The Boy in the Red Dress

by Kristin Lambert

  I told Romeo I wouldn’t go with him. While he is a beautiful boy, I don’t love him or anyone. No Romeo, no Juliette. I can’t fall in love while I have so much unfinished business in my heart.

  But that does not mean I won’t go. I have plans to make and I feel energized. I hardly dared hope you could still be here in our city, right under my nose, and I swear to God I will find you if I can. I will see you in just a few days. I know it.

  December 31, 1929

  Dear Robbie,

  See you tonight. I hope. I’m wearing your grandmother’s necklace Philip gave me, for good luck. I hope she’ll lead me to you. Fingers crossed.

  Arimentha had written this with such hope, it made my heart ache to read it. Marion had rejected her peace offerings, and then someone had snuffed out her very life.

  The girl whose voice lived in these diary pages was gone now. She’d floated away from the earth just as she’d feared she would, but she certainly wasn’t forgotten. Marion remembered her, cared about her, whether he wanted to or not. Her father missed her, too, of course.

  And me. I’d never forget her now.

  But I glanced to my right at Sabatier’s solemn face and knew his thoughts were less sentimental. He was staring hard at the words that piled more evidence on top of Marion.

  I swallowed hard. I’d made a mistake trading this diary for my freedom. I’d made a mistake trying so carelessly to break into Sabatier’s office in the first place. This was my fault.

  I tried to keep my voice steady and my hand firmly on the diary. “What now, Detective Sabatier?”

  He looked at me carefully, not letting go of the diary either. “You tell me, Miss Coleman. Do you still believe your friend is innocent?”

  “I don’t ‘believe’ it, I know it. You should be focusing on figuring out who this Romeo person is.”

  “And I will. But there’s no sense pretending the facts aren’t the facts. It doesn’t look good for Mr. Leveque.”

  “His name is Marion Leslie.”

  Sabatier inclined his head. “Mr. Leslie then. Witnesses say Miss McDonough came to the club that night to look for him; witnesses say the two argued and he threatened her; witnesses say she came back in the club alone to find him; she was found pushed off a balcony down the hall from his dressing room, during a period of time when no one saw him for twenty minutes. Her necklace, once owned by his grandmother, is the only piece of jewelry missing from her body. And now Miss McDonough says in her own words how eager she was to speak with him that night, and she’s even provided a motive for the murder: whatever disagreement the two of them had in the past. I’m afraid your Mr. Leslie looks very guilty.”

  “But there’s this, too.” I jabbed a finger at the diary. “She broke up with this guy Romeo the night before the murder. And he’d invited her to go with him to the Cloak—maybe he went anyway, just in case she showed up. Then he saw her with Fitzroy and blew a gasket.”

  “It’s possible. And I will pursue that possibility to its logical conclusion.”

  “Or maybe Fitzroy was blackmailing her.”

  Sabatier’s brows rose gently. “The diary says nothing about blackmail.”

  “Then maybe she found out he was trying to blackmail somebody she knew and the two of them argued about it.”

  “What makes you so interested in blackmail?”

  I wanted to stab my drinking straw through his eye. “What makes you not interested? Maybe you should take a closer look at Minty’s rich friends. Ask some more questions! They’ve got secrets, and I for one am going to uncover them all until I find the one that ended in her murder.”

  “I think you’ve done quite enough sleuthing, Miss Coleman.” He stuck the bird drawing in the diary, shut it, and waggled it at me. “You’re too close to the case to see it objectively. I’d advise you to keep your distance from Mr. Leslie; the closer you get to a killer, the more desperate he becomes, and therefore more dangerous. And enough breaking and entering. Leave the rest to the police. I would feel better if you stayed well back from this from now on.”

  I balled up my fists in my lap. “I just bet you would!”

  Sabatier tucked the diary under his arm and plunked a quarter tip on the counter. “Tell your mother no hard feelings, and I’d like a rain check on that coffee.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What are you doing? We haven’t read the beginning. There could be more. You can’t just leave!”

  “Yes, I can.” He tipped his porkpie hat. “Good day, Miss Coleman.”

  I leaped from my seat and lunged for the diary. I got my fingers on it and it almost slid into my grasp, but Sabatier turned and gave me a stern look.

  “Do not force me to return you to jail. Sit on your barstool and wait five minutes. I don’t want to see you again tonight.”

  Then he turned and hurried toward the drugstore entrance, ducking through a crowd of students. I snatched up the quarter he’d left and considered pinging it off the back of his head. But the soda jerk leaned across the counter and stared at me pointedly.

  “I believe that’s mine.”

  “Take it then.” I shoved the quarter into his waiting palm and grabbed the now-empty wood box and useless key off the counter.

  Then I saw it—the slip of paper facedown on the tile floor, its corner stuck under a kid’s shoe. The words From your Romeo shone up at me.

  The drawing. It must’ve fallen out when I’d grabbed at the diary. I swooped down, tapped on the kid’s leg to get him to lift his foot, then snatched up the drawing.

  I didn’t have the diary, but I had this. It was something at least. Something to build on.

  CHAPTER

  22

  MARION, BENNIE, AND Olive were all waiting when I came through the apartment door. It looked like Marion had moved on to patching Cal’s clothes now, because one of her vests dropped to the floor as he leaped to his feet.

  “What are all of you doing here?” I said.

  “We wanted to see if you got back all right,” Olive said from Cal’s green chair.

  “And we want to know what the diary said,” Bennie said with a wink, “after all that work we did to get it.”

  “You weren’t the one thrown in jail over it,” I reminded him, and dropped onto the arm of Olive’s chair.

  “Did you get your beret back?” Marion said eagerly.

  My smirk dropped away. In the fuss over the diary, I’d forgotten to ask about my beret. Before Sabatier let me out of jail, he said if I handed over the diary, he’d “lose track” of my beret, but I had no way of knowing if he’d really tossed it out or if he planned to use it as leverage again.

  “I’m sure it’s all right,” Marion said, correctly interpreting the expression on my face. “If Sabatier wanted to arrest you again, he could’ve today.”

  I nodded slowly. That was true, but it didn’t ease my anxious feeling much. Sabatier was more slippery than I’d given him credit for.

  Olive looked up at me, a crease between her brows. “But you got to read the diary, right?”

  “Yeah. Some of it. The important parts.” I tried to recapture the swagger I’d had a moment ago. “And I got this. We found it stuck in the diary.”

  I slipped the drawing of the bird out of my cardigan pocket and moved aside somebody’s bowl of sliced apples on the coffee table to give it pride of place. Marion sat down on the sofa, and both he and Bennie leaned forward to look at the drawing.

  “It’s . . . a bird,” Marion said.

  “A magnolia warbler,” Bennie said. “You can tell by the stripes on the . . .” He trailed off, noticing we were all staring at him.

  My brows lifted. “You know birds?”

  His cheeks reddened. “Me and my nonna used to bird-watch a little.”

  “Bennie and his nonna again.” Olive snorted.

  “Look what’s on th
e back.” I flipped it over, and as they all leaned in to read the message from Romeo, Olive’s arm rested on my leg in a way that almost restored my mood.

  “Whoever drew this was a boyfriend of Minty’s?” she said, not retracting her arm.

  “Yep.” I reached forward and snagged a slice of apple from the bowl. “And she split up with him the day before she died.”

  Marion held up both hands. “Wait—let me write all this down while the details are still fresh in your mind.” He moved to Cal’s little desk in the corner of the room and rummaged in the drawer for paper and a sharp pencil. “Okay, go. Don’t leave anything out.”

  I chomped down on the apple slice and told them every word I could remember—the ripped-out pages, Minty’s lingering melancholy about Marion, then how she’d addressed her diary entries to him, how she’d been drinking a lot and that she felt guilty about leading Romeo on when she wasn’t capable of love right now. I found myself avoiding Olive’s and Bennie’s faces during that part. I told them Minty had written that she was coming to the Cloak that night specifically to find Marion, and because of that, Sabatier was convinced more than ever that he was the killer.

  When I’d finished and Marion’s pencil had stopped scratching, he turned around and looked at the three of us, his eyes tinged with red.

  “I wish . . .” He looked up at the ceiling to stop himself from crying. “If I’d only . . .”

  “It isn’t your fault,” I said. “You’re not obligated to forgive her at all, let alone do it on her timetable. She sprung it on you at work. How could you know it was your last chance?”

  He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed under his nose. “But she wouldn’t have even been there if it weren’t for me.”

  “Maybe not.” Olive leaned up in her chair to look around at him. “But someone furious enough to shove a girl off a balcony probably had that anger brewing awhile. It was going to explode sometime, somewhere. It was just bad luck it happened at our club.”

  “Like this Romeo,” I said. “If he was homicidal and hopped up on masculine pride, he’d go looking for Minty no matter where she was.”

  Olive’s lips twisted. “This is why I don’t date men.”

  I nudged her with an elbow. “Is that the only reason?”

  Marion rolled his eyes, looking somewhat recovered. “One question—Minty wouldn’t even go to the club with this Romeo, so why would she go upstairs with him?”

  “And,” Bennie said, “if she’d hurt his pride so much, why would he even ask her to?”

  “Maybe he still hoped she’d change her mind.” I grabbed another apple slice and punctuated my words with it. “She mentioned kissing him on a balcony before, so maybe he considered it the perfect place to rekindle their romance.”

  Olive watched me wave the apple and moved the bowl out of my reach. “And then when she said no thanks—”

  “He didn’t take it so well.” I snatched at the bowl, and we tussled over it for a moment, laughing, until I let her win.

  “How sure are we this Romeo is our murderer?” Marion said, still all business, flipping through the motley collection of paper he’d written my account on.

  I coughed and tried to focus on the case instead of the cuteness of Olive’s triumphant little grin. “I think he’s a solid bet. But I’m still not ruling out Fitzroy.”

  Marion frowned down at the papers. “The diary didn’t say anything about blackmail, did it? Or did I miss it?”

  “No.” My cheeks flushed with a sudden wave of either embarrassment or annoyance or both. I didn’t want to admit it, but Sabatier had shaken my assumption that I could do this as well as the cops. It didn’t help that he’d one-upped me with the beret.

  “Did you mention your pet theory about Fitzroy to Sabatier?” Olive said, bumping me with her shoulder.

  “He didn’t want to talk about it, big surprise. He thinks he’s already found his killer.”

  “But we know he’s wrong about that,” Bennie said. “He could be wrong about Fitzroy, too.”

  “I got Fitzroy’s address from Sabatier’s office,” I said eagerly, sitting up straighter. “I could go talk to him.”

  “I think you should,” Bennie said, scooting forward on the sofa. “I could come with you if—”

  “Wait,” Olive said. “Don’t you think Romeo is the bigger lead right now?”

  “I agree,” Marion said. “Maybe we should try to find him first. Then see about Fitzroy.”

  I folded my arms, trying to decide what I wanted to say next and if it was worth arguing over. I was intrigued by Romeo, too, and I had to admit he seemed the most likely candidate for murder. Spurned ex-lovers often featured prominently in the detective novels Marion and I traded back and forth.

  Olive picked up the bird drawing from the coffee table and studied both sides of it. “We know Romeo likes to draw, has decently neat handwriting, and knows the alphabet. Doesn’t tell us much. Do we know where she met him?”

  I shook my head. “But she sneaked off with him at least once after a rich-people’s Halloween party. All we know is it was someone she wanted to keep secret.”

  “Could be a guy from the wrong side of Canal Street,” Marion said. He flipped back a page in his notes and read from them. “She said she might love him if she wasn’t worried about her future.”

  “Or maybe he’s a friend’s boyfriend?” Bennie said. “Maybe that’s what she and Daphne really argued about that night.”

  “Or he’s some creepy old married guy,” I said. “Like that guy that used to come in the club. Remember, Mar? He always asked the Red Feathers if they liked to be tickled.”

  Marion’s mouth curled into a moue of delicate disgust.

  “You know,” Olive said thoughtfully, “that friend of hers draws.”

  I straightened up on the arm of the chair. “Who? Fitzroy? Rosenthal? Claude Holiday?”

  “No, no, Symphony. She was drawing on a scrap of paper at the table that night.”

  I vaguely remembered seeing one of the girls doodling during Marion’s show, but at the time it hadn’t seemed important.

  “Did you see what she was drawing?”

  “Marion. Onstage.” She shrugged. “It was one of those weird modern portraits, but she kept glancing up at him as she drew, like artists do.”

  I rubbed my chin. “But what does it matter? Symphony can’t be Romeo; Minty specifically referred to him as a he.”

  “Maybe that was code, too, like the name,” Bennie said, leaning forward, his knee jiggling. “If she was having an affair with a girl, she could write ‘he’ to disguise the fact she was really seeing a ‘she.’”

  “That would explain why she was keeping Romeo a secret,” I said. “But Duke said she didn’t seem interested in the women who tried to pick her up at the club. And Kitty Sharpe never caught wind of her having an affair with a woman. Marion, did you ever notice hints she liked the ladies when you were friends?”

  “No . . .” Marion twirled a curl around his finger the way he did when he was thinking. “But at the time, she mostly had a crush on me.”

  “I still think Romeo is a boy,” Olive said. “She had this box locked and hidden under her floor, so why bother with changing Romeo’s gender?”

  “Then she wouldn’t need the code name either,” Bennie pointed out.

  Olive rolled her eyes. “It sounds to me like she was doing all this ‘Romeo and Juliette’ code stuff for fun. She’d be in plenty of trouble if her father read this, names or no.”

  “But what if—” Bennie started.

  “It doesn’t matter right now,” I said, getting to my feet. “We don’t have to agree about the details, because we all know the next step is to interview Symphony Cornice again.” I plucked the drawing from Olive’s hand and waved it. “Either to find out if she drew this or to find out if she knows
who did.”

  Marion and Olive nodded, but Bennie rubbed his jaw and frowned. “Remember how uncooperative Symphony was at the Roosevelt? Do you think she’d really agree to meet you again?”

  “Meet me? No way.” I grinned. “But she might just meet Kitty Sharpe.”

  * * *

  I recruited my mother to call Symphony Cornice. Despite how she’d failed in our last escapade, I couldn’t really blame her for it now that I’d cooled off. We’d both underestimated the detective. And the fact remained—when I considered all the women I knew, Gladys Coleman was the best liar by far, besides myself. I couldn’t call Symphony, in case she recognized my voice, so Gladys was it.

  I hovered behind her as she used the telephone in the hall, the city directory flopped open in front of her. Mama put on a saccharine voice as she asked for Symphony. When I heard Symphony’s voice respond a few moments later, I took a step forward but then stopped; I wanted to hear what Symphony said, but I somehow couldn’t bring myself to squeeze right up next to Mama to listen.

  Mama smiled into the phone. “Hellooo, Miss Cornice,” she cooed. “This is Kitty Sharpe with the New Orleans Item society page?”

  Even from a few feet away, I heard Symphony’s tone go icy. I remembered her mother was one of the ones who’d complained to Kitty’s editor.

  “Ah yes, you’ve heard of me,” Mama said. “I’m writing a profile of your dear departed friend Miss Arimentha McDonough. A portrait of sorts, and I believe the clearest picture of her would come from her best friend.”

  Mama nodded along with whatever Symphony was saying.

  “Yes, dear, but those other stories covered the bare facts of the case. I want to know who Miss McDonough really was. Her hopes, her dreams for the future. I want to know what the world has lost in her passing.”

  I took a step closer but could only catch incoherent sounds.

  “I understand, I don’t mean now, darling, of course. I mean at your convenience. I can stop by your house.”

  Mama kept a fake grin pasted on her face even though her audience couldn’t see it. “Yes, well, I normally don’t meet with the sources of my articles. I normally insist upon maintaining absolute anonymity. But in this case, with the sensitive nature of the subject, I decided to make an exception, just for you, to preserve your comfort.”