CHAPTER 13
Now that I’ve made myself available to you, when would it be convenient for you to make yourself available to me?” Belestrade asked at the end of the interview. “You can visit me at my studio at any day or hour.”
The unflappable lady detective squirmed but eventually settled on the following Wednesday in the late afternoon. I think she was hoping we’d have the case wrapped up by then and could welch.
I walked Belestrade to the door.
“I hope you’ll join us next Wednesday, Miss Parker,” she said, pitching her voice in a way that sent shivers down my spine. “The invitation is open to you both.”
My eager smile fooled no one. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Back in the office, I sat down in the chair that Belestrade had just vacated, took a steadying breath, and spilled the events of the night before, leaving out nothing.
I capped it with an apology. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I got caught and I was embarrassed.”
“You’re sorry you didn’t tell me, but not sorry that you went in the first place— Let me finish! That you disobeyed a direct order and approached the woman when I expressly told you not to. You’re not sorry about that?”
My cheeks grew hot. I thought about quibbling over “direct order” and “approached,” but I bit it back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice was weak and wavering. I hated it. Yeah, I was ashamed. My boss had trusted me and I’d flubbed it. At the same time…
“Yes?” Ms. P said. “You have something else to say?”
“Yeah,” I said, gathering my guts. “I regret getting caught. I regret getting played. But I don’t regret trying to scope the woman out. She’s a suspect in a murder case. She’s head-and-shoulders the oddest bird in the flock. And she’s got you nervous like no one I’ve ever seen.”
My boss opened her mouth to deny it but I didn’t give her a chance.
“She knew things about me she shouldn’t have known,” I said. “Places I go that I’m real careful about. So unless you believe she’s got a direct line to the dead, she had an eye on us before the Collins case ever came along. I know there are some cases you work alone, and I’m usually okay with that. But this time I need to know. I think you owe it to me to tell me what’s going on.”
For about three breaths’ worth of stony silence, I was weighing the odds on whether I was about to be fired. It was so quiet, I could practically hear the coin flipping through the air. Then it landed and she gave a nod.
“You’re right, Will. I do owe it to you.” She sounded tired and care-heavy. She stood up and walked to the bookcase on the far side of the room to retrieve a book. She teetered three times—twice on the way there and once on the way back. I hadn’t realized until then how much the interview had taken out of her.
“What do you know about Jonathan Markel?” she asked.
“The man whose murder introduced us? As I recall, you’ve never said word one about him.”
“As you’ve proven, you are not afraid to seek out answers on your own initiative.”
I gave her the point and thought back to the hours I’d spent poring over old newspapers.
“Jonathan Markel—thirty-five, never married, oldest son of a wealthy clan,” I began. “Not Collins wealthy, but high-six-digits comfortable. Social butterfly. Content to spend his days gallivanting about town and burning off the top layer of his inheritance. Early afternoons at his club, early evenings at the theater or opera, late nights at the seedier establishments his proper peers wouldn’t be caught dead in. A new date on his arm every night. As one particular journo said to me over a beer, he was a man without a passion except for all his passions.”
“Excellently put,” Ms. P said, nodding her approval. “Though almost laughably inaccurate.
“It’s not your skills as an investigator that are at fault,” she added. “It’s Jonathan’s skills as a dissembler. While his family had been wealthy, the Crash had not been kind to them. His inheritance was more modest than he led most to believe. He supplemented it by acting as a broker of sorts.”
“What kind of sorts?” I asked.
“Information, mostly. Jonathan deftly walked many worlds. He was equally at home in the upper rooms of power as he was conversing with gangsters in a downtown club. He had an uncanny ability to ferret out even the most secreted bit of information. Whether it was for use in industrial espionage or blackmail or for less criminal reasons—he would take all clients if the price was right. People paid dearly for his services.”
“Were you one of them?”
“I was,” she said. “On more than one occasion. Though I did not pay as dearly as Jonathan did.”
She cracked the book open, flipped to a page in the middle, and removed a small slip of paper. She held it delicately between two fingers.
“In the years before we met, when I was not quite so well-known and my health allowed me a modicum more stamina, I frequently took it upon myself to look into crimes I had not been hired to investigate. Many times I was able to pass on suggestions to the police or to the newspapers.”
I nodded. “You were drumming up business.”
“That was part of it.”
She didn’t have to mention the other part. Ms. Pentecost with free time on her hands is a dangerous thing. She has a tendency to take unsolved crimes personally.
“There were some cases that resisted my talents,” she continued. “Over time, I started to see a pattern in some of them. There was the bank president who fell from the Brooklyn Bridge. The garment tycoon who was burned alive in his penthouse apartment. The zoning commissioner who disappeared from his bedroom with his wife asleep beside him and was never seen again. Others like it. I can show you the files. All involve wealthy or influential people who were involved in activity that was, if not criminal, then at least suspect. Their deaths or disappearances had far-ranging ripples, and all contained certain inexplicable elements.”
That explained some of my standing orders when it came to scouring the newspapers. I’d always thought she had a thing for weird crime. Now I saw she was looking for more threads in the pattern.
“Other than their…resemblance, I could find no…other commonalities,” she told me. “At the same time, the cases that I was managing to solve were…bringing more clients to my door. I had less and less time to pursue my hobby. So I went to Jonathan. I…told him I was looking for a person…or persons linked to several if not all of these crimes. For any connection. I paid…a retainer I could not quite at the time afford and he went to work. That was…five months before his death.”
I was starting to see where this was going, and I didn’t think I was going to like it. I also didn’t like how tired she sounded.
“You don’t have to tell me all this now,” I said. “Take a break. Get a nap in before dinner and we can go into this later.”
“We will do it now,” she snarled.
I knew she wasn’t angry with me. She was angry at the disease. I walked to the drinks cart and poured her a water. She accepted it with a nod and took a big swallow. She came up coughing. I handed her my handkerchief.
“I’m sorry, Will.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You take your time.”
Another swallow, slower this time. Then she continued.
“The evening before his death, Jonathan contacted me and let me know he’d found something. Or someone,” Ms. P said. “I asked him to…tell me. He refused. He said what he had for me was…worth more than I was paying him. He asked to meet the…following afternoon. In a public place…A park. He sounded…worried. I said yes. I was…to bring the rest of…his fee. That night…he was murdered.”
That’s what I’d seen coming. And I was right; I didn’t like it. A man with information about a string of crimes gets offed less than twenty-four hours before he’s suppos
ed to hand it over?
“What are you saying?” I asked. “That McCloskey didn’t do it?”
“Oh, I’m quite sure he did,” Ms. P said. “Do you remember McCloskey’s final words?”
I cast my memory back and went fishing.
“As I recall, his last words were something like ‘In for a penny, et cetera.’ What came before that, I didn’t catch. I was too occupied getting ready to put a knife in his back. I do remember that whatever it was got your hackles up.”
“What he said, what interested me so, was ‘She said it wouldn’t come back on me.’ ”
I let that bit of information sink in.
“I’m guessing the ‘she’ he was referring to wasn’t his dear, departed mother.”
“Mr. McCloskey did not seem the type to think often of his mother.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Who was he talking about?”
“That’s what I asked Mr. McCloskey,” she reminded me. “Unfortunately, he was soon far beyond answering.”
I wound up a sardonic apology for saving her life, but before I could throw it she slid the slip of paper across the table.
“This is what I took from Jonathan’s watch. A hiding place few, if any, knew about,” she said. “This is the message he was going to pass on to me.”
On the paper, written in tight, spidery script, was “Ariel Belestrade.”
She leaned back in her seat, as if the very act of telling me had drained her. I picked up the strip of paper and studied it, piecing together the questions in my head.
I dredged up what else I’d been able to learn on the sly about the incident that brought me and Ms. P into each other’s orbits. I knew the police had no doubt that McCloskey killed Jonathan Markel. As soon as they started picking apart his life, they uncovered a dozen other bash-and-grabs he was good for. Several of those had also left the victims dead.
“Any connection between Belestrade and McCloskey?” I asked.
She shook her head. “None that I can determine.”
“Was Belestrade on your radar before that?”
“No,” she said. “I’d never heard of the woman.”
“What about these other cases?” I asked. “Does Belestrade turn up in any of them?”
“None.”
“She have anything to gain?”
“Not that I’ve been able to discover,” Ms. P said. “I can find no instance in any of the cases where she benefited, directly or indirectly.”
She arched her back, trying to find a comfortable position. I could tell she was in pain—partly physical and partly the mental pain of butting against dead ends.
“How about revenge?” I suggested. “Maybe each of these people were clients of her mother that treated her wrong.”
“Now that I have a better grasp of Ms. Belestrade’s background, if indeed any of what she told us is true, I’ll have to consider it. Though for something as seemingly complex as this, revenge as a motive seems far too…raw.”
I thought about my own mother and how she’d been treated in life. The lengths I would go to, given the temperament and opportunity, to get a little payback.
Sometimes the rawest motives are the ones that last, I thought.
Out loud I asked, “Why come here? Is she playing with us?”
“Certainly,” Ms. P said, leaning back and closing her eyes. “She knew we would soon approach her. This way it’s all on her terms.”
I thought about it a little more. Not that I hoped to hit on an answer my boss hadn’t already considered and discarded. One thing did occur to me, though.
“What are the chances Markel was wrong?” I asked.
“He built…his reputation on…accuracy,” she said, eyes still shut.
“Okay, then maybe wrong on purpose.”
“What are you suggesting?” she said, peeking open one lid.
“You said he was looking for more dough. That he was living a champagne life on a nickel-beer bank account. Maybe he was running short and decided to throw you a name.”
Her eyes shot open again and a rogue’s gallery of emotions ran across my employer’s face.
“Jonathan would…not…have done that. He was…morally compromised…but he lived…by his reputation,” she said. “I trusted…him as…I trust…you.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you trusted him, he was worth trusting.”
I didn’t drop the idea but stashed it on a mental shelf to pick up later. It’s not that I don’t think Ms. Pentecost is a good judge of character. She hired me, after all. I just had the sense, reinforced by her reaction, that maybe her relationship to this character went beyond the professional.
In the handful of years I’d been with her, Ms. Pentecost had never shown a romantic interest in anyone, man or woman. Of course the vast majority of the people she encounters are criminals, victims, or cops. It’s not a life that lends itself to improving one’s dating prospects.
That said, I wasn’t fool enough to think that she was incapable of feeling that way. She’d given me advice from time to time, things they didn’t put in the ladies’ magazines, that suggested she definitely had a romantic history.
I wondered if Markel had been part of that history. Sure, he was “morally compromised.” But he was also a handsome man-about-town with a curious, sharp mind who crossed class lines with ease. Does that sound like someone we know?
Ms. Pentecost closed her eyes again and her breathing slowed. Soon she was softly snoring. I slipped out on mice feet and into the kitchen to tell Mrs. Campbell to make a few revisions to dinner, then I went back in and gently shook Ms. P’s shoulder.
The famous lady detective woke with a snort.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re going to bed.”
“I’m fine,” she said groggily. “Dinner will be ready shortly.”
“Dinner is postponed. Mrs. Campbell’s gonna turn the roast chicken into sandwiches. I’ll bring you up a couple.”
She didn’t argue. That told me how tired she was. I helped her out of the chair and up the stairs. At the door to her bedroom I handed over her cane.
“Want me to help you into bed?”
“I’m not an invalid,” she growled. Then she took a shaky breath. “I’m fine, Will. Thank you. If I’m asleep when you come up, leave dinner by the door.”
“Yes, boss.”
I left her to it and went downstairs to my desk. I listened for her footsteps as she moved across the bedroom, to the bathroom, and to her bed. I didn’t stop listening until I heard the creak of the springs.
I sat there for a while thinking about Belestrade and Markel and the Collins clan. Basically shifting the puzzle pieces around on the table. Not only couldn’t I get them to fit, I couldn’t even get a sense of the big picture.
I also thought of what Ms. P had said.
I’m not an invalid.
Specifically I thought about the word I’d thought she was going to say next. Even though she didn’t, it still hung there. Silent and awful.
Yet.
CHAPTER 14
The next day was Friday and I was scheduled for a full day of interviews at Collins Steelworks. We’d never heard back from Lazenby about what ground his men had covered, so I was starting from scratch.
I was up before dawn, almost but not quite beating Mrs. Campbell to the kitchen.
“You look smart,” she said when she saw me. “Like somebody’s secretary.”
“That’s the idea,” I said, draping my wool blazer over the chair and pulling down my pencil skirt as I took my seat at the kitchen table. “I’m hoping this pile of executives I’m combing through will let their guard down if I look more like their secretary and less like…”
“Like someone who keeps a gun in her pocket?” the housekeeper suggested.
�
�Exactly.”
I tucked a napkin into my collar before digging into the eggs and cheddar biscuits. I wanted to wait until at least lunch to get the first stain on my white blouse.
Right before I left, I asked Mrs. Campbell to check on the boss around lunchtime and see if she was sleeping, eating, or other.
Strictly necessary? No. But when we’re working a case I get a little touch of the den mother and Ms. P lets me get away with it until she doesn’t.
I made it out of Brooklyn just as the sun was coming up and into Jersey City along with the rest of the nine-to-fivers. I followed the directions to a sprawling industrial area on the banks of the Hudson. To call the plant a factory is underselling it. It might have started as a single building, but over the years it had spread like a fungus of concrete and steel to take up some serious waterfront real estate.
At the center of the complex were the Collins executive offices, which were housed in a five-story brick square that an architect clearly didn’t waste much creativity on. Harrison Wallace greeted me at the door. I couldn’t tell if his sour face was for me or for someone else, or if that was just how his features were sorted.
“I’ve arranged time for you with everyone who was at the party,” he said as he led me through the maze to a small conference room with a bank of windows overlooking the river. “They’ll come to you one at a time. All except John Meredith—he’s one of our floor managers. You’ll have to speak to him on the plant floor.”
Not exactly how I would have fixed it. Everyone would be walking in with their guard up. I’d have no chance to see them in their natural habitat.
But Wallace was the client and I needed to squeeze in close to forty interviews over the course of the day.
“Are the police still poking around?” I asked.
“My God, yes.” He struck a martyr’s pose. “Hours and hours. A pair of them spent all of Wednesday and Thursday going through our financials. I’m not sure they’ve even talked to everyone who was at the party. Like I said—incompetent.”
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 13