“No, Mr. Frevert.”

  “Police?”

  “Why would you expect the police, Mr. Frevert?” asked Fullerton.

  A hitch of one bony shoulder. “Well—Graham.”

  Edith and Fullerton glanced at each other. As the gentleman had come to the point, she felt it time for introductions. “My name is Mrs. Edith Wharton. I was a colleague of your former brother-in-law.” She saw her name meant nothing to him.

  He squatted on the chair next to the settee. “Still is my brother-in-law. Or … was.”

  Not terribly bright, she thought. Easily overwhelmed. But probably murderers weren’t bright. If they were, they’d find less risky solutions to their problems.

  Fullerton gave the story they had planned. “I’m writing an article about the shooting.”

  A sharp shake of the head. “I can’t tell you anything about that.”

  “We’d be happy to pay you for your time,” said Fullerton. “We don’t expect a busy man such as yourself to give his thoughts for nothing.”

  Frevert glanced at the hallway where the landlady lurked. “How much?” Fullerton named the amount they had agreed to in the taxi. Frevert accepted it with a nod.

  “What was your reaction when you heard Mr. Phillips was dead?”

  “Sad,” said the other man swiftly, as if relieved the question could be answered in a single word.

  “Surprised?”

  “Not really. Graham wasn’t the sort to make friends.”

  “Were you his friend?” Fullerton asked artlessly.

  “How many in-laws you know who call themselves pals?” He slid his palms over his thighs. “No, but I was sorry to hear it. I’m sure it’s grieved Carrie terribly.”

  Intrigued, Edith asked, “You call her Carrie?”

  He colored. “I know she prefers Carolyn now. But we started with Carrie, and I got into the habit.”

  “Where did you ‘start’?” asked Fullerton.

  “Indiana.”

  His leg had begun to jiggle. Wanting to put him at ease, Edith said, “I understand you were a businessman.”

  “One of Madison’s most promising.”

  “And what brought you east?”

  “Oh, well…” The hands hanging limply between his knees came together. “That would have been Graham. He came to work for The Sun. Carrie was worried about him alone in a big city, felt he should have someone to look after him. It did make expenses easier, all of us sharing a place.”

  Feeling she had gained his confidence, she said, “Expenses might be easier, but surely living together made other things difficult.”

  Mr. Frevert squirmed. “How well did you know Graham, Mrs. Wharton?”

  “Enough to know that I would not have enjoyed living under the same roof with him. He seemed a domineering personality.”

  “That about sums it up. Carrie—excuse me, Carolyn—used to say to me, ‘Don’t start fights.’ I said, ‘I’m not the one starting them.’”

  “What did you fight about, Mr. Frevert?” Fullerton asked.

  “Graham just took up so much space. Always going on about the corporations and the crooks in Albany and Washington. I don’t say he was wrong, but you know how it is with people of strong opinions: If you don’t go along with every last thing they say, they make you the villain.”

  And are you the villain? wondered Edith.

  “You could have told him to leave,” said Fullerton.

  “Couldn’t afford to. New York is expensive.”

  “So you were the one to go,” said Edith softly. “What happened, Mr. Frevert?”

  He glanced nervously from her to Fullerton. “Like I said, he took up a lot of space.”

  “But there must have been a breaking point,” said Fullerton. “As you say, it’s expensive in New York.” Pointedly, he looked about the wretched sitting room. “For you to leave your home, the situation must have become intolerable.”

  Frevert exhaled. Looked again to the door. Under normal circumstances, Edith would see this as a natural reaction to being asked to share intimate details of a broken marriage. But these were not normal circumstances.

  Finally he said, “I just got tired of the man’s posturing. If I mispronounced something or said a topic of conversation wasn’t suitable, he’d sneer. He had a lot to say about how a husband should act. One night, I lost my temper and told him if he was so interested in being a good husband, why didn’t he find his own wife? Turned into a real battle. I told Carrie she had to choose. Took her about two seconds. That was ten years ago.”

  He raised his hands, letting them fall back to his knees. Perhaps unwittingly, he had made a point in his favor, she thought. If the Freverts had been separated for a decade, why would he shoot his cantankerous brother-in-law now?

  Fullerton asked, “And you’ve been living here since?”

  “No.” Frevert pulled at his tie. “Hit a rough patch in the panic of last year. Had to change the living arrangements.”

  Well, there was the why. A sudden downturn in fortune might have inflamed Frevert’s resentment against the man who was the reason he had left a prosperous business back home to come to a city he didn’t care for—only to be turned out of his own home.

  But why did he not return to Indiana, she wondered. Why stay? Unless he had hopes …

  “Have you been in touch with Mrs. Frevert since her brother’s death?” she asked.

  “No, I’ll go see her when the time’s right.”

  “Right for what?”

  Fullerton had posed the question in his smoothest, most neutral tone, giving Frevert no clue as to what the answer should be. Flummoxed, Frevert said, “When she’s had some time. To grieve and get past…”

  “The loss of her beloved brother.”

  Mr. Frevert gazed at him, not seeing the trap clearly but knowing it was there.

  Fullerton said, “You must admit, his death presents an opportunity for you.”

  Frevert’s fingers curled around the edge of the armrests. “I don’t at all.”

  Edith said hastily, “I think what Mr. Fullerton means to say is that perhaps something good might come out of this tragedy. If you and Mrs. Frevert were able to reconcile. If nothing else, now that her brother is dead, how will she support herself?”

  “I imagine Graham left her provided for. Didn’t have anybody else to leave it to.”

  “But he wasn’t a wealthy man,” said Edith.

  “By your standards, maybe not. But he did all right by Madison standards.”

  It was one of Fullerton’s gifts to say the unsayable. “But that’s even worse, Mr. Frevert. A brother-in-law you disliked, a man who got you evicted from your home, then took your wife as his companion, has been killed. You have recently fallen on difficult times. His death means you not only get your wife back, but she has become a rich woman. By Madison standards.”

  Edith glared; that last insult was unnecessary. Ready to apologize, she looked to Henry Frevert and was astonished to see him smiling.

  “Sure, it makes sense,” he said. “Couple of things wrong with your theory, though. First off, Carrie wouldn’t have me back. It was never a love match. I think her folks wanted the marriage more than she did. Graham was always telling her that her mind and spirit were going to waste, married to me. And while she never said it, I knew she pretty much agreed.”

  “How awful,” said Edith sincerely. Then recalled the times she had thought the exact same thing about being married to Teddy.

  Frevert nodded to the outer corridor where the landlady was swatting the floor with a broom. “Finally you can ask Mrs. Krauss. I was here all that day hanging wallpaper for her. I’m a bit behind on the rent, so I pay her in odd jobs. I was covered in paste, so she made me take off everything and go back to my room wrapped in butcher paper. I was a sight. I remember it because when I heard, I wanted to go to Carrie, but every last stitch I had was drying on the line.”

  Fullerton bestowed his most beguiling smile. “You won’t mind if I do ask the charming Frau Krauss.”

  “Be my guest,” said Frevert.

  As Fullerton went off in search of Mrs. Krauss, Edith felt the sudden intimacy of being left à deux and wondered how to use the situation to its full advantage. She didn’t think Henry Frevert had the imagination to concoct the story of hanging wallpaper; most likely the bilious landlady would confirm it. True, he would not miss his brother-in-law, but he did not seem bitter toward the woman who was once his wife. Therefore, probably not a man to rail against impure women who left their home.

  If Carolyn Frevert had not inspired such rage, who had?

  Then she remembered: David Graham Phillips did not detest women society might condemn. His contempt was for women whose only passions were for luxury or status. Women such as Grace Vanderbilt, for example. Remembering the writer’s wistful expression as he talked of love and burning bridges, she wondered again if some lady—or a woman who was not at all a lady—had captured his heart.

  “Mr. Frevert, may I ask an indelicate question?”

  “Another one?” The hands between the knees bobbed. “Go ahead.”

  “When you asked Mr. Phillips why he didn’t find a wife of his own, what did he say?”

  “Said he didn’t have time for it. And that he had a duty to his sister.”

  “Certainly, as a loving sister, she wanted to see her brother happily settled.”

  Frevert nodded. “When I lived with them, she’d invite ladies over for supper, encourage Graham to show an interest. Every one, he dismissed as a noddle-head or doodlewit. But a short while back, I stopped by the apartment and Carrie was all excited. She told me Graham had finally found a woman who could match wits with him.”

  Edith waited for the name. When it didn’t come, she asked, “Mrs. Frevert didn’t say who it was?”

  He shook his head. “It was all very hush-hush for some reason.”

  Edith surmised she knew the reason. “What happened?”

  “I suspect it ended badly. Graham still had plenty of invective for fat cats and politicians. But after that, he built up a real rage against women of a … certain level of refinement,” he finished tactfully. “Women who liked money. Put it before love, in his view.”

  Refinement—that fit, thought Edith. But avarice? That hardly described the woman she had in mind. Although she was certainly beautiful.

  Then she remembered Anna Walling laughing as she said, “He once rebuked me for riding in a motorcar. He feared I was becoming an aristocrat.” Perhaps avarice was in the eye of the beholder. A woman who refused to leave her wealthy husband might be described as such, if one was unkind. Or disappointed.

  There had been some kind of rift in the Walling marriage. An affair could cause a rift. As could the suspicion that your husband had killed your lover.

  She asked Henry Frevert, “And you don’t know when it ended?”

  He shook his head. “I spent a lot of time being aggravated by David Graham Phillips. I’m not inclined to give him another minute’s thought.”

  Fullerton appeared at the door. A short nod indicated that the landlady supported Mr. Frevert’s account of wallpapering.

  Edith had one last question for Henry Frevert: “Did Mrs. Frevert keep a tidy house?”

  He blinked in surprise that she had guessed. “Yes. Yes, she did. She liked things orderly. Everything in its place, and if it didn’t have a place or use, out it went.”

  He smiled sadly and Edith understood he felt himself to be one of those things. Still, he had confirmed that it was not out of character for Carolyn Frevert to have destroyed the notes. Desiring dominance over her own small space in the wake of a catastrophe, she wanted them out of her domain as quickly as possible. That, Edith could understand.

  Then she heard Henry Frevert say, “I don’t suppose Carrie mentioned me at all.” And before she could devise something suitably pleasant, “I didn’t think so.”

  Mr. Frevert’s humility spoke well of him, she decided. As did the butcher paper. As did the fact that he seemed a simple, plainspoken man, not given to words like vampire. And she doubted he knew the Belmont existed, much less that she was staying there or was a writer who must be warned off a story.

  Rising, she said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Frevert. If it is any consolation, I don’t believe Mr. Phillips respected me very much either. He was stingy that way. And mistaken.”

  Hands in his pockets, Frevert bobbed his head in thanks.

  Going out into the corridor, she found the landlady. In German, she asked, “How much does Mr. Frevert owe you, Mrs. Krauss?”

  “Seventy dollars,” she said indignantly. “Six months, he has not paid.”

  Taking out her purse, Edith handed her the back rent. Then she realized they had not paid Mr. Frevert and instructed Fullerton to do so. He waited a moment. Noting the hesitation, she raised an eyebrow. He said yes, of course.

  As they left 18 Dey Street, Edith glanced back at the parlor window and wished Mr. Frevert better fortune.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “It’s not unheard of,” Fullerton said.

  After Dey Street, Edith said she wanted to see where the murder had occurred. Now she and Fullerton stood side by side gazing up at the dull beige brick of the National Arts Club. She tried to imagine the currents of three lives in that ungainly space—was it always the same two against one, or did the alliances ever shift? As she envisioned Carolyn Frevert moving from room to room and man to man, she was so absorbed, she forgot Fullerton was with her until he spoke.

  He had been ominously quiet in the taxi over. She suspected it was something to do with the money she had asked him to pay Frevert, but surely he understood that she had given over a much greater sum to the landlady. Anxious, she had tried to engage him by pointing out sights that had changed; he had not even bothered to look. His only contribution to the conversation had been to remark that Henry Frevert was a complete nonentity and Carolyn Frevert a wise woman to have left him. His instinctive siding with the leaver left her on the side of the abandoned. Tartly, she responded that if decent were deemed a synonym for dull, it was a sad world.

  She noted that Fullerton had not specified what was unheard of; she was meant to ask. Asking would give him permission to say things she might not wish to hear. She sensed that his mood had turned malicious. Recalling Henry’s snipe about cousins and half-sisters, Edith decided not to respond.

  Instead, she envisioned David Graham Phillips’s last journey. He would have come sauntering out of the building, preoccupied by his own greatness and the world’s wickedness. His head would have been down, she thought; hers was when she was thinking hard. And as it was a walk he had taken many times, he would not need to look where he was going. So he hadn’t seen the man with the gun until it was too late.

  The quiet homeliness of the block, the brevity of the walk, struck her as painful. David Graham Phillips’s life had ended so quickly after he left this place. He had died so close to home.

  That felt important. She reiterated the thought: He died close to home. And the letters had come to his home.

  “What?” asked Fullerton.

  “I am thinking of letters.”

  In her preoccupation with David Graham Phillips’s home, she had forgotten that letters were a charged subject. The word hung, awkward and twisting, between them until she broke the mood, saying briskly, “Prior to his death, David Graham Phillips received several threats. Some were sent to the Princeton Club. Others came here.”

  “Which means the killer knew his address,” said Fullerton, catching her line of thought.

  “More than that, he knew his movements, the precise times he came and went. Not easy, even with a man of habit such as David Graham Phillips.”

  “So, the killer was watching the house.”

  “Precisely.”

  But where had the killer stood as he charted the writer’s movements? It would be difficult to stand for hours in such a quiet neighborhood and not be noticed. Especially in the frigid air of January. If he had waited on the street, why hadn’t David Graham Phillips noticed him? A man who was receiving death threats would surely be aware of anyone watching or following him. A man idling close to his house would be suspicious, especially if one saw him repeatedly.

  Turning, she gazed up at the surrounding buildings, then across the street where a row of drab, anonymous houses slumped along the block, interrupted only by a large, squat building that seemed to be an institute, judging by the plaque bearing the name RAND SCHOOL. The upper floors seemed to be lodgings. From a distance, she peered into windows. Saw nothing more incriminating than curtains and pane glass.

  But there was a second possibility: The killer knew David Graham Phillips’s habits because he knew David Graham Phillips. A stranger would be noticeable on these streets, seen as possibly dangerous by a man who was being threatened. But a friend, a relative, a colleague …

  But Fullerton was restless. “Is it a large apartment?” he asked.

  It was the same artless tone he had used with Frevert, but she heard the subversion. “Not especially. Let’s walk his path to the Princeton Club.”

  She started on ahead. He remained where he was.

  “Two bedrooms,” he clarified.

  “Yes, two bedrooms,” she said shortly.

  She hoped her tone was a warning. But he smiled. She had answered; that was all that mattered.

  As they approached Gramercy Park, she was careful not to look at him. She partly guessed what he wished to spring on her, and she hoped to avoid the trap.

  Princeton, she realized, was also a charged subject between them. As were sisters. She had always known she was not the only woman to exchange letters with Morton Fullerton. Sometimes he read them in her presence, smiling as he did so. Always, she feigned lack of interest. But once, unable to resist, she peeked and saw the words “Ah, my own, my own!” She never looked again.

  Several months after that, Fullerton’s adopted sister, Katharine, arrived in Paris. The young woman was ardent and literary, quite without the defenses of wit or irony. She had studied at Radcliffe, lectured at Bryn Mawr. She sent Edith a poem on the subject of Dante and Beatrice. Edith was unsure: Was it a confession? An inquiry? Or was she simply looking for affirmation? In the end, she sent praise, and an invitation to see Isadora Duncan.

 

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