Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets Read online

  “All I’m sure of is that he owes money at his clubs, but he’s paid off his debts in the past every time he’s fallen into arrears.”

  “Which means they’ll continue to let him play, and there won’t be any shortage of members ready and willing to take his money or his IOUs.” Hayes fanned out the deck of cards he’d been shuffling. “Pick one.”

  Geoffrey obliged, knowing from past experience that his friend Ned was a master at the art of deception.

  “Lay it facedown on the table. You picked the ten of hearts. Turn it over.”

  Geoffrey did, not surprised that Ned was right, but baffled by how he did it.

  “I’d say his favorites are whist and poker,” Ned decided, shuffling and laying out cards, naming each one correctly before revealing its face. “The stakes can go very high, very fast, in both those games. They take a good head for counting and remembering what’s been played and a face that won’t give away what the player is thinking or seeing. It doesn’t hurt to have nerves of steel and the ability to bluff your way out of a tight spot.”

  Waiters at the Union Club prided themselves on knowing and remembering every member’s customary drink, no matter how much time elapsed between visits. One of them set a glass of French cognac at Geoffrey’s elbow and a tumbler of Kentucky bourbon in front of Ned. A carafe of water accompanied it.

  “Has Mr. Sorensen come in yet tonight?” Geoffrey asked.

  “About half an hour ago, sir,” the waiter answered, smoothly tucking away the bill he’d been slipped. “He’s in the small card room. Will there be anything else?”

  “Mr. Hayes might have a few questions for you later on, Samuel.”

  “I’ll be around, sir.”

  They watched the dignified Negro waiter weave his way among the upholstered chairs and narrow side tables of the smoking room, collecting empty glasses and full ashtrays as he went.

  “He’ll know whatever secrets Sorensen is trying to hide,” Ned said.

  “But will he tell you what they are?”

  “He served me my first drink when my father brought me here just before my mother took me South. Samuel is loyal to a fault, and Hayes men have been Union members since the club was first founded. It won’t show on his face, but if what we suspect about Sorensen is true, he can’t have much respect for the man. He’ll do it reluctantly, but he’ll tell me.”

  “I’ll make my way to the small card room, then.”

  “Don’t hurry,” Ned warned. “Sorensen is probably desperate to win, which means he’s twitchy.”

  “Do you think he’ll try something?”

  “The only question is whether he’s skillful enough to get away with it.”

  “I don’t plan to do anything more than watch him. He’ll see me, but he won’t know who I am.”

  “You’re sure you’ve never been introduced? Perhaps in the lounge?”

  “Positive. I would have remembered the name. The first time I heard it was from my client a few days ago.”

  “Watch to see if he drags his arms along the table when he pulls his cards in.”

  “Allan Pinkerton hated men who cheated. He made sure all of his agents knew what tricks to look out for.”

  “All I’m saying is that you don’t know if he’s an amateur or he’s been at this for a while. He could be clumsy or very, very good.” Ned shuffled and then sprang the deck of cards from one hand to the other; the movement was so fast that all Geoffrey could make out was a blur of motion and a snapping sound. Even with a few drinks of Kentucky bourbon inside him, Ned Hayes was as good as any shark Hunter had ever seen.

  * * *

  The small card room was one of the quietest in the club. The walls were padded with dark green patterned Chinese silk, the floors laid with Turkish carpets. Tables were felt covered, chairs cushioned for the comfort of players who sat in them for hours at a time. Each table was illuminated by a single gas lamp hung low enough to cast light on the cards while allowing the faces of the men to recede into half shadow. There were four tables in the room; a club attendant supplied chips and the occasional paper and pen. He also monitored the waiters who served drinks, lit cigars and cigarettes, emptied ashtrays. Except for the slap of cards, the whisper of bills, and the clink of gold and silver coins, the room was utterly silent. It was bad form to speak for any reason during a game.

  Geoffrey chose one of the tall chairs ranged along the wall opposite the door. Idle spectators were discouraged, but members waiting for a seat at the tables often perched on the sidelines after whispering their intention into the ear of one of the attendants.

  Sorensen was playing with two men Geoffrey knew by name and sight, and one other he didn’t think he’d seen before. Even if a waiter’s discreet nod hadn’t pointed him out, he would have recognized her late sister’s husband from Claire Buchanan’s description.

  Meticulously barbered and expensively dressed, every inch the wealthy gentleman, he was taller and broader across the shoulders than the other players in the room. New York City’s financiers and moguls tended to reflect lives spent in offices and clubs, paunching out from good food and abundant wines as they grew older. Sorensen, blond and as tanned as though he spent every spare moment on a yacht, blue eyes sharp and focused, looked rakishly out of place in these surroundings.

  Geoffrey understood immediately the initial effect he must have had on delicate, artistic Catherine Buchanan and the second wife, the Philadelphia heiress who was her father’s closely protected only child. Sorensen was the embodiment of the romantic hero popularized in song and prose, the powerful challenger of the gods with whom women fell swiftly and disastrously in love. He knew that Catherine had ceased to have any affection for her husband before her death; now he wondered whether Ethel Sorensen was beginning to have second thoughts about the man she had married.

  Sorensen was playing poker, though not with the kind of fierce concentration a desperate gambler might have exhibited. He was smoother than that, holding his cards with a light, almost careless grip, allowing his gaze to leave the table every now and then for a quick glance around the room, something none of the other players did.

  Watching, counting off the seconds and then the minutes between those rapid, fleeting looks, Geoffrey soon recognized the pattern and knew what Sorensen was doing. Without being obvious about it, he was checking the concentration of the players and the whereabouts of the waiters and the gaming attendant whose job it was to provide fresh packs of cards and change for large banknotes. It was the kind of prelude to cheating that guaranteed a trick of some sort would be pulled before too much longer.

  Geoffrey was watching for a false shuffle or an adroit marking of cards, but Sorensen chose a deception that would be far more difficult to prove was deliberate. He was fast and he was good. If Geoffrey hadn’t known it was coming, he might not have spotted it.

  It took practice to drop a card so that no one noticed it fall. As soon as it touched the intricately patterned Turkish carpet, it disappeared under Sorensen’s left foot. At the same time he raised one finger for another drink, distracting the waiter and disturbing the concentration of the other players. He knew what the card was, of course, and would choose one of two ways to use it.

  If the hand was going against him, and the card wouldn’t help, he’d pretend surprise and dismay at too few cards. No one would notice his shoe slide off the missing pasteboard; it would be assumed that it had lain there in plain sight all along, its decorated back fading into the Turkish carpet. That round would automatically be null and void. If the hand was going to net him a good win with the aid of the missing card, he would find some pretext to pick it up. A sneeze followed by the drop of a handkerchief, or an ash from his cigar that needed to be quickly brushed from a pant leg. Any one of half a dozen small diversions would do.

  As if he’d decided not to wait any longer for a chair to become free, Geoffrey nodded to one of the waiters and stood up. The eagle-headed cane he’d unobtrusively carried into the room and
leaned against one of the high chairs fell to the carpet. He took a few steps toward the door and appeared to stumble over it. The glass of cognac he was carrying flew out of his hand, the syrupy liquor splashing against Aaron Sorensen’s pant leg and onto one of his highly polished shoes. The movement of his foot was reflexive, the outraged snarl equally so. The waiter who sprang into action with a linen napkin to wipe up the offending liquid also retrieved the ace of hearts from just beside the sticky shoe.

  Geoffrey picked up the cane and bowed apologetically, shrugging his shoulders as if to say that trivial accidents like the one that just happened were unfortunate, but sometimes unavoidable.

  “I’m sure you’ll want a waiter to sponge out that stain, Sorensen,” one of the cardplayers at his table said, raking in the cards that lay strewn before him and signaling to the gaming attendant to bring paper and pen. “You can leave your IOUs. We know they’re good.”

  Aaron Sorensen had been losing badly, but the cards would have turned in his favor, had he been able to retrieve the dropped card and complete the hand. The bets were high. His eyes met Geoffrey’s in sudden suspicion and his handsome face twisted in ill-concealed rage. He scrawled his signature on the notes held out to him, raked the room with a defiant glare as if daring anyone to accuse him of an impropriety, and left with only a perfunctory farewell bow.

  He knew. And so did every other person in the small card room. Before the evening was out, the story would be all over the club.

  * * *

  “He told his coachman to take him to the Lotos Club,” Ned Hayes said. “There’s no hurry. He’ll need time to settle himself into another game. What happened?”

  “When it was his deal, he dropped a card and stepped on it. The ace of hearts.” Geoffrey put the eagle-headed walking stick back into the hollowed-out elephant’s leg by the cloakroom. “I spilled cognac on him, and a helpful waiter picked up the card.”

  “How was he doing?”

  “Big losses, but there was a sizable pot on the table.”

  “He would have used the ace to win it.”

  “From what I could tell, that’s what he was planning to do.”

  “When did he drop the card? Before or after he looked at his hand?”

  “While he was picking it up.”

  “A cunning man. It could have gone either way.”

  “But he wouldn’t have sustained another loss if the hand was voided.”

  “He knew what he was doing.”

  “I wonder how often he’s played that trick.” Geoffrey allowed the attendant to help him on with his evening cloak.

  “Judging by what we know of how much he’s been losing, not often enough. He’s probably been hoping his luck would change.”

  “And when it didn’t, he decided to help it along.”

  “He knows what will happen to him if he gets caught.” Ned shrugged his shoulders in disgust. “Nothing is ever said publicly, but the man disappears from his clubs and from society as completely as if he were dead. He might as well be.”

  “He’d have no choice but to leave the city and hope to be able to start over somewhere else.” Geoffrey paused, one hand on the door of the hansom cab waiting for them at the curb. “You don’t suppose that’s why he’s so secretive about his affairs, why there aren’t any business records at city hall?”

  “It makes him very hard to trace, doesn’t it? Do we know when he first turned up in New York?”

  “Claire Buchanan told us he was dealing in antiques shortly before he married her sister. He would have had to establish a presence here, so that makes it at least two or two and a half years ago.”

  “Most of the members of the Lotos Club are known to be art connoisseurs and collectors,” Ned mused. “I wonder who sponsored him for membership.”

  “Perhaps someone who had no choice but to do as he requested.”

  “Every rock you turn over nowadays has some kind of reptile lurking beneath it.”

  “Another legacy of the war,” Geoffrey agreed. “Fortunes were made from first shot to surrender, sometimes on nothing more substantial than the right signature on a commissary contract.”

  “Don’t forget the railroads. They’re what’s tying the country together. If Sorensen is hiding a shady past, it stands to reason he knows other men who are doing the same thing. Blackmail is an attractive and deceptively easy way to solve problems.”

  “I think you’d better be the one to keep an eye on him here, Ned,” Geoffrey said as they pulled up to the Lotos Club at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-first Street. “He’s already suspicious of me because of the spilled drink. If I show up at another card game, he’ll call it quits for the night and go home to his pregnant wife. No telling when he’ll think it’s safe enough to try again.”

  “Poor woman. Is she rich?”

  “According to what Prudence found out, she’s the only child of an old and well-established Philadelphia family. Money and properties on both sides. Her father’s health is said to be fragile.”

  “Didn’t Claire Buchanan’s sister die soon after delivering a child?” Ned asked.

  “I don’t trust coincidences.”

  “There’s no such thing. Only repetitions of successful swindles. Or murders.”

  “He’ll leave the city once he inherits from his next widow,” Geoffrey predicted. “Sorensen has survived this long because he knows when to disappear. His type can never have enough money. They piss it away as soon as they get it.”

  “You think there were others? Before Catherine Buchanan and her child?”

  “I’d make book on it.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “He won’t use the same trick again tonight,” Ned Hayes said. “He’ll be afraid someone who saw or heard about his game at the Union Club will decide to have his last drink of the evening here at the Lotos.”

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t been asked to resign his membership there.”

  “The members who would have demanded it left almost twenty years ago to found the Knickerbocker. Too many new millionaires had been inducted into the Union Club after the war for their liking.” Ned twisted a heavy signet ring on his left hand, one Geoffrey hadn’t seen him wear before. “Sorensen hasn’t been challenged openly yet because no one wants to chance a false accusation.”

  “I saw what he did at the Union Club.”

  “But could you prove it was done deliberately with intent to defraud?”

  “Probably not. That’s the beauty of dropping a card. It can happen to anyone,” Geoffrey admitted.

  “There’s something else to consider.”

  “What’s that?”

  “As long as Sorensen has expectations of inheriting the Caswell money via his wife, Ethel is safe. If she predeceases her father, I’d lay you odds the fortune will skip the widower and go to a close cousin or to charity.”

  “Ethel’s father has to die while his daughter is still alive for Sorensen to profit more than by the dower amount, considerable though it may be. She has to inherit.”

  “Our boy is greedy. He’ll want it all, especially if Mr. Caswell really is seriously ill.”

  “Which means Ethel isn’t in danger unless we expose her husband prematurely and he has to make a run for it. In that case there’s a good chance he’ll take out his anger on her before he disappears,” Geoffrey said.

  “So tonight we let him attempt to cheat, we ruin whatever his scheme is, and nobody is the wiser.”

  “Except Sorensen. He’ll wonder why his tactic didn’t work. It won’t take him long to figure out that someone else at the table knows what he’s doing.”

  “If I can make him think that one of his opponents is himself trying to rig the game, he might put his defeat down to pure bad luck and coincidence.”

  “I didn’t believe in coincidence when I was a Pinkerton, and I don’t now. But every confidence man I’ve ever run across has a superstitious faith that blind chance will work for him and against his mark.”

  “If I can
carry it off, it will go a long way toward lulling any suspicions he might have that someone is after him.” Hayes twisted the ring again, running his fingers lightly and then with more force over the large onyx mounted in a massive gold setting. He emptied his glass of bourbon, then refilled it from a silver flask. “Cold tea,” he grimaced.

  * * *

  The club steward wasn’t as reluctant to answer questions as Geoffrey had expected him to be.

  “I’ve been worrying about whether to mention Mr. Sorensen’s name to someone on the membership committee,” Lionel Batters said. Tall, slender, and immensely dignified, the Lotos Club steward was not light enough to pass, but not as dark as the waiters and their assistants.

  “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “Nothing you can swear to, Mr. Hunter, but a lot of sidelong glances and low-voiced comments whenever Mr. Sorensen’s name is mentioned.”

  “Or when he shows up in one of the card rooms?”

  “Especially there. I understand that one evening last week he waited for more than an hour, but no one surrendered a seat. That’s most unusual.”

  “I’ve heard that he incurs sizable losses.”

  “Which he eventually pays off. Unfortunately, several members have had to remind him of his obligations.”

  “How long?”

  “Almost two months in one case.”

  “Did he write a promissory note?”

  “He didn’t offer to do so at the time, and the member who was carrying the debt accepted his word. He claimed to have forgotten all about it. Implied it was his creditor’s fault for not reminding him sooner.”

  “You’d think someone who loses at cards would eventually decide he’s not as good a player as he thinks he is and quit,” Geoffrey said.

  “He has winning streaks,” Lionel explained. “Then his luck changes and he starts losing. His bets get bigger because he’s trying to recoup the losses.”

  “Has there ever been a suggestion of anything unusual about his playing?”