Uncivil Defense

  UNCIVIL DEFENSE

  Maggie Sullivan mystery #7

  by

  M. Ruth Myers

  Copyright ©2018 by Mary Ruth Myers

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Contact

  www.mruthmyers.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Tuesday House

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Ongoing thanks to the Dayton Police History Foundation for its wonderful window into an important element of Dayton’s past, and to the organization’s secretary-treasurer, Steven Grismer for patiently answering my questions.

  Any errors in the story you are about to read are entirely my own.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Uncivil Defense

  Uncivil Defense

  May 27, 1943

  ONE

  Milo Thompson was the queerest little duck who’d ever walked into my office. He’d barely told me his name, and still was shaking my hand, when he leaned across my desk and spoke in a voice just above a whisper.

  “Miss Sullivan, I need the services of a private investigator.”

  I fought the urge to whisper back. Instead, I smiled reassurance.

  “That’s what I’m here for. Why don’t you sit down?”

  He settled himself in the chair in front of my desk while I closed the afternoon paper where I’d been following the progress of Allied troops in North Africa. Thompson was slightly built with white hair that didn’t match the age of his face, which suggested early forties. The hair was neat at the sides, but on top it resembled something out of the sample case of a Fuller Brush salesman. His gray suit was quality all the way, although on the conservative side. It looked nice with his hair. He settled a very nice felt fedora on his knees.

  “Now tell me about the nature of your problem, Mr. Thompson.”

  Again he leaned forward, his chin level with my telephone. He peered at me gravely over the top of his black-rimmed glasses.

  “I’m being followed.”

  By men from Mars, I thought, considering his mannerisms. Yet those same mannerisms suggested a life so constrained that I felt sorry for him.

  “There was a note too. This morning. That’s why I decided I ought to see someone. I thought, since you’re a woman, you’d be less likely to carry a gun. I really don’t want to see anyone hurt.”

  He’d shifted back to sit normally now. The part about a note had sharpened my interest.

  “Mr. Thompson, I carry a gun sometimes for the same reason any other detective does. Helping people like you often means coming in contact with people who aren’t very pleasant. Most men are bigger than I am.” Which was five-foot-two and a hundred ten pounds, if anyone cared. “I throw a pretty good punch and can handle lots of them with that and tough talk. Other times, it takes the sight of a gun to persuade some gorilla that I’m not a cream puff.”

  “Oh. Yes, well ... I suppose that’s all right then. In any case, I’m sure Mother will feel more comfortable with a woman if you have to talk to her, which I hope you won’t.”

  Ah-hah. That explained his fussy manner. He was a mama’s boy. As he talked, his volume had tiptoed up to almost normal. I reached for the lined tablet I kept on my desk for taking notes.

  “You said there’d been a note? Tell me about that, and the being followed part.”

  “There’s a car. A strange car. It follows me when I leave work in the evening. I’ve seen it once or twice in the morning as well. It parks down the street from our house, sometimes one direction, and sometimes another. A few times I’ve thought ... I’ve thought someone was following me on the street as well.”

  “What does this car look like?”

  “Look like?” He frowned. “Gray, I think. Older, possibly. I haven’t really noticed it enough to describe it, but I’m certain it’s the same car.”

  Milo Thompson looked so serious, and so intent on what he was saying, that I was inclined to believe him. He hadn’t so much as glanced at his surroundings, which was fine since there wasn’t much to see. The plant in one corner had been dead for years, a permanent replacement for numerous predecessors I’d forgotten to water. My wall decor consisted mainly of a calendar from my DeSoto dealer. The only touch which might impress a prospective client was a world globe I’d splurged on once we’d entered the war against Hitler and his bunch.

  “And the note you mentioned?” I prompted.

  “Yes, that’s when I decided I had to do something. It meant whoever it was was getting closer. I was afraid they might be ... upping their ante.” He looked pleased with himself for using the phrase.

  “It came in our paper this morning, you see. Rolled up inside it. That means-that means whoever put it there was on our porch, right at the door to our house. They stood there and unrolled the paper and put the note inside, and if I weren’t the one who brings the paper in every morning, Mother might have opened it first and seen it. The whole business would have upset her terribly.”

  “What did the note say?”

  “‘Pay up or else.’ It was written in crayon. Printed. ‘Pay up or else.’”

  I sat back in my chair. He watched me anxiously.

  “It’s threatening, don’t you think?”

  “Any chance it’s some neighborhood kid’s idea of a prank?”

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “And you don’t owe anyone money?”

  “Oh, goodness no.”

  He didn’t look like the sort who’d get in over his head gambling, but I’d learned a long time ago that people in that kind of trouble didn’t admit it. Someday someone was going to walk through my door and say, “I’m in hock to my bookie for more than I can ever possibly pay, and I need your help.” It would be refreshing.

  “What about favors?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Has anyone done you a favor and then come to you later asking you to do something for them? A favor in return?”

  “Oh.” He wrinkled his brow. “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “Do you have any idea at all why someone would be following you, Mr. Thompson?”

  “No! It’s - it’s ... that’s what makes it so ... outlandish! We are perfectly respectable people, my mother and I.”

  “I take it you live with your mother?”

  “Yes. I’m-I’m a bachelor.” His cheeks colored ever so slightly. He looked down at the hat on his knees. “She wanted to stay in the house after my father died, and, well, she had a lot to adjust to just then. There was no reason why I shouldn’t stay ... help out where I could.”

  I thought I caught a wistful note in his words, but I couldn’t be certain.

  More questioning brought the information that he owned a small garment factory started by his grandfather. Before the war, as he put it, the company had made ladies’ belts and skirts. Now, like every other manufacturer, they were making things for the war effort. My guess was it would be uniform pants of some sort and belts for G.I.s, making them an unlikely target for espionage. It didn’t leave me much to go on.

  “You told me whoever’s following you drives a gray car, an older model. Take a minute and think about what led you to think it was older.”

  The line appeared on his forehead again.

  “It’s boxy. Not streamlined like the newer ones,” he said after a moment.

  That was something, at least.

  “I don’t suppose you g
ot the license number.”

  “As a matter of fact ... well, it’s only the last two numbers, and I’m not sure about the last of them. It might be either 42 or 43. That corner was either rusted or there was mud, and I only thought of it this last time—”

  “That’s okay.”

  He’d relaxed as we talked. His voice, though soft, was now in a range approaching normal. His answers were thoughtful. I felt growing confidence he wasn’t imagining all this.

  “Mr. Thompson, I need to ask you some things I’d asked anyone who came to me with this kind of problem. Or just about anything that brought them here, really. If you take offense, it’s going to be harder for me to help you. Understand?”

  He nodded, listening intently.

  “Has anyone been let go at your business? Or maybe missed out on a promotion? Anything that would give them a grudge.”

  “No. No, I can’t think of anything like that. I don’t really do the day-to-day running of things, though. You’d need to talk to my manager, Mr. Wohl.” He gave me a phone number.

  “What about women you’re seeing, or have been involved with? Any of them married?”

  “Certainly not! There haven’t been many women at all. No one for ... for a long time.” His gaze faltered and he looked at the floor. “I’m not the sort of fellow women go for.”

  On the one hand, he could be making the whole story up. On the other hand, I didn’t think he was. I told him I wasn’t sure how much I could help him, and what my daily rate was. He wrote me a check for three days, which was my minimum. He also wrote the name and address of his business in neat script and added the name and title of the manager. Precision plus.

  “I’ll be in Cincinnati most of tomorrow,” he confided. “I’ll call you Saturday morning when I get back to see what you’ve learned. That is, if you don’t mind.”

  When I heard the elevator at the end of the hall go down, I walked to one of the pair of windows that looked out on Patterson. Milo Thompson emerged from my building. I watched him head up the street with a surprisingly decisive stride, and tried to shake off the feeling I would live to regret agreeing to help him.

  TWO

  Dayton and the surrounding area held its first official blackout drill that night. Mrs. Z, who owned the glistening white, two-story rooming house where I lived, had made blackout curtains and brought them around to all our rooms the week before. There was pretty chintz on the inside to hide the black that blocked out the light. Although Mrs. Z was sweet about it, she’d made it clear that any girl who didn’t have them completely closed for the drill would be hunting new lodgings come morning.

  Defense factory jobs had swelled the city’s population. With people sleeping in shifts, two or three to a single bed, and even reading obituaries to spot rooms coming vacant, it was an effective warning. In addition to closing my curtains, I moved my bedside lamp to the floor and sat there to read.

  Next morning, while I sat on the end stool at McCrory’s lunch counter, my folded-up newspaper told me city officials reported “almost complete” compliance to the drill.

  “A policeman came in hunting you,” a scrawny little waitress named Izzy murmured as she slid a bowl of oatmeal in front of me.

  “A policeman?”

  I knew lots of policemen. My dad had been one. One had courted me for a long time. But he was unlikely to come here hunting me. Izzy moved like a flash, the fastest waitress I’d ever seen. She was gone before I could ask for particulars. I went back to the paper.

  Some of the pooh-bahs responsible for our civilian defense claimed Dayton was just as likely to be bombed as the White House was because of two big Army airfields right next door. Wright Field was headquarters for the U.S. Army Air Corps Materiel Division. They developed new aircraft and technology there. Patterson Field was the center for Air Corps aviation logistics, maintenance and supply. I skimmed the rest on the blackout and moved on to other articles.

  “What did he look like?” I asked as Izzy came toward me with more hot water for tea.

  “Real young.” She paused in her hummingbird darting. “Tomorrow’s my last day, so in case you don’t come in, thanks for all you did for me.”

  “Factory job?” Any woman who wanted could get one.

  “Waitressing, out by the airfield.” She was in flight again to wait on customers. “Better pay and better tips,” she said over her shoulder.

  I was glad for Izzy. She was a good woman. But the thought of someone else serving my breakfast was hard to swallow.

  ***

  Curiosity over why a cop was looking for me so early in the morning itched at me all the way to my office. It only took about five minutes for that curiosity to turn into a rash. I’d barely had time to hang up my pint-sized navy-blue hat with white trim and get out a bottle of solvent to clean my typewriter keys when the telephone rang.

  “Freeze wants you to meet him over on East First,” said a cop whose name I didn’t recognize.

  Lieutenant Freeze was head of the homicide squad. They weren’t an official unit. They were part of the general detective division. But when bodies turned up, so did they.

  Freeze wanting me at a crime scene was contrary to the way things usually went. Up to this point it had always been a case of my finding a body, or of trying to worm my way in someplace where one had been found because the victim might be connected to a case I was working on.

  My pal on the phone gave me an address.

  “They’re out at the back,” he said. “Sort of between two buildings.”

  East First turned into Springfield Street at the edge of downtown. Factories started to line it. The number I was looking for was in a transitional area before that happened. Buildings housed warehouses, small manufacturing places and wholesalers. A bottling plant was thrown in for good measure. It had gone out of business.

  I recognized the car that Freeze and the two men who worked with him usually used. It was parked at the curb with a squad car behind it. I found a spot for my DeSoto half a block up.

  “Took your own sweet time,” said Freeze as I made my way through the narrow space between a four-story building of dun-colored bricks and its neighbor.

  “Gee, Freeze, I didn’t realize I was working for you.”

  Freeze had a sharp chin and a nose that was way too pretty for the rest of him. When I first knew him, his hair had been an even mix of black and white. Now the white was winning. He didn’t like me much, and clung to the notion people dumped information into my lap because I was female, but we’d managed to cooperate occasionally of late. War made strange bedfellows.

  Freeze stepped to one side and I saw a body.

  “What do you know about this guy?”

  Closing the space between us, I looked down. I didn’t like what I saw.

  “His name’s Milo Thompson. He came to my office yesterday wanting to hire me.”

  Instead of a nice suit the dead man now wore slacks that had been around for a while and a tweed jacket. In place of his fedora, a tweed cap lay a few feet away from him. Lying there on the pavement in different clothes he looked coarser, somehow. Everything about him looked rougher and tougher. Yet his white hair and the way it stood up on top was unmistakable.

  “That explains the slip of paper we found in his pocket.” Freeze held it out by the corner and I saw the neat script of the man who’d written the name and address of his business down for me. An address, I realized now, that was close to where we stood.

  “Thing is,” Freeze was saying, “according to the driver’s license we found on him, which matches a mug shot and fingerprints we’ve got on file, his name is Floyd Hotchkiss. He and two other men robbed a bank in Cincinnati ten years back. He got out of prison two weeks ago.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been snookered.” With more satisfaction than was seemly, Freeze stuck an Old Gold in his mouth and held a match to the tip. “Did you write down that alias, Dotson?”

  A kid with the thin hair that males who
are strawberry blonds seem to have, jumped and put pen to notepad. His suit, along with the notepad, suggested he was either a new detective or a Boy Scout out of uniform. Boike, the blocky blond who usually accompanied Freeze, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was another man I’d sometimes seen with them.

  “Uh, is it spelled with an i or a y? The Milo part?” the kid asked.

  Freeze’s jaw tightened so I thought he might bite his cigarette in two.

  “An i,” I said.

  “What kind of story did Hotchkiss spin you?” asked Freeze.

  “He claimed someone had been following him.”

  “Looks like he was right.”

  “Yeah. He also said there’d been a note.”

  I told Freeze the gist of it, and that he claimed he’d destroyed it. I fiddled with the inch-high V-for-Victory pin on my lapel as I put two and two together.

  “Did they recover the loot from the robbery?”

  “Nope. Just a bill from the bait money. Hotchkiss tried to use it for a train ticket. That’s how they caught him.”

  “If he didn’t share, his two partners might send him a note like that.”

  “One’s dead. The other one got out of the pen three years ago. We’ll have a chat.”

  There were cuts on Hotchkiss’ cheekbones and his nose had bled.

  “Someone roughed him up before they killed him.”

  “Yeah.”

  I didn’t have much sympathy. I’d believed the little skunk. I’d fallen for his worried voice and pretense of innocence.

  “How’d he die?”

  Apart from his nose and his cheeks and a splotch above his belt that could have come from either of those, I didn’t see much blood.

  Freeze nodded to his young assistant.

  “Dotson. Show her.”

  Dotson slipped the notepad into his pocket with what looked to be some reluctance. Bending down to the body, and using his pencil to avoid contact, he lifted the left lapel. Toward the center of the chest was a bloodstain the size of my palm, big enough to notice, but not soaked. I couldn’t see either a knife wound or bullet hole.