by Rhys Bowen
Four
I walked home with heavy steps, deep in thought. How could I afford a place of my own, big enough to take in Seamus and the children? I wouldn’t want it to be in a neighborhood like this, either. I wanted to stay in Greenwich Village, where I had made friends and where I loved the exuberance of the lifestyle. Somehow I needed to make money. I did have the means in front of my nose—I’d just have to overcome my repugnance and get on with the Tomlinson divorce case—if I wasn’t arrested every time I tried to follow Mr. T.
I gave a big sigh. I wasn’t the sort of person who liked going against her principles, which was the reason that I was not prepared to spend the tidy sum of money that I’d discovered in Paddy’s filing cabinet. It was sitting in the bank, waiting for an heir to claim it. So far no one had, which probably meant it was my money. But I still couldn’t bring myself to use it for anything but official business.
I stepped back from the curb, hastily, as a carriage went past, its wheels and the horses’ hooves spraying up muck from the gutter. I supposed I’d have to go back to spying on Mr. Tomlinson. I just prayed he didn’t have aged female relatives all over the city. Next time I’d find some excuse to check out who owned the houses he visited. It was all so complicated. Why couldn’t the wretched man just agree to give his wife a divorce and save me all this trouble? I was half tempted to go to his office and beg him to grant her wish, so that I was spared any more of this sordid business. I paused on a street corner, one foot in midair. Why not? Why did it always have to be furtive and sordid like this? We were, after all, civilized human beings.
Having made up my mind, I turned on my heels and instead of catching the trolley up Broadway, I went in the other direction, down to Wall Street. I knew where Mr. Tomlinson worked. I had stood outside waiting for him enough times now. It was right next door to the magnificent columns of the stock exchange where there was always such a hustle and bustle that I could blend nicely into the crowd. This time I didn’t lurk in the shadows. I went up the steps, through the front door, and up a flight of marble stairs. I passed an impressive mirror and glanced at myself. I was glad that I had elected to put on my one respectable garment, a beige tailored business suit which had been made for me when I decided to become a female investigator. But I wished I’d put my hair up. With it tied back in a ribbon I looked ridiculously young and most unprofessional. I stepped into a recess and attempted to twist it into a knot. If only I could learn to wear hats like other women, then I’d never be caught out like this. But I’d grown up without wearing a hat and only wore one when strictly necessary. I didn’t like the feel of my head being restricted any more than I liked the restriction of a corset on my body.
J. BAKER TOMLINSON III, STOCKBROKER, was on the second floor. A hollow-eyed young man wearing a large starched collar greeted me and tried to wheedle out of me why I wanted to see Mr. Tomlinson. I was suitably enigmatic and, shortly afterward, I was shown into a tastefully furnished office with mahogany desk and thick carpet on the floor.
“Miss Murphy?” Mr. Tomlinson waved me to a leather padded armchair. “My secretary didn’t make it clear what your manner of business was. Are you here for financial advice?” I saw him summing up the quality of my costume and the hair, which was probably already escaping from its makeshift bun.
“I’m here on a very different sort of matter, Mr. Tomlinson,” I said. “One which causes me considerable embarrassment.”
“Really?” He was looking interested, not guilty. “Please proceed. I am quite intrigued.”
I handed him my card. “My company was hired by your wife.” I met his gaze. “She wanted us to provide proof for her to file for divorce.”
Mr. Tomlinson sat back in his chair with a thump. “Good God.” He hadn’t even noticed the profanity spoken in my presence. “Lillian wants a divorce? I can’t believe it.” His eyes narrowed. “So if you are working for my wife, why exactly have you come to see me?”
“Because I don’t like it, that’s why,” I said. “I’m not the sort of person who enjoys snooping for sordid details. I’ve been watching you for a couple of weeks now, and you seem like a gentleman to me. Quite the opposite of another chap I was watching who was with a different floozie every night. So it seemed to make sense to lay it out straight in front of you. If your wife wants a divorce, why not behave like a gentleman and agree to give her one? That way we will all be spared a lot of embarrassment.”
He continued to look at me through narrowed eyes then he started laughing. “You’re a rum one all right, Miss Murphy. I have to admit you’ve caught me completely off guard. I had no idea that Lillian wanted a divorce. We haven’t had the happiest of marriages for some time, owing to her illness, of course.”
“Mrs. Tomlinson is ill?”
He sucked through his teeth before answering. “She thinks she is. She takes to her bed at the slightest excuse and we have a constant procession of doctors coming to the house. I know she thinks I’m not sympathetic enough but God knows I’ve tried. She complains I’m never home, but who’d want to stay home with a wife who spends the evening taking patent medicines and then retires for the night at eight?” He stopped suddenly, as if he realized he had said too much. “I’ve stuck it out so far because I was raised to do the right thing, but by God, if she wants a divorce, I will be happy to grant her one.”
“Is there anyone—another woman?” I couldn’t resist asking. “I’ve been following your movements and I’ve not found one yet.”
“So now you’re getting me to do your work for you?” A spasm of annoyance crossed his face, then he laughed again. “You really are delightfully refreshing, Miss Murphy. They always say your countrymen have a touch of the blarney, don’t they?” He straightened a pile of papers on his desk before he looked up again. “If you really want to know, there is one young woman I would have approached, had circumstances been different. But, as I say, I was brought up to do the right thing. I have thrown myself into my work and put thoughts of other women aside.”
I left John Baker Tomlinson’s office with a warm glow of success. Now both the Tomlinsons would get what they wanted. Lillian would be free of a husband who paid no attention to her and John would be able to court the woman he admired. I always knew that the forthright approach was best. All that time Paddy had wasted, lurking in dark alleys and trying to take incriminating pictures, while I had brought my first divorce case to a happy conclusion without any effort!
I stopped off at the post office on the way home to buy a stamp, so that I could send my advertisement to Dublin. I was about to leave when the postal clerk, a florid man with mutton chop whiskers, called me back. “Aren’t you the young woman who worked for Paddy Riley?”
“That’s right.”
“Letter just came for J. P. Riley and Associates,” he said and produced it. I thanked him and put it in my purse, although I was dying to open it. Once I was safely in the street, I ripped it open.
The letter was typewritten. “Mr. Max Mostel requests that you call on him at your earliest convenience, regarding a matter of great delicacy and confidentiality.”
The address was on Canal Street—a seedy area of commerce, factories, and saloons. Another divorce case? In which case, a strange address for a client. But he had called it a matter of some delicacy. The difference was that a man had written to me this time. And in all the other divorce cases in Paddy’s records, the clients had been women. This in itself made it appealing. More appealing was the fact that it represented the possibility of enough money to rent a place of my own.
Sid and Gus were out when I returned to Patchin Place, probably doing the morning shopping at the Jefferson Market opposite. I hurried up the stairs with a sigh of relief. I sat at my desk and wrote a letter to the Dublin Times. “Lost touch with your loved ones in America? Private investigator will make discreet inquiries. Reuniting families is our specialty.” I didn’t mention the sex of the private investigator, nor that I had never actually reunited a family. I as
ked for long-term advertising rates and promised to send payment by return of post. Then I went downstairs again and deposited the letter in the mailbox at the end of the street. I looked up to see Sid and Gus bearing down on me. Gus’s arms were full of flowers. Sid carried two over-flowing baskets.
“Look, Gus, she’s up and awake and looking so much better. We have been having such fun, Molly. Gus has been buying up the entire market.”
“I wanted oysters, but Sid wouldn’t let me, even though I told her there was an R in the month so it should be fine.”
“They didn’t look fine to me, they looked decidedly peaky,” Sid said. “I had an uncle who died after eating a bad oyster. I’m not taking any chances with you.”
“So I had to settle for lobster instead. Even Sid had to agree they were still swimming around with great vigor and positively radiated health. So I’m going to prepare a true Boston lobster feast tonight. Whom should we invite?”
“Someone who won’t mind plunging the damned things into boiling water,” Sid said, laughing.
They swept me along Patchin Place, caught up in the excitement of frivolous living. It was moments like this that reminded me how very hard it would be to leave them and move to a place of my own.
That afternoon, while Sid and Gus were in a flurry of preparation for tonight’s lobster feast, I made myself look respectable and businesslike, secured my hair in a bun with twenty or more hairpins, perched my one respectable hat on top of it, and set off to present myself to Mr. Max Mostel. As I followed the Bowery southward, and then turned onto Canal Street, my confusion and curiosity grew. This was not a respectable residential area—it was full of factories, run-down saloons, the occasional seedy boarding house. Certainly not the kind of area in which I expected my clients to live. When I came to Number 438 it wasn’t a residence at all. The bottom floor was half open to the sidewalk and I could hear the sounds of hammering and sawing going on inside. A newly made chair was being varnished just inside the doorway. I asked for Mr. Mostel and was directed up the staircase around the corner. A business then, not a home. I went up the dark and narrow stairway, one flight, two flights, then a third, until I came to a doorway with a sign on it: MOSTEL AND KLEIN, LADIES FASHIONS. I knocked and entered a packing and shipping area. Men were staggering around with large boxes and depositing them on a primitive platform outside a back window to lower to the street. I asked for Mr. Mostel.
“In his office. Up two more flights. Go through the sewing room and you’ll find the stairs at the end,” an elderly man gasped as he paused to mop his brow.
Up another flight that ended in a closed door. I knocked on this and eventually was admitted into a long gloomy room full of young women sewing, row after row of them, their heads bent low over their work. I had been in a room like this before, when I had briefly tried my hand at any job I could get. I hadn’t liked it then and I didn’t like it now. The room resounded to the clatter of the machines. A hundred pairs of feet worked the treadles while one hundred needles flew up and down. There were bolts of cloth piled along walls. It was airless and lint rose from under my feet, causing me to sneeze. This made several of the girls glance up, look at me, and then go back to their sewing again, as if they begrudged the second they had wasted. Nobody said a word as I walked the length of the room until a male voice roared out, “Hey, you—where do you think you’re going?”
I imagine that every sweatshop employs at least one male bully to strike fear into its female workers. This one—sallow, sagging, and with the sort of face that had a perpetual leer—was rather more repulsive than the one I had encountered before. Luckily I was in a very different situation this time. I eyed him coldly.
“I am on my way to see Mr. Mostel. Would you kindly find out if it is convenient to see me at this moment?”
“You want to see Mr. Mostel? Miss Hoity Toity, ain’t we! If it’s about a job, I’m the guy you see. The boss don’t see no stinking girls.”
“Fortunately I bathed this morning and don’t happen to be a stinking girl,” I said, hearing the titter of laughter from some of the workers who understood English. “But I received a letter from him this morning, asking me expressly to call upon him.” I was about to hand him my card, when I remembered that I should be discreet and confidential. No need to let this greasy man or any of these girls know who was calling on the boss. “If you would direct me to his office, please.”
“Follow me,” he said, “and don’t blame me if you get your head blown off.”
He led me up another flight of stairs, negotiating boxes of thread and trimmings on almost every step. He knocked on the door and opened it gingerly. “Young lady to see you, sir. Says you wrote her a letter.”
I stepped past him into a cluttered little office. There were more bolts of cloth stacked in the office and a dressmaker’s dummy displaying a frilled blouse and black skirt. Max Mostel was seated at a cluttered desk. He was a big podgy man with heavy jowls, sweating in a pinstriped three-piece suit. A cigar stuck out of one corner of his mouth.
“Yeah? What do you want?”
I handed him my card. “You wrote to me. Here I am.”
He looked at it, glanced up at his foreman. “What are you hanging around for?” he growled in heavily accented English. “Get down there again before one of those girls shoves a few yards of my ribbon into her blouse. Go on. Raus! And shut the door behind you.”
The foreman went, closing the door none too gently. Max Mostel continued to scowl at me. “You’re the one I wrote to?”
I nodded. “I am Miss Murphy. Junior partner. I’m sorry if you were expecting a man, but I assure you I am most efficient and do excellent work.”
“No, I wasn’t expecting a man,” he said. “It’s a woman I need for this job. I was asking around and a little bird told me that you were doing this kind of thing. Am I right?”
“What kind of thing was that, Mr. Mostel?”
“Snooping. I need someone to do some snooping for me.”
“I see. Would you care to elaborate?”
He leaned across the desk toward me, even though the door was shut and we two were alone in the room. “We’ve got a plant.”
I looked around the room, also, trying to locate this particular piece of flora.
“A plant?” I asked.
“A spy in the camp, Miss Murphy. A traitor in our midst.” He looked around the room again. “You see this design”—he handed me a page from a catalog showing a sleek, long dress with high collar and sweeping skirt.
“It’s very nice,” I said.
“And it was on the racks in all the major department stores a week before ours was finished, with the Lowenstein label on it. My design, mark you. My garment. With his filthy label on it.”
“Are you sure that it wasn’t an unhappy coincidence?”
He shook his head so that his chins quivered. “Stolen, from under my very nose. And not the first time it’s happened either. Someone in this building is a plant, Miss Murphy, secretly working for Lowenstein. Getting their hot little hands on my latest designs and running them across town for him to copy in a hurry.”
“And you would like me to discover who this person is?”
“Exactly. Have you ever been involved in the garment industry, Miss Murphy?”
“Only very briefly.”
“But would you know how to operate a sewing machine?”
“With only moderate success. I haven’t had much practice.”
“No matter. We’ll take you on here and train you, until you get up to speed. Then I want you to apply at Lowenstein’s. Keep your ear to the ground in both places and see who turns up where he or she shouldn’t.”
I nodded. “I can do that. Who has access to your designs?”
“Not many people. The cutters and finishers would see them when they are in the process of being made, but the girls at the machines—they only do piecework, whatever is put in front of them. Their only concern is a sleeve or a pocket or a collar. They
never see the finished garment.” He tapped the side of his nose. “That’s not to say that a smart girl couldn’t do some snooping if she’d a mind to, but I don’t see how. I’m usually here in my office most of the day. The designs are kept in this drawer. And I lock my office when I go out.”
“Are you the only one with an office up here? What about Mr. Klein?”
“Mr. Klein?” He looked surprised. “Dead, Miss Murphy. Dropped dead two years ago—may he rest in peace.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, Mr. Mostel. So who might come up to your office during the course of the workday?”
“My foreman. My two sample hands—who are completely trustworthy, by the way. The samples are made in the little back room up here, behind me, so nobody has a chance to see the garments before they are ready to be shown. Apart from that—I usually come down if there is a problem with an employee. They don’t come up here.”
“And buyers?”
“I go to them, Miss Murphy. Buyers are not going to climb up five flights of stairs.”
“Could anyone get in when everyone has gone home at night?”
“I take the designs home with me.”
“So it has to be someone who works here during the day.”
He nodded. “A nice little problem we’ve got for ourselves, eh? So will you take on the job, Miss Murphy? I’ll make it worth your while.”
“This could require several weeks of work,” I said. “Shall we say a retainer of one hundred dollars, plus the regular wages I would earn if I worked here?”
He put his hand to his chest. “One hundred dollars? Miss Murphy, I asked you to help me, not bankrupt me.”