Passing Fancies (A Julia Kydd Novel)

by Marlowe Benn

  The door closed on the orchestra’s wild thumping. Wallace released her arm.

  He knew where Eva was. He’d known all along. Julia slapped him hard across his right cheek.

  He rubbed the spot as he poured out whiskey from a decanter on the sideboard. “So you’ve flushed out Mr. Crockett. I assure you it would’ve been better if you hadn’t.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “I lied to you.” He rested his glass against his chastened cheek.

  “You’ve been hiding Eva all along?”

  He took a swallow. “I have.”

  “I want to see her.”

  He touched the damp skin beneath her ear.

  Julia leaned away. “I want to know what you know.”

  For several seconds he considered. “All right. We’ll talk about it. But not here.”

  Julia slipped into the chair beside Philip. If he’d wondered about her long absence, it was far from his mind now. He lifted a forefinger to register her return but kept his narrowed eyes on the stage. Jack was even more absorbed in the show. He sat on the edge of his seat, elbows splayed over the table and hands framing his head, blinkered like a dray horse to focus wholly on what lay ahead.

  The orchestra seemed to burst from its corner: trombones poking their snouts into the spotlight, cornets and clarinets squalling in counterrhythms. In the vortex of all that sound, impaled by a shaft of white light, danced a man and a woman. Both wore huge headdresses transforming them into fantastical strange birds with human bodies, all eight limbs painted shades of green and banded with rows of gold bracelets. Their bones throbbed from one erotic posture to another, arms and legs swarming and humming, shoulders ever squared beneath the weight of their bird masks.

  The audience had swelled. The Half-Shell was now jammed with watchers, some unable to stay in their chairs. They pounded tables and stomped on the floor to the beat of music and muscles. Their energy inflamed the performances of both the featured dancers and the impromptu ones.

  Behind the costumed pair, half in and half out of the stage’s shadows, another couple cavorted. Pablo Duveen and Carl Sweeney drew shrieks of laughter as they mimicked the dancers’ movements. Both men’s jackets were gone, and Duveen’s white dress shirt gaped open to his belly. Slabs of pale flesh quivered as he pranced into and out of Sweeney’s embrace, his white hands graphic claws against the younger man’s black trousers.

  As the music reached a crescendo, the masked dancers swung apart. The man sank onto his back on the floor, and the woman kneeled in triumph over his mask, its sharp beak thrusting explicitly between her parted thighs. Beside them, Duveen also tumbled to the floor and pulled Sweeney to his knees, haunches hovering over Duveen’s panting face. The final cornet note screamed, and Duveen waggled his tongue like a randy snake. Julia had never witnessed anything so obscene.

  The houselights brightened onto bedlam. Weirdly severed from the masks left lolling on the floor, the dancers flung up their arms to receive the adulation, then followed the sweat-mopping musicians back through the curtains offstage. Duveen and Sweeney retrieved their jackets and slowly made their way through the crowd toward Jay and Edwin, who stood clapping and barking.

  Philip sat back with a wry smile, but Jack sat motionless for several seconds. Then he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his face. His mottled cheeks spoke to the pace of his heartbeat.

  “I’m going to leave in a few minutes,” Julia said. “With Martin Wallace.”

  Philip rose half out of his chair, but before he could implode with objections, Duveen and Sweeney returned, stirring commotion with every cackle. Jay and Edwin embraced them with all the affection of a six-hour acquaintance. Duveen poured gin straight from his flask into his throat, burbling what he couldn’t swallow.

  “We’re off to worship Gladys Bentley.” He reached across Philip to tug at Jack’s sleeve. “Van Dyne, you virtuous daisy. Come with us. You too, Kydd.”

  So they’d become acquainted while she was away.

  Sweeney giggled. “She’s the queen of the life. Biggest bulldagger in Harlem.”

  “Two hundred pounds of sugar!” Duveen’s arms swarmed to find the sleeves of his jacket. His shirt still hung open, and his pale breasts sagged like an old woman’s. “You haven’t seen Harlem till you’ve seen Gladys stir her vat. Come on, daisy. You’ll love her.”

  Julia eased away to the ladies’ room to freshen her wilted countenance. Which terror would Philip choose, she wondered: Gladys Bentley, or contemplation of her departure with Wallace?

  The Duesenberg rolled through the streets of Harlem like a great stalking cat. Julia watched scores of people, mostly colored but some white, walking, dancing, arguing, singing, weeping, laughing, and being sick on the sidewalks as they glided by. It must be three or four in the morning, yet no one was sleeping. A breeze stirred her hair and chilled her scalp. It brought fleeting smells of garbage and gasoline.

  As they headed south, the streets grew darker and quieter. Soon Central Park loomed black on their left, and slumbering apartment buildings towered on their right. They crossed the park and headed north again on Fifth Avenue. Edgar turned the motorcar smoothly onto one of the residential side streets, then right again into a small narrow lane along the rear east side of a handsome brick building. He eased to a stop in front of a sidewalk that led to a recessed private entrance framed by two conical shrubs in urns. A red-jacketed doorman held aside the door, then pushed the button to summon the elevator. After relocking the entrance behind him, he turned to join them, but Wallace waved him off.

  “I can manage, Archie,” he said, maneuvering the iron gate closed. He eased up the controls, and the machine lifted them into the building. Its only stop was at the top. They rode in silence. Wallace kept his eyes down, his thoughts veiled. If he was feeling half as chastened as he ought, Julia wanted to see it. A subdued spirit was not enough. She still seethed. She’d been played for a fool. She had hoped they’d become allies in Eva’s cause, but if he intended simply to lie to her, he was only another obstacle to be overcome. A formidable obstacle, made more so by her smarting heart.

  Julia stepped into a marble foyer. A Venetian chandelier shimmered overhead. On facing walls stood identical polished mahogany harp tables, topped with vases of fresh white roses, each beneath a similar but not matching large gilt-framed mirror. She saw her reflection in the nearest one and observed her back reflected in the opposite glass: an infinity of Julias. As many Wallaces lifted the Spanish shawl from her shoulders.

  The foyer intersected a long hall lit by sconces. When she stepped onto its plush carpet, patterned with elaborate Celtic knots, she smelled a faint aroma of lemons. It swept through Julia like a flame. Eva. Wallace had told Kessler he’d brought her here at least once, when the police had released her into his care. Was she still here? Every nerve strained for some clue: a sound, another whiff of that sweet citrus lotion. Nothing. She smelled only the roses from the foyer behind them.

  Ahead lay the living room, one step down. Tall windows spanned the opposite wall, each draped with burgundy velvet. It was a grand room, some thirty feet or more in length. Several lamps provided ghostly pumpkins of golden light.

  “This place was built for Andrew Millbank,” he said, glancing to see if Julia recognized the name. She did not.

  “Are these family things?” Julia asked, amazed at the room’s abundance of paintings and sculptures and bibelots.

  Wallace laughed. “No, no. This is what fortunes are for. My father kept books for a button-making firm in Queens. But anything can be bought these days, including family heirlooms. I merely hired someone to put it all together. But I like it. It’s mine now.”

  To their left the wide corridor led to several closed doors, but Wallace showed Julia to the first door on their right. It was a beautifully appointed bathroom. Fresh towels lay on an ebony sideboard. “You can freshen up in here.”

  She opened the taps to run water into the basin, then peeked into the hall. Wi
th Wallace moving about in the living room, she could only explore to her right. She slipped out. Directly opposite was a spacious room swathed in shadows. Silver candelabra glimmered in the dark, ghostly reflections across a long polished dining table. It was huge, easily seating two dozen. An enormous silver samovar stood like a proud flagship on a walnut sideboard.

  The hall jogged right and narrowed, the carpet changing to maroon linoleum to mark the service end of the apartment. The first door opened to a large kitchen. Julia counted five closed doors along the long wall opposite and three on the kitchen side, plus an opening to another corridor. As she crept forward, she heard someone grunt and punch a pillow with a low epithet. She froze to listen but heard nothing more than the trickling water. No scent of lemons, no further sounds, but at least one person was awake behind these doors.

  She hurried back to the bathroom. No sign of Eva’s lotion, no earring escaped behind a vase or jar of bath salts. Julia laid her frock over the side of the bathtub and swabbed herself with a wet cloth. It seemed an age since she had sweltered beside Jerome in that backstage hell. In lieu of a more thorough wash, she dusted herself liberally with the perfumed powder offered in a decorated tin. She smoothed her step-ins, trimmed in deep bands of ivory Valenciennes lace; straightened her stockings; and drifted her dress back over her head. She pinched her cheeks and shook her hair to loosen the way it fell about her face. Christophine would despair, but it would have to do. Wallace would expect a leisurely toilette, but she couldn’t wait another minute to demand answers.

  He was standing beside a large turbulent seascape painted in oils in the last century. Below it, on a massive credenza, stood two filled champagne flutes and a bottle diapered in linen in a silver bucket. An excellent vintage. Avize, 1911. He handed her a glass, its crystal etched with his elaborate monogram, an interlaced M and W. Brushing back the hair that curled about her hatless face, he said, “Did Mr. Crockett clear things up for you or only confuse you further?”

  “Where is she?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Is she safe?”

  “As long as no one knows where she is.”

  “Is she here?”

  He smiled. “She is safe. Location secret.”

  He nudged Julia’s hand, encouraging her to taste the champagne. “If Eva is to have any chance, she needs to disappear. No one, not even a well-meaning friend, can know where she is. Everything is on the line for her, Julia. For me as well.”

  He met her gaze. His eyes were nearly the color of hers, dark blue without a hint of gray. She saw no shadow, no hitch in their steady overture. Yet he had lied, deliberately deceived her. Deceit was a slippery slope. Unless he could convince her otherwise, it now shadowed everything she knew and felt about him.

  “Why did she go to you that morning?”

  “That troubles Crockett, does it?” Wallace led her to a plush burgundy sofa. “I did promise you some answers. Which you shall have. I’m a man of my word.”

  She sat warily, waiting.

  “There are two answers to your question. Neither is short.” He removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and unfastened his top collar stud. “We may as well get comfortable.” He sat and stretched an arm behind her.

  Julia sat forward. Wallace gave a soft laugh.

  “The first answer is that she trusts me.” He tapped faintly along the ridge of her collarbone. “Unlike you.”

  She brushed his hand from her shoulder. “You lied to me. Repeatedly.”

  “No one is entirely honest, my dear. No one. You and I both have many secrets. You’re clearly interested in mine, and I hope to discover a few of yours.”

  “Why does Eva trust you?”

  “She and I have known each other for a very long time. She worked in a little club I owned with some other people. It was a pretty rough and common place, mainly for coloreds. It was managed by a terrible boozer named Rudy who scraped along just under the law, but he kept the place profitable, and we didn’t ask many questions. Eva was tall and skinny but light skinned enough for what passed for a chorus line—tans, they call them.”

  He paused for a few swallows of champagne. “Well, Eva was sweating away for her twenty bucks a week in the Calico Club. Then one night I noticed how the other girls looked like whores in that cheap getup, but not Eva. Even then, hoofing away on the end of the line, she had that something. So I asked Rudy to let her try a solo number, and right away, she’s a hit. People started coming round to that dump just to see her.”

  Julia remembered Eva’s mesmerizing performance. She was graceful and lithe but not a natural dancer, and her singing voice was passable but nothing remarkable. Yet she held the spotlight, captured a roomful of eyes, better than most stage performers. Her something was powerful and seductive. It was, Julia realized, the subterranean flow of interest that had so captivated her that first evening they’d met, at Duveen’s party. She felt a stab of gratitude that Wallace had noticed it too, despite that club’s drab squalor. How much more grateful Eva must have been. It had opened up a new life for her.

  “That started her career?”

  “It seemed so. Until one night when I stopped by and some West Indian girl was doing her number. I found Eva backstage with bandages wrapped around her head.” He circled his own, drawing an imaginary swath across his hairline and over both ears. “There’d been a blowup. Rudy was a worse stinker than I thought.”

  Julia wondered if this was the source of the scene in Eva’s manuscript that had sent Timson into a fury. If it had actually happened, Eva must have been desperate to escape. “Did he rape her? That terrible scene in her book, was it him?”

  Rising with an exaggerated creak of his knees, Wallace carried his glass to the credenza and refilled it. “I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times these past few weeks. I don’t know. She said nothing then and won’t talk about it now. But I saw that gash on her head, clean through to her skull. If he had raped her, and I’d known about it, well.” He stifled the rest of the sentence with a hand across his mouth. “As it was, I knew he’d continue to hurt her if she stayed.”

  “How did she get away?”

  “I struck a deal with Leonard Timson. He was a rat too, but a bigger, smarter rat. He’d just bought the old Shalliwag Club and renamed it Carlotta’s. He was putting in a lot of money to make it the best. Best music, best clientele, best entertainment. I told Leonard if he gave her top billing and treated her well, she’d fill that place for him.”

  So Wallace had brokered Eva’s escape. Not only that, he’d made sure she moved into a bigger and better spotlight. He’d possibly saved her life. At the same time Timson had gained his biggest star. This explained why both he and Eva had yielded during their intense confrontation after Eva’s show.

  But Wallace was no simple country parson urging peace and harmony. Julia remembered the gun sleeping against his ribs. Firing means you’ve lost, not won. He emanated power more than he exercised it. Julia wondered if there was more to the deal than he’d mentioned. Had he included incentives or threats to induce Timson and Eva to accept the arrangement? Where was his gun now? Perhaps it didn’t matter. Wallace was a pragmatist in a way that Julia was coming to better understand. In a way, she was too. Power could be a force for good as much as for evil. No wonder Eva trusted him.

  Julia drank her champagne. It was cold, sweet, delicious. “So he hired her at Carlotta’s?”

  “It was just the ticket for her,” Wallace said, resettling beside her. “Leonard was still a rat, but he knew if he went too far, I’d hear about it, and I could make things miserable for him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I don’t break thumbs, if that’s what you’re thinking. No dungeons down the hall. I meant I have connections downtown, among the clientele Leonard depended on. I have the ear of influential men.”

  “It didn’t stop Timson from treating her viciously that night.”

  “Leonard could be na
sty, but that was a performance. He was too smart to foul his own nest. Not with her.” Wallace’s voice rumbled into Julia’s hair.

  This was what Eva had said too. But Timson had been livid. Julia remembered the tension of that night, the squeeze at her windpipe. She couldn’t know his usual temper, but when he’d spoken of the manuscript, and particularly that scene, his rage had seemed white hot.

  Wallace lifted her chin, but she turned aside, and his lips brushed her cheek.

  Something more, something deeper, had disturbed Timson. “Could Timson be the rapist in her book?”

  Wallace let out a heavy breath. “Quite possibly. I don’t know for certain.”

  “You could ask her.”

  “I could.” He kissed her nose. “I did. But she won’t say. She says very little these days.”

  He pulled back to look into her face. “Which is wise. Until the police find something that points them elsewhere in the next few days, she’s square in their sights.”

  Julia finished her champagne in one swallow, cutting short the import of his words.

  “I’m doing all I can to protect her from Hobart,” Wallace said quietly, moving her glass to the floor. As he bent forward, she marveled at the gold luster of his hair, swept back over the crown of his head to a precisely shaved edge at his nape.

  “But unless you trust me, I can’t keep her safe from the courts.” He caressed her shoulder and edged aside the strap of her frock.

  His mouth moved to the hollow below her throat. Not yet, she told her spine, helplessly arching. Listen. Concentrate. She felt his hand slide to the top of her stocking and knew in a moment she would be lost.

  A strange sound escaped from her lungs. “Wait.”

  He recognized it as a word before she did. He breathed deeply and sat back.

  She swallowed. “You said there were two reasons Eva went to you. What’s the second?”

  “Ahhh.” Wallace dropped his chin. “The second reason.”