Death in Detail
Page 7
Felix was continuing his fingerprinting work on the globe when the door burst open and Diane marched in, neon green scarf flopping behind her.
“Hello,” Felix said by way of greeting, and Alders noticed the globe had suddenly disappeared from the table. “So good of you to come speak with us, Ms. Bellinger.”
“I’m not here to answer any of your wretched questions. I’ve come to insist that you start looking for the necklace. It’s the only reason I ever tolerated this awful place and that insane old woman, and I absolutely demand you find it.”
“We are investigating the murder of your aunt, Ms. Bellinger,” Felix advised her. “Don’t you think that somewhat more important?”
“She’s not going to get any deader,” Diane snapped back. “But the necklace could be miles away by now. If you’ve been hired by the estate to investigate things, investigate the necklace.”
“That’s not the way it works,” Alders said roughly.
“I think we can spare a minute or two,” Felix interjected. “Why don’t you show us where this necklace was kept and we’ll look for clues?”
With a shrug, Alders followed Felix out of the room. Diane showed them up to the second floor, into a bedroom, dimly lit by a handful of standing lamps strewn around the room. A single large bed, the sheets disorderly and unmade, rested against one wall. Across from the bed, an ancient sort of boudoir-style vanity with a large mirror and a handful of cosmetic creams stood next to an old hardwood cabinet.
“Was this your Aunt Agatha’s room?” Felix asked, glancing around.
“Yes,” snapped Diane. “Where else would she keep her necklace?”
“Still focused on the necklace, I see,” Felix murmured, leaning over to inspect the bed. “I take it this is where your aunt died?”
“Of course. She died in bed, the night before last. She absolutely refused to go to the hospital, if you can believe it. That was tantamount to insisting on dying here. Forced the doctor to come to her. I suppose it’s only fitting. It’s where the old woman lived out her life. Why not die here as well?”
“Where did she keep the necklace?” Felix asked.
“Here.”
Diane marched over to the old cabinet and threw it open. Inside, on the top shelf, there was a faceless plaster bust.
“She kept it around the bust’s neck instead of her own,” Diane said. “It was a long necklace with a gold chain and the most beautiful diamond in the middle. It’s gone now, so someone must have taken it. Find it.”
“When was the last time you saw it?”
“Two days ago, just before Auntie died.”
“Is any of your aunt’s other jewelry missing?” Alders asked firmly.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” Diane answered, flipping her neon green scarf over her shoulder. “She kept most of her other jewelry in that box on the second shelf.”
Felix took the second box and examined it with interest. Inside were a pair of diamond earrings, a small gold pendant, a tiara, several rings, and assorted other items of sparkling gold. Precious gems inlaid in small rings and bands littered the bottom of the box.
“Is there anything missing from here?” Felix asked her.
“Not that I know of,” Diane said, snapping at him.
Felix shrugged and put it back.
“As the other jewelry is not missing, it seems very likely that this wasn’t the work of a burglar,” Alders said flatly. “I would suggest that it’s someone in the household.”
“It’s probably the maids,” Diane said immediately. “Aunt Agatha said they were thieving. Unless Stephanie took it. It’s terribly valuable and important, so you must find it.”
Felix looked at her. “Then you don’t agree with Gloria that there are more important things in life than trinkets?”
Diane gave a hollow laugh. “That sounds like the sort of moralizing thing Gloria would say. She’s sweet enough, but she has no idea what she’s talking about. That necklace? A trinket? It must have been just about priceless.”
“Then we will search for it,” Felix said.
“Good,” Diane said. “Tell me when you’ve found it.”
She turned and marched out.
“She is not very attentive,” Felix said vaguely. “When I asked her if there was anything missing from the box...”
He reached into his pocket and brought forth a small silver bracelet, decked with sapphires, which he dropped into the box.
“So there might be other items missing from the box,” Alders said. “Still, it doesn’t look like any smash and grab burglary I’ve ever seen. Someone inside the house must have taken it. Maybe there’s something to this whole thieving maids business.”
“If you were a clever thieving maid, why would you steal the most conspicuous piece of jewelry?” Felix asked.
“Maybe because you’re not clever. That’s how you ended up as a maid.”
Felix bowed his head.
“That is possible. But for the moment, I have my own hunch about where the necklace is. I think it is in the hands of the same person who took the silver spoon. And considerable time, and grief from Ms. Diane, could be saved if we speak with him directly.”
Chapter 7
Chester sank into the vacant chair and glanced at the Duke of Baden’s clock.
“Will this take long?” he asked. “I have somewhere to be, guys.”
He gave them the same toothy grin he’d given them yesterday.
“It will take as long as you make it take,” Felix said softly. “What did you do with the necklace, Chester?”
The prodigal son looked first from Felix then to Alders with a passable imitation of oblivious innocence. Had it not been for the smell of booze coming from him, the expression might have even been believable. His suit was even more ruffled than it had been yesterday, his brownish hair was in disarray, and the rose-shaped pin on his lapel was lopsided and broken off at one end.
“Necklace? You mean the one Diane’s been going on about? I’m not really the type for jewelry.”
Felix thrust his hand back into his ever-deep pockets and produced a small silver spoon. The smile vanished from Chester’s face.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked.
“You happened to drop this on the occasion of our last conversation. I’m sure you remember. It was when you tried to bribe us.”
Felix laid the pawn shop ticket next to the spoon. “The pawn shop owner was good enough to let me keep this ticket. He said he remembered you, by the way. And he also said it wasn’t the first time you’d been in there with a funny old thing, like this.” He tapped the spoon.
Chester frowned up at Felix, who sighed heavily.
“If you’re pawning family heirlooms, Chester, then you’re obviously in need of money. I am investigating the murder, not the thefts, and the sooner I find the murderer, the sooner your inheritance will be in your pocket to squander however you see fit. However, if I can’t solve the murder because you’re withholding information, then the money will go to your cousin Robert Breckinridge, for whom I have no particular love. So unless you are your aunt’s killer, you have no reason to stay tight-lipped.”
“Fine.” Chester’s demeanor suddenly and violently changed. He kicked his legs out and reached for the nearby crystal bottle of brandy, pouring out a measure and downing it in a single drink.
“I’ll tell you because I need the money,” he said promptly. “Are you a betting man, Mr. Green?”
“No,” Felix said. “Though I would be willing to wager that you are.”
Chester chuckled. “You’d wager that I’m a betting man. Very good. It has a symmetry to it. Well you’d win that bet, Mr. Green. I play poker.”
“Perhaps it would be more accurate to say you lose at poker,” Felix said. “You have been taking your aunt’s possessions, pawning them for cash, then returning them when you come into enough money to reverse your losses - if you come into enough money to reverse your losses. Isn’t that so?”
“I didn’t have any proof, but I suspected it quite strongly. How long have you been doing this?”
“Four months, give or take.”
Surprise outlined itself across Alders’ face.
“You’ve been doing this for four months?” Alders asked. “And no one noticed you were taking things?”
“I didn’t take large things, or more than one or two at once. It was just, you know, knives, forks, that little clock up there.” He gestured to the Badenese clock. “And with the exception of that spoon you have there, I never took them for more than a few days. I’m quite a good poker player. I’ve just had a few runs of bad luck.”
Alders said nothing.
“You don’t believe me, do you? Well, Mr. Detective - I lost - lost five hundred dollars on a hand where I had a full house not so long ago, because the man across the table had four aces. Do you know what the odds are on that? If that’s not bad luck, I’d like to know what is.”
“How did you get away with this?” Alders asked. “Did you just stop in for an unannounced visit whenever you ran low on cash?”
“No, Auntie would have gotten suspicious. I just drove up at night. I have an old key to the house. It used to be dad’s. They never locked the front gate so I walk in, let myself in, and take what I needed. The servants don’t live here, so the only people here at night were Stephanie and Aunt Agatha, and they were upstairs. Besides, that stuff you found Aunt Agatha full of, parabarbital, that’s sleeping pills. She probably wouldn’t have woken up if I hit her over the head with that clock.”
“So you’ve been burgling the house at night, then when your luck improved, you’ve been returning what you took?”
“That’s about right, yeah,” Chester said, crossing his legs.
“Your aunt didn’t have a security system?”
“Security system?” Chester repeated, choking on a mouthful of brandy. “Have you seen this house Aber, or whatever your name is? We’re lucky to have running water.”
“What is your profession, Mr. Bellinger?”
“Profession?” repeated Chester with a laugh. “Unemployed. Professional gambler, if you like.”
“Not a very successful one, apparently,” Alders shot back.
“Don’t make me repeat myself, detective. Full house. Four aces. Bad luck.”
“So, what have you done with the necklace?” Alders barked. “Pawned that too?”
“No,” Chester said with a shifty grin. “That’s worth more than a few dollars. You wouldn’t take it to a pawn shop. It’s in my car. But listen, the necklace is the interesting part. I never wanted to sell it.”
“You’re not going to wear it obviously, so what were you going to do with it?”
“I was asked to steal it,” he said, with something bordering on glee. “Your albino pal didn’t see that coming, did he? I was promised a lot of money to deliver that necklace into the right hands.”
“Stop dancing around the issue, Chester,” Alders shot back. “Who asked you to steal the necklace?”
“Gloria. She promised me ten thousand dollars if I stole that necklace and gave it to her. It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I walked upstairs and took it off the bust, stuffed it in my pocket, then went and walked down to my car. Easy as that. I’ve never seen Diane so upset, of course.”
Alders was temporarily at a loss for words. What Gloria had said about there being more important things in life than trinkets was still echoing in his head. Before he thought to ask another question, Felix stepped forward and cleared his throat.
“Why did she want the necklace, Chester?”
“I have no idea. Don’t ask me to understand how women’s minds work. Gloria asked me to take it right after the reading of the will. I actually went to go steal it when I passed the pair of you in the hallway.”
“And you tried to bribe us with money you didn’t have,” Felix said.
“I prefer to think of it as re-incentivizing you with a more lucrative profit-sharing arrangement.”
“A rose by any other name,” murmured Felix, glancing at the pin on Chester’s lapel.
“Well, I don’t much care what you think of me, frankly, as long as you get me my money and don’t send me packing off to prison. I stole that necklace for Gloria and I still have it. She didn’t tell me when she wanted to make the exchange. I gather she won’t have ten thousand dollars until she gets her inheritance.”
“I take it you are not married, Mr. Bellinger?”
“None of us are married, Green,” Chester shot back. “How could we be? What with our expected inheritances, how would we know if we were really marrying for love? Any girl I meet - if she knows anything about me, that is - might just be some golddigger, trying to marry into a life of ease and wealth.”
“It’s funny,” Felix said, even more quietly. “I’d have thought no one knows more about golddigging than your family.”
“Come now, you can insult me all you like, Mr. Detective, but my family is filled with a lot of perfectly nice people. Look at Stephanie, enduring every day and night with that old hag Agatha out of nothing other than the goodness of her heart. You didn’t have to live here to be included in the will, you know. She could have went and gotten a life of her own. Or Gloria. She’s practically family, and she runs that Food Bank. Jasper’s maybe not done anything as charitable as that, but he’s very daring, what with his mountain-climbing and his adventuring, and Henry runs the old family business, such as it is these days. It’s just me that’s a shiftless good-for-nothing, like Aunt Agatha used to yell when she’d had a few glasses too many.”
“Is that what happened on the night of her birthday?” Felix inquired. “She had a few glasses too many?”
“I have no idea. I arrived late. The traffic was awful. By the time I made it into the hall, everyone told me that Aunt Agatha had stormed upstairs after some kind of tantrum. They gave me a pretty good idea of the kinds of things she’d said about me. She thought I was on drugs and drunk out of my skull, of course.”
“And were you on drugs or drunk?”
“I was drunk, but only because I started drinking when I got to the party. We were all drinking then, I think, except for Gloria and Stephanie. They didn’t drink much.”
“And drugs?”
He gave them another toothy, shifty grin. “Not that night, no.”
Felix peered at him over bridged fingers. “I understand you went to medical school, Chester.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” he answered nonchalantly. “Went to, past tense. I flunked out. All that memorization wasn’t my strong suit. It was really Dad who was pushing me to go to medical school - this is before he died, obviously.”
“Do you know anything about parabarbital?”
“I know it’s a barbiturate.”
“Why did you flunk out of medical school, Chester?”
There was a brief silence where Chester took another sip of brandy. He squinted at Felix.
“Alright, I guess I’d better tell you. You’re likely to find out sooner or later. I failed a critical exam when I was in medical school. It was on pharmaceuticals and biochemistry. The reason I failed was because I made a calculation error and said I’d prescribe a patient too much of a drug - so much, in fact, that if I had made that prescription in the real world, the patient would have died. Killing a patient, even a hypothetical one, was an automatic fail on that exam, and that’s what pushed me over the edge into flunking. Don’t think I don’t know where this is going, Green. You want to pin this all on me. You think I must have taken that bottle and dumped it into the old lady’s tea or something and killed her. Well, you’re wrong. I may-”
“-be a thief-” Alders finished for him.
“May have borrowed some things, nearly all of which I returned later,” Chester said loudly. “But I didn’t kill Aunt Agatha. From
the looks of things, she was getting pretty close to the end as was anyway. I can’t understand why anyone would have wanted to poison her. Her health was getting worse and worse every day. I guess she was looking up a bit towards the middle there,” he said. “She stopped complaining about the leg pain as much and was moving around a bit. Maybe whoever it was thought he’d better take no chances and he could make it look like natural causes - but whoever it was, it wasn’t me.”
Felix shrugged. “We will need the necklace back.”
“You’ll get it. Is that everything?”
With a nod from Felix, Chester rose and left the room.
“Do you believe him?” Alders asked. “Why in the world would Gloria want the necklace? After what she said about things being more important in life than trinkets?”
“Maybe later, we could ask her.” Felix had slipped on his gloves and was gingerly examining the glass of brandy that Chester had filled and emptied so many times over the course of the conversation. He took out his finger print kit and began to brush along the surface of the glass.
“Ah ha. Another set of finger prints.”
“Yes, but I don’t think I can draw any conclusions just yet. Of greater immediate importance is what Chester said. He has raised the issue of when Agatha was poisoned. I have been arguing that Agatha must have been first poisoned the day after her birthday, on the same day she told her niece that someone was trying to kill her. After all, that is the day that she noticed the pills missing from the bottle. However, it is possible that Agatha began to take a turn for the worse on the same day, and began to die of natural causes. This idea raises the question that Chester mentioned. Why poison a dying woman?”
“Maybe she wasn’t dying?” Alders asked. “Maybe she was just having a small problem that she might have recovered from.”
“The idea has crossed my mind that she was faking the decline in her condition in an effort to deter the murderer. After all, she has managed to do a remarkable number of things for a dying woman - prepare her own food, for example. However, this idea doesn’t quite satisfy me. The entire family was apparently convinced that she was dying, which is why they decided to stay in the house after her birthday. What’s more, the pretense would have made her still more dependent on the help of the people around her. If she was pretending to be largely bedridden, she must have needed people to carry food and water up to her. Wouldn’t this have rendered her more vulnerable?”