Secret of the White Rose

by Stefanie Pintoff

  The dean gave me a perplexed stare.

  “Or an appointment book, for meetings with students?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” She indicated that I should follow her to the small secretary’s office at the end of the hallway. I did, leaving Isabella to the task of searching the set of cabinets below Professor Hartt’s bookcases.

  “Our secretary is home ill today, but she keeps all of the professors’ appointment books. Most, you see, spend more time in the classroom or the research library than they do in their offices. So we have someone on staff to handle student requests for appointments.”

  She ushered me into an office just large enough for a desk and chair, bookshelf, and telephone table. I managed to squeeze myself between the desk and the wall, with barely any room to turn around, while the dean ran her finger along the pile of appointment books.

  “Allan Hartt. Right here.”

  She passed me a flimsy cardboard book, which I immediately flipped open to October 1906. Two different kinds of handwriting were inside: one was fine and close, with perfect penmanship; the other was so heavy and bold that the black ink often smeared. My instinct—one that Dean Gill confirmed—was that the secretary had entered the former, and the professor himself the latter. Most of the professor’s days had been filled with student appointments, judging from the names and class references the secretary had marked. The professor himself used initials—and I immediately saw that Monday the twenty-second had been marked “HJ.” Hugo Jackson?

  This could be the connection I was looking for. Had Allan Hartt joined in the meeting with Alistair and the two murdered judges this past Monday? But that meeting had presumably been about the Drayson case. While I’d learned from Dean Gill that Professor Hartt was a native New Yorker from a well-known family and would have run in the same social circles as Alistair, there must be some other reason why the history professor would have joined in a discussion ostensibly about Drayson.

  I flipped through prior months and saw similar notations: sometimes “HJ,” but other times “AP” or—even more troubling—“AS” initialed on the pages. Alistair Sinclair? It was another confirmation of what Isabella had discovered in Judge Porter’s calendar: evidence that these men had met regularly for months.

  The final confirmation of a link came from Isabella, who approached the doorway with a worried face. “I finished searching his office and found this, Simon.” She passed me a folded letter. “It was tucked between one of his history books and the rear wall of his bookcase.”

  My fingers pulled the letter apart, though I knew what it was before I opened it: music. Two bars only, but in the same style as the others.

  An uncomfortable thought took hold of me. Four men had been meeting regularly. Three were now dead—the same three who had received musical ciphers in the days before their deaths. If Alistair was the fourth, then he was in danger. And given the murder of Professor Hartt, more so than he would imagine.

  “You need to see this.” I handed Isabella the appointment book, directing her to the relevant dates.

  From the odd expression on Isabella’s face, I had no doubt that the same thought had occurred to her. She bit her lip and tugged on a curl of her hair, as she often did when worried about something.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve figured out how they knew each other,” she said. “Come.” She motioned me back down to the professor’s office, with Dean Gill following close behind.

  Once there, she pointed to the framed diplomas on the wall, hidden behind the door. We had not noticed these when we initially entered his office. One from Columbia, the other from Harvard.

  “Look,” she exclaimed, pointing at the Harvard diploma. “It’s not just Harvard. It’s Harvard Law. And the date is 1877.”

  I stared at the large piece of parchment. Most of it was in Latin.

  “I’m not positive,” she said, “but I think that’s the year Judge Jackson, Judge Porter, and Alistair graduated. It means the four of them were classmates.”

  I turned to Dean Gill. “Is that right? I didn’t know Professor Hartt had legal training.”

  She nodded, puzzled that we were so interested.

  “Why did he turn from law to history?” Isabella asked.

  “I never knew,” the dean replied. “Perhaps he loved history more. He certainly completed his history doctorate in record time.”

  Isabella and I exchanged a worried look. Allan Hartt had been a classmate of Alistair’s—and that meant there was no question that Alistair was hiding something significant. And there was no good explanation for it: either he was involved in something he ought not to be—or his own life was in danger.

  We needed to figure out what the two remaining ciphers said—for there were two, including the one Isabella had retrieved from the Porter household. We’d not yet had the opportunity to decode it.

  “You must have music rooms where students practice,” I said to Dean Gill.

  “With pianos,” Isabella added.

  “Of course. I’ll escort you across the quad to the music building.” Dean Gill’s answer was stiff, but her face wore a look of relief that we were leaving Professor Hartt’s quarters.

  * * *

  A cacophony of sounds filled the third floor of the music building where the practice rooms were located. An accomplished pianist was playing something that reminded me of falling raindrops—Isabella told me it was Chopin. With the exception of a high soprano singing her scales, for me the other music blended into indistinguishable notes and sounds. We finally found an empty room, right next door to the music library, and settled in at the piano bench. I placed both ciphers, the code Judge Porter had devised, and a blank sheet of paper in front of us. While we knew that the piano was not essential to unraveling the cipher, I thought it was important to hear the melody played out loud. I wanted to be sure we missed nothing.

  “Should I start at the first bar?” Isabella asked, playing a few tentative notes.

  “No,” I said, “we should start at the white rose.” I pointed to the third bar on the page where the image of a rose replaced the clef symbol.

  “F—low A—low C … B—G.” Isabella said the notes intermittently as she began to play.

  I cut her off. “This makes no sense. Am I misreading the substitutions?”

  “It’s the key of A, just like the others,” she said, puzzled.

  Angus Porter had laid out for us the key to Porta’s cipher, based on an A major scale. It was a simple substitution cipher in which pitch and rhythm governed the correspondence between letters of the alphabet and specific musical notes and values. Thus, A correlated with the written half-note “low A,” then the alphabet ascended to “high E” where the half-note indicated M and the quarter-note indicated N, with all quarter-note values then descending until quarter-note “low A” indicated Z.

  Porta’s cipher had easily unraveled the embedded code in the music sent to Judge Jackson. But here it revealed nothing but a garbled series of letters.

  Isabella’s fingers floated over the keys, trying to make music of the notes on the page. “Simon, why do you think the killer uses a musical cipher?” A frown crossed her face. “I mean, there are plenty of ways to hide a message. Why music?”

  “No idea. Unless…” I stopped myself.

  “What is it?”

  “He’s obviously confident that his recipients can decode what he sends. That may mean something in itself.”

  “Maybe he sent them instructions,” she said.

  “Instructions would be useful right now,” I muttered, staring at the page in front of me. “You’re good at puzzles,” I finally said. “Can you think of some variant of Porta’s cipher that might have been used here?”

  “Maybe. Let me check something in the library.”

  She left me for a few moments to visit the small music library room, then returned with a biography of Michael Haydn. After grabbing her pencil and notepad, she began to work, flipping through t
he book’s pages, then writing feverishly.

  “The goal of these is to make the music as realistic as possible,” she said. “A lot of composers—Bach and Schumann among them—became masters of embedding names in their music using more complicated correspondences. But I remember reading about Michael Haydn’s cipher, and I’m wondering if it might help us. He devised a cipher that, while presumably for communication, also helped him to compose his music.”

  Utterly transfixed, I watched her write a series of notes and letter correspondences. “How is his system different?”

  “It’s more complex than Porta’s. His correspondences begin with low bass clef G; that corresponds with the letter A. Then G-sharp is B, A-flat is C, and so forth. He even incorporates punctuation, aligned with rests.”

  With interest, I noted that what Isabella called a half-note rest—it looked like a man’s hat on top of a line—corresponded with a question mark. “And I think this one makes sense. Look: we read it as bass clef high G, high A, E-flat, high G, low B-sharp…”

  We continued to match each note to the cipher until we had a message:

  Two thousand more or you meet the same end.

  “Do we assume ‘two thousand’ refers to money?” Isabella asked.

  “I think so. And the word ‘more’ implies that this wasn’t the first request.”

  She tapped the musical score. “Is this the one delivered to Judge Porter?”

  I nodded. “Should we move on to Professor Hartt’s?”

  “It begins with a white rose,” Isabella said, pointing, “and look—these are the same notes. High G, high A, E-flat, high G, low B-sharp, and so forth.”

  “The exact same message,” I said aloud. “Except that Professor Hartt seems unlikely to have two thousand dollars in the bank.”

  “The dean mentioned that he came from a well-off New York family, though. Perhaps he had family money.”

  “It’s possible. If he did, his manner of living certainly didn’t reflect it. Either way, it’s blackmail,” I said.

  “But if the writer wanted money—and had been getting paid—then why kill off the source? It makes no sense.” Isabella sat back, dropping her pencil on the table.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe he’d gotten enough money from his victims. Maybe in the end, revenge was better than payment. But right now we have a different concern—”

  She cut into my thoughts. “Alistair—”

  “Exactly. We’ve got to find him, get a message to him.”

  “But he must already know. I don’t like thinking this—but he’s probably been receiving the same ciphers. Paying the same blackmail money.”

  “He doesn’t know Professor Hartt has been killed,” I said, my voice tight with worry. “He doesn’t know he could be next.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The Dead House. 10 A.M.

  We sought proof of Hartt’s murder—solid proof that only science could provide—at the Dead House. It towered above us, casting gloomy shadows along Centre Street as Isabella and I approached. Sometimes, when superstition got the better of me, I thought of the many departed souls whose violent, untimely deaths led them to pass through this house. And even when my rational mind kept superstition at bay, I still entered with no small amount of trepidation.

  Dr. Jennings himself would be quick to call this a house of learning and knowledge, not death. He believed that science yielded truth, and truth ensured justice. Yet I’d learned otherwise: everyone has a different truth, and science itself is vulnerable to interpretation. But in a given case, the hard facts that Dr. Jennings offered—gleaned from massive soapstone tables where steel instruments cut into flesh and blood and coaxed out their secrets—provided me with the closest approximation of certain knowledge I could hope to find. And if this particular evidence didn’t always lead to justice, well—that wasn’t the coroner’s fault.

  Isabella leaned in closer to me as we entered the building and made our way up the marble staircase to Dr. Jennings’s office on the second floor. According to the station house secretary, Mulvaney had managed to make it downtown despite his injury and was meeting with the coroner now. Sure enough, we heard the sound of Mulvaney’s thick Irish brogue even before we reached Dr. Jennings’s door, which was open a crack. Mulvaney was being typically stubborn.

  “You’re telling me that the path of the bullet alone indicates that it wasn’t suicide? Since when did you become an expert on ballistics, Doctor?”

  “I’ve learned a thing or two from doing hundreds of autopsies on gunshot victims.” There was a pause. “It wasn’t suicide, Mulvaney,” Dr. Jennings said, his tone emphatic. “Ziele is right about this one.”

  I took a breath, made a loud rap on the door, and opened it before the invitation to come in could be issued.

  “Speak of the devil,” Dr. Jennings said with a broad smile. His eyes rested on Isabella. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure, Miss…?” He half rose out of his seat to greet her.

  “Mrs. Sinclair. Professor Sinclair’s daughter-in-law.”

  “Ah.” His eyes lit with recognition. “And where is the professor? I’d have thought he’d be eager to help out with a high-profile case like this.”

  “Unfortunately, he’s not.”

  My response was short, and Jennings interpreted it the wrong way—as I intended him to.

  “You need my help, then,” he said, self-satisfied. “Take a seat.” He motioned for us to pull over two chairs from the corner of his office. “And if you have the stomach for it, help yourselves to something to eat.”

  A pile of tired, soggy turkey sandwiches rested on a plate between them—right next to several pages of what appeared to be Allan Hartt’s autopsy report. I helped myself to one. Despite the subject matter we were about to discuss—not to mention the two skulls that stared down at me from the bookshelf next to the coroner’s desk—I was famished.

  “I believe you were saying that the bullet trajectory clearly rules out suicide,” I said.

  “And he doubted me.” Jennings passed me a section of his report. “But if bullets don’t fall within the expertise of a pathologist like myself, then I don’t know what does. No one is more expert at evaluating the damage bullets do to the body—and the trajectories they take when they snuff out a life. And the great city of New York has given me ample opportunity to study the subject.”

  He waved his left hand toward a glass jar at the top of his bookshelf, filled to its top with small, shiny gold pellets.

  “Bullets?” Isabella asked. “There must be at least fifty in that jar.”

  “Each one is from a victim I autopsied. And I’ve got two more jars just like it in the lab.”

  Of course, his lab also contained specimen jars of the sort I’d learned to avoid examining too closely. He collected it all for his research, from tissue samples to liver extracts.

  I scanned his autopsy report. “So it was the lack of tattooing around the bullet wound that led you to believe suicide was inconsistent?”

  “Exactly.” Dr. Jennings pointed to the relevant section of the autopsy with his pen. “If Allan Hartt had committed suicide, then the gun would have discharged within inches of his head. That leaves powder marks that we describe as ‘tattooing’ around the wound. But Hartt’s wound showed no sign of that, nor did the pillowcase on his head, indicating that the gun was fired from at least a foot away—physically impossible.”

  I let Isabella explain the details of what we had discovered at Barnard this morning.

  “So blackmail is involved—and Alistair is somehow mixed up in it. Why am I not surprised?” Mulvaney asked with a roll of his eyes.

  “The four men are connected. Now three of them are dead,” I said simply.

  “Have you spoken with Alistair?” Mulvaney asked.

  Isabella shook her head. “I can’t reach him. I have contacted all of his close friends and colleagues. No one knows where he is, including those friends with whom he often stays while in Boston.�
��

  “You’ve got to try harder,” Mulvaney said, sitting up in alarm. “Not just for this case; for his own good.”

  “We plan to look through the papers in his study. He may have left a record of his itinerary,” I said. Not to mention anything else that would help me figure out what he was mixed up in.

  “Perhaps Mrs. Sinclair can do that, without your help. I need you back on Drayson,” Mulvaney said.

  “No one has reported seeing him?” I asked.

  Mulvaney shook his head. “Plenty of other developments, though. We located the print shop that created the pink flyer found in the aftermath of the Tombs bombing. And guess who had the flyer made up?” He grinned. “China Rose. We had her picked up yesterday for questioning. And while Funke hasn’t yet made a positive identification, I’m guessing that she’s also the exotic-looking woman with our Swedish friend the day he bought the Browning pistol used to kill Angus Porter. Looks like the commissioner was right: it’s one large conspiracy.”

  “A large conspiracy where the pieces don’t fit together,” I said.

  “And where the murders of these other three men are playing a role we don’t understand,” Isabella added.

  “I gave you a morning. It’s all I can spare.” Mulvaney made a hard square of his jaw.

  “And in just hours,” I countered, “we found compelling evidence linking Allan Hartt to both murdered judges. All three men were in the same Harvard Law class. All three were being blackmailed.”

  Isabella interrupted me. “And probably Alistair, too—though both of you are too polite to say so in front of me. He’s like a father to me and I’m worried about him. I need Simon to solve this case, or Alistair will never be safe.”

  A flash of sympathy crossed Mulvaney’s face, for he genuinely liked Isabella. “I guess we can spare a little more time. Ziele, why don’t you put together a comprehensive evidence chart? Maybe organizing our evidence will help us to see the gaps in our knowledge.”

  “Use my chalkboard,” Dr. Jennings urged. “You can erase my own notations.”