The only way Delaney could have known that Hansen had been attacked was if he were in on the scheme to assault him. And the only way he could have known that Rosie was alone was if he had been watching her apartment.
Where was he when he had called? Was he at home? Or was he nearby? There was only one way to find out. She’d call him at home and see if he answered. But if he were to answer, what would she say was her reason for calling? As a married woman, what possible reason would she have for calling a bachelor at his home?
I’ve got it! she thought as she recalled the hip flask Delaney had given her the day of Finch’s assault. Rushing to the bedroom, she retrieved the object, which, thanks to Katie, had been wrapped in Delaney’s newly laundered handkerchief and placed on Rosie’s dresser to await delivery.
I’ll call Delaney to remind him that I still have his flask and handkerchief, she plotted. And tell him that if he’d like to collect it, he can stop by tomorrow since I’ll be packing my things to move out.
With her plan in place, she lifted the receiver and placed it to her right ear, but before she could dial the operator, something caught her eye. It was the glow of the stainless steel hip flask, sparkling in the soft light cast by the distant streetlamp.
Replacing the receiver, Rosie reached to the end table and turned on one of two matching living room lamps. Beneath the light of the incandescent bulb, she examined the flask thoroughly. Able to hold approximately eight ounces of liquid, it measured about eight inches by four inches, featured a screw-on cap, and on the front, the initials “MDD” were engraved in bold, block lettering.
But what was most notable about this particular flask was its pristine condition. Every inch of its smooth surface seemed to gleam in the light and, aside from a few greasy fingerprints, possessed no scratches, scuff marks, or other flaws.
Rosie turned the object over in her hands meditatively. Surely a man like Delaney, one who worked in the shipyards, would have inflicted a few nicks on the surface by now. Even if he hadn’t dropped it, the rubbing of the flask against the pocket of his canvas work pants as he plied the bucking bar would have caused some wear and tear.
No, she decided, this flask was new. Brand new.
But how, and more important where, would Delaney have procured such a thing? All nonessential metal items had been pulled from store shelves immediately after the United States declared war on Japan, over four months ago. True, Delaney might have been one of the last lucky civilians to acquire such a luxury prior to the metal ban, but she was doubtful that the flask would have retained its flawlessly shiny finish for that length of time.
Likewise, the pressure was on civilians nationwide to turn in any and all metal items during the recent citywide scrap drives. So great was the sense of urgency that a church in Greenpoint had turned in its bell and a local park had even surrendered a set of Civil War–era cannons to the cause. Indeed, Rosie had noticed that Lieutenant Riordan—a man who might have found a way around the law—lit his cigarettes, rather clumsily, with matches: a hint that until now, he had most likely used a lighter. Quite possibly one made of stainless steel.
There was only one place where Delaney might have acquired any product made of steel: the black market. But if he was buying black-market items, might he be selling them as well? Could he and Finch have been accomplices?
Rosie closed her eyes and tried to imagine how the profiteering scheme might have come together. Although she had a good idea of Finch’s role in the plot, she could not guess the why and wherefore behind his murder. There were still too many missing details to get a clear picture. However, one thing was for certain: involved in the plan or not, Michael Delaney had something to hide.
With a sense of urgency, Rosie picked up the telephone receiver and dialed the operator. “Greenpoint-1105, please.”
Within a few seconds, the phone rang at the Delaney residence. After several rings, an elderly woman answered. “Hello?”
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Delaney. It’s Rosie Keefe, er, Doyle,” she corrected, realizing that the elderly woman might not recall her married name. “I was looking for Michael. Is he around?”
“Oh, Rosie! How nice to hear from ya,” she said in a soft brogue. “Michael had some errands to run after work and hasn’t come home yet. Shall I give him a message?”
She felt lightheaded again. If Delaney wasn’t home, where was he? “Umm, no ... no, thank you. I’ll call him back some other time.”
“All right, then. Good-bye, dear.”
“Good night, Mrs. Delaney.”
She put down the receiver and moved to the window. Was Delaney down there, somewhere on the street? Had he been watching her apartment all afternoon? Had he seen her meet with Hansen? More important, had he seen Riordan stop by and then leave for the shipyard?
Without missing a beat, Rosie dashed to the phone and called Riordan’s precinct.
“Seventy-sixth Precinct, Sergeant Cooper speaking,” a gruff male voice answered.
“Yes, Sergeant. This is Mrs. Rose Keefe. I need to get a message to Lieutenant Riordan.”
“Lieutenant Riordan is away from his desk right now. May I take a message?”
“Yes ... I know he’s away from his desk. He’s at the Pushey Shipyard and I do need to get a message to him. Is there any way you can send it to him by radio?”
The sergeant fell silent.
“Hello?” Rosie prompted after several seconds had elapsed.
“Yeah, I’m here. Hold on a second, please.”
She could hear him conversing with another man, most likely about her request. “Yeah, okay. What’s the message?”
“Tell him that Delaney’s in on the shipyard scheme. And that he might be following him.”
“Okay. Hold on a second?”
“Sure,” she agreed breathlessly, but as the seconds ticked away, she felt her sense of urgency grow.
After what felt like an eternity, Sergeant Cooper returned to the phone. “We tried radioing the lieutenant, but there was no reply.”
Rosie’s pulse quickened. “What? No! There has to be another way to reach him. Can you send a car? It’s important.”
“Hold on, please.”
Again she heard the sergeant speaking with someone in the background. This time, however, the reply came quickly. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t do that.”
“You can’t? Why not?”
“If he needs backup, he’ll request it.”
“You don’t understand. He may be in danger,” she insisted.
“If you’d like to speak with Captain Kinney—”
“No,” she replied. The reason for the sergeant’s lack of cooperation became suddenly clear. “No, that’s all right.”
“Good night, ma’am.”
Rosie slammed the receiver into the cradle without a word. She had one option left: to go after Riordan herself.
Taking the hip flask as evidence, her apartment key, and a bit of change (the only money she had left after paying part of Billy’s bar tab) from her handbag and placing it in the pocket of her dress, she set off to the train station.
The day’s warmth and humidity had visually manifested itself in the shape of storm clouds forming a few miles east of the Hudson River. Amid the rumbling of distant thunder, Rosie rushed down the steps of her apartment building and onto the sidewalk. A block away from the Eighth Avenue/Twenty-third Street station, Rosie felt a strong arm reach around her shoulders and a hand clamp over her mouth. Before she could put up a struggle, a hard cylindrical object pressed against the small of her back.
“Where do you think you’re going, Rosie?” came a whisper in her ear. Although she recognized the voice as belonging to Michael Delaney, its usual whining cadence had been replaced with a tone far more sinister. “Going to warn your friend?”
Rosie’s eyes were wide with fear. Although she couldn’t speak, she managed to shake her head slowly from side to side.
“Liar,” Delaney spat back. “I saw him leave y
our apartment and I know where he’s headed. You were gonna meet him there and warn him, weren’t you? Warn him about me. You know what? I think that’s a great idea. Let’s you and I go join him. Okay?”
She didn’t react, prompting Delaney to push the gun harder into her back.
“Okay?”
This time she nodded in agreement.
“Good. Now, I’m going to take my hand away from your mouth and we’re going to take a walk to the train station. Quietly. Got it?”
Again, she nodded.
“And when I say quiet, I mean quiet. Don’t make me hurt you, Rosie. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She nodded, this time vigorously, prompting Delaney to slowly remove his hand.
Rosie drew a deep breath through her mouth.
“That’s it. Breathe.” He draped his jacket over her shoulders so as to conceal the gun he had pointing in Rosie’s back. “Now walk.”
Putting one foot carefully in front of the other, she proceeded slowly yet surely down the remainder of the block. Delaney, walking at her side, with the gun planted firmly in her back, made sure to nod and smile to passersby.
“Okay, down the steps,” he instructed as they reached the IRT station. “You first, and don’t try to get ahead of me. There’s nowhere you can run.”
With Delaney close behind, she descended the steps to the train platform. There, he joined her, and they waited side by side in silence until the next train to Brooklyn pulled to a halt and deposited its passengers.
It being a warm Saturday night—the first of the year—the trains heading into Manhattan were packed with lovers, singles, and groups of men and women looking for a night on the town. Trains heading out of Manhattan, however, were empty and would not be full until the bars made last call at three a.m.
It was a lucky break for Delaney.
When the train had expelled its passengers and the doors had cleared, Delaney directed Rosie into the third car, which had been abandoned save for three people. Dead center on the bench that ran the length of the left side of the car sat an elderly woman who appeared to be going on an overnight trip. Diagonally across from her, at the rear of the right-side bench, an adolescent boy and girl were busy necking.
The elderly woman, visibly uncomfortable with the public display of affection, played awkwardly with the handle of her small valise and cleared her throat periodically.
Delaney motioned to Rosie to take hold of the leather strap and stood close behind her, one arm keeping the gun positioned in her back, the other wrapped tightly around the front of her waist.
The sight of what she deemed to be another set of amorous young people caused the elderly woman to clear her throat even more loudly and then busy herself with the task of cleaning out her handbag.
“Look at that,” Delaney said in Rosie’s ear. “The old bird thinks we’re lovers. Should we give her a show?”
Rosie leaned her head away from Delaney’s. She couldn’t stand the feeling of his breath on the side of her face.
“But we’re not, are we, Rosie?” he continued. “Not for lack of trying, though. No. I’ve been here all this time, loving you, wanting you,” he added in a whisper. “But you’ve never wanted me, have you? You always seem to want someone else. First it was Billy Keefe and now this cop, Riordan.”
“Riordan?” she exclaimed. “There’s nothing going on with him. He’s just trying to keep me out of jail.”
“Liar! Liar. I saw you two by the Navy Yard, watching the sunset, and talking. That didn’t seem very law enforcement-like to me.”
Rosie thought she might vomit. How long had Delaney been watching her? How long had he been following her every move? How could she not have seen him there in the shadows? How could she not have known?
“And now, here you are rushing after him, trying to save him. But it’s too late, Rosie.”
“What do you mean?”
“I already called Del Vecchio. He’ll have the warehouse emptied by the time your cop gets there. Well, empty except for Del Vecchio and his .38.”
Rosie had been terrified, but at least she had hope that Riordan might have called for backup. At the prospect that Riordan might be dead, genuine panic started to set in.
She had to get away from Delaney. She had to. But how?
The train had emerged from its subterranean channel and hummed along the elevated tracks that led to Red Hook. Rosie thought about her escape as she watched the landscape flicker past the windows. The train offered no exit route and the station only one, but the walk to the shipyard was filled with alleys, side streets, and apartment buildings. What’s more, the war effort had tapped into the city’s supply of skilled male workers, thus bringing infrastructural repairs to a grinding halt and leaving streets and sidewalks in various stages of disrepair.
If she could use the potholes, cracks, and missing pavement to break away from Delaney, she might stand a chance.
With the sound of escaping air, the train drew to a halt at the Romanesque revival City Hall station, which, with the work week ended, now stood eerily empty. Before the war, City Hall station had been a favorite stop of Rosie’s. The curved section of track offset the elegant style of the polychrome tiled arches, brass fixtures, wrought-iron chandeliers, and three cured skylights made of cut amethyst glass. Since entering the war, those skylights, which corresponded to three gratings in City Hall park, had been blackened with tar to avoid attention from enemy bombers. The move to obliterate the light source, although strategically sound, had left the station with a timeless, dark feeling that Rosie found deeply foreboding.
Delaney pushed Rosie out the sliding doors and waited until the train left the station before directing her to walk. With the train gone, the only sounds in the empty station were the clacking of their heels against the platform cement.
As they scaled the steps that led to the green square of land in front of City Hall, Rosie mentally retraced the walk to the shipyard. Two blocks ahead, there was a hole in the sidewalk that might afford her an opportunity to knock Delaney off balance—providing, of course, that he wasn’t aware of its presence. Considering her abductor traveled from the opposite direction each morning, Rosie was willing to stake money on the fact that he wasn’t.
Marching forward through the wind and thunder, Rosie could pick out the pivotal spot in the near distance. Calculating where Delaney might walk, given his proximity to her, she altered her pace so that she could step daintily, and discreetly, over the small pothole while, with any luck, her abductor stepped in it.
Unfortunately, when she reached the spot, Delaney followed her lead and bypassed the hole with no difficulty.
Disappointed but not hopeless, Rosie zeroed in on the next obstacle, just a few feet ahead. A section of pavement that had buckled, causing an uneven walking surface.
Having walked this path for ten days, Rosie had learned, without even looking down, where to walk to avoid getting the toe of her shoe caught on the cement.
Delaney, meanwhile, tripped and stumbled forward. It was precisely the break Rosie needed. Kicking off her shoes, she ran, hell for leather, down the street, doing her best to stay in the shadows.
Chapter Sixteen
Riordan pulled his Ford Deluxe to a stop along Beard Street and approached the young man standing outside the Pushey Shipyard gate. Between eighteen and twenty years old, he possessed a pencil-thin mustache that did little to hide or age his youthful countenance and, unlike the typical guard on duty, he was conspicuously lacking a uniform.
“Lieutenant Jack Riordan, NYPD.” He flashed his badge. “What happened to the MP who’s usually on duty?”
“Oh, h-he’s out sick.”
“Really? Here I was thinking that whatever is going on behind that fence might not be condoned by the United States government.”
The young man’s face blanched.
Riordan reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “Here, my badge and this twenty-dollar bill say you leave here without
a word and I pretend I never saw you.”
The young man gazed at the bill, looked back over his shoulder, and hesitated for a moment, at which point Riordan raised his voice. “Go on! Get out of here!”
He took off like a shot, leaving Riordan, by the glow of a nearby streetlight, to figure out how to jimmy the complex lock.
Riordan rolled his eyes. Next time he would have to remember to pay off the guard after demanding that the gate be unlocked. For now, however, the sole of his size eleven-and-a-half shoe would suffice.
After several tries, he managed to finesse the gate and enter the yard, his Colt Detective Special at the ready in his right hand and a long, black flashlight in his left. As the impending storm rolled closer to the city, he moved to the right of the building known as the employee holding area and focused his attention on the smaller outlying structures.
Although Riordan’s men had searched the shipyard thoroughly, Riordan himself, preferring to reserve his time and energy to focus on clues, was still somewhat vague about the yard’s layout. As such, it was only after discovering the toolshed, worksite lavatory, and blueprint building, that he happened upon an expansive building made of corrugated steel.
Shining his flashlight in the window, Riordan saw a wooden rack system, approximately six feet deep and twelve feet high, built neatly along the far wall. The first two slots of the rack were filled with sheet metal. The rest were empty.
To the right, on a perpendicular wall, metal corrals held burlap bags labeled as containing fasteners of every size, shape, and variety. However, there were just two or three bags of each kind.
Giving the door latch a turn, he entered the building and examined its contents. In a warehouse capable of holding tons of materials, the presence of only a few pieces of sheet metal and several hundred fasteners—end of week or not—seemed dubious. Given that the country was ramping up for war, one would have thought that this storage area would be filled to the rafters with supplies.
Shining his flashlight onto the cement floor of the sheet-metal racks, Riordan bent down to take note of several lines of dirt on the front and back beams of the rack, running perpendicular to the sides of each section. Moreover, those lines looked fresh and damp, indicating that there had, indeed, been more sheet metal stacked in the area and that that metal had been moved quite recently.
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