Lenox came from a country whose fashionable manners were largely determined by just a few hundred people. It was said the Prince of Wales could walk along Pall Mall without any risk of being recognized because so many gentlemen had copied his appearance—his clothes, his smart beard, his regal pace and posture. The exactitude was almost scientific. Once, after a bout of rheumatism, the prince had taken to shaking hands with an arm pressed tightly to his side. Within a week it had been the only acceptable way to shake hands in society.
America was different. Even in the level and open way Mrs. King, the cook at Cold Farm, had addressed them there had been an intimation of her bedrock knowledge that before the eyes of their nation, Lenox, Blaine, and she were equals.
Yet, here, too, what counted was inevitably what could be counted. Lenox saw that when they went to visit Mayor Welling.
The local government worked in a large white house on Bellevue Avenue, not far from Mrs. Berry’s. It was also home to the town’s historical society. It sat in a tidy row of prosperous-looking shops and houses, beams exposed in the brickwork facing the street, bunting in the pattern of the American flag strung across their upper windows.
In front of the tavern next door was a weathered man missing an arm—one sleeve was pinned back to his shoulder—and next to him a tin cup and a small but vivid painting of the whaling accident that had brought him to his current predicament: a man flying from a small boat, splayed, and about to be pinned against a larger ship by a right whale with a diabolical fury on its face.
Lenox dropped a coin in his cup and followed Blaine next door to the Mayor’s office.
It was a spacious room they entered, with desks that had nameplates for each of six city counselors, though only Welling was here. The mayor, standing with an open newspaper, a cigar between his thumb and first two fingers, saw Lenox alone, initially. Blaine had paused outside to clean his shoes. Straightaway Welling put up his hands, though his demeanor was friendly.
“We’re very busy today, I fear,” he said.
Then Blaine opened the door.
Instantly Welling’s whole conduct changed, his meaty face breaking out in a new kind of smile, and Lenox understood that of course it was Blaine’s family that allowed Newport’s prosperity, the leavings from their table that made this fine row of houses and Welling’s thick, well-made worsted suit possible.
“Mr. Blaine! Fancy seeing you here! Mr. Lenox, if you’ll excuse us—”
“Oh, we’re together,” said Blaine.
Welling didn’t falter. “Then you must both join me for a cup of coffee—piping hot, too. Stevens!” he cried. “Bear a hand! Three cups of coffee, please!”
There was a loud response, possibly containing words, from behind a door to the rear of the room, and Welling, apparently satisfied with it, gestured toward the office that lay just off this central room, his name in silver lettering upon the door: MAYOR JOHN WELLING.
“How long have you been mayor, Mr. Welling?” Lenox asked as they sat down in a small, neat room with a view of the street through wooden slats.
“Nine years, sir,” said Welling. “A very good nine years for Newport, as I know Mr. Blaine will agree.”
“I was only twelve when they began,” Blaine pointed out.
“Ha! True. You wasn’t there when we overturned the restriction on playing ball sports on the town green, in ’75. That was quite heated.” He smiled again. “It was the last scandal we had, I think.”
“We had some questions about Lily Allingham,” said Lenox. “We were wondering what you—or really Mr. Partridge—might have found.”
Welling gave him a doubtful look. “Found? Well—Mrs. Astor’s ball being tomorrow, things have—”
“I am assisting Mr. Lenox in his investigation,” Blaine said.
“Are you!” Welling slapped his desk. “What a fine thing to do, Mr. Blaine. A credit to Newport. We all regret the girl terrible—an inexcusable thing.”
“We’ve heard you’ve been spreading it about that Miss Allingham might have fallen,” said Lenox.
“Only that it was a possibility. Only that it was a possibility. She was handled rough—inexcusable, that—but our fellow says that could have been incidental to a fall.”
Lenox was starting to despise Welling. “So he thinks the fall could have killed her? Caused that wound?”
“I don’t know. That will be in his full report.”
“Who is the coroner here?” Lenox asked.
“Dr. Fitts. A dab old hand.”
At that moment a tall, handsome gentleman entered the room without knocking. He wore white socks up to his knees in the very old colonial American fashion, as Lenox had noticed some men still did here, and held a tray of coffee cups on one arm.
“Coffee,” he said, glancing around and nodding courteously but briefly.
“Thank you, Stevens.”
He set down the tray, which had small pots of cream and sugar on it, and then pulled some papers from a pocket. “Crime report and afternoon newspapers.”
“Very good. Set them there.” Stevens withdrew, and when he was gone, Welling said, confidentially, “Took the war hard, Stevens. He was only sixteen when he went in. Soldier’s heart. The town found him a place—a right hero he was in those battles, so they said. Awful things they saw. We saw.”
“You served, Mr. Welling?” said Lenox.
“That I did, sir.”
Lenox glanced after Stevens, striding away across the broad room. He knew the term, at least by report. There were numerous veterans of the civil war here, it was said, who had a strange lingering emotional aftereffect, what medical men referred to as soldier’s heart. Apparently it meant nightmares, long periods of diffidence, and even violence on occasion; mingled with the strongest recollections of the war at random, even inappropriate moments.
Welling was pouring the coffee. “What was on the crime blotter today?” asked Blaine.
With one hand, Welling riffled through the sheets Stevens had left. “Looks like a fight at the docks and a break-in up-island. About the normal run of affairs.” He took a sip of his own coffee. “Ah. That’s the stuff.”
“When was the last murder you had?” asked Lenox.
Welling frowned. “That’s hard to say. Three years ago there was a bloody fight between two fishermen. One of them took a fever and was sick for some weeks, and he went, eventually. I don’t know you could properly account that a murder, though. Old Bradford Ellingboe.”
“And before that?”
Welling blew on his coffee. “Not in my time. Oh! That’s not true. Warwick Ondine shot a man over cards at Creve Coeur. That’s one of the cottages. Southern gentleman—came up and reported the death himself in this very office, as calmly as you can please, dressed all in white. Said he’d do it again. That was six years ago.”
“I remember it,” said Blaine.
“He sold his place out to a New Yorker, fittings and all, and headed south again before the law came after him.”
Lenox frowned. “Surely he might have been arrested at home in the South—murder, after all.”
Welling shrugged. “It was a matter of honor. The dead man’s family agreed, said it right in an open letter. He had been cheating at cards—ten people saw it. Blind drunk, the poor fool. A Frenchman, you know how they are.”
“And otherwise? Smaller crimes?”
Welling sipped his cup. He was right on this subject, anyhow: It was good and strong, putting a spark in Lenox’s spine. Much better than what he had been given at Sea Cloud by the Vanderbilt siblings.
“You met Mr. Clark, I believe,” Welling said.
“Indeed I did.”
“A right hard horse, Mr. Clark,” said Welling, and gazed directly at Lenox.
The message was clear, if less direct than Welling’s look: There were too many ladies and gentlemen of astronomical wealth, each with a fleet of staff, for crime to be a problem in Newport.
“Given how rare it is, I wonder that Miss Allingham’s death is not more remarked, then,” said Lenox. “The town seems to be going on much apace.”
Blaine and Welling exchanged a glance. It was Blaine who spoke. “You must think of yourself as being on the floor of a stock exchange, I think, Mr. Lenox,” he said. “Any match that could be arranged at Mrs. Astor’s tomorrow evening would be worth millions of dollars.”
Lenox was from a country where ten thousand pounds was considered a fine fortune, and the word millions still threw him, though he had heard it used often enough in New York and Newport; but to think of the whims of two youths of twenty determining how those millions were transacted still slightly took his breath away. He wondered if he had underestimated money as the possible motivation for this murder.
“People are very conscious of Miss Allingham’s death, you may trust in that,” said Welling.
“Are they?”
“There will be no women traveling unaccompanied this summer on Newport. There are a dozen other people looking into it just as you are.” Lenox detected a slight triumph in the mayor’s look. “Good men, too.”
So that was why the mayor could sit here calmly sipping coffee. All across this small island, apparently, there was a concerted, silent effort to root out the murderer. But was this true?
“Where was the break-in?” he said.
“The break-in?” asked Welling, puzzled.
Lenox pointed at the sheet Stevens had brought in with the Newport Beacon and the New York Daily Caller. “Last night.”
“Oh.” Welling drew the sheet toward him again. “Mrs. Walliter’s, from the looks of it. Smashed back window. Nothing taken.”
“Who is Mrs. Walliter?” asked Lenox.
“She has a boardinghouse for young women. Occasionally a constable will go up there to see to a rejected suitor making trouble. A broken window is about ordinary.”
“Ah. I see. And the fight?”
Welling consulted the paper again. “Two men at the Seagull who fell out over right of way on a fishing route, it says. One was … oh—Josiah Franklin. He’s reliable for a fistfight every six weeks or so. Usually it’s not reported. A good man when he’s not in his cups. But I see here he took after a young stripling—Walcott, out of Hyannis. No surprise it got bloody.”
Lenox filed these names away in his mind. “Is Mr. Partridge in?” he asked.
“Ah!” said Welling, and with a meaningful look he tapped his nose. “He’s out on his shoe leather working the case, too, never you mind. He’s a deep file, old Partridge. You’ll see. He might even get there before you, Mr. Lenox.”
Welling chortled and took another sip of his coffee. Lenox looked at the clock. It was 12:40. He felt suddenly uneasy—sensed, in an old, primitive way, that there was something he had missed. Even that there might be violence yet to come in this matter.
Out on the porch, the old mariner was still there with his tin cup. A carriage pulled by four horses was passing, with ROTONDI FLORISTS, 29 ORCHARD STREET, NY printed on the side. Through its windows Lenox could see hundreds of bouquets of flowers. It occurred to him again that if he meant to stay for the ball he must find a tailor, quickly.