer.

There was a streetcar terminus under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing just across the street from the Tidal Basin. The Pennsylvania Railroad coming from Virginia across the railroad bridge, or from the north through the District for that matter, had a stop there. From the terminus a person could get a streetcar or a bus anywhere in the city. Royal wondered if his victim was in the habit of making his connections at the streetcar terminus. And maybe taking his constitutional walking around the Tidal Basin.

Royal parked outside the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and walked down two flights of steps to the streetcar terminus. It functioned as a streetcar barn, too, but most of the cars were out.

For the rest of the day Royal met every streetcar that stopped and every driver who checked in at the office until the end of rush hour. Hundreds if not thousands of passengers passed by him. And every time he climbed aboard a car and showed the driver Hughes’ picture, the response was pretty much the same. ‘Sure I seen him, and a thousand of his twin brothers. All these guys look alike to me. You know how many times I’ve driven this route?’