The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

But what kind of action? To tell the truth, Verna didn’t have a clue.

She sighed and looked down at her wristwatch. It was eleven, time for her shift at the Darling Telephone Exchange. And only an hour before Frankie Diamond telephoned Mr. Capone and learned that the telegram he had received was a hoax.





THIRTEEN





Verna Works the Switchboard


The evening before, Myra May had pretended that she would be doing Verna a great favor to let her work the switchboard during the noontime dinner rush at the diner. But Verna knew differently.

And when she went into the diner just after eleven that Monday morning and saw the situation—five customers seated at the counter, three more at tables, the switchboard buzzing, and Myra May looking gaunt and frazzled—Verna resolved, right then and there, that she would give up her dinner hour every day until Violet came home, in order to give Myra May a break. What’s more, she would talk to the Dahlias and see if she couldn’t recruit a few people to help Myra May behind the counter. It wasn’t right, her working this hard when others could lend a hand.

The switchboard in the Darling Exchange hadn’t changed a bit since Mrs. Hooper had taught Verna to manage it some years before, and she rather enjoyed getting reacquainted with the plugs and cords and switches. The board worked according to a simple system, and all you had to do was keep your mind on what you were doing.

The operator (in this case, Verna) sat in front of a vertical board that displayed rows and rows of empty sockets, one socket for every telephone in town, and a horizontal panel with a dozen pairs of cords with phone jacks on the ends. Say that Ophelia Snow was at home and decided to call her husband Jed at Snow’s Farm Supply to tell him to stop at Hancock’s Groceries and pick up five pounds of sugar. When Ophelia rang the switchboard, a little bulb would light above her socket—or rather, the socket for her party line, which connected several different houses. Verna would pull one of the cords out, plug the jack into Ophelia’s socket, and say “Number, please,” into her headset microphone. When Ophelia gave Jed’s number (or just said, “Verna, connect me to the Farm Supply, please.”), Verna would plug the second cord of the pair into the socket for the Farm Supply. Then she would send a signal down the line that rang the Farm Supply phone. When Jed answered, she would flip the switch that cut off her headset so that Ophelia and Jed could talk in private. (That was the theory, anyway, although everybody in town knew that the operators didn’t always bother to turn off their headsets, especially when they didn’t have any other calls to tend to.) When Ophelia and Jed hung up, Verna would unplug the cords from the sockets and that was that.

Long-distance phone calls were a little more complicated. The switchboard had a couple of lines that connected to the long-distance office in Mobile. If Ophelia wanted to talk to her cousin in New Orleans, she would give the number to Verna, who would connect with the Mobile long-distance office, tell the operator she had a call for New Orleans, and would eventually be able to give the New Orleans operator the number for Ophelia’s cousin. When the cousin was on the line, Verna would connect Ophelia, and the two could talk. The process often took fifteen minutes or more, especially if the call had to go through several long-distance offices before it finally reached its destination. Circuits were often busy, and callers were sometimes told to hang up and try again later.

Verna was just getting into the swing of things—plugging in a call from Mrs. Sedalius at Magnolia Manor to Beulah’s Beauty Bower—when she heard a familiar voice behind her.

“Verna!” Liz Lacy exclaimed, sounding surprised. “Verna Tidwell, is that you? What in the world are you doing here?”

Verna turned around. “I’m working the switchboard,” she replied, somewhat nettled. “What are you doing here?”

Liz, looking like a ray of sunshine in her yellow dress and bright yellow straw hat, closed the door behind her and leaned against it. “I’m here because of that baldheaded man you told me about—the one who came to your house yesterday afternoon. Bessie says that Miss Jamison is scared to death of him, and he—”

“Bessie?” Verna asked sharply. “How does Bessie know about him?”

“Because she was at the Beauty Bower this morning when Miss Jamison was getting her hair dyed brown,” Liz replied. “Leona Ruth Adcock came in for her appointment and was telling everybody about this baldheaded man—she thinks he’s one of Mr. J. Edgar Hoover’s government agents—who came to her house looking for a platinum blonde. Bessie said Miss Jamison almost fainted. She also bought a red wig for Miss Lake.” She added, “Bessie’s out there in the diner now, waiting for me.”