Colette embroidered her tapestry, needle weaving a story she might afterward tell with her pen. Stitch after stitch fleshed out a rose. “Gisele,” she said, “on Wednesday, why did you leave so late for the Bois?”
“I was watching for Henri.”
“Do you walk together every morning?”
“Sometimes we meet after his ride.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Oh, really.” Two words out of Henri’s lockjawed mouth, and already Ducasse looked annoyed. As did Liane.
“Of course not.” Gisele’s voice was casual, indifferent to Henri. In her simple white blouse and gray skirt, she looked like a postulant with a prayer book in her pocket.
“Did you kill your husband?”
“No.” That was all. No trembling chin. No fluster. Formidable child. When this was over Colette intended to invite Gisele to play bridge with Maurice and Cocteau.
“Did you know your husband meant to seize your family’s farms?”
“No.”
Ducasse jumped in. “The letter was on his desk. You must have seen it.”
Colette silenced him with a look. “Tell me about the anonymous note,” she said to Gisele, possibly the calmest person in the room.
“It came Tuesday night. Someone knocked, and when I opened the door I saw an envelope on the floor with my name on it.”
“Your name?”
“Yes.” Some emotion, irritation perhaps, at last crept into Gisele’s voice.
“You’re sure—”
The chair creaked under Ducasse’s impatience. “It was her name. I saw it myself.” He turned to Giselle. “Madame Roland, why did you ignore the count’s note?”
“Really, Inspector.” Henri’s face slackened into petulance. “I did not send that note.”
Colette cast her line in a different direction. “Gisele, did you bring my novel?”
From deep inside a gore-seam pocket, Gisele pulled out the little book.
“Open to page forty-seven.”
With painstaking fingers, Gisele leafed through the pages. “Here.” She offered the book to Colette.
“Just read from the top, my dear.”
“My eyes.” Gisele rubbed her lids. “Blurry today.”
“Would you like more light?”
“I am waiting.” Ducasse’s voice came from far away.
Colette’s heart beat in her throat. “You will wait forever. Won’t he, Gisele?”
The country bride shook her head, an ivory comb slipping from her braid.
“Read,” Colette said.
“Chapter…” A capillary pink suffused Gisele’s neck. “Chapter…”
“There are no chapters in my book.”
Gisele pressed a hand to her cheek.
“You can’t read, can you, my dear?”
“No! I can’t!” Her face twisted with rage, Gisele stabbed a long finger at Colette’s name on the cover. “Names I recognize. Numbers. The kitchen boy helps me with menus and things. I saved the note for him to read to me later.” Still no tears, but Gisele’s face was on fire. “ ‘Reading leads to reading,” she said, mocking Colette’s easy aphorism. “For me nothing leads to reading. At school they thought my eyes were bad. My friends helped me. That’s how I got Henri to read this to me.” She pitched The Innocent Libertine across the room. “Satisfied? Now that you’ve shown the world how stupid I am?”
“My dear child, I’ve shown the world how innocent you are.”
No one spoke.
While Colette waited for the truth to sink in, she drifted on her raft, past Henri, fingering his tie, past Ducasse and Liane, both sipping tea. On the mantel glass paperweights glowed, chrome yellow, cobalt, all the colors of tropical fish.
She circled back to Liane. “Countess, would you be so kind? Fetch my crewelwork needle?” She pointed at her workbasket across the room.
“Is this what you mean?” Liane held out a fat needle, its eye cocked like a wink.
“The very one. Bring it here, will you?”
Something must have shown in Colette’s face, because Liane hesitated before coming close.
“Thank you.” Like a mongoose, Colette grabbed Liane’s wrist and pushed back the sleeve, exposing the Gypsy bracelet.
“Don’t touch it!” Liane screamed. “It’ll bring you bad luck.”
But the bad luck was all Liane’s, her arm trapped in Colette’s steel grip. A few jabs with the needle released the mermaid catch and, like a hinged shell, the bracelet fell open.
Bruises, fading from purple to sulfur, girded Liane’s hidden skin.
“Your own little fling?” Colette asked. “Did Roland forget himself and hurt you where others could see?”
“She’s covered with bruises,” Henri murmured. “For Liane, pain equals joy, something I can’t give her.”
“They battered each other.” Colette pictured the scrapes on Roland’s hands and neck. Scarred by Liane’s fingernails? The tips of knives?
“He was blackmailing me,” Liane whispered. “He took pictures with a hidden camera and threatened to publish them.”
Colette, once married to a baron, understood Liane’s predicament. If Roland exposed her to the world, Henri’s mother, descended from kings, would be unable to endure the infamy. She would push Henri into divorce. And divorce would cost Liane her title.
Worse, half her assets—for Liane, true infamy. She had to shut Roland’s mouth, search his apartment, implicate Gisele.
If only Topaz could speak. Dogs don’t shy away from blood, they’re carnivores. But a tender pooch might shy away from the scene of a murder he had witnessed.
Shouts, Liane’s sobs, mingled with Colette’s thoughts. Let the inspector sort out the pieces. She’d done enough. She snapped off her lamp, and silent as a ghost, Pauline appeared with the coats.
When they were gone, Colette turned to watch the sky through her window. It was the sky of Paris, the color of cats, and slowly darkening. Already the moon hung over the gardens, but there was an hour still, she thought, of good light. She picked up her pen.
THE VERY PRIVATE DETECTRESS
BY CATHERINE MAMBRETTI
In his later years, my dear friend Allan Pinkerton confessed he shared my opinion that, in the ordinary course of business, a private detective eye encounters few persons of interest. In most cases our clients grossly overestimate both their adversaries and themselves. All claim to be “reluctant to consult you” and hint that the only reason they’ve made their way to your door is that they’re too ethical to stoop to handling the matter personally. “The characters I wrote about,” Pinkerton said, “had to be spiced up for publication. However, there was one case about which I never wrote, a case which involved an extraordinary person, who, as it turned out, grossly overestimated me.”
The woman arrived at the Chicago office one November morning in 1856 without an appointment. Pinkerton’s secretary, Harry, took her coat and showed her into a secluded waiting room. At five minutes to noon, Pinkerton escorted a typical client out of his private office, then said to Harry, “Lunch with the accountant. Be back before my next appointment at one-thirty.” When he grabbed his bowler off the bentwood hat stand, he noticed the woman’s coat on the rack and turned to Harry with a question-mark eyebrow.
Harry put a finger to his lips and stepped up to the closed waiting room door. He slid aside the copper disk that hid the peephole, so Pinkerton could take a look at her. “Not the usual society peacock who needs proof her husband’s cheating on her,” Harry whispered.
Pinkerton agreed. The woman was a wallflower, if he had ever seen one. She wore a black bonnet, behind whose veil her face was nothing but a blur. He wasn’t even sure there really was a body inside the voluminous hoopskirted dress. Its balloonlike sleeves might have been filled with air instead of flesh and bone. The bonnet’s wide bow and the stiff, mannish white collar of her charcoal-gray dress completely hid her neck, which could have been long and scrawny or short and thick—or she
might have had no neck at all.
The only thing about her body of which he was certain was “There’s a backbone inside that corset.” She sat up as stiff, in his words, “as if she had a broom handle up her arse,” reading a book she had selected from the agency’s small library.
“What’s she reading?”
“A translation of Machiavelli,” Harry said.
On the table beside the horsehair armchair was an unusually wide leather reticule of the kind that terrified Pinkerton, who was well known to suffer from an unreasonable fear of ladies’ reticules. His worst nightmare was that his wife might one day ask him to reach into her reticule while it sat across the room from her: “Allan, fetch my hanky for me, won’t you, dear? It’s just over there in my reticule.”
“Did she say what she wants?” Pinkerton whispered to Harry.
“No, she just said she’d prefer to tell that to Mr. Pinkerton. I said your schedule for the day was filled, and she said she could wait.”
“After I leave,” Pinkerton whispered, “tell her I won’t be able to see her until late, four o’clock at the earliest, and if that isn’t acceptable she can make an appointment.”
When Harry passed on this information, the lady declined to leave. Instead she sat there all day, while a series of gentlemen told Pinkerton they were more sinned against than sinning, like a long line of vindictive supplicants at the devil’s own confessional.
“My name is Mrs. Kate Warne. I’m a widow.”
Even up close, Pinkerton told me, he found her so ordinary-looking as to be literally indescribable. Except for her eyes. They were blue and cold as the heart of an iceberg, eyes that even her black veil could not obscure.
“How may I help you, Mrs. Warne?” he said, as usual trying very hard not to sound bored.
“I’ve come in response to your advertisement for detectives. I’m willing to submit to a thorough background check.”
To say he was surprised doesn’t describe what he felt. “I must admit, I never thought of hiring a female detective. For that matter, Mrs. Warne, I’ve never imagined a woman would want to become such a thing.” It was just after four o’clock on a gray autumn afternoon. In the streets of Chicago, lamplighters would soon begin their work. The window behind Pinkerton was the room’s only light source. He considered asking Harry to bring some lamps into the room, then thought better of it. The interview would soon be over.
“You astonish me, sir,” she said. The dying sun briefly penetrated her veil. He caught the slightest twitch of an eyelid. As if she feared her face might reveal something about her, she looked down at her gloved hands and the wide leather reticule in her lap. “What I mean is, I assumed all detective agencies must employ lady detectives, or I would never have inquired about the position. It never occurred to me that I would be proposing an innovation.” She raised her eyes to him, but now their cold intelligence was muted, as if she had drawn another, thicker veil across her face. Her face was a complete blank, a veiled blank.
“Have you ever heard of a female detective?” he asked.
“No, but I assumed a detective agency would never advertise specifically for ladies. Public knowledge that you employ lady detectives would undoubtedly diminish their… stealth. I suppose that’s the word. Better not to alert a criminal to the possibility that the woman with whom he’s conspiring is actually his nemesis.” For an instant Pinkerton thought he must be looking at a daguerreotype, so expressionless was her face. It was uncanny, he told me. He had never known a woman who could hide her feelings so well.
He didn’t like to ask a lady to leave, so instead he examined the desktop, as if he were searching for a document there and needed to get on with his work.
She said nothing.
Finally, he said, “Surely it goes without saying, the last sort of employment a widow should seek is employment as a private detective. A lady’s companion or a nanny might be more suitable, and certainly more in demand.”
“Mr. Pinkerton, I don’t have the temperament to coddle either old women or children. Besides, I have no credentials—at least written ones—for such ladylike forms of employment. I believe I’d make a fine detective. I can be stealthy. I’m very plain. No one ever gives me a second look.”
The room was dark now, but he took his watch from his vest pocket and pretended to check the time. “Mrs. Warne, the hour grows late. I’ve business to attend to.” He rose and walked to the door, which for propriety’s sake stood open. “It would be ungentlemanly of me to turn you out of my office,” he said, certain it was clear that was exactly what he was doing.
“Now that I understand you have no lady detectives in your employ,” she said, “perhaps you’d be so kind as to entertain a proposal that I be the first. I’ve been alone for some time. My husband left me very little to survive on. I’m at a crossroads in my life and must seek employment. If you won’t listen to me, then I’ll take my proposal to your chief competitor.”
He thought she must know it wasn’t much of a threat, but she had piqued his curiosity. He wondered how far the woman would carry the conversation. He poked his head out of the door. “Harry, bring lamps in here, will you?”
“As I said, I’m more than willing to have you inquire into my background,” she said as he returned to his desk. “In fact, I beg you to do so.”
Harry entered with a lighted lamp in each hand.
Pinkerton thanked him; then to Mrs. Warne he said, “I don’t like to work here after dark, not with all these papers. Even the walls are covered in paper. The building’s nothing but thin lathing and a bit of plaster. God forbid a fire should break out in the neighborhood.”
“I won’t keep you long,” she said. “I’ve no intention of telling you my whole life’s story. Quite the contrary.”
“Then please don’t tell me, either, why you want to be a Pinkerton detective. I don’t care what your reasons are. I doubt they’re good ones. Just tell me why you think you can do a man’s job.”
“I’m not suggesting I can do a man’s job,” she said. “I’m suggesting there are jobs of detection no man can do.”
“Such as?” said Pinkerton.
“Have you read Mrs. Browning?” she asked. “Then ‘Let me count the ways.’ ”
Pinkerton didn’t recognize the quotation, but he was lawyerlike and said nothing.
“First, there are some secrets no man could ever worm out of another person and certain places where a man can never go,” she said.
“Such as?” he persisted.
“Secrets no woman will tell a man, not even her lover, and especially not her husband.” She looked around the office, as if before then she had paid no particular notice to her surroundings. Her gaze came to rest on the lever-lock safe behind Pinkerton’s desk. “There are secrets every man would love to confide in someone, especially a woman, things he needs to get off his chest but couldn’t confess to another man, not even to a priest.” She looked Pinkerton in the eyes. “You know that’s true.”
He snorted skeptically but did know it was true.
“Second,” she said, “there are many places where a man can’t go.”
“And a woman can?”
“Can a man enter a lady’s bedroom while her husband’s at home? Can a strange man enter an infant’s nursery even if its mother keeps watch?”
Pinkerton’s mustachioed lip curled noncommittally.
“Can a man enter a girls’ dormitory or a brothel’s inner sanctum or a nunnery or a seamstress’s fitting room or—”
“Enough. I concede your point. However, I’m far from convinced that you, Mrs. Warne, are the sort of lady every woman will invite into her boudoir and in whom every man will confide. You said it yourself, or I wouldn’t tell a lady this, but you are plain.”
“Exactly why people confide in me,” she said. “It’s as if they think I’m not really there.”
“Can you dissemble? In my experience few women are capable of cold, calculated investigative subterfuge of
the kind a detective must engage in daily. Besides, women lack the physical skills I require in a detective.”
“What skills?” she said.
“Every Pinkerton must carry a firearm and know how to use it,” he said.
She put her gray-leather-gloved hand into the reticule on her lap and pulled a Derringer out by its barrel. “Be careful.” She offered him the gun.
He took it. By its weight he could tell it was loaded. He placed it on the green blotter in front of him, its barrel pointed away from them. “My operatives carry revolvers and can shoot a man between the eyes at twenty paces—if he’s stupid enough not to turn and run.”
“I’m an excellent shot with all manner of firearms,” she said.
“May I ask how you learned?”
“Perhaps Chicago girls don’t learn to hunt by the time they’re twelve, but in other parts of the world, it’s common,” she said.
“And what part of the world are you from, may I ask?” Like the rest of her, her accent was nondescript.
“I won’t say.” She retrieved the Derringer and slipped it back into the reticule. “I also have a small flick knife concealed upon my person.”
Pinkerton smoothed his moustache with the thumb and index finger of one hand, as I often saw him do to hide a smile. “I might consider hiring you as an office clerk,” he said. “Can you write and do arithmetic?”
“I have perfect penmanship, am an expert computer, including the calculus, a precise bookkeeper—but I’m not interested in clerical work, thank you,” she said. She didn’t rise to leave, however.
Pinkerton was flummoxed. He simply couldn’t fathom why any woman, let alone an unprepossessing widow in need of funds, would be willing to risk her reputation and possibly her life as a detective. “I’m not saying I’m considering your proposal, but if I were to employ you in any capacity, let alone as a detective, I’d first need proof, not only of your marksmanship, but also of your absolute integrity.”
“I expected you to say that. I’ve told you I’m willing to submit to an exhaustive background check,” she said. “I’m also ready to demonstrate my marksmanship.”
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Mystery Box Page 23