Fortune Favors the Dead

by Stephen Spotswood

  “A séance is a pretty strange place for her to turn up,” I said. “Would be nice to know what she was doing tagging along with Belestrade.”

  “Yes.”

  About thirty seconds of silence passed without a word and I considered tiptoeing out. Sometimes Ms. P’s brain conjures the words “you are dismissed” but she’s too distracted to push them out her lips.

  I was about to tip the first toe when she asked, “Is Hiram working tonight?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “He should be. It’s not Shabbat and the holidays don’t kick off for a couple weeks. Besides, it’s not like Hiram keeps tight with tradition.”

  “Will he be awake now?”

  I checked my watch—four-thirty P.M. Stuck on the night shift, Hiram was a late riser even by Ms. P’s standards, but I figured he should at least be up and at breakfast. I told her as much.

  “Call him,” she ordered. “If he’s on shift tonight, tell him we’d like to pay a visit around one A.M.”

  “Just so you know, we have an appointment at the Collins manse for ten tomorrow morning. So you might want to curtail your usual late night.”

  The look she gave me would definitely not have come from a maiden aunt. Although the only aunt I had ran a roadhouse outside Chicago and had done three years for manslaughter, so what did I know.

  She gave a great sigh and told me to ask Hiram if eleven P.M. would work.

  “Anything I can do in the meantime?”

  She shook her head. “Choosing a direction now would be a waste of your energy. We need to ascertain what ground the police have gone over, what they have discovered, and exactly what kind of crime we’re dealing with. Call Hiram.”

  She dove back into the boxes.

  I went downstairs to call a man about a corpse.

  * * *

  —

  Homicides made up a pretty small chunk of the cases that we tackled. Still, I’ve seen more bodies—in situ and on slabs—than ninety-nine out of a hundred New Yorkers. It’s not something you get used to.

  It’s not the gruesome ones that get me. Bullet holes, stab wounds, the broken-china insides of car wrecks and jumpers—I can handle all that.

  It’s the ones that look like they’re sleeping that I have a hard time with.

  Eventually, I notice the stillness. The absence of things I take for granted: the slow in-and-out of regular breathing, the thrum of blood pulsing under the skin. It hits me that they’re not just playing a champion game of possum. It sinks in just how thin the line is between me and them. One thimble of poison in my coffee and that’s that.

  That’s when the cold finger runs up my spine.

  Abigail Collins was somewhere in between. From the neck down she looked pretty good, if you discounted the chalk-white pallor from being in the morgue’s freezer for two weeks and the telltale Y incision of the autopsy. It was clear that in life she’d been a good-looking woman, a youngish forty who shared her children’s fair features.

  Above the neck was another story. The tip of her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth, giving the socialite the look of a petulant child. Her left eye was filled with blood and the pupil was cocked at a grotesque angle. The other eye had gone the blue-white of corpses.

  “Show me the wound?” Ms. Pentecost asked the man standing beside her.

  My boss never demanded anything from Hiram. Everything was a request. She knew how much he was putting on the line letting us into the morgue after hours. A little over five feet tall, with a close-cropped black beard and deep-set eyes, Hiram carried himself with the solemnity of a rabbi.

  Working as an assistant to the medical examiner for nearly a decade, he’d seen a healthy cross-section of mankind’s creative ways of doing away with one another. If it weren’t for his being Jewish, he’d have been his boss’s boss by now. Maybe even a coroner if he’d had the patience for politics. On the flip side, his vocation put him at odds with his community, making him a pariah twice over. But nobody in that room, dead or alive, was mistaking the world for fair.

  He gently turned Mrs. Collins’s head. High on the left side, where pale forehead met golden-blond hair, was a crater set off by a jagged cut a good three inches long. Ms. Pentecost ran a gentle, white-gloved finger across the cut.

  “I am told it was from the base of a crystal ball,” Hiram said, his voice low and reverent. “A single blow struck with considerable force.”

  “Would the assailant have needed to be particularly strong?”

  Hiram shook his head. “Not particularly, no.”

  Since the victim had been found sitting, the angle of the wound meant nothing, other than that she probably saw it coming. Which meant our murderer was a man or woman of unknown strength and indeterminate height.

  Excellent! We could rule out infants and the comatose.

  Ms. Pentecost worked her way down the length of the body, examining every inch. She stopped at Mrs. Collins’s left wrist, leaning in so close her nose almost brushed the cold flesh.

  “You observed these bruises?”

  Hiram nodded once.

  “They’re very faint,” she noted.

  “They likely occurred very shortly before her death.”

  “Made by the killer?” she asked.

  “I could not say,” he told her. “That is your charge, Lillian. Determining the possibilities. Mine is caretaking the dead.”

  I can count the number of people who call her Lillian on my fingers and still have digits to spare. She’d helped his family out of a jam a few years back. I don’t know the details. It was before my time. Whatever it was, he calls her Lillian and sneaks us into the morgue when needed, and she tries not to wear out his hospitality.

  Still, before we left, I slipped a couple bills from our clients’ bundle into the pocket of his white lab coat. He didn’t put up a fight. He had a family and was a practical man. He gave a quick nod of thanks, then saw us out the back door and into an alley behind the building where the morgue is housed.

  I’d parked the Cadillac several blocks away. Even though it was after midnight and there weren’t many cops around, it wouldn’t do for someone to see the great lady detective sneaking in and out of the morgue. On the way back to Brooklyn, I thought I spotted a tail. But after a few loop-de-loops around some choice blocks in Midtown, the headlights disappeared. So either I was imagining things or they were very good.

  Once home, the boss disappeared up to the third floor and I retired to my room. It was the same bed that had been there when I’d arrived. I’d furnished the rest out of my own pocket: a couple of low bookshelves I was slowly filling up with detective novels, a not-too-battered end table, a tall lamp, and a wing-backed armchair I’d rescued from an empty lot. The walls were decorated with framed movie posters and signed lobby cards from Broadway shows. I sneak in the occasional musical or cabaret when I can. It reminds me a little of the circus. The room had a small fireplace, but it wasn’t quite cold enough to get it going.

  I slipped into a pair of green silk pajamas that had been a gift from Ms. P the Christmas before and lay in bed for a long time digesting the day. Locked rooms and vengeful spirits and dead women tucked away in the cold. I listened to a familiar patter from the floor above me: the rhythm of a pair of slippered footfalls interspersed with the hard rap of a cane.

  When I finally managed to fall asleep, I dreamed of the circus, of clowns beating on drums and the sound of knives carving a path to their target.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Collins place wasn’t exactly the Vanderbilt mansion, but it was within spitting distance. A four-story granite edifice lodged in the heart of an Upper East Side block, it had the gray, flat face of an upscale asylum. We were greeted at the door by Sanford—a whippet-thin man in traditional butler’s attire. He had a carefully waxed white moustache and the practiced remove of the lo
ngtime servant.

  Having read more than my share of detective novels, I’m always hoping for a “the butler did it” moment. Taking in Sanford’s cultivated detachment, I doubted he could have ginned up the passion to raise his voice, much less a blunt instrument.

  Inside we found Randolph waiting with barely concealed impatience. Wallace, we were told, had been called into a board meeting, so the ten-cent tour had fallen to the young Mr. Collins.

  “Rebecca had a late night,” he said with disdain. “She’s still asleep.”

  “Lucky girl,” Ms. P muttered.

  She was allowed to be resentful. She’d been dragged out of bed a good four hours too early for her. But she’d filled up with enough coffee to get Rip Van Winkle doing the jitterbug, so I hoped at least three out of four cylinders were firing.

  Randolph was wearing dark gray trousers and a heavy-duty work shirt. When I commented on it, he said, “I’m going to be on the floor of the plant later today. It’s no place for a suit and tie.” It came off as posturing and reminded me of a little boy playing dress-up.

  While the outside of the house leaned toward grim, the inside was pleasant enough. The first floor was a sprawl of sitting rooms, a dining room, kitchen, and what Randolph referred to as “a modest ballroom.”

  The second floor contained the siblings’ bedrooms, as well as Alistair’s office and bedroom. The third floor held the master bedroom suite, which Abigail had used, along with a suite of vacant servants’ quarters. Neither Sanford, the cook, nor the part-time maid lived on the premises. The fourth floor had a conservatory and nursery and was mostly unused.

  I made a mental note of the separate sleeping arrangements for Abigail and Alistair. Maybe it was something. Or maybe one of them snored.

  We kept the walking portion of the tour to the first two floors. Ms. P wasn’t having a bad day but there were a couple stumbles going up the stairs.

  Randolph led us into the study, which he told us had been left as it was since the night of the murder. I was surprised to discover that this extended to the black velvet draped on the walls and over the room’s single, barred window. It turned the room into a dark, claustrophobic womb with old Alistair’s desk, at least twice the size of Ms. P’s, hovering in the center. The candles, the bloodstained silks, and, of course, the murder weapon had all been collected by the police.

  There was a lingering smell of scorched fabric and paper. It was strongest around the fireplace to the left of the desk.

  Ms. Pentecost strode over and sat heavily in the desk chair. Randolph stayed in the doorway, trying to look nonchalant and failing.

  “The police insisted we keep the scene intact, whatever that means,” Randolph said. “To be honest, once the estate is settled, we’ll probably gut this entire room. Tear it out and turn it into…anything else.”

  Who could blame them? Both their parents dead by violence while sitting in the chair my employer was currently occupying. I’d want to do some extreme renovating myself.

  “The locks on these drawers appear to have been forced,” Ms. P noted.

  “The police,” Randolph said with more than a hint of contempt. “If they’d asked, we could have provided the key, but why ask when you can just destroy an antique?”

  I wouldn’t have called anything “destroyed” but I didn’t argue.

  “They were locked the night of the party?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They were always locked. Though everything of real value was removed after our father’s death.”

  While my boss rummaged the desk, I checked behind every velvet drape. All hung pretty close to the wall or a bookcase. No room for somebody to hide without their feet sticking out the bottom. There was one space near the door—a gap between the bookcase and the wall. I squeezed in and found it a very tight fit. A person could hide there if they were small and didn’t put too much of a premium on breathing.

  “Did you find anything?” Rebecca stood behind her brother in the doorway. She was dressed in white silk pajamas, barefoot, blond ringlets twisted by sleep.

  “Thank you for joining us,” Randolph muttered.

  “Sorry. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “Maybe if you didn’t stay out until all hours,” he said, a little more forcefully than required.

  But Rebecca wasn’t listening. She was staring at the desk, at the chair she had sat in during the séance.

  “I used to love this room. Now it’s ruined,” she said. “That séance alone would have been enough to keep me from ever coming in here again.”

  “Do you believe the séance to have been legitimate, Miss Collins?” Ms. P asked. “Now that you have had time to consider?”

  Rebecca took a moment before responding.

  “I suppose not,” she finally admitted. “But if the woman is a charlatan, then I have to accept that she tricked me. Thinking my father was reaching out from beyond the grave—that would have been less painful.”

  “Uncle Harry’s spent good money making sure talk like that doesn’t spread,” Randolph said.

  “Would your father’s spirit have any reason to harm your mother?” Ms. Pentecost asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” Randolph snorted. “What kind of question is that?”

  “A necessary one,” Ms. Pentecost said. “Assuming the culprit is not your late father, then it could be someone who wishes us to think it was him. In the latter case, the real killer would seem to know of a reason such a thing might be believed.”

  Randolph muttered something not fit to print.

  “To rephrase,” Ms. P continued, “were the relations between your mother and father cordial when he was alive?”

  “Yes,” he blurted. “They were fine. They were happy.”

  Rebecca said nothing.

  “Was there any suspicion that your father’s death was anything but a suicide?”

  This poked a hornet’s nest behind Randolph’s eyes.

  “There was not! No matter what the press tried to dredge up, it was very clear that…” He sputtered into obscenity. Rebecca put a hand on his arm. The gesture got him back on track. “Look—it was Uncle Harry’s idea to hire you. I told him to go with someone we’ve worked with before, a company we can trust. But now you’re on board to help clean this up and digging up more mud won’t do it. It’s obvious this Belestrade woman had a hand in it. Why don’t you go talk to her?”

  I didn’t disagree, but I still had the urge to tell him where he could shove his suggestions. Ms. P just cocked her head like she was inspecting a painting by a deeply mediocre artist.

  Rebecca opened her mouth to add something, but Sanford chose that moment to pop his blank-faced head into the study.

  “Mr. Wallace has returned. He’s waiting for you in the sitting room.”

  My employer brushed some stray ash off her jacket and turned to me. “Willowjean—would you mind finishing the inspection of this room? I have questions I’d like to pose to Mr. Wallace.”

  “No problem, boss.” To the Collins twins, I asked, “Do you mind if I take down the drapery? It’ll make going through things easier.”

  “Do whatever you want with it,” Rebecca said. “I won’t ever come in here again.”

  Ms. P followed Randolph out of the office and headed downstairs. Rebecca veered off to the right.

  “I’m going to shower and dress,” she threw over her shoulder. “I’ll be down in a bit.”

  Randolph, still simmering, grunted in response.

  I counted to twenty, walked out of the office, veered right, and stopped in front of the door to Rebecca’s bedroom. Ms. P and I have developed a few codes over the years. When she addressed me as “Willowjean,” that was her giving me a cue to poke around and see what I could find out.

  I knocked. A voice called from the other side.

  “Yes?”<
br />
  I opened the door. Rebecca had taken off her pajama top and I was greeted by a view of her bare back. I had a split second to wonder whether the rest of her was as smooth and flawless. Startled, she slipped the top back on and quickly did up the minimum of buttons.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought you might want to exchange a few words without your brother or uncle listening in.”

  “I really don’t think I should,” she said.

  “How about I ask a direct question? If you feel like answering, you answer. If you don’t, no hard feelings.”

  She brushed an errant blond ringlet out of her eyes. “I’m not in the habit of inviting strangers into my bedroom to grill me.”

  “I’m not exactly a stranger.”

  “Strange enough,” she said with half a grin.

  “Then I guess we need to be properly introduced. I’m Will Parker.”

  I held out a hand for her to shake. After flipping a coin in her head, she did. Her fingers were long and smooth, but with a certain amount of iron in the grip.

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Parker.”

  “Just Will.”

  “Then you’ll have to call me Becca,” she said.

  “Now we’re not strangers,” I said.

  She let loose with a real smile then—one that stretched all the way up to her eyes. “Fair enough. Ask your question.”

  “Was it true what your brother said? That your mother and father were happy?”

  Her smile died by degrees. She sat back on the bed and turned her baby blues to the floor.

  “I wouldn’t say happy. Maybe content. Or satisfied. Not all relationships are built on passion.”

  “Did your mother tell you that?” I asked.