Keeping stock-still, she shifted her eyes over to Charlie. He was staring straight ahead, giving her ample time to study his profile. Had his face always been so soft? So square? The night they’d met at a little underground club on K Street, he’d seemed different from the other guys. Rounded, affable, safe—and thus he’d remained all these months. He stayed with her for three solid days after her mother died; nights, too. Never so much as a whisper about his wife, or his home, or his family. He was a boon of her imagination, coming to life only when he drifted in line with her gaze. Existing nowhere but here, beside her. Disappearing into a dark void the minute he left her bed, moving with surprising silence for a man of his girth.
He called on that same stealth now, because the next thing she knew, his broad face filled the curve of her neck.
“I see you got your gift.”
“I did.” She stared at the back of the driver’s head, giving Charlie nothing. “What an unexpected surprise.”
“Well, I remembered what you said about me never giving you a bottle of perfume. So I thought I’d set that right.”
“It’s very nice. Usually the cheap stuff makes me break out in hives, so I’m keeping a watch. You’ll let me know if my neck turns red, won’t you?”
“Ah, Mousie, you know I do the best I can for you.”
“What I know is that you gave me the same scent your wife wears.”
An unmistakable snicker from the driver prompted Charlie to nudge the back of the seat as he twisted his body in a protective shield around her. His face disappeared in and out of shadow, depending on the streetlight. Like a film projected in slow motion, she watched his face turn from confused to surprised to hurt at her accusation.
“Sweetheart, I don’t buy my wife perfume. She buys her own. I don’t pay any attention to that kind of stuff.”
“Well, it’s an amazing coincidence, don’t you think?” For her part, she kept her face the same. Cold.
“I told the lady it was for a beautiful girl, hair black as midnight. I said you looked like some beautiful Egyptian princess, only, you know, with this perfect white skin. And then she shows me this ad, and I could picture you in that silk robe you wear sometimes, and it seemed perfect.”
Her mind wandered through the fabric of his story, looking for tufts of truth. Maybe he really didn’t know the name of his wife’s perfume. He probably did have some conversation with a store clerk. He thought she was beautiful. Other men thought so too, given the way they flirted and carried on until Charlie became some big, fuzzy shield, staring them down and sending them away. He’d never let anybody hurt her. In fact, he would never hurt her. Not if he could help it. Unless she let him.
The lie he told tonight—and other, smaller ones she barely remembered—was meant to protect her. To keep her miles away from the tragedy of their truth, to make her feel like she was the only woman in his life. The only woman in the city worthy of Mavis perfume. It was just the kind of lie a girl needed every now and then.
“Oh, Charlie.” She kissed him before the driver’s doubts could worm their way into the backseat, and she didn’t stop until the car did.
Don’t flirt: those who flirt in haste oft repent in leisure.
ANTI-FLIRT CLUB RULE #1
WHILE CHARLIE COUNTED OUT a generous tip for the cabbie, Monica tilted her little mirror toward the streetlight, fixed her lipstick, and powdered her nose. The air outside the car felt refreshingly cool and clean, inviting her to forget her previous touch-up and turn her face toward the now-intermittent flakes drifting lazily down.
Charlie swooped in beside her, taking her under his arm as if to shield her from the snow. “You hungry?”
“Starved.”
“Good.”
He kept her close to his side, hurrying the few slick steps to the black-and-red canopy over the restaurant’s door.
Romo’s was a steak house on K Street. A fifty-cent cab fare from Monica’s apartment, making it far enough away to seem like an adventure. In fact, it had been an adventure the first time they went, on a tip that ordering the crêpe flambé for dessert would get diners a pass into a back room where they could sip an after-dinner brandy while listening to a sonata played by a string quartet made up of the proprietor’s daughters.
“I love this place,” Charlie said as their cab eased its way through the traffic-clogged street. “Steaks as big as my face, right?”
“Yeah.”
Monica, rather, chose to remember the dark-paneled room, lamps with red-tinted domes, and the haunting music that made the light and the brandy join in as a perfect blend for the senses. That’s what she’d written, anyway, without giving any clues to the location or the name or even the code word to gain access to the hidden treasure. This was one place that deserved to be both celebrated and protected.
They were met at the door by a man just her size who took their coats and disappeared while another led them to the only free table, which just happened to be tucked away in a perfect dark corner.
“A secret place for secret love, am I right?”
The host’s olive skin gave an aura of mystery and romance to his words, and Charlie answered with a slug to his arm. “What are you trying to say, pal?”
“Only that a woman this beautiful needs to be kept under lock and key, lest someone steal her away.”
Charlie looked at her, his arms open in surrender. “What did I tell you, Mousie?”
“You told me you were hungry,” she said before turning her attention to the simpering host. “I’ll bet you’d have a whole other line if we had to take a table by the kitchen.”
He smiled deferentially before bowing away, leaving her to look at Charlie across the table by the flickering light of a low-burning candle. Hushed conversations swirled around them, filling the absence of their own for a while, at least until they’d been served two glasses of water and ordered their supper.
“So tell me,” Charlie said, tucking his napkin into his collar in anticipation of the meat to come, “what’s new in your life since last we met?”
Monica smiled at his attempted lyricism. “You first.”
“Same old, same old.”
“How lucky for you. My boss died, our office was held at gunpoint on account of the Monkey Business story about Hoofers, and I got two swigs of genuine thirty-year-old Scotch whiskey.”
He sat back, impressed, though she wouldn’t venture to guess which headline intrigued him most.
“Please tell me you got that bottle stashed in your purse.”
“Did you hear me, Charlie? Guns. Doc King, not appreciative of the way I rendered his joint in the press. I could have been killed.”
“But you weren’t, were you? And good thing for him, too, because I would have knocked his block off. Ought to do that just for scaring you.”
She chose not to mention Max, how he’d held her close to his side throughout the ordeal. No doubt any bullet meant for her would have had to go through him, or at least she liked to think so.
“Now—” Charlie leaned across the table—“about that whiskey. Where’d you stumble across that? From that gangster?”
Monica smiled. “No. It was Mr. Moore’s. We found it with some of the, um, things he left behind.”
We. Would he wonder?
“Imagine. Checking out of this life and leaving something like that behind.”
“Imagine,” she confirmed, choosing instead to think of all Edward Moore had not left behind—namely a hint of the heart he’d kept hidden. “But it makes a person think, doesn’t it? What we’re leaving behind, I mean. You know what I got from my mother? Nothing. She sold the house, gave everything away. I didn’t have claim to anything I didn’t take with me when I left.”
“But you’re doing okay.” He wrapped his paw of a hand around her wrist, rubbing his thumb under the gold bangles encircling it.
“Sure, but then what happens to it when I go? Say Doc King made good on his threat?”
“Let’s not ta
lk like this.” He gave her wrist a squeeze. “How many nights do we get to sit down to a nice dinner? Why are we going to spoil it with talk like this?”
Two sizzling steaks were set in front of them. Charlie immediately dug in with gusto, tearing in with his knife and fork, while Monica tried not to wince at the trickle of pale blood released by his attack.
“You might not even know,” she said, speaking as much to the meat as to him. “I could be gone for days and days, and you wouldn’t know until you showed up at the Graysons’ only to find some other person renting my room after they box up my things and take them to the orphanage or something.”
“No orphan pull off that dress,” he said, pointing with his fork.
“I’m an orphan, Charlie. You don’t know what it’s like to be all alone in the world.”
He at least had the courtesy to look chagrined.
“And what about you?” she continued. “What if something happened to you? I might never know. I’d be sitting around some Friday night, waiting, and no one would even know they were supposed to telephone, or send me a telegraph, or anything. And who would I ask?”
“What? You want I should check in with you every day, just so’s you’ll know I’m alive?”
“Isn’t that what people do for each other?”
He was chewing. “Not people like us. We live. I’ve got a wife to watch me die.”
She sliced a sliver of steak and held it aloft; Charlie devoured three more before she could bring herself to take the first bite.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Not cooked right? You need me to send it back?”
“No,” she said. “I mean, it’s fine. It’s perfect.” She cut and ate another slice to verify.
“Good. I like to keep my girl happy.”
The bite barely cleared the growing lump in her throat, and she set her knife and fork aside.
“You know I’m crazy about you, right, Charlie?”
“Same here, Mousie.” He lifted his napkin to wipe his chin and lips, misreading her direction.
“But I think we have to stop. This has to stop.”
“Ah, now . . .” He tore the napkin from his collar and sent it drifting to cover the decimated meat on his plate. “Why would you say something like that?”
“I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to be alone.”
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Won’t you be more alone without me?”
“No,” she said simply, feeling the brush of her earrings as she shook her head.
“It was the perfume, wasn’t it? Look, I’ll buy you another—”
“It wasn’t the perfume. Not completely, anyway.”
“Oh no. You can’t fool me. If it’s one thing I know, it’s women.”
He’d kept her for this long, so the statement might be just as true as it was delusional.
“I’ve just been doing some thinking lately; that’s all.”
“Lately? More like the last five minutes. The way you was kissing me in the car didn’t feel like you were ready to run me over.”
“What can I say? I’m impetuous. That’s how this whole thing started in the first place.”
“So impetuous your mind right back.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t work like that. Sorry. And I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to try to keep a mistress against her will. Might get messy.”
He looked sad. No, stricken. “I hate that word.”
“Messy?”
“Mistress.”
“Not as much as I do. Don’t you think I deserve better, Charlie?”
He picked up her hand, held it, then brought it to his lips for a last, lingering kiss. She decided to forgive the trace of grease he left behind.
“Baby, you deserve everything.”
In that terrifying second, she wished she could take it all back. Laugh it off like a joke, but he might not laugh with her. For all she knew, he was going to whistle his way out of this place, go back home to his wife, or maybe even find another girl. Certainly she wasn’t the first. She might not be the only. But none of that mattered now. Her stomach roared with relief and hunger, and she couldn’t wait to get her hand back.
“Don’t suppose we’ll be going out dancing after this.”
He’d loosened his grip just enough that she drew her hand away, bringing it to rest on the table. “I don’t think so.”
“Then I guess it’s time to take you home.”
He was fighting something—a struggle between sadness and pride—as he reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew his wallet, opening it to retrieve a few bills, which their waiter handily arrived to take from him.
“I don’t want you to take me home, Charlie.” The long car ride in the dark, the familiar walk up the porch steps, the welcome darkness of the abandoned parlor, the silent reminder on the stairs to skip the third, squeaky step.
“So, this is it?”
“It had to happen sometime, you know.”
“I never would have said so in a million years.”
“Yes, you would have.”
He looked away, conceding the point, and by the time their eyes met again, it was over.
“How are you going to get home?” he asked, his voice full of business.
“Same way I got here. Cab.” She stopped him as he began to reach into his wallet again. “Please. I can take care of it myself. But thank you for supper.”
“You haven’t hardly touched yours.”
“I know, but I plan to. I think you should leave now.”
He sat back and up, surprised. “You’re kicking me out of Romo’s? Can you do that?”
She smiled. “Yes, and yes.” The threat of tears whittled her sentences shorter and shorter.
He surrendered. “As you wish.” Moving slowly, as if through water, he pushed his chair away from the table, stood, and walked over to where she sat. She filled her gaze with the flickering candle, forcing herself not to turn when she felt his lips touch the top of her head.
And then he was gone.
Her steak had congealed on the plate, as unappetizing as anything she had ever encountered, but she dared not look away. That would mean facing the roomful of people who had just witnessed her abandonment. She had to wait at least long enough for Charlie to get his own cab or maybe even just walk around the corner. For all she knew, he lived on the next block. But she couldn’t just sit here with her uneaten supper.
Catching the waiter’s eye, she summoned him over and asked him to take it away, which he did with aplomb.
“Hey, wait a minute,” she said before he could take a second step.
“Sì, bella.” There was just a hint of suggestion in his smile.
“I’d like an order of crêpe flambé.”
The smile disappeared. “Mi dispiace, signorina. I apologize. We do not serve that dish here. Perhaps a nice custard?”
“Yes, you do. I’ve had it before.”
“Perhaps you were accompanied by the nice gentleman. We are not in the habit of serving such to una donna non accompagnato. You understand?”
“Capisco,” she said, understanding too well what he feared. Too many single girls in a speakeasy, and a whole new set of crime might get under way. Still, she wanted darkness, and music, and a drink. She reached into her purse, took out a few folded bills, and slipped them between his palm and the plate. “Capisci?”
He did, and the next thing she knew she was being led to the coat check and, after a reassuring glance, ushered through a door behind it. With no frame and no knob—just a metal slide bar near the floor—she might not have known it was there, except that she’d been through it before. Then, tracing her fingers along the wall in utter darkness, she took a dozen steps down a dark hallway before turning a corner to find yet another door. This one, however, had a series of thin slats creating narrow stripes of light. She knocked, and a small window slid open near the top. She went to her toes, getting as close as she could to the onyx
eyes and moustache, and whispered the words the waiter had whispered to her. The window slid closed; the door opened.
If she ever had a home of her own, something other than a room in a boardinghouse, she wanted a salon that looked just like this. Dark paneled walls; thick, plush carpet; overstuffed, comfortable furniture gathered in cozy combinations. The tables were small and low, perfectly placed for a languid stretch to retrieve a drink. Soft music came from the corner—classical, provided by the owner’s daughters, two on violin, one viola, one cello. Conversation hummed just above it, laughter tinkling like ice cubes in a glass. Nobody here had any intentions of calling attention to themselves. In the days before Prohibition, this was a scene that might have unfolded in these people’s homes, friends gathered after dinner for brandy. But the cost and the risk was too great, sending them scuttling into speakeasies like this one. For that, Monica was glad. One had to be invited to drink in somebody’s home. This place welcomed a girl like her, provided she knew the correct words to get in.
The room was perfectly warm, mostly due, she assumed, to the fireplace dominating one wall. That same fire was largely responsible for the light in the room, casting all of the men and women gathered in its shadowy, dancing glow. It was reflected in the amber-filled glasses.
“The Devil’s Lair” is what she’d called it the first time she walked in on Charlie’s arm, and he’d whispered something deliciously evil in her ear.
Now she walked in alone, draped shoulder-to-shin in red. The minute she walked through the door, someone handed her a cigarette, and she bent absently to the flame proffered on her behalf. Her lungs filled with smoke—a sensation she failed to find as enjoyable as others did—and she surveyed the room for an empty seat. There were plenty, but none completely alone. Unless she went to the bar at the other side of the room, varnished black and lined with stools upholstered in rich, red velvet, she’d have to join a group. Easy enough to do if she’d had a date, but alone?
She took slow, measured steps across the room, aware of every eye observing her. It was a favorite line from Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth Bennet and Miss Bingley take a turn around the room to better show off their figures. The music was low and dramatic, the perfect score if this were a scene in a movie. She, the exotic unknown, and one of these men poised to succumb to her charms.
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