Murder in the City of Liberty

by Rachel McMillan

  Hamish scanned the manifests from some recent shipments. Livestock. Liquor. Cigarettes.

  A haphazardly folded paper in jagged handwriting had lines of notes he could just make out. Erosion. Rising tide. A few squiggles. Uneven territory.

  Hamish looked at his feet. This place was uneven, for sure. It looked to be standing, but the hurricane the year before and the rising tides that sluiced in and over the shore had left their mark.

  He abandoned his quick survey, tucking the pamphlet safely in his pocket, when a vehicle backfired outside and sent him in faster pursuit of Reggie. The warehouse was a damp labyrinth.

  He slid on the water suddenly sloshing over the boards the closer he got to the harbor-facing side of the building. There were no footsteps other than his own. No shadows in the corners. No sound . . . and then a pitiful one. He swerved. Reggie.

  * * *

  Reggie’s shoe was caught in something that he couldn’t quite see from the side of the water. So of course he threw off his glasses and dove in. Because she might have been at the bottom of a lava pit and he would have dove in headfirst without thinking. He had long ago decided that if at any point the universe decided to rid itself of Reggie, he wouldn’t bat an eyelash before following.

  Once the shock of the million stabs of ice shards initially washed over him, he gained enough physical momentum to reach for her leg. Something was coiled around it. He broke the water’s surface again and raked his hand through his hair. “Okay, you’re stuck.” His teeth chattered. “Reggie! Wake up.”

  Heartbeat, Hamish. It was rather hard to think about his heartbeat when he couldn’t feel his heartbeat even as the panic of seeing a far-too-inanimate Reggie shuddered through him. He ducked under again and this time wrenched her free, slicing his right finger open in the process. He watched the red stream a moment, then snapped himself into focus, surfaced, caught Reggie in his arms, and propelled them to the edge. He lifted her up and set her on solid ground, then hoisted himself over the edge and retrieved his glasses with a hand shaking uncontrollably—whether from cold or an anxious episode, he couldn’t be completely sure.

  Somehow in a gray blur, he found his way back to the office with Reggie draped under his arm and the torchlight casting eerie shadows over the walls and rang for a taxicab.

  After helping the driver finagle his bike onto the back with a few cables, he slid in beside Reggie and watched her intently. Hamish was colder than he had ever been. Colder than when his dad forgot to pick him up at the ice-skating rink at High Park and his fingers and toes greeted the eventual warmth with daggers. So cold even though Reggie was huddled beside him, her chin on his shoulder, fast asleep. He’d dragged her out of the cave, her wet hair brushing the gap in his damp shirt collar.

  Usually Reggie’s slightest touch blazed through him, starting at his fingertips, warming through his veins, reddening his ears. Even if it was something as light as the brush of their fingertips as they reached for the radio dial in the office in the North Square. He placed his trembling fingers over her hand, fallen limply on his knee, so close were they together in the back seat of the cab. Ice. Icier still just past the knuckle on her fourth finger. Hamish winced, from more than the pain of the feeling slowly returning to his fingers.

  The blurred lights of the city spread over the rain-spattered car window. Hamish’s right hand shook slightly, but that kept the blood moving at least. His mind had always loved her since the moment he saw her in the cannoli line at Mrs. Leoni’s bakery in the North Square. To distraction. Beyond distraction. He loved her so frantically that his heart jabbed when she even suggested he leave her behind. As if she wasn’t half of himself. As if he would know how to wake up and function and greet a day without her.

  And it was that love that made him curse the stupid decision to let her out of his sight. She had flashed him a look in which he read her seriousness and capability as she turned to follow the man who lured them there. He’d agreed to let her prove her independence while he puzzled over a few files. From now on he would be more alert and would learn to defend himself—and her.

  The cab swerved over as they reached the corner of Battery and Commercial Streets: a line of redbrick tenement-style housing of which Hamish and Nate occupied a town house. The cab parked roughly on the curb, jolting Reggie awake.

  “Come on.” Hamish held her arm as she slowly roused. He led her half-stumbling to the door of the two-floor flat he shared with Nathaniel Reis.

  He maneuvered the unlocked door open with the arm not balancing Reggie, then bellowed inside the lit hallway, the warmth of the house almost overtaking him. “Nate!” He could hardly keep Reggie upright. He ushered her into their small sitting room and laid her out on the couch. Hamish’s eyes darted around the room for a quilt or an afghan. Nothing. He hurriedly tucked a pillow under her head. “Reg, I’ll be right back. You can’t stay in those clothes.” If he wasn’t half frozen to death or plagued with the thought of her dying of hypothermia, he might have had the grace to blush.

  “Reggie!” said Nate the moment he arrived in the doorway. “What happened?”

  “I need you to start a fire,” Hamish said. “I need you to boil water for tea. I am going to go and find her all the blankets we have. And some clothes.”

  “Hamish, you don’t look so well yourself.”

  “I’ll live. See to Reggie.”

  Hamish was dizzy ascending the stairs. The feeling in his fingers hadn’t completely returned and everything hurt, especially his chest. Thankfully the pulse in the back of his head had dulled. He rummaged through his dresser for anything that she could wear. Settling on pajama pants and a varsity sweater from the University of Toronto and two pairs of socks his Aunt Viola had knit, he quickly changed into dry trousers, a cable-knit sweater, and a hat his adopted home would call a beanie, also knit by his Aunt Viola. He dashed back down, set down the clothes, and lifted her up. Her cheeks were colored again, but dangerously flushed. Her eyes, when they opened, twinkled brown but looked dazed in the glow of the roaring fire.

  “Up you get, Reggie.” He gently pulled her up. “You need to take your wet clothes off and put these on.”

  She flopped against him. “Can’t move.”

  “I can’t very well undress you myself . . . I . . .” Hamish ran his fingers through his hair. It was still a little damp but mostly dry and lay plastered against his forehead.

  Reggie nodded drowsily.

  He helped her out of his coat and then her own, stiffly cold. With that bulk removed, he assessed her knit sweater and skirt and tried not to think about what was likely as stiff and cold underneath—right next to her skin. Then he got analytical. It was one thing to be a gentleman. It was another to keep her from catching pneumonia.

  “Regina,” he whispered. “I want you to know that I am only doing this as a last resort and I respect you and I don’t want you to think that I would ever consider overstepping the boundaries of our friendship and—”

  “Your lawyer voice, Hamish,” Reggie slurred with a smile. Her rich alto was a tad higher with exhaustion and she sounded like a little girl.

  “My lawyer voice,” he repeated, gritting his chattering teeth.

  He centered his hands on either side of her and tried to avert his eyes, fumbling with the ends of her sweater, focusing to get bearings and tug the heavy wool over her head. Her head flopped back a bit with his effort. Hamish tossed the sweater aside and exhaled. Not so bad, he blinked into the fire.

  Nate crossed the carpet with tea. “Oh,” he said, surveying Hamish’s predicament.

  “I’d call for Mrs. Leoni, but she couldn’t get here fast enough.” Hamish had ventured a look back at Reggie. With the removal of her sweater, her arms were bare and all that covered her front was the top half of a slip. He reached out a tentative finger to her skin, then reeled back as if burned. “Do people really catch their death from cold water?” Hamish looked up at Nate.

  Nate held the steaming cup to Reggie’s nose. “T
ake a sip of this, Reggie,” he coaxed gently, holding the cup to her mouth. She sipped tentatively through cracked, ice-blue lips.

  “H-hi, Nate.”

  “Hello, Regina.” His voice held a clinical precision. “I want you to know that Hamish and I have no intention of being anything but gentlemen. It is just you are a dear friend. And we would rather you not freeze to death.”

  Reggie’s attempt at a laugh sputtered into a cough. “So pragmatic.”

  Hamish set back to his task. And somehow with her bottom half covered under the blanket and his placing her hands in the right position they were finally able to get one half of her frozen slip off of her and rapidly pull down the varsity sweater in its place without a flash of anything. Hamish breathed a sigh of relief.

  Reggie was a little more animated by this point and was able to handle her garter and stockings while Nate and Hamish studied the fireplace with an intensity Hamish assumed might blind them forever. Then, miraculously, the pajama pants were on and she was tucked under every blanket they owned.

  Nate poked at her garments with a fire poker and arranged them into a pile. “Should I send for the doctor?”

  “No,” Reggie chattered. “You don’t need to. I’ll be fine.”

  “Should I send for Vaughan?” Hamish asked quietly.

  “No,” Reggie repeated.

  Hamish looked down to hide his relief and inspected his pruned fingers. Then he looked back to Regina. The blankets were up to her chin, her hair had dried into a thousand tight ringlets—the intensity of curls something he had never quite seen before, even in the dead humid heat of the summer—and her eyes were focused on the flames.

  “I have a funny feeling this has nothing to do with boat licensing,” Nate said drily, balancing the poker against the brick of the mantel, then leading Hamish to the adjoining kitchen.

  Hamish shifted a little in his seat, tugging at a loose thread on the sleeve of his sweater. “It has everything to do with a case.”

  “Should I be concerned?”

  Hamish thought about Kelly and his primitive views. Not only was Nate the best flatmate he could imagine, he was his best friend. Hamish hadn’t had a lot of friends. Maisie Forth, sure. She was a police dispatcher back in Toronto. One of his closest friends through childhood thanks to her family’s presence in his parents’ circle. And Luca his cousin . . . but Luca turned out to be more complicated than any boundaries of friendship should have allowed. Under the slowly burgeoning enterprise of Van Buren and DeLuca, Reggie and Hamish took on clients with every manner of mystery, from lost cats to botched contracts overseen by some of the shadier presences of the North End. In many cases, residents had nowhere else to go and the uneasiness of a looming war overseas, the financial difficulty as America used Roosevelt’s series of New Deals to completely recover from the financial depression that had sunk so many so low over the decade just past. And while Reggie and Hamish assisted and occasionally twirled on the wrong side of danger, Nate never pried. He never asked. He merely showed up near daily to listen to Winchester Molloy on the wireless, eating his weight in almond cookies and sending clients Hamish’s way when they needed advice on employment contracts. He thought about the soggy pamphlet in his trouser pocket.

  “He’s worried that Hyatt and Price are going to be developing housing where he does his trade. Do you know anything about this?”

  Nate studied Hamish a moment, affording Hamish a clear view of his friend’s face, most importantly his eyes. “There’s always some big Washington Street firms that think we’re ripe for the picking. You know this from Schultze and Baskit and some of your cousin Luca’s investors.”

  “You’re being evasive, Nate.”

  “Am I?” Nate looked in the direction of the sitting room. “Can you go make sure that Regina doesn’t catch hypothermia on our sofa?”

  “You’re not going to answer me?”

  Hamish waited through a beat of silence before leaving Nate at the table and crossing back to where Reggie lay in front of the fire.

  Reggie burrowed down further under the blankets. “It hurts. The feeling is coming back. Ow.” She sighed. “We should have had a plan B.”

  “We never had a plan A. I don’t even really know why we were there.” He knew he sounded testy. But he was exhausted and she had almost drowned.

  She laughed softly. “And you wouldn’t leave me, Hamish DeLuca.”

  “And I never would, Reggie.”

  She wriggled a little under the covers.

  Hamish looked around, hearing Nate. Would she be better situated upstairs in his own bed while he took the couch? But then she would be away from the fireplace. Hamish scratched the back of his neck. Not any more appropriate than disrobing a woman with only one bachelor chaperone. But still . . .

  Hamish watched Reggie’s lashes sweep the curve of her cheekbones, noticed her freckles stand out like stars in a pale sky.

  It had been eons since he first met her at the counter in Mrs. Leoni’s in the North Square. Well over a year since they danced, her cranberry silk dress spilling around her like tipped merlot. Well over a year since they had started their business, stitching up a strange patchwork quilt of problems. Hamish employing his quickly learned skills in employment and property law to help residents in the North End who were prey to wealthy landlords. Translating for clients who spoke little English, their first language—Italian—as familiar to him as breathing thanks to his father, who’d ensured that Hamish had a second language as far back as he could remember.

  “I guess he got away,” Reggie murmured.

  Hamish puzzled for a moment, then realization dawned. He had completely forgotten why they were by the infernal harbor in the first place. “I guess he did.”

  He wondered if he should tell her he thought he had seen Kent: the silent partner of Mark Suave, the man who had shot Hamish. The man who died by his cousin Luca’s hand. And he wanted to tell her even as her breathing was tempered. She would follow him to the ends of the earth, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted her to, especially if it meant that he could lose her. Lose her as he had Luca.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Hamish.” Her voice was so quiet he wondered at first if he was imagining it.

  “What’s that, Reg?” Hamish fixated on embers hopping in the fireplace. He retrieved the papers from under his coat and began hanging them alongside Reggie’s clothes and underthings in a strange line.

  “How did he find his way back here, and why? Luca . . .”

  “So you saw him too?” His voice caught in his throat. His shoulder throbbed and his breath sped up a little bit. If it was who they thought it was . . .

  “I thought so.” She nodded tiredly. “Kent.” She gave a little laugh. “Long time since I heard that name, Cicero.”

  Hamish watched the fire silently. Cicero. Luca’s pet name for him. Not one he had heard more than a handful of times in the nearly two years since his cousin left. Maisie Forth, his childhood friend, teased him with it at Christmas on a visit home. He looked up at Reggie: her eyes were fluttering closed. Then he rejoined Nate in the kitchen.

  “Cocoa?” Nate inclined an open tin of chocolate powder, pointing at the stove.

  Within minutes Hamish stared ruefully into his cocoa. He tugged his knit cap over his ears, eyes settling on a fanned-out page of the Jewish Advocate. The serial was as familiar to Hamish as Nate himself. Nate wrote long editorial pieces often contradicted by a fellow named Aaron Leibowitz. There was a comfort in seeing something so familiar.

  “I think Reggie’s been bored lately,” Hamish said. “Most of our clients have been . . . well . . . the ones you send over. This one wasn’t. And she wants adventure. She sits there typing for Mrs. Rue all morning, and then I have her read over legal documents. So I gather when someone called about boat licensing and wanted us to meet at the docks, she flew at the opportunity to get out of the office. A twilight meeting by the harbor. Who knows what she imagined. But when we got there . . .” Hamish squ
inted into his cocoa a moment. “I thought I saw . . . Sometimes, Nate, I swear I am losing my mind. Mark Suave—”

  “The man who shot you,” Nate said pointedly.

  Hamish nodded. “He had this man with him. At the Flamingo and . . . something or other. I swear I saw him tonight. Suave is long dead and then this man is resurrected?” He shrugged. “We separated. I didn’t want to . . . but . . .” Hamish ran his hand over his face, his fingers trembling a little. “I had the funniest feeling that I saw Suave’s man, so I chased after him a bit. But I was desperate to find Reggie, and I am glad I did.” Hamish flicked a look in the direction of the sitting room.

  Nate swallowed a sip of cocoa. “So maybe someone wanted you there instead of where you were?”

  “The office?” Did they want something from the office? A file perhaps? “Did you see anyone while we were gone?”

  Nate shrugged. “Or this fellow who knew Mark Suave wanted to check in on you.”

  Hamish shuddered from more than leftover cold. His anxious moments meant that his heart clutched when someone wasn’t being completely honest with him. It was funny for the tightening sensation to occur with Nate across from him. His friend was so pragmatic and honest. What you saw was what you got.