Murder on Black Friday (18 page)

Nell and Will were shown to the drawing room, settled into deeply tufted chairs, and brought demitasse and lemon kisses. Their opening “small talk” had to do with their surprise at finding Mr. Wallace at home, having been told that he no longer lived there. Sophie had admitted their estrangement, but chalked it up to her husband’s “quaint and rather flattering jealous streak.”

“A gentleman can hardly look in my direction,” she’d said, “without Freddie thinking he’s got designs on me.”

And now the news that she and Freddie had reconciled.

Nell said, “This reconciliation must be a source of great comfort to you, Mrs. Wallace.”

Sophie merely sipped her coffee.

“Especially,” Nell added, “in light of the circumstances.”

Sophie fixed her gaze on Nell.

“That dreadful scene at the Parker House Thursday night,” Nell said, wondering if Sophie had been told of it. “I’d say half of Boston knows about your husband’s jealous streak by now. Must have been terribly distressing for you.”

Sophie drained her demitasse and refilled it. “I sent a note to Freddie the next morning, when I heard what he’d done, asking him to come here for lunch so that we could talk. I told him how distraught it had made me, knowing he’d bandied my name about like that in public—especially considering it wasn’t even true.”

“The...accusation, you mean?” Will asked. “About you and Philip Munro?”

“Freddie found a stickpin of Philip’s in my boudoir a couple of weeks ago,” Sophie said with a little roll of the eyes, “and jumped to the wrong conclusion. Stormed out of the house without giving me a chance to explain, and the next thing I knew, he’d moved out and sued me for divorce. I explained over lunch that I’d merely borrowed the pin from Philip so that I could have one like it made up for Freddie as a Christmas present. It’s a very smart pin—I’d always admired it.”

“I see,” Nell said as she lifted her own dainty little cup and saucer. What she didn’t see was why it should have taken two weeks for Sophie to share this all-important detail with her anguished husband.

“It was an emotional conversation,” Sophie said. “I couldn’t contain my tears, and Freddie, poor dear, could never bear to see me weep. He was quite contrite about that scene at the Parker House, couldn’t stop apologizing. I must admit, he wore me down. I forgave him, and we...” Her too-pink lips curved into a private little smile as her gaze flicked toward Will. “As I say, we reconciled.”

Had Freddie actually believed his wife’s tall tale about replicating the stickpin? Were her tears, however practiced, really that convincing? Or had he accepted her version of things merely in order to reunite with his beloved Sophie, while still knowing, in his heart, that she’d betrayed him with Philip Munro?

Sophie’s own motives in all this seemed no less pathetic. Nell wanted to feel nothing but disdain for the aging coquette, with her ringlets and her sheer gown and her flirty eyes always sliding toward Will. She might have felt just that but for Sophie’s final, degrading encounter with Phil Munro, as recounted by Harry—she begging him to marry her so that she wouldn’t be alone, then weeping while he used her for the only thing he’d really ever cared about.

Sophie was telling Will that her husband had sent a footman to Munro’s house during lunch, requesting an appointment at 3:30 that afternoon. “Freddie wanted to bury the hatchet—apologize to Philip for his little display at the Parker House, and hopefully convince him to keep him on as legal counsel. Philip has been a lucrative client for my husband, as you can imagine. It would have been devastating to lose him.”

“Do you know whether Mr. Wallace was on time for that three-thirty meeting?” Will asked.

Sophie couldn’t disguise a whiff of scorn when she said, “Freddie’s always on time.”

“The reason I asked,” Will said, “is that Mr. Munro’s body was found by your husband at three-
forty
. Either he was late arriving for his meeting, or he’d already been there for ten minutes or so before making the discovery.”

Sophie thought about it for a moment as she reached for a lemon kiss. “I’m not really sure when Freddie left the house Friday afternoon, because I was gone by then. He was asleep when I left, and I didn’t want to—“

Nell said, “Asleep?” as Will said, “You left?”

“He was, er, taking a little nap upstairs,” Sophie said. “I had some shopping to do, and I didn’t want to disturb him, so I just slipped out. I suppose I should have asked one of the maids to awaken him in time for his meeting with Philip, so if he
was
late, I suppose it’s really my fault.” She touched the lemon kiss to her tongue before closing her mouth around it.

“That might explain the timing,” Will said. “Do you recall when you returned home from shopping?”

Sophie looked thoughtful as the lemon kiss dissolved in her mouth. “Four-thirty, perhaps? Freddie was already back home, and halfway through a decanter of whiskey. He just kept saying, ‘He’s dead...Phil is dead.’ Poor thing, he was utterly beside himself. It was guilt—that’s what I think.”

“Guilt?” Nell said.

“Think about it. The last time he’d seen Philip was the night before, when he was drunk and screaming false accusations in a dining room full of people. And now that I think of it, if he’d only been on time for their meeting Friday afternoon, he might have been able to talk Philip out of jumping from that window.”

“Mr. Munro didn’t jump,” Will said. “He was murdered, and his body thrown out of the window to make it look like suicide.”

“Murdered,” Sophie said quietly. “Are you sure?”

“We
would
like to be able to prove it,” Nell said, thinking the time had come to, as Will would say, lay their cards on the table. “It would help if we could get an idea of his state of mind in the days preceding his death. Can you tell us how he appeared to you when you visited him in his office Thursday evening?”

Sophie stilled in the act of lifting her demitasse to her mouth. Her gaze shifted from Nell to Will. By the time it shifted back, her expression had grown hard and opaque. She lowered her cup without taking a sip, stood, and strode across the room toward a bell pull in the corner, her filmy gown billowing behind her. “Colleen will show you out.”

Nell said, “Mrs. Wallace—“

“What you’re implying is outrageous, and if you think I’m going to sit still and listen to—“

“There was a witness,” Nell said.

Sophie froze with her hand around the bell pull.

“Someone was listening from the fourth floor landing,” Nell said. “And...watching.”

Sophie closed her eyes, looking suddenly much older than she had before. She removed her hand from the cord and lowered herself into a little hard-backed corner chair. “What do you want?”

“Not to tell your husband, you mean?” Nell asked. “We have no reason to—“

“It’s information we want,” Will said, with a furtive little glance at Nell. “You could help us a great deal just by answering a few questions, and in return, you have my word that we’ll keep these matters as confidential as we possibly can.”

Sophie regarded them listlessly.

“How long have you and Mr. Munro been...intimately acquainted?” Will asked.

She drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “Twenty years, more or less.”

“Did you love him?” Nell asked.

Sophie shrank into the chair, staring blankly at the carpet. “I was a fool.”

“Did he love you?”

“The concept of love is foreign to him.
Was
foreign to him.”

Nell said, “I can’t imagine how you must have felt Thursday night. I mean, the things he said...and did...”

“I was shocked,” Sophie replied numbly, her gaze still on the floor. “Devastated. Enraged. I wanted to claw his face open, gouge out his eyes.”

“Did you wish he was dead?” Nell asked.

Looking up, Sophie said, “Wouldn’t you have?”

“You knew him for twenty years,” Will said. “Who, among his acquaintances, might have grown to loathe him, or felt threatened by him?”

“Who didn’t?” Sophie asked with a sort of weary bitterness.

“Do you know anything about his relationship with the Bassett sisters?” Nell asked.

Sophie groaned. “The younger one was after his money. God knows that’s the only reason a Bassett would agree to marry a parvenu like Philip.”

“Yes, but
you’re
from one of the old Brahmin families,” Nell said, “and my understanding is that you would have married him in a heartbeat.”

“As I’ve already pointed out,” Sophie said, “I am a fool. Becky Bassett, her idiot chatter notwithstanding, is actually rather shrewd. Certainly not the type to let messy emotions get in the way of an advantageous marriage. For all I know, she may have detested Philip. I’m fairly certain she was nothing more to him than a pretty young blonde with a good name. She’d get the money, he’d get the name. A match made in heaven’s countinghouse.”

“What about Miriam?” Will asked.

“Miriam.”
Sophie said it as she might have said,
Pig Dung.
“Miriam Bassett is not entirely what she seems.”

A popular refrain, that. “How do you mean?” Nell asked.

Sophie stood, smirking, and sauntered back to the fainting couch. “She likes to make herself out as the epitome of moral purity, but I assure you, it’s all an act. I’ve known her since she was sixteen, and one thing she’s not is pure.”

“Did she know Mr. Munro then?” Will asked.

“Oh, yes,” Sophie said as she settled back on the couch, spreading her skirts out prettily. “I met her through him. We’d been...involved, he and I, for a couple of years, but he was still at Harvard, so I didn’t find it odd that he hadn’t proposed to me yet. I assumed, once he’d graduated and was earning a decent living...” She looked away in evident disgust. “I assumed wrong. One day, after we’d been...well, suffice it to say he was feeling relaxed, a bit too much so, perhaps, he told me he’d decided to steal Miriam Bassett away from Chet Langdon.”

“Chet...?”

“Her beau. Excellent family, wonderful prospects...” Sophie waved a listless hand. “Everything that sort thinks is important. Chet was due to leave on his Grand Tour soon, so Philip planned to pounce while he was away.”

“He told you this,” Nell asked, “even though you and he were...?”

“It was when I first realized he thought of me not so much as a lover, but as a sort of chum who was conveniently free with her favors. It was an eye-opener, and not a pleasant one.”

“No, I don’t imagine so.”

“He rhapsodized at great length about Miriam’s many assets—her breeding, her beauty, but most of all, her virtue. She was the perfect Brahmin bride for a high-reaching upstart such as he, and he was determined to wed her. He’d been wooing her with every romantic trick at his disposal, he told me, redoubling his efforts every time she rebuffed him.
Rebuffed
him! Here I was, dreaming about the day when he would finally get down on one knee before me, and this absurd little mouse was showing him the cold shoulder.”

“So Munro thought she’d come ‘round once this Chet fellow was safely overseas, eh?” Will said. “Out of sight and out of mind?”

“That was the idea, but he was in for a surprise.” Sophie sat forward and lowered her voice, although they were the only people in the room. “Right after Chet left for Europe in June of eighteen-fifty, Miriam came to see me, which was rather unexpected. We knew each other, but we weren’t exactly what you’d call friends. She was several years younger than I, and we had nothing in common.”

“Except for Philip Munro,” Nell said.

“Not for long.” Sophie chose a lemon kiss from the plate and sat back, smiling. “It took Miriam forever to come to the point. She was shaking like a rabbit. She told me I was the only person she could think of to consult about a particular matter, because of my—how did she put it?—’familiarity of a certain nature with gentlemen.’”

“She knew about you and Munro?” Will asked.

“She knew about
me
, because I was never quite as discreet as I might have been back then. It wasn’t widely known, at the time, that Philip and I were lovers, but everyone seemed to know that Sophie Cabot was no blushing maiden. Nevertheless, imagine my surprise when Miriam finally screwed up the courage to ask me how she could tell if she was in the family way.” She popped the little confection into her mouth, grinning like a cat.

Nell said, “She and Chet...?”

Sophie smiled as she washed the kiss down with a sip of coffee. “Evidently, and now he was in Europe, and Miriam, in her pathetic naïveté, was trying to figure out if she was going to have to cable him home for a hasty wedding. She’d taken no precautions, of course—hadn’t even known they existed.”

“Was she with child?” Will asked.

“She was too mortified to discuss the particulars of her own situation,” Sophie said. “Just wanted the basic information, which I gave her. She thanked me and left, whereupon I promptly called on Philip and told him what any female in my position would—that his darling Miriam of the spotless reputation was, in fact, carrying Chet Langdon’s baby.”

“But you didn’t know that for sure,” Will said.

“Let us just say I assumed it from the nature of our conversation.”