The Boy in the Red Dress

by Kristin Lambert

  I took advantage of the coughing to get in another dig at Mama. “Where has your ward slipped off to? There’s plenty of mopping to be done if she plans to earn her keep.”

  Cal narrowed her eyes at me. “Worry about your own keep, kiddo.”

  I batted my lashes. “You planning to fire me, boss?”

  “Not if I don’t have to.” The look she gave me was part joke, part warning.

  “So, it’s like that?” I said, gritting out a smile. “Mama’s back, and you’re ready to shove me off the boat?”

  Cal’s jaw softened. “You know that’s not how it is.”

  “How do I know? Blood’s thicker than water, they say.”

  “You’re my blood, too. And you know blood don’t matter around here anyway. We choose our own family.”

  “Then I’d like to un-choose her.”

  Cal looked exasperated. “Millie, you could give her a chance. You don’t know everything—”

  “I know enough.” I saluted Cal and dipped my head at Rhoda. “See you around, ladies. I got work to do.”

  I didn’t mention that most of the “work” I had planned was on Marion’s case. I sneaked up to Cal’s office and rummaged in her desk until I found a little red notebook and a pencil. While I was there, I cut Arimentha’s debutante picture out of the newspaper and pasted it inside the notebook’s cover.

  I’d already spotted some of the regulars that had been there on New Year’s Eve, and I needed to talk to them and find out if they’d seen or heard anything that might lead me toward a suspect other than Marion.

  But the first interview on my agenda was Duke. Sometimes customers got chatty with bartenders and told all their business, like who they were meeting upstairs on the balcony. I raced downstairs, planted myself on a stool at the mostly empty bar, and waited for him to stop pretending not to see me.

  “Duke,” I said.

  “Mildred,” he said silkily.

  He was trying to get under my skin, but I refused to show any reaction. I opened my red notebook and tapped the pencil against the bar. “I gotta ask you some questions about last night.”

  Duke wiped a rag in a circle on the already-clean bar, looking far too pleased with himself. “Well, kid, as you can see I’m pretty busy right now.”

  I folded my arms across my chest, like that cop Sabatier had. “Where were you when that girl was murdered?”

  Duke snorted. “Right here, chained to this bar, like always.”

  “Someone said they saw that girl talking to you awhile,” I lied. “Did you see her?”

  “I’m the bartender. I see everybody.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Duke finally stopped wiping the clean bar and crossed his arms, too, so now we were both elbows out. “Why should I?”

  “Because not answering makes you look like you’ve got something to hide. Did you talk to her or not? It’s a simple question.”

  Duke studied me with narrowed eyes for a long moment. “She came up here with that cake-eating date a couple of times.”

  “You hear what they said?”

  “Nah.” Duke’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Her date always wandered off right when it was time to pay. Pretended to see somebody he knew. But I know the type.”

  I knew the type, too. I remembered how Arimentha had given him a dollar out of her own handbag to pay for his drink. Maybe he wasn’t as rich as the raccoon fur coat and the company made him look.

  “You think he could’ve killed her?” I said. “Based on what you saw?”

  “I didn’t see nothing.”

  “Between them, I mean. Were they arguing? Tense?”

  “Nope,” Duke said unhelpfully.

  I blew out a sigh. “What happened when the date wasn’t around? Did she show you a picture of Marion?”

  Duke shrugged again. “Yeah. So? I didn’t tell her anything. She saw him with her own eyes on the stage about five minutes after that.”

  “Did you ever see her other friends with her? There were two girls and two other guys.”

  “Not sure. Saw a couple of different ladies trying to make nice with her, but they were ones I’d seen in here before.”

  “Who?” I said eagerly.

  “Nobody I’d peg as a killer.” Duke glanced down the bar at his customers. One of the Red Feathers pointed to his empty glass and raised a finger. My leg jiggled under the bar as Duke took his time pouring another whiskey and delivering it to his customer.

  “Duke, who was flirting with that girl?” I said the moment he returned.

  He opened the cash box and stuck the customer’s dollar in it. “I don’t know their names.”

  “Then what did they look like?”

  He hesitated. I thought at first he was still just enjoying the power of withholding information from me, but he surprised me by looking me in the eye with sincerity instead of antagonism. “These are our customers, Millie. Our people. You don’t need to give them a hard time.”

  “Do you really think I would?”

  “I think you’d do whatever you had to for Marion. But he’s not the only one that matters in here. Remember that.”

  Duke had a point, and I didn’t like it. I clenched my fists in my lap below the bar where he couldn’t see them. “I’ll remember. Now, please—tell me what those ladies looked like.”

  Duke let out a long sigh. “Okay. But for Marion, not you. One was a kid with brownish-red hair, I guess. Maybe five foot eight and pretty femme. Hadn’t seen her for a while before last night. The other is in here all the time. Dark brown curly hair and big brown eyes, short, always wears a pink flower in her lapel. Cute as a button . . . Too bad for me, she only likes girls.”

  I scribbled everything down in my notebook. Though Duke’s descriptions were vague, I was pretty sure I knew at least who the second woman was, a regular named Lo who’d tried to get friendly with me a time or two.

  When I looked up, Duke was watching me, eyebrows raised. “You really think that deb went off upstairs with one of those girls?”

  I slapped my notebook shut. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

  * * *

  Much as I hated to admit Duke was right, I kept his advice in mind as I made my way around the club, asking the regulars every question I could think of about last night. Had they seen this girl? When was the last time they remembered seeing her inside the club? Had they talked to her, even just in line for the john?

  I asked them, too, about the ladies Duke had seen talking to Arimentha. There were a few possibilities who the first girl might’ve been, but everyone knew Lo. Someone had even heard her talking about that table of rich girls; Lo had reportedly said at least one of them must be interested in women, or they wouldn’t be here, and she’d bet she could prove it. But no one knew if she’d been successful in that bet, and she wasn’t there tonight.

  In between, I served drinks and mopped a little, too, so I looked busy for Cal’s benefit. One of the Red Feathers said he saw Arimentha come back into the club at about eleven thirty, but then he said it could’ve been another blonde girl. Two women nearly Cal’s age said they’d slipped out onto the balcony themselves and it had been empty as a gin jug, but that was earlier in the night, more like eleven.

  I talked to Olive, too, following her around while she served her tables. She already knew most of the regulars’ names and drinks by heart, and she’d only been at the club a few months. If anybody’d noticed a girl mooning over Arimentha it was her.

  “The Uptowners definitely attracted some attention from the regulars,” Olive said as she cleared glasses from a vacated table. “New blood always does. And they were a flashy bunch, especially the blonde one. I’d guess every girl in here was giving her the eye.”

  She passed me the tray of glasses to hold while she wiped off the table
.

  “Even you?” I tried to sound teasing, but it came out stiff.

  “I didn’t have time for that,” she said without looking up from the table, but I thought I saw a hint of a smile sneak up the side of her mouth.

  “Did you see anyone have a confrontation with Arimentha?” I said, adjusting my grip on the tray. “Even a small one? Like maybe someone tried to flirt with her, and she was rude? Or someone flirted with her, and that someone’s girlfriend or boyfriend saw and got mad?”

  Olive shook her head. “I didn’t notice if they did. But once the murder happened and everything went pear-shaped, I didn’t notice anything except what you were doing and if you were getting out safe.”

  I stared at her. The faintest hint of pink tinted her light brown cheeks, and she wiped the table more vigorously.

  “Did . . . um . . . did you hear Lo talking about her at all?”

  “Yeah, I heard her boasting.” Olive straightened and pressed a hand against the small of her back. “But that’s just Lo.”

  “I know. But will you talk to her for me, if you see her? Ask her about last night?”

  “Sure.”

  Duke was shooting me dirty looks from the bar, so I said see you later to Olive and went back to serving drinks. I interviewed a few more customers across the bar before the night was over, but none of them had seen or heard anything useful.

  That night when I got home, I lay in bed with the lamp on studying everything I’d written in my notebook. Much as I hated to admit it, I only had two pieces of evidence that might lead me anywhere: the fact that Lo had been trying to pick up Arimentha, and the fact that Fitzroy might be a lot broker than he appeared.

  What I wanted to do the next morning was go track down Kitty Sharpe, the gossip columnist Marion had told me about. She might know what skeletons were in Arimentha’s closet—and in Fitzroy’s, for that matter. The trouble was, it was a school day, the first one back since Christmas.

  Over a breakfast of dry toast in the morning (dry because Mama had used up the last of the butter), I tried to convince Cal I shouldn’t go to school with a murderer on the loose, but she didn’t buy it. She never bought any of my excuses. She always said some variation of “I didn’t get to finish school, but you’re going to, by God, if I have to chain you to the desk.”

  This time, we had an extra audience of one to our familiar argument.

  “I didn’t graduate,” Mama said, stifling a yawn and wrapping her floaty seafoam dressing gown tighter around her middle. “And it hasn’t done me a bit of harm. I don’t see why she has to go. Doesn’t the law say she can quit at sixteen?”

  Maybe she was trying to make me less angry about her living with us; maybe she was throwing me a bone. But I didn’t want her lousy bones.

  “You’re the last person who should be giving out life advice,” I said, shooting her a pointed look. “And you gave up the right to comment on mine a long time ago.”

  Mama looked affronted. “I was just trying—”

  I pushed my chair back across the linoleum with a loud squeal, spun on my heel, and left to put on my school uniform. At least if I went to school, I wouldn’t have to come up with creative ways to avoid Mama all day.

  Instead, I suffered the indignity of a scratchy wool jumper, a Peter Pan–collared blouse, and a lumpy navy-blue cardigan. Navy blue might just be the worst color ever invented. Even worse than pastel pink.

  I took the St. Charles streetcar uptown toward the finer parts of the city and walked the six blocks of Nashville Avenue to dear old Ursuline Academy, a highbrow Catholic school Rhoda somehow pulled strings to get me into. All the girls were buzzing about the murder when I slid into my desk at the last possible second. I caught an extra few glances aimed my way, some curious, some sneering. They all knew about my aunt’s speakeasy, and most of them called me Dagger behind my back, only partly because of the club’s name.

  The putty-faced nun rapped on her desk for silence, and half the girls complied.

  “Hey, Dagger,” Virginia Baines hissed from behind me. “You sure that killer wasn’t looking for you?”

  Her cohorts giggled.

  I turned in my seat and cocked an eyebrow. “How do you know I’m not the killer?”

  “You probably are,” Virginia said after a beat. “Since criminals run in your family.”

  I smirked. “Looks like mules run in yours.”

  Virginia’s pretty mouth dropped open.

  “Girls!” cried the nun sharply. “Miss Coleman! Face front, please!”

  I gave Virginia one last up-and-down and turned around, pleased with myself. Until a few minutes later when she “accidentally” spilled ink down my back. These were the times a navy-blue cardigan wasn’t so terrible.

  The rest of the day was more of the same. Conjugating pointless Latin verbs, teachers yelling at me when I fell asleep in class, girls trying to verbally take me down a peg, and me trying to cut them back. I ate lunch alone out back by the trash bins. The smell of dead fish wafted up out of the nearest one, so I ate fast.

  By the end of the day, I was even more relieved than usual to get the hell out of school and out of my stained cardigan. I practically ran home from the streetcar stop on Canal Street and was happy to see Marion standing outside my apartment, tucked inside the little porch to shelter from the wind, like any other day. For a moment, I forgot he was accused of murder. For a moment, my heart lifted. But only a moment. Because when he tipped up his fedora, I saw the panic and worry in his red-rimmed eyes.

  “What is it?” I said, touching his sleeve. I realized he wasn’t even wearing a jacket and was shivering in the chill.

  “The cops.” He swiped a tear off his cheek. “They found me.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  “WHAT?” I SAID, looking him over for bruises or injuries. “And they let you go?”

  He shook his head. “They knocked on the door at Mrs. A’s, but I heard them talking and climbed out the window. I didn’t have time to grab anything except my hat and this.” He held out a small paper-wrapped package.

  “You can tell me about that in a minute.” I hustled him through the front door, glancing around to see if we were being observed. No one appeared to be paying attention to us, and I didn’t spot anyone that looked like a cop.

  When we were upstairs and had safely slammed the apartment door behind us, Cal and Mama came out of the kitchen with matching looks of irritation on their faces.

  Mama took one look at Marion and cinched the belt of her dressing gown around her waist. “I’m not dressed for visitors,” she sniffed, even though it was four o’clock in the afternoon.

  But Cal, who was already wearing her work clothes, took in Marion’s harried appearance and beckoned him to sit down and tell the whole story. She parked herself across from him in her favorite green armchair and listened with her elbows on her knees.

  “What’d Mrs. Altobello say to the cops?” Cal said after she’d heard the basics.

  “That I’d moved out last month.”

  “Ha!” I said, propping myself on the arm of Cal’s chair. “Didn’t know the old bird had it in her.”

  Cal slapped my arm with the back of her hand. “Who do you think started that bootlegging business?”

  “The cops didn’t get in then?” Mama said, draping herself across the sofa. Smoke from her cigarette curled around her head.

  Marion took off his hat and ran a hand through his disheveled curls. “They said they didn’t need a warrant if there was ‘imminent danger’ or something, and they shoved past Mrs. A.”

  Cal’s brow furrowed. “They’re only supposed to do that if they think someone inside is about to be killed or hurt.”

  “Big shocker, they didn’t follow the rules,” I said. “The real question is how they found out where he lives.”

  “Mrs. A knows all t
he tricks to keep the city out of our business,” Cal said. “She won’t have put your name down anywhere.”

  “How many people know where you live?” Mama said.

  Marion chewed the corner of his thumbnail. “Everybody who works at the club, except Zuzu. She’s the newest. But I know they wouldn’t tell.”

  “Did you ever take any Red Feathers home?” Cal said.

  Marion’s pale neck burned pink. “Never.”

  “Not that they didn’t want him to,” I said. “Maybe one followed him some time.”

  Marion shook his head. “The Red Feathers wouldn’t hand me over to the cops either.”

  “Whoever it was,” Cal said, “you can’t go back to your place for a while.”

  Marion’s head popped up, eyes wide. “Where am I supposed to go then?”

  I slapped him on the shoulder. “Here, o’course.”

  Mama blew out smoke and an exasperated sigh. “Why don’t you just turn yourself in? Let the cops ask their silly questions, and then you’ll be free to go.”

  Cal’s lips curled in a sneer. “They’re not just gonna believe him, Gladys. You’ve been off in vaudeville-land, but here the cops only turn a blind eye when they feel like it, bribes or not. Last month they roughed up some boys who were picking up sailors on the dock.”

  “And remember that kid whose teeth got busted out when they raided that club in the back of the fur factory?” I said.

  Marion shuddered and hugged himself tighter.

  Mama tapped her cigarette on an ashtray. “Not all cops are bad eggs. I used to know that Larry Sabatier—I saw his card on the table. He’s a good man . . . or at least he was . . .”

  Of course, Mama would know one of the cops on the case. She probably knew every man of a certain age in town.

  Cal snorted. “Even if they did believe him, they’d still toss him in jail until they found better evidence on somebody else—which might not be ever if they think they’ve caught the killer.”

  Marion’s shoulders stiffened, and his back straightened. “I won’t go to jail,” he said, with a determined set to his chin.