Fortune Favors the Dead

by Stephen Spotswood

  “Oh good, it arrived,” Waterhouse said. “I hope you find it interesting. Or at least not terribly boring. The publisher pushed me to include more lurid details than I would have liked, but he knows better than I do what sells, I suppose.”

  A full ten seconds ticked by. Ms. P just looked—examined, really—the unprepossessing woman sitting across from her.

  Finally, she asked, “Who are you?”

  “What do you mean?” the woman who called herself Waterhouse responded, the look of confusion on her face a perfect forgery.

  “I mean that until you took your post as a lecturing professor, you did not exist.”

  Or at least she didn’t exist on paper. I’d spent three days pushing every resource I had and making half a hundred phone calls to source Dr. Waterhouse’s résumé. Phone numbers were defunct, previous employers unreachable or deceased, college records lost to a fire. While all her ID would stand up in court, I couldn’t find a single person who knew Olivia Waterhouse before 1938.

  Meanwhile, in our office, Waterhouse hadn’t let the mask slip an inch. She removed her glasses, squinted, put them back on.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Ms. Pentecost,” she said. “Is this about the book? Did I get something wrong?”

  Ms. P reached across and opened the cover of the book to reveal what she’d used to bookmark the title page with the inscription. It was a thin slip of paper with the name “Ariel Belestrade” written on it in tight, elegant handwriting.

  “Handwriting analysis is an imperfect science,” Ms. P said. “And there are forgers who are expert at re-creating an individual’s script. But even when concentrating on deception, there are certain tics of the hand that are difficult to obscure. Especially when one is working quickly. This upstroke of the ‘t.’ This narrow loop in the ‘d.’ ”

  I was staring right at Olivia Waterhouse’s profile while Ms. P talked. No tells. Just a slight tightening around the eyes, but I might have been imagining it.

  “I do not know the exact order of events, but I can surmise. You tasked Robert McCloskey with waylaying Jonathan Markel as he walked home from his club. McCloskey bludgeoned him and dragged him into the building site, where you were waiting. You replaced the message hidden in his watch—something you must have done out of sight of McCloskey, since he later decided to steal the watch. Likely because he was being blackmailed to do the job rather than paid. You somehow discovered he had committed such crimes before. The watch was his recompense. Fortunately for you the message eventually reached its destination and McCloskey died before he could describe you.”

  “That is…fantastic,” Waterhouse declared.

  My boss shook her head. “Not fantastic,” she said. “Merely the explanation best supported by the facts. I might be mistaken on a few of the details, but they lead to the same conclusion. I tasked Jonathan Markel with finding a link. Someone to connect a series of crimes—some not even crimes, merely strange occurrences. I was looking for a single hand behind these events. He was successful. He found you.”

  Waterhouse shifted in her seat and crossed her legs. The sudden movement caused my hand to slip half an inch closer to the .38 holstered under my armpit. Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw the professor’s eyes flick toward me, followed by the very slightest uptick of her mouth.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to elaborate, Ms. Pentecost,” she said. “What exactly is it that this person found?”

  “Someone who pries out secrets—indiscretions, crimes—and uses them to leverage people of power and influence. Frequently these incidents have ended in disappearance or death.” My boss listed the cases in her file—the bank president, the zoning commissioner, the garment tycoon, and others. “You did not limit yourself to people of influence. Mr. McCloskey is an example. Though men such as him have their purpose.”

  Waterhouse pushed her glasses up on her nose and leaned forward, like one of her own students. My boss continued the lecture.

  “With Belestrade, you found someone you could not only leverage but also use to ferret out the secrets of others. You were the reason she was able to elevate to the circles of the city’s elite. You were the reason she was so prepared for my attention, how she knew so much about myself and Will.”

  The mention of my name caused Waterhouse to look my way. I searched her face for some hint that my boss was hitting pay dirt. Nothing. Just my own reflection looking back at me from her spectacles.

  “By replacing your name with hers, you’d made Belestrade your stalking horse,” Ms. P continued. “You could watch me watching her and learn what you could about my methods. That Abigail Collins’s murder brought you into my orbit was merely ill luck. Though perhaps it was inevitable.”

  “Are you accusing me of having something to do with Abigail Collins’s murder?” Waterhouse asked. “With Ariel’s?”

  “Oh no,” Ms. P said. “I know you’re not responsible for their deaths. But I believe you arranged the events that triggered those killings. You discovered Ariel Belestrade’s former relationship with Abigail Collins and directed her to make contact. That led to all that followed.”

  Waterhouse shook her head. “Incredible,” she said, though I wasn’t sure what mast she was nailing that adjective to. “These things you’re saying I did. What advantage could I possibly gain from them?”

  “That is the question I am still wrestling with,” my boss admitted. “With the Collins case, there is still a large amount of money unaccounted for. The police believe Neal Watkins has it, but I’m beginning to suspect otherwise. As for these other cases, we have yet to uncover how you financially benefited. But we have had only three days.”

  For a solid half minute, there was barely a blink from Waterhouse. I imagine there were wheels turning in there. But her insides were a safe, and I couldn’t see the gears.

  She removed her glasses, squinted, and…tucked them into her breast pocket. When she spoke, it was slowly, carefully, like she was feeling her way through a dark room.

  “These…cases…you mentioned. The bank president? If I remember correctly, he was later discovered to have been embezzling funds from a number of charities he was tasked with overseeing. The zoning commissioner was taking bribes to rule in favor of developers and allow for the desolation of poorer neighborhoods. The garment tycoon…”

  She said “tycoon” like most people say “rapist.”

  “Wasn’t it one of his factories that caught fire several years back? The one where all those seamstresses died, trapped, screaming? And so many more were burned.”

  With each word, she grew more confident. Like she was slowly finding her footing.

  “I imagine you’ve met some of those women,” she said. “Perhaps during your Saturday sessions. When you’ve opened your doors. You’ve seen the scars they carry. He was leading the fight against new safety regulations, this man. Thirty years since the Triangle Shirtwaist and it’s like we’ve learned nothing.”

  Here was the real Olivia Waterhouse, if that was even her real name. There was a fire in her eyes and in her voice, like a street-corner preacher. She leaned in with each word, keeping time with a conductor only she could see.

  “And consider Alistair Collins,” she said. “A man who earned his prestige by ordering the brutal beatings of labor organizers. Beatings that sometimes ended in deaths. Who bribed and backstabbed and bartered his own soul. Long before Germany’s surrender, he was making inquiries with the military on where the next big war would be. And how he could make money from it.”

  “What are you suggesting?” my boss asked.

  “That not everything is about money,” Waterhouse declared.

  I let that sit for a second, then chimed in. “That’s why you called me about the tapes.”

  She looked over at me again. Without her glasses, I could see her eyes. They were dark pits that I coul
d have slipped and fallen into if I weren’t careful. I had to concentrate to keep my hand from moving toward my gun.

  “When it looked like Wallace was going to take the fall and the company was cutting ties with him, the contracts would have probably still gone through,” I said. “You needed to make sure we got on the right track. So you told me about the tapes and hearing that rumbling and all that. Of course, you’d already cleaned it out. But not without leaving the one recording that might point us in the right direction. What I’m wondering is whether Neal Watkins is hiding out in Florida or Canada, or is he sucking mud in the Jersey swamps. Too big a coincidence that he started out as a researcher down the hall from you. You had to have planted him there.”

  “You make me sound like a gangster,” Waterhouse said with a hint of a smile.

  “Nah. I’ve met gangsters. You’re something else.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Someone who enjoys pulling the strings of the people pulling the strings.”

  This time her smile was more than a hint; it was almost cheerful. “What a wonderful turn of phrase,” she said.

  Then she uncrossed her legs, casually smoothed out the creases on her skirt, and stood.

  “You have no evidence, of course.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “We do not,” Ms. Pentecost admitted.

  Waterhouse turned toward the door but stopped when my boss held up a hand.

  “One thing puzzles me,” Ms. P said. “You could easily have avoided my notice. By directing me at Belestrade, while remaining in her orbit, you almost assured that we would eventually come into contact.”

  Waterhouse gave her head a cock, as if giving Ms. P the point.

  “Even today, you must have suspected why I called you here,” my boss said. “So why come at all? If not to confess?”

  Again, Waterhouse took her time answering. Like she was working out something in her head.

  “I think…I hope,” she said, “that we could become friends.”

  Whatever Ms. P was expecting, it wasn’t that.

  “Or at least allies,” Waterhouse added. “We have so much in common. Women striving to change the world for the better.”

  Ms. Pentecost jerked up ramrod straight, good eye blazing fire.

  “I bring criminals to justice. You blackmail and rob and murder, and justify it using your own twisted moral code,” she declared. “We are far from alike.”

  Waterhouse nodded, like she was considering a question from one of her lecture-hall students. “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps not.” She glanced down at me. “How is Becca doing, by the way? Moving on, I hope?”

  My throat went dry and I let my fingers curl around the butt of my gun.

  “It’s quite all right, Miss Parker,” Waterhouse said. “Becca’s secret is safe with me. I’m merely pointing out that there is often a vast gulf between what is the law and what is right. And that everyone in this room understands that. The only difference, currently, is how far each of us is willing to go to see justice done.”

  She took out her glasses and slipped them on, like she was donning a costume.

  “This has been illuminating. Seeing you work,” she said. “You are, by far, one of the most interesting people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Both of you are.”

  She nodded at the book sitting open on Ms. Pentecost’s desk.

  “I hope you read it,” she said. “On the surface, it examines our inability to grapple with our own mortality and how that can be used to control us.”

  “And beneath the surface?” Ms. P asked.

  “You might say it’s about strings and the people who pull them. Who have been pulling them for a very long time, and how it is long past time for some strings to be cut,” she said. “Good day, Ms. Pentecost. Miss Parker.”

  With that as her exit line, she walked out. I stayed in my seat and listened for the sound of the front door. Then I got up and checked. She was gone. I drew the dead bolt and went back to the office.

  “What now?” I asked. “Give Lazenby a call?”

  “And tell him what?” Ms. P asked. “That a professor of cultural anthropology is responsible, directly or indirectly, for a number of crimes, some of which are not even recorded as crimes? Our credit with the NYPD does not stretch so far.”

  “I guess we start a file box on Waterhouse,” I said. “Or whatever her real name is.”

  Ms. P nodded. “We will need to keep a close eye on her.”

  She reached for her cane and stood. She hadn’t had a bad day in a while, but she was using the cane more regularly. And the shadows under her eyes had never quite gone away.

  “You think she’ll keep at it?” I asked. “Even knowing we know?”

  “I think she enjoys being discovered,” Ms. P said. “As you noted, she comes alive when she’s in front of an audience.”

  She walked to the kitchen to see what Mrs. Campbell was preparing for lunch.

  * * *

  —

  As I type this out, the smell of fresh-baked bread is wafting in from the kitchen. These days, kneading the dough fires up Mrs. Campbell’s arthritis and she has to soak her hands in ice water for an hour after making a batch. But she still refuses my help when I offer it.

  Stubborn old woman.

  I can hear her singing softly to herself. It’s a hymn I don’t recognize. The light coming in through the windows is starting to dim. I’ll have to turn on the lamps soon.

  The big desk is empty. Mrs. Campbell says I should start using it, but I can’t bring myself to. At least not tonight.

  Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.

  I’m stubborn, too.

  Back when I started, I talked about invisible costs. I wondered how my ledger would be weighted at the end of the day—in the red or in the black.

  All of this, and I still don’t know.

  What I do know is that I started this story with a piece of advice wrapped in a lesson: The trick is knowing when to let go.

  There’s a flip side to that coin. These days the lesson I try to take to heart is one Ms. P never said out loud but lived every day of her life: Hold on tight to what you can while you can. There’s not a better world out there. There never will be.

  Unless we make it.

  WILLOWJEAN PARKER

  LEAD INVESTIGATOR

  PENTECOST AND PARKER INVESTIGATIONS

  NEW YORK CITY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There were so very many people involved in getting this book from my head to your hands. Special thanks go out to:

  My agent, Darley Anderson, whose faith and enthusiasm in this novel were spectacular. The exemplary work he and his team did is the reason you’re holding it now.

  My editors, Bill Thomas and Margo Shickmanter, who provided an exceptional debut experience. They helped make this book the best it could be and ensured I didn’t trip over my feet the first time out. They were assisted by a battalion of talented people, including Carolyn Williams, Maria Massey, Maria Carella, Peggy Samedi, Mike Windsor, Elena Hershey, Hannah Engler, Aja Pollock, and a host of others. And if you’re holding the U.S. edition, three cheers for illustrator Rui Ricardo’s work on the cover.

  Game-master Austin Auclair, who was kind enough to beta-read for me and who test-drove the mystery. Eventually I will stump you.

  My dear friend and co-conspirator, Melissa Hmelnicky, who has always been one of my most passionate cheerleaders and whose love of Lillian and Will gave me hope that others would feel the same.

  And most importantly, my wife, Jessica, who has been my first reader, first supporter, and first love for many years. Who after reading an early draft said she’d love to see more of Will emotionally processing things, which is a contender for best note I’ve ever gotten. If you enjoyed this book, I think you’ll agr
ee. She regularly provides me with examples of how to be a better writer and a better person, and this novel wouldn’t exist without her.

  About the Author

  Stephen Spotswood is an award-winning playwright, journalist, and educator. As a journalist, he has spent much of the last two decades writing about the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the struggles of wounded veterans. His dramatic work has been widely produced across the United States. He makes his home in Washington, D.C., with his wife, young-adult author Jessica Spotswood.

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