Nobody with a lick of sense would be out wandering the streets of New York so late in the evening, particularly with no clue as to which areas of the city he ought to avoid. Unfortunately, Desmond had been so full of self-pity and misplaced resentment, he didn’t realize he’d overshot his destination by at least a couple of stops until he’d exited the train and watched it pull away from the platform.
Desmond figured his aunt’s hotel shouldn’t be too difficult to find, especially since he’d been under the impression all of Manhattan was aligned to a grid—except, there went Broadway, zigging past Seventh Avenue at an odd angle to bisect the streets in a most untidy fashion.
Instead of the clean white buildings he’d been expecting, dingy tenement housing sagged on either side of the narrow street, illuminated only by the full moon and the dim tendrils of light snaking from the occasional electric lamp. The acrid stench of refuse assaulted his nose, and Desmond realized he’d most definitely wound up in the wrong part of town.
For all of it, he blamed Amelia, the object of his distraction.
Theirs had been a whirlwind romance. Desmond, convinced she was the one, had jumped in with a gusto only matched by hers for him. It had felt like a wonderful dream, and he’d swept her away on his next adventure without a worry in his heart.
They’d spent the trip across the Atlantic as in love as any other couple on board the ship. Plied with sumptuous food, attentive service, and luxurious accommodations, Desmond perused the jewelry shop for diamond engagement rings with his trigger finger close to his billfold. The infatuation only grew during their Caribbean layover, though now he thought perhaps a surplus of potent rum might have prolonged his naivete on that count—rum and a string of sultry nights set to the beat of calypso music.
No, it was the train ride across what felt to Desmond like a barren wasteland between Savannah, Georgia, and the Hollywood hills that dampened his desire for the girl. Perhaps the intolerable weather—first stiflingly humid, then later, a heat so dry he felt like a hollowed-out husk—had played a role. Regardless, discomfort turned to irritation, and both parties abandoned all efforts at geniality. The passion that had felt as though it might last a lifetime fizzled like a wet match.
Not even the cool Delta Breeze of southern California was enough to revive the romance, and when Desmond’s aunt declared in no uncertain terms that Amelia was not a good fit for the family, he took the opportunity to disentangle himself. The feeling of relief lasted all the way up until Amelia expressed a similar emotion rather than the disappointment he’d expected.
However, that bit of information wasn’t something he was prepared to share with his friends—Frederick would never let him live it down! Rather, he would play off the breakup as a mutual relief, but the truth was rejection in any form stung, particularly for a man such as Desmond, who rarely felt its prick.
All the way back across the country—the northern route, thank heavens, he’d never been happier to see snow in all his life—Desmond had sulked. He felt used up and thrown over (never mind he’d been the one to initiate the split) and worse, humiliated. His pride had taken a beating, and since he was traveling alone, there was nobody around to tell him to either buck up or shut up.
“How did I end up all the way down here?” he asked out loud to nobody in particular. Had he been in a nicer part of town where the conventions of polite society were more strictly followed, Desmond’s outburst might have been ignored by passersby—but he wasn’t in a better part of town, and he was starting to think he might never make it to the hotel at all.
“Kept going too far south, by the sounds of it.” Desmond heard the sarcastic answer to his obviously rhetorical question, dropped the heavy suitcase he’d been lugging, and whirled around to find its source. A nondescript man of medium height wearing a khaki trench coat peered at him from beneath the brim of a coordinating bowler hat.
“Thanks,” Desmond replied curtly, “that’s bloody helpful.”
The stranger’s eyebrow quirked. “Not from around here, are ya?” he asked.
“What was your first clue?” Desmond snapped. It felt good to verbally blow off some steam, and he considered that he might have been wrong about polite society after all. Perhaps it was highly overrated, as many popular notions tended to be.
“I can tell you where you need to go, for a price,” the man said, adopting a wheedling tone and wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. “I know every street in this city.”
The scrappy boy inside Desmond wanted to make a snide comment and storm off, but the lamps had become fewer and further between, and the road was now so narrow the light of the moon barely reached the ground between the buildings on either side. Shadows pooled, inky enough to provide adequate cover should one wish to conceal oneself.
At that moment, standing there wondering who else might be lurking nearby, Desmond thought he’d hit rock bottom. In fact, he would have felt it quite impossible to sink any lower, but unfortunately, he was just then poised to discover there were further depths to plumb.
“I’m trying to find,” Desmond pulled his billfold from his pocket and fished out a slip of paper, “The Plaza Hotel, on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue.”
It didn’t occur to him that mentioning an expensive hotel while flashing around any amount of cash in a bad neighborhood probably wasn’t the best idea he’d ever had until it was too late.
“Like I said, for a price,” the man repeated, his words much harder now than they had been before. He lifted his hand, still inside his jacket pocket, and Desmond could make out the shape of a gun.
“Hand it over. All of it.”
1920’s New York City
Desmond Cooper is nursing a broken heart. He’s so distraught, in fact, that his arrival in the Big Apple doesn’t go as planned. Instead of living it up at The Plaza Hotel, he ends up wandering around a bad part of town and stumbling over a dead body!
Enter feisty speakeasy proprietor Imogene, a woman unlike any Desmond has ever met. She wields a pistol, drinks whisky out of a teacup, and won’t settle for anything less than the truth about the murder–even if it means discovering one of her closest friends is the killer.
Will she mend Desmond’s heart in the process, or leave him wondering why out of all the juice joints in the city, he had to wander into hers?
A cozy historical mystery set in Prohibition-era New York, Half Seas Over features characters from the Red Door Speakeasy Mysteries as well as the Mrs. Lillywhite Investigates Mysteries.