The Boy in the Red Dress

by Kristin Lambert

But my eyes flicked quickly away from that. I didn’t want to see her weak and sorry. I didn’t want to see her at all.

  “Welcome home, Mother,” I said with as much venom as I could muster.

  Then I shoved past her and Cal, and ran down the stairs.

  “Millie!” Cal called after me in her exasperated voice. I didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to look at her anymore after she’d lied to me and left me alone to deal with a dead girl and the cops and a best friend accused of murder.

  I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, my hand on the doorknob. I didn’t look back. “You might want to pick up a newspaper. See what you missed last night.”

  “What do you m—” Cal started to ask, but I jerked open the door and burst through it and was gone.

  Out into the streets, where no one owed me anything, and no one trusted me. So I was free to do the same.

  CHAPTER

  8

  I WALKED FAST, head down, past shoe shiners and fruit sellers and grubby boys sword-fighting with sticks. Past knobby-shouldered girls carrying lumpy burlap sacks, grannies in kerchiefs selling pralines on the steps of Saint Louis Cathedral to all the extra New Year’s Day parishioners, and tired-looking mothers pushing babies in prams, while crying toddlers clung to their skirts.

  How many of those mothers would give up one day and leave?

  I imagined Arimentha McDonough had a devoted mother somewhere, weeping behind the door of her gilded mansion. If I died, would my mother even cry? Or would she feel a terrible, guilty relief?

  Eventually, the morning’s blinding sun disappeared behind a gray blanket of cloud, and rain pattered against my cheeks. I’d walked so long my shoes had rubbed my sockless ankles raw. The whole world deserved a swift punch in the gut.

  I stopped and leaned both hands against the nearest build-ing. The clapboards swam in my vision, chalky gray where the paint wasn’t flaking off, and I realized where my feet had taken me. Marion’s rooming house loomed, shabby and listing to one side like a drunk elephant. Relief flooded my chest, cooling the hot coil of pain in my throat. Marion would understand why this was disastrous, why it couldn’t be happening. Why I would rather stand in the rain in no socks than spend one second in the apartment with my mother.

  I jerked open the shutter with a squeal of the hinges and pounded on the front door. I recalled Marion had problems of his own right now, but we’d deal with that, too. I’d warn him the cops were looking for him and for the necklace. We’d figure out what to do together.

  Finally, I heard Mrs. Altobello grumbling and cursing in Italian. The door opened a crack, and Mrs. A glared around it, clutching at the pocket of her dress like she thought I would mug her for her pipe tobacco.

  Marion had lived at Bennie’s grandmother’s rooming house for more than a year now. Plenty of time for her to decide she hated me and for me to decide the feeling was mutual.

  “You!” she said. “What you want?”

  “Sorry to bother you, Mrs. A,” I said, forcing a smile. “Is Marion home?”

  Her scowl deepened. “No! He don’t come home!”

  “You mean he didn’t come home last night at all, or he came home and then left again this morning?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t see him. You find him, you tell him come home. Now go!”

  A thin blade of fear jabbed at my heart. I’d told Lewis to bring Marion straight home, to keep him safe. Where had they gone? Had the cops caught them somehow?

  “Wait, can I—”

  But Mrs. A shoved the door shut, knocking me off balance. I stumbled backward, missed the step, and fell, smashing my hip against the wet banquette.

  “Thanks for nothing!” I yelled, waving my fist at the door.

  The rain was picking up steam now, pinging off the concrete and my skin like little daggers. I climbed to my feet and tucked the rest of my hair inside my cap, contemplating what to do next. My rain-spattered wristwatch read just past eleven o’clock. Six hours till I had to be at work. I’d be damned if I’d spend it in the apartment with Gladys and the Traitor.

  “Millie? Is that you?”

  I shut my eyes a moment, then turned slowly, remembering whose store was next door to Mrs. A’s boarding house. I didn’t want to see Bennie, not now, cursing his grandmother with my shirt half buttoned, the side of my pants wet, and rain leaking into my shoes and dripping off my nose.

  But it was too late. Bennie had already seen me. He stood there in his crisp white grocer’s apron, looking as warm as a fresh croissant and holding a black umbrella over his head.

  “Heard you yelling at my nonna.”

  “So?”

  “So, you usually at least pretend to be polite to her.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest to hide the buttons I’d missed. “I’m not in the mood to be polite.”

  His gaze swept over me, taking in my hastily assembled ensemble, and settled on my face again. He crept closer, bringing me under the umbrella’s protection with him, and reached out a hand as if to touch me but stopped short, like I was a dog who might bite.

  “Millie, did something else happen after I left last night? You weren’t arrested, were you? I saw in the paper about Marion and . . . and what happened to that girl. They printed her picture . . . and Marion’s. I saw . . .”

  He trailed off and looked away at the rainy sky. I hadn’t slowed down long enough to read the paper yet. But I doubted there was anything in it I hadn’t seen or overheard for myself last night.

  “Everything’s copacetic,” I said, though the rain was sluicing across the banquette and drenching the hems of my trousers.

  Bennie’s thick black brows rose gently, and his eyes drifted toward the buttons of my shirt again. I cinched my arms tighter around myself.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he said. “You want to come in the store and get warmed up? Wait out the rain?”

  I could feel the ache coming back in my throat, the hollowness in my chest. If I stood there much longer, I would cry, and if I cried, Gladys won. That had always been the way.

  But I also couldn’t go into Bennie Altobello’s warm, dry store, sit on a barrel of pickles as the whole neighborhood passed through, and pretend everything in the world wasn’t exploding all at once.

  I swiped at my nose with the back of my hand and straightened my shoulders.

  “I’m going to the club,” I said. “To wait for Marion to come back.”

  Like me, the club was the only other place he had to go. It was home as much as the apartments we lived in, maybe more.

  “Then let me go with you.” Bennie spun the umbrella over our heads. “I’ll even drive you.”

  “No. It’s only a few blocks, and I’m already soaked. You don’t have to do that for me.”

  Bennie’s lips quirked upward. “Who says it’s for you? I got deliveries to make. You can help me carry the crates.”

  I smiled back, unexpectedly relieved. “Then what are we waiting for?”

  * * *

  As Bennie parked his delivery truck at the curb in front of the Cloak two hours and six deliveries later, I crossed my fingers that Cal and Mama wouldn’t be there yet, and that Marion would. I wanted to talk to him before they got hold of him, wanted to hear his side of the story—all of it, not just the half version he’d told me last night.

  The rain dripped into my eyes as I followed behind Bennie, toting one of his crates of hooch. Mine was stamped SO-DA-LICIOUS on the side, which usually made me chuckle, but today my stomach bubbled with too many nerves.

  He held the door open, and almost instantly I heard voices. One carried above the others, and I knew whose it was without laying eyes on her. I almost turned back. Only the weight of Bennie’s crate in my arms stopped me. I arranged my face so Mama would see nothing to give me away: no tears; no guilt; no love; and definitely no forgiveness. I resolutely slipped in
to the club, expecting every head to turn. They’d have wondered where I was, wondered if I’d even show up. They’d watch to see the expression on my face.

  But nobody even looked up. Olive and Zuzu were across the room setting knocked-over chairs back on their feet. Aunt Cal and Frank sat at a table, heads bent together as they counted cash from the lockbox. And Mama perched high on a barstool reading aloud—really loud—from the afternoon newspaper, as if she was performing a dramatic monologue. I braced myself, expecting it to be an article about Arimentha and Marion, but after a moment I realized it was a review of a movie about some prisoner falling in love with the warden’s daughter.

  Mama caught Frank’s eye over the edge of the paper and wiggled her brows at him. The bruises on her face were almost concealed under a heavy layer of makeup, and her hair was so freshly dyed it looked like the inside of a rare steak. My stomach wrenched tight.

  I set down the case of hooch none too gently, sending the bottles clinking together, then stalked across the room and snatched the paper out of Mama’s hands.

  “Hey!” she screeched. “You cut me!”

  I rattled the paper in her face. “This is no time for movie reviews. Someone is dead.” I spun on my heel to find Cal standing two feet in front of me, hands balled in fists on her hips and scowling like a concrete gargoyle.

  “Oh! The prodigal niece returns!”

  I set my hands on my hips, too. “So?”

  “So . . . ? All of this happened . . .” She waved a hand, mouth working but no sound coming out, as if blocked by a logjam of too many angry words fighting to get out all at once. “And you . . . you ran off this morning without even telling me? There were cops in my club, and I had to find it out from the goddamn paper?”

  I said nothing. Kept my chin up and my gaze steady on hers, the paper crumpling in my hands.

  “I see this disaster in the afternoon edition,” she continued, no longer logjammed in the least, “and I come here and spend an hour on the phone, reassuring my vendors and the electric company that the club isn’t padlocked. And you? Where’ve you been? Off having a sulk like a five-year-old child.”

  “I’m not a child,” I said in a low voice, less than thrilled to have an audience for this conversation. Tears pricked behind my eyes, but I’d be damned if I shed a single one. “I stopped being a child a long time ago. Thanks to her.”

  I didn’t spare a glance back at Mama, but Cal’s gaze flickered over my shoulder.

  “That’s no excuse,” she said, but a bit of the heat in her voice had cooled.

  I knew an opening for a truce when I saw one. I swallowed over the lump in my throat and tossed the crumpled paper on the bar. “Has Marion been here?”

  Cal narrowed her eyes at me. Marion was one thing we always agreed on. She knew what I was doing, changing the subject, but after a beat, she sighed and ran her hands through her hair, mussing its smoothness for the second time that day.

  “No, we haven’t seen him yet. Where’d you send him?”

  “Lewis was supposed to take him home to Mrs. A’s, but he hasn’t been there.”

  “So that’s where you went.”

  I ignored that. “And now his picture is right here in the paper.” I flipped back to the front page and jabbed at it with my finger, under the big, bold headline FEDERAL JUDGE’S DAUGHTER FOUND SLAIN IN VIEUX CARRÉ. A photograph of Arimentha in debutante white glowed above the one of Marion that Craggy snatched from his dressing room. She was smiling, showing the perfect little pearls of her teeth. I shut my eyes to stop that other image of her from coming into my mind—Arimentha’s face in the courtyard, in my dream—but it came anyway. My gut felt hollow, scooped out.

  Cal rubbed a hand over her face. “If he’s out there wandering around, the cops are bound to find him.”

  “And then what?” I said. “They throw him in jail? Or worse?”

  A little cry made my head pop up. Cal and I both turned toward the back hall.

  Marion and Lewis stood shoulder to shoulder, just inside the doorway. Marion’s face was pale and his curls disheveled. He swayed, and Lewis grabbed his arms and steadied him. Together, they took another step into the room.

  Everyone else stopped moving. I felt Olive’s eyes on me from across the room, but I kept my face forward, focused on Marion as he moved slowly toward me and Cal.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” he said, his gaze shooting from my face to Cal’s and back again. “Are they going to . . .” He swallowed hard and touched the collar of his shirt.

  Against my will, my mind conjured up an image of Marion shivering in a windowless room. Marion with a rope around his neck.

  “No,” I said firmly, banishing the worst thoughts back to the shadows.

  “Don’t worry about that yet,” Cal said. “But this girl was a federal judge’s daughter. Bribes won’t work for this, at least not the kind of bribes I can muster.”

  I crossed the room to Marion and took his hand in mine. “I told the cops you were gone on the train to New York to find your fortune.”

  Marion’s chin quivered. “And they believed you?”

  I bit my lip. “Not exactly.”

  “I can’t go to jail, Millie.” Marion clutched my hand. “I won’t. It would be just like—” He bit his lip and shook his head, eyes brimming.

  “Just like what?” I said.

  But Marion didn’t answer. He buried his face in his hands. Lewis met my eyes across Marion’s bent back, and his expression matched mine—worried, curious, itching to do something to help.

  “If you didn’t do it,” I said soothingly, “they can’t prove you did.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry, kid,” Cal said. She straightened and paced the floor with one arm set firmly behind her back and the other rubbing her chin, like the Napoleon Bonaparte of the Cloak and Dagger club. “You just have to ride this thing out, wait for them to find the real killer. You’ll lay low for now. Can’t be seen at the club—especially not in drag. At least not while the cops think you’re a suspect.”

  Marion’s shoulders trembled. “Maybe I should leave town,” he murmured. “Go away.”

  “To where?” Cal said gently.

  “New York, like Millie said? Don’t you know some people there? At the Pansy Club? You could get me a job.”

  “No,” Lewis said, and I looked at him, surprised to hear his voice.

  “No,” I agreed. “They’ll already have an eye out for you there because of what I told them.”

  Marion’s shoulders sagged. “Then what do I do?”

  “Lay low, like Cal said. They’ll never pin this on you. I won’t let them.”

  “But what can you do to stop them, Millie?” Marion said in an anguished voice. “What can any of us do?”

  I set my hands on my hips. “I’m gonna find the killer myself is what.”

  Mama snorted behind us.

  Cal’s brow creased. “No.” She shook her head and waved her hands in the air. “Absolutely not. I don’t want you mixed up in this.”

  “I’m already mixed up in it,” I said. “We all are.”

  Cal studied me. “What makes you think you can do a better job than the police?”

  I lifted my chin. “What makes you think I can’t? I got eyes and ears, same as them. And people might talk to me who’d clam up around the police.”

  “What people?” Cal said.

  “The customers who were here last night. The people who work here.” I flicked a hand toward Olive, Zuzu, and Bennie. “Somebody might’ve seen something that could help Marion. Plus, unlike the cops, I don’t have to put on a show of following procedure.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No buts!” I said, slapping my hand on the bar. I wasn’t in the mood for Cal’s warnings and rules. Not after she’d lied to me and brought Mama back. Not after she’d left me
to handle a murder and the cops on my own, then yelled at me in front of everybody. “Those police detectives want somebody convenient to blame it on, so they can tell the papers the case is solved. They don’t care what really happened. They don’t care if they ruin Marion’s life.”

  “Not all cops are bad,” Mama piped up. “I used to—”

  “Nobody asked for your opinion,” I said, and Mama’s jaws clamped together so hard I heard her teeth click. I felt the others shifting their eyes toward each other, felt them silently asking each other, What’s the story there?

  Cal squeezed the back of my neck. A warning and a comfort in one. Give your mother a break, it said. But also, I understand. I dodged away from her touch.

  “Maybe Millie’s right about the cops,” Cal said in her conciliator voice, the one she used for breaking up bar fights and talking Bennie’s father into a cheaper price on a case of whiskey. “They’ll want to solve this case quick for Judge McDonough, but they might not care about solving it the way we want it done.”

  “The way we want it?” Mama’s eyes glittered. “Some girl is dead, and nobody is asking the most important question.”

  I curled my hands into fists and glittered right back. “Yeah, what’s that?”

  She smirked and took her time striking a match and lighting a cigarette. When she looked up, it wasn’t at me but at Marion. Her brows curved upward.

  “So, kid, did you kill that girl or what?”

  CHAPTER

  9

  ALL HEADS TURNED to Marion. He looked around at us, eyes wet and full of sadness and fear.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. Bennie shifted from foot to foot beside the bar, as if he couldn’t decide whether to stay or go. Frank rubbed a hand across his bald head, back and forth and back. Olive edged closer, the tension obvious in her posture.

  Marion sucked in a long breath, eyes flicking to Lewis’s face and back to mine. “I didn’t kill her, I swear. I—”

  “You don’t have to talk about it right now,” I said, glancing sharply at Mama. She didn’t need to know all the specifics. Didn’t need a story to tell the cops. “Let’s go to your dressing room and fix it up. The cops were in there last night.”