She had never danced like this before. The careful three-quarter world of roses and lace gave way to a pulsating cadence that set her heart on fire and made her think she was floating on air. She was pulled and spun and her head was ablaze. Schultze and Luca and MacMillan made her color within the lines and connect the dots. But with Hamish there was a curious sense of oneness. They were on the same page and she had a preternatural idea of where he was going to step next. He held her so tightly, no shudder through his hands. Just a grip that reassured her as their eyes connected in the firefly light of the dark club that he wouldn’t let her go. She closed her eyes, squinting them tightly, and let go—through the smoke and the noise.
It wasn’t like dancing with Maisie at all. At all. He looked at her. Really looked at her. His feet could function quite well on their own, taking the rhythm in stride, with a confidence he so rarely felt. Real life felt like a sweater with sleeves too long for him. But here, with Regina in his arms, her chin tilted slightly, her eyes closing now and then to taste the moment . . . He wanted to kiss her. He looked around at the explosive carousel of color. Kiss her. No one would notice. He could slow the world and press his lips to hers and make the globe stop spinning. His eyes took a quick sweep of his surroundings. There they were: the men Hamish had seen at the Dragonfly. He instinctively pulled Reggie closer and more tightly than he intended. She gave a little squeal then laughed.
“Any dancing requires a knack for losing inhibition,” Reggie said breathlessly as the band broke in between songs. She was clapping but absently. He wasn’t applauding at all, just scrubbing at the back of his neck while she wanted the music to keep pulsing. He almost kissed me. Or at least she thought he had. Maybe that was just another mind trick, like seeing Vaughan everywhere, the little pings of guilt she didn’t quite understand. Hamish is my friend. I am dancing with my friend. I am dancing just as I did with Luca and Brian MacMillan and that odious Schultze. And he held her so closely. He smelled like soap and lemons and something else. Reggie. Snap out of it! There is nothing in your Journal of Independence about falling for another man while your heart is still confused about Vaughan!
But there was something about the way she felt the sinews of his arm beneath the light cotton of his shirt, the way she sensed the rhythm of his breathing as they stepped in synchronicity. In time. Swing was a push and pull of buoyancy and athleticism, but also sheer abandon. Abandonment of thought. Abandonment of the conditioned repression starting from your curled-in toes and slipping up the muscles of your calves and all the way into your spine—a straight, spindly line—then up to your neck and over your shoulders. All of it dissolved, a sloppy smile in its stead. You could color inside the lines as much as you liked until the pulse of the drums and riff of the horn pulled you out.
The music started again.
Reggie’s hair smelled a little like coconut. He had trouble breathing, but for a completely different reason than usual. He liked how she felt in his arms too. She was just a bit shorter than he was so he could lean protectively over her while allowing her to assert a strength and agility in her movements. And she felt divine. Her soft skin, the satin of her dress, her cheek on his shoulder. He warred between bottling the memory by itemizing every detail and just falling into the starlight of the moment in hopes that it would trail him after. Kiss her. Kiss her even though she mentioned a boyfriend from home. Kiss her even though he hadn’t kissed a girl before. A reward. For helping. For stepping out. But he didn’t. His lips hovered an infinitesimal inch above her mouth before he turned again.
An almost kiss. Quasimodo was only an “almost” in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame—maybe he was only an almost too.
Just as he was imagining her in white with a small bouquet and picking names for their children, the band transitioned into a faster tune and a blond man with a stature that towered over them both cut in.
“Regina.” His voice cut thick and deep.
Hamish backed up and loosely dropped Reggie’s hand.
“Vaughan.” Her eyes were wide.
“May I cut in?” he asked Hamish.
Hamish relinquished the floor.
One step and a count and two. Lace curtains wafting with the slightly open window, a world of white and roses. Her mother’s condescending tone dripping over the tiles and settling around her, in the wall sconces and plastic plants.
Lift your chin—but not too much. Never let anyone think you are above them. Lower your shoulders. And spin and turn and . . .
Vaughan’s embrace took her home. They were chess pieces on a board that instinctively knew their next move. A tapestry woven with years of scrapes and fights and laughs and little moments that veined through her.
It was hard to talk, their conversation relegated to steps on an off-beat. Reggie was sure any words she had would fall to the tile. But she knew that the way she leaned into him was more carefully calculated than the way she had leaned into Hamish.
“You’ve changed.” His lips were at her ear just under the damp curl tickling her lobe.
“I know.” How . . . ? Why . . . ?
“Dirk Foster has a friend whose girlfriend is one of the cigarette girls. Trust Dirk to find us a swinging party. Who were you dancing with?”
“A friend,” Reggie said casually.
Almost. The man with the rower’s shoulders and gold-tinted hair was so close to Reggie, almost as close as Hamish had been.
It was wrong for him to think the dance meant anything. Stupid to dream. She had told him about her boyfriend from back home. Still, if Hamish were to kiss her, he would start at her right temple. Flutters of kisses brushing butterfly light over her forehead and over the whisper of her cheekbone, catching a few freckles in soft exploration. He wouldn’t press too hard of course. He would treat her like the heirloom crystal vase his mother always warned him to stay clear of. He tingled thinking about it, drew back and worked his teeth over his bottom lip.
She was silk. Milky white. The lithe fall of her arm, the curves shrouded in that scarlet dress spilling liquid light to the floor.
He almost laughed. Absurd! Stammering tongue when he met new people or was caught off guard, heartbeat that didn’t need romance to step out of time. What right had he to assume that he could imagine his lips on someone else’s? What confidence to think that someone would want to feel the circle of his arms or the tenderness of his touch?
He raked his fingers through his hair. It hadn’t really bothered him before. He assumed that he would be alone. He hadn’t really imagined a life without anyone, because until this moment, he hadn’t imagined a life with anyone. But then, there hadn’t been a Reggie before.
An arm stole around his shoulders. “Saw you dancing with Mary Finn earlier. Remind me to dock her wage for the champagne she snuck in the back.”
“You saw that too,” Hamish said.
“You did your time.” Luca’s eyes followed Hamish’s and landed on Reggie with her new dancing partner. “Tsk-tsk. That really is a shame, Cicero. If I had known she had a young man and he would be prowling around here, I wouldn’t have given him admittance.”
Hamish grimaced. “Her boyfriend.”
“I don’t see any ring. Nothing is set in stone. I see the two of you together.”
“It’s a success, I think.” Hamish changed the subject.
“I’m really proud of you, Cicero. Taking a chance.”
Hamish smiled. He was happy their little spats and Hamish’s suspicions didn’t carry into Luca’s happy tone. “I am so glad you found something to excel at, Luca.”
“Do you need anything? A drink?” Luca dabbed at his forehead with a silk kerchief.
Hamish shook his head. The silver top of Schultze’s walking stick caught the transient glow of the spotlight.
“Because Johnny is—Hey! Johnny!”
Johnny Wade was distracted. “We’re out of orange bitters.”
“I could find someone to run down for you.”
“I need a moment a
lone.”
Johnny strolled in the direction of the cellar.
“Was the light fixed then?” Hamish asked.
“You’re the height of mystery, Hamish DeLuca,” Schultze cut in. “You appear so calm. So innocent.”
Hamish didn’t know how to respond. So he didn’t.
Eventually Schultze moved in the direction of a woman to this point unfamiliar to Hamish: ringlets and dimples and a bow mouth and, like Mary Finn, several years younger than Schultze himself.
Hamish and Luca sidled over, leaving room at the bar for Brian MacMillan, who pushed damp hair from his perspiring forehead. “Where’s your girlfriend?” He leaned over the bar into Johnny Wade, who was back and polishing a glass.
“Who?”
“Mary Finn. I saw you getting cozy with her.” The longer Hamish listened, the easier it was to make out the fluid slur to Brian’s tone. He was a few sheets to the wind by now.
“You’re the cousin, right?”
“Hamish DeLuca. We met the other—”
Brian didn’t care. “Mary must know something about who is at the center. All of them.” He waved his arm. “Schultze, Luca. They are all in on something. Even Luca’s driver. My father made me get involved, and now I want a contingency plan.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Someone is rumored to hold information that could make their lives easier. At the expense of others.”
Hamish chose his words carefully. “Certainly if my cousin were involved in some organization, I would have noticed. He’s my closest friend and we have been living together for a few weeks now. It sounds as if you are listening too much to what you are hearing. The smoke and martinis might be going to your head.”
Brian pounded his glass on the bar for another drink. “You sound so—what’s the word?—clinical. I am not visiting my pharmacist!”
Johnny turned to the other bartender, holding up a bottle to show his unavailability.
Brian’s glass was filled and Hamish turned away, focusing on the band. He could almost see their outlines through the haze of smoke.
“Another drink?” Johnny Wade asked.
Hamish nodded and held up his empty glass.
The liquor flowed as freely as the tongues of men wooing women across the dance floor.
The first bars of “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” sped up. Roy Holliday worked the crowd with the most popular tunes of the day and a band that followed the tone of the evening: one minute setting a furious pace, then swinging languidly into the easy pulse of a slow dance.
The spotlight trailed through the mist of smoke, bringing Luca into focus. Shrouded in shadow, dragging at his cigarette, back erect, commanding the room.
Reggie found Hamish next. His feet shuffled in rhythm with a Porter tune, his hands on either side of a stranger’s waist: the dance had all the fireworks of a chaperoned grade school dance.
She joined Vaughan for a drink near the bar. It was the time of night when many patrons trailed out to the square for a breath of air: to laugh and smoke and press close under streetlights.
“You have no claim on her!” Schultze’s voice erupted.
“I don’t have time for this,” Johnny Wade snarled. He was clearly looking for something amidst the bottles and accoutrements of his trade. “Bill, you have a flashlight? A candle? Anything?”
Reggie leaned over the bar, listening. Johnny was clearly shaken. Perspiring. Frantic.
“Mr. Valari needs me to do one thing and I can’t even find a cursed flashlight.” He rammed his hand on the bar top, and a few glasses tremored.
“Can I help?” Reggie asked, ignoring Vaughan’s look of surprise.
“The lightbulb in the stupid cellar.”
Reggie nearly jumped. “I can help! I can change that. We had an electrician.” She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to prove to Vaughan she was part of this endeavor or felt a personal sense of responsibility for the evening. Johnny Wade, flustered, shrugged. Bill provided the sought-after light. He passed it to Reggie.
“Be my guest.”
“I’ll be right back, Vaughan!” she said happily.
“You’re going to change a lightbulb? Regina—”
“I work here.”
“What?”
Reggie waved the flashlight like a trophy. “Well, I work for the owner. I’m the secretary.”
She suspected as she began maneuvering through the crowd that Vaughan’s head was spinning.
It was difficult to make the straight diagonal in pursuit of the cellar door. Women and men stood in clusters around the dance floor, chatting in loud voices, bopping to the beat, extending glasses that almost collided with her nose in their general revelry.
The band sighed into a legato rendition of a Cole Porter tune—so different from the Artie Shaw version that was always on the radio—and for a split second Reggie pretended its lazy pulse didn’t take her back into Vaughan’s arms. It was dirty pool, this song, with its mournful call to reminiscence. As she stepped through the dim magic of the floor, couples losing themselves in the mystery of the pining bars, she felt the music’s power wind around her. As she set her mind on the perfunctory task of changing the lightbulb, she recalled Vaughan’s cologne tingling her nostrils and his lips at her ear and the luscious tickle of his breath as he whispered the castles that he would build for her in the sky.
Why did music do that? Play on your weakest moments and slip into your veins and your heart and your mind until you couldn’t tell where you left off and the longing began.
It swept her to the top of the stairs where the light was, as she and Hamish anticipated, flickering and buzzing its retaliation against the otherwise perfect evening. Reggie sloped onto the balls of her heels just as the saxophone improvised and embellished a verse of the song. She squeezed the lyrics of longing and love from her mind and focused on her task.
“Regina Van Buren!” She heard her name as she neared the staff door entrance.
“Dirk Foster.”
“Geez, doll, you look a sight. What’re you doing with that flashlight?”
“Fixing a lightbulb.” Luca would think her a hero. She’d tally another win for Reggie Van Buren and her Journal of Independence.
“Huh.”
“Where’s your girl, Dirk?” Reggie asked. “Never saw you without a girl.”
“I was just dancing with Mary Finn.”
Reggie’s ears perked at the name. Was that woman stepping out with half of Boston?
“She’s a cigarette girl here. Just haven’t seen her. She disappeared on me.”
Reggie bit her lip before anything tripped out.
“I’ll see you later,” she said to waylay his inevitable questions about why she was here and why she left Vaughan.
Reggie excused herself and opened the door to the basement, a glint in her eye that Luca needed her. At previous parties—the ones attended by Dirk and Vaughan—she was as useful as a Ming vase on a doily in the corner. But here? She was part of the inner mechanism that turned the club into sparkling, shimmering life. Luca had told her there were lightbulbs on a shelf at the top of the stairwell. She flicked on the flashlight, humming Cole Porter while she extracted one. Smiling from wine and light and the night and Vaughan seeing her. “You’ve changed.” It was the highest compliment he could pay. The new bulb flickered after she installed it, but she bit her lip and fiddled with it, remembering how her trick of loosening it slightly at the top had given her success the night before, and then the dim cellar opened to her clearly. She turned one last time, her smile fizzling. She slammed her hand over her mouth.
The girl was drooling on Hamish’s jacket, just over the pocket square. Look at a girl, approach a girl, talk to a girl. They were midway through a clarinet wallowing in “Someone to Watch Over Me” and he worried his partner was asleep on his bespoke shoulder. She had been nearly three sheets to the wind when she wound her arms around his neck and propelled him to the floor. He had been midway through a sip of Coke and the
surprise fizzed the soda into his nostrils.
“Ssoooo nice,” she mumbled into his shoulder. Hamish quivered. He attempted to gently disentangle himself as the trumpet mournfully wailed the last bars. The applause began, Hamish faltering through a clap, hands still full of the sleepy girl. The next number began, and even though it was of a faster tempo, she clung to him, swaying. Hamish let his eyes roll. Revelers bordered the walls like an extravagant garnish, their baubles and beads catching the light. He thought he saw two familiar faces during his scan. His throat stung involuntarily. The men from the office at the Dragonfly: Mark Suave and the other one. He wanted to storm over and run Mark into the wall for the way he had startled Reggie. Hamish bit his lip and tightened his grip on the girl, if only to keep his hand from shaking. When he heard his name over and over again, he wondered if his mind was playing tricks on him. The lights were low and the music could swoon anyone into believing things. But then there was a flash of scarlet from the direction of the Employees Only staircase, and just as Hamish untangled himself from his dance partner, Reggie took her spot, throwing her arms around him and holding tightly.
She sputtered his name a few times.
“Reggie, what happened?”
She mumbled something into his lapel.
Hamish’s chest constricted. If it was that fellow with the rower’s shoulders . . . If someone had . . . He couldn’t even mentally finish the train of thought. He held her a moment. She was smaller than usual, curling into him like a tiny bird, and he wanted her to stay safe and sheltered in his arms forever if need be. Finally she pulled away, face splotchy, makeup smudged with the intensity of her tears. It was an inopportune time for him to realize that even in this state she still outshone every other woman in the club.
Murder at the Flamingo Page 17
