“What kind of stories?”
“Crime stories. Bad guys. Mafia. That was mainly Preston. Farrel, she can act like anything from the Queen of England to a weather girl and you can’t tell she’s acting.”
“Have they called lately?”
“Been over a week.”
“Where do you think they are?”
“Well, Center Springs is the only place I know they ain’t. I don’t expect to ever see them out this way.”
I did the simple math and the not-so-simple math. Eight grand for two months of work. Farrel dancing for tips. Preston delivering pizza and working his end of the Vic hustle. Vic caught between Farrel’s good acting and his own eager heart. And of course betrayed, finally and fatally, by his own bad temper.
I finished the beer and stood. “Two men died because of them. Eight thousand bucks is what they died for. So the next time you talk to Farrel and Preston, you tell them there’s real blood on their hands. It’s not make-believe blood. You tell her Vic was murdered for taking that eight thousand.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Thanks for your time.”
“I can come up with a couple a hundred. It’s not much, but …”
I saw the orange triangles bouncing in the air between us. I thought about those triangles as I drove away. Orange triangles denote pity and sometimes even empathy. All this for Vic Primeval, as offered by a man he’d never met, from his vinyl chair in his slouching home in the Ozarks. Sometimes you find a little speck of good where you least expect it. A rough diamond down deep. And you realize that the blackness can’t own you for more than one night at a time.
THE HOME FRONT
BY DIANE CLARK & ASTRID BEAR
Sherman Heights
The sailor sat in the wooden chair across from the desk, twisting his white cap. His hair was white-blond, his face tanned to walnut. He was young. They all were. San Diego was full of young sailors in their crisp blue uniforms.
“It’s my sister. She came out to work for Consolidated. They trained her as a riveter. She was real good, just loved it. She shared a house with a bunch of girls but got tired of the noise and late nights, so she moved to a boardinghouse on K Street. About a week later, she didn’t show up for work. No one’s seen her since. I went to the police. They asked around some but couldn’t find out anything. They said there’s no law against someone going missing, but it’s just not like her. Can you help?”
Mike McGowan had called that morning to say he had a case for me. “Sailor. Missing kid sister—probably ran off with a jarhead—let him off easy, okay, Laura? The boy’s shipping out soon and wants to know what happened to her.”
Ever since my husband Bill got called up by the navy and left me in charge of the agency, his friends in the police department had been pretty good about sending work my way. I liked the work, and when Bill came back, I was planning to tell him we needed to change the name to Taylor & Taylor Investigations.
I pulled open a drawer and took out a notebook. The pen was resting in a leather cup, along with some of Bill’s chewed-up pencils. “Okay, Navy, let’s get some details. What’s your name?”
“I’m Joseph Przybilski. My sister’s Magda, but she went by Mary once she came out here.”
“Got a picture?”
He fished a photo out of his jumper pocket, a little crumpled at the corners. It showed a pretty, slight blonde, standing with a dour-looking old man and woman on the steps of an aggressively neat house. “That’s her with our mama and papa—I took that picture on the day I left for the navy. They weren’t too happy with me for going.”
“I see that.” I examined the girl’s face. She looked eager, excited. “Your sister seems happy.”
“She was excited for me to be leaving the farm, going off to see the world. She really wanted to get away too. We’d talked about it, and she’d already decided to leave as soon as she could. When Papa arranged to get some German POWs to work for him, she skedaddled out west. She never wanted to look another chicken in the eye again!”
“Can I keep this?”
He nodded.
“And when did she get here?”
“In May. She got taken on right away at Consolidated, and they put her on the PBY assembly line as soon as she finished her training. Flying boats.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“They had her working tail, cause she fits into small places.” He grinned shyly. So young and cute. “Her last letter said she got to see the first flight of a plane she made. She was so proud!”
I could imagine that slim girl creeping into the cutaways and nooks in the rear of the fuselage, toting her rivet gun, snaking the air hose along and avoiding sharp edges and snags, then getting to work, the staccato slap-choo of the gun echoing in the tiny space. Tending chickens somehow didn’t seem so bad compared to that, but I hadn’t grown up with them.
“Any boyfriends?”
“Not that she told me about. There was a boy at home who was sweet on her during high school, but I don’t think they stayed in touch.”
I got the details of Mary’s workplace and the address she’d moved to and told Przybilski I’d see what I could do. He gave me two dollars for my retainer and left.
I decided to check out where Mary had been living. I locked the office and walked downstairs to India Street. It was a typical San Diego September day, sunny and warm with a gentle breeze ruffling the bay. The water sparkled with heartless beauty. I caught a streetcar heading south, then transferred to a bus. I got off at Market and 20th.
I looked down 20th toward K Street. Three blocks away, I saw a red-roofed tower lording it over the small bungalows that made up the neighborhood. It was the Jesse Shepard House, a mansion built by rich men for an eccentric musician in the 1880s in the hopes of bringing culture to their dusty town. With a start, I realized that it had been converted into the boarding house that Mary had moved to. It was a jumble of architectural features and finishes punctuated by stained-glass windows. Wrought-iron panels topped a low concrete fence that rose up from the sidewalk. The whole effect was of a cut-and-pasted Victorian Sears catalog.
As I came closer, it was clear that this grand building, once the pride of San Diego, had been thoroughly humbled by the needs of wartime. The white paint had cracked and peeled into loose flakes. Blackout curtains framed the panels of stained glass. Wide windows showed the edge-on shadows of partitions. Formerly spacious rooms had been roughly subdivided.
I crossed the street to a corner market and bought a soda.
“Pretty fancy building over there,” I commented to the clerk, an older woman with her gray hair in a tidy bun.
“Just a shame what they’ve done to it since the Lynches died. I know people need places to live, what with the housing shortage and all, but it’s too bad they had to turn that fine old place into a boarding house. Can I open that for you?” she asked, gesturing to the bottle.
“Sure!” I took a sip of the fizzy cold Coke and leaned against a vegetable bin. “So they’ve got a lot of folks living there now?”
“They put up so many partitions to make rooms, they must have twenty people staying there. All girls, they don’t take men. Each girl gets her own personal cracker box. They mostly work at the aircraft factories.”
“Must be a nice bit of extra business for you, with so many girls around.”
“Well, they’re gone all day and they hardly cook, but we make sandwiches to sell for their lunch pails, so we’re doing okay. Sometimes a few girls will get together and buy some stew meat and vegetables to make dinner on the weekend, but the owners are pretty stingy with kitchen privileges. It’s almost like they don’t want them to have a good time when they get a chance.”