The liquor pinned her eyes shut, but every thought in her head tracked his attentions traveling her throat, ear, cheekbone, nose, lips.
“I’m told to beware your seductive charms,” Julia teased. His scent was intoxicating.
Wallace drew back. Jaw in his palm, his elbow sank into the cushion beside her head. He stroked the skin behind her ear. “Seductive? Not at all. I defer to your wishes.” His fingers slid into her hair. “What would you have me do next, Miss Kydd?”
Julia tasted the warmth of his cognac. Desire twisted awake, curling her spine and lifting her chin. Her eyes opened with the deep pull of it. Stately stone buildings, glowing in the early dawn, slid past the car’s window like fat pink pearls.
“Say good night, Mr. Wallace.”
CHAPTER 18
“At last,” Philip said late the next morning when Julia pushed open the library doors. “I was about to crash a few minor chords to rouse you.”
It was just before noon, hardly cause for comment. Julia suspected the coffee in his cup was freshly brewed, not stale and cooling as he’d have her think. She yawned and filled a cup from the pot beside his chair, remembering it was Christophine’s Sunday out. Apart from any other qualities the man claimed to possess, knowing his way around a kitchen seemed to Julia among the most useful.
Philip watched her with maddening attention. Was her hair standing upright? Her robe’s collar askew? His eyebrows rose in comical inquiry. Damn him. What was so funny?
It took just one swallow, and her focus returned. Last night. The conclave between Kessler, Philip, and Wallace she had not been allowed to join. Philip was mocking her slow-awakening wits. Wasn’t she perishing to learn what he had heard? The apartment had been dark last night when she’d returned, and she’d assumed he’d retired—or was still out.
“Yes, yes—so tell me.” She pulled up a chair. “Has Kessler found Eva’s manuscript?”
Philip shook his head. “Not for lack of trying. The poor man is flummoxed. He’s had men combing the neighborhood, inside and out, but no scrap of it’s turned up. He did discover how the killer got in and out, though.”
“Not the obvious way?” Julia sat forward. “Is there another?”
“Turns out there’s a second stairway. Not surprising, really, in those old buildings. It leads from the back alleyway—a painted-over door behind the rubbish bins and coal chute—up to the apartment.”
“I saw only two rooms, the office and a little bedroom Eva used to get ready between shows. There was nothing even resembling a door. Where is it?”
“In the lavatory, apparently. I suppose a well-directed tap or firm twist to some finial, and the linen cupboard swings out to reveal the passageway. Hobart danced a fine jig as Kessler’s men turned the place inside out, and no wonder. Turns out they use the passage to stash bootlegged liquor. Crates and crates of the stuff.”
Julia considered this, not the bootlegging but the secret passage. Why was it there at all? She could think of several possibilities, well beyond providing access to a commode for the distressed pedestrian below. Most obviously it offered access to and from Timson’s rooms without alerting his guards. The killer had to be someone well acquainted with the club’s layout and operations. One of those armed brutes seemed most likely.
“It’s quite the spice route,” Philip went on. “One door opens into a coat closet in the manager’s office downstairs—”
Julia interrupted. “Bobby Hobart. I knew it. Or one of Timson’s guards. I saw it in their eyes, Philip. They’re killers. Probably many times over.”
“In their eyes?” Philip leaned close to peer into hers. “A wild glint? The pallor of a dead soul? The smudge of eternal damnation?”
She clapped a hand over her eyes to thwart his mocking gaze. “Something. Killing changes a person. It must.”
He sat back, briefly somber. “You have no idea.”
For a fraction of a second she wondered if he’d ever killed a person. Shocking thought! In the war? She knew only that he’d served as some kind of attaché, far from any actual shooting. But before she could ask, he said, “Kessler needs more than garrulous peepers. He’s checked those fellows’ alibis a hundred times, and nothing has budged yet, but I agree there’s nothing more intriguing than the airtight alibi. Still, I’m afraid that deuced passageway keeps meandering. There’s another entry point behind a mirror in the biggest backstage dressing room. Eva Pruitt’s dressing room.”
“Damn!” Julia didn’t apologize for her unseemly outburst. Her heart fell. This explained how Eva and Jerome had gotten upstairs that night. They’d arrived after Julia and the others but come in through the back bedroom. She had wondered only vaguely at the time. “I bet Kessler leaped to all sorts of conclusions about that.”
“Only the obvious ones. And theories, not conclusions.”
“But anyone could have used those stairs, coming from the alley or from Hobart’s office.”
“Or her dressing room. Much as you want to see your friend exonerated, Julia, you have to think like a detective and look at all possibilities.”
He was right, of course. Moving on, she asked, “What did Mr. Wallace have to say? He seemed intent on talking to Kessler about something, I assumed about Eva. Is she all right? He wouldn’t tell me much, only that she was safe.”
Philip rolled his lips between his teeth for a moment. “Your aging suitor—”
“Philip! Don’t be absurd. He’s not much older than you.”
“And he preys on young—”
“Please. Just what did he say?”
“When Kessler needled him for doing too good a job of keeping Pruitt out of the public eye, Wallace hemmed and hawed—”
Julia coughed in exasperation. The man she knew was incapable of hemming and hawing.
“But finally he confessed that he’s lost her.”
“Lost her?”
“She’s given him the slip. Disappeared. Gone.”
Julia tried to smother her reaction before Philip saw it. As an unofficial deputy to Kessler’s unofficial deputy, she’d agreed to help the police
