The Formula for Murder (9 page)

Besides the clothing that would have raised eyebrows at a showing of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, much less at a posh restaurant-hotel in the heart of London’s West End, everything about Oscar is big—six-foot-three, soft and flabby with a low mezzo voice that people concentrated to hear yet reaches across a room. His mind is big, too, encyclopedic; his tongue a guillotine that cuts through hypocrisy and affronts with a razor-edged blade.

He excitedly waves his hand as he weaves around a sea of tables, coming toward me with as much subtlety as Sherman’s march on Atlanta—no, make that Moses crossing the Red Sea: Oscar is carrying a white pooch dressed much the same way he is.

O
SCAR
W
ILDE

15

“Nellie!”

The pooch barks. It’s a small white poodle wearing a duplicate hat and a purple cape that matches Oscar’s. If Oscar’s flamboyant entrance had not already captured every eye in the room, the barking of the provocatively dressed dog for sure brought stares from everyone.

I should have known that it’s simply not in Oscar’s makeup to isolate himself from the world. Lost on a desert island, he’d recruit the monkeys and the fish as a social circle.

There is no “rose” big enough for him to hide himself or his secrets under. Obviously, everyone’s eyes are upon him, which is understandable since this man is like no other on the entire planet. Oscar Wilde is one of a kind—and God broke the mold after He created the man.

And I wouldn’t change a hair on his head.

I get up to hug him. “Oh, Oscar! I’ve missed you!”

He gives me this huge smile and then immediately puts his hands to his mouth to cover his bad teeth as he giggles, “I’ve so missed you, too, Nellie-girl.”

As we hug one more time before sitting down, the doggie he’s carrying gets squished between us, again.

“Oh, you poor thing … what’s your name?” As I pet the little fellow, he paws me and licks my fingers. “Oscar, he isn’t wearing purple nail polish?”

“Of course! It must match his cape. Nellie, meet Lord Dudley.”

“Lord Dudley … okay, I suppose that fits.”

“Isn’t this place magnificent? Look at all its beauty!” Oscar surveys the place as if he’s admiring his kingdom. He’s always been attracted to beauty. “This place is a tour de force. There is no other like it in the world.”

“I know. It’s the first to have hydraulically powered lifts, air-conditioning, and its own steam-pumped artesian well. The hotel bored three hundred and sixty-five feet below the basement floor into the chalk-basin and with the help of two fourteen-horsepower pumps they are able to pump twenty-five thousand gallons of water into iron tanks in the cupola tower that distributes hot and cold running water to every bedroom.
That,
my dear Oscar, is truly amazing.”

“Yes it is. How did you…”

I love surprising Oscar with my knowledge since he believes us poor Americans are so ignorant, so I continue. “You must know that Sir James Langham built a mansion on this site in 1820, subsequently named Langham Place, because it’s ninety-five feet above the Thames high water mark on fine gravel soil, making it healthier than the peat bogs in Belgravia nearer the Thames. In fact, this area is not only regarded as the healthiest in London, but has a much lower death rate than any other of the city’s districts.”

Poor Oscar just sits looking at me confounded. I almost break down and tell him when I was waiting for him I overheard a gentleman explaining in detail, to his dinner companions from Italy, about the place.

“Nellie, you never cease to amaze me.”

“Why thank you. What also impresses me is they have telephones, a real rarity anywhere, a post office, two libraries that have up-to-date newspapers and journals from around the world, public lavatories, a railway ticketing and shipping office, all under one roof. And their employees are qualified to converse in every language, from pure Yankee to High Dutch. I wonder if this is the way all hotels will be one day.”

“Maybe, but they will never have the beauty like this place.” Once again Oscar pauses, sweeping the room with his eyes, soaking in all its exquisiteness. “Art, which comes in all forms—paintings, sculptures, people, décor—has one purpose, to display beauty, and this place does it magnificently. I believe we are nothing but God’s canvas. And it’s amazing what some of us do with it. Look at the elderly ladies here…” He pauses for a moment and nods at one and then another.

“They all have gigantic tiaras and parrot noses.”

“Oscar!” But I couldn’t help laughing. He’s right.

“Thank God I won’t end up looking like that truculent and red-faced old gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons. Did you know that the romantic novelist Marie Louise de la Ramée or Ouida, as she liked to call herself, lived here for four years before she died? What a marvelous eccentric! One day she invited me to her room. She was lying on her bed wearing only a sheer, green silk, sinister nightgown, surrounded with masses of purple flowers and candles. She refused to have the black velvet curtains drawn; claimed the obtrusive daylight made it hard for her to think. Couldn’t help but love a lady who said she did all her best work in bed!”

Oscar laughs with such delight I can’t help but laugh myself.

“Your first American to be a guest here was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or better known to the public as Mark Twain, stays here whenever he comes to London. In fact, my own novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray,
that will soon be out was negotiated with the publisher at this very table. Also present at that dinner was Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
⁹
Have you read his mystery stories?”

“No, not yet.”

“Well, you must. It will sharpen your detecting skills.”

“Congratulations on your book. What is it about?”

“The philosophy of beauty. It’s about what one can choose to do with his life and how he can either destroy it…” Oscar pauses for a moment, as if his life is passing him by.

As much as I hate silence, especially awkward ones like these, I keep quiet for his sake. He is a dear soul who has to endure a lot of cruelty and criticism from society, yet somehow he manages to keep his humor and love for life or, more appropriately, beauty. I wish I was as strong as him.

“… or try to make it worthy. I think it is a masterpiece. One might say it’s as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal. I must say, the publisher was a bit disappointed that he didn’t get all the words he wanted. It’s true we had agreed on a manuscript of a hundred thousand words, but after I completed it I informed him that there were not a hundred thousand beautiful words in the English language.”

“And I imagine that you used all the beautiful ones in your book. I shall rush and buy it the moment I see it out. However, Oscar, I must say, you have me a bit confused.”

“How so, my dear?”

“Well, with your story being published, something you’ve always wanted, which would make, I believe, life good; in your telegram you said that you are incognito, ducking trouble, that sort of thing. What’s up?”

“I’m hiding in plain sight.”

16

“Ah, yes, I should have thought of that.
Why
are you hiding in plain sight?”

“That thing called love that the immortal Dante said moved the sun and other stars. Unfortunately, that which can move heavenly bodies can sometimes cause utter ruin and devastation among us mere mortals.”

“Which translates to…?”

“As my miner friends in Leadville would say, I got caught with my pants down.”

I am afraid to ask if it had anything to do with buggery … because I am absolutely certain that it does. I called poor Oscar a “sodomite” the first time I met him, that’s before I got to know him and realized that his choice of lovers is a private matter about which no one has the right to throw the first rock. Regardless of Oscar’s distaste for the hypocrisy of our legal system that is heavily influenced by religion—the law still has severe penalties for men who mate with other men.

“I met a young ang—no, not an angel, an Adonis whose appearance on even a bright day is as if a more brilliant sun had suddenly risen in the sky. And his looks … they are as if the gods had molded him from ivory and rose leaves. When I met him I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and deep sorrows. I was not let down. Unfortunately, Nellie, as our first ancestors learned in Eden and I have discovered in this matter, behind every wondrous thing that exists there is something tragic. I like to think of it as there always being a snake in paradise.”

“He loves someone else,” I say, barely above a whisper, hoping to bring down his own volume.

“
Oh no!
” he booms. “It’s his damn father. Even in that raw colony across the pond, you’ve heard of the Marquis of Queensbury.”

“I believe we adopted the Queensbury rules of boxing as a matter of fact … gloves, no punches in the clinch, that sort of thing.”
¹⁰

“Yes, yes. What a vulgar creature he is—the marquis. He has a son who is the glorification of all that is beautiful and pure and the creature embraces a sport in which men sweat and bleed and punch each other and there is a ten-second count for a knockout.”

This goes on for ten minutes while Oscar moans about the damage to his soul, how when one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. His lamenting is what the world calls romance. Now, because of all this tangled web his lover wove, he is in hiding because the Queensbury marquis is out to practice some of his pugilistic talents on Oscar for “corrupting” his son.

Somewhere between Oscar’s breaths for air, I manage to direct the conversation to Hailey and he is an attentive audience as I start with news of Hailey’s suicide and end with being mugged for her diary. I tell him that I suspect Hailey was killed by a wealthy man to hide their affair.

“It’s karma,” he says, when I am finished.

“Karma?”

“Your consistent ability to stumble onto murder wherever you go. There is no other explanation for why people come to a violent end around you.”

“You think my karma killed Hailey?” My features pucker, ready for tears.

“Oh my … no, no, no. Of course I didn’t mean that.” He reaches over and pats my hand. “That was a bad choice of words on my part. Your karma couldn’t hurt a flea. You care too much for people. It’s not your fault that they die.”

“You’re saying I somehow had a hand in them being murdered.” My emotional state breaks.

Oscar quickly hands me his pink handkerchief before I flood dinner with my tears. “Nellie, you are taking this all the wrong way. Lord knows you try to prevent it and you do end up saving lives. You saved mine.”

That stops my tears and I remember why I love this gentle giant. “No, Oscar … you saved
my
life and that’s why I need your help again.”

“You’re in danger?”

“No, I don’t think so, but I can’t let Hailey’s killer get away with murder or allow the people who knew her to think she took her own life when she didn’t. That would be horrible.”

With my emotions back in control, I tell Oscar the news story about a health doctor and a society woman.

“Ah, yes, the Lady Winsworth matter,” he says. “It was front page news until the next juicy story showed its head. You’ve heard of Dr. Lacroix, Anthony Lacroix? No, of course you haven’t, you’re a parochial colonist and only interested in what happens on your side of the pond. Where should I start?”

“At the beginning—with the doctor.”

Our waiter sets down a crystal bowl of water on the floor for Lord Dudley. Oscar waits ’til he leaves and puts in on the table. “I can’t let him out of my hands. He’ll go socializing with the people.”

“I believe you. Now, back to the matter at hand.”

“Ah, yes, Dr. Lacroix. He has a mineral spa in Bath near the ancient Roman ruins. He sells a substance that my miner friends in Leadville, Colorado, with whom I bellied up to the bar during my American tour, would call ‘snake oil’.”

“We have quite a few salesmen of that type, and not all in western mining camps.”

“Aqua Vitae.” Oscar smacks his lips as if he can taste the name. “The Waters of Life is a mixture made from the waters the doctor gets from the mineral springs and his ‘secret’ ingredients.”

“What’s his snake oil?”

“I’ve heard it’s animal organs.”

“What?”

“Most animals are much faster and more powerful than humans. Rejuvenation researchers seek the essence of animal organs that will revitalize humans.”