A Lady Never Trifles with Thieves (17 page)

“I
have never fainted, not once in my entire twenty-two years, and I’ll thank you never to accuse me of it again.”

The statement was a tad brassy for a young woman who’d just regained consciousness on the carpeted floor of J. Fulton Shulteis’s law office. Then again, being told that my father had resurrected himself from the grave to collect the fee owed the detective agency established in his name should qualify as an extenuating circumstance.

To be fair, Fulton’s pronouncement had been neither as boorish or blunt as implied. Not that he wasn’t given to both on occasion. The most vivid example was the lecture he delivered at the Denver City jail after my arrest for lewd and lascivious behavior. Though I was dancing the cancan atop the bar when the police raided Madame Felicity’s sporting house, my objective was to get the goods on the adulterous spouse of one of Fulton’s clients.

Nor could I fault the delight he’d expressed at finally having met the elusive, illustrious Deputy U.S. Marshal Joseph Beckworth Sawyer. Papa’s renown as a lawman had traveled from the Arkansas Western District to Colorado Territory well before he resigned his commission to become a private investigator.

Why, just this morning, the
Rocky Mountain News
spared no adjectives in praising Papa’s capture of a murderer, plus a suspected one and bigamist wanted in three states. The feat was most worthy of notoriety, particularly for a man who’d suffered a fatal heart attack six months ago, en route to Denver City.

Mine wrenched all over again, thinking of my father swaddled in a tattered blanket to sleep for eternity near a desolate wagon road in southwest Kansas. My Chinese patron, Won Li, and I had no choice but to inter Papa where he’d fallen. A man of his courage and devotion to justice deserved a bronze monument to his memory. For him to rest beneath a rude cross graven with his name for a tombstone was a tick short of infamy.

Leaving nothing behind in Fort Smith to return to, Won Li and I had soldiered on to Colorado’s territorial capitol. Once there, I could have hired on as a shopgirl to earn our keep, had I the slightest inclination toward hawking ladies’ underdrawers, or tins of Newton’s Heave, Cough, Distemper, and Indigestion compound. My sights could also have set on schoolteaching, had self-educated expertise in botany, anatomy, chemistry, herbology, criminalistics, and pyrotechnics been in demand.

Instead, I founded the detective agency in Papa’s name—traded on it, as Won Li opined. He’s right, I suppose, but with or without a mouthful of a handle like Josephine Beckworth Sawyer, pigs would fly before a client would knowingly employed a female to investigate sundry crimes and misdemeanors.

To excuse the official proprietor’s chronic absences, I alluded to Papa’s dyspeptic stomach, bouts of catarrh, frequent sojourns from the city pursuant to his caseload, and the ever-dependable, “Sorry, but Mr. Sawyer just stepped out a moment ago.”

This tangled web of deceit was of my own weave, but there was no
quid pro quo
in a miscreant capitalizing on Papa’s name and reputation, much less in stealing the fee owed me for freeing a belle from the bonds and fists of unholy matrimony. The son of a she-dog who had, would rue the day he concocted his scheme. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but a special corner of Hades is reserved for those of us whelped and reared in the wilds of darkest Arkansas.

Fulton reached down a flabby hand to me, which I accepted. A chemise, corset, petticoats and a nipped-waist dress hardly allow for proper respiration. To indulge in an acrobatic maneuver might dislodge a rib, or an organ of import, such as my spleen.

I said, “It was a carpet wrinkle that tripped my feet. If I were you, I’d have it stretched and relaid at my earliest convenience.”

He surveyed the fern-and ivy-patterned expanse surrounding the visitor’s chair I’d gripped the back of, before landing flat of my own. “Wrinkles? I don’t see any wrinkles.”

“Neither did I, until I fell victim to one.”

Moving sideward, Fulton studied my face, then frowned. “Egad, Joby. That bruise on your cheek—”

“Is nothing.” I sidled away from scrutiny. “I ran into a door last night.”

Actually, a door ran into me. Two towering and quite solid ones to be exact, along with the leaded glass sidelights gracing Aaron and Geneva Wilhelm-Oglethorpe’s stately home. The nitrostarch admixture I’d applied to disable the locks accomplished its purpose, but blowing the mansion’s entryway to flinders in the process wasn’t part of the original plan.

The owners and I eventually bargained down the damages from five thousand dollars to five hundred. The sum was payable in installments I’d bequeath my heirs, assuming I ever produced any.

I again reassured Fulton that I wasn’t injured in the physical sense. It was the one sustained by my empty coin purse and bank account that could prove fatal to Sawyer Investigations. No business could survive without capital. The money paid in good faith to the bogus Joseph Beckworth Sawyer wouldn’t have retired my numerous debts, but no income whatsoever sank me so far in the hole, I’d need ladders and a long rope to glimpse blue sky.

Barring a stampede clamoring to hire the agency’s services, my only recourse was to apprehend the thief and recover the purloined cash. Complicating that solution was the fact I had no earthly idea what the man looked like. Nor could I ask Fulton outright for a description. One presumes a daughter in command of her faculties needn’t ask after her father’s height, build, hair color, distinguishing scars, and manner of dress.

Fortunately, I became adept at contrivance at a tender age and practiced it as regularly as a pianist would a Chopin etude. “At breakfast,” I said, “Papa promised his first order of the day would be a haircut and a shave. Was the Joe B. Sawyer who called on you of the shorn persuasion, or still as shaggy as a mountain goat?”

Fulton chuckled as he rounded his desk. A satchel and bowler were retrieved in preparation for a court hearing he’d mentioned earlier. “The comparison might be apt, but somewhat disrespectful, don’t you think?”

Wherever Papa’s soul had found rest, he knew bunkum when he heard it. Also the truth. From Fulton’s rebuke, I surmised that the imposter was also estranged from the tonsorial arts. The clue narrowed my field of suspects to approximately seventy-five percent of Denver City’s male population.

Alas, even if I bamboozled Fulton into a chapter and verse portrait, unless the charlatan had a clubfoot and a glass eye, such information is almost always too general for good use. I daresay the city’s boardwalks don’t teem with slender, shapely young ladies with black hair and olive complexions, yet my attributes are not unique.

Still, I had to try. The agency’s future depended on it.

The real Joe B. Sawyer had stood a full six-foot-three in his socks. J. Fulton Shulteis was a couple of inches shorter than me—the lifts in his shoes notwithstanding. I begged the law of averages to find in my favor, then said, “Disrespect had naught to do with my analogy. I’m sure you’ll agree, a well-groomed man of Papa’s size would inspire confidence in prospective clients and be no less intimidating to scofflaws.”

Fulton opened the office door for our departure. “I’ll grant, Sawyer is a great bear of a chap, but knowing his daughter as I do, I’d wager he is, at this very moment, wedged into a barber’s chair and praying he’ll depart it with both ears intact.”

Strolling from his sumptuous inner sanctum to the reception area unfolded like a scene from a Dickens novel. The cramped space was drafty in winter and steamy in summer. The walls were plastered, but the floor was bare wood and the unoccupied desk chair listed severely to starboard. The office of Sawyer Investigations was hardly prepossessing, but in comparison, this ground-level garret had all the ambience of an oversized outhouse.

Percy, Fulton’s cadaverous clerk, was still away from his post. Being as much an accoutrement as the globed coal-oil lamp at the desk’s far corner, I asked if the poor lad had taken ill.

“No, I’d say he’s somewhere between the bank and the newspaper office, picking up the new stationery we ordered.” The tip of the attorney’s hat revealed the ornery glint in his eye. “I’ll be sure to pass on your concern, though. Percy will be elated to hear of it.”

An exaggeration, if ever there was one. The clerk and I weren’t enemies, but assuredly weren’t friends. The root of our coexistence was to annoy the bejesus out of each other. I should be ashamed of myself for taking pleasure in besting Percy at every opportunity, but everyone knows at least one other who doesn’t have sense enough to hush when he’s behind.

Fulton and I exchanged farewells, then he hoisted his roly-poly frame into a surrey hired to transport him to his appointment. The springs chirruped melodiously as the driver gidapped the unmatched team for the six-block journey.

It wasn’t much farther to my next errand, but in my present mood, the distance seemed equal to Moses’ expedition from Goshen.

Weekend rains had slaked August’s drought and thrown off its sultry cloak. It was a welcome respite, but exacted a toll on horses and humans consigned to thoroughfares resembling a ruddy clay and manure-clodded stew. Soon, the incessant wind would dry the stenchy wallow to corduroyed cement.

I hugged my reticule, flummoxed by how a morning that dawned triumphant had turned on me like a fierce dog. The litany of
couldn’ts
drumming in my head echoed the stamp of my high-laced shoes on the boardwalk.

First off, the imposter’s ruse couldn’t be reported to the police. In my experience, law enforcement takes a dim view of complainants guilty of fraud raising Billy Ned about another’s petty larceny. The attitude reflects George Herbert’s “Whose house is of glass, must not throw stones at another.” Countering it with John 8:7, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone,” would cut no mustard with the cops.

Above all, I couldn’t compromise Constable Jack O’Shaughnessy’s blissful ignorance of the situation. Lies of the number and magnitude I’d told him might imply a significant lack of faith in a man I liked enormously and might even love. Verily, I trusted Jack second to Won Li. It was just that the proper moment to confess the hoax I’d perpetrated on my beau and the entire town hadn’t arisen as yet.

Which left the only female detective west of the Mississippi to her own devices. What, precisely, they might be and how I’d institute them, I couldn’t fathom.

The false-fronted brick building I sought on Arapahoe Street between G and H was as nondescript as its owner, Avery Whitelaw. He and a business associate, Garret McCoyne, had solicited the agency’s help in recovering a trove of precious jewels recently burgled from their respective homes.

I spied my quarry near the end of the block. He’d secured a pasteboard carton of rolled maps in the bed of a buckboard and was preparing to leave. “Mr. Whitelaw,” I called. When he failed to acknowledge me, I lodged a thumb and pinky finger between my teeth and whistled like a teamster.

In unison, Whitelaw’s horse, saddled mounts hitched to the rail, and others passing on the street pricked their ears, reared their heads, and stutter-stepped. A rider hand-rolling a cigarette lurched sideways, then tumbled off, butt over boot soles. The pond of a puddle he landed in cushioned his fall, but his suddenly unencumbered dun mare bucked and sunfished, her hooves firing mud like twin shotgun barrels.

Bystanders didn’t connect the incitement to riot with the innocent-looking young brunette in the hideous, flower-fraught hat. I added another impetuosity to the thousands for which I’d beg atonement on my deathbed, then greeted Avery Whitelaw like a lady.

“Miss Sawyer.” He smiled and swept off a wide-brimmed John B. “What a lovely surprise.”

From my reticule I removed a sealed envelope containing a hundred-dollar bank note. “With my sincerest apologies, I’m returning the retainer you and Mr. McCoyne paid the agency last week.”

“You’re quitting the case?”

‘There is no case to pursue, sir. I must agree with the police that your jewelry won’t be found in Denver City. It was probably smuggled out shortly after the burglaries, and days before you hired me.”

Nodding, Whitelaw took the envelope as though it was advance notice from the Grim Reaper. “I figured as much, but hoped I was wrong.” He sucked his teeth and sighed. “The heirlooms were irreplaceable. Oh, how I dread telling my wife they’re gone for good.”

“Perhaps not,” I blurted, out of sympathy for and empathy with his plight. Unlike Garret McCoyne, the mining entrepreneur had treated me as an equal, not a maid of all work. “It stands to reason, a collection as valuable as yours and the McCoynes’ would be fenced in a larger city. New York, most definitely, followed by San Francisco, or Chicago.

“While it might be for naught, I’d suggest you write the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and enclose a list and description of the pieces—in particular, those of unusual design or antiquity. Pinkerton’s services don’t come cheap, but he has the resources and an army of operatives to assist in the search.”

Whitelaw’s face brightened. Repeating my caution didn’t dull it one iota. He insisted on giving me five dollars for my time and astute advice. Accepting it increased my net worth a hundred-percent.

Four-bits of his largess was squandered on coffee and pastries at the Mountain Home Coffeehouse and Confectionery. Glover Rudd, a reporter for the
Rocky Mountain News,
had sent a note requesting a meeting at the wondrously aromatic establishment. I didn’t know what compelled Rudd’s invitation, but as soon as he arrived, I’d ask that he listen sharp in the future for the distinction between Joe B. Sawyer and Joby Sawyer—short for my unwieldy Christian name.