Murder on Washington Square

by Victoria Thompson

  “How interesting,” her mother said, obviously entertained by the idea.

  “I thought so,” her father agreed. “I was apparently among the last to have heard about it. I had to explain my purpose in making the inquiry, so he wouldn’t refuse to ever speak to me again. I did not reveal the identity of the individuals involved,” he hastened to add. “Even though Van Scoyoc was very interested to learn who else had been victimized. You see, the situations were eerily similar.”

  “In what way?” Sarah asked, even more interested than her mother.

  “The bank employee who stole the money had been, until then, very trustworthy and conscientious. A responsible family man, too. The kind you would never expect to be so foolish.”

  “What happened, then?” her mother asked, actually leaning forward in her chair in her eagerness to hear the entire story.

  “It seems he fell into the thrall of a young woman.”

  Sarah could hardly believe she’d heard him correctly. “Who was she?”

  Her father shrugged, puffing on his pipe. “If Van Scoyoc knows her name, he didn’t mention it. But I can’t believe he would care to know it. Some Irish girl, I think he said.”

  Sarah felt her hackles rise over the tone with which he said “Irish,” as if the Irish didn’t need names, being something less than human. But to Van Scoyoc and her father and others like them, they didn’t. It was a hideous injustice, but she must choose her battles. She would fight that one another day. She had more pressing matters with which to deal at the moment. “Why did he think she was Irish?” she asked, recalling she’d noticed Catherine Porter looked Irish the first time she’d seen her.

  “I don’t . . . Oh, yes, now I remember. Van Scoyoc said something about a red-haired vixen. That must be why I assumed she was Irish.” He dismissed the topic with a wave of his hand, although Sarah made careful note that the woman he described might have been the elusive Francine. “In any case, this fellow stole several thousand dollars from the bank before anyone discovered it. He’d given the money to this girl, of course, and once his crime was discovered, she disappeared.”

  “What happened to the embezzler?” Sarah asked, fairly certain the mystery of Francine’s departure was now solved and the identity of her “rich gentleman” discovered. Surely there weren’t many other red-haired women in the city doing the same thing. “Was he arrested or did he escape?”

  “Neither. He was dismissed from his position, of course, but the bank didn’t press charges. The scandal would have ruined them, so they didn’t dare.”

  “Could you find out who this man was?” Sarah asked urgently, certain now he must be another victim of the Walcotts and their tenants.

  “I probably could, but I don’t believe that would help you,” her father said. “According to Van Scoyoc, the fellow hanged himself from shame after it all came out.”

  “How cowardly of him,” her mother said. “And selfish. You said he had a family. What would become of them with him dead?”

  “It wouldn’t be much different than if he were alive, my dear,” her father explained. “He’d never be able to find another position. People talk, you know, and his crime would follow him wherever he went, even if no one spoke of it publicly. At least with him dead, his family could be free of that.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice. “With him gone, they could starve in respectability.”

  Her father frowned at her tone. “Life is frequently unfair, Sarah. When it is, the innocent often suffer. That’s the way of the world, and we cannot hope to change it.”

  He believed that, of course. They’d had this argument many times. This argument had driven her sister Maggie to her death. Unfortunately, Sarah didn’t have the energy to answer it tonight. She had more important things to do, in any case. She, for one, was going to change at least one of the ways of the world and make things better for the Ellsworths and Webster Prescott.

  Before she left, however, she still needed a bit more information. “Did Mr. Van Scoyoc explain how one might embezzle from the bank without being caught?”

  “Not without being caught. Eventually, the discrepancies would be found, no matter how careful the thief was. Blame might be diverted onto another, but the crime could not be concealed forever. He was also surprised that the discrepancy was found so quickly. He did not believe that such a thing couldn’t be discovered in a day, even if the auditors knew what they were looking for.”

  “Then how does he explain it?” Sarah asked.

  “He doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t believe they found it at all.”

  The hour was late by the time Sarah finally arrived at Bellevue. She found Mrs. Ellsworth dozing in her chair, her chin resting on her bony chest, her breath coming in unladylike snores. Webster Prescott was sleeping, too. He seemed to have recovered a bit from his earlier ordeal, and the nurse confirmed he’d been resting comfortably for several hours. Even his fever was a little lower.

  Mrs. Ellsworth awoke with a start and a snort when Sarah touched her shoulder. “What . . . ? Oh, Mrs. Brandt,” she said in relief. Then she instinctively looked at Prescott. “How is he?”

  “He seems to be doing fairly well.”

  “Oh, heavens, don’t say that! It’s bad luck to say a sick person is doing well!” she informed Sarah, aghast at her ignorance.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, however insincerely. “I mean to say he’s not doing as poorly as he was.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” the old woman replied with some relief.

  Sarah bit back a smile. “You’ve done a good job guarding him, but it’s time for you to go home to your own bed now.”

  “Nonsense! Someone must stay with him all the time. What if that woman comes back to kill him again?”

  “Then I’ll be here,” Sarah told her.

  “But you shouldn’t waste your time here. You have things you could be doing, while I don’t have anything to look forward to except more waiting.”

  “Yes, you do,” Sarah assured her. “I need for you to go home and tell Mr. Malloy where I am when he comes looking for me tomorrow. I have some important things to tell him, especially about the woman who tried to kill Mr. Prescott, and I need to see him as soon as possible.”

  “Then I should stay here while you go find Mr. Malloy,” she argued.

  “I’ve spent a good part of the afternoon trying to do just that without success. I left a message for him at Police Headquarters, so I think the best plan is for me to stay in one place and let him find me. But he’ll go to my house, and he won’t know where else to look unless you tell him.”

  She started sputtering additional objections, but Sarah cut her off.

  “You’re going home, and I’m staying here, and I won’t hear any more on the subject. Now, I’ve got a carriage waiting for you downstairs, and you’re keeping the poor driver from his bed.”

  “A carriage?” she echoed suspiciously.

  “It’s my parents’. They sent me home in it, so I thought I should make good use of it. Now don’t make that poor man wait any longer. There’s food, too, for your and Nelson’s supper, courtesy of my mother’s cook. Enjoy it.”

  Mrs. Ellsworth offered a few more feeble arguments, but finally she surrendered. She really was starting to feel the strain of the day. Before she left, however, she pressed a rabbit’s foot into Sarah’s hand.

  “It can’t hurt,” she said when Sarah looked skeptical.

  “How many of these do you have?” Sarah asked, remembering she’d given one to Malloy as well.

  “As many as I need,” she replied.

  When she was gone, Sarah made herself as comfortable as possible and settled in for a long night.

  Frank wondered how Sarah Brandt could give him a headache when he wasn’t even with her. He’d been feeling pretty good this morning, having arrested Anna Blake’s confessed killer the night before. Although he’d had no reason to be concerned about her comfort, he’d manag
ed to get Mrs. Giddings locked up in The Tombs instead of at Police Headquarters. The Tombs were grim, but they were still far more tolerable than the cellar at Mulberry Street.

  Getting Gilbert Giddings released from jail had been the work of a few moments, and he hadn’t even had to deal with the man himself. Let his son tell him the awful news about what his wife had done. He never wanted to see that sorry drunk again. Frank’s sense of accomplishment had dimmed somewhat when he’d gotten Mrs. Brandt’s message, though. He was used to being teased about her, or as used to it as he was ever going to get, but that didn’t mean he was used to having her involved in his cases. He’d never get accustomed to that, especially when being involved meant confronting would-be killers in the act, as he’d learned from Mrs. Ellsworth when he’d gone looking for Sarah Brandt at her home.

  “I’m sure Mrs. Brandt is perfectly fine,” Mrs. Ellsworth said from where she was sitting beside him on the El as they sped uptown toward Bellevue. “We scared that woman off. She won’t be back.”

  Frank gritted his teeth. “If it was a woman,” he said. “You said yourself you didn’t see her face.”

  “Well, whoever it was who tried to poison poor Mr. Prescott, they won’t be back,” Mrs. Ellsworth insisted.

  Frank only hoped she was right. The thought of Sarah Brandt facing down a killer in the middle of the night on a deserted hospital ward was unsettling, to say the least. It unsettled Frank so much he wanted to strangle somebody. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said, not for the first time. “I told you I’d get somebody to stand guard over Prescott. His newspaper will probably hire a guard when they find out what happened. It would make for a good story.”

  “A guard can prevent the killer from striking again, but he won’t be able to give Mr. Prescott the special care he needs,” she pointed out. “Besides, I’m tired of being locked in my house day and night.”

  When Frank had gone to Sarah Brandt’s house this morning—and he’d gone the instant he’d gotten her message—the last thing he’d expected was to find Mrs. Ellsworth watching for him.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Mrs. Ellsworth was always watching for something to happen on her street. If she’d been unable to do anything about what had been happening lately, that only made her more anxious to get active again. Frank would’ve had to tie her hand and foot to keep her from accompanying him to the hospital to find Mrs. Brandt. When she told him about the attempt on Prescott’s life, he hadn’t wanted to waste time trying to deter her, either.

  “If it’s any comfort to you, I arrested Anna Blake’s killer last night,” he told her.

  Her eyes widened, almost erasing the wrinkles around them. “Oh, Mr. Malloy! That’s wonderful! Who was it?”

  “The wife of another man Anna Blake was blackmailing. This man was ruined. He stole from his employer to pay her. When he got caught, he impoverished himself to pay back what he’d stolen. His wife was very angry, so she took it out on the person she held responsible for her troubles.”

  “That poor woman! The wife, I mean. Anna Blake asked for her trouble, but this poor woman didn’t. I guess I can’t blame her for wanting vengeance. I probably would’ve felt the same, in her place.”

  “You women,” Malloy snorted. “You’re so cold-blooded.”

  “I didn’t say killing Miss Blake was right,” she defended herself. “I just said I could understand why she wanted that woman dead. If my Nelson had been ruined, I might have considered the same thing.”

  Frank didn’t point out that Nelson was as good as ruined unless they could find out who had really stolen money from his bank. Even if they could, it was possible the sensational stories about him that had appeared in the various newspapers would have destroyed his reputation and he would be unable to make a respectable living again. In Frank’s experience, innocent people often had to suffer for others’ crimes. Nelson Ellsworth would probably be one of them, and there might be nothing Frank could do to save him. He wasn’t going to be the one to explain all this to the man’s mother, however. His job was hard enough as it was.

  To Frank’s chagrin, he had to quicken his usual pace to keep up with Mrs. Ellsworth as they walked from the train station to the hospital. The old woman was a caution.

  They found Sarah Brandt sitting beside Prescott’s bed, feeding him something from a bowl. She glanced up and smiled when she saw them. Frank felt a strange flutter in his chest at the sight of that smile. Or maybe it was from the sight of her. She looked like she hadn’t slept in a week, and Frank didn’t like that one bit. Why did she feel responsible for sitting up all night and guarding a newspaper reporter she hardly knew, especially one who’d caused her friends so much trouble?

  “Good morning, Malloy,” she said, her eyes shining, as if she were enjoying a secret joke at his expense. “You’re a difficult man to find.”

  “Finding you isn’t so hard,” he replied in kind. “I just need to look where you have no business being, and there you are.”

  “I’m a nurse,” she reminded him. “Why shouldn’t I be at a hospital?”

  “Because . . .” he began, but stopped when he realized he didn’t really want to explain. If he did, he’d have to reveal how worried he was about her safety, and then she might start to wonder why he cared so much. This was a topic he didn’t even want to consider himself, much less discuss with her. “Have you seen any sign of that woman who tried to kill Prescott?” he asked instead.

  “No, but I’m sure she’s the same one who stabbed him in the first place,” she said. “Nothing else makes sense. And she’s also probably the person who killed Anna Blake, although I never would’ve guessed her killer would be a female.”

  “Mr. Malloy arrested Miss Blake’s killer last night,” Mrs. Ellsworth reported helpfully.

  Frank shot her a disapproving look, but she wasn’t paying any attention.

  “Who was it?” Mrs. Brandt asked, brightening at the thought.

  “Who . . . was . . . it?” Prescott echoed feebly.

  Frank looked at him in surprise, having forgotten he was even there and certainly that he was listening to every word. “You’re in no condition to write a story about it, Prescott, so I’ll tell you. It was Mrs. Gilbert Giddings.”

  “Mrs. Giddings!” Mrs. Brandt exclaimed in surprise. “I thought you were going to arrest the son!”

  “She confessed when I went to question the boy,” Frank said. “She was afraid I was going to arrest him for the crime.”

  “You were,” Mrs. Brandt reminded him with a small smile.

  “Only if he was guilty,” Frank said, not liking the defensive tone in his voice. He didn’t need to make excuses to her, he reminded himself. “But he wasn’t.”

  “Did she tell you why she tried to kill Mr. Prescott?” she asked.

  Frank shook his head. “She didn’t try to kill him.”

  “But—” she began to protest.

  He cut her off. “Not in front of Prescott,” he cautioned.

  The patient was growing restless, his eyes intent. Frank could almost imagine him mentally composing his story for the World.

  “How’s he doing?” he asked Mrs. Brandt.

  She glanced at Mrs. Ellsworth before replying, and he thought she was holding back a grin. “He’s not doing as poorly as he was before,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” Frank asked.

  “That means it’s bad luck to say someone is doing well,” she explained, with another glance at the old woman.

  Frank managed not to snort in disgust. “So the opium didn’t hurt him?”

  “He must not have taken very much,” she said. “The mixture was very strong, so it was also very sweet. Apparently, that didn’t appeal to Mr. Prescott, to his great good fortune.”

  “Don’t like . . . sweets,” Prescott explained. He looked as if he were trying with difficulty to keep his eyes open.

  “What’s going on here?” a woman demanded. “Are you the doctor? Webster, my dear boy! What�
�s happened?”

  A small woman inserted herself into the group beside Prescott’s bed, forcing her way to him. Malloy was just about to grab her when Prescott said, “Aunt Orpah!”

  “Webby, dear, what have they done to you?” she asked, smoothing his hair back from his forehead as she checked for fever. Then she turned accusing eyes to the rest of them. “Who are you people?”

  “I’m Sarah Brandt,” she said. “I sent you the message about your nephew, Mrs. Beasley.”

  The woman softened immediately. “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Brandt. It was such a shock! I got here as soon as I could. Webby is my sister’s boy, and I promised I’d look after him for her. How on earth you can look after a grown man, I’m not sure, though. He seems determined to get himself in trouble!”

  “Indeed he does,” Mrs. Ellsworth said. “He’s been set upon twice by females intent on murdering him.”

  Mrs. Beasley looked shocked, but Mrs. Brandt distracted her by introducing the two older women. “And this is Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy,” she added. “He’s going to find the person who attacked Mr. Prescott.”

  Actually, Frank wasn’t particularly interested in finding out who had attacked Prescott. His concern had been finding Anna Blake’s killer and clearing Nelson Ellsworth. Since the person who had attacked Prescott was someone else entirely, he felt no further obligation, especially to someone who had made the Ellsworths’ lives miserable. He wasn’t going to mention all this to Aunt Orpah, though. He needed her to take over caring for Prescott so he could get Sarah Brandt away from here. Let Aunt Orpah worry about fending off would-be murderesses.

  “Mr. Malloy is going to order the World to hire a guard to protect Mr. Prescott in the meantime, too,” Mrs. Ellsworth added.

  Now Frank knew he should have tied her hand and foot to keep her from coming with him today. “I can’t order them to do it,” he quickly clarified, “but I was going to strongly suggest it.”

  “What a good idea,” Mrs. Brandt said, smiling her approval. Frank wished her approval didn’t matter so much to him.