This Dame for Hire: A Novel - Hardcover

Scoppettone, Sandra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 034547810X ISBN 13: 9780345478108

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2005

Synopsis

"I didn’t start out to be a private eye. I thought I was gonna be a secretary–get my boss his java in the morning, take letters, and so on. Hell, I didn’t get my degree in steno to put my life on the line. It was true I wanted an interesting job, but that I’d end up a PI myself . . . it never entered my mind."

New York, 1943. Almost anything in pants has gone to serve Uncle Sam in the war–including Woody Mason, the head of a detective agency in midtown Manhattan. Left to run the show is his secretary, Faye Quick, who signed on to be a steno, not a shamus. At twenty-six and five foot four, there’s not much to Faye, but she’s got moxie–which she’ll need when she stumbles over a dead girl in the street and takes on her first murder case.

This victim wasn’t any ordinary girl. Claudette West was a student at NYU and the daughter of a Park Avenue family. Faye, who lives in bohemian Greenwich Village–where no one cares how you look–ventures uptown, where people care enough about money to kill for it. Claudette’s father is convinced greed was the motive, and that Claudette’s working-class boyfriend, Richard Cotten, killed the girl because she threw him off the gravy train.

Faye, however, isn’t so sure, not when she learns about all the other men Claudette was secretly seeing–from her lecherous literature professor to an apparent con artist. For Faye, there are more shocking surprises in store than turns and dips in the Coney Island Cyclone.

Going after the bad guys and fighting a good fight on the home front, Faye is as scrappy and endearing as any character Sandra Scoppettone has ever created, and This Dame for Hire’s period setting is rendered so real you can hear the big band music, see the nylons and fedoras, and feel the rumble of the Third Avenue El. When it comes to an irresistible detective and a riveting new series, you must remember this: Here’s looking at Faye Quick.

About this title

About the Author

SANDRA SCOPPETTONE has written numerous other novels, including three under the pseudonym Jack Early. Most recently she created the five-book series of mystery novels featuring New York private eye Lauren Laurano. Scoppettone lives on Long Island in New York. Visit her website at www.sandrascoppettone.com.

Reviews

Starred Review. An original idea—a female PI working on her own in 1943—and an unusually imaginative portrait of a New York City coping, surviving, even thriving during WWII lift the first of a new suspense series from Scoppettone (Gonna Take a Homicidal Journey). Faye Quick makes a tough and touching heroine, with a voice that just cries out for an actress like Ida Lupino to bring her to cinematic life. She starts as a secretary, learns everything her sleazy but charming boss knows about being a detective, then assumes charge of the agency after her employer is drafted. "Even though I looked like any 26-year-old gal ankling round New York City in '43, there was one main difference between me and the rest of the broads," Faye tells us. "Show me another Jane who did my job and I'd eat my hat." This lively, slightly mocking tone continues at perfect pitch, as Quick finds the dead body of a missing young woman on a snowy street, then is hired by the victim's parents to catch the killer. There are echoes of Chandler and Hammett in the distance, but the plot offers some fresh surprises. Best of all, Quick's 1943 New York looks like old magazine and newspaper photographs come to life—not faded but enhanced by the passage of time. (July 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Fresh from her series featuring New York PI Lauren Laurano, the veteran crime scribe introduces a delightful new protagonist, Faye Quick, who also prowls Manhattan in the gumshoe game. But Faye's first mystery unfolds in 1943, as a vibrant-but-jittery Big Apple copes with World War II, and detectives' secretaries sometimes have to take over agencies when their bosses head to the front lines. When Faye trips to her first murder case--by tripping over a young woman's body on a Greenwich Village sidewalk--she must contend with a ration book's worth of shady suspects while keeping the victim's overbearing father at bay. Smart and sassy Faye proves up to the task as she diligently ties off loose ends--only rarely taking a break to sample heavenly lemon meringue pie or cut a rug at the USO with the boys on leave. Although many readers will finger the culprit before Faye does, Scoppettone delivers a satisfying plot about love gone wrong and a large cast of engaging characters. And it's hard to dislike a book that ends with a playful "Hubba--hubba!" Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE

I didn’t start out to be a private eye. I thought I was gonna be a secretary—get my boss his java in the morning, take letters, and so on. Hell, I didn’t get my degree in steno to put my life on the line. It was true I wanted an interesting job, but that I’d end up a PI myself . . . it never entered my mind.

Back in 1940 when I went for my interview, one look at Woody Mason and I thought for sure it was gonna be a bust.

There he was, brogans up on the wobbly wooden table he called his desk, wearing dark cheaters in the middle of the day, his trilby pulled down so low on his head it was a week before I knew he had straw-blond hair. A butt hung from his thin lips, smoke curled up past his rosy nose. I wondered if he was a boozehound.

“I’m Faye Quick,” I said.

“Good for you.”

“Mr. Mason, I came for the job. You wanna good secretary or not?” That got his attention.

Mason slid his legs off the desk, pushed down the sunglasses, and over the rims eyeballed my gams, while he stubbed out his Old Gold and lit a new one. So what did I expect from a gumshoe?

My friends told me I was a crackpot trying for a job with a shamus. But I thought it could be interesting. I didn’t want to be in some nine-to-fiver pushing papers that had to do with mergers, business agreements, or the like. I wanted to be where whatever I was typing or listening to had some meat to it.

“Are ya?” Mason asked.

“Am I what?”

“Quick.”

To myself I thought, Hardy, har, har, but I didn’t say it. I gave him a look instead.

“Sorry. Guess ya get that a lot.”

“Yeah.”

“Sometimes I open my big yap too much. So Miss Quick, you wanna work for me?”

“That’s the general idea,” I said, and thought maybe he was a little slow or something. But Woody Mason was anything but slow, I was to find out.

We went through some Q and A’s, then he hired me on the spot. I was slaphappy getting a job my first day looking.

That was how it was then.

But in ’41 the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, and by January of ’42, Woody Mason was in the army and I was running A Detective Agency. The A didn’t stand for anything. He named it that so it would be first in the phone book. By the time I took over I knew almost as much as Woody, but in the beginning it was a scary idea.

“I’m not sure, boss.”

“Ah, Quick, you can do it. I got complete confidence in ya.”

“Yeah, but I don’t.”

“Listen, when I come back from this clambake I wanna have a business to come home to. You gotta keep the home fires burning, like they say.”

“That’s not what it means: a girl like me packin a heater and chasin the bad guys. Keepin the home fires burnin means sittin in the nest waitin for your man.”

“Ain’t I your man, Quick?” Woody smiled, the dimples making their mark in his cheeks, and my heart slipped a notch.

I wasn’t in love with Woody, but he was a looker when he gave ya the smile. Mostly he reserved it for female clients. But on that day he brought it out for me.

“You’re my boss, Mason, not my man.”

“Ah, hell. Ya know what I mean.”

“Even still. I can’t be a PI.”

“Why not?”

I wanted to tell him I didn’t know how, but he knew that was a lie. So I said, “I’m afraid.”

“Hell you are, Quick. I never saw the likes of you when it comes to guts.”

I had been on a few stakeouts with him and never showed any fear even when we got into close shaves.

“If you’re thinkin of some of those cases we did together, well, I had you with me, Mason.”

“Ah, you coulda handled them alone.”

“How’d ya know?”

“I know ya, Quick. I knew it from the first day I laid my headlights on ya.”

“You were hungover and ya woulda hired King Kong.”

“But I didn’t. I hired you, and now I gotta get my rump overseas and knock off some Nips. Ya gotta take over.”

“What if I’m so lousy at this I lose the agency.”

“Ya won’t.”

And so far I hadn’t.

I’m not what you’d call a raving beauty, but some even call me pretty, and I agree I’ll pass. Take today. I was wearing a short-sleeved cream-colored dress that was covered with bright blue intersecting circles, cinched below my bosom and belted at the waist. My hair was black, the long sides ending in a fringe of manufactured curls, and every hair in my pompadour was in place. But I was getting sick of this style, and I’d been thinking of changing. Maybe I’d get it cut short, shock the pants off my pals. Rolling and pinning were getting to be a pain in the derriere.

My mouth was small but full; my nose had a little bump, but it was okay. So the point was that even though I looked like any twenty-six-year-old gal ankling round New York City in ’43, there was one main difference between me and the rest of the broads. Show me another Jane who did my job and I’d eat my hat. And I wouldn’t relish that cause my brown felt chapeau had a bright red feather sticking up from the left side of the brim, and I knew the feather would tickle going down.

Once or twice I had some numbskull who thought a dame couldn’t handle his so-called important case, but most people didn’t care that I was a girl, and they knew any self-respecting male private dick was fighting to keep us safe.

So I wasn’t hurting for things to do when my secretary, Birdie, showed the Wests into my office. But I was surprised, even though it was no mystery why they’d come to me as I was the one who’d discovered their daughter’s body and no one had been arrested so far. I lit a Camel and listened while they talked.

The man and woman who sat on the other side of my desk were in their late forties to early fifties and looked fifteen years older. Having yer child murdered will do that to you.

Porter West was a big man, but he slumped in his chair like a hunchback. His thinning blond hair was turning the color of old corn. And his brown eyes were dull and defeated.

His wife, Myrna, was a brunette, spear-thin with skin that looked like tracing paper and eyes too sad to look into.

“Will you take the case, Miss Quick?”

“Yeah, I’ll take it,” I said. “But starting this late after the murder will make it harder.”

“Well, the police haven’t done anything,” Mrs. West said. Her voice was shrill.

I knew the coppers had probably done plenty. Still, this was what people who were connected to unsolved murders believed. I didn’t say this to Mrs. West. I nodded in a way I hoped would give her the idea that I agreed with her and was sympathetic, which I was.

“You have to understand that chances are slim that I’ll find the killer.”

West said, “We have no other choice.”

“Well, my fee is—”

“We don’t care what the fee is.”

He was a lawyer with an important firm, and the Wests were in clover.

“I have to tell ya anyway.”

When that was settled, West gave me a picture of his dead daughter, a folder that included a history of Claudette West’s short life, and all the newspaper clippings about the case. The murder, as I well knew, had taken place four months before.

“You don’t have police reports, do ya?”

He snorted. “What do you think?”

“They wouldn’t give us anything,” she said.

“Not even the names of possible suspects?” I asked.

“There was only one. Her ex-boyfriend, Richard Cotten.” She wrinkled her small nose like she was smelling Limburger.

“He was never charged,” West said.

“But he was a suspect?” I knew he was.

“For a time.”

“I guess neither of ya liked him much.” I stubbed out my butt in the overflowing glass ashtray.

“Liked him? Cotten is a despicable bastard,” he said.

“Tell me why ya say that?”

“He didn’t love her. He was only interested in her money.”

I’d heard this before, but mostly from wives hiring me to follow husbands they think are stepping out on them.

Mrs. West said, “He was from a poor family and was raised by a working mother. Not that there’s anything wrong with a mother working, but she was never there and Richard ran wild.”

I could tell Myrna West didn’t think a mother should work no matter what.

“Father?”

“Shot in a bar fight when Cotten was four,” West said.

“Richard is a very angry person.”

“Did he hit your daughter?”

He said, “Oh, no. But he showed it in other ways.”

“How?”

“It was the way he talked to her. He always acted as if she was dumb, said hurtful things. That’s what we observed the three or four times we saw them together.”

“Claudette would have told us if he’d hurt her physically,” Myrna said.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 034547810X
• ISBN 13: 9780345478108
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272