French Polished Murder (14 page)

Cas was working on a laptop and looked somewhere between bewildered and tired, but grinned as he saw me. “Hello, Dyce,” he said. He got up and came toward me at the same time I closed the door. “I’m so glad to see you.”

In the next second, he showed me how glad he was, with only the thin door and its hammered glass protecting us from the most glaring violation of the public displays of affection ban in the history of Goldport Police Department.

When we’d both come down to earth and recovered our breath, I asked, “The file, on Jacinth Jones’s disappearance? Do you have it?”

He nodded. “Actually,” he said, dropping his voice, “I brought it in here this morning, after a conference . . .”

“A conference?” I asked.

“My captain called Rafiel and me in this morning.” He frowned slightly. “It was very strange. He said that he’d been told someone was writing a book about cases that had never been solved, in Goldport, and that he had been asked for us to keep those files away from any curious eyes. Now, mind you, he wasn’t exactly stopping us from showing them to someone. Just giving us a heads-up that from what he had heard the book might disparage the police department and we were to make things difficult for this writer.”

My mind spun. I’d given the writer story to my mother. To the person at the library, too, I supposed. Either of them could have talked, but who would they have reached that would have led to the two senior investigators in the Goldport Police Department being told to make my life difficult.

“But—” I said.

“I talked to Rafiel and we both agreed that we were not going to sit on an old file just because some big brass is all upset at having to admit we fail sometimes.” He gave me a tentative smile. “Rafiel has a rebel streak a mile wide, you know.”

I shook my head. “I have no idea what can have brought- “

“Attention to this?” Cas sighed. “I wish I could believe it was someone else poking around, but I don’t think so. I told you, Dyce, that it could become dangerous.”

I bit the tip of my tongue before I told him that, of course, it was dangerous, but once I had started down this sort of path, I could no more stop myself than I could grow wings and fly. That letter had rung too many emotional bells for me to ignore. Yeah, the writer and the man she’d written it to might long be dust in the dust, but the thing was—we’d all be dust, someday. It didn’t make us stop mattering. It didn’t make who we’d been and what we’d done stop existing.

“Gosh,” Cas said, putting on his best aw-shucks intonation. “Stop looking at me like that.” He gave me a nervous smile. “Somehow you always look years older and wiser when you do that. I get the impression that I’ve been tested and found wanting. I’ll talk to you about it at lunch, okay? I still think there are dangers, and you need to at least be aware of them. But meanwhile, the file is here, if you want to read it.”

He motioned me toward one of the oversized armchairs, and reached into his desk drawer, to pull out a very yellowed envelope. So yellowed that I didn’t know if it had been yellowish to begin with. He set it down in front of me, and pulled out pages.

I was surprised they were typewritten then told myself I was an idiot. Of course they had typewriters in the twenties.

He handed the whole mess to me and went back to his desk and his laptop.

The first thing that surprised me was the thoroughness of the investigation, considering the time period. There were, for instance, pictures. Poor quality and sepia-colored, of course, but pictures, which I never expected. Pictures of the front of the house where Jacinth had lived. I looked at it avidly. It should have been a familiar place. Only blocks from me, I must have driven or walked past it dozens of times.

When E was smaller, the only way of making him fall asleep was to take him for a drive or for a long ride in his baby carriage. Mind you, nine times out of ten, when we got home he’d wake up again, but sometimes, particularly when he was fussy right after All-ex and I separated, I’d taken him on long walks all over the neighborhood. So that house should have been as familiar to me as the outside of my own apartment building.

Only it wasn’t. To begin with, it sat on a bare yard, without a hint of grass, much less trees. And though grass is notoriously hard to grow in Colorado, my neighborhood had trees everywhere. Big, shallow-root conifers sat next to the houses, climbing ever taller, posing a danger to power lines, passing vehicles and, in wind storms, sometimes the houses themselves. On the devil strips and sometimes in front yards, huge old maples grew, lifting sidewalks and dipping their roots into sewer lines and enriching Roto-Rooter.

The thing was that I knew houses with their accompanying greenery and never without, so looking at this isolated house, standing there, with no greenery of any sort seemed odd. It threw me off. Of course, it was sepia, too. But more than that—the house itself looked so bare. All of the other houses in the neighborhood sported porches, upper-story verandas, and what not.

This was simply a saltbox, square and tall, with nothing about it to say that any personal thought had gone into the building. Just a shelter in what was still, back then, in many ways the Wild, Wild West.

At least, I thought, squinting at the brown expanse of the picture, the yard wasn’t totally bare. To the right of the house there were two tiny trees that had just been planted. Saplings, maybe all of five and a half feet tall. I couldn’t tell whether they were maple, but presumed so.

I set the picture aside and turned to the next three. These showed the inside of the house. That truly impressed me, since the idea of photographing the inside of a potential crime scene couldn’t have been normal at the time. I smiled, imagining that I should credit some ancestor of Cas’s who had a friend who was a photographer.

I concentrated on the pictures, the first one of which showed a kitchen arrangement. There was one of those square sinks with a water pump on it and next to the sink, a Franklin stove.

On the other side of the sink was a small table that had clearly been the focus of the photographer’s attention. It showed two coffee cups turned upside down as if to dry, on a smudgy bit that I thought was a tea towel or the equivalent.

I turned to the next picture, of what looked like a Victorian living room with a wooden-framed sofa. On the sofa were two piles of paper, looking like someone might have been in the middle of a job and set a few on either side of him. A pile for “looked at” and “not” perhaps.

The last picture was of a wardrobe, the doors flung open to show an array of neatly hanging clothes, and a suitcase on the shelf above them.

I went on to the report to look for indications of what the pictures meant. The main investigator was a policeman glorying in the unlikely name of Domingo Dunkirk. Well, Goldport had always attracted odd balls, and in my mind the gentleman’s image formed. A sad Mexican face with dark blue eyes. He would, of course, be half Mexican and half Anglo Saxon and would have taken refuge in our little eccentric mountain fastness to escape the prejudice of the larger world.

However, since I wasn’t writing a work of fiction—or even nonfiction—I had to pass on thinking about Domingo Dunkirk any further and turn to what Domingo Dunkirk had to say.

The report was dated almost a month after the date the letter gave for the rendezvous. The first paragraph detailed how:
since Mr. Jacinth Jones has been missing from his usual haunts and business for the last month, without having given anyone reason to believe he had absented himself on travel or voluntarily, his friends, associates, and creditors had asked the police department of Goldport to look into his effects and his domicile and determine whether he might have been the victim of foul play.

I squirmed in the seat and made myself comfortable by shoving a leg under my own behind, the position I used to sit in when listening to Grandma’s stories. As far as narration went, I had to admit the style of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was far more pleasant to read than current dry reportage.

Plunging into the flowery narration with gusto, I found that the pictures were meant to show that the house looked as though Mr. Jones had left the premises in some hurry, surely intending to return. Nothing appeared to be missing but the clothes he was last seen wearing. Even his business papers, some of which the report pointed out, were letters of credit, which could be exchanged for assets, had been left on the love seat in what the report quaintly called the parlor.

However, no signs of violence or blood were found in the house. But behind a chair in the kitchen, a hairpin, such as a lady might wear was discovered.

The report made no speculation at all on who the lady might be, though that long-ago investigator had included two newspaper clippings, dated six and three years before, respectively, each intimating that Mr. Jacinth Jones had been seen in the company of a local lady whose name started with
M
. The later clip intimated that the lady was the mayor’s wife.

I made notes to check out later, all the while wondering what I hoped to gain by this. The conclusion of the investigator was that Mr. Jones had left the house in a hurry, fully intending to come back.

Was it not possible that it had happened just that way? He thought, perhaps, that Almeria was exaggerating their danger, and that they didn’t have to go away. Or perhaps he’d thought he could calm her down. But then she’d come to him and said, “We must run, my husband is after me,” and he’d left, without thinking twice, because he loved her that much.

I realized I was chewing on my lower lip, something I only did if I was deep in thought. And I also realized I didn’t believe the pretty story I’d just told myself.

Yeah, he might have been deeply in love with her. That was the first thing a person would think, of course, when reading about things like this—that the man must have been madly in love with the upper-class politically connected wife. Otherwise, why would he take the risk of getting involved with her and invoking the wrath of her powerful husband?

The problem was that it didn’t always—or perhaps not even most of the time—work out that way. After all, the powerful husband would have many gifts in his giving. And if the man could manage to manipulate the wife behind his back, so that she made sure some of those gifts fell your way, then you were golden.

This might be particularly useful if a person was running a saloon—and I made a note of it, because I was almost sure that at the time Prohibition had still been in effect. I’d need to look it up. If that were the case, did Jacinth serve just root beer, in his saloon, or did he perhaps serve things that were stronger in the back? At any rate the place had gambling, by all accounts, and at the time running a saloon was at best straddling the law. That meant having connections with powerful people would be essential.

I stared at the yellowed pages in my lap and wondered about the man the report was about. Perhaps he had been a smooth operator, on the take, and his bets had finally gone wrong. Heck, if Prohibition was still in effect, he had to know some bootleggers, and that immediately brought up the prospect of his having been killed or “disappeared” by them. On the other hand . . . On the other hand what if Jacinth was truly in love with Almeria. Willing to risk all for her. She was clearly in the upper echelons of society in Goldport. Now, that might not have meant as much as it does now. Western society, in particular, was more permeable. People would come from menial jobs or from the lower middle class in the East, arrive in Colorado, give themselves airs, and either become big-time financiers—mostly men—or married rich people—mostly women.

Still, born to it or not, Almeria would have been used to a luxurious existence. More important, back then, because the gap—not so much in the earnings, but in the manner of living—between rich and poor was so much broader. Surely if he loved her, Jacinth Jones wouldn’t hare off into the blue, taking nothing with him to support them, would he? Even the money orders that could easily have been converted into money in almost no time, before or after he left?

And where had Mr. Jones come from after all? Who was he?

It seemed to me the entire mystery revolved around his character—whether he was decent or not. I looked through all the papers again, and found a reference buried almost at the end. Something about making inquiries to Chicago, from which Mr. Jones was said to have come, and getting no conclusive answer.

“Cas,” I said, and he jumped in a way that told me that he’d completely forgotten I was present. Which in the normal way of things should, I suppose, have annoyed me, only I knew Cas so well, and I knew that he forgot just about everything while he was working. He looked up. “Yes?”

“Is there any way you can check with Chicago and find out about Jacinth Jones, after all this time?”

“Where in Chicago?” Cas asked. “They do have more than one police station, you know. . . . Even in those days, they probably had more than a dozen.”

“It has a number here, of the precinct the detective, Domingo Dunkirk, called,” I said. “I don’t know if he called it because Jones came from there or because he knew someone there.”

“Could be either,” Cas said, and shrugged, as he noted down the number in the papers I held out to him. “And I have some people back there that I know from past cases, but you know . . . It’s been a long time.”

I nodded. “Of course, you probably won’t find anything, but I’d like to know as much as I can about where Jones came from and what he was doing in Colorado.”

Cas grinned at me. “He was running a saloon during Prohibition . . .”

“So it was during Prohibition?” I said.

He nodded. “I doubt it made much difference,” he said. “Those miners who came down after months alone on the mountains probably weren’t dying for a root beer and a nice little game of pinochle.” He made a face. “I suspect there was both liquor and women available, you know, discreetly. We know about the gambling.”