Beautiful Little Fools(20)

“What do you want?” Nick had asked abruptly when he’d spied Frank standing out on the sidewalk in front of Probity Trust smoking a cigarette. Nick gave Frank a wary look, shivered, and pulled his overcoat tighter around him. The air had turned, suddenly, and that sweltering heat of August, a month ago, when Jay Gatsby was bloodless and floating in a pool, almost felt like nothing more than a dream.

“I have a few more questions for you,” Frank said.

Nick pulled up the collar of his overcoat and started walking.

Frank dropped his cigarette and squashed it with his shoe, grinding it into the sidewalk. “Hold on,” he’d called, running after Nick. “I’ll buy you lunch.”

“I can buy my own lunch,” Nick had said, frowning.

Now, a week later, Frank got off the train in Minneapolis, still turning Nick’s final words to him over again in his head. Why don’t you talk to Daisy? Nick had said. She knew Jay so much longer than I did.

Longer? Frank had questioned then. According to Daisy, Nick was the one who’d introduced her to Mr. Gatsby, earlier in the summer.

“Talk to her,” Nick had said brusquely, before walking off, disappearing into the lunch crowd.

Later that night, Frank had combed through the files again. And then something had caught his eye that he’d missed before: Jay Gatsby had been stationed at Camp Taylor before the war.

Camp Taylor.

Frank’s younger cousin, Barney, had been there, too, and Frank and Dolores had even gone down to Louisville to visit him one spring, before Dolores got sick. It was a memory Frank had discarded somewhere in the back of his mind after Barney was killed in the war. But it came back to him again suddenly: Barney’s thin childlike grin, the great blue cascade of the Ohio River, the quaint brick storefronts of a city caught between the South and the Midwest. Daisy was born and raised in Louisville. Jordan too. And if he were a betting man, he’d bet the two of them had met Jay Gatsby there, once, years ago. Is that what Nick meant? And if so, why had they lied to him about that, of all things?

It was that question that got him to call Meyer Wolfsheim to let him know he needed some travel funds to go out of state to interview a witness. And that brought him on the long train ride from New York to here: Minnesota, where the Buchanans had been packing to move to long before Jay Gatsby had been murdered. Or so Daisy had claimed. What was it she’d told him? These things take time.

But whether she’d been talking about her move or whatever it was that had happened between her and Jay Gatsby… well, now he wasn’t quite so sure.



* * *



PERHAPS UNSURPRISINGLY, THE Buchanans’ new home outside of Minneapolis was a mansion so large, so massively sprawling, that it made their East Egg house seem somewhat ordinary in comparison. It sat four stories high and was propped up with marble columns that looked like something out of Ancient Greece. The house was next to wooded acres on one side, a sprawling bright blue lake on the other. Frank wondered if the Buchanans owned both the woods and the lake, too. And maybe that was the difference between being wealthy in Minnesota and in New York—even the mansions in New York were smaller and closer together than out here.

A housekeeper let Frank in and led him to a lavishly decorated, tidy parlor. It was well furnished with paintings on the walls, and there was no sign of boxes, or the kind of disarray you might expect from a move halfway across the country that had happened very recently. Maybe Daisy had been telling the truth about the planning for this being long in the works. Or maybe people as rich as the Buchanans never had disarray.

“Detective Charles,” Daisy gushed, walking into the parlor, greeting him as if they were old friends. Her lips were poised in a smile, but her face was pale, and her eyes betrayed her. They were dim, tired. Angry? “Good heavens”—she was still talking, her voice an elevator rising so fast it could give you vertigo—“I could hardly believe it when Marie said you were here. Sit down. Can I get you a whiskey? Or maybe a bourbon? You look like a bourbon man, Detective.”

He felt slightly unnerved. He was a bourbon man. Or he had been, back when it was legal. And truth be told, he still was in the privacy of his own apartment. But not when he was on the job. And at the moment, with the amount of money Wolfsheim had offered him, he was taking this job even more seriously than his real job. He cleared his throat. “No, thank you, Mrs. Buchanan. But I could take some water, if it wouldn’t trouble you too much.”

“Oh.” She laughed. “You’re one of those men, are you? Water?” She rang a bell and then the poor house servant ran in looking anxious and was tasked with bringing him water. He shot the servant an apologetic smile, but she didn’t seem to notice before scurrying out.

He turned his attention back to Daisy. Her smile had momentarily faded and now she just looked tired. “So, Minneapolis, huh?” He forced a smile, trying to be friendly, hoping she’d let her guard down.

“Tom wanted more room for his ponies. There’s more land out here. So much land.” She frowned and leaned in closer, lowering her voice to an almost conspiratorial whisper. “I hear it’s dreadful in the winter, though.”

“I’m sure,” he said. Even today, mid-September, it was cool enough to feel like a winter’s day in New York. His hands had been cold since he’d stepped off the train, and now he held them in his pockets, running his fingers across the cool diamond hairpin, again and again. “Anyway, Mrs. Buchanan, thanks for seeing me. I had a few more questions for you.”