Maxie Mainwaring, Lesbian Dilettante Page 21

  The telephone rang, allowing her to escape before Kathy had a chance to ask any awkward questions. She exited the lounge and picked up the receiver.

  “Maxie, my dear, it’s Velma, do you have a moment?” The smooth voice of the high-powered businesswoman flowed over the wire like well-beaten cake batter. “A little bird told me you were free again, and I just had to call and make my pitch.”

  For an astonished instant Maxie thought Velma had heard about her fight with Pamela, but her mother’s protégé was continuing: “The job I told you about at Amalgamated Enterprises is still open. It would be a marvelous opportunity, and I assure you, I’ll appreciate you more than Hal Hapgood has!” Her laugh told Maxie she’d somehow gotten the inside scoop on the ex-deb’s abrupt departure from the pages of Polish.

  “Well—” Maxie couldn’t even pretend to be tempted by the dull business of dry cleaning. “The answer’s still no. I’ve got some other wieners on the grill, as the saying goes.”

  “Really? Jobs like this don’t grow on trees.” Velma’s voice sharpened slightly. Maxie could have sworn the magnate was miffed. “We’ve dozens of applicants. It was only my personal friendship for your family that made me call.”

  “I appreciate the thought, but the answer is no,” Maxie repeated patiently. “You’ll have to give one of those other applicants a break.” What game was Velma playing, giving Maxie the hard sell on this job after her very definite rejection of Maxie’s other talents at Loon Lake?

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Velma’s voice was smooth and sweet again. “I wish you best of luck with your new endeavors.” She hung up.

  Maxie headed upstairs to get started on the Lathrop tell-all. She was working too hard to even think about a job!

  Chapter 29

  The Mysterious Phone Call

  Maxie was in her favorite place—in her bed at the Arms, propped up on pillows with a cup of coffee and a cinnamon roll on a tray next to her.

  Despite her leisurely appearance, the unemployed girl was hard at work. Blue pencil in one hand, she was studying Stella’s manuscript. When she’d told Stella yesterday about Mamie’s advice to inject a little suffering into the lives of the Homophile Handbooks girls, the budding author had looked stricken.

  “You want me to kill one of them?” she gulped, her fingers frozen on the blouse she was rebuttoning.

  “Or maybe just maim?” suggested Maxie. “Perhaps you could commit someone to a sanatorium.”

  Stella had declared she could never decide which of her fictional characters to destroy and had begged Maxie to make the hard choice.

  Now the former editorial assistant frowned thoughtfully as she turned the pages of If Love Is the Answer. Who could go—and how? What if Stella rewrote it so Jane was run over by a bus in chapter 32? But then what would motivate Minnie to make out with the new volunteer?

  Maxie circled Patricia’s name and wrote drugs? in the margin. There was a tap on the door. “Come in,” called Maxie.

  It was Dolly, still in her pajamas. “Breaking up agrees with you,” she observed as she collapsed into one of Maxie’s slipper chairs. “Who’d you bribe to bring you breakfast?”

  “No one!” Maxie bragged. “I bought the bun last night at the bakery before it closed—you get half off then. And I picked up this cunning little coffee percolator at the secondhand shop!” She was pleased to demonstrate her independence to Dolly.

  “It’s too bad you can’t share a little of this joie de vivre in Splitsville with Lois. She could use it!” Dolly remarked.

  Maxie had already heard how hard Lois was taking Netta’s defection. The efficient office manager was devastated by the abrupt end to her romance. The call to Netta had finally gone through, but there’d been no misunderstanding. “She was up almost all night afterward,” Phyllis reported, “wondering what she’d done wrong.”

  Now Dolly told Maxie, “Pamela collected her from work the other night and made her take a sleeping pill to get some rest.”

  “I wish there was something I could do for her.” Maxie’s heart went out to the suffering girl. At least I can warn her not to go into the office short on sleep, she decided.

  “Time heals everything, or so they say,” Dolly sighed. “What with Lois spending her time at Pamela’s home for heartbroken girls, Netta gone, maybe for good, and you off frolicking who knows where, the fifth floor feels like a ghost town,” she complained. “After Phyllis goes to work, it’s just me and that kooky Kitty. Remember the good times we used to have, when the whole gang was here? Nowadays I can’t even rustle up a game of Ping-Pong.” She looked at Maxie hopefully. “How about it?”

  Maxie shook her head. “I have to finish these edits.” She didn’t add that she was avoiding Kitty/Kathy, who would almost certainly be in the lounge. The brooding way she gazed at Maxie made the ex-deb uneasy. “I miss the old days too,” she told Dolly. “But on the other hand, I can see why the girls move out. Running down five flights of stairs because there’s only one phone! It’s outrageous!”

  “Mrs. DeWitt’s old-fashioned.” Dolly defended their landlady loyally. “She just doesn’t realize Bell Telephone has superseded Western Union!”

  A voice floated up the stairwell. “Maxie! Telephone!”

  “See what I mean?” Maxie swung out of bed, thrusting her feet into her slippers and pulling on her dressing gown in one coordinated movement. She ran lightly down the stairs, feeling cheerful and energetic in spite of her complaints.

  Picking up the receiver, she caroled, “Hello!”

  “Maxie Mainwaring?” A man’s voice, raspy and uneducated. “Mainwaring” came out “Mainwarin’.”

  “Yes?”

  “You Mabel Mainwaring’s daughter?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Never mind who.” The man gave a sinister laugh. “I’ve got something you want. Only I need some, like, reward money.”

  “I haven’t lost anything,” Maxie said, growing more and more puzzled.

  “Aren’t you maybe missing a paddle?” suggested the man.

  “Please speak plainly.” Maxie was growing impatient. “Are you trying to say I’m up a creek without a paddle? Is this some sort of prank?” Kids, she concluded in disgust. That fake raspy laugh should have tipped her off.

  But before she could hang up, the raspy voice became anxious. “No, no, that ain’t my meaning at all. I got a real paddle—bloodstains on one end and fingerprints on the other. Your ma’s fingerprints!”

  Maxie froze. Even though she’d pictured her mother murdering the crooked cop, it was a shock to find her theory was correct.

  “How much do you want for this used paddle?” she asked tersely.

  “Five thousand.”

  “Five thousand! I can’t raise that kind of money, and I’m not even sure I want to.”

  “How about twennyfi’hundred?” the voice offered.

  “One thousand, and that’s my limit,” countered Maxie.

  “Pier thirteen, ten o’clock tonight. Bring the dough in small bills, and come alone.” There was a click and the line went dead.

  Maxie replaced the receiver, and sat a moment, thinking. What to make of this startling phone call? Doubts set in. Had she been too quick to believe her mother was a murderer? Was this a shakedown or a setup? Why was this fellow contacting her and not her mother, if he had the incriminating oar? And that raspy voice—why had it sounded so familiar?

  She snapped her fingers. The dairy thug at Eleanor Roosevelt! Of course! How on earth did he connect with the crooked cop? Or her mother, for that matter?

  These were murky waters indeed. And there was only one way to find out more. Show up tonight at Pier 13.

  Mrs. DeWitt drifted through the hall, reciting one of her favorite poems:

  “Alone stood brave Horatius

  But constant still in mind,

  Thrice thirty thousand foes before

  And the broad flood behind.”

  Horatius managed to hold off a whole army
of Etruscans, Maxie thought, as she slowly climbed back upstairs. Surely she could face down a few Bay City miscreants!

  Chapter 30

  Accident!

  It felt odd to be getting ready for a date with a blackmailer—or maybe a killer—amid the gay hustle and bustle of the fifth floor. The gang was going out to dinner—Dolly had organized it as a kind of cheer-up-Lois excursion. “So she’ll know she still has plenty of pals, even if she’s lost that special someone,” Dolly explained.

  Maxie had found out about it when she returned from an afternoon of hectic preparation for her mysterious meeting. She’d gotten a good price for her pearls and garnet set, at the jeweller recommended by Dolly. “All the chorus girls sell to him,” Dolly had explained to Maxie. “They turn the presents they get from stage-door johnnies into cash. Only poor people go to pawnbrokers!”

  After Maxie had raised the blackmail money, she’d done some shopping. Finally she’d visited Pier 13 to get the lay of the land. The pier was piled with crates bearing the Sunshine Dairy label.

  Preoccupied with crime, she’d returned to find party preparations. Everyone was coming, even Kitty/Kathy. “I invited Pamela,” Dolly told Maxie a little anxiously. “Be polite, okay?” Maxie promised. Lois, with her pallid face and red-rimmed eyes, was such a pathetic sight that the tenderhearted heiress vowed once again she’d find some way to help the hapless secretary heal her broken heart.

  Pamela must have been warned as well. “I’m here for Lois, of course,” she told Maxie stiffly when they met at Luigi’s.

  Maxie wanted to say, “Why do you think I’m here, the food?” But she answered “Of course!” Then she wished she’d said something equally patronizing, like how she believed in being civilized and that she bore Pamela no ill will even though Pamela . . . No, it was better she’d kept it brief.

  Kathy had been watching Maxie like a cat. When she observed Maxie tuck her newly purchased canvas bag behind her chair, she muttered acidly, “Expecting to ‘run into’ your mobster friend?”

  “I’m starting to think I’m a ‘person of interest’—at least to you,” Maxie murmured mischievously.

  Kathy flushed on cue. “To the whole agency!” she snapped. Then stopped as if she’d said too much.

  Maxie twirled her fork thoughtfully in her fettucine. She wished she knew as much as the Bureau seemed to think she did. This business was as tangled as her pasta. Lon, Sunshine Dairy, Mumsy, the pawnshop, and the corpse of the crooked cop—she still didn’t understand how they connected.

  “Summer is the slow season at Sather and Stirling,” Lois said in answer to an inquiry about the office. “I’m sure I’ll be back in shape, come fall.” She attempted to smile, but the result was more of a grimace.

  Maxie leaned forward impulsively. “Lois, you should take that vacation—after all, you already had it scheduled. And you need it now more than ever.”

  “But where would I go?” Lois’s eyes filled with tears. “I have nothing p-p-planned.”

  Janet refilled the sobbing girl’s wineglass and pushed it toward her. “You could go anywhere. Use the money you were saving for the deposit.”

  At the reminder of her broken dreams, Lois’s eyes overflowed again.

  “Go to Loon Lake.” Maxie came to the rescue. “It’s empty now. Take a friend, or two! It’ll make a new woman out of you.”

  The gang chimed in, urging Lois to take advantage of Maxie’s offer.

  “I didn’t realize you were on such good terms with your mother,” Kitty/Kathy said suspiciously.

  Maxie got up. “Oh, Mumsy and I have reached an understanding,” she said, stretching the truth only slightly. She’d lifted the spare key to the Lodge during her last visit.

  “Are you leaving already?” Janet asked. “I wanted to talk to you, about that trust.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” Maxie told her. She put her hands on the G-woman’s shoulders and felt her start. “Kitty, tell Lois about the psychological stages of grief. Weren’t you saying earlier there are four?”

  That should keep the government girl pinned down long enough for Maxie to escape. She threw some bills on the table as Lois turned expectant, if watery, eyes on Kitty/Kathy. Outside the restaurant she hailed a cab. “The Knock Knock Lounge, on Pingst,” she told the driver. A glance behind showed an empty street.

  She’d reverted to her old habits—throwing money on the table and catching cabs. Except now, of course, she noted everything in her budget book. She hesitated in the “for” column as she noted the cab fare, and finally wrote Independent Enterprises again.

  Inside the Knock Knock she went straight to the bathroom and changed into the clothes she’d carried in the canvas bag—jeans and a dark sweater. When she emerged, she stopped at the bar and ordered a whiskey. A little liquid courage, she told herself, tossing it back in one long gulp. “Seen Lon tonight?” she asked the bartender, coughing a little.

  Della shook her curly gray head. “She’ll probably be in later,” she volunteered.

  Maxie unzipped the canvas bag and pulled out a pair of flippers, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. “Give her these when she comes in, will you?” If Maxie didn’t return from Pier 13 she wanted the beautiful butch to have something to remember her by. Fleetingly, she thought of Stella, and regretted not getting a memento for her too. And really, why not Pamela as well? And Elaine, and Velma, and all her friends on the fifth floor.

  I’m getting morbid, she chided herself as she slid off the stool and exited the bar. It was time for positive thinking. She would go to Pier 13, turn the tables on that dairy thug, find out what her mother was up to, and who the new mob boss was to boot! Under her breath she recited the line from Mrs. DeWitt’s favorite poem: “ ‘Alone stood brave Horatius. . . .’ ”

  She turned off Pingst Street, leaving the raucous, neon-lit district behind. The docks weren’t far. Already she could smell the faintly fishy scent of the lake, and see the sleeping cranes, visible above the tops of buildings.

  The gates in the chain-link fence were closed and locked at night, but someone had thoughtfully left the one to Pier 13 ajar. Maxie shivered in spite of her sweater, as she walked quickly toward the pier. The light posts were widely spaced, inadequate golden pools in this great black swamp. The lone girl stumbled on the uneven pavement and almost fell. She peered all around, searching the darkness and seeing nothing.

  She had that queer, prickling feeling on the back of her neck as she walked along the pier, which told her she wasn’t alone. Hearing a rustling sound, she whirled around in time to see an enormous rat scuttle under the warehouse to her right. Ugh!

  Maxie slid on the brass knuckles she’d purchased that afternoon and looked at her watch. It was two minutes after ten, and no sign of the raspy-voiced thug with the paddle. In the stillness she could hear the splash of water on the pilings below.

  She’d just circle around to the other side of Pier 13’s warehouse, a low building almost at the end of the pier. As she passed the side of the building facing the water, she saw the big crane that was used to load the lake boats.

  There was no lake boat anchored at Pier 13, but the crane suddenly came to life with a grinding, mechanical noise. Something made Maxie look behind her. An enormous steel beam was swinging through the air, coming straight at her!

  Instinctively Maxie dropped to the ground and covered her head with her hands. Thank heavens for all those duck-and-cover drills! she thought. She felt a whoosh of air on her hands and neck, so closely did the I beam pass over.

  Already the gears were grinding into reverse. Maxie staggered to her feet. The steel beam was swinging next to the warehouse, cutting off her escape route. Now it began to move toward her again, gaining speed in its deadly assault.

  Maxie ran toward the end of the pier, thinking wildly of Horatius plunging into the Tiber. She felt the beam behind her, coming closer. Then she dropped over the side of the pier, and the beam swung out into the empty air over the water.

/>   There was no splash. Maxie crouched on the worn wooden ladder, peering up at the beam that spun slowly overhead. She was glad she’d taken the time to inspect the pier that afternoon!

  Now she would wait, until her would-be killer got down from the cab of the crane and came over to the edge of the pier to see what had become of his prey.

  He’ll get a big surprise! Maxie thought grimly, fingering her brass knuckles.

  The steel beam was swinging back. She could hear the mechanical whir as it disappeared from view. Then she heard something else—running footsteps—at least two sets. Cautiously poking her head up, Maxie saw the wavering beam of a flashlight, and two figures running along the warehouse. They were almost at the end of the pier. The beam began to move again.

  “Behind you!” Maxie shouted. One of the figures flattened, the other was a fraction too slow. The beam caught him chest high, and flung him off the end of the pier, like a sack of powdered milk.

  “Joe!” the figure on the ground screamed.

  That’s Kathy’s voice! Maxie dove into the water and swam toward the sinking body. She heard muffled shots and hoped none of them were aimed at her. She reached the half-submerged figure, and was pleased she could remember the drowning swimmer hold the other Recreational Aide had taught her in May. Maxie towed the unconscious agent to the ladder, hoping she wasn’t carrying a corpse.

  “Kitty! Kathy! Help!” she gasped, clinging to the ladder with one arm, while the other encircled the G-man.

  Kathy’s face loomed overhead. “Have you got Joe?”

  “Yes, but I can’t lift him,” Maxie managed. “The crane operator?”

  “Got away. Wait.”

  A moment later, Kathy returned with a rope she’d fashioned into a kind of lasso. Bumping and scraping the waterlogged G-man, the two girls managed to haul him onto the pier.

  While Kathy anxiously examined her limp partner, Maxie was overcome with a sense of deep disappointment. The evening had been a crushing failure—no new information, just an injured agent. Why couldn’t the FBI stay out of her affairs?