by Liz Bradbury
Samson shrugged loose his jacket and pulled his collar over to the edge of his shoulder. He was black and blue over most of his skin.
“I could feel the steps, so I dragged myself up, but the door was locked. I tried to rest and I think I passed out again. When I woke up, I could see some kind of purple light coming from round spots in the ceiling. I was glad I wasn’t blind, but it was still so dark. What day is it?”
“It’s Thursday morning.” I looked at my watch. “It’s nearly 7:30.”
“Oh shit, Lois must be out of her mind. I told her I’d be back in an hour on Tuesday night.”
Now he’s thinking of Lois? Do people still use the word fickle?
“Samson,” I said, “we need to get you to the hospital.”
“Yeah, there’s this ringing in my ears and I have a headache. But mostly I’m really hungry. Why would Suzanne push me? She must be out of her mind.”
“Did you see her face?”
“Yeah, I saw her.’
“Her face? You’re sure it was Suzanne? What was she wearing?”
“A dark red coat and a scarf over her head. Shit, it was cold out. It was her Maggie... The ring tone.”
“Samson, all you saw was a shadow with a scarf. If it was Suzanne, then you’re saying she pushed you down the stairs and left you in there to die?”
“No, no. I’m not saying that...” His voice trailed off. He’d been thinking this already, but he didn’t want to admit it out loud.
Kathryn edged over to the top of the steps. “What’s down there?”
“I dunno. I was afraid to go back down there and get lost.”
I pulled my flashlight back out of my pocket and went over to the narrow door. I flashed it around the walls just to see if there was a light switch. That would be a kick in the pants.
Just like the steps we’d taken up to the studio, there were about twenty steep steps down to an irregular stone floor. It was a miracle Samson hadn’t broken anything. It was a miracle he hadn’t died.
In fact, whacking him on the back of the head with... I looked around. There was a broken face mold with a small dark flaky stain on it on a shelf near the door. The big hunk of plaster must have sent Samson arcing into space before he began to roll. I didn’t say attempted murder, but I thought it so loud, Kathryn looked at me pointedly.
Halfway down the stairs a thin chain dangled from a ceiling fixture. I could just barely reach it with the tips of my fingers. I pulled gently and a low wattage bulb bathed the brick-walled room in yellow light.
There were flakes of the plaster mold and some lack of bathroom stains under the steps. Well, it had been two days.
I went carefully down the stairs, trying to breathe minimally. The space was the beginning of a rough tunnel that went... I took out my compass... east. But it ended in a pile of rubble that filled the tunnel to the ceiling only about twenty feet along.
It looked as though Victoria had used this space for storage. There was a wide door under the stairs. I opened it and swept the flashlight around. A large room that extended far back under the studio held dozens of pallets with stacks of canvas bags. The first few pallets were marked PLASTER, but the rows beyond were all marked Red, Porcelain, and Terra Cotta CLAY. I lifted one of the heavy bags near the door out of my way. It tore open, puffing plaster dust into the air. I made my way carefully between the stacks toward the back of the room just to be sure no one was hiding there or that there wasn’t another door that led out to the street or something. No luck. I tried to avoid stepping in the plaster dust, but I was tracking it all over.
I marveled that Victoria had amassed so much material. Of course the clay pieces in the studio would have taken hundreds of pounds to make. I wondered what would happen to this stuff. Using Victoria Snow’s clay to make a sculpture would be inspiring.
I stepped out and closed the door. I could see marks where Samson had fallen in the dust on the floor. Some of the step edges were freshly splintered and scraped. There were also marks that looked like someone had dragged something from the storage closet to the steps.
The rubble that blocked the other end of the room seemed new. There was rebar in it. It must have been some kind of cave-in that happened after Victoria died. When she was alive, this tunnel probably connected to the main one. There was an old-fashioned four-wheel cart against the other wall that Victoria could have used to bring in all this material.
I couldn’t understand why Victoria would choose a workplace with no daylight. It seemed unnatural. She had to get here by climbing under a coffin in a graveyard through a sewer tunnel. Yet Victoria had created some great works here. There’s a moral in this somehow.
She must have been pretty spry to have worked this space into her later years, I mused. Maybe she’d had a helper, perhaps a younger woman who was Victoria’s able right hand, just like the young man who lived with Georgia O’Keeffe as she painted into her nineties. Maybe Victoria hadn’t been as reclusive as everyone supposed.
“Maggie? What are you doing? I think we should get Samson out of here.” Kathryn came partway down the steps.
“Just looking around. Is he OK?”
“I’m OK,” croaked Samson. “I just needed a drink. I want to see where I was. Holy shit, I can’t believe I sat in the dark for two days when I could have just reached up and pulled on the light. Oh crap and there’s a faucet over there too. Do you think that works. Seeing this is making the whole thing worse,” he groaned.
Kathryn said, “We should take him out. He’s still shaky.”
The three of us went back into the studio. Kathryn said, “There’s a strange odor in here. Is it sewer gas?”
“No, that’s not a sewer smell.” I’d noticed it when we first came in. It was faint but I’d smelled that odor before and just like the gawker who can’t turn away from a highway accident, I was drawn to it despite the sense of dread it stirred up. I’d hoped it was just some dead sewer animal that had crawled up the steps. An alligator maybe.
I sniffed again and knew it wasn’t an alligator. I went to the nearest clay crock with a lid on it. It was glazed cast-iron, like a big round bathtub. The cover, a four-foot disk of white glazed earthenware, served to prevent the clay inside from drying out.
I pushed against the lid, lifting its slight lip over the edge. It was heavy, but the smooth glazed surfaces slid against themselves easily. The lid had a good seal. That’s why the smell had been faint. As soon as the top was pushed back, the dusty clay and plaster smell of the studio was replaced by the odor of death. The overhead bulbs cast light into the open vat. The three of us looked in.
Samson barked a short scream. Kathryn took two giant steps backwards and I felt a rush of sadness that filled my eyes with white and then a rim of tears.
“Oh my lord,” said Kathryn. “It can’t be Victoria Snow.” She put her hand over her nose and mouth. “Who is it?”
“It’s Suzanne. Suzanne Carbondale,” I said softly.
Samson roused and rushed forward. Then he turned, vomited the quart of the water he’d just drunk, and crumpled to the floor in a dizzy faint. He roused in a second and began sobbing, “No... Oh no.”
“We have to get out of here. It’s a crime scene. I need to call the police,” I said firmly.
Kathryn came closer again and looked over my shoulder into the vat. “Crime? Are you sure? She might have just fallen down the steps like Samson and hit her head, or... broken her neck.” Kathryn whispered the last part. The closeness to sudden death was sinking in, but she was trying to be analytical. I found myself pleased by that, but Kathryn was missing a key point.
“Kathryn, she didn’t die naturally and then crawl into this vat and pull the lid over herself.”
I leaned in. Suzanne’s body lay on its side with knees drawn up nearly to her chest. She was wearing a red and green sweater with reindeer on it and a green enamel wreath pin. Her head was against the side of the vat. There was a lot of blood on her shoulder. It had stiffened the collar
of her shirt. I took out my flashlight and played it over Suzanne’s body slowly, then closer to her neck and the area around it. I took a pen from my jacket pocket and pushed back her collar. There were two wounds at the base of her neck. Suzanne’s blood had stained the side of the vat wall and pooled on the surface below.
I turned and swept the flashlight around the outside of the vat. There was plaster and clay dust on the oak flooring.
I looked back at Samson, who was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands, his head nodding as though he was dizzy again. He looked so white he seemed opaque.
“Um...” I whispered.
Kathryn took the hint and came closer. I said in a voice inaudible to Samson, “Looks like she died in there. Which either means someone forced her in there and then killed her, or she was knocked out, put in there and then finished off. There are neck wounds. That’s where the blood came from.”
“How do you know she was killed in there?”
“You can see footprints and drag marks but no blood stains on the floor. It’s clean but not washed. If it had been washed, the dust would be smeared and caked. It’s murder.”
Kathryn turned toward Samson, then back to me. “I doubt he did it. There’s no blood on him. Well, I guess he could have fallen down the stairs when he was trying to leave the crime scene.”
“He could have, but she’s been dead a long time, not just the last two days. Look, she’s wearing a Christmas sweater and pin. I think she’s been in here since just after Jessie saw her on Christmas Eve. If he did it, he’s the stupidest murderer in the world. Coming back down here and getting locked in with the corpse so close by? And he’s been pining away for her for the last six weeks.”
Kathryn whispered back, “What if he came down here to hide the evidence, wipe up the fingerprints. Maybe tried to hide the body and then he fell down the steps and couldn’t get out?”
“Possible. But then we’re posed with a pretty big question. How did he manage to lock himself in?”
“Oh, yes, there’s that,” said Kathryn, looking at Samson.
“So if he wasn’t following Suzanne, who was the person he followed?”
“The killer? Maybe she was trying to implicate him?”
“Maybe. But we really have no evidence it was a woman.” Another look at Samson’s chalk-white face changed my tone. “Samson looks very shocky. People can die of shock. We don’t have time to get him down the steps and out the tunnel. We have to get some EMTs to him fast.”
I took out my cell and tried to get a signal. No bars. I climbed the steep steps that ascended from the basement to the ground floor of the Majestic to see if I could get a signal near the windows. At the top was an archway blocked by a wall of newer brick. The opening had been sealed long ago but long after the original building had been built. No secret passage through it though. Victoria had probably walled this door frame up herself. Kind of a dramatic way to ensure privacy.
Holding the railing tightly, I leaned over and held the phone near the ground-level windows. One bar. Not enough to make a call. Probably enough to send a text but how could I explain this all in a text message?
I surveyed the studio from this aerial view and spied the tools I needed. I climbed back down, grabbed a big cold chisel, an extra heavy ball-peen hammer, and an eight-pound sledge. You don’t have to be MacGyver if all the tools for the job are right there. There were even some old-fashioned goggle-like safety glasses to protect my eyes. Farrel’s insistence on safety gear had successfully rubbed off on me. I also hoped that none of these things had anything to do with the murder because if so I was destroying evidence, but I really didn’t want Samson to die from shock and dehydration; he needed an ambulance.
I carried everything back up the steep steps, wiped off the glasses and put them on. I took a moment to balance myself. Then I pounded the chisel into the mortar and wished for only one course of bricks. I loosened a four-brick square pretty quickly. I called down to Kathryn and Samson to stand back in case any bricks fell into the studio.
Of course the other side might be a big tank of water or a room full of pea coal. The flow of either would knock me right down the stairs. Ah well, Carpe Diem. I moved down a step, drew back the sledge, and slammed the middle of the loosened bricks.
The sledge crashed through the bricks so easily that it almost flew out of my hands through the wall. I threaded it back to my side and smashed at it again less forcefully, making a larger opening. The wall was only one course thick and seemed to be more for show than security. After all, nobody really questions a brick wall.
A few more whacks and I had a hole I could squeeze through.
Kathryn called up to me, “Where does it come out?”
I took out my flashlight, leaned into the hole, and looked around. “Looks like a prop room.”
I crawled through the opening then poked my head back. “I’ll be right back.”
*******
“How do you know it’s Suzanne Carbondale?” asked Sgt. Ed O’Brien.
“Hair color, clothes, wedding ring, that bracelet, and honestly, Ed, her face, even though... How long does the Coroner think?
“Maggie, it always amazes me that you can stand this stuff. Makes me want to toss my cookies.”
“I worked highway patrol.”
“Oh yeah, right.”
Truth was, though, seeing someone like this whom I’d known and cared about was not settling well in my stomach, much less my soul.
O’Brien answered, “Being in the airtight vat is making it tougher, but the Coroner’s saying about six weeks. Might have been more. Couldn’t have been much less.”
“It couldn’t have been much more, Ed. People saw her six weeks ago.”
“Must have been a pretty girl. Yeah, Henshaw said he saw her.” O’Brien paused to look around. He said idly, “Sure have been a lot of witnesses barfing lately.”
“He just drank a lot of water.”
“I see that,” O’Brien said, scanning the floor.
“I thought Marc Freligh was taking over this case,” I said.
“What do you mean this case? Marc’s on the Skeleton Park case.”
I explained about Frankie, the antique market sales, and the crypt.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m betting the brass aren’t going to believe this connection. But I’ll call Marc in. It’s his case now. Kind of interesting though; maybe we could work together on it.”
“When you do call Mark, you and he might consider keeping the fact that Henshaw’s still alive a secret for now. Tell Henshaw and his wife to lie low for a few days. I’m betting whoever clocked him believes he’s dead and that can be an advantage sometimes.”
“Yeah, OK, I see your point. For a few days anyway,” said O’Brien.
“How did she die? Could the M.E. tell?”
“Major bruise on the back of her head. Probably knocked out here, dragged into the vat and then stabbed. Killer could have thought she was already dead when he put her in, but then she moved or something and... Well, you can see where the blood is,” said O’Brien.
“You know, someone’s been making it seem as though she was still alive. My friend Jesse got an email from her last week. And someone’s updating her Facebook page, saying she’s in Mexico researching a new book.”
“Really? Talk about a virtual world. I’ll have the tech guys trace back the updates to the person making them.”
“Hard to do. They’ll just show that she was making them.”
Ed sighed. “Age old question, Maggie...”
“Who profits?”
“Uh huh.”
“The husband to some extent, though there isn’t much to inherit. They rented their house from the college. They weren’t rich. I guess he’ll get their book royalties, but how much could that be? Still... the best motives are money and love and I think Suzanne was about to leave him. So he may have been engulfed by a jealous rage, though he really wasn’t the type.” I thought for a minute. “Prob
lem though, Ed...”
“What?”
“Carbondale was in England presenting a seminar on US Civil War history during the holidays. And people saw Suzanne after he left. Heck, I even saw her after Gabe left on the 20th. If the Coroner is committed to six weeks or more...”
O’Brien sighed again. “So the husband didn’t do it? That’s a novelty.”
Fenchester’s finest smashed a larger hole through the brick wall in the Majestic’s prop room and cleared the bricks away. Using that access was easier than the underground tunnel.
EMTs took Samson Henshaw to the hospital. He was back on the verge of dehydration, having lost the water he’d drunk to chunder, as Nora Hasan would probably say.
When he was stable, Samson used my phone to tell his faithful wife Lois he’d be at Fenchester General in a few minutes. She wailed with joy and relief when she heard his voice, then told him to thank me for finding him. O’Brien suggested to them both that they avoid talking to the press and stay under wraps for awhile.
I guessed my finding Samson a few hours from death counted rather heavily on the pro side when it came to Lois’s evaluation of my work. With Suzanne out of the picture forever, Lois would probably be stuck with Samson again, which seemed to be what she wanted. I thought about that carefully as Samson tried to get Lois off the phone.
Kathryn was shaken by the sight of the dead body but braced up to say she’d stay through the crime scene investigation.
“No, Kathryn, don’t stay here. They probably won’t let you anyway. It’ll be grim and tedious, and besides... I think you should go and tell Jessie and Farrel about Suzanne.”
“And Gabe?”
“The police will send someone to tell him.”
“Do they think he did it?” she said quietly.
“They always think the spouse did it. But he has an alibi.”
Kathryn left for Farrel and Jessie’s. I promised to meet her there.
By the time Sgt. Marc Freligh arrived, Ed O’Brien and I were surveying the sub-basement storage area. When the CSI team had finished with it, they confirmed that Henshaw had been in there for two days. I really didn’t want to know how they’d figured that out.
