He smiled hugely and bowed rapidly several times. “Welcome, welcome,” he said in his singsong accent. “You want eat?”
“Three,” Malloy said, holding up three fingers.
“Yes, yes, chop, chop,” the man said, “Very good, you see.” He turned so quickly that the long pigtail that hung down his back swung out and almost hit Mrs. Decker.
She cried out in alarm, although not as loudly as she had when Mikail Petrov had spit on the floor. Sarah winced.
“That man has a pigtail,” she whispered, her eyes even wider than they’d been before.
“Chinese custom,” Malloy said with amazing kindness.
“His skin is . . .” She gestured helplessly.
“Yellow,” Sarah supplied. She felt certain her mother had never been so close to a Chinese man, if she had ever seen one at all.
“I knew they called them the Yellow Race,” Mrs. Decker explained, still whispering, “but I thought it was just an expression.” She looked around once more, taking in the strange décor. “What did you order three of Mr. Malloy?” she asked when her gaze returned to him.
“Chop suey. That’s all they serve here.”
“What is it?”
Sarah could see the twinkle in his eye, but his expression remained grave. “No one knows.”
Mrs. Decker’s jaw actually dropped open, something Sarah had never seen her mother do as long as she’d known her.
“Don’t pay any attention to him, Mother. It’s just meat and vegetables,” she said, and turned to Malloy. “Did you find Katya when you were in the building?”
The twinkle vanished from his eye. “Yeah, I found her. She’s staying with that midwife woman.”
“That’s right, Miss Goldman.”
“Miss Goldman lacks some of the finer social graces, but she seems genuinely concerned about that poor young woman,” Mrs. Decker offered.
“Miss Goldman may lack social graces because of the time she spent in prison,” Malloy said grimly.
“Prison?” Mrs. Decker exclaimed in surprise.
“That’s right. For inciting a riot a couple years ago, when she made an anarchist speech to a group of people, and they went crazy. But that’s not the worst of it.”
He wasn’t teasing this time. “What’s the worst?” Sarah asked with a growing sense of dread.
“Miss Emma Goldman was the mistress of the anarchist who tried to assassinate Henry Clay Frick.”
8
ELIZABETH DECKER GASPED IN HORROR, AND EVEN Sarah looked shocked. Frank had begun to think nothing could shock her anymore.
“Are you sure?” Sarah asked.
“Of course I’m sure. I remember when she was on trial. We heard she’d left the country when she got out of prison, but I guess she came back.”
“She said she’d studied midwifery in Vienna,” Sarah recalled.
“She hasn’t been back long, then. The police would’ve gotten word. Don’t you think it’s strange that she comes back into the country and another rich man gets blown up?”
“Frick wasn’t blown up,” Sarah reminded him. “He was shot, and he wasn’t even killed.”
“The Fricks live here in the city now,” Mrs. Decker reminded them, her voice a little breathless from shock. “They should be warned.”
“I’ll see to it,” Frank said, not wanting to be distracted from his main point. “Do you know what this means? Emma Goldman and her friends are probably the ones behind all this.”
“Then why haven’t they gone into hiding? Sarah asked.
“Because anarchists like to be martyrs. They want people to know they’re responsible for these assassinations.”
“Then why haven’t they come forward to take responsibility?”
Frank felt his hackles rising, but he remembered Mrs. Decker was witnessing this argument. She wouldn’t understand if he said what he really wanted to say to Sarah. “Because they don’t want to go to jail,” he said reasonably.
“Listen to yourself, Malloy,” she replied. “That doesn’t make any sense. I always pay attention when you prove my theories are ridiculous, and now it’s your turn. If the anarchists killed Mr. Van Dyke, they’d either want recognition for their crime, or they’d try to avoid being blamed. What they’re really doing is hiding out and trying not to be falsely arrested and denying responsibility. Does that sound like they’re guilty?”
“It doesn’t to me,” Mrs. Decker said.
Frank gave her a look that should have frightened her into eternal silence, but she didn’t even blink. She was as bad as her daughter. He opened his mouth to reply, but Sarah didn’t give him a chance.
“I’m certain Creighton and Katya and her brother didn’t know anything about a plot to kill Mr. Van Dyke. If Emma Goldman was involved, she certainly wouldn’t have taken Katya in. That would lead the police right to her, and I can’t imagine she wants to return to prison.”
Fortunately, the Chinaman returned at that moment with their food, saving Frank from making a hasty reply he probably would have regretted. Mrs. Decker stared in amazement at her plate of steaming chop suey, while Sarah started pouring tea from the pot he’d left into the small, handle-less cups.
This gave Frank a chance to collect his thoughts and his temper. “All right,” he said, proud that he didn’t hear a trace of exasperation in his voice. “If the anarchists didn’t plant the bomb, who did?”
Sarah glanced at her mother expectantly, but Mrs. Decker was trying to figure out what the chopsticks were for.
“Like this, Mother,” Sarah said, demonstrating and helping her mother get the first bite of the meal into her mouth.
“It’s quite tasty,” she decided in surprise.
Sarah apparently decided not to rely on her to enlighten Frank. “Lilly Van Dyke was probably having an affair,” she said.
“How do you know that?” he challenged.
“Everyone knew it,” Mrs. Decker supplied between mouthfuls. “I’m surprised the Chinese race didn’t starve to death centuries ago, if this is how they eat,” she added, struggling with the chopsticks.
“Who was her lover?” Frank asked.
Mrs. Decker looked at him with a small smirk. “No one knows,” she replied, mimicking him.
Sarah had the grace to cover her mouth so he wouldn’t see her grin. Then she said, “Lilly was unhappy in her marriage. Mr. Van Dyke was stingy and boring, and Lilly was apparently forced to marry him in the first place. She behaved scandalously by flirting with every man she met.”
“That doesn’t prove she killed her husband, or even that she wanted him dead,” Frank said.
“We think she may have influenced someone to do it,” Mrs. Decker explained, as if figuring out people’s motives for murder was an ordinary task for her.
“How would she have done that?” he asked, not bothering to hide is skepticism.
“The usual way a woman influences a man, Malloy,” Sarah said smugly. “But we’ve decided it probably wasn’t a man in her own social circle.”
“Heavens, no,” Mrs. Decker confirmed. “As I pointed out to Sarah, Lilly isn’t interesting enough to inspire a rich or powerful man to murder. We think it must be someone inferior to her, a tradesman or a servant.”
“A tradesman or a servant who just happened to know how to make a bomb?” Frank asked sarcastically.
“I’m sure it’s possible for anyone to learn how,” Sarah said, unfazed. “If the anarchists can do it, other people can, too. And of course, the bomb would immediately cast suspicion on Creighton and his friends.”
“Lilly did seem eager to blame Creighton,” Mrs. Decker recalled.
“So did Tad,” Malloy said without thinking.
Sarah’s head snapped up, her eyes wide. “What did he say?”
Frank wanted to bite his tongue. He knew better than to give her information about a case. It only encouraged her. “He just agreed with this stepmother that his brother had good reason to want his father dead.”
Sar
ah glanced speculatively at her mother, then turned back to Frank. “I didn’t want to say anything about this, but it might be important.”
Frank’s grip tightened on his chopsticks. He respected Sarah’s powers of observation enough to know she was probably right. He glanced at Mrs. Decker, too. Sarah plainly was hesitant to say anything in front of her, but what could it matter now? The woman already knew far too much about the case. “What is it?”
She looked down at her half-empty plate and carefully framed her reply. “The way Tad treats Lilly,” she said, looking up with misery in her eyes. “I think his feelings for her are . . . deeper than would be appropriate for their relationship.”
“Sarah, what are you saying?” Mrs. Decker asked in alarm.
She sighed. “Remember we thought Lilly might have influenced someone weaker than herself to murder her husband? Someone who thought getting rid of Mr. Van Dyke would win him Lilly? Someone who would have no other hope of attaining her?” Mrs. Decker nodded reluctantly. “Tad fits that description.”
“What makes you think he’s in love with her?” Frank challenged.
“The way he took her in his arms when she was crying. There’s a subtle difference between comforting someone and embracing them. And the expression on his face . . . He’s besotted with her, Malloy. I’m certain of that. I have no idea if she knows, however.”
“And even if she does know, would she have used him to kill her husband?” Frank said.
“And what kind of a man would he have to be to murder his own father?” Sarah agreed.
“I think that settles it for Tad,” Mrs. Decker said decisively. “Patricide is a heinous crime, no matter how one might profess to hate one’s father. A young man might have unnatural desires toward his lovely young stepmother. I’m sure it happens with alarming frequency, since wealthy men often take younger wives when they are widowed. But how many of them end up murdered?”
“On the other hand,” Frank said, mulling over the possibilities in his mind, “he did have access to his father’s office and the basement storeroom.”
“Why would he need access to the storeroom?” Sarah asked.
Once again Frank had let something slip. He was losing his grip. “The killer set up the bomb so it could be triggered by pulling a wire in the basement,” he said, surrendering to the inevitable.
“That would have taken a lot of time,” Sarah said. “How would someone get into the building who didn’t have the right to be there without anyone noticing?”
“There’s a window into the storage area that opens into the alley. It has a broken latch. The killer could’ve gotten in that way during the night, when no one was there.”
Mrs. Decker had been paying close attention to their conversation. “Even if the killer was someone with a right to be in the building, he couldn’t have set up the bomb during working hours, anyway. Too many people would have seen him going into the storage area and wondered what he was doing there, so the killer could very well have been someone who didn’t work there.”
Frank hated to admit it, but she was right. She really was too much like her daughter.
“I guess we’ve established that anyone could have managed to plant the bomb without anyone seeing them,” Sarah said. “The question is, who had the best reason for killing Mr. Van Dyke?”
“The person with the best reason isn’t always the killer,” Frank reminded her.
“Why, Mr. Malloy, how very profound,” Mrs. Decker said with some surprise. “I’d never thought of it that way.
Although I don’t suppose I’ve given a lot of thought to murder at all, come to that. But I’m sure you’re right. Simply having a good reason to kill someone couldn’t possibly be enough to make someone actually do the deed. If it were, there’d hardly be a soul left alive on earth!”
Frank’s astonishment at her compliment lasted only a moment because her observation reminded him of a conversation he’d had with Allen Snowberger. Van Dyke’s partner had remarked that if businessmen settled disagreements with bombs, the city would be rubble.
“You’re absolutely right, Mother,” Sarah was saying. “We have to figure out who had the most compelling reason to want Mr. Van Dyke dead. What are all the reasons we’ve discovered so far?”
“Creighton still has a good one,” Frank pointed out stubbornly.
“So he would inherit a lot of money and be able to support Katya and their anarchist friends,” Sarah agreed.
“And if he didn’t do it, their anarchist friends could’ve done it for him,” Frank added.
“Lilly probably wanted to be free of her marriage,” Mrs. Decker said. “Divorce would have ruined her and left her penniless and disgraced, but if Gregory died, she’d have a comfortable income and no husband to control her anymore.”
“I doubt Mrs. Van Dyke built the bomb,” Frank said.
“So she would have had to influence someone to do it for her,” Mrs. Decker said, undeterred.
“Someone who was in love with her and foolish enough to believe murder would be a reasonable solution to his problems,” Sarah said.
“Someone young and impressionable,” Mrs. Decker guessed.
“Or naïve,” Sarah said. “Or desperately in love.”
“Or maybe just stupid,” Frank said impatiently.
“We’re only trying to help you, Malloy,” Sarah reminded him. “What other reason might someone have wanted Mr. Van Dyke dead?”
Frank glared at both women for a long moment, but they didn’t seem to notice. They were too busy trying to figure out another motive for Van Dyke’s death.
“He must have been standing in someone’s way,” Mrs. Decker finally said.
“What do you mean, Mother?” Sarah asked.
“The killer wanted something he couldn’t have as long as Gregory was alive.”
“Lilly,” Sarah guessed. “No one else could have her if she was married to him.”
“Or his money,” Mrs. Decker said. “Lilly wanted to spend far more than he allowed her, and of course, there’s Creighton and the anarchists who needed money.”
“What other reasons do people kill?” Sarah asked Frank. “For love and money and what else?”
“Revenge,” he offered idly, just to see if she could assign that motive to anyone in this case.
“Could he have cheated someone?” Sarah asked. “In a business deal? What about Mr. Snowberger? They were partners. Maybe Mr. Van Dyke did something dishonest to him. Would Father know about it if he had?” she asked her mother.
“Only if one of them told him or it was public knowledge,” Mrs. Decker said.
“We’ve heard a rumor about that,” Frank informed them, “but the story was that Snowberger cheated Van Dyke.”
“Oh, dear, that doesn’t help,” said Mrs. Decker.
Frank decided he might as well get their opinions of yet another possible motive. “Lilly wasn’t the only person he controlled.”
Sarah looked at him with a frown, but it cleared almost instantly. “Alberta!”
“What about Alberta?” Mrs. Decker asked.
“He refused to allow the man she loved to court her,” Sarah said.
But her mother was shaking her head. “Nonsense. Gregory would have been thrilled if anyone had courted her. He would have been very generous to her husband, too.”
“What if the man she wanted wasn’t socially acceptable to him, though?” Sarah asked. “He wouldn’t have been generous then. He wouldn’t have even allowed her to see him.”
Mrs. Decker wasn’t impressed. “Thwarted lovers usually elope instead of committing murder.”
Frank watched Sarah’s expression grow grim. “But if the girl’s father is a powerful man, they’d risk his wrath if they eloped.”
He saw the memories claim Mrs. Decker, sucking the color from her cheeks and the light from her eyes. Both women were remembering the Deckers’ other daughter, Maggie. She’d fallen in love with the wrong man, gotten herself with child, and defi
ed her parents to elope with him. Felix Decker had ruined the man’s job prospects, hoping to drive Maggie back home, but instead she had refused to leave her husband—and died in childbirth in a squalid tenement.
“Alberta is nothing like Maggie,” Mrs. Decker said, her voice hoarse with emotion.
“She’s with child by a man her family knows nothing about,” Sarah replied.
Mrs. Decker gasped aloud.
“It’s Reed,” Frank said to pull them all the way back from their dark past. “Lewis Reed, Van Dyke’s secretary.”
Sarah turned to him in amazement, the shadows of her sister’s memory gone from her blue eyes. “How do you know?”
“I saw them together today. As you said, there’s a subtle difference between comforting someone and embracing them. They were definitely embracing.”
FRANK WALKED SLOWLY BACK TO POLICE HEADQUARTERS after escorting Sarah and her mother to the El station for the trip back uptown. He didn’t believe for a moment that Sarah would really forget all about the Van Dyke murder, but at least he’d gotten her and Mrs. Decker out of the Lower East Side for today.
Remembering what Commissioner Roosevelt had said about finding out the truth made Frank slightly sick to his stomach. Usually when he was working on a murder case, his problem was finding the solution. This case was just the opposite. Here he had too many perfectly logical solutions, but none of them was one the Van Dyke family or Roosevelt would be very happy to hear.
Of course, the anarchists could still be guilty. The fact that Creighton had escaped did cast suspicion on him and the rest of them. Frank just wished his gut wasn’t telling him something different or that he didn’t have so many other good prospects. He tried to imagine a way he could accuse the Widow Van Dyke or son Tad or partner Snowberger of murder without getting himself fired.
Murder on Marble Row Page 14