The Case of the Troubled Tycoon: A Gilded Age Historical Cozy Mystery (Shipwreck Point Mysteries Book 5)

by Elise M Stone

  Although it was easy to see there were several apple danishes and an assortment of cookies among the crumbs, Mrs. Abbott blushed like a schoolgirl at the attention from the famous—and handsome—lawyer. “I have just the thing for you and Miss Wade.” She leaned forward and whispered, “I saved a dozen eclairs and some strudel for people who came later.” She turned around and lifted two plates from a small table behind her.

  “Bless you,” Titus said. “I must have one of your excellent eclairs.”

  The baker placed one on a small plate, then spoke to Elisabeth. “And what can I get for you?”

  “I’ll have an apple danish.” She was about to open her purse to pay for it, when she saw Titus dropping a dollar bill and a few coins into a jar with a sign that said Widows and Orphans Fund on it.

  “Shall we step away and let others in?” Titus asked.

  Elisabeth nodded, and he led the way to a shady spot near the church steps. She noticed he’d never offered one of his business cards to Mrs. Abbott, and so, when they went to return the plates, she spoke up. “I wondered if you’d ever considered hiring a lawyer to handle your business affairs?”

  “Business affairs?” the woman said as she touched her chin. “I can’t say as I have any affairs, business or otherwise, that have need of a lawyer.”

  “Perhaps you’d take a card just in case you find a need in the future.” She nudged Titus with her elbow, and he awkwardly produced the stack of cards he’d put in his pocket.

  “Well, I suppose that would be all right.” Mrs. Abbott took the top card from the stack and examined the unfamiliar item.

  “Why don’t you take a few more? You could put them on the counter at your bakery for others who might find them useful.”

  The baker hesitated for only a moment before lifting three more from the pile.

  Elisabeth smiled at her warmly. “Thank you so much. The apple danish was delicious. If you have any left at the end, I’d like to bring a couple home with me.”

  The flattery made the woman forget all about the strangeness of the business cards. She positively glowed at the compliment. “I’ll try to save two for you, but I can’t promise. This is a ravenous crowd.”

  “Shall we move on to the next table?” she asked Titus.

  He nodded.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Peck,” she said when they reached it. “I’m surprised to see you here today. I’d think you’d be busy preparing food for the restaurant.”

  “Good afternoon, Miss Wade, Mr. Strong. My chef is perfectly capable of completing that task. The rummage sale will be over in a few hours, and then I’ll go back to being mâitre d’. I thought it was important that I be here to encourage people to enter my raffle for a dinner for four.”

  “How much are the tickets?” Titus asked.

  “Ten cents.”

  “I’ll take ten,” the lawyer said as he pulled his wallet out.

  The restaurateur dealt ten of the orange-colored tickets off the stack and exchanged them for a dollar. “Write your name on the line at the bottom,” he instructed, “and put them in the jar here. I’ll be drawing the winner at two o’clock.”

  Titus dutifully did as he was told, then said, “I was wondering if I might leave a few more of my business cards with you? I thought those visiting Peck’s Landing might be just the kind of people who might need a lawyer one day. You know, of a better class than average and generally involved in a business of some sort.”

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve already given out the ones you left by the register. I’d be happy to take more. Since the idea was so successful, I’ve put up a board in the lobby where other local businessmen can leave their cards or a flyer advertising their business.”

  “It sounds like that would be the perfect place, what with diners waiting there for a table.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Peck said with a nod.

  “That wasn’t so hard now was it?” Elisabeth said as they strolled toward the next booth.

  “I had a good teacher.” Titus smiled at her.

  But they didn’t quite reach the stall before Ranson Payne approached the couple. “I’m glad to see you taking my advice about handing out business cards at local events.”

  “It seemed like a good idea,” Titus said, “although I’m not the shrewd hustler that my secretary is.”

  She wasn’t sure whether to be insulted at the word he’d called her or not, but in the end decided he’d meant it as a compliment.

  “I’m sure you’ll learn in time.”

  Elisabeth was still puzzled why the chairman of the board of selectmen had encouraged the lawyer to build his business in Whitby. She’d thought his aim would be to get Mr. Strong to leave the town since he often acted as the opposition to most of the chairman’s schemes. Politics must be more complicated than she could imagine.

  “Miss Wade has been a big help.” He smiled at her. “I think she’s concerned about the stability of her own position should I not secure more clients.”

  “We couldn’t have that, could we?” Payne said.

  “No, we couldn’t.”

  “It was good seeing you, Strong, but I’d better move along. I need to get indoors before I get a severe case of sunburn.”

  “Of course,” Titus said, acknowledging the albino’s risk.

  “I’m not sure I’ll ever understand that man,” Elisabeth said.

  “Oh, he’s only taking his own advice. He’s glad-handing everyone in town and keeping the wheels of his machine greased. I doubt he meant any of what he said. Except the part about the sunburn.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Titus found Elisabeth fluttering about the office when he entered it on Monday morning. She’d just emerged from the doorway to his private office and headed for the window where she raised the shade, then lowered it a bit. Scurrying to her desk, she straightened a stack of papers, then turned a plant exactly forty-five degrees. She stood stiffly, her foot tapping on the floor while her eyes darted from one thing to another until they lit on him standing in the entrance.

  “At last!” she exclaimed. “I thought you’d never get here.”

  He shook his head. “I believe I’m slightly early this morning. Unless you’ve changed my hours?”

  He hoped his attempt to make a joke would relax her, which it seemed to. At least she stopped tapping her foot.

  “I’m sorry. I probably should have mentioned it yesterday, but I thought what I discovered could wait.” She smiled shyly. “Apparently, I’m not as patient as I expected I’d be. And Owen has been sitting in your office sipping coffee for fifteen minutes trying to get me to give him a hint.”

  “Well, then, let’s go join him so I can hear all about this news you have.”

  Once the three of them were seated around his desk with full cups, he spoke to the detective, who, as always, was as relaxed as if he were lying in a hammock on a porch in front of one of the guest houses on the beach. “Do you have any idea what has my secretary in such a tizzy?”

  “No, but I’m sure we’ll find out now that you’ve arrived. She insisted she wanted to tell us both at the same time.”

  He cocked his head at Elisabeth.

  “You know how I’ve begun painting on weekend afternoons out at the Point?” She paused and waited for him to nod. “I ran into Alain DeGarmo on Saturday afternoon. We began talking about one thing, then another, and Warren Chapman’s name came up. Alain told me he backed out of buying a canvas from him recently.”

  “That doesn’t sound so exciting to me,” Titus said. “People change their minds about things like that all the time. Or perhaps the subject didn’t appeal to Mrs. Chapman.”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Elisabeth said with annoyance, “but it wasn’t in this case. The reason Chapman reneged on the purchase was because of a financial setback, specifically something he called a ‘short sale’ of copper stock. Since neither Mr. DeGarmo nor myself knew what a short sale was, I was hoping you would.”

  T
itus thought back to several articles he’d read in the financial section of the Boston Globe over the past few months. He still subscribed even though by mail it arrived a few days late, and most people were more interested in the news carried in the Whitby Weekly than the city paper. He smiled wryly. “A short sale makes a game of poker at Golden Chances look like a conservative investment. Basically, an investor sells stocks he doesn’t own, at a high price. He’s betting that by the time he has to actually transfer those stocks, the price will have dropped considerably. He wants to buy them at a much lower price than the sale is for.”

  “How does he do that?” Elisabeth asked. “Do they all have fortune-tellers who can see into the future?”

  “No, although I’m sure several of them wish they had. Copper prices have been particularly volatile over the past decade. It’s one of the most suitable materials for things like electrical and telephone wires, and so demand has gone up tremendously. On the other hand, production increased to meet it. New mines have been developed and new processes for extracting the ore invented. Well, those who owned copper companies couldn’t have that, and so the firms in Europe formed cartels and stockpiled the supply rather than letting it come to the open market. Because of the Sherman Act, companies in the United States can’t legally do any such thing, but I’ve heard there were some informal agreements to similarly control the price of copper.”

  “What I want to know is how someone sells something they don’t own,” Owen said, his brow furrowed in concentration.

  “They ‘borrow’ the stock from their broker. In other words, they contract to buy the shares from their broker in the future, who allows them to sell the shares to someone else. For some reason, companies like J.P. Morgan and Dominick and Dickerman are allowed to conduct business in this manner.”

  “So how does this relate to Warren Chapman?” Elisabeth asked.

  “From what you’re saying, Chapman arranged a short sale with his broker and some third party, counting on the price of copper stocks to go down. Instead, it went up—which I can confirm with a copy of the Boston Globe I have at home—which meant he had to cover his margin.”

  “I feel like I’ve stumbled into a foreign country. What’s a margin?” the detective asked.

  “It’s a percentage of the sale price,” Titus explained. “Say you give your broker ten percent of the expected purchase price in order to reserve the stock for you. That’s the margin. So, if you plan on buying ten dollars worth of stock, you give him a dollar. If the price goes down to five dollars, everything works perfectly. But if it goes up to twenty dollars, you have to give the broker another dollar before you’re able to sell the stocks. Now, imagine that you’re purchasing not ten dollars worth of stock, but ten thousand dollars worth.” He let that lie there while they did the math.

  “That explains why he couldn’t buy the painting,” Elisabeth said.

  “It does indeed. But I doubt his broker would have killed him because he couldn’t cover the margin. I imagine he would have just charged him penalties and voided the sale.” He realized he was getting in over his head on the topic. He wasn’t exactly sure what would happen in those circumstances, but he stuck by his conviction that murder wasn’t it.

  Campbell scratched his head. He must have been thinking something similar. “So how does this relate to our murder?”

  “I’m not sure it does,” Titus said. “But just in case, I’d like you to do some investigating. See if you can find out who his broker is, how much money was involved, and who he was selling the stock to.”

  “I can’t promise I’ll find out anything. I barely know where to start.”

  “I understand. But you never know what you’ll find out until you begin asking questions.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Elisabeth parked her bicycle at one of the inverted U-shaped racks in front of the grocery store and quickly went inside. Annie had asked her to pick up a pound of butter on her way home, and she thought she might ascertain if they had some peppermint drops. She liked to suck on them in the office, particularly if Mr. Strong took her for lunch at the pub, where they seemed to make everything with a generous ration of garlic.

  As she waited for the proprietor to weigh the candy, she was surprised to see Pauline Chapman enter the store, a shopping basket on her arm. The woman ducked her head when she caught sight of Elisabeth, and set about filling her basket with a bag of sugar and some canned goods. She hung back until Elisabeth finished with her purchase.

  As she put the butter and candy in the pannier suspended from the handlebars of her bicycle, she contemplated how odd it was that a woman of Pauline Chapman’s status would be grocery shopping. Particularly a woman in mourning. Surely she could have sent a kitchen maid or her housekeeper on such an errand. She backed her bicycle out of the stand, angled it toward the street, and was about to mount it to continue her ride home when she heard a woman call out her name.

  “Miss Wade?”

  Elisabeth turned around, and as she’d suspected, the woman hailing her was Mrs. Chapman. Composing her face into a pleasant smile, she replied, “Yes. What may I do for you?”

  The woman cast her eyes downward, as if to watch her shuffling feet. She raised her head and said, “It is I who must do something for you. I didn’t mean to ignore you inside the store. I’m not accustomed to doing errands of this sort, although I imagine I will get used to it in time. Please accept my apologies.”

  “Of course,” Elisabeth said. “I will admit I was surprised to see you buying groceries.”

  “I’m afraid there is no one else to do it nowadays.”

  That was a shocking statement. “But surely one of your maids could have done it.”

  “All gone,” Pauline Chapman whispered sadly. Then, in a slightly stronger voice, “I’ve had to let most of the staff go. I’m down to a housekeeper and a gardener. I’d let go of the gardener, but I have to keep up appearances, and a yard full of sea grass would give it all away.”

  “Are circumstances that dire with you?” She felt genuinely sympathetic towards the woman. It was one thing to grow up poor. You learned to make do with what you had early on. It was another thing entirely to grow up with everything done for you, and in your later years to be forced to learn how to do it yourself.

  Pauline Chapman nodded. “Mr. Chapman’s occupation never brought a steady income. When his investments were profitable, we lived very well indeed. But when they didn’t work out, we suffered in poverty, pinching every penny. While he was alive, I could always count on things turning around. But now that he’s gone…”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “There’s one more thing.” The woman stopped, as if whatever she wanted to say had got stuck in her throat.

  “Yes?” Elisabeth urged.

  “I sold the cuckoo clock to Mrs. Muir. It was another of those times when there was no food in the house and nothing to buy it with. I could barely eek out wages for the servants, who had threatened to quit if I wouldn’t pay them. I knew she’d admired the timepiece, and at tea one day when we were discussing how difficult it was to buy presents for men, I suggested the clock. She latched onto the idea immediately and promised payment the same day.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police that when they asked you?”

  Pauline Chapman recoiled from the thought, her eyes widening and her mouth dropping open. “How could I? How could I admit our desperate circumstances in public? Warren would have never forgiven me for that.”

  Elisabeth pressed her lips together as she bit back the words that came immediately to mind. Was it better to preserve one’s reputation and let an innocent man be accused of theft than to tell the truth and spare him? Instead, she said, “That would have been difficult, I’m sure. But now that he’s gone, I’m glad you’ve told me.” And I’ll be telling Mr. Strong at the first opportunity.

  “Thank you for understanding. And now I’d better hurry home, or there will be no supper for anyone.”

  She
watched the poor woman as she hurried down Mayfield Road, head bent. Perhaps being a member of the upper class wasn’t as good as those who weren’t imagined it was.

  “I’ve brought the butter,” Elisabeth said as she entered the kitchen. But although she could smell a savory soup bubbling on the stove, Annie wasn’t there watching it. After putting the butter in the icebox, she climbed the stairs, thinking to change out of her office clothes and perhaps do some work in the yard after supper. But she stopped when she reached the doorway to her bedroom.

  Annie stood in front of her full-length mirror, twirling a parasol and glancing over her shoulder just at the edge of it. Practicing coy glances, Elisabeth assumed. She couldn’t help but chuckle at the young girl who, hearing the sound, spun in her direction and froze, her face ashen and chin trembling.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Miss Elisabeth. I know I shouldn’t be dallying in your bedroom, but Bert, I mean Mr. Hathaway, has asked me to step out with him on Sunday, and…” Her pallor was vanquished by the flush that suffused her cheeks.

  “Bert, is it?” Elisabeth asked. There was something familiar about that parasol. But the development in her maid’s romantic life intrigued her too much to dwell on that now. “Have you become that friendly with Mr. Strong’s manservant already?”

  “He’s so nice, Miss Elisabeth. He hardly seems like a stranger at all. And he smells so nice.”

  She imagined he must use Bay Rum cologne, like most men, but it seemed odd that he would have had it on last Saturday when he’d shown up at the rummage sale. Elisabeth doubted he’d expected to meet a young woman there, and it was only the coincidental meeting of Annie that had persuaded him to stay. Which made her wonder… “Have you seen him since Saturday?”

  Her cheeks, which had pinked up when speaking about Bert before, now flamed crimson. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Of course, she’d reverted to her more formal terminology in her unnerved state. Elisabeth decided not to correct her for this once.