“Don’t tease me like that,” he murmured, his lips nuzzling into my hair. “You know I’m waiting until I can do it properly.”
I pushed him away. “Then we should wait until you can do it properly,” I said, giving him a meaningful glance.
He laughed at my double meaning. I put my hand up to his cheek. Why did his closeness still have this effect on me? I could feel the roughness of his skin and the warmth of his breath on my face and hand.
“So what brings you here?” I asked, attempting lightness as I moved away and sat at the kitchen table. “Don’t tell me you’ve two free evenings in a row?”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” he said. He pulled out a chair and sat opposite me.
“You’ve solved all of those complicated cases?”
“Not solved. Put new men on them. We weren’t getting anywhere. And with the Chinese tong murders I suspect we’ll never get anywhere. They’ll not betray their own. Frankly I don’t really care if they go around killing each other, but I’d surely like to know who is their opium kingpin. Someone’s bringing it into the country in large quantities and not for medicinal purposes but to keep the opium parlors supplied.”
“Speaking of opium,” I said. “You remember the suspicious death I spoke to you about?”
“Which didn’t turn out to be suspicious at all,” he said. “I interviewed her doctor, remember?”
“Yes, I know. But something strange has happened. Two of her friends, both society ladies, have died under similar strange circumstances.”
“I told you, this flu has been a killer, Molly. That’s why I was so worried when you insisted on running around just when you were recovering.”
“But there’s a chance it wasn’t influenza, Daniel. The symptoms weren’t typical. I went to visit the second woman and she was suffering from considerable gastric distress as well as a high fever.”
“So what are you saying—that they were poisoned somehow?”
“It is a possibility.”
“For what reason?”
“I told you the first woman was planning to divorce her husband because he had a mistress. That was a good enough motive. If they divorced, he’d lose her fortune.”
“And the second and third women? Were they also planning to divorce their husbands?”
“You’re not taking me seriously, Daniel,” I said angrily.
He patted my hand, which I found annoying. “I’m thinking that maybe you’re letting your success as a detective go to your head and seeing crimes where there are none. The thing to ask yourself in any murder case, Molly, is ‘who benefits?’”
“In the case of the first victim, obviously the husband, in many ways. He keeps her fortune and is free to marry his mistress if he wants to.” As I said this I found my thoughts wandering to that graveyard scene. Would Anson Poindexter really want to marry Mademoiselle Fifi? Hardly likely given their difference in class, and given that look I had seen pass between him and Bella.
“But the other two?” Daniel insisted.
“It’s possible that the first woman told her friends what she planned to do, or that she suspected her husband was trying to kill her.”
He shook his head. “Not a strong enough motive. First, how would he know what she’d told her friends?”
“He overheard her?”
“Unlikely that she would have revealed such a suspicion with him in the house. And second, why would he need to kill them? The first death was so well carried out that the doctor was convinced she died from natural causes.”
I sighed. “You’re right, of course. We managed to obtain some of her hair and there was no trace of arsenic in it, so that rules out the most obvious poison.”
He looked at me, surprised. “You obtained her hair? How did you do that? Yank it out of her head when she was dead? Or did you ask her for it when she was still alive?”
“We didn’t have to do either. Her hair came out with the high fever. It was all over the pillow.”
“Interesting,” he said. “And who tested this hair?”
“My friend Emily’s young man. He’s an apprentice to a druggist.”
“An apprentice druggist? I wonder if he has the facility and knowledge to run a test like that.”
“He’s very smart,” I said.
“Yes, but . . .”
“If you’re volunteering to retest it for me, I’m sure I can get more hair from Emily. She was planning to weave it into a mourning ring. And there’s something else you could do,” I added as I remembered. “It just happens that I have a sample of a preparation that was never tested,” I said. “It was a bottle of stomach mixture. I poured some onto a ball of cotton wool.”
“Quite the daring opportunist, aren’t you,” Daniel said. “But I wasn’t actually volunteering to do either. Until you can come up with a good motive for someone needing all three women out of the way, then I’ll have to believe that they died of natural causes.”