Chapter Nineteen
The day broke cloudless and bright. Vivian squinted out the dining room window at the sun-splashed snow. Looking out on the blindingly white morning, she found it hard to believe that her suspicions of last night hadn’t been her overactive imagination.
“…Gloria?”
Vivian jerked her head toward her brother, little dots in her vision. “Hmm?”
“I knew you weren’t listening. You had that faraway look on your face.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.” She unfolded the napkin and placed it on her lap, careful to keep her bandaged hand under the table. She didn’t want to answer any questions about it so early this morning. Not before she’d had a chance to think things through.
“Gloria said the show went swimmingly.” Everett dipped one corner of his toast into the yolk of his fried egg.
Vivian shrugged, remembering Graham’s queer mood. She hadn’t had to step in to save things, but he definitely hadn’t been himself. “I don’t know about swimmingly, but it went all right, I suppose.”
“Well, if anything went wrong, she didn’t notice it. She was thrilled to be there and see it in person. She went on and on about how exciting it was to see a live show.” He smiled, happy for Gloria’s happiness.
“I’m glad she enjoyed it,” Vivian said. She gazed down at the eggs on her plate.
Everett studied her. “What’s wrong?”
She sighed and glanced at Everett. She should just tell him. She should tell him she thought someone had been snooping around the coach house. She should tell him everything. He deserved to know, after all. Arthur Witchell was his father too. It would be a load off her mind, really, to have someone to share these confidences with. And who was to say he wouldn’t be helpful? Everett was young, but he had matured. And God knows, she couldn’t keep all of these secrets to herself much longer. “Nothing. It’s stressful at the station these days. I don’t think Graham’s Pimpernel is going to go well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. He’s put everything into this show, hasn’t he?”
Vivian nodded and looked out the window, squinting again at the sun sparkling off the freshly fallen snow. The scrape on her hand ached, and she touched it gingerly.
“Do you have rehearsal all day?”
She nodded.
“You should probably eat something then.”
She looked down at her plate again, but her stomach churned. She picked up a piece of dry toast and took a bite, chewing it slowly.
“Gloria and I are going out on the town this evening. Maybe you and Graham would like to join us.”
“Thank you, but I doubt Graham will be in the mood. If we aren’t rehearsing, he’ll be holed up with Paul somewhere agonizing over the script.”
She saw one of Everett’s ruddy eyebrows rise.
“Maybe there’s someone else you’d like to invite then. Martin, perhaps? He seems rather keen on you.”
She narrowed her eyes at her brother. He certainly was observant. Maybe he’d make a good lawyer after all. She shook her head, but offered no further information. She took another bite of toast. “So you and Gloria are going out on the town, eh? You two are living it up.”
“Why shouldn’t we? We’re young.” Everett smiled and took a hearty bite of his toast.
“Where do you get the money, Ev?” Once she’d said it, the thought took shape in her head. She knew exactly where he could’ve gotten a sudden influx of cash.
“The money?”
“For such expensive gifts—the ice review tickets, nights out on the town.”
“What does it matter to you?”
She swallowed, the dry bite of toast scratching all the way down her throat. She spoke slowly and carefully, because it had to be said. Now that someone was following her. Now that someone had been in her house without her knowledge.
“It matters to me if by trying to impress her and keep up appearances, you felt you had to take things that don’t belong to you.”
“What are you talking about?”
Vivian looked at her younger brother, cocking her head to the side.
“I’m talking about the money from Father’s desk. You saw it the night of the Christmas party, didn’t you?”
He stared at her, his face betraying nothing. “I saw you sitting at Father’s desk looking at an ugly Saint Nicholas ornament.”
“Come on, Ev. You can tell me.”
“I can tell you that I have no idea what you’re on about,” he said.
She studied his expression. Everett had never been known for his poker face.
“Viv, what’s going on?”
It was time that she told him what she suspected of their father. She still didn’t trust Everett fully, but what choice did she have? Someone had taken that money, and if it wasn’t Everett or Freddy, then who was it? Besides, she needed an ally in the family. And who would understand her position better than her own brother? She glanced over her shoulder at the closed door to the kitchen.
“It’s about Father.”
“Father? What about him?”
“I found something in his desk drawer that night I went looking for the Saint Nicholas ornament.”
Everett leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. “You found money?”
“A lot of money—almost $4,000 in an envelope marked ‘A. W. Racquet.’ Taped to the back of the drawer was a key to a safe-deposit box downtown.”
Everett blinked and then shook his head. “And?”
“And our father, Ev…” She swallowed, unable to look her brother directly in the eye. “Our father was not who we thought he was.” She fiddled with the edge of the bandage on her thumb. It was starting to come loose.
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“There was a ledger in that safe-deposit box,” she said. “From the Racquet Club—a gaming palace in Cicero. Father knew the men involved with it…” She looked up and focused on Everett’s deep-brown eyes. “Our father was chummy with Al Capone.”
Despite her initial reaction to what Charlie’s father had told her, she believed the story now. Now that she’d had time to think about it and let the idea settle into her consciousness. Now that someone had been in her house, snooping around.
Everett’s brow furrowed. He didn’t believe her. “Oh, come on. That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not. And Father was holding on to that ledger because inside was proof of Capone’s income. One line that said ‘$200 to Al’ from July 1929.”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So what does all of this mean now? Capone’s been in jail for years, and Father’s been dead for even longer. Why are you dredging this up?”
Vivian looked at the rug, blurring her eyes against the intricate Persian weave. Why was she dredging this up? Why did they need to know—her, Everett, anyone?
“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I started digging, and the hole got deeper and deeper.” What she wished she could do was forget the whole thing. Go back in time and never retrieve that dumb ornament.
“Do you think Mother knows?”
Vivian shrugged again. “I don’t know. If she does, then I’m not sure what to think. If she doesn’t, then it might kill her to find out.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”
“To find out that her whole married life was a lie—that her husband was good friends with someone who had people killed on a whim? That this whole house and everything in it was purchased with dirty money?” She looked around her, and her stomach turned. In her mind she continued, That my inheritance, and yours, are tainted with that same filth?
“Did you ask Uncle Freddy about it?”
“Yes, and he told me that the money was for a rainy day…that the ledger was being
held for a client and that I should stop digging.”
“Maybe you should stop.”
I can’t, she thought. Not now.
“So where did the money come for the gifts for Gloria? From Mother?”
Everett ducked his head as he shook it. “I got a job.”
“A job? Doing what?”
“I’m an usher at the Varsity. That’s where I was last night, working an extra shift. I’ve seen Suez ten times this week alone. I’ve had enough of Tyrone Power to last me a lifetime.”
Vivian stared at her brother. She didn’t quite know what to say. Her brother, future member of the bar, moonlighting as an usher in a movie theater. Wait until their mother heard about this!
“Well, that’s…unexpected.”
“I couldn’t take money from Mother to buy gifts for my girlfriend. What would that make me?”
Under Mother’s thumb, Vivian thought. Maybe she had underestimated Everett. Still, she held her tongue about his inheritance. He’d find out about that soon enough, assuming his would come to him at twenty-one. That was a year from now. Besides, it would do him a world of good to do some honest work for a change. It had certainly done her a world of good to be a secretary for a few years. Not everyone was born and raised in an ivory tower and would inherit a load of money. Not everyone had their path paved so easily for them in life. She smiled at him, and he smiled tentatively back.
“Look, I’m sorry I accused you of stealing. And I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about what I found right away,” she said.
“I’m not a little kid anymore, Viv.” He caught her eye, and she knew they both knew what he meant by that. “And I never told Father about what you were up to—no matter what you think.”
She looked at him long and hard and found she believed him. He hadn’t told Father about her sneaking out.
“I know you’re not a little kid anymore. But still, all of this is between us, right? Not a word of this…” She jerked a thumb toward the closed door to the front hall.
“Of course. Wait, you accused me of stealing the money. That means it’s gone?”
She nodded. “Someone took it.”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have accused you, would I?”
What she did know was that whoever had taken the money was the key to all of it, and that person had been present at dinner on Monday night. If it wasn’t Everett or Freddy, that left Oskar and Martin, didn’t it? Assuming that Gloria hadn’t taken it—or Julia. At this point, Vivian couldn’t rule anyone out, could she? After all, if her mother had known all this time about what her father had been up to, maybe she could have taken it. But why would she?
Speaking of her mother, Vivian wasn’t looking forward to her certain look of triumph when Vivian asked to use her driver to take her to the station this morning. Her mother thought it was beneath her daughter to take public transport, not when there was a perfectly acceptable uniformed driver at the ready to take her wherever she wished to go. Vivian would tell her that she was trying to avoid the cold, all that standing on street corners waiting for the streetcar to show up, but in truth it was because she was terrified of a repeat of last night’s events. Someone was most definitely following her. Why, she wasn’t sure. The one consolation of eating crow and taking a driver was that someone following her car would be much more obvious. Well, that and the novelty of showing up at the station without frozen toes for once.
She ran back to the coach house to get her handbag and found a note stuck in the front door.
I’ll pick you up at eight o’clock. Wear something nice. C
Vivian smiled. So she was wearing Charlie down after all.
Chapter Twenty
Vivian looked up at the blinking green and yellow bulbs of the sign, and her hopeful mood disappeared. The Green Mill. It was now a legitimate place for a cocktail, but it had been a speakeasy in those heady days when the Eighteenth Amendment reigned and Capone ruled the city. It had also been one of Vivian’s preferred nightspots then. Not anymore.
She glanced around her, gazing longingly in the direction of the Aragon Ballroom a few blocks over, where Dick Jurgens and his orchestra were in residence. The elaborate gothic Uptown Theatre was next door. She could see the glowing marquee from here: Angels with Dirty Faces, starring James Cagney, was playing tonight. She’d worn the nicest dress she had—the dark-blue velvet backless number she’d been saving for a special occasion. But she knew this wasn’t a date, as much as she would like it to be. She’d hired Charlie to dig into her father’s past, and there was probably a good reason he’d taken her to the Green Mill tonight.
“Can’t we go somewhere else?” she asked.
Charlie shook his head as he helped her from the passenger seat. “We’re expected here.”
Vivian felt Charlie’s eyes on her.
She smoothed the fur lapels on her coat. The Green Mill’s heyday had been years ago. But being there again was a strange coincidence. It seemed there were memories everywhere she turned these days. “I haven’t been here in a long time. It reminds me of my father.”
Charlie followed her eyes to that harmless blinking sign. Green Mill Cocktail Lounge was spelled out in scrolling green neon. The bulbs that surrounded those words in a field of yellow flashed as if to the syncopated beat of some soundless jazz tune.
“Your father? How so?”
Vivian sighed and watched her breath fog the air in front of her face. “I snuck out of the house one night a few months before he died and came here. He caught me.”
Charlie’s eyebrow arched. “Snuck out?”
Vivian nodded and could see Charlie making the calculations in his head. “Your father died in 1931.”
“Yes, I believe that’s been established.”
Charlie studied her. “You were that kid in the photo with the big bow in her hair seven years ago.”
Vivian rolled her eyes. “I was almost seventeen.”
He stuck his lower lip out and blew air up toward his hairline. He cocked his head as he appraised her. “‘Almost seventeen’ is a mere babe, in my opinion. What on earth were you doing at a place like this?”
“I wanted to have some fun. I… Well, I acted out a bit shortly before my father died.” She shrugged, looked down at the sidewalk. And it had been fun, for a while—until she realized that the middle-aged shoe salesmen that had brought her was married with children and wanted to ply her with gin and press her into dark corners, snaking his greasy fingers up her skirt.
“I’ll say.”
Vivian sighed. “It wasn’t anything that dramatic. I snuck out a few times, had a few drinks.” A lot of drinks on many occasions, she amended to herself. Her head ached with the thought of all that horrendous bathtub gin.
“What happened?”
“My father found out and put the kibosh on it.”
The smile slid slowly across Charlie’s face. “He caught you shimmying down a drainpipe?”
Vivian couldn’t help but smile in return. She’d told Charlie about that months ago, a lifetime ago—her one-time penchant for escaping from her own home via the drainpipe. She thought about that morning in his car. She’d been so furious at her mother, so grateful for Charlie’s presence and his not-so-subtle interest in her. Had that been just two months ago?
“No. Actually, I’m not sure how he found out,” she said. “But boy, was he ever steamed.”
Her father had been waiting up for her in her bedroom, sitting in the dark, smoking a cigar. She’d stumbled in drunk and stinking of cigarettes. He hadn’t yelled, hadn’t even raised his voice. But he was disappointed in her, and that was far worse. And when she’d sobered up, she resolved to never do it again. And she hadn’t—until her father died—and then she’d done even worse.
“Damn straight he was steamed, Viv. You were a kid. You h
ad no business in a place like this, especially then.”
She shivered, and not entirely from the stiff wind blowing in off the lake. The Green Mill had been a dangerous place in 1930, but it had also been glamorous. And that was precisely why Vivian had wanted to go there. It had been the only place on the North Side that sold liquor openly without any pretense of being a speakeasy, because Capone’s men had bribed the cops to leave it alone.
Vivian had spent most of that evening in the ballroom-cabaret on the second floor. The notorious hostess Texas Guinan had been performing that night. Her trademark “Hello, sucker!” had boomed through the ballroom as she introduced her crew of fifty dancing girls to the hooting, well-heeled audience. The man Vivian had been meeting, whose name she could no longer recall, had tried to impress her by introducing her to the big shot who ran the place. Vivian had been mildly impressed, though she hadn’t even known who the man was at the time. She recalled that the tall, dapperly dressed man had repeated her name and patted her on the arm in a fatherly way before excusing himself. Vivian had recognized his photo on the front page of newspapers two years later. Ted Newberry, a known Capone associate, had been dumped by the side of a dirt road in Indiana with a bullet in the back of his head. That was Vivian’s first lesson that there was a limit to a certain kind of ambition in this town.
Charlie moved toward the front door, and as he pulled it open, a group of laughing people spilled out onto the sidewalk. Vivian found herself face-to-face with none other than Frances Barrow. Her arm was hooked through that of a short, pudgy man, and she was whispering something into his ear. As she looked up, her eyes locked onto Vivian’s.
“Viv!” she said, her eyes darting to Charlie and back to Vivian again. Her smile widened at the sight of the detective. “What a surprise!”
“That’s a word for it,” Vivian muttered. “Frances, imagine running into you here.” She turned to the pudgy man and extended her hand. “I’m afraid we haven’t met.”
Homicide for the Holidays Page 19