For a long moment the room was silent. A few muscles jumped in Christophine’s face, but she did not drop her chin or squirm beneath the intense attention suddenly focused on her. She kept her eyes squarely on Julia, refusing to cower under the others’ awkward gazes. Julia envied her composure, so swiftly mustered. She silently cheered that others might see the Christophine she knew and loved.
“Hey, now,” Hannity objected in a strident burst. “We did everything on the square.”
“You focused on finding evidence of Eva’s guilt.” Julia raised her voice over Hannity’s. “But even that was a sham. You knew a Negro woman would be easy to convict for the murder of her white boss. That gave you time to let Wallace calm jittery nerves among Timson’s friends. Meanwhile, Eva was doomed unless something pointed to a better suspect. I couldn’t let her suffer that unjust fate. I wanted to talk to her but didn’t know where she was. My only breakthrough was to find Jerome. He told me Wallace was hiding Eva.”
Kessler frowned. “Wallace? He told me she gave him the slip.”
Julia nodded. “He deceived us both. He planned to hide her until you gave up looking or found another suspect. It would have worked, had circumstances not changed.”
“Circumstances?” Kessler repeated. “Nothing changed in this case until this morning, when one death turned into three, thanks to your interference.”
Christophine stirred with indignation at his tone, and Julia retorted, “A great deal changed, but there wasn’t time to inform you.”
Before Kessler could heap more blame on her, Philip stood. “More brandy?” He was treading lightly too. He hadn’t been entirely forthcoming either.
Kessler covered his glass, scowling away the offer. He still viewed her involvement as marginally culpable, and his patience was thinning. She’d have to move quickly, streamlining the narrative. All that mattered was getting to the truth as she now understood it.
“I realized I’d been looking at this from the wrong angle,” she said. “We all assumed Timson was killed so Eva’s book could be published. What if he was killed to keep it unpublished? Suddenly Eva and Jerome had least motive, not most.”
“Who’d want to prevent its publication?” Kessler asked sourly.
“Timson, obviously. That’s why he locked the novel in his safe. But what provoked him was a particularly gruesome scene in which a Harlem club owner rapes the heroine. Timson feared readers would think it was true and about him.”
“Maybe it was.”
“Eva denied it. She said only that it was a story from before her time at Carlotta’s. Then I remembered Wallace knew Eva in her earliest days in New York. As an owner of the first club she worked in, he helped launch her career.” Julia paused. What came next was both the most critical sentence and the most painful. She had wrestled with it all afternoon, forcing herself to confront the worst wound of all. “I believe that years ago a much younger and rougher Wallace raped a much younger and more vulnerable Eva. I imagine that afterward he was contrite, making it up to her with years of help.”
Wallace and Eva. The two people she’d come to care about so deeply in the past weeks, in completely separate ways, were bound by that act of unspeakable cruelty and its shame.
Philip’s gaze sharpened. Kessler sat back warily. “You’d better have compelling grounds for an accusation like that, Miss Kydd.”
She chose her next words carefully. “I do, though you may resist, as I did at first. But it fits. Eva had a strange pattern of scars on her hip, which she said she received from an abusive lover long ago. It was a pattern of dots that, if connected, form the points of a W. Wallace was proud of his monogram. And he was adamant that a man should not force attentions upon a woman.” Julia studied the carpet, avoiding Philip’s eye as she added, “He made a point of insisting any intimacies he enjoyed were freely given.”
“That’s hardly—” Hannity began.
“Imagine his horror,” she said, cutting him off, “on hearing that Eva has not only written of that long-ago rape but is about to publish her account in a widely touted book. No wonder she was so distraught about her quarrel with Timson. Afterward she fretted that he’d witnessed the scene, that he’d feel betrayed after all he’d done for her. At first I guessed she meant Timson. Then I assumed he meant Jerome, since she looked at him fearfully when Timson objected to the rape scene. Now I think that anxious look was for Wallace, who was standing in front of Jerome. He referred to Wallace.”
The room fell quiet except for Pestilence’s steady purr.
“Wallace had a powerful motive to steal the manuscript. Everything—his business empire, his political ambitions—would be in jeopardy if that rape came to light.”
Hannity snorted. “Now you’re just shooting steam, miss. You said it yourself. Mr. Wallace is as fine a gentleman as they come.”
“My sergeant’s right, Miss Kydd,” Kessler said, sitting forward. “And before you go haring off down that slanderous path, remember Wallace couldn’t have shot Timson. Senator James swore they were together in Wallace’s club until the next morning, after Timson was found.”
Julia was prepared for this. “Wallace kept an empty flat for the senator to use for discreet entertaining, if you understand. Whether Wallace pressured him for an alibi or a grateful James offered, I don’t know. You could ask him, Mr. Kessler. He might squawk.”
Before Kessler or Hannity could take umbrage at the term, she spooled out the narrative she’d painfully constructed that afternoon. “I believe Wallace returned for the manuscript and, whether in an argument or because there was no other way, shot Timson. He was back at his own club before Hobart telephoned. Taking charge like the responsible man he’d worked hard to become, he rushed over and went up to Timson’s office a second time. Only this time he found Eva there, kneeling beside the body.”
Kessler slapped the arm of
