What the Dead Leave Behind

by Rosemary Simpson

  Now he stood on the corner of Hester Street wondering if he dared take the last few steps into McGlory’s concert saloon. Other places in the city tried to compete with Billy; Donald had visited nearly every one of them. No other saloonkeeper could match McGlory’s flair for balancing on the razor edge of what his customers wanted and the police would allow before shutting him down.

  Donald had danced in McGlory’s with men and boys of all shapes and sizes, skin tones and races. He’d fondled the Africans who waited on clients in the private booths and watched breathlessly the wrestling matches where dark oiled skin rippled in the lamplight and a tiny pouch was the only bit of clothing worn. He liked tanned white skin, too, as long as it was young and unwrinkled, blond hair that reminded him of sunlight, and blue eyes. They smelled differently, the two races, and sometimes Donald was in the mood to taste one, sometimes the other. It was like deciding whether you wanted steak or chicken for your dinner, oysters or shrimp. All of them delicious. Donald seldom hurt anyone he paid and he never wondered at the morality of the commerce. He did what he did without a care for what the preachers called sin. He’d been born without an innate sense of right and wrong; what you’re born without, you can’t grow.

  He’d go to the Haymarket on Sixth Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, he decided, hailing a hansom cab that had just unloaded a party of happy drunks in front of Armory Hall. It was a different crowd, but one in which he dared show his face without having to worry about Victoria finding out. She’d hammered it into him until he knew the reason he had to avoid Billy’s place as well as he knew his own name. Neither one of them wanted to chance McGlory’s seeing him and being reminded of what Victoria had managed to get out of him. The Irishman was notoriously unpredictable when it came to things like that. He could shrug you off or order your throat slit. Just for the hell of it.

  Donald was enjoying life too much to want to chance leaving it with the taste of a knife and a fountain of his own blood cascading onto his chest. He settled himself into the cab and looked back longingly one last time at the Armory. He didn’t see what difference it made now that the Judge was dead, but Victoria was peculiar in some ways.

  Still, it wasn’t fair that she could order him to do the things she did and then not allow him a little bit of fun afterward.

  Donald never saw the man who detached himself from the shadows outside Armory Hall as soon as his hansom cab turned the corner. With a nod to one of the ex-boxers working the door, he went inside to report to McGlory that Morley had been back again. Alone, as usual.

  Their man at the Haymarket would shadow him for the rest of the night.

  CHAPTER 17

  “There’s no one I can send with a message,” Prudence said. “Except perhaps for young Frank. He went to Mr. Hunter’s hotel once before for me, the afternoon Colleen fell.”

  “Getting an answer would take time, miss.” Kincaid began hitching the pair of grays to the small calèche that could be drawn by one or both of the horses. “I can get you to Mr. Conkling’s and be back here before either Mrs. MacKenzie or Mr. Morley is ready to go out this morning.”

  “I don’t want to get you into trouble,” she persisted.

  “The lads need their exercise, Miss Prudence. I always take them around Central Park a time or two early every morning anyway. To get them ready for the day, so to speak. Nobody from the house has ever questioned me on it. So we’ll slip you into the calèche from the stable side with no one the wiser if you don’t mind crouching down a bit until we’re out of sight.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said, smiling enthusiastically. It was like playing hide-and-seek when she was a child. Only now she would have to be much more careful not to be found. The game had turned dangerous.

  She glanced toward the kitchen window, saw no one watching, then moved quickly around to the hidden side of the calèche and climbed in.

  She knew she had nothing to fear from Donald Morley; she’d awakened in the wee hours of the morning to hear him stumble up the stairs. Most likely he’d not be out of his bed until well into the afternoon. She’d primed German Clara to inform Victoria that Miss Prudence was indisposed and would keep to her room. With any luck at all, the lie wouldn’t be discovered. She’d have to figure out some way to deal with the consequences if Victoria decided to pay a visit to her stepdaughter, but she pushed that out of her mind.

  The pages of the notebook she had found in the rolltop desk were burning a hole in her skirt pocket. She had tried to decipher them herself, then sent Colleen to Geoffrey Hunter’s hotel suite with the message that she needed to meet with him. That was the afternoon Colleen had been pushed down the stairs. Even in the confusion of getting her safely out of the house, Prudence had not dared try to pass the pages to Hunter. Last night, after rereading her mother’s letters, she had tried one final time to decipher the Judge’s code, finally admitting defeat.

  It was time to ask for help, time also to see with her own eyes how Colleen was faring.

  Time to take another chance.

  * * *

  “Mr. Hunter is on his way,” Josiah had told Prudence thirty minutes ago, putting down the receiver of the telephone that was changing the world of business as much as the advent of electricity. Voices over wires and instant light. What would be next? Horseless carriages? “Mr. Conkling is just finishing a brief.”

  “I don’t mind waiting. There’s no need to interrupt him until Mr. Hunter gets here.” Prudence had waited patiently in the outer office, studying the notebook pages yet again, wondering why Conkling’s devoted secretary seemed so distracted, so pale and drawn, as if he hadn’t slept well in days. When Conkling brought out the finished brief and then ushered her into a seat beside his desk, she understood.

  The ex-senator, as famed for his obsession with physical fitness as he was for his lawyering skills and his love affairs, was plainly suffering from fever, the skin above his full, bushy black beard as red as though he had overexerted himself in the hot sun of summer. His breath was raspy, short, every inhalation an effort; she detected a foulness to it that smelled like the pus of a lanced boil. The rigid military posture on which he prided himself had deserted him. He sat at his desk with rounded back and hunched shoulders.

  “You’ll need to lean on Geoffrey in the days to come, my dear,” he mumbled.

  “Should you be in the office, Mr. Conkling? You don’t sound well.”

  “Not to worry. Josiah is pouring all kinds of concoctions down me. One of them is bound to work.”

  “Perhaps if you saw a doctor?”

  “They’re quacks, all of them,” Conkling complained, making an obvious effort to appear better than he felt. “Now tell me what this is that Josiah says you’ve found.”

  Prudence laid the notebook pages on Roscoe’s desk, fanning them out so he could see the Judge’s distinctive ink and style of handwriting. She tapped a gloved forefinger on the pages. “I can’t make heads or tails of it. I’m completely stymied. What do you think?”

  Even at a glance, even through the haze of fever, Roscoe could tell that the jumble of letters and numbers couldn’t be read in the normal way of things. “I’d rather wait for Geoffrey, if you don’t mind. He’s had more experience with this sort of thing than I have. Code, is it?”

  “Yes, and I have no idea how to break it.”

  “Break what, Miss MacKenzie?”

  Geoffrey Hunter breezed into Conkling’s office just as Josiah appeared with a tray of translucent china cups, hot water, cream, sugar, and a pot of freshly made coffee. He placed a small silver dish of his own delicious chocolates on his employer’s desk; he was that worried about him. As unobtrusive as a shadow, he faded into a corner of the office, stenographer’s pad in one hand, sharpened pencil in the other.

  “Before you answer my question, Miss MacKenzie, I think you should decide which of us will tell Mr. Conkling about the gas.”

  “What gas?” Roscoe asked.

  “Colleen wasn’t supposed to say anything
,” Prudence said.

  “So she told me. Being a smart girl, and one who has a care for her mistress’s safety, she knew her only choice was to disobey.”

  “What gas?” Roscoe repeated.

  “Friday night, six days ago, there was a gas leak in my bedroom. Fortunately, something woke me up and I smelled it. I was able to open the window. Other than a fierce headache, no damage was done.” Prudence raised her head defiantly, knowing she was in for a scolding for trying to keep the incident a secret.

  Conkling’s fever-flushed skin paled. “You could have been killed, Prudence.”

  “Colleen very nearly was killed.”

  “Who did it, Geoffrey? Do you know?” Conkling expected miracles from the man Charles Linwood had believed could solve any case, no matter how difficult.

  “My money is on Donald Morley,” Hunter said.

  “Donald doesn’t have the brains to conceive of either of the two attempts that have been made on me,” Prudence said. She blushed scarlet as she realized what she had just revealed.

  “Colleen told me about the gas,” Geoffrey said. “I think you’d better tell us about the other one.”

  Josiah sat so far forward in his chair, he was in danger of falling out of it. His pencil skittered across the page of the stenographer’s notebook.

  “It came to nothing,” Prudence said. She sighed deeply and squared her shoulders. “At times I believe I really felt something; then I decide I must have been imagining it.”

  “You won’t make a good lawyer unless you can marshal your facts,” Conkling chided.

  “It was after I’d left Dr. Worthington’s office and was walking down Fifth Avenue on my way here. That was a week ago today.” She described the feeling of being viciously prodded in the knees by something that felt like a cane or the pointed end of an umbrella, recounted in vivid terms the near fall, even cited what the woman beside her had said about lacing her stays too tightly.

  “So when you looked around, you saw nothing?” Geoffrey asked.

  “Nothing. And no one I recognized.”

  “Donald Morley,” Geoffrey said through clenched teeth. “He’s the only one who could have followed you from the house to Dr. Worthington’s office without being missed. I know how those crowds on Fifth Avenue can be. He could easily have slipped away before you turned around.”

  “I think you’re wrong about Donald. I don’t like him, I don’t trust him, and I’m afraid of him. There, I’ve said it. But he’s a brute, Mr. Hunter, and a stupid one to boot. Whoever tried to push me in front of a hansom cab and gas me in my sleep had to think through his plans before putting them into action. Donald isn’t capable of anything nearly that involved.”

  “You can’t go back to that house, Prudence,” Conkling declared. “I won’t allow it.”

  “Victoria is my guardian; I’m sure she’ll have something to say about that.”

  “You want to go back, don’t you?”

  “I don’t understand everything that has happened, but I do know there are mysteries I have to solve, and only one place where I can find the clues Mr. Hunter tells me we need to prove my stepmother guilty of moral turpitude. I’m only valuable if I’m alive, Mr. Conkling. You’ve told me so yourself. So I wasn’t pushed in front of a hansom cab until there was a crowd around to save me, and not enough gas was released into my room to do more than give me a pounding headache. Don’t you see? I’m being warned off. Nothing more than that. Someone wants me to stop asking questions, someone is afraid of what Maurice Warneke and Dr. Worthington might tell me. I’m safer than my father was or Charles. I’m worth a great deal of money alive. I have no value at all as a corpse.”

  The skritch of Josiah’s pencil was the only sound in the silent room until Hunter stood up and walked to the window overlooking Wall Street. He stood there for what seemed forever to Prudence, then he turned around and retook his seat by Conkling’s desk.

  “I heard something about a code we have to break. Tell me about it, Miss MacKenzie,” he said.

  “I found a small notebook hidden in a secret drawer of a rolltop desk belonging to my father. It had been stored in the attic for years, though I don’t think I could tell you exactly how many.”

  “How did you find this secret drawer? And how did you know to look for it?” Except for one piercing glance at Conkling, Hunter concentrated all of his attention on Prudence.

  “I remembered playing under it as a child. I could see my father’s feet. He showed me where the drawer was and how to open it. He told me I could put my jacks there for whenever I wanted to play with them while he was working.”

  “Do you think it was your father who hid the notebook?”

  “It had to have been. He and I were the only two who knew about the hidden drawer. He had to have concealed it so I would find it. I and no one else. I think he slipped it into its hiding place recently, Mr. Hunter. Perhaps when he knew he was dying. Until then he must have kept it on his person.”

  “Could there be other secret places in the house, Miss MacKenzie? In the Judge’s study, perhaps?”

  “I’m sure there are. I just haven’t found them yet.”

  Hunter picked up the notebook pages that looked absurdly small in his large hand. The entire notebook could easily have fit in one of the inside pockets of a man’s jacket.

  “I think it’s a record of all the important cases my father argued as a lawyer or presided over when he became a judge. There are sets of numbers that must be dates, clusters of letters that represent names, and a mixture of the two to indicate the type of crime, the verdicts, and the sentences. I tried the simplest, most logical substitution I could think of, but it doesn’t work. No matter how many variations I attempted, the numbers and the letters wouldn’t unscramble themselves.”

  Hunter listened to her with undivided attention, nodding his head as she explained her reasoning. “I doubt I could have done any better, Miss MacKenzie, and I’ve seen dozens of different codes. You’re undoubtedly right about the information on these pages, right too about the Judge hiding the notebook recently. He’s using a different pen on the last few pages. Look.”

  Geoffrey laid six pages side by side on Roscoe’s desk. Josiah handed him a magnifying glass. The handwriting seemed to leap off the paper, and now it was obvious that different writing instruments had been used. “Here, on the first pages, he’s using a dip pen; you can see where excess ink has accumulated at the tip of the nib. I’ll have to leave this part to the experts, but I think it likely the formula for the ink he’s using changes over time. Look at the last page now. Do you see the difference?”

  “He bought himself a Waterman fountain pen with a gold nib. I read the advertisement in one of his legal directories. We laughed about it together because he knew it was bound to leak, but it was too beautiful to resist. That was only a year or so before he died. He and I had begun to work together in the evenings again, in his study. He was turning down invitations, for health reasons, he said, encouraging Donald to take his place as Victoria’s escort. They were out of the house several evenings a week.”

  “Did you ever write with the Waterman? Josiah has been after me to buy the latest model, but I don’t want ink all over my fingers.” Conkling’s breathing became labored as he leaned over the notebook pages, magnifying glass in hand. It eased when he straightened, and some of the flush faded from his face.

  “Many times. There’s a ladies’ model, you know, much smaller than the business version. Father hinted he would be giving me one for my birthday if I liked his. Which I did. I became very adept with the dropper that’s used to fill the reservoir.”

  Hunter laid out more of the tightly written pages, examining them with a second magnifying glass that Josiah brought from his desk in the outer office. He settled on several pages from near the beginning and then the last page, arranging the rest of them in a neat pile held in place by a crystal paperweight bearing the seal of the United States Senate.

  “Miss MacKenzie
, look at these pages and tell me what you see.” Suppressed excitement twitched at the corners of Geoffrey Hunter’s smile.

  Prudence took her time before answering, moving her glass back and forth between the pages. When she looked up, they were all staring at her. Hunter looked triumphant, as if a prize pupil were about to perform, while Josiah and Roscoe appeared puzzled and not a little put out. They’d examined the same pages but had noted nothing unusual.

  “The entries on these earlier pages were written with a dip pen, but the underlining was added later. I recognize the kind of stroke the Waterman creates. Sometime after he began to use the fountain pen and when he hid the notebook, the Judge went back through what he’d written and underlined some of the entries. The important ones. The ones he wanted me to notice. They tell a story, if we could decipher them.”

  “Josiah, will you send someone down to Trinity Church to see if Danny Dennis and his hansom cab are available?”

  “I’ll go myself, Mr. Hunter. He won’t ask questions if it’s me, and he’ll come right away.”

  “There’s someone I’d like you to meet, Miss MacKenzie. I think he may be the only man in New York City who can break your father’s code. And then afterward, if you want, I can take you to see Colleen. Mrs. Dailey’s boardinghouse is only a few blocks away from my codebreaker.”

  “I’d like that very much, Mr. Hunter.”

  Conkling sat down heavily in his chair. “I have to be in court again tomorrow, Geoffrey, so I’ll leave Prudence in your capable hands. I’m afraid I’ll need Josiah to put together the papers for the morning.”

  Prudence stepped to Roscoe’s side, leaning over to kiss him lightly on the cheek. “You are very kind and quite right to think of my reputation, Mr. Conkling, but I’m sure Mr. Hunter and I will manage very well without a chaperone.” She smiled as she said it, but Roscoe’s skin was hot to the touch; she could feel the burn of his fever lingering on her lips. “We won’t leave until Josiah returns. And then I think I shall encourage him to order you to bed.”