Come Hell or Highball

by Maia Chance

  “—when Arbuckle went and got himself killed.”

  “That had nothing to do with me.”

  “Course not. But you were there.”

  “So were you.”

  “Not exactly. I was snug as a bug at the Foghorn in Hare’s Hollow.”

  “Judging by the twinkle in your eye, I rather suspect you were dancing and drinking at an illegal gin mill.”

  “Maybe. My point is, I have an alibi. But you—you discovered the body. Can’t you stay out of mischief, Mrs. Woodby?”

  “If I stayed home and knitted socks all day, then you’d be out of a job.”

  “Naw. I told you. I’m investigating your dear departed hubby.”

  “Rubbish. You’re investigating me.” I added in my head, And I’m worried you’re working for a murderer. I turned away from him and pretended to be absorbed in the chocolates display. The funny thing was, chocolate seemed a whole lot less interesting when Ralph Oliver was around.

  He stood there, watching me. I assumed a starchy expression and read chocolate labels.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could tell he was grinning. I made an exasperated sigh. “Was there something I could help you with, Mr. Oliver?”

  His eyes lingered on my lips. “Probably.”

  “Oh, go away, would you?”

  He bumped up his fedora to scratch his temple. “Sure like your chocolate, don’t you?”

  My cheeks grew warm. “Well, I—”

  “Don’t get me wrong. Sweets for the sweet. Besides, I like my ladies…”

  I prayed he wouldn’t say pleasantly plump. Or healthy. Because then I would have to slap him.

  “I like ’em satisfied,” he said. His gaze sank into mine.

  I swallowed. Why had it grown so danged hot in the store?

  “What’re you doing here, Mrs. Woodby?” He selected a large bar of milk chocolate with hazelnuts from the shelf.

  “Shopping. Obviously.”

  “That all?” He took down another bar, nougat, and another, plain dark.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  Ralph paid the shopgirl with a mangled bill from his wallet. “I’m not suggesting anything. Merely piecing it all together, see. And to me, it looks a lot like you and your Swedish sidekick are up to something. Trying to solve Horace Arbuckle’s murder? I dunno. I just don’t think it’s wise for ladies to get mixed up in these kinds of affairs. There are things you don’t know.”

  “What things?”

  “Dangerous things.” He pushed the chocolate bars into my hands. “There. Got you an assortment.” He tipped his fedora and stalked off, his shabby-suited form merging into the crowd.

  14

  After ten minutes of searching, I found Berta at the perfume counter.

  “Where have you been, Mrs. Woodby?” she said. Her voice was muffled by the hankie she held over her nose.

  I gulped down the square of chocolate I’d been chewing, crumpled the foil over the end of the bar, and stuffed it in my handbag. “Nowhere.”

  Berta tipped her head toward the shopgirls behind the counter. “I suppose these are the ones we should ask questions of.”

  One of the girls was wrapping a box in brown-and-white houndstooth paper. She was wispy, with a dark bob and pug-dog eyes. The other girl, kneeling behind the counter and rummaging in a drawer, had a gerbil-colored updo and a pudgy build. They both wore houndstooth Wright’s smocks.

  Berta and I waited until their customer left.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the wispy girl, “is this the counter where Sadie Street used to work?”

  She rolled her eyes. The other girl boinged up beside her.

  “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked that,” the wispy girl said.

  “A nickel?” the gerbil-haired one said. “Why, we’d be drinking tea with Mrs. Rockefeller if we had a penny for every time.” She turned to me. “Look, lady. We’re trying to do business here. This ain’t some tourist attraction.”

  Wispy elbowed Gerbil Hair. “Isn’t,” she whispered.

  “That’s what I said,” Gerbil Hair whispered back. She glared at me. “Now, if you’re interested in some perfume, I can help you with that.” She swept her hand along the counter. “We got your Lilac Aphrodite, your Musky Maiden, your Pompeia, and your Sphinx. Here we have the Elizabeth Arden Babani line—Ambre de Delhi, Ligeia, and Ming.” She tapped fingers on the countertop. “So what’ll it be?”

  Berta removed the hankie from her face. “I shall buy a bottle—your smallest bottle—if you tell us about Sadie Street.” She shot me a glance: business expense.

  “Why’re people so crazy about Sadie Street?” Wispy said. “She was nothing special.”

  “So this is where she worked,” I said.

  Gerbil Hair wedged herself in front of Wispy. “You got to buy something first. We work on commission.”

  “Oh, all right.” I dug through the chocolate bars in my handbag, pulled out my coin purse, and found a fin.

  Berta’s eyebrows lifted. Five dollars was obviously more than she’d had in mind. But this was Wright’s, not the five-and-dime. I placed the bill on the countertop. “What’ll this get me?”

  “A miniature Roger and Gallet Le Jade.” Gerbil Hair stuffed the money in the till. “Okay, what do you want to know about the wondrous Sadie?”

  “Were you here when she was discovered by the motion picture executive?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Gerbil Hair said. “Never saw the fish.”

  “Neither did I,” Wispy said. “None of us girls ever saw him here.”

  “Do you even know what he looks like?” I said.

  “Course,” Gerbil Hair said. “His photograph’s in the motion picture weeklies all the time. George Zucker. He’s a big cheese.”

  “Do you know where Sadie lives?” I asked.

  “What are you, some kinda fanatic?”

  “Um,” I said.

  “We are private detectives,” Berta said through her hankie.

  Both girls blinked.

  “Oh!” Gerbil Hair said. “Because of that murder! Saw it in the papers on my way to work. Is Sadie the murderer, you think?” She looked cheery.

  “Sadie didn’t really work here long,” Wispy said. “Maybe three days.”

  “When was this?”

  “Back in … let’s see. January. I remember, because it was right after the Christmas rush, and all us girls thought it was funny that the management hired a new girl in the slowest month of the year. But like I said, she was only here a couple days.”

  “Yeah,” Gerbil Hair said, “but them couple days was still long enough for the reporters to sneak in and snap her picture while she posed, all prissylike, at the counter. Acting like she was a hardworking girl. But we knew better, didn’t we?” She elbowed Wispy.

  Wispy elbowed her back. “We said we wasn’t gonna talk about that,” she muttered. She gave us a counterfeit smile. “Anything else, ladies?”

  “You have not given us our perfume,” Berta said.

  “Didn’t think you actually wanted it.” Gerbil Hair stomped off to fetch the bottle.

  We had Wispy alone. I leaned in close. “What was that she was saying, about knowing better about Sadie being a hardworking girl and all that?”

  Wispy chewed her lip. Her eyes slid over to Gerbil Hair, who had her head buried in a cupboard. “All right. I’ll tell you.”

  I saw Ralph Oliver, not three yards away, lounging against a marble pillar with his arms folded and his fedora tipped at that exasperating angle. He was looking right at Wispy, all ears.

  The absolute gink.

  But Gerbil Hair would be back in a second. I had no choice but to let Ralph listen in.

  “Go ahead,” I said, throwing Ralph a dirty look.

  He made kissy lips at me.

  “Don’t tell a soul,” Wispy breathed. “I went to one of those backroom bars, see. Blue Heaven, up in Harlem. Just the once, on a lark with my brother and his friend. This was befor
e Sadie came here. In December, I think it was. And I saw her there.”

  “That’s all?” I said. “Lots of people go to speakeasies.”

  “Sure, that’s true. But Sadie wasn’t there drinking. She was up onstage. Singing jazz.”

  “You’re sure it was her?”

  Gerbil Hair returned with the perfume. She wrapped it up in houndstooth tissue, and Berta and I headed toward the front of the store. Berta didn’t notice Ralph as we passed him. I gave him a freezing look. He winked.

  A few seconds later, I glanced over my shoulder to see Ralph sauntering away in the other direction.

  * * *

  As soon as Ralph’s back was turned, I grabbed Berta’s arm and pulled her toward the elevators.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Did you forget about Eloise Wright? She’s still just as much of a possibility for having stolen the reel as Sadie is.” We stepped onto the elevator. “Foundations Department,” I said to the red-uniformed elevator boy.

  He appeared to be wrestling with the inclination to smirk as he pushed the button for the fifth floor.

  The Foundations Department was bathed in soft light. Soothing music wafted from somewhere. The carpet was like a soufflé. All, of course, to distract ladies from the reality that they were purchasing a garment made of steel and elastic panels to squash themselves into shape.

  Eloise wasn’t in. “She’ll be here tomorrow,” the saleslady behind the brassiere counter told us. “Would you like to make an appointment for a girdle fitting?” She peered over the tops of her oblong glasses at Berta and me—actually, at our middles.

  “No, thanks.” I turned toward the elevators and ignored Berta’s appalled gasps as we passed a rack of lacy negligees.

  * * *

  I couldn’t leave Wright’s without buying caviar for Cedric in the food hall.

  “That is not a business expense, Mrs. Woodby,” Berta said.

  “But Cedric hasn’t so much as sniffed those Spratt’s Puppy Biscuits.”

  “You indulge him.”

  “He’ll waste away!”

  I set the jar of caviar on the counter, and my last five-dollar bill next to it. “It’s not beluga, anyway—only salmon.”

  “Where I come from,” Berta said, “the dogs eat the offal and fish innards they find in alleyways.”

  The cashier gave me my change. I crammed the caviar into my handbag, next to the chocolate bars. “Well, then. Cedric’s not so very far off the mark, is he?”

  * * *

  It started raining around dinnertime. Berta and I ate bowls of leftover pea soup, spinach salad with vinaigrette, and fresh-baked buttery rolls. Cedric had caviar. A little later, we dressed to go to Blue Heaven.

  “It’s a speakeasy, Berta,” I said when we convened in the foyer. “Not an ice cream social.” She wore a dress printed with daisies and old-timey boots that gave me bunions just looking at them.

  “You do not like my dress?” Berta pulled on her rubberized raincoat. “I do not care.”

  Next to her, I looked like a vamp escaped from the inferno: red lipstick, beaded purple dress with a plummeting V neckline, seamed black stockings, spiky shoes, mink-collared coat. The coat was kind of scrunched from being in my suitcase, but I figured that in this dress, no one would be looking at my coat.

  We hustled out the door.

  It took a couple of tries before we found a taxi driver willing to admit that he knew where Blue Heaven was. He drove us to an out-of-the-way street in Harlem. A few folks strode down the wet sidewalk, eyes cast down. A ramshackle brick building overshadowed us. Its windows were boarded up.

  “Through there,” the taxi driver said out the window. He jerked his thumb toward a dark alleyway.

  Berta and I lingered on the curb.

  “You’re certain?” I asked.

  “Listen, lady, I’m gonna charge extra if you keep me hanging around all night.”

  “Business expenses,” Berta whispered.

  I thanked the driver, and the taxi splashed away.

  I hadn’t been to Blue Heaven before, but I’d been to lots of speakeasies. So when I saw a door in the alley with a small sliding panel, I knew I was looking at a speakeasy entrance.

  I knocked on the door.

  The sliding panel whapped open. Two eyes appeared. “Yeah?”

  “We are here to attend the festivities,” Berta said.

  “He wants the password,” I whispered to her. Then, to the guard I said, “Um, hocus-pocus?”

  He didn’t flicker an eyelash.

  “Gin rickey?”

  “Open sesame,” Berta said. “It is always open sesame.”

  “Not this time it ain’t, mama.”

  “How about Louis Armstrong?” I asked.

  “Don’t think so.” He started sliding the little door closed.

  “Oh, very well,” Berta said.

  The sliding door stopped, halfway shut.

  Berta bent over and drew up the hem of her dress to reveal a portion of her woolen-stockinged, bowling-pin calf.

  “Berta!” I said.

  The man chuckled. “Lady, I can tell you ain’t one to go around flashing your gams at the drop of a hat. I can see you’re desperate. Besides, we need some variety down there. All them flappers is starting to look the same.” He slammed the little window shut and opened the door.

  We were in.

  We walked along an ill-lit corridor and down a rickety staircase.

  “Are you certain this is quite safe, Mrs. Woodby?” Berta asked.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not.” I pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs.

  We entered a raucous, crowded, low-ceilinged cavern that reeked of cigarettes, spilled gin, and sweat. A bar stood off to one side. Slick-haired men in suits buzzed around flappers in short, sparkly dresses. Bartenders rattled shakers, ice clinked, girls shrieked with laughter. Mismatched tables and chairs were packed with more people bobbing their heads to the music, smoking, and chattering. A dance floor, twisting with perspiration-glossed bodies, filled the space in front of the stage, where a jazz band wailed out a tune.

  Berta and I would’ve looked like a couple of nervous nanny goats, standing there by the door, if anyone had paid us a bit of notice. But no one did.

  No one, that is, except Ralph Oliver.

  He sat at a table by himself, hunched over a drink in a teacup, and staring at me from beneath a furrowed brow.

  My belly did a flip.

  “Ah,” Berta said over the ruckus. “So that is why you are tarted up so. You knew the Irish detective would be here.”

  The possibility had crossed my mind. “I’m not tarted up. And how was I to know he’d be here?”

  “Perhaps because he was eavesdropping upon our conversation with the perfume girls this afternoon?” Berta toddled toward Ralph’s table.

  I followed her. “You saw him?”

  “I am not blind. Thad Parker says that a private detective has eyes on the back of his head.”

  “You do know that Thad Parker’s not a real person, right?”

  By the time we reached Ralph’s table, he was grinning.

  I tossed my beaded clutch on the table and dropped into the chair kitty-corner to his. “Care to fill me in on the joke?” I shimmied out of my coat.

  “Oh, nothing. You’re kinda cute, that’s all.”

  I gave him a withering look and flagged down the waiter, a short black fellow in a red waistcoat. “Highball, please. On the double.”

  “I shall have an orange blossom,” Berta said. “With more blossom than orange, if you please.”

  “That’s got gin in it,” I said to her.

  “Do you think you invented drinking, Mrs. Woodby?” Berta said.

  15

  After the waiter left, Ralph scooted his chair around the corner of the table so he was right next to me.

  He wore evening clothes. They were threadbare, but the black and white made him look just a touch too handsome
for such close quarters. His ginger hair was slicked up and over with brilliantine. His forehead was a little weathered, like he’d spent time working outside. By the looks of those sturdy shoulders, I’d have said in farming or construction. And on his right temple was a two-inch-long, deep, white scar.

  He caught me studying it. “Shrapnel,” he said over the hubbub. “France.”

  That was all he needed to say. The Great War had mangled half the young men you saw on the street. Those, that is, who’d been lucky enough to make it back home.

  “Is that scar why you’ve always got your hat tipped down?” I asked.

  “Nope. The tipped hat’s for the ladies.”

  Ralph Oliver was nothing but a bee in my bonnet. But who was he, exactly? At Wright’s, I’d worried he was working for the murderer, but now I almost wondered if he was working for Uncle Sam. And why, oh why, did I find the sight of his big square hand fiddling with that chipped teacup so mesmerizing?

  “Where are you from, Mr. Oliver?” I asked.

  “That’s not something I like to say.”

  “Why not?”

  “How come you don’t like to say you’re from Scragg Springs?”

  I frowned.

  “Come on, kid. Lighten up.” He gently chucked my chin.

  I felt a bit melty. Good golly. I hadn’t even started drinking yet.

  “By the way,” Ralph said, “you look gorgeous tonight.”

  Melty? Heck, I was practically a puddle on the floor.

  He leaned his forearm on the table and turned to look at me more closely. “I’ve gotta say, I’m a little surprised you turned up at this joint.”

  “Well, Mr. Oliver,” Berta called from across the table, “we are not surprised to find you here. You follow us like the little lamb after Mary.”

  “It’s a bad habit you’ve got, Mr. Oliver,” I said.

  Ralph leaned in still closer. “Oh, I’ve got worse habits than that.”

  “I shudder to think.” Actually, I felt kind of feverish.

  “Listen, you two,” Ralph said, slouching back in his chair. “I came here tonight because I worried that if you were crazy enough to show up—which I guess you are—you could be getting yourselves behind the eight ball.”

  “Oh, come off it,” I said.

  “This is an illegal establishment. There is, course, always the possibility of police raids. I can just imagine what the society page in the paper would have to say about you being collared in a raid, Mrs. Woodby.”