Death of Riley

by Rhys Bowen

  Suddenly I felt quite exposed, sitting reading this at the counter. Paddy had wanted me to summon Daniel Sullivan. He had muttered as he lay dying in my arms that it was too big for him. I closed the book, shoved it into my purse and hastily finished my coffee. The first thing now was to take another look at Paddy's office, to see if any of his cases contained mention of RO or LC.

  The sky had cleared while I had been eating, and steam was rising from wet sidewalks. I crossed the square, entered Fifth Avenue and turned into the alleyway. A group of young boys was playing on the cobblestones. As I started up the steps to Paddy's office, their playing ceased and they became unnaturally quiet. I turned to look at them and found they were staring at me.

  “You can't go up there, miss,” one of them called to me.

  “Why not?”

  “It ain't safe. You might fall through the floor.” “The firemen said no one was to go in,” another boy chimed in.

  “The building was on fire?”

  Delighted, excited faces looked up at me and they all started yelling at once …‘There was flames coming out of the window and everything. You shoulda seen it. And then the engine come and the hoses went whoosh and there was a whole lotta smoke.”

  “When was this?” I asked with a sinking heart.

  “Why, they only left half an hour ago. If you'd been here earlier you'd a seen it all.”

  Half an hour ago—the fire engine I had seen galloping past. I ignored the boys' warning and pushed open thedoor. The place stank of smoke, but the back window was wide open, so there was plenty of fresh air coming in. The front office wasn't too badly affected, although walls were singed and blackened and the piles of papers were now reduced to charred scraps. I went through to the back office, treading very cautiously, as the firemen's warning had been valid. The floorboards here were blackened and scorched. They might indeed easily give way. It was here that the fire had raged. Where the file cabinet had been there was a blackened, sodden pile of ash.

  I stood staring at all that was left of Paddy's world. My first thought was annoyance that I hadn't come straight here from the cab, and thus maybe averted this disaster. Then reason took over and I reminded myself that I had been fortunate. I could easily have walked in on a man who had killed once and who would not hesitate to kill for a second time. For it had to have been Paddy's killer who had done this. He had tipped over Paddy's file cabinet on the first occasion, in a frustrated attempt to get inside. And now he must have returned, just to make sure that no evidence remained.

  But evidence of what? I had taken the three folders on his only active cases and they had all proved to be relatively harmless. A closed case would be of no interest to anyone, as Paddy would already have turned over the information to his clients. None of it made sense, and yet I wished I could have had that second look. Maybe I had overlooked something—a secret file hidden among the rest? Anyway, there was no point in moping about it. It was too late now. Paddy's records were effectively destroyed.

  “What do you think you're doing here?” a voice behind me demanded.

  I jumped a mile, realizing I hadn't heard footsteps on the stairs. Surely a good detective is always on guard— clearly I was lacking in many ways. Sergeant Wolski was standing in the doorway, eyeing me coldly. Come to think of it, I don't think he had any other expression, but it was definitely chilling.

  “I heard about the fire and came to see for myself,” I said. “How about you?”

  “It should be quite obvious that this place is no longer safe,” he said. “I want you out of here right now. Until the building owner is notified and decides what he wants to do with this wreck, nobody is to enter. Do you still have your key?”

  I nodded.

  “Then hand it over immediately, please. I'm going to have the front door boarded up, just in case you get any more silly ideas.”

  I handed him the key. “How is the investigation coming along?” I asked. “Have you got any leads?”

  “The investigation is none of your business,” he said, pointing me to the doorway. “But so far the results have not been encouraging.”

  “Wait.” I shook myself free from his grasp on my arm. “If the place is to be condemned, then I'll remove what can be salvaged of Mr. Riley's things.” I went back into the burned room and took down the clothes hanging on the wall: a big cloak, a raincoat, an umbrella, a top hat and a fancy waistcoat. They were all the worse for their recent experience—singed, wet, smoke-damaged. I couldn't think how they might be useful to me—I just didn't want anyone else to get his hands on them. “You've no reason why I shouldn't take these with me?” I asked. “Since they belonged to Mr. Riley's business.”

  Wolski looked at me with distaste. “Take them by all means, although I can't imagine you'd get anything for them if you tried to sell them.”

  It was my turn to look at him with scorn. “I wouldn't be thinking of selling them. They belonged to Mr. Riley's business. I might even decide to keep that business going on my own.”

  A supercilious smile. “Then I wish you good luck.” This time he gripped my arm and led me to the steps. “Just don't think of trying to come back here again.”

  “I don't need to,” I said over my shoulder. “There's nothing here anymore.”

  I walked down the steps and out of the alley, trying to keep the cloak and raincoat from trailing in the mud as I carried them home.

  There was blissful peace as I came into the O'Hallarans' front hall. No Mrs. O'Hallaran to leap out at me, wanting to know my business or tell me gossip, no sound of monster children leaping and screaming upstairs. I tiptoed up the stairs and let myself into my room. My arms felt as if they were about to fall off with the heavy garments in them and I dropped them onto the nearest chair. I was about to sink into the other chair myself when a loud snore from my bed almost had me jumping out of my skin. My bed was occupied by Nuala and Finbar, both out like lights, on their backs and snoring. First my apartment, then my room and now my own bed—this had gone too far.

  I strode across the room and shook them awake. Nuala sat up, arms flailing and demanding, “What? What is it?” in the panicked voice of one woken from deep sleep.

  “What in heaven's name do you think you are doing, sleeping in my bed?” I demanded.

  “You weren't here to use it yourself,” she said in an aggrieved voice.‘The little‘uns went out to play, so Finbar and me thought we'd catch forty winks of peace and quiet. I've been missing out on my sleep, up at all hours ministering to my sick cousin in there.”

  “Catch up on your sleep by all means, but not in my bed,” I said. “Come on, out. I want you both out of there right now.”

  Nuala prodded Finbar, who still seemed to be in total oblivion. At last he jerked awake, spluttering and snorting. “Wassamatter?” he growled.

  “We're being thrown out, Finbar. Miss Ungrateful here, who shared our own bed and board without paying a cent, has decided that she can't spare the use of her bed for a half hour.”

  I said nothing but stood there with arms folded, watching as they got up—Finbar an alarming sight in long grayish combinations—and slunk to my door.

  “And if you had any decency you'd offer to wash the sheets,” I called after them.

  “Wash the sheets!” Nuala retorted. “Anyone would think we had fleas. Come on, Finbar. We know when we're not wanted.”

  She slammed the door behind them. I was so angry and frustrated I felt I could burst. There was no place I could call my own anymore. I was sure she had snooped through my things before now, but knowing that she could be sleeping in my own bed every time I went out was something different again. I wasn't sure what to do— I could complain to the O'Hallarans and have the lot of them thrown out, of course, but that might risk having Seamus and his two out on the streets. And however much I told myself that I wasn't responsible for what happened to them, I still felt responsible.

  I crossed to the window and opened it wide, wanting to blow away the stale sme
ll of their bodies. Fd have to do something with my life to get me out of here—find a paying, respectable job and earn enough money for my own place. Which was essentially back to square one. I did have Paddy's money in the bank, but I still couldn't justify using it outside of business purposes.

  I stripped the bedclothes off the bed and then sank down on the mattress. What a fiasco. What a hopeless failure. Now all the potential evidence was gone, the killer had gotten away scot-free and I was proving to be a rather mediocre investigator. I had learned nothing from the fire, had I? Shouldn't I have looked for fingerprints on the windowsill or worked out what had been used to start the blaze? Useless, I said to myself. You useless bag of wind—I stopped because I was sounding just like my mother again.

  As I got up from the bed, I realized that I had learned one thing from the fire. Sergeant Wolski couldn't have been right after all. If it had been a gangland revenge killing, then the killer would not have needed to come back. He had wanted very badly to make sure that some kind of evidence was destroyed. I knelt down and pulled out Riley's briefcase from under my bed, then I spread out the three folders on the floor. Lord Edgemont and Kitty—what could Paddy possibly have uncovered about that case to put himself in danger? I worked backward through the little black book. Several mentions of LE and KL—times that he came and went from her house, when they were seen together in a box at the theater. All harmless stuff.

  Paddy had hardly started on the embezzlement case, so the file was almost empty. Besides, if the embezzler really had taken a ship to South America a full four days before Paddy was killed, then he could hardly have slipped back to be the killer. I could double-check with the shipping company, just to make sure—but I rather thought that Mr. DeBose would have been thorough in his own attempt to retrieve his money.

  Which left us with the MacDonald case. Elizabeth MacDonald had become hostile when she thought I might have been from a newspaper—could she have something to hide? But then she was the one pressing for the divorce. I sat and thought about this … It was possible that she wanted incriminating evidence against Angus so that he was taken by surprise and didn't have time to dig up any dirt against her. Now that was a thought worth looking into.

  Then I remembered something else—I had observed Angus leaving his office building in a big hurry right after he thought I had gone. And not too long after that, Paddy's office had been burned down. This was the case worth digging into then. There had been some piece of very important evidence hidden in Paddy's office—evidence so vital that it was worth killing for and then burning the place down.

  I went through the MacDonald file again. It contained details of Paddy's original conversation with Elizabeth, a documentation of Angus's movements, including visits to certain clubs and a weekend out at Newport, Rhode Island. Again all seemingly harmless stuff. Nothing. I closed the files and went to put them back in the briefcase when I noticed that something had fallen out. There was a small snapshot caught in the leather fold of the briefcase. I took it out and looked at it with interest. It looked like the sort of snapshot someone would take on holiday—a beach scene with two young men in bathing suits standing in the waves laughing, their arms around each other's shoulders.

  Completely harmless, except that I recognized the two men. One of them was Angus MacDonald and the other was the beautiful Irish playwright, Ryan O'Hare.

  Seventeen

  I shoved the briefcase back under my bed, but I slipped the snapshot inside Riley's little black book and put that back in my purse. Ryan O'Hare was friends with Angus MacDonald. Ryan O'Hare frequented O'Connor's Saloon. And the last cryptic message in Riley's black book had read, “Saw RO with LC at O'CS.” Clearly I would have to investigate the dashing Mr. O'Hare.

  I spent the afternoon at the public library, reading back issues of The New York Times. Ryan O'Hare was proving to be an interesting—and very flamboyant—man. From the snippets I read, I could gather that he had been the darling of the English stage, and of English society, too, until he blotted his copybook by writing a satirical comedy about the Queen and her beloved dead Prince Albert. He hadn't called them by their names, of course. He had made them archduke and archduchess of a fictitious Central European country, but they were still easily identifiable. I mean, when you have a Central European archduchess who insists on sleeping between plaid sheets and says, “We are not amused,” even the slowest brain among theatergoers could put two and two together. The fact that the play was hysterically funny made it even worse. Ryan had had to flee from England in a hurry and was no longer welcome there.

  Since then he had made quite a name for himself in New York. His experience in England hadn't taught him to play it safe. His new plays were bitingly witty and he was learning just enough about his new country to hit hard with his satire.

  Frankly I couldn't wait to meet him. I wasn't sure how I was going to accomplish that, but I did have a place to start from. I knew he frequented O'Connor's; I would just have to start frequenting the saloon for myself. I felt hot all over at the daring nature of my thought. In the eyes of society, women who went into saloons alone were no better than they should be, and asking for trouble. And yet I had sensed that somehow in the neighborhood of Greenwich Village the rules were different. I had seen respectable-looking women drinking there. I'd just have to make sure I looked like a bluestocking, so that nobody got the wrong idea about me.

  There was no point in waiting. I would go to O'Connor's that very evening. However, I was in a dilemma about what to wear. If I was to turn the head of Mr. O'Hare, then presumably I should look my prettiest and most feminine. And yet if I wanted to blend in with the women who I had seen at the saloon, I should have to resemble a frump. I decided to steer a middle course between the two. Unfortunately I owned no black garment. I had no wish to own a black garment since I had had to wear black for a year following my mother's funeral. And yet those women were all dressed mannishly in somber colors. The most mannish and somber I could look would be in my new business suit—already a little the worse for wear after its encounter with a puddle—and the white shirt I had appropriated from the pile of cast-offs meant for Shameyboy. I also sneaked a tie from the same pile. I couldn't see young Seamus needing a tie for a while yet, and the shirt was far too big for him. If I left either of them lying around, no doubt Nuala would help herself to them for her own sons.

  When it came to my hair, I decided that the severe bun did me no justice, and left it curling around my shoulders, tied back with a green ribbon. There was, after all, a difference between looking serious and frumpish.

  I set off for O'Connor's around seven, still a little apprehensive about what might befall me there. At least the landlord knew me and I could presumably seek his protection if needed. With this reassuring thought I strode out along Fourth Street, then got lost yet again in the bewildering maze of backstreets before I came out to the broad thoroughfare of Greenwich Street and located O'Connor's. The place was still half empty and quiet. I realized that the hour might be too early for the artistic set, but I wasn't going to risk walking home across Broadway too late at night. This was merely a foray, to spy out the lay of the land.

  The landlord greeted me with a nod of recognition and brought a glass of ginger beer to my table. I wasn't brazen enough yet to order myself a real beer or a glass of wine. I sat in the corner, trying to make the glass of ginger beer last for a long time, and looked around the room. Even at this hour it was quite smoky and my eyes started to smart. Two women were sitting at the table beside me, and as I turned to glance at them I was horrified to see that one of them was smoking a cigar! It was all I could do not to stare rudely. I wished I had positioned myself across the room, where I could have observed them without having to swivel around. My second brief glance revealed that the lady cigar smoker also had her black hair cropped short to her cheeks and was wearing what looked like a man's embroidered silk smoking jacket.

  I was just digesting these interesting facts when th
ere was a minor commotion in the kitchen and a pale young man wearing an apron was pushed out into the middle of the floor. He stood there looking sheepish and embarrassed. I wondered what sin he could have committed when the landlord came up behind him, clamped a big hand on his shoulder and said, “Here he is then. Come to say good-bye. Young Johnny Masefield's last night here before he goes home to England. Have a drink on the house, then, Johnny lad.”

  The young man gave a hesitant smile and requested a half-pint of bitter.

  “Bitter be damned, boy. Bitter's no good for a sendoff. Here. A tot of Irish whiskey for you—the best money can buy! You'll need it, going back to that heathen country where it rains all the bloody time.”

  The young man grinned, took a swallow, choked, then drained the rest of the glass to the applause of all the customers.

  “What are you going to be doing with yourself in England then, Johnny?” a voice demanded from across the room.