The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion: A Haunted Bookshop Mystery

a dollar bill, picked up the check, folded it neatly, and tucked it into his breast pocket.
    “What’s Plaza-3367?” I asked. “An address?”
    The little boy turned to Jack. “For a lady shamus she sure is slow.”
    Jack grabbed his fedora and rose from his stool. “Take it easy on her, kid. Where she came from, they do things different.”
    “Oh, I get it!” The boy faced me. “You’re from Canada or something, huh?”
    “Or something,” I said.
    “Come on, gang. Let’s blow this joint.” Jack began to herd us toward the door. J. J. skipped ahead. I was right behind.
    “So what’s Plaza-3367 really?” I pressed. “A clue?”
    Jack’s eyes were laughing. “You could call it that.”
    “Excuse me?” I said.
    J. J. swung around. “Jeez, Mrs. McClure, it’s a cinch!” he announced loud enough for half the diners to hear. “The waitress gave him her phone number!”
    Jack turned the boy back around and pushed him through the front door. “Okay, kid. I think she finally got it.”
    I followed the pair onto Third Avenue’s crowded sidewalk and noticed the busy newsstand on the corner. Reaching up, I tapped Jack’s cementlike shoulder. “Hey!”
    “Easy, baby. Don’t go getting jealous on me—”
    I rolled my eyes. “I’m trying to tell you that I just changed my investigation strategy.”
    Jack put the fedora back on his head and gazed down at me. “To what?”
    I pointed to the newsstand. “Didn’t J. J. say he works at that newsstand?”
    “Yeah, he did.”
    “So we should speak to his boss. He might have some more coherent idea of what happened to his mother.”
    “Think so, huh?” Jack’s eyebrow arched. “That’s what I thought, too.” He grabbed my arm. “Come on.”
     
    WE SPOKE WITH Mac Dougherty, the newsstand owner who employed J. J. He was thirty-two and blinded in one eye from a grenade battle in Germany’s Hurtgen Forest. Jack had been one of the commanding officers in the field. He clearly thought the world of Jack, but he said he’d never met J. J.’s mother. The only things he knew about the woman were what J. J. had mentioned to him—she was a schoolteacher who taught uptown.
    Jack mentioned the possibility of J. J. staying with him, but Dougherty shook his head.
    “Wish I could,” he said. “But the wife and I, we already got four mouths to feed and one on the way in a two-bedroom flat. We’re full up. And anyway, J. J. has a place all to himself now, says he can take care of himself.”
    I was about to argue but bit my tongue. This was 1947. A man like Mac Dougherty, half-blind, his head already half-gray, had probably grown up fast in the middle of the Depression. J. J.’s situation wouldn’t look the same to him as it did to me.
    Jack pulled me to the side. “Okay, baby, what’s your next move?”
    I chewed my glossy red lips. “We need to find this Frankie Papps. If he’s the woman’s boyfriend, then he either has a clue to where she went, or else he had something to do with—” I glanced back to the newsstand, made sure J. J. was out of earshot. “I hate to say it, but this Frankie person might have had something to do with ‘disappearing’ the boy’s mother.”
    “And how will I find Frankie?”
    “Phone book?”
    “I’ll save you some time, doll. Frankie wasn’t listed. Probably didn’t even have a phone.”
    “What about your cop friends? You used to be on the police force, didn’t you? Before you joined up and went off to fight the Nazis.”
    “No record for a Frankie Papps. No driver’s license, either—not under that name.”
    “What do you mean that name? Are you saying—” A mechanized roar suddenly drowned out my words. I felt the vibrations of the girders around me and realized a train was passing on the elevated tracks overhead. I waited for the noise to subside. “Are you saying he was using an alias?”
    “It’s always a possibility, isn’t it?” Jack folded his arms. “Come on, baby, what’s your next step? We haven’t got all day.”
    “You mean night, don’t you?” I glanced around. Everything seemed real enough—the roar of the el train, the snap of high heels on pavement, the rank smell of leaded gasoline, the coolness of the dappled shade beneath the raised subway tracks. “This is all just a dream, isn’t it?”
    “It’s more than that and you know it. Come on, honey. Think .”
    “Okay. I guess we should search the missing woman’s residence next, look for leads