Murder on Fifth Avenue: A Gaslight Mystery (22 page)

None of the other servants knew anything about the mysterious decanter of whiskey, although one or two of them wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Roderick had stolen it from Devries’s room. He did like a nip now and then, although Devries didn’t allow his servants to drink in the house. Frank had given up hope of learning anything important long before young Winston sat down with him in the receiving room, the last one to be questioned.

He lacked Roderick’s air of confidence, but Frank figured time would take care of that. Paul was the master of the house now, and his valet would soon start to feel the importance of his position.

“When did you last see Roderick?” Frank asked, the same question he had asked all the others before him.

“At supper.” The same answer the others had given.

“Did he seem ill or complain about not feeling well?”

“No, in fact …”

Frank’s weariness evaporated. “In fact what?”

Plainly, Winston had been taught not to speak ill of the dead, so he hesitated diplomatically before saying, “He seemed rather jolly.”

“Jolly?” No one else had mentioned this.

“Well, cheerful at least.”

“Do you know why?”

Winston shifted uneasily in his chair. “He said…He said Mr. Paul had asked to see him.”

“Why would that make him happy?”

“I don’t know. See, we’ve all been talking, ever since Mr. Devries died. The servants, I mean. We’ve been wondering how long they’d keep Roderick, what with Mr. Devries being dead and not needing a valet anymore. We thought maybe they’d keep him until after the funeral, in case they needed him to choose his clothes or something, but Roderick thought different.”

“What did he think?”

“I’m not sure, but he didn’t think Mr. Paul was going to let him go.”

“What did he say to you?”

Winston shifted again. “He said…Well, not in so many words, but he thought Mr. Paul was going to take him on and let
me
go.”

“
Exactly
what did he tell you?”

Winston sighed. “He said,
Winston, old sport, we’ll be sorry to see you go.
”

“He said this
before
he met with Paul Devries?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you say?”

“What
could
I say? I know Mr. Paul has been very happy with my service, but I didn’t know. Maybe Mr. Paul thought he should keep Roderick because he’d served his father or something. I was nervous, I can tell you.”

“What did he say afterwards?”

“Nothing. I mean, I didn’t see him again. I waited down in the kitchen for a while. I thought he would come and tell
me I was out—he would’ve liked lording it over me—but he didn’t. He just went right up to his room. That made me think Mr. Paul told him some bad news. Next thing I knew, I heard you yelling for somebody to call a doctor.”

“Did you see the decanter we found in Roderick’s room?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where it came from?”

“Mr. Devries had one like it in his room. I’ve seen it there. He likes his walnuts and his whiskey.”

“Would Roderick have taken the decanter on his own? Without permission?”

“I couldn’t say for sure, but I’d have to say no. Mrs. Devries, she’d be real hard on anybody who stole something.”

“But if Paul Devries had just told him they were letting him go, maybe he didn’t care.”

“Oh, he’d need a reference from the family if he wanted to get another job. He wouldn’t dare do anything to make them mad, even if they’d just turned him out.”

“Winston, do you know what Paul and his father argued about the day Mr. Devries died?”

To Frank’s surprise, the color drained from Winston’s face. “Uh, no, I don’t. Mr. Devries, he was always finding fault with Mr. Paul. It could’ve been anything at all.”

“Roderick said they argued because Mr. Devries had been cruel to Garnet Devries.”

He blinked. “Did he? Well, then, that must be it.”

“What did Mr. Devries do that was cruel?”

He had to think about this for a moment. “He was always saying hurtful things to people. Yes, that’s probably what it was. He’d said something to her and hurt her feelings.”

Winston was a terrible liar, Frank noted. “Did he hurt Mr. Paul’s feelings, too?”

Winston’s expression hardened. “He’d say terrible things to him.”

“What kind of things?”

“Accuse him of not being a real man. Of being soft and weak.”

“Did he ever talk about Mr. Paul’s friend, Hugh Zeller?”

Winston blanched at that, silently confessing that he knew about Paul’s secret. “He…he didn’t approve of Mr. Paul’s friendship with Mr. Zeller.”

“How does Mr. Paul get along with his wife?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do they argue a lot?”

“Oh, no! They’re right fond of each other. That’s why Mr. Paul was so mad about his father not treating her well.”

Which confirmed one of Frank’s suspicions. “Did Mr. Paul think his father took an improper interest in his wife?”

Winston’s eyes grew wide. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you know exactly what I mean.”

“I couldn’t say. I won’t say nothing about Mrs. Paul. You’ll have to ask somebody else.”

Which confirmed Frank’s other suspicion.

“Take me up to Mr. Devries’s bedroom.”

“Whatever for?”

“I need to see where the decanter came from.”

Winston obviously didn’t like this, but he’d been instructed to assist Frank in his investigation, so he led the way up the back stairs to the third floor, where the family’s bedrooms were located. Before opening the door from the stairway into the hall, he turned to Frank.

“Try not to make any noise. You don’t want to disturb Mrs. Devries.”

He was right about that, Frank thought, following him
down to the proper room. Winston closed the door behind them and leaned his back against it, silently telling Frank he was going to observe his every move. Frank remembered seeing a decanter on the table in the sitting area in front of the fireplace, and sure enough, the tray on which it had sat was still there, along with the matching glasses, but the decanter itself was gone.

“That’s where the old man kept his whiskey, isn’t it?” he asked Winston, nodding to the table.

“I believe so, yes.”

“The last time I was here, I saw the decanter sitting on the tray, but it was empty.”

“That’s impossible. Roderick always kept it full for Mr. Devries.”

“It was definitely empty when I saw it.”

Winston frowned. “When was this?”

“A day or two after Devries died, I think.”

Winston nodded. “Roderick had probably drunk it by then.”

“Was he in the habit of doing that?”

“Not when Mr. Devries was alive, I don’t think, but with him gone…I mean, who would know? Nobody comes in here but him now.”

“Where is Mrs. Devries bedroom?”

Winston nodded to his left.

Frank pointed to the door on that wall. “Do the rooms connect?”

Winston smirked. “Sure, but there hasn’t been a connection in a long time, if you know what I mean.”

Frank returned his grin. “I suppose it’s locked on her side.”

“That’s right.”

Frank looked around again, and this time he noticed
something he hadn’t before. He walked back over to the table where the decanter had sat. If Roderick had sampled the whiskey, he hadn’t touched the walnuts. The bowl still held as many as Frank remembered from his previous visit. The implements stood neatly in their holders, polished and gleaming. Frank plucked one of them from its place, a nut pick, to examine it more closely.

Something long and thin, like an ice pick,
Haynes had said. Testing the point with his thumb, he easily punctured the skin and drew a drop of crimson blood.

“What are you doing?” Winston asked in alarm.

Frank ignored him. He was noticing something else. “One of the nut picks is missing.”

“You’ve got it in your hand,” Winston said, hurrying over.

“No, there’s an empty hole where another one should be. Where is it?”

“How should I know? Ask…Oh, I was going to say, ask Roderick,” he said in dismay.

“I’d like to,” Frank muttered.

“It seems like a strange thing to steal. It wouldn’t be worth much.”

“It’s probably just lost,” Frank said.

Winston brightened. “That’s it. Mr. Devries, he was always walking around, eating his walnuts and dropping the shells everywhere. The maids complained about it all the time. He probably carried it with him someplace and left it.”

He had, Frank remembered Roderick saying, been eating walnuts the morning he died.

S
ARAH AND THE GIRLS HAD JUST FINISHED WASHING UP
their Sunday dinner dishes when the front doorbell rang.
Maeve and Catherine ran to answer it, and from the laughter, Sarah knew she wasn’t being summoned to a birth. She found the girls happily hanging up Malloy’s coat and helping his son, Brian, off with his.

When Brian saw Sarah, he ran over and threw his arms around her. She caught him up and returned his hug, smiling as widely as she could to let him know how happy she was to see him, since she knew he couldn’t hear her words. His small hands started making the signs he had learned at the New York Institution for the Deaf and Dumb where he attended school. Plainly, he had learned a lot, and Sarah sighed when she realized she could make little sense of them.

“Do you know what he’s saying?” she asked Malloy.

“He’s happy. I know that sign, at least.”

“I’m happy, too,” Sarah said, hugging him again.

But Catherine was tugging on Brian’s arm. When he looked at her, she pointed at the stairs, and when Sarah released him, the two children raced away, clattering up the stairs to visit the toys in Catherine’s room.

“They don’t need words
or
signs,” Maeve said, following them upstairs. “They understand each other just fine.”

“Thank you for bringing Brian,” Sarah said to Malloy. “Catherine loves playing with him.”

“It makes him pretty happy, too.”

“Come into the kitchen and tell me what you found out from the valet.”

To her surprise, his expression darkened, but he followed her obediently. She set out cups and poured them some coffee. She thought he’d start talking the minute he sat down, but he waited until she’d served them both and taken a seat at the table herself.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Roderick is dead.”

“The valet? What happened?”

“Someone poisoned him.”

Sarah needed a minute for the words to register and another for the awful truth to dawn on her. “Oh, no!” she cried, covering her mouth as tears sprang to her eyes. “It’s all my fault!”

“No, it’s not!” Malloy said, taking her hand in a grip just short of painful. “It’s not your fault, Sarah. You didn’t kill him. Someone else killed him, and that’s who’s to blame.”

“But if I hadn’t said anything about him—”

“The killer would’ve thought of him sooner or later.”

“But maybe not until later and maybe he still would’ve been alive when you arrested the killer.”

“Stop it! You can’t know that. You can’t know anything, and
you
didn’t kill him. Somebody else did, and that’s whose fault it is. I won’t have you taking on somebody else’s guilt.”

He was right, of course, but Sarah knew she would never forgive herself for losing her temper with Mrs. Devries. “That means Mrs. Devries must be the one who stabbed him!”

“I know that’s what we were all hoping, but from what I’ve been able to find out, Paul seems to be the one who gave him the poison.”

“Paul? I can’t even imagine that. How could he have done it?”

“I don’t even know for sure what the poison was yet, but the medical examiner and I think it was arsenic.”

“Rat poison.”

“Probably. It’s pretty easy to find.”

“But how—”

“Somebody gave him a decanter of whiskey.”

“Who would do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know that either, at least not for sure, but here is
what I do know. Roderick seemed to think Paul was going to fire his own valet and keep Roderick on.”

“Why did he think that?”

“I’m guessing, you understand, but remember we thought Roderick knew more about what happened the morning Devries got stabbed than he was saying. Maybe he knew who had stabbed him, and he thought that knowledge would protect him.”

Sarah sighed. “When it really put him in mortal danger.”

“Right after supper last night, Paul met with Roderick. Afterwards, Roderick went straight to his room, and an hour or so later, I arrived to question him. We found him writhing in agony, and a few minutes later he was dead.”

“Didn’t you ask him what happened?”

“Of course I did, but he couldn’t speak. I saw the decanter of whiskey in his room. It was real fancy, not the regular kind of bottle whiskey comes in, but the kind rich people put it in to sit around and look nice.”

“He might have
borrowed
it. Servants do that, you know.”

“One of the maids said he’d probably pinched it, but Roderick managed to say someone had given it to him. Of course I asked him who,” he added when she would have interrupted, “but he was too far gone. He never said another word before he died.”

“How awful!”

“I’ve been trying to figure out what happened before I question Paul Devries, and here’s what I think: I think Roderick knew who killed Devries, so when Paul realized it, he put the rat poison in the whiskey. Then he called Roderick in and told him he was going to let him go. Roderick would’ve been pretty disappointed. Maybe he even threatened Paul, but maybe he was afraid to. Whatever happened between them,
Paul knew he’d be upset so he told Roderick to take the decanter of whiskey to his room to drown his sorrows. What do you think?”

“It sounds logical, but do you really believe Paul Devries is a cold-blooded killer?”

Malloy frowned. “That’s the part that bothers me, too, but if he killed his father—even by accident—he might be feeling desperate. He might be willing to do whatever he could to protect himself.”

Sarah considered the possibilities. “Or maybe to protect someone he loves.”