Seven for a Secret (18 page)

As had Val, apparently. The shape didn’t quite fit between my ears. I hastened after, catching him at the stair.

“Are you some kind of . . . of almshouse administrator?”

He scowled over his shoulder. “Of course not.”

“You just gave your own money to a penniless emigrant. On condition he
sing for you.
”

“A penniless
voter.
Part of roping them in, isn’t it? I’m the police captain of Ward Eight and its Party boss, not to mention the senior Knickerbocker Twenty-one engine man.”

“That means you’re a dead rabbit, not a charity director.”

“Yes, I am a dead rabbit. And the things you don’t know about politics would run Harper Brothers dry of ink.”

“Then aren’t you going to tell me about them?”

“No. You treat this place like a quarantine hospital. And since you know nothing about politics, then nothing about politics should surprise you.”

I confess myself stung. And over accusations of political apathy, no less. Scrambling up the stairs, I searched for a hole, any hole, in his weary-sounding statement. None seemed apparent.

The upstairs room proved cozier than the engine shrine. Night tapers flickered in brass sockets along the walls. An iron pot on the hearth emitted a heady smell of rich brown stew that set my stomach roiling. Bunks had been attached to the plaster, the way berths are rigged in a ship, which explained where Val had been sleeping. Without preamble, he ladled some stew into two wooden bowls, produced pewter spoons from a drawer, and took a seat at the table in the center of the room, shoving an abandoned card game, several dice, an empty corn whiskey bottle, a box of cigars, and a copy of the
Herald
aside.

Too topsy-turvy to continue fighting, I sat down and ate. The stew proved one of Val’s standards, veal with beer gravy. It was perfect. Of course it was. I began reading the
Herald
upside down, as I’d missed it that morning, my eyes at once drawn to
THE TERRIBLE STORM
. Sixty men from the doomed packet ships had been killed in the gale, and ten vessels foundered, amounting to upward of half a million in damages. Possibly, we were at war with Mexico. Possibly, with Great Britain. Sighing, I turned the paper over to reveal an advertisement for imported Turkish leeches. That was better. At least leeches aren’t lethal.

“Why were you looking for me?” I inquired when we’d both pushed our bowls away and commenced staring at nothing.

“When?”

“This afternoon, when you went to my ken while I was at the Tombs. What did you want?”

Valentine rubbed at the bags beneath his eyes with a sweep of his fingertips, yawning. “Oh. Nothing. Just passing the time.”

That was about the dustiest thing I’d heard since leaving the courtroom.

“I actually want to know.”

“I actually just told you. Christ’s left nut, you can be
such
a sack of drowned kittens, Timothy. Oh, excepting when you’re antagonizing murderous culls or transporting corpses, presumably all because you’ve developed some sort of death wish.”

“That’s a vile thing to say, and you know it,” I choked out. “I’m not the one with the . . . Moving her body was—”

Stopping seemed best at this juncture. My throat had inconveniently grown splinters. Val opened his mouth, but then wisely shut it again and instead poured a generous pair of whiskeys.

“It was horrible,” I finished when he’d sat down again.

“I know it was,” he said quietly. “That took a mountain of nerve, and I’ll not forget it. Ever. Now, tell me what happened, and don’t be gripe-fisted about the details.”

I did. From Val’s disordered bedroom, to the encounter with Sean Mulqueen, to the long walk through the cold with a body in my arms, to the trial and the unexpected appearance of Silkie Marsh. When I was through, half the whiskey bottle was gone, and I’d finally begun to feel warm again. Val leaned back in his chair, drew another toward him with his boot toe, and put his feet up, looking as perplexed as I’d ever seen him.

“My turn, then. I’ve a bit of good news,” he said. “First of all, your lay worked. A couple of hours ago, after I’d been to your ken, a news hawker ran screaming to one of my copper stars about a dead woman in an alleyway. The roundsman carted her back to the Prince Street station house and sent for me.”

Thank God,
I thought. My imaginings since leaving her there had conjured nothing save ghoulish body snatchers and corpse-scavenging rats the size of chickens.

“The roundsman was Glazebrook, which is a rich streak of luck. He is as lumber-brained as they come. If Glazebrook could locate his own arse in the dark without a candle, I’d be considerably surprised. Naturally, I took over the case. So as it happens, thanks to you, I’ve had a perfectly valid chance to study her over.” Val flicked a vesta against the tabletop and pulled a cigar from his loose shirt pocket. “Dead since about dawn, according to the coroner.”

That figured. She’d been barely cold when I’d arrived. “What else?”

“She wasn’t raped, for one. For another, there’s no bruising on her body, so whoever caught hold of her did it neat and fast. Obviously, she was strangled, and strangled something fierce—I’d not think a moll would be capable without a struggle that would leave other marks, so we’re after a man, and a ruthless one. Neck was nigh crushed.”

“With the tie from your dressing gown.”

“Dainty touch there.” A crooked smile formed. “That means one of two things. Either hushing her was unplanned and he used whatever he could lay hands on, or someone wants me to dance at my death.”

“Don’t joke about hanging. And it must be the former—that he used whatever he could. No one save us knew she was there. Not even Piest. And even apart from my moving the body, you must have an alibi,” I argued. “Who was keeping you company this morning?”

My brother grew distracted by a smudge of soot on his sleeve. After contemplating it, he looked up.

“Actually, I was alone,” he reported. “Taking the air along the Battery. Seemed a flash day for a stroll.”

The most enormous silence I have ever heard spread between us. In seconds, that silence had spread over the entire United States, past Texas, and on to Oregon.

When Val is lying, he looks at something irrelevant, and then he looks you bright as brass in the eye. He’d never tried it on me before. But I’d seen it done a hundred times. An invisible hand took hold of my guts and squeezed.

“My God,” I whispered. “What have you done?”

“Nothing. Why should—”

“You’re never alone.” I gripped the cup of whiskey with both hands and watched the caramel-colored liquid tremble in concert with my fingers. “You’re here, or at your police station, or at the Liberty’s Blood saloon, or at a Party meeting, or at a race or a boxing match with your pals, or annoying me. You
loathe
being alone. The only time you’re ever alone is when you’re asleep—no, ninety-nine percent of the time you’ve company in bed as well.”

“Well, I was alone early this morning, so you can stuff that wheresoever you like.”

I stared at Val’s face, aghast. His was deliberately blank. “I can’t credit it. I
can’t
. You actually killed that woman.”

Val’s lip snagged viciously, destroying the unsettling expression of neutrality. “Dry up, you stunted little weed, I did nothing of the sort. I was putting myself through a few paces down Battery Park way.”

“Wading through the remains of a snowstorm
.
”

“Timothy, I’m a grown man, not a hothouse lily.”

“Valentine,
tell me
,” I begged him. “If someone saw me, if I made a single mistake, if you’re suspected, you’ll have to give an account of yourself—”

Valentine actually snorted. “Thank you kindly for explaining the intricacies of our judicial system, my Tim. And all this time, I’d supposed we still decided guilt by whether or not people with millstones round their necks sink or float.”

I sat forward with my hand to my snakeskin-textured brow. That my brother is impossible is a principle akin to daylight following nightfall. But apart from a single ghastly secret that ought never to have been one, I’ve always known all there is to know about the man. Unfortunately.

“You lie to plenty of other people, but never to me. Why start now?”

He pulled his thumb along a seam in his tailored black trouser leg, considering. “Because you are being a rash on the hindquarters?”

“Val, consider how helpful it was the
last
time I failed to grasp a significant event in your personal life.”

A sharpish flinch crossed my brother’s face. But then he threw up his arms to their full wingspan and linked his hands behind his head in a neat little gesture of unconcern.

“My alibi is unimportant and will never be presented in court,” he announced pleasantly around the cigar.

The steel bands encircling my stomach loosened a fraction. “Bully. What is it?”

“
Irrelevant
. Also uninteresting, and no longer the topic of our conversation.”

“Did it have anything whatsoever to do with Mrs. Adams’s death?”

“Did someone replace your brain with a parrot’s?”

“Was it illegal?”

Frowning, Val thought it over, the deeply scored bags beneath his eyes contracting. “Now, that’s a maybe. Could well have been. Probably so.”

Though hardly surprising, I couldn’t call that piece of news helpful.

“So you’re telling me that although you are never alone, you have no alibi for the morning a woman was strangled in your bed, because you were doing something
else
that was criminal.”

Val grinned, a look on him that’s always carnivorous somehow. “Young Timothy Wilde, copper star, solves another mystery. We’ll put it in the
Police Gazette
.”

My fingers squeezed themselves into angry, helpless little balls.

“It would give me tremendous pleasure just now to tell you I hate you,” I hissed.

“Better let fly, then. It’s all bob to me.”

I don’t hate my brother, though I think he expects me to. But I’m often pretty tempted to punch the airy, uncaring expression right off his mouth. I’ve done it before and will doubtless do it again, though I tend to come off the worse in such matches. But on this occasion, my head descended to where I’d folded my arms on the table. It seemed a likely place to settle while I worked out whether I wanted to drink all the whiskey in Manhattan or throw Val out his firehouse window.

“None of this makes sense,” I protested to my boots in despair. “You didn’t strangle the murdered woman in your bed, but you won’t tell me where you were at the time. No one save us knew she was there, but someone found and killed her. Some sort of struggle knocked over your bedside table and your painting, but there are no signs on Mrs. Adams’s body of having resisted attack. Varker and Coles have good reason to want revenge on us—and on Julius too, for that matter—but no reason to hush someone who’s worth a mint to them alive. Were Delia and Jonas dragged off somewhere? Are they the reason the furniture was disarranged? And just where in sodding
hell
does Silkie Marsh come into it?”

A humorless laugh sounded from the other side of the table. “I can tell you
that
much, Tim. Where she comes into it is where we start to worry.”

“Just how bad would it be if you presented this alibi to a jury?”

“About as bad as you’re supposing. So we won’t.”

Breathing deliberately through my nose in an effort to slow my heartbeat, I tried for several minutes to calculate what ought to be investigated first. That is, apart from investigating Val.

“You’re right, you know,” I heard my brother remark at length. “I never noticed I hate being alone, but I do. My thoughts are very . . . loud.”

Lifting my head, I set my chin on my arm.

“That was good, earlier,” I murmured. “What you did for the Irish family. I didn’t mean to rag you. You probably saved their lives.”

“Dead men can’t vote,” Val pointed out blankly.

“Neither can girl kinchin.”

“You calculate they’ll recall me fondly when that kid’s in her grave?”

“I don’t care what you say. It was still top marks.”

“You should see me on Sundays, when the crowds come,” he sneered. “Then I do it in choir robes and a halo.”

“Mrs. Adams said she’d been kidnapped before, Val.” My voice fell still lower, and I let my temple list to one side. “That writing. God, that writing. You saw it.”

As many as I love I rebuke and chasten, be zealous therefore and repent.

“I saw it,” he answered, also hushed.

“What does any of it
mean
?”

Val stood, dousing the cigar stub in his empty whiskey glass. He arched his back in a lazy stretch and then angled his head at the bunks along the wall. “Get a little sleep. We’ve a great deal of work ahead.”

I stifled a yawn. “I don’t need—”

“You’re obviously past clear thinking, mulling over whatever happened to Lucy Adams long ago and far away from here. Have a rest. Keep arguing with me and I’ll make your face more of a burnt soufflé than it is. I don’t want that kind of challenge. I’ll wake you in a couple of hours.”

What Val said carried weight. He knows me, and I
was
drifting, facts flying past my lidded eyes in chaotic swarms, and I unable to pin any down. Part of my befuddlement was shock seeping out of my bones. And part of it was probably whiskey. Still, I’d never have obeyed that order, not with—as he’d said—so much to be done.

If not for a tiny suspicion hovering at the back of my mind.

So I removed my boots and crawled into a bunk. For five minutes, I listened to the muted rustle of Val reading the
Herald.
And then the quiet puffs from his lighting another cigar. Slowly, my breath evened out. Then it deepened. My fingers relaxed, and my eyelids stopped nervously fluttering. For a quarter of an hour, perhaps, I drifted in a cotton-headed reverie, the hissing and popping of the firewood my only indication time was passing. For all appearances dead to the world.

I wasn’t, though.

So when the creak of the door met my ears—the sole indication that silent feet had exited catlike down the stairs—I did the only sensible thing. I threw on my boots again, laces flying through my fingers.