Arthur held the cab door for Mrs. Brodigan’s nephew—Rory, he’d said his name was—and said, with saccharine courtesy, “After you.”
He half expected him to rabbit and run, like a man with an ounce of sense, but Rory was either made of sterner stuff than he looked or he wasn’t very bright because he slunk into the cab like a confused stray dog into a warm house.
“Harlem,” Arthur told the cabbie, as he climbed in second, and didn’t miss Rory’s small intake of breath. “What’s your problem with Harlem?”
But Rory just shook his head. “No problem,” he said, earnest enough that Arthur believed him. “I’ve just never been.”
“It’s barely four miles from you.”
“I know, I just don’t—” Rory bit off the words. “I’m just not from the city,” he said, instead of whatever he’d been going to say.
Arthur rested his back against the cab door. “And where are you from?”
Rory made a vague gesture. “Oh, you know. Upstate.”
Clear as mud. Arthur’s instincts told him Rory was hiding something, and his bet was on Mrs. Brodigan’s psychometry. He’d spent weeks trying to track down information on Mrs. Brodigan and all this time she’d had a mouthy nephew, a potential fountain of inside knowledge.
Arthur was going to crack him like a rusty vault.
The cab slipped through the streets, the city lights rippling over the back seat like gentle waves on a lake’s edge. “Where’reyoufrom?” Rory was eying Arthur’s lips. “You got a fancy accent.”
An accent bought by Arthur’s parents, taught at his expensive schools and then made more pronounced by frequent transatlantic travel. “I spend a lot of time abroad,” he said. “How exactly are you Mrs. Brodigan’s nephew? I understood she had a single sibling who died childless.”
“Through the late Mr. B. Cousin of a cousin of a third cousin twice removed, that sort of thing. Nephew’s easier to say than sorting out a big Irish family.”
“So you’re Irish?” Arthur raised an eyebrow. “With those eyes?”
Rory bristled like a porcupine raising its quills. “All sorts of folks wear cheaters.”
Arthur hadn’t meant the glasses. In the dark of the cab he could barely see Rory’s eyes, but he’d noticed them instantly in the shop—hadn’t been able tostopnoticing them. The deepest of browns, like coffee, fringed with long jet-black lashes despite Rory’s blond hair. Those eyes belonged on a lush Adonis from a sultry Mediterranean beach, not some surly urchin from Hell’s Kitchen.
He rapped the door behind him, getting the cabbie’s attention. “Drop us here.”
Rory clambered awkwardly to the curb as Arthur paid, looking around the empty, snowy street. “I don’t see anything.”
“Exactly.” Arthur waited until the cab was out of sight, then tugged Rory by the sleeve toward the street’s corner, to a deli with a green awning and an abandoned tobacco shop.
Chapter Six
Benson was the one to take them into the Magnolia again. Rory slouched behind Arthur as they walked, head down and hands crammed in his pockets like he could make himself invisible. “People can still see you,” Arthur pointed out. “You’re notthatshort.”
“You’re notthatfunny.”
Despite himself, the corner of Arthur’s mouth quirked up.
The place was wall-to-wall packed with bodies, but Benson somehow found them a small table along one wall, the closest thing to private the club had. On stage, Stella had ensnared the crowd with a slinky red dress and a heartfelt rendition of “I’m Nobody’s Baby.”
Arthur took a seat, tucking the briefcase under his chair, and watched as Rory, eyes glued to her, walked straight into the table. “You have seen a woman in your twenty-six years, haven’t you?”
Rory scowled as he found his chair. “Yes.Just not many as airtight as her.”
“It runs in their family,” Arthur said, gaze stealing to Benson’s retreating back.
“You know her?” Rory huffed. “Of course you do. Figures a big-timer who looks like you knows a doll who looks like that.”
Arthur blinked. The words were as grouchy as everything else out of Rory’s mouth, but that had been a compliment.
Rory turned to look at the stage again, the lights illuminating his profile; the line of his jaw and neck above the collared shirt and suspenders, the blond curls clamped down by the newsboy cap, the near-black of his striking eyes. As the light flashed wrong off the side of his glasses, Arthur frowned. The cap was patched twice, the coat three times; Rory wouldn’t be careless with something expensive.
