He gave us a cheeky grin. “You ladies are on your own, then. I’ll wait for you out here.”
As we were about to pass by, he stretched out an arm, blocking our entrance. “Irena’s dressing table is against the far wall, and I’ll ask you not to remove anything. If you find something of import, we’ll notify the police.”
“Fair enough,” I agreed. He let us pass.
The women in the dressing room, in various stages of dishabille, some with freshly scrubbed faces, others still in full makeup, were watching the door with curiosity when Hetty and I passed through. The space was rectangular and about as large as my dining room. To our left, a shelf about chest high ran the length of the wall, with five or six mirrors spaced out above it, each surrounded by lights. A rack of gowns and robes filled the right side of the room, and against the far wall stood a single dressing table, supposedly Miss Teskey’s. Yet it was occupied by a dark-haired woman industriously applying some sort of cream to her face. She alone had no apparent interest in us.
The other five women in the room more than made up for her indifference as they stared at us in open curiosity. “Who’s this you’re sending in here, Gilliam?” one of them inquired.
He must have stepped away from the door, as there was no reply. We were indeed on our own. Perhaps we might be able to do more than just search her dressing table. But where to begin?
I cleared my throat. “Pardon us for disrupting your toilette, but we’re here about Irena Teskey.”
“You mean Her Majesty?” One of the women in full theatrical makeup chuckled at her own joke. “Why wasn’t she here tonight? Tea with the queen?” This brought snickers from everyone.
“Sadly, no.” I glanced back at the door to see Gilliam was still missing. “Unfortunately, it’s been left to me to inform you of Miss Teskey’s death.”
Each face registered some variation of surprise. Even the woman at her table stopped and turned her cream-covered face to us.
“Here, I didn’t mean no harm.” The fair-haired woman who’d called Miss Teskey “Her Majesty” stepped forward in her own defense. “Are you friends of hers?”
“Not exactly. We met only yesterday. She came to us with a request for assistance. It seems she knew her life was in danger.”
“Wait just one minute.” The woman at the dressing table left her seat and strode toward us. Even through the cream, I recognized her as the lead actress in the play, Sally Cooper. “Are you saying she was murdered?” A collective gasp spread through the room when I nodded. “And she knew it was coming?”
“She had reason to be concerned,” I said. “I was hoping she might have mentioned something to one of you. As colleagues, I’m sure you’re together for more than just the performances. Perhaps she took one of you into her confidence.”
The lead actress made a noise of derision. “Her? She was too far above us for any sort of confidences. All she ever talked about were her connections—to the prince, to the queen, to some Russian royalty. As if we’d believe that.” She wagged her finger at me. “If she’s related to half the royalty in the world, what was she doing here? That’s what I want to know.”
“What happened to her?” This came from a fresh-faced young woman already dressed in her street clothes.
“She was strangled,” Hetty said.
I gave her a nudge. Had she already forgotten we weren’t to reveal too much? Perhaps pressing her to accompany me had been a mistake.
Miss Cooper turned to Hetty. “By who?”
“That’s what we’re attempting to find out,” I said before Hetty could start naming suspects. “If she didn’t mention her fear to any of you . . .” I let the sentence hang and glanced at each face for confirmation. “Did you happen to notice a strange man hanging about the theater lately? Someone who might have seemed to have an interest in Miss Teskey?”
A flurry of responses attacked me from all directions.
“Might this not be better if we speak to each of you one at a time?” Hetty asked.
I thought this a good idea, but another wave of dissent rose from the ladies. The short of it was that they wanted to go home. As I was not the police, I couldn’t force them to stay and talk to me. Neither did I want to antagonize them. I was certain Delaney and his men would be here themselves by tomorrow, and I’d like to stay as vague and unmemorable to these ladies as possible.
“Very well, we’ll speak to you all at once, and I’ll do my best to be quick about it.” Hetty took a seat along the wall, ready to record anything of import that might be revealed, and I brought the ladies back to some order. I addressed the fair-haired actress first. “Did you ever see anyone following Miss Teskey?”
“Not following, exactly. There was someone new hanging about the place, a Russian chap, but she talked to him now and then, like they were friends.” She glanced around at her companions, who nodded in agreement. Perhaps this was the man, Igor, Miss Teskey had mentioned.
“How do you know he was Russian?” I asked.
“His accent, I reckon. Irena said she was Russian, so since he had an accent I didn’t recognize, I assumed he was, too.”
“You spoke with him?”
She bumped her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Right, right. That’s how I pegged him for Russian. If I left before her, I might see him in the hall. He’d ask for Irena Alexeievna.” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s Russian, isn’t it?”
“I believe it is. Did you see him last night? Or today?”
This brought on a bit of debate. It seemed Igor, if that was who this was, had become something of a fixture the actresses had stopped noticing. They eventually came to the conclusion he’d been backstage yesterday evening, but no one had noticed him today.
“But I only ever saw him when I was heading home,” said the woman I’d started thinking of as the young one. “He may be out there now, for all we know.” She gave me a pointed look. “We’re a little behind our usual time.”
I took the hint and moved the conversation forward. They gave me a description of Igor: tall, stocky, dark hair, with some debate over the amount of gray, and a very full beard. All the ladies agreed there was no one else they’d seen backstage or at the stage door who hadn’t been around from the beginning. He was also the only one who had paid particular attention to Miss Teskey.
“I’d like to go through her dressing table, if I may.” I looked at Miss Cooper when I made the request.
She shrugged. “Her Majesty’s table is right there.”
“Go on, Sally,” said the blonde. “You shouldn’t talk about her like that.”
“Why not? Speaking ill of the dead is no different from speaking ill of the living. Besides, I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t have said to her face.” She turned to me. “She bought her way in here. Took the plum parts she hadn’t the talent for.”
Miss Cooper was a pretty young woman, with ice-blue eyes that struck a startling contrast to her dark hair. Her only imperfection was a slight twist to her left front tooth, which made her upper lip protrude the tiniest bit. I doubted she ever lost a role to another actress before Miss Teskey came along.
“You played her role tonight, didn’t you?” I asked.
“And did a lot better job of it.”
I nodded. “And now you’re using her dressing table.”
With a huff, she turned away from me, snatched a towel from the table, and swiped at the cream on her face. I moved around her to the table and began opening the small drawers. Nothing but greasepaint, hairpins, brushes, and combs. When I’d returned everything to the drawers, Miss Cooper sauntered over to me, one hand on her hip.
“It’s fair enough to say I didn’t like her,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I’d want to hurt her. I only had to bide my time. Soon enough, the empty seats would push Mr. Gilliam to get her off the stage and put me in her roles.”
She had a point. “He was in an awkward position, wasn’t he? If he wanted her as a partner, he had to accept her as an
actress.”
She let out a snort. “Irena wasn’t much of a partner either, from what I could see. For all she had a fancy office, she only showed up here in time for rehearsals. I don’t know why she even used the dressing room, except to rub our noses in the fact that she was the lead.”
I suppressed a groan. Gad, I was a fool. “She had an office?”
Her scowl turned into a smirk. “If you’re looking for anything she left behind, you should probably start there.”
She pointed us in the direction of the office, but I had a feeling we were too late. If Miss Teskey had left anything there, we’d given Gilliam plenty of time to go through it.
Chapter Ten
We had to pass Gilliam’s office on the way to Miss Teskey’s. Through the corner of my eye, I saw him at his desk, in conversation with another man. I pretended not to hear him call out to me as I rushed Hetty past the open door and down the corridor. The door to Miss Teskey’s office was closed and, as I found when I tried the handle, locked. So much for my plans to search without the watchful eye of the manager.
He was at my shoulder by the time I turned around. “I was searching for the spare set of keys while you were talking with the girls, but nobody seems to know where we keep them.”
“You haven’t been in here, then?” Perhaps luck was with me, after all.
He laughed. “Doors and doorframes are expensive items, Lady Harleigh. I don’t break them down without first determining if I must. Even though I couldn’t find the duplicate, I held off in the hope that you had Irena’s key.”
His expression gave nothing away, which didn’t necessarily mean he was telling me the truth. In his business, people lied for a living. If he was lying, I couldn’t discern it. Either he hadn’t entered her office or he wanted us to think he hadn’t. I didn’t trust him, but I was inclined to reserve judgment.
I pulled her key from my bag. “I don’t know if this is it or not. Shall we try?” I pushed the key into the lock and turned. It moved stiffly, but it did move. The three of us crowded in the doorway as I pushed open the door. The dull, workaday office, much like Mr. Gilliam’s, came as a disappointment.
“Odd. I expected it to be more exotic.” Hetty echoed my sentiments.
The office was off an interior hallway, so there were no windows. Shelves lined the far wall, behind a desk that faced the door. An electric lamp, a pencil, and a bound stack of papers, which I thought might be a script, covered the desktop. I turned on the lamp, the better to see what was on the shelves—several recent newspapers, a stack of writing paper, and a lot of dust.
Behind me, Gilliam stepped up to the desk and thumbed through the papers. “Well,” he said, “it seems she actually was attempting to learn her lines.”
“Her colleagues don’t seem to think much of her talent,” I said, turning back to the desk.
He smirked. “I’d wager it was Sally who gave you that impression.” At my nod, he continued. “Sally had the lead in this production, but when Irena came along, I had to give it to her.” He blew out a breath. “For obvious reasons.”
“Otherwise, you’d be short one investor?”
“Exactly. I hate when people put conditions on their money, but at the time, I thought she had at least a bit of talent.”
Hetty pulled the chair from behind the desk around to the front and seated herself. “Did you actually see her perform when you were in Paris?”
“I did.” He took a few steps toward Hetty. “It was a small role, and she performed it well. I found out too late that the more lines she had, the worse she performed. It’s bad enough having to feed an actor his lines, but Irena would panic when she forgot one. She’d lose her connection to the character and, in turn, to the audience. The performance would slowly fall to pieces. It was a difficult thing to witness.”
I casually ran my fingers over the desktop. Since there had been nothing of import at her hotel or in her dressing table, this was the last place to search. But I felt that as soon as I opened the drawers, Gilliam would be looking over my shoulder again. As if Hetty sensed this, she kept him talking—and facing away from me.
“Miss Cooper seemed to think all she had to do was wait, and eventually, you’d have no choice but to put her back in the leading role.” Hetty made the statement sound like a question.
“She was hoping for that, but she might have had a long wait. Irena was adamant about the acting part of our agreement.”
“But if you didn’t replace her, you would surely begin to lose revenues. Patrons don’t want to buy a ticket for a shoddy performance. Don’t you think even Miss Teskey would have seen that, eventually?”
“I’m not so sure. She craved an audience.” He paused. “No, not just any audience, an adoring one. Maybe after some time, she would have seen that they did not adore her, but for now, she was willing to pay me for the privilege of a stage on which to perform.”
Hetty sighed. “That’s unfortunate. One always hopes that business partners are of the same mind. In your case, the two of you were working at cross-purposes.”
My aunt, with her usual flair for business, had identified the professional issues Mr. Gilliam and Miss Teskey had faced. Their conversation had me wondering if Gilliam had given up on waiting for his partner to come around to his way of thinking. He had an insurance policy on her life. She was causing unrest among his cast and costing him money in the form of lost revenue. Might he not be better off with Miss Teskey out of his life?
As they were deep in conversation and ignoring me, I took the opportunity to slide open the center drawer of the desk. The first thing I saw was an account book with a sheet of blank bank drafts tucked inside. Leaving it in the drawer, I turned back the leather cover and goggled at the numbers on the page. The woman was as wealthy as a robber baron. Or the average Romanov, I supposed. Unsure if I’d made any noise when I saw this, like a gasp or a choking sound, I glanced at my companions. They paid me no heed.
So, Miss Teskey was worth a great deal of money. What did that mean? Bradmore couldn’t have known, or he’d never have asked for a divorce. Or, as her husband, would he inherit her wealth? That complicated the matter. I shook my head and pushed the problem aside. Right now, I needed to dig a little deeper into this drawer. I composed myself and took another peek at Mr. Gilliam and Hetty.
“I don’t suppose you’d be open to an investment in my little theater venture, would you, Mrs. Chesney?”
Hetty visibly drew back from the man. “I make it a habit to invest only in business I understand, sir. I know nothing about the theater.”
“But you did mention your interest, Aunt Hetty.” Her expression of shock said she wasn’t following me. “Don’t you recall, at the interval, you said you’d love to understand the working of the theater.”
“Perhaps I did. That doesn’t mean I intend to invest in one.” She threw me a glare, which I answered with a bob of my head toward Gilliam.
“I’d be delighted to take you for a tour at any time, ma’am,” he said. “Obviously, I’m in need of a new partner, and I’d consider myself lucky indeed to find one so knowledgeable as you, but I promise not to pressure you to make any decisions. I’d be grateful if you’d just consider it.”
As Gilliam faced Hetty, he couldn’t see me frantically nodding at her. She flashed me a scowl but twisted it into a smile for the man. “Very well, sir. As long as you have no expectations of me, I’ll be happy to let you try to convince me to invest in your theater. But you should know I am no easy mark.”
“That’s all I can ask,” he said. “Let me just fetch my schedule so I may take you around at your earliest convenience.” With no further thought of Miss Teskey, he dashed out of the office, leaving me alone with my furious aunt.
“You know I don’t want to invest in a theater.”
“Before you rail at me, you must see this.” I handed her the account book. “And it’s not as if you have to go through with it. You can always send word to him later that you’ve chan
ged your mind, but for the moment, I needed a distraction.”
“Well, I’m not sure I want to be a distraction, either . . .” Her words trailed off as she took in the numbers. “That’s quite a healthy bank balance.” She returned the book to the desktop and watched while I rummaged through the drawer. “I hadn’t expected her to be so well off.”
“Neither did I. It looks like Alexei didn’t stint on her allowance.” I found two sheets of thick paper folded and wedged in the back. With a little force, I pulled them free. “At least I assume that’s where the money came from. She wouldn’t earn that much acting.”
“What are you looking for?”
“The letters, of course. And I think I’ve found them.” Sure enough, a brief perusal was all it took to see the words Leave London. “Watch for Gilliam, will you? I want to read these, and I don’t want him to see them.”
“Why not?”
“He might be their author.”
She scurried over to the open door. “You should slip them in your coat. He’ll be right back.”
“They’re evidence. I can’t take them.”
“He’s coming.” She made a shooing motion. “Just take them. We can turn them over to Delaney later. If you leave them here, they may disappear.”
I pushed the drawer closed with my hip and, against my better judgment, stuffed the account book and the letters into a pocket of my coat, which I hung over my arm. Thank goodness Gilliam was brimming over with excitement at the prospect of Hetty’s money, or he’d have seen the guilt on our faces. He headed straight to her.
“If you have some free time tomorrow, around noon, I can make myself available to show you around the place. I’d be happy to share my plans for the theater, the financials, whatever you require.”
Hetty threw me a glance, and I pressed my hands together in prayer. Resigned to her fate, she forced a tight smile and managed to make him believe she was enthusiastic about the idea. Good on her. I rounded the desk and took her by the arm.
“Thank you for allowing us to search Miss Teskey’s office. A wild-goose chase, I’m afraid.”
A Fiancée's Guide to First Wives and Murder Page 11
