Regarding Anna (5 page)

“If it was during the war, maybe the owner needed the money,” I added.

“I suppose. I never met her, the owner that is. I didn’t find out until after I was settled in here that she was actually murdered in this house—right here in this room.”

So Anna actually owned this house. I hadn’t considered that.

“No kidding. What happened?”

“I don’t know for sure.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “But I
do
know there was some hanky-panky going on between her and one of the boarders.”

“Really? What kind?”

“Well...there were rumors.”

It was all I could do to contain the excitement mounting in my chest.

“Rumors?”

“They were having an affair,” she whispered.

“How scandalous. It would make for a good book though. I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

“Are you a writer then?”

“Yes. Well, I would like to be one. So far, all I’ve done is collect ideas. So do tell, what were the rumors?”

“I shouldn’t say. They were just rumors, and—”

A ringing phone interrupted her. Minnie walked across the room to answer it. The conversation was brief.

“Ginger, dear, I completely forgot about my hair appointment. They’re going to hold it for me, so I have to run.”

“Can I give you a lift somewhere?”

“I was going to call a taxi.”

“Oh, don’t do that. I’ll give you a ride.”

“Well, okay. It
would
be faster that way.”

Minnie threw on a coat, and we walked to my car.

“Where are we going?” I asked her.

“Near your house—Six Corners.”

Realizing there was now not much more time to get information from her, I got right to it. “So, Minnie, tell me more about the juicy rumors you heard about the people who used to live in your house. I love gossip.”

“Well, I don’t really know exactly what went on there before I moved in, but don’t you think it strange that— Oh, look, there’s Mrs. Jedlecker! That old battle-ax. She stole my Sunday paper from me once, right off my sidewalk! I like her granddaughter though. Reminds me of...” Her voice trailed off.

“Of who, Minnie?”

“Muriel.”

“Muriel?”

“My little girl.”

No matter how important it was to maintain my investigator role, I just couldn’t. The sadness in her voice was heartbreaking. “How old was she?”

“Six.” She paused. “Just six years old. Her first day of school. September 9, 1942. The war was in full swing by then. Everyone was in it—it may have been easier to list the countries that
weren’t
in it. September 9...” The sound of her voice appeared to be coming from a different place. “Clarence drove her to school that day. He had the radio on, and when the newscaster said Japan had just dropped a bomb on us—not in Hawaii like Pearl Harbor, but in Oregon—he lost control of the car and ran into a tree.”

“How awful.”

“By the time I got to the hospital, Muriel was gone, and Clarence was hanging on by a thread. He told me what happened. I didn’t tell him about Muriel, but I’m sure he found out soon enough...when he passed over to the other side.”

I was trying not to tear up, but it was hard not to. I didn’t know what to say, so I kept silent for the next couple of blocks. The rumors didn’t seem all that important then.

Minnie broke the silence. “Don’t you think it strange that the woman didn’t close off the inside stairway to the second floor when she took in boarders? After all, those stairs were in her bedroom. There it is, dear. On the right. See the awning?”

We’re there already?

I pulled over, and before I’d come to a complete stop, Minnie had the door open. “Thank you for the lift, Ginger! Do keep in touch, dear!”

It was all I could do to collect myself and drive away—first, the unexpected news about the house having had boarders; then, Minnie on the verge of telling me something provocative about Anna, followed by the tragic story of how she’d lost her husband and daughter. I wasn’t sure which of these bombshells was causing my stomach to swirl like it was.

It was four o’clock, and I was just minutes from home. I decided to forego stopping in at the office before climbing up to my apartment. I needed to sort things out without distractions.

I parked the car behind my building and walked through the alley to the front. I was almost past our office windows when I heard a rap on the glass and saw Elmer waving me in. He met me at the door.

“You have a visitor.”

Louise Fincutter, the mother of the missing teen, started talking before I’d even sat down. “I got a call from one of Erma’s friends who said she’d heard from her. Apparently, she left the house on the South Side where her two half-brothers live and hopped on a bus to Detroit looking for her father.”

“How long ago was this?”

“The call? This morning.”

“Do you know how long ago she got on the bus?”

“I asked that question too, but her friend didn’t think to ask her that.”

“What else did Erma tell her?”

“Just that one of her half-brothers gave her some money to look for their father and told her if she found him to let them know.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“The last I heard he was in jail, but that was some years ago. I’m sure he’s out by now.”

“Well, I can check that out. In jail in Detroit?”

“I can only assume that because that’s where he’s from and where he went after we parted ways. I know it’s not here in Chicago, because I have a sister who works at the County Clerk’s Office, and she checked that out for me. Flora. You interviewed her when you first took my case.”

“Yes, I remember her. The County Clerk’s Office, you say?”

“Yes. She’s been there for years.”

“It would be nice to have an inside contact there. Sometimes—”

“Say no more. I’ll talk to her.”

Louise gave me more information about her ex-husband before leaving.

I went upstairs with visions of a long bath and a glass or two of Mad Dog, the only wine I could afford. Weighing heavily on my mind was how I was going to manage to continue the search for Erma Fincutter if she was in Detroit looking for her ex-con father.

FIVE

That Was No Poker Game

I wasn’t in my office five minutes, hadn’t even gotten my coat off, when the phone rang. I couldn’t imagine who would be calling before eight o’clock. The sun was barely up.

The man introduced himself as Jeff Porter. He suspected his daughter’s husband was “shady” and wanted a background check on him. He said he’d bring the retainer check over shortly. He sounded anxious. I named this case Shady Lane.

Since I’d started the business four months earlier, my workload had consisted of mostly skip traces, public record searches, and process serving. A background check would be a nice change of pace, and it paid more.

The tinkling bell told me someone had just walked in the front door. Too early for Elmer. I should have locked the door until we officially opened at nine.

“May I help you?”

A middle-aged woman dressed to the nines and a foot taller than me held out her gloved hand. “Lucie Barnett.” She glanced at the NSU sign behind the reception desk. “Are you with NSU?” she asked.

Her handshake was so soft, it was barely noticeable. I introduced myself and led the way into my office. She closed the door behind us.

“I need your services.”

“Okay. What is it you need?”

“I want to know where my husband Nathan goes on Thursday nights.”

I explained my retainer fee, and before I could finish she had her wallet open.

I spent the next twenty minutes asking Mrs. Barnett questions about her husband and his suspicious behavior: Had he suddenly started taking better care of himself? Was he using different cologne? Was she getting hang-up calls at the house? Had he been working late? Had he been less interested in…“intimacy”?

She answered no to all of them.

She told me she wanted answers immediately and was willing to pay extra for it. Christmas was a month away, and she wanted to have just the right gift for him—new golf clubs if he’d been a good boy and divorce papers if he hadn’t.

I named this one Thursdays Out.

Between Shady Lane, Thursdays Out, process-serving, and skip traces, I had a full caseload. My next visit to Minnie would have to wait until after the New Year. In the meantime, I thought I’d send her a little thank-you note and tell her I looked forward to chatting with her again...soon.

When Elmer came in, he brought with him Danny Davis, someone for me to consider taking along on jobs when I didn’t feel comfortable going it alone. From a purely physical standpoint, he was perfect—over six feet tall, built like a sumo wrestler, with a face only a mother could love.

I spent an hour with Danny discussing my business and his background, all the while trying to determine whether we were compatible. In the end, I liked the guy. The only thing tough about him was his appearance—his personality and demeanor appeared to be just the opposite. I told him what I was prepared to pay, and he accepted my offer, which was conditional upon a favorable background check.

I didn’t need Danny for my Thursdays Out case, which I delved into, doing as much preliminary investigating as I could before Thursday when I could actually surveil Nathan Barnett. I didn’t find anything incriminating or even the least bit suspicious in the man’s background. He had been a lieutenant in the Army during World War II and had worked for Morton Salt in their engineering department for the past eight years.

While working on Thursdays Out, I’d made calls to the Detroit police, hospitals, and homeless shelters looking for Erma Fincutter and wove in aspects of the Shady Lane case, one of which was to clarify Jeff Porter’s son-in-law’s age. I questioned it because I’d read in the military record I pulled that he’d been a Navy SEAL during the Korean War, but based on the photograph Jeff had given me, the man looked way too young to have served in the military during that time period. I looked into the SEAL age requirements and did the math—one could have been as young as twenty-eight or as old as fifty-two to have been a SEAL between 1950 and 1953 during the Korean War. In the photo, he looked to be in his early twenties, at the most. A call to Jeff confirmed my suspicion—his son-in-law claimed to be twenty-five and had never mentioned serving in the armed forces. Something didn’t add up.

The days flew by as I continued with my cases and a growing number of skip traces. I tried, on several different occasions, to make plans with Beth, whom I missed terribly, but between my unpredictable hours and her busy life with hubby, we never seemed to make a connection.

Lucie called me on Wednesday to tell me that the excuse her husband was using for this particular Thursday was a poker game with his golf buddies. The Barnetts lived in the Conrad Hilton Hotel—I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that would be like—so it wasn’t going to be easy catching him leave. The hotel was on South Michigan Avenue overlooking Grant Park, and there was no place to park where I could observe him leaving the building.

At six-thirty the following evening, I drove into the Conrad Hilton parking garage, pulled a ticket, and rode around the multi-floor structure until a spot opened up near enough to the exit where I could observe who was leaving. Lucie had told me they were having room service for dinner at six o’clock. My task was to sit in the car and wait for a dark blue Mercedes with license plate number FT1033 to exit the garage.

I didn’t mind the waiting time—it gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own case, which had been neglected lately. Minnie was the key to my learning more about what had gone on in the boardinghouse. Sure, I had gotten her to invite me in, but as I had witnessed first-hand, she could be a tough cookie. How much she revealed would depend on me. If I could glean more information about the boarders, especially the one involved in the “hanky-panky,” I was sure I’d be closer to knowing who Anna was and how she had died.

At exactly seven-forty, I saw the blue Mercedes exit, so I turned on the ignition, paid the attendant sixty-five cents, and away I went. He turned right out of the garage, toward the park. Then he turned right on Michigan Avenue, and before I knew it, we were on Lake Shore Drive, headed south.