Murder in Murray Hill (Gaslight Mystery)

by Victoria Thompson

They started back inside, and Sarah realized she still held Rose’s shoes. For some reason, that made her infinitely sad.

  • • •

  Maeve and Sarah had escorted Grace Livingston downstairs to her father, and they’d promised Frank they would leave for home as soon as the Livingstons were safely away. With no sign of the medical examiner or Broghan or anyone else yet, Frank was left to finish searching the house. Broghan might not like it, but if Frank found some useful evidence, he should at least be grateful.

  Pendergast’s obscenely decorated bedroom yielded only an assortment of unpleasant-looking devices for which Frank could only guess the intended uses. He didn’t think he wanted to know, either. One of the upstairs bedrooms held a cage similar to the one in the cellar. The mattress in it was cleaner, but it was the same in all other ways. Is this where he’d kept Grace Livingston? Someone would probably ask her, and he was glad he wouldn’t be that someone.

  Downstairs, he found a small room furnished as a study. The cluttered desk held a collection of mail, mostly bills, but one drawer contained stacks of letters, all written in female handwriting. As Frank flipped through them, he realized they were replies to Pendergast’s advertisements, dating back a couple years.

  If he were the detective on this case, he would take the letters with him. Since he couldn’t do that, he pulled out his notebook and jotted down all the names and addresses he could find in the stack. If the police weren’t interested in what had become of the missing women, maybe he could track them down or at least let their families know why they had disappeared. It would be a small way of compensating for not being able to bring the man responsible to justice.

  Gino found him as he finished searching the rest of the drawers.

  “Is Broghan here?”

  “Not yet, but Neth and the girl are complaining about being locked up in the Paddy wagon.”

  Frank had almost forgotten about them. “I guess we should get them in here to identify Pendergast, at least. Broghan will probably want to question them, too, about what Pendergast was up to here. Go ahead and bring them in.”

  Frank waited outside the bloody parlor for Gino to bring the two prisoners upstairs. He could hear Joanna complaining about being kept locked up for so long, but she fell silent as they reached the second floor. Halfway down the hallway, she stopped dead, and Frank realized her face was ashen.

  “Miss . . .” Frank realized he didn’t know her last name. “Joanna? Are you all right?”

  Neth, who had been walking beside her, had gone on a few steps before he realized she had stopped. He went back to her. “Joanna, what is it?”

  “I . . . I don’t want to be in this house anymore.”

  That’s when Frank realized the truth about Joanna. “You were one of his victims.”

  The color rushed back into her face, blooming like a fever in her cheeks. “One of the stupid females who believed his lies, you mean?”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. He tricked you.”

  Neth took her gently by the arms. “You don’t have to stay. I’ll go look at his body.”

  But she shook him off, furious at someone or something not present. “I need to know he’s dead. Where is he?” she asked Frank.

  He gestured toward the parlor. The door still stood open, and she headed toward it, determined now. Neth hesitated only a moment before following, and Frank trailed after, wanting to see their reactions.

  Joanna faltered a moment in the doorway. The smell of death still hung heavy in the air, and the drying puddles of blood were daunting indeed. But she squared her shoulders and continued. Neth, however, stopped dead, covering his mouth and whispering something that might have been a prayer. Or a curse.

  Joanna strode over to the body and peered down at it. “That’s him.” To Frank’s surprise, she didn’t look away, though. She just kept staring. Finally she said, “He doesn’t look like much, does he? Lying there in his own blood like that.” She looked up at Frank. “Did he suffer? I hope he suffered.”

  “I think he died pretty quick, but he’d have been choking on his own blood, so it wasn’t very nice.”

  “Good.” She suddenly realized Neth still stood in the doorway, frozen by the horror of it. She strode back to him, took his arm, and turned him, urging him back into the hall. “Don’t look at him anymore. You don’t even have to think about him anymore.”

  Neth looked like he might be sick, but he seemed to take heart at her words. “You’re right. He’s dead. I still can’t believe it, though.”

  She looked over at Frank again. “Can we go now?”

  “I’m afraid not. You still have to answer some questions, and there’s the matter of the young lady you tried to lure into your house this afternoon.”

  “That was a mistake,” Joanna said quickly, before Neth could speak. “He didn’t mean her any harm, and you can’t prove that he did. Pendergast told him to meet her in the park and make his excuses for not coming. She’s the one who wanted to go back to his house with him. She was trying to trick him so that man could attack him.”

  Frank raised his eyebrows. “You’ve been out there in that Maria for hours. Is that the best you two could come up with?”

  Neth had the grace to look abashed, but Joanna never batted an eye. “It’s the truth. Now let us go.”

  “I can’t let you go. We’ve got to wait for the detective to get here. This isn’t a very pleasant place to wait, though.” Frank gestured toward the gruesome scene in the parlor. “Why don’t we go to Pendergast’s study?”

  “Yes, let’s,” Neth said, obviously eager to be someplace else.

  Frank waited and was gratified to see Neth head down the hall to the study without the slightest hesitation. He’d been here often enough to be familiar with the house.

  Neth and Joanna sat down on a small sofa that was the only furniture in the study except the desk. Frank pulled the desk chair over and straddled it to face them. “Now, Mr. Neth, let’s start with how long you’ve known Milo Pendergast. And is that his real name?”

  “It’s the only name I know him by,” Neth said, then glanced at Joanna as if for her approval. They obviously hadn’t cooked up a story for this.

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “At my . . . at our club. He’s a member, too. I’ve known him for a long time.”

  “What club is that?” New York had dozens of private clubs for men.

  “The Fleet Street Club.”

  “There’s no Fleet Street in the city,” Frank said.

  “It . . . it’s named after a street in London.”

  So, a bunch of pretentious snobs. “When did he tell you about his little hobby of kidnapping unsuspecting females?”

  “He never . . . I didn’t know anything about it!” he tried, but he kept glancing at Joanna, who simply glared at him.

  “All right, Mr. Neth. Let me tell you what I know. Pendergast has been enjoying his little hobby for a couple of years now, and you knew all about it. I know that because Joanna here was one of Pendergast’s victims. I also know she now belongs to you. Did he give her to you when he was finished with her?” Now Joanna was glaring at Frank. “Oh, wait. Pendergast wouldn’t just give her to you, would he? Oh no. He sold her, didn’t he? How much did you pay, Neth? I hope you drove a good bargain.”

  Joanna had paled again, but Neth’s face grew scarlet with rage and humiliation. “How dare you suggest such a thing.”

  “After what I know went on in this house, I think I can suggest just about anything. We found a naked woman locked in a cage in the cellar. Is that where Pendergast kept you, Joanna?”

  “Don’t talk to her like that! Can’t you see she’s terrified?” Neth cried, putting his arm around her.

  Only then did Frank realize she was trembling, but whether from terror or from fury, he couldn’t be sure. “So why don’t you
just tell me what you know about Pendergast, and then I won’t have to talk to her at all.”

  Neth sighed and turned back to Frank. He looked annoyed, which struck Frank as a rather mild emotion considering what most people would be feeling under the circumstances. “I told you, I met Milo at our club. He . . . he didn’t tell me where the women came from, not at first. He just . . . Well, he invited a few of us to his house for some entertainment. That’s what he called it. He had two women here. They . . . they did whatever he told them to. We thought they were prostitutes. I swear, I never suspected what he was doing.”

  “Not until Joanna told you,” Frank said.

  Neth glanced at her again and swallowed. “Yes.”

  “So, did you offer to buy her or did Pendergast suggest it?”

  “I had to get her out of here, didn’t I? I couldn’t leave her here.”

  “What does it matter how he did it?” she snapped. “He got me away.”

  “But he didn’t set you free, did he?” Frank said. “Now you’re his slave instead of Pendergast’s.”

  “I can leave him whenever I want to!”

  “Then why are you still with him? Why didn’t you go back home?”

  “I couldn’t go back home. They knew I’d been corresponding with a man. When I didn’t come home, they would’ve thought I eloped. I couldn’t go back after months away, alone and unmarried. I was ruined, and they never would’ve taken me back. They wouldn’t want their friends to know how I’d shamed them.”

  Frank had suspected this, of course, but hearing it from her made it sound even worse. “Is that what he does with the women he kidnaps? Does he sell them to his friends?”

  “Stop saying that,” Neth said.

  “Then answer my question.”

  “He . . . I don’t know what he does with them. I do know that some . . .” He glanced at Joanna again, and she stared back at him in surprise.

  “What do you know about some of them?” she asked, her voice crackling with outrage.

  “He told me that sometimes . . . well, two times, he said . . . that sometimes they kill themselves.”

  “The women?” Frank said, shocked, although he shouldn’t have been. Anyone who’d been treated the way he knew the woman in the cellar had been treated might well lose all hope.

  “Yes,” Neth said, not meeting Frank’s eye. “He complained about it.”

  “Complained?” Frank echoed in astonishment.

  “Yes, because he had to get rid of the bodies. He couldn’t just call the undertaker or anything, you see. There would be questions. It was difficult, I gathered, to, uh, dispose of them.”

  “So he didn’t kill the women when he got tired of them?”

  “Oh no.”

  “What did he do with them, then? I know he’d had at least a dozen of them here over the past couple years.”

  “A dozen? Are you sure?”

  “He kept their shoes. They’re upstairs in a cabinet where he could look at them whenever he wanted.”

  Joanna made a strangled sound. “That bastard.”

  “You shouldn’t swear,” Neth said. “It doesn’t become you.”

  She shot him a glance sharp enough to draw blood. “I heard him say once . . .”

  Frank waited, knowing how difficult this must be for her. He tried to soften his expression, although he thought it was probably too late to win her confidence.

  She cleared her throat. “I heard him say that he’d taken a girl to a madam once.”

  “Did he mention the madam’s name?” Frank asked, keeping his voice calm and even so as not to alarm her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter, though. He said . . .” She had to close her eyes for a moment and draw on some inner strength to go on. “He said the madam wouldn’t take her because she was too . . . too ugly. He said that was the trouble with fooling ugly women. Nobody wanted them when you were done with them.”

  So what did he do with them? Frank wondered. Did Neth even know?

  Before he could ask, Gino Donatelli stuck his head in the door. “Broghan is here, and he’s drunk.”

  7

  Frank sighed. “Stay here,” he told Neth and Joanna.

  He found Broghan standing in the parlor doorway, taking in the bloody scene. He turned when Frank approached.

  “A fine mess you’ve made here,” he said.

  Frank could smell the liquor on him, but aside from his bloodshot eyes, Broghan gave no other sign of being drunk. Frank suddenly realized he’d probably never seen him sober, so he really had nothing with which to compare his behavior. “I didn’t make the mess.”

  “But you found it, which you wouldn’t’ve done if you hadn’t been interfering in my case.”

  “I told you I’d sent Pendergast a letter. He replied to it and wanted to meet the girl this afternoon. I didn’t want to miss the chance to catch him.”

  “You could’ve told me.”

  This was true. Frank had no reply that didn’t insult Broghan, so he made none.

  Broghan shook his head. “So that’s Pendergast?”

  “It is.”

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  Frank told him, starting with their plan for Maeve to meet Pendergast in the park, how Livingston had spoiled it, and how they’d ended up here to find the real Pendergast dead and Grace Livingston in shock near his body. Then he described who and what else they’d found in the house.

  “So the Livingston woman killed him,” Broghan said.

  “I doubt it.”

  Broghan scowled. “From what you said, there were three people in the house—the woman locked in the basement, the Livingston woman, and Pendergast. Maybe you don’t think I’m as smart as you, Malloy, but even I can figure out she’s the only one could’ve done it.”

  “Did I mention the front door was unlocked? Anybody could’ve come in and done it, or maybe somebody else was here and left after killing Pendergast.”

  “You said his blood was all over the girl, though.”

  “Yeah, because she was standing in front of him when his throat was cut, but would you let somebody walk up to you with a knife and slit your throat? Especially somebody smaller and weaker and female? Seems like he could’ve stopped her pretty easily.”

  “Unless he didn’t think she’d really do it. Would you? Expect a female to slit your throat? Maybe he just laughed at her and that made her madder and she caught him by surprise. I’ve seen crazier things and so have you.”

  “What did she do with the knife, though?”

  “Huh?”

  “The knife she slit his throat with. It wasn’t in the room anyplace.”

  “You sure?” Broghan glanced around as if to see for himself.

  “Yes. I haven’t found it yet, anyway.”

  “You search the whole house?”

  “Not for the knife, but if it’s not in this room, Grace Livingston didn’t kill him.”

  “How do you figure that? She could’ve hid it someplace after she did it.”

  Frank frowned. “So you really think she cut his throat, stood there while his blood squirted all over her, then ran out someplace—without managing to drip any blood along the way—hid the knife, came back here and slumped down in front of the dead body in a faint?”

  “Like I said, people do strange things.”

  Frank knew that. Broghan was proving it. “She didn’t kill him.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “I didn’t ask her. She wasn’t in any condition to answer questions when I found her.”

  “Well, let’s ask her now. Where is she?”

  “She . . . Her father took her home.”

  Broghan raised his eyebrows.

  “Like I said, she wasn’t in any condition to answer quest
ions, and we know where to find her. You can talk to her later.”

  “What about the other woman? The one in the cellar?”

  “She, uh, she left.”

  “What do you mean, she left?”

  “When nobody was paying attention, she snuck out of the house.”

  “You didn’t have anybody watching her?”

  “Donatelli was outside the kitchen door, but she went out the back way. She wasn’t in any shape to go very far. We think Pendergast had been starving her, and she didn’t have any shoes. Nobody figured she’d leave.”

  “And yet she did,” Broghan observed.

  Frank really hated not being a cop anymore. If he were still a cop, Broghan wouldn’t dare make him feel like he’d messed up. In fact, if he were still a cop, Broghan wouldn’t even be here. He decided to change the subject. “We found about a dozen pair of shoes that Pendergast had apparently been keeping as souvenirs of the women he kidnapped. I also found where he kept the letters from the women. Most of them have addresses.”

  “Why would I need that? Can’t prosecute him for kidnapping when he’s already dead.”

  “The families might want to know what happened to the women if they never made it back home.”

  “And maybe they wouldn’t.” Broghan looked around the room again. “Did you send for the medical examiner?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where the hell is he, then?”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “Yeah, well, I got here, didn’t I?”

  “Malloy?” A voice called from down the hall.

  Frank looked out to see Neth and Joanna standing there expectantly. Once again he’d almost forgotten about them.

  “Who’s this?” Broghan asked.

  Frank introduced them, choosing not to add that Joanna had once been one of Pendergast’s prisoners. “They identified Pendergast’s body. I thought you might want to ask them some questions.”

  Broghan nodded. “Were either of you here when he was killed?”

  “Of course not!” Neth said.

  “Then you can go.”

  Frank glared at him. “You might have more questions when you’ve finished looking around.”