Death, Diamonds, and Deception

by Rosemary Simpson

  “I think it’s time for a cup of tea,” Lady Rotherton declared.

  When she went into the dining room, Lena wasn’t there.

  * * *

  “He’s bolted,” Geoffrey said, reading the note Amos Lang had had one of Danny Dennis’s street urchins deliver.

  It was late on the Monday afternoon following Morgan’s viewing and interment on Saturday. According to Damien Rosarlo, staked out opposite the De Vries mansion, Lena had not left the house, not even pulled aside a curtain as far as he could tell.

  A steady stream of sweeper boys ran messages back and forth between Geoffrey and his ex-Pinkertons. The street urchins were all wearing warm coats, sturdy boots, and woolen gloves and hats. Josiah ordered sandwiches from the bar on the corner every lunch hour, handing them out at the same time as he made sure the tough little runners were well protected against the elements.

  The storm that had contributed to Morgan’s death had passed, leaving behind freezing air and bright blue skies.

  “Does Amos say where he thinks he’s going?” Prudence asked.

  “To the train station,” Geoffrey replied. “Carrying a suitcase. Mr. Jasper Owens isn’t coming back. We’ll let him buy a ticket and get aboard, but he won’t leave the depot. Amos will see to that.”

  “If Lena is to join him, she should be leaving the house any time now,” Prudence said. “She can’t take her own carriage and the trolleys are undependable. She’ll have to hail a cab.”

  “Danny Dennis and Mr. Washington will be the first vehicle she’ll see at the curb.”

  But although Geoffrey and Prudence paced their offices for another two hours, Lena De Vries remained shut up inside her husband’s Fifth Avenue mansion.

  Jasper Owens, with no evidence against him to prove he was part of the diamond theft, had to be allowed to take a late train out of the city.

  “He bought a ticket to Chicago,” Amos told them. “The man had money in his wallet.”

  “But no sapphire ring in his pocket,” Prudence said.

  “He sold it this morning,” Amos confirmed. “I got a quick look at it when he made the transaction. It was a beautiful piece of jewelry. He got a lot for it. Enough to carry him to San Francisco if Chicago is too close for comfort.”

  “Maybe we were wrong,” Prudence fretted. “Perhaps Lena never had any romantic connection to him. He could be a friend of Morgan’s, as she said. Giving him the ring might have been a last homage to her son. She couldn’t do any more for him, but she could help his crony.”

  When she confided that possibility to Lady Rotherton over dinner that night, Prudence’s aunt scoffed.

  “Don’t call off the man you’ve got on Fifth Avenue,” she advised. “Not yet.”

  * * *

  Lena left the next morning, after William had departed for his office and hours before he could be expected home for lunch. If he wasn’t dining out with clients that day.

  She was dressed in mourning black and veiled hat, carrying one small suitcase and moving quickly down the steps and across the sidewalk. Danny Dennis secured the suitcase to the back of the hansom and mouthed the destination he’d been given to Damien Rosarlo, who immediately set out for the Hunter and MacKenzie offices. Mrs. De Vries would be unable to shake off Danny Dennis’s runners inside the train station, and Mr. Washington could be depended upon to take his time getting there.

  * * *

  Lena bought her ticket and then went to the platform to wait. Passengers eddied around her as she stood alone in the crowd, suitcase at her feet, head swiveling anxiously as the train’s scheduled departure time grew closer and closer.

  No one joined her.

  Conductors and porters wove their way along the track, urging passengers to board, loading luggage, helping ladies mount the car steps.

  Gradually the mass of people thinned out. Friends and relatives of departing travelers backed away from the train and its billowing clouds of smoky steam, waving good-byes, calling out farewells.

  Lena remained frozen in place.

  “It’s time to board, miss,” a porter said. He reached for Lena’s bag, but she waved him off.

  Tears glittered in her eyes.

  From where they stood behind a pillar, Geoffrey and Prudence watched as Lena slowly realized that she had been abandoned. Used and callously discarded as soon as her usefulness was over.

  After the train had left the platform to begin its westward journey, Lena tore in half the ticket she had never relinquished and let the pieces flutter to her feet. She turned toward the station’s massive waiting hall, leaving the suitcase in place behind her.

  “I’ll get it,” Geoffrey said.

  Prudence nodded, eyes fixed on the tragic figure moving blindly back toward the life she had thought to escape. When she reached Lena’s side and touched her arm, the other woman gripped Prudence’s hand convulsively, but did not speak.

  What was there to say?

  * * *

  “We’ll leave the suitcase in the cab,” Geoffrey explained to Prudence. “After the butler has let us in, Danny Dennis will carry it up the steps. When I’m sure there’s no one in the entry hall, I’ll open the door. You’ll have to be quick about it. Up the stairs to her bedroom and get it unpacked and put away as fast as you can. Are you certain no one saw you leave, Mrs. De Vries?”

  “I’m positive. I planned it out very carefully. But I never thought I’d be returning.” Lena no longer wore the stunned look of incredulity that Prudence had noted when she took her arm in Grand Central Depot. This was a woman who seemed able to weather the storms and disappointments of her life with remarkable resilience. She was pale but calm. Fatalistically controlled. Her son was dead; the lover she trusted had cruelly deceived her. “I’ll instruct our butler that Taylor need not attend me until after my guests have departed. She won’t interrupt us. She’ll stay in the servants’ hall until I ring for her.”

  “Are you expecting William home for luncheon?” Geoffrey asked.

  “I didn’t see him this morning, but he’ll have left word with the butler. My instinct says that he’ll want to avoid me for a few days. He knows I blame him for Morgan’s death. But he thinks I’ll forgive him.”

  “And will you?” Prudence asked. How could you ever forgive a man whose heartless disregard for human frailty robbed his stepson of any chance to redeem his wasted life?

  Lena didn’t answer.

  * * *

  “He had no resources of his own,” Lena began. “I gave him pieces of jewelry to sell. Whatever I thought was insignificant enough so William wouldn’t notice it was gone. The money was supposed to give us a start together in the West until we could find a lawyer who would initiate divorce proceedings. We thought we’d try Denver. William would never think of looking for me there.”

  Prudence hadn’t asked Lena to explain why she had carried a suitcase to Grand Central Depot that morning. Unaccompanied. They’d unpacked Lena’s clothes, stowed the valise in her dressing room, and come down to the parlor where Geoffrey waited.

  As soon as the parlor door closed behind them, the story had started pouring out of Lena as though she were powerless to stop it. She had to tell someone.

  “People were saying at Morgan’s funeral that he’d lost money that wasn’t his own,” Geoffrey said. “And that was why he drank himself into insensibility.”

  “They were right. William swore he’d fire whoever leaked the truth, but I told him not to bother. In the end, there are no secrets in society that someone doesn’t uncover. He should know that.”

  “When did Mr. Owens learn that it was your money Morgan had lost, that you were virtually penniless?” Geoffrey was trying to spare Prudence the task of asking the hard questions. It would be enough if she could soften the blows he was dealing.

  “I think he knew before he came to the viewing. I can’t be sure, but I suspect he did because he asked me for more jewelry to pawn. Not asked, demanded. As if he reckoned that since he could no longer count
on a fortune sometime in the future, he might as well get what he could right now.”

  “Was he behaving differently?” Prudence asked.

  “Not so I noticed. And I was terrified that William would guess who he was. Pretending he was Morgan’s friend was stretching things because Jasper is at least twenty years older than my son. That’s why I came up with the idea that the two had met at the Keeley Institute. Men of all ages take the Gold Cure.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. De Vries,” Prudence said.

  “You might as well call me Lena. You know all of my secrets.” A wan smile curved across her lips, making her appear both frail and resolved.

  “The sapphire ring was valuable,” Geoffrey said. “Your husband is bound to ask why you’ve stopped wearing it.”

  “It’s not fair to blame a crime on a dead man, but that’s what I’ll do. That ring and every other piece Jasper sold. I don’t know how the Tiffany ring box ended up in Leonard Abbott’s room, but in William’s mind he’s already a thief. I’ll simply add to the number of things he allegedly stole. And if my husband questions me about not knowing they were missing, I can truthfully tell him that worry over Morgan had me so anxious and distracted that I didn’t notice half of what was going on around me. He’ll believe it.”

  Why did you come back? Why are you so determined to stay? Prudence wanted to ask.

  But she did not dare. They were the kind of questions to which Aunt Gillian wouldn’t hesitate to demand answers, but Prudence wasn’t as unyielding as Lady Rotherton.

  It was enough to witness the desolate sorrow on Lena’s face and the fierce struggle she was waging to keep her back straight, tears from her eyes, and misery from carving furrows of agony on her cheeks.

  CHAPTER 21

  “I could have turned this over to the servants to accomplish,” Lena De Vries said, standing woebegone and despondent in her son’s room. She looked around as though unable to decide where to begin. “But I couldn’t bear the thought of it.”

  “William really ordered you to get rid of everything?” Prudence asked.

  “I’m not surprised.” Lady Rotherton peeled off her gloves and unpinned her hat. “But it’s not the kind of thing a mother should ever have to do alone. You were right to send for us.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “We could start with the clothes,” Prudence suggested. She remembered from her father’s death that disposing of the garments he had worn was by far the hardest thing to do; they were permeated with his familiar aroma of cigars and bay rum shaving lotion. Sorting through her friend Eleanor Dickson’s trousseau had been almost equally difficult because that death, barely seven months ago, had been so senseless. If she’d learned anything from those two experiences, it was that it was best to tackle the worst of it first. Before energy flagged and emotions erupted into tears.

  Lady Rotherton closed the bedroom door.

  “We might need some help, Aunt Gillian,” Prudence said. She was thinking of the boxes that would have to be labeled and hauled away.

  “Later. After we’ve gone through everything. I think it’s best that things remain private until then.”

  “There’s nothing to be found that we don’t already know about,” Lena said. “William kept track of every detail of my son’s transgressions. Morgan has no more secrets from me.”

  “Everyone has secrets,” Lady Rotherton maintained. “Even the dead.”

  She opened the armoire door, scanned the row of suits hanging neatly from padded hangers, and took out a dark brown jacket and pants frayed around the cuffs. “The valet who was supposedly looking after him was not doing a very good job,” she sniffed. “These pants should have been turned and mended before being hung back in the armoire ready to wear again. Better still, they should never have gone back at all.”

  “William didn’t pay Morgan’s tailor bill,” Lena said, taking the trousers from Lady Rotherton and smoothing the worn cuffs with motherly affection.

  “We haven’t talked about Morgan’s trust fund from his father.” Prudence set a stack of starched and ironed shirts on the bed.

  “It was more than adequate to begin with,” Lena said. “Morgan could have lived on it quite comfortably for the rest of his life if he’d turned the management over to a competent investment consultant.”

  “Why didn’t he?” Lady Rotherton asked. She herself had never trusted anyone else to oversee her fortune. She’d educated herself in the ways of finance and profited handsomely from what she’d learned, never gambling on anything but a sure bet. Which wasn’t really speculating at all.

  “He felt he had to prove himself to William,” Lena explained. “If his stepfather was going to trust him with the firm’s clients and assets, he had to show that he could double or triple his own holdings. It was a challenge he couldn’t resist.”

  “But the drinking impaired his judgment, so the more he lost, the greater and more foolish the chances he took,” Lady Rotherton said. She shook her head over the condition of the jacket pockets she was rifling through. “I’ve seen it before. Many times. London is full of second and third sons whose lack of prospects doesn’t keep them from throwing good money after bad. They’re a pitiful lot. The only hope is that their elder brothers will die or an heiress will become besotted and persuade her parents to make the match.”

  “It’s not much different here, Aunt Gillian,” Prudence said. “Except that everything doesn’t automatically go to the eldest son. But a father can write a wastrel out of his will, if he wants. Or younger sons can contest the bequests. There are always hungry suitors angling for wealthy debutantes.”

  “What’s this?” Lady Rotherton said, holding something compact and leather bound in her hand. “Is this Morgan’s diary, Lena?”

  “He had a larger appointment book for business. But I remember a smaller one he kept for personal notes. I think that must be it. May I see?”

  Lady Rotherton passed it to Morgan’s mother, staying close as Lena turned the pages. “Nothing,” she concluded when Lena had finished. “An incomplete record of sums he’s won and lost, and a few scribbles here and there.”

  Lena handed the book to Prudence, who sat down in Morgan’s easy chair to go through it. Page by page. Slowly. Taking nothing for granted. The way a trained Pinkerton approached documents. “He’s written Aubrey’s name. With a question mark after it,” she said. “Just once. Leonard Abbott’s. And here’s Everett’s name. Again with a question mark. Toward the end of whatever record he was keeping. After all the numbers he’s added up and scratched through. In fact the names are the last things he wrote, except for a page that’s been torn out.”

  “Run a pencil across the next page,” Lady Rotherton instructed. “That’s how you discover who’s careless enough to write love notes in the library at a house party. They often leave an impression on the blotter. Sometimes you can read the whole thing.”

  “Not this time, Aunt Gillian,” Prudence said. When Lena nodded permission, she slipped the notebook into her reticule for Geoffrey to look at later.

  Morgan’s small personal items were inexpensive and limited. Two pairs of moderately priced cuff links, a cigar trimmer, a tarnished silver money clip. A pair of well-worn hairbrushes, an unused mustache trimmer, and a leather-handled shoehorn. Toothbrush in a glass, a tin of tooth powder beside it. Macassar oil for his hair, an almost empty bottle of the bay rum cologne worn by so many men.

  “We buried him with his Harvard ring,” Lena said, fingering the empty money clip.

  “Is this all he had?” Lady Rotherton asked. “It’s not much for a young man of his social standing.”

  “He must have sold his father’s cuff links. They were solid gold. And there was a gold cigar case also.” Lena straightened her shoulders. “He was desperate toward the end.”

  “This does not look like the lair of a diamond thief,” Lady Rotherton declared. She’d emptied the armoire and piled the clothes onto the bed. “Everything I touched ne
eded to be mended or discarded. Even his evening clothes were a disgrace.”

  “He didn’t steal the diamonds,” Lena said obstinately. “He told me he didn’t, and I believe him.”

  “Of course he didn’t,” Lady Rotherton snapped. “No young man could resist the lure of new suits to entice the ladies into his net. If he’d taken the diamonds, we wouldn’t be pawing through this miserable excuse for a decent wardrobe.”

  “Aunt Gillian!” Prudence exclaimed.

  “Lena knows I’m right. Don’t you, Lena?”

  “Morgan took pride in dressing well when he was at Harvard.”

  “His tailor bills were probably huge,” Lady Rotherton said.

  “I helped him out sometimes.” Lena smiled. “William never knew.”

  “And that was well before he’d lost the bulk of his trust fund, wasn’t it?”

  “They all spent as though there were no tomorrow,” Lena said. “All of those boys. They were from wealthy families and they’d never had to question where their next dollar was coming from. Life after Harvard was a never-ending round of debutante balls, soirees, and appearances at the opera. Their greatest fear was boredom. They partied madly to avoid it.”

  “Surely they worked?” Prudence was horrified at the notion of a crowd of well-educated ne’er-do-wells squandering their lives and fortunes in the pursuit of pleasure.

  “These are the heirs, Prudence,” Lady Rotherton said. “Their fathers and grandfathers were the moguls. All these children have learned to do is spend.”

  “Not all of them, Lady Rotherton,” Lena said. “I grant you that Morgan seemed determined to run with the worst of their type, but many of the friends he made at Harvard have taken on the responsibilities they were primed to accept. I know their families.”

  “You’re talking about Everett Rinehart, aren’t you?” Prudence asked.

  “I suppose I am. Comparing him to Morgan became de rigueur in this household. My husband is proud of his sister’s son. Deservedly so. He boasts that Everett takes after the De Vries side of the family. Blood to blood, as they say.”