Don't Die Under the Apple Tree

by Amy Patricia Meade

Genres: Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Life is definitely not easy for 32-year old Rosie O'Doyle Keefe, but she can handle working in New York City's World War II shipyards--until her foreman winds up dead--right after she rebuffed his "requirements" for a promotion. . . Never one to sit back and hope for the best, Rosie discovers that everyone who knew the foreman had good reasons to kill him off. She also finds that she has a surprise ally in the darkly handsome police lieutenant Jack Riordan. But Jack also has to produce a viable suspect for his captain in five days--even if it has to be Rosie. . . Before long, the mystery spirals onto the streets of wartime New York. With the clock ticking and her freedom on the line, Rosie and Lieutenant Riordan will need to join forces to find the truth and catch the now very desperate killer. . .who may be much closer then they think! Raves for the novels of Amy Patricia Meade "If only Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart were still alive. They would be fabulous in the movie version. . .Meade's kickoff mystery is a winner." -- Booklist on Million Dollar Baby "Nary a dull moment." -- Publishers Weekly on Black Moonlight Amy Patricia Meade is the author of the The Marjorie McClelland Mysteries, published by Midnight Ink, including such titles as Black Moonlight, Shadow Waltz, and Ghost of a Chance. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. She grew up watching black-and-white movies from the World War II period, especially anything with the Andrews Sisters. Amy lives in Vermont with her husband and their two cats.

Release date: October 24, 2011

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

“Rose Doyle Keefe.” The petite thirty-two-year-old lifted the lapel of her tan wool coat to display the badge that identified her as an employee of the Pushey Shipyard Corporation, Brooklyn.

The uniformed military guard nodded absently as his eyes traced the outline of her coat lapel and came to rest on the open neck of the dark blue canvas coveralls she wore beneath it.

“Mrs. Rose Keefe,” she amended.

The guard hastily returned his gaze to the badge, scribbled something on a large clipboard, and, without making eye contact, nodded Rosie’s admittance.

Stepping from the cobblestones of Beard Street through the doorway of the nineteenth-century red brick building, Rosie followed the sound of male voices to the massive, windowless holding area. There, by the dim glow of the factory lights, foremen issued the day’s directives and workers waited for the horn blast that signaled the end of one shift and the start of the next.

Rosie stood in the back of the room with the other female employees. Although the still predominantly male staff of Pushey Shipyard understood that the draft was making young male workers increasingly scarce, they refused to take the new, and decidedly temporary, female hires seriously. Shipbuilding was hard, dirty work and no one of the weaker sex could ever excel at it; to infer otherwise was an insult to the profession.

Fearful that cheap women’s labor would replace them or lower their wages, and resentful of the special labor laws that afforded women longer rest periods and newer washroom facilities, even the most decent of men harbored some mistrust or animosity toward the new recruits.

And so, instead of chatting with each other like coworkers, the two genders remained separate. The women huddled together at the back of the room, watching silently as the men told jokes, discussed their families, and regaled each other with tales of their latest sexual conquests.

Even amid the din of boisterous male conversations, one voice rose far above the others, that of self-appointed political pundit Tony Del Vecchio. “Did you hear Roosevelt on the radio last night? Now he’s breaking the army into three different groups—one for air, one for land, and one for supplies. It’s like tirty tree all over again with one bunch of people doing this, another bunch of people doing that, and no one getting anything done. Next thing you know, he’ll be giving them letters of the alphabet, like WPA, NRA, NLRA ... Jeez, if the guy worried half as much about killing Nips and Krauts as he does about naming things, the war could be over before the year is out.”

Michael Delaney, a familiar face from Rosie’s childhood, nodded his head in agreement. “You said it, Tony. The Normandie burned in the harbor just two month ago and they still haven’t figured out who did it. For all we know, it could have been a Nazi. The whole city could be crawling with them, but all FDR cares about is housekeeping. If you ask me, we New Yorkers have to take matters into our own hands.”

“Yep,” Del Vecchio concurred. “Though my old lady could learn something from Roosevelt. If she did half as good a job at putting things in order, I’d be a happy man.” Delaney chuckled in commiseration.

Rosie, meanwhile, shook her head in silence. The only “old lady” in Delaney’s life was his elderly, ailing mother. Barring a minor miracle—namely, the demise of every other man on the planet—that situation was not likely to change anytime soon.

Rail thin and ratlike in countenance, Michael Delaney did not possess the genetic traits that most women considered “swoon worthy.” On the contrary, his wiry black hair, deep-set eyes, and rather prominent nose had, since childhood, garnered negative attention from both sexes, often earning him such unflattering nicknames as “Ichabod” or “Crow.”

Such ridicule might have caused a less determined or less clever child innumerable problems. But Michael Declan Delaney was a master of self-preservation. Adopting the policy of “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em,” Delaney learned at an early age that he could ward off potential tormenters by befriending the loudest, biggest, and dumbest kid in St. Cecilia’s schoolyard. Due to relocation, rising uniform expenses, and growth spurts, the identity of that “kid” changed from year to year, but Delaney’s skill at playing the faithful lackey never wavered. Given his current friendship with Tony Del Vecchio, it still hadn’t.

“Now Frankie-Boy—oh, excuse me: ‘Mr. President’ —is saying the Normandie might have been an accident,” Del Vecchio continued as the men, now silent, gathered around him and Delaney, their insulated work jackets engulfing the two men in a sea of blue. The women, meanwhile, remained clustered in the back of the room; however, they listened and watched with rapt attention. “Accident? You and I were both there, right, Delaney?”

Delaney nodded his head in earnest. “Sure were.”

Again Rosie silently shook her head. Tony Del Vecchio could claim to have kissed both Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable in the same night and Delaney would swear it was true.

“We both saw it, didn’t we? First the black smoke, thicker than anything I’ve ever seen.”

“Everyone saw the smoke, Del Vecchio,” finally Rosie piped up, causing all eyes to turn toward her. “It covered most of Manhattan.”

“Yeah, but not everyone saw the boat go over, did they?” Del Vecchio challenged. “It was the middle of the night, but we saw it, Delaney and me. The fire was out by then, but all of a sudden the thing lurched to the port side and kept on going. I’ve worked on the docks all my life and I ain’t never seen a ship do that.”

“Me neither,” Delaney said.

“The minute we saw it, we both said that it was no accident. Nope. No way that was an accident,” Del Vecchio repeated, much to the delight of his audience. “Mark my words: someone sabotaged that ship. That’s why the fire hoses didn’t work. Someone cut the hoses so that the fire would be out of control by the time anyone could get there.”

“Nazis,” Delaney said. “Had to be.”

“Of course it was Nazis. You can see their U-boats from Rockaway or Jones Beach.”

“The Jersey shore, too,” a man remarked from the crowd. “My sister has a place down there.”

Delaney again nodded, this time with arrogance. “What the hell is the navy doing letting the Krauts get that close? How many ships have to burn before ol’ FDR takes notice and does something other than housekeeping?”

“Housekeeping,” Del Vecchio muttered. “Only thing reorganizing the military does is makes it impossible to find anyone. I got a cousin who signed up for the army and he thinks they might move him to the air force. Do you know where your kid brother’s gonna wind up, Delaney?”

“Nah. I don’t think they’ve told anyone for sure yet. But then again, with my brother you never know.” Delaney looked in Rosie’s direction. “How about you? You know where your husband’s gonna be?”

Billy Keefe had been the bane of Michael Delaney’s existence ever since their school years. Handsome, charming, and a consummate liar, Billy excelled at everything Delaney didn’t, including winning Rosie’s heart.

Reluctant to discuss her absent husband and possibly reignite a childhood rivalry, Rosie feigned deafness.

Delaney, however, was his indefatigable self. “Say, Rosie,” he persisted. “Rosie. Doyle ... I mean, Keefe. Rosie Keefe!”

His voice, combined with the stares of her coworkers, proved impossible to ignore.

She leveled a stare at Delaney that was far blacker than the smoke of the Normandie.

“Hi ... Rosie,” Delaney grinned nervously. “Say, do you know where your husband’s gonna be when they split up the army?”

Like spectators at a tennis match, the seventy-odd employees of Pushey Shipyard turned their attention to Delaney and then back to Rosie, who stood, arms folded across her chest, at the back of the room.

“No,” she answered flatly. “I haven’t heard from him.”

“What?” Delaney put a hand to his ear.

“I don’t know,” Rosie repeated in a voice just softer than a shout. “I haven’t heard from him.”

The crowd again turned to Delaney.

He nodded. “Yeah, the mail is slow in coming. Driving my ma nuts. How long’s it been since your last letter?”

Volley. Back to Keefe.

Rosie drew a deep breath. “I ... umm ... I haven’t had a letter. Or a phone call,” she added.

“Huh? You saying you haven’t heard from your husband since he was called for service?”

Rosie gazed at the faces staring back at her. She wanted to run, hide, bury her head in the ground, but she knew that doing so would cause her to lose her job. “Michael Delaney, your mother is friends with my mother. You know darn well Billy wasn’t drafted. He enlisted.”

This time all eyes remained focused on Rosie.

“How long ago was that?”

Rosie scratched her head through the dark blue kerchief that covered her auburn hair and avoided all eye contact lest she break into tears. “Let’s see ... when did we declare war on Japan?”

“Before Christmas?” Delaney replied incredulously. “Jeez, I had no idea... . That was over four months ago.”

Four months, six days, and eleven hours, Rosie thought. Outwardly, however, her response was one of carefree nonchalance. “Over four months? Really? I’d lost track.”

“Hey, did you say your husband’s name was Billy?” Del Vecchio spoke up. “As in Billy Keefe?”

“Yes,” Rosie answered. “Why?”

Del Vecchio convulsed with laughter, his rounded abdomen quivering violently beneath his gray cotton overalls. “The Billy Keefe I know couldn’t hold a steady job, let alone make it in the army. Every time I see the guy, he’s tying one on with a good-looking dame. Last time it was a tall, cool blonde. The time before that, it was a cute brunette. That’s why you haven’t heard from him. He’s probably shacked up somewhere with some broad.”

As the crowd gawked and whispered, Rosie felt the color drain from her face. She had always suspected that Billy stepped out with other women; so long as those suspicions remained unfounded, it was easy to push them aside and focus on the daily business of living. But now, here she was, surrounded by coworkers she had known for less than a week, listening to this odious troll of a man laugh as he confirmed her worst fears.

“Come on, Tony,” Delaney chided in an uncharacteristic display of backbone. “You don’t have to—”

“It’s okay, Delaney,” Rosie interrupted. “I’m sure Del Vecchio has my husband confused with someone else.”

“I don’t think so. This guy’s five foot nine, light brown hair, and has a big mouth.”

“That describes a lot of men,” Rosie argued.

“Yeah, but not all of them hang out at The Cannery Bar on Court Street,” Del Vecchio countered. “That’s where your Billy liked to go before he ‘enlisted,’ right?”

“I ... I don’t know where he used to go in the evenings,” Rosie stammered.

“This guy probably never worked any job longer than two weeks either. Ring any bells?”

Rosie had no time to confirm or deny the statement. Bob Finch, the shift foreman, stepped to the front of the room to announce the day’s work assignments. “Miller ... Jones ... Murphy ... machine shop. Drummond ... Gaikowski ... Phillips ... Snyder ... Wallace ... graving plate. Nelson ... Scarlatti ... you’ll be in the belly of the beast. Owen ... you’ll assist them.”

“Mr. Finch,” a Negro woman called from the rear of the room. “I thought I was assisting at the bottom of the ship.”

“You know the rules, Jackson,” Finch admonished. “You have to weigh less than 120 pounds to be let down there.”

“But I—” Jackson began to argue.

“You heard what I said, sweetheart. Cut back on the meatloaf sandwiches, fried chicken, or whatever you people eat, and then we’ll talk.”

Rosie felt her blood boil. Although she had grown up in a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Greenpoint, childhood visits to a grandmother in the Bronx had introduced Rosie to people of different races and religions, many of whom helped to look after her grandmother when her health began to fail. It was a life lesson to take people one at a time, instead of as a group.

As Jackson, eyes wide and blinking back tears, shrank back into the crowd in stunned silence, Finch continued the morning’s announcements with the cool reserve of a military sharpshooter. “Hansen, Heater ... Keefe, Passer ... Delaney, Bucker ... Del Vecchio, Riveter. Gang one, Pier number two.”

A “riveting gang,” as it was called, consisted of four members: heater, passer, bucker, and riveter, each of whom played a vital role.

At the beginning of the workday, each gang would be dispatched to their section of the ship. There, a safe distance from the ship’s exterior, the heater would lay wooden planks across a couple of steel beams placed on the ground, thus making a platform for the portable, gas-burning forge in which he would heat the rivets. While the heater brought the forge to temperature, the three other gang members scaled the scaffold and laid planking along the area where they were going to work. Once they were firmly ensconced on the planking, the bucker and passer would drop a rope scaffold bearing the riveter into the ship and lower it until it was level with the exterior platform. Comprised of three two-by-ten planks, this rope scaffold provided just enough space for the riveter and his tools.

Once setup was complete, the passer and bucker, tools in hand, took their position on the exterior scaffold, while the riveter, on the rope scaffold, waited on the other side of the steel hull. The heater, standing on his platform, would heat a rivet until red hot. Using tongs, he would pick it from the coals of his forge and toss it to the passer, who caught it in a metal can.

Meanwhile, the bucker had unscrewed and pulled out one of the temporary bolts joining the two pieces of steel, leaving the hole empty. The passer would pick the rivet—which, at this stage, was shaped like a mushroom with a button head and a stem—out of his can with a pair of tongs, stick it in the now-vacant hole, and push it in until the head was flush with the steel and the stem protruded from the riveter’s side.

While the passer stepped aside and prepared to catch the next rivet, the bucker fitted a tool over the rivet head and held it in place while the riveter pressed the cupped head of his pneumatic hammer against the rivet stem, which was still red hot and malleable, and formed a button head on that side as well.

The process was repeated until every hole that could be reached from the scaffolds was filled with permanent rivets. The scaffolds would then be moved to a new section. The heater’s platform, however, remained in place until all the work within a seventy-foot radius had been completed.

Upon hearing her assignment, Rosie sighed noisily. She had spent the previous week acting as passer to the riveting gang of Hansen, Del Vecchio, and Delaney. It was only Tuesday, but this week looked to be shaping up the same way.

Although working on high scaffolding presented its own risk to workers’ safety, that risk was far outweighed by the dangers posed by the red-hot rivets as they sailed approximately forty to seventy feet through the air. In the few days since starting at Pushey, Rosie had heard several employees speak of flying rivets that had burned through their clothes, hair, and flesh. And Delaney, a lifelong bucker, had warned Rosie against allowing the hot metal to fall into the vats of oil, varnish, paint, or any of the vast number of flammable chemicals present at the shipyard on a daily basis.

Indeed, for a riveting gang to avoid injury, it was necessary for all four workers to learn to anticipate each other’s movements, but nowhere was this truer than in the relationship between heater and passer. The best heater/passer teams in the yard not only minimized the risk of injury, but they enabled the bucker and riveter to work at maximum efficiency and speed while demonstrating a rhythm and flow typically seen only in Major League catchers and pitchers.

Rudy Hansen was one of the best heaters at Pushey Shipyard. In complete control of the forge at all times, he could heat a rivet to the perfect temperature and do so quickly, so that none of it melted away. Meticulous and highly observant, he could determine whether or not a passer would be good at his job within the first few hours of working with him. Unfortunately, the only thing Hansen could determine about this new passer was that she was female.

Rosie followed the rest of her gang into the shipyard and climbed, along with Delaney, to the scaffold. Working at a height of fifty feet granted her a bird’s-eye view of the yard below and the cobblestone streets beyond, but the massive steel hull completely obscured her view of Gowanus Bay. Just as well, she thought. Catching Hansen’s rivets while balancing herself on the narrow platform was difficult enough; she did not need the added distraction of a waterfront view.

Clutching her rivet cone tightly in her hand, she waited for the first toss of the day, fully aware of Hansen’s contempt, and confident that he’d persist in the previous day’s behavior of consistently overshooting the bucket. While most of yesterday’s tosses could still be caught by taking a step backward toward Delaney, the few that had been thrown overhanded, rather than in the traditional underhanded fashion, proved impossible to either catch or dodge and had left large red welts on Rosie’s wrists.

It was, therefore, a genuine surprise to find that today, the first, second, and then a third round of rivets landed softly in the bucket.

Still on guard, yet hoping for the best, she caught every rivet Hansen cast her way that morning. Feeling herself falling into the rhythm the other, more experienced passers had described, she finally understood their love for the trade. There was, amongst the creaks and crackles of the narrow walkways, despite the swinging of the ragged old ropes, a beautiful choreography to the process.

Rosie grabbed a hot rivet from her bucket, placed it in a predrilled hole, and smiled to herself. Perhaps this job will work out, she thought. Perhaps I’ve been too hasty—

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden and sharp burning sensation in the back of her trousers. Rosie turned her head to see a round hole, just about the size of a rivet, singed into the sea. . .