Shooting For Justice by G. Tilman (top 100 novels txt) 📗

it was a team effort between the police and the military. He realized it was a meeting which should have occurred earlier and with the chief’s office. With the potential imminence of a death threat to be handled, he was going too fast and had to focus.

Sarah left on the first train for New York City. She used her cover as a writer and supported by the letter from the assistant attorney general to research the files of several newspapers. She used the clipping files for Arthur and Roscoe Conkling. The information she found was inflammatory and she could not wait to share it with Pope. She felt she had solidified Conkling as probably being the man behind the threats.

Sarah found a news article about Conkling and Arthur and a third man, George Chadwick, forming a consortium to sell cotton during the war. The reporter claimed the three each made over a million dollars in the endeavor, then had all records of their dealings expunged from records of the customs office in New York and their partnership was dissolved by lawyers Conkling and Arthur.

She resolved to find and interview the reporter who had since left the paper a decade ago. Using every skill she learned at Pinkerton’s, she traced him to a tenement in New York City. There was no response to her knock. She walked to a better part of town, glad for the .38 concealed on her person.

Sarah knew she would not make it back to DC tonight. This was a prime lead.

She found a hotel she deemed respectably safe and checked in. She had brought a large handbag with overnight toiletries and a briefcase with her leather notebook and a couple relevant clippings she had purloined from the New York Sun’s clippings file on the president.

Sarah ate a light dinner and walked back to the area where the former reporter lived.

She knocked on the door and a sallow, thin man answered.

“Are you Matthew Ricard who used to write for the Sun?” she asked.

“Maybe. Who wants to know?”

“I am Mrs. Pope. I’m doing an article on the good and bad aspects of Chester A. Arthur. I gathered from your excellent article on the cotton deal during the war you were expert on one of the bad aspects.”

“I have suffered enough because of the damn article, lady. I was fired with no notice, beaten severely in a so-called mugging, and told after being beaten to never be a reporter or talk about Conkling or Arthur or Chadwick again.”

“Who did this?”

“The important part is who had it done. Any thug can beat somebody up for a fiver and deliver a message. Of the three, who is a known gangster?”

“This is all new to me, Mr. Ricard. Conkling?” she asked for verification.

“I am not saying his name aloud. Ever again. He was and maybe still is the most important man in New York. Actually any of the three could be behind ruining me. Maybe all three.”

“How did they expunge the records of the cotton consortium they ran?” she asked.

“What’s it worth to you?”

“Twenty dollars, maybe.”

He stood there until she withdrew the money and handed it to him.

“They are big time lawyers and the famous two have been involved with the customs house for years. The deals ran through there,” Ricard said.

“I might have some papers with evidence on them…” he suggested.

“If I was to see them and think they were helpful for my article, another twenty might be available.”

“Twenty is not worth dying for,” he said.

“Let me see them and I will make my decision.”

“Come in. I’ll dig them out.”

She entered and sat on a threadbare sofa while he rummaged around a box of files. It appeared to her his filing organization was no better than his housekeeping.

Finally, he pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed her five pages.

She looked at them. They were bills of lading from the consortium. No duty had been levied. They were transferred to Canada tax free.

“They were like finding pure gold,” she thought, keeping her face expressionless.

“These might help. Another twenty is all I can go.”

“Make it thirty and you walk out with them in your hand,” Ricard said.

“All right then. You win. Here’s the thirty dollars.” She handed him the bills and placed the papers in her briefcase.

“Anything else you can tell me, Mr. Ricard?”

“Yeah. Watch your back, asking questions about Conkling and the guy he mentored, and then who left him high and dry. They are both snakes as far as I am concerned.”

“Thanks for your help,” she said as she went out his door and began a very dark walk back to her hotel.

About four blocks from his building, Sarah felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

They came at her fast. Three of them. They were burly and she could smell them before they closed on her.

Sarah was able to draw the dagger Pope had given her. She slashed one attacker and he recoiled in pain. The second one grabbed her arm as the third pulled at her handbag.

She thrust the dagger’s seven-inch blade into his throat and twisted the handle.

Sarah was only splattered by a little of the gush of blood, but the man holding her got a face full and let go. She drew the .38 Smith & Wesson and smacked the first man across the face with it. He went down. The one whose throat she had opened up still stood, dying on his feet.

The man who had grabbed her arm was trying to wipe his friend’s blood out of his eyes with a dirty sleeve.

Sarah pressed the revolver against his torso and fired it. Being pressed in and between two bodies, the sound was muffled. The man went down for the count.

The sound must have carried further than she thought. Sarah heard a police whistle in the distance. She walked across the street and hid behind a tree as two of the city’s finest ran up to the scene.

“What happened here?” the first policeman