Free The War Against Miss Winter by Kathryn Miller Haines Page B

machine. After Jayne’s performance, the least I could do was treat her to lunch.
    “So who was he?” she asked as we waited for the counter worker toplace a second sandwich behind the glass.
    “I’m not sure. He was at Jim’s funeral with the rest of the tough guys and I caught him tailing me the night Jim died.”
    Jayne gasped. “You don’t think he killed—”
    I cut her off with a wave of my hand. “No. I can’t guarantee he didn’t bump off Fielding, but I don’t think he’s responsible for Jim’s death. I got the strangest feeling he was there because he wanted me to tell him something, but he couldn’t ask me to tell him whatever it was he wanted to know.”
    Jayne squinted as if the light were hurting her eyes. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “I know, but then nothing about today does.” We took our trays to the back and hunted for a free table. A group of soldiers on leave clutching maps of the city rose from one of the two tables they occupied and offered Jayne and me a pair of chairs.
    “Thanks,” she said before helping me slide the table out of their earshot. They could ogle us all they wanted, but we needed our privacy. “Do you want me to ask Tony about him?”
    “Why? Does he have a leash on every thug in the city?”
    She shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt, could it?”
    I stared into my coffee, trying to find the best way to express why talking to Tony was a bad idea. If he did know Frank, there was a good chance Tony was involved in whatever was going down and I didn’t think either of us needed confirmation of his activities. And it probably wouldn’t do me good if word got back to Frank that I was snooping into his business. The last thing I wanted was a follow-up visit.
    “Sure, it wouldn’t hurt,” I said, “but I’d rather forget about the whole thing. I’m fine, and he should have a pretty good inkling that I know nothing about nothing.”
    Jayne pulled the crinkled newspaper out of her bag and smoothed it with her hand. On page one, above an article blaring NEW YORK OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION DECRIES NOW IS THE TIME FOR PATRIOTISM was a death notice for Raymond Fielding, playwright.
    “He was a playwright?” I asked.
    “I thought you knew,” said Jayne.
    “Did you?”
    “Well, sure…after I read the paper.”
    I pulled the newspaper close to me and scanned the contents. The day before, Fielding’s butler had found the recently deceased with a bullet wound to his head in an upstairs bedroom. In the past month, his home had been broken into twice, though it wasn’t revealed if the thief took anything.
    As far as the victim was concerned, he was a playwright. A prolific playwright. An oft written about and discussed playwright who never achieved popular recognition. He had written at least fifty shows, all produced under the moniker “anonymous,” since one of his many theories was that the writer should be invisible to the theatrical experience. There was a partial list of the plays he’d written and not a title among them that I’d ever heard of. He was also deep into theory—he’d written a tome about the modern theater that had become standard for college classrooms. He was closely associated with a number of experimental companies. In addition to being a writer, he was an amateur painter and independently wealthy, the son of a long-deceased man who’d made his fortune in rubber right about the time the Ford Motor Company started operating. Fielding had also fought in the Great War, and had received a Purple Heart after losing his leg. He started his own charity for vets after returning home. In fact, he was such a stand-up guy they couldn’t fit his entire obituary on the front page. It was continued on page twelve.
    “Well, I’ll be…” I shook my head. “I knew I should’ve gone to college.” I scanned the first part of the article a second time. “If you were a playwright and you lost something important that happened to be on paper, what