The Red Queen Dies

by Frankie Y. Bailey

  “Not to say there were no pro-slavery Southern sympathizers here in Albany,” McCabe said.

  “Definitely not to say that, Detective McCabe. The North has never been pure in its ideology.”

  “But getting back to Vivian Jessup’s reaction to the story you told her,” McCabe said. “You said she was ‘intrigued.’”

  “Yes. And a few months later, she contacted me because she had this idea for a play and she wanted to know if I would be interested in doing a theater lab here in Albany.”

  “What’s a theater lab?” Baxter asked.

  “That’s when a play is tried out, often with student actors. It gives the playwright and the director an opportunity to work through any problems. Since this was going to be Vivian’s first attempt to write a play and the encounter had happened here in Albany, she thought UAlbany would be the perfect place to do the lab.”

  McCabe said, “Speaking of the ‘it happened here’ aspect, didn’t I hear on the news that the mayor intended to feature the play as a part of the yearlong events?”

  “Yes, she did. She and Vivian met at a UAlbany reception. The mayor was really excited about the idea of having a Tony Award–winning actress involved in her PR campaign.”

  “Now that we have the background, could you tell us what we’re going to see in the footage?” McCabe said.

  Noel glanced at the wall. “This is a ‘work-in-progress’ session that Vivian did for the Theatre Department. We post these for the students and anyone else who is interested. She’s talking here about her inspiration for the play and what she wanted to achieve with it. And about her creative process.”

  “Okay,” McCabe said. “Could we watch now? And then we’ll follow up if we have more questions.”

  Noel waved her hand toward the wall, and Vivian Jessup completed the gesture of brushing back a strand of her shoulder-length red hair. The gesture seemed unconscious, made as she was focused on conveying what it was about Booth, Lincoln, and Henrietta Irving that had made her go home and start to jot down notes. And when she’d read more about Lincoln and his assassination, learned that the young couple who had joined the president and his wife in their box at Ford’s Theatre had been a major and his fiancee from Albany, that the soldier who had shot Booth when he was trapped also had been from Albany, or close enough, from nearby Troy, she had gotten more and more excited about telling the story. Not just Albany’s recurring role in the Lincoln-Booth saga but also Irving’s story. She had imagined Henrietta Irving looking back and realizing that she had shared her bed with a future assassin, that if she had killed Booth that night in Albany …

  Vivian Jessup pushed back her hair again and said, her British accent stronger, “There are moments when our lives intertwine and connect. Moments when we encounter each other, when a gesture, a word, a decision to do one thing rather than another changes everything. And we move through our lives, unaware of how what we did or didn’t do affected other lives … unless something happens, as with Booth and Lincoln, and then we go back and we try to reconstruct. And we think, What if. What if I had done that or this? Or been able to do that? In my play, Henrietta Irving imagines, looks back.…” Jessup shook her head, smiled, and pointed to the open journal in front of her. “I was no more coherent when I tried to muddle through this in my writing log. But I hope the play captures the essence of what I want to convey.”

  “That’s all,” Noel said. “She planned to record a longer version later.”

  McCabe said, “Where was she in the production process? Had the play been performed in the theater lab?”

  “Not yet. Vivian had a couple of months before beginning rehearsals for her next play—sorry … the play she was starring in, not the one she had written. Having that hiatus, she intended to spend two or three days a week here in Albany, working on ‘John and Henrietta.’”

  “That was the name of the play?”

  “The working title. She wanted to work it through, see it onstage.…” Noel’s eyes filled with tears. “She was so excited about getting started. We had scheduled the first public performance for November twenty-third. The mayor was going to be here to introduce…” Noel lowered her head into her hands. Voice muffled, she said. “I saw Vivian on Wednesday. We met here that morning and talked about what we wanted to do next Monday, with the students.”

  “What time did she leave?” Baxter asked. “Did she mention her plans?”

  Noel raised her head. “She got here at a few minutes after nine. We were here until just before eleven, when I had to leave for my eleven o’clock class. She said she was going back to the hotel and work. And later, she was going to have dinner with Ted Thornton and his fiancée.”

  “She knew Ted Thornton?” Baxter said.

  “Yes. She and Thornton are—were old friends. She had told him about the play. If it did well here and in repertory theaters, she thought she might persuade him to back it on Broadway.”

  Baxter shot McCabe a glance.

  She was pretty sure he was thinking that this was even bigger than they’d thought, not only a Broadway actress but a billionaire businessman/adventurer to boot.

  And Ted Thornton’s name did keep popping up.

  McCabe said, “Is there anything else you can tell us, Professor Noel?”

  Noel frowned. “I’m not sure this is important. But Vivian mentioned that she had been talking to a collector about a Dalí edition of Alice.”

  “A what?” Baxter said before McCabe had to reveal her ignorance.

  “Salvador Dalí,” Noel said. “The Surrealist artist. He did the illustrations for a limited edition of Alice in Wonderland.”

  “So these editions are rare?” McCabe asked.

  “From what Vivian told me, a mint edition is hard to come by. The one she had was stolen when the apartment she used to live in was burglarized. She had it in a glass case, which must have suggested it was valuable.”

  “When did this burglary happen?” McCabe asked.

  “Years ago. She had just moved to New York City and was sharing a flat with two roommates.”

  “And she could afford a Dalí edition?” Baxter said.

  Noel wrinkled her nose. “I think it was a gift from a friend.”

  McCabe said, “This friend wouldn’t happen to have been Ted Thornton?”

  “Oh, no, she hasn’t known Thornton that long. I mean not as long ago as when she first moved to New York. She mentioned meeting him at a Hollywood party when she was out there for her role as Lady Macbeth. That movie came out about ten years ago.”

  “Okay,” McCabe said. “If we could go back to the collector who contacted her. Did she mention a name?”

  Noel shook her head. “Only that he lived here in Albany and he said he had both a Dalí edition and one of the stamp cases that Lewis Carroll designed.”

  Baxter said. “And was she planning to meet this collector to get a look at the book and the stamp case?”

  “She said he was being cagey. She wasn’t sure he actually had what he claimed to have.” Noel pushed her fingers through her hair. “She said he contacted her after the interview she did the last time she was in Albany. It was a Public Radio interview, and the interviewer had asked about her Alice collection.”

  “How did this collector contact her?” McCabe asked.

  “I think he contacted her through her publicist, who forwarded his tag to Vivian. That was after she had gotten back to the City. He offered to show her the book and stamp case the next time she came to Albany.”

  “But she wasn’t sure he was for real?” Baxter said.

  “He had this story about a distant cousin who’d been a huge Alice fan and how he’d been thrilled to inherit the items when the cousin died. Vivian thought that if he was for real, he was going to try to get as much money out of her as he could. She told him she’d rather they meet in the City and have the items authenticated. He was balking about going down there when she was going to be right here in Albany. She offered to pay for a hotel ov
ernight. She was waiting to hear back from him.”

  “And that was where things stood on Wednesday when you spoke to her?” McCabe said.

  Noel nodded. “Yes. She mentioned it because she was going back to the City on Thursday and she hadn’t heard from him. She really wanted that Dalí edition.”

  Baxter said, “Did she want it enough to agree to meet the collector here?”

  “I don’t know.” Noel looked from McCabe to Baxter. “But I thought I should mention it, in case … I mean, the man may be perfectly legitimate, but…”

  “But we need to find him and confirm that,” McCabe said. “Professor, when we searched Ms. Jessup’s hotel room, there was no sign of any type of communication device. No ORB.”

  Noel said, “She had her ORB with her when I saw her on Wednesday. She … Do you think the person who killed her took it?”

  “That’s possible,” McCabe said. “Did Ms. Jessup also have a purse or handbag with her on Wednesday?”

  “Yes, a beautiful bag. Red leather in the shape of a rose. She said she’d bought it the last time she was home in London.”

  McCabe said, “The clothes we saw in Ms. Jessup’s hotel closet were rather plain. Expensive, but not—”

  “Vivian preferred classic lines in her clothes. But she loved one-of-a-kind accessories.”

  McCabe took her card from her own plain black shoulder bag. “If you should think of anything else, will you contact us?”

  “Yes, absolutely,” Noel said. “Vivian’s daughter—”

  “We’re expecting her in this afternoon.”

  “Vivian adored her daughter and her grandchild. She even adored her son-in-law. Something that many mothers-in-law can’t say.”

  McCabe didn’t ask if Noel had a son-in-law, but from her tone, she suspected she did. “Thank you again, Professor Noel. You’ve been a great help.”

  “I will call if anything else occurs to me. It’s so awful that Vivian should die … be murdered … here in Albany.”

  McCabe said, “But not your fault.”

  “Yes. I know that logically. But right now, it doesn’t help.”

  They left her sitting there at the conference table.

  Outside, Baxter said, “Didn’t I hear your brother works here on campus? You want to stop in and say hello?”

  McCabe shook her head. “He’s probably busy, and so are we. We’d better let the lieutenant know about Vivian Jessup’s dinner engagement with Ted Thornton and see how he wants to handle the interview.”

  “Discreetly?” Baxter said.

  11

  “Go have lunch. I’ll get back to you as soon as I hear from the commander.” Dole ended his call with McCabe and turned back to the detective standing in front of his desk.

  “Pettigrew, you’ve got at least four other cases from last week alone that you ought to be working on. Cases where you have a cooperative victim, or a witness, or a lead. Something. Anything.”

  “I know that, Lou,” Pettigrew said. “But even if the victim isn’t cooperating, we know a crime was committed. We have the attack on-cam—”

  “We have two unidentified men wearing masks and gloves. We have a stolen car that they left in another alley. That’s it.” Dole rubbed his hand over his head. “In case you missed the memo, we’re supposed to be focusing where we can get results.”

  “Just give us another forty-eight hours on this one, Lou.”

  “You’ve got twenty-four. Now, get out of my office and get back to work.”

  “Thanks, Lou,” Pettigrew said.

  Yin looked up from his ORB when Pettigrew sat down at the desk across from his. “We still on it?”

  “Until tomorrow. Got anything?”

  “Research came back with more on Jorgensen. Details of his rise and fall. Nothing we didn’t already know. A phenom by the time he was twenty. Women, wine, and riding high. Then the gambling and getting kicked out of baseball.”

  “It was probably the gambling again,” Pettigrew said.

  “Where does a guy who went bankrupt and was on serious hook to the IRS come up with the kind of money for bets that would bring two professionals looking for him?”

  “Maybe they were making an example of him.” Pettigrew reached for his mug.

  Yin grimaced. “I don’t know how you can drink that stuff.”

  “It’s better than the brand they were trying a couple of weeks ago. If you don’t think about it, it tastes almost like real coffee.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Want to ride over to Jorgensen’s address?”

  “Yeah. The guy lives in a boardinghouse. Maybe his landlady can tell us something.”

  Yin reached for his new hat. “Bachelors in the city. When my great-grandfather first arrived in this country, he lived in a boardinghouse down in the City, on Mott Street. Now boardinghouses are back again.”

  “Did they ever go away?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe they just called them something else for a while.”

  Pettigrew grimaced at the sour taste rising from his esophagus. He opened his desk drawer to find an antacid tablet. His ORB beeped.

  “Detective Pettigrew,” he said, putting it on voice only.

  “Detective Pettigrew, this is Nurse Woods at St. Peter’s.”

  Relieved that it wasn’t his ex-wife calling back, Pettigrew went to visual and a blond woman in a white uniform appeared. “Yes, Nurse Woods?”

  “It’s about the patient you came to see yesterday. Mr. Jorgensen. I’m afraid he died this morning.”

  “Died?” Pettigrew said. “I’m going to put you on speaker so that my partner can hear this.”

  He clicked the ORB into the holder on his desk.

  “What happened?” Pettigrew said to the nurse. “He seemed all right when we interviewed him. Battered from the beating, but not that serious.”

  “Mr. Jorgensen suffered an aneurysm. He died before he could be taken into surgery,” Nurse Woods said. “Because you were investigating the attack on him, the doctor thought you should be informed.”

  “Yes, we should be.”

  “We have some personal items that belonged to Mr. Jorgensen. Apparently, he had no next of kin. Unless the young woman from this morning was a relative.”

  “What young woman?”

  “A young woman called on an old-style cell phone. There was a great deal of static on the line, but she wanted to know how Mr. Jorgensen was doing. When she was asked if she was a relative, she hung up.”

  “Thank you, Nurse Woods. We’ll want to listen to that playback when we stop by to pick up Mr. Jorgensen’s personal items.”

  Pettigrew closed his ORB.

  Yin said, “So now we have a dead ex–baseball player.”

  Pettigrew shook his head. “We’d better let the lou know.”

  “Cheer up,” Yin said. “Maybe he’ll give us more than twenty-four hours on this one now that the vic’s dead.”

  “I wonder who she was,” Pettigrew said. “The young woman who called.”

  12

  To get to Ted Thornton’s house on the hill, McCabe and Baxter drove past the homes of several other members of Albany’s very well to do. Including the Tudor-style mansion owned by a former corporate attorney named Joanne Barker-Channing, who had made her fortune and then founded a monthly “literary salon” in her home. McCabe’s father had sometimes been known to attend, drawn by the highbrow conversation and what he described as the hostess’s “graciousness.”

  “If you got it, flaunt it,” Baxter said as they drove up the landscaped driveway to the home that Thornton had built when he started doing business in Albany.

  “Apparently, the key is to ‘flaunt it’ in good taste,” McCabe said.

  She parked the city-issue sedan they had picked up from the garage after lunch behind the only other car in the circular drive.

  The other car’s hinged upper body had been left up. It lifted on each side from the center to allow the exit of passengers and packages.

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sp; Baxter stood there staring at the car. Then he walked over and circled around it slowly, with reverence.

  McCabe laughed. “Wipe the drool off your chin, Mike, and let’s go in.”

  “Do you know how fast this baby can go?”

  “Fast enough to flap its wings and take off from the ground?”

  “I guess I’m not going to impress you with my collection of classic automobile magazines.”

  “Probably not,” McCabe said. She walked over to the car. “And this looks more futuristic than classic.”

  “A futuristic take on a classic,” Baxter said.

  “Ah, now, I understand, sensei. Ready?”

  “Yeah, let’s get to it.”

  They went up the three steps to the door and McCabe knocked.

  “Hello,” she said as the door swung open. And then she realized no one was there.

  “Mike,” she said, drawing his attention from the car to the empty foyer in front of them and the empty stairway winding up to the balcony above.

  He said, “The guard at the gate called—”

  “Yeah,” McCabe said.

  “Hello,” she said, pitching her voice louder. “Detectives McCabe and Baxter, APD. May we come in?”

  From around the corner, a melodic female voice said, “Please come in, Detectives McCabe and Baxter.”

  A moment later, the speaker glided into view.

  Baxter whispered to McCabe, “Ever see The Jetsons? Rosie, the robot.”

  “I am Rosalind,” the maid said, focusing her metallic gaze on Baxter.

  He coughed. “Sorry. Wrong robot.”

  Rosalind held out her arm in a gesture of welcome. “Please come in.”

  “Thank you,” McCabe said.

  They stepped into the foyer with the two-story ceiling, and Rosalind closed the front door.

  “Please follow me.”

  The maid, clad in trim black uniform and white apron, glided off toward the back of the house. They followed.

  McCabe caught glimpses of expanses of glass and airy rooms with modern furniture in white, black, and brown, with scattered animal prints. Lots of green plants.