Beacon Street Mourning

by Dianne Day

  I returned to recording my speculations in the notebook.

  A few minutes later Mary was back, this time with a telegram that did not require a reply. It was from Michael, and it was brief, without even the usual salutation:

  FREMONT STOP LB NOT AT NY ADDRESS STOP NOT

  REPORTER ONLY OFFICE BOY NYDN STOP HAS NOT

  RETURNED TO WORK STOP BE CAREFUL STOP NOW

  PROCEEDING NJ AND CONN STOP WILL RETURN SOONEST

  STOP LOVE MICHAEL

  I took this rather cryptic telegram to mean Larry Bingham was not who or where he was supposed to be, and that Michael was now on his way to check out Augusta’s other relatives. But why now, especially, was he warning me to be careful? I mean any more than I was being careful already.

  I was not particularly surprised to discover that Larry was not a reporter but an office boy. Many office boys did work their way up to be reporters eventually, I had heard.

  I was less happy with something Michael didn’t know, and that was what Mrs. Boynton had told me about Larry’s bungle and his mother’s subsequent anger. Yet in a way, that bungle made me happy too, for it seemed typical of Larry that he would want to do something to please his mother but in the end couldn’t quite do it right. I liked to think perhaps he couldn’t quite do it because deep down inside himself Larry Bingham had known it was wrong. And so he had saved himself from himself by making a mistake.

  He would have saved my father too, if only Augusta had not found herself another accomplice. Surely that was what had happened?

  I intended to prove it.

  TWENTY-THREE

  JUST WHEN I thought I might get away to visit an automobile dealership or two—they could hardly laugh up their sleeves at me if I were only looking, I could always say I was looking in order to persuade my husband, they should like that—my plans were thwarted again. This time by Detectives McLaughlin and O’Neal, who had finally decided they needed to search Augusta’s two rooms themselves.

  When they were done with that, they asked if they could take a look around the rest of the house, and I gave them permission. If they found my gun inside the muff, well then so be it; there was not much I could do to stop them from searching without making them suspicious. I asked if they were looking for anything in particular, to which they replied they couldn’t say, which was what I’d thought they would say, but I’d had to try.

  Everything I know about policing, I know from Wish Stephenson, who used to be a policeman in San Francisco. However, one does hear that police departments can vary from town to town; also I myself had heard rather often that San Francisco, like the West in general, is fairly corrupt as far as public officials are concerned. I did not know if this was true of Boston as well, but so far these two detectives were much milder examples of their breed than any I’d ever encountered in my City by the Bay.

  Of course, they were somewhat winning me over by the fact that they didn’t seem to suspect me—which had to mean no one had told them about Augusta’s threatening to challenge Father’s will in court. I’d been quite certain Searles Cosgrove would tell, even if William Barrett didn’t. Why hadn’t they told? It rather bothered me. I supposed I would find out about William when we had lunch tomorrow, but Cosgrove …

  How was I going to handle him? I certainly didn’t know—though I supposed I had better think of a way soon. Yes, Dr. Searles Cosgrove was definitely a problem.

  Finally, after what seemed an inordinately long time, the two detectives came back downstairs. They asked about a diary. I said if Augusta had kept one I was not aware of it; I said further that she was not an introspective type of person and so I would not have been surprised if she hadn’t taken the trouble, as a daily entry in a diary is a bother, which I could attest to, as that was why I did not keep one myself.

  I wanted to add that it was a myth that all women who have had a certain degree of education keep diaries—a myth no doubt perpetrated by males because they think we are such idle creatures we have nothing else to do except embroider or perhaps play the piano—but that would have been going too far and so I did not.

  They asked again about keys. I told them I’d had the locks changed on all the doors, and now I knew precisely how many keys there were and who had them, and would be happy to supply them with a list. This did not impress the detectives as much as I had thought it would—I mean to say, I had been efficient, I had been precise, did I not deserve at least a minor accolade? A “Yes, give us the new list,” if nothing else?

  Apparently not. McLaughlin, who was the primary asker of questions, looked at O’Neal and O’Neal looked back at McLaughlin, until I wondered if these two had been working together for so long that they had learned to communicate without speech. Then O’Neal said, “Tell her.”

  Yes! I wanted to scream at them: Tell me! So that we can be done here because I have places to go and things to do; and besides the police make me terribly nervous.

  McLaughlin said, “We think the person who murdered Mrs. Jones entered the house with a key, more than likely by the front door, then left both doors—that is the door to the vestibule and the door to the outside—open. In the event he needed to make a quick getaway, it would take an intruder too long to get through both doors. He’d want to leave them open.

  “That would be what happened with Mrs. Jones. She heard the killer—either she’s a light sleeper or else she hadn’t been to sleep yet—and she got out of bed and was able to run outside through those doors he’d left open.”

  “Or she,” I couldn’t resist saying. But then I could have kicked myself, lest it get them suspecting me. Still, police detectives or private detectives shouldn’t assume a woman is not just as capable of killing as a man. Because, I assure you, we are.

  “Or she,” McLaughlin said, giving me a look. “See, you’d have the same set of circumstances going if the killer had hidden in the house.”

  “Hidden in the house?” That was something I hadn’t thought of, and it gave me the willies.

  “You had a lot of people here earlier in the day, didn’t you, after your father’s funeral.”

  “Yes, we did,” I agreed. That afternoon seemed a hundred years ago now. But the grief was ever-present, and as soon as I heard the word “funeral,” tears pricked my eyes.

  I said, to keep the topic moving, “But I don’t think anybody hid. I saw them all leave, said goodbye to them on their way out.”

  Surely I’d seen them all go, hadn’t I?

  “We don’t think anybody hid either,” O’Neal said, for once taking over from his partner. He was the shorter and rounder of the two, balding; McLaughlin had a square face and a lot of dark hair. “What my partner here is taking forever to say is, the crucial point here is Mrs. Jones was shot outside the house, not inside it. She had time to run down the stairs, out the door, and all the way across the street before she was shot. That couldn’t have happened, we don’t think, if the killer hadn’t come in the front door and left both those doors open.”

  “And”—McLaughlin took over again—“we think he—or she—had a key, because the lock hadn’t been forced. These big doors on these old houses in this part of town, and their locks, have been painted and spit-and-polished to a fare-thee-well. They’d show the slightest scratch, and believe me, ain’t nobody been opening these doors with anything but a key.”

  “I see your point,” I agreed. It was actually a sharp piece of reasoning, and I was moderately impressed.

  I continued: “I’d love to help you, but ever since my father married Augusta Simmons, I have been living in California and she has been running the house. From what I’ve seen in the few weeks I’ve been back here, Augusta was only a passable housekeeper. She didn’t keep a list of who had keys. My father would have had such a list—he was a widower for a long time before marrying Augusta, you understand—but once she was in charge she could have given keys to any number of people and we would never know. I do not even know the names of the servants she has had since
I’ve been gone, except for Mary Fowey—and she has only been here a few months.”

  They had a few more questions about servants, about Myra Porter, whom they’d found upstairs, and about Mrs. Boynton’s leaving, which Mary had told them about when they were looking around in the kitchen.

  Eventually McLaughlin declared himself satisfied with my answers, O’Neal concurred, and they left. As I closed the front door after them, I found I was satisfied too; their visit had gone a long way toward relieving my mind of some lingering anxiety.

  I had changed the locks. The killer had come from outside, and he had come only for Augusta. He wouldn’t come again, that was over now; he wouldn’t come for me. And even if he did, with the new locks on the doors he couldn’t get in.

  I privately thought Augusta had been killed by one of her lovers. She’d had at least one, perhaps throughout my father’s long illness, I felt sure. But none of that was my problem. I needed only to prove that she had killed my father.

  IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS something awakened me. I was still in that guest bedroom on the back of the second floor. With Ralph and Myra’s help, I was planning to refurnish and redecorate Father and Mother’s room at the front of the house for myself and Michael, but that would take time. Also, the detectives were not thrilled right now about the prospect of my touching anything in Augusta’s two rooms, and so that rather put me off doing much—therefore I was still at the back of the house.

  The sounds I heard, very faintly, were coming from the walled garden out back.

  I got up and went to the window. I had to feel my way because it was quite dark in the room, only the faintest light from the gas lamps out on Beacon Street filtered back this far.

  But this state of affairs had its advantage: by the time I reached the window my eyes were fully adjusted to the darkness, and when I pulled back the curtain I was able to see out. And I did see something!

  The problem was, I could not be sure what I’d seen. It was like seeing a ghost—you blink, and it’s gone. One minute it’s there and the next minute it isn’t.

  I stood there looking and looking, staring until I knew if I didn’t stop I would end up conjuring something out of the darkness that wasn’t really there. So I let my vision go all blurry and concentrated instead on remembering the sound I’d heard.

  The sound that had awakened me had been a thud. Not a big thud, but a soft one. Like … someone jumping over the back garden wall and landing on both feet, in soft shoes. And then smaller sounds, nothing definite or definable, very hard to hear—as I’ve said, the house has thick walls and sounds don’t carry well.

  While I’d been feeling my way to the window, I’d heard something more, though: scraping noises, like something being dragged across a rock. And then I could have sworn I’d seen a white face turned toward the house when I first twitched the curtain back—but I’d blinked and it was gone. Just completely gone.

  From all this, what could I conclude?

  Either someone had climbed over the wall into the little garden, tried and failed to get into the house with a key that no longer fit the lock, and then had a rather difficult time of it climbing back over the wall …

  Or I was sleepwalking and seeing ghosts—take your pick, Fremont Jones!

  “YOU WOULD THINK,” I said to William conversationally, as a waiter who was older than God led the two of us past the Men’s Bar and Cafe toward the stairs to the two upper floors, “that they would realize if they opened the whole place to women all the time, instead of just the upper floors on Ladies’ Day, they’d make a great deal more money.”

  As I said this, the waiter’s ears turned pink. He was too well trained—and probably too set in his ways—to turn around and glare at me for my impertinence but I am sure he wanted to.

  The waiter needn’t have worried; William, like any prosperous businessman on Tremont across from the Common, had learned chapter and verse of the Locke-Ober Bible. Locke’s, you see, is on Winter Place, which is a little alleyway between Winter Street and Temple Place. In other words it’s about half a block from Great Centennial Bank; Locke’s has been in this same place since before I was born—and probably with this same waiter.

  Being therefore well prepared, William immediately recited the appropriate verse in response to my plaint: “Locke-Ober is not about making money, Fremont. It’s about tradition and excellence.”

  “Um-hm,” I said, watching the waiter’s ears turn back to normal.

  The interior at Locke’s is all dark, gleaming mahogany, imported from someplace in the Caribbean and carved by New England cabinetmakers. From past experience I could attest to the excellence of the mahogany wainscoting along the stairway, and in the ceilings, and around the walls of the private dining rooms; I used to come here with Father on Ladies’ Days as often as I could pester him into it.

  When I was fifteen or sixteen I had fantasies of getting past the various watchdogs and into the Men’s Bar, where no women are ever allowed to go. I have heard tell the mirrors and glass in there are from Paris or Venice or someplace exotic like that, and there is a large nude painting of a woman behind the bar, and another nude woman in brass, a statue that they use for hanging their hats. These things I have heard about for most of my life, but never seen.

  As William and I settled into our private dining room, which was quite small and perhaps even a little too private, I had a naughty thought: What if I were to dress up like a man, as I had done a few times for undercover work in San Francisco—would Michael accompany me to Locke’s famous Men’s Bar so that I could see that nude painting for myself, just once in my life? Not to mention hanging my hat on some part of the bronze woman’s nude anatomy. Now that would be a coup.

  William had asked me a question while I was having this fantasy. I recovered his question from the part of my mind that conveniently records these things when I am not otherwise paying attention, and answered it:

  “Yes, I’ve been here a number of times with Father,” I said, “and I am familiar with the menu. I will have the Lobster Savannah.”

  “An excellent choice,” William said.

  He was beyond nervous. I was glad when the food had been ordered and the ancient waiter—who was quite the most efficient and polite waiter I had ever had anywhere even if he didn’t approve of me—had produced a half bottle of wine for William. I had ordered beer with my lobster, which may not seem refined, but I prefer that combination. It is, I believe, a Yankee thing. I got my beer too, in a lovely tall glass. And then the waiter left us until it was time to bring the first course.

  “I’m waiting,” I said pointedly. I did not intend to spare him, for I felt William Barrett had dealt me the worst sort of betrayal. He had, as it were, gone over to the enemy.

  He swallowed so hard that I could see his Adam’s apple move above his tight white collar. He said, “I—I’m humiliated. All I can think of is to thank God there weren’t that many people present to hear what I said about poor old Sefton—”

  “The Forrest sisters were there,” I reminded him peskily, “and they will repeat it to everyone, you know.”

  “Yes, but no one pays any attention to them.”

  That was true enough.

  “Of course,” William said, leaning forward so that his tie dangled perilously close to his crab soup, “none of what I said is true. I can’t think what came over me. Elwood Sefton is just as in command of all his wits as I am.”

  “In fact,” I said acerbically, “he may be more in command of his wits than you are. Let us cut to the chase, as they say in the melodrama: Are you trying to tell me that Augusta Simmons bewitched you and caused you to say things you didn’t really mean?”

  “Yes! That’s it, that’s exactly what happened!”

  I gave him a hard look and began to eat my soup slowly. The first taste was excellent, sharply fishy as good crab should be, the cream smooth as velvet would be if one could put tongue to velvet—but after that first taste I was really too busy controlling my
anger to enjoy the food.

  I simply ate. Without comment. Letting William stew in his own juices, lie in his own bed, which he’d made, all the clichés that apply; there are thousands of them for situations like this one. He couldn’t stand my silence—I hadn’t really thought he could; I’d thought my silence would get him to talk, and I was right.

  He blurted, “When I heard, I mean when I saw in the paper that she’d been, well, shot—well, she was gone then, wasn’t she? I mean Augusta of course.”

  I merely raised my eyebrows and kept on eating.

  “I swear to you, Fremont, it was as if the woman had put a spell on me, a real witchy spell, that was broken just as soon as she died. Really, it was exactly like magic—well, I mean like one hears magic is, because of course I haven’t really had any experience of magic. Other than this. What I’m trying to say is, it was exactly like magic because as soon as she was dead, it all fell away. All the madness, all my … my obsession with Augusta just simply disappeared. It was gone, poof! Just like that!”

  “And you went to Harvard,” I said, slowly shaking my head, “graduated and everything.”

  He blushed. The waiter brought our main courses. I asked for more beer, which of course the ancient fellow did not like, but he brought it to me anyway, and I began to enjoy the sweetness of my lobster together with the dry-tasting bubbles of the beer. I am sorry to say that poor William went along for quite a while in that ridiculous manner of claiming Augusta had driven him temporarily out of his senses.

  Finally he got to the apology part—he said he was sorry he’d agreed to support Augusta in her legal action to break Father’s will. “She’d need someone inside the bank, you see.”

  “Um-hm, of course she would. To get information that should have been kept confidential, no doubt,” I said, lifting my lovely tall glass and taking a sip, “or perhaps even to plant misinformation in places where it did not belong? Had she gotten that far with you yet?”

  William looked baffled.