Alice Kimberley
The Ghost and the Femme Fatale
The fourth book in the Haunted Bookshop series, 2008
To the noir filmmakers of the '40s and '50s for the remarkable art they left behind.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Sincerest thanks to Wendy McCurdy, executive editor, and John Talbot, literary agent. Like Jack, they are entities unseen, yet absolutely vital to the existence of this book.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Although real places and institutions are mentioned in this book, they are used in the service of fiction. No character in this book is based on any person, living or dead, and the world presented is completely fictitious.
But that was life… light and shade… a coming in of the tide and a going out…
– The Ghost and Mrs. Muir by R. A. Dick (a.k.a. Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie)
Prologue
I don't mind a reasonable amount of trouble.
– Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, 1941
The Empire Theater 42nd Street, Manhattan April 16, 1948
THE SPRING EVENING was cool, the 950-seat movie house was packed, and Jack Shepard was on the job, watching a too-young chippy enjoy a night at the pictures with her paramour.
The doll was no raving beauty, more like the girl next door, with a pert face and dimpled chin, mustard yellow dress with a cutesy lace collar, curls the color of Cracker Jack, and young- seventeen, eighteen, if that.
Planted next to her was the sugar daddy: thinning brown hair, Errol Flynn mustache, face like a flushed baseball. Not fat, but a torso plump enough to annoy the buttons of his three-piece suit. Hired cars and steak dinners every night would do that to an Alvin, not to mention downing case after case of prime tonsil paint.