“All right,” she said, still smiling, “but it’s Katherine with a K McGinty if you need to credit someone. M-c-G-i-n-t-y.” She pointed behind her. “Gray file cabinets at the bottom of the stairs.”
It was all too easy.
The two metal cabinets contained meticulously-kept Nevis land records dating back to the late 1700s, although the further back you went, the spottier the documents. Still, there were enough historical documents to send an historian straight to Nirvana. The older records all seemed to be copies, the originals, no doubt, now housed in the official Maryland archives in Annapolis. This would be a quick search and Shoe’s mind was already jumping ahead to his next steps.
The documents were arranged by street name, then house number. He opened the third drawer—Sixteenth to Twenty-Second—and located the group for Twenty-First Street. He thumbed through the ascending house numbers. Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-six. Thirty-five? Nada. He checked the last of Twentieth Street. Zero. After Twenty-First? Goose egg. He started with Sixteenth Street and ran straight through all the documents in the drawer. The official records were strangely silent on 35 Twenty-First Street. He banged the metal drawer closed. When a cold stare failed to produce results, he yanked the drawer out and started all over again. Zip. Naught. Nil.
He returned to Miss M-c-G-i-n-t-y’s desk. “I can’t seem to find the property records for a house on Twenty-First Street. Is it possible that recent activity has them out somewhere for some sort of updating?”
“I’m the only one who updates,” she said. “It may be on my desk. What’s the address?”
“Number 35 on Twenty-First Street. I’m thinking the property might have changed hands.”
She looked at him a moment as if it were too much information to process all at once. “Number 35? No, sir, I don’t recall seeing anything on Twenty-First Street.”
He pointed to a wooden box marked IN. “Can you check there? Maybe someone else . . .”
A scowl replaced her earlier sunny countenance. “No, sir. Just me. Perhaps you overlooked it. Two records stuck together? Returned to the wrong place in the drawer by another researcher?”
He shook his head. “I searched the whole drawer. There has to be something somewhere.” He gestured to the box again.
She huffed once and emptied the box. “I can assure you there is nothing concerning Twenty-First Street in here. Are you sure the address actually exists?” she asked as she leafed through. “Sometimes things get renumbered.”
“Oh, it’s there all right. Checked this morning.” He tapped impatiently on the edge of her desk, eyes roving. Was there no one of higher authority to whom he could plead his case? His eyes settled on the robust gentleman in the nice suit across the room—an upper-level bureaucrat if he ever saw one.
She followed his gaze. “No. Mr. Hunnicutt would not know anything about the day-to-day activities of property records.”
Shoe took off for bigger fish. No and not know were not in a reporter’s vocabulary. “Mr. Hunnicutt,” he said, approaching the civil servant, who had to be tipping the scales at a good 250 pounds. “A moment of your time, sir.”
Hunnicutt looked up, startled. Whatever he did here, it apparently didn’t include cavorting with the locals. “How may I help you?”
“Tate Shoemaker, Evening Star,” Shoe said, tipping his fedora. “I’m working on a story for the paper. Was hoping to get it into tomorrow’s edition, but I can’t seem to find the property record I need down in the archive.”
“Miss McGinty should—”
“Miss McGinty was a peach, but she couldn’t help me. You’re her supervisor, right?”
“What’s the address?” Hunnicutt said, putting aside the document he had been reading.
“Thirty-five on Twenty-First Street.”
Mr. Hunnicutt might be further up the management hierarchy, but he seemed clueless. He floundered around, moving everything within reach until finally settling on a nearby folder underneath an elaborate millefiori paperweight. His review of the documents proved to be slow and aggravating. Shoe thought himself better off with Miss McWhatever.
Shoe checked to see if she was still at her post and froze mid-look. Not ten feet from her stood Prentis Gant, the very politician his Prohibition exposé had toppled from his lofty position of power and influence and sent to jail. A meeting would be most unpleasant. Shoe put his elbows on the counter and shielded his profile by massaging his temples. He stayed that way until Prentis’s noisy entourage passed through to another room. How on earth was the man out of jail?
“Yes, sir,” Honeycutt said, tapping a paper in his hand. “There was a transfer of ownership on that property quite recently.”
“When was it sold?”
“No, sir. No money exchanged, no sale. Just the name changed on the deed. Donaldson to Koenig.” He shoved it under Shoe’s nose. “Here. See?”
Shoe moved it back three inches. It was a simple document transferring the deed from Carlton Donaldson to Mildred Koenig two days earlier. Donaldson again! Was this some sort of Sorry you got involved gift? A bribe? “May I see the rest?” he asked, indicating the folder.
“Certainly, Mr. . . . Mr. . . .”
“Schoenberger, from the Tribune.” Shoemaker, Schoenberger, did it really matter? Not to Honeycutt. He immediately turned away and started a new conversation with another associate behind the counter.
Shoe clutched the folder to his bosom and slipped away. He was almost out the door when a thought struck him. What did the history of the original Koenig house show? He slipped back down to the basement. From there, his luck ran out and things headed south. He couldn’t remember the house address or the street name. Sure, it was the Seventh Street extension, but the street changed names at some point outside town. Opossum Pike, was that it? And the house number—he could kick himself. He’d looked right at it when Jack knocked on the door. His brain was now racing like his heart, and the more he wracked his brain, the faster they galloped. He yanked out the drawer marked M through P and started plowing through the Os. One hundreds. Two hundreds. He found it in the 300s block—315, his father’s birthday. He lifted the whole folder, slammed the drawer shut, and vaulted the steps two at a time, pausing only at the top to see what Honeycutt was up to and to pick up on any lurking politicians. He had worried needlessly. Prentis Gant was nowhere in sight, and the consummate bureaucrat was huddled in an animated discussion with several people. Miss McFlinty Whatever was nowhere in sight. He walked out as if he had stock in the place.
Chapter Twenty
New Players
Shoe scuddled straight to the Evening Star. He needed the lowdown on Prentis Gant before someone sneaked up behind him and meted out some retribution on the politician’s behalf. Riley Tanner would know, only he wasn’t in his office or anywhere else in the building, which was puzzling. Sure, evening was rapidly descending, but Tanner lived and breathed this business. Shoe searched the newsroom for another friendly face. There wouldn’t be many. The senior staff had never warmed to him and his meteoric rise to fame had no doubt added to their animosity. No worry, the place was deserted—the only sign of life the chugging of the printing machine at the other side of the building.
Shoe leaned around the Chandler and Price press as it zipped out news pages and shouted at the linotyper. “Perkins!” He yelled it several times before the two made eye contact.
“Damn syndicates and their boilerplates,” Perkins said, fuming. He ran his fingers across the metal plate in his hand, jiggling the type letters to check their placement. “Someday they’re going to put me out of my job.”
Shoe sat down on the corner of a nearby desk. “Well, if news organizations get big enough, that could be a lot of us. But not the local news. You’ll always be setting type for the local stuff. Waste your ire on something else.”
“Already got my replacement lined up anyway. Dubbya Arthur, have you met the young pipsqueak yet? Tanner thinks I don’t know I’m training my replacement.
Hell, spent all yesterday replacing his upside-down Ms with Ws. Hopeless,” he said, shaking his head.
Asking Perkins not to complain was like asking a dog not to bark. Shoe would need to be quick about it—hit him in between beefs and then be off again. “Listen, maybe I’ve been working too hard, but I would swear I just saw Prentis Gant over there in the courthouse.”
“No mistake,” Perkins said. “Exonerated not more than four hours ago.” He pulled a finished sheet from the press and shoved it a him.
It was a special edition of the Star and the banner headline made Shoe’s knees wobble: Criminal Charges Dropped against Mayor’s Office. “But they caught them red-handed, bootlegging down at Parkers Wharf. How the—”
Perkins’ eyebrows knitted together. “If the feds are gonna let ’em go, why even have a law? Course, Volstead was crazy in the first place to think you can legislate—”
“Federal District Judge Morris Hopper in Baltimore,” Shoe said, interrupting the momentum of Perkins’ swelling tirade. “Lemme see, lemme see. Okay, here it is. ‘Of particular interest was the dismissal of all charges against Nevis, Maryland official Prentis Gant. Although federal agents identified him as an active participant in the now-infamous raid at Parkers Wharf, Judge Morris ruled in favor of Mr. Gant, citing improperly obtained search warrants as well as other legal irregularities. For his part, Mr. Gant maintained his innocence throughout the trial, claiming he had come to the wharf to pray at St. Raphael the Archangel Catholic Church and was indiscriminately swept up in the frenzy federal officials created.’” Shoe balled up the paper.
“Yeah, shame about Mr. Gant there,” Perkins said, shaking his head. “Right nice fella. Bought me one at Kelly’s Tavern before they closed up. Can’t arrest a man for practicing religious beliefs now, can you? Constitution says so. Hell, he didn’t seem to have profited in any way from what was going on. Feds checked his bank account. Poor man was pretty much a pauper—just like you’d expect of a civil servant. If he was guilty, he’da had a bushel-basket load of cash tucked away. Had to have friends pay his fine. One thousand bucks!” he said, shaking his head, “and two months served. I say justice has been done.”
Shoe slid off the table and handed the wadded paper back. “No way, Perkins. This is bullsh—I documented the whole shebang. Even a baby could follow . . . They fined the rest of them a thousand dollars and let them go to. I thought they’d at least get the six months’ jail time.” He slumped into a nearby chair.
“You really thought these uppities were gonna do serious time?”
“Well, yeah.”
Perkins shook his head in disgust and picked his boilerplate back up. “Then you really don’t understand Maryland politics. Prohibition is a federal dance, but the State holds the dance card. Judge Hopper knew he could only go so far without risking someone filling him full of lead out on Charles Street. What’s the compromise? Everyone stands up before His Honor, says they’re sorry, and promises not to do it again. Then they leave the courthouse discussing how they can be more careful about covering their behinds the next time. Men don’t change. Laws and circumstances change.”
Perkins sputtered on with a profanity-laced tirade about repealing the Eighteenth Amendment, but Shoe had moved on to how he could be more careful. He walked past the empty desk that used to be his and looked out the building’s front window. A wagon loaded with split wood clattered up the hill, and a few businessmen in dark suits scurried from unknown point a to destination point b—the same activities he’d seen out the same window six months before. He didn’t expect to see a lynching party approaching. Not yet, anyway, and certainly not with Prentis Gant leading it. He was much too clever a man to get caught directly again. Shoe was already certain he had one little shadow ghosting him around town. Was it a Prentis associate? And then again, he was fairly certain he hadn’t put an end to the Clinton boys. Maybe they could all meet together at a prearranged place and beat the hell out of each other— the victor taking the spoils. The absurdity of it made him chuckle. He would simply keep moving.
He drifted away from Perkins and found an empty desk to spread out the documents about the house on Twenty-First Street. Apparently, both the Weathersby and Donaldson families had histories in Nevis. Donaldson’s ownership of the property went back decades to a land transfer from his father, Orville. In fact, the title traced back through many Donaldsons to Benjamin Starker Donaldson, who had acquired the property for three dollars and some change in 1785. Shoe stared at the latest land transfer. Why would he gift it out of the family? He leafed through the rest of the papers but found nothing to answer that.
He moved on to the Opossum Pike records. As suspected for this working-class section of town, there was no passing of property from one generation to the next. Property ownership regularly changed hands between families. The Koenigs had been living at the residence for the previous five years. The latest sale was recorded the day before the paperwork on Twenty-First Street, the buyer a company called Calvert Unlimited. Shoe tried to recall employers in Nevis big enough to buy housing for their employees. The railroad, for sure, but those would probably be owned by the Chesapeake Railway Express and they were usually on railroad rights-of-way. Bayland Park? Possibly. Shoe found nothing else of interest in the folder. He closed it up and made a note for Fannie to hunt down Calvert Unlimited and determine if the company owned any other houses on the Pike.
He looked at Perkins’ girlie calendar tacked up on the opposite wall, where Theda Bara was staring back at him with a come-hither look. What was today, the 19th? That left only five days until President Coolidge lit thousands of lights on the National Christmas tree. Holy Jerusalem! What he wouldn’t give for just one bright light and a tiny bit of illumination.
As Riley Tanner took a seat across from the acting mayor, Leedon “Buddy” Bowen, he glanced at his fly to make sure it was fastened. He also took a quick tug on his tie, the only one he owned. It came out of his desk drawer maybe once or twice a year when he found it necessary to impress. Like now. In the last five years, he’d been called to this office exactly three times. His recall was precise on that because he never forgot when his rear end got chewed out. He swallowed hard and smiled politely. “Couldn’t ask for nicer weather, huh, Leedon?”
He’d been friends with Buddy Bowen all his life—forty years and a few extra. They’d learned their sums and alphabet on Miss Martha’s back porch back in the ’80s after a lightning strike burned down the old schoolhouse. Ate corn they stole from Mr. Harper’s fields and spent many a summer night swimming buck naked in the Piscataponi with the rest of the boys. But the face that looked back at him now was anything but friendly. Today, anger had a name, and it was Leedon. Politics was like that.
“Riley, we’ve known one another a long—”
“Long time,” Riley agreed, nodding.
“We have a problem, you and I.”
“Oh? Leedon, after all these years, I’m sure there isn’t anything we can’t fix. What is it?”
“Fire Tatum Shoemaker.”
Prentis Gant already pulling strings again. That hadn’t taken what, less than half a day? “Except that. Good man, great reporter. Anything else I can do for you?”
“Riley, be reasonable. We’ll all . . . all be happier if he goes back to Washington. Now. Without any more ideas about sensational stories. I’m asking as a friend. Send him packing.”
“’Preciate that. And as a friend of yours, my answer is no.” He stood up. “Anything else while we’re just two friends shooting the breeze?”
“It’s not me. I, uh, er. . . Please, Riley, see it everyone else’s way for once.”
“‘Bad company corrupts good character.’ 1 Corinthians 15:33. Have a blessed day, Leedon.”
With that, Riley walked out of the office and into the twilight. He liked this time of day: smack in the middle of the light and dark. It was like being a good journalist—neutral and unbiased. He pulled out a Camel and started puffing. By the time he g
ot back to the newspaper offices, he’d flipped it away and begun scribbling on his notepad. The Star was in for a rough time, but, damn, how he relished a good fight. Shoemaker’s notoriety and ambition hadn’t worked out so well for the young fella, but he had a job at the Star as long as he needed it.
Chapter Twenty-One
Brother’s Keeper
Shoe’s eyes popped open with the first squeak. The second had his fingers inching toward the Police Special Colt lying next to him on the patchwork quilt. He found the hard rubber grip and eased off the safety. The night was moonless, the Bayside room pitch dark. Point of entry was either the window or the door. He bet his life on the latter. He aimed the gun toward the door without rising. It would be a hell of a recoil. “Talk fast before I plug you good.”
“Don’t shoot! I’m not armed.” The light flipped on, revealing Rudy at the door with his hands raised above his head.
“Rudy Becker!” Shoe slipped the safety back into place.
“Who else would it be?” Rudy lowered his arms and shrugged his coat back into place. “Do you make a point of shooting people before you identify them?” He clicked the door shut again.
“Only when they sneak unannounced into my room in the middle of the night. What do you want, Rudy?”
“Unannounced? I left a note.” Rudy pointed to the writing table under the window.
Shoe’s eyes found the sheet of stationary propped up against the brass lamp on the table. “Well next time, give me a little extra warning. I’ve had a very trying day. Most of it because of you.” He turned his attention back to Rudy. “How much clearer could I have made it on the wharf?”
“We need to have a talk.”
“I’m done talking.”
“Yeah, I noticed, but did you have to try to drown me? Not everyone knows how to swim.”
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