“Been better.”
“What are you drinking?” Clive asked, nodding at Davis’s nearly empty pint.
“Pabst.”
Clive looked around for a waitress but could see none.
“Butler’s off duty,” Davis said as he leaned back slowly and lit a cigarette. “’fraid you’ll have to get your own.”
“Piss off, Davis.” Clive retreated toward the thick, grimy bar stained with water marks and deep gouges. His choice of drink was single malt, but after a quick perusal of the paltry stock lined up behind the bar, he ordered a Pabst, too.
“Charming place,” Clive muttered as he placed two glasses of beer on the table in front of Davis and pulled out a chair. He slid one of the glasses toward Davis and took up the other. “Cheers,” he said and took a long drink.
“Not quite the Drake, but it serves its purpose,” Davis said wryly, exhaling a large cloud of smoke.
“So do you have anything for me, or not?” Clive asked, having already spoken to Davis on the telephone earlier in the week, saying that he was eager for a case, but not mentioning exactly why.
“Not much,” Davis shrugged. “You know the chief. ‘There isn’t any crime in Winnetka.’”
“Well, you must have something, or you wouldn’t have called me out here.”
“It’s pretty flimsy,” Davis said, finishing his first beer and shoving the empty glass aside. “You won’t like it.”
“Try me.”
“Suit yourself.” A grin crept across Davis’s face. “Got a case of some psychic. A spiritualist, she calls herself,” Davis said as he inhaled deeply and looked at Clive as if to gauge his reaction.
Clive sighed. “Go on,” he said wearily.
“Not much to tell. Two days ago, a man shows up at the station, a Mr. Tobin, I think he said. Claims his wife’s been ‘hypnotized’ by this spiritualist and wants us to investigate.”
“This is hardly a matter for the police.”
“But you’re not the police, are you?” Davis said, slouching over his beer again, one eye involuntarily squinting shut, perhaps from the pain of leaning over.
“Come on, Davis. Give me something better than this.”
“I don’t have anything better than this, Howard,” he exhaled. “Look, there aren’t that many real cases to begin with, and I can’t go giving them all to you under the table, can I? I’d be helping myself right out of a job.”
“All right, all right,” Clive said, waving his hand at him, as if to stop the sob story. He rubbed his brow and tried to think. A spiritualist case? This smelled rotten. He had been hoping for something open and shut, like a stolen car or something. Was it really wise to involve Henrietta in such a . . . what would you call it . . . vaporous type of case? Something told him it wasn’t a good idea, but what choice did he have? If he and Henrietta were to really operate a detective agency, it naturally followed that it was going to be fraught with danger and nastiness, which is why he had always been less than enthused about the whole thing in the first place. It was never going to be some sort of gay scavenger hunt that Henrietta always seemed to think it would be. Detective work, by its nature, involved the uglier sides of humanity: theft, murder, rape, kidnapping, blackmail, and every other kind of vice.
Why couldn’t Henrietta be happy strolling about the grounds of Highbury and entertaining his mother’s bridge club? he groaned to himself, but he made himself stop before he got too far down that line of thought. He could have had any number of women who would have been content to sit at home and knit, but it had been Henrietta’s spunk, he reminded himself, that had originally attracted him. Her sense of adventure coupled with her naiveté had been irresistible. They still were, actually, though she was sadly lacking in both at the moment.
“Okay,” he sighed again. “What do you got on it?”
“Not much,” Davis responded with an annoying grin. “This Mr. Tobin says he found his wife packing up all her jewelry—not that it’s worth much, he claims. When he questioned her, she says that she’s giving it to this quack—as a gift, she says. Tobin says she’s been acting all funny lately. Like she’s in a trance or somethin’, going around the house mumblin’, so Tobin’s convinced it’s this spiritualist that she’s been going to see. Claims she must have hypnotized her. Too scared to go see this charlatan himself, he claims, lest he get hypnotized, too, he says, so he wants us to check it out.”
“What was the chief’s response?” Clive asked, fingering his glass.
Davis just raised an eyebrow, suggesting Clive should already know the answer to that.
“Okay, so the basic shell game type of thing. Only with a bit more song and dance to it. Got it. Give me the address to this Tobin,” he grumbled. “And where do I find this ‘spiritualist’?”
“Apparently, she’s set up shop in that one-room schoolhouse out on Willow Road. You know the one?”
“Yeah,” Clive said, fishing for a piece of paper in his inside jacket pocket. “Out by Crow Island? She got a name?”
“Calls herself Madame Pavlovsky.”
Clive rolled his eyes and reluctantly wrote down this information and Tobin’s address. Quickly he downed his beer and stood up, the chair scraping behind him on the sticky floor. “How’s your wound?” he asked, nodding at Davis’s abdomen.
“Coming along.”
“Good to hear,” Clive said, putting his hat on firmly.
“Don’t forget—you owe me a whiskey,” Davis said, referencing Clive’s offer to him in the hospital as a debt of thanks.
“Yes, yes, of course,” Clive said absently. “You’ll have to come over some time to Highbury so we can thank you properly.” He winced at the thought of how irritating that would be to arrange with his mother.
“Should I use the servants’ entrance?” Davis asked, gingerly leaning back.
“Fuck off, Davis. I’ll get back to you when I know something,” Clive said and walked out, leaving Davis sitting at the low table, a sly grin on his face.
Chapter 3
Henrietta folded up the letters, slipping them back in their envelopes. She set them to the side and looked into the mirror of her vanity, patting her hair one more time. She needed to snap out of it.
She chose a lipstick in a faint shade of peach to match her salmon-colored Zimmerman crinkled crepe and gingerly applied it. Turning her head from side to side to observe herself, she decided she was satisfied and stood up.
She had no desire to go and pay a visit to Ma in Palmer Square, but Elsie had been very insistent on the telephone. Saying she had something very important to discuss with her. Henrietta couldn’t imagine what it could possibly be, except something to do with their grandfather’s bullying efforts at marrying Elsie off. She hoped this wasn’t it; she was not up for a fight at the moment.
Henrietta knew she was being ridiculous and cowardly, but she couldn’t seem to help it. She couldn’t shake the dreary malaise that had come upon her since . . . since, well, since she had lost the baby. It’s not that she was a stranger to grief. She had naturally been sad and cried for weeks when her father killed himself, but somehow that grief had been different. This was more acute and aching, as if a part of her had died as well. In both instances, however, she felt the need to hide her grief, to push it down inside of her. The shameful nature of her father’s death, the taking of his own life, had prevented them from mourning publicly. And Ma’s bitter rage prevented them from mourning privately at home, as she forbade them to ever speak of Pa again.