No Rest for the Departed, page 29
Nick waited as Taylor flipped to a new page in his notebook before continuing.
“After what she’d discovered, Meg had to be silenced. Brutally silenced,” he said, his arm aching. “Not by your brother, though, but by the individual at the center of it all. Somebody who’d come to your aid, Miss O’Neal, at a desperate time for you. Deborah Hunter.”
He’d avoided facing the woman, letting Taylor question Mrs. Hunter himself. If Nick had been left alone in a room with her, he doubted he could’ve stopped himself from causing her damage. Maybe even killing her, like he’d threatened to do. He’d wrestled down his impulse, though, because Celia had been right. Meg would never have wanted him to avenge her murder in that way. And he never would’ve been able to live with himself if he had.
“I still can’t believe it, Detective,” Eileen said. “It must’ve been an accident. Or Judith is lying about having seen her.”
Deborah Hunter had prepared an explanation for why Judith had noticed her outside the hotel where Meg had died, saying she’d gone there solely to check on Meg. And that, if only she’d been aware of suspicions surrounding Meg’s death, she would’ve given a statement to the police to that effect.
“I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for Deborah, Detective Greaves,” Eileen was saying. “You don’t understand how difficult it was for me after Francis left and went to Chicago. So difficult.”
“My sister would be alive if it weren’t for her, Miss O’Neal.”
She sobbed more loudly than before. Taylor didn’t offer her a fresh handkerchief. Maybe he didn’t have any more to give. Or maybe he’d used up all his sympathy.
“I suppose that when Mrs. Hunter invited you to help her move jewelry and other small items between her and a jeweler she’d befriended, you thought nothing of it. Thought it completely innocent,” Nick said. “Wouldn’t dream of questioning the woman you felt so indebted to.”
Judith Whelan had provided some of the specifics of Mrs. Hunter’s scheme. Nick and Taylor had guessed the rest.
“I had no idea it might be a crime, Detective.”
“Then why bring that brooch you claimed you’d found in Meg’s rented room—but actually hadn’t—to Mrs. Davies? Wondering if it contained real garnets or fakes, if you had no idea?” he asked. “I’ll answer for you. You did suspect Mrs. Hunter. You suspected that she was asking you to carry items to a jeweler to be copied and then auctioned as authentic, and you had the proof in your possession. Mrs. Hunter’s crimes had gone beyond smuggling, hadn’t they, Miss O’Neal? And you were up to your neck in it.”
Her tears became a torrent.
Nick pushed away from the desk; he’d had enough of Miss O’Neal and her crying. “Taylor, finish up here. I’m going for a walk.”
• • •
“You’ve got a visitor, Detective,” one of the station officers said to Nick when he returned from his walk, which had been more of an enraged march around the square than a refreshing, head-clearing stroll.
His visitor turned out to be Harris. He’d have preferred it to be Celia. But, as usual, it was his fault that he hadn’t seen her. He’d stormed away from her house like a vengeful madman.
“You’ve found your killer, Greaves,” Harris said to him, twisting around to watch as Nick strode through the office.
“It’s killers, Harris. More than one,” Nick said, dropping his hat onto his desk and settling onto his chair. Which squeaked. Some things never changed, which he was glad for. “O’Neal’s sister Eileen shot Eckart. Trying to protect her brother from Eckart, she insists.”
“Because of Meg,” the former coroner said.
“Yes, Harris. Because of Meg.”
Harris was watching him closely, like Taylor tended to do. Nick stood to avoid the scrutiny and turned to look out the window. The dreariness outside wasn’t able to compare to the dreariness inside. He envied the passing pedestrians, looking like they were just going about their business for the day. Looking like they weren’t weighed down by remorse.
“Eckart and Judith Whelan—and Raymond Fuller—believed that O’Neal had killed Meg. It’s looking like he wasn’t her murderer, though. He had, however, been stupid enough to talk openly to my uncle Asa about his getting paid to overlook smuggling down at the docks. Which got Meg to asking too many questions. She always had liked to ask questions, Harris. Used to annoy my father to beat all. But she was a Greaves. There was no stopping her,” Nick said, appreciating that the former coroner knew how to listen. That made him a good doctor and an even better friend. “Unfortunately, she got so curious that she discovered what was going on.”
“I read that you arrested the Hunters,” he said. “I’ve met them. At a charity ball.”
“Did they look like criminals, Harris?”
“Not in particular,” he said.
He should have Harris tell that to Briggs. That not everyone’s forehead or curve of their skull could be used to distinguish between the villains and the virtuous.
“Mrs. Hunter had a position with the Ladies’ Society for Christian Aid that involved selecting needy women for the Society to assist,” Nick said, tracking a pair of boys racing across the dusty ground of Portsmouth Square. “She helped Meg, she helped Miss Whelan, she even helped Eileen O’Neal find her position with the Chases. But what she really wanted from her women was to have them smuggle small, expensive foreign goods off boats and into Mr. Chase’s auction house, where they would be sold without having had to pay import duties.”
“The Society would be the perfect way to meet women who might be persuaded into a life of crime,” Harris said, somewhat admiringly.
At least they hadn’t been persuaded to work in a brothel like other equally needy women had, trapped by their poverty.
“Brodie suspected but he was bought off. O’Neal was in on it. And my uncle . . .” Nick paused, an upwelling of emotion catching in his throat. One day I’ll forgive you, Asa. At the moment, Nick couldn’t imagine that ever happening, though. “I’m not sure, frankly, how much my uncle knew or wanted to know. I’m also not sure that Archibald Chase was ever aware of what was taking place in his auction facility. He might’ve trusted his good friend Bill Hunter to deliver him goods that were exactly what Hunter claimed them to be.”
“It’ll be hard for Chase to claim ignorance, Greaves.”
“He’s been trying to.” According to Taylor, who’d been managing most of the interviews in Nick’s absence. Maybe he’d get that promotion to detective that he’d been wanting and deserving for months. A job O’Neal had taken instead.
“Smuggled goods weren’t the only items he’s been selling in that auction house, Harris,” Nick continued. “Deborah Hunter got greedy and concocted a counterfeiting scheme that involved selecting certain items of jewelry from Chase’s catalog, having a copy made, which was then auctioned as being the genuine item, while the original piece was sold at an auction house Hunter operates in Sacramento.”
Nick heard Harris’s heels scrape across the floor as he shifted in the chair and stretched out his legs. “Chase has been selling fakes?”
“And claiming he didn’t know. Eckart was naive to go to Chase’s house and attempt to get him to help pin a crime on any of these people. The fellow would never risk his reputation by cooperating. His wife suspected, though, but she didn’t want to believe it.” Nick got bored with watching hackney-coach drivers, their carriages parked at the curb across the street, argue with customers about fares and turned away from the window. “We might’ve taken a long time figuring this out, if Eileen O’Neal hadn’t brought Mrs. Davies a brooch.”
Harris didn’t grin like he usually did when Nick mentioned Celia. This case wasn’t like the others he and Nick had worked on together. It was deeply, achingly personal.
“She told Celia that my sister had taken it from Chase’s auction house,” Nick said. “In reality, the brooch was of far more recent vintage. She brought the brooch to Celia hoping to confirm whether or not it was a fake. Got the idea of saying she’d found it in Meg’s old room after learning that Celia had come to the Chases’ Mission house, asking about my sister. Eileen couldn’t ask the cops for help or take the brooch to a jeweler without being questioned. If it turned out to be a fake—which it was, made with colored-glass garnets—she wanted out of Mrs. Hunter’s criminal enterprise. Was going to beg to get out.”
On his way back to the station after his circuits around the square, Nick had run into Taylor, who’d filled him in on what else Miss O’Neal had decided to confess.
“Both Detective O’Neal and his sister were involved. That’s incredible, Greaves.”
Nick could think of other words to describe the situation.
“Eileen was the link between the counterfeiter and Deborah Hunter, shuttling items back and forth,” Nick said. “Sometimes Eileen took the copied jewelry to the Chases’ old house out by the Mission. Other times, the goods changed hands at the Chases’ new house, whenever Deborah Hunter visited. Such as Wednesday night at a benefit Mrs. Chase was holding for a new charity. Where Marian Chase wore the original of that brooch, arousing Celia’s curiosity.”
“Miss O’Neal foolishly gave Mrs. Davies the evidence that revealed her involvement.” Harris whistled.
“She mustn’t have appreciated just how skilled a ‘lady detective’ Celia is.”
“So who killed Mr. Fuller?”
“Now that was O’Neal. His alibi for Wednesday night is as full of holes as a coal sieve. We didn’t find a duster coat like the shooter was wearing but, of course, he owns a .44. One of the chambers still had the spent cartridge he hadn’t removed after shooting Fuller,” he said. “Furthermore, a friend of Fuller’s came forward yesterday. Fuller was the one who’d encouraged Eckart to come back to San Francisco. He’d become convinced that Chase had evidence of O’Neal’s involvement in Meg’s death. But he soon got scared that O’Neal was on to him.”
“I never would’ve suspected Detective O’Neal, Greaves.”
“He was counting on that,” Nick said. “Deborah Hunter isn’t just a smuggler, Harris. She likely was with Meg the day she died. Judith Whelan spotted her leaving the hotel that night. She was worried and tried to get into Meg’s room, but the door was locked and nobody responded when she pounded on it.”
“The tainted laudanum had made her insensible.”
If Miss Whelan had been able to get inside, would Meg still be alive? “What I can’t figure out is if Meg carelessly let Deborah Hunter into her hotel room that night, or if Deborah Hunter found another way to get that poisoned laudanum into the room.”
Harris made a sympathetic noise in his throat.
“We found fragments of Meg’s letters to Sy Eckart burned on Mrs. Hunter’s parlor grate.” Mullahey had salvaged enough of the fragments for Nick to identify Meg’s handwriting. “She got ahold of them somehow—somebody had broken into his room after he’d died—wanting to destroy what Meg had revealed in those letters.”
“The names of everyone involved,” Harris suggested.
“Maybe. But you know what’s really frustrating, Harris? We actually don’t have enough blasted evidence to link her to Meg’s murder. Being seen outside the hotel that night is not enough to prove that she poisoned my sister. Finding fragments of burned letters isn’t, either,” he said. “Maybe she isn’t responsible. Maybe we’ll never know for certain.”
“I’m sorry, Nick.”
“You really don’t need to be.”
He cocked his head to one side as he looked at him. “What now? After the trials are concluded.”
“Are you asking me about my work, or about something else?”
“What do you think?”
Nick exhaled and grabbed his hat off his desk. “You and Mrs. Jewett are two of a kind, you know that?”
“She’s a good woman, Nick. I’d marry her if I were you.”
Harris wasn’t talking about Mrs. Jewett.
“Give my best to your wife,” he said and stomped from the room.
Chapter 23
“It’s Mr. Greaves, ma’am,” Addie whispered in Celia’s ear. “I’ve left him in the hall. Didna think you’d want me to bring him into the parlor.”
Celia had presumed that the sound of the front doorbell meant that another of Mrs. Reynolds’s students had arrived for the exhibition of their educational attainments. For the past half hour, the young ladies, attired in their finest dresses, had been filing into the parlor where Celia had offered to hold the event.
“Thank you, Addie. See if any of the girls or their parents require anything.” She stepped into the hall, where Nicholas stood, running his hat brim through his fingers.
“Nicholas, I was not expecting you today.” Or, perhaps, any day soon.
“I wasn’t planning on coming here, but Harris convinced me to.”
Dr. Harris’s urging was the only reason Nicholas stood in the entry hall, looking uncomfortable? She was not certain whether she should thank the doctor the next time she saw him or not.
Nicholas looked over at the parlor. “What exactly is going on?”
“Mrs. Reynolds, Barbara’s tutor, has scheduled an exhibition of her students’ talents,” she said. “I offered our parlor for the purposes of displaying them.”
Addie had gathered straight-backed chairs from every room in the house to accommodate the guests of the handful of young women, a hodgepodge of wicker-seated pine and carved walnut and even the rosewood chair that had belonged to Uncle Walford and presently resided in Barbara’s bedchamber. The hum of nervous and excited voices filled the room.
“Can we go into your clinic to talk, where it might be quieter?” Nicholas asked, going from running the brim of his hat through his fingers to crushing it. Being forced—be more generous, Celia—being encouraged to visit might not be the only cause of his unrest. Perhaps the presence of so many females and their guests chattering away made him ill at ease, too.
“Certainly.” She led the way inside the room. She left the door open, though; she’d not want Mrs. Reynolds to observe her closeting herself away with a man who was not her husband and draw scandalous conclusions.
“I have read that Deborah Hunter and her husband have been jailed,” she said, opening the conversation, as he seemed prepared to stand in the middle of her examining room until he’d finished strangling his hat brim.
“I didn’t try to kill her, Celia,” he said, gazing at her. How brown his eyes could be in the soft afternoon light. “Thank you for stopping me from doing something I’d regret. That I’d be ashamed of.”
“You would have stopped yourself, Nicholas,” she said. “You did not require my entreaties in order to conduct yourself like the man who you truly are. The man you always have been—a decent and just one.”
“Thank you for believing in me.”
She placed her hand on his forearm. “I have always believed in you, Nicholas.” Despite her momentary doubts.
“I don’t know why.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Mrs. Reynolds cross the parlor and glance their direction. Nicholas stepped back from Celia, smiling. She loved his smiles. They were too few.
“As I was saying, I see that the Hunters have been jailed on charges of smuggling,” Celia said, resuming their discussion of the case. “But not Mr. Brodie or either of the Chases.”
“Brodie has assisted us with the investigation into the smuggling accusations against the Hunters, so he’s been granted bail and some measure of leniency. As for the Chases, they appear to be innocent,” he replied. “Or really good at hiding their knowledge of what was going on at the auction house.”
She would assume the latter more likely. “How much has Eileen confessed?”
“A lot. She’s the reason the Hunters have been indicted, in addition to Brodie’s testimony,” he said. “Miss O’Neal has also admitted there was no intruder the night of the benefit. That she’d knocked out Mrs. Hutchinson to stop her from finding the box of jewelry—two pairs of emerald earrings, one a copy made of colored glass—that she’d hastily buried under Mrs. Chase’s display of ferns.”
“Jane’s interest in azaleas had brought her too close to the items Eileen had concealed. But why bury them in the conservatory in the first place?” Celia asked. However, it had become a good location to hide contraband or counterfeited goods, given the temporary absence of the Chases’ gardener. Who would notice a patch of disturbed soil?
“When you showed up that night, she got scared you’d catch her handing the box to Mrs. Hunter, which had been the plan,” he said. “She panicked and looked for somewhere to hide it.”
“I told her I would be there,” she said. “Although she did encourage me to not come.”
“I suppose she didn’t believe you actually would show up.”
“It appears that all the stories written about me, Nicholas, fall short in indicating how determined I am.”
“Reporters don’t know you as well as I do, Celia,” he said with another smile.
No, they did not. Thankfully.
“So Eileen invented a story about an intruder, going so far as to unlock the conservatory doors, in order to hide her guilt. Obviously, she dug the box back up before I had a chance to examine the area around the fountain,” she said. “But what about the policeman and Meg? Had she also invented that tale?”
“Yes,” he answered. “And if you’re wondering where that brooch she brought you came from, she picked it up from the jeweler who’s been counterfeiting stones for Mrs. Hunter. Miss O’Neal kindly provided his name to Taylor and we found the records the man has kept of the transactions.”
“Do you believe Eileen comprehended what she was involved in, Nicholas?” she asked.
“To ask you if the garnets might be fake was the giveaway, Celia. She’d figured it out.”
“What about Deborah Hunter’s role in the death of your sister?” There had been no mention in the newspaper of her being indicted for that crime.
“I can’t get her, Celia. I can’t get her for that, despite what we’ve learned from Miss Whelan. Not enough proof,” he replied, his voice tightening with frustration.
