LIKE JUST ABOUT EVERYONE else in San Diego, Cradoc Bradshaw had taken to calling their anonymous assassin “Nemesis.” Partly it was laziness, lack of anything else to call the brute. But if asked, the marshal might have admitted that he sort of liked the nom de plume that Clive Bennett had conjured for the killer. Sure it was cheesy, but it also rolled off the tongue. Uttering one word was a whole lot easier than spewing “the guy who killed Archer and Ingraham” every time the case got mentioned. And people certainly knew who you were talking about from the getgo. Until such time as they knew his true identity, Cradoc was content to use the over-the-top alias.
The marshal spent the weeks after his return from San Francisco trying to establish a link, no matter how tenuous, between the killer and his latest victim. As part of that quest, he spoke with Ingraham’s family and friends, ranch hands, and meat factory employees. Much like Archer, Yankee Jim had his enemies and detractors. Rivals in the cattle and food business, especially the small-time butchers he was slowly driving to extinction with his automated cow-cleaving. Yet no one stuck out as having the motive, means, and opportunity to kill the man.
The prospect of fingering a suspect became even more remote when you figured in the letters and the killer’s elegantly stated motivations. Other than the fact that Archer and Ingraham had got away with murder at some point in their past, there were no readily apparent connections between the long-ago incidents. Chinese immigrants and white squatters. Politics and property rights. Death by drowning and death by gunplay. Victims who had not known each other. And completely different means of dispatching the two men that Nemesis had murdered.
By the time he reached the bottom of the list of people that he wanted to question about Yankee Jim’s demise, Cradoc had come to the conclusion that the deadly letter writer either had some sort of Robin Hood complex or discovered a connection between Archer and Ingraham not yet obvious to the marshal or anyone else in law enforcement.
Plumb out of leads—and under pressure from Joe Coyne, who was under pressure from the mayor—the marshal began to work his way down a list of secondary contacts, people with only a marginal connection to the homicides. Cradoc knew it was grasping at straws, but that’s all he had left at this juncture.
One lingering item was asking Father Figueroa about the comment in the Times after the first murder—the fact that he’d helped arrange the burial of Sam Ah Choy on a plot of unconsecrated land adjacent to the Christian cemetery in Old Town. That’s not how Cradoc remembered things. He recalled his own father saying words over the dead Asian’s grave. The priest certainly could have been amongst the onlookers. Several people had wandered up from town for the service behind the old Spanish presidio, most of them just curious gawkers. If the padre had been there, perhaps he could recall something small or seemingly insignificant that might shed fresh light on the Archer case. And if not, no big deal. One more thing to check off a list growing shorter by the day as the leads and loose ends fizzled out.
Standing on the top rung of a wooden stepladder, Roz Pinder used a measuring tape to figure the width and height of the windows in Father Figueroa’s bedroom in the church rectory. Nick certainly didn’t intend a return to professional fashion when he gave her the Singer sewing machine, but he could hardly complain about Roz making new curtains for the priest’s house. After all, stitching remained an essential part of her past and how Roz had come to her current station in life.
Fresh off the boat from Ireland, her parents had apprenticed Roz to a prominent Boston dressmaker, who put her to work as a lowly seamstress. But the girl discovered, dabbling around the workshop in her spare time, that she had a talent for design. The dressmaker, without the least bit of shame, pilfered the designs and called them her own. As a thirteen-year-old migrant worker, Roz tolerated the theft of her creativity. By the time she was sixteen, Roz had determined that she would no longer stand for it.
Spotting an employment notice in one of the Boston papers, Roz had clandestinely written to the headmistress of a California school advertising for a seamstress to make its uniforms. She secured the job, used every penny she had to buy passage to the West Coast, and arrived in San Diego without so much as a dollar in her pocketbook. But the job and her new life were everything she had dreamed about in that dreary Boston workshop.
Kate Sessions, headmistress at the Russ School, encouraged Roz to use her spare time creating fancy frocks for the town’s wealthy matrons. Her couture became an overnight success, earning Roz more money than she had ever thought possible, as well as an entrée into local society. In less than a year, Roz’s risky decision to flee from Boston to San Diego had catapulted her from indentured servant to woman of independent means and modest notoriety. All on the basis of her skill with a needle and thread.
Much like riding a horse—or making love—you never forgot how to sew. But as she was learning today, it was possible to get rusty. Having finished measuring the bedroom windows, Roz moved into the kitchen and then a fairly large front room that doubled as a parlor and parish meeting hall. Last but not least she ventured into Father Figueroa’s office, where she pushed aside a small wooden table with a typing machine in order to reach the window. Standing on a stepladder, reaching up to measure the top of the window frame, she noticed a familiar face approaching on horseback—Cradoc Bradshaw.
Moments later, she heard a knock at the front door. Wrapping the measuring tape around her neck, she hopped down from the ladder and went to greet him. Roz couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when she pulled open the door rather than Figueroa.
And sure enough, he flinched. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m a good Catholic girl,” she teased.
“Besides that—”
“I’m making new curtains for the rectory.”
Cradoc snorted. “How’d you get roped into that?”
“It was my idea,” she declared proudly. “My own little project.” As well as a means of exerting her independence. Not fully, mind you, but enough to make her feel like she wasn’t totally dependent on Nick. Although she wasn’t about to admit that to Cradoc.
“Nick finally letting you work?” he asked.
“I won’t be getting paid. It’s volunteer. My way of giving back to the parish.”
“Work is work,” he mused. “Whether you’re getting paid or not.”
“Nick gave me a new sewing machine, and I have to do something with it. Might as well be for the glory of God.”
Roz hadn’t seen Cradoc since the ugly incident at the Times, when he had crashed the celebration after the first Nemesis letter. He had looked haggard that night, and discontented. But now Roz thought she saw a certain gleam, not just in his eyes, but Cradoc’s whole manner. A spark she hadn’t seen in years. She wondered if it could be the Nemesis case, the energy that comes with taking on a new investigation, or something else in his life. Perhaps a woman? She was about to inquire, but never got that far.
Cradoc looked into the room. “Is the padre around?”
“I’m afraid he’s in Old Town. His regular Wednesday rounds to minister to people who can’t make it to church for the sacraments. Is there anything I can help you with?”
The marshal sucked his teeth. “Nothing that you’re going to agree to,” he said sarcastically.
She knew him well enough to know that he was only half kidding. Still, this was a vast improvement over the grimness he normally displayed around her. She wondered if he had finally gotten over everything that had happened in the past, all of the drama from what now seemed like so long ago. Did time really heal all wounds? And if so, what was his magical curative?
But again, this wasn’t the time or place to ask. It’s not why she was here, and not why Cradoc had made the ride up the hill from the jailhouse. “If you don’t mind me asking, why did you want to see the Father?”
“Nothing earth-shattering,” he answered. “Something he said in the paper that I wanted to double check. Something that may or may not have some minor bearing on the Nemesis case. Most likely not.”
“How’s the investigation going?”
“You read the papers. You know as much as I do.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Roz responded.
“It’s true this time.”
“So you really have no idea who the killer might be?”
“Not a damn clue. Two months down the line from the first murder, and we aren’t any closer to making an arrest or even naming a suspect than the morning they found Archer’s body dangling from that cliff.”
“Can I quote you on that?” Roz quipped.
Cradoc smiled. “Like I’d be saying anything if I thought you were gonna blab it all back to Nick.”
Given their history, it was an incredibly generous thing for him to say. “You still trust me that much?” she asked.
“Stuff like this—for sure,” he said without batting an eye. Implying, of course, there were other ways in which he did not trust his former lover.
An awkward moment of silence followed, all of that past hovering between them, all of that baggage. And then Roz spoke up. “Would you like to leave a note for Father Figueroa?”
“Naw, I’ll come back some other time. It’s not that urgent.” He flashed a warm smile before turning to leave. “You were damn good,” he said without further elaboration.
“At what?” she said, not quite sure what he was getting at.
“Making dresses for all those rich gals. You were the best in town.”
“I don’t know about that,” Roz said, blushing a bit.
“No, you really were. You should take it up again. I hear women saying all the time how they wish you were still making dresses.”
“Do you?”
“Well, maybe not all the time. It’s not like I’m going to tea every day on Banker’s Hill. But often enough. You wouldn’t have any problem getting back into the saddle.”
Cradoc tipped his hat and crawled back onto his horse. Roz watched him disappear around a corner and returned to her task.
She carried out the last of the measurements for the office curtains and moved the typewriter back into place beneath the window. It was an old machine, nothing like the slick new typing devices that Nick and the others used at the Times. Yet it was quite striking in appearance, decorated with diminutive paintings, floral patterns, and gold-leaf motifs. A small nameplate on the black metal façade read “Sholes & Glidden.” Didn’t mean a thing to Roz. But then again, typing was not amongst her many skills.