Spider Dance (6 page)

My guide stiffened as he spied her, so I watched her imperious advance much as a courtier might await a royal personage coming abreast.

When she arrived even with us, her gaze was only for my conductor. He bowed his head at her passage. Her sharp footsteps never faltered, and I was accorded only the slightest glance and that at my clothing.

The door behind us opened to admit the clatter of Fifth Avenue. I heard the butler murmur that madam’s carriage was awaiting at the curb. Then the door closed again and we were left to the lonely silence of a mausoleum.

Mr. Wilson swallowed audibly.

“Mrs. Vanderbilt, I take it?”

He only nodded. I surmised that he would not be displeased if some unearthly force took Mrs. Vanderbilt from us all. America prided itself for its egalitarianism, but it struck me that its queens of society were as imperious as any Empress of All the Russias.

I was also struck by the difference between these two American women, Mrs. Vanderbilt and
the
woman, Madam Irene. Mrs. Norton was infinitely more comely if not less expensively attired, but Mrs. Vanderbilt moved as if she commanded every creature within her purview, man or mouse. And as if man would soon be reduced to mouse. Madam Irene was in admirable command of herself, but did not seek to erase the presence of others, witness how she had tended the poor injured churchman I had played to gain entry to her house in St. John’s Wood when we first met two years earlier.

Had I played the same disabled role with Mrs. Vanderbilt as she entered her carriage, she would no doubt have used me as stepping-stone.

American women, I was beginning to suspect, were like their sisters everywhere, not to be trusted, but in addition as willful as wolverines.

“This way, sir.” My guide was polishing his ruddy perspiration-dewed cheeks with his handkerchief.

And so we proceeded down that wide hallway, our bootheels the only sound in that palatial expanse.

As we passed the grand curving stairway from which Mrs. Vanderbilt had descended, I spied a dark-haired elfin sprite crouched at the top of the stairs, gazing down on us wistfully.

My work occasionally had brought me into grand halls and palaces, but none so oppressive as this, despite the light-colored stone of its construction.

At a pair of ornate wooden doors, Mr. Wilson stopped, tapping upon his game leg with impatience.

I stood back to let Mr. Wilson open the doors, but he then beckoned me inside and whirled to shut the doors behind us as if sealing out Satan himself.

He had moved so fast I could not object that he had disarranged the threshold before I could examine it.

A familiar stench filled the room, undignified death in its most disagreeable form. I catalogued the immediately obvious contents of the large chamber. Its centerpiece was a billiard table set upon ornate wooden legs so stout and swollen they seemed to suffer from gout. Enough gilt fringe to circle several lampshades dangled from the corner pockets. Gilt metal inlay, probably gold, glinted from every curve in the carving.

The thing more resembled some bloated pagan altar than a gaming table. Over it hung an immense branched electric lamp of brass and opaque stained glass.

And on its green felt surface, the only ordinary thing about the table, lay a form that was the source of odor, arms stretched out and . . .

A soberly dressed fellow stood near a massive sofa several feet from the billiard table.

I spoke. “I must examine the entire room thoroughly, from the bottom up. Starting with the threshold. Mr. Wilson, if you will open the doors again.”

“No one in the house must know.” The man by the sofa’s voice creaked with recent disuse, but it held a modicum of command.

“Mr. William K. Vanderbilt, I presume.” I faced a man of no great height, but of regular, even bland, barefaced features, most notable for the waves of dark hair parted in the middle.

“Who is this dead man?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You have no idea why he’s in your house? Are any servants or workmen missing?”

“I’m not about to upset the house with such inquiries, but everything has been perfectly normal this morning. One would never know—” His glance slid toward the table, then avoided it. “No one in the house must suspect any problem. Your investigation must be completely discreet.”

“Then I require your patience. It is crucial that the floor and furnishings of the room be as untrampled as possible. The sooner I make my examination, the sooner those doors can be bolted again.”

He finally nodded, and Wilson opened first one, then the other door, gazing anxiously down the hall.

But no one approached and I was soon on hands and knees, magnifying glass a monocle before my right eye, surveying the hallway stone for any mite of evidence.

“How often are the floors swept?” I asked.

From the silence I knew that both men regarded my posture with amazement.

“I may look as if I’m playing a schoolroom game, gentlemen, but you have no idea how many conclusions may be gathered from the testimony of the trail a pair of shoes or boots may leave on stone and carpeting. I see, for instance,
that Mr. Wilson was the first to discover this tragedy when he entered the room before breakfast this morning.”

“How, sir, would you know that?” he said.

“Beyond the inequity of the depth in this set of impressions on the carpet, here they are made by shoes with an arch, so only sole and heel show. You, sir,” I noted to the master of the house, “are dressed, but still shod in leather house slippers. These flat, potato-shaped impressions reveal almost the entire foot. Obviously you were urgently summoned here by Mr. Wilson from the breakfast table, where, I also perceive, you enjoyed a finnan haddie in asparagus sauce.”

“Are you a chef, man, or a detective?” the businessman huffed.

“That is a very fine-figured smoking jacket, Mr. Vanderbilt, but the paisley can’t conceal the dropped fragments of your final forkful at Mr. Wilson’s obviously urgent summons.

“Scared the living kidney pie out of me,” Mr. Vanderbilt admitted. “And . . . this.” He glanced at the top of the billiards table with a shudder. “I am a man of industry and a yachtsman, but no hunter or meat dresser. I am lucky that more of my breakfast doesn’t adorn my jacket front.”

“Indeed. If you gentlemen will remain standing where you are, I’ll complete my examination of the floor. Then you may leave.”

Mr. Vanderbilt raised an eyebrow at my instructions, but said nothing. I had quickly realized that he was used to heeding domestic directions. I had only to seize the reins and he would go where I led.

“What disposition do you plan to make of the body when my examination is done?” I asked.

“No one must know, most particularly my wife. She would wish never to set foot in this house again. It cost three millions six years ago and would cost a million more today.”

“The body must be removed and an autopsy performed,” I said. “I am not a medical man. And then buried.”

“Wilson will see to that. I have influence with the authorities, so they will remove the remains discreetly. Fortunately the house is large, with a maze of service areas at the rear. This truly unfortunate fellow will pass out of this house as discreetly as a drunkard from my wife’s dinner party last night.”

Answered if not satisfied, I bent back to my task, crawling my way around the room’s perimeter in narrowing circles until I came up short on one of the billiard table’s gargantuan legs. One would think I was kowtowing before one of the ancient world’s wonders, the Colossus of Rhodes.

My labors had given me little more than a pocketful of rye: a few tiny and sere blades of grass tracked in from the nearby park, no doubt.

I nodded at the master of the house, and a great many more things, as I stood. “I will do the rest alone.”

Vanderbilt skated on his flat-soled slippers to the door, erasing my tracks as well as his own and Wilson’s, the sizes of which I had paused to record in a pocket notebook.

“Wilson will wait outside the door until you are done, Mr. Holmes, then escort you to my library, where we will talk. In the meantime I will call those discreet enough to remove the er . . . cadaver.”

I nodded, or bowed, depending on how the observer wished to take it. Both men left the room and closed the door.

For a moment I mulled my astounding conclusion: other than the foot marks of Mssrs. Vanderbilt and Wilson, and now my own, there were no other foot tracks in the room. None.

I glanced at the savaged body on the green felt.

The feet were bare.

Ah, now what would Watson title a story on this grisly corpse in the millionaire’s billiard room? An American Conundrum, perhaps, though I feared it would be nothing so tasteful. Perhaps “The Adventure of the Barefoot Corpse?”

I bent to the second, more repellent stage of my work,
wishing my physician friend were here to put the purest mayhem I had ever witnessed—save for the depredations beneath Paris this past spring—into the distancing drone of a medical opinion.

When he tried in vain
To raise Her to His embrace . . .
She bounded off . . . as she knew
He could not touch her, so was tolerant
He had cared totry.
. . .
—
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
, “
AURORA LEIGH
”

A knock at the hotel suite door surprised me.

Irene would have used her key. I confess to feeling a bit uneasy about being left alone in a hotel room in New York City, but Irene had insisted that I stay here and “rest,” from what exertion I cannot imagine.

So I had occupied myself with brushing our travel-weary clothing. The contents of each of our small trunks had been intended to last for ten days. Now it seemed our exile in America was to extend far beyond that.

The knock sounded again. No doubt it was some emissary from the hotel desk, seeking boots to polish or to perform some other petty service that required being rewarded with the extravagance of an American fifty-cent piece.

I swung the wide door open, a no of refusal already formed on my lips. It swiftly transformed into an oh of pleasure followed fast by panic.

Quentin Stanhope stood on the threshold, his hazel eyes merry with the knowledge of what a surprise his presence was.

“Nell, you look radiant,” he informed me. I could hardly say that this desirable feminine condition was due to a hard hour of sponging and pressing like a ladies’ maid.

“Come in.” I stepped back, even as I weighed the propriety of inviting a bachelor gentleman into hotel rooms occupied by a spinster lady.

But then, this was America, and propriety seemed to have been subdued and permanently confined to the cellar as far as Stateside customs went.

“Irene is out,” I informed him as he set his hat, a soft-crowned affair, on the nearby table.

“I know. I saw her uptown.”

“Uptown?”

“Farther north on Fifth Avenue.”

“What did she have to say for herself?”

“Nothing.” He arched an eyebrow toward the sofa.

“Do sit.” I was less interested in playing hostess than solving why Irene had snubbed Quentin. She had been mightily put out with him a few days earlier for consorting with Nellie Bly at Delmonico’s, but Irene was the last person to hold a grudge. “She said nothing to you?”

“She didn’t see me.”

“Were you trying not to be seen?”

“Oh, no. This is a spy’s holiday for me. I am not known in this country, and have hardly any duties at all. Except, perhaps, accompanying intrepid ladies to Coney Island.”

“Oh, Quentin, I was not at all intrepid at Coney Island!” I paused, appalled and confused to the point of momentary speechlessness. He immediately sensed my distress.

“What is it? An unhappy memory of the Ferris wheel?”

“Ah, no. I was just wondering, that is, I can’t exactly remember, if we had formally agreed to being on informal terms.”

The twinkle in his eyes was growing wicked. “How so on informal terms?” Distinctly not unhappy memories of our jaunt to Coney Island swept over me.