by Liz Freeland
His expression brightened. “You read my book? Already?”
“I did.”
“And you really thought it was magnificent?” His boyish eagerness was hard to withstand, so I didn’t try.
“I wrote a long note to Mr. Van Hooten telling him I thought so.”
He slapped his hands together. “At last—someone who agrees with my high opinion of myself.”
“I also admire your modesty.” But his palpable happiness infected me, too. I couldn’t help smiling.
“What writer ever got ahead by showing modesty?” He turned to his little trunk and picked up a bottle. Amber liquid filled the bottom fourth. “Just enough here to celebrate.”
Call me foolish, but it took that whiskey bottle to make me question my actions. Rushing here without thinking to visit a man I barely knew alone in his room was the most reckless thing I’d done. I tensed, looking at the ropy muscles of his forearms where he’d rolled up his sleeves.
“Something wrong?” His face screwed up in puzzlement. “Don’t tell me you’re a teetotaler.”
His teasing made me get ahold of myself. Every man wasn’t Arnie Tate. “No, but I’m not much of a whiskey drinker. And I skipped lunch today.”
“All the better—the liquor’ll hit you faster. I don’t have much of the stuff, so we need to optimize, as the businessmen say.”
He poured a generous amount of the whiskey into two mismatched, cloudy glasses and handed me one. “To you, Louise,” he said. “My patroness.”
I drank, then tried to mask my shudder as the liquid burned its way down to my empty stomach. It was no use. I coughed until he came and pounded me on the back. The stuff was like drinking kerosene.
“Did you really like the book?” he asked.
I cleared my throat and waxed enthusiastic for several long minutes, going on at length about the story and the parts I’d liked best, and how much more forceful his writing seemed than in the last book, and how original it was. “Even if the book doesn’t get taken on by Van Hooten and McChesney, some smart editor will see your talent. I know it. You’re on the brink of success.”
“That calls for another toast,” he said.
Before I could demur, the door opened and a burly man broke in.
“Why’d you run off, Fitz?” A split second later the man noticed me. Some half-dead instinct awoke him and he pulled his blue cap off his head, revealing a thatch of oily hair. “Who you got here?” he asked with a half leer.
“I’m entertaining, Mug,” Ford said, not introducing me.
Mug’s lascivious up-and-down stare made me cringe. The man was as thickset and sweaty as a stevedore. Not to mention, it was only suppertime and he was clearly drunk. Was this one of Ford’s friends?
“How long’s she gonna be?” he asked.
“She’s a lady,” Ford said. “You don’t give ladies the bum’s rush. Don’t you know that?”
His friend snorted. “Nah, I dunno a lot of ladies.”
When he was gone, I said, “You need to find another place to live.”
Ford shook his head. “Mug’s not so bad. He and his brother saved my life once.”
It was hard to keep the amazement out of my voice. “How?”
“I had a little run-in with the law in Boston. Before I came here.”
“You mean they came to New York with you?”
“No, but they found me when they got out.”
I was afraid to ask, but I did anyway. “Out of where?”
“Jail.” My silence made him smile. “Don’t look so appalled. I was in jail with them, but only for a night, because of a fight. Trouble over a lady. I was charged with being drunk and disorderly, and Mug and his brother were in the same cell for the same offense, with theft added to it.”
“Thieves,” I repeated.
“Sailors get accused of all sorts of crimes. I don’t think they really did anything so awful.” He finished off his glass. “You see, I’m not like my book’s protagonist. A patrician.” His lip curled. “I knew that type at the university. I worked in the dining hall’s kitchen after the check my father gave me to cover my tuition turned out to be bad. My old man—he never failed to disappoint. After two years, I dropped out, worked on the docks, wrote when I could, and started to hunger. A man like me needs friends of all sorts. Believe me, Mug and Red aren’t bad types to have on your side when you need them.”
“Why would you possibly need help of that sort now?”
“You never can tell.” I must have looked appalled again, because he reached out and took my hand. “Don’t worry—I don’t court danger. And I only play cards with Mug and Red because I get bored here all on my own. Think of them as my Callie.”
I knew he had a bad opinion of my roommate, but that was taking things too far. “Why would you say that? What do you have against her?”
“I’ve known her type before.”
I crossed my arms. “What type?”
“A vivacious taker. She’ll charm you until she’s got you where she wants you—but then something will happen to make you realize that she feels nothing. She only wants.” The bitter flash in his eyes, which I’d noted at Aunt Irene’s house, made me suspect that Callie reminded him of the woman who’d been at the center of his troubles in Boston.
“Something will happen . . . like jail?” I asked.
He polished off another glass. “Exactly.”
I remembered moments when I’d felt at odds with Callie. Like when she’d said she would marry Sawyer, even knowing he was a cheater. Didn’t that make her seem like a taker?
One of his brows arched. “Something the matter?”
“No.” But doubts whirled in my mind. Callie’s secret meeting with Sawyer. Her lateness the night of the party. Even that horrible painting and Muldoon’s suggestion that Max and Callie had somehow conspired to kill Ethel and steal her money. Where is that money?
My disloyal thoughts made me ashamed. “You’re wrong about Callie.” There were explanations for all of this, I was sure.
“I hope so.” Ford stood and crossed to his typewriter. “Say—how tired are you of reading the oeuvre of Ford Fitzsimmons?”
“Not a bit,” I answered truthfully.
“I had something else I wanted to show you last week, but I changed my mind. It’s only a long short story—I’m not even sure such an animal is supposed to exist. I doubt your publisher would have anything to do with it. That’s why I gave you the novel instead.”
I glanced around the room in amazement. “How many unpublished pieces do you have lying around?”
“Too many. I write stories and then I feel as if I’ve just wasted my time. Some days I’m not sure if I’m a writer or just a very accomplished typist.”
“You’re a writer,” I assured him.
“When you say it, I almost believe it.” From a stack on his typing table he unearthed a manila envelope. “It’s a little different than the book. It hasn’t got a bit of romance in it.”
“I’m not so fond of love stories that I can’t appreciate something a little more realistic.”
His gaze met mine. “Isn’t love real?”
I couldn’t help remembering Sawyer’s fickle vacillations, and Otto’s, never mind my own limited experience. “I suppose it can be.”
“Do you have someone you’re in love with now?”
Despite my best efforts, a flush crept into my face. “No.”
“That fellow the police picked up—”
“Otto’s a friend.” Would I ever meet anyone again who didn’t think I was Otto’s tootsie? That awful word. “And he’s a good songwriter. Next time he publishes a song, though, I hope he keeps me out of it.”
Ford walked me to the staircase. It was only a polite ritual—escorting the guest out—but I savored every detail like a girl at her first dance. The slight pressure of his hand at my lower back. The almost shy way he glanced at me. The warm pressure of his hand squeezing mine as he sent me on my way.
&nbs
p; “I’m glad you hunted me down in my burrow,” he said. “You’ve lifted my spirits more than a winning bet.” His lips brushed my cheek. Although I tensed in surprise, even the liquor on his breath didn’t repulse me.
I pressed his envelope to my chest and hurried down the stairs much more quickly than I’d come up them. The matchstick urchin was gone, and the smell of the place didn’t offend my nostrils so much. I hadn’t reached the front door before a swell of laughter rose from above. Ford had returned to his cronies. Maybe Mug and Red were ribbing him about me.
I hated to think of him being mired in such rough company. But perhaps even if I wasn’t rich or influential enough to really be Ford’s patroness, I could at least be the gatekeeper who opened a way out of this squalor. That thought lightened my steps during the short walk home. The sun was disappearing behind the tallest buildings to the west as I approached our place. A miracle had occurred. For the first time since the murder, no reporters waited outside our door, and I could detect no sign of a police detective lurking on the street, either. Wherever they’d all gone, I was glad to no longer be forced to bushwhack my way into the building.
Wally, unfortunately, was still with us. He attacked me the moment I crossed the threshold. “I can’t take another day like this one, Louise. You tell your friend I can’t stand the racket.”
“What racket?” I tilted my head, listening. A thump or two came from above, but for our building it was surprisingly quiet. Once you were used to the bone-shaking blare of a bass saxophone, nothing could rattle you. Or so I’d assumed.
“Those brats of Lucia’s!” he yelled right into my face. “Callie’s got ’em on the second floor. How can little feet clomp so loudly?”
I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. I could hear footsteps and childish voices, barely. “You think that’s louder than saxophone players?”
“I don’t mind music,” he grumbled, “but those shrieking, squeaky voices get on my nerves.”
I wondered if his mood didn’t have more to do with the defections of the journalists than his tiniest tenants. Both his brief fame and source of graft were gone.
“I got half a mind to tell Ma to chuck everybody out and start over,” he grumbled. “Painters, musicians, kids, working girls, Italians—you’re all nothing but trouble. After seeing what Max and that roommate of yours was up to, it’s a lucky thing the police didn’t toss us all in jail on indecency charges.”
So much for the hope that Wally hadn’t seen the painting. “Callie had nothing to do with that.”
“Sure looked like her to me,” he said, practically licking his lips. “Bad enough we got murders here and people being arrested for killing each other without pornographic kind of doings. Ma don’t like it.”
I walked away.
“Ma said there’d be trouble with yous girls,” he called after me.
Upstairs, I soon discovered why the sound of the kids was as muffled as it was. Callie had laid the saxophonists’ mattresses across the floor, and now the two oldest children were tumbling about like tiny acrobats while the baby crawled after them. In the center—in the role of the frog being leaped over—was Callie. When she looked up at me, her eyelids sagged with exhaustion.
“Louise—thank heavens!” She got to her feet, taking the little girl clinging to her back with her. “Where have you been?”
Guilt for staying away for so long made me turn away slightly. “I worked late.” It wasn’t entirely a lie.
She frowned at the envelope I carried. “And you brought work home, too. You—” Whatever she was going to say next was lost to me when I was tackled by Lucia’s three-year-old son, Charlie or Carlo, depending on which parent was talking to him.
“Louise! Play a game with us!”
When I refused, he simply climbed up me as a monkey might swing up a tree.
“Did you hear about”—Callie looked down at the boy and spelled it out—“M-A-X?”
I nodded.
“And the painting?” she asked.
“I was at the police station earlier. I saw it.”
Her voice rose in alarm. “They have it on display?”
“It was in an interrogation room,” I said. “Covered.”
Her blue eyes grew big. “Why were you being interrogated?”
“I wasn’t. I was there for . . . other reasons.”
“Max evidently painted several like it to sell to bars,” she said. “No telling where I’m hanging in this town. Me and the Miller High Life girl. He might as well have painted me on a crescent moon.”
“I saw M-A-X at the station, too. He seemed very sorry.” I wasn’t certain how much consolation that would be.
“Oh, I know he did it for the money. And for them.” She nodded toward the baby yanking on my skirts. “Lucia was beside herself. I thought she’d never stop apologizing.”
“She knew?”
“She was the model. But the bar owners said they preferred a blonde. So he stuck my head on her body.”
I spent the next five minutes untangling myself from children; then Callie and I prepared something for dinner.
“Wally was complaining about the noise,” I told her once we were huddled together over the burner. We had canned soup and bread. It would have to do.
Exasperation sighed out of her. “He was up here earlier. Honestly, what was I supposed to do? I don’t know anything about children, so I was teaching them a little soft shoe.”
“The way he was carrying on, you might have been teaching elephants to polka.”
Callie lowered her voice. “Why were you at the police station this afternoon?”
“Just checking on something—a hunch I had.” I told her about her faithful shadow.
“The police were following me?” She reddened, and I guessed why.
“They were watching when you paid your visit to Sawyer this weekend.”
“Muldoon told you that? You two must be chums.”
“Hardly,” I said. “He didn’t have to tell me anything. I spoke to Sawyer this morning because I thought he’d hired the man who was following you. But when he told me the police had just left his office, I realized the only way they could have found out about him was if you’d led them to him.”
The fact that the police had spoken to Sawyer seemed to distract her from the fact that I also had. “They don’t suspect Sawyer, do they?”
“He denied any involvement with the murder, and according to Muldoon they believe him. A bartender at McGrath’s vouched that he was there.”
Callie started hacking through the hard loaf of bread with the saxophonists’ dull knife. I considered running upstairs to get one of our sharper ones, but the thought of that butcher block with the murder weapon missing stopped me.
“Sounds like you’re not convinced Sawyer’s innocent,” she said.
“I don’t think he murdered Ethel. But I still don’t understand why you went to see him.”
“I wanted to protect him.” She blushed. “That sounds silly now, but I didn’t know the cops were following me. I worried he’d read the papers and would think he should come forward, for my sake. I had to warn him not to volunteer any information, or to go to the police on his own.”
“Fat chance of that.”
“I also wanted to assure him that I was keeping his name out of it. He worries so much about that precious name of his.”
“What did he say to you?”
“He swore that he had nothing to do with the murder, of course, and then . . .” She bit her lip. “Well, he said that I’d been right and that we shouldn’t see each other anymore. He said that he loved his children and he intended to be faithful to Margaret.”
Ah. So that was why he suspected Callie had sent the police to his office. He’d told Callie he’d decided to give her up. Reading what had happened to Callie’s cousin in the newspapers had put the fear of scandal in him. But when the police came knocking, he must have imagined that she’d felt like a woman scorned and so had sent them aft
er him.
“Why didn’t you tell me about all of this?” I asked.
“That’s a fine question, coming from you.”
I drew back. “I tell you everything.”
“No, you don’t.” I must have looked incredulous, because her expression hardened. “You think I don’t ever notice you looking off as if you’re miles away? Whenever I ask what you’re thinking, you always say nothing.” She crossed her arms. “That’s a lie, isn’t it?”
I said nothing, even though I knew exactly what she was talking about, and where my mind disappeared to in those moments. I could even give her a specific address. 7 East Eightieth Street. Only I’d never been there. I’d never worked up the courage.
She laughed mirthlessly at my silence. “Don’t lecture me, Miss Enigma.”
“I don’t lecture,” I said. “Do I?”
“Well, no. But I knew if I said anything about Sawyer you’d think I was being a sap. And maybe I was—I honestly thought he’d be mad with worry about me because he still cared for me so much in spite of all I said to him last week. Fine blow to my conceit to find how easily a man can set me aside.”
She sounded depressed. I remembered the look in Sawyer’s eyes when he was showing me the door. Is she all right? It hadn’t been easy for him to renounce Callie, but he’d managed to hide that fact from her. Maybe Sawyer possessed more maturity than I’d given him credit for. When one was trying to break off a relationship, making a show of lingering emotions was the same as leaving the other person fettered. He’d had the wisdom to free her. Following his lead, I held my own tongue.
“Did Lucia say when she’d be back?” I asked.
Callie shook her head.
We were both anxious about Lucia and Max, but we tried to mask our worries as we fed the children. They attacked the food with gusto, and Callie and I collapsed on a mattress and watched.
“Early this afternoon—before Lucia came by—I went out and ordered a new bed,” Callie told me in a low voice.
The new bed would replace the one upstairs. I should have thought of it myself. But where had Callie found the money for a new mattress? Our meager cash supply wouldn’t cover that.
“We can’t stay down here,” she said. “The Blowers will be back before long, and anyway, we have our own place.”