Spider Dance (8 page)

I will say one thing for my Continent-wide pursuit of Madam Irene and her cohorts during my mission to put Jack the Ripper to rest last spring: It had prepared me for the most gruesome killings on the planet.

Here again was one such before me.

First I examined each carved curlicue of wood in the four massive pillars that upheld the table. My magnifying glass was hard put to spy a spec of dust, much less evidence. Then I studied the bank where green felt met ruddy wood.

At last I stepped back to view the body on its felt-lined bier of solid mahogany.

The stained-glass lighting fixture above it was nigh as long and wide as the table, illuminating each ornate leather pocket as if they were gopher holes to oblivion. Now it cast the half-clothed body of the man below it into harsh relief, like a cameo of death.

His skin was indeed that pale. Though the face, neck, and hands may have been ruddy once, they were now the gray of clay, of lifeless human clay.

The man lay centered precisely on the felt, arms stretched out to each side at shoulder height. Curled knuckles just brushed the billiard table’s banked sides.

He was clothed only in trousers so rent and stained that it was difficult to determine their original manufacture. A far from young man, this fact made the violent nature of his death all the more shocking. One likes to think that the old have declined into a state of terminal innocence, although the second most vicious blackmailer I ever knew had been almost ninety.

Death’s rigor had stiffened his form into temporary stone, but an examination of the felt beneath him revealed bloodstains. He had been limp, and possibly still living when placed upon the surface.

My usual methods would not suffice in this case. His hands had been so mutilated—fingertips missing, or nails wrenched from their roots—that the abuses obscured whatever calluses and lines his life’s work and habits had scribed into his skin.

The bare feet were equally abused. Torture was the only answer, and merciless torture the civilized world had not known in centuries. Why had no one in the house heard his screams? It was huge, of course, and the long, stone-lined hall kept sounds confined to the rooms along it.

I examined the features, which were crusted with rivulets of dried blood. Were the corners of the mouth damaged by a gag?

Never had I so wished for Watson’s seasoned medical presence. Usually I can sink myself so deeply into my scrutinies that I barely contemplate the larger ironies of violent death. I leave that sort of thing to Watson.

Now I had no partner in the bloody work and felt an alien unease. Something about this murder was more Watson’s sphere than my usual orbit. Cruelty, vicious anger, murderous rage . . . I see the results of these stormy emotions and weigh and measure them and feel only curiosity and a determination to undo the doer. Watson, on the other hand, worries, fears, expresses all the emotions I find too distracting to note, much less feel.

I stood back. There was more to this picture . . . it was indeed a “picture,” almost a painting. Something from an earlier age.

My brown study was interrupted by a voice from the adjacent room, half-muffled.

“All the staff is supposed to be upstairs cleaning this morning. Master’s orders. What are you doing here?”

I was slightly surprised to note the British accent in that admonition, and even more surprised when the voice of Erin answered with a soprano lilt.

“Master wanted his billiard balls dusted up, now didn’t he tell me, just? This mornin’. And dustin’ all the other folderol around the place. I was just gettin’—”

“So you loiter in the back stairwell, my girl?”

“I don’t do any of that there ‘loiterin” you mention. I was just adjustin’ me collar and cuffs, ‘case I was seen by the gentry.”

“Then be about it. Mr. Vanderbilt is extremely particular about the billiard room.”

That very Mr. Vanderbilt’s wish to keep the contents of this room secret held me silent.

I heard two sets of footsteps, light ones scurrying this way and heavier ones ascending an unseen staircase.

I began to step around the billiard table to block the view of the body, but the admonished maid darted into the room like a scalded black-and-white hen, a flurry of dark skirts and a flourish of feather duster.

“Oh! Sorry, Sir.” She kept her voice low, at least. “I didn’t know a gennelman was about the place.”

Her skin, as white as her cuffs and collar, was strewn with pale freckles. Her hair was the burning-bush scarlet of Ireland, abundantly escaping her white cap.

In attempting to back out of the room, she sidled away from me . . . and into full view of the thing on the billiard table.

Her eyes widened to cue-ball rounds. “Holy Mother o’ God! ’Tis a dead man, for sure.” Her fingers moved to forehead,
breast, and shoulders in a sign of the cross. Then her voice took on a deeper, awestruck tone. “Crucified, begorrah, like the holy martyrs of old.”

Crucified! Of course. Would even Watson have realized this? Perhaps only a Roman Catholic, an ignorant, superstitiously devout underhousemaid.

“Listen, my girl.” I stepped toward her with finger on lips. “I am from the police. The master doesn’t wish anyone to know of this. You mustn’t scream.”

She paused her frantic Latin muttering and breast-beating to eye me. “I’m not one to scream, Sir, I—”

At that her eyes rolled up in her head and she began to swoon.

I caught her before she made a confounded thump on the floor that would bring the butler back, and deposited her on a long velvet-upholstered bench from which the losers must have watched the winners finish up the table.

Her eyelashes batted open again before I could turn away to finish inspecting the scene, now from the vantage of a new and profane manner of death.

Her white little hands clamped onto my sleeve like the teeth of a deep sea conger.

“Oh, please, Sir. Don’t tell anyone I came in here. ’Twas only to escape that awful Masher footman. Was he killed here, that poor man?” She crossed herself yet again.

“It’s none of your affair. And your dereliction of duty will soon be at least Mr. Vanderbilt’s knowledge. I can’t say that I think it will go well for you with him. Now, no more swoons. Stay still and keep silent.”

Sometimes it is necessary to be firm, and I am no more mindful of hushing a housemaid than shushing a Royal when it comes to ensuring that I am free to go about my work undistracted.

Crucified, though. I approached the billiard table again. The Vanderbilt family was not Roman Catholic, that I knew. Why would a corpse defaced in such a manner be deposited in their great city house? This was fast becoming a far more
fascinating case than that of the missing Astor chess set that had originally entangled me with the first families of New York City.

I examined the corpse’s hands and feet once more, bending very close with the glass. The central wounds were not gross enough to have been made by thick, ancient nails, but indeed his hands had been pierced by something sharp and long, perhaps a very narrow dagger. I glimpsed minuscule flakes of metal in the wounds, betokening great force.

Mr. Vanderbilt would not welcome this diagnosis of the murder on his premises, but it would be interesting to observe his reaction.

I turned as the door from the hall opened, my eyes passing over the recumbent maid.

She was gone.

I cannot conceive how men who are husbands, brothers, or fathers can give utterance to an idea so intrinsically bad and infamous, that their wives, their sisters, or their daughters, want but the opportunities and ‘facilities’ to be vicious, and if they are not so, it is not from an innate principle of virtue, but from fear
.
—
MADAME RESTELL

A key scrabbled at the lock and then Irene was in the room, hat and hatpin already in hand, hair windblown, her cape opening on a skirt of black sateen, just as Quentin had described.

I had leaped up at her entry.

She was as surprised as I. “Nell! What are you doing?”

“Having tea. What are you doing, or rather, what
were
you doing? And where?”

It was a stalemate. We had both managed something we rarely did after all our years of living together. We had surprised each other at one and the same time.

“Quentin.” Irene advanced on our . . . no, my . . . guest, gloved hand extended. “Please don’t get up. It looks as if you and Nell have consumed far too many tea cakes to permit unneeded leaps.”

“I’m sorry there’s nothing left.” I turned toward the telephone. “I can order more.”

“Don’t bother.” Irene had sat on the occasional chair and unfastened her summer cape hook. It fell away from her black gown as she began easing her fingers out of tight, pale
kid gloves. “My appetite is not quite right anyway,” she muttered.

“Where have you been?” I was not to be drawn away.

“Out. Investigating.”

“What have you to investigate now that the matter of ‘the wickedest woman in New York’ is resolved?”

“Nothing’s ever quite resolved, is it? You remember that we have that most fascinating and annoying book in code?”

I had forgotten the infernal book, a coded Who’s Who to illegitimate births in New York City at midcentury.

Quentin was looking politely bemused as only an Englishman born can. Neither Irene nor I chose to enlighten him. I almost suggested he have a look at the code, for he was a seasoned spy, but felt the book was Irene’s private matter and didn’t want to speak for her.

So Irene sat smiling vaguely at us, stroking the empty kid gloves in her lap. “I have had quite a walk. Much of it inside B. Altman’s and Macy’s. Mercy! What massive emporiums. But I’ve ordered a few more articles useful for our prolonged stay here, Nell. They should arrive tomorrow.”

“Excellent,” Quentin said. “Word of a ‘prolonged stay’ is most welcome.”

“To you,” Irene noted. “Others would not be so happy to know of our remaining here.”

Quentin exchanged a glance with me. It was odd to know more of what he was thinking than what Irene was. And not entirely comfortable.

Irene sat, lost in thought. She didn’t even twit me indirectly about my recent seclusion with Quentin. This was most unlike her. Also, as a former diva, she was used to sweeping onto each new scene and mastering it at once. Now it was as if she had bumbled onstage into a play starring Quentin and myself, quite without having a role in it.

Quentin finally disobeyed her and rose. “This has been a delightful repast,” he said with a bow to me, “but I must be about some trying business with the banks. Extended visits abroad are costly.”

Irene nodded, leaving me to see Quentin to the door, through which he swiftly drew me into the hall.

“Irene is not herself,” he whispered. To whisper just outside the not-quite-closed door required him to lean his face very close to mine. “What do you suppose is going on?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I whispered back.

“Then perhaps you had better find out.”

His breath warmed my cheek as his lips brushed the hair at my temple.

It was a farewell gesture that one could consider brotherly. And, then again, that one could not.