“You’re leaving again so soon?”

“A bankers’ conference in Denver. I must attend.”

“Until Monday morning, then,” she said with vast relief as he released her hand.

Marion climbed the steps to the door but turned and gazed at the Rolls-Royce as it pulled away into the street. Her mind acted without command. Things between her employer and herself would never be the same. There was a coldness about him that she was not aware of before and she cringed as she remembered his touch. All of a sudden, the lingering smell of the dance hall’s smoke and sweat on her clothes sickened her.

She rushed upstairs to her room, turned on the faucets of her bathtub, frantically removed her clothes, and slipped into the soapy water to remove all memory of the decadent evening.

“WHAT WAS your little meeting with Red Kelly all about?” asked Margaret after they let off Marion at her apartment.

“I hired him for a little job.”

She stared at his face as it was reflected by the light of the passing streetlamps.

“What kind of a job?”

“He’s going to take care of Isaac Bell,” he said matter-of-factly.

“You can’t murder a Van Dorn agent!” Margaret gasped. “Every peace officer in the country would come after you.”

Cromwell laughed. “Not to worry, dear sister. I instructed Kelly to administer only enough damage to keep Bell in the hospital for a few months. That’s all. Call it a warning.”

Cromwell had blatantly lied to his sister. He would act surprised when Bell’s murder was announced and claim the agent’s death had been a mistake, that Kelly had gotten carried away. Inciting his sister’s anger, he decided, was a small price to pay for eradicating the man who had become his worst enemy.

16

“GIVE IT ANOTHER COAT,” CROMWELL ORDERED THE two men painting his boxcar. The color had been the earth brown that most freight cars had been painted since the early days of the railroad. But Tuscan red was the newer color used by Southern Pacific to standardize their vast fleet of freight cargo haulers.

Cromwell wanted a second coat because the O’BRIAN FURNITURE COMPANY, DENVER still bled through the freshly dried first coat.

Margaret, dressed in a woolen dress and short jacket to keep her warm against the cool breeze blowing in from the ocean through the Golden Gate, held a parasol against a light early-morning mist that fell in the city. They stood watching the painters on the loading dock of an empty warehouse her brother had leased under a pseudonym.

“Can you trust them?” she asked.

“The painters?” He stared at the four men busy brushing paint on the boxcar. “To them, it’s just another job, another boxcar that needs to be tidied up. As long as they’re well paid, they don’t ask questions.”

“About time you changed the name,” she said. “Some sheriff or a Van Dorn detective is bound to discover that an O’Brian Furniture freight car was present in five of the towns that were robbed.”