“She has made a stunning admission,” said Celia. “She offered herself as an alibi for Mr. Blanchard’s movements the evening of Mr. Shaw’s death. She maintains that she was with him.”
“What?” asked Jane, disbelieving. “A young woman like Miss Campbell would never behave so foolishly.”
“She cares for him enough to be willing to sacrifice her reputation,” said Celia. “That much is clear.”
They arrived at Miss Shaw’s photographic gallery and studio. Jane reined in the horse and halted the tilbury before the shop door.
Celia hopped down, as did her friend, who tied the reins to a nearby hitching post. The blinds were lowered to the level of the row of photographs on display, the studio behind dark, as expected. Miss Shaw would not be at her camera today.
“Here, these are the images I wanted to examine,” said Celia, studying the faces mutely staring back. The young women in their plain dark dresses and simply coifed hair. Evoking the reality of a working-class girl? Or seeking to project a preconceived notion of what a woman forced to earn her living looked like?
“Miss Shaw does good work,” said Jane. “Are any of the girls Miss DiPaolo?”
“I believe she is that one, there.” Celia tapped the window glass in front of the portrait propped in the center of the row of pictures. “This is where I recognized her from.”
“She is lovely.” Jane squinted at the photograph. “That young woman with her is Olivia Campbell. Don’t you recognize her? She’s dyed her hair dark. Probably for the benefit of the photograph; light hair doesn’t always show up well. But that’s definitely her.”
Celia leaned closer to the glass.
“Yes, that is Libby Campbell.” A shiver danced over her skin.
“Maybe she’s not so innocent after all, Celia,” whispered Jane, her warm breath clouding the window glass.
“She mentioned a friend who’d visited the Hygienic Institute,” said Celia. “What if instead she had been the patient, receiving treatment for her weak arm? Learning the daily routine. Becoming aware of how to most easily arrive at a private suite. Perhaps even managing to acquire a critical key to that room.”
Jane looked over at her. “Could Miss Campbell be the culprit?”
“Perhaps. Or at least, one of them.” Celia pondered the image of two women, their arms about each other’s waist, looking bold and brave. “Moreover, Jane, we may have identified the authors of that note. What if these ladies are the ‘us’?”
• • •
What if Platt isn’t guilty? What if Giulia DiPaolo is lying?
Nick stared out the window behind his desk, barely noticing the passing pedestrians or hearing the barker parading in front of the nearby gentlemen’s clothing store hawking its wares. “Doeskin pants for you, sir. Blue flannel coats. Doeskin pants.” He’d had other witnesses ready to swear on their family Bible that they’d caught sight of a suspect at the scene of a crime, only to discover twenty-five other folks ready to swear that the person had been drinking at the saloon with them or had been attending a church picnic . . .
“Sir?” Taylor called around the half-open door of the detectives’ office. “Can I come in? You didn’t hear my knock, I guess.”
Nick looked over his shoulder. “Lost in thought, Taylor.” He dropped onto his chair and spun it to face his assistant. “Of course you can come in. What is it?”
“I wanted to let you know that Mullahey and one of the other fellows have been looking into whether Mrs. Wynn was at the Institute when those patients reportedly had possessions stolen,” said Taylor. “Looks like she was, sir. Could be coincidence—”
“You know what I always say, Taylor.”
“Not a coincidence,” he said. “So she’s likely been the thief and took advantage of Mr. Shaw’s sudden death to steal from him too. Right?”
“Probably,” he replied. “Platt may have planned to steal that watch from Shaw then blame the theft on Mrs. Wynn, who we eventually would’ve connected to the other thefts at the Institute.”
“Well, that’s resolved at least,” said his assistant, doing his best to sound chipper. “And we’ve got our killer locked away.”
Nick frowned and rubbed his arm. “We’ve got Platt locked away.”
“Is Mr. Greaves here?” called a familiar voice out in the main station. What in hell was she doing there now? Hadn’t they discussed everything at the cemetery?
Taylor jogged over to the door. “In here, Mrs. Davies.”
“Ah, Mr. Greaves.” She’d taken the time to change out of her somber blue dress and into the outfit he’d first seen her in, her businesslike Garibaldi blouse and brown skirt. Taylor offered his chair, but she declined. “I am glad you are in your office.”
Mrs. Hutchinson was not far behind her. “Hello, Mr. Greaves.”
“Is she embroiling you in one of her schemes, Mrs. Hutchinson?” he asked, getting to his feet.
“Nothing dangerous,” she answered, with a playful smile. “We went to visit Rebecca Shaw’s photographic gallery.”
“I have discovered a connection between Rebecca Shaw, Giulia DiPaolo, and, sadly, Barbara’s tutor, Olivia Campbell,” said Celia Davies. “The latter two women were subjects for an exhibit Miss Shaw had planned but never put on.”
Taylor located his pencil and notebook among his coat pockets and started writing.
“So?” asked Nick.
“So, according to Mina, it was Miss DiPaolo who was the intended recipient of Mr. Shaw’s gift of candy, Mr. Greaves. Miss DiPaolo whom Mina was likely following to the Institute Wednesday night,” she said. “When I was called to Mina’s bedside that evening, she was muttering that something terrible had happened, and ‘what has she . . .’ Unfortunately, by the next morning Mina had completely forgotten what she’d said. I can only surmise she’d learned of Miss DiPaolo’s involvement in the scheme to harm Mr. Shaw and sought to stop her.”
“Giulia DiPaolo needed a key to that private entrance and Shaw’s room, though,” he said. “How’d she get it?”
Mrs. Davies’s eyes lit. Damn, she has an answer for that, too.
“Perhaps her friendship with Olivia Campbell is the answer. Miss Campbell has a partially paralyzed arm, from a childhood illness, I suspect,” she explained. “She may have recently been a patient at the Institute, in pursuit of relief. Time spent at the facility that could have come in handy if one wished to discover how to access Mr. Shaw or obtain the key to his room.”
“You’d proposed to me that Rebecca Shaw had taken it,” he said.
“I have not ruled out that scenario, Mr. Greaves.”
Of course she hadn’t.
“Don’t you agree that Celia has devised an excellent explanation?” asked Jane Hutchinson, beaming with pride over her clever friend.
“I don’t know what to make of it, Mrs. Hutchinson.”
“What about Mr. Platt, sir?” asked Taylor, looking up from his notes. “Isn’t he guilty, after all?”
“Not now, Taylor.”
“Tell him about the note, Celia,” said Jane Hutchinson.
Nick’s old wound throbbed. “What note, Mrs. Davies?”
She hesitated, so the woman who’d accompanied her filled in the blanks. “A message telling Celia to ‘leave us alone.’”
Damn. “If you’re hiding any other snippets of information, ma’am, I wouldn’t mind hearing them right now.”
“I do not possess any other ‘snippets of information,’ Mr. Greaves, although I’ve come to suspect it was Miss DiPaolo I observed deep in frantic conversation with Miss Shaw yesterday morning,” she replied. “While you attend to her, Jane and I shall collect Miss Campbell and persuade her to come to the station and give an account. And Mr. Taylor here can interrogate Miss Shaw.”
“Whoa, no you don’t, Mrs. Davies,” he said, stretching out his hand. He’d lunge over the top of his desk and tackle her if that’s what it took to stop her recklessness. “Mrs. Hutchinson, please take your friend back to h
er house and make sure she stays there.”
Jane Hutchinson gave Celia Davies a quick look. “I’ll do what I can, Mr. Greaves.”
Mrs. Davies was busy scowling at him. “You do comprehend the criticality of my information, do you not, Mr. Greaves?”
He comprehended that her critical information was about to derail his entire case. If she was right. Which she quite often was.
“Taylor, bring Miss Campbell in. I’ll go to Miss DiPaolo’s. We’ll attend to Miss Shaw later.” Nick turned to the woman whose scowl hadn’t let up. “Mrs. Davies, can you promise to stay at your house, or do I need to find a policeman to guard you?”
“Where might I seek to go, Mr. Greaves, as you intend to interview the two women I am primarily interested in?” she asked, smiling innocently.
Nick grabbed his hat off his desk and used it to point at her. “Stay. At. Home.”
He swept past her, stomping from the room, Taylor on his heels.
• • •
“Well?” asked Jane, interweaving her fingers to tighten her gloves. “Do we still intend to visit the Hygienic Institute? Since it seems you’ve resolved everything.”
Celia waited for the slap of the closing alleyway door to finish reverberating through the police station before replying. “I’ve no intention of twiddling my thumbs at home, awaiting news from Mr. Greaves, while I have questions to answer.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to go home.”
A police officer, seated at one of the desks out in the station, inspected them as they strolled through the room. “Ladies.”
Celia inclined her head and kept on walking, straight for the alley door, and sped up once she reached the stairs. Out onto the street, she glanced both directions, in case Mr. Greaves or his assistant were nearby.
“Is it clear?” asked Jane, stealing out into the alleyway behind her.
“I do not see either of them.”
She and Jane hurried up the alley and around the edge of the building to where Jane had parked the tilbury when they’d arrived. They clambered onto the seat.
“What are you hoping to learn at the Institute though, Celia?” asked Jane, releasing the brake. “Mr. Greaves will interrogate the women involved and unearth the truth.”
“None of them have divulged the truth so far,” Celia replied, arranging her skirts and securing her hat. “And they may continue to refuse to be honest. So I seek evidence there, Jane. Evidence that might force an admission of guilt out of one—or all—of them, should Mr. Greaves fail to be persuasive.”
Jane steered the tilbury toward Sutter. “I do hope Miss Campbell isn’t involved.”
“So do I, Jane. But I’ve hoped and been wrong before.”
Chapter 19
“Have you found Mrs. Wynn’s murderer, Detective?” The landlady had opened the front door with a harried look on her face. This made the third time Nick had been to her boardinghouse, and he was coming to believe the expression was permanent.
“We’ve got a man awaiting indictment,” he replied.
“Thank goodness,” she exclaimed, her expression briefly rearranging into relief. “My ladies have been scared out of their wits.”
“I need to speak to Miss DiPaolo,” he said.
“She went out right after breakfast—to Calvary Cemetery, she claimed—and hasn’t been back since,” the woman answered.
“You won’t mind if I look around her room while she’s gone, then.”
“Having poor Mrs. Wynn brutally struck down in my backyard has been hard on my lodgers, Detective. The ladies won’t like police rummaging around in the house again,” she said. “Besides, if you’ve arrested the brute who killed her, what else do you need from us?”
“Just a few minutes, ma’am,” said Nick, his level of irritation rising.
“Are you implying Miss DiPaolo is somehow involved in poor Mrs. Wynn’s death?” she asked. “One of my girls? In this very house?”
Yes. “If Miss DiPaolo has got something to hide, ma’am, don’t you think you’d like to know?”
That got her attention. “Come with me.”
She climbed the stairs. A few of the female lodgers congregated in the ground-floor hallway. Two more looked on from the doorway to the parlor.
The landlady turned right at the first landing. “She’s there. The room at the end.”
A room that faced the yard in back. Where Giulia DiPaolo had either noticed Mr. Platt and his distinctive red hair, or she’d spotted Mrs. Wynn slinking across the yard and intercepted her with a broken chunk of cobblestone.
The landlady unlocked the door. “I’m standing right here to make sure you don’t take anything.”
She stepped aside, making way for him to enter. About ten by six, the room had two windows, their curtains pulled back to let in the midday sun. Brighter and airier than the ones overlooking the cramped light well. He peered out at the yard, yesterday’s lines of laundry gone. The shed did block the view of where Mrs. Wynn’s body had been dumped. But the fence between the yard and the alley . . . how tall was Platt for Giulia DiPaolo to have been able to see him over its top?
“We scraped up the gravel,” said the landlady. “Hope that’s okay.”
Any reminders of yesterday’s tragedy removed with it. “That’s okay.”
The bed linens were rumpled, a cotton dressing gown tossed on top as if she’d been in a hurry to dress and leave. The washing basin on the dressing table hadn’t been emptied, her hairbrush and pins scattered next to it.
Nick pulled open drawers in the chest against the wall. There were clothes inside, which meant she hadn’t packed to bolt from town like Mrs. Wynn had attempted. He felt around, through each of the drawers. No tucked-away messages. No store receipts for chloroform. Only stockings, underclothes, a spare petticoat. No evidence of blood on any of them. If she’d murdered Mrs. Wynn and stained her clothing in the process, she must have gotten rid of the proof.
He closed all the drawers and squatted next to the wastepaper basket alongside the dressing table. Nick pulled out the few scraps of paper in the waste bin. A shopping list like the one he’d found at Bauman’s. A section of the Dramatic Review newspaper, read by a young woman who might have aspirations beyond warbling in a Barbary saloon. A handbill from the Hygienic Institute.
“What’s that you’ve found?” asked the landlady, leaning through the doorway.
Nick held the paper aloft. “Was Miss DiPaolo ever a patient at the Hygienic Institute?”
“Where that politician fellah died?”
“The same.”
“Don’t think so.” She squinted at the pamphlet in Nick’s hand. “Mighta gotten that from Althea.”
He folded the handbill and shoved it into his coat pocket. At the very bottom of the waste bin was a crumpled paper wrapper printed with the name Roesler’s.
“That came from her beau, I expect,” said the landlady.
“Ambrose Shaw?” he asked, tucking the wrapper alongside the handbill.
“Ambrose? No, his name’s Leo,” she said. “He should be asking her to marry him any day now.”
Well, well, Miss DiPaolo. The inappropriate woman worth spoiling dinner at the Shaws’ to argue about. The unnamed female who was Leo Shaw’s alibi for an early departure from a boring Wednesday night meeting of the San Francisco Club. And possibly the reason he’d stopped in Bauman’s last evening.
The building’s front door closed, prompting a fury of whispering among the women standing in the ground-floor hallway. Nick jumped to his feet, sprinted to the head of the stairs, and leaned over the banister.
“Don’t even think of running off, Miss DiPaolo,” he shouted down to the woman, her hand on the doorknob, preparing to do just that.
She lowered her hand and looked up at him. The eyes of the other lodgers clustered around her did likewise. “Good afternoon, Detective,” she said. “Are you here to take me to the station?”
• • •
Jane brought the tilbu
ry to a halt outside the Hygienic Institute, its windows shuttered against the world. Their arrival attracted the attention of the gawkers collected outside on the pavement, who pointed their direction and murmured. One yelled out for them to be careful.
“After we spoke yesterday, I came here and left a note saying to expect us, but it doesn’t look open,” said Jane.
No one from the Institute came to take charge of the carriage, forcing them to leave it and the horse in the hands of the most trustworthy-appearing of the boys who scrambled forward to do the job.
“This will be a short trip if the facility is closed,” said Celia. “What excuse did you offer for why we desired an appointment this afternoon?”
“A vague comment about feeling under the weather,” said Jane, tidying her skirts as she stepped onto the pavement alongside Celia.
“Adequate.” Celia looked over at her friend. “Shall we?”
Jane nodded, and Celia pushed open the door. A bell rang in the depths of the building. Within seconds, Mr. Ross darted from the hallway at the rear of the entry hall.
“Ladies, welcome! Were we expecting you?” he asked, striding across the marble entry hall with a wide smile, his hands outstretched toward Celia and Jane.
“I left a note yesterday,” replied Jane.
He glanced around the entryway, seeking out the displaced missive. “I don’t know why I didn’t receive it. Well, no matter. I bid you welcome!”
He had changed out of the clothes he’d worn to Mr. Shaw’s burial service, the hems of his trousers dirtied by the dusty paths of the cemetery, and into a clean gray suit with matching silk waistcoat. Why go to the effort, Celia wondered, when the likelihood of patients arriving under the current circumstances was so remote. Perhaps a superstitious faith that dressing for guests meant guests would appear.
No Darkness as like Death Page 25
