“Some reason?” Leo prompted at last when she didn’t continue.
Vivian jumped a little at the sound of his voice. “Some reason Roy would decide to bump him off,” she finished slowly, thinking of another article she had read about Mrs. Wilson—and the way it had pointedlymentioned that she would need her sister for the next few months. “Some reason like maybe Hattie Wilson was pregnant, and maybe the baby was his.”
“What?” Leo snatched the paper out of her hands. “It says that in there?”
“No, of course not.” Vivian rolled her eyes. “The way rich folks can talk around plain facts they don’t want to come out and say makes my head hurt. But maybe she was—” Vivian broke off. It suddenly occurred to her that they were sitting nearly on top of each other, that maybe she didn’t want to be discussing pregnancy—even someone else’s—when she was sitting practically in the lap of a man she had just met a week before. Clearing her throat sharply, she changed the subject. “Anyway, whatever happened, someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to hush it up. Do you remember the obituary? It said he died of a heart ailment.”
“Well, it wasn’t wrong. Getting shot in the heart’s a pretty severe ailment,” Leo joked. When he saw her wince, though, he smiled ruefully. “Too rough for you? Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Vivian said quickly. The memory of finding Wilson’s body in that alley was always at the front of her mind these days, but she still preferred not to think about it too closely. “But really, what would it take to do that? Get a false cause of death printed?”
“Depends on how careful they’re being,” Leo said thoughtfully. “If the family gave the obituary directly to the paper, they could claim whatever they wanted. But if they wanted to cover their tracks, they’d have to bribe the coroner and any police involved to fill out a false report and death certificate. That doesn’t come cheap.”
“Well, his widow definitely has money,” Vivian pointed out. “Far as I could tell, she’s the only family he had around, so she’d be the one to have done it.”
“And if she wanted to protect her reputation, she’d have a good reason to hide that her husband was shot in some shady back alley,” Leo agreed. “Happens more than you might think.”
“So that means she’d have to know at least something about whathappened,” Vivian said. Caught up in her thoughts, she swung her feet onto Leo’s lap, relaxing back against the arm of the couch without really realizing it. “But here’s what gets me. How does a fella like this—high society, right, and damn well connected from the looks of things—how does he end up shot behind a place like the Nightingale? And what could that have to do with a bunch of bruisers trying to send a message by beating a bartender senseless?”
“Well, one of two things,” Leo said, one of his hands curling around her foot and sliding over her stocking-clad ankle. “One, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also happens more than you might think. Or two, plenty of fancy fellows make their money in dirty ways.”
His hand was still making its slow way up her leg, and Vivian shivered. “You trying to distract me?”
“You want me to stop?”
She didn’t, but she wasn’t going to admit it out loud. “No wonder Danny warned me about you,” she said instead.
His hand started traveling back down, raising goose bumps on her skin. “He’s one to talk.” A sudden frown creased his forehead, and he cleared his throat. “Were you and he ever—”
“No,” Vivian said, resisting the urge to laugh at his obvious discomfort. “Actually, before our jailbird morning, I’d never seen him outside the Nightingale.”
“You and Bea were friendly before though, right?” His hands resumed their slow journey up her other leg.
“Oh yes,” Vivian said, smiling. “We moved to the neighborhood around the same time. Me and Flo from the orphan home—” She broke off, realizing she’d never before told him where she had come from. But his hands didn’t falter, and there was no judgment on his face, so she continued. “And the Henrys from Baltimore. Apparently they were pretty fancy folks there. Her father was a Pullman porter, once upon a time.”
“Was?” Leo asked. “What happened to him?”
“Influenza,” Vivian said shortly, suddenly regretting the way theconversation had gone. “He made it home from the war in one piece, then he died the next year. Her family never recovered. Now all Bea cares about is sending the little ones to school so they can make something of themselves. And Mrs. Henry…” Vivian smiled in spite of herself. “Mrs. Henry cares about taking care of everyone she meets, no matter who they happen to be.”
“She took care of you, I’m guessing?”
Vivian shook her head. “My sister,” she said. “Right after we moved to the neighborhood, Florence got real sick. We were on our own for the first time, and none of the neighbors would come near us. That was just after the influenza was finally gone from the city. Everyone was still so scared of it coming back.” Vivian swallowed, remembering too clearly the visceral fear of watching her sister get paler and weaker and having no idea what to do—and no money to do it with, even if she had known. “But Mrs. Henry heard. She came to help, and Flo got better.” She was silent for a moment, then shook herself abruptly, glancing up at him with a flirtatious smile. “Sorry, didn’t mean to get so serious. What were we talking about?”
“Murder,” Leo said dryly. “So definitely not serious at all.”
Vivian laughed. “Well, you sure know how to show a girl a cheerful good time.”
Leo pulled the papers from her hands and tossed them to the floor, sliding closer until his lips tickled her ear. “Then how about we talk about something more fun?”
Vivian bit her lip, smiling as his mouth moved slowly down her neck. “What did you have in mind?”
TWENTY
The room swam into focus slowly, and for several long moments Vivian was too distracted by the fuzzy taste of her tongue to remember where she was. The dawn light was creeping a sideways path across the floor just below her eyes, and she was snuggled under a blanket with something warm pressed up against her back. Comfortable, well aware that if she woke up completely she’d be nursing a vicious hangover, Vivian would have closed her eyes once more if she hadn’t felt the warm thing at her back take a deep breath and roll ever so slightly away.
“Oh hell,” Vivian breathed, the words barely making a sound as she remembered where she was. If it was dawn, that meant… that meant she had fallen asleep at Leo’s place.
They both had, apparently, slumped in a tangled pile of limbs on the tiny sofa. At some point Leo must have pulled a blanket over them. The bootlegged bottles—both empty now—lay on their sides, rolling a little on the uneven floor, as if they had been too drunk to remain upright.
