A Deadly Affection

by Cuyler Overholt

  She turned, stiffening at the sight of me.

  “You have to get Eliza a better lawyer,” I said breathlessly. “She’s going to need someone really first rate.”

  “How am I supposed to afford someone like that?” she snapped. “We barely have enough to pay our bills as it is.”

  “I could help. I have a little money put away.”

  She took a halting step toward me. “Can a lawyer turn back the clock?” she asked, leaning on her walking stick with both hands. “Can he put Eliza back safe and sound in the shop with me instead of alone in that office with the doctor?” She grimaced, shaking her head. “Save your charity, Doctor. You’ve done enough to ‘help’ already.” She turned and started down the stairs.

  I stood rooted in place, hearing her earlier words to me with each strike of her stick on the terrazzo steps: “…all your fault…everything that happened…all your fault…” I reached blindly for the wall as a wave of panic washed over me. I couldn’t be responsible, not again. I knew, deep down, it would be the end of me.

  I forced myself to take a deep breath. Only Eliza knew the truth. Not Detective Maloney, not Professor Mayhew, not even Mrs. Braun. I lifted my head and wiped my damp palms on my skirt. I had to speak with Eliza before I could draw any reliable conclusions—about her guilt, or my own.

  • • •

  When I returned to the courtroom, the roundsman was back in front of the rail, where another arraignment was in progress. He gestured to me to come through the gate, then led me through a side door into the hallway. “Matron Gilbert will take you down,” he said, pointing to a stout woman by a steel-barred door halfway down the hall.

  I followed the matron out the door, down a staircase, and through another, plated door into the jail. Several twists and turns later, we arrived at a chain-link gate, where Officer Callahan was having a smoke with the man on guard. After the matron had searched my bag and pockets, the guard opened the gate to let us through.

  I hesitated, looking at Officer Callahan.

  “I’ll be right here if you need me,” he said with a wave of his cigar.

  I followed the matron onto the ground floor of the jail. Five cell doors were recessed into a thick brick wall on my left, facing a narrow courtyard. Looking up, I saw several more tiers of cells cantilevered out above me. Each had a security post in one corner, separated from the cells by more chain-link fencing.

  Jangling her key ring, the matron led me to a cell with the number two inscribed in its arched lintel. The brick enclosure was so narrow she had to stand partially sideways as she turned the key in the lock. “You’ve got ten minutes until the wagon gets here,” she advised me, pulling open the door.

  I peered past her into a dim cell lit by a single incandescent globe. Two wire-strung bunks were attached to the wall on the left, one over the other. The top one was folded up flush against the bricks, the bottom one suspended over the concrete floor by chains at its corners. Eliza sat on the edge of the open bunk, staring up at me. The matron’s hand pressed me forward and the door slammed shut. I heard the key grate in the lock, and then the matron’s footsteps receded down the courtyard.

  Eliza rose from the bunk, hugging herself, her eyes wide with fright. A hundred uneasy questions had been circling in my mind, awaiting her explication. But as she stood there shivering before me, the first thing that rose to my lips was “Are you cold?”

  “Oh, Doctor…” she wailed, rushing toward me with outstretched arms.

  I held her as she started to cry, deep sobs that welled up one after another, and seemed as though they might go on forever. Finally, she raised her head and wiped her face with her hands. “I was afraid you’d think I’d done it,” she said between stuttering intakes of breath.

  “I didn’t know what to think, Eliza,” I replied, stepping back from her. “I still don’t.”

  “I didn’t kill him, I swear! If you’d seen what he looked like…” She stopped as a shudder rocked through her. “I could never do that to anyone.”

  If this was an act, it was a bravura performance. I scrutinized her face for telltale signs of dissembling, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find any. “Why don’t we sit down, and you can tell me exactly what happened.” I stepped around a puddle that was snaking across the floor from the toilet in the corner, guiding her back to the open bunk. “We don’t have much time,” I said as we sat down, “so you need to tell me as quickly and clearly as you can everything that you remember.”

  “All right, I’ll try.” She paused to collect her thoughts, then began, “I got there early, before office hours, so that I could talk to the doctor without being disturbed. He answered the door when I knocked. He said he’d be with me in just a few minutes and asked me to wait in the examining room. So I waited, and the minute he came in, I asked him.”

  “Asked him what?”

  “Where Joy was. I wanted to ask him right away so I wouldn’t lose my nerve.”

  “You mean you actually talked with him in the examining room? That wasn’t in the detective’s notes.”

  She bit her lip. “I didn’t think I should tell the police about Joy. I had promised Dr. Hauptfuhrer never to tell, and there didn’t seem any reason for them to know.”

  “So instead,” I said, recalling my conversation with Detective Maloney, “you told them you went to ask the doctor for a prescription.”

  “I really did need a new prescription, for my headache powders. I was going to ask him for it when we were done.”

  She was clearly eager for me to believe that she was telling the truth, and so far, I saw no reason to think that she wasn’t. As Professor Mayhew had pointed out, however, what Eliza considered the truth wasn’t necessarily rooted in reality. “How did the doctor react when you asked him where Joy was? Did he seem…surprised?”

  “No, not surprised. I had telephoned him the day before to tell him I wanted to talk about her, so he was expecting it. But I can’t say he was very pleased.”

  “What did he say, exactly?”

  She frowned. “He said it would be best for everyone concerned, especially Joy, if we left what happened in the past.”

  That didn’t sound like someone confronting a fantasy, I thought. “And how did you respond?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to do anything to hurt Joy. But I couldn’t see any harm in just knowing where she was. So I promised that if he told me where she lived, I wouldn’t try to talk to her. I’d only look at her, without her even knowing. But he said…” She hesitated, color rising in her cheeks. “He said he couldn’t be sure I’d keep my word.”

  So Joy wasn’t just some hysterical concoction, I concluded. But that meant that Eliza had a real reason for resenting the doctor. Had that resentment kindled a violent assault when Hauptfuhrer refused her request? “And how did that make you feel?” I asked, watching her closely.

  “I felt…ashamed, I suppose, the way he said it. Embarrassed for even asking. But then I remembered what you’d said, about how I had a right to know, and that made me feel stronger, somehow. So I looked him right in the eye and told him that she was my daughter and that if he didn’t tell me where she was and give me some sort of proof that what he told me was true, I’d go to the police and let them know he’d taken her without my say-so.” She smiled crookedly. “I don’t think I would have dared to, really, but I suppose it must have frightened him, because after a minute, he agreed.”

  I sat back, making the bunk bed creak. “He agreed?”

  She nodded.

  I’d considered half a dozen other scenarios, but this one had never occurred to me. I stared at her, wanting it to be true, while she gazed steadily back at me. “And then?”

  She shrugged. “And then he went to get me proof.”

  “What kind of proof?”

  “Well, I don’t know, because he never returned.”

 
“All right, let’s back up a bit,” I said, racing to put these new pieces into place. “Where exactly did he say he was going to get this proof?”

  “He didn’t say. He just told me to wait while he went to get it. Then he went through the connecting door into his office and closed it behind him.”

  “You didn’t go after him?”

  “No! Although I was so excited, I could hardly sit still. I kept thinking how wonderful it was going to be to see Joy again, even if I could only watch her from a distance. But then I heard the doctor shout…”

  “He shouted? You mean he called something out?”

  “It was more of a cry, really, like…” She imitated a startled yelp. “And then there were bumping noises, and a minute later, a door slammed.”

  “Which door?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think it must have been the one that led from his office into the hallway. The noise came from that direction.”

  For the first time since her arrest, I felt the stirring of hope. “What did you do then?”

  “Well, at first I was too frightened to move. When it was quiet again, I called out his name, but he didn’t answer. So finally, after another minute or so, I got up and opened the door, and that’s…that’s when I saw him.”

  “What did you see, Eliza?”

  She swallowed. “He was lying on his back on the floor, all covered in blood. There was an awful gurgling noise coming from his throat, and the blood was just…spurting up, out of his neck.” Her hand rose unconsciously to her own neck. “I didn’t want to go any closer, but I thought there might be something I could do to help, so I made myself walk over to him. At first, I thought he was trying to say something, but when I bent down to listen, I realized it was just…dying noise, I suppose. Finally it stopped, and he was still.” She drew a breath. “Then his daughter came in—the one who answers the door during office hours. I tried to talk to her, but she just backed up and ran out of the room. I wasn’t sure what to do then, so I waited, thinking she’d return. And then a few minutes later, the patrolman arrived.”

  I listened with mounting excitement. If she could be believed, then the facts of the case as presented by Detective Maloney took on a very different light. The open file drawer, for instance—Detective Maloney had assumed the doctor was filing unrelated paperwork when he was attacked, but he might just as well have been retrieving Eliza’s proof from that drawer, while she waited innocently in the adjoining room. And then there was the blood on Eliza’s gloves and skirt. A severed carotid artery could spurt blood a distance of several feet; if the doctor’s artery was still pumping when Eliza stooped beside him, as she had suggested, she most certainly would have been splattered. The fact that she had remained at the crime scene instead of running away, moreover, suggested not culpability but only a desire to help.

  “Is it true that you screamed when you saw the doctor?” I asked her. “The detective on the case told me Miss Hauptfuhrer came downstairs because she heard you through the heat vents.”

  “Why, yes, I suppose I did,” she said a bit sheepishly. “It was just such a shock, seeing him there on the floor.”

  “You needn’t apologize. It was a perfectly natural thing to do.” Surely, I thought, if Detective Maloney heard the full account that Eliza had just given me, he would realize that they’d arrested the wrong person. “You have to tell the police what you heard,” I told her. “Once they know that there was someone else in there with the doctor, they’ll have to let you go and start looking for the real murderer.”

  “But I already did,” she said in surprise.

  “You told them about the shout? And the door slamming?”

  “I told the patrolman as soon as he arrived.”

  I gritted my teeth. Detective Maloney had not bothered to convey this critical information, to me or to the magistrate. It was beginning to seem as though he’d closed his mind to the possibility of Eliza’s innocence, long before all the evidence was in. What evidence he had considered, he seemed ready to distort in the interest of wrapping up his case. I’d seen what he did with the little I revealed about Eliza’s emotional state. He had also suggested, to me at least, that her fingerprints were on the sword, which was apparently untrue. I remembered his hesitation when I asked him what had brought Miss Hauptfuhrer downstairs. He clearly hadn’t wanted to tell me, no doubt because it didn’t mesh with his version of events.

  “Do you think I should have told them about Joy?” Eliza asked.

  It was a good question. If the police knew that Eliza was trying to discover her daughter’s whereabouts, they might conclude she had no reason to harm Hauptfuhrer, who was the only person who could tell her. But they might just as well spin out a sensational scenario featuring Eliza as a vengeful mother righting a long-ago wrong. In light of Maloney’s conduct thus far, I had little reason to expect the former. Nor, in light of his deception, was I inclined to fulfill my promise to obtain Eliza’s permission to tell him all that I knew.

  “What I think,” I told her, “is that you need a good lawyer. Not that dreadful man who foisted himself on you in the courtroom. I mean a really good attorney who’s had some experience with…cases like this.” There was no reason, I had decided, to let Mrs. Braun keep me from doing what I was sure was in Eliza’s interest, no matter how much she might blame me for what had happened. “I could ask around and get some names, if you like.”

  “All right, if you think that’s best.”

  I smiled, touched but also daunted by her trust in me.

  The matron reappeared at the door, jangling her keys. “The wagon’s here,” she announced.

  Eliza shrank back on the bunk as the key grated in the lock.

  I took her cold hand in mine. “Try not to be afraid,” I said, giving it a squeeze.

  The door swung open, and I rose to go. Eliza, however, remained seated, clinging to my hand.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this somehow.”

  I cringed as the matron shackled her wrists, then followed helplessly as she was handed over to Officer Callahan at the gate and led to the front of the jail, where the wagon that would take her to the city prison was backing through the vehicle entrance. I watched Callahan load her into the wagon with four other women, feeling the weight of her trust on my shoulders. Though I would do everything in my power to help, I feared it wouldn’t be enough. I was out of my element, my medical school honors and advanced training of no use in navigating the city’s criminal justice machinery. Finding her a better lawyer would be a good first step, but I didn’t know how much he’d be able to accomplish without evidence corroborating Eliza’s story.

  What we needed, I thought as the wagon drove off, was someone with influence. Someone who could use his connections to stall Maloney’s steamroller tactics and give us time to uncover the truth. Unfortunately, the only person I knew who might fit that description was the last person I’d choose to ask for help. He’d gotten those boys off, however, and the young prostitute. Maybe he could help Eliza too. I was going to have to swallow my pride and ask him, for her sake.

  I followed the wagon out to the street, then went back in the side door and up the staircase to the police court. At the first break in the proceedings, I leaned over the rail and hailed the roundsman. “Can you tell me where I might find Simon Shaw?” I asked him.

  “This time of day?” He scratched his head. “I’d say your best bet would be at his saloon, on Eighty-Fourth and Second.”

  “He owns a saloon?”

  “Well, sure, and more than one,” he said, as if this were common knowledge. “But the Isle of Plenty is where you’re most likely to find him. That’s where he takes care of business.”

  I would have liked to ask what kind of business, but before I could do so, he had turned away to call the next case. And so I left the police court behind and set out t
o discover the answer for myself.

  Chapter Eight

  I gazed across the street at the Isle of Plenty’s curtained windows, shifting from foot to foot in the slush. So, Simon had become a saloonkeeper. I wouldn’t have expected it of him; but then, I supposed I’d never known the real Simon Shaw. I caught a glimpse of the saloon’s warmly lit interior as the door opened and a customer walked out, followed by strains of piano music. It looked like a decent enough place. Still, although my stockings were soaked through and my feet were numb from the cold, I was hesitant to cross.

  I’d been nine years old when Katie brought young Simon back from the boat with his mother, our new parlor maid, and installed them both in the loft over the stable. Of course, Conrad and I weren’t allowed to play with the hired help, but I was aware of the boy, as children are, and on the rare occasions when his mother brought him to the house, I found him to be an interesting, if reserved, young lad.

  It was perhaps inevitable that when adolescence struck, Simon became the target of my youthful longings. My parents hadn’t seemed to notice that I was becoming a woman. They’d provided me with tutors in French and astronomy, with dance lessons at Dodsworth’s and tennis lessons in the park, but had done nothing at all to prepare me for the internal roilings of new womanhood, waiting for my debut year to launch me into society and its attendant, time-tested mating rituals. And so, in the lonely evening hours when Father locked himself in his study and Mama tended her flowers in the conservatory, I spent far too many hours staring vacantly over my needlepoint while fantasizing about a perfect beau. In time, with this paragon’s hazy image fixed in my mind, I began to search for a flesh-and-blood counterpart among the boys of my acquaintance. The man of my dreams was made of more substantial stuff than the tongue-tied, sweaty-palmed boys at school or at Dodsworth’s, however. I had almost despaired of finding him when, shortly after my sixteenth birthday, Simon was assigned to escort me on my morning rides, so that the coachman could drive Mama on her errands.