Ghost of a Chance by Kelley Roos Page B

Tollman himself. He didn’t know Frank Lorimer, he couldn’t tell me anything about him. But he did tell me about the hansom cab.”
    “Yes?”
    “Tollman bought it years ago from Hiram Kennedy.”
    “That name,” I said, “Is familiar.”
    “Money,” Jeff said. “Oh, so much, much money. But the 1929 crash nearly wiped old Hiram out, the poor guy. Fie died a millionaire. All he had left was a couple of lousy millions.”
    “And Frank Lorimer was his coachman in the old days?”
    “I think he must have been,” Jeff said. “But we’ll find out for certain at Gramercy Square. The Kennedy town house is still there.”
    He told the driver to take us to Gramercy Square.
    “Jeff,” I said, “who are we going to see? You said old Hiram was dead.”
    “I don’t know who we’ll see, if anybody. Tollman told me about the house. He doesn’t know if there’s even anyone in it. And I haven’t had time to find out.”
    I opened the package of my own clothes. I took off the fancy high heels and got into my plain, heavenly brogues. I switched to my old hat. I slipped out of my sables and Jeff enthusiastically helped me into my tweed coat. I rolled the sables up in a ball.
    “Jeff,” I whispered, “I’m going to leave this fur coat in the cab.”
    “Go ahead,” he said, “but you’ll probably be imprisoned for committing a nuisance.”
    We went straight through Gramercy Square without stopping. Halfway down Irving Place Jeff had our driver make a sudden U-turn and come to an abrupt stop. No car seemed to have been following us. But we walked back to the private, iron-fenced park that formed the Square called Gramercy. We walked slowly twice around the park.
    If Joyce had picked me up again, he wasn’t letting us know it. If Jeff’s shooting acquaintance was watching us, he didn’t tip his hand, He might have been any one of the scattering of men walking about the square. He might have been the man reading his newspaper as he sauntered along, or the man so engrossed in the pigeons foraging in the tiny park, or the man talking to the nurse as he patted the tow head of her small charge. He might have been anyone. It wasn’t a nice thing knowing that, it wasn’t conducive to a feeling of well-being. It was frightening. My hands ached from holding so tight to Jeff’s arm.
    We headed for the Kennedy place on the eastern side of the square. The house was the eighteen-nineties at their most. It was overweighted with cornices and elaborate stone work that was as practical as a bustle. It made the refaced, modernized building next to it look positively naked and indecent.
    Jeff rang the bell a second time. Someone, apparently an ancient, infirm family retainer, needed his help to swing in the great door. A female hand stretched through the widening opening. In it was a dollar bill. Then the hand quickly withdrew.
    A female voice laughed and said, “A thousand apologies! I thought you were from the delicatessen.”
    We could see her now, all of her. She was something to see. Her jet black hair swirled about her round face in that obsolete coiffure, the wind-blown bob. Her eyebrows were thinned to a pencil-line arch, her lashes dripped mascara, her lips were a crimson, carefully-painted cupid’s bow. She wore a baby blue cardigan that was taxed to capacity by her bra-ad bosom. She wore a skirt that was too tight and too short, no stockings, pumps with heels higher than the ones I had just discarded because they were dangerous. She was a sweater girl, aged forty.
    Jeff, when he could speak, said, “No, we’re not from the delicatessen.” He sounded as though he were sorry we weren’t. “Are you… is your name Kennedy?”
    “No!” she cried vivaciously. “A thousand times, no!”
    “Do any of the Kennedys still live here?”
    “My pal, Thelma. You want to talk to Thelma?”
    “Yes, we do.”
    “Well, come in, why don’t you? Whatcha standing there for?”
    She beckoned us into a great dusky hall that