The pressure in my shoulders melts away. With that simple agreement, he let me know I’m not the only one. I’m not alone.
“This photo is such a fluke,” he muses, “it’s like it was meant to be discovered. Does that make any sense? I mean, almost a hundred years separating the two of you standing in the same place. I’d do the same, Bridget. I’d wonder if she was watching. Did anything come of it?”
“No, nothing. But it was still nice.”
His thumb skims the edge of the photograph. “Did your grandmother tell you anything else about her?”
“No. She doesn’t know anything.”
He’s confused, so I tell him everything about Grandma, beginning with being left at the church as an infant.
“That day she showed me the old photo, she also showed me the letter that her mother had tucked into the basket with her. It was so sad. Rosie’s handwriting was like a child’s, you know? She was young and, I imagine, uneducated. I feel so sorry for her. It’s hard for a young, single woman to discover she’s pregnant even now, but back then it would have been monumental.” I sigh and scan the line of chambermaids, seeking something familiar. “Grandma has never gotten over being abandoned. She doesn’t want to talk about why, or what might have been.”
He is transfixed, listening to her story. “Understandable. That’s a deep hurt.”
“I wish I could help her. She means the world to me.”
He sips his coffee, then he swallows a muffin like it’s nothing.
“How about I show you what I found this morning?” From his bag he pulls a thick white binder, just like the ones in his office, and he opens it to the beginning. In it are copies of newspaper articles. “The other day I mentioned Marco Carboni, remember?”
“Yeah. The gangster.”
“Right. He was briefly a suspect in a murder in the hotel in 1929, and I got curious. The victim was a woman named Mrs. Geraldine Evans,” he says. He taps his finger on a slender, no-nonsense woman standing at the side of the rows of chambermaids. On the next page, he’s magnified her photo and placed it beside the mug shot of Mr. Carboni.
“Mrs. Evans was in charge of the chambermaids. She was a widow with one brother named Walter, who lost his legs in the First World War. From what I can figure, Mrs. Evans became a sort of middleman between Mr. Carboni and the hotel staff, since he stayed there so often. She even facilitated some of the illegal activities that he committed there, though the facts are well buried. It seems odd to me, though. From her record, she was a straightforward, loyal employee of the hotel. I imagine she would have been reluctant to work closely with someone like Carboni, which indicated Carboni was holding something over her. So I dug a little deeper and discovered her brother, Walter, worked for him. Maybe she finagled that, I don’t know. But he was disabled, which made him vulnerable. Could be that’s what Carboni was holding over her.
“Carboni was well respected among the underworld characters, for what that’s worth. Between the witness reports and Carboni’s reputation, he was the number one—and most obvious—suspect in Evans’s murder. Trouble is, a man with that much power might never have gone to prison. Not in those days. Not even if he held the smoking gun, I imagine. Probably not today, either, come to think of it. He was released from police questioning right away.”
I sip my coffee, enthralled by his story and his obvious enjoyment of it.
“Carboni knew how to grease the right palms, he had the police in his pocket, and he had bankers and lawyers at his beck and call, which explains how he managed to come out so far ahead after the stock market crash. He sold shares and bought warehouses, all of itbeforethe Crash. He had all the insider information he needed, and he knew how to use it.”
“This is fascinating.”
“It’s just good old-fashioned sleuthing, using newspapers and notes. There’s a lot more I need to show you.” He turns a page in his binder, then points at a photo of a black leather journal, weathered by a hundred years. “Then I found this. I can’t take artifacts from the archives, but I can make copies and take photographs.
“This is a really interesting part of the story, because this book has been a mystery for a while. I believe it could have belonged to Marco Carboni. Since then, I have investigated some of the contacts and information on here, and I’m, well, it’s not good for a researcher to say something this concrete, but I’m positive it’s his.”
He hands me more pages, and I see lists and lists of names and numbers, written in a masculine hand. Most are crossed out, some are marked withX’s. None of them make sense to me.
“If you look into all of these, which I did, he’s liquidating assets ahead of the Crash. All those buildings he purchased would probably have sold for a fortune in the future. A very smart guy.” His finger moves to the next page. “Now here… See anything interesting? A couple of names stick out for me. What do you think?”
I read more closely and stop at the bottom.
FILE GRIEVANCE: EVANS
DISCUSS WALLY: EVANS
SOLVE: EVANS
“Evans. Is that Mrs. Evans, the murdered woman? Oh! And Wally—that’s Walter, her brother. You said he worked for Carboni, right?”
“And? Two more. Keep going.”
I read the next line down.Courier skimming—DW? With Rosie?“Why was Rosie on Carboni’s radar? And who is DW?”
“I know exactly who he is,” Matthew says smugly. He reaches into his bag, then slides a newspaper article across the table toward me. “Read this.”
