The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

“Not since New York. I believe it was the night we met at Club Deluxe.”

He decided to throw the dice on Pauline’s and Marion’s belief that Fern Hawley was disappointed in Zolner. If they were wrong, he would find himself back in the water.

“I could swear I saw you with him in Detroit.”

She hesitated. Then her smirk faded and a faint smile softened her face. “I hope,” she said, softly, “that I won’t have to call my lawyers.”

Bell couched his answer very carefully.

“I mispoke slightly. I did not mean with him, I meant near him.”

He was bending the truth only slightly. For while he was reasonably sure he had seen her in the Pierce-Arrow limousine at Sam Rosenthal’s send-off, he had not seen her in it when it sped away, firing at the police. Nor had he seen Zolner’s gunmen get into it. But by mentioning lawyers, she had all but admitted she had been there.

Fern acknowledged as much, saying, “Now you’re the one taking a chance.”

“How so?”

“Shielding a criminal.”

“I did not see you commit the crime. Before the crime, I saw a young woman whose sense of adventure may have caused her to fall in with the wrong crowd . . .”

“You’re very generous, Mr. Bell. I am not that young.”

“You met ‘Prince André’ in Paris?”

“At a victory parade,” Fern said. “A Lancashire Regiment marching up the Champs-Élysées. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They were midgets. None taller than five feet. Prince André told me why. They were poorly paid coal miners. They belonged to a race of men who hadn’t had a decent meal in a hundred years. I realized—for the first time—the difference between rich and poor. Between capitalists and proletariat. Between owners and workers.” She touched Bell’s arm confidingly. “I’d never even called them workers before. I called them workmen. Or, as my father referred to them, ‘hands.’ Never people.”

“Prince André sounds unusually broad-minded for a Russian aristocrat. If there were more like him, they wouldn’t have had a revolution.”

“He can be sensitive.”

“Do you know what he’s up to now?”

“Business interests, I gather.”

“Did he ever ask you to invest in his interests?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“It’s a cliché of our times. The impoverished European aristocrat courts the wealthy American heiress.”

“Not this heiress. All he asked was to take him to Storms.”

“Storms?”

“Storms & Storms. One of my father’s brokers.” She laughed. “It was so funny. Stormy old Storms was quaking, terrified that André wanted to borrow money. He knew the cliché. When it was just the opposite.”

“What was opposite?”

“André gave him oodles to invest.”

Bell looked up at the sky. A scrim of cloud was spreading from the south. It had reddened the horizon at dawn. Now it seemed thicker . . . Cloud the issue, Joe Van Dorn taught apprentices. Throw them off with two more questions after you hit pay dirt.

“Would you have lunch with me at my hotel?”

“Let’s stay on the boat,” said Fern. “The chef has lobsters. Not our proper New England lobsters—they have no claws—but if we share a third, we won’t miss claws.”

“I wish we could,” said Bell, “but I have to send a cable.”