The Kingdom of Bones

TWENTY-NINE

Each Pinkerton office had a criminal department. They had card files and a rogues’ gallery and the resources to track certain kinds of criminal activity. The information held by the Philadelphia office didn’t compare with the criminal departments in New York and Chicago, but it gave a good account of all the local activity. The room was stuffy and high-ceilinged, and there was a fly somewhere loose in it.

“This one may fit,” said Sebastian, pulling out one of the cards to read it more closely.

“How so?” Sayers was in one of the office’s captain’s-style swiveling chairs, hands on his knees, looking ill at ease. He was out of place in here, and he knew it.

Sebastian read for a few moments and then said, “It’s one of our closed cases. A woman engaged us to look for her husband. Forty-two years old. He owned a company making optical and scientific instruments. Happily married, five children, and he disappeared without any reason or warning.”

“People disappear all the time. That’s not enough.”

“Wait. We closed the case after a farmer found his body. At first, it was assumed that he’d fallen from a train. He lay by the tracks for a month until the farmer came along. After all the animals and insects had been at him, it was impossible to be sure of the cause of death. But in the space of that month, our agent found out a few things about him that his family would have preferred not to know.”

Sayers had been swinging the chair from side to side. He stopped.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “He led a double life.”

“He liked the vaudeville. The chorus girls best of all.”

“Louise Porter is no chorus girl,” the prizefighter said.

“I use the term loosely.”

“As does everyone.”

“I mean young actresses of any kind. He’d take a box at Keith’s theater or the old Trocadero and send notes to the stage door. Once in a while, he’d get lucky.”

“Louise has a particular method,” Sayers said. “I’ve seen it develop over the years. She arrives in a new city, sometimes with a letter of introduction to someone in society. That gets her an invitation to one salon or another, where she sings and recites and always causes a stir among the men. She might hire a hall to give a reading, but never a theater. She keeps the title of an actress, but she is never part of any cast or company. She dare not be.”

Sebastian held the card up, as if it might offer the proof of something.

“This man’s wife was on the committee of the Philomusian Club,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a women’s club. Arts, music, poetry. For all we know, some of their events could even have been hosted at his mansion.”

Sayers thought about that one. It did, indeed, seem to put a different light on matters.

He said, “Is there anything there to say how he died?”

Sebastian had to go deeper into the file for an answer. He read for a while and then, with his eyes still on the paper, said, “Our police contacts say they found needles in his body. A dozen of them. All in a cluster. Pushed in where no needle ought to go. All else might decay, but the needles did not. The family were never told.”

Sayers asked to see the paper. Sebastian checked for anyone passing the room before he handed it over, but no one was there. Bearce wouldn’t like it if he saw an outsider reading a confidential file, potential client or not.

Sayers read for a while and then said, “I believe this may be evidence of her work.”

“Her work?”

“I have learned so much about my own sex in these past fourteen years, Becker. There are men who hold that they worship innocence while they seek to consume it like dogs. And there are upright, respectable citizens whose secret dream is of pain and humiliation at the hands of another. Of a mistress, or a lover. To undergo such is an almost unbearable ecstasy for them. Most stay well within the safety of the dream. Some would go to its limit. And at that limit, there is always the possibility of something going wrong.”

“These are the men she seeks out?”

“She does not need to seek them out. Whatever signal they are looking for, they seem to find. They pursue her. Most of what I know came from the case of a man in San Francisco. He had survived her attentions, but was left damaged. His consent to what had happened meant nothing in law. There was a scandal. After that, she had to stop using her own name.”

“Good God,” said Sebastian, who until this moment was certain that he’d pretty much seen everything there was to see of human nature.

Sayers said, “Don’t you see what she’s doing, Sebastian? She’s fulfilling the letter of the Wanderer’s contract without being entirely true to its spirit. She dispenses suffering, all right, but only to those who actively seek it. If a death occurs, it’s more by their misadventure than by her intent.”

“A nice distinction,” Sebastian said drily. “As I’m sure the widows would agree.”

Alongside the post office building stood the square-towered headquarters of the Philadelphia Record. They waited in the foyer as Sebastian had a message sent upstairs, and within a few minutes one of the regular staff came down, greeted him as an old friend, and led them through to the archive rooms.

Here, recent copies of the newspaper were piled flat on shelves. Older editions could be consulted in huge bound volumes that needed a rolling ladder to get them down and specially built lecterns to hold them open.

They were interested in those issues that covered the weeks before the dead man’s disappearance. Sebastian wasn’t entirely sure of what they were searching for, but Sayers seemed to have more of an idea.

“Here’s one,” Sebastian suggested, and read aloud from the classifieds. “Miss M. S. Lyons. Private instruction in all the latest and most fashionable dances. Classes taught out of town. Private lessons any hour.”

Sayers glanced up from his own pages. “A dance instructor?” he said. He didn’t seem persuaded.

“You said she tried something like it before,” Sebastian suggested.

“I don’t think so,” Sayers said. “I’m in the society pages, here…” He ran his finger down an entire column in a second or two. Sebastian realized that he wasn’t so much reading it as taking in the text as a block of print and extracting from it such detail as he needed. Was that how actors got their lines so quickly? Not so much learning the words as absorbing the sense of a piece, and then re-creating the words from it?

Sayers’ finger stopped on the page.

“Here she is,” he said excitedly.

Sebastian moved to his side, and both read together. It was a small announcement in the society column for a literary lunch to be held at the Rathskeller Café and Ladies Dining Room in the Betz Building on Broad Street. The guest speaker was to be the noted actress and récitateuse…

“Mrs. Louise Caspar,” Sebastian read aloud. “That must be a cruel twist of the knife for you. I’m sorry, Sayers.”

“Ignore it,” Sayers said. “I can.”

There were only two photographs accompanying the society columns, and neither was of Louise.

Sebastian reread the piece and said, “I see no actual mention of the Philomusian Club.”

“The name places her in town. That’s good enough for me. And look at the date. The trail is fresh.”

They looked through more issues, but found no further reference. As they were leaving the Record building, Sebastian said, “We need better information. There are other newspapers.”

“Never mind newspapers,” Sayers said. “Find me a dozen rich women with time on their hands. Find me the clubs and the literary societies. The lecture circuit and the private library. Those are the fields where she beats for her game.”

They stopped at the Automat for coffee and sandwiches. It was early for lunch, and the office crowds hadn’t built up yet. Despite the morning’s excitements, or perhaps because of them, Sayers appeared to have a healthy appetite. His color was better than the day before, his eyes brighter. The cuts about his head were beginning to heal…although for the moment he continued to have the look of a barroom brawler, taken out of his element and tossed into the daylight.

Sebastian said, “Say you find her. What then?”

Sayers was oddly silent.

Sebastian said, “I don’t believe you’ve never thought about it.”

“I have thought about it,” Sayers said. “I have written the scene in my head a thousand times. But until I face the moment itself…I have no idea what will happen.”

Rather than return to the Pinkerton office, where conversations might be overheard and questions raised, they stood outside Wanamaker’s and pretended to study the window displays.

Sebastian decided to be bold.

“You drink, Sayers.”

The prizefighter took this without embarrassment or any show of defensiveness. “I have been known to,” he conceded.

“It will not help you from here.”

Sayers gave a wry smile. He said, “It is very hard for a man to deny something whose companionship has sped the passage of the harshest of days.”

“Nevertheless. If you’re staying in my house, it won’t do to be three days without a shave and have gin on your breath.”

“I can easily get a shave,” Sayers said.