“Prudence?”
“Sorry, I must have drifted off for a moment. What was it you were asking, Geoffrey?” She wondered if Josiah had slipped a tot of whiskey into her tea to make her thoughts wander away like that. She put teacup and saucer on the table in front of her and willed herself to pay attention. Geoffrey was reading down the list of De Vries’s household staff. When had he picked it up?
“Twenty-five servants,” he said. “How many are in your household, Prudence?”
“Half that number. But mine is a very modest establishment.”
“Ned thinks the shirt and socks our occasional shop assistant wore when he was murdered came from the kind of secondhand store that specializes in buying used clothing from men in the upper echelons of society. Their valets sell the items as one of the perks of the job.”
“I remember my father passing on some of his suits, but I believe he earmarked them for charitable donations,” Prudence said. “Though now that I think about it, some things he might have just given to whoever was dressing him that season.”
“Do you have the name of William De Vries’s valet?” Geoffrey asked.
“Connections?” Ned asked.
“Someone in that house had to have been involved,” Geoffrey said. “I don’t know who or how yet, but I have a gut feeling that one connection will lead to another. They usually do.”
“Carpenter and the diamonds,” Ned summarized. “Connected by the stone Prudence so cleverly found. A man calling himself Vincent Reynolds and Carpenter again. Connected by Jimmy the sweeper boy and Mama Oshia. And Carpenter and Reynolds themselves, connected by violent deaths within days of each other.”
“Someone is very worried,” Geoffrey theorized. “And doing whatever he can to eliminate anyone who could point the finger at him.”
“There are two names listed here as valets,” Prudence said. “I wasn’t expecting that. Both of them still apparently employed in the De Vries household.” She held out the agency list from which she was reading. “There’s always a notation when a servant leaves or changes his post.”
“That’s odd,” Ned commented, but he didn’t suggest that Prudence might have made a mistake. She never did.
“Lena De Vries has a son by her first marriage,” Prudence said, pulling from her skirt pocket the small notebook in which she jotted down items she wanted to remember. “Aunt Gillian made a rather embarrassing reference to him while we were there this morning. I remember Lena telling the butler to inform the cook that her luncheon would be delayed, and then when I began to apologize for disrupting the routine of her staff, she said it wasn’t important because the midday meal was usually taken en famille. William apparently often dines at a restaurant with clients.” She paged rapidly through the most recent pages. “Here it is. I don’t know why I wrote it down, but I did. En famille implies more than one person in an informal setting. My French governess insisted on using the right expression to define every situation.”
“Go on.” Geoffrey knew where this thread was leading, but he would give Prudence the pleasure and reward of following it to its end.
“If he lives in the house with William and Lena, the second valet could be his. Which would give us two servants selling their master’s old clothes.”
“What can you tell us about this son?” Ned asked.
“Obviously not enough,” Prudence replied. “We knew one another as children, but I saw very little of him once he went away to Harvard. Whitley was Lena’s surname when she was widowed, so unless William adopted him, it wouldn’t have been changed when she remarried. His first name is Morgan.”
The recently installed telephone in the outer office rang, still such an unexpected noise that all heads turned to glare at the interruption.
“That was Mr. De Vries’s secretary. The police have been called,” Josiah announced a few moments later. “De Vries wants you to meet him at his home.”
“What’s happened?” Geoffrey asked, reaching for a key to lock the door of the conference room behind them as they decamped. He’d leave Vincent Reynolds’s clothing on the table, but it was better not to tempt Josiah into tidying up the evidence.
“Someone is dead. That’s all he was told.” Josiah’s hand tightened around the telephone receiver. He’d broken the connection, but hadn’t been able to pry his fingers from the instrument.
“Messy,” Prudence said. “You said it was going to be messy, Geoffrey.”
“This is one time I wish I hadn’t been right.”
CHAPTER 9
The police hadn’t bothered trying to conceal their presence outside the De Vries mansion on Fifth Avenue. A mortuary van was already pulled up at the curb, its team of horses patiently waiting for their burden to be loaded. Unlike most animals, they weren’t spooked by the smell of death; over the years they’d grown inured to it. A pair of uniformed patrolmen paced on the sidewalk to keep would-be onlookers moving along, and another pair guarded the front door. Every now and then a face appeared at one of the basement windows as a servant looked outside to see what, if anything, was going on. So far, nothing.
Everyone was waiting for Mr. William De Vries’s arrival and the firestorm that was certain to erupt when he walked into his home and found policemen had invaded his privacy.
* * *
“I hired you to find out what happened to my wife’s diamonds,” stormed De Vries. “How in the name of all that’s holy could you have allowed something like this to happen?” He tore the cashmere scarf from around his neck and hurled bowler hat, overcoat, and gloves onto the floor before the butler could help him out of them. Face reddened by fury and the cold December air, he stalked toward the closed parlor door without waiting for an answer.
“Detective Phelan is upstairs, waiting for the medical examiner,” Geoffrey said calmly. He and Prudence had arrived only minutes before their client, but it had been time enough to speak quietly to the butler. “Shall we join them? Miss MacKenzie has gone to see if there is anything she can do for Mrs. De Vries.”
“How could you have allowed this to happen?” De Vries repeated, turning around to confront Geoffrey again. “Did you see the fools gathering on the sidewalk outside? It will be in all the papers this afternoon.”
“That can’t be helped. The New York newspapers are a world of their own.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone has his price.” Over a lifetime of accumulating enormous wealth, William had bought influence and anonymity too many times to believe he was now going to be flung without recourse into the court of public scrutiny and opinion. “Damn the man!”
“His name is Leonard Abbott,” the butler told Geoffrey in answer to his low-voiced question. “He started as a footman, then added valet to his duties, though I didn’t consider him fully trained yet.”
“And he hanged himself in the attic?”
“One of the maids found him when the housekeeper sent her up to look for more blankets for the staff bedrooms.” He didn’t have to add that the tiny servant rooms directly under the roof were frigid in the winter, uncomfortably hot in summer.
“I’m going up,” Geoffrey said. “Whether you come with me is your affair, Mr. De Vries, but as the man’s employer, you will almost certainly be called upon to make an identification of the body.”
Geoffrey kept his face carefully neutral. In the last few minutes he had decided that his client was inherently unlikable. This William De Vries bore little resemblance to the one who had sat in the Hunter and MacKenzie offices less than a week ago, recalling his past friendship with Prudence’s father and proclaiming his trust in the judge’s daughter and her partner. Definitely not the same concerned husband who had expressed dismay at his wife’s assumption of guilt over circumstances beyond her control. Damn the man, he had said. No compassion for a servant so demonstrably unhappy that he had taken his own life.
Entry to the storage attics was along a narrow passageway at one end of the fourth-floor hallway where the servants’ bedrooms wer
e located. Geoffrey heard voices and sounds of movement as he approached, William De Vries lumbering irately in his wake. They hadn’t passed a single member of the household staff on the way up. Likely they were all gathered in the servants’ hall in the basement, cups of tea or coffee clutched in their hands as they tried to make sense out of a death none of them could understand or have anticipated.
Leonard Abbott’s body hadn’t been cut down yet from the beam over which he’d slung the rope that choked him to death. An oval window in the end wall of the attic flooded the space with gray, wintry light. Enough so that no detail was lost on the men examining the scene and the two men who came to an abrupt halt in the doorway. De Vries would have pushed his way in, but Geoffrey’s outstretched arm blocked his way.
Detective Steven Phelan and two uniformed officers stood in a half circle staring at the still figure whose feet dangled above an overturned three-legged stool. One of the man’s hands clutched at his throat, fingers caught in the circle of rope around his neck. The other hand flopped uselessly by his side. A stench of loosened bowels filled the air and a puddle of urine stained the floorboards. He was dressed in a cheap brown tweed suit, not the livery worn by a servant on duty. Most household staff, except on their afternoons off, wore livery or a uniform from the time they got up until they went to bed.
“So the client you were at such pains to conceal is William De Vries,” Phelan said, spotting Geoffrey in the doorway. “You’ll have to tell me what he’s hired you for, you know, and what brought you and your partner to Carpenter’s jewelry store. This changes everything.” He gestured at the corpse, setting it to swinging slowly as one hand brushed against a leg.
“Whatever you have to say can be addressed directly to me, Detective,” De Vries barked. He pushed past Geoffrey, well into the attic. “Get the body out of my house. I don’t want the maids seeing it.”
“Would you be so kind as to identify the deceased, sir?” Phelan touched his hat, but did not remove it.
“You know perfectly well who he is. The butler’s already told you.”
“Nevertheless. We need a formal identification from next of kin or someone in authority.”
“His name is Leonard Abbott. He was hired as a footman two years ago.” De Vries’s tone of voice was peremptory and dismissive.
“I understand he was also doing the duties of a valet,” Geoffrey said.
“Temporarily. Filling in, so to speak, until a suitably trained valet could be found.”
“Did you find his services inadequate then?” Geoffrey asked. He could well imagine what the dead man might have said about his employer.
“I wouldn’t have put up with the likes of him. My valet has been with me for ten years or more. Trained in England.”
And every time he threatens to leave, you raise his salary. There were men in society whose valets made many times what anyone else on their staffs did. Blackmail for putting up with foulmouthed outbursts of temper and the keeping of marital and extramarital secrets.
“I’ll require a complete list of family members living in the house,” Detective Phelan said. He nodded toward one of the policemen, who immediately took out his notebook and a pencil stub.
“I fail to see that it’s any of your business,” De Vries snarled. “This is a servant who’s chosen the coward’s way out of whatever difficulty he found himself in. It has nothing to do with the family.”
“We’ll need to speak to everyone the dead man might have come in contact with,” Phelan insisted. “Upstairs as well as below.” He took a knife out of his pocket and flicked open the blade. “Sometimes a valet and his master share secrets they’d rather no one else know. Or so I’m told.”
“Abbott saw to my stepson and my nephew,” De Vries conceded. “But I doubt if either of them can tell you anything useful.”
“And why would that be?”
“We’re not in the habit of consorting with our servants, Detective.” De Vries was making it obvious that an unbreachable gulf existed between the police and New York City’s upper class, one Phelan would do well to consider before attempting to push his way into an arena where he did not belong. “Now get this wretched creature out of my house!” He turned on his heel, shoved Geoffrey out of the way, and stormed off down the corridor.
They heard his heavy footsteps on the uncarpeted stairs leading to the servants’ quarters, then the muffled thud of his descent into the opulent family rooms. He left behind the scent of expensive imported English cologne and the sour residue of his anger. De Vries was not a man who would be trifled with, especially not in his own house.
“Do you know these two young men he mentioned?” Phelan asked.
Geoffrey shrugged. He wasn’t about to give away any information, even when he didn’t have much to begin with. The New York City Police Department was like a sieve. And he was still working for William De Vries. Both of them had signed a contract.
The policeman who had been taking notes joined his partner beside the corpse. They held it by legs and torso while Phelan stretched to cut the rope. Leonard Abbott had been a slight fellow; his thin body was easily lowered to the floor.
“The doc should have been here by now,” Phelan said, twisting the dead man’s head from left to right. “But he doesn’t always show up. And I don’t think we need him to tell us what happened here.” He rifled through the valet’s trouser pockets, removing a dirty handkerchief, a few coins, a small black comb, a package of W. Duke Sons & Co. cigarettes, and an expensive-looking gold and tortoiseshell snuffbox.
“This didn’t belong to him,” Phelan said, opening the snuffbox. He sniffed a pinch of the white powder it contained. “Good stuff. Not cut by much. He shouldn’t have been able to afford a snuffbox like that on what he was being paid.” He shoved it into his jacket pocket without offering it to Geoffrey to examine. “But maybe that’s why you showed up at Eighteenth Street. Was Abbott fencing the odd bit of jewelry he could lift from his mistress’s boudoir? Is that why De Vries hired you?”
Geoffrey turned away without answering. Phelan was edging uncomfortably close to his case.
Two attendants from the mortuary van appeared with a canvas sling on which to carry the body down the three flights to the ground floor. They conferred briefly with Detective Phelan, complaining that the uncarpeted staircases used by the servants were slippery and too narrow to accommodate them and their burden without the serious possibility of dropping the corpse to tumble its way unceremoniously toward the waiting wagon. Phelan told them to take it through the family rooms and hallways. One of the policemen went ahead to make sure they were empty while Leonard Abbott was trundled through the house and out across the busy Fifth Avenue sidewalk.
Phelan watched them go with a grim smile on his face. He hadn’t missed the condescension in William De Vries’s voice and attitude. There was nothing he could do about it except continue the investigation as fully and annoyingly as he could.
“The bedrooms have name cards on the doors,” he muttered, gesturing to the remaining uniformed officer to find the one where the dead man had slept. He nudged the three-legged stool with his booted foot, then stood for a moment looking speculatively at the death scene. As if imagining the victim entering the attic, rope in hand, locating something to stand on, securing the noose around his neck, hesitating, weeping perhaps with the inevitability of what he had come to do. Kicking himself off into eternal damnation.
Geoffrey watched, not saying a word, counting on the possibility that Phelan would allow De Vries’s private investigator into the case to aggravate the man. And because he sensed a connection between Abbott and Carpenter, but couldn’t yet prove it.
He ticked off the facts he’d repeat to Prudence as soon as she was free to leave Lena De Vries. There was no doubt in his mind that the case was escalating at an alarmingly fast rate. The challenge would lie in maneuvering behind the scenes, milking Phelan for every bit of information he was worth, and tracking down some of the most famous dia
monds in the world while concealing from the police detective and New York City’s shrewd reporters what he and Prudence were really doing.
He expected Phelan to want to keep the suicide and the valet’s implied guilt of other crimes alive in the press. De Vries had insulted and demeaned him, never a wise thing to do when you had the kind of newspaper contacts every cop cultivated.
“I’ve located his room, sir. Third on the left. Nothing much to see.”
The policeman had left the dead man’s door cracked open. Inside was a narrow metal cot made up with worn sheets and thin blankets. A candle stood on a battered bedside table, an equally scarred chest of drawers against one wall. A row of hooks took the place of a wardrobe, a faded rag rug lay beside the bed, and a single chair held a neatly folded nightshirt. A small round window beneath the eaves let in light and a wintry draft. What looked like a scrap of old toweling had been tacked over the window against the cold, then allowed to fall loosely against the wall.
It was as dreary and unwelcoming a room as Geoffrey had ever seen. Cold, barren, devoid of the warmth of a happy human presence. He wondered if all the servants’ rooms were this bleak.
Phelan pulled open the drawers of the chest, tossing the contents onto the floor, doing the same with the sheets and blankets of the bed and the few garments hanging from the wall hooks. He overturned the mattress, beckoning to Geoffrey when a brown envelope fell onto the springs. “I’d like to hear your client explain this,” he chortled, shaking out a small snowstorm of what appeared to be betting slips and IOUs. “No name on any of these.” He rifled quickly through the bits of paper. “Not even initials.”
“It’s enough that they’ve been marked by the bookie,” Geoffrey commented, turning one of them over, noting that the odds and amount of the bet had been written in ink, not pencil.
“There’s too many bets here for someone barely earning enough walking around money to make his days off worthwhile,” Phelan said.
Abbott may have aspired to be a valet, but he was still learning, still being paid the low wage of a footman. Shelter and decent meals were the chief attractions of a servant’s life, that and the knowledge that unless he was stupid enough to be caught for thievery or demonstrated unacceptable laziness, the job was better proof against firing than anything he could find on the docks, in the slaughterhouses, or on a factory floor. And you were less likely to lose a foot or a hand in service than working where safety was of no consideration when measured against profit.
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