Page 22 of By Any Means

Irving eyed him. “Better find out what changed.” He grinned. “Or jus’ get a dildo. Y’know. One of ’em wooden pricks.”

6

LAURIE

June

Delmonico’s

E 44th St. and Fifth Ave

In spite of the short notice of the same-day invitation—done old-school, a runner boy with a letter around sixish, returning with a quick response—Tjofabier F. Raberding made it to the restaurant before Laurie did. This wasn’t a surprise. The leisure class, with no working hours, only fashionable ones, were available at any beckon, constrained only by their means of transportation. And Laurie would’ve bet any money that the ostentatious new-model gold motorcar he’d seen conspicuously parked on Fifth was Raberding’s.

“Laurie Tulley.” There, Raberding did rise from his chair to shake Laurie’s hand, as though having something to prove. “What a surprise to hear from you after so many weeks. I hadn’t held out any hope.”

“Thanks for coming, Mr. Raberding.”

Raberding raised eyebrows as he sank back into his chair. “I thought I was Tjo to you. I will assume from that, and our surroundings, that this is professional over pleasure?”

“This Delmonico’s is close to home,” Laurie said shortly. And in public, where nobody could go to their knees.

“Well, then.” Raberding brightened. “Hope shall not die. Glad to make the trip.” He sipped his drink, an old-fashioned. “Has something been revealed in your investigations?”

Hell, yes, it had been. Four men were missing, two of them confirmably dead. It seemed there were secrets worth killing for at Wright Glass.

“Of a sort. Look, last month, you said August was a thief. You didn’t elaborate.”

Raberding was unfazed. “You didn’t ask.”

“You distracted me.” (Raberding liked hearing that, all right.) “I’m asking now. What did August steal from you?”

“Trade secrets,” Raberding said promptly. “What else?”

“Go on—what specifically?”

Raberding sighed. “Then-unpatented sealing mechanisms for jar canning.”

“Jar canning?”

“Commercial canning technology hasn’t much improved since the Civil War, when men were eating out of knifed-up tins. But jar canning… we produce Mason jars, of course, but they seal unreliably—relegated to home cookery.”

“But Brooklyn’s a flint glasshouse, isn’t it?” Laurie tapped the crystal rocks glass a waiter had dropped before him—also an old-fashioned, which he didn’t drink. “Tableware. Not really jars and bottles.”

“Flint glass simply means clear glass. The metropolitan way is to court the common man. Or women, I suppose, since they do the cooking.”

Laurie kept silent. The “metropolitan way” he’d heard of was a pretty fantasy: the belief that any man, even the poorest, given enough hard work and resilience, could become a Rockefeller, when instead most rich men of today were like Chary and August Wright and Tjofabier Raberding, inheriting their wealth and industry.

“Anyway, the seals didn’t function in the end, so I needn’t have worried. A ridiculous rate of failure. We are keeping on with screw-top lids of tin.”

“How much time passed between August’s theft and his death?”

Raberding considered it. “You’re thinking they’re connected? Erroneously so, Mr. Tulley. I hope you don’t consider me a suspect.”

“Mm. You know what’s said of those who find the body.”

Raberding didn’t react. Not even a wince. “It was six… seven months between the two. We made up. In the end, the theft made no difference as to our ‘friendship.’”

“No?”