Murder in the City of Liberty

by Rachel McMillan

  “Do you have a handkerchief?” he asked Reggie.

  She reached into her small purse and passed it to him. He unfolded the expensive silk and used it to open a few desk drawers. Lift a few files.

  “We have to get going,” the officer said from the doorway. Reggie had forgotten he was there. “So I can’t chaperone this much longer. Have you seen what you need to see?”

  “Was anyone here when you were called in?” Hamish asked, nearing the door.

  “Just the lady from across the square.”

  “That’s where we’re going next,” Hamish said to Reggie as they sidled past the officers to the staircase.

  There was something grim about the night that contrasted the bustle and light Reggie loved of the North Square. It was as if the street was an imposter. Shaded with unfamiliar tones and colors and a sound that was worse than no sound at all. Rather the sound of a place trying to be quiet. She followed Hamish, her heels catching in the cobblestones.

  Mrs. Leoni’s sign read Closed and the flower stands that stood sentry on either side of her open door during the day were gone. But the lights burned low through the windows. Hamish rapped three times and she appeared.

  She reached up on her toes and pulled Hamish’s head down, one hand on either side of his face. She kissed him on each cheek before drawing him into a brief hug. Then she turned to Reggie and performed the same.

  “You look very beautiful,” she said to Reggie in Italian.

  “My engagement party.” Reggie smiled. Had she told Mrs. Leoni she was engaged? She hadn’t exactly been yelling it from the rooftops.

  Mrs. Leoni looked puzzled and then swiftly looked to Hamish. Then back to Reggie, tugging her inside.

  “Rosa has just gone to bed. Thank you for seeing to her safety, Hamish. You must come and I will make tea.”

  “We don’t have time for tea, Mrs. Leoni. We were just at the office where Nathaniel . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. Mrs. Leoni’s face crumpled.

  “He is such a nice boy. Nathaniel.” She muttered in Italian. Crossed herself, then pulled her arms tightly around her ample chest.

  “He called you. When it . . . when it happened?” Reggie said, shifting her weight to the other uncomfortable foot.

  Mrs. Leoni nodded. “He was here so late. I thought it was late. I saw a second-floor light on in the office as I was bringing the plants in.”

  “Had anyone been around today? A stranger? Someone unusual? Maybe watching the office.”

  Mrs. Leoni shook her head. “I should pay better attention.”

  “No. No,” said Hamish. “Not your fault.”

  “I did see that baseball player.”

  Hamish and Reggie startled straight. “Which player?”

  “Mr. Parker. I knew his face from the papers.”

  Hamish went far away for a moment. His blue eyes staring at nothing, his right hand slowly shaking. Reggie could hear his heartbeat from where she stood.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Leoni.” Hamish squeezed her shoulder. “But Reggie and I have to go to the hospital and see how Nate is doing.”

  Mrs. Leoni nodded then turned in the direction of her display counters. Empty. She prided herself on making each delicacy fresh for every morning. Reggie shuddered to imagine what time the lady was up in the morning. “You wait here.”

  She disappeared despite Hamish and Reggie’s protests and returned with a white box. “Cannoli. I know Nathaniel is your friend. And I will pray he will be all right.”

  She pressed her hand into Reggie’s, and they let themselves out to the sound of Mrs. Leoni clicking the door shut.

  * * *

  Hamish sat silently next to Reggie on the hospital steps. Something in Nate’s office was off. It wasn’t something Hamish could pinpoint beyond instinct. But it wasn’t because of whoever attacked Nate. Nate’s office was almost unrecognizable to those who knew him best. First, the desk was a mess of papers. Second, the bookshelf was almost empty. Hamish assumed most of its contents had been moved with the work that seemed to pile higher and higher around their flat. The office was just a noiseless space now. Hamish scratched the back of his neck. He should have been five steps ahead of this. Should have anticipated disaster. He knew something was wrong. Why would he leave Nate alone? Now Errol? Had Errol gone to the office looking for them and found himself in an altercation with Nate? It didn’t make sense.

  “A penny for your thoughts? All the pennies? Truly, Hamish, if you could see your face.”

  “Why was Errol in the North End?”

  “He is renting that property from Kelly. When all of the construction is complete and the development is built. He could have been here on business for that. Was there a baseball game tonight?”

  Hamish shook his head. “No. Maybe he was looking for us.”

  “You don’t think he has something to do with Nate?”

  Hamish wiped his face with his sleeve. It was hot all of a sudden. Everything felt small and close. He ignored the mounting pain in his chest and the heartbeat that thudded like an anvil. “No. Unless he was provoked unintentionally? I mean, he just lost his nephew. He’s been the victim of pranks. Maybe he broke.” But even as the words left his mouth, he realized how ridiculous they sounded.

  “I don’t believe that. You’re right. Errol wouldn’t attack Nate. There was blood. There . . .” Reggie reached to touch her absent Spira, Spera necklace and Hamish followed the gesture to her collarbone. “My parents will be furious.” Reggie now picked at the ripped satin of her dress, which floated around her on the steps outside the hospital.

  They hadn’t been permitted to see Nate, who was in serious but somewhat stable condition. They weren’t family. Not to the hospital staff. Reggie started into a diatribe about what constituted family in the first place but ended up trailing off when she didn’t get a rise—or even a look—from Hamish’s direction.

  “Nothing was as important as Nate.”

  “Funny.” Reggie mulled a moment.

  “What?”

  “When I first met you, you would have apologized. Even if I knew that in your soul you didn’t mean it.”

  “Nate is more important than any party.”

  “Still . . .” Reggie smoothed her skirt again. It was beyond salvageable.

  Hamish studied a scuff on his shoes. Had it only been a few hours since he had pedaled over after stealing some of Nate’s pomade, determined to put forth the best impression he could? It seemed like several lifetimes or several chapters of a long book.

  “You were brilliant with my parents tonight, Hamish.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “I have never seen you like that. I’ve heard your lawyer voice.” She nudged him with her elbow. “But you charmed them. My mother was speechless—and my mother is never speechless.”

  Hamish knew it was reckless, but he looked at her anyway, just as she was raising her chin and their eyes met. Hers were tired, the carefully applied makeup smudged. “I knew how important it was to you,” he said.

  “I saw Luca’s handwriting.”

  “What?”

  “On the paper Reid retrieved from Toby’s pocket. Is he back?”

  Hamish shook his head. “I don’t know.

  “But if he is back, you’d tell me, right?” Her eyes were round and sheened with almost-tears, searching his face.

  “You can’t choose your family,” he said sharply.

  Reggie grabbed his hand. “Yes, you can.”

  * * *

  Hamish turned the key and stepped into the dense quiet. He flipped on the light and blinked away the scene of Nate’s office, the smell of Reggie’s hair under his chin as she tugged hard at his sleeve, the stiff opulence of the whiskey he’d sampled with Reggie’s father contrasting the devastation of the rest of the night and the realization that she had left with him. She could have asked him to report later and clung to Vaughan’s arm and social propriety.

  The keys jangled in his shaking right hand, so he
tossed them on the table in the front room. He stared a moment into the empty fire grate. It had to be Bricker, of course. Or one of his men. Or maybe even Dirk Foster . . . Hamish scrubbed his neck. But Dirk was at the party. He saw him. His mind rifled through the evening. But they had arrived late, hadn’t they?

  Hamish pinched his nose as if to contain the many thoughts spiraling in several directions and dropped onto the sofa and angrily swatted a pile of papers Nate had left there; they fanned on the floor. Hamish nudged at one with his shoe. Nate had never been untidy—until recently. Bringing everything from the office home every night as if the building might go up in flames and leave him without anything. Maybe he was worried it would.

  Hamish leaned down and gently picked up the papers. He flicked his eyes over them, recognizing a few names but not many. Feeling guilty for prying into Nate’s business. Besides, as much as he hated to admit it to himself, there was a pretty good chance Nate’s attack had nothing at all to do with business.

  The room buzzed with a quiet that rang in his ears. He was so used to coming home to a light in the sitting room or the rustle of mug and kettle in the kitchen. The latter he could remedy. He filled the kettle and put it on the stove. Then he wiped the crumbs from the table. A half loaf of bread sat open on a wooden cutting board. Nate must have been in a hurry. But he also must have been home between the time Hamish saw him at the office and the attack: the bread hadn’t been there earlier.

  He opened the Frigidaire in pursuit of the last of the morning’s milk. As he closed the door, his eyes settled on their most recent game of battleship. Nate affixed them proudly around the house.

  “We will learn and be better.” They saved all of them.

  Hamish ripped it from the icebox and tore it up. “Stupid game!” It was just another reminder of how much Nate had changed. No more chess. Battleship. Little dots instead of x’s. Papers in the hallway and in the living room and all over. He was too exhausted to mount the stairs and perform his usual nighttime routine. He found a leaflet for one of Nate’s neighborhood safety meetings. Sometimes he came up with excuses to miss them. Now he thought he would give anything to listen to Nate’s terrible puns and reminders for people to lock their doors and keep their trash bins roped so that rats and critters didn’t multiply in their housing units.

  He fell backward on the lumpy sofa, ripped his bow tie completely off, undid another two buttons of his shirt, and threw his arm over his eyes, hoping the extra darkness would speed what he prayed was a dreamless, imageless, Nate-less sleep.

  He awoke to the sound of the telephone, sat up, and hoped it was about Nate.

  “Hello!” he said urgently.

  “Hamish! Are you all right? Is Miss Van Buren?”

  Hamish blinked and ran his hand over his face. “Dad? Yes. Why? . . . Oh. Something in the papers there already?”

  “A violent attack at your North End office. MacDonald, you remember him? From the Herald? He rang when you were here at Christmas. Anyway, he rang over. He got it and nearly went mad when he saw the address. Not as mad as I did.”

  “It was a friend of mine.” Hamish barely kept his voice intact.

  “Does this have anything to do with the pamphlets that Miss Van Buren rang me about?”

  That woke him up. “Reggie called you?”

  “She had me look into some pamphlets from the Christian Patriots. They were requisitioned here by a D. Foster.”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “She also asked if I had heard from Luca.” There was a long pause. A significant pause. A pause that made the chiming grandfather clock in the hallway take on the solemnity of a death knell. “Have you heard from Luca?”

  Hamish reached for his glasses and slid them on his nose. He knew he wouldn’t get back to sleep now. “You always told me that a story kept in confidence required a measure of grace.”

  “Are you quoting me to evade talking about your cousin?”

  “You also told me that not everyone’s story is ours to tell.”

  “I taught you too well, it would seem.”

  “I appreciate your concern.”

  “And I appreciate not having to find out from the newspapers that my only son was shot in an altercation involving his cousin and—”

  “Three years.” Hamish pinched his nose. “It’s been almost three years and you knew the whole time and you are just talking about it now.” His dad and he had crossed mountains when it came to Hamish’s episodes of panic, his hiding his hand behind his back in intense moments, his ironing out his stutter, and yet . . .

  “A story kept in confidence requires a measure of grace.”

  Hamish let out a sound that hovered between a frustrated growl and a submissive yelp. “I give up.”

  “Just tell me if you hear from Luca.”

  Hamish said good-bye without promising anything. His heartbeat was thrumming and beads of sweat were forming at his hairline. Both familiar sensations that ebbed on the shore of a familiar episode.

  But why shouldn’t he panic?

  Someone had to be accountable for Nate. For the terrible views in the Christian Patriots pamphlets. For men like Bricker! Pete Kelly and his obvious black market. Errol Parker was subjected to inhumane pranks, and Dirk Foster was building his own house of cards that would only make those around him topple. And on top of it the city called Toby’s death an accident. A punch in the head. No, someone had to be accountable—it was how the world turned and how justice was served. Without accountability there was nothing. The war at home would last forever . . . and the people responsible for very possibly maiming his best friend would be free. He could just imagine Nate sliding back into the office and refusing to give up the name of his attacker out of some sense of forgiveness and reparation.

  Hamish focused on his sanctuary. Like Quasimodo. Here he could be himself. He could speak in his second language and sip espresso and taste Mrs. Leoni’s lemon cannoli as the bells clanged and the world was fresh and new. People knew him here, sure, but just as Hamish DeLuca, the kid with a penchant for contracts and legal matters. Nothing of the moon-shaped scars on his hands or his parents’ expectations followed him over the stones or draped from the tenement-style houses. He didn’t want anyone to take away his freedom.

  Through the open slice of window, a dog barked. A siren moaned. Familiar sounds. He gulped through a few breaths then snatched at a thought buzzing at the back of his brain. Hamish opened his sock drawer and reached under a flap of fake wood, withdrawing the scrap of paper bearing Luca’s number, worn from being in his pocket. The number was imprinted in his brain, but it gave his long fingers something to do.

  Luca’s writing was on a manifest found in a dead kid’s pocket, and Luca’s thumbprint was all over the new initiatives for shipping munitions on the same manifest.

  But Hamish was just a stuttering kid on a bike.

  A stuttering kid who at this moment felt his heartbeat mounting and an all-too-familiar pang in his chest. The walls seemed closer and the room drained of air. The same way it felt when Dr. Gillies told him he wouldn’t be able to fight for his country.

  “When men come back from war, they feel unwhole. It takes the people around them so they can feel whole. I think of you as one of those men, Hamish. You sit there and there is a part of you that is not whole. A part that is broken. A space that you can fill with friends and family. People who truly appreciate and care for you. You are not any different than patients who have an injury or a missing limb. There is a doctor here in the city who believes we should be doing a better job at deciding what young men we send over—and then we might be able to welcome them home on the other side ready to be citizens again. Look at you. You’re—”

  “Uneven? H-hopeless?”

  “Shaky.” Dr. Gillies lifted Hamish’s arm. “Look. You can’t fire a gun. Or call an order.” He gently released his grip. “Men over there cave under pressure. I saw it dozens of times in my unit. But I have the opportunity to stop you. Your eyes
ight isn’t perfect.”

  “But you would have signed me off.”

  “I am not just thinking of you, Hamish. I’m thinking of the other men in your unit. I’m saving their lives as well as your own. You’re not fit.”

  Not fit. Hopeless. So if he was so hopeless, why shouldn’t he call Luca? Choose a different side. Who would fight for Toby? Who would stop Bricker? The police wouldn’t. Reid had no jurisdiction. Hamish and Reggie only played at detective. But Hamish had a lifeline. Luca inspired great loyalty. But he also gave it. To Hamish.

  Hamish let his hand flop to his side. Why count his heartbeat? It was already thrumming at several times its natural pace. He splayed his palm on his chest: not to count but to feel. The breaths were more painful now: sharp and stabbing. He swallowed reason away and logic too. In moments like these he could focus on little. He sometimes couldn’t get past his own name.

  Tonight was different. It linked his current panic to the past in a chain tightening around him. He couldn’t patch up everything: the world, his inability to enlist, Reggie, Nate . . .

  Nate. His brain snagged on that name over and over. (Later, Hamish would rationally work through other solutions. His brain would easily conjure a list of steps taken again and again, never once landing on the option that found him reaching for the telephone.)

  A few ticks. Static. Finally, the operator patched him through. On the other end, a voice he hadn’t heard in almost two years.

  “Hello.”

  “One drop of wine is enough to redden an entire glass of water.” He had been playing the quote in his head over the ripple of silence. He hadn’t expected he would say it aloud.

  “Interesting greeting, Cicero,” his cousin said drily. “Am I correct in assuming it is something from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame?”

  “Luca, I need your help.” If he could fix one thing, then maybe everything else would domino into place.

  The voice on the other end was quiet, then said softly, “Are you in trouble?”

  Luca sounded so far. But Hamish knew he was close. The Parker House Hotel. A man who registered under the name Hult. None of it mattered now. “I’m not in trouble. But my friend Nate is.” Silence. Hamish waited several beats. Then said with urgency, “Luca, someone almost killed Nate. In his office. He’s in the hospital.”