Murder in the City of Liberty

by Rachel McMillan

  Luca squeezed Hamish’s shoulder. “You’re such a good kid.” He adjusted the brim of his expensive hat. “You’re the best person I know, Hamish DeLuca. Don’t ever—ever—let anyone change even one ounce of who you are. Not even me.”

  “We’re long beyond your having any kind of influence on me.” Hamish tried to keep his voice light, wondering if it was true.

  “Good.”

  “And if we f-find ourselves on opposite sides?” Hamish said, his stutter flaring.

  “You should still call me. For anything. That doesn’t change, Hamish.” The door clicked closed behind him.

  Hamish lingered a moment, then returned to the sitting room, sinking into the armchair by the window that Luca had occupied, peering through the curtains to the street. His eyes avoided the crumpled newspaper as his heartbeat sped up, his breath coming in jagged gasps as if everything he had been able to counter with Luca there was now unfettered.

  He didn’t move save for the rise and fall of his shoulders and the drop of his head to his knees until the telephone jangled in the kitchen. Hamish debated answering; his mind was reeling, heart thudding, world off-kilter.

  “Hamish DeLuca?”

  “Yes.”

  “I probably shouldn’t be calling you, but the papers will be out soon enough.” It was Reid. “I have some news on Walt Bricker.”

  Hamish rubbed at the space around his heart; it had, if possible, constricted even more with the sound of Bricker’s name.

  “A witness has come forward.”

  Hamish listened to the rest of Reid’s sentence as if in a fog. Hearing a few words through a spinning brain. Piecing together the entirety of the puzzle only when Reid signed off. An altercation was seen between Kelly and Bricker, resulting in the latter’s death. The former had a history of drunk and violent behavior. Though Kelly was adamant that Bricker had been dealt quite a few blows before he got there and assumed he could get away with just finishing the job. Hamish felt all of the air leave his lungs in a delicious deflation. I am not responsible. For a brief moment the world wasn’t tilted on its axis. Hamish felt absolved. Reggie would surely forgive him, and the thoughts that plagued his brain in the dark moments just before sleep finally arrived would be a thing of the past.

  Hamish stood stone-still in the kitchen, unbalanced. For the millionth time, he wished he heard Nate’s footsteps overhead. Why would Luca accept the blame for something he wasn’t responsible for? Because Hamish helped him get away before? Because he wanted to prove he was invincible?

  “Because he wants me to still believe in his power,” Hamish said to the empty kitchen, to the thrum and buzz of the icebox, to the vehicle backfiring out the window, to the slow and steady tick of the clock in the front room. “That he would do something magnanimous for me. He needs me to believe in him.”

  For the first time in his life, Hamish felt something for Luca he hadn’t before. It knotted his chest and turned his stomach a little, sheened his forehead with perspiration and started his hand trembling. It wasn’t love or pride or anger or hatred or misunderstanding. It was far worse. Belittling. Pity.

  Hamish’s hand hovered over the telephone. He took a breath and began to dial a number that his fingers knew before his brain even caught up. Then stopped.

  What was the point? Just to remind his father what he lived with every day? Hamish couldn’t fathom the burden of carrying someone’s death with him, like a millstone. Especially not the death of a family member. He breathed in deeply. Empathy. His father wrote of it often as the greatest gift. The least Hamish could do was offer some.

  He dialed another number instead.

  “Station One,” said a female voice on the line.

  “Hamish DeLuca for Maisie Forth.”

  A second later, a bright voice funneled through the wire. “Cracker Jacks, DeLuca. Calling me at my place of work. The other girls think you’re my boyfriend. Which you are not. Rich Halbot asked me out again last night. Took me to the Royal York for cocktails and—”

  “Maisie, I need a favor.” He smiled. Cut her off.

  “Sure thing, kiddo.”

  “Your dad keeps all his case files still, eh?”

  “Piles and piles.”

  “I need you to look into my uncle. Tony Valari. Find out what happened in Chicago. Summer 1912. Who he was working for. If the same . . . operation or what have you . . . is still in existence.”

  The other end of the line was quiet. “You’re finally going there, huh?”

  He twirled the telephone cord around his finger. “I need to understand Luca a little better.”

  September 1940

  The Court of Miracles was a study in jubilant tranquility. The racket came from applause and thundering footsteps as hundreds crowded into the Prado until the churchyard spilled like an overturned vessel. Banners draped low and light in Hanover Street. But it was peaceful. The fountain jumped and pranced in the prism of September light. The sun was kind enough to settle just above the steeple of the Old North Church, its rays snagging on the tower where the fateful lantern hung to signal the arrival of the British. Today Hamish felt even the sunshine had a smell, contributing to the potpourri of basil and bread, oil and gasoline, and coffee.

  The sculptor, Cyrus Dallin, was given a finite moment to speak of the artistry that consumed most of his life. A moment in a languorous symphony of speeches. Hamish would have been caught up in the excitement of the moment even if he didn’t know every last thing about Dallin and the statue’s history from Nate’s unending enthusiasm.

  Nate leaned on his walking stick, Sarah Abrams affixed to his other arm, straining to see over the sea of people to Dallin himself. The statue was still shrouded in its covering, and Hamish enjoyed his friends’ excitement. Nate was looking beyond the gift-wrapped emblem of liberty to its creator. Dallin had a pointed white beard and an intelligent gaze—an interesting face.

  “I almost didn’t live to see this,” Nate said somberly, turning from Sarah without loosening his grip on his cane or her elbow. “Can you imagine?”

  It was one of the few times Hamish had heard his friend speak morbidly. Hamish imagined a city of freedom that had found a darkness underneath. While people applauded and alighted at this symbol of Revere’s magnificent trail to liberty, so many were still shackled. Hamish tugged at his collar, thinking of Errol.

  The sky was turquoise in a parade of autumn light. Hamish thought the North End courted all seasons well, but there was something about the crisp blessing of autumn winds and the slight chill that matched the red brick and cobblestones better than any other time of year. Now, the Prado—that eruption of space cloistered between the bells of St. Stephen’s and the Old North Church—would display a grand emblem of liberty.

  Hamish scratched under his collar. Liberty. This Revere statue and the pomp and circumstance of officials and politicians droning on in monotones the crowd could barely hear.

  Hamish couldn’t fit into this liberty, though he promised himself he would stand through the endless processions for Nate and his palpable excitement. Nate’s new love was at his side and the world was shimmering around him.

  More speeches and words that fell on deafening applause. No Reggie though. She should be here: her freckled nose squinting in the sun, her profile upturned intelligently. Her little asides. Just like the one he was giving Nate. He hadn’t seen her in two months. She had gone home to spend time with her mother, to help her father with his books. They talked on the phone, and something about her voice was always just out of reach. Something evading him that he couldn’t place his finger on. But he was determined to learn what it was. To erase any last lines between them. Not seeing Reggie was becoming harder and harder. There were no little mysteries in the office. Just contracts and legal paperwork and the headlines that tugged the war closer and closer even as it rampaged in Europe and pulled men from Toronto by the hundreds.

  “He worked his whole life,” Nate was saying, breaking Hamish’s thought. �
�And he was given but a moment.”

  Hamish faltered as Nate clutched his stick in one hand and clasped Sarah Abram’s hand with the other. Nate was immortal in his incessant need to speak and write and be the conscience of an entire neighborhood. A blip or notch on a long line of time. A moment. They were all given but a moment . . . to snatch and keep or hold tight.

  The cover was pulled back and the life-sized statue was resplendent, catching the lacy pattern of the shadow of the leaves as the sun filtered through them. Revere with the aura of a knight fighting for his new world, hat draped in hand, dashing in the direction of Charlestown to round up the farmers of Lexington and Concord and start a revolution. Every detail was deft, shadowed by sunlight highlighting the crevices of Dallin’s mastery: the muscled flanks of the horse’s thighs and hoofs, the blacksmith’s boots in the stirrups. Hamish could spend a lifetime gaping up at this artistry and never see the entirety of its sculptor’s intent.

  Your great cathedrals. Their architects never saw the end of their labors. They went to their graves never seeing their final product. Boston was in itself a cathedral: towering, bells pealing, attempting through history and humanity and light to reach heaven on merit and folklore and legend.

  Cyrus Dallin saw the fruits of his labor. Poorer. Older. Hamish wasn’t sure if he was wiser. But he lived to see his legacy.

  Ascending to the top of a church. Pulling back the curtain on a crime. Or, in Nate’s case, holding out his arms to the whole of a historic neighborhood and tugging it into him.

  Then the crowd dispersed. Hamish left Nate and Sarah to explore the statue and catch another look at the sculptor.

  Hamish was happy life was finding its usual rhythm of Nate and history, cobblestones and cannoli. There was just one thing missing under the span of blue sky.

  He smiled, sidestepping inhabitants he knew well. Neighbors whose names were imprinted on his mind. Who once looked like tiny dots in a battleship game but now flourished in real, beating life.

  And in the middle of the commotion and the symphony of North End sounds—the bells tolling and the carts rolling across the uneven stones, the whistles and layered languages of the world, the music spilling from somewhere high above a flower box—he focused on a figure in yellow.

  Bright as the sunshine and the catch of the window light on Vaughan’s ring.

  The clack of Reggie’s Spanish heels on the stones echoed the nearer he came. Revere was alive now, and every time he crossed over that slip of a courtyard he knew by heart he would take a moment and stall and wonder. The redbrick Prado with its fountain, wedged between two churches, their bells pealing jubilantly as if for him . . . and her, of course.

  “Regina!” Hamish caught her elbow, turning her so her dress spun around her bare legs.

  She was crying in the middle of the sunlight while the rest of the city was a smile.

  “Reggie, what’s the matter?”

  She looped her arms around his neck and held him tight. He could feel a stream of tears trickle onto his neck. He tightened his grip and let his long fingers fall into the curls at the back of her neck. “Reggie?”

  She mumbled something into the space between his cheek and earlobe, damp with tears and breath.

  “I’m sorry?” he gently disentangled her and searched her face.

  “I missed you, Hamish.”

  Hamish smiled, loving the feel and smell and nearness of her. “I wasn’t even half of myself without you, Reg.”

  * * *

  Reggie loved him, of course. With every breath and every thought and every pulse of adventure. She loved him beyond reason. Loved him enough to tug him out of his bell tower and into the sun-dappled North End even as the world blasted its uncertainty over the wireless and in the newsreels. She wanted to throw her lot in with his until she couldn’t tell where she ended and he began: insecurity and episodes and shaking fingers and hiccupped breaths. She wanted to breathe something into him. Something pristine and new—just like the statue erected in the corner of the world as familiar to them as their collective heartbeats. And she needed him to be a center for her as she navigated the choices she saw around her. Her father. Vaughan. The world she so long held tightly to slipping through her fingers, and not on account of her running away.

  Hamish was expectant. Watching her through lenses reflecting the sunlight, blinking his wide blue eyes into focus on her, then painting over her face, his gaze like a brush. Then they were in the North Square, having stolen through an alley crisscrossed with fire escapes and stones nudged close together, a slice of secret in the rambling bricks of the North End. The North Square was a burst of lemony light. Mrs. Leoni’s awning at one end ushering in Prince Street, the familiar schoolchildren ignoring their teacher’s guidance before the wood-slatted Revere House.

  She lightened her voice for him, turned on the switch that allowed her to straighten her shoulders and tuck the hurt and insecurity inside.

  He walked calmly beside her, the swing of her skirt brushing his pant leg. One minute he looked like a kid at Christmas: knowing there was a stocking full of wrapped toys but unsure when would be the appropriate moment to dive in and explore. The next, his eyes were on her profile and something was turning over in his mind. His hand shook slightly to prove it.

  “So you see, Hamish DeLuca,” she said, keeping her eyes on her shoes, her tears drying, the uncertainty of the future and her father’s choices and Luca falling with the stream of sunshine pooling on the stones. “I am a silly girl who spends too much time in her mind and gets too excited about the prospect of murder. But I love you. Truly, wholly love you. And I always, always will. And so I think . . .” She looked up at him. Then said, “No! Don’t open your mouth! Don’t you dare think of speaking. Van Buren comes before DeLuca, remember? It’s there on the front of the door. I practiced in my head. Everything I was going to say.” His eyes were bright and glistening, his cheeks flushed with surprise. His two forefingers crooked underneath his suspender. A measured count.

  She reached up on her oxfords and brushed a comma of black hair from an ear that stuck out just a little—not too much—the perfect amount, settling her fingertips in the crook of his neck. Her Journal of Independence opened across the space of her imagination. Make Hamish happy, she had written over and over again. Hamish. Here he was. Right before her. She would fling herself smack dab into the middle of loving him with his short breaths and panic episodes, his tremors and stutters and shakes. “Your heartbeat,” she whispered, treasuring the slight reverberation in her throat, sure that her voice would tickle in his earlobe. His breath was jagged. She was breaking something and settling in the cracks within. Too close. Just right. Squeezing the breath and the inhibition and her heritage from her. She spoke again in an uneven whisper. “So, as I said, I was practicing . . .”

  “You’re lying to me, Regina.” His voice was steady. “But you’re here and I’ll protect you. Whatever it is. Do you understand? I would do anything for you. My Reggie.”

  “I love you.”

  “I know.”

  He pulled her in and she was surprised that someone could be so firm and gentle at the same time. He kissed her first at her temples, just a soft brush, then over her cheeks, and then, before making his way down to her lips (too slowly, for her taste), he ripped off his glasses and folded them into his pocket. Now there wasn’t an inch between them. She eagerly opened her mouth so that she could return everything. Every last thing! And he kissed her very senseless, while the colors of their neighborhood exploded and the bells continued to chime.

  A Note from the Author

  While Murder in the City of Liberty draws greatly on the political and sociocultural climate of 1940 Boston, I did take fictional liberties to heighten the atmosphere and tension of Hamish and Reggie’s world in an accessible way.

  As a voracious reader of historical fiction, I am most invested in stories that are suffused with enough historical ambience and detail that I am inspired to read more about t
heir settings and time periods, and I sincerely hope readers feel the same.

  While the Christian Patriots were a fictional organization, many anti-Semitic and racist groups were rampant in large cities across the United States and many of the viewpoints aligned with Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent became popularized as the war rampaged overseas.

  All of the baseball teams and players are fictional, but I did find Ken Burns’s Baseball: An Illustrated History a remarkable snapshot of the racial tensions experienced by players of color in Major League Baseball during the first half of the century.

  During the beginning years of World War II in Canada, there were many shifts in the view of psychological evaluation for men enlisting. Psychology was still met with skepticism, but within the higher ranks of personnel selection, greater attention was being placed on determining the psychiatric competence of men fit or unfit for duty. I find it likely that a Canadian doctor would—beyond the censure of his colleagues in the medical field—posit that men with anxiety with episodes and visible symptoms such as Hamish would be seen unfit for duty overseas. After all, many of the men on these committees served themselves in the Great War.

  The Cyrus Dallin Museum in Arlington, Massachusetts, was an incredible place to learn more about the man behind the iconic statue in the Prado behind the Old North Church. I highly recommend reading more about the nearly half century it took for the statue to find its rightful place and for Dallin to fulfill his promised commission. As well as on-site research, I found Rell G. Francis’s Cyrus Dallin: Let Justice Be Done a fantastic pictorial guide to this remarkable man and his work.

  I did rely on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s impressive range of 1930s maps to attempt to recreate the Boston Reggie and Hamish would have cycled and strolled. All errors in the presentation of history are completely my own.