“Sure thing,” Verna replied in a careless tone. “If I see her, I’ll let you know. Where are you staying?”
“Where else?” His harsh laugh turned into a harsher cough. “The only hotel in town. If I ain’t around, leave a message for Mr. Gold-that’s me. I’ll be here through tomorrow, at least. Maybe longer. Good evenin’, ma’am.”
He tipped his hat politely and went down the path to the street. As she watched from behind the lace curtain on the door, Verna saw a bulge under his suit coat. She had never seen one, but she had read enough descriptions of such a thing to know exactly what she was looking at. A shoulder holster.
She shivered again, watching Mr. Gold cross Larkspur Lane and walk up Robert E. Lee in the direction of the hotel. But he turned in at the first house up the block. Clearly, he was canvassing the neighborhood. Sooner or later, he was bound to run into someone who had seen the woman he was looking for. Miss LaMotte’s platinum hair was a dead giveaway, and his claim that he had money for her would encourage someone to tell him where she was staying.
Frowning, Verna dropped the curtain, turned away from the door, and crossed the living room to the bookshelf where she kept her collection of true crime magazines. She picked up one and leafed through it, then another. In the third, she found what she was looking for. She had remembered correctly, and her breath came quicker.
She went straight to the telephone on the wall, gave a short crank, and when the operator answered (it was Olive, sounding very froggy with her cold), gave Liz’s number. In a moment, Liz herself was on the line.
Mindful that someone else was probably listening-like most people in town, both she and Liz had a party line-Verna measured her words.
“You remember what I asked you this afternoon, Liz, about looking for that address in the file? Well, it turns out to be important, after all. The lady we were talking about-she definitely has a connection with that man who’s been in the news recently. The man in Cicero.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish,” Verna replied.
There was an astonished silence as Liz processed this. “How do you know?” she asked cautiously.
“A gentleman came to my door just now. Said his name was Gold, and that he’s looking for her and her friend. He showed me a photo of her standing in front of a building with a street number on it.” Verna couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “Liz, it was the very same number as the hotel I mentioned to you!” According to the Dime Detective, 4823-the number on the wall of the building in the photo-was the address of the Western Hotel, on Twenty-second Street in Cicero. The place where Al Capone hung out.
A longer silence. “You’ve got to be kidding,” Liz said at last, with a little whoosh of her breath.
“On my honor,” Verna replied grimly. “It’s true, every word of it. I just double checked the street number in the magazine where I read about it.” She took a deep, shivery breath. “And what’s more, I have the feeling that the gentleman who came to my door is an associate of that fellow we’re talking about.”
Liz gulped. “Gee whiz,” she said incredulously. “You mean-”
“That’s right,” Verna said quickly. “That’s exactly who I mean. And now I really do need your help, Liz. The address of that house you mentioned-do you think you could get it to me tomorrow morning?”
“I… I can’t promise,” Liz said slowly. “I’m not sure I ought to do it. And anyway, what makes you think that an address will be any help?”
“I know it’s a long shot. But given the situation, don’t you think somebody ought to… investigate?”
“Well, I’ll think about it,” Liz said at last.
“Thank you.” Verna knew that Liz took her work-and its confidentiality-seriously. A promise to think about it was the best she was going to get.
She said good-bye and hung up, but she didn’t go back to her book. She was remembering the bulge of the shoulder holster under Mr. Gold’s coat and the hard look in his eyes when he said Lorelei LaMotte’s name. Fictional detectives-not even those tough-talking tough guys she liked to read about-no longer seemed terribly exciting, not when she suspected that she had just been talking to one of Al Capone’s henchmen, in person!
But while Verna was sure that she could trust her instincts on this, she knew that suspicion wasn’t enough. She needed to find out whether this man was really connected to Capone-some sort of positive identification. But what?
She went back to the kitchen table and sat down to think for a few minutes. She picked up a pencil and doodled on a piece of paper, pushing her lips in and out, in and out, still thinking. Outside in the yard, Clyde was barking excitedly again-this time, to announce the arrival of their next-door neighbor, Buddy Norris. At the sound, Verna got up and went to the window that looked out on the grassy side yard between her house and the Norris place, where Buddy-a Cypress County deputy sheriff-lived with his elderly father.
Actually, Verna didn’t need Clyde’s barking to know that Buddy had arrived. The racket of Buddy’s motorcycle took care of that. He rode a 1927 red Indian Ace, which, if truth be told, was probably the reason Roy Burns had picked him to be his deputy. Sheriff Burns had read that the New York Police Department’s crack motorcycle squad rode nothing but Indian Aces, so when Buddy applied for the position vacated by the retiring deputy, the sheriff hired him without hesitation. Buddy’s Indian Ace gave Sheriff Burns the right to brag that Cypress County had the only mounted deputy in all of southern Alabama.
Frowning speculatively, Verna watched as Buddy-who everybody said looked so much like Charles Lindbergh that he could be his brother-cut the engine on his motorcycle. He swung a leg over, got off, and pushed it toward the back of the house. He was favoring his arm, which he had broken some months before when he rode his motorcycle through Jed Snow’s cousin’s corncrib. Buddy had always been a reckless sort.
Verna tilted her head, watching him. She didn’t think much of Sheriff Burns, who kept his job by staying on the good side of the local heavyweights. Of course, Darling wasn’t Cicero or Chicago, and its law enforcement officers didn’t have to deal with any serious lawlessness, except for bootlegging, of course. Even so, when it came to investigations, Sheriff Burns didn’t display a lot of initiative. And when it came to fighting crime, he wasn’t inclined to step out swinging.
But Buddy was a different matter. If push came to shove, he might-just might-be useful in dealing with Mr. Gold. For one thing, he was enterprising, and even ambitious, always looking for a way to stand out from the crowd. He was smart: he had bought a mail-order how-to book on scientific crime detection from the Institute of Applied Sciences in Chicago and taught himself how to take fingerprints, identify firearms, and take “crime scene” photographs. He had taught himself to shoot, too. Verna knew this for a fact, because he’d rigged up a shooting range in the pasture behind the Norris house and spent a couple of hours a week (and way too much expensive ammunition) practicing with his service revolver, much to the consternation of Mr. Norris’ old horse Racer, who lived in that pasture and hated loud noises. And because he had only recently celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday, Buddy was inclined to believe that he was immortal, which made him brave, as well as reckless. If there was trouble, Deputy Norris might be a good man to have around.
But there wasn’t any trouble just yet, Verna thought. And there was no point involving Buddy until she had some idea what kind of situation she’d be asking him to get involved in. Still staring out the window, she thought for several moments, then turned and went to the telephone again.