Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [113]
He remembered the night he had returned from the opera with his father, and the red-faced detective who had been waiting for him with the news about Francie and her lover. He’d taken away his father’s gun to stop him from killing her. Now he knew how his father had felt, because if the woman in the picture was Francie, then he wanted her dead.
He got up and paced the study restlessly. Everybody assumed she was dead anyway—she was a missing person, no one would ever even look for her. But how to do it? He thought of the Chinese bordello. It was run by one of the tongs and he knew they had a reputation as hired killers. They would be able to get him the man he needed.
There was a knock on the door and Fredricks appeared carrying an envelope on a silver salver. “From the Examiner, sir,” he said as Harry grabbed it eagerly.
He peered at the face only half-visible beneath her hat. He knew Francie’s face like his own. That was her mouth, that was her hair, he’d swear to it. And those sapphire eyes that had met his for a fleeting instant had been Francie’s.
Picking up the telephone, he called the chief of police, told him who he was, and asked for the name of a reputable detective agency.
“It’s just a small job,” he lied, a smile in his voice, “a little matter of security at the bank.”
Within minutes he had the name and number he needed, and half an hour later a tall, gray-haired Irishman was employed to find the woman in the photograph. “Right away,” Harry told him impatiently. “You’ve got forty-eight hours.”
CHAPTER 24
Aysgarth’s Boardinghouse was tall and narrow and fronted onto the south side of Union Square. The bottom half of the building was red brick and the top white clapboard. There were apple-green shutters at the long windows, a glossy green front door with a gleaming brass lion’s head knocker and a sign in the lace-curtained window to the left of the well-scrubbed stone steps that read NO VACANCIES.
There were four good reasons for the NO VACANCIES sign: First, the house was immaculately clean in the nicest way; it smelled of lavender and beeswax, not lye soap and disinfectant. Second, it was blissfully comfortable and homey, with bright rugs on the polished elm floorboards. There were deep club chairs in the parlor that a man could sink down into to read his newspaper, and firm beds with good plain white linen and no frills. Third, there was decent plumbing and plenty of hot water and always a good fire in the grate on a cold evening. And fourth, and most important, Annie Aysgarth’s cooking was famous.
“Just like your mother made—but better,” was what they said about her lamb hotpots with succulent chunks of meat in an herby aromatic gravy with a layer of brown, oven-crisped potatoes over the top. Her simple roast chicken with tiny golden matchstick potatoes and fresh green peas braised with lettuce and pearl onions were what your grandmother should have cooked, and her Sunday roast beef came with real Yorkshire pudding made with the lightest, simplest batter. “Two eggs instead of one,” she always said, “plain flour, milk, and just a pinch of salt, the fat heated smoking hot and the batter poured in quickly and cooked in a hot oven until it puffed high and light as an eiderdown.” It was served immediately as a course on its own with silky, onion-flavored gravy. And Annie’s bread-and-butter pudding was to die for, the plain home-baked bread was buttered and soaked in a beaten mixture of milk and eggs flavored with vanilla, layered with sugar and brandy-plumped golden raisins and broken pecans, then scattered with golden vanilla sugar and baked in a bain-marie for forty-five minutes until it was as lightweight as a soufflé and creamy as a custard.
“You should open a restaurant,” her boarders told her admiringly, patting their growing stomachs happily. But Annie didn’t want just a restaurant. After four years she had outgrown Aysgarth’s and