Girl in Disguise Read online

  I couldn’t—and didn’t—linger. A tiny alarm at the back of my brain began to clang louder and louder. Every moment I stayed put me in danger of being discovered. I had to leave, and finally, feeling my feet and my mind heavier than I could have imagined, I did.

  • • •

  I said nothing. Not to DeForest, not to anyone. Aside from Pinkerton, he was my only ally in the agency. If I exposed him, I would lose a friend. His predilections clearly hadn’t impeded his abilities as an operative, so there was nothing to gain from speaking up. I had to be practical.

  The first time I saw him after that night, quizzing him at Pinkerton’s behest about the habits of train-based pickpockets, I was uncomfortable. I asked him questions, but I couldn’t concentrate on his answers. An image of him with the other man, their heads bent together, sprung up unbidden in my mind. His words buzzed in my ears, and I had to ask him to repeat himself. I learned what I needed to, but I was concerned our bond had been irrevocably altered.

  The next time I saw him, I only thought words and not the image: I saw him with a man. After that, the information faded, day by day, until it was barely a tickle at the back of my brain.

  Walking away from what I’d seen that night, I thought it might be hard to keep it hidden from him, knowing something he wasn’t aware I knew.

  But I could keep secrets, even one as potentially incendiary as this one.

  And so I would keep it, for a while.

  Chapter Nine

  A Visit

  I had been a Pinkerton operative for more than a year before someone tried in earnest to kill me.

  By then, I was living in a smaller, finer boardinghouse just off Des Plaines Street. My unusual comings and goings at Mrs. Borowski’s had started to draw notice from my fellow boarders. I gave a false name at the new house to make things easier. Whoever I was on the inside, as far as this corner of the world was concerned, I was Miss Cora Harris, spinster. That was all they knew and all they needed to know.

  My new boardinghouse was comfortable and elegant. I had a good-sized room with a bed and bureau and my own private dressing room. The bedspread was soft under my fingers, and the drapes at the window were new enough not to be faded from the sun. The window overlooked the street at the front of the house, shaded by a pretty, delicate birch tree. I pretended I was fully accustomed to such lush surroundings. Miss Cora Harris had not been raised in theaters and flophouses, terrified of being left behind on purpose or by accident; Miss Harris was a lady.

  And while I returned to the boardinghouse nearly every night, all my days were spent on cases. A year of experience had made me wiser and more useful as a Pinkerton operative. I knew nearly every kind of case. Counterfeiting, blackmail, burglaries of all kinds. I had impersonated a fortune-teller to suss out a poisoner, a case that was not just memorable because of its novelty but because the nut juice Tim Bellamy offered me to darken my skin did not fade completely for an entire month. I assumed he’d stained me on purpose, but I didn’t complain, either to him or to Pinkerton. I knew that appearances were everything. If I appeared to be a difficult employee, even if I had every reason, I’d lose the ground I’d gained with the boss. And Pinkerton had come to rely on me more and more. Sometimes, he even seemed friendly.

  It was only unfortunate that my least favorite kind of case was also the kind Pinkerton found me most essential in solving: the murders.

  The Harrington case began with a tapping on my window, just after four o’clock in the morning.

  Groggy with sleep, all uncertain, I heard the noise. Was it even there? Was it part of a dream? I opened my eyes to see.

  As soon as I knew for sure that the sound was real, and the gentle tapping became a louder series of knocks, I immediately slid across the bed and pulled my Deringer from the nightstand. I thumbed the hammer, stood, and wrapped my robe more tightly around my body as I walked toward the window. I drew aside the curtain with one fingertip, just the narrowest sliver, and looked out. I could not have been more surprised at what I saw.

  Tim Bellamy stood under my window, hunched against the nighttime chill and darkness, staring up expectantly with his cold, blue gaze.

  After a few long moments, he said in a normal speaking voice, “Let me in, please, Mrs. Warne. I don’t think either of us likes me standing here.”

  I replaced my gun in the drawer and hastened into the hallway, unlocking the front door of the building and holding it open to admit him. He immediately handed me something and stood silently with his heels together on the carpet, waiting, like a messenger boy.

  I opened the paper note, hastily folded and not quite square, no envelope. It read:

  136 Sedgwick. Fatal case. Come right away. AP.

  “He was going to send a messenger,” said Bellamy quietly. “I offered to come instead. I didn’t think you should go alone this time of night.”

  It wasn’t the time to argue. I could defend myself against his chivalry some other day. I turned back toward my room and said, “Come on.”

  “Mrs. Warne, I don’t think—”

  “The hallway’s worse than outside. Someone will come along. Think of my reputation.”

  That got him moving. He stood in my room like a statue, facing the closed door, while I dressed hastily. I would have suspected any other man of peeking over his shoulder while I was en déshabillé, but I doubted our white knight would lower himself to something so base. Had the circumstances been otherwise, I would have needled him about it to amuse myself, but had the circumstances been otherwise, he never would have been standing there.

  After that, the only question was whether or not to take my gun. But if Pinkerton hadn’t suggested it, I likely wouldn’t need it. It sounded like the violence was in the past tense. I slid a jackknife into my boot just in case.

  Bellamy and I walked together in complete silence, keeping a brisk pace, block after block disappearing behind us. I scrambled a bit to keep up, my breath coming faster, but I had no intention of asking him to slow down. When the boss said right away, I knew he meant it.

  As I’d expected from the address, the house was impressive. Three steady floors of good brick behind a cheery green front door and bright white shutters. It would not have been stretching the truth to call it a mansion. Walking up to it for any other reason, I would have been jealous, but the word fatal loomed large in my mind. If this case was what I feared, I would not have traded places with the mistress of the house for anything.

  Pinkerton, in his shirtsleeves and a sober charcoal vest, met us inside the front door.

  “Empty?” asked Bellamy, receiving a curt nod as his answer. He then stood by the door, facing outward, his arms folded as if keeping watch.

  To me, Pinkerton said, “I know this wasn’t the most pleasant way to wake up. But I needed you to see everything before it was disturbed.”

  “A fatal case, you said.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many? When?”

  “One. Last night, we think.”

  I asked the easy next question. “Why aren’t the police chasing this?”

  “We’ll call them shortly,” he said.

  I chose my next words carefully. I was still sleepy but not too sleepy to understand the gravity of the situation. “How do we know about this if we didn’t hear it from the police?”

  He looked at me in silence. I quickly realized he was giving me the chance to change my question so I wouldn’t get an answer I didn’t like.

  Still, I needed to know. “Have we been hired to find the truth or to put together the evidence to support a lie?”

  “Fair question,” he said. “Her husband found her. Cut her down, said he thought she might still be alive. She wasn’t.”

  “So she’s a suicide, and he thinks…what?”

  “Well, he told me that she appeared at first to be a suicide, but when he looked clo
ser, he saw signs that she might not be.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll need you to see her yourself. Are you prepared?” He paused with his hand on the closed parlor doors.

  “Is anyone?” I asked and pushed past him into the parlor to look at the dead body.

  The woman lay on the carpet as if resting, which I supposed she was, only forever. She wore a simple homespun dress with a pattern of small flowers, pink on cream. Had I not been told, I wouldn’t have taken her for the lady of the house. I looked up at the nearby balcony, where I could see an overturned chair and the frayed ends of a cut rope. The other part of the rope lay a few feet away as if flung there. Other than the cut, it looked brand-new.

  Pinkerton and I both stopped, as if by accord, a few steps away from the body. He pointed to the marks around her neck. They did indeed look like the marks of a noose. But there were other marks too, lighter ones—around her wrists, as if she had been bound. There was no blood, either on the body or around it. The faint scent of verbena lingered near the body, not disguising the unmistakable stink of death. She’d worn a lovely perfume, but she’d died like all of us do, with the undignified loss of bodily control. I raised my handkerchief to my nose and mouth to ward away the worst of the stink, trying to concentrate.

  “Who is the husband?” I asked.

  “Jay Harrington. President of National Cattle Company.”

  “Rich?”

  He gestured, with one sweep of his arm, to the house around us. It was more sumptuous on the inside than the outside. The Persian carpet upon which the body lay likely cost more than the agency saw in a month. The library walls were lined with rich-looking, leather-jacketed books. The foyer floor, if not marble, was an excellent facsimile thereof. I should have known without asking the question, but it was hard to focus. Good detective work involved a complete view first, then a narrowing. Methodically, I noted everything, then tried to make sense of what I saw.

  “I suspect she was tied up,” I said, pointing to her wrists. “Then tortured in some way, hoping that she’d give up information.”

  I looked over her wrists again and her neck and eyes. One eye was partly open, giving her an uneasy look, almost as if she were just starting to wake up from sleep. But the pupil was fixed. There was no red in the white, as I would expect from someone who had died of strangling, either by someone else’s hand or her own. I had seen examples of both. There were no burns or open wounds on her pale skin, just the scrapes and bruises, all superficial.

  I added grimly, “I don’t think they got what they wanted.”

  “If that’s the case, why would they kill her?” Pinkerton asked. “Why not hold her for ransom? The husband would have paid dearly to get her back.”

  I bent down and knelt on the carpet, looking more and more closely at her mouth. Her lips were slightly swollen. Not bruised but reddened. I used a pencil to open her mouth and peer inside as best I could. There was something behind her teeth that didn’t belong. I braced myself for the task and put my fingers inside the dead woman’s mouth, pulling out a wad of torn fabric. Stained cotton. I showed it to Pinkerton and said, “I think they intended to hold on to her. I think they killed her by accident.”

  He nodded soberly, and I realized that he had already guessed the answer. She had died by smothering, not by strangulation, and she certainly hadn’t done it herself. The rope, the hanging—it was a clumsy attempt to disguise what had really happened. Not suicide but murder, and not a planned one. Improvisation.

  “You agree?”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “So why did you bring me in to look?”

  “I figured you could do a more thorough inspection to see if I’d missed anything.” He gestured at the wad of cotton. “I hadn’t gotten that far yet. Also, I suppose it was a sort of a test. But the third thing is the most important.”

  “And that is?”

  “I need you to help me figure out what to do next.”

  I looked down at the dead woman, considering.

  Pinkerton added, “No witnesses. No information. Just the dead woman and anything she can tell us.”

  I stood, stretched, and looked away from the body, trying to clear my mind. The house was lovely. It was a good reminder that having lovely things doesn’t save a person from the world. And it might have been the money that brought misfortune to the Harringtons’ door.

  The door, I thought.

  “She didn’t do it herself, so someone was here. So how did they get in? And how did they leave?”

  “The husband didn’t notice anything. Or if he did, he didn’t say.”

  We checked the doors ourselves. No sign of forcing, either at the front door or the back. Thinking out loud, I said, “Well, the locks might have been picked, but they weren’t forced. What if the perpetrator had a key?”

  “You think the husband let someone in?”

  “Could be. But I was thinking something different. Maybe it was his key, but someone else got their hands on it.”

  “How?”

  “Where do you keep your spare house key?” I asked him, knowing the answer.

  “In my office. In my desk.”

  I was beginning to get the seedling of an idea. I turned back to the body of Mrs. Harrington. She looked like a doll now, a broken doll. I tried to look at her corpse only as a collection of details. Her hair was several shades darker than mine and her skin several shades more pale. Her eyes were closer together, and she was narrower at the shoulders. But these were all minor details and could be overcome. The key element was present. We looked to be about the same size.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “The husband is our client?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I searched for the right words. “Mad with grief? Sobbing, screaming? Or can he keep himself together?”

  “Stunned, I think, but coherent. What do we need him to do?”

  “What time does he go to work?”

  “I can ask.”

  “Does his wife ever visit him at his office?”

  He was only a heartbeat behind. “Let’s find out.”

  • • •

  Three hours later, at Jay Harrington’s downtown office building, I walked in through the front door with my head held high. Only I wasn’t myself. I was Sarah Harrington, in a square-necked, sprigged dress and graceful, feathered hat, risen from the dead.

  I’d carefully chosen the dress from Mrs. Harrington’s wardrobe that was most like the one she wore when she died. I drew the line at removing the actual garment from her body, but the greater the resemblance I bore to her, the better my plan would work. We would only get one chance.

  Bellamy had remained back at the house. Pinkerton had already arrived here before me, pretending to be a customer, speaking with Mr. Harrington himself. He’d originally asked to be paired with another man in the office, giving him a better vantage point, but a jolted, nervous Mr. Harrington admitted that he couldn’t think of a single man in his office who he fully trusted, who would be one hundred percent beyond suspicion. I couldn’t blame him. Poor man. He was admirable for even trying this gambit. We were all doing our best, but we’d never known the dead woman. Everything truly depended upon his successful charade.

  I hoisted the lunch bucket. It was not empty, because we might need to play the scene all the way to the end if no suspect gave himself away at my first appearance. Cold chicken with rolls and butter awaited us if we needed to extend operations. I knew they would taste like dust; food eaten on a case always did. Readying myself for my performance, I neared Mr. Harrington’s desk.

  “Oh, Jay!” I called in a voice we’d rehearsed together to be as little like mine and as much like hers as possible.

  “Sarah, dear,” he called back and held his arms out toward m
e.

  My knees nearly buckled under me at the naked longing on his face. No one had ever looked at me with such passion, but it wasn’t me he was really looking at. I was only his pretend wife coming toward him. The real one would never do so again.

  I let my eyes scan the room lightly as I walked, though Pinkerton was the one in charge of watching the reactions of the other men in the office. When it came, the reaction was so obvious not even Jay Harrington, caught up in playacting a normal life, could miss it.

  Two desks over from Mr. Harrington stood a short man, thick in the waist under his neat, pin-striped vest. The placard on his desk named him: Gordon Wilder, vice president.

  We all heard his audible gasp and saw his head turn. On seeing me approaching and hearing Jay call out Sarah’s name, the round little man went white.

  His desk was only a few steps away. I would need to pass him to get to Harrington. This gave me the opportunity to be sure, and I took it.

  I stepped toward him, saying, “Surprised to see me?”

  He staggered backward a full step. If we’d had any doubt of his involvement, it vanished.

  As I closed the gap between us, still advancing, a second wave of recognition dawned on his face. There was relief—and much more.

  “You’re not her,” he said.

  I was considering my answer when he launched himself at me. I only had half a moment to react, and I got my hand halfway down my thigh toward my knife, but I didn’t have nearly enough time to draw it, let alone defend myself. He tackled me around the waist like a dummy, squeezing out my breath and propelling us both to the ground. If Pinkerton or Harrington tried to step in, they were too late; my head thumped hard against the wood of the desk. I felt his hands on my throat, the thumbs pressing down and down and down.

  After that, I saw nothing but sparks in blackness, and then even the sparks winked out, one by one.

  Only sound reached me then, a man’s sobs and hiccups, very close by. The soft weight of a body, breathing, was on me. The hands on my throat were hot and merciless.