Chapter 12 #2
The cashier’s chin jumped an inch. He assessed Fern a little more closely, then took a fast glance up at the exterior of Harris Looms.
“Best to let things lie, miss. I can call you a cab if you like. It isn’t any trouble.”
She shook her head. “I have one waiting. Were you here the day she was found?”
He waved his hand at her. “Said I don’t know anything about it, and that hasn’t changed.”
The cashier did know something; he was just frightened. Of the Rosetti brothers, most likely.
A bell sounded, and almost immediately, a pair of doors sprang open at the back of Harris Looms. Men and women spilled out of the mill, their voices a burst of thunder as they dispersed, groups turning left and right, up and down the street.
A handful of men and women walked quickly for the parking elevator, and Fern hurriedly stepped aside, angling her head so the brim of her cloche blocked them from her view.
If she was going to try to find Cal, it had to be now.
The back doors kept opening as more factory workers emerged, and after a group of women exited, Fern caught the edge of one of the doors and slipped inside.
There were coatrooms to the left and right, a time clock mounted on the wall, and straight ahead, an open floor of what looked like hundreds of weaving looms. Most of them were already shut down, though a handful continued to roar.
The machinery’s automatic components hummed as hundreds, maybe thousands, of threads were being woven into patterned cloth.
Workers hovered over the machines that were still running, reaching to adjust levers and press buttons.
They didn’t pay Fern any attention as she searched for the mill office.
An exit off the factory floor led into a quieter corridor, and to the right, she spied the building’s front entrance.
To the left, there was a glass door to an office.
A woman was putting on a hat in preparation to leave when Fern stepped inside.
The woman looked up, and a punch of recognition struck them both. She dropped her hands from her hat.
“I know you,” she said, smiling, her glossy, red lipstick accentuating her bright-white teeth. “The girl Cal brought to the Den.”
“And you’re…Bessy, right?” Fern said. The last time she’d seen her, Bessy had been in sheer negligee.
Now, she wore a smart skirt suit and comfortable-looking heels.
She finished pinning her hat and went to the secretary desk.
She rolled out a drawer and retrieved her small purse, ready to depart just like all the other workers.
“Are you here to see Cal? I mean, Mr. Rosetti.” She sent Fern a quick wink, and her eyes drifted toward a wood-paneled door.
“If he’s in.”
She lifted the receiver on her desk’s candlestick telephone and dialed. “You have a visitor,” she said into the mouthpiece. Fern’s palms flashed with cold sweat as Bessy leaned away from the mouthpiece and asked, “Do you have an appointment?”
Fern shook her head, unable to speak.
“No,” she relayed into the telephone. Bessy turned away and whispered something. Fern heard girl and Den.
She was still holding the black receiver to her ear when the wood-paneled door swung open. Cal burst into the front office, surprise mixing with irritation in his copper-brown eyes. He gestured toward his office. “Inside.”
Bessy slowly lowered the receiver back onto its hook. “Should I stay, Mr. Rosetti?”
“Go home, Bessy. It’s fine.” His frown, however, said Fern’s being there was anything but fine.
Fern walked past him, into his office, and he shut the door, sealing them inside.
The office had a glass window that, had the blinds been open, would have looked out over the machinery floor.
Papers and accounting books were strewn across his desk, the seat of a black leather chair still slowly revolving from when Cal had launched from it moments before.
On the wall behind the desk, a few papers had been framed.
Permits, it seemed. As well as a diploma from the University of Illinois College of Business.
His name was inscribed along with the year 1916.
Cal had gone away to university. He was an educated man. Unless the diploma was a fake.
“What the hell are you doing here?” His voice was restrained, as if he was trying not to shout.
She cut her eyes away from the diploma on the wall. “Why are you so angry?”
He stayed rooted near the door, his hands in his pockets. Not a single muscle twitched. “I’m not.”
“You could’ve fooled me.”
He came forward a step, the torrent of surprise he’d shown before dissolving. “I don’t need Rod finding out you came here.”
Fern had wondered if she might cross paths with Rodney at the factory. As much as she loathed him, the risk had been necessary.
“Last night…my brother…when he…” Fern stumbled, her prepared words crumbling.
All those hours, closed in her room, looking through newspapers, thinking of what Buchanan had said about a sister for a sister, felt distant now.
Being here, with Cal, on the other side of his intense stare, sent her mind into a spiral.
Everything she wanted to say went spinning off in different directions.
He took a step forward, coming away from the closed door. “What did he do to you?” His attention shifted to her bruised eye.
“No. Nothing. It’s what he said. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” Her mouth went dry. “A sister for a sister.”
Cal stepped to the side, his eyes no longer pinned on her. He went to the chair behind his desk and stilled its sluggish turning with a firm hand. “You should have asked him instead of coming all the way down here.”
“I did. He refuses to speak to me.”
“What makes you think I’m gonna be any different?” He stayed standing and riffled through some papers, pretending disinterest.
Fern opened her purse and extracted the newspaper clipping, then slid it onto the cover of the spiral-bound ledger he’d just closed. Cal swore under his breath.
“Well, well, Detective Fern. Where’d you dig that up?”
“I have a lot of old newspapers, and when Buchanan mentioned a sister, I went through all of them.”
Cal picked up the clipping, spent a few seconds reading it, then tossed it back down. “We wanted the story buried.”
“Why?”
“None of your business.”
Fern slammed her purse down on his desk, knocking aside a paperweight and pen holder. “Stop saying that. It is my business. You and your brother have used me as a pawn, and I don’t think it’s just because of who my father is.”
Cal stared, startled by her outburst. But like usual, he tamed his reaction.
He braced his hands on his desk and leaned forward.
It brought him closer, and Fern was reminded of last night, when he’d trapped her against the wall and given her the love bite that was currently sweltering under the high neck of her dress.
“Your shit of a brother was screwing my sister Eugenia,” he said, his coarse language again setting off prickles of awareness along her arms and back. “He knocked her up, but hell if he was gonna do right by her. She was just a piece. A broad he couldn’t take home to Mommy and Daddy.”
Fern held her breath as fury twisted Cal’s features. This close, with fluorescent bulbs overhead, fine lines around his eyes stood out as he tensed. His thick, dark brows pulled together. “But he had no problem taking her to a doc near the Yards. A fuckin’ back-alley butcher.”
Fern shook her head, refusing to believe it, even as Sarah’s comment the other night about her brother sleeping his way around the city chose that moment to crop up. “He wouldn’t do that.”
The defense was out of her mouth before she’d even had time to think it over.
Whatever she thought she’d known about her brother had dissolved the night he’d told her the truth about the dinners and the men their mother selected to attend.
She’d also seen how little she really knew him when he’d entered their father’s study, peered at her crumpled on the floor, and hadn’t moved to help her.
“Yeah, my sister thought he was made of gold too.” Cal pushed off from his desk. He was like a caged animal as he went to the window and pried open two of the blinds to look out over the factory floor.
“After going to that butcher, she managed to drive her Buick here and into the parking lift out back,” Cal said. “The cashier thought he saw her walking away. Swore he did. Another car came along, and he tossed the lever, lifting the stall to let in the next car. Didn’t think anything of it.”
Fern hadn’t used one of the lifts before, but the lift doors would close in the auto, and a ticket dispenser in the stall would churn out a stub. The driver took the ticket with them, to be returned to the cashier when they came back to claim their car.
“We couldn’t find her for hours. No idea where she was. Finally, I had the cashier bring down the Buick.”
Cal paused. He didn’t need to continue. Fern knew what he had found when he finally got the car onto the ground.
“She’d bled to death,” she guessed. “Something went wrong during the procedure.”
Cal glared at her. “Procedure,” he sneered. “She’d had her insides ripped to shreds.”
Fern looked to the carpet with a wave of nausea. It hadn’t been a procedure. Cal was right. It had been a brutal and desperate act. Her heart ached for his sister. For Cal, and for what he had gone through when he found her like that.
“You think Buchanan took her to have it done,” Fern surmised.
“I don’t think. I know. Genie’s friend told us.” He took out his cigarette case. Rolled one free and stuck it between his lips.
“And the doctor?”
His lighter flared. Cal’s eyes met Fern’s over the flame. “Taken care of.”
He capped the lighter, and a streak of cold shot into her chest. He’d had the doctor killed? Or maybe he’d done it himself.
“If you blame Buchanan, why haven’t you just taken care of him too?”