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Authors: Anthony Flacco

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BOOK: The Last Nightingale
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It didn't matter; the course was set. Moses looked up at Sergeant Blackburn and smiled. The smile came easily to him and went unchallenged, surprisingly enough. Under any other circumstances, Moses would expect a man like Blackburn to wipe the expression right back off of him.

But not today. Probably not tomorrow. And certainly not until that inevitable moment when they removed him from this marvelous position. Until then—

His smile broadened. He couldn't help it. Fat Gregory Moses hadn't felt like smiling in a long time.

CHAPTER SEVEN
THAT AFTERNOON

B
LACKBURN SAT AT A
thick wooden table in a clammy little interrogation room while the jailer escorted murder suspect Marletta Pairo back to her cell. He had gone straight to the jail to have Miss Pairo brought up to the interview room as soon as he left Lieutenant Moses. He was surprised to discover that the retired captain’s girlfriend was remarkably stupid and inarticulate. He wondered how the captain had been able to stand her company whenever they weren’t between the sheets.

Miss Pairo tried out a range of attitudes on him and ran herself through a gamut of emotions over the course of the long interview, but her fear and anxiety were as plain as her protests of innocence. Still, she could not explain how the gun got into her locked apartment. It was certainly the murder weapon: handmade, firing a distinct 35-caliber forged lead slug. The barrel still smelled of freshly burned powder and the chamber was minus a round. Miss Pairo’s denials added just enough to the case to make his job hard, and to guarantee the need for fieldwork. The rest of her interview was worthless. The poor woman was so terrified that she would eagerly swear to seeing pigs fly if she thought that it would get her off the hook.

It went no better at the home of the late Captain Sullivan. Elsie Sullivan was a self-possessed and well-spoken woman in her for-
ties, a product of a social class that prided itself on tightly controlled emotion. She was heavier than most women, but Blackburn noted that she still presented herself well, with a series of girdles and corsets that held her in an hourglass shape beneath her outer clothing.

She was able to tell her story with relative poise, until she got to the part about finding Captain Sullivan sprawled across the big floor scale. Her voice broke and her face went pale while she described the scene.

None of it did Blackburn a bit of good. Her story fit all the known facts. As a potential suspect, what motive did she have? The family money was hers as well as his. Her closest staff members backed up her story about the terms of her marriage. They all scoffed at the idea of Elsie Sullivan having a fit of jealousy over one of her husband's passing flings. Furthermore, Mrs. Sullivan's attitude with the police was fully cooperative. She was eager to have the guilty party tried and convicted.

And Blackburn didn't believe her at all. Even when he set aside his natural resentment of smug complacency, he still didn't believe her. Her pretty face and polished mannerisms gave her a pleasant veneer, but her eyes left him cold. They reminded him of an animal who knows nothing but hunger and fear.

The brass wanted evidence by noon the next day and he was on his own.

Shane lay on his back, sound asleep, protected in the cool darkness of the little toolshed at the rear of the cemetery. The society pages were draped across him like a blanket. In that day's newspaper, even the usually decorative Society section was given over to crime reporting, elaborating on the scandalous story of Captain Sullivan's murder by his enraged mistress. The drama was deep—she was arrested with the murder weapon in her possession. The article took care to acknowledge the new widow Sullivan's lack of involvement.

And while no reputable newspaper stooped to printing a sketch of Captain Sullivan's body, sprawled wide across the big scale, the scene was described in sufficient detail that the effect was the same.

Shane had grabbed up the newspaper as soon as it hit the corner stand that day, eager to practice reading out loud as soon as he got the chance. But when he came across the Sullivan murder story, it hit him hard, wiping away all the other trivial items. Everything about the case struck him the wrong way, even though he didn't understand why.

For an instant, he wondered if it was because he felt his hope fading for finding a class of people that he could aspire to join. That thought quickly faded. It didn't explain his feelings. This story was simply one family's tragedy, and the Nightingale family had fared no better in their place among the merchant class, especially Mrs. Nightingale.

Something about the news story made Shane remember a time when he spied Mrs. Nightingale while she examined herself in her full-length mirror. A coincidence of geometry and a passing moment had placed him so that he caught her reflection through a carelessly closed door. And in that ambushed moment she presented her full self to him, unknowing, while he silently stared from the darkness and watched her turn this way and that before the mirror. His attention riveted itself to her troubled face and her frustrated breathing while she struggled to get a view of herself that would give her whatever she was seeking.

Mrs. Nightingale was a full-bodied woman, by any standard. Shane knew very well how much she loved to eat, and that she considered any form of physical exercise the antithesis of refined living. But she always dressed so well and walked with such stiff pride that it never occurred to him that she was anything but delighted with herself. And yet at that moment, her principal traits were vulnerability and distress over her appearance. It opened his eyes to the depths of effort that women expended for their appearance, since appearance had a great deal to do with how well they lived. It
suddenly seemed clear to Shane that if a woman suffered this hard over the shape of her body, she must be in a constant state of torment in the presence of other women. The younger ones, the prettier ones, the ones with ideal figures—what else could they be to Mrs. Nightingale except constant jabs, reminders of her own failings? Self-criticism was something that Shane knew too well.

She stepped to the mirror and tossed a robe over it, completely blocking all reflection. She turned away in disgust.
The reminder is too much,
he had heard himself say out loud, just as he realized that she heard him, too. She turned in alarm, spun to face him, and locked her eyes with his.

He felt surprised that she didn't appear angry. She simply nodded.
The reminder is too much,
she repeated. Holding his gaze, she gently closed the door on him.

Then it was over. The memory dissolved and sleep carried him away.

Shane woke up to a throbbing headache, with pains so sharp that he had to move slowly while he sat up. He pulled the newspaper blanket off of himself. The paper was open to the Society section, and as he glanced down, his eye caught the realistic pen and ink sketch of Mrs. Elsie Sullivan. She was bigger, much bigger, than Mrs. Nightingale had ever been.
So that's it.
The news article had prompted the strange memory as he fell asleep. He looked at it again. Yes, the accompanying sketch of Mrs. Sullivan showed that she had far more to be concerned about than Mrs. Nightingale ever did, with regard to her appearance. What was Mrs. Sullivan's stance in front of a mirror? Could she stand the view? Or did she cover her mirrors, too?

That's when the key seemed to jump off of the page at him. The large scale in the bathroom, the one where the body was discovered—it was more like something you might find in a meatpacking house. That scale was a heavy-duty item meant to take a
lot of use. Mrs. Sullivan would never have brought something like that into the house. What woman would? No, it must have been brought in by Captain Sullivan himself.

And why would he do that? He was a fit man, hardly in need of a heavy-duty scale.

Shane felt the answer before he had time to think it—the scale wasn't there for Captain Sullivan. It was there for her. He was the one who brought it home, but it was there for her.

Shane had plenty of experience at being the object of taunting, and now the same familiar feel was here. What else could the big scale be, he asked himself, besides some sort of goad from Sullivan to his wife? The scale's mere presence in the house presented an ongoing insult. The contraption might as well have been screaming,
This is what it takes to weigh you!
In its power to inflict pain, it could laugh at her in a cruel voice that no one else heard.

Shane wondered how long the big scale had been in the house. Surely every single one of those days held some special new humiliation for Elsie Sullivan. Each one was delivered by the sight of the scale itself, possibly along with the occasional verbal barb from her husband. Like straws on the camel's back, they built up, one after another after another, into a boiling mass of resentment and a murderous rage.

And so she shot him, just right, so that he fell more or less across the thing. And then she left him there on purpose.
This is for your oversized scale, bastard!

Shane couldn't explain the gun, but he felt certain now that Sullivan's mistress was innocent. It hurt him to think of how terrified she had to be, locked up for this crime. The memory of Mrs. Nightingale's final screams of terror and desperation were stuck in his brain like bullet fragments, and he had to wonder if the Pairo woman's fear was any less. He found himself overwhelmed with the urge to help her. However, the force of it didn't keep him from being baffled as to what he could actually do. After all, was he supposed to go to the police with all this?

To tell them what?

And why should they believe anything that he told them, anyway? Worst of all, what if somebody recognized him for what he was? What if somehow these men who dealt with criminals every day could look at him and see his horrible guilt?

But the picture might as well have been burned into his brain; Marietta Pairo's pain was now linked to the final agonies of Mrs. Nightingale. There was nobody but him to help her now. He had to ask himself if he was ready to abandon another innocent one, ready to lie quiet and piss himself instead of taking the necessary risk. Back in the kitchen pantry, his legs had been paralyzed and his throat sealed shut. But what would his excuse be now, if he kept silent about his suspicion, just to keep himself safe?

What good was anyone's life under that kind of burden? He knew the answer to that.

Shane picked up his newspaper and opened it to a full-page advertisement that left a good portion of the page blank. He tore off the blank part to use for notepaper and went to get a pencil from the Mission schoolroom. There, he addressed the note to the head police officer named in the newspaper article: Sergeant Randall Blackburn.

Shane knew of no other way to try to get the images out of his head, so he began to write down his suspicions.

The freshly minted Widow Elsie Sullivan spent her entire ride to the City Hall station fuming in outrage and plotting her ultimate revenge against that arrogant police officer, Blackman or Black-heart or whatever his name was. The man had not only committed the outrage of summoning her down to the station house, but he had sent hirelings in uniform to arrest her like some petty criminal. Fortunately, none of her friends were in attendance. Still, plenty of servants observed the spectacle of the grieving widow being escorted from her home and driven away.

The few moments that it took to walk with the officers from her doorway to the police cart felt as if they took half an hour. Her blood boiled inside of her all the while. She thought of French royalty being hauled to the guillotine in death wagons.

Fine enough, gentlemen,
she seethed. The policeman would play his little game of hauling her in and of flexing his great authority. She would toy with him in his "interview" until he tired of bothering her and "allowed" her to leave. With that, his power over her would be exhausted. And at that point, he would have concluded his little fishing trip with nothing.

Then it would be time for her to demonstrate her power over him. Not the petty, niggling power of a common street bureaucrat with minimal education and excessive brawn, but that of an intelligent, college-educated, ambitious woman with access to half the people in the SFPD who ranked over him. Several were within her active social circle. Thus the more subtle but far more lethal power of her social influence was about to bear down upon this bastard sergeant, and from every direction. A plague of locusts.

Elsie rode along in the police cart enduring simultaneous levels of discomfort. The officers had snatched her away just before she was to begin her bath, and the clothes they made her put on were the soiled ones she had just discarded.

At first she was so taken aback by them that it was almost funny to her. It was unbelievable, the sight of these two officers blithely destroying their futures by treating her this way. They wouldn't even allow her to dress in private, insisting instead that they guard her in plain sight while she went from bathrobe to fully dressed and all phases in between. The officers refused to allow her to don her usual array of support garments: unmentionable straps and elastic wraps, layers of squeeze-tight underthings that supported her hourglass shape. Instead the men had barely given her time to put on her outer clothing.

With her flesh unsupported, Elsie Sullivan's naked body usually felt, to her, like a bundle of moist rubber sacks. But once she
was safely ensconced in her lifts and wraps and girdles, she transformed into a formidable warrior woman. Men were respectful and a little shy in her presence, and most women didn't even try to give her any sort of trouble.

Today, however, without the needed strength that should have been supplied by her fabric exoskeleton, she found herself arriving at the station as a glob of moist and overlapping rubbery bags. Her own odor was excruciating to her. The assault on her senses caused her backbone to shiver uncontrollably several times.

By the time they pulled into the station and escorted her inside, she was only able to maintain a ladylike composure by concentrating on her breathing and avoiding all eye contact. They have
no idea
what they are doing, she kept reminding herself.
They have no knowledge of the sort of strings that I can pull. They are servants.

BOOK: The Last Nightingale
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