by Marlowe Benn
The heat woke her. Bright sun leaked through the draperies, and a fire burned in the grate. Green tartan wool blanketed her from toes to chin. Heaving it away, Julia saw the ashtrays wiped clean, the glasses washed and inverted on the trolley. Oh, please God, let it have been Mrs. Cheadle who’d covered up her sleepy disarray, not Philip. She stumbled to the mantel to see the time. Not yet nine. She slipped into her mules, pulled her mangled shawl about her arms, and hurried to reassemble her dignity. She was due at Glennis’s in an hour.
Glennis pressed her ear against the heavy wood basement door and knocked. “Alice? Are you there? Do you mind if we come in? We need to finish up with Naomi’s things.” When no one answered, Glennis fitted a large key into the keyhole and heaved it to the left. The bolt slid back.
“I don’t know why I’m nervous,” she said. “I’m in my own house, and we do need to finish up our sorting.”
Julia felt the same anxiety. She’d never sneaked into another person’s home. Glennis stepped back to let Julia go first into the dark apartment. A weak yellow light shone from the living room window. A market basket leaned against the wall outside Alice’s bedroom. They crept toward the light, careful to avoid the bulging basket.
Julia stepped on something small and rolled her instep to avoid crushing it, but at the sound of breaking glass, she sucked in a guilty breath.
Glennis crouched to peer at whatever lay beneath Julia’s right foot. “Something white. Smashed to smithereens.”
“Look.” Across the floor lay more white beads. At the end of the hall, light came from the tall lamp beside the old rocker. The folded quilt cushioning the rocker was askew, bulging between the chair’s tall back slats; someone was there.
“Alice?” Julia said. “So sorry. We’re just here to finish up in—” Then she saw the leg stretched at a crooked angle toward the sofa.
Beads burst beneath her feet like pops of a tommy gun. Glennis arrived in a rush right behind her. Alice was sprawled in the rocker, her hips slid nearly off the seat. Both arms curled toward her throat and lay limp across her chest. Her head hung as if she were asleep or drunk.
Julia touched her wrist, and Alice lifted her head. Glennis gasped to see her livid throat, ringed with a purpling bruise. Alice’s fingers crawled up to touch it, recoiled into weak fists.
“Quick, Glennis. A wet cloth. Cool water.” Julia unbent Alice’s hot fingers. “Can you breathe?”
Alice nodded and winced. Julia straightened Alice’s arms and laid them in her lap. Glennis brought a damp dish towel and eased it against her throat. A sound rumbled from Alice’s chest. Julia sent Glennis for a cup of water, then held it steady as Alice swallowed, at first in a blinking grimace, then again and again and again. “Run upstairs to telephone for a doctor,” Julia told Glennis, hovering over her shoulder.
“No.” Alice spoke with more air than sound.
“You’re hurt. You need a doctor.”
“No.” Alice grasped Julia’s wrist to pull herself up. She managed only a few inches, but with her shoulders less collapsed into her ribs, she looked more alive. Glennis gripped Alice under the arms to tug her another couple of inches upright. They helped her up to lie across the sofa and covered her with the quilt. Glennis fetched the uncased pillow from Naomi’s bed, and Julia folded it to support Alice’s blade-thin shoulders. She didn’t look at Glennis for fear she’d see her own guilt mirrored there. Their stealthy plan to snoop around seemed a distant memory. This changed everything.
“What happened?” Julia leaned close. “Can you talk?”
Alice nodded, eyes closed. Several moments elapsed. “I was resting.” She settled a hand against her throat. “Tight, burning.” She spoke in a raspy voice between more sips of water.
“Did you hear anything?”
Alice’s head moved. No. She wore the same wool dress she’d had on last evening.
“See anyone?”
Again, no.
Julia glanced at the front door: bolted. The attacker had probably entered and certainly left through the house. Not even Chester could disguise this as anything but a malicious attack, and suspicion fell squarely on the household. Only a fool would act so recklessly, and no one in this business was a fool. This was shrewdly done. However alarming the look of Alice’s throat, her injuries were not serious. The attack was meant to frighten, to warn rather than to kill. The tremor of her hand against the quilt illustrated its success.
The more ominous question was why. To keep Naomi’s money in the family? To scare Alice into forfeiting the new will? Or because Alice had lashed out with her one weapon, the assertion that she alone loved Naomi and understood her suffering? It was time for direct questions. They had to find out what Alice knew. Glennis gave Julia a poke, encouraging her with narrowed eyes to go on.
“Alice,” Julia said, “this can’t wait. You must trust us. We can’t help unless you tell us what you know about Naomi’s death.”
“What really happened to her?” said Glennis.
Alice held the cloth to her neck, sipping and swallowing several more times. “So waspish,” she said in a weak whisper. “That morning. Wouldn’t tell me. Just walked out.” She eased more water down her throat and patted the sofa cushion. “I found her here. Thought she had a headache. Didn’t ask, even look. My heart was hard. Until, such sounds.”
Her head sank into the pillow, but her voice grew stronger. “She was so pale. Hair sopping. Clammy. Barely breathing. I tried to help her but . . .”
“Someone poisoned her,” Glennis said.
Alice fingered the loose skin below her jaw and moved her head slowly from side to side.
No? Not poison? “Alice, what are you not telling us?”
Another resisting shake.
“We know she was pregnant.” Julia spoke bluntly.
Alice twisted her face into the pillow. After a full minute she said in a muffled voice, “So much blood. Blood everywhere. Her skirt was soaked through.”
Shock buckled Glennis’s knees, and she dropped into the rocker. “You mean she lost the baby?”
“Worse.”
Julia’s legs wobbled too. After her hours of crafting murderous possibilities, the truth caught her hard. It made no sense. How could Naomi, of all women, meet such an old, even banal fate? Despite her struggle for women’s rights, in the end was Naomi just another poor and panicked victim of a knitting needle, a lye douche, a tincture of tansy or feverfew? Killed by despair, not malice? The most modern of women, undone by the most ancient of troubles?
“Blood everywhere,” Alice repeated slowly. “Butchered. Torn stem to stern and sent home with nothing but a diaper, bloody wads of cotton. I’ve seen it before.”
“How ghastly. I’m so sorry, Alice.” Julia hated the feeble, inadequate words. Glennis only whimpered.
“I held her to the end, prayed to know what to do. I had to go to that meeting, but first I bathed her, got her into her fine underthings and a clean skirt.”
Glennis’s head swerved at the mention of Naomi’s lingerie.
“To make it look like suicide,” Julia said.
Alice refolded the cloth to find a cool patch. “To help the cause,” she said. “People would despise her if they knew the truth. Call her a whore. It would destroy everything. Suicide would show how she suffered. How her own brother made life impossible. That her Union sisters were her only true family.”
“And the note?” Julia said quickly, before Glennis could feel the sting of Alice’s words.
Alice flinched and dropped her eyes. In barely a whisper she admitted, “A letter she wrote after he spelled out his terms. To share if things became unbearable. They did, and I wanted to shame him.”
“And you placed the tablets in her mouth?”
“Too late, if that doctor’s right.”
“You expected to be the one to find her?”
Alice nodded. “So awful, seeing them here and that cloth he put on her head. Then when he said there was no note, I saw what
he was up to but couldn’t stop him.”
Not without exposing her own deception. “So you typed up those threats and pretended they came earlier?”
“I wanted you to think he sent them. I wanted you to know how he tormented her.”
“Who’s the baby’s father?” Glennis said abruptly. “I bet you know.”
Alice gave a harsh sigh.
“Russell Coates?”
Alice weakly pushed herself upright. “He pestered her. She lost her good sense around him. But—I don’t know.” Her legs moved beneath the quilt. “I’m better now.”
“Was Naomi wearing her gray cardigan that day?” Julia asked. It was a loose end, a detail in the winding down of their investigation, a distraction from the enormity of Naomi’s awful but unintended death.
Alice thought. “I suppose. It was draped over the sofa, right here. I hung it in her bedroom. Why?”
“We found a café receipt in the pocket, probably from that morning. It doesn’t matter now.”
Alice stirred again, more forcefully. “I’d better go. Your brother will be angry if he finds me here,” she said. “Will you help get my things together, Miss Rankin? In my room?”
“You bet. We’ll get you to the Union, where you’ll be safe.” Glennis went to gather up the parcels in the hall and in the tiny bedroom.
As soon as she had stepped away, Alice gripped Julia’s wrist to pull her close. In a low rasp she said, “I’m sorry I tried to trick you, but now you know everything, and I’ve betrayed my dearest friend. Can you do something for me in return? It’s eating me alive.” She listened for Glennis’s return and hurried on. “Naomi would never go to a butcher like that. Never. We know doctors, brave, good doctors who help women weary half to death with too many children already. And, oh, the young girls . . .”
She leaned even closer. “She’d never let one of those other monsters near her body. Someone made her do this. Forced it on her, then dumped her here to die. As good as killed her.”
Forced it on her? Were Glennis’s accusations not so wild after all? “What do you want me to do?”
“Find out who did this,” Alice said. “Who took her to be butchered. Please.”
“Ready.” Glennis returned, overstuffed cloth bags dangling from either hand. “I’ll have George run us downtown in the motorcar.”
Julia murmured a vague reassurance into Alice’s ear as she helped her to her feet.
The story had taken a horrifying turn. Alice had been attacked by someone who feared what she knew. But which knowledge? Of the pregnancy or its gruesome termination? Or was there even more to the story, something Alice didn’t know or was still hiding? The mystery of Naomi’s death was not over. It had deepened alarmingly, like the bruises circling Alice’s throat.
While Glennis escorted Alice downtown, Julia went directly to Jack’s office. He was generous with his time, sweeping her onto his schedule like a prized heiress rather than the penniless acquaintance she was about to become. She showed him the odd receipt from Naomi’s pocket and told him of the shadowy hunch swirling in her mind. He understood it immediately and, better still, knew how to inquire for an answer. He made a series of short telephone calls before reaching a police detective in Mr. Kessler’s office, to whom he listened with great care for nearly ten minutes, scribbling notes all the while.
“Pay dirt,” Jack said when the call ended. “Your suspicion was not far off the mark, Julia. Turns out this isn’t a receipt at all. Heacock is the street name of a disgraced doctor, a shady fellow named Weatherford who’s been in all sorts of trouble with the law—illegal prescriptions, phony death certificates, patching up fugitives, and so on. Apparently he lost his clinic years ago and was sent to prison, but now he’s back and operating on the lam. It seems this business about tea—”
He glanced at the paper. “Black tea, no sugar, no milk, $40.14. It’s an address, a coded way of identifying where Heacock could be found.”
“I wondered if it might be something like that.”
“Scrambled egg is also a code, a crude one, for the service she received. Miss Rankin went to Heacock to end her pregnancy.”
Julia relayed this information as benignly as she could to Glennis that evening over the telephone.
Glennis’s voice shook. “I don’t understand. Any of this. Why?”
Julia had no answers. Why terminate, and why go to Heacock? Naomi had already been seeing a reputable doctor to safeguard her pregnancy. If some drastic despair had changed her mind, she knew where to find clean, safe, and discreet help. Heacock was notorious for inflicting the opposite.
“Why?” Glennis demanded, her shrill voice vibrating across the wires.
“Do you remember the telephone call Alice says Naomi took that morning? The one that sent her rushing out of the Union in a foul temper? If Naomi decided to end her pregnancy, maybe the caller agreed to pay for it but only if he made the arrangements.”
“Russell would never send her someplace grummy. But Chester would. He’d find the cheapest, nastiest doctor he could, just to cheese her.”
Julia covered the mouthpiece and listened for sounds in the apartment. Philip appeared to be out, and Mrs. Cheadle was clanging pots in the kitchen. “Paid in full,” she said, fingering the receipt. “That’s all we know for sure. Someone either gave Naomi the money or more likely paid Heacock directly. Unfortunately, the only way to find out who sent her there is to snoop around at this man’s clinic. It could be quite horrid and even dangerous, Glennis. You needn’t come along. I have a tougher stomach than you.”
As expected, Glennis howled her determination not to be left behind. They agreed to meet at Jack’s office the following afternoon at three, by which time Jack hoped to have more information. It left the midday hours free for Julia’s other urgent business, which she did not mention to Glennis, as it was every bit as disturbing and possibly as dangerous.
CHAPTER 22
“Yes, I understand I’m not on his schedule. I do apologize. But please, I need only a few minutes of his time.” Julia softened her posture and smoothed every sharp edge off her words, trying to sound both deferential and helpless, but the secretary would not be moved. She studied her desk calendar’s immaculate script detailing a succession of names, events, and responsibilities. Russell Coates’s law practice was busier than Julia expected.
“It’s important.” Julia added a squeak of pathos to her voice, the sound, she hoped, of one who simply loathes causing trouble.
The woman tapped her needle-sharp pencil against the leather desk pad, clearly deliberating how best to be rid of her. She relented with a scowl and reached for the telephone. “You’re due at the restaurant in twenty-five minutes, sir,” she told her employer. “And a Miss Kydd is here to see you. Shall I schedule an appointment for her?”
She nodded at the reply and replaced the receiver. “Have a seat, Miss Kydd. Mr. Coates will see you presently.”
But before Julia could turn to find a chair, Russell appeared. His coat was off, his tie loosened. He guided Julia into the office and closed the door. “What brings you here?”
The blinds were drawn, and folders lay strewed across his desk.
“I’m sorry to disturb you at work like this, but a great deal has come to light about Naomi’s death. Can you spare a few minutes?”
He studied her face. It was the first time they’d seen each other close up in sober daylight, without the softening haze of liquor and smoke and vague desire. She met his gaze, eyes nearly level with his, alert, prepared.
“All right. But not here.” He retrieved his jacket from behind the door. “Telephone Marchant to reschedule, Agnes,” he told the secretary. “I’m stepping out. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
The door closed on indignant reminders of other duties neglected.
Neither spoke until they reached the pavement three stories below. As the elevator descended, Julia fixed her eyes on the attendant’s gold-braided collar and considered what she would say an
d how. Perhaps this had been a rash decision. It was certainly a hasty one. She’d spent the morning in a whirlwind of errands: sending telegrams, collecting her ticket for Sunday’s sailing, and badgering Philip for a last installment of funds before Friday’s meeting to complete the paperwork of his legal triumph. She’d telephoned Jack with instructions and, before her courage could fail, directed a taxicab to Russell’s office.
It was another sultry autumn day. The street teemed with office workers slipping out for lunchtime strolls or coffees alfresco. Russell and Julia joined the throng heading west, toward Central Park. Another few minutes and they entered its oasis.
“What have you learned?” Russell asked as they passed noisy peanut and lemonade vendors, dodging the oncoming crush.
Julia stopped walking and was buffeted by three shopgirls, whose high-pitched tirades about poncy customers she could no longer abide, following close on her heels. They glared at her for an apology, without success, and marched on. Russell returned to her side. “This way,” he suggested, and they headed for a narrower side path lined with benches, all occupied.
“Why were you so upset about Naomi’s new will?” she asked.
They walked for several paces before he answered. “I’ll presume this is relevant. As I told you the other night, I don’t trust that Clintock woman. I think she manipulated Naomi. Turned her away from lifelong attachments.”
“Who benefited under the terms of the original will?”
Again he considered at length. “Since it’s now void, I suppose I can tell you, as you seem to be acting as some kind of factotum for Glennis in this business.” Julia accepted his pause for what it was, censure for her meddling, for extracting confidences under less-than-honest pretenses. She endured the burn across her cheeks and hoped it was sufficient penance.