After a half-hour search turned up no results, Sallie’s men left. With adrenaline still coursing through his veins, Jared returned to the library and sat at his desk, berating himself for the thief’s escape and contemplating the only clues he had to the man’s identity.
In the breast pocket of the worn tweed jacket the thief left behind, he’d found a matchbox inscribed “The Peacock Club.” Jared turned the matchbox over and over in his fingers. There was a gin mill on Melborn Avenue with that name, an unsavory place with unsavory customers. He would check it out tomorrow.
But why would a jewel thief carry a camera?
The leather case held more promise. The man had apparently been proud of his craft. The initials JFQ were monogrammed on the bottom corner of the front flap of the case in gold leaf. “Hanover Leather, Chicago, Illinois” was clearly embossed on the back. Jared ran his hand over the leather, smooth and worn from being carried in a pocket over a lifetime. He picked up the telephone receiver and dialed O. A nasal, feminine voice answered.
“Annie, darlin’, would you please check on a number for me? Hanover Leather, Chicago. Yes, and the address, please.” There was a brief pause before she gave him the number. “Thanks, Annie, you’re a doll.” He was in luck. He hung up the heavy black receiver and jotted down a number. Hanover Leather was still in operation at 1513 47th Avenue. Now if only they kept extensive records.
Chapter Eight
The balding man ran his blunt fingers over the precious gems spread across the dust-covered desk. S-o-o-n. He wrote the letters in the dust. Soon he would have the rest of the fortune. Then Angela would be his for the taking. He didn’t blame her for not wanting him now. No, Angela had a right to be kept in a swank style. After he sold the stones, he could treat her like a queen.
He mentally skimmed over her physical features, starting with her perfect breasts to the shadow that he knew lay between her thighs. Only yesterday she’d worn that damn blue dress of hers again. You could see her gams through it all the way up to her crotch, for Christ’s sake. The damn dress showed off her whole body. She wore it on purpose.
Oh, she was a temptress all right. Smiling, flirting with him like that. Trying to make him jealous. For two bits he would have smacked her silly. But he’d have the last laugh when she belonged to him. She wouldn’t act so hoity-toity then.
He felt his manhood stir. She was the only one who could do that to him. He rubbed himself through his trousers. She wanted him. Oh, she wanted him bad. And why not? He was smarter and better looking than the rest of her beaux.
He’d show them all when she hung on his arm, listening to his every word, filling all his needs. Soon. He drew a line under the word in the dust. One by one, he dropped the gems back into the leather envelope.
If the little bitch would only get on with her business he could finish the job. But he had to be patient. Patient and smart.
He took the gun out of his jacket pocket and ran a hand over the smooth cool barrel. That rich high-hat was going to be a problem, but he could be handled. Trusting other people to do a job he should have done himself had been a mistake. He’d fix everything. Hadn’t he always fixed it? He pictured the brick in his mind. Felt the weight of it in his hand. Felt the impact, heard the dull thud.
He’d show Angela. He’d give her a swell ride. He’d show them all. They’d all pay.
The man slammed the gun on the dusty desk.
Angela would be his. Soon.
Chapter Nine
The door to Hanover Leather had a red and white sign in its smudged and grimy front window— Closed Sunday. Jared had counted on it. Early morning mist intensified the filthy grayness of the decrepit business district. Seedy shops huddled in shadows of the narrow street. From an alley across the way, Jared checked for signs of life. The hour was still too early for 47th Avenue to have much activity.
A rat skittered out of an overturned garbage can and ran along the sidewalk toward the back of the store. Jared followed the vermin into the muck, looking for a side door. With a quick glance around, he stepped down into a recessed doorway and took the leather case from his pocket. His skills, honed during his years on the street, were not forgotten. He picked the ancient lock easily and slipped noiselessly into Hanover Leather.
Inside, Jared hesitated. The loud ticking of a cheap clock pinged in the background. He heard the scratching of some animal he didn’t care to think about. Enough light came through the grimy windows to illuminate a row of file cabinets in a back room. He hoped the owner’s records went back a few years.
The middle drawer to one of the cabinets overflowed with information shoved in haphazardly. The owner must have kept the carbon of every receipt he’d ever written. Fortunately, the Q file was thin, and Jared had only to sort through several pieces of paper before he found a yellowed receipt for an engraved leather case. “JFQ” the monogramming instructions stated. Sold to a James F. Quigley of 325 Garden Way.
Jared committed the information to memory and let himself out of Hanover Leather’s side door, slipping silently into the dissipating mist.
****
Grace took the softened Italian bread from her mouth and flattened it into the size of a quarter. She sprinkled it evenly with sugar. “Give me your finger, sweetheart,” she said to the red-haired child who sat beside her munching contentedly on an oatmeal raisin cookie.
The imp frowned, her milk mustache curved down, her bottom lip stuck out in a pout. “Will it hurt, Graciella?”
“Not even the tiniest bit, Patty. I promise.”
She gently molded the poultice around an infected hangnail on the child’s tiny finger and tied it with a narrow strip of old sheet. “There. Now that didn’t hurt, did it?” Grace smiled as the child inspected Grace’s handiwork.
“No...I guess it’s jake,” Patty said, giving the poultice her solemn approval.
Grace almost laughed out loud at the six-year-old’s use of the slang word. “You deserve a reward for being such a good patient.” She lowered the cookie jar, and the child reached in and carefully removed another cookie, wistfully eyeing the remaining sweet morsels.
“Do you think your mommy would like one?”
“Oh, yes,” the child agreed, taking another. “And probably baby Michael, too.”
“Of course. We wouldn’t want to leave baby Michael out.” Grinning, Grace wrapped a third cookie in the napkin, wondering how Michael, virtually toothless, would manage the treat.
She tucked the sweets into a wicker basket filled with freshly baked bread, vegetables from the garden, and a canning jar filled with homemade chicken soup. “Do you think you can manage, sweetheart?”
The child flexed her skinny arm into a muscle and announced, “Of course. I am
veeerrry
strong. My mommy says I’m a pistol, don’t you know.”
Grace chuckled as she helped the child down from her stool, noticing the hem on Patty’s dress had been let down and colorful rickrack trim added to cover the old hemline. “How is your mommy feeling today?”
Patty’s expression took on a serious bent. “Much better, thank you. I’m sure she will be ‘quite herself’ in a day or two,” she said, imitating her mother’s voice. Then turning somber, she confided, “I wish my daddy would come home.”
Grace hugged the red curls to her breast, reliving the feeling of abandonment when her father had turned to the bottle.
Patty’s mother, Jane, had barely recovered from a difficult childbirth when her fickle husband decided the responsibility of two children and a wife was too much for him. He’d left an unsuspecting, ill woman alone and nearly destitute.
Luckily, the neighbors Grace contacted had rallied with food and the necessities for the approaching winter. Jane had the offer of a job when she recuperated and free babysitting options from several of the older women in the area. The outpouring of help had warmed Grace’s heart and renewed her faith in everyday miracles.
Jane would raise her children and make a life for herself without the help of that no-account flat tire, Grace thought.
As she watched the child navigate the sidewalk, the full basket carefully balanced, Grace couldn’t help comparing Patty and Jared’s situations.
He, too, had been abandoned and had no idea why. Had it been out of necessity or simple selfishness? How had he kept bitterness and anger from rooting in his heart?
The magnificent portrait of his mother he had commissioned attested to his capacity for compassion and forgiveness.
She feared she would not have been so magnanimous. Her experience with Adam had left her impatient with weak, flawed men.
Removing her apron, Grace hung it on the peg by the door and glanced at the clock above the stove, making a mental note to call on Jane soon. Then she donned her suede turquoise hat with the feather and left for early Mass.
****
Garden Way is a misnomer, Jared thought as he stood across the street from the dilapidated apartment building. The building’s poor quality was evident in the rotted wood and peeling paint. 325 Garden Way formed the corner of the three-story apartment building erected in the standard dumbbell tenement design.
He knew from experience what the residents of a complex like this would be. He’d had to claw his way out of the bowels of many such places, and his mind and body still bore the scars.
If Grace’s enemy had been spawned in such a place, she’d not have a chance in hell of surviving.
He pulled the collar of his jacket up and the rim of his slouch hat down to conceal his features. Jared stepped into the deeply shadowed alley that led to the back of Quigley’s apartment. In the dim morning light, he saw a metal fence and rusted gate that opened into a postage stamp-sized backyard.
The gate squeaked loudly. Jared glanced around to see if anyone had seen his approach. A bit of frost clung to the bare branches of a straggly bush near the gate. No one in the thief business got up very early, if he remembered right. He slipped into the littered yard and approached the back door.
A dingy curtain covered the door’s window, obscuring a clear view of the inside, so he knocked twice and waited to hear if there was movement in the apartment. The low static of a radio not tuned in properly was annoyingly audible. He tried the worn doorknob. The door swung open to a kitchen cast in shadows.
Cautiously, he entered the room and closed the door behind him. When a cloying, mawkish odor reached his nostrils, Jared slipped a hand into his pocket and felt the cool metal grip of his pistol.
He crept through the darkened house. Drawers and cupboards had been left open, their contents scattered on the floor. He figured a hasty search had been made through the general disorder of the apartment.
A few moments later he stumbled across James F. Quigley face down in the front room, his grimy white shirt blood-soaked from the insult of the bullet in his back. Checking for a pulse, Jared found none, and from the appearance of the stiffened body, Quigley had been dead for quite a while. There were no signs on the body of a struggle. James F. Quigley had known his attacker. From the looks of it, he probably let someone in the side door and had been shot in the back as the killer followed him into the front room.
He looked around for something to connect Quigley with his murderer. The filthy apartment showed years of neglect. An acrid odor permeated and, along with the smell of death, made Jared nauseous. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose as he visually sifted through the debris of the small, squalid apartment.
If the sparse furnishings were any indication, JFQ hadn’t prospered from his choice of occupation. Just the sort of employee to be expendable. No family mementos or evidence of a mate. Though he didn’t know what to look for, nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
Except for Quigley’s dead body sprawled in the front room.
Logic fought with his intuition. How could a woman like Grace be mixed up in this fiasco? The demons of his past had been relentless teachers. Now he rarely misjudged the nature of an individual.
As he let himself out the back door, he wiped the doorknob with his handkerchief. A cursory glance over the dark brick buildings lining the alley told him no one was about.
He glanced down for the step and noticed a crushed pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and several cigarette stubs under the window to his left. Someone had waited a long while for Quigley to come home.
Crouching, he put a few of the stubs in his handkerchief and then noticed a familiar matchbox on the windowsill. Whoever Quigley’s late night visitor had been, he also frequented The Peacock Club.
****
Sunday afternoon proved cool and crisp, just the right kind of day for pulling out and putting up the geraniums for next year. Grace shook the dirt from a geranium’s roots, flipped the plant upside down, and hung it on a wire stretched across the width of the small greenhouse that filled a corner of her narrow back yard.
She brushed absently at her cheek with her gardening gloves and let the earthy scents of the greenhouse permeate her nostrils. She’d thought busying herself at one of her favorite tasks would take her mind off a certain dangerously attractive gentleman, but it hadn’t.
She was curious, of course, of how an abandoned boy, orphaned before he could articulate his own name, had overcome so many obstacles to become a man of wealth and power.
Jared’s reputation had him linked with beautiful women, his name on the society page with socialites and starlets. If she remembered correctly, the last one had been an up-and-coming raven-haired beauty called Loretta Young, slated to appear with Colleen Moore in
Naughty but Nice
.
So what in the world could Jared possibly want with her?
She dug her trowel deep into the moist black silt, turning it over and over. Last night had been magical, she thought glumly. Kissing Adam paled in comparison. The memory of that kiss would warm her bed for a long time after he left.
And he would leave. Because he would want more than she’d be able to give him. She hadn’t been enough for Adam. Her former fiancé’s fair, angelic features danced in her memory. He’d been beautiful and glib and so attentive. She’d craved every crumb of affection he gave, holding every smile, every kindness to her heart. What a fool she’d been.