Garrett Investigates (6 page)

Garrett called for the lamp, insensible for the moment that it was a ship’s captain she ordered around. When she remembered, the lantern had already been set beside her.

“Do you need her lifted?” O’Brien said.

“Not yet.”

It was hard to tell in the poor light, but as she lowered her head toward the floor and lifted the dead woman’s hand, something else struck Garrett’s attention. There should have been pale patches on the backs of her curved fingers, marking where they had pressed the floor. Around those, there should have been liver-red rings. The marks of dependent lividity showed how a body had laid as the blood settled, and could outline anything that pressed that blood from capillaries near the skin.

Garrett humphed and unbuttoned the dead woman’s sleeve. Her flesh was slack and inelastic—more like Plastiline than human skin and muscle—but there was no sign on
any
surface of the marks of lividity. Nor did they mar her face, already marred as it was by staring, clouding eyes.

She appeared, in other words, fairly freshly dead—except for the fact that warmth had fled her.

“A physician examined her?” Garrett asked.

“Dr. Fenister,” O’Brien said. “He’s the ship’s surgeon. His opinion as of this morning was that she was freshly deceased, although he noted the coolness of her temperature as unusual…you may, of course, speak with him yourself.”

“He didn’t turn her?”

“It was obvious she was beyond help.” O’Brien shifted uncomfortably. “If that’s real,” he said, with a wave to the victim’s ring, “we’re looking at a diplomatic incident.”

“I’m not a jeweler,” Garrett replied. “But it looks real to me. Is that why you stalled the vessel?”

O’Brien’s mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. He glanced aside. “The owners would have preferred the body remain undiscovered until Albany.”

She didn’t drop her eyes. He didn’t raise his.

He shrugged and finished, “Time tables are sacred. And we have perishable cargo and wealthy passengers aboard. Neither take well to delays.”

“Humph,” Garrett said.

Garrett lowered the dead woman’s hand again. As her fingers grazed over it, she examined the ring more carefully. Two heraldic lions supporting a quartered field, on which a red lion and a blue panther alternated with more abstract red-and-white designs.

Before she became a forensic sorcerer, Garrett had been Lady Abigail Irene Garrett, heir to a minor nobility. Those days were past, but she still recognized the arms of the Kingdom of Bayern.

D.C.I. Garrett closed her eyes and sighed. “I assume there’s no shortage of coffee aboard a paddle boat?”

O’Brien cleared his throat. “I shall have young Carter here fetch you some. Cream and sugar?”

“Black,” said Garrett. “I don’t plan to enjoy it.”

***

The book had plain red boards and a spine curlicued with gilt but otherwise unmarked. When Garrett lifted it, she found beneath it a fountain pen with a shattered nib. Ink daubed the wooden floor, the edge of the carpet, and the printed pages. A glance at the page head told her it was a German-language edition of
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.

“Washington Irving,” Garrett muttered to herself.

She was reminded of O’Brien’s presence when he answered from the door, “Reading up on the local culture, I see.”

Garrett grunted in the most unladylike fashion she could manage. Years of deportment lessons she’d never quite shaken rendered it into a delicate huff.
Pity she never made it as far upriver as Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown.

Garrett looked for the gouge in the floorboards or the spot on the rug where the pen nib might have struck—and for the broken bits of the nib itself—but without success. She was still frowning and weighing
Das Skizzenbuch
in her hand when a clatter by the door alerted her to the arrival of her coffee. Carter set up a silver tray on a folding stand and poured. The beverage had arrived accompanied by a fat, tempting slice of coconut cake, by which Garrett knew that the ship’s cook was attempting to butter her up. The curls of fresh coconut, the rich aroma, and her own interrupted supper suggested she would allow herself to be courted.

It was probably bad form to eat standing in the doorway of a chamber where a dead woman lay. Nevertheless, she drank left-handed, balancing the book upon her right, and blew on the pages to turn them.

Cut edges fluttered; someone had done a meticulous job with the paper knife. Here and there were cryptic notations in a brown-black ink matching the color of that splashed on the floor and dabbing the dead woman’s fingertips.

“I’ll need access to a room with a table and good lighting. And some privacy.” Garrett frowned at the cut pages and set her empty cup aside. “Where’s her handbag?”

It might contain a clue to her true identity. Or where she had been coming from, first thing in the morning, dressed as if she had danced the night away.

Captain O’Brien did not step across the threshold into the stateroom. He hunkered with his hands upon his knees and leaned in, though, angling his head to peer under furniture. “Let me speak to the baggage master,” he said. “I’ll soon find her luggage.”

“It hasn’t been retrieved yet?” Garrett asked. “Never mind, of course it hasn’t. You were no doubt waiting for instructions?”

O’Brien paused in his leaving and shrugged apologetically. “If I owned the ship, things would be different. As it is—”

“Indubitably,” Garrett said. “Well, she didn’t pay her passage without a handbag, unless they’re sewing concealed pockets into evening gowns these days.”

“A pathetic motive for murder,” O’Brien said, with obvious, real disdain.

Garrett felt the thin fragility of her own smile, the ease with which it cracked when she spoke. “There are good ones?”

O’Brien shifted, his hands behind his back.

Garrett took pity on him. “Who’d lift a handbag and leave a head coiffed in rubies?”

“Considering the overturned cup—I imagine you might be thinking of poison? Even suicide?”

“It could be suicide,” Garrett said. “An imaginative detective might hypothesize that she first tossed her handbag over the railing, to confound scandal.”

O’Brien raised his eyebrows. “It’s better to be murdered than a suicide?”

“It is if you’re a Catholic,” Garrett said, after a brief pause.
Well, there are Protestant Irish. And probably atheistic ones.
“Or if you wish to conceal the reasons for your suicide.”

“That
is
imaginative.”

Garrett’s knees still hurt from crouching on the deck. Every year left her a little less nimble. “And imagination is not always a friend to the homicide investigator,” she said. “Too often, the reasons and means of murder are monotonously tedious. But my point is, the staging of this death could be consistent with either self-poisoning, or poisoning by another. The locked stateroom suggests the former; the lack of handbag the latter.”

She set the book on the edge of the coffee tray and picked up cake and fork. The boiled frosting was too sweet, but that was the nature of boiled frosting. The cake itself was excellent. “Except—it’s just as one would expect. And any time I see a crime scene that’s just as one would expect, it makes me suspect that it could be just that: staging. Dead people usually don’t look as the layman would think they must.”

***

“Mrs. Abercrombie,” it turned out,
had
loaded a steamer trunk—and the purser from whom she’d booked passage at the last minute clearly recollected her handbag, because it had seemed exceedingly out of place with her costume.

It was well-made, the purser said, and obviously expensive—but suitable for day, not an elegant evening out. “I assumed she was leaving her husband,” he said, “having caught him…” He hesitated, with a glance at Garrett. Garrett restrained herself from rolling her eyes. O’Brien frowned encouragingly, and the purser continued. “Angry women in last night’s clothes aren’t unheard of as paddleboat passengers, is all I mean.”

“I imagine not,” said Garrett. She picked an invisible and exceedingly uncomfortable bit of lint from her sleeve.

“I remember her in particular because at first I turned her away, and she seemed quite distressed. But she returned an hour later, offering more money—we would not, of course, put another passenger off for her convenience. But there had been a cancellation. A Mr. Eugene Sisters, who I recall because of the peculiar beauty of his name.”

Garrett was coming to conclude that the purser—a Mr. Manley—was accustomed to making excuses for his excellent recall of his passenger lists. “Did Mr. Sisters rebook for later?”

He shook his head. “He sent a telegram. It had his code number on it, which is how we prevent pranks in such matters.” Manley rocked awkwardly in his chair. “Shall we go check the holds for that trunk?”

“Oh, yes,” Garrett replied, with a tired glance to O’Brien. Not that he wasn’t a suspect, but at least she liked him. “Let’s do.”

***

The steamer trunk, of course…

…was missing.

Quite ostentatiously missing. Although the passenger’s half of its claim tag could not be found—perhaps it was with “Mrs. Abercrombie’s” handbag—the tag
number
was in the baggage master’s book; however, its assigned berth in the hold lay innocent of contents. The deck where it should have lain was lightly scratched, but that signified very little—the deck throughout the hold was much-abused, scratched and gouged and furrowed from the steel-shod feet and corners of years of joyously mishandled luggage.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Garrett said. A chill crept up her spine; closer inspection revealed that it was just the radiant cold from some sort of large crate that seemed to contain something perishable packed in ice and sawdust. “Well, I suppose the contents of a trunk are as good a motive for murder as the contents of a handbag.”

“Indeed,” said O’Brien. “If only we could find either, we might be that much closer to the murderer.”

***

O’Brien set the crew to searching
The Nation
—stem to stern, quite literally. It was a less than ideal situation, as any one of them could have been involved in the murder, and so Garrett specified that they must work in pairs—and that the mate would choose who paired with whom, rather than relying on crew members to sort it out. Garrett needed to begin interviewing the remaining crew and the passengers—but she was painfully aware that there were close to three hundred people aboard
The Nation
, and that she had less than eight hours remaining in which to find the one who was a murderer.

Garrett had done the obvious thing first, and laid out the dead woman’s pen on a clean handkerchief to see if it could be thaumaturgically encouraged to point out the direction of its missing piece. But it lay there without even a shiver, blithely ignoring the principles of affinity and sympathy. Which didn’t mean that the broken-off piece didn’t exist, of course. But if it were far enough away that the spell didn’t offer at least
some
direction, it was a safe bet that it wasn’t on board
The Nation.

Perhaps the pen had been broken before the dead woman came on board. But if that was the case, why had she had it out to make notes in a book when she died?

Garrett needed a starting point. Any starting point. Even a bad one. Flipping through the pages of the dead woman’s short story collection was not providing the needed inspiration. Her annotations were cryptic—shorthand in a foreign language—and there wasn’t even a name scribed on the flyleaf.

She was about to pick a direction of questioning at random, on the ancient axiom of police investigations: some action is better than no action. Until she glimpsed a shorter edge of paper tucked between the pages of the book, and flipped back page by page until she found it again.

It was a newspaper article, on fresh, greasy newsprint. Garrett could still smell the cheap ink. A column clipped from the pages of
The New World Times
, penned by one “Josh,” apparently a “Master Riverboat Pilot” by trade. It was a humorous tall tale of travel on the North River between New Amsterdam and Albany, focused in particular on the perils of sea monsters and the opportunity to view “extinct saurisceans” in the canyons below West Point.

Garrett frowned at the thing. “O’Brien.”

“Ma’am?”

“What’s the name of your pilot?”

***

The pilot’s name was Clemens. Garrett did not stand as he was brought into the captain’s office, which had been hastily cleared to serve as her interview room. Instead, she sat behind the powdery pale wood of the desk and assessed him. He was a man neither tall nor short, whose eyes glittered sharply over a luxuriant moustache. His once-ginger hair was fading to the color of strawberry milk, but his posture remained as crisp as it ever might have been. He did not seem put off by her sex or her spectacles, which could be good or bad.

He radiated an aura of wit and focus that led Garrett to suspect immediately that while he might be a charming interview, he would not be an easy one. She longed for a gin just looking at him.

He had removed his cap upon entering and stood now with it tucked jauntily under his arm. The ring it had left depressed his curls, a small flaw she found comforting, like a chink in the otherwise flawless armor of his uniform.
Dammit,
Garrett thought.
I’m the one who’s supposed to be making
him
feel this way.

“Mister Clemens,” she said. “Please sit.”

A ladder-backed chair had been drawn up to the blank side of the desk. Clemens folded himself into it as the door shut and latched behind him—the invaluable and nearly invisible Carter, yet again—and spoke in a cultured Virginian accent. “Detective Crown Investigator.”

“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Clemens?”

“I imagine you are interviewing the ship’s officers regarding the death of Mrs. Abercrombie, as that was why you were brought aboard.”