The Girl Is Murder (12 page)

“When who’s ready?” asked Rhona. She claimed an egg cream for herself and downed the first sip, smearing a crescent moon of bright red lip cream on the edge of the glass.

“Tommy,” said Suze.

Rhona’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about him for?”

“Iris was asking why he hasn’t been around.”

“Why?” asked Rhona. “You interested?”

I blushed. “I was just curious. I hadn’t seen him for a while.”

“Tommy goes where Tommy goes,” said Rhona. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to reappear. Pity, though; you are his type.”

What did that mean?

“Thank God that crippled private eye didn’t reappear,” said Maria. “I thought for sure he’d be waiting for us outside the cafeteria again.”

“I told you I’d take care of it,” said Rhona.

I concentrated on my drink, hoping that by doing so they wouldn’t notice that I’d turned as red as Rhona’s lip cream.

“Tell Suze what you did,” said Maria.

“I picked up the horn, made a call.” Maria gave her a look that made it clear that this explanation was insufficient. Rhona rolled her eyes and pantomimed lifting a phone receiver. “Hello, Principal Deluca? This is Mrs. Randall Hyatt, Rhona Hyatt’s mother. I understand that you’ve permitted male strangers to harass young women on campus. This is unacceptable, and if it doesn’t stop immediately I will go to the school board about it.”

“You didn’t!” said Suze.

“She most certainly did,” said Maria.

“What did he say?”

“It was hard to tell with all the stuttering and backpedaling, but he apologized and promised my dear mother that it wouldn’t happen again.” She finished the egg cream in a single gulp and pulled a handful of change from her purse. With a clatter she deposited two dimes on the table, then gestured to Maria to follow suit. “We’ve got to blow. I’ll catch up with you later, Suze.” She offered me a wide smile that stopped at her eyes. “See you around, Iris.”

“What did I do?” I asked as soon as they were gone.

“It’s not you, baby. It’s Tommy. She’s worried about him and she doesn’t like talking about it.”

I couldn’t let that pass without comment. “If she’s so worried about him, why has she taken up with someone else?”

“That’s her pride talking. If he’s safe and avoiding her, she wants to punish him by showing him that she’s moved on. The truth is, she’s sick about it.”

That had certainly been corroborated by what I’d overheard. “So is that who the private eye was asking about? Tommy?”

“I wasn’t there, but from what everyone else said, he was the one and only topic.”

“Wow.” I stirred the dregs at the bottom of my drink. It was almost solid chocolate down there. “No wonder she’s upset.”

“He probably just took a powder. He’s done it before. Of course, those times he always told Rhona where he was going. I think that’s what worries her the most.”

“What could keep him away for so long?”

“It’s hard to say. He could’ve done something bad, gotten pinched, and decided it was better to stay gone than face his pops.”

“His old man’s strict?”

“Tight as a girdle. It’s amazing Tommy can breathe some days. He has an older brother who wound up in the joint and his pops is convinced Tommy’s going to do the same.”

I wished I could take notes, but there was no way that was going to happen without drawing suspicion. Maybe that was why the Rainbows hadn’t wanted to talk to Pop: they believed Tom wanted to stay lost.

“But if Tom was lying low until the heat was off him, don’t you think he’d try to contact one of you?” I asked.

“That’s what I’m hoping. At the very least, he’d need cash.”

“What about the money from the locker thefts?”

“That was used for something else.”

I was dying to ask what that something else was, but I could tell I was quickly approaching the point of asking too much. Besides, there was only so much Suze was going to be able to tell me. The person who knew Tommy, who could best guess at his whereabouts, was Rhona. She was the one I needed to talk to.

“You feeling better?” asked Suze.

“Much. Haven’t thought about my pop for a half hour now.”

“So come out with us on Friday. See if you feel like spreading your wings a bit. If nothing else, you’ll be giving your mind a rest.”

“What do you on Friday nights?” I asked.

“Dance, of course. It’s the only way to end the week.”

“Where do you go?” I asked.

“The land of darkness. It’s the best place for it, baby girl.”

A thrill passed through me. She was talking about Harlem. I’d never been there before. It was forbidden territory, not because anyone had ever told me not to go there, but because I knew that it wasn’t the kind of place young white girls went. And now
I
was going there.

Rhona would be there on Friday, and maybe by then in her eyes I wouldn’t be the odd little girl following her crowd. I’d think things through between now and then—what to ask and how to ask it. I’d have a plan. I’d find out why she was worried about Tom.

“All right,” I said. “Just tell me where to meet you.”

CHAPTER

8

I WAS ITCHING WITH QUESTIONS by the time I got home that day. What had Tom done with the money from the locker thefts? How could Rhona be both concerned about Tom and willing to take up with someone else to teach him a lesson? Why had she said I was Tom’s type?

“Hi,” I told Pop as I came in the door. His own door was open, giving him a clear view of me as I arrived. I wondered if it was deliberate; perhaps he no longer wanted to be surprised by my comings and goings.

“Hello yourself,” he said. He had a stack of phone directories in front of him. “How was school?”

“Fine. What are you working on?”

“Trying to track down a missing person for an attorney handling a will. If I find her, she has quite a bit of money coming her way.”

I couldn’t tell if it was the truth or if he was doing something to help chase down Tom.

“You had a phone call from Grace Dunwitty. I told her I’d have you call her when you got home.” He pushed a piece of paper my way with Grace’s exchange scrawled on it. “She said she’s called before.”

“I know.” I waited for him to say something more, to, at the very least, ask me if I was avoiding Grace, but it wasn’t in Pop’s nature to pry into my life. Besides, if he did, it might give me permission to pry into his. And then what? Would I ask him what it was like to have only one leg? Or if he missed Mama as much as I did?

“You ever see those kids you went to that club with?” he asked.

“I eat lunch with Pearl almost every day.” I saw my chance and grabbed at it. “In fact, she asked me to go out again this Friday.”

“Where?”

“A dance.” It was sort of the truth. After all, there would be dancing.

Pop nodded. “Sounds good. They seemed like nice kids.”

How would he know? He hadn’t even bothered to talk to them.

He didn’t ask anything else. Not where the dance was, not how late I’d be. I should’ve been thrilled, but I was strangely disappointed. For a man who refused to let me work for him because he was worried about my safety, he was curiously nonchalant about the whole thing. Maybe it just didn’t occur to him that high school kids could get themselves into trouble, despite what Tom Barney’s disappearance implied.

“Here.” He passed me a pile of rumpled bills he’d unearthed from his pants pocket.

“What’s this?”

“What does it look like? If you’re going to a dance, you need a new dress, right?”

I stared at the money, simultaneously touched and uncomfortable. Was this part of the retainer from Tom’s parents? Or had he pawned something else? “Thanks, but I’m okay.”

“Take it, Iris. You deserve a treat.”

He turned his attention to the newspaper in front of him. War news. There were numbers on the front page, never a good sign. I knew what those digits meant: lives lost, boats sunk, planes downed. Numbers never meant anything good. Victories were reported with vague, verb-heavy language like “pushed back,” “taken over,” “captured,” and “defeated.”

“How long do you think it will last?” I asked Pop.

He looked at the front page, wondering, I’m sure, what had inspired the question. “It’s hard to say. The Germans and Japanese are good fighters. It could end tomorrow.” I read between the lines. They weren’t just good enough to beat us; they could do it fast.

“So they’re better than we are?”

“They’re more prepared. They’ve been at this longer. We have a lot of catching up to do. Our military wasn’t ready for this.”

“But we can catch up?”

“Maybe.”

This was one of those moments when I hated that Pop didn’t immediately think he needed to reassure me. Would it hurt him to tell one little white lie to help me sleep better at night? “Do you think the draft is a bad idea?” I asked.

“I think eighteen and nineteen is awfully young. But it won’t affect me—what do you think about it?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t have time to worry about it. I had other things to focus on. Things like going to a dance club in Harlem and finding out about Tom Barney.

PEARL WAS WAITING FOR ME outside the cafeteria the next day. “What happened to you yesterday? I waited for you after school.”

“I’m so sorry,” I told her as we entered the lunchroom and claimed our usual spot. Her lunch bag bulged with delectable offerings. What would it be today? Cake? Pie? Chocolate doughnuts? “I actually ended up going with Suze to Normandie’s after school.”

“Seriously?” she asked. “How did you arrange that?”

“I went into the restroom pretending I was crying. She stuck around after Rhona and Maria left and asked me what the matter was.” I couldn’t tell her the whole truth, but I needed to provide some sort of explanation for how I’d wrangled an invitation. “I told her I was just so lonely since starting public school. I hadn’t made any friends.”

“And that did it?”

I didn’t blame her for her disbelief. Hollywood would’ve rejected that scene as too dull to be believed. “That did it.”

“Wow.” She let this roll about her head for a moment. I expected more questions, but she decided to let it drop. “Did she talk about Tom?”

“A little, after school. I mean, I couldn’t tell her why I was asking, not if I wanted her to be open about it.”

“Or honest about it. You can’t trust the Rainbows. Remember that.”

I don’t know why, but Pearl’s comment irritated me. Yes, they had a bad reputation, but the Rainbows had their good qualities.

And besides, her need to remind me that some of them were dishonest made me wonder if what Rhona said Pearl had done was true. It was hard to believe that everyone stopped talking to her just because her brother died. Being a gossip, on the other hand, might’ve sealed her fate.

“Do they know where he is?” she asked.

“Not yet.” I chased a pea around my plate. “Did you know Tom’s brother?”

She pursed her lips. They were dusted with sandwich crumbs that I longed to tell her to wipe away. “Yeah. His name’s Michael. He was in my brother’s class.”

Her dead brother’s class. “Were they friends?”

“Not particularly. Michael was always a troublemaker. Peter was pretty straitlaced.”

Peter. It was the first time she’d said her other brother’s name out loud.

She pulled out a folder and slid it across the table to me.

“What’s this?”

She raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

I lifted the edge and saw Tommy’s name typed on an official-looking form. “You pulled his student record?” My irritation at her instantly lifted.

Pearl put her finger to her lips, like I needed a reminder that this was on the q.t. “I need to get it back by the end of the day. Think you can do that?”

“Absolutely.” The boredom I’d been expecting to face that afternoon instantly washed away. The topmost page of the file was Tom’s schedule, written in Pearl’s familiar sloping scrawl. “Did you do this?” I asked.

She nodded. “I thought it might be helpful for you to see what classes he was in. They keep the schedules filed separately and I couldn’t get into that cabinet.”

“Do you memorize everyone’s schedule?”

“Of course not.” She played with the lid from her milk bottle.

But she knew his, and a thousand other details about him. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to put two and two together: Pearl liked Tom. And not just a little bit.

“So are you going to go out with Suze after school again?” she asked me.

“I’m not planning to. Actually, I’m going to go out with them on Friday to see if I can’t find out more.”

“Them?”

“Suze, Rhona, Maria, and those two Italian guys who are always with them.”

“Oh.” She unwrapped the rest of her bag’s offerings. A piece of coffee cake glistening with translucent icing was among its contents. “How did that happen?”

“I don’t know. She just asked if I wanted to go and I said yes.”

She continued staring at her lunch. “Where are you going?”

“Dancing. At a club. In Harlem.”

She looked up and her eyes grew wider than Little Orphan Annie’s. “A negro club?”

“I think it’s a black and tan. Otherwise, how could we get in?” I felt like an old pro, using the lingo I’d seen in the movies and read in the magazines.

She removed the cake from its waxed paper cocoon and took a bite. “That should be interesting.” She licked her fingers clean and dug into the bag for a napkin. “I’ve always wanted to go to Harlem.”

Did she expect me to invite her to go with us? I tried to ignore her fishing expedition and concentrate on my own lunch. “I’d invite you, but that might seem strange. After all, I cried about not having any friends.”

“Oh, I know. I’m just saying that I’d like to go
sometime.
” She took another bite of cake. I wished she’d use a fork, or at the very least stop licking her fingers after every bite. “Want some?” she asked.

“No, thanks.” I needed to clear things up with her, just so if it became an issue, there wouldn’t be a problem. “Were you ever friends with Rhona?”