In the Shadow of Gotham (26 page)

“He was killed before he went in the water,” Jennings said as he put on his gloves. He motioned for me to come closer to the corpse’s head. “First, look at the eyes.” He pried open one of the dead man’s eyes and explained something I did not quite follow about lines. “Furthermore, see how his head is rotated all the way to one side?” he instructed. “You never see that position in a drowning victim. His head got that way because rigor mortis set in while he was still on land.”

“Any sign of violence to the body?” I asked, knowing from my quick glance at the swollen, discolored remains how difficult a question I was asking. If the river had not erased signs of foul play, it may have actually created them. Underwater branches and rocks could take a toll upon whatever came near them.

“You’re in luck there.” Jennings’s eye glinted as he looked at me slyly, proud of himself. “We think he was a gunshot victim. I’ll know more when I do the autopsy, but there were holes in his clothes consistent with a gunshot wound to the chest. Including on the coat you examined over there.” He gestured to a pile of effects that had been pulled from the river.

My mind raced with possibilities. If this were indeed Fromley, perhaps he had committed suicide, as his mind became unhinged by the murder he had committed and the gruesome fantasies that haunted him night and day. Or had he been killed in the heat of a fight? It had been clear that his volatile temper repeatedly got him in trouble. If this proved to be Fromley . . .

“What’s your interest in him, anyway?” Jennings asked.

I opted for the truth, knowing I could count on Jennings to be discreet. “Actually, he’s the prime suspect in a murder I’m
investigating—that of a young woman in Dobson this past Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?” He looked at me sharply, standing up straight. “You surely don’t mean Tuesday of this week?”

“Yes,” I replied, and wondered why he seemed so surprised.

“Well, if this corpse is indeed Michael Fromley”—he returned to the disfigured body in the wagon and removed the blanket entirely, revealing the corpse’s full state of decomposition—“I’d say you can clear him of that suspicion.”

The corpse was a grotesque mass of black, with little remaining semblance of humanity.

Jennings continued to talk. “Look at the protruding eyes and tongue, the distended abdomen, and the extensive skin maceration. This bloke’s been dead, by my guess, for at least two, maybe even three weeks.”

It was impossible.

And yet, as I gazed at the dark, mottled, distended corpse in front of me, I knew Jennings spoke the truth.

And if so, I realized with dizzying certainty, then everything we had learned and thought about the case up to this point was utterly, stupidly, and senselessly wrong.

Dead for at least two weeks. I walked north on the riding path along the Hudson River with no particular destination in mind; I simply needed to walk. Maybe Jennings was wrong. Maybe the corpse wasn’t Fromley. Maybe it was some poor sod murdered so Fromley might fake his own death. Until Jennings’s autopsy was complete, I could believe it was possible. But the pit in my stomach told me not to pin my hopes in that direction.

Quite literally, I had been chasing a ghost—and that must have been the real killer’s plan. As long as we tracked the long-stale movements of a dead man, the real killer remained safe. What had foiled his plan was the unpredictability of the Hudson waters, which had washed up Fromley’s corpse too soon. Only a few more months in the water, and—if it were still possible to
identify the body as belonging to Michael Fromley at all—it would have been impossible to determine an accurate time of death. We would have continued to blame Fromley as the killer for lack of other evidence.

I lost all track of time as I continued to think. I considered those whom we would now treat with renewed interest as suspects. Angus MacDonald, who had devoted his life’s work to the Riemann hypothesis, only to have a young female graduate student beat him to the solution, immediately came to mind. I wanted to believe the older man’s attestation of innocence, but now we would need to revisit the possibility he was involved. Lonny Moore, the student who had tried to sabotage Sarah Wingate’s academic success, was also a likely suspect—along with any of the other men at Columbia who had resented Sarah’s feminist agitation. One of them might have managed access to Fromley and the research center without much difficulty. I would need to discuss that with Alistair come morning.

Whichever culprit I sought, somehow Fromley remained the key. It had to be someone with access not only to Fromley’s thoughts and murderous fantasies, but also to Fromley himself—assuming the confession letter sent in the box to Isabella proved to be Fromley’s real handwriting. So Fromley remained important: no longer as a suspect to be tracked down, but as a guide to the real killer. The murderer we sought had the ability to kill—but more important, he had the ability to frame a murder scene that had deflected all our suspicions to Fromley.

That thought led me unavoidably back to two uncomfortable suspicions. The first involved Mamie Durant and her mysterious connection with Michael Fromley. She had known where he lived—when even Alistair and the Wallingfords had not. Why? The second involved Alistair, whose own secrets
were now inextricably connected to this case. I could no longer consider Fromley without examining Alistair’s methods at the same time. What information was he still withholding from me? And how did it bear on this strange twist involving Fromley?

I sat down on a bench and gazed blankly at the river, watching the interplay of light and dark cast by the shadows of early-evening dusk. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the locket Sarah had worn, and stared at her picture. Who had killed her? And why?

I would find the answer only once I had uncovered the oddest triad of connections: among Sarah Wingate, Michael Fromley, and the real murderer himself.

Sunday, November 12, 1905

The autopsy results came swiftly the next morning and they were definitive. Dental records confirmed that the washed-up corpse was indeed Michael Fromley. And, by measuring the extent to which it had decomposed, Coroner Jennings was confident that Fromley had spent at least two to three weeks in the river. Together with the bullet fragment found lodged beneath the corpse’s sternum, which suggested Fromley had been shot before his body was dumped into the Hudson, this information placed us firmly back at square one. It did not matter that Fromley had died within the city’s jurisdiction, and thus, technically speaking, was not ours to investigate. His death called into question everything we thought we had discovered about the Wingate murder.

I delivered the news confirming Fromley’s death to Alistair personally at his apartment on West Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. He lived at the Dakota, a sandstone and yellow brick building with some Gothic features. The low iron fence surrounding it, which was decorated with grotesque human and serpentine figures, made it seem particularly uninviting this dismal Saturday morning, as cold rain poured from dark clouds that all but obscured the daylight. Alistair proved equally unwelcoming; the moment I told him the news, he skulked away to his library in silence.

Isabella—who must have heard voices in the hallway from her apartment next door—came almost instantly to Alistair’s apartment to offer me coffee and breakfast. At her request, Alistair’s housekeeper, a matronly woman named Mrs. Mellown, put on coffee, eggs, and toast. I ate as Isabella tried to raise my spirits.

“This is a setback, of course,” she had said. “But the things you have learned in the last few days will help you, I’m sure of it.”

“We owe Sarah Wingate nothing less. But this case was going to be tough—potentially unsolvable—from the very beginning. It was the information Alistair brought to the table that made it seem possible. I’ve no solid leads of my own.”

Her tone had been adamant. “Then you will keep looking. You have seen for yourself that Alistair’s experience and intellectual breadth will not solve your case. Focus upon what you know, and let your own common sense and instincts lead you.”

Yet, what Isabella and others called my “good instincts” actually was something I considered more akin to dumb luck. It was a sudden flash of understanding when all the pieces of a puzzle came together in a pattern that made perfect sense. But
with every case, I worried that my luck was about to run out. And this case was certainly no exception.

Disheartened and frustrated, Alistair finally emerged from his library a half hour later. He looked as dejected as I felt, the heavy bags under his eyes attesting that he, too, had passed a night of sleepless anxiety and worry. We needed the strong coffee in front of us as we retraced our steps to figure out where we had gone wrong. We finished breakfast in silence, as the rain pounded its steady drumbeat against the windowpane.

“I suppose we’ve still a case to solve,” he said, offering a weak smile. “Shall we begin?”

“Everything I need is uptown. Should we head to the research center?” I asked, though the thought of returning outside into the pouring rain was decidedly unappealing.

“Nonsense. It’s all right here. Come.”

We followed Alistair into his dining room, where Mrs. Mellown had already laid a crackling fire. It was a large room, painted in tones of gold and white, and decorated with treasures accumulated during his travels to the Far East. Tapestries, gold vases, and even a pair of samurai swords were placed in different areas of the room. Two piles of folders were stacked at one end of Alistair’s eight-and-a-half-foot dining room table, for Alistair had brought home the most relevant files. As Isabella set to work organizing them in chronological order, I was reminded of all we had lost: Our efforts of the past four long days had been for nothing.

“Fromley, of course, remains the key,” I said. “Though we now know he is not the killer himself, he remains the link to the murderer. The real killer
wanted
us to think he was Fromley. He framed the crime scene to resemble Fromley’s handiwork.
He sent the package to Isabella containing evidence and a confession in Fromley’s own writing.”

Alistair shook his head in disbelief. “How could the killer have known so much? The Wingate murder scene was a perfect match to the scene Fromley had fantasized about. He had described it to me in vivid, breathtaking detail—not just once, but time after time.”

I ran my fingers along the side of the table, thinking aloud. “As you say, the question is
how.
I can think of a few possibilities. The first is that Fromley liked to talk. If he described this fantasized murder scene to you, then he may have just as easily described it to someone else.” I added, “From what you say, it appears he took a positive delight in sharing his revolting thoughts.”

Alistair caught my train of thought. “So the question becomes, which person or persons would he have shared this murderous fantasy with? Someone who, in turn, had his
own
motive for murder—and decided to coopt Fromley’s sick vision in order to frame him.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Someone who is a copycat; he wants his crime to appear as though it were done by a different, known killer, so the investigation will proceed in the wrong direction. Just as our investigation did.”

“So we must continue to focus upon those persons Fromley was in contact with,” Alistair said, “on the theory one of them is the real culprit.”

“Which means we look closely at anyone who had access to him or his files.” I watched Alistair’s reaction carefully. Clearly, he was displeased by the suggestion—but to his credit, he responded rationally.

Though he raised an eyebrow, he said, “I see your point. All
of us at the research center have had unfettered access to Fromley. But not one of us knew Sarah Wingate, much less had a motive to kill her.”

“That we know of,” I said.

“Fine. Let’s consider the matter in practical terms, then. You have eliminated the possibility that the killer is a woman, which clears Isabella and Mrs. Leab. I cannot fathom Tom or Fred in the role of the killer. Tom is as upstanding and honest a man as you’ll find. In physical terms, Fred is too thin and frail to have managed it. And, while he is an odd duck, I can’t see Horace as the killer, either.” Alistair paused as he searched for the right words. “Horace is awkward and bumbling, whereas the killer was highly sophisticated, able to manage a complicated copycat scenario. And Horace has been distracted lately by personal disappointment. His fiancée called off their engagement quite recently, and he does little but sulk about. Because of it, his work has been irregular of late, though he has continued to come in as scheduled.”

“What about his gambling?” I asked. “You said he was in debt. The pressure of debt—especially if it’s owed to less-than-understanding bookies—can be tremendous.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Alistair agreed. “But plenty of young men get into a spot of trouble, are helped out of it, and never have issues again. I was one of them, once. I’ve helped Horace with his debts and I can assure you he is a small-time gambler who has been clean of late. He hasn’t asked me for money in at least two months. Besides,” he added, “we can’t seriously think Sarah Wingate was killed for money, can we?”