Murder at the Flamingo
Page 18
“C-come here. Y-you have t-to . . .” She sniffled the end of the sentence, her composure gone.
She held tightly to his arm with both hands, dragging him in the direction of the Employees Only sign. She waited for him to push the door open, cowering into his shoulder. The light was flickering again.
Hamish reached up and held the bulb in place to stop the blinking. Reggie’s grip tightened, her nose soiling the fabric of his shirt with sniffles. He morbidly spared a thought for the cleaning and pressing it would need after not one girl but two made a damp impression on his shoulder.
Then Hamish saw. At the bottom of the stairwell, Mary Finn sprawled at an unnatural angle, haloed by a growing pool of blood.
CHAPTER 17
It had to have been adrenaline. There was no other way Hamish was ready to sprint down the stairs. Hamish fully expected his hand to shake and his chest to tighten. When his nerves didn’t react, he figured Mary Finn’s corpse had startled them still.
He didn’t want to leave Reggie in case whoever had done this was still in the area. He dragged her whimpering down the stairs, stopping two steps before the floor, eyes lingering on the corpse, his arm tightening on Reggie as he surveyed Mary. She’d fallen backward or else she would have been facing the other way. But there was blood underneath the pantheon of curls over her forehead.
The muted footsteps overhead and Reggie’s sobs sparked him into action. They couldn’t be here. But he wanted a closer look.
“Wait,” he said.
“What?” She shuddered.
“Oh heavens,” he breathed. Though the most injurious impact was at her head, Hamish saw a raw band of pink straight across her neck. He used his free hand to rub against the same still-tender spot on his own neck. His thoughts spiraled to the men he’d noticed on the dance floor.
“Hamish,” she squeaked. “There’s someone—” Reggie’s grip tightened. Tighter. Tighter. Footsteps, and not from above.
Hamish felt ill when the shadow became recognizable. And two figures behind him. One that startled Hamish: Luca. With Schultze’s walking stick and Mark Suave not far behind.
Hamish kept Reggie close as they tiptoed upstairs to the sights and sounds now gaudy and garish. He was in shock. Or else he would have flown down the stairs and ripped the stick from Luca’s clutch.
“The police!” Reggie shouted to the milling group smoking and reveling nearest the now closed employee door. “Someone has to call the police!” Her voice compensated for the din. “The police! Call the police!”
Hamish was nauseous. They would call the police, and Luca was there, and—
“I should have . . . I should have . . .,” he repeated into Reggie’s ear.
“What’s this racket?” Tom Schultze limped over.
Hamish looked at Schultze, then in the direction of the door. There was a dead woman at the bottom of the stairs and Tom Schultze was without his cane because Luca had it.
When Reggie detached herself, he felt it before seeing it, a damp spot on his shoulder imbued with the impression of her. She blinked around.
“She’s dead!” she told Schultze blandly. “And your stick! Your stick!” She didn’t mention Luca at all.
“Shhh, Reggie.”
“Dead? Who’s dead?” a bystander said far too loudly, and soon they were flooded with slurred questions and stirring commotion.
“Mary Finn,” supplied Hamish uneasily, her name recalling a life drained of blood.
“What?” Schultze whitened.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know!” Reggie jabbed at his shoulder with a weak index finger.
“Get the police!” a man shouted. “Someone is dead!”
Hamish’s shoulder might as well have been a magnet, she was so reluctant to be pulled from him. But when Vaughan parted the crowd, something stirred inside her and with it the safety of home. She let his broad shoulders engulf her, tasting the tang of his cologne as he led her away, forcefully working his way through the milling crowd in pursuit of a glass of water.
“Let’s get you home.”
Reggie surveyed the bar with swollen eyes. Johnny Wade had been replaced by a short redheaded man whose proficiency made up for his lack of Wade’s beguiling charm. Where is Johnny? He’ll be devastated by the news of Mary. If I hadn’t offered to go and check the lightbulb, then . . . Vaughan handed her a glass of water and commanded she sip slowly.
“Dirk.” The name bubbled from her suddenly.
“What?”
“Dirk Foster. He knew Mary.”
“Reggie, this is hardly the time.”
“When is the time, Vaughan? A girl is dead at the bottom of the stairwell. Dirk was just there.”
“You’ve suffered a shock, darling.”
“Hamish!” She looked around for him. Hamish would be wondering about it. He would know.
“Let’s get you a taxi.”
“No. I should stay here.”
“Darling, the police and the press will overflow this place, and you don’t want to be caught in the middle of anything.”
“But I am in the middle of it,” Reggie said tremulously. “I f-found her.”
“You’re a Van Buren. There is protocol. I am sure any upstanding officer will recognize a woman of your breeding cannot be interrogated like some riffraff. You require delicacy.” His fingers gently cupped her elbow.
Reggie shook her head. “I’m going to stay.”
“Vaughan!” Dirk Foster cut through the commotion. “We have to leave. I’m already on shaky footing with my father, and a nightclub with a murder—”
“But you knew her.” Reggie sounded like a ghost of herself.
“What? Reggie, what are you saying? Dirk . . . she’s in shock.”
“The police will need to see you, Dirk.”
“Is she serious?” Dirk laughed darkly. “Come on, if Reggie wants to stay here and pander to the coppers, she’s welcome to it. I will spare myself the notoriety.”
“You go,” Reggie said, a wave of exhaustion overtaking her.
“Reg, I can’t leave you.”
“My friend Hamish will see me home. I have a car waiting. Honest, Vaughan.”
Vaughan seemed unsure and she was gifted a look familiar from the near past. “You’re coming with me,” he said with finality.
Reggie pushed him back. “No. I am not.” A memory surged through her. Vaughan tugging her into the middle of her parents’ party. The same familiarity that tugged Vaughan at Dirk’s insistence.
Hamish banged his head against the wall. He only had a small space of it, just to the side of the Employees Only entrance. The nightclub sounds shifted and stretched. After the din of the band, the relative silence was louder than the previous noise.
Luca appeared then. Hamish’s heart sank. There was blood on his hands, and he was trying to wipe it off with his kerchief.
“L-Luca, what happened?” His voice wouldn’t rise above a whisper no matter how he forced it.
“Wrong place at the wrong time.” Luca fashioned a smile that again failed to reach his eyes. He was clearly shaken, his dark skin unnaturally pale. But he would play Luca, ever the consummate professional. Unfazed.
“B-but you have Mr. Schultze’s walking stick and . . .” Hamish looked around. “Where’s Mark Suave? He was with you. His friend too. Luca! You have to say something. Where did they go? Did you try to stop them?” Hamish grabbed Luca’s sleeve and held tight.
“Not now, Cic. When the police come, you stay silent,” Luca growled.
“I can’t do that.” Hamish ground his teeth. “I went to get Reggie and both of us saw . . . We were . . .”
“Well, Valari.” Ben Vasser’s unmistakable baritone rang out and he appeared at Luca’s elbow. “Fine kettle of fish. First night of your club and already a disaster.” Hamish followed his study of Luca’s pale face and then the blood streak on his bespoke jacket and then the smear of blood on his hand.
“I didn’t do it, you know.”
“Accidents happen,” Luca said shortly.
“We’re going to have to take you in.”
Hamish wanted to intervene. To do something. To run downstairs and uncover whatever had truly happened. But he froze.
One of Vasser’s men approached, detaching his handcuffs from his belt and linking Luca’s arms behind his back.
“Go home, Cicero. Answer their questions and go home. Get a good night’s sleep. Take care of my club. It’ll be all right.”
The cops edged Luca along, but he looked back over his shoulder. “You’re fine, Cic. Trust me.”
The crowd parted, spreading around and past him while he stood in place, jostled a little by the river of satin and silk, gossip and laughter still ringing out in little spurts. Then Luca was gone.
“I have the car, Mr. DeLuca.” Phil materialized.
Hamish felt seasick with the sudden wave of people whooshing by him in the direction of the exit. “I-I have to find Miss Van Buren and—”
Phil turned abruptly. “I’ll be outside with the car.”
Hamish ran his shaking hand over his face. Was this what he got for leaving home? For being foolish? A disaster of a summer, complete with the opening of a club with underhanded investors, his cousin’s probable involvement with a criminal organization, as Brian MacMillan had hinted, and now his cousin’s arrest?
“Hamish?” Reggie’s voice shuddered behind him. He turned and saw her, face white from more than powder, wringing her hands, the red manicure of her nails blood-like against the ivory of her fingers. Where was Vaughan Vanderlaan? Shouldn’t he have been pressing Reggie close and comforting her?
“Reggie.” Her name was all he could muster.
“I’m sorry, Hamish. Is there anything I can do?”
“You just stumbled on a corpse,” he blurted. “I should be asking you the same thing.”
“Well, you look like one.” She took his right hand and squeezed. “I’m sure Luca didn’t do it.”
“Of course he didn’t do it.”
“I’m just trying to—”
Hamish exhaled. “I know.” He retrieved his tuxedo jacket he’d removed for dancing and handed it to her. She draped it around her shoulders.
“So?”
“So what?”
“What are we going to do about it?” Her voice dropped to a whisper.
“You’re shivering.”
She pulled his jacket more tightly around her dress.
“I think I should have Phil drive you home. Or perhaps you arranged transportation with Mr. Vanderlaan?”
“I’m not going home tonight,” she said with finality.
Hamish startled. “Is Mr. Van—”
“Vaughan left.”
Hamish felt a stir of rage. Didn’t this Vanderlaan fellow want to protect Reggie? She had just witnessed something awful. Hamish reached out and tugged at the sleeve of the jacket around her shoulders. Her blood-red nails gripped the lapels.
“My landlady won’t accept my showing up after one in the morning.” She shivered. “I could scale up the drainpipe, but it wouldn’t be easy in this getup.” She gave a weak smile.
“You can come home with me,” he suggested.
“Even after the shock of tonight, trust Hamish DeLuca to fall back on his gentlemanly manners.”
Hamish gripped her arm on an impulse. “I have another idea. Come on.” They walked a few steps before he reached behind to brush her arm and make sure she was behind him. They escaped through the back door and into the alley where he had leaned his bicycle. Hamish stretched one leg over the crossbar.
“Hop on,” he said, while Reggie’s jaw dropped.
“In this dress?”
“I can’t leave you here and I don’t want to talk to Phil. There’s no way I’ll sleep tonight and I doubt you will either after what we just saw. We’ll go to the office.”
“Are you sure?” Reggie looked around.
“It’s just a dress, Reggie. Do you really want to stay here?”
She shrugged. Then assessed the width of the handlebars. “You’re going to have to make sure I don’t fall off.”
“I won’t let you fall.”
Her shivering had subsided. Reggie wriggled out of Hamish’s suit coat and laid it across the front bar of the bicycle. She smoothed her satin skirt beneath her then hopped on before promptly sliding back off, her shoe catching in the spoked wheel.
She looked back at Hamish and exhaled. “Well.”
“Sorry. We can—”
“You just put this idea in my head, don’t take it back out again.” She stepped out of her shoes and dangled them from her two forefingers, then she hopped back on, holding tight, latching her feet on either side of the front wheel and turning her head over her shoulder so the lights from the busy street outlined her high cheekbone and bright eyes. “Just don’t let me fall,” she breathed.
Hamish could almost taste her breath. She smelled like peppermint and the cigarette smoke they both trailed from inside. For a moment the world slowed to a halt: no Luca, no murdered girl. Just Reggie and Hamish. He blinked a few times, then reached in his pocket with the hand not steadying the bike and settled his glasses on his nose. Then he pushed off. Her extra weight made the ride slower, and her nearness forced him to concentrate twice as hard. He had pedaled Maisie home dozens of times, but Maisie never made him forget his way like Reggie, with her little shrieks and laughs that bubbled above the tragedy of the night and the slight wind they created with the whoosh of the wheels.
When they made it to Cross Street, leaving the dim lights of Haymarket Square behind, the only stragglers on the dark street a meowing cat and a man walking a large black dog, Hamish slowed to a halt.
Reggie followed his lead and hopped off. “Oh!”
“What?”
“Cold cement.” She adjusted her dress and finagled her shoes on, leaning on the unbalanced bicycle. It teetered and so did she. Hamish’s reflexes were quicker and he caught her around the waist, letting the bike clang to the ground. The black dog howled. Reggie smoothed her skirt.
“Well, see? I needed my smelling salts after all. Weak in the knees after stumbling.”
Her attempt at lightness didn’t work. He leaned down, picked up the bike, and rolled it beside them the rest of the way to the office.
It was highly inappropriate. Her father would have polished his hunting rifle, her mother wringing her ivory fingers and bemoaning her “thankless child,” wondering, “Where did I go wrong to have a girl . . . my Regina . . . who would stay an entire night alone in a dingy office with an unmarried man?”
They would pray for her on Sunday. The minister more than happy to make it a declaration from the pulpit with the other requests. The people surrounding the family pew eyeing Reggie as if her rebellion might be contagious and shoving their daughters against the hard wood backs of the pews so they wouldn’t catch it.
Hamish was rolling up his shirtsleeves and loosening his collar. His hair was damp from the warm night, and when he ran his fingers through it, it stuck up a little. Reggie smiled. She sank into her usual chair and stretched out her arms.
“Well, this is a scandal. Me alone with a handsome young man.” Hamish looked up quickly, sending his glasses down his nose. “Yes, Hamish, handsome”—she smiled at him—“and after finding a corpse at a nightclub.”
“I guess it was an impulsive suggestion.” Hamish took two steps so far backward she was worried he would tumble into the wall and the bicycle he had leaned there.
Reggie laughed. “Come on, Hamish. I know you don’t bite.” She motioned toward the chair opposite the desk. Hamish sat and she noticed how tired he was under the lamp above the desk. He nudged his glasses up and ran his hand over his eyes. He had long fingers. Had she noticed that before? They were rather graceful. She yawned. She was cle
arly exhausted and her mind was focusing on the wrong things . . .
“Why didn’t the police detain us for questions?” Hamish asked. “The only person Vasser was interested in was Luca. Not Mark Suave.”
Reggie picked at the corner of the desk with her finger. “Maybe they set up Luca to take the blame?”
Hamish nodded. “Crossed my mind.”
For someone who had recently encountered a corpse, Reggie was surprisingly calm. She supposed she was still in a latent state of shock, more worried for Hamish in the moment than she was about herself. He went silent, staring at the window above her shoulder, his face a cross between worry and sadness. “Luca will be fine, Hamish,” she said quietly. “He’s probably charming the prison guards into a comfortable suite at the Park Plaza.”
She felt terrible for him. More so than she ever would for Luca. Luca would find a way out of jail, but Hamish couldn’t find a way out of his mind, or his loyalty to his stupid cousin.
She must have fallen asleep eventually, for when she woke in the predawn, rubbing her stiff neck, her head had been cradled in her folded arms and Hamish’s jacket was around her shoulders. She sat up, remembering where she was and what had happened. The memories sleep had dulled. She looked around. Had he left her there alone? She shivered and blinked. He had switched the light off and the only light seeped in from the streetlights through the window. She looked around in the shadows.
“Hamish,” she whispered, her voice uneven. She leapt up and dashed across the floor in her bare feet, slowly opening the door. The hallway was dark and silent, save for regular breathing below her.
Hamish was slumped beside the doorway. Arms folded over his shirtsleeves, black hair over his forehead, glasses folded beside him.
“Now there’s a gentleman,” she said softly, impulsively leaning over and brushing her lips over the top of his head before retreating back into the office until dawn.