Born in a small town. I won’t give the name so you don’t have to pretend to have heard of it. Only child; mother died when I was six; father a third-generation railroad man and fourth-generation boozehound. You probably won’t be surprised to learn I ran away from home the day after my fifteenth birthday.
I footed it two towns over, where the Hart and Halloway Traveling Circus and Sideshow was wrapping up a weeklong run. I hitched a ride and made friends with a group of the spec girls—the showgirls who appear in the larger big-top numbers and in the strip-show tent after dark. By the time the circus reached the next town, they’d practically adopted me. I don’t know if they thought of me as a little sister or the daughter they’d never had. Either way, they got me a job at the bottom rung of the crew. Actually, I had to crane my neck to see the bottom rung. I spent the first few months scraping out animal cages, emptying latrines—anything they wanted to foist on the new kid.
When I proved I could shovel manure without fumbling, I got recruited doing general setup and takedown, providing backup for the games, greasing the crowd for the midway performers.
I’d been there maybe half a year when the Lovely Lulu got laid up with the nine-month flu and both Mysterio and Kalishenko were down one shared assistant.
Between Kalishenko’s personality and Mysterio’s wandering hands, none of the spec girls wanted the job, so I got drafted. I was squeezed into an outfit that was mostly bare thigh, rhinestones, and a spangly bustier the girls helped pad out with fabric scraps. I spent each day being handed off from magician to knife thrower and back again.
I was definitely no Lovely Lulu, and no amount of padding made me look like anything other than what I was: a fifteen-year-old tomboy in borrowed sparkles. That didn’t stop a lot of our male audience from making propositions you’d be shocked to hear coming from the lips of good churchgoing folk.
Or if you’re a woman, maybe you wouldn’t be shocked at all.
Mysterio lived up to his reputation but kept his hands to himself after I purposefully flubbed one of his tricks, embarrassing him in front of a sold-out crowd.
Kalishenko was a different story.
His nickname among the crew was the Mad Russian. Partly because he professed to be a descendant of Rasputin, partly due to his tendency to hiss and snap and toss the occasional knife at whoever rubbed him the wrong way.
My job was mainly to stand still and let him outline my body with thrown blades, hold balloons in my teeth that he would pop—that sort of thing.
“Just stand, smile, bend over every few minutes to show the crowd your ass, and don’t talk,” he slurred. “No reason for little girls to talk.”
After a couple weeks of this, he had the idea to add a bit where I got mad at him, grabbed one of the knives from the wooden target, and threw it back. It was supposed to go wide left. Instead, the first time we did it live I cut it so close to his face I practically trimmed his sideburns.
After the show he asked, “Did you do that on purpose?”
“It’s ninety degrees and these bloomers are riding up like gangbusters. So, yes, I did it on purpose.”
He gave a big, bearded smile—something I’d never seen him do when a crowd wasn’t watching.
“Fantastic!” he exclaimed. “We keep it. But we make you better, okay?”
We made me better.
Other performers saw me working with Kalishenko and figured if I could make the Mad Russian happy, maybe I was worth investing a minute in. Over the next five years, I apprenticed with everyone who’d have me. I learned how to juggle fire and walk over hot coals, the basics of costuming and makeup from the spec girls and the clown crew, bareback horse riding, sharpshooting, cold reading from Madame Fortuna, how to handle the big cats, and more about the residents of the reptile house than I was ever really comfortable with. I spent so much time in the House of Oddities, I could tell at a glance if a new exhibit was a fake and make a pretty good guess how the fakery was done.
There weren’t many skills I could learn from the born freaks in the sideshow. You’re either blessed with a tail or you’re not. But I felt more comfortable hanging around with the sideshow crew than with just about anyone else at the circus. I burned away a lot of late nights listening to stories about the good old days from the Alligator Boy or the Tattooed Woman.
I spent some time with the aerialists, but the high wire didn’t come natural to me. I can make it across a tightrope, but only at the cost of a bucket of sweat and a year off my life.
The lock-picking skills were developed during a short, ill-advised romance with a contortionist. He was only with the show for a summer, but during that time he taught me how to tackle any lock ever made; how to wriggle out of a straitjacket, both rigged and legit; and a few other things you don’t put on a résumé.
I even apprenticed with Mysterio, who turned out to be a halfway decent instructor once he learned that making passes at me gained him nothing but grief. I had such fast fingers he began using me as an audience plant. In front of a packed tent, I’d execute the smoothest deck-switch you ever saw. Or didn’t see.
In short, I became the circus’s jack-of-all-trades—able to assist just about any of the talent and filling in when necessary. Never stopped having to pad the bustier, though.
That’s where I was when my life intersected with Lillian Pentecost. The day after I accepted her offer, I began the next leg of my odd education.
She said in her pitch that she’d foot the bill for any training, and she was as good as her word. Over the next three years, I took classes in stenography, bookkeeping, law, target shooting, auto mechanics, and driving, among a host of other things. She even pulled some strings to mock me up a birth certificate, making me legally Willowjean Parker. With that bit of forgery in hand I was able to get a driver’s license, a private investigator’s license, and a permit to carry a pistol.
“I do not expect you will have much cause to use it,” Ms. P said when I picked up the latter. “But there are places you will be asked to go where it would be imprudent to be without a weapon.”
In reality, I spent more time in lecture halls than pool halls. A week didn’t go by where she didn’t announce a trip to see this or that expert give a lecture about invertebrates or astronomy or abnormal psychology.
“When am I going to need to know the difference between mold and a mushroom?” I asked before one such excursion. I was sore that this particular lecture was replacing a much-anticipated night at the Rivoli for the latest Hitchcock.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s better to have the knowledge at hand and not need it than the reverse.”
I couldn’t argue. Though no case to date has hinged on either of us knowing the life cycle of fungus.
Anyhow, that was life—at least between cases.
When we were hot on a job, there was no time for lectures or movies and barely time for meals. One of my unwritten jobs—and there were many—was to make sure Ms. Pentecost got at least one square a day. A lot of times that meant steering her into the nearest diner and refusing to budge until she shoved a roast beef sandwich into her mouth.
This was an extension of one of my other unwritten jobs, which was to keep an eye on Ms. P’s health and make sure she didn’t push it so hard it did her harm. Her disease didn’t get too much worse in those first few years. There were good days and bad days. On the good days, you wouldn’t know she was sick at all and could mistake the cane for a fashion statement. On bad days, she would limp and stumble, and that hitch would creep into her voice. She was also tired more and in pain, though she tried not to show it.
Then there were the really bad days. The kind that lasted a week or more. Luckily, she didn’t have them too often.
All in all, it was a good life.
The Collins murder fell into our lap on a Tuesday morning in mid-November 1945. Much of that
summer had been spent tracking down a firebug who was lighting up tenements in Harlem. Ms. Pentecost wrapped that up just in time for us to join the rest of the city in celebrating Japan’s surrender. After we shook off the hangover and swept up the confetti, we were immediately thrown into a homicide dressed up as a suicide—a bit of chicanery the police were unaware of until Ms. P gracefully pointed it out.
Just so you know, the climax of those cases consisted of short phone calls to the authorities. No getting all the suspects in a room and laying out the facts before pointing a finger. As much as I might like that kind of mystery novel, most of the time our cases ended with a quiet whisper in the right ear. No dramatic unmasking.
On that Tuesday morning, we were only a few days into our first break in a long time. I had a quick breakfast of eggs and biscuits at the kitchen table courtesy of Mrs. Campbell. She lives in a renovated carriage house attached to the back of the brownstone, so no matter how early I get up she’s already in the kitchen stirring and scrambling.
If you’re looking for her bio, there’s not much I can tell you. She’s widowed; she’s been with Ms. P forever; she’s originally from a place she calls the “Border Counties”; and while she can cook, clean, and generally keep a house, she can’t drive worth a damn. She rarely talks about herself, and by that time I had learned not to ask.
I opened and sorted the mail, then skimmed through my copies of that morning’s major New York papers, marking what articles to clip for our files. I moved on from that and began jotting down a list of phone calls I needed to make. Most were responses to requests for interviews, quotes, and pictures. Anything to keep Ms. Pentecost’s name out there and the phone ringing. I was finishing the list when the phone did exactly that.
“Pentecost Investigations. Will Parker speaking.”
A fussy patrician voice asked me if Ms. Pentecost would be available to meet with Rebecca and Randolph Collins that afternoon. At that moment, the great dame detective was still asleep. Since she’s practically nocturnal, it’s rare that you see her illuminated by morning sunlight. Luckily, she had long ago given me leave to use my best judgment when it came to scheduling consultations, and my best judgment was that we wanted in on the Collins case.
Neither the murder nor the arson case had come with a big paycheck attached. But I was sure the Collins family could fork over whatever fee we demanded. The papers over the last couple weeks had hinted at an air of weirdness attached to the thing that I knew would pique my employer’s interest. And if that didn’t do the trick, I had an ace up my sleeve.
I told the voice that Ms. Pentecost would be happy to meet with the Collins siblings at three o’clock. Time enough for me to drag her out of bed, get Mrs. Campbell to fix her some biscuits and gravy, and give her a summary of the last two weeks of headlines.
The Collins murder was big news in a city numb to lurid crime. And it wasn’t the first time the family had made forty-point headlines. They had first hit the front page nearly twenty years previous when Alistair Collins, owner and CEO of Collins Steelworks and Manufacturing, married his secretary, Abigail Pratt. Abigail was thirty years his junior, decidedly working-class, and four months pregnant at the time. Shotgun weddings were a rarity in that tax bracket—at least such public ones—and the press had a field day.
Over the next two decades, Al Collins’s name popped up pretty regularly in the business section, usually in the context of how deftly he was running the company. He hit the A section a couple of times in the thirties when he hired some leg-breakers to bust up a strike. That resulted in a number of cracked skulls and at least one death. Or at least one the cops knew about. Nothing too uncommon in those days, but it prompted one journalist to wax poetic by saying, “Collins is known to have a heart as hard and cold as the steel being shaped in his factory.”
Five years ago, he got promoted to the front page when Collins Steelworks won a big government contract and Alistair announced the company would be refitting its factories to build military machine parts instead of office supplies, guns having become somewhat more lucrative than staplers.
Then the headlines turned grim for the Collins clan.
A year ago that September, Alistair sat down at the desk in his home study, put a revolver in his mouth, and took the express train to the end of the line. Interviews with associates revealed that the manufacturing magnate had been recently depressed, but no one knew about what.
A few of the papers made not-so-subtle suggestions that Abigail had given her husband a hand in pulling the trigger. In response, representatives for the family pointed out that Alistair had recently done away with a prenuptial agreement severely limiting his wife’s access to the family checking account. That, combined with the fact that Alistair’s will put most of the family fortune in a trust to be given to their children, put the kibosh on any motive Abigail might have had to hasten his death. No less than the district attorney himself came out and said the death was definitely a suicide.
All of this had recently been given a light dusting-off in the papers on account of what had happened Halloween night two weeks prior. According to the reports, Abigail Collins had been throwing her annual Halloween shindig—a masquerade party where the upper executives of Collins Steelworks got to play dress-up, groove stiffly to a swing quartet, and down an ungodly amount of champagne.
* * *
—
From the November 2 edition of the Times:
Among the masked frivolity, guests lost track of Mrs. Collins. Sometime around midnight, smoke was discovered pouring from under the door of the late Alistair Collins’s private study. The door was found to be locked from the inside. When it was battered down, it was discovered that a blaze started in the room’s fireplace had spread. More horribly, Mrs. Collins was found sitting at her late husband’s desk, bludgeoned to death.
Police are baffled as to how the killer escaped the room after having committed this awful deed. According to one unnamed officer, “That door can only be locked from the inside. The only window is barred shut. And there are no hidden passages. We checked. It’s a real puzzler.”
Lieutenant Nathan Lazenby said he could not comment on the details of an ongoing investigation, but that the police were following a number of promising leads and expected to lay their hands on a culprit soon.
“Soon” had turned into two weeks. Apparently, it was indeed a “real puzzler.”
Nowhere in the papers was there a rundown of that evening’s events. No timeline, no off-the-record interviews with guests. Nothing.
The absence of those kinds of details made me curious. Either someone had spread some wealth around to keep things quiet, or the police were hot on the trail of somebody and working hard to keep the lid closed so their prey didn’t get spooked. Considering it had been two weeks without the hint of an impending arrest, I was betting on the former.
When the clock struck one, I grabbed a mug of strong coffee from the kitchen and climbed to the second floor to knock on Ms. Pentecost’s bedroom door. There was no response. Undeterred, I let myself in.
“Good morning,” I said cheerfully, flinging open the heavy curtains and bathing the room in gray November light. “Well, not so much good morning as good afternoon, but the sentiment’s the same. What time did you get to sleep?”
A four-poster bed dominated the center of the room. From beneath its thick, white duvet, I caught a murmured reply.
“Six o’clock.”
I set the coffee and copies of that day’s papers on the nightstand by the bed, careful not to jostle the glass eye staring up at me from its nest in a folded white handkerchief.
“Is the sun up at six o’clock in the morning in November?” I asked. “I’m an early riser, but not quite that early. Unless appointments demand it or I’ve had a particularly late night and I’ve yet to see a bed. Though if something’s exciting enough to keep me out that la
te I’m usually not looking at my watch.”
She threw back the duvet and glared—a glare made more menacing by the fact that half of it came from an empty socket. But the effect was undercut by her hair, which tends to frizz up when let out of its braids and lean toward full bog witch after a night in bed.
“Are you tormenting me for a purpose?” she hissed.
I put on a bright smile and shook my head. “Merely delivering coffee and word of potential clients who will be arriving at three o’clock. I thought you’d want time to shower and eat and wrestle your hair into submission.”
“We have no appointments today.”
“We didn’t,” I said. “Now we do.”
I walked out.
This might seem like odd behavior for someone whose job title has “assistant” in it and who can be fired at will. But I’ve found that sometimes the best way of assisting Ms. Pentecost is to make sure that she’s awake and fed and vertical enough in order to do the work she’s devoted her life to.
Also, if I had said our potential clients were the Collins siblings, she might immediately have nixed it, or at least asked me to reschedule before burrowing back under her duvet.
Ms. P and I share a certain prejudice when it comes to the upper crust. Mine is the usual small-town, working-class chip on the shoulder. Hers stems from the fact that the wealthy are usually the least in need of her help. However, part of my assisting includes directing her to the occasional clientele who can write a five-figure check without breaking into a cold sweat.
We had expenses after all, not least of which was my salary.
An hour later, showered, fed, dressed in a navy blue tweed, and hair tortured into her customary bundle of braids, she walked into the office. She’d left her cane upstairs, which suggested that the day was a good day, or she was being stubborn. She sat at her desk and I gave her the rundown, including the Collinses’ timeline of headline-producing scandal and woe.
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 4
