Chapter 3 Harrison
HARRISON
“What do you mean?” Dinah asks.
“Think about it.” I place my cell phone on the nurses’ station counter. “The only communication we’ve received from Alissa has been written. She hasn’t called once. In a month.”
Dinah drops her jaw. “Dr. O’Rourke, you couldn’t possibly be insinuating…”
I hold up a hand. “I’m not insinuating anything. It’s just… They’ve been gone for so long. Before that, they were dating for all of two weeks. To go on a trip twice as long as the time you’ve actually been dating? It feels fishy.” I rub at my jaw. “Something isn’t right here.”
“Alissa seemed to be pretty head over heels for him, though,” Dinah says. “Those first few days she was mooning all over the hospital. Big, dreamy eyes, humming to herself. She was a walking cliché. Even the patients picked up on it.”
“Maddox seemed pretty into Alissa as well,” I reply. “But there’s something gnawing at the back of my neck about this.”
“I feel it, too. I tried to ignore it the first couple of weeks, but now it feels like we need to figure out what the hell is going on.”
“Steady, Dinah. There could be a rational explanation for all of this.” I draw in a breath. “Maybe we’re not seeing the forest for the trees here. We don’t know the whole story.”
“I suppose so. All I really know is that Alissa met Maddox two weeks before Valentine’s Day, and they saw a lot of each other those first few weekends.”
“And then she was back to work Monday.” I open the calendar app on my phone. “That would have been the ninth of February. What happened that day?”
Dinah focuses her gaze on the hospital computer. “It was a pretty normal day here… No big emergencies, no deaths… Oh! But that was the day Lou Chambers got his heart. She would have been overjoyed. He’s one of her all-time favorites.”
“Right. And Carol had just gotten her lungs a few days prior.” I tap my finger to my chin. “So Alissa was in a good mood.”
“Well…she should have been.” Dinah frowns.
“But shortly after I told her the good news, she got this haunted look on her face. Like she’d just seen a ghost or something.
It was just for a second, and then she pasted on a smile.
But she’s my best friend, Dr. O’Rourke. I could see through it in a heartbeat. ”
“Why didn’t you say something then?”
“Because she was off to go see Lou before his surgery. She didn’t have a lot of time to spare.”
“Of course.”
“If I remember though”—she narrows her eyes—“she had just come up the elevator with you when I saw her, told her about Lou.”
I smack my palm against my forehead. “Right. I came up with her on the elevator that day. Maddox had walked her to the hospital.” I furrow my brow as I try to remember. “And now that I think of it, he said something odd right before he left.”
Dinah widens her eyes. “What?”
“Well first off, my guard was already up because he had told me he was taking the day off from the haberdashery he runs in Uptown. Extremely out of character for Maddox. I don’t think he had ever closed the shop since his father’s death.
” I pace in front of the nurses’ counter.
“Something would really have to shake him to keep him from going to work. At the time I thought it was because of Alissa, but that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since it’s not as if he could hang out with her while she was working at the hospital. ”
“But what did Maddox say that was odd?”
“Right. His voice got all serious, which was very off-brand compared to our usual back and forth. He played it off as casual, but like you said, a best friend can tell when something’s up. He told me to make sure she stayed safe while she was working.”
Dinah lifts an eyebrow. “But St. Charles is perfectly safe.”
“I don’t think he was concerned about the hospital specifically. I think he was concerned about some outside force harming Alissa.”
Dinah shifts her gaze. “You mean…?”
“I don’t know what I mean.” I squeeze my eyes shut, try to remember the rest of the day. “I rode up the elevator with Alissa, and then you told her about Lou, and she sauntered off to see him. And then, later… She wasn’t looking where she was going and bumped into me.”
Dinah nods. “That sounds like Alissa. She often gets lost in thought.”
“Yeah, but she’s usually pretty attentive at work, so I asked her if anything was the matter. The way she was acting, plus Maddox’s strange request to make sure she was protected, had my hackles rising. So I asked her point-blank to tell me what was on her mind.”
“What did she say?”
“That there had been some kerfuffle at Aces Underground, that club Maddox took her to.”
“Oh, right. With the playing card waiters. Alissa told me all about it.”
“That’s the one. And Alissa told me they had learned something upsetting about the woman who runs the club.” I lean in, lower my voice. “Her name is Rouge Montrose.”
“Rouge Montrose.” Dinah bites her lip. “Why does that name sound familiar?”
“She’s involved in a lot of charities and businesses with the city, owns lots of clubs, Aces chief among them. But the reason you might hear her name now and then is that she also sits on the board of this very hospital.”
Dinah cocks her head. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
“It is.” I swallow. “It’s almost too much of a coincidence. The color drained from Alissa’s face when I told her.”
“Have you met this woman? Rouge Montrose, I mean?”
I shake my head. “Maddox always kept a healthy distance from her when he’d take me to the club. I never even knew her name was Rouge Montrose until Alissa told me. But Rouge is one of those people with a very…specific aura.”
Dinah leans in. “How do you mean?”
“Like… She’s very charming, very charismatic. But whenever she was within a few feet of me, I’d feel this…chill. Like a foreboding feeling that something terrible could happen at any moment.”
“Interesting.” Dinah scratches her chin. “And Alissa got mixed up with this woman?”
“Yeah. Or so she told me. She said she and Maddox found out something about Rouge and they were concerned it would affect Maddox’s membership at the club.”
Dinah frowns. “That’s it? Who the hell cares about his membership? He can go to another club. He’s a Hathaway, for Christ’s sake. Those sons of bitches can write their own ticket anywhere.”
“Yeah, it didn’t sit all that well with me, either,” I say.
“But that’s all I have to go on. As soon as I told Alissa that Rouge was a board member, she stormed off.
That was the last I saw of her that day.
She acted relatively normal the rest of the week when she was in.
But then, the night of the fourteenth, Maddox tried to call me.
I was working late and didn’t have my phone on me, so I missed the call.
He left me a simple voicemail, saying ‘Damn it, Harrison.’”
“What does that mean?”
“I texted him back the next morning. He told me it was nothing, and”—I hold up my phone, displaying my messages—“that was the last text he sent me before he told me he was taking Alissa out of town on a trip.”
Dinah presses her lips together. “Nothing is always something.”
“I felt the same way,” I reply. “But that’s the whole story. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do with it.”
“The only lead we have is this Rouge lady, right?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“Maybe we can have someone look into her?”
I cross my arms. “Rouge has paid off every single detective in town. I don’t think that’s the answer.” I rub at my forehead. “But that club is where Maddox took Alissa when things started getting fishy. I’ll go to Aces Underground myself and check things out.”
* * *
I chose to wear an elegant black tuxedo with a dark velvet bow tie. You don’t grow up the best friend of Maddox Hathaway and not learn a thing or two about men’s fashion.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not a member of Aces Underground. That weird-looking guy who runs the desk in the foyer will surely just turn me away.
Maybe I’ll convince another patron to let me in as their guest. I don’t know.
This is my only plan, so it has to work.
I make my way to the little alleyway off Randolph and State and walk until I find the black door with the four card-suit symbols on it.
Spades, Diamonds, Clubs, and Hearts.
I wonder why they chose that order.
I open the door and, sure enough, the tall guy in the fuchsia pinstriped suit leers at me. I spy the nameplate on his small pink desk. That’s right. His name is Chet.
He raises his white eyebrows. “Dr. O’Rourke. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen you here.”
“Indeed it has, Chet.” I pull out my wallet, hand him my ID.
Chet slowly reaches his arm out and grabs my ID. He lugs out his big book of member names, but I know that my name won’t be in there. He knows it, too. This is just a formality.
“I’m afraid your name is not on our list, Dr. O’Rourke,” Chet says. “Are you waiting to be escorted in by a member? We haven’t seen Mr. Hathaway in…quite some time.”
I take a deep breath in. “No, I’d like to be let in on my own merit.”
Chet furrows his brow, the grin on his face not wavering. “I’m afraid that’s not how we do things here at Aces, Doctor. As you are aware, members must be invited, typically by Rouge herself. Or they can inherit their membership, as was the case with your friend Mr. Hathaway.”
“But I’ve come here several times as a guest. It’s not as if I’m not already aware of your whole vibe here.”
Chet wrinkles his nose. “Our vibe, as you refer to it, has nothing to do with it. Rouge’s rules are ironclad, and my hands are tied.
” He reaches into his desk, pulls out a selection of pamphlets.
“You are more than welcome to frequent one of Rouge’s other clubs, though.
” He fans the pamphlets out on the desk.
“The Noir Parlor, Second Star, even MINOS… These are all wonderful establishments, and their rules for membership are not quite so stringent as ours.”
“You don’t understand, Chet,” I say. “I need to come here tonight.”
“If you’re not coming as the guest of a listed member, then—”
I slam my hands onto his pink desk, sending the club pamphlets fluttering to the floor. “Chet, you’re not hearing me. I demand that you let me in.”