New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [282]
She’d heard of women who’d been set up for life by older men. Heard of it, but never met one. Not girls like her, anyway. And why? Because men didn’t care. They didn’t respect you. They took what they wanted, but if you asked for anything in return they called you a gold-digger, or worse.
That was rich people for you, in Donna Clipp’s opinion. Scum, really, when you thought about it. They might look good, but underneath, they were just scum. Worse than she was.
It was ten at night, pitch black and pouring with rain, and she was sitting in this stupid hotel on the wrong side of the Brooklyn Bridge, and not a smell of her so-called lover, the old fool.
Donna Clipp was a nice girl. She had thick blonde hair—natural blonde, too—and blue eyes that could laugh or give you a smoldering look, just as she pleased. She’d never walked the streets. Always had respectable jobs. She’d made dresses, and she’d sold them. She had an eye for fashion. She had some talent for acting and had tried to get theatrical jobs, but they usually told her she wasn’t tall enough. Her short, rather full figure certainly hadn’t been a problem in encounters of a closer kind, and she’d been kept, more or less, by various men. When she came to New York, she found respectable lodgings in Greenwich Village. Within a month, she’d met Frank Master. But though she’d been seeing him for some time now, she hadn’t much to show for it.
So she’d been wondering, for the last three weeks, what to do with him.
There was one other matter that had been weighing on her mind lately. A letter she’d received a couple of weeks ago, from a friend with whom she’d shared lodgings in Philadelphia. The letter had been cautiously worded, but she’d understood very well the message it contained.
Someone had been round asking questions about her. Her friend didn’t seem to know if it was the police, or possibly some person with a grudge. But it looked as if someone was on the trail of certain missing articles of value. The gold bracelet she was wearing, for instance.
She might claim that it had been given her as a gift. But was it really likely that a rich man would steal his own wife’s jewelry to give to his mistress? Would a jury believe that? She didn’t think so.
If he hadn’t brought her on a pretext into the house, and if she hadn’t seen all the lovely things his wife had, it wouldn’t have happened. She blamed him, in a way. But that wasn’t going to do her any good. If they were on to her in Philadelphia, would they find her in New York? They might. Not at once, but one day. She wasn’t sure what to do about that.
The simplest thing would be to get rid of the offending items—you couldn’t prove anything then. But they were valuable. She really needed Frank Master to come up with something before she did that.
So when he’d suggested the trip up the Hudson, in all the comfort of the finest steamer too, she’d thought that things might be looking up after all. She’d prepared herself carefully. And she’d been rather disappointed when his note, announcing the change of plan, had come on the very day of their departure. But the only thing to do was go along with it, and see what was on offer.
She’d put her bags in a cab, therefore, and set off from Greenwich Village to Brooklyn.
It was a pity that it had been raining. When the Brooklyn Bridge, with its mighty suspended span, had opened five years ago, it was counted as one of the wonders of the New World. Over a mile long, soaring a hundred and forty feet over the entrance to the East River, its two stupendous supporting towers with their pointed arches, and the great, graceful arc of its steel cables combined to evoke all the power and beauty of this new industrial, Gothic age.
Down its center went two sets of tracks for railcars. On each side, with views up or downstream, lay roadways for horses and carriages. And over the