The Formula for Murder (7 page)

She’s lying, of course. The woman probably spies on her boarders.

“Did she talk to you or any of the other boarders about a particular story she was working on?”

“
No,
now—”

“Miss…” The voice comes from the maid.

“Maggie, go attend to your chores.”

The maid quickly disappears down the hallway.

Mrs. Franklin turns back to me and points at the open door. “And until I see payment, you can leave, too.”

“I’ll arrange payment and be back to select the clothing.”

What a witch—to put it politely—but I know I have gone as far as I can get with her, so I leave. Besides, the diary is burning a hole in my thoughts and I need to get somewhere to read it. What a find—if a young woman is going to confess her life and loves anywhere, it will be in her secret journal.

As I step out the front door of the house and start down the stairs, I hear, “Miss, Miss—”

The maid comes out the front door behind me and hurries down, looking nervously back at it.

“You wanted to know about Hailey’s mood. She was happy, not depressed. And excited. We did talk sometimes. She told me she’d met the perfect man, that’s why I was so surprised when the police came and found her note.”

“Did she tell you who the man was?”

“No. She couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“She said she couldn’t because he was very important and well known with the rich and powerful. She said him and her needed time to figure things out before making their romance public.”

“When did she tell you this?”

“Three days before she took her life. She came home late and I sneaked her in. I couldn’t help notice she was wearing a beautiful ring. I asked who gave it to her and she told me it was a gift from the man she loved and that I mustn’t tell anyone about it. It was a secret. She also said she was going to be moving out, that this man was going to take care of everything. She was so happy.”

“What did the ring look like?”

“It was a ruby surrounded by diamonds … very expensive.”

She didn’t have a ring like that at the morgue. If she had it on when her body was recovered, the morgue attendant or someone earlier took it. “Did she talk to you about any of the stories she was working on?”

“Yes, yes…” She looks back at the front door.

“It’s okay; she’s probably still in Hailey’s room adding up how much she can sell everything for.”

Maggie puts her hand to her mouth to smother a laugh. “You know Mrs. Franklin for sure, you do. About a week before she done herself in, Miss McGuire said she was working on a story that would give her … oh, what was the word … recognition. She was so excited, but I have no idea what it was about. I’m sorry I can’t be more help. She was always so secretive about the news stories she worked on. But I think I know something.” Maggie uses a confidential tone and glances back again to see if the boogey woman has reared her ugly head.

“Three or four days before she died, I was cleaning her room and I happened upon an article on her bed stand that she had scribbled on. Of course, I never looked closely at it, knowing how she was about keeping things a secret.”

“Of course not. What was the article about?”

“A doctor.”

“Do you remember the doctor’s name?”

“No.”

“What about the doctor?”

“Some woman, Lady Somebody, had died.”

“He killed her?”

“No … I don’t know. I have to go back in.”

“Wait. Please think. Do you remember
anything
about the doctor?”

She bit her lip. “He’s … he’s a health doctor. He makes people healthier. He was treating the woman with something that wasn’t real medicine and she died. I’ve gotta go.”

“Here.”

I take her hand and put the brooch in it. Her jaw drops.

“This is expensive … I can’t…”

“Yes, now go run before Mrs. Franklin catches you.”

I, too, hurry away, taking a good deep breath, relieved to have gotten away from that terrible woman. I would not have been so kind and gentle to her if I didn’t know that she would have taken my tongue lashing out on her poor servant girl.

I take the diary out of my pocket and stick it in my purse. Once I find a café, I will stop and read the diary over tea and biscuits.

My heart pounds … I have Hailey’s diary, now I will be able to get answers.

The restraint of not plopping myself down and reading her diary is driving me nuts, but I can’t chance the evil Queen of Hearts watching me from an upper floor window to see if I had stolen anything.

Which I had, of course.

12

Archer watches from a hundred feet away as Nellie Bly comes out of the boardinghouse. He picks up his step to stay close enough behind her to make a quick move if he has to. He doesn’t want to bring attention to himself or risk getting his legs chopped off again if she boards a trolley.

He gets a jolt as the Bly woman pulls a red book out of her pocket and slips it into her purse without looking at it.

The diary
.

It had to be the diary. It had that look and color. But the furtive way she slipped it into her purse was the tip-off that makes him certain she hadn’t gotten the book with the landlady’s permission.

How did she get her hands on it?

He had bluffed his way into the McGuire woman’s room yesterday by showing his old police badge. Once inside, he did a thorough search of the room. He knew from over a dozen years as a copper that women are much more clever than men when it comes to hiding evidence. But leave it up to a woman to find another woman’s hiding place.

He should have torn the place completely apart. Even without the police badge, the old bitch that runs the boardinghouse would have sold him anything he had wanted from the room for a quid.

The Bly woman turns the opposite direction from the trolley stop as she comes up to the corner.

She’s anxious to take a peek in the book.
Going for hot tea and a warm place to read it.
Good. That means she hadn’t had time to read it. And she wouldn’t get her nose between the pages, either. Not on his watch. He has to get it before she reads it. That was made very clear to him if he wants to get paid very well.

Getting this job had been a fluke, saving him from the final slip into the gutter that he’d been sliding toward since he had been dismissed from the force for taking bribes from a bookmaker to supplement that lousy salary they pay junior detectives.

It wasn’t his fault. He had had a wife who liked luxuries. That’s how he kept getting in deeper, first for what
she
wanted to wear and eat and then she even demanded
he
wore expensive suits. “I ain’t being seen with a man dressed like a street cop,” is what she told him. So, he did the only thing he could, he went on the take, looked the other way for a tidy sum from the bookmaker who handled bets on the races and sports. As his wife’s demands got bigger and his tastes got more refined, he started shaking down some of the criminals he’d collared. When one of them tried to turn the tables by blackmailing, he had beaten the man half to death. His only regret was that he hadn’t completed the other half of the beating because the bastard was able to tell a doctor who he’d been smacked by and why.

If only he had kept his temper down and dumped his wife long ago, but he fell hard for her beauty and that she was an actress. He never understood why she married him, nor did anyone else. He was big and burly, with a face that had been bashed into too many times over fights he started; while she was delicate, like a china doll. She had manners, he had none.

He knew the other coppers were jealous of his gorgeous wife and expensive habits. They constantly were asking him how he did it—with every one of the bastards knowing and not a few of them also on the take.

The money he always had jangling in his pockets aside, he knew he had also made enemies on the force because of his temper. His way of solving anything, right or wrong, was to punch hard. Talking didn’t get you anywhere, at least that’s what he learned from his dad, who used his fists more than once on Archer until Archer got big enough to give tit-for-tat.

In his mind, no one on the force cared that he was taking bribes because others were on the take, too. They just remembered how many times he pushed his way in to get what he wanted. Ratting him out was their way of getting even.

Now he’s answering to a wealthy aristocrat who’s a lot more corrupt than him. No one made millions of quid in business without doing things under the table that would make a bank robber look like a saint.

He had come into contact with the rich man when he was still on the force. Soon after he was promoted to junior detective, the man’s teenage son was being investigated for beating another boy severely over a girl. The father slipped Archer some money and the case got dumped.

Now the man has another problem, a problem the police couldn’t handle. “You’ll be my consulting detective,” is what he told Archer.

Archer didn’t care about his title; all he cared about was the money. He was sick and tired of being poor. And he wanted revenge, the kind he’d get when he looked up his ex-wife and made her green with envy with his pockets full of money. He’ll shove money in her face. Then to really make her mad, he’ll lavish it on another actress she knows. He’s not worried about who he’ll get, all actresses are sluts and will do anything for money. She did.

This book the American woman found in the dead girl’s room will be his ticket back to the good life. He knows something valuable is in it, information that will make him a wealthy man. And if that aristocratic pig who hired him thinks he is just going to simply turn it over to him for a few lousy quid—he’s in for a big surprise.

But first he has to get it from the woman.

Being the man he is, asking her for it politely isn’t in the cards.

13

Blue-eyed brother? I mulled over what Hailey’s landlady told me. With a British accent, no less. Now who in the devil is he? The elusive lover? Why he would want access to Hailey’s room is the one thing about him I’m certain about. He wants the diary because there is something in it that will expose him as her lover. And I have the damning evidence.

“
Wha—!
” pops out of my mouth as a man comes up from behind me, grabs my purse, and takes off like a bat out of hell.

“
Help! Help! He has my purse!
” I yell at the top of my lungs as I give chase. There is no one else in sight on this gray wet day.

I only get a glance of him, but I’m positive it’s the man who made the mad dash to get on the trolley near Hailey’s office and got off with me at her boardinghouse.

His head goes down and I get the impression he’s opening my purse. I try to increase my speed but my long dress, ridiculous petticoats, and bulky high-topped heeled shoes that encase a woman work against me sprinting.

A woman comes out of a food store and the man, concentrating on the contents of my purse, runs right into her. Her grocery bag flies out of her hand, exploding as it hits the ground. The man stumbles to stay on his feet.

My purse flies into the air as he throws it over his head back at me as the woman he nearly bowled over yells a curse at him.

Quickly grabbing my purse off the ground, I determine that my coin purse with my gold coins and folded money are inside, but something even more important is missing: Hailey’s diary.

“What’s happened?” the woman asks me. “That thief get your money?”

“No, not my money.”

“Thank God. You all right?”

“Yes, and you?”

“Oh I’m fine, can’t say the same for me groceries.”

As we gather up her food, the grocer comes out of the store and they chatter about how unsafe the streets are for honest people. “And the police do nothing,” the grocer says.

Even though I am hearing everything they say, none of it penetrates the fog in my brain. My God—the diary was stolen, taken from me in broad daylight by a man who must have been following me from Hailey’s office.

“You sure you’re all right?” the woman asks me again. “You look like you’ve seen the devil.”

“Yes … I’m okay, I’m just amazed at how devious people are. And what terrible things rational human beings are capable of.”

“Did you hit your head, dear?”

The murky stuff in my head is still there as I am carried away in a hansom cab to my hotel.

Shocked down to my socks,
I admit. And angry. Is the lover so desperate about being exposed that he is resorting to criminal acts? It’s obvious to me that this is the case. And I can’t help wondering if there is more to it than just the man’s identity. Is he also trying to cover up some complicity in Hailey’s death? Did she get that bump on her head before she went into the water?

I don’t know whether it’s a lover trying to avoid scandal or one covering up murder, but I realize that I have been looking for a reason to find Hailey hadn’t killed herself almost from the time I got the news in New York. Now that I know something is amiss, I am confronted with both a dilemma and a challenge: What can I do about it?

I’m alone, in a foreign country, thousands of miles from the resources and contacts that I can employ whenever I do an investigation. And I’m under a time pressure. The paper expects me to stay only a few days to lay Hailey to rest and “clear up her desk” as Mr. Cockerill instructed me. After that they expected me back, beating the bushes for stories.

Which is another quandary I’m in: do I want to return to
The World
?

Their cavalier treatment of me since my return from my trip around the world has me questioning if I want to continue working for the newspaper. Mr. Pulitzer and the editor-in-chief never even said so much as “
thank you
” or offered a salary increase or any other reasonable compensation a man would have received for a similar accomplishment. Bottom line, I did not receive one cent and my salary has been a very low one.