When I was a schoolgirl at the Convent of The Sacred Heart in New York City, I lived with Maps, my governess, in an enormous apartment overlooking Central Park. My father, Tyrone Moran, was a movie star who was rarely home and when he was, he was out with a string of women, one younger than the next. On Sundays, Maps and I would venture into the park with our drawing pads and crayons. She was an amateur artist and in my view, a very bad one, however, I was even worse. She used to say to me, “A good artist notices every detail. It’s in the details that great art comes.”
As a detective for those lost in World War Two, I’ve always taken that lesson to heart. I spend hours pouring over my notebooks scouring the details. Sometimes one pops up that may seem insignificant, but really is the most important clue of a case. Take this morning for instance, I was sitting in La Silhouette, the bar I own with Marlene Dietrich’s ex-lover, Françoise, going through my notebook for my latest case, a missing Polish boy, Karol, kidnapped by the Nazis and Germanized. His mother Lena, had given me a photo of both of them shortly before they were separated by the SS in the town square of Zamość in 1942. Something caught my eye, it was a gold watch on Lena’s wrist shaped like a heart. Where had I seen that watch before? Before I could think, Françoise came over with a bowl of café au lait and then barked at Remy, her assistant, to mop the floors. Then the door opened and a deliveryman came in with the liquor delivery. He nodded to me and went straight to Françoise who lit her ubiquitous Galouise and moved her wrist to glance at her watch. The watch face was turned on the back of her wrist and then it hit me. The German nurse I had interviewed in Ebensee wore a watch identical to Lena’s except it was facing backwards as if she was hiding it from me. The nurse had professed not seeing Karol when she ran her infamous children’s home which had warehoused the children kidnapped from Poland.
Why did the nurse have Lena’s watch? And how did a poor Polish maid get a watch like that in the first place?
Françoise sat down. She stubbed out her cigarette. “You’re stuck,” she noted looking at me staring at my notebook. “Remy, after the floors are done wipe down the bar.” She caught my look at disapproval, rolled her eyes and then said, “Please.”
“I am stuck.” I said. “Look at this watch this woman is wearing in this photograph. It’s gold in the shape of a heart with diamonds around the face. The thing is, she’s a maid, so how did she get this watch in the first place?”
Françoise studied the photo and then said. “There are two ways someone like that gets a watch; either it’s stolen or it’s from a lover. And since she’s wearing it so blatantly, it must be from a lover. Trust me I know.”
She got up and left. I studied my notebook. Françoise was right, but who was Lena’s lover? Had she given the nurse her watch or had it been taken? Sometimes, it’s the smallest detail that opens a case wide. Other times, it’s a red herring that leads me into a maze with a dead end. The watch was more than a clue, it was a metaphor for the case, time was running out. I had three weeks to find this boy or his mother would be gone forever to Chicago. Then something else occurred to me; the watch was more than a clue. It was probably used to save the boy’s life. I knew had to find that nurse again and ask her what she had done with he lost boy. I slammed by notebook shut. It was time to travel back to Germany.
You can read more about Slim in The Lost Spy, the first book in the “Slim Moran” historical series.
It is Paris, 1949. 27-year-old American detective and heiress, Slim Moran, is hired by a British spymistress to find Marie-Claire, a spy long presumed dead. Slim soon realizes that scores from the last war have not been settled. She races to find out what happened to this deeply troubled lost spy because if Marie-Claire is not dead, she will be soon.
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About the author
Kate Moira Ryan is an award-winning playwright. Her work was been produced nationally and internationally. She is recipient of two GLAAD Media Awards. Her first book in “The Slim Moran” Mystery Series, The Lost Spy won a Kindle Scout campaign and is published by Kindle Press.
I roll over on my feather bed and moan, feeling vaguely hysterical, only mostly awake from a Detective Joe Singer dream. We were trapping a criminal together— a man who did unspeakable things. In the dream, the only way to catch the maniacal fiend and save our own lives was if Joe and I got perfect scores in ring toss.
When you make your living conning people out of their money, you have to expect good days and bad days. Today was one of the bad ones. A really bad one, in fact. It all started when my partner, Jake, made a stupid mistake and the mark we were working realized he’d been cheated. The mark had his two goons beat Jake up and then sent them after me. I didn’t stand a chance, but luckily, I remembered those women who were marching in front of the White House, which was only a few blocks from the hotel where we were staying. I figured I could blend in with them and the goons wouldn’t dare bother me. And it worked. I got away from them.
Life for me in the small English village of Walmsley Parva used to run along a rather predictable pattern. Most days I woke up to a nagging series of thoughts concerning my overdue accounts at the local greengrocer or a disturbing patch of damp growing ever larger in the corner of my sitting room. I spent my day in the company of my beloved terrier, Crumpet, and my irksome jobbing gardener Simpkins with whom I have an ongoing quarrel on the subject of tuberous begonias. Evenings I spent playing games of Patience or knitting small jumpers and pairs of booties to be sold in support of the church roof fund. One day was very much like another. It was not a bad life but it was not a particularly exciting one either.
I pressed a hand to my temple, closing my eyes as the beat of the drums grew ever louder, synchronizing with the pounding in my skull. I silently willed my man-of-all-work to hurry, praying I wasn’t already trapped. That it wasn’t too late.
Only a few weeks ago I could never have predicted my day-to-day life would change so completely. Which presents some degree of difficulty as I profess myself to have psychic abilities. One could reasonably argue that I should have had some inkling I would soon find myself settled into sumptuous accommodations at my aunt’s hotel in Maine rather than rattling the roads working with my father on a Canadian medicine show. It seems like one moment I was living the life of an impoverished wanderer with nowhere to call home and a list of aliases so long I hardly remembered my real name. The next moment I had a luxurious bedroom all to myself complete with a fireplace and a sweeping view of the sea.
Mayfair Section of London – Saturday, September 1, 1888
dru's book musings 