• • •
It was shy of four o’clock, but the light was already turning soft. Vivian knew that if she could see the western sky beyond the buildings, it would be filled with one of those beautiful winter sunsets the pastel of orange sherbet. Both frigid and lovely, like Chicago itself at this time of year. She craned her neck to see the pinky orange reflected in the upper windows of the department store. Her eyes ranged back down and fell on the evergreen wreath hung over the lamppost in front of her. The ends of the thick red bow were starting to fray from the wind, and the gold star in the middle of the wreath hung lopsided. It looked like she felt: bedraggled, worn out. She’d had a live show and two grueling rehearsals today: The Darkness Knows and The Scarlet Pimpernel. She couldn’t keep this pace up for much longer. Around her, people clamored, rushing home with their packages.
She was beat, but she’d managed to make two trips before going home. She’d rushed off to Stop and Shop after rehearsals to pick up a box of the expensive Italian Majani candies that her father had loved, and then on to Carson Pirie Scott to buy herself a new dress. Not that Charlie would notice the dress. Not that he would care. It was senseless to pine for him when he’d told her in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t interested. Still, she had to try. Because she’d never wanted anyone like she wanted Charlie Haverman. She’d been sleepwalking through the past two months, but she hadn’t realized that until she’d seen him again. And perhaps, she thought, she wanted him so badly because she couldn’t have him. She had to admit that was a novel concept for her, a man who was out of reach.
She stood on the sidewalk outside Carson’s, her eyes ranging over the store’s front window still decked out with its festive Christmas display of Shirley Temple dolls and toy trains while simultaneously proclaiming Sale! from banners hanging from the ceiling.
The scent of roasting chestnuts wafted on the air and her stomach growled, reminding Vivian that she hadn’t eaten lunch. She reached into her bag and pulled out the box of candies. She popped one into her mouth and let the sugary, violet-flavored candy roll around on her tongue.
She wound the handle of the bag containing the ledger around her right wrist. She felt the weight, the realness of it. It was quite real, and it was evidently important. But why? She hadn’t looked at it beyond what she’d seen inside the vault, and she’d decided not to look at it again until Charlie arrived.
Charlie. He’d be with her tonight. Alone. She smiled.
Someone bumped into Vivian from behind, jostling her. Her arms automatically pinwheeled forward to stop her from toppling over, but she felt her right arm pulled backward. She blinked, confused. Then she was yanked sideways. A gloved hand appeared in her view, clutching the strap of her bag. Someone was trying to pull it from her.
“Hey!” she said. She was more shocked than frightened, and the tiny sound of her protest was lost in the din of the crowd. The hand continued to grasp, pulling on the bag and rubbing the strap painfully against her wrist. “Hey!” she repeated. A few faces turned her way, but no one stopped to help.
Instinct and outrage kicked in. Vivian hitched in the biggest breath she could muster and screamed. It was the scream she saved for the live episodes of The Darkness Knows, the scream she was known for—shrill, high, and piercing. It echoed off the stone facades of State Street. Everyone, everything around her stopped. A dozen startled faces turned in her direction. “Thief!” she cried. Immediately, the hand loosened its grip and slipped away. Vivian’s weight shifted in the opposite direction, and she stumbled, almost slipping to the icy pavement. Her eyes darted toward the movement of a dark figure rushing away from her through the crowd. She could make out nothing distinctive about the man except that he was young, dark, and wearing a flat cap—like the young man at the bank earlier today.
Vivian blinked and looked down at the bag, the strap still securely twisted around her wrist. It ached where the strap had slipped under her coat sleeve and rubbed against her skin. There would be a welt there. She rubbed it with her fingertips. When she looked up again, the man was long gone, replaced by a crowd of pale, worried faces. They swarmed around her.
“Are you okay, miss?” The question came from all sides.
She nodded numbly as snippets of conversation floated toward her. The outraged voice of an older woman rang in her ears.
“Filthy purse snatchers. At the holidays too. Don’t people have any decency anymore?”
A purse snatcher. Panicked, she reached for the handbag slung over her left shoulder. It was still there. She patted it with her gloved hand, felt that the snap was still securely closed, and sighed with relief. A purse snatcher, she thought again. Not unheard of in a crowd already prone to confusion. But that snatcher hadn’t gone for her purse, had he? No, he’d gone after the bag with the ledger.
• • •
Vivian plumped a pillow on the sofa and immediately felt silly for doing it. Charlie wouldn’t care one bit if her pillows were plumped. But she had too much nervous energy to sit around just waiting. She put both hands on her hips and cast an eye over the interior of the tiny coach house, wondering what he would see when he entered. It was essentially one big room, with the front door opening directly into the living room. The stairway to the second floor made a division of sorts between that and the kitchen behind. The powder room was tucked into the nook behind the stairs. Her eyes skimmed over the furniture cribbed from the attic of the main house—the riotous checks of the overstuffed chair at war with the elaborate swirling vines of the sofa. The effect was cozy, cramped, and rather underwhelming, she decided.
She had no maid, and tonight was the only time she’d worried that it showed. She ran an index finger absently around the bottom edge of the lampshade and winced at the deep-gray smudge left on the pad of her finger when she pulled it away. She started toward the dust rag in the hall closet, and then a double knock sounded at the front door like a gunshot. Vivian put a hand to her throat as if clutching at imaginary pearls and glanced at the clock. He was early. She transferred the dust from her finger onto the back side of the chair and kicked a dust ball the size of a small tumbleweed under the sofa. Then she hurried to the mirror over the side table to check her reflection. She smoothed her eyebrows down with the wetted tips of her pinky fingers and smiled at herself to take the edge off her nerves.
He knocked again, and she forced herself to wait thirty seconds before opening the front door, timing it on her wristwatch. She didn’t want to appear too eager. Charlie stood there, backlit by the porch light of the front house. His face was in shadow under the brim of his hat. She watched the breath leave his mouth in a puff of icy air as he opened his mouth to speak.
“So these are the new digs? You’ve come down in the world, Vivian Witchell.” She narrowed her eyes at him, and he raised his hands to ward off her retort. “Kidding. This is a penthouse suite compared to my place.”
He stepped slightly forward, his face becoming discernable in the yellow glow of her living room lamp. She followed his eyes as they darted over her shoulder and took in the interior of the coach house. But if he thought anything else of her tiny mismatched abode, he didn’t say it. She wondered what his place was like—where he slept, where he brushed his teeth, shaved, hung his hat, among other things.
“So?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Come in.” She stepped backward and watched as he removed his coat and hat, which she took from him. They stood looking at each other for a long awkward moment.
“You found the place all right?”
He smirked. “It’s right behind the old place.”
“Oh. Yes. Would you like a tour?” She held her hand out, palm up. “Living room, powder room, kitchen.” Her wrist ticked a few degrees to the right to indicate each separate space as she announced them. She walked toward the back of the room and threw her arm with his overcoat draped over it out to the side to indicate the stairway. “This way to the bedroom.”
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She stopped speaking, acutely aware in the silence that followed of how that had sounded. Her hand remained outstretched for another long moment before she lowered it to her side. She caught Charlie’s eye for a split second, and then glanced away again to hide the blush creeping onto her cheeks. The best thing to do was to press on, she decided. Pretend that she hadn’t said precisely what she was thinking. She started walking again and smiled at him over one shoulder. She opened the hall closet, set his hat on the shelf, and hung his coat.
“Well, that covers it. Nothing else to see, I’m afraid.”
She turned and found he had stopped inches from her.
“Cozy little place,” he said, looking down at her.
“I like it.” She forced herself to maintain eye contact with him. “And it keeps Mother out of my hair.”
He turned back toward the front of the coach house and walked over to the window. He drew the curtain back a bit with the tips of two fingers and looked out.
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Vivian hurried over to the window. There was indeed a fuzzy-headed silhouette in the kitchen window that quickly slipped out of view. She frowned. Mrs. Graves.
“Is she about to scurry off and report that there’s an unknown man in your house?”
“Probably,” Vivian said, her frustration growing. How had she ever thought that living twenty yards away from her mother and under a different roof would exempt her from the woman’s scrutiny? She exhaled and took a moment to calm her frazzled nerves.
“Who cares? I’m a grown woman. I can do as I please.” She walked over to the small liquor cabinet and opened the door. “Speaking of… What I would like right now is a nice, stiff drink. Would you like one?”
Charlie looked at her for a moment, brow furrowed. Something flashed in his eyes. Temptation, she thought. She smiled at him and batted her eyelashes. This is it, she thought. The moment he cracks. The moment he admits that he still feels something for me.
Then Charlie’s gaze slipped away. “How about we look at the ledger,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Of course. The ledger.”
She’d managed to forget entirely about that ledger. Charlie had commanded all of her attention. But apparently she hadn’t had the same effect on him…because Charlie was all business. Again.
She pulled the ledger from the bag and set it on the side table. She watched Charlie approach and the frown deepen on his face. It was a frown of recognition.
“You know what it is?”
He didn’t answer. He opened it, paused when he noticed the date on the inside front cover, and started to page through, pausing every so often to take a more thorough look at one of the entries.
“Well?”
He held up one finger, silencing her. Vivian took the opportunity to mix herself that nice stiff drink. She sipped her gin and tried not to think about how her seduction scene was not playing out as she’d hoped. Not at all, in fact.
“Accounting. Collections. Payments,” he said finally.
“I know that,” she said in exasperation. “For the Racquet Club in Cicero. But why did my father have it? Why did he keep it in a secret safe-deposit box?”
“I imagine because it was important to him at some point in time.”
Vivian grunted and finished off her drink. The liquor burned down to her stomach as she set the empty glass on the table. “It’s not his.”
“How do you know that?”
“Freddy said he was keeping it for a client. He said they did things like that.”
“A client…”
“I know. I know. Save your lecture. The client was probably not a respectable citizen. But that doesn’t mean my father wasn’t respectable.”
Charlie shook his head. “The Racquet was a high-end place, but it was still illegal.” He looked off into the distance for a minute. Then he turned to look at her, his face serious. “Do you know anything about what sent Capone to jail?”
“Al Capone?” Vivian’s stomach twisted.
Charlie narrowed his eyes at her. She was being naive, and they both knew it.
“Tax evasion, wasn’t it?” she said. She looked away, not able to meet Charlie’s gaze. She could still feel his eyes on her.
“Not murder, not bootlegging…tax evasion. He was convicted on the testimony of a bookmaker and a single dusty ledger that showed he’d earned money that he never reported to the federal government.”
Charlie tapped an entry with his fingertip until Vivian turned back and looked down at it. “Two hundred dollars to Al,” she read aloud. She glanced up at Charlie. Al. The word tasted sour in her mouth. “That could be Al anyone.”
Charlie tilted his head at her. “But it isn’t.”
Vivian swallowed. Of course it wasn’t any Al. It was the Al. Which is why someone had had her father hide this ledger. She glanced back at that line—so innocent and yet so incriminating.
“So this ledger is proof of Capone’s income then. And my father was keeping this ledger until it could be used at trial?”
“Looks like it.”
“For whom?”
He shrugged again. “The men who kept ledgers, the numbers men, tended to wind up in Lake Michigan wearing cement overshoes—disappeared along with the ledgers they kept. Which is why the feds could dig up only one solitary ledger with any reference to Capone’s income, and that one had been sitting in a file cabinet for years collecting dust, acquired in a raid years before and forgotten.”
Vivian swallowed. Cement overshoes. Dead. Like her father. She flipped through the remaining pages, then shut the book with a thump.
“And this was another,” she said.
“The problem was that you couldn’t just have the ledger… You also had to have the man who kept the ledger to testify that it was legit.”
“So my father was keeping this for an accountant that was going to testify?”
“Looks like it.”
“Capone’s sitting in Alcatraz, and the man that this ledger belonged to is probably long gone. So this”—she tapped the cover with a fingernail—“is a dead end.”
Charlie moved toward her, then hesitated. She stopped breathing for a moment as he gazed down at her. “You mind if I borrow it?”
She started breathing again.
“I thought it was worthless.”
He glanced away again before answering. “It probably is, but I want to give it another look. Does anyone know you have this?”
“Just Uncle Freddy.”
“And he knows what it is?”
“He knew what the Racquet Club was, and that the ledger is probably connected to one of my father’s old clients.” Vivian looked off into the distance, thinking. “There’s one thing that bothers me. There was a safe in my father’s office. Why didn’t he keep it there?”
“Perhaps your father didn’t trust his law partner.”
That’s exactly what Vivian had thought, but she hated hearing Charlie confirm her suspicions. “He and Father were best friends. They were law partners for almost fifteen years…”
“And yet your father kept secrets from him.”
Charlie reached across her to snag the ledger. Vivian flinched backward and watched him slide it across the table and scoop it into his arms. She was treating him like a skittish animal, afraid that if she made any sudden movements, he’d run away. Unfortunately, Charlie wasn’t a stray kitten. She couldn’t give him a saucer of milk and a scratch behind the ears to win his affection.
He nodded and headed toward the closet. He pulled out his hat and coat and then stalked toward the front door without a word.
“You’re going?”
“I have something to take care of.”
At this time of night? The last time he’d said something like that, he’d disappeared for h
ours and had nearly been killed. The leggy Maxine jumped to the front of Vivian’s mind, and she pushed her away. She frowned. She was hoping he’d stay. She was hoping they could talk, that she could explain things. Explain about Graham.
“You’re sure you don’t want a drink or anything?” She winced. That had sounded desperate. But she’d planned on getting him to have at least one drink. Loosen up a little. She was terrible at this. Seduction scenes were not her forte.
Charlie shook his head. She followed him to the door and considered telling him about how someone had tried to steal the ledger from her this afternoon. But she didn’t have any proof that the thief wasn’t just a purse snatcher, and she didn’t want him to think she was making things up to guilt him into staying. Even though that’s exactly what she wanted to do. Vivian Witchell was used to being the chasee, not the chaser, and she would not resort to desperate acts to get a man, she decided. Not even Charlie Haverman.
She watched him put on his coat and hat. Then he turned back right outside the door, as if a thought had just struck him. “Are you free tomorrow?”
Vivian shrugged. “That depends on what you have in mind.” She caught his gaze and held it for an instant before he looked away.
“I think I know somebody who could fill in some blanks.” He tapped the ledger with a forefinger.
“Oh.”
“Swing by my office around noon,” he said. “And bring a photo of your father.”
“A photo?”
He nodded at her. “Noon.”
She flipped through the day’s agenda in her mind. “Okay, noon.”
He hesitated on the doorstep, his eyes darting into the house once more as if he might change his mind and stay. But then he tipped the front of his hat toward her and turned to walk out into the night.
She closed and bolted the door behind him. Then she leaned against it and sighed. He was purposely making this difficult, she thought. She looked out the window, but Charlie had already disappeared into the darkness. Vivian’s eyes drifted to the kitchen window, but Mrs. Graves was no longer watching. Her twenty-fifth birthday couldn’t come soon enough, Vivian decided. When she inherited her money, she could move away from prying eyes and finally live her own life. She just hoped Charlie would be in it.
Homicide for the Holidays Page 15