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8:10 p.m. Saturday, August 29th, 1992
BAILEY and Padget hadn’t had too much difficulty getting the guests to leave the dining room in a swift but orderly fashion. Neither man could think of any real reason to keep them from taking their food with them, but they didn’t have any problem persuading people to leave their wine glasses behind. And only the lawyer had lingered.
Dobson stood there staring at Padget. “The authorities will have to be notified. It will be their job to determine just what happened, and they wouldn’t want anyone to disturb the scene.”
The butler bristled. “Of course I wouldn’t touch anything, and I’ll call and inform the sheriff’s office about Mr. Oak’s death. It is a duty I had to perform when Mr. Keener died, and it’s my responsibility to do so now as well.”
The lawyer shook his head. “They need to be informed right away, without delay, while you need to seal this room and its contents until they arrive. It’s also your responsibility to take care of the guests—I’ll go to the study and phone the police. As an executor of the estate, that’s my responsibility now.” He shifted his gaze to Bailey. “I’m afraid the authorities may not be satisfied with Padget being alone in this room. I’ll have to ask you to stay with him and be a witness to everything he does or doesn’t do, at least until after this room has been sealed.”
Bailey nodded. Without saying so explicitly, the lawyer had clearly implied the police could consider the butler a suspect. That meant Dobson was thinking of the possibility of foul play, though Bailey had not said anything about the aroma of potassium cyanide. It also intimated that Mr. Oak’s death might be connected to Keener’s. Of course Bailey thought so, and he wasn’t surprised the lawyer appeared to be thinking along those lines too.
Dobson didn’t waste any time, once he knew his orders had been understood, taking his own plate of food and stalking out after the rest of the guests. He would probably wait to finish his meal until after he had called the authorities, but Bailey wasn’t worried about that. The longer it took the police to get here, the better from his perspective.
Bailey was biased. Without proper legal identification, he wouldn’t want to still be hanging around here when the authorities arrived. And Sam wasn’t even supposed to be on the island at all. The police would surely discover her presence when they came to searching the place, but Bailey also knew that she would resist leaving until they’d accomplished their mission. Despite the perilous position it would put them in. It would be his job to convince her to leave and leave it to the contemporary authorities to find out the truth.
Once the lawyer had left them, the butler sighed and gave Bailey a strange look. “He was murdered, wasn’t he?”
“I can’t say for sure.” It was unclear whether the man was referring to Oak’s death or Keener’s. Bailey decided to assume he’d meant Mr. Oak. “But it certainly was no accident. The symptoms were suggestive, and then I could smell the cyanide. It might have been suicide though.” Bailey doubted that was the case, but he had to consider the possibility, under the circumstances. “Either way, Dobson made a very good point—the evidence must be preserved for the police.”
The butler cleared his throat. “Dobson is a lawyer, of course, and as he said, he’s one of the executors of Keener’s estate. So I’m not surprised that he took charge like that. But I wouldn’t expect a footman like you to be so self-assured, or to know what to do the way you clearly seem to. Are you a cop?”
Bailey had been studying the scene, but at that remark his gaze flew back to the butler. “I’m not—”
He was interrupted by the butler hastily reaching into his inside jacket pocket. “It’s alright. I’m a federal agent myself. Undercover.” Padget held up some kind of official-looking identification.
Bailey couldn’t afford to demonstrate his ignorance of such things, so he would have to assume it was alright. But he was confused. Padget had been in place already the night Keener died, so it couldn’t be the man’s death the federal government was investigating. Not knowing anything about what was going on here, Bailey would have to be careful what he said. “I’m retired from law enforcement.” That, at least, was true.
Padget sighed again. “I don’t care. I’m just relieved they sent me some help. I don’t have any experience investigating violent crime.” He gave Bailey a rueful grin. “I suppose they must consider me a suspect, or you would’ve identified yourself right away.”
The butler was busy making an awful lot of assumptions. No, not a butler, but a federal agent of some sort, and if the man didn’t investigate violent crimes, that left one glaring probability. Bailey was going to have to watch his words to play into these assumptions Padget had fallen into and not disillusion the fellow.
“I had to consider everybody who was here that night a suspect, but I didn’t really think it was you. And like I said, I’m retired. I’m only here to take a look into things unofficially.” Also quite true. “And I’m going to ask you to keep it to yourself—Dobson doesn’t even know who I am.”
“The lawyer. Is he a suspect too? But he wasn’t even here.”
Bailey nodded. “Even so, he had motive and is on our list. Though down toward the bottom.” He shifted his gaze to the dead man lying on the floor. “Oak was near the top.”
Padget opened his mouth, but it took a minute for the words to come out. “Are you saying he murdered Keener? And now he’s taken his own life?”
“That’s one of four possibilities I can see, but I wouldn’t say it’s the most likely.”
“Four?” Padget looked perplexed.
“One is the scenario you just suggested. But he could’ve committed suicide without necessarily being Keener’s killer. You may not have heard, since you weren’t present when Dobson read that part of the will, but Brandt Keener claimed to have collected evidence of embezzlement against Oak, and that he’d made arrangements for it to be turned over to the proper authorities this weekend.” Bailey stared at Padget. “But you probably know more about that than I do.”
The man blinked. “Well, I suppose I might. We did suspect that either Quill or Oak was helping to hide Keener’s assets. But this doesn’t really tell me anything about that. Oak might have been the one and gotten greedy—only why would Keener expose himself by giving evidence? Or Oak could just have been an ordinary embezzler, siphoning funds from his employer.” Hiding assets? That explained why the federal government had been investigating.
Bailey nodded. “Either way the man was facing complete and imminent ruin, so suicide because of that and unrelated to the murder is the second possibility we have to consider. And as for why Keener would take the risk—this was part of his will. Since he knew he’d be dead and beyond our reach, he had no reason not to take Oak down with him. And his testamentary dispositions did seem somewhat vindictive.”
“So two of your four are suicide. The other two must be murder, but why two separate scenarios?”
“The obvious possibility, and the most likely, is that the same person who killed Keener decided to take out Oak as well for some reason. But another possibility is that someone else had a motive to kill Oak, one that has nothing at all to do with Brandt’s death. We still don’t know Keener was in fact murdered. And either way, we can only speculate what that motive might’ve been. We need evidence if we are going to narrow it down.”
“There should’ve been evidence proving Keener had been murdered, but you people bungled everything—” Padget flushed as he broke off. “I’m sorry. You’re retired, and I’m sure you had nothing to do with it, so I shouldn’t have made it sound like I was blaming you.”
His curiosity was far too strong for Bailey not to try to find out what that was about. “I don’t understand what you mean. We didn’t have the evidence even to open an official homicide investigation.”
Padget snorted. “I can’t say I’m surprised they were too embarrassed to let you know. Didn’t have the evidence indeed. After what Dobson said to me, I’ve got to wonder what they told him, but it seems they didn’t try to blame me when they briefed you.”
“Blame you for what?” At least Bailey was getting briefed now, if in a backhanded way.
“I made sure the scene was preserved until the police crime scene technicians got here—and it took them a long time too—and then they had to go and lose the evidence before it could be processed.”
“Well, that does explain how Brandt could have been poisoned and we still couldn’t prove that he’d been murdered. And the poison might’ve been potassium cyanide, as I believe it was with Oak. Without samples to test—” Bailey caught himself. “But didn’t the post mortem prove that Brandt was poisoned? There should have been enough evidence at autopsy to show the manner of death and open the case as a homicide.”
Padget shook his head. “If there had been one. But we don’t know what it might’ve shown because there was a mix-up and the body was cremated before the coroner ever got to it.”
The amount of incompetence was beginning to sound too convenient. “How could that happen?”
“Keener’s personal physician got here soon and signed the death certificate, and then the men from the mortuary got here and removed the body before the authorities arrived. The police got a court order to transfer Keener’s remains to the county coroner, but the body had already been incinerated.”
“Well, it’s up to you and me to make sure something like that doesn’t happen this time. And while this room does need to be sealed, I’m not sure that will be secure enough. Isn’t there someplace safer to keep the evidence?”
Padget gave him a blank look, then gazed at the room in bewilderment.
Bailey sighed. “Not the whole room. Nobody’s going to make off with that. And no one is going to steal the body from under our noses.” He hoped not anyway. “But it might be a good idea to take some samples—of the wine from the bottle, what remains in Oak’s glass, and a piece of the tablecloth where it spilled—and keep them somewhere else to be safe.”
Padget nodded enthusiastically, and Bailey began to wonder if he’d been wrong in assuming that Talia had been the one to leak all those details to the tabloids. Perhaps it had been Padget, frustrated by the police’s lack of progress.
The man jerked his head toward the back of the house. “There is a safe in the butler’s room, where cash is kept for household expenses. Brandt Keener is the only other person besides myself who had the combination.”
Bailey examined the federal agent, who looked a lot less prepossessing now that he wasn’t playing the part of a butler. “You’re an important witness. How similar was Keener’s death to Oak’s?”
Shuddering, the man looked again at the corpse on the carpet. “It was like some horrible repeat performance by a different actor. If Oak was poisoned by cyanide, I’d say it’s a safe presumption the same substance killed Keener.”
“And you were here undercover because he had been hiding assets.”
“My superiors have their suspicions but no evidence. They hoped, they still hope, that I might be able to discover where to start looking at least. I’m not here to find a murderer—and I certainly wasn’t trained to investigate homicides—but the state police asked me to keep my eyes open.”
Padget was in over his head, but Bailey was not going to say so. And he could use the man’s help. “I don’t have to tell you most murderers tend to repeat themselves. So even if we don’t know who could’ve got their hands on some potassium cyanide, we can probably assume that if the same poison was used, it was also the same hand that employed it to cause both deaths. That leaves us with only two options. Either Oak had killed Keener and has now committed suicide in similar fashion. Or somebody else is the murderer, and they had reason to do away with both Brandt and now Oak, and still had their same weapon at hand.”
“Is cyanide that rare? Isn’t it possible that Oak really did commit suicide because he didn’t want to face the ordeal of embezzlement charges?”
“And just happened to have cyanide with him to do the job? It’s a possibility, but it’s slim. It’s more likely that if he committed suicide it was due to his killing Keener and that not working out well. After all, if Oak was already a murderer, he must’ve done in Brandt because he hoped to protect himself from the very ruin he seems only to have hastened. If he killed Keener.”
Padget nodded. “So there are two likely scenarios, and one of them would mean this whole sordid business is over and done with.” And it was clearly that solution Padget preferred.
Bailey shook his head. “I said more likely. But would someone who’d killed Keener in such a calculated fashion really be so quick to take his own life? Anyway, we would do best to assume that the same person murdered both men.”
Padget paled. “You’re saying there’s a killer on the loose, here, with us.”
“I’m saying we should act as if that’s the case.”
“Hopefully the sheriff’s men as well as the state police will get here soon, and they can take over.”
It was obvious the federal agent would welcome that, but it made it all the more imperative for Bailey to find Sam and convince her to leave before the authorities arrived. First he and Padget would have to secure the scene, though, and collect those back-up samples.
Before they could begin, Dobson returned with a grim countenance. He looked at them, then down at the dead man. “I’m afraid I’ve come bearing bad news. More of it, anyway. The phone lines appear to be down, and I couldn’t contact the police.”
Bailey narrowed his eyes at the man. This was another convenient coincidence for the murderer—but Bailey didn’t believe in that kind of coincidence. “Are you sure? Just because you didn’t get through right away?”
The lawyer squinted back at him. “There wasn’t a dial tone from the phone in the study, so I tried to call from the line in Brandt’s bedroom, but it wasn’t working either. We can keep trying, but as we don’t know when the problem might get fixed, we have to face the possibility that we won’t be able to contact the authorities until the ferry returns tomorrow afternoon.”
At least it gave Bailey more time to find a way to persuade Sam to leave the island. She’d want to use that time to investigate, and he wanted to make the best of it as well. He didn’t want to leave things unfinished any more than she.
He turned to Padget. “You can try calling them at regular intervals, but if the police aren’t going to show up soon, then we need to preserve as much of the evidence as we can. In addition to preserving a few extra samples, we should probably take photos of the scene as it is now, just in case. Then we seal off the room.”
Dobson nodded his approval. “Hopefully it will turn out to be nothing but a natural death, or maybe a suicide, but it’s suspicious, and the police will want us to treat it as such. And that means that, as an officer of the court, I should probably supervise your activity, so I can testify it was done properly.”
Padget gestured at the late Mr. Oak. “But what about the body? If the authorities may not be arriving until as late as tomorrow evening, shouldn’t we do something with it?”
Bailey shook his head. “The police will want us to leave the body where it is. If you’re worried about the smell, don’t be. It won’t become an issue in the twenty-four hours or so that it may take the authorities to get here.”
The lawyer looked at him sharply. “You sound as if you have some experience with this.”
“I do. A bit, at least. Enough to know what we should and shouldn’t do, I’d think.” He glanced at Padget. “And since we don’t know when the police will get here, we should probably say as little as possible to the others. No use upsetting people.”
Dobson coughed. “Surely you’re not saying we try to keep Oak’s death a secret?”
“No, of course not. But there’s no need to throw around words like suicide or murder.”
Padget frowned. “But they’re bound to be suspicious, aren’t they?”
Bailey nodded. “Let them. But we don’t want people to panic.” He looked back at the lawyer. “It seems prudent, doesn’t it, to say as little as possible, since we don’t actually know what happened?”
Appealed to like that, Dobson could only agree. “Yes. We should definitely exercise caution.”
Turning back to Padget, Bailey had some more questions. “You’ve got the keys to the dining room on you?” The federal agent nodded. “Then lock the door to the hall off the foyer, and we can get what we need to collect samples from the kitchen. Is there a camera somewhere in the house we can use?”
“Yes. I’ve got one in my room.”
“Then lock that door, and let’s go tell Mrs. Trimble and Talia that Oak is dead and the dining room off-limits. Then you can go grab the camera and we can get to work.”
Padget took a ring of keys from his pants pocket and locked the one door then led the way through the other and into the kitchen. Bailey and the lawyer followed and saw Mrs. Trimble and Talia at the table talking. Then the maid sprang to her feet and shrieked.
“That interfering witch! She was the reason he was sending me away? I’ll kill her. I would’ve killed her then if only I’d known.”
Bailey mentally moved Talia up to the top of his list of suspects. Then he met Padget’s eye and gave him the slightest nod. Resuming his role of butler, the man stepped forward and looked at Mrs. Trimble as he announced, “I’m sorry to say that the dining room is now off-limits. I’m afraid Mr. Oak died during dinner, and I can’t allow people to tramp in and out of there.”
The cook slapped her hand against her chest. “I knew thirteen people here was an unlucky number. Something bad was bound to happen.”
Padget seemed confused for a moment, then he must’ve remembered her earlier ramblings. “Thirteen only if you counted Mr. Keener’s ghost.”
“And obviously I was right to, wasn’t I? Surely it was Mr. Brandt’s vengeful spirit that struck down Mr. Oak.”
“We don’t know what killed Mr. Oak. That will be for the proper authorities to decide. Not you.”
But Bailey thought this was too good an opportunity to pass up. “Mrs. Trimble, do you think Oak murdered Mr. Keener? Is that why his ghost sought revenge?”
The woman blinked furiously. “We don’t know for sure Mr. Brandt was murdered, do we?” Despite her earlier accusations, the woman was hedging. “I do know that man was stealing from him. Wouldn’t that be enough reason for Mr. Brandt’s ghost to get back at him?”
Either reason might be sufficient motive for the non-existent ghost, but why had a real person needed Oak dead? Had the man known something that was dangerous to the murderer, or might the same motive apply to both men’s deaths? Bailey wanted the answers to those questions, but now wasn’t the time to try to think them through.
Bailey nodded at Padget again, and the federal agent hurried across the kitchen and into the corridor, headed toward his room to get his camera. Bailey turned to Talia then. “Maybe you should worry about Keener’s ghost yourself.”
Talia squared her jaw at him. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. Brandt knew I was in love with him, and I’d never do anything to hurt him. That’s what you’re accusing me of, isn’t it?”
Bailey held up his hands. “Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t accusing you of anything. But I heard what was in the will, and it sounded like Mr. Keener was unhappy with you.”
“He left me fifty thousand dollars. If you heard that, then you know how happy he’d been with me.” She said it with a straight face, despite knowing he had witnessed her earlier outburst.
“Then I guess you have nothing to worry about from a vengeful ghost.” He looked back at the cook. “But it seems the phones are out, and so we’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the police. Until then we all need to sit tight and stay calm.”
Except that Bailey needed to work quick. With Padget’s help maybe he could uncover the killer before the police arrived. Or perhaps Sam was doing that right now.