“It’s a nice place,” Leo said, making both girls start a little. “Small, but nice.”
It was nice, Vivian thought, looking around. There was no wardrobe, but hooks on the wall held two suits, each with a matching hat hung just above it. She stepped closer. She had only ever seen Pearlie in the black suit he wore when he worked at the Nightingale, but she had spent enough years sewing clothing to appreciate the other: sharply cut, made with elegant lines and expensive fabric. She frowned. There was a nightstand between the suits and the bed; Vivian pulled open the top drawer and found a box of carefully folded handkerchiefs and ties. She reached out to touch them, even though she didn’t need to. She could tell what the fabric was just by looking.
She glanced up to find Bea watching, her apprehension clear in the nervous way she was biting her lower lip. “Where was Pearlie getting his money, Bea?” Vivian asked quietly.
Bea swallowed. “Pearlie can’t have been one of those poor joes so in despair that he couldn’t see any way out,” she said in a low voice. “He wasn’t poor, not anymore, and he could see a way out.” She glanced at Leo.
“What did you find, Viv?” he asked.
“Silk for his handkerchiefs and ties,” Vivian said. “The suit he woreto work at the Nightingale was nothing special, but the other one is top quality. And so is the hat.”
“Money isn’t always enough to stop folks from falling into despair,” Leo said gently, but he sounded uneasy.
“I noticed the suit first,” Bea said, coming to stand next to Vivian. “Guess it comes of spending so much time with you, Viv. And then I noticed the neckties.” She glared at the drawer, then abruptly shoved it shut. “I asked Pearlie what was going on. And he told me. A big payout from a mob boss, he said, and he spent a little, but most of it he squirreled away. And another one coming soon. Just one more job to finish, and then he was moving out of this sad little place. On to bigger and better things. He was going to take my whole family with him.”
“Out of New York?” Vivian said, suddenly feeling like a vise had squeezed around her chest. She wanted what was best for Bea and her family, she truly did. But what would she do without her friend?
“To Harlem or something. Somewhere better than here.” Bea cast a critical eye around the small room, but Vivian suspected she wasn’t really seeing it. Bea gave every penny she made to her mother, hoping to buy a better life for her brothers and sister than a precarious living in two rickety rooms in a neighborhood that most of the city forgot even existed. “He wasn’t despairing. He was the most hopeful person I knew. He was downrightjaunty. He said things were just getting better and better. He had a plan.” Bea shuddered. “And now he’s dead, and I’m supposed to think he just couldn’t take it anymore and swallowed arsenic? Fat chance. I think someone killed him, and I want to know who.”
“Did he say where he hid the money?” Leo asked.
“Does it matter?”
“It does if we want to make sure he was telling the truth. Maybe he just stole those things and didn’t want to tell you that.”
“You can’t steal a suit like that,” Vivian pointed out. “Not and have it fit.”
“He said it was here,” Bea said.
A quiet gasp echoed through the room, and all three of them wheeled around to find a woman in the doorway. Her eyes, already large and dark and fringed by extravagant lashes, were wide with shock as she stared at them.
“Alba?” Bea frowned, taking a step forward. “How long you been standing there?”
The woman, Alba, was older than Bea and Vivian, but not by much. And she didn’t answer, just stared at them without speaking before turning abruptly and hurrying away.
“Alba!” Bea yelled, but she was already gone.
“Who was that?” Leo asked, looking wary. “Do I know her?”
“Alba,” Vivian said slowly. “Alba Diaz.” Alba had come and gone so fast Vivian felt as though she had imagined seeing her. But the pain and surprise in her expression had been all too real.
“She works at the Nightingale,” Bea said, eyes still on the doorway where Alba had been. “You’ve probably seen her around there. That’s where she and Pearlie met. They’ve been seeing a lot of each other recently.”
“They’re a couple?” Vivian asked, surprised. “I never saw them together.”
“They’ve been keeping it quiet at work, I think. And from her family.” Bea scowled, and her voice was brittle and bitter as she spoke. “Apparently her people wouldn’t have liked her stepping out with someone like my uncle. I hope she didn’t hear what we were saying,” she added, lip curling. “She’s probably dumb enough to blab it all over.”
“She heard something,” Leo said grimly. “And I don’t think it made a good impression. Can’t believe we left the door open.”
“We didn’t,” Bea said, rubbing at the spot between her eyebrows. “Lord, my head hurts something fierce.”
“Should we go after her?” Vivian asked hesitantly. “She looked…”
“We’ll talk to her tonight,” Bea said firmly, going to close the dooronce more. “If we’re here now, we’re getting this done, because I don’t want to come back.” She gestured toward the bed. “Help me slide that out, will you? I’ll prove it. Pearlie didn’t do this to himself.”
Pearlie had been too clever to hide anything under the bed, Vivian realized. Instead, Bea instructed them to slide the bed toward the door until there was a foot and change of space between its head and the corner where it had rested. There, in the spot that had been behind the headboard, a rectangle of knotty wood covered up a hole in the wall. It looked like the sort of shoddy, slapdash patching that Vivian was used to seeing in her own building. It didn’t even have nails in each corner.
But the hole for one of the nails that was there was a little too big. Bea pulled it out of the wall easily, and the board slipped out of place, swinging around the remaining nail to hang with its long edge down. Behind it, a neat cubby had been cut into the wall.
