Spider Dance (12 page)

“On what grounds, sir?”

Vanderbilt squirmed in his chair, ill at ease for the first time. “It was quite ugly, Mr. Holmes. My father was a gentle soul whom my grandfather dismissed as a ‘blatherskite’ when he was alive.”

The son gazed at the smoking cigar in its tray and some emotion passed over his features.

“There’s a family story, Mr. Holmes. The Commodore took the entire clan to Europe on the
North Star
, the largest private yacht in the world, in ’53. My father was a married man of thirty then, but when the Commodore caught him smoking a cigar on the deck, he denounced tobacco as ‘a dirty habit’ and offered my father ten thousand dollars if he never touched it again. My father immediately tossed his prime Havana overboard. He didn’t need the money, he told the Commodore. He would do it to please him.

“At that the old man took out his own Havana, grinned, and lit up.”

Vanderbilt shook his head. “My father was a greatly underestimated man. He’d overworked himself into a nervous breakdown on Wall Street trying to please the Commodore in vain, but when relegated out of sight to a Staten Island farm, he made such a profitable go of it the old man finally took him seriously. It was my father who expanded the railroad holdings, even beyond the U.S. borders, and he did it paying decent wages. When the Commodore’s will was challenged, he was charged in court with heinous things that did little to make our family acceptable to the Four Hundred. Perhaps that’s why my father died only eight years later, but he had managed to double the inheritance by then.”

“‘The past is prologue,’” I quoted again. I fancied I could be quite as commanding as the Commodore when I chose to be so.

The younger Vanderbilts struck me more as pot metal than of the Commodore’s steel, no matter how crudely smelted.

“Uncle Jerry and the aunts accused my father of manipulating an old man by . . . ‘procuring’ was the term . . . parlormaids. They said my father had arranged with phoney spiritualists to manipulate my grandfather into giving him all the money. He was even accused of bribing the Commodore’s young second wife into assisting with the charade. My father was a man who had married a modest minister’s daughter. It quite leveled my mother. The newspapers and the cartoonists ran riot.”

“Hmm. And this was when?”

“The trial ran from late ’78 to early ’79. At the end, my father had to setde with the dissidents. He actually drove in his carriage to each of their homes and handed over a million in bonds to Uncle Jerry, and half a million each to the aunts.”

“I assume the eldest son is still the heir, in your case.”

“Yes, only now it is the two eldest. My brother Cornelius and I share the wealth, and the onus of managing it. When my poor father died, he was the wealthiest man in the world.”

“And what killed him?”

“Wear and tear, Mr. Holmes, wear and tear. He’d made an unfortunate misstep in front of the press seven years ago. It was during a railroad junket with some of his fellow moguls. The Chicago press wanted an interview and my father explained that he maintained the crack passenger service between Chicago and New York less from profit than to keep the rival Pennsylvania Railroad out of the market. Didn’t he feel that good passenger service was a duty to the rail-riding public? he was asked. My father, relaxed and thinking only of his rivalry, answered ‘The public be damned,’ and was vilified for that ever after, which for him turned out only to be three years, no doubt due to the onslaught of vicious cartoons portraying him as a heartless robber baron. He retired soon after, and began work on the Staten Island mausoleum he had promised the Commodore he would build. Ironically,
he was all too soon serving himself. He died almost four years ago, while lunching at home, just down the avenue. The president of the B & O Railroad had a bone to pick and went over Neily and myself to call on my father, who collapsed of a stroke the moment he rose to receive him.”

“A pity. It does indeed seem that your father had a fine head for business, but no heart for it. How did he leave his millions? Was another scandalous court case necessary?”

“He would have died to prevent it.” Vanderbilt frowned, realizing what he had said. “He often announced that the Vanderbilt fortune had become ‘too great a load for any brain or back to bear.’ He said he had no son on whom he would wish such a burden. We elder sons were the major heirs, but he created two forty-million-dollar trusts that all eight of us shared equally, one was untouchable except for interest, the other not.”

I nodded, amused by the unthinkably enormous sums Vanderbilt bandied about

“And the Vanderbilts are still social outcasts?”

“Indeed, no! My own wife, Alva, produced a ball so lavish a few years ago to inaugurate this very house that even Mrs. Astor’s daughters were begging their mother for invitations.”

“And the result?” I asked, although I already knew it, thanks to Miss Bly.

He laughed. “Total truce. Mrs. Astor capitulated completely and accepted Alva into the bosom of New York society.” He nodded at another wall where a framed photograph was hung.

I recognized the imperious lady of the morning, although her aspect was much altered. She was arrayed in an elaborate gown with a train long enough for a coronation curled around her feet. Stuffed doves perched upon her wrists and fluttered like courtiers on the carpet before her. Pearls and diamonds draped her neck, wrists, and bosom. She wore some haloing headdress. I was reminded of representations of the Roman goddess Juno, she of the signature bird, the peacock, and of the upheld hand of Lady Liberty in her spiked crown of copper.

I rose to further inspect this apparition, reminded of another, simpler cabinet photo that sat on my mantel in Baker Street. The face set in all this glory was as adamant as a dyspeptic bulldog’s.

“Alva’s shining moment,” he said.

“These jewels—”

“The pearls were my latest gift at the time. They’d belonged to Catherine the Great of Russia, and later the Empress Eugénie of France.”

“Jewels worth a queen’s ransom indeed. Are they stored securely?”

“Of course, in our own vault—Oh, I take your meaning, Mr. Holmes. Given the recent . . . incident, it might be best to remove them to a bank vault.”

“Jewels were mentioned in the threats. The difficulty, though, is whether it’s safer to move them or to leave them be, even perhaps to leave them as bait.”

“Which do you recommend?”

I turned, more than ready to leave this oppressive pile, but I had one more task to finish this day.

“I will smoke some pipes of shag over that question, Mr. Vanderbilt, over the complete problem, in fact. This is a pretty, if particularly grisly, conundrum. I assume die Commodore would have been pleased to have presented me with such a challenge. Like many self-made men, he must have thrived on goading others to their utmost. A side mystery here is why these ruffians play so coy as to their demands, but first I must request sequestered time in your billiard room until I’m satisfied that I’ve wrung every clue from the premises.”

“Mr. Holmes, you’ve gone over the place with more energy and thoroughness than my army of cleaning staff. Given Alva’s habit of going through every room in a long white kid glove and immediately firing any maid who allows one visible particle of dust to linger, that’s saying something.”

“As with your wife, it takes a great deal to satisfy me. I must have the chamber completely to myself until I leave.”

“I’ll notify Wilson to await your departure, whether it is three this afternoon, or three in the morning. And I look forward to hearing your suggestions, sir, but more to hearing your solution.”

By then Wilson had entered and shut the door behind him. “They are here to remove the, uh, atrocity, sir.”

We doused our respective smokes. Vanderbilt stood and took one last swallow of brandy. “We shall go along to supervise. Fetch Mr. Holmes an envelope first.”

Wilson, surprised, opened the top drawer of a smaller desk and produced a large envelope. He watched while I deposited the papers within via my tweezers. It must have looked as if I were handling dead insects instead of a lively batch of threatening communications.

Vanderbilt and I shook hands, and then I left the library to return to the mysteries of the billiard room.

I had a great deal to think about, and no one waiting at my hotel room to pester me for the estimated time of my return, or for premature conclusions.

This case was beginning to show some intriguing features.

Chief among them was the poor soul about to be bundled away to a secret autopsy and then a pauper’s grave, no doubt.

I quite deplored this shabby and secretive course of action. Only in America would a wealthy man like Vanderbilt have the power or nerve to attempt such a violation of police routines. Yet his willingness to do so, and his need to call on a visiting foreign investigator, told me that he was not a total innocent in some business practices.

Or perhaps he was merely terrified of his wife, should she learn of the irregularities in her fabled household. From what I had glimpsed of the lady, she was a far more immediate threat to him than any unknown villain. As I have often warned Watson, women are not to be trusted, not even the best of them. And when it comes to the worst of them . . . I shudder, Watson. I shudder.

As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it
proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes
which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face
is the most difficult to identify
.
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, “THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE”

F
ROM THE
C
ASE
N
OTES OF
S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES

Once the body had been spirited away, I returned to the room that had so far defeated me. Vanderbilt was correct; he had watched me scour the premises inch by inch and fiber by fiber.

Wilson had shut the doors behind me and secured the entry from the serving halls beyond by stationing a footman there. I stood just inside the doors and studied everything in the room as I would a stage set.