Death-Wish Green

Frances Crane

• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781504075404
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

Did she jump—or was she jumped? A sleuthing couple looks into the disappearance of a young woman on the Golden Gate Bridge . . .
 
An abandoned car on the Golden Gate Bridge usually carries the sad suggestion of suicide. But after Pat and Jean Abbott spot the car in the fog and learn that it belongs to a friend's niece, Katie Spinner, they begin to suspect that she is not in a watery grave but in the clutches of a kidnapper.
 
When one of Katie's friends—who was supposed to go with her to the North Beach arts festival—turns up dead, the mystery of the missing young woman becomes only more challenging in this compelling 1950s mystery in the long-running PI series.
 
Praise for the Pat and Jean Abbott Mysteries
"Pat does a first-class job of detecting." — The New York Times
 
"Amusing and sophisticated." — Daily Star
 
"[A] lively, well-plotted and mystifying case." — Saturday Review

Thirteen

On the way upstairs to Sylvia’s rooms it occurred to me that Katie Spinner could be hidden in that disc jockey’s apartment on the ground floor of the house where Celeste had had her fatal plunge.

It was obvious! Suppose Celeste had discovered her friend and had paid for the knowledge with her life? Nobody would kill a girl on account of a brief phone call which could not be traced, and a call from a public telephone couldn’t be traced unless the police were already on the job, impossible in the few minutes between the finding of the Model A on the bridge and the time the call was made. Besides, at that time, there wasn’t known to be any connection between the two girls; that is, that they’d agreed to meet, both dressed in black. Mrs. Brown had assumed this. Celeste herself had confirmed it.

My idea ballooned instantly. I used fortitude to keep it from being vocal. Not before Sylvia Harwood. The timing was too bad.

Sylvia bounded ahead. At the top of the stairs she threw out her right arm as a gesture of welcome to her “pad.”

She was wearing black velvet Capri pants, a velvet-lined leopard jacket with a mandarin collar, and velvet slippers. Three hundred? Five? The outfit suggested Morison’s French Room where Celeste had modeled. It could have cost seven hundred, nine.

Sylvia had two rooms. The sitting room and bedroom, seen through open doors, were in pink and blue, right for a girl of less exotic taste than Sylvia’s. A chaise in the sitting room was blue, but piled with black and yellow pillows. Those would be Sylvia’s choice. On the left of piled-up pillows was a small French chest, painted blue, with gold and pink decorations. It had three drawers. A girlish pink-shaded lamp stood on the chest, also a box of pink tissues, and a little yellow book with its title turned down. The deep dusty-pink carpet extended over the floors of both rooms.

There were no ash trays, no careless magazines, nothing left about as is usual with a young girl. The place was neat to the point of coldness.

It was a curious background for this beautiful, seductive-looking girl. She’s the calendar type in a seraglio, I thought. She’s Moslem. She doesn’t belong here at all.

Sylvia waved a small hand with rose-tinted nails.

“Did you ever see anything so utterly rancid as this room? Mom got it up for a Shirley Temple doll. It’s the stinkingest. She was here almost all the time you were with Daddy. There she sat. Here I sat. I was simply panicked to get you up here. Mom was absolutely chomping to kick you off the place. Do you like Sinatra?”

She threw herself backward like an acrobat. Her garments parted showing a lovely little stomach and navel. She sat up again and deposited a small hi-fi player on the chaise at her side. She flicked the switch. Sinatra sang “Autumn In New York,” Gavin Maguire’s favorite.

“Adore, adore, adore!” she crooned, bending over the disk with shaped kisses and hovering hands. “I have to keep it low. Mom comes in if she hears it at night. Late she calls this. Late. How nauseous! Oh, tell me everything. Everything. Why did you come here?”

“To talk with you, Sylvia,” Patrick said.

“With me? That’s heaven. You saw me wink? There at Mrs. Brown’s?”

“Yes. You were being wicked, weren’t you?”

Sylvia laughed with pleasure.

“I didn’t want to leave without your knowing that I got Liz Brown’s pitch. Mom didn’t get it all. She never does. She’s too flabby. She decided that Mrs. Brown was off her rocker. She blamed herself afterwards because she thought her telling about Sky and me being engaged pushed poor Liz overboard. As if.”

Sylvia giggled, wriggled, ran one slim brown-tanned hand through her artistically tousled ink-black hair, pulled her knees up, clasped her arms around them. She kicked off her gold slippers and stared at her pretty feet.

“Your father called your mother Sonya,” I said.

Sylvia returned as if from far away.

“Oh? That’s her name. Sonya Virginia Khoushboulian Harjak Harwood. She’s Virginia now. And no more of that Khoush. Can’t blame her, can you?”

She threw back her head and laughed, showing beautiful little teeth.

“So that’s where you got those gorgeous eyes, Sylvia?” I said.

“Harem eyes,” Sylvia scoffed. “Mom’s ashamed because she was born in an Armenian section which she declares is no better than Skid Row. Couldn’t you have died when Mrs. Brown made that crack about Skid Row? Mom thought it was a dig straight at her. Wow!”

Patrick said, “Mrs. Brown didn’t mean it so, Sylvia. She’s the kind who tries to cover up a great sorrow with what appears to be chitchat. She’s at the end of her row from worry and anxiety.”

The girl said sulkily, “Katie isn’t hers.”

“No. But she’s as near her own child as Mrs. Brown has. They are very compatible.”

“That must be nice,” Sylvia said, making a face. “Anyway, a girl’s life is her own. If she wants to step off a bridge she has a perfect right to. I don’t see why old people don’t know that. They think they own us. It’s monstrous and rancid.”

“You think she stepped off?”

“Sure.”

Patrick said, “Why is your mother ashamed of her background?”

Sylvia shrugged, waved her hands. “Dad says the same thing. Virginia says it’s because she descended from rug peddlers. So she’s ashamed. Dad says she should be proud. They were good rugs, he says. But she was an orphan at sixteen and had to work and went to college and made honors and finally, when she was Daddy’s secretary, she hooked the poor guy. He says she’s brilliant. If she’s so smart why doesn’t she do something for me? I’m dead. Embalmed. Buried. This awful place is my coffin. Wow. Would you like a drink?”

She bounced up, bounced across to a blue and pink chest, took a bunch of keys from her pants pocket and flung open the doors of the well-stocked little bar. The bottles had not been opened. The glasses looked as though never used. Everything was placed just so, like a picture. Too perfect. Too tidy.

We declined. Sylvia locked the cabinet without urging us and skipped back to the chaise. She landed with a bounce and grabbed the player to keep it from overturning. The song changed to “Three Coins in the Fountain.”

“Love. Love. Love. Love Sinatra. If only I could meet him. Just once. Even if he didn’t even speak to me or even see me. If I could just stand there and let my eyes eat him up. Do you know Frankie?” No, we both said. “I thought a private eye knew everybody. I’ve never met a detective before. I think you’re the most, Pat. May I call you Pat? I call everybody by first names. It makes Mom creep. Frankie’s so aware. I’ll bet you are too, Pat.”

“Aware of what, Sylvia?” I asked.

“Just aware. It’s a thing itself. To be aware. I’m aware. I’ll get away. I’ll escape.”

The girl’s amazing beauty was unreal. She now sat very still. Around her slightly tilted bright-blue eyes the eyelashes were so heavy they were hard to believe. But they didn’t seem artificial. They weren’t. Persian is the word, I thought. This little San Francisco girl is as true to type as though born in the country her forefathers came from. No wonder her mother set her up as special. She was.

There was that odd trick of the eyes, a swift almost sinuous movement, sideways, an evasion of a direct glance, the eyes of women who wear the veil and who are permitted to meet directly the glance of no man except a husband.

Wait a minute! Armenians are Caucasians. Christians. Maybe their women never wore the veil. A Persian must have strayed into the family at some time. Virginia Harwood had the eyes. She didn’t use them like a veiled woman. Sylvia did. She began telling Patrick how she would escape from this luxurious pad. He let her talk.

“Girls manage to get away all the time. Just this summer a rich San Francisco girl went to Siam and shaved off her hair and went into a Buddhist monastery. Now don’t say it was a nunnery because the papers all said monastery. She wanted to cast off everything worldly. That’s for me. I’ll manage it, too.”

“You wouldn’t be so pretty with your head shaved,” Patrick said.

Sylvia was pleased, but said, “I mean it. I don’t care about my hair. I want to be free. Free of all this muck. This crud. I want to be entirely aware.”

“Do you mind if I smoke, Sylvia?”

The eyes did their trick. She did mind. But she said she didn’t mind, whipped out the keys, and took an ash tray from the top drawer of the little French chest next the chaise. Patrick hitched his chair closer and looked in before Sylvia again locked the drawer.

There was a timid knock. Mrs. Harwood opened the door and put her head in.

“You’re allowing smoking, darling?” she screeched.

“Oh, get the hell out, Virginia,” Sylvia shouted.

“Darling, you’ve had such a day. Your friends must go. I …”

“Beat it, Virginia. You’ve got everything you want now and at least you might let me have a little fun. We’re talking. I like Pat and Jean.”

“I didn’t realize you knew them so well.”

“This is my pad, Sonya. Go away and do your yodeling some place else. Scram, damn you.”

Sylvia was off the chaise and at the door in a second. She slammed it, locked it, and yelled that she would squirt vitriol through the keyhole if her mother kept snooping.

“Why can’t she lay off?” she said, dejectedly, back on the chaise. She wrapped her arms around her knees again. “She grew up free. She could do anything and go anywhere. I’m a slave. Shut in. Shut in. Watched. Watched … Oh, my darling lover, that’s mine. You sing that for me alone, lover.” She was addressing Frankie. The player was giving out “All Of Me.”

“Oh, what a doll. Some men are dolls. Dolls. Adore!”

Sylvia rested her chin on her knees, closed her lids, and her eyes were ambushed by her lashes. Patrick was watching her with an eyebrow up.

“I shouldn’t think this house too hard to escape from,” he said.

Sylvia opened the eyes.

“Oh, it’s not. I slip out all the time.”

“You have that slick Porsche, too. Easy to get around in a car like that.”

“They lock it up. I take cabs, busses, anything. Fix myself up so that even Virginia wouldn’t know me. Get away.”

“And now you’re getting married.”

“Sure.” Sylvia’s eyes were again ambushed. “I won’t have to hide around after I get married. That’s why I’m doing it. You don’t have to stay married. Virginia can have her goddamned big wedding and then I’m free.” She looked up, met glances directly, and laughed. “You know what? She plans for Sky to move in here. She’s planning for our kids already. Says we can have the guest wing and this dump will be the nursery. God in heaven! What a witch! Do you use pod? Nobody calls it tea any more. Nobody who counts.”

I stopped myself from blurting “marijuana.” Patrick said nothing and again Sylvia took out her keys and opened the top drawer of the cabinet. There were three reefers there. You could smell them slightly. She held up a small transparent box of white powder. These treasures were lined up precisely. She picked up the little yellow book and placed it in what must be its special place. Pat asked if the powder was junk. She bobbed her head excitedly and closed and locked the drawer.

“I don’t dare use anything here. The pod smells. Junk leaves marks on your arms. They’re both good for you. They make you aware. Cool. After I’m married I’ll cut out and do what I like. If I want to use drugs it’s my business. I’ll go to Japan. In the Orient they smoke opium. Oh, I’ll try everything when I get away.”

“Do you love Schuyler?” I asked.

“God, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Thirteen
• Fourteen
• Fifteen
• Sixteen
• Seventeen
• Eighteen
• Nineteen
• About the Author
• Copyright