Death on Beacon Hill (18 page)

“He was still alive? It
must
have been a long time ago.”

“Thirteen years ago. I made a fool of myself, as men that age are wont to do. For some time afterward, I wished I’d never met her. But then I came to realize that she really wasn’t such a bad sort, just looking after her own interests. In a way, I grew to admire her for it.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Foster said. “She had her faults, but she was self-reliant, fearless—not qualities one normally associates with feminine allure, yet I must admit they only added to her...” He paused as if foraging for words. “She was...” 

Will knew enough not to fill the silence with words.

“Virginia and I...” Foster trailed off. Nell wished she could see him.

“So I gathered,” Will said.

“She used to tie a ribbon around the knob on her garden door when she wanted me to come calling,” Foster said. “I knew there were other men she...entertained. I would see them at night, sometimes, going into her garden, or coming out. It never really troubled me. I mean...one uses a French letter, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I didn’t love her,” Foster said, “I just loved...well...”

“Yes,” Will said knowingly, “I think I—”

“No, it wasn’t just because she was free with her favors. It was the way in which she was free. She was...utterly abandoned in that respect. Her appetites were as consuming as any man’s, and she gave full rein to them. It was never boring, being with her.”

“No, I don’t imagine it was.”

Nell felt an absurd stab of jealousy, knowing what was transpiring in Will’s mind.

“And she expected nothing from you?” Will asked. “No declarations of love, no promise of marriage?”

“She expected gifts,” Foster said. “That was understood. She preferred jewelry. At some point, I noticed she never wore any of the things I’d given her. I assumed she was pawning them.”

“Really?” Will was wise to keep his responses brief, Nell thought. Foster obviously felt a rapport with him, and was in a mood to unburden himself. It was best just to listen.

“I suspected she was in embarrassed circumstances, but too proud to let on. After I broke it off—”

“It was you who broke it off,” Will asked, “not she?”

“I had started calling on a young lady,” Foster said, “It began to feel sordid, continuing that sort of relationship with Virginia while I was seeing Louise. I told Virginia the truth, that things seemed to be getting serious with Louise, and that was why I couldn’t see her anymore. About a month later, I found a note slid under my door. It was from Virginia, demanding five-hundred dollars, or she’d show the Red Book to Louise and the dean of the medical school.”

“The Red Book?”

At last,
Nell thought.

“It’s this thick journal bound in red snakeskin. She uses it—used it—to write about her encounters with men. And believe me, she spared no detail. She used to like to read to me from it—omitting the real names of the men, of course. It’s the most ribald stuff I’ve ever encountered. I could only imagine what she’d written about me. We’d done things... Let’s just say she brought out a certain side of me.”

Mrs. Kimball’s former lovers would be ruined, Nell realized, socially and professionally, should the Red Book come to light. Perhaps one of them had come to her home looking for the book—either to protect himself or to use the information in it to his advantage—only to have the situation get out of hand. Or perhaps he’d come there intending to kill Mrs. Kimball, thereby ensuring that she could never expose their affair—or because he was enraged over the blackmail, or jealous of her other lovers. There were, it seemed to Nell, far too many reasons for Mrs. Kimball’s gentlemen friends to have wanted her dead.

“Funny thing was,” Foster continued, “Louise and I had parted ways just a few days before I got Virginia’s note. Of course, Virginia had no way of knowing that. As for the dean, he and I were actually close friends, had been for years. I was privy to every detail of his own liaisons, so I had no fear that my little dalliance with Virginia would come back to haunt me. At least I was a bachelor, which was more than he could say.”

“So you didn’t pay the five-hundred?” Will asked.

“No, I did.”

There came a pause. “I don’t understand,” Will said. “If she had nothing to hold over your head...”

“Virginia was a proud lady. Her situation must have been terribly dire for her to stoop to blackmail. I had the money. I didn’t begrudge it.”

Nell stood there in Isaac Foster’s library with her mouth hanging open. From Will’s silence, she gathered he was as astounded as she by Foster’s largesse.

Finally Will said, “Why didn’t you just give her the money outright?”

“Oh, she would have been mortified. She never would have taken it. You see, the blackmail was her way of squeezing money out of her former conquests—I can’t have been the only one she tapped—without giving away the true extent of her hardship. If you’d read her notes, you’d understand. She’d make it seem as if it were all a game to her, as if she were doing it as a perverse form of amusement rather than out of actual need.”

“‘Notes?’” Will asked. “Did you receive more than one?”

“Oh, yes, she’d come tapping on my piggy bank every few months.”

Will fell silent for a moment, and then he said, “You felt something for her, obviously. Her murder must have shocked you.”

After a long pause, Foster said, “I was walking home from the medical school that afternoon after delivering a three-hour lecture on clinical surgery. At the corner of Mt. Vernon, I noticed a crowd gathering around Virginia’s house, so I went down there and asked a boy what had transpired. He said an actress had been shot.”

“Had it just happened,” Will asked, “or...”

“About an hour before, I suppose. The lecture had ended at a quarter to five, and the paper said she was killed around four.”

That was a good question on Will’s part. Assuming Foster really had been lecturing on clinical surgery when Mrs. Kimball and Fiona were shot, there was no way he could have done it.

“There were constables milling around,” Foster said, “just about every constable in the city, it looked like. I told one of them I was a physician, and asked if I be of any help, but he said it was too late, that the lady who lived there was dead, and her maid, too. They brought out two bodies on stretchers. I pulled back the sheets. The first one was the maid, but I could only tell that because her hair was reddish brown, not black. Her face...well... As for Virginia, her eyes were wide open, but so...blank. She’d always had this...spark in her eyes, you know, this crackle.”

“Yes,” Will said. “Yes, I know what you mean.”

“Max Thurston was there—the playwright? He and Virginia were very close. He lived just across Mount Vernon from her, in one of those Louisburg Square townhouses that look exactly alike, except that his has bright blue window shutters and a lime green front door. Every afternoon at exactly four o’clock, he walked over to Virginia’s for cocktails and gossip.”

“Cocktails? I thought it was tea.”

“So Max has been claiming, but I happen to know it was Martinez cocktails, and plenty of them. It was an entirely platonic relationship of long standing. He’s quite the Lizzie. Not a bad sort, though, quite likable in his own way. You may not credit it, given his...inclinations, but—”

“Believe me,” Will said in an amused tone, “after eighteen years in British boarding schools and universities, where one can go a very long time without glimpsing a female, I’ve long since learned not to make assumptions about a fellow based on what he does with whom when the lights are out.”

“Max was inconsolable,” Foster said. “Weeping, clawing at his head. His clothes were covered with blood, his hair sticking out at all angles—I don’t know what had happened to his hat. I remember thinking how sad it was to see him like that—he’s quite the dandy, always so well turned out. He’d cornered the detective in charge, fellow named Skinner, and wouldn’t let him go. He kept saying he knew who’d killed Virginia, and that it wasn’t Fiona Gannon—that’s what the maid was called.”

“Really?”

“He said it was an important man, very wealthy and powerful, but that he was afraid to name him out loud with so many strangers about. He said he’d come to the Detectives’ Bureau in City Hall the next morning, and tell him then. After he left, Skinner made some crude remarks to some of the constables—you know, about Max being a weepy old cot-betty, and how the local matrons shouldn’t meddle in murder cases, that sort of thing. They were roaring with laughter when I left. I went home and poured myself a whiskey and then a few more. I don’t even remember going to bed that night, but when I woke up in the morning, I realized I had a problem.”

“Yes?” Will said when Foster didn’t continue.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

“Because I understand why you cared about Virginia Kimball. It the same reason I cared about her.”

Presently Foster said, “My old friend is no longer dean of the medical school. The new fellow, Calvin Ellis—it’s well known that he’s a man of strong ethics and principles. He’s considering me for assistant dean, which is something I’ve wanted for a very long time. When I woke up that morning, I realized how damaging it could be if the Red Book were to be made public at this particular juncture.”

“What did you do?” Will asked, although of course he already knew.

“I bribed the detective handling the case to bury that damned book as deep as he could—or preferably, burn it—if it should ever come to light.”

“I suppose I can’t really blame you.”

“So now that I’ve told you all my darkest secrets,” Foster said in an amused tone, “you owe it to me to buy my house.”

“All right.”

Foster chuckled. “Seriously, think about it and—”

“I
have
thought about it. Nine thousand, you said?”

“Um...”

Nell was as stunned as Isaac Foster—more so.

“A whole house for less than it takes to buy a secondhand gun,” Will said. “That sounds like a bargain to me.”

*   *   *

“You’re buying the house?” Nell asked incredulously as they strolled back up Acorn after their visit to Foster; they were on foot today.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Well, yes, but what does a single man—a single man who’s away from home most of the time—need with such a big house?”

“Perhaps I’m trying to attract the more desirable young ladies,” he said, mimicking Winifred Pratt’s advice.

“Hewitt!” They turned to see Isaac Foster leaning out of a second floor window, his hands cupped around his mouth. “This Madame Blavatsky character...?”

“A gibbering madwoman,” Will called back. “No doubt about it.”

Foster grinned as if a colleague had just confirmed his diagnosis. “Have your lawyer contact Pratt about the house. I’ve just got one stipulation. The sale is dependent upon your applying to teach medical jurisprudence at Harvard.”

“What?”

“Just make an appointment with the dean and propose the course. You don’t have to accept the position, even if he offers it. You just have to apply for it.”

“Now, wait a—”

“Within the week.” Foster waved goodbye and shut the window.

*   *   *

“Miss Nell Sweeney and Dr. William Hewitt to see Mr. Thurston.” Will handed his card to the handsome young valet who’d opened the lime green door.

The valet, clad in a martially inspired blue uniform with fringed epaulettes and lots of gold braid, gestured them into a palatial entry hall. Lifting a silver salver from the hallstand, he placed Will’s card in it and disappeared down the hall.

He returned a minute later and invited them to follow him back down the hall to a solarium so bursting with potted trees, bushes, ferns and vines that it looked as if a tropical forest had erupted right up through the slate floor. In the middle of the room stood a green wicker table with Will’s calling card on it. Maximilian Thurston, a spotless linen apron tied over his lounging jacket, stood with his back to them, one hand gripping his antler-head cane while the other tilted a watering can over a tub of philodendrons.

Without pausing in his task or even looking over his shoulder at them, Thurston asked, “Do I know you, Dr. Hewitt?”

“We met in passing some years ago.” Will’s resonant British drawl made Thurston’s ersatz accent seem rather inane by comparison. “I doubt you’d remember me.”

Only when the philodendrons were thoroughly watered did Thurston slowly straighten up and turn to face them. He looked sallow in the dappled sunlight filtering through his indoor jungle, and a bit stooped—older than on the day of Virginia Kimball’s funeral. His grooming, however, was impeccable, from the top of his slickly combed head to the toes of his tassled slippers. The slippers and jacket were precisely the same cobalt blue as the design on his floral neck scarf.

Thurston squinted at Will from across the room, then at Nell. “Some coffee, please, Christopher,” he told the footman, who bowed and left.

Will stepped forward and laid his hat on the table. “Sir, Miss Sweeney and I are making inquiries into the death of Virginia Kimball on behalf of Fiona Gannon’s uncle. He believes her to be innocent, and he would like to see her exonerated.”