Passing Fancies (A Julia Kydd Novel)

by Marlowe Benn

  “Where is she? Just tell me, and I’ll go.”

  “Leave us alone.”

  “Tell me where she is.”

  “Get the hell out of here.”

  “I saw her in the police station,” Julia said. “I know she didn’t kill anyone. I want to help.”

  At police he dipped into a crouch. He regripped the blunt thumb of the pencil. It was short and dull but still a weapon. With enough force, it could do plenty of damage. Julia took a quick step back, raising her handbag and bracing her heel should she need to turn and run. Her voice rattled. “Please, where is she?”

  He swallowed. His jaw creaked, but no words came out.

  She tried again. “If you care about Eva, tell me where she is.”

  He shook his head. Did that mean he didn’t know, or he would never tell? Perhaps he felt he was protecting her. Regardless, he seemed adamant.

  “I just want to talk to her,” Julia said. “Find some way to prove she’s innocent.”

  He paced toward the back of the cave-like room, shaking his head like a bear tormented by flies. “You live on another planet. If Timson’s dogs don’t get her, the cops will. Either way, it’s just one more New York lynching. She’s good as dead.”

  Scraping sounds rose from his lungs, the empty husks of tears. Julia could hardly bear it. Eva was right. This man did love her. He might be persuaded to help her in some other way.

  “You can still help her get out of this alive,” Julia said.

  His head came up, eyes narrowed. “How?”

  “Give yourself up. You can’t hide forever.”

  His forehead pleated in disbelief.

  She pressed the point. “Confess, Jerome. At least save her.”

  With a guttural moan he took a step closer. She raised her handbag like a shield, flashing its sharp clasp. He stared at it, then at the remnant of pencil in his fist. He barked a hoarse laugh and dropped it onto the table. “Really?” he croaked. “You’re afraid of me? Filthy and rank, I know, but frightening?”

  His unshaven face convulsed in disbelief. Another wrenching sound came from his lungs. “You can’t think I shot Timson.”

  Couldn’t she? An hour ago she’d been certain of it. Now that certainty was melting fast. A fugitive killer with nothing more to lose would never make that anguished sound. A murderer would never accept a slow descent into this backstage hell. No killer would wonder at her fear.

  Julia regripped the handbag at her waist, as if to ward off the terrible sound. She had come prepared for anger, even violence, but not this. Not such tormented grief.

  “Do you know where she is?”

  Another gust of despair. “I don’t know one damn thing. Not one!”

  Julia’s heart lurched. This man was broken. Grief leaked out of every pore. She wanted to flee his misery but couldn’t. She had to stay, try to learn anything she could. But when she asked what he knew about that night, his jaw sagged in scorn.

  “Why the hell would I tell you anything? You?”

  “Eva trusts me.”

  His eyes narrowed. He didn’t believe her, or he didn’t care.

  “I’m her friend,” Julia pleaded.

  He swayed, thighs bumping against the table edge. “It’s too late.”

  “Not as long as she’s still hiding. Tell me, Jerome.”

  He bent toward her. Their noses six inches apart, his dark, hard eyes bored into hers. She blinked at the noxious smell of uncleaned teeth and endless cigarettes.

  “You think you can just waltz in anywhere—her life, my life, this hellhole?” He gave a ragged sweep of his arm. “I may be a pathetic wretch, but you can snap your fingers all you want, and I still don’t have to jump. Not for you. You don’t get to tell me what to do.” He lifted his chin. Dirt lined the creases in his neck.

  Sweet Jesus.

  Julia! What a dunderhead she was. He was right. She’d done exactly what Logan had warned her against. She’d sailed into his hiding place like a meddling Miss Anne, one of those righteous white women determined to rescue Negroes from their woes. She’d mistrusted Jerome from the start, wary for Eva’s sake and put off by his haughty pride. What about her arrogance? She’d presumed much and understood little. He had every reason to mistrust her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I truly am. But I can’t do anything without your help, and you can’t do anything without mine. Please trust me, for Eva’s sake? Please?”

  His eyes darted across her face as if searching for chinks of treachery. At last he turned and shuffled into a tiny side chamber created by a thin wall of rough boards. This hiding place had been partitioned off from the laundry, sharing its heat and moisture but not the basins. A grimy window, covered with an iron grille, was pushed up as far as it would go. But it admitted only the stench of stewing garbage from the alley. Beneath it was a cot with a bedsheet tucked neatly into place. A single metal chair, its white paint chipped and scratched, held a folded shirt. Was this tidiness the last vestige of his pride? He moved the shirt to the bed and sat beside it, slapping the chair for Julia.

  A distant roar reached them from the stage. The show must be coming to its headline acts. Jerome slumped, elbows on his knees, forehead in his palms. Perspiration beaded and trickled on his skin. She tried to ignore her own.

  “She wouldn’t shoot him,” he said wearily, as if for the thousandth time. “No matter how vile he was. She hates guns. She’s terrified of them.”

  “Did she go back up after her last show?”

  Jerome raked fingers over his spongy mat of hair. “She wanted to get that damn manuscript. I thought it was a terrible idea. But she wouldn’t give it up.”

  Julia considered. “She went back?”

  His head sagged into his hands. “I don’t know.”

  “What happened?”

  Jerome sank as he spoke, until his chest lay on the planks of his thighs. “I went home. Next thing I knew, some white men were hauling me out of bed and saying Timson had been shot. That was all. They gave me about two minutes to get some things together, then dumped me here and said I’m a dead man if I try to leave. As if I killed him!”

  “Have you talked with her?”

  “Once, that night. They took me into Wallace’s office. I guess he owns this place. I got on the line, and her voice was shaking so bad she couldn’t put more than three or four words together. I’ve never heard her like that.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That Timson was dead and we both had to hide. She was crying about how we were in terrible trouble. She fussed about losing that damn manuscript. Like I care two beans for that now.”

  “Do you know where she was?”

  “One of Wallace’s buildings, I don’t know which. She said he told her he’d help if she went to the cops, so she was going to do it in the morning. I think maybe he was there.”

  Jerome looked straight at Julia. “She never said she killed him, and she never said she didn’t. She knew it was hopeless either way.”

  “She went to Wallace for help?”

  “Yes.” The word gushed out in a sluice of pained disbelief. “Why him? Why not me?”

  Julia understood why. Eva had gone to someone with the power to help her. She swallowed and asked her next difficult question, praying he wouldn’t get angry. “When I saw her on Monday, she had some nasty bruises. Do you know how she got them?”

  He coughed. “You mean, Did I beat her? Just say it. Yes, we argued. I told her it was crazy to go back upstairs. You saw what that man was like. But I would never, ever lay a hand on her.”

  He exhaled another foul breath. “It was probably the cops. They like to remind us who’s in charge.”

  “They said she’d been beaten before she came into the precinct.”

  “Timson then. Bastard.”

  “Except,” Julia said slowly, thinking, “those bruises could prove Timson attacked her. She could say she acted in self-defense.”

  Jerome snorted. “Says a white lady in
a ten-dollar hat. There’s no such thing as self-defense if you’re colored and a white man’s dead.”

  Julia felt something slip inside her, her moral logic wobble and crack. He was right. How could she keep forgetting? Her map of the world was the wrong map. Here she was a ridiculous stranger. How absurd was she at that moment, formulating a logical defense in her smart Agnès hat and Callot frock, now sodden with the perspiration of a backstage laundress?

  She found her small handkerchief and lifted off her hat. She ran the cloth around her hairline, pushing back the curls stuck to her face. “Eva loved your plans for Paris.”

  His eyes sparked. “She told you about that? Seems like a million years ago. We’re not going anywhere now. Not to Paris, not to the toilet, nowhere, without checking six times that no one sees us.”

  Julia refolded the cloth and wiped the hollows of her throat. She hunched her shoulders and jiggled her dress before daubing the trickles between her breasts. Sweat is a great equalizer, she thought as she sacrificed dignity for relief. “Why was she so keen on Paris? Wouldn’t it be simpler to stay closer to home?”

  A wry smile crossed his face. “She was keen, wasn’t she? It made no sense. But when I told her about the time I was there on a fellowship, she decided it was the perfect city, perfect for us. With a little money, the world was going to be at our feet.”

  The smile faded, but his eyes kindled with a new warmth. “She started scheming how to get us there. That’s why she decided to write her book, to give Pablo Duveen what he’d been babbling for, the whole gaudy, glittering rara avis of Evangeline Pruitt, in prose just purple enough to make him pry open Goldsmith’s wallet and dig deep.”

  “She wrote it for the money?”

  Jerome smiled again, and Julia saw a tenderness so acute she dropped her eyes. “Hopeless romantic,” he said, cheeks buckling. “Did she tell you? We got married two weeks ago so we could share a cabin on the ship.”

  Julia’s throat swelled. She clamped down against tears. Married. Oh, Eva. That was why she’d wanted to change the wording of her dedication page. The irony was unbearable.

  “She wanted the ship’s captain to perform another ceremony,” Jerome said, “for pictures to send out with the announcement. We were going to stay in Paris as long as the money lasted. It was to be our honeymoon, but what she really loved was the idea of afterward, being a teacher’s wife, having a few babies, singing in a choir, writing some. She has talent, you know, not that you’d see it in that damn novel. She has a nice vernacular style, an easy, clean voice.”

  “I’d have thought she had plenty of money,” Julia began, until she remembered that Timson controlled Eva’s bank account. Good God. When would men and banks trust women to manage their own funds?

  “That’s what Timson wanted everyone to think. He bragged about her big salary like he was so generous, but he took most of it back for rent and ‘security’ fees. He actually charged her for the goons he hired to make sure she toed the line. She got just enough cash to keep herself looking good, which was all he wanted to pay for anyway.”

  Julia’s sense of Eva’s elegant life slipped even further. “What about her jewelry? Couldn’t she sell some of it to buy those tickets?”

  “He watched what she wore. She was like his expensive pet—she had to look rich to show how rich he was.”

  “No wonder she wanted out.”

  “And she was proud of that book money, thought it was respectable. She wanted to show my parents she could measure up to their Strivin’ standards.”

  They sat nearly knee to knee now. In the linty heat Julia’s slippery legs eased apart. Another few degrees, and she’d be no better than a slumbering grandma. “Where is she, Jerome?”

  He took the hat from her lap. In his dark hands, his fingernails rimmed with dried blood from cracks and fissures, the thing looked as ridiculous as Marie Antoinette’s towering powdered wigs. He made a fist and hung the limp pouch of straw, felt, and Belgian ribbon from it, like a foppish head on a bloody pike.

  She hiccuped a weak laugh.

  Jerome made a kind of laughter too. Julia tasted salt. She sponged at her face with her scrap of lace and linen. Jerome wiped his with the crown of her hat.

  He laid the sticky wad in her lap. “You need a new hat.”

  She caught his thumb. “Where is she?”

  “I do not know. Honest to God.”

  Julia let go of his thumb.

  “You could ask your boyfriend.”

  “My boyfriend?”

  He swiped his face again, with the back of his hand. “I saw the way you looked at him. Wallace knows. He’s the one who stuck me in here. Some child brings me cigarettes and vile stuff they call food, and I just piss away the days in this oven. Might as well be in prison.”

  Julia barely heard him over the shouts in her brain. Wallace knew where Eva was?

  Wallace knew. He’d lied to her. Each time he’d said he didn’t know, he’d been lying. Each time he’d listened to her worry and speculate, his silence had been another kind of lying.

  She straightened. “Can you communicate with her?”

  “I write notes, but who knows what the boy does with them. I know one got out—” He stopped. “Lanier. It was that sap who told you I was here.”

  “I made him tell me. Don’t blame him.”

  “What a gent. He’d twist his knickers to please a pretty girl who talks Yeats.”

  “What about Eva? Have you heard from her?”

  “Two notes, both queer, both begging for that damn manuscript. How the hell do I know where it is?”

  Julia considered this puzzling news. “May I see?”

  He stood. As he moved, the cot’s thin mattress shifted, and something clattered to the floor. Julia nearly gasped when she saw it: the barrel of a gun, poking out of a small chamois bag. She shrank back, thinking wildly of what to do. Was it better to try to dive for the thing before he could grab it, or run like mad?

  Jerome made a startled noise too. “Damn thing. It’s not mine.” Julia spread her palms in a ridiculous semblance of a shield as he picked up the bag with two fingers and folded it shut.

  “Wallace’s men gave it to me, in case someone comes nosing around. As if I’d last two seconds in some shoot-out. I’d feel safer without it.”

  He pushed it back under the mattress and pulled a small leather satchel from under the cot. He lifted out its contents: a few framed photographs she didn’t have time to see and two folded letters, both typed. One fell open long enough for her to read its letterhead: The Criterion. The letter from Eliot. Of course he’d save that. Before the pain of its new irrelevance could unsettle her, she watched him remove a pile of old newspapers, limp and wrinkled in the heat. They were covered with blue ink, written in columns across the length of the pages, perpendicular to the print: palimpsests. The script was swollen and distorted, possibly no longer legible on the unsized paper. From beneath them he handed her a square white card.

  The card stock was heavy and expensive with a mouldmade deckle. In a large spiking hand, each stroke like a wayward arrow, was written: Baby, it’s important! Please give my book to Mr. Wallace’s boy. XO! E.

  “The other one’s just like it.”

  Julia read the note again and turned it over. The back of the card was covered with a dozen or more lines written in a tight, crabbed cursive of blue ink, spattered with blotted-out words and webbed with lines threading substitutions to be inserted. A poem in progress.

  Jerome returned it to the bottom of his satchel. “I might as well use the paper.”

  “You’re writing?”

  “What else can I do?”

  “On newspapers?”

  He cocked his head. “You never think about all the clean white paper at your fingertips. I had to leave so fast I didn’t even have time to grab a book, much less paper. Well, when you’re ready to scream for something to write on, newspaper works just fine. But all I could find in this hole was that sorry stump of a pen
cil. That’s why I had to ask Logan for a pen.”

  He exhaled. “It’s almost out of ink now.”

  Julia’s thoughts churned. Those notes meant Eva didn’t have the manuscript. It wasn’t exactly proof of innocence, but it made Kessler’s assumptions much shakier. Why would she want it so badly? Was she frightened by Goldsmith’s ultimatum? More importantly, why did she think Jerome had it? Did she think he’d killed Timson?

  Good Lord. Had he? Had Julia’s first instinct been right after all?

  Too many questions swarmed in her melting mind. Another blast of wailing trumpets meant the show would be ending soon. She had to get back before the performers returned backstage. She stood and peeled her dress from the back of her thighs. “I have to leave. But I’ll do everything I can to help.”

  Jerome pulled himself to his feet as well, stirring a wake of nauseating odors.

  Julia reached the door before she thought of it. She turned back to hand him the pen from her handbag, a slim silver Waterman. It had been a gift from a long-ago friend who called himself a writer but would never understand how scraps of newspaper could be enough.

  She nearly ran through the Half-Shell’s backstage cavern. She ignored the whistles and grunting laughter. Music caromed off the walls, peppering her temples with its hot tempo. Philip would be wondering what had become of her. She broke into a faster trot. A single thought drummed in her mind to the music’s beat: Wallace knew where Eva was. Wallace knew.

  She reached the corridor that led to the carpeted hallway. She spun around the corner and smacked straight into a wall that hadn’t been there before. She’d have been knocked to the floor if the man had not caught her elbows.

  “Pardon me,” she gasped, then recognized Martin Wallace.

  In an instant she saw. He knew where she’d been. As she dug for breath to speak, he steered her through the unmarked door.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was an office, beautifully furnished with a settee and two wing chairs facing each other across a low table. A massive desk presided over the far end of the room, beneath a gloomy New England landscape in oils. Two lamps glowed on a sideboard, giving the windowless room a genteel warmth cruelly unlike the clogged heat of Jerome’s cell.