Comeuppance Served Cold, page 8
“Sullen?”
“Polite enough, but I could smell the gin from across the room. She’s . . . numb.” Marguerite set down her teacup. “The brother Francis is dangerous.”
“A heartbreaker, is he? I shouldn’t wonder, with all Daddy’s money.”
The dressmaker leaned forward. “I’m serious, Dolly. He’s hard on women.”
Dolly laughed.
“It’s no joke. He’s got a trick, invisibility or something, and a mean temper. If you’re going to take a run at them, keep out of his reach. He’s got a type, girl, and you’re it. He likes them tall with dark hair.”
Dolly shook her head. “Any other gossip about this naughty boy?”
“He got himself a little gang of ruffians who shake down the waterfront magicians, and his father protects him.”
“That all-powerful father,” Dolly said.
“He is. He controls the Commission of Magi, and they are squeezing out the unlicensed magickers. Even people who aren’t magicians, just on the fringes. I think most of the time, he’s pleased with his son’s gang. They can do what he can’t.”
“He can’t be pleased with the daughter’s antics. Where does she get her hooch, do you know?”
“She likes speaks. There’s one called Violet’s Hat Shop. It’s near the waterfront, pretty high-class, I hear. Fiona’s mentioned a ‘new hat,’ and it’s clear she doesn’t mean haberdashery. I’m worried about her, honestly. I think she’s spiking her drink with shimmer-shim.”
“That could kill her.”
“Like everyone who’s riding down that road, she’s been warned, but she doesn’t care.” Marguerite fiddled with her plate. “Dolly, if you’re thinking of stealing from them, I’d think again. The house is warded, and there’s talk of a safe that’s more than unbreakable. They’ve had a couple of burglaries, and it hasn’t ended well for the thieves.”
Dolly gave a careless shrug. It was one she had practiced. “I might just be thinking of settling down. It’s like the Wild West up here, isn’t it? There might be room for a girl like me.”
“Just be careful.”
“They seem like an isolated family, all alone in their castle. What about mistresses? Did the White King ever cheat on his queen?”
“At least twice, from hints Blanche dropped, but he was discreet and didn’t embarrass her.”
“How gallant. Anyone now?”
“The whispers are there’s a girlfriend. He’s been known to”—Marguerite cleared her throat theatrically—“‘spend the night at his club’ a couple times a week.”
“But he hasn’t remarried.”
“Oh, she’s not of his social class.”
“The poor man. All alone on his pinnacle.”
“He’s generous, they say. He’s donated a lot to help wounded veterans, and he contributes to a school for licensed magickers, but he has only a few friends. He and Mortimer Lester, they go way back, back to when he first came here. Mortimer’s not magic, but he came from money, and he took Ambrose up right away, introduced him to the Bartelles. Lester’s in real estate. And one or two members of the city council dine with Earnshaw and play golf with him on occasion.”
Dolly rolled her eyes and let her head drop to one side as if in a stupor. “For crying out loud, what a bore this man is!”
“Unless you’re trying to make a living as a magicker, or an herbalist, or curandera,” Marguerite said. “Then you might find him a little too interesting. Do you have a place to stay? My guest room’s available.”
Dolly stood. “No, thanks. I have lodgings.”
Marguerite stood too. “Clothes?”
“You’re a temptress, but no. Thank you.”
They started for the door. Dolly cleared her throat. “You might see me again, and if you do, it would be better if you didn’t recognize me.”
“Of course.” Marguerite opened the front door. She turned and smiled. “And Dolly? I hope you know, if the White King sends his officers, or others, to question me about you, I’ll tell them everything. I can’t afford to be on that man’s bad side.”
Dolly leaned in, kissing the air half an inch from Marguerite’s cheek. “Dear Daisy. I’d expect nothing else.”
* * *
By ten o’clock that night, she’d had her fill of coffee. At the first diner, after she left Marguerite, she’d ordered a chicken sandwich. At all others she’d had coffee, with one stop to use the diner’s toilet. Now the streets were dark, slicked by a brief rain shower earlier. Along the way she’d learned about several speakeasies, none the one she needed.
She was looking only for all-night diners now. It was not the best time for a woman alone to be out, especially not in this slightly disreputable neighborhood. At the corner, light from one more place painted the street.
She checked the street and crossed. The window of Jack’s Place was steamed up. Inside, it smelled of cooking grease and old coffee, but the red-and-white tiled floor was clean enough to squeak under the soles of her shoes. At the curve of the counter, a single customer sat in profile to her, hunched over his plate. The counterman looked up as she entered.
“Coffee, please.” She took a seat.
He slid a thick mug across to her. She stretched and sighed aaaah melodically.
“Tired, miss?”
“I arrived today, on the steamer. It was a cramped voyage. I’m exhausted.”
The man at the end of the counter turned his head. She kept her gaze on the counterman, but even without looking, she knew the other man was sweeping his gaze up and down her body. So tiresome, yet unavoidable, she supposed.
“Where’d you come from?” the counterman said.
“San Diego.”
He shook his head as if to say he’d never been there.
“It’s lovely, but a girl needs to stretch her wings.” She sipped her coffee. “I can’t help thinking about the days when a girl could find a bit of refreshment after a long journey. Against the law, of course, but weren’t we a bit, well, more civilized back then?”
“We’ve been dry a long time up here, but we’d get them in here sometimes—the Bright Young Things, we called them. This place would be jumping after midnight. Bacon and eggs, hash browns, gallons of coffee. Not so much now. People coming off swing and night shifts mostly.”
“It seems sad.”
“You want a little snort?” The man at the end of the counter stood up. He ambled over and sat down on the stool next to her. He wasn’t bad looking. He was just intruding.
“Oh, no. No, thank you.” She fluttered her fingers. “We’re just talking.”
“This town was wide open when I was a kid,” the interloper said. “I remember Chief Roy Olmstead, the biggest bootlegger of them all, and his wife, Aunt Vivian, on the radio. Between the teetotalers and that Council of Magic, whatever it is, it’s sewn up tighter than a nun’s—sewn up tight. In the old days, you could get anything you wanted on any street corner.”
“Provided, of course, it was the right corner.”
Dolly grinned at the counterman’s comeback. “Well, we’re homebodies, basically, but I do miss the gaiety of the old days.”
“You like gaiety?” The interloper leaned in, exhaling wintergreen.
The counterman leaned against the counter, his hands flat on the surface.
The interloper was hitting his stride. “I know just the place. It’s a supper club. You can get a steak Diane with maître d’ butter and all the champagne a pretty girl like you can pour down her throat.”
She swiveled to face him. “Do you think I’m pretty? I’m not the beauty in my family. My sister Priscilla is.”
He leaned back on the stool and looked around the diner. “I don’t see her.”
“Well, of course not. She’s back in our room. She and the landlady are listening to the wireless.”
The counterman’s fingers moved, tapping. Tap, a pause, tap, tap, tap, tap-tap tap-tap.
“Bring your sister along,” the interloper said. “We’ll make it a party.”
“Are you sure?” She picked up her spoon and began to stir her black coffee. The spoon struck the sides of the mug. “She really is beautiful, and she’s got a voice that charms nightingales.” Tink-tink tink-tink. Tink. Tink-tink-tink. “The chair won’t be a big problem, will it?” She looked up at him through her eyelashes.
“Chair?”
“Oh, yes. She’s in a chair. Polio.”
“Oh.” He looked away. “That doesn’t sound . . . I don’t think she’d be comfortable.”
“What a shame, because I couldn’t go without her.”
“Your loss, then, doll.” He stood and tossed a quarter on the counter. She faced back to the front. The door clicked shut.
She looked down at the brown surface of her coffee. When she glanced up, the counterman raised his eyebrows.
“Sister, huh?”
“Well, she’s not my sister, but I do know her.” Priscilla was beautiful, with a voice like aged bourbon, and she was in a chair. She was Dolly’s go-to forger. Someday, the law of odds said there should be a man who would call her bluff and be willing to meet the sister in the chair, but the ploy hadn’t failed her yet.
“You seem to know your way around.”
“I didn’t just fall off the farm truck.”
“Well.” The counterman unscrewed the lid of a saltshaker. “I can’t help you with the first thing, you know. It’s against the law.” He picked up a box of salt and poured a thin stream into the shaker. “But I imagine a lady like yourself enjoys getting a new hat from time to time.”
“A hat.”
“Yes. Perhaps one with a nice flirty brim would suit you. There’s a hatmaker down near the waterfront. Violet’s. Very modest shop, you could walk right past it and not know it’s there, but she makes fine hats.” He set down the box and screwed on the lid.
“A hat might be just the thing.”
“She’s a colored gal. Would that bother you?”
“Few things do,” Dolly said, “and that’s not one of them.” She slid a nickel across the table for the coffee.
“Tell her Abner sent you,” he said.
* * *
Violet’s Hat Shop sat on South Jackson Street. The place was dark, but the streetlight highlighted three ladies’ hats in the window. Dolly gave the knock Abner had shown her.
A moment or two later, the lock clicked, and the door swung open. A girl peered out. Her straw-colored hair was in neat braids, and her dress, while worn, was clean. She wasn’t much older than thirteen. “Shop’s closed, miss.” Black tourmaline hung on a chain around her neck.
“I’m in need of a hat, though. Abner sent me.”
“Abner?” The girl looked her up and down. Dolly had not been a lookout at her age, but she knew plenty of girls who had been. “Well, come in, then. Miss Violet’s still in the back, and she might be able to give you something off the shelf.” She held up the stone. When Dolly nodded, the girl swept it around her then stepped back and held open the door.
Dolly entered the shop. Yellow light bloomed as the lookout turned on a lamp on the counter. The redbrick walls held only a few shelves, mostly empty, and the place smelled of wool and something floral, perhaps the scent of Miss Violet’s namesake. The girl vanished into a darkened back room.
Dolly waited. Because she was listening for it, she heard the low thump of a door somewhere below her. A minute later a woman came through the doorway into the shop. For a moment, she was a figure of gold and shadow. Then she moved into the lamplight. Emerald stones dangled from her ears, and her hair was covered with a twisted scarf in gleaming green and gold. The ends of the scarf formed a flower shape over her left ear. Her sleek dress repeated the colors in a pattern like the eye of a peacock’s tail feather. She was an inch or two shorter than Dolly, and her skin was brown. “You say Abner sent you?”
“Yes, he said a girl who’d like a nice hat with a flirty brim should come to Violet’s Hat Shop.”
The woman folded her arms. “Well, I do have very nice hats, but we’re not open. And I don’t know you.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to. I’ve only arrived from San Francisco. I got in late yesterday.”
“And went straight to Abner’s?”
“Oh, no. His was the seventh diner I tried.”
“Really?” The woman tilted her head. “You must have particular taste in . . . hats.”
“I do. I look for special qualities, and I’m willing to pay for them.”
“What’s your name?”
“Dolly White.”
“Never heard of you.”
“You may have heard of these.” Dolly gave her two other names, one from a job in Seattle a few years earlier and one from Portland, where she had acquired some magical artifacts for a collector.
The woman rubbed her arm. “One of those rings a bell. Tell you what, come back tomorrow. I’ll be getting a new shipment in, and we’ll see if we have what you want.”
Dolly liked that the woman was cautious, careful to protect her operation. She smiled. “Tomorrow, then. Same time?”
“Everything the same. Maureen here will know it’s you.”
Dolly nodded and left. The girl closed the door and shot the bolt behind her.
* * *
She spent the next day at the city library, reading up on the city’s golden families. She called up the old editions of the papers and read the society pages with care. Dolly knew how to see between the words for what was coded and what was deliberately missing. What she discovered necessitated a telegram to Marguerite, who replied with a telephone number and the name of a man who sold men’s shoes.
She sent a telegram to her client in Wichita, confirming merely that she had arrived in Seattle. He was a wealthy collector who desperately wanted a void mask to round out his collection and was willing to pay very well for it. If she was successful here, she’d earn enough to dodge the powerful, angry client she’d left behind in San Francisco for a year at least, long enough for her trail to go completely cold, even for him.
After ten, she went back to the hat shop and gave the knock. Maureen let her in, and the proprietor was waiting for her, still in the shadows. Tonight she wore a hat and dress in shades of bronze and gold. “People know you,” she said. “They say you’re all right.”
“Good.”
“They say lots of other things too. Are they true?”
“Which ones?”
“They say you visited the Fair Folk when you were a child.”
“Oh, yes.” Dolly made herself smile pleasantly. “That one’s true.”
“How did that happen?”
“The same way it does with most children, I think.” She pushed away the sudden memory of her sisters’ faces, painted red by the light of boiler, as they shoved her into the rotting cupboard in the basement, as they slammed and blocked the door. “I got lost. I wandered in the Twilight Lands, and soon they found me.”
“How long were you there?”
Dolly shrugged. “That depends on who you talk to. I thought it was about a month. According to my mother, it was three years, but she was a lush, so her word can’t really be taken as gospel.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Do you think the you that came back is—”
“Oh, I’m human,” Dolly said. “Changed, yes. But human.”
“All right.” She turned.
Dolly followed her back through the dark stockroom. She was not surprised to see a burly man standing in the corner.
“A friend of Abner’s, Tom,” the woman said. “Dolly. Make a note.” She pulled down a lever in the wall, and the basement door opened with a sigh.
Music swirled out.
The room glowed with golden light. Small, circular tables dotted the floor, and red velvet booths hugged the old red bricks of the wall. There was a dark-skinned piano player riffing something of the new music, jazz, and the lithe bartender behind the polished bar was two shades darker than the proprietor. Everyone else was white. White and well-dressed, Dolly couldn’t help noticing. All the women were in couples or groups, and there wasn’t a blond to be seen. Fiona Earnshaw was not drinking here tonight.
“Is your gin real?” Dolly said.
The woman grinned. “It’s not brewed up in a bathtub, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you cut it?”
“I flavor it. I have training as an herbalist.”
“Shimmer-shim?”
The grin vanished. “If shim’s what you want, I’ll have Tom escort you right back out. I won’t have that shit in my place.”
Dolly nodded. “Good. I’d like a gin, neat. And what’s your name?”
“I’m Violet. Welcome to Violet’s Hat Shop.”
* * *
The next evening, Dolly stepped out with the shoe seller Marguerite had recommended, going to a supper club called the Pageant. Dolly slipped Trevor the envelope of money discreetly when they were settled in the cab he’d ordered. He was slender, blond, with eyes as blue as bachelor’s buttons and an earnest handsomeness, exactly what she needed—a male escort who would raise no eyebrows and would not challenge her virtue while she was working. He knew enough to not ask questions either.
The hostess beamed at them, giving Trevor a wink, and guided them to a table near the dance floor. She had a hennaed spit curl in the center of her forehead and two on her left cheek. Dolly exclaimed over the beautiful ring she wore on her right hand, and the hostess blushed and held it out for Dolly to admire.
She and Trevor enjoyed their meal and took a couple of turns around the dance floor. While the band took a break, Trevor approached the clarinet player, and Dolly visited the powder room. When she came out, she chatted with the hostess for a few minutes, until Trevor came up to meet her. He was grinning. They were both quite satisfied with their evenings.
The pieces of Dolly’s plan were dropping into place.
* * *
Two days later, she watched over the top of her newspaper as Mortimer Lester strode across the dining room, pausing once or twice to shake hands with men at other tables. He was stocky, although he looked firm, not flabby. She had read that he played tennis. His skin was pale, his sandy hair thinning at the top. She imagined his hands were manicured.
