They both shot her quick glances, the older one accusing, as if she thought Bea was being sarcastic; Doris wide-eyed and worried.
“We won’t say anything to anyone about you talking to us,” Vivian added.
The older one gave her another hard stare, then nodded without saying anything and turned away, Doris scampering to gather her things and hurry after her.
The sun was low enough now that there wasn’t much light left in the alley, but it was enough for Vivian to see Bea’s wide-eyed worry. “Don’t say it,” she warned.
“You shouldn’t get mixed up in it, Viv,” Bea said anyway, the fingers of one hand tapping staccato agitation against her thigh.
“Well, then, be a doll and go tell Honor that for me,” Vivian snapped. “I’ve got a twenty-five-dollar favor to pay off.”
“You could say no,” Bea pointed out. “You did once.”
Vivian threw her a skeptical look. “And if the Nightingale shuts down?”
“There are other spots for dancing in this city.” Bea shivered and pulled her coat more tightly around her to ward off the chill of the shadowed alley.
“Not like the Nightingale,” Vivian said, her voice cracking a little in a surge of uncomfortable emotion. “And anyway, you work there.”
“So?”
“So unless you want to keep waiting for the police to bust in, Honor needs something to satisfy whoever’s so upset about Wilson’s death. If I can find something out, things’ll settle down, and you and everyone else can work in peace.”
“Just looking out for me?” Bea’s expression softened. “That’s good of you, Viv. But there’s another reason you’re not admitting, you know.”
Vivian bristled. “Oh? And what’s that?”
“You want to impress Honor.”
Vivian rolled her eyes, trying to ignore the way her crossed arms tensed. “If I wanted to impress her, I’d have said yes the first time she asked.”
“You want her to think you’re smart and worth something. You wantyouto think you’re smart and worth something.” Bea’s quiet voice was sharp as a surgeon’s lancet, and Vivian flinched without meaning to. “You’ve always got something to prove.” Seeing the pained expression on her friend’s face, Bea sighed. “Just… figure out who he was, find out whether that Leo fella had anything to do with him, and leave it at that, okay? You don’t need to get mixed up with why someone wanted him dead.”
“Sounds like someone wanted him dead because he was a bastard,” Vivian said, glancing pointedly in the direction the two shopgirls had gone.
That made Bea snort. “Plenty of bastards out there, and no one’s in a hurry to kill them off. There’s more to it than that. Come on, I have to get to work. And Honor has something in her office that’ll help you out.”
It took some persuading, but eventually Danny agreed to unlock the office for Vivian while the staff got set up for the evening. “Just be out of here by nine, okay? Hux has a couple meetings tonight, and I don’t need her chewing my head off when she gets in for them.”
“Where is she now?” Vivian asked as Bea lugged over a basket of newspapers.
Danny raised an eyebrow. “If you don’t know, I don’t tell. Hux doesn’t like me gossiping about her day.”
“And how will she feel about you opening up her office?” Vivian asked, taking the basket from Bea’s hands and letting out a smalloofof surprise at its weight.
“Keep talking and I’ll kick you back out,” he threatened cheerfully, and Vivian closed her mouth on the rest of her questions. “Out by nine, and lock the door when you leave. Oh, and don’t touch anything else. Believe me, Hux’ll know.”
Vivian didn’t doubt it. As Danny and Bea left, shutting the door behind them, she took one long, curious look at the imposing wood desk and the secrets it contained before settling on the floor with her stack of newspapers.
They were society sheets, gossip columns printed about the glamorous lives of New York’s wealthy families and famous faces, which Bea told her Honor read regularly. It made sense. Most people who were rich in New York had some connection to bootleg alcohol, either selling it or drinking it, and knowing a thing or two about their personal lives would give Honor an advantage whenever she had to deal with them. It would also let her spot any society darlings who stepped into her club, even if they went to the trouble of keeping their heads down.
Vivian, however, was interested in only one man, and after flipping through five papers she found him splashed across the sixth. She stared at Wilson’s smiling black-and-white face for long, eerie minutes before she glanced at the rest of the article and realized it was an obituary.
Startled, she flipped back to the front page of the paper to check the date and discovered it was only a day old. Honor must have just picked it up—but what on earth could have been printed about a man who was shot in a back alley? Vivian propped the paper up on her knees and leaned back against the desk to read.
Willard Wilson was the sort of man whose business seemed to consist of knowing lots of people and appearing at lots of parties, and the list of his business associates’ names read like an advertisement for New York royalty. There was nothing written about his people or where he came from—“a New York family” was all the paper said—but he had lately married. And his wife, by the looks of things, was determined to keep whatever seediness had led to his death out of the public eye. In the obituary, his cause of death was listed as a heart ailment. Below the obituary there was a photo of Wilson and his new bride on their wedding day and a short, gossipy article on the couple. Without realizing it, Vivian sat forward as she kept reading.
Hattie Wilson had become that smiling bride less than a year before, and she was from an old family that had made a fortune in canned food and was probably still making a fortune in imports of the bottled variety. Her own people were dead, and her younger sister, Myrtle, had lived with the Wilsons until very recently.
