Five floors above gridlocked traffic, a woman—mink wrapped around her neck, sequence dress hugged around her frame—gazed through a broken window at a marquee whose chaser lights encircled ‘The Red Herring Club with special guest Carolyn Sparano’. Before long, however, she reached past potted plant leaves and traced a nickel-sized hole in a wall.
“Can’t believe she has the gull to stand anywhere near that window,” a voice said, and she turned.
“Excuse me?” she said, and standing beside a sofa, two suited men in trench coats and wide-brim hats shifted their weight.
“Mind repeating that?” she said.
A man holding a notepad nudged the other. “Sure: Detective Baysmore said, ‘We’ll be out of your hair in no time, Mrs. Sparano.’”
“And your name, sir?”
“Peters. Just a few more questions.”
She glanced at a wristwatch. “Well, you’d better make a start—it’s getting late.”
“Of course. So, last night, you’d stepped off the Red Herring stage at what time?”
“Two thirty, two forty-five.”
“Then you left and arrived at this apartment where you heard shots, correct?”
“That’s right.”
The men glanced at each other.
“Problem, detectives?”
Peters scribbled on the pad and Baysmore strolled to picture frame-topped sideboard.
“You’re not hearing anything that hasn’t been reported by the papers,” she said.
“Well, despite the papers’ gun fight reports,” Peters said. “Enough shell casings were found in a certain spot on the sidewalk that could make one conclude the fight was a cover-up for something else.”
She shrugged. “Where were they found.”
“Beneath your window.”
She nodded.
“Yet you don’t seem surprised.”
“I was born and raised in this city. Not much out there scares me.”
“Not even a bullet—which seemed to have your name on it—that shattered your window and lodged itself in your wall. But the question is ‘why’?”
“I’m a lounge singer.” She sauntered to a mantlepiece and peered into a wall-mounted mirror at her reflection. “You’re the ones who’d be surprised at what I’ve seen.”
“Well, in our line of work, we’ve seen our fair share, and it’s enough to stir the emotions.”
Baysmore studied a photo. “And enough to make one wonder how Mr. Sparano had allowed a beautiful wife to take a stage every night.”
She turned toward him. “When my husband and I’d met, I was on the stage, and he’d never dreamed of making me stop.” She lowered her eyes. “In fact, before he passed, they said his last words were, ‘Tell her to keep singing.’”
Peters nodded. “I read about his passing. Big brawl at a train station.”
“Which he’d had no part in,” she said.
“Yes, we’re well aware: he was a ‘bystander’ who was stabbed ‘accidently’.”
She glared at him.
“How long were you married?”
“What does your pad say?”
“‘All but two years’; it also says he was thirty years your senior.”
“Well, scribble beside it, ‘Love has no age requirement.’”
Peters rolled his eyes. “Know of anyone who’d wanted to do him harm?”
“In this city, every business mogul has at least one envious rival.”
“Yes, especially a mogul who lived to brag at after-hours spots how many times he’d escaped an insurance fraud conviction to, of all people, industry associates who didn’t keep their hands quite as clean.”
“What are you insinuating?” she said.
“Nothing. Just wondered what would happen to such a man if he was so high on his own fumes he stopped footing the bill to keep his hands clean, and as a result, the boys-in-blue gained ground and made arrests?”
She peered at him.
“Or, better yet, what if a beautiful woman, who’d calculated how the dominos would fall, over time, pampered his ego to such an end; especially a woman who stood to collect a massive life insurance payout?”
“How dare you!”
“Mrs. Sparano, we don’t ‘dare’ anyone or anything,” Peters said. “We follow evidence and motive. That is all.”
She marched to an entry door and snatched it wide. “Well, if you’re not charging me with anything, you can follow both out my apartment.”
Baysmore shook his head. “Not so fast—we’ve a few more questions.” He watched Peters lift a hand.
“No worries,” Peters said. “We’ll head out. We’ve got to stop-by the precinct anyway.”
Both men ambled to the door—
THUMP!!
Everyone’s eyes snapped toward a corridor which stretched past several closed doors to an open lavatory door.
“What was that?” Peters said and watched the woman shrug.
“Probably the wind,” she said. “I may just have a broken window somewhere back there, as well.”
“Can’t give us a straight answer, ay? Fine.” He looked at Baysmore and gestured toward the corridor, and both men started toward it.
“Okay!” she said. “I’ll tell you!”
The men halted.
“Well?” Peters said.
“Yesterday,” she said. “While on stage, somewhere around my third number, I peered over tables packed with glittery dresses, grinning faces, and smokey cigars at a gentleman leaning on a sidebar whose face seemed familiar. You see, weeks back, a fellow who worked at the train station approached me after my performance.” She gazed into a corner. “And I studied a description he provided me to no end. Last night however, I wasn’t certain whether this gentleman was who I believed he was or not until he opened his suitcoat and flashed something shiny at me that made me botch a high note or two. And while the audience shifted in their seat, I recovered within the song.” She looked at the detectives. “No worries—the whole exchange baited his overconfidence.”
Peters folded his arms. “And how’d that workout for you?”
“Worked fine: After my act, I lured him to this apartment, poisoned him, and, with the same shiny object he’d used on my husband, all but killed him.”
“Why didn’t you?” Baysmore said.
“Because two superheroes arrived at my door, asking questions.”
The men chuckled.
“Funny?” She pointed at the sofa. “The shiny object’s lying under a cushion and the gentleman’s tied-up in a guestroom. That thud you heard was likely him shuffling about.”
A phone rang, and she glanced at the wristwatch.
“But fortunate for him I’m meeting someone.” She picked-up the receiver. “Give me five minutes to powder my nose, and I’ll be right down.” She hung-up the phone, started down the corridor, and halted, gesturing toward the sofa. “So, what’s it going to be, detectives? Are you going arrest me for attempted murder or watch me head to dinner?”
The detectives glimpsed at each other.
“I know that look. What are you thinking?”
“Tonight, I presume a different gentleman’s taking you to dinner,” Peters said.
“You presume, correctly,” she said.
“Old business associate of your late husband; like the gentleman in your guestroom?”
“Maybe.”
“Then if your story’s true, you won’t get far.”
The detectives ambled out the apartment, and once the door was closed, and she walked to the mantlepiece mirror and fixed her make-up. Afterward, she strolled to the sofa, lifted a cushion, and snatched the shiny object. She walked it down the corridor and into a guestroom where a bruised and battered man laid duct-taped and gaged on a floor beside a bed. She stepped alongside him, sliced half an ear away, and slapped flesh on a floorboard before a whimpering face.
“What did I say?” she said. “I believe it was, ‘Keep still’. But since you don’t listen, or seem to hear me, you can study the ear until I return.”
She then ambled to the sofa, tossed the object beneath the cushion, and walked to a table where she picked a purse. She opened the purse, lifted a small pistol, and checked the chamber.
“Perfect.”
She then stuffed it to her purse and then strolled out the apartment, into an elevator–she used to take her to ground floor–and through a lobby to a car grumbling out front. She got in and sat beside a suited man and sighed.
“Everything okay?” he said.
“Everything’s fine. I’m just hungry. Drive toward the docks.”
“Everything’s closed up down there, isn’t it?”
She shook her head. “No, there’s little seafood place…it’s new.”
He shrugged, wheeled a U-turn, and drove toward an undeveloped river area.