Murder in the City of Liberty

by Rachel McMillan

This part was ironic, considering Reggie was would-be heir to a New Haven fortune had she not skipped off to the North End from a high-end garden party on her parents’ lawn.

  “Money!” She clapped her hands.

  “Come on, then.” He’d have followed her to the bottom of Mystic River if it secured a night in which she would be with him and not with Vaughan Vanderlaan, rising architect in a posh Washington Street firm, Hyatt and Price. While Hamish was never quite sure of the line between them, it wasn’t blurred enough that he couldn’t sense the obvious connection tethering them to their past, their parents’ money, and their affluence.

  Yet in his mind—the same mind that graduated at the top of his class from Osgoode Law School in Toronto and housed a deep and abiding love for Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame—was a grand love story. Their great love story. Only problem was one party didn’t realize it while the other was Quasimodo aching for the lithe beauty of the Romany girl Esmeralda, whose eyes were turned by the far more dashing Captain Phoebus de Martin. At the pace Hamish was going, he might well end up like the eponymous hunchback in a barren crypt in Paris slowly turning to dust.

  So Hamish followed Reggie’s buoyant stride out of the office of Van Buren and DeLuca: Consultants in Investigations and Law long before the appointed time and place at Fiske’s Wharf and Commercial Street. He lifted his bicycle from its resting spot against the wall and followed Reggie out the door, past the North End Housing Development office of their friend, and Hamish’s flatmate, Nathaniel Reis.

  “Heading out?” Nate’s voice came from the open door. “I mean, I don’t blame you. Mrs. Ricci’s pet mouse Fluffy hasn’t been seen in a week.”

  Reggie giggled. Hamish rolled his eyes.

  “Glad to see we have the serious support of our friends in our business ventures,” Hamish said while hopping down the stairs, bicycle over his shoulder.

  * * *

  They could have taken a cab, but Reggie wanted to take Hamish’s bike. It was highly improper for a woman of her breeding to hoist herself up on the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by a young man like himself. But while she reminded him of this several times as they pursued their adventures, she never stopped. Hamish set off, much more used to her weight, propelling the bike with a few kicks of his foot to ramp up speed and rhythm before pedaling. Soon they reached Fiske’s Wharf, a barrage of buildings at the end of Commercial Street facing Charlestown across the river. The wind barreled in from the Atlantic, their voices compensating, Hamish’s bike swerving with a bit of lost control.

  A shadowed figure, collar turned up against the cruel sea breeze, awaited them.

  “You came.” He watched Reggie slide off the bicycle with her mix of spirit and ladylike charm. “Interesting mode of transportation.”

  “Were you the one who rang earlier?” Reggie stepped forward, removing her hand from its warm space in her coat pocket to brush back the hair escaping her pins with the whip of the wind. The man didn’t answer. Hamish studied his profile—what he could see of it—under a tweed cap.

  “I’m Regina Van Buren and this is Hamish DeLuca.” She turned her head over her shoulder to smile briefly at Hamish. “Hamish is proficient in legal matters. If you and your associates are worried about some illegal licensing, you could come to the office and we could take a look. It would be much warmer.” She rocked slightly on her heels and flashed a smile that brightened the muddy light. It was lost on the man.

  “I don’t go to offices. People come here to do my business with me.” His eyes lingered on Reggie’s pinned hair and then over her collarbone. Then slightly down. Even her beige trench, collar tucked up against the elements, couldn’t keep her feminine shape from being noticed—and appreciated. Hamish stepped up to Reggie so their shoulders brushed. The slight move was testament to how comfortable they had become with each other over the past two years. Reggie remembered their first strides toward friendship. Remembered blue eyes widening in answer to her tugging at his sleeve or the slightest friction between their arms.

  The man pushed his hat back on his head, focused on something beyond Reggie for a moment. “Hold on! Kid!” Hamish and Reggie followed his sightline to a lanky black kid in his midteens. “Did you bring it? Paddy send you?”

  Hamish couldn’t hear the kid’s responses even though he wasn’t but three feet from them, bordered by their client, muffled by the sound of the wind. Something exchanged hands and the kid set off, tugging his beanie cap low on his ears.

  The man swerved back and took in Reggie with a long look, his eyes, steely gray against the canvas of the sky meeting the sea, shifting over Reggie. His Irish accent was light as if it had been churned several times through a ringer and come out American with a few leftover vowels. “So you are familiar with files?” He studied Hamish. “Contracts? A friend said you helped his mother.”

  “I know the law. Property law, to some extent. Employment law.”

  “I know your face too. Something about a murder. In that club in Scollay Square. Few years ago now?”

  “The murder we solved,” Reggie said. “Not quite two years ago. Now we consult on all manner of things from deduction to legal matters. Jacks-of-all-trades.”

  The man didn’t acknowledge Reggie, rather kept his eyes on Hamish. “There’s something familiar about you. Ah! Yes. Luca Valari. Bit of an infamous name around here.”

  Hamish felt an unwelcome spark in his right fingers. He clenched them together and shoved them deep in his pocket to keep them from trembling. “I am quite trustworthy, I assure you. And my associate, Miss Van Buren, is right—we are jacks-of-all-trades. But it will be much more helpful if we know how to address you. And why we’re here.”

  The man turned, and Reggie and Hamish followed him, Hamish rolling his bike, then leaning it against a large wooden structure darting out to the lapping river. It was a prime spot for water traffic, tugs and freighters chugging in and out from the Atlantic.

  “Well . . .” The man spoke barely above a whisper, and something in the cadence struck a familiar chord. Hamish let Reggie set the pace as they followed the man’s lead inside. Hamish startled at the door slamming behind him. “You’ll see here that my business is being threatened by a motion to turn this property into North End housing.”

  Hamish’s two forefingers were tucked under his suspender, tapping softly.

  “Bit fidgety there, Mr. DeLuca?”

  “Nervous habit.” Hamish looked around. “Not a lot of boats.”

  Reggie followed his sight line. “What should we call you?” she asked.

  Their client hesitated a moment, eyes fixed on Hamish, then cocked his head while his watery blue eyes narrowed slightly in concentration. “Pete Kelly.”

  Kelly shifted the package the teen had given him, then took a pen and piece of paper out of his pocket and scribbled something with his left hand. Hamish saw the paper showed a map of the wharf and the surrounding area as well as a few notes and lines. He averted his eyes as quickly as Kelly looked up and met his gaze.

  “I have had this slice of the harbor for as long as I can remember. We don’t have any big frigates here, just sloops that jettison in and out. But this proposal would take the land and give it to Hyatt and Price, the architects. They want to develop here. And I am not sure that they are permitted to.”

  “You really should be speaking to our friend Nathaniel Reis. He’s—”

  “I won’t deal with his sort,” Kelly cut in. “I’ve heard about him. Around.”

  Reggie spluttered something while Hamish’s forefingers tapped more steadily. “His sort?”

  “Fellow like him shouldn’t be given that kind of position. Don’t trust them. Barely human.”

  From the corner of his eye, Hamish saw Reggie clench her fists. Her weight was on the balls of her feet and she was this close to throwing herself as a missile in the man’s path. Hamish shot her a look. War had already erupted back home, and the national newspaper his father edited covered not only headlines of the
battles being fought but the philosophies behind them and the leaders driving their men to war. Sadly, this man’s prejudice toward Nate was not unfamiliar to Hamish. But it was still new to the North End, a neighborhood made up mostly of Italian residents who rallied in solidarity with the few Jewish inhabitants who hadn’t shifted when the dominant race changed.

  “Why did you hire private investigators? Why not just speak to a council member if you won’t speak to Mr. Reis?”

  “I did. And no one is admitting who signed off on this. Suddenly I’ve got boats in and out of my area here—surveying—as well as a motion to tear down my entire enterprise. To build housing.”

  He cursed under his breath, looked up, registered Reggie’s eyes on him but didn’t apologize. “I have been in this business for two decades. Come over from the Town every day and on Saturdays if it’s not snowing. I have never done anything but keep my head down. I hire good men. Some of my own kind. Others all-Americans from all points of Boston. We deal in what we can get at a bargain price. Everything from livestock to handguns.”

  Hamish assumed his own kind were Irish. So many of the Irish who emigrated, spilling from crude ships when the great famine ravaged their green land, ended up within Boston’s perimeters, particularly in Charlestown. Still, the “all-American” term pinged at him. The country was older than his home country of Canada, but not by more than one hundred years, and most of the people he met in the city were first or second generation: a patchwork quilt of all races, religions, and creeds.

  Kelly led them through a broad door into an office. It wasn’t a lot to look at, but it was neat. There was a pride to his work. Kelly followed Hamish’s inspection with a slight smile.

  “You approve?”

  “You truly take care in what you do.” Hamish didn’t expound. He knew enough about black-market enterprises: of illegal shipments of weapons and liquor often tied to groups of men determined to cut a buck or two and use violence as a means of wielding power and keeping their enterprises profitable. They were a nightmare for people trying to do honest business in the North End.

  “A job worth doing is worth doing well. I accept deliveries from Charlestown. Sure, they could come over the bridge in a van or by train; but if the freighters are about to dock in the harbor farther down, why not send someone over in a little boat to drop things off?” He stretched. “I even have a little black kid from across the river who takes manifests back and forth for me. Fast. His uncle’s some kind of baseball player.”

  “And you wouldn’t be getting a child to do anything untoward . . . ,” Reggie asked.

  “I don’t need to share all of my transactions, Miss Van Buren. But legal in the sense that I am owed the right to keep this piece of land. Here.” Kelly was on the other side of the desk and clearly prepared for their arrival. He passed Hamish a folder. “I’ve done some retyping.”

  Hamish’s conscience pricked, but he reasoned that Kelly wasn’t expecting them to be a part of his enterprise, just to ensure that those who wanted to build on his property did so legally. “You rent the building, though?” Hamish leafed through the open folder. “So the land you are on—”

  “It’s all in there.” Kelly nudged his hand at the folder. “Just read the fine print and see if I have a case to stand on.”

  “You really could have come by the office,” Reggie said.

  Pete shot her a look. “Why don’t I make you useful, show you around, while Mr. DeLuca puts his legal mind to work taking a look at the papers in my office?”

  “We work together,” Hamish said. “I can look into this later. All of my books are at the office, and I would want to consult with Nate.”

  “I never know who is in and out.” He looked Hamish over. “Or who I can trust.”

  “You can trust me. But I would rather accompany you and Reggie.”

  “No, it’s fine!” Reggie’s smile hit him, wide and assuring. “I’ll go and report back.” She raised her index finger to her temple in a little salute. “You make sure everything is right here.”

  “I’ll get her back to you in one piece,” Kelly said with a skeptical eye over Hamish. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Do I have a reason not to?”

  * * *

  Kelly led Reggie down a narrow hallway that got darker the farther they strolled. Reggie wrinkled her nose at the pungent blend of mold and a blend of gasoline and fish.

  “It would be ridiculous to build housing here.” Reggie waved a hand toward a percolating stream.

  “There we are in agreement, Miss Van Buren.”

  They walked farther and the chill prickled Reggie through and through. The wind whistled through the building and winnowed through her, and she sensed they were inching closer to the water. She looked back over her shoulder, then studied Kelly before her. “This is a rather empty corridor.” She thought she heard footsteps, but they disappeared so quickly, she assumed it was just the echo of Kelly’s own shoes.

  “Everything important is just ahead,” he told her, nudging open a wide door that immediately ushered in another wall of chill from the exposed outside. A kind of boathouse where vessels could easily pull just inside and offload their wares.

  There were several reasons Reggie shouldn’t have trusted Kelly. Many of which passed through her mind as she struggled to keep from slipping on the sleek stones of the crevice where the boats would tug in to deposit their goods. It was a small, caged half oval. She didn’t know why, but she immediately thought of the Traitor’s Gate leading up to the Tower of London: a place she had seen in her teenage years when her mother was insistent she have a classical education. That shadow of a life that would never find her trapped in a warehouse on the Boston docks. But Kelly wanted her to see it. To see how the water would make it a poor place to develop housing. Reggie, instead, saw the crates stacked inside. Ammunition. Guns! They should get a gun. For the office. A sleek one like in The Thin Man.

  “Look! You can go show Mr. DeLuca. This is a poor place for any development other than my own.” Reggie refocused on him. His fair fingers were freckled, catching the dull light of the lamp he carried.

  Kelly probably didn’t mean for the heavy door to shut behind him just as she was inspecting a half-open crate. He was distracted by a voice in the hallway and turned, the intensity of his quick movement startling the door into a slam behind him. Reggie slid over and pulled on the handle.

  “Mr. Kelly!” She turned her head over her shoulder, assessing her surroundings. Damp. One dilapidated rudder in the sluicing water that gulped up the slight platform she had. “Mr. Kelly!” she bellowed more loudly, beating at the door with her fist. “I don’t think you meant to lock me in here!”

  In the end it was the sound of a boat’s engine just outside—loud as a shot—that startled her until she slipped and fell sideways. When her mouth—teeth chattering first with shock, then with cold, then with the reverberation of several unladylike sounds—filled with the unwanted water, she kicked and scrambled, and it was then that her foot snagged on the rudder she’d noticed earlier. Panicked, Reggie kicked harder until she remembered a scene from some picture. Darned if she knew which. She supposed that was the first part of her memory to go. All of the stars and plots. Darn. But what a stupid way to perish.

  * * *

  For most of Hamish’s life, he had focused on the limitations of his nervous disorder. The attacks and quickened heartbeat, the short breaths and panic that drove him from his first court case. He hadn’t anticipated that he might have a far greater problem on his trembling hands. Reggie was gone. She was there and then she was gone, and he was stuck in this infernal warehouse as a lobster skittered over the floor and a man who had at least a foot on Hamish’s medium height walked nearby. Something about the figure, the way he curled his fingers into his fist and the profile cloaked in shadow, clutched at Hamish’s chest.

  He might have had a second more to determine whether the figure was indeed familiar or whether he was just seeing the pas
t everywhere he went, if the figure hadn’t disappeared as quickly as Hamish had made him out.

  He called after him, but the man didn’t turn around. Hamish heard the slight echo of footsteps and sprang quickly forward. He lunged at the figure but was thrown off with quick ease against the wall. Hamish wheezed a breath the moment the air returned to his lungs and kept going. He didn’t know where Reggie was. He didn’t know where he was. A maze of offices and storage rooms peeked out like dead eyes on either side of dank hallways. The air was suffocated with salt, fish, and mold, and the tinny trill of dripping water punctured his head as he continued to follow what he thought were the footsteps of his attacker. Though he knew it was probably a poor choice, he turned in the direction of a slice of light spilling onto the creaking floorboards around his now soggy spectator shoes. He thought about chasing the man in the dark, but he had nothing to defend himself with.

  He peeked inside the office in hopes that Reggie was perhaps in the corner. Maybe with a piece of cloth gagging her mouth. The Winchester Molloy serials were rubbing off on him. He took a quick look around, hoping Reggie could fare okay on her own in the interim. She would want the opportunity for adventure. “Do you think Myrna Loy needs William Powell at every turn and corner? I think not. She might want him there, but she doesn’t need him there.”

  The office looked slanted. Hamish assumed it was its uneven position alongside the water, and the piles of papers all around made it look worse. While he supposed the land surrounding and leading up from the wharf must have been prime real estate, the building itself showed little evident value. No one looking around this office could think of it as holding a high price.

  He grabbed immediately at a torch on a nearby cabinet. A pamphlet caught his eye, the words Christian Patriots printed across the front. A strange group name. If it was a denomination, it wasn’t one he had heard of. It didn’t sound traditionally Irish either, he decided, after wondering if it was perhaps something from Kelly’s home country. He took a closer peek, brow furrowed at what he saw. He had heard of this type of propaganda from his father, who saw a lot of it during the Great War. Hamish grabbed the pamphlet and stuffed it in his pocket. The haphazard state had little to do with someone rifling through the uneven filing system. The office reminded him of the one in the penthouse he shared with Luca when he first moved to Boston in that it seemed to hold little purpose other than for show. But while Luca’s office was all sleek mahogany and ornate bookshelves, this one was an eruption of papers. It caught Hamish as funny that it was the polar opposite of the orderly office of his friend Nathaniel Reis of North End Housing Development. He rifled some more, then turned his attention back to the pamphlet in his hand, eyes flickering over a name familiar to him belonging to one of the founding members: Dirk Foster. A man who was momentarily a suspect in the Flamingo murder of two years ago, but far more memorable as one of Reggie’s high society friends from home. A close friend of Vaughan Vanderlaan.