No Justice for the Deceived, page 23
“But not so far in this investigation,” Celia replied.
“Weel, luckily for all of us, ma’am,” Addie said. “Och. What am I to do with you?”
She huffed and stomped back into the kitchen.
Celia smiled, even though she should not, and returned to her list and her thoughts. Suspects, then. For all of them, the choice of using arsenic was not unusual, as the substance was frightfully easy to obtain. Addie kept a box of rat poison in their house, even.
Anthony Ingram. Motive—revenge for the vitriol attack on his sister, Louise, which Sebastian was suspected of arranging but never formally accused of executing. Also, hatred of the man who may have impregnated his sweetheart, Emma Joyce. A friend of Preston Carr’s, he was told to stay away from the party for fear of a scene. The caftan and turban found in his bedchamber supported the idea that he’d been the stranger observed outside the house. Uncertain how he’d known about the supply of vanilla in Sebastian’s room or how he’d managed to enter the bedchamber unobserved. Had Emma somehow helped? Or was he the person she’d seen on the staircase?
Blast. Why not just have Emma poison the bloody vanilla rather than sneak about the house himself?
“Perhaps she had done, Celia,” she whispered, tapping the end of her pen against her teeth. She’d had access to Sebastian’s bedchamber before she had locked it.
Lastly, Tony Ingram left his house an hour before the musicians were required for the evening minstrel show at the American Theater, and was reportedly late.
Preston Carr. Motive—jealousy of his brother. Relationship with Louise Ingram collapsed when she took up with Sebastian, who then discarded Louise in favor of Irene Bremerton. It was Preston’s idea to celebrate the pending engagement at the masquerade ball and invite a large crowd, an event that would provide enough clamor and confusion to conceal his plans to poison Sebastian. Would have known about his brother’s predilection for vanilla-flavored coffee. Could come and go upstairs without anyone remarking.
Strange, though, that he’d insisted that Tony Ingram not attend the party. His presence in the house would have made the perfect cover for Preston’s planned actions and provided the obvious scapegoat. Unless, of course, Preston was not responsible. Initially failed to mention that Katherine had come upstairs to confront Sebastian. Why?
Irene Bremerton. Motive—jealousy. Aware of Sebastian’s rumored role in Miss Ingram’s assault. May have discovered that Sebastian had forced himself on Emma Joyce. Also upset that he’d forbidden her from helping her good friend, Miss Vanmeter, with her clinic. May not have thought the arsenic—which he would’ve consumed in small doses over a long period of time—would kill him but only make him ill. A small portion of vengeful punishment. Out at a luncheon and enjoying a ride that afternoon before returning to find Katherine waiting for her in the library. Purportedly delivered a valentine to Sebastian’s room around seven, noticing the nearly full bottle of vanilla—the poisoned one—at that time.
If Irene had known about Emma’s pregnancy, who might have apprised her? Not Emma herself, who would have risked dismissal. And certainly not Sebastian.
Celia’s gaze traveled up the sheet of paper to the name immediately above Irene’s. Preston Carr. Who may have enjoyed the disruption to his brother’s connubial happiness.
I do keep returning to him, do I not?
Celia gathered a fresh blank sheet of paper, re-inked her pen, and moved on to the next suspect.
Katherine Vanmeter. Motive—distressed over Sebastian Carr’s interference with Irene’s support of the clinic. Irene may have told her about Sebastian’s vanilla habit. Removed from suspicion, though, because she was not in the house when the door to Sebastian’s room was unlocked? Interesting that she came to visit Celia Saturday morning, afraid Sebastian would blame her for the poisoning attempt. Why would she do so if she was not guilty in some fashion?
Louise Ingram. Motive—revenge for Sebastian paying a boy to toss vitriol on her. May have also learned about Sebastian and Emma. Aware of upcoming party and engagement announcement, which would explain the timing of her revenge. Was she the person in the Turk costume or the unknown individual Emma had confronted on the staircase? Was that why Emma, possibly sympathetic to Louise’s ordeal at the hands of Sebastian Carr, had not informed the police of seeing the person? Would very likely know about Sebastian’s love of vanilla-flavored coffee. Her neighbor maintained that she’d not left the house Friday evening.
Paulina Lyons. Motive—unknown. Helped with the flower arrangements, among other tasks, taking one upstairs, which gave her access to the bedchambers. Left abruptly once the news of Jenny Bernard’s death spread through the household. Provided false address to intelligence office and possibly a false name, as well. Clearly intended some sort of wrongdoing. If that included poisoning Sebastian was unclear.
Celia wished she knew anything at all about the young woman. She sincerely hoped Mr. Bell would provide an answer or two. And soon.
Man in Oriental or Turk costume. Motive—unknown. If not Tony Ingram, found with the costume, who could it have been? Louise Ingram? Dr. Schneider noticed the individual when he arrived, after seven. Seemingly too late to deliver a bottle of poisoned vanilla to Sebastian’s room, which Irene had propped her valentine against close to seven o’clock. Unless they’d been there for a while, hiding in the house and waiting for the optimal opportunity to sneak back out.
Emma Joyce. Motive—retaliation. Strike back at the man who’d assaulted her. Although by the time of the masquerade ball, she was no longer pregnant. Perhaps Sebastian was still making unwanted advances. She was responsible for locking the bedchamber doors, which meant she could have easily gone inside Sebastian’s room. Did not kill herself, though.
So, on to her murder.
For all of the other suspects in Sebastian’s attempted killing, they held one likely motive in wanting Emma dead—Emma had evidence they’d poisoned the vanilla. Or at least had been upstairs at a time that would have allowed them to do so. But she’d not provided any such evidence to the police. Why? Either because she actually had no evidence or she had sought to protect the person. Emma would only choose to protect one of the Carrs or Miss Bremerton if she feared for her position in the house. She’d not likely be motivated to protect Miss Vanmeter. However, Emma would want to safeguard the Ingrams. Both of whom she would have willingly admitted to her rented room. Nicholas had implied that both of their alibis were not particularly strong for this morning.
As far as Celia knew, the bloody clothes and the weapon used on Emma had not been found. Which meant only the thinnest thread could connect any of them to the crime. However, Miss Bremerton had been out very early that morning. And where had Sebastian Carr been before joining his father and fiancée at church?
A question that segued to the other motive to kill Emma. Her pregnancy. Preston Carr had implicated his brother rather than the obvious father, Tony Ingram. Could Sebastian Carr be responsible? Celia recalled the pamphlet she’d found in his room. The Handbook and Descriptive Catalogue of the Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Natural Science, a brochure that told a different story. It was a place men might visit to obtain help with their . . .
“Manliness,” she whispered to herself.
At the bottom of the page she wrote The Pacific Museum of Anatomy and circled it. She’d never been inside the museum herself—women were not permitted to enter—but she had always been curious about the items on display. Since the likelihood was essentially nil that she’d be able to get even a toe past the threshold of the museum’s front doors, she would need to send a male to inquire in her stead. While she set about questioning a young woman who might be intimately familiar with Sebastian Carr’s virility.
• • •
“Tell me about Emma and Sebastian Carr, Mr. Ingram.” Nick leaned an elbow against the crossbar in the cell door. After Taylor’s search of the Carrs’ house yesterday had been unproductive, he’d sent both him and Mullahey back to the Ingrams’ to tear up floorboards, if necessary. They’d finally found the proof Nick needed to show that Tony Ingram had murdered Emma. A shoe tucked behind a large, heavy trunk that had eluded Nick’s hasty search, and the other officer’s, too. A shoe with an incriminating trace of dried blood on its sole. “About the attention he’d paid to her.”
Ingram sat up on the cell’s cot. A piece of straw had worked its way through the mattress cover seams and clung to his trouser leg. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Ingram glanced at the fellow in the cell across from his. The drunk—a regular—was dead asleep and snoring loudly, oblivious to the world and whatever Ingram might have to say. It was early morning, so the snoring could be forgiven. Although Nick suspected the fellow would still be snoring this afternoon.
“I didn’t try to poison Sebastian because of how he was treating Emma, Detective Greaves,” Ingram insisted. Spending the night in the miserably dank jail cell hadn’t softened him up any.
“No, you tried to poison him because he’d gotten her pregnant. Isn’t that so?”
Ingram jumped to his feet and slammed a hand against the bars. “Don’t say that! Don’t say that about her!”
The thud had startled the drunk out of his sleep. “What in tarnation?” he muttered, coughed a few times, and resumed snoring.
“You didn’t know she was pregnant, Mr. Ingram?”
Ingram pushed away from the cell door. “I did suspect. She’d been unwell recently and I recognized the signs. I remember my mother’s many pregnancies. But Emma never admitted that she was and I hadn’t gotten her with child,” he said. “I dismissed my concerns.”
“But the child could’ve been Sebastian Carr’s?” Nick asked.
“I doubt it.”
The warden at the end of the aisle slurped noisily from his cup of coffee, his attention pinned on Nick. Monday morning’s entertainment. He snickered in response to Nick’s scowl.
“Your story is you left your house at six on Friday in order to get to the theater by seven. Except you arrived late,” Nick said. “It doesn’t take an hour to get from your house to the theater, Mr. Ingram, not even if you’re walking slowly, lost in thought. I know because I had a policeman check. And it definitely doesn’t take more than an hour.”
Ingram collapsed onto the cot, causing more straw to poke through the mattress seams. It would not be comfortable in the least, but then discomfort was the point. “Okay, I’ll admit it, Detective. I did head to the Carrs’ house that evening.”
At last, thought Nick. Intuition, Uncle Asa. It does work.
“Made it as far as Market Street before turning back. I realized I couldn’t accomplish anything by going there. Nothing except trouble,” Ingram continued. “Anything I said to Sebastian Carr or did to him wouldn’t heal the scars on my sister’s hand. Would only make things worse.”
“Your aborted trip to the Carrs’ house is the reason you were late to the theater. That’s what you want me to believe?”
“Yes, and I nearly got sacked because of it,” he said. “It wasn’t me in that costume, Detective, as I keep telling you. Those items of clothing never left my house. They’ve been collecting dust on that shelf in my wardrobe for months.”
“Maybe Louise put it on, out for revenge when it looked like she was never going to get the justice she sought.”
“The wardrobe is always locked and she doesn’t have a key. There’s only one. No spare.” He ran his hands through his hair and looked up at Nick. “It was somebody else in an identical costume, Detective. Or the whole episode has been created. Have you considered that? That this person doesn’t even exist? That the real perpetrator made them up?”
“Two different people saw him, Mr. Ingram.”
“Who are these people? I think I have a right to know.”
Nick drew in a breath, grateful that somebody had strewn fresh sawdust in the cells—beneficial when the occupants weren’t always willing to make use of the slop bucket—and it didn’t stink as much as usual. Aside from the tang of the ever-present damp and mold and outside sewage. “Irene Bremerton, for one.”
“Irene?”
“Why would she lie, Mr. Ingram? Plus one of the guests saw the fellow too. A Dr. Schneider.” Nick doubted Schneider had a reason to lie about spotting the fellow, either.
“I can’t explain how he could’ve.”
And that was the problem.
“Were you angry with Emma about the pregnancy?” Nick asked. “Is that why you didn’t want to marry her? Because you didn’t want to be responsible for some other man’s child?”
“Angry with Emma? Whatever had happened, it wouldn’t have been her fault,” he said. “But you know what’s ironic, Detective Greaves? I’d decided I did want to marry her, after all. That we could leave San Francisco and find a way to make it work.”
“You know what’s actually ironic, Mr. Ingram? Emma lost the child recently. She didn’t need anybody to marry her out of pity any longer.”
Ingram exhaled, his breath misting in the cold, damp air of the jail. “That’s why she’d been acting so strangely lately. Distant. Irritable.”
Nick leaned into the cell door. “And it dawned on you that she must be pregnant, which is why you went to see her yesterday morning. My assistant, Mr. Taylor, found one of your shoes with blood on it. Emma’s blood,” he said. “You hid it pretty well but we found the shoe eventually.”
“What does any of this matter now? You think I tried to poison Sebastian and killed her, and you don’t want to listen to anything I have to say.”
“So you’re denying you were in her room yesterday. Despite the bloodied shoe we found.”
Ingram had run out of lies and didn’t respond.
“Did you go to her apartment to ask if she’d seen you at the Carrs’ house on Friday?” Nick asked. “Did she reply that she had, so you had to shut her up? Or maybe you murdered her out of jealousy. Sebastian Carr is a handsome man.”
Ingram slumped against the cell wall. “I did go to see Emma yesterday, Detective. I was worried about her,” he said. “She wasn’t alive when I got to her place.”
Nick waited for the thrill that usually came when a suspect started to talk, but he didn’t feel it. “If you’re so innocent of her murder, Mr. Ingram, why didn’t you contact the police after finding her body?”
“I panicked. I was afraid one of her neighbors might’ve seen me going into her room. They’d think I was the murderer.”
They would. “So instead of summoning the cops, you went to the oyster saloon and calmly sat down to a meal.”
“I wasn’t thinking. I was just acting out of habit,” he replied, a tremor in his voice. “I didn’t want to believe it was Emma. I’d almost convinced myself the body belonged to somebody else.”
“How did you get inside her room if she didn’t let you in?”
“It’s easy. I took the rear steps—she never wanted the woman who lives at the other end of the hall to see her admitting a man to her room. The back door is usually unlocked. The kids forget to refasten it after they’ve been down to the outhouse. It was open, as usual. Just like the door to her room. That wasn’t usual.” He paused, his breathing unsteady, swallowing before he started talking again. “She was sprawled there on the floor, already dead. I crouched next to her . . . I stepped in the blood . . . There was so much . . .”
He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to blot out the memory. Nick could tell him the attempt never worked; the memories, the sights got stuck inside your brain, and no amount of closing your eyes helped.
“And then I heard voices out in the stairwell. Emma’s neighbor with one of her kids. Returning from church, I think,” Ingram continued. “I threw open the window and jumped out. I’m lucky I didn’t break my ankle.”
Nick stared at him, letting the silence—what there was of it inside the jail, noisy with the clatter of horses’ hooves and wagon wheels, the dripping of unseen water, the drunk snoring—stretch, hoping it might rattle Ingram, encourage him to confess. It didn’t.
“If you didn’t kill Emma Joyce, who did?”
“I don’t know. Preston, maybe. Preston.” He dragged the thin plaid blanket off the cot and wrapped it around his shoulders. “He wanted Emma for himself. Couldn’t stand that Sebastian had gotten to her first. Just like he had with Louise. Just like he had with Irene Bremerton.”
This was a twist. A believable one. “But Eustace Carr has always intended for Miss Bremerton to marry his elder son, hasn’t he?”
“That might be so, Detective, but that doesn’t mean Preston hadn’t hoped she might choose him instead,” he said. “And you know? He might’ve tried to poison Sebastian, too. I’ve always thought they were a bit like Cain and Abel. But I never thought it might go that far.”
Chapter 16
Her morning patient dispensed with—a woman who’d required a quick consultation on an ankle sprain caused by awkwardly stepping off a curb—and with the address of the Ingrams’ house in hand, Celia ventured out for the day. Before visiting Louise Ingram, she needed to stop at Roesler’s and collect Owen in order to recruit him for a trip to the Pacific Museum of Anatomy. Hopefully he wouldn’t prove to be too squeamish while visiting there.
The shop’s bell chimed merrily as she walked through the door. Mr. Roesler had applied his usual welcoming expression upon hearing the bell, only to observe that the entering customer was her. He’d not been fond of Celia ever since she had utilized Owen to search the man’s customer logs for clues in a prior case. He’d not be any more pleased if he discovered what she intended for Owen today.
“Owen Cassidy is busy, ma’am.” Mr. Roesler’s brows lowered over his black eyes. Owen had once described his employer’s eyes as resembling a beetle’s. She did grasp the comparison, especially at that moment.
“I would like to purchase a pound of your best chocolates, Mr. Roesler, and I need Owen to deliver them to a friend. Immediately,” she replied as pleasantly as she could. “So if you would put together a selection, I would be most grateful.”
