Cupboards All Bared, page 13
Real people had real feelings, real passions, real frustrations. Like him.
Thomas had gone out of his way to help Bernard by trying to lose the reporter for him, and instead he’d taken off without him again. And yet Bernard had offered to include him last night. Had he just been trying to assuage his guilt?
Fine. Thomas didn’t need Bernard. He would solve this case on his own, and before Bernard.
They reached the steps of the Campbells’ front door quicker than Thomas had anticipated, and he took a moment to look around for Bach, who was panting a few yards behind him.
“Perhaps you should give up smoking after all. Don’t you Tacomans exercise?” Thomas asked, shaking his head.
Bach pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket and wiped his brow. “Do Spokanites all walk with such purpose?”
Thomas grinned. “Yes. Now, let me do the talking.”
Bach shrugged and pulled out his notepad and pencil. “Then I will do the noting.”
Thomas turned and rang the front bell.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE a blonde housemaid answered. She wasn’t German, though her blue eyes and nose were almost right for it. Peter guessed she was Swedish, that little bit of Norwegian spiking her chin and cheekbones.
“May I help you?”
Thomas tipped his derby. “Good morning, I’m Officer Carew with the Spokane Police Department, and this is my assistant, Mr. Bach. We were wondering if we might speak with Mr. Campbell about Mr. London.”
The housemaid shook her head, lifting a rather pert little nose as she took in Thomas’s plainclothes. “You’re no police officer. I know a reporter when I see one.” She glared toward the notepad in Peter’s hand. “Besides, Mr. Campbell has already spoken with a Detective Carew.” And then she slammed the oak door in his face.
Peter let loose a burst of laughter.
Thomas glowered, his cheeks red with embarrassment. Peter kept laughing as Thomas turned and walked toward the carriage house to the east, heading up the drive with purposeful strides, ignoring Peter’s mirth at his expense.
A couple yards outside the carriage house, Peter began to smell the horrid scent of horse manure and hay. Horses would always be a sore spot for him. He was quite happy automobiles were becoming more plentiful in Washington, but chagrined to find they hadn’t yet made their presence known on the eastern side of the state.
Could it really be that the Campbells hadn’t bought an automobile yet? Given the size of their house, he would’ve thought them one of the few families in Spokane who’d have one.
Clearly, this was not the case, as they opened the door to the stable and the smell only strengthened.
He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.
“Hello?” Thomas called out.
A whinny answered and they followed it back into the bowels of the stables, past a beautiful carriage, the top down thanks to the warming spring weather, with gleaming rims and seats pin-tucked and fit for a king. This seemed to confirm Peter’s theory of a lack of automobile.
“Grrrrr, roaf, rufff!” The bull terrier surprised him, growling fiercely enough to intimidate most men, including himself. But Thomas just put out the back of his hand for the dog to sniff.
“Excuse me?” he called out over the dog’s continuing barks of alarm. “We’re looking for the coachman of Mr. Campbell? I assume this fella isn’t him?”
A rather square head poked out from inside one of the back stalls before stepping out, revealing a clean-shaven young man, a curry comb in one hand.
“Bobby, heel,” he said firmly, and immediately the dog came to him and sat at his feet obediently, though he continued to study Thomas and Peter warily.
“Good guard dog,” Thomas said pleasantly, offering his hand to the coachman. “Officer Carew, at your service.”
The man scratched his high forehead. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up to reveal massive forearms. Suspenders held up his black trousers, criss-crossing his broad back and wide shoulders. His eyes focused on the two of them with all the intensity of a horse, revealing the man was in the right trade.
“Gladding,” he finally said, moving the brush to his left hand before shaking Thomas’s hand firmly. “Joseph Gladding.”
Thomas apparently didn’t mind that his hand now smelled of horse.
“This is my associate, Mr. Bach,” Thomas said, nodding over his shoulder at where Peter stood with the handkerchief over his nose. “I see you have a way with animals.” Thomas pointed toward the stall with the horse in it, and then the dog at Gladding’s heel.
Gladding nodded. “Been a horse-trainer from a young age, grew up around ’em back home.”
“Where are you from?”
“Youngstown,” he said, “Ohio.”
“Ah, is that where you met the Campbells? I believe they come from Ohio stock, as well.”
“Yup. Met Mr. Campbell while he was in town to buy some horses and a pony. We hit it off, so he offered me a job as coachman out here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Ninety-eight, back when the house was first built.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?” Peter asked from behind the handkerchief.
“Ever since,” Gladding said, giving Peter a wary look before returning his focus to Thomas. “Carew, eh? You related to the detective in the paper?”
Peter smiled at Thomas’s discomfort. The man just couldn’t get a break.
“Why, yes, I am,” Thomas replied. “I’m his brother.”
Gladding crossed to some hooks where he hung the brush and wiped his hands on a towel. “Well, how can I help you?”
“I’m looking for anyone who can tell me more about Mr. London.”
“Yes, sir, he was found at the bottom of Hangman Creek. It’s not too far from here.” He pointed in the general direction over his shoulder.
“I heard he worked for Mr. Campbell.”
Gladding nodded. “Yes, sir, he did. But you’d best talk with Mr. Campbell about that.”
“My brother already has. I’d like to hear what you knew about him.”
Gladding shrugged. “Didn’t speak much with him. Just gave him a ride when Mr. Campbell traveled with him on business. He was always with Mr. Campbell.”
“Did you ever give him a ride home?” Peter asked through his handkerchief, thinking maybe they could get a leg up on Bernard by beating him to the dead man’s house.
“No, sorry. He always walked home, though that doesn’t mean much these days since the streetcar can take you most places just as quickly as a coach.”
Peter couldn’t tell if the man was trying to be helpful or purposely unhelpful. “Is there anyone else who might know more about him?”
Gladding scratched his forehead again. “You might speak with Chung Lee, I suppose.”
“Chung Lee?” Peter repeated.
“He’s the cook.”
Thomas gave Peter a smile. “Perfect.”
BERNARD WAS BEGINNING to realize he sort of missed the slower pace and lesser paperwork of thefts, hold-ups, break-ins, and the like. With a murder, there was so much more to consider.
Like what to do with the murderer after he, or she, had been caught.
The Baker was an exception in that no one in Spokane quite knew how to handle her rather unique case. Chief Witherspoon had told Bernard and Thomas to keep an eye on her, and speak to her at least once a day, to see if they couldn’t get a better handle on the situation, and how it would be best to move forward with prosecuting her case.
As he rode the streetcar up to the House, the watch the coroner had given him rested in his palm with a weight of indecision, and he found his mind turning not to his current case, but to the middle-aged woman already locked in a cell.
One of the first times they’d talked with her in jail she had shared something from her past that had stuck with him. He was pretty sure it was Eleanor speaking at the time, since she’d seemed lucid and had told a story from before the Baker’s first appearance in 1889.
She’d started by saying she’d grown up on a farm. “My father had a small one-man forge for fixing horseshoes and tools and such on his own. One day I saw him leave the forge to go attend to some emergency. The fire called to me. I snuck inside and studied the apparatus. I’d seen my father working it before, but knew better than to touch anything. And yet... The fire called to me again. So I reached out to touch the tongs, which were stuck in the sand beside the glowing pit. It burned. I plunged my hand into the slack tub, but it wasn’t enough. Just a brief touch of the still-hot metal had left a line of irritated, melted skin across my hand, a clear sign of my disobedience.”
She’d held her palm up then for him to see. She’d hidden the hand from her parents, she’d said, afraid what her father would do to her if he found out. And so she still had the scar. A constant reminder of why fire was no laughing matter.
She’d traced her fingers over the red line. Tenderly. “So many scars...,” she’d murmured. “Mr. Sigmund, my first husband...Fire.” She’d seemed to forget then that he was still standing out there, memorandum book in hand, writing down every word she said. “Sometimes I wonder how God, if he exists, can allow so much pain to happen to just one woman. Why not spread it out amongst the populace? Surely there are enough people in the world. But no, I seem to gather them all on my own. Like some terrible lodestone, magnetically drawing all the pain to myself.”
She’d turned away from him then, folding in on herself as she sat back down on the cot. “Perhaps someday the stone will become heavy enough to drag me under, and I can escape, finally, for good.”
Bernard had made doubly sure afterward that she didn’t have access to any shoelaces or small knives or even a hatpin with which to finish the job on her own, though something told him the Baker would never allow Eleanor to kill herself. The Baker side of her—if that was how one thought of it—had gone to too much trouble to allow her to take her own life.
But then, Thomas had taken Miss Kenyon down... Bernard suddenly realized he hadn’t checked on the Baker yet this morning, and he’d meant to. As much as he hated to think it, he needed to be certain Miss Kenyon hadn’t accidentally—or purposely—handed the Baker something through the metal bars.
Escape from this new prison would be much more difficult, of course, in comparison to the old jail, which the Review had once described as looking “like a poor man’s overalls. It is patched in 100 places.” The new, thicker brick walls enclosed separate steel tanks for males and females, though they still didn’t have matrons, something they were unlikely to get anytime soon with cutbacks on the horizon.
Bernard sighed. He was too far up the hill to go back now. He’d have to stop by on his way back in. Just one more thing for him to handle on his own.
On his own. The first time, Thomas had helped him. And he most certainly had helped, no matter what the papers said, or how overlooked Thomas felt. Bernard wondered, not for the first time, if he’d be able to figure out this newest one without Thomas’s assistance.
Part of him wanted to. The part of him that had jumped on the streetcar without waiting for Thomas to arrive after being so gracious as to try to shake the reporter for him.
But the other part of him really missed his brother. They were twins, after all, so he couldn’t imagine a world without him.
That part of him kept asking if he might have ever solved the Baker murder without him, without Eleanor explaining it all and the Baker revealing herself in a moment of truth. He’d had all the clues, but would he have eventually gotten there himself? To the complete truth?
Would Thomas?
THOMAS THOUGHT THINGS were finally looking up as he followed the coachman into the main house. He held cooks in a special place in his heart, and just knew this Chung Lee would have the answers he needed to beat Bernard to the punch this time.
It was a short walk out of the carriage house and up the back steps to the door of an enclosed porch. Inside stood a large ice box along the back wall, an appliance that seemed common enough in America these days. Here they were asked to wipe their boots thoroughly on the outdoor rug before entering the kitchen.
“Chung Lee does not take kindly to those who come tromping in with mud on their heels,” explained Gladding.
After checking to be sure they’d followed his instructions—it was clear the man feared he’d be blamed should they not comply—he opened the door and let them into the kitchen.
White-and-red-patterned wallpaper covered the upper half and ceiling of the room, with white tile and moulding covering the bottom half of the walls and floor. Everything sparkled as though it had been whitewashed with paint, rather than scrubbed with vinegar and borax. A white marble sink stood in the corner, though clearly no dirty dishes dared to remain there long. The only black item was the massive wood and gas range along the wall to their left, its size declaring it to be the master of its domain.
Standing at it was an Asian man dressed all in white, who whirled around as they entered.
“Can I help you?” the cook asked sternly, the spoon in his hand held at the ready like an executioner’s axe.
Gladding introduced them and left quickly, muttering something about getting back to the horses.
“May I say: it smells quite delectable in here.” Thomas looked pointedly toward the enormous pot on the stove.
“You may.” Chung Lee did not smile or elaborate, or offer a taste, much to Thomas’s chagrin. But they were only getting started.
“We’re here about Mr. London.”
“Yes, I hear he is dead,” Chung Lee said.
Thomas nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid he is. Anything you can share with me about him would be most helpful.”
Chung Lee turned and stirred the delicious-smelling something in the pot, replacing the lid before turning back to Thomas to reply.
“Mr. London was not to be trusted. Everyone but Mr. Campbell knew that.”
Thomas’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “May I ask what made you believe he was untrustworthy?”
“Mr. London took smoke breaks practically every hour, and he always did it out back, behind the carriage house, where Mr. Campbell could not see him from his study windows upstairs. But I could see him.”
“You don’t trust a smoker?” Bach asked, no doubt concerned his own yellowing teeth might give him away.
“Not when he continually does so in order to meet with certain persons without Mr. Campbell’s knowledge.”
“Like who?” asked Thomas.
Chung Lee returned to his pot on the stove for a minute, and then turned back to face him, as though giving himself a chance to decide whether to answer the question. “People like Mr. Pavoni.”
“Pavoni?” Thomas repeated. “I know that name. He’s on the McKinley Reception Committee. He’s from Olympia or Seattle or somewhere out west.”
“Tacoma.”
Thomas turned to Bach. “Tacoma?”
The reporter nodded. “He’s from my neck of the woods.”
“Do you know him personally?” Thomas asked, for once interested in what the bearded man had to say.
“As much as any reporter might do. I had the pleasure of making his acquaintance at a Fourth of July parade, and I attended one or two of his speeches. He’s a great orator. Very persuasive.”
“I see,” murmured Thomas.
Bach pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose loudly. Chung Lee glared at him and pointed toward a door with a little round window in it for peeking out, or in, as the case may be, but said no more.
Bach nodded—clearly no one blew their nose around Chung Lee’s food—and made his escape while Thomas shook his head after him.
“I apologize for him. He’s getting over a cold,” he lied. Why was he bothering covering for a man who irritated him so much? Thomas cleared his throat. “I guess I don’t understand the dilemma,” he said, turning back to the cook. “If Mr. London was Mr. Campbell’s secretary, then wouldn’t it make sense for them to meet?”
Chung Lee sniffed. “Yes, it would not be odd for them to discuss things in Mr. Campbell’s presence. Indeed, Mr. Pavoni has often been a dinner guest of this house in the past month.”
Chung Lee set down his spoon and opened the top of the range to stoke the fire. “What is odd is for Mr. Pavoni to say good evening to Mr. Campbell and exit by way of the front door, only to return to have a private smoke with his personal secretary behind the carriage house.”
Thomas agreed. That was certainly odd. “I take it you enjoy working for the Campbells?”
“The Campbells are ever so kind. Mrs. Campbell, in particular, is very considerate, especially with the menu. She is willing to try new suggestions, and always lets me know well in advance when plans have changed.”
“Like when McKinley’s visit was canceled?”
Chung Lee nodded, though Thomas noticed his shoulders slumped a little.
“That must have been a great blow to you. I’m sure you had many wonderful meals planned for him.”
Chung Lee returned to his pot for one more stir before setting down the spoon and crossing to a small white table that sat along one wall of the kitchen, which hid a few small drawers just under the lip. Opening one, he removed a piece of paper covered in scrawling handwriting and handed it to Thomas.
“This was what was planned,” was all the cook said.
Although both breakfasts were pretty standard with eggs, toast, potatoes, steak, fruit, and coffee, the lunch and dinner menus were extravagant, including things like boiled fish, red flannel hash, and hot lobster salad.
“Food fit for a king, or a President, as it seems,” Thomas said encouragingly.
“Indeed.” Chung Lee returned the list to the drawer and then crossed back to the range. “And now, if you would please take your investigation elsewhere, I am in the midst of luncheon preparations and cannot be disturbed further.”
Thomas’s face surely revealed his feeling of utter sadness as he thanked the cook and exited through the swinging door.
