Metropolis Pt. 2, page 18
Murphy sat up. “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby” played quietly in the background. “Okay, well, if you heard that song during regression, perhaps I need to rethink my position on hypnotherapy. In any case, maybe we can use your sessions with this Dr. Beadys to learn more about the case. You think you could sort of influence the direction of these regressions?”
Nick thought about it. “I honestly don’t know. I can try. It might look suspicious to Beadys.”
“Just play it cool. Certainly don’t say anything to him. Not at this point.”
“Got it. What else?”
“Well, it’s been a while, but I think it’s time I dig up the suspect list again. The primary ones, at least. Maybe with your fresh eyes, we’ll turn up something I’ve missed.”
“Did you file the FOI request on the witness?”
Murphy nodded. “I still have a friend or two down at the precinct. We should get something back in a day or two.”
Nick went and made himself a second Bloody Mary, and drank half of it before sitting back down. “Okay, let’s run through the suspects.”
Murphy jumped up, shuffled out of the room, and returned a minute later with a three-ring binder. He sat next to Nick and plopped down the binder. “All right, first there’s Julian.” He opened the binder and thumbed to a tab that read, Suspects. “We can’t discount the reporting in the Times, since that’s the official line on what happened. But, since you and I agree there’s more here than the what the Times seems to want to tell us, let’s put Julian in the bull pen and move forward.”
Nick sat up, drink in hand. “Julian was a handsome devil, though, wasn’t he?”
“From everything I’ve read, he had his demons, sure enough, but he also seemed to have a moral compass.” He turned to Nick. “Do they still say such things out there in the modern world? About morality, I mean?”
“Can I plead the Fifth?”
Murphy laughed and turned the page. “Next there’s Julian and Edward’s father, Cornelius Baynes. After men like Rockefeller and Rothschild, he may be the most important industrialist of his generation. Mean as spit, too.”
Nick ran a finger over the photo. “I think I’ve seen his picture in a history book. Didn’t he consolidate all the rail lines?”
“And shipping along the eastern seaboard. Doesn’t seem he was very fond of his sons. And he certainly didn’t give a rat’s ass about Victoria. We’ll come back to him.” Murphy turned the page. “Recognize this fellow?”
Nick leaned further forward. “He looks like a movie star. One of those guys from the ’30s or ’40s, like Cary Grant or Gregory Peck. Or maybe a mobster.”
Murphy chuckled again. “That’s ’cause that’s Bugsy Siegel, perhaps the most notorious gangster from the late teens through the 1940s. He’s one of the men responsible for Murder Inc., the kill-for-hire outfit that worked for the mob. Bugsy set that shop up. Him and a pal of his.”
“Seems a likely suspect, doesn’t he? He have any reason to want Victoria dead?”
“Maybe,” Murphy said. “There’s some evidence to suggest Siegel was doing business with Edward Baynes. Maybe even Cornelius Baynes. The mafia had a beef with Julian that we can dig into, as well. That might square with what you said about Victoria getting caught up in the middle of something mob-related.”
Nick drank the last of his second Bloody Mary and set the glass aside. The record player finished the song and went on auto-repeat. Nick could hear Billy humming it in his head. There were so many pieces to this crime. How could he and Murphy put together a case that had gone cold more than a half-century ago?
Murphy turned over one last photo. “Edward Baynes.”
“The guy who owned this house.”
“One and the same.” Murphy pointed at the top of the photo. A banner hung from a balcony. “Mayoral Candidacy Ball,” he said. “Over his father’s objections, Edward was a politician. A mostly failed politician, as it happens. But he seems to have had the decency to take Victoria in when her relationship with Julian hit the skids.”
“So why’s he a suspect?”
Murphy pointed to the upstairs. “Murder took place in Edward’s house at an hour when most people are already in bed. Now, he has an alibi. His business calendar has him in Atlantic City at some kind of rally for an upstart Worker’s Party. But alibies are like assholes. Everybody’s got one.”
Nick was overly familiar with the idea. “Okay, so, where do we start?
Which one?”
Murphy pinched his lips and flipped the photos again. Then he stood suddenly, left the room, and returned with several notebooks. “Back in ’45, I paid a visit to Cornelius Baynes at his estate in Westbrook. It pissed him off something awful, but I took some copious notes. Let me tell you what I learned from that tough old piece of leather not a year before he cashed in his chips.”
Nick listened as Murphy opened a little notepad and told him about interviewing the man responsible for modern transportation, their first suspect in the murder of Victoria Page.
CHAPTER 26
NOVEMBER 24, 1945
DETECTIVE COLIN Murphy pulled into the long circular driveway at the Westbrook estate of Cornelius Baynes, Esquire, at four p.m. The main building resembled nothing so much as the White House, except the wings extended north and south. Gravel crunched beneath the wheels of his ’33 Ford Coupe as he rolled to a stop next to an immense water fountain encircled by pyracantha bushes. The prickly shrubs were trimmed up in the shape of an old locomotive train. As he stepped out onto the drive, the wind caught the mist from a marble steamship at the fountain’s center and coated his face with it. He hurried out of the spray and mounted the six granite steps to the double doors of Baynes’s imposing mansion.
Murphy gave the door three sharp raps with the brass lion head knocker. The ten-foot door swung, and an old-school butler, dressed out in black tails, a white shirt, and a black cravat, stepped into the doorway. The old fella looked at him impassively.
“Have you an appointment?”
“I’m Detective Colin Murphy with the Metropolis Police. I’d like a word with your employer.”
The butler continued to stare without blinking. “What may I say it is regarding?”
“I’m looking into the death of Julian Baynes. Now, as I understand it, your boss isn’t one to get out of the house much these days, so if it needs to go hard, I can have him brought down to the precinct.”
“How nice it would be someday to have policing done without the need of such vacuous threats.” The butler motioned Murphy inside, closed the door behind them, then started off into the dark interior. “Follow me, please.”
The butler shuffled straight ahead, toward the rear of the home, between the stairs, and into a great room that stretched back sixty feet, and lengthwise another sixty. The far wall was almost entirely glass, with a view out onto a garden of footpaths, stone-lined streams, and topiary in the shapes of more ships and trains. The vista ran out several hundred yards to a hem of elm trees whose bare limbs scraped the slate sky.
It was downright cold in the dark mansion. Six-foot hearths dominated the walls to the left and right, but were unlit. The walls around them were carved of stone and hung with six grandfather clocks, all showing different times, and all ticking out of time with one another other.
Murphy had been to the Metropolis Mausoleum at the north end of Three-Mile Park on more than one occasion—usually funeral services for a fellow cop. This house had a similar feeling, and Murphy thought he’d rather be over there with the dead bodies.
The butler ushered him over the black-and-white checkered floor, weaving through wood furniture that had no cushions and sat directly on the marble—no rugs of any kind. At the far end of the room, in a wheelchair facing the great window, sat a man wrapped in a scraggly brown afghan blanket. A fringe of wiry hair circled his bald, spotted pate. He smelled of Aqua Velva and dried urine. His nose was thin and curved like a beak, and his eyes were milky, but he stared out at his garden like a vulture.
“Mr. Baynes, sir, a Detective Murphy to see you.”
Baynes didn’t move. “Tell him I’ve got no use for gumshoes.”
“I’m already here, Mr.—”
“I know where you are,” Baynes growled. “That doesn’t mean I want to see you. Take your questions and pedal yourself back to whatever clubhouse sent you.”
Murphy waved the butler away. “Afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Baynes. It’s either here, or it’s in the box down at the precinct.”
The old man smirked. “I make one call, and you’re on the breadline tomorrow, Mr. Murphy.”
“With what they’re paying me, Mr. Baynes, that don’t sound half bad.” He pulled a polished straight chair over and sat next to the old man. “And if I’m you, I want to hear what I’ve got to say.”
“You are not me,” said Baynes. “And your inane questions are preventing me from listening to the only things I do care to hear.”
“The grandfather clocks.”
Baynes cocked his head, looked up vacantly. “They mark whatever time I have left before the old bald cheater finally comes to claim me. Do you find that morbid, Mr. Murphy?”
“I do. Guy with your kind of dough ought not to be waiting on death. He ought to be living someplace warm, someplace with sun in the winter, or . . . spending his elder years surrounded by his family.”
“Clumsy of you, Mr. Murphy. I hope you’re more clever at solving my son’s murder—which is obviously why you’re here—than steering conversations.”
“Fair enough, I won’t mince words with you, Mr. Baynes. Tell me about your boys.”
Baynes grimaced and shifted in his wheelchair. “First tell me why. Why after almost twenty years are you still barking up this tree?”
“Never sat right with me, that’s all. Oh, I know these days we’ve got all kinds of forensic advancements for fighting crime. We’ve got folks who go poking around evidence with microscopes, and tape recorders, and round-the-clock surveillance using cameras with lenses that can show the blackheads in a fella’s nose at a hundred yards. I’ve got some of that gear myself. But a good detective listens to his instincts. It don’t take much to know when a man is lying, wouldn’t you say?”
“Still trying to be clever, are you?” Baynes smirked. “Well, then, what can a man say about sons who gave him no heir, which I’m sure you already knew. Probably because they were both disastrously foolish about women—that bohemian tart, in particular. I’m sure you know about her, too. The one they say Julian shot before he turned his .38 on himself.”
“Victoria Page was her name.” Murphy got out his notepad and started to jot things down.
“If you say so.” Baynes wiped a drop of runny snot from the tip of his nose. “She was a floozy, if you ask me. The kind of woman no one really misses after she’s gone, and you can put that down in your little notebook for all I care.”
“Would you say you wanted her gone, Mr. Baynes? Enough to help that process along? Kill her, I mean, since we’re being direct.”
Baynes cackled. “I wouldn’t waste my time or money, Mr. Murphy. It was bad enough my son took up with her in the first place. Then, by all accounts, she swapped him for my other boy. She was looking for a meal ticket, you see. And when she crapped out with one Baynes, she found another with better prospects.”
“Your son Edward.”
“For a long while, Edward didn’t know which side of his bread was buttered. Went into politics, of all the fool things. Best I can say about that period of his life is that he found an outlet in public office for his particular brand of larceny.”
“So he was dirty,” Murphy said, making a note.
“You know a politician who isn’t?” Baynes pulled his afghan up over his shoulders. “I do hope you’re here with more penetrating questions, Detective Murphy.”
Murphy pulled his chair around to try and force Baynes to look at him. “So you think your son Julian was so jealous over this ‘floozy’ that he waltzed into his brother’s home, probably trying to win her back in some last-ditch appeal to love—which, to your mind, was the last thing she was really looking for—then after she rejects him, he blows her away, and having come prepared to be rejected, kills himself and leaves a note to that effect. You buy all that?”
“It’s what the papers said. Who can we trust if not a fair and honest press?”
“Now who’s trying to be clever,” Murphy said. “But about Julian’s note. You wouldn’t happen to have a sample of his handwriting you could share, would you? And while you’re at it, maybe samples of yours and Edward’s, too? It would sure help me clear some things up where the suicide note is concerned.”
“Can’t find any of those in the public record, Detective?”
Murphy scratched his chin. “Damnedest thing. Like someone scrubbed ’em all away.”
Cornelius smirked. “I’m afraid I can’t help you there. And as for me, my hands don’t work the way they used to. Arthritis, don’t you know.”
“My bad luck.” Murphy glanced at his notebook. “Now, from what I gather, talking to people who knew Julian, he was a bit of a lush, liked cocaine when he could get it, and had a real weakness for the ponies. But even the people who thought he was a toper said he was a straight shooter. He probably even bent your nose out of shape with some Teamster talk in the summer of ’28, stumping for ethical wages and such. You want to know how many homicides I got in my case file for fellas who tried to organize against men like you?”
“I see,” Baynes said. “So you drove all the way out to Westbrook to interrogate a man dying of cancer of the ass, because your heightened ‘instincts’ are telling you that I had my son and his harlot killed on account of a wage dispute.”
If this guy weren’t such a bastard, Murphy could see them being friends. “I think I like the way I said it better.”
Baynes reached a skeletal hand from beneath his afghan and picked up a Browning shotgun that had been lying out of sight against the opposite side of his wheelchair. “I grow weary of you, Detective. I suffer neither fools nor their ‘instincts.’”
Murphy inched closer. “Tell me, Mr. Baynes, at the time of Julian and Victoria’s death, what were the stipulations in your will? In other words, if the two had married, and you had died, and then, say, Julian succumbed to the drink, would the bohemian tart have been sitting in this big old room with all its clocks, maybe throwing mad sex parties instead of dying from cancer of the ass?”
Baynes ground his teeth. “I don’t give a good God damn what my will said or didn’t say. That whore wasn’t getting a penny from me—”
“Do I need to read your rights, Mr. Baynes? ’Cause that sounds dangerously close to a confession.”
The old man pushed his wheelchair forward, knocking his knees into Murphy’s, and poked Murphy’s chest with the business end of his shotgun. “My will was signed, sealed, and delivered years ago. Now, you may ask one more question, Mr. Murphy, and then I’m afraid you’re going to have to leave before I shoot you for trespassing.”
“Mmmm, okay, I’d better make it a good one, then.” Murphy looked down at his notebook. “How about this? At the time of the derailment in ’28—the one at the Broadstreet–Seven station—were you aware that one of the Federal Reserve note plates went missing?”
Baynes flexed his hand around the barrel of his shotgun. “How would I know that?”
“You’re right,” Murphy said. “That little tidbit never did make the papers. You must have been proud, though, to see your son, Julian, saved them—well, most of them—from the wreckage. And perhaps equally proud to see Baynes Industries’ profits soar right through the depression, almost as if you were just printing money.”
“You, yourself, said my son was straight as an arrow.”
“Indeed. Oh, wait, you’ll indulge me with one last question, won’t you? Did Victoria, the ‘whore who wasn’t getting a penny from you,’ come to see you in the days after the derailment? Perhaps I could have a look at your appointment calendar or a journal kept by your secretary—”
“Why would she come to see me? I despised her, and she knew it. She killed my boy long before he took his own life. Killed his ambition. Killed his potential.” Baynes raised the shotgun. “But I didn’t kill her . . . or him. Now you get the hell out!”
Murphy snatched the shotgun from Baynes’s hands. “I’m confiscating this on account of your threatening the safety of a peace officer with it.” He stood. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Baynes, and good luck with your ass. Terrible thing for a man. My father died of the same thing right after he quit the carny.”
Baynes lashed out, but Murphy sidestepped him and let himself out of the house. He whistled his way back to his Ford Coupe and headed back to the precinct with his notebooks, a new Browning shotgun, and a suspect in the murder of Julian Baynes and Victoria Page.
CHAPTER 27
JULY 11, 1999
LATE AFTERNOON sunlight streamed through the windows, throwing Murphy’s sitting room into hues of russet and orange. Nick sat in the silence as the old detective closed his notebooks.
“He seems like a legit suspect,” Nick said. “Anything more ever come of it?”
“The old codger gave up the ghost a few months later. Most I got out of it was Ole Betsy and some strong suspicions.”
Nick went and poured himself a Murphy’s Law—an evening drink. “You think he had it in him to have his son killed?”
“I think that man would have done anything for a dollar,” Murphy said. “The real question is whether there was profit in killing Julian and Victoria, because even with high-priced lawyers, I don’t think he’d have risked the publicity and possible crash in consumer and investor confidence if there wasn’t a stronger upside.”
“Well, if your notebooks and memory are right, there’s another possibility.”
