Murder in the City of Liberty

by Rachel McMillan

  Soon he saw a face he was immediately familiar with. The moment the fresh grass of the diamond gave way to the tarmac and gasoline of busy Charlestown, Hamish registered a height and visage he knew well. Pete Kelly. Of course, the man’s presence wasn’t surprising. Kelly had told them from the first that he was a resident of the Town. He didn’t, however, seem to register Hamish or Nate. Kelly’s eyes, hidden by the brim of his tweed cap, were determinedly fixated on the pavement. Hamish was relieved. He didn’t want to acknowledge a man who—on first meeting—already had a slur to toss in Nate’s direction. Who was so easily distracted by a figure in his building that he left Reggie for dead.

  So Hamish and Nate funneled out with the droves onto the same hilly side street in Charlestown that had led them there earlier. The game and the screeching for the Patriots had relieved Hamish of the tension from earlier, and he almost forgot about the man on the trolley. Nate even showed a bit of his usual self. An animated Nate was one of Hamish’s favorite things. Hamish brightened listening to him. He was yapping away about the game and the weather and how Howard from the grocer’s had a farmer’s almanac predicting weather sunny and warm by the weekend. The tension unspooled. Hamish’s thoughts weren’t pulled in the direction of war or instincts or Luca or Kent. It wasn’t until they reached an open area just at the base of Thompson Square Station that Hamish noticed a small group of people milling around in a slow swell.

  The noise dissected into distinct sounds, most people separating and trickling onward to the train platforms, when he listened hard enough and narrowed in. And finally the reason for the crowd registered. Speaking of superior races and quoting Darwin and mentioning plans and problems and the Lord’s will: familiar phrases strung into an incongruous twist of their original meaning and ending in a maze of strange propaganda. Hamish soured. Then got scared. The half dozen men centered on Nate with intensity and Hamish grabbed Nate’s elbow.

  “I’ve read about these demonstrations.” Nate’s voice was serious in Hamish’s ear.

  Hamish listened to the filth a little longer until they stepped from the shadow to the line of streetlights bordering the elevated train station. The protesters’ voices were undercut by slight slurring, and Hamish wondered if there was even one sober man among the crowd.

  It was something in the man’s face: beady eyes, quiet smirk, confidence running through the sinews and veins as it might blood in another. Hamish saw in this man’s bearing every last thing he lacked in his own. The dissonance empowered him.

  “Do you have something to say?” He straightened his shoulders and shoved his trembling hand in his pocket.

  “I might. Depends on who is asking.” While his words were directed at Hamish, his eyes daggered Nate.

  “What is your name?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “I want to know.” “You find the name, you find the human,” his father said. Then they aren’t something faceless: whether victim or instigator.

  “Bricker. Walt Bricker. You a journalist or something?”

  Hamish flexed the fingers of his dominant hand. It couldn’t shake with anger or anxiety if it was finding good occupation plowing into Bricker’s smug face. In his amateur self-defense lessons, Jasper Forth had told him to never instigate, but he wasn’t sure how to remain still with men like this guy. Nate, on the other hand, was expressionless and calm.

  “Take a few notes from your friend there.” Bricker inclined his chin at Nate in recognition. “Nathaniel Reis.” Bricker’s voice slithered a few words that pricked at Hamish’s neck until he couldn’t see anything but the man’s smug face.

  “You know me.” Nate’s tone was the same as if he were welcoming a client. “But I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “You’re known to me.”

  Hamish’s eyes settled on the pamphlets in Bricker’s outstretched hand while he recalled the conversation with Reid leading him to believe that most of the Christian Patriots were well-dressed businessmen. The fact that Bricker looked like any other man he might see on the street—not overbearing or tall, just a part of the scenery of the city—made him angrier, until the blood in his shaking hand warmed to boiling and bubbled up through his elbow and into the space between his collar and his neck. It flushed his face and darkened his mind. Spots blurred his vision, combining with the shadows cast from the station, and made him blink to focus. He squinted one eye shut, propelled his arm back, and drove his fist into the man’s face.

  “Hamish!” He thought he heard Nate behind him in a tunnel, but he was focused on the strange tingling sensation that flustered any tremor from his right hand. More noise as Bricker rallied, calmly waving his friends back while dabbing at his bleeding nose. In the half light, Hamish saw a strange light pass over Bricker’s face and settle into its not quite handsome features. His left hand was tight on Hamish’s forearm. The same hand that had gripped the pamphlets now circled him on the ground.

  “I wasn’t expecting that of you.” Bricker’s tone was almost complimentary. “And for that, I am going to give you a pass.” He held up his blood-spattered sleeve. “Helps me look a bit of a martyr, doesn’t it? Peacefully speaking my truth while this wop kid comes and starts a brawl.”

  The slur didn’t sting. Hamish was too breathless and frustrated to register it. The world buzzed and every last bit of him seemed more alive than it had ever been: pinging through his fingers and surging down to his shoes.

  “Hamish!” Nate was repeating. Hamish blinked perspiration from his eyes and finally turned. Nate’s face was resolutely set in stone. “We’re leaving.”

  * * *

  “You’re angry at me?” Hamish shook out his fist.

  “Of course I’m angry at you!”

  “Why? Because I wanted to shove those men onto a train track and rip up their filth?” He kicked at a discarded Christian Patriots leaflet. “Jasper taught me to defend myself back at home, and I’m glad I did.”

  “So you jump in front of me, and I jump in front of you, and we both end up on the ground in a brawl? I do not fight that way. And it’s not a very clever way to make it out of protests.” Nate sucked in a breath. “There were three of Bricker’s friends and two of us, and I couldn’t fend off a squirrel. So if you wanted to fly into death, why not just catapult into the Charles and let the fish take care of you?” It was a strange mix of Nate’s customary dry humor and a tone unfamiliar to Hamish. “You’ll never win a fight flying at a man like that, Hamish. He’ll just become a martyr and you’ll look stupid and temperamental.” Nate’s hands clenched with a force Hamish hadn’t seen before. “Right now you look stupid and temperamental.”

  Nate’s usual humor underscored Hamish’s anger and prickled his nose. The train screeched onto the platform, but Hamish was too angry to board. “I think I’m just going to walk.”

  “Hamish . . . don’t get angry.”

  Hamish felt Nate’s hand on his arm and turned around. “Why aren’t you angry?”

  “There is nothing in my world that would have been better if I fought back.” Nate scrubbed the back of his neck “They were all talk, Hamish. I didn’t want to play martyr and drag you down with me. It is not worth it. Not for me. Not for you. Come, I’ll walk with you.”

  Despite having paid their fare, they watched the train disappear and set off, their steps taking them away from the platform.

  Silence for a few moments as Charlestown fell behind and the familiar rooftops of the North End created a dark, jagged line across the winking river. The Old North steeple the most distinctive, stabbing Hamish with an idea of home. Hamish flexed his right hand before finally shoving it in his pocket. Nate had lived with him long enough for familiarity with his anxious episodes; nonetheless, he hoped the night sky—the moon gobbled up by a gray cloud, the skyline of Boston eerie from the Charlestown side, and the river black ink in its rippled course—would keep his friend’s attention away.

  “You’re going to see more of this, Hamish.”

 
; “You know this group?” Hamish didn’t want to validate them with a name.

  “Of course I do. This has been bubbling beneath the surface here for years. It was bound to rise up. When people are uncertain and afraid and poor, they get complacent. And if the wrong ideas are ripe for the picking in the loudest, most assured voices, then it is easy to follow.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “Of course it bothers me. But I will not draw attention to myself. I don’t have that luxury. I can’t have these men coming after me or the circle I have created.” He stopped in his tracks, the moonlight behind him, framing a face with delicately stenciled lines. He stared up at Hamish a moment but decided against saying anything, and they fell back in step.

  Midway across the river, Hamish’s eyes fluttered toward Fiske’s Wharf. The warehouse jutted out into the harbor, a few boats bopping around it, gutted oblongs silver in the moonlight.

  “Let’s see that hand of yours, young DeLuca.” Nate tugged at Hamish’s elbow.

  Hamish unfurled his fingers and held out his hand. “Stings a little.”

  “No!” Nate feigned surprise.

  Hamish’s smile started slow, tugged softly, and curved up. “But I punched someone! Never done that before.”

  “Y-yes. You punched someone.” Nate walked a few strides ahead, mumbling for Hamish’s benefit, “Suppose you’ll be expecting some kind of prize for this.”

  Chapter 6

  Madison Abbott was named for the town of her birth, and she was up for anything, including playing flirtatious heiress at Dirk Foster’s favorite watering hole. She worked at the makeup counter at Gilchrist’s: on the bottom story of a towering structure intersecting the fashionable Winter and Washington Streets. It joined rivals Filene’s and Jordan Marsh to form a triangle in Downtown Crossing. Its balance of fashionable and financial clientele tugged Reggie into the past. Despite her modest Wisconsin upbringing, there was a scent that lingered on Maddy at the end of her shift that was far more Regina Van Buren heiress than Reggie Van Buren of the North End.

  Reggie confirmed the appointed meeting time over the phone, Maddy elated that Hamish was joining them.

  “He’s cute, isn’t he?”

  Reggie lowered her voice to compensate for what she didn’t want Hamish to hear. Even though he was at his desk and not remotely paying attention.

  “He’s . . . ,” Reggie whispered.

  “You said he’s a magnificent dancer.”

  “He is that.”

  She hung up and Hamish started talking about the night before. Errol. The conflict on the field. Hamish’s own conflict. Reggie’s eyes widened at Hamish’s recount of his fistfight. Reggie blinked a few times. Something equally proud and sad was warring over his features. She was shocked and inappropriately delighted. He was in that moment the rusty knight she knew him to be. Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, unlikely champion of the underdog while Jean Arthur watched and waited from the sidelines. No damsel in distress, of course—Reggie had little time for those. But nonetheless in periphery, waiting for the man to step into the potential she felt special for seeing all along.

  “It didn’t seem as remarkable when I was there,” Hamish said in response to her gasping yet again. “And we have to ask Errol about his fight the next time we see him.”

  “You defended your friend’s honor.”

  “He wasn’t that pleased about it.”

  His blue eyes stayed on hers, the fingers of his right hand tapping their usual rhythm under his brace, the other playing the lip of the homburg still on the edge of his desk like a piano.

  She then told him she had put in an order for a tiny ivory-handled pistol. “It’s darling. Really.”

  “You’re cooing over a gun, Reg.” And he turned back to his papers until it was time for them to change and leave.

  Hamish jogged home and Reggie used the communal bathroom at the end of the hall, checking her eyeliner and lipstick in the cracked mirror and then in a coffeepot in their office.

  She and Hamish split a cab, which dropped them near the Parker House Hotel so they could walk through Scollay Square to the club.

  As the sun swathed over the city like a liberal knife of butter on toast, the Dragonfly came into view under spotlights that had already washed the Flamingo in their passing. Then, finally, the Top Hat.

  “The man would attempt to impress a hat stand,” Reggie said, referring to Dirk. “And while he’s drooling over Maddy, you and I can finally get a dance in.”

  “Will Vaughan join later?”

  “Not if he can spend more time on the river. I know, I know. You can take the man out of Harvard.” She overcompensated with an eye-roll.

  Behind all of this, she just wanted the opportunity to dance.

  With him.

  * * *

  The Top Hat was not familiar to Hamish, even though it was in Scollay Square, home to the Dragonfly and the infamous Flamingo and some of the other more elegant clubs attended by Dirk and his set. And Luca Valari, too, when he was still in the city. Still, it had its own charm—mostly in its simplicity. There was no garish spotlight roaming over the dance floor, highlighting the interior’s personality, its crisp lines and monogrammed bandstand. It had a large floor and a well-stocked bar but didn’t stand on ceremony with all manner of fancy cocktails. The owner, or so the Herald reported, was far more interested in using the club money for a band rather than atmosphere.

  “People create the atmosphere,” Hamish had recalled from the article. “Music creates the atmosphere. It is so dark and smoky in these places, why does anyone need a fake Rembrandt on the wall of the water closet? Or a real one for that matter.”

  Reggie looked up at Hamish, who had tossed the Herald on his desk. Then pursed her lips. “Takes you back, doesn’t it?”

  His shoulders crept up to his ears. “A little.”

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed. There were some fun times at the Flamingo.”

  His eyes widened. “Were there?”

  “Facetiousness doesn’t suit you, Hamish DeLuca.”

  “There were fun times anticipating the Flamingo,” he’d said.

  Anticipating. The green dress was a favorite of hers and one her mother never would have approved of for the New Haven set. It had the same backless cut Myrna Loy wore in After the Thin Man. The sleeves were thin, and a fake-gold belt gave Reggie the illusion of an hourglass like Jean Harlow’s. Her brown hair was longer than usual, and finger waves were a slightly trickier task than they had been with constant trips to a dresser, but with patience she’d created little ripples that would catch the sheen of the club lights.

  Hamish, too, had dressed to the nines. The moment she saw him in front of the club, she recognized the ivory suit jacket and bow tie from their first moments at the Flamingo two summers ago. His hair was slicked back, and it made his ears seem to stick out a little. As if signaling something. Alert. She liked the style. It allowed her to see the whole of his features. A half dozen times a day her fingertips tingled to sweep a lock of black hair from his face so she could see him completely.

  “Is that your Hamish? Bit sweet, isn’t he?”

  Reggie had forgotten Maddy was beside her. “Not my Hamish.”

  Hamish smiled and gave a wave from the doorway.

  “Oh, and a dimple!” Maddy cooed. “What a lamb.”

  “Great dancer too,” Reggie said absently.

  “Hello.” Hamish smiled at Reggie and the smile stretched. Its effect sent Maddy into an immediate demure moment.

  “Hi, doll! Reggie has told me so much about you.” She squeezed his arm. Reggie watched him blink a few times and tuck his free arm behind his back.

  “Hamish DeLuca, Maddy Abbott. She is a fellow boarder.”

  Hamish shook Maddy’s hand. “How do you do, Maddy.”

  “You’ll save me a turn, won’t you? Hamish! What a name! I’ll never get that from rolling around in my noggin!”

  Reggie had chosen Maddy be
cause she was the least annoying of her housemates, she reminded herself as they entered the club.

  Reggie watched Maddy and Hamish dance, standing by the bar. She declined several offers to dance and watched for Dirk. When her eyes did roam Hamish-ward, she squinted to see if anything marked his face. Any sign of Hamish DeLuca in a fight. It still startled her.

  He made his way over to her eventually, having spun Maddy away from him into the arms of a tall admirer.

  “Fancy a spin?” Hamish asked.

  Reggie couldn’t recall the last time she’d danced with Hamish. It had been several months. For one, they weren’t at clubs together, and for another, it felt more and more that any close proximity made her brain spiral . . . to many places. And her eyes tried too hard to lock with his eyes like an open book and her fingers couldn’t help but feel the muscles under the cotton of his shirt and her heart couldn’t stop thrumming the way she assumed his did in the middle of one of his panic episodes. But, sure, they were still friends when they danced. In the exact same way Jean Harlow and Clark Gable were friends. Right?

  Wrong. He was Trouble with a capital T. The first time they’d danced at the Dragonfly, Reggie realized she was settling into a new version of herself. In many ways—more than the Journal of Independence—more than throwing her suitcase out the window and scurrying down a tree—it was the first true step toward how free she felt in her new city. She took Hamish’s hand and felt every inch of his long fingers over her wrist. He was always careful with her, even when the tug and pull of the music flung them around a floor, lost in a beat. She liked the way it felt when he tightened his grip, his chin just over the top of her head. Just tall enough to be protective.

  * * *

  The spotlight meandered languidly over the crowd, flushing mellow light and outlining each couple on the monogrammed floor. Hamish fell into the rhythm. He knew how to dance. If anything, he was more at his prime than ever, having spent so many hours with Bernice in his arms. But as much as he enjoyed her company and as pretty as she looked with her pink lips and small waist, it was nothing like dancing with Reggie. Nothing like the way the universe slowed with her in his arms as if all of the crowd and the lights and the wordless notes from the band proclaimed, This. This is what is right. This is what makes sense.