San Diego Noir

“She was excited for me to be leaving the farm, going off to see the world. She really wanted to get away too. We’d talked about it, and she’d already decided to leave as soon as she could. When Papa arranged to get some German POWs to work for him, she skedaddled out west. She never wanted to look another chicken in the eye again!”

“Can I keep this?”

He nodded.

“And when did she get here?”

“In May. She got taken on right away at Consolidated, and they put her on the PBY assembly line as soon as she finished her training. Flying boats.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“They had her working tail, cause she fits into small places.” He grinned shyly. So young and cute. “Her last letter said she got to see the first flight of a plane she made. She was so proud!”

I could imagine that slim girl creeping into the cutaways and nooks in the rear of the fuselage, toting her rivet gun, snaking the air hose along and avoiding sharp edges and snags, then getting to work, the staccato slap-choo of the gun echoing in the tiny space. Tending chickens somehow didn’t seem so bad compared to that, but I hadn’t grown up with them.

“Any boyfriends?”

“Not that she told me about. There was a boy at home who was sweet on her during high school, but I don’t think they stayed in touch.”

I got the details of Mary’s workplace and the address she’d moved to and told Przybilski I’d see what I could do. He gave me two dollars for my retainer and left.

I decided to check out where Mary had been living. I locked the office and walked downstairs to India Street. It was a typical San Diego September day, sunny and warm with a gentle breeze ruffling the bay. The water sparkled with heartless beauty. I caught a streetcar heading south, then transferred to a bus. I got off at Market and 20th.

I looked down 20th toward K Street. Three blocks away, I saw a red-roofed tower lording it over the small bungalows that made up the neighborhood. It was the Jesse Shepard House, a mansion built by rich men for an eccentric musician in the 1880s in the hopes of bringing culture to their dusty town. With a start, I realized that it had been converted into the boarding house that Mary had moved to. It was a jumble of architectural features and finishes punctuated by stained-glass windows. Wrought-iron panels topped a low concrete fence that rose up from the sidewalk. The whole effect was of a cut-and-pasted Victorian Sears catalog.

As I came closer, it was clear that this grand building, once the pride of San Diego, had been thoroughly humbled by the needs of wartime. The white paint had cracked and peeled into loose flakes. Blackout curtains framed the panels of stained glass. Wide windows showed the edge-on shadows of partitions. Formerly spacious rooms had been roughly subdivided.

I crossed the street to a corner market and bought a soda.

“Pretty fancy building over there,” I commented to the clerk, an older woman with her gray hair in a tidy bun.

“Just a shame what they’ve done to it since the Lynches died. I know people need places to live, what with the housing shortage and all, but it’s too bad they had to turn that fine old place into a boarding house. Can I open that for you?” she asked, gesturing to the bottle.

“Sure!” I took a sip of the fizzy cold Coke and leaned against a vegetable bin. “So they’ve got a lot of folks living there now?”

“They put up so many partitions to make rooms, they must have twenty people staying there. All girls, they don’t take men. Each girl gets her own personal cracker box. They mostly work at the aircraft factories.”

“Must be a nice bit of extra business for you, with so many girls around.”

“Well, they’re gone all day and they hardly cook, but we make sandwiches to sell for their lunch pails, so we’re doing okay. Sometimes a few girls will get together and buy some stew meat and vegetables to make dinner on the weekend, but the owners are pretty stingy with kitchen privileges. It’s almost like they don’t want them to have a good time when they get a chance.”

I pulled Mary’s picture out of my handbag. “I think a friend of mine might have been staying there—have you seen her?”

The woman peered at the photo. “I couldn’t say. Some of those girls come and go so fast, I just can’t keep track. There’s a group of them that’ve been there for a while, but sometimes I’ll no sooner see one than she’s gone. With all the girls coming to take jobs at the plants, those rooms don’t stay vacant but hardly a day.”

I finished my Coke and put the bottle in the return rack. Another customer came. Her eyes shifted to him, narrowed, and she shook her head slightly at him. I took the opportunity to wave goodbye and head back down the street.