Dames Fight Harder Page 5

  “I take it you’re the foreman?”

  He stood with his back against one of the uprights now, smoking. He tossed his cigarette to the ground, grinding it out as he straightened.

  “If you’re a reporter, I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  I gave him a business card.

  “I’m a friend of Miss Minsky’s. She wants me to see if I can find out anything more about why that body turned up here.”

  “Maybe she should stop by and ask herself,” one hulk of a man said sullenly. “Sure sticks her nose in any other time.”

  The foreman held up a hand. He looked from the card to me.

  “Yeah, I remember you now. You’ve come to other sites I was on a time or two with Miss Minsky. We quit at noon on Saturday. He wasn’t here then. None of us knew him.”

  Some of the men who now stared at me sat with their arms crossed. One nudged his neighbor, giving a nod at my slacks. Their prevailing mood, however, seemed sour. I didn’t think it had much, if anything, to do with my arrival. If there was something to learn here, I might be better off to go after it in a roundabout way.

  “I guess the police must have put a stop to construction? Last time I saw one of Miss Minsky’s projects, all you fellows were busy as beavers. There were more of you, too.”

  I caught angry grunts.

  “We can’t do anything else until they pour concrete,” the foreman said. “That was supposed to happen yesterday. The cops said forget it because of finding the body. They were crawling around the place like ants, so I had to send the men home.

  “The concrete company was mad as hops when I called and cancelled. They’ll probably bill Miss Minsky anyway, and now we’ve got to get back on their schedule.”

  “While we sit drawing half-pay until they pour,” someone grumbled.

  “Be glad you’re getting any pay,” the foreman said sharply. “Boss didn’t have to do that.”

  “She’s doing it because she needs us.” The hulk crossed arms the size of hams. “Every builder in town is crying for workers. It’s her pocketbook she’s worried about, not ours.”

  A man with a square chin and droopy eye spoke with a twang.

  “Some man you are, talking about her like that after she gave you a second chance.”

  The hulk was off the stack of boards where he sat in an instant. He caught the front of the other man’s shirt, yanking him to his feet.

  “Either of you throws a punch and you’re both fired.” The foreman inserted himself between them. He held a lead pipe in one hand.

  The hulk had drawn his fist back to deliver what would have been a bruising blow. Three or four seconds passed before he lowered it. The foreman, a trim little guy, continued to stand between them with arms outstretched. He nudged the larger man’s chest with the length of pipe.

  “Hawkins, go home. Cool off before you come in tomorrow.”

  The other men watched Hawkins stalk away in silence. Some of them shuffled their feet. At least one of Rachel’s employees seemed to be nursing a grievance against her. The man with the droopy eye smoothed his neatly ironed work shirt and gave me a nod. Maybe it was meant as apology.

  “I know Miss Minsky appreciates your loyalty,” I said. At least she would if she knew what was happening. It appeared these men had no idea she was being looked at as a murder suspect.

  “Did anything out of the ordinary happen these last few weeks?”

  Heads shook.

  “Think a minute,” urged the foreman.

  This time a good minute passed. Frowns emerged here and there as the men searched their memories. Some ducked inquisitive looks at their pals. Something flared in the face of the fellow who’d nearly gotten into the fistfight. He darted a look at me. The foreman’s forehead had wrinkled in thought.

  “The rest of you might as well go home too,” he said with a sigh. “Concrete’s not likely to come today, late as it’s getting, and not without somebody from Minsky coming to tell us. Come in usual time tomorrow.”

  Relaxing enough to talk now, with most of them picking up lunch buckets, they filed toward the street. The foreman watched for a minute, then lighted a cigarette and leaned back against the joist he’d leaned against earlier.

  “I’ll stick around the rest of the day,” he said by way of explanation. “In case the police come back, or anyone drives out with any sort of instruction.” He slanted his work cap back and looked at the sky. “If the weather turns and we get rain like we did up until last week, that means we can’t have concrete poured either. Put us even farther behind.”

  He offered me the pack of cigarettes.

  “No thanks.” I took a seat vacated by one of the workmen. “Those two who were fixing to duke it out, do they have some kind of bad blood between them?”

  He nodded.

  “Over what?”

  “You’d have to ask them. Hawkins is a royal pain in the backside, but with those muscles of his, he does the work of two. And what he said’s true, the supply of men for construction work keeps shrinking because of the draft, and isn’t likely to get bigger anytime soon.”

  I stretched my legs out, thinking I could possibly start to like slacks. The sun directly overhead was making me squint a little.

  “You looked as though something might have occurred to you right before you sent the others home.”

  He frowned and took his cigarette out to study it.

  “It probably doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, but when I’m in charge of a project, I drive by on Sundays, late afternoon usually. Just to make sure everything’s okay.

  “I was running late day before yesterday, almost suppertime. When I drove up, a car was parked on the opposite side. Right before that side street comes in.”

  “Parked facing the way you were coming.”

  He nodded.

  “I hadn’t really noticed it, but when I started to pull to the curb like I always do, so I can creep along and make sure nothing’s been bothered, the car took off. It didn’t exactly whiz around the corner, but it went too fast for a Sunday afternoon, if you know what I’m getting at.”

  “I think I do.”

  Instinct had told him something wasn’t right about the situation. It was the sort of gut reaction I’d learned to listen to when I felt it.

  Streets didn’t run in a tidy grid where we were. To the north, a vacant lot abutted Rachel’s building site. Across from the site, coming toward the two lots, was the street into which the departing car had turned. From the foreman’s description, the place where the car had been parked before it took off would have been a dandy spot to sit and study the area. In particular, it offered a close look at the spot where the body had been found and how hidden it was from passersby. It also, as the foreman had noticed, afforded a quick getaway.

  “Did you mention that to the police?”

  He took a quick draw on his cigarette.

  “I told them I’d come by to check things. I didn’t want to say anything about the car. It could just have been some fellow out snuggling with his girlfriend.”

  “There were two people in the car then?”

  He considered.

  “I think so. Yeah, I’m sure I saw two heads right before it turned. Except...” He started to frown. “Now that I think about it, I saw two hats, too. Men’s hats. Or at least I think so.” He waggled a finger at mine. “Harder lines than yours. Like fedoras. Men’s brims.”

  He hadn’t noticed the make of the car, or the plate numbers. It hadn’t been colorful. It was black, or dark blue. In other words, there was nothing to go on. It was one more thing assuring me Rachel was being framed for a murder she hadn’t committed.

  “The police said they were able to reach Miss Minsky because she’d left a business card with one of the neighbors around here. That she’d written her home phone number on the back.”

  “I can’t say about the phone number, but yes. She gave a card to the old bat across the street, trying to get her to simmer down.”


  I looked at the gray house with white trim he indicated. Everything about it proclaimed tender care, from the two chairs on its small front porch to its neatly tended flowerbeds and freshly painted picket fence in front.

  “Simmer down from what?”

  “A truck with a load of lumber swung around too fast and some of the boards slid off. Broke a couple of boards in her fence and wrecked some rose bushes or something. That chucklehead Hawkins was driving, so instead of apologizing when the old lady came out yelling, he probably smarted off. I was up on a scaffold, and before I could get to the ground, she went in her house and came out waving a rifle.

  “Not sure what would have happened if Miss Minsky hadn’t happened along just then, coming to check on something. She was out of her car and bustled across the street like a banty hen. She lit into Hawkins — you could hear parts clear over here — and smoothed things over with the old woman. When she got over here, she told me to treat the woman with kid gloves, that she’d see to new rose bushes and had given the woman a card and told her to call if she had any more complaints.”

  “Has she?”

  The foreman shrugged.

  “None that I know of. I’ve heard she had run-ins two, three years ago with the outfit that built that place.” His head tipped toward the neighboring office building. “Waved her rifle at them at least once. You’re not thinking of talking to her, are you?”

  I smiled. “Why, as a matter of fact, I am.”

  TEN

  The old lady with the rifle wasn’t home. As I came back down the porch steps, I waved to the foreman who stood at the opposite curb, ready to dash gallantly across and save me. It had taken some talking to persuade him not to accompany me.

  “I’ll check in tomorrow,” I called as I got into my car. My statement included the woman in the gray house as well, if she wasn’t around when I swung past later today.

  I had some lunch in the Arcade, looking up at its glass dome and enjoying the ham on white I’d gotten at one of the stalls. I watched a woman buy three jars of preserves and a younger one buy fresh-made noodles. The noodles would probably make an appearance in whatever she served for dinner tonight: soup, or chicken and noodles, or goulash. The place was always filled with bustle, all sorts of people swirling through. The streets outside were more orderly, and less colorful. The Arcade pulsed with life.

  So far, I had one employee who apparently nursed a grudge or two toward Rachel, and a neighbor who sounded hostile toward her project, if not toward her. I also had a suspicious car with two men in it not too many hours before Gabriel Foster was dumped there or killed there. And two men who’d broken into Rachel’s place of business last night, hunting something. Were they the same two men?

  Possibly. But just as possibly not. All four could be mixed up in this but with different chores. Or even working different angles. I’d had a case last year where men who worked for a rackets kingpin and men who worked for an amateur turned out to be trampling each other’s feet.

  Balling up the brown paper from my sandwich, I tossed it into a wastebasket and headed back to my office to try calling Pearlie again.

  I’d picked up my pencil to dial when the phone rang under my hand.

  “I got something for you,” said the voice I’d been waiting to hear. “I’ll be here the next forty minutes or so. It’s a restaurant.”

  He hung up before I finished writing the address.

  From anyone other than Pearlie, I would have been miffed. As it was, I felt relief that he’d saved me some time and dug up information. I was also considerably curious about the sort of place he frequented when not with Rachel.

  ***

  The restaurant was a hole in the wall deeper than it was wide. Its shape, and the lowered lights I encountered inside, kicked my wariness to the maximum. As soon as my eyes adjusted, I saw it wasn’t at all like the narrow little café of which I had unpleasant memories. Three women sat laughing and talking at one table. There were plenty of couples.

  A man with a white linen towel wrapped around him like an apron led me to one of the tall wooden booths at the back.

  “What’ll you have?” asked Pearlie as I slid in across from him.

  “Just coffee, thanks. I already ate.”

  The restaurant looked like it might be Italian. People were eating things with spaghetti. A half finished steak sat before Pearlie.

  “Bring her one of those tiara things. That’ll go good with coffee.”

  He cut into his steak. Only a faint line of pink showed. Maybe Pearlie didn’t like seeing blood.

  “So did you get my message that Rachel is out?”

  “Yeah. Kinda surprised she didn’t get in touch, to tell you the truth.”

  There was something besides surprise in his words. Hurt feelings that he’d mattered so little.

  “I haven’t talked to her since the jail. Her brother sent a messenger over.”

  “The lawyer.”

  “Yes.

  “He sent a note saying Rachel wanted to see me tonight. I’ll let you know what I learn.”

  The waiter returned with my coffee and a fancy dessert that was layers of dark crumbs and white I couldn’t identify.

  “How about Foster? What did you find on him?”

  Pearlie patted his lips with the checkered napkin.

  “He’s in the same game Rachel is.”

  “Construction?”

  “Yeah.” He reached into his pocket. “There’s where his office is. There’s where he’s got his current job going up. There’s where he lives — wife and three kids. That last one’s his girlfriend. Name’s Gloria.”

  His finger moved down the list of addresses in squarish print on the paper he slid me.

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “Needed to get it done. I’m going somewhere else for awhile.”

  For the first time since I’d known him, Pearlie seemed uncomfortable. Wary, even. I recognized now that he’d been that way since I walked in. What was going on? Why was he leaving town right when Rachel needed him, for moral support if nothing else?

  “Nice work digging up a girlfriend,” I managed to say.

  He nodded.

  “Thought it might save time if I looked for places he wasn’t a Boy Scout. From what I could find out, he started going out with her about three years back. Year, year and a half ago she moved from a room on Washington to an apartment on Booher.”

  “He paying the rent?”

  “Don’t know on that.”

  One thing was certain, Gloria had moved up in the world. Booher was a small street squeezed in between First and Second but parallel to them. The number wasn’t enough to tell me the apartment’s exact location, but I didn’t think it was far from the Hulman Building or Dayton’s swankiest hotel, the Miami.

  “Any other places where Foster wasn’t a Boy Scout?”

  “None I found. Doesn’t gamble, doesn’t owe money to people who might take exception.”

  “What about his business? It in any kind of trouble? In the red or facing lawsuits?”

  “Don’t know how to find out about business things.”

  Pearlie looked at his watch.

  “Gotta go. Check’s taken care of. Look after yourself, okay?”

  ***

  The old woman purported to wave a rifle still wasn’t home when I drove over. Across the way, the Minsky Construction site with its scraped up earth and skeletal structure sat deserted. Since I had the place to myself, I got out and walked to where Freeze and the others had been working yesterday. Then I surveyed the spot where, according to what I’d been told, the body had been. In neither case did anything catch my attention or the idea of something to look at creep into mind.

  The dead man had been in the same line of business as Rachel. Rachel hadn’t liked him. Why?

  I turned my face up to the cloudless blue sky, but I didn’t see any answers there either. All I saw when I brought my gaze back to earth was the pink froth of a pair of redbud t
rees in the yard of the gray house across the way.

  I could understand why the woman had been upset about the changes taking place on this side of the street. Before an office building went up next to where I was standing and this lot was cleared, she’d probably looked across at redbud trees and daffodils, followed by lilacs and mums. She’d looked and seen little houses like her own, a neighborhood where people knew each other.

  Sharp as an icepick I felt longing for the house I’d grown up in, a modest house like the ones across the way. I’d had no choice but to sell it to pay off my father’s medical bills. I’d been eighteen. There’d been a plum tree in the backyard, and flowering quince. On long, lazy summer days I’d taken a quilt out and lain on it reading, or curled up petting one of my cats.

  Shaking free of the past, I returned to my car and drove around having a look at the addresses Pearlie had given me, and wondering what each could tell me about the recently departed Gabriel Foster. The project he’d had going up was twice the size of Rachel’s, its outer walls nearly completed. It looked as if work had come to a halt there. No men were in sight.

  Next I drove past his office. It was fancier than hers, with a sidewalk leading up to the entrance and patches of grass at either side of the steps. At his two-story brick house the driveway was filled with cars, leading me to suspect a wake or other comforting of his widow might be in progress. The building where his girlfriend lived was four stories of tan brick with a small awning over the entry. Most of the windows facing the street had draperies as well as shades.

  The afternoon was almost gone. I went home to peel the bulkier bandages off my shins so I could put on heavy cotton stockings and a suit before presenting myself at the home of Rachel’s parents.

  All the time I found myself thinking of Pearlie and the oddness of his manner and why he’d be leaving town when the woman I’d thought he was devoted to was in a pickle.

  ELEVEN

  The address in Joel Minsky’s note turned out to be a substantial two-story brick house with an attached garage a few blocks off Salem Avenue. It was a neighborhood of quiet prosperity marked by deep front yards and mature trees.