Privy to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  Henry finally pulled the door open, looking undamaged. “Hey, Nell. Aunt Marty said you’d be stopping by. Come on in.”

  I followed him down the hall, savoring the scent of sawdust and varnish. I spotted our plastic box in the middle of Henry’s worktable. “Have you found anything new?”

  “Marty told you she thought the escutcheon you found might match some of those on the Terwilliger furniture, like the ones she showed you at the museum, right?”

  “She did. So, do they match?”

  Henry nodded. “These are identical. Probably all came from the same shipment to Philadelphia.”

  “They aren’t locally made?”

  “Nope. The furniture is—nobody was supposed to import anything from England back then, but there were plenty of talented furniture makers in the city here. But metalwork is something else. Of course, somebody could have laid in a supply before the war, but that would have been a pretty big investment—those babies weren’t cheap.”

  “Did Marty share her theory with you?” I asked.

  “That the fragments came from a Terwilliger piece? Or that it was a lap desk? Yeah, we both arrived at that conclusion pretty quickly. I think she’s right, at least in terms of style and size. She can dig into the history side of that—you’ve got all those records.”

  “You haven’t talked about this to anyone else, have you?” I asked.

  “Nah. Marty said not to, and I don’t see a lot of people anyway, so who would I tell?”

  “Just be careful—please. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.” The list of possible targets was growing daily, which made me anxious.

  “You sound like Aunt Marty. Don’t worry, I can take care of myself. And I’ve got a lot of weapons handy.” He waved around his workroom, and I could see plenty of gleaming chisels with nice sharp edges. And lots more things I didn’t recognize, but all with wicked points or evil blades. I relaxed just a bit.

  “Good. Well, I’d better get over to the police station and hand the stuff over.”

  Henry slid the plastic box with the fragments into a padded envelope and handed the envelope to me. “Will you get them back?”

  “I hope so. They’re not exactly evidence, although if they find the matching escutcheon, the one we have might be. I’m not going to worry about it now. I just plan to give them to the detective.”

  “Oh, hey, I kept some of the smaller wooden bits,” Henry said before I could leave. “The brasses were pretty much standard issue, but I’d like to run a few more tests on the wood, see if anything pops up.”

  “Sure. Since the police are only interested in the metal, no one will miss them You run whatever you think is best and let me know if you find anything useful. Thanks, Henry!”

  “No problem.” Henry escorted me out again, and I turned toward the Roundhouse, aka police headquarters.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Roundhouse, which houses the Philadelphia Police Department (although possibly not for much longer, if the city’s movers and shakers have their way), is a rather odd building built in the 1960s, and, yes, parts of it are round, or at least curved. I’d been inside it before, and not under the happiest of circumstances. I found it hard to believe that I was entering it voluntarily now, but I was fulfilling a police request, hoping to score a few points against any future issues. Besides, it was my civic duty to present potential evidence in a major crime, even if the police weren’t officially calling it a crime. What Detective Hrivnak would make of what I gave her, I couldn’t guess.

  Clutching my plastic box in its bag, I entered by the front door and stated my business. Someone called upstairs and ascertained that Detective Hrivnak was busy in a meeting and asked, would I wait? I thought waiting was preferable to leaving and coming back again, so I sat in a hard chair and stared into space while I tried to construct my story.

  All Hrivnak knew was that the bartender had seen a small, flat, curly metal object in the dead man’s hand, as she had told me. So had someone else, who had buddied up with Carnell Scruggs, and who had left with him. A short time later Scruggs was struck by a car, and there was no metal object found on his body. It was a rather fragile link between that man and what I held in my hand, but it was still a possible one.

  Twenty minutes later, Detective Hrivnak finally appeared. “So it really is you. What do you want?”

  “I may have some evidence in that death next to our place. Can we take this somewhere private?”

  “Yeah, whatever.” She turned and went around the screening devices. I went through the screening, though, of course, my “evidence,” being metal, set things off, so we had to sort that out. Hrivnak was not happy, but she didn’t say a word until we reached her small, messy office. “So, what you got?”

  “We found something in the basement of the Society when we were cleaning it out.” I was careful not to specify when we found it, since we’d been holding on to it for a few days now. “Since that’s where the victim was working on the day he died, we wondered if it might be connected.” I opened the plastic box and withdrew the escutcheon. “I thought this might be a match to that ‘flat, curly metal thing’ that the victim showed to the bartender.”

  “What is it?” Hrivnak asked, her eyes not leaving the piece.

  “It’s called an escutcheon—it’s a plate that goes behind a drawer handle on a lot of eighteenth-century furniture.”

  “Where’s the furniture?”

  I pulled the rest of the items out of my box. “This is all we found: a couple of hinges, some screws, and some chunks of wood.” I didn’t mention that we’d held back some of them.

  “Where did you say it was found?”

  “In a pit beneath the basement floor. That was the last part of the building to be cleared out for our construction project. That’s where Scruggs was working. I’m sure the construction foreman will confirm that.”

  “Huh,” Hrivnak said, then stopped. I resisted my impulse to start babbling about the theories my friends and I had come up with. Let her draw her own conclusions.

  She didn’t appear impressed by my fabulous find, and gave me no credit for bringing it to her, even though she’d been the one to ask for it. But at the same time I was relieved: if she didn’t think it was important, then she wouldn’t push it any further, and the Society wouldn’t be officially involved. I knew full well that Marty wasn’t going to give up her search for more information, but I wasn’t about to tell the detective that.

  I got tired of waiting. “Well, I’m sorry I bothered you, then.” I stood up and reached for the items, but she stopped me.

  “Leave ’em here. I’ll see if that bartender recognizes the es-thing.”

  “Will I get them back?”

  “What do you care?”

  “They came from the Society. We collect and keep things. This is a piece from our history.”

  “Fine. Talk to me after we’ve wrapped up this thing with Scruggs’s death.”

  Since I had her attention, I thought it was worth asking, “You have any leads?”

  “That’s police business. Where’s your FBI buddy?”

  “What’s he got to do with this?” Why was she asking?

  “Just wondering—thought you two were a team.” She hesitated for a moment. “There is one thing . . .”

  “Yes?” I prompted.

  “We figure that driver got it right—the man was moving backward when she hit him, based on the accident reconstruction. Lot of scratches and bruises on him, but it’s hard to say if that was because of the car or something else. Like someone pushing him.”

  “But he was still okay not long before, in the bar, right? No fight there?”

  “Yeah,” she replied reluctantly. “And it’s a pretty tight timeline. He left with that other guy, who we’re still looking for, but the street cams don’t show them and we don’t know how long the
y stayed together. Anyway, whatever happened, happened pretty quick after they left that bar.”

  “Was he on his way home, do you know?”

  “Maybe—he was headed that direction, toward Spruce. He’d gotten paid for the work he’d done, so he could have been going to another bar to celebrate.”

  One of his coworkers had mentioned that he’d been paid in cash. “You told me he’d had a couple of beers at the first bar?”

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t drunk enough to stumble, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not without help.”

  Detective Hrivnak was being very chatty, for her. After all, if the Society wasn’t involved, she had no reason to share anything with me.

  She stood up, signaling that our chat was over. “Let me take you downstairs.”

  She escorted me back to the first floor, and I left the building feeling kind of deflated. All right, I’d done my duty. No one could say I was hiding anything. Of course, she hadn’t asked any of the right questions, but I didn’t feel I had to volunteer information. And it wasn’t information I had kept quiet about, really—more like educated guesses, and, I’d be willing to admit, a lot of wishful thinking. I wasn’t looking to make trouble. I didn’t have to—it kept finding me.

  It was now past three. I contemplated briefly stopping by James’s office, which was only a block away, but I’d see him soon enough. I should go back to work for a couple of hours, and hope that Marty didn’t spring any more surprises on me.

  She didn’t. The only surprise was a call from Hrivnak about an hour later. “The guy at the bar recognizes that whatchamacallit,” she said without preamble. “It worth much?”

  “Not without the piece of furniture it belonged to. Nobody would want to steal it, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You aren’t missing any, over at your place?”

  “We don’t have room for furniture in the collections here.” Which was sort of true. Of course, now would be the moment to elaborate on some of our suspicions, starting with the likelihood that both of those brass pieces had been in the pit for a hundred years. That sure wouldn’t make the detective any happier, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Huh. Well, I’ll hang on to it for now, see if anything pops up. Thanks for stopping by.” She hung up. At least she’d thanked me.

  Then Marty showed up, either because she’d been eavesdropping or because she had some weird kind of radar. “What’s the news?” she asked.

  “Hrivnak says the bartender ID’d the escutcheon. Definitely, not maybe. She’s going to keep it for now.”

  I couldn’t read Marty’s expression. On the one hand, it was the first validation of our convoluted theory: the escutcheons were a pair, they had both come out of the pit, and Scruggs had carried one away with him. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure Marty or I were looking forward to following that theory to the conclusion we’d sketched in for it. It was troubling that we wouldn’t have known about any of it, save for the death of a stranger, and it was all too possible he’d died only because he’d picked up something he thought looked pretty.

  “What’d you tell her?” Marty asked.

  “As little as possible, I guess. She didn’t ask much—I think she wanted to talk to the bartender first. I don’t think she believed it was important, but now she does. What do we do now?”

  “Look at the list,” Marty said. “I’m checking out the history of portable writing desks. There aren’t a lot of ’em, or maybe they weren’t important enough to talk about. I don’t know how they were carried around. Slung over a horse? In a backpack? So I need to do some homework. Maybe it was where they kept the good silver, for all I know—more than just letters, anyway.”

  “Was Henry any help with that?”

  “Henry’s a good kid, but he’s more into the fixing than the history. He can tell you how old a piece is, and what it’s made of, but who made it? Not so much. He usually calls me. He give you anything new?”

  “Only that our escutcheon was a clear match to the Terwilliger ones, which we’d already guessed. But there must be other local experts on colonial furniture, if you’re stuck on the lap desk part.”

  “Yeah. Let me think about it and see who I can ask. Maybe someone at Sommerhof.” Trust Marty to know people at that renowned institution, even though it was in Delaware. She stood up abruptly. “I’m going back to the files.” She disappeared before I had time to say good-bye.

  James called minutes later to say he was headed home, and did I need a ride? I told him I did, and gathered up my things. I was waiting on the curb when he arrived, and climbed into the car quickly. “Hey,” I said as I buckled my seat belt.

  “Hey to you. Hard day?” James said, pulling away smoothly.

  “Mentally if not physically, although I did do my share of walking. I almost stopped by to say hello this afternoon, but I thought that would be complicated. Don’t I need security clearance or something to get into your offices?”

  “We’re not that bad—just give me a call if you want to come in. Why were you in the neighborhood?”

  “I stopped by the Roundhouse to turn over the brass bits and splinters to Detective Hrivnak.”

  “I see,” James said neutrally. “What did she say?”

  “Nothing at the time. But she called back later to say that the bartender said the escutcheon matched the one Scruggs showed him.”

  “Ah.”

  I turned in my seat to face him. “Ah, what? ‘Ah, I’m making random sounds because I don’t know what to say but I think I have to say something’? Or, ‘Ah, that’s what I expected’? Or maybe, ‘Ah, now you’ve stepped in it, Nell’? Which is it?”

  “Don’t bite my head off, Nell. I was just acknowledging that I’d heard you. And I was trying to think about what that might mean, as I navigated this two-ton hunk of metal through streets that were laid out over three hundred years ago for much smaller vehicles.”

  I must still be on edge, I realized. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. Look, without going into details, Marty came by with a—well, I guess you’d call it a matrix of suppositions and what we would need to confirm or eliminate any of them. Determining that the two escutcheons matched was the first item on that list. We guessed right, at least so far. I just don’t like where we go from here. Maybe I don’t want us to be right. Maybe I’d like this to be an overblown fantasy that will simply collapse from its own idiocy.”

  “Why? I’m not just making conversation, you know. I know you, and I know you don’t back off easily. Why with this?”

  “Because it involves so much—my friends, your family, the place I work for and am responsible for. Somebody is going to come out of this unhappy, and that’s probably Marty, because she’ll never view her grandfather and maybe her father in the same way, if we’re right.”

  “She already knows that, but it’s not stopping her.”

  “I know! That’s why I can’t just tell her to drop it. If she can face the truth, I don’t have a choice except to back her up and follow her lead. Sorry, that phrasing makes no sense, but you know what I mean.”

  “I do. I understand.”

  I struggled to get a grip on myself. Where had that little tempest come from? “I know you do. I’m just venting.”

  “Feel better?”

  “A little. But I’d feel even better after a good meal.”

  “That part I can handle.”

  We found a nice restaurant in Chestnut Hill, one we hadn’t tried before, and after a couple of glasses of wine and some good food, the world looked much brighter to me. When we got home, before I could even hang up my coat, James turned me around and wrapped his arms around me and held on, and I leaned into him. I was not alone in this battle, whether or not the FBI was involved. I was working hard to get used to having someone to depend on. It felt good.

  “Thank you,” I said into his coat.

 
; “I’m here, Nell. We’ll figure this out.”

  I believed him.

  CHAPTER 16

  Poor Carnell Scruggs had been dead for nearly a week, and we were no closer to knowing why, save for our discovery of one small piece of metal that might have had nothing to do with his death. I’d watched enough cop shows on television to know that if a murder wasn’t solved quickly, it might never be. On the other hand, I also knew that history didn’t move quickly. If this was a crime that was related to another crime that had taken place a century earlier, we were sort of on track, or at least not off track. Heck, we’d solved older crimes than that.

  James dropped me off at work, and his parting comment was that he had an all-hands meeting after work he had to attend, so I’d have to make my own way home and I’d be on my own for dinner. I assured him I’d be fine with both. I could take the train home, though I enjoyed our shared commute.

  When I walked into the Society, I found it a beehive of activity. The reading room doors would remain closed to give whatever determined researchers came in a little more peace and quiet, but the big main room beyond the lobby had somehow become a staging area, with boxes both of files and of incoming shelving and tools and whatever. At least the crew had had the foresight to cover the floor with sheets of plywood, because replacing it was not in the budget at the moment.

  Felicity Soames, our head librarian, was standing in front of the reading room doors, arms folded, looking disgruntled. I went over to say hello.

  “How long will this go on?” she all but yelled in my ear. “Our researchers are going to pitch a fit!”

  “The contractor promised only a couple of weeks, but you know how that goes,” I yelled back. “There are almost always surprises with construction.”