The Ghost and the Dead Deb

CHAPTER 6

In Jack’s Case

It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman.

—Sir Winston Churchill

New York City

July 19, 1946

HER NAME WAS Emily Stendall—the pedigreed blonde in pink polkadots who’d waltzed into his office worried about flies and swatters.

She’d gotten Jack’s name from Gertrude Herbert, a fellow cliff-dweller, one of those uptown, high-rise, society dames who hired him as a bodyguard on a fairly regular basis.

“Start at the beginning, Miss Stendall,” Jack suggested from across the dry, brown desktop.

“I’d rather start at the end,” she said primly. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’d like you to stop Joey Lubrano from murdering me. If you take my case this minute, I’ll double your per diem plus expenses, and I’ll give you a bonus of one thousand dollars if you’re able to gather enough evidence for his conviction of a capital crime.”

“The crime of?”

“I told you, killing my sister. And planning to kill me.”

Jack picked up his deck of Luckies and gave them a shake. Emily Stendall nodded and he rose from his chair. He shook the pack again, watched her slip one white cylinder out of its nest, place it between her lips. He fired up a match. Soft fingers touched his, pulling the flame close. She inhaled and closed her eyes, savoring the hit.

Jack lit his own and took a long drag. “Okay—” he began, sitting on the edge of his desk.

She exhaled a long, white plume. “You’ll take the job?”

“Not yet,” Jack said. “You started on your end. Now do me a favor and start on mine.”

Emily Stendall’s brown eyes widened. “Your what?”

“From the beginning, honey,” he clarified. “Tell me the story from the beginning.”

“My sister’s name was Sarah. Mrs. Sarah Nolan. Her husband, Melvin, secured a promotion a year ago that had him traveling on business quite a bit.”

“How much is quite a bit?”

Emily shrugged her creamy shoulders. “Two weeks out of every month I’d guess.”

“I’d guess that’s quite a bit.”

“Well, you can see how it started then. Sarah became lonely, and one night she invited him in for a drink. Joey Lubrano, I should say, our building’s elevator operator—”

“Our building?”

“We lived in the same building on East Sixty-fifth. She lived on the ninth floor. I live directly above her on the tenth.”

“Go on.”

“After a while, Joey threatened her with blackmail, and—”

“How?”

“He’d taken photos . . .” Emily Stendall paused a moment, bit her lower lip. “Risqué photos. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“At the time he’d said they were just for him to remember her. But obviously he’d had other things in mind.”

“Mmm . . . obviously.” Jack’s tone had a bite. Emily Stendall noticed.

“What?” she asked. “You think she was naïve?”

“Not naïve.” Jack took a long drag. “Stupid.”

“Mr. Shepard, no one calls my sister stupid.”

“She cheated on her husband with a man who blackmailed and then killed her. You call that smart?”

“I call that victimized. Or is that too expensive a word for your vocabulary?”

“Cheating on her husband with the elevator man? Her actions do suggest other adjectives, Miss Stendall,” said Jack. “Words that aren’t pretty. The kind of ugly words men use in front of their bartenders—”

Emily Stendall rose. “How dare you!” And in a blur of movement Jack grabbed her quickly approaching hand.

“Let me go!” She yanked at her trapped wrist.

Jack held. “Look, doll, I’m sincerely sorry about your sister’s death, but I’m not about to start my weekend with a red-hot handprint tattooed to my cheek . . . even if it is a beautiful hand.”

Emily Stendall’s firm, full breasts were heaving in fury and indignation.

“Let me go,” she said, her voice finally level.

Jack released her. She rubbed at the red mark circling her right wrist. Her eyes speared him as her glossy pink lips made a little-girl pout.

“A little advice, honey,” said Jack, retrieving the lit cigarette from the green linoleum floor and stabbing it out in the ashtray beside his cracked-leather davenport. “You might be able to lead your Yale men around by the leash with that indignant princess act, but when you’re dealing with rough trade, you’ll need another strategy.”

The little-girl pout loosened to a grim frown. Jack put a second Lucky in his mouth, lit it, then transferred it to hers. She took another hit, long and needy.

“That’s why I want to hire you, Mr. Shepard,” she admitted. “My sister’s involvement with ‘rough trade,’ as you put it, got her killed. Now I need someone like you to—”

“Clean up the mess.”

“Precisely. So will you take the job or not?”

“I have a few more questions. Namely, why haven’t the police picked up Lubrano? I assume you’ve gone to them?”

“Yes, of course, I went to them. They picked him up, too. They questioned him, then they released him. No evidence, they said, and, of course, he denied everything. They searched his apartment but didn’t find any photos. And his alibi that night was supposedly airtight.”

“What was it?”

“He’d entered a dart-throwing contest at a downtown bar. Ten cops were in the bar with him.”

“That’s pretty airtight, honey.”

“But he slipped away to kill Sarah. I know he did. My sister’s death was ruled an accident. They claim she drank martinis on top of sleeping pills then drowned in a bath. But the night she died, Sarah and Lubrano were supposed to meet. He was supposed to be exchanging the photos and their negatives for the payoff. But something obviously went wrong. Maybe my sister became angry and it went badly. Maybe he’d planned all along to murder her and tricked her into drinking a drugged martini so she could never get him into trouble. Whatever happened that night, he took the money and the photos and set her up with an accidental death. That’s why Lubrano wants to kill me now.”

“Because you went to the police?”

“I’m the only one who knew about the affair he had with Sarah. I’m the only one who knew about the blackmail and the photos. He didn’t know it before he killed her, but now he does because I went to the police. He threatened me just the other day, told me to keep my mouth shut from now on or he’d shut it permanently—just like he did my sister’s.”

“When did he say this?”

“Just last night, right there in my building’s elevator. That’s when I knew I was in over my head. I remembered a friend had used your services some months back, so here I am . . .”

Jack nodded. The dame was right. She was in over her head.

“Mr. Shepard, I think Joey Lubrano is going to try to use those photos again, this time to extort money from Sarah’s husband. If it gets out what happened—that Sarah posed for nude photos with her lover—the scandal would socially ruin and devastate not just him but his father. You know who his father is, Mr. Shepard?”

“Sorry, enlighten me.”

“He’s the fundraising director for St. Bernard’s.”

Jack nodded. St. Bernard’s Episcopal Church was a Fifth Avenue institution. Its members included prominent politicians, judges, and financial scions.

“I get it, honey.”

“Do you?”

Jack’s interest piqued as he watched Emily close her long-lashed eyes and take another long pull on the Lucky Strike.

“And your parents . . . they don’t know their little girl smokes, do they?”

Emily opened her big brown eyes and levelly met Jack’s stare. “They don’t know their little girl does a lot of things.”

Jack’s eyebrow rose. “I’ll need more information from you, Miss Stendall, before I can get started.”

“But you’ll take the case?”

“Yeah, honey,” said Jack. “You just hired yourself your own private dick.”

A few minutes later, Jack was escorting Miss Emily Stendall from his warm office to the hot elevator, then to the steamy Manhattan streets.

“Seven million people in this city,” said Jack Shepard, “and every last one is hailing a cab.”

When the tenth hack went by, already hired, Jack muttered, “Nuts to this.” He considered suggesting they each cough up a dime for the subway, but he doubted very much Miss Stendall would agree.

“Mr. Shepard, a lady of class cannot be seen taking the subway,” one of his clients once had told him when they’d been stranded by her driver and no cabs were in sight. And, of course, what Jack understood was the idea of the act itself was not as repugnant as being “seen” committing it.

“Hungry?” Jack asked his client, because he was.

Emily nodded. So he rolled down his sleeves, put on his jacket and fedora, and took her into Little Roma, a cozy Italian joint near his office, ten wooden tables covered by red-and-white checkered tablecloths and wine bottles with candles stuck in the tops. Nothing pricey but no dive, either. Every table was taken. Ceiling fans moved a pleasant breeze through the room and the smell of fresh rolls and garlic stoked their appetites. They shared a bottle of chilled Chianti and ate thinly sliced veal cutlets made into a melt-on-your-tonsils dish he could never pronounce.

When they stepped back onto the street, the hot day had cooled a few degrees with a breeze off the Hudson, and the hour was well past quitting time. Not for everyone though . . .

Ten blocks north, clouds of steam continued to waft from pressing machines in sweltering loft factories. Long into the night, the Garment District would still be making dresses like the polkadot halter number Miss Stendall wore; while ten blocks south, men without faces had forgotten what quitting time even was. Theirs was a world of shuffling feet and bottomless bottles, outstretched palms, sidewalk beds, long steady stares, and in the end, Bellevue.

Jack doubted Miss Stendall had even been down near the Bowery—he couldn’t blame her. For that crowd, the Depression had never ended, and Jack didn’t like to be reminded of those days, either. He’d had his bad luck like everybody. His mother dying young, his father at a loss for what to do. Putting the two girls in a convent orphanage and Jack left to fend for himself.

He’d boxed some, knocked around, then on a lucky break became a cop. And when the war broke out, and the draft began, that’s the time even more bad luck had blown his way—and he thought it best to enlist his way out of it.

Maybe that’s why he liked Manhattan mostly at night. He’d seen it on leave during the war, when an official dim-out had shut down the bright lights of his town, darkening its marquees and skyscrapers, shrouding even the Statue of Liberty in shadow as a precaution against marauding German subs. Wartime New York had become a somber ghost of itself.

Stepping into this postwar evening, Jack happily eye-balled the forest of buildings, all lit up like torches. This was the reason he’d never leave the city. The lights of night transformed a country boy’s night into a working stiff ’s brand-new day, blazing the pathways to movie theaters and restaurants, gin mills and nightclubs, allowing pursuits of pleasure long past the time the suburban rube and farm boy had been forced to put up their feet.

He flagged a taxi easy now and held the door. The address was Upper East. A tree-lined street tucked between fashionable Park Avenue and utilitarian Lexington. Park was where the opulent building had been erected for tycoons past and present, and Lex was where their help shopped for groceries, took their cleaning, and bought the goods that kept them living in the style to which they’d become accustomed.

Miss Stendall’s building sat exactly between the avenues. The redbrick façade matched the others on the block, with its tall set-back windows and canopied entrance.

“Good evening, miss.” The doorman looked to be in his early sixties. Gray hair, gray eyes, and the flushed cheeks of a man who liked to sneak a nip or two—short jacket and cap the same color as the building’s forest-green canopy; pants black with a side stripe the same shade of green.

“Good evening, Benny.” Emily stepped out as Jack paid the hack. He’d paid for dinner, too. They were Miss Stendall’s expenses, and she’d be charged for them eventually.

The cliff-dwellers never liked to be “nickel and dimed” as they saw it. One big bill was more their style—so they could write Jack one big check. Jack was willing to shell within reason, especially when it came to female clients. Having a dame pay his way wasn’t up his alley anyway. Made him feel like a snot-nosed kid being treated to an ice cream by his mommy.

They crossed the lobby—marble floor, oak wainscoting, forest-green walls with paintings of landscapes hanging from picture rails. A high oak counter for the doorman’s station, across from it armchairs upholstered in gentleman’s club burgundy leather and a matching sofa.

Miss Stendall breezed in with head high, striding. Her white-gloved hand reached out to call the elevator, but Jack’s fingers closed on hers before she could push the button.

For a moment, they stood there alone, holding hands. She looked up at him with surprise.

“Let me handle him,” Jack advised, his voice steel.

“But—”

“Keep your lips zipped, doll,” he warned. “That’s what you hired me for. To handle him.”

Her mouth made a little-girl moue, but she nodded. Jack released her hand and jammed the elevator button himself. He could hear the ringing bell all the way up the shaft.

Emily sighed. “It’ll be a minute. When things are slow, Joey likes to listen to a radio he keeps on the third floor. He comes when he hears the bell.”

“I see. And his boss allows it?” Jack asked gesturing to the doorman.

“Benny’s not his boss. The building superintendent is. He lives in the basement, and I’ve never seen him emerge from his rooms unless there’s a problem with the plumbing. One can only hope he’d emerge for a fire, should one occur.”

“Yeah,” Jack said. “One can only hope.”

When the elevator finally arrived, Jack stepped to the side. Emily didn’t seem to notice, but Joey would be forced to think that she was all alone. And Jack was curious to see Joey’s initial reaction. This was a killer after all—a man who’d drugged and drowned his ex-lover and seemed intent on threatening Jack’s client.

Keeping his body loose, Jack got ready for almost anything—from throwing punches to pulling his rod clear. With a rumbling jolt, the elevator car halted. The door noisily retracted and a white-gloved hand pulled back the gate. The glove wasn’t lost on Jack—part of the uniform. No suspicion on the part of the victim. And no fingerprints.

“Emily . . .” said a deep voice, slightly urgent. “We have to talk.”

Emily blinked and looked beside her, suddenly realizing Jack had stepped out of Joey’s line of sight. Instantly, she searched him out, a look of panic on her face.

“Tenth floor, Joey,” said Jack, stepping forward. That’s when he got a good look at the young man’s face—and raised an eyebrow in surprise. Because this face was one he recognized and didn’t like. “Or should I call you ‘Lucky Joe’?”

Lubrano’s face went pale. It was a face just as handsome as it had been ten years before. Dimpled chin, Roman nose, deep brown eyes, and jet-black hair slickly combed. He’d been a strong kid at seventeen, boxed with precision in the ring—with brutality in back alleys for dirty coin, a casino bouncer with a mean streak—and now his physique looked even bigger, its muscles packed into a short green jacket and striped black pants identical to Benny the doorman’s.

“What’s the matter, kid?” asked Jack. “Looks like you saw a ghost.”

“Who are you?” Lubrano’s hands clenched into fists. “I don’t know you, do I?”

“Steady, kid,” said Jack. “I’m a friend of Emily’s, that’s all you need to know. A good friend. And I’ll be taking care that she’s in good health from now on and no harm comes to her. Get me?”

Jack watched Lubrano carefully. The kid’s brown eyes narrowed with fury on Emily. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something. And she did.

“Tenth floor.”

“You heard the lady. Let’s go,” said Jack.

Jack could see the moment’s confusion in Lubrano’s face, the consideration of what to do. Jack pushed the point; stepping forward, he put his large, strong form between the young ex-boxer and Emily.

When they were fully inside the elevator car, the inside aviator’s routine took over. Lubrano’s white-goved hand slid the heavy cage shut, pressed the tenth-floor button, then pushed the lever on the machine. The motor coughed to life and the car slowly ascended.

The tense silence held for three floors and then Lubrano turned, studied Jack’s face—

“How do you know me?”

“I know you. That’s all,” said Jack.

Joey Lubrano’s dark eyes narrowed. The boxer’s muscles were clenching, the fists forming balls.

“Steady,” said Jack. “I’m a private eye. I got a license to carry.”

Joey glared at Emily again with pure fury, then he spun away, giving them his broad back until the tenth floor. When the cage opened, Jack put his body between Lubrano and Emily again, seeing that she got off without a hitch. But as they stepped down the hallway toward Emily’s apartment door, Joey lunged out of the car.

“Wait just a second!” he said, reaching for Emily’s arm.

She yelped as Joey grabbed her, and Jack reacted, swinging a hard right hook to the handsome kid’s face. He went down holding his bloodied nose, and Jack hustled Emily forward—because he knew the kid wouldn’t stay down long.

“Let’s go—into your apartment now.”

Her hands shaking, Emily fumbled for a key and opened the door.

“Pack,” said Jack quietly, when she’d closed and bolted it behind them. “Take only what you need. I’m taking you out of here tonight.”