The Cincinnati Red Stalkings (24 page)

So far, it all seemed plausible. As for killing Yates, and setting me up for it, all I could think was that maybe Bonner felt I was getting too close. Since I’d talked with him at his lumberyard, he knew I had in interest in the events of 1869. And I was probably being watched—hell, Yates and Knucksie even knew which side of Dalton Avenue I habitually walked on, because they chose the right one to lay their ambush for me. So Bonner probably also knew I’d gone to the Cincinnati Work House and that I’d recently met with Adela and Aaron Whitaker.

I couldn’t piece it all together, though. There were gaps and inconsistencies in the scenario that I couldn’t yet resolve. The problem was I didn’t think I had time to wait for more information—not with Knucksie on a train to Chicago to tell Judge Landis that I tried to have a man murdered.

So I thought of how I could fill in the pieces, and as the night drew on, I came up with a plan.

As I picked up the telephone, I thought it was probably a good thing that Margie and Karl were still out. They’d certainly have tried to talk me out of proceeding.

Then I went ahead and placed the first call. Let’s see how far Adela Whitaker will go to do something about Nathaniel Bonner.

I
’d been asleep when Margie and Karl got home Monday night, and although she’d tried to explain what had happened at the zoo, I was too drowsy to comprehend. It wasn’t until morning that I got the full story of their adventure.

Over a breakfast of coffee and chocolate cake, Margie said, “I never would have believed anyone could steal their food like that.”

“From the animals?”

“Yes. And we caught them red-handed.”

“What exactly happened?”

“Well, an anteater died yesterday, so I knew something would be going on last night. That’s why Karl and I went—to stake out the place.”

Margie seemed to enjoy using the phrase “stake out the place.” I didn’t get the connection. “The anteater died of starvation?” I asked.

“No, old age, the vet said.” She backed up, and started again at an earlier point in the chronology, “You remember when I went to dig up the wildebeest?”

I said that I did. It was when I’d been in Boston—and I’d thought at the time that she was kidding.

“Its carcass wasn’t there. In fact, I found there were hardly any animals buried in the plot where they were supposed to be.”

“So where’d they go? Cremated?”

“Sausage.”

“The attendant who was supposed to bury the animals sold them for meat. They went into Maynard Kimber sausages.”

Kimber, I recalled, was one of Garry Herrmann’s guests at the memorial for Ollie Perriman. I wondered what Herrmann would think if he knew that his friend was putting anteater in his beloved wurst. “Yech,” I said.

Karl spoke up, “Read
The Jungle
sometime if you’d like to know what other things end up in sausage casings.”

Margie went on, “He had a nice business for himself. The zoo has almost two thousand animals in the collection. Every week, several of them die from age or disease. The attendant saved himself the work of digging graves and made extra income by selling the meat.”

“But how does stealing food from the animals come into it?”

“The keeper of the Carnivora House found out what was going on and he wanted in on the deal. A big cat is fed about six pounds of fresh meat a day—and it’s prime meat. The keeper skimmed off more than a pound a day from each animal. With twenty or thirty big cats in the collection, it added up. And he got a better price than the attendant got for dead animals.”

“So what happened last night?”

“We caught them! A panel truck from Maynard Kimber was picking up the anteater, and we saw the driver give the attendant his money. The attendant tried to run off, but Karl tackled him.” She gave him an admiring look, and he blushed.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I asked. “I’d have gone with you.”

“You already had enough to worry about with your own situation,” Margie said. “Anyway, we called the police and the zoo superintendent, Mr. Stephan. The driver got away, but the attendant confessed to everything. There should be a few more arrests soon.” She was beaming and Karl was looking awfully pleased with himself.

I congratulated them on their success, and silently hoped that my upcoming engagement this afternoon would have an equally successful outcome.

Adela Whitaker sat behind her desk and I was in one of the two chairs in front of it. Neither of us spoke, and I had the feeling that behind her iron facade she was as nervous as I was. I kept glancing up at the portrait of her father; his stolid, homely face had a calming influence on me.

We were waiting for the phone to ring, but were both startled when it finally did. Adela picked up on the first jangle of the bell. She listened a moment, then said, “Send him in.”

Nathaniel Bonner came into the office, ducking his tall frame as he passed through the doorway. Today his resemblance to the sixteenth president was closer to the Lincoln of the war years, with worry creasing his features.

Bonner and I exchanged curt nods. Adela said to him, “Please have a seat.” Once he’d done so, she went on, “As I mentioned on the telephone, I’ve decided to take you up on your offer. Mr. Rawlings here confirms that there is merit to your claim regarding my father’s past indiscretion.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Miss Whitaker,” Bonner said.

She frowned. “I’m referring to—”

“Nice place,” he interrupted, looking around. “I’ve thought of getting some of the modern amenities for my own office.” He then looked from me to Adela. “Don’t think I’ll get a Dictaphone, though. Too noisy. You mind turning that thing off?”

Adela looked disappointed. Then she turned a switch on the machine behind her desk, and the whirring of the recording apparatus came to a stop.

Visibly more relaxed, Bonner asked me, “
Do
you have information, or was this just a ruse hoping I’d say something incriminating for the machine?”

“I know you don’t have what you were looking for,” I said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have paid Rufus Yates’s fine, or hired him to break into my house.” I wasn’t willing to say much more; there wasn’t much that I knew for certain, and so I had to make it last, giving him one crumb at a time to make him think I knew more than I did.

“What Mr. Rawlings is proposing,” Adela said, “is that, since he has the evidence that can verify your claim, you pay him a finder’s fee, as it were. I think his proposition sounds reasonable.”

He turned to me. “What size ‘finder’s fee’ did you have in mind?”

“Whatever you were going to pay Ollie Perriman for the entire collection. What I have is the only part of it you really wanted anyway.”

Bonner slumped back and thought it over. He finally said quietly, “It would have been so much easier if he would have sold. Everything that followed is on his head—Perriman brought it all on himself by being too stubborn to sell.”

Adela put in, “If he’d sold you his collection, you would have recouped the cost with the money you expected to get from me.”

“Exactly,” Bonner said. “What happened is partly your fault, too, you know. You threatened to charge me with attempted extortion. So I
had to
find the ledger”—he smiled—“so it could be genuine extortion.”

Ledger? What ledger? I didn’t know what he was referring to, but I tried not to look surprised. “You couldn’t let Perriman know exactly what you wanted,” I said, “so you had to try buying the whole lot. The day Perriman was killed, there was an announcement in the newspaper saying the exhibit would be opening soon. I take it that’s when you decided you couldn’t wait any longer.”

He nodded. “Once it was on display, there wasn’t much chance of ever getting it back. So I paid him a visit that night. Tried to get him to tell me where the ledger was.”

“And he wouldn’t.” My mind was racing, trying to determine what ledger Bonner could be talking about. The one in which Perriman recorded his collection had still been in the office, so that couldn’t be it.

Bonner shook his head. “Claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about. And I did try to get it from him. Tied him up, punched him around a little . . .”

“Tried burning the old uniform, too?” I asked.

“Figured if he didn’t care about himself, I’d see if he cared about his precious relics. Set a match to the shirt, but he still wouldn’t talk. So I put the fire out—that ledger was somewhere in the room, and it wasn’t going to do me any good as a pile of ashes.”

“And then you killed him.”

“Wasn’t planning it that way,” Bonner said. “I brought the gun with me as a precaution—I don’t make a habit of breaking into places at night. Then when Perriman wouldn’t talk, I realized he’d tell what I’d done. And by that time I was furious that he didn’t give me what I wanted. So ... I shot him.”

“And later you found out that he’d given part of the collection to me. Why bring Rufus Yates into it? Why not do it yourself again?”

A distasteful expression curled his lips. “I didn’t care for the experience. I decided it would be better in the hands of a professional.”

Adela said, “You are not only a blackmailer and a murderer, Mr. Bonner. You are a coward.”

His eyes narrowed. “My price just went up, Miss Whitaker.” Then he leaned back farther in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “Now let’s decide exactly how much it’s going to cost you to keep the world from finding out your father built this business on money he embezzled from the old Red Stockings.”

Embezzlement?
This was supposed to be about the murder of Sarah Devlin.

He stretched out his long legs under her desk, then jumped at the clattering sound when his foot struck something. He was quickly on his knees, pulling out the base of a candlestick telephone. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s a line to my secretary’s office, Mr. Bonner. She has a Dictaphone also.”

Bonner dashed to the door and pulled it open. Aaron Whitaker was standing outside, blocking his path. He had a shotgun in his hands and the muzzle was aimed at Bonner’s chest. Aaron stepped forward, forcing Bonner back into Adela’s office.

Adela calmly said, “We didn’t know if you would be armed, Mr. Bonner. Now, my brother will keep you here until the police arrive.” She looked at me. “Detective Forsch was the name, correct?”

I nodded, and she told her secretary to put in a call to the detective.

With a few exceptions, the meeting with Bonner had gone the way we’d planned. Adela and I expected him to notice the first Dictaphone; the idea was that once he discovered it and the recorder was turned off, he might feel secure that he’d thwarted our scheme and open up about what he’d done to Ollie Perriman. I didn’t count on his long legs knocking over the phone under the desk, though. I’d hoped to get a lot more information.

I tried a few more questions while we waited for the police to arrive, but Bonner had clammed up completely.

Forsch arrived with several patrolmen. We gave him our statements and the disk from the secretary’s recording machine, and he took Nathaniel Bonner into custody. Bonner refused to make any comment to the police, telling them to contact his attorney.

I was still trying to figure out the strange turn this had taken. Especially Bonner’s charge about embezzlement from the Red Stockings. And what ledger had he been looking for?

Then I looked up at the portrait of Ambrose Whitaker and realized he wasn’t the one who had killed Sarah Devlin.

At home that night, I finally told Margie and Karl all that had happened. I was uncertain whether confronting Nathaniel Bonner had been an overall plus or a minus. On the plus side, I had learned some more, and I had another idea on the role Sarah Devlin’s murder played in things. But Bonner had thrown that curve about embezzlement, and failed to tell me anything that would get me out of trouble with respect to Rufus Yates. And, perhaps the biggest negative, I’d sure antagonized the man who might have given me more answers. If he continued to keep silent, some questions might never be resolved.

That’s what the three of us discussed: the pressing need to find out more about Yates. And a question that was bothering me: how did he and Bonner happen to know each other—what was the connection between them?

Margie volunteered to contact the manager at the Palace Theater again and ask if he knew any other bookies she could contact about Yates. Karl was going to get in touch with Spider Jenkins to see if he had been able to dig up any additional information.

As for me, I was going to look for the ledger that had been the true target of Bonner’s search.