Murder On Waverly Place

6

SARAH COULD SEE HOW MUCH MALLOY WANTED HER OUT of there. He hated involving her in murder investigations. How many times had they both vowed she’d never be involved again? She almost wished she could oblige him this time, but with the poor girl sobbing in her arms, she couldn’t possibly walk out, not even if it meant protecting her mother from scandal. In point of fact, her mother didn’t look like she was all too eager to leave either.

“There, now,” Mrs. Decker was saying soothingly. “Crying isn’t going to help anything. Why don’t you come back inside here with us.”

“You won’t leave me alone?” Madame said, looking more like the young girl that she was than the sophisticated spiritualist she’d pretended to be.

“Absolutely not,” Sarah assured her, pretending not to notice the face Malloy made when she said it. She turned the girl and walked her back into the parlor, her mother close behind. When the doors were safely shut behind them, Sarah seated the girl on one of the sofas and sat down beside her. “Can I get you something? Some tea?”

“No, no,” Madame said quickly. “I… What will they do with Nicola?”

“Who’s this Nicola?” Mrs. Decker asked, taking a seat in the chair beside the sofa.

“He is my fidanzato,” she said. “We are to be married. I am not sure of the word…”

“Fiancé?” Sarah supplied.

“Yes,” she said. Her remarkable eyes shone with unshed tears.

“But why would he want to kill Mrs. Gittings?” Sarah asked.

“He would not,” Madame assured her. “He would not want to kill anyone, but the police will accuse him, and because he is poor, no one will believe him, and he will hang-” Her voice caught on another sob.

“Slow down!” Sarah cried. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself. I promise you, Detective Malloy won’t arrest him if he’s innocent.”

“How can you know? He is the police!” Madame reminded her tragically.

She was right, of course. The New York Police were notorious for arresting whoever might be handy, with no regard for what the truth might be. Unless someone paid them a “reward” to find the real culprit, anyone might be charged and convicted of a crime. This Nicola sounded like someone who could easily fall into that category. “Mr. Malloy is a friend of mine,” Sarah said. “That’s why my mother insisted that he be called in to investigate.”

“You know a policeman?” Madame asked, staring at Sarah and her mother in amazement. People like Mrs. Decker did not know policemen.

“Yes, we do,” Mrs. Decker confirmed. “Mr. Malloy will make sure that the real killer is found and punished.”

Sarah hoped he would be able to do this. Right now, she knew too little of what had transpired here to be sure. “Can you tell me what happened? The policeman who came to get me didn’t know very much except that Mrs. Gittings had been stabbed.”

Madame straightened, looking back at Sarah with some apprehension. “I do not know what happened,” she said rather stiffly. “I was… Yellow Feather was there. I was in a trance. The first thing I knew was Mrs. Burke was screaming that Mrs. Gittings had fainted.”

Sarah wanted to ask her a question, but her mother jumped in before she could.

“It was horrible, Sarah. Yellow Feather was trying to contact Maggie, but there were a lot of spirits there today, and they were all talking at once. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. He started shouting, trying to quiet them down, and then everyone else starting talking at once.”

“The spirits?” Sarah asked in confusion.

“No, of course not. Everyone in the room. They all wanted to ask questions, so they started shouting, trying to make themselves heard. They were extremely rude,” she added, a bit outraged. “I couldn’t understand a thing.”

“When was Mrs. Gittings stabbed?” Sarah asked. She glanced at Madame Serafina, but she was studying her hands where they were folded in her lap.

Her mother had to think about it. “That’s just it, we don’t know exactly when she was stabbed. She didn’t scream or anything, so far as I heard, which now seems very strange. Wouldn’t you scream or at least cry out if someone stabbed you? The first hint we had that something was wrong was when Kathy… Mrs. Burke, she started screaming.”

“Did she see Mrs. Gittings get stabbed?”

“Oh, no,” her mother assured her. “None of us did. The room was dark, just the way it was at the séance you attended, dear.”

Sarah nodded, remembering how she hadn’t been able to see a thing in the pitch-dark room. “Were you holding hands?”

“Yes, just the way we did that other time. Everyone was holding someone else’s hands or, rather, their wrists. So of course we would have known if anyone at the table had let go to… Well, you know. Then Kathy… Mrs. Burke started to scream that Mrs. Gittings had fainted. That’s what she thought, of course.”

“Why did she think that?”

“Because she fell out of her chair, and naturally, she wouldn’t assume the woman had died, at least not at first. Mrs. Burke said she fell against her. She was quite hysterical when she realized the woman was actually dead.”

“I’m sure she was,” Sarah said. “When did you realize that?”

“As soon as someone opened the door, and we got a good look at her. The knife… Well, we all saw it sticking out of her back.” Suddenly, her mother looked a bit pale.

Sarah reached over and took her hand. “I’m so sorry you had to go through this.”

“Not your fault,” her mother reminded her sheepishly. “You made me promise not to come back here, didn’t you.”

“I’ll say I told you so later,” she promised in return and turned back to Madame Serafina. “Could anyone else have gotten into the room?”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Decker answered for her. “Remember, we would have seen if someone had opened the door. I’m sure no one else could have come in.”

Sarah nodded, recalling quite clearly. That meant someone at the table must have killed the woman, although that didn’t really seem possible. Fortunately, figuring out how it had happened was Malloy’s job. She might be able to help him along, though. “Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill Mrs. Gittings?” she asked the girl.

Madame Serafina looked up, her expression guarded. “No, none at all.”

“What do you know about her?” Sarah asked. “Does she have any family? I suppose someone should send for them, if they haven’t already.”

“No, she has no family,” Madame said quickly.

“That must be why she spent so much time here,” Mrs. Decker said. “Mrs. Burke said she attended all the séances.”

But Sarah was still looking at the girl. She was hiding something. “Madame,” she said kindly. “What do you know about her? You have to tell us everything so we can help you,” she added, not sure if it was true but knowing it would work.

“Mrs. Gittings is…” The girl looked uncertainly at Mrs. Decker, then back at Sarah again. Her dark eyes looked even darker. “This is her house. She… finds people to come here, and she takes the money.”

“Are you saying that she’s your manager?” Sarah asked in surprise.

“Yes, that is it. She is my manager,” she said, grateful for the suggestion. “She takes care of everything for me so I do not have to worry.” This sounded like something Mrs. Gittings would have told her.

Sarah looked at her mother, who gave her a small shake of the head to indicate she’d had no idea. Sarah wondered briefly if Malloy knew this yet. “So you live here with her and… and who else?”

“Nicola,” she admitted reluctantly. “And the Professor.”

“How did you get involved with her in the first place?” Sarah asked, excusing her nosiness with the certainty that any information she could get about Mrs. Gittings might help identify her killer.

“She found me,” the girl said, obviously choosing her words carefully. “I was telling fortunes. I told her fortune one day, and she said I had a gift. She said I was wasting my talent, and she could help me. She said I could be rich.”

“So she brought you here?” Sarah guessed.

“Yes. She helped me to… to contact the spirits. Then she found people to come.” The girl was starting to look uneasy again.

Sarah had a million questions about how Mrs. Gittings had helped her to contact the spirits. “How did she-?”

“Please,” Madame interrupted anxiously. “What will happen with Nicola? He did not do anything wrong. You cannot let them take him to jail!”

“Nobody’s going to take him to jail,” Mrs. Decker promised rashly.

“That policeman hit him!” the girl said, tears pooling in her eyes again.

“Which policeman?” Sarah asked. “Not Mr. Malloy!”

“No, no, one in uniform,” the girl said, the tears spilling down her cheeks. “Please, do not let anything happen to him!”

“If he’s innocent, nothing will happen to him,” Sarah promised even more rashly. “But the only way to prove he’s innocent is to figure out who really did it. Do you have any idea at all?”

“None!” the girl insisted. “Please, can you find out what they are doing to Nicola? Can you talk to your friend Mr. Malloy and ask him?”

Sarah gave her a reassuring smile. “I’ll see what I can do.”

FRANK WENT BACK TO FIND THE PROFESSOR SITTING WITH his head bowed, rubbing his forehead. When he looked up, his face was gray with strain.

He took his chair opposite the Professor again. “Who was this Mrs. Gittings to you?”

He stiffened. “I worked for her.”

“What else? Don’t lie to me,” Frank warned. “I’ll just get annoyed, and you won’t like what happens after that.”

The Professor had been around long enough to know how the police behaved when they got annoyed. “We were partners,” he said, his face rigid with reluctance.

“You split the profits of this little scam?”

“It’s not a scam,” he protested indignantly. “Madame Serafina is a legitimate spiritualist.”

“Yeah, that’s like being a legitimate fake,” Frank said. “So you picked this girl up off the street and taught her the tricks of the trade-”

“There are no tricks! You can scoff if you like, but ask any of her clients. They’ll tell you.”

“I’m sure they will. So you think this Nicola killed Mrs. Gittings because she wanted to get rid of him.”

“That’s right,” Rogers said, pulling himself up straight in the chair again.

“I just have one problem,” Frank said. “He wasn’t in the room when the séance started, and everybody said that nobody could get in without them knowing it. So how did he do it?”

“I told you, he was hiding.”

“Where was he hiding?”

“In the cabinet,” Rogers said, as if it should have been obvious.

Now Frank felt stupid. He’d seen that cabinet himself and wondered about it. O’Toole had told him it was empty, so he must have checked it. But Nicola could have gotten out when nobody was looking, sometime after everybody ran out of the room and before the police came. But where had he been hiding in the meantime? He’d have to question the boy next, he decided with a sigh.

This time when someone knocked on the door, he was glad for the interruption.

“Doc Haynes wants to see you,” the cop guarding the hallway reported.

Frank crossed the hall to find the medical examiner sitting in one of the chairs at the séance table.

“What exactly was going on in here?” Haynes asked. “O’Toole’s been telling me some cock-and-bull story about spirits.”

“That girl in the front room, she’s some kind of spiritualist,” Frank confirmed. “She can talk to your dead mother and find out where she hid the family jewels.”

“My family didn’t have any jewels,” Haynes said with amusement.

“Too bad. But that’s what was going on. People pay this girl money so they can sit around a table in the dark and talk to their dead relatives.”

“Why would they want to do that?’ Haynes asked. “I’m glad most of my relatives are dead so I don’t have to talk to them.”

“I don’t understand it either, but that’s what was going on.”

Haynes looked around. “If they were all sitting around the table, why didn’t they see who stabbed her?”

“It was dark. Pitch dark,” Frank added. “And they were all holding hands, so nobody could do anything without the people next to them knowing.”

Haynes gave this some thought. “Unless one of the people sitting next to her did it. She’d notice one of them let go of her hand, but before she could say anything, she was dead.”

“Did it happen that fast?” Frank asked in surprise.

“I’ll know more when I do the autopsy, but I’m pretty sure that’s a stiletto.” He nodded toward the body on the floor. “They go in like a knife into butter, if you’re lucky and don’t hit a rib, and this fellow was lucky. I’m guessing the knife went right into her heart. She might’ve felt a pain, but she probably thought it was indigestion or something. She wasn’t alive long enough to figure out she’d been stabbed.”

“So she wouldn’t have cried out?”

Haynes shook his head. “I doubt it. If you see somebody coming at you with a knife and see it go in, you’d scream bloody murder. Not because it hurt so much as because you’re scared and you know something bad is happening. Sitting in the dark like that, I’m guessing the last thing she expected was to get stabbed to death while she was talking to her dead relatives.”

“You’d think one of them would’ve warned her,” Frank said, glancing down at the body, which had now been covered with a sheet.

“My orderlies will be here in a few minutes to take her away. I’ll let you know if I find anything else in autopsy.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

Frank remembered the cabinet. He walked over and opened the double doors. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but what he saw was an empty cabinet, just like O’Toole had said.

“You finished in here?” O’Toole asked from the doorway.

“I’m finished,” Doc Haynes said, getting up wearily.

Frank turned to look at the other detective. “You checked this cabinet when you got here to make sure it was empty?”

“Yeah, like I told you,” O’Toole said with some irritation. “We searched this place, top to bottom. I’m telling you, the wop kid wasn’t here.”

“That Professor fellow says he was hiding in the cabinet during the séance, and he must’ve sneaked out and stabbed the woman.”

“I figured it was something like that,” O’Toole said. “But where did he go after that, I’d like to know.”

“So would I,” Frank said. “Guess I could ask him.” He closed the cabinet.

“Mr. Malloy?”

Frank nearly jumped at the sound of Sarah’s voice, but he managed to keep his composure. He turned to see her standing behind O’Toole in the doorway.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but may I speak with you a moment?” she asked.

O’Toole was looking at her like he’d never seen a female before. Frank somehow managed not to punch him, but he did have to use a little force to get him out of the doorway. Frank paused in the hallway, trying to remember which room might be empty. Mrs. Decker wasn’t in the office anymore. He pointed toward the door and followed Sarah inside.

He closed the door behind them and turned to face her. For a moment, just one moment, he thought of all they’d been through together and how she was unlike any other woman he’d ever known. He owed her more than he could ever repay, for what she had done for his son and for helping him solve cases he could never have hoped to solve without the knowledge she had of the rich and the world they lived in. Once he’d planned to repay her by finding the man who had killed her husband and bringing him to justice. Now that he’d done so, he knew nothing could ever repay what he owed her, just as nothing would ever bridge the gap that separated an Irish Catholic policeman and the daughter of one of the oldest families in New York.

Before he could surrender to the despair that thought caused him, she said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but Madame Serafina is worried about that boy, Nicola.”

“She should be,” Frank said, forcing himself to forget what he could not change and concentrate on the case at hand. “It looks like he’s the killer.”

“Oh, no,” she protested. “What proof do you have?”

“The Professor said he was hiding in that big cabinet in the séance room and sneaked out during the séance to stab her.”

“Madame Serafina is sure he didn’t do it,” she said with a little frown that made him want to grind his teeth. She frowned like that when she was setting her mind to something.

“Of course she is,” Frank pointed out reasonably. “They’re lovers. Even if she knew he did it, she’d be defending him.”

“Are you sure he was in the cabinet?” she tried.

“Not yet,” he had to admit. “I haven’t had a chance to question him, but I was going to do that next. Besides,” he added quickly, wanting to convince her before she got too involved in all this, “nobody else who was here even knew who Mrs. Gittings was, so why would they want to kill her? Turns out, she’s the one who ran this whole show.”

“I know. Madame Serafina just told us.”

“Why do they call her Madame Serafina?” Frank asked, strangely annoyed to hear her saying the odd name over and over.

“I have no idea. She’s not even married. It’s probably something they made up to make her sound more impressive.”

“That makes sense,” he agreed. “Anyway, this Mrs. Gittings ran everything and showed up at every séance, probably to keep an eye on Serafina. Everybody else thought she was just another… uh, client,” he said, catching himself. He was going to say sucker, but he’d remembered just in time that Sarah’s mother was among them. “So none of them had any reason to kill her.”

“What reason did Nicola have?”

“From what they said, he was trying to convince the girl to leave here and go off with him. Maybe he was tired of this Gittings woman taking all the money and figured they could do just as well on their own. Whatever it was, they had a big fight about it yesterday.”

“If Serafina was going to run away with him, why would he have killed Mrs. Gittings?”

“She wasn’t. She’d promised to stay if Nicola could stay, too, but maybe Nicola wasn’t happy about that.”

She frowned again, but this time she was just disappointed. “I can see why you’d suspect him. But what about the Professor? He knew her. Couldn’t he have been the killer?”

“He said he was in the kitchen during the séance. Apparently, he doesn’t go into the room with them, and nobody saw him there. Besides, he was partners with the Gittings woman.”

Her face lighted up. “Maybe he was tired of sharing the profits with her,” she said. “That would be a reason to kill her.”

“If you can figure out how he got into the room, I’ll be happy to consider it,” Frank told her dryly.

She sighed. “So it looks like Nicola and Serafina are the only ones with a good reason to want her dead, then.”

“Yes, it does,” he told her with relief. He couldn’t believe she’d accepted it so easily. “So why don’t you take your mother home and let me sort this out.”

She gave him an apologetic smile that was just as beautiful as the regular smiles she gave him. “I know you want us out of here, but we can’t leave Serafina. And if you arrest Nicola, she’s going to be hysterical. You’ll be happy we’re here if that happens.”

“Nothing could make me happy you’re here,” he informed her, making her smile again. She was making him forget why he was here, though. He needed to get away from her and back to work.

“We’ll wait with Serafina until you decide if you’re going to arrest Nicola or not,” she said. “And maybe I’ll be able to find out something helpful from her.”

Defeated, Frank opened the door and motioned for her to proceed him out of the room. “Just don’t think you’re going to get involved in this,” he told her in a whisper as she passed.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she assured him without the slightest hint of sincerity.

Frank gritted his teeth to keep from saying anything else. He waited until she was safely back in the parlor again. Then he went upstairs to find Nicola.

He found him in one of the bedrooms with Donatelli. Nicola was sitting on the neatly made bed, and Donatelli was perched on a straight-backed chair, blocking the door.

“What have you found out?” Frank asked Donatelli.

“His name is Nicola DiLoreto. He’s known Serafina Straface since they were kids,” he reported, not taking his eyes from the prisoner, who stared back with defiance. “They met on the ship coming over from Italy, and their families settled in the same neighborhood. Neither one has any family left, to speak of, so they looked after each other. He worked odd jobs, and she told people’s fortunes on street corners for a few cents until this Mrs. Gittings came along. She’s the dead woman, isn’t she?”

“That’s right.” Frank was looking at the prisoner, too. A bruise was darkening on his cheek where somebody had socked him.

“The Gittings woman said she could set Serafina up in a first-class place, and people would pay lots of money to see her.”

“And that’s just what she did, isn’t it, Nicola?” Frank said conversationally. “So what was the problem?”

“We have no problems,” Nicola said. “Everything is fine.”

At Frank’s nod, Donatelli got up and let Frank have the chair. He moved it closer to the bed where Nicola was sitting, turned it around, and straddled it, resting his forearms on the back of it as he glowered at the boy.

“That’s not what the Professor says,” Frank told him.

“He is lying!” Nicola cried.

“Why would he lie?”

“Because he hates me.”

“Did you give him any reason to hate you?”

“No!”

“How about threatening to take Serafina away?”

“That is not true,” he claimed. “I would never do that.”

“Why not?” Frank asked curiously. “Now that you know how it works, you two could set up on your own. You didn’t need Mrs. Gittings and the Professor anymore.”

“We could never get a house like this,” Nicola pointed out. “You need a nice place if you want to get rich people to come.”

Frank glanced around the bedroom. The bed Nicola sat on had a cheap, iron frame. The only other furnishings were a washstand and a clothespress that looked like somebody had salvaged from the dump.

Seeing his expression, Nicola said, “They never come up here, the people who come. We kept the downstairs nice for them, though.”

Frank nodded. Why waste money on what the customers would never see? “Where were you during the séance, Nicola?”

The boy went rigid and his expression grew wary. “I was upstairs,” he tried. “Mrs. Gittings, she didn’t like the customers to see me.”

That made sense. She could pass Serafina off as a gypsy or something exotic, but people wouldn’t expect to see an Italian boy in a nice neighborhood like this. “I thought you were hiding someplace,” Frank said.

“I was hiding up here.”

“Not downstairs?”

“No, why would I do that?” He had started to fidget.

“I don’t know. Maybe you need to be in the séance room for some reason.”

“I was not in there,” he insisted. “Ask anybody. They will tell you I was not in there.”

“They wouldn’t have seen you,” Frank said. “Because you were in that big cabinet.”

His eyes widened in alarm. “No, I was not!”

“I think you were,” Frank said mildly, remembering the music that almost everyone in the séance room had said they’d heard. “I think you were in there to help make the noises during the sitting.”

“I did not make any noises!”

Frank smiled slightly. An innocent man would have said, “What noises?”

“Somebody made the noises,” Frank said.

“The spirits make them,” Nicola said. “They sing and they play music.”

“How do you know if you weren’t there?”

“Serafina told me.” He seemed proud of that answer.

“You’re in love with Serafina, aren’t you?”

“We are going to get married,” he said, even prouder of this answer.

“When?”

That stopped him. “When… when we have saved up enough money.”

“Didn’t Serafina make a lot of money doing the séances?”

“Yes, but… Mrs. Gittings was holding it for her.”

Ah, another reason for Nicola to want to get rid of the woman. “And she wouldn’t give it to Serafina if the two of you left here,” Frank guessed.

“We did not want to leave,” Nicola said, not very convincingly.

“I think you did,” Frank said. “I think you wanted to run away with Serafina so you could run your own operation, but Mrs. Gittings wouldn’t give you the money if you left, so Serafina convinced you to stay.”

“No,” Nicola insisted.

“And when you realized that Mrs. Gittings wasn’t ever going to give you the money, you knew there was only one way to get it.”

“No, that is not true!”

“So you hid in the cabinet, just like you did every time-”

“No, it is not true, I tell you!”

“And when things got really noisy… Maybe Serafina made sure things got really noisy-”

“She did not have anything to do with it!”

“And when things got really noisy, you climbed out of the cabinet and-”

“No, I did not!”

“-and you found Mrs. Gittings-”

“No, I swear!”

“-and you stuck your knife between her ribs-”

“Stop it!”

“-and then you climbed back in the cabinet-”

“No, I tell you!”

“-and waited until everybody figured out what happened and ran out of the room-”

“No!”

“-and then you climbed out of the cabinet again-”

“I never!”

“-and hid someplace until you saw your chance to sneak out of the house and get away.”

“No, no, I did not! It was not like that at all!”

“How was it then?” Frank asked with great interest.

The boy’s dark eyes were large with terror, but he just shook his head. “I did not kill her.”

“You know what she was stabbed with?” Frank asked.

Nicola shook his head again, probably not trusting his voice.

“A stiletto.”

Nicola swallowed loudly.

“That’s an Italian knife, isn’t it?” Frank asked.

“I… I do not know,” the boy claimed.

“Yes, you do. You knew it would be quick and quiet. You knew just where to stick it, too, so she’d die without making a sound.”

He was shaking his head, but he was terrified now. He was well and truly caught.

“I can’t blame you, Nicola. She was probably a mean old bitch who deserved to die, but it’s still against the law to kill her, so I’ve got to take you in.”

“I did not kill her! Please, you must believe me!”

“You’ll get your chance to tell it in court,” Frank said, pushing himself up out of the chair. He looked at Donatelli. “Take him downstairs and send for a wagon.”

“No, please, I did not do it!” Nicola was protesting as Donatelli, grim-faced, grabbed the boy by the arm and dragged him to his feet. He started babbling something in Italian to Donatelli, who remained unmoved.

Frank waited in the hall while Donatelli dragged him out of the bedroom and followed as they stumbled down the stairway together. Nicola was still protesting in Italian, obviously having decided Donatelli was the only one who might believe him.

As they reached the bottom of the stairs, Frank saw the parlor door open and Madame Serafina appeared, looking as wild-eyed as her lover. Sarah and her mother were right behind her.

“What is happening?” Serafina demanded. “Where are you taking him?”

Donatelli said something to her that Frank didn’t hear, and she started screaming.

“No! You cannot take him! He did not do anything!”

The Professor had come out of the dining room, and he stood there, stone-faced, watching the scene unfold.

Donatelli was saying something to the girl, and Frank realized he was speaking Italian, and she was still screaming. She’d grabbed hold of Nicola, throwing her arms around his neck in an attempt to rescue him from Donatelli. One of the other cops hurried over to pry her off.

Meanwhile, Sarah Brandt had escaped from the parlor and ran to where Frank stood at the bottom of the steps. “You said you weren’t going to arrest him!” she cried.

“No, I didn’t,” he said wearily. “He killed her.”

“He wasn’t even there!” she tried.

“He was hiding in that cabinet. He sneaked out in the confusion and stabbed her, then he got back in before the lights came on again. He’s the only one who was in the room who even knew her besides Serafina, and he’s the only one who had a reason to want her dead.”

The cop had pried Serafina’s arms from Nicola’s neck and was trying to drag her away from him when she heard Frank’s last words. She ceased struggling instantly and turned to Frank. “No, he is not!” she cried. “He is not the only one who wanted her dead. They all did, all of them! Every single one of them wanted her to die!”