Murder in the City of Liberty

by Rachel McMillan

  “They warned me. To stay away from what I was doing. I don’t really do a lot.” Toby shrugged. “Your eyes are really blue. They look pretend.”

  Hamish adjusted his glasses. “Thanks, I think. They’re real. They’re my mom’s.”

  “Don’t see a lot of blue, blue eyes. Sometimes I see green. I run errands for a fellow over here. He likes to have someone who can get to and from Charlestown while he works.”

  “Pete Kelly.”

  “Geez. You are some consultant.”

  “I saw you there one day. I didn’t know you were Errol Parker’s nephew then.”

  “He sometimes gives me tram fare too. My mother doesn’t think I should be working. But I need something to do. Saving up to follow Uncle Errol on the road. I want to go to Cincinnati.”

  Hamish knew nothing about American geography. “Is that far?”

  Toby nodded. “Would have liked to be a batboy. But they don’t have much use for me. My mom would never let me anyway.” He scratched at the scab on his forehead and Hamish could sense he was losing him. Kids were only good for a few moments before their minds drifted to something more important, like bubble gum or Coke or comics or a girl—something else Hamish recalled hearing from his dad. None of these things had applied to sixteen-year-old Hamish, however. He never had time for them. Not even girls. Until now. And Reggie—

  Toby was saying, “He trusts me. Pete Kelly. With secret safe documents.” His eyes flitted toward the Parker. Hamish could tell Toby was warring between the manners his mother obviously taught him and his eagerness to get to the Parker and step into its grand foyer. Hamish wondered if Toby would be turned away.

  “He must think you are worth it.” Hamish wanted to see these secret safe documents. They certainly avoided him the first night he visited the property.

  Hamish rummaged in his pocket. “I’m keeping you. But come, let me walk you inside at least. Those fancy places might have a lot of questions for an errand boy like you.” Toby inspected his collar. His clothes were clean but wrinkled from bounding about the city, and clearly secondhand. The hems of his pants sewn and resewn again, Hamish assumed, with every inch he grew. Hamish felt guilty for escorting Toby to a meeting with heaven knew whom. He had already been in one violent skirmish. But he wasn’t personally responsible for him, and the kid was safer in the Parker House with its staff and attendants than wandering Tremont Street.

  He reached into his pocket for a bill and pressed it into Toby’s hand.

  “I didn’t run you a message,” Toby said, inspecting it.

  “It’s for the subway after. Make sure you get home safe.” A smile ticked up Hamish’s cheek.

  “You’re a nice guy. I can see why my uncle chose you.”

  “Well, I haven’t gotten very far in helping yet. Between you and me.”

  They crossed to the street, just missing a sleek black car of the same make Phil used to drive Luca around in. Hamish led him, adjusting his bow tie and smoothing out a crease in his jacket.

  “Who are you meeting?”

  “Someone very important. Movie star important, I was told.”

  Hamish thought of pressing but noticed that Toby was shifting a little. His answers were as carefully evasive as a sixteen-year-old with a big responsibility could conjure.

  As soon as they pushed through the revolving doors, Toby’s face lit with the grandeur of the dripping chandeliers, the expensive carpets, and the ornamental floral arrangements.

  “Excuse me.” Hamish addressed a concierge returning from a quick inspection of a bouquet on route back to his desk.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My young friend here will want to see one of your guests. To deliver a message. You can help him with that?”

  “Of course.” The concierge smiled at Toby. “Come to the desk and let’s see if we can find who you are looking for.”

  Toby grinned at Hamish and Hamish gave him a rare, full-on smile.

  Then he made toward the door. Slowly. Perhaps the man he was here to see would come down to collect him. And Hamish could loiter and see who it was. Keep an eye out. Wait for him. He fingered the brace under his jacket.

  But just as a doorman looked at him quizzically, he saw a bellboy collect Toby and lead him in the direction of the elevator.

  He took one last look around the grand foyer, smiled at the doorman, and set off into the night.

  * * *

  Luca peered through the open windows of his fifth-floor room. He usually stayed on the penthouse floor, but he truly liked a corner suite on this floor. The bells at King’s Chapel warred with the ones clanging in Park Street Church at the edge of the nearby Common.

  He had already put a deposit on a town house in Beacon Hill. Fashionable and rimming one of those cobbled streets people bought postcards of. Patriotic flags draped from shuttered windows.

  The Realtor told him he could still have some control over the fully furnished place he’d requested. Some room for his own art, to exhibit his own taste. Luca liked to step into a place already furnished and decorated. To slip into its deco lines and sprawl on its fancy furniture with a martini from a well-stocked bar. Then slip out as quickly as he had arrived, leaving no imprint of himself.

  The Realtor said he could have the place immediately but that the current owners would appreciate having until the first of the month. Luca had a hankering for Boston cream pie and Parker House rolls delivered fresh every morning. So he had Phil drive him to the hotel.

  The only remnant of his own mark he had left on this city during his previous stretch here was, according to his vantage from the window, strolling in the direction of School Street. Luca would know Hamish’s gait anywhere. Hands in pockets, shoulders slightly raised. Characteristics he could make out from the fifth floor.

  He let the curtain fall from his fingers.

  It was all about keeping things in play. In baseball you stretched the inning as long as you could. Players rounding each base. Holding on hoping you can fool the pitcher as each play becomes elastic. Luca was always aware of the dream of a setup that allowed him to stay put. His last stint in Boston might have been the perfect stretch, if Suave hadn’t followed him and shot his cousin.

  Kent was practically useless. His first order of business had been to call on Pete Kelly and stake out his place. Instead he saw Hamish and spooked, telling Kelly that Hamish was Luca’s cousin. After that, Kelly would have little to do with him. Kelly wanted to keep his property, Kent said, but if he was going to look for protection and investors, he would rather stay loyal to men of his own kind in Charlestown rather than someone of Luca Valari’s stature and reputation.

  So Luca, in a slightly benevolent mood lubricated by a few martinis, heard Kent out and sent him to a Christian Patriots meeting where he met a fellow named Walt Bricker who seemed intent on ascertaining the quickest way to rise financially in order to join the set his friend Dirk Foster was part of.

  “Dirk Foster knows the Van Burens,” Kent had slurred, having downed the drink Luca bought him.

  “You don’t say.”

  When it came to Nathaniel Reis, however, Kent was two steps from completely incompetent. Luca was not one given to casual cursing, believing one could give the impression of educated intelligence by carefully selecting replacement words for the ones at the tip of his tongue. He reined himself in as Kent spoke of his great effort in searching Nate Reis’s office. He had held up a hand.

  “Clearly you won’t impress me with anything you may come up with in terms of your association with Reis.”

  The one slight (very slight) reprieve to Kent’s ignorance was his discovery that Pete Kelly used a kid named Toby to run messages and manifests over the bridge from Boston to his home in Charlestown. For safekeeping, Kent theorized. Why use a safe when you had an eager sixteen-year-old kid to store them away?

  Luca figured that if the case went to court, Dirk Foster and the Hyatt and Price set would want evidence like Kelly’s underhanded manifests a
s a sure win for their side. If the paperwork disappeared with a kid across the bridge, it would be less likely to be found. And there were dozens of errand boys across the city.

  One such errand boy was knocking on his door at the moment; he set his drink down, his reverie cut off with the clink of glass on the marble table.

  Luca swished the tie of his silk dressing gown and opened the door.

  Toby Morris was scrawny and tall with broad shoulders. Luca welcomed him in and clicked the door shut.

  Luca opened his small fridge to put a Coca-Cola on ice for the kid. “Want an ice cream? A burger?”

  “No thank you, sir.”

  “No ‘sir.’ I’m Luca. You like the room, eh?”

  Toby’s eyes roamed Luca’s broad suite: from the perfectly made bed to the leather sofa to the bar. “Yes.”

  In the next five minutes, Luca learned that he was an only child, that his uncle had been in two fights on the ball field, that he was failing math, and that he wanted to be a batboy for the Cincinnati Reds. Everything pointed to Cincinnati for this kid. Luca almost peeled off a check and wrote a few zeros to get him there as quickly as possible. The city was growing smaller the longer he sat in this pretty suite waiting for the first of the month and the move into his fancy town house.

  “Toby, you’re a smart kid. Hard worker too. I like that.” Luca handed him his soda. “Sit down. Baseball fan?”

  Toby’s eyes widened. “My uncle plays for the Boston Patriots.”

  “Robin Hood, isn’t that what they call him? Bit of a baseball fan myself. My cousin and I had season tickets to Fenway. Ever seen the Sox play?”

  “Uncle Errol took me once.”

  “You give me your address and I’ll send you and your uncle tickets again.”

  What Luca liked most about Toby was that while he took in the promise of ball games and started on his second Coke and ate his way through a box of Cracker Jack from a basket on the desk, he knew when to cut off the small talk.

  “Your man said you had a proposition.”

  Luca had sent Phil to the ball game. Phil found Toby shifting from one shoe to the other beneath the bleachers watching the first base line and his uncle parrying between first and second.

  Phil had little tolerance for children, but Kent was stupider than them. It was a fine balance.

  “Do you know a fellow named Bricker?”

  “Angry man. Yells a lot at the subway station. Sometimes at the games.”

  “Yes. Have you ever seen him with Pete Kelly?”

  Toby shook his head. “I thought . . .” He broke off, sipped his Coke.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you need a message delivered?”

  It was past 11:00 p.m. “Where does your mother think you are?”

  “My friend Joey’s.”

  “Is there actually a friend named Joey?”

  “No.”

  “So you’ll go home, sneak through the window. Or through the front door, saying you got a stomachache while eating candy and doing your homework. I have been sixteen before, you know.”

  “I just want to deliver the messages. And keep the papers. I don’t read them. I don’t want to be insta . . . insti . . .”

  “Implicated?” This kid had no idea what he was part of.

  Toby nodded. “That’s how I got this.” He pointed to his forehead. “People thought I was a rat.”

  “Well, I won’t make you a rat.” And Luca stood and lit a cigarette. Then he smiled down at Toby. “You’re a good kid.” He used his free hand to reach into his pocket and peel a bill from a sterling silver money clip. “Do you need more for the tram home?” Luca asked.

  “A fellow walked me here. He already gave me some.” He held up a one-dollar bill.

  “A chaperone?”

  “Just someone I ran into. Bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Don’t even seem real.”

  Luca smiled sadly. He would rather be working with this kid than with Kent. He walked Toby to the door and pointed him in the direction of the elevator, then he fell on the leather sofa near the broad window.

  Part of Luca wanted Toby to play messenger again. This time to the North End. To the house that Phil easily found. One Hamish shared with Nate Reis. It wasn’t as if he had made a lot of headway with Kent, no matter what the man promised in Chicago.

  “I don’t know how useful you are going to be to me,” Luca had said as he watched Kent down another second-rate lager.

  “There’s nothing there. He won’t talk to me and I went back to his office and there was nothing there. Just books. Tons and tons of books.”

  “If you can go to an office and just see tons of books, you aren’t looking hard enough,” Luca had reprimanded. He tucked his fingers into his palm just thinking about it. It annoyed him that someone who had the potential to see so much had seen so little. With Toby, he could get somewhere. The kid had Hamish offering him dollar bills on the side of the street. But then, that was Hamish, dispositioned to do a good turn. Well, Luca had done a good turn too. He paid that Morris kid far more than he’d get from anyone else. He worried several times after Hamish was shot how much of himself had rubbed off on his cousin. In moments like his interaction with Toby, Luca hoped, at the very least, some of Hamish had rubbed off on him.

  * * *

  Reggie’s Journal of Independence proved that you could learn a lot during two years away from your proper upbringing. Perhaps, most importantly, that you could fall in love with a person in little increments. A little bit when it rained and a little bit during the first snowfall. A little bit on a Tuesday and a little bit when he gave you the last piece of cannoli. A little bit on the dance floor and a little bit as Winchester Molloy crackled through the wireless. Reggie knew little about baseball. What she knew about it, she knew through Nate and Hamish. During afternoon games on the radio on sticky summer afternoons, Winchester Molloy was shelved while an exuberant announcer’s inflection rose and fell with the action of the game. Reggie was always outnumbered; she knew she wouldn’t win against the two of them and that her favorite serial would have to wait until the next day. But over time, she started forming an image of the action in her mind’s eye. And while she had once attended a Fenway game with Vaughan, spending most of her time fanning her cheek with her hat and listening to Dirk’s then-paramour talk about dating a Max Factor salesman, she experienced a tinge of excitement at stepping into Errol Parker’s world as part of their case.

  “You’re in my neighborhood!” Reggie bounced a little beside Hamish. They walked up Pleasant Street in the direction of the Bunker Hill Monument: a needle piercing the lemony sky. The smell of freshly cut grass added to a spring symphony of crickets and a lone bird’s chirp. This time of year smelled and felt different than any other in the rotating seasons. Late snow, ice, and wind a recent enough memory to inspire constant appreciation of warm weather and blue sky.

  “That’s my house! That’s my window!” Reggie found it odd that Hamish had never seen it before. Perhaps he had walked by it but she had never taken the time to point it out. She saw him more than she saw the circumference of her room or any of the other boarders, but still it was an important part of her life and she was energized by their walking Charlestown together.

  When they arrived at the diamond, spectators were beginning to fill the bleachers while the hot dog and pretzel and peanut vendors wheeled their carts to the edge of the field. The overhead lights flickered and filled out, and while the sun still winked down, it would soon disappear, the lights illuminating the players and field.

  “Errol!” Reggie turned at Hamish’s voice.

  Parker wore a smile. He was still dressed in his everyday clothes and there was a tired glaze to his eyes. “Thank you for coming.” He shook their hands in turn.

  “Do you get nervous before a game?” Reggie asked as they followed him in the direction of the locker room. Several interested fans watched them, some gasping at seeing the great Robin Hood up close.

  “More nervo
us now, I confess.” Errol grimaced. “Whoever is doing this is trying to catch me off guard. I need to be in the right headspace before I go out on the field, and whoever is sabotaging me—is doing these pranks—is close enough to know my routine.”

  “Someone on the team?” Hamish asked. “I was at the game the other night. I saw your fistfight. With Treadwell. Was it about this?”

  Errol shook his head. “He thinks Winston shows me favoritism.”

  “How?” Reggie asked.

  “Well, you’re here, for one.” He smiled at her. “But I let my kid nephew in around the players.”

  They were nearing the locker room door and Errol motioned for them to keep their voices down. “They know I hired a couple detectives, but I don’t want to give anyone anything.”

  “Is there anyone on your team you do trust implicitly? An ally?”

  Errol nodded. “The coach. Ed Winston. I wouldn’t be here without him. He’s also assured me that he has talked to talent scouts about what has been happening here. I don’t want to be given an unfair advantage though. I am smart enough to know I will deal with adversity and challenges no matter whether I play here or at Fenway. I can’t get rattled.”

  “You’re not sleeping, are you?” Hamish kept his voice low.

  “Would you?”

  Reggie and Hamish exchanged a look as they followed Errol into the opening of the locker room. It was loud and raucous. Reggie took everything in. A few players were practicing their pitches and swings to the side, halting at her approach. One whistled appreciatively. The other slurred something to Errol that offended Reggie so deeply she wondered if she heard it correctly. Hamish stiffened beside her.

  “Well, I hope the other men on your team have slightly better manners.” Reggie gritted her teeth.

  “Miss Van Buren,” Errol said politely, “I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to stay just outside.”

  “You didn’t honestly think you could come inside?” Hamish added.

  “I figured we would all stay outside and they would come to us.” Reggie sighed.

  The players who’d aggravated Reggie a moment earlier snickered.