Ingenue (2 page)

Vera couldn’t help feeling hurt. He’d been planning to leave without saying goodbye?

Evan reached out to pat her hand. “I was going to tell you. I just wanted to sneak my horn out of here early, before anyone was around. Or at least it was
supposed
to be before anyone was around.” He gave a wry grin. “Now, what are
you
doing here?”

Before Vera knew what was happening, words started spilling out of her. She told him how she had betrayed Jerome and nearly cost him his life. How Bastian and Carlito had been lured to the docks, and how the killer had shot Bastian dead. And she told him how she’d nearly caught a bullet herself. “And the woman asked about Jerome,” she said. “Bastian knew about Jerome’s post office box in New York City. He knew Jerome had sent me a postcard.”

“He sent you a postcard?”

“Months ago. I—I carried it around like a dog with a bone. Someone must have gone through my purse when I was working. Someone must have told—” She swallowed heavily. “And now the killer knows he’s in New York.”

Evan reached over and tilted her chin upward, forcing her to look at him. “That is not your fault. But don’t you worry—I’ll help you sort this out.”

She turned away from his hand. “I’m dealing with it all right on my own.”

Evan raised his eyebrows at her torn dress and dirty face. “Yep, you’re doing just fine.”

Despite herself, Vera laughed, and then she stood. “I’m gonna go clean myself up a bit.”

She washed the grime off her face in the ladies’ room. Now she’d gone and involved Evan. He was the one person besides her father she really cared about in Chicago, and she’d repaid his friendship by putting his life in danger, too. In the dressing room at the end of the hall, she stuffed her makeup kit, red hairbrush, and silver clutch into a large black shoulder bag she found on the floor.

Then she looked at the clothes rack and winced.

She couldn’t very well run away with only a bag full of sparkly flapper dresses. Still, she chose three of her favorites and packed them. And then, murmuring an apology, she swiped a few of a fellow cigarette girl’s simple day dresses, including a pale yellow number that she slipped over her head. It was a little tight, but not in a bad way. Finally, she slipped her feet into a pair of black ballet slippers. With her T-strap heels packed in the bag, she slung it over her shoulder and said goodbye to this place.

She found Evan behind the bar. His beat-up trumpet case and a tan briefcase sat on the floor near the booth.

Two glasses of water sat on the table. Evan carried over a pair of plates from the bar and set them down. “Isn’t that Betty’s?” he asked, glancing at her dress.

“Not anymore,” Vera replied as she sat down.

“Fair enough,” Evan said, taking a seat. “I figured you might be hungry. Sorry it’s not the greatest breakfast—I worked with what was available.”

Vera looked down. A ham and cheese sandwich. There was even a pickle next to it. Evan was kind as well as handsome. And unlike her, he remembered the importance of things like drinking water and eating regular meals.

She grabbed the sandwich and devoured it.

Evan cleared his throat. “So, what’s the plan now? Send a note to Jerome?”

Vera pushed the plate away. “There’s no time for a note. Somebody’s got to stop this woman.” She opened her bag and pulled out Bastian’s gun. “I’m going to New York.”

Evan dropped his sandwich. “What the hell are you doing with a gun, Vera?”

She sighed. “Long story, and I’m not particularly in the mood to tell it.”

“Then save it for the train ride to New York,” Evan said. “No way am I letting my best friend’s sister head into danger by herself. I’m coming with you.”

GLORIA

“Extra! Extra! Harry Houdini, King o’ the Cuffs, will break out of a straitjacket right in Times Square!” A dark-haired boy offered a paper to Gloria with a hopeful look in his big brown eyes.

She smiled at the boy, at his dirty face. The fact that she couldn’t spare him a penny or two made her heart ache. But there was a different ache Gloria had to deal with this Tuesday morning—the growling in her stomach.

She wandered through the open-air market on First Avenue, pretending to shop. The large wooden pushcarts offered everything a fashionable New York City girl could desire: cloche hats in every shade from midnight blue to the palest rose, tiny silver compacts, endless tubes of lipstick. Soft silk stockings, along with the new artificial silk ones that, while cheaper, were still way out of Gloria’s price range.

Gloria stopped and ran her fingers over a long string of white beads. She glanced down at her pale pink dress with its delicate lace embroidery. A narrow belt settled low on her hips, with a large cloth flower in the center. She couldn’t help thinking how the necklace, wound twice around her neck, would really complete the outfit.

A woman with frizzy gray hair, standing behind the pushcart, cleared her throat. “You better buy those beads if you’re planning to paw ’em much longer,” she snapped.

The woman’s gaze was focused on the gaping hole in the palm of the white glove on Gloria’s left hand. Despite the rest of her rich girl’s outfit—the pink scarf wrapped around her hat, the pointy-toed black heels—that one hole gave Gloria away for what she truly was: a woman who couldn’t afford to replace even a torn glove.

A desperate woman. A woman who would steal.

Gloria gave the pushcart woman a polite smile. “I was just browsing.” She would have to remember to keep her palms out of sight.

Gloria weaved away through the crowd and finally reached her destination—the food stalls.

Her stomach rumbled loudly at the sight of the shiny red apples and creamy hunks of cheese on display. A rainbow of vegetables decorated the stalls—green peppers, orange carrots, and yellow squash. Platters of sugar cookies were laid out, and hints of brown sugar and cinnamon wafted up from fluffy apple pies. She followed closely behind a young couple sharing buttery popcorn. Just watching them eat was the most delicious thing Gloria had done in a while.

She removed the oversized black purse hanging over her shoulder and slung it back on under her thin coat, then slid it behind her back.

It was now or never. As long as she hid her hands and kept calm, this was going to be duck soup.

She edged toward the baker’s stall. Standing in front, looking over a platter of muffins, was a man in his early twenties, cute, wearing a plain blue shirt, knickerbockers, and a newsboy cap.

He would do.

Gloria let out a helpless cry. “There he is!” She pointed at the man with a trembling finger. “The man who stole my purse!”

The man looked up from the muffins. “Hey now, girlie, I ain’t done nothing!”

But a balding man in an apron had already grabbed the so-called thief by his collar. “You think you can steal from a nice young lady outside
my
stall?”

“
All
my
money
!” Gloria wailed.

A group of men closed in on either side. “We’ll get your money back for you, miss, don’t you worry,” said a man with a dark mustache as he joined the baker.

“But I don’t
have
her purse!” the accused thief cried out. Gloria could no longer see him over the shoulders of the men around him.

Gloria dove toward the baker’s stall. She snatched the closest loaf of bread within reach and stuffed it inside her coat, then inched behind the pushcart. She backed away through the crowd, pointing, saying, “Those men caught a pickpocket!” until she’d reached the mouth of a nearby alley.

And then she turned tail and ran.

Once she was in the alley, leaning against the brick wall, she caught her breath, composed herself, and strolled to the other end of the alley and out onto Second Avenue.

A successful steal.

She began the long walk home.

These days, Gloria barely gave thievery a second thought. Going hungry had changed her. She and Jerome had burned through the last of her family’s money sometime in April, and now it was June. Gloria had to rely on her wits—and her looks—so that she and Jerome wouldn’t starve.

She passed a gray, blocky high school and felt a brief pang for her old life at Laurelton Prep. Back then, a tardy slip from a teacher could seem like the end of the world. She should be sneaking notes in class, not stealing loaves of bread.

What would her mother think if she knew her daughter was stealing bread? What was her mother doing now, anyway? They hadn’t had any contact in months, not since Gloria had fled town. Gloria would have liked to be in touch, but she worried that her mother would track her down.

Silence was safer—at least until she had her future figured out.

She turned onto 110th Street, and the already shabby brownstones became even shabbier. Paint peeled off the buildings in giant brown scabs, and many of the yards were just hardpan dirt. There was a church on the corner, but it looked as run-down and miserable as the homes around it. She glanced away from the church and noticed a flyer tacked to a lamppost.

Gloria swallowed hard. She was staring at herself.

It was an old photograph. She was smiling shyly in a conservative frock, looking exactly like the perfect debutante and bride-to-be she had been a year before. The innocent, apple-cheeked girl in this photo never would have disobeyed her Prohibition-loving fiancé and sneaked out to the Green Mill. Or snagged the job as the Green Mill’s singer with Jerome, the joint’s black piano player. Or fallen in love with Jerome and killed a man to save him.

It was a Missing Persons notice:

LOST GIRL

Gloria Carmody, 18

SUSPECTED KIDNAPPING!

Mother Worried Sick!

If spotted, contact:

Cooper Station Post Office

Box 1281

New York, NY

Gloria reached up and ripped the flyer off the lamppost. How long had it been up? How many others were there? And—most importantly—who was hanging them?

It could have been her mother. Or Bastian could have been looking for her, considering they were supposed to be married by now. But the person most eager to find her was Carlito Macharelli, and it certainly wasn’t because he was “worried sick” about her.

For a moment Gloria was back on the snowy pavement outside Jerome’s apartment. Tony’s gun was pointed at Jerome, and without even thinking, Gloria took Bastian’s pistol out of her purse and shot Tony dead.

Gloria shuddered. She could still see Tony’s blood seeping into the white snow.

She folded up the flyer and stuffed it into a pocket.

At the next corner, she climbed a small flight of stairs to a tall brown apartment building. She held the door for a woman and her two young children and waved her hellos to the few mustachioed men sitting in the dilapidated lobby. At first Gloria’s red hair had drawn stares in the predominantly Italian building, but the residents were used to her by now. She ducked into the stairwell.

But instead of going up, she went down.

In the dank basement, she opened the door to the boiler room. She avoided the large white pipes—they were hot, she’d learned the hard way—and made her way to the far corner. There, from behind the water pump, she dug out a canvas bag.

She dumped out its contents, removed her white gloves and cloche hat, and replaced them with long black gloves and an oversized hat that sloped down over her eyes and covered her features. She slipped her arms into a black wool coat that came down to her ankles. Then she placed her earlier accessories in the canvas bag, returned it to its usual hiding spot, tucked the bread under her coat, and exited through the back.

The wool of the coat was itchy and awful against her skin as she walked out into the hot sun.

A few sad patches of grass were dying in the dirt yard behind the building. Gloria walked to the left corner of the wooden fence, searching for the board with the dark brown scar at the bottom. She found it, pushed the loose board aside, and climbed through a gap just large enough for a person. For a made-skinny-by-hunger person, at least.

On the other side was a yard much like the one she’d left, only with even less grass. A few women with dark skin were sitting on chairs outside the back door, fanning themselves and shooting the breeze. The women glanced up as Gloria climbed the steps to the door but didn’t say anything.

Inside, a few black children careened down the staircase as she went up, but they barely paid her any attention. Gloria unlocked the apartment door and closed it behind her, then flung the coat, hat, and gloves away. This routine was becoming more and more irritating. And dangerous. The yards had been empty during winter, but now people were all over the place, and this disguise wasn’t going to fool anyone. What sort of nut wore a long black coat in New York in the middle of June?

But this was the only way Gloria and Jerome could stay together. They were living on the lam—they certainly didn’t need the kind of extra attention that an unmarried white woman and a black man living together were bound to receive.

“Jerome?” she called softly, but it was obvious he wasn’t home.

Their place wasn’t exactly large enough to hide in. There was a tiny kitchen with a lovely oak table and chairs that Gloria had spent a half hour haggling over at the flea market. There was a comfy overstuffed chair they’d found on the street. And there was Jerome’s secondhand piano, an old upright they’d found at an estate sale. The wood was scratched all over, and Gloria was convinced the thing had never been completely in tune, but she knew that a life without some sort of piano would be like a life without air to Jerome.

It was a far cry from her family’s mansion on Astor Street. Back home in Chicago she’d drunk out of crystal; here she and Jerome got excited when they found two mismatched but unchipped glasses they could afford. But so what? While she and Jerome didn’t have much, at least everything they had was
theirs
.

They’d gotten lucky when Jerome found an abandoned Victrola on the street. With a little fine-tuning it worked swell, and now it sat in the corner of their bedroom along with their collection of records—Bessie Smith, a couple of Gershwins, the Jelly Roll Morton she’d bought Jerome to replace the one he’d left in Chicago.

Gloria set the loaf of bread on the kitchen table, then dug down into the bottom of the laundry hamper and retrieved a heavy canvas sack, which she set beside the loaf. Newspapers were spread across the tabletop, all of them open to the classifieds. Several ads were circled in ink.

Gloria pushed the papers aside, opened the sack, and removed a pile of textbooks. European history, algebra, biology—all her old friends. She fished out her notebook as well as her math workbook and, tearing off the heel of the bread and gnawing on it, began working on a problem set.

She’d been studying secretly for several months now. Not even Jerome knew.

But it was the only thing that kept her sane. After weeks in New York and dozens of failed auditions, Gloria had started to worry. Maybe she
wouldn’t
make it as a jazz singer. Then where would she be? No inheritance, no high school degree, no real qualifications for a job.

So she had written a letter to her old English teacher, asking for help.

Miss Moss had always been Gloria’s favorite teacher, and Miss Moss had agreed to keep Gloria’s address a secret and to help her graduate from high school. Soon textbooks began arriving at the post office box Gloria and Jerome shared. Miss Moss instructed her long distance, through the mail, and as long as Gloria kept up with her lessons, she would be ready to take her exams at the end of the summer. Provided she could sneak back to Chicago. Provided she wasn’t arrested for murder. Provided—

Oh, it was too much to think about! She took another bite of bread and chewed thoughtfully.

After she finished her homework and stashed her book bag, she put the rest of the bread on a plate. She should have stolen some cheese to go with it. Maybe tomorrow.

Then Jerome walked through the door.

In a tan suit and an Optimo Panama hat, he looked handsomer than ever. Gloria had always figured that over time, she would get used to seeing his beautifully sculpted face. But her passion only grew every day. Those long, elegant fingers felt even better clasped behind her back than they looked when he played the piano. And she always felt a flutter in her stomach when his lips broke into that easy, enormous smile at the sight of her.