Addleton Heights Read online

  I mumbled yes as I felt an odd twist in my stomach.

  Montague sounded like an excited schoolboy going to the carnival. “Thank you, Mr. Kipsey. Marcus, you may open the door.”

  Six

  I entered the room last behind Hennemann and rubbed my eyes awake. The fragrant aroma of books filled my nostrils. It was intoxicating. Thousands of books of every size and color lined maplewood shelves from floor to ceiling. Only once had I ever been in such a massive, open room. That had been as a boy visiting the garment factory where my mother had worked in Dolan.

  Maybe I’d misjudged this guy. Was it possible that he wasn’t as tetchy as his reputation? How could someone having such an obvious love for books and knowledge not be all right?

  “And I thought that I like to read,” I said, scanning the shelves from side to side. It was like a book warehouse, probably everything in print.

  Montague seemed pleased that I was impressed. “Yes, I’ve always had a love of the printed word. Though, to be truthful, some of what you see in here is business writings—financials, steel manufacturing schematics, reports, and the like. But, Mr. Kipsey, to the task at hand.”

  The steam-powered chair sped up, passing a reading couch and end tables.

  Hennemann broke from me to trot in front of Montague. He stopped ahead to turn the lights brighter in the alcove area at the end of the study.

  Instantly noticeable was the punctured metal globe on the floor. It lay beside a toppled waist-high cradle stand. There were half a dozen books scattered on the rug, and of course, there were the still bodies of two men, both lying in puddles of blood.

  And Hennemann was worried that I’d ruin the rugs with my wet boots?

  As I approached the scene, I pressed the button in the brim of my hat. I coughed to cover the click sound the device made.

  Only four pictures left. I’d have to make each shot count.

  “Who found them?” I asked as I approached the first body.

  “Berkeley,” Montague answered. “Shortly after midnight.”

  Careful to avoid stepping in blood, I crouched and measured the man’s height by unwinding a spool of marked string from the top of his hat to the heel of his boot. Six foot four.

  With a fair amount of effort, I rolled the body over to study his face and snap a shot for later. He looked like he was well into his fifties, but there were signs of drinking. Sometimes that can distort the appearance of age in a man.

  Calluses on his hands told of a life of physical labor, though not as hard as that of a crop farmer from the agronomy sector. Blackened areas under the fingernails of the right hand indicated that he satisfied his tobacco habit by chewing.

  The dead man’s suit was a common, well-made brown tweed, but judging by the wear on the cuffs and elbows, it had been worn a lot, possibly every day for a time, and the bottom button was missing.

  I stood and faked rubbing my forehead so I could snap a picture of the corpse lying next to his gun. The weapon was nearly as big as Hennemann’s.

  The victim’s vest had two small-caliber punctures, but what did him in was the bullet that connected with his jugular. The blood from this wound had soaked his shirt in the shape of a macabre bib.

  Who shoots a man in the throat?

  I silently counted twenty-two steps on my way to the other body and snapped another picture. This man was smaller, with the build of a mortician or a schoolteacher. He was on his back. Dead brown eyes looked past me as if searching the things of Heaven unknown. He was considerably better dressed than the first man. If not for the bloodstain on the left side of his woolsack coat, one might’ve envied his tailor.

  I performed the same measurements as before, the slender guest coming in under five and half feet.

  Just so you know, my willingness to touch the skin of a dead man has always been woefully inadequate given my line of work. I attribute my squeamishness to finding my father dead on a midmorning in June when I was six years old. I can still remember the queer sensation that enveloped me when I grabbed his forearm to rouse him after one of his usual drinking binges.

  My mother had already gone off to work, so it was just me and him in a room that reeked of booze and vomit. After I realized that he wasn’t going to wake up then or any other morning ever again, I sat in the wooden chair in the room and cried until she returned home that evening.

  Even at that young age, I knew that our lives would never be the same—no one could survive on the wages of a factory seamstress. As I waited for my mother, I felt the spiral of change uncoiling to swallow us up like a python. The few hours crumbling away at his bedside were the final moments of the life I had known.

  When the department employed me, I observed how fellow officers treated a corpse with healthy indifference. To them, a body without a living person in it was just a shoe empty of a foot. I hoped that in time, I’d develop this ability to see a corpse as simply a large piece of evidence.

  It hasn’t happened yet. To this day, nothing brings the reality of my father’s death into sharp focus quite like touching the clammy skin of a person whose blood has stopped moving through their veins.

  And yet, as I examined the second victim, I discovered something peculiar about the index finger of his right hand that would require me to pick it up. At a distance, I thought the tip of the digit had been dipped in ink. He looked like an office type, maybe a solicitor’s assistant working with pen and quill. I could have dismissed it, except that the brown spot wasn’t dark enough to be ink.

  I sucked in a breath and lifted the man’s lifeless wrist.

  The finger had been dipped in blood.

  I held the hand for as long as I could stand it.

  The wound on the left side of his body, while fatal, hadn’t killed him instantly.

  Why hadn’t he gone for help?

  The gore on his side . . . a single shot from a large-caliber weapon at close range had taken a big bite out of him below his ribs.

  Unlike the man shot in the throat, this one had lived a few minutes before he’d bled out—time enough to think about dying. Certainly, any pleas for help would’ve gone unheard in a room this size, especially with the rows of books serving as insulation. Why had he stayed in here?

  I rested the dead hand back on his chest and discreetly wiped my fingers on my trousers.

  It’s common for a shooting victim to grab their wound, but if he’d done that, his palm would’ve been covered with blood. Only the fingertip was stained.

  I moved a few feet from the body and picked up the smaller weapon on the floor. Sensing the two men’s anxiousness brought on by my silence, I made my observations aloud. “This is a pepperbox gun. At one time, weapons of this sort were the preferred firearms of gamblers. The gun’s small size allows for concealment in a waistcoat pocket. This comes in especially handy when the integrity of your royal flush is challenged at the poker table.”

  “Are you a gambler as well as a reader, Mr. Kipsey?” Montague asked.

  “Poker’s my game, but it’s not much of a gamble for someone who knows what they’re doing.”

  “More a student of the strategies of chess, myself,” Montague said.

  I nodded respectfully and then looked over at the man shot in the throat and back to the snub 4-barrel of the gun in my hand. I’d bet the coin from a month’s worth of cases he’d been shot by this gun.

  Just what kind of a rum do was this?

  Montague cleared his throat behind me to attract my attention. When I turned, the old man motioned with a bony finger toward the recessed area a few feet to the side of me.

  Instead of more books, the nook contained a small bookcase holding a variety of sundries. Between the shelves hung a portrait, probably of his father, Fredric Montague. Someone had scrawled letters across the painting.

  It was clear to me now. The thin man had done this. For whatever ghastly reason, he’d written this in his own blood. The first six letters were clear enough to read: “LOOK AT.” Directly ben
eath were larger letters, “JASON,” followed by a distorted character that was rounded and smeared.

  “Is that a ‘D’ or an ‘O’ on the end?”

  I faced Montague as his powered chair rolled up with a whine.

  “You’re the detective,” Hennemann said, strolling up to his side.

  “We don’t know, Mr. Kipsey. I suspect that Mr. Nelson’s final act was to write the name of their killer for us to find.”

  “Nelson? He’s the skinny one?” I turned back to the painting and clicked a shot, my last one.

  “Yes, Mr. Nelson was my Babbage administrator—the overseer of the difference engine and my financial clerk for the last seventeen years.”

  “So he wasn’t a guest? He worked here?” I turned to face the portrait and pointed at the scrawled message. “‘Jason O.’ Is he an employee too? Was Nelson warning you to watch out for this Jason O.?”

  “We don’t know,” Hennemann said. “That’s why you’re here.”

  Montague butted in. “I want you to find whoever this Jason person is and bring him to me so that I may speak with him. To find out why he did all of this.”

  “All of what?” I asked.

  “The murders, you scrogger,” Hennemann answered. His face was turning red, and the clockwork fingers clamped into a fist.

  Apprehensive that he was about to pounce, I removed my hat and offered the slightest of nods. “Mr. Montague, sir, something’s off here. Did you move the bodies?”

  He snorted. “Do I look like I’m capable of anything like that from this chair?”

  “Then someone else . . . Has anyone come in here and rearranged things?” I stared at Hennemann.

  “No, I had Berkeley lock the door after he showed me,” Montague said. “I took a nap until your arrival.”

  “If no one else has been in here—if nothing’s been moved—you have a problem, sir.”

  He raised a finger to stave off Hennemann as he asked, “How so, Detective?”

  I replaced my hat. Returning to the first body on the floor, I asked, “I assume you know this man too, that he was also a guest, not an intruder?”

  Montague engaged the steam chair and followed. “Yes, the man there is Anthony Fitzpatrick. He’s somewhat of a . . . special projects manager.”

  Another special projects manager?

  “So, he’s an employee too?” I asked, bending to pick up the man’s weapon. “Did these two men know each other?”

  “Get to the point, Kipsey,” Hennemann ordered as he passed the wheelchair to join me.

  I ignored him. It was my show now. “This is a Colt M1892.” I presented the piece as if I were an auctioneer. “It holds six rounds, medium caliber .38.” The cylinder purred like a cat as I spun it. I stopped it with a click and slid it open.

  As the remaining bullets emptied into my palm, I confirmed their number. “Five shots left in a piece that shoots six, but you only need one to do the trick, right, Marcus?” I winked at Hennemann as I extended my hand.

  He received the bullets reluctantly. It was clear that he was not accustomed to playing the straight man.

  I counted aloud the clinks they made landing in his vast metal hand. Next, I twirled the gun like a pinwheel, stopping it aimed at the big man. I clicked the hammer back as he had done to me in my office, and I smiled. “One shot.”

  “Mr. Kipsey . . .” Montague said from behind him in a parental tone.

  I handed the weapon off to Hennemann’s free hand as he muttered, “Don’t you ever point a gun at me, loaded or not.”

  “You’re adorable,” I whispered and watched his face turn a shade of purplish-red.

  I don’t know if he would have struck me in front of his boss, but I moved out of range just in case. Back at Nelson’s body, I grabbed the weapon beside him. “Now, this one’s not much for distance, but it’ll do the job if you can get close enough. It delivers four rounds, .22 caliber, one from each chamber.”

  I slid the barrel open. “As you can see, there’s nothing in here, no bullets. That’s because three of them found their way into Mr. Fitzpatrick over there.”

  I allowed the pistol to fall to the floor and strolled over to the punctured metal globe. I shook it and offered it to Montague. “You hear that clang? A stray that missed Fitzpatrick.”

  Montague acknowledged with a nod and allowed the metal ball to roll from his lap to the floor with a mild thud. “So, all the shots are accounted for. What’s your supposition?”

  “That these two men, the finger painter and your special projects manager, shot each other. But I think you already know this.”

  I waited for Montague’s expression to change. When he didn’t flinch, I added, “Admit that you knew there was never anyone else in the room with them, no Jason O. or otherwise.”

  A faint high-pitched whine from the back of the motorized chair pierced the silence, adding to the tension. I ignored the sound as if it were the buzzing of a gnat. “Admit it,” I said.

  Finally, he replied with a smug expression, “You seem very certain of this.”

  “Mr. Montague, why do you believe me to be so gulpy?”

  “You’d best watch yourself,” Hennemann chimed in as he returned the bullets to Fitzpatrick’s revolver.

  Montague turned a dial, attempting to squelch his chair’s growing hiss. “Indulge me, Mr. Kipsey. What is it that you do believe to have happened here? How can you be so certain that Jason O. isn’t responsible?”

  “I’ll tell you, but first, answer some questions for me.”

  He shot a glance at Hennemann and then back at me. “Very well, I’ll be as candid as possible so that you may locate this Jason and bring him to me. But please keep in mind there are some topics about which I must implore discretion.”

  I was sick to death of hearing about discretion from this man. We were in the presence of two dead men.

  “All right then. First of all, both of these men worked for you. What was the special project that Fitzpatrick was assigned to?”

  “I’m sure it was nothing of consequence to this case,” Montague answered.

  The whine from the chair grew, and I caught myself thinking about how long it’d been since I’d had a decent cup of tea.

  “You don’t know or you’re not telling me?”

  “Move on, Kipsey,” Hennemann said.

  I sighed my displeasure loudly to be heard over the whine of the chair. “So, any idea why they both brought weapons to your party? I ask this only because you’ve stated that your mansion is the safest place in all of Addleton Heights. In fact, Mr. Hennemann wouldn’t even let me bring my derringer to the scene of a double homicide.”

  “I’d authorized Mr. Nelson to carry a pistol to protect himself,” Montague replied. “I think it obvious he wasn’t a strong man. If he were to be captured, what he knew about Montague Steel could be damaging to the company.”

  I looked at Hennemann. “And which of those special projects required Mr. Fitzpatrick to carry?”

  The big man answered with gritted teeth. “I won’t tell you again, Mr. Montague says Fitz’s assignment isn’t important to this.”

  What were they hiding? I couldn’t work like this. I’d had more disclosure during poker games. “Fine. So I’ll tell you how I know Jason O. was never here. These two men, for whatever reason, shot at each other.”

  Montague interrupted. “What if Jason O. stood between them and ducked as they shot at him?”

  “Sir, with all due respect, I think we both know that’s not what happened here.”

  The steam chair began to sputter as the whine turned into a high-pitched whistle. Hennemann attempted to adjust a lever to release pressure, and Montague smacked his metal hand away, leaving him looking chastened.

  Montague, the powerful magnate, had become flustered—the mighty titan of industry reduced to fidgeting with the dials on a push chair.

  I took advantage of the distraction. Maybe he was rattled enough to slip. “If you were truly concerned about Jason
O., if you really believed that he was here at the mansion . . . you knew you had him confined somewhere up here with the only way of escape being the bassel transport.”

  The noise of the chair forced me to speak more loudly until I was nearly shouting. “But your guests were freely allowed to leave. In fact, we passed two groups of them on the way up here.”

  Montague alternated between twisting knobs and smacking the panel with both hands. Out of striking range, Hennemann cautiously pointed at a lever.

  I wondered if anything I said was getting through. I backed away a few steps on the off chance this thing was about to blow.

  Montague motioned for Hennemann’s assistance, and he obliged by accidentally breaking off one of the levers in his metal hand.

  “Another thing is that you told me you were napping before we arrived,” I shouted above the noise. “That’s hardly the behavior of a man who believes there’s a killer loose on the grounds. So no, Mr. Montague, this is not a murder, at least in the way you’ve presented it to me. I’ve been lied to about what’s really going on here.

  “Now, do either of you know why these two men would have a quarrel with one another? Did one owe money to the other, or is there a woman? Or could it be that—”

  My question was cut short by a loud burst of steam that shot from the back tubing of the chair. A few seconds later, the pipes’ brass caps hit the floor like shrapnel.

  I ducked.

  Montague erupted in a far worse explosion. “Sawyer! Get me that tink-ish fool Sawyer!”

  “Yes, sir.” Hennemann was already running for the exit. The floor shuddered beneath his heavy footsteps.

  “Marcus, he’s in his lab with the crates. Bring him to me—now!”

  The cloud of steam dissipated as Montague grumbled to himself. “Blasted Sawyer! “

  And then his gaze turned to me, and I realized he’d heard my every word.