“The son he never had,” Lady Rotherton declared.
* * *
“Shall we tell William that we’re going to reopen the case?” Prudence asked. She felt as though she were carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. “He’ll take it better from you than from me.”
“This development occurred after he ceased being our client,” Geoffrey reminded her. “We were investigating on our own, tying up the loose ends William preferred to ignore.”
“I wish you’d been able to go through Morgan’s clothes the way Aunt Gillian and I did, Geoffrey. It was so obvious he’d spent little or no money on his wardrobe in a very long time. Almost everything he owned was worn and frayed. Not quite noticeable to the casual eye, but he soon would have been forced to incur considerable expense at a good tailor. A gentleman in banking can’t afford to look shabby.”
For once Josiah had nothing to add. He continued to take notes in his Gregg shorthand, amazed that any young swell would neglect his appearance.
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Geoffrey commented. “He was on his way to being eased out of the banking and investment businesses, and he had to have known it. He continued playing the game to some extent, showing up at his stepfather’s offices and managing a few portfolios, with Everett’s help and always under his supervision, but he surely understood that his stepfather knew he hadn’t the gift of making money. Nothing he touched turned to gold.”
“Including the South Dakota mine whose ore samples were probably salted,” Prudence said. William had not spared Lena the details of how Morgan lost the last of his fortune and all of his mother’s.
“Back to the thorny issue of whether we tell De Vries that the investigation has to be reopened,” Geoffrey said.
“He won’t take it well,” Prudence predicted. “It suits him to believe Morgan was the thief and that with his death, the whole incident can be put to rest.”
“The jeweler to whom the stones were sold has been murdered, the runner who worked for that jeweler was beaten senseless before he died, and a servant in the De Vries house either committed suicide or his hanging was made to look as though he had taken his own life. Not one of those deaths has been satisfactorily resolved.”
“Detective Phelan closed all three of the cases.”
“Either he or his superiors were paid off. Probably both.”
“He hasn’t always been a bad cop. Or is it copper?” Prudence asked. She wasn’t consistently sure about the slang Geoffrey used without thinking twice about it.
“Either one will do. And you’re right, Phelan isn’t as bad as I’ve made him out to be. If a bribe isn’t involved he’ll work a case as hard and honestly as he can. But nobody cares too much about ordinary crime in this city. And the casual killings of men whose bodies are likely to end up in the trenches of Hart Island are definitely ordinary by every definition of the term.”
“I think we owe it to Morgan and especially to Lena to inform William that we are as convinced now of Morgan’s innocence as we once were suspicious of his guilt. It will make Lena’s life easier to bear if she can believe that someone is working to clear her son’s name.”
“Did she tell you why she went back?” Geoffrey asked. “Why she didn’t get on that train and set off somewhere on her own?”
“We may have to wait a while for the answer to that question,” Prudence said. “And we might never know.”
“I’ll make an appointment to see William at his office,” Geoffrey said. He wasn’t happy about it, but Prudence was right. If they were to work to exonerate Morgan postmortem, William deserved to know about it. He might decide not to cooperate, and he almost certainly would not underwrite their investigation, but going behind his back was sure to enrage him.
It was never a good idea to bait openly a man who was both wealthy and powerful.
* * *
The offices of the investment bank of De Vries & Co. were luxurious, dim, and silent. Thick carpeting muffled footsteps, capable receptionists and secretaries steered clients where they needed to go, and private consultations took place behind heavy mahogany doors. The building itself was five stories tall, and there were rumors that De Vries was considering installing one of the ascending rooms like that operating in the Lord & Taylor department store. It would be equipped with padded benches, a chandelier, and gold-framed mirrors on three walls. Elevators, they were being called now, though some doubted their safety and preferred a solid staircase. For that very reason, the firm’s senior officers conducted their business on the first two floors. Older wealthy clients tended to be robustly rotund if they were male, tightly corseted and averse to anything resembling exercise if female.
Geoffrey did not make an appointment with William De Vries, reasoning that Lena’s husband might, if given time to think about it, guess at the reason for his visit and refuse to see him. They had parted amicably when De Vries dispensed with the further services of Hunter and MacKenzie; Geoffrey’s presence would only bring up memories of the recent unpleasantness that were best forgotten. But at the same time, Geoffrey and William were both gentlemen, and no gentleman was ever deliberately ungracious toward another. Without cause.
William listened politely while Geoffrey laid out the reasons he and Prudence had decided that Morgan could not possibly have engineered and carried out the theft of Lena’s Marie Antoinette diamonds. He ended his recital with a description of the clothing Prudence, Lady Rotherton, and Lena had meticulously prepared for donation to charity.
“They were quite certain that none of the garments was newly purchased,” he concluded, “and that since Morgan had been somewhat of a dandy when he was at Harvard, he would not have allowed his wardrobe to fall out of fashion and even into disrepair for anything less than a seriously embarrassing shortage of funds.”
“He gambled away every last penny he had,” William said, puffing furiously on the cigar clamped between his teeth. “Threw away his mother’s fortune without a care for her welfare. A man like that is perfectly capable of losing thousands of dollars on the turn of a single card. He was as worthless as they come. Lena will never admit it, of course, but she’s well rid of him.”
“I hardly think any mother would feel that way about a dead child.”
“I know what you’ve come for, Mr. Hunter, and I am astounded that you should think for a moment I would countenance any attempt at rehabilitating the reputation of a wastrel like Morgan Whitley. A wastrel, a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a drunkard—” William ran out of names to call his stepson. His face had flushed a deep red and the hand now holding his cigar trembled. “I won’t have it. You are not, I repeat not, to involve my family in anything that will result in another smear on my name.”
“I wasn’t aware that had happened,” Geoffrey said calmly.
“It was all over the papers when that valet chose to put a rope around his neck in the attic of my home. Reporters and gawkers milled around outside for days, and I can only describe the speculation in the newspapers as publicly injurious. I made sure Lena was not exposed to any of it.”
“It’s partly for your wife’s sake that we’re doing it,” Geoffrey reasoned. The other rationale, which he forbore from mentioning, was the simple justice of clearing an innocent man of suspicion of a crime he had not committed.
“Leave her out of this. The sooner she forgets she ever gave birth to that miscreant the better.”
“Surely you don’t mean that.”
“I never say what I don’t mean,” William stormed, rising from behind his desk. “No gentleman interferes in the personal life of another gentleman. Not if he wishes to remain in society’s good graces.”
“My profession would seem to exclude me from that august company,” Geoffrey said. He stood, and for a moment wondered if William would commit the unpardonable affront of refusing to shake his hand. Decided not to push the financier that far. “I regret to have to inform you, Mr. De Vries, that Hunter and MacKenzie has decided to reopen the
case and to continue the investigation into the disappearance of your wife’s diamonds and the three deaths that appear to be linked to that crime. We will not rest until we have solved the theft and the murders.”
“I forbid it!” roared William De Vries.
“I’m afraid we will not be dissuaded.”
Geoffrey was back out on Fifth Avenue before William’s secretary knocked on his office door to inform him that his nephew was requesting a few moments of his time.
And found his employer sprawled on the floor beside his desk.
William’s body shook with spasms and one side of his face drooped into paralysis. His garbled speech was incomprehensible, he could not stand, and the fear in his eyes reflected knowledge of the horror that had descended upon him.
Any man of a certain age and girth could fall victim to an incapacitating weakness of heart or brain that ended his usefulness and his independence. There were no cures for the half-life that stretched before him if he survived the first few hours or days.
Now that nightmare had visited itself on one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful entrepreneurs.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
CHAPTER 22
Lena turned William’s bedroom into a sickroom, complete with twenty-four-hour nursing care and an array of nostrums that ranged from tincture of opium to quiet his spasmodic tremors to mustard plasters applied to the feet to draw excess blood from his damaged brain.
Three women clad in long, white nursing aprons saw to his needs in rotating four-hour shifts. Two of them had learned their skills during the late war, on the wards where wounded and dying men sometimes suffered for months before succumbing to their battlefield injuries or the contagions that raged through military hospitals. The third hoped to study at the New York Medical College and Hospital for Women as soon as she could persuade her outraged father to allow it. Or she turned twenty-one and no longer needed his permission.
The patient was unable to do anything for himself. Everything, from bathing and massaging his paralyzed limbs to cleaning the most intimate areas of his body, had to be done by someone else. William De Vries was as helpless as a newborn infant.
Except that deep in his eyes gleamed a spark of comprehension. He was conscious, aware of his surroundings, yet unable to speak or move. He could not even control the movements of his eyelids, which sometimes drooped like heavy curtains, and at other moments remained obstinately wide open as if touched by the rigor that comes to the body after death.
The nurses spoke in quiet, even tones, withdrawing into a corner of the large room or out into the hallway to discuss medical procedures and problems, even to exchange notes at the end of a shift. They understood that the mind of a paralyzed patient often absorbed what was being said and done around him. They had read horror and dismay in the eyes of mutilated soldiers unable to do more than lie on their backs and wait for death to release them from unanesthetized amputations, the sucking maws of greedy leeches, and the pitying condescension of healthy men. There was no reason to assume that the once masterful financier William De Vries was any less sentient than a farm boy drafted into the army against his will.
Lena sat by her husband for as many hours as she could tolerate the reek of the alcohol used to rub his legs and arms, the pervasive stench of loosened bowels that no amount of diaper changing could eliminate, and the acrid odor of the tonics spooned between his lips at regular intervals. Strong smells tortured Lena’s always delicate stomach these days; she frequently had to flee the sickroom with a handkerchief pressed to her nose and mouth. The nurses could hear the sound of vomiting from her room and they shook their heads in commiseration at her distress. Some women were made that way; there wasn’t anything they could do about it.
No matter how ill she had been, Lena always came back. Pale and trembling, but seemingly determined to do her duty. A wife’s place was at her husband’s bedside.
* * *
William had put severe restrictions on Geoffrey and Prudence, both before the footman’s suicide and afterward. The more convinced he became that his stepson was the guilty party, the less he wanted the detectives he’d hired to pry into the private lives of the people living under his roof.
But William was no longer their client. Lena had assumed that role. She had authorized Hunter and MacKenzie to do whatever it took to prove her son’s innocence, sealing the contract with a sizable advance against expenses and carte blanche to pursue any investigative thread that seemed promising.
They started with the servants they’d only spoken to briefly before William fired them.
“I make it out to be twenty-four total,” Prudence said, studying the list the housekeeper had given her. “Leonard Abbott would have brought it to twenty-five.”
“No one’s been hired to replace him?” Geoffrey asked.
“Apparently William’s valet is looking after Everett now. The nurses see to changing William’s nightgowns and linens. Another laundress comes every other day to help with the extra washing. I’ve added her to the list, but she doesn’t live in.”
“What do we know about the butler?”
“He was hired when William and the first Mrs. De Vries set up their household shortly before their marriage. The house was a wedding gift from William’s father, who also greatly expanded the banking and investment firm. The furnishings were supplied by Mrs. De Vries’s family.”
The butler’s name was Terence Harris. He had begun his life in service as a twelve-year-old boot boy, becoming a footman as soon as height and good looks qualified him to serve at table during formal dinners. He had graduated to the office of butler at the very young age of thirty-two. It was the pinnacle of a career; he never looked back and the only two moves he made were to larger and more important households. Now in his midfifties, he had settled in to the confirmed bachelorhood required of a senior servant.
“The hiring of Leonard Abbott might have been a mistake,” he admitted, “but it was Mr. Whitley who insisted that we take him on.”
“Do you know why?” Geoffrey asked. They had decided that he would question the male servants while Prudence occupied herself with the female members of staff.
“Leonard came with good references. He looked the part of a footman and he was punctilious in the execution of his duties.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. Why was hiring him a mistake?”
“I believe I said that it might have been a mistake, Mr. Hunter.” Harris deflected the question by looking around the comfortably furnished basement room from which he was accustomed to ordering his small kingdom. He wasn’t used to someone else sitting behind the desk that was almost as massive as the one Mr. De Vries used in his library, himself relegated to a chair pulled away from its usual place against the wall. He hoped this intrusive investigation would soon be over; there were numerous adjustments to be made to accommodate Mr. De Vries’s medical condition.
“Abbott hanged himself in the attic. A footman wanting to become a valet who was under your supervision. Something had gone very wrong in his life. I would call your ignorance of what it was a failure in observation and management. And that would definitely constitute an error in judgment. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Harris?”
“Leonard had become increasingly unhappy in recent months,” Harris conceded. “He started returning late from his half days off and requesting permission to absent himself from the house when his duties permitted it.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“He never said. And if I asked, he didn’t answer. Since he was something of a favorite with Mr. Whitley, I didn’t press or pursue the case. These things usually work themselves out, especially when the servant in question is young.”
“Abbott was twenty-three.”
“And doing well for himself.”
“So I ask you again, why was hiring him a mistake?”
“It didn’t seem so at the time.”
“Would you have taken him
on without Mr. Whitley’s insistence?” Geoffrey asked.
Harris didn’t answer immediately, staring down at his perfectly groomed fingernails and aligning the crease in his trousers. “I don’t believe I would have,” he finally said.
Reluctantly, Geoffrey thought.
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
Harris sighed. “It was something about him that struck me the wrong way. I can’t put my finger on it, but I know when a candidate presents himself for an interview and I sense right away that he isn’t right for the job. It’s a feeling you develop over time and with experience.”
“But you hired him despite this feeling? Because Mr. Whitley asked you to?”
“He didn’t come right out and insist. It was more that he expressed a strong preference.”
“It was my impression that household staff were provided by the Wentworth Domestic Employment Agency.”
“They are,” Harris confirmed. “The agency sends us candidates they have already interviewed so that we may accept or reject them.”
“Do you accept more frequently than you reject?”
“We almost never reject the candidate they’ve chosen for us. Miss Wentworth selects with an eye toward compatibility as well as competence, and since the agency has already supplied most if not all of the other servants in the household, she knows very well who will fit in and who won’t.”
“Yet in this case, your first instinct was to deny Abbott the post for which he was applying?”
“It was,” Harris said, a frown creasing his forehead. “I’m not sure I thought about it as deeply as your questions are now forcing me to look into my reactions.”
“Did he like other men?” Geoffrey asked bluntly.
“He got along very well with the male members of staff.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
Harris went so pale that if he had been a woman, Geoffrey would have reached for the smelling salts.
Death, Diamonds, and Deception Page 20