by Etta Faire
She ran a finger along the edge of her short glass then motioned around her kitchen and living room with it. From the countertops to the couch, everything was clean and white. “This apartment. This bottle.” She held up what was probably gin. “Only the well to do can afford luxurious problems like me. It’s given Daddy scads to talk about at all the best parties now. His out-of-control, modern daughter.” She leaned over the bar’s countertop that separated the kitchen from the dining area, her silky white blouse almost blending into the tile completely.
I listened to the thoughts floating around Drew’s head at the time. She was comparing her looks to Flo’s.
Flo was beautiful, all right. High cheekbones. The kind of short, cropped hair Drew wished she was daring and young enough to pull off. She was only about seven years older than Flo, but I could tell, Drew felt every one of those seven years.
Drew lowered her head, and I heard her thoughts clearly: When I cut my hair a year ago, Feldman accused me of trying to be a flapper, a radical. Like wanting independence and a fair share in life was a bad thing.
She’d ignored him at the time. But then maybe she’d been ignoring too much. His winks at other girls. His short temper. “Do you think Feldman has a girlfriend?”
“Oh darling, I have no idea. But you two aren’t married, and even if you were, that hardly means what it used to.”
“He said he’s not the marrying type.”
“Then you knew what type you weren’t marrying.” Flo seemed to catch herself. She stood up and brushed the wrinkles from her top. “No offense. Sorry.”
“No, you’re right. I should have known. And now, I don’t even have a dime to show for it.” Drew put the cigarette out in the seashell ashtray in front of her and gulped down her last bits of gin. “Are you sure he’s selling the bar?”
“Not selling. Sold. To Doc. Used Henry Bowman’s lawyer. It won’t be final until December, but it’s a done deal.”
That did sound about right, but Drew didn’t want to hear it. She rubbed her temples with her fingertips.
“If you don’t believe me, ask Feldman.”
“No, I wouldn’t dare.”
“Why?”
“That would sound like I didn’t trust him.”
“Why do you care how it sounds? You don’t trust him. Hell, no one trusts him.” Flo lit a cigarette then searched one of the drawers in the kitchen cabinet. She finally pulled out a clunky wad of keys. “Look, I have to go. Marshall and I are taking the ponies out for a ride before autumn really sets in and it’s too cold to do that. Wanna come?”
Drew shook her head. She knew it wasn’t a real invitation. Only the rich got to do things like take the ponies out. “I’ve got the evening shift at Merlot’s. And Mr. Merlot told me not to be late again.”
“You’re too good for that old man’s dress shop. How many little old ladies come in there for ridiculous things like bustles or repairs for their outdated, humungous hats? You should have your own shop by now, sweetie.”
“That’s what we were saving for before Feldman went and partnered up with Henry Bowman for a little easy money bootlegging. Both of us saving. He told me it was an investment in us. I’m guessing he sold that bar for a lot more than he paid. Than we paid,” she corrected herself. “We both saved our money for it. He talked me into putting it into the speakeasy because Henry Bowman told him that kind of business was really going to take off during prohibition…”
Flo set the keys down and put her arm around Drew’s shoulder. She smelled like the time Drew was twelve and a rich lady came into the orphanage to make a contribution. It was the first time Drew realized money had a smell, and it wasn’t sweat.
Flo was talking. “I only know all of this because I adore art. And Terry’s a good artist when he’s sober. Feldman came to me asking about an art studio…”
“An art studio? For a good-for-nothing lush?”
“Probably why he’s doing it. He wants Terry to sober up and fly right.”
Drew grabbed the gin and poured a little more then downed it. It burned our throat without the tonic part and we made a face. “Well, it’s sending the rest of us straight to the bottle.” She practically gagged out the words.
“You know I’d help if I could. But my money’s daddy’s money. And Daddy doesn’t part with much. Do you have your own bank account?”
Drew shook her head. The sinking feeling in our stomach got worse.
“I’m afraid you haven’t much of a leg to stand on here. I heard from Daddy’s friend at the bank that Feldman already withdrew most the money Doc paid him for the bar. Looks like not all of it’s going to that art studio. Terry told me Feldman was taking him to the track this spring. He doesn’t know about the bar, but he’s very excited about the track.”
She leaned farther across the bar. “If I were you, I’d find what Feldman did with the cash before that gambler loses it all.”
Drew ran a nervous hand through her curls. “Then what? He’ll kill me if he finds out I took money.”
“He’ll kill you for taking your own money back? That sounds like that convenient male logic to me. Too bad you can’t beat him to that punch line. Kill him first.”
“Who says I can’t?”
Flo stopped in her tracks. A smile spread across her perfectly lined, red lips. “Now we’re talking.” She pushed her cigarette out and tossed her keys back into the drawer. “This suddenly became much more interesting than ponies. Marshall won’t mind if I’m late. He probably won’t even notice. He’s such a dear. Plus, he has his eye on one of the stablehands so he probably won’t even notice.”
Drew raised an eyebrow.
“Come on. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed. My brother is the topic my father is desperately trying to avoid at parties. It’s why he loves having me, so that conversations won’t roll around to raving homosexuality. Not that they ever do. Never as much as I want them to, they don’t.”
Flo pulled Drew by the arm over to the couch, causing her to land hard along the stiff, over-stuffed cushions.
“I’m not really… doing this,” Drew said.
“Of course not. We’re just talking.”
Drew’s heart raced. This was so unlike her. Even joking around about something so horrible.
“When do you want to do it?” Flo asked.
Drew gulped. “Well, if I were really doing it, which I am not, Feldman’s got a poker party planned in December at the Bear Bird with all of his friends from high school. Doc’s going too. I guess now I know it’s really a last hoorah at the bar.”
“Typical gambler. We need a plan. Or, at least an objective to work off of.”
“I guess…” Drew began, stammering her words a little as sweat formed along her temple. “I would want him to know it was me, but only at the end when it’s too late to do anything about it.” She ran her hand over the pants she’d designed for herself. Woolen, practical ones that looked good on curves, not like the ones meant for men. The fabric scratched her palms a little. She should really make a pair in linen for spring. “And I would definitely want to make sure I didn’t get caught.”
“We won’t.”
“We?”
“You don’t know the first thing about law, do you? Trust me. My family has had a lot of lawyers, so I know. Just telling me about this makes me an accomplice. I might as well have some fun and play along at this point. Plus, I’m practically mad about the idea. It’s so deliciously terrible. If I could at all trust Marshall, I’d get him in on it too. My brother adores stuff like this. But his mouth is larger than his gut. Let’s make a list of all the people going to the party. Then, we’ll pick someone to frame.”
“Wait, what? Why?”
“You should really get out more. This is what happens when you spend all your time around sewing machines and orphans.” She rolled her eyes. “All the best murders are pulled off because the murderer took the time to make the evidence point away from them and onto at least one other person.”<
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She opened a drawer on her coffee table and pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil. “We’ll write out everything. Then, we’ll burn the notepad.” She squealed. “Isn’t this already a hoot?”
Drew’s stomach flopped. She liked her new friend, but what was she doing? She used to love Feldman. She still did. He was the one who’d lost all love for her. Lost his mind, really, and any sense of who they used to be. The dreams they used to share. He hadn’t even told her he sold the speakeasy. Plus, he’d been seen all over town with other women. How had she ignored so much?
“Poison is how a woman would kill her sweetie. So we’ll cross that off the list I haven’t started yet. A gun is far too noisy.” Flo bit the tip of her pencil. “I know. We’ll drug him. Then, you’ll slice his throat when the coast is clear. Don’t worry. I can teach you how to do that. Who should we frame?”
“Richie,” Drew found herself saying without a moment’s hesitation.
“Richie? The cop?”
Drew nodded. “He’s creepy, always asking me out. And he’s been taking far too much money from the whole neighborhood for protection, against the police showing up and raiding people.”
“You don’t say. Who knew he was that kind of a cop?”
“You wouldn’t know. The rich have their problems. And the rest of us have real ones. Richie is a problem for a lot of people in this town.”
“Done. Now for the plan.” She held up the pad of paper. “We’ll need gloves, a sharp knife, practice…”
Drew knew this was just for fun. She was definitely not going to let this get out of hand. No one was killing anyone. It was just a hoot to fantasize about it, like Flo said, that’s all.
“And don’t worry, darling. I have the best sleeping pills. They could knock out a race horse. I believe they have, actually…”
Sure, he looked at other women, but he loved her. She couldn’t have spent almost ten years with a man who didn’t love her. Who lied to her and never had any intention of helping her get a career going, a family, a life after the orphanage. Was he about to toss her out like a first draft of one of his manuscripts?
Being used and tossed out couldn’t be her ending. It wasn’t going to be. She might have a thing or two to add to the plot line.
Chapter 30
Closing Time
Drew never spoke to me in our combined conscience the whole time we were at Flo’s, not the way other ghosts had when I channeled with them. I had no idea why, maybe guilt or lack of trust. But she merely fast-forwarded her memories with me until we reached the night in question. The night she did Feldman in.
It was dark in the bar. Everyone else had gone to sleep after Terry and Feldman’s fight.
I could tell, in the back of her mind, she was still questioning things. Was she really going to go through with this? It had been such fun, her and Flo sharing in the secret, hiding the horse all over the club.
But it was now or never. Feldman thought Drew was asleep upstairs. But really, when she overheard Doc say he needed to talk to Feldman, she quickly brought down two glasses from the bar and began pouring their favorite drinks.
“I’d known the entire night that Feldman was going to eventually admit to selling the bar,” she finally said to me, her voice barely over a whisper. “He had to. But I kept thinking that when he did, he’d tell me he’d done it for us. Maybe show me where he’d hidden the money, or tell me that he wasn’t really buying an art studio.” She paused her memory to talk. The beer froze in mid air over the glass she was pouring it into. “But when he finally mentioned it, it was like he was being forced into admitting it after his fight with Terry. He never even mentioned us. It was then that I realized what we had wasn’t love anymore. I wondered if it ever had been. It felt more like we’d just been going through the motions of life the whole time.”
She un-paused the memory. The beer filled quickly into the glass, and she looked around to make sure no one was coming yet.
Taking all ten sleeping pills Flo had given her out of her pocket, she slipped five into each drink then snuck off to the kitchen.
“Things are gonna change, that’s for sure,” a man’s voice muttered under his breath. Drew knew it was Doc. He was already drunk.
She couldn’t hear what the men were saying in the bar as they drank their sleeping pills.
But when Doc wobbled off to join his girlfriend, she knew it was time. Feldman would be stumbling through his nightly routine of locking up. Just like she thought, he tripped his way over to check the back doors first, mindlessly grabbing a chair to steady himself as he did. She could tell he was already feeling the pills. There wasn’t really a reason to lock the doors anyway, not when they were stuck in a snowstorm.
Flo approached her from the shadows of the hall, carrying the horse and the book. “You can do this,” she whispered.
Drew nodded. She was already holding the thick, woolen pillow case she’d sewn herself to throw over Feldman’s head.
I had just been the victim in this death and here I was, about to be the murderer now too.
Even though every part of me hated Feldman and should have looked forward to this, I couldn’t.
I fast forwarded past the murder, past her hand trembling though it, past Flo nodding to her from the shadows, and over to the voice at the end.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Drew looked up. Her nose was dripping, her eyes stinging from the smell of blood that was everywhere. Richie. He looked from Drew to Flo and back again.
Drew dropped the knife and cried. “Oh Richie.”
“What in the hell,” he said again to both women. “Drewsie. My God, Drusilla, what have you done?”
Drusilla. It hit me.
“You were Richie’s wife? The one who died in the fire?”
“Yes.”
“What the…” I began.
She didn’t let me finish. “Richie helped us, and not just because he saw the knife we used and knew that we’d tried to frame him for the murder.”
While she talked, the memory continued playing around us. Richie directed the women on how to clean everything up. On what they would say to the others, barking out orders left and right. “Feldman killed himself,” he said. “Got it?”
“Nobody’s gonna believe that,” Flo said.
Richie curled his lip at her. “It doesn’t matter. I got dirt on everyone here, including you now, missy. Plus, I’m the police. If they so much as peep a word, they’re goners. I know ways to make people disappear.”
Drew talked to me again. “He made me believe everything would be okay. He told me he wouldn’t let anyone take me away, or arrest me if I married him. He loved me too much to let that happen.” She paused. “At least I found the marrying type.”
I didn’t say anything. I just let her have it out. “I was very confused at what was love at that point. The man who helped me cover my worst mistake or the man who drove me to it. Richie and I married the next year, but Doc refused to give him any cut from the business for protection like he was accustomed to under Feldman. So Richie started blackmailing Flo for extra money. And you don’t blackmail Flo.”
“She arranged for the raid on the crooked cops.”
“Yep. And she never spoke to me again either. She blamed me for my husband’s actions. Richie was always the con. I’m pretty sure it’s how I died in a fire. He was behind it, from jail, I think. For the insurance money because we had nothing then. We were broke.”
“He wouldn’t have started a fire with you and his own mother in the house. I’m sure he loved you both.”
“I wasn’t supposed to be home. I was supposed to be down in Illinois to see his mother for Christmas at the time. I was an orphan. I never had a mother, so it was kind of nice, actually, to visit her. She wasn’t the sweetest person in the world, but it was still good. A couple days before I was supposed to leave, she was on my doorstep, saying she wanted to surprise Richie in jail…”
“So, he didn’t
know.”
“I was supposed to be gone.”
I thought about Eliza’s sparrow warning to the men at the meeting not to go down the crooked path. And about how they were all being cursed. Richie was one of those men. Feldman too.
“Maybe it’s not too late for you and Feldman,” I said. “He wants to haunt at the speakeasy.” I paused. “But then, you know that.”
She didn’t say anything.
And just like that, I decided I was done. I opened my eyes to the basement of Chez Louie’s once again. I was lying on the floor. Not inside a wall like I was a little bit worried I might be.
The cold hardwood smelled like must, but I could smell it perfectly. I no longer smelled sulphur, which was good and weird because the smell of sulphur usually dissipates in a lingering kind of way.
Rosalie knelt over me, fanning my face with something she held in both hands. My eyes tried to focus on her and the room.
“What in the world happened?” I asked.
“You mean aside from you drooling and mumbling to yourself?” Mr. Peters said, rolling up the sleeves on his good work shirt.
Rosalie stopped fanning and playfully smacked his arm with the book in her hand. “You also farted a lot too,” she added.
The room was quiet. The hole in the wall was gone. Just bricks. I got a sense Drew was still here. But now, she wasn’t angry anymore.
Rosalie handed me the small, golden book. “The gates of hell closed up so suddenly I never even saw it happening. This was left on the floor in front of the wall. Probably meant for you.”
“I wonder if I can get it autographed posthumously,” I said, taking the hardback copy of Golden Promises, hoping a small part of Jeremy Mortimer still believed in the crap he wrote about. He and Drew could still be there for each other.
Chapter 31
Golden Promises
“Now, remember,” Mr. Peters said excitedly as he headed down the stairs to the basement with Rosalie at his heels. “The work has just begun. The speakeasy won’t officially be open for another month or two. But I’m really surprised by how much progress we’ve made already.”