SABINA
The last person she expected to come knocking on her door on a Sunday morning was a uniformed policeman she’d never seen before.
It was nearing eleven o’clock and she was about to leave for church, after which she intended to lunch with cousin Callie and then call on Roland W. Fairchild to find out if Charles the Third had kept his promise. When she opened the door to be confronted by the bluecoat, her first thought was that his presence had something to do with the previous night’s hubbub at the Rayburn Gallery. But he soon disabused her of that notion.
“Officer Dundee, Mrs. Carpenter,” he said with cap in hand but no smile on his beefy countenance. “I’ve been sent to fetch you. If you’ll come with me, please.”
Past him she could see a police van waiting at the curb, with a second bluecoat standing beside it. “Come with you where?” she asked. “The Hall of Justice?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Where, then?”
“You’ll soon see. Come along, now. Lieutenant McGinn is waiting.”
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know a Lieutenant McGinn. What does he want with me?”
“That’s not for me to say. He’ll tell you himself.”
Sabina had no choice but to go along. As the van clattered them downhill toward the city center, she tried again to pry information out of Officer Dundee, but he remained stoically silent. The feeling of alarm in her grew as they turned east on Market Street, and became full-fledged when she saw that their destination was the Baldwin Hotel and that two other police vehicles were on the circular carriageway at the front entrance, one parked and the other just about to leave. That one she recognized as the coroner’s morgue wagon.
Oh, Lord! Not Charles the Third!
The van rattled to a stop behind the morgue wagon. A knot of onlookers were being kept at a distance by more bluecoats, Sabina saw as she alighted with Dundee at her side. Among them were a number of reporters from the city’s half-dozen newspapers; one of them, she was sorry to note, was that dreadful muckraking, backbiting columnist for the Evening Bulletin, Homer Keeps.
Dundee escorted her inside, across the mostly empty lobby, and into one of the elevators. They ascended and stopped at the third floor, then proceeded down the hall to room 311. Dundee knocked, and when a gruff voice responded, gave his name and said he’d accomplished his mission. The door was opened by a young, grim-visaged stranger with notebook and pencil in hand, obviously a plainclothes detective, who appraised Sabina briefly before stepping aside. She steeled herself as they entered.
A large, gray-haired man of some fifty years stood in the middle of the room, his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets. He wore a rumpled suit and a tie either carelessly knotted or pulled askew; a watch chain with the largest elk’s-tooth fob she’d ever seen was draped across his middle. His eyes were shrewd but on the dull side—the unimaginative plodding sort, she guessed. She had never seen him before, either, but he was even more obviously a police detective; she would immediately have identified him as such if she’d spied him in the midst of a crowd in Union Square.
Behind him, Octavia Fairchild was seated on the tufted red plush settee, her large-boned body encased in a plum-colored silk dressing gown. There was nothing haughty about her today. She sat with shoulders bowed, her hands in her lap twisting a lace handkerchief; tears stained her cheeks, and the left one bore a blood-caked gash some two inches long. The look she gave Sabina was one of grief and suppressed anger, but lacking any of the malice of their previous meeting.
There was no one else in the room. But others had been here recently, one of them the occupant of the departed morgue wagon. The overturned chair before the hearth, and the still fresh bloodstains spattered on the carpet next to it, made this all too plain.
The gray-haired detective said in his gruff voice, “You’re Mrs. Sabina Carpenter? Good. Police Lieutenant McGinn.”
“Why was I brought here, Lieutenant? What happened?”
“Murder, that’s what happened,” Octavia Fairchild said in a strained, tremulous voice. “Foul murder.”
“Who was killed?”
“Who do you suppose? My husband, poor Roland. Viciously slain in cold blood—”
“That’ll do, Mrs. Fairchild,” McGinn said, not unkindly. Then, to Sabina, “You were summoned to help us catch the man who committed the crime. The man you were hired by the victim to locate, Charles Fairchild.”
Sabina had felt a small relief when the victim was identified as her client; rather him than Charles the Third. But now she felt only bewilderment. “Why would he murder his cousin?”
“He came to see Mr. Fairchild this morning. At your direction after that business at the Rayburn Gallery last night, according to what he told the victim. Is that right?”
“Yes. I talked him into it, as per my client’s wishes. But Charles was perfectly amiable about it. He seemed to bear no ill will toward his cousin.”
“The evidence says he bore plenty. Doesn’t believe he’s Charles Fairchild, got some screws loose and thinks he’s this British detective, Sherlock Holmes. Showed up here at … what time, Hatton?”
The younger detective consulted his notebook. “Ten-fifteen. Dressed in what he called his ‘true colors’ and carrying a walking stick with a heavy knob.”
True colors. That meant Inverness cape, deerstalker cap, blackthorn stick—the outfit he’d worn the first time Sabina had met him.
“Insisted he was this Holmes gent,” McGinn said, “and that he’d never heard of Charles Fairchild, never been to Chicago, and had no intention of going there. Victim tried to talk sense to him, but he wasn’t having any. Started yelling that the victim was trying to … what was the word he used?”
“Persecute,” Hatton said.
“Trying to persecute him and he wouldn’t stand for it. Then without warning he up and bashed Mr. Fairchild over the head with his stick.”
“Kept hitting Roland with it!” Octavia Fairchild cried. “Hitting and hitting him even after he fell!”
“Skull crushed in four places,” Hatton said.
“When I screamed he spun around and struck me a glancing blow.” She touched the cut on her cheek. “If I hadn’t ducked away and continued screaming, he would have killed me, too!”
“Did your husband do anything to provoke the attack?” Sabina asked her. “Push or strike him, perhaps?”
“Of course not! Roland was not a violent man.”
“Neither is Charles the Third, in my experience.”
“You have only had limited dealings with him, you admitted that to me when you were here before. You have no idea what that madman is capable of. I do because I witnessed it!”
McGinn gave her a look and she subsided, sniffling. “Mrs. Fairchild’s screams drove him out. He managed to get clear of the hotel before any of the staff knew what happened. The house dick searched the neighborhood and so did my men when they arrived. No sign of him.”
Sabina said slowly, “And you think I might know where he can be found.”
“Stands to reason. He was with you the past two nights at the art gallery, so you must’ve tracked him down.”
“But I didn’t. He came to the gallery the first night in answer to a personals advertisement I placed in the newspapers.”
“He tell you or give you any idea where he’s lodging?”
Sabina begged the question by saying, “He was questioned by the investigating officers last night. Surely they asked for his present address.”
“They did, and he gave them one.”
“Well, then—”
“This one,” McGinn said. “The Baldwin Hotel.”
Shrewd and slyly playful, as always. Daft, yes, but a man of keen intelligence not unlike that of the famous detective he believed himself to be—a cerebral individual devoted to solving crimes, not the witless sort who committed them. It seemed out of character, real or fancied, for him to resort to sudden violent behavior. Unless he’d been severely provoked or threatened, as may well have been the case in the death of Artemas Sneed last fall. If he had killed the blackmailer then, the deed had been almost certainly one of self-defense. And Sneed had been skewered with a sword cane, which Charles’s stick likely was, not bashed on the head with it several times in a blind rage …
“Well, Mrs. Carpenter?” the lieutenant said. “Do you know where we can find the man?”
All her professional instincts commanded that she give McGinn the names of the Dubliner Hotel and Tam O’Shanter pub in Tar Flat. And yet it seemed almost an act of betrayal to do so without knowing Charles’s side of what had taken place here this morning. It was difficult to imagine him bludgeoning his cousin to death in a homicidal frenzy, but if he had, he must have been driven to it in some way. Would he perhaps attack her in a similar fashion if she questioned him about it? No. Of that much she felt certain; he had never been anything except courtly and respectful to her. Would he admit to the crime and reveal the reason? He might; she had never known him to tell an outright lie. In that event she could and would act accordingly.
“No, Lieutenant,” she said, one of the few willful lies she’d ever told, “I’m afraid I don’t.”
* * *
McGinn finally permitted her to leave. Octavia Fairchild was weeping again by then, saying between sobs, “I can’t bear the thought of that monster escaping punishment for what he did to my poor Roland. You must find him—you must!” The woman’s expressions of grief and outrage seemed genuine enough, but they struck Sabina as exaggerated, overly dramatic. From what she had observed of the Fairchilds’ union, it had been something considerably less than idyllic.
The bluecoat, Dundee, with McGinn’s permission, offered to provide return transport to her lodgings. Under different circumstances, Sabina might have declined. But home was where she needed to go now, and the police van would get her there just as quickly as a cab. As John was fond of saying, why pay for what you can have free of charge?
When they exited the elevator, she saw to her dismay that the gaggle of newshounds had been permitted to enter the lobby. And naturally the first of them to notice her was Homer Keeps. The nasty little muckraker accosted her before she and Dundee could escape.
“Ah, Mrs. Carpenter,” he said around the cigar clamped between his yellowing teeth. His piggish little eyes glittered eagerly. “A statement for the press, if you please.”
“I don’t please.” She attempted to move past him, but he scurried around Dundee to block her way again.
“Why were you brought here in a police van? What have you to do with the crime that took place here this morning?”
The bluecoat answered for her. “The lady’s not at liberty to give out any statements to the press.”
“Does it have anything to do with the attempted theft at the Rayburn Gallery last night?”
“As the officer just told you,” Sabina said, “I’m not at liberty to comment.”
The other newshounds were now grouped around Keeps. One of them started to ask a question of his own, but the fat little mudslinger overrode him. “Who is the weirdly outfitted gent who assisted you in the apprehension of the handbag thieves, the one who calls himself Sherlock Holmes? Does he have anything to do with the murder of the hotel guest?”
“All questions you should be asking Lieutenant McGinn,” Dundee said.
“That I will. That I will. But now I’m asking them of Mrs. Carpenter, and as a representative of the fourth estate I demand satisfaction.” A long ash fell from his cigar onto the front of his frock coat, joining the residue of numerous others that he hadn’t bothered to brush off. “You and your none too respectable partner have a serious history, serious indeed, of participation in all sorts of scurrilous crimes—”
“Most of which we’ve solved or helped solve to the satisfaction of all concerned.”
“Not all. Oh, no, not all. The people have a right to know the truth, the whole truth, of these latest heinous acts of violence and chicanery.”
“Yes, they do,” Sabina agreed. “These and all others that plague our city. But they’ll never learn the truth of anything whatsoever by reading Homer Keeps’s columns in the Evening Bulletin.”
The other reporters laughed. Keeps spluttered indignantly, his round face reddening. Dundee shouldered past him, ushered Sabina out of the hotel and into the waiting van with no further harassment.
In her rooms, she rummaged in the trunk she used for storage of various odds and ends. She couldn’t very well make a sojourn into Tar Flat dressed as she was in her rather expensive Sunday best. Or in any clothing that would make her an object of attention in that neighborhood. Charles the Third may have fled the city by now, but she doubted it. If he was guilty of Roland Fairchild’s murder, he was not the sort of man to panic and Tar Flat was as safe a haven as any. If he was innocent, he would have returned there to continue his mysterious surveillances.
From the trunk she took the outfit she wore for outdoor activities such as biking, picnicking, and hiking—a plain skirt and a nondescript shirtwaist. Two other trunk items completed her wardrobe: a cloth handbag into which her derringer fit nicely, and an out-of-date, daisy-decorated bonnet that she had bought on a whim and neglected to discard even though it made her look just a bit dowdy.
Looking at herself in the full-length bedroom mirror, she decided she would past muster in Tar Flat. She also had the wry thought that the costume amounted to a disguise. Hardly as outlandish as any of those Charles the Third was so fond of, but a disguise nonetheless. In a manner of speaking, she was now employing one of the crackbrain’s favorite gambits.