The Styx (38 page)

While Maltby attended to the removal of Abby Morrisette’s body, Faustus was taken to the Birch apartment on the fourth floor. There would be a different excavation here, entailing a bit more tact and a lot less muscle.

With the concierge as his introduction, Faustus was greeted at the door by a young black woman, dressed just as the corpse downstairs. She was a replacement from the housemaid pool, and despite her age, which Faustus guessed at twelve or thirteen, she was already adept at greeting important white folk with deference and stoic servitude. Not once did she look up at the visitors.

“Yes, sir. Mizz Birch be out on the porch. I will tell her you are here.”

The girl left them at the threshold. Faustus looked about the vestibule, sneaking glances around the corner at the collections of art pieces, cut glass objects and hand-carved furniture. A lot to lose, he thought to himself.

Within a suitable five minutes of waiting, a woman with the carriage of a tired old lioness approached, her hands folded in front of her large breasts and stomach. She was dressed in a dark conservative skirt that reached to the floor and a pristine white blouse with a high embroidered neck collar that rose up under her chin. Her face was inquisitive. Not unusual for a person being greeted by the coroner, yet her eyes were intent and steely and on full alert. If she had been grieving, it had not been with tears.

“Mrs. Birch, if I may,” started the concierge. “This is Mr. Amadeus Faustus. He is working with the undertaker’s office with our, uh, situation.”

“Mrs. Birch,” Faustus said, “My deepest condolences, madam. I understand that Miss Morrisette was a long-time employee and I hate to bother you at such a tragic time.”

Faustus extended his hand and Mrs. Birch took it, just by the fingers, nearly touching the Masonic ring with her own thumb but never taking her eyes off his face.

“Have we met before, Mr. Faustus? In New York perhaps?”

“I don’t believe so, ma’am. I certainly would have remembered.”

“How is it, sir, that you know of my long-time employ and personal admiration of Miss Abigail?”

Faustus had his hat in his hand, and they had not yet been offered a chance to step inside.

“I’ve had the opportunity to speak extensively with one of Miss Morrisettes’ close friends, one Shantice Carver, who elucidated on her, Miss Morrisettes’ that is, close relationship to you and your husband.”

Faustus saw the muscles in the woman’s jaw tighten. “Mr. Conlon, unless you have any specific inquiries of your own, would you please leave us alone? I believe Mr. Faustus and I need to speak alone.”

Not only was the concierge nonplussed by the request, he fairly bolted from the apartment with as much politeness as would not slow him down.

“Will you join me on the patio, sir?” Mrs. Birch said.

Faustus followed the woman through her expansive parlor and out through the French doors into the sunlight. When she sat in the big Adirondack chair Faustus noted there was a half-filled goblet of wine nearby. Mrs. Birch took a substantial draught from the glass before asking Faustus if he would join her.

“I will have a brandy if there’s any available.”

Birch rang an annoying silver bell and the young maid appeared.

“Bring us the bottle of brandy from the parlor bar and a glass for Mr. Faustus. And do bring more of my chateau, dear.”

Faustus stood at the railing looking out on the deep green of the fairways beyond.

“Was Mr. Birch as fond of Abby as you?” he asked.

“Other than his use of her in procuring a whore for himself, no,” Mrs. Birch said. “I doubt that he even noticed the girl in the three years she was with us. Though his obvious taste for Negro women leaves me to wonder if I was misled in that also.”

Faustus blinked at the woman’s bluntness. If she was drunk, it did not show. If she’d somehow obtained the news of her husband’s philandering and was simply angered, he would use that to advantage.

“May I assume then, madam, that you are aware of your husband’s, uh, dealings with the Carver woman?”

“Dealings? Is that the way you southern Masons refer to whoring and prostitution? Dealings?”

The maid returned, bringing the brandy and wine and bearing a look of embarrassment on her cheeks. She put the liquor down on the table and, forgetting to pour, started backing through the doors.

“Close the doors behind you, dear, if the conversation makes you uncomfortable,” Mrs. Birch said with a chuckle.

Faustus filled her glass with wine and poured a substantial tumbler of brandy for himself. They both drank. Now it was his turn to be blunt.

“My understanding, Mrs. Birch, is that you were here on the island the night of the fire in the Styx. It has come to my attention that you were in fact in the woods that evening, seen in the company of a man known as Mr. Bingham, now deceased. If you will, madam, could you tell me about that meeting?”

Mrs. Birch took yet another draught of wine. “Would you like me to start before or after I shot the bastard in the throat and stuffed his bribery money into his offensive mouth?” she asked.

Byrne had a bicycle carriage driver take him to the northern entrance of the Royal Poinciana where he could enter through the side door. The night of the ball, Harris had given him a quick tour of the first floor where the executive suites were located, and it didn’t take long for him to find the office of Mr. McAdams. He hesitated at the door, taking a deep breath against the pain in his side, then went into McAdams’ rooms without knocking. Byrne knew the art of busting down doors of gambling and whore houses as a cop. You usually had to watch for the scrambling customers and employees scurrying out before they got caught in a lineup, but rarely did you have to be concerned that someone was going to take a shot at you or draw a blade. Byrne figured his confrontation with McAdams would be even more business-like. Yet the man and his colleagues had tried to kill him yesterday, so when he entered, his steel baton was out.

McAdams was caught sitting behind a large walnut desk on the other side of the room. The look on the man’s face was probably quite foreign to him: surprise and fluster passed through his eyes and a dumfounded O shaped on his mouth. Byrne grabbed a wooden straight chair, swung it to the door and jammed its top rail under the knob. Flagler’s architects had not yet adopted the habit of hanging office doors to open out instead of in and the chair would provide a lock that couldn’t easily be broken.

“Well, my God, Mr. Byrne. How wonderful to see you, alive and well!”

Byrne took two long strides across the room and finished his approach with a whip of the baton. The whoosh ended with a crack across McAdams’ desk top, shattering a porcelain figurine and sending a metal tipped ink pen flipping through the air until it stuck point first into the wallpaper to the left.

“Don’t start, McAdams,” Byrne said, his voice hard but in control. “Your plan to shut me up with a bullet in the Glades leaves you in a poor position to backpeddle now.”

The rip of the baton had frozen McAdams with his knees flexed, hands still on either of the chair armrests, defenseless.

“Well,” he said. “Obviously our Mr. Ashton overestimated the accuracy of his firearms skills. You were supposed to have bled out before we even got back to town.”

“Hunting accident, eh?” Byrne said. McAdams was giving it up far too early for his liking.

“Something like that, yes,” McAdams said. “But you weren’t supposed to still be walking around asking questions.”

McAdams had straightened his legs, maybe gaining confidence and Byrne knew better than to allow it. He poked the man in the chest with the baton, forcing enough pressure to McAdams’ sternum to make it hurt, enough to make him stumble and sit back in his chair. A flash of fear came into McAdams’ eye. This was not a man accustom to physical violence.

“Are you admitting that you tried to kill me?” he said, trying to show enough anger to jack up the fear factor. “Just because I know about this whole real estate swindle you guys have going?”

Byrne had no idea what Ashton had been talking about when he’d explained the motive for killing him out in the glades. He was bluffing. But you use the little you have to get more. It was one of Danny’s old tricks and a detective’s tactic. Turn their words back on them.

“We knew you were poking around in affairs that were none of your business,” McAdams said, an air of control returning to his voice, the one he’d used on the handcar out to the glades. “It was our business, a quiet business, a quiet affair until other parties got involved. There is a way to do such things in a civilized manner.”

“Like killing the messenger of bad news, sticking a wad of money in his mouth and then setting up some poor Negro housemaid to take the blame. That’s civilized?”

“That was never supposed to happen,” McAdams said. “Mr. Bingham was supposed to conduct himself in a straightforward manner. Sell the land documentation for the price agreed and walk away. It was a business proposition, nothing more.”

Byrne was winging it now. He took the baton from McAdams’ chest and began using the tip to flip over papers on the man’s desk.

“You wanted the land. Bingham wanted the money. It should have been simple. Why kill him?”

“He was dead before we got there,” McAdams said in a way that sounded like he was actually disappointed.

“We, Mr. McAdams?” Byrne said. “You mean Birch and Pearson? You must be talking about your co-conspirators because you were still on the train out of New York with me when he was killed.”

“None of us killed him, Mr. Byrne. He was dead before anyone of us got there. The meeting was set up in the Styx because it was considered a safe place on that particular night when it was supposed to be empty. But when they arrived, Bingham had already been shot.”

Byrne tapped the shaft of the baton again on the desk top, the armrests of the chair, the head rest only inches behind McAdams’ skull.

“And why not you, Mr. McAdams? If you were the one to put this all together, why didn’t you make the payoff yourself?”

“As you said, I was on the train. My duties are not easily discarded. And there was a deadline. The property had to be cleared and the paperwork signed or the deal was off. Bingham was the bearer of the deed and he’d been pushing the price higher and higher, trying to use the time constraint to make us barter.”

“Sounds like a sharp businessman to me.”

“He was a cheat and a bastard,” McAdams said.

Byrne’s baton crashed down on the desk, this time splitting a piece of the hardened walnut on the edge nearest to McAdams. He was not going to tell this man that it was his brother who was killed.

“But you still sent a woman to deal with him instead of doing it yourselves,” Byrne said.

“I had no idea Marjory was going to take on the task herself,” McAdams said. “I thought she was going to get Birch to do it.”

Byrne froze at the admission. It was his turn for shock. He’d pieced together an assumption that Birch had sent his wife to make the land deal and that the prostitute and Abby Morrissette had gotten it all wrong. He was even entertaining the possibility that Danny had seen a chance to kill two birds with one meeting, a real estate swindle and a blackmailing at the same time.

The possibility that Marjory McAdams had anything to do with it was a blow.

“Marjory? You sent your own daughter to pull this off?”

“I already said I didn’t send her,” McAdams said. “But you underestimate my daughter if you think she lacks the wherewithal to carry out such a task. She is quite capable. And she proved so by acquiring the deed as expected.”

“She has the land deed? This document you bought from Bingham that gives you title to the land that the Styx was built on?”

“Marjory and I kept in touch via the telegraph. She passed on business messages to me so she was aware of the timetable we were working against. She elected to take the matter into her own hands and paid Mr. Bingham for the deed. The fire was a fortunate accident that cleared the land.”

Jaysus, Byrne thought. The man is actually proud of what he and his daughter had done, like it was some brilliant accomplishment, acquiring valuable land where a man lay dead. Again he let anger rule his hand and the baton whooshed down again with a ripping blow.

“A man has been killed, McAdams,” Byrne snapped, raising his voice for the first time. “Peoples’ homes and possessions burned. For a real estate deal?”

McAdams went quiet. Byrne could tell by the man’s breathing that he was consciously trying to calm himself, like he might do in a boardroom during hard negotiations.

“You don’t understand the ramifications,” he said, his voice under control. “This island, in fact this state, is about to turn a corner. And the new avenues that open will make many men rich beyond their dreams.”

“Wrong, McAdams. You don’t understand the ramifications of a conspiracy to murder. It’s a charge that will put you all in jail where riches don’t spend well.”

“Murder? My God man, there was no forethought of murder. That’s not the way we do business.”

“Right, you hire others to do that,” Byrne said, swallowing the pain in his side rather than let McAdams see him wince.