by Liz Freeland
“Guy might have been all the things you say. I don’t know much more about him than what you’ve told me. But I do know he was human, and a human can change. It’s rare, I know—but we all have that potential. Guy, in the end, might’ve decided to turn over a new leaf and own up to his responsibilities.”
“Are we discussing Guy or a novel?” He laughed. “In the last chapter, will stern old Edith Van Hooten take in the half-caste Jew grandson to her bosom?”
Every time he spoke of Myrna’s child, I hated him a little more. Pretending became impossible. “You’re despicable.”
“And you’re pathetic, with your silly pretensions at trying to be a detective. Do you realize how enjoyable it was to feed you little tidbits that I knew would send you chasing off down blind alleys? You were like an untrained coonhound bounding after every jackrabbit.” He shook his head, mocking me. “Yet you take yourself for a clever person. Even now you think you’ll talk me out of killing you.”
At least now I was certain of his intention. I lifted my chin. “Did you bring poison with you?” I couldn’t resist taunting him back. “The poison confused us, you know. My aunt calls it the woman’s weapon.”
In response, his hands came out of his pockets. The blade in his right hand glinted in the moonlight.
Every cell in my body froze. A memory from the summer flashed through me. Blood. Callie’s cousin’s lifeless body sprawled facedown on a bed. A butcher knife in her back. A horrible way to die.
I was not going to die that way. Not if I could help it.
“You’re not that kind of killer, Jackson.” I swallowed. I hoped he wasn’t at least. “You could have knifed Guy in the back, but you didn’t.”
“I had time then. I need to get rid of you quickly.”
“You won’t get away with it. Miriam knows I went looking for you.”
“She won’t talk. Her kind doesn’t get involved with the police.”
That’s all he knew. “Someone else knows I’m here, too.” I smiled with a confidence fabricated from thin air.
His eyes shifted in doubt. “Where is this person, then?” “Fetching the police.”
He gave that statement a fraction of a moment’s thought. “Then I’d better hurry.”
Jackson wasn’t a man in peak physical condition, but he struck faster than I imagined him capable of. Ever since I’d glimpsed the knife, I’d been poised to run, trying to anticipate how best to dart past him. But he saw my dilemma at once and feinted to the left, then caught me as I made a dash for it. As he grabbed my arm, spinning me back in the direction of the water, I screamed. But who would hear me? The lumps in the empty lot scores of yards away? Streetwalkers?
I didn’t expect rescue, but I wasn’t going down without a fight. I twisted and kicked, escaping his grasp and breaking into a run—the wrong way. The only choice was to scramble farther out on the pier, but I didn’t care. I stumbled away, yelling myself hoarse, until my head jerked back in blinding pain. The bastard ripped off my hat and grabbed my hair.
“Shut up!”
Standing behind me, he had his right arm crooked around my neck. Steel punctured my left cheek. A little lower, one swipe of the blade, and my throat would be cut.
Jackson’s hairy wrist pushed my chin back so I was pinned against him. He wasn’t wearing a glove—he’d probably known he’d be wielding the knife. He’d planned this. Planned my death. I searched frantically for a way out—fast—but all I saw was water, and those distant barges with the long johns flapping at me like a goodbye.
I had one weapon, one chance. I took it. I opened my mouth and bit down as hard as I could on the soft pad of Jackson’s thumb.
Years spent around my uncle the butcher had familiarized me with the sound of an animal in pain. Jackson’s cry reached a hog-being-slaughtered pitch, but I waited for the sound of the knife’s clattering to the planks at our feet before I unclamped my teeth from his hand. I lunged for the knife, but he kicked it away. It went spinning off the edge of the pier. The sickening taste of his blood in my mouth didn’t stop me running. The end of the pier had a rope strung across it, the flimsiest of barriers. I hiked my skirts above my knees and scrambled over it. There was a good twenty-foot drop to the water lapping below. Jackson, cursing and bending over his clutched hand, followed me.
“You bitch! You bit off my thumb!”
I doubted it. “I don’t care if your whole hand comes off. Go complain to someone at Bellevue.”
“As soon as we’re through.”
“Your knife is gone,” I pointed out.
“Drowning will work as well.”
“Then you’ll die. I can swim and you can’t. You told me so yourself.”
“And you, like an idiot, took me at my word.”
Frustration roiled through me. I had believed him, and now here I was, perched on the edge of a pier over a cold, filthy river. My gaze scanned the world beyond his shoulder—dry land—and I saw a flash of figures running down the sidewalk beneath a streetlamp. My heart rose, and I lifted my hand to signal them. Only the briefest of cries escaped my throat before Jackson’s hand hit my chest.
The shock of it knocked the air out of me, and instead of hailing my rescuers, I found myself wheeling my arms as I pitched backward off the pier, toward the black water below.
I dropped like a stone. It was a long way down, yet there seemed to be no time to catch my breath. Freezing river water swallowed me, and I inhaled too late. Cold, murky liquid filled my nostrils, my lungs. My breathing passages were smothering in liquid, and trying to cough it out only made things worse. Meanwhile, all the wool, cotton, and leather on my body pulled me down with the efficiency of a dropped anchor. I was a good swimmer, but I was used to feeling buoyant in the water, floating along in a bathing costume of the lightest wool, not heading straight for the bottom like a boulder.
I could die. The idea startled me almost as much as the iciness of the water and my inability to breathe. My drowned body would wash up somewhere, and what then? Otto and Miriam wouldn’t know what had happened. Several would mourn me—Callie, Otto, Aunt Irene, Walter, maybe even Bernice. Muldoon would shake his head over how I’d mucked this up. And the NYPD would record the death of the most disaster-prone and shortest-lived probationer in its history.
I would never again look into the face of the son I’d given up.
Frustration brought me back to myself. I wasn’t dead yet. Hard as it was, I forced myself to kick.
At the same time, something exploded next to me. I panicked, then realized it was a man in the water, sinking like I was. Muldoon? I continued to kick for my life.
It seemed like an eternity, but I finally broke the surface and simultaneously inhaled and hacked up the liquid that had been trapped in my lungs. It was a struggle not to sink again. And then my waterlogged companion bobbed up, too. I looked over and groaned in irritation. It was Jackson.
Almost before I could react, he lunged and grabbed my neck, forcing me down again. This time I was able to inhale a breath that was half air, half Hudson.
My limbs, benumbed with cold, had trouble obeying my commands. Yet I kicked out, and one kick landed right where I aimed, at Jackson’s middle. For a moment, I was free, and I surfaced again, gulping and paddling my arms to get away.
Above, a figure on the pier looked down. “Louise! Are you okay?”
Muldoon was stripping off his coat.
“I’ve got her,” Jackson called back, a split second before his hands landed on my shoulders and shoved. I went under again.
I struggled, but felt myself being held under and pulled farther out. Jackson was stronger than he looked, and he was counting on my already weakened state to make it easy to finish me off. And Muldoon had been so close. So close.
I stilled my breath, wanting to hang on for as long as I could.
The hands holding me under suddenly let go. At first I thought perhaps Jackson had thought he’d killed me already. When I bobbed up to the surface, however,
the water was churning. Muldoon, hair glistening wet and all askew but jaw set as ever, was throttling Jackson, who attempted to box him through the water. I was treading water, trying to find a way to help. Finally, I managed to pull myself around Jackson’s back and grabbed his heavy coat collar, which I yanked down until his upper arms were slightly straitjacketed. Enough to allow Muldoon to get hold of him.
“You’re caught, Beasley,” he said.
The whites of Jackson’s eyes showed in the moonlight. “At what? Trying to save Louise?”
“Drown her, you mean.”
“The crazy woman tried to commit suicide by jumping from the pier.”
“Your own wife knows otherwise,” I said. “So does a friend of mine.”
“But were they here?” he spat. “They were not.”
Several policemen had gathered at the end of the pier and were holding a lamp toward the water.
“We’re throwing a rope, Detective!”
“Throw two!” Muldoon called back. “And get a rowboat out here.”
“I don’t need a rope,” I said. Unfortunately, at that moment the water lapped at my face and I swallowed a few quarts of river.
“I’ve done nothing,” Jackson insisted.
Muldoon ignored him. His gaze was on me. “You all right, Louise?”
My chattering teeth probably belied my nod, but I was determined to keep a stiff upper lip, even if it was blue.
“Good. Then I’ll let you say the words, Officer Faulk.”
I blinked. The cold water was freezing my brain.
He cued me. “Jackson Beasley . . .”
“Oh!” I was treading water, but even so, I straightened my shoulders. “Jackson Beasley, I’m arresting you for the murder of Guy Van Hooten.”
This is how you help a fellow police officer apprehend a violent criminal, I thought. The messy operation probably wouldn’t have garnered me many points on the police exam, but the results sure felt good.
Most of Jackson’s obscene reply to my statement was lost when his head went under. I raised a brow at Muldoon, whose hand was palming the crown of Jackson’s bald head like a basketball.
“Water’s rough,” he said.
Rough and cold. Jackson came back up, spluttering curses. When the ropes were thrown, I looped one around the prisoner, then took hold of the other and allowed myself to be tugged back to the pier, to relative safety, and wonderful dry land.
CHAPTER 21
Is there anything more glorious than being right and having the proof to show it? The day after we caught Jackson, I put that question to Callie and she laughed in my face. My now-scarred face with a black eye.
“Being smug is the word you’re looking for,” she said. “And if that’s the look of glory, give me some lesser feeling any day. Like the thrill of applause at the second act curtain.”
“We all can’t be Broadway showstoppers,” I said.
“All right, then, what about love?”
“Love,” I grumbled. Half the time people in love seemed miserable. Callie’s worst days were the ones clouded by friction with the men she was supposedly in love with. And I didn’t dare look at poor Otto, who’d spent half his life in the throes of unrequited love. He was sitting in our chair, wrapped in a blanket and drinking a cup of tea. You’d think he was the one who’d nearly drowned in a freezing river last night.
“The best feeling I know is when a tune that’s been in my head finally comes together,” he said. “Like the one yesterday. Everything was going great guns until I showed up here. It’s a fine thing to be right, Louise, but your being proven right always seems to come at the price of near death.”
I laughed. He was correct. But it was still a great feeling.
Callie came around to my way of thinking, and sooner than I would have thought possible. Later in the day, after she’d gone to her show’s final dress rehearsal before the big Broadway opening, there was a knock on my door. I padded across the room in my slippers, girding myself for an encounter with Wally. We still hadn’t fixed the window.
But it wasn’t Wally at my door. It was Hugh Van Hooten, his mouth tensed in an impatient frown, battered hat twisting in his hand. When his gaze reached my face, he exclaimed, “Great God. You look horrible.”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry,” he said. “That probably sounded rude. But your face really is something out of Edgar Allan Poe.”
“You should have stopped at sorry,” I told him. “Would you like to come in, or do you prefer insulting me from the chill of the hallway?”
“In, I think.” He strolled past me, heading straight for the parlor, taking it all in as critically as if he were a potential buyer. “This place isn’t as bad inside as the looks of the house would lead you to think. A little cramped, though. I have a closet wider than this parlor.” He frowned at Callie’s curio shelf. “That kind of thing is totally useless.”
I’d been on the verge of offering him something to drink, but thought better of it.
Not that Hugh noticed. He plopped himself down on the sofa, crossed his spidery legs, and let out a sigh. “Of course you know why I’m here.”
“I don’t have the foggiest idea.”
His lips twisted like a man swallowing a sour pickle. “Obviously, I came to thank you. For finding out who killed Guy. It’s been an awful business—very hard on my mother especially. And quite a distraction for me.”
“It’s good that you’ll no longer be distracted, then.”
“Yes.” He sighed, as if the worst bit of his visit was yet to come. “Also, I wanted to apologize.”
The last words came out so fast, I almost missed them. “You’re apologizing to me?”
“Who else?”
“Callie.”
He blinked. “What has she to do with anything?”
“You busted up her relationship with Teddy.”
He sputtered at the accusation. “That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Didn’t you tell Teddy not to bring Callie to the air park again?”
“Yes, but so what? Women don’t belong around airplanes. Besides, it’s not as if I give Teddy orders. I’m not his father.”
“He looks up to you. Heaven only knows why, but your opinion is gold to him.”
“I see.” He frowned. “I’d been wondering why he was moping around like a sad puppy.”
“You never asked him?”
“Didn’t seem any of my business.”
“Well, now it is. So you can tell Teddy that he should call on Callie, who is wonderful and who, incidentally, would be an excellent pilot, no matter what you think of women flyers.”
I half expected him to retract his apology and storm out. Instead, he studied me for a moment the way he might inspect a misfiring piston. “You’re really quite interesting for a girl. I hadn’t noticed that.”
“There’s no call to overwhelm me with flowery compliments.”
If he heard my sarcasm, he didn’t acknowledge it. “Well, girls are usually such nuisances. Only a fraction of them seem inclined to use their brains. And they always cause problems.”
“Like Myrna?”
“Well, yes.” He frowned. “There’s no helping her.”
“Yes, there is.” I leaned forward. “Tell your mother she has a grandson. That’s all you have to do.”
He barked out a laugh. “All! All Odysseus had to do was face the Cyclops.”
“Nice way to talk about your mother.”
“You’ve never crossed her.”
“No, but I saw how much she loved her children.”
“Guy, you mean.” He sighed. “Well, you could be right. I suppose if you can jump into an icy river to catch Guy’s killer, I could have a heart-to-heart with Mother about Guy’s illegitimate child.”
Personally, I would rather jump into the Hudson again, but saying so wasn’t going to help my argument. “You won’t regret trying.”
“I might, but as you say, it may help. I cal
led Guy a coward for not telling her. I’ve been no better than a coward myself.”
He left soon after this, exiting the apartment as abruptly as he’d appeared. The whole encounter was so brief and so strange, I doubted anything would come of it. But that very night I was awakened from a deep sleep by Callie, who lifted me in a hug before I was fully awake.
“You’re a miracle worker, Louise.”
I blinked back exhaustion. “I am?”
“Teddy came backstage after the show tonight with the biggest bunch of flowers you’ve ever seen. He was all apologies. He said Hugh told him he was a fool if he turned his back on me just because he said so, which he now insists he never did. Poor Teddy was so flustered. But he said Hugh’s change of heart must have been on your account, because Hugh said that if I’m half as smart as you, I’m golden.”
“Then you’re platinum, because you’re a hundred times better.”
“That’s what Teddy said. But he was wondering if maybe you and Hugh . . .”
I was so sleepy it took a moment to catch her drift. I laughed. “No.”
“What a shame.” Callie sighed. “We could have all gone flying together.”
That wasn’t the end of my good deeds, however. Callie later reported that Myrna and son had been asked to Thanksgiving dinner at the Van Hootens. No telling how that would turn out, but the invitation alone indicated the old lady must have thawed a little.
Now it seemed that only my own future was uncertain.
The department had given me a week’s leave. At the end of that time, after Thanksgiving, I was supposed to report back and find out if I had any future with the NYPD. Yes, I’d caught a criminal, but as Muldoon had warned, the brass didn’t appreciate probationers acting as detectives. And there was still the matter of the jailbreak and the unseemly behavior regarding poor Bob.
I remained on pins and needles, even as I tried to catch up on sleep and revel in Callie’s success. Her show opened to solid reviews, with a few special mentions for her. I pinned the newspaper clippings all over the house, and Otto and I went to the show three times.
Thanksgiving’s being on Thursday gave my aunt an excuse to turn her Thursday evening into an all-day extravaganza. At noon, the dining room was packed with her friends, who were treated to a feast cooked up by Bernice, me, and Miriam.