“She doesn’t want to speak with you,” Randy said. “I don’t know what you said to her yesterday, but she locked herself in her bedroom and didn’t come out all night. She’s still in there.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll be there in half an hour. Less if traffic is accommodating.”
“I told you. She doesn’t want to—”
I hung up. I’d let him finish his sentence in person.
“I’ve got an apology to deliver,” I told Ms. P. “Not sure if they’ve got the news about Belestrade or not. Want me to let it drop and watch the ripples?”
“Use your best judgment,” she said. “But keep the details to yourself. We don’t want to be accused by the lieutenant of interference.”
I took the sedan and, thanks to Midtown traffic, made it to the Collins manse in something closer to fifty minutes than thirty. Randy met me at the door. He adjusted his shoulders to fill the frame and played linebacker.
“I said she doesn’t want to speak to you,” he said. I wondered if he’d practiced that haughty look the mirror.
“Have you asked her that?”
“I don’t need to ask her. In case you haven’t forgotten, this is my house and if I don’t want you to enter—”
He was interrupted by a shout from the sitting room.
“Who’s that at the door?” Wallace came around the corner. “If it’s the police again, I—”
He was surprised to see me but not unpleasantly so. The lawyer looked wrung out. The stoop in his shoulders was even more pronounced, robbing him of a few inches. His thinning hair fell limply across his high forehead.
“Miss Parker.”
“Mr. Wallace. I’m sorry to disturb you.”
“Quite all right,” he said. “Is your employer with you?”
“Afraid it’s just me.”
“Let the girl in, Randy.”
Randy did the math of letting me in versus having to explain to his godfather exactly why he didn’t want me to. The latter would open a can of worms I was guessing dear Uncle Harry was blissfully unaware of.
Begrudgingly, Randy stepped aside.
“Is there news?” Wallace asked, leading me into the sitting room where my boss had interviewed them a few days before.
“There is, though not what you might expect,” I said, claiming a spot on a particularly uncomfortable chair. “You’ll want to sit down.”
It wasn’t that I thought either man would go weak in the knees. I just wanted both of their faces in my line of sight when I dropped this particular stone in the water. Both perched on an overstuffed sofa—Wallace nervous, Randy sullen and simmering.
“So,” Wallace said, pushing his half-moons back up his nose, “what’s this news?”
“Ariel Belestrade was murdered last night.”
I wanted a reaction, and I got it.
“Murdered? How? By who?” That was Randy, his face a perfect mixture of surprise and confusion.
“That’s awful…I mean, she was…not a pleasant woman. But that’s still terrible. When was this?” That was Wallace. He was also working with surprise and confusion, but there was some other ingredient in the mix. Fear, maybe?
I was about to answer as many of their questions as I could when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Becca descended from the landing, where I guess she’d been eavesdropping. She was awake and properly put together in a blouse and slacks—very Kate Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. No makeup, though. Her eyes looked puffy, like she’d spent too long crying. A sliver of guilt slid into my heart.
“That woman is dead?” she asked.
“Last night. Shot,” I told her, keeping one eye on her and one on Wallace’s face.
“Good.”
“Becca!” Wallace exclaimed. “That’s terrible.”
“She was terrible, Uncle Harry. You said so yourself.”
“Yes, but…No one should be…” He hopped off that train and switched to lawyer mode. Turning to me, he asked, “What does this mean for us? Does that woman’s death have something to do with Abigail’s? Do the police think it was the same person?”
“It’s a fool’s errand to say for sure what the police think,” I said. “It’s possible that Belestrade ticked off a lot of people, and I’m sure they’re following up every lead.”
Using my best judgment, I neglected to mention I was one of those leads.
“You can be sure that if the police don’t drop by tonight, they’ll be here first thing in the morning.”
“What would the police want with us?” Randy asked.
“I’m surprised they haven’t been here already,” I told them. “Belestrade was a suspect in your mother’s death. All of you were vocal in your dislike for her. The cops would have to be dull, lazy, or both not to want to spend a few hours tacking down your alibis.”
All three shuffled a little, Becca on her feet, the two men in their seats. Nobody likes to hear they’re a suspect in a homicide, much less two homicides within a fortnight.
“I was at the office until nearly midnight,” Wallace said. His fingers twitched in his lap and he stared at them rather than at my eyes. “After that, I went home.”
“I was here all night,” Randy added. “So was Becca. The servants can vouch for us.”
Lazenby had asked me about midnight until two in the morning, so I was guessing that was when Belestrade had died. The butler and cook would have been asleep by midnight. And Wallace’s alibi was so flimsy I wouldn’t blow my nose with it.
I decided to go for a kidney punch.
“One question the police will be sure to hit you with is what dirt Belestrade had on your family.”
Becca and Wallace looked blankly quizzical. Randolph, on the other hand, boiled over.
“I’m sick of these insinuations!” he snarled. “First from the police, and now her? Our family, our mother, is the victim here!”
I’d seen his take on sputtering rage before, and this version seemed somewhat counterfeit. But not so put-on that I didn’t follow the advice I gave my basement students—look for exits or weapons.
Wallace put a hand on his godson’s arm. “Randy, calm down.”
Randy found the brakes and tapped them. He was still simmering but managed to spit out the question he should have started with.
“What do you mean ‘dirt’?”
I explained what Ms. Pentecost and I had discovered about Belestrade’s operation, or at least what we surmised. How she abused her clients’ confidences to ferret out secrets she could then use for blackmail.
“The police are going to start flinging open closets,” I said. “If you have any skeletons, they’re sure to come tumbling out.”
None of the three looked particularly enthused by that, but who would?
“Anyway, you might want to call your lawyers tonight and have them ready to go, just in case the police try and get you down to the station.”
Wallace nodded and got up. “I’ll get Simpson on the phone now.”
He left to make the call and I looked back to Becca.
“Do you have a minute?”
Randy started to stir again, but Becca shot him a look that nailed his tongue down and sent him fuming into the next room. I wondered how much of his outburst had been an act and what he really knew about what Belestrade might have had on his mother.
While I pondered, Becca led me through the house and out onto the veranda. The sun had set and a chill wind was blowing what little snow was on the ground. White, swirling devils twisted around our ankles. I could see goosebumps pebbling the flesh of her arms. I resisted the urge to put an arm around her.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.
“I need some air. I’ve been cooped up all day.”
Without lipstick or eye shadow, her features tended to disappear in
to her pale face. She resembled one of the marble statues nailing down either corner of the veranda. But those statues weren’t shooting blue daggers at me from between narrowed eyelids.
“I’m sorry about last night,” I said. “You didn’t deserve that.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said, thrusting her chin out. “I would never have told that woman anything.”
“I know that now.”
I gave her the basics of what I’d learned from the police—that Belestrade had a file on me.
“Why would she target you?”
I shrugged. “Probably as a way to get to my boss. Or to get me angry enough to do something stupid. Like call you up and let go with both barrels.”
She reached out and took my hand. The goose bumps on her arm spread to mine.
“I forgive you,” she said, gracing me with a smile.
“We still on for tomorrow night?” I asked.
“Of course. But I’m going to have to insist you tell me where we’re going. If only so I don’t turn up in the wrong shoes.”
I told her.
Her smile got much bigger.
CHAPTER 25
Ms. Pentecost’s answer to my question of “Where do we start?” was “At the beginning.” Friday morning we began sorting through everything we’d learned to date. Common practice when a case stretches out and we can’t get traction.
Ms. P is fond of saying, “If we never go back and examine what we have as a whole, we might not see the pattern that exists in the chaos.” She’s equally fond of the corollary “Spend every moment gnawing on the things you know and you might miss a new morsel that comes your way.”
The former sounds like her. The latter like something she picked up from someone a lot more homespun.
Ms. P was downstairs by ten-thirty and we ate a quick breakfast, then retreated to the office. Mrs. Campbell had been up before the sun making a batch of homemade sausage. It was an all-day affair and the thick scent of pork and pepper saturated the brownstone.
At two, we were still at it, so we lunched at our desks. The kitchen had been given over entirely to sausage manufacturing, so I called to the deli around the corner and had them send a boy with sandwiches and a couple of greasy bags of French fries.
I was on my second egg salad on rye when I noticed one of those patterns in the chaos. I had just finished my third pass through the interviews from partygoers. It was the first time I’d taken in my factory interviews and Ms. P’s calls to the wives and hired help all as a single piece.
“Nobody’s accounted for,” I muttered to myself.
My boss looked up from her own homework, her toasted pastrami still untouched.
“There’s not a single major player in this little drama whose whereabouts are accounted for continuously from the moment the séance is over until the body is found,” I said. “There are gaps everywhere. Not to mention all the company people who had a bone to pick with Abigail making waves with the shareholders. Not a decent alibi for anybody. Except maybe Dr. Waterhouse, who left early.”
My boss didn’t blink.
“You already clued into this, didn’t you?”
“It was to be expected,” she said with a shrug. “At a party of so many people, it would have been unrealistic for anyone to be fully accounted for. Add in the presence of alcohol, and things become even cloudier. I’ve put in another call to Mrs. Buckley—the woman with the Kodak. She said she’ll have the film developed right away and send over copies. That might help provide clarity. Even then, it’s likely there will be gaps in people’s movements.”
“How about a twenty-minute gap?”
That raised an eyebrow.
I showed her the pages I’d dog-eared. “Wallace said he talked to the board president, Henry Chamblis, then went out onto the veranda to pass a couple words with Randy. But Chamblis said that after he talked to Wallace, he said some long goodbyes to a few board members, then headed for the veranda to say farewell to the one Collins sibling still circulating.”
I flipped some pages to Ms. P’s interview with the Collins clan.
“Look at this.” I pointed to a passage in the center of the page. “Randy says Chamblis came out, said goodbye, and left. About ten minutes later Wallace came out on the veranda.”
Ms. P leaned back, closed her eyes, and double-checked my math. “Long goodbyes with board members and then a farewell to Randolph Collins. Yes, I can see that fifteen minutes actually being as long as twenty,” she said, half to herself and half to me. “Or as short as ten if Collins is mistaken about the time.”
“Ten minutes is still ten minutes,” I said. “We might be able to track him if we piece together enough interviews. Hard to lose sight of a sparkly Uncle Sam.”
“We could,” my boss admitted. Then she opened her eyes, picked up the phone, and dialed. After a moment…
“Mr. Wallace, please. Tell him it’s Lillian Pentecost.”
A pause, then…
“Mr. Wallace, good afternoon…No…Yes, I’m concerned about that as well…Yes, I think that was wise….Mr. Wallace, the reason I’m calling is to ask a question. The night of the party you said you spoke to Henry Chamblis, then immediately joined your godson on the veranda. Is that correct?…Are you sure you weren’t delayed?…Ah…Yes…Yes, of course…Absolutely understandable…Which one, might I ask?…Thank you. I will be in touch.”
She hung up, cutting off what I’m sure would have been a load of time-consuming questions from Wallace.
“He says that the police interviewed him and Randolph at the office and Becca at their home this morning,” she said. “Also that he was in the bathroom.”
“Ah…Can’t imagine why he didn’t mention that the first time around,” I quipped.
“Hrrrmmm.”
“What do you mean ‘hrrrrmmm’?” I asked. “What’s wrong with him visiting the can?”
“He says it was the second-floor bathroom.”
It took me a second, then it clicked. I shuffled through the pages until I found the right interview.
“Conroy was ‘indisposed’ in the upstairs bathroom from the séance through the fire. Pretty sure he didn’t make up that little nugget.”
That meant Wallace had just lied. But why?
“He couldn’t have done it,” I protested. “He’s the one who hired us. That’s his personal cash in the safe.”
“People do many strange things for even stranger reasons,” said the genius behind the desk. “If you recall, he told us that first day that I had been suggested by the board. Perhaps strongly suggested. Perhaps over Wallace’s objections.”
I tried to imagine that prim pigeon of a man bludgeoning Abigail Collins but came up blank. Still, there was his reaction when I announced Belestrade’s death. Maybe the mystery ingredient had been guilt.
We spent another few hours on it, but nothing else leaped out. At six o’clock I excused myself and went upstairs to change.
For this second time out with Becca, I leaned toward comfort, passing an iron over some pleated trousers and buffing my brown oxfords. However, I did opt for my sheerest blouse, a silk number in pale green that Mrs. Campbell referred to as “a scandal waiting to happen.”
I tried to hammer my red curls into something closer to Carole Lombard than Harpo Marx but eventually gave it up for lost. I slipped a peacoat over my silk scandal before telling Ms. P that I’d be back but didn’t know when.
“Be careful,” she said.
I turned, surprised. She was still at her desk, surrounded by precarious towers of paper. “Worried mother” wasn’t her usual manner, but I guess with one woman bludgeoned and another with two bullets in her, it wasn’t unreasonable to be a little concerned.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “Where I’m going, I’ll practically be at home.”
I gave a little
curtsy and walked out into the night.
CHAPTER 26
The woman plummeted through empty air as the ground reached up to meet her. The crowd gasped. Becca held her hands over her mouth, eyes wide. A man swooped in out of nowhere, his hands clasping tight around the woman’s wrists. The swing continued in its arc, the man’s legs wrapped tight around its bar as he held fast to the woman dangling beneath him.
The crowd at the Garden erupted in cheers, Becca and myself included, as the husband-and-wife team arrived safely on a platform four stories above our heads.
After the aerialists came the lions, and after them a trick horse rider who galloped a pair of white stallions full speed as she did flips, rode backward, and leapt between the animals with ease.
Darning Brothers wasn’t the biggest circus going, but they were impressive enough to draw a hearty Friday night crowd to Madison Square Garden.
“So this was your life before detective work?” Becca asked as they led the horses off and replaced them with a group of clowns riding a twenty-foot tricycle.
When it came to her wardrobe, she’d opted for capricious coed—black A-line skirt over white stockings and a red pullover tight enough it made imagination obsolete.
“H and H was rinky-dink compared to this,” I told her. “We were plenty good for what we were, but that was mostly the county cornfield circuit. When we came to the city, we played Long Island or set up in an empty lot in Brooklyn. We made half our nut on midway games and rides. Put us in here, we’d have been a joke.”
However, Darning Brothers didn’t have a sideshow, which I held against it. No Human Blockhead, no Tattooed Woman, no sword-swallowers and fire-eaters. Just big-top razzle-dazzle.
Becca plucked a piece of cotton candy from the cone in my hand. “I’d still have paid my two bits to see you in rhinestones.” Her tongue lapped the pink sugar into her mouth.
With great difficulty, I turned my eyes back to the center ring.
The clowns wheeled off to laughter and applause, and the aerialists returned—this time the whole family, a dozen strong. They waved to the crowd as they climbed the ladders. With an ominous roll of drums, the net was lowered to the ground and pulled away. The crowd watched as the first flier leaped, then three. Soon the full dozen men and women in red were flying across the empty air in defiance of death and gravity.
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 20
