Murder on Waverly Place

by Victoria Thompson

  Frank nodded his understanding. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Almost a year. Madame’s talent was beginning to draw the attention of some important clients.”

  Frank thought of Mrs. Felix Decker. “And starting to bring in a lot of money,” he guessed.

  “Madame cares nothing for that,” the Professor insisted. “She only wishes to help others.”

  Sure, Frank thought. That’s why she charged so much for her services. “But Nicola was causing trouble,” he guessed.

  “He’s an ignorant child. He was jealous of Madame’s success, and he was trying to convince her to leave here.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  The Professor shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “They are lovers,” he admitted. “When Mrs. Gittings discovered Madame, she was supporting him by telling fortunes on street corners. Mrs. Gittings recognized Madame’s true talents and brought her here. Madame insisted on bringing Nicola along. She wouldn’t come without him, in fact, and so we put him to work. For a while, he wasn’t any trouble.”

  Frank could imagine what happened next. Nicola saw how much money Serafina brought in with her séances and decided they didn’t need Mrs. Gittings and the Professor anymore. “So Mrs. Gittings wanted to get rid of him.”

  The Professor nodded. “They had a terrible fight about it last night.”

  “Did she throw him out?”

  “No,” the Professor admitted angrily. “Madame refused to continue her work unless Mrs. Gittings allowed him to stay.”

  “Sounds like a compromise,” Frank observed.

  “One that pleased no one,” the Professor said bitterly. “So Nicola found a solution of his own.”

  Someone knocked on the door. Frank muttered a curse and got up to answer it. The cop guarding the front door grinned sheepishly. “Sorry to bother you, but Donatelli’s here with a lady. She says she’s come for Mrs. Brandt.”

  “Wait here,” Frank told the Professor.

  He stepped into the hallway and saw Sarah Brandt standing there. The sight of her brought him a surge of unreasonable joy even though he hated the very thought of having her at a murder scene. She gave him the smile he loved, which only made it worse.

  He nodded politely, careful not to say her name. “Your mother’s in there,” he said, nodding toward the office door, which opened as he spoke. Mrs. Decker stuck her head out.

  “Mother,” Sarah said.

  “Oh, Sarah, I’m so glad you’re here,” Mrs. Decker said with relief.

  Then the door to the parlor opened and Madame Serafina cried, “Mrs. Brandt, oh, please, you’ve got to help us!”

  Before anyone could stop her, she threw herself into Sarah’s arms and began to sob.

  Sarah looked up at Frank accusingly.

  “I haven’t even talked to her yet,” he defended himself.

  “They’re going to arrest Nicola,” Madame claimed to Sarah. “But he didn’t do anything. I swear to you, he’s innocent!”

  “Who’s Nicola?” Sarah and her mother asked in unison.

  “Her lover,” Frank said.

  This shocked Sarah and her mother and made Madame sob more loudly.

  They all heard a disturbance upstairs followed by shouting. Nicola was probably trying to get downstairs to find out why his lover was crying. Frank noticed Gino Donatelli standing behind Sarah. “Donatelli, go upstairs and see what you can get out of that Nicola fellow.”

  Donatelli pushed by them and hurried up the stairs. Frank turned back to Sarah and her mother, who were still trying to comfort Madame Serafina.

  “What on earth is going on?” Sarah asked him.

  He wanted to tell her it was all none of her business and why didn’t she just take her mother home and forget she’d ever been in this house? He wanted to get her as far away from here as possible and erase any memory of Madame Serafina from her mind. He wanted to perform a miracle. Unfortunately, it was far too late even for a miracle.

  Instead he sighed with resignation and said, “Why don’t you take Madame Serafina back into the parlor and get her calmed down?”

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  6

  SARAH COULD SEE HOW MUCH MALLOY WANTED HER OUT of there. He hated involving her in murder investigations. How many times had they both vowed she’d never be involved again? She almost wished she could oblige him this time, but with the poor girl sobbing in her arms, she couldn’t possibly walk out, not even if it meant protecting her mother from scandal. In point of fact, her mother didn’t look like she was all too eager to leave either.

  “There, now,” Mrs. Decker was saying soothingly. “Crying isn’t going to help anything. Why don’t you come back inside here with us.”

  “You won’t leave me alone?” Madame said, looking more like the young girl that she was than the sophisticated spiritualist she’d pretended to be.

  “Absolutely not,” Sarah assured her, pretending not to notice the face Malloy made when she said it. She turned the girl and walked her back into the parlor, her mother close behind. When the doors were safely shut behind them, Sarah seated the girl on one of the sofas and sat down beside her. “Can I get you something? Some tea?”

  “No, no,” Madame said quickly. “I . . . What will they do with Nicola?”

  “Who’s this Nicola?” Mrs. Decker asked, taking a seat in the chair beside the sofa.

  “He is my fidanzato,” she said. “We are to be married. I am not sure of the word . . .”

  “Fiancé?” Sarah supplied.

  “Yes,” she said. Her remarkable eyes shone with unshed tears.

  “But why would he want to kill Mrs. Gittings?” Sarah asked.

  “He would not,” Madame assured her. “He would not want to kill anyone, but the police will accuse him, and because he is poor, no one will believe him, and he will hang—” Her voice caught on another sob.

  “Slow down!” Sarah cried. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself. I promise you, Detective Malloy won’t arrest him if he’s innocent.”

  “How can you know? He is the police!” Madame reminded her tragically.

  She was right, of course. The New York Police were notorious for arresting whoever might be handy, with no regard for what the truth might be. Unless someone paid them a “reward” to find the real culprit, anyone might be charged and convicted of a crime. This Nicola sounded like someone who could easily fall into that category. “Mr. Malloy is a friend of mine,” Sarah said. “That’s why my mother insisted that he be called in to investigate.”

  “You know a policeman?” Madame asked, staring at Sarah and her mother in amazement. People like Mrs. Decker did not know policemen.

  “Yes, we do,” Mrs. Decker confirmed. “Mr. Malloy will make sure that the real killer is found and punished.”

  Sarah hoped he would be able to do this. Right now, she knew too little of what had transpired here to be sure. “Can you tell me what happened? The policeman who came to get me didn’t know very much except that Mrs. Gittings had been stabbed.”

  Madame straightened, looking back at Sarah with some apprehension. “I do not know what happened,” she said rather stiffly. “I was . . . Yellow Feather was there. I was in a trance. The first thing I knew was Mrs. Burke was screaming that Mrs. Gittings had fainted.”

  Sarah wanted to ask her a question, but her mother jumped in before she could.

  “It was horrible, Sarah. Yellow Feather was trying to contact Maggie, but there were a lot of spirits there today, and they were all talking at once. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. He started shouting, trying to quiet them down, and then everyone else starting talking at once.”

  “The spirits?” Sarah asked in confusion.

  “No, of course not. Everyone in the room. They all wanted to ask questions, so they started shouting, trying to make themselves heard. They were extremely rude,” she added, a bit outraged. “I couldn’t understand a thing.”

  “When was Mrs. Gittings stabbed
?” Sarah asked. She glanced at Madame Serafina, but she was studying her hands where they were folded in her lap.

  Her mother had to think about it. “That’s just it, we don’t know exactly when she was stabbed. She didn’t scream or anything, so far as I heard, which now seems very strange. Wouldn’t you scream or at least cry out if someone stabbed you? The first hint we had that something was wrong was when Kathy . . . Mrs. Burke, she started screaming.”

  “Did she see Mrs. Gittings get stabbed?”

  “Oh, no,” her mother assured her. “None of us did. The room was dark, just the way it was at the séance you attended, dear.”

  Sarah nodded, remembering how she hadn’t been able to see a thing in the pitch-dark room. “Were you holding hands?”

  “Yes, just the way we did that other time. Everyone was holding someone else’s hands or, rather, their wrists. So of course we would have known if anyone at the table had let go to . . . Well, you know. Then Kathy . . . Mrs. Burke started to scream that Mrs. Gittings had fainted. That’s what she thought, of course.”

  “Why did she think that?”

  “Because she fell out of her chair, and naturally, she wouldn’t assume the woman had died, at least not at first. Mrs. Burke said she fell against her. She was quite hysterical when she realized the woman was actually dead.”

  “I’m sure she was,” Sarah said. “When did you realize that?”

  “As soon as someone opened the door, and we got a good look at her. The knife . . . Well, we all saw it sticking out of her back.” Suddenly, her mother looked a bit pale.

  Sarah reached over and took her hand. “I’m so sorry you had to go through this.”

  “Not your fault,” her mother reminded her sheepishly. “You made me promise not to come back here, didn’t you.”

  “I’ll say I told you so later,” she promised in return and turned back to Madame Serafina. “Could anyone else have gotten into the room?”

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Decker answered for her. “Remember, we would have seen if someone had opened the door. I’m sure no one else could have come in.”

  Sarah nodded, recalling quite clearly. That meant someone at the table must have killed the woman, although that didn’t really seem possible. Fortunately, figuring out how it had happened was Malloy’s job. She might be able to help him along, though. “Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Mrs. Gittings?” she asked the girl.

  Madame Serafina looked up, her expression guarded. “No, none at all.”

  “What do you know about her?” Sarah asked. “Does she have any family? I suppose someone should send for them, if they haven’t already.”

  “No, she has no family,” Madame said quickly.

  “That must be why she spent so much time here,” Mrs. Decker said. “Mrs. Burke said she attended all the séances.”

  But Sarah was still looking at the girl. She was hiding something. “Madame,” she said kindly. “What do you know about her? You have to tell us everything so we can help you,” she added, not sure if it was true but knowing it would work.

  “Mrs. Gittings is . . .” The girl looked uncertainly at Mrs. Decker, then back at Sarah again. Her dark eyes looked even darker. “This is her house. She . . . finds people to come here, and she takes the money.”

  “Are you saying that she’s your manager?” Sarah asked in surprise.

  “Yes, that is it. She is my manager,” she said, grateful for the suggestion. “She takes care of everything for me so I do not have to worry.” This sounded like something Mrs. Gittings would have told her.

  Sarah looked at her mother, who gave her a small shake of the head to indicate she’d had no idea. Sarah wondered briefly if Malloy knew this yet. “So you live here with her and . . . and who else?”

  “Nicola,” she admitted reluctantly. “And the Professor.”

  “How did you get involved with her in the first place?” Sarah asked, excusing her nosiness with the certainty that any information she could get about Mrs. Gittings might help identify her killer.

  “She found me,” the girl said, obviously choosing her words carefully. “I was telling fortunes. I told her fortune one day, and she said I had a gift. She said I was wasting my talent, and she could help me. She said I could be rich.”

  “So she brought you here?” Sarah guessed.

  “Yes. She helped me to . . . to contact the spirits. Then she found people to come.” The girl was starting to look uneasy again.

  Sarah had a million questions about how Mrs. Gittings had helped her to contact the spirits. “How did she—?”

  “Please,” Madame interrupted anxiously. “What will happen with Nicola? He did not do anything wrong. You cannot let them take him to jail!”

  “Nobody’s going to take him to jail,” Mrs. Decker promised rashly.

  “That policeman hit him!” the girl said, tears pooling in her eyes again.

  “Which policeman?” Sarah asked. “Not Mr. Malloy!”

  “No, no, one in uniform,” the girl said, the tears spilling down her cheeks. “Please, do not let anything happen to him!”

  “If he’s innocent, nothing will happen to him,” Sarah promised even more rashly. “But the only way to prove he’s innocent is to figure out who really did it. Do you have any idea at all?”

  “None!” the girl insisted. “Please, can you find out what they are doing to Nicola? Can you talk to your friend Mr. Malloy and ask him?”

  Sarah gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  FRANK WENT BACK TO FIND THE PROFESSOR SITTING WITH his head bowed, rubbing his forehead. When he looked up, his face was gray with strain.

  He took his chair opposite the Professor again. “Who was this Mrs. Gittings to you?”

  He stiffened. “I worked for her.”

  “What else? Don’t lie to me,” Frank warned. “I’ll just get annoyed, and you won’t like what happens after that.”

  The Professor had been around long enough to know how the police behaved when they got annoyed. “We were partners,” he said, his face rigid with reluctance.

  “You split the profits of this little scam?”

  “It’s not a scam,” he protested indignantly. “Madame Serafina is a legitimate spiritualist.”

  “Yeah, that’s like being a legitimate fake,” Frank said. “So you picked this girl up off the street and taught her the tricks of the trade—”

  “There are no tricks! You can scoff if you like, but ask any of her clients. They’ll tell you.”

  “I’m sure they will. So you think this Nicola killed Mrs. Gittings because she wanted to get rid of him.”

  “That’s right,” Rogers said, pulling himself up straight in the chair again.

  “I just have one problem,” Frank said. “He wasn’t in the room when the séance started, and everybody said that nobody could get in without them knowing it. So how did he do it?”

  “I told you, he was hiding.”

  “Where was he hiding?”

  “In the cabinet,” Rogers said, as if it should have been obvious.

  Now Frank felt stupid. He’d seen that cabinet himself and wondered about it. O’Toole had told him it was empty, so he must have checked it. But Nicola could have gotten out when nobody was looking, sometime after everybody ran out of the room and before the police came. But where had he been hiding in the meantime? He’d have to question the boy next, he decided with a sigh.

  This time when someone knocked on the door, he was glad for the interruption.

  “Doc Haynes wants to see you,” the cop guarding the hallway reported.

  Frank crossed the hall to find the medical examiner sitting in one of the chairs at the séance table.

  “What exactly was going on in here?” Haynes asked. “O’Toole’s been telling me some cock-and-bull story about spirits.”

  “That girl in the front room, she’s some kind of spiritualist,” Frank confirmed. “She can talk to your dead mother and find out where
she hid the family jewels.”

  “My family didn’t have any jewels,” Haynes said with amusement.

  “Too bad. But that’s what was going on. People pay this girl money so they can sit around a table in the dark and talk to their dead relatives.”

  “Why would they want to do that?’ Haynes asked. “I’m glad most of my relatives are dead so I don’t have to talk to them.”

  “I don’t understand it either, but that’s what was going on.”

  Haynes looked around. “If they were all sitting around the table, why didn’t they see who stabbed her?”

  “It was dark. Pitch dark,” Frank added. “And they were all holding hands, so nobody could do anything without the people next to them knowing.”

  Haynes gave this some thought. “Unless one of the people sitting next to her did it. She’d notice one of them let go of her hand, but before she could say anything, she was dead.”

  “Did it happen that fast?” Frank asked in surprise.

  “I’ll know more when I do the autopsy, but I’m pretty sure that’s a stiletto.” He nodded toward the body on the floor. “They go in like a knife into butter, if you’re lucky and don’t hit a rib, and this fellow was lucky. I’m guessing the knife went right into her heart. She might’ve felt a pain, but she probably thought it was indigestion or something. She wasn’t alive long enough to figure out she’d been stabbed.”

  “So she wouldn’t have cried out?”

  Haynes shook his head. “I doubt it. If you see somebody coming at you with a knife and see it go in, you’d scream bloody murder. Not because it hurt so much as because you’re scared and you know something bad is happening. Sitting in the dark like that, I’m guessing the last thing she expected was to get stabbed to death while she was talking to her dead relatives.”

  “You’d think one of them would’ve warned her,” Frank said, glancing down at the body, which had now been covered with a sheet.

  “My orderlies will be here in a few minutes to take her away. I’ll let you know if I find anything else in autopsy.”