Rafferty's Last Case, page 29
I saw at once what Holmes was thinking. “You believe the dead man could be Johnny Riordan,” I said.
“Yes, and if it is indeed Mr. Riordan, you may be assured his death was no accident.”
“But we can’t be sure.”
“No, and that is the problem. Do we assume he is dead or do we continue searching for him in the hope he is still alive?”
“What have you decided?”
“We must move forward along other avenues, Watson, while keeping an eye out for Mr. Riordan, just in case. It is the only course that makes sense for the time being.”
“And what will these other avenues be?”
“I have been extremely stupid,” Holmes said, words I was hardly accustomed to hearing from him. “Do you remember what I did with Mr. Rafferty’s notes after we obtained them from his bank box?”
“Of course. You hid them away in a closet on the floor above our rooms.”
“Yes, and it has belatedly occurred to me that Mr. St. Aubin might have employed a similar strategy at his apartment building to safeguard all of his blackmail documents, knowing as he did that the police might search his rooms at any time.”
“But didn’t he hand over all that material to Riordan just before he was killed?”
“I think not. Recall, if you will, that the newsstand operator who saw them stated Mr. St. Aubin gave a single manila envelope to Mr. Riordan. However, one envelope can hardly have been sufficient for all of Mr. St. Aubin’s ‘treasures,’ if they can be called that. He must have collected quite a trove of material over the years, and I believe it may still be somewhere in the apartment building.”
After lunch, the hotel doorman hailed a cab for us. When we got in, Holmes quickly engaged the driver in conversation, and I soon understood his intentions. The driver left us off at a large clothing store only a few blocks from the hotel. We walked briskly through the store and out a rear door to another street. Our driver pulled up moments later, and we were off again, this time toward the Piedmont Apartments, where St. Aubin had lived.
Holmes craned his head around as our cab sped away and pronounced himself well satisfied. “We have shaken them,” he said. “Detective Grimshaw’s men are as obvious as crows in a bevy of swans. Driver, how long to the Piedmont?”
“Five minutes. It’s not far.”
The Piedmont, located on a quiet street at the edge of the city’s commercial quarter, was impressive in an old-fashioned way, sporting craggy brownstone walls and all the agitated effects common to buildings from the past century. Light shafts cut through it above the ground floor, and the size of the building—it rose to a height of six stories—suggested a thorough search would not be easy.
Holmes had called ahead to make arrangements, and the building’s superintendent greeted us when we arrived. He was a short, bespectacled man named Laurence Barteau, and he was quite pleased to be in our presence.
“Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson! Don’t that beat all! My wife’s read every one of the stories. She loves those deductions of yours, you know, where some fellow comes to talk and you say, ‘I see you’ve been to Abyssinia recently and rode a camel with three humps,’ that type of thing. Too bad she’s out playing cards with her hens. She’d be beside herself, she would, if she knew—”
“Yes, but she is not here,” Holmes said with some asperity. “Now, tell us what you knew of Mr. St. Aubin.”
“Not much, really. He wasn’t the talkative type. Kept to himself for the most part. But he was a good tenant. There was no trouble from him and he always paid his rent on time.”
“It is nice to learn he had at least one virtue,” Holmes said. “We should like to begin by seeing his apartment. I understand the police searched it quite thoroughly after he died.”
“That very night. They didn’t waste any time, I’ll say that. A whole squad of them came to my apartment flashing their badges like they were a gift from God and demanding my passkey. Scared my wife, they did. Then they trooped up to St. Aubin’s apartment and started tearing it apart. I was watching, of course, and I told the big cop in charge they’d have to clean everything up, but he just laughed at me and told me to mind my own damn business.”
Holmes provided a precise description of Grimshaw and asked if he was the policeman in question.
“That sounds like the one who barked at me all right,” Barteau said. “Not what you would call a friendly sort of a fellow.”
“You have a gift for understatement, Mr. Barteau. Did Detective Grimshaw say anything else to you?”
“No. He just told me to get the hell out of his way and keep my mouth shut. When the baboons finally left, I couldn’t believe the mess they’d made. No respect for private property. I called the mayor’s office to complain but nothing happened, of course. St. Aubin’s mother finally had to have the place cleaned up. That was kind of a funny business, too.”
Holmes’s ears perked up. “How so?”
“Mrs. St. Aubin wasn’t the first one in the apartment after the cops went through it. She sent the monsignor over to look for some things, or so he said.”
“Monsignor Pierre Denis?”
“Sure, from up at the cathedral. Have you met him? Quite the man. But like I said, it was funny because when Mrs. St. Aubin showed up the next day, I mentioned the monsignor’s visit and she didn’t seem to know a thing about it. She was even mad at me for letting him into the apartment. Sometimes you just can’t make people happy no matter what you do.”
“You are a font of wisdom, Mr. Barteau. Now, how long was the monsignor in Mr. St. Aubin’s apartment?”
“Oh, at least an hour.”
“Did you see him when he left?”
“Sure. I keep an eye on things around here.”
“I have no doubt you do. Was he carrying anything with him on his way out?”
“Not that I noticed. Of course he had a heavy coat on, so he could have slipped something under it, for all I know.”
“Did he say anything when he left?”
“Nope, he just nodded to me and went out the door.”
“You have been most helpful,” Holmes said. “Please show us Mr. St. Aubin’s apartment now.”
“Sure thing. Follow me.”
Chattering all the way, Barteau led us up a staircase to the second-floor apartment and used his passkey to let us in. The four-room apartment had been cleaned and repainted after the police search but not yet rented to a new tenant. No personal belongings were evident.
“Nothing here, as you can see,” Barteau said. “Clean as a whistle. I’m hoping to have a new tenant in here soon.”
After we’d walked through the apartment, Holmes said, “I should like to speak to the resident of the apartment across the hall, if he or she is in.”
“That would be Mrs. Monroe. A real busybody, she is. Knows everything that goes on here.”
Mrs. Monroe, a dark-eyed wisp of a woman in her seventies, was indeed in, and very happy to answer the questions Holmes put to her. Holmes quizzed her in some detail about her neighbor. One singular detail emerged from the avalanche of largely irrelevant information she offered. She said St. Aubin kept very late hours, and she sometimes saw him leaving his apartment at three in the morning and returning not long thereafter with a handful of file folders.
“It was very strange, if you ask me,” she said.
I thought it even stranger that she was at her peephole at that hour of the morning, but I did not say so.
Holmes then asked Mrs. Monroe when she had last seen St. Aubin. She said it had been about two weeks before he was murdered, adding, “I don’t know where he went. He didn’t confide in me, you know.”
“Our elderly night owl has confirmed my suspicions,” Holmes said after we’d sent her back to her spying. He then asked Barteau if there were any janitor’s closets, storerooms, or the like near St. Aubin’s apartment. There were, and Barteau showed us three such rooms, all small and all locked. As Barteau looked on with considerable bafflement, Holmes meticulously examined each room, reaching up behind shelves, looking into boxes, and even tapping the walls to sound out any hollow spaces behind. He found nothing.
Searches of similar rooms on the third, fourth, and fifth floors proved equally fruitless. By the time we reached the sixth and uppermost floor, I was beginning to think Holmes had miscalculated. Perhaps St. Aubin’s stash of blackmail material, assuming it even existed, was stored in another location.
It wasn’t. As Holmes searched an unlocked and apparently unused janitor’s closet on the sixth floor, he found three thick file folders lodged behind old cans of paint stored on a high shelf. What was in the folders would help lead us at last to Rafferty’s murderer.
THE NEXT MORNING, Thomas joined us for breakfast, and afterwards we retired to Holmes’s room for what proved to be a most enlightening discussion. Holmes and I had stayed up much of the night carefully examining the file folders discovered in the storeroom at the Piedmont. St. Aubin was a very meticulous blackmailer, and his files, organized by name, formed a stockpile of damning information about some of St. Paul’s leading citizens. There were photographs of men cavorting with prostitutes, passionate love letters not addressed to spouses, and financial documents suggesting arrant thievery, along with much other evidence of deceit and wrongdoing.
St. Aubin’s encyclopedia of untoward human behavior included a thick file that contained a set of documents describing how he had attempted to blackmail Bertram Abbey and Monsignor Pierre Denis for their sexual indiscretions. Its most damning item was an explicit photograph of the two men together at the Ryan, presumably taken by Margo Sartell. Rafferty had mentioned the photograph in his notes but indicated he had never seen it.
There was much more in the file. St. Aubin described how he had attempted to use the photograph for purposes of blackmail, only to suffer a beating at the hands of Grimshaw. St. Aubin believed Mayor O’Donnell and Meeks had orchestrated the attack. Both men, he alleged, were also engaged in a “vast conspiracy” designed to cover up “widespread criminality” at city hall. He offered no proof but vowed he’d avenge his beating by bringing down “the whole system” in St. Paul.
“We now have strong evidence that all five of our suspects had a motive to kill Mr. St. Aubin,” Holmes said. “Indeed, he might be described as a murder waiting to happen. Still, the documents do not tell us who committed the crime. There are other questions as well. I wonder, for example, how Mr. St. Aubin learned of the intimate relationship between Mr. Abbey and the monsignor.”
“Perhaps he suspected what they were doing and had them followed,” Thomas suggested. “Then he hired the Sartell woman to take the incriminating picture, despite what she told Rafferty.”
Holmes shook his head. “That does not seem likely, given Mr. St. Aubin’s rather limited wherewithal. Following someone around the clock is usually the work of private detectives, and it is a costly proposition. I have no doubt engaging the services of Miss Sartell would also have been expensive.”
“And yet St. Aubin had the photo,” I noted. “If he didn’t hire Sartell, who did?”
“I have an idea along those lines,” Holmes said but would say no more. “In the meantime, there is one more crucial item in Mr. St. Aubin’s files we must consider.”
“You must mean that note regarding a woman named Ruth Merrill,” I said.
“Who’s she?” Thomas asked.
Holmes showed Thomas the handwritten note, which said: “Ruth Merrill (Mrs. Coddington), Birth Control League, 1610 Mt. Curve. Ask $2,000 to start?”
Thomas understood the note’s significance at once. “The American Birth Control League. They’re a client of that answering service with the phone number Shad left behind.”
“Indeed they are,” Holmes said. “Like all good blackmailers, Mr. St. Aubin was a detective at heart, and he must have found a connection between Ruth Merrill, who also seems to have gone by the name of Coddington, and Margaret O’Donnell. If the girl was seeking to end her pregnancy, she may have turned to the Merrill woman for help. The fact that St. Aubin apparently thought he could extort two thousand dollars from Mrs. Merrill suggests she may have been involved in arranging an illegal abortion. There is one other point to consider. I am beginning to think that ‘astounding development’ of which Mr. Rafferty spoke on the day of his murder may have had something to do with Margaret O’Donnell and the father of her child.”
I saw Thomas’s shoulders slump, and he said, almost in a whisper, “I still wish Shad had told me what he found out. I would have stood guard by him every minute of the day if I knew a killer might be after him.”
“There is no blame to be had,” Holmes said. “I think the killer simply moved more quickly than either Mr. Rafferty or you had reason to suspect.”
“And do you now know who the killer is?” I asked.
“I will say only that the truth is close at hand. The many strands of this case are coming together and they will form a tight noose before long.”
Thomas said, “Well, the way I look at it, we maybe can eliminate Abbey as a suspect if everything hinges on who fathered Margaret’s child. I don’t see that he could have done it, given his, you know, preferences.”
“True, but I am not yet ready to rule out Mr. Abbey as a suspect. As Watson and I have seen, he presents a smooth veneer, but there is much rough-work underneath, and I would not put murder past him. It is possible he is strongly connected to the father. If so, he might have abetted in the crimes so as to prevent exposure of his illicit activities with underage boys like Riordan.”
“So now you seem to pointing toward Monsignor Denis,” I said, “since he and Abbey are obviously close.”
“I should say they are extremely close,” Holmes said with a sly smile.
“Then we must talk to Mrs. Merrill at once to find out what she knows,” I said.
“Yes, but there is another woman I should like to speak to first. Let us see if we can find her at home.”
EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON, Holmes ordered a cab and gave the driver an address on Summit Avenue.
“Where are we going?” I asked, for Holmes had been silent about his plans.
“You shall see soon enough.”
The cab deposited us at the door of a stout house of buff brick and white stone that looked to have been built many years ago. I soon learned its owner was Muriel St. Aubin.
“This is a surprise,” she said in a guarded voice after she led us to a small parlor outfitted with gilt mirrors, an oriental rug, and cream-colored furniture. “Have you something new to report about my son’s murder?”
“You might say that,” Holmes said.
“Very well. Please tell me.”
“A matter has come up which puzzles me,” Holmes began. “It concerns a revealing photograph taken last year in a room at the Ryan Hotel.”
Mrs. St. Aubin’s large gray eyes betrayed a hint of concern, and she cocked her head slightly to one side. “And what of this photograph?”
“It was taken by a woman named Margo Sartell who specializes in such things, and it ended up in the possession of your son, who used it for purposes of blackmail. I believe you gave it to him.”
I will admit I was astonished by this statement, but I was even more surprised when Mrs. St. Aubin made no effort to deny it.
“You have talked with Miss Sartell, I suppose,” she said in an even voice.
“Yes,” Holmes said. “She told us you hired her.”
This was not true but Holmes sounded utterly convincing. He added, in a matter-of-fact way, “You wanted, of course, to know with whom your lover, Monsignor Denis, was having an affair.”
I could scarcely believe what I was hearing, and yet Mrs. St. Aubin still gave no sign of contradicting Holmes. Instead, she said, “I see now why you are called the world’s greatest consulting detective. Yes, the monsignor and I became very close, to use a euphemism. I make no apology for it. Men and woman have needs and always have. We satisfied each other for a time before I discovered, after hiring Miss Sartell, that he was not the man I thought he was.”
“What kind of man did you think him to be? He is a priest, bound to celibacy, and yet he became your lover. Surely, you could not have believed such a relationship would last for long.”
“Perhaps, but I certainly did not think a man to whom I’d given my heart would go off and have sex with a man behind my back. It was insulting and disgusting, and I told him so to his miserable face.”
“How did you find out about his relationship with Mr. Abbey? Did your son tell you about it?”
“No. I found out by other means, which I prefer not to disclose. But you may be assured I was unaware at that time of my son’s activities as a blackmailer, and I most certainly did not give him that photograph, as you seem to think.”
“Then how did he obtain it?”
“l can only guess he stole it. It was kept in a locked box in my bedroom, and he may have come across it when he stayed here for a few nights in early December.”
“Was that after he was badly beaten?”
“So you know about that, too. Yes, he said he’d run into some trouble over a debt and didn’t feel safe in his apartment. I see now it was a mistake to let him in the house.”
“I am curious, Mrs. St. Aubin, what you did with the photograph before it was stolen, as you claim. Did you threaten to expose Monsignor Denis, perhaps by bringing the picture to the archbishop’s attention?”
“I am not a blackmailer, Mr. Holmes. Such a sordid business would be beneath me.”
“And yet the monsignor appears to have been very worried about that picture. Is that why he went to search your son’s apartment after his death, a fact you did not mention to us earlier?”
“I saw no need to mention it, as it is irrelevant to my son’s murder. You will have to ask the monsignor what he was looking for in the apartment.”
