Ms. P gave her a nod of apology and understanding.
“Anna was explaining how she spent five years in the employ of Vincent and Dianna Lance.”
The names failed to throw off a spark of recognition.
“I have to admit, I’m drawing a blank.”
“There’s no reason you should know them,” my boss explained. “Mr. Lance was the vice president of a modest import company that specialized in Asian silks. Mrs. Lance was a homemaker. As Anna describes it, they were comfortable but hardly wealthy.”
So well-off but not fodder for the society pages.
“Anna was telling me about the last year she worked at the Lances’. This was about five years ago, is that right?” my boss prompted.
The axe blade nodded.
“Yes,” Anna said. “I was a cook. I still am a cook, but different family. I see this woman you ask about many times. She does not like onions. Who does not like onions?”
I felt like I’d missed my train.
“Hold on,” I said. “Who didn’t like onions? Mrs. Lance?”
“No, no, no,” the cook said. “The czarownica. Belestrade.”
She turned her head to the side and spat—“ptooey”—onto the carpet, then immediately realized where she was. She started to apologize, but I held up a hand.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I ptooey on the floor all the time.”
I need to make a confession here. Our Saturday program is as altruistic as advertised, but that doesn’t mean we don’t leverage it when we need to. If we’re looking for information, we get the word out. The women who come to the open house know that if they happen across any sundry or sordid details of interest, we might be in the market. They also pass that word on to their friends and neighbors. The word Ms. Pentecost had sent out earlier in the week was this: Willing to trade favors or cash for any solid intelligence about Ariel Belestrade.
“Mrs. Lance—she starts seeing this woman. Then she brings her home. Invites her to dinner. This is when I’m told no onions,” Anna explained. “First time she comes, she makes nice. Next time, she asks questions. Mrs. Lance says I should answer. That they are to help…something…Something with making good energy.”
The way she said it left no doubt as to Anna’s opinion of “good energy.”
“What sort of questions did she ask?” I asked.
“All of the sorts. All about Mr. and Mrs. Lance. What food? How much do I spend? What nights do they eat together? What nights separate? What are their moods? What do they eat when they are sad? What do they eat when they are happy?”
Anna threw up her hands in exasperation.
“It was śmieszny. Ridiculous.”
Ms. P tossed me a look. I nodded, letting her know I was seeing what she was seeing.
“Let me take a crack at guessing some of the rest,” I said. “Did she ask if Mr. Lance canceled dinner a lot? What was his energy the next day? Did he show up for breakfast? Was Mr. Lance eating new foods recently? Cutting down on sweets? Trying to lose that spare tire?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” The axe blade was really chopping away now. “Very much like that.”
“How long after these questions did the Lances separate?” Ms. P asked.
Anna shrugged. “I think two months? Three months? Mr. Lance, he became very different. Very unhappy. Shouts at me. Very suspicious. Then Mrs. Lance leaves and I am fired.”
Ms. P peppered her with a few more questions. Once she determined we’d gotten the lot, she stood and shook Anna’s hand.
“You will help with landlord?” the cook asked. She looked like she wanted to spit again but restrained herself.
“I’m going to pass your name on to a group that specializes in litigation against predatory landlords,” Ms. P explained. “You’ll hear from them soon. If that is not effective, I will visit him personally.”
A smile blossomed across Anna’s face and any resemblance to an axe blade vanished.
“Thank you, Ms. Pentecost. Thank you so much. I wish you much luck against the czarownica.”
With that, she left, cutting through the kitchen to exit by the back door. No use getting a reputation as an informant.
“That was educational,” I said when she was gone.
“You see the pattern.” A statement, not a question.
“Sure,” I said. “She gets a lead on some marital trouble from Mrs. Lance. She says, hey, you’ve got bad energy around your house, let me track it down. Then she grills the household until she nails down what Mr. Lance has been up to. Or gets down who Mr. Lance has been nailing.”
Ms. P scrunched her nose at the wordplay but didn’t disagree.
“Considering Mr. Lance’s mood change between the questioning and his separation, especially his newfound suspiciousness, we can infer that Ms. Belestrade put her information to use,” she said.
“If by ‘use’ you mean blackmail, I’m making the same assumption.”
“The real question is whether Belestrade employed the same methods with the Collins family. If so, what secrets did she uncover?”
I thought about that for a breath or two.
“Not to pile it on,” I said, “but here’s another question for the list. How does Belestrade go from some no-name VP like Lance to hobnobbing with the Gramercy Park crowd? That’s a lot of tax brackets to leapfrog.”
Ms. P leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.
“Too many questions and not enough answers,” she murmured. “But at least we know what questions to ask when we visit Ms. Belestrade on Wednesday.”
Mrs. Campbell poked her head into the office. Her cheeks were flushed red and there was a smile playing around her usually disapproving mouth. She complained about Saturdays—the extra shopping and all the cooking and the feet tracking mud every which way in the house—but I suspected she harbored a secret love for our open house tradition. She let the gruffness slip away and allowed herself to play hostess.
“Ya ready for the next one?” she asked. “If you’re not, can you get her yourselves? I’ve got soda bread ready to come out.”
“That’s quite all right,” the boss said, prying her eyes open and resituating herself in her chair. “Send the next one in.”
Effectively dismissed, I went back to punches and pressure points. Once class was over and I’d gotten my fill of brisket, I retreated to my room and pulled out the portable Remington I kept stashed in my closet, and got to work typing up my notes from the factory interviews. She wanted the whole lot, not just the highlights, and it took me all the way through to dinner. By then our guests had left, so I took dinner at my desk and finished off my typing there.
For good measure, I included a summary of my night with Becca. With a few judicious edits, of course. For example, I left out the flirting and the dancing and the kiss. But I kept in the encounter with Randy and the likelihood that Becca was no stranger to spending time in smoky clubs with the occasional woman.
If Belestrade had gone digging for dirt, that wouldn’t have been a hard nugget to uncover.
I was reading over the last few pages when my boss stepped into the office. In one hand she held a plate. On it was some soda bread, a healthy portion of homemade apple butter, and a spreading knife. The other had a firm grip on a king-size goblet of honey wine.
“I’ll be up in the archives if you need me.”
“Here,” I said, putting the stack of typed notes on her desk. “You can add this to your reading.”
She didn’t look thrilled at the homework. She’d probably planned to go diving into the Belestrade files again.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
Saturdays were always strenuous, and she was coming off a bad day. She put down the plate and goblet, spread her arms to demonstrate the absence of her cane, and did a little curtsy.
“Ve
ry well, I think,” she said. “Less a relapse and more of a hiccup.”
I slapped on a smile. “Good,” I said. “Don’t stay up too late.”
She didn’t dignify my mothering with a response. She put the notes under her arm, retrieved the goblet and plate of bread, and headed to the stairs. I listened to her slow, careful steps and the mad rattle of the butter knife on the plate.
A thing you need to remember: Lillian Pentecost is a world-class detective, which means she’s also a world-class liar.
I’d have to keep an eye out for more “hiccups.”
I went to bed not long after, devouring the last story in the latest issue of Strange Crime before turning out the light.
Instead of counting sheep, I counted suspects. There was Belestrade and her assistant, Randy and Becca, Harrison Wallace, John Meredith, any of a thousand Collins Steelworks shareholders, not to mention whatever characters were lurking in the dark spots of Abigail’s early years. I threw in Dora and Sanford for good measure. And of course there was the ghost of Alistair Collins.
I was sending them over the fence for the thirteenth time when I finally fell asleep.
CHAPTER 20
Mrs. Campbell was the only one under our roof who was particularly religious, but my boss and I still tried to observe the Sabbath even when in the middle of a hot case. If we didn’t, we ended up working a month nonstop, and that was no good for anyone, especially Ms. Pentecost.
I slept until noon, then took a quick jaunt to a Brooklyn barber who kept Sunday hours and knew how to hold my red curls in check. Afterward, I indulged in a midafternoon showing of Blithe Spirit, hoping the movie about a skeptical novelist and a hapless psychic would knock some ideas loose. The only ideas I got were about Constance Cummings, the novelist’s new bride, who has to deal with the summoned spirit of the writer’s dead wife. Unfortunately, none of them were applicable to the Collins case.
I was home by dusk, where I found my employer sipping wine at her desk and catching up on the last month’s clippings. Since she had no pressing orders for me, I took my dinner of leftover brisket up to my room. That’s where I keep my radio, and I didn’t want to miss the latest episode of The Shadow.
Knowing what evil lurks in the hearts of men let Lamont Cranston wrap up his case in a tight half hour. The announcer signed off, and so did I.
* * *
—
The next morning I came downstairs to find a note on my desk.
“Track down Abigail Collins’s family. We know too little of her life before her arrival in New York City.”
I appreciated her faith in my ability as evidenced by the lack of the preface “Try to.” She wanted Abigail’s backstory and I’d been tasked with delivering.
I started with a call to the Collins residence. After some bickering with Sanford, he agreed to transfer me to Becca’s bedroom. After half a minute of ringing, she came on the line.
“Hello?” She sounded groggy and hoarse.
“Good morning, sunshine.”
She cleared her throat and forced some cheer into her voice. “Hello, Miss Parker. I thought I’d never hear from you again after the way our evening ended.”
“I remember it ending quite nicely,” I said. “If you mean that little incident with the truant officer, I’d practically forgotten it.”
“Are you calling to arrange another date?” she asked.
“As nice as that sounds, this is a business call. You mentioned that your mother came from upstate New York? I don’t suppose you know where exactly that might be.”
She was silent for a moment. “She didn’t like to talk about her childhood. It was something like Prattsville or Pattsville. Something like that,” she said, sounding far from certain. “I remember because it was so similar to her maiden name.”
“You ever meet anyone from that side of the family?” I asked.
“Never,” Becca said. “Her parents died when she was a teenager. She was an only child and she wasn’t close to any of her extended family.”
I thought for a second, then asked, “What are the chances of Pratt not being her birth name?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“Girl shows up ready to take a bite out of the Big Apple. No family. Starting fresh. It wouldn’t be the first time someone like that shed a name along with her old skin.” I could have been describing myself, except I’d ended up with an eccentric detective instead of a king of industry.
“Pratt’s her real name, as far as I know,” Becca told me. “We’ve been through all her personal papers the last two weeks and everything says Pratt.”
That proved nothing. I knew from personal experience how easy it is to get a bogus birth certificate.
“If it’s not too much trouble, could you take a run through any photo albums she might have?” I asked. “Let me know if you come across anyone that looks like kin.”
“I doubt I’ll find much. Mother wasn’t exactly a sentimentalist,” Becca said. “Why do you need to know about her family?”
“With any investigation, it’s good to know everything you can about the deceased,” I told her, reading her the boilerplate we handed every victim’s family when we went snooping. “You never know what might end up being relevant.”
There was a second or two of awkward silence, then she cut in.
“So,” she said, “about seeing each other again…”
I was about to beg off. A lone night of dancing was one thing; two dates added up to something else. Then I remembered the flyers I’d seen plastered all over the subway the other evening.
“What are you doing Friday night?” I asked.
“Whatever you tell me to do.” The line dripped with the kind of innuendo they invented the Hays Code for.
“This time I’ll pick you up. Let’s say six,” I said. “The dress code is decidedly downscale. More a walk in the park than a night dancing.”
“Are we going for a walk in the park?”
“No peeking,” I said. “I give it even money you’ll enjoy yourself. Two-to-one that you’ll love it.”
“I’ll take those odds,” she purred.
Three minutes after hanging up, I still had a goofy grin on my face. I wiped it off and went hunting for our New York State atlas. Lo and behold, there was a Prattsville. According to the atlas it was about an hour southwest of Albany in Greene County and boasted a population of 848 as of the last census. Not a metropolis, but not exactly a one-horse burg either.
I made a quick trip to the library and found a copy of the Greene County phone book. Because Prattsville was close to Delaware and Schoharie counties, I tracked down those as well. Then I went to work copying the number for every Pratt I could find. There were 294 listings in total. I noted which ones were in towns within twenty miles of Prattsville. That cut things down to 82. Not awful, but definitely a chore.
While I was there, I also copied the numbers for every sheriff’s office, town hall, and library in the three counties. Better safe than sorry.
I went back to the office and started making calls.
I knew it was possible that news of Abigail Collins’s death had made it back to any family she may have left behind, so I stuck to the truth. I was employed by Abigail’s children to track down her kin. I kept the reasons for the hunt vague. The easy assumption was that there was some money in the will, which I hoped might grease the skids.
I made calls all Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday. I did so much dialing, I didn’t know what was going to overheat first, the phone or my ear. Ma Bell should have sent me flowers.
For all of you thinking that detective work is a thrilling, glamorous gig, sorry to disabuse you. This is what the job is like nine hours out of ten. It’s grueling, tedious, and frequently fruitless. Also, it was a fifty-fifty shot as to whether our Abigail’s kin had a phone.
If she grew up as poor as she’d reported to Becca and Randolph, it was possible whatever family she’d left behind weren’t forking over cash for a home line.
I actually did track down Abigail Pratt. I tracked down seven of them. My favorite was the eighty-four-year-old Scottish immigrant who had an accent so thick I had to get Mrs. Campbell to translate. I was holding out hope that our Abigail was her long-lost granddaughter. No such luck. But Mrs. Campbell did get a recipe for sausage stuffing out of the call.
By dinnertime Tuesday, Ms. P was ready to pull the plug on the endeavor. She’d spent that time making calls to the wives and girlfriends who had been at the Halloween party, a job that was proving as tedious as my own.
“It’s possible she changed her name,” Ms. Pentecost conceded. “If so, I’m afraid you’ve wasted the last two days.”
I didn’t disagree with her. But I woke Wednesday morning with an idea. I might have been going about it all wrong, I thought. I shouldn’t have been looking for Abigail Pratt. She might very well have changed her name. But Prattsville was so small that it was unlikely she’d have been able to name-drop it to Becca unless she had some familiarity with the region.
What I should have been asking about was a girl—between seventeen and twenty, blond hair and blue eyes, and probably considered one of the prettiest girls around—who had up and left sometime around 1924.
I started with the town libraries, using the same spiel but adding that it was possible that Abigail had changed her name. Nobody gave me a snap answer, but I didn’t expect them to. Instead, I told them to think it over and ask around, and if they came up with anything to give me a call.
I also asked for the name and phone number of the oldest, most clued-in woman in town. I didn’t say “town gossip” but I didn’t have to. Every librarian, to a woman, knew what I was asking for. Then I started calling those clued-in women, in one case a very chatty widower.
In the process I gathered a lot of juicy tidbits about the inner workings of Greene County towns, including what sounded like a bed-and-breakfast that doubled as a brothel and the names of several town councilmen open to bribes. By midafternoon, I had her. Specifically I had Mrs. Bettyanne Casey-Hutts of Cockerville, a town about a dozen miles north of Prattsville.
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 17