A Sense of Entitlement (9 page)

M
rs. Mayhew called for me after breakfast and I spent several hours working, updating Mrs. Mayhew’s calendar, sorting letters, invitations, and calling cards, and creating a seating chart for the supper at Mrs. Mayhew’s upcoming ball. Her lavish garden party had ended only yesterday afternoon and yet she had scheduled another lavish entertainment in just three days’ time.
Astounding!
I thought.
With so many parties, luncheons, concerts, and lectures to plan and attend, how can they call these weeks in Newport a holiday?
I’d be exhausted.

As I made suggested changes to the guest list, Mrs. Mayhew, lounging on her chaise longue and stroking a serene and contented Bonaparte, pored through dozens of invitation samples that had arrived from the stationery store this morning.

“What do you think of this one?” she asked, holding up a plain white card with a simple green border. Before I could respond, she held up another with an elaborate floral design. “Or this one?” Again she didn’t wait for a response.

“You were at the fire last night, weren’t you?” she said, without looking up. Her question surprised me. Was that recrimination in her voice or was she merely trying to confirm a fact?

“Yes, ma’am, I was.”

“There are rumors about it already, but I don’t know what to believe.” I waited, my pen drying as I stopped my writing, giving her my full attention. “I heard mention of a bomb.”

How did that rumor get started? And how had Mrs. Mayhew heard of it so soon? Britta said the newspaper hadn’t provided any details. Although many thought the telephone was a poor substitute for a personal visit, I knew Mrs. Mayhew didn’t always share that opinion. The telephone was a lightning-quick lifeline of gossip. Had she already had at least one telephone conversation this morning?

“I wouldn’t know, ma’am,” I said.

“I heard you could feel the ground shake a mile away.” Yes, because she rarely, if ever, interacted with the staff who witnessed the blaze, she had definitely been on her telephone.

“Some of the housemaids and I did feel something when we were walking back from the Forty Steps.”

“That’s more than a mile. Jane was right then. It could’ve been a bomb. What with all the strike talk and now this, one would think that anarchists have made it to Newport. This is a disaster. What will become of the Season with this chaos and destruction? What will they do next? Dig up the greens at the Country Club? Ransack the Casino? Pour tar on Bailey’s Beach? Appear unannounced at my ball?”

I didn’t want to contradict her, but her equating bombing a bank, doing thousands of dollars in damage, disrupting commerce, and potentially endangering human lives with someone arriving uninvited at her party was a grotesque line of thinking. Besides, she was getting herself worked up for nothing.

“It could’ve been a gas leak or an old boiler exploding,” I said.

“Of course, you are right. I knew I could rely on your levelheadedness, Davish. Oh, thank goodness. I hate to think that Mrs. Post might postpone her luncheon because of this. What does it have to do with us, anyway?” She smiled and began flipping through the invitation samples again. “Are you finished with the guest list?”

After the conversation with Mrs. Mayhew, I was relieved to get away from Rose Mont, even just to deliver another letter, this time a spontaneous invitation to tea to Mrs. Harland Whitwell. I had no doubt Mrs. Mayhew intended to interrogate her friend about the fire. I’d learned from Britta at breakfast that Jane’s husband, Harland Whitwell, was a co-founder of the Aquidneck National Bank. Fortunately, that building had only suffered minor structural damages and was rumored to be ready to open for business in a few days, again something I learned thirdhand from Britta.

The invitation had to be delivered immediately, never mind that Mrs. Mayhew had promised me another carriage ride that didn’t materialize or that she gave me no indication as to where Jane Whitwell lived. My job was to know these things, and after days of reading the Newport books I was now prepared. A few days ago I confused the Reading Room, the exclusive all-gentlemen’s club, with a physical room somewhere in the vastness of Rose Mont. Now I not only knew where the round stone tower called the Old Stone Mill was (in Touro Park at the top of Mill Street), but I also could quote its history and the varied theories as to who constructed it and why. I favored the one that claimed the tower was a windmill built by Benedict Arnold, the first governor of Rhode Island and great-grandfather to the famous Revolutionary War general. I felt confident, and admittedly a bit proud, that I could easily find my way around Newport, with or without a carriage. Ironically, my efforts were unnecessary in this case, as Mrs. Whitwell lived in a “cottage” named Glen Park less than half a mile straight down Bellevue Avenue. I hoped future deliveries or tasks would be more of a challenge.

And so I found myself walking around to the back of Glen Park and under an umbrella of wisteria vines meant to hide the servants’ entrance from the windows above. A kitchen maid let me in.

“What do you want?” Mrs. Whitwell’s housekeeper asked after I’d been left standing in the kitchen for several minutes.

“I have an invitation for Mrs. Whitwell,” I said. “I’m Mrs. Mayhew’s social secretary.”

“Well, give it to me then, and I’ll see that she gets it.”

“I’m afraid, Mrs. . . . ?” I said.

“Johnville,” the housekeeper said.

“I’m afraid, Mrs. Johnville, that Mrs. Mayhew requested I deliver it personally and return with a response.” I shrugged my shoulders to indicate that I knew this was a breach in protocol.

“Oh, all right. Follow me.” She led me up the back stairs and pushed through a door into a hall. Stretching away into the distance, the hall, like a sketch I’d once seen in
Harper’s
of a gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was lined with a plush red carpet and dozens of portraits, landscapes, and still-life paintings in elaborately carved gold-leaf frames hung from red silk ropes on the walls. Rose Mont wasn’t the only extravagant home in Newport, I thought as I glanced at each painting as we passed. Mrs. Johnville looked straight ahead, not giving the paintings a single glance.

Halfway down the hall, we approached one of several closed doors with open etched-glass transoms. The housekeeper was poised to knock when a shriek pierced the silence of the hallway. Mrs. Johnville forced open the door, but the room was empty. She looked back at me.

“Where did that—?” Before she could finish, someone screamed.

“Haaarlaaaand!”

I followed Mrs. Johnville as she dashed down the hall and was confronted by Nick Whitwell rushing toward us. He didn’t stop.

“Oh!” Mrs. Johnville said, smacking her elbow against the wall attempting to get out of the young man’s way.

Nick Whitwell said nothing as he raced by, but for one brief moment our eyes met. I dropped my eyes, trying to avoid his piercing gaze, and noticed a conspicuous bulge under his waistcoat. Before I had time to consider why he was running in his own house or where he was going or what he could be hiding, someone screamed again.

“Noooooooo!”

Mrs. Johnville ran and stopped abruptly in an open doorway a few yards down the hall. I hesitated a moment, watching the retreating figure of Nick Whitwell before I joined her.

Oh God, not again!

Mahogany bookshelves, their leather-bound books sticking out spine down or tipped over like dominoes, lined the walls and an enormous oak desk stood prominently in the middle of the room. The door of a small metal safe hung open, nothing but a gold cigar box labeled
Partagás
left inside. Overturned books, ledgers, and papers littered the desk while many more were strewn about on the floor. And sprawled amidst them on a well-worn Persian carpet of red, green, and gold was Harland Whitwell, his wife kneeling at his side, blocking most of the view of the man with her body.

“Harland, Harland, Harland,” she repeated over and over as she rocked back and forth over her husband.

She clutched one of his hands to her chest. Her husband held something, a letter, pamphlet, or leaflet, in the fist of his other hand. I stepped closer and nearly tripped on Mr. Whitwell’s cane, lying abandoned on the floor. I tiptoed over the cane and peered over the distressed woman’s shoulder.

Oh God, has it happened again?

I turned away, cursing my curiosity, my ill luck, Mrs. Mayhew’s penchant for gossip, and anything else I could think of to blame for bringing me here at this moment. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes tightly. It was too late. His bright starched white shirt and waistcoat flashed before my closed eyelids. And there in the middle of his chest, like a rose on the white field of a family crest, was a blossom of splattered red blood. I opened my eyes and gazed down at the man again. A cigar, identical to the one I’d seen him offer Mr. Mayhew at the Casino, jutted from Mr. Whitwell’s waistcoat pocket. Speckles of blood clung to the shiny gold wrapper.

Poor Mr. Whitwell,
I thought.
He’ll never smoke a Havana cigar again
.

“I
s he dead?” Mrs. Johnville whispered from behind me. I hadn’t heard her approach.

“I don’t know, but I can find out,” I said. The other times I’d found a dead body, Walter had felt at the person’s wrist for a pulse. I didn’t expect to find one.

I knelt down next to Mr. Whitwell. His wife was on his other side, watching my every move. I placed two fingers on the man’s wrist like I’d seen Walter do. I couldn’t feel a pulse. I didn’t need Walter to tell me what that meant.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Whitwell,” I said.

The grieving woman pulled her bulky husband onto her lap, cradling him like a child. The white ruffle frill on the yoke of her girlish day dress touched the wound, turning the trim red.

“No, no, no,” she repeated.

Unable to comfort her, I decided the next best thing was to look about me for any indication as to who might’ve killed the man. My first thought was to look at what he clutched in his hand. I knew better than to try to pry it out of his hand but instead peered down into the crumpled paper hoping I could read something that would give me a clue.

. . . higher wages, shorter hours . . . for a day’s work
was all I could read, but it was enough. This looked like a labor union propaganda pamphlet. But Lester Sibley had said he’d lost them all when the Pinkerton detective threw the trunk overboard. How had Harland Whitwell acquired one? And why was he clutching it when he died? Was he trying to tell us something?

“I called the police,” Mrs. Johnville said. I hadn’t realized that she had left.

“Johnville!” Mrs. Whitwell’s head shot up to glare at her housekeeper. Her shout startled us both, as Mrs. Whitwell had not said anything coherent in the last few minutes. “Who asked you to call the police?”

“Um . . .” Mrs. Johnville floundered for the words. “No one, ma’am, but . . .” She hesitated to state the obvious.

“If your husband’s been murdered, Mrs. Whitwell . . . ,” I started to say, not sure how I was going to convince her to involve the police.

“If ?” Mrs. Whitwell said. “Of course he’s been murdered! Poor Harland. Weeks!” she screeched for the butler. “Weeks!” She suddenly yanked her husband’s tie and pulled at the pearl buttons of his waistcoat. “We have to get him out of those bloody clothes! He’d hate for anyone to see him like this.”

I put my hand over hers. “We should wait for the police, Mrs. Whitwell,” I said, drawing her hand away. “And then you can clean him up. Mrs. Johnville, don’t you think it would be a good idea to get Mrs. Whitwell a cup of coffee or tea or something?”

“Yes, of course,” the housekeeper said, dashing away.

“Why don’t you sit down, Mrs. Whitwell, and wait for your coffee?” I said, putting my arm around the grieving woman and slowly guiding her to her feet and to a chair away from the body on the floor. I looked about for something to cover the man up with so his wife didn’t have to keep looking at him but had trouble finding anything. I did notice, however, several papers with the
Aquidneck National Bank
letterhead. One correspondence caught my eye, the telegram that had arrived for Harland Whitwell during the garden party. The words
foreclosure
and
bankruptcy
leaped off the page. I opened several drawers in the desk. They brimmed with papers of all sorts. Receipts with the names of local merchants I recognized, memoranda on the stationery of several businesses whose names I didn’t recognize, letters from several charities, and personal correspondence. A few had
ROSE MONT
embossed across the top. It was all well organized into stacks with staples and large paper clips. I found what I was looking for in a bottom drawer, a stack of clean white handkerchiefs with a simple
HW
stitched into the middle in brown silk thread. I pulled three from the pile and laid one gently over the dead man’s face and another over the bloody wound. I gave Mrs. Whitwell the other.

Mrs. Johnville came in, followed by a footman carrying a silver coffee service. The footman immediately left, leaving Mrs. Johnville to pour the coffee. She put in three cubes of sugar and several tablespoons of milk. She handed it to Mrs. Whitwell, whose hands were trembling. She put the cup to her lips and drank the entire contents without stop. She handed the cup back and Mrs. Johnville poured more. Over the rim of the second cup, first Mrs. Whitwell looked at her husband’s dead body, blood already seeping through the handkerchief on his chest, and then her gaze found me.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am,” I said. “I’m Hattie Davish, Mrs. Mayhew’s secretary.”

“That’s right. I saw you at the garden party, didn’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What are you doing here?”

I picked up the invitation I’d dropped on the floor at first sight of the dead man.

“I came delivering this,” I said, handing her the envelope. “It’s an invitation to tea from Mrs. Mayhew.” Even as I said them, the words sounded inane.

Jane Whitwell tried to open the envelope, but her hands were shaking too much. She handed it back to me. “Keep it. I’ve no use for it now,” she said.

We all stood in silence a moment until a knock on the door woke us from our reverie.

“The police, ma’am,” the butler announced. Two men came into the room, both wearing blue policemen’s uniforms. The two rows of brass buttons on their jackets glittered under the electric chandelier. One was young, barely in his early twenties, clean shaven with straw yellow hair. He still wore his hat, a dark blue flat cap with a visor, gold braid, and brass metal hat badge. He was too far away for me to read what it said. The second man was in his early fifties, graying hair on his head and in his long, twisted mustache, and was well over six feet tall. An imposing figure, he dwarfed everyone else in the room. He politely held his hat in his hands, a long silver fishhook jutting out through the fabric. He walked over to Mrs. Whitwell, barely looking at the dead body on the floor.

“I am so sorry, Mrs. Whitwell,” he said. “Everyone knew your husband to be a kind, hardworking, charitable man. He will be missed.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Whitwell said, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief. She still stared down at her husband.

“Now, I’m Chief of Police Sam Preble and I’m going to be personally investigating this heinous crime against your husband. He was a valued member of this community and deserves nothing less.” Mrs. Whitwell nodded her approval. “That’s Sergeant Ballard,” he said, indicating the young man standing still and silent by the door. “He’s going to be assisting me. Show some respect, Ballard,” Preble said. The young officer quickly took off his hat.

“Now, I don’t want to trouble you too much, ma’am,” Chief Preble said. “I know this is a difficult time for you and your family, but I do have a few questions I have to ask you.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Whitwell said.

“Did you find your husband dead, ma’am?”

“No,” she said. “I mean yes. Oh, I don’t know.”

“Take your time, Mrs. Whitwell,” Chief Preble said.

“I mean to say that I found Harland like that on the floor.” She pointed to her dead husband. “I came by to see if he was all right.” A sob caught in her throat. She held the handkerchief up to her mouth.

“Please continue if you can, Mrs. Whitwell,” the police chief said. Mrs. Whitwell nodded. “Why did you think he was not all right, ma’am?”

“Harland usually spends a couple of hours in the morning working in here. I’d come by to see if he’d learned anything new about the fire last night. Anything that might’ve eased his mind. He’d been distraught before going to bed, pacing, mumbling to himself, wringing his hands. And there he was.”

“Dead?” the policeman said in almost a whisper.

“No, he wasn’t dead, at least not at first.”

A glint of hope shone from the policeman’s eyes. “Did Mr. Whitwell say anything to you?”

“Yes, he said, ‘Sibley.’ ” Mrs. Whitwell looked up from her dead husband and regarded the police chief for the first time. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Chief Preble’s eyes widened. So did mine.

“Yes, ma’am, it does. Lester Sibley is a man with a great capacity for trouble. A labor man we’re holding on the suspicion of arson. We believe he may have been involved in the bank fires last night.”

“Chief Preble?” I said, no longer able to remain quiet.

“Yes? And you are?”

“Miss Hattie Davish, social secretary to Mrs. Charlotte Mayhew. I was here delivering an invitation to Mrs. Whitwell when the housekeeper and I came across Mrs. Whitwell here with her husband.”

“And?”

“And I think you would be interested to note what Mr. Whitwell is holding in his hand.”

Chief Preble stepped over and looked at the dead man for the first time. He lifted the handkerchief with his little finger and peeked at the man’s face for a moment before letting the handkerchief drop. He carefully removed the handkerchief covering Mr. Whitwell’s chest and examined the wound before looking at the pamphlet in the man’s hand. Unlike me, Chief Preble had no qualms about prying the paper out of the man’s grip. The chief smoothed the pamphlet out on the floor, reading.

“What is it?” Mrs. Whitwell said.

“Besides the usual rhetoric, it calls for a strike at several banks, one of which is in Newport.”

“Why would he be holding that?” Mrs. Whitwell said. “What does that have to do with anything?” With each word her voice rose in pitch to the point of hysteria.

Chief Preble showed Mrs. Whitwell the pamphlet. “Doesn’t your husband own controlling shares in all of these banks, Mrs. Whitwell?”

“Maybe; I don’t know. Harland’s a prominent banker, I know that much, but he never talked about work with me. But even if he did, what does that have to do with his murder?”

“Ma’am, this pamphlet was authored by Lester Sibley.”

“Then Harland was trying to tell me who killed him, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Chief Preble said, avoiding Mrs. Whitwell’s gaze and her questions by slowly folding the pamphlet in half and then in quarters. He stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “It may seem that way but—”

“Chief Preble, I want you to arrest this Lester Sibley immediately!” Mrs. Whitwell said.

“I would, ma’am, but you see—”

“That man murdered my husband! If you don’t arrest him this instant, I’ll see that you never work again.”

“Mrs. Whitwell, I can’t arrest Lester Sibley for the murder of your husband.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“Because he didn’t kill your husband.”

“How dare you tell me you know who did and didn’t kill Harland. Harland himself told me.”

“That may be, ma’am, but Lester Sibley couldn’t be the murderer.”

“And why not?”

“Because, Mrs. Whitwell, as I said before, we brought Lester Sibley in for questioning about the fires. The man’s been locked up since last night.”