The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion (15 page)

“Yes. Were you
often
in the habit of picking up luncheonette waitresses?”

Jack smirked my way. “You got something to say about
the case
?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I think we should begin our investigation by calling New York’s Board of Education. If the little boy here doesn’t know where his mother teaches, then we can ask them to look up her name. Next we go to the woman’s school and question her boss and coworkers, find out what they know.”

“Uh-huh.” Jack lit a second cigarette. He didn’t appear impressed with my logic.

“What’s wrong?”

“Plenty.” Jack said, blowing out a snow-white cloud of carcinogens. “Your first and best witness is sitting right beside you. Don’t you want to find out what else the kid knows before you start charging up my phone bill?”

“Oh. Right. Of course.” I turned to the little boy who’d just about licked Jack’s plate clean. “J. J., what else can you tell me about your mother?”

“What else you wanna know?”

“Well . . .” The waitress returned with my coffee and a little air-kiss for Jack before sashaying away again. I concentrated on my young client. “Did she say anything special to you on the morning she disappeared?”

J. J. shook his head. “She just went off to work as usual.”

“Did she have any special friends?”

J. J. shrugged. “Just Frankie.”

“Frankie?” I repeated. “And who is he?”

“Frankie Papps. He’s her boyfriend.”

“Do you know how to reach this man? Where he lives? What he does for a living?”

J. J. shook his head. “I don’t know where he lives. But my mom told me he’s an electrician.”

I motioned to Jack, then leaned around the boy’s back to whisper: “Shouldn’t we go to the police with this?”

“Police!” J. J. cried. “Hey, what’s the big idea, Mr. Shepard? No police. You promised!”

“That’s right, kid, take it easy.” Jack met my eyes. “He says he’ll run away if we bring the police in. He doesn’t have any other family and he knows they’ll stash him in an institution if they find out he’s living on his own.”

“But, Jack,” I whispered, “he’s only twelve.”

“I can take care of myself!” J. J. declared. “I’ve got a job at the newsstand and everything. Jiminy crickets, Mr. Shepard, I already paid you twenty dollars. You’re not going back on your promise, are you?”

“No, kid, I’m not. We’ll find out what happened to your mother.”

I frowned at Jack. “You took twenty dollars from this little boy?”

“Sure,” Jack said, stubbing out the butt of his cigarette. “I’ve got bills to pay, you know. I can’t let it get around that I do charity work.”

“Well, it’s not very nice.”

“Nice?”
Jack grunted. “On these streets, baby, a ‘nice guy’ rep will land you six feet under. Wake up and smell the coffee.”

I knew Jack wasn’t being literal, but at the mention of coffee I remembered my cup. Birdie had served it to me black, and I really preferred milk and sugar. I was about to ask for some when Jack lifted his scarred chin and yelled—

“Hey, Birdie! Check!”

The PI reached for his wallet and Birdie sashayed back over, scribbling as she walked. “There you go, Jack,” she said, sliding the check to him facedown.

As she sauntered away, I noticed something was written on the back.

“What’s that she wrote?” J. J. asked, curiously craning his neck. “Plaza-3367.”

Jack slapped down a dollar bill, picked up the check, folded it neatly, and tucked it into his breast pocket.

“What’s Plaza-3367?” I asked. “An address?”

The little boy turned to Jack. “For a lady shamus she sure is slow.”

Jack grabbed his fedora and rose from his stool. “Take it easy on her, kid. Where she came from, they do things different.”

“Oh, I get it!” The boy faced me. “You’re from Canada or something, huh?”

“Or something,” I said.

“Come on, gang. Let’s blow this joint.” Jack began to herd us toward the door. J. J. skipped ahead. I was right behind.

“So what’s Plaza-3367 really?” I pressed. “A clue?”

Jack’s eyes were laughing. “You could call it that.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

J. J. swung around. “Jeez, Mrs. McClure, it’s a cinch!” he announced loud enough for half the diners to hear. “The waitress gave him her phone number!”

Jack turned the boy back around and pushed him through the front door. “Okay, kid. I think she finally got it.”

I followed the pair onto Third Avenue’s crowded sidewalk and noticed the busy newsstand on the corner. Reaching up, I tapped Jack’s cementlike shoulder. “Hey!”

“Easy, baby. Don’t go getting jealous on me—”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m
trying
to tell you that I just changed my investigation strategy.”

Jack put the fedora back on his head and gazed down at me. “To what?”

I pointed to the newsstand. “Didn’t J. J. say he works at that newsstand?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“So we should speak to his boss. He might have some more coherent idea of what happened to his mother.”

“Think so, huh?” Jack’s eyebrow arched. “That’s what I thought, too.” He grabbed my arm. “Come on.”

 

WE SPOKE WITH Mac Dougherty, the newsstand owner who employed J. J. He was thirty-two and blinded in one eye from a grenade battle in Germany’s Hurtgen Forest. Jack had been one of the commanding officers in the field. He clearly thought the world of Jack, but he said he’d never met J. J.’s mother. The only things he knew about the woman were what J. J. had mentioned to him—she was a schoolteacher who taught uptown.

Jack mentioned the possibility of J. J. staying with him, but Dougherty shook his head.

“Wish I could,” he said. “But the wife and I, we already got four mouths to feed and one on the way in a two-bedroom flat. We’re full up. And anyway, J. J. has a place all to himself now, says he can take care of himself.”

I was about to argue but bit my tongue. This was 1947. A man like Mac Dougherty, half-blind, his head already half-gray, had probably grown up fast in the middle of the Depression. J. J.’s situation wouldn’t look the same to him as it did to me.

Jack pulled me to the side. “Okay, baby, what’s your next move?”

I chewed my glossy red lips. “We need to find this Frankie Papps. If he’s the woman’s boyfriend, then he either has a clue to where she went, or else he had something to do with—” I glanced back to the newsstand, made sure J. J. was out of earshot. “I hate to say it, but this Frankie person might have had something to do with ‘disappearing’ the boy’s mother.”

“And how will I find Frankie?”

“Phone book?”

“I’ll save you some time, doll. Frankie wasn’t listed. Probably didn’t even have a phone.”

“What about your cop friends? You used to be on the police force, didn’t you? Before you joined up and went off to fight the Nazis.”

“No record for a Frankie Papps. No driver’s license, either—not under that name.”

“What do you mean
that
name? Are you saying—” A mechanized roar suddenly drowned out my words. I felt the vibrations of the girders around me and realized a train was passing on the elevated tracks overhead. I waited for the noise to subside. “Are you saying he was using an alias?”

“It’s always a possibility, isn’t it?” Jack folded his arms. “Come on, baby, what’s your next step? We haven’t got all day.”

“You mean night, don’t you?” I glanced around. Everything seemed real enough—the roar of the el train, the snap of high heels on pavement, the rank smell of leaded gasoline, the coolness of the dappled shade beneath the raised subway tracks. “This is all just a dream, isn’t it?”

“It’s more than that and you know it. Come on, honey.
Think
.”

“Okay. I guess we should search the missing woman’s residence next, look for leads there.”

“Bingo.”

A minute later, Jack was herding us again—this time we were heading downtown. Despite the slight limp from his old war wound, Jack guided us smoothly through the crowds, maneuvering our little group around men in fedoras, ladies in hats and round-toed pumps.

The Big Apple’s blocks were lined with restaurants, bars, and stone stoops leading up to residential buildings—places that looked much the same as they had during my own years working in the city. But there were other sights, too, things I’d never seen in my time: an antiques store with a wooden Indian chief standing guard, a barber shop with an old-fashioned candy-striped pole, a rustic food stand with fruits and vegetables displayed in wooden crates, and the kind of corner drugstores that had lunch counters and soda jerks.

I noticed sidewalk shoeshine booths, too, and a hardware store with a dozen cast-iron potbellied stoves sitting out front. At the sight of them, I stopped and pointed.

“Why in the world would a New Yorker need one of those?”

A wood- or coal-burning stove might be useful in the country to warm a small unheated cabin, but this was the middle of Manhattan.

Jack laughed. “Cold-water flats, baby. We still got ’em back here.”

J. J. Conway’s residence turned out to be one of them. His building was a six-floor brownstone walkup—although we didn’t have to walk
up
. J. J. and his mom were renting a basement apartment.

We moved along a dimly lit hallway, then down an even more dimly lit stairwell. There were only four doors along the basement corridor. J. J. pulled a key from the pocket of his wrinkled gabardine slacks, stepped toward the door marked B2, and froze.

“That’s funny,” he said.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“Door’s already opened.”

I looked at the knob and lock. They were intact and unmolested. There was no break-in here. Someone had used a key. I began to hear sounds inside the apartment. Someone was loudly opening drawers, one after another. I put a hand on J. J.’s shoulder.

“Maybe it’s your mom. Maybe she’s come back.”

The boy stared up at me like a hopeful puppy. “You think so?”

I moved forward, my hand reaching out to push the door all the way open, but I was suddenly jerked backward by a sharp tug on my elbow.

“Jack! What are you—”

“Stay quiet,” he whispered, glancing down. “Both of you.” His long left arm marshaled us behind him while his right hand dipped into his double-breasted jacket.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“You blew the call, honey.” He pulled his .45 free of its shoulder holster.

“Wow.” At the sight of Jack’s gun, J. J.’s eyes went wide. “Lemme see!”

“Shhh.” I grabbed J. J.’s small shoulders and maneuvered him behind me. “Jack, what’s going on?”

“Those aren’t the sounds of some dame moving around her own apartment, baby. Someone’s tossing this place.”

“Tossing?”

“Ransacking it.”

Jack held his gun with two hands. As he slowly pushed the door open with his foot, he brought the weapon level in front of him, quickly sweeping the room with the sight until—

“Don’t move!”

Jack stepped into the apartment.

“Stay here,” I whispered to J. J., then followed Jack in.

The basement room was small, dark, and sparsely furnished—a threadbare sofa and a scuffed wooden table with two unmatched chairs. The only natural light came from two barred windows high on one wall. A black potbellied stove stood off to the side, near a small white sink. Next to it, a line of cupboards and a closet stood with their doors wide open, their contents scattered. Through the open bedroom door I noticed a dresser with its drawers pulled out.

Jack’s large body was closing in on a young man now stepping out of the bedroom. The intruder had olive skin, dark hair, and his frame was just about as skinny as the living room’s floor lamp. He stared at Jack with hard eyes, his hands holding a pillowcase stuffed with bulky items—presumably stolen from this apartment, but I couldn’t imagine what there was of value to steal.

“Drop the bag,” Jack commanded, “and put your hands up.”

The young man didn’t obey; he just kept moving away from the PI. The intruder didn’t appear armed, either, and I couldn’t imagine Jack would actually shoot an unarmed young man.

Jack took a step closer. “Do you speak English?”

The young man said nothing. And then, in an explosive motion, he swung the bulky pillowcase at Jack’s gun. Jack reared back and in the second it took to regain his balance, the young man vaulted for the apartment’s front door. Out in the hall, J. J. stuck his leg out. The burglar tripped, sprawling across the cold concrete. He got up a split second later.

By now Jack had recovered. “Stop!” he yelled. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

The young man didn’t stop—but he didn’t get away clean, either. During his fall, the pillowcase had spilled its contents, and he didn’t have time to gather anything up. He raced for the stairs. Jack stepped into the hall, leveled his gun at the intruder’s leg, and fired. The shot just missed, lodging into the back wall while the intruder disappeared into the stairwell.

Jack followed with surprising speed, forcing his bad leg to move faster than it had on Third Avenue’s sidewalk. I kicked off my peep-toed pumps and ran after him. By the time I reached the front steps of the apartment house, however, Jack was already holstering his weapon.

“Where did the guy go?” I asked between deep breaths.

“Getaway car.”

“What?!”

“He sprinted a block”—Jack pointed up the avenue—“then jumped in the back of a black Packard.”

“Did you get a license plate?”

“Half of it.”

“The getaway car makes no sense. I mean, for a bank robbery maybe. But that apartment’s not exactly Fort Knox. What could there be to steal that’s of any real value?”

Jack folded his arms. “Good reasoning, baby. What else do you think? What did you notice?”