The Girl Is Trouble (4 page)

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Tomorrow is when Hanukah starts, yes?”

I think the relief must’ve shown in my face. Boy, howdy—
that’s
what she wanted to talk about? “Right.”

“You don’t celebrate, though.”

Apparently, the word was out: Iris Anderson was a bad Jew. The relief I’d felt moments before was eclipsed by a knot in my throat. “Not really.”

“Every year I have tree.” She gestured toward a window in the parlor, where blackout blinds obscured the lamplight from the street. “Is okay with you?”

She was asking me for permission to have a Christmas tree? Seriously? “Sure.”

“And your father?”

“Pop won’t mind a bit,” I said.

She smiled, and the lines that had crisscrossed her forehead when her query first began grew shallow. “Is good. You will share a meal with us on December 25? I make big feast.”

I said yes, even though agreeing to it only increased my guilt. If we celebrated Christmas, did that mean we were no longer Jews?

She left me and I sat down and tried to put questions of faith out of my mind. The desk was littered with the usual banal tasks, save one:
Call the following hotels and find out if a Mickey Pryor is staying there or has recently stayed there. On the Q.T.
Most of Pop’s work involved tailing spouses suspected of infidelity. He spent a lot of time calling and visiting hotels, hoping to catch a glimpse—and hopefully a photo—of the couple together. His instructions, though sparse, were clear: come up with a story to use when calling the hotels that will convince the desk clerk to pass on what is considered confidential information.

I cleared my throat before picking up the phone and asking the operator for the first hotel’s exchange. Two rings later and I was greeted by a chipper woman at the hotel’s switchboard.

I put on my best little-girl voice, full of rounded vowel sounds and a lisp that softened the attack on all of my words. “Mr. Pryor’s room, please.”

There was no Mickey Pryor staying there.

Nor was he at the next ten hotels on the list.

I filled the time waiting for each receptionist to respond by practicing opening a series of locks Pop had mounted on a board for me. I had the hang of getting them open with the picks, but my speed wasn’t particularly impressive. This, he kept telling me, was the most important part of gaining entry to forbidden places. You had to get in fast so you could get out fast.

By the time I called the twelfth hotel, I was growing weary with both the calling and the lock picking. But I soldiered on, determined to complete the task set before me. After being greeted by the switchboard operator, I again stated my query in the same juvenile tone.

She told me she would check the register. When she came back on the line, she hesitated before telling me, “I’m sorry, there’s no guest here by that name.”

I took a chance. I was pretty sure that pause of hers wasn’t a coincidence.

“But … but he said this is where he would be.” My voice shook with imaginary tears as my fingers deftly opened a dead bolt with three turns of the pick. Instead of hanging up on me, the clerk pulled the story behind my emotion out: we’d received one of the telegrams every family dreaded, announcing that my older brother, Bud, was missing in action. “Mama won’t get out of bed,” I told the sympathetic operator. “I don’t know what to do. I thought if I could find Uncle Mick, he might be able to help.”

“Look,” the woman on the phone whispered. “I could get in a lot of trouble for this, but he
was
here. He and his … uh … wife checked out about an hour ago.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d found him. “Oh. Then he must be on his way home. I’m sure Mama will come around.” And with that I hung up.

I wrote up a paragraph describing everything for Pop, finished up my notes from tailing the man over the weekend, and then did the little bit of filing and typing he’d left for me. As I was completing my tasks for the day, I heard the front door open and close. I left the office to greet Pop and found Betty Mrozenski instead.

“
Bonjour
, Iris.”

“Hello.” Betty was Mrs. M.’s daughter. She was in her twenties and worked as a salesgirl at Macy’s. She usually came over once a month, always toting some little gift for her mother as a surprise.

“Comment allez-vous?”

“Fine, thank you,” I said. One of the reasons Betty got her job was because she spoke several languages, a fact she was always happy to demonstrate whether you wanted her to or not. Unfortunately, while she had a knack for learning languages, she lacked the same skill for learning proper accents, a failing that amused me and my one year of private-school French to no end.

“You look surprised to see me,” she said, mercifully reverting to English.

Did I? I certainly didn’t mean to. Betty had just joined us for Thanksgiving the week before, so I suppose I didn’t expect her to show up so soon after that visit. I liked her well enough, but there was something about her presence that I found off-putting. Maybe it was just that she changed things among Mrs. M., Pop, and me. When it was just the three of us I could pretend we were family, but when Betty was there, it reminded me that Mrs. Mrozenski wasn’t mine.

“Oh, I just didn’t know you were coming is all,” I said. “Is everything all right?” Betty had a brother in the Navy who Mrs. M. spent far too many hours worrying about. I’d never met him before, but after hearing about him for so long I began to worry for her whenever the phone rang at odd hours or the Western Union courier was spotted on our street.

“
Tout va bien
. Ma invited me for dinner and I couldn’t say no. The Christmas shopping season has me too pooped to cook.” She must’ve come straight from work. She wore a smart gray suit with a fitted jacket and pencil skirt. Underneath the jacket was a crisp white blouse and a string of pearls similar to ones I’d inherited from Mama. Her hair was in an updo, her lips colored a deep red that matched her nails. She had an impressive figure that I knew was helped out by a girdle. (I’d borrowed one from her once upon a time, though she didn’t know it.) She was softer and rounder than Mama had been, but nothing like her own mother, whose large girth demanded waistless dresses. It wasn’t hard to predict that she’d be just like her one day. You could see the older woman trapped inside her, just like I could see a glimpse of the young woman Mrs. M. must’ve been every time she smiled. “Plus I brought her this.” She had the newest issue of
Screen Album
, with Lana Turner on the cover. “Is your pop here?” she asked.

“He will be. Soon.” My eyes danced back toward the office. Would it be rude to leave her?

“Is he out on a job?” She lowered her voice when she asked it, like there were spies about whom she didn’t want to clue in to what Pop did for a living. Usually I enjoyed people being impressed by what Pop did, but coming from Betty it annoyed me.

“Nope, he went to the bank. And the post office.”

“Probably for a case, huh?” She picked up the photo of Mama that sat on the radio. The glass had been broken out of it months before and we still hadn’t replaced it. “She was so pretty,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, because what else was there to say?

“You’re going to look just like her.”

I shrugged. What was the point in agreeing with her when I knew it was a lie?

“I never thought to ask you. Do you speak German, too?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Such a shame. I’ve been dying to find someone to practice with. Ma refuses to help me until I learn to speak Polish, and that’s not likely to happen anytime soon. And you can’t just break out the German with any old person without seeming suspicious, you know?”

The office phone sang its shrill song.

“Oh, don’t let me keep you,” said Betty. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

I left her and answered the phone with a chipper “AA Investigations.”

“Iris?” It was Michael Rosenberg. I settled into Pop’s chair and again worked the picklocks. As I listened to Michael apologize for not calling sooner, I could hear Betty flipping through magazines, fiddling with the radio dial, tapping her nails on the side table, humming along to the music underplaying a Chock Full o’ Nuts commercial. It unnerved me. Why? Betty was a perfectly nice person. She had every right to visit her mother as often as she wanted.

“Anyways,” said Michael, “the group was very enthusiastic about you helping, especially since two more of them received letters today.” I put aside the picks, got out pen and paper, and jotted down notes as he told me about what he’d learned at the meeting.

There were now four people who’d received the anti-Semitic notes: two boys and two girls. Two of them had found them in their lockers after lunch, and both Michael and the most recent victim had found them at the end of the day. They had been pushed through the locker vents, so anyone could have placed them there. The notes were similar in content, except for the most recent one, which included a newspaper clipping with the headline “Slain Polish Jews Put at a Million. One-third of Number in Country Said to Have Been Put to Death by Nazis.”

“Is that true?” I asked after he’d read me the headline.

“Yes,” he said, a note of disbelief in his voice. “The number might actually be much larger.” How had I not known that? “So what else can I tell you?” he asked.

It was hard to concentrate with the image of all those dead people dancing in my head. “Were all of the notes on the same kind of paper?”

“Yes. Lined, with no distinguishing marks.” In other words, the same paper every high school student used.

“And the handwriting and ink color?”

“Identical.”

I forced myself to focus. “What about the locations of the lockers? Are the people who received the notes near one another?”

“No. Two of us are in the upperclassman hall, two in the lower.”

“Then I guess the next steps are to interview the other three people who got the notes and do a stakeout on the lockers of those who haven’t gotten any.”

Michael gave me the names of the as-yet-unaffected members and hung up.

I called Pearl and gave her the scoop. She’d used her time in the attendance office that afternoon to identify where each federation member’s locker was located. She suggested we do our first stakeout before school started the next day.

“Meet me at a quarter after seven, okay?” she said.

I promised her I would.

As I hung up the phone, the front door opened and I heard the unmistakable sound of Pop entering the room. His wooden leg always lagged, creating a momentary drag that was like the walking version of a lisp.

“Look who’s here,” he said to Betty. I moved so that I could catch sight of him as he came into the parlor. “Everything all right?”

“Yes.” Her eyes flickered toward me before returning to him. “I hope you don’t mind, Arthur, but Ma invited me to dinner. I think she’s worried I’ll starve to death if left to my own devices.”

“You and me both,” he said. He removed his fedora and hung it on the hall tree. Pop was a handsome man, with the kind of good looks that used to make my friends insist they’d seen him in a movie before, only they couldn’t remember which one. He’d aged a lot in the past year, but even though he looked older than his years, he still managed to turn heads wherever he went.

“Would you like to sit?” asked Betty.

“Thanks,” said Pop. Of course he wanted to sit. He’d been walking around on an ill-fitting prosthetic all day. And who was she to offer him a place in the parlor? It wasn’t her house. We should be the ones inviting
her
to sit down.

Why was I getting so upset about this?

“I’m glad you’re here. I tried telephoning you this afternoon,” said Pop.

“Oh, really?” said Betty. She tossed another look my way.

Pop followed her gaze and suddenly increased the distance between the two of them. “Iris! Why are you hiding in there?”

I left the desk and came to the doorway. “I’m not hiding. I’m working.”

He raised an eyebrow. “No need to get defensive. It was a joke. Why don’t you come out here? We have company.”

I left the office reluctantly and offered a forced smile to Betty.

“It’s fine,” she told Pop. “Iris had work to do.”

Why had Pop tried calling her? “What did you do this afternoon?” I asked him.

“Errands. Got the mail.” Ah, of course he wasn’t going to tell me what he had really been doing. Not in front of Betty. I raised an eyebrow to let him know I knew he was lying. In response, he tapped a stack of envelopes sitting on his lap. He had a P.O. box for client mail, and for those occasions when he needed an anonymous address to help track down a lead without tipping his hand that it was a detective behind the inquiry.

“I could file it if you like,” I said.

“No need. Actually, there are a few checks in here. I should probably stick them in the safe before I forget. If you’ll excuse me, ladies.”

Pop went into the office and opened the closet at the rear of the room. There was a safe stored on the floor there, recently purchased after a break-in convinced him that more sensitive documents—and money—should be a little bit more difficult to get access to. I could hear the tumblers click as he spun the dial. He’d never shown me what he kept in there and I’d never asked, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious.

“Finish your work?” asked Betty.

“Just about,” I said.

“I guess you’re helping your pop out now, huh?”

“Here and there.”

“It’s exciting stuff, working for a detective.”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Just don’t let it get in the way of your studies.”

“I won’t.”

She looked around the room like she was hoping to find the next topic of conversation hidden among the throw pillows. “Have you seen
You Were Never Lovelier
?”

I’d been dying to see the flick starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth but there wasn’t money for movies. “Nope.”

“You should. It’s great. Fred Astaire is just dreamy in it.”