Murder In Chelsea Part 23

Frank felt a chill slither down his spine. "The bottle who brought?"

Vaughn was scratching his head. "I need a drink."

"Answer my questions, and you can have one," Frank lied. "Who brought you a bottle?"

"I don't know. Some fellow. He wanted to talk to Emma."

Frank glanced at Gino, who gave him an "I told you so" look. "Who was he? What was his name?"

"I don't know. I don't remember. Nice fellow. He gave me a drink."

"Then what happened?"

"I don't know. I felt funny. I don't remember. I need a drink."

"Vaughn, listen to me. Emma is dead. Somebody strangled her. Do you remember what happened?"

Vaughn stared at him for a long moment. "Emma is dead?"

"That's right. Somebody strangled her. Was it you?"

Vaughn's bloodshot eyes filled with tears. "Emma's dead? She can't be dead."

"She's dead, Vaughn. Somebody strangled her, and you were the only one in the room with her."

"No, no, I'd never hurt Emma. I loved her. She said we'd always be together, and she'd take care of me."

"Then why did you strangle her?"

"I didn't! I'd never hurt her." His voice broke. "Emma, Emma!" He dropped his head onto his arms and began to sob.

Frank swore.

"I told you we didn't know what happened in that room," Gino said.

"He could be lying," Frank said, even though he didn't believe it himself.

"He could be," Gino agreed without much conviction.

Then Frank remembered what Haynes had said about Emma scratching her killer. He pulled Vaughn's hands out from under his head. Not a single scratch.

Frank sighed. "Lock him up and go back to the hotel. Take somebody with you, and see if you can find somebody who saw this visitor. The desk clerk had to see him, at least. Tell him you're going to pack up all of his customers and bring them back to question them if he doesn't tell you the truth. That'll put the fear of G.o.d into him."

"It won't do any good. n.o.body will admit to seeing anything."

"I know, but we have to try."

"What will you do?"

Frank pushed himself to his feet. "I've got to go tell the rest of Catherine's family that her mother is dead."

11.

SARAH SIGHED WITH RELIEF WHEN SHE HEARD SOMEONE ringing her doorbell. After her mother left, she'd started cleaning her house in hopes that the activity would distract her. Instead, it had only given her more time to think about her situation. She hoped it was a delivery. She needed the distraction.

Then she saw Malloy on her doorstep, and she realized she hadn't wanted it to be a delivery at all.

"Malloy," she said, smiling in spite of everything. He didn't smile back as he came in. In fact, he didn't even meet her eye. "What is it? What's happened?"

He waited until she'd closed the door behind him. "Emma's dead."

She needed a full minute to take it in. "Dead? How could she be dead?"

"Somebody strangled her."

"Dear heaven! Who?"

"I don't know." He handed her a battered wooden box so he could slip out of his coat and hang it up.

"What's this?"

"I found it in Emma's room. It's full of letters and papers. I thought there might be something important in it, so I brought it along to go through later."

By silent agreement, they made their way to the kitchen, and Sarah set the box on her desk in the front room as they pa.s.sed through. The breakfast coffee was gone, but she started a new pot, then sat down opposite him at the table.

"What happened?" she asked.

He told her how he and Gino had found Emma.

"Wait, Vaughn was alone in the room with her body? But you just said you don't know who killed her."

"He was pa.s.sed out. Not just drunk, but like somebody'd slipped him a Mickey Finn. We took him down to Headquarters, and he kept falling asleep while I was questioning him."

"Who would have given him a Mickey Finn?"

Malloy smiled suddenly and shook his head.

"What's so funny?" she demanded.

"You. I'll bet your mother doesn't know what a Mickey Finn is."

"Everybody knows that."

"Ask her."

"I will. So who could have slipped him a Mickey Finn?" she asked with a grin of her own.

"He claims some fellow came to see Emma last night. The fellow gave him a bottle, or maybe just a drink from a bottle, and he says it made him feel funny and he doesn't remember anything else, and now Emma is dead."

"That's pretty far-fetched."

"Yeah, even a drunk like Vaughn could make up a better story than that. All those plays he's been in, he probably knows a lot of stories he could've told us."

"Are you saying you think it's true because it's so unbelievable?"

"Well, I guess it's possible that he strangled her when he was drunk and doesn't remember it now. That happens with drunks. But if he just didn't remember, he'd probably say so. I think his story is true because if he'd decided to lie about it, he would've made up a better story."

"But who would have wanted to kill Emma?"

"Ozzie Wilbanks, for starters. I almost forgot, you don't know what happened yesterday. Emma went to see Wilbanks."

"Oh, my. That must have delighted him."

"It didn't make Ozzie or Gilda very happy either. I don't know what happened between her and Wilbanks, but when I got there, Emma was telling Ozzie and Gilda that she had decided to marry Wilbanks after all."

"What did Wilbanks say about that?"

"Nothing. He'd had one of his coughing fits, and he couldn't speak."

"How did you happen to walk in at just the right moment?"

"I went to see her at the hotel, and Vaughn told me where she was. I figured she would've already left, but I got lucky."

"Do you think Wilbanks would really marry her?"

"No, and neither did she. I think she just said it to annoy Ozzie and his bride."

Sarah considered this for a moment. "Do you think someone did believe she'd marry him and killed her to stop it?"

"By 'someone,' do you mean Ozzie?"

"I guess I do."

"I don't know, but why else would somebody bother to kill her? She didn't have Catherine, and even if she did . . ." He straightened in his chair, obviously realizing the awful truth at the same moment she did.

"Even if she did, she wasn't the threat," Sarah said, her blood turning cold. "Catherine is the threat."

"We're not going to let anything happen to her, Sarah."

The coffee had started to sputter, and she jumped up to rescue it, grateful for the distraction. This was just too horrible.

"Both of the women who were closest to Catherine are dead," she said, pulling cups and saucers out of the cupboard.

"I thought I'd figured out who killed Anne Murphy."

"Who?"

"Something Kirby told me got me thinking-"

"Who's Kirby?"

"Oh, he's the investigator Hicks hired to find Catherine. I went to see him to find out if he knew anything we didn't."

"Did he?"

"He said Emma, uh, hits Vaughn."

"What? That's crazy. Women don't hit men." She set the cups on the table.

"He said they sometimes do, and the men won't hit them back for some reason."

Sarah shook her head. "Maybe because they've been trained that it's not right to hit a woman."

"Maybe. Knowing Vaughn and Emma, I'm not real surprised, actually. He got a black eye a couple days ago. He said he walked into a door."

Sarah poured the coffee. "That's unbelievable."

"That he walked into a door?"

"No . . . Well, yes, I guess. I meant it's unbelievable that a woman would hit a man and blacken his eye."

"Kirby's point was that Emma was known to be violent when she's angry. Then he said something I should've realized right away: Anne Murphy and the killer were alone in her room at the boardinghouse."

"Why is that . . . Oh! I see. Men aren't allowed upstairs, at least in decent boardinghouses." She sat back down.

"But she would've invited Emma upstairs, the same as she did you and Maeve."

"And you think that's what happened, that Emma went up to Anne's room, and Anne told her Catherine was missing, and Emma got mad and stabbed her?" Sarah thought this over. "Did she bring the knife with her?"

"I think Anne already had the knife in her room. She was scared, remember? Emma had told her she was leaving the city because someone wanted to kill her, and for all Anne knew, they wanted to kill her and Catherine, too."

"So the knife was handy for the killer, who maybe hadn't planned to do Anne any violence at all until Anne provoked her by telling her that her daughter had vanished."

Malloy nodded. "That's what I was thinking, and I went to the hotel to take Emma in and see if I couldn't get her to confess."

"And instead you found her dead." Sarah sighed. "I hoped she wasn't the killer."

"Who else would Anne have invited up to her room, though? It had to be a female."

Sarah saw a flaw in that logic. "But the landlady wasn't there the morning Anne was killed, and neither was anyone else. Who would know if she invited a man upstairs?"

"Remember how scared she was. I doubt she would've let a strange man into the house at all. Kirby had been asking people about her, and I'm sure someone told her. She probably thought he was one of the men Emma was afraid of, so she would've been extra careful."