Secrets Typed in Blood: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery - Softcover

Spotswood, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593469046 ISBN 13: 9780593469040

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST CRIME NOVEL OF THE YEAR • In the newest entry into the Nero Award-winning Pentecost & Parker Mystery series, Lillian and Will are hot on the trail of a serial killer whose murders are stranger than fiction.

The Pentecost & Parker series “takes gritty 40s noir, shakes it up, gives it a charming twist, and serves it up with unforgettable style” (Deanna Raybourn, author of the Veronica Speedwell Mysteries). From the author of Fortune Favors the Dead and Murder Under Her Skin.

New York City, 1947: For years, Holly Quick has made a good living off of murder, filling up the pages of pulp detective magazines with gruesome tales of revenge. Now someone is bringing her stories to life and leaving a trail of blood-soaked bodies behind. With the threat of another murder looming, and reluctant to go to the police, Holly turns to the best crime-solving duo in or out of the pulps, Willowjean “Will” Parker and her boss, famed detective Lillian Pentecost. 

The pair are handed the seemingly-impossible task of investigating three murders at once without tipping off the cops or the press that the crimes are connected. A tall order made even more difficult by the fact that Will is already signed up to spend her daylight hours undercover as a guileless secretary in the hopes of digging up a lead on an old adversary, Dr. Olivia Waterhouse. 

But even if Will is stuck in pencil skirts and sensible shoes, she’s not about to let her boss have all the fun. Soon she’s diving into an underground world of people obsessed with murder and the men and women who commit them. Can the killer be found in the Black Museum Club, run by a philanthropist whose collection of grim murder memorabilia may not be enough to satisfy his lust for the homicidal? Or is it Holly Quick’s pair of editors, who read about murder all day, but clearly aren’t telling the full story?

With victims seemingly chosen at random and a murderer who thrives on spectacle, the case has the great Lillian Pentecost questioning her methods. But whatever she does, she’d better do it fast. Holly Quick has a secret, too and it’s about to bring death right to Pentecost and Parker’s doorstep.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

STEPHEN SPOTSWOOD is an award-winning playwright, journalist, and educator. As a journalist, he has spent much of the last two decades writing about the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the struggles of wounded veterans. His dramatic work has been widely produced across the United States and he is the winner of the 2021 Nero Award for best American mystery. He makes his home in Washington, D.C. with his wife, young adult author Jessica Spotswood.

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Chapter 1

The kidnapper was good, I’ll give him that.

He parked himself right next to the trash can, then pulled out a cigarette and a book of matches. He flubbed the first match and tossed it in the bin. That gave him the chance to eye the paper bag sitting on top of the lunchtime leftovers and discarded morning papers.

He flubbed the second match—­not a hard thing to fake on a blustery January day. He tossed that second match in the bin, which gave him the opportunity to glance around and check out the people in his immediate vicinity.

There were plenty.

There might have been busier intersections in New York City than the corner of Forty-­second Street and Madison Avenue, but you’d have to go hunting. Two dozen restaurants, bars, and greasy spoons were throwing their lunchtime crowds onto the sidewalk. Everyone was hustling to get out of the cold and back to work, warmed by overcoats, hats, and three-­martini lunches.

It was a smart place and a smart play. It gave the kidnapper cover, and it made anyone standing still look mighty conspicuous.

People standing still included:

The newsstand owner hawking the latest copies of Life and Vogue and the Monday, January 20, 1947, edition of the Times and its assorted competitors. The kidnapper had probably scoped this spot out several days running, so he’d recognize the owner for genuine.

The drunk panhandling at the mouth of the alley twenty yards down. Too old to have served in the Pacific, but that’s what his cardboard sign proclaimed. The line seemed to be working for him if the pile of coins in his hat was any indication. He was a regular, too.

The girl in the phone booth, the one in the private-­school uniform arguing with her mother in that kind of why-­me whine fifteen-­year-­old girls hold a patent on.

“I want to see the matinee and it’s closing this week and Billy invited me! . . . He is not. . . . He would never. He’s a gentleman. His dad is vice president at Mavis and Mulgrave.”

No one to set off the fine-­tuned alarm bells wired into the kidnapper’s nerves.

The man in question was dressed in assorted grays—­light-­gray suit, charcoal overcoat, gunmetal-­gray porkpie. He had the kind of easy-­smiling face you’d hire to play second-­fiddle in a Seagram’s ad.

Pleasant and forgettable.

That forgettable mug and careful planning were the reasons he hadn’t gotten caught. And we were pretty sure he hadn’t gotten caught a lot.

This was a sample of what was going through my head as I defended fictional Billy to a dead telephone line: “I’ll come home after the show, I promise. . . . But, Mom, we’ve already got our tickets.”

I was thinking he didn’t look much like a kidnapper. Then again, they never do.

To be fair, I didn’t look much like a fifteen-­year-­old girl playing hooky. Even with the wool skirt and the school jacket and my frizzy red curls pulled into place with plastic barrettes.

Up close, I looked every bit my twenty-­four years. Maybe a couple more, once you factored in mileage. But through the smeared, breath-­fogged glass of the telephone booth, I could pass.

Also, I had the whine down pat.

“No, Mom, I love Billy. I loooove him.”

The easy-­smiling man tore off a third match, struck it, and lit his smoke. He shook the match out. Then he carefully placed it in the garbage can, dipping ever so slightly to scoop up the paper bag at the top.

He took a moment to feel what was inside—­three stacks of tightly bound bills. Then he was off, moving as fast down Madison Avenue as the post-­lunchtime crowd would let him. I was out of the phone booth a moment later, hurrying to keep up, slipping in between the cracks in the masses with ease. I top out at five-­two in flats, with a narrow frame that makes dress-­fitting a pain but helps when I need to tail a crook.

Twenty seconds in and I was only three people back. The hope was that I could ride the kidnapper’s slipstream all the way to Wyatt Miller.

Wyatt had been snatched from his pram in Central Park three days earlier. His mother had been distracted giving directions to a German tourist, and when she turned back she found her fourteen-­month-­old darling gone. In his place was a typewritten note.

we have wyatt.

do not call the police.

we have people on the force.

we will know.

go home and await further instructions.

Gloria Miller ran back to her Upper West Side apartment and showed the note to her husband, who did the reasonable thing. He picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect him with the cops.

An overly gruff voice answered.

“Twentieth Precinct.”

“This is Simon Miller. My son’s been kidnapped. My wife was in Central Park and—­”

The voice cut him off.

“What did we tell you, Mr. Miller? We told you not to call the police. We have people everywhere. This is your only warning if you want to see your son again.”

Then the voice instructed the Millers to gather ten thousand dollars in ransom money. The voice went so far as to instruct them on the best way to do it, naming bank accounts and telling them to cash in this or that stock.

The kidnapper really did seem to know everything.

What he didn’t know was that Mrs. Miller played a weekly bridge game with a group of wives, one of whose sister’s best friend had had something similar happen to her daughter a year before.

Back when it happened, it had made for juicy conversation between bids or rubbers or whatever the lingo is. I’m a poker girl, myself.

Naturally, the chatter had expanded to include what each card player would have done if such a thing happened to them. Someone had suggested that a private operator would be the best choice—­someone who could work to bring the child back without the flash and show of the NYPD.

Gloria Miller raised the idea with her husband, who quickly nixed it. Private detectives were nothing but glorified grifters, he told her. While Mrs. Miller loved and cherished, she didn’t always obey. Which is why, while her husband was tying up the house phone making calls to his bank, she walked down the street and made a call of her own. This one to the offices of Pentecost Investigations, Lillian Pentecost being known far and wide as the greatest private detective working in New York City in that year of our lord 1947.

That reputation was kept fresh through the efforts of her erstwhile assistant, Willowjean “Will” Parker, who made sure her boss’s name appeared in the paper as often as legitimately possible, sometimes going so far as to flirt shamelessly with the editors. Which, if you’d met the editors in question, you’d know took a lot more acting chops than playing a whiny schoolgirl.

We took the case.

What followed was a whirlwind seventy-­two hours. While the Millers got the ten grand together, Ms. Pentecost and I tracked down the friend of the sister of the bridge player—­a Mrs. Diane Neary.

We couldn’t pick apart the Millers’ lives. There was a chance the kidnappers had them under surveillance, and we didn’t want to trip any alarm bells. So we dissected the Nearys’.

We talked to grocers and bankers and lawyers and landlords and housepainters and hairdressers and everyone listed in their address book. If we’d ever worked faster, I couldn’t remember...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593469046
• ISBN 13: 9780593469040
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland