The Detective's Dilemma (8 page)

That stung. “I played dirty, but here’s the thing. I was never
actually
caught. They figured out what I’d done, and they played dirtier. They found ‘witnesses’ who had nothing to do with the case and were nowhere near the scene of the crime. They decided not to accuse me of the crime I committed, by the way.” He wondered if the lady who owned the apartment kept any liquor.

“Why don’t you just leave? Start again somewhere else?”

“When I took the job…” He shook his head. No point in describing the hell he’d created within his family. His always stubborn, stiff-necked father had become as unbending as an iron rod. To walk away would mean living through the whole idiocy for nothing. His father wasn’t the only stubborn idiot in the family. Except that old, stupid argument didn’t lie at the core of his reasons for staying on the job, did it? Stubbornness and something else, perhaps that core of idealism. And the fact that he couldn’t think of anything else in life he was suited for.

He tried again. “Do you remember the candy factory fire, a few years back? A boiler exploded. The whole brownstone front of the building collapsed and caught on fire, sheets of flame, lots of smoke.”

“On Barclay Street, I read about it in the paper and you obviously remember far more clearly. Does that mean you were there? My gosh.” She paused then added. “What does this have to do with blackmail?”

“Nothing much, but listen anyway. You’re right, I was there. And when that thing blew, everyone took off, running from the fire, heading in the other direction like sane people.”

“And you didn’t.” She shook her head and grimaced. “I remember reading that every pane of glass for blocks around shattered. You’re admitting you’re insane, then?”

“I ran toward the explosion. When something like that happens, that’s my instinct. I don’t run away.” He’d forgotten crawling through smoke and those moments of fear followed by satisfaction as he helped free a man from the rubble. Telling her brought back the vigor of those old days when he
knew
what he did was right.

“So your life is like a dreadful explosion?”

He grinned. “Sure. I like helping people and I don’t like being pushed around. Maybe someday I’ll figure out a way to get the people your father-in-law hired off my back.”

“You don’t seem to be trying to escape.” She sounded sad, without a note of sarcasm.

True enough. Getting along day to day seemed enough lately. He could only shrug. She wasn’t done questioning him, though. “If you weren’t caught by the people who threaten you, how did they find out you were the one to put the weapon there?”

He shrugged again. “I have my suspicions.”

Those hazel eyes remained steady on him. He stared back though it took some effort. “A friend, a cop assigned to the bureau,” he said. He suspected a few fellow officers on the force kept an eye on him, but he didn’t bother with that detail. “I told him what I wanted to do with the revolver.” They’d been out for a drink together, but he didn’t add that part. “I’m fairly certain he was the only person who knew.”

She brushed her knuckles across her lips. “I know what it’s like to have a friend betray you.”

“Do you? What happened to you?”

She waved a slender hand. “It’s silly. But this conversation is about you now.”

“Say, you do a pretty good job of bossy grand dame.”

The corner of her mouth twitched up, but otherwise she ignored him. “Did you try to talk to your friend in the police? After?”

“He denied talking to anyone else. In fact, he pretended to be shocked that there were crooked folks in the ranks above us—that’s a laugh. I guess he’s a good actor. These days, when he sees me coming, he goes the other way.”

“He’s a policeman too. So much corruption. Don’t you take some sort of oath when you join the force?”

“Yeah. And there’s some kind of lip service on that too. My ‘friend’ said I should turn in the people who have a hold on me.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“After he said that, I figured they were watching me real closely, waiting to see if I’d keep dancing to their tune. I will for now because fact is, I don’t know who up top is crooked and who isn’t. If I talk to the wrong people, well, prison would be one solution. People, even cops, tend to disappear. If I could figure out whom to talk to, I would.” The usual rage filled him, and he shook his head. “If I guess wrong, I could end up dead.”

“Good heavens,” she said faintly. “I can see why you do the work for them.”

She seemed serious, but he felt the sting of criticism—the same sort he aimed at himself, especially late at night. “Those employers were only a little bothered when I pulled the trick with the murderer’s gun. They had me beaten and then laid out the new terms of my work. If I made a move against them, and not just against someone under their protection…” He didn’t bother finishing.

“You must have some of the names of the corrupt men.”

“Yes, but I don’t know how high it goes,” he said, and then suddenly understood her reasons for all this prodding. “I think it’s dangerous for you if you know any names.”

She glared at him.

He smiled back. “No, not a word more from me. I expect you’d try to use anything I tell you in your fight with the Winthrops. I don’t want your kid to end up an orphan.”

She sniffed and twisted her wedding ring, no longer meeting his eyes. He’d guessed right. She sought any weapon she could to use against her enemies.

He hadn’t known her long, just a matter of hours now, but he already knew how she worked. Anything that came between her and her kid’s safety was fair game.

Not so long ago he might have felt that same sort of ferocious need to protect the innocent and see justice done.

He walked over to the bag of apples and reached in, ignoring her cry of dismay. He pulled out the book and flipped it open. “What is it?”

She was on her feet. “I don’t know, but it’s none of your business.” She reached for the small volume, and he held it over his head and easily out of her reach. For a moment, he was back to his own childhood, when his cousins would take away a precious possession and mock him for his anguish. Hardly the stuff of nightmares, but he felt a sympathetic twinge for the woman who now folded her arms and glowered at him.

He wasn’t going to return the book until he knew what lay inside, but the anger on her face made him speak to her gently. “Calm yourself. Please. I won’t open it, all right?”

“Give it to me.”

“Why do you care about a butler’s account book? What did he write that’s so inflammatory or secret?”

She stared into his face for several long seconds. He tried to look nonthreatening and interested, and he must have succeeded, because she answered at last. “It’s not Brennan’s writing in there. James wrote it. I’m not sure what it is, but he did keep journals when he was young. I’m fairly sure it’s one of those.”

“Why would Brennan have it?”

“He and James. Brennan and James, uh. They were very good friends,” she said. And he suddenly understood what she wasn’t saying.

He at last saw the secret that she’d been hiding from him about her husband. It took all of his gentlemanly upbringing not to demand she spell it out. Her face burned, and she looked ready to cry for the first time that day.

“Ah,” he said. And with that, he handed over her dead husband’s book and pulled out his own incidence notebook again. “You don’t know what’s in there, then? Suppose you read it and tell me if there’s anything in there we can use.”

The pencil in his hand, the book resting on his palm brought back something he’d lost. A wrong must be righted and he could be the agent, or at least part of the force for good. Over the last few months, he’d told himself the quest to be a good cop played to a boy’s simple passions drawn from old penny dreadfuls. Right or wrong didn’t matter. Staying alive did.

  Since that day in front of Gregory’s desk, he’d forgotten a basic fact. Simple or not, they were real emotions. He drew in a long breath and readied himself to write.

Chapter Four

The detective had changed. His voice and face no longer conveyed contempt. Julianna didn’t want to bring him into this business, but here he stood, in the middle of it all and possessing more of her secrets, and James’s, than anyone other than Brennan.

She touched the worn leather cover. “Yes. All right. I’ll sit down and…” She nodded at the sofa and walked over to sit.

Nothing but the sound of a new rain shower starting up interrupted her reading.

He walked around the apartment holding his book, but he made no attempt to leave. Every now and again he’d ask, “anything?”

“Not yet,” she answered. The book was a chronicle of James’s life, back and forth from the end of his childhood to his marriage. He’d written through the day before they were married. She squinted down at the lines he’d written about her. Not because her vision was bad, but she wanted to be able to close her eyes quickly if the words hurt too much. The lines she read about herself seemed dreary but not hurtful. “She is a good person and better than I deserve,” both annoyed her and softened her heart. “Her quick thinking saved my life and my own D.H.”

D.H. On another page she found the meaning. “Dear Heart.” He hadn’t meant her, of course.

She realized she made a sound deep in her throat like a growl.

The detective stood near her, pencil ready. “Go on, tell me.” It was an order, not a request.

“No. It has nothing to do with being able to break the Winthrops’ hold or help you.”

He sat down on the sofa next to her. “You miss your husband, huh? Despite what you said about…”

She closed the book and ran her hand over the cover, reluctant to read the thing while the detective sat next to her. She’d be reluctant to read it alone too, she supposed. “Sometimes I missed him while we were married too. Although, really, we were excellent friends.” She shouldn’t be unfair to James. She’d never developed unbridled passion for him and—hardly surprising—he hadn’t particularly had one for her. But eventually they had a good marriage.

“Were you fond of someone else?”

She laughed. “Yes, indeed. What an unholy triangle.”

“Triangle? What on earth?”

She considered what to say and decided to risk an explanation. She hadn’t understood most of the words the cab driver had used, but he obviously held Officer Walker in high regard. At least twice in his life, Mr. Walker had helped a man with little money or influence.

Besides, she had to trust someone, and what else could she do? Eventually she’d have to let him read the book, and the truth would be in there. Why Brennan, that idiot, had kept it all this time without telling her… No, no point in getting angry with him. He had given over his secret to her again, in case it would help keep her and Peter safe.

Still, she found it hard to speak about the whole matter and not just because she’d never done so before. One did not like looking foolish—and she particularly didn’t want to look like a fool in front of Detective Caleb Walker. That peculiar realization pushed her to blurt out the truth. “I haven’t thought about this for a very long time. Years. Ha, I expect a triangle is the wrong shape. More like a straight line with me hanging about the outside. The two men and me at the end.”

His puzzled frown cleared. “You were in love with Brennan,” he said slowly.

“He was good-looking, considerate, and he treated me with respect and kindness. I didn’t care that he was a servant. We aren’t English, for goodness sake, all worried about class and breeding. I had money enough for both of us. I was such a fool.”

“You were young. The young are required to be fools.”

“Go on,” he prompted. “Does this have to do with that day you ran away all those years ago? When you went missing?”

She nodded. “I followed Brennan on his day off. And I discovered he would never be interested in me. The funny thing is that he’d met James because of me. James was my suitor, though we were hardly on a serious path to marriage.” She shook her head. The sight of Brennan embracing James and exchanging the sort of kiss she hadn’t tasted had felt like a blow to the stomach.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, that moment wasn’t the worst of that day. James’s father and another man, one of Mr. Winthrop’s employees, got to the apartment first. They’d followed James. I was about to run from that place when their shouting drew me. They made the most hideous remarks. From the things they said, I believed they planned to kill Brennan.” She drew in a long sigh. “I really did think Brennan and James were in danger, so I stepped forward. I told them that I’d gone to meet James, and that Brennan had accompanied me.”

He said, “Right. I can figure out what happened. You threw yourself away to protect a man who wouldn’t appreciate you.”

He made her sound like a weak-witted saintly creature who’d turned herself into a martyr. She held her breath for a few seconds rather than tear into him. “You’re wrong. I didn’t throw myself away. Also it didn’t occur to me that I would be forced to wed until after I spoke up.”

“What did you think would happen?”

She ignored the question because the answer was
I didn’t think at all—I just reacted
. “I wasn’t lying before when I said it was a good marriage. James was able to, ah, appreciate…” Her cheeks flamed. She was discussing her most personal affairs with a stranger. A man. Who was glaring at her. “We were happy together,” she said at last. “Happier than I think either of us expected to be.”

“And what about Brennan? That slimy piece of—”

“Stop. Just stop speaking about subjects that you know nothing of.”

“All right, you tell me.” A soothing sort of voice, the kind he used with witnesses, she expected. It worked on her too because she found she actually wanted to explain.

“As he walked with me back to my house, Brennan said he would tell my parents the truth. He said it wasn’t fair to me to be forced into a marriage. Although he did say James would be lucky to marry me.” That memory made her smile. She even, on occasion, believed Brennan meant those words.

“Why didn’t you let him take the blame for his own actions?”

“He’d certainly lose his position and go to jail or worse. Something far worse, if Mr. Winthrop had his way.” She wouldn’t admit to Walker—or anyone else—how for a time afterward she’d been fool enough to hope she could somehow make Brennan love her with her selfless act of stepping forward. It took almost a year for her to understand that Brennan would never love a woman, and perhaps never love anyone other than James.

“Did Brennan live with you and your husband?”

“No, of course not. He worked for my parents until they lost their money.”

“Then how did he get your husband’s journal?”

Good question. “Before he died, my husband grew very sick. It’s true, he was ill and it was his heart—although he did improve before…well. During that illness, James asked me to summon Brennan, so I did. And I suppose that’s when Brennan ended up with James’s book.”

“You left them alone together for a long time?” he asked.

Though his voice held no judgment, only curiosity, she came close to hating him in that moment. “I thought my husband was dying, Detective.”

He nodded, as if she’d said something wise. “But you said he killed himself. That means James didn’t succumb to his illness.”

“No. He grew healthy enough to leave his bed and return to an almost normal life. And a few months later, he was dead.” She sighed and closed the book. “After… After that, Brennan told me that during their final meeting, James asked him to keep me and Peter safe.”

She sometimes wondered if the two men in her life had done more than speak together or had met more than that single time, but she wouldn’t let that thought ruin the regard she had for Brennan or the memory of her husband. And she wouldn’t say anything to this man with the sharp gaze.

He asked, “Did your husband leave a note when he killed himself?”

That horrible letter. She considered lying, but didn’t, because the letter had convinced her of her father-in-law’s distant hand in James’s death. “He wrote an apology for his weakness. He seemed to loathe himself so often, and the words he used in that note… Those words came from his father. I heard a version of them that horrid day when they were caught. My father-in-law spoke like that on other occasions, though he stopped if he saw I was listening.”

“Did you save the note James wrote?”

“I burned it. I didn’t want Peter to ever see it. Unless we can find something useful in this book, I’ll burn it as well.” Better to ask forgiveness from Brennan than permission.

The corners of Detective Walker’s mouth crooked up. A smirk? A smile?

“Why does that please you?”

“You said ‘we.’ Good. Does that mean you’ll let me read that?”

She wanted to tell him that her family and her husband weren’t his business. The whole sad story made her itch with embarrassment—and she didn’t want him to touch James’s things. Yet a detached outsider would see something she didn’t in the words she already knew would turn her inside out. The important thing was gathering the tools to stop the Winthrops.

He seemed to want to help her—a competent, attractive man offered to share her burden, and wasn’t that a novel sensation.

She rubbed the worn leather one more time, then handed the journal over to the detective.

“Thank you,” he said gravely.

She inched away from him and watched as he read, distracting herself by examining him from the side. He had a good profile, firm chin, a nose that had possibly been broken once but had only a bump to show for it. He glanced over once while she watched him and gave her a quick smile. Not a knowing leer but something with good humor. He said, in his plain, unemotional manner, “This must be awful for you.”

Yes, it is.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.

“I know you will.” That grin flashed again—and for a second he made her believe she could come entirely alive again.

He pushed his shoulders against the sofa and thumbed through some pages. He stopped and studied one page for a full minute. “I think DH is your friend Brennan? The things he describes…” He shook his head.

She didn’t bother to answer.

Silence fell as he read, went back a few pages, then forward again. “Aha,” he said softly.

“What?”

“‘I believe F will kill me. I will escape with my DH. We shall go to another country where men like us can live and I can never be hurt by them again. They have said they will poison me, and I would not be surprised. They have nearly killed me before, and it’s a matter of time and nothing else.’”

“F is probably his father. Yes, and the ‘they’ was probably James’s father and the other man who was with him, must be Mr. Springfield. To tell the truth, I’m not certain Mrs. Winthrop was ever involved in the matter. In fact, she told me the day we wed that our marriage meant now she would be allowed to see more of her son. I think his father had decided her influence had made James into… Had been bad for James.”

“Did he visit his mother after you wed?”

She shook her head. “I paid calls upon her, but James wouldn’t come with me. He resented her. I think now it was because he felt that she didn’t keep him safe as a child. But I don’t think she was part of the threat.”

“Hmm.” He bent his head and read. “He should have run off with his DH before they got caught that day, but I suppose he didn’t want to start over with no capital or resources.”

Funny that he thought James ought to have run away with another man.

“James did enjoy the money that his parents gave him. If he left, I’m sure he would have lost it all.” She realized that sounded disloyal to James and quickly added, “He was a good man. He had his faults, but he tried to improve himself.”

He made a small disbelieving sound and thumbed back a few pages. She longed to ask him what he read. She feigned interest in her chipped fingernails.

At another of those scoffing noises, she dropped the pretense of disinterest. “What?”

“He dithered and carried on. Didn’t take action at all. Or at least it doesn’t sound like it. He had no ambition. How did you stand being with him?”

She glared at him. “You didn’t know him.”

He lowered the book to his lap and studied her, those eyes so warm again. “No. I didn’t.” He fell silent as if waiting for more. She suspected that policemen would do that often, grow silent and watch you as if your words were important, a seductive sort of pose, especially for someone not used to being taken seriously. The respectful attention reminded her of James.

“You must understand, James cared,” she said slowly. “Unlike many other men I know, he listened to me and respected my opinion.”

He opened his eyes wide and raised his dark eyebrows in an exaggerated fashion—clearly an invitation to include him in the list of men who ignored her opinion—it made her want to laugh.

Another long moment passed, and Walker gave a decisive nod. “Just as I thought. He wasn’t good enough for you,” he said.

She looked at her fingernails to escape his intense scrutiny. “You don’t know me,” she said.

“He was weak, and you deserve strength.”