“I’m happy to have lent a hand, Emmie. But I have to admit I hadn’t really suspected the General myself until you found that receipt.”
“Honestly? You came up with all that about the photo, and Whitner guessing the General shot my uncle, only after I showed you the receipt?”
“Well, parts of it had been in my mind, but just as a jumble of facts. For instance, Mason telling us he knew all along where Elwell’s building was. I thought maybe the man who had spoken to Mrs. Redstone just happened to look like Mason. But it kind of stuck in my mind. Then when you found the receipt, it all fell into place. I take it you had Whitey steal the General’s wallet as well as Keegan’s?”
“No, Whitey must have done that out of habit or something.”
“Seems a little odd to have lapsed during our wedding supper. But maybe when you told him to snatch Keegan’s, he figured it was open season.”
“You don’t think Whitey knew something and was just making it easier for us to find some evidence?”
“No, I think Whitey’s altruistic streak is a figment of your active imagination.” I handed her back the notebook. “I noticed several pages have been ripped out. Charlie?”
“Yes, but don’t ever tell him. He might not understand.”
“No, no. Mum’s the word,” I agreed. “Didn’t it seem possible someone else, someone we never knew existed, might have killed your uncle?”
“No, of course not. Not in this genre.”
Since Emmie had confided her secret, I thought it was a good time to confide my own. I came clean about my precarious finances.
“I suspected that was the case,” she said.
“Was it that obvious?”
“Oh, yes. For one thing, there was the way you hung on to my fifty dollars. And for another, you broke into a sweat every time the subject of money came up. I brought it up Monday morning just to watch you squirm. It was very amusing.”
“How charming. I hope you won’t expect that sort of entertainment at the breakfast table every morning. I might develop a permanent tic.”
Then Emmie made another trip to the confessional. She hadn’t saved five hundred dollars. In reality, it was less than a hundred. And she had paid for the private room and supper at the Iroquois, not Charlie. The truth was, we had about sixty dollars between us. If we were frugal, and the job in Scranton took no more than a couple days, we’d have just enough left when we got to Brooklyn to pay the back-due rent.
Of course, I pointed out, there were two three-hundred-dollar checks coming to me by the end of the month, with any luck. Emmie didn’t like my wording.
“I think you mean we have two checks coming to us, don’t you? I’m the one who made the arrangement with the Provident Life Insurance Company, and the one who solved the case first.”
I could have pointed out that if I had been allowed to make the arrangement with the Provident Life Insurance Company, I’d be waiting on a check for a thousand dollars or more. But I had seen Emmie sulk and it wasn’t something I wanted to relive.
“Of course, Emmie. I merely meant they’d be in my name.”
“I forgive you, Harry. It’s just that you ridiculed my idea that Uncle Charles was killed because of his association with the Elevator Company. And it turns out I was right all along.”
A little later, we had a relatively reasonably priced lunch in the dining car. It took me the entire meal to persuade Emmie to tell me what it was Sadie had asked her to relay to Robert Mason.
“You have to promise not to reveal it to anyone, Harry.”
“Of course, I promise.”
“Well, I think Sadie was crying when she said it, so it wasn’t altogether clear. But I believe she said, ‘Tell the sap to buy some envelopes next time.’”
“Sage advice.”
On our way back to the coach we passed some fellows playing poker. I sat down, but Emmie went back and tried to talk her way into the game. They kind of resisted the idea at first, probably because they felt uneasy about cheating a lady. But she pestered them until they relented. Then, once they realized Emmie was cheating, they paid her back in kind. I was sitting some distance away, so I can’t say exactly what brought the game to a conclusion. But while there were some raised voices, there were no fisticuffs. Emmie sat down beside me with a look of defeat.
“Those men cheated me, Harry. I lost eight dollars.”
As she was speaking, the three fellows she’d been playing with went by and tipped their hats. It was only then that I recognized them—the three drummers I’d plucked on the train into Buffalo. They were up four dollars on us.
I said nothing to Emmie about that, but promised I’d write the president of the railway as soon as we reached Brooklyn. Then I tactfully suggested it might be better to avoid games of chance until we’d paid the rent. Thankfully, she agreed. For the rest of the trip, she contented herself with reading Aunt Nell’s wedding present: How to Cook Husbands.
The case in Scranton involved a common accident insurance bunco. Some sort of accident occurs, maybe a train wreck, or a boat sinking, and an enterprising insurance agent goes and sells the injured victims accident policies with a date of issuance a week or two before the accident. If he’s smart, he makes sure each policy is with a different company. Then he takes half of each payout and moves on to another town with a new name.
In Scranton, a gas explosion had destroyed two buildings and injured more than a dozen people. Four new policies showed up at four different companies, all within a few days of the accident. There was a time when the agent might have gotten away with this. But Keegan’s file room made it a lot harder to put over such a scheme. That’s what did in the agent in Scranton.
By three o’clock the next afternoon, I had signed statements from the four injured parties. They hadn’t received any payout, and they probably wouldn’t even get their premiums back. What happened to the agent wasn’t my affair. That night we arrived in Brooklyn to an empty larder and an apartment that desperately needed airing. But Emmie was clearly excited to be in New York.
A couple days later, there was another elevator fire in Buffalo, just as Ed Ketchum had predicted. The Dakota, not far from where the Eastern had stood, likewise burnt to the ground. No one asked me to go to Buffalo this time. Instead, I was sent to Glens Falls, where yet another fire had occurred. Unfortunately, Glens Falls was also the next stop of the Grand Circuit trotters. I felt a chill in the air, and it was too early for autumn.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
The End
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
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If you’ve enjoyed this book, I hope you’ll take a look at the others in the series:
The Harry Reese Mysteries
A Charm of Powerful Trouble
Kalorama Shakedown
Crossings
Always a Cold Deck
Emmie Reese Mystery Short Stories
Psi no more…
Hidden Booty
The Birth of M.E. Meegs
For more information on the books—including a glossary, list of characters, maps and chronology—please visit my Web site at: StreetCarMysteries.com
Always a Cold Deck (A Harry Reese Mystery Book 1) Page 21
