Murder in Midtown

by Liz Freeland

  “These people possess great wealth and even greater pride. Part of what maintains both is guarding their privacy from the prying eyes of the public.”

  The reverence in his tone for “these people” sickened me. Of course, Mr. McChesney had been on the receiving end of the Van Hooten largesse. His company had been founded on it. But they weren’t a different, superior species, however they might consider themselves to be. Just remembering Hugh’s words made my blood boil. Despite the oil stains on his jacket, he was Edith Van Hooten’s son through and through. A chip off the old battle-ax.

  “Everyone has pride,” I said. “But the world will descend into chaos if people can just run around burning down buildings and killing one another with impunity.”

  At the sidewalk, we saw two men pass through a gaggle of journalists and then come toward us—Muldoon and another detective. Muldoon almost stumbled when he saw me standing there, which gave me a jolt of satisfaction. There was something delicious in catching him off guard. It made him seem almost human.

  Mr. McChesney acknowledged the two men with a nod. “Detectives.”

  “What are you doing here, Louise?” Muldoon asked.

  “Paying a condolence call on the family,” I said. “And you?”

  “We need to ask questions,” Muldoon said.

  Knowing what a stone wall he was rushing headlong into almost made me feel sorry for the man. At that very moment, Hugh was no doubt coaching his mother to say nothing. Or maybe he was putting in that call to Acting Mayor Kline. Given how Mrs. Van Hooten and Hugh had seized up at my gentle inquiries, I could well imagine the chilly reception a police detective’s questions would receive inside that opulent manse.

  “Good luck.” I smiled at Muldoon and trilled a goodbye with my gloved fingers.

  * * *

  Aunt Irene nearly tackled her servant Walter in her impatience to answer the door when we arrived. Held back by a silver circlet decorated with citrines, her curls drooped in afternoon limpness, which gave me an indication of how long it had been since she sent me her message. My rumbling stomach was another hint. I hadn’t eaten anything today.

  “I was expecting you at least an hour ago,” she said. “What’s happened? I’ve been so upset I’ve canceled the usual Thursday night soirée. Walter’s been telephoning to let people know.”

  She was so eager to get news out of us that she worked against her own interests, talking nineteen to the dozen and blocking our path inside. Mr. McChesney, a gentleman, was not given to gossiping in doorways.

  Walter rescued us. “Excuse me.” He mimicked a breaststroke past his employer. “Only one of us is being paid to answer the door, and it’s not the one in the tiara.”

  Aunt Irene let out a puff of irritation, but dutifully stepped back with a flick of her pleated skirt of raw silk. She had two regular servants, and both of them often treated her more like an exasperating relative than an employer.

  In the vestibule I unbuttoned my coat and explained what had delayed us. “Guy Van Hooten died this morning. Mr. McChesney wanted to call on his mother.”

  Aunt Irene had only heard about the fire, not about Guy Van Hooten’s death. She didn’t know him, of course, except from what Mr. McChesney and I had told her. Nevertheless, she looked almost as dazed as Mr. McChesney as she took her seat on the couch between Dickens and Trollope. The two old toy spaniels, plump and snoring, were the only inmates of the house who hadn’t bestirred themselves at the sound of our arrival. Watchdogs they were not.

  A pot of hot tea and a plate of finger sandwiches were brought in straightaway. The cook, Bernice, must have been hovering at the kitchen’s swinging door like a racehorse at the starting gate. I couldn’t have been more grateful.

  My aunt didn’t even wait for the tea to be poured to exhort us to tell her more. “How could it have happened? And how is poor Mrs. Van Hooten bearing up?”

  In fairness to my aunt, she was no ghoul, nor an idle gossip. The goings-on of her friends and acquaintances were always listened to with sympathy and understanding, and she was not stingy with advice when it was called for. Her generosity had helped not only me, but also friends and even friends of friends.

  She was, however, a writer, and like any good chronicler of human nature, she soaked up details like a sponge. Her avidity for news, I reckoned, was roughly eighty percent humanitarian and twenty percent mercenary.

  I laid out what facts we knew. The entire telling didn’t take much longer than the duration of the devouring of two egg-salad sandwiches—that’s how paltry my knowledge of what had happened actually was.

  My aunt leaned back, her face thoughtful as she absently petted the dogs who sat on either side of her like bookends, both awake now and leaning toward the sandwich tray in quivery longing.

  “Died at his desk,” she wondered aloud. “I’ve often thought that’s how I’ll be found when I meet my maker. Not that I’m in any hurry, heaven knows.” She let out a nervous chuckle and glanced ceilingward. “At least, I hope heaven knows.”

  Depositing my teacup on the piecrust table at my side, I scooted forward on my chair. “But Guy was the last person I’d expect to die in the traces. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. McChesney?”

  A second passed before my boss registered that I was talking to him. “Oh, yes. The very last.”

  “Especially first thing in the morning.” I told Aunt Irene about Guy’s lax work habits and also what Hugh Van Hooten had told us concerning his brother’s absence from the family house last night.

  “Is it known when the fire began?” she asked.

  “It had to be before eight in the morning,” I said. “That’s when the first witness on the street saw smoke. A few minutes before, a woman walking her poodle noticed a hunched man on the street in a brown overcoat and a plaid scarf.”

  “That’s not a peculiar sight in midtown,” Mr. McChesney piped up.

  “She described him as lurking.” Of course, the poodle woman was, to put it kindly, eccentric. I wasn’t sure how reliable the police would consider her testimony to be.

  My aunt steepled her fingers. “Even if a young man was inebriated last night, he should have been sober enough to escape a fire this morning.”

  “He might have died from breathing the smoke before he reached consciousness,” I said.

  “Or perhaps the arsonist knocked him out before setting the fire,” Aunt Irene suggested.

  I frowned. “The firemen didn’t say positively that the fire was arson....”

  Mr. McChesney lifted his head. “They didn’t, did they?”

  “But they must suspect. Why else would it have started?” Aunt Irene asked.

  “Why do buildings all over town catch fire?” In the papers I read about the fire department putting out blazes every day. “Carelessness, usually.”

  “Guy Van Hooten was alone in the building, you said.” Aunt Irene poured herself some more tea. “Do the firemen know if he was careless with the gas or with matches?”

  “We’ve heard nothing,” Mr. McChesney said. “And there was so much damage. Perhaps we’ll never find out the cause of the fire.”

  That possibility bothered me most. Was there anything worse than not knowing? The question reminded me of Hugh Van Hooten. “Guy’s brother told us his family will resist any efforts by the coroner to do an autopsy,” I told Aunt Irene. “He said they won’t help with the investigation in any way.”

  “How odd.” Her eyes narrowed in thought as she lifted her teacup to her lips.

  “Autopsies are hideous and surely not necessary in this case,” Mr. McChesney said. “The poor fellow died in a fire. By all accounts, it was a grisly death. Pardon me for speaking of it, but it’s the truth. No family like the Van Hootens would willingly put up with such a desecration of a family member.”

  “But if the death was murder, and the autopsy would help discover who killed their beloved son and brother?” Aunt Irene asked.

  Had Guy been a beloved brother to Hugh, though? Hugh had
seemed more annoyed than mournful at his brother’s death. Guy was never early in his life, except in managing to get himself born before me. If that didn’t show bitterness . . .

  “It was all an accident,” Mr. McChesney said, rolling through the events in his mind again. “Tragic. The fire . . . no matter how it started . . . and then poor Guy. I for one can see the family’s point of view. Guy’s gone. No police investigation will change that.”

  “But don’t you want to know the truth?” Aunt Irene asked him. “It was your business.”

  “If the family refuses to cooperate with a police investigation, there’s nothing I can do.”

  My aunt swung toward me. “The police aren’t the only ones who can investigate, are they, Louise?”

  This past summer, I’d conducted an investigation of my own to clear my friend Otto of the murder of my roommate’s cousin, which had taken place in our flat. My success had led me to think I could find a place in the NYPD. But in that case, the murder had been bound up in the lives of my own friends, not an old New York society family hell-bent on guarding its privacy.

  “You’re quite at leisure now,” my aunt reminded me.

  That was another problem. “I need to find a job. I can’t live off Callie.”

  “You already have a job.” She smiled. “I’m giving you one.”

  Salvation! Didn’t I mention Aunt Irene was a generous soul? “What do you need me to do?”

  “Type.” At my confusion, she held out her hands. “Look at them. Quite useless against that beast of a Remington. Arthritis. Bernice wraps them in hot towels every afternoon. It’s the damp cold that worsens the problem, Dr. Lazenby says. So it would be such a help to me if you could be my typist until the spring. If that’s agreeable to you?”

  I would have kissed her if it hadn’t required knocking over Dickens to do it. “Of course I’ll help you. You didn’t need to wait for a fire to ask me.”

  “Perhaps the fire was all your aunt’s doing,” Mr. McChesney said. “The whole conflagration was just a ploy to free you up.”

  My aunt laughed but quickly sobered again. “I’ve seen Louise type—grateful as I am for her help, her skill’s not enough to murder for.”

  Murder. It was still so hard to believe that someone would have killed Guy. I’d never liked him myself, but men like him always struck me as the kind of people nothing bad ever happened to. No matter how irresponsible or profligate he was, Guy’s vaunted position in life was meant to inoculate him from the evils and dangers the hoi polloi were subject to.

  But it hadn’t. And my aunt was right. Something inside me burned to discover what—and who—had brought about his early death.

  “Come here in the mornings and type my pages,” my aunt said, “and in the afternoons, you can look into that fire—and what Guy Van Hooten was up to—for Ogden.”

  Mr. McChesney’s eyes grew large. “For me?”

  “You want to get to the bottom of whatever happened to your business, don’t you?” she asked. “You said yourself that the Van Hootens will stonewall the police. In one way, I can’t say as I blame them—my few experiences with policemen have revealed them to be blunderers, more often than not. But Louise is very astute, and dogged once she sets her mind on something. She’ll find out what happened. I’ll refund all the money you pay her if she doesn’t.”

  She expected Mr. McChesney to pay me? He and I both must have mugged our surprise like actors in a moving picture. “You can’t expect a girl to waste her afternoons for no pay at all. Admit it, Ogden,” Aunt Irene admonished. “If I, a poor working woman, can give her money to type for me, surely you can fork over five dollars per day for her to risk life and limb to hunt down an arsonist-murderer on your behalf.”

  I gulped. The prospect of being five dollars per day richer was as sweet as a song to my ears, but I hadn’t considered the task she was setting before me in such stark terms. Risking life and limb? Hunting down a murderer?

  Mr. McChesney scratched his chin. “Yes, but you need a typist, while I never had any intention—”

  “No intention of finding out what kind of fiend burned down the business you spent a lifetime building and which killed your partner?” She glared at him imperiously. “If that’s true, you’re not the Ogden Cornelius McChesney I thought I knew.”

  To be honest, the Mr. McChesney I knew was the type of passive man who would allow himself to accept the investigation of the proper authorities, no matter how slipshod or halfhearted. He was not a forceful man, or daring. He hadn’t even wanted to put his neck out to discover new authors, or branch out in unfamiliar sales territories. The mere suggestion of beginning a mail-order business had once sent him home ill for a week. Gumption wasn’t his strong suit.

  Nevertheless, something in my aunt’s thundering pronouncement made my former boss sit up straighter. He had loved her once, and she had refused him, twice, calling him an old fool. He’d probably wondered if he’d ever have the chance to prove himself to her. Now a gauntlet had been thrown down, and to my surprise, cautious, ulcerous Ogden McChesney took up the challenge.

  “Three dollars per day would be more in line with my budget,” he said. “I was hoping to retire soon, you know, Irene. And Louise isn’t a real detective, is she?”

  Aunt Irene swiveled toward me. So did the dogs. “Well, Louise, what do you think? Is this acceptable to you?”

  Three dollars a day wasn’t five, but it was more than acceptable. In fact, the sum verged on the miraculous. I’d woken up this morning a mere secretary, had feared my dreams of greater things permanently dashed by ten o’clock, and was unemployed by noon. And now I found myself an investigator—and possibly making more than I had working at Van Hooten and McChesney. And all I had to do was type a little and hunt down a mad arsonist-murderer.

  Duck soup.

  CHAPTER 3

  The sidewalks were teeming that afternoon, and everyone seemed to be in a hurry. People swung impatiently in and out of shop doors in front of me, and a few speed demons ploughed through the pedestrians like running backs charging a pigskin through a defensive line. It was bump and jostle all along the avenues. Closer to home, children savoring the last glimmers of daylight cluttered the side streets and sidewalks with roller skates and impromptu stickball games that occasionally required death-defying dashes in front of automobiles or collisions with irritated pedestrians.

  These autumn days were the last afternoons the children would be hanging about the stoops and sidewalks after school until next spring, so who could blame them for making the most of it? I didn’t, even when a marble underfoot tripped me and, even worse, almost caused me to drop the package Aunt Irene had sent home with me, which included sandwiches and half a coconut cake from the canceled party. Bernice’s coconut cake was a commodity to be valued as highly as gold bricks.

  In the foyer of our building, music blared down from above. A saxophone quintet inhabited the apartment on the second floor, but the Bleecker Blowers had driven to Utica for a show last night. Our top floor was currently occupied by a poet who called himself a creator of “word symphonies,” but those were strictly non-musical. The sound had to be coming from a phonograph, and the only one of those in the building was in our flat. Callie was home.

  I hurtled up the stairs, eager to fill her in on everything that had happened during the day even as I became more puzzled by the exotic, undulating pulse of the music issuing from our apartment. I pushed through the door, slightly winded, and sucked in my breath. Callie was not alone. In fact, she and a man were entwined together so intimately that they were as close to mimicking the act of carnal love as it was possible to without having an actual bed beneath them. The man—handsome, yet a stranger to me—leaned over Callie, who was practically dipped into a backbend. This required considerable strength on the man’s part and impressive flexibility from both Callie and her foundation garments.

  “Another reason to be grateful for the no-bone corset,” I observed.

  Stil
l almost upside down, Callie’s face broke into a smile. “Louise!” she called over the music. Noticing me backing away to give them some privacy, she laughed and whacked her partner playfully on the shoulder. “Let me up, Teddy. We’re shocking my roommate.”

  Teddy, whom I had been hearing about for weeks but had not yet met in the flesh, complied.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, still poised to flee.

  Callie lunged for the phonograph to turn down the volume. “Stop blushing, Louise. It wasn’t lovemaking you interrupted. Just the tango.”

  “That was a tango?” I’d heard of it—the whole country was hearing about it—but hadn’t yet seen it performed. It and other so-called lewd dances like the turkey trot were being debated and banned in other cities. Boston, for one. I understood the controversy a little better now.

  “I was just teaching Teddy. Isn’t it fun?” she asked him.

  “I’ll say.” Children in candy stores were blasé compared to the eagerness he displayed.

  “I’ll have to teach you, too,” Callie told me.

  “I need to do a few months of limbering exercises first.” Even then I wasn’t sure I’d ever be comfortable being that intimate with a dance partner. “I’m not quite tango-ready.”

  “Oh!” An idea suddenly occurred to Callie. “You two don’t know each other yet, do you? Louise Faulk, Teddy Newland.”

  We smiled at each other in greeting. Teddy was a type I’d only encountered in novels and in Manhattan—a young man about town for whom the chief concern wasn’t work but how to spend all the money he was receiving from his rich father. Some, like Guy Van Hooten, found ersatz employment. Others idled away their days drifting from one club to the next. Life for these rarified creatures was all yachts, tailors, and tangos.

  And chorus girls. Teddy was an investor in the show Callie was about to open in. I’d assumed he looked upon chorus girls as a sort of entertaining dividend, but the sinister vision I’d conjured up from weeks of Callie telling me about him was immediately shattered by Teddy himself. I’d imagined a wolf. In reality, he was more a golden puppy dog with a dapper mustache, and the look he gave Callie was one of unabashed adoration.