High Spirits [Spirits 03] (2 page)

      
“Um, why is that, Mrs. Kincaid?” That’s when she started sobbing over the telephone. I hope I suppressed my sigh.

      
“Stacy has taken up with the most horrid woman, Daisy! She calls herself
Flossie
!”

      
She’d told me that before, and I hadn’t yet been able to figure out what she had against the name. Maybe because it was a couple of vowels and a consonant away from “floozy,” which is what her daughter was, but Mrs. Kincaid surely didn’t blame Stacy’s hideous behavior on Flossie. Did she? Shoot, maybe she did. People aren’t always enamored of rational thought. This was particularly true of Mrs. Kincaid. I said only, “Mmmm.” Soft murmurs go a long way in my trade. They’re expected, in fact.

      
“And she’s begun seeing a terrible man called Jenkins!”

      
Most of the bootleggers I read about in the newspapers had a million vowels in their names and were Italian. This fact sat ill with Billy’s best friend (and my mortal enemy) Sam Rotondo, who was Italian
and
a police detective.

      
“Ah, yes,” said I in my silkiest mystical tone. “That’s the gentleman she calls Jinx, if I recall correctly.”

      
“Yes.” Mrs. Kincaid paused to blow her nose. “Can you imagine such a thing?”

      
Well, yes, I could, but only because I have an excellent imagination. I gave her another “Mmmm.”

      
“The man’s employer—the man who runs the speakeasy—is determined to hold a séance there. He wants to get in touch with his uncle. He calls him his godfather, although I doubt that he has anything at all to do with God. I think that’s some sort of thing gangsters have. Godfathers. Oh, Daisy!” Again she wailed. I repressed another sigh. “The man was
murdered
!”

      
I gathered from this speech that the murdered man was Jinx’s employer’s uncle, although I didn’t attempt to clarify the matter. I’d become accustomed to interpolating Mrs. Kincaid’s garbled communications years earlier.

      
“And I
need
for you to go there and make sure the place is suitable for my daughter! Harold won’t do it.”

      
Perfectly understandable. Harold and I harbored similar opinions about his sister. I wanted to ask Mrs. Kincaid how any speakeasy could be a “suitable” place for a young woman from a wealthy family—or any other young woman, for that matter—to frequent, but didn’t. As already mentioned, Mrs. Kincaid had never been a strict disciplinarian or a devotee of rational thought. Also, her old man had been a crook and a bounder, so there you go. Maybe Stacy came by her unpleasant tendencies naturally. Mrs. Kincaid and Harold were both sweethearts. It’s odd how such disparities can exist in families, isn’t it?

      
Feeling more than slightly beleaguered, as well as awfully guilty (after all, Mrs. Kincaid had been the rock and the mainstay of my career for years), I attempted to demur gracefully. “I wish I could help you, Mrs. Kincaid, but Rolly simply refuses to manifest himself under certain conditions.”

      
“But are you
sure
, dear? Won’t Rolly do it for
me
?”

      
Crumb. I wish she hadn’t put it that way. With an awful feeling of impending doom, I hesitated. I knew it was the beginning of the end, but I refused to give up yet. “Um … perhaps I can meditate on the problem and consult the spirits, Mrs. Kincaid.”

      
“Oh, Daisy!” She knew I was done for, too. I could hear it in the joyful tone of her voice. “Thank you so much! I’m sure Rolly will understand how much this means to me.”

      
I was sure he would, too, darn it.

The next Friday, the evening of the speakeasy séance, Harold Kincaid came to call for me up in his low-slung, snazzy, bright-red Stutz Bearcat. Billy and I had been sitting on the front porch, the February evening being unseasonably balmy, awaiting his arrival.

      
Billy wasn’t happy that I was going away, but Spike, our almost-grown-up, black-and-tan dachshund, was doing his best to cheer him up. Spike had been one of my more inspired acquisitions. There’s just something about a puppy that makes the world a brighter place. This holds true even if you’re Billy. I know it for a certified fact because my husband had been much happier since Spike joined the family. He’d even decided to try to walk again.

      
Actually, Billy had always been able to walk a little bit, but his legs were badly damaged, and his lungs were half eaten away by the gas. He’d talked to Dr. Benjamin, however, and they had come to the conclusion that if he went slowly and I helped him, the functioning of his lungs and legs might improve with time and exercise. Therefore, we went for tiny walks every day. He put his arm around my shoulder, and I supported him, and we walked at least as far as our neighbors’, the Wilsons, house to the north of us. I don’t know if Billy felt any improvement in his mobility, but I was getting shoulders like a line backer. I sure hoped it would help him, though.

      
I truly believe Billy’s new-found interest in improving his health sprang directly from the influence of Spike who, being a dog and not beleaguered by the prejudices we humans have, loved Billy and me uncompromisingly, was never persnickety or depressed, and never looked down on Billy because he was crippled. Or me because I was a medium, God bless the beast.

      
What’s more, Spike was a most discerning doggie. He’d actually piddled on Sam Rotondo’s shoe the first time they met. You’ve got to love a dog like that.

      
Anyhow, back to the porch where Billy, Spike, and I awaited Harold’s arrival. I was as nervous as a prairie dog in a cage full of rabid coyotes but didn’t dare let my anxiety show. Billy didn’t know where I was going that evening. If I had my way, he never would know, either.

      
When Harold pulled up in front of our house, Spike announced his presence with gusto. Billy condescended to allow me to roll his wheelchair down the ramp Pa had built for him so he could admire Harold’s jazzy automobile. Billy was always polite to Harold even though he didn’t like him, and he was wild about motorcars.

      
I’d recently purchased for the family’s use a perfectly splendid, closed-in, battery-operated Chevrolet sedan with a self-starter and a driver’s-side door as well as one on the passenger’s side, as a replacement for our old 1909 Model T Ford that had given up the ghost right around Christmas time. We all loved the Chevrolet, but it sure wasn’t a bright-red Stutz Bearcat.

      
Before the war, Billy had been primed to become a motorcar mechanic. The automobile industry had become a huge employer countrywide, and mechanics who could work on motorcars were much in demand. Billy had always been fascinated by automobiles and was a crackerjack mechanic. He’d been all set to start work at Hull Motor Works when he came home from the war. Thanks to the Kaiser, my husband’s mechanical skills with automobile engines had become moot. The war had left him with a paltry pension, a ruined body, a generally bad mood, and a beleaguered wife.

      
Poor Billy.

      
Poor me.

      
“Beautiful machine, Mr. Kincaid.”

      
“Call me Harold,” Harold said to Billy. He winked at me to let me know he doubted Billy would take him up on the offer.

      
I knew my husband, though, and was pleased when Billy proved me right. “Thanks, Harold. I’m Billy, as I’m sure you already know.”

      
“Yes, indeed. I hope you don’t mind that I’m in love with your wife, Billy.”

      
Billy let that one pass, and I tapped Harold lightly on his shin with the pointy toe of my left shoe. Harold winked at me again. Billy ran his hand over a glossy painted fender. “This is a real beauty, Harold. I used to like working on machines like these.”

      
“It’s a whiz to drive.”

      
As for me, I wasn’t all that interested in motorcars, although I was pleased that Billy and Harold were talking. That didn’t last long. After Billy had looked his fill at the machine’s outsides and inspected the motor, which enthralled him, he bade me a short farewell and wheeled himself back to the porch, Spike trotting at his wheels.

      
Harold opened the passenger’s door and I climbed into the motorcar, hoping my hat wouldn’t fly off. Harold must have anticipated this problem because he presented me with a scarf with which I tied it down.

      
“I don’t want to do this, Harold,” I muttered, not sure the words could be heard over the racket the motor was making.

      
They must have been because Harold said cheerfully, “Everything will be fine, Daisy.”

      
“Hmm.” I was glad I’d worn my black wool coat. Even though the night wasn’t yet cold, the breeze whipped up as the auto sped south on Marengo was chilly. I watched gloomily as lawns and houses seemed to fly by, becoming sparser the farther south we went. Harold turned right on Glenarm Street, then south on Fair Oaks Avenue, and my heart started thumping out a funereal dirge in my chest. I felt as if I were headed to my own execution—and not your quick beheading, either, but a slow, painful death by torture.

      
The winter night, while moderately mild, was black as the pit from pole to pole. The electrical streetlights ended approximately a mile north of where Harold finally parked the Bearcat. I saw nothing but trees when he and I set out to cross Fair Oaks Avenue, unpaved since this part of the street was well south of Pasadena’s city limit. I think it was close to Cawston’s Ostrich Farm because I detected the faint aroma of poultry in the air. Actually, it was more of a stench.

      
The new moon grinned at us. Stars twinkled innocently down from the heavens. Innocence sounded like a good idea to me, but it was too late. I think I must have groaned.

      
“Don’t be frightened, Daisy. This will be fun.”

      
Harold was all set to enjoy himself, at any rate. As for me, I had grave doubts about the evening’s agenda. For one thing, I lied to Billy, and I hated doing that. But if you think my husband would have countenanced my visit to a speakeasy, even to do something as blameless as conduct a séance, you don’t know my Billy. Well, of course you don’t, but ... Oh, you know what I mean.

      
I muttered, “Sez you.”

      
“I’ve always wanted to visit a speak,” Harold went on, his relatively high-pitched voice even squeakier than usual due to his state of excitement. “Del won’t go to one with me, even though I have the passwords to a dozen of them in Los Angeles. He’s very religious, you know.”

      
Del was Delroy Farrington, Harold’s boyfriend.

      
That sounds odd. Perhaps I’d better explain. You see, Harold and Del were what my husband and Sam Rotondo called “faggots.” I called them friends.

      
They were both perfect gentlemen: kind hearted, generous, well behaved, and well dressed—and Del even had a religious streak. Both were employed at high-paying jobs (Harold worked in the moving pictures, and Del and another gentleman had saved the Kincaid bank when Harold’s father ran off with a pile of bearer bonds). Both men had exquisite taste in home decoration.

      
But did Billy and Sam ever mention
those
pertinent facts? Facts that would, if they didn’t know about the one little eccentricity Harold and Del shared, have lifted the two men out of the realm of masculine mediocrity and to the heights of respectability and praiseworthiness?

      
Of course not. Men are like that. One little thing reduces two exemplary fellows to the status of freaks in a sideshow.

      
Okay, so maybe it’s not exactly a little thing to prefer people of one’s own sex to those of the opposite one, but golly, I thought Harold and Del were both swell, and Harold had saved my own personal hide more than once. I resented it that Sam and Billy overlooked all of their sterling qualities and concentrated on that one blot, if it can be called a blot, on their characters.

      
But that’s neither here nor there. Harold had agreed to go with me to the speakeasy, a condescension I truly appreciated. In spite of that, I was scared to death.

      
Not only had I lied to Billy, but I was going to work for a bunch of vicious criminals, one of whose progenitors had been murdered. My imagination, which is sometimes too vivid for my own good, had already created hundreds of scenarios for the evening. They all ended with me lying dead in a pool of gore, the victim either of gangs of rival bootleggers or overzealous policemen.

      
Perhaps I hadn’t really
lied
to Billy. I’d told him I was going to do a job for Mrs. Kincaid, which was the absolute truth. But I’d committed a sin of omission at the very least, and the criminal part still held true. If Billy had known what I’d intended to do that evening, he’d have pitched a fit. And I wouldn’t have blamed him.

      
I dug in my heels. “Harold, I don’t want to do this. I’m scared. I don’t care what you say. This is an awful place, it’s run by a bunch of murdering hoodlums, and we could get arrested. Or even shot.” I squinted across the expanse of dirt road at what looked like a large bunch of trees, probably sycamores since there were a lot of them down that way, although it was too dark to tell for sure. “Besides, I can’t even see it. Maybe it’s not there after all. Maybe they moved it.” That was an almost-comforting thought, and it lasted approximately five seconds, until Harold spoke again.