Louise's Blunder (2 page)

Royal and Sergeant Tyson rolled the corpse face down and Royal folded back the victim’s shirt collar. ‘No laundry label,’ he said. He grabbed the victim’s belt and pulled his trousers down, and underwear with them. The crowd murmured disapprovingly. Royal ignored them. ‘No laundry marks on his trousers, or boxers either. That’s unusual these days. Someone at home does his laundry for him.’ He jerked up the trousers, leaving them askew, then rolled the corpse on to its back again. He inspected the victim’s hands and fingers. ‘No defensive wounds. No calluses or scars. Should be able to get good prints once he dries out,’ he said. ‘He’s dressed like a desk jockey and has soft hands, so he must push paper for a living. If he works for the government the FBI will have his fingerprints on file.’ When he was finished examining the corpse Royal had to grab Tyson’s arm to stand up. ‘Left knee’s messed up,’ he said. ‘Second Battle of the Marne. Never thought I’d see another war in my lifetime.’

Another black Chevy coupe with the District Metropolitan Police seal on its door pulled up and a policeman carrying a big Graflex camera got out.

‘Get the victim full face and then all the other usual angles,’ Royal said to him. ‘And don’t miss the lump behind his right ear.’

The photographer straddled the corpse and photographed the victim’s face. He popped out a spent flashbulb, inserted a new one and took a second close-up. Then he rolled the corpse on its side to get a good shot of the victim’s injury. He repositioned it, then proceeded to walk around the corpse, taking a few more shots from several different angles, then a few more of the shoreline of the Tidal Basin where the soldiers dragged the body up from the water. When he was done he picked up all his spent flashbulbs and tossed them in a nearby trashcan.

‘OK,’ Royal said, gesturing to the mortuary van drivers. ‘Get this guy to the morgue pronto. Tell the doc to crack this guy’s chest before he works on any natural deaths. We’ll send over a fingerprint man tomorrow. And you,’ he said to Tyson, ‘get the soldier who discovered the body down to the precinct to give his statement right away.’

By now Tyson was about as star struck as an Army sergeant could be. He was a big fan of Erle Stanley Gardner and James M. Cain but he’d never met a real detective before.

‘You think maybe he was murdered?’ Tyson asked.

Royal shrugged. ‘Don’t know yet,’ he said, ‘but I intend to find out.’

Almost every seat at the long wooden tables in the OSS Reading Room was occupied. Files filled worktables, file carts and the return table. Some were stacked on the floor and a few empty chairs. Reference books, coffee cups, ashtrays and green-shaded reading lamps added to the disorder of the room. Tobacco smoke from dozens of cigarettes drifted upward and collected around the industrial lights dangling from the tall ceiling on long cords. A map of the world hung on one wall in a small area free of file cabinets. A frightening percentage of the world was outlined in black, indicating countries controlled by Germany and Japan.

The Reading Room operated much like a regular library. OSS staff and authorized visitors combed through the index card files and selected the files they wanted to read. They filled out slips of paper requesting those files. File girls took the slips and retrieved the files, listing the files and their readers in a bank-sized ledger. If the reader decided he or she wanted to remove files from the Reading Room and take them to their offices the file girls noted that in the ledger too. Later the ledgers themselves were filed away in case a document couldn’t be found and needed to be traced. This happened fairly often, sending us on quests all over OSS. I once found a file of conversations between Archbishop Spellman and Pope Pius XII on the back of a toilet in a men’s room in the Europe/Africa division offices.

Girls in khaki work dresses or trousers swarmed the Registry and the Reading Room. Wearing cotton gloves to protect their hands and comfortable shoes they scurried about, picking up request slips, delivering files, then retrieving files from the return table to file them yet again. More girls pushing file carts roamed the OSS halls and offices to locate files that had been removed from the Reading Room that no one had bothered to return, or to find missing documents that someone was screaming for.

I recognized several OSS staff at one of the reading tables. I nodded at Spencer Benton from the Far Eastern Section but he didn’t notice me. His wife worked at OSS too, as a typist. And I recognized the only woman at the tables but couldn’t place her. Most of the OSS men wore uniforms since OSS had been militarized, but there were a few regular Army and Navy officers, as I could tell from their visitor badges and chest hardware. The few men in civilian clothes wearing visitor badges could be from the Department of State or even the White House.

A bored Army private stood watch over the door to the ‘L’ files reading room, where the documents from the Special Intelligence Section were kept. Those files couldn’t be removed from the room. A person had to have special clearance to use them.

I found the stacks of ledgers and went through them until I found the one beginning with April 1, 1943. I hefted it into my arms and looked for an empty space at a table.

I squeezed into a chair between two men, one an Army colonel and the other a small elderly man with thick glasses in civilian clothes. Opening the ledger I skimmed it for Paul Hughes’ name and signature.

The Army colonel shot me a suspicious glance.

‘Compiling some statistics for Mr Lewis,’ I said, responding to his unanswered question. The colonel shrugged and went back to his work, but I noticed he hid his own notes from me with his forearm.

I found Hughes’ signature. The ‘P’ in Paul was florid, embellished with a wide loop, so I could easily identify it as I read down the narrow columns.

I skimmed the leaves of the ledger first, noting Hughes’ signature regularly, then settled down to my task listing the files that he’d requested. My enthusiasm dimmed swiftly. Whatever the Security Office suspected Hughes of doing, the files he read seemed boring and innocuous to me. If he was a manpower expert, as Wicker had said, most of the files he read made perfect sense. They contained intelligence on German civilian labor, military losses gleaned from the obituary pages of German newspapers smuggled to Switzerland, estimates of Polish slave labor in Germany and OSS interviews with German exiles in Mexico.

But then I noted some inconsistencies. Why would Hughes be interested in the transportation network of the Soviet Union? Or estimates of the production of the Russian metallurgy industries? Or the location of the Red Army in the Mideast? This must be what Wicker wanted to know.

I needed a break. My eyes and throat stung from cigarette smoke and dust and I needed to use the ladies’ room. To protect my notes from prying eyes I took my notepad with me, stuffing it into my pocketbook, and closed the ledger, leaving behind in my seat a red ‘reserved’ card that meant I was coming back soon.

In the bathroom I cleaned my dust-coated glasses. Rooting around in my pocketbook I found some lozenges for my throat.

I wasn’t alone long. The woman who had looked familiar to me entered the restroom but she didn’t head for the toilets.

‘I’m desperate to wash my hands,’ she said. ‘I swear the files I’ve got are covered with the sludge of centuries. Who knows where all the people who handle them have been?’

After washing up she stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Rose Dudley,’ she said, ‘Spanish desk. I think we’ve met before.’

‘I’m Louise Pearlie,’ I said. ‘I think we’ve met, too.’

‘Probably at some office party,’ she said. ‘Where do you work?’

‘I’m a file clerk in the Registry. Compiling statistics on file usage for my boss today.’

Rose opened her pocketbook and pulled out a packet of Luckies and a short ebony cigarette holder. She teased a cigarette out of the pack, squeezed it into the holder and held out the packet to me.

‘No thanks,’ I said.

‘You must be the only person in this town who doesn’t smoke,’ Rose said, flicking her lighter into flame.

‘I’ve tried,’ I said. ‘But it makes my throat sore.’

‘Oh,’ she said, immediately crushing her cigarette out in the bathroom sink.

‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said. ‘Really, I don’t mind.’

‘The last thing I need is another cigarette anyway,’ she said, returning the packet and lighter to her purse. ‘My voice is starting to sound like Jimmy Durante’s.’

‘If you’re on the Spanish desk you must speak Spanish very well,’ I said.

‘Fluently.’

‘Where did you go to college?’ I asked.

She smiled at me widely. ‘The Spanish Civil War,’ she said.

‘No kidding!’ I was impressed.

‘I was a stringer for a bunch of small Midwestern newspapers behind the lines,’ she said. ‘I only left my hotel in Madrid to go across the street to a restaurant for meals. Picked up everything I needed from Spanish radio and the men correspondents in the hotel bar. I wasn’t getting paid enough to get shot at. And no, I’ve never met Ernest Hemingway! And you? What’s your story?’

‘I went to junior college and got married. When my husband died I worked for my parents. They own a fish camp on the coast of North Carolina. I sure prefer my job here to slinging fried bluefish and hush puppies.’

‘If you’re the Louise Pearlie I’ve heard about, you’re quite the file clerk. Aren’t you the girl who—?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, interrupting her. ‘You shouldn’t listen to gossip.’

We both giggled.

‘I’m surprised you haven’t been recruited into one of the operations divisions,’ she said. ‘If you were a man you would have been.’

She was right about that, but I didn’t know her well enough to talk to her freely.

‘I need to get back to work,’ I said.

‘Want to have lunch first?’ she said.

‘I’m going to work through lunch,’ I said. ‘I need to get this done by the end of the day.’ I wanted to impress Wicker with my ability and I had a candy bar in my pocketbook to sustain me.

‘Some other time then,’ she said. ‘I practically live in the Reading Room.’

‘Sure.’

During the lunch hour the Reading Room was less crowded. The suspicious colonel had vacated the seat next to me so I had more elbow room. I munched on a Hershey’s chocolate bar while I took more notes. Throughout the month Hughes’ reading activity continued to focus on German labor and manpower. But interspersed amongst the files describing fourteen-year-old boys working in German factories and the lowering of the German military draft age were some totally unrelated subjects. Like the organization and policies of the British intelligence services. And material compiled by our Foreign Nationalities Branch on racial groups in the United States. What did that have to do with German manpower?

I found myself making excuses for Hughes. The files were open to any staff from OSS. Who knew why he was straying from his own field? His boss might have asked him to look something up for him. His reading of these files was meaningless without some other suspicious information about him. Which, I assumed, OSS Security must have.

It was a waste of time for me to be curious. I would probably never know why I’d been asked to do this job.

When I finally finished and looked up from my task my eyes were so tired I couldn’t focus on the wall clock. I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes and slipped my specs back on. It was five thirty. I’d finished the job in a day.

After folding my notes into a letter-sized brown envelope I carried it over to OSS headquarters and up to Mr Lewis’s office. His door was closed and I asked his secretary to let him know I was here, that I had information for him.

She reached for the envelope. ‘I’ll give it to him,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m supposed to hand it to him personally.’

‘That’s absurd.’

‘Those are my instructions.’

‘I can’t interrupt Mr Lewis,’ she said. ‘I assure you I’ll see that he has your letter the next time he calls me into his office.’

‘I’m not giving this document to you and I’m not leaving,’ I said. Then I added, ‘It’s Top Secret.’

She looked me over. I was a lowly file clerk wearing a military-blue tailored dress that sold by the hundreds at J.C. Penney. She was secretary to a division head and I suspected her suit was a Fred Block. It had his signature leather cuffs.

‘You can’t have that kind of clearance!’ she said.

‘But I do.’

She gave in but she wasn’t happy about it. When she lifted up the phone and spoke to Lewis on the intercom her voice sounded a tone higher. She slammed the receiver down.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘you can go in.’

Lewis looked up from his desk.

‘Finished?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I …’

‘Don’t say anything,’ he said, checking to make sure that I had signed the envelope across the back flap. ‘I’ll take care of it. You may go.’

I didn’t move and he looked at me impatiently.

‘I’m supposed to watch you lock it in your safe,’ I said.

‘Oh, right, of course.’

I officially observed Lewis as he placed the document in his safe and twirled the knob. Then I left. I suspected that would be the last I ever saw of Mr Wilmarth Lewis. I wondered if I’d hear from Major Wicker and OSS Security again. I was curious about Hughes. I wanted to know what OSS suspected he had done.

After the record-breaking cold of the winter of 1943, walking home in springtime was a treat. Most District residents had converted their gardens into vegetable plots but there were still nooks filled with daffodils and lilies. An occasional rosebush climbed over a picket fence and blooming redbud trees filled the pink gap emptied by the end of cherry blossom season. Being outdoors was a respite from the hours I spent bent over a desk, and I loved the exercise.

My boarding house was on ‘I’ Street, south of the fashionable addresses that began on ‘K’, and continued north to Dupont Circle. My landlady, Phoebe Holcombe, had been wealthy before the Depression. After the death of her husband she somehow still had a little money. She’d opened the doors of her home to boarders for patriotic reasons and to take her mind off her two sons who served in the Pacific. I’d been lucky to find a room here. ‘Two Trees’ was much less crowded than most boarding houses in Washington. I even had my own room and shared a bathroom with just two other women, Phoebe and another boarder, Ada Herman. Ada hailed from New York City. Formerly a music teacher, now she played clarinet in the Willard Hotel and made pots of money doing it.