Chapter 1 — Chapter 01

The man at table four had been staring at me all night. Not the hungry kind of stare — I knew that one well enough. This was something else. He looked like a man who'd found what he was looking for and wasn't sure if he should be happy about it.

I kept singing. "St. Louis Blues" tonight, the kind of song that lets you watch the room while you perform. The man at table four wasn't watching the stage anymore. He was watching the woman who'd just come in.

She moved like money. Not new money either — the kind of old money that doesn't need to announce itself. Evening dress, dark hair pinned up with something that glittered when she turned her head. She took the man's table like she'd reserved it days ago, and he didn't seem surprised.

I'd seen her before. Twice a month, maybe. Always alone. Always left alone.

The men who bought her drinks never seemed to leave at all.

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Malone's wasn't the fanciest speakeasy in San Francisco. That would be the Meridian Club, where the politicians and bankers pretended they weren't breaking the law they'd voted for. But Malone's had something the Meridian didn't: discretion.

Patrick Malone didn't ask questions. He didn't want to know what you did in the back rooms, as long as you paid your tab and didn't break his furniture. The furniture was expensive. The privacy was worth more.

I'd been singing at Malone's for two years. I knew which cops were on the payroll, which politicians came in on which nights, and which back rooms were soundproofed well enough that you couldn't hear what happened inside.

That last part was useful. I preferred not knowing.

But when the man from table four went into the back room with the dark-haired woman and didn't come out for an hour, I started counting the exits. Three that I knew about — the front door, the kitchen entrance, and the cellar that let out in the alley behind the Chinese laundry.

When the woman came out alone, looking flushed and satisfied the way people do after something that's none of my business, I kept singing. When Malone's boys went into the back room and came out carrying something wrapped in a tablecloth, I turned toward the piano and hit a high note that covered whatever sounds they were making.

I didn't see anything. That was the rule.

But when the dark-haired woman came back the next night and sat at table four with her eyes on me instead of the stage, I knew the rules had changed.

"You're Rose Quinn," she said, when the set ended and I tried to walk past her table.

"That's what the posters say."

"You have a remarkable voice." She smiled, and I noticed that her lipstick was perfect and her skin was pale in a way that looked expensive rather than sick. "I wonder what else you're remarkable at."

I wanted to say 'minding my own business.' But the words stuck in my throat, because she wasn't asking. She was telling me what I was going to be remarkable at from now on.