Lies That Comfort and Betray

by Rosemary Simpson

  They’d reached the carriage where Kincaid had fastened feed bags over the horses’ heads to distract them from the smells of death as the morgue wagon drove by.

  “She might have been in too big a hurry to remember to do it,” Geoffrey reasoned. “We don’t know why no one answered the bell. Or even if she rang it.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but it wasn’t working,” Kincaid said. “I looked at the bellpull before we left. The cord was badly frayed. It could have snapped yesterday or the day before. No one noticed because deliverymen usually pound on the door to get attention if they don’t hear a ring. They’re always in too much of a hurry to wait.” He opened the carriage door and pulled down the mounting step. A wave of warmth flowed out at them from hot bricks wrapped in wool.

  Prudence settled herself inside the carriage, grateful for the heat. November was always a cold month, and she’d rushed out of the house without changing into outdoor boots. Her trained lawyer’s mind had begun to treat Nora’s murder as if it were one of the Judge’s cases laid out for her consideration. Facts. She was reaching for and organizing the few facts they knew.

  Geoffrey climbed in and sat beside her, silent, abstracted. He was going through the same mental exercise.

  “I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if someone had heard her,” she said. “If Cook or Brigid had opened the door, Nora might not have gone wherever it was she went. Wherever it was she was killed.”

  “If it even was Nora who brought the hens. We can’t forget that we don’t know for sure who it was, Prudence,” Geoffrey reminded her. “Her killer might have been bold enough to want to send a message. He could have read your address on the envelope if he searched Nora’s pockets. It was bloody and crumpled, but we don’t know how it got that way. You don’t want to build a case on a false premise.”

  Most of the reporters had left, either to follow the death wagon on its way to the morgue at Bellevue or to race back to their newspaper offices with whatever information they’d been able to glean before deadline. The small crowd of bystanders curious enough to brave the early morning cold had begun drifting away. With the corpse gone, there was nothing left to see.

  “I’ll have to go to Staten Island this morning,” Prudence said. “I can’t let anyone else tell Nora’s family.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Geoffrey volunteered. “They may have information that will help.”

  “Can’t that wait? The questioning?”

  “I wish it could, but we need to know if Nora intended on going anywhere except to your house. The only ones she’s likely to have told would be family members or the young man she was engaged to. Phelan will send someone out to tell them the official identification of the body will have to take place at Bellevue. He’ll probably want to conduct his interrogation there or at the Mulberry Street headquarters.”

  “How horrible for them.” Prudence had seen sketches in the newspaper of sobbing women identifying their sons or husbands laid out on hard tables in the Bellevue mortuary. In one illustration a young woman lay atop the table, a wrinkled sheet pulled to just above her breasts, long hair spilling over her shoulders.

  She pictured Agnes Kenny’s work-worn hands clasped together, her face contorted with the effort not to break down and weep in front of strangers. Brian Kenny standing stoically beside his wife, brothers fanned out around the bereaved parents, the fiancé mute with the horror of what his beloved had suffered. They wouldn’t ask, but Prudence would send Kincaid to meet them at the ferry landing and take them in her carriage to Bellevue. Danny Dennis and his hansom cab were on retainer to the firm. She’d send him, too, because the entire family wouldn’t fit in a single vehicle.

  “Phelan never showed us the note,” she remarked, her mind turning away from the grief she could not assuage to the murder she was determined to solve. “The bill for the hens. Do you suppose he didn’t have it? Could Nora’s killer have kept it, Geoffrey? As some sort of macabre keepsake?”

  Geoffrey didn’t remind her of what else was missing from the scene.

  CHAPTER 5

  On the Tuesday morning after Nora died Prudence went to the Wall Street offices of Hunter and MacKenzie at the same time that thousands of workers who thronged the streets of lower Manhattan reported to their jobs. She wore a trim black suit devoid of the elaborately draped skirt and wasp waist that had lately become fashionable. The tightly corseted waist made it impossible to walk quickly without feeling faint and the draped skirt was heavy and cumbersome. It seemed that the higher a woman’s rank in society, the less practical and comfortable was the clothing she was obliged to wear, and the more restricted her movements.

  Prudence was angry and determined. She had stood with the Kenny family in Bellevue’s morgue yesterday as the attendant rolled down the sheet covering Nora’s naked body. It would have been enough for the identification to reveal only her face, but before she could prevent it, the terrible wound encircling Nora’s neck and the beginning of the incision that had mutilated her breasts and belly lay revealed to her family’s eyes.

  Agnes had not fainted, but she had clung so hard to Brian’s arm that her fingers stiffened. The brothers remained stone-faced and silent, but in each young man’s eyes could be read the resolve to wreak a terrible vengeance on the man who had done this appalling damage to their sister. Tim Fahey wept openly, streams of tears plowing his cheeks.

  Prudence arranged with the undertaker who had buried both her father and her fiancé to take Nora home to Staten Island in the finest mahogany casket Maurice Warneke’s mortuary parlor could supply. She would be laid to rest in Saint Brendan’s hilltop cemetery where the view of New York Harbor and Lady Liberty was unsurpassed.

  The funeral was tomorrow, Wednesday, but for today at least, Prudence was determined to turn her mind toward the future. The laudanum craving that almost overpowered her the night of Nora’s death had frightened her into a cold examination of the life she was living. And she didn’t like what she discovered. She was going to make changes. When the hunger for laudanum came again, as she knew it would, Prudence would repeat what her father had told her after Sarah MacKenzie’s death nearly crushed the two of them. “Hold on. Never give up, never give up. Hold on.” The refrain was like a drumbeat in her head.

  No one was in the office when she let herself in with the key she was using for the first time since Josiah Gregory handed it to her. She had played at the game of investigative law, enjoying the idea of uncovering secrets and the excitement of doing what few women of her class ever dreamed of. Their homes were as much silk lined prisons as they were jewel boxes to showcase their beauty and accomplishments. Work, real work, when it was spoken of at all, was rarely mentioned without a disdainful curl of the lips. But that was precisely what Prudence had determined she would do. She would work. As hard and as steadily as any man. Work with the talent she knew she possessed for seeing to the simple core of a complex problem. It only remained to convince others of her sincerity.

  Standing in Josiah Gregory’s small kingdom, the impeccably neat outer office that was the gateway to Hunter and MacKenzie, Investigative Law, Prudence decided she needed her own private place to work. She wanted a separate office with a desk and file drawers, comfortable chairs, and a table on which to spread out documents. A door that could be closed against interruptions. As long as she drifted from the library in the house on Fifth Avenue to the large office that was Geoffrey’s domain, she would be more a visitor than a partner in the business to which she had given her name. The MacKenzie name. She remembered with what enthusiasm she had embarked on the new adventure, and admitted to herself now how difficult it had been to maintain that level of zeal when she had precious little to do.

  Part of the problem had been the untangling of her affairs after the death of her late and unmourned stepmother. Victoria Morley MacKenzie had blackmailed Prudence’s father into a loveless second marriage and almost certainly connived at his early death. The Judge had thought to pr
otect his only child with a complicated trust arrangement, but as soon as he was safely laid in the family mausoleum, his widow began manipulating the financial interests he thought he had safeguarded. It had taken months and far too much of Prudence’s attention to undo the damage. Geoffrey had offered to help, but he had also had to retitle the assets Roscoe Conkling left him in his will and meet with the late senator’s clients. That too, had taken more time than either of them had expected.

  The problem was not so much the complexity of the situation as the lack of any real need for haste. Geoffrey was a gentleman born and bred, happily without the need to support himself that afflicted so many of his impoverished fellow Southerners. He was a wealthy man with a tendency to drift into indolence until an intriguing problem was tossed into his lap. For several years Charles Linwood, Prudence’s fiancé, had kept his former school and college friend amply supplied with challenges. After Charles was killed, it had been Prudence herself who’d roused Geoffrey from his lethargy. He had saved her life and fortune from Victoria, but in the months since then there had been nothing comparable to engage his considerable talents. Until now.

  Like Geoffrey, Prudence had been born into a class that asked very little of its members except adherence to the social codes governing all but business behavior. A man could steal his competitors blind and no one would think the less of him. But let that same man breach a single one of the many odd customs of society, and the resultant buzz might very well ostracize him. Women, too, were bound by rigid codes of deportment. For all the independence Prudence’s fortune should have bought her, she was on as tight a rein as any other woman who had a care for her reputation.

  War and the deaths of more than six hundred thousand men had changed America, but real freedom for women outside their homes was a distant dream. Delegates to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 had debated female roles and even a woman’s right to vote, but then war had intervened, profiteering had risen to staggering heights, and the imperatives of social change were pushed aside.

  Prudence turned her attention to the problem of how to create a space that would be entirely hers, and by the time Josiah Gregory arrived, she had a plan. Hunter and MacKenzie would rent the adjoining and currently vacant offices.

  “We’ll cut a door through,” she instructed him, “renovate and furnish one of the offices for me, designate the other as a permanent conference room. No more huddling around Mr. Hunter’s desk every time we need to consult with each other. Can that be done?”

  “Easily enough, I think. I’ll contact the firm Mr. Conkling used when he first moved in here.”

  “I didn’t realize he’d made changes.”

  “Everyone does. Nobody wants it said that someone else’s office is good enough for him.” Josiah’s eyes lit up as he poured fresh coffee for Miss MacKenzie. He was something of an amateur architect cum decorator; the renovations his late employer enjoyed had originally been Josiah’s idea.

  “How soon can you get this finished?”

  “I’ll call today, Miss. Martin Parish works fast once a customer signs off on the specifications. He’s a small operation, but the result is always high quality.”

  “I’ll tell Mr. Hunter about the new arrangements.” Prudence stood beside Josiah’s desk, one hand on her hip, the other drawing sketches in the air. “We’ll probably need to do more than cut one door. Walls may have to come down.”

  “Not today, I hope,” Geoffrey Hunter said from the open doorway. He thought Prudence had never looked more alive and confident than she did at that moment. He hadn’t liked the bleak, strained face she’d been wearing since Nora’s body was discovered. Strong though she believed herself to be, Geoffrey knew that her core was still fragile. Laudanum would always beckon to Prudence; she would have to prove to herself over and over again that she could resist its lure. He wished she would lean on him more often.

  She turned from her contemplation of the space to be transformed, smiling broadly at his teasing. “Soon,” she said. “Josiah has a man coming to plan it all out and give us an estimate.”

  “Josiah always has a man.” Geoffrey shrugged off his overcoat, accepted gratefully the steaming cup his secretary handed him. “Now tell me what this is about.”

  “I’ve decided to become a working woman,” Prudence said.

  “Like Hetty Green?”

  Scornful of any male advice or attempt to interfere with her financial speculations, the woman known as the Witch of Wall Street had inherited money and then amassed an enormous fortune entirely on her own. And was still doing it, if the rumors of her deals could be believed.

  “Not exactly. I won’t be buying and selling stocks and bonds, Geoffrey. We have a crime to solve,” Prudence said resolutely. “I don’t think Nora’s family has much trust in what the police will accomplish. I certainly don’t.” Unshed tears pricked at her eyelids.

  She’d have to learn to control that, she thought, blinking furiously. A weeping private investigator wouldn’t be of much use to anyone.

  Josiah cleared his throat. Any display of emotion embarrassed him. “I’ll send word to Mr. Parish,” the secretary said. He smiled as he watched Miss MacKenzie walk into Mr. Hunter’s office. He’d only observed her father the Judge a few times, when he’d come as a client to consult Roscoe Conkling, but Josiah thought the man’s daughter just might be a match for him.

  She had that look about her.

  *

  Nora Kenny’s funeral was the first Catholic service Prudence had attended. She found the soaring gothic interior of the small Staten Island church awe-inspiring and grand for its size, given the humble station of most of its parishioners. Sunshine lit up narrow stained glass windows, casting vivid red, blue, and yellow shafts of color across the pews. The smell of incense and melting candle wax from the altar wafted over the congregation; a mournful tolling of muffled bells filled everyone’s ears and touched every heart.

  The same thoughts were in all of the mourners’ minds. Nora was too young to have died. There would be no more children for Agnes and Brian Kenny. They had lost forever the only daughter they would ever have.

  The coffin was carried down the central aisle of St. Brendan’s Church by Nora’s father and five brothers, all of them stone-faced with rigidly repressed emotion. Agnes Kenny walked behind her daughter’s remains, veiled head to foot in black, gloved hands tightly clasped around her rosary. She paused for a moment before filing into the family pew, reaching out to lightly touch Prudence MacKenzie’s arm. It was as though she needed to draw comfort from the young woman who had played with Nora when both were children. Perhaps she was reminding her that the relationship did not end with death; there was work still to be done.

  The funeral Mass was said in Latin, the ageless, sonorous syllables soothing if incomprehensible to the congregation. Geoffrey Hunter, whose classical education at Phillips Academy and Harvard had included extensive study of both Latin and Greek, nodded his head from time to time. Whether your loss was new or far in the past, there was something very consoling in the measured cadences of the ancient language and the centuries old prayers.

  As non-Catholics, Prudence and Geoffrey stayed in their pew while nearly everyone else in the congregation filed up to the altar to receive Communion. Prudence felt the intensity of her partner’s gaze on every man who walked past where they sat; it was the Pinkerton in him scrutinizing faces and postures, looking for anything that betrayed guilt or anxiety. It was a truism among homicide investigators that murderers often attended their victims’ funerals.

  “Watch for signs of edginess,” he’d instructed her. “Tension that seems misplaced, eyes shifting for no good reason, an unguarded smile. Whatever makes a man different from those around him is what we want to find.”

  None of the faces Prudence saw streaming past her seemed to fit Geoffrey’s description of suspicious characteristics. There was something else about them she wasn’t sure of at first, but that gradually made an indelible impression. No
matter the color of hair or eye, tone of skin, height or body build, the men, women, and children gathered to bid Nora Kenny good-bye all shared some indefinable sameness that marked them as Irish. She turned to Geoffrey to ask if he had noticed the same thing. He bent his head so she could whisper her inquiry, and nodded in agreement.

  Immigrants sharing the same language and religion tended to create neighborhoods of their own ethnicity. Staten Island was home to substantial populations of German, Italian, and Irish newcomers who had flocked to join earlier arrivals. The hodgepodge of villages in its hills and along its shores were as divided one from the other as though national boundaries had been wrapped around each one.

  Prudence remembered the Judge commenting on how separate the groups held themselves. “God forbid a young man or woman should cross one of those borders,” he had said. “You’d have a modern day Romeo and Juliet on the island. It would probably put the tragedy of Shakespeare’s play to shame. There would certainly be more bloodshed.”

  As she was remembering that conversation, the last of the communicants passed the pew in which Prudence was sitting. She turned to see if anyone else was coming down the aisle. As she looked toward the rear of the church she saw a man whose differentness was too obvious to ignore. She felt Geoffrey stiffen beside her, and knew they were both looking at the same person.

  Young, perhaps in his mid to late twenties, tall and lean. Heavily muscled shoulders. His hair was no blacker than some of the so called Black Irish, but this man’s eyes were the deep brown of a Mediterranean heritage and his skin had been kissed a rich tan by generations of sun drenched ancestors. Plainly not a member of this Irish parish, he stood close to the door leading from the nave of the church into its outer vestibule, nearly invisible in his dark clothes, poised to make a quick exit should anyone notice or challenge him.

  “Geoffrey.” Prudence spoke softly under cover of the organ music.

  “I see him.”