Murder Once Removed

by S. C. Perkins

  Her desk at the back of the room had been cleared off in its entirety as well. Pens, stapler, file folders, a five-tier file tray with all the papers it had once held, two framed photos, her desk calendar, and research books galore were strewn across the orange and brown carpet. Not far from me, beside the flung-off dust jacket of a book chronicling the Mexican-American War, was her favorite coffee-stained mug, red with white lettering. Despite being hurled from her desk, the mug was intact and I read the words KEEP CALM AND CURATE ON.

  My eyes once more filled with tears and my chest felt like an elephant had plopped down on it. To keep from crying, I bit my lower lip, breathing deeply through my nose, because I knew if I started—if I allowed myself right now to think about how I’d just lost my friend—I wouldn’t be able to stop. I tried looking out the windows, but the dark night outside and the lights inside served to make the window one big mirror, where I could see myself in all my miserable-looking glory. My nose was shiny, my mascara had smudged, my pencil skirt was askew, and I looked scared and pale. In my buttoned-up white coat and my ivory-colored skirt, the only thing keeping me from looking like a wimpy ghost in need of a touch-up was my dark hair—which was mussed, again.

  Straightening my skirt, I turned back to the mess from the display tables.

  I hadn’t really looked at the items the first time and now I blinked when I realized a number of the display pieces were daguerreotypes. I counted; there were eighteen in all, and each one had its photo removed from its case before both pieces were strewn on the floor. While a couple of the photos were faceup, the vast majority weren’t. Yet all of them would be ruined in no time due to air exposure if they weren’t put back into their protective cases.

  Without thinking I moved to the nearest one and bent to pick it up.

  “Don’t touch anything,” growled the stocky officer.

  “These photos will oxidize if they aren’t put back in their cases,” I told him.

  “I said, don’t touch anything.”

  “All right, okay,” I replied, stepping back. I’d just have to make sure Detective Dupart understood the photos needed to be handled properly.

  I only had to wait a few more moments for my chance, when Detective Dupart walked back in the room, sans Gus. Following him in the room were two men and two women, all wearing dark windbreakers with CRIME SCENE UNIT in big white letters on the back. The other plainclothesman strode in after them. With a nod from Dupart, the crime-scene techs all got to work processing the room. A thin blonde with blue-tipped bangs who looked barely able to drink legally started taking photos of Winnie like a pro who’d seen a million dead bodies before. I didn’t know whether to marvel at her or feel sad for how hardened she’d become at such a young age. Then I realized again that it was Winnie she was photographing without emotion and my eyes blurred with tears again.

  “Ms. Lancaster,” a voice said as I watched the tech clicking away in a daze. I glanced up, seeing a vague shape of the officer’s face through my tears. My ears, which were still operating properly, thought the businesslike voice sounded familiar, but it wasn’t Dupart’s.

  “I need to ask you some questions. Would you please step outside with me?”

  While blinking my eyes clear, I noticed another tech photographing the items from the display tables, including the daguerreotypes.

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said, stepping toward him. “Those things by the little hinged cases are called daguerreotype photographs. They’re very fragile and they’ve been pulled from their protective cases, exposing them to the air.” I pointed to the metal cases for emphasis. “The images will be ruined irreparably if they’re not sealed again.”

  The tech looked at me blankly; it was the other officer who answered.

  “Thank you, Ms. Lancaster. We’ll do our best not to let them tarnish.” He addressed the tech. “Please get these photographs out of any excess air as soon as you can, okay?” The tech nodded and kept snapping photos.

  I whirled around, feeling my grip on patience unraveling.

  “‘Do our best’?” I snapped. “That’s not going to be good enough. If these photos are here at the Hamilton Center, they’re important to history. Winnie might not have photographed them yet and the images will be lost completely if they continue to be exposed. I don’t know who you are, but I won’t let something that Winnie cared about be lost just because y’all can’t get your acts—”

  I stopped when I found myself glaring into a pair of narrowed blue eyes I recognized. Average in their blueness until you got as close as I was and saw the green centers.

  “You,” I said. “What are you doing here? You’re not a cop.”

  Special Agent Ben Turner replied without a trace of a smile. “No, but I’ll be working with the police on this investigation.” He didn’t give me a chance to ask any other questions, much less go off on him further. “Did you touch anything, Ms. Lancaster? If so, we’ll need to get your fingerprints.”

  I felt my jaw clench, but told him that I’d only touched Winnie’s arm. “And the wine bottle.”

  He motioned over the other female tech and she began taking my prints. “Run Ms. Lancaster through Clear,” Agent Turner told the tech, then stepped away to speak with Detective Dupart.

  “What’s this Clear thing?” I asked the tech, who had her long dark hair tied in a knot at the nape of her neck.

  She didn’t look at me as she worked, but she answered in kind tones, “It’s an app, called Clear. It shows who your associates might be and other relevant information. They’ll use it to cross-reference yours with the victim’s. Standard procedure.”

  She finished with me just as Agent Turner returned, gestured toward the hall, and said, “Now, if you’ll follow me, Ms. Lancaster, I have some questions for you.”

  I glared at his back the whole way, but did as directed. We walked a few steps away from the door and he turned to face me. “Tell me what happened in your own words,” he said. “Start with why you came here tonight to see Dr. Dell.”

  His stare was so unflinching that my irritation gave way to a spate of nerves and I began to ramble through the facts.

  “Winnie—I mean Dr. Dell—and I were going to discuss some historical photos I recently found and the possibility of having the Hamilton Center acquire them for preservation and display. I brought a bottle of wine for us to drink. It’s a pinot noir, because I knew she likes … liked pinot noirs,” I said, feeling the elephant sit on my chest again as I turned and pointed unnecessarily back into the office, toward the bottle that would never be shared. I saw the crime scene techs still snapping away at the daguerreotypes scattered on the floor and it finally dawned on me that I hadn’t seen the photo of Seth among all the others on the floor. I raced back into Winnie’s office.

  “Ms. Lancaster, where are you going?” Agent Turner called after me.

  “I have to see if one of the daguerreotypes on the floor is the one of Seth Halloran after he’d been murdered in San Antonio. I can’t let it be ruined through air contact or anything else.” I only got two good steps inside before the Latino officer wordlessly blocked my path.

  I whirled back around, sending an icy look at Agent Turner, whose own stony face had ramped up another few clicks. “Fine,” I said. “Then get one of your techs to look. I need to know if it’s here. It’s important. Both to history and to the families involved.”

  Agent Turner looked as if he wanted to say no just to put me in my place, but he finally jutted a chin toward one of the crime-scene techs, who wordlessly started checking the photos for Seth.

  “You can’t miss him,” I said. “He’s a dead guy, wearing suspenders, lying in a dirt street.”

  Agent Turner ushered me back out into the hallway and asked what time I’d arrived.

  “A few minutes before seven,” I said. “I was let in by Homer, the security guard. When I walked in, I saw Gus Halloran. He was kneeling on the ground, beside Dr. Dell’s head. He had the crystal award in his hand. I saw bloo
d and I … I initially thought he’d…”

  I realized right then that, while I believed Gus didn’t hurt Winnie, I didn’t know why he’d come to see her, and I hadn’t thought to ask him. Why was he here? I breathed in a shaky breath, trying not to show any more untoward emotion on my face since Agent Turner’s eyes seemed to be glued to my face, no doubt looking for any reason he could to call me out on getting involved in something I shouldn’t. I’d ask Gus later, I decided. Surely there was a simple reason.

  “I know Gus,” I continued, “and when he said he’d arrived only minutes before me, I believe him.” I snapped my fingers in recollection. “In fact, Homer mentioned it, too, when he let me in.” I looked through the doorway at the office mess and then my eyes rested on Winnie’s body. My throat tightened like a vise and I could barely get out the words, “There was no way he…”

  “Take a breath, Ms. Lancaster. Finish when you’re ready,” Agent Turner said, not unkindly, though his authoritarian vibe hadn’t diminished one iota.

  “There’s no way Gus Halloran could have done this,” I said finally. “He’s strong and in shape, yes, but he’s seventy-five and he’s got arthritis in his knees, elbows, and shoulders, and high blood pressure like nobody’s business. Could he have killed Winnie Dell? I suppose it’s possible, but he sure as heck didn’t have time to kill her and destroy her office to that level.” I pointed emphatically into the office. “That took time, and energy.”

  “You know this because…?”

  “It’s a guess, but it’s for darn sure a pretty good one,” I returned. “Plus, you saw how neatly Gus was dressed. If he’d done all this in his custom three-piece suit and silk tie mere moments before I came in, he’d be sweaty, breathing hard, and his clothes would be all a mess, wouldn’t they? Not to mention that his shirt is a light French blue. It’d likely turn dark at the collar behind his neck where he’d been sweating, and it hadn’t. I saw the back of his neck when I walked in, and a few minutes ago when I watched him walk out here to talk with Detective Dupart.”

  I stopped and looked over my shoulder, toward the elevators. “Where did Gus go, by the way? Y’all didn’t arrest him, did you?”

  “He’s been taken to the station to give his formal statement,” Agent Turner replied as the male crime-scene tech tasked to look for the daguerreotype came out.

  “It wasn’t there, sir,” he said.

  I was about to demand that he keep looking when the tech with the blue-tipped bangs came out. She handed Agent Turner two clear evidence bags. One had a previously crumpled scrap of paper in it.

  “This was in the victim’s hand,” the tech said. She held up the second, which was a smallish white flower, partially crushed. “This was, too, underneath the paper. Likely came from the vase on her conference table. Looks like a rose. Has a sweet smell.” She wrinkled her nose, as if sweet-smelling flowers were a scent she was unused to after being around dead bodies all day.

  Agent Turner took both, thanked her, and the tech went back to her crime scene. He studied the scrap for a moment, then turned it around so that I could see it.

  While it’d looked old from my first peek at it, I now could tell it wasn’t. The back of it was the bright white of everyday copy paper. The scrap had been torn from a color copy of a yellowed document, leaving only three Latin words. Ex pertinacia victoria.

  I whispered the translation before I could stop myself. “Out of determination, victory.”

  “You’ve seen these words before?” Agent Turner asked, his tone sharp and a little condescending, like it was this morning when he accused me of trying to be an amateur detective.

  I had seen the words, though. Those exact words in that exact handwritten script, in fact. It was the motto of the Halloran clan, and it’d been written for the first time in 1849 by Jennie Epps Halloran, Gus’s great-great-grandmother, when she finally accepted no one would believe that her husband had been murdered. She then vowed two things to herself and her family: one, that she would never cease to assert that Seth’s death was not an accident, and, two, that she would do everything in her power to make Halloran Textiles into the successful business that Seth had always imagined.

  She first wrote the motto in a letter to her sister-in-law, and it had appeared on every piece of Halloran correspondence since then. Yet while the Hallorans hadn’t kept the motto hush-hush, it was specific to the family. Gus had joked to me the motto was almost akin to a secret handshake. Family members understood from childhood that the motto was only to be used with other family members. It was a reminder that, with family, they could always get through tough times.

  I looked at the other plastic bag Agent Turner held and recalled something else. In the early days of working with Gus, I recorded his family stories on camera. There’d been some good ones, including a lovely story of Seth Halloran gifting his wife Jennie with her first gardenia bush on their last anniversary before he died. After his death, Jennie always wore a gardenia flower on her dress in remembrance of her husband, and as a reminder to never give up trying to make people believe he was murdered. Soon it became the unofficial, official family flower.

  However, it also had occasionally been used over the generations for other reasons.

  Gus had looked into the camera lens and said, “Just like Jennie wore the flower as a reminder to never stop trying to seek justice for her husband, other family members who felt wronged for some reason would wear one as a gesture that they wouldn’t quit until the good name of Halloran had been restored once more.”

  “So, for your family, it signaled perseverance of the truth,” I’d said from off camera, to encourage him to elaborate.

  “Mostly yes,” Gus had said. “But there’s stories that a few Hallorans used it to indicate they weren’t simply wanting to right a wrong, but were truly out for revenge.”

  I hadn’t thought twice about it at the time. In fact, I’d laughed along with Gus when he’d gone on to say that the last time he knew of a Halloran actually following through on a quest for revenge was in 1910, when Padraig Halloran stole a nude painting he’d commissioned of his own wife. It happened after the painter, who’d fallen in unrequited love with his subject, refused to hand over the artwork. While Paddy vowed revenge and wore gardenia flowers in his lapel for all his friends and neighbors to see, the most vengeful the situation reportedly got was when Paddy spelled out the words “paid in full” in gardenia petals on the painter’s studio floor before absconding with his wife’s racy portrait.

  The Hallorans were not on a level with the mob, that was clear, and throughout my in-depth look into the family, I hadn’t found any other instances since Paddy’s where a Halloran had publicly sought revenge for anything, with or without the gardenia as a signal. Was it possible a present-day Halloran had revived the tradition? Maybe. There was no way it was Gus, though.

  Right?

  “Ms. Lancaster,” Agent Turner said, interrupting my thoughts. “I asked, have you seen this before?” He was holding up the bag with the piece of paper.

  I tried for the breezy response coupled with an offhand shrug. “Oh, sure, yeah. It’s a copy of part of a letter Gus’s great-great-grandmother wrote, and those words are the Halloran family motto.” Touching the flower through the other plastic bag, I added, “But that’s not a rose, it’s a gardenia blossom. They call it the ‘unofficial, official’ Halloran flower. To the family, it generally means perseverance.”

  “Generally?” Agent Turner repeated.

  Aw, nuts. Way to go, Luce.

  The federal agent’s blue eyes bored into me as if injecting me with truth serum, and I found myself saying, “Oh, well, you know … in the past, it also sometimes meant that a family member was out for revenge. Funny, right?”

  TEN

  “Yeah, apparently it wasn’t so funny,” I said, feeling close to tears again as I downed a good third of the gin and tonic Serena put in my hands. Walter pushed a slice of hot pepperoni pizza my way—with jalapeños, the way I li
ked it—and gave me a look of pity when he saw my reddened eyes. We were sitting around my kitchen island, my antique pendant lights casting a warm glow over our tired faces. Winnie’s potted gardenia was in the middle of the island, scenting the room, Agent Turner having allowed me to take it since Winnie herself had brought it downstairs to Homer’s desk long before she was killed. The rest of my little condo was dark, except for the moonlight coming in from my French doors. The clock on my microwave read 11:42 P.M.

  “At least you’re a witness, not a suspect,” Serena said, passing a beer to her boyfriend and serving up a gimlet for herself. “If you’d shown up ten minutes earlier, you’d be in the hoosegow along with Gus.”

  Walter kissed her cheek, looking rumpled in Halloween-themed flannel pajama bottoms and an old gray sweatshirt. “He’s not in jail, honey. He’s just being held for questioning. If he’s not out by now, he will be before the morning.”

  “Oh, well, then good,” Serena said. Besides her throwing a long cashmere cardigan over her silk pajamas, the two of them hadn’t even changed clothes before speeding over to my condo after receiving my call, where I could hardly speak for blubbering. Serena hadn’t even put on a stitch of makeup and her hair was scraped up into a high ponytail—a sight no one ever saw and retained the social credibility to tell about it. She’d planned to call Josephine for me on the way, but I reminded her that Jo had a conference call at four in the morning and needed her sleep. I would fill Jo in tomorrow.

  “What happened after they had you write down your statement?” Serena asked.

  “Didn wite. Fhay recorwed id,” I said through a big bite of pizza, the slight buzz I was feeling enough to help bring my appetite back somewhat after the tragic events of the evening.

  “Come again?”

  “She didn’t write it,” Walter interpreted. “They recorded her making a verbal statement. The police rarely take written statements anymore, if they can help it.”