Till the End of Tom (16 page)

“I’m afraid it will work out that one of my students is arrested for this.”

“Why would he?”

“Because it turns out he’s Severin’s son. From the first marriage, and Severin treated him with contempt.”

“Maybe the kid really did do it. It makes sense.”

“No.” I refused to accept that. “He had motive, the drug’s one that every kid in my school says they can get hold of easily, but he couldn’t have been where the drug was administered and in the school building at the same time.” I kept the cast and the broken cheekbone to myself. “The police have questioned him, though. I’m sure he’s a suspect.”

“Well, they make mistakes.” Her expression suddenly brightened. “Hey—here’s what to do. Tell them—”

“Who?”

“The police. Tell them they’re ignoring the obvious and in this case, the so very obvious!”

I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Detecting one-oh-one, girl. Come on—what’s the bottom line of sleuthing? Surely you take a break from great lit every so often and read a mystery.”

“You want me to tell the cops that the butler did it?”

“Did he? That wasn’t what I had in mind.”

“You’ve had too much wine.”

She poured herself still more, then leaned close. “It’s a
literary
convention, and I’m shocked and dismayed by your ignorance. What do we do when faced with crime? We
cherchez la femme
! And hasn’t this particular dear departed provided you with a bevy of femmes for which to cherchez? My God, there are three wives, a fiancée, the limerick lady—”

“Who?”

“The Severin Senior’s social secretary—and me. And don’t forget his mother, who is known to be something of a nightmare. And those are the ones we know about, so cherchez, cherchez, and remind those cops to do the same thing.”

Imagine, the teachers in junior high hadn’t thought Sasha was bright.

Fifteen

P
ENELOPE
Koepple did not respect the sanctity of the weekend. She phoned at twenty-six minutes past seven
A
.
M
. That would be annoying on a workday, but on Saturday, it was first alarming, and then . . . alarming, because the only rationale would be an emergency, Penelope telling us either that the building was on fire or that we ourselves were fired.

I yawned audibly into the receiver. It was possibly unintentional.

“Did I wake you?” she asked, not sounding at all concerned.

I was by now so perturbed by her imperial manner that I used the snarky response that forced apologies out of people. “Oh, it’s all right,” I said. “I was going to have to wake up at some point, anyway.”

“Good, then,” she snapped. I was sure there were Prussian generals on every branch of the Koepple family tree. “In that case, let us have our status conference within the hour.”

“Our . . . ?” No matter how groggy I was, I knew I’d never have agreed to anything called a “status conference.” What did it even mean? An update? Did I have to teach her to communicate more clearly? Why didn’t she say she wanted to know what we were doing with her money and what we had found out about or fabricated against Cornelius Westerly?

I would have told her on the phone. Later in the morning.

I had planned, I had fantasized, I had anticipated with great pleasure, a dawdling morning, the kind where I didn’t have to do anything immediately. Anything I didn’t want to do, that was.

And Penelope was most assuredly not on my “want-to” list. She was, however, pressed for time, she said. She didn’t say why, but I remembered the news that she was being let go, and I’m sure she felt that pressure day in and day out. At least we’d get some more of our fee up front today, and that in itself was reason enough to meet.

My partner in crime-solving was not overjoyed by this rescheduling. He’d planned to spend every free minute of the day studying for a looming midterm and finishing a paper. Such were our wild weekend plans.

I must admit walking to the so-called status conference was almost as enjoyable as dawdling around the loft would have been. The glorious autumnal weather was hanging in there, with air so crisp I could almost hear it crackle, and even in Center City, it carried the scent of cider. We walked south on Second Street, then turned up Chestnut to Independence Mall, which always feels like time travel of the best sort: Carpenter’s Hall, the First—and Second—Bank of the U.S., Independence Hall, the Philadelphia Exchange, the new democracy’s political shrines in all their unprepossessing red brick glory, the shrines to money veneered with marble and built in classical style, as if afraid to try anything too new.

While we crossed through Washington Square and the preserved brick facades of Society Hill, Mackenzie mentioned that he’d talked with Owen Edwards after the funeral, and would probably get information later today about Nina’s brother, Jay Kress. “At a civilized hour,” he said. “Even when life and death’s concerned some people—professional people—understand about days off.”

We were there on time, washed and semi-starched. Penelope checked her watch as we entered, and the gesture made me want to slap her. Instead, I sat down and waited for the unhappy-looking waitress to notice her two new customers.

It was eight-fifteen Saturday morning, and she’d driven in from the Main Line at seven
A
.
M
. And yet her coal-dust hair looked sculpted into a stiff pouf that made her resemble an Edward Gorey drawing. She wore a tailored dove-gray suit with a burgundy silk blouse and looked ready to run a corporation, not talk with two sleepy part-time detectives.

“What have you found?” she asked before a single sip of caffeine could reach our lips and brains. She already had a small teapot in front of her, and she made no mention of actual breakfasts. Fine. Mackenzie and I would stop at Reading Market on the way home and stuff ourselves. Hot, freshly baked soft pretzels sounded a reasonable way to start the day, and if we topped them off with homemade ice cream, we’d have our dairy allowance as well.

“Surely you’ve found something by now,” she said. “Poor Tomas is dead and buried and it can’t be that his murderers are going to profit from it.”

“We’ve found out a lot.” Mackenzie slathered Southern on his vowels. That usually calms savage organisms, but I wasn’t sure Ms. Koepple was soothable. “Unfortunately or fortunately, none of it incriminates Cornelius.”

“And by the way,” I added, “that is his given name.”

She leaned back in her chair, as if to remove herself from me. “You’ve spoken with his cohort, then.”

“If you mean Georgeanne Errico, yes. But that wasn’t how we verified his name.”

“But as a character reference . . . well—what would she say? They’ll cover for each other. They have this all planned out.”

“We checked Social Security records and birth records, ma’am,” Mackenzie said. “School records. Work records. That’s his given name, an’ he has no criminal record.”

“It will all be in the report,” I said, “but the bottom line is—nothing criminal, nothing even unethical.”

“As far as you can tell,” she said with a slight sniff.

“It’s understandable if you don’t like him,” Mackenzie said. “Or if you don’t think this engagement’s the best idea. But he’s legit, and we’ve done about all we can—”

I kicked him gently under the tabletop and interrupted. “—in the preliminary investigative phase. Who knows what we’ll turn up next?”

“You should have already . . .” She didn’t bother finishing the thought. We had failed her.

Mackenzie waited a moment, then spoke in a low voice that was close to a whisper. “You strike me as an upright, law-abidin’ woman with a strong desire to see justice—true justice—done. You don’ want us to falsify anythin’, do you?”

She didn’t answer instantly, which was answer enough. “Of course not,” she ultimately said with no conviction. And then her facial muscles realigned into an expression that looked hungry, though not for food. Hungry to tell.

Mackenzie, no slouch he, saw it too, and he waited, like a predator outside a cave. And when the silence stretched tendrils into the discomfort zone, he said in that voice that’s so low you’re surprised you’re hearing every word, “What is it you want to tell me?”

She shook her head, then looked down at her hand on the table.

“Can’t help as much as possible if you don’t say what’s on your mind,” Mackenzie said.

“It’s simply that . . . I know he was involved in Tomas’s death.” She twisted her paper napkin until it looked like a cheese straw, then she untwisted it and began the process again. “I find it, I find it unbearable if you can’t . . .”

“What makes you positive?” I asked.

I was sure she’d say something about character, or woman’s intuition, or something along those lines, but instead, she dragged her eyes up until she looked levelly at us. “I saw him at the crime scene.”

“Saw him?” we said in unison.

“Saw him push Tomas down the stairs?” Mackenzie asked.

She shook her head. “Saw him following him.”

Mackenzie put down his coffee mug and held up his hand like a crossing guard. “Let’s take this step by step. Where and when did you see him? An’ I take it the two ‘hims’ means you saw Cornelius following Tomas.”

She nodded.

“So where? When?”

She took a deep breath. She no longer looked us in the eye. “Tomas came out of the café near the Square, about two blocks north, on Eighteenth.”

I thought I knew the place she meant. Cute, with small green awnings and crisscrossed curtains at its many-paned windows, and a constant flow of people in need of nonalcoholic beverages and a sweet. I always suspected that they piped the scent of freshly baked cinnamon rolls out onto the street.

“Did he come out alone?” Mackenzie asked.

She was silent. “I’m not sure. I actually saw him across the street from the coffee shop, but he was carrying a cup—the take-out kind, so it was obvious where he’d been. I was surprised. I thought he’d had a lunch date, and the coffee shop doesn’t serve real food.”

“But he was alone,” I said. “Not with a companion.”

She hesitated. “Nobody was talking to him. There were people on the sidewalk, men and women, but I didn’t see any interaction.”

“And Cornelius?”

“Half a block later, I realized that there he was, on the other side of the street, pacing himself so that he was like a mirror image, moving just as fast as Tomas and no faster.” She looked first at Mackenzie, then at me. I had no idea how to respond, or to know whether I was upset or delighted by this news.

“What happened next?” Mackenzie prompted.

“I followed him or rather them—”

“On foot?”

She nodded. “That brought us near the school, and I saw Cornelius cross the street, and then I was afraid he’d see me, so I left.”

Of course it could have been coincidence. The Cornelius and Tomas part, at least. They’d both been nearby at the lawyer’s. They had both presumably done something nearby—eaten, gone somewhere—for an hour, and if they then happened to be walking in the same direction later on in the day, so what? She hadn’t seen them leave the café together, nor had she seen them enter the school together. So of what was this evidence?

Aside from that, there was an obvious question, but it seemed impolitic to ask it outright. I was still working on how to phrase it when Mackenzie, in his half purr, half growl, saved me further deliberation. “How’d it happen that you were following Tomas?” he asked.

Once again, she looked down at her hands, now folded on the table. She waited awhile then spoke with none of her customary arrogance. “I wasn’t. Not really.”

“You happened to be downtown walking around? In the same area as the lawyer the men were seeing?”

“Yes,” she snapped, looking directly at Mackenzie, her eyes unblinking. I was sure that boring-through-you look had been effective many times. But not this time. “I spotted him—Tomas, I mean, and I wanted to ask him what had happened at the lawyer’s. I meant about his mother’s decisions, her mental health hearing. He wouldn’t tell me. Sometimes he seemed to care about pursuing a hearing, and sometimes not. Entirely too much hinged on his whims.” She pursed her lips, silencing herself.

“What hinged on his decision or his ability to deal with his mother?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Her estate, the apartment houses, control, if he had power of attorney, if she was declared incompetent—” She was spluttering, very un-Jane Austen now, trying hard not to mention the part that touched her directly, the bequest that would allow her to safely stop working, that would free her of all this. That couldn’t be changed if the will remained as is. If Ingrid couldn’t change it.

It was hard believing she’d accidentally stumbled across the men that day and it was painfully apparent that she had never once mentioned the fact that she’d been fired, that her days with the Severin household were numbered.

If Cornelius had been telling the truth. There was not one single person involved in Tom Severin’s life and death whom I believed or fully trusted.

Except Zachary.

“Did the two men speak? Did they go into the building together?” I asked.

“I couldn’t say. I didn’t want Tomas to see me, nor Cornelius, for that matter. As soon as Cornelius crossed the street, I felt obliged to leave the scene.”

“You didn’t ask Cornelius why he was there?” Mackenzie had perfected the art of asking hard questions in the softest, least threatening manner.

“Of course not! I didn’t speak to him—I hid when I saw him! And when I reemerged, neither man was anywhere to be seen. Had I spoken to Cornelius, he’d have run directly to Ingrid, and she’s besotted with him. He’s charmed her into idiocy, so of course not! What would I say? What would be my explanation?”

“That you’d seen him accidentally, the way you said you did.” I widened my eyes and made my voice innocent, outraged on her behalf. “I assume you had appointments in the city . . .”

She said nothing for much too long, and when she finally spoke, she mumbled. Her Prussian ancestors would have been ashamed of her. “She wouldn’t have believed me,” she said. “She—she’s short with me lately. He’s poisoned her against me. My whole life . . . my . . . everything I hoped for . . .” She shook her head, looked back down at her hands, but I saw the glint on her lash.

An actual tear. A most un-Koepple-like response.

She was a wretched, insincere, sycophantic, pretentious, and completely annoying woman. She had dragged us from bed in order to plant further suspicion on somebody else, and that effort had backfired, at least for me, so that I wondered precisely where she’d been at the moment Tomas Severin plummeted. Maybe Tomas had decided to let his mama do as she liked, to change her will every day if she wanted. Maybe Penelope found out and was enraged.

That would take care of everything. Penelope wouldn’t have to worry about providing for her future because she’d be a guest of the state, and I could sleep late again on Saturday mornings.

But still, watching her plaster-of-paris face work—and fail—to keep its facade, seeing generations of stiff upper lips and straight arrow posture crumple, I felt sorry for the woman. I didn’t want to, but then, you don’t always get what you want.