Homicide for the Holidays

by Cheryl Honigford

  “Nice to meet you, Gloria.” He turned to Vivian while Gloria offered her hand to Mr. Marshfield. “I wasn’t aware we were having guests for the performance.”

  “She’s my brother’s girlfriend. Graham invited her.”

  Mr. Langley’s scowl lightened at the mention of Graham. Ever the golden boy, Vivian thought. She wondered what she’d have to do to gain the esteem Mr. Langley had for Graham. Promise her firstborn?

  “Two minutes to air,” Joe McGreevey announced into the microphone.

  “Oh,” Vivian said, glancing through the control-room glass into the studio. The actors had taken their places at the microphone in the center of the room. The organist’s fingers hovered over the keys. “I’m sorry. I should get back.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Langley said. “Don’t worry about Miss Mendel. She’s in good hands.”

  Vivian glanced at Gloria, who was in conversation with Mr. Marshfield. She caught Vivian’s eyes and gave her a jaunty thumbs-up.

  Vivian rushed back into the studio and picked up her script. She had it memorized, but she couldn’t stop herself from running through the first few lines again. And again.

  “One minute to air,” announced Joe’s booming voice.

  Vivian glanced up at Graham across the microphone, and one corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. Then he lowered his head and raked a hand through his wavy black hair and pushed the rolled cuffs of his shirtsleeves up past his elbows. Vivian’s stomach fluttered with nerves. It always did before a performance, but she hadn’t felt a churning in her guts like this since she’d first started on The Darkness Knows shortly before Halloween. She took a deep breath and let it out through her nose. Her eyes darted to the control room.

  Gloria wasn’t standing near the front with Mr. Langley and Mr. Marshfield as expected. No, now she hovered over Morty, smiling and fawning. The poor boy looked like there was a fox in his henhouse. His usually sure hands fluttered over the controls, and his freckled cheeks were pink. Vivian had no time to speculate what Gloria could be about, because the minute hand of the clock swept up to mark the hour and the on-air light blinked on. Bill Purdy stepped up to the microphone to start the show.

  “And now it’s—” Bill stopped speaking abruptly and scowled into the control booth. His voice had come out flat, and Vivian realized she couldn’t hear the telltale electrical hum. The microphone was dead.

  Morty flushed and scurried over to the control panel. Bill took a breath and started all over again. Vivian glanced at the clock above the door, the second hand sweeping ever forward. The entire production was now approximately three seconds off. They’d have to make up that time somewhere.

  She glanced at Graham, but his head was bowed. He hadn’t noticed the loss of time, and that didn’t bode well. Graham was usually on top of his game for Harvey Diamond and could be counted on to help cover any blips in the live show. Vivian took a sip of water and opened the script, her eyes focusing on her first line.

  “And now it’s time for another edition of that tantalizing tale of detective muscle, The Darkness Knows,” Bill said, his voice rising with enthusiasm. “Sponsored by Sultan’s Gold, the cigarette that’s truly mellow. Today, we open on Harvey Diamond’s downtown office. Diamond is at his desk when a well-dressed man of middle age bursts in, followed by Diamond’s right-hand gal, Lorna Lafferty.”

  “Diamond, you’ve got to help me,” Dave said, his eyes wide as he glanced up at Graham.

  “I tried to stop him, Harvey,” Vivian said. “He doesn’t have an appointment.”

  Graham looked up from his script and held up one hand with a smirk. “That’s okay, doll,” he said. Then the smirk faded as he looked to Dave. “Help you with what…uh, Mr.…?”

  “Gold.”

  “Mr. Gold. Have a seat and fill me in.” Graham frowned down at his script, and Vivian hitched in a breath. Graham always held the character of Harvey Diamond, the gruff yet carelessly charming gumshoe, throughout every moment of the performance once they were live—even during the sponsor break. And now he’d dropped out of character, if only for a moment. He’d jump effortlessly back in, no doubt, but that lapse worried her. Of the two of them, Graham was usually the more reliable during a performance. Yet his concentration had just faltered. And if he went under, it would be up to her to drag him to the surface and keep them both afloat.

  “It’s my daughter, Diamond.” Dave waited a beat. Then he leaned into the microphone, lowering his voice to a throaty whisper. “She’s been kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped? Oh, Harvey!” Vivian exclaimed, her free hand fluttering to her chest.

  The organ came in with a dramatic stanza. Vivian glanced at Graham. He looked terrible. A fine sheen of sweat was visible near his hairline. He wasn’t ready for this performance. The Pimpernel was eating him alive.

  “Did you get a ransom note?” Graham asked.

  “No, but I got this letter in today’s mail.”

  “May I see it?” Dave handed Graham a sheet of paper close to the microphone so the audience would be able to hear the sound of shuffling. Graham read it, brow furrowed. “‘They’re holding me against my will. Please, help me. I’m at The Golden Lion. Myra.’”

  “The Golden Lion? That’s in Chinatown,” Vivian announced.

  The organ broke in with an ominous chord progression, followed quickly by a lighthearted jump into the Sultan’s Gold jingle. The three girl singers stood in a tight half circle around another microphone in the corner of the room. They were sisters and so similar in appearance that Vivian couldn’t tell them apart on a normal evening. Tonight they were dressed in matching gold sweaters and black skirts. They matched the Sultan’s Gold box exactly, and that could be no coincidence, Vivian thought. “Sultan’s Gold. You’ll be sold on the cigarette that’s truly mellow.” They twitched their hips from side to side as they crooned in perfect harmony. Vivian’s eyes strayed to Graham. He looked at her, and she winked. He forced a smile in return.

  “And now back to our story. A mysterious Mr. Gold has asked for Detective Diamond’s help in locating his missing daughter.”

  “Chinatown, you say?” Graham asked.

  Vivian’s eyes strayed again into the control booth. The ad man hadn’t appeared to notice anything amiss. He caught her eye and smiled at her, raising his half-smoked Sultan’s Gold in something of a salute. Maybe Vivian wouldn’t be overlooked in this magazine advertisement after all. She smiled back. With all of her date dialog cut since the rehearsal, Vivian had a page with nothing to do before she was kidnapped by the white slavers, and then all she had to do was scream on cue. She could do that in her sleep.

  The first live show went well, despite such an inauspicious beginning. Morty managed to shake Gloria’s attentions and hit all of his cues.

  When they finished the second live show for the West Coast, it was ten thirty, and it was almost eleven by the time she’d left the station and was on her way home. This workload was catching up with her. Vivian could barely keep her eyes open.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The streetcar was almost empty. Vivian entered from the back and made her way up the aisle to one of the wicker bench seats near the middle of the car. She slumped into it and rested her aching head against the window. The icy glass felt wonderful against her temple. She closed her eyes. She was so tired. Her last conscious thought was that this week would be the death of her.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  Vivian startled awake. She sat up with a start, blinking into the gloomy light of the streetcar interior. She could make out the shape of a man standing in the aisle at her seat. He was gesturing to something, his arm outstretched. She couldn’t see his face in the dark, but he was wearing a flat cap. Just like the man who’d tried to steal her bag. Panic rose in her throat. But no, this man was shorter, stockier. The streetcar ambled down a darkened street. She glanced out the window, hoping to spo
t a familiar sign, a landmark, to help her orient herself. There was nothing. Every twenty feet or so, the streetcar passed from darkness into the yellowy-orange pool of a streetlamp.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said, his voice coming out of the darkness. “But I was walking past your seat and noticed that your bag had spilled.”

  Vivian jerked her attention to the bag resting beside her on the seat. The strap was still wrapped around her arm, and her hand was still in her pocket, but the bag itself was on its side, the top open and the contents spilled out onto the rough rattan of the seat. How on earth had that happened? Her mind was lazy. She was having trouble getting things back into focus. She blinked again.

  “Oh,” she said, scrambling to scoop the contents back into the open bag. “Thank you. I guess I fell asleep and knocked it over.”

  He nodded and made his way to a seat at the back of the car.

  In the dim interior light of the car, Vivian scanned the things spread out in a clump on the seat. Everything appeared to be there. She hastily scooped it all into her bag and then closed the top. It hadn’t been open, had it? But maybe it had. Maybe when she boarded the streetcar, she’d been in such a tired daze that she hadn’t buttoned it properly, and then she’d dozed off, hadn’t she? Oh no…

  Her attention snapped back to the passing scene outside. Surely, she’d missed her stop. She reached up and pulled the cord. Her guts twisted. This was wrong. This was all wrong.

  The streetcar clanged to a stop at the next corner, and Vivian hopped off. She watched the back of the red-and-cream car clamor up the street and glanced up at the street sign: Clark and Division—only a few blocks west of her usual stop. She sighed. The good news was that the distance was walkable. The bad news was that the icy wind was blowing in off the lake, and she’d have to walk an extra three blocks into it on this icy pavement.

  It’s amazing how much seedier the neighborhood becomes a scant distance from my house, she thought, glancing at the blinking neon signs of the bars and pawnshops that littered the avenue. Just south of here was Bughouse Square, a well-known gathering place for hobos and crackpots and left-leaning radicals lobbing opinions and abuse from their soapboxes. And just west of that was Death Corner, tucked among the Italian tenements near the north branch of the Chicago River where many a low-rent hood had lost his life to a bullet during Prohibition.

  It wasn’t the best area to be walking in just before midnight, to be sure. She scanned the passing traffic for a taxi, but saw none. Vivian pulled the woolen scarf tighter around her neck and wound it up over her head and around her ears. She shoved her gloved hands deep into her coat pockets and started walking east. There was no use for it. It was just a few blocks, she told herself. Don’t be a ninny, Vivian.

  She walked, head down. There were very few people on the street on this bitingly cold December evening. She turned left onto a side street to use the buildings as a break from the unrelenting headwind. If the main thoroughfare was nearly empty, then this side street was decidedly so. Her heels echoed like gunshots on the pavement, and a chill that had nothing to do with the weather crawled up her spine. She passed under the electric glow of a streetlamp and breathed a little easier for those few seconds, but then was plunged back into darkness. She sucked in her breath. She couldn’t feel the tip of her nose, and her toes were numb. Why hadn’t she brought boots today? Why hadn’t she stayed awake on the streetcar and gotten off where she was supposed to?

  Then she heard them. Footsteps somewhere behind her. The cadence matched her own. She sped up, they sped up. She stopped walking and cocked her head to listen. The footsteps stopped as well. She hurried to the next pool of lamplight ten paces ahead. Then stopped and whirled around, feeling the Dutch courage of being in the light, even if no one else was around to hear her, to see her. She scanned the sidewalk, the street, and the snow-covered bushes, seeing nothing. Everything was an indistinct gray-black blur. She cocked her head and listened, but all she heard was the wind whining against her ears—like the sound of the ocean in a seashell. She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of home.

  One more block to go. It was ridiculous to think anyone could be following her. Her mind fell on that man on the streetcar. He hadn’t gotten off with her. Certainly she would have seen him. But what if someone had seen her get off alone and decided she was easy prey? Her coat was expensive, and it looked it. The same with her handbag, her shoes. She looked like she had money, even if she only had four dollars in her pocketbook at the moment. She took a deep breath, the icy-cold air searing her lungs. What could she do but hurry? She stepped out of the pool of lamplight into the darkness again. Walking quickly but carefully, she picked her way around the patches of ice. She didn’t run. Not at first. And then she heard the footsteps again. Whoever it was, they were gaining on her.

  She hitched her step and began to run, panic rising from her stomach to lodge in her throat. She could scream if she had to, but who would hear her? Her eyes swept over the homes she passed. All dark. Everyone asleep in their cozy, warm beds. She ran, and as she turned the corner onto her street, her heel caught an unseen patch of ice. Her right leg flew out from under her, and her weight shifted backward. Her right hand instinctively reached out behind her to break her fall. She felt the jolt of pain as her elbow buckled, then the searing heat as the ice scraped the fleshy part of her thumb as her hand slid out from under her.

  Her head hit the pavement with a thump. She’d bitten her tongue, and she tasted blood. Her purse skidded away from her in the opposite direction, landing in a snowbank underneath some bushes. All she heard for the first few seconds was her own labored breathing. Then there they were—the footsteps behind her, coming closer, ever closer. She tucked her chin to her chest and threw her gloved hands up over her head.

  The footsteps stopped, only a few feet away. Paused. Shuffled. Retreated. She lay there, hands over her head, until she couldn’t hear anything anymore but the wind. It was only then that she started breathing again. As she opened her eyes, a searing pain shot through her right hand. Vivian pulled her hands down and saw that her leather glove had been torn clean through and there was blood seeping out around the wound. She sat up gingerly, glancing around her. Nothing moved. She felt underneath her coat for the sharp telltale outline of the keys she’d taken to wearing around her neck on a string. She rubbed them for a moment, and then pulled herself from the ground slowly, feeling every spot where her bones had hit the frozen sidewalk. She rubbed the back of her head and bent to retrieve her purse. She had to get home.

  By the time she’d limped to the coach house, she’d almost convinced herself that it had just been a thug out to steal her purse who had chickened out at the last second. She let herself into the house and paused inside the front door, glancing around in the darkness. Nothing terrible had happened to her, she reminded herself. She was still in one piece. Yet her breath was short and her hands were shaking.

  She unwound the scarf and turned to fling it over the coatrack. The scarf fell onto the floor. She paused, her arms still outstretched. Had the coatrack moved? No, of course not. Her nerves were on edge. Carefully, she removed her coat and gloves and assessed the damage. Her shoes had been badly scuffed, her stockings ripped at the knee, and the scrape on her hand stung. She peeled the ruined glove from her hand and inspected the wound. It was painful, but the scrape wasn’t too deep. She’d have to clean and bandage it to make sure it wouldn’t get infected.

  Vivian started toward the powder room but paused in the middle of the living room. She scanned the room in the darkness—the moonlight glinting off the snow lighting the room in shades of gray and black. There was nothing amiss, and yet the house felt odd. She sniffed. Was that cigar smoke? She paused to turn on a lamp, but the scrape on her hand demanded immediate attention. She rushed to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet, rummaging for the bandages and antiseptic. She closed the mirrored door, att
ended to her hand, and then straightened to replace the supplies.

  She noticed in the reflection of the mirror that the linen closet door behind her was ajar. A chill went down her spine. Suddenly, she knew. Someone was in there, lurking, patiently waiting to jump out and clock her with a blackjack. Heart hammering, she whirled and flung the door all the way open. It hit the wall with a solid bang, exposing the contents of neatly folded sheets and towels. Nothing else.

  She walked through the tiny coach house, turning on every light as she went. She stopped and studied the drawer of the side table. Had she left it ajar like that? She pulled it open and studied the contents. Nothing seemed missing, but her place was such a mess on an average day that she wouldn’t even be able to tell if someone had been rifling through her things. She glanced around the room. She told herself that it was just her imagination and the adrenaline still pumping through her veins from being followed and slipping on the ice. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been in her house tonight.

  She realized she had no weapon that she could use to protect herself if that someone decided to come back. She searched the small house and, in the end, curled up in her bed, all the lights on, with a cast-iron skillet sitting on her nightstand. She’d have to swing it with both hands, but it could knock a grown man cold.

  Vivian lay there wide awake, her right hand curled around the handle of the skillet. Then her eyes snagged on the Kewpie doll propped against the pillow on the opposite side of the bed. Impulsively, she reached for it with her left hand and pulled it close. Her father had won that cheap doll for her at a carnival game long ago—so long ago it seemed part of another life. She curled her arm and tucked the doll comfortingly under her arm.

  She smoothed her fingers along the molded curve of the curl over the doll’s forehead as she stared at the ceiling. Who had followed her from the streetcar, and who had been in her house? And why? What were they looking for? Feeling the keys still on the string around her neck, she pressed them into her chest lightly with her fingertips. Then she finally admitted to herself that whatever she had unwittingly discovered went deeper than her father holding a ledger for a client. A lot deeper.