Free Murder is a Girl's Best Friend by Amanda Matetsky Page B

the West 4th Street entrance to the BMT.
    It was freezing cold below ground, too. The handful of people waiting near the track for the uptown train were standing unusually close together—in an almost-but-not-quite huddle—hoping, I realized, to draw some warmth from each other. I wormed my way into the middle of the small crowd and stood there, shivering, watching everybody’s breath turn to steam, until the train screeched into the station.
    It was one of the older, heavier, clankier trains—the kind that had been around since the late 1920s—with the long, segmented, caterpillar-like cars. When the doors slid open, I scurried into the closest car, hoping the air would be warmer inside. It was—a little. Sitting down in the first forward-facing seat I came to, I carefully arranged my coat underneath my legs to keep my nylons from snagging on the frayed rattan seats.
    The train was old, but the overhead advertisements were new. Judy Garland smiled down from one of the posters, proclaiming that Westmore lipstick had been KISS-TESTED, and had PROVED BEST in movie close-ups, while right across the aisle—dressed in a white evening gown and proudly smoking a cigarette—Mrs. Francis Irénéé du Pont II of Wilmington and New York, “one of Society’s most charming young matrons,” declared she wouldn’t go anywhere without her Camels. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made hostile faces at each other in an ad for The Colgate Comedy Hour, and the owners of a certain brewery were proud to present Miss Adrienne Garrott—a golden-skinned girl with a thick, foamy head of light blonde hair—as Miss Rhein gold of 1954 (I wondered if she’d been chosen for her likeness to a glass of beer). There were lots of other ads, too—for products like Ovaltine, Tussy lotion, Duz detergent, Camay soap, Odo-ro-no cream deodorant, and (eerily enough) Thom McAn shoes—and I dutifully scanned them all.
    I was beginning to read the ads all over again, for the fourth and (I hoped) final time, when the train pulled into the Times Square station. As soon as the doors opened, I jumped out onto the platform and dashed through the underground depot to the 42nd Street shuttle. Then I got on that train, and stood—lurching and swaying from a leather hand strap near the door (not even one of the male passengers got up to offer me his seat!)—until the shuttle reached the Third Avenue stop. My stop.
    A short block’s trudge through the snow, a quick dash into the lobby coffee shop for my take-out morning muffin, a fast flight up nine floors in the elevator, a brisk stroll down the hall to the third door on the left, and I finally walked into the cold, dark Daring Detective office.
    As always (i.e., as required ), I was the first employee to arrive. One of my primary daily duties was to make the place comfortable—turn on all the lights, warm up the radiators, open the blinds, gather up the newspapers, sort the mail and so forth—for my five male “superiors,” who wouldn’t begin rolling in until thirty minutes later.
    The early bird catches the worm, they say, but in my case it just meant I got to make the coffee.
    “SO WHAT WAS IN THE SHOEBOX?” LENNY asked me as soon as he stumbled into the office. He was still gasping for breath from his nine-floor climb. His black-rimmed glasses sat crookedly on his large hook nose, giving him the appearance of a cockeyed goose.
    “Shhhhhh!” I hissed, holding my index finger up to my lips, jerking my head toward Harvey Crockett’s private office, where our ex-newsman boss sat swilling coffee and reading the papers—with his door (and probably his ears) wide open. “I’m secretly working on a new story,” I whispered. “I’ll tell you all about it later.”
    Lenny looked like he was going to pop. “Another murder story?” His lips were murmuring, but his eyes were screaming their heads off. He was, I knew, scared that I might be getting involved in something I shouldn’t. Something perilous