ONERUBY
CHICAGO
DECEMBER 31, 1927
Golly, good murder took ages! Two hours I’d been sitting at this horrible excuse for a bar. At this rate, by the time I got out of here, all the best parties would be over!
Across the room, one Francis G. Mather, married, (wretched) father to five, sat with his arms around two women wearing enough paint to redecorate Tribune Tower. I’d watched them drink Smoke and toast to the end of 1927, Good riddance what a damned awful year!, and now I was ab-so-tive-ly determined Francis Mather would not see the start of 1928.
In front of me sat my own smudgy glass, half full on account I wasn’t draining it the traditional way but in secret sips-and-spits into the flask I kept snuggled in my décolletage. Though Papa’d lectured me and my sisters for hours about the Dangers of Alcohol in All Its Forms, I didn’t have to be the daughter of the Cook County state’s attorney to know how colossally idiotic it would be to drink a full glass of Smoke. Glittery speakeasies might manage to sneak some legit booze past the jaws of Prohibition, but here in Back of the Yards, where they hadn’t been able to get a drop of the real stuff since 1919, they had to make do with homemade rotgut. Might as well go outside and siphon out some gasoline from the nearest automobile—it’d be quicker, and cheaper, and have the
same effect. But even if the bartender had offered me a beautiful flute of fizzy golden Champagne, chilled and freshly popped, I’d still pass it up. Drinking fiddled with the reception.
As Francis Mather launched into another chapter of Horses I Have Known, Bets I Have Made, I had to prop myself up to keep from wilting. I had places to be and people expecting me and, underneath this shabby pink coat, a party frock that was practically required by law to set heads turning. In my pocket, a postage-stamp-sized paper sachet of arsenic waited to be dropped into Francis Mather’s almost-equally-poisonous cocktail. It would be so easy to slip it in and walk away...
But I had rules.
TIPS AND TRICKS FOR A SUCCESSFUL MURDER:
1. Locate the target.
Fellows like Francis Mather weren’t hard to come by. Good-for-nothing drunk bum bad husband worse father rang through minds from Hyde Park to Uptown more often than the chorus of “My Blue Heaven.” But as much as I would have liked to take the business end of my hairpin to every deadbeat in the city, the ones who earned a visit from me had to have something truly evil in mind. In this case, three trips to the hospital for Mrs. Mather within a year—illnesses that only seemed to get worse, like terrible rehearsals for something even more awful—followed by a visit from the life insurance man got people talking. And worrying. And whispering. And that got my attention.
2. Determine appropriate response.
Well, did I have to kill them? No, not always. “Ruby, the law can be a powerful weapon for justice,” Papa taught me, and I believed him. But I did find it highly suspicious—not to mention highly annoying—that it seemed to be a helluva lot more powerful for a certain kind of (male) person. Still, if the situation called for it, I’d pass tips on to the law. Always anonymously, of course, because as far as anyone knew, I was just a barely eighteen girl in the city, glamming around parties, only interested in fast cars and fast boys.
As for Mrs. Mather, maybe I could have convinced her to try for a divorce, and maybe the right cop or the right lawyer could have believed her, but Francis Mather had a cousin on the force who was happy to look the other way, and too much resting on a large insurance policy in Mrs. Mather’s name.
Someday I’d be that right lawyer, and I’d take all the Mrs. Mathers in the world and use the law to pos-i-lute-ly skewer anyone who tried to hurt them. But, golly, I’d only just graduated high school and
law school was years away and by that time, Mrs. Mather would be dead. I’d take my chances with the arsenic.
3. Wait for the starting pistol.
The most important part. How could you possibly be sure a person intended to do real, terrible harm? How could you snip someone out of existence for a crime they had, technically, yet to commit? How could you be sure of someone’s mind?
But I am always sure.
Ever since I was a kid in knee socks, other people’s thoughts have bobbed through the air like pretty baubles floating in a stream. I simply had to reach in and pluck them out. Worries and wonders and idle passing fancies—somehow, like a supernatural radio antenna, I could hear them all, and the older I got, the easier it became. I went deeper, under the surface for those bright flashy fishies, and even all the way down to the mucky bottom, where I could sometimes pry up the deepest, heaviest rocks. I learned to recognize different kinds of minds and what they told me about the person they belonged to. Honest, open people had minds as smooth and clear as a millpond. People who kept secrets had minds walled up tight, riddled with hidden whirlpools that tried to pull me down.
Killers had a particular kind of mind, too. Icy cold. Oily slick.
At this point, Francis Mather’d spent the better part of two hours fantasizing about the freedom and money that would come with his wife’s death—never mind the five mouths relying on him—while also looking forward to a little privacy with his two companions. He was a scummy man. A bad father. A worse husband. But not a real murderer. Not yet.
And so, I sat, waiting, drumming my fingers against the bar and spitting out burning mouthfuls of Smoke into my pocket flask.
“Another one?” The bartender—and I’d use that word with a whole Christmas basket’s worth of generosity—reached for my half-empty glass.
The real Ruby Newhouse probably would have snapped at his hand with her purse, flashed a dazzlingly gorgeous smile, and said something like “The last man who tried to jimmy my dregs lost his whole arm.” But I wasn’t myself tonight. My red hair was tucked up into a messy black wig and topped with a pitiful pancake hat the color of old putty. I kept my shabby coat bundled over my best deep-blue silk dress (and underneath that, my best black satin knickers, the grown-up ones my mother would hang me for if she ever discovered them). With no makeup and a pair of specs nicked from
Papa’s upstairs office, I was a regular Mrs. Grundy and 100 percent guaranteed no one’d give me more than a fish-eye glance—except for the bartender, annoyed at the sluggish pace of my drinking.
“Not done yet,” I snapped, snatching my glass away, and, with the patience of a person who worked for tips, he gave me a stiff smile while mentally picturing my gruesome disembowelment.
“And what’re we gonna do once we get there?” one of Francis Mather’s girls giggled. He leaned in, whispered something that made her snort with laughter. Her thoughts came out mushy and muddled and drowned in Smoke, but I could read him loud and clear:
...tonight. Or tomorrow. Tonight’s better. Get the money by the end of the week. Rat poison. Sneak it into her hot cocoa. They won’t find her until the morning. Tonight or tomorrow. Tonight’s better...
Starting pistol, and we’re off.
“Hey! Bartender! Top ’er up,” I said, and the bartender narrowed his eyes at me but sloppily filled my glass. Once I had my Smoke, I slipped a hand into my pocket for the paper sachet and slid back off my stool, the soles of my scuffy shoes sticking to heavens-knew-what on the floor. I stumbled a little, cursing, swaying, making my way to an empty table on the other side of the room. Just as I passed Francis Mather’s table, my foot caught the ankle of companion number one and my glass of liquor went flying, hair to hemline, down the front of companion number two.
“Watch yer bony feet!” I shouted, while Number Two let out a screech like a cat and jumped up.
“My dress! You ruined my dress!”
“Blame her and those Clydesdale stompers!”
“I’ll call you a Clydesdale!”
“Girls! Girls!”
They both came at me, with Francis Mather laughing fit to bust. The bartender whipped out between us, more worried about what three hellcats could do to his collection of glassware than what we’d do to each other, so I brayed, “I’m leaving, I’m leavin’! You can have this stinkin’ hole!” before retreating out to the street.
Number Two wanted to go after me but she got one bite from the Chicago winter wind into her wet dress and lost her nerve. I was gone in a twenty-cent flash, sideways to a hidden alley where I’d hid my favorite kitten heels and my mother’s tarnished makeup compact.
Ten minutes later, I’d traded the scuffy shoes, oily wig, and sad putty pancake hat for a smear of
kohl over my eyes and a Cupid’s pout on my lips. After giving my red curls a good fluff, I stepped back into the street, my heels snapping on the pavement.
I didn’t need to stick around to see the end. Acute alcohol poisoning would be the official report, and no one would fuss with an autopsy; come morning, the county coroner would find his office hopping with revelers laid out from the 1928 Special. Hell, at the rate Mather’d been drinking, maybe the arsenic wasn’t even necessary—quite literally overkill—but I didn’t bother with chance. In my experience, the wicked tended to be inordinately luckier than the innocent.
Which was exactly what made this work so satisfying.
As I tucked my favorite pin into my curls and made a beeline for the taxi stand on Ashland, I felt the weight of Francis Mather lift from the world, turning everything lighter and brighter—including me. I couldn’t help dancing down the sidewalk, knowing I looked perfect for tonight’s party: fresh and pretty and glowing with a mysterious kind of something that would send the fellas gathering like moths to a candle. I grinned.
Honestly, murder worked better than mascara.
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