The Darkness Knows

by Cheryl Honigford

  She stopped abruptly and shook his hand off her arm. “I can’t,” she said as forcefully as she could muster. “I have to do the ten o’clock show.”

  “Miss Witchell, I don’t think you’re in any condition—”

  “I have to get to the studio.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Vivian had no illusions about her talent. She was a capable actress, but just that. She had no doubt that if she had demurred tonight, as acceptable as it may have seemed under the circumstances, another girl—almost certainly that horrible Frances Barrow—would step in and do Lorna as well as Vivian had ever done her, and that would be the beginning of the end of her short career. Vivian knew she had to hold on to Lorna Lafferty with everything she had, and if that meant navigating a live show while her stomach roiled and her vision clouded with images of a dead Marjorie Fox, then so be it.

  She clutched her script with one hand and brushed away the beads of sweat that had formed along her hairline with the other.

  “That’s right, sweetheart. And you’re a goner.” Dave Chapman spoke his line smoothly, without conveying the tension apparent in his face. He glanced at Vivian, then nervously into the control room.

  Bill Purdy stepped to the mike, looking just as dapper as he had during the eight o’clock show—not a hair out of place. She’d seen him give his statement to the police right before they went live. Then he’d just sauntered up to the microphone and done his job as if nothing had happened. He raised his right hand to his ear and gazed off into the middle distance as he began the sponsor’s announcement.

  “That’s right, folks. You’ll be sold on Sultan’s Gold. The mellow choice of cigarette smokers everywhere…”

  Graham stood slightly apart from the others as he usually did. He ran a hand through his oil-black hair, never taking his eyes from the script.

  The organ music came in to wrap up the sponsor’s jingle.

  “I think Mr. Diamond will have something to say about that,” Vivian said after a perfectly timed beat, hitting the cue she had missed earlier.

  She glanced into the control room. Joe gave her a sharp nod, the highest praise he was willing to give under any circumstances. Vivian smiled nervously and nodded back. The control room was especially crowded for this performance. Joe was surrounded by Mr. Hart, Mr. Haverman, Sergeant Trask, and two other uniformed policemen. Morty was sitting at his control panel. Vivian’s eyes wandered to each man in turn. Mr. Hart looked beside himself with either worry or excitement—she couldn’t tell which. The police detectives and Mr. Haverman simply observed the performance, their faces impassive. She wrinkled her brow as she reviewed those assembled in the control room again. Someone was missing. Someone else had been there for the eight o’clock show who was not here now, but neither the name nor the face would come to her.

  She glanced around at those assembled on the studio floor. Dave, Graham, Bill Purdy, the soundman, the organ player. Could one of them have hated Marjorie Fox enough to kill her?

  The scuffle between Harvey Diamond and Glanville, his nemesis, began again. Then the shot rang out, followed by a beat of silence.

  “Harvey!” Vivian shrieked. “Oh, Harvey, are you all right?”

  “It’s over,” Graham said. “I’ve disarmed him, and he’s out cold. There’s a jail cell with this mug’s name all over it.”

  Graham liked having a live audience—paying customers or policemen, it seemed to make little difference to him. He’d worked up a sweat, and his gestures were even more exaggerated in this performance than they had been two hours before. He’d nearly knocked Dave’s script right out of his hands during the fight scene.

  In fact, they all seemed to thrive under pressure because the timing in the second half was perfect this go-around. When the on-air light went out, Vivian almost collapsed with relief.

  “Well done, everyone,” Joe announced over the speaker.

  “Nice work, Viv,” Graham said, rerolling the cuff on his right sleeve. “You really came through tonight.”

  Vivian shot him a feeble smile. “I’m a professional.”

  “That you are, Miss Witchell. That you are.” Graham smiled warmly at her. “Say, Viv—”

  Vivian glanced up through her lashes at him, but he didn’t get a chance to finish his thought.

  “Miss Witchell?”

  Her shoulders slumped, and she turned reluctantly toward the source of the interruption. Mr. Haverman stood just behind her, hands in his jacket pockets.

  “More questions?” she asked him wearily.

  “I was just going to offer you a lift home,” he said.

  “Oh.” She sighed. “No, thank you.”

  “But I insist,” he said firmly. His face softened, and he glanced to Graham. “Mr. Yarborough can vouch for my character.”

  Vivian glanced at Graham, who was looking at the detective through narrowed eyes.

  “I have no doubts about your character, Mr. Haverman.” She offered him a tired smile. “You are the real Harvey Diamond, after all.”

  Vivian regretted the words as soon as they came out of her mouth. Graham’s ego was a remarkably fragile thing. There was a long pause, and then Mr. Haverman held out his arm to her.

  “Then shall we?”

  She looked at Graham, but his face was unreadable. She hoped she hadn’t offended him too terribly. She knew how much he identified with his character. Wordlessly, she took the detective’s arm. After all, any ride home was better than taking the streetcar—especially after the night she’d had.

  • • •

  “I’m parked across from the LaSalle.” The detective tilted his head to the west and the general direction of the large redbrick hotel on the far corner of the next block. Madison Street was crowded even at this time of night with well-dressed couples ducking into the hotel nightclubs for a late dinner and a show. There were several choices in this small strip of the city alone—the Terrace Garden at the Morrison, the Brevoort’s Crystal Bar, and, of course, the LaSalle, near where Mr. Haverman had parked.

  A red-and-cream streetcar clanged past them heading west, and Vivian flinched at the sudden loud noise. She exhaled slowly and, to distract herself, glanced up at the La Salle Theatre’s marquee to see what was playing. Crime and Horror Show Tonight! the sign screamed. She hesitated a second, blinked, and looked again. It was a B movie double feature of Boys in the Racket and Phantom G-Men. The detective had stopped walking when she had, and she felt Mr. Haverman’s forearm tense under her hand.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  Nothing except that Vivian felt like she was starring in her own crime and horror show tonight, and she had to stop herself from laughing at the nearly perfect coincidence. Somehow she didn’t think Mr. Haverman would get the joke.

  “I just realized that I never got my blasted umbrella,” she said instead. It was the first thing that had come to mind, and it sounded ridiculous. She avoided looking at him, instead glancing up toward the night sky, which had been rendered a useless, rusty-brown haze by the lights of the city.

  “I’ll go back and get it for you.”

  “No, no,” she said. A train thundered over the elevated tracks a block west at Wells Street. A car horn honked, another streetcar clattered past, and suddenly everything was too loud, too much. She wanted to be home very badly and tugged Mr. Haverman forward again by his jacket sleeve.

  They walked on without speaking, stopping at LaSalle and Madison in front of a nondescript black sedan, its wheels hugging the curb. He opened the passenger-side door.

  Vivian stepped forward, and her eyes swept the length of LaSalle Street—an artificial canyon made by the lofty buildings on either side and capped at the end by the imposing Chicago Board of Trade Building. She glanced up at the illuminated Ceres statue, goddess of agriculture, standing sentinel at the very top. Then the sky behind the statue flickered, and
she heard what could only be a rumble of thunder somewhere in the distance. She shivered.

  “Miss Witchell?”

  She shot the detective an apologetic smile, meeting his eyes only briefly as he helped her into the passenger seat.

  The sodium lights lit the streets of the Loop bright yellow, and neon lights blinked, advertising beer, cigarettes, chop suey, and dancing to Dick Jurgens and his orchestra at the Aragon Ballroom in Uptown. She eyed the happy couples strolling arm in arm as the car turned right onto Washington Street, and she envied them having nothing on their minds other than where to find a good time.

  “So where exactly am I taking you?” he asked.

  “Sorry.” Vivian sighed. “Left on Michigan up here. Then another left on Scott shortly after Michigan meets Lake Shore. I’m at Scott and Astor.”

  They stopped at a red light, the engine rumbling unevenly in its idle. She shot a glance at the detective’s sharp profile, and then her eyes fell on the glowing red sign of the Stop and Shop on the street beyond him.

  Vivian’s mouth flooded with the taste of the delicate, sugary, violet-flavored Italian Majani candies that her father brought home from that store at Christmastime. Sometimes he’d stop on his way home from the office and pick up an exotic item like a kumquat or a pomegranate, presenting it to her triumphantly upon his return as if he were giving her a bag of gold. She wished he were here now. He would know what to do. It would comfort her just to hear his voice. She closed her eyes against the tears that threatened and immediately saw Marjorie dead, hair matted with blood, on the black screen of her eyelids. Vivian opened her eyes and folded her arms tightly across her chest as the car lurched into gear again.

  “Are you all right?” Mr. Haverman asked, briefly taking his eyes from the road.

  Vivian sighed. “I’m a little rattled, to be honest.”

  He grunted sympathetically. They passed under the El at Wabash and then made a left onto Michigan Avenue to head north. Speed West with Streamliners to California! the brightly lit billboard announced off to her right. What she wouldn’t give to get on a screaming-fast train headed anywhere right now, she thought.

  “So what’s it like to be a private eye?” she asked. “Is it terribly exciting?”

  “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what I’ve been hired to do.”

  “I think Graham has the impression that it’s terribly exciting all the time,” she said.

  “I let him believe what he wants to believe. It makes for a better show.”

  The lights of the city sparkled off the black mirror of the Chicago River as they rumbled over the Michigan Avenue Bridge.

  “Do people really call you Chick?”

  “Only Mr. Yarborough.”

  She smiled. “And I bet you’ve never been tied up and left for dead in an emerald mine.”

  “Can’t say I have,” he replied drily. Then he returned her smile, his teeth a flash of muted white in the semidarkness of the sedan.

  Vivian broke from his gaze and turned back to the window. The activity outside had quieted. Traffic was light, and they’d just passed the elegant white wedding cake of the Wrigley Building and the towering gothic spire of the Tribune Tower across from it. North Michigan Avenue was subdued, the immediate hubbub of the Loop behind them on the other side of the river. The soaring Palmolive Building was ahead, the recesses in its limestone facade lit impressively with floodlights and the blazing white Lindbergh Beacon at the top swiveling 360 degrees to guide airplanes into Chicago Municipal Airport southwest of the city from more than two hundred miles away.

  “So what is it that you do exactly—assuming you aren’t always disarming kidnappers and saving damsels in distress?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Usually a lot of waiting around, trying to catch people doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”

  Vivian glanced sidelong at the detective. “Like cheating husbands?”

  “And wives…”

  Vivian tried to imagine what The Darkness Knows would be like every week if all Harvey Diamond did was lurk outside hotel rooms waiting to catch unsuspecting couples in flagrante delicto. Less dramatic, she thought, and decidedly not suitable for radio.

  “I can only assume you have a lot of leggy, mysterious brunettes showing up in your office asking you to look into wayward husbands, missing heirs, things like that?”

  “Not nearly as many as I’d like.”

  “Is that why you became a private detective, Mr. Haverman?”

  “The promise of leggy women in need had a lot to do with it, yes.” He took his eyes off the road for a moment to fix her with a curious stare. “Why the third degree? Interested in giving up your career in radio for the life of a private dick?”

  “Oh no,” she said, ducking her head. “It’s just helping take my mind off…off the situation.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Vivian’s attention was again drawn out the passenger-side window, gazing at the vast, inky void of Lake Michigan. Mr. Haverman turned the car left onto the quiet side street. “The short answer is that it’s the family business. My father, that’s Charles Haverman Sr., taught me everything I know.” He paused a few seconds and then added, “No one calls him Chick either.”

  Vivian smiled.

  “And what’s the long answer?” she asked. “Oh, here it is. You can let me off on the corner.”

  “The long answer is a story for another time,” he said as the car slowed to a stop. “This is your…house?”

  Vivian heard the strange lilt in his voice and glanced out the window, realizing she’d forgotten to warn him. Her circumstances, such as they were, usually surprised people.

  They’d arrived in front of a large, elaborately carved stone house at one of the toniest addresses on the Near North Side. The house, though much larger than her family had ever needed, was actually one of the smallest in the neighborhood. It was dwarfed on either side by much larger expressions of wealth in brick and stone, and the famed castle of Chicago scion Potter Palmer was only a few blocks away. The porch light burned brightly, but all of the interior windows were dark, the lace curtains still. It was well past eleven o’clock now, and Mrs. Graves, the elderly housekeeper, would have long since been in bed. Vivian’s mother was likely out at some society soiree.

  It was still difficult for Vivian to think of this monstrosity as her home. They’d moved here from an only slightly less stylish neighborhood in Lincoln Park not long before her father’s death seven years ago. He’d purchased the house from a former client who had hit hard times. A lot of people had hit hard times during the Depression, but her father, a prominent attorney, had flourished. Now that Vivian’s younger brother, Everett, was at Northwestern, just she and her mother were rattling around this ridiculous old place.

  “Pretty grand,” Mr. Haverman said simply.

  “Yes, well, it’s my mother’s house,” she answered. “I’m only staying here until…until I can get a place of my own.” The stone lions stared reproachfully at her from their perches on both sides of the massive stone staircase leading to the double-hung front door.

  “I see.”

  “Well, thank you for the ride, Mr. Haverman.” She extended her hand, and he shook it. “I very much appreciate it.”

  “I’ll walk you to the door.”

  “No need—” she began, but he’d sprung out of the car before she could finish.

  They walked in silence, dry leaves crunching under their feet. The thunder seemed to be moving off into the distance, the promised rain skirting the city. The night had grown frosty, and Vivian pulled her flimsy jacket tighter around her shoulders, wishing she’d opted for something a little more substantial when she’d dressed that morning.

  Mr. Haverman unhooked the wrought iron gate and swung it open. He paused briefly in front of one of the stone l
ions, hands in his pockets, raising an eyebrow but saying nothing as Vivian hurried up the stairs. She pulled the key from her handbag as she went to unlock the thick mahogany door with a quick flick of her wrist. She turned on the threshold, already fantasizing about soaking in a nice, hot bath. Mr. Haverman took the wide limestone steps two at a time.

  “Again, thank you for the lift home. Maybe I’ll see you around the station sometime?” Vivian tried to smile, but it was all she could do to keep her eyes from closing as she said her good-byes.

  “Actually, I’d like to come in,” he said.

  Vivian’s mouth opened in reply, but words momentarily failed her. She searched her memory for anything she’d said during the drive that might have led Mr. Haverman to believe that she was anything but the most respectable of ladies.

  “Perhaps we can have a nightcap some other night, Detective.” Her voice was tipped with ice. He was charming, but this was a bit too forward. She held his gaze for a long second and then began to close the door, but the detective stopped it with his hand.

  “No, Miss Witchell,” he said. “I don’t think you understand. You’re in danger.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Mr. Hart wanted to keep this under wraps for as long as possible.” Mr. Haverman took off his dark gray fedora and placed it atop the coat-tree in the entry hall. “He doesn’t want a lot of loose talk around the station.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand,” Vivian said, even though she didn’t. She strode straight through the entryway and into the den. “Would you like a drink?” she asked over her shoulder. She didn’t wait for a response before opening the paneled oak doors of the extensive liquor cabinet and surveying the contents. “Scotch all right?” She named the first bottle she recognized that contained enough liquor for two.

  “Sure.”

  She poured the drinks with a shaking hand, the bottle bouncing against the lip of the glass. She handed Mr. Haverman his drink and took a mighty gulp of her own. She coughed and then sank into the armchair nearest the fireplace, wishing it had been lit. She was suddenly chilled to the bone.