This Dame for Hire
Read This Dame for Hire Online
Authors: Sandra Scoppettone
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Other Books by Sandra Scoppettone
For Steven L. Prenzlauer
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Susan Caggiano, Beverly Maher, Marijane Meaker, and especially to Linda Crawford.
Prologue
New York City—1943
At ten-fifteen in the
P.M.
I was walking along Bleecker Street near Thompson, going home after putting on the feedbag with my friend Jeanne Darnell. It was snowing big wet flakes. Snow never brought nasty cold with it, so I was warm enough in my blue cloth coat. I didn’t own a fur anyway, not even muskrat. Since there’d been no tip-off on the weather, I wasn’t wearing galoshes and my feet were getting the full winter-weather treatment.
When it snowed in the city, it was always quiet, and I could almost con myself into thinking I heard the flakes land.
Then in the next second, I tripped over something on the sidewalk and flew through the air, landed on my hands, then fell to my knees. My coat and skirt hiked themselves up around my keister, and I was glad there was no one else on the street at this most embarrassing of moments.
My knees were chilled but the snow cushioned my fall, and I was sure the only thing hurt was my pride. There’s nothing like a fall to make you feel stupid. Even alone on a Greenwich Village street.
I pushed myself up and stayed kneeling for a moment, then, with the help of a stoop railing, rose to my feet. I almost went down again cause I had broken the heel on one of my pumps.
Now what? I stood there in the wet while I got my wind back and took stock of the pickle I was in.
I knew I’d freeze my tootsies, but I had to take off my shoes if I was to make any headway. And what had I tripped over?
A few feet behind me I saw what looked like a pile of rags. Why would anyone put those there? I wondered. And almost at once my heart did a tumble and I knew that these weren’t rags at all, but something alarming, something sinister.
In my stocking feet (the last of my hoarded hose) I inched my way closer to the heap on the sidewalk. My throat felt tight, and my eyes did an owl.
The moment I was closer I saw what I’d suspected. These weren’t rags. This was a person. Was it someone else who’d fallen and got knocked out?
I bent down and right off took in that the white snow had a dark patch near the person’s head. And I knew. Not because I was a detective, which I was, but because it was so clear.
This was blood, and the side of the victim’s head was bashed in so that I couldn’t see a profile, but the length of the hair and the clothing told me I was looking at a woman. A very dead woman.
ONE
I didn’t start out to be a private eye. I thought I was gonna be a secretary—get my boss his java in the morning, take letters, and so on. Hell, I didn’t get my degree in steno to put my life on the line. It was true I wanted an interesting job, but that I’d end up a PI myself . . . it never entered my mind.
Back in 1940 when I went for my interview, one look at Woody Mason and I thought for sure it was gonna be a bust.
There he was, brogans up on the wobbly wooden table he called his desk, wearing dark cheaters in the middle of the day, his trilby pulled down so low on his head it was a week before I knew he had straw-blond hair. A butt hung from his thin lips, smoke curled up past his rosy nose. I wondered if he was a boozehound.
“I’m Faye Quick,” I said.
“Good for you.”
“Mr. Mason, I came for the job. You wanna good secretary or not?” That got his attention.
Mason slid his legs off the desk, pushed down the sunglasses, and over the rims eyeballed my gams, while he stubbed out his Old Gold and lit a new one. So what did I expect from a gumshoe?
My friends told me I was a crackpot trying for a job with a shamus. But I thought it could be interesting. I didn’t want to be in some nine-to-fiver pushing papers that had to do with mergers, business agreements, or the like. I wanted to be where whatever I was typing or listening to had some meat to it.
“Are ya?” Mason asked.
“Am I what?”
“Quick.”
To myself I thought,
Hardy, har, har,
but I didn’t say it. I gave him a look instead.
“Sorry. Guess ya get that a lot.”
“Yeah.”
“Sometimes I open my big yap too much. So Miss Quick, you wanna work for me?”
“That’s the general idea,” I said, and thought maybe he was a little slow or something. But Woody Mason was anything but slow, I was to find out.
We went through some Q and A’s, then he hired me on the spot. I was slaphappy getting a job my first day looking.
That was how it was then.
But in ’421 the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, and by January of ’422, Woody Mason was in the army and I was running A Detective Agency. The
A
didn’t stand for anything. He named it that so it would be first in the phone book. By the time I took over I knew almost as much as Woody, but in the beginning it was a scary idea.
“I’m not sure, boss.”
“Ah, Quick, you can do it. I got complete confidence in ya.”
“Yeah, but
I
don’t.”
“Listen, when I come back from this clambake I wanna have a business to come home to. You gotta keep the home fires burning, like they say.”
“That’s not what it means: a girl like me packin a heater and chasin the bad guys. Keepin the home fires burnin means sittin in the nest waitin for your man.”
“Ain’t I your man, Quick?” Woody smiled, the dimples making their mark in his cheeks, and my heart slipped a notch.
I wasn’t in love with Woody, but he was a looker when he gave ya
the
smile. Mostly he reserved it for female clients. But on that day he brought it out for me.
“You’re my boss, Mason, not my man.”
“Ah, hell. Ya know what I mean.”
“Even still. I can’t be a PI.”
“Why not?”
I wanted to tell him I didn’t know how, but he knew that was a lie. So I said, “I’m afraid.”
“Hell you are, Quick. I never saw the likes of you when it comes to guts.”
I had been on a few stakeouts with him and never showed any fear even when we got into close shaves.
“If you’re thinkin of some of those cases we did together, well, I had
you
with me, Mason.”
“Ah, you coulda handled them alone.”
“How’d ya know?”
“I know ya, Quick. I knew it from the first day I laid my headlights on ya.”
“You were hungover and ya woulda hired King Kong.”
“But I didn’t. I hired you, and now I gotta get my rump overseas and knock off some Nips. Ya gotta take over.”
“What if I’m so lousy at this I lose the agency.”
“Ya won’t.”
And so far I hadn’t.
I’m not what you’d call a raving beauty, but some even call me pretty, and I agree I’ll pass. Take today. I was wearing a short-sleeved cream-colored dress that was covered with bright blue intersecting circles, cinched below my bosom and belted at the waist. My hair was black, the long sides ending in a fringe of manufactured curls, and every hair in my pompadour was in place. But I was getting sick of this style, and I’d been thinking of changing. Maybe I’d get it cut short, shock the pants off my pals. Rolling and pinning were getting to be a pain in the derriere.
My mouth was small but full; my nose had a little bump, but it was okay. So the point was that even though I
looked
like any twenty-six-year-old gal ankling round New York City in ’43, there was one main difference between me and the rest of the broads. Show me another Jane who did my job and I’d eat my hat. And I wouldn’t relish that cause my brown felt chapeau had a bright red feather sticking up from the left side of the brim, and I knew the feather would tickle going down.
Once or twice I had some numbskull who thought a dame couldn’t handle his so-called important case, but most people didn’t care that I was a girl, and they knew any self-respecting male private dick was fighting to keep us safe.
So I wasn’t hurting for things to do when my secretary, Birdie, showed the Wests into my office. But I was surprised, even though it was no mystery why they’d come to me as I was the one who’d discovered their daughter’s body and no one had been arrested so far. I lit a Camel and listened while they talked.
The man and woman who sat on the other side of my desk were in their late forties to early fifties and looked fifteen years older. Having yer child murdered will do that to you.
Porter West was a big man, but he slumped in his chair like a hunchback. His thinning blond hair was turning the color of old corn. And his brown eyes were dull and defeated.
His wife, Myrna, was a brunette, spear-thin with skin that looked like tracing paper and eyes too sad to look into.
“Will you take the case, Miss Quick?”
“Yeah, I’ll take it,” I said. “But starting this late after the murder will make it harder.”
“Well, the police haven’t done anything,” Mrs. West said. Her voice was shrill.
I knew the coppers had probably done plenty. Still, this was what people who were connected to unsolved murders believed. I didn’t say this to Mrs. West. I nodded in a way I hoped would give her the idea that I agreed with her and was sympathetic, which I was.
“You have to understand that chances are slim that I’ll find the killer.”
West said, “We have no other choice.”
“Well, my fee is—”
“We don’t care what the fee is.”
He was a lawyer with an important firm, and the Wests were in clover.
“I have to tell ya anyway.”
When that was settled, West gave me a picture of his dead daughter, a folder that included a history of Claudette West’s short life, and all the newspaper clippings about the case. The murder, as I well knew, had taken place four months before.
