FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “I never thought,” Irene commented, “to regard my small cigars as perfume. However, here—”

  She needed to say no more. Tobacco and match sulphur would smell like French perfume in contrast. Under the cloying Oriental scent I detected the aftermath of boiled cabbage, surely one of the more unfortunate dishes ever prepared in common lodging houses.

  That was what we visited, I was sure, a common lodging house. I was especially certain when I glimpsed nicked furniture legs and worn upholstery on the pieces that crowded the hall.

  The landlady seemed to recognize Pink, for she took the girl’s plump young wrist in one wrinkled hand and pulled her forthwith through a door into the front parlor.

  Here the air was mustier even than in the passage, overlaid with a peculiar thick and unpleasant odor.

  Our guide bustled out as soon as we were escorted within. Irene went to ensure the door was shut fully behind her . . . and that our landlady wasn’t listening. Her silence might have been calculated to disarm us.

  The crack of that sturdy oak door hitting the door frame gave me the oddest impression of a coffin lid slamming . . . I had much recent reason to recoil from such a memory!

  Irene shed all anxiety and became her brisk, inspecting self at once. “This is the séance chamber, I take it; also the death chamber.”

  Pink nodded in the dimness.

  “How was the furniture arranged? You must show me.”

  “How do you know that what you see is not the fatal arrangement?”

  “Because the carpet bears impressions of the chair and table legs being normally established elsewhere.”

  “It’s too dark to see that,” Pink complained.

  “But not to feel it.” Irene crossed the room again. “My profession, my former profession, accustomed me to making my way onto dark stages. My feet automatically notice any subtle variances in what’s beneath them. Can we turn up the lights?”

  “Yes. These are gas.”

  Pink approached a bronze wall sconce and tweaked some part of the fixture I couldn’t see. The light within the milk glass globe brightened like a new moon.

  “Gas,” Irene repeated in a portentous tone I had only heard used in regard to certain intestinal difficulties not suitable for public mention.

  In the sudden silence I detected a sibilant hisssss from the vaunted gaslights. I understood Irene’s skepticism for the new lighting system. Invisible and odorless, gas was unseen and could be deadly, like the subtle serpent hidden in long and rustling grasses.

  “The lights were dimmed for the séance.” Irene stated as much as asked.

  “Of course. Madam Zenobia required complete darkness to work.”

  “So does a jewel thief,” Irene noted.

  She was rapidly circling the room, gazing high and low, running her ungloved fingertips over the walls and the furniture. After several swift spirals, she joined Pink and me where we stood gawking in the middle.

  “What were this woman’s credentials as a medium?” she asked Pink.

  “She’d . . . she’d been in all the papers in upstate New York and Connecticut. ‘The Nyack Wonder,’ she was called. And she was as reputable as a medium could be—”

  “Which is nil,” Irene interrupted with a brief bark of laughter distressingly like those “Ha!”s employed as emphasis by none other than Sherlock Holmes.

  I cringed to hear Irene adopting The Man’s brusque, highhanded methods, yet I must admit that the chamber’s smells did not encourage lingering.

  Irene pointed out areas of interest her feet had detected around the chamber. “This central mahogany table has been moved two feet. Observe the indentations on the Turkey carpet there . . . and there. The small occasional tables were of course swept to the room’s perimeter in some haste, and recently. Before the police arrived, I assume?”

  “The room was prepared for the séance earlier that day.”

  “And the day before that, and that, and that.” Irene strode toward the heavy Empire-style dining table that sat naked of any decorative cloth in the room’s center. Above it loomed a huge gas lighting fixture with so many arms it resembled Medusa’s serpentine tendrils of hair, had they been cast in bronze.

  “There was a cloth over the table during the séance?” Irene remarked. “There always is.”

  “Yes, but it was a light silken shawl with foot-long fringe.”

  “Ah, the shawl, an ever-useful accessory whose beauty cannot be allowed to overshadow its . . . practicality. So might we say of women, in general. Weight was not a factor with the cloth employed; obscurity was. Who else was present?”

  “Phineas LaMar, known as Professor Marvel, the Walking Encyclopedia. And Timothy Flynn. He’s a strapping fellow now, but was a child prodigy called Tiny Tim when he was in baby skirts. Also Gordon Evers, a professional pickpocket of my acquaintance. I wanted someone present who could see if our credulity was being picked.”

  It struck me that these names and bizarre occupations disturbed Irene, though it was hard to tell what actually did disturb Irene. She was as good at keeping her true reactions hidden as a milliner was at keeping a widow deeply veiled.

  “Was that all?” Irene demanded.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You have named three people, not including the medium and yourself. The chair-leg impressions in the carpet beneath the table number six sets.”

  Pink lived up to her nickname and blushed for her faulty memory, or her deliberate omission. “You forget that my mother came, too. She’d hoped to hear from my dear dead father, the judge.”

  “So in fact this was both an investigative and a personal expedition?” Irene said.

  “I suppose so. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: end my mother’s credulous hope that the judge had wished more for us than penury, and also unmask a fraud who fed people’s hopes and starved their pocketbooks.”

  “I quite approve of the stratagem,” Irene said. “Your mother’s belief helped hide your less friendly motive.”

  I could no longer remain silent, and in such situations, I invariably spoke my mind. “Irene, Pink behaved abominably toward her mother! Using her as a . . . gull. A shield. A pretext.”

  “An accidental ally?” Irene suggested more kindly. “She would have been tempted by the notion of a séance in any case, Nell. Were Godfrey to be snatched from me, I cannot say what measures I would resort to.”

  This silenced me—for that very instance had happened only weeks before—but it did not silence Pink. Finer feelings never seemed to.

  “You yourself resorted to blackmailing all your friends into aiding your recent quest,” the young woman accused.

  “Not only friends,” Irene demurred modestly, as if responding to high praise. “Some enemies as well.”

  “At any rate,” Pink went on, “you provided quite an admirable model of relentless investigation, and so I have called you here, because I believe that what happened in this room requires relentless investigation.”

  “And because you believe it concerns me in some intimate way you don’t understand,” Irene said. “You need me to solve your case, so you can have a story for your newspaper.”

  “I could write up the incident this minute.”

  “But it has no ending. Even newspaper stories do better with tidy endings.” She moved to regard the bare table. “It elevated, I suppose, during the séance?”

  “Yes!” Pink sounded surprised.

  “Anything else elevate?”

  “A flute.”

  “A flute? Apparently the strongest wires were saved for the table. A flute is a trifle compared to that.”

  “And the medium’s face floated on the dark.”

  “You mean,” Irene corrected, “that only her face was illuminated from some unguessed source.” Irene was again pacing the perimeter of the chamber, moving around furniture and occasionally bending to inspect the carpeting as if she were a head housekeeper in search of dereliction of duty by the under-housemaids
.

  “Ah.” Irene stopped near the wall opposite the heavily draped bow window. “Only one chair was set here. Bring me another.”

  Pink and I glanced at each other. At least we were serving as under-housemaids together.

  We seized one of the heavy black walnut side chairs sitting near the naked table and, panting like hod carriers, toted it to where Irene stood by the wall.

  She helped us maneuver it . . . into the dents in the carpeting that fit the chair’s four legs like a template.

  “Hold it steady, ladies!”

  Irene grasped the top rail and sprang onto the seat, immediately turning to gaze at the bow window. She balanced herself on the upholstered seat by grasping an arm of the wall sconce.

  I was tempted to murmur something about the Lady Liberty posed in New York harbor on her pedestal, lifting her torch, but restrained myself.

  “Pink!” Irene sounded very excited indeed. Perhaps it was the altitude. “Drag another chair over by the window draperies and see if there is a slit in the velvet at about the same level as my hat.”

  I objected immediately. “The chairs are too heavy for one person to move. I’ll help her.”

  “You will not, Nell! I am teetering here as it is. You will hold my chair steady and let Pink manage. I did tell her to ‘drag,’ not lift, the thing.”

  “Hmmmph,” I sniffed. While I had no reason to spare Pink the wages of her drawing Irene across the Atlantic Ocean on a wild goose chase, I doubted that slip of girl could manage the assigned task.

  Perhaps my doubt showed, for she cast me a determined look and began to wrestle the chair into the position Irene had requested. Soon she was balancing atop it, and thrusting her hands into the velvet draperies like a pickpocket rifling a skirt.

  “Why, there’s nothing here but yards of velvet, Irene,” she complained, leaning forward to pummel more folds of cloth.

  My warning cry died in my throat. In an instant Pink had gone over, chair, skirts, draperies and all.

  Her fall had ripped a length of drapery from its rod.

  I stared aghast at Pink’s fallen form, but above me Irene was waxing triumphant.

  “Horsehair!” she cried. “A horsehair line leading from this lighting sconce to the secret room between the draperied bow window and the room. A double set of drapes. Fairly clever. Hold the chair steady, Nell. Steady! And Pink! Stay exactly where you are. Do not move. I am coming directly.”

  Pink, tangled on the floor in petticoats, chair legs, and heavy velvet draperies, was going nowhere.

  I pushed Irene’s chair legs into the carpet with all my strength as she bounded down like a mountain goat and hastened to Pink’s aid.

  Or rather . . . she hastened to Pink’s vicinity, where she stretched up her arms and commenced to pull the remaining draperies back like a demented stage manager.

  “There! And there! You see what a sweet scheme it was? An entire velvet-shrouded room within a room for a confederate to hide in, and a horsehair clothesline above it all on which to ‘float’ all sorts of delusions from flutes to whistling spirits.”

  I hurried over to untangle Pink from the domestic furnishings.

  The silly girl was staring up toward the ceiling as if viewing angels heard on high.

  “I see it! Now I do . . . if not then, during the séance. A silver . . . wire. Almost invisible.”

  “In the dark,” Irene reminded her, “it was utterly invisible. There must have been some hook in the ‘ectoplasmic’ emanation, so the confederate could draw it up and make it seem to dance.”

  “And that is the murderer?” I asked. “The confederate hidden behind the bow window draperies?”

  Irene glanced at the small chamber her efforts had unveiled. “Yes. Or perhaps no,” she answered, not sounding happy. “This was an illusion gone awry. The confederate could have fled when he—or she—saw the medium had been killed.”

  She glanced at Pink, who was still shaking out her tangled skirts.

  “So how did she die, Pink?”

  “She was throttled.”

  “Throttled? At a table with five other persons? Throttling is not a silent process and it requires the killer to come close. Yes, it was dark, but I can’t believe that no one would notice a strangler at work.”

  “That’s just it. We saw her die. Or struggle at least. We assumed it was part of the show. I mean, mediums do moan and groan and speak in tongues and spit out spirit vapors . . . what were we to think?”

  “Ah.” Irene sat on the chair that had been Pink’s uncertain step stool. “Her murder was accomplished in plain sight, but with the murderer out of sight. This may be a more subtle and disturbing crime than I first thought. The woman fought for her life, with help only feet away and was . . . ignored. It was brutal and cruel to the victim, as well as to witnesses who now know that they understood too late. Anyone with black gloves and a mask could have stepped behind the eerily lit medium in the dark and manipulated the murder like an unseen puppeteer. You all would have witnessed the effect, but not the means. Who would kill in such a fashion, and why?”

  I could keep silent no longer. Irene and Pink seemed to dance away from what to me was the central issue. “If no one was visible standing behind her, choking her, how was she killed? And don’t tell me it was a spirit guide!”

  Irene looked up at Pink. “Yes, that’s a good point. Was there any misty apparition of the dead? The judge?”

  “There was a misty apparition,” Pink said grimly. “Ectoplasm. The breath of the dead emanating from the medium’s mouth. It was utterly convincing. Not just a wee trail, as one sees of cigar smoke, or even one’s own breath on a frosty winter morning. It was as long as a snake and kept twisting up and up in spurts, almost like a serpent moves its coils. It made my mother shriek. I confess even I felt a chill at that abnormal substance’s dance, almost like a cobra rising from its basket to the keening of a snake charmer, and don’t forget that flute was floating and piping, too.”

  Pink turned her glance on me, something of that uncanny fear still in her expression, except it was changing into anger. “Can you guess what that ectoplasm really was, Nell?”

  How could I say? The soul after death surely does not come gliding back in snakelike form to reside in the mouths of mediums.

  Irene anticipated Pink. “Eggwhite-dipped cheesecloth,” she said. “That soft, netlike fabric porous enough to strain something as solid as cheese, yet light and airy. Some mediums know the—art, should I call it?—of regurgitation at will. Instant ectoplasm. It’s a very old trick.”

  Pink nodded. “Then the medium lay . . . still. Quiet. And we all realized that this was not part of the séance, but something else. I got up, and went to her. It was wrapped around her throat, that long boa of ‘ectoplasm.’ It was twisted and soggy and wrung so tight I couldn’t unwind it, couldn’t even get a finger between her neck and that . . . stuff. It was too late anyway, as Gordon quickly told me.”

  “A macabre story,” Irene said after a pause. “Now, Pink. I have revealed the mechanics behind the séance. I have suggested who might, and might not, have been the killer. Now tell me why on earth do you think that this scene has anything to do with me? Personally?”

  Pink did not answer. She asked another question instead.

  “Now that you know what this murder involves and who was present, are you sure you want to know what I think?”

  “Who was present? A group of mostly your selection, except for the medium and her unknown confederate. Why should I care who was present?”

  “Are you saying that you don’t recognize any of them? Not a one?”

  10.

  Unwelcome Baggage

  How can you build on such quicksand? Their most trivial

  action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct

  may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES, “THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN,”

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  FRO
M NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  I don’t quite know where my dislike of Englishmen comes from.

  It can’t be from my adventures in the U.S., for the Brits are thankfully rare on this side of the Atlantic, although I have met a few in New York City reception halls.

  I guess it’s their inborn sense of superiority; that aloof, supercilious air most of them disseminate like dandelions do seeds.

  So I stood on the wharf in New York harbor, unhappily awaiting the docking of the Atlantic steamship Ulysses. Much as it was my idea and long-nursed machination, I did not welcome Sherlock Holmes to these bustling shores, except as a necessity.

  In fact, I was amazed that he would come in answer to my cablegram at all, save I had used those most effective code words in his case: murder and Irene. And I had implied, a bit mendaciously, that it might be murders plural, a fact that might intrigue him after chasing a multiple murderer from London to Paris to Prague and beyond in the recent past. Yet I had a recent clipping in my sturdy leather handbag of a death as similarly bizarre as the one I myself had witnessed not long after. I had not yet shared it with Irene, but was saving it for Sherlock Holmes. I needed more than one freakish crime to command his demanding attention, since I couldn’t manage it by myself alone, as Irene could.

  Obviously, the man was intrigued by this woman who had bewitched audiences and aristocrats and criminals. And, I must add modestly, I had also used another name with perhaps even greater cachet as a lure for this quintessentially disciplined Englishman: Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the man who documented maniacs.

  Certainly a mere enterprising female reporter for the New York World would not snag the attention of the globe’s first and finest and only consulting detective without the more attractive bait of Madam Adler Norton in her hip pocket.

  And so it was with both faint hope and triumphant jubilation that I spied a tall erect figure, pipe firmly clenched in jaws, inching down the gangway among the usual horde of transatlantic crossers.

  He looked most put out!

  I couldn’t help smiling at his grim demeanor as he advanced, carrying one fat tapestry bag in lieu of other baggage. Somehow I knew that was his entire kit, and that it would contain all he needed to dress as the quintessential Englishman, to nurse a pipe, or to solve a crime.