No Darkness as like Death

by Nancy Herriman

  Nick thought back to what Mrs. Wynn had reported. “Around six thirty.”

  “And his body was discovered at seven thirty, after an intruder was spotted?” he asked. “An hour’s not enough time to have died from exposure to coal gas, Greaves. Not even if the gas flow was extremely high.”

  Interesting. “So the gas was meant to make us think he’d tried to kill himself?”

  The coroner poured water into the adjacent basin to rinse his hands. “I suspect Mr. Shaw was already dead from another cause, and the gas was turned on for one of three reasons—to ensure Shaw died, to make his death appear accidental, or, lastly, to look like suicide, as you say.”

  “So how was Shaw killed?”

  Harris dried his hands. “It’s just a thought, but how he might’ve come to die from that here . . .”

  “Care to be more specific, Harris?”

  “Sorry about being vague, Greaves,” he said, flashing an apologetic smile. “Note the redness around Mr. Shaw’s nose, as though the skin had been exposed to a chemical that had inflamed it,” he pointed out. “The last time I saw redness like that was on a woman who’d visited her dentist and had received chloroform as an anesthetic. Too strong a dose, as it turned out. Dangerous stuff in the wrong hands. Even in the right hands.”

  “Chloroform?”

  “Just a hypothesis, and I’m not all that sure it makes sense. Although I did find this wedged beneath Mr. Shaw’s body.” He pulled a white linen handkerchief, its edge embroidered with gray thread, from his vest pocket. “Perhaps soaked with chloroform and applied to his face to sedate him. Unfortunately, the substance is highly volatile and the smell dissipates rapidly. The man had good taste in handkerchiefs, though.”

  “What happened to that woman who visited her dentist?” asked Nick.

  “Oh, didn’t I say? She died,” said Harris. “When her heart failed.”

  • • •

  “Who is the deceased, Mr. Taylor?” asked Celia.

  It had taken an age to calm the uproar his comment about a dead man had caused, but somehow Celia had settled the Cascarino family. Reluctantly, Mr. Cascarino had given her use of the parlor to speak in private with Mr. Greaves’s assistant. Celia was not so naive, however, as to imagine many ears were not pressed against the closed door between them and the entry area.

  Mr. Taylor stood in the center of the room, his heavy policeman’s shoes depositing dirt on the floor’s threadbare oilcloth. He was unable to sit as every chair and table was covered by scraps of material waiting to be sewn into shirts, which would be sold to supplement the Cascarinos’ meager income. He gripped his hat and looked as distressed as Celia felt.

  “Mr. Ambrose Shaw, ma’am,” he answered.

  “The politician?” What an amazing coincidence. “I’d heard he was unwell and receiving treatment at the Hygienic Institute.”

  “Seems so. But he’s gone and died in a suspicious fashion.”

  “What has his death to do with Mina?”

  “Mr. Greaves wouldn’t say, ma’am,” he replied. “He just wanted me to find her as quick as I could and report back when I did.” He glanced at the door as though he hoped to make his escape right then.

  “Mr. Greaves must have a reason to connect Mr. Shaw’s death to Mina,” she pointed out. “Some clue or evidence linking her to the fellow.”

  Mr. Taylor hesitated, his mouth twisting.

  “You can tell me, Mr. Taylor,” she said. “I expect I shall learn the story from Mr. Greaves himself soon enough.”

  “Well, I heard from the local policeman who patrols the area around the Institute that he found a shawl in the alleyway next to the building.”

  “A shawl.” That was the evidence? Nicholas Greaves must have a strong reason to believe the item belonged to Mina, though.

  “Was Miss Mina here all evening, ma’am? Do you know?” Mr. Taylor asked, sounding hopeful she might reply in the affirmative.

  “She was not, Mr. Taylor,” she answered. “She stumbled home sometime before eight with a concussion and no recollection of the evening’s events.”

  Other than to mutter about something terrible having occurred.

  He frowned. “That’s not good, ma’am.”

  “No, it is not, Mr. Taylor.”

  • • •

  “This is absolutely horrible, Detective,” said Ross, pacing the rug spread across his office floor. “Do you have a report from the coroner?”

  “He’ll have to perform an autopsy to be certain of the cause of death, but it does look suspicious,” Nick answered.

  “That trespasser . . .” Ross took a seat on the nearest chair and pulled off his spectacles. “Oh my. Oh my, oh my.”

  “I’m hoping you can answer a couple of questions, Mr. Ross.”

  “What could I possibly tell you, Detective?” He blinked nearsightedly at Nick. “I was at home while all of this transpired.”

  They’d be confirming that, too. “The private entrance to the side staircase . . . we’ve searched for Mr. Shaw’s copy of the door key and it’s missing.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “Mr. Shaw informed me yesterday that he’d lost his key. I sent to have a copy made, but I haven’t received it yet.”

  “Did Mr. Shaw have any visitors this week?” Somebody who’d helped themselves to the fellow’s key, planning on coming back later and making use of it.

  Ross dug out a handkerchief to wipe his glasses before returning them to his nose. “His family had been to visit. His wife, son, daughter.”

  “Any other visitors? Lady friends, for instance?”

  “Ladies visiting here?” Ross clawed at his shirt collar like it was choking him. “I do not run that sort of establishment!”

  “Of course not. Just thought I’d ask.” Nick examined the room, took in the polished furniture, the books on shelves and tables. A set of porcelain statues purchased in the Chinese quarter. The worsted damask curtains at the window. All in all, tasteful and comfortable. And expensive to sustain. “You don’t store chloroform on the premises, do you, Mr. Ross?”

  “Chloroform? I don’t comprehend why you’re asking . . .” The reason dawned on him. “It has to do with Mr. Shaw’s death, doesn’t it? He wasn’t killed by gas asphyxiation?”

  “Do you store chloroform on the premises?” Nick repeated.

  “No. Not at all. We don’t make use of the substance.” Ross’s eyes were weirdly large behind the lenses of his spectacles. “His assailant brought it with him. Isn’t that what occurred, Detective?”

  “Maybe so, Mr. Ross.”

  • • •

  “You may not speak with Mina this morning, Mr. Greaves,” said Celia, entering the Cascarinos’ sunlit parlor and closing the door behind her.

  After Mr. Taylor’s visit last night, she’d anticipated that the man he worked for would eventually turn up. She wished, though, that Mr. Greaves had waited until she’d had a chance to have a cup of strong black tea. She’d spent the night sleeping—attempting to sleep—on a chair next to Mina’s bed and every muscle ached with exhaustion.

  “Good morning to you, Mrs. Davies,” he replied, dragging his hat from his head. The gaze that met hers revealed little emotion. Nothing beyond the cool aloofness he often and easily enwrapped himself with, as readily as drawing on a coat. “You look well. Taylor told me you were here.”

  She waited for him to say more, which he did not.

  What did she expect? That he might claim to be pleased to see her? That he’d missed her these past months, even though he had said goodbye? She’d gotten used to not seeing him, and now to be face-to-face once more . . .

  Stop with the sentimentality, Celia. Mina was in trouble, which had to be her primary concern.

  “I would return the compliment, Mr. Greaves, except that you look rather tired.” Weary, worn out, his soft brown eyes shadowed. “Addie told me you’d gone to Sacramento. You have family there, I believe.”

  “Taylor’s been gabbing.”

&nbs
p; “Should he have not mentioned that you were away?” she asked.

  “My father died. That’s all.”

  He meant to sound flip, but she heard the misery in his voice. “And you regret not seeing him before he passed away.” Her guess struck home, if she read his responding expression correctly. Which was never an easy thing to do.

  “I do regret not mending fences with him before he died, but what’s done is done,” he replied. “And I’m not here to discuss my trip to Sacramento.”

  “You are here to speak with Mina, of course. Her condition has improved from last night, but her concussion has left her with amnesia and she cannot explain what took place,” she said, yawning behind her hand. “Mr. Taylor relayed that Mr. Ambrose Shaw has died. Suspiciously, I gather.”

  “Harris thinks so.”

  “Then it must be the case,” she said. “Please do sit down, Mr. Greaves, because I fully intend to.” She dropped onto a chair across the room from him.

  He removed a bundle of shirts, in the middle of being sewn, from a stool and sat. “When did Mina arrive here last night?”

  “One of the children came to fetch me to tend to her about eight in the evening,” she replied, feeling for unpinned strands of hair and wrestling them back into place. His eyes, she noticed, traced the movement of her hands as they worked. “I would guess Mina had arrived ten minutes earlier. Possibly more.”

  “Ten minutes . . .”

  She could see him calculating what the hour meant, and the solution to his calculation was not encouraging.

  “You suspect her of involvement in a man’s suspicious death because you found a shawl, Mr. Greaves?” she asked. A loud gasp followed by a murmur of young voices rose in the entryway beyond the parlor’s closed door. Mina’s siblings must have gathered outside to eavesdrop. Mr. Cascarino called to them in Italian from another part of the house, and several of them pattered off.

  “An intruder was seen outside Shaw’s room around seven thirty, Mrs. Davies,” he replied, turning his hat through his hands. “His body was found shortly afterward. Her shawl was discovered out in the alley.”

  “The intruder has been identified as Mina Cascarino?”

  “No, but the shawl we found is the blue one she always wears,” he said. “She didn’t have it on when she showed up here last night, did she?”

  “I shall have to ask,” she replied, acutely aware she hadn’t noticed a blue shawl in the bedchamber Mina was currently occupying. “But many women own blue shawls, Mr. Greaves. How can you be so positive the one found is hers?”

  “Until you prove it’s not hers, ma’am, I’m going to suspect it is,” he said. “She knows Shaw, based on the box of candy I saw in her possession yesterday afternoon signed ‘A.S. . . . with affection.’ Pretty damning, if you ask me.”

  “A shawl and a box of candy.”

  “And a concussion,” he added.

  “There could be an entirely innocent explanation for her concussion, Mr. Greaves.” Hair pinned as well as she could manage, Celia lowered her hands to her lap. “Furthermore, a murderer is not likely to promptly smack themselves on the back of the head after committing the crime, are they?”

  “I’d say that would be unusual, ma’am,” he replied. “More likely she was an accomplice.”

  “Oh, Nicholas, honestly. You truly believe that of her?”

  He began to knead the spot on his arm, the location of a wound he’d endured during the war, which tended to ache when he was unsettled. “I have to suspect her, Mrs. Davies. And there’s more. Taylor went to Bauman’s last night before coming here and running into you. She left around six thirty because she had ‘plans.’”

  Over an hour elapsing with no explanation of where she’d gone or what she’d done. “You are positive there was an intruder at the Hygienic Institute.”

  “Our witness is positive,” he replied. “On top of that, the outside door to a private staircase leading to Shaw’s exclusive first-floor suite was discovered unlocked and the man’s copy of the key, missing.”

  “You are assuming the intruder made use of this missing key, which they’d acquired . . . how?”

  “They’d either taken it from his room—his wife and children had gone to visit him at the Institute—or Shaw had given the key to them,” said Mr. Greaves. “Not expecting the person might use it in order to kill him.”

  She’d have to search Mina’s things for that key.

  “How precisely did Mr. Shaw die?” she asked. “His daughter, Miss Rebecca Shaw, told me he was being treated for a weak heart. And before you ask how I know her, Barbara and I happened to have been at her photographic gallery having our portrait taken yesterday afternoon.”

  He chuckled wryly and gave his arm a final rub before dropping his hand. “Why am I not surprised, Mrs. Davies, to learn you know the Shaws?”

  “I have met his daughter, that is all,” she said. “How did he die?”

  “There are what appear to be chloroform burns on Shaw’s face,” he said. “His heart may have failed as a result, but the person responsible wasn’t taking any chances and turned on the gas in his room to be positive. Or to make us think it was an accident.”

  “Chloroform.” What a curious choice of weapon.

  “Mr. Ross, the proprietor, informed me he doesn’t use it, so Shaw’s killer had to have brought the chloroform with them.”

  She was fatigued and not thinking clearly, but the events he’d outlined seemed implausible. “If I may, Mr. Greaves, the scenario you are proposing is as follows—Mina, who’d somehow obtained Mr. Shaw’s key, crept into his room, managed to subdue him with chloroform, which may have resulted in his death, turned on the gas, fled, dropping her shawl, mysteriously ended up concussed, and stumbled home.”

  “A tidy summary, Mrs. Davies.”

  It was. Too tidy. “Have I described the actions of the Mina Cascarino you know, Mr. Greaves?” she asked. “Tell me the truth. Would she do this? For I suspect she would not.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you or I think, Mrs. Davies,” he replied. “Because, so far, the only evidence we have points to her.”

  “We must prove her to be innocent, Mr. Greaves. We must find who is actually responsible.”

  “‘We,’ Mrs. Davies?” he asked with the slightest of smiles.

  “‘We,’ Mr. Greaves. One more time,” she replied earnestly. “For Mina’s sake.”

  • • •

  For Mina’s sake.

  “Well, sir?” asked Taylor, trailing Nick into his office, a steaming cup of coffee in his hand.

  “Mina Cascarino still doesn’t remember what happened last night.” He picked up the shawl his assistant had left atop his desk, disturbing a stack of papers, which fluttered onto the floor. Last night, he’d been positive it was Mina’s. This morning . . .

  “You saw Miss Mina?” asked his assistant.

  Nick lifted an eyebrow. “‘Miss Mina,’ Taylor?”

  “I go to Bauman’s, sir. She’s got a nice voice.”

  “She does.” He dropped the shawl back onto the desk. “Oh, and Taylor, you don’t have to keep Addie Ferguson apprised of every blessed thing I’m doing, okay?”

  His assistant blushed a darker red than Nick had ever seen on his face, and Taylor had done an awful lot of blushing in the many months he’d worked for Nick. “She asks about you. I’m not gonna not reply.”

  Damn. “It’s all right. I’m just being irritable,” he said, bending down to retrieve the papers. He noticed an ant crawling across the floor and crushed it with his boot. “And to answer your question, I didn’t see Mina. Mrs. Davies wouldn’t let me.”

  Taylor started to laugh but quickly stifled the sound, pretending instead to be overtaken by a bout of coughing. “She wouldn’t let me see Miss Mina, either.”

  “You told Mrs. Davies about finding the shawl.”

  “She insisted that she’d get you to tell her about the case if I didn’t,” he said. “So I did.”

  “T
hat’s okay too, Taylor.” The woman had a way of convincing the most reluctant individual to blab. An ability that had come in handy before and might again. She had looked well that morning, he thought. And damn if he hadn’t missed her.

  “I gotta be honest, sir,” said Taylor, pausing to sip from his coffee. “I can’t imagine Miss Mina getting tangled up in a mess like this. Or why she’d get involved with some fellow like Mr. Shaw.”

  Why would she be interested in a man old enough to be her father? Maybe Shaw had been charming, sensitive, generous. All the things Nick had never been.

  “Did you have a chance to check on Platt’s story about being downstairs until Mrs. Wynn came looking for him?”

  “The other patients confirm that they were in the parlor until . . .” He set down the cup and consulted his ever-present notebook. “Until a few minutes before seven thirty, sir. They were pretty sheepish about the mess they’d caused, and that both Mary Ann Newcomb, the cook, and Mr. Platt had to clean up. One fellow saw Miss Newcomb leave the building while Mr. Platt was still in the parlor, sweeping up broken glass.”

  “So maybe we can exclude Platt and the cook from consideration, although I’d like to hear her version of events,” said Nick. “Did any of the other patients report spotting this trespasser?”

  “No, but would they have if he’d come in through that private side door?”

  “Had to ask.”

  Taylor closed his notebook. “What do we do next, sir?”

  “Tell Mullahey to question Miss Newcomb, specifically to learn if she can back up Platt’s story and if she noticed an intruder,” he said. “Meanwhile, we go visit the Shaws.”

  “I hear they’ve been told Mr. Shaw died from a simple heart attack,” said Taylor. “Why would we show up at their house to ask questions?”