Page 27 of Method of Revenge
He lifted his cup but didn’t sip. “Why not?”
“Because I’m odd. You already know that,” she replied, perhaps a touch more aggressively than was warranted. Leo lowered her voice. “I’m more comfortable around the dead than the living, and men don’t like that in a lady, or so I’m told.”
Jasper made no comment. Likely because he knew it was true.
“You’re supposed to be shouting at me,” she said, wanting to change the subject.
“I can’t shout at someone wearing her hair the way you are.”
She lowered her teacup to glare at him and found him smiling again. Two grins in one night? She wondered what was going on with him.
“They are curling wrappers, and most women wear them to bed. Now, tell me what Mr. Carter said after you threw me out.”
He leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea. “I shouldn’t say.”
“But you’re going to anyway?”
Jasper shook his head, but it was in defeat, not defiance. “He said the waiter who delivered the first drink to Gabriela—the one that had the arsenic in it—announced that it was compliments of Eddie Bloom.”
“But you don’t think Mr. Bloom sent it over,” she guessed.
“No. Killing the wife of someone in an opposing gang would be reckless. Bloom is scum, but he isn’t stupid. We questioned all of Bloom’s waiters, but none of them knew who this man was.”
“He was posing as a waiter in uniform?” Leo asked.
Jasper canted his head as if to say yes, probably.
“You don’t suspect Mr. Carter, do you?” Leo hadn’t. Not really. But she was suspicious of the meeting that had called him away from the table. Then again, if the arsenic was in Gabriela’s first drink, the woman who came to sit with her arrivedaftershe’d been poisoned.
“No.” Jasper set his cup on its saucer. His hand looked too big for the delicate bone china. “I can’t think of what he’d stand to gain by it. Not money, as she didn’t have a life insurance policy attached to her. Plus, he’s taken it upon himself to hunt the killer.”
“I suspected that,” Leo said. “He’s quite intimidating, isn’t he?”
It was the wrong thing to say. Jasper’s expression darkened. “He’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants. I don’t want him believing you know more than you do.”
She adjusted her position in the chair, her legs beginning to feel a bit tingly.
“And Mr. Wilkes? Do you suspect him at all?” she asked, again to change the topic and erase his baleful expression.
“I don’t.” He then explained how Lawrence Wilkes had met Gabriela and how he’d lost her to Andrew Carter. As she listened to the sorry tale, Leo reached for the top hat Jasper had set on the table between them. She picked it up, running her fingers along the brushed midnight-black felt of the brim.
“It’s odd, don’t you think,” Leo said, tracing the edges of his hat, “that Mr. Wilkes said arsenic was a contested chemical being used in Mr. Henderson’s wallpaper pigments, and yet that is also how Gabriela died?”
“It might not be odd at all,” Jasper replied. “Regina Morris made the mistake of introducing Gabriela to her beau. He threw over Regina, and she was upset enough to seek out Wilkes,wanting to commiserate. She was distraught. And working at the factory, she would’ve had access to the chemical.”
Leo pictured the poor young woman, tossed aside like she was nothing. She felt sorry for her. But she knew why Jasper had now focused on her.
“You think she was the woman in the hooded cloak at Striker’s Wharf.”
He nodded, then sat forward, leaning his elbows on the table again. “Don’t let this go to your head, Leo, but I think it would be permissible for you to come with me to Henderson & Son Manufacturing tomorrow when I speak to Miss Morris. I want to know if you recognize her from the club.”
Even with his plea not to let it go to her head, elation lit through her at the invitation. She then deflated a little. “I didn’t see her face. Dita saw her more fully than I did.”
“Miss Brooks can come with us,” he replied.
Above their heads, a floorboard creaked in Flora and Claude’s room. At the sound, Jasper stood. He eyed his hat, still in Leo’s hands.
She stood and handed it over. “It’s quite a nice hat.”
