Chapter Five #2
Bea shook her head. “Not yet. Not until I can prove something. Pearlie wasn’t her brother, but she’s still…
” Bea stopped mid-stair, pulling in a shuddering breath and dropping her forehead against the wall.
Vivian took her friend’s hand, and Bea squeezed it like it was a lifeline.
“She’s having a hard enough time now, between managing her own self and trying to explain things to Baby.
The boys are old enough that they get it, they’re sad but they’re not confused. But Baby…”
Bea shook her head again, and Vivian caught a glimpse of something wet on her friend’s cheek before Bea brushed it angrily away.
Vivian didn’t say anything. One thing they had in common was hating to let anyone see them cry.
Bea gave her hand a final squeeze and straightend up.
“Anyway,” she continued. “I don’t want to say anything until I know it for sure. ”
Leo was waiting for them outside, watching the door, hands in his pockets while he leaned against a streetlamp and whistled. When he saw them emerge, he stopped whistling, took his hands out of his pockets, and pulled off his hat.
“Beatrice,” he said, his voice more somber than Vivian would have expected. “I’m sorry to hear about your uncle.”
Bea eyed him, clearly surprised by the gesture but unwilling to let it change her mind about him. “Did you know him?” she asked coldly.
“No,” Leo said, unoffended. “Saw him a time or two at the Nightingale. But I know losing family’s hard.”
He said it with sympathy, but Vivian heard a roughness to the words.
Leo had once mentioned that his father lived on Long Island, and she was pretty sure he had been telling the truth.
But beyond that, she knew little about his family.
He was estranged from his mother’s relatives, except his tenuous connection to his uncle the commissioner, but she didn’t know anything about where his father’s family was or what kind of relationship he had with them or even whether his mother was still alive.
That had never struck her as odd before—folks who met over a cocktail and a dance in a jazz club didn’t tend to share more about their lives than they had to.
And Leo held his secrets close to his chest. But now she found herself wondering who he had lost, and when, and how.
“Appreciate it,” Bea said. “But you’re still going to make me prove he didn’t do it himself, aren’t you?”
“You don’t have to prove it,” Leo said. “But if I’m going to ask the medical examiner to do me a favor, I need to be able to tell him why.”
Vivian watched them, her eyes darting from one face to the other. But Bea only sighed. “Come on, then.” She turned and started walking, her shoulders tense and her stride so brisk it looked like she might collapse if she stopped moving. She didn’t turn to see if they would follow.
Vivian glanced at Leo, not bothering to hide her worry. He gave her shoulder a brief squeeze before following Bea, with Vivian bringing up the rear.
“It’s not much to look at,” Bea said quietly as she looked around Pearlie’s onetime home.
There was only one room; like the building where Vivian lived, the shared washroom was out in the hallway.
A large iron bedframe was pushed up against one wall, made up for the summer with lightweight sheets that had been tossed back over the footboard to air it out, presumably after Pearlie’s body had been taken away.
In the center of the room was a heavy wooden table, dented and nicked by the many families that had likely used it over the years, and one wall was taken up with a stove, washbasin, and cupboard.
But in spite of the sparse furniture, the room was cluttered in a way that felt cozy and lived in.
Books were piled on the floor and table, and a basket at the foot of the bed held blankets waiting for when the weather turned cold.
Vivian felt an ache in her chest, thinking of the winter that Pearlie wouldn’t be there to see, and she turned quickly, looking for something else for her eyes to rest on.
There was a typewriter sitting on the table, and on the wall hung three photographs, faces in shades of gray smiling out of the frames.
Vivian stepped closer to look at them. Two were groups of people, but one showed two men.
One of them was Pearlie, younger than when Vivian had known him but still broad-shouldered and tall, with a playful lift to one eyebrow.
The other man was a little older, sharply dressed and with a wide, gentle smile, one arm around Pearlie and one holding a little girl with an enormous bow in her hair.
“My father.”
Vivian jumped; she hadn’t heard Bea come up next to her.
Her friend was staring at the photograph with hungry, sad eyes.
“We hadn’t seen Pearlie since my father died until he turned up here at the beginning of the summer.
I was so happy that he came to find us. We don’t have much left in the way of family, and ever since…
” She cleared her throat. “He had a lot of fun stories about Dad from when they were growing up. Left Baby and the boys in stitches every night after dinner. Me too,” she added in a whisper.
“And that’s you?” Vivian asked quietly. The little girl smiled sunnily at the camera, her head resting contentedly on her father’s shoulder.
Bea nodded without saying anything.
“It’s a nice place,” Leo said, making both girls start a little. “Small, but nice.”
It was nice, Vivian thought, looking around.
There was no wardrobe, but hooks on the wall held two suits, each with a matching hat hung just above it.
She stepped closer. She had only ever seen Pearlie in the black suit he wore when he worked at the Nightingale, but she had spent enough years sewing clothing to appreciate the other: sharply cut, made with elegant lines and expensive fabric.
She frowned. There was a nightstand between the suits and the bed; Vivian pulled open the top drawer and found a box of carefully folded handkerchiefs and ties.
She reached out to touch them, even though she didn’t need to.
She could tell what the fabric was just by looking.
She glanced up to find Bea watching, her apprehension clear in the nervous way she was biting her lower lip. “Where was Pearlie getting his money, Bea?” Vivian asked quietly.
Bea swallowed. “Pearlie can’t have been one of those poor joes so in despair that he couldn’t see any way out,” she said in a low voice. “He wasn’t poor, not anymore, and he could see a way out.” She glanced at Leo.
“What did you find, Viv?” he asked.
“Silk for his handkerchiefs and ties,” Vivian said. “The suit he wore to work at the Nightingale was nothing special, but the other one is top quality. And so is the hat.”
“Money isn’t always enough to stop folks from falling into despair,” Leo said gently, but he sounded uneasy.
“I noticed the suit first,” Bea said, coming to stand next to Vivian.
“Guess it comes of spending so much time with you, Viv. And then I noticed the neckties.” She glared at the drawer, then abruptly shoved it shut.
“I asked Pearlie what was going on. And he told me. A big payout from a mob boss, he said, and he spent a little, but most of it he squirreled away. And another one coming soon. Just one more job to finish, and then he was moving out of this sad little place. On to bigger and better things. He was going to take my whole family with him.”
“Out of New York?” Vivian said, suddenly feeling like a vise had squeezed around her chest. She wanted what was best for Bea and her family, she truly did. But what would she do without her friend?
“To Harlem or something. Somewhere better than here.” Bea cast a critical eye around the small room, but Vivian suspected she wasn’t really seeing it.
Bea gave every penny she made to her mother, hoping to buy a better life for her brothers and sister than a precarious living in two rickety rooms in a neighborhood that most of the city forgot even existed.
“He wasn’t despairing. He was the most hopeful person I knew.
He was downright jaunty. He said things were just getting better and better.
He had a plan.” Bea shuddered. “And now he’s dead, and I’m supposed to think he just couldn’t take it anymore and swallowed arsenic?
Fat chance. I think someone killed him, and I want to know who. ”
“Did he say where he hid the money?” Leo asked.
“Does it matter?”
“It does if we want to make sure he was telling the truth. Maybe he just stole those things and didn’t want to tell you that.”
“You can’t steal a suit like that,” Vivian pointed out. “Not and have it fit.”
“He said it was here,” Bea said.
A quiet gasp echoed through the room, and all three of them wheeled around to find a woman in the doorway. Her eyes, already large and dark and fringed by extravagant lashes, were wide with shock as she stared at them.
“Alba?” Bea frowned, taking a step forward. “How long you been standing there?”
The woman, Alba, was older than Bea and Vivian, but not by much. And she didn’t answer, just stared at them without speaking before turning abruptly and hurrying away.
“Alba!” Bea yelled, but she was already gone.
“Who was that?” Leo asked, looking wary. “Do I know her?”
“Alba,” Vivian said slowly. “Alba Diaz.” Alba had come and gone so fast Vivian felt as though she had imagined seeing her. But the pain and surprise in her expression had been all too real.
“She works at the Nightingale,” Bea said, eyes still on the doorway where Alba had been. “You’ve probably seen her around there. That’s where she and Pearlie met. They’ve been seeing a lot of each other recently.”
“They’re a couple?” Vivian asked, surprised. “I never saw them together.”
“They’ve been keeping it quiet at work, I think.
And from her family.” Bea scowled, and her voice was brittle and bitter as she spoke.
“Apparently her people wouldn’t have liked her stepping out with someone like my uncle.
I hope she didn’t hear what we were saying,” she added, lip curling.
“She’s probably dumb enough to blab it all over. ”
“She heard something,” Leo said grimly. “And I don’t think it made a good impression. Can’t believe we left the door open.”
“We didn’t,” Bea said, rubbing at the spot between her eyebrows. “Lord, my head hurts something fierce.”
“Should we go after her?” Vivian asked hesitantly. “She looked…”
“We’ll talk to her tonight,” Bea said firmly, going to close the door once more. “If we’re here now, we’re getting this done, because I don’t want to come back.” She gestured toward the bed. “Help me slide that out, will you? I’ll prove it. Pearlie didn’t do this to himself.”
Pearlie had been too clever to hide anything under the bed, Vivian realized.
Instead, Bea instructed them to slide the bed toward the door until there was a foot and change of space between its head and the corner where it had rested.
There, in the spot that had been behind the headboard, a rectangle of knotty wood covered up a hole in the wall.
It looked like the sort of shoddy, slapdash patching that Vivian was used to seeing in her own building.
It didn’t even have nails in each corner.
But the hole for one of the nails that was there was a little too big. Bea pulled it out of the wall easily, and the board slipped out of place, swinging around the remaining nail to hang with its long edge down. Behind it, a neat cubby had been cut into the wall.
“Smart,” Leo said, nodding. “Did he make it himself, or was it here already?”
Of course Leo would admire a good hiding spot. He probably had more than one in his own home. Vivian was about to say something sharp when she caught sight of Bea’s face. “What is it?” she asked.
“The money,” Bea said. Her voice was quiet, but there was an edge of panic under her words. “It’s not here.”