Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 (3 page)

“You and Paul have a nice chat?”

“Better than sitting out watching the fish jump. Reading the latest potboiler. It’s got so the high spot of my day is walking with Lizzie to the drugstore, looking for a new shade of rouge. You working days and nights, you don’t even make messes for me to clean anymore.”

“Lunches at the club. Tennis lessons.”

“I’m bored, Tom, get it?”

Hickey laid the book on the sinkboard beside the fruit bowl, dug into a coat pocket for his briar and Walter Raleigh. “How about you, and Elizabeth if you want, meet me at Rudy’s a couple nights a week, for dinner and a drink or two? Matter of fact, anytime you want to host the place, I’ll stick around here with Elizabeth.” He detected a caustic note in his voice and caught Madeline’s fleeting sneer. “How about, give me a day or two to find the girl, I’ll take off, make Paul run the joint all weekend? We jump on the Santa Fe about noon Saturday, get a couple drinks in the club car, have a room waiting at the Beverly Wilshire. I’ll find out where Basie or Harry James are playing. We rent a car, some fancy British number, and do the town.”

Madeline’s shoulders, neck, and arms went rubbery. She leaned on the sinkboard, ran the tap, and drowned her cigarette. “Sure, Tom, I’d love that.” She gave him a cautious smile. “What’s that thing?” she asked, motioning to where the book lay.

“I dug it out of the girl’s room. Not exactly a diary, more like part of a story she’s telling.”

Madeline slid along the counter and fingered the book as if it were mink. “You going to let me read it?”

“Naw.”

“Tom, she’s not your client. You got no more right snooping through her things than I do.”

“Nice try, darling.”

“The hell!” She grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl and flung it, smacking him in the lower abdomen. “There’s stuff in there about what a handsome brute you are? Maybe how good you kiss?”

Rather than fuel her temper, Hickey shook his head mildly. He picked the banana off the floor and set it back into the bowl. Finally he picked up the book. As he turned and started into the living room, he heard Madeline stomp down the hallway. He crossed the living room to the back porch, a screened-in place with wood-slat floors and shelves full of driftwood and shells. He’d built it for sleeping cool in summers. He stared at the black-glass surface of the bay, at the pool of moonlight around the first buoy, trying to find a piece of oblivion. When the rooms behind him darkened, he went back there and looked in on Elizabeth.

Her little room held a single four-poster bed with a canopy he’d bought for her fourteenth birthday last May, a small white mirrored dresser, and two chests that used to hold toys. Now they were stuffed with photos of singers and movie stars, letters from friends who’d moved away, school papers she’d gotten As on, and her drawings, mostly of tall women in elegant gowns she’d designed. The walls were each a different bright color—yellow, green, orange, and blue—muraled with jungle flowers, a tiger, a couple of monkeys, a giraffe whose head turned onto the ceiling. She’d worked most evenings for a month last year. The window above her head was open. Misty breeze fluttered the curtain that touched her golden hair, the color Hickey’s used to be. She had the quilt tucked around her neck, tight as a noose. She hardly breathed. Hickey swept back a curl and kissed her forehead.

“’Night, Daddy,” she murmured.

He walked out to the sleeping porch, flopped into the hammock, listened closely. All sounds were muffled by the water. He tuned to the creaking dock, a distant motorboat, sea gulls. A splash as somebody belly-flopped into the water, and one of his drunken neighbors howling. He drifted, picturing girls, women. Madeline, Elizabeth, Cynthia Moon.

Chapter Four

Eva the potter lived about a mile southeast around the bay. Her husband, Captain Dick, USN retired, had taught Hickey sailing before he fled to Guadalajara, where liquor was cheaper. Eva dressed like a fisherman. Every morning she and six or eight of her cocker spaniels circled the bay, under the piers, across the mud flats and channels. When Hickey slept on the porch in summer, the yapping woke him at dawn. He usually ran out and threatened to hang her mutts by the ears, for which Eva loosed her cockers to snarl around his feet. Hickey and Eva would glare at each other until one of them laughed, and they’d sit on the pier and gossip awhile. Eva knew everybody around the bay. She was like the daily news.

This morning she stood a minute gazing at his window, the signal that she’d brought a scoop for him. But Hickey had plenty more on his mind than neighborhood gossip. After she moved along, he got up, pulled on the slacks he’d left hanging across the chair beside the hammock. He slipped into his shoes, shirt, hat and coat, picked up Cynthia’s book, then tiptoed through the parlor and kitchen, out the carport door.

He didn’t want to hear any of Madeline’s sighs or complaints. Months ago, about when Rudy’s opened, she’d taken up griping, like a hobby. Not that she wanted him to give up the nightclub. Rudy’s was going to make them rich. Madeline wanted him to shove the detective work onto his partner Leo. No matter if investigating was the business that had paid for their bayside cottage, the new Chevy every few years, the private Episcopal school in La Jolla for Elizabeth, which Madeline insisted on, where Elizabeth could meet classy friends. Madeline wouldn’t consider that next month the fickle public might empty its wallets in some other dive besides Rudy’s. Before Christmas, the guys who shoveled out their bucks at Rudy’s might be on the bridges of minesweepers, flying missions against Bora Bora, digging foxholes somewhere in Europe. By the New Year, Japs might bomb Rudy’s into bite-size chunks, along with the harbor, shipyards, Consolidated Air, and the rest of San Diego. If none of the above, then the strings Castillo was pulling might snap. Without the eight hundred pounds a week of Grade A prime T-bone and New York cut they sneaked between the cracks in the rationing laws, and without Cynthia Moon, Rudy’s was just another overpriced hash house. But Madeline didn’t worry about any of that. She was hardly one of your security-minded dames. Her favorite bets were long shots.

Besides, if Hickey hadn’t bolted out of the house this morning, she’d likely have tried to convince him to let Cynthia disappear, tell Clyde McGraw to go fiddle elsewhere. To grab this Charley Wayne’s Orchestra from the Mission Beach Ballroom. Madeline could’ve put Castillo up to going over there and scouting last night. She might’ve invited Castillo over and worn that nightgown as persuasion, to get rid of Cynthia Moon. Though you wouldn’t catch her admitting it, Madeline was crazy jealous of the girl.

Madeline was a lifetime’s worth of puzzle. A cross between hellcat and cherub. A fiery lover who could frost over the instant you rubbed her wrong. A bright, elegant, gracious companion. A shrew jealous as Lucifer, on account of her unquenchable vanity, like all but a few rare beauties.

The motor had warmed. Hickey sped to get downtown before the traffic jammed. At 6:15, beside Harbor Drive, cargo planes taxied across Lindbergh Field. Three merchant frigates and a Norwegian-flagged passenger liner had anchored in the harbor since yesterday. Around them, tugs, daysailors, barges, fishing skiffs, houseboats bobbed on the swells. The harbor was mottled with shadows of the barrage balloons that were supposed to confuse and snag Japanese aircraft. People called them flying silver fish. A line of them floated over the tuna clippers, fat and sturdy as whaling boats. Dozens more shadowed the half mile of piers lined with warehouses. Cranes, forklifts that weaved and dodged like mosquitoes, and gangs of stevedores filled holds and piled decks with sides of beef, bins of lettuce, crates of mortars and rockets.

Hickey turned up Market Street, swerved around double-parked trucks, had to jam his brakes and skid to a stop a foot from smashing a wino who stumbled, leading with his head, off the curb beside the Salvation Army Mission. Hickey turned down Fifth. Outside the Hollywood Burlesque Theater, a line of flashy hustlers leaned against the wall. Posing. Smoking. Gaping at their images in compact mirrors. For an instant he thought the redhead could be Cynthia Moon, but she was somebody else he knew. Melinda. She waved. He tossed her a salute.

A cab pulled out, giving Hickey a parking spot. He locked the car, walked a block up to Fourth and Broadway, entered a four-story brick building. He climbed three flights of stairs, passed the credit dentist and chiropractor’s offices to a door lettered
HICKEY AND WEISS, INVESTIGATIONS
.

The office had a single desk, a wardrobe closet, a stuffed chair and sofa, photographs tacked to the wall. Leo Weiss with his wife and two daughters, back when Leo still featured hair and Vi was slender. Before their oldest girl, Una, got her face battered by a Nazi gang while she was studying music in Vienna. Hickey and family on the beach, arms around each other. A photo of Madeline singing at the old Agua Caliente casino in Tijuana. Elizabeth at five years old, drifting in a rowboat on Lake Arrowhead. Hickey receiving an award from the La Jolla Women’s Club for tracking Mrs. Fox’s daughter and arranging her escape from the Okie Communist guitar player with whom she’d eloped. Beside the memories hung a collage of Elizabeth’s drawings—a brown trout she’d caught on vacation, a flattering portrait of her dad, a line of Parisian cancan dancers.

From the wardrobe Hickey got a clean shirt, underwear, socks, and a green-and-blue tie with a sailboat painted on it. He dug a razor and toothbrush out of the desk and walked down the hall to a rest room. In ten minutes he was back, looking sharp, smelling like spice, dialing his partner’s number. Leo grumbled hello and kept chewing the last crumbs of breakfast.

“Leopold, you got a couple hours for me today?”

“Hold it while I count. Last I heard, there were about twenty-four every day. Between us, not including your tours at Rudy’s, we got about twenty-seven committed, of which you been covering maybe six a day. That leaves twenty-one for me. Three left over. What you need?”

“I’m trying to locate Cynthia Moon. There’s a diary, kind of, in a ledger book. I’m gonna leave it here for you to browse. You’re apt to think she’s a little peculiar.”

“A doll like her’s allowed to be.”

“Read it over. Maybe you’ll zero on something I missed. Call Bobby Wisdom, the pianist. Number’s with the musician’s union. Then try Joshua Bair, the painter. Somebody at the Frenchman’s Gallery could tell you how to reach him.”

Leo grumbled. Hickey said thanks, hung up, locked the office. He walked back to Market Street and down to the Pier Five Diner, a couple blocks from the tracks, an old railroad car backed by a small Quonset. At the end of a counter lined with uniforms, sailors, and two cops, Hickey ate Bobo’s delectable thin, grainy hotcakes, drowned in syrup to make up for the lack of butter. No place in town save Rudy’s could get butter these days.

He stayed long enough for an extra cup of coffee and a smoke, then hustled to his car and drove north on Fifth, up the hill winding between the eucalyptus groves and canyons of Balboa Park where a thousand or so mangled boys arrived every day. The museums, the recital halls—the whole showplace erected for the Expositions of 1915 and 1935 had gotten commandeered by the navy and makeshifted into hospital wards. A gang of bandaged fellows in pajamas and several pretty nurses sat smoking on a roadside lawn. A great shriek jolted Hickey before he recognized it as the bellow of an elephant from the zoo. Birds screeched angrily as if cussing the elephant for waking them.

At 8:35 Hickey wheeled into the parking lot of Mercy Hospital. He found a corner spot where at least one side of his Chevy could be safe from getting whacked.

There were padded wing chairs in the hospital lobby. The Catholics didn’t buy junk, Hickey mused. The faint scent of lavender mixed with acrid and putrefying smells. While nuns in white pushed gurneys and escorted visitors, whispering their news and consolations, Hickey told the records clerk his occupation, the day job, briefed her on his mission, and asked if there’d been a TB patient named Moon within the past year.

The clerk was a portly, ageless Mexican woman with eyes so white and animated that Hickey would’ve loaned her money, listened to her troubles; if he weren’t a true husband, she could’ve easily led him astray. She scanned a book. Nobody named Moon. So he asked for a list of the past year’s TB cases. Cheerfully, she offered to type a list for which he could wait or come back in an hour. She held out a box of Christmas candies and he took one, a chocolate crème bell with a bow on it. He ate it on the way across the lobby to the pay phone, from which he called the county bar association. They claimed no member attorney named Moon.

A half mile east, at County General Hospital, Hickey argued with a straw-haired female who spoke like a mynah bird in the throes of asphyxiation. She couldn’t help him. Such information was confidential. She waved him away, and when he wouldn’t budge, she whisked herself into a back office. After ten minutes she returned with a large-headed fellow in doctor’s garb, who heard Hickey out and commanded the straw-haired person to accommodate him. It took her thirty-five minutes to inform him they’d not had a patient named Moon and to add that she could possibly type the list he’d requested, of the year’s TB cases, by next week.

“Swell,” Hickey said. “In return, I’ll write Santa Claus, tell him to bring you a wig.”

Angel Eyes at Mercy Hospital gave him a list and another chocolate. In trade, he wrote an IOU on the back of his business card, dinner and drinks for two at Rudy’s Hacienda.

He sat in the Chevy, propped the list on the steering wheel, and studied it. Of sixty TB cases, thirty-four had been discharged to home—none to a daughter named Cynthia. The rest had gotten sent to various nursing homes. Fourteen of those had gone to the Saint Ambrose Home, out east in La Mesa.

He took University all the way, racing the streetcar to the end of the line. The shops turned to houses, the houses got smaller and farther apart, the Victory gardens more frequent and lush, with flower beds surrounding the winter tomatoes, lettuce, pole beans, cabbage. He passed a chicken ranch, citrus and avocado orchards, a desert stretch with prickly pear cactus, sagebrush, granite outcrops at the base of a hill beneath a stand of oak trees. La Mesa was a single main street winding between foothills, and outlying neighborhoods that ran up the several hillsides. On the east end of the main street, the Saint Ambrose Home looked like a monastery. Three stories, stucco with Spanish tile, topped with three arches housing eight large bronze bells in graduated sizes. Across the front of the place were dozens of small windows, not much bigger than portholes. The walkway, bordered with beds of pansies, led past a carved redwood sign:

The double entrance doors were solid carved wood that opened into an oak floored lobby graced by two love seats and several wing chairs more plush than the hospital’s. The ceilings were two stories high. On each side, a tunnel-shaped hallway led off into gray darkness where it appeared ghosts could dwell, like caves Hickey remembered from dreams. Wheelchairs crept in and out of sight, near the entrance to each hallway.

A nun materialized, standing an arm’s length straight in front of Hickey, who didn’t care for nuns. At a distance they looked harmless, but up close they aroused in him a mix of awe and fury. Too often, their suspicious, unpampered faces made him think about his mother.

The nun called herself Sister Johanna. Her mouth looked hard as a beak. She had dark freckles set off by pale skin, pale blue eyes, and eyebrows like white fuzz. The way her nose twitched, and her watery eyes, made Hickey imagine a rabbit with allergies. Her voice was loud but mild until Hickey showed her a photo of Cynthia Moon.

A publicity shot. Hair cascaded over her right shoulder. A noose of pearls glittered around her neck. Gypsy earrings dangled and flashed. Her parted lips were brightly rouged, her eyelids darkened. Her knee and a half yard of thigh angled out from the slit of a floor-length sequined evening gown, teal blue, the bodice slashed low, like an arrow pointed at the danger zone.

With a first glance at the drawing, Sister Johanna gave a muted shriek. “Oh dear,” she muttered.

“Know her?”

“Why, I believe it could be Henry Tucker’s girl. Sir, I speak to her every day, until…?”

Hickey allowed her a moment, then urged, “Until what?”

“Oh, the last two weeks, she hasn’t come.”

“Name’s Cynthia?”

“Yes, it is. She’s a modest girl. I’ve never seen her with a speck of powder or paint.” The nun looked behind her for one of the wing chairs, picked the nearest, and guided herself into it. She motioned Hickey down close where she could whisper. “Is she a harlot?”

“Naw. Jazz singer.”

“Oh dear. Perhaps her father learned? And that could be why…?” She looked up plaintively. “He’s dying, sir.”

Hickey returned the photo to its manila envelope, tubed the envelope, and stuck it into his coat pocket. He scooted a chair close to the sister’s, perched on the edge of it while he explained why Cynthia was his business, and the nun related how the girl would arrive every morning on the 9:15 bus, dressed simply, to sit with her father all day, walk him on the grounds, or take him to sun in the patio. Between July, when Henry Tucker was admitted, and two weeks ago, she’d only missed a few days. She’d nursed him so well that he’d been recovering miraculously, his lungs almost clear, his spirits high.

“Toward the end,” Sister Johanna said, “commonly he became effusive. I overheard him telling Cynthia stories about his past and their mother and…”

“Whoa,” Hickey said. “Toward the end of what?”

The nun bowed her head. “Of his life, I fear? Two weeks ago, nearly. Monday, after she’d missed two or three days, Mister Tucker had a relapse. I found him gasping for air? As soon as the doctor arrived and they’d secured him with oxygen, I tried to phone Cynthia and discovered we don’t have an address or number for her. Do you think, sir, there could be a connection between his relapse and her disappearance? Couldn’t it be she saw him failing and ran away, to escape the pain.”