Come Hell or Highball (32 page)

“I have always, Mrs. Woodby, considered myself a lady. However, these are desperate circumstances. I must step into the character of the trollop.”

“Trollop?
You?
”

Berta tore off her hat, unpinned her bun, and shook her silver waves free. “Have you any lipstick? Jimmy did so like the pink shade I wore last night.”

Berta dolled herself up with the lipstick, cake mascara, and jeweled hairpin we found in my handbag. I checked the Brownie's film-winder and shutter to make certain they were in working order. I nestled the camera in my handbag, shoved the Model T's key down my brassiere for extra security, and we left the motorcar.

We crept on foot along the shadows of two abandoned buildings, to the side of the warehouse where we'd seen Jimmy standing guard.

We peeked around the corner.

Jimmy sat at the top of the warehouse ramp, legs dangling over the side in minuscule shoes. He wore a three-piece suit and a fedora, and an outsized tommy gun lay across his knees. He stared into space.

“I shall distract him,” Berta whispered, “and you sneak inside and get the photographs. Do not dilly-dally. I am not willing to advance to the next base with Jimmy. Not today, at any rate.”

Oh boy.

Jimmy almost fell off the ramp when he saw her. “Berta?” he said in his gravelly voice. “Tomato! Whatcha doing here? Say, don't
you
look swell.”

Berta said something in low tones and fondled his lapel.

Jimmy's face suggested a man riding the conveyor belt to Paradise. He set his tommy gun aside and wrapped his pipe cleaner arms around Berta.

It was now or never.

I tiptoed around the corner and up the ramp, hugging my handbag to my chest. I was halfway up when Jimmy, who was nuzzling Berta's neck, lifted his head.

If Jimmy turned his head even a single inch, he'd see me.

Berta's eyes bugged. She wrapped her fingers around the back of Jimmy's head and thrust his face into her bosom.

I ran the rest of the way up the ramp and tried the door. It opened. I found myself in a lofty, dim space with a concrete floor. Light from a high window showed me that the room was empty.

But—I squinted—there was
another
room, through a doorway on the other side.

The next room was filled with stacks and stacks of wooden crates, piled in a half dozen haphazard, six-foot-high rows. Some kind of factory machinery ran along one wall. Double cargo doors filled another wall, and I saw the sunlit, flowing river through the crack. The building must've been some kind of storage hold, or transfer point, for the crates.

I moved closer to the crates. Black lettering said
AUNTIE ARBUCKLE'S PORK AND BEANS.

I flicked open the Brownie's lens and twisted the film-winder. I aimed the lens at a crate, squinted through the viewfinder, and snapped three pictures.

I set the Brownie on the floor and tried to heft a crate down. It was heavy. It rattled and clinked. It didn't sound like metal cans of pork and beans. It sounded like … glass.

I yanked at the crate.

The crate tipped, and wobbled, and the entire stack of crates crashed to the floor. One of the crates split open, and glass bottles splintered. Liquid sprayed up into my face.

I licked a drop at the corner of my mouth. Good Canadian whiskey.

A rather unforgivable hankering for a highball washed over me.

I grabbed the Brownie—luckily, it seemed to be unscathed—and aimed the lens at one of the broken bottles.

That's when I heard the muffled shouts.

“Hey!” a man yelled in a castrato's soprano. “What the hell was that?”

“Dunno,” another man said in a slow bass.

Doors squealed as they were pushed open. I saw a spreading fan of light.

I seemed to have lost the use of my legs. They simply wouldn't move. Was this punishment for all the unkind thoughts I'd had about my ankles?

I peeked around the crates.

Two men had entered through the cargo doors. They were mere silhouettes: one medium-sized, the other shaped like Frankenstein's monster. And they each had a large pistol braced low against a hip. They advanced toward the fallen crates, toward me.

My legs still wouldn't budge.

The distance between us shrank.

My legs finally switched back on. I scuttled, crablike, to the side, away from the fallen crates. With one hand, I clutched the Brownie. I put my other hand to the floor to brace myself, and I squelched a cry; splinters of glass bit into my skin. I scampered around the corner of the row.

Not a second too soon.

“Wouldya look at that?” the bass voice said. “Them crates just fell down.”

There was a smacking sound.

“Ow!” Bass cried. “What you do that for?”

“Don't be a sap,” the castrato voice said. “Someone's in here.”

I heard a
click
. Then a deafening burst, a
zing,
and a
thunk
as a bullet lodged in a wall somewhere.

I stifled a whimper.

“Come on out,” the castrato voice crooned. “Or we're gonna come and get you.”

Then footsteps pattered farther off, and I heard Jimmy the Ant. “Hey! Tomato! Come back! You ain't supposed to go back there!”

“Mrs. Woodby?” Berta cried.

If I got out of this alive, Berta and I were going to need to have a little chat about blowing one's cover.

“Hey, Jimmy,” the castrato voice said. “Who's the dame?”

“My lady, that's who,” Jimmy said. “Put them guns outa her face. What's going on here? Look at this mess. Boss ain't gonna be pleased.”

“Mrs. Woodby?” Berta called again.

“Mrs. Woodby?” the castrato voice said. “Say. I know her. I know her
real
well.”

He did?

I peeked around the corner.

Mr. Highpants. I'd never heard him speak before; that castrato voice belonged to
him
. He stood with Frankenstein's Monster, Jimmy, and Berta. They stared down at the shattered bottles of bootleg.

I dodged into the next aisle. This aisle was stacked, not with wooden crates, but with large brown cardboard boxes.

I knew that goal numero uno was, now, to get out of this warehouse alive. But I had a sudden vision of Cedric's toy-bear face, and I realized that if I didn't get photographic proof of Arbuckle's bootleg scheme, I might never see Cedric again.

The three gangsters and Berta were engaged in a back-and-forth about Berta's identity. I might have a couple moments to snap more photographs. I lifted a cardboard box down from the stack and removed the lid.

I'd expected more whiskey bottles. What I saw were rubbery white mounds of … girdles.

I glanced up and down the row of cardboard boxes. Each one was printed with the image of a crown and the words
GIRDLE QUEEN
.

I dug into the box.

It turned out that the box
was
filled with whiskey bottles. Whiskey bottles wrapped in perforated white rubber girdles.

Eloise Wright had found a profitable use for her girdle seconds, after all. Profitable enough, it seemed, for her to divorce her husband and establish herself as financially independent.

I aimed the Brownie's lens and snapped away, trying to catch angles with enough stray light.

But the gangsters—and Berta—must've heard my camera shutter whapping and the film-winder clicking. Four sets of footsteps came closer.

I stuffed the Brownie down my bodice and ran to the end of the aisle of boxes, away from the footsteps. Just as I reached the end, Highpants yelled, “Hey!” A bullet whizzed by my ear. I sprinted past the factory equipment along the wall. I had the wild idea that I could outrun bullets, I guess.

But then, something snagged against my side, and I was flung to a stop. A piece of the factory machinery, some sharp protuberance, had sliced through my dress and snagged into my rubber girdle.

I yanked and thrashed, but the gummy material only stretched.

“There she is,” Frankenstein's Monster said behind me.

Another bullet whizzed by.

“Leave Mrs. Woodby alone!” Berta cried. Then she said
“Oof,”
and there were thundering sounds.

I corkscrewed around to see a pile of cardboard boxes shower down onto Highpants and Frankenstein's Monster.

Oddly, there were no sounds of shattering glass.

“Run!” Berta screamed to me.

I struggled and twisted. With a twang of the metal machinery and a long
ziiiiip
of ripping dress, I finally wrested my girdle free. I ran through the room with the crates, across the other big empty room, out the front door, and down the ramp.

I fled down the street and across the weedy lot. The Brownie joggled inside my bodice. I leapt behind the wheel of the Model T, dug the key from my brassiere, and fired up the engine. I skidded the motorcar along to the warehouse. Berta was bouncing down the ramp. I slowed down just enough for her to leap into the passenger seat. I slammed my foot on the gas before she'd even shut the door.

Yells and gunshots rang out behind us. Bullets dinged off the Model T's bumper. Another hit the rear window, and it shattered. Then I two-wheeled it around a corner, and we were safe.

 

35

“Eloise Wright,” Berta said a few moments later. She was still wheezing for breath.

“You saw the boxes?” I asked.

“Indeed I did.”

“Eloise telephoned us from Dune House earlier,” I said. “I'll bet she called to make sure we'd found her note, and to see if we'd realized that Cedric was missing.” I clenched the steering wheel. “I'm driving straight to Dune House. And then I'm going to throttle her.”

“Did you obtain photographs of the bootleg operation?” Berta asked.

“Yes. I hope they turn out. It was kind of dark in there.”

“The girdles must prevent the bottles from clattering. The bottles did not break when I pushed the boxes on top of those dreadful men,” Berta said. “The rubber acts as cushioning.”

“And there's no telltale noise when the boxes are transported. That's how Eloise Wright has been disposing of all her troublesome seconds. Letting Lem Fitzpatrick have them, and allowing him to use her labeled Girdle Queen boxes. They
are
in business together. Do you think Eloise could've really killed Arbuckle, though? And Vera Potter?”

“Mrs. Wright was a desperate lady. She longed for financial independence from her husband in order to divorce him. Desperate ladies are capable of far more than people might suppose.”

True. Berta and I were desperate ladies, and look at the soup
we'd
dipped ourselves into.

*   *   *

Around the thirty-mile mark down the highway toward Hare's Hollow, the Model T's engine started clanking.

“Rats,” I said. “We're out of gasoline.”

I pulled over at the next gas station. While the attendant was filling the tank, I saw a Cadillac Phaeton across the highway.

The Cadillac crouched on the grassy verge, long, black, and wicked. I saw the silhouette of Frankenstein shoulders behind the wheel. Mr. Highpants was riding shotgun.

Quite
literally
shotgun, in fact: the barrel of a tommy gun poked out the passenger window.

I rummaged in my purse for money to pay for the gasoline, and then remembered that I hadn't a cent. A sparkle at the bottom of the handbag caught my eye. One of the diamond stud earrings I'd worn to Mrs. Hartwicke's staffing agency. I dug it out.

“Keep the change,” I said, and dropped the earring into the slack-jawed attendant's hand. We roared out of the gas station.

Berta clung to the dashboard. “What on God's green earth has come over you, Mrs. Woodby?”

I glanced in the rearview mirror. The Cadillac eased onto the highway.

“They're back.”

“What?” Berta turned. “Insolent men.”

“What do they
want
? And do you think they'd really—” I swallowed. “—really use a machine gun? On us?”

“Of course.”

“But why?”

“Do not whine. It is most unbecoming. They want the camera. You photographed the bootleg operation they have been entrusted to guard. Mr. Fitzpatrick will have their hides.” Berta shook her head. “Jimmy told me never to trust a gangster.”

I swerved around a delivery hack. “I hate to break the news, Berta, but Jimmy's a gangster, too.”

“Only temporarily.”

“Oh, okay. He became a gangster to pay for—what? His mother's operation?”

“He wishes to buy back the family farm. In Missouri. They were swindled out of it.”

“He told you that because he knew it would impress you, and then he'd have a better chance of getting to second base.”

“Good heavens, what a terrible thing to say. Apologize at once.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. I glanced in the rearview mirror again. The Cadillac was stuck behind the delivery hack. I pressed still harder on the gas. In another minute, we would lose them.

But suddenly, the delivery hack turned off the highway. The Cadillac roared up on our tail. Bullets clanged against our fender.

Berta sighed. “I had
so
hoped I would not have to do this.” She unfastened her black handbag. She pulled out her Colt, rolled the window down, and leaned out. “Do try to stay within the lines, Mrs. Woodby,” she said. She spiraled her torso halfway out the window and squirted metal.

I guess I hadn't believed Berta would actually shoot. Not really. I white-knuckled the wheel and concentrated on staying on the road. The speedometer quivered as it crept past sixty, then on to seventy.…

Berta fired again. I heard squealing tires. “Gotcha,” she muttered.

“You shot a gangster?” I yelled.

“Indeed not. I shot his tire.”

We burst around a bend in the highway, out into a sweep of road with a meadow along one side. A low stone guardrail lined the other side of the road. Below the guardrail crashed a rocky surf, about two stories down.
Straight
down.