by Liz Freeland
“Actually, the news is good,” he said. “The medical examiner found no evidence of Miss Gail’s having been molested.”
“I see.” Not raped, just stabbed to death. That sunny bulletin constituted good news to Detective Muldoon.
Silence stretched, and his gaze narrowed. “Now that your friend isn’t here, is there anything you can tell me that you couldn’t last night?”
Tempting as it was to give Sawyer’s name to the police, I’d promised Callie I wouldn’t. Instead, I asked, “Couldn’t the murderer have been some person neither of us knows?”
“A random madman, you mean?”
“Or a burglar, for instance.”
He tilted his head. “We are considering that. . . .”
“But?” I prompted.
“Apart from money, nothing else seems to have been taken. And we can’t even be sure about the money. You said it was hidden, and that only you and your roommate knew of it.” He tilted his head but kept a steady gaze on me.
I swallowed. “Well, perhaps the burglar came in and forced Ethel at knifepoint to show him what money she had. She gave it over, but he killed her anyway.”
“But in your random burglar scenario, it would have made more sense for the man to simply have run out of the apartment when Miss Gail called out. There would have been no reason to stab her at all.” He shook his head. “In my opinion, the attack was direct, purposeful. The killer even seemed to know how to find the largest, sharpest knife in the apartment.”
Not random, then. Perhaps someone I knew. I couldn’t forget Callie’s lie about when she’d arrived at my aunt’s, even though I felt like a traitor thinking about it at all. Besides, Wally said he’d seen Ethel coming up the stairs hours after Callie would have arrived at Aunt Irene’s. Nevertheless, I asked, “Do you know what time Ethel was killed?”
“The coroner estimated between nine and ten, not long before the body was discovered.”
That squared with what Wally had said about seeing Ethel on the stairs, but I was puzzled. “How does the coroner know?”
Muldoon’s brows beetled, as if this were some sort of alchemy a person like me couldn’t understand. “Body temperature, and the state of rigor mortis. That kind of thing.”
“Rigor mortis?”
He took a breath. “How set the muscles become after death. After about two to four hours, a rigid stiffness sets in.”
“How gruesome.” I was fascinated, actually, but Muldoon didn’t seem interested in enlightening me further on the subject of forensics.
“Miss Faulk, how well do you know your upstairs neighbors?”
“You think it was Max?” I’d wondered the same thing last night, but I didn’t want it to be him. “Max and Lucia are good people. They might not be married, technically, but what does that really matter?”
His brows raised slightly. Free love and unwedded bliss might be common in our neighborhood, but Greenwich Village wasn’t the world. It wasn’t even typical of New York City.
I swallowed, trying to think of a better defense. “Max was always generous. He helped us put up curtains in the kitchen and bedroom. And he and Lucia are certainly nicer than the people who lived upstairs before. When we first moved in, there were three Portuguese anarchists up there. I didn’t mind that they were Portuguese, of course, and even anarchists for neighbors aren’t bad as long as they keep their pamphleteering to a minimum. The worst was that they seemed to live on salt cod. The odor! I’m no stranger to fish smells, but the stink was almost enough to send me back to Altoona.”
My babbling was finally halted when I caught Muldoon’s unamused glower. “Better for you if it had.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Miss Faulk, Max Freeman was once convicted of a crime. A serious crime. I need to speak to him.”
What did Muldoon consider a serious crime?
“Did Max Freeman seem especially friendly toward Ethel?” he asked. “Or Callie?”
“So you suspect Ethel’s killer thought she was Callie.”
He hesitated. “It’s a possibility. They had similar hair color and height. And according to you and Miss Gail, Ethel knew very few people here.”
“But the lights were on,” I pointed out. “In the light, no one could have mistaken Ethel for Callie.”
“The lights could have been turned on after Miss Gail was killed.”
“That would be a stupid thing for a murderer to do.”
“Don’t believe what you read. Criminals aren’t masterminds.”
I supposed that was good news for the authorities, because from what I’d witnessed so far, detectives weren’t masterminds, either. Without any experience or resources at my disposal, I had divined as much as they had. And, criminal record or no criminal record, the more I considered Max, the less likely a suspect he seemed. He knew Ethel—he certainly wouldn’t have confused her for Callie. And even given the extremely remote possibility that he’d meant to murder Ethel, why would he have done so when his wife was right upstairs?
Except for the money. Wally had said Ethel had come upstairs before the murder. What if she’d walked in on Max stealing? But then, that wouldn’t account for her being dressed in a nightgown, especially one of Callie’s nightgowns.
As far as I knew, Max hadn’t returned during the night. Now I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. He would be an especially choice suspect when the police realized he’d hoofed it. But if he’d had a previous run-in with the police, that might be reason enough to explain his disappearance.
“What was Max’s crime?” I asked.
“Assault.” His lips turned down. “With a knife.”
“Oh.” So much for our helpful, even-tempered neighbor. I remembered Lucia’s hysterics, her sobs. I just hadn’t wanted to believe Max was bad. No wonder Muldoon was here so early. He and Robinson had encouraged us to accept the murder suspect’s hospitality.
“I beg you, Miss Faulk, do not shield the man, no matter how much you like your neighbors.”
“Of course I won’t.” I spoke as if such a thing would never have entered my mind, yet there were two men I was already shielding with silence.
Did I have a right to? Without the information Callie and I had, Max was the detectives’ lone suspect. The story had become front-page news, which meant that there would be pressure to arrest someone and wrap up the case with a shiny, tidy bow for the papers.
Poor Max. Unless, of course, he was guilty.
A door slammed downstairs, followed by sounds of a scuffle. Wally’s voice, high-pitched with excitement, cried out, “I’ve got him! The murderer! Police!”
Muldoon and I exchanged surprised looks before we raced down the stairs. By the time we reached the landing, a few saxophonists in dressing gowns or pajamas were already on the scene. Wally knelt before the closed front door, pinning down a slight blond man by the scruff of his jacket collar. An envelope lay on the floor next to them.
Wally spotted Muldoon and beamed proudly. “Got him for you, Detective! The very man I saw on the stairs last night!”
He stood and lifted his arm, drawing the man up to his tiptoes as easily as if he were a puppet on a string. When the blond man turned toward me, I gasped. I knew him—but I knew him from Altoona, not here. Blue eyes that used to gaze at me over the meat counter now bulged in panic. “Louise!” he said.
I still couldn’t quite believe my eyes. “Otto?”
CHAPTER 3
At the precinct where Muldoon took Otto for questioning, a desk sergeant with salt-and-pepper hair and a gruff voice directed me to wait on a bench. I waited. And waited. For two hours the derelict, the drunk, and the criminal were dragged past me to areas beyond my sight. They were the ones who received immediate attention here. Others—complainants and visitors like myself—waited. Despite how difficult it was for me and my backside to endure, given how worried I was about Otto and how hard the bench was, I couldn’t help being riveted by the action going on around me. I’d never been in a police
station. Now I had a front row seat to the passing parade of the most immediate drama in the city.
Under feebly swirling overhead fans barely stirring up the stale air, people came and went, some meekly, but others arguing, hollering, or even weeping. A mother sought her missing son, a man complained he’d been robbed on the Sixth Avenue El, and one man arrived, head tipped back and blood down his front, shouting that his wife had clouted him at the breakfast table with a butter bell. All the while, policemen drifted in and out much the way my coworkers did at Van Hooten and McChesney, and in the background there was the familiar beehive buzz of office sounds—file drawers banging open and closed, the distant clack of a typewriter, low-voiced conversations, and even, occasionally, laughter.
All the while, I worried about Otto. Back at the apartment, events had unfurled so chaotically that nothing had made sense. Stunned to be taken for a murderer, Otto had only been able to stammer out his innocence and, more inexplicably, something about a song. Meanwhile, Wally had blustered, Muldoon barked out questions, I pleaded, and Lucia came down and burst into tears of relief and thanksgiving that it wasn’t Max who’d been collared.
Frankly, it didn’t help that Otto looked guilty, just normally. He was thin and nervous, with eyes that bulged slightly, like a pug dog’s. But what that Cossack Muldoon couldn’t see was that inside Otto’s concave chest beat a heart as honest, true, and un-homicidal as they came.
What was he doing in New York? Why had he shown up at my apartment last night of all nights—and then again this morning, walking right into Wally’s and Detective Muldoon’s clutches? He might as well have been wearing a sandwich board announcing, “I killed Ethel.” Not that he did kill her. I didn’t believe that for a moment.
Muldoon hadn’t listened to Otto’s protestations or mine. No matter that the purpose of the detective’s morning visit had been to question Max and Lucia. When Muldoon found a live suspect on his hook, he’d been just as happy to reel Otto in as go hunting for Max. There in the apartment building’s foyer I’d felt like sinking to my knees and going into hysterics before him, but unlike Lucia I’m not the operatic type. I’m the dogged type.
Finally, a policeman informed me that I could speak to Otto. I’d heard interrogations could be rough, so I mentally girded myself to find Otto black and blue. The police were searching for a vicious killer. Every person walking past me or waiting in the station, and every copper with an idle moment, was reading about the murder in Greenwich Village. One story carried a subheading, TENANT TUSSLES WITH FAIR-HAIRED SUSPECT ON STAIRS OF MURDER HOUSE. Another more lurid one read, A BEDROOM DRENCHED IN BLOOD. Around me, lips pursed and heads shook, and mutters of outrage about the abomination perpetrated against a helpless woman hung in the air. In death Ethel had become the personification of the very perils of the wicked city that she’d been sermonizing about for the past month. The primary suspect in her murder wouldn’t have an easy time of it here.
The policeman led me up a flight of stairs and we passed a police matron on her way down. I’d seen women in uniform on a few occasions but hadn’t given them much thought. Now I had a hard time looking away from her in her high, starched collar, brass-buttoned jacket, and crisp blue skirt. What must it be like for her, working in this place every day? I bet it made my own job seem colorless by comparison.
My guide in blue led me through a door opening onto a large room that we entered via a waist-high wooden gate. Four desks dominated the room, a couple of them manned at the moment by men in street clothes—detectives, I assumed. I didn’t see Robinson or Muldoon. At one end of the room there were several doors that appeared to be offices. File cabinets lined the adjacent wall, and directly opposite the offices was what I can only describe as a cage. Inside, like animals in a zoo, sat a couple of unsavory-looking characters and Otto.
He spotted me, hopped to his feet, and grasped the metal bars. “Louise! Over here!” He hallooed my name as if we’d been separated at a carnival. The greeting raised a few chuckles and calls for him to keep his shirt on.
At least Otto wasn’t black and blue, or garbed in prison stripes . . . yet. He still wore his own clothes, a mustard brown suit that was probably a recent purchase but now looked rumpled and dusty. His straw boater was pushed far back, like a saint’s medieval halo, giving a view of his freckled forehead and his hair’s center part.
My policeman steered me over to a worn table near this holding pen and told me to sit down. “You get ten minutes with your pal.”
“Ten minutes?” Anger rose in my throat. “I’ve waited two hours.”
“Muldoon’s orders.” He pulled Otto out and locked the cage again. “No passing anything,” he warned. “I’ll have my eye on you two.”
As if we were criminals! Rage thundered in my breast, but Otto seemed unfazed by it all. His eyes were bright with excitement to see me, and he took my hands across the table as if we were meeting at the drugstore fountain in Altoona. His lips turned down only momentarily as he regarded me with concern.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Was I all right? “I’m not the one in the jail cell.”
“But that poor lady, the one who was killed. Mr. Muldoon told me all about it. Was she really a friend of yours?”
“My roommate’s cousin,” I explained. “She was staying with us.”
“That’s horrible. I’m so sorry.”
“Otto, why—”
Before I could get the words out, he squeezed my hand and gushed, “Gee, it’s good to see you again, Louise. It’s been so long. You up and disappeared so fast last year, I worried something had happened to you.”
Beneath the table, my leg began to jiggle. I pulled my hands away from his. A wave of guilt suddenly hit me for how I’d treated Otto. He was right. I’d fled town leaving him nary a word, and even after he’d written I’d replied only once and hadn’t sent my new address to him when Callie and I moved. It was no way to treat an old friend. “I just had to get out,” I explained.
“Oh, I understand. You never did like Altoona much. Still, I was frantic those months until your Aunt Sonja finally gave me your address at the hotel. I don’t know why she waited so long to tell me where you were.”
I stared at the table. “I’m sorry—I should have written to you earlier myself.”
“Well, never mind all that now. New York obviously agrees with you. You’re even prettier than I remembered.”
“Attaboy, Romeo!” one of his holding cell confederates yelled. Though policemen barked at him to shut up, several sneering glances were directed toward our table.
I glared at the sneering men and then turned back to Otto, who was still gazing at me as if he hadn’t heard a thing. I wanted to shake him. “Otto, what a mess.” I lowered my voice. “Why were you at my apartment?”
“I know it was early, but I couldn’t wait to see you.”
“I mean last night. What were you doing there last night?”
“I wasn’t there last night. I explained all that to Mr. Muldoon.”
I’d known Otto hadn’t killed anyone, but it never occurred to me that he hadn’t been Wally’s man on the stairs. He’d made that protest before Muldoon had hauled him away, but I’d assumed he was just muddled, or afraid to admit it. Under the circumstances, collared by the Wyatt Earp of Greenwich Village, who wouldn’t have been afraid?
I should have known Otto wouldn’t lie.
“The man on the first floor, Wally, said he saw you last night,” I said.
“He’s mistaken. I was lots of places last night, but never at your apartment.”
“How long have you been in town?”
“Since night before last. Yesterday”—he practically quaked with remembered pleasure, and his face broke into a huge grin—“yesterday was the most incredible day of my life, Louise. That’s what I was in such an all-fired hurry to see you about. What do you think? A song of mine’s been published! And it’s going to be made into a phonograph record. Guess by who.”
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br /> I could barely absorb what he was talking about, much less switch mental gears from police precinct to Tin Pan Alley. “Who?”
“None other than the Denver Nightingale himself, Mr. Billy Murray.” He gave his head a sharp shake as if he still couldn’t believe his luck. “Remember how we used to listen to his record of ‘The Sidewalks of New York’? And here we are!”
There we were. In a police station. “We’re not exactly tripping the light fantastic.”
“Well, no. But someday soon people will be listening to Billy Murray singing my song.”
“That’s marvelous.” I tried, none too successfully, to infuse my voice with enthusiasm. The song might create a sensation, but the songwriter would be in Sing Sing.
“I was bringing you a copy of the music. They gave me a whole stack yesterday.” He frowned, as if he suddenly remembered what had happened since then. “Mr. Muldoon took them.”
That’s what had been in the envelope, then. An unfortunate incriminating detail. And yet, it hadn’t been Otto whom Wally saw last night. So who had it been?
“I’m happy for you, Otto, but I’m also worried.”
My anxiety didn’t faze him any more than his spending a morning in a jail cell had. It was as if he hadn’t heard me at all. “I dedicated the song to you, Louise.”
How could someone be so unconscious of the precipice he was standing next to? He was like one of those screen comedians staring up at the sky as he strolled ever closer to an open manhole. And now I was in a conundrum myself. I always was with Otto. I’d liked him since we were kids in school, but for years now it had been clear that he wanted to be more than friends. I had rebuffed him twice, officially, but Otto lived by the maxim “Persistence pays.”
“I’m honored,” I said. “I really am, but—”
“Remember all the times you said that you were sure I’d make a big success with my songwriting if I just kept at it?”
Actually, he’d said that and I’d mostly nodded along, never quite believing his dream ever would amount to anything. When you’re working in a butcher shop, achieving songwriting fame seems only slightly more likely than establishing oneself as a Bedouin prince.