Mama was silent for a long moment. I heard nothing from the other end of the phone either. Then Symphony said something, and my mother smiled.
“Fantastic, thank you so much for accommodating me, Miss Cornice. How is four o’clock tomorrow afternoon? . . . Excellent. I will see you then.”
Mama hung the receiver back on the hook, looking pleased with herself.
“See? Nothing to it.”
I grinned at her, then stopped myself. It was the least she could do, that was all.
Her smile faded. And I turned away to hide the unwelcome pang of guilt welling up inside me.
CHAPTER
23
COLISEUM STREET, WHERE Symphony Cornice lived and Arimentha used to, was lined with houses big enough to fit four of the Cloak and Dagger. Each garden could cover at least a block in the French Quarter, and the air was scented with camellias and wet leaves, not garbage or factory smoke or, for that matter, roasted pecans or marinara sauce or fresh beignets. Standing on that street felt like wearing a scratchy wool jacket one size too small. You couldn’t throw a punch in a jacket like that. You couldn’t breathe on a street like this.
Just the other night I’d been here with Marion and Bennie, breaking into Minty’s house. My heart raced at the memory of her father’s voice and our frantic retreat, and I tried to slow it back down as I stopped outside 3008 Coliseum and looked up, up, up at the house where Symphony lived. It was a huge blocky building with clapboards painted the color of fresh butter and surrounded by palms tall enough to brush against its eaves. There must have been enough rooms in there for an army, but the real Kitty Sharpe had informed me that Symphony, like Minty, was an only child.
A housekeeper answered my knock on the front door and showed me inside a foyer gleaming with polished wood and glass, golden from the light that streamed in from tall, westward-facing windows. It smelled golden in there, too, if that were possible, like lemons and honey.
The entryway of my building smelled like damp plaster and our neighbor’s cigar smoke. I adjusted my cardigan, hoping the housekeeper didn’t notice the place on the elbow where Marion had sewn up a hole.
She showed me into a room with way too many rugs and chairs and delicate tables covered in shiny doodads. I was told to have a seat and Miss Cornice would be with me in a moment, but I didn’t feel like sitting. I lifted the lid of a crystal dish on a marble-topped table as soon as the housekeeper had left the room, hoping for a butterscotch candy, but there was nothing inside. What was the point of a bowl that held nothing?
“Miss . . . Sharpe?”
I jerked my hand back, letting the lid clatter back onto the dish, and turned slowly, delaying the moment when Symphony would realize who I was. But she’d figured it out long before my eyes met hers—that much was obvious from the furious expression on her face.
She picked up a bell from another little table at her elbow, but I lunged at her and closed both my hands over hers.
“Don’t . . . please.”
Symphony stared down at our hands in shock and disgust. She tried to wrench hers away, but I held tight. “How dare you? Let me go!” Her eyes narrowed. “Miss Sharpe was never coming here, was she? Who did I speak with on the phone? Another of your low-class friends?”
“Something like that. I need to talk to you.”
She glared down her nose at me. “Tell me one reason I shouldn’t call for the housekeeper and have you thrown out this instant?”
“Because I found something in Minty’s diary. About you.” It wasn’t necessarily a lie. Minty hadn’t mentioned her by name, but she could’ve mentioned her in code.
The tension went out of Symphony’s arms, and I took the risk of letting go of her hands. She set down the brass bell. Her face looked as stunned as if I’d slapped her. “Her diary? But how did you—”
“Sit down and talk to me. Please.”
Symphony hesitated. She glanced over her shoulder into the hallway and then pulled the pocket doors shut behind her. We were alone in the oversize room, and no one could hear us. What if Symphony was the killer?
She took an armchair in front of a warm, crackling fireplace and gestured toward a matching one across from it. She seemed to have recovered her composure as she looked at me with her customary shrewdness, taking in every speck of my uniform from my secondhand shoes to my borrowed beret.
“I wasn’t aware you went to Ursuline, Miss Coleman.” A chilly smile lifted the corner of her lips. “I’m surprised you can afford it.”
Of course, she recognized the uniform. She probably knew some of my awful classmates. I chose to ignore her comment and looked around the room for any sign of art she might have done. There was a painting of a white crane at the edge of a pond over the mantel. “Did you paint that?”
Symphony looked taken aback. “No. What does this have to do with Minty?”
“It has to do with what I found.” I slipped the drawing out of my pocket. “It was stuck between the pages of her diary. We—I hoped you might know something about who drew it.”
She held out a hand for it. “May I?”
I hesitated. It was our only copy. What if she ripped it to shreds or tossed it on the fire?
“Be careful with it,” I said as I released it into her hand, bracing myself to leap forward and snatch it back if she made a move to destroy it.
But Symphony brought it closer to her face, her fingers tracing just above the penciled lines. Unprompted, she turned the paper over and read the message on the back. Her mouth opened and then pinched tightly shut.
“Did you give that to Minty?” I said quietly, afraid to startle her while she held the drawing.
She looked up at me, her mouth curling in a sneer. “You think I’m this Romeo?”
“I think anyone can be a Romeo,” I said evenly.
Her eyes roamed over me coldly again. “Not everyone is like you, Miss Coleman.”
“I have no doubt of that, Miss Cornice.” I struggled to keep the bite out of my voice. “But Minty said in her diary she was keeping this Romeo a secret, and there had to be a reason she’d go to so much trouble.”
Symphony pressed her lips together, her eyes darkening to a deeper green. “I did not draw this.”
I couldn’t tell if she was lying, but I decided to play along. “Then who did? Do you recognize the style?”
Symphony surprised me with a harsh laugh. “There’s no style at all. Unless you count ‘amateur hour’ as a style.”
“What do you mean?”
She rolled her eyes. “See here? The way the lines are thick and clumsy? It’s because the ‘artist’ was using a basic Number 2 pencil like the kind you’d use in school, and they don’t know how to use even that properly. A trained artist would have an arsenal of skills and tools at his or her disposal.”
“Or they just drew it on the fly with the materials available. Like you did in our club that night.”
Symphony stared at me appraisingly, but I detected underneath the calm veneer that she was surprised again. She thrust the drawing back at me, went to a spindly-legged desk in the corner, and opened a drawer. When she returned, she was clutching a small piece of paper. She hesitated one moment, just as I’d done, and then handed it over to me. Now it was my turn to be astonished; it was the drawing Olive and I had seen her sketching on New Year’s Eve. Marion, in profile, from the waist up. It was stark and unfinished, but it was good—like I was looking at a living, breathing him on the page.
“I drew this that night,” Symphony said, with a hint of pride. “Tell me you can’t tell the difference between these two drawings.”
I was no art expert, but with the drawings side by side, they did seem very different. The bird was all tentative softness, while the portrait of Marion was made of sharp, bold strokes. I looked up at Symphony.
“Let’s say I believe you.” I passed the
drawing of Marion back to her, and she avoided touching my fingers as she accepted it. “Surely, Minty told you something about this Romeo person. No one’s that good at keeping secrets.”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Then maybe you saw her sneaking off with someone?”
Symphony massaged her temple with one hand as if I were giving her a headache. “No. Never.”
“Listen.” I tried to keep my voice calm and hide my rising frustration. “I know you don’t want to tell your friend’s secrets. But she isn’t alive to care anymore, and telling them might lead me to her killer. Don’t you want to find that person? Don’t you want Minty to get some justice?”
Symphony was silent a long moment, her face half hidden by her hand, so I couldn’t read her expression. “She didn’t . . .” Her voice came out pinched and rough. “Didn’t tell me who he was. I asked, but she just laughed. Said he was no one important.”
“But she definitely said ‘he’?”
Symphony’s other hand curled tightly around the arm of her chair. “Yes, I think—I don’t know. I don’t remember her exact words.”
“Do you know why she was keeping him a secret?” I said quietly, trying not to scare Symphony into clamming up again.
“Why did Minty do anything?” Her voice rose and cracked. Her eyes met mine again, bright with unshed tears. “Did you know we were supposed to go to college together at Maryville in the fall? I have a gentleman friend there in St. Louis, and his mother was going to give Minty and me both a room to stay. But Minty fell behind in school and kept disappearing off to the Vieux Carré. When I called her house, she was often gone and hadn’t told anyone where.”
“Do you think anyone else could’ve known about her romance?”
Symphony stiffened again. “If I didn’t know, who else would?”
I sat back and met her gaze steadily. “Maybe someone who was looking for dirt on her. Someone with a reputation for blackmail.”
Her brows rose. “You mean Fitzroy DeCoursey.”
“Everyone seems to know him, and nobody seems to like him,” I said, conjuring Kitty Sharpe’s words. “How many of you Uptowners has he pulled his tricks on?”
Symphony’s voice went hard. “I wouldn’t know.”
I studied her face for a long moment. The ice in her eyes could’ve chilled a roomful of drinks. “Did he ever try any of that stuff on you, Miss Cornice?”
“I have nothing to hide, Miss Coleman.”
“Funny, that’s the same thing Philip Leveque said when I asked him that question.”
I stood and tucked the bird drawing away inside my bag. I smiled. “And he sounded like he was lying, too.”
* * *
At the streetcar stop down the block from Symphony’s house, I took out the scrap of paper I’d stolen from Detective Sabatier’s office. I’d done things Marion’s and Olive’s way first, but now it was time for my way. The street Fitzroy DeCoursey lived on was about midway between Symphony’s stop and mine, with a short walk beyond St. Charles Street on foot. I had plenty of time left before dark.
The cottages in Fitzroy’s neighborhood were not as large or fine as the mansions in the Garden District, but they were pretty and freshly painted, with fences dividing small, neat lawns. I found the house with his number easily enough and hesitated only a moment before opening the little gate and mounting the steps onto the wide porch. The black mailbox hanging on the wall beside the front door was painted with the address 1660 Erato in white, below a name—Delacroix.
I frowned and checked the scrap of paper with the address again. This was the right place. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching and opened the lid of the mailbox. There were letters inside, and I slid them out and read the names. Mrs. Georges Delacroix was on two of them, and Mr. Roy Delacroix was printed on the third.
The front door creaked open, and there stood Fitzroy, managing to look perfectly put together even in a plain undershirt and trousers.
“I hear tampering with the mail is a federal offense,” he said lightly, but his blue eyes were like stone.
I held the letters out to him and kept my gaze fastened on his. “I hear blackmail carries a hefty sentence, too.”
Fitzroy let the letters hang there between us for a solid three seconds before he snatched them and tossed them on the floor inside the house.
“I know who you are,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
The cadence of his voice was so different from what I’d heard him use at the Cloak. It sounded harder, older. Was he even really our age? Was Fitzroy even his name?
“I’m here to talk to you, Roy,” I tried.
He didn’t even flinch. “Yeah, that’s my name. You want a cookie for figuring it out?”
“No thanks. But I’d like some answers.”
Roy sneered, an expression that was far less attractive than his smile. “Why would I tell you anything?”
“Because I know what you’ve been doing, Roy. I know how you’ve been keeping up with those rich kids.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t care about that. You can take them for every dime for all I care.”
Roy snorted, but his eyes showed a flicker of interest. I took a step closer, though it was the opposite of what I wanted to do, and lowered my voice. “All I care about is what happened that night on that balcony. Were you there with Arimentha when she died?”
Roy’s expression changed to one of amusement. “It’s cute you think I’d tell you if I was.”
I smiled. “It’s cute you think I won’t tell the police what you’ve been up to. I’ve become very close with Detective Sabatier. I’m sure he’d be interested to know about your little escapades with other people’s money.”
Roy smiled back, looking vile even with one hundred watts of beauty shining out of his face. “First you’d have to persuade the rich folks to tell the cops about it. And then they’d have to admit all the scandalous things they’ve been up to. Somehow, I don’t think they will.”
He was too smooth, too venomous. I tried to change tack. “What scandalous things did Arimentha McDonough get up to? I know you were watching her.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“I do,” I lied. “I know about Jerome Rosenthal, too. And Philip Leveque. And Symphony Cornice.”
His brows raised, but he still looked bored.
“And Minty McDonough,” I said. “I know you were looking for a way to blackmail her. And maybe you found it. Maybe you tried to spring the trap on her the night she died, and it backfired on you. She ended up dead.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“Did you talk her into going up on that balcony? You’re a smooth talker when you want to be, aren’t you? And then what happened? She wouldn’t give in and pay you the money to keep her secrets quiet?”
“No. That isn’t—I didn’t even know that place had a balcony.”
“But you did find out some of her secrets, didn’t you?”
“Not anything worth using.”
“I told you I’m not interested in your petty crimes. What I need to know is what you found out about Arimentha. Where did she go? Who was she seeing?”
Roy glanced toward an older neighbor across the street who’d come out into her yard and was pretending to water her flowers, all while watching us intently. He rubbed his palm against the back of his neck and turned his hard gaze back at me. “Look, kid,” he said in a lower voice, barely moving his lips. “I need you to get out of here.”
“Why? Afraid your sweet old neighbor will find out you’re a criminal?” I raised my voice a little louder. “A murderer?”
“I’m not a murderer,” he said through gritted teeth, glancing now at another neighbor who’d appeared. The two neighbors were chatting over their fence, both looking our way.
“But you did spy on Minty, right?” I said, drawing his attention back. “You did find some dirt on her?”
Roy hesitated a long moment, so long I lost patience.
“Tell me what you found, and I’ll go right now, before your granny gets home and finds out what kind of boy she’s raised.”
The granny thing was a wild guess, but I could see its arrow hit home.
“I . . . I didn’t find much, okay?” Roy sighed and flexed his hands like he’d like to throttle me. “And I didn’t talk to her about it that night, or any night, because I hadn’t found enough yet.”
“What a shame. Now she’s dead, and all your hard work is wasted.”
“Hey!” he said sharply. “Don’t talk about her like that. She was an all right kid. Just too rich for her own good. All of them are.”
That I could agree with. But I’d found his weak spot and decided to dig in the knife.
“You’re not all bad either, are you, Roy? Greedy, selfish, unprincipled, but not all bad, right?”
He crossed his arms over his muscled chest. “So?”
“So, tell me what you found out about Minty. Tell me and maybe you can do something good for once. You can help me catch her killer.”
Roy glanced again at the neighbors, then at his grand-mother’s tidy bed of purple pansies and vivid pink dianthus along the fence. He ran a hand along his chiseled jaw and didn’t look at me as he spoke.
“All I know is she’d been meeting up with somebody, but I don’t know who.”
“Where?” I said, anticipation percolating through my whole body.
Roy sighed heavily. “A speakeasy on the far side of the Quarter. A place called the Pelican.”
CHAPTER
The Boy in the Red Dress Page 21