City of Dragons (14 page)

“By background, you mean as an escort.”

Helen Winters looked toward the counter. “Your salad is waiting. That’s exactly what I mean, Miss Corbie.”

Miranda exhaled, sending smoke toward her left. The waiter was still watching her.

“Won’t doing business with me be harmful to your position?”

The lower half of Mrs. Winters’s face cracked into an eggshell-thin smile. “I married beneath myself, Miss Corbie. Lester was an ambitious man, and I helped him achieve what he wanted to achieve. My first marriage. His second.”

“I’m relieved they won’t throw you out of the club.”

Mrs. Winters narrowed her eyes, and removed an alligator wallet from her purse. She counted out ten twenties and laid them on the table in a precisely spaced row.

“You don’t have to like me, Miss Corbie. You just have to like my money. That’s two hundred dollars for your retainer.”

Miranda stubbed her second cigarette out, half-finished. The owl on the bottom of the ashtray was missing an eye.

“Because I’ll do anything for it? No thanks, Mrs. Winters. You strike me as a woman used to getting her way. On the phone, you were a little hysterical. I felt sorry for you. Right now, I just feel sorry for your—what is she, a stepdaughter? How clichéd.” Miranda waved to the waiter.

“I’m not able to be bought and sold, contrary to what you may or may not have heard. So you can drop the class act, it doesn’t impress—or convince. If you married down, there wasn’t much lower to go. But don’t worry … I won’t be checking.”

The waiter brought the salad, placing it in front of Miranda with a flourish, and adding a basket of rolls and butter. Mrs. Winters’s face drained, matching the cold ash of her hair and making her look less like the cover girl on
Town and Country
.

“Here are my terms. You tell me the truth. About your husband, your stepdaughter, whatever and whomever you suspect. You tell me why, and let me make up my own mind. If I agree and think there’s enough there to buck what the police and coroner are going to say, then I’ll take the case, and you’ll pay me. If I don’t, then I’ll tell you that, too, and you’re free to go hire some cheap bastard who really will do anything for money. But that’s not me, Mrs. Winters. Your call.”

She drained the cherry Coke, and plucked the maraschino from the bottom of the glass. The lettuce in the salad was a little brown at the edges. She started in on the apples.

Mrs. Winters’s face gradually flushed into pink, then a pinched crimson, which shone through her thick face powder. Her arms hung at her sides as if she didn’t know what to do with them.

“She’s a drug addict. Lester was looking for her.”

Miranda scraped some of the mayonnaise off the lettuce. “Your stepdaughter, I presume. Cocaine?”

The woman nodded mutely. Miranda took another bite, wiped her mouth, then reached for her purse and took out her notepad and pencil.

“Name, age, and I’ll need a photo. Also a list of her closest friends, classmates—people who might know where she is. How long was your husband looking for her?”

“She’s been gone with no word for three weeks. She’s eighteen, just graduated from Sacred Heart. Her name’s Phyllis.”

“How long has she been on coke?”

Helen Winters shook her head. “I don’t know. She never confided in me, never liked me. Daddy’s little girl, even though she was three when we married. I do know her grades started slipping this year. She managed to graduate only because her father made a donation to the convent. Much larger than we could afford.” She took another noiseless sip of coffee, as if drowning her bitterness in blacker grounds.

“She was close to her father?”

Mrs. Winters shrugged. “Lester is—was—a busy man. The shipping company wasn’t paying him to nursemaid his own daughter.”

“But they used to be close.”

“Yes. Until she turned sixteen. Then the boys began to turn up, and we’d have row after row with her. We gave the little bitch everything she could want,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “Fine way of thanking us.”

Miranda looked up at her, then took another bite of salad. “So why do you think your husband was murdered?”

Urgency tugged at her lips and eyes, stretching the Max Factor. “Because Lester was looking for her. That’s why he was in the Pickwick. He was supposed to be meeting someone with information.”

“Did you tell this to the police? Do they know Phyllis is missing?”

“Not—not entirely. They know she’s missing, but not about the drugs. Lester and I were trying to handle this ourselves. He was in line for another promotion … once we found her, we were planning to send her to a sanitarium. Obviously, we couldn’t do any more for her.”

Miranda pushed the remaining salad to the side, took a drink of water. “Obviously. What were the circumstances of Lester’s death?”

“Heart attack, they said, but I’ve requested an autopsy. The inquest is next Friday.”

“You’ll need to tell them about Phyllis. If they find evidence that he was murdered, they’ll also find that you’ve suppressed information, and you may be held as an accessory. The police aren’t stupid, Mrs. Winters.”

“That’s precisely why I want the girl found before this goes any further.”

“What about the woman he was supposed to be with?”

Her mouth curled, the dry lines on her lips deeper without the red lipstick. “A maid says she saw a prostitute come out of the room. A Chinese. Lester would never stoop to that level.”

Miranda wrote on the pad, and asked without looking up: “Who’s the boyfriend?”

“You mean Phyllis? I have no idea.”

“Someone does. Get me a list of names and addresses of her friends from school, anyone who might know. Places she liked to go to dance, ballrooms, clubs. And a picture.”

Mrs. Winters fished around in her clutch and took out a small photo. “This is Phyllis. I knew you would need it.”

The girl smiling at Miranda looked younger than eighteen, a vapidly pretty blonde a little too soft around the eyes.

“Thanks. Who’s
your
boyfriend?”

The coffee cup dropped out of her hand and hit the saucer hard, not enough left in it to spill. The noise drew a few eyes.

“What—what did you say?”

Miranda waited until the race results and recipe pages summoned back the interested parties. “I asked who your boyfriend is. It would be easy for me to find out, but I’d rather you told me.”

The well-groomed face began to melt, its features drifting toward the middle like puddles of wax.

“I—I fail to see …”

“Maybe you don’t, but I do. You’re trying to set up your stepdaughter to take the fall for your husband’s alleged murder. You wouldn’t pay money to see it done unless you had a motive yourself. I figure you’ve got two: Lester’s money and a boyfriend on the side. That’s why you want Phyllis found right away, before the police look too closely at you.”

Miranda sat back in her chair and crossed her legs, watching the colors play on the other woman’s face.

“I’m not saying you’re guilty, Mrs. Winters. I think you’ve figured the angles, and you’ve heard something that didn’t make the papers. What I want to know is why they’re hushing it up … because if there’s an inquest and we’re still waiting for an autopsy report, it’s not just because you requested it. So you know it was murder and you play outraged wife. Jump all over the foul-play bandwagon, blowing your trumpet early, hoping to deflect suspicion. And then you time your announcement about your daughter’s addiction when you can control what she says, safely under lock and key. No embarrassing questions.”

Mrs. Winters’s fists lay stiffly on the table, her nails digging into her palms. “What are you going to do?”

Miranda shook out another Chesterfield, lit it with a matchbook on the table.

“I’m going to take the case and take your money, but only with a few rules. Number one: you tell me everything, if not here, then by tomorrow. Number two: I’ll find your stepdaughter, but not so you can frame her. Addicts aren’t exactly subtle when someone gets in between them and their fix, and whatever you’ve got on her or whatever you think she’s got on you, let it play out. Number three: You go down to the Hall of Justice now and tell them about the cocaine. Keeping her out of it because you want to control her story won’t work—not with me, the cops, or the papers. In return, I’ll produce her before the inquest, or you don’t pay me anything. Once again—your call.”

The other woman’s eyes hardened, hiding nothing, glittering like quicksilver. She looked at the money on the table. She looked at Miranda.

“You think I had Lester killed?”

Miranda spoke in a level tone. “No, I don’t. You were comfortable. From the sound of things, you didn’t need to murder Lester. He’s been unofficially dead for a long time. The only time he bucked your orders was over his daughter. And she fell in with the wrong crowd, probably out of rebellion, probably to get away from you. No, Mrs. Winters, I’m willing to find Phyllis because I’d like to see her get a chance in life. Her and the Chinese woman, if she’s innocent. Because that’s who they’ll be looking for.”

“And you’re willing to take my money to—”

“I’m willing to pocket a one-hundred-dollar retainer, and fully refund it if I can’t find your daughter before next Friday. Minus expenses, which will be documented.”

Mrs. Winters stared at her empty coffee cup. Then she slowly picked up five of the twenty-dollar bills still on the table, folding them neatly and carefully into a billfold.

Miranda was writing something on the notepad, and pushed it across. “Read and sign it. It says you’ve hired me to find your daughter within fourteen days, for twenty dollars a day plus expenses. It acknowledges your one-hundred-dollar retainer, and if I can’t produce her by the morning of the inquest, you owe me nothing except out-of-pocket costs.”

Mrs. Winters bit her lower lip as she read it. She hesitated, then signed her name in pencil.

“I’ll send it over—what you want to know.”

“Right away, please. After you walk down to the Hall of Justice.”

The woman stood, her chair scraping the linoleum, her fur stole drooping over her shoulders. She arched her long neck, trying to summon up the act she’d walked in with.

“You know—I don’t usually do business with whores.”

Miranda smiled. “Neither do I, Mrs. Winters.”

She watched as her client flung herself out the side door on her way up to the toiletries department. Then she caught eyes with the waiter, who walked over to the table, his tall, lanky frame too small for the uniform. He took the plates, looking at her curiously.

“Anything else, Miss?”

“Another cherry Coke.”

Miranda leaned back against the red seat cushion, studying the herd of women still gathered at the counter.

Ten

T
here were times when she just wanted to be left alone. Like Garbo, in
Grand Hotel
, though of course Garbo never really wanted to be left alone, she just didn’t want to face an audience. Miranda listened to the chair back squeak, letting the din of clanking plates and the staccato syllables of the short-order cook set her adrift.

She’d seen the picture eight years ago. When she was twenty-five, still wearing her hair bobbed and curly, still fresh from the Mills College days and still swigging bootleg gin. She taught English to hungry children, heads too large for permanently shrunken bodies, taught them together with their leather-skinned parents, as dry and thin as the autumn leaves they burned to keep warm. Hooverville coal, they called it, when they were lucky enough to find a tree.

The children grew old at ten, working in factories or stockyards or cotton farms, their fathers and mothers sewing the clothes and cutting the machine parts and planting the corn that covered and ran and fed the cities. If they voted at all, they voted for whomever their local boss told them to vote for. Then 1929. Suddenly the bosses were gone, along with the jobs and the crops and the homes.

1932. Worst year of the Depression. Three years before New York.

No, she wanted to be alone like everyone wanted to be, in their soul of souls, bereft, empty, not feeling, nothing to feel against, nothing to provoke emotion. Emptiness.

Sometimes the swirl of the cigarette smoke took her there, sometimes she closed her eyes and felt the hollow, the comfort in solitude. Like playing solitaire on a cold night, not watching out the window, not listening to the radio, not hearing, not seeing, not caring.

It was something more than numbness, something less than what the Hindu fakir told her about nirvana. The Treasure Island Gayway was enough nirvana for some. Men and women, restless, searching, craving sex, thrills, whatever basement-sale stimulation could be had for a nickel, twenty-five cents tops. Reminding them of life while they moved aimlessly, bacteria under a heat lamp.

A midget village, babies in incubators, and thirty-five-year-old women with saggy tits and cowboy hats playing nude volleyball at Sally Rand’s. Every day they’d find paper bags and handkerchiefs in dark corners where one of the nirvana seekers had jerked off, a souvenir from paradise, a memento for his achievement.