Murder on Black Friday

by P. B. Ryan

  “We would,” Will said. “Thank you.”

  “Of course,” Catherine said, “not everyone made appointments. Philip often had callers who just showed up unannounced. We can go directly up to his office, or if you’d like to know who came to see him yesterday afternoon without appointments, I can first take you downstairs so you that can question our cook. She’s generally the only person who would see Philip’s visitors come and go—aside from Philip himself, of course.” Gesturing toward the stairwell, she said, “Up or down?”

  “Down,” Will said.

  * * *

  “Oh, there were a number of gentlemen come to see Mr. Munro yesterday,” said Catherine’s cook, a stocky Negress named Mrs. Gell who wore a sleeveless white smock over a black-dyed dress. “A regular parade of ‘em through that door there and up those stairs early in the afternoon. They’d petered out by about two.”

  “You were here all afternoon?” Nell asked.

  “Till about a quarter past three, when I went out to do my marketing. It was close to five-thirty by the time I come back. Front steps had just been washed and there was a black ribbon on the front door. A lot can happen in a couple of hours.”

  The kitchen, located at the rear of the house on the ground level, had been spared any shred of black crepe, and was therefore refreshingly sunny. Its walls were brightly papered, its appointments, like the cookstove at which Mrs. Gell stood stirring a pot of custard, the very latest in design.

  Turning to the scrawny, pockmarked young kitchen maid kneading pastry dough on a marble slab, Nell said, “Did you notice these visitors?”

  “Maggie’s a deaf mute,” said Catherine.

  “And simple, to boot,” added Mrs. Gell. “She don’t notice much of anything.”

  Indeed, Maggie had glanced at them when they entered the kitchen, but hadn’t looked up from her work since then.

  “Can you tell us what any of these gentlemen looked like?” Will asked the cook.

  “White men in black coats and top hats,” said Mrs. Gell as she stirred.

  “Mrs. Gell, if you please,” Catherine said wearily.

  “Well, now, ma’am, I didn’t turn ‘round from the stove to stare at ‘em, and I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have wanted me doing that if I was of a mind to. When white folks are scuttling past me like I ain’t even there, not so much as a tip of the hat, which they shouldn’t even be wearing indoors, much less in my kitchen, well...they pretty much all look the same to me.”

  Mrs. Gell pursed her mouth, just slightly, as she hefted the custard pot from the burner.

  Catherine looked down and brushed her hands over her skirt, as if sweeping off specks of invisible lint. When she was done, she stood up very straight and clasped her hands at her waist. “I shall take you upstairs.”

  * * *

  “This was meant to be a bedroom when the house was built, of course,” Catherine said as she showed them into the front room on the fourth floor that had served as Philip Munro’s office. The windows in the bay that looked out onto Marlborough Street were quite tall, but swathed in so much black crepe as to swallow virtually every bit of available light. The air was very close, and redolent of lemon oil, tobacco, and leather.

  Catherine said, “The back room is a guest bedroom. In between, there’s a closet, the necessary, and of course the stairs.”

  “Do you mind, Miss Munro?” Stepping around a table strewn with large rolls of paper, Will pulled the crepe aside, letting sunlight stream into the room. “I’ll set it right before we leave.”

  Nell could tell from Catherine’s expression that she viewed this uncovering of her carefully draped windows as almost a form of desecration; this room was to be, after all, a sort of shrine to her sainted late brother. But she merely pressed her lips together in silent, if grim, acquiescence.

  Looking around at the office, a masculine enclave of dark, glossy wood and burnished leather, Will said, “Have you spent much time up here since...the unfortunate incident?”

  “I came up here to supervise the hanging of the crepe this morning, but I didn’t touch anything, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You didn’t have one of the maids straighten up?” he asked.

  Catherine shook her head. “I can’t even bear the thought of dusting in here. No, everything is as it was yesterday afternoon.”

  “What are these?” Will asked as he flattened out one of the rolls of paper on the table. “Architect’s drawings?”

  Catherine nodded. “My brother was planning to build a new house out in Chestnut Hill. I take it he meant it as a sort of wedding gift for Rebecca.”

  “This is quite a floor plan,” Will said. “How many rooms, if I may ask?”

  “Twenty-eight at last count,” Catherine said, “but he kept adding new ones.”

  “He was going to sell this house, then?” Nell asked.

  “No, actually. His intent was to keep this house for business purposes, with me remaining here to oversee such matters for him.”

  Will said, “That’s quite a responsible position for a lady.”

  “But a lonely one,” Nell said. “He meant for you to live here all by yourself?”

  “Of course not. The household staff would remain.”

  Nell wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.

  “Philip...” Catherine began. “He...felt Rebecca and I might not get along. His leaving me here was meant to avoid familial discord.”

  “I see.”

  There were two desks in Munro’s office—a smallish black lacquer secretary decorated with Oriental designs in gilt, and a massive, carved desk which stood about five or six feet from the west wall, facing into the room. It was the secretary that Catherine unlocked with one of the keys hanging from her belt, folding down the hinged lid to produce a working surface. As with Mr. Bassett’s cylinder desk, it featured an arrangement of little shelves, all neatly stocked with paper, postage stamps, sealing wax, and the like. Directly over the desk hung a brass bell connected to a wire emanating from the wall; no wonder its ceaseless ringing had driven Catherine to her bed.

  From one of the larger cubbies, Catherine slid a fancily tooled leather book with the initials PM stamped in gold on the front. “This is Philip’s calendar.” She opened it to the page marked with a ribbon and handed it to Will, who tilted it toward Nell: Friday, September 24th—yesterday.

  Four notations were penned on the thin, ruled page, two in a jagged scrawl, and the other two in an elegant, feminine hand.

  Rev. Tanner , 12:30

  L. Thorpe — 2:00

  F. Wallace — 3:30

  D. Cavanaugh, 4:30

  Nell and Will shared a meaningful glance. So Miriam Bassett’s fiancé, Reverend Dr. John Tanner, had had an appointment with Munro yesterday afternoon.

  Wrestling another key off her ring, Catherine said, “This will open the iron closet over the fireplace. That’s where Philip kept all his business papers, and those of the gentlemen he advised. Mr. Bassett’s papers will be there, and you may help yourself to them, but I must ask you to leave everything else as you find it.”

  “Of course,” Nell said as she took the key.

  “I pity her,” Nell said after Catherine disappeared down the service stairs in a murmur of silk.

  Will grunted in the affirmative as he opened another drawing on top of the first, weighting down the corners with four beautiful millefiori glass paperweights.

  “Do you suppose it’s laudanum she takes for her headaches?” Nell asked. The walls, covered in what looked like silk block-printed with leaves and berries, were hung with numerous framed pictures—lithographs, paintings, and a few photographs featuring scenes of hunting, horse racing, archery, and most of all, cricket.

  “I suppose it’s laudanum she takes just to get through each day,” Will said as he perused the drawing, both arms braced on the table. “Or sleep through it. Did you notice her pupils? There was hardly any light downstairs, yet they were practically pinpoints, wherea
s yours—“he glanced up with a grin”—were quite fetchingly dilated. And then, of course, there was her general demeanor, the odd tranquility, the drowsiness.”

  There was a wooden rack on the wall behind Munro’s desk that was similar to a gun rack, except that it displayed not rifles, but paddle-like wooden clubs with round handles: cricket bats. There were five of them, altogether; the rack was made to hold six. Next to the rack stood a huge, ornately carved étagère, its glass shelves cluttered with silver bowls, cups, and trophies, as well as a number of and gold-plated cricket balls.

  Slipping the key into her chatelaine, Nell lifted one off the cricket bats the rack. It looked old and worn, with several splits in the wood.

  She said, “It amazes me that Catherine can function as she does, minding her brother’s business affairs, keeping this house running...”

  “Because of the laudanum? I doubt it’s a habit of long standing, otherwise I don’t imagine she’d have been able to keep up appearances as she has. And my guess is she takes just enough to make things bearable.” Thumping a finger on the drawing, he said, “Take a look at this.”

  Still holding the bat, Nell joined him at the table. The drawing was of the grounds of Philip Munro’s planned country estate, which encompassed, according to a note on the bottom, thirty-eight acres. In addition to the house, with its complex network of walks and gardens, there were fountains, two greenhouses, an orchard, a deer park, three artificial ponds, a gate house, and a carriage house several times larger than the house they were standing in.

  Nell said, “Not one for half measures, was he?”

  “That’s the property. This is the house itself.” Will rolled up the landscape plan, exposing the drawing beneath, which showed the layouts of all four floors of the mansion. It was to have been an extraordinarily complicated edifice with gabled roofs, a dozen verandahs, an oval drawing room, double ballroom, music room, conservatory, two-story library, innumerable parlors and bedchambers...and at the hub of it all, a majestic circular staircase.

  “How must Miss Munro have felt,” Nell said, “when her beloved brother, the mainstay of her life, told her he was leaving her here and moving to this...castle with the detested Becky Bassett?”

  Rolling up the plan, Will said, “Possibly it was around that time that she started dosing herself with laudanum. It will have eased the hurt a bit.”

  “But not eliminated it altogether?” Nell asked.

  “Not that kind of pain—especially if her habit is a fairly mild one. Inside, she could be seething with bitterness, even rage. What have we here?” he asked as he took the cricket bat out of Nell’s hand.

  “He had a sort of collection.” She nodded toward the rack behind the desk.

  “Those are old ones,” Will observed. “Probably fairly valuable, if one is a cricket enthusiast.”

  “One of them is missing—assuming there were six to begin with.”

  “Indeed.” Will hefted the bat in his hands, feeling its weight and balance. Stepping back, he gave it a slow, measured swing—not in the way one would normally swing a cricket bat, but downward from overhead.

  “Could one of those have done the job, do you think?” she asked.

  “It’s heavy enough, and the shape of the edge and the toe—this bottom part here—is right to have caused those particular fractures.” Will smoothed a hand thoughtfully along the blade of the bat as he carried it back to the rack and replaced it. Turning toward the desk, he said, “From what I know of Philip Munro, I wouldn’t have expected him to be quite this fastidious.”

  It was, Nell saw as she approached it, an austerely tidy desk. A square-shaped crystal inkwell stood in the center of the desktop, a flawless slab of dark-stained oak buffed to a silken sheen. In a neat row next to it were a steel pen, a mechanical pencil, and a letter opener. Aside from that, there were just three stacks of papers lined up precisely along the bottom edge; no scrawled notes, no scrap paper, no blotter, no calendar, no letters, nothing one would normally expect to see scattered across a working desktop.

  Standing across the desk from Will, Nell said, “Those papers must be what he was working on when he died.”

  He lifted the top sheet of the middle stack and frowned, then the next, and the next, and the next, looking ever more puzzled.

  “What is it?” Nell asked.

  “The first page is a legal description of a piece of land in Chestnut Hill. Must be from his deed to the property he was going to build on. The two below it are stock certificates. Then come another few pages from the deed, a page from a letter someone wrote him, another page from the deed... It’s all out of order.” He riffled through the piles to either side. “These, too.”

  “May I?” Nell held out her hand.

  Will handed the middle stack across to her, but the bottom sheet remained on the desk. When he went to lift it, it was stuck. He peeled it up by a corner, causing it to rip, a layer of it adhering to the wood, which was whitish in that area. “Looks as if there was some dampness under there.”

  He lifted the stack to the right, while Nell circled the desk and picked up the other one. The bottom sheets of both were likewise stuck to the desk amid a hazy water stain.

  “If I had to guess,” Nell said, “I’d say some water spilled here, or a drink of some kind.” Sniffing the shred of paper in her hand, she said, “Water, I suspect, and the wood wasn’t dried thoroughly enough before the papers were set back down.”

  Will said, “If it was water, perhaps it wasn’t a spill. Perhaps someone was simply cleaning up.”

  “Washing a fine oak desk with water?” Nell shook her head resolutely. “It would be worth a maid’s job to do such a thing. One dusts wood furniture, then oils or waxes. And this desk must have been very well cared for, because it’s in perfect condition—except for these.” She pointed out a smattering of dents and nicks in the section that had been marred by water.

  “Yes, well, someone was also a bit careless in drying up this spill—or whatever it was.”

  “Careless or perhaps just in full chisel to set things right and be gone,” Nell said.

  Will crossed to the corner sink, a reminder that this room was originally intended as a bedroom. He lit the gas sconce on the wall above it, and inspected it closely. “No sign of blood, but there’s nothing easier to clean than a sink.

  “No blood here, either, that I can see,” Nell said as she scrutinized the front of the desk and the tufted leather chair tucked into it. Pulling the chair out, she crouched down and examined the carpet, an Aubusson in autumnal shades of garnet and amber. “The rug is ever so slightly wet,” she said as she ran her hand across it.

  Nell followed the damp spots across the room and around the table that held the architectural plans; the trail ended at the middle bay window. She pushed the window open as high as it would go, leaned out, and looked down onto the front steps some forty feet below. From this angle, as from the sidewalk, she could see no sign of blood or damage to the cornice. It did protrude a bit from the rest of the building, but not so far as all that. A person might fall from this window without hitting it.

  “Got it all sorted out, do you?” Will asked as he came up behind her. She could hear the amusement in his voice.

  “You were right, it wasn’t a spill,” she said as she ducked back into the room and tidied her dress. “It would appear that the desk was washed with water, as well as several spots on the carpet in a path leading over here.”

  “A trail of blood?” Will conjectured.

  “It would fit in with your theory that Munro was bludgeoned from behind, then pitched out the window.”

  “All right, then.” Will turned and stared at the desk, his arms crossed. “Munro is sitting at his desk. He has a caller.”

  “Or an intruder.”

  “If it had been an intruder,” Will said, “I can’t see Munro just sitting there while this fellow comes ‘round behind him, grabs a bat off the rack, and bashes him over the head. It had to be someone
with whom he felt reasonably at ease.”

  “A fatal lapse in judgment.”

  “Munro is attacked,” Will said as he crossed to the desk and sat in the leather chair. “One good whack, perhaps two, and he slumps forward—” which Will demonstrated “—onto the desk.”

  “Onto the papers on the desk.”

  Will sat up, nodding. “Yes, quite. His assailant rains blows upon him, several of which fracture the base and back of his skull, killing him in short order.”

  “And scarring the wood. Some of the blows presumably missed their mark, or slid off.”

  “Right.” Will rubbed his fingers meditatively over the damaged wood.

  “Could a wooden cricket bat really fracture something as thick and hard as a skull?” Nell asked.

  “It the victim’s head were supported on a firm surface, like this?” Will gave the desk a smack. “Absolutely. I’ve known a man to suffer a fatal skull fracture from a single punch when he was lying with his head on the ground.”

  “His face would have been smashed against the desk during this assault,” Nell said.

  “Hence the broken nose and other vital injuries to that area.” Pushing the chair back, Will rose to his feet. “Our killer is left standing there with a bloody cricket bat in hand, looking at a dead man draped over the desk—or perhaps sprawled on the floor by this point. He sees the blood all over the desk and the papers and what have you, and realizes he’s been witnessed coming up here, either by Mrs. Gell or that little scullery maid, whom he probably doesn’t realize is incapable of identifying him. Once his butchery is discovered, it’s only a matter of time before the constabulary comes knocking at his door. How to throw them off the scent?”

  “Make it look like a suicide,” Nell said. “The gold market has just plummeted. People will assume, as we did, that Munro was distraught over losing his investments.”

  The subject of the gold debacle reminded Nell about Mr. Bassett’s business papers. Retrieving Catherine’s key from her chatelaine, she crossed to the marble fireplace in the east wall. To one side of it stood a cocktail cabinet set up with decanters and cut crystal glasses, to the other a leather-upholstered chaise lounge draped with a silken throw and heaped with pillows.