The Last Nightingale (11 page)

She didn't take their actions personally, as compared to those of the sergeant himself. Elsie Sullivan held a complete grasp on the appropriate care and feeding of servants, and of the delight that their proper use delivers. She would be satisfied to simply have them fired. But she was convinced that something had to be wrong with this Blackbeard fellow. His clumsiness in dealing with her begged for retaliation, cried out for it so loudly that she felt a wave of pity for the foolish man—not that it lessened her craving for his violent destruction. That was a foregone conclusion.

Elsie Sullivan had never entered City Hall through the police doors before, and she was shocked at how primitive and nasty things were below the station. The inner offices looked like they had been carved out of a cave, dimly lit, clouded by fresh cigar smoke, sour with the residue of old tobacco. The two officers, who did not yet realize that their careers were dead, escorted her into a small and bare office. There was nothing more than one large wooden table in the center of the room, with two hardwood chairs. The professionally doomed men sat her down at the table with a few polite, empty words, then walked out and left her there alone. She heard a key turn the door's lock.

Elsie could only stare around the bare room in silence. A powerful knot of dread appeared inside of her, inviting her to panic. She vowed not to give in to it. Instead, she committed herself to turning its energy toward fueling her anger, and to focusing her mind while she waited for a weakness to appear in the situation. Then Elsie Sullivan, a grieving widow who had entertained most of the city's powerful citizens right inside of her home, would finally have her opportunity to turn the tables on this puffed-up little policeman. She would guarantee herself the opportunity to calmly observe him while he stood broken and publicly humiliated, all out in the open, for anyone to see. She would stand aside, coolly watching, dressed in something especially fine.

Why do men always have to kill their enemies? It's so much better to let them live, while you torment them from a distance and prolong their suffering.

She needed to urinate badly enough to feel concerned about it. This situation needed to be resolved before she was forced to put herself in the vulnerable position of having to ask to use the facilities. She tried to estimate when that would be. Thirty minutes? An hour? Say an hour, then. That single hour more or less defined her timetable for this encounter. No matter why they had dragged her here, it was crucial for her to get back out within that much time.

Keys jingled on the other side of the door. Then came the clicks in the lock. When the door opened, Elsie watched the doomed police officer walk in. He was by himself. She quickly checked his name tag.
Blackburn, then. Sergeant Randall Blackburn.
She sat quietly and kept her face impassive while he closed the door, stepped to the table, and pulled up a chair. He sat down across from her. She decided not to give him any satisfaction by speaking first.
Let him make the overture.

The sergeant simply pulled out a torn scrap of paper with some childish handwriting penciled across it. He appeared to run his eyes over the lines again, then he set the paper down on the table and looked up at Elsie, studying her face. She felt his gaze moving
around on her. Nevertheless, she fixed her eyes on the door, raised her chin, and said nothing.

But the sergeant, instead of speaking, just picked up the scrap of paper and read it over again before he finally lowered it back to the table and returned his gaze to her face, still reading her in some fashion. She cursed herself when she felt the old hot rash blushing its way across her upper chest and throat.

That was it. The business with the paper scrap appeared to be some sort of attempt on his part to provoke her. Elsie decided not to let him toy with her this way. She was going to speak first after all. So what? It meant nothing, to speak first. She set an ironclad control on her voice and prepared herself to lash out with quiet power. Then she turned to face him.

“Sergeant Blackburn, I am trying to imagine what possible circumstance could arise that would cause you to have me arrested and brought here like a criminal, when all you had to do was to send word that you wanted a meeting.
What
could be so compelling to you that your men would deny me the right to get properly dressed before leaving my home?" She held her voice down, perfectly pitched to show calm control and absolute determination.

“It doesn't matter what you have on," the sergeant quietly replied. "Think of Miss Pairo, sitting alone in a cell right now. What do you think she's wearing?" His voice was even softer than hers.

Don't take the bait!
Elsie matched his technique and lowered her voice even further. "Sir, perhaps a male who wears a uniform every day cannot appreciate the social expectations placed upon a woman's manner of dress,
especially
when she mixes with the city's most powerful and influential people. On a daily basis." She wondered if that was blatant enough for this plebeian.

But he murmured his reply, absently tapping the scrap of paper against the tabletop. "None ofthat matters anymore.”

“I
beg
your pardon! Perhaps none of it matters to you—”

She had just yelled. A real slip. But another moment passed and the sergeant didn't make any reaction. He just kept reading over
that godforsaken piece of paper. Elsie felt the air going stale. Could the man smell her? Her skin crawled with the feeling of self-consciousness.

Officer Blackburn nearly whispered, without even looking at her. "Mrs. Sullivan, your husband wanted the prestige of a wife with a youthful figure. He chided you about losing weight until it became a major issue in your home.”

Elsie's blood ran cold. The hot rash on her chest and throat turned to flame.

“He bought an industrial-sized scale and brought it home as an insult to you. He probably claimed that it was to ‘remind’ you to lose weight or something, but that doesn't matter. You knew that it was there to mock you.”

Elsie tried to recapture her confidence, or even a reasonable imitation of it. She squeezed her brain for some fiery retort that would shut Blackburn up. But her mind seemed gripped in solid ice. What was happening to her?

How did he know these things?

And still he kept talking. "It was a good thing," he began, "that you had the, ah, ‘arrangement’ with your husband about his mistresses. Since you were aware of when they were planning to see each other next, you knew just when to shoot him, then run to her apartment while she was still on her way to meet with him. You took his key to open her door, and then planted the gun inside." He focused his gaze directly into her eyes, but she was primed for combat and did not turn away.

“I am impressed, Sergeant Blackburn. Did you get this information by reading my mind? If so, I think you need a few more lessons.”

The big sergeant just sighed. He seemed to make up his mind about something before he finally spoke. "Mrs. Sullivan, have you heard of the science of reading human fingerprints to determine someone's identity?”

“Yes. I've heard of it." Elsie felt a brief flicker of triumph. She
had indeed read about fingerprinting, in a recent magazine from Great Britain. She was careful not to smile too much. "As it happens, I know that there are scientists who say it is valuable for identification, but that no police departments are using it. Too cumbersome, I think they called it.”

“Oh, it can be a bit messy, I suppose, what with the black powder and all. But in fact the English detectives at Scotland Yard are beginning to use it, and we've been considering it here in San Francisco. Your case is one of a dozen test cases that we are running.”

She watched Sergeant Blackburn pause, probably for dramatic effect, before he added, "And your fingerprints are all over the gun we retrieved from Miss Pairo's apartment.”

All of the fine hairs on Elsie's body stood up. She knew better than to speak.
A nervous mouth will betray you every time,
she could hear her mother's voice saying, giving her valuable lessons in how to lie to boys.
Keep quiet and let them wonder what you're thinking.

She took another look at Sergeant Blackburn. He really was quite handsome, with a lovely, strong voice. She briefly wondered if she could still seduce a man like him, but immediately felt foolish for thinking about it. She forced the thought out of her mind and tried to reclaim confidence where suddenly there was none.

“I'm curious," Blackburn went on, "did you actually meet Miss Pairo just as she was coming out of the house, or did you have to wait around to catch her?”

She didn't reply. Several awkward moments went by. The two of them were alone there, after all. No windows. The door was made of solid wood. No one could see.

She knelt down in front of him and started to undo his pants.

Blackburn slipped both of his hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet. He was almost gentle, but not quite. "Use the writing tablet, there," he told her in a voice that did not invite a response. "Mrs. Sullivan, you need to write out a full confession. Put
all of it down, and don't leave anything out." He regarded her for a moment, then added, "I promise you, it's for the best.”

“Do you mean that?" she asked in the voice of a timid little girl, one she had always found to be tremendously effective in the bedroom. It compelled a man to show her that he wasn't angry with her.

“Mrs. Sullivan, you're under arrest for murder, now. You won't be leaving this place for a while. That's why it doesn't matter whether you are well dressed today or not.”

“I can afford to post a very high bond.”

“Not for murder. There is no bail." He went on to explain that as soon as she finished her confession, she was going to be redressed in the muslin coveralls of a jailhouse inmate.

As much as his words frightened her, Elsie felt sure that she caught a flash of reassurance in Sergeant Blackburn's eyes. It puzzled her for just a moment, then she realized that yes—he seemed to be saying that he could help her, if only she did as she was told. She sensed that her charms were working on him as well as ever, even in her degraded condition.

Feeling better now, she sat down to the writing tablet and picked up a pencil. When she looked up at Sergeant Blackburn and smiled, she caught him almost smiling right back, plain as anything. She began to write, then, in her studied and elegant hand, determined to please him enough to gain every possible advantage over him.

She wrote out everything: how the captain tormented her so cruelly and for so long. She emphasized that Marietta Pairo was not the subject of her malice. Bather, the younger woman was simply the natural scapegoat. The captain, of course, was the problem—a man who was simply too nasty to live. The deservedly late captain. Elsie did not doubt that she could make any reasonable person see that.

Mind over matter, the way she had always done it. So she ignored her current state of appearance and projected the idea of
herself as a woman in distress. Within moments, she was transformed. While her physical appearance remained deplorable, she could tell that her presence itself became as sweet as blueberry pie. She knew that no man would do anything to harm her, when she was like this.

She concentrated on writing out her confession just as instructed, making sure to use her best penmanship. The things she was committing to the page were too scary to think about. Somehow the fears tightened her muscles and twisted at her stomach. So she kept them at bay by focusing on the challenge of writing with perfectly even letters. This served to show the policeman that she obeyed the rules, while her handwriting was still decorated with enough feminine swirls to be sexy.

Elsie Sullivan trusted that she would soon have this Sergeant Randall Blackburn curled up in the palm of her hand.

B
LACKBURN
WAS THE HERO
of the hour, since the Sullivan widow was in the city jail, huddled with her attorney and sending out scores of frantic missives to her highly connected friends. Lieutenant Moses rewarded him by allowing him to nap in an empty cell until it was time for his night beat. After four hours of near-death slumber and half a pot of tar-like coffee, Blackburn was ready to pull one more full shift before he would finally be allowed to go back to his new apartment and get a full night's sleep.

However, once he stepped outside into the darkness and cool night air, his energy doubled. What he really wanted to do was to ignore the Barbary Coast altogether and do a little investigative work instead. The very idea picked up his pulse. Hunting down a good mystery was far more compelling than the thought of spending the night hunting down street thugs. So in silent retaliation for the brutal treatment by his supervisor, he decided to give the thugs a few hours off and pursue the mystery instead.

He turned away from City Hall's temporary station. The single advantage to walking the Barbary Coast beat was that his supervisors seldom found cause to risk themselves by going down there to check on him. Instead he headed in the opposite direction and took a walk toward the Mission Dolores, several long blocks away.

The day before, when a boy walked into the station bearing "an
urgent note for Sergeant Blackburn," the desk sergeant on duty refused to accept it unless the boy provided a return address. For some reason, the boy refused to leave his name, but did say that he was living at the Mission Delores, and claimed that he worked there, guarding the place from looters at night. If he really was at the Mission, he would be easy enough to identify. The desk sergeant had commented that the boy had a pronounced stutter.

Blackburn still felt a pleasant buzz of surprise that the ruse about fingerprints had actually worked on Mrs. Sullivan. With the science being so new, she had not realized that nobody had taken fingerprint samples from her. Most new inventions seem to be half miracle; maybe she just thought there was some magic to it that she did not comprehend. By the time her lawyer arrived and she began to feel buyer's remorse, she had a long, detailed confession written down and signed in front of several witnesses.