Claimed by the Detective and the Don

Chapter 15 — Halloway

COLE

Two days. That was the number sitting in my chest since I'd walked out of The Tin Violin’s front hall the night before, the three of us still not saying half of what needed saying out loud. One day, now, until the badge stopped meaning anything at all, and I still hadn't given Mae the one thing I owed her. A reason. Not a theory. A name.

I started where I should've started a week ago, at the boarding house two streets off Fenmore where Mae had kept a room before Sal hired her into the Tin Violin. The landlady remembered me from the funeral, the one nobody but three of us had bothered attending. She let me in without much convincing. Grief does that to people. It makes them want somebody else to carry a piece of it.

Mae's room hadn't been touched since she'd moved out. A few boxes stacked in the corner, a mirror still hanging crooked on the wall. I went through what was left slow, the way you do with anything that used to belong to somebody who isn't going to need it back. A hairbrush. A tin of rouge, same brand Lenore used, the one she'd borrowed and never returned. A torn page from a magazine, folded soft from handling, a photograph of a singer with dark waved hair and a mouth painted the same deep red Lenore wore onstage every night.

I sat with that page a long moment before it meant anything. Then it meant everything.

I found the hairdresser two hours later, a woman named Rosie who did half the girls at the Tin Violin out of a back room three blocks from the docks. She remembered Mae clear enough, said the girl had come in six weeks back asking for a change. Wanted her hair set the exact way Lenore wore hers, wanted the same shade lifted into it, even asked which perfume counter Lenore favored so she could match that too.

"She said it was a joke," Rosie told me, working a comb through somebody else's hair without looking up. "Said she wanted to see if she could fool the doorman one night. Fool Sal, even, just for a laugh." She paused, comb going still. "I told her it wasn't smart, playing at being another man's woman in this town. She laughed it off. Didn't think anybody'd take it serious enough to matter."

I stood there a long moment with my hat in my hand, feeling something colder than a case moving through me. Not a mistake of architecture, the wrong door in a dim hallway. A girl who'd painted herself into somebody else's shape for the sake of a joke, and a man with a blade who hadn't needed the light to be good, only needed her to look close enough at first glance to already be sure.

That was the detail I'd been missing. Not the room. Her.

I wrote it down slow in the notebook, like everything that cost somebody their life to give me. Then I went looking for the second half of it, the part that had nothing to do with Mae and everything to do with the man who'd wanted her dead believing she was somebody else.

Halloran's was quiet at that hour. The bartender looked up the moment I stepped in. I didn’t lead with badge, though. I led with a photograph instead, one I'd lifted off Doyle's desk before I left the department, an old file shot of Lenore from her first year singing at the Tin Violin.

He went still looking at it, the same particular stillness I'd learned to read off a dozen faces this month.

"Seen a man come through asking about her," he said. "Not long ago. Wouldn't have given his name easy. Lot of men ask about a lot of women in a bar." He said it careful, the way men say things they've already decided to give up before they finish pretending they won't. "But this one smiled with his mouth and nothing else. Rain didn't seem to bother him. Carried a photograph of his own, older than this."

His hand stopped moving on the glass he was drying.

"Didn't leave a name," he said finally. "But he paid for a room two nights running with a bill big enough that the desk clerk remembers the face better than most guests who actually sign the register."

"Which hotel."

He told me. I didn't wait for him to change his mind.

The clerk at the Averly, a tired kid working a desk two sizes too big for him, didn't need much convincing once I laid a bill of my own next to his ledger. He turned the register around without me asking twice, tapped a line three days back with a chewed pencil.

D. Halloway. Cortland, NY.

I stood there reading it until the letters stopped looking like letters and started looking like the last piece of something I'd been assembling one bad conversation at a time since a woman bled out on the wrong side of a wall that wasn't hers to die behind.

Dutch Halloway. Not a rumor out of Cortland. Not a name some scared desk sergeant refused to finish saying down a dead phone line. A man with a room not four miles from where Mae used to sleep, close enough the whole time that he could've walked past me on any wet corner in this city and I wouldn't have known to look at him twice.

He wasn't hunting from somewhere else. He was here, breathing the same rain-soaked air as the rest of us, close enough to touch the one woman who still didn't know how close he'd already gotten.

I closed the register slow, careful, the same way I'd closed that dead phone line weeks back, like something might still go off if I moved too fast.

One day left on the badge. I didn't know yet if that was enough time to matter. I only knew I wasn't spending a single one of them pretending Halloway was still some name on a matchbook two hundred miles north.

He was in Port Verity. And somewhere out there tonight, he already knew exactly which door was the right one.