“It’s all right, I guess,” Dex said, still poking.
I took a breath that felt like the first I’d pulled in half an hour.
“Who was it?” Mustard asked. I could sense his urgency returning. His friend was all right—would live, in any case. Time he was out with his muscle, chasing down whoever had done the damage. I knew the signs. “Did you recognize them?”
“Seems to me there were three or four of them altogether. But I only recognized one of them: Xander Dean.”
Mustard’s eyebrows rose, then ducked back into position so quickly I doubted having seen them lift in the first place.
“Little I saw of him,” Mustard said, “he didn’t seem the type.”
“Ha,” Dex said mirthlessly. “I think mebbe you had him pegged wrong.”
“I think mebbe you’re right,” Mustard agreed. “Where’d he go?”
“Wish I could tell you. But I think they were careful not to say. Or maybe they did say, and I was too busy listening to the floorboards.”
“What was it about?” I asked.
“He wanted to know had I changed my mind about what I told him earlier,” Dex said. “I told him I hadn’t.”
“What had you told him?” Mustard asked.
“That we were parting company.”
It was clear to me that there was as much here that Dex was not saying as what he chose to share. It must have been clear to Mustard, as well, because he didn’t pursue the matter; didn’t press for greater detail. I resigned myself to the fact that Mustard and I would never know exactly what had happened here this afternoon. But the upshot? That much I knew: Xander Dean had been even more unhappy than we’d suspected that Dex had left his employ. He’d put some pressure on Dex to prevent it happening. That hadn’t worked. Could never work. Not with Dex who, in the end, truly didn’t care what was done to him. You got that with Dex before long. It was hard to frighten someone who figured that nothing worse could happen to them than what already had.
“When did it happen?” Mustard wanted to know.
“I’m not sure, to be honest. But they were waiting for me when I got back to the office and they worked on me for maybe half an hour.”
“He would have gotten back to the office close to two hours ago,” I supplied. “If he came back here right after he dropped me off at Blackstone’s.”
“I did,” Dex said nodding.
Mustard nodded crisply, all business. “All right then. So you were out for an hour, Theroux? That ain’t good. You wanna make sure you keep an eye on yourself: see you don’t go all loony or anything after bein’ out that long.”
“Yeah,” Dex said dryly. “I’ll do what I can about that, old hoss.”
Mustard seemed not to have heard the irony in Dex’s voice. Or maybe he just chose to ignore it. With Dex, that wasn’t always a bad idea.
“I’ll go poke my head out,” Mustard said, “see what I can see and if the boys have picked anything up. I have a hunch there won’t be anything. Not today. They had too big a lead. Still…” and with that he plunked on his hat and left the office without another word. The air about him swirled as though it knew it followed a man on his way to fix something.
“I need a drink,” Dex said, dusting himself and his bourbon off and righting the chair behind his desk before dropping himself into it.
The office was a mess. Dean’s toughs had seen fit to upend every single chair in the place, including mine. I wondered mildly what they had against chairs.
A couple of file drawers had been opened, their contents strewn on the floor around my desk, but I got the idea that no one had been looking for anything, that whoever had done it had just wanted to make sure their message was delivered loud and clear. Dex’s ashtray and the contents of the coffee pot had been dumped in the middle of the floor together. This was more irritant than anything. Since our floors were battered hardwood, one more mess wasn’t going to make that much difference, but it wasn’t going to be much fun to clean up, either. And though Dex’s blood would mop up easily enough, the trick would be tracking down all the places he’d left it. Judging from the blood spatters I found all over the office, they’d really bounced him around a bit.
I let Dex nurse his bruises, his battered ego and his bourbon while I put the place back together. The toppled chairs and tobacco soup messes were easy. The most difficult part would be organizing the files. I decided to just press everything neatly into an empty file drawer for today: I could sort things out properly over the next week or so, whenever I had time in the office that needed filling up. It wasn’t like we hit those files on a daily basis anyway.
My tidying was interrupted only once when Steward Sterling popped by as promised with masks for the ball, an invitation and the address.
He whistled when he saw the place. “Wow,” he said pleasantly, “what a dump! Tell me it’s not always like this.”
“It’s not always like this,” I repeated as instructed. “Only when we’re anticipating going to a ball.”
“There’s a story, I’d imagine,” he said.
“Yeah. I just don’t know that I feel like telling it right now,” I said taking the small package he’d brought. “You could try your luck with Dex, though,” I said, indicating his closed door.
“Naw, that’s OK,” he said. “Maybe you two will feel like filling in the details next time I see you.” And with a smile and a bit of a bow, he was gone.
Once I’d tidied things up to the point where it no longer looked as though a tornado had hit the place, I poked my head in at Dex, Steward’s package under my arm.
Dex was sitting upright in his chair with his face turned toward the window. There were about three fingers of bourbon in the glass on the desk, but he wasn’t touching it. His ashtray was sitting just as I’d left it after cleaning: no butts marred the jade-green surface. It always scares me when Dex abandons his vices. Sometimes it can be the calm before the storm, sometimes it can be the storm itself but, whatever it is, it’s usually not good.
“Want some company?” I said now.
“Sure,” he replied, pointing one long index finger at my usual seat.
“Thanks,” I said, taking it.
“Drink?” he said once I was seated, using the same index finger to indicate the bottle.
I shook my head. He knows I don’t care for spirits, but he’s also dead polite.
“What do you figure?” I said after a while. I was trying not to notice the angry color the flesh around his eye was turning.
“I’ve got a bump on the noggin, but I figure I’ll live. And they didn’t dump my bourbon, so that’s good news.”
“But what do you figure it was about?”
“You know as well as I do, Kitty. And you called it right, too, didn’t you?”
“I guess,” I said, not sure that I had.
“I honestly figured I’d quit Xander Dean and that would be the end of it. It seems he has other ideas.” He paused for a moment, deep in thought. “You were right about something else, too,” he said, finally.
“What’s that?”
“Well, you figured maybe Dean didn’t hire me to follow as much as he hired me to see what he wanted me to see.”
“I said that?”
Dex nodded. “More or less, yeah, you did.”
“OK,” I said, unconvinced. “Let’s say I did. What makes you figure I was right?”
“It’s in how mad he was at me wanting to part company,” he said, as though thinking it through for the first time. “You know: you hire someone to do a job and they don’t do it. What do you do?”
“I don’t know. Hire someone else, I guess.”
“Exactly right. That’s what you do. Easy as pie in this day and age too, ain’t it? You open a door and holler, someone’ll come running to do the work that needs doin’.”
“Pretty much I guess.”
“So why break a sweat if I don’t want to do it? Unless the job, such as it was, is already done. And the thing y
ou’re paying for is what was already seen, if you follow.”
Unfortunately, I did. “He was hoping for corroboration,” I said softly. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Right. Corroboration. Trust you to find a ten-dollar word,” he said, not without affection.
Dex saying it like that—out loud and in plain language—made me think of something else. “If that’s true, Dex, if you were hired not to follow but to … to witness, then maybe you weren’t the only one.”
Dex looked at me for a while, as though if he looked closely enough he might see a more complete answer. He took a sip of his bourbon. Lit a butt.
“And if I wasn’t the only one,” he said finally, “it’ll make our job that much easier.”
“How so?”
“All we have to do is find the others.”
It might have sounded easy to him. To me it did not. To me it sounded like needle in a haystack time.
“Not first, though,” I said.
“Huh?”
I looked at Dex’s bruised noggin, at the careful way he was holding his arm. “Well, I don’t know if you’re still feelin’ up to it, but before anything else, Dex, we’re supposed to go to a party.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
BEFORE I LEFT the office for the night, I called Mustard and arranged for the use of a car. Dex would stop by and pick it up after he left the office, at which point he’d come and collect me and we’d go to the Masquers’ Ball together.
Dex arrived right on time. I opened the door myself. When he saw me, Dex’s eyes went wide. It was gratifying and a little scary, too. “Why, you’re all grown up, Miss Pangborn.” We stood at the door like strangers. Me on the inside, backlit by the house. Dex on the stoop bringing with him the scent of evening and the sound of cicadas and the city at night.
“I’ve decided to take your remark as a compliment, Mr. Theroux. I take it you approve of the purchase you had Mr. Wyndham make?” I spun around theatrically, with more élan than I felt.
Dex smiled. “I do, Miss Pangborn. You’ll be quite the belle of the ball.”
“You look pretty dashing yourself, Mr. Theroux. You cut quite the fine figure in your monkey suit.” He did, too. And I was glad to see that, though his face was bruised and somewhat the worse for wear, and though he held his arm gingerly, it looked battered more than broken. You had to be glad for small favors. From what I’d seen that afternoon, it could have gone either way.
He nodded at me formally, then handed across a white mask. It was beaded and in a pale champagne color that didn’t entirely clash with my dress.
Dex hooked a black mask from his breast pocket and popped it on. “Say: I’m starting to think we might just have some fun at this shindig.”
“Miss Katherine, do invite Mr. Theroux inside,” Marjorie said, poking her head into the foyer from the dining room.
“Well, hello Mrs. Oleg,” Dex said, taking off the mask and popping it back into his breast pocket. “Lovely evening we’re having, isn’t it?”
Marjorie just scowled at him. Even though she’d extended her invitation, you didn’t need to be a detective to know she was suspicious of Dex. In a way, I understood that quite well. When my father was alive, Dex was not the sort of man who would have been welcome in our home—at least, not when anyone was looking. Since he’d died, though, I’d had reason to wonder about some of the secrets my father had kept.
Dex wasn’t put off by her coldness. “And you’re not to worry about Miss Katherine, Mrs. Oleg,” he said, just as though she had greeted him in return. “I’ll have her back to you all in one piece in a couple of hours.”
“Thanks, Dex,” I said once we’d settled into the big car. I had the cape I’d bought at Blackstone’s around my shoulders to ward off the evening’s chill. The beaded dress had been built for beauty, not warmth. “Marjorie is never very nice to you. I’m sorry about that. Nothing I say or do seems to change her mind.”
“It’s all right, Kitty. I understand. She’s afraid I’m a danger to you. I can see it in her eyes. And I guess I am.” I would have protested, but he barged right through. “No, no: really. Look at the danger you face on a daily basis.” I laughed at that because, truly, there were whole weeks where we didn’t see a single paying customer and I doubted I was in danger from the mailman. “Well, she sees danger even where you and I do not, Kitty. It’s just the way of things.”
I knew that, in a way, he was right. Yet that was a part of it all I enjoyed, though I don’t think I would have admitted it out loud to Dex or anyone else. And I was quite sure I could never have made Marjorie understand.
Working for Dex wasn’t like working for a doctor or a lawyer. Perhaps those jobs had their points of interest, as well. But from where I was sitting, I couldn’t see it. And where was I sitting? In a big car, at the side of a handsome man. I was wearing a pretty dress made by a famous designer and purchased by a movie star. We were on our way to a masquerade ball—a ball—being thrown in the clubhouse of a secret organization of actors.
No, really: it was difficult to imagine this happening to a girl who worked for Hartounian the importer or in an accountancy firm.
“Have I told you that you look swell tonight, Kitty?” I smiled. Thanked him. Controlled the melt of lipstick and the flutter of wings in my gut.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE MASQUERS WERE headquartered on North Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood, just a couple of blocks off Hollywood Boulevard, a couple more from Sunset. Their clubhouse was in what had once been a grand private residence. From the street it looked like a normal, if lovely and huge, home. It was finished in the Tudor style, the grounds carefully maintained and closely clipped, the house an island in a huge man-made oasis.
I didn’t know what I had expected, but it was different from the reality. As we wandered up the front walk, our masks in place, the music got louder, the cacophony more pronounced. The front door was open, as were many of the windows, perhaps letting in the cool evening air but also allowing plumes of smoke and sound to escape into the night.
Once we’d put our masks on, we stood in a larger foyer momentarily flummoxed, not knowing quite what to do with ourselves or what to expect beyond this point. Stairways led up and down, though the largest wave of music and noise came from a pair of double doors on one side. They were closed just now but one imagined that, when they were thrown open, it would have been difficult to talk or even think.
“It’s all a bit much to take in, isn’t it?” the speaker was about Dex’s height, a tall man with broad shoulders under an evening jacket of good quality. He had medium brown hair, dark and laughing eyes but, almost inexplicably, it was difficult to tell anything more about him because he was wearing a tidy black mask that, like ours, covered only the area around his eyes. You wouldn’t have thought that small black mask would make so much of a difference, but somehow it did; completely obscuring the essential something that would have made the man an individual to me. I knew that our own masks would have the same effect.
His voice was surprisingly deep, even for someone of his height, and it was warm and welcoming. I figured that might be the reason he’d been given the assignment to greet people at the door. “It’s early yet, though you’re certainly not the first to arrive.”
Dex handed over our invitation. The man gave it a cursory glance and handed it back.
“I’d start in the ballroom,” he said, indicating the direction we should follow. “You can get a drink and look the food over. But you’ll find most of the house open tonight, and the gardens, as well. Follow your pleasure and have a wonderful time.”
Once there, I guessed that the room our greeter had described as the ballroom served many functions at different times. With very few modifications, it could have been a large dining room—with row upon row of masquers raising toasts—or even a theater suitable for live productions, the revels Wyndham had told us about. In its ballroom function, however, a ten-piece orchestra commanded the far wall. I couldn�
��t see who tonight’s orchestra was from my vantage on entry but it was immediately apparent that they were wonderful.
Small tables and stools flanked the walls, providing places for people to sit and chat and perhaps have a drink while watching the dancers. It was early yet—just nine o’clock—so there weren’t many dancers when we arrived. I suspected that would change as the night wore on, though, while the champagne—and other drinks—flowed and inhibitions loosened. Food was already laid out, though. I could see the tables from across the room and I looked forward to a closer inspection.
On one side of the room a series of doors led out onto a verandah and from there to a garden. Lanterns were lit and food and drink were laid out there as well. Beautifully dressed masked couples flowed in and out of those doors like so much liquid.
I made a beeline for the eats. Dex pressed a glass of champagne into my hand while I looked the food over. Seeing all that food made me a little sad. If only Marjorie could have been there to see and enjoy it, I thought. It was so beautiful. Almost too beautiful to eat, though I didn’t let that stop me.
One platter alternated eggs and small artichokes, both filled with crabmeat and shrimp and arranged so prettily it looked like modern art. A molded fish salad glittered on its own platter, the salad an iridescent green, with flakes of salmon apparent through the gelatinous surface. The whole was covered with a lovely cucumber sauce and the green against green took my breath away.
An iced bowl held a pile of glistening black caviar. Next to the bowl were tiny pancakes a la russe and soured cream. I thought of making myself a confection of these ingredients as indicated, but feared I’d get the order wrong.
There was one beautiful tray that featured bite-sized tomato aspics filled with cream cheese and anchovy and I helped myself to one of these. The salt of the one perfectly complimented the creamy texture of the other while all those glorious flavors were encased in softly flavored glossy red. In that moment, it seemed the most perfect bite of food I’d ever enjoyed. These things—and more—were all served in the buffet style: one could go as often as one liked and eat as much as one could hold. But there was more food yet. Masked serving girls bearing trays moved among the guests, some offering glasses of champagne, others hot canapés with creamed oysters, crabmeat as well as tiny little perfect sandwiches featuring pineapple with ham, egg with almond and other clever combinations.
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