4

DETECTIVE SERGEANT FRANK MALLOY COULDN’T BELIEVE it. He’d managed to keep Sarah Brandt from becoming involved in a murder investigation for weeks, and now she was summoning him to one!

At least that’s what he’d been told. They’d sent a uniformed officer out to track him down where he was investigating a warehouse robbery over near the docks this morning. They’d told him somebody’d been murdered at a séance, and Sarah Brandt was there and demanding he be brought in to investigate. That sounded like Sarah. Imagine his surprise when he arrived at the house to find not Sarah at all but her mother, Elizabeth Decker.

“I couldn’t give the police my real name,” Mrs. Decker explained to him the moment they were alone. He’d immediately taken her to what appeared to be some sort of office to interrogate her in private. “Do you know what the newspapers would do if they found out I was present at a murder?”

“But nobody would think twice about your daughter being at one,” Frank said with a weary sigh.

“Exactly.” Mrs. Decker gave him an approving smile. “And she’d already been here with me the first time I came.”

Why was Frank not surprised? “Tell me what happened here,” he said, not feeling at all like smiling.

Mrs. Decker sobered instantly. “We were having a séance in that room where the… the…”

“The body,” he supplied when she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“Yes, where the body is. We were seated around the table, holding hands.”

“Holding hands?” he echoed in surprise. He had seen the room with the table where the body was, but nobody had mentioned holding hands.

“Yes, it increases the bond to help the spirits communicate with us.”

“Maybe we should sit down,” he suggested, feeling a headache starting to form behind his eyes.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Malloy. I’m afraid I’m still suffering from the shock of seeing her lying there-”

“Over here,” Frank said, taking her elbow and directing her to one of two straight-backed chairs that had been placed in front of the desk that sat in the center of the room. The top of the desk was bare and slightly dusty, as if no one ever actually used it. He seated Mrs. Decker and took the other chair, turning it to face hers. “You were sitting around the table holding hands,” he reminded her.

“Well, I guess we weren’t exactly holding hands,” she clarified. “We were holding each other’s wrists, but it has the same effect, doesn’t it? In any event, Madame Serafina-she’s the spiritualist-she was talking with the spirits, or rather Yellow Feather was talking with them-”

“What’s Yellow Feather?” Frank asked, confused already.

“He’s Madame’s spirit guide. He’s an Indian warrior who died in battle over a hundred years ago.”

Frank was having trouble following all this. “Is he some kind of ghost?”

“No, I told you, he’s a spirit guide. He comes when Madame calls him, and then he speaks through her.”

“What do you mean, he speaks through her?”

“He uses her body. It’s his voice, though, very obviously. Her body speaks but a man’s voice comes out.”

Frank had a lot of questions about that, but he decided to save them for later. “All right, so this Indian spirit is talking through her. Then what happened?”

“We were all asking questions, and Yellow Feather was getting very agitated. He was shouting, and there was some music-”

“Music?”

“Yes, we could hear music playing, although I confess I wasn’t paying much attention to it. I was too distracted by what Yellow Feather was saying.”

“But there was a lot of noise in the room?”

“That’s right, so we didn’t notice… Or at least I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until Mrs. Burke screamed.”

Frank gaped at her. She had been sitting in a room, practically holding hands with perfect strangers and talking to ghosts, and she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary? He was really beginning to understand where Sarah had inherited her intrepid disposition. “Didn’t anybody notice somebody going up behind this woman and sticking a knife into her back?” he asked in amazement.

“How could we? It was pitch dark.”

“All this was going on in the dark?”

“Oh, yes. The room must be dark to decrease distractions when you’re contacting the spirits.”

Frank stared at her for a long moment, trying to judge her sincerity. Plainly, she was telling the absolute truth, no matter how ridiculous it sounded to him. “Then that would explain how someone could sneak into the room.”

“Oh, no, it couldn’t,” Mrs. Decker protested. “There’s only one door to the room, and it was closed tightly the entire time. We would have noticed immediately if someone opened it because light would have come in.”

That was good. The number of suspects would be limited to those in the room. “So one of the…” He couldn’t think of what people attending a séance would be called. “One of the other people in the room killed her, then.”

“Oh, no, that’s impossible,” she assured him confidently.

“Why is it impossible?”

“Because,” she reminded him, “we were all holding each other’s hands. No one could move without someone else noticing.”

Frank definitely had a headache now. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I see.”

“Mr. Malloy,” Mrs. Decker said, leaning forward and looking him straight in the eye. “I’m very much afraid that Mrs. Gittings was killed by one of the spirits.”

FRANK LEFT MRS. DECKER IN THE OFFICE, JUST IN CASE some reporters showed up to nose around. He was surprised they hadn’t gotten the scent of this already. It had all the makings of a scandal. High-society ladies and gentlemen attending a séance with a beautiful spiritualist and one of them ends up murdered. Frank could probably write the story himself, if he’d been so inclined. But he was more inclined to keep Mrs. Decker’s name out of the newspapers if at all possible. He didn’t like Mr. Decker much, but he owed the man for helping him solve Tom Brandt’s murder, and he genuinely liked Mrs. Decker. He’d have to send for Sarah, though. If the cops who’d been called in to investigate before he got here told any reporters who was present at the séance, they’d give Sarah’s name. It would be a good idea if she was actually here, and then she could get her mother out without drawing suspicion to Mrs. Decker. He’d send Gino Donatelli, the one patrolman he could trust not to talk to the press.

“So that’s the famous Mrs. Brandt,” one of the officers standing in the hallway said when Frank came out of the office and closed the door behind him. “She’s a little long in the tooth, isn’t she?”

Frank gave him a murderous glare. Did every cop in the city know he was friends with Sarah Brandt?

“Sorry,” the cop said hastily. “I just thought… Well, she’s still a fine-looking woman for all of that.”

“Make sure nobody bothers her unless I say so,” Frank said. “And find the nearest call box and get Officer Donatelli over here for me.”

“The wop?” the cop asked in surprise.

The New York City Police Department had only recently begun hiring officers of any ethnicity besides Irish, and few of the old guard trusted them. “That’s right. Any more questions?” Frank added in a tone that said there better not be.

“No, sir. I’ll get Donatelli for you.”

Frank sighed and went back into the room where the body still lay. He’d done no more than glance around the first time to see who the victim was. He’d been in too much of a hurry to get Mrs. Decker out of sight.

The ward detective who’d been called to the scene first was still in there, waiting for Frank to finish with “Mrs. Brandt.”

“How’s the lady doing?” he asked politely.

“She’ll be fine,” Frank snapped, walking over to get a better look at the body.

“We already sent for the medical examiner,” Detective Sergeant O’Toole informed him.