Murder Wears a Hidden Face

Book 8: Gilded Age Mystery

by Rosemary Simpson

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Private Investigators

Synopsis

A diplomat’s murder draws heiress-turned-sleuth Prudence MacKenzie and former Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter away from New York’s high society and into the dark heart of Chinatown . . .
 
MURDER WEARS A HIDDEN FACE

February 1891: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is hosting an exhibition of Chinese art objects, timed to coincide with the arrival of a new Chinese cultural attaché, Lord Peng. Prudence and Geoffrey are invited to attend the opening ceremonies. But among the throng of dignitaries making their way through the galleries is one decidedly unwelcome and unexpected visitor—an assassin who stabs the attaché to death, then flees through Central Park.
 
As witnesses, Prudence and Geoffrey quickly become immersed in the case and join former New York detective Warren Lowry in investigating the murder. But there are complications. The Peng family will no longer enjoy diplomatic standing and is threatened by deportation and possible disgrace or execution in their homeland. Desperate to remain in the West, they flee into the labyrinth of Chinatown, enlisting the protection of a long-lost uncle, now the leader of one of the city’s most feared Tongs. But that alliance comes with a price; Peng’s son must become his uncle’s apprentice in crime, while his eldest daughter will be forced to marry a Tong leader she has never met.
 
With a killer still at large, bent on revenge for a long-ago injustice and determined to eliminate every member of the Peng family, Prudence and Geoffrey are plunged into the heart of a culture about which they know very little. Each foray into the narrow streets and alleyways of Chinatown could be their last. 

Release date: November 28, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Ten years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art moved into its new building at Fifth Avenue and Eighty-second Street, a wealthy widower bequeathed his trove of Chinese artifacts dating back to the Ming Dynasty that ruled China during the early European Middle Ages. Each item had been painstakingly and expensively acquired over years of dedicated collecting.

To celebrate the donation, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the Met’s first and current director, announced a special exhibition of the exquisite porcelains, rare jades, cloisonné enamels, and intricately embroidered silks, timing the event to coincide with the appointment of a new cultural attaché to the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C. Westernized by years of residence in London, Lord Peng Tha Mah, arriving in New York City in February 1891, agreed that his wife, son, and two daughters would also grace the opening ceremonies with their presence.

Invitations had gone out to the museum’s board of trustees and patrons, all of whom figured prominently in New York society, though not every benefactor could be counted among Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred. The event would open with a reception in the glass-roofed gallery where the collection was on display, followed by luncheon for a select group of the museum’s deepest pocketed and most influential sponsors. Catered by Delmonico’s, the menu was a masterpiece of dishes made famous by the celebrated restaurant, a gastronomic triumph designed to eclipse anything London or Washington had to offer. Nothing to equal di Cesnola’s extravaganza had ever been mounted at the museum.

Security was adequate, though not as tight as the Pinkerton National Detective Agency would have provided. Geoffrey Hunter counted only a handful of uniformed gallery attendants stationed at key points in the exhibition hall, regular museum employees by their demeanor. The fit of their jackets told him that none of them was armed.

“Not the way you would have done it,” Prudence MacKenzie commented, pale gray eyes following her partner’s scan of the room.

“I haven’t been a Pinkerton in charge of something like this in years,” he reminded her. “But you’re right. The director seems to have cut budgetary corners exactly where he shouldn’t have. Very careless for a man who understands firsthand how tempting artifact theft is. Every archaeological dig I’ve ever heard of is bedeviled by looters and forgers. He should know better.”

“Delmonico’s is expensive,” Prudence murmured, drifting from Geoffrey’s side toward a display of brilliantly colored silks. The exhibit was stunning, but she couldn’t help wondering if the wide-sleeved robes wouldn’t be uncomfortably heavy and unwieldy. Ladies’ corsets and her own fashionable Worth gown were difficult enough to maneuver in, but they didn’t appear to be nearly as cumbersome. Still, she supposed women the world over got used to whatever idiocy fashion dictated. By the display explanations she was reading, it seemed that Chinese noblemen burdened themselves with robes that were even more ostentatious and elaborate than those of their spouses and concubines.

“They take your breath away, don’t they?” Josiah Gregory’s vest was a match for anything he was admiring in the glass cases around the room’s walls. Its vividly colored embroidered peacocks had caught more than one admiring male eye. Josiah’s suits might be a gentlemanly black, his shirts blindingly white, but his vests had always been a feast of extravagant showmanship.

He hadn’t asked how Miss Prudence had wangled him a ticket to the reception. It was enough to remember that her late father, Judge Thomas Pickering MacKenzie, had been a prominent member of the Met’s board of trustees and a generous patron of the city’s arts. She might have scandalized society by eschewing a suitable marriage to pursue a career in law and detection, but the MacKenzie family name guaranteed that no one would exclude her, including the redoubtable Caroline Astor.

Josiah’s admiration for his employer was nearly boundless. It was matched only by his loyalty to her partner, the Southern-born plantation owner’s son who had abandoned his heritage and established himself in the North. Any day now, Josiah hoped, their on-again, off-again, undeclared courtship would blossom into the passionate wooing he’d thought it should have been from the beginning. He was losing patience with the elaborate dance that appeared to be going nowhere but around in circles. He stroked the silk threads of his vest as he contemplated what a Hunter-MacKenzie marriage might look like.

Prudence smiled at her secretary, thinking how much Josiah resembled the peacocks on his vest, proud birds whose tails could swirl open to reveal hidden depths of color and the startling pattern of unsuspected eyes.

Being surrounded by the wealth, beauty, and artistic glory of a foreign culture was a soothing invitation to set aside the complexities and raw ugliness of the investigative work she and Geoffrey routinely took on. They were between active cases at the moment, though, as Josiah had reminded her that morning, there were several possibilities simmering. Hunter and MacKenzie, Investigative Law, had the distinction of being able to pick and choose its clientele. Lately, now that Prudence had been admitted to the bar, she’d leaned toward considering inquiries that promised intriguing legal components, but she’d yet to step inside a courtroom. Women’s progress toward greater equality was slow and faltering. Men fought it at every opportunity.

She thought there must be several hundred guests in the gallery and the two smaller adjoining rooms where display cases featured exquisite enamels and glazed ceramics. Most of the attendees knew one another, New York society being both closed to outsiders and tribal in its makeup. The museum’s patrons murmured polite greetings as they glided slowly and gracefully to the whisper of the ladies’ skirts and the occasional tap of a gentleman’s walking stick. Not unlike dancers in a sequence of well-orchestrated quadrilles.

“Geoffrey, look,” Prudence said, directing his attention toward a tall, familiar-looking figure just entering the gallery. A slender young woman clung to his arm as if in need of support. “Isn’t that Warren Lowry?”

“You’re right. I thought he and Bettina were in Switzerland.”

At the end of May, nearly nine months ago, Geoffrey and Prudence had seen Lowry and his fragile sister off on a journey that would take them to a sanitorium near Geneva where damaged minds were said to be healed through a new and controversial treatment known as the talking cure. Bettina had been the victim of a cruel kidnapping and two years of unspeakably evil abuse. Whether she would ever recover had been unknown, but Lowry, who had joined the New York City Police Department as a detective in hopes of finding her, had refused to admit defeat.

As if he felt Prudence’s gaze, Warren Lowry turned from the display case of jade earrings and necklaces that had attracted his sister’s attention. His eyes swept the room in the measured, searching scan familiar to every good investigator. It touched briefly on the flamboyantly vested Josiah, lingered for a moment to assess Geoffrey, then settled on Prudence. He smiled and dipped his head in a greeting that was scrupulously polite and impersonal, yet also intensely private. Intimate, as though no one else were in the exhibition hall but they two.

He touched Bettina’s elbow lightly, spoke quietly to her, then folded her arm into his and steered her across the broad expanse of the gallery. She walked with the slow, deliberate steps of someone newly restored to health, head tilted downward to avoid the inspection of curious onlookers. Her experience, though never trumpeted in the city’s newspapers, had been widely hinted at in the discreet gossip that kept society informed of its members’ indiscretions and peccadillos. A sudden departure for Europe was always grist for the scandal mill.

“I don’t think you’ve met the other member of our firm. This is Josiah Gregory,” Prudence said, introducing him.

An awkward silence followed the initial greetings. Bettina didn’t raise her eyes from their contemplation of the floor. Geoffrey and Lowry exchanged the briefest of handshakes.

Josiah assessed the situation with one keen glance; he was familiar with Bettina’s abduction and eventual rescue from the reports Geoffrey and Prudence had filed. Prudence’s account of how she came to seek Warren Lowry’s help when Geoffrey was still recovering from near-fatal bullet wounds had been less detailed, but Josiah had long experience reading between the lines of the documents that landed on his desk.

Lowry had been one of New York City’s most eligible bachelors before his sister’s disappearance and his own withdrawal from society to devote all his energies to finding her. The months spent in the Swiss mountains had burnished his skin with a skier’s tan and brightened the silver streaks in his blond hair. He was still wealthy, unmarried, and as handsome as the devil. Josiah suspected that the latent attraction between the ex-detective and Miss Prudence would spark back into life unless Mr. Hunter did something to tamp it down. Right away.

He stepped back from the foursome, the better to listen and observe.

“We met Lord Peng and his family aboard ship,” Lowry said. “Lady Peng and her elder daughter seldom left their cabin, but Bettina struck up an acquaintance with the younger girl. Peng Mei Sha. The Chinese introduce themselves with the family name first, then the given name,” he explained. “It emphasizes one of the essential facets of their culture, an intense loyalty and responsibility to blood kin that is quite remarkable.”

“How wonderful for you, Bettina,” Prudence said. “Atlantic crossings can be dreary without an agreeable companion to help while away the time. And the voyage can be uncomfortable in January and February when the seas are rough and the winds high.”

“Mei Sha is a few years older than I am,” Bettina said, finally raising her head to look at Prudence. “She went to an English boarding school for a while, but also had a governess. Her English is impeccable.” She paused for a moment, as if deciding what else she should reveal about her Chinese friend. “Her brother is even more westernized. He studied engineering at the Royal Naval College in Portsmouth. Peng Fa Cho. His English friends called him Johnny. Mei wrote her name as May when she was at school. That’s short for Mary, but she’s not a Christian.” Bettina fell silent, her eyes drifting downward again.

“I assume you’ll be attending the luncheon,” Lowry said. He patted Bettina’s arm softly, as if to congratulate her on having contributed to the conversation.

“We will,” Prudence answered. She’d hesitated about accepting the invitation, but now was glad she had.

“And how goes the investigation business?” Lowry turned from Prudence to Geoffrey. “I’m not sure I ever thanked you properly for what you did for Bettina. Without your ex-Pinks, we might not have succeeded in freeing her.”

“We’re on hiatus at the moment,” Geoffrey said, not adding that they had more prospective clients than time to take on all their cases. He was watching Lowry with the concentration of one man absorbed in figuring out another. He had no proof of it, but he was certain in his own mind that Bettina’s brother had deliberately burned down the mansion where his sister had been held captive, assuring that the guilty parties sheltering in the basement would not escape. Lowry had never expressed remorse or regret for killing them.

“Something worthy of your talents is bound to come along.”

Prudence had been contemplating attending law school or sitting for the bar without formal study when Lowry and Bettina sailed for Europe. It was a step Lowry had encouraged her to take, yet so far, he’d steered the conversation away from anything personal.

“I think they’re coming now,” Josiah said, interrupting the faltering exchange.

General Luigi Palma di Cesnola was a portly man in his late fifties, distinguished by the military bearing he’d never abandoned and a pair of distinctively thick white mustaches. He’d been a subject of controversy ever since his appointment as director of the museum, but he’d survived accusations of tampering with the Cypriot artifacts he’d excavated and subsequently sold to the Met, multiple complaints to the board of trustees, and a suit for libel. He insisted on being addressed as General, even though the commission to brigadier at the end of the war had been sidetracked by Lincoln’s assassination. In his own mind, di Cesnola would always be a distinguished American war hero awarded the Medal of Honor. He could do no wrong, no matter what others thought. Few people found him easy to get along with.

Flanking di Cesnola were two museum guards who fanned out to clear a path through the throng of guests as Lord Peng and his party made their appearance. China’s cultural attaché was as splendidly dressed as any of the mannequins in the exhibit, enveloped from head to foot in emerald-green silk and sunrise-yellow satin. Like di Cesnola, Lord Peng wore a set of swooping mustaches, but his were paired with a long, wispy, triangular shaped beard. He carried a fan and stepped lightly in embroidered satin shoes soled in a thick layer of soft leather, wide sleeves like wings greeting the spectators who were spellbound at the sight of such magnificence.

Behind him marched his son, Peng Fa Cho, a young man in his twenties, also clad in the traditional robes of the Chinese nobility, but whose expression of lively curiosity signaled that this member of the family was at ease in the Western world, curious to explore its possibilities and eager to understand its inhabitants.

Following the son processed the women, Lady Peng first, then her daughters.

Every female in the room stared at Lady Peng’s feet, tiny appendages shod in sharply pointed, high-heeled embroidered red satin. A shoe not quite four inches long. Those who had read about the odd Chinese custom of breaking and binding their women’s feet expected her to mince, totter, shuffle, or hobble, but the attaché’s wife glided across the floor with fluid grace. The eldest daughter also approached on tiny feet with unnaturally high arches, but the younger girl wore shoes that would have fit any of her Western counterparts. No one knew why.

General di Cesnola guided Lord Peng and his entourage through the exhibition, smiling, nodding, pointing out the highlights of the collection. Lord Peng was reputed to speak excellent English, but he had chosen to be accompanied today by a translator who murmured softly in Chinese, then conveyed the attaché’s words loudly enough to be heard by most of those standing closest to the distinguished visitor. The translator’s English was accurate, though so heavily accented it brought frowns of concentration to the foreheads of his listeners.

Prudence, standing beside Bettina, caught Mei Sha’s glance in their direction, Bettina’s answering smile, and the quick flick of her friend’s finger. No expression marred the stillness of the Chinese girl’s features, but Bettina gave a barely audible chuckle.

“The family is staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” she said. “I was able to get a note delivered to their suite as soon as I found out Warren and I had been invited to the luncheon. They’re leaving for Washington tomorrow or the next day, but her father has promised that I’ll be welcome to visit once they’re settled.”

“That will be wonderful,” Prudence agreed.

“She doesn’t know,” Bettina whispered. “About what happened to me. And she’s too polite to ask why my face looks the way it does.”

“It’s hardly noticeable,” Prudence lied. Bettina’s eyebrows and eyelashes had been plucked by her abductors, doll-like arcs tattooed on. Her skin had been artificially whitened, cheeks and lips died a bright crimson. Months of treatment in the Swiss clinic had included removing or lightening the cosmetic enhancements that had turned a once lovely face into a distorted facsimile of natural beauty. “Perhaps with the passage of time . . .”

“The doctors were very kind, but they didn’t try to hide the truth from me. It will get better, but I’ll never be exactly as I was before.”

Prudence thought Geoffrey was about to reassure Bettina that he found her nearly perfect, but then he stiffened and took a step forward, eyes fixed on what appeared to be an unplanned interruption. She saw his hand stray toward where he usually wore a concealed holster. Not today.

A thin man dressed in dark blue trousers, frogged jacket, and round cap was making his way through the mix of Chinese guests, museum officials, and members of the board of trustees. They parted to let him pass, he, in turn, bowing and begging their forgiveness and indulgence for disturbing their important selves. Something consequential, an urgent message, to impart to the Lord Peng. It couldn’t wait.

He brushed past Lady Peng and her daughters, kept several feet away from the son, then, as he reached Lord Peng’s side, pulled a wide-bladed knife from his sleeve. A stray beam of sunlight through the arched glass roof caught the steel and flashed like lightning. But soundless.

The knife disappeared into the folds of Lord Peng’s emerald-and-yellow gown, spouting gouts of bright red blood as the assassin plunged it into the attaché’s body. The arm in the dark blue jacket rose and fell, striking again and again, the sun glaring off the blade with every blow. Without a word or cry, Lord Peng crumpled to the floor, blood pooling across his chest and onto the back-and-white tiles.

For a moment no one moved except the spectators who were too far away to see what was happening.

Then a shrill scream pierced the hush, Lord Peng’s daughters wailed, and the dead man’s two bodyguards leaped toward their master, guns drawn and pointed at the figure streaking toward the far archway where the gallery opened onto the museum’s foyer. Cloakroom, ticket booth, a pair of heavy wooden doors opening onto Central Park and Fifth Avenue.

They shouted something in Chinese, but no one understood what they were yelling, so no one got out of their way, no one crouched to avoid a bullet. The bodyguards ran through the crowd of guests, shoving and pushing aside New York City’s most distinguished citizens. Within moments they’d disappeared from sight.

In the appalled silence, the gunshots echoing in the high-ceilinged foyer at the Fifth Avenue entrance were as rapid and loud as the clacking wheels of the city’s elevated trains. The bodyguards emptied their pistols, the bullets thwacking into walls and ricocheting off the marble floor.

Like Geoffrey, General di Cesnola had instinctively reached for a gun he was not wearing, then shouted orders at the museum attendants who were also unarmed. Lacking training to act as guards and confused by the director’s contradictory commands, they milled about uncertainly, succeeding only in further alarming the crowd. The Chinese physician who had traveled with Lord Peng and was also on his way to the embassy in Washington fell to his knees beside the attaché’s body, deft hands checking pulse points where he was already certain he would find no throb of life.

When General di Cesnola touched him on the shoulder, the doctor shook his head and closed the eyes that stared upward but saw nothing.

Geoffrey and Warren Lowry exchanged looks.

They moved together toward Lord Peng’s family, reaching them just as Lady Peng gathered her daughters into her outstretched arms.

Peng Fa Cho stepped forward, his face contorted with shock, anger, and grief.

“Mr. Lowry?” he asked, looking from Warren to Geoffrey and back again. “Who would do this? Did someone order my father’s death?”

“We’ll find out,” Lowry promised, ignoring the fact that he was no longer a member of the New York City Police Department’s Detective Bureau. Hadn’t been for the past nine months. “I promise you. We’ll find him, whoever he is.”

Lowry turned to Prudence and Geoffrey.

“You’ve blood on your skirt,” he said matter-of-factly, pointing to the faint spray of red across the hem of Prudence’s pale gray dress. “As a favor to me, will you take the case?”

Director di Cesnola sent one museum attendant running outside to find a beat cop, another to telephone Mulberry Street Police Headquarters. The reporters assigned to cover the opening of the exhibition took out their pads and pencils, scribbling notes and elbowing their way through the crowd to ask questions and get a better look at the blood-soaked corpse. One of them, who freelanced as a sketch artist, had nearly finished a preliminary drawing when the Chinese bodyguards returned with their emptied revolvers.

There wasn’t time to wait for the police to arrive.

Leaving Prudence to see to Bettina and the attaché’s youngest daughter, while the son comforted his mother and other sister, Geoffrey and Lowry reached the museum’s lobby area before the huge central doors had swung shut behind the man sent to locate a beat cop. A dusting of fresh snow had covered the ground overnight, but the morning’s foot traffic had churned it into icy, muddy slush. Street sweepers who usually mounded horse dung into steaming piles in the roadway were brushing the walkways clean.

With a nod to signal agreement, Lowry turned into Central Park, and Geoffrey struck off across Fifth Avenue where rows of brownstones were interspersed between the mansions, apartment houses, and luxurious hotels that had sprung up when lower Fifth no longer had room for expansion.

It had been years since either of them had done basic foot reconnaissance, but lessons well learned are never forgotten. There was no telling in which direction the man in the blue jacket and trousers had run, so the two most likely possibilities had to be explored. Few pedestrians strode the sidewalks opposite Central Park and the museum, but here and there servants swept front steps and areaways, polished brass doorknobs, and walked pampered pets. Someone running for his life would be noticed, even if he slowed to a walk after leaving the museum’s immediate area. Especially if he still clutched a bloody knife in his hand.

Three blocks into his search, Geoffrey knew the man hadn’t run in that direction. No one had seen him, and the description he gave raised eyebrows. There were no Chinese living in this part of the city, no Chinese servants employed by hotels or householders. He was usually only a few sentences into his description before the individual he was questioning shook his head and walked away.

His last stop before turning back was at the small and very select apartment hotel where he’d briefly considered renting rooms before deciding on the far grander Fifth Avenue Hotel. The Vienna Arts catered to an older, more settled crowd of wealthy New Yorkers than those who frequented the larger hotels, the plush lobby so silent you could hear the swish of its ferns whenever the front door opened. The doorman pocketed Geoffrey’s generous tip and assured him that no one who shouldn’t be there had come by.

It had been a long shot, but even the least likely gambles sometimes paid off. He took a moment to catch his breath and drink a whiskey at the bar, wondering if Prudence had managed to question any of the Peng family despite the shock of what they had witnessed. Then he pushed through the beveled glass doors and turned south on Fifth Avenue, hoping Lowry had had better luck than he.

Warren had hoped to pick up traces of heavy footsteps in the lightly snow-covered grass or along the muddied gravel paths, but he found no sign that anyone had made a swift getaway through the park. He stopped frequently, asking everyone out for a constitutional or walking a dog whether he had seen anyone matching the description that grew less and less detailed the more often he repeated it. No one had. It was as if the man in the dark trousers and jacket had willed himself to disappear into thin air. Still carrying a bloody knife, because although Lowry kept a sharp eye out for all the places where the weapon might have been tossed, there was no trace of it. No drops of blood that might have fallen to the ground as it sailed through the air toward a trash can or thicket of brambles.

As he made his way back to the museum, Lowry tried to picture the killer’s back as he’d disappeared into the throng of guests crowding the exhibit hall. Had he worn a queue? Had a long pigtail trailed down his spine, swaying from side to side as he ran? He couldn’t remember. He’d gleaned a bit of Chinese history during the long hours crossing the Atlantic, but not enough to have more than a superficial understanding of why Chinese men grew and braided their hair while shaving the front of their heads. Something to do with manifesting subservience to the Manchu dynasty that ruled the country. He’d have to find a book about Chinese culture. He certainly couldn’t ask Fa Cho to explain it again.

“The police have arrived,” Geoffrey announced when they met at the carriageway that delivered important visitors to the museum’s front entrance.

Two hansom cabs and a morgue wagon blocked the road, a line of uniformed officers had formed a cordon across the building’s steps, and a growing clump of curiosity seekers was drifting toward the building from Fifth Avenue. It wasn’t often that this somewhat staid section of the city saw the type of violence that brought out the long arm of the law.

It took some arguing and one of the policemen recognizing Lowry from his days on the force, but eventually the senior officer on duty conceded that they might indeed have run out of the museum in pursuit of the culprit and should therefore be allowed to go back in. The detective in charge would insist on questioning them; they were witnesses. Money changed hands, as it always did in New York when anything needed to be done.

The morgue attendants had placed Lord Peng’s body on a stretcher. They’d covered it with a canvas cloth, secured by loops of rope. No one had mopped the floor. The dead man’s blood had begun to coagulate on the cold marble, a pool of bright red gradually turning darker around the edges.

Looming over the deceased was Detective Steven Phelan from Mulberry Street Police Headquarters. Beside him, taking notes as General di Cesnola recounted what had happened, stood Phelan’s partner, Pat Corcoran. Neither policeman paid attention to the mutterings of the crowd of spectators, most of whom had asked more than once when they would be permitted to leave. Two uniformed officers worked at ticking off names on separate pages of a guest list provided by di Cesnola’s secretary.

“I don’t see any of Lord Peng’s family,” Lowry remarked as he and Geoffrey assessed the situation from the vantage point of the Fifth Avenue side of the gallery.

“I imagine Prudence had them taken to one of the private parlors where the board of trustees meets,” Geoffrey said. “Bettina also.”

“I won’t worry about her, then,” Lowry said. He lowered his voice. “Have you worked with Phelan?”

“Our paths have crossed. I wouldn’t g. . .