Murder On Waverly Place

“It’s not a scam,” he protested indignantly. “Madame Serafina is a legitimate spiritualist.”

“Yeah, that’s like being a legitimate fake,” Frank said. “So you picked this girl up off the street and taught her the tricks of the trade-”

“There are no tricks! You can scoff if you like, but ask any of her clients. They’ll tell you.”

“I’m sure they will. So you think this Nicola killed Mrs. Gittings because she wanted to get rid of him.”

“That’s right,” Rogers said, pulling himself up straight in the chair again.

“I just have one problem,” Frank said. “He wasn’t in the room when the seance started, and everybody said that nobody could get in without them knowing it. So how did he do it?”

“I told you, he was hiding.”

“Where was he hiding?”

“In the cabinet,” Rogers said, as if it should have been obvious.

Now Frank felt stupid. He’d seen that cabinet himself and wondered about it. O’Toole had told him it was empty, so he must have checked it. But Nicola could have gotten out when nobody was looking, sometime after everybody ran out of the room and before the police came. But where had he been hiding in the meantime? He’d have to question the boy next, he decided with a sigh.

This time when someone knocked on the door, he was glad for the interruption.

“Doc Haynes wants to see you,” the cop guarding the hallway reported.

Frank crossed the hall to find the medical examiner sitting in one of the chairs at the seance table.

“What exactly was going on in here?” Haynes asked. “O’Toole’s been telling me some cock-and-bull story about spirits.”

“That girl in the front room, she’s some kind of spiritualist,” Frank confirmed. “She can talk to your dead mother and find out where she hid the family jewels.”

“My family didn’t have any jewels,” Haynes said with amusement.

“Too bad. But that’s what was going on. People pay this girl money so they can sit around a table in the dark and talk to their dead relatives.”

“Why would they want to do that?’ Haynes asked. “I’m glad most of my relatives are dead so I don’t have to talk to them.”

“I don’t understand it either, but that’s what was going on.”

Haynes looked around. “If they were all sitting around the table, why didn’t they see who stabbed her?”

“It was dark. Pitch dark,” Frank added. “And they were all holding hands, so nobody could do anything without the people next to them knowing.”

Haynes gave this some thought. “Unless one of the people sitting next to her did it. She’d notice one of them let go of her hand, but before she could say anything, she was dead.”

“Did it happen that fast?” Frank asked in surprise.

“I’ll know more when I do the autopsy, but I’m pretty sure that’s a stiletto.” He nodded toward the body on the floor. “They go in like a knife into butter, if you’re lucky and don’t hit a rib, and this fellow was lucky. I’m guessing the knife went right into her heart. She might’ve felt a pain, but she probably thought it was indigestion or something. She wasn’t alive long enough to figure out she’d been stabbed.”

“So she wouldn’t have cried out?”

Haynes shook his head. “I doubt it. If you see somebody coming at you with a knife and see it go in, you’d scream bloody murder. Not because it hurt so much as because you’re scared and you know something bad is happening. Sitting in the dark like that, I’m guessing the last thing she expected was to get stabbed to death while she was talking to her dead relatives.”

“You’d think one of them would’ve warned her,” Frank said, glancing down at the body, which had now been covered with a sheet.

“My orderlies will be here in a few minutes to take her away. I’ll let you know if I find anything else in autopsy.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

Frank remembered the cabinet. He walked over and opened the double doors. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but what he saw was an empty cabinet, just like O’Toole had said.

“You finished in here?” O’Toole asked from the doorway.

“I’m finished,” Doc Haynes said, getting up wearily.

Frank turned to look at the other detective. “You checked this cabinet when you got here to make sure it was empty?”

“Yeah, like I told you,” O’Toole said with some irritation. “We searched this place, top to bottom. I’m telling you, the wop kid wasn’t here.”

“That Professor fellow says he was hiding in the cabinet during the seance, and he must’ve sneaked out and stabbed the woman.”

“I figured it was something like that,” O’Toole said. “But where did he go after that, I’d like to know.”

“So would I,” Frank said. “Guess I could ask him.” He closed the cabinet.

“Mr. Malloy?”

Frank nearly jumped at the sound of Sarah’s voice, but he managed to keep his composure. He turned to see her standing behind O’Toole in the doorway.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but may I speak with you a moment?” she asked.

O’Toole was looking at her like he’d never seen a female before. Frank somehow managed not to punch him, but he did have to use a little force to get him out of the doorway. Frank paused in the hallway, trying to remember which room might be empty. Mrs. Decker wasn’t in the office anymore. He pointed toward the door and followed Sarah inside.

He closed the door behind them and turned to face her. For a moment, just one moment, he thought of all they’d been through together and how she was unlike any other woman he’d ever known. He owed her more than he could ever repay, for what she had done for his son and for helping him solve cases he could never have hoped to solve without the knowledge she had of the rich and the world they lived in. Once he’d planned to repay her by finding the man who had killed her husband and bringing him to justice. Now that he’d done so, he knew nothing could ever repay what he owed her, just as nothing would ever bridge the gap that separated an Irish Catholic policeman and the daughter of one of the oldest families in New York.

Before he could surrender to the despair that thought caused him, she said, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but Madame Serafina is worried about that boy, Nicola.”

“She should be,” Frank said, forcing himself to forget what he could not change and concentrate on the case at hand. “It looks like he’s the killer.”

“Oh, no,” she protested. “What proof do you have?”

“The Professor said he was hiding in that big cabinet in the seance room and sneaked out during the seance to stab her.”

“Madame Serafina is sure he didn’t do it,” she said with a little frown that made him want to grind his teeth. She frowned like that when she was setting her mind to something.

“Of course she is,” Frank pointed out reasonably. “They’re lovers. Even if she knew he did it, she’d be defending him.”

“Are you sure he was in the cabinet?” she tried.

“Not yet,” he had to admit. “I haven’t had a chance to question him, but I was going to do that next. Besides,” he added quickly, wanting to convince her before she got too involved in all this, “nobody else who was here even knew who Mrs. Gittings was, so why would they want to kill her? Turns out, she’s the one who ran this whole show.”

“I know. Madame Serafina just told us.”

“Why do they call her Madame Serafina?” Frank asked, strangely annoyed to hear her saying the odd name over and over.

“I have no idea. She’s not even married. It’s probably something they made up to make her sound more impressive.”

“That makes sense,” he agreed. “Anyway, this Mrs. Gittings ran everything and showed up at every seance, probably to keep an eye on Serafina. Everybody else thought she was just another… uh, client,” he said, catching himself. He was going to say sucker, but he’d remembered just in time that Sarah’s mother was among them. “So