“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he hastened to assure her. “He just . . . Well, it’s your mother, you see.”
“My mother!” she echoed in alarm. “Has she been injured?”
“Oh, no, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you. She’s fine, just fine. It’s just . . .”
“What is it!” she demanded impatiently when he hesitated.
“Well, I’m sorry to say that there’s been a murder.”
“Who was murdered? Someone I know?”
“I don’t know if you do or not, but it happened at a séance.”
“A séance! At Madame Serafina’s?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s it, on Waverly Place.”
“And my mother was there?” Sarah asked, almost wailing in despair.
“I’m afraid she was. That’s why they called for Detective Sergeant Malloy. She asked for him special.”
Of course she had. She knew he would handle everything with the utmost discretion. If he could. If anyone could. What would happen when the press found out that someone had been murdered at a séance attended by a half-dozen socially prominent citizens, one of them Mrs. Felix Decker?
“And he sent me to get you,” Officer Donatelli was saying. “He wanted you to make sure your mother gets home all right.”
Sarah sighed wearily. “I’ll get my things.”
4
DETECTIVE SERGEANT FRANK MALLOY COULDN’T BELIEVE it. He’d managed to keep Sarah Brandt from becoming involved in a murder investigation for weeks, and now she was summoning him to one!
At least that’s what he’d been told. They’d sent a uniformed officer out to track him down where he was investigating a warehouse robbery over near the docks this morning. They’d told him somebody’d been murdered at a séance, and Sarah Brandt was there and demanding he be brought in to investigate. That sounded like Sarah. Imagine his surprise when he arrived at the house to find not Sarah at all but her mother, Elizabeth Decker.
“I couldn’t give the police my real name,” Mrs. Decker explained to him the moment they were alone. He’d immediately taken her to what appeared to be some sort of office to interrogate her in private. “Do you know what the newspapers would do if they found out I was present at a murder?”
“But nobody would think twice about your daughter being at one,” Frank said with a weary sigh.
“Exactly.” Mrs. Decker gave him an approving smile. “And she’d already been here with me the first time I came.”
Why was Frank not surprised? “Tell me what happened here,” he said, not feeling at all like smiling.
Mrs. Decker sobered instantly. “We were having a séance in that room where the . . . the . . .”
“The body,” he supplied when she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“Yes, where the body is. We were seated around the table, holding hands.”
“Holding hands?” he echoed in surprise. He had seen the room with the table where the body was, but nobody had mentioned holding hands.
“Yes, it increases the bond to help the spirits communicate with us.”
“Maybe we should sit down,” he suggested, feeling a headache starting to form behind his eyes.
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Malloy. I’m afraid I’m still suffering from the shock of seeing her lying there—”
“Over here,” Frank said, taking her elbow and directing her to one of two straight-backed chairs that had been placed in front of the desk that sat in the center of the room. The top of the desk was bare and slightly dusty, as if no one ever actually used it. He seated Mrs. Decker and took the other chair, turning it to face hers. “You were sitting around the table holding hands,” he reminded her.
“Well, I guess we weren’t exactly holding hands,” she clarified. “We were holding each other’s wrists, but it has the same effect, doesn’t it? In any event, Madame Serafina—she’s the spiritualist—she was talking with the spirits, or rather Yellow Feather was talking with them—”
“What’s Yellow Feather?” Frank asked, confused already.
“He’s Madame’s spirit guide. He’s an Indian warrior who died in battle over a hundred years ago.”
Frank was having trouble following all this. “Is he some kind of ghost?”
“No, I told you, he’s a spirit guide. He comes when Madame calls him, and then he speaks through her.”
“What do you mean, he speaks through her?”
“He uses her body. It’s his voice, though, very obviously. Her body speaks but a man’s voice comes out.”
Frank had a lot of questions about that, but he decided to save them for later. “All right, so this Indian spirit is talking through her. Then what happened?”
“We were all asking questions, and Yellow Feather was getting very agitated. He was shouting, and there was some music—”
“Music?”
“Yes, we could hear music playing, although I confess I wasn’t paying much attention to it. I was too distracted by what Yellow Feather was saying.”
“But there was a lot of noise in the room?”
“That’s right, so we didn’t notice . . . Or at least I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until Mrs. Burke screamed.”
Frank gaped at her. She had been sitting in a room, practically holding hands with perfect strangers and talking to ghosts, and she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary? He was really beginning to understand where Sarah had inherited her intrepid disposition. “Didn’t anybody notice somebody going up behind this woman and sticking a knife into her back?” he asked in amazement.
“How could we? It was pitch dark.”
“All this was going on in the dark?”
“Oh, yes. The room must be dark to decrease distractions when you’re contacting the spirits.”
Frank stared at her for a long moment, trying to judge her sincerity. Plainly, she was telling the absolute truth, no matter how ridiculous it sounded to him. “Then that would explain how someone could sneak into the room.”
“Oh, no, it couldn’t,” Mrs. Decker protested. “There’s only one door to the room, and it was closed tightly the entire time. We would have noticed immediately if someone opened it because light would have come in.”
That was good. The number of suspects would be limited to those in the room. “So one of the . . .” He couldn’t think of what people attending a séance would be called. “One of the other people in the room killed her, then.”
“Oh, no, that’s impossible,” she assured him confidently.
“Why is it impossible?”
“Because,” she reminded him, “we were all holding each other’s hands. No one could move without someone else noticing.”
Frank definitely had a headache now. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I see.”
“Mr. Malloy,” Mrs. Decker said, leaning forward and looking him straight in the eye. “I’m very much afraid that Mrs. Gittings was killed by one of the spirits.”
FRANK LEFT MRS. DECKER IN THE OFFICE, JUST IN CASE some reporters showed up to nose around. He was surprised they hadn’t gotten the scent of this already. It had all the makings of a scandal. High-society ladies and gentlemen attending a séance with a beautiful spiritualist and one of them ends up murdered. Frank could probably write the story himself, if he’d been so inclined. But he was more inclined to keep Mrs. Decker’s name out of the newspapers if at all possible. He didn’t like Mr. Decker much, but he owed the man for helping him solve Tom Brandt’s murder, and he genuinely liked Mrs. Decker. He’d have to send for Sarah, though. If the cops who’d been called in to investigate before he got here told any reporters who was present at the séance, they’d give Sarah’s name. It would be a good idea if she was actually here, and then she could get her mother out without drawing suspicion to Mrs. Decker. He’d send Gino Donatelli, the one patrolman he could trust not to talk to the press.
“So that’s the famous Mrs. Brandt,” one of the officers standing in the hallway said when Frank came out of the offi
ce and closed the door behind him. “She’s a little long in the tooth, isn’t she?”
Frank gave him a murderous glare. Did every cop in the city know he was friends with Sarah Brandt?
“Sorry,” the cop said hastily. “I just thought . . . Well, she’s still a fine-looking woman for all of that.”
“Make sure nobody bothers her unless I say so,” Frank said. “And find the nearest call box and get Officer Donatelli over here for me.”
“The wop?” the cop asked in surprise.
The New York City Police Department had only recently begun hiring officers of any ethnicity besides Irish, and few of the old guard trusted them. “That’s right. Any more questions?” Frank added in a tone that said there better not be.
“No, sir. I’ll get Donatelli for you.”
Frank sighed and went back into the room where the body still lay. He’d done no more than glance around the first time to see who the victim was. He’d been in too much of a hurry to get Mrs. Decker out of sight.
The ward detective who’d been called to the scene first was still in there, waiting for Frank to finish with “Mrs. Brandt.”
“How’s the lady doing?” he asked politely.
“She’ll be fine,” Frank snapped, walking over to get a better look at the body.
“We already sent for the medical examiner,” Detective Sergeant O’Toole informed him.
Frank nodded. He hunkered down next to the woman. She looked to be middle-aged. Nothing unusual about her. Well dressed. She’d apparently been sitting in one of the chairs, and someone had slipped a stiletto between her ribs. He couldn’t see the blade, but he could tell by the design of the handle protruding from her back that it would be long, thin, and diamond shaped with a needle-sharp point. The kind of knife made popular by the Italian secret society, the Black Hand. Her body lay as if it had just slid off the chair of its own weight. When he touched her hand, it was only slightly cool and still flexible.
He pushed himself back to his feet and turned to where O’Toole still waited. “What do you figure happened here?”
“Can’t get much sense out of those people in there,” he said in disgust, nodding toward the front room, where the séance participants had been gathered. “Something about talking to ghosts or something.”
“Spirits,” Frank corrected him. “They were sitting around the table holding hands or wrists or something?”
“That’s what they said. Six of them, including that girl they call Madame, although she ain’t like no madam I ever saw.”
“In the dark,” Frank said.
“So they said.”
“Close that door,” Frank said. “Let’s see how dark it really is.”
O’Toole closed the door. He had to use some force. It fit very tightly in its frame. Frank reached up and turned off the gas jet.
O’Toole swore softly. “Can’t see my hand in front of my face.”
He was right. Whatever happened here, no one else would have seen. “Open the door.”
Frank found a match and lighted the gas again. He looked around once more, this time taking in all the details of the room. “There’s no window in here.”
“No,” O’Toole confirmed. “This here’s a false wall.” He indicated the wall opposite the door. “There’s a space about four feet deep between it and the outside wall of the house. Looks like that’s where they store stuff. A lot of junk in there.”
A large cabinet sat against the false wall. “What’s in there?”
“Nothing,” O’Toole reported. “Just an empty cabinet.”
Frank wondered why they had an empty cabinet in the room, but before he could figure it out, he heard a woman start to scream hysterically. Muttering a curse, he went back out into the hallway and into the front parlor. The cops O’Toole had set on guard were just staring helplessly as one of the women was having a fit. Frank had half expected it to be the young one, the spiritualist, but it was the other one. She was a woman about Mrs. Decker’s age and dressed like she had money and lots of it.
The girl was talking to her, holding her hands and trying to calm her down, and by the time Frank got there, she wasn’t screaming anymore, just sobbing uncontrollably. The door to the office opened and Mrs. Decker stuck her head out. Naturally, she’d want to see what was going on.
“Get back in there,” he commanded her in a voice very few people had ever disobeyed.
Her eyes widened in surprise, but she had the good sense to do what he told her. Everyone in the front parlor had looked up when he shouted at her. The three men who had been waiting there instantly all began talking at once.
“See here, you can’t keep us here like this!”
“I have an appointment this afternoon!”
“What’s going on? I have to see Mrs. Gittings!”
“Quiet!” Frank shouted, and they all fell silent, even the hysterical female, who looked absolutely terrified. “I’ve got to ask each of you a few questions, and then you can go. Is there another room where I can meet with you in private?”
“The dining room,” the tall man who’d wanted to see Mrs. Gittings said.
“Do you live here?” Frank asked.
“Yes, I . . . I work for Madame Serafina. I’m Professor Rogers.” He was very pale and he was clutching his hands together in front of him, as if trying to keep them from trembling.
“I’ll talk to you first,” he said, indicating the hysterical woman. “And then you can go home.”
“But I don’t know anything!” she protested tearfully. “I didn’t see anything. None of us did.”
“Then it won’t take long for you to answer my questions,” he said reasonably. “Come along.”
“You’ll be fine,” the young woman assured her. She seemed very calm for having just witnessed a murder, Frank thought.
The older woman rose uncertainly.
“Come with me, please, Mrs. Burke,” the Professor said, and he escorted her out into the hallway toward the room where the dead woman lay.
She balked, but he took her elbow. “This way,” he said, and steered her toward the room across the hall. Sliding pocket doors led to a large empty room. Dust motes danced in the sunlight streaming through the large windows. Plainly, Madame Serafina had felt no need for formal dining. A chandelier hung forlornly from the center of the ceiling. It was an old one that had been converted to gas. Fortunately, the sunlight made artificial light unnecessary, at least in here.
“Get some chairs, will you, Professor?” Frank said.
He disappeared and returned with two straight-backed chairs that he’d probably fetched from the kitchen. O’Toole wouldn’t have let him into the séance room. Then the Professor closed the doors behind him and was gone.
Mrs. Burke sat down on one of the chairs, and Frank placed the other so he could face her. “I know this has been a shock, Mrs. . . . I’m sorry. What was your name?”
“Mrs. Burke,” she said, her voice a little steadier. “Mrs. Philip Burke.”
Frank pulled a notebook and pencil from his pocket and jotted it down, along with the address she gave him. She was a near neighbor of Mrs. Decker’s on the Upper West Side and a long way from home down here on Waverly Place. “Tell me what happened or at least what you remember happened.”
“Where shall I start?”
“Right before Mrs. Gittings . . .” He made a vague gesture with his hand.
She nodded and drew a steadying breath. “We were sitting around the table.”
“In the dark, I know. Holding hands. Talking to the spirits.”
“That’s right,” she said with some surprise.
“Who were you holding hands with?”
“Not holding hands exactly,” she corrected him. “We hold each other’s wrists. Madame Serafina was holding mine and . . .” She had to stop and swallow before she could finish. “And I was holding Mrs. Gittings’s.”
Frank nodded encouragingly. “And what was happening just before you noticed something wa
sn’t right with Mrs. Gittings?”
She gave a little shudder and for an instant Frank was afraid she would start screaming again, but she got hold of herself and went on. “Mrs. Decker was . . . Oh, dear! I mean, Mrs. Brandt . . .”
“I know who Mrs. Decker is,” Frank told her. “I won’t tell anyone. Go on. What was Mrs. Decker doing?”
“She was trying to get her daughter to speak to her.”
“Her daughter?” Frank echoed in surprise, wondering why Mrs. Decker would need a séance to talk to Sarah.
“She has a daughter who died,” Mrs. Burke clarified. “She wanted to contact her.”
“Oh, right,” Frank said, remembering now. “Go on.”
“As I said, Mrs. Decker was trying to get her daughter to speak to her, but there was a lot of confusion, and Yellow Feather couldn’t understand the message. Yellow Feather is—”
“I know, the spirit guide,” Frank said, managing to keep the sarcasm from his voice. “What did you hear?”
“Yellow Feather was shouting and there was some music,” she remembered with a frown. “I don’t think it was really a song exactly, just notes, discordant. There was so much noise, and we were all listening to find out what Mrs. Decker’s daughter would say to her.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing,” she admitted sadly. “Or at least nothing I could understand. I was distracted, you see. I was holding Mrs. Gittings’s wrist.” She held up her left hand and looked at it in wonder.
“How exactly do you do that?” Frank asked, trying to picture it in his mind. “Hold each other’s wrists, I mean.”
“Oh, well, you hold the wrist of the person on your left, and the person on your right is holding your right wrist.”
Frank nodded, understanding at last. “All right, go on. You were holding Mrs. Gittings’s wrist.”
“Yes, and she was very still, although I didn’t think about that at the time. But then she leaned over toward me, or at least I thought that’s what she was doing. Her shoulder touched mine.” She instinctively grabbed her left shoulder with her right hand, as if she could still feel the pressure from the dead woman. “And then . . . and then . . . she just kept coming.” Her voice caught on a sob and she was weeping again, her shoulders shaking as she bawled into a fine, lace handkerchief.
Murder on Waverly Place Page 6