Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 4, September 1971

It was the beginning. He saw her almost every night for several months. The word spread. Buy her presents and she’ll put out. She soon became one of the most popular girls in the neighborhood. Hortense learned of her escapades and had her committed to the Ventura School for Girls, a state reform school.

The matrons had checked her mother’s background and believed that the daughter was no better or worse and took pains to tell her so. She was told that her mother, according to the records, had spent two years in the school as a delinquent. It had happened when Barbara was two years old. Barbara spent two years in the school and was paroled. The conditions of her parole was that she work at a job and stay home nights. She got a job as a domestic at a paltry wage.

The work was hard. She stuck to it for the eight months of her parole and was discharged from custody. As soon as she received her discharge papers she left town and went to San Diego. This was early in 1940. She worked at various jobs, had a few dates, and then met a mechanic named Harry Kielhammer in a small-time bar.

It was the kind of bar girls and women frequent for the sole purpose of meeting men, and the men feel that any girl who walks into that bar is ready to say “yes” to the big question. Harry Kielhammer, dull, humorless, ordinary, had never hoped to find an attractive young girl like Barbara who would be willing to go along with him. He asked her to marry him and she said she would.

It was an escape from Hortense’s authority. Their marriage was hectic because of Barbara’s frequent excursions to bars and her staying out until the wee hours of the morning after which she refused to explain her whereabouts or actions. She bore Kielhammer two sons, Billy and Darryl.

Soon after, Kielhammer got a divorce. He didn’t want the boys and Barbara couldn’t afford to keep them. They were sent to Kielhammer’s mother in Seattle.

Barbara then began cruising up and down the West Coast, trying to find some place where she would fit, someone who would want her! There was an assortment of men but none of them sought a permanent alliance with her. She wound up back in San Diego. The town was full of sailors eager to spend months of pay on any attractive girl who was willing. She was willing.

She became a “sea-gull” — a gal who follows the fleet. She finally married a sailor named Aloyce Pueschel, just before he shipped out. After Pueschel shipped out she roved from Seattle to Reno; from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Bakersfield, Stockton, and other towns on the Coast. Once she got as far as Chicago, where she obtained jobs as a waitress and a dice girl.

In a bar on North Clark Street and North Avenue she met two “pals” — Mark Monroe and Tom Sittler, a couple of journeymen thieves, robbers, and small-time gunmen. They went for her because she talked like a girl who had been around and knew the score.

“How are you fixed for money, baby?” Monroe asked her.

“Is a girl always fixed for money? There’s never enough, and I’m not giving you a sob story.”

“I’m sure you’re not.” He turned to his friend. “Tom, you think she’s giving us a sob story?”

“Nope. She looks like a right-o to me. Let’s do something for her. Here, I’ll chip in a double sawbuck.”

“Don’t be cheap. Make it half a yard and I’ll match it.”

Tom Sittler handed Monroe fifty dollars and Monroe added his fifty to it and gave it to Barbara.

“You guys were sent from heaven,” Barbara exclaimed. “This will take care of a lot of my troubles.”

“Any time,” Monroe added. “What time do you get off?”

“A little after two. This joint only has a two o’clock ticket. I generally have a bite to eat and then I go home.”

“You tied up with anyone?” Monroe asked.

“Free as a bird.”

“Good. We’ll meet you back here at two. See you.”

They paid her rent, gave her money for clothes, the whole bit. And then on this night they made her a proposition and she went for it.

Monroe said, “We’re convinced you’re a real solid gal, Babs, so we’re going to ask you to help us. We’ll make it worth your while. We need your help bad so we can stay out of the can.”

“Sure, Mark. If I can help I’ll be glad to.”

This was one of Barbara’s weaknesses, agreeing to do something before she weighed the consequences, the danger to herself, the price she would have to pay. It wasn’t that she was gullible nor lacking in intelligence. She was weak in that singular area of giving of herself in order to win someone’s favor, especially if she was wanted or needed.

Mark Monroe said, “We’re wanted in San Francisco. We’re out on bail now for having beaten up and ribbed Sally Stanford, the vice queen out there. You hear of her?”

“No, I don’t think so. Maybe. What do I have to do?”

“We want you to be our alibi, say that you were with us on the day it happened. That’s all.”

“That’s all? Sure, I’ll be glad to do it. Just tell me what to say and I’ll fix it.”