Fortune Favors the Dead

by Stephen Spotswood

  There was that damn girl.

  Neighbor up the road had a cousin visiting from somewhere down south. Don’t remember her name. Something unusual. Younger than Abby by a few years, but they hit it off. Some of the men at the feed store said this girl’s mom was a whore and was in jail, and that’s why she was staying up here. Think half the reason Abby made friends with her was because it set Pa off.

  This was maybe a month after Abby had stopped seeing Billy. She’d seemed pretty set on not getting back with him, but then I walked into the hardware store one day and saw Abby with Billy in the back. Not…not like that. Just talking. He looked…scared. They shut up when they saw me.

  Later I saw Abby and her friend out on the porch talking all serious. Then not long after that, I caught Abby in the old toolshed. We didn’t use it except to store junk. She was in there with one of the floorboards pried up and a wad of bills in her hand.

  I asked where she got it. She said it wasn’t none of my business and not to tell Pa. She, um…she gave me a few dollars. Said there’d be more if I kept my mouth shut.

  End of the summer, this friend of Abby’s goes back to wherever she came from. Then Billy shot himself. Not two days after, Abby was gone. No warning.

  Money was gone, too. I checked.

  Good riddance. She was dead weight, you know? Pa died a year after. Facedown in the hog pen. Stroke.

  I think I’m done.

  Keep your money. Leave it. I don’t much care.

  But if you’re not off my property in five minutes, you’re gonna regret it.

  Because Ms. Pentecost plays square, she left the money. More than a man like that deserves, but the information was worth it.

  After Ms. P finished giving me the abridged version, I made a couple of informed guesses that my boss agreed with. Then she clued me in on a few things I’d overlooked and made a few informed guesses of her own.

  I dragged the tape player out of the basement and had it nearly set up when Ms. P found the packet of photos in her desk. She took them out and studied them. She’d never seen a lot of the cast of characters, so I stood over her shoulder and played pin the name to the face.

  Looking at one particular photo—a group shot with everyone in the frame—I noticed something that I hadn’t before. I pointed it out to Ms. Pentecost and she confirmed my suspicion. Then she pointed out something else. A little detail that I’d overlooked. The rest of the pieces slid home.

  By that point, we didn’t really need to listen to the tape, but we did anyway. It was well past midnight by the time the reel ended.

  There was some hashing out about what should be done and how we should do it. But for all intents and purposes, we knew who had killed Abigail Collins and Ariel Belestrade. More important, we knew why.

  CHAPTER 35

  Back at the beginning of this thing I told a fib. Let’s be honest, I’ve told a lot of fibs. Some were for my benefit, some for yours, none so big that they changed the heart of the thing.

  The fib I’m thinking of is when I said that Lillian Pentecost doesn’t work like detective novels, that she doesn’t go in for dramatics, for getting all the suspects into a room and holding a show where she fingers the killer.

  That was only half true. She does like to put on a show, even if it’s for an audience of one. Technically, two, but I didn’t really consider myself audience. I was the backstage help.

  Settled behind her desk, glass of honey wine within easy reach, Ms. Pentecost focused her good eye on the person sitting in the chair across from her. She looked just like she had that first night I met her.

  Resolute. Leaning into the storm.

  “The roots of this case extend back at least twenty years, perhaps longer,” she began. “Abigail Pratt, who was born under another name, grew up in rural poverty and was likely the recipient of regular abuse at the hands of her father. She learned at a very early age that if she was to survive and thrive, she would have to fend for herself. She learned to view her relationships—especially those with men—in terms of who could benefit her and who couldn’t. Those who were not wealthy or ambitious were discarded. As was the boy who had a gambling problem and was stealing from his parents to pay off his debts.

  “Then she met a girl—a visitor to her rural county. This girl’s mother had raised her daughter to flourish on the fringes of society. The girl had learned how to leverage people, especially vulnerable men.

  “Abigail and her friend blackmailed the boy with the gambling problem, threatening to tell his parents he had been stealing from them. The boy acquiesced, stealing even more to pay Abigail and her friend. Eventually he descended into despair and took his life. The girl returned south and Abigail took the money she’d extorted and fled to New York City.

  “She’d learned much from her friend, including how to procure false documents. She changed her name. Possibly because she was worried that the boy’s family would discover what she’d done. More likely because she wanted to sever ties with her own family.”

  Ms. P reached for her glass, but her hand was shaking, so she pulled it back. It had been a late night, preceded by a long journey. I knew she was teetering on the edge of exhaustion. I’d argued holding off a day, maybe two. No doing. She wanted to end this. Honestly, so did I.

  She shifted in her seat, took a deep breath, and continued.

  “But people contain patterns just as crimes do. Abigail—now Pratt—would not stand for feeling trapped. Being a mere secretary would have been just a different kind of cage for her. First she sought comfort, becoming pregnant in the process. Then she sought leverage, as her friend had taught her. She discovered a secret about her employer. Something that would have ruined him, had it been known. But she’d learned from her mistakes. Instead of merely seeking money, she approached him with an offer. Marry her, claim her children as his own, and he could carry on his secret life in perfect camouflage. Alistair Collins accepted the offer. He likely had little choice, though he was able to exert some control by placing Abigail under a strict allowance. So Abigail Pratt became Abigail Collins. And Alistair continued his decades-long affair with his old friend and now business partner, Harrison Wallace.”

  Hollis Graham had seen Wallace’s photo in the paper after his arrest and recognized him as the man who’d followed Al Collins into the upstairs room of the restaurant.

  “I do not know how content Abigail Collins was in her new life. People who grow up as she did—deprived and abused—are suspicious of comfort. It’s very possible that she was incapable of love, at least selfless love. Whether or not she was content, her life for the next two decades was stable.

  “That changed when she attended a charity ball where one of the entertainments was a medium. Both women had changed since that summer, but Ariel Belestrade recognized her summer friend, the one she’d talked into blackmailing her ex-boyfriend. How exactly their partnership was rekindled, I don’t know. For someone of Belestrade’s skills, I don’t think it would have been difficult to feel out the fractures in Abigail’s life and marriage. Either way, before long the clairvoyant had…awakened that old feeling of discontent in Abigail. That…feeling of being trapped. The idea to use…Alistair’s secret to extort him…would not have been so hard a sell. For Abigail, it would have been…less about money. And more about…freedom.”

  That hitch was starting to creep into Ms. Pentecost’s voice. I knew she hated it, because it took attention away from her words. She was nearing the heart of it, though.

  She soldiered on.

  “Whether it was the cumulative effects of…hiding his true self and of…being blackmailed, or whether there was…an inciting incident that propelled Al Collins to take…his own life, I do not know. Perhaps both. He had ended his…relationship with Harrison Wallace that year. He even…moved Wallace’s office to the other side of the building. So he would…see him le
ss. A person…forced to deny who they are can easily bow under the…weight of their unhappiness.”

  Ms. P’s eyes drifted my way. I’d told her what Hollis had said about nails being hammered down. “Be as circumspect as you feel is needed,” she’d told me. “But do not deny who you are. There will always be someone looking to beat you down. Do not do their job for them.”

  I tried to take the advice to heart, but it didn’t make me feel much better. Especially considering what we had ahead of us.

  “How long…Abigail and Ariel waited…until…until…”

  I stood up and grabbed a tall, lidded stein from one of the bookshelves. I poured Ms. P’s wine into the stein and handed it to her. She nodded her thanks and managed to take a sip without spilling. While she gathered her strength, I picked up the story.

  “Maybe they waited a decent amount of time after Alistair’s death to start putting the pinch on Wallace, but I don’t think being decent was on the top of their to-do list,” I said, reclaiming my seat at my desk. “Belestrade was used to walking a high wire when it came to blackmail. She figured that now that her friend had voting shares, she had the kind of leverage that could get Wallace to fork over six figures. Maybe more if they were smart about it.”

  I looked to Ms. P. She nodded at me to continue.

  “Wallace proved to be a harder squeeze,” I said. “He suspected why his friend and lover had killed himself and that put some steel in his spine. Also, he wasn’t rich like Alistair. And he was married. He had a wife who saw their bank accounts. She’d notice if chunks started disappearing ten thousand at a time.

  “But there was his friend’s legacy to consider,” I said. “Abigail had enough voting shares to hold the company hostage. That whole shtick about not wanting to be a war profiteer was for show. I’m guessing that’s what did it. Wallace was always loyal to Alistair and to the company. He eventually found a way to get the money by siphoning it out of company accounts. This goes on for about a year. Then his doctor delivers the bad news. Cancer. He did some soul-searching and turned off the faucet. No more embezzling. No more payments.

  “The average criminals probably would have cut the cord. They’d gotten plenty of dough off of Wallace. But these two women—they weren’t average. For Abigail, it was as much about power as it was money. Having Wallace shake off his harness only made her more determined. She had her clairvoyant friend send him a message. That whole Halloween party show was directed at him. What was it Belestrade said? ‘Please, just let me be at rest. Don’t betray me, my love’? In other words, just because your lover is dead, it doesn’t mean his reputation can’t still be ruined.”

  I flashed to sitting in Belestrade’s parlor as she aped my mother’s voice and just how easily she’d been able to push my buttons.

  “We’re not so sure it got the job done, though,” I said. “Wallace snuck away during the party to powwow with Abigail in the study. There were bruises on her wrist that she picked up right before her death. If I had to lay money I’d say Wallace dug in his heels, said something nasty, she slapped him, and he grabbed her wrist. Something along those lines, anyway.

  “Lazenby and his crew don’t have that yet. Wallace going back up to the study. Eventually they’ll get there. Maybe Wallace will tell them himself. Add in how he got angry and picked up the crystal ball, et cetera. The district attorney will probably overlook the locked door. Lazenby will chafe, because he hates not crossing all the Ts, but he’s got to do what his bosses tell him.”

  My boss held up her hand, signaling that she was ready to take the baton. I gratefully passed it back to her. I didn’t want to be the one to say what came next.

  She went slowly, taking every word with care.

  “Until her death, Ms. Belestrade was the most obvious suspect, though not necessarily one supported by the immediate facts. Something that I stubbornly refused to see,” Ms. Pentecost said. “As it had been in their youth, Abigail was her intermediary in the scheme. It…buffered her against reprisals. Mrs. Collins’s death did her no favors.

  “But because of other facts—ones unrelated to this case—I remained focused on her,” she admitted. “John Meredith tried to contribute to that belief in Ariel Belestrade’s guilt. He lied about seeing her when the body was discovered. But no one else had seen her, and she was someone who would surely be noticed. It was only after Ms. Belestrade’s murder that I managed to clear my head enough to see the significance of that lie.

  “One of the details I am lacking—and it’s a minor one, really—is whether Mr. Meredith glimpsed you through the smoke, already standing in the room. Or whether he saw your bedroom door open and made the correct conclusion.”

  Becca sat like a statue on the other side of the desk. The funeral had been the day before, but she’d come dressed for mourning—a slim black dress, black stockings, black gloves. She wore it like armor. There were no tears, no lip-biting. She didn’t even blink. It was like she’d seen this speech coming.

  “No matter,” Ms. P said. “It’s a small detail. What matters is that he knew or strongly suspected the truth. That you had killed your mother that night.”

  CHAPTER 36

  If you were expecting Becca to crack once the finger was pointed at her, you haven’t been paying attention.

  That makes two of us.

  Maybe you tumbled to Becca a while ago. Maybe you’ve been yelling at me this whole time—“It’s the dame! Don’t trust the dame!”

  But you weren’t me. I can follow a queen right up the sleeve of any three-card monte dealer in the city, but I couldn’t see Becca. Call it love or lust, or just some stupid cliché about falling for the damsel in distress.

  I told you before that I was going to be honest with my mistakes. Becca was the biggest one of all.

  The boss and I would have a lot of long, late-night conversations about that.

  “Ms. Collins was exceptional,” Ms. Pentecost would assure me. “In a better world, she would have been the one we were assisting.”

  In the world we had, I waited for Becca to say something. A confession. A denial. Anything. She just sat there, still and silent. Her baby blues were fixed straight ahead, waiting for Ms. P to go on.

  She did.

  “I don’t believe you knew about the blackmail that led to your father’s death. I think if you had, you would have acted sooner,” my boss said. “But I imagine you suspected something. Something that began to eat at you. You drank more. You went out to clubs. You took chances. You did your best to escape.”

  Tears started racing down Becca’s cheeks. I had to grip the arms of my chair to keep from going to her. Even knowing what she’d done, she still had a hook in me.

  “Then your mother began pushing for the company to forgo its military contracts, saying it was their moral duty,” Ms. P continued. “It was so out of character for her. You began to ask questions. About your mother’s actions. About why your father killed himself. About why your godfather seemed so haggard and sad.”

  This we had gotten from the recording of Abigail’s last visit to Belestrade’s parlor. It didn’t spill everything, but it gave us enough to know Becca’s curiosity hadn’t gone unnoticed. During the visit, the two laid out their plan for the séance—to use it as a way to jolt Wallace to cough up the dough. The idea to use Becca as the “volunteer” had been Belestrade’s. Her mother had provided the detail about the stolen perfume. Apparently her father hadn’t kept it a secret after all.

  “The part of the crossword I can’t fill in is the killing itself. How you found yourself picking up that crystal ball. I just can’t see it,” I admitted. “We know it wasn’t planned out. If it was, you’d have kept your gloves on.”

  I leaned over and took the wheel.

  I saw the question in her eyes.

  “Your fingerprints were on the crystal ball,” I explained. “But you were wearing gl
oves at the party. The police found smudges they figure for glove prints. Which means you were wearing them during the séance but not when you came back. If you’d known what was going to happen, you wouldn’t have taken them off.”

  I watched as she took that little detail in. It wasn’t exactly a keystone clue. If the cops got their hands on the party snaps and noticed the gloves, she could say she’d touched the crystal ball after they discovered the body. Or had taken her gloves off during the séance. And if anyone said otherwise, it’d be she said, they said.

  For that matter, she could have clammed up and walked out and there wouldn’t have been a thing we could have done about it.

  Instead, she said, “I heard them arguing. Uncle Harry and…and my mother.”

  “This was in the study after the séance?” Ms. P asked.

  Becca nodded. “I didn’t hear the words. But I recognized the voices. And the anger,” she said. “I opened my door a crack and saw Uncle Harry walk out. He looked so…broken.”

  She stared down at her hands. Her fingers found a loose thread in the seam of one of her gloves and began picking at it.

  “I went to the study and found her there. She was sitting at the desk, staring at her reflection in that crystal ball. I told her…I told her I knew something was going on. Something with Uncle Harry and something…Something with my father. And that I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t stand for it. Whatever was going on, I wouldn’t stand for it.”

  She’d worked the thread loose. She pulled at it and tore a hole in the palm of her glove.

  “She laughed. She laughed at me and said I didn’t know what I was talking about. That it wasn’t any of my business. I told her if it was about my father, then it was my business….Then she told me.”

  She yanked off the ruined glove, then the other. Her fingernails were chewed to the quick.

  “What did she tell you?” I prompted gently.

  She looked up and met my eyes. What I saw there was hard and cold, like ice rimming the Hudson.