The Last Nightingale (28 page)

Moses watched Blackburn comply, but the sergeant looked con-
fused and stared at Moses. As soon as Moses saw the surprise on his face, he knew that Blackburn had no part in this.

But of course, Moses realized; it made sense that Blackburn was no part of any plot. The man was a sergeant. No, this variation on hell came from somebody much higher up in the structure, somebody who could order the arrest of a Station Chief.

In the next instant, the answer leaped up before him.

Tommie Kimbrough. The son of a bitch must have betrayed him! He used his fancy contacts to get some sort of false confession from the Widow Sullivan. The little fellow had thumbed his nose at Moses, and even dared to ignore the fact that Moses knew all about the foreclosure notice. Kimbrough was daring Moses to move against him.

A rush of anger filled him until there was no room left for fear. Every muscle cell in his body twitched for the chance to spring, but bound up as he was, the only weapon left to him was verbal. So while the officers escorted him across the station floor and toward the stairs leading down to the jail, he craned his head around until he could see Sergeant Blackburn, who stood aghast.

“Sergeant!” Moses hollered. “I found a foreclosure notice on Tommie Kimbrough. It fell out of the file on the Nightingale family!” The officers kept pulling Moses along. He was nearly at the door. There was only time to get out one last line.

“Nightingale foreclosed on Kimbrough’s house, and a few days later
they were all dead!”

The stairway door slammed at that point, cutting off the sight of Sergeant Blackburn’s astonished face, staring helplessly. He had to assume that Blackburn heard enough. If the fellow was worth half of what people estimated, he was going to drop everything and make sure to find out anything he could about Tommie Kimbrough.

Moses felt some measure of satisfaction in knowing that Kimbrough would never walk away from his betrayal with a smile on his face, but he also realized with dawning dismay that he had just committed his final act as the Acting Station Chief. The wild ride
that began with the collapse of City Hall on the morning of the Great Earthquake was over, just as his fears had always projected. All that sacrificed sleep, never a day off. For nothing. New thin clothes. For nothing.

The ability to look at himself in a mirror without feeling his heart sink was gone.

Blackburn stood amid the chaos on the station house floor and saw that everyone was captivated with the hot gossip about Lieutenant Moses. He glanced down at the girl Vignette, and as soon as their eyes met, they both shared the obvious question. How, amid a broken command structure, was he supposed to get clearance to round up a group of beat cops and detectives and spread them out in an organized manhunt for Tommie Kimbrough and Shane Nightingale?

Vignette tapped him on the arm and motioned for him to bend close to her. When he did, she put her mouth next to his ear and whispered, “I know where Mr. Kimbrough lives. I followed Friar John there when Mr. Kimbrough sent for him. It was late at night.”

Blackburn considered that. The headmaster of St. Adrian’s had been summoned in the middle of the night to the home of Tommie Kimbrough?

He took Vignette’s hand, turned around and walked out of the station house.

The early afternoon streets were busy up on fabulous Russian Hill. Ice wagons, coal wagons, fish wagons, meat wagons, commerce makers, and pleasure seekers passed their horse-drawn carriages within inches of one another and gave resentful room to the rare automobile banging and smoking its way up the hills. Blackburn’s street sense told him that at this hour on a busy day, a policeman and a little girl could walk up to a lovely three-story Victorian resi-
dence and appear to be making a simple house call. Charity work, perhaps.

The front door was set far enough off of the street that no one other than Vignette saw when he took a casual look all around, and then rammed his shoulder into the door so hard that the lock immediately gave way and the door swung open. A moment later, they were inside. He pushed the door closed and set it back on the latch to conceal its damage from the other side.

The curtains were drawn and the house was dark. They both stood at the door for a moment to let their eyes adjust. There was a claustrophobic feeling to the air that seemed out of place in the big house until his eyes adjusted well enough for him to see the details.

There was a lot to see.

There was three times as much furniture as the place needed, and several times as many lamps, statues, and wall ornaments. On top of the furnishings themselves was what appeared to be years of accumulation of paper trash of every sort. Years’ worth of newspapers were stacked in bundles and tied with rope. The bundles were piled up to shoulder height all along the walls. The whole place smelled of musty paper.

His eyesight was finally able to resolve thin trails cleared through the piles of junk. Each trail had a specific purpose and led to a chair, a sofa, a shelf. “Wait here,” he told Vignette. Then he moved off down the trash trail that led to the stairway.

“All right,” she replied, following him anyway a few feet behind. He ignored the fact that she disobeyed him, and they moved up the stairs to the third floor, climbing between rows of books and bundles of newspapers that lined both sides. He planned to begin searching from the top down, but the surprise sight on the top floor simplified his task. With the exception of a few storage closets stuffed with linens, most of it was completely bare with plain wood floors. The walls were lined with mirrors. One of those new vacuum sweeping machines was parked in a corner.

There was a horizontal ballet bar mounted on freestanding supports in the middle of the room, obviously designed so that the person using it would get a full view from every angle. Apparently, Mr. Kimbrough thoroughly enjoyed the sight of his own reflection. Blackburn turned and went back down to the second floor with Vignette shadowing him.

The view there was much more like the downstairs area; excessive levels of furnishings and knickknacks stuffed every bit of open space. Trails were carved through the mass to allow access to a bathroom, a sitting room with barely enough space for one person to sit, and a bedroom so stuffed with unnecessary items that even half of the bed was piled high, leaving only the other half for sleeping.

His interest peaked when he tried the knob on the final unopened door on that floor and found it locked. Unlike the other glass knobs throughout the house, this one was made of delicately carved ivory. The doorplate appeared to be gold.

He took a step back and kicked the door open, noticing that Vignette barely flinched.

“Hold it now, what’s all this?” the words popped out of him on their own. He stood in the doorway of what appeared to be the boudoir of a whorehouse madam. Red velvet was draped everywhere, and even the wallpaper was embossed with red-and-gold fleur-de-lis patterns. This room was neither barren nor packed. A single chaise longue occupied one end of the room with a lamp and reading table. On the other end was an elaborate dressing table fit for a Broadway actress and piled with an array of makeup items and half a dozen colorful female wigs. Next to the mirror stood a rack of elaborate dresses and walking outfits, with the appropriate shoes lined up below.

Turn boys into girls . . .
And these were, no doubt, the same outfits that would be described by witnesses who saw a “small-boned woman” near the crime scenes around the Barbary Coast. He turned to see Vignette staring up at him.

“All right, now,” he whispered. “You have to see everything? Look around inside of here and meet The Surgeon.”

“I’ve heard about her. You think I don’t know anything? She’s some crazy killer lady.”

“Right. Except it turns out, here, that she’s a man after all. A man who dresses like a woman. That’s what all this is. Right here is where Mr. Tommie Kimbrough has been turning himself into The Surgeon. And whatever it was that he was talking about doing up at the Golden Gate, it looks like he might be already headed out that way.”

“And he’s got Shane,” Vignette quietly added.

A
FTER
S
HANE
GAVE HIMSELF
up for dead, he was amazed to feel himself gripped by the utter fearlessness of his rage. An absolute transformation began taking place inside of him. Because of it, his fervent wish to reclaim the bold stance that he was able to make for Vignette not only came true, it arrived as a sum multiplied.

All of the anger that he had barely sensed within himself in the past now overflowed and demanded release. His lifelong concern about how anyone else might perceive him receded into his memory and dissolved there. Every part of him that formed while he was playing the good orphan to encourage his adoption out of St. Adrian’s vanished, while the parts of him that were so concerned about being the perfect adoptee for the Nightingale family disappeared.

The shame that caused Shane’s speech to stutter also left him, and the voice that boomed out of him was nothing that he recognized as his own.

“God damn you, you bastard! God damn you into Hell! I swear I’ll kill you! I will kill you!”

Tommie backhanded him across the mouth with such force that Shane was knocked into momentary silence. It left his head ringing.

“Who are
you
calling a bastard?” Tommie hissed. “You don’t know
what the hell you’re talking about!” He paused to pace back and forth, practicing his breathing. Finally he made himself calm and continued.

“I’m the
real son,
you miserable larva! I’m the real heir! You’re just my father’s little ‘oops,’ some son of a whore that Daddy was careless enough to impregnate!”

“There, you see?” Shane shot back. “You are out of your mind! I don’t have anything in common with you! You think that I’m your bro—”

Tommie struck him again. Harder this time. The room swam and Shane’s vision blurred.

“You will
not
use that word! I do
not
think you are my brother! That’s the whole
point,
you stinking idiot! You are a piece of garbage that our father and his slut left behind. She would have kept you in her shitty little world and no harm would have been done! It’s all you ever deserved anyway! What have you ever done to earn anything, any privilege? Who the hell are you?”

Shane just stared at him. He had been forced into silence, but the rage still fueled him, demanding release.

Tommie sneered. “Oh, not feeling so talkative, now? You were quite the little tough guy there for a few seconds, weren’t you? You never would have known anything about this, and I never would have known anything about you, if my parents—
my
parents— hadn’t found me naked with a couple of the neighborhood boys. Is that justice? Is that the way for me to find out I have a bastard son of a bitch for a half brother, and that I am then completely disinherited in his favor, just because of who I am?”

“You are getting crazier by the minute, mister.”

“My, aren’t we confident? What happened to your stu-stu-stutter, bastard boy?”

“It decided to leave so I could tell you that you are going to rot in Hell.”

“The bastard boy is a fortune-teller! He knows my future!”

“That’s right.”

“You don’t look that powerful, under the circumstances. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“You’re the one who didn’t notice. You didn’t notice me in the Nightingale house. And I heard everything. For a day and a half, I heard it all.”

Tommie’s triumphant look faltered for just an instant, but he quickly restored it. Shane went on anyway.

“So what about our half sister, Vignette? Did she have the same mother as I did?”

Tommie looked at him, puzzled, then just shook his head. “You’ll be glad to know that the father who intended all your life to leave his bastard in poverty is dead. And so is the bitch who was willing to throw me away, her own son, just because I was different. Different from them. They killed each other.”

“You killed them.”

There was a long pause. Shane could not see what Tommie was doing. Finally, from a corner behind him, he heard Tommie’s voice. “You don’t know that.”

“Oh, I know it. Because I know you. I listened to your pathetic babbling for all that time. And after a while, I could tell that half of the time, you didn’t know whether you were talking out loud or not. Sometimes one of them would answer you when you said something, and it would surprise you. Because you didn’t know that you said anything out loud.”

Tommie focused a stare on him as if he were a lab specimen. “Interesting, you’re still not stuttering.” He gave Shane a pouty smile and a little wink. “Shane, Shane. Were you faking it all along? A fake stu-stu-stutter? Why? To get girls, perhaps?” He whispered conspiratorially “I know you’re at that age . . .”

Shane ignored the question. What difference would the answer make? Despite the fear gnawing at him, his rage still focused his attention like a sunbeam through a magnifying glass. He knew that
he had the power to turn that burning ray onto Tommie Kim-brough. And he knew the exact combination of words to make it happen.

Shane took a deep breath and once again squeezed every muscle in his body to keep his voice from faltering. He looked straight into Tommie’s eyes and held his gaze.

“I have to empty you out.”

This time Tommie could not conceal his shock. Shane saw the blood rush to Tommie’s face. And off in the back of Shane’s mind, a part of him wondered how a man who has slaughtered innocent people as a source of joy could still have the ability to blush at all.

Tommie made an incredulous little giggling sound, then asked, “You’re going to do what?”

“You know what it means. I heard you say it. I heard you tell all about it. It’s just something you were thinking out loud. Without even knowing you were talking! But I heard it. Even after they were all dead and I knew for sure that you had nobody to talk to, you kept right on arguing with your demons. I listened. I was inside of your head.”

Tommie leaped forward and flashed his heavy-bladed knife directly under Shane’s nose. “Shut up! Shut the fucking hell up!”