“Unfortunately, I must also confess that I haven’t actually heard the program in question. A detective show, is it?”
“For shame,” she chided, tapping his arm playfully. “Don’t you have a radio in that office of yours?”
Martin hung his head and then glanced up at her, the picture of contrite remorse.
“I do not, but I’ll get one right away tomorrow. And I promise not to miss another episode.” He studied her for a moment, long enough for her to feel the heat bloom on her chest. “With your pluck and steely reserve, I can only assume you play the detective.”
Vivian shook her head. “I’m the sidekick who gets into trouble and screams for help a lot.”
“Sounds delightful,” he said with a laugh. “When’s it on? I’ll have to tune in.”
“Thursday evenings, eight o’clock.”
Vivian turned and raised her voice so that it carried across the room. “So about that drink. What’ll you have, Freddy?”
“Scotch,” Freddy answered without turning from the fire.
Vivian turned back to Martin and raised her eyebrows in silent question.
“Scotch is fine. Thank you.”
She made her way to the bar and poured two drinks from the decanter. She delivered one to Freddy and then returned to Martin. “How’s life in the state’s attorney’s office?”
“Busy. Always busy. But it keeps me on my toes, and it’s something new all the time. Speaking of, I thought about contacting you a few months back after that murder at the station.”
“Yes, that was a horrible business.”
“Is that why you came to see Freddy today?”
She shook her head, reluctant to let even someone like Martin in on the real reason. “Are you prosecuting the case against Peggy Hart?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I had to recuse myself—personal connection to a witness.”
“Oh, right.” She took a sip of her drink and noted his emphasis on personal connection. The man was always flirting, she thought, even when talking about a murder case.
“I don’t think it’ll go to trial though,” he continued. “Not if Miss Hart pleads guilty, and from all indications, it looks like she will.”
“I’m glad,” Vivian said, sighing. She hadn’t been looking forward to having to testify at Peggy’s trial. She was glad for herself and glad for Charlie. He shouldn’t have to relive any of that nightmare either.
Vivian followed Martin’s gaze to Freddy, standing looking morosely into the fire.
“What’s going on with him?” she whispered.
Martin shrugged. “He was drunk when I picked him up. I think it might be Pauline… There’s trouble there.”
There had always been trouble there, Vivian thought. “He told me. What happened between them?”
Martin shrugged. “Pauline was never one for social standing and things like joining the ladies’ auxiliary. Now that Freddy’s up for a judgeship, that’s the kind of wife he needs her to be.”
“A judgeship? He didn’t mention anything about that earlier. That’s wonderful.”
Vivian saw the question in Martin’s eyes. She knew he was wondering about the content of their earlier conversation. She glanced away as if she hadn’t noticed.
“Freddy, dear, it’s been too long!” They all turned to find that Julia Witchell had swept into the room like a queen, Oskar trailing half a step behind her. She walked up to Freddy and took both of his hands in hers. “We missed you at the Christmas party.”
Freddy’s blue eyes flicked from Julia to Oskar and back again. His mouth turned down under his pencil mustache at the sight of the other man. “Yes, well, it couldn’t be avoided. I’m sorry to have missed it. I’m sure it was a wonderful time. Your parties are always the event of the season.”
“Well, I’m glad you could make it tonight.” Julia stood on tiptoe and pecked him on the cheek. Freddy flushed and glanced quickly away toward the fireplace, clinking the ice in his glass.
Vivian saw her mother’s nose wrinkle at the alcohol on Freddy’s breath.
Freddy stuck a hand out to Oskar. “Frederick Endicott,” he said. Oskar shook his hand and introduced himself.
Julia’s eyes drifted over to Martin.
“And Martin! I was delighted when Vivian told me earlier that she’d run into you and invited you to dinner. It’s been far too long.” She rushed over and clasped Martin’s hand. He bent down slightly so she could press a kiss to his cheek. “Where on earth have you been keeping yourself?”
Vivian turned her head and rolled her eyes. Like her mother hadn’t been keeping tabs on the eligible lawyer all along.
“I’m still with the state’s attorney’s office,” he said.
“Ah, is that so?” She looked meaningfully at Vivian. “Such an important job.”
“I like to think so.”
Martin smiled at Mrs. Witchell, and Vivian saw the blush bloom on her mother’s cheeks. They moved toward the dining room, and Vivian followed Martin’s glance from Oskar to Freddy. Martin’s and Oskar’s eyes locked for a second, and Vivian saw something pass between them.
• • •
Everett and Gloria joined the group as they moved from drinks in the den to the dining room. Gloria was seated to Vivian’s right, Martin to her left. Everett and Freddy sat across the table, and her mother was at one end of the table, Oskar at the other. The dinner was a last-minute affair, sparked by Vivian’s spur-of-the-moment invitation to Freddy and then Martin. Once they were coming, her mother had decided to invite Oskar and Gloria as well and make it a true party. It was still the holiday season after all.
“I hate to be a nuisance, Viv,” Gloria began, leaning in toward her from the right. “But do you think I could come down to the station to watch this week’s performance of The Darkness Knows? Graham said I was welcome anytime…”
Vivian bristled at Gloria’s familiar way of addressing Graham. She smiled at the girl anyway and forced a politeness she didn’t feel. “Of course,” she said. “You and Everett can both come. You’ve never seen the show done, have you?” She looked at her brother.
Everett shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t. Thursday nights are when the fraternity’s officers meet.”
“Surely not during Christmas break?”
“We take our obligations seriously,” he said, chewing on a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “We have the spring fund-raiser to plan. But you can go ahead without me, Gloria.”
Gloria didn’t seem the slightest bit put out. “It’s going to be so exciting!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together in glee. “I’ve seen Quiz Time, but that doesn’t count. Nothing like The Darkness Knows…”
“We don’t usually invite an audience to watch, you see,” Vivian said. “The Darkness Knows doesn’t broadcast from an auditorium like Quiz Time. I’m afraid you’ll have to stand in the control room with the production staff and be quiet as a mouse.”
Gloria shrugged. “No bother. What’s this week’s episode about?”
“I’m afraid I’m sworn to secrecy on the plot,” Vivian said. She mimed locking her lips and then tossing away the key. “You’ll have to wait until Thursday evening like everyone else.”
“Where is Graham tonight, by the way?” Gloria asked.
“He’s holed up working on the script for this Sunday’s performance of The Scarlet Pimpernel. He’s having terrible trouble getting act 2 the way he wants it.”
“Ah,” Gloria said, bringing a forkful of glazed carrots to her lips. “I imagine it’s quite something to adapt a novel like that as a radio play. A lot of long hours…”
“He’s been working so hard on this program,” Vivian said. “He’s the director and the coauthor. He’s been working day and night rewriting act 2 with his coauthor, Paul.”
Gloria nodded in sympathy.
/> “Yes, very hard,” Vivian repeated. She pressed her fork into her pile of mashed potatoes with a little more force than necessary. “Mr. Heigel,” she said, turning to the older man at her right. “Mother hasn’t told me where you two met.”
Oskar rested his knife and fork on the edges of the china plate and glanced toward the end of the table at Julia, smiling. “Please, call me Oskar. We met at a charity event for the European Aid Society,” he said. “She was so dazzling. I was asking everyone at the party who she was, hoping they would introduce me to her. In the end, I decided to introduce myself. So I worked up the courage to ask her to dance, and she turned me down.”
Everyone at the table laughed, except for Freddy. Vivian couldn’t help but notice that he hadn’t looked at Oskar during the anecdote. In fact, he seemed to carefully avoid meeting the man’s eye, though they were seated around the corner from each other. What he did do, however, was drink. As she watched, he finished yet another scotch and held it up to be refilled.
“Oh posh!” Julia tittered and threw her hands out in front of her face to push away such a ludicrous idea. “I turned you down because I had worn brand-new shoes, and my feet hurt so terribly.”
“Yes, yes, that may be true. But I like to tell it my way. It’s a better story. It gets me sympathy, although I clearly deserve none with someone as lovely as you on my arm.”
The women at the table sighed audibly. Vivian caught her brother glaring at Oskar. He was obviously setting the bar too high, in Everett’s estimation. Vivian bit her lip to choke down a laugh.
“What exactly is your profession, Mr. Heigel?” Freddy asked.
“Please, it’s Oskar,” the older man answered, locking eyes with Freddy across the table.
“Well then, what’s your profession, Oskar?” Freddy’s voice hardened slightly.
Vivian and Everett exchanged glances.
“I was a banker for some years. Now I do charity work.”
“A charity case is more like it,” Vivian heard Freddy say under his breath. Thankfully, no one else at the table caught it, and Freddy was at least sober enough not to repeat it. She glared at him. He was drunk and not suitable for polite dinner conversation.
“Say, where’s Pauline tonight?” Everett asked, shooting a nervous smile in Vivian’s direction. She grimaced and shook her head. Nice try, but poor choice of subject.
“Your guess is as good as mine, kid,” Freddy said and drained his glass. “Say,” he said, turning back to Oskar. “What’s that accent? A bit of the Deutsch?”
“I was raised in Germany, but I lived in Switzerland most of my adult life. Until I came here, that is,” Oskar responded. His mouth twitched. With Hitler threatening to overrun Europe, being German wasn’t the most desirable of nationalities.
“Then you fought with the Huns?” Freddy asked. He smiled as if he were joking, but his voice was hard.
The table was deathly silent except for the nervous scratching of forks on plates. Why on earth would Freddy bring up something as awful as the Great War at dinner—especially with another war looming on the horizon? Vivian glanced around the table, silently urging someone to do something, say something to swing the conversation in a better direction. No one did.
“Regrettably,” Oskar answered finally with a small smile of apology. “And I wish I could say I was too young to know better. I had no choice in the matter. Drafted, you see.”
Silence again. Vivian scanned her mind for a suitable topic, anything other than wars and drafts and rising animosity. Her eyes darted about the table. Everett looked at her helplessly. Martin cleared his throat to her left as if he might wade into the fray, but then he must have changed his mind because nothing followed. Vivian shifted uncomfortably in her chair.
“And you?” Oskar continued, turning to Freddy. “I assume you did your part for Uncle Sam? Perhaps we could have met across the trenches?”
Freddy blanched and looked down at his untouched pheasant. “I’m afraid not. Ruptured eardrum.”
“I see.” Oskar said, a slight smile visible under his voluminous mustache.
Fifteen-love, Oskar, thought Vivian. She glanced at Everett across the table. Was it possible that these two men were sparring over her mother? She glanced at Julia Witchell, sitting regally at the head of the table. Vivian had to admit that her mother had aged well. She was plump, but it suited her. It kept a healthy hue in her cheeks. Not to mention that she was a wonderful schmoozer. She knew everybody who was anybody, and she was also a member of one of the wealthiest families in Chicagoland. Vivian knew that her mother was something of a catch, despite her old-fashioned rigidity and stubbornness to move entirely into the twentieth century. But Vivian supposed the two middle-aged men at the table weren’t interested in a woman with progressive social ideas.
Someone cleared their throat, and then the tension passed over like a summer storm. Martin asked Freddy something in low tones. Vivian couldn’t hear their conversation, but at least Martin had gotten Freddy off topic.
Vivian turned back to Gloria. “What are you studying at Northwestern?”
“Journalism.”
Vivian sniffed. She wasn’t fond of journalists after what Mack Rippert had done to her at that rag the Patriot. What she’d done to herself, she amended. But he had tricked her…and she had fallen for it and almost lost her job as a result. He’d begged that dance from her at Chez Paree and fed her a cheap line. She’d been so naive that she’d given him a couple of plum quotes about the murder before he revealed himself to be a reporter.
When she’d turned down his request for a full interview, he’d used those quotes to write a story about her that, though mostly true, painted her as flippant and casual about a woman’s death. All of that after she’d promised Mr. Hart she wouldn’t speak to the papers about Marjorie’s murder. She’d been burned and had nearly killed her burgeoning career in the process. It had taken Graham’s intervention to get her job back as Lorna Lafferty on The Darkness Knows. She’d learned her lesson about reporters all right. She’d grown to be more careful about sharing her confidences, period.
“What sort of journalism do you intend to do?”
“Investigative,” Gloria said.
“Real hard-nosed pieces,” Everett chimed in. “Digging up the dirt.”
“Like politics and unionizing…things like that?” Vivian’s voice trailed off. She couldn’t think of any other serious topics one might investigate in a hard-nosed way.
“Maybe,” Gloria said, a slight smile on her perfectly penciled red lips.
“Gloria’s terrific,” Everett interjected, jabbing his butter knife in her direction. “She’s written some interesting stuff.”
Gloria looked down. “Below the fold, pieces on things like our sorority fund-raiser. Small potatoes.”
“No it’s not,” Everett said. “It’s a stepping-stone. Gloria wants to be a career girl like you, Viv.” He beamed at the girl, and Vivian forced a smile.
“How was the show last night?” she asked him.
“Not half bad. That Sonja Henie can cut some ice.”
Vivian mmm’d in agreement. She had no idea if Sonja Henie could do any such thing. She glanced at Uncle Freddy across the table. He was pushing the potatoes around his plate with his fork, staring at the table. The he looked up and caught her eye. He looked alarmingly green about the gills.
“If you’ll all excuse me for a moment,” he said, already standing. He dashed out of the dining room before anyone could speak.
Vivian exchanged glances with her mother, the older woman’s eyebrows drawn together in disapproval. Freddy never could hold his liquor.
“I hear you’re headed for law school, Everett,” Martin said, breaking the awkward silence.
“That I am.”
“Let me know when you’re ready for some real-world experience. I can fit you into the state
’s attorney’s office—if you’d like, of course.”
Everett’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean it? That would be aces. Thank you.”
“It’s the least I can do after all your father taught me.”
“I hear there may be a city council seat in your near future, Martin,” Vivian’s mother said.
“If everything goes to plan.”
Vivian glanced sidelong at him and saw the smile flash on his face. A smart, ambitious, undeniably handsome young man could go far in this town, she thought. Then her eyes shifted to her mother. Julia’s ruddy eyebrows rose a fraction as if to say Are you making note of all this youthful vigor, Vivian?
“Then perhaps you’ll set your sights on mayor? Governor?” her mother asked, a lightly teasing note to her voice.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Martin said. Then he turned to Vivian and winked. Her breath caught, and her mind refused to work for a moment. And just like that, she felt sixteen again, her stomach fluttery over the attentions of worldly Martin Gilfoy.
“Arthur would be so proud,” Julia continued.
“Well, he taught me everything I know, and I’m grateful for that.” Then Martin leaned in toward Vivian, his voice pitched low. “Then again, I’m glad those days are over. Your father was a wonderful teacher, but he also worked me like a rented mule.”
Vivian laughed and nudged Martin’s arm with her elbow. “You know Father loved you like a son. And he would be proud of you.”
She watched Martin’s playful smile falter, but then it rebounded as brilliantly as ever.
“Thank you,” he said simply.
Vivian glanced over in time to see her mother’s satisfied smile. Martin may have his sights set on an elected position, but Mother Witchell seemed to have Martin in mind for a potential son-in-law.
• • •
Martin turned from the fire as Vivian handed him the glass of after-dinner port.
Ah now, she thought, as she caught his handsome profile by the light of the fire. Here was a suitable match—prescreened by her dead father and an assistant state’s attorney with designs on public office. Frankly, Vivian was surprised that she’d had to be the one to invite Martin to dinner. A likely candidate right under her nose this whole time. She glanced over her shoulder at the uncomfortable scene across the room. Oskar and Freddy sat on opposite sides of Mother on the divan, glaring at each other like two dogs fighting over a bone.
Homicide for the Holidays Page 10