[Maggie Sullivan 04.0] - Shamus in a Skirt by M. Ruth Myers

Author:M. Ruth Myers [Myers, M. Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: historical mysteries, Irish-American detective, series, private investigator, historical detective cozy
Publisher: Tuesday House
Published: 2015-09-22T23:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SIX

Rachel Minsky slid a three-page form across the table to me. We were in a booth at a working-class restaurant on Watervliet that served cabbage rolls, which Rachel said were Hungarian. The dark beer we were drinking while we waited wasn’t half bad. Apart from a waitress, we were the only women, but no one in the noonday crowd so much as ogled us. It strongly suggested Rachel was known here.

“You mind telling me why you wanted a bid sheet for a construction project? And why couldn’t you pick it up at my office?” she asked.

Rachel looked like a porcelain doll: pointed chin, a cloud of dark hair, pulp magazine bosom. The suit she had on had set her back more than I paid for a month’s rent. A trio of minks chased each other around her neck. She could have fit right in with the guests at the Canterbury, except, perhaps, for the fact that she was a Jew. And ran a construction company. And, somewhere—ever so discreetly—carried a gun.

She was the black ewe in a family that otherwise ran to bankers and lawyers and women who stayed home. Plenty of people claimed she was crooked. I trusted her.

“I need a form that looks semi-official if nobody reads too closely. I’m kind of short on time, and I figured if you’d meet me for lunch it would save some.”

“And?”

“And I thought if I plied you with liquor, I might pry useful information out of you,” I said.

“A man here and there has tried that.” She cocked her head. “Are your intentions pure?”

I grinned.

Rachel’s eyes were dark as an abyss. As dangerous to misjudge, too. Right now they suggested amusement. She took out a tortoiseshell lighter and matching cigarette case.

“What kind of information you need?”

“Didn’t you tell me once your people were Polish?”

“My family, you mean? Way back when. My mother’s side had been here ten, fifteen years before she was born. My father was a toddler when his folks came over.”

“You know much about the politics there?”

“Apart from Hitler taking over? Not really. Near as I can tell, their history’s pretty much been fight, lose, get gobbled up by some country, then repeat the whole thing with another country gobbling them. Why?”

“I need to find out about a man named Szarenski. Whether he’s really a count, for starters.”

She was fitting a cigarette into a long gold holder. Her head snapped up.

“He’s real, all right. War hero. He fought against the Nazis when they rolled in, then joined an underground group. Home Army or some such. The Germans burned his estate, killed a relative – brother, son.”

She shrugged off her display of knowledge.

“My father and brothers talk about things over there at Shabbat dinner. The women start talking kids. I drift in and out.” Lighting the cigarette, she jutted her jaw to the side so the smoke she expelled didn’t reach me. She studied me thoughtfully. “Don’t tell me something you’re working on involves Szarenski.”

“Not directly.”

I paused while the waitress served our cabbage rolls.

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