Murder on Waverly Place (12 page)

Madame Serafina looked up, her expression guarded. “No, none at all.”

“What do you know about her?” Sarah asked. “Does she have any family? I suppose someone should send for them, if they haven’t already.”

“No, she has no family,” Madame said quickly.

“That must be why she spent so much time here,” Mrs. Decker said. “Mrs. Burke said she attended all the séances.”

But Sarah was still looking at the girl. She was hiding something. “Madame,” she said kindly. “What do you know about her? You have to tell us everything so we can help you,” she added, not sure if it was true but knowing it would work.

“Mrs. Gittings is . . .” The girl looked uncertainly at Mrs. Decker, then back at Sarah again. Her dark eyes looked even darker. “This is her house. She . . . finds people to come here, and she takes the money.”

“Are you saying that she’s your manager?” Sarah asked in surprise.

“Yes, that is it. She is my manager,” she said, grateful for the suggestion. “She takes care of everything for me so I do not have to worry.” This sounded like something Mrs. Gittings would have told her.

Sarah looked at her mother, who gave her a small shake of the head to indicate she’d had no idea. Sarah wondered briefly if Malloy knew this yet. “So you live here with her and . . . and who else?”

“Nicola,” she admitted reluctantly. “And the Professor.”

“How did you get involved with her in the first place?” Sarah asked, excusing her nosiness with the certainty that any information she could get about Mrs. Gittings might help identify her killer.

“She found me,” the girl said, obviously choosing her words carefully. “I was telling fortunes. I told her fortune one day, and she said I had a gift. She said I was wasting my talent, and she could help me. She said I could be rich.”

“So she brought you here?” Sarah guessed.

“Yes. She helped me to . . . to contact the spirits. Then she found people to come.” The girl was starting to look uneasy again.

Sarah had a million questions about how Mrs. Gittings had helped her to contact the spirits. “How did she—?”

“Please,” Madame interrupted anxiously. “What will happen with Nicola? He did not do anything wrong. You cannot let them take him to jail!”

“Nobody’s going to take him to jail,” Mrs. Decker promised rashly.

“That policeman hit him!” the girl said, tears pooling in her eyes again.

“Which policeman?” Sarah asked. “Not Mr. Malloy!”

“No, no, one in uniform,” the girl said, the tears spilling down her cheeks. “Please, do not let anything happen to him!”

“If he’s innocent, nothing will happen to him,” Sarah promised even more rashly. “But the only way to prove he’s innocent is to figure out who really did it. Do you have any idea at all?”

“None!” the girl insisted. “Please, can you find out what they are doing to Nicola? Can you talk to your friend Mr. Malloy and ask him?”

Sarah gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

 

 

 

F
RANK WENT BACK TO FIND THE PROFESSOR SITTING WITH his head bowed, rubbing his forehead. When he looked up, his face was gray with strain.

He took his chair opposite the Professor again. “Who was this Mrs. Gittings to you?”

He stiffened. “I worked for her.”

“What else? Don’t lie to me,” Frank warned. “I’ll just get annoyed, and you won’t like what happens after that.”

The Professor had been around long enough to know how the police behaved when they got annoyed. “We were partners,” he said, his face rigid with reluctance.

“You split the profits of this little scam?”

“It’s not a scam,” he protested indignantly. “Madame Serafina is a legitimate spiritualist.”

“Yeah, that’s like being a legitimate fake,” Frank said. “So you picked this girl up off the street and taught her the tricks of the trade—”

“There are no tricks! You can scoff if you like, but ask any of her clients. They’ll tell you.”

“I’m sure they will. So you think this Nicola killed Mrs. Gittings because she wanted to get rid of him.”

“That’s right,” Rogers said, pulling himself up straight in the chair again.

“I just have one problem,” Frank said. “He wasn’t in the room when the séance started, and everybody said that nobody could get in without them knowing it. So how did he do it?”

“I told you, he was hiding.”

“Where was he hiding?”

“In the cabinet,” Rogers said, as if it should have been obvious.

Now Frank felt stupid. He’d seen that cabinet himself and wondered about it. O’Toole had told him it was empty, so he must have checked it. But Nicola could have gotten out when nobody was looking, sometime after everybody ran out of the room and before the police came. But where had he been hiding in the meantime? He’d have to question the boy next, he decided with a sigh.

This time when someone knocked on the door, he was glad for the interruption.

“Doc Haynes wants to see you,” the cop guarding the hallway reported.

Frank crossed the hall to find the medical examiner sitting in one of the chairs at the séance table.

“What exactly was going on in here?” Haynes asked. “O’Toole’s been telling me some cock-and-bull story about spirits.”

“That girl in the front room, she’s some kind of spiritualist,” Frank confirmed. “She can talk to your dead mother and find out where she hid the family jewels.”

“My family didn’t have any jewels,” Haynes said with amusement.

“Too bad. But that’s what was going on. People pay this girl money so they can sit around a table in the dark and talk to their dead relatives.”

“Why would they want to do that?’ Haynes asked. “I’m glad most of my relatives are dead so I
don’t
have to talk to them.”

“I don’t understand it either, but that’s what was going on.”

Haynes looked around. “If they were all sitting around the table, why didn’t they see who stabbed her?”

“It was dark. Pitch dark,” Frank added. “And they were all holding hands, so nobody could do anything without the people next to them knowing.”

Haynes gave this some thought. “Unless one of the people sitting next to her did it. She’d notice one of them let go of her hand, but before she could say anything, she was dead.”

“Did it happen that fast?” Frank asked in surprise.

“I’ll know more when I do the autopsy, but I’m pretty sure that’s a stiletto.” He nodded toward the body on the floor. “They go in like a knife into butter, if you’re lucky and don’t hit a rib, and this fellow was lucky. I’m guessing the knife went right into her heart. She might’ve felt a pain, but she probably thought it was indigestion or something. She wasn’t alive long enough to figure out she’d been stabbed.”

“So she wouldn’t have cried out?”

Haynes shook his head. “I doubt it. If you see somebody coming at you with a knife and see it go in, you’d scream bloody murder. Not because it hurt so much as because you’re scared and you know something bad is happening. Sitting in the dark like that, I’m guessing the last thing she expected was to get stabbed to death while she was talking to her dead relatives.”

“You’d think one of them would’ve warned her,” Frank said, glancing down at the body, which had now been covered with a sheet.

“My orderlies will be here in a few minutes to take her away. I’ll let you know if I find anything else in autopsy.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

Frank remembered the cabinet. He walked over and opened the double doors. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but what he saw was an empty cabinet, just like O’Toole had said.

“You finished in here?” O’Toole asked from the doorway.

“I’m finished,” Doc Haynes said, getting up wearily.

Frank turned to look at the other detective. “You checked this cabinet when you got here to make sure it was empty?”

“Yeah, like I told you,” O’Toole said with some irritation. “We searched this place, top to bottom. I’m telling you, the wop kid wasn’t here.”

“That Professor fellow says he was hiding in the cabinet during the séance, and he must’ve sneaked out and stabbed the woman.”

“I figured it was something like that,” O’Toole said. “But where did he go after that, I’d like to know.”

“So would I,” Frank said. “Guess I could ask him.” He closed the cabinet.

“Mr. Malloy?”

Frank nearly jumped at the sound of Sarah’s voice, but he managed to keep his composure. He turned to see her standing behind O’Toole in the doorway.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but may I speak with you a moment?” she asked.

O’Toole was looking at her like he’d never seen a female before. Frank somehow managed not to punch him, but he did have to use a little force to get him out of the doorway. Frank paused in the hallway, trying to remember which room might be empty. Mrs. Decker wasn’t in the office anymore. He pointed toward the door and followed Sarah inside.

He closed the door behind them and turned to face her. For a moment, just one moment, he thought of all they’d been through together and how she was unlike any other woman he’d ever known. He owed her more than he could ever repay, for what she had done for his son and for helping him solve cases he could never have hoped to solve without the knowledge she had of the rich and the world they lived in. Once he’d planned to repay her by finding the man who had killed her husband and bringing him to justice. Now that he’d done so, he knew nothing could ever repay what he owed her, just as nothing would ever bridge the gap that separated an Irish Catholic policeman and the daughter of one of the oldest families in New York.

Before he could surrender to the despair that thought caused him, she said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but Madame Serafina is worried about that boy, Nicola.”

“She should be,” Frank said, forcing himself to forget what he could not change and concentrate on the case at hand. “It looks like he’s the killer.”

“Oh, no,” she protested. “What proof do you have?”

“The Professor said he was hiding in that big cabinet in the séance room and sneaked out during the séance to stab her.”

“Madame Serafina is sure he didn’t do it,” she said with a little frown that made him want to grind his teeth. She frowned like that when she was setting her mind to something.

“Of course she is,” Frank pointed out reasonably. “They’re lovers. Even if she
knew
he did it, she’d be defending him.”

“Are you sure he was in the cabinet?” she tried.

“Not yet,” he had to admit. “I haven’t had a chance to question him, but I was going to do that next. Besides,” he added quickly, wanting to convince her before she got too involved in all this, “nobody else who was here even knew who Mrs. Gittings was, so why would they want to kill her? Turns out, she’s the one who ran this whole show.”

“I know. Madame Serafina just told us.”

“Why do they call her Madame Serafina?” Frank asked, strangely annoyed to hear her saying the odd name over and over.

“I have no idea. She’s not even married. It’s probably something they made up to make her sound more impressive.”

“That makes sense,” he agreed. “Anyway, this Mrs. Gittings ran everything and showed up at every séance, probably to keep an eye on Serafina. Everybody else thought she was just another . . . uh, client,” he said, catching himself. He was going to say sucker, but he’d remembered just in time that Sarah’s mother was among them. “So none of them had any reason to kill her.”

“What reason did Nicola have?”

“From what they said, he was trying to convince the girl to leave here and go off with him. Maybe he was tired of this Gittings woman taking all the money and figured they could do just as well on their own. Whatever it was, they had a big fight about it yesterday.”

“If Serafina was going to run away with him, why would he have killed Mrs. Gittings?”

“She wasn’t. She’d promised to stay if Nicola could stay, too, but maybe Nicola wasn’t happy about that.”

She frowned again, but this time she was just disappointed. “I can see why you’d suspect him. But what about the Professor? He knew her. Couldn’t he have been the killer?”

“He said he was in the kitchen during the séance. Apparently, he doesn’t go into the room with them, and nobody saw him there. Besides, he was partners with the Gittings woman.”

Her face lighted up. “Maybe he was tired of sharing the profits with her,” she said. “That would be a reason to kill her.”

“If you can figure out how he got into the room, I’ll be happy to consider it,” Frank told her dryly.

She sighed. “So it looks like Nicola and Serafina are the only ones with a good reason to want her dead, then.”

“Yes, it does,” he told her with relief. He couldn’t believe she’d accepted it so easily. “So why don’t you take your mother home and let me sort this out.”

She gave him an apologetic smile that was just as beautiful as the regular smiles she gave him. “I know you want us out of here, but we can’t leave Serafina. And if you arrest Nicola, she’s going to be hysterical. You’ll be happy we’re here if that happens.”

“Nothing could make me happy you’re here,” he informed her, making her smile again. She was making him forget why
he
was here, though. He needed to get away from her and back to work.

“We’ll wait with Serafina until you decide if you’re going to arrest Nicola or not,” she said. “And maybe I’ll be able to find out something helpful from her.”

Defeated, Frank opened the door and motioned for her to proceed him out of the room. “Just don’t think you’re going to get involved in this,” he told her in a whisper as she passed.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she assured him without the slightest hint of sincerity.

Frank gritted his teeth to keep from saying anything else. He waited until she was safely back in the parlor again. Then he went upstairs to find Nicola.