The Marshal's Pursuit Read Online Free PDF

alone.
    Her “Aah” had a somber edge. She pulled the chair from her desk over to his and sat. “Enough with the flattery. What plagues you?”
    “Malia Vaccarelli.”
    “Who is she?”
    Frank gave a quick rundown on the events of the morning, minus the fact he’d been unable to get Miss Vaccarelli from his mind since he made eye contact with her in the garden. He smacked the box of files. “I pulled every case that mentions Van Kelly. I need to find a connection from him to her.”
    She stared at him, unblinking. “You’re serious.”
    “It’s this, or put an announcement in the Times —Frank Grahame Louden is seeking a woman.” He sat on the edge of his desk. “I do that and, next thing I know, my parents are ordering wedding invitations and I’m looking at china patterns in Gimbels.”
    “There may not be a connection.” Norma took a file from the box. “It may have been a mere coincidence Daly showed up at the police department when she was leaving.”
    Frank looked longingly at the coffeepot on the other side of the room, but his aching foot demanded a rest. “Maybe, but my gut is telling me she’s important. Or I think she’s pretty and this is the easiest way to get her number. I need concentration juice.” Leaving Norma to begin the search, he limped toward the coffee press.
    “Bring me mine straight black,” Norma called out over the drum of the typewriters. “Cream and sugar are for babies and love-struck marshals.”
    Frank stopped and looked over his shoulder. The back of Norma’s head already had several ebony corkscrew strands falling from the poof she called a pompadour. “Do you think I’m going to bring you coffee like I’m your secretary?”
    Norma nodded and a few more strands loosened.
    “You wound me, Norma.”
    She chuckled. “You will bring me coffee, Louden, because no matter what else is said about you—and it’s not all positive, believe me—you are a chivalrous man.”
    “What are you talking about? I don’t have flaws.”
    Laughter came from too many desks around the room.
    “Boys,” Norma called out, “shall we let him in on them?”
    Adjectives flew from their mouths quicker than machine gun fire. Jokester. Lackadaisical. Guarded. Set in his ways. Nosy. Reticent. Unable to be serious.
    “Give a different synonym to the meaning and my ‘flaws’ become honorable traits,” proclaimed Frank.
    More laughter.
    “It’s true,” he said, resuming his pace to the coffee press. “ Lackadaisical is to a pessimist what easygoing is to an optimist, and I am an optimist.”
    “That’s another word for denial, ” Norma quipped.
    “I can be serious.”
    Silence.
    Then someone sputtered and the laughter became contagious.
    Frank rolled his eyes. He scooped coffee into the press and added hot water. He could take their ribbing. Because, before the day was over, the easygoing Frank Louden was seriously going to find what—and whom—he was looking for.
    1:16 p.m.
    “Louden, how’s your toe?” Marshal Henkel of the Southern District of New York asked in that monotonously deep voice of his.
    Frank glanced at the wall clock before sitting in one of the two chairs before his boss’s desk. He’d worked through lunch again. “It is almost healed, sir.”
    “It’s been a week. Are you going to tell me how you broke it?”
    The overhead bamboo fan made a woodpecker-like clicking noise as it twirled.
    “No, sir.” Frank shifted in the wooden chair that no one in his right mind would find comfortable. He suspected that was Marshal Henkel’s reason for choosing these chairs. “Is there a reason why you called me in? I’m pursuing a new lead.” He and Norma had yet to find the name Vaccarelli in any of their files, but he wasn’t losing hope.
    Henkel scribbled something inside a folder on his desk, giving Frank a prime view of his gray head. “What do you know about Van Wyck Cady?”
    “In his first act after taking office in January,” he answered,