THE CITY BENEATH THE LAW by GIC
Chapter 5: THE GALA OF SHADOWS
Chapter 1: THE MOURNING AND THE MISSION | Chapter 2: THE HIDDEN AGENDA | Chapter 3: THE RETURN OF THE GHOST | Chapter 4: THE SINS OF THE JUDGE
Nova Loncastre, May 1925
“Invitation, sir?” the boy said, stiff as starch. He had a voice meant for matinees and a jaw that had not met a razor more than twice. The tux looked borrowed, like a child playing butler with his father’s best suit. He had no business guarding a door where murder wore cufflinks.
Chapter 4 recap: Harvey Turpin and former Chief of Police Jack O’Keeffe pulled off a daring heist beneath the sleeping streets of Nova Loncastre, slipping through Judge Hawthorne’s warehouse to rob the first legal liquor shipment in the city after many years of Prohibition. Amid shadows and sleeping rookies, they uncover a damning paper trail implicating Mayor Langston and the judge. The job turns sour when Harvey is cornered by James “Needle” Calderone and Louis “Ledger” Ferelli. Harvey plays for time, then escapes by unleashing chaos with a lit cigarette and two well-placed shots. Safe in the hideout, Harvey reflects on the fractured alliance between Needle and Ledger, sensing a powder keg ready to blow.
Harvey smiled.
“Tell Ironclad I’m here,” Harvey said. “Or better yet, I’ll tell him myself.”
He stepped forward.
The boy raised a hand, too slow, too soft. Harvey just looked at him. The kid flinched, blinked, then turned his eyes elsewhere, as if it had not happened.
Harvey walked in.
No announcement, no escort. Just the creak of the doors behind him and the soft gasp of silk and sequins in the candlelight.
Heads turned. Conversations stopped mid-sentence.
He helped himself to a glass of champagne, gave it a swirl, took a sip — then winced.
“Isn’t this a party?” he said, loud enough for the chandeliers to hear.
The guests stood still. No one dared to speak. Not until Mayor Langston said, “The gentleman is right. It is a party. Let’s celebrate.”
The band picked up again, hesitant. Music filled the room, just enough for people to pretend they had neither seen nor heard what they saw and heard.
If you wanted to know who was who, you only had to watch their faces. The ones who didn’t know Harvey? Upright citizens. The ones who did? They looked away too quickly, as if eye contact might be a crime.
From the far side of the room came a voice like gravel under patent leather.
“What are you doing here?”
Ironclad Malone stood near the hearth. He smiled, but his eyes were not smiling. His eyes were coals. Hot, black, patient.
“Free booze,” Harvey said. “Legal,” he added.
Ironclad did not flinch. He tilted his head. The room shifted. The other bosses started to circle.
Harvey held up a hand.
“Take it easy, boys. I didn’t come here to stir trouble.”
He turned his eyes back to Malone, the only man in the room who counted.
“On the contrary. You hired me to find Harlow. Took me longer than usual, but I’ve got what you wanted.”
The four bosses shifted — not much, just enough to let the tension slip from their shoulders without making it look like they had been holding their breath. All but Ironclad. He stayed still, eyes fixed, unreadable. He knew Harvey too well. Whatever was coming, it would not be clean.
“Take him,” Ironclad said, low and flat.
He drifted away, shoulders brushing silk and perfume, and leaned in to whisper to Langston. Hawthorne joined them. Whatever Ironclad said made the mayor’s lips go thin, but he nodded.
The band, sharp enough to read a room even through gin haze, took the cue. The tempo picked up, horns brightened, cymbals hissed — loud enough to paint over the conversation, not loud enough to forget it. The guests got the hint and turned their backs. This was not their business.
Ironclad returned, eyes sharp.
“You carrying?”
Harvey flashed a slow, crooked grin.
“Whaddya think? I stroll into a viper’s den empty-handed?”
Ironclad did not flinch.
“Take it,” Harvey said, passing his pistol to whoever dared to take it.
“I can handle myself, Malone. Steel or no steel,” he said. Then, he added, “Ain’t that right, Ledger?”
That drew blood. Ledger Ferelli lunged, but Runaway Totti’s hand on his arm pulled him back. Harvey laughed.
A waiter passing by chuckled with Harvey. Ironclad’s eyes snapped to him, and in one look, the grin died on the man’s face.
Ironclad turned. “Let’s go.”
They slipped through the crowd. Eyes followed, but pretended not to. The second floor waited — oak stairs, velvet runners, the hush of old money. Langston’s place, naturally. The man wanted the world to know he had not just ended Prohibition, he had tamed it.
They reached the bedroom — high ceilings, soft light, the kind of place where old secrets slept in cedar drawers.
“Talk,” Ironclad said.
Harvey glanced around.
“The bedroom,” he muttered. “The sheets. Easier that way.”
Ironclad’s eyes narrowed. “Harvey. Talk.”
The name came hard. Not loud, not angry — final.
Harvey felt it. He struck a match, lit a cigarette, dragged in deep and let the smoke curl out slowly.
Malone was reasonable, sure. However, men did not become bosses by being reasonable. They got there by walking over bodies.
Harvey began his tale.
“I ain’t pointin’ fingers, let’s get that straight. You gave me a job, and I took it ‘cause, despite all the blood and bad jokes between us, I don’t figure you for the double-crossin’ type. I figured it’d be a milk run. I got a nose for losers. Even if Kearns handpicked them. But I was wrong. Harlow was knee-deep with some real stink. Not your garden-variety thugs, either. These boys ain’t in it for the city. Not like you. Not like me…”
Alas, dear reader, we won’t be hanging around to hear what yarn Harvey spins next because I had an idea that I believe will make for a more entertaining story.
The waiter — the same one who nearly caught a death glare from Ironclad for chuckling — had traded his tray for silence. He was tiptoeing through the upper halls, ears sharp, nerves tighter than a piano wire.
He heard Harvey’s voice — steady, slick. The waiter allowed himself a smile.
“You got them eating out of your hand, don’t you, Turpin?” he whispered. “I was the one supposed to be watching your back while you poked around. Now, you’re penned up with the wolves, and I’m the one with room to move.”
He slipped deeper into the mansion, leaving Harvey by himself.
The waiter wasn’t a waiter at all, he was Jack O’Keeffe — wearing silverware like armour.
The house was a palace dressed in pretense. Marble floors you could eat off, crystal chandeliers heavy with ego, rooms that echoed like cathedrals. The kind of place that told you money wasn’t just power, it was insulation.
O’Keeffe moved like he used to in the old days, before politics turned his badge into a target.
The office waited at the end — a cavern with books for walls and ambition for furniture. O’Keeffe stepped inside.
O’Keeffe moved toward the desk, eyes scanning for secrets — not just the kind people tried to hide, but the kind they tried to lock away.
He crossed the room slowly, the hush of his footsteps swallowed by the plush rug that probably had a bloodline of its own. Langston’s desk stood like a monument — big, broad and burnished to a shine that came from years of polishing and privilege.
The wood was real. Heavy. The kind of timber you could no longer buy — not unless you owned a railway or three. Deep scratches marred the top, not many, but enough to say the desk had outlived its first master. Maybe even the second, the third and the fourth.
“Old money doesn’t buy taste,” O’Keeffe thought, running a finger along the edge. “But it buys furniture that’ll bury you.”
Still, for all its polish, it did not hold a candle to Harvey’s desk.
Want to know more about Harvey’s desk? Harvey Turpin, Private Investigator.
The drawers slid open with a sigh. First, the easy ones — unlocked, unguarded, full of papers. Briefings, reports, committee minutes… Nothing dirty.
Then came the locks. Three drawers, each with brass fittings polished to a dull gleam. He pulled a slim tool from inside his cuff and coaxed the first one open with a click.
Neatly filled, with the kind of arrogance only crooks with a clean record could manage, were letters. Dozens of them. Signed not by Langston, but by the good Judge Hawthorne. O’Keffe’s brow twitched.
All Hawthorne’s pen. Not a scratch from Langston. The mayor was squirrelling them away as insurance. It smelled, but only if you had the proper sense of smell.
O’Keeffe flipped through the stack, scanning dates, signatures and a few veiled references that could fill a courtroom if read aloud. It was not spelled out, though.
O’Keeffe leaned back, exhaled slowly.
One drawer open. Two more to go.
That first drawer had teeth, but not fangs, not unless you knew the language of rats and had danced with all seven dwarves before. Harvey would have known. O’Keeffe, too. But the average lawperson or pencil-pusher? They would miss the tune entirely.
“But that’s only drawer number one,” O’Keeffe muttered, his voice just a breath, like dust on old wood. And for the first time in a long time, he let himself feel it. Hope. Not a lot. Just a flicker, like a match lit in a blizzard.
Drawer two did not take long to crack. The lock yielded with a soft click, as if it were ashamed of what it was hiding. Inside: more letters.
They reeked of lust, desperation and bad penmanship. Love notes from Langston to a parade of women, each more scandalous than the last. Some wrote back. Some did not. One enclosed a black-and-white photograph that made O’Keeffe raise and eyebrow and whisper, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
He read a few. The language would have scorched paint. That kind of talk could make a sailor blush and a nun lose sleep.
“Guess even kings got dirt under their nails,” O’Keeffe said, tossing the last envelope into the drawer. “But who doesn’t, these days?”
Oh, the good ol’ days when values and family mattered, eh?
He shut it softly, hope slipping from his chest like smoke from a cheap cigar.
Drawer three gave him nothing. No files. No letters. Just a bottle of whisky in a brass cradle, tucked away like it was worth more than the mayor’s soul. The label screamed age and arrogance.
O’Keeffe popped the cork, took a slow pull, and let it burn down like a sermon.
“If we’re going to bring these bastards down,” he said to no one, “we’ll need more than letters and liquor. We’ll need Harlow to crack that damn ledger wide open.”
He relocked the second and third drawers, then, by hand, copied the letters from the first. He tucked the copies. The real letters went back like he had never touched them.
Then came the bug.
The telephone was easy. The lamp base, easier. Behind one of the bookshelves, a little harder, but worth it. O’Keeffe paused near the doorframe, weighing his options, but shook his head. Langston would not gossip in the hall like a schoolgirl. No, he kept his dirt on carpet and leather, where it looked respectable.
That left the vault.
O’Keeffe stepped back and looked around. The office was too big. A rich family’s ego made manifest in walnut panelling and antique clutter. Every inch screamed excess. And every inch could hide something.
The band had not taken a break all night, but their tempo was waning, like a boxer in the final round. The crowd was thinning. Laughter now came in smaller doses. Chatter had dulled. The evening was winding down, and so was O’Keeffe’s window.
He started with the obvious. The painting — one after the other, each heavier than sin. He moved slowly, careful not to leave a trace. There were more than twenty, and they all led nowhere — just wallpaper and plaster.
He wiped sweat from his brow and muttered, “Maybe the bookshelves.”
The thing loomed like a mausoleum. Top to bottom, spine to spine, shelf to shelf — more than a thousand books stared back at him. He stared at the far end, moving volumes with quiet fingers and a prayer for loose panels or hidden hinges. He worked fast, but it was not fast enough.
The band had softened to a faint echo of brass and sorrow, a background noise. Voices upstairs grew clearer, more distinct. His time was up.
If Langston had anything else locked away, it would stay that way — for now.
O’Keeffe cracked the office door and listened. Nothing but the drunken hum of a party reaching its hangover
Then, a shout.
“You’re stealing our money!”
That was Ledger. Slurred, sharp. Dangerous.
“You’re a coward,” he growled. “Your first instinct is to flee!” Ledger was drunk, but it was more than that. He was also under heavy drugs to handle the pain from the bullets. The combination loosened his tongue.
O’Keeffe slipped into the hallway, footsteps silent as a ghost. Down the stairs, the tension was thick enough to chew. The party had twisted — no longer a celebration, but a spectacle. The guests hovered near the walls, faces pale, eyes darting. Ironclad and Harvey stood apart, hands at ease but ready. Langston and Hawthorne looked like they had seen spectres — or worse, the truth.
Ledger was swaying, eyes glassy and wild, a pistol dangling in one hand. Runaway Totti stood opposite, gun drawn, eyes burning like gasoline.
“Say that again,” he said, his voice a low dare.
Ledger did not blink. “You. Are. Stealing. Our Money,” he raised the gun, slow and steady.
The crowd murmured. Someone whispered, “That’s what you get when you dance with devils.”
Ironclad’s voice cut through the noise, low and quiet, but laced with steel. “Enough.”
It was a command, not a request.
The guns stayed up a beat too long. Then, like dancers hearing the last note of a song, both Ledger and Runway lowered their gazes — and their weapons.
Ironclad turned his head slightly. “Harvey.”
Harvey did not hesitate. He grinned like a man clocking in for work, then knocked Ledger cold with a twist of the wrist and a sharp backhand. Runaway swung, fast, but Harvey ducked, caught him by the arm, and sent him down in a heap.
“You,” Ironclad said, pointing at O’Keeffe without turning, “waiter. Help them.”
Needle and the Rat cooped up Ledger. Harvey leaned down and hauled Runaway by the arm. O’Keeffe moved beside him and grabbed the other.
As they dragged him past the stunned guests, O’Keeffe caught Harvey’s eye. Just for a moment, nothing more than a flicker — but there it was. The ghost of a smile. The kind of smile only old detectives share when they have just pulled the wool over a roomful of wolves.