Chapter Eight
EIGHT
“I don’t think I can go with you.”
Bea spoke in an undertone, glancing over her shoulder. Alba was seated at the Henrys’ kitchen table, hands locked around a cooling cup of coffee as though it were a lifeline. Behind her, Mrs. Henry stood with her hands on Alba’s slumped shoulders, head bent down as she spoke softly.
“Alba told my mother about me poking around Pearlie’s place yesterday,” Bea said, her mouth twisting. “I could slap her for that if she weren’t clearly so broken up about him. But Mama’s not happy. And I want to find out what Alba saw.”
“Is that what they’re talking about?” Vivian asked, her own voice not much more than a whisper.
She was standing in the doorway, hesitant to come in but still trying to get a good look at Alba without being too obvious.
Bea had said she and Pearlie were a couple, but Vivian hadn’t seen them together before, and she couldn’t help her curiosity.
Alba wasn’t anything like the sort of person Vivian would have pictured big, brash, friendly Pearlie being attracted to.
She was much younger than he was, lithe and pretty, with big dark eyes and a perpetually sarcastic edge to her smile.
She was always fashionably dressed at work, but today her hair had been pinned back sloppily, as if she hadn’t bothered with anything more than getting it out of her eyes, and she clutched a man’s coat around her shoulders like a blanket.
Vivian thought it must have been one of Pearlie’s, because it swamped her tiny frame.
She looked like her grief was a physical weight.
She barely lifted her head, her eyes fixed on her mug, though she nodded at whatever Mrs. Henry was saying.
“I don’t know,” Bea said, looking nervous. “Alba showed up here maybe thirty minutes ago. Last time I saw them together, I didn’t think Mama even liked her. But now…” She glanced over her shoulder again. “I mean, it’s gotta be about Pearlie, right? But I dunno what—”
“Beatrice, we need you to—Oh, hello, Vivian.” Mrs. Henry had straightened and was now frowning at the two of them. “Why are you lurking in the doorway, honey?”
Vivian lifted the basket that she had set down by her feet. “I picked up some groceries for you all. There’s fresh milk for the kids. And sugar for your coffee.”
Mrs. Henry nodded, one hand rubbing her back where it always ached from being on her feet too many hours of the day.
She wore the uniform for the restaurant where she worked six days a week as a waitress, and even in that she was beautiful.
Mrs. Henry was a woman who had presence, no matter what life seemed to throw at her—and it had thrown a lot.
From the grim set of her mouth and eyes, it was clear that Pearlie’s death was just one more tragedy to soldier through.
“That’s sweet of you, honey,” she said, not really paying attention.
“Will you and Beatrice put them away, please? The little ones will be home soon, and Alba and I have to head to the coroner’s office. ”
Vivian, already walking toward the kitchen cupboard, froze. She and Bea exchanged a nervous glance. After a moment of silent panic—eyebrows raised, heads shaking quickly—Bea spoke up.
“Why’re you going there?”
“We have to claim your uncle’s body,” Alba said, her voice tense and miserable.
Vivian shuddered a little. Too often, when someone in their run-down little neighborhood died, the family struggled to scrape together the money for a decent burial.
Those who couldn’t afford it had to leave their loved ones’ bodies with the coroner’s office, destined for a mass grave on Hart Island, where the unknown and unclaimed of the city’s morgues were sent.
Technically, the Henrys should have close to two weeks to claim Pearlie’s body for burial.
But the rules weren’t always followed, especially when it came to poor folks.
Vivian couldn’t blame Mrs. Henry, or even Alba, for wanting to hurry. But if there hadn’t been time for Leo’s favor yet …
“Can it wait a day?” Bea asked, earning herself a look of confusion from her mother and one of disgust from Alba. “Please, it’s important.”
“What could be more important than treating your uncle with respect, when it’s the very last thing we can do for him?” Alba demanded, setting down her coffee so forcefully that it splashed over the cup’s edge and spattered the table. She didn’t seem to notice, but Mrs. Henry grimaced.
“Why do you get a vote, Alba? You’re not even part of this family,” Bea snapped. Vivian suddenly wished she were anywhere else.
The emotions flew across Alba’s face in quick succession: pain, then sorrow, before settling into pure rage. Her eyes were full of angry tears, her mouth already open on a torrent of sharp words, before Mrs. Henry gripped her shoulders.
“You need to keep yourself calm, remember?” she murmured, just loudly enough to be heard where Vivian and Bea were standing. “She’s hurting, same as you. But you think about what Pearlie would want you to do, hear me?” She turned to Bea before Alba could argue. “Why on earth would we want to wait?”
“Because…” Bea looked to Vivian, who shook her head uselessly.
It wasn’t her uncle, wasn’t her family. It couldn’t be her choice whether or not to say anything.
Bea grimaced, then took a step forward, squaring her shoulders.
“Mama, there was a hiding spot behind Pearlie’s bed, and there used to be money in there, cash from a—”
“From a job he did for some mobster, I know,” Mrs. Henry interrupted. The ugly words were jarring, delivered in her soft voice with no emotion.
Bea stared at her mother. “You know?”
“Of course I know, girl. Pearlie was no good at keeping secrets when he was excited about something.” Mrs. Henry shook her head. “Thought he’d at least have the sense to keep it from you, though. I’d wring his neck if he was…” She broke off, looking suddenly stricken.
“Well, then, you’ll know why I don’t think Pearlie killed himself,” Bea said, her voice suddenly hoarse.
“What?” Alba stood, pushing off Mrs. Henry’s hands. “What do you mean—”
“I think someone else must have wanted him dead.” Now that she had started, Bea seemed like she couldn’t stop.
The words poured out of her, like a river of music from an untuned piano, heartbroken and angry.
“Because who’s going to kill himself when he’s got cash enough to change his life, and more coming in—It doesn’t make sense, Mama, you have to see that.
So if we just wait a little, we can find out who—”
“No.”
“Mrs. Henry, we can be careful about it, I promise,” Vivian put in, glancing at Bea’s stricken face.
Part of her wanted to stay out of it, but even more of her wanted to back up her friend.
“Someone I know has connections at the coroner’s office, so he’s asking them to look into it. They should be able to—”
“No.”
The sharp word hung in the air, startling all of them.
Even Mrs. Henry looked surprised by how forceful she had sounded.
She took a deep breath. “You don’t need to be prying into Pearlie’s life,” she said.
Her voice was soft; thawed of its frost, Vivian could hear a current of fear running underneath.
“No matter what happened, no good comes from getting mixed up with those kind of people, or from getting in their way. I know you and your uncle were close, Beatrice. But you let things be, you hear me?”
“Wait, do you mean you don’t think he killed himself either?
” Alba demanded. Mrs. Henry tried to urge her back into her chair, but Alba shook her hands off, stepping away from the table, her movements quick and jerky.
“Why didn’t you say something? What do you think happened?
You have to tell me, Della, you have to—” Her voice was rising as she spoke, her breathing coming faster.
“Alba, you have to calm down—Think of the—Alba!”
It was no use. Alba shook off Mrs. Henry’s hands once more, then kept shaking her head, growing more hysterical.
“Bea, get Dr. Harris,” Mrs. Henry ordered. “Tell him Alba’s in a state and he needs to come quick. It isn’t safe for her to be getting agitated like this.”
“Mama, what—”
“Do what I say. Now.”
Bea nodded, already sliding her feet into shoes. “Yes, Mama.” She didn’t waste time arguing or asking more questions—when Della Henry spoke like that, her children listened.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Vivian asked as they hurried out the door.
Bea looked as though she wanted to say yes, but in the end she shook her head. “You find Leo and get to the coroner’s office. We need answers, and we need them quick.”
“What if the coroner says nothing strange happened, it was just…” Vivian couldn’t bring herself to say the word suicide, not to Bea. Not yet.
Bea’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t have time to argue. “Get going and find out, will you? I need to find the doctor.”
Walking through the halls to the coroner’s office made Vivian shudder, and not just because she could picture a corpse on the other side of every door.
The city’s chief medical examiner kept his offices as part of Bellevue Hospital, a large, ominous building overlooking the East River.
Not many years ago, the position had been held by a man who knew nothing about science but was very good at taking orders from the sort of people who put politicians in power.
But there had been a scandal that had made so much of a splash in the papers that even the Tammany political machine couldn’t protect their man.
The old medical examiner was out and a new one had taken his place.