“Fidg, this is my dear friend and cousin. Almost a brother, really. This is Hamish DeLuca.”
Fidget’s crooked smile widened. “You are most welcome, Hamish. I mean to spoil you immediately. Come, come.” She waved the men out of the hallway and into the main apartment. “I will make you sandwiches and milk for a snack. You look hungry!”
“That’s why I hired her,” Luca said once Fidget had retreated to the kitchen. “She bosses me around something fierce but feeds me all the time. She makes the best egg sandwiches this side of heaven.”
Luca strolled to a bar caddy in front of a large window compensating for a wall. “A toast?” he asked Hamish, holding up a martini mixer.
“A Coke for me,” Hamish said, watching his cousin mix several splashes of gin in a glass. “Luca, honestly, it’s so early.”
“It’s nighttime somewhere,” Luca said flippantly, assembling a few olives on a stick.
Hamish took in the living area, which proved an exercise in keeping his jaw from slacking. It really was something out of a picture set on the Warner lot. Framed splashes and scrawls of art that he would never understand but were undoubtedly priceless were featured on three of the four walls. The grand window was canopied by modern black blinds. The furniture and ornamental statues were sparse in their grandeur, everything precisely selected from the year’s most elegant and modern offerings. The entire room was designed to highlight its focal pieces: a sleek grand piano in one corner and a long leather sofa in the middle.
Onto said sofa Luca plopped a moment later, extending a Coke to Hamish with the hand not holding his strong martini.
“Chicago, Chicago,” Luca droned after Hamish asked what had inspired his move. He reached over to a side table and presented Hamish with a folder. “I had worn the town out. Was getting bored.”
Hamish opened the folder, filled with numbers relating to the Flamingo: a place to Hamish as mythical as old Atlantis, such was the hyperbolic mist of enchantment surrounding Luca’s every written and verbal description. Luca’s eyes followed Hamish’s across a few mockups of newspaper ads.
“It will make the Palais Royale seem an oversight.” Luca drew on their shared point of reference: a club they sometimes went dancing at in Toronto. “It will seem like a little hiccup by Lake Ontario. Count Basie. Ellington. Porter. They will all be tripping over themselves to play my joint.” Hamish had rarely seen his cousin so animated. “And it will be attended every evening by the most prestigious Boston has to offer.” Luca beamed. “But why stop there? People will train in from miles and miles to see it for themselves.”
“It’s a club.”
Luca dismissed him. “No, Hamish, the Flamingo is not some run-of-the-mill club. The Flamingo is a bottled experience ready for the making. The Flamingo will change everything.”
“What needs to be changed?” Hamish asked.
“Nothing. I just mean it will change the way people experience a club.”
“Oh.”
“What did you think I meant?” Luca swished his martini.
Hamish shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Because the Flamingo, Cic, is all about the experience—” Luca broke off before giving another embellished recitation of the club’s positive attributes and the optimal experience it would provide.
Hamish studied the room around him. There was nothing homelike about it, and his trick of finding familiarity to fend off later anxiety failed. Something about this place tightened his chest. He sipped his Coke. Often his anxious episodes were the result of internalizing the projected worry of another. While Luca appeared as he always did—dressed to the nines, with perfectly smoothed hair and an easy smile—something in Hamish twitched.
“Empathy is the greatest gift,” his father had often told him. There was no divide in empathy. It transcended race and class and gender.
“I got you a bicycle,” Luca was saying.
“You did?”
Luca nodded. “I want you to be at home here, Cicero.”
Cicero. Luca had used that nickname for as long as he could remember. Even before Hamish had gone to the library and picked up an encyclopedia that nearly dragged him down with its weight. Cicero, who refused the magnanimous invitation to join the First Triumvirate on account of his fear of undermining the Republic in Caesar’s time. Cicero. Named for his proficiency in all things legal, philosophical, and academic.
“Thank you.”
“And I want you to not feel guilty for leaving. You needed to break out on your own for a bit.”
“I don’t feel guilty.”
Luca chuckled. “Cicero, do you remember that one Christmas when I told you I was late because my train had been held up and you saw right through me? You did. You stared at me intently and then you called me out for lying. Which I certainly was. And I said—”
“That I had an amazing gift.” Hamish remembered the incident clearly. “That I could tell when someone was lying.”
“And in this case”—he squeezed Hamish’s shoulder—“so can I. Now! I propose a toast.” Luca’s smile was broad and his eyes glistened under the white lamp beside him. “I actually can’t believe you’re here.” Luca shook his head with delight.
“Is that the toast?” Hamish inclined his Coke bottle.
“No, no, no. It’s just that . . .” Luca stopped.
“Are you misting up?”
“Stop mocking me!”
“I wasn’t mocking you.”
“And bottoms up!” Luca insisted, chiming Hamish’s glass and taking a long sip.
Hamish gulped a welcome swallow of cold soda. Then he laughed. “That was a terrible toast.”
“Yes, maybe.” Luca swished his martini. “But it’s going to be an absolutely dazzling summer.”
CHAPTER 5
Reggie blinked away the mosquito-like persistence of Vaughan’s memory. Why was he still in her brain? She was angry with him. He really was the springboard that catapulted her to Boston, wasn’t he? Yet his looks, his smiles, and his easy way with her spun through her mind like a record skipping on a phonograph. New details and remembrances sent her off-kilter. Had she overreacted? Had she made a mistake? Would she ever truly be able to survive beyond her parents’ wealth, or was she only playing at independence?
Yet she was sure she had never felt freer than when skipping over the stones of age-old patriotism en route from Miss Clara’s to Luca Valari’s office in the North End. Church steeples scraped the sky and old bells chimed their authority over cobblestones once prodded by the hooves of Revere’s legendary ride, just like the poem she had learned in school, now slick under her oxfords from a recent spurt of rain. The promise of the city rose up and pulled her close, becoming more pronounced as she neared the oldest part of the quarter with taverns and houses sloping into little alleyways, nooks and crannies with secrets extolled by a harvested heritage.
Luca’s office was on the second floor with just the right vantage point to see the uneven rooftops for miles out the grainy window.
With Winchester Molloy: New York Gumshoe on the wireless, unwrapped cannoli at her elbow, and the bells of St. Stephen’s tolling the hour, Reggie couldn’t think of anywhere she would rather be. Boston intoxicated her imagination. Every time the church bells pealed, she conjured the outline of the bell tower over a century before. A swinging lantern. One if by land. Two if by sea. Galloping hooves and derring-do pulled her from the routine of ledgers and books and phone messages from men with deep voices who always spoke to urgent Chicago business for which she never had an answer before reciting the grandeur of Luca Valari’s new club. More than one morning she wondered if she would see her employer again. She dusted and filed and tried her best to take messages—leaving out the inevitable cursing when she was yelled at by investors and creditors, a past now nipping on Luca’s heels. She also heard from the offices of several men whom she mentally described as Luca’s entourage. Men who buzzed with enthusiasm, as excited for the opening of the Flamingo Club as h
er new employer had been when she signed her work contract.
Reggie knew little about business beyond the endless hours around the dinner table with her own father speaking to the fluctuation in current markets and Vaughan’s father agreeing with a sound intersecting a wheeze and a snort. These men sounded similar. Their alma mater was probably Harvard and they would probably say it in a tone making her wrinkle her nose.
Reggie’s confidence grew with these interactions; yet the Chicago calls persisted and her employer was often nowhere to be found, telling her he was busy on location at the soon-to-open club.
While her head told her she was probably tying herself up in an unstable business, she had few other options—and when Luca was around, she fell under his spell.
“Good morning!” she said delightedly when he walked through the door ten days before the club’s official opening. She slightly adjusted the flowers she had picked from Copp’s Hill Terrace on her morning walk and arranged in a chipped blue vase.
Luca smiled down at the bouquet and grabbed a daisy, turning it over in his hand. “This is sweet. Love these little feminine touches.” The comment might have sounded patronizing if his voice wasn’t so dazzling.
“There have been a lot of phone calls from Chicago, Mr. Valari,” Reggie said. “Should I tell them something specific?”
“Reggie, if we spent all of our time being tugged into the ennui of old business, we would not be physically, mentally, and spiritually prepared for our next big adventure.” He cocked his eyebrow expectantly and his whimsical smile sparked one of her own.
“The Flamingo.” Reggie played along with heightened enthusiasm.
“Precisely. Chicago is in the past. Whenever you are in any kind of business”—Luca ran his fingernail over the side of the desk—“you doubtless have some leftover strands. But I am starting something new here, and your job, as you recall, is to be discreet. To answer phone calls and be here if anyone—the press, a rival like that fellow at the Dragonfly, a potential investor—calls wondering about the progress of my club.”
“Yes, Mr. Valari.” He had written a type of memo about her duties the day she started and her eyes flickered over it. What would he think if he knew her daily routine included slamming the receiver on angry cursing men from the Windy City and listening to Winchester Molloy: New York Gumshoe with Nate, who had started to make daily visits to listen to the serial?
“And call me Luca, for the love of the angels,” he said. “I am not Mr. Valari. I don’t even think my father was Mr. Valari.”
“All right, Luca.”
“You won’t have to spend all your days in this dusty hovel alone. I will be needed more and more at the location while we prepare for opening.” Luca reached into his lapel and showed her a new advertisement introducing Boston’s newest supper club at Scollay Square. “And soon I’ll want you along.”
“It’s gorgeous.” Reggie appraised the art deco lettering and the careful precision of the club’s expected grandeur.
“I’ll need you to free up a few evenings as well. If you are to represent my club here, you should have firsthand experience. Plus, you’re a Van Buren. You have taste. You can help me decide what we should steal from our rivals and what to leave behind.”
Luca hopped on the edge of the desk and leaned toward her. “My cousin is visiting. He’s a little bit bookish. A bit shy sometimes. Especially around members of the fairer sex and . . . say . . . is that a new lip color?”
Under Luca’s attentive eye, Reggie self-consciously worked her teeth over her bottom lip. “I thought I needed to start looking the part if I am going to be the face of the Flamingo’s headquarters. No more roses and white gloves for me.” Reggie strung anecdotes of her debutante life like beads. Some flourished for Nate, some for Mrs. Leoni. Now for Luca.
“Yes!”
“And a bit more the style of the North End,” Reggie concluded. “It’s strange you chose this location. I thought a man like you would want some busy glass skyscraper.”
“We can’t always get what we want,” Luca said. “Besides, isn’t being so close to Paul Revere’s house good luck?”
“I certainly think so.”
“Schultze is one of my investors, as you know,” Luca said easily. “And he thought the cost of rent here would allow me to spend more on my club.”
The phone jangled and Reggie moved to pick up the receiver.
“Good to see you, Reggie,” Luca whispered, leaving her to business and handing the daisy back to her with a playful bow.
Reggie smiled and tucked the receiver under her chin. “Luca Valari’s office, Reggie Van Buren speaking.”
The man was yelling so loudly words spilled into one another. Reggie placed her finger in the opposite ear to block out any slight noise so she might better focus on the jumble of angry syllables. Close, but no cigar. All she heard was “Chicago,” trailing into a sentence about a clip joint and a bunch of sums. Luca owed someone something. She could make that much out. She should also shake a leg because “whoever you are, girly, he’s beat. He’ll bleed you out and leave you by the roadside.”
“Thanks for the warning.” She held the receiver away, inspecting her chipped manicure while the voice ebbed and flowed in a wide range of expletives, looking through the door Luca had just exited. Then she carefully placed it back in the cradle, wondering how Luca seemed to disappear the moment angry people wanted him. She wondered how they found his new office number in the first place. If Luca wanted to escape these incessant phone calls, he was doing a poor job of it.
The one reprieve was the eventual appearance of Nate. Who seemed to know everything and everyone in the neighborhood, including Luca’s investors.
“That would be Tom Schultze.” Nate gritted his teeth, answering her question about the fellow who prowled about rapping a walking stick over the floorboards. “He owns several properties in the area,” Nate explained. “A sort of side business to whatever he does the rest of the time. Loud talker. I hear everything he says outside the door. And the landlord and property manager? Mr. Edwin Baskit. Yes, funny name. Edwin Baskit squeezes everything he can from property laws. But I always figured there was more than one egg in that Baskit.” Nate laughed at his pun. Moved closer. “Our little North End community has changed a lot in the past few years. The powers that be—the Lantern League as they so like to call themselves, committed to the glorious cause—gutted some of our housing in pursuit of light and fresh air and gardens. And to preserve the beauty of our Old North Church. The preservation of the past ironically means the displacement and discomfort of the present.”
“My father is on a similar committee,” Reggie said.
“Not like this I don’t suppose. They slotted several ‘undesirable’ houses for demolition. Turned Webster Street into the Prado and a grand open space. They just didn’t take into account the people who would have to uproot their lives. Again.” He smiled ruefully. “Considering so many of us were uprooted in the first place.”
“And this Mr. Baskit?”
“He’s good to ignore leaky faucets and demand rent weeks early and hike up fees with little notice. But I try to keep things fair. Or at least let the neighborhood know someone is in their corner.”
Reggie bit her lip.
“And the Temporary Employment Agency.” Reggie recalled a sour reception from a middle-aged woman whose figure was so broad, the violets on her flimsy dress wilted under her arms and under her bosom. “Mildred something?”
“Rue. Mildred Rue.”
It was a hodgepodge of people; but so far it was safe, if a little dull. Reggie’s skin still prickled remembering Rod Barlow’s advances on her first day in the city.
Nate misinterpreted the look. “Fair Regina, you needn’t worry about some slithering old man with a walking stick. I will protect you from any dragon. Even if that dragon is Luca Valari. Or Tom Schultze.”
“What do you know about Luca Valari?” Reggie leaned her chin into the heel of her pa
lm.
“May I sit?”
Reggie nodded and Nate sank into a chair on the opposite side of the desk and turned his head over his shoulder a moment.
“I sometimes wonder if there’s something just in front of me that I’m missing.” Reggie spread her hands on the desk. “But maybe that’s just because I’ve seen The Thin Man too many times.”
“I personally don’t understand why a man like Luca Valari—obviously of means—decided his office should be here.” Nate waved his hand toward the window. It was slightly open and the bustle of a sunny afternoon in the North Square filtered under the pane: children laughing, tourists milling around the Revere house.
“I thought the same thing,” Reggie said.
Nate continued, “On one hand, it takes the space from someone who couldn’t afford the lifestyle Luca Valari appears to live. We have little space as is and people need to be able to afford rent. So I wonder what he and Schultze and their ilk are doing here.”
Reggie bit her lip. “Capitalizing on cheap rent?”
Nate shrugged. “I think there are bigger forces at play with some of these men.”
Reggie felt a shiver slide down her spine. “You mean organized crime?”
Nate nodded. “I don’t want to scare you. I like having you around. There are good people here, Reggie. Even Mildred Rue. Mrs. Leoni. Others who just want to help and make something of a community here. But times are tough and money is nearly impossible to find and some people are desperate enough to do anything. And there are always people who know where to find desperation and how to use it.”
“Luca?”
Nate rocked back in his chair. “I am thinking aloud.”
“I don’t want to be involved in anything that isn’t aboveboard. My parents would think it was scandalous enough that I found a job with a nightclub owner.”
“Then maybe you can turn the experience into something good.”
“How do you mean?”
“Find out what Luca wants. Why he’s here. What those phone calls are all about.” Nate’s eyes drifted toward the wireless. “Be the best Winchester Molloy that you can be.”
Murder at the Flamingo Page 4
