The Formula for Murder

by Carol McCleary

  My purse flies into the air as he throws it over his head back at me as the woman he nearly bowled over yells a curse at him.

  Quickly grabbing my purse off the ground, I determine that my coin purse with my gold coins and folded money are inside, but something even more important is missing: Hailey’s diary.

  “What’s happened?” the woman asks me. “That thief get your money?”

  “No, not my money.”

  “Thank God. You all right?”

  “Yes, and you?”

  “Oh I’m fine, can’t say the same for me groceries.”

  As we gather up her food, the grocer comes out of the store and they chatter about how unsafe the streets are for honest people. “And the police do nothing,” the grocer says.

  Even though I am hearing everything they say, none of it penetrates the fog in my brain. My God—the diary was stolen, taken from me in broad daylight by a man who must have been following me from Hailey’s office.

  “You sure you’re all right?” the woman asks me again. “You look like you’ve seen the devil.”

  “Yes … I’m okay, I’m just amazed at how devious people are. And what terrible things rational human beings are capable of.”

  “Did you hit your head, dear?”

  The murky stuff in my head is still there as I am carried away in a hansom cab to my hotel.

  Shocked down to my socks, I admit. And angry. Is the lover so desperate about being exposed that he is resorting to criminal acts? It’s obvious to me that this is the case. And I can’t help wondering if there is more to it than just the man’s identity. Is he also trying to cover up some complicity in Hailey’s death? Did she get that bump on her head before she went into the water?

  I don’t know whether it’s a lover trying to avoid scandal or one covering up murder, but I realize that I have been looking for a reason to find Hailey hadn’t killed herself almost from the time I got the news in New York. Now that I know something is amiss, I am confronted with both a dilemma and a challenge: What can I do about it?

  I’m alone, in a foreign country, thousands of miles from the resources and contacts that I can employ whenever I do an investigation. And I’m under a time pressure. The paper expects me to stay only a few days to lay Hailey to rest and “clear up her desk” as Mr. Cockerill instructed me. After that they expected me back, beating the bushes for stories.

  Which is another quandary I’m in: do I want to return to The World?

  Their cavalier treatment of me since my return from my trip around the world has me questioning if I want to continue working for the newspaper. Mr. Pulitzer and the editor-in-chief never even said so much as “thank you” or offered a salary increase or any other reasonable compensation a man would have received for a similar accomplishment. Bottom line, I did not receive one cent and my salary has been a very low one.

  After my insane asylum exposé, which I know did not garner a fraction of the publicity and increase in ratings that my trip around the world did, I received a generous bonus check. I have yet to receive one.

  And, not to sound petty, but the only “thank you” I received from Mr. Pulitzer was a cabled congratulation with a note begging me to accept a gift from India, another item I have yet to receive. Such treatment would never have been given to a man.

  If I hadn’t written Around the World in 72 Days,4 I would be in horrible financial straights, for I am not just taking care of myself, I am taking care of my mother, brothers, and sister.

  To make matters worse, shortly after I returned my favorite bother, Charles, died—inflammation of the bowel. He was only twenty-eight, five years older than me,5 and that worries me. I’ve been having health issues myself and the doctor keeps telling me I need a vacation. I thought my trip around the world would be one, but instead it was very stressful.6 But I mustn’t think of that for now I have more pressing issues at hand. I must help provide for his widow, Sarah, and their two small children, Charles and Gertrude. After our father died, Charles and I made a pact always to take care of each other. I will not let him down.

  So when a book publisher, N.L. Munro, offered me an incredible three-year contract to write dime-novel fiction7 in a series of installments for his weekly New York Family Story Paper—ten thousand dollars for the first year and fifteen thousand for each of the next two years8—I couldn’t refuse. While this is more than what Mr. Pulitzer will ever offer me, reporting the news is oxygen to my soul and I don’t know if I’m ready to give it up, but I do know that health-wise, I can’t write the books and remain a reporter.

  My poor head wants to explode but I must focus back on the issue at hand—my attacker.

  The first question is who was the man that attacked me in broad daylight on a public street? Hired help, I am sure. Nor did he appear to me to be someone that Hailey would have become romantically entangled with.

  He looked street tough, the sort of man you’d find in a lower-class bar and hire to do dirty work, the kind that the police investigate.

  I hadn’t paid much attention to him when he came aboard the trolley, but reflecting now, my impression of him is that while he wore a business suit, it needed cleaning and some attention from a hot iron, indicating to me that he probably isn’t married and that he might be down on the heels from a higher position in life than the one he now held.

  He is hardly the important personage that Hailey had boasted about to both the maid and James the gatekeeper. Definitely just hired help, paid to get the diary and whatever else the lover wanted the covers pulled over. But what is in the diary that would make Hailey’s lover take the risk of having his thug commit a street crime that could send both him and the street tough to prison?

  The lover’s identity? Or a more serious crime—the murder of Hailey?

  That diary speaks from the grave. Words that might not be direct evidence of murder, but might point to the man who made her pregnant and raise questions that would make the police reconsider a simple verdict of suicide.

  Then there is the other question eating away at my mind: How does the big story Hailey was working on fit in? She mentioned doing a major story to both James and the maid. Yet I found nothing about it in her room and found at her office only the red file with just filler stories. More important than the stories I didn’t find were the ashes left behind. The only explanation for the burning that my head will accept is that someone, possibly the mugger who attacked me, went into her office and burned all evidence of the story.

  There has to be a connection between the story and the man Hailey had become infatuated with. That all references to the story were destroyed because they led back to the man who wanted his identity kept secret seems a reasonable conclusion to me. But could the two situations be completely alien to each other? A coincidence? No way will I accept that. The diary and the news story Hailey was working on are linked to Hailey’s lover and her lover obviously has no scruples when it comes to relying on violence to get what he wants. I might not have fared as well today if I’d met that thug in a dark alley.

  But for the life of me, I can’t imagine how the lover and the news story could be linked. Hailey imitated me in carving out a career in reporting. And that meant that inevitably, any story that Hailey would go overboard about would involve crime, political dirty dealing, or other scandalous matters. The World is not a scandal sheet by any means, but it did not become the circulation champ by being anything but a bare-knuckle street fighter when it comes to the news.

  My gut tells me I can’t go to Abberline until I have more evidence. He has the suicide note and I can’t tell him what is in the diary. As for the mugger, he’ll point out that purse snatchings are common instincts in any city anywhere—and it so happens that London is the most populous city in the entire world. I can almost hear him telling me exactly how many purse snatchings occur every day in the city—and my retort being, of course, how many of them discarded the money in a purse and ran off with a young woman’s diary?

  His
rebuttal will be that the thief got confused and simply starting throwing things. And he’d want to know if I continued after the thief to see if he had soon discarded the diary. I didn’t and my failure to do so would be the inspector’s coup de grace in the discussion.

  No, a simple purse snatching isn’t going to impress him or win him over to my side, not without something solid. Nor will the feelings of a maid and an office clerk that Hailey wasn’t suicidal, since neither was an intimate of Hailey’s.

  Until I have an explanation for the suicide note, I can’t go to the inspector. At the moment, the only explanation that sits well with me is that she was coerced into writing it under duress. Unfortunately, I have no proof except the hairs standing up on the back of my neck and someone mugging me.

  Where to start is not a difficult question for me. Like Hailey, I am a reporter and know the beat: She was working on a story about a medical scandal involving a health doctor and a high-society woman, so I will start there and see where it leads me.

  Hopefully the news story and the man in her life who betrayed and probably murdered her will intersect.

  I could drop by a newspaper office and ask reporters about recent stories featuring a health doctor and a dead noblewoman, but I already have an inside source for London high society and its rumors, innuendos, and scandals—basically an artery to all that goes on in London society.

  “Drop me at the nearest telegraph office,” I tell the cabbie, through the hansom cab’s roof door.

  It is time to contact an old friend, one who once fought killers with me, and who is not only a world-champion purveyor of gossip, but perhaps also the most common subject of gossip in the city, and a shameless instigator of the most outrageous, titillating, and racy scandals on the planet.

  You will find me at the Langham under the name of Count Von Kramm.

  —The king of Bohemia from “A Scandal in Bohemia” by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  14

  “I’m meeting Mr. Ernest,” I tell the maître d’ at the dining room in the Langham Hotel, the grande dame of hotels in the world and the epitome of elite chic.

  I’m escorted to a table to bide my time while I wait for “Mr. Ernest,” who is my friend and sometime partner in crime—detection, of course—Oscar Wilde.

  Oscar’s reply to my telegraph had advised me cryptically that he would present himself “incognito” at the restaurant, thus the Mr. Ernest bit, and would offer explanations that must be kept “under the rose.” It took me a moment to realize that “under the rose” was an idiom for secrecy dating back to ancient times.

  As the wit and scandalous rascal of London society, both because of his sharp tongue and refusal to limit his sexual activities to those dictated by “respectable” people and straitlaced religious organizations, Oscar’s need to hide out could have arisen from any number of things he said—or did.

  The fact we were meeting in the most fashionable and exquisite hotel dining room in London at a time when Oscar is “incognito” is merely part of the charm of a man who upon his arrival in America to begin his speaking tour advised a customs officer that he had nothing to declare but his genius.

  I admit I had been taken in by Oscar’s secrecy-laden message, but when my cab dropped me off where the entrance to the hotel is completely lit with electric lights and the doorman, who is waiting to help me down and escort me in, is dressed as modestly as the admiral of the Royal Fleet, I decided Oscar may be more melodramatic than in danger.

  My poor stomach grumbles and I mutter, “Where are you, Oscar?” as I await his presence. His response instructed me to meet him at ten-thirty, a fashionable time for dinner after plays are over. I check my father’s pocket watch. He’s five minutes late. And there is nothing fashionable about my healthy appetite.

  I’ve never gotten used to chic late-night eating, not even after several years in New York, and I’m hungry enough to nibble on the wood table. In my hometown of Cochran Mills, Pennsylvania, population exactly 534, I grew up having dinner at six sharp, not hours after the sun has gone down.

  I almost feel like getting up and going back to roam again in the encased garden atrium. It’s really lovely and so unexpected in downtown gray foggy London. They took the inner courtyard and covered it with an iron and glass roof so it can be enjoyed year-round. Scattered among the flowers and trees are wrought-iron tables and cushioned chairs and benches so one can sit and gaze at the stars as they sip wine. I imagine it must be beautiful to sit and watch snowflakes fall. It would be like being in one of those glass balls my mother has that you shake and watch the snow fall on the animals in a forest.

  I’ve traveled the world and seen many gorgeous hotels, but never have I experienced a place as elegant as the Langham. Throughout the public areas they have intricately laid mosaic flooring decorated in white, gold, and scarlet. Selectively hanging on walls covered with hand-printed wallpaper are Moorish murals and silk hangings—each having a story of their own to tell. White marble pillars that give one the feeling of pure wealth are standing guard all about.

  Coming through the grand entrance, hanging on the hallway wall leading into the dining area is a Persian tapestry carpet that must have cost a king’s ransom.

  The dining room is enormous and simply dazzling. Their wallpaper is a light creamy beige adorned with little golden angels, each holding a black bow and arrow—some shooting arrows and some sitting on fluffy white clouds. And something I’ve rarely seen, electric chandeliers—thousands of crystals of all shapes and sizes lit with lightbulbs. There are over a dozen of these brilliant lighting fixtures hanging from the fourteen-foot ceiling which is a highly polished pinkish Italian Veneziano plaster—or as the Italians say, “the Women’s Stucco” because it burnishes to an even gloss with very little effort. White marble pillars are scattered among the tables. One wall is floor-to-ceiling glass that overlooks the encased garden. All this creates a sumptuous atmosphere, perfect for eating … which I’m dying to do.

  When the maître d’ took me to my table, I paused for a moment and stared at a large stone fireplace with roaring flames on the opposite wall from the glass wall—the wood is not being burned. “A gas fireplace,” he tells me, “with ceramic logs.”

  Amazing. What will they think of next?

  Our table sits right in the center of the room. If Oscar wants anonymity, this is definitely not going to please him; however, if I take into consideration a pillar which is right by our table, Oscar might have a little privacy from the curious if he is truly planning to appear in some sort of disguise.

  Each table is set with floral china sitting on top of silver charger plates, sterling silverware, crystal water and wine glasses, a small vase of flowers, and a candle in a decorative etched glass candleholder in the center of the table; some settings, like mine, have a crystal wine holder that looks like a duck.

  After seeing what other diners are wearing, I’m not happy being in the center of the room and find myself leaning toward the pillar to hide. The couture is formal, men are in white tie, the women in evening gowns, some sleeveless with long gloves, most with feathered hats and almost every woman has either a pearl necklace, dazzling diamonds—or both.

  Not many months ago I completed a seventy-two-day trip around the world with only one change of clothes that I carried in a small valise, yet managed to attend shipboard dinner parties without shame. I came to London with the same valise and the same one change of clothes and the same lack of embarrassment. I work hard and travel fast and light and refuse to load myself down with trunks in order to look fashionable.

  If the other women in the world believe they are seeing an ugly duckling crossing the room, they are probably right, but I’d like to tell each of them that I earn my own duck food.

  I hear a stir and murmuring among the diners and look toward the door.

  There he is, in all his glory, pausing as he enters. I shake my head and sigh. Incognito?

  Oscar is wearing a green velvet suit with wide lap
els, a white silk shirt with a Lord Byron collar, and an oversized red tie that is loosely tied and as wide as a scarf. His cape is purple and reaches nearly down to the heels of his brilliantly polished black patent leather shoes. His hat is black and would have gone nicely on the head of one of the Three Musketeers.

  Besides the clothing that would have raised eyebrows at a showing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, much less at a posh restaurant-hotel in the heart of London’s West End, everything about Oscar is big—six-foot-three, soft and flabby with a low mezzo voice that people concentrated to hear yet reaches across a room. His mind is big, too, encyclopedic; his tongue a guillotine that cuts through hypocrisy and affronts with a razor-edged blade.

  He excitedly waves his hand as he weaves around a sea of tables, coming toward me with as much subtlety as Sherman’s march on Atlanta—no, make that Moses crossing the Red Sea: Oscar is carrying a white pooch dressed much the same way he is.

  OSCAR WILDE

  I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  15

  “Nellie!”

  The pooch barks. It’s a small white poodle wearing a duplicate hat and a purple cape that matches Oscar’s. If Oscar’s flamboyant entrance had not already captured every eye in the room, the barking of the provocatively dressed dog for sure brought stares from everyone.

  I should have known that it’s simply not in Oscar’s makeup to isolate himself from the world. Lost on a desert island, he’d recruit the monkeys and the fish as a social circle.

  There is no “rose” big enough for him to hide himself or his secrets under. Obviously, everyone’s eyes are upon him, which is understandable since this man is like no other on the entire planet. Oscar Wilde is one of a kind—and God broke the mold after He created the man.

  And I wouldn’t change a hair on his head.