“She told me about my father and Uncle Harry,” she said. “That their entire marriage was a lie. That it had always been a lie. That he had used her. That he’d used me. That he…that he’d owed us. The money she’d…that she’d gotten from him. It was what she was owed.”
“You never suspected about your father?” I asked.
“I should have,” Becca said. “When I told him about that first crush and he saw right through me. The advice he’d given me. About keeping your heart hidden. I should…I should have known he was speaking from experience.”
Something ignited in the pits of her eyes.
“That makes me so…There I was, telling him my secrets and…And he didn’t feel like he could do the same. He had to hide. Him and Uncle Harry both. Even from me. The biggest part of his life and…I never knew. And now he’s dead and we can never…I hate her for that. I still hate her.”
“Is that what did it?” I asked. “Is that why you picked up the crystal ball?”
She shook her head, her lip curling in disgust.
“No,” she said. “It was starting to sink in that this was the reason he’d killed himself. The pressure of hiding. Of…No. It was when she said that he wasn’t even really my father. He was just…He was just an old queer and we were his props.”
She took a deep, shaky breath.
“By the time I knew what I was doing, it was already done.”
“And the fire?” my boss asked.
“I threw the crystal ball into the fireplace,” Becca said. “It caught on one of the drapes and knocked it into the flames. The room began to fill up with smoke. I just sat down. I didn’t think about…about anything. There was pounding on the door. I ignored it, but it kept going. I got up and went to answer it. Then the door burst open and John Meredith rushed in. He saw everything. He must have figured out what had happened. He grabbed me and threw me to the side and into the drapes. Then everyone else was there. In the smoke and confusion…”
She didn’t have to finish. Becca might have been bruised and battered on the inside, but her gears could still spin when they needed to. The “I was alone in my room” alibi was good enough as long as she stuck with it and Meredith kept mum.
That must have been a dreadful couple of days. Waiting for Meredith to spill. Then wondering why he hadn’t. Maybe thinking he had some blackmail of his own in mind. When really it was love.
Who knows if she’d have been able to keep it buried forever. Even with Meredith keeping his mouth shut, even if the police couldn’t pin it on her—killing your mother is a heavy load to carry.
Then fate intervened by way of Lillian Pentecost. Maybe it really was because of the board’s urging that Wallace hired her. More likely it was because he was afraid a prolonged police investigation would turn up his secret relationship. He needed a detective who would answer directly to him, get the solution quick, and keep the past under wraps.
“I’ve got a question,” I said. “When you asked me out, were you just fishing for answers on where we were at, or were you hoping to get in my head and short-circuit things?”
Becca answered immediately. “It was just fishing at first,” she said. At least she had the decency to look ashamed. “Then it became something more.”
“When?”
“About three minutes after we started dancing.”
She smiled. I didn’t.
I don’t know if she was answering straight. I didn’t want to know. I nodded to Ms. P to get on with it.
“Your mother’s murder was in the throes of rage. Ariel Belestrade’s was not,” Ms. P declared. “You might have suspected she was involved in the blackmail scheme that led to your father taking his life. But it wasn’t until Will called you—angry and accusing you of betraying a confidence—that you knew for sure.”
Yeah. I’d set that particular row of dominoes falling. I’m not too proud of it, and I’ve never dialed a number in anger since. Belestrade wasn’t going to be citizen of the year, but her death had slammed shut doors that Ms. P had spent years trying to pry open.
“You knew where you could find a gun. Perhaps it was a gift from Mr. Wallace to your father. Or maybe to yourself or your brother,” Ms. P said. “You went to Ms. Belestrade’s home. She gladly let you in, perhaps seeing you as her next target. Her skills at reading people failed her that night. She failed to realize that she was the target, and you shot her. Then you left, disposing of the gun in a sewer grate, and returned to another uncorroborated but suitable alibi.”
Becca got unlucky, though. The gun was found and traced, and Uncle Harry put two and two together. He might not have known it was Becca, but he probably had a good idea it was one of Alistair’s children.
So he decided to be a good godfather. He clammed up, told his lawyer not to fight the charges, fired us, and decided to sit in the Tombs and wait for the cancer to put an end to the whole thing.
“What now?” Becca asked. She sounded like a woman on the edge of the world, staring out into the abyss.
“That is very much up to you,” Ms. P told her.
“You have to tell the police, don’t you? You said so that first day. If you have evidence of a crime, it’s your duty.”
Ms. P spread her hands, open and empty, in front of her. “I have no evidence,” she explained. “Only suppositions and inferences.”
“But I…I confessed. I told you—”
“Very little, really. Bits and pieces of the night your mother died. You never said explicitly that you killed her. And you never admitted to shooting Ms. Belestrade,” Ms. P said. “Unlike the late clairvoyant, I have not seeded this room with microphones, and Will is taking no notes. Besides, our testimony of this conversation would be deeply suspect. Ms. Parker is still recovering from a head injury and I have a degenerative disease that, in advanced cases, affects the memory. A district attorney would be brave or foolish to build a case on either.”
We’d talked it over the night before—how we should approach it; wrestling with the moral implications and all that. For me, it was a one-sided fight. For Ms. Pentecost, it wasn’t quite so easy. In the end, we found ourselves standing in the same corner.
Becca was blinking, confused. Now she didn’t even have the abyss in front of her. She didn’t know where she was standing.
“What should I do?”
She sounded so lost. My heart cracked.
“I cannot tell you what to do, Miss Collins,” my boss said.
“What would you do?”
Ms. P leaned back in her chair. She raised her hands to her head and smoothed back the loose strands that had escaped her braids. That streak of iron gray looked a mile wide.
She looks so old, I thought. Much older than when I met her. Older than when we started this case.
“What would I do?”
Emotions flitted across her one good eye faster than I could follow. I knew she was exhausted and on the edge herself. I also knew she wanted to choose her next words perfectly.
“I would…I would manage to get to women like Abigail in time. Before they learned to trade one pain for another,” she said. “I would find a way to turn the gifts of women like Ariel Belestrade toward better ends. I would find a way where your father could be free and happy and you were not left to avenge him.
“I cannot do any of those things. Instead, I would sever the chain of these events so that no one else need suffer from them, innocent or guilty.”
For the next half hour, Becca and Ms. P talked through options. I threw in some ideas of my own. When Becca finally left, it was still up in the air exactly what she would do. We had an awkward moment at the door as I let her out into the winter darkness.
No kiss. No words. Just a look.
Part of me worried she’d go home and take the same quick exit her father had taken. I wanted to say something, but I didn
’t. Instead, I watched her walk away on unsteady legs. I kept my eyes on her until she was in a cab and out of sight.
CHAPTER 37
We learned how the Collins case wrapped up the same way the rest of the city did—in the pages of the daily papers. Though we did supplement that with a few discreet calls to our contacts.
Two days after that meeting in our office, Becca and Randolph convened an emergency, closed-door meeting of the Collins Steelworks board. Nobody leaked what was said behind those doors, but considering what followed, I could hazard a guess.
That same day, the board talked with the DA and the embezzlement charges were dropped. The company, it seemed, was refusing to cooperate with any prosecution of Harrison Wallace. Later that day, Wallace’s lawyer finally applied for bail, which was granted. Becca and Randolph paid it. A few days after that, on page 2 of the Times business section, I read that the siblings were selling their shares in the company. At a steep discount.
Here’s my guess about that board meeting. A threat was made and a deal struck. Help get Wallace out of jail and you get the reins of the company. Or let the prosecution go forward, risk a whole lot of dirt going public, and have the largest shareholders as enemies going forward.
The board made the easy choice.
The case against Wallace for Belestrade’s murder floundered. No prints were recovered on the gun, and the lack of other evidence made the district attorney balk. The police tried to build a case against him for Abigail’s murder. Even after they pieced together the partygoers’ testimony like we had, and figured out he’d gone back to the study that night, it still wasn’t enough. Expensive lawyers can work miracles.
The deal would come back and bite the board, though. A few weeks later, it was announced that the military would be going elsewhere with their big contract. The ups and downs at Collins Steelworks had been too much, even for the U.S. government.
Lazenby made a couple of visits to our office looking to pry some information loose. He wanted anything we could give him on Wallace. We kept mum and said we had nothing. It crossed a line, but I’ve crossed plenty. He left frustrated, sure we knew more than we were telling.
The police were also keen to find Neal Watkins. He’d vanished from his room at Belestrade’s, leaving behind empty drawers and an empty bank account. He also took, I guessed, a few dozen audiotapes filled with blackmail material. Why’d he leave behind Abigail Collins’s tape? Because he felt some loyalty to his old employer and thought it would point us in the right direction? I didn’t know.
The tape was eventually filed away on the third floor with the rest of the notes from this case. You never know when things you thought were dead and buried will come back to haunt you.
* * *
—
Shortly before the holidays, John Meredith pleaded guilty in front of a judge and got four years. I wasn’t in the courtroom. By then we were in the middle of another case—a missing persons thing—and it was getting messy.
The guilty plea didn’t come as a surprise. Not to me, anyway.
The week before, I’d taken a field trip to the Tombs. Fifty dollars slipped to the right guard got me ten minutes in an interview room with Meredith. Another fifty ensured the guard wouldn’t have his ear to the door.
By then my bones and bruises had healed. The only reminder of the attack was the scar on my cheek that I was trying to convince myself gave me an air of danger.
Meredith hadn’t healed quite so well. His nose had never been set properly and his left eye drooped, giving him a perpetually sleepy look. Seeing me walk in instead of his lawyer woke him up, though.
“What are you doing here?” he snarled, pulling at the cuffs chaining him to the table. “I don’t want to talk to you. Guard! Guard!”
“The guard’s taking a walk.”
“I ain’t talking to you.”
“I don’t need you to talk,” I told him. “Just listen. Five minutes and you’ll never see me again.”
He didn’t like it, but he settled down. I sat down at the table across from him.
“My boss and I—we know everything. We know who killed Belestrade and Abigail Collins. We know why you lied for her.”
His features twisted, fear and rage warring with each other.
“And we’re not going to tell a soul,” I said. “Nobody knows. Nobody needs to know. Everyone thinks Wallace did it, and he’ll be dead soon. There’s no reason for any lingering questions not to go in the ground along with him.”
His face settled, but he looked at me warily. Like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. I dropped it.
“You plead guilty, there’s no trial and no questions about why you did what you did. You take it to a jury, there’s no telling where the DA will start digging or what will come out. I just wanted you to know that. In case you were weighing your options.”
I stood up and pounded on the door to let the guard know I was ready to leave.
“Does she know?” he asked, his voice thick and trembling.
I turned. Tears were streaming out of his wounded eye.
“Not from me,” I said. “But she’s smart. She knows Collins isn’t her real father. She knows you kept silent about seeing her in the study that night. She might put it together. All it took for me was seeing a photo of the three of you in one place. They got their beauty from their mother. But your bone structure’s there. If you look close enough.”
“But you’re not going to tell her?” he croaked.
The heavy lock turned and the door swung open.
“She’s had enough pain when it comes to family. I don’t see any reason to add to it.”
I turned my back on him and left.
* * *
—
We celebrated Christmas in our own way. No decorations aside from a wreath on the door. I bought Ms. P a new cane—one with a two-foot blade hidden in the handle.
“Do you really think I’ll have cause to use this?” she asked.
I reminded her of her own advice. “Better to be prepared than found wanting.”
She got me a first edition of Evil Under the Sun to replace my tattered paperback copy. On the title page was an inscription: “Will, Keep up the fine work—Agatha.”
I might have squealed with joy, but you’ll never prove it.
Christmas afternoon we went with Mrs. Campbell to her church and served dinner to those who didn’t have the home or the dough to make it themselves. We did the same thing on New Year’s Eve. Not a bad way to greet 1946.
In the second week of January, I opened up the Times and was greeted by Harrison Wallace’s obituary. They used a cropped photograph. In it, a man’s arm rests across Wallace’s shoulders. He’s smiling.
I half expected Becca to get in touch that week, but she didn’t. I considered calling her, but every time I reached for the phone, something stopped me. It wasn’t anger. Or not anger alone.
I’d come to the conclusion that maybe she did have feelings for me. That she wasn’t just playing me. I also decided that I had feelings for her, too.
If it had been garden-variety lust, I might have called her. Asked her if she felt like dancing.
But I was still healing. And some wounds hadn’t quite closed.
It would be a while before we saw each other again.
By spring, the Collins case had more or less receded into memory.
One thing about life in the Pentecost household is that you never have too much time to mull over the past. The first months of 1946 saw us embroiled in a slew of cases. Some came with paychecks, others we’d come across during our Saturday open houses.
There were a few loose ends that bugged us. According to my sources, there was a good chunk of embezzled money that the police had lost track of. Something in the six-figure range. If Neal Watkins had it, I figured we wouldn’t be s
eeing him again. Five zeroes buys you a long, anonymous life.
Also, why did Belestrade start researching us so early? And how did she figure into those cases that Jonathan Markel had been looking into?
That’s the way it is with most mysteries. There are always more questions than answers. Few things wrap up nice and tight like they do in my dime-store novels. That’s probably why I like reading them so much.
CHAPTER 38
One warm March day, a package arrived. I opened it to find a copy of Olivia Waterhouse’s new book, Speaking with the Dead: Spiritualists in the Twentieth Century. She’d inscribed the title page with a short note.
“To Lillian Pentecost. A fellow seeker of truth. I hope the chapter on Ariel Belestrade meets with your approval. —Olivia Waterhouse.”
I reached across Ms. P’s desk and handed it to her.
“Some light Sunday reading if you’re interested.”
She cracked the cover, read the inscription, and froze. She stared at it for so long, I was afraid she was having some kind of seizure.
Finally, she spoke. “Please phone Dr. Waterhouse. Tell her I’d like to meet with her here at her earliest convenience.”
* * *
—
Her earliest convenience turned out to be three days later at noon.
“Thank you so much for inviting me over,” the petite professor said as she crossed the threshold into our office. “To be honest, I was overjoyed. To see where the greatest female detective in the country makes her home. It’s thrilling.”
She was dressed in her lecture-hall duds: off-the-rack jacket and skirt in bland shades of brown and gray. Her brown curls still needed combing, and her wire-rim glasses sat low on her nose.
I kept my face as expressionless as possible as the professor took a seat in the nicest of our yellow chairs. She was so small that the chair practically swallowed her.
Ms. P slid the book across her desk.
Fortune Favors the Dead Page 27