“That’s two questions, Will.”
“Lend me a little credit.”
She curled her toes into the lush carpet.
“My father said it. He said that lives might be built on a foundation of ideals, but that the rest of the construction is made of compromises.”
“That’s a hard way of looking at life,” I said.
“My father could be a hard man. He was not…sentimental.”
That tracked. Anyone who had kept a company alive and thriving during the years after the Crash had to have a little cutthroat in him. More than a little if the papers’ accounts of Steel-Hearted Al Collins were to be believed. Though that didn’t quite match up with a man who’d eat his own gun.
“Do you think he really committed suicide?”
That snapped her head up. Fire sparked in her eyes. It wasn’t the sputtering anger her brother had shown. It was something else.
“Yes, I do,” she said. No hesitation. No doubt.
“It didn’t surprise you?” I asked. “The way the papers told it, it came out of nowhere.”
I don’t know what flickered in and out of her head while she was coming up with a response, but I would have given a sawbuck to catch the matinee.
“Yes, I was surprised,” she finally said. “He was a…He didn’t seem the type.”
“But you don’t think anyone killed him.”
“No. No, I don’t,” she said with resolve, or at least a decent counterfeit. “Now, I’m afraid I need to shower and dress. And you’ve run out of credit.” She stood and gently but firmly led me to the door.
Just as I crossed the threshold she asked, “Can I ask you a question, Miss Parker?”
“It’s only fair.”
“Do you dance?”
“I, um…I…Yes?” I sputtered. “I mean, yes. I dance.”
“Good.”
She closed the door in my face.
CHAPTER 7
I stood on the other side of the bedroom door for a solid half minute trying to regain my balance. I don’t know what I was thrown by more—the dancing question or the fact that I was positive there was a lie hidden somewhere in what she’d told me. I just couldn’t put my finger on where.
I went back into the office and, after pulling the drapes off the walls, spent the next hour and a half giving the room a thorough searching. This included shaking out every book in the bookshelves, using my penknife to unscrew electrical sockets to search for hidden stashes and test for loose floorboards, and going over the desk inch by inch.
Not a thing. Or, I should say, a thousand things, probably none of them relevant.
I found a couple hundred scraps of paper, mostly receipts from bookstores, tucked into pages. I found canceled checks and a few innocuous company documents. I found two dozen errant paper clips, more than a few dust bunnies, and a cigarette tucked into the back of a drawer that Mr. Collins must have been saving for a rainy day.
No revelations in the lot. I was disappointed but hardly surprised. It’s a rare case that hangs on a keystone clue.
I confirmed that the bars on the room’s single window were legit, and that the window had long ago been painted shut. With cat burglary crossed off, I spent the next fifteen minutes on the door trying to lock it from the outside using picks. No dice. It could only be locked from the inside.
The only thing I found that was really interesting—though I’d hardly call it a clue—was a framed family photo on one of the bookshelves. In it, Al Collins was sitting on the main staircase of the house. He looked as dark and cold as he did in the papers—wide forehead, receding widow’s peak, carefully groomed moustache set above a razor slash of a mouth.
He held a smiling toddler on his lap I presumed to be Rebecca, though he didn’t seem all that pleased to have her there. Next to him sat Abigail trying to comfort a shrieking Randolph. A man sat on the step above them—younger than Alistair, but not by much, and very handsome in an asymmetrical kind of way.
After a few moments of study I realized that I was looking at a young Harrison Wallace. The years hadn’t been kind, but back in his prime he hadn’t been far from a heartthrob. He was leaning down between the couple in what I assumed was an attempt to help calm baby Randolph. The gesture had him pressed very close to Abigail. Of all the people in the photo—toddlers and adults alike—he had the biggest smile.
Harry and Abigail. That was a thought.
Was Abigail sharing more than just her secretarial skills with the two men? Neither twin resembled their father much. They didn’t look like Uncle Harry, either. Still, it was something to think about.
Downstairs I found Randolph, Rebecca—I made a note to start referring to her as Becca—Wallace, and my boss arranged in a sitting room. Randolph was mid-rant.
“I’m not saying that, as businesspeople, we shouldn’t have ethics, but—for crying out loud, it was war. It would have been unethical not to have done our part to arm our soldiers,” he declared. It didn’t take much to see the cranky toddler hovering just underneath Randolph’s pretty face.
“And your mother disapproved?” Ms. P asked.
“She said we had the blood of everyone killed with our bombs on our hands.”
“Which was never something she cared about before,” Wallace said, jumping in. “Not until she got involved with that spiritualist. And we’re talking millions. More when you think about the company’s stock prices.”
As Wallace worked himself into a lather, Ms. P shot me a look. I shot her one back. I was still on poking-around duty.
I walked through the modest ballroom and into the kitchen. There I found a squat woman in her fifties sporting an apron and attending to three steaming pots and what smelled like half a cow sizzling in the oven.
I gave a polite cough and she turned to see who was intruding on her kingdom.
“Can I help you?” she asked with a hint of Irish in her voice.
“Willowjean Parker. I’m Lillian Pentecost’s assistant.” I pull out the full first name for court officials and women of a certain age. It keeps the confusion to a minimum.
“I’m Dora. I’m the cook. In case that wasn’t obvious.”
“Do you have anything cold to drink? A soda, maybe?”
“I think there are a couple in the icebox. I’ll check.”
“Don’t bother yourself,” I told her. “I can open an icebox door as well as anybody. You keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t want the gravy to get lumps.”
“No, I certainly don’t,” she said, going back to stirring. “Mind you, a few lumps wouldn’t be noticed. Young Mr. Collins inhales his food, Miss Collins eats like a bird, and Mr. Harry never stays for meals anymore. But I spent the better part of twenty years making gravy for the late Mr. Collins and he liked things just so.”
Thank God for chatty house staff.
I stuck my head in the icebox and pulled out a bottle of something labeled “lemon fizz.” I cracked it open and took a sip. It was disgusting, but a drink in hand gives you a purpose and it makes it harder to kick you out. I sat down at the little table in the corner of the kitchen where I assumed Sanford and Dora took their meals.
“I’ll take good gravy any way I can get it,” I said. “But I understand wanting something just so. He was like that? The late Mr. Collins?”
“Oh, yes. You don’t get to be where he was, an important man, head of a company, by neglecting the details.” She never took her eyes off the dishes on the stove except to turn to a counter and grab a pinch of this or a dash of that. Mrs. Campbell would have approved.
“You should meet my boss,” I told her. “She can hear me make a typo at a hundred paces.”
“Read about her in the papers,” Dora said. “Those Central Park killings. Neat trick figuring that one.”
“Yeah, that was a tense couple of weeks.”<
br />
“Seems like a smart woman. Good at ferreting things out.”
Her tone walked a line. I couldn’t tell whether she thought Ms. Pentecost’s ferreting was good or bad. I waited for her to pick up the thread, but she’d gotten absorbed in tending to a pot of greens.
“You’ve been with the family twenty years, you said?”
“Little more than twenty.” She measured out a pinch of salt in her fingers. “Jeremy and I came on a few years before he and Miss Abigail married.”
I assumed Jeremy was Sanford’s Christian name. From the way she said it, I took it they were a matched pair. I couldn’t quite picture the two in wedded bliss, but I try not to judge the strangeness of bedfellows.
“It must be a nice place to work if you stayed this long.”
“We were lucky to find ourselves here. Especially back in those days. Hard times, they were,” she said. “Then the children arrived—the twins. I’d worked as a nursemaid, so I spent a lot of time with the two of them.”
She cracked open the oven and peered at the sizzling roast. She must have liked what she saw, since she closed it again with no additions or subtractions.
“When I said Mr. Collins was particular, I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” she said, wiping sweat off her brow with a dish towel. “He was always very generous. Bonuses on Christmas and our birthdays. Any time he was getting rid of furniture or clothes or anything like that, he let Jeremy and I have first pick. Jeremy has quite a few suit jackets that used to belong to Mr. Collins.”
Whenever someone bends over backward to tell me so-and-so was a saint, I always wonder what sins they’re trying to sweep away.
“How about Mrs. Collins?” I asked. “Was she particular?”
A bit of silent stirring from Dora.
“She was particular, too, I guess, God rest her soul. But her particulars kept changing, if you know what I mean.”
“Mercurial kind of woman?”
She let out a little bark that I took for a laugh. “Mercurial. That’s a good word. Always trying new things, new hobbies, new fashions. Horseback riding, archery, knitting for about a week, that kind of Mexican dancing with the big dresses. And her diet kept changing along with the rest. Seemed like she loved a dish one week and pulled faces at it the next.” She gave her head a brisk shake. “I shouldn’t say things like that. She wasn’t a bad employer. Just a little hard to please.”
I let out a lemony burp. “Excuse me. Did, um…Did she and Mr. Collins get along?”
“They were married,” she said, patly.
“There’s married and then there’s married,” I said. “My parents, for instance. Lovebirds their whole life. They’ll be holding hands and splitting chocolate malts until the day they die. But I have an aunt and uncle—this is on my father’s side. Pick an afternoon and listen at their door and you’d swear you were eavesdropping on a Bowery barroom.”
None of that was true, but I’ve never been one to shy away from sacrificing honesty for a good story.
Dora turned to me, lips pressed in a hard line.
“I know what you’re asking. I’m not a stupid woman.”
“I’d never mistake you for one,” I said. “Anyone who keeps a bowl of bacon fat on hand and knows how to use it can’t be a dummy.”
“All right,” she said. “I guess you and Ms. Pentecost are doing the Lord’s work. I’ve got a friend who works at a boardinghouse in the Bronx. Met your boss a couple times, she has. Nothing but good things to say.”
I knew what boardinghouse she meant. It kept a handful of rooms open for women who found themselves suddenly in need. Ms. P occasionally stopped by to provide free consultations. Half the time the problem was booze or a husband too free with his fists, or both. Usually Ms. P’s assistance boiled down to helping the women find a way to get out and get out quick.
Dora turned the burners down and started giving things a final stir.
“I never saw the two of them fight. Arguments, sure. All couples argue. Usually about money. Though I tried not to listen in.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, I wouldn’t say they were the most affectionate couple—not in that hand-holding way. A lot of couples aren’t.”
She was doing some contortionist tricks to make out that Al and Abigail were doing fine, but I was reading between the lines well enough: cold, distant, and fighting over money. She grabbed a pair of mitts, opened the oven, and reached in.
“Did his death surprise you?” I asked.
She stayed half in, half out of the oven so long I thought I might have to rescue her before she started to broil.
“Certainly, it did,” she said, hauling out the steaming roast. She turned away from me and set it on a counter and started slicing into it. “But that kind of thing. Can’t always see it coming, can you?”
I think she wiped away a tear, but she had her back to me so it could have been sweat. I could feel her wriggling off the hook, so I didn’t tug any harder on that particular line.
“What did Mr. Collins think about his wife seeing a spiritual advisor?”
The gnomish woman whirled around, meat fork in one hand, oven mitt in the other.
“Advisor!” she spat. “That woman was nothing but trouble.” With each syllable, she jabbed the air in front of her with the fork.
“Why was she trouble?”
“Say what you will about Miss Abigail being mercurial. But at least she had sense. Then she tries out this woman. Everyone figured it was another of her whims. She’d be done with it in a week or a month or however long. She just kept going. Then she started bringing her here.”
“Ariel Belestrade? What for?”
“Something about reading the rooms. Divining the energy of the space—that’s what she said. I remember very clear because she came in here while I was in the middle of fixing a chocolate soufflé, which takes a bit of care. She said there was bad energy in this room. Unkind energy. Looked at me like it was my doing.”
She threw her hands in the air so hard, the oven mitt flew off, bounced off the ceiling, and nearly fell in the pot of greens.
“See? Even thinking of it gets my back up. And of course, the soufflé didn’t turn out. Had to fix it into pudding.”
“Terrible thing to do to a soufflé,” I said, shaking my head gravely. “What did everyone else think of her?”
“About like I did, far as I could tell. Mr. Collins ignored her. Mr. Randolph threw faces at her behind her back. Miss Becca avoided the woman altogether.”
As she spoke, she took pots off the stove and started ladling things into dishes.
“What about Mr. Wallace?” I asked. “He’s around a lot, isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes,” she said with a genuine smile. “Mr. Harry’s practically family. Old, old friend of Mr. Collins. And, of course, he’s the children’s godfather.”
“What did he think of Belestrade?”
“Not much. Especially after what she said to him. You can’t blame him, really.”
“Of course not,” I said, sipping my lemon awfulness and trying to look casual. “What were her exact words again?”
“That he was a terrible source of energy for the whole household. That he was spiritually poisonous. Mr. Harry! One of the sweetest men. A second father to the children. If that man is poisonous, I must be Typhoid Mary.”
“Did she give a reason why?” I asked.
“Not to me. I gather it was because he and Mr. Collins were always talking business. Money, she said, muddied the well of the soul.” If she dripped any more sarcasm I’d have to get a mop. “Anyone who says things like that hasn’t had to worry about money a day in their life.”
“What did Mrs. Collins think about that?” I asked. “Did she come to Harry’s defense?”
She might have had an answer for me, but Sanfor
d took that moment to walk in. He saw me sitting at the table and for a split second his mask of reserve fell away and beneath it was…what? Panic? Anger?
“Can I help you, miss?” he asked, slipping the mask back on.
“No thank you. I found what I was looking for,” I said, saluting with my lemon fizz.
“I was telling her about that Belestrade woman,” Dora told him. “How she got her hooks in.”
A little tension went out of Sanford’s shoulders and I wondered what he had been worried we were talking about.
“Do you think she had something to do with what happened to Mrs. Collins?” I asked.
Dora was about to answer but her husband jumped in. “We really couldn’t say. We were assisting in the kitchen the whole time. And certainly when…when the incident occurred.”
His wife fell in line and nodded.
“That’s true,” she said. “Went over it all with the police.”
“I believe they are finishing in the sitting room,” Sanford told me. Unminced, that translated to time to skedaddle. I thanked the cook for the soda and the chat and left.
Back in the sitting room, things were indeed wrapping up.
“I don’t know why it’s necessary,” Wallace was saying. “These are busy people.”
“Which is why it’s best to interview as many at once without requiring them to travel to my office.” The between-the-lines message here was that either Wallace acquiesced or the Collins Steelworks muckety-mucks would be forced to schlep out to Brooklyn.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll tell everyone to make themselves available.”
We said our goodbyes and Ms. Pentecost promised to keep them updated on any progress. Driving back to our house in that dreaded borough, she let me know I’d be making a trip to the Collins plant in Jersey City later that week. There I’d find a number of executives and managerial types, along with assorted others, who’d been at the party. Sure, we could have gotten them to come to us, but she wanted me to get a feel for the atmosphere of the place.
“It seems that there was something of a crisis point developing within the company prior to Mrs. Collins’s death,” Ms. Pentecost explained from her leathery nest in the backseat of the sedan. “The board overwhelmingly favored renewing the military contracts. However, over the last year, Mrs. Collins had expressed a change of heart. She spoke about moving the company back to a domestic footing. It seems she’d acquired ethical concerns about prospering from the war.”
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 8
