I was at my desk eating a turnip when the head of homicide came calling. I’d picked up the turnip at the produce market down the block from my office.
It was half-past one, and considering the substantial breakfast I’d had at The Canterbury, the turnip made a fine lunch. Its peelings were piled on a used envelope at the edge of my desk, a salt shaker was at hand, and I’d just cut off a nice slice when the door opened. A cop named Freeze walked in with two of his men trailing him.
“Lieutenant Freeze,” I said. “Always a pleasure.”
He frowned, not sure whether I was being polite or being a smart ass. I wasn’t sure either. Freeze was lean, with a hard face that went with his job and a pretty little nose that didn’t. His two assistants lounged obediently against the wall.
“Turnip?” I offered him the fresh slice. It bought me an extra three seconds to choose my dance steps.
“One of our officers saw you leaving The Canterbury hotel this morning,” he said, ignoring the turnip.
“Glad to know there’s nothing wrong with his eyesight.” I raised my eyebrows, mutely inquiring his point.
Freeze exhaled as if counting to ten. He didn’t like me much, but I’d proved myself a time or two when he and his team had dropped the ball. A jittery truce existed between us.
“What were you doing there?” he asked with barely reined annoyance.
“They’ve hired me to do some work. Background checks on people they’re thinking of hiring, like I do for Rike’s department store and other places.”
My bread and butter work.
In my last, hurried confab with Tucker, I’d told him to give that explanation in case any cops who knew me saw me there. Now I was glad.
Freeze narrowed his eyes.
“A place like that does a lot of hiring?”
“Don’t know. I haven’t started. The owner was getting ready to spell out details when somebody ran in telling him he had to come, that the cops had found a dead girl in the alley.”
It seemed like a waste to let a good slice of turnip dry out. I popped it into my mouth and chewed, then talked around it.
“I assume that’s why you’re here?”
“You’re a swell detective.”
He’d planted himself in front of my desk, and stood with legs spread and arms crossed, ignoring the chair available for visitors. I’d recited my piece about why I was at the hotel, yet he wasn’t leaving. It made me uneasy.
“Gee, Freeze, I hope you don’t think I can tell you anything useful about her, because I can’t. She worked nights. Scrubbed floors, I think. The woman in charge of housekeeping was on the phone when I got there, grousing to Mrs. Tucker that the dead girl hadn’t shown up for work last night.”
Freeze hadn’t had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth when he entered, which was unusual. He remedied the situation, watching me closely.
“Just checking all angles. Looked like the girl had been pretty. Maybe the boss had discovered she could do something other than scrub.”
“Did you meet his wife? Mrs. Tucker?”
“Boike talked to her.”
Boike was one of the detectives with him. He was fair haired and built like an icebox.
“A man with a wife like her would have to be nuts to philander. Right, Boike?”
He looked up from taking notes, which seemed to be his usual assignment with Freeze. At a glance from his boss okaying comment, Boike nodded. The burly detective actually did have a voice. I’d heard him use it when he was on his own.
“Funny he’d fire a man for making a pass at the dead girl then, don’t you think?” Freeze asked.
Had he guessed he’d catch me off guard? I stretched, determined not to let him win a round, and irritated Tucker hadn’t mentioned firing someone when I asked about people with grudges.
“What I think is, all those years he managed theater people taught him to get rid of troublemakers,” I said. “Freeze, if you were any more off on this, you’d be on the moon.”
But I was worried. If Freeze believed there was even a grain of truth in what he was saying, he could have men sniffing around the hotel for days. That included talking to guests. Joshua Tucker could end up without a soul getting wind of his jewelry problem only to see his hotel destroyed by unfounded suspicion related to something else.
“It just seems like a strange coincidence, you showing up at a place linked to a homicide,” Freeze said.
“The only link is the girl worked there. You going to tell me there haven’t been any other girls raped and killed in this city?”
“How did—?” He clamped his mouth shut, aware too late that I might have been guessing about the rape, which he’d just confirmed.
“Look, I know you’re just doing your job,” I said, switching tactics. “Checking every possibility, like you said. How about hunting a connection between the dead girl and the man who went missing from the hotel a month or so back?”
A muscle twitched in his jaw.
“Is that what butterball hired you for?”
“I already told you why he hired me.”
“Yeah? Well, why ever he did, you’ve got yourself a client who’s crazy as a bedbug. Either that or he made up the whole thing about a man disappearing.”
My mouth opened several seconds before I found my voice.
“Why would he do that?”
“Maybe to make it look like someone’s got it in for him. To deflect suspicion when he does something else he’s planning. Say, killing a girl who didn’t appreciate his advances or was making demands or—”
“Get out.”
“Then he fancies the whole thing up by hiring a shamus in a skirt that he can buffalo.”
I rose, clenched fists grinding the desktop to keep from punching him.
“Get. Out.”
* * *
To sweeten the sour mood left by Freeze and the fact my client had omitted useful information, I went for a walk along the Great Miami. It wound through the heart of the city, creating a hairpin bend before heading south to empty into the Ohio. Clouds slow waltzed in the brilliant end-of-September sky. A man in much-patched trousers flew a homemade kite accompanied by delighted shrieks from two tykes trailing him.
Why hadn’t Tucker told me he’d fired someone when I’d asked about people who might have grudges against him? It could be, as Frances had said, that he got so caught up in the present he put past events out of his mind. Or it could be deliberate. Whatever the reason, he’d gotten himself into more trouble rather than less.
My client was an odd little duck, but Polly’s murder convinced me he hadn’t imagined the tampering with his safe. Or, despite Freeze’s skepticism, invented the tale of a missing guest. Unfortunately, Freeze now suspected him of murder. I had to punch a hole in that theory before I began hunting what lay behind Tucker’s trio of problems.
What did I have to work with?
Freeze’s slip of the tongue had confirmed that the dead girl had been raped — or it looked as if she had. He’d also said she’d been pretty. Had Polly been more than pretty? It would open up explanations for her death beyond an affair with her boss.
More interesting still was Freeze’s use of the past tense. It looked like she’d been pretty, he’d said. That implied she no longer was. It conjured two possibilities. One was that her face had been beaten, or maybe slashed with a knife. The other was that she’d been strangled.
The question of when the girl had been killed also niggled at me. Sitting with Frances that morning, I’d learned the night scrub women came in at midnight. The late-shift dishwasher was getting off then, as was the bartender who presided in the small lounge, and maybe a couple of others. With employees coming and going through the back kitchen door, it was hard to imagine anyone being attacked and killed just beyond it without being noticed.
On the other hand, only three women cleaned in the hotel at night. At half-past four in the morning, they were the only ones leaving. The city wasn’t yet stirring with milk deliveries and bakers’ trucks. The alley would be deserted.
Polly hadn’t made it to work Thursday night. That meant she’d either been killed while arriving at midnight, which seemed unlikely, or while leaving work Wednesday — the same night Joshua Tucker had noticed suspicious activity in the in the hotel safe.