by Liz Freeland
We made our way toward the stairs, but halfway across the lobby Callie tugged on my sleeve and motioned me toward an anemic potted palm. “We shouldn’t pounce on them all at once,” she said.
“Pouncing wasn’t my intention.”
“Sometimes you lose your temper and pop off, Louise.”
“I’m just interested in hearing what they have to say for themselves.”
“Do you think we should send for Detective Muldoon?” she asked.
Muldoon had accused me of not keeping him informed, but how could I inform on people before I knew if they were culpable of anything? My latest attempts to find Ford at home had failed, and for two days I’d agonized over not telling Muldoon what I knew about him. But if Callie’s and my suspicions about Abel and Ethel were correct, Ford had nothing whatsoever to do with Ethel’s murder. It just proved I shouldn’t rush to judgment of anyone.
“Contacting the police would be premature.” Imagining Muldoon’s disapproving scowl, I continued. “We don’t know for sure if Dora and Abel have done anything.”
“True. After all, how could they have come here and killed Ethel without our knowing?”
I frowned. “The same way they came to the funeral. By train.” I glanced at her. “Of course, you telephoned them early the next morning and spoke to them.”
“Just to Dora. Abel might have been in Little Falls, or he might not have. Dora didn’t say.”
This was why we needed to speak to them. With so little information, it was easy to assume the worst. Our new theory would explain a lot, though. Such as why he and Dora were so emotionless during the entire ordeal. And why, after hearing about Ethel’s death, they’d never even bothered to come to New York until last night.
“Abel just doesn’t look like a murderer to me.” Although it dawned on me that no one I knew looked like a murderer. Either I was too trusting or killers were hard to spot.
“He doesn’t look like anybody’s dreamboat, either, but we both think he and Ethel were having an affair,” Callie said.
It was still so hard to believe. Yet Ethel and Abel had lived in the same house, under Dora’s boot. It wasn’t inconceivable that a sympathy would spring up between them and develop into something deeper—or that the discovery of the affair would result in Ethel’s exile.
We started up the stairs. “We need to act as if nothing is wrong so they’ll let their guards down,” she said in a low voice. “Then we can ferret out how much they knew about Ethel’s condition.”
How did one rationally ask another person if they’d committed murder? I hadn’t gotten the trick of that yet. Nevertheless, I agreed with her.
“We need to use finesse.”
“Finesse,” she repeated. “Exactly.”
We made it to the fourth floor and I followed her down the hallway to room 411. She rapped on the door and stepped back, hands at her sides, waiting.
When Dora opened the door, her face registered surprise. I was just about to speak when Callie bellowed, “MURDERER!”
Dora immediately moved to shut the door. I shot my hand out to stop it, and Callie bulled her way in. All I could do at that point was bolt after her, feeling as if I’d grabbed a tigress by the tail. What had happened to finesse?
“How could you?” Callie demanded when we were all inside.
Abel, standing in the center of the room in his shirtsleeves, suspenders drooping around his hips, turned the same drab hue of green as the room’s color scheme. He couldn’t have looked any guiltier if he’d blabbed out a full confession.
Callie pivoted back to me. “I told you we should have brought the police. Send for them now.”
“No!” Dora threw herself against the closed door, almost making an X of her body. “You’d just be wasting their time. No one could convict Abel of anything.”
“Killing someone isn’t murder?”
Dora’s eyes bugged. “Have you taken leave of your senses? He didn’t kill Ethel!” She threw back her head in contempt. “Abel? He won’t even wring the neck of a chicken.”
“Louise and I just came from Dr. Alberink’s office,” Callie said. “We know all about what happened there.”
Up to that moment, we hadn’t known anything for a certainty, but after seeing the look of Dora’s hard, implacable expression, we did. “Ethel got herself in a mess. What else could be done?”
She spoke as if Ethel had impregnated herself.
“You could have raised it,” Callie said.
“And told our neighbors what, exactly?” Dora shook her head. “I wasn’t going to let Ethel cast her shame over my whole life. She had no right to have that child.”
I shook my head. “So you took her to a dipsomaniac butcher? How did Ethel even find Dr. Alberink?”
“I found him,” Abel confessed, red-faced. “Man I met in Utica gave me his name. Said he was okay.”
Callie scowled. “Okay if you didn’t care whether the person he operated on lived or died, which you obviously didn’t.”
“Don’t you talk to my husband that way,” Dora said. “It was me that took her there. You remember my visit. You saw it all and you didn’t say a word that I recall.”
She spoke accusingly, as if we had been a party to the whole episode. “We didn’t know what you’d done, or why you left Ethel with us,” I said. “We assumed you’d had a quarrel.”
“Of course we did. I never wanted to speak to her again—and I never did. She threw herself at Abel just like a Jezebel. I hate to say it of my own sister, but that’s what she was. And after I’d let her live in my home all those years. Imagine how betrayed I felt.” Although Dora’s blazing fury commanded our attention, it was hard to ignore the elephant in the room, which was Abel. He stood there, silent and ashamed. I had a hard time imagining how this unassuming man had become the center of a domestic hurricane.
I almost blurted out, And what if Ethel had died? But of course that was ridiculous. Ethel had died, but it wasn’t Dr. Alberink’s illegal work that had done it. “Neither of you heard from Ethel after Dora went back to Little Falls?”
Abel shook his head. “I swore to Dora I’d never so much as look at Ethel again, and I’ve kept that promise.”
Dora glared at him. “If you’d stayed true to your vows to begin with, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Callie was indignant. “Would you stop calling it a mess? Your sister is dead.”
“That’s not my fault.” Dora’s chin jutted forward. “I gave her a good home. Our parents raised us to be decent women, but Ethel resented my happiness. She always was prone to envy, even when we were girls. I couldn’t keep her out of my hair ribbons until I put poison oak in my ribbon box. You should’ve seen the state of her hands the next day! That cured her.”
I never expected my heart to be so filled with sympathy for Ethel, but at that moment I could have gladly strangled Dora. I turned to Callie, but she had sunk down on the bed and now sat there, tears in her eyes. “I misjudged her,” she said.
“No more than I did,” Dora said, but I didn’t think she meant it in the same way as Callie. “I should have known, though—‘The evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil.’”
I couldn’t take any more. “You talk about evil? You hated your own sister. Did you hate her enough to kill her?”
Indignation snapped in Dora’s eyes. “I told you—neither of us ever saw Ethel again. It was her own doing that got her killed, I’ve no doubt. Once a woman loses her character, there’s no telling what she’ll get up to.”
“It didn’t happen like that.” Not that I knew how it had happened.
Dora leveled a disdainful glare at me. “Then you’ll have to look to your own lives for the answer. Abel and I weren’t involved. We told that detective who was at the funeral all about where we were the night of the murder. We were at a church supper in Little Falls. About fifty witnesses saw us there. So don’t go blaming us for what happened to Ethel. This town’s probably full of murderers and heave
n only knows what-all.”
“There’s plenty of what-all in small towns, too,” I said.
Dora’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You know nothing about us.”
Callie stood. “I’ve heard enough. Louise and I are leaving now.” I could see what an effort it was for her to maintain her composure. She kept her head high, but she didn’t seem quite able to look either of them in the eye. “Have a safe journey back to Little Falls.”
I was as glad to get out of that hotel room as a traveler would be to flee a city of contagion. Yet the encounter left me unsatisfied. Could we trust what they’d said? If they’d told Muldoon they had an alibi for the night of the murder, they probably had one. That would be easy enough for the police to check. But Muldoon had suggested to me once that Sawyer conceivably could have hired a professional killer. Couldn’t Dora and Abel have done the same?
I kicked the idea around for a block or two, but it seemed too unlikely. Yet, so was the thought of Dora, Abel, and Ethel being involved in a sordid love triangle. If Abel could manage to drum up the name of an abortionist, he was more resourceful in the ways of lawbreaking than his Honest Abe appearance had led me to believe.
Callie was so shaken that we barely spoke all the way home. What we’d just learned wasn’t the kind of subject you could talk about openly on public transportation. At one point she did say, “I guess this solves the mystery of Madame Serena.”
The jolt I felt had nothing to do with the lurching brake of the conductor pulling into Twenty-third Street. “What?”
“Don’t you remember? She mentioned a crying baby. You seemed bothered enough at the time. I assumed it was still worrying you.”
“Oh . . . yes. I suppose that’s true.”
She sighed, already thinking of something else. “I was going to ask Dora and Abel to pay for the funeral, or at least help. Not now. I’ll hock everything I own and pay installments till I’m gray rather than ask them for a penny.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Thanks.” She crossed her arms. “Our generosity’s a little late, isn’t it? If only Ethel had told us!”
If only.
At home, we both dropped onto the sofa. I felt like dough that had been squeezed through Aunt Sonja’s noodle press, and Callie groaned with exhaustion. She looked profoundly sad. Of course she would. These were people she had known all her life.
“We should tell Muldoon about this,” I said.
“What good would that do?” Callie asked. “Apart from soiling Ethel’s memory a little more.”
It would soil Dora and Abel, who deserved it. Yet I couldn’t quite bring myself to advocate dragging Callie’s family through the mud just to appease my righteous indignation. The goal was to find who’d killed Ethel, and to make sure the wrong man didn’t pay the penalty for that crime.
“Do you still think they were involved in Ethel’s murder?” she asked.
I made myself look at the matter logically. The hows and whys didn’t add up. “Dora confessed that they were involved in getting rid of the baby, and that happened weeks before the murder. Why would either of them kill Ethel after she was no longer carrying a child? She did what they wanted.”
“What Dora wanted,” Callie said. “To clean up ‘the mess.’”
I sank farther down into the lumpy cushions. My heart itched to convict them, and I could tell Callie’s did, too. At least Dora.
“I feel almost sorry for Abel. Why is that?” I wondered aloud.
“Because he has to live with Dora.” She shook her head. “A girl who’d poison her own hair ribbons to punish her sister’s petty theft probably knows how to make her husband plenty uncomfortable for cheating on her with that same sister.”
“Forgiveness doesn’t seem to be in her nature.”
“It’s awful to think so bad of your own family, isn’t it?” Callie asked. “I grew up around those two. Now I wouldn’t weep to see them behind bars.”
“Dora was in Little Falls the very next morning,” I reminded her. “Given the logistics, it’s unlikely she killed Ethel.”
“It’s an age of wonders. Late trains and automobiles . . .”
“But she practically dragged Ethel uptown to get rid of the baby and then banished her from her own hometown and family. Why kill her?”
“Maybe she decided no punishment was bad enough.”
“It would have been taking a big chance, with no benefit. Abel was and is under her thumb, and the mess had been dealt with.” I couldn’t believe that I was standing up for Dora. But I wasn’t, really. I was advocating for the truth.
Callie continued to brood as I fixed a pot of tea for us.
“It was nice of Otto to show up at the funeral,” I said, trying to make her think of something else.
Her mouth tilted up in the hint of a smile. “I’m not sure he would have if he’d known Muldoon would be there.”
“No, probably not.”
“Not that he has anything to hide,” Callie added quickly.
I cut a glance at her. “He seems very fond of you.”
“Oh!” She rolled her eyes. “He’s a good person. I think he’s one of those young men who feels a natural sympathy toward a woman in distress. A knight on a white charger.”
“Do you need a white knight?” I asked.
“Everyone does, sometimes.” When she caught me eyeing her, she added, “Well, don’t they?”
“Otto’s not like your usual beaus,” I said.
“He’s not a beau, he’s just being nice. And in return, I showed him a few secondhand stores in his neighborhood. Is that a crime?”
“Of course not.”
She sat up straighter. “You act like I’m a corrupting influence because I’ve paid him a little attention. Meanwhile you’ve been ignoring the poor fellow since he got here.”
Everything she said was true. It had been a strange week, and now I didn’t seem able to stop suspecting everyone around me. “I’m sorry if I insinuated—”
She collapsed again. “Oh, don’t mind my temper, Lou. I’m all keyed up and bushed at the same time. Otto’s grand, but you’re my best pal.”
We sat in silence a moment, until music filled the air. Not saxophones. The opera teacher next door, Mr. Weiss, was singing a duet with a student. I knew the song from one of Aunt Sonja’s records, but my neighbor’s rendition made it sound even more stirring, as if the mournful notes were drifting through the window directly into my bones.
“What is this?” Callie asked.
“The Pearl Fishers,” I said. “Bizet.”
“It’s beautiful.” She hummed a few bars of chorus, but I could tell she was still distracted. I should have tried to figure out why.
My own thoughts were going over everything we’d just said. Did I think Callie was a corrupting influence on Otto? I was sure she didn’t mean to be, but she was so different from other women he’d encountered. He was susceptible, and she couldn’t have missed the signs that he was smitten with her.
And in return, I showed him a few secondhand stores. In return for what? For helping with the funeral . . . or something else?
The baritone and tenor didn’t skimp on the duet’s finale, and the last rousing notes raised gooseflesh on my arms.
“I wonder what that song was about,” Callie said.
I remembered Aunt Sonja’s battered copy of Stories from the Opera, which sat on a shelf between the Bible and the dictionary. “It’s a song sung by two friends. It’s about friendship.”
She stretched and sighed, as if still savoring those last notes. “I don’t ever want to live anywhere else, do you?”
I wasn’t sure if she meant New York City, or Greenwich Village, or this apartment, but I shook my head, agreeing. No matter the horror that had happened, I felt that same willful contentment I’d had since I’d stepped off the train at the Pennsylvania Station on a frigid January morning. I was where I wanted to be. And no matter their faults, my circle of friends here made me happy. I was in
a city I loved, with my people.
That night as I was nodding off, however, I wondered if I’d been right about that duet from The Pearl Fishers. Was it really a song about friendship . . . or about one friend deceiving the other?
* * *
“Oh, it’s you.”
It wasn’t quite the reception I’d expected when I’d decided to pay my impromptu visit to Otto’s apartment. I’d left work early again, hoping to swing by Ford’s to have that conversation about the envelope. It was long past time I told Muldoon about it. But after my conversation with Callie last night, I was also curious to see Otto’s new flat, and to talk to him.
He glanced expectantly over my shoulder.
“Just me,” I confirmed.
His disappointment gave way to eagerness to show off his new place. The apartment, he told me, had been used for years as a music teacher’s studio, which explained the grand piano taking up half the main room.
“Mr. Kesdekian, the old music teacher, left it here because he couldn’t afford to move it. Isn’t that sad?”
“Lucky for you, though,” I said, edging around the behemoth.
“Oh sure. I don’t even have to worry about playing it at night. The hardware store downstairs closes at eight, and there’s only an accountant’s office on this floor and an old deaf man up above me. Isn’t that great?”
“Maybe you can find some high stools and make it double as your dining table.”
“No need.” Otto practically danced over to the corner, where a wobbly gateleg table in desperate need of refinishing stood next to two chairs, one with a frayed cane back and the other with the words Marvin is a dunce carved into the backrest. “I found these after I came back from the funeral yesterday. The chairs were a steal.”
“Unless you actually did steal them, you might have paid too much.”
He laughed and pulled one of the chairs out for me with the formality of a maître d’. “Have a seat, madam. I’ll make us some coffee.”
After I sat, he bustled over to the corner of the room where the makeshift kitchen was only half hidden behind a striped wool blanket serving as a curtain. He filled his percolator’s pot with water from the tap, then began manipulating the one-burner contraption that was the stove. At times like these it seemed a miracle that the whole city hadn’t burned down yet.