Ingenue (11 page)

The illusion was quickly dispelled.

While these girls looked like flappers, they certainly didn’t act like them. Where were the wild toasts and vamps dancing on tables? Could the New York social scene have changed so much in her absence?

“To think we all got so dolled up for such a yawn of a party,” Clara said. But her old roommates
did
look fantastic. Leelee’s feathered headband coordinated beautifully with her sheer, netted dress. Coco was a shock of silver fringe, and a glittering headdress covered most of her dark bob, accentuating her sharp features.

“Oh no, darling,” Leelee said with a hand on Clara’s arm, “if anyone is a waste of beauty tonight, it’s you. You should move back in with us only so I can steal that dress from your closet.”

Clara looked down to admire her bronze Chanel. The two tiers of delicately beaded cotton tulle fell gracefully just past her knees. It was a perfect match for her bronze headdress, a complicated number inlaid with pearls, with even more pearls hung off the sides in elegant loops.

“What do you girls say to cutting a rug?” she asked. Teddy Brown was up on the stage playing his heart out on xylophone with Smith’s band, but no one even seemed to notice. “We need to show these kids how to appreciate good jazz.”

“We probably need to show them how to dance, too.” Coco lifted her shoulders, then dropped them. “I doubt these palookas know anything other than the foxtrot.”

Clara clung to the golden banister as she and the girls made their way down the steps. She was a little tipsier than she’d thought. She, Coco, and Leelee wandered through the crowd, searching for suitable partners. Clara stopped and tapped the shoulder of a blond boy with pretty brown eyes.

He turned to her and raised his eyebrows. “Well, hello there,” he said with a grin. “What’s your name?”

“My name’s not important, sweetheart.” She said a silent apology to Marcus. “What’s important is that hardly anyone is on that dance floor. It’s practically scandalous.”

“We can’t have that, can we?”

“Absolutely not!”

He took her hand and led her out onto the floor.

Clara allowed herself a moment to savor the Charleston. Her body found the rhythm, and before she knew it she was bobbing and swaying to the song, forgetting herself and her worries—Marcus, her uncertain future—and just glorying in the dance. It was impossible not to be happy when she was dancing. And everyone could see it: People turned to watch as she and her girlfriends allowed the jazz to seep into their bones.

Sadly, after a few minutes, the boy’s eyes widened and his hand flew to his mouth. He made it to an empty champagne bucket just in time and was loudly and violently sick.

“This shindig is all wet,” Leelee said.

Clara sighed. “This is a bust. Let’s skedaddle.”

A clock began to chime as they made their way to the exit. So Clara wasn’t a journalist. She still had a wonderful boyfriend who loved her, and a prestigious education waiting for her—

“Everyone pipe down!” a man yelled. Instantly everyone in the room held still, fixed by the voice. It was what they’d been waiting for: someone to command them.

Clara looked up and saw a young man at the top of the staircase, addressing the entire room. He was tall, sharply attired, and handsome, with dark hair slicked away from his face. “As you all know, our good friend Maxie is now a man.” At this, the teenage crowd exploded into applause, and a few whistled.

“But wait!” the boy said. “If you know Maxie anywhere near as well as I do, you know he has spent his first eighteen years indulging in some very
questionable
behavior.” Several guests laughed. “And I don’t think the sophisticated ladies at Yale will be impressed. So we have decided that Maxie needs to wash away his sins in the pond in Central Park. A baptism into his new life, as it were. And I invite all of you to witness the ceremony!”

The young man stepped aside, and Clara could finally see what had been going on: The group of teenagers was working to pull a white dress shirt off a young man with dirty-blond hair. They succeeded, leaving him in only his undershirt and trousers.

This had to be Maxie Gabel, the birthday boy. Maxie was obviously drunk but was trying his hardest to escape his friends’ clutches. Once he’d lost his pants as well, he managed to slip away from the group and bounded down the staircase.

“Get him!” Maxie’s friend yelled, running after the guest of honor.

The crowd roared in excitement and turned as one to chase Maxie and his friends out of the ballroom. Scores of sparkling teenagers tumbled down the stairs and through the hotel’s restaurant.

“Stop that man!” they yelled, laughing hysterically as they bumped and sprawled across the late-night diners’ tables and knocked into waiters carrying trays of food. Then they were out the other side, through the lobby, and into the summer night.

Clara was exhilarated by the chase. As they moved through the Central Park trees, the party guests fanned out and cornered Maxie along the shore of the pond. He stood ankle-deep in water, panting and looking desperate, staring daggers at the boy who’d made the speech on the staircase. “Arthur, please don’t make me do this,” he said.

“I’d really rather not, dear friend. But you are a dirty, dirty boy. And this is for your own good.”

Maxie glanced at the boys on either side of him, who stood ready to push him into the pond.

“The cleansing will work far better if you submit to it willingly!”

Then Maxie gave a defeated shrug. “Oh, may as well!” With that, he stripped off most of the rest of his clothing and belly flopped into the water.

“Attaboy!” Arthur exclaimed. The partygoers cheered.

Maxie disappeared under the water and resurfaced some distance out. “You all should join me—the water’s fine!”

Clara had no idea where Coco and Leelee had gone off to. She glanced around at the smiling faces—there was the mayor’s son, making out with a girl she recognized as the daughter of Terri Pottington, a famous New York socialite, and there was Frankie Marlborough, heir to the cigarette throne, puking in a bush. She made a few quick mental notes for the column she was going to write as soon as she got home.

“That’s the spirit!” the boy called Arthur said, and he charged into the water with his tux still on.

The other boys who’d chased Maxie jumped in as well. The sound of splashing water and laughter filled the warm summer air. After a moment of hesitation, during which they were probably worrying about ruining their dresses, the girls followed in a shrieking, giggling tide, flashes of red and green and yellow disappearing into the ink-black water, illuminated only by the amber light of a handful of street-lamps.

Clara stared down at her own dress—her beautiful,
expensive
Chanel work of art. But she knew that what she would get by diving into the pond would be worth much more than any old dress. She’d have to ask Parker for an advance on her next paycheck—there’d be no returning this dress once it got soaked.

She kicked off her shoes and jumped in, gasping at the cold. She wiggled her arms and legs, trying to warm herself up, and splashed over to Arthur, nudging his arm. “That was quite a speech,” she said.

“Why, thank you,” Arthur said. He was even handsomer up close, but in a more imperfect way than she’d thought from a distance. His wet brown hair looked almost black in the darkness and stuck out in every possible direction, the pomade that had been taming it washed away. His large hazel eyes crinkled when he showed off his slightly crooked but adorable grin. “Do I know you?”

Clara shrugged, using a wet hand to remove her ruined headdress. “I don’t know. You’ll definitely know me if you introduce yourself.”

He stuck out his hand. “I’m Arthur Spence.”

“Spence … as in Julia Spence?”

“She’s my older sister.” He gave a full-throated laugh. “Oh, you’re Clara Knowles! Julia
adores
you.”

“And I adore her!” With her flaming red hair and practically violet eyes, Julia would have put every would-be flapper at this party to shame.

“Arthur, my head’s starting to hurt,” Maxie called from the other side of the pond.

“Oh no!” Arthur said. “Well, I know a remedy for that. It starts with a
g
and ends with in.” He raised a finger into the air. “Back to the Plaza, everyone!” As he waded out of the water, he extended his hand toward Clara. “Come along now, Clara Knowles, you’ve got to tell me everything you’ve been up to so I can report back to my sister. She’ll never believe I ran into the Queen of Sheba herself.”

Clara took his hand and enjoyed the warmth of the evening air. “Pos-i-lute-ly.” She stepped into her shoes, felt mud squish against the toe straps. “You seem like exactly the sort of depraved fellow a girl should know.”

As she mingled with Arthur, Maxie, and their friends, she mentally filed away a dozen new leads for articles. The Cotton Club was up in Harlem, and a new Greenwich Village speakeasy called the Opera House had just opened.

When Clara at last stumbled into her Brooklyn apartment, it was already getting light outside. But rather than sleep, she sat down in her desk chair without even taking off her wrinkled dress and stockings. She rolled a piece of paper into her Royal 10 typewriter and began to write:

GLITTERING FOOLS: WET & WILD

Maxie Gabel may have started Friday evening as a meek young schoolboy, but at the stroke of midnight, he arose from the waters of the Central Park pond a new man.

She typed furiously through the early morning until the column was finished. As she read through the pages, a smile spread across her face. She didn’t need Parker’s stamp of approval or anyone else’s. She knew this column was good.

After a load of mistakes and self-doubt, Clara had finally figured out who she really was.

She was a writer.

FOOL’S GOLD

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

—Zelda Fitzgerald

VERA

Vera studied her reflection in the mirror.

After two weeks of running all over the city looking for Jerome, she was exhausted. She’d checked practically every club in Harlem that had a piano. A few musicians had heard of her brother, but none could give her any help in locating him. And she’d waited under the clock in Grand Central, but if he had picked up the note she’d mailed, he never showed up.

Now she was back at the Harlem boardinghouse where she and Evan were staying. Her room offered only the absolute basics—a cotlike bed, a dresser, and a flimsy table with a mirror hanging over it. But it was cheap, there were regular meals, and the room was right below Evan’s.

The boardinghouse was only a few blocks away from the Cotton Club. It hadn’t been all that long since gangsters had seized the Club De Luxe and transformed it into the Cotton Club, but the joint had already built a reputation for staging one of the glitziest revues in town.

Vera was planning to make her first visit to the club that very evening to see Evan play. “Ethel Waters is making her Cotton Club debut,” he told her, “and I think you should be there.”

“Ethel
Waters
?” Ethel Waters had taken Harlem by storm when she’d come to New York a few years earlier, and she had quickly become one of the most famous blues singers in the country. A poster showing Waters hung on Vera’s wall back in Chicago.

“The very one. So gussy yourself up and take a night off,” Evan told her.

At least Vera still had the glitzy clothes she’d brought with her from Chicago.

She shimmied into a silver beaded dress and pinned an Egyptian-inspired silver headdress to her hair. She clasped on her T-strap heels, added a spritz of perfume, and was ready at last.

At the foot of the boardinghouse stairs, a few men were shooting the breeze. One hard-boiled character with a scratchy beard whistled as she walked to the door. “Hey, beautiful, you off to the Cotton Club?”

“I am!” she said.

“You better be in the chorus, then, doll face,” the man said. “Even a beaut like you won’t be able to get in the front door.”

“I guess we’ll see!” She waved goodbye and set off.

If Vera got her way, a chorus girl was exactly what she would be by the end of the evening. She wasn’t an idiot. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get in through the front door of a whites-only joint like the Cotton Club. Even the name of the club was racist—it was supposed to bring to mind a cotton plantation. Blacks worked themselves to the bone onstage while the whites lounged in the audience and enjoyed themselves.

A few minutes’ walk, and Vera could see the bright lights spelling out
COTTON CLUB
on the awning above the club’s entrance. Cadillacs, Lincolns, and Rolls-Royces were parked out front—fat cars for fat men with fat rolls of dough. Some wore pin-striped suits and fedoras, while others were decked out in tuxedos. The sequined dresses, beaded handbags, and feathered boas on the women were some of the finest Vera had ever seen.

When she reached the edge of the crowd, she turned and made her way down the dark, trash-strewn alley alongside the building. At the back of the Cotton Club, she found another line—one of black singers, chorus girls, musicians, and workers unloading instruments.

Vera slinked through the group and tried to pass two men in tuxedos.

“Hey there,” a young man with a mustache called as he lifted a tuba case. “Where do you think you’re goin’?”

“Who, me?” Vera asked, making her best doe eyes. “I’m here about a job.”

“Oh, really?” Mustache put down the tuba case and walked over. “Sad to say, we’ve got more than enough girls right now.”

“Are you sure they’re the
right
girls, though?” Vera asked slyly.

Mustache chuckled and shook his head. “What’s your name, darlin’?”

She extended her hand. “Vera, Vera Johnson.”

Another man looked up from the trunk he was unloading. “Oh, don’t you worry none about her, Ralph, that’s Evan’s girl—the one he’s always flappin’ his gums about.”

Evan had called her his girl? “Yep, that’s me.”

Ralph shook her hand. “Ralph Escudero. Nice to meet you.”

The man who’d identified Vera came over. He had darker skin than Ralph and a face that looked as if it never stopped smiling. “I’m Charlie Green. Sorry to cut this short, Vera, but Ralph and me better get onstage or Big Frenchy’ll have our heads. Just follow us in. Nobody’ll give you any lip.”

True to Charlie’s word, the bouncer at the door barely gave Vera a second glance. Ralph and Charlie led the way through the winding halls and dim backstage. They passed beautiful women dressed much like Vera—probably other musicians’ girlfriends—and she spied the feathered costumes of the chorus girls.

Charlie and Ralph both shook her hand again before strutting onstage. The other men in the orchestra were already there, setting up their instruments. Vera leaned past the edge of the stage curtains and saw Evan looking very dapper in his tux, trumpet at his side. He looked up and caught her eye. She grinned widely, and he grinned back.

Vera looked out at the audience. A few scattered white couples were dancing to the Gramophone record that was playing between sets. The bright lights from the stage glinted off the jewelry the women were wearing—princess-cut diamond necklaces and rich emerald earrings and sapphire brooches as blue as the ocean.

A handsome white man with close-cropped brown hair stepped up to the microphone as the song playing on the Gramophone ended. He raised his hand and the crowd quieted.

“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cotton Club!” The room filled with polite applause. “This next act is one that—and I am not exaggerating—will change your life. You haven’t heard jazz until you’ve heard these cats. Without further ado, I give you Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra!”

A young black singer with a trimmed beard took the mike as a mustachioed black man with slicked-back hair stood up in front of the orchestra, baton in hand. Then the members of the orchestra raised their instruments and a burst of music came forth.

It made Vera want to dance, to sway her hips in time with the luxurious rhythms, the timpani and the bass and the trumpet, the trill of the flute and the sharp, piercing notes of the clarinet. The singer jumped in from time to time with nonsense words that managed to sound cool and jubilant at the same moment.

Vera swelled with pride when Evan stepped away from the group to play a trumpet solo. He looked good up there—the spotlight making him as shiny and bright as any jewel in the audience. The passion that filled his face—no, his entire body—as he played was remarkable.

This was music as she’d never heard it before. This was what jazz was all about. In the old days, musicians marched to the beat of the same boring old drummer, but no more—these days, every performance of a song was different. Modern songs practically burst at the seams with improvised solos and ad-libbed singing and all the energy and life of being young. There was something mad and wonderful happening to music here in New York City; no one would ever think the same way about it again.

“You can see just as well from over here,” a man’s gravelly voice called from a row of wooden chairs near the back wall. “No reason a pretty dame like yourself should have to stand all night.”

Despite his raspy voice, the man barely looked older than Evan. He lifted a silver bucket next to his seat and spat a brown streak of liquid into it. “Tobacco always helps to settle my nerves before I go onstage.”

She took in his tuxedo. “Is your act coming up soon?”

The man chuckled. “My act is actually up there right now. I got food poisonin’ last night. Redman convinced Fletcher to be a pal and let me skip the first set so I can rest up a bit.”

“Oh, you must be Pops! I’m Vera!” she said, then rushed to add, “Evan’s told me all about you.”

He reached out to take her hand. “Folks sometimes call me Dippermouth, due to my horrible habits. But I’d be honored if you, Vera, would call me Louis.”

According to Evan, Louis Armstrong was the best horn player he’d ever met. Fletcher Henderson had worked hard to recruit him out of Chicago.

Louis pointed at her. “Evan’s told me a lot about you. You’re a Chicago native, too, ain’t that right?”

She nodded. “Born and raised.”

“I miss Chicago. With all due respect to Fletcher, Chi-town is where the real happening is. They’ve got King Oliver, the Wolverines, and the great Jelly Roll Morton.”

“Yeah, Morton is my brother Jerome’s hero,” Vera said wistfully.

“You’re not talking about Jerome Johnson?” Louis asked.

“I am. Have you seen him?” she asked, hoping he had a lead.

“I saw him play once at the Green Mill. If anyone were going to give Jelly a run for his money, it would definitely be that kid. He’s got music in every inch of his fingers.”

“I, uh, haven’t seen him in a while,” Vera said.

“Jerome Johnson?” called a chorus girl in an elaborate headdress from a few feet away. “Boy came in here a couple of weeks ago looking for a job. We’ve already got a pianist, so we all recommended he try Connie’s. I heard their player quit to look for something more steady.”

Connie’s Inn. That was one place Vera hadn’t looked yet. “Oh, thank you!” she said. “Any chance a singer named Gloria Rose was with him when he stopped by? Pretty white girl with red hair?”

The chorus girl’s eyes widened. “A
white
girl? No, it was just Jerome. Owney would never let a white singer audition. He wants his chocolate on the stage and his milk in the audience.”

Glad to have another lead, Vera went back to listening to the music. She heard another trumpet solo, then said goodbye to Louis, rose from her seat, and went back to the wings to get a better look at the band.

After Evan’s second solo ended, her eyes strayed to the audience. Smiling face after smiling face, all beaming at Evan and the band. And then she saw a familiar bobbed red head at the front of the crowd: Gloria.

She still looked a bit thin, but much more put together than she had at the post office a week earlier. She was decked out in a breathtaking gold dress that fell in layers of fringe over her body. She looked almost happy.

This was it: Vera’s chance to save her brother.

Without a second thought, Vera dashed from the wings and onto the stage. A part of her noticed how every eye in the club turned toward her, but she couldn’t stop now. “Gloria!” she shouted.

Gloria’s green eyes widened with pure and total shock. But instead of running toward Vera, she darted the other way, into the crowd.

Ever the professional, Fletcher continued to conduct his orchestra without missing a beat.

Vera leaped from the stage and somehow managed to land on her feet, despite the crowd and her heels.

She tried to follow Gloria through the swarms of complaining white people, but she quickly lost sight of the girl. “Gloria!” she yelled again. “Come back!”

Before Vera could call Gloria’s name a third time, two muscular white men grabbed her arms and dragged her toward a side exit. “You are in the wrong place to be lookin’ like you do,” one of them said.

“If you know what’s good for you, girlie, you won’t set foot in this place ever again. We won’t be anywhere near as polite next time,” the other bouncer said as he pushed her out the door and slammed it in her face.

Thwarted. Again.

Why had Gloria fled instead of waiting to meet up with her? Vera was here in New York to save her, not to hurt her.

Vera walked out of the alley and stared at the club. She considered waiting out front for Gloria to emerge, but then one of the bouncers stepped outside and stood on the sidewalk with his arms crossed.

So she walked away, defeated. She would explain to Evan later. She just hoped she hadn’t cost him his job. And she hadn’t even seen Ethel Waters perform.

So far her time in New York had been one failure after another. But how many chances would she get? If she didn’t find her brother soon, Carlito—or the killer—most certainly would.