by Alice Duncan
Fiddlesticks! “Well, maybe she was blackmailing somebody! I’m sure this is no simple heart attack. It’s up to the police to investigate!”
He grunted, once again reminding me of Ernie, but darned if my suspicions weren’t confirmed in the next instant. Well, at least one of them was.
Dr. Fitch was leaning over Mrs. Hartland’s back. He’d lifted her hair and was squinting at her collar when he said in a distracted voice, “Detective, you should see this.”
With a glare meant, I’m sure, to keep me in my place and across the room from the body, Mr. Bigelow walked over to the doctor. Since I grew up with an expert at keeping young women in their places, and Mr. Bigelow didn’t even come close to my mother’s expertise in the activity, I followed him—very softly, so he wouldn’t hear me—across the thick Persian carpet.
“What is it?”
“Do you see this?” The doctor gestured at the back of Mrs. Hartland’s dress.
I stood on tiptoes and peered over Mr. Bigelow’s shoulder. Fortunately for me, he was bending over the body because he’s much taller than I. I didn’t see anything.
“Do I see what? I don’t see anything.”
“This,” the doctor repeated, pointing.
“Ah. Yeah, I see it.”
Finally I saw it, too: a speck, no more than a pinprick, really, on the back of her gown.
“So what? What is it?” Mr. Bigelow asked.
Dr. Fitch straightened, putting a hand to the small of his back and groaning slightly. Immediately I straightened, too, and pretended I hadn’t been snooping. I smiled innocently, but I don’t think my precaution was necessary. He didn’t even seem to notice me.
“On her dress here. What is it?” Mr. Bigelow repeated.
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s a speck of blood. And you see here?” With another groan, he bent over the body once more, and pulled back the neck of Mrs. Hartland’s dress. “That speck corresponds with this tiny puncture wound here. Right here, at the base of her neck, above the left clavicle.”
“Hmm.”
Aha! A puncture above the left clavicle! That must mean . . . poison!
Hmm. I wondered what kind of poison killed people so quickly. It must have worked extremely fast, since she didn’t even cry out during the séance. She only fell forward onto the table without even releasing the hands of her neighbors. It occurred to me that someone ought to ask Miss Lloyd and Mr. Carstairs if they felt a spasm in her fingers or anything like that. I hoped Mr. Bigelow would think of querying them about the possibility. Perhaps I’d just give him a hint.
“So what does that mean?” Mr. Bigelow frowned at the doctor.
“She must have been pricked with something.” Dr. Fitch gently lifted Mrs. Hartland’s head and gazed at her face. Her right cheek had been resting on the table, and I noticed it was turning purple. Was that a symptom of poisoning? I longed to ask, but didn’t quite dare.
“I don’t know if it matters. Could have been a mosquito.” The doctor shrugged.
I longed to protest, but didn’t want either man to kick me out of the room.
“Could be anything,” Mr. Bigelow said, nodding.
The doctor sighed and reached for his black bag. “I won’t be able to tell you much until I get the body to my office. I’ll be able to do a more thorough examination there. Right now all I can tell you for certain is that the poor woman is deceased.”
“Yeah,” said Mr. Bigelow. “She sure is.”
“My post-mortem examination will undoubtedly tell us more, although it’s probably just a heart attack.”
“But you will check into that puncture wound, won’t you?” I said, unable to control myself a second longer. “She might well have been poisoned.”
Both men turned to look at me, and neither one of them with favor. I cursed my too-ready tongue even as I lifted my chin. “She was a famous woman,” I declared. “She dealt in scandal and gossip. It’s absolutely possible that someone wanted to stop her from revealing secrets.”
Dr. Fitch and Mr. Bigelow exchanged a glance. Dr. Fitch shut his black bag with a snap. “I will perform a thorough examination, young lady. You needn’t worry about my competence.”
“Oh, I wasn’t—”
“Yeah,” said Mr. Bigelow. “If there’s anything to find, Dr. Fitch will find it.”
Darn it! “I wasn’t questioning your competence, Dr. Fitch. Really. I only wanted to make sure that you don’t overlook anything.”
“I am not in the habit of overlooking things, my good woman.”
Oh, boy, I guess I’d put my foot in it that time. But darn it, nobody seemed to be taking the possibility of murder seriously, and I thought it was a highly likely possibility. “I’m sure that’s so,” I said meekly. “I only wanted—”
“Yes, yes,” said Dr. Fitch. “I understand.” He stomped out of the room.
With a sigh, I gave him a couple of seconds, then left the room after him.
Mr. Bigelow followed me. He was chuckling, the rat.
I soon forgot all about the detective’s inappropriate sense of humor, however. Shortly after the doctor left the house and the police had allowed the séance attendees to go, I realized I’d have to call a taxicab in order to get home since Mr. Francis Easthope, who had promised to escort me to Chloe’s house, was occupied with his mother.
“Don’t bother with a cab, Miss Allcutt,” Mr. Bigelow said, surprising me. “I’ll take you home.”
A police car. With lights on the roof. “Oh, but—”
“I’ll take you home,” he repeated with such emphasis that I knew it would be useless to argue.
Thus it was that I arrived at my sister Chloe’s house in a police car, driven thereto by a detective on the Los Angeles Police force, and I faced the appalling task of relating the events of my evening to Chloe and Harvey. Worse, I had to tell my mother.
At least the auto’s roof lights weren’t flashing and the siren wasn’t blaring.
Chapter Seven
“This,” declared my mother in her most austere and commanding voice, “is the limit. You are to cease disobeying your father and me at once, Mercedes Louise Allcutt. You have no business with a job.” She said the word job as if it were a crawly bug that had landed in her soup.
“I’m twenty-one years old, Mother,” said I staunchly. “I love my job, and I shall keep it.” At that point in time, I fear I sounded a good deal more staunch than I felt.
“You are a disobedient child,” said she regally. “You are being utterly ridiculous. At your age, you need to be thinking about marrying and starting a family. You have no business pretending to be of the working classes.”
“I’m not pretending to be anything,” I cried, feeling beleaguered and overwhelmed. “I am a working woman! If that makes me one of the working classes, I guess I am. And I’m proud of it, too.”
“You’re taking a job away from someone who needs it,” Mother declared. I guess she figured that if she couldn’t get to me using her tried-and-true bullying tactics, she’d shame me into quitting.
Well, it wasn’t working. “Mr. Templeton had been searching for weeks for a secretary before he hired me. If somebody else wanted the job, she could have had it before I even moved to California.”
“Mr. Templeton.” Yet another couple of words that sounded dirty in her mouth. “Your precious Mr. Templeton is no better than a thug.”
I gaped at her. “A thug! How do you figure that?”
She eyed me as if I’d turned into the crawly bug swimming in her soup. “You know very well what I mean, Mercedes Louise.”
“No, I do not!”
“A private investigator,” she said with a sniff. “What kind of occupation is that for a young man to pursue?”
“A perfectly respectable one. A useful one. A necessary one,” I said fervently. In truth, it sounded to me as if Mother was grasping at straws, and I felt minimally more secure in my position as part of the worker proletariat. I mean, a thug? Ernie? Good heav
ens, what next?
“Fiddlesticks. You’re being irresponsible and impulsive, and you have no business trying to persuade me that you’re anything but a frivolous young woman who is behaving abominably.”
“I’m sorry if you believe I’m behaving abominably, Mother, but I still see no harm in my holding a job. In fact, I believe I’m contributing more to the world by working in it than by presiding over social teas in Boston. That is the sort of thing I consider frivolous.”
“Nonsense. And the people with whom you now associate are completely inappropriate.”
“Inappropriate? How do you figure that?” I was both angry and curious at this point.
“Your precious employer actually carries a gun,” said my mother, adding emphasis to her condemnatory statement with an eloquent shudder.
“He doesn’t carry a gun all the time. Most of the time it’s locked in his desk drawer.”
“That doesn’t make his use of a deadly weapon any more appropriate. He has a gun, and he uses it in his work.” She spoke as if Ernie’s owning a gun put a capper on the conversation.
I wasn’t buying it. “Good heavens, Mother, Father owns a gun, if it comes to that. What’s more, he and his friends go out hunting at least once a year, searching for animals they aim to kill that they don’t even need for food!”
“Hunting is a sport, Mercedes Louise,” said my mother coldly.
“I think hunting is disgusting,” I said bravely. No matter that it was the truth and that I felt sorry for the poor deer and quail and whatever else my father and his cronies slaughtered. They had no need to slaughter anything because we had plenty of money to buy food.
“You, young woman, are being absurd. There’s a vast difference between hunting for sport and carrying a gun intended to be used against human beings.”
I didn’t like the way she’d put that, but I went on anyhow. “Ernie needs his gun because the bad guys carry guns. Ernie has never used his gun since I’ve known him. That’s more than you can say for the criminal element. Why, every day you read about Tommy-gun toting bootleggers shooting innocent people on the streets.”
“It’s the job of the police to deal with the criminal element,” Mother pointed out.
“They aren’t always successful.” I saw no need to mention that the last three cases Ernie had worked on—all of his cases, in fact, since the Ned affair—had been spying on unfaithful spouses and attempting to gather information in divorce cases. That sort of thing sounded sordid even to me, although it was a necessary function, I guess, in some circles. Of course, the mere mention of the word divorce would give my mother a spasm. Divorce was unheard of in her circle. Divorced people were ostracized and—
But wait.
According to Chloe, divorce might well be the reason Mother was here right this minute, making my life miserable.
When that thought occurred to me, I blurted out, “Perhaps you should hire a private investigator, Mother. You could probably take Father to the cleaners if you had proof of his liaison with his secretary.”
It was as if the world stopped spinning. The entire household—it only consisted of Mother, Chloe, Harvey, Buttercup (who was snuggled in my arms and giving me a necessary degree of comfort) and me—froze. A gasp went up from the human occupants of the room, and Buttercup uttered a tiny “yip,” probably because I squeezed her rather tightly the next second, when I realized what I’d said. Curse my tongue!
Straight as an ancient oak, Mother sat, staring at me with eyes like frozen flames. Chloe and I had inherited our blue eyes from her, although neither Chloe nor I could make our eyes look like that. With a voice so strained it quavered slightly, Mother said, “Mercedes Louise Allcutt, I had known before I came here to visit you and your sister that you had gone wild. I never expected to discover that you had become so utterly degraded as now seems to be the case. I will thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, young lady.”
I could have said the same to her—well, except for the “young lady” part—but I’d already said entirely too much. I did not, however, lower my chin. Darn it, there was nothing wrong with my holding a job. And it certainly wasn’t my fault somebody had died during the séance that night. Or that Father was having a fling with his secretary.
It was Chloe who spoke next, nearly surprising me to death. “Mother, I think you’re taking this much too seriously. Mercy loves her job. Lots of women work nowadays. There’s nothing wrong with it.” God bless my sister as a saint.
To my absolute shock, Harvey backed her up. “We employ many young women at the studio, Mrs. Allcutt. We couldn’t run the place without them. Women have added immeasurably to the effectiveness of our workforce.”
From everything I’d read, women also came cheaper than men so the studio was probably saving money, but I didn’t point that out to anybody. I was too grateful to my wonderful sister and her equally wonderful husband for coming to my defense.
Eyeing the three of us with motherly scorn, Mother said, “The women in our family, Mr. Nash, do not work. They maintain their places in society by fulfilling the duties thereof.”
I’d had enough. Rising, with Buttercup in my arms for the aforementioned comfort’s sake, I said, “I don’t care for the duties thereof, Mother. In fact, I think they’re stupid. I like my job. I’m keeping it. And Ernie is a fine, upstanding man, earning his living in a profession closely allied with the one he held in the police department.”
Mother’s eyes went huge. “He was a policeman? Good God, child, how much lower can a man sink?”
Very well, so Mother was thinking of all the Irish cops in Boston—who weren’t low, darn it, but you could never get Mother to admit it. It’s just that back east, there’s a prevailing attitude among the so-called upper crust that Irish immigrants and their offspring are somehow less proper than the rest of us. Silly prejudice if you ask me, but nobody did. Sometimes it seemed as if nobody ever asked my opinion about anything, but only attempted to dictate to me.
“According to you, I’ve already hit bottom,” I said, feeling spiteful. “So you might as well write me off as a lost cause.”
And with that I left the living room, climbed the stairs to my bedroom, entered it, and collapsed on my bed, hugging Buttercup the whole time. She knew I was troubled, and she kissed me to show me that she loved me. I was ever so glad I’d bought her, even though she’d cost more than I earned in a week working for Ernie.
* * * * *
The next day I left for my job before anybody else, except Mrs. Biddle the housekeeper and Buttercup, was out of bed. I thanked my lucky stars for it as I paid the engineer at Angel’s Flight my nickel and the little railroad car made the steep descent from the heights of luxury to the middle of Los Angeles.
My chest ached, and I knew it was because the altercation with my mother had left me hurt and angry. I also knew my mother would never understand the choices I’d made for myself in life, so I might as well just forget about trying to please her. But it’s difficult to write off one’s mother as a lost cause, as I suggested she do with me.
I mean, we all want the approval of our parents, don’t we? Even when we don’t really approve of them.
Nuts. By the time I walked from Angel’s Flight to the Figueroa Building, said good morning to Mr. Buck, and entered the lobby, I felt like crying. When I saw Lulu, who truly was crying, I reminded myself that I wasn’t the only person in the world with problems. What’s more, although I might well have family problems, at least I had money, which was more than Lulu and her brother had.
I hurried to the receptionist’s desk. “Oh, Lulu, did Rupert tell you what happened last night?”
She sniffled into her handkerchief. Lulu always wore interesting clothes. Today, she was clad in a bright pink, drop-waist dress with red flowers on it and a big red bow on the side. She nodded, and I noticed that not only had her mascara become smudged, but she hadn’t repainted her fingernails. She generally spent her days filing and polishing them, but this m
orning she’d evidently been crying instead of fiddling with her nails.
“Oh, Mercy, Rupert’s so worried! I just know the coppers are going to blame him for that woman’s death.”
Puzzled, I said, “But why would they do that? Last night they kept saying it was a heart attack.”
She shook her bottle-blond head. “Oh, they’ll find some way to pin it on him. They always do.”
They did? I didn’t understand. That being the case, I said, “I don’t understand, Lulu.”
She shook her head some more. “You don’t know.”
“Why don’t you tell me, then?”
She eyed me for a second, then apparently decided I could be trusted. “Don’t tell nobody, okay?”
Not only would I not tell nobody, I wouldn’t tell anybody, which was more to the point. “I promise,” said I, figuring I was safe in doing so, since whom would I tell?
Lowering her voice, she said in a harsh whisper, “Will has a record.”
A record. I had several records myself. And a Victrola upon which to play them. Then the meaning of her words struck me. “You mean he has a police record?”
She nodded. “Yeah. In Oklahoma.”
And neither one of the Mullins siblings had bothered to tell me. I’d placed a crook in Mr. Francis Easthope’s residence, all unawares. Boy, maybe my mother was right about me. Maybe I was irresponsible and impulsive and not to be trusted on my own in the big city. How discouraging.
“Do you mean to tell me that your brother is a criminal and you didn’t tell me?” I regret to say my words were shrill.
Lulu flinched. “He’s not a criminal! He played a prank and got arrested. The problem is, he left the state before his trial, so he’s . . . well, I guess, technically, he’s a fugitive.”
A fugitive from justice. Things just kept getting better. I wanted to thump Lulu and her precious brother both. “What kind of prank?”
“He and a friend knocked over an outhouse on Halloween. The bad thing is that somebody was in it at the time, and when the outhouse fell over, it landed on him and he broke his arm.”
