7
Sabina
She was at her desk, once again rereading the two threatening messages Amity Wellman had entrusted to her care, when John arrived on Tuesday morning. The messages bothered her. Why would a person bent on shooting an enemy, real or imagined, write a series of warning notes in advance of the act? A misguided attempt to frighten the intended victim? Because the tormentor hadn’t made up his or her mind yet to cross the line into violence? Or was there some other explanation?
John greeted her pleasantly enough, but as he folded his umbrella and shed his overcoat his smile turned upside down and became a semi-ferocious scowl. Which meant that he was in one of his dark moods, at least in part because he had spent a restless and mostly sleepless night. Smudges under his expressive brown eyes testified to that.
She waited until he was seated behind his desk before she asked, “Difficulties, John?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“The way you’re scowling. You have the look of a pirate on his way to the gibbet.”
“Bah.”
“A business-related problem?”
“Yes, confound it. Involving a banker named Titus Wrixton who called for a consultation yesterday. He has troubles that seemed simple enough to handle, and in exchange for a generous fee I agreed to act on his behalf. Now I’m almost sorry that I did.”
“What sort of troubles?”
“Of his own making that led to blackmail. And worse, as it turned out. Infuriatingly worse.”
“How so?”
John didn’t answer. He sat scowling, fluffing his beard, apparently having subsided into a gloomy reverie. He could be closemouthed about his investigations at times, particularly when they weren’t going well. On those occasions he tended to resent being prodded. He would confide in her eventually, in his own good time.
He changed the subject before Sabina could. “What’s that you’re studying? Letters?”
“Notes. Threatening messages.”
“Threatening to whom? Not you?”
“No. To a friend.”
“The new client you mentioned in your note?”
“Yes.”
“A wealthy one?”
“That’s always the first question you ask. Financial gain isn’t the only reason we’re in business.”
“No, but it’s the primary one. Who is the client?”
“Amity Wellman.”
“Ah. The woman in your Sunday bicycle club, the leader of the voting-rights folderol.”
Sabina said, “Folderol, John?” sharply and warningly.
He paused in the act of charging his pipe, correctly read the expression on her face, and said hurriedly, “I was merely teasing. You know I support the suffrage movement—”
“It’s not a subject to be teased about, now especially. Not with me, nor with any other New Woman. I’ll thank you not to do it again.”
“No, no, of course I won’t.” He looked genuinely abashed. “Sincere apologies, my dear. I’m just not thinking clearly this morning. Those notes... are they genuine? Is Mrs. Wellman’s life in danger?”
“Yes. She was nearly shot to death Sunday night. Do you want to hear the details?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
Somewhat mollified, Sabina told him of the attempt on Amity’s life, the possible suspects, and the fact that she’d hired Elizabeth Petrie to watch over her friend. She also showed him the notes. He was properly attentive but had no fresh perspective to offer. Not that she had expected him to; the entire matter was outside his experience.
“If there is anything I can do—”
“There isn’t,” Sabina said. “At least not now.”
Since he had paid heed to her, she felt she owed him the same courtesy and made another effort to draw him out. “Are you ready to discuss the Wrixton matter now?”
He uttered a grunting sound that she took to be an affirmative. She prompted him by saying, “Infuriatingly worse than blackmail, you said. Meaning?”
“Murder. Sudden and so far inexplicable.”
“Who was murdered? Not the banker?”
“No. He’ll live to pay our fee; I’ll see to that.”
“Then who was killed?”
He related the details of his meeting with Titus Wrixton, the probable reason behind the extortion attempt, and his surveillance of last night’s second blackmail payoff in the Hotel Grant’s bar parlor. “The blackmailer, or the blackmailer’s emissary,” he went on, “is or was Raymond Sonderberg, the proprietor of a cigar store in Gunpowder Alley. He led me directly there from the hotel.”
“And then?”
“He was shot to death in his locked quarters before I could confront him and recover Wrixton’s letters and payoff money.”
“Locked quarters?”
“Behind double-locked doors and a tightly barred window.”
“It couldn’t have been suicide?”
“No, though that is evidently the official verdict.”
“What makes you so sure?”
John’s answer to that question indicated that he was right, Raymond Sonderberg had in fact been murdered. “A puzzling series of events, to be sure,” she said when he’d finished his account. “But perhaps not as mysterious as they might seem.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know from experience, John, that such mysteries generally have a relatively simple explanation.”
He admitted the truth of this. “But I’m hanged if I can see it in this case.”
“Well, the first question that occurs to me — was the crime planned or committed on the spur of the moment?”
“If it was planned, it was done in order to silence Sonderberg and make off with the five thousand dollars.”
“By an accomplice in the blackmail scheme?”
“By the scheme’s mastermind. I suspect Sonderberg was only a pawn. In any event, the second person was waiting for him in his quarters. The stove there was glowing hot and there was not enough time for Sonderberg to have stoked the fire to high heat, even if he’d built it up before leaving for the Hotel Grant.”
“Then why all the mystification?” Sabina asked. “Why not simply shoot Sonderberg and slip away into the night with the loot?”
“To make murder appear to be suicide.”
“That could have been accomplished without resorting to elaborate flummery of whatever sort. Locked rooms and mysterious disappearances smack of deliberate subterfuge.”
“That they do. But to what purpose?”
“The obvious answer is to fool someone in close proximity at the time.”
“Who? Not me, surely,” John said. “No one could have known ahead of time that I would follow Sonderberg from the hotel to Gunpowder Alley. Or that I would be near enough to the shop to hear the shots and rush into the side passage.”
“The bluecoat, Maguire, then. From your description of him, he’s the sort who makes his rounds on a by-the-clock schedule. Still, it seems rather an intricate game just to confuse a simple patrolman.”
“Exactly. If the whole business was planned ahead of time, and not a result of convenient or inconvenient circumstance.”
“In either case, there has to be a plausible explanation. Are you absolutely certain there was no possible means of escape from the building after the shooting?”
“Front and rear entrances bolted from the inside, as I told you. The door to his living quarters likewise bolted, the only window both barred and locked. Yes, I’m certain of that much.”
“Doesn’t it follow, then, that if escape was impossible, the murderer was never inside the building?”