A Lady Never Trifles with Thieves (9 page)

As he stalked off, I begged Papa to watch over Penelope, like the angel I believed him to be.

I looked to the gravediggers shoveling dirt into Belinda’s eternal resting place. The nameless constable and the woman I thought to be Gertrude Hiss were nowhere to be seen.

Hell to breakfast, I fumed. I couldn’t buggy to the station house and name LeBruton as the driver Jules had hailed. An ensuing official interview would anger LeBruton, who’d then vent his temper on his wife.

Wait and see. My two least favorite activities. If Jules was arrested, I’d intervene. And there were ways of finding out what Gertrude Hiss told the constable I sicced on her. What they might be, I hadn’t a clue, but if I set my mind to it, I’d think of something.

W
ith blurry eyes, I read the passage in the law book again, then a third time. At that, it took a moment to register that my wild-hared hunch was correct.

“Won Li?” I called. “Come here on the double. I want to show you something.”

Placing my hands at the small of my back, I stretched, hearing pops and crackles uncustomary for one of my youth and vigor. Pain shot outward across my shoulders and up my neck. Another hour in the Windsor chair and I’d have been crippled for life.

Supper was delicious, plentiful, and a distant memory. The bowl of poppy seed cookies on the table was now as empty as my stomach. I didn’t recall eating nary a one.

“Won Li?”

From the kitchen, a surly voice answered, “I am coming.”

Which turned out to be when he was darned good and ready, which coincided with the expiration of my patience. Won Li strolled into the parlor. On the tray he carried were squares of cheese, crackers, and glasses of whiskey and water. I thanked him for the snack, eyed the whiskey with undisguised interest, but took the glass of water.

“What did you want to show me?” he said. “Other than how an excessively loud voice is extremely unpleasant to the ear.”

I pointed to a numbered statute. “Read this.”

He leaned closer to the page I indicated and squinted to bring the text into better focus. “Yes. That is interesting.” Whiskey in hand, he started back to the kitchen.

“Did you even read it?”

He turned and recited the paragraph verbatim.

My patron was an incurable grandstander. I swept the hair back from my face. “Eidetic recall has its advantages, Won Li, but the importance to Penelope LeBruton lies in what the law
doesn’t
say.”

“What is not specified cannot be enforced.”

“Precisely.”

He frowned. “It is absurd to try and assemble a puzzle to which you hold the pieces.”

“Humor me, please? Just read it one more time.”

The ceiling, not the book, was the target of his obsidian gaze as he sipped his nightly jigger of tanglefoot. Why follow instructions to the letter—so to speak—if one can review sentences committed to memory while irrigating one’s tonsils simultaneously.

“I still do not approve of your working for J. Fulton Shulteis,” he said. “But what you propose is an ingenious method of complying with the law while circumventing it.”

I grinned. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

The statute concerning printed notices of a marital dissolution allowed that they must be published in a newspaper of general circulation and accessibility. It did not stipulate that the announcement, or the newspaper in which it appeared, must be in English.

Won Li warned, “Yet there is no guarantee the outcome will be as you desire. If gossip were edible, few would ever retire to their beds malnourished.”

“I realize it’s possible Rendal LeBruton could learn of the notice.” I grimaced. “It’s his wife who’ll suffer the consequences if he does.” Looking up, I added, “And you, if LeBruton finds out who wrote it.”

“The Chinese newspaper editor is the cousin of the sister-in-law of my friend Cheng Xinnong. If asked, he will keep a confidence.”

The rush of triumph I’d felt dissolved like mercury in nitric acid. ’Tis the simplest breeze that feeds the gale, said…well, someone far wiser and prescient than an orphan from the wilds of northwest Arkansas.

I stood and closed the law book. “You’ve told me never to overestimate a friend or underestimate an enemy, WonLi. A man who beats his wife won’t hesitate a nonce to beat information out of a newspaper editor.”

I laid a hand on his narrow shoulder. “Truth is, if LeBruton guesses, or is told of my involvement, he’ll know in an instant who conspired with me. I can’t—I
won’t
—put you in danger.”

He laughed, which startled me, as the sound resembled the death throes of strangulation and was heard on the rarest of occasions. “You experiment with gunpowder and homemade nitroglycerin. You build pipe cannons in the toolshed. You concoct deadly gases, poisons, and tinctures like other women divine a new mint sauce for roast lamb, but you shy from endangering me to a mere and mortal bully with a penchant for violence?”

He set his glass on the table and slumped in an adjacent chair, chortling and gasping for breath. The liquor he’d consumed was surely the cause of this singular episode of uncustomary mirth.

At long last, a handkerchief was produced to wick the moisture from his eyes and his pink-flushed brow. He coughed to clear his throat, then reopened the book. Thumbing through its pages, he said, “Please fetch a goodly supply of paper, a pen, and bottle of ink.”

I knuckled my hips. “I won’t let you do this.”

“It is not a question of let, Joby. The decision is mine to make and act upon.”

His posture and tone defied argument. Holding a match to every scrap of foolscap in the house and booby-trapping all our writing implements would only delay the notice’s translation into Chinese. Every word of it was already graven in his bottomless cerebral cortex.

Morning provided another topic for discussion with my beloved and infinitely aggravating patron. Actually, the debate to-ing and fro-ing over plates of fried eggs, toasted bread, and sliced melon wasn’t worthy of clashing tempers, but the angelica oil bath I’d taken the night before hadn’t yielded a restful sleep.

Won Li insisted on depositing me at the drugstore to meet with Abelia, the LeBrutons’ maid, then driving himself to the newspaper’s shanty in Hop Alley. My counter-plan was to leave him at his destination, keep the buggy for my convenience, then reconvene with him at the agency. It was a smart walk from the alleyway between Wazee and Blake to Champa and H, but Won Li’s stride wouldn’t be encumbered by a chemise, corset, cotton drawers, two petticoats, and suede boots cobbled for style rather than perambulation.

We’d compromised. Ribbon-tied scroll in hand, he was by now likely exchanging pleasantries with the newspaper editor. I halted the buggy as near the door of Cheesman’s as I was able.

Taking the precaution of bringing along the market basket, my step faltered at a newsbutcher’s spiel. Holding a copy of the morning
Rocky Mountain News
aloft, he cried, “Extra, extra. Ladykiller Thief arrested by police. Read all about it.”

I laid two pennies in the butcher’s hand and took a newspaper from the stack beside him. Under the banner headline were a series of subheadings set off with ornamental symbols known in the trade as dingbats. “Justice Prevails over Fiendish Atrocity.” “Mayor Congratulates Police on Swift Capture.” “‘I Am Innocent,’ Suspect Proclaims.”

My eyes raced down the page, plucking facts from the report’s verbose chaff. The suspect, Vittorio Ciccone, had been arrested while attempting to pawn a diamond-and-ruby bar-pin owned by the deceased, Belinda Abercrombie.

The suspicious pawnbroker compared the pin to the illustrated list of stolen jewelry the police had provided every pawnshop, secondhand store, and jeweler in the city, in anticipation of just such an occurrence.

Vittorio Ciccone professed no knowledge of how the piece of jewelry found its way into his pocket, but he admitted hunger had taken precedence over honesty once it had been discovered. He’d ventured into the pawnshop with the intent to sell the pin for the price of a decent meal and hotel room for the night.

I folded the newspaper into my market basket to reread at my leisure. Ciccone’s story reminded me of lies I’d told before practice begat proficiency.

Shortly before Won Li joined the household, an indoor swordfight with an imaginary band of pirates had toppled a kerosene lamp. Flames devoured the roof and one wall of our cabin before I extinguished them with a wet blanket. With Papa due home any minute, I smashed bunches of pokeberries upside my head, letting the crimson juice drizzle down my face and clothing. Wild-eyed with hysteria, I told him Indians had torched the cabin and tried to scalp me, but thanks be to Jesus, I’d escaped into the woods.

His response forced me to sleep on my stomach for a week and eat meals off the charred mantelpiece.

“Live and learn,” I said, stepping into the dim coolness of Cheesman’s Drug Store. I patronized the tidy dispensary with some frequency, but I still reveled in the laced aromas of perfumes, astringents, French milled soaps, and plasters whose boxes promised the annihilation of more types of pain than a human should suffer in three lifetimes.

Shelved cabinets purveying patent medicines, female remedies, and nostrums of all kind and description stretched from plank floor to ceiling. On the counters were curved glass showcases replete with merchandise to catch the eye and fancy, and the far wall behind the woodstove displayed ready-to-frame art prints of landscapes, flora, fauna, and dead but unforgotten heroes.

I smiled and greeted a bevy of bona fide customers before spying Abelia in a back corner stocked with bath salts and aromatic candles.

“You’re late. I’d ’bout give up on you, girl.”

Her face shone with nervous perspiration. I saw no reason to belabor my exacting punctuality. I asked after her mistress and was relieved to hear Penelope was to attend a banquet with her husband later that evening.

“Just goes to show, you don’t know beans from apple-butter,” Abelia said. “That man’s as mean as a scalded cat when he’s sober, but put the drink in him and he’s spoiling for a fight. Miss Penelope’ll be in worse shape than you saw her, come mornin’.”

“Not if we can prevent it.” I told Abelia about the notice Won Li was placing, then said, “In the buggy, I have a jar of castor oil distillate for you. I brought it to impede Mr. LeBruton’s daily activities, to lessen the odds of him finding out about the dissolution.

“I’d planned on him receiving the first dose at supper, but begin as soon as you get home. He won’t feel any effect for several hours, but each subsequent one will compound the discomfort.”

“How much do I give him?” Abelia asked.

“A quarter teaspoon, every six to eight hours. Stir it into his food, or a cold drink, such as lemonade or milk. Coffee or tea are fine, too, if he takes them with cream.”

The maid took on the visage of an elderly, nut brown elf. “What if, purely on accident, I slip him a pinch too much?”

I chuckled. “It won’t kill him, if that’s what you’re hoping. It would likely worsen his stomach cramps, until he refused food and drink altogether.”

Abelia grunted. “So, I’m s’posed to keep him sick enough to put him outta commission and well enough to keep poisoning him, regular.”

“You’re not poisoning him, Abelia. Only disrupting his digestion.”

“Hush, girl. I’ve dreamed of poisoning that man since the day he met up with Miss Penelope. Don’t you go spoiling my fun.”

A casual glance toward the counter met with Mr. Cheesman’s hard stare. A young brunette spraying perfumes on her wrist was watching us from the corner of her eye. Abelia’s and my whisper campaign had not gone unnoticed.

I asked her to join me outside after she finished her shopping, then loudly chirped my appreciation for recommending the jasmine bath salts over the gardenia.

I also removed a bottle of Dr. Kilmer’s Female Regulator and box of worm expeller from shelves as I passed. I felt duty bound to pay a toll for loitering and figured the pharmacist wouldn’t truck with a woman cursed by irregularities of the menstrual cycle and a tapeworm.

Hastily wrapping my purchases in brown paper, he offered to charge them and bill me at month’s end. Reluctant to remind him of my name, I dipped into my dwindling cash reserves.

I could have kicked my own derriere for wasting money on claptrap I didn’t need and would never use.

The retainer from McCoyne and Whitelaw couldn’t be added to the agency’s ledger until it was earned. By all rights, it was a loan, repayable by equal outlays of my time and effort. To date, I hadn’t expended six-bits worth of either.

Abelia followed me outside a few moments later. She fidgeted as I repeated the dosage instructions. “I done heard ya the first time. Just cause I’m colored don’t mean I’m deef, nor stupid.”

I retracted my arm as she reached for the jar. “Before I give you this, you have to promise me something.”

“What’s that?”

“You must tell your mistress you burned her letter to Mr. Shulteis. I can’t aid her escape from her husband without her knowledge and consent.”

“I already did,” Abelia said. “Not an hour after you left t’other day, she called me upstairs. She was standing in front of the lookin’ glass, angry as all get-out with herself for not going ahead with the divorce. When she give me another note to take to the attorney, I told her he never got the first one.”

My skepticism must have shown, for she spat out, “That’s the
truth,
girl.” She yanked a folded sheet of stationery from her shopping basket. “Read this, if’n you don’t believe me.”

I smiled and gave her the jar. “If I doubted you, Abelia, it was because I know how much you love and fear for Mrs. LeBruton.”