Murder on Black Friday (22 page)

“From what we know of the man,” Will said, “I wouldn’t put it past him to let Miriam follow through with her end of the deal, then renege on his.”

“I...I don’t think so,” Eileen said.

Nell and Will turned to look at the pink-faced girl, whose blush deepened as she said, “I mean I don’t think Miss Bassett...did what you think she did with that fella. I don’t think that’s why her dress was buttoned wrong.”

“Why
do
you think it was buttoned wrong, then?” Nell asked.

“I dunno, but I don’t think it was that.”

“Why not?” Will asked.

Eileen ducked her head and shrugged.

Will said, “If you’re holding something back—”

“It’s just...” She glanced at him, then quickly away. “Fergit it. I’m just blatherin’. I don’t know nothin’.”

“Is it that you don’t think wellborn, churchgoing ladies do that sort of thing?” Nell asked. “Or is it because she’s engaged to Dr. Tanner?”

“I...I reckon I don’t know. Like I said, I’m blatherin’.”

“Miriam Bassett is a person who does what needs to be done,” Nell said. “Or what she thinks needs to be done. If she felt there was no alternative, I think she might have committed a sin for the sake of her family.”

“I s’pose so,” Eileen said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

*   *   *

“Miss Munro is not at home,” declared the sour-faced butler with the black armband who opened the door to Nell and Will later that morning.

Nell considered and rejected the notion of saying,
We know she’s at home, you self-important little toad. We saw her in the front window of her brother’s office as we were walking up to the house.
Catherine Munro looked like a black-clad wraith, staring out through the swath of crepe
with her white face and her sad eyebrows and her vague, dreamy gaze. A skyful of clouds, dark as smoke, cast an appropriately murky pall over the scene.

“Not at home” usually meant “not at home for callers” or “not at home for particular callers.” After their last visit, which had left the late Mr. Munro’s fourth floor office in shambles, Nell suspected his sister had issued orders that they never again be allowed into her home.

“Would you ask Miss Munro if she would be so kind as to make an exception and see us?” Will asked. “It’s a matter of some importance.”

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question, sir. Mr. Munro’s funeral is to take place this afternoon, and Miss Munro prefers to be undisturbed until then.”

Having been thus dismissed, Nell and Will walked a few doors down to an alley between two blocks of attached townhouses, wove their way to the kitchen yard of the Munro house, and opened the back door after a perfunctory knock. Doffing his hat, Will said good morning to Mrs. Gell and her slow-witted assistant, and escorted Nell up the skylit service stairs.

They entered Philip Munro’s office to find Catherine still standing with her back to them at the middle bay window. The room was unlit but for a meager haze of sunlight through the filmy crepe. If Nell hadn’t known that the shadowy form by the window was Catherine, she might have thought no one was there.

“I’m not at home,” Catherine said without turning around. Her voice, naturally soft, had an especially blurry quality this morning.

Will said, “We realize that, Miss Munro, and I apologize for the imposition, but we have something important to ask you that may help to unravel the truth about how your brother died. You’ll be burying him this afternoon. Perhaps, by then, we’ll have disproved the notion that he died by his own hand, which will perhaps provide you some comfort as you lay him to rest. I promise we won’t take up any more of your time than absolutely necessary.”

Catherine remained entirely motionless for so long that Nell had decided she was unmoved by Will’s handsome speech...until she slowly turned toward them. As she did so, her gaze fell on a small druggist’s vial on the window ledge, before Catherine scooped it into a hidden pocket in her dress. It was another elegantly unfussy crepe gown, this one sans weeping cuffs and with a very high neck that framed her chin in tiny black pleats. There were no buttons or adornments of any kind, no belt buckle, no key ring, no watch—just a wasp-waisted silhouette of matte black punctuated by the glittery little locket housing Philip Munro’s portrait.

Catherine’s face and hands looked unnaturally pale against the darkness of her hair and dress and the surrounding room. Nell took a mental photograph so that she could capture the image later in India ink brushed onto good, heavy watercolor paper with just a hint of a tooth.

“What is your question?” Catherine asked, her hands clasped at her waist, her eyes oddly heavy-lidded.

Moving farther into the room, Nell saw that some of the damage Harry had wreaked with that cricket bat had been repaired. There were new sheets of glass over the pictures on the wall, and new shelves on the étagère. The silk wallpaper, however, bore an unsightly grayish abrasion where someone had tried to scrub away the ink stain; it would need to be replaced.

“What we’d like to know,” Nell told her, “is what Miriam Bassett talked to you about Wednesday night.”

Catherine frowned blearily. “Wednesday night?”

“She spoke to you about something,” Will said. “It was something she’d told your brother, something of a confidential nature. Friday afternoon, your brother shared it with Mr. Bassett, who didn’t believe it at first. When he found out it was true, he became very distraught. It would go far toward helping us piece together what happened that day if we knew what it was Miss Bassett spoke to you about.”

“Have you asked
her
?”

“We thought you might be more forthcoming,” Nell said.

“You thought wrong,” Catherine said. “Philip’s posthumous reputation is all he has left. It is my intent to promote that reputation through philanthropic works in his name, not sully it.”

“So it’s something that reflects poorly upon your brother,” Nell said. “Then I can certainly understand why you might want to keep such information to yourself, but you should know what the repercussions will be, should you take that tack. Dr. Hewitt and I will have to expand our investigation, question many more people. If we do that, certain other information is bound to get around, information that, if I were you, I might want to keep under wraps.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact that Philip Munro took advantage of his power of attorney on behalf of Noah Bassett to destroy Mr. Bassett financially.”

Catherine said, “If Mr. Bassett suffered setbacks Friday, that is most regretful, I’m sure, but it is hardly my brother’s fault. Countless investors were ruined Friday.”

“How many were ruined,” Will asked, “as a result of the deliberate connivance of their advisors?”

“That’s absurd,” Catherine said.

“It’s the truth,” Nell said, “He talked Mr. Bassett into buying gold with borrowed money, and left him holding it Friday when he knew the market was about to collapse. His purpose was to force Mr. Bassett to allow his marriage to Becky. If he allowed it, your brother would dig him out of the hole he’d dropped him in. If not...” She lifted her shoulders. “I suppose Noah Bassett would have ended his days in the poor house.”

Catherine said, “You can’t prove any of this.”

“We have telegrams taken from your brother’s safe that will prove it quite effectively.”

Catherine’s eyes glowed as if they were lit from within. “You took things belonging to my brother?”

“You can have them back when the district attorney is through with them,” Nell said. “You do realize it’s not just unethical, but an actual criminal act to abuse a power of attorney that way. Noah Bassett was a beloved figure in this city. When it becomes known what was done to him, your brother will be forever remembered as a duplicitous, double-crossing schemer.”

“You might consider naming the Philip James Munro Foundation after someone else,” Will said dryly.

Catherine stood with her eyes closed for a moment, then walked to the chaise lounge, her layers of black crepe whispering
shush, shush, shush
in the dusky room. She sat and folded her hands in her lap, staring at nothing. “If I tell you about...Wednesday night,” she said in a voice almost devoid of inflection, “who will find out?”

Will said, “That would depend, I suppose, on what you tell us, and how helpful it is in explaining your brother’s murder. All I can promise, but it is a sincere gentleman’s promise, is that I’ll be as vigilant as possible in keeping certain information, such as your brother’s dealings with Mr. Bassett, out of the Boston gossip mill.”

Catherine’s chest rose and fell slowly. In a somnolent monotone, she said, “Miriam came to see him Wednesday night. I knew she was up here. I heard raised voices, but I ignored them. Philip needs his—
needed
his privacy. I tended to turn a deaf ear to what went on up here.”

Will exchanged a grim look with Nell. No doubt he, too, was recalling what his brother had said about Munro’s ravishment of Sophie.
I was sure someone would come upstairs to see what the ruckus was, but nobody did.

“Finally,” Catherine said, “I heard Miriam’s feet on the stairs, but instead of going out the back door, she came and found me in my sewing room. She said she knew I didn’t like her, and that she didn’t much care for me, either, but that I would want to hear what she had to say. She said she was giving up on trying to get through to Philip. She’d been trying all summer, but he was being thick, and even though she’d promised herself long ago that she’d never tell anyone, she’d finally broken down and told Philip, and now she had to tell me, because Philip didn’t believe her, and if anyone could convince him, it would be I.”

Catherine shut her eyes and rubbed her temples with tremulous fingers.

Will rolled Munro’s leather chair from behind the desk and offered it to Nell, who sat. Leaning back against the big desk, arms crossed, he said, “Was this the first time you realized Miss Bassett’s visits to your brother were platonic in nature? That she was merely trying to...‘get through to him’?”

Catherine nodded with her eyes still closed, fingertips kneading her temples. “Philip never discussed his women with me. He had too much...” She sighed.
He had too much respect for me.
That was what she’d told them the other day. Nell wondered if she still believed it.

“What did Miriam tell you?” Nell asked.

“She said she needed my help in keeping Philip from marrying Rebecca. I assumed she was opposed to the marriage on the basis of Philip’s low birth, so I lied and told her I didn’t care if they got married, in fact I was all in favor of it. She asked me...she asked me if would still feel that way if I knew that Rebecca wasn’t really Noah Bassett’s child, that she’d been fathered by someone else. I told her it wouldn’t make any difference to me, but that it was a vile affront to her mother to say such a thing, true or not. So she said...”

Catherine wrapped a hand around the locket. “She said that Rebecca wasn’t really her mother’s child, either, that her mother hadn’t given birth to her—that she, Miriam, had, when she was sixteen. And she said that the reason we must do everything possible to prevent the marriage was because...” Catherine looked up wanly, her gaze lighting on Will, then Nell. “Because Philip was Rebecca’s father.”

Will crossed to the cocktail cabinet and poured three stiff brandies. Catherine drank half of her fairly quickly, then lay back on the chaise, looking exhausted. “Do you want to hear the whole—?”

“Yes,” Nell and Will said in unison.

“This all happened some twenty years ago, and I didn’t come to Boston till ‘fifty-seven, so all I know is what Miriam told me Wednesday night. She said she’d had a beau when she was young who went to Europe, Chet something.”

“Langdon, I think it was,” Nell said.

“Philip had been trying to court her, too, around the same time, but she’d been discouraging him, undoubtedly because of his lack of lineage. Anyway, Miriam had allowed Chet to compromise her before he took ship, and Philip found out about it. Of course, now that he knew what kind of female Miriam was, he abandoned the notion of marrying her, but he was still, well, a man. He had Sophie. She was his mistress. But he also had a masculine drive to pursue and conquer, so...”

It was an indication of Catherine’s obsession with her late brother, Nell thought, that her recounting of these events should be from his perspective rather than that of the person who’d related them to her.

Catherine drank some more brandy, looking preoccupied. “The gist of it is that Philip pursued and conquered Miriam Bassett. Sometime afterward, Miriam realized she was in a delicate condition—by Philip, not Chet. Of course, she never thought to give Philip the chance to do the right thing and marry her. She never even told him she was with child, that’s how contemptuous she was of his social standing. Instead, she went to spend her confinement with relatives in New York under the guise of taking the yearlong finishing course at Miss Finch’s. Meanwhile, her mother feigned a pregnancy by padding her dresses, and when Miriam returned with baby Rebecca, Mrs. Bassett reared her as her own.”

Catherine knew all this the last time they spoke, Nell realized, but all she’d told them was that Miriam was virulently opposed to the marriage, not why. She’d wanted them to suspect that Miriam might have had something to do with her brother’s death, while concealing the fact that he’d come perilously close to marrying his own daughter.