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“You sure you don’t want me to try and get a look at that car, Miss Sullivan? Get the make and the whole license number?”
Calvin had wasted no time in meeting me at a spot three blocks away from the hat shop. His bean pole frame was bent almost double as he looked in through the open passenger window of a jalopy he’d lovingly built from salvaged parts. I sat at the steering wheel of the nondescript vehicle, which under its hood was powerful as a panther. Calvin let me borrow it when I needed a car that wouldn’t be recognized.
“Thanks, Calvin, but no. I want you to drive off like you don’t even notice it. Leave mine at the garage. I don’t want anybody following you home.”
Calvin was a good egg. I wasn’t about to take even the slightest chance of endangering him.
“Just make it look like my car was acting up and you came to get it,” I said.
“I’ll pull it in the bay, then. There’s room. That’ll look like we’re going to work on it first thing in the morning.”
He unfolded himself and stepped back onto the curb. With a cheerful wave he set off. I reached across the seat and cranked the window up against seeping December cold. Then I found a spot on an intersecting street from which I’d be able to spot Calvin when he drove by. When he had, and I was sure no one had followed him, I tried Daisy’s place, but either I’d missed her or she hadn’t come home.
I went to a diner and had a hot pork sandwich. The mashed potatoes were first rate, and so were the green beans. When I’d topped it off with a cup of coffee it was time to try catching Daisy at work. I knew the approximate time when she started, so I found the trolley stop closest to C&S Signals and stood in a sheltered doorway she’d pass when she started walking. Speaking to her on a public street close to a streetlight was likely to frighten her less than pounding on the door of an empty building when she was alone inside.
My fingers were starting to tingle with cold by the time the trolley pulled to a halt and a stocky little woman with nice ankles got off. She started up the side street toward me. She was bundled up in a coat and a muffler and carried a cloth tote in one hand.
As she got closer, I could hear she was singing, half to herself. Something sprightly. Every so often she did a little jig step. Finally she got near enough I could make out her tune. Sweet Georgia Brown. Only instead of singing “Georgia”, she was singing “Daisy”.
Smiling, I stepped out where she could see me.
“Daisy Brown? Lucille Collingswood told me you might be able to tell me something that would help me find Mr. Tremain. I’m a detective. Her dad hired me. They’re both worried to death.”
I held out one of my business cards as I spoke. She looked from it to me, from it to me again before she took it.
“A detective?”
She was steady on her feet and hadn’t swayed a hair when she was doing her little dance steps.
“Like on the radio? Well, I don’t know.”
She began to walk again, toward C&S Signals. Either the prospect of talking to me made her nervous, or she was thinking about the night of mopping and dusting ahead of her. I fell into step.
“Myrtle Hawes did say he’d brought someone in to ask questions.” She was thinking aloud. “I just don’t remember her saying it was a woman. Can you show me a badge or something?”
Daisy was sharper than some. I fished the badge out of my purse. It was pinned to a nice leather holder and said Special Detective. It hadn’t been issued by the police, but it saved wear and tear on my paper license, which had been. Daisy stopped to have a good look.
“Well, okay then. But let’s get inside, first. Cold gets to me worse now than when I was young.”
We walked on.
“He’s a nice fellow, Mr. Tremain. Always speaks to me when he’s working late, asks how I am. Not many do that. Of course not many of them work late, either.” She laughed merrily. “Mr. Collingswood used to, but three or four years ago he began having heart trouble.”
“What about Mr. Scott?”
“Oh...” She shrugged. “He pops in and out sometimes. Doesn’t sit at his desk for hours figuring and making those funny squiggles like Mr. Tremain does, though to tell the truth, I think he works too much. Mr. Tremain, that is. I was real glad when Myrtle told me he was starting to see Miss Lucille. There ought to be more to life than work, don’t you think?”
We’d reached the empty parking strip in front of the building. She gestured to the left where there was a side door.
“Mr. Collingswood says I’m welcome to come in the front where it’s lighted, but that doesn’t seem right. I use this one.”
This side of the building lay in shadow. I followed her, slipping my hand in my reinforced coat pocket where it could rest on my .38. Daisy let us in with a key, then locked up behind us. Flipping on lights here and there, she led the way down to a basement room that housed the furnace and shelves of supplies. One corner held a utility sink and the tidiest assortment of mops and scrub buckets I’d ever seen.
“How long did you stand out there waiting for me?” asked Daisy hanging her coat on a peg. “There’s tea in that wrapped up whiskey bottle if you want something hot in you.” She nodded at the bag she’d brought in, then turned her attention back to putting soap in a bucket and turning on water. “A man downstairs where I live gives me one now and then when he’s emptied it. Put plenty of padding around it and the tea stays warm two or three hours, about as good as one of those Thermos bottles, I bet, and doesn’t cost anything. I’d sooner spend my money on a radio. That’s what I’m saving for. I do love music.”
She did a little dance step.
I didn’t need to taste what was in the bottle to know it was just tea. Daisy was a whirlwind. In my experience, that didn’t go with being an alkie. I told her I’d smelled her cinnamon rolls when I tried to find her at her apartment. We chatted about her baking as I followed her upstairs.
“Lucille told me you saw Mr. Tremain somewhere Monday morning,” I prompted at last.
She’d started her chores in a lunchroom at the back of the building, wiping things down first, emptying trash, then using her rag mop.
“That’s right, over on West Fifth. I was riding the Main Street bus, on my way to have a tooth pulled down by the hospital. Dr. Benton. I guess if you’ve got to go to a dentist he’s okay.
“Anyway, we’d stopped to let people off at the intersection, and I was looking out the window, wondering whether the misery before or after I had the tooth out was going to be worse, when I noticed Mr. Tremain walking along.”
“How?”
“How?”
“How did you know it was him?”
“The way he walks. That’s what caught my eye anyway, and sure enough, it was him.”
My silence cued her to my puzzlement. She glanced up from mopping.
“What do you mean, the way he walks? Does he limp?”
Her head shook.
“No, just walks kind of funny. Kind of tipped forward to one side, like he’s pushing his shoulder against a door. Then he stopped and I caught a look at his face. Just for a second. The bus started up again right then. But I know it was him. Besides, he had on that muffler his daughter knitted him. Ugliest shade of blue I’ve ever seen in my life, but he wore it ‘cause she made it.”
She plopped her mop in the bucket of water for emphasis.
“He’s a good man, Mr. Tremain.”
It was starting to sound as if Daisy actually had seen him. I let her mop awhile before my next question.
“You said he stopped. Why?”
A frown appeared on her face. She paused to consider.
“I never thought about it. I guess he could have been hunting some place....” All at once her features brightened. “No. I bet he was checking his watch ‘cause he had his arm out. Leastwise I think he did.” She pantomimed. “He wears one of those on his wrist. These engineer fellows are plumb crazy for newfangled things.”
Hunting an address. Checking the time. Both possibilities made me want to dance like Daisy.
“Do you remember how far along Fifth Street he was? Did you notice?” I asked as she gathered her things and started for the next room on her rounds.
She considered.
“It was close to that place with the four bumps in front. The ones that look like they want you to think that they’re balconies or towers only they’re not.”
I had a vague recollection of passing a building like she described. You notice different things at the wheel of an automobile or walking than you do from the vantage point of a passing bus, and I didn’t often get to that side of Fifth.
I followed her around for another half hour without learning anything else. She’d already given me more to go on than anyone else. As I was buttoning my coat to leave, the thought of her walking back to the trolley stop alone, in the dark, began to bother me. She did it night after night, and had for a long time, but key employees where she worked didn’t disappear every night. Their apartments weren’t torn apart every night. Nor did strange cars dog my movements every night.
I went back upstairs.
“Listen, Daisy. I don’t like the idea of you walking back to the trolley line in the dark. When are you likely to finish? I’ll stop by and give you a lift.”
She flapped her hand.
“Oh, you don’t need to. I’ve walked it a million times.”
I finally convinced her. We arranged that she’d come out the front door, where she could watch for me through one of the windows that flanked it. I described Calvin’s car, and told her I’d blink the headlights on and off two times so she’d know it was me. Then I went back to Mrs. Z’s to pick up the key she let me use when my job was likely to keep me out after the time when she locked up.
Thirty minutes or so after midnight I came up the street in front of C&S Signals, checking the few parked cars I passed. I wanted to make sure none were brown, or occupied, before I turned in. None were. The parking lot was deserted, but as I was about to turn in, I thought I saw something by the unlighted side door Daisy and I had gone in earlier. Had there been movement? Some sort of shape?
I circled the block.
This time on my approach, I doused my lights at the last intersection I passed. If anyone up ahead saw them disappear, they would assume I had turned. Traffic was almost nonexistent. There was ambient light enough for me to creep along and pull to a stop just shy of C&S’s parking strip.
I waited, with the motor running. Calvin kept it so perfectly tuned that three steps away its sound would be only a whisper. My eyes began to adjust as I watched the area by the side door. Finally... yes. A shape. Its margin stretched and split, becoming recognizable as two men. Their car must be in the shadows behind them. Either they were fixing to break in, or they were lying in wait for someone. And any minute now, Daisy would start wondering why I hadn’t shown up, and perhaps step outside.
Would it matter that she came through the front door? No. She could still be in harm’s way.
So I did what any red-blooded girl with a car would do. I slid the Smith & Wesson on the seat next to me into my lap. I cranked down my window. Then, letting the clutch out and shifting, with all the speed I could muster, I roared toward the side door. About the time they registered what was happening, I switched on my headlights.
The beams caught two startled figures, blinding them. I heard a shot and one of the headlights in my borrowed car shattered. Sticking my left hand out the window, I got off a few rounds even though my accuracy with that hand wasn’t the best. The two fleeing men jumped into a car. One fired again.
“Hey! What’s the ruckus?” a voice called.
In my rearview mirror, I saw Daisy run out the front door. She was crouched low, brandishing her empty whiskey bottle like a club.
The car with the thugs tore into the street. I wasn’t the only one who’d parked a car with its engine running. If I tried to catch them, Daisy would be left alone. I didn’t like that idea. Backing up as fast as I dared, I blinked my lights twice.
“Get in!” I shouted.