Deadly Summer Nights by Vicki Delany

Author:Vicki Delany [Delany, Vicki]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

That had been a mistake.

When I finally got into my office and dropped into my chair, I leaned back and closed my eyes. I would have loved absolutely nothing more than to grab a quick nap, but the pile of message slips threatened to bury my desk beneath a pink snowstorm. I sighed, opened my eyes, plucked a pencil out of the holder, and picked up the pages. I was about to flip the stack, to start with the earliest, when the name on the topmost caught my eye.

Lucinda McGreedy. Never mind the spelling error, my friend had called half an hour ago. That would have been only minutes after I left the diner. I picked up my phone and read the number off the paper to the hotel switchboard operator.

“Red Spot Diner. What do you want?” Mrs. McGreevy snarled.

“May I speak to Lucinda, please?”

“Lucinda’s working.”

“It’s very important. I won’t take much of her time.”

Mrs. McGreevy’s martyred sigh poured down the line. “I’ll see if she’s not busy.”

I crossed my fingers, hoping for the best. Lucinda was never not busy.

“Hello?”

“Lucinda, hi. It’s Elizabeth. Did you call me?”

“I’m glad you got my message. I was afraid you’d have so many messages you wouldn’t see mine for days.” In the background I heard a man screaming at someone. Something about hot water, not boiling water. “Only moments after you left, that newspaper reporter, the new one, came in.”

“It must have been him I saw on the street. Drat. I’m sorry I missed him.”

“Too bad you didn’t see who joined him.”

“Who?”

“None other than our beloved chief of police, Norman Monahan Jr., who came in about five minutes later. They huddled together in a back booth, just the two of them. I tried to get close enough to hear, but all they ordered were two coffees, plus a blueberry pie for the chief, and Janie brought it to them before I could intercept.”

“Did you hear anything they said?”

“Not a single word. Sorry. They were keeping their voices down, and when Janie brought their bill they stopped talking altogether. That must mean they weren’t exchanging baseball scores.”

“No.”

“One thing I should have told you earlier. The chief’s a rabid anti-communist. Nothing wrong with that, except that he’s accused people of being reds who flatly deny it. The big hotel owners like that about him. He ran off a couple of guys from the city who were trying to organize the groundskeepers at one of the hotels to argue for better pay.”

“Wanting better pay doesn’t make you a communist,” I said.

“No, but it does give the bosses a good excuse to get rid of troublemakers. All of which might not have anything to do with your murder, Elizabeth, but it’s been said that the chief sees reds where none exist. Partly because of genuine political conviction, but partly because it’s a way to get himself noticed in the wider world of law enforcement.”

“Like calling in the FBI for an ordinary murder. If there is such a thing as an ordinary murder.

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