by Liz Freeland
“That’s what I assumed at first, too—that the killer mistook Ethel for you.”
“You thought it was Sawyer,” Callie guessed.
I didn’t say anything. Sawyer had crossed both our minds last night. On the subject of Ford Fitzsimmons, I stayed mum. After all, the chance that a mere acquaintance would have come here was so slim. If not for Wally’s description of the man on the stairs, I never would have given Ford another thought.
“It couldn’t have been Sawyer, Louise. We saw him, and we both saw that bed. If he’d come from killing Ethel, his clothes would’ve had blood on them. But he looked as neat as a pin.”
She was right. I wished I could have seen how Ford looked at ten thirty last night.
“Ethel is the key,” I said, purposefully derailing my thoughts from the track they kept returning to. “She was the victim. Finding out more about Ethel will lead us to who killed her.”
“You mean lead the police to who killed her,” Callie said.
“The police suspect Otto, and I can guarantee he’s not a murderer. I have no faith that they’ll find the right person or even spend much time looking for him. Not when they have Otto to point to as the culprit.”
Her eyes went saucer wide. “You don’t mean to say you intend to find the murderer yourself.”
“If I can.”
“That’s insanity! You’re not a detective. You’ll just be stumbling around guessing.”
“Maybe. But with any luck, I’ll stumble into the killer. Don’t you want to find out who killed Ethel? Now that you’ve seen them haul Otto away, are you willing to accept whatever person the police come up with?”
Callie stared at the toes of her navy-blue shoes peeping from under her skirt. Finally, she glanced up at me. “Where do we start?”
That we was music to my ears. “We need to find out what Ethel was up to.”
Callie laughed. “Ethel?”
“I know, I know. We used to joke about what she could be doing while we were at work. But maybe she really was involved in something.”
“You think she was gambling, or sneaking off to opium dens?”
“No, but we need to find out more. It might be the key to who took her money, and her life.”
I decided to start my investigation close to home. Lucia would probably be incoherent—and possibly not inclined to be truthful—so I went downstairs and knocked on the door of the Bleecker Blowers. As far as I knew, Ethel had never had many dealings with them beyond banging on the floor with a broom handle to get them to shut down their playing. But perhaps I was wrong.
A moment passed with no response. I was about to knock again when the door swung open and my knuckle rapped nothing but air.
The Bleecker Blowers consisted of five saxophone players. The group had begun life as The Five Bleecker Brothers, but one brother dropped out after falling in love with a Nebraska widow during a tour of the Midwest, and another brother had decided to join an uncle’s painting business. The group scared up substitute brothers of varying talent, but since the original brothers had very distinctive red hair, the substitutes were forced to dye theirs, often with startling results. Even after the name change, the hair requirement persisted. The man standing before me now was definitely one of the recent members. His head had an artificial tangerine hue.
“Oh, hello,” he said breathlessly. Something crashed behind him, and he turned to yell, “Careful with that!”
My curiosity itched to know what was happening on the other side of the door, but Tangerine Man blocked my sight. He turned back and seemed almost surprised to see me still there. “You need something?” he asked, before he remembered who I was and blushed. “That is, we were awfully sorry about what happened to that lady . . . your roommate. I’m glad they caught the bastard who killed her. Pardon the language.”
“They didn’t,” I said.
“Huh?”
“They have the wrong man. That man they collared in the foyer this morning was just a friend of mine.”
Another bang sounded from the apartment, and my orange neighbor practically quivered with impatience. “I’m sorry . . .” His eyes narrowed. “Did you need something?”
“I wanted to know if you’d heard anything last night. You or any of your roommates.”
“We told all that to the police,” he said. “It’s not like we knew Miss What’s-Her-Name, or even noticed her much. She wasn’t one of those women you do notice.”
“That’s strange. I found her hard to ignore.”
“Maybe because you lived with her.” He shrugged. “She was just one of those invisible women, you know? Nothing special. I don’t mean to sound callous, but we just didn’t pay any attention to her.”
Because she was older, I guessed. Spinsterly. She’d been no one’s sweetheart, no one’s mother. Mostly she’d just been in the way.
The idea unnerved me. How many years did I have before I became invisible?
I forced a smile. “Well, thank you. We were just curious to find out if you’d noticed anything. Callie is so upset, you know.”
“Oh, Callie.” At once, his impatience melted away, and a scrim of dreamlike desire clouded his eyes.
Callie was not invisible to the male sex, and I’d become used to this muddleheaded reaction from men who encountered her. It was part of the reason Ford Fitzsimmons’s lack of interest in her had surprised me. Usually I was a little irritated with men for being so superficial and predictable when confronted with a pretty blonde. Now I wondered if I could use some of this Callie worship to my advantage.
“The police won’t tell us much,” I said, “and poor Callie is tearing her heart out with questions about what happened last night. She feels sure someone must have heard something. If I could just reassure her . . .”
“Heck, I’ll reassure her,” Tangerine said, leaping at the bait. He turned. “Pat, I’ll be right back. Going upstairs for a minute.”
“You can’t leave now!” came the annoyed reply. “The car’ll be here any second.”
“Then the car can wait.”
“Bill’ll kill us.”
But nothing was going to keep the orange Lochinvar from his chance to dash upstairs and comfort Callie. He pushed right past me and took the steps three at a time.
I frowned and gave the door a shove. Before I could step into the apartment, however, a natural redhead pushing an instrument case the size of a rhinoceros blocked my path. His face peeked around the top, annoyed. “What lit a fire under his tail?”
“My roommate,” I said. “Would you mind if I came in and waited for him to come back?”
“You better believe I would. We gotta be in Schenectady by nine o’clock tonight. That’s a long way to drive even on decent roads. If we don’t leave in five minutes, we’ll never make it.”
I was running out of arguments to get inside. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to—except that I no longer trusted anyone.
Unfortunately, at that moment we were interrupted by Wally. “I need words with you, Louise.” He grabbed my arm from behind.
With a shudder, I swiveled on him. “Miss Faulk, if you don’t mind.”
“It don’t matter what you’re called. Ma says if you and your pretty roommate can’t behave yourselves, you’ll have to go.”
Behave ourselves! “What have we done?”
“We didn’t have no murders here before.”
Callie and I were somehow bringing down the respectability of the building? That was a laugh. Max had a criminal record, and the Bleecker Blowers had thrown a party the month before that had nearly shaken the bricks from the building. That had been Ethel’s first weekend, and she’d sworn she’d seen two people so drunk that they had to be rolled out of the building like logs. I wasn’t going to start tittle-tattling about my neighbors to odious Wally, but neither did I want to be booted out for the offense of having a visitor murdered in our apartment. As if being murdered was a crime.
My irritation boiled over, especially when
the Bleecker Blower pulled his sax cases out into the hallway and locked the apartment behind him. For all I knew, there was vital evidence being hauled away inside those cases. The bass sax alone was big enough to stuff a corpse into, never mind a few bloodied garments and a wad of cash. Wally and I had to flatten ourselves against the wall to avoid being squished by the monstrous thing.
“Neither Callie nor I killed anyone,” I reminded him.
“Ma says it’s the kinds you attract,” said Wally.
I had a sneaking suspicion that “Ma” was more interested in getting rid of us and finding a tenant who would pay more. We’d bargained her down when we moved in by promising to stay a year, paint the walls ourselves, and pay by the month.
“I refuse to discuss this with you out here on the landing,” I said.
His glistening lips pulled back into a smile. “Then how ’bout we go somewhere more private? Like my office.”
Not a chance. Wally’s “office” was a dank room in the basement. Reversing my original intention, I planted my feet firmly and attempted a Mary Pickford–like helplessness. “You wouldn’t put two girls out on the street just after they’ve been traumatized, would you?” He seemed unmoved. Who could blame him? I wasn’t very convincing as a helpless damsel. I added quickly, “Callie was so struck by how you handled yourself this morning.”
When you attacked the wrong person, I thought, bristling.
“Callie said that?” That look came over him, and he preened a little, which manifested itself in a sort of grotesque twitching.
“She certainly did.” Forgive me, Callie. “You wouldn’t want to put her out on the street, would you?”
“Nah, I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “Don’t be sore at me—I’m on your side. I’ll talk to Ma. You tell Callie she’s got nothing to worry about.”
The underlying message came through loud and clear: Without my roommate, my fanny would be booted out on the sidewalk.
“I’m just glad the guy’s been caught,” he added.
I should have kept my lip buttoned, but there was only so much of this fool I could stomach. “He wasn’t the murderer.”
His face scrunched like a clenched fist. “Like hell he wasn’t. I caught him red-handed—the guy I saw on the stairs last night.”
“That wasn’t him, and he didn’t kill Ethel.”
“Who says?”
“The man himself. Otto.”
He snorted. “Like you can believe a guy who’d butcher a woman like that.”
“But he didn’t. He has an alibi.”
“A what?”
“He can prove he couldn’t have done it,” I translated.
“That must be some fancy proof, when I saw him with my own two eyes. I notice a lot that happens in this building.”
“I’ll bet.”
He twitched again as if I’d complimented him, and combed a hand with aw-shucks modesty through hair so greasy with pomade that it looked as if his dandruff was swimming in gravy. “Have to keep my eyes open. You know. Look after things.”
Looking was his hobby. Callie and I knew he was fond of looking up skirts as we went up the stairs . . . and it was only slight consolation that he was half blind. Had this predilection of his extended to watching Ethel, as well? Much as I loathed the man, I couldn’t overlook anything he knew that might be useful.
“Callie and I work such long hours, you probably saw Ethel more than we did,” I said.
His lips pulled down. “Not really. She was a quiet one, that one was. Sort of . . . what do you call it?”
“Aloof?”
“Nah—it was more that she was kind of standoffish.”
I nodded. “That’s just what I would say.”
“Maybe she was snooty, or shy, or maybe she didn’t like men all that much. Well, I could tell she didn’t by the way she’d scurry past me, barely saying hello. Which was a damn shame. She was a fine-looking woman when she dolled herself up.”
I had to repeat the words slowly to convince myself I’d heard correctly. “Dolled herself up?”
“Sure. Course, she was too old to be a knockout. Nothing she could do about that. But put a pretty dress on those skinny old bones and she wasn’t too hard on the blinkers.”
His eyes were worse than I thought. Ethel didn’t own a dress that anyone with functioning eyesight would have described as pretty. I even doubted the kindness of donating her wardrobe to charity. Cutting the clothes into squares for pot scrubbers seemed the best option.
“Call me crazy,” Wally went on, “but that lady had ankles almost as nice as her cousin’s.”
Not only was he half blind, he was cracked in the head. “Ethel wore sturdy brown boots.”
He crossed his arms. “Not all the time. She had a pair of slipper-shoes—blue satin with white ribbon ties. The kind of shoe a girl wears when she wants to be noticed.”
I resisted the urge to tap the side of my head to try to adjust my hearing. He sounded like Wanamaker’s advertising copy. Not to mention, the idea of Ethel swanning around Manhattan in fancy, gaze-attracting togs was ludicrous. “You must have mistaken Ethel for Callie.” Why not? He’d mistaken Otto for someone else.
He wasn’t budging on this point, though. “No mistake.”
“Ethel didn’t own anything like that,” I argued. “Callie does, but—”
My jaw snapped shut. The floor seemed to tilt beneath me, and I pressed a hand against the wall. I remembered Callie’s puzzling insistence that I’d been responsible for an ink stain on her shirtwaist. Perhaps last night wasn’t the first time Ethel had worn something of Callie’s. Probably Ethel had never intended to sleep in that nightgown, but was going to change back into one of her ugly flannel ones before Callie and I returned home. But she never got that opportunity.
What else could Wally tell me?
“Did Ethel ever mention where she was going when you saw her dressed up?”
He shook his head. “Like I said, she was a real hands-off type, that one.”
I looked down at his sausage-fingered hands with their dirty, ragged nails and suppressed a shudder. With some men, a hands-off policy was essential.
Outside, an automobile horn honked loudly several times. The angry goose blasts startled me, and within seconds the door to our apartment upstairs banged open and the tangerine Lochinvar galloped down the stairs. “Bill’ll kill me!” He streaked past in an orange blur.
I’d forgotten he was upstairs. What had he been talking to Callie about all this time?
“Thank you for speaking with me,” I told Wally. “You’ve been very helpful.”
He laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“You sound like one of those fellows from last night—those police detectives.”
“Do I?” Now it was my turn to preen. Except that I probably shouldn’t want to sound like Muldoon and company. They had badges. I needed to be more discreet.
Back upstairs, Callie was pacing across our already threadbare carpet, agitated. Heaven knows a murder was enough to make anyone edgy, but there seemed to be something else that caused her to jump as I came through the door. “Where have you been?” she asked. “We had a visitor. One of the saxophone players. I can never keep their names straight.”
“Me neither.”
“He came in here and practically held my hand as he told me how sorry he was about Ethel, and promised that if any of them had heard her being murdered, they would have stopped it. How is anyone’s guess.”
“One of them almost crushed me with a bass saxophone case. That might have worked.”
“They didn’t hear anything, which is too bad. But get this—he told me that Ethel had asked him for directions once.”
I crossed my arms. He hadn’t told me that. “Where?”
“That’s the odd part—and that’s why he said he remembered it so clearly. Ethel wanted to know how to go to 115th Street and Lenox Avenue. Does that sound right to you? Why would Ethel want to venture all the way up t
here?”
Interesting. “I think Ethel had more going on than we knew. Wally told me she dressed in your clothes sometimes when she went out.”
“My clothes?” Callie said.
“Well, he said she wore pretty dresses sometimes, and he described a pair of shoes just like your blue ones.”
Her mouth dropped open. “My blue slippers? Those cost me sixteen dollars!”
I lifted my hands and then dropped them. “He swore he saw her wearing them.” I told her my theory about Ethel’s having worn the stained shirtwaist.
She crossed her arms. “Very handy for you to have found a scapegoat for your wardrobe destruction.”
“I know I’ve borrowed your things before and have been careless, but Ethel really seems to have had some secret fetish for dressing up in your clothes.”
“Poor Ethel. I’d have loaned her anything if she’d asked.”
“Maybe it was the secrecy she enjoyed.” I picked up my satchel and checked the mirror to see that I was street ready.
“Where are you going?” Callie asked.
“To Lenox Avenue and 115th Street.” Not that I was completely sure where that was. Up, was all I knew. “I need to find out what Ethel was interested in up there.”
Callie hopped up. “I’ll go with you.”
Two pairs of eyes would be better than one, and I was glad for the company. But sometime between when I crossed to the hall tree and when I turned, pinning on my hat, the color drained from Callie’s face. “Oh, Louise. If Ethel was wearing my clothes often . . . like she was last night . . . isn’t that more evidence that the murderer might have mistaken her for me?”
I went to her and held her by the forearms. She seemed to be in need of bracing. “Or it might mean the opposite. That more people here had contact with her than we realized. In fact, it seems likelier now that Ethel was involved with something that drew her killer here.”
Callie nodded and prepared herself to leave. Looking into her tiny purse, she sucked in a breath. “Oh—I almost forgot.” She brought out a key and held it up.