This Dame for Hire (5 page)

I loved Fourth cause it had lots of different kinds of bookstores. The books were all used, but some stores specialized in rare books, some art books, some popular fiction, and some everything all jammed together. We’d picked an everything called The Bookman to meet.

Inside, the smell was pure mold. But that was jake with me cause most of the books on the shelves weren’t moldy. I’m not sure where the smell came from; maybe it was the general aroma of used-book stores.

The Bookman was owned and run by one Elisha Raft. He was a little palooka who didn’t seem to have any help. The shelves sagged with the weight of the books, and I wondered how he could handle it all.

Raft came from the back room cause he heard the bell when I entered.

“Hello, Faye,” he said.

I greeted him back. Raft was an oddball, to say the least. First time I clapped my eyes on him I almost jumped out of my pumps.

He had beady dark blinkers and bushy eyebrows. His black hair was busy with tufts, and he never smiled. The sunken cheeks didn’t help the picture. As far as his body went, he looked like the ninety-seven-pound weakling in the Charles Atlas ad. He always wore dungarees and a crisp white shirt kept neat with a shabby leather belt, the buckle almost as big as him. But as strange as he looked, he was a very nice guy. And he knew his books.

“You lookin for anything special, Faye?”

“Just browsin today.”

“Browse away then.” He nodded his head once, which is what passed for a smile, and walked toward the back of the store.

While I waited for Anne I went over to the fiction and started at
A.
Even if I found something, I wouldn’t let myself buy more than one book cause, not only couldn’t my change purse let me, I was running out of book space in my apartment.

Anne had her own sense of time, so I knew I could be waiting here anywhere from ten minutes to an hour.

Books have always been my pals. I guess I turned to them in my childhood cause I didn’t have any brothers or sisters. I almost had a brother, but he died of influenza when I was a baby. That’s when my ma went off the deep end, my aunt Dolly told me. My ma couldn’t get over little Frank dying like that. And I guess me staying alive. So that’s why I spent the first four years of my life living with Aunt Dolly and Uncle Dan in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When I came back to Newark, my ma was supposed to be better, but I don’t think she was. By then she was already pretty well hooked on morphine.

My pop was around as much as he could be, and I loved him like crazy. He was nuts about me, too. He always read to me, and that’s where I got my love of books. I had my own library card by the time I was six. So I brought home five, six books a week instead of five, six buddies. Books were safe and loyal and wouldn’t dump me if my ma was nodding out in the living room or saying wacky things.

I read all kinds of stuff from Agatha Christie to Thomas Mann. But I’m not much of a nonfiction reader. I feel like ya can learn a lot by reading novels. I’ve learned a lot of what I know about humans that way.

I’d been browsing about fifteen minutes and was holding a Lloyd Douglas book when I heard the bell and saw Anne walking toward me. As eye-catching as ever, she wore a long colorful garment, which she’d folded and draped so that it hung on her frame perfectly, like Dorothy Lamour, though you couldn’t call it a sarong. A cream crepe jacket cloaked her shoulders. She had her own sense of style, too. Like they say, she marched to a different drummer.

“Faye,” she said.

We kissed each other’s cheek.

“How are ya, Anne?”

“Fine,” she said.

I didn’t believe her. She was never fine. There were the usual dark circles beneath her brilliant blue eyes. And although she wore her blonde hair neat and short in its wavy way and her makeup was perfectly applied, I could tell. Being psychic took a lot out of her. It had always been like that.

Just walking around and seeing or knowing things didn’t weaken her too much, but when she was doing her clairvoyant stuff for someone it was different. Anne would sometimes get sick to her stomach or get dizzy or both. But she felt since she had this gift it was her duty to help people.

Anne came from an upper-class family who lived on a gated block in the swankiest part of Newark, New Jersey. She was the oldest of four sisters and brothers. Her parents, especially her mother, had high hopes for her. She’d wanted Anne to be a college professor or maybe a doctor, even though it would be hard for a girl to do that. Anne’d gone to Vassar, but after she graduated she didn’t want to go on with the halls of ivy. By then she felt she could do more good in the world if she plugged away at her clairvoyant knack. And she had a trust from her grandmother so she didn’t have to worry about do re mi.

Her family was dead set against this, but Anne went for broke and she moved to New York and got her own place. She didn’t advertise or anything, but word got around and soon she was finding lost things and sometimes lost people, and, although it made her sick, it also made her happy.

Anyway, I’d become aware of her psychic abilities the first day she spoke to me in the hall of Newark High. We were both sophomores. She stopped me and said, “How’s Paul?”

I gave her the old jaw-dropping routine. Paul was a boy I was smitten with, but I hadn’t told anyone and had never gone out with him.

“How’d ya know?” I said.

“It’s written on your forehead in green.”

I slapped a hand over where she said it was.

She laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m the only one who can see it.”

“What are ya, some freak or somethin?” I asked. Subtle as always. And kind, too.

“Yes,” she said, and walked away.

Cause I didn’t wanna ask anybody about her I didn’t find her for two days. And when I did she was sitting alone under a tree, eating an apple.

I stood over her. “I’m sorry I said what I did.”

“That’s okay.”

“You’re used to it, huh?”

She stared at me, then patted the ground next to her.

I sat.

“Have you been asking people about me?” she said.

I told her I hadn’t cause I didn’t think she’d like that.

“Are you a psychic, too?”

“No. I just had a sneakin suspicion. Is that what you are? A psychic?”

“I guess. It’s been happening all my life. I know things. I see things, like the name on your forehead. I don’t usually say anything, don’t know why I did with you.”

“Cause you knew I was special?”

“Are you?”

I shrugged. “So you’ve been havin this stuff happen to you forever?”

“Yes, and it makes me sick. Physically sick.”

“Then why do it?”

“I can’t control it. I wish I could.”

And that was the beginning. We became best friends.

Now I said, “Wanna go have some coffee?”

“Sure, there’s a diner over on Third.”

I knew she meant Earl’s. I put back the copy of
Magnificent Obsession,
and we headed toward the door.

Elisha had come out when he’d heard the bell and was standing behind his wooden counter. “You gals leavin?”

“I’ll be back,” I said.

“I know you will,” he said, and gave us the nod of his head.

Outside I asked Anne if she thought Raft was weird.

“Lonely,” she said. “Since his parents died he’s been living alone in an apartment that’s much too big for him.”

“I didn’t know ya knew him that well.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t know him at all.”

“Oh.” I didn’t need to ask her how she knew.

At Third Avenue we crossed under the El. Earl’s Diner was in the middle of the block. It was your usual dirt-cheap hash house in a chrome building set up to look like a dining car. Earl’s name was on the roof, and at night it was lit up in red neon.

Inside there was a long counter and booths. The floor was a black-and-white-checkered linoleum. It being fairly empty, we took a booth near the back.

Before we could start jawing the waitress mooched over and slung a menu in front of each of us, then asked if we wanted coffee. Anne said tea.

Our soup jockey put a squint on her before she slouched away.

Personally, I didn’t know how Anne could drink that swill, but it was none of my beeswax. We opened our menus and took a gander. I knew right away I’d have bread pudding. If that’s all I had for lunch, I figured it wouldn’t count. I asked Anne what she was having.

“I’m not hungry,” she said.

She was never hungry. At first I thought it might be a problem of too little scratch, even with the trust, but when she came to my crib she never wanted anything either. I once made her a dinner of roast chicken, creamed spinach, and a baked potato. She picked at it, but I wouldn’t say she ate it. I didn’t do that again. The thing was she didn’t look scrawny, she looked just right.

But I always wondered how a person could live without sweets, which Anne did. When I’d asked her about it in our teens, she’d told me she didn’t care for them. I never got her to say more. I guess there wasn’t a whole lot to say about it.

Our bubbly waitress returned with my cup of joe and Anne’s tea.

“So youse know whatcha want?” She held her order pad in one chunky hand, a pencil in the other.

“I’d like the bread puddin. She doesn’t want anything else.”

She sighed so loud I thought the whole place could hear her, forgetting it was almost empty. But not even the two mugs at the counter looked our way.

“So what’s up?” Anne asked.

“You remember that murdered student, Claudette West?”

“The one you found?”

“Yeah. Her parents came to see me yesterday.”

“To hire you?”

I nodded. “Father was a pain in the derriere, but after what he’s been through, well I gave him some room. He kept harpin on the ex-boyfriend, said he was the only suspect. Joker by the name Richard Cotten.”

“Nothing about Brian Wayne?”

“No. Who’s he?”

“He was her literature professor.” She sipped her tea.

“I didn’t see anything about him in the clippins the Wests gave me.”

“He was never a suspect. They questioned him, of course. They questioned all her professors and friends.”

“So why do you mention
him
?”

She bit her top lip, took a deep breath. “I have a feeling.”

“You’ve met him?”

“No.”

It didn’t matter. I took this seriously. “How do you know about him?”

“In some article there was a brief mention of people in Claudette’s life. He was listed. When I read his name, I started to feel dizzy and queasy, the way I do.”

Had I missed Wayne’s name in the clippings? Or did West leave out that report cause he was so fixed on Cotten? I took out my notebook and wrote down Wayne’s name and what he taught.

“Anything or anybody else interest ya?”

She closed her eyes. “No. Not now.”

The waitress threw my bread pudding in front of me. “Anything else?”

“No,” I said.

“Why do I ask?” She scribbled on the pad, tore it off, and sailed it to me.

I eyeballed my dessert. It sure had the look. Bread pudding wasn’t the ordinary dish that some people thought it was. There are all kinds of variations, which I won’t go into, but this thing here, this beauty in front of me, looked like the real McCoy. I picked up my spoon and slipped it into the confection. It had the feel. And when I put it in my mouth, it had the taste.

“Good?”

“Perfect.”

Anne smiled cause she was familiar with my sweet tooth.

“I’m glad,” she said. And I knew she was.

I said, “Anne, will you work with me on this case? It’s so cold I might need help.” I hated to ask her cause I knew she’d go through hell if she helped. I also knew she always wanted to do good things.

“Of course I will, Faye.”

“I don’t know exactly what I want ya to do yet.”

“That’s all right. Get me something Claudette West used or wore.”

“I will. I don’t want to ask the Wests right away because . . .”

“They’ll think you’re a crackpot,” Anne said.

“I . . . I guess they would.”

“Don’t feel bad. If I didn’t know that by now, I’d be in big trouble.”

True. She had no illusions about how anything to do with her being psychic affected most people.

“I feel like a crumb bum askin ya.”

“Why?”

“Because it takes so much out of ya.”

“So what?” She smiled the kind of smile that made men turn to mush. “It happens to me whether I’m concentrating on something specific or not. You know that, Faye.”

“Sure. But isn’t it worse when you’re tryin to do something specific?”

“A little, maybe.”

“But you’re willin to help, anyway?”

“What’s a psychic for?”

SIX

When I got to the office, Birdie handed me a bunch of pink memo slips with phone calls on them.

“Suddenly you’re a very popular gal,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m a regular June Allyson.”

“Ya haven’t been here much,” Birdie said.

“Is that a knock?”

“Just sayin.” She took out her compact and powdered her face. Something she did when she thought she hit a snag in a conversation.

“For your info I’ve been poundin the pavement.”

“Any luck?”

I reached into my pocketbook and took out all my notes. “Would ya type these up?” I asked, handing them to her.

“You bet,” she said. Birdie rolled a piece of paper into her Underwood.

“Before ya do that would ya look up a guy named Brian Wayne?”

“Sure thing, Boss Lady.”

“It ain’t funny, McGee.”

“What ain’t, Faye?” She batted her brown eyes at me all innocence. Birdie knew damn well what I meant. She knew her onions better than the next guy.

“You can drop the ‘Boss Lady.’ ”

“Why? You ain’t my boss anymore?”

“Can it, Birdie.”

I opened my office door, and before I closed it behind me I heard her flipping through the phone book. Birdie could be irritating sometimes, but basically she was a good kid.

I sat behind my desk, threw the pink slips in front of me, and started going through them. There was one from my friend Jeanne, one from Anne, one from Marlene Hayworth, ten from Porter West, and none from Marty, which meant he hadn’t been able to get the info yet.