The Ashford Key

The dame walked into my office on a Thursday and she didn't waste my time, which was rare enough that I poured her a drink. Constance Ashford was the dead man's sister. She'd buried her brother two weeks back — William Ashford, the financier, who put a bullet through his temple in his own study with the door bolted from the inside. The police closed it suicide. The insurance company is sitting on a hundred-thousand-dollar policy that doesn't pay on self-inflicted. She doesn't care about the money. She cares about William.

"He was right-handed," she said. "Shaved with his right hand. Signed his name with his right hand. Held his pipe in his right hand even when he was tying a tie with the other one."

I told her I'd look at the file.

The Ashford house sits on Charles Street — the kind of brownstone where the silver gets polished twice a week whether anyone uses it or not. The valet, a narrow man named Thomas Reilly, walked me through the rooms with the cool efficiency of a man who has rehearsed his answers. He has been in service to the family for nine years. He found the body at half-past ten on the night of the third. The study door was locked from the inside. He used his master key — the only duplicate, kept on his person — to enter. He found Mr. Ashford slumped across the desk with the revolver in his left hand.

I asked to see the study.

The room smelled of pipe tobacco and old wood. The desk was almost clean: a fountain pen capped neatly on the blotter, a half-finished letter to a Mr. Henry Croft regarding the dissolution of their partnership. The bottom of the letter was torn raggedly across — torn, not cut — where Ashford's signature would have lived. The decanter on the sideboard held brandy I would not have served to a man I disliked. Watered. I know the trick. Reilly had been pinching the good stock for months and topping off what was left from the tap. Ashford had noticed. There were household memoranda in the desk drawer documenting it in his own hand. The valet was three weeks from being shown the door, and from a criminal complaint besides.

The window was unlatched. It had rained that night, hard enough to drown the gutters. The sill was bone-dry. Whoever set that window open did it after the storm passed — and did it to point a finger somewhere else.

On the dead man's chin, where the rigor had set, there was a small shaving nick. Fresh. Pink at the edges. The kind a careful valet does not leave, except when his hands are unsteady, or his thoughts are elsewhere. Reilly had shaved his employer at nine o'clock — by his own statement — less than two hours before the killing.

Three people had reason to want William Ashford in the ground. His wife Eleanor, who inherits everything — and who spent the evening on the receiving line at the Astor Foundation gala beside the mayor's wife with half of Baltimore in evening dress to vouch for her. Henry Croft, his partner of fifteen years, whose holdings would collapse to dust the moment Ashford dissolved their concern — Croft alone in his house on Madison, no witnesses, and hasn't crossed the Ashford threshold since the spring. And Thomas Reilly, the valet with the master key.

I have ninety seconds to give you what I've got. You make the call.