Twenty-four
“Tell me again what happened,” the fresh-faced officer said, watching Billie carefully and with a somewhat puzzled expression, brows knitted together and head cocked. “You were driving the automobile, you say?”
Billie and Sam sat in Katoomba Police Station, a combination sandstone lockup, police station, and sergeant’s residence at the rear of the Katoomba courthouse. Her black roadster, now a dusty gray from the chase, was parked outside the back entrance. The sun had set on both the day and Billie’s patience. The adrenaline of the pursuit had subsided, leaving little energy for strained diplomacy.
“Yes, I was driving my motorcar,” she answered with emphasis. She had endured a far too tedious interrogation already, and her professional smile—usually so handy—did not quite work, and settled into a scowl. She pushed back a wavy lock of dark hair that insisted on falling into her eyes, tried to tuck it under her hair wrap, but, not finding a hairpin where she thought she might, let the curl fall again, all the better to obscure her interrogator. She crossed her arms. “I went to the hospital to see my clients—” she began again but was interrupted.
“Your clients?” the officer echoed, as if she hadn’t painstakingly explained the situation already.
Billie watched the uniformed constable from beneath her uncooperative locks. Sandy-haired and fit, he had the glowing but prematurely weathered skin and bright eyes of an outdoorsman. She imagined him scaling the local cliffs in his time off. He might have seen many things in his work with the Katoomba police, but it seemed that gunfights and women PIs driving fast automobiles did not fit into his framework of understanding about the world.
“Yes, my clients,” Billie enunciated clearly, with deliberate slowness. “I am a private inquiry agent, as I mentioned, and this gentleman is my assistant.” She gestured toward Sam as a schoolteacher might indicate a blackboard with a simple math equation written on it, then cleared her throat and paused, trying to maintain whatever scant composure she still possessed. “My clients had almost arrived at the hospital when two men attacked their son in his hospital bed, then fled on being interrupted. It was at that time we made chase, as I mentioned,” she said, stretching out her thinning patience as one would stretch a stick of chewing gum to the moon.
There was a knock on the door and another officer entered, not quite as young, but with the same weathered, glowing skin as his colleague. “Mate, the crocodile . . .” He paused. “Pardon me,” he said, looking at the elegantly windswept woman and her partner, who looked somewhat like Alan Ladd, clearly believing the pair had already departed. “Um, Constable, there’s been another spotting of the crocodile.”
Billie’s eyebrows shot up. “A crocodile? Out here?”
“Escaped from the traveling circus, it did. Been eluding us for weeks,” the second officer said. He removed himself from the room, and Billie sincerely hoped that the sighting of the crocodile would precipitate the end of the interrogation.
“And the shooting?” the constable continued, evidently not finished yet, despite the bizarre news of a crocodile stalking the streets of his jurisdiction. “Why did you chase these armed men?” he asked, for what might have been the fourth time. “That was dangerous, wasn’t it?”
Billie willed herself to stay calm. Because they were armed men, shooting at people, she wanted to say, but refrained. “We felt it was our civic duty to alert the police, protect the vulnerable citizens at the hospital, and hold the men until you arrived. Sadly, we could not reach them in time and they drove off the pass.”
“Right,” the constable said. “I’ll get my superior.”
Billie felt like slapping him.
It was dark before Sam and Billie were released and found themselves back at Katoomba’s ANZAC Memorial Hospital, finally alone with Nettie and Mikhall Brown, and provided with tea and Anzac biscuits. It was a blessing, to Billie’s mind, that the Browns had missed the struggle and the shooting, and had not seen their son pinned to the ground with a pillow forced over his face.
“Do you recognize this photograph?” Billie asked, putting down her tea and extending the small portrait first to Nettie Brown, then to Mikhall.
“Well, yes,” Nettie responded, surprised. “That is my aunt, Margarethe, and her family. Where did you find this?”
Adin’s great-aunt. The one who stayed in Berlin. It was as Billie had suspected.
“This was tucked away in Adin’s clothing. Do you think it could be the photograph taken from the frame in your office?”
Husband and wife looked at each other. There was nodding. “Yes, I think so,” Nettie said.
“I must ask you again, does anything about this advertisement look familiar or ring a bell of any kind?” Billie smoothed out the folded clipping on the tabletop, between the plate of biscuits and the pot of tea.
“Well . . .” Nettie blinked and bent closer. “My goodness. That looks like the same necklace, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does appear to be the same necklace,” Billie agreed, and watched her. The Kleemann design was quite distinctive. Those batwing shapes. Surely there couldn’t be too many like it?
“I . . . I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention. What would he have to do with an auction?” Nettie asked, shaking her head. Billie recalled her frustration when she’d first been presented with the clipping, her inability to accept a connection. “But it is impossible. This was made by Georg Kleemann in Pforzheim, far from here. It was a prized possession of Margarethe’s. How could it be the same one?”
Billie thought she knew how. And she thought Adin knew, too.