by Liz Freeland
“I think I’m finally getting the hang of this thing,” he said, referring to his coffeemaker. “I was completely flummoxed until Callie showed me how to work it.”
I peered around me, wondering what my roommate had made of this place. The apartment faced Union Square, and the noise and dust from Fourteenth Street came right in through the high transom-topped windows. He had no curtains or shades, either, so the glass had the effect of a greenhouse. I felt hot enough to start sprouting.
A few minutes later Otto presented me with a mug of coffee, which, now that I was holding it, I realized was the last thing I really wanted. Yet he seemed so happy playing host, I couldn’t disappoint him. Though steam plumed in warning from the black brew, I took a tentative sip. The liquid was inky, boiling acid.
“Is it strong enough?”
“Delicious,” I rasped.
He produced a china sugar bowl whose red-and-white old-fashioned pattern made me do a double take. The busy pastoral scene of a castle and a footbridge in the foreground looked just like something out of Otto’s mother’s kitchen.
“I saw it in a secondhand store and couldn’t resist,” he explained. “I guess I get a little homesick sometimes.”
“We all do.”
“Not you, I bet. You never did like Altoona all that much, or living at your aunt Sonja’s.”
“Oh, I’ve discovered myself missing things I never dreamed I’d ever give a second thought. One day I found myself with tears in my eyes, and I realized it was because our office boy at work was crunching on a huge dill pickle. Remember Mr. Meerfeld’s All-Day Nickel Pickles?”
“ ‘The Best Dill in Town!’”
The slogan had been on a sign outside Meerfeld’s, five doors down from Uncle Luddie’s fish shop. It wasn’t easy to tempt me to forego stick candy and lemon drops, but those gigantic garlicky pickles were worth saving pennies for.
When I looked up from my cup, Otto’s face had gone deadly serious. “I’m glad to finally talk to you alone, Louise. I was so worried about you. One minute you were there, and the next you weren’t. I know you hadn’t seemed happy for a while before you left, but you never said why.”
I swallowed. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Every time I tried to talk to your uncles or your aunt about you, it was like you’d died. What happened?”
I forced myself to choke down more coffee. “Aunt Sonja and I had a disagreement. You know how she is—life is work, dreams are frivolous, content yourself with listening to Puccini while you scrub the floors. I had to leave.”
His brow puckered. “Sure, but . . .”
“What good does it do to look back?” I asked. “Especially now. Aunt Sonja said it best—‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ ”
“So you ran away from her, but you’re trying to be like her now?”
I crossed my arms. He was more right than I wanted to admit—but maybe sharing the same genes as my aunt was my salvation. I’d become almost as expert as she was in stifling the urge to look back, to dream too big, to regret.
“Well, if you don’t want to talk about yourself,” Otto said, “what about Callie? Something’s been worrying me.”
His face was so deadly serious. He hadn’t looked this grim even when he was in jail, or at Ethel’s funeral. Had Callie confided something to him? “What is it?” I braced myself.
He gulped in a deep breath and blurted, “I think I’m in love with her.”
Before I could school my reaction, a nervous laugh escaped me. Love? Part of me wanted to sag with relief and say, Is that all?
“I knew you’d be surprised,” he said. “So am I. My whole life’s topsy-turvy now. Everything that was fixed in my mind—you and me—has been shattered. You must feel it, too.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “We were never fixed in my mind.”
He nodded. “I can see that now—all those refusals you gave me, and leaving town without warning . . .”
“We’ve always been friends,” I said. “That’s what’s important.”
He blew out a long breath and sank into the chair next to mine. “I’m so relieved to hear you say that. And I hope this won’t affect your and Callie’s friendship.”
“I don’t see why it would, but—”
“It’s good you’re not the jealous type.”
“Is there anything to be jealous of?” Before he could answer, I added, “You’ve only known Callie a week, and this hasn’t exactly been a normal week for any of us.”
“I knew from the moment I saw her, though. She’s the most perfect girl I’ve ever met. More perfect even than you.”
“You need to stop romanticizing people, Otto. Everyone has faults. Even Callie.”
He crossed his arms. “All right, Miss Wet Blanket, name one.”
“Well . . .” I hated to disillusion him, but what were friends for? “She’s fickle. I’ve known her six months, and she’s been in love twice in that time.”
“Oh, I know all about that. At least, I know about one of them. Sawyer Attinger.” His expression hardened. “I’d like to knock his block off.”
If Callie had told Otto all about Sawyer, maybe they knew each other better than I’d assumed. I looked around me. “What did Callie think of your apartment?”
His glance cut away from me, staring at a dust patch on the floor illuminated by sunlight. “She liked it well enough, I guess, but she didn’t stay long. I think she was distracted by the funeral and all. I wanted her to visit awhile, but she couldn’t.” He released his breath in a rueful laugh. “I even asked if she wanted to play cards. She bolted like a rabbit.”
Otto and I had been card fiends since our teens. I nudged his leg with the toe of my shoe. “A little bird might have told her what a card sharper you are.”
“Ha! Look who’s talking. I’ve never seen a person just so happen to drop cards under a table so regularly in my life.”
“I’m a butterfingers.”
“There are better words for it than that.”
I laughed. “Okay, here’s your chance to get even. Where are your cards?”
His face brightened. “You really want to play? Now?”
I looked out the windows. It wasn’t even four o’clock yet. Plenty of time. “Why not?” I suddenly had a craving for the competitive nonsense Otto and I used to engage in during our stolen hours of free time. I’d missed my friend. “It’ll be nice to think about something besides murder for a change.”
“I’m starving, though,” he said. “Would you like a sandwich?”
I swiped a dubious glance toward his sad excuse for a kitchen. There was no icebox, and I spied nothing on the single shelf but two tins of sardines, condensed milk, a can of tomato soup, and soda crackers.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll just run downstairs to the delicatessen and buy us something. How about pastrami on rye? I’ll even spring for a pickle.”
He seemed so giddy at the prospect of playing Mrs. Astor, I couldn’t have refused even if my stomach hadn’t been gnawing with hunger, which it was. “I wouldn’t say no.”
He was out the door like a shot. I stood and idly circled the room once, admiring the busts of famous composers obviously left behind by the previous occupant, and also the way Otto had tacked up sheet music to cover holes in the plaster. Deciding I could make better use of my time, I set the table with the paltry utensils and plates I scrounged up in the kitchen and then started hunting for the cards. The main room was so sparsely furnished it echoed, so I peeked into the bedroom.
It was actually little more than a large, long closet, and looked about as spacious and comfortable as a Pullman berth. I sidled along the length of the narrow bed to reach the dresser, which abutted the footboard. The dresser had five drawers—three large ones and two half-size ones side by side at the top. The top drawer on the left contained socks, so I tugged on the rusted shell drawer pull on the right. The contents there were much more promising. At a glance, the drawer held
scissors, a rolled-up belt, and a glass ashtray containing eighteen cents in change. I pulled it open farther to reveal a few family photographs, a small ball of string, a knife, the sought-for deck of cards, and a pair of women’s gloves stained with blood.
Sharp on the heels of my mind’s registering that last item came an intense longing never to have seen it. In fact, I wished I’d never have opened the drawer at all. If only I could have reversed time, I would have waited patiently for Otto with my now-tepid but still undrinkable coffee. Instead, I stood there, transfixed, unable to breathe. All my mental effort focused on trying to make sense of those bloodstained gloves—surely the ones I had seen by Ethel’s bed the night of the murder. What were they doing in Otto’s drawer?
Blood pounded in my ears. I refused to believe the explanation that leapt to mind first. Otto is not a killer. How many times had I repeated those very words to Muldoon? I couldn’t be wrong. I knew Otto as well as I knew anyone. Didn’t I?
Slowly, I backed away until a body behind me stopped me. I cried out.
Otto grabbed me by the shoulders and whirled me around. “What’s the matter?” When I failed to find my voice, his gaze traveled to where I’d been standing and the opened drawer. His face tensed. “What did you see?”
“Enough.” A wave of sickness hit me. And fear. Not just for myself, but for Otto, as well. “Why did you lie?” Unable to contain my emotion, I thumped my fist on his chest. “I stood up for you. I swore up and down to Detective Muldoon that you had nothing to do with the murder.”
His hands dropped away from me. Across his features—his familiar, dear, bug-eyed face—understanding dawned. “But I didn’t have anything to do with it!” An incredulous sound barked out of him. “You know me, Louise.”
That was the trouble with murder. One life was taken, and a dozen others were damaged in the aftershocks. Doubts about everyone rumbled into my thoughts. A week ago I would have sworn I trusted Callie more than anyone else in the world, but now I sometimes wondered if I knew her at all. None of us seemed completely innocent anymore, or completely clean.
“Why are those gloves in your drawer?” I asked. “Are you saying you didn’t put them there?”
“Of course I did. Callie gave them to me.”
So the two of them were colluding now. Tears filled my eyes.
Seeing my distress, Otto took hold of my arm. “Come on. Let me explain. I’ll make you some more coffee.”
“No, don’t,” I said quickly.
A blond brow arched. “Afraid I’ll poison you?”
In spite of my confusion, or maybe because of it, I smiled. “Maybe not intentionally.”
We returned to the gateleg table—there was really nowhere else to go unless we wanted to sit on the bed or at the piano. The chair I sank into had one leg that was too short. I wobbled back and forth, tapping out a Morse code of frayed nerves.
Still standing, Otto said, “It’s nothing like what you’re thinking. Honest. Callie just brought the gloves and asked me to keep them for her. That’s all there was to it.”
“Why did she have them?”
“She found them the night of the murder and grabbed them before the police came.”
Yes, that’s when I last saw them—before the first policemen had arrived. She probably picked them up when I ran to call for help. “She must have been out of her mind! Those gloves are evidence.”
He shook his head. “She thought they’d make her look guilty.”
I remembered Callie’s plaintive question to me that first night when we were up in Lucia’s. You don’t think I did it, do you? It had seemed so absurd. I’d seen the gloves lying next to the bed, but it had never occurred to me that they might tie Callie to the murder.
“Now she looks guilty for hiding them,” I said.
“That’s what I told her when she brought them here. But by then it was too late. She’d been hanging on to them for days.”
“There was no way the police would have thought she committed the murder,” I said. “Why would they? She was the one who discovered the body.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Otto said.
No, I supposed it didn’t. “But I could vouch for her. I was with her.”
“The entire night?”
I remembered that Callie had been late to Aunt Irene’s party, and a chill went through me. But that was ridiculous. The coroner might have done a slapdash job, but surely he would have known if Ethel had been dead several hours before the police arrived on the scene. In fact, Detective Muldoon had mentioned something about...
I dug through my memory for the term I was looking for. “Rigor mortis!” I cried, in the way a miner might shout “Eureka!” on discovering the big strike.
“What?”
“Detective Muldoon told me Ethel couldn’t have been dead too long, because the body hadn’t reached the stage of rigor mortis, when it goes stiff.”
He frowned.
“So Callie couldn’t be guilty,” I explained. “If she’d killed Ethel before arriving at Aunt Irene’s, the body would have been stiff. But it wasn’t, so there’s no way anyone could think she did it.”
“She said she was worried that the police might think the two of you were in on it together.”
Provided with a little evidence, the police might have imagined some scenario of two roommates killing an inconvenient guest. And what a heyday the press would have with that idea. I could just see the headlines. MURDEROUS ROOMMATES RUN AMOK!
“But we’d been at my aunt’s,” I said.
Otto proved himself an able devil’s advocate. “You might’ve fudged the time when you left.”
“But what about Sawyer?” I asked. “He met us coming home.”
“She worried the police wouldn’t believe him.” He blew out a breath of exasperation. “Besides, he’s no help. She showed him the gloves.”
I choked, took another sip of coffee, and then choked some more. “Why?”
“She wanted his guarantee that he would stand up for her if anything went wrong, and also to assure him that she wasn’t going to tell the police she’d seen him that night. I told her I thought it was crazy, but she’d already spoken to him by then.”
His account squared with what Callie had told me about her meeting with Sawyer over the weekend. She hadn’t told me about the gloves, though. “What did Sawyer say?”
“He told her to destroy the gloves and to keep him out of it.”
“But by meeting with her, he’d become involved. The police found out about Sawyer through Callie. They followed her to their rendezvous.”
Otto’s eyes bulged. “Do you think they followed her here?”
“I doubt it. Muldoon told me on Monday that they weren’t following her anymore.”
“He would say that, wouldn’t he?”
True, if he wanted us to let our guards down. And yet I’d believed him. I still did. “I think it had more to do with having Max in custody. There are only so many resources they want to waste on an old spinster’s murder, after all.”
My words did little to soothe Otto. Judging from his stiff posture, he expected the men in blue to bust down his door any second now. I hated to see him dragged into this more than he already had been.
I stood. “Give me the gloves.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes no sense for you to have them. If the police ever do search this place, their finding the gloves here would simply drag you under suspicion again.”
He chewed over my words. “We should destroy them. That’s what I told Callie the moment I saw them.”
It’s what Sawyer wanted, too. Which convinced me they needed to be safeguarded. “They’re evidence.”
“Callie was hesitant to destroy them, too. But at the same time she was afraid the police would jump to the wrong conclusions if they got their hands on them.”
At least Callie and I were on the same page, even if she was afraid to tell me what she’d done. The gloves were e
vidence.
But of what? Something about them bothered me. I frowned, trying to think. Callie’s gloves . . . I pictured them again on the floor by the bed. They were soft leather, reaching just beyond the wrist.
“If you take the gloves, what will you do with them?” Otto asked.
“Hide them with someone who’s not in danger of becoming a suspect in Ethel’s murder.”
“Who?”
“Aunt Irene.” No chance of the police suspecting her. An entire houseful of guests were witnesses to the fact that she’d been at home all of Thursday night.
Given how afraid he was that the police would raid his house, I assumed Otto would hop at the chance to have the gloves taken off his hands, so to speak. I assumed wrong.
“I told Callie I would hold the gloves for her,” he insisted. “I promised.”
Callie had not mistaken her Galahad.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll explain it all to her.”
“A promise is a promise.”
“I’ll sort this out,” I assured him. “But for now, I’d feel better if you didn’t have the things here. They’ll be safer at Aunt Irene’s. Callie will understand that. This evidence could send you to the electric chair, Otto.”
He remained stubbornly silent. I nodded at his hands. They were delicate, small—not only for a butcher’s assistant, but also for a piano player. When he played, they moved fast, hopping across the ivories “like fleas on the keys,” he’d joked once. “Not many men could wear those gloves,” I pointed out to him. “But they would fit you.”
He stared at his hands. Swallowed. Red flashed into his cheeks. Reluctantly, he stood, retrieved the gloves, and gave them to me. Dried blood had stiffened the butter-soft leather, so that taking them from him was like grabbing hold of desiccated flesh. It took all my composure to slip the gory relics into my satchel without gagging. I could see why Callie would be frightened witless by the things. It was impossible to forget how so much blood had gotten on them. Ethel had not been wearing them when she was found, and she certainly hadn’t been in any shape to sit down and remove her gloves after she’d been attacked with a knife. So unless the gloves just happened to be lying next to the bed and were soaked with blood accidentally, that meant the murderer had worn them.