When I type “The End,” it’s like being paroled from prison.
—Clive Cussler
JACK AND I tailed Dorothy Moreland from the subway station. We watched her buy groceries and a paper before turning onto a quiet street in Canarsie, Brooklyn.
We planned to confront her on the front stoop of her three-story walk-up, when somebody beat us to it.
“Trouble,” Jack said, jerking his thumb at a too-familiar brown DeSoto speeding down the block.
The car braked hard, the door opened, and out popped Gold Teeth. He left the vehicle idling, the door wide open, as he charged up to a rattled Miss Moreland.
“Doris!” he bellowed.
“I told you not to call me that,” the frightened woman shot back. “It’s Dorothy.”
He brushed off her complaint. “I need three yards, right now—”
“Three hundred dollars!”
“And maybe another grand next week.”
Miss Moreland—or should I say Doris Sizemore—backed away from the big man. “I don’t have that kind of money! Honest, Mickey.”
Mickey?! Gold teeth is Mickey?!
Gobsmacked, Jack and I exchanged astonished glances.
“You’re my sister, so you gotta help,” Mickey Sizemore growled. “You’re getting paid for that new book, ain’t ya?”
“You took the advance, Mickey. There’s no more money until publication—”
“Let’s see what you got, then!”
Horrified, I watched Sizemore push his sister to the stoop, and the groceries scattered. He slapped the cowering woman’s hand aside and reached for her purse.
Jack cursed low. His long legs and rapid stride carried him right up to Mickey Sizemore. Gold teeth flashing, Sizemore reached for his gun—only to remember the PI had relieved him of his iron in Hell’s Kitchen.
By then, Jack was on him. There were no niceties, no exchange of snappy patter this time. The gumshoe slugged Sizemore, and the man went down.
Jack quickly helped Miss Moreland to her feet.
“Move your Mary Janes before the mug gets up again!”
Heels clicking, I caught up with Jack as he pushed Miss Moreland into the idling DeSoto. I dived into the back seat beside her, and Jack took the wheel. As Mickey Sizemore began to stir, we sped away, his curses echoing after us, down the Brooklyn block.
ON THE DRIVE to Manhattan, the former Doris Sizemore tearfully told us her story.
Orphaned at fourteen, Doris was left in the care of her delinquent older brother. When he and his punk friends were caught knocking over a liquor store, he was given a choice by a criminal court judge. He could join the navy or face eight years in Sing Sing. The war had just begun, and Mickey figured the draft would have gotten him anyway, so he opted for a long sea voyage.
Alone, with no job and no skills, Doris did what a lot of young women were forced to do to survive—until she was arrested and sent to reform school. While learning stenography, she penned a story and sent it to Macklin’s short-lived mystery magazine Dark Façade.
“It was rejected,” Doris confessed, “but Mr. Macklin wrote me such a nice letter. I knew that I wanted to work for him someday.”
Years passed, the war ended, and Harry Macklin turned from magazines to books. Doris finished her time served with a secretarial degree, a smoothing of her Brooklyn rough edges, and a permanent stain on her record.
Doris told us she’d been a voracious reader since she was a little girl. Once incarcerated, she read even more. She also became the fastest typist in the entire school.
“One of my instructors helped me land a job at a printer’s office. Turned out my boss was an ex-con himself. So when I asked if he’d sign a letter of reference for me as ‘Dorothy Moreland,’ he said, ‘Sure, kid, I’ll do it.’
“That’s when I started applying for jobs on Publisher’s Row. Mr. Macklin liked me from the start. I told him things about how his books were printed that he didn’t even know. I read enough to converse with him about writers, too: Dash Hammett and Chandler and James M. Cain—I so loved Mildred Pierce. Anyway, he hired me as his personal secretary . . .”
Unfortunately, as Doris told it, Harry had the same luck with books as he had with magazines—very little. His company was floundering when Doris brought him a manuscript that she claimed she’d found in the slush pile.
“The plot was based on a story my brother told me when he was running with his gang of street punks, so I put his name on it,” the tearful girl told us.
“Next to the jam that landed me in reform school, it was the worst mistake I ever made. When Mickey found out, he threatened to tell Mr. Macklin the truth. I paid my brother to shut him up, because I knew if Harry Macklin found out his innocent secretary was a . . . a criminal, he’d fire me on the spot.”
“How much did you pay your brother?” Jack asked.
“Plenty, but Mickey wanted more. I wrote a second book, then a third. He took all the money, and it still wasn’t enough.”
Jack passed his hankie to her, and Miss Moreland dabbed at her tears.
“When Harry hired detectives to find Mickey, I wanted it to end. So I splashed the manuscript with pig’s blood from the butcher to convince everyone that Mickey Sizemore was dead.”
Once again, tears filled her eyes as Miss Moreland turned to me.
“What do I do, Mrs. McClure? As a woman, you know no decent man would have anything to do with me, not after learning how I got by on the streets. But Mickey knows my secret. He can ruin everything for me!”
I took her hand. “Doris, they say the truth will set you free—and in your case, you need to get free of your abusive brother. Remember, Harry Macklin hired us to find the truth, so he’s going to learn it anyway. You might as well be the one to tell him. Come clean and confess, that’s my advice, whatever the consequences.”
WHEN WE KNOCKED on the door of Harry Macklin’s plush Park Avenue apartment, he answered with a whiskey in one hand, a Cuban cigar in the other.
“Jack! Penny! What brings you here?”
“You wanted Mickey Sizemore?” Jack said. “Well, here she is.”
Harry Macklin blinked, then donned the spectacles he’d tucked into his smoking jacket. “Miss Moreland? I don’t understand.”
Jack removed his fedora. “I figured you liked Sizemore’s stories so much, you’d want to hear the latest from the horse’s mouth. It’s a doozy.”
“Come in, come in.”
Harry’s vast apartment was a real bachelor pad with a mirrored bar, a gorgeous view, and a large couch for entertaining the ladies. Like his office, the man’s living space was in total chaos. Despite the mess, Harry found more whiskey and cigars, and for the next hour Dorothy Moreland confessed all.
She told her boss about reform school, her identity switch, her felonious brother, and how she wrote the books under his name. She even told Harry she tipped her brother off when he went to meet Jack Shepard.
“I wanted him to scare you off, Mr. Macklin, not hurt you,” she explained. When her confession was over, the woman set aside her glass, rose, and straightened her skirt.
“I’ll be going now, Mr. Macklin. You’ll have my resignation on your desk tomorrow morning.”
Harry jumped to his feet so quickly he spilled his whiskey.
“You poor kid,” he cried. “You’re not going near Canarsie, not even after I deal with your brother! You’re staying right here with me from now on, so I can look after you.”
With that, he wrapped both arms around his secretary.
“I’m willing to write a few more books for you, Mr. Macklin, if you can find a way to control my brother—”
“Harry! It’s Harry! And I swear I’ll put your brother on a leash. We’ll make a deal with him to shut him up and leave you alone. If I have to, I’ll hire muscle to make sure he sticks to it.”
“The truth is, Harry, what I really want to do is help you find better authors than the ones you’re publishing; new authors, who we can afford, but who have sensational stories to tell. I know your business inside and out, and I know what real people want to read. I know what will sell!”
“I’ll bet you do, Dorothy!”
“It’s really Doris, you know.”
He put a protective arm around her frail shoulders.
“Doris Sizemore is dead, and so is Mickey,” Harry replied. “You’re sticking with Moreland until you get hitched—and maybe after that. We’ll stick a hyphen in there or something.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Macklin?”
“It’s Harry. Just Harry!”
Harry-Just-Harry was still cooing to his star author—and, most likely, future editor in chief—as Jack hooked my arm and pulled me out the front door.
“Hey, aren’t you going to collect your fee?”
“Sure, I’ll settle with Harry next week.” Jack shook his head and set the fedora on top. “Some things are worth more than twenty bucks and expenses.”
I touched the big man’s shoulder and smiled. “Like reuniting another lost puppy with someone who cares for her.”