Louise's Blunder (10 page)

‘No!’ I said. ‘Are you a lunatic?’

‘No ma’am,’ he said. ‘Stubborn and cranky, but not loony. Find Hughes’ personnel file and take notes on it. You can leave out the secret bits. I want to know the basics – birth, residence, education, parents’ address, all that everyday stuff. If I was assigned to the case I could find it out myself.’

‘I can’t!’

‘Sure you can. Unless you want me to stroll over to that big building with the columns – the one that used to be the naval hospital – and tell them how I found you. Or get in touch with the FBI. They’re familiar with you, aren’t they?’

‘That’s blackmail!’

‘Sure it is. You don’t doubt I’d do it, do you?’

‘No, you creep!’

‘Don’t hold yourself back.’

‘You bastard!’ I think that was the first time I’d ever spoken that curse out loud.

‘I have no intention of harming you, Mrs Pearlie, but I’ve had a young man murdered in my jurisdiction. I intend to find out who did it. If some important government agency then decides it has to be hushed up, well, so be it. But we’re going to know who the murderer is. Otherwise we can’t pretend to be more civilized than the scum we’re fighting.’

He drained his cup of coffee. ‘I’ll meet you here tomorrow, same time,’ he said. ‘And you can give me your notes on Hughes’ file. OK?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘What?’ he said.

‘This is how it will be. I won’t remove any documents from OSS. I won’t photocopy any documents. I won’t take any notes. I’ll memorize the basics about Hughes, information you might be able to find out for yourself if you hadn’t been taken off the case.’

‘All I want is his birth date, his mother’s name and address in Fredericksburg, stuff like that. Something to start with.’

‘That’s all you’re getting.’

‘Fine. I’ll meet you here tomorrow.’

‘No. Wait in front of the Western Market on ‘K’, just past 23rd. I’ll meet you there. We’ll walk to a café of my choice for breakfast.’

Royal leaned into me and whispered, smiling, ‘You
are
a spy.’

I whispered back. ‘This is not a joking matter. Use that word again and I’ll go straight to OSS Security and tell them all about you. I’m sure blackmailing a government employee, especially in time of war, is a seditious act.’

Give the female employee [ … ] a definite day-long schedule of duties so that she’ll keep busy without bothering the management for instructions every few minutes. Numerous properties say that women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them but that they lack initiative in finding work themselves.

‘1943 Guide to Hiring Women’,
Mass Transportation
magazine, July 1943.

I
stayed at my desk as lunch hour neared waiting for the number of people in the Registry to dwindle. I wanted as few witnesses to my search for Paul Hughes’ personnel file as possible. By twelve thirty the Registry was as empty as it ever got.

I made my way to the personnel index files and looked up Paul Hughes’ card. Good, the ‘H’ personnel files were located just one floor up outside a ladies’ restroom, which could serve as my cover.

There was just one other girl in the toilet and she ignored me, focusing on putting on her make-up and brushing her hair. I didn’t recognize her, so there was a good chance that she didn’t know me either. I washed my face and hands and cleaned my glasses, waiting for her to leave. When I left the restroom I found the hall empty, so I darted down the ‘H’ aisle, opened the correct file drawer and riffled through the contents. Hughes’ file wasn’t there. In its place was a yellow card that read ‘moved to L file’.

Hughes’ personnel records had been sent to the Limited file, which was only available to authorized personnel. It was created to house the Special Intelligence Branch documents, but the big men at OSS could stamp any file they wanted with the ‘L’ designation.

Who would send Hughes’ personnel file to the Limited file room? Perhaps Major Wicker or Don Murray wanted to keep Hughes’ personal information away from prying staff. Like me!

I slid the file cabinet door closed and made my way back to my own desk. Lunchtime was over. The returning file clerks were clustered around the coffee cart that was parked in the middle of the Registry aisles. I got my cup and joined a few of the girls standing around the cart. I was glad to see Ruth, who’d worked with me in the early days. She was a Mount Holyoke graduate who wore pearls every day, even under a denim jumpsuit.

‘I haven’t seen you on the bus recently,’ I said. ‘Have you been coming in early?’

She shook her head. ‘Jack picks me up almost every morning now,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know when we started dating how convenient it would be to have a beau with a motorcycle and sidecar.’

She drained her cup and grasped the handle of her file cart. That’s what Ruth did. She filed all day long, pushing her cart down long aisles, A to Z, until her cart was empty, then filling it up again at the return tables in the Reading Room. She wore gloves to protect her hands and a leather apron to cover her clothes.

‘Want to have lunch today?’ I asked.

‘Can’t,’ she answered, ‘I’m meeting Jack. I made a picnic lunch. We like to eat outdoors when it’s pretty.’

She expertly maneuvered her cart in the narrow aisle and headed toward the elevator.

I went back to my desk with my cup of coffee and mulled over Hughes’ personnel file.

I had Top Secret clearance so I could go into the Limited file room. There was an ‘L’ return table just outside the door to said file room, and the guard knew who was authorized to pick up those files and take them inside. I just had to wait until there were files stacked on the table that needed to be returned, collect them, take them inside to put away and locate Hughes’ file. Simple.

I walked over to the Reading Room. Almost every chair was full already. The Trident Conference was in full swing and the Joint Chiefs needed answers to dozens of questions. The ‘L’ return table was empty. I’d need to wait until it was stacked with files to pull off my plan.

On my next trip to the Reading Room the return table held enough files for me to look like I was working when I picked up an armful. The guard at the door to the ‘L’ room recognized me but he did his duty and checked my tag – which displayed my picture, employee number and security clearance, but not my name – and nodded for me to go inside.

Once inside the dim room I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. I turned on the bank of overhead lights. The only window let in little light, but that was compromised by the heavy bars that criss-crossed it, and drawn blinds. A notice read ‘Do Not Open the Blinds or Window’. I felt almost as if I were in jail.

I quickly filed the folders I had picked up from the return table. I paused in front of the ‘H’ drawer, suddenly nervous. I could sense my heart pounding and feel the sweat gathering in the small of my back. I had to do this, I told myself. I couldn’t take the chance that Sergeant Royal would tell OSS that I’d made such a basic mistake when questioning Mrs Nighy. Besides, I had the clearance to be here and I wasn’t going to reveal any secrets. It would be OK.

I found Paul Hughes’ personnel file. ‘Analyst, Europe/Africa Section’, stamped ‘L’ and ‘Top Secret’. Why Top Secret? Swiftly I opened it. And my hope for a quick exit from this messy business vanished.

Paul Hughes’ parents were both dead. His father, Samuel Paul Hughes, had died in 1937. His mother, Mariella Hodgson Hughes, died the following year. Hughes’ next of kin was a sister, Mary Hughes Perkins, who lived in Knoxville, Tennessee. A mortuary receipt showed that Hughes’ body had been shipped to a funeral home in Knoxville.

Hughes’ home address was listed as the boarding house where he lived. His death certificate was signed by a District medical examiner that listed the cause of death as ‘drowning incidental to head injury’. I flipped through the autopsy pictures. Years of cleaning fish had given me a strong stomach. The photo of Hughes’ head showed a very substantial bruise behind his right ear. He would have had to fall from a great height to have had a lump like that. And if he had, why weren’t there more bruises on his body, as Royal had suggested?

If that wasn’t enough startling information, the letters and numbers on the Western Union telegram from Hughes’ ‘mother’ to Mrs Nighy had been deciphered. It had been sent from a Western Union office located a very short walk from the Tidal Basin.

I looked up from the file and took a deep breath. Dust motes floated in the strips of light that found their way through the window blinds. Fortunately I was still alone. If someone had been with me in the room I’m sure they would have noticed my reaction to the unexpected information in Hughes’ file.

Next I read Hughes’ job application to OSS. He’d earned a Masters degree in economics from Yale. OSS was packed with Yalies. General Donovan himself had gone to Yale. He recruited his staff from his cronies and old professors and their protégés. And most Yale graduates spoke a second language, unlike graduates from many other American universities.

Hughes listed four references. Two were clearly professors. The other two were Spencer Benton and Clark Leach. This surprised me at first. But it made sense. If Clark and Hughes knew each other at Yale, and had similar political ideas, then of course they might continue to meet socially once they were in OSS. This helped explain why Leach, despite his lofty rank at OSS, hobnobbed with Rose’s group. His friend Paul Hughes was already a member.

Nowhere in the few papers in Hughes’ file was a name I could identify as ‘G’.

I replaced Hughes’ file in the cabinet and went back to my desk. Now I knew why someone had stamped ‘L’ and ‘Top Secret’ on Hughes’ file. It contained explosive information. That Hughes didn’t visit his mother in Fredericksburg on the weekends. That Spencer Benton and Clark Leach knew Hughes at Yale. That the telegram to Mrs Nighy was sent from a Western Union office near the Tidal Basin.

At lunch I took a very long walk. I bought a hot dog from a cart on the street. I couldn’t finish it and tossed it to a skinny dog begging scraps from the other government girls eating their lunches on blankets in the grass. I walked for blocks. By the time I got back to work I had managed to minimize the significance of the facts I’d found. I figured that Hughes’ file had been sequestered just to keep curious staff members from looking at it. As for the so-called visits to his mother in Fredericksburg, maybe Hughes had a girlfriend he spent weekends with and didn’t want anyone to know about. Yes, that made sense. The girlfriend could have sent the telegram to Mrs Nighy, omitting her return address from the message. And if Hughes had the flu and decided to go back to his boarding house anyway, why couldn’t he have fainted and hit a damn big rock on the edge of the Tidal Basin before he fell into it and drowned? As for his empty pockets, I was stumped. But then I thought of an explanation for that too. Perhaps he was wearing a light jacket and took it off when he began to feel faint. Then it could have been stolen, along with his wallet.

But what about ‘G’?

Oh, for God’s sake! Just this minute I didn’t give a damn. I intended to give Royal all the information he asked for tomorrow morning and extricate myself from this mess!

Ada held one end of the measuring tape at the corner of Phoebe’s davenport while I read the tape at the other end. ‘Sixty-two inches,’ I said, scribbling the measurement into a notebook.

Phoebe was out of the house at a bridge party, so Ada and I were taking the opportunity to estimate how much fabric we’d need to slipcover Phoebe’s lounge set for her. The davenport and two matching club chairs were so worn in places the muslin backing showed through the upholstery.

‘OK,’ Ada said. ‘Now we need to do the back.’

She leaned over the back cushions and dangled the tape measure over the back of the davenport. I crept under the console table behind the davenport to read the tape.

‘It doesn’t need to be perfect,’ Ada said, ‘just close enough to know how much fabric we need to buy.’

‘Where did your friend say this discount fabric store is?’ I asked.

‘Just outside the District in Chevy Chase,’ Ada said. ‘We’ll have to borrow Phoebe’s car to get there – and to get back with yards of fabric. We’ll need a good excuse.’

‘We’ll think of something,’ I said.

‘I hope she likes what we pick out,’ Ada said.

‘If it’s floral and has some pink in it she’ll love it.’

The telephone in the hall rang and Dellaphine picked it up.

‘Yes ma’am,’ Dellaphine said into the receiver, ‘she’s in. But her social calendar is mighty full.’

I dropped the chair cushion I was measuring and ran out into the hall, pulling the telephone out of Dellaphine’s hand.

‘You’re a barrel of laughs,’ I said to Dellaphine.

‘I just says it like I sees it,’ she said, a wide smile splitting her usually solemn face.

‘Hello?’ I said into the receiver.

‘It’s me,’ Rose said. ‘I was wondering if you’d like to do something with me and Sadie tonight. We’re bored. We’re thinking of going to the movies.’

‘I would, but I’m in the middle of something,’ I said, glancing into the lounge, where Ada was writing figures in the notebook. She looked up at me.

‘You go on,’ Ada said. ‘I can finish this.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Ada said. ‘Go have a good time.’

‘I can come,’ I said to Rose. ‘What’s the plan?’

‘We want to see
Above Suspicion
over at the Capitol Theatre. With Fred MacMurray and Joan Crawford. Have you heard of it?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve read the book.’

‘If we meet at Thompsons Cafeteria in half an hour we’ll have time to get dessert or something first.’

‘OK,’ I said, glancing at my wristwatch. ‘I’ll see you there.’

Thompsons Cafeteria had about two dozen tables ranged down the middle of the restaurant between the buffet line and the short-order counter. Though it was still early in the evening, the dinner rush was over and the restaurant was half empty. Sadie hadn’t eaten dinner yet so we got in the buffet queue. Sadie piled her plate full of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans and corn. Rose and I pounced on the last two pieces of peach pie.

We found a table at the front of the restaurant so, as Sadie observed, we could watch interesting people pass by the front window. ‘Maybe we’ll spot some hunky soldiers,’ Sadie said.

‘They’re all children,’ Rose said.

‘Not the officers,’ Sadie said. She peered at the meatloaf on her fork. ‘I think this is mostly breadcrumbs,’ she said. She popped the piece into her mouth. ‘Oh, well, it tastes good.’

‘I guess Peggy couldn’t come?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Sadie said. ‘She’s cooking dinner for Spencer and maybe darning his socks.’

‘I’m never getting married,’ Rose said.

‘So you’ve said,’ Sadie said. ‘But you can date, can’t you? And not all husbands are like Spencer Benton.’

‘What about you, Louise?’ Rose said. ‘Do you think you’ll ever get married?’

‘Well, I’ve been married,’ I answered, scraping up the tiny crumbs of my peach pie. I would swear there was real sugar in it. ‘My husband died of pneumonia six years ago.’

‘You dope,’ Sadie said to Rose. ‘Didn’t you notice there’s a “Mrs” before her name?’

Rose laid her head on the table and crossed her arms over it. ‘I am so terribly sorry,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘This must be my stupid day. Please forgive me.’

‘What was your husband like?’ Sadie persisted. ‘Did you like being married?’

‘Do you think you could repress your curiosity for a few seconds until I can see if Louise is mad at me?’ Rose asked, sitting back up.

‘I’m not mad at you at all; it’s been six years since Bill died,’ I said to her. ‘And yes, Sadie, I did like being married. Bill was my childhood sweetheart. He had a good job, and during the Depression only one person in a family could work. I had fun fixing up our apartment and learning to cook. We went out to the movies or to a fish fry at church on the weekends. I didn’t know there was anything else.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Rose said again.

‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘Forget about it.’

‘Do you want to get married again?’ Sadie asked.

‘If I meet the right man, sure,’ I said. I thought about Joe. I was in love with him, but he was not the right man! I wasn’t even sure the name he was using was his real name. ‘But I don’t want to get married just for marriage’s sake. I really like working and supporting myself.’ By which I meant that I was thrilled not being dependent on my parents, not cleaning slimy fish at their fish camp, not feeling like every eye at my Baptist church was trained on me and not being introduced to every halfway presentable bachelor in Wilmington, North Carolina. Especially the elderly widowers who chewed tobacco.