The Art of Detection (24 page)

“Kate, glad to catch you.”

“How are you, Hadassah?”

Typically, the woman didn’t bother with an answer but went straight to business. “You know old Mrs. Kirchbaum in the next block?”

“Er.”

“Nice lady, no grandchildren, works at the children’s center?”

“Poppy seed rolls?” Kate remembered.

“You got her. Anyway, I hadn’t seen her in a couple days so I went around, and she’s hurt her leg, finding it hard to get around. I’m organizing people to drop in with dinners, but I know she has a son down in LA or something and I want to talk to him without her knowing. You have any idea how to get in touch with him?”

“I could probably hunt him down,” Kate told her, figuring she was being asked because cops can do anything. “But it would be faster to ask Lee. I think she’s got a list of emergency contact numbers for everyone at the center.”

“Great, I’ll see if she’s got it.”

“She’s home now,” Kate told her neighbor, but she was already talking to Hadassah’s back.

She finished getting into the car, a smile on her face. Small-town life.

I should not by choice have sat through the second arrangement of Miss Birdsong’s music, as the increasing intoxication of the audience and its dancers did nothing to make their feverish gaiety any more appealing. But I held myself in patience, observing the behaviour of this self-avowedly barbaric race of moderns and making notes on the stylistic oddities of American slang, Jazz music, and the parallel between the men/women musicians before me and their reverse equivalents (actresses in breeches) of the eighteenth century London stage. All three being topics with the potential for engrossing monographs (the number of euphemisms for drunkenness alone would fill a small note-book), the evening was not wasted.

     Eventually, however, the singer waved her way merrily off the stage for the second time that night (or, by that time, morning). The crowds began to thin as those who had gainful employ the next morning took themselves home for a few hours’ rest, and Ledbetter and I made our way down the stairs and to the dressing rooms behind the stage.

     One of my first questions regarding the singer was answered when I saw that the costume draped over the screen, clearly for her to don once she had shed her stage finery, was also a frock: Some performers acting the part of women make it a point to assert a strongly masculine identity off of the stage. Miss Birdsong was one of those whose act merged into everyday life.

     ‘Sit down, dear boys, I’ll just be a jiffy. Have a bonbon.’ We pushed aside the chocolates and orchids and sat on the stools beside the gifts while the singer swabbed the heavy pancake make-up from her face, revealing delicate features that, had the eye-brows preserved their natural thickness and the side-burns been permitted to grow, would have read as that of a boy. As it was, she looked like a somewhat boyish girl--as indeed had half the audience, to my eyes. When her face was clean, however, she did not leave it bare, but replaced the heavy theatrical mask with lighter but equally effective powder and paint, chatting gaily all the time, mostly about Paris and London.

     When she had finished to her satisfaction, she rose, loosing the belt of her mauve silk dressing-gown as she walked towards the three-panelled screen. When she had stepped into hiding, the dressing-gown shot artfully up to drape itself over the top of the screen, the frock waiting there vanished a moment later, and soon she came back, adjusting the seams of her embroidered stockings coquettishly.

     A most entertaining performance; I could already see that this excursion into the night-life of the city of St Francis was bound to add to my education.

     She caught up my silk hat and tipped it onto my head, permitted young Ledbetter to help her into her brilliant white sealskin coat, picked up her tiny gold mesh handbag, and sashayed down the corridor to the stage door, calling farewells to various fellow musicians and staff as she went. Outside of the door, she repeated the performance with the men and a few women waiting there, signing autographs and exchanging banter. The nightclub diva seemed well liked by all.

     She hooked her two hands through our arms and steered us up two streets to a small bistro that was doing a brisk business despite the hour. Clearly a regular customer, she was whisked to a table, where she shrugged out of her furs and accepted a cigarette and light from Ledbetter.

     When we had ordered, however, her first words were to me. ‘Mr Sigerson, how can you possibly imagine that I am in need of your help?’

     ‘You were hoping to see someone back in the balcony, a person whose absence both surprised and troubled you. The person, I venture to say, who gave you that pearl you wear.’

     Her fingers dropped away from the object as if it had gone suddenly hot. ‘Ridiculous!’ she said, her fists clenching in a most unladylike manner.

     ‘You scarcely listened to what Mr Ledbetter and I had to say, you worried that necklace to the breaking point, and you chewed your finger-nails into an early manicure. How else to explain that level of anxiety?’

     She reared back her head and stared at me. ‘What are you, some kind of Sherlock Holmes?’

     It was a question I had encountered before. ‘I am a gentleman who finds himself with leisure on his hands, willing to assist a lady in distress.’

     The series of expressions on the face across the table from me was inimitable, and priceless, as the singer wrestled with the improbable possibility that this grey-haired English gent might be far more of an innocent than was either likely, or desirable. In the end, the body inside the frock sat forward, subtly changing form, as the voice dropped the better part of an octave to ask, ‘You do know I’m not actually a woman?’

     ‘Mr Birdsong, how you choose to present yourself matters not in the least to me. And if you prefer to keep to yourself whatever troubled you on the balcony, I shall happily share a meal with you and take my leave.’

     The man studied my face for a long moment, then sat back and slowly resumed the woman’s skin. Such a talent is no common thing, nor an easy one, and my curiosity about the person gave another stir.

     Birdsong--patently not the singer’s birth name, although I thought the William might be original--was by feature and accent from the American south-west, Arizona or New Mexico. The thick, straight black hair and exotically tinted skin revealed a percentage of blood older to these lands than that of the European settlers, although the light green eyes were imports--in northern India one found this mixture of brown skin and green eyes, but not in America, and not with those cheek-bones. Close quarters revealed that he was older than the twenty-eight or thirty years old that he looked, perhaps by as much as a decade. As an adolescent, he would have been remarkably beautiful; the complications accompanying great beauty had, no doubt, contributed to set him on the road to his choice of profession.

     Still, the singer seemed happy enough. Apart, that is, from those anxious eyes in the balcony.

     ‘I was looking for a friend,’ she said abruptly. ‘He said he’d be there and he wasn’t. It’s not like him.’

     ‘And you are unable to make enquiries?’ I suggested. She had, after all, failed to reach her dressing room’s telephone.

     Still she hesitated, before explaining, ‘I think he may be a soldier.’ The shrug of shoulders was eloquent.

     ‘Ah. Yes, that would create difficulties. A person such as myself, however, might gain access where you would be rebuffed.’

     ‘Impossible. If he is, and if his commanding officer got wind of where he spends his free time, he’d be in the brig before you could snap your fingers.’

     ‘My dear Miss Birdsong, kindly give me a modicum of credit. In a long and mis-spent life, I have at least learnt how to ask questions that lead nowhere.’

     ‘I couldn’t take the chance.’

     ‘You and your friend were, I take it, seen together in public?’

     ‘Occasionally.’

     ‘That alone is more of a risk than any queries I might make.’

     I have been told that my manner with the fairer sex, although far from intimate, can be remarkably comforting. So it proved with this artificial female. Our meal arrived, and as she ate, the singer spoke about other things, keeping up a flirtatious repartee with Ledbetter, but all the time her eyes kept coming back to my face, trying to decipher what lay there.

     Finally, when the plates had been cleared and I had settled the cheque, she studied me, then seemed to come to a decision, laying her pretty hand on my sleeve.

     ‘If you do anything to give him away, you will destroy the life of a fine man.’

     ‘Miss Birdsong, you have my word: If his superiors discover his secret, it will not be through me.’

     ‘I don’t know why I’m trusting you with this. I shouldn’t. But I do. His name is Jack Raynor.

     ‘I met him a little more than a month ago, my second night back at the Tiger. I’d only been home from Europe a few days, but the travel expenses for that trip were monstrous, so I came right along to work. He sent a bottle of bubbly to my dressing room after the second show, along with an enormous armful of pink roses and a note saying how much he’d enjoyed the show. I invited him back, along with about twenty others, and thanked him politely, and by the time the crowd thinned out he was gone.

     ‘But the next night he was there again, with the champagne and the roses--yellow this time. I had him back, told him to wait until the others had left, and then we went for dinner. He was a very sweet, well-spoken boy. No--a man. Quiet but very self-assured.’

     ‘He did not wear a uniform to the club?’

     ‘Heavens no!’

     ‘Yet you thought
soldier
rather than
sailor
.’ The San Francisco Bay was home to both Army and Navy personnel.

     ‘Yes. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the hair-cut and the straight back. Those generally say
soldier
, don’t they?’

     There might be a score of more definitive indicators, I reflected, but a singer in a port city such as this would have encountered enough of both varieties of military personnel to render an immediate impulse relatively trustworthy.

     ‘How old is he?’

     ‘In his early thirties, perhaps. He’d spent time in the tropics, and had that kind of baked look to his skin that makes it hard to tell. And I think, too, that he’d been sick. Not now, but not so long ago--his skin was a little sallow, and he spoke once about fevers.’

     ‘But you think he was still actively in the services, rather than an ex-soldier?’ A man in his early thirties would have been in his middle twenties during the War, and could easily have left the service since then.

     ‘I really don’t know. Does it matter?’

     ‘All detail matters.’

     ‘I suppose so,’ she said doubtfully.

     ‘What about his history? Is he from San Francisco? Did you ever meet any of his friends?’

     ‘He wasn’t from here, no. I got the impression that he hadn’t been in the city very long.’

     ‘Why do you say that?’

     ‘He had that kind of new-kid interest in the place, kept coming up with items of local interest that tickled him. He especially liked our sizeable collection of dotty characters--he got a kick out of Emperor Norton, I remember. Have you heard about him? One of our local eccentrics of the last century, who got involved in some shady deal, lost everything including his mind, and then went around telling everyone he was the Emperor of California and making sweeping commands and pronouncements. Another eccentric he liked was Charley Pankhurst, a stage-coach driver down near Watsonville. “Mountain Charley” owned an inn, voted in elections, had a lot of friends in the area--only when Charley died, they discovered he was a woman. Yes, the San Francisco area has its fair share of characters.’

     ‘I see,’ I told her, taking care to keep my voice even, lest she think I might be so bold as to include her among the eccentrics. ‘What about Raynor’s friends?’