A Lady Never Trifles with Thieves (6 page)

To my right, a shadow moved across a wan rectangle of light on the grass. I shrank back, peering up at the source. A silhouette loomed at the window in the room next to Mrs. Abercrombie’s. By the height and shape, I surmised it to be Avilla. She couldn’t see me, but it didn’t keep my heart from pounding.

When I reached the buggy, Izzy was dozing, his head a-droop in the harness. An undertaker’s wagon with black-draped isinglass side windows, a few saddled horses, and another buggy had joined the parked cavalcade.

Constable Hopkins stood guard at the entrance. The spectators had been shooed away or quit the scene of their own accord. I departed with more questions than answers.

As I’d expected and dreaded, Won Li was waiting up for me. Jack was the unknowing recipient of a series of Occidental insults for abandoning me to my own devices at such a late hour. Mentioning my obviously unscathed condition did naught to stem the tide. While I waited for Won Li to lose his voice, or a lung to collapse, I stoked the woodstove and put on the kettle. Rifling the pie safe devoted to his herbal pharmacy released fragrances both pleasing and noxious.

The long, complicated day had sapped my energy. Sleep was the sensible antidote, but there was research to be done, requiring a lively, agile brain. In addition, if Jack perchanced to retrieve his horse from our stable in the wee hours, slumbering through his visit would not achieve an informational exchange in regard to the Abercrombie case.

He’d proven himself egregiously tight-lipped about police matters. Coming at him from ambush and a subtle application of friendly enticement should alleviate that minor character flaw.

Won Li watched as I measured gotu kola, red clover, damiana, ginseng, kava kava, red raspberry, peppermint, and cloves in a teapot.

“Have you taken a chill?” he asked. “Or are you desirous of plowing a field by moonlight?”

I laughed. Changing out of my rumpled suit into my thinnest cotton gown before the elixir fired my blood was imperative. However, his remark confirmed I’d remembered the recipe correctly.

We took chairs at the kitchen’s round, pine table, where I discoursed the rudiments of the LeBruton divorce and Abercrombie robbery/homicide. His interest was as plain as a spinster’s shimmy, but he said, “Your father would not approve.
I
do not approve.”

“Neither do I.”

In my experience, no race of people on earth could scowl as menacingly as those of the Chinese persuasion.

“I do not approve of men who thrash women physically and emotionally,” I said, “and I do not approve of a life being extinguished for a pillow slip full of jewelry.

“Furthermore, I don’t give a fig whether what’s happened to Penelope LeBruton and Belinda Abercrombie is my bailiwick, my duty, or my responsibility to resolve. They deserve a champion. I may not be equal to the task, but I can’t turn my back and hope for the best.”

Won Li folded his hands on the table. “That is not the type of disapproval to which I referred.”

Steam flumed from the kettle’s spout. “Oh, yes it is. Years ago, if I’d asked for approval before I jumped that yahoo and his friends who were beating you to a pulp, would I have gotten it?”

I took a pot holder from a wall peg, poured boiling water into the teapot, and shrouded it in a cozy. “I told you then, I can’t hash bullies, cheaters, or drunks. All that’s changed is adding killers and thieves to the list.”

“Your motives are honorable, Joby. They have been for as long as I have known you. It is your methods that are too often impulsive and foolhardy.”

I kissed the top of his shaven pate. “How many times have we had this argument?”

“If you will allow a rough estimate, I would say three thousand, four hundred and seventy-nine.”

“Have you won one, yet?”

“The knowing enjoy water. The humane enjoy mountains.”

I groaned. “Again, in English, please. I’m too tired to puzzle out Confucius’s analects.”

“Enjoy life. Take trouble as a challenge to overcome, but don’t seek it.”

“I do enjoy life and I’ve never sought trouble. It’s just always had a way of finding me.”

W
ith my nose in a book was precisely how I wakened the next morning. I knew the instant my eyes opened that last night, while I’d been changing my clothes, Won Li had substituted a muscle-relaxing tea for the stimulant I’d brewed.

He’d also taken the precaution of not being in hollering range when I realized the treachery. Calling his name indoors and from the back porch was to no avail. I didn’t comprehend the thoroughness of his disappearance until I finished my ablutions and ventured to the stable.

Izzy and the buggy were gone. In a second stall stood Loralei, Jack O’Shaughnessy’s bay mare. He must have toiled deep into the morning hours, then collapsed on a cot at the station house.

Loralei had been unsaddled and curried to a glorious sheen. I fed her the cubed sugar intended for Izzy and wondered why my treasonous patron thought I’d stay to home, rather than take the liberty of borrowing Jack’s trusty steed.

Since the age of four, I’d ridden bareback and saddle-mounted for the sheer joy of it, as well as transportation. One of Papa’s few deviations from Victorian mores pertinent to feminine comportment was railing against the invention of the sidesaddle.

“It’s a pretty seat, with a gal’s skirts and petticoats all caped and aflutter in the breeze,” he said, “but for practical purposes, it’s as worthless as teats on a ladybug.”

I tried it once, for the novelty and in keeping with my youthful theory that adult opinions were designed to wreck enjoyment of life to its fullest. Imagine my shock when Papa’s judgment of female equestrianship proved accurate. A subsequent yarn about a secret garden where babies were plucked from under cabbage leaves restored my faithlessness in grown-ups.

Except now that I was past the age of majority, I cringed at thoughts of making a spectacle of myself—well, any oftener than necessity dictated. Unfortunately, a lady riding through town forking a saddle was liable to generate scorn from her own gender and impure thoughts from the opposite.

The only activity less comfortable and more awkward than riding sidesaddle on a sidesaddle was riding sidesaddle on tack designed for a man.

For one thing, a typical Western pommel is several inches shorter than its sidesaddle counterpart. Crooking my knee around the former provided as much bracing and balance as a fossilized mushroom and pinched the bejesus out of my calf, to boot. Add to that, the saddle’s curvature created a sensation similar to my buttocks being wedged into a tinware dishpan that’s bouncing down the world’s longest set of stairs.

Aside from anatomical abuses inflicted in the name of convention, the brief ride into Denver City proper was uneventful—other than the heat wilting me like bacon fat drizzled over spinach leaves. A black cloche and jersey wool dress was mandatory attire for one of my appointed rounds, but criminitly, how I envied Asians their traditional white mourning garb.

As usual, my arrival at the agency wasn’t met with clients queued up and clamoring to hire a professional investigator. I dialed the vault’s combination and pushed down the brass handle. The door swung open on oiled hinges.

Papa’s badge lay atop his holstered Colt revolver. There’d have been hell to pay if he’d been caught the night he’d reclaimed the tin-plated memento he’d slapped on Judge Story’s desk that very afternoon.

As it happened, I was thrilled when Papa excused himself after supper to wet his whistle at his favorite Ft. Smith saloon. I gave him a ten-minute head start, then hopped bareback on the paint pony I owned at the time and lit out for the courthouse in Van Buren.

My father had bought and paid for that Deputy U.S. Marshal’s badge with cash money, blood, sweat, and tears. Judge Story demanded it when Papa resigned, but I’d go to prison for life before I’d let that slimy carpetbagger keep it.

When I’d hoisted myself through the judge’s office window, Papa had jumped higher than most would expect a six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-pound lawdog was able. My heart had swelled bigger than the whole of me when I’d seen that tin star already clutched in his hand.

As far as I know, it was the only crime my father ever committed. Alas, the same couldn’t be said of his daughter, even before the night of our accidental collusion.

I returned the pouch containing the agency’s financial assets to the vault. Ten dollars and change remained. The balance tucked into my reticule would be spent. Whether for good or ill, I left to Providence.

Within the hour, Loralei conveyed me to the train depot’s Western Union telegrapher. A host of like-worded telegrams from Joseph Beckworth Sawyer were dispatched to sheriffs and municipal police departments in California, Nevada, and Utah, all requesting an urgent reply.

I refused to believe Penelope was the first and only woman Rendal LeBruton had romanced for profit. Lotharios and bunco-steerers were made, not born. Criminals of all stripes were drawn to prosperous cities like lead to lodestone, and Abelia
had
said Rendal met Penelope in San Francisco.

If my hunch was correct, grounds for a speedy, uncontestable dissolution were virtually guaranteed.

Blake Street was next on my itinerary. There were some blocks where one’s virtue, wallet, or life were endangered even in daylight. However, a gardener with a penchant for gambling probably did not frequent the avenue’s tonier reaches.

The initials D.P.D. were etched and whitened on both aspects of Loralei’s saddle skirt. Only a certified lunatic would unhitch and abscond with a horse belonging to a city constable. Naturally, I excluded myself from that group.

Sam Merck, groundskeeper and suspect in the Abercrombie homicide, was no stranger to mixologists at the Green Flag, Strange & Knaught, May Flower, and Green Bement’s saloons. William Marchant’s Billiard Hall, the Atlantic Garden, and Planter’s House were also waystops along Merck’s road to perdition. It was disappointing, but not unexpected, that none I spoke with at those establishments would confide Merck’s address to his recently widowed sister.

I couldn’t feature a boardinghouse more filthy than the second I braved until I smelled its downstreet competitor. The structure’s whomperjawed front door was screened, but flies buzzed in and out of the building’s unchinked log walls.

A toothless, fat man rocking on the stoop had no use for soap or the spittoon beside him. He smiled at me. The cold biscuit I’d gobbled for breakfast did a do-si-do in my stomach. I kept my distance, but any locale west of the Mississippi River was too near.

I bid him a good morning and inquired after Sam Merck.

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m his sister. My husband just passed away—”

“What you want Sam for?”

“Then he
does
board here?”

“Nope.” A stream of tobacco joined its predecessors swamping the base of the spittoon. “Not no more, he don’t. The sumbitch done packed up his plunder in the dead of night.”

“Last night?”

“Yep. Owes me two weeks for the room, too.” He scratched what itched. “Promised he’d pay up this morning. Comin’ into money, he told me. He ain’t never got that far in arrears afore, so I took him at his word.”

One eye squinted shut. “I don’t reckon you’re good for it, are ya?”

“No.”

“Hmmph. I figgered as much.”

“How long did Sam live here?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions. Even for a widder-lady.”

I chuckled in spite of myself. The landlord was as repulsive as a bloated toad, but he had a certain charm.

“Oh, I ’spect Sam bunked here three, mebbe four months. Didn’t leave so much as a watch fob to pawn for what’s due me.”

His eyes rambled my length, the orbs acting independently of each other. It was mesmerizing for its ocular impossibility. “Merck ain’t dead, is he?”

“I can’t say with certainty, but I doubt it.” I thanked him for his time and started away. He called after me, “If you see him, or that Gertie he runs with, tell ’em I wants my money, cash on the barrelhead.”

I turned. “Would that be Gertrude Hiss?”

“Never heared her Christian name. Not that I’d peg ’er for no Sunday school teacher.” His belly jiggled when he laughed. “Them two romped hosannas out’n the bedsprings, though. From what Gertie hollered, ’twas always a helluva prayer meetin’ goin’ on in there.”

A blush blossomed at my stockinged toes and raced to my crown. It hadn’t abated when I entered the bakery between E and F streets. I took some solace in the ruddiness of owner Adolph Schinner’s jowled countenance, though its color was an occupational hazard.

Come to think of it, so was mine.

I cursed Won Li with blistering fervor as I remounted Loralei sideward, balancing a string-tied, pasteboard box on my winged knee. The bay craned her neck and neighed at my sudden fidgeting for purchase.

“Go easy, girl. Heaven forbid, the Abercrombies be scandalized by me riding like a human to bear them a condolence cake.”

A Mexican boy of about twelve was repairing the damage done to the flower beds by last night’s Looby Lu’s. In heavily accented English, he told me his name was Ferdi and that Sam Merck hadn’t reported for work that morning. Avilla had waited a full hour before hiring Ferdi and his brother, Santo, to replace the groundskeeper.

I was midway to the door when I stopped short and whirled around. Pansy’s description of Sam Merck and Gertrude Hiss chimed in my mind.
That’s
where I’d seen them. A stocky redhead with a mannish hairstyle and her disreputable companion had been among the rubberneckers on the lawn last night. They’d rated notice for standing on the fountain’s far side, separate from the others.

Why had they stayed outside, rather than go into the house? Now Sam Merck was absent from his job. Six bits said Gert wasn’t ricing potatoes for pancakes in the kitchen, either.

A mourning wreath hung from each door, and the windows were draped in black bunting. Even without them, an aura of tragedy was almost palpable.

Jules, dressed in a butler’s livery, answered the bell. His eyes were swollen to slits and his shoulders looked as though anvils weighted them. He accepted the boxed raisin cake and said, “Mister Abercrombie isn’t receivin’ till after the service for Miss Belinda.”

“Might Avilla Abercrombie be receiving?”

“Miss Avilla, she isn’t here. Had things needing took care of before the funeral. The master’s too sick at heart to do them hisself.”

His monotone took me aback. If his lips hadn’t moved, I’d wonder if a ventriloquist was hiding behind the door. “Are you all right, Jules?”

He hesitated, then set the box aside and stepped out, pulling the door after him. “No, ma’am. I never been so scared in all my born days. Pansy, too.”

“Scared? Why?”

“Those po-licemens was here till past daybreak. Looked high, low and in-betwixt for Miss Belinda’s jewelry. After they tore through the house, they tramped the yard with lanterns. One even fished a stick around in the outhouse.”

He wiped his face with a handkerchief from his trousers’ pocket. “They think we’s the burglars. Think we stole from them other folks, too.”

I squeezed his forearm. It was as pliant as an iron pipe. “They’re just being thorough, Jules.”

“If that was all of it, I might ought to agree with you. Pansy, she heard two of ’em talkin’ whilst they ransacked our room. One of ’em said I must have given the loot toa…a ’complice—yeah, that’s it. Said ’twas the people in the buggy I sent after the police.”

The thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but it was a logical suspicion. Actually, it would be a brilliant ruse to divert suspicion. “Didn’t Mister Abercrombie tell the constables he sent you to get help?”

Jules shook his head. “The master don’t remember keen enough to swear to it. Miss Avilla don’t, either. They’re sure they must have, seein’ as how somebody
did
tell the police, ’cept whoever it was, run into the station house and out again and didn’t give a name.”

“You didn’t recognize the people in the buggy?”

“No, ma’am. There was two of ’em and they was white. That’s the onliest thing I recollect.”

Miss Cornucopia Brown, a teacher imported from West Virginia to Ft. Smith for one school term, had been wild for an exercise she’d called a lightning quiz. She’d belt out spelling words, history questions, sums and the like for us to answer with whatever first popped into our heads.

I won enough horehound candy to turn my stomach, but hearing Bubba John Vickery blurting state capitals and the names of Columbus’s ships was a pure-de-miracle. Miss Brown said the brain is like a frog in a pan of water on the stove. Ponder too long, and it won’t matter if
jump
is the correct answer.

“You said there were two people in the buggy.”

Jules nodded.

“Two men?”

“Huh-uh. A man and a woman.”

“Old? Young?”

“The man was older’n her. Coulda been her daddy.”

“Was she blonde?”

“No, her hair was brown as molasses.” He hesitated a beat. “And the gent had one of them billy goat beards.”

“A Vandyke?”

He shrugged. “Could be the fancy name for it. I don’t rightly know.”