Welcome to the fourteenth Operation Quickline story. When new evidence is found in the murder of Sid’s mother, he and Lisa get dragged into the messiest case of their careers.
The case started with the room. Or, rather, Sid and I got sucked into the case because of what happened in the room in September 1952.
But Sid and I didn’t know that when Jay Fedders first left a message on our home answering machine a couple days before New Year’s. Since Fedders said he was an editor for a newsweekly, and since Sid and I work as freelance writers, we eventually returned the call.
Sid had already verified that Fedders worked on the magazine he said he did. It may seem a little paranoid. Our problem is that freelance writing is only the visible part of our lives (and I wasn’t doing that much of it at that time, anyway). The hidden part is that we are undercover operatives for a government agency so secret only its members and a few liaisons know it exists. Which is why we get cautious when someone calls us out of the blue. On the other hand, editors sometimes do, and neither Sid nor I like turning down writing work.
So when Fedders checked out and Sid called back and Fedders found out we were actually in New York at the time, we agreed to go to lunch. We met Fedders at a deli in Midtown Manhattan, on the ground floor of the building where he worked. He was a medium-sized man, probably in his early forties. His half-glasses sat on top of thinning blond hair, the chain hanging down his back.
“It’s good to meet you two,” Fedders said after we ordered. “My colleague at World of Real Estate has a lot of good things to say about you. Especially you, Sid.”
“Well, Mike’s a good guy to work for,” Sid said with a smile.
I smiled, too. Mike had darned well better be saying good things about Sid and me. He usually called because something had gone wrong and he needed a story yesterday. We had pulled his fat out of the fire so many times, we put on fireproof gloves when he called. [But he was still one of the nicer guys we wrote for. – SEH]
“And he’s a real pain in the backside,” Fedders said, laughing.
I darned near bit my tongue in half. We waited as the waitress brought me a huge pastrami sandwich on rye with potato salad on the side, a nice bit of chicken salad for Sid and a Reuben for Fedders.
“But I didn’t call you to bash Mike, as entertaining as that can be,” Fedders continued with a laugh. “There’s something else I want to talk to you about. I was figuring I could catch up with you, Sid, right after the Consumer Electronics Show later this month. I’ll be heading to Northern California to follow some stuff up and figured we could meet then. But this is even better. So what brings you to the big city?”
Sid smiled. “Holidays with the family.”
“You still got relatives here?”
“One, and not for long. It’s a long story.” Sid nibbled a bit of chicken salad. “So why are you looking to meet with us?”
Fedders chortled. “It’s not related to a writing job. Sorry about that, but there it is. However, I think this will be of interest to you. My wife, Petra, and I bought this brownstone not far from the financial district about three years ago. We’ve been restoring it. So a few months ago, we take apart this one room and find this ledger with half of it in code, and half of it with what looks like real names.” Fedders grinned. “Including one Sheila Hackbirn.”
“I see,” said Sid.
I could see Sid forcing himself to keep his face blank. It wasn’t terribly surprising. Sid’s last name is Hackbirn. He finally nodded politely, but clearly didn’t want to share more until he knew what Fedders wanted.
“Here’s what gets interesting,” Fedders continued, oblivious to Sid’s reaction. “We’ve found out that the place was a whorehouse for a lot of rich and powerful men, and that one of the girls, a Sheila Hackbirn, was found dead in her room there. Murdered, and it was never solved.”
“So I’ve heard.” Sid’s smile was stiff, polite, and just sad enough.
“You knew her?”
“Of her,” Sid replied.
He was acting indifferent, which was not a good sign. I totally got why he was being so cagey. We’re alive because we don’t take that kind of chance, and we didn’t know Fedders from Adam. But there was something else going on, too.
“Huh.” Fedders took a big bite of his sandwich, then spoke as he chewed. “The police reports that I looked up? They mention a sister of the victim. A Stella Caponetti. You know her?”
“My aunt.” Sid cleared his throat. “Sheila Hackbirn was my mother. I was only two when she died, so I never knew her.”
“No kidding!” Fedders all but bounced out of his seat. “That’s awesome. That settles it. You gotta come by. We think we figured out which room it happened in.”
“Uh…” Sid smiled stiffly again. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“But maybe we can figure out who killed her.”
Sid glanced at me. “That would be nice but seems pretty unlikely at this point. I appreciate the offer, Jay. I really do. But it’s not just about me. There’s my aunt to consider. She’s the one who raised me. Somehow, I think this would rake up more pain than necessary, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh. Uh. Yeah.” Fedders looked a touch chagrined. “I suppose it might. Well, talk to her about it. You never know.”
“True.” Sid focused on his chicken salad.
The conversation meandered elsewhere, although Fedders gently hinted multiple times that it would be great if Sid and Stella saw the room. Sid and I finished lunch, leaving Fedders hanging.
“So why didn’t you want to see the room?” I asked Sid as we walked uptown to the apartment belonging to Stella’s lover, Sy Flournoy.
Sid gazed over at the traffic on Park Avenue. He’s not a tall man, just barely three inches taller than me, and I’m average. He has dark, wavy hair, bright blue eyes, and a dimpled chin.
“Stella.” He smiled at me. “You know how she is about her sister. She told me hardly anything about Sheila when I was a kid, and still won’t say much. And when she does, she totally shuts down.”
“Still, we could have looked at it ourselves. Aren’t you even the least bit curious?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t want Fedders to know that. Which is why I said no.” He shrugged. “And I am concerned about how Stella would react.”
I made a face. “Yeah. That makes sense. At the same time, it seems kind of unfair to not tell her about Fedders.”
“I know. Let’s see what kind of mood Stella’s in when we get back to the apartment. Like Fedders said, you never know.”
The Whole Fam-Damily was at the apartment when we got back, lounging or reading. Fam-Damily was a joke my nephew Darby had made the year before and thought he was really getting away with something. Only it seems to have stuck. The family consists of my parents, Bill and Althea Wycherly, Sy and Stella (who are functionally Sid’s parents), my sister Mae and her husband, Neil O’Malley, their six kids (Darby, Janey, Ellen, Mitch, Marty, and Lissy), Sid, me, and our son, Nick, who was 15, almost 16.
The reason we had celebrated Christmas at Sy’s apartment was that it would be the last time we’d have a chance to. Sy was retiring as head of the strings department at Juilliard and moving to the Los Angeles area, where all the rest of us lived, except my parents. As in, Sy and Stella were finally going to be living together, something they hadn’t done since they were undergraduates back in the 1940s. Yeah, that was one of those things that I had to respect but would have rather barged in and asked.
Sy’s apartment was mostly empty except for our things and some rented furniture. He and Stella had cleared out everything the week before we’d arrived, so that Sy could rent it out. It was surprisingly large for a New York city apartment. The rooms were laid out in a long line, with the kitchen and utility room at one end, the dining room, living room, the study, then four bedrooms, each with its own bathroom.
Sy’s family had owned the place since the building was built in the late ‘thirties. Or maybe it was older than that. The exterior of the building certainly had the clean lines of that time.
“Did you two have a nice lunch out?” Mama asked when we got back. She’s small and birdlike, with a will of iron.
“Nice enough,” said Sid, pulling off his topcoat.
I took the coat and went to put it in our bedroom. When I got back to the bedroom, Stella was cursing at Sid.
“Why on earth would you think that?” she snarled. Stella is short, although taller than Mama. Her hair is dark gray, wavy like Sid’s, and she has Sid’s blue eyes and cleft chin. “It’s the not knowing what happened to her that’s so hard to take.”
“Well, excuse me if I can’t read your mind.” Sid paced in the living room that seemed oddly vacant of family members except for Sy and me.
Sy’s a tall man, with balding white hair and beard, and a full belly. He watched Sid and Stella with a resigned look on his face. Not that there was anything unusual about Sid and Stella fighting with each other. They mostly got along, but it had never been an easy relationship.
Stella snorted. “I would think you would understand.”
“Understand what?” Sid snapped. “You almost never talk about her, and the few times you do, it’s with complete disdain! I haven’t got anything to go on here except your anger.”
“My dear,” Sy interrupted, his voice ponderous. Ponderous was his usual mode of speech, but it got exceptionally so when he was dealing with Stella in one of her more difficult moods. “Perhaps we should simply ask Sid if he would be so good as to contact this Fedders person and ask to see the room after all.”
Sid blew his breath out. “I can do that.”
He watched Stella, his eyes blazing as brilliantly as hers.
She sniffed, then pulled herself up even straighter. “Then do it.”
Sid called Jay Fedders and arranged to meet him in the middle of the afternoon the next day. Mae and Mama took care of ordering dinner for that night and getting it delivered.
One of the challenges we face as a group when we’re traveling is the wide diversity of ages among the kids. Lissy was only two and a half that January and Nick and Darby were both almost 16. It’s one we embrace, and in this case, meant that several evenings were spent in the apartment. That night, Mama and Daddy took the youngest kids out to a movie. The rest of us sprawled around the apartment reading.
The next day, we all spent the morning at the Central Park Zoo. But then Sid, Sy, Stella, and I had to head downtown to meet Fedders at his brownstone.
It looked pretty typical for the area, with several steps up the stoop to the front door and a rough gray brick exterior.
Fedders’ wife was gone. He was all smiles as he let the four of us in, then ushered us upstairs.
“Well, here it is.”
Fedders opened the door to the room. I stepped back from the doorway to let Sid and Stella enter the room first. Once inside, Sid put his arm around Stella’s shoulder, but she didn’t seem to notice. Sy rested his hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. This would not be easy for him, either.
Sid can keep a pretty tight leash on his emotions, something that used to make me crazy when we first knew each other. And though he’s gotten a lot better at talking to me about his feelings, I couldn’t read him at that moment. There was something going on, but I didn’t know what.
Stella, for her part, seemed even more shut down than usual as she looked around the room with the tulip wallpaper and dark colonial-style bedroom furniture.
“We’re pretty sure this is where it happened.” Fedders nodded at the wallpaper. “We were lucky to find that stuff. It matches the wallpaper in the crime scene photos, and as we scraped down the walls in all the rooms, this was the only one that had that pattern.”
Stella nodded. “She always liked tulips.”
“Huh,” Sid replied, his voice flat.
“And here’s the ledger,” Fedders said, then paused.
Stella nodded and Fedders placed the small ledger on the full-size bed with the pink bedspread. Stella shifted out from under Sid’s arm and went to the bed. She touched the small pasteboard binder filled with lined paper covered over in narrow but neat handwriting.
“Any chance we can find out who her johns were?” she asked.
Fedders winced. “If we can find someone to read the code, maybe.”
I glanced over at Sid. He’s actually pretty good at code breaking and we knew a couple of people who were even better at it. But that was the part of our lives that we can’t talk about.
“Wealthy, powerful men,” Stella grumbled, her bitterness finally adding some life to her voice.
“My darling,” Sy said, his voice subdued, but still sonorous. “Perhaps it is time for us to make our way home.”
Stella nodded, then looked over at Sid. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” Sid replied a little too quickly. “I’m more worried about you right now.”
Stella took a deep breath. “I am well enough.” Her bright blue eyes turned on Fedders. “I would like a copy of the ledger.”
“Absolutely,” Fedders said. “The more people we have looking at this, the better our chances we’ll be able to find out what happened here.”
“We shall see,” Stella said, her voice flat again. “We’ll stay in touch.”
Fedders smiled, and we agreed.
In the cab on the way back to Sy’s apartment on the Upper East Side, Stella insisted that we not tell the rest of the family about Fedders and the brownstone.
“I do not want to be answering any questions until I’ve had a chance to think this through,” she said.
“I suppose that’s fair,” Sy said.
“Fine,” said Sid, letting out his breath. “Any thoughts on what we want for dinner?”
I wasn’t exactly thrilled about letting things go, let alone thinking it was a pretty unrealistic request given the argument the day before. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. Stella had made up her mind and Sid and Sy both felt they had to honor that.
Sid and Darby took over getting dinner ordered and picked up. Mae and Neil went out for dinner to get some time for themselves. I could tell that Mama wanted to know about that afternoon, but had to respect that Stella didn’t want to talk about it.
After dinner arrived and we ate, Sy took the eight-year-old twins, Marty and Mitch, to the apartment’s study to give them a lesson in trumpet and French horn. Sy may have focused on strings, but I don’t think there’s an instrument he can’t play, or teach, for that matter. All of Mae’s kids, except Lissy, who was only two, play some instrument or another. However, we gravely fear that Marty talked his brother into playing brass to be as annoying as possible. Mama thinks it was more likely that they wanted to avoid competing with Darby, who’s a violinist and very talented. Even odds either way.
Stella read in the living room, holding Lissy, who was sleeping in spite of the horn lesson. Ellen, age 10, sat reading next to Stella. Mama lounged in a nearby chair with her book. Daddy got a poker game going for the rest of us at the rented table in the dining room.
Poker remains a very popular family activity, never mind all the complaints that it’s almost impossible to beat Daddy, me, or Janey. [We’re just humoring you guys. We can beat you. Occasionally. – SEH] I drew the high card for the first deal, and we each took turns around the table calling and dealing games.
We’d gone around the table at least three times. Daddy dealt a hand of five-card draw. I pulled a pair of jacks in the first deal, worth staying in for, but not that exciting, and it didn’t look like anyone had pulled anything terribly good. I checked, then Janey, age 13, and Nick did (as in decided whether or not to bet based on who made the first bet). Darby opened the betting with a penny bet. The rest of us called. Daddy asked us how many cards we each wanted for the second deal. I got three cards, Janey took two, Nick three cards, Darby three, Sid got one, and Daddy folded. Sid took one card? Either he was bluffing or hoping he’d fill out something.
As Sid picked up the card that Daddy dealt him, I saw it. The tell. Whatever Sid had gotten, it was pretty damned good. I still had my pair of jacks and had gotten the third in the draw. But I knew that look and the second Daddy called for the first bet, I folded. Even odds Janey had caught the tell – she’s really good that way and even better with Sid. She folded promptly. Nick and Darby picked up on it and folded as well.
Sid looked at us, utterly disgusted, and it wasn’t the particularly bad trumpet note.
“It’s time for me to cash out,” he grumbled, throwing his cards onto the table.
I looked at my watch. “You know. I think I’ll cash out, too.”
It was getting rather late and Sid, being a morning person, means that we’re usually in bed by ten or eleven at night. I’m not sure if the others continued playing. But I followed Sid to the back of the apartment and the bedroom we were sleeping in.
“What’s going on?” I asked as he pulled off his snowy-white dress shirt.
“Isn’t there enough going on?” He glared at me.
“Come on, Sid,” I groaned. “Cashing out after a bad hand? That’s not your usual style.”
“It wasn’t a bad hand,” he snapped, viciously tossing the shirt onto his suitcase. “It was a nine-high straight flush. How often does that come along?” He sprinkled curse words throughout his rant. “But you had to go and read my mind and lead the folding.”
“I can’t read minds. Your eyebrow quirked and you got that little grin you get when you’re about to get laid. Janey was onto you.”
Sid snorted, mostly because he knew I was right. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t understand how he felt about that hand. It is insanely frustrating to get a really good hand, only to have everyone at the table spot it and fold before you can make any decent cash on it. But there was more.
“It was only for less than a second,” I said, trying to be consoling. Then I touched his arm. “What’s really going on?”
His sigh slid up from the depths of his being.
“I’m not sure,” he said, wincing. “I really didn’t think seeing that room today was going to be any big deal. But now…” He blinked and shook his head. “In some ways, it was like the woman who gave birth to me was this vague fictional character. If people wanted to make up for anything it was that I didn’t have a father. Stella was there, so I was covered on the mother front, I guess. But guys trying to be father figures? Crap. It was like they were trying to save me from some fatal disease or something. They were coming out of the woodwork to be my father.” He snorted. “Which is ironic as hell because the guys who were, in fact, doing the job didn’t pull that stuff.” Okay. He didn’t say stuff. Sid’s language is usually pretty blue. “Sy taught me how to pee standing up, which is one of those things that can be a little hard for a woman to teach a boy.”
“Huh.” My brow creased. “How did Nick learn then? I mean, I’m pretty sure he does.”
Nick had been raised by his first mom, the woman who gave birth to him, and her mother until he was ten. That’s when his grandmother had died. Then Rachel brought him to us when Nick was a few days short of his eleventh birthday because Rachel had been diagnosed with leukemia. She died when Nick was twelve and I became Nick’s second mom and later adopted him.
“He stands.” Sid nodded. “He doesn’t remember how he learned, though.”
We both winced at that. We know very little about Nick’s life before he came to us besides what he remembers. Rachel had not been very good at sharing that kind of information.
Sid waved his hand. “That’s all irrelevant anyway. The thing is, my birth mother was never very real to me. Stella wouldn’t talk about her, and I just accepted it. I had a photograph and that was it.” He sank onto the bed and gazed at the floor. “But today… First, Stella gets all freaked out. Then, it was as though Sheila Hackbirn came to life for the first time. Like it finally hit me that she was a real person.” He looked up at me. “How do I react to that? Grief? Anger? I have no idea.”
“All of the above, none of the above?” I sat down next to him and held him. “I’m pretty confident you’ll figure it all out, though.”
He squeezed me back. “Not without you, I won’t.”
He kissed the side of my head, and the two of us slid onto our backs. And things went where they normally go at that time of night.
Thank you for reading. For more information about the Operation Quickline series, click here.
Please check out the Fiction page for the latest on all my novels. Or look me up at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Vroman’s, in Pasadena, California.