LITMIR.BIZ

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he didn’t have a chaser. Like you, he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

      He backs off a step or two. “You can’t be serious.”

      “But, I am, Mr. Dietrich. You could go to prison for what you did to me. Maybe it’s not too late to put you there.”

      “What did you call me?”

      “It doesn’t matter what phony name you used back then. You’re Leland Dietrich. If you wanted to keep your identity secret, you should have kept your face off the society page. If Mrs. Dietrich doesn’t know who she married, maybe it’s time she finds out.”

      His hand shoots out and grabs her by the back of the neck, dragging her down the sidewalk toward a fancy yellow car with red leather upholstery. She struggles and cries out, but her cries are lost in the wind. She stumbles. Her book drops to the sidewalk and her umbrella somersaults down the sidewalk. With a squeal of tires, a green cab swings to the curb. It’s young Tom Kelly from the cab stand, punching the horn until people in the street take notice. He’s a strong-shouldered, handsome fellow with rusty auburn curls poking from beneath his driver’s cap.

      “Help me, Tom!” she cries, as he jumps from the cab.

      After a moment’s indecision, Dietrich pushes her roughly to the sidewalk. Tom helps her to her feet and retrieves her book. He pushes her safely inside the cab and slams the door shut.

      Dietrich jumps behind the wheel of his car and peels away from the curb as Tom scrambles for something to write on. Before the fancy car turns down the next side street, Tom has the license plate number written inside a matchbook cover. He puts it in his pocket and gets back behind the wheel.

      “Are you okay?” he says, checking his side view mirror and pulling into traffic.

      She covers a skinned knee with her hand.

      “Yes, just a bit shaken up.

      “Do you want me to call Jack?”

      “No, please don’t. Don’t call anybody.”

      “Who was that?” he asks.

      “Just some drunk,” she says. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come along.”

      * * * *

      Frances Dietrich, watches the drama from her parked Mercedes down the block. She’s dressed in jodhpurs and the raincoat she bought in London where she met Leland, a German teaching something-or-other at an English university. Frances is what’s called a handsome woman, meaning forceful and unpretty. She’s cut from the same durable fabric as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, both of whom she admires.

      She watches Leland drive away, sets her opera glasses on the dash and thoughtfully taps a smoke from a pack of Old Golds. His secret life isn’t as secret as he thinks it is. When he goes into Little Ireland or Chinatown it’s not for corned beef or chop suey.

      On the seat beside her, a 1910 Police Positive .38 special sits beside a silver whiskey flask, both gifts from her father on her sixteenth birthday, a time when her girlfriends were fluttering over hope chests and bridal magazines. Not Frances. She’s always been a no nonsense girl.

      Fran is the only offspring of infamous bootlegger, Red O’Hara. When he was shot in the back off-loading contraband liquor in Monterey Bay, she inherited his fortune, his steel backbone and his serious cigarette cough. Now that Prohibition has ended, the fleet of brown and yellow O’Hara trucks continues to supply every liquor store and bar in the county.

      She smokes aggressively and watches the cab deposit the girl in front of the Rexford Hotel. The kid was clearly terrified when Leland accosted her, almost as if they’d crossed paths before. The cold irritates her raw lungs and triggers a coughing jag that leaves her eyes watering. When she finally catches her breath, she spits bright red blood into her pristine handkerchief. She blames the damp weather and lights a fresh cigarette off the cinder of the last.

      * * * *

      “Let me help you into the lobby?” says Tom.

      “No please. I don’t want to make a fuss.” Tom walks reluctantly back to the cab stand. He wants to ask her out to dinner or a movie, but the opportunity always slips away.

      Angel runs into the recessed entry, umbrella gone, a shoe damaged, but her book intact. She still has nightmares about that long ago night with Dietrich. People can sometimes reclaim things that have been stolen from them, but the innocence of childhood isn’t one of them.

      A movement in the corner of the sheltered entry catches her eye. She hears a whine, and two big brown eyes look up from a pugged dog-face with big bat ears. With his serious under bite and squat body, this little fellow is ugly in the most adorable way. She slips the book inside her coat and kneels down.

      “Bo, what are you doing out here? You’re soaking wet.” Seventy-eight year old Lulu Barker doesn’t go anywhere without her dog. Angel looks through the double doors and sees Albie reading a comic next to the cigarette machine. He hurries outside when Angel raps on the glass.

      “What’s Bo doing out here?” he asks.

      “I don’t know,” she says, gathering the trembling little creature in her arms. “Let’s go to my room and get him dried off.”

      “Where’s Lulu?”

      “I don’t know, but I have the feeling something is terribly wrong.”

      CHAPTER 3

      When Up To Date comes on, Madame Zarina turns the radio to music so she doesn’t have to think about the bad things going on in the world. She was born, Cathleen Rose Cook, but she’s Cookie to her friends. She walks to the window over-looking Cork Street as the first drops of rain begin to fall.

      After her husband Skipper died, Cookie moved into the apartment above Joe Crisalli’s Bakery, with its pink scalloped awning and charming bistro tables. Heavenly scents fill the entire building: cinnamon, vanilla, powdered sugar and coconut.

      The first thing she did when she moved in seven years ago was hang her neon sign outside the upstairs window:

      MADAME ZARINA.

       FORTUNES TOLD FOR A DIME

      Although she uses an exotic name to attract customers, she doesn’t wear a turban or pretend to be a Gypsy princess. On any given day she’s likely to give a reading in her housecoat and slippers, her grey hair fluffy with short poodle curls. When the weather allows, she can count on five or six customers a day. A few dimes here and there are nothing to sneeze at when gas is ten cents a gallon and bread eight cents a loaf.

      As she stands at the window, a sharp flash of lightning blinds her and she flinches away from the pane. A vibration begins in her head and the muscles tighten painfully around her left eye. Migraine. It takes very little to wake the monster in its cave…a flash of light…a chemical odor…a sip of wine. Dr. McBane says only kidney stones or childbirth compare to the pain of migraine. Cookie doesn’t need a doctor to tell her that. She washes two aspirin down and hopes she can head it off at the pass.

      The headaches began when she was knocked unconscious in a buckboard accident at the age of nine, the visions following shortly thereafter. Their family priest called in an exorcist, but the ritual didn’t take and the nuns at school said she had the devil in her. Her childhood doctor said she might outgrow the spells, but at 67 it was highly unlikely.

      McBane calls her headaches “aberrant episodes” because they’re accompanied by dream-visions, sometimes as clear as snapshots, other times as surrealistic as a Salvador Dali painting.

      After one of her visions a few years back she led police to the bludgeoned body of three year old Bucky Chapelle, hidden in a culvert on Silver Creek. Rather than gratitude, she was accused of complicity in the crime. How could she know so much if she hadn’t been there? She was exonerated when Bucky’s stepfather confessed to “maybe going overboard” with his discipline when the boy dropped his cigarettes in the toilet.

      Cookie

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