The caretaker looked up in surprise.
“I want you to get things in order at the townhouse. I’ll be staying there for the next week or two.”
Jack said nothing for a moment, continuing to polish industriously. When he finally spoke, his observation sounded almost nonchalant. “You’re going to hunt down Mrs. Allworthy’s killer, aren’t you, Miss Engie?”
“Yes, Jack, I am.” The lady folded her arms decisively.
The coachman grinned in amusement, his gold tooth flashing briefly in the lantern light. “Then I’d say the guilty party’s chances of surviving are about as good as a snowball’s in hell. You’ll pardon the expression, miss.”
Turning toward the door, Evangeline said over her shoulder, “Yes, I’d agree with your assessment, Jack. Get some rest. Tomorrow will be a very busy day.”
Chapter 16—Pressed Into Service
Once she had decided on a course of action, Evangeline wasted no time in executing her plan. Jack left shortly after dawn on the first morning train to the city. She followed him on the next. Instead of going to the townhouse, she went straight to the offices of the Gazette, Chicago’s most widely-read newspaper. The Gazette took up a four-story building on the corner of Dearborn and Madison in the heart of the downtown business district. Evangeline went there, at least in part, to perform an errand which was occasionally required but which she found highly distasteful nonetheless—admitting to Freddie that he had been right about something.
She had visited him a few times at his office since he made the transition from jurisprudence to journalism, so she had a vague idea of which cramped corner of the bullpen on the third floor he occupied. She braced herself for the usual zoolike sounds of hyena laughter, bird whistles, and cat calls, all of which passed for communication in some odd reporter language she had never quite grasped. Freddie had lately become proficient in the pig grunt variation of that language—a fact which distressed Evangeline greatly.
She recalled her last foray into this den of masculine iniquity. One particularly impudent youth had leered at her and asked, “Hey Sis, what’s your name?” to which she replied, “My friends call me Miss LeClair, but you can call me Ma’am!” The impudent youth thereupon being rendered speechless, Evangeline was left in possession of the field. She had no desire to draw blood today. She had come on a peaceful errand, but if the challenge was given, she wasn’t one to run from battle.
Thus steeled for the fray, she was quite surprised that, upon opening the door, no one seemed to take the slightest notice of her. There were at least twenty desks heaped with a mad array of copy and waste paper, typewriters, and men hunched over them hammering furiously at the keys. The sight of a woman in that bastion of adolescent good fellowship wasn’t greeted with as much stupefaction as a few months before. She found this change remarkable until she happened to glance toward the window where she saw a crisp little woman in a white shirtwaist and ascot tie hammering away at a typewriter keyboard along with the rest. It would seem the management of the Gazette had finally bitten the bullet. Since the Daily Courier and the Trans-Ocean had both hired female reporters, another sacred bull was in its death throes.
Evangeline jumped when a telephone rang on the desk near where she stood. As if in sympathy, three others began to jangle all at the same time from different points around the room while men scurried one way and another to silence the peevish summons.
Thankful for the diversion, she wove her way unnoticed between the desks until she came to the corner at the opposite end of the room where, she recalled, Freddie lurked. The poor underling’s desk appeared about the size of the student desks Evangeline saw in all the classrooms at Mast House. She fully expected that his chair would be bolted to the floor, but it moved backward when she pushed it away from the desk.
He wasn’t there. She was in the process of writing him a note to call her at her townhouse when her nostrils became irritated by the reek of cigar smoke. Very cheap cigar smoke. Without even looking up to establish the source of the offensive aroma, she guessed the name of the perpetrator.
Keeping her eyes on the note she was writing, she asked, “Mr. Bill Mason, I presume?”
“Gad, Miss LeClair! Your powers of deduction are truly amazing!” The veteran newsman beamed at her. He had apparently been standing next to Freddie’s desk for several moments unannounced.
Evangeline finally looked up and greeted her friend’s unkempt and aromatic mentor with a rueful smile. “You needn’t praise my powers of deduction too highly, Mr. Mason. I fear your presence would be self-evident to anyone possessed of a normal olfactory sense.”
Mason blushed in embarrassment. “Oh, uh, truly sorry, ma’am. I do beg your pardon.” He ground out the cigar on a typewritten sheet of copy on Freddie’s desk. “Hmmm.” He viewed the charred streaks he had left on the page. “Well, it wasn’t too good anyhow. The boy’s going to have to rewrite that one for sure.”
He slipped the extinguished cigar back into his coat pocket. “No sense in wasting a perfectly good stogie.”
Evangeline decided to let her opinion of the quality of the stogie pass unarticulated. “Have you seen Junior?” She gestured toward Freddie’s vacant chair.
“I think I just saw him skedaddle into the editor’s office. He’s sure he’s onto a hot story about that society dame who just got poisoned up your way the day before yesterday. The way he’s been carrying on, you’d think it was the crime of the century. You wouldn’t happen to know what he’s babbling about, would you?”
Evangeline kept her response guarded. “I think I have a fairly good idea where his thoughts are tending.”
Mason’s journalistic instincts had become alerted. “Care to share any of it?”
“Not quite yet, Mr. Mason.”
The reporter laughed, an appreciative gleam in his eye. “Uh-oh. Whenever it’s just Freddie who’s off on a wild goose chase, I pay it no mind. Two weeks ago, he was sure he’d heard a rumor that Bathhouse Johnny Conklin was going to quit politics and enter the theater as a ventriloquist. Freddie cooked up this scheme to start going through Conklin’s trash to see if he could find any wood shavings. You know, from the dummy. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by telling him who I thought the dummy was. He couldn’t get me or anybody else to bite on that worm. But this is different. When you get involved, I kind of start to take things seriously. I can’t help remembering what happened the last time...”
Evangeline gave her best impression of demure propriety. “I’d hardly think that catching a killer once should create a pattern of expectation, Mr. Mason.”
The reporter shook his head. “As I recall, I lost the credit for a perfectly good story because I made you a promise, and I wouldn’t like to lose another opportunity because I was caught napping.”
“Your vigilance does you credit, sir. As does the fact that I can rely on you to keep your word. You are indeed a man of integrity, Mr. Mason.”
“By holding that opinion, Miss LeClair, you’re in the distinct minority. Ah, here comes the young rapscallion now.” Bill gestured toward the editor’s office door, from which Freddie had just emerged. “How now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?” Bill had a penchant for quoting Shakespeare at the most irrelevant moments.
“Hal?” Freddie echoed in bewilderment.
“You’ve got a visitor, my boy. Not polite to keep a lady waiting.” Temporarily forgetting his own need to be polite, Mason had just fished the cigar of dubious quality out of his pocket and caught himself in the act of relighting it. “Oh nuts!” he cursed mildly and allowed said unlit cigar to remain perched on his lower lip. “Sorry, Miss LeClair. Can’t seem to help myself.”
Freddie threaded his way across the room to his own desk.
He seemed surprised to see his friend. “Engie, what are you doing here?”
Bill stood back silently, evidently hoping for some crumb of information to drop unheeded.
“Just an innocent social call, Freddie, that’s all.” E
vangeline had no intention of alerting Mason’s instincts further.
Freddie looked at his friend as if she’d lost her mind. He was well aware that she never pursued any course of action without a purpose.
She grabbed his arm to forestall any more questions. “Can we go somewhere for a stroll? The air is so stuffy in here.”
“But, Engie, I’ve got mountains of work to do.” He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. Unfortunately, he chose Bill’s makeshift ashtray to illustrate his point. “Hey, who did this?”
“Well, have to be going.” Mason backed away from the desk as if it were a bomb about to explode. “Always a pleasure, Miss LeClair.” He bent to kiss her hand.
Evangeline smiled, guessing the unasked question that remained. “Mr. Mason, I assure you when there’s anything to tell you’ll be the first to know.”
“What?” Freddie, even more perplexed, allowed Evangeline to steer him through the maze of desks and out the press-room door.
“We need to talk!” she told him. “But somewhere where the walls don’t have ears or cigars.”
“But... but...” Freddie objected weakly.
“This way!” Evangeline forged on toward the stairwell.
“Wait a minute, old girl. Wait a minute. I know the perfect spot.”
Freddie led Evangeline down to the ground floor and through the double doors to the print room. The roar of the presses rattled the walls, the floor, and the teeth of the room’s occupants. “How’s this?” He beamed proudly, waiting for her approbation.
“What?” she howled over the hammering of the nearest machine.
“I... said... isn’t this... better?”
Evangeline read Freddie’s lips because she couldn’t hear him. “No!” she thundered.
Sighing in exasperation, he took her by the arm and led her to the corner of the room nearest the windows and farthest away from the infernal din.
Her ears still ringing, she scowled at him as she tried to readjust her hat. The vibration from the machines had knocked it askew.
“Just trying to be of help.” He rolled his eyes heavenward in persecuted martyrdom.
She relented slightly. “Well, I suppose this will do. Is there anyone who could overhear us?”
“You mean hear us, don’t you? There’s nobody else around except for a few typesetters, and they’re over at the other end.”
“Good.” Evangeline launched into her story. “You’ve heard about Euphemia Allworthy, I suppose.”
“No thanks to you!” Freddie was off and running. “Why didn’t you try to send me word? I had to find out when the news was telephoned in from one of the suburban papers.”
“I rather had my hands full, having strolled onto the scene of the murder about fifteen minutes after it happened.”
“But that’s wonderful, Engie!” Freddie went instantly from accusatory to exuberant as he flipped open his ever-present notebook. “You can give me an eyewitness account of everything that happened!”
Evangeline shot a grim look at her friend before filling him in on the interrogation scene at the Allworthy villa. When she came to the end of her narration, she paused. “But then something even worse happened yesterday that kept me from contacting you.”
“Worse?” Freddie looked bemused. “What could be worse than a murder?”
“An innocent person framed for committing it, that’s what.” Evangeline then regaled her friend with an account of Serafina’s arrest.
“The swine,” Freddie said between clenched teeth. “Setting her up to take the fall for him or for Roland!”
“Well, we’re in agreement on that point. Now all we have to figure out is how to make one of them confess and clear Serafina.”
“I’d bet anything that Bayne is involved in this somehow.”
“Yes, Freddie, I’d agree with you on that point as well.” Evangeline spoke in a whisper that would have been barely audible in a quiet room. Her words were fairly drowned in the echo of the presses.
“What was that, Engie? I didn’t hear you.” Freddie had become proficient at lip-reading above the racket, but apparently he just wanted to hear her say it again.
“You were right.” She enunciated for his benefit in clipped and very loud syllables. “There! Are you happy now? I freely admit it. Your instincts about the nefarious Mr. Bayne proved to be correct.”
“Engie, don’t speak. I beg you. Don’t say another word! I just want to savor this moment.” Freddie sighed and closed his eyes in deep satisfaction.
The lady allowed him all of twenty seconds to revel in his victory. “Are you through?”
“No, but you may continue.” A smirk still lingered on his face.
Ignoring his irritating expression, Evangeline forged ahead. “I kept trying to find a motive for Martin’s behavior. After all, he’s not in any financial difficulties. He had free access to Euphemia’s fortune before. So inheritance, in and of itself, wouldn’t be reason enough to want to kill her. And then I started thinking about the mysterious Mr. Bayne.”
“Who shows up shortly after Nora Johnson is murdered.” Freddie looked at his friend impishly. “And, oh, by the way, is there anything you’d care to contradict in my last statement?”
She returned a baleful glare. “Really, I’d think a person would be content with one concession per day.”
“Engie, come on,” he wheedled.
“Very well! I see there’ll be no living with you after this!” She sighed and took a deep breath. “Yes, all right, I agree that Nora Johnson was murdered. Once again, your theory was correct. Can we proceed now?”
“Of course.” He waved her magnanimously to continue.
“As I was saying, the mysterious Mr. Bayne makes his appearance shortly after Nora Johnson’s murder and claims to be a long-lost friend of Martin’s. Martin gives him a job in his company with a big title and a paycheck to match. The obvious conclusion is that Bayne is blackmailing Martin because he possesses some evidence implicating Martin in Nora’s death.”
“Implicating him!” Freddie cried in disbelief. “He’s the one who killed her!”
“On that point, we do not agree. What was his motive? He’s far too proper to get involved in a secret affair. Roland seems the more likely culprit.”
“Roland?” The thought evidently had never occurred to Freddie before.
“Yes, Roland is the lady’s man in the family and he might very well have been seeing Nora on the sly. Given his general lack of self-discipline, I could easily envision a lover’s quarrel turning into something more ugly if he couldn’t control his temper. Remember that Serafina saw Nora’s ghost standing behind Roland’s chair, not Martin’s.”
“Serafina!” Freddie snorted. “So now we’re relying on spectral evidence to prove a case?”
“No, Freddie, we’re relying on common sense. Martin is rich. Roland is not. Of the two, Martin is the obvious target for a blackmailer. Both men bear the Allworthy surname, and I think Martin would do anything to protect his family honor, no matter what he might think privately of his nephew’s character.”
Freddie nodded in assent. “I guess you’re right about that.”
Evangeline continued in her line of reasoning. “Whatever the case may be, one fact of which we can be sure is that Bayne was there to see something, in fact has some material evidence, that he’s using to blackmail Martin.”
“Do you suppose Martin killed Euphemia because she wanted him to get rid of Bayne?”
“I don’t think so.” Evangeline shook her head. “It seems logical to conclude that whoever killed Nora also killed Euphemia to cover up the first crime. It’s only the first murder that’s hard. It seems to get easier after that, or so I’ve heard. If we’re assuming Roland was vicious enough to kill Nora, he wouldn’t stick at killing his aunt either. I discovered that Roland was not in his aunt’s good graces just prior to her death. Maybe he feared she had uncovered something about Nora’s accident that pointed to him as the murderer. Remembe
r, he’s also the one who served her the poisoned wine and there was no way Martin could have known ahead of time which glass Euphemia would drink from since he was out of the house when it happened. No, it’s too far-fetched to think Martin did this, but he does seem to be implicated as well. I can’t be sure if he actually knows that Roland killed his wife or only suspects he did. But he seems to be moving heaven and earth to cover it up and—”
“And pin the crime on Serafina with false evidence.” Freddie completed her thought. “It doesn’t look good for her.”
Evangeline tapped her chin, deep in thought. “Freddie, do you have any time to spare for detective work?”
“Now that you’re finally willing to help, I’ll make the time! With the strike winding down, I ought to be able to slip away to do some investigating.”
“You know where the mysterious Mr. Bayne lives, don’t you?”
“I should say!” The young man laughed ruefully. “I spent so many nights leaning against a lamp post across from his flat that it probably still has the imprint of my shoulder on it.”
The lady sighed with all the appearance of profound regret. “Well, for the third time today, Frederick Ulysses Simpson, I am forced to acknowledge that you are right.”
“How’s that?” Freddie sounded suspicious.
“Yes, yes, even now I see the brilliance of your plan. We get possession of whatever Bayne is using to blackmail Martin with. It may give us evidence to prove that Nora was actually murdered, and with that we can establish a motive for Euphemia’s death as well.”
“Why, uh, yes.” Freddie puffed out his chest importantly. “That’s what I meant all along.”
“Then I certainly wish you the best of luck and look forward to an account of your daring exploit with the greatest anticipation!”
“Exploit?” Freddie found it difficult to maintain the pretense that he had any idea what she was talking about.
Shrouded In Thought (Gilded Age Mysteries Book 2) Page 17