Her mother shot her a look.
“There’s no time to worry about that now. We have to worry abouthim.”
Even without Alma’s coffee, the baroness was now wide-awake. She lifted her chin, her mouth set in a grim line. Her hands went to her hips. “I guess we’d best get rid of him,” she said matter-of-factly.
Billie nodded. “Agreed.”
“I think we ought to get Alma,” the baroness said.
“I think so, too. I’ll run up. Don’t you touch anything.”
The baroness took an exaggerated breath. “Trust me, darling, I have no intention of touching any of...this,” she said, making a circling gesture with an open palm. She backed out of Billie’s bedroom.
In a couple of minutes Billie returned to her flat with Alma and a thermos of fresh coffee. Billie poured it into three cups while Alma stared at the corpse on the Persian rug, blanching. Billie had forewarned the dear woman, but the shock made her dry retch and she ran to the bathroom. This was not a good morning for Ella’s lady’s maid. She liked order and quiet and doubtless didn’t like anything about this situation. There wasn’t much to like about it in Billie’s books, either, especially this close to home.
“Drink this.” Billie thrust a steaming cup at her mother. Ella sipped eagerly and seemed to grow a touch taller.
She heard the toilet flush and Alma returned, her face damp and ashen. Billie handed her a cup of black coffee, and after a few sipssome color returned. The three women stood in a semicircle looking down at the corpse.
“He seemed a nice man,” Billie offered after a short silence. “I only met him twice. I think he was about to tell me something important.”
“I’d bet my finest pearls you’re right about that,” her mother replied. “You’ve been poking in the right fireplace, my dear.”
Billie’s initial jolt of adrenaline was subsiding, and now the reality was sinking in. Yes. She had been poking in the right fireplace. Probably the same one Adin Brown had been, which did not bode well for the boy at all. Someone very badly wanted Billie to go down. And they didn’t want her to find the boy. It was well past six now. There could be cops here any minute, and if they really wanted to put the nail in her coffin there would be a photographer as well, positioned across the street to catch her humiliating arrest for murder, as she was dragged out of the block of flats at sunup wearing little more than disheveled lingerie while the body of her would-be informant was stretchered out. A very dirty setup. Even if Billie was exonerated by the courts, could prove her innocence, having a corpse show up in her bedroom meant her name would be mud for a long time to come, and there were already too many people who wanted her out of this “man’s occupation.” Inquiry agents sometimes came across stiffs, of course, but not in their own bedrooms.
“Let’s wrap him in the rug,” Alma said, breaking Billie’s spiraling train of thought. The resourceful woman put her cup down on the floor and got on her knees, her mouth set in concentration. She began to roll the edges of the Persian rug, tucking it around the body like a shroud. After a beat, Ella and Billie knelt down and joined her. “We’ll get him to the lift,” Alma added.
“Good thinking,” Ella said.
They kept rolling.
“He’s skinny, at least,” Billie said, hoping they’d be able to carry him all the way to the lift and wondering if indeed he would fit inside it cocooned in the rug, which added considerable stiffness and bulk. Her mind churned through the logistics as she worked. She left Alma and Ella to finish the job and roughly made up her bed, put the coffee cups in a cupboard, and tidied things so everything looked as it had the day before, apart from the empty space where the Persian rug had been. There was nothing to do about that, but she supposed anyone who didn’t know her flat wouldn’t see the difference.
“He looks a lot more like a body rolled in a rug than I was hoping,” Ella observed quietly as she and Alma inspected their handiwork. “Let’s hope we don’t run into any neighbors or the next residents’ meeting will be hell.”
At six thirty on a clear Sunday morning, the three women dragged a suspiciously heavy rolled rug out of the door of Billie’s flat, sliding it down the hallway of the second floor, Alma and Billie at the front and Ella taking up the rear.
“Shame,” Ella said, panting softly and taking a break from her efforts. “Your father picked up that rug for me at—”
“Not now, Mum. Please. We need all hands,” whispered Billie with some urgency.
“Of course,” she said and got to work again. “I must say, though, I’ve seen a dead man before, but I never realized they were so damn heavy.”
“Shhh.” Deadweight they called it, and it seemed to Billie to beout of all proportion, particularly with this fellow, who for all the world had looked like a featherweight. He’d been pure sinew, muscle, and ribs, the poor man. Billie and Alma were now walking backward. “Mum, you watch the hall behind us; we’ll keep an eye behind you. We have to be very, very quiet. No chatting. Okay, it’s not too far now. But there’s not much time left.” They put their backs into it as they moved down the hallway toward the lift. They were but a few feet from their destination when their burden shifted and a foot slipped out the bottom end of the rug.
“Blast!” Ella exclaimed.
“Shhhhh,” Billie reminded her. Maybe the stairs would have been wiser? No, too awkward, though the prospect of being seen would possibly be less. “I promise he won’t be in your flat long,” she whispered, thinking through her plan.
Ella dropped her end again. “My flat?”
“Yes,” Billie said calmly, in a low voice. “If we godownwe risk running straight into the cops. We are goingup...” The baroness might not have quite the clout she once did, but Billie felt confident the police wouldn’t dare burst into her flat without a very good reason and an ironclad search warrant. Billie, on the other hand, was not protected by a title or her mother’s impressive connections.
Ella stared at her daughter, then turned up her nose, closed her eyes, and crouched beside the bundled corpse, evidently having accepted the inevitable. “Do you think your father ever did something like this?” she whispered, stuffing the foot back in.
Billie sidestepped the question. She didn’t have an answer to that, though she felt sure her instincts had come at least in part from her father. He’d known a setup when he saw one, and there was zeropossibility he would be sitting around waiting for a knock on the door after a body showed up in his room.
Reaching the lift, the three women encountered another problem. A horizontal Zervos wouldn’t fit in the lift. Billie, Alma, and Ella were now visibly perspiring, their hair disheveled, and looking suspicious in the extreme.
