The Impersonator (28 page)

“Ev’ning, dollface. What’s a looker like you sitting all alone for? Come join us and I’ll buy you a glass of bubbly.” His friends were watching, all of them, to see what luck he would have. I wasn’t overly concerned. The light was dim and my costume, wig, and makeup were good enough that I would feel comfortable speaking directly to Henry without fear he would recognize me. Still, Shakespeare had it right, discretion is the better part of valor.

“Thank you, but I need to meet my husband at the theater in a few minutes.” I folded the dollar under my glass and stood.

“Husband, eh? Well, now, that’s one lucky man, that husband.” He sneered, grabbing my arm with his rough fingers. “I think he should spread his luck around a little, eh, dollface?” I twisted away from his grasp as I threw what was left of my drink in his face. He sputtered with rage.

I crossed the room toward the stairs, weaving through several patrons. The boozehound shoved them aside as he followed. Suddenly he crashed to the floor, tripped by an outstretched foot that a gentleman at another table had kindly extended on my behalf. He sprawled messily, and I made my escape into the night.

Markie’s was two blocks from the main strip, and the street was quiet. The cold air tasted fresh and clean after the thick smoke in the bar. The corners were dark—no streetlights in this part of town. No place for a girl alone, I thought, heading toward an intersection where a gaslight beckoned. Behind me, the door to Markie’s slammed shut. A glance over my shoulder told me my suitor had been down but not out.

Anger at his humiliation trumped inebriation. I bolted for the gaslight but my ridiculous shoes slowed me down, and before I could put any distance between us, he was on me. He snatched at me and got a handful of rabbit stole which I immediately released, but not soon enough to avoid being slung into the gutter, tearing a hole in my dress with my knee. I swung backward hard with my elbow, hoping to hit something vulnerable. My arm hit only air, but oddly enough, I heard him scream.

Someone had lifted the goon off me and a familiar voice drawled, “This man bothering you, lady?”

Without waiting for my reply, David Murray planted a powerful fist in the man’s stomach and released him to crumple to the pavement. I had the feeling David wasn’t finished, but the door to Markie’s swung open just then and a couple of the men from Henry’s table came out. “Sammy? That you?” one called. Sammy could only gasp for air.

“Come on,” David said, grabbing my wrist. I didn’t have to look back to know several dark figures were in pursuit.

37

I had no idea where I was going. I didn’t need to think about that, only to concentrate on keeping up with David who wasn’t wearing flimsy high heels. One heel broke, but I kept on. I had no choice. David would not have let go of my wrist for all the tea in China. I could hear the shouts behind us. “Stop! Thief!” they called, hoping someone would oblige. Fortunately for us, it wasn’t a part of town where people minded other people’s business.

David knew the city well. He executed several turns, pulled me through a broken fence, doubled back, and cut through an abandoned warehouse until he was certain we’d shaken them. Catching our breaths, we came out on a street near a tired wooden sign that read,
MAJESTIC HOTEL
. He dragged me into a lobby that mocked the hotel’s moniker. A bald man with spectacles perched on the tip of his hawk nose looked up from his newspaper and turned down the radio.

“I’d like a room,” said David.

“I got one.”

“I’ll take it.”

“Ain’t you gonna ask how much?”

“How much?”

“Two dollar.”

“I’ll take it.” He pulled out his wallet and gave the man five. “Here’s a fin. There’s another tomorrow if you don’t mention we’re here.”

He came around the desk and took in my broken shoe, bleeding foot, and lopsided wig. “Mum’s the word,” he said with a leer.

“She’s my sister.”

“Whatever you say, pal. Number three, top of the stairs.” He tossed David a key chained to a block of wood.

The room smelled like urine.

“You knew it was me.” I said, pulling off my black wig.

“Not at first.”

“How?”

“Your hands. The way you touch your fingertips together.” Damnation, I wasn’t aware I did that. “I didn’t know what you were up to, but I knew you shouldn’t be in that part of town alone. So I waited in the alley. I was planning to trail you home without you knowing.”

It was the moment for a girl with pluck to mouth off a few lines, but I wasn’t feeling too plucky. No telling what would have happened if David hadn’t been there to bail me out of the mess I’d blundered into. “Thanks.”

“You can thank me by telling me what’s going on.”

“I don’t think I can do that.”

“I’m your brother, Jessie. You can trust me.”

“You work for Henry.”

“Not anymore.”

“What did you do for him?”

“I told you. Campaign work.”

I threw his words back at him. “I’m your sister, David. You can trust me.”

He took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand on end. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you the truth. Henry runs a bootleg operation. He acts like a big shot, but he’s really small potatoes. Fills his boat in Canada, brings it into the coast every few weeks. My job was to distribute the hooch to some Portland speakeasies.”

“There’s someone bossing him?”

“Sure. You don’t work alone in this business, not for long anyway.”

“But you’re out of it now?”

“Yeah. I wanted out of it after the first job last summer. He told me that was his final run, and I agreed. Turned out there was another final run, and he wanted me to help out again. The money was real tempting. But no more. I’m out.”

“He’s still bootlegging?”

He nodded. “He’s done it for years. The Carr money would have let him give it up. He’d have had plenty of jack to spread around for politics. But you came back, and he had to continue.”

“Poor thing. Driven to a life of crime by his cousin’s resurrection. What if he fingers you to the police if you don’t continue?”

“He won’t do that. We’ve got what we call in Texas a Mexican standoff. I wouldn’t go to jail alone, and he has more to lose than I do, with the elections coming up.” I looked at him with new respect. David was nobody’s patsy. “Now sit down and put your foot up while you tell me your side of the story.”

He took a thin towel from a hook by the corner sink and wet it. I peeled off what remained of my stockings and held out my hand for the towel, but he took my foot in his hands and bathed the blood off himself. “This hurt?”

“I’ll live.”

“Then talk.”

I talked. I told him that someone wanted the Carr money bad enough to kill me for it. I told him about the threat coming up from the beach and about the poison in my sherry. Put those incidents alongside a bootlegger and three strangled girls in the past six years, one of whom was rumored to have been involved in smuggling, and you had motive, opportunity, and ability, all in one person: Henry.

He didn’t laugh or brush off my concerns. He stared through me for some moments before he met my eyes. “Tell me about the three girls.”

“The Chinese girl was first, killed in October of ’18. She was strangled, and some of her hair cut off. The girl in the warehouse was strangled too—sometime late in September of ’19, the doctor said. The coroner’s report isn’t in yet, but I’ll bet a hank of hair is gone. And the Indian girl was killed a few weeks ago, as you know, strangled. The tip of one braid was missing.”

“What do the police make of this?”

“They brushed off the Indian girl’s death as some tribal vendetta, which is not so, and they claim the Chinese girl was a prostitute involved in smuggling and got her just deserts, so to speak. That one’s long forgotten. The body they found in the warehouse is in the hands of the state coroner.”

“Like as not, at least two of them were killed by the same man. Sounds like a madman on the loose.”

I gasped, leaped up off the bed, and gasped again at the pain in my foot. “Oh, my God! I’ve made a huge mistake.”

“What?”

“It couldn’t have been Henry.”

“Why not?”

“He was hundreds of miles away at college in California in October of ’18, and in the fall of ’19 too.”

Utterly devastated, I sat back down on the smelly bed. Why hadn’t I realized that earlier? Henry couldn’t be the lock-of-hair murderer after all. He’d not been near Dexter when those girls were killed. He’d been far away at college. David was right. I felt like a fool.

“Well, then,” said David, “I guess he can’t be in two places at once. Besides, I’ll admit Henry’s got his mean streak, but he wouldn’t harm a woman.”

Still, even if he hadn’t murdered any of those women, there was his behavior toward me. And there was the woman in Dakota’s who’d warned me about Henry’s penchant for violence. “You think not? What about my close call at the edge of the cliff?”

“What exactly did he say to you?”

I repeated his words with a visible shudder. “‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous to play around cliffs. You’d not survive a fall from this height.’”

“I don’t necessarily hear ‘I’m going to throw you off’ in that.”

“It was there, believe me.”

“You may have been mistaken.”

I was starting to waver. “What about the poisoned sherry?”

“Maybe the gardener was wrong. He’s a gardener, for God’s sake, not a doctor. Maybe a bad oyster made you sick. It happens. Maybe the sherry was some bathtub gin with God knows what in it. Look, I don’t deny Henry is a pretty unpleasant person—that’s why I’ve broken off with him—but murdering his own cousin?”

“I’m between him and a fortune. You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I believe every word you’ve said. I’m just not sure about your conclusions.” Suddenly he stood. “Give me your dress.”

“What?”

“You can’t leave here in a ripped dress—”

“I came in a ripped dress.”

“—and I need to make sure you don’t run off before I can rummage up something for you to wear back to the hotel.” He picked me up from the bed and unhooked the back of my frock. When the purple dress came off and I was left standing in my step-in, he averted his eyes in a brotherly way. Not feeling sisterly, I grabbed the stinking bedspread. “I’ll be back in half an hour with decent clothes, and I’ll get you back to the Benson. You get that war paint off, and lock the door behind me. Don’t open it unless you’re sure it’s me.” He reached to a pocket inside his topcoat and pulled out the smallest pistol I’d ever seen. “Take this.”

“Geez, it looks like a toy.”

“It’s not. If somebody breaks down the door—”

I nodded. No point telling a cowboy that I was no Annie Oakley. I’d never even held a loaded gun before. I’d used trick guns onstage, though. How different could it be?

Alone in that squalid room with nothing to do but think, I set to the task. So Henry couldn’t have killed the Chinese girl or the girl in the warehouse because he was away at school in California. Fair enough. Someone else did, and the same person, given the trademark lock of hair he took from both victims. I’d think some more about that later. And just maybe I had blown out of proportion the menacing remarks Henry had made standing above me on the cliff. But something had sickened me that night at Cliff House, and there had been something in my glass that wasn’t sherry. Chen could have been mistaken about what that was. If it had been a bit of soap or residue from some backyard still and a bad oyster was the real culprit, then no one was trying to kill me after all. Dr. Milner thought I had food poisoning. No doubt Chen knew far more than Dr. Milner when it came to roses and rutabaga, but why would I believe a gardener over the respected town doctor when it came to medicine?

Had a lifetime of theater made me too theatrical?

38

Rainy welcomed me on the front steps of Cliff House when I arrived home the next day. “I’ll take your coat, miss. And a letter came for you Saturday, just after you left. I put it in your room.”

Benny! I hurried upstairs.

Benny wrote like a man, short and to the point. My imagination filled in the details. I pictured him entering Portland’s police station on that slow Sunday afternoon, looking official in his good serge suit, and giving the weekend duty officer some excitement. Murder always got people’s attention. Benny was good at serious roles; he’d have made a perfect hard-hitting Pinkerton from north of the border, looking for information that might link to a murder in Canada, and the Sunday officer would have spent an hour or more scouring the files to help him.

The gist of it was, there had been four women strangled in Portland since 1916, and all four deaths were unsolved. A common thread could be seen in their station in life: one worked in a bar, one (a Negro) worked in burlesque, and one in a hotel, but she was on record as a prostitute. The fourth was something of an anomaly—she was married and had been killed in her home. I had the sense that her death wasn’t connected to the others.

In one of the files, the police had noted that a lock of the young woman’s hair had been cut off. The others, said Benny, might have had locks of hair missing, but no one had noticed. It wasn’t, I admit, something police or coroners normally looked for, no more than they would note whether the woman’s fingernails were light red or dark. The lock-of-hair victim had been killed in February of 1920.

There was no way to link that one to Henry. Once again, he had been away in California studying at Stanford when the death occurred. The other Portland murders had been committed at various times between 1920 and 1924, the last occurring six months ago. Henry might have been in Portland on those dates, but the link with the Dexter murders was missing.

Well, that was that. Henry was certainly an officious prig, but I couldn’t make him into a murderer with these facts. In the unlikely event that a bootlegging charge made it as far as the courtroom, a guilty verdict would bring little more than a fine. But what about Ross? He was awfully interested in Indians and dark-haired girls, and he even wore some beaded band around his wrist that was similar to Lizzette’s. He would have been living at Cliff House the year the Chinese girl was killed. But he would have been so scrawny and young—just fifteen at the time of her death and sixteen when the one in the warehouse was murdered—that he was hardly a credible murderer. And Buster? He was big and strong and had spent his life in Dexter. I didn’t think he was intelligent enough to plan and get away with several murders, but there was that lock of Jessie’s hair in the treasure box that couldn’t be denied. Beyond that, I was fresh out of suspects.