THE DEVILS DIME (29 page)

Perhaps that was the answer. The darkness. Going undercover. It had never failed before.

Jess pulled a weathered buckskin pouch from its drawer in the highboy and contemplated it for a long while. Everything he needed was here.

With this, he could simply stay on the streets until he had some answers.

Calmly, Jess stripped off his white linen shirt and pinstripes and pulled on faded muslin and dungarees. He counted the cash in the tobacco tin and shoved it into his pocket.

His tattered black cavalry boots still sat in the closet where he’d tossed them six weeks earlier. He could hike the mountains for a week in these boots and not feel a thing. How they’d do for him on cobblestone and brick he had no idea.

It felt good to get his feet back into them, though.

Jess sat at his corner table and pulled out all the notes he had. He read and re-read them, made mental priorities, committed every minute detail to memory.

When he was satisfied, Jess killed the gas lamps and secured his apartment. He hid the pages deep in the umbrella stand that stood by the door.

And in the darkest hour of the night, with a fire in his belly that wouldn’t be silenced, Jess Pepper slipped down the dark hallways and out into the night.

Chapter Twenty-One

In a window on the top floor of a noisy dance hall, a lamp guttered and went out. With darkness for a backdrop, a red glow moving past the window was the only thing to be seen from the street. A moment later, the lamp flickered back on, brighter, adjusted by some human hand.

Inside, the talk was gruffly impatient, enlivened by the occasional growl. It was risky meeting like this, but they’d both agreed too much was at stake not to.

“He can’t possibly know anything. We cleaned it up twenty years ago.” The voice was low, cultivated, on the keen edge of disdain.

“I’m telling you, Pepper is on to something.” The red glow arched out, lost some of itself to the floor, and flared again.

“Perhaps he could be persuaded.”

“The bastard’s got a conscience. And a public. Crusaders like him make me sick.” Another flicking of embers.

“Then get rid of him.”

The flaring embers dropped to the floor and died under the broad shoe of the man who paced the storeroom loft. He fancied shoes, the kind that drew envious stares when he nonchalantly crossed a foot over his knee at his favorite drinking establishment, a blind tiger on the upscale side of the Tenderloin. They paid him good money to keep their “permission” to serve alcohol, though no license had ever changed hands. He was always sure of a good time there. And the girls at the Palladium were sure to notice when he sported new footwear.

It had always been that way. Deacon Trumbull took pride in his boyish good looks, his devil-may-care swagger, and his top drawer shoes. It was a deadly combination, sure to draw the prettiest of the pretty to sit on his knee.

When he’d made his first run at getting a promotion to sergeant, he’d had too much confidence in the devilish good looks. They’d bought him entrance to every venue he’d ever sought. But not in the police force. It was sewed up tight as a drum by the commissioners. And they’d gotten greedy with him. It still rankled, even after all these years.

The Samaritan mess had almost gotten him dumped in the East River, he’d fumbled it so badly. So royally, in fact, that when he put in his first bid for promotion, they’d laughed. The bribe they’d set to overlook the bungling of his beat duties was stiff, and he refused to pay.

Twice he’d threatened to expose their graft if he didn’t get the promotion, and twice he’d just about taken a final dip in that filthy river. But he’d done too many favors for too many swanks and politicians by then, and they came through for him. Still, when he went for the third time to his commissioner, meekly with the bribe in hand, the squeeze had suddenly quadrupled. His backers—the ones who needed him in the chief’s office to keep their own necks out of the noose—had nearly balked. But they’d paid. And the favors he’d had to render in return had been endless. Now, in his twisted logic, Ford Magee owed him that $20,000.

That was the last time the hotheaded swaggerer had swallowed his rage, and it had been the best choice he’d ever made. Within a day of making sergeant, his pockets were lined with the kind of “contributions” he could never have imagined. And it had only gotten better.

“I mean it, Deac,” his companion repeated, “just get rid of him.”

“It’s too late. He may have talked to someone already.”

A chair scraped back from the table and soft Italian Barracudas moved quietly to the window. Deacon’s partner was well-soled as well, but unlike Deacon he’d been born that way. “Then discredit his voice. Ruin him. Make his audience hate him.”

The two looked out the window in silence, then turned in unison toward the door.

“Don’t wait too long with Magee, either.”

“How does tonight sound, Cash?”

The hollow laugh of two men who knew not to turn their back on one another died away in the rafters. They scuffed along carefully over tattered satins that had fallen from padded hangers. Mice scurried away from their nest in the springs of a half-buried chaise lounge as the two passed to the door.

“I miss what we had here.” The cultivated voice stopped to drag the door open.

“You know I had to shut it down. That damn Magee had already cost me a promotion.” He took a long draw on his cigar. “I couldn’t take the chance of him connecting the part he knew to the burglaries. If he knew about them, chances were he’d find out about the ‘rewards’ our boys took off those Madison Avenue dames right here. Hell, half the wives and daughters from those hoitytoity mansions lost a bauble of some sort here. It would’ve been holy hell for me if their names went public. I’d have been dead before their spit could hit the floor. It had to stop cold.”

He shook his head and kicked at a dusty scrap of wood. “I cannot fathom how Magee’s lived this long, you know? I really thought he must be dead by now. Nobody, I mean nobody could find a trace of him. He left his job, his place, just kicked me in the balls with that letter he wrote to the paper and disappeared, the goddamn, two-bit—”

Cash put a careful hand on his shoulder, lightly, in case it was not welcomed. “You’d be Chief of Police right now,” he commiserated, if it hadn’t been for that damned Samaritan.” His sympathetic tone carried more than a hint of remorse.

Deacon gritted his teeth. He’d get rid of Magee tonight. And then partner or no, one day he was going to sink his fist into this patsy’s jowl. But not yet. Not just yet.

. . .

The hollyhocks in back of Sutton House pitched and waved as Tad Morton shoved the old pennyfarthing back where it belonged. He stepped out of the flower patch and rubbed his behind.

The scrapes on his elbow and knees were almost healed now, and he’d become so good at riding the three-wheeler that he’d kept it out way too long this time. But he was hooked. Once he’d figured out how to move the thing onto and off of walkways without tipping it over he’d been able to ride nearly anywhere he pleased. With the night wind in his hair he felt he could ride to the end of the world. The streets were his, and he could leave in the dust any beat cop who thought he ought to be home in bed.

But tonight his sore bottom told him he’d have to cut it a little shorter next time.

“Ack!” Tad yelped as a hand caught him from behind and jerked him off the path.

“What’re you doin’ here, kid?”

“I-I-I-nothin’, sir.”

“Nothin’?”

“J-JJJust practicin’ m’wheelin’, mister.”

“
Your
wheeling?”

“No, sir, but she said I—”

“Siddown an’ shuddup, kid.”

Tad was shoved to the ground and he scrambled a few feet away before turning toward his captor. The fellow hunkered down and removed his hat.

“Whaddya got t’ say fer yersef, Tad?”

The boy’s chin dropped to his chest and he leaned further away from the dark fellow. “How do you know m—”

The squatting man chuckled and Tad’s eyes flew open wide, then squinted hard.

“Jess?”

“Shhhttt! Keep yer trap shut and git on over here.”

Tad scrambled over to Jess and they both crawled into the space between the hollyhocks and Addie’s bicycle.

“You scared me t’ death!” Tad was grinning from ear to ear, but his eyes were still big as saucers.

“Listen, Tad. I didn’t mean to scare you. Pretty good disguise, huh?”

“Scared the liverin’ lights outta me. What’re you doin’?”

“Listen up, now, Tad. I really need someone to scout for me, and you’re the best man I know to do it.”

Tad puffed his chest out and dropped a grownup sober expression across his face. But the corner of his mouth kept twitching up in a proud grin.

“Is it dangerous?”

“Well, I can’t say it is. And I can’t say it isn’t. We’ll just have to see how things work out. But some fool kids would go playin’ hero or cops and robbers when they should be paying attention. I’ve got no use for a kid like that. What I need is a kid who keeps his eyes open, does what I tell him, knows how to blend in a crowd. Know what I mean?”

Jess leveled a serious look at Tad and watched him absorb every word.

Tad nodded slowly.

“And then, some other kids think the little things are too boring and they won’t do the little things. Even when the littlest thing might be what saves people the most. Understand?”

Tad nodded.

“I’ve got three things I need you to do. Are you with me?”

“Three things, yessir.”

“First, I want you to see Miss Magee tomorrow night at the hotel and tell her all about your late-night cycling.”

Tad swallowed hard. “Yessir. I been meanin’ to do that.”

“Second, tell her you have a message from me, and that I won’t be around for a few days, but that you know how to get a message to me if she needs something. Got that?”

“Yessir.”

“Third, you find some excuse to hang around here as much as you can the next two days. If anyone goes to her apartment, you go up these back stairs and try to hear what they want. I mean anybody, now, Tad, y’hear?”

“Yessir.”

“Then you bring me a message and tell me everything I need to know. Don’t leave out a single detail. All right?”

“Yes, but how—”

“Yeah, I know. How are you gonna get a message to me. I was thinking about that. Did you know there’s a little hole behind those loose bricks at the base of the front stoop?”

“No, I never did.”

“Well, I was thinking it’s about the size you could fit a cocoa tin into. You got a cocoa tin?”

“Golly, Ma keeps all o’ hers. She’d yell bloody murder if I took one. But I’ll find one, Jess, don’t you worry.”

“That’s m’boy. Now tell me what you’re gonna do.”

Jess listened with pride as Tad recited in perfect detail each of his instructions. When he was finished, they stood and saluted one another.

“Make me proud, son.”

“I will, Jess. You’ll see!”

“Now skedaddle on outta here.”

“Yessir! Bye!”

“Shhhht!”

“Bye.” Tad corralled his exuberance to a whisper and trotted off down the alley.

So far, things were working out just fine.