A Charm of Powerful Trouble (A Harry Reese Mystery Book 4) Read online

  “What mystery?”

  “The night of the shooting, what should have been a prop gun turned out to be real. Carlotta insisted she’d brought the prop gun and someone must have switched it. Then she borrowed another prop gun for the trip to Weedsport.

  “But the night before the final show there, Nell borrowed one from Carlotta’s trunk. The next afternoon, while Carlotta and Thibaut were using one on stage, the prop gun Nell had taken was in the custody of Deputy Sheriff Carson. Carlotta must have forgotten to bring it the night Ernie was shot and just never searched her trunk for it.”

  “Then I was right about the gun all along,” Emmie gloated. “Ernie brought it there himself. He wanted to get rid of it and only just happened to pick the spot where Lou expected to find the prop gun.”

  “The first piece of bad luck Ernie ever had,” Ainslie added.

  After leaving the car at Nostrand Avenue we made the slow walk home. Due to his short legs and desultory nature, Thibaut was a difficult person to hurry along. You couldn’t pass a stray dog without him stopping to confer with it. Nell and Emmie had proceeded apace and were soon well ahead of Thibaut, Ainslie, and myself. At the plaza, I was again approached by Jimmy Yuan.

  “You fellows go on up. I think Jimmy wishes to consult with me.”

  They left us.

  “You were warned, Harry. Now you have twenty-four hours in which to produce the girls.”

  “Or?”

  “Your wife, Harry. They have your wife. Didn’t you notice she was missing?”

  “I had her a minute ago.”

  Jimmy looked puzzled.

  “Don’t play games, Harry. They found where she was staying, on 27th Street. If you want to see her again, you must produce the girls by tomorrow night.”

  “When did this abduction occur?”

  “This afternoon, I believe. The exchange will be made in the plaza here tomorrow at midnight. If you cooperate, your wife will be returned to you unharmed. And do not call in the police.”

  “I might need more time.”

  “You are out of time, Harry. Remember, these men are ruthless.”

  “Why do you always refer to them in the third person? Aren’t you a party to this?”

  “I’m only the messenger. I’m afraid I’m in much the same situation as you.”

  “They have your wife?”

  “No. They have my dog, Harry.”

  With that, he wandered off. I went upstairs, where Ainslie was offering toasts with our wine and renewing his pledge to hasten the return of Carlotta.

  “I’m afraid your undertaking will come up empty-handed.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It would seem the tong has kidnapped her.”

  “Why would a tong kidnap Carlotta?” Nell asked.

  “Because they thought she was Emmie.”

  “Why would a tong kidnap Emmie?”

  “They’ve given me twenty-four hours to return some cargo that’s been misplaced. Goods they were smuggling in from Canada.”

  “Oh….” Emmie said. “I suppose it was naïve to think they’d just forget about the… goods.”

  “Yes, apparently.”

  “What goods? What’s it have to do with you?” Ainslie asked.

  Before explaining, I made sure Xiang-Mei wasn’t within earshot. Then Emmie and I gave Ainslie and Nell the general outline of our rescue and secreting away of the six girls.

  “Where are they now?” Nell asked.

  “It would be indiscreet to say,” Emmie said. “But even if we were willing to give them up to a life of white slavery, it would be impossible to get them here within twenty-four hours.”

  “They warned me not to contact the police, but I don’t see how we have any choice.”

  “Wait, I have a plan,” Ainslie interjected.

  “What sort of plan?” Emmie said suspiciously.

  “Foolproof. You need a half dozen Chinese girls, and you will have them. But you’ll have to trust me.”

  “That’s a tall order,” I told him.

  “I guarantee Carlotta will be safely back home tomorrow night.”

  The market for Ainslie’s assurances had soured appreciably in the last few days. But he did have one bidder.

  “Give him a chance, Harry,” Nell pleaded. “It’s important you let him make amends.”

  “All right, but if you make a mess of this, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Of course, there was little doubt that I’d be the one doing the paying.

  A while later, Emmie and I went off to bed, leaving Ainslie alone on the couch. Apparently Nell’s backing only went so far.

  “I’m not sure I can sleep not knowing what’s happening to Carlotta,” Emmie told me.

  “She’ll be all right. As long as they think they can get back the girls, they can’t risk hurting her.”

  “Are you really going to trust Ainslie to come up with a solution?”

  “No, I’ll call Tibbitts in the morning,” I told her. “I expected to find him here when we got home.”

  “Why would he be here?”

  “He spent the last couple nights on our couch. Things got a little too hot at home. I guess they made up.”

  “Only if he backed down.”

  23

  While Emmie was bathing the next morning, I made a search of her things for the money she’d relieved the pickpocket of the day before. I found it hidden in her lingerie drawer and slipped out a hundred dollars.

  I also came across two pairs of folding frames. The first was the one she’d taken from Rhodes’ office the previous afternoon. One side held a photograph of him, and the other side one of Mrs. Twinem, which had needed to be trimmed so as to fit a smaller frame. The other pair of frames contained a picture of a fellow I’d never seen and opposite it an empty frame. Then it occurred to me what Emmie had done. Sure enough, I found a photo of a second woman behind that of Mrs. Twinem. She must have taken the larger folding frame from Mrs. Twinem’s bedroom at her mother’s house in New Jersey—the fellow I didn’t recognize must have been Twinem. Emmie had removed Mrs. Twinem’s photo from that and paired it with Rhodes’, covering up the photo of his own wife. Which was too bad, because Mrs. Rhodes was by far the better-looking of the two.

  When I heard Emmie in the hall, I closed the drawer and went out to make my call to Tibbitts. Rather than immediately launch into the kidnapping of Carlotta by a vengeful tong, a circumstance that had resulted from a part of the story we’d neglected to tell Tibbitts, I told him I had information that might account for how Frank Rhodes’ commemorative gun came to be involved in the shootings of September 2nd. He suggested I come over to Manhattan, but I countered with an offer of a hearty breakfast.

  A half hour later he was at our table looking hungry and tired. Emmie and I related what had transpired at the house in New Jersey and later at Earl Rhodes’ office. When we finished, Emmie presented her theory that Earl Rhodes was Mrs. Twinem’s lover.

  “So, the way you have it, they were meeting at the Cosmopolitan and her husband surprised them?” he asked.

  “No, not exactly. The shooting wasn’t a result of Mr. Twinem’s unexpected appearance, but a carefully laid plan. Suppose Mrs. Twinem and Rhodes met regularly at the Cosmopolitan and were planning to do so again that evening. Mrs. Twinem realizes her husband has been enlightened to her infidelity. Perhaps he hired a detective, and she saw his report. So on this evening, she and Rhodes lay a trap. She meets Rhodes at the Cosmopolitan, and he comes equipped with his father’s gun. When Twinem, who she knows is following her, arrives, Rhodes shoots him, then flees. Meanwhile, Mrs. Twinem has seduced Ernie Joy….”

  “Meanwhile?” Tibbitts asked.

  “Well, over the preceding several weeks. She has arranged for him to meet her at the Cosmopolitan after the show that evening. He arrives just after Rhodes has fled. She tells Ernie she shot her husband and he must take the gun away for her. He does so, not so much out of devotion, but in panic.
/>   “Fearing he’s been followed, he joins Jimmy Yuan’s tour. When we reach the opium den, he recognizes Carlotta and now is particularly anxious to rid himself of the gun. He hides it at the foot of the bunk as he’s talking to her, not knowing that is the very spot Lou Ling expects to find Carlotta’s prop pistol, which we now know she had left home in her trunk. Thus, Ernie Joy is the engineer of his own death.

  “Mrs. Twinem then tells the police the fantastic tale about her husband expecting to meet someone at the Cosmopolitan, and that a thief shot him and took the manuscript. When she reads about Ernie’s death and suspects he was shot with the very gun used to kill her husband, she calls you to make sure you’ll make the connection, hoping Ernie’s death, by its exotic nature, would buttress her own bizarre story and thus lead suspicion away from her.”

  There Emmie stopped, breathless, but with a self-satisfied smile.

  “I suppose there could be something to it,” Tibbitts said without much enthusiasm.

  “Oh, most definitely. All we need to do is find the detective her husband hired.”

  “The detective you imagine her husband hired,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, that one.”

  Apparently, Tibbitts’s acquaintance with Emmie had not been sufficient for him to fully appreciate how little it mattered to her whether any particular fact were real or imagined.

  “Suppose there is a detective—how do you expect to find him?” Tibbitts asked.

  “Sherlock Holmes would put ads in all the dailies,” I suggested.

  “We don’t need to find him. In fact, it’s not even important whether he exists at all. Perhaps better if he doesn’t.”

  This left Tibbitts looking noticeably puzzled. I was puzzled as well, but it was such a frequent state for me I doubt it was evident from my expression.

  “All we need to do is have someone pose as the detective, approach Mrs. Twinem, and offer to withhold what he knows for some remuneration. If she pays, we know she’s guilty.”

  “Emmie, you’ve already tried twice to trick her with impersonations. Don’t you think she may be a little leery the third time?” I asked.

  “She may be suspicious, but if she’s guilty, she couldn’t dare not to pay.”

  “Remember, Emmie, you’re only out on bail. If the New Brunswick police pick you up again, you can count on becoming much better acquainted with your chums there. And I will not be borrowing any more bail money.”

  “If Sergeant Tibbitts would help, we could do it very easily.”

  “Cops don’t like cops from other jurisdictions playing games in their backyards.”

  “Yes, that’s true. We need to entice her into New York. I’ll work on that.”

  “All right,” Tibbitts said noncommittally. “I’ll leave that to you.”

  I still wasn’t ready to bring up our little disagreement with the tong, so I asked him about affairs at home.

  “I’m playing it like Shakespeare’s shrew tamer.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Not so as I can tell. She’s still planning to take the boat tomorrow.” He put down his napkin and was about to get up when I stopped him.

  “There is one more trifle I wanted to bring up.”

  “Trifle?”

  “Well, more of a predicament. Remember what we told you about the trip up north?”

  “Not much of it.”

  “Well, that’s just as well because there was one small bit of it we forgot to mention.”

  Interestingly, throughout our account of the girls’ rescue and subsequent domiciling with the Corinthians, his blank expression never wavered.

  “It’s all true,” Emmie assured him. Which, of course, had the opposite effect to what she intended. Still, there wasn’t much choice but to soldier on.

  “It seems the tong that arranged for the shipment of girls is harboring a grudge,” I explained. “Thinking she was Emmie, they’ve kidnapped my cousin Carlotta.”

  I’d taken the thing forward a little too quickly. It took some time to illuminate the details, but finally he seemed to have the general picture.

  “Maybe you should give them the girls,” he suggested.

  “Sergeant Tibbitts!” Emmie exclaimed.

  “I thought perhaps you’d be willing to come along this evening, with some of your fellows.”

  “All right,” he said. Then he turned to Emmie. “But if this is just something you imagined happened, someone’ll live to regret it.”

  “You needn’t threaten me. Harry’s the one in contact with the tong.”

  “Through their emissary, Jimmy Yuan.”

  “I’ll have him picked up.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. At least as long as there seems a reasonable chance Carlotta will come out of this unscathed.”

  After sharing the particulars of the appointed rendezvous, I walked him out to the street below.

  “What was the name of the handwriting expert you mentioned earlier? The fellow who looked at the hotel registration cards.”

  “Mahar. Owen Mahar. He says he’s reasonably sure that Twinem’s card from the Cosmopolitan matches the card from the Victoria.”

  “Where does he work out of?”

  “Has an office right in the Times Building. Why?”

  “Oh, I just wanted to ask him something. Does he still have the cards from the two hotels?”

  “Yeah.”

  I went back upstairs to find Emmie getting ready to go out.

  “I probably won’t be back until this evening, Harry.”

  “All right. But remember, no more bail.”

  She made a face and went out.

  A moment later, Thibaut emerged and headed into the kitchen. I took the opportunity to search the room he’d been sharing with Carlotta for any evidence of Ernie Joy’s handwriting, but found nothing.

  At Mahar’s office there was a note on the door saying he’d be out until two. From there I revisited the boarding house of Bauman, Ernie’s feeder.

  “I need a sample of Ernie’s handwriting, and a photograph,” I told him.

  “What for? To tie him to that murder?”

  “He’s already tied to it—I’m trying to untie him from it.”

  It took a good amount of coaxing, but eventually he handed me a publicity photo and several notes Ernie had made earlier that summer. Apparently he’d played Puck in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream over at Manhattan Beach.

  It was still before noon, so I went up to Madison Square and visited a fellow in the fraud department of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. I told him I might be able to save them some money on Mrs. Twinem’s claim on her husband’s life policy. The normal arrangement was for an investigator to reap ten percent of whatever he saved the company. If he had had a $50,000 policy, I could pay my debts and still live for a year on what I’d net.

  Unfortunately, it was a boilerplate through the university for just $5,000. Still, the five hundred he agreed to would be enough to free me from the clutches of my usurious house guest, and maybe even send something on account to the rest of our creditors. Between that and Emmie’s new career as pickpocket, we might be able to live all right for a while.

  I was now just a few blocks below the Victoria Hotel and decided to see if I could find out a little more from the loquacious desk clerk. I found him sorting the mid-day mail.

  “Do you remember mentioning how Twinem was always asking about his mail?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about the day he was shot?”

  “Yes. He received one letter in the early afternoon mail, I believe. Then another arrived that evening.”

  “What time that evening?”

  “Not long before he went out.”

  “Was that before or after Mrs. Twinem asked for the manuscript from the safe?”

  “Before. I was just leaving for my break, so about half past eight.”

  “And that was just another letter?”

  “No, there was something in
it. Something metal, maybe a key.”

  “A key?”

  “Well, that’s just a guess. A key with a tab, like ours.”

  He held up one of the room keys, with the room number inscribed on an attached metal tab.

  “And it came in the mail?”

  “No, I don’t believe so. There was just the name on the envelope. And actually, it was Mrs. Twinem’s name.”

  “Her name?”

  “Yes, Isabel Twinem. I’m almost certain of it.”

  “Did you see who left the envelope?”

  “No, I found it on the desk, with her name on it, so I naturally put it in their box.”

  I thanked him and left. After lunch at a chop house a few blocks to the east, I went back to Mahar’s office in the Times Building and found him reading the newspaper. I asked him about the hotel cards Tibbitts had given him.

  “As I told the sergeant, they are very likely by the same hand. The average person is fairly inconsistent, so no two signatures are ever exactly the same.”

  “But it’s possible the second signature was made by someone else. Someone who’d studied the first?”

  “Yes. I would have to say the other samples of Twinem’s handwriting more closely match the first card.”

  “Would it help if you had some samples from the potential forger?”

  “It would make all the difference.”

  I handed him Ernie’s notes. He spent some time looking back and forth.

  “This is an excellent case. I’d like to have all these photographed, if you don’t mind. I could use this in my book.”

  “You see a match?”

  “There’s no question, the card from the Cosmopolitan is by this hand.”

  Business must have been slow. Ten dollars was enough to convince him to accompany me to the Cosmopolitan Hotel. As we were going up the front steps, Emmie came running down.

  “You’re wasting your time, Harry. Those fools won’t tell you anything.” She continued on her way, but then called over her shoulder. “I’m missing some money, Harry.”

  “Are you? I’ll keep an eye out for it.”

  “Yes, do. By the way, I won’t be home for dinner.”

  “But you plan to be there for the entertainments later?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  We went in and I asked to speak to the manager.