Come Hell or Highball

by Maia Chance

  Ralph got us past Blue Heaven’s door without even saying the password. Maybe it should have bothered me that he was known by a speakeasy guard, but I had other things on my plate. Inside, Blue Heaven was just as rip-roaring and gin drenched as it had been a few nights back, and the jazz band was at it full steam ahead.

  We settled into a table with our backs to the wall. I slid off my sable and looked around for Bruno Luciano. No sign of him.

  “How do you think Bruno will get past the guard?” I asked Ralph.

  “Easy. He’s famous,” Ralph said. “Drink?” A waiter had appeared.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve got to keep my head clear.”

  Berta ordered a gin blossom. Ralph asked for neat whiskey.

  Fifteen minutes later, Bruno still hadn’t shown, and Berta was submerged in her second gin blossom.

  “Hey there, you juicy Swedish tomato, you.” Jimmy the Ant sidled up to our table. He only had eyes—or, I should say, an eye, since one of them was glass—for Berta.

  “Jimmy,” Berta said. “Goodness. I did not expect to see you here.”

  Judging by Berta’s freshly ironed rosebud-print dress, her lipstick, and her waved hairdo, I fancied she had expected to see him.

  “Wanna dance?” Jimmy said. Before Berta could protest, he’d swept her to her feet.

  “Mrs. Woodby,” Berta whispered. “Would you manage my handbag?” She plonked it in front of me, black, hefty, and square.

  I propped my chin in my hand and sighed.

  “Buck up, kid,” Ralph said.

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “Well, okay.” Ralph signaled the waiter.

  Three minutes later, I had an extra-extra-strong highball in hand. In another three minutes, half the highball was coursing through my bloodstream, and I was having trouble ripping my eyes off Ralph’s mouth. At the next table, a flapper was getting really comfortable with her fellow. Hands and lips weren’t exactly being kept to themselves.

  Ralph glanced over at the couple. He looked at me, lips quirked, eyes smoky. “How about it?”

  My body yelled Yes! I said, “Certainly not,” straightened my spine, and looked haughtily away.

  I gave a start. Mr. Highpants! Again. Leaning against the bar on an elbow, nursing a drink. He wore the same drab suit and hat, those same pleated trousers pulled up to his sternum. For once, he wasn’t staring at me. His empty little eyes were on the jazz band.

  I almost keeled off my chair.

  Ralph put a hand out to steady me. “Hey, I was only joking about a smooch. I know you only kiss me when you’re real, real mad.”

  “Look,” I whispered. “It’s Mr. Highpants. At the bar.”

  “I see why you call him Highpants. Jeez. Those suspenders of his couldn’t be more than four inches long.”

  Mr. Highpants leaned and sipped. After a few minutes, the throng around him parted. Everyone kept chatting, but their eyes were shifty. Something was happening.

  Lem Fitzpatrick, in pinstripes, with a caveman shadow on his jaw, strutted into the space the crowd had made. Sadie Street clung to his arm.

  “Huh,” Ralph said.

  Lem wrapped a hand around Highpants’s shoulder. Highpants stared down at his own feet, bobbing his head.

  “Mr. Highpants is acting like a peon,” I said, “like a—”

  “Like a hired hand,” Ralph said.

  My eyes met Ralph’s.

  “Lem,” I said. It sounded like a swear. I got up and slung Berta’s handbag in my elbow. The handbag was heavy, I realized, because her gun was in there. Her .25-caliber Colt.

  Dandy.

  * * *

  “Hey, where are you going?” Ralph said.

  “I’m going to give Lem a piece of my mind,” I said over my shoulder. “He’s scared me half to death, siccing his spooky little bloodhound on me!”

  “Don’t go over there.” Ralph was on his feet. “Are you crazy?”

  Evidently, I was.

  I barreled through the tables, turning heads as I went. Lem was still giving Mr. Highpants a talking-to when I made it over. Neither man had seen me coming.

  Sadie Street noticed me, though. Her nostrils flared. “I simply can’t remember your name,” she said to me, “but I do adore that handbag. My, it’s big enough to carry around at least six extra girdles for your—”

  “I’ve got to carry a big bag,” I snapped, “on account of all the dropped lipsticks I find next to dead bodies.”

  Sadie’s eyes were as blank as a cartoon bunny’s. That sealed the deal. Her lipstick must have been planted next to Nanny Potter’s corpse.

  I tapped Lem on the shoulder. He stiffened, and turned. “Yeah? Oh. Mrs. Woodby. Hi there.”

  “Hi there?” I said. “Hi there? Why, I ought to slap you, you low-down, rotten skink! What do you mean by sending your spy to follow me all around the city?”

  Sadie tittered. Ralph was just behind me; I felt his hand on my shoulder. I shook it off. “It’s an affront to my freedom,” I said to Lem. “I ought to telephone the police.”

  “Yeah, real funny,” Lem said. “You, call the police on me? I seen the papers, dollface.” He touched the side of his jacket, west of his pin-striped lapel. Something bulged there. A gun.

  The people around us had gone silent. In the background, the jazz band kept wailing, and the crowd kept up its hubbub.

  “You really shouldn’t bring up the fuzz in a joint like this,” Lem said. “They ain’t welcome. And snitches ain’t welcome, either.” His hand lingered over the gun bulge. “Unless, of course, they wanna be Swiss cheese.”

  My hairline misted. Lem wouldn’t shoot me, would he? Not in front of all these onlookers.

  “Come on, kid,” Ralph whispered in my ear.

  “It’s about Eloise Wright, isn’t it?” I said to Lem. “You’re in business with her. I know she telephoned you after I visited her office at Wright’s. She said I was a meddler, and that something had to be done. So then you set this piece of work—” I prodded a finger toward Mr. Highpants. “—on my tail. Right?”

  Lem unbuttoned his suit jacket.

  Dear sweet bejeezus.

  Berta’s handbag was still in the crook of my elbow. I inched my right hand to the handbag’s clasp. I snapped it open.

  I heard Ralph pull in a breath.

  “Okay, Mrs. Woodby,” Lem said. “You got me. I’m doing business with Eloise Wright. If you can call it business. We had a kinda deal, see, about staging Sadie here’s little discovery. Sadie wanted a real cute, high-publicity place to take photographs for that dumb discovery story she cooked up with the film studio. Mrs. Wright agreed to let the movie reporters photograph Sadie in the store. For a fee.”

  “If that’s all there was to it, then why send Mr. Highpants here after me?”

  Mr. Highpants jerked his chin, offended.

  “Show a little respect,” Lem growled. “His name—” He shoved his face right up to mine. “—is Morrie.” Lem’s hand was inside his jacket now.

  I shoved my hand deep inside Berta’s handbag, feeling for the cool hard Colt. Where was it? I peered down into the handbag’s shadowy abyss.

  The crowd gasped. I heard a snick.

  I looked up. Lem was aiming a big silver pistol at my chest.

  I rummaged blindly in the handbag. My hands wrapped around something, and I whipped it out.

  Lem burst out laughing.

  I stared at the object in my hand. It was a waxed paper parcel of butter almond cookies.

  “No!” Berta shrieked from somewhere. “Those are for Jimmy!”

  Lem shoved his gun back inside his jacket. His shoulders shook with laughter. “I wasn’t gonna shoot you,” he said. The sparks in his eyes told a different story. “I just gotta show you dames who’s in charge. Right, Sadie?” He gave Sadie’s cheek a hard pinch.

  Ralph drew me away. “Let’s blouse,” he said in my ear. “I don’t care to wait up for the fireworks. Let’s get Berta, get your coat, and go.”
>
  I was too shaky to argue.

  Berta intercepted us at our table. “What did you mean by that?” she said to me. She swiped the waxed paper parcel of cookies from my hand, and grabbed her handbag, too. “Not every last cookie in the world was baked for you, Mrs. Woodby.”

  “We’re heading out, Mrs. Lundgren,” Ralph said.

  “Oh dear. But I must say good night to Jimmy.”

  Ralph tossed me my coat. He shoved his fedora down low over his eyes and grabbed my hand. “Maybe you ought to skip the Romeo and Juliet routine tonight, Mrs. Lundgren. Lola’s gone and made Fitzpatrick upset.”

  Berta sighed. She gathered up her raincoat and followed us.

  We’d made it halfway to the exit when Bruno Luciano came through the door. He wore a dark suit. His hair was brilliantined, his face placid.

  “I’ve got to talk to him,” I whispered.

  Ralph flexed his jaw. “Why do I feel like a baby-minder?”

  “Take that back.”

  “Last time you said that, I got a kiss.”

  32

  I edged up to Bruno at the bar. People were watching Bruno, of course. Especially the girls. Bruno was a star. But Blue Heaven’s customers were too slick to make a fuss.

  “Hi there, Lola,” Bruno said. “Wow. Being on the lam sure looks good on you.” Bruno’s piping voice made everything sound like a puppet show.

  “I’ve taken it upon myself to poke around a little,” I said. I situated my rump on a barstool. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do in my thigh-length girdle, with my sable coat balled in my arms. “Into your, um, past.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first girl to do that.”

  “No! Not—I’m not some kind of crazed fanatic.”

  “Course not.”

  It suddenly hit me: Bruno Luciano was what nerve doctors like the Prig called a narcissist. The world, to their kind, was one big mirror.

  “I know you’re not really from Italy,” I said, lowering my voice. “You’re from Little Italy, and your mother used to run a tobacconist’s shop down on Mulberry Street, and you worked as a taxi dancer at Philippe’s.”

  Bruno’s eyelids flittered. He ordered a gin gimlet from the bartender and turned back to me. “Okay, okay.” He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Boy, you sure are one great sleuth. Mind if I ask why you’re poking your nose into other people’s business?”

  “Because Inspector Digton thinks I murdered Horace Arbuckle and Vera Potter, and I don’t especially relish the possibility of going to the electric chair, that’s why.”

  “What’s the big idea? Trying to pin the murders on me?”

  “Where did you get enough dough to buy your mother a new house and fur coats, and to allow her to sell off her shop?”

  Bruno looked past me. Was he thinking? Or showing off his magnificent profile?

  The bartender slid over a gin gimlet. Bruno took a swallow. “It’s like this,” he said. “That money that I used on my mama was an advance, sort of.”

  “From Pantheon Pictures?”

  “No. Pantheon didn’t start paying me big till after The King of Sheba came out. The money was from Fitzpatrick.”

  “What?” I glanced down the bar. Lem Fitzpatrick was lording over a herd of cool characters. Sadie perched beside Lem, smoking.

  “Yeah,” Bruno said. “Fitzpatrick hatched a scheme, see. Sadie and I would pretend to have this feud, and then the studio would be forced to beef up our contracts.”

  “I knew it was all a big sham,” I said. “All that posing for the photographers at the golf links.”

  “Fitzpatrick knew we’d have Pantheon over a barrel, because Zucker had made a deal with him, buying out all his movie palaces under the condition that Zucker groomed Sadie into a star.”

  George Zucker had said the same thing, to a T. Except—something seemed off. I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “If the studio fires Sadie,” Bruno said, “they’ll be dropping their end of their deal with a, you know—” Bruno tipped his head in Lem’s direction.

  Gangster.

  My palms went moist. “Wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “Anyway,” Bruno said, “it’s a good deal. Everybody gets what they want.”

  “Everybody, except for George Zucker.” I thought of George’s defeated shoulders, of the desperation in his voice.

  Bruno swallowed more gimlet. “Oh, yeah. Except for Zucker.”

  Things seemed neatly wrapped with a frilly bow on top. Lem Fitzpatrick and Eloise Wright were in cahoots, but not over anything to do with the film reel or the murders. Bruno Luciano hadn’t been blackmailing Arbuckle; he’d got his sudden crop of cabbage from his own deal with Fitzpatrick.

  Although people lie. They lie through their teeth.

  * * *

  It was around midnight when Berta, Ralph, and I arrived at the love nest. Ralph wanted to see us safely inside, since I’d gone and fizzed off a notorious gangster.

  I dug the key from my handbag and reached out for the lock. Except that the door was already ajar.

  “Rats,” I said. “The landlord must have come.”

  We crowded into the foyer.

  Ralph whistled. “Unless you’ve got the rottenest landlord in New York City, I’d say he had nothing to do with this.”

  The apartment was in shambles.

  The hall tree was on its side, and coats and hats flowed across the floor. In the sitting room, desk drawers were ripped out, lamps were toppled, and leopard-skin cushions had been slashed open to disgorge cotton wool and feathers.

  “Where’s Cedric?” I cried. “Cedric?” I rushed down the hallway and checked the bathroom and the bedroom. Both rooms had been ransacked. No Cedric.

  I stumbled into the kitchen. The light was on. Shattered glass sparkled on the floor tiles. The window gaped open, and cold wind puffed in. I crunched over the glass shards and put my head out the window.

  A small form cowered on the fire escape. Two eyes gleamed up at me. Puffy fur waved in the breeze. “Peanut!” I gathered Cedric in my arms. “Are you frightened, puppy boy? Poor sweet precious. Mommy’s here.”

  Ralph and Berta were watching from the kitchen doorway.

  “She never talks to me like that,” Ralph said to Berta.

  “Who did this?” I said. “Do you think it was Lem Fitzpatrick? Maybe one of his goons?”

  Ralph shook his head. “Maybe someone’s looking for the film reel. Or maybe someone’s just real peeved. One thing’s for certain: You ladies aren’t safe here anymore. You’ll have to stay at my place till things blow over.”

  * * *

  It turned out that Ralph lived only six blocks away, in a leafy street on the other side of Washington Square Park. His building was another brownstone—a little frayed, but respectable. He lived on the second floor.

  “Good heavens, Mr. Oliver,” Berta said, parking her suitcase in Ralph’s entry foyer. “I suspected you would be in someplace one notch up from the YMCA. This is actually habitable.”

  Ralph’s sitting room was cramped, and furnished with a hodgepodge of tattered antiques and smooth-jointed wooden pieces. A real—and to my eye, at least, quite good—expressionist painting hung above the fireplace, and the objects on the mantel were natural history museum in character: a wooden mask with googly eyes; a seal carved from bone; a round box of delicately grained wood; three arrowheads of some shiny, black stone. One wall was crammed with books, and a gramophone squatted on a mahogany buffet. The wallpaper was curling off, and the Oriental rugs were threadbare.

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa here,” Ralph said. “You two will have to kip together in the bedroom.”

  “I shall go to bed directly, then,” Berta said. “If I do not fall asleep first, I could be kept awake by the snoring.”

  “You snore?” Ralph asked me.

  “She means Cedric,” I said quickly.

  Ralph went to ready his bedroom—he’d muttered something about clean sheets and dirty socks—and several min
utes later he reemerged. Berta bade Ralph and me good night and toddled off, suitcase in hand.

  “How about a bite to eat?” Ralph said to me. “Are you hungry?”

  “Starving.”

  “Yeah. Run-ins with gangsters will do that to you.”

  Ralph’s kitchen was tiny, but it appeared to be well used—especially for a bachelor’s kitchen. Boxes and tins lined the open shelves. A bowl of apples sat on the table. Everything was spick-and-span.

  “Pull up a chair, kid,” Ralph said. He shrugged off his jacket and draped it over a chair, and rolled up his sleeves. His shirt was wrinkled, and he wore dark blue suspenders. “I’ll fix you up.”

  I sank into a chair. Cedric hopped down to beg for scraps at Ralph’s feet.

  Ralph washed his hands in the cracked sink and whipped a clean kitchen towel over his shoulder. He poured gin into a tiny juice glass painted with daisies. “Sorry I don’t have any ginger ale and whiskey,” he said.

  “This’ll do.”

  “Normally, I make something special when ladies come over.” He winked. “But it’s kind of late. Sandwich okay?”

  “Wonderful.”

  Ladies came over? Well, of course they did. In droves, probably.

  Ralph brought out a loaf of bread, mustard, pastrami, a tomato, and a brick of cheese, and got to work.

  “Okay,” I said, “you grew up in South Boston. With—” I glanced around the kitchen. “—without a mother. So you learned to cook.”

  He smeared mustard on bread. “Practicing your sleuthing on me?”

  “Am I correct?”

  “Yep. I learned to cook from the neighbor downstairs. She was Portuguese. So even though I’m Irish, I couldn’t cook corned beef and cabbage to save my life. Ma lammed off when I was small. Left me and my two brothers alone with Dad. Kind of a rough-and-tumble childhood.”

  By the clench of his jaw, I guessed rough-and-tumble was putting it mildly.

  “Then what?” I said.

  “Well, I’d grown up working with my hands, what with Dad in the shipyards.” Ralph sliced the tomato. “But I wanted to learn a real trade, so when I was sixteen, I took myself up to Maine, to Bath, and learned how to build ships.”