The Diviners (41 page)

“Again!” the great Ziegfeld barked.

Henry launched into the music. The star of the piece, an
arrogant crooner named Don, descended the long, wide staircase, singing with melodramatic vibrato:
“Stars up in heaven, fall from the sky. So tell me, my darling, why can’t I fall into your arms like a heavenly star, and live there forever just as you are…”

At the piano, Henry rolled his eyes as Theta looked his way.
Constipaaaation
, he mouthed, and Theta tried not to laugh. Arms out, the girls began their elegant descent. Out in the audience, Flo looked as if he’d been sucking on a dill pickle. They’d end up doing it again, Theta could tell. But no amount of rehearsal could ever make the number work. It was lousy—sentimental and cheap. As her feet felt for each step, she remembered a piece of advice she’d gotten in vaudeville: If you want a laugh, do the unexpected.

As the girls strutted gracefully forward down the long staircase, Theta intentionally went the wrong way, gliding to the left like a deranged Isadora Duncan, screwing up the other girls, who had to scramble to get around her.

“Hey, watch it!” Daisy griped.

“Sorry, Mother,” Theta said, eliciting snorts from some of the other girls.

“Theta! What are you doing? Get back in line!” Wally shouted.

Theta kept going. She bumped into a glittery hanging star. “Oh!” she said, petting it as if she were a drunken flapper. “Sorry, Mr. Rogers.”

The company glanced nervously at Theta and then out again to Mr. Ziegfeld sitting in the audience. Don, the stick in the mud, picked up the song again, glaring at Theta with a tight smile. Theta stumbled down the stairs, humming loudly. “Don’t stop, Don, honey. You’re doing swell! Even Mr. Rogers liked it,” she said, gesturing to the glittery star. “Oh, Henry!”

Theta raced to Henry’s side near the wings and threw her
arms around his neck, giving him a passionate kiss. “Oh, it’s okay. He’s my brother.”

“Just don’t tell our mothers,” Henry quipped, and this time everyone laughed, except for Don, Daisy, and Wally, whose cheeks reddened.

“Miss Knight! I think we’ve had quite enough of your bad behavior—”

“Gee, Wally, that’s not what you said last night,” Theta cracked. She was skirting dangerously close to the edge. She might have even gone over. For all she knew, she’d be out on the street in a minute. Somewhere in the dark, Flo was watching, waiting to pass judgment.

“Mr. Ziegfeld, I can’t work under these conditions,” Don huffed.

A hush fell over the entire company as the great Florenz Ziegfeld marched down the center aisle. “Fine, Don. You don’t have to. I can always get someone else.” Mr. Ziegfeld looked at Theta, his eyes narrowed. Slowly, he broke into a grin, applauding her performance. “Now,
that
was entertaining!”

Theta let out the breath she’d been holding.

Ziegfeld pointed at the stage manager, talking as fast as New York traffic. “Wally, add that bit in. Build an act around it. And get me an item planted in the gossip rags: ‘Ziegfeld discovers new star in…’ ” He smiled at Theta.

“Theta. Theta Knight.”

“Miss Theta Knight!”

“And her brother, Henry DuBois,” Theta added.

The chorus girls giggled anew at this, except for Daisy, who had sided with Don. She stared daggers at Theta.

“And her brother,” Flo echoed. “I like this kid. Where you from, honey?”

“Connecticut,” Theta lied.

“Connecticut? Who’s from Connecticut?” The great Ziegfeld made a face like he’d tasted sour milk. He paced near the orchestra pit, thinking. “You’re a long-lost member of the Russian nobility whose parents were killed by communists—that’ll win hearts. You were smuggled out of the country by loyal servants in a daring midnight escape and sent on a ship to America, land of dreams. Wally, let’s get some shots of her on a ship. Put a bow on her head. A big bow. Blue. No, red! No, blue. Sweetheart, give me a forlorn look.”

Theta cast her eyes heavenward and clasped her hands over her chest. “Sad enough for ya?” she asked out of the side of her pitiful pout.

“Perfect! Another minute and I’ll need a handkerchief. Now, you were raised by sympathetic nuns in Brooklyn—Wally, find me a convent school in Brooklyn that needs a donation—where my dear wife, Billie, was visiting—make sure the papers get that part about Billie, along with a picture of her holding a baby—and she heard you sing. ‘Silent Night.’ ” Ziegfeld grimaced. “ ‘Silent Night’ too much?”

He looked to Henry, who shrugged.

“ ‘Silent Night’ it is,” the great Ziegfeld continued. “And she brought you straight to me, your Uncle Flo, who knows beauty and talent when he sees it. I like it. You’re about to become famous, kid.”

“Mr. Ziegfeld, Henry could write you a swell number. He’s very talented.” Theta shot Henry a
Speak up for yourself
look.

“I could.”

“Fine, fine. Hank—”

“Henry, sir.”

“Hank, write me that number. Make it…”

“Hummable,” Henry finished for him.

“Exactly!”

Henry gave Theta an
I told you so
face, and she answered with a tiny shrug that asked,
What can you do?

“Wally, get this up on its feet. I have to go meet Billie to look at a country house—that woman can spend money. Fortunately, I’ve got a lot of it.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Ziegfeld,” Wally said, following the great man out. He looked back at Theta, and she stuck out her tongue at him.

The girls crowded around Theta, congratulating her on her good fortune, while Daisy stomped off, cursing a blue streak.

“Upstaging people isn’t very nice,” Don sniped as he breezed past.

“If you were any good, I wouldn’t be able to upstage you, Don,” Theta shouted after him. She hugged Henry. “Do you know what this means?”

“More rehearsal?”

“We can finally afford a piano, Hen. And everybody’s gonna walk out of the show singing
your
song.”

“Don’t you mean humming my song?”

“Don’t get cute. It’s a start.”

“I can see it now,” Henry said, sweeping his hand wide. “Florenz Ziegfeld presents Mr. Henry DuBois’s memorable melody, ‘The Constipation Blues’!”

Theta hit him.

The New York Public Library, that grand beaux arts queen of books, presides over Fifth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-second streets with a majesty few buildings can match. At exactly eleven o’clock in the morning, Evie arrived at the bottom of the grand marble steps, confident that she would find just what she needed to break open the case of the Pentacle Killer, and that she would find it in roughly a half hour, give or take. She’d pestered Detective Malloy for what he knew about John Hobbes, which wasn’t much, but he did tell her that the man was hanged, he believed, sometime in the summer of 1876.

“
Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening, ain’t we got fun? Ba-da-bum-bum, la-la-la-la. Ain’t we got fun?
” she sang as she passed one of the pair of sculpted stone lions guarding the entrance. She gave its right paw a pat. “Nice kitty,” she said, and went inside. She was directed up three flights of winding stairs into a large, wood-paneled room crammed with bookcases. A librarian whose brass nameplate identified him as a Mr. J. Martin looked up from a copy of Edith Wharton’s
House of Mirth
. “May I help you?”

“Pos-i-tute-ly!” Evie beamed. “I have to get the goods on a
murderer for my uncle, Dr. William Fitzgerald of the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”

Evie waited while Mr. Martin furrowed his brow, thinking. “I can’t say that I have.”

“Oh,” Evie said, deflated. “Well, then. What can you tell me about a man named John Hobbes who went to trial for murder in 1876? Oh, and could you be a doll and make it fast? There’s a swell sale over at B. Altman, and I want to get there before the crowd.”

“I’m a librarian, not an oracle,” Mr. Martin said. He offered her a scrap of paper and a pencil. “Could you write down the name, please?”

Evie scribbled
John Hobbes
,
murderer
, and
1876
on the paper and slid it back. Mr. Martin disappeared for a bit, then returned with two stacks of newspapers bound on a wooden rod, which he placed on the desk in front of Evie. There had to be a week’s worth of work for her in those two volumes. She wouldn’t be shopping that day. Or possibly ever.

“All of this?” Evie said.

“Oh, no,” Mr. Martin said.

“Thank heavens.”

“I’ll be back with the others in a moment.”

“Others?”

“Yes. All fourteen.”

At half past six Evie staggered back into the museum. She clomped into the library, past the table where Will, Jericho, and Sam sat working, tossed her scarf to the floor, and, with a heavy sigh, collapsed onto the velvet settee, her cloche still on her head. “I’m exhausted.”

“I thought you went to the library,” Uncle Will said.

Evie cut her eyes at Will, who didn’t look up from his book.
“Why do you think I’m so exhausted? If you’d like to know anything at all about this city in 1876, please raise your hand. No show of hands? Pos-i-tute-ly shocking.” Evie bunched a pillow into a corner of the settee and rested her face against it. “There is a hideous invention called the Dewey Decimal System. And you have to look up your topic in books and newspapers. Pages upon pages upon pages…”

Uncle Will frowned. “Didn’t they teach you how to go about research in that school of yours?”

“No. But I
can
recite ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ while making martinis.”

“I weep for the future.”

“There’s where the martinis come in.” Evie yawned and stretched. “I thought research would be more glamorous, somehow. I’d give the librarian a secret code word and he’d give me the one book I needed and whisper the necessary page numbers. Like a speakeasy. With books.”

“I don’t see any books,” Uncle Will said warily.

“Got it all right here,” Evie touched her head. “And here,” she said, patting her pocketbook.

“You stole books from the New York Public Library?” Will’s voice rose in alarm.

“O ye of little faith, Unc. I took notes.” Evie drew a stenographer’s notebook from her cluttered bag.

Uncle Will held out a hand. “May I see them?”

Evie clutched them to her chest. “Nothing doing. I’ve lost hours of my precious youth I’ll never get back, and I never made it to B. Altman. I’m playing radio announcer, here.” Evie lay on the settee with her feet propped on the back and flipped pages till she found the one she needed. “Naughty John, born John Hobbes, raised in Brooklyn, New York, at the Mother Nova Orphanage, where he was left at the age of nine. A troubled youth, he ran away
twice, finally succeeding when he was fifteen. He shows up in police records again at age twenty-nine, when a lady accused him of doping her up and trying to have his way with her—what a bad, bad boy!” Evie waggled her eyebrows, and Sam laughed. “However, the lady in question was a prostitute, and the case was dismissed. Poor bunny.” Evie riffled through to another page. “He worked in a foundry, where he was told to beat it when they caught him using company iron to make his own goods. He showed up again in 1865 for peddling dope to returning Union soldiers. In 1871, he worked for an embalmer—that’s a real undertaker, not a bootlegger. He set up a profitable side business selling cadavers to medical schools. At some point, he reinvented himself as a Spiritualist, running séances at Knowles’ End, a ritzy mansion uptown on the Hudson. Ida Knowles—who owned the joint—ran out of dough and had to sell it to a lady”—Evie traced her finger to the spot she needed—“named Mary White. Naughty John’s companion, who was a wealthy widow and medium who got pretty chummy with Ida after Ida’s mother and father died. That Ida was a real tomato who was not hitting on all sixes….”

“Beg your pardon?” Will said.

“She was pretty gullible,” Sam explained.

“Because she started spending all her clams on séances with Mary and John. Anyway, the chin music was—”

“The what?” Will asked.

“Gossip,” Sam said.

“That John Hobbes kept a lot of dope around, and these
Spiritualist
meetings should’ve been called ‘spirits meetings’ because everybody was pretty half seas over on some kind of drugged plonk, and what they got up to would’ve made every Blue Nose and Mrs. Grundy from here to Topeka reach for her smelling salts.”