Seven for a Secret Read online

  “Widowed, with a child.”

  “Previous residence?”

  “She was originally from Albany.”

  “How long had Mrs. Wright overseen your ken?”

  “Two years, all told. I was very fond of her.”

  “Seemed the sort of lass it would be easy for a man to grow fond of.” Val smiled salaciously, flicking a vesta with his thumbnail and lighting his cigarette. He leaned forward and did the same for Gates. The man obviously needed one.

  “Lucy was lovely, yes,” Gates said with some care. His hale complexion had grown moldy. “If you’re suggesting that my relationship with her was in any way improper—”

  “Oh, I’m not suggesting it,” Val said in a remarkably bold display of cunning. “Don’t tell me you had that thoroughbred under your nose for two years and never took a ride.”

  My hackles rose at Val’s language—but the foul tone aided the greater good, for Gates’s pallor shifted to a stunning shade of crimson.

  “Are you accusing me of something, Captain?”

  My brother splayed a hand over his chest, all innocence. “Senator, I’d never dream of it. But were you in a position to know Lucy? Her friends? Enemies? Where do we start?”

  Gates shuddered, looking stricken. “I’m sorry. This is such a shock.”

  “That’s fair,” I allowed, aiming for kindly and landing at civil. “Take your time about it.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Gates cast a look at my brother, a We all of us have our little foibles, do we not expression. “We were … intimate on occasion. We kept it secret, and I hope I can trust you to do the same. Lucy spent the majority of her time within the walls of my home with her little boy. She was terrified of slave catchers, you see. As many Africans are. She was once the victim of a vile kidnapping attempt from which I extricated her. That’s how we met, in fact. Lucy lived in mortal fear of being snatched up again. When she found the position at the florist’s shop, I was terribly proud of her. It seemed that she was finally making a recovery.”

  Val blew out a smooth circle of smoke, watching its lazy dissipation with considerable interest. “Before she was killed, her sister and son were netted by blackbirders.”

  I shot a glance at my brother, surprised at the admission. Likely because my head was spinning. Gates’s tale was so close in character to what I’d supposed to be the truth that I felt in a dreamscape. Gates, meanwhile, dropped his own cigarette. Gutted, for all appearances. My brother calmly stepped on the glowing point.

  “No. Please tell me—”

  “The Wrights afterward escaped to a safe location. Two days later, Lucy Wright was put to anodyne with a cord round the neck, possibly in an alleyway, possibly somewhere else. Delia and Jonas Wright are missing. Might you know whereabouts they are?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “Nary a suggestion?”

  “I wish to God I had one. I don’t even know where Delia Wright resides, only that she teaches school at the Abyssinian Church. This is all so shocking.”

  “Shocking is about the color of it. And here’s what I’m wondering, Senator.”

  Gates tugged at his goatee, looking as if he might sully the flawless reputation of Astor House by being ill on its finely worked carpet.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “I’m wondering what you want me to do about it.”

  Val propped his elbow on the arm of the settee and continued smoking reflectively. I hadn’t known where he was leading before, but now he’d arrived, I saw his ploy for the brilliantly simple scheme it was. If Rutherford Gates had returned home, somehow inexplicably discovered Lucy at Valentine’s, and killed her in a jealous rage—all of which fit, people kill for love every day of the year and the world keeps turning—then his response to Val’s question would be telling.

  I know nothing of this affair. But please drop the case, for the sake of the Party.

  “Please do all you can.” Gates slumped back, mouth slack with grief. “I arranged to have the house closed up this morning—I’m so often traveling between here and Albany that I’m thinking of selling it, and after all, my housekeeper had given notice. Living in a hotel seemed much easier in the interim. When I found no one home, I pictured her settled elsewhere … the mistress of her own establishment. Happy. I can’t stomach it. Find the son of a bitch who did this, Captain, and hang him.”

  “Oh, there you are, Rutherford. But I fear that I interrupt you.”

  Animal apprehension slithered across my shoulders. Silkie Marsh stood behind Val, dressed in her usual splendor—black satin with jet beadwork, lips artfully rouged, a pale fur cape the exact color of her pale golden hair. She was addressing Gates, but naturally she was looking at Valentine. Madam Marsh sees people the way most people see cobblestones—as a means of getting somewhere. But she once had Val, and she wants him back, the way a child would want a toy simply because they’ve been told they can’t have it any longer. She’d worked a spray of tiny scarlet hothouse roses into the artful sweeps of her hair that made me think of sprayed blood.

  “Silkie.” Val smiled, still languidly smoking. “What a pal you’ve been to the Party this year. They’ve all but built you a shrine at the Hall, dear little duck. You’ve been plumping our coffers something admirable.”

  “I couldn’t think of doing anything less.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. He ignored it. So she shifted her attention to me, smiling as if he’d leapt up and embraced her. “And Mr. Wilde. I gather your efforts to redeem Mr. Carpenter were successful. It is the last time I’ll trust Mr. Varker’s word, of that I assure you.”

  “I take it you only imagined meeting Coffee St. Claire,” I couldn’t help but mention.

  “I was convinced it was the same man, but now I understand that I allowed myself to be led, I’m afraid.” She cocked her head, dimpled and wide-eyed and soft as a razor. “You must think me a foolish, impressionable girl, Mr. Wilde.”

  “That is the last thing I think of you.”

  Blushing as if at a compliment, Silkie Marsh turned to the senator. He mopped his face with a handkerchief, pushing his half-spectacles up his nose. “Rutherford, darling, I won’t ask what you were speaking of, but you seem most … troubled. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes. I’ve had a bit of a shock, I fear. Nothing to speak of.”

  “Nothing but murder,” Val said brightly.

  Emerging from behind the settee, Silkie Marsh eyed us in either real or feigned wonderment. The woman is such a creature of clockwork, mimicking humanity by means of wax and paint and cogs, that it’s almost impossible to tell when she’s lying or simply parroting normal sentiment.

  Rutherford Gates, meanwhile, was turning blue.

  “Murder?” she echoed.

  “You’re familiar with the concept,” I reminded her.

  The vivid circles within her dappled eyes froze over. “I’ll await you in the restaurant, Rutherford, and we can discuss fund-raising. If you are able. If other business detains you, I’ll simply take advantage of their excellent chef. Valentine, might you consider my house at Greene Street for a Knickerbocker Twenty-one event soon? My girls and I would be delighted to provide a little cheer, entirely gratis, of course.”

  “Gratis, you say?” my brother mused.

  “Always for you, Valentine,” she murmured.

  “Well, they do say you get what you pay for. No.” Val crushed the cigarette in a discreet crystal tray. “No, I would not.”

  Shock would be the mildest word for my reaction. I’d never seen him so openly reject an overture in my life. Silkie Marsh colored again, this time naturally. A sheen of tears sprang into her eyes for good measure. Nodding to Rutherford Gates, she hurried away, silken coiffure bobbing in a sea of similarly artful heads.

  “Thank you for speaking with me,” Gates said, rising. If we’d insulted a pal of his, he seemed game to ignore the fact. “I really must meet with Miss Marsh, as she’s contributed healthy sums to my campaign in the coming s
pring. But keep me informed. Please.”

  “You’ll be in town for the Party ball a week from now?” Val inquired.

  “Yes, though Albany will doubtless require me in the meanwhile. I’m staying here at the Astor when in Manhattan. Room three thirty-seven. Don’t hesitate to contact me.”

  Gates departed. He left behind him a visible aura of grey unease. When the senator had caught Silkie Marsh up at the restaurant entrance, she smiled, taking his arm. They proceeded into an exotic realm of terrapin and goose liver and capon. Neither of them honest. One of them, at the minimum, a ruthless killer.

  I hadn’t decided about the other quite yet.

  “I don’t suppose we should be surprised Gates and Silkie Marsh know each other?” I ventured.

  Val shook his head. “They’ve been pals for years. So have I, for that matter. We’re all cut from the same cloth.”

  “No, you aren’t. Would you call them friends or friendly?”

  “Friends.”

  “That worries me tremendously.”

  “That’s because you, my Tim, are sharper than the average fence post.”

  “Have you spotted the lie yet?”

  “The only hummer I know he just delivered was that they were intimate on occasion. I told you I wouldn’t go sniffing after Lucy Adams, and that’s because she wasn’t the casual sort of ladybird. She was a one-man moll. Worried at her wedding ring as if it eased her, nary a disloyal thought in her head. They went to it regular if they went at all, though I never spied her at his ken.”

  My scar needed some vicious rubbing, so I started in. Val, for once, ignored me. After he waved his fingers at a waiter—Irish this time—a pair of brandies were shortly thereafter clasped in worried grips. I drank, not caring what it cost. Anyway, Val would pay for it. He’s the Democrat, after all.

  “Motive, Val,” I said under my breath.

  “Motive,” he sighed. “Don’t I know it.”

  A politico, I thought, rescues a beautiful woman. He’s entranced. He likes who he is in the story because it’s the wrong story he’s telling. He supposes himself the hero. He imagines the narrative is printed in great block letters, with pictures rendered in blinding splashes of color. Fantastical portraits of knights drawn in his image. Of dragons slain, the glory of the conqueror. Of swift, heartbreaking love. And then he finds himself married—perhaps—and only a politico after all. With a wife, now.

  Seixas Varker and Long Luke Coles wanted Lucy alive so as to make a swift, rancid profit. Val and I and Piest and the Committee men—at least to my knowledge, God knows my acquaintance with Higgins and Brown was brief—wanted her safe. I assumed Silkie Marsh was acting true to form and assigned her the role of perpetrator of whatever evil is foulest and left it at that. These circumstances, barring extraordinary new evidence, led to one conclusion.

  The only person I’d yet met who could have wanted Lucy Wright dead was Rutherford Gates. When an election and a secret marriage had entered the picture, anyhow.

  Val tossed several coins on the pewter salver, rising and buttoning his coat. “The poor fish seemed shocked enough. Whether shocked that she’s croaked or shocked we wanted a chat with him over it, though, I couldn’t say.”

  “Could the sisters have known about all of this? Found Gates out long ago, and kept mouse for the family’s sake?”

  “No way to be certain just yet. But if they were mum in the name of peaceableness, that tack seems to have gone south.”

  “I’m for the Committee of Vigilance,” I said, following him out the great glass-paned door. “The remaining Wrights need finding, and finding now.”

  “Then I’ll explore a few notions of my own.”

  “Which?”

  “Ones I’ll keep snug over for now.”

  Irritated and worried, I blinked up at the sun, stepping to the edge of the paving stones to allow the scores of beaver-hatted gentlemen and fur-caped ladies to pass me by. “Do I have to tell you to be careful again?”

  “No. I just gave the middle finger to Silkie Marsh, major Democratic contributor and present or former darling of every Party boss in Manhattan I can think of. Careful won’t serve the purpose. We sort this quick as possible or there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Val touched his hat brim and set off, swinging his stick like a dandy out for a lark. He was right, of course. Time was a precious commodity. I hastened off alone, ruminating over names.

  Wright or Adams, I thought as I drew closer to Julius’s ken, having sent word the night before requesting an audience with the Committee. Her murder couldn’t be unraveled until I knew which it was. And I would find it out, I determined, as I recalled the weight of her nearly cold body and the depth of her richly dark voice. I would know her name, and like a key it would unlock every obstacle that barred me from the answer. And heaven forbid I leave a mystery unsolved or a strongbox unopened.

  Learning people’s secrets, God help me, is what I do.

  thirteen

  No grand inquest has for years had the courage or virtue to find a bill of indictment against a kidnapper, however plain and undeniable the proof of his guilt.

  —JAMES G. BIRNEY, 1842

  George, if you don’t sit down and take a breath, you’re going to do yourself an injury,” Julius announced from where he sat propped against his desk.

  Julius and Higgins had absorbed my tale—that their friends had lodged at Val’s for two nights; that Lucy had been found strangled in an alleyway; that the others were missing; and that Charles Adams seemed to be a fictional character—with the quick-smothered grief mastered by people who constantly absorb tragic information. Yes, tears sprang to Higgins’s eyes, to be swiftly blinked away again. And yes, Julius’s jaw clenched so tight I’d feared for his teeth. But neither was a stranger to barbarism. I could practically see the groove that trickling cruelty had eroded in Higgins’s skull. He paced the room as if enough circles could erase Lucy’s death and erase me from Julius’s ladder-back chair. My delivery of the news hadn’t exactly endeared me to him. And the Reverend Brown was attending a deathbed and thus unable to sprinkle water over the hot coals of Higgins’s temper.

  To stop myself staring, I studied Julius’s home. He lives in Ward One on Washington Street, in a boarding house catering to unmarried black men. Boarding-house living is practical and collegial, and pleasant smells of stewed mutton and hair oil and ninepin cigars filled the halls. We were on the third floor, the window overlooking dozens of masts in the quays, though not so many as at the eastern docks and not so many as in fairer weather. They still looked like so many spearheads, somber and warlike.

  I think if George Higgins could have torn one off and charged into battle with it, he’d have done so in a heartbeat.

  “This is a message, Julius,” he bit out. “To us, from Varker and Coles. That supposing we interfere further, we’ll find our friends lynched and not just sold down the Mississippi.”

  “You could be right,” I reflected. “That never occurred to me.”

  “Nothing occurs to you.” Higgins made an abortive gesture that clearly wished to be a fist flying at my eye. “It never occurred to you that we’d have started searching for Delia and Jonas an entire day sooner if you’d done us the courtesy of telling us our friend Lucy is dead, for instance. It never occurred to you that we might in fact care she’s no longer for this world.”

  “That occurred to him,” Julius put in evenly.

  “Did it occur to him that Delia and Jonas might be in a slave market in the Capital by this time?”

  His voice broke, the faintest hint of a hairline fracture. So now I knew. There are particular ways a man has of saying names. His Delia sure enough resembled my Mercy Underhill.

  Higgins wasn’t near through with me, though. “We are speaking of a child of six, and a woman who was already nearly violated by the likes of Varker. So this copper star is your friend, you tell me, Julius. And he probably saved your life yesterday. Fine. What possible excuse can he give for—�
�

  “Lucy Adams wasn’t strangled to death in an alley.” I shivered as I said it. But there was only one thing to be done. “She was killed in my brother Valentine’s bedroom. Val never did it. Even apart from the fact he was with a friend, my brother would never harm a woman. Someone is trying to ruin us all. I can’t make you trust me, but I can give you the square truth.”

  I remember the explosion that disfigured me last July as being silent—a tremor so deeply felt that hearing the blast was superfluous. My statement sent a similar shock through the room.

  Julius uncrossed his arms and gripped the edge of his desk. He wore only trousers, braces, and white shirtsleeves. Though he seemed much recovered, I can’t imagine jackets are comfortable when your back resembles a shallow-ploughed field. “And you moved her,” he said to me.

  “I hid her in a shelter the newsboys had made. Covered in a blanket. I’m so sorry.”

  George Higgins took two quick steps in my direction and then stopped. Plainly wondering whether killing a New York City policeman would be his style or not.

  “I never did it lightly. I don’t know how many people you have, but I have one,” I told him.

  Confession of a sort had almost been a foregone conclusion when I’d arrived at Julius’s digs to talk murder. But that second admission had been wholly personal and rawer than the fact of the terrible thing I’d done. My tone shifted the disgusted look in Higgins’s eyes to blank surprise.

  “And we’re simply … we’re meant to take your word for it?” Higgins spluttered in disbelief. “That your brother is innocent? That dandified morphine freak who smashed Varker’s wrist and liked it?”

  “Remember when you called me dense? And it was true?”

  “Yes, perfectly.”

  “Calling my brother names that accurately describe him are every bit as flash of an idea. I want this crime solved, but Val wasn’t responsible.”

  Higgins turned to look at Julius, still visibly battling smash-the-copper-star’s-eye-against-his-brain urges. “So I’m meant to simply take as given the lofty grandeur of this fellow’s white abolitionist morals—”