Death on Beacon Hill (10 page)

“I’ve always felt I would prefer it. I used to, anyway.”

Nell directed a quizzical look toward Will, but he didn’t meet her gaze.

He entered the room, stepping carefully over the blood, and took Nell’s hand to help her do the same. More footprints formed tracks back and forth all over the carpet. The clothespress and armoire were open, their contents strewn about. Drawers had been yanked from them, as well as from the dressing table and writing desk, and emptied onto the floor.

A bed bench upholstered in yellow silk had been upended and gutted near the foot of the bed. Nearby lay a lacquered box, its lid open, revealing an empty jewelry tray lined with purple velvet. Nell lifted the tray; the compartment beneath it was empty, too. She turned the box over and felt around, looking for evidence of a secret drawer, but there was none.

“Look at this,” Will said as he pulled aside the curtains on the lefthand window. The window frame on the right side had a small gouge carved out of it, and several panes of glass were shattered, letting in a little welcome air, along with street sounds from outside—wheels on cobblestones, the neighing of horses, a newsboy yelling, “Mrs. Kimball murdered by her own maid! Fiona Gannon guilty!”

Nell said, “That’s where they retrieved the bullet Mrs. Kimball fired first.”

“And that’s where Fiona fell.” Will pointed to a pool of congealed blood, thick with flies, on the floor near the west wall—not just blood, Nell realized, but bits of what could only be Fiona Gannon’s skull and brain tissue. Leaning against that wall was an enormous oil painting that had been taken down, exposing an open wall safe, its wooden shelves entirely empty. The painting was of Virginia Kimball posing as an odalisque, her nudity cloaked by a violent burst of blood mixed with specks of other matter.

“That painting was on the wall during the shooting.” Nell pointed out a mist of blood on the wallpaper surrounding the pristine, rectangular section that had been shielded by the picture. She closed her eyes and drew a deep breath, but the smell of all that blood conspired with the oppressive heat to make her feel as if the world was wobbling slightly on its axis.

Will grasped her arms to steady her. “So much for being immune to swooning.”

She opened her eyes to take in the ravaged bedroom. “I’m all right. I’m just...” She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Murder almost never does.”

“No, I mean it doesn’t make sense that the bullet that killed Fiona Gannon could have remained in her head, as the coroner claimed it did, if the exit wound was as explosive as it appears to have been. Brady described it as a ‘crater.’ He said the left side of her head had been blown completely away. I thought he might have been exaggerating, and that I’d have to have a look at the body myself to be sure, but from what I can see here...”

“He wasn’t exaggerating,” Will said soberly. “A gun pressed to the head tends to do a remarkable amount of damage.”

“That being the case, wouldn’t the bullet have been ejected along with...everything else? And wouldn’t it all have landed on the same wall?”

Will smiled at Nell with that nonchalant directness that was peculiarly his. “One of the delights of your company is never having to explain the obvious. Yes, one would think the blood and fragments from such a massive exit wound would follow the path of the bullet. It’s a commonsense observation that cannot, I suspect, have escaped either the coroner or Detective Skinner.”

“Giving Skinner the benefit of the doubt for the moment—”

“In a peculiarly charitable mood today, are we?” Will asked.

“Perhaps he really does believe it happened the way he said it did, with Mrs. Kimball catching Fiona in the act, being shot, then shooting twice at Fiona. Perhaps Skinner searched in earnest for the second bullet, the one that passed through Fiona’s head—a spent thirty-one caliber ball he could match to the murder weapon, hard physical evidence to show off at the inquest. He took the painting down, which revealed the safe, but no bullet hole.” She looked at the section of wall that had been concealed behind the painting; it appeared to be unmarked.

Will squatted down to inspect the patina of blood covering the middle of the huge painting. “And yet...” He pointed to a gash in the canvas that would have been immediately noticeable but for the bloody mess that surrounded it. “Almost dead center.”

They both raised their gazes to the spot the bullet would have struck.

“The safe,” Will said as he stood, favoring his bad leg.

Nell closed the safe’s door, a slab of maroon-painted iron with the words Diebold Safelock Co. – Canton Oh. stenciled onto it in gold leaf. Its surface was smooth and undamaged save for a dime-sized spot above the lock—not a combination lock, but the type that opened with a key—where the paint was missing. Nell touched the little blemish, which was slightly concave. “Could a thirty-one caliber slug have left a dent like this?”

“Any bullet could have. And one can’t help but think Skinner would have noticed it.”

“And searched for the bullet that did it.”

Will lifted the painting to look behind it, then set it back down. Hiking up his trousers, he knelt and examined the area in front of the wall with an expression of fierce concentration. He said, “The bullet must have struck the safe, bounced back through the hole in the painting, and landed somewhere on the floor, probably within a few feet of the wall.”

“If it was here,” Nell said, “wouldn’t Skinner have found it?”

“The fact that he didn’t doesn’t mean it’s not here. Bullets don’t just vaporize on impact.” Will stroked the carpet in a methodical back and forth pattern as he edged away from the wall. “Depending on the type of bullet and what it hits, it might fragment, or mushroom, or otherwise deform, but it won’t disappear. It might even end up relatively unscathed. The bullet you found among Mrs. Kimball’s effects, the one from the window frame—what did it look like?”

“Like a lump of spruce gum after it’s been chewed and spat out.” Nell leaned over to scrutinize the intricate pattern on the carpet; two sets of eyes were better than one.

“Then that’s more or less what we’re looking for.” He bent over to peer at the spot where Fiona’s head had come to rest after she fell. The blood and various unthinkable bits had coagulated into a grisly mass that Nell, despite her strong stomach, found hard to look at.

“Those bluebottles have been busy,” Will said as he probed the gummy matter with his fingers. “There are hundreds of first stage larvae in here.”

Nell swallowed hard. It didn’t surprise her that Will thought nothing of poking about in such ghastly stuff. As a battle surgeon, he’d seen and touched much worse. Would Skinner have had the grit for it? She couldn’t imagine it.

“It would appear the good detective simply didn’t examine the evidence quite thoroughly enough.” Will held something between his gore-smeared fingers, something small and dully metallic. “If he’d just been willing to soil his hands, he’d have found it. He knew it, too. He must have.”

“But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it,” Nell said. “He could hardly admit that at the inquest, though, so he claimed the bullet never exited Fiona’s head, and he got the coroner to go along with it.”

Nell crouched down for a better look, taking care to tuck her skirts away from the worst of the “evidence.” It was a bullet, all right, but unlike that taken from the window, it didn’t remotely resemble a squished little ball. This bullet, although buckled and badly scarred, was clearly conical in shape.

“How much do you know about bullets?” Will asked as he studied the little projectile.

She shrugged. “I know there are two kinds—round balls and the cone-shaped ones, like you’ve got there. And they come in different sizes. A bullet has to be the same size as the inside of the gun barrel.”

“As measured in calibers, which are hundredths of an inch. This bullet is at least forty calibers, probably larger. There’s no possible way it was fired out of a thirty-one caliber Remington pocket pistol.” He rubbed his grimy thumb over the bullet, as if to shine it. “I’m going down the hall to wash this off. I’ll be right back.”

While he was gone, Nell sorted through the detritus from the writing desk for something to draw on. She found a blank sheet of vellum with
Mrs. Virginia Kimball
embossed in crimson ink across the top, along with a quill and a silver inkstand. Positioning the chair on the window side of the desk, affording her a view into the room, she sketched out a rough floor plan, including the positions of the two bodies.

When Will came back, his hands were clean, and he was wrapping the bullet in his pocket handkerchief. “What are you doing?” He came to look over Nell’s shoulder as she pondered the drawing.

“Trying to understand what happened.”

“As compared to what Detective Skinner and the coroner claim to have happened?”

Nell sighed heavily. “The official story is that Mrs. Kimball came home from shopping to find Fiona rummaging in her jewelry box. Fiona grabs the pistol from beneath the pillow—or perhaps she’s thought ahead and already has it—and shoots Mrs. Kimball in the chest from across the room.”

“We can be fairly certain it was from a distance,” Will said. “Didn’t you tell me there was a small, neat bullet hole in the bodice of Mrs. Kimball’s dress, and no gunpowder residue?”

“Mightn’t any residue have been hidden under all that blood?”

Now it was Will’s turn to sigh. “In any event, Mrs. Kimball fell to the floor over there.” He nodded toward the bloodstained doorway.

“Fiona thinks she’s dead, but in fact, she’s still very much alive. She somehow manages to get her hands on the gun and—”

“How?”
Will asked. “The lady is lying on the floor with a sucking chest wound, in respiratory distress. Unless Fiona set the gun down very close to her on the floor, or perhaps on the edge of the bed—” he pointed to those spots on Nell’s sketch “—I can’t see how Mrs. Kimball could have possibly gotten hold of it. And why would Fiona have put it within reach of the person she’d just shot?”

“Unless she thought that person was dead.”

“But she wasn’t.”

“Maybe Fiona thought she was. It’s hard to tell sometimes, even if you know about the carotid pulse, and most people just check for breathing. You know how inaccurate that is.”

Will didn’t look convinced. Neither was Nell, by any means, but arguing the point helped to clarify things in her mind.

“Mr. Thurston did testify that he found the Remington near Mrs. Kimball’s hand,” Nell said, “and we know that the bullet from the window frame came from that gun. And I can assure you her glove was stained with gunpowder residue.”

Will grimaced and rubbed his neck.

“I’m just walking through the official version,” Nell said, “not advocating it, God knows. So Mrs. Kimball somehow gains possession of the Remington and gets off a shot, which goes astray.” She drew a dotted line from the supine Mrs. Kimball’s right hand to the spot where the bullet was recovered from the window frame. “She fires again. The second shot—”

“The second shot,” Will said in a tone of complete exasperation, “wasn’t fired from the Remington at all. It was fired—”

“From a high-caliber revolver. I know. In the official version, the bullet remains lodged in Fiona Gannon’s brain. In reality, we know it passed through her skull and the painting, ricocheted off the safe and onto the floor several feet away—onto the very spot, in fact, which Fiona’s head hit a second or so later, as she fell to the floor.”

“Almost certainly already dead,” Will said as he sat on the edge of the writing desk to watch Nell work.

“One can only hope so.”

“Head wounds like Fiona’s tend to be instantaneously fatal,” he said. “Chest wounds can take a while, as Mrs. Kimball’s clearly did. Therefore, if they were the only two people involved...”

“Then Mrs. Kimball
had
to have been shot first,” Nell finished, “and Fiona second.”

“Which supports the official story.”

“
If
they were the only two people involved.”

“We already know there was more than one
gun
involved. Do you mind?” Will asked as he withdrew his cigarettes and matches.

“Why do you even ask? You know I always say it’s all right.”

“If I were a gentleman, I wouldn’t even ask.” He lit up, then lifted a cut glass vanity tray off the floor to use as an ashtray. “I would simply abstain.”

“Then why don’t you?” she teasingly challenged. “It’s a sign of respect. I
am
a lady.”

“A lady who needn’t rely, I should hope, on such puerile gestures as evidence of my regard for her.” There was a hint of amusement in the softspoken statement, and a hint of something else, half-hidden beneath the droll banter, the whisperlight suggestion.

Turning away from that hint, that whisper, that treacherous lure, Nell said, “Skinner wouldn’t have realized there were two guns involved, given that he never found that second bullet. He probably did think it happened the way he presented it to the inquest.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. May I?” Will asked as he slid Nell’s drawing across the desk. “If only we could know what position Fiona actually assumed when she fell.”

“I believe she fell pretty much as I’ve drawn her. The stains on the rug clearly indicate where her head was. Mr. Thurston testified that she was lying on her left side in an east-west direction, and Skinner didn’t dispute that.”