by Liz Freeland
Myrtle in Springtime was the name of my aunt’s first and most popular book. Van Hooten and McChesney had published it, which is how she met Mr. McChesney.
“I felt it would be symbolic of what I’m doing.”
Murdering Myrtle. I nodded, understanding. “It seems rather a shame to kill off your best-selling heroine, even symbolically. What about Fern, or Violet?”
She laughed. “Oh, Myrtle had her day, but she doesn’t bring in much now. I don’t mind killing her off. She’s had a good life.”
I frowned. I’d been under the impression that Myrtle in Springtime was still doing well. Maybe I was mistaken, but it turned my thoughts back to the investigation. “I’m curious about the finances of Van Hooten and McChesney.”
“Why?”
I gave her a quick rundown of all that had happened yesterday, ending with, “Leonard Cain mentioned that Guy couldn’t count on getting any money out of Van Hooten and McChesney. Do you think that was true?”
My aunt didn’t look me in the eye. “I’m not in a position to know anything about it.”
“He also mentioned that Edith Van Hooten was very tightfisted.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Widows sometimes are. They’re getting their hands on the purse strings for the first time. Many become open-handed when that happens, but others might become paranoid about money, and apt to be miserly.”
“According to Cain, she took the miserly route.”
My aunt frowned. “Is Mr. Cain the type of man whose word you trust?”
“Not exactly . . . but then again, I didn’t feel he was telling me outright lies. Anyway, Mrs. Van Hooten could be the biggest skinflint in the world, but it would still be difficult to imagine her holding back money from Guy. He was the sun at the center of her solar system.”
“Her firstborn son.” My aunt sighed. “I suppose neither you nor I can fully understand that bond.”
Beneath the typing table, my leg began to vibrate. I could understand better than Aunt Irene knew. This was what came of keeping secrets.
I pushed away from the table and stood. “Would you mind if I left a little early today? I wanted to visit Mr. McChesney.”
“It’s sweet of you to worry about him,” my aunt said. “He seemed so downcast when he was here last night. Even Bernice’s excellent lamb stew didn’t cheer him.”
“He’s lost everything.”
“But that’s just the attitude I was telling him not to take. There will be insurance money.”
“How much?” It was one of the things I’d wanted to ask Mr. McChesney about.
“I’ve no idea,” she said. “I’m not sure he does, either, for all his tooth gnashing over that business. He should be glad to be rid of it. For years it’s done nothing but aggravate his ulcer.”
True. “Yet I think in his own way he loves the publishing business.”
“What did Wilde say—‘Each man kills the thing he loves’?” Aunt Irene shook her head. “It should be the opposite. The thing we love is almost inevitably what does us in.”
* * *
Mrs. Carey was back. Her round, stern face greeted me at Mr. McChesney’s door. “He’s in,” she said in answer to my question, “but you’ll have a wait to see him. He’s with the doctor.”
I frowned. “Mr. McChesney sent for the doctor?”
She puffed up. “I sent for the doctor when I came in and discovered what a state he was in. And the house—no doctor for that, of course, but me.”
“I’ll wait.” She looked as if she were going to argue. “Aunt Irene will want me to find out what’s wrong. She’s worried about him.”
My aunt’s name softened her a little. “Just as you please,” she said, letting me pass. She closed the door, took my coat, and marched ahead of me. “He told me Miss Livingston Green tried to get some food in him. I don’t know what he means, sending me away and then starving himself.” She stopped at the parlor door and opened it. “You can wait here, but you’ll have company.”
“Thank you, I—”
My steps froze in the doorway. Muldoon, sitting in the velvet upholstered wing chair, sprang up at the sight of me. I hadn’t been expecting this meeting, and from the momentary, flustered look in his eye, he hadn’t, either.
I moved toward him. “Please sit down,” I said. “I’ve been looking forward to collapsing into a chair myself. I couldn’t get a seat on the cross-town bus.” An unsettling nervousness fluttered inside as I drew closer.
He remained standing until I sat on the sofa. Though Mrs. Carey had pulled back the drapes, the sun barely seemed to penetrate the gloom of the heavy furnishings and forest-green walls.
Muldoon tapped his hands on his knees. “I’m glad you’re here. I needed to speak to you about something serious.”
Oh dear. Now that I looked more closely, the deep furrows of his brow revealed themselves. So did the hard glint in his eye. What could I have done to set him off? “Did you?” I kept my voice bright.
“Perhaps this isn’t the place to—”
“Yes, it’s gloomy here, isn’t it?” I interrupted, to waylay whatever unpleasant line of conversation he’d been about to take up. “You should come to my aunt’s sometime. Not long ago she was wondering if she would ever see you again at one of her Thursday night parties.” I’d been wondering, too. He’d come to one during the summer after the case of Ethel’s murder had concluded, but he’d never repeated the visit.
“I don’t have much time for that sort of thing.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“Not that I didn’t find it very pleasant, seeing you there,” he added quickly.
“There are always so many different people at her house. It’s a marvelous opportunity to see the passing parade of Manhattan.”
“That’s not exactly what I meant. I see plenty of the passing parade in my job.”
I tilted my head. “Are you here to interview Mr. McChesney?”
“I’d hoped to. The doctor had just arrived when I got here.” He took out his watch and frowned. “Twenty minutes ago.”
“Were you going to ask him anything in particular?” Surely the police were looking into the insurance angle, too.
He lowered his voice. “Louise, I need to—”
The door swung open and Mrs. Carey reappeared and addressed us both. “The doctor says no visitors. You’ll both have to move along.”
Muldoon protested. “I only need to speak to him for a few minutes.”
“You’d find the conversation one-sided,” a thin voice said. In the doorway stood a gray-bearded man clutching a medical bag. “I just gave my patient a sleeping draught.”
I could read an unspoken curse in Muldoon’s expression. He’d come all the way uptown for nothing.
We tramped back out into the hall and shrugged on our coats. I debated whether I’d prefer to flee before Muldoon could deliver whatever lecture he’d been building up to, or endure his talking-to so I could find out details I needed for the investigation.
Outside the apartment building, he settled the question for me by stopping me before I could flee. “Where are you going?”
“Back to my aunt’s.”
“I’ll walk you across the park.”
I hadn’t intended to walk, but Muldoon took hold of my arm and soon we were crossing Central Park West. Normally a man taking a lady’s arm to cross a boulevard was a gentlemanly gesture, but Muldoon’s grip on my sleeve gave me a taste of what it must feel like for criminals he dragged off to the paddy wagon. His irritation as he spoke confirmed that this was not going to be a pleasurable stroll through the park.
“What the hell are you playing at, Louise?”
I jerked my arm free. “What gives you the right to talk to me like that?”
“Excuse me,” he said, but only after muttering something worse than hell under his breath. “I forgot I was speaking to prim Louise Faulk, secretary, and not the girl who goes to nightclubs to confront a character notorious for illegal
gambling and God knows what else and gets herself booted out on her rear.”
“How did you find out about that?”
“Do you think the NYPD is so incompetent that we didn’t note that Cain was the last man seen with Guy Van Hooten? Could it really be surprising to you that we would plant a man in his club to watch him?”
Heat crept up my neck and into my face. To be perfectly honest, it never had occurred to me that the police would be doing exactly what I was doing. I could just imagine what a spectacle Otto and I had made of ourselves, being dragged out by that big lummox Red. That must have caused a few guffaws when it was mentioned at headquarters.
“How did the officer know it was me?” I asked.
“You’re not exactly a stranger among the detectives.”
Not after last summer, he meant. “No, I suppose not.”
His voice rose again. “Have you lost your mind? Do you know what kind of man Cain is?”
“I’ve heard stories of executions. Very nasty.”
His face went slack. “You knew, yet you went there and got into a tussle with the man?”
Now that was just wrong. “I didn’t tussle with him. I spilled a drink on purpose—just to catch his attention. After that we merely talked.”
“About what?”
“About why he had visited Guy Wednesday evening. I’d heard that Guy owed Cain money. Cain insists that it was just the opposite. He says he paid Guy three thousand dollars on some sort of investment. And I doubt it was a regular investment like stocks and bonds.”
Muldoon blinked slowly. “You don’t say.”
I frowned. “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you. And it’s poor thanks for my having shared my findings. You could at least sound appreciative.”
“I’ll sound appreciative the moment you tell me you’ll give up whatever it is you’re doing and leave the detective work to the police.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t oblige you. I’m being paid to look into the fire.”
“By whom?”
“Mr. McChesney. I promised him and Aunt Irene that I would try to find out who set the fire.”
He shook his head. “Your aunt should know better. She ought to be protecting you.”
Despite being one of the younger detectives in a police force in one of the most modern cities in the world, Frank Muldoon remained a reactionary creature at heart. All around us the twentieth century pulsed, throbbed, and hooted, but he was still chugging along with quaint ideas of how proper young ladies should behave.
“Keep your nose out of this one,” he continued, not giving me time to speak. “Oh, I know what you’re going to say about solving the murder last summer, but there’s a world of difference between that crime and this one. Last summer’s murder was a personal matter. This looks like a professional killing. It’s much more dangerous.”
“So you really think Cain did it,” I said.
“I won’t dignify your so-called investigation with either a yes or no. Stay out of it, Louise.”
The poor man. He might as well have been talking to the trees we were passing. Quite beautiful trees they were, too, in their burnished autumn finery. We’d already walked as far as the new Maine memorial near Columbus Circle. It was impossible not to stare at the bright gilded figure in her seashell chariot at the top of the pylon.
I nodded at the statue. “Did you read the papers? She was fashioned from the melted-down metal recovered from the Maine itself.”
He tilted his head, interested in spite of himself.
A battleship had been turned into art. Tragedy into inspiration. I felt a little like Columbia urging on her hippocampi. No matter what Muldoon said, I would drive forward.
“Cain wasn’t responsible for Guy’s death,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “What led you to that conclusion?”
“Logic. Fire’s not his style. When Cain kills a man, he sends an ape with a gun to kill them. He wouldn’t show up in person at the victim’s place of work and then set a fire. Also, why would he have waited until the next morning to burn the building down? It doesn’t add up.”
His jaw clamped shut, and we walked a ways in silence. I slid a sidewise glance at him. Muldoon didn’t wear a uniform, but he walked with military-erect posture. Why didn’t he speak? He rarely missed an opening to argue with me.
“Well?” I asked, growing uncomfortable with the silence. “You have to admit that fire isn’t the most efficient way to assassinate someone.”
He stopped and turned to me. “Look, I shouldn’t say a word to you about this. The only reason I’m telling you anything is so you’ll realize how deadly serious this situation is.”
I leaned forward, my curiosity growing.
“The coroner doesn’t think fire killed Guy Van Hooten.”
“The coroner?” I asked. “I thought the Van Hootens were against an autopsy.”
“Mistakes are sometimes made.” He kept his face a blank, but he couldn’t hide that glint in his eye that told me that occasionally mistakes were made on purpose. “The Van Hootens are friends of Acting Mayor Kline, but the coroner is our captain’s cousin. Guy Van Hooten’s lungs had no smoke in them.”
It took me a moment to make sense of that grisly statement. “Then . . . Guy didn’t inhale any of the smoke.”
“That’s right.”
“So he was dead when the fire started.”
“You didn’t hear that from me. In fact, you didn’t hear it at all.”
My mind was attempting to cycle through possibilities. “What killed him, then?” Flossie’s story about Cain was still fresh in my mind. “A bullet?”
“No—there was no bullet wound.”
“A blow?”
“The body was very damaged, but the coroner didn’t see any fractures on his skull.”
“Strangulation?”
“We’re less sure of that. Because of the condition of his tissue, bruising around the neck was impossible to detect. But the coroner noticed a burning inside his mouth, on his tongue. We’d seen that in another case. That’s why he went ahead and did a few tests.”
“What did you suspect?”
“Poison. The coroner found evidence of cyanide. The lining of Guy’s stomach was dark.”
How awful. I bit my lip. “I suppose I’d rather be poisoned than burned to death.”
“Cyanide kills quickly if enough is given, but it’s still no picnic,” he said. “After talking to the coroner, I went back to Thirty-eighth Street. There were peculiar stains on the floor by the desk—evidence of some liquid that had dried and burned in the heat. Possibly. . . well, vomit.”
I almost smiled at his hesitation to say the word in front of me. As if my sensibilities were too delicate to hear about bodily fluids. “Is that what you were going to discuss with Mr. McChesney this morning? I suppose you’ll need to check alibis again, depending on when Guy died.”
He frowned. “The coroner still can’t be very specific. It might have been anytime during the night. Your colleagues seem to be a predictable bunch. Most of them claim to have gone home after work and stayed in until leaving again for the office the next morning. They all sing the same song, except for Sandy Novotny.”
“Sandy’s our salesman. He was in Boston Wednesday night.” Wasn’t he?
“And he has a telegram sent to his wife that night to prove it.”
I released a breath. Not that I suspected Sandy, but his being out of town did put him in a dodgy position.
“I wanted to hear McChesney’s account of his whereabouts again,” Muldoon continued, “but I suppose that will have to wait. I need your promise that you won’t divulge police findings to possible suspects, Louise. I told you all this in confidence.”
His voice dropped, and when I looked into his steady gaze, I felt the crazy, unfamiliar inclination to do what he asked. I heard myself saying, “I won’t say anything to Mr. McChesney.”
“Good girl.”
My jaw clenched at the words, the verbal equivalen
t of a dismissive pat on the head. But I don’t promise not to tell Aunt Irene. Or anyone else, for that matter.
Back at my aunt’s house, I wasted no time filling her in on all that I’d learned.
“Poison!” she exclaimed.
As far as I was concerned, it was another reason not to believe Cain was at the bottom of Guy’s death. Administering poison to Guy while he was at his office desk would have required more cunning than Cain and his henchmen possessed. They were bullet men.
Who did I know with cunning? Ford leapt to mind—but he had no motive for killing Guy. In fact, he had every incentive to keep Guy alive.
A throat cleared. I’d forgotten Walter was standing by the door. Aunt Irene looked up at him with interest. “What is it, Walter?”
“If you don’t mind my interjecting an opinion . . .”
“If I minded, I would go mad. You always give your opinions anyway.”
He nodded. “It seems clear to me what kind of culprit we should be looking for, if it’s a matter of poison.”
I didn’t understand. “What kind?”
My aunt’s breath caught. “The female kind. Poison is the woman’s weapon.”
Walter’s head bobbed. “To find the killer, the French have a phrase for you: Cherchez la femme.”
Aunt Irene looked pleased. “You’re exactly right, Walter. Find the woman who had a reason to kill Guy Van Hooten and we’ll have our poisoner.”
CHAPTER 8
There was one big problem with the cherchez la femme directive my aunt had given me: I’d never personally heard of or seen any lady connected to Guy. I considered asking Callie to use her Teddy connection to find out if Hugh knew of Guy’s having had a liaison with any particular girl. But with Callie now wholly consumed in rehearsals, it wasn’t fair to keep pestering her to help me in my investigation.
Of the people I knew, Jackson would be the one most able to help me. I went to the candy store down the block, where there was a telephone the owner allowed us to use. When I attempted to call Jackson, the operator informed me his address no longer had service.
An hour later I arrived at his flat carrying a bouquet of chrysanthemums I’d picked up at a flower vendor on Broadway. I hoped it would be a little compensation to Miriam—a very little—for my lack of friendliness the last time I’d been there.