Grave Phantoms

by Jenn Bennett

  Festive boughs of holly and the muffled sound of hot jazz welcomed her as she stepped inside the speakeasy lobby. A few patrons mingled, smoking cigarettes and chatting near a newly installed coin-operated telephone. Her friends were supposed to be here already, but she didn’t see them. And when she asked Daniels about them, she found they hadn’t arrived, so she followed him into the dark club to wait.

  Gris-Gris was a swank place with a great house band and an interesting rotation of stage acts, from clairvoyants to acrobats to flashy dancers. But the best thing about it was that it was a black-and-tan club. And that meant societal restrictions went unheeded here. You could dine with who you wanted. Dance with who you wanted. No one cared about anything as long as you had cash. Bo came here a lot, so she made sure to mention at breakfast that she’d be coming tonight, hoping he’d get the hint and drop by. She wasn’t sure he would. He’d left for work with Winter before she could speak to him alone.

  The tables that clustered around Gris-Gris’s stage were half empty tonight, and Astrid didn’t see anyone she knew. She certainly wasn’t going to sit around waiting for her friends, so she joined the people lined up along the dance floor who were cheering on two couples doing a new dance called the Lindy Hop, with wild swing-outs and kicks. Astrid cheered them on and soon found herself seduced by the infectious beat of the snare drum and joined in when a man offered to teach her the moves. She initially fumbled, laughing at herself, but soon picked up the steps. It was exciting and fun—so fun that she forgot about the rain and her errant friends. She changed partners twice, and then danced with another girl, laughing breathlessly as the musicians onstage sped through another song. And another.

  And another.

  When the house band took a break, she was ready for one, too, and plopped down at a table to cool off with a glass of ice water.

  Her friends weren’t coming. Traitors. She wouldn’t care so much if an older man a few tables away would stop staring at her. She’d first noticed him on the dance floor, but now he was making her feel uncomfortable—especially when he looked as if he was headed over to talk to her.

  Absolutely not.

  She took the long way around to the bar at the back of the speakeasy and wasted several minutes ordering a fresh drink and chatting with the bartender before taking another route back to her table. She thought the man was long gone.

  He wasn’t.

  “Your fella leave you high and dry, sweetheart?”

  Astrid glanced up to see the older man leaning against a nearby column. He flicked a cigarette into a potted palm and smiled. He had full, fetching lips and an interesting nose with a prominent bridge. He was also twice her age and drunk as a fish.

  “Just waiting for some friends,” she answered, hoping if she didn’t look him in the eye, he’d get the message and move on to another woman. No such luck.

  “You’ve been waiting for a good while now. Think you’ve been forgotten.” He pulled out the chair next to her and plopped down, smoothing his light brown hair. “Pretty little gal like you shouldn’t be alone. Especially not during the holidays. Don’t worry, Max will keep you company.”

  His eyes were so glassy, she expected him to reek of booze, but all she smelled was smoke and a fruity cologne. “I appreciate your concern, Mr. Max—”

  “That’s my given name,” he said. “I’m not a stickler for old-fashioned formalities. Everyone just calls me Max. What do they call you?”

  “If they call me anything, there’s a good chance my brothers will put them in the bottom of the Bay.”

  His laugh was nasal and lazy. “Where are these brothers of yours tonight, hm?”

  She reminded herself that the club was perfectly safe. All she had to do was raise her voice and Daniels or Hezekiah or one of the bouncers would come get her. Hopefully. She glanced up at the big window on the upper tier, where Velma normally watched the floor from her office, but it was dark. Astrid rather wished it wasn’t.

  “Look,” she said. “I’ll be straight with you. I don’t keep company with men your age.”

  The votive candle on the table cast flickering shadows on his face that sharpened when he turned his head. “I’m twenty-three, sweetheart.”

  She started to laugh, but when she took a closer look at his face was surprised to see that, indeed, he might be only twenty-three. Maybe boozing aged him. Her friend Mary’s mother drank too much and easily looked twenty years older. And where the hell was Mary, anyway? Astrid thought of the new public telephone in the lobby and wondered if she should try to ring her.

  “Let’s try this again,” he said, flashing her a charming smile. “I’m Max, and you, I believe, are Miss Magnusson.”

  Her fingers stilled around her glass. “How do you know that?”

  “Your family’s infamous. And I asked one of the waiters,” he added, hunching over the small table to speak in a lower voice. A gaudy signet ring on his finger flashed in the candlelight when he set his hand on the table, inching closer. “You are the Viking Bootlegger’s baby sister, yes?”

  The warning bells that had dinged inside her head when he first mentioned her name now grew louder. He was toying with her, and she didn’t like the edgy eagerness in his eyes. Maybe he was one of her brother’s business rivals. Winter and Bo had both warned her a hundred times to be cautious in public. Being in Los Angeles had made her forget to be guarded. She remembered now.

  “If you’re hoping for a discount, I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she said, pulling away from him while trying to keep her voice light.

  “No, no discount. I’ve got more cash than I know what to do with and plenty of booze back home.” His suit looked expensive enough, so maybe that was true. Glassy blue eyes squinted as he smiled down at her. “I’m only interested in you.”

  “Me?”

  “Indeed,” he assured her, rapping his knuckles on the table to underscore the word. There was something awfully familiar about the design on that ring, but she couldn’t quite place it. “Tell me more about you, Miss Magnusson.”

  “Not much to tell.”

  “I doubt that’s true. Word is you were at your brother’s warehouse last night when that yacht crashed into the pier. That had to be interesting.”

  She didn’t like where this was going. Maybe he was a reporter. Magnussons do not speak to reporters. That was one of Winter’s (many) house rules.

  “Hold that thought,” she all but shouted at Max, pasting on a fake smile as she clinked the melting ice in her glass. “I just decided I need some gin. I’ll be right back, and then we can chat.”

  She all but leapt away from the table in her rush to get away from him and wove around tables looking for Daniels, who was nowhere in sight. She glanced over her shoulder to see if Max was watching her. He was. She waved and darted behind a column. A small crowd of people had descended on the bar. She’d have trouble getting the bartender’s attention. She also couldn’t make a dash for the lobby, because it was in Max’s line of vision. Her anxious gaze fell on the door to the ladies’ restroom—out of sight, and that was good enough for her. She stepped inside the bright room, leaving behind the chatter and smoky haze of the club.

  SIX

  Bo held out a chair as he stealthily scanned the dim speakeasy, looking for the telltale flounce of blond hair. Gris-Gris wasn’t as busy as it should be this time of night, but there were still enough people to make it difficult to spot someone across the tangle of candlelit tables and dancing bodies.

  “You owe me for this, Yeung Bo-Sing,” Sylvia said in Cantonese as she sat down in the chair he offered, using the formal Chinese surname-first pattern to emphasize that she meant business.

  Then again, Sylvia Fong always meant business. The twenty-year-old switchboard operator lived with her twin sister in an apartment two floors above the one Bo grew up in—one he still kept but rarely used—just off Grant on the north
ern edge of Chinatown. She occasionally helped him when he needed to listen in on telephone conversations, and he made sure the building superintendent knew that he couldn’t screw her over on rent or bamboozle his way out of repairs.

  “You said you weren’t busy tonight,” he told her. The house band was loud, so they had to practically shout at each other to be heard. “Besides, I’m buying you a drink. Your boyfriend surely won’t mind two friends catching up.”

  “No, he won’t.” Her ruler-straight short bob swayed as she slowly shook her head. “But no club in the city would make you pay for drinks, and you wouldn’t beg me to race over here with you in this nasty weather if you didn’t want something.”

  True.

  Thanks to the widow Cushing moving the Plumed Serpent, Bo had been able to oversee the loading of tonight’s runs from Pier 26 instead of staging everything across the Bay. This saved him a couple of extra hours of work, but it was already past ten. He hoped Astrid hadn’t already moved on to another speakeasy—or decided against coming here altogether.

  “Only one thing would make you look that nervous,” Sylvia said. “She’s home from college, isn’t she?”

  Bo sat where he could see the bar and the door. “Who do you mean?”

  “Pssh. Don’t play dumb. The blond Swiss girl.”

  “Swedish.”

  Sylvia widened her eyes and pretended to pant, mimicking small dog paws with her hands. “This is you, wagging your tail and begging for her to scratch your ears.”

  “A bit lower down than my ears,” he said with a smile.

  She laughed. “Lucky her.”

  “You’re a boon to my ego, Miss Fong.” Bo had known Sylvia several years, and even though things started off lustily between them, it had been quick burning and short. But she was funny and easygoing, and they had not only remained friends but become closer. A rare joy, she was. “Why aren’t we together again?”

  A stupid question, because they both knew why. She’d been uninterested in being hampered by a serious relationship, and he’d been harboring, well, whatever this was for Astrid.

  Then, of course, there was the other thing. That night. The night he didn’t want to think about right now.

  But she only said, “Because my mother would just as soon me marry a convicted murderer.”

  “Mm. That’s something I hear a lot,” he murmured, half serious as he flagged down a waiter and ordered them two drinks: black-label champagne for her, water for him. When the waiter left with their order, Bo mused, “Maybe I should change my line of work. Do something respectable.”

  “And give up your fancy new car?” Sylvia said as she took off her gloves and pocketed them.

  He smiled. “Good point.”

  “What did you name it, by the way?”

  “I never could decide,” he lied. He didn’t want to give her the wrong idea—or even the right one, which was that he’d decided to christen it “Sylvia” as a quiet act of petty and irrational retaliation after he’d received one of Astrid’s college letters that mentioned that damned professor of hers.

  “You should give it a nice Chinese name,” Sylvia said. “What about your mother’s name?”

  “A car is too sexy to be named after a mother.”

  She huffed and crossed her legs, adjusting the fall of her dress over one knee. “As if mothers can’t be sexy.”

  “Not your own mother.”

  Sylvia squinted over his shoulder. “Don’t look now, but I think I’ve spotted the person holding your doggy leash.”

  Bo slowly, slowly turned his head in the direction Sylvia was looking, and damned if she wasn’t right. In the middle of the dance floor, Astrid twisted her curvy hips in a beaded aqua blue dress. Her mouth was open, laughing, while she stomped it up with one of Gris-Gris’s regular patrons, Leroy Garvey.

  Jealousy, hot and liquid, shot through Bo’s chest.

  He forced himself to watch her. Penance for dreaming an impossible dream. A voice inside argued: You could be the one out there, swinging her over the dance floor. Dancing with her. Whispering in her ear. Anticipating getting her alone in some dark corner of the club, where people would look the other way.

  Could he be satisfied with that? Stolen moments in dark corners, seeing her when he could, between her long trips to Los Angeles and his short trips up the coast to Canada, running booze . . . until she found someone permanent, forcing Bo to step back and accept it? To let her go and watch her spend her life in another man’s arms?

  He watched her trade partners. Another handsome man, happy to hold on to her, and he, sitting here moping beneath a cloud of nebulous anger and hurt.

  The band finally ended their set. As the crowd on the main floor dispersed, Bo tracked Astrid’s sparkling dress to a table across the main aisle, where she sat down with her back to him. Alone. Waiting for her friends, he supposed. Or was she? Was that just a fabricated excuse to shake off any protests that she’d be out alone, acting like a spoiled flapper, drinking and dancing with anyone in sight? What the devil was going on here, anyway?

  “Oh my,” Sylvia said, clucking her tongue and shaking her head. “My-oh-my-oh-my.”

  Bo’s gaze flicked to his companion’s face.

  She gave him a pitiful smile. “What I wouldn’t have given for you to look at me like that.”

  He relaxed against his seat and tapped his fingertips against the linen-covered table. Casual, cool. Slow breaths. He didn’t dare look in Astrid’s direction again. In fact, he banished her from his head completely, proud that he actually could.

  “But if I’m being honest,” Sylvia continued, “I do think I prefer you better as friend. You are less intense.”

  “You were the one who told me I was coming by too often.”

  “I got tired of you looking at the clock and hearing you talk about her.” Sylvia lifted her chin in Astrid’s direction.

  “You didn’t want a commitment,” he argued.

  She lowered her eyes. “No woman wants to settle for second prize, Yeung Bo-Sing.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly, and meant it. “I wish things had turned out different between us. We’ve never talked about it, but that last night, with—”

  “I agreed to it. We were drunk.”

  “My good sense failed me.”

  She shrugged with one shoulder. “Amy was always more adventurous.”

  “It changed things between us, and I can’t even look at your sister anymore without feeling guilty.”

  She dismissed his words with a coy smile. “No need for regret. Amy has long forgotten it.”

  It may have been two years ago, but her sister still flirted with him shamelessly and occasionally tried to talk him into coming over when Sylvia wasn’t around. Which would be a temptation to even the most pious of priests. But he couldn’t. Sylvia would be hurt, for one, and he valued her friendship too much. More than that, just thinking about it made him feel like he was cheating on Astrid . . . a woman he’d never even kissed.

  He was pathetic. Truly.

  “Besides,” she said. “I’ve forgotten it already, too.”

  “Ugh.” He clutched his chest and grinned. “My male pride.”

  Sylvia swatted his hand playfully. “What about my female pride? You drag me out here tonight for what—to make your little biscuit jealous?”

  “No.”

  Her eyes narrowed with cool incredulity.

  “All right, yes.” Was she mad? He felt a little ashamed, and hoped she wasn’t mad, considering their history. Sylvia was hard to read. Sometimes he felt she was full of light, uncaring about what anyone thought, and other times, he worried that she cared too much and went to great lengths to hide it.

  But she only laughed at him right now, and relief washed through him.

  “Fine,” she said. “But you really owe me, and I
get to name the price.”

  They ribbed each other good-naturedly for a while, Sylvia naming off favors that became more and more exorbitant, until she elbowed his arm. “Hold on a minute. Now who is that she’s talking to?”

  Bo looked. A man sat at Astrid’s table. Well dressed, older. No friend of hers that Bo knew—and Bo knew them all. In fact, he’d go so far as to call the mystery man at Astrid’s table . . . dangerous looking. An animal toying with its prey. That’s likely your jealous heart talking, he told himself. But he realized a moment later that his instincts about the man were not based on anything the man himself was doing. Bo was only reading Astrid; she had gone completely rigid in her seat.

  Without thinking, Bo pushed away from the table. But before he could stand, Astrid was on her feet and saying something to the man as she dashed away and disappeared behind a column.

  “What was that all about?” Sylvia said in a low voice.

  Bo wasn’t sure, but he didn’t like it. And he liked it even less when the mystery man followed Astrid into the shadows.

  “Stay here,” Bo instructed Sylvia, and strode off after the man.

  SEVEN

  The restroom was empty but for a single woman fixing her hair in a mirror. No attendant. Maybe she was on a break. Astrid breezed past the mirrors, headed to the last of three marble-walled toilet stalls, and closed the door with a sigh of relief.

  Tonight was not going well. She sat on the edge of the toilet seat and cursed her friends for not showing up and leaving her here to deal with drunken strangers on her own. Cursed herself, too, for telling Jonte she’d find her own ride home. At least she had money for a taxi. If she could just sit it out here long enough for that shady man to leave, she could make a beeline for the lobby and get her coat.

  It will be fine, she told herself as she blew out a long breath. He was just a drunken lout. A nosy reporter trying to get a scoop. So why couldn’t she get the image of his garish ring out her head? She was being paranoid, surely, but the ring reminded her of the turquoise idol . . .