The Darling Dahlias and the Naked Ladies

A longer silence. “You’ve got to be kidding,” Liz said at last, with a little whoosh of her breath.

“On my honor,” Verna replied grimly. “It’s true, every word of it. I just double checked the street number in the magazine where I read about it.” She took a deep, shivery breath. “And what’s more, I have the feeling that the gentleman who came to my door is an associate of that fellow we’re talking about.”

Liz gulped. “Gee whiz,” she said incredulously. “You mean—”

“That’s right,” Verna said quickly. “That’s exactly who I mean. And now I really do need your help, Liz. The address of that house you mentioned—do you think you could get it to me tomorrow morning?”

“I . . . I can’t promise,” Liz said slowly. “I’m not sure I ought to do it. And anyway, what makes you think that an address will be any help?”

“I know it’s a long shot. But given the situation, don’t you think somebody ought to . . . investigate?”

“Well, I’ll think about it,” Liz said at last.

“Thank you.” Verna knew that Liz took her work—and its confidentiality—seriously. A promise to think about it was the best she was going to get.

She said good-bye and hung up, but she didn’t go back to her book. She was remembering the bulge of the shoulder holster under Mr. Gold’s coat and the hard look in his eyes when he said Lorelei LaMotte’s name. Fictional detectives—not even those tough-talking tough guys she liked to read about—no longer seemed terribly exciting, not when she suspected that she had just been talking to one of Al Capone’s henchmen, in person!

But while Verna was sure that she could trust her instincts on this, she knew that suspicion wasn’t enough. She needed to find out whether this man was really connected to Capone—some sort of positive identification. But what?

She went back to the kitchen table and sat down to think for a few minutes. She picked up a pencil and doodled on a piece of paper, pushing her lips in and out, in and out, still thinking. Outside in the yard, Clyde was barking excitedly again—this time, to announce the arrival of their next-door neighbor, Buddy Norris. At the sound, Verna got up and went to the window that looked out on the grassy side yard between her house and the Norris place, where Buddy—a Cypress County deputy sheriff—lived with his elderly father.

Actually, Verna didn’t need Clyde’s barking to know that Buddy had arrived. The racket of Buddy’s motorcycle took care of that. He rode a 1927 red Indian Ace, which, if truth be told, was probably the reason Roy Burns had picked him to be his deputy. Sheriff Burns had read that the New York Police Department’s crack motorcycle squad rode nothing but Indian Aces, so when Buddy applied for the position vacated by the retiring deputy, the sheriff hired him without hesitation. Buddy’s Indian Ace gave Sheriff Burns the right to brag that Cypress County had the only mounted deputy in all of southern Alabama.

Frowning speculatively, Verna watched as Buddy—who everybody said looked so much like Charles Lindbergh that he could be his brother—cut the engine on his motorcycle. He swung a leg over, got off, and pushed it toward the back of the house. He was favoring his arm, which he had broken some months before when he rode his motorcycle through Jed Snow’s cousin’s corncrib. Buddy had always been a reckless sort.

Verna tilted her head, watching him. She didn’t think much of Sheriff Burns, who kept his job by staying on the good side of the local heavyweights. Of course, Darling wasn’t Cicero or Chicago, and its law enforcement officers didn’t have to deal with any serious lawlessness, except for bootlegging, of course. Even so, when it came to investigations, Sheriff Burns didn’t display a lot of initiative. And when it came to fighting crime, he wasn’t inclined to step out swinging.