But Wallace was no simple country parson urging peace and harmony. Julia remembered the gun sleeping against his ribs. Firing means you’ve lost, not won. He emanated power more than he exercised it. Julia wondered if there was more to the deal than he’d mentioned. Had he included incentives or threats to induce Timson and Eva to accept the arrangement? Where was his gun now? Perhaps it didn’t matter. Wallace was a pragmatist in a way that Julia was coming to better understand. In a way, she was too. Power could be a force for good as much as for evil. No wonder Eva trusted him.
Julia drank her champagne. It was cold, sweet, delicious. “So he hired her at Carlotta’s?”
“It was just the ticket for her,” Wallace said, resettling beside her. “Leonard was still a rat, but he knew if he went too far, I’d hear about it, and I could make things miserable for him.”
“What do you mean?”
He kissed the top of her head. “I don’t break thumbs, if that’s what you’re thinking. No dungeons down the hall. I meant I have connections downtown, among the clientele Leonard depended on. I have the ear of influential men.”
“It didn’t stop Timson from treating her viciously that night.”
“Leonard could be nasty, but that was a performance. He was too smart to foul his own nest. Not with her.” Wallace’s voice rumbled into Julia’s hair.
This was what Eva had said too. But Timson had been livid. Julia remembered the tension of that night, the squeeze at her windpipe. She couldn’t know his usual temper, but when he’d spoken of the manuscript, and particularly that scene, his rage had seemed white hot.
Wallace lifted her chin, but she turned aside, and his lips brushed her cheek.
Something more, something deeper, had disturbed Timson. “Could Timson be the rapist in her book?”
Wallace let out a heavy breath. “Quite possibly. I don’t know for certain.”
“You could ask her.”
“I could.” He kissed her nose. “I did. But she won’t say. She says very little these days.”
He pulled back to look into her face. “Which is wise. Until the police find something that points them elsewhere in the next few days, she’s square in their sights.”
Julia finished her champagne in one swallow, cutting short the import of his words.
“I’m doing all I can to protect her from Hobart,” Wallace said quietly, moving her glass to the floor. As he bent forward, she marveled at the gold luster of his hair, swept back over the crown of his head to a precisely shaved edge at his nape.
“But unless you trust me, I can’t keep her safe from the courts.” He caressed her shoulder and edged aside the strap of her frock.
His mouth moved to the hollow below her throat. Not yet, she told her spine, helplessly arching. Listen. Concentrate. She felt his hand slide to the top of her stocking and knew in a moment she would be lost.
A strange sound escaped from her lungs. “Wait.”
He recognized it as a word before she did. He breathed deeply and sat back.
She swallowed. “You said there were two reasons Eva went to you. What’s the second?”
“Ahhh.” Wallace dropped his chin. “The second reason.”
He lifted the fallen strap of her dress.
“She didn’t exactly come to me. When I went up to see what had happened, she was there. Kneeling beside his body.”
CHAPTER 24
Julia jerked upright. “What?”
Wallace clasped her knee. “You must swear on whatever’s holy that you won’t repeat any of this. It would only make things worse for Eva. I’m serious, Julia. Promise me.”
“Of course.” She twisted to face him. “What happened?”
He took another deep breath, gathering his thoughts. “When I left Carlotta’s that night, I ran into Senator James. He and I went on to the Half-Shell. After Eddie’s late show—he was in fine form that night—we retired to my office to discuss a few matters over an excellent bottle of Scotch. The next thing I knew, Bobby Hobart’s on the telephone. I could hardly understand him. He said Timson was dead, shot. He wanted my help.”
So Kessler had been right about Wallace’s political ambitions. No wonder he was circumspect about helping Eva.
“I rushed back there, grabbed the keys from Bobby, and ran upstairs. I unlocked the door and saw Leonard, obviously dead, with Eva beside him.”
Julia held his forearm as she listened.
He stroked her fingers, perhaps to loosen their grip. “Poor kid. She was hysterical.”
“Did she have a gun?”
“No. I didn’t have time to think of much, but I did check that. I told her to hide in the alley until I could get to her. She ran into the bedroom and disappeared.”
“So you knew about the back staircase?”
Wallace massaged his jaw, roughening the new day’s beard. “I did then. She told me that’s how she got in.”
“Any sign of the manuscript?”
“No. Leonard’s holster was on the chair, but his gun was gone and the safe was empty. Otherwise the place didn’t seem disturbed. I hustled downstairs to send Edgar around for Eva in the alley. I had him take her to a flat in the Lester, a building I own on West 146th.”
He smiled faintly. “It’s a flat I keep as a favor for friends who need a place their wives don’t know about. The car had just turned out of sight when the cops came roaring up, as they do. I told everything—almost everything—to the precinct men and then to the detective from the homicide bureau.”
“Hannity,” said Julia. She felt herself relaxing. Everything Wallace was telling her matched what she knew from Kessler and Jerome. He might have lied to her about his roles—his quite illegal roles—in helping both Eva and Jerome escape, but he hadn’t. True to his word, he’d shared
