Fortune Favors the Dead

by Stephen Spotswood

  Her voice was high and light, but there was a power and passion behind it. Dr. Waterhouse was someone you probably wouldn’t spare a second glance if you passed her on the street. But standing onstage, holding forth from her favorite academic soapbox, her eyes lit up and she drew from a hidden well of charisma.

  Her hundred or so students were certainly paying attention, which is saying a lot for a late afternoon class of undergraduates.

  “Think on this,” Waterhouse continued. “How many churches are there in this city? How many cemeteries? How many crypts? How many statues carved in the semblance of long-dead men? Each of these exists because we believe the dead are more than just dust and bones. Most modern religions—Christianity especially—have created complex hierarchies of the dead that put the ancient Egyptians to shame. We are taught that the dead are still around us. Hovering. Whether above or, in the case of our more freethinking ancestors, below.”

  She squeezed a polite chuckle out of that.

  “Let me employ a little exercise. How many of you, as a child, stole something? Something small, like a piece of candy from a shop?”

  I didn’t know where that left turn was heading, but I raised my paw along with a scattering of others. She made a show of counting the sparse number of hands.

  “Now,” she continued. “How many of you, as a child, thought about stealing something—really considered it—and decided not to.”

  About five times as many hands went up. Waterhouse smiled and nodded.

  “For those of you who chose not to steal, what swayed you to choose not to?” she asked. “Was it a surge of civic pride that suddenly made you loath to transgress our society’s laws?”

  I started to see where she was leading us. The first time Ms. P and I had seen Dr. Waterhouse speak, I’d been struck by how good a performer she was. Most academics aren’t. It’s like they don’t realize they’re on a stage and it’s their job to grab their audience and not let go. But Waterhouse knew when to breathe, when to gesture, when to raise her voice, and when to lower it to make the crowd lean in and listen.

  “Or was it guilt that kept you on the straight and narrow?” she offered. “Was it because, even as a child, it was impressed into you that there were people somewhere high above you looking down, watching, judging? Much harder to steal a Mars bar if you think it might damn you. Or if you think Great-Aunt Grace is looking over your shoulder.”

  There was a wave of laughter as her little joke let some of the tension out of the room.

  “I led you on this tangent to make the point that we modern women and men of the twentieth century are not so far removed from the ancient cultures that we are studying. We are as beholden to our superstitions as they were to theirs,” she said with true earnestness. “I’m not saying this to provoke you. Just to remind you that we are not so far out of the cave as we’d like to think. Now, please, open your books to chapter fifteen.”

  She moved into a more traditional lecture, spending the next hour on the Sumerians, whose gods, as far as I could tell, were a lot more interesting than any saint you’ll find hanging out in St. Pat’s.

  When she finished, we weaved our way through the departing students, introduced ourselves, and begged a few minutes of her time.

  “Of course,” she said. “This is my last class, and as usual, I have no social plans. Please, come to my office.”

  As we followed her through a warren of narrow hallways, she asked, “What did you think of the lecture?”

  “Surprising,” my boss said. “Less for its content than for what you judiciously left out.”

  “And what was that?”

  “It seems that the argument you were leading to was that religion has been used through the centuries as a goad to enforce the law,” Ms. P explained. “That the ones hovering above are not just the dead but whoever happens to be in power, whoever is holding on to that goad.”

  “It did seem like that, didn’t it?” Dr. Waterhouse said, stopping in front of an office door.

  “I wish my students were as swift to make that leap as you,” she added, fumbling a key out of her pocket. “Sadly, most of them are in the class to fill some requirement or other. The few that do make the leap—well, I’ve frequently found that life’s already taught them about power and abuse.”

  She opened the door and we entered an office that was about twice the size of a bathroom stall. Dr. Waterhouse squeezed behind a postage stamp of a desk, while we sat in a pair of rickety wooden chairs.

  Except for a scattering of papers and books, the room was practically bare. The only personal touch I could spot was a glass case mounted to the wall above her desk. It held a row of stone arrowheads, like the kind I used to stumble upon in the tilled-out fields where I grew up. It caught my boss’s eye as well.

  “The Illinois?” she asked, nodding at the case.

  Dr. Waterhouse looked surprised.

  “The color of the stone,” Ms. P said, answering the unasked question. “And the barbed tips.”

  The professor smiled.

  “I must say, you’re exactly as perceptive as advertised,” she said, flipping over a folded copy of the Times that was sitting on her desk.

  On page 3, there was a follow-up to the Collins murder under the headline FAMOUS LADY DETECTIVE BROUGHT IN ON COLLINS KILLING. It included a photo of Ms. P that had to be at least five years old. I made a mental note to schedule a photo shoot whether the famous lady detective wanted it or not.

  “You were at the party the night Abigail Collins was killed?” Ms. P asked. It was a softball, but we had to start somewhere.

  “I was. Though I’m not sure what help I can be.” The professor removed her spectacles, squinted, then put them back on. “The police have spoken to me, of course. They didn’t seem to find my testimony very interesting. I’ve been racking my brains trying to remember more details from that evening.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” Ms. Pentecost suggested. “How did you come to accompany Ms. Belestrade?”

  “Well, I hadn’t expected to,” Dr. Waterhouse said. “She had invited me a while back, but I’d declined. I don’t really like those kind of events. They’re like faculty mixers, you know? I always feel so awkward and out of place, and then I get going on the unspoken caste system in modern American culture and how in some ways it’s more regressive than older civilizations, especially in regards to how women are treated, and…Well, people don’t seem to want to engage in that kind of dialogue at a party, and I try and change the subject and that just seems to make it worse. Then I was talking with my editor and he suggested I needed what he called a concrete set piece in the last chapter and I thought that this might provide it.”

  I glanced over at my boss and was comforted to find her as lost as I was. She waited for Dr. Waterhouse to take a breath, then raised a hand.

  “Perhaps we should start with more basic details,” she suggested. “How do you know Ms. Belestrade?”

  Being a pale redhead, I’m a master blusher. But the doc gave me a run for my money.

  “I’m sorry. If I don’t have a lecture plan, I tend to ramble,” she said. “I’m working on a book, you see? Actually, it’s with my editor now, so most of the work is done. In it, I interview a number of clairvoyants, psychics, spiritualists, and so forth. Men and women who claim to have supernatural powers or profess to have contact with the dead. That sort.”

  “This was in order to debunk them?” Ms. P asked.

  “I don’t use the word ‘debunk.’ Certainly not in the interviews,” Waterhouse said. “I’m less interested in how they do what they do than how they fit into the overall scheme of our culture. Our willingness to believe the unbelievable if it provides comfort. Because most of these spiritualists target the poor and working-class, that comfort usually comes in the form of hope. That things will get better. That, as they say,
their ship will come in.”

  “Ms. Belestrade’s clientele are hardly working-class,” my boss pointed out.

  “True! Ariel—Ms. Belestrade, I mean—is something of a holdover from the last century. The drawing-room séances, the theatricality—those things have mostly gone out of fashion. The revolutions in science and technology started it, but it’s the Depression that really did them in, you see?”

  We couldn’t see and told her so.

  “For the rich and powerful, spiritualists’ comfort was wrapped in the message that everything would stay the same. That all was well and would stay well. Even beyond death.” Waterhouse was on the edge of her chair, revving back into lecture mode. “The Crash proved that message to be a lie. And the years that followed drove that proof home. Things would not be well forever. Not even for the rich and powerful.”

  She finally took a breath and Ms. P took the opportunity to toss in a question.

  “How does Ms. Belestrade thrive where others do not?”

  Thrown off her rhythm, Waterhouse took a moment to think.

  “A different message, I suppose,” she finally said. “In her practice, it’s less about communing with the spirit world and more about maximizing her client’s success in this one. There’s also her considerable talent to consider.”

  “Her talent?”

  The professor leaned back in her chair. Which, because of her office’s jail-cell dimensions, meant angling catty-corner to the room.

  “I met her at some party I was dragged to years ago. We started chatting. She’d heard of my research and invited me to visit her at her home. I interviewed her on a number of occasions and sat in on several of her meetings with clients. She very quickly became a focus for my book. At the time, she was not as in demand as she is now, but I was sure she would be.”

  “Because of her talent?” my boss prompted.

  “Ariel has a very…powerful personality,” Waterhouse said.

  Glasses off, squint, glasses back on. If I didn’t know better, I’d have said the good professor had a bit of a crush on the clairvoyant. And I didn’t know better.

  “Are you familiar with cold readings?” she asked.

  My boss turned to me.

  “I’ve had a little experience with those kinds of operators,” I said. “They ask sort of broad questions or say the kinds of things that might hit home with anyone. Like ‘I sense you’ve lost someone.’ If that’s a yes, the easy follow-up is ‘I sense they were dear to you’ because if you’re thinking in terms of ‘lost,’ then of course they were dear. Then they narrow things down from there. To the mark, it seems like the fortune-teller knows things they shouldn’t know. But really, the mark is playing their cards faceup.”

  “Yes, yes, exactly!” A little of the lecture-hall glow came back into the prof’s eyes. “A person going to this kind of—‘operator’ is the word you used. I like that. I wish I’d used it in my book. Anyway, a person walking in to see a medium or a fortune-teller is almost always emotionally vulnerable in one way or another. Even those that don’t believe, deep down they want to believe.”

  I added, “And if the medium or whoever hits the bullseye right off the bat, it puts the mark in the frame of mind that they know things other people don’t. So even if they miss the target farther down the line, the mark will give them the benefit of the doubt.”

  Waterhouse nodded thoughtfully. I got the sense she was seeing me for the first time.

  My boss grabbed the reins of the interview and pulled. “What makes Ms. Belestrade different from the rest of these so-called operators?”

  “Not only is Ariel able to glean information from every word or gesture her clients make, but she has such a magnetic presence,” the professor explained. “She’s able to relax the subject in such a way that they divulge more information than they want to. Her voice, the way she holds herself, the cadence of her words. All of it combines to set the person at ease and make them susceptible.”

  “You make it sound like hypnotism.” Ms. Pentecost’s tone let slip exactly what she thought of that practice.

  Waterhouse shook her head. “No, no. Hypnotism on unwilling subjects without a soporific is a myth. She’s more subtle than that.”

  I thought of that honey-spice voice slipping into my ear.

  “Also, there were occasions when we were speaking during which she revealed things about me that I absolutely did not divulge, unwittingly or otherwise. Things very few people know about me. She said they had been revealed to her by the spirits.”

  “Did you believe her?” Ms. P asked.

  Waterhouse cracked an embarrassed smile. “I have to admit that I almost did. I guess I was just like everyone else—someone who wanted to believe.”

  “But in the end you didn’t.”

  “In the end, I recognized her assistant,” she said. “He used to be a student here. Neal something. Watkins. Neal Watkins. A focus on history and anthropology, but he dropped out before graduating. Lack of funds, I believe. I asked around and his professors remember him as an excellent researcher. I surmised that he’d been tasked with digging up obscure details about me.”

  “So you did find her out in the end?”

  “Not that I could prove it. At least not enough that I could put it in my book. I don’t believe in making unsubstantiated charges. And…”

  “And?” my boss prodded.

  “Some of the things she knew about me…They weren’t the sort of things that could be discovered through casual research. I don’t know how she did it. Even with assistance.”

  The way she said it, it was clear that whatever those things were, they weren’t open for inquiry. Ms. P must have gotten the same cue, because she changed course.

  “From descriptions of the Halloween party, she did much the same thing with Rebecca Collins. What was your impression of her performance?”

  “It’s interesting you call it a performance,” she said. “Because that’s what she is. A performer. Usually a very good one. But that night…” She leaned back again and half closed her eyes. “At the beginning it was the usual fare. The card readings, the little tricks. Then there was the…incident…with the Collins girl and channeling her father. No subtlety. No grace.”

  “You’ve been present before when she purportedly channels the dead?” Ms. P asked.

  “On two other occasions—neither was like that.”

  “Were you still at the party when the body was discovered?”

  She shook her head and rocked her chair forward again. “No. I left immediately after the séance.”

  “Have you had the opportunity to speak with Ms. Belestrade regarding her performance that evening?”

  “No, I haven’t. I’ve left messages for her, but she hasn’t returned my calls.” The words came out draped in regret. I decided Dr. Waterhouse’s interest in the clairvoyant was definitely a little extracurricular.

  Ms. P shot her a few more questions about the party and the people and what she heard and saw there, but there were no further revelations. We thanked her for her time and were retracing our steps through the warrens when we heard her hurrying to catch up.

  “Would it be possible to interview you at some point, Ms. Pentecost?” she asked after she caught her breath. “I’d be fascinated to see the same techniques my collection of charlatans use put to the cause of justice. It would make a wonderful chapter in future editions of my book.”

  For a second, I thought Ms. P was going to take her up on it. Then she shook her head. “No, I think not, Dr. Waterhouse. Like your collection of charlatans, I like to keep my tricks a secret.”

  * * *

  —

  Ms. P didn’t say a word the entire way back to Brooklyn. Neither did I. I recognized her deep-thinking face and I don’t like to disturb her when she’s working her way through a line of thought.
>
  Instead, I did some deep thinking of my own. About Ariel Belestrade and Abigail Collins and what might have gone off the rails on Halloween night. Pulling up in front of the brownstone, I noticed a car parked across the street. I noticed it because a maroon Pierce-Arrow—the 1935 V12 model, I believe—was as out of place on our avenue as an opal in a Cracker Jack box.

  A man was behind the wheel—young and slender with a carefully cascading mane of black hair. As we went up the steps, I eyed him eyeing us.

  I’d barely gotten the key in the lock when Mrs. Campbell opened the door, her usually steely warden’s face clouded with worry.

  “You’re back,” she said with a snarl that was half relief and half annoyance. “I told her you weren’t in, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Said she’d wait as long as she needed to. That it was a matter of life and death. Then she strolled right into the office and made herself at home.”

  Ms. Pentecost asked if the woman had identified herself, but this time I was a step ahead of her. It wasn’t genius, though. Behind Mrs. Campbell, hanging from the coatrack in the hall, was a familiar long, white fur.

  CHAPTER 11

  I’m sorry for imposing myself on your housekeeper, but I had a feeling—a very powerful feeling—that we needed to meet. And it needed to be today.”

  The clairvoyant lounged in our most comfortable guest chair—all long legs and black bob, dressed in white slacks and a violet blouse that stood in stark contrast to Ms. Pentecost’s earth tones. Her choice in nosebleed heels remained constant—these in a purple that matched her blouse.

  “Why did it need to be today?” Ms. P asked, seeming to take Ariel Belestrade’s sudden appearance in stride. I knew the nonchalance was a put-on. There was a tension just beneath the surface. It showed around her eyes and in the way she flexed her fingers against the arms of her chair. She was staring at a tiger cage, wondering if she could trust the bars.