“I’d hardly be on this side of the veil if I did.”
“From what I hear, you’ve sent a fair number of men to be fitted for a pine suit. I like that.”
Kingston would.
“You’re familiar with the Lee Walker case. You found his niece.”
“I did,” confirmed Riot.
“I need you to investigate Walker. I’m representing Claiborne, and I want you to personally look into this matter.” From the muffled way he spoke, Riot could well imagine the cigar thrust between his thick lips.
“I’m currently working on another case,” Riot said. “I’ll put a man on it, however.”
“I want you. And I won’t take no for an answer.” It was a near growl.
“Is there a reason for the rush?”
“I don’t want this to reach the courts. Better to nip it in the ass beforehand. Is there a reason why you’re questioning me?”
“I’m a detective—that’s my job.”
“Then damn well do it.”
Before Riot could deny his request a second time, Kingston slammed the telephone down. Riot jerked the receiver away from his ear, and frowned at the crackling line. He had been slowly working his way into Kingston’s circle, and here was a chance to get closer. It was tempting to report Lee Walker to the authorities. If Walker avoided the courts, the man might go free, or Kingston would press charges, and Sarah would be dragged into her uncle’s mess.
The outside door opened. Low voices came from the main office. A moment later Monty Johnson stomped inside without knocking, and Riot waited.
“I found your woman,” Monty grunted. So he had taken on the job himself. “It wasn’t hard. A few old timers remembered her well. They were fond of her at Park’s Place.”
“Where is she?”
“In the Odd Fellow’s Cemetery.”
38
A Tangled Web
Ravenwood manor clung to the side of a hill. A thing of turrets, and a confusion of design. It dominated the block as if to threaten visitors away. That wasn’t working today, however. Cameron Fry was sulking across the street, but it wasn’t the young reporter who caught Riot’s attention—it was another, the same man who’d lurked under a lamppost the day before. The man leaned against his post, smoking and watching the house without any attempt at subterfuge.
The man tipped his hat, and Riot angled towards him, heading across the street, but Cameron Fry got eager, intercepting him in the middle.
“Mr. Riot,” Fry said.
He kept walking, eyes on the smoking man. “In a minute, Fry.”
The reporter fell silent, and kept on Riot’s heels, his journalistic instincts sensing something grave in the air.
“Can I help you?” Riot asked the lurker. He was a few inches taller than Riot, but most men were. Everything about the man was bland, from his bowler to his brown hair to the cut of his suit. Unremarkable in every way. Even his eyes. They appeared half-glazed as he sucked on his cigarette. The lurker took a lazy drag, and blew out a slow cloud of smoke. It raised Riot’s hackles.
“No, sir.” Slow and steady, without inflection. Definitely a predator. His coat was open, and he rested a hand on his right hip, but smoked with his left. A gun was sure to be hidden on that side.
“You look lost,” Riot said.
“I’m enjoying your fine neighborhood. A nice family you have there.” The smile barely moved his drooping mustache.
Riot was as relaxed and poised as the smoking man. Danger took him that way—like the calm before the storm. “That’s a neighborly thing to say,” Riot said. “You enjoy your day. A man never knows when it might be his last.”
“Amen to that. Women and children, too.”
Riot stared at the man, not in threat, but patience, waiting for him to say more. It unnerved most; they usually reacted, or left.
“You have a pleasant day, Mr. Riot.” The smoking man tipped his hat, and strolled away.
Riot watched him until he disappeared around a corner.
“Who was that?” a voice asked.
Riot glanced at the reporter. “I don’t know.”
Fry licked his lips, and fiddled with the pen in his hand. “Why didn’t you ask his name?”
Riot smirked. “I doubt he’s the type to give it freely.”
“What was that all about? He’s been standing there all morning.”
“Trouble, Mr. Fry. He’s trouble. I’d stay clear if I were you.”
“Is that why you have those two goons out front?”
Those ‘two goons’ were slouching in plain view in front of the house. They watched as Riot came their way. One was bulky, the other wiry. Riot had sent both of them to San Quentin.
“That young fellow giving you problems, Mr. Riot?” the big man asked.
Fry’s feet stuttered, and he angled himself to the opposite side, putting Riot between him and the big man.
“No, he isn’t, Meekins.” The bulky man was built like a Japanese wrestler. His hair, currently pulled back in a ponytail, was long and stringy, and he never bothered with a waistcoat.
“Oh.” Meekins frowned. “Should I have let him pass?”
“No.”
Meekins cracked his knuckles.
“That man tried to kill me,” Fry said to Riot. “If I wasn’t an amiable fellow, I’d have summoned the police. I could still press charges.”
Riot arched his brow at the reporter. “Fry, if he had tried to kill you, he would have succeeded.”
Meekins had had an awful temper once upon a time. Riot had encountered the ‘tough-for-hire’ during an investigation, and subsequently been the target of his drunken wrath. Meekins later confided to Riot that jail was the best thing that ever happened to him. When he sobered up, he found Jesus, and embraced the first half of his name. The man might be meek, but he was still a bull waiting to charge.
His thin partner mumbled something.
“I’ve been good, Mr. Payne, thank you.”
Before San Quentin, Payne had built up a reputation worthy of his name. The man had a love of blades and revolvers. An agile bounty hunter who had once hog-tied a wanted man and taken him to jail—only to discover it was the wrong man. Luckily, for the sake of his neck, the wanted poster had been for alive and not dead.
Riot started to walk up the lane.
“Mr. Riot!” Fry called, too wary of the guards to step off the sidewalk. Riot stopped, and waited. “If I could have a chaperoned interview with Miss Byrne, I’d be in your debt. Someone’s bound to keep trying anyhow. Wouldn’t you rather I do the interview than some unscrupulous fellow? I have four sisters.”
The young man was neatly dressed, and had a smile he liked to flash. Riot would be surprised if a word he’d just said were true.
“It’d be a sure-fire way to get rid of me, too. Otherwise, I’ll dog your every move.”
“I’d advise you to stay off my property.”
“Oh, I will, but I’ll be waiting. Persistence is my middle name.”
Riot cocked his head with amusement. “Cameron Persistence Fry,” he tasted the words. “It sounds like a character from Jane Austen.”
“Who?”
Riot sighed, and Payne mumbled something low with a nearly unintelligible accent from his hometown in Maryland. “I agree, Mr. Payne, no class these days. Don’t you read, Fry?”
“Newspapers.”
“I have a proposition for you, Fry. Read one of Jane Austen’s novels, give me a proper summary, and then I’ll ask Miss Byrne if she’ll consent to an interview.”
“I would recommend Pride and Prejudice,” said Meekins. “Makes a man think.”
“An excellent recommendation,” Riot agreed. He had regularly visited Meekins in prison, lending him a stack of books each time to better his education.
Fry scribbled down the name. “I’ll hold you to that, sir. I’ll be back—you can count on it.”
Riot didn’t doubt that. He walked up the lane without looking back. The yard and carria
ge house were quiet. There was no clunking, cursing, or sounds of deranged banging coming from its innards. That stillness was alarming.
And it triggered a memory—the smell of blood, and glazed, staring eyes. Instinctively, he drew his revolver, and hurried through the barn doors.
Riot swallowed down his dread, and took a step inside the carriage house. There was no blood, there were no murdered friends. He took a shaky breath, and climbed the stairway, careful not to step on the boards that he knew creaked.
The workshop was empty, and he moved into the living area. Sao Jin was not in the big chair by the stove. Finding the kitchen empty too, he headed towards the small room in the back.
Wong Kau lay in the bed, pale and deathly still, while Isobel sat in the chair beside his bed. She was slightly slumped. Before reason could take hold, Riot holstered his gun, and rushed forward, placing two fingers under her jaw and feeling for a pulse.
The heart is a most irritating and irrational organ, Ravenwood grumbled.
Isobel cracked an eye open. “Worried?”
“A little,” he said faintly. She opened her eyes fully, and tilted her face towards his. His fingertips lingered over her pulse, and she smiled up at him.
“I figured it was you when I didn’t hear the stairs creak.” She shifted the blanket, uncocked her Shopkeeper, and wedged it back into her pocket.
She reached up and took his hand, brushing her lips along his knuckles. The touch drove all reason away, and his mind went momentarily blank; he even forgot the hatchet man in the bed.
Gripping his hand, she used it to pull herself up. She moved stiffly, and concern trumped all else. “Did Doctor Wise examine you?” he asked.
Isobel frowned, wrapping her blanket around her shoulders like a shawl. “I can’t believe you put him up to that.”
“You would have done the same.”
“I’d have tied you to the bed, Riot.”
“I look forward to it.”
Her breath caught, and then a mischievous quirk raised the edge of her lip. He wanted to pull her close and kiss that quirk. And she well knew it. She was waiting, of course, waiting with a raised brow in challenge.
“I’ll hold you to that.” She slipped a card from her sleeve—the Queen of Hearts—and tucked it into his waistcoat pocket. “If only we didn’t have an audience.”
The words were a reminder of time and place. And he wished the same—wished that his past hadn’t caught up to him at that moment. Riot remembered to breathe, his chest swelling, as her hand smoothed the fabric over his breast.
“Jin ran off,” she said, snapping him from his daze.
“Unfortunate,” he murmured. “But I didn’t imagine she’d stay.”
“Well, I certainly didn’t help things,” she said with a sigh. “I’m not the motherly sort.” Isobel narrowed her eyes at him. “Where have you been?”
He glanced over her shoulder at Wong Kau. His breathing was shallow, but steady. Riot placed a gentle hand on her back, and directed her out of the room, away from the hatchet man. When she sank into a plush chair by the stove, he went over to the kitchen and poured two glasses of water.
“I’m fairly sure I’ve aged twenty years in three days,” she said, accepting his offering. Riot’s back and shoulders ached as well, from carrying Kau across the dunes. But Riot hadn’t been hog-tied and beaten beforehand, so his discomfort wasn’t nearly as acute.
He pulled over a wooden chair, and sat. “I like to think I am a bit more fluid than you are, just now.”
She sniffed at the water. “I hope you added brandy to this.”
“A whole heap.”
She smirked, and drank the plain water. As did he, stalling for time.
“You’re not going to make me wait, are you?” she finally asked.
“Wait for what?”
“For you to start talking. It’s clear you discovered something.”
“Is it?” he asked.
“To me.”
“I must be out of practice and losing my poker face.”
“It’s not your face that’s rusty. It’s…” she tilted her head, “more like how I can sense the mood of the ocean.”
“Every sailor claims that,” he said dryly.
“I will not be thrown off course,” she said, and waited.
He obliged. “I stopped by 920,” he said, and filled her in on what he had gleaned.
“That explains why Jin had such a violent reaction when I threatened to put her in a mission. She likely thinks she’ll be handed back to the very people she ran from. She speaks English, you know.”
His brows shot up. “Does she?”
Isobel inclined her head, and then made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat. “I don’t have a maternal bone in my body, but it boils my blood to see those scars on her face, especially knowing the police were involved in handing her back.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about your lack of maternal instinct.”
“I don’t have one,” she persisted. “What do you think happened to her after she was taken from the mission?”
“Who knows. They may have been her parents, or not. And it’s not terribly uncommon for parents to sell a daughter so they can return to China.”
“Barbaric,” Isobel growled.
Riot sat back, crossing his legs. “Is it much different than the custom of marrying off a daughter to a wealthy family in ‘civilized society’?”
“I don’t much care for that either.”
“I didn’t imagine you would,” he said with a quick smile. “Slap whatever name you want on it, but there’s little difference. Whether it’s dowries, an outright sale, or pushing your daughter towards a financial gold mine to pad the family fortune—strip away the finery, and it’s all the same. In English society, most mothers parade their daughters around like fine wares.”
“Thank God I wasn’t raised in England. God forbid a woman might work.”
“Not all women, nor men, have your tenacity.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She cocked her head. “Do mothers throw their daughters at you?”
“Since I inherited Ravenwood’s estate the attempted engagements have tripled.”
“A wealthy American with the manners of an English gentleman. A catch indeed.”
“Only until you get to know me.”
She snorted. “The same could be said of most so-called gentlemen.”
“A pity,” he sighed. “I hate to be another fish in the barrel.”
“You’re far more interesting than the other ones.”
“The miserable have no other medicine, but only hope.”
“Far from miserable, Riot.” She looked at him sideways. “Do you memorize Shakespeare so you can quote verses to all your women?”
“My harem swoons whenever I quote sonnets.”
“I’m beginning to think you might have a harem,” she mused. “You’ve knocked us off track again, Riot.”
“Are you sure it was me this time?”
“Men were deceivers ever,” she muttered. “If it weren’t for men like Doctor Wise, whose daughter is the apple of his eye, and my father, I’d lose all hope for the male sex.”
“I hope I’m included in that list.”
“I have yet to meet your harem,” she quipped. “I imagine there are quite a few headstrong women in your life.”
He clucked his tongue. “A gentleman never tells, Bel.”
“You told me about Abigail Parks.”
“It seemed relevant.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. He thought of her grave. The date on the stone said she died a week after Ravenwood. There had been a bouquet of hothouse roses at her gravesite. She had hated roses. And now he knew for a certainty that he was avoiding the subject, that he was hesitant to speak of Abigail’s death aloud. “I find myself examining everything in those months. I’m seeing webs where there are likely shadows.”
“You’ve got a mixed
-up puzzle, Riot,” she said softly. “We need to separate the pieces.”
“Easier said than done.”
“It only takes stubborn patience, and you have that in spades.”
He removed his spectacles, and rubbed his eyes. “My supply is running thin of late.”
“I hope you’re not looking to me to be the patient one of this partnership?”
“You’re more of a wrecking ball,” Riot said.
“I like that image.” There was true pleasure in her voice. “So what has you so uneasy?”
“Abigail Parks is dead.”
Isobel narrowed her eyes in thought, as if she were shifting pieces around on a chessboard. Most would automatically express sympathy, but not Isobel—interrogation was more her style.
“How’d she die?”
“Murdered in a robbery.”
Isobel frowned. “At the saloon?”
“Yes.”
“Was she shot?”
Riot shifted. “Her skull was crushed with a slung shot. From the sound of it, she put up a fight.”
“I’m so sorry, Riot.”
He frowned into his glass. “We were two ships passing in the night. Still, for three years, I imagined her enjoying life—raising chickens in some quaint village, or serving drinks in Montparnasse.”
“I would have liked to meet her. She sounds like my kind of woman.”
“I didn’t know her very well,” he admitted. “Our relationship was one of… convenience. Both of us valued our independence.”
He could feel her eyes on him. Could practically feel her thinking. There was an energy that buzzed around Isobel as palatable as an electric charge.
“Do I dare ask?”
“Haven’t you just?” she returned.
He threaded his spectacles over his ears, and looked expectantly at her.
“I’m seeing shadows, too,” she confided. “Maybe everything is tangled. It feels like it, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t see how Abigail could be tied up in all this.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”
“I was lying in a hospital bed when she was murdered. She wasn’t involved in any of my affairs, and no one knew we were intimate.”
“When did Jim Parks get out of prison?”
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