Bellamy and I walked together in complete silence, keeping a brisk pace, block after block disappearing behind us. I scrambled a bit to keep up, my breath coming faster, but I had no intention of asking him to slow down. When the boss said right away, I knew he meant it.
As I’d expected from the address, the house was impressive. Three steady floors of good brick behind a cheery green front door and bright white shutters. It would not have been stretching the truth to call it a mansion. Walking up to it for any other reason, I would have been jealous, but the word fatal loomed large in my mind. If this case was what I feared, I would not have traded places with the mistress of the house for anything.
Pinkerton, in his shirtsleeves and a sober charcoal vest, met us inside the front door.
“Empty?” asked Bellamy, receiving a curt nod as his answer. He then stood by the door, facing outward, his arms folded as if keeping watch.
To me, Pinkerton said, “I know this wasn’t the most pleasant way to wake up. But I needed you to see everything before it was disturbed.”
“A fatal case, you said.”
“Yes.”
“How many? When?”
“One. Last night, we think.”
I asked the easy next question. “Why aren’t the police chasing this?”
“We’ll call them shortly,” he said.
I chose my next words carefully. I was still sleepy but not too sleepy to understand the gravity of the situation. “How do we know about this if we didn’t hear it from the police?”
He looked at me in silence. I quickly realized he was giving me the chance to change my question so I wouldn’t get an answer I didn’t like.
Still, I needed to know. “Have we been hired to find the truth or to put together the evidence to support a lie?”
“Fair question,” he said. “Her husband found her. Cut her down, said he thought she might still be alive. She wasn’t.”
“So she’s a suicide, and he thinks…what?”
“Well, he told me that she appeared at first to be a suicide, but when he looked closer, he saw signs that she might not be.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll need you to see her yourself. Are you prepared?” He paused with his hand on the closed parlor doors.
“Is anyone?” I asked and pushed past him into the parlor to look at the dead body.
The woman lay on the carpet as if resting, which I supposed she was, only forever. She wore a simple homespun dress with a pattern of small flowers, pink on cream. Had I not been told, I wouldn’t have taken her for the lady of the house. I looked up at the nearby balcony, where I could see an overturned chair and the frayed ends of a cut rope. The other part of the rope lay a few feet away as if flung there. Other than the cut, it looked brand-new.
Pinkerton and I both stopped, as if by accord, a few steps away from the body. He pointed to the marks around her neck. They did indeed look like the marks of a noose. But there were other marks too, lighter ones—around her wrists, as if she had been bound. There was no blood, either on the body or around it. The faint scent of verbena lingered near the body, not disguising the unmistakable stink of death. She’d worn a lovely perfume, but she’d died like all of us do, with the undignified loss of bodily control. I raised my handkerchief to my nose and mouth to ward away the worst of the stink, trying to concentrate.
“Who is the husband?” I asked.
“Jay Harrington. President of National Cattle Company.”
“Rich?”
He gestured, with one sweep of his arm, to the house around us. It was more sumptuous on the inside than the outside. The Persian carpet upon which the body lay likely cost more than the agency saw in a month. The library walls were lined with rich-looking, leather-jacketed books. The foyer floor, if not marble, was an excellent facsimile thereof. I should have known without asking the question, but it was hard to focus. Good detective work involved a complete view first, then a narrowing. Methodically, I noted everything, then tried to make sense of what I saw.
“I suspect she was tied up,” I said, pointing to her wrists. “Then tortured in some way, hoping that she’d give up information.”
I looked over her wrists again and her neck and eyes. One eye was partly open, giving her an uneasy look, almost as if she were just starting to wake up from sleep. But the pupil was fixed. There was no red in the white, as I would expect from someone who had died of strangling, either by someone else’s hand or her own. I had seen examples of both. There were no burns or open wounds on her pale skin, just the scrapes and bruises, all superficial.
I added grimly, “I don’t think they got what they wanted.”
“If that’s the case, why would they kill her?” Pinkerton asked. “Why not hold her for ransom? The husband would have paid dearly to get her back.”
I bent down and knelt on the carpet, looking more and more closely at her mouth. Her lips were slightly swollen. Not bruised but reddened. I used a pencil to open her mouth and peer inside as best I could. There was something behind her teeth that didn’t belong. I braced myself for the task and put my fingers inside the dead woman’s mouth, pulling out a wad of torn fabric. Stained cotton. I showed it to Pinkerton and said, “I think they intended to hold on to her. I think they killed her by accident.”
He nodded soberly, and I realized that he had already guessed the answer. She had died by smothering, not by strangulation, and she certainly hadn’t done it herself. The rope, the hanging—it was a clumsy attempt to disguise what had really happened. Not suicide but murder, and not a planned one. Improvisation.
“You agree?”
“Yes.”
I said, “So why did you bring me in to look?”
“I figured you could do a more thorough inspection to see if I’d missed anything.” He gestured at the wad of cotton. “I hadn’t gotten that far yet. Also, I suppose it was a sort of a test. But the third thing is the most important.”
“And that is?”
“I need you to help me figure out what to do next.”
I looked down at the dead woman, considering.