Dames Fight Harder Read online

  His mouth curved at the memory.

  “Then over here he pulled that stunt with the truck full of lumber. Swerving around too fast and ruining that lady’s bushes. And I’ll tell you why he was wasn’t driving better. He was hung over. He ought to be kissing Miss Minsky’s feet that he still has a job, not grousing about her.”

  On the surface, Hawkins sounded like nothing more than another perpetually disgruntled loudmouth. I couldn’t see him having a motive to kill Foster. I could, maybe, see him helping someone cast suspicion on Rachel, either for money or because he resented her. He was at the construction site every day, and if Rachel herself hadn’t dropped the earring, somebody had planted it.

  * * *

  “Miss Minsky is expecting me,” I told the dumpy man sitting behind the desk that controlled visitors to Rachel’s apartment building. If he recognized me from the previous day, he didn’t show it. Happily, I’d interpreted Rachel’s note correctly. Once I gave my name he told me the apartment number and I took the single elevator up.

  Rachel opened the door before my knuckles had left it. In contrast to the drab and not-too-brightly lighted halls I’d come through, the living room I entered seemed awash in light. Pale pink walls made sophisticated by a faintly grayish tone formed a background for Eames chairs and a claret red sofa. By chance or design it created an exquisite setting for the dark-haired woman who had started pacing as soon as she closed the door.

  “I lunched with Joel. He had a deposition to get to, and agreed to drop me at Rike’s on provision I check the fit on a dress I was having altered and go directly home.” She pointed me to a seat. “I’ve already asked them to deliver it day after tomorrow. I suggest you get right to the things you want to ask. We can risk about twenty minutes.

  “Drink?”

  I shook my head.

  “First of all, tell me about the quarrel you had with Foster. Where it was, what it was about, what was said?”

  “Outside the Stockyards Inn, three weeks ago. There’s a builders group that meets for lunch every month.”

  Sinking into a chair, she surveyed her surroundings and made a soft growl of contentment deep in her throat.

  “I didn’t threaten to kill him, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Kicking her pumps off, she reached for her cigarettes. “I may have said something that could be interpreted that way, though.”

  “Which was...?”

  She frowned in thought and blew out smoke. “As near as I can remember, I called him an underhanded s.o.b. and told him one of these days he was going to get what was coming to him.”

  Aware how it sounded, she shrugged irritably.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that life, God, the things you do or whatever you want to call it has a way of catching up with you. I was pretty sure he’d been behind some vandalism to a piece of equipment a month or so back. To that bucket loader you tangled with, as a matter of fact. I was still fuming over how the repairs had delayed things. Part of it was frustration because I’d just given away one a few years older that I’d kept as a backup.

  “That’s one of the ways I’ve kept my costs down, having machinery so we can do our own horizontal work. Five years back or thereabouts, when businesses were still going under, I bought an extra loader and a grader dirt-cheap and kept them as spares. But projects are drying up because of the war. There was word that machines were in short supply for something they’re doing at Patterson Field. I decided to do my bit rather than letting two machines we’d almost never needed sit and rust.”

  It took me a moment to absorb all she’d told me. I understood now why the equipment area at her office had looked emptier than usual.

  “What made you think it was Foster behind the vandalism?”

  “We’d had differences before. I’d all but accused him of cheating to get the contract for the project he had under way when he died. The rest of us were more or less clumped together in terms of our bids. His was enough lower that my jaw dropped. I wouldn’t have said anything if he hadn’t been so damn cocky, but the miserable gob of excrement smirked at me and said, ‘Better luck next time, honey.’”

  “The ‘honey’ part didn’t sit well?”

  Her eyes became fathomless pools. Their darkness chilled me.

  “I might have managed to hold my tongue if he hadn’t followed it up by telling me now I’d have more time to spend at the beauty shop. At which point I said he must be planning on cutting corners and underpaying his people to come in so much lower than the rest of us. He turned so red I was braced for him to take a swing at me.”

  “And there were witnesses to that too?”

  “The other bidders were still around, and a few other people. I’m sure some of them heard. Win Lamont was looking daggers at him.”

  I noted the name on my pad.

  “Am I to understand your bid came in second?”

  “Yes.” Rachel eyed me steadily. “I haven’t made this easy for you, have I?”

  “Did you know Foster had a girlfriend?”

  My change in direction threw her as few things did.

  “The point being, Rachel, there are other leads.”

  She sat silent a moment.

  “Thanks.”

  “The other bidders you mentioned, who were they? I have Lamont.”

  “Phil Clark and... I’m not quite sure. Oscar Jones? Arnie Snow?” She shook her head. “Sorry. Are you saying this could have something to do with Foster rather than me? With his project?”

  “I’m just saying there are other possibilities.”

  She glanced at her wristwatch, removed what remained of her cigarette from its holder, and rubbed it out. “What else?”

  “Where’s your gun?”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “I need to know.”

  She jumped up.

  “Wait. Show me. And don’t touch it.”

  I held my breath, uncertain whether or not to pray there would be a gun. She led me down the hall to a bathroom where she pointed to the kind of closet that held towels and extra soap and such.

  “In there. In the bottom of the toilet plunger.”

  Wondering if I’d heard her correctly, I picked the rubber plunger up by its long wooden handle. I tilted it and looked at the concave rubber part. All I saw were faint indentations under the lip.

  SIXTEEN

  Until we knew the whereabouts of the missing gun, we were waiting for the other shoe to drop. When I got back to the office, I opened the window halfway, then dialed the detective squad. Boike answered.

  “Hey, Boike. I’ve got a couple of questions.”

  “No sweet talk first? No roses?”

  “Freeze must be out.”

  “Shall I have him call you?”

  “No need. I expect you know the answer. Did you find the gun that killed Foster?”

  His breeziness disappeared.

  “I’ll have the lieutenant call you.”

  “Come on, Boike. Just this morning we were buddy-buddy, sharing ideas.”

  His sigh gusted down the phone line.

  “Yeah, I know. And regardless of what I said a couple days back, I don’t really think being friends with Miss Minsky would make you turn a blind eye to something. It’s just...”

  “You’ve got a job to do and you can’t be a hundred percent certain.”

  “Well, yes.” Cautious silence hung between us. “I guess it doesn’t hurt anything telling you. No, we haven’t found the gun. Why?”

  I crossed my fingers.

  “What about the one you found in her apartment?”

  More silence.

  “The fact it was a different caliber doesn’t mean anything,” he said at length.

  “Yeah, sure, I know that.” Of course I hadn’t known they had it, let alone the part about different calibers. I wondered whether Joel Minsky did. “What I meant was where did you find it?”

  “In the bottom of a toilet plunger. Even Freeze had never heard of hidi
ng one there before.”

  “Had it been used?”

  “The gun or the plunger?”

  “The fine points of housework don’t interest me, Boike.”

  “There wasn’t any residue on the gun, if that’s what you mean. It didn’t smell recently cleaned, either, but—”

  “She still could have killed Foster, using the one you haven’t found. I get the picture. When you fine fellows searched her place, did you see any signs of anyone else having searched?”

  He thought a minute.

  “Like we did at the girlfriend’s apartment, you mean?”

  “Exactly. Or torn up like at Miss Minsky’s office.”

  He thought.

  “If the Minsky wo— if Miss Minsky’s guilty, she wouldn’t search her own apartment, but she might someone else’s.”

  “She wouldn’t tear her own office apart.”

  “It could be two different parties searching.”

  “You’re a pain in the neck when you’re logical, Boike.”

  He chuckled.

  ***

  Walking to the window I opened it an inch to let the air in and stood staring out. Let’s say my basic theory was right and the earring had turned up where Foster’s body was found because someone wanted to frame Rachel. They would need to know her well enough to know she had the earrings. They would need to get their hands on one. They’d have to be a better pickpocket than Harry Blackstone, who had huge audiences laughing with that part of his magic show, to remove the earring while Rachel was wearing it. That suggested to me that whoever took it had access to her apartment and knew where she kept her jewelry.

  What that person hadn’t known was where she kept her gun. Or even that she had one, possibly.

  I leaned on the windowsill and breathed in the scent of the city. Just as I felt myself hovering on the edge of progress, Dayton still hovered on the edge of spring without quite getting there. The produce market a few blocks away didn’t yet have the berries and fruit whose fragrance sweetened the air in the afternoon sun. Its sounds were soothing though. The clatter of feet on cobblestones, voices, stall owners calling orders to assistants. Their words were too faint to make out, but the rise and fall made a kind of music.

  Before I lost too much time to the pleasant world outside, I returned to my desk and added items to my list of things to do next. Rachel had indicated at least one of the other bidders might have nursed hard feelings toward Foster over the contract he won. I wanted to talk to them. My pencil was moving methodically when my door popped open.

  “Hey, Mags, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  The man who planted himself in the chair in front of my desk had the physique of a praying mantis and a halo of reddish gold curls. Assorted camera gear hung from his neck. He was a shutterbug for the afternoon paper.

  “A favor? Jenkins, as I recall, you owe me about a dozen before we’re anywhere near even.”

  His cherubic face beamed at me with deceptive innocence. We’d been friends a long time.

  “Ah, but this one’s actually for Ione. I need you to hide her birthday gift.”

  “Um. Well, maybe then. As long as it’s not some sort of animal. Or bird, or reptile, or fish...” I tried to list them all on my fingers. Jenkins loved to wiggle through technicalities as well as I did. Usually the favors we pretended to keep track of involved information, which sometimes we traded and other times guarded like crazy. At least once a month he and his wife Ione and I went out to listen to jazz together, or spent a long evening at their apartment talking and drinking.

  “I wouldn’t leave anything alive in your care.” He looked pointedly at the plant whose brown remains had decorated a corner near the window for several years. “It’s a sewing machine.”

  My jaw fell.

  “Jenkins,” I said when I could finally speak, “why on earth could you possibly think Ione would want a sewing machine?”

  He preened, pleased at his own cleverness.

  “Well, she may not want one, but she loves clothes. You know that. And unless this war ends a whole lot faster than anyone paying attention thinks it will, clothes are likely to be rationed here just like in Britain. I can’t see Ione trading dresses with other women when she wants a new one, or rummaging through a used rack, can you? This way she can make her own.”

  I sat staring at the man who had a college degree and read half a dozen magazines, and wondering how he could possibly be so wrong about this. True, Ione was a clotheshorse. What was also true was that she bought most of those clothes in New York. She earned a pretty penny writing for magazines there and elsewhere, and several times a year she took the train to talk to editors there. Those trips also involved a healthy amount of shopping.

  “Does Ione even know how to use a sewing machine?”

  Jenkins waved his hand.

  “If she doesn’t, her mother or sister can teach her. And the thing is, Mags, the Singer store only has a few left, and won’t have any more new ones until the war ends because making new ones takes metal.” He paused. A serious note crept in. “Besides, if my draft number comes up, having something new to do might keep her from worrying while I’m gone.”

  I didn’t agree with his last assessment, but it got to me.

  “Every Tom, Dick and Harry and all their relatives can jimmy the lock on this door, and I think you’d be better off getting her perfume, but if you have your heart set on it, you can leave it here.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “I need the names of a couple of companies run by people that Rachel knows.” Betting myself that her secretary wouldn’t even need to look it up, I settled my backside into my office chair the next morning.

  “Which ones?” Cecilia’s cheerful voice asked.

  “Phil Clark and Win Lamont.”

  I won the bet. She rattled them off. Then she told me to hang on a second and gave me their phone numbers too.

  “Anything else?”

  “Does Rachel have any sort of list that shows who else bid on the same contracts she did?”

  “Oh yes. It’s not an official list unless it’s a project that used public money, but I type one up for her on every project. She keeps track of who the contract was awarded to, and as near as she can the rank of the other bids.”

  “She doesn’t actually know who bid how much?”

  “Again, not unless it involves public money. Sometimes she hears things, though. From what she tells me when it’s just the two of us, men can be as catty as they accuse women of being when a business deal doesn’t go their way.”

  “Could you please see who, besides Clark and Lamont and Rachel herself, bid on the project Gabriel Foster was working on when he was killed?”

  “It will take me five minutes or so. The contracts and lists were one of the things in that file cabinet in her office the burglars went through. I think I’ve got everything back where it should be, but there have been a lot of distractions. Shall I call you back?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I hung up and swiveled my chair to help me think better.

  Should I take a closer look than I’d initially intended at the people who’d been in the running on Foster’s project? When I’d asked Cecilia for names, my only interest had been talking to people who witnessed her set-to with Foster. Now I began to remember what I’d been hearing about the war making such projects scarce.

  Maybe I also ought to look at who had bid on Rachel’s project. With Foster dead and Rachel charged with his murder, were two projects and the profits that went with them suddenly up in the air? Were they worth committing murder? Was there any link between the two projects? I wished I knew a lot more than I did about the construction business.

  Cecilia called back with several minutes to spare.

  “Oscar Jones was the only other bidder. His company’s Jones Brothers, but there’s no brother. He died about the time I started here.”

  “Thanks, Cecilia. I don’t suppose you happen to know if any of the outfits who bid o
n that project bid on Rachel’s.”

  “No, but I’m in her office and I have the folder lying right in front of me.”

  Cecilia was a paragon.

  Only two other companies had submitted bids for the project Rachel was working on, though. Neither name was one I recognized. I glanced at the clock.

  “If I have time later today, I may stop by to look through that file if that’s okay.”

  “Of course. I’ll be here.”

  ***

  Two of the witnesses to Rachel’s quarrel with Foster couldn’t see me until tomorrow. Phil Clark could manage this morning. I recognized him as soon as he rose to greet me. He was the man I’d seen all but physically evicted from Rachel’s construction site for trying to poach her workers. He wasn’t much taller than me, dark-haired, and more than a little good looking. Rachel had good taste there. I put his age somewhere in his late thirties.

  “A private detective,” he said when I’d introduced myself and given him a card. “You don’t look nearly rough and tough enough for that kind of work.”

  He smiled.

  I smiled.

  His office was a far cry from Rachel’s. Walls and floor were quality wood. They glowed with regular polishing. A desk lamp with a green shade matched the green leather of his desk blotter, and his walls held a generous assortment of minor awards and photographs taken at business events. On his desk a gold tone frame held a photo of some kind of spaniel. He indicated a chair in front of his desk.

  “What occasions a visit like this?”

  “I’m gathering information relevant to the death of Gabriel Foster.”

  Clark grimaced.

  “Terrible business.”

  “An opportunity for someone like you, though.”

  He looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “A chance for you to pick up workers from two projects whose immediate futures look less than certain.” I let the words dangle a second. “I saw you at the Minsky site two days ago as you were leaving. The foreman there didn’t appear to appreciate your efforts.”

  “Ah. Yes.” He managed a look of strained politeness. “The hard truth is that able bodied men are in short supply, and that the workers there need paychecks.”

  He wasn’t a man who worked in his shirtsleeves. An unbuttoned suit jacket seemed to be his only concession to informality in his own office. He glanced at his wristwatch.