apart.
Louise crossed the room in silence and spun into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. It had no lock, but it had a thumb latch that she slid across. Then she waited and listened. After less than a minute, she heard the door to the sitting room open and close. Then the sounds of drawers being pushed all the way shut, of cushions being picked up and slapped into shape.
When the bedroom doorknob was turned and the door rattled against the latch, Louise took a step back. She was not nervous.
She heard the maid on the other side of the door call out, “Mister Patenotre? Do you want me to make your bed up, sir?”
Louise pretended to yawn, making a sound that could have come from anyone—man, woman, even an animal—and which could have been intended to mean anything at all.
In the same raised voice, the maid said, “I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you, sir,” and went. Louise heard the outer door close a few moments later.
She looked at the bed. It was still made up from the day before. Jules Patenotre hadn’t returned to his rooms last night, nor would he ever again. But it would suit her best if he didn’t disappear just yet. She threw back the covers, mussed the sheets, and put a dent in the pillow, giving the bed a slept-in look. Then she searched the bedroom.
Shoes. How many pairs of shoes did a man need? Behind them in the bottom of the closet she thought at first that she’d struck lucky, because she found a locked box about the size of a gun case. Louise didn’t have the Silent Man’s skills, but she went and got the letter knife from the sitting room, and forced the lock.
The resemblance to a gun case was no coincidence. The box contained two guns. It also contained a collection of obscene postcards and a small number of books. She took out one of these and read the title:
She left the box’s contents as she’d found them. The damage to the lid wasn’t obvious. The rooms had yielded nothing of use, but she wasn’t done with Jules Patenotre yet. Before leaving, she took one last look around. She’d have the Silent Man or his wife come in and untidy them every day for a week or two. It would blur over any apparent link between her own arrival and her patron’s disappearance. It wouldn’t matter that his room key stayed behind the front desk, as long as the clerks didn’t keep a record.
She went back down to the lobby.
“The manager promised me a strongbox?” she said to the clerk on duty.
“Right here for you, ma’am,” he said, and reached under the desk to bring out a ledger. “If I can get a specimen signature in our security book.”
“How does this work?”
“I’ll walk you through it.”
She signed as Mary D’Alroy, and then he led her to the small room just off the lobby where the wall of strongboxes was to be found. He showed her how two keys were used to open the door to her personal safe.
“This one you keep,” he explained, showing her the key on the smaller tag. “It fits your box and no other. This second key is the hotel’s master key. You need both keys to open any box.”
With that, he left her alone. As soon as he’d gone, she dug into her clutch bag and took out the key that she’d found in the pocket of Jules Patenotre’s coat. She tried it in each of the strongbox doors in turn, until she found the one that it matched. Then she took the hotel’s master key out of her own safe’s door and used it to open the second lock.
She drew out Patenotre’s long tray and lifted the metal lid. This was more like it. There was a substantial amount of money, both in paper and gold coin. Her reaction was not of greed or of pleasure, but of relief. She transferred it all across to her own box. There was another key, a big one, with nothing to say what it was for. She took that. There were some pieces of jewelry, but she left these behind. Such things could be identified. The risk of that exceeded any value they might have—which, in all honesty, looked as if it wouldn’t be much. She was no expert, but to her eye these were sentimental pieces, not heirlooms.
There were also some papers, legal documents—probably the last remaining records of a now-extinguished line. She was going to leave those as well, but she gave them a glance first in case there was anything involving stocks or shares. Without her close-work glasses, she had to strain a little. What she saw prompted her to stuff all the papers into her clutch bag for a closer reading later on.
She’d been in the room for about five minutes. Long enough. She slid both boxes back into the wall, closed the heavy doors on them, locked both sets of locks, and then took the hotel’s master key back to the desk.
“Very ingenious system you have,” she told the clerk as she handed in the master.
“We like to think it’s pretty well foolproof,” he said. “Good day to you, ma’am.”
She read his name off his badge.
“And to you, Charles,” she said, and went back up to her suite.
THIRTY-SEVEN
It was one hell of a gentlemen’s club, that was for sure. Housed in a mansion built in the Victorian Italianate style, it stood behind fancy iron railings in the middle of the downtown area on East Franklin. The entire building was at the disposal of its members, who included a large number of Richmond’s prominent and powerful. The rules governing membership were complex, subtle, and mostly unwritten.
Membership was for men only. Decent women of the town were known to turn their faces from the building as they passed it on their way home from church; to do otherwise was considered unladylike. The club was not spoken of, and it was generally understood that whatever happened within its walls, stayed within its walls. This was a place for the boys to be boys. The boys included bankers, factory owners, military men, and a significant number of the city’s idler rich.
In a set of tails borrowed from the Bijou’s costume store by arrangement with a fellow boarder, Tom Sayers pushed his way through the iron gates. He’d been advised to play up his English accent, so they’d think he was a gentleman, and to remember to take his hat off, lest they should spot that he wasn’t.
Flaming torches lit the portico from brackets on either side of the entranceway. A black footman stood ready to open the door but hesitated, not recognizing Sayers as a regular member. But Sayers had taken advice for this moment, also.
“I’m a guest of the judge,” he said.
It seemed that he’d been provided with a good choice of patron. “Justice Crutchfield?” the doorman said with an undercurrent of apprehension that bordered on alarm, and he all but jumped to admit him. Sayers could only hope that the footman would say nothing should the justice actually appear that evening.
He stepped into a marble-floored hallway with a staircase that swept around and up to a second-floor gallery and a dome of painted glass above. Another footman took his hat.
And where now? He couldn’t appear to hesitate. Sayers chose the nearest set of doors, and found himself in a large, airy, and empty room the size of a gymnasium. It would have served equally well for dancing or banqueting.
A further set of doors took him into the dining rooms; these were spare and masculine, with hard wooden chairs and plain white linen tablecloths. The billiard room had five tables and electric lighting, and was entered through a curtained archway. Four of the tables were in use. He stood and watched one of the games for a while. Nobody addressed him or acknowledged him.
Finally, he reached the barroom, which proved to be the liveliest part of the club.
It was a dark room with a big fireplace, full of cigar smoke and well-dressed males. Some lounged on sofas but most stood in groups, each group back-to-back with two or three others, all having the loud conversations of men who are agreed that they’re absolutely right about everything. Above the fireplace was the club’s coat of arms, a wooden crest of shields, spears, and helmets with an incongruous clock face in the middle of it.
The air was thick and the room unpleasantly warm. Rather than stay in the doorway attracting attention, Sayers threaded a way through the crowd. Without meaning to, he jogged the arm of a big man addressing a small crowd of listeners. The man’s fist had a drink in it, and some of the drink spilled. He looked around.
“Watch where you’re going, sir,” he snapped.
