THE DEVILS DIME Read online

“Perfect! It’s done.” Addie slipped out of the booth and looked down at her friend who was still contemplating the work cut out for her that evening. “You saved my life, Cherise. God bless you for it.”

  Addie squeezed the redhead’s hand, winked, and hurried to the door. She’d stayed longer than she’d intended. And she knew well what happened to tellers who were late to work at Chase National Bank.

  Chapter Seven

  Jess read with some relief the note pinned to the door of Addie’s apartment. Last night it had seemed the most natural thing to mix the poultice and put the poor girl out of her misery. Today, it would have been just plain awkward.

  Jess took the stairs to the street and looked back up toward her window. He hoped she was telling the truth and was truly out and about. He’d brought the column to show her, and only now realized that he’d really jumped the gun. Raising a crowd for a performer with a lame arm was hardly clever.

  But now it looked like she was going to be all right.

  He’d come only because he’d promised to come, and was later than he’d expected getting to her place. Jess had gone first to the dockworkers’ union hall and collected the material that he’d requested earlier in the week. A hunch that had nagged at him for several days had led him to seek out archived records at the hall.

  The hall’s proximity to many of the attacks described in the tattered blue folder seemed somehow relevant. Jess was itching to dig into the copies of member lists and meeting timetables the union secretary had made for him, just those in a four-hour span of time surrounding each of the attacks.

  The smallest twinge of guilt rippled through his temple over his gratitude that Addie’s shoulder didn’t need tending as he backtracked the twenty or so blocks to his office on Park Row.

  He loped up the stairs two at a time, shedding his leather coat as he went, and almost didn’t see the city desk manager scurrying toward him.

  “Jess!” The man’s stage whisper got his attention. “Jess! Wait a second.”

  Jess turned and grinned at the fellow who’d already become a friend and mentor.

  “Mornin’, Gus.”

  “Morning, Jess.” Gus Callaway issued his greeting in a normal tone with a slap on the back and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Chief Trumbull’s in your office. Thought you’d want t’ know.”

  He clapped Jess again and began to move on, waving the morning edition in the air between them. “Didn’t know you were so fond of music, Pepper. I think I’ll let you review the opera for me next week.”

  Jess snatched the paper and laughed. “You do, and you’ll have a whole gang of angry Brunhilde’s on your doorstep.” Jess dropped his voice and leaned closer to Gus. “What’s he want?”

  “No clue, Jess. Sorry. I assume you haven’t broken too many laws in your brief tenure here. At any rate, he comes bearing gifts.” His envious glance toward Jess’s office was impossible to miss before he disappeared around the corner, leaving Jess to face the man about whom he’d heard a great deal and knew very little.

  Precinct Chief Deacon Trumbull.

  . . .

  Jess stood at the door of his office, taken aback for a moment by the dapper man sitting behind his desk. He looked more fit for the ballroom than the crime scene.

  “Pepper! Jess Pepper, I presume!” The man swiveled to the left, then to the right, and patted the arms of the cowhide desk chair. “Just trying out your new chair, Pepper. I say,” he smiled a gleaming, envious grin, “this is one comfortable piece of furniture.”

  Jess stepped into the room, pulling the door closed behind him. His office had been transformed. Two heavy book cases lined the far wall, and a Turkish rug was laid out on an angle in front of his desk. Two handsome side chairs sat on it, ready for visitors to Jess’s domain.

  A huge portrait of a buffalo stampede took up the wall behind his desk, and a mirror-topped hall tree had been planted just beyond the door, awaiting his topcoat and hat.

  The desk chair he’d brought with him had been shoved to the side, and in its place was a monster of a chair, upholstered in soft, burnished leather. Studs marched up its sides and across the top just above Chief Trumbull’s head.

  It was a man’s chair, no doubt about it. But it was not his. None of this was his.

  Trumbull rose from the chair with easy grace for a man his size. He stood half a head taller than Jess, and evidence of a well-fed stomach filled out his expensive suit coat. Still, he was a handsome man. He rounded the desk with his hand out.

  “Pepper, I am just honored to shake your hand,” he said.

  “Chief,” Jess replied, “I honestly don’t know where all this came from,” he said, nodding toward the chair.

  “Oh! Just a little welcome to New York City for you, Pepper. Here, try it out.”

  In one smooth move, Trumbull stepped to the side and propelled Jess around the desk. Jess looked down at the tufted seat of a chair the likes of which he had never owned. He frowned, then knew he needed to try it out and pretend he liked it. After the Chief left he could swap it for his old favorite.

  “Well, Chief, this is just about the finest welcome a man could hope for,” he said, trusting he sounded sincere. He turned and grasped the arms as he settled down into the chair. And almost groaned in ecstasy.

  Now this was a chair. It hugged his backside and massaged his shoulders and hit the bend of his knee in exactly the right spot. He’d never, in any of the fine places he’d visited, sat in a more comfortable chair. He felt giddy. And he felt guilty. He’d never want to sit in his old wooden bucket again. This was heaven. And on wheels.

  Jess shook his head. If the tables were turned and he were gifting this to the Chief, it smacked of bribery. He couldn’t accept it.

  “Chief, I —”

  “Ah, I know what you’re going to say, Pepper. You don’t want to owe me any favors.” Trumbull winked. “And I promise you, you won’t. You’ve just done me a big favor by helping me empty out a storage barn. Saving the taxpayer some money.”

  “So, where—?” Jess opened his arms to indicate all the new furnishings.

  Trumbull laughed. “’Fraid we have more than our share of this kind of stuff, Jess. Half the folks in this city are on the take, you know, livin’ on the Devil’s dime. Sometimes we just get lucky and put some of them out of business. And when we do, we have to find a place for all the things their evil ways helped them acquire. Most of it we sell and use the funds. Turn bad money into good, so to speak.” He smiled, a theatrical sadness lighting his eyes. “Some of it we give to folks who need it. And Jess,” he looked around and cocked a sheepish grin, “from the looks of this place, you really needed it.”

  Jess stepped around the desk, and his boots sank into the thick, colorful Turkish carpet. It alone gave the room a welcome energy, and Jess was already feeling strangely at home. He put out his hand in thanks and Trumbull shook it, then dropped his other hand on Jess’s shoulder. His face transformed to a solemn, fatherly expression.

  “You are just what this city needs, Jess.” He shook his head slowly, and an odd despair fell across his face. “Wish there were more like you, men not afraid to tell the truth.” Suddenly the look vanished and the self-assured demeanor swung back into place with his wink. “Keep us on our toes, Pepper. You’re the voice of the people. You run into anything—anything at all—makes you the least bit concerned, you bring it to me. Hear?”

  Jess nodded, and Chief Trumbull turned to leave.

  “That’s what we do here, Jess. We keep the people safe.”

  . . .

  Jess laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back into the welcoming cushion of his new chair. A partnership with the precinct chief was going to open lots of doors for him. This could be good, he mused, really good.

  Beyond his own open door the typing pool was falling back into its rhythm as the Chief exited the floor. Once again their postures mimicked one another. Backs straight, heads bowed and angled toward racks holding handwritten copy
, wrists poised over the keys, and a blur of fingers.

  Easily a hundred typists, arranged in twelve rows of forty-foot tables, pumping out text to the collective tune of eight thousand words a minute. Or more. New York’s finest. Each of them intent on their work.

  Except for one. The blonde corker, who he knew now as Birdie Tabor, was surreptitiously watching Trumbull make his way to the stairs. Jess leaned forward, surprised to see Trumbull hesitate on the top step and raise one finger. It seemed like a signal.

  And it was.

  Jess watched as the buxom figure rose and broke the symmetry of the ranks of typists. She left her place and stopped to speak with the manager of the typing pool.

  Birdie sagged wearily and held a hand to her head as if complaining of a headache. The exchange was brief, and then she stepped away from the manager’s desk. As she turned toward the stair, Birdie looked back over her shoulder. It was a look Jess knew well. She hoped no one was watching.

  It was a tattletale move, a dead giveaway, the unmistakable mark of a novice sneak. This girl, the buxom blonde chatterbox with the southern lilt, had something to hide.

  Intrigued, Jess watched as Birdie crossed the open hall leading to the staircase. Two more furtive glances before she disappeared into the stairwell had Jess laughing right out loud and shaking his head. Amateur.

  He counted to thirty, the number of steps it would take a girl with her stride to cross the lower lobby. Three counts later, Jess pushed off from his desk and rolled, chair and all, to the window.

  Sure enough. There she was. Just stepping down off the last step of the main entrance. He was a count or two off, but close enough that he could gloat.

  She turned to her right, slipped a look back over her left shoulder, then began walking north toward the end of the building. Jess swept the sidewalk a few yards ahead of her and stopped grinning when he recognized the smartly tailored coat of the man who’d just left his office.

  If he’d waited two seconds longer to look up the street he would have missed the Chief entirely. But there was no mistaking the owner of the pristine white spats that marked the man’s progress away from the building. And at the same instant that Jess realized who he was watching, the Chief stepped off the sidewalk and into the alley.

  “Son of a gun,” Jess moved to the south edge of the window for a better angle and unconsciously counted steps as the corker moved up the street. At the corner of the building she slowed, cast another look over her shoulder, and without missing a beat, swung into the alley.

  “Son of a gun!” Jess repeated, as he stared unblinking at the empty shadows between his building and the next. Either he’d just witnessed a clandestine meeting between the Chief of Police and the blonde corker from the typing pool, or she’d had some reason to risk following him on her own.

  Jess had his answer a moment later when a sleek, enclosed gentleman’s brougham eased out of the alley behind a perfectly liveried dappled bay with braided mane and tail. Better even than the mayor’s personal conveyance, this carriage bore the official-looking trademark of Chief Deacon Trumbull on its leather siding. The clever modification that narrowed the undercarriage was hard not to admire. This devil could really slip through traffic.

  As it rolled onto the thoroughfare, the carriage window revealed exactly what Jess had expected. The blonde head that bobbed above animated hand gestures told him Birdie was already chattering the man’s ear off.

  And beyond her, in the darkened corner of the brougham, flashed the red and gold embers of a flaring cigar.

  Why, you old dog.

  . . .

  The fact that a man — even if he was the precinct chief — had easy access to his office made Jess uneasy. There would, from time to time, be papers in his possession that he would not want anyone, even the Chief, to see, lest it reveal the name of someone who wished to remain anonymous. Before he left his office again, Jess stowed his files in the large bottom drawer and locked it. He found a small ledge on the backside of the buffalo painting’s frame to stow the key, then grabbed the union folder he’d brought with him and headed down to the stacks.

  “Twickenham?”

  He called out as he strolled the lane that passed for a main corridor into the newspaper’s morgue.

  “Ollie? You around?”

  “Out! Now! You goons want these files you better come with a warrant or I’ll—”

  “Shut up, old man.”

  The hackles on the back of Jess’s neck were still responding to the cold warning when a burly cop knocked past him and charged back up the aisle toting a box half-filled with morgue material.

  “Why, I’ll—” Ollie Twickenham came flying around the corner and collided with Jess. His fists pummeled with the vengeance of a much younger man until Jess caught his wrists and pushed him off.

  “Ollie! Hey, cut it out!”

  “Pepper?” Ollie stilled immediately, slid his hands down to clutch Jess’s, then slumped against the bookcase behind him. “Sorry, son, I thought you were one o’ them goons.”

  “Whose goons?”

  “One guess. And I gather he just paid you a visit.”

  Jess processed the thought but couldn’t buy into it.

  “Maybe they were cops, but I’m betting someone else sent them. What did they want?”

  Ollie gave him a quizzical look and shook his head.

  “It seems your initial column got somebody in a tizzy. They wanted everything I had on those old cases,” the angry librarian growled.

  “He had a box...was it anything important?”

  Ollie Twickenham looked at the floor and shuffled a chunk of loose mortar back into the brick with his toe. “All this stuff is important, Jess. You of all people oughta know that.”

  “You know I do, Ollie, but—”

  Ollie Twickenham snickered, raised his chin and signaled with his eyes for Jess to follow him around the corner. He paused beside an empty spot in the shelving and gestured toward it as if he were pointing to the empty seat of a favored child.

  “They have absconded with my brothel beauties,” he whispered.

  “Your what?”

  “My brothel beauties. Best collection of whorehouse tintypes in the city.”

  “What would they want with those?”

  “Hussy stuff? Oh, it won’t do them one iota of good. But it’ll for certain distract them from remembering what it was they were looking for in the first place!”

  Twickenham could no longer hold back a delighted chuckle. “And when the Chief asks them if they got any good information from the files they lifted from my morgue, you can bet your sweet self they are not going to fess up to this!”

  Twickenham spread his arms and rested his elbows on the highest perch his short stature would allow. He swung his hands down and patted some of the remaining boxes with a satisfied grin. “What I did, you see, was draw them off guard. I moved real surreptitious-like in front of the box of whores like I was protecting the box, you know. So naturally, that’s the box they wanted, heh, heh.”

  Ollie Twickenham was thoroughly pleased with himself.

  Jess felt his mouth go dry. “Ollie,” he choked, “were they looking for the file you gave me?”

  Ollie waved a dismissing hand. “Maybe so, maybe not. Most all of that was in the papers already.”

  Jess huffed in relief and clapped Ollie on the shoulder. “Well then, hang it all, Ollie,” he moved past Twickenham and fingered the edges of boxes and folders that remained. “What else do you have here that you were so willing to sacrifice the brothel beauties for? Hmm?”

  “What do I have here, he asks? What do I have here?” Twickenham’s cocky grin turned a bit sheepish. “Actually, I haven’t figured that out just yet.” He turned and ran his thumb across the dusty boxes. “But whatever it is, it’s here, Jess. I’m sure of it. And when I find it, you’ll be the first to know.”

  Jess had no doubt the little fellow would find what he was looking for. But he was taking a great risk d
eceiving a policeman like that.

  “You be careful, Ollie.”

  “I will, son. Believe me, I will. Now you find a place to lock up what I already gave you, and I’ll plant some decoys here, just to be on the safe side.”

  “Oh, that reminds me, Ollie.” Jess pulled the list of union dock workers from his file and held it out to Twickenham. “You recognize any of these names?”

  Ollie studied the list, mumbling as he read. He squinted, clucked, and finally shook his head. “Nope, can’t say as I do.” He handed the page back to Jess. “Now you remember what I said. Lock up your papers. Or hide ’em where the devil won’t find ’em.”

  Jess grinned and tucked the page back into the file. Ollie waved farewell and scurried about in a fit of industry, cackling over his choices as he pulled bogus documents from defunct files. Whatever Ollie was doing certainly tickled his funny bone. But Jess knew that anybody taken in by it was not going to react with similar good humor.

  The wheezy giggles echoed off the water pipes that traced the ceiling as Jess retraced his steps to the front of the morgue. The sound went a long way toward dispelling Jess’s anxiety over the troubling episode he’d witnessed when he entered the morgue.

  But the unease that prickled behind his ears refused to be banished quite so easily, and Jess decided to stop in the bundling room before continuing on his mission. He pulled an old newspaper from the surplus pile and laid the union folder out on the worn maple counter.

  Making certain no one was watching, he wrapped his folder and notes in the newsprint and tied the bundle well with twine.

  As he left the Times and headed for home, his bundle looked no different than those carried by half the men in Battery Park. An ordinary fellow carrying an ordinary item from an ordinary market which—like every other market on the square—wrapped inexpensive purchases in day-old newspaper.