A Study in Revenge (2 page)

Deputy Marshal Archie Lean of the Portland police had been circling the body and staring at it for several minutes, making some sense of the horribly scarred and disfigured face. Cracked blisters dotted the blackened skin, the charred bits flaking away from the underlying musculature and bone. It wasn’t so much that he expected to see anything new, but there was nothing else to draw his attention away. Apart from the chair and its disturbing occupant, the dingy second-floor room was merely an attic that had been finished off to its short peak with old barn boards. The space held nothing more interesting than empty booze bottles, old newspapers, and a few other scraps of litter. He circled his forefinger and thumb across his sandy, well-trimmed mustache. It didn’t satisfy the restlessness in his hands. Lean wanted to light a cigarette but didn’t want to disturb the air, which already held a strong smell, like that of a struck match or spent gunpowder.

According to the neighbors, the old house hadn’t been occupied in six years. After the last owner’s death in 1887, the place had passed to an out-of-state relation who had paid it no heed. The house had suffered badly enough from neglect even when it had a resident. The past few years had sped it on toward its inevitable condemnation. The property had been left to occasional use by vagrants and transients, and more constant abuse by neighborhood kids.

Lean heard the clatter of the horse-drawn carriage’s wheels rattling over paving stones. He went to the room’s single small window facing the front. There was no curtain, but Lean had to yank his handkerchief from his pocket, spit on the glass, and give it a firm rub in order to see through the stubborn layer of grime. Even from a distance, he recognized the man at the reins as Rasmus Hansen. The quiet but reliable man had formerly worked as the driver for Dr. Virgil Steig, before the latter’s untimely death last summer. The old city surgeon had been a trusted ally and a good friend. His murder in the course of duty, a death that could have been prevented, remained a painful memory for Lean. Still, he allowed himself a hint of a smile at the thought of the carriage’s current occupant.

He strode across the room, careful to avoid stepping on the sooty footprints that marked the dull, scuffed floorboards. Leaving the door open, he made his way down the creaking stairs. He kept his feet to the outer edges of each board, again to avoid damaging the prints, but also out of concern that the worn and cracked treads might not support his sturdy frame. The front parlor was mean and empty except for bits of trash along the baseboards and a clinging odor of dampness tinged with urine. Every stick of furniture that had ever been in the house was long since sold, stolen, or smashed to kindling and burned in the room’s small fireplace.

Lean eased open the front door of the run-down little building and stepped outside, onto the crooked stoop. He stared once more at the blackened shape of a hand, fingers splayed, that was scorched into the door. A few people stood in a doorway along the narrow, unpaved stretch that led from the house down to Vine Street. More faces craned in from the sidewalk where this alleyway ended. A uniformed patrol officer, Harrington, made sure none of the overly interested neighborhood gawkers got any ideas about wandering close. Lean was glad for the timing of it, ten a.m. on Friday. The demands of the weekday had already thinned the early-morning crowd of schoolchildren and men walking to work.

After fumbling in his pocket for a match, Lean lit a long-overdue cigarette. He was glad that Harrington was the officer at hand. The man was a veteran whose combination of solid nerves and blunted imagination
kept him from getting keyed up at crime scenes. At the moment, Harrington was staring in the direction of the newly arrived carriage.

A man in a lightweight frock coat had exited and now stood examining the house and its environs. Lean recognized the sharp features of Perceval Grey peering out from beneath the brim of a black brushed-felt hat. He recalled a similar arrival by Grey a year ago, in the dead of night, at the scene of a young woman’s gruesome murder. That night he’d met the man for the first time in an atmosphere of desperation, skepticism, and irritation at Grey’s condescending arrogance. Now he simply smiled, glad to see his onetime partner again.

“Y’know,” Harrington began, without taking his eyes off Grey, “the more I think on it, the more I’m sure I’ve seen that guy up there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the upper floor of the house. “Course, can’t say for sure with his face the way it is.”

“It’s Frankie the Foot,” Lean said with all the enthusiasm of a desperate card player forced to reveal his own middling hand.

“What?” The announcement was startling enough to yank Harrington’s attention away from the new arrival for a moment. “That’s impossible. Frankie’s—”

“Yes.” The look of utter disbelief that greeted Lean was exactly what he’d expected. “He certainly is.”

“Then how the hell could he be here? And looking like that?”

“The question of the day, right there.” Lean blew out a cloud of smoke and watched it disintegrate above him.

An uncomfortable silence settled over the deputy and the patrolman, as if Lean had just committed an embarrassing gaffe with a pronouncement that caught Harrington so far off guard. A guttural sound escaped from Harrington’s throat as Grey approached and that man’s slightly dark complexion, inherited from his Abenaki Indian father, became apparent.

“Not this one.” Harrington’s raspy voice was suddenly thick with disapproval. He sounded like a man readying himself for a confrontation. “Such a high-talking windbag.”

Lean knew that Grey’s work was earning him a reputation around the city, one not fully appreciated by the other members of the police department.

“It’s all right. He’s here at my request”—Lean fished about for the right way to justify calling on a private detective during a police investigation—“as a sort of expert on … unusual matters.”

The look in Harrington’s eyes still bordered on hostility, so Lean suggested the man take a stroll past the onlookers down the alley, to see if anyone had had a change of heart and now wanted to offer up something useful.

“Deputy Lean.” Grey touched the brim of his hat, then cast a dubious glance at the ramshackle building. “Forgive me for showing up empty-handed. Your note didn’t mention that this was to be your housewarming.”

Lean chuckled. “Good of you to come, Grey.”

“I was surprised to hear from you so soon.”

Lean tilted his head. “We haven’t spoken in nearly a year.”

“Yes, but during that last bit of business, you voiced your hope that we wouldn’t need to renew our professional acquaintance.”

“Yes, well, I missed that radiant bonhomie of yours.”

“Bonhomie?” Grey chuckled. “Good to see that the Vocabulary for Policemen correspondence course is paying dividends.”

He looked again at the building. The paint was peeling from the sides. Dry rot was visible in the sills below the few narrow windows. Many of the panes were cracked, and all of them held several years’ worth of dust and grime.

“Judging by the air of morbid curiosity among our crowd of onlookers, and the absence of any signs that a financially motivated crime would even be possible at these premises, I assume that the offense was one of bodily violence.”

“Violence to the body would be a very apt description,” Lean said.

“And yet there’s something else at hand that concerns you?”

“Several bizarre pieces of evidence. The type of thing that, after our previous work together, I thought might be of interest to you.”

Lean led the way over to the building. The front door was just a step up from the alley. The single granite block had been level at one time. Though the idea seemed foreign now, in the heat of July, the step had clearly fallen victim to decades of severe frosts that had caused the
ground underneath to heave and buckle. Now it sloped noticeably to the right. It fit the building, which also sagged and slouched with age.

“This isn’t just a stain,” Grey said as he peered at the hand-shaped mark on the door.

“No—it’s actually burned into the wood.” Lean slid past, into the front room. The unkempt space was poorly lit, and the walls had gone a flat gray from lack of wiping. Years of scuffing by soles tracking in dirt had left the wooden floor dull and soiled. Still, a new series of blackened footprints stood out, leading from the front door across to the staircase on the far side of the room.

Grey knelt and examined one of the footprints closely. He ran a finger through the mark, then sniffed the sooty material. Lean felt a bit uncomfortable watching the man dirty the knees of his expensive-looking trousers. Grey came from money on his mother’s side and, apart from his earliest years, had been raised to be a gentleman. He dressed accordingly, always in impeccably tailored suits. As if to balance the ledger, Lean straightened his waistcoat and tightened the tie he’d been loosening over the course of the warm morning.

With the close inspection of the ashen marks finished, Grey returned to the front door. He then crossed the room, comparing his own track to that of the blackened footprints.

“I’d say a man of average height, in no particular hurry, wearing mismatched shoes and intent on leaving a trail.”

Lean nodded in agreement. “The body’s upstairs.”

Grey held up a finger, wishing to pause a moment as he checked the other two rooms on the ground floor. The back room was small and held nothing other than a door to a dark, narrow closet. The kitchen, which never boasted running water, had been greatly abused, with the drawers and cupboard doors all having been removed, presumably for use as firewood. The brief examination complete, Grey started for the staircase, but Lean stepped in front of him.

“Something I want to show you before we enter the attic.”

The door at the top of the staircase was open, but Lean stopped short so he could close it. A small, four-paned window admitted enough light to reveal an image on the front of the faded, whitewashed door. Grey
paused and studied the crudely drawn figure. A rough-shaped face, traced in ashes, stared back at them. It lacked a nose or mouth, the only features being two slitlike eyes that appeared to be drawn in blood. Above these was a small pentagram. The face narrowed at the chin, giving the look of a short, pointed beard. The head was topped with two curving horns, completing the malevolent, inhuman impression. Above the face, scrawled in greasy ash, was a two-word message:

“ ‘Hell Awaits,’ ” Grey read, then motioned Lean to proceed. “Onward now. Impolite to keep your acquaintances waiting.”

They entered the room, and despite the grisly sight ahead of them, Grey focused on the scent that permeated the space. He continually sniffed the air as he approached the body.

“Like sulfur. Cheap eggs or expensive matchsticks—which have you been indulging in?”

Lean nodded at the body. “His fault.”

Grey bent forward, close to the seated corpse, and sniffed again. “So it is.”

He briefly examined the man’s shoes, then stepped back. “That explains the difference in the footprints. He has a deformity—clubfoot, probably.”

Grey began to slowly circumnavigate the room, patiently looking into every corner and occasionally stopping to consider the dead body from various vantage points. After a few minutes, he arrived back in front of the body, staring at a face scorched beyond recognition.

“All in all, this is quite the case of fire and brimstone, eh? Well, we can officially eliminate what it seems we were meant to assume as obvious. The man was, of course, not actually on fire when he entered the house. The footprints do not reflect his deformity. Also, they’re too evenly and closely spaced. No one suffering the unbearable pain of being burned alive would have been able to walk up the stairs and find his way to a chair with so measured a step as this trail would have us believe.”

Grey stepped closer and lifted the dead man’s arms one at a time, checking the palms. The back of each hand was charred, but the palms looked undamaged.

“Furthermore, neither palm is burned, which refutes the right handprint on the outside door as being made by the victim. If such a ludicrous possibility even needed to be disproved.”

After a close study of the face, which was swollen and horribly blistered, Grey tugged at the man’s collar, enough to glance down his neck. “No burns on the torso.”

“Arms or legs neither,” Lean said.

Grey pointed to the dead man’s mouth and then the right side of the head. “He’s missing teeth and part of his ear, but they could well be old injuries. Difficult to tell with the extensive damage from the facial burns. Has the photographer been here? And the city surgeon?”

“Photographer’s come and gone,” Lean said. “Dr. Sullivan preferred to wait at Maine General and view the body there.”

Grey’s dark eyes flashed a bit of surprise. Lean thought he saw a hint of annoyance as well, even though Grey had no formal ground on which to object to the surgeon’s choice. The deputy just shrugged.

“In any event,” Grey said, “the scorch marks are placed selectively. His hair is only partly singed, the clothes are largely fine, though it looks like he may have taken a roll in the dirt. The soles of his shoes are slick with soot, but the laces are knotted loosely. They were tied by someone else, in a hurry and at an awkward angle. There’s something seriously out of place with this body.”

“I’m glad to see that your powers of observation have remained sharp,” Lean said.

Grey raised an eyebrow at the comment, and the faintest hint of a smile appeared. “As has your keen wit. I’m not speaking of him being burned and dying, but rather the order of those two events.”

He stared at Lean for a few seconds. “Each one of my observations has been obvious. No inference I’ve drawn from the scene has been surprising. You didn’t need me to come here and tell you that all of this is a false design, some kind of hoax. So what is it that you’re not telling me, Lean?”

The deputy feigned insult. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that, based on our past dealings, I’ve come to expect that you have an opinion on this. Furthermore, you usually find it difficult not to share your opinions. Which leads me to believe that you must have an ulterior motive for standing there so quietly.”