Would he ever reconcile the Hamish he saw with the Hamish he was trying to be? Luca could help. His cousin had always boasted that under his tutelage, Hamish could have the world—and women—lining up at his door. Hamish wasn’t as preoccupied with world domination as he was the potential of life with an easy confidence. He supposed that girls would follow after.
If he stayed with Luca (who always had the world bowing at his feet), maybe some of his cousin’s impenetrable belief in himself and his life would brush off on him. Maybe he would become who he was meant to be.
CHAPTER 2
BOSTON
THREE MONTHS EARLIER
Life wasn’t like the pictures. With the panache of Irene Dunne, Reggie Van Buren should have been able to merely throw her suitcase out the window and scurry down an old oak after it and into her life of adventure, leaving her would-be fiancé Vaughan Vanderlaan nursing a too-sweet chardonnay miles behind her. But that was the problem with pictures. They never showed what happened en route to the adventure. They only showed what happened when the heroine arrived in the middle of the adventure. And the camera lens never panned to routine duties like fixing a clogged sink in the communal water closet or changing a lightbulb in one’s new boarding house.
A New Haven Van Buren was not expected to know how to change a lightbulb. Subsequently, every fizzle and snap of the socket forced her into a quick retreat. More than once she almost fell backward over the chair she had scraped across the rickety floorboards to reach the dangling light. She looked at the bulb and sighed, stepping off the chair, and again considered asking the porter in the office on the main floor of Miss Clara’s Boarding House for assistance. But every time she considered taking the two strides toward her bedroom door, her stubbornness reined her in. Regina Van Buren would prove herself capable of anything—from recklessly leaving the comfort of her wealthy life to making the bulb stick in its finicky socket. She took a deep breath, stepped back on the chair, squinted her eyes shut, and twisted the bulb in, flinching as it buzzed, not daring to open her eyes until the room radiated and she could see clearly even as dusk fell outside.
“Ha!” she said proudly, wiping her hands on her trousers. Another accomplishment to scratch off in her Journal of Independence. Reggie picked up said journal from the side table and opened it to a creased page, crossing through Change lightbulb. Another victory, though not as grand as the one she had crossed off a week previously—Find gainful employment. The moment the train screeched into South Station in Boston the week before, Reggie circled three prospective ads in the Herald, determined to lug her suitcase across the city until she found a means to put bread on her table and a roof over her head.
Boarding houses advertised as clean and respectable were listed by the dozen, and Reggie secured a room in one across the Charles River in Boston-adjacent Charlestown on Pleasant Street, near a tavern with wooden walls just down from Bunker Hill once frequented by the Sons of Liberty. She’d be able to take a quick elevated ride to Boston’s North End if she was in a hurry or a brisk twenty-minute walk if she had time to spare. She emptied bills from a candy tin she had swiped from her dressing table at home. When the landlady pressed as to her being alone and unaccompanied by a male chaperone as reference, she peeled another bill off the wedge and explained her family had fallen on hard times. Her falsehood was thus overlooked and the room secured thereafter, Reggie having shrugged out of pretension and her allowance until all she had left were a few pieces of jewelry she intended to sell should her employment train not screech into the station.
She hadn’t supposed her high breeding would be a detriment, but it was. Drat the years of diction lessons. The dancing. The tea parties elongating her spine and teaching her to speak with crisp, clipped consonants. Potential employers assumed a woman of her pedigree must be in some sort of trouble to be circling potential jobs in the classifieds. And not an acceptable manner of trouble either.
The first advertisement led her to an address on Washington Street and into the bustle of newspaper offices and theaters, cafés spilling onto the street, automobiles jamming along in the summer sun. She turned just before a jaunty alley through which she could make out the Common’s spurt of green. Inside, she was met by a man on the wrong side of portly, folding in and out of his skin like poorly bound bales of cotton.
She checked the clipping once more then hid it behind her back with one hand while extending the other to match his offered hand. As he walked her into the corridor leading to his office, she felt for the first time she truly knew the definition of leer.
Behind the door featuring a frosty glass window with his name, Rod Barlow, in black block letters, she entered an office smelling like it had been stuffed in the back of her parents’ laundry.
Her eyes stung with the atmosphere. Nevertheless, she crossed through the room and took the offered chair.
“I am looking for a secretary.”
Some of his lunch was still lodged in his teeth.
“Ah.”
“And you seem perfectly suited.” His gaze lingered somewhere between her collarbone and navel. Reggie folded her arms around her abdomen, the muscles tight from perching there, half on the chair, half not, appearing comfortable while slightly raised, the muscles in her legs cramped with the effort.
“I haven’t said anything yet. Don’t you have any questions? About past experience perhaps?”
“Your voice, your manner.” His tongue found the side of his mouth. “You can tell a lot about the quality of a woman in her bearing.”
Reggie shivered. He was looking at her as if she were a canvas and his eyes a paintbrush. He rose from behind the barrier (safe barrier, she thought) of his desk and soon faced her, leaning against the chipped mahogany and staring down at her. The imbalance of power unsettled her and she rose a little higher, her calves burning.
“Everything in this line of work is appearance.”
“You’re in real estate,” she said. Swallowed. Nervous.
“Exactly. Property value.” She knew for certain he wasn’t talking about plots of land when he reached out with a beefy thumb and trailed it down her shoulder.
New Haven had never seen her recoiling from a man’s physical advances. In her silver-spooned sector, if a man said something untoward, a member of her father’s extensive house staff removed him. And Vaughan? He was a little boring sometimes but never a cad. He treated a lady like a delicate flower, only . . . oh my . . . what was Rod Barlow doing now? Reggie felt her eyes peel open with surprise because his finger moved lower and lower and—Reggie jumped from her chair.
“Pardon me!”
“Jobs aren’t easy to come by in this city, Miss Van Buren.”
“So you think you can take whatever liberty you like then?”
“It’s my business. I like a pretty face.”
“I-I have far more to offer than a pretty face,” Reggie shouted before realizing she had given him further bait.
It didn’t end well, of course. Reggie had to shove him off, flailing her arms weakly before turning and nearly tripping out the door in her sprint. Panting down Washington Street, she stopped, leaning a moment on a lamppost clock even as the throng moved around her. Her eyes fuzzed it with the towering Old State House in an interesting juxtaposition. She was in over her head. She wasn’t ready for the big city. She wasn’t Jean Arthur in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, able to hold her own with the other reporters and catch the latest scoop.
A cold perspiration beaded the back of her neck.
She walked onward, first unsteadily, slowly finding a surer pace. The city was beautiful. Her rural life so green now replaced with people and movement like cogs in a wheel picking up momentum with harried speed. A horn shrieked and a church bell chimed the hour.
She sighed and moved to the next notice in her crumpled newspaper: secretarial work for the man behind the Flamingo Club. She had seen advertisements for the club the moment she stepped into the city. It had a fashionable address at School Str
eet and Scollay Square and was set to enjoy its grand opening in a few weeks’ time. A nightclub. What would her parents think of her even applying for such a position? Would the devil reach out his scaly fingers and drag her down to the underworld for even daring to meet with its owner? Maybe that was why the position was unfilled by a respectable woman.
Reggie didn’t have the privilege of choice when it came to finding gainful employment. Economic times had fallen hard for those with numerous skills she didn’t possess. But she did have resolve and she refused to be taken advantage of. Nor did she want to be leered at. A nightclub owner might be precarious, but he might be a saint compared to that Barlow fiend. She asked directions and wandered past Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market in the direction of the North Quarter. Once across North Street, she found the office easily: adjacent the centuries-old house where Paul Revere had once been a resident. It hugged the wood-slatted building closely even though it towered high above it. Tourists milled about and the neighborhood engulfed her in a parade of tangible senses: smell, sound, and light.
She ascended the stairs to the proprietors’ offices on the second floor and read the names on the doors around her. Paul Petrov, General Practitioner and Psychiatry. Jimmy Orlando, Private Investigations. Nathaniel Reis, North End Housing Development. Mildred Rue, Temporary Employment Agency. Here, several stragglers with hollow eyes and worn expressions formed a tired line. They looked at her closely and she lifted her manicured fingers to her hat self-consciously before smiling wanly and pressing on her way. By process of elimination, she selected the last slightly ajar door.
Reggie fidgeted with her netted gloves fusing to her hands in the summer heat. The man behind the door was moonlight and chocolate and Rudolph Valentino. She widened her eyes. He was exceedingly handsome.
“My name is Luca Valari.” He extended his hand.
“Regina Van Buren.” Her heels echoed over the creaking boards toward him, and she met his hand with her own.
“A New Haven Van Buren?” He raised his eyebrow.
“Yes.”
“Which father? William Senior or Thaddeus?”
“William. How—?” But of course she knew how. Everyone knew about the Van Burens—the society pages in New Haven gave way to the same in Boston.
“I’ve read about them enough in the paper.” He motioned her to take a seat, his eyes looking straight through her. “So you’re here to kick off the dust of your past.” He folded his long fingers. “I was expecting a young woman who would answer my phone calls and correspondence. But this could be even better. You look like you stepped out of finishing school.”
He stretched languidly in the chair behind the desk she assumed would be hers if she secured the position. Reggie was mesmerized by his aquiline profile and sparkling black eyes. His hair glinted purple in the overhead light. Her own was frizzed by the outside humidity.
“My entire upbringing was a finishing school,” Reggie said honestly.
“You sound like it too.” He lethargically gave her a once-over. She sucked in her stomach and erected her shoulders, and it seemed to have the desired effect.
She was rarely self-conscious about her well-trained Mid-Atlantic, popularized by Katharine Hepburn and Clara Bow onscreen and something she couldn’t shake from years of elocution.
If she was self-conscious about a chipped nail, she could hide it behind her back. If she was self-conscious about a cut of purple under her eye due to sleeplessness the night before, she could use the magic of Max Factor, but her voice? It was hard to erase years of practice.
“I don’t have a lot of secretarial experience.” She folded her hands in her lap.
“But I bet you have a great deal of taste. My nightclub is going to be the quintessence of good taste.” He held her eyes with his magnificent obsidian ones. “I want all business to be done away from the Flamingo, hence my establishing an office here. Never mix business with pleasure. My Flamingo will be the first of many similar clubs throughout America to become the watering holes for those who want a nightly escape. The best music. Liquor. Food.”
Reggie nodded. “I’ve seen the advertisements.”
“And I am thinking, as well as being the face of my little business corner here, you would know a Beaujolais from a merlot?” He tilted his head.
“I’ve been to enough parties.”
“While I respect your leaving your past behind you—and thus will not require references—I hope you will also allow the door on my past closed. I am recently of Chicago and—how shall I put this delicately?—not all my accounts there are settled. A man, say, rings, asking for me, having nothing to do with the Flamingo, you are just to talk about the Flamingo. Of its advertisement. Of how it is going to flourish.”
“Even before it is flourishing?” She raised her chin.
“Exactly. You grew up in a society that is very adept at closing the curtains on some things. This should come easy to you.” He rapped the desk with his olive-skinned hand. He had long fingers, carefully manicured. If he was so attentive to detail and class, she wondered, why choose an office where dust specks flickered with each ray of light? With creaky scuffed floorboards in a neighborhood bursting at the seams with life—just life? No cadence of wealth or social graces. Just swinging laundry, discarded vegetable peels, the splash of used water in alleys accustomed to murky rivers, hot and rank in the midday sun. Reggie listened to the music of this world through the open window directly behind Luca. “And I will need someone who will be discreet. I have confidential business here and I don’t want it leaking out into the pages of some rag newspaper.” Was he looking at her more closely? “But you won’t let me down, will you? Young girl out here trying to make it in the world. You recognize a good thing when it crosses your path. Surely you’ve seen the lines outside of the employment agency.”
She took a moment. His eyes were intent on hers.
“I will try,” she said. “I have a specialty in social graces.”
A specialty in social graces? She might have secured the job, but she couldn’t dismiss the stupid things coming out of her mouth when face-to-face with a man who looked like Luca Valari. She didn’t know what to think of him, but she wasn’t of a mind to set out into the city again and run into another fellow like the one on Washington Street. Besides, a nightclub? It wasn’t so scandalous if it was respectable: a high-class watering hole for the city’s elite. Vaughan and his friends often went down to the city to try out the floorboards of a new dance hall. Sometimes she went with them. This wasn’t any different.
Reggie’s Spanish heel caught in the floorboards as she maneuvered her way out of Luca’s office with a promise she would start the next morning. She wriggled it out with an unladylike grunt, eager to disappear into the square and count the bills in the envelope he handed her. “For moving expenses.” He studied her as if he’d watched her shrug off her old life like a moth-eaten sweater.
In a way, she had. She could pin it on the reckless behavior of one night, but really she was a pot warming to boil. She hopped on one foot, inspecting the scuff on her heel. Had it really been three full days since the fateful night that flung her from her parents’ colonial Connecticut bower? It had begun as so many before it with Reggie Van Buren the dandelion at the end of a rose garland of New Haven debutantes. Reggie watched Katherine Harrow and Cecilia Thorne fan out their scented handkerchiefs in an appeal to the variety of slick-haired suitors milling around her parents’ annual garden party. If Reggie cocked her head at a slight angle, she could see how the manicured lawn, the sloping curves of the shrubbery, and the sun’s buttery tint on the horizon could conjure a million fairy-tale moments. Instead, she was relegated to a too-tight dress her mother insisted accentuated her best assets and Vaughan Vanderlaan’s penchant for handing her drinks she didn’t care for.
“Another chardonnay.” Vaughan handed her what he’d brought from the bar.
Reggie wrinkled her nose. “Lovely. Thanks, Vaughan.” She set the glass untou
ched on the high table beside her next to a glass once filled with more unwanted chardonnay until she’d tipped it onto the lawn when Vaughan wasn’t looking.
Vaughan grabbed her hand and stroked it with his thumb. She hated the sensation but feigned a smile. “Such a luscious night.” Reggie hated when Vaughan tried on his romantic hat. It never fit. “Such a night for things to happen, Reggie. Things to change us forever.”
“Such a night for you to speak in euphemisms and italics.” Reggie stared at the reviled amber liquid in the glass.
“Regina Van Buren, I am the only man here who would put up with your peculiar brand of sarcasm.”
“And that’s what makes you so special to me.”
“Am I special to you?” Vaughan ignored her tone, his persistent thumb-strokes like the flap of butterfly wings.
Reggie looked to the pinpricks of stars for an answer. Finding none, she took her hand gently away. “Sometimes I think we have nothing in common except our parents and your unfailing belief the stars have aligned to see us together for all of eternity.”
“I never said that.”
“I have half a dozen cards upstairs from half a dozen bouquets of roses proving otherwise.”
“We’ve always been friends. I told you, I will find business in Boston. You want the city. So do I. A planning firm wants to have a conversation. The week after next.”
It was more than the city. It was more than her remembrance of the moment Vaughan turned from the most bearable of her parents’ friends’ children into a young man whose slight touch made her feel like she was the ocean and he the midsummer sun. It was the desire for someone to understand her right through to the core. “I want . . . I want to be someone’s Gallagher.”
Murder at the Flamingo Page 2
