Twenty-one

When I got home the first thing I found was a note in my mail slot. It was from Emily.

I must see you at once. Dorcas died suddenly today.

I paused only to wash the grime of the trip from my face, then I went out again, straight to Emily’s drugstore. It was by now half past five. I didn’t know how late she had to work on Saturdays, but most stores had closed by this time. McPherson’s hadn’t. I glanced at the globes in the window and then went inside. Emily was at the counter, her face looking pale and strained.

“Oh, Molly, you came. Thank heavens.” She came around the counter to greet me and grabbed both my hands. “I went to see you yesterday evening but you weren’t home.”

“No, I was up in Massachusetts, working on your family background.”

“And did you find—” She looked up expectantly then shook her head. “No matter about that now. It’s not important. Not when my friends are dying. First Fanny and now Dorcas. There has to be something to it, Molly.”

“Unless it’s a very powerful disease.”

“But Dorcas was getting better. You saw for yourself. She didn’t seem to be at death’s door.”

“No,” I agreed, “she seemed like anyone else with influenza—under the weather, but not dying. But I don’t see why Anson Poindexter or anyone else would want to kill her.”

“She went to see Fanny the week before, that’s why.” Emily had been keeping her voice down. Now she raised it without thinking, looked around at the men still occupied in the back room, and lowered it again. “Fanny may have been suspicious. She may have told Dorcas something damning.”

“Well, even if she had, that wouldn’t explain Honoria, would it?”

“Honoria? What has she to do with this?”

“Honoria Masters—is that the woman you were speaking about the other day? Comes from a good family and now sings opera?”

“Yes, that’s her.” Emily smiled. “She was one of our Vassar classmates, you know. She had a lovely voice, even in those days. Then she went to study in Italy and the rest, as they say, is history.”

“She’s dead. I read it in the paper today. ‘Brief, unexplained illness,’ it said.”

Emily put her hand to her throat as she gasped. “And she went to visit Dorcas last week. I suppose she could have caught whatever microbe it was that killed Fanny and Dorcas, but . . .”

“She had no connection to Fanny Poindexter, did she?”

She shook her head at this, puzzled. “Only that we used to be students together. I don’t think she was part of Fanny’s current circle. They are mostly young married women like Fanny herself. Honoria was too busy with her career.”

“Well, then. We have to put the deaths down to a nasty sickness and nothing more.”

She nodded. “I suppose so. But I can’t rest until I’m absolutely sure. Maybe I’m being an hysterical female. Maybe I cared about Fanny too much, but . . .” She paused and looked at me strangely. She had obviously read from my face what I was thinking.

Because I had just remembered something I had not taken into account until now. Somebody had deliberately tried to run me down the other day—somebody in a big black carriage. There could be no other explanation for this except that someone didn’t wish me to arrive at the truth.

“I don’t think you are the hysterical type, Emily,” I said. “What time do you get off work? Maybe we could visit Dorcas’s family to offer our condolences this evening.”

At this she blushed bright red. “I’m afraid. You see, Ned and I—well, he asked me to go with him to a show and . . .”

I smiled. “Of course you must go on your outing with your young man. We can visit Dorcas’s family in the morning. It would probably be more seemly, in any case.”

We arranged to meet in the morning. I took the El train home and was just walking up Patchin Place when I heard my name called and turned to see Daniel behind me. “Ah, there you are,” he said, quickening his pace to catch up with me. “I was just coming to call on you. I’m glad to find you home for once. I had a free evening yesterday and I came over, all prepared to take you out for the evening, and you weren’t there.”

“No,” I said. “I was in Massachusetts.”

“Massachusetts? My, you do get around these days. Quite the globe-trotter.” He sounded a trifle annoyed.

“Just checking some details for a case I’m working on.”

I opened the front door and he followed me inside. The setting sun was shining in through the front windows, giving the whole place a pleasant rosy glow.

“And how is this case progressing?” he asked.

“Well, thank you. I think I’ve pretty much got it solved.”

“Good for you. You’re turning into quite the detective, aren’t you?”

I looked up at him to see if he was being sarcastic. He read my look and laughed. “No, I mean it. You’ll be an asset to me in my profession, I can see that.”

“Not if you won’t share your cases with me.”

“Ah, well, when we’re married it will be different.” He came over to me and slipped his arms around my waist, drawing me close to him. “In many ways,” he added. “I can’t wait until we can be together, Molly.”

“You haven’t asked me yet,” I said. “I may be so successful that I’ll turn you down.”

“Don’t tease me like that,” he murmured, his lips nuzzling into my hair. “You know I’m waiting until I can do it properly.”

I pushed him away. “Then we should wait until you can do it properly,” I said, giving him a meaningful glance.

He laughed at my double meaning. I put my hand up to his cheek. Why did his closeness still have this effect on me? I could feel the roughness of his skin and the warmth of his breath on my face and hand.

“So what brings you here?” I asked, attempting lightness as I moved away and sat at the kitchen table. “Don’t tell me you’ve two free evenings in a row?”

“As a matter of fact, I have,” he said. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite me.

“You’ve solved all of those complicated cases?”

“Not solved. Put new men on them. We weren’t getting anywhere. And with the Chinese tong murders I suspect we’ll never get anywhere. They’ll not betray their own. Frankly I don’t really care if they go around killing each other, but I’d surely like to know who is their opium kingpin. Someone’s bringing it into the country in large quantities and not for medicinal purposes but to keep the opium parlors supplied.”

“Speaking of opium,” I said. “You remember the suspicious death I spoke to you about?”

“Which didn’t turn out to be suspicious at all,” he said. “I interviewed her doctor, remember?”

“Yes, I know. But something strange has happened. Two of her friends, both society ladies, have died under similar strange circumstances.”

“I told you, this flu has been a killer, Molly. That’s why I was so worried when you insisted on running around just when you were recovering.”

“But there’s a chance it wasn’t influenza, Daniel. The symptoms weren’t typical. I went to visit the second woman and she was suffering from considerable gastric distress as well as a high fever.”

“So what are you saying—that they were poisoned somehow?”

“It is a possibility.”

“For what reason?”

“I told you the first woman was planning to divorce her husband because he had a mistress. That was a good enough motive. If they divorced, he’d lose her fortune.”

“And the second and third women? Were they also planning to divorce their husbands?”

“You’re not taking me seriously, Daniel,” I said angrily.

He patted my hand, which I found annoying. “I’m thinking that maybe you’re letting your success as a detective go to your head and seeing crimes where there are none. The thing to ask yourself in any murder case, Molly, is ‘who benefits?’”

“In the case of the first victim, obviously the husband, in many ways. He keeps her fortune and is free to marry his mistress if he wants to.” As I said this I found my thoughts wandering to that graveyard scene. Would Anson Poindexter really want to marry Mademoiselle Fifi? Hardly likely given their difference in class, and given that look I had seen pass between him and Bella.

“But the other two?” Daniel insisted.

“It’s possible that the first woman told her friends what she planned to do, or that she suspected her husband was trying to kill her.”

He shook his head. “Not a strong enough motive. First, how would he know what she’d told her friends?”

“He overheard her?”

“Unlikely that she would have revealed such a suspicion with him in the house. And second, why would he need to kill them? The first death was so well carried out that the doctor was convinced she died from natural causes.”

I sighed. “You’re right, of course. We managed to obtain some of her hair and there was no trace of arsenic in it, so that rules out the most obvious poison.”

He looked at me, surprised. “You obtained her hair? How did you do that? Yank it out of her head when she was dead? Or did you ask her for it when she was still alive?”

“We didn’t have to do either. Her hair came out with the high fever. It was all over the pillow.”

“Interesting,” he said. “And who tested this hair?”

“My friend Emily’s young man. He’s an apprentice to a druggist.”

“An apprentice druggist? I wonder if he has the facility and knowledge to run a test like that.”

“He’s very smart,” I said.

“Yes, but . . .”

“If you’re volunteering to retest it for me, I’m sure I can get more hair from Emily. She was planning to weave it into a mourning ring. And there’s something else you could do,” I added as I remembered. “It just happens that I have a sample of a preparation that was never tested,” I said. “It was a bottle of stomach mixture. I poured some onto a ball of cotton wool.”

“Quite the daring opportunist, aren’t you,” Daniel said. “But I wasn’t actually volunteering to do either. Until you can come up with a good motive for someone needing all three women out of the way, then I’ll have to believe that they died of natural causes.”

“You’ll not even volunteer to test a strand of hair for me then?”

He stood up again and came around the table to me, putting both hands on my shoulders. “Molly, why don’t you give up on this? You are grasping at straws, or rather you’re being influenced by someone else’s vivid imagination. Is she paying you to look into this? If not, then you’re wasting valuable time and can achieve nothing by it. In my job we find it hard enough to prove a case of poisoning unless it was so obvious that the victim was practically frothing at the mouth. I’m sure skilled poisoners get away with murder every day in New York City. We may be dealing with one ourselves, because we still haven’t found any link between quite a few deaths from arsenic poisoning.”

“You’ve tested everything they ate or drank?”

“Of course. And looked into any motive the family members might have had for wanting to get rid of them. But nothing. In most cases the victims were poor and had nothing to leave.”

I looked up at him suddenly. “What color was their wallpaper?”

He laughed. “Their wallpaper?”

“That’s right. This young druggist was saying that some wallpaper contains arsenic, especially the green one with roses that is so popular.”

Daniel was still smiling. “Yes, but even if it contained arsenic, it wouldn’t be enough to kill somebody unless they actually licked it. And if it gave off fumes, it would have made the rest of the family sick.”

“Just a thought,” I said. “I know nothing about it personally.”

“Which is why you should stop sticking your nose into this business of the three women. If there were a real poisoner, then your bumbling attempts would warn him to be on his guard. It might even drive him to kill again. So be careful. You’ve had enough narrow scrapes—including almost stepping under the wheels of my automobile.”

“That’s it!” I shouted, making him jump. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s the reason I’m inclined to believe Emily.”

“What is?”

“Someone tried to run me down the other day. A big black carriage came right at me as I was crossing the street.”

“I’d put that down to a bad driver,” Daniel said, “and to your not looking where you were walking.”

“No, it was deliberate, I’m sure. He came right at me and didn’t attempt to slow or swerve.”

“So you think someone, in a city as big as New York, was waiting and lurking on a street, just on the off chance you’d pass by and he could run you down?”

“It wasn’t just anywhere in New York City,” I said. “It was around the corner from Patchin Place, just by the Jefferson Market building.”

“All the same,” he said, “I’m still inclined to believe that some coachman was not looking where he was going, or had been told to hurry by his master and was driving rather too fast.”

“But he came right at me, Daniel. He didn’t attempt to rein in the horses or to swerve away. In fact I think he almost steered toward me.”

He was looking at me with a look I couldn’t quite fathom—was it humor or concern, or maybe a bit of both?

“You don’t believe me, but it’s true,” I said.

He sighed. “If it’s true, all the more reason to back down, Molly. If you really think that someone would be desperate enough to try to kill you in this way, then that person must suspect that you are coming too close to the truth. As I’ve said before, criminal cases should be left to the police.”

“Aren’t you the police?” I demanded. “But I’ve presented you with the facts and you’re doing nothing.” I shook his hands from my shoulders and spun around to face him. “You could at least volunteer to test that hair for me.”

He sighed. “I suppose I could have that done, if it would finally satisfy you.”

“Thank you.” I gave him a peck on the cheek. “I’ll ask Emily when I see her tomorrow and I’ll try to get a strand or two from the second dead woman.”

He shook his head, smiling. “Molly, you’re like a terrier. You hang on and shake and won’t let go.”

“Not until I’ve reached the truth.” I stood up to face him. “So where are you going to take me this evening?”

“I thought the theater,” he said.

“Any particular one?”

“What would you like to see?”

“I’d rather like to see the revue starring Mademoiselle Fifi,” I said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Rather risqué for a respectable young woman, don’t you think?”

“But I hear she is a wonderful dancer,” I said, eyeing him steadily.

He came over to me and put his hands on my shoulders again. “Molly, you are up to something. You have an ulterior motive for going to this show.”

“Really? Don’t be silly. And don’t tell me you’d not enjoy watching the dancing of Mademoiselle Fifi.”

“Of course I wouldn’t mind watching her,” he said, looking decidedly uncomfortable, “but . . .”

“Well then, what are we waiting for?”