Deadly Proof: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery (31 page)

“Do you know what Newsome’s article is going to say?”

“He said he concentrated on the history of Rashers’ firm, bringing up the old battle he had with the unions in ’71, sprinkling in a few quotes he got from some of the printers that Rashers drove out of business, and throwing in some stuff about July Fourth weekend shenanigans to suggest that Rashers’ death could have been some burglary gone wrong.”

“Oh that’s splendid. But it is going to make Catherine Rashers very upset.”

“Well too bad. What did she think was going to happen when she made those accusations that helped get Mrs. Sullivan arrested?”

“She probably didn’t think about the consequence at all. I can’t help but wonder if all she cared about at the time was diverting the attention of the police from herself. Especially after what Miss Minnie told me.”

“The Moffets actually looked into the widow’s alibi?”

Annie shook her finger at him and said, “Of course they did, ‘ye of little faith.’ They had a nice cozy talk with the housekeeper while they waited for Mrs. Rashers to return home for a fitting. Pretended they’d gotten the time wrong to explain why they were there so early.”

“How did they know she wouldn’t be there?”

“Because they scheduled the fitting for right after the meeting she had scheduled with me yesterday!” Annie smiled at him in triumph.

Nate smiled back but thought to himself that he would have to take care once he was married to her—she clearly had much more effective troops at her command than he did. He said, “What did the housekeeper have to say?”

“That Catherine Rashers was ‘as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room of rocking chairs’ that day. Had a fight with the cook, made the nursery maid cry, and finally flounced up to her room with a sick headache.”

“And no one saw her during the crucial times?”

“No, and Miss Minnie said that it would be easy for her to nip down the back stairs and go out a side door without being noticed because the servants were either in the kitchen working on dinner or up in the nursery getting the children bathed and ready for bed.”

Nate felt a slender tendril of hope. “It does seem possible, as Laura suggested last Sunday, that Mrs. Rashers decided to go to the print shop to make sure her husband was going through with her demand that he fire Florence. And if she discovered he had no such intention, they could have argued and she could have stabbed him.”

Annie replied, “I suppose if there were anyone who could get close enough to him to stab him, it would be his wife, but wouldn’t you have to find someone who saw her on the street or going into the Niantic?”

“Even if we didn’t find someone who saw her, at least it gives me a line of questioning to pose in cross-examination.”

Annie leaned forward, her lovely scent momentarily distracting him, then she said, “You know, I had another thought about Mrs. Rashers’ involvement. When I met with her yesterday, she brought me a sheaf of documents that purported to contain the financial figures for an ‘un-named’ company she was considering investing in.”

“She asked you to evaluate these figures?”

“Yes. And when I took them and showed them to Florence, she thought they were definitely the records for another printer. We couldn’t help but wonder if they were figures for Neppier—the company Rashers seemed to be targeting.”

“I don’t understand. Hadn’t you already told Mrs. Rashers about Neppier?”

Annie’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, I had told her, so why not just tell me I was evaluating that company? Why all the mystery? Unless her husband, or even she, got these figures in some underhanded fashion. What if the person that Rashers was meeting with wasn’t a future customer but someone who worked for Neppier and was feeding Rashers information?”

Nate thought for a moment then said, “What if James Neppier found out about this—another reason he might have confronted Rashers that Friday and killed him? Maybe it is time to get Jackson to look into Neppier’s alibi.”

“Or his son’s?”

“That’s right. There is a son. What are you thinking?”

Annie started fiddling with one of her curls that had escaped its pins and fallen against her cheek. She took a deep breath and said, “This is pure speculation. But Florence Sullivan mentioned to me that she’d heard that Neppier’s son, Jack, was tired of waiting for his father to hand over the business to him. She even passed that information onto Rashers a few months ago. What if the son is the one who was meeting with Rashers and feeding him information?”

Nate, puzzled, said, “To what end? Why would he want to ruin the business he would eventually inherit?”

“There are a number of reasons. He might have felt that temporary business reverses would convince his father to hand over the reins to him. Or maybe he and Rashers had agreed to buy his father out once the business was on the point of bankruptcy?”

“Merging Neppier and Rashers into one company—with the son as a partner in the new firm? That is a different strategy than Rashers had used before, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Annie said. “But think of the advantages to Rashers. In the new company, Catherine Rashers wouldn’t be the majority stock holder any more.” She sighed and said, “The problem with that theory is—I don’t know how Rashers could have hoped to get away with buying up shares of Neppier without his wife’s knowledge and approval.”

Nate chuckled and said, “One thing I’ve learned from dealing with wills and financial transactions among family members is how easy it is for one person to trick another into signing something. But maybe he didn’t get away with it.”

He felt that tendril of hope just grow stronger. “Annie. This gives her an even stronger motive to kill him than anger over his refusal to fire Florence. She could have killed him when she discovered he was trying to weaken her financial control over him.” Nate sat back and thought about how he could go about getting Neppier or his son to the stand, and how to get Mrs. Rashers to reveal what she did or did not know about her husband’s business plans. Cranston might have a suggestion.

Annie touched his arm and said, “Listen to me. Whether or not Catherine is the murderer—she is now so worried about what might come out in the trial that she suggested to me that she would talk to the district attorney about lowering the charges against Florence Sullivan to manslaughter—if Florence agreed to plead guilty.”

Saturday, morning, July 31, 1880

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“The bodkin in sued to pick out such of the types as are misplaced.”
Print Apparatus Amateurs
, 1846

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L
aura wiped a bead of moisture from her brow. Despite all the windows in the WCPU print shop being open, the room was already stifling hot at ten in the morning. Last night while she was at the theatre, the city’s erratic climate decided to switch from the usual chilly dampness of summer to hot dry winds from the northeast. As they waited for Kitty’s coachman to pull up in front of the Bush Street entrance of the California Theater, little whirlwinds of dust blew around their feet and rustled their petticoats.

The wind continued to bedevil her when she got home. The rattle of her bedroom windows kept her awake until well after one and then provided a percussive backdrop to a series of unsettling dreams until Kathleen knocked on her door at six-thirty to wake her. Not surprising that she found setting type difficult this morning. She was all thumbs, and her head ached in syncopation with the steady thumping of the small Gordon printers.

Thank goodness she only had to work half day on Saturdays, which had been her excuse for agreeing to go to the theatre with Kitty in the first place. But she should have known the late night would interfere with her speed and accuracy. To make matters worse, she’d not really enjoyed herself very much. The play turned out to be an inferior production of one she had seen two years ago in San Jose, and the last-minute addition to the party of a friend of Ned’s, who was obviously enamored with the wealthy Kitty Blaine, left Laura feeling very much like the fifth wheel on a stage coach.

“Is that the final page?” Iris leaned over Laura’s shoulder to watch her transfer a line of type onto a galley, which was on a slightly slanted rack to keep the type from slipping.

To Laura, this transfer was always the scariest part of the job. When she first worked for the
San Jose Mercury
, a whole line of type would far too frequently buckle and fall to the floor as she tried to move it from her composing stick to the galley. Now, very aware of her forewoman’s scrutiny, she locked the form, took it over to the galley press, and pulled a proof. She examined the printed proof carefully, noting only one typographical error. She pointed this out to Iris, who then read through the proof herself.

“Good job, Laura. You should be able to pick out that one letter and replace it without having to redo the whole line.” Iris pulled a bodkin from the deep apron pocket where it resided with other tools of the compositor’s trade like line gauges, tweezers, and slug cutters, handing it to Laura.

As Laura used the sharp steel end of the bodkin to pick out the offending letter “o” from the last line of an article on bee-keeping, she thought about the fact that a similar bodkin had been used to stab Rashers to death. If the person who murdered Rashers generally had a bodkin on them—as did compositors like Florence Sullivan or Rashers’ foreman Griggs––then it is quite possible the attack was completely spontaneous.

If the attacker was Mrs. Rashers or some irate businessman, they would have had to bring the bodkin with them on purpose, maybe even choose it as the weapon because it would deflect suspicion onto one of Rashers’ employees. Unless the bodkin was just lying around somewhere on Rashers’ desk and was grabbed up in the heat of the moment. She had a distinct memory of the
Mercury’s
editor, Mr. Owen, keeping a bodkin on his desk to use to dig out the tobacco from his pipe. Was Rashers a pipe smoker?  She could ask Seth...

“Here, I will take that,” said Iris, putting the bodkin back into her pocket. “Now lock up the form onto the chase and test it for lift.”

Laura was excited. Iris had never let her do this last part, which got the whole page ready to be printed out on the large Koenig press. First, she laid a thin sheet of wood over the form, tapping it with a mallet that Iris handed to her to make sure that all the type was at the same height. She then used metal wedges called quoins to firmly lock the whole page into the metal frame so it would stay rigid. Next, she used a quoin key to lift the edge slightly, sighing with relief when nothing slipped––which meant the page justification was correct. Finally, she pressed her hands all over the page, feeling for any give.

She nodded to Iris, who repeated this process and then smiled broadly at her, saying, “Perfect. Now I’ll take it right on over to Sam so he can get the
Journal of Commerce
printed up this morning.”

Watching Iris move across the room, Laura tucked up a strand of her hair and fanned herself with the galley proof, glowing from the praise. Then the elation drained away as the unwanted thought came that the bodkin Iris handed her looked shiny and new, with a bright red handle. Usually, Iris carried an old one whose wooden handle was a faded blue.

But would Iris have gone to Rashers still wearing her apron? That didn’t make any sense at all. She always left her apron in her office before going upstairs. And there would be no reason for her to come down through the shop that Friday when she left the upstairs apartment after her argument with Nell. Was there?

Feeling exhausted, she went slowly back to her job case. A flurry of noise towards the entrance to the shop caught her attention, and she saw Betsy, one of the apprentices, talking to a tall, broad-shouldered young man who was blushing furiously at whatever she was saying. He handed her something and then stood waiting as Betsey left him. Assuming it was some message for Iris, Laura went back to sorting type from the first project she’d done today, returning them to the proper compartments in her case so she could start on the next job.

“Seems you have a note, Miss Dawson.” Betsy stood behind her, smiling and holding out a folded piece of paper. “Some conquest from the theatre last night?”

As she unfolded the paper, Laura said, “Hardly, I wonder...” She stopped speaking when she recognized the signature at the bottom. The note was from Seth, asking if she would please meet him outside the Niantic after she got off work at one. Her mind skittered, looking for a reason why he would need to see her.

Betsy interrupted her thoughts, saying, “The boy there, says his name is Dunk, can you believe it? Who would willingly admit to a stupid name like that? Anyway, he says he’s to take back an answer.”

Laura nodded and went over to her case to get a pen and dip it into the inkwell. She quickly wrote the word “yes” and her initials at the bottom of the note, before she could change her mind. Then she refolded and handed the note to Betsy. 

Turning back to her job case and her sorting, she suddenly felt like crying.

*****

S
eth carefully tightened a bolt on the big Babcock with a wrench. He’d found that at least once a week he needed to go over the whole machine, cleaning off the accumulated grit and ink that worked its way into the threads of the bolts, looking for cracks, and then making sure each bolt was securely screwed down tight. He’d sent Dunk off on his break while he did this, asking the boy if he would mind taking a note to Laura over at the Women’s Cooperative Printers Union.

For nearly two weeks he’d been wrestling with what to do about Laura. Seemed like he kept hitting the same patch of dangerous black ice with her. Ever since he first met her. She’d walked up to where he and her friend, Hattie Wilks, sat in the library at San Jose Normal School and asked Hattie about the next assignment for their botany class. Tall, long-limbed, with an awkward grace, she reminded him of a young colt, an image that was reinforced when she inadvertently swung her book satchel too close to the table edge, knocking off a chemistry text that fell to the floor with a crash.