Shake your business up and pour it. I don’t have all day.
—Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
New York City
October 1947
I WAS TIRED. Dead tired.
Heading for the office, I squinted against the too-bright sun. The autumn chill seemed friendly enough, until I stepped beneath the Third Avenue El, where shadows turned everything meaner. Fighting the shiver, I flipped up my collar and forged ahead, albeit slower than usual.
For the past two nights, I hadn’t seen a bed. The punishing hours couldn’t be helped. From the moment those Park Avenue parents hired me to find their missing daughter, I knew time was not on my side.
Mom and dad were desperate for good reason. Cops want nothing to do with missing teenagers, especially wannabe actresses who have posters of movie stars glued over their eyeballs. Runaways they called them and closed the book, telling families to check the bus terminals.
The coppers weren’t wrong. Girls like Millicent typically caught a Greyhound to sunny California—one was launched every few hours—and after her LA landing, she could disappear for years behind a “stage” name.
I told Mr. and Mrs. Adair as much. They hired me anyway.
Millie was a good girl, they said. She would never run off on her own. They claimed the wrong boy had seduced her with empty promises, and she was bound to come to her senses. When that happened, she could find herself in bad trouble.
It’s your dime, I thought and went to work.
It took me thirty-six hours to track down Millicent and Romeo, not in the land of starlets and glamour, but in a fleabag hotel in Paramus.
Millie had a few new bruises to go along with a new attitude. She was more than ready to go home. But first she gladly helped me escort her drunken ex-boyfriend to a New Jersey jail cell, where the punk confessed he’d had the perfect grift planned, a fake kidnapping to shake down Millie’s parents, one that went south when she refused to play along.
The Adairs were right, after all.
With their daughter safely home, Mr. Adair was so grateful he forked over enough cabbage to keep me in sirloin and scotch for a month.
“I hired you,” he said, “because I heard you always got the job done.” And since I did, he asked me to accept this “generous reward” beyond my measly per diem.
With a stack of bills and a bookie to pay, who was I to argue? I shook his hand, and we parted ways.
Now I was striding across Third toward a run-down building of cramped offices. I already knew which one was mine because I’d had jack shepard, private investigator painted in simple black letters on the beveled glass door.
I was ready to hit the sheets for a decade or so, but my secretary was off visiting Sis in Myrtle Beach, so I figured I’d check the mail before shuffling back to my apartment.
As I yawned myself up the sagging office staircase, I noticed the eau de ashtray tickling my Jimmy Durante. I figured the stink of smoke came from my own coat, given last night’s stakeout at the polluted taproom where I’d waited for Millie’s low-life boyfriend to show.
But I was wrong.
As I crested the steps, I saw the little chimney, wrapped in an oversize raincoat, waiting at the end of the long hallway. The young woman stood leaning against my office doorway, the floor around her peppered with her burned-down Luckies, her face masked by a cascade of shiny black hair and clouds of blue smoke.
When she heard my oxfords tapping the tiles, her head jerked up. She might have reacted like a defensive animal, but she didn’t look scared. Those hazel brown eyes in her pale doll face were steady as spotlights when they locked onto mine.
“Are you Jack Shepard?” she asked, voice direct and strong enough to echo off the long row of closed doors.
“Who’s asking?”
“The name’s Shirley . . . Miss Shirley Powell.”
“I’m sorry, miss, but you’ll have to come back another day. I’m not—”
“Please—” Reaching out, she took hold of my elbow, expression no longer so steady. “I need your help today, Mr. Shepard. Please?”
For a moment I stood stiller than Michelangelo’s marble. Then those begging doll eyes melted me. Thinking of poor Millie and her fresh bruises, I blew out air.
“Guess you better come in.”
Nodding like a grateful puppy, she thanked me for my time, and I fumbled for my keys. Stifling a yawn, I creaked open the door and led the way into my cluttered HQ.
The air was stale, so I opened a window, wondering if the subway would stay quiet long enough for me to hear the girl’s sob story.
After a longing glance at my percolator, I threw my fedora on the desk, hung up my trench, and offered her a chair. She refused it with a shake of the head.
“My fiancé is Nathan Brock. Have you heard of him?”
I shook my own head. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Nathan is a talented artist. A genius, really. Do you know much about art, Mr. Shepard?”
“The art of the con, maybe.”
“But you’ve never dabbled yourself?”
“Dabbled?” I stifled a laugh. “No, Miss Powell. But if I were to paint a picture of my life, it wouldn’t have flowers or rainbows. The colors would either be foggy gray or bloodshot red. Nothing would ever be black or white. Lines would be blurry, so you’d never know when you crossed one, and—knowing my clientele—an elaborate frame job would be involved.”
“I realize you’re joking with me, but what you’ve described is exactly the kind of picture my fiancé likes to paint.”
“Cut to the chase, miss. Why are you here?”
“Nathan is in trouble.”
“What did he do? Draw a mustache on the Mona Lisa?”
“No, Mr. Shepard. He’s been arrested for murder.”