The Ghost and the Dead Deb (7 page)

The ease with which he’d been able to breeze through the years of his life had done nothing to build his character. His father’s early heart attack and his mother’s incessant coddling—accompanied by pulling strings attached to his money when it suited her—left the man a moral weakling.

Of course, that’s my perspective now. Then, I’d been too caught up in it all to understand what was happening in my marriage and why.

It’s been said that anything coming close to accomplishment, achievement, invention, or discovery emerges from an ability to overcome obstacles and roadblocks . . . from a willingness to endure pain. Too late, I deduced that Calivn didn’t actually ascribe to this philosophy.

After years of making excuses for my husband in my own mind, I was forced to admit the bald truth. Calvin had grown so accustomed to letting his family sweep in and solve any childhood difficulty, that the first sign of any roadblock in his adult life sent him off every path he’d begun to travel.

He dropped out of law school, quit job after job with which his mother’s friends had hooked him up. He’d started writing probably two dozen novels and plays, but never wrote past page forty on any one of them. He took to smoking cigarettes and staring out windows. He wasn’t a man who could even muster the requisite vigor to enjoy partying, clubbing, or any other vice, for that matter—having had his fill of them all through his high-society teen years.

The most interest Calvin showed in anything was his own analysis. For five solid years, he sought daily appointments with therapists, but he never kept the same one more than six months. Each, eventually, would be labeled a “quack.” Then, during one stretch, while ostensibly “searching” for a new one, my late husband stopped taking his medications.

And where was I during all of this?

Right there with him, trying to raise a young son whom Calvin took little interest in. Trying to deal with in-laws who refused to see Calvin as deeply troubled. Yes, right there with him . . . to absorb his verbal abuse and mood swings, to take it all because I told myself that my husband was ill and in need of help, right up to the day my hand turned the door knob to our bedroom, just in time to witness his attempt to fly—

“Jack,” I whispered into the dark. “You there?”

I smiled. A year ago, I’d forbidden Jack to hang around in the upstairs ether. He told me I couldn’t lay down house rules to a man with no body. An uneasy truce followed. For the most part, he gave me my privacy upstairs, but occasionally, on nights like this one, he’d make his presence known.

Just remember this,
Jack added.
In the scheme of things, nobody’s got it as bad as yours truly. For me, this isn’t a bunch of gag lines.

“Well . . . look at the bright side,” I told him, fluffing the pillow behind me, “a Rhode Island bookstore in July really isn’t that bad. There are much
hotter
places you might have been sent.”

A long minute of silence followed.

The room had cooled off with Jack’s arrival, but now I felt the summer’s cloying warmth seeping back into the bedroom air.

“Jack?” I silently called, sitting up. “I was just teasing.”

The silence was getting to me. “Jack, please answer. Don’t go.”

Has it ever occurred to you
—
because it has to me
—
that this
is
my eternal punishment?

“No,” I said falling back against the pillow again, “and do you know why? Because it’s beyond insulting.”

“You’re suggesting the fire and brimstone of Satan’s inferno is less of a punishment than running an independent bookstore?”

“You really can be infuriating, you know?”

“Can it, Jack.”

“I don’t want to fight.”

I sighed.

“What Johnny did to Mina was pretty hard to witness,” I told him. “The kid obviously ran off with Angel tonight and left Mina high and dry. I always liked Johnny, but what he did tonight was pretty rotten. It makes me angry at Angel, too . . . but I’m also sorry for the girl. And furious about that Jag dragging her through the street and then taking off without a backward glance, and all because she dared tell the truth about her privileged circle of friends—one of whom likely committed murder during a party then tried to frame a member of the catering staff.

Yeah, like I told you earlier, the Banks girl knew her killer, all right. I don’t agree with your author on much
—
but I agree on that.

“Maybe you should read her book.”

“I could tell you weren’t impressed with her reading.”

“I have, after a fashion. I’ve read all the Jack Shield novels, and Tim Brennan based all of them on your cases.”

“I will . . . I just haven’t had time . . .”

“What’s that tone? You don’t believe me?”

“Why?”

You don’t want to make the time
—
because you’re afraid.

“Of what?”

“Ridiculous.”

“Don’t be insulting.”

Don’t be naïve. You did it with that worthless late husband of yours
—

“Don’t, Jack.”

A long silence followed.

“What is it you think I should know?”

Your little Angel’s act with Johnny Napp tonight reminds me of a case I took back in ’46, after the war. I couldn’t go back to being a cop
—
leg wound left me with a slight limp on bad days
—
so I set out a shingle as a licensed P.I.

“What was the case?”

Vassar grad in her mid-twenties comes in on a Friday at six, looking to hire me to save her life from a blackmailer she claimed already gave her sis the big chill. Class clash. He was an indoor aviator
—

“A what?”

“Johnny’s usually a nice kid. I don’t think he’d actually hurt anyone.”

“You hardly know him, doll. And from what you’ve told me, he’s already hurt that tall, freckled thing, Mina
—
”

“He hurt her emotionally, I’ll grant you, but not physically. That’s what I meant.”

I felt the cool breeze in the hot room, the icy chill of Jack’s presence whispering across my cheek. The sleepiness overcame me, and I immediately began to dream.

“Jack, what are these images I’m seeing?” I asked through a restless haze. “Are they your memories?”

It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman.

—Sir Winston Churchill

 

 

 

New York City
July 19, 1946

 

HER NAME WAS Emily Stendall—the pedigreed blonde in pink polkadots who’d waltzed into his office worried about flies and swatters.

She’d gotten Jack’s name from Gertrude Herbert, a fellow cliff-dweller, one of those uptown, high-rise, society dames who hired him as a bodyguard on a fairly regular basis.

“Start at the beginning, Miss Stendall,” Jack suggested from across the dry, brown desktop.

“I’d rather start at the end,” she said primly. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’d like you to stop Joey Lubrano from murdering me. If you take my case this minute, I’ll double your per diem plus expenses, and I’ll give you a bonus of one thousand dollars if you’re able to gather enough evidence for his conviction of a capital crime.”

“The crime of?”

“I told you, killing my sister. And planning to kill me.”

Jack picked up his deck of Luckies and gave them a shake. Emily Stendall nodded and he rose from his chair. He shook the pack again, watched her slip one white cylinder out of its nest, place it between her lips. He fired up a match. Soft fingers touched his, pulling the flame close. She inhaled and closed her eyes, savoring the hit.

Jack lit his own and took a long drag. “Okay—” he began, sitting on the edge of his desk.

She exhaled a long, white plume. “You’ll take the job?”

“Not yet,” Jack said. “You started on your end. Now do me a favor and start on mine.”

Emily Stendall’s brown eyes widened. “Your what?”

“From the beginning, honey,” he clarified. “Tell me the story from the beginning.”

“My sister’s name was Sarah. Mrs. Sarah Nolan. Her husband, Melvin, secured a promotion a year ago that had him traveling on business quite a bit.”

“How much is quite a bit?”

Emily shrugged her creamy shoulders. “Two weeks out of every month I’d guess.”

“I’d guess that’s quite a bit.”

“Well, you can see how it started then. Sarah became lonely, and one night she invited him in for a drink. Joey Lubrano, I should say, our building’s elevator operator—”

“
Our
building?”

“We lived in the same building on East Sixty-fifth. She lived on the ninth floor. I live directly above her on the tenth.”

“Go on.”

“After a while, Joey threatened her with blackmail, and—”

“How?”

“He’d taken photos . . .” Emily Stendall paused a moment, bit her lower lip. “Risqué photos. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“At the time he’d said they were just for him to remember her. But obviously he’d had other things in mind.”

“Mmm . . . obviously.” Jack’s tone had a bite. Emily Stendall noticed.

“What?” she asked. “You think she was naïve?”

“Not naïve.” Jack took a long drag. “Stupid.”

“Mr. Shepard, no one calls my sister stupid.”

“She cheated on her husband with a man who blackmailed and then killed her. You call that smart?”

“I call that victimized. Or is that too
expensive
a word for your vocabulary?”

“Cheating on her husband with the elevator man? Her actions do suggest
other
adjectives, Miss Stendall,” said Jack. “Words that aren’t pretty. The kind of ugly words men use in front of their bartenders—”

Emily Stendall rose. “How dare you!” And in a blur of movement Jack grabbed her quickly approaching hand.

“Let me go!” She yanked at her trapped wrist.

Jack held. “Look, doll, I’m sincerely sorry about your sister’s death, but I’m not about to start my weekend with a red-hot handprint tattooed to my cheek . . . even if it is a beautiful hand.”

Emily Stendall’s firm, full breasts were heaving in fury and indignation.

“Let me go,” she said, her voice finally level.

Jack released her. She rubbed at the red mark circling her right wrist. Her eyes speared him as her glossy pink lips made a little-girl pout.

“A little advice, honey,” said Jack, retrieving the lit cigarette from the green linoleum floor and stabbing it out in the ashtray beside his cracked-leather davenport. “You might be able to lead your Yale men around by the leash with that indignant princess act, but when you’re dealing with rough trade, you’ll need another strategy.”

The little-girl pout loosened to a grim frown. Jack put a second Lucky in his mouth, lit it, then transferred it to hers. She took another hit, long and needy.

“That’s why I want to hire you, Mr. Shepard,” she admitted. “My sister’s involvement with ‘rough trade,’ as you put it, got her killed. Now I need someone like you to—”

“Clean up the mess.”

“Precisely. So will you take the job or not?”

“I have a few more questions. Namely, why haven’t the police picked up Lubrano? I assume you’ve gone to them?”

“Yes, of course, I went to them. They picked him up, too. They questioned him, then they released him. No evidence, they said, and, of course, he denied everything. They searched his apartment but didn’t find any photos. And his alibi that night was supposedly airtight.”

“What was it?”

“He’d entered a dart-throwing contest at a downtown bar. Ten cops were in the bar with him.”