Dames Fight Harder Read online

  The green awning fluttered over the entry to Gloria the girlfriend’s building as I went in. With a smidgen of regret that I was going to miss what was shaping up to be another nice day, I turned my attention to the rows of mailboxes in the lobby. They were set in the wall and had brass doors that opened with keys. Each had a slot at the top large enough for letters and folded up magazines to be inserted. Brackets below the boxes gave the owner’s last name.

  Gloria Overbrook lived one floor up, three doors down on the left. Like the outside, the interior of the building was nice without being flashy. The carpet runner in the hall was free of worn spots. The management kept the place in tip-top shape. I knocked on Gloria’s door and waited.

  No sounds of movement reached me from inside. No radio played. I knocked again. That’s when my nostrils caught the smell of something sour. Not the smell of a body. It was more like the stink of a damp shirt left too long before ironing or milk gone bad. Frowning, I stepped back. As I did, something thumped against the other side of the door.

  The yowl of an unhappy cat split the silence. From the volume and the frequency with which he repeated it, he had a serious grievance. The racket he was making drew my eyes down to where I could hear him scratching frantically at the door between us. I saw the source of the sour smell. Something white had oozed out beneath the door and congealed in a thin line that was sticky to my touch.

  I stood a minute trying to think while the cat wailed. It had been quite a while since my girlhood kitchen where things were put in and out of the icebox and milk got spilled. Spills that were noticed got wiped up right away, but now and then a glass with milk residue got overlooked, or some of the contents dribbled down the side and left a ring. When that happened it took more than a couple of hours for milk to turn sticky.

  My eyes slid toward the lock on the door. I’d had considerable experience plying the crochet hook in my purse to open a locked door. In most cases, if I thought I might find something useful on the other side, I wouldn’t hesitate. This time another instinct kicked in. I needed to make sure everything I did here was completely aboveboard and couldn’t possibly be construed otherwise. Failure to do so might prove detrimental to Rachel’s legal defense.

  Going back downstairs, I knocked on the door marked MANAGER. A woman answered.

  “I just went up to see Miss Overbrook,” I said. “Her cat’s kicking up an awful fuss and there’s milk seeping under the door and spoiling your floor. The milk smells like it’s several days old. I’m worried something’s happened to her, that she might be sick or something.”

  “Oh, dear! Let me get my husband.”

  I could hear her repeating almost verbatim what I’d told her. A man in an olive green cardigan hurried back with her. He was past middle age.

  “Milk spilled, you say? I’d better get my keys.”

  His wife hadn’t asked me in. From the hallway I watched him set the pipe he’d been carrying in an ashtray. He opened a cabinet and took out a key ring. When he headed upstairs, I tagged along.

  “Like I told your wife, I was worried when I saw the milk. Something like that’s hard to clean once it sets.”

  He grunted and knocked on the door.

  “Miss Overbrook? Miss Overbrook, it’s the superintendent. I’m coming in.”

  A cat shot past us as soon as he opened the door. It was down the stairs before I could blink.

  “Miss Overbrook? Well, what on earth...?” The super stood shaking his head at the broken milk bottle that lay at his feet.

  Just inside the door, a spindly console table for visitors to set a hat or handbag on held an empty tumbler. Since the broken bottle lay between it and the door, I suspected the bottle had been on the table too. A quick stoop showed me the paper tab was gone from the bottle. The milk had been opened. It looked to me like Foster’s girlfriend had been about to pour herself a glass of milk when someone knocked. She’d set the glass and bottle down to open the door ... and then what?

  “I, uh, I suppose I ought to have a look in the bedroom. See if she’s too sick to call out, or-or....” The superintendent swallowed. He glanced toward me now as if glad for my presence.

  The place had an empty feel. Only the sound of the Frigidaire kicking on in the kitchenette broke the silence. The bedroom was empty, its bed neatly made. I tucked my hands under my arms so I wouldn’t touch anything.

  A pretty little vanity table held an overturned lipstick tube and two perfume atomizers. Not a lot of primping supplies for someone with a sugar daddy. The louvered closet doors to the closet stood open. Enough clothes to make me faintly jealous hung there, but there were empty hangers as well, half of them on the floor. Gloria was untidy.

  “You’d better check the bathroom,” I suggested. “In case she fell and hit her head.”

  As soon as he stepped out, I used my hanky to open the drawers in the vanity table for a quick peek. One showed signs of spilled powder. Another held a couple of scarves. No stockings there, or in the chest of drawers, whose contents were jumbled. No comb or hairbrush either.

  I met the super as he was coming out of the bathroom.

  “Well, it looks like she must have set that milk down and forgotten about it, and the cat got hungry and knocked it over while she was away. I guess it’s nothing to worry about, except she’ll have to pay for it if that floor outside her door needs refinishing. And I think I better tell her to get rid of...”

  He stopped, his gaze following mine as I stepped in for a closer look at a smudge I’d spotted on the hallway wall. It was just above eye level, a faint rust-colored smear that looked as if someone had made an attempt to wipe it away. I stepped back and stooped, and saw spots here and there on the carpeting.

  “We need to go down to your place and call the police,” I said. “This is blood.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Tell me again how you came to know Foster had a girlfriend?” said Freeze.

  ”Possibly because I’m a first-rate detective?”

  I gave him a breezy smile. Thanks to two-way radios the city’s entire fleet of police cruisers had gotten two years earlier, dispatch had been able to reach him while he was out elsewhere and give him the message that brought him to Gloria’s address.

  “I’ve got a few sources, Freeze, just like you’ve got yours. When I’m sniffing at suspects, trying to find out if they should move up or down on my list, I start with things they might want to hide. Gambling and girlfriends are right up there. Which you probably know. It occurred to me the same thing might apply to a victim.”

  “If you were hunting someone to pin it on, because you didn’t like the suspect we had.”

  “Which I don’t.”

  He grunted.

  “And the door wasn’t conveniently unlocked when you got here? That’s a first.”

  We were standing in Gloria Overbrook’s living room. While waiting for the police to arrive, I’d worked up a couple of things that might persuade Freeze to let me stay. I hadn’t needed any of them. He strolled around the corner and looked at the stain on the wall.

  “That’s blood alright. Dried. It’s been there overnight anyway, same as the spilled milk.” An unlighted cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. He took it out and jabbed it in my direction. “What would you make of it?”

  His invitation to put my two cents in left me momentarily speechless. Judging by Boike’s expression, it had startled him too. The landlord had no reaction. He was downstairs in his apartment, sitting on the couch with his head in his hands so he wouldn’t faint.

  “I think Gloria was about to pour herself a glass of milk when somebody knocked. She set the bottle down on that little slip of a table and answered the door. Then...” I took a breath. I wasn’t sure a homicide cop would be willing to make the same leap I did.

  “No telling when the milk got spilled, but I’d say the minute Gloria opened the door, somebody pushed his way in. He, or they, knocked her around pretty hard.”

  “Hard enough to
leave blood on the wall.”

  “Right.”

  “Because?”

  “Because she knew Foster? Because whoever hit her wanted information they thought she might have?”

  “Or because they were looking for something?”

  “Maybe...”

  “Something they didn’t find at Minsky Construction?”

  These rapid-fire questions were a side of him I’d never seen. I stole a look at Boike, who was listening intently. Was this what Freeze was like to work with? It suggested a keener mind than I’d ever witnessed.

  “There’s no sign anyone went through things.” I looked around. “The pictures are straight on the wall. Her bed was made. All the drawers were closed.”

  “One of the sofa cushions is turned upside down so the patterns don’t match. Broads are fussy about things like that.”

  A match flared to life in his hand. Looking pleased with himself, he started his cigarette. I nodded slowly.

  “I missed that. But here’s the thing, Freeze. Gloria could be dead, what with that blood on the wall and her gone. What I think’s more likely is that she got scared and ran. I think she cleared out in a big hurry, even a panic.”

  Freeze crossed his arms and leaned one shoulder against the wall. “Go on.”

  “Her hairbrush is gone, and some of her clothes, and — trust me on this one — most of her makeup. I didn’t poke around, but I peeked in her closet. I didn’t see a suitcase anywhere. Did you?”

  “Boike? You look under the bed?”

  “Harris did. Nothing.”

  Freeze nodded slowly.

  “You get good ideas sometimes. I’ve been starting to think there might be something to what you said about everything being too pat where we found Foster’s body. The earring I might take as a lucky break I don’t get enough of. But it plus the phone call about the body when no one around there looks like a candidate for the dog walker? Yeah. It’s awfully convenient.

  “Which doesn’t mean I think the Minsky woman’s innocent. I just think something’s off.”

  Cupping a hand beneath the ash that was on the verge of falling from his cigarette, he looked around. With alacrity suggesting it wasn’t the first time he’d seen his boss in such a fix in unfamiliar surroundings, Boike grabbed an ashtray from a table next to the sofa. Freeze took it without missing a beat.

  “The suspect’s office getting torn apart could fit a man she’d had differences with showing up dead on her property, but this business here, I don’t see how.”

  Thank goodness for sofa cushions put back the wrong way.

  A wee unfriendly voice in my brain told me Freeze could be buttering me up so I’d let my guard down. I decided to ignore the possibility. For the moment.

  “There’s something else that bothers me about all this,” I ventured. “Those shots Mrs. Cottle, the woman who gave you the card with Miss Minsky’s phone number, heard.”

  Our truce began to break down. Freeze snorted.

  “Claims she heard. In the kitchen at the back of the house. A woman that age?”

  “How many shots did she tell you she heard?”

  “Two.”

  “That’s what she told me, too.”

  “So?”

  “So you found two spent casings, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When you were first combing the scene I commented on the lack of blood. Besides the bullet that killed Foster being small caliber, you said it was also dead aim, one shot in the back of his head.”

  “Is there a point to this? I can look at Boike’s notes if I want a summary.”

  “Yes, but will they ask you why, if it only took one well-placed shot to kill Foster, Willa Lee Cottle heard two shots? And why you found two casings?”

  He hunted for an answer.

  “There could have been some kind of struggle.”

  “In the course of which Foster’s assailant managed to overpower him, then pop him neatly in the back of his head? And the moon could be made of green cheese, too, Freeze.”

  ***

  Since cops were currently questioning other residents of Gloria’s building I couldn’t do the same thing. In any case, I wanted to have another look at the area where Foster’s body had been discovered. I headed there hoping they weren’t pouring concrete yet.

  The building site was all but deserted. A solitary figure straddled a crossbeam not very high off the ground. His back leaned comfortably against the upright behind him. His arms were crossed. He looked completely content.

  As I drew closer, assuming it was the foreman, I saw it was the fellow with the droopy eye instead. He spotted me at the same moment and sat up, his legs still dangling.

  “No concrete?”

  “Tomorrow. One of the men from the office just drove out to give us the word. Foreman said we might as well all go home, and expect to work an extra hour every day until we make up lost time. I was just sitting enjoying this weather. Could I help you with something?”

  “I want to take another look at where they found the body.”

  “There,” he said pointing. “I guess you know that.”

  I nodded. “I didn’t see it, though.” A thought occurred to me. “Did you?”

  “Not much.” He hopped down. “The police were already here when we started arriving. As soon as they saw us, they took our sawhorses and put them up with cloth over them, to keep us from watching. Not long after that, the coroner’s truck came and they took the body away. So all I can really tell you is the body was there.” He pivoted to point again.

  Shots that could have been firecrackers.

  The possibility kids were out running around at an hour when kids shouldn’t be.

  Signs of a violent struggle at the apartment of a murder victim’s girlfriend.

  All I had to show for my morning’s work was a jumble. Still, a jumble was better than Rachel as a clear-cut suspect. Remembering yesterday’s confrontation between this man with an eyelid at half-mast and the hulk named Hawkins, I realized this was a perfect opportunity to learn what might lie behind Hawkins’ seeming animosity toward Rachel.

  “It might help me help Miss Minsky if I could find out more about the charming Mr. Hawkins,” I said. “Any chance you’d be willing to forego whatever’s in your lunch pail and let me buy you some lunch?”

  The man in neatly pressed khakis had clear gray eyes with flecks of brown. The skin around them was crinkled from working in the sun. And from smiling, as he did now.

  “I don’t get many chances to have lunch with a good-looking woman. My name’s Morris, by the way.”

  FIFTEEN

  Morris didn’t have a car, so I drove a few miles to a café that was near the trolley line he took. We were on the early side for lunch, but I wanted to be on time for my meeting with Rachel. I didn’t think a man who worked construction would object, since they were usually pounding nails before offices opened.

  “How did you get into this kind of work?” he asked as he looked at the card I’d given him. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “My dad was a cop.”

  We both had coffee to help pass time til our plate lunches came — creamed chicken on biscuits for me, hot pork for him.

  “Why didn’t you do that? They have policewomen now, don’t they?”

  I didn’t feel like telling how my brother had taken off when I was nine, and how my dad wrote letters to distant places and made calls trying to find him in scraps of time remaining between his workday and his efforts to placate my increasingly difficult mother. Nor did I want to talk about the young neighbor woman who had killed herself after her rat of a husband made a fool of her.

  “Sometimes people need help the police aren’t able to give.” I moved my elbow as our food arrived. “And I’m not as good about following rules as he was.”

  He chuckled. “What was it you wanted to know about Hawkins?”

  “He doesn’t seem to like Miss Minsky much. Any idea why?”

  �
�Just the fact that she’s boss would be reason enough for him. Her being a woman doesn’t help.”

  “It sounds like you’re telling me he’s got a chip on his shoulder.”

  “The size of a four-by-four.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  He chewed thoughtfully. “Some men are just like that, I guess. With him and Miss Minsky, there was more to it. A year or so ago, on another project of hers, some of the men had items go missing out of their toolboxes.”

  “You all buy your own tools?”

  “Hand tools, yes. Good quality ones. They’re worth a good bit if you sell them. One of the fellows who had something turn up missing had seen Hawkins hanging around his toolbox the day before. He asked Hawkins if he’d picked it up by mistake, but Hawkins denied it and got all huffy. About a week later, I opened my box and saw my best hammer was gone. I didn’t ask. I strolled over and opened Hawkins’ box.”

  “And there it was.”

  He grinned.

  “No, and he knocked me three ways to Sunday. I found it in a pawnshop not far from there, though, and the owner described the man who’d pawned as a big bruiser.”

  “That explains why there’s bad blood between you two, but what does it have to do with what you said about him getting a second chance?”

  He paused to pat his mouth with a paper napkin. Because of the war, some places had stopped putting holders of them on the table so you could help yourself. I wasn’t sure whether the move was to save paper or because the machines that made them were needed to make something else.

  “The foreman on the other project, the one where things disappeared, mentioned it to Miss Minsky. I don’t think he even knew anyone was suspected, just that men were grumbling. Not long afterwards that Buick of hers pulled up and she came out of the backseat like she’d been shot from a canon. She told the foreman to get us all down to ground level, then stood there with her hands on her hips and lit in. She let us know in no uncertain terms that she wouldn’t tolerate thieves on her crews. One or two might have snuck a look at Hawkins. Anyhow, she finished her piece up staring right at him.”