Murder in Greenwich Village

by Liz Freeland

  Now that Max was a fugitive, they probably assumed they’d been right all along about him. His running made him look guiltier than ever. And with Lucia vanishing, too, there would be no hope of contacting him.

  Frustration swamped me. “I was just going up to see her.”

  Wally’s squint narrowed. “Why?”

  “You say you’ve seen her?” Mrs. Grimes yelled. “When?”

  “I haven’t seen her,” I explained. “I was—”

  “Of course not,” Mrs. Grimes interrupted. “How could you? She’s run away—foreign baggage!”

  “I figured you and Callie wouldn’t clear out so soon after buying that new mattress, but Ma wanted to be sure.” Wally lowered his voice. “She thinks the Bleecker Blowers have ducked out, too. But they’ll be back. I made ’em leave a saxophone with me as security.”

  “Good riddance!” the old lady piped up. Impossible to tell who she was talking about. But it was clear from the way that her eyes bugged out that she didn’t like the way Wally was leaning toward me. In that, Mrs. Grimes and I were in accord. “C’mon, son! I told you to leave these girls alone. They’re bad.”

  Yes, listen to your mama. Leave us alone.

  I waited until they were gone, locked the door, and put the key under the mat. Then I went upstairs, just to see for myself. Sure enough, Lucia had stripped the beds but left everything else except clothes—Max’s included. The furniture was there, and Max’s canvases, too, both his modern pieces and a nude no doubt meant to hang in a Tenderloin bar. Now the latter was probably destined for Wally’s basement lair. I shuddered. At least this one didn’t have Callie’s face.

  Where was Callie? I needed to talk to her, but I didn’t have the patience to wait around the apartment.

  I left the building and walked toward Sixth Avenue. Out of curiosity, I went by the Jefferson Market Courthouse, where Max had been held. Standing on Sixth, in the shadow of the El rumbling by above me, I tried to make out where to enter. The courthouse’s red-brick edifice with its white stone rings, clock tower, and churchlike roof had always made it my favorite building in the neighborhood. I’d never expected to have to go there, though. Especially to the adjacent prison. Police precincts, prisons . . . what a week I was having.

  The place seemed awfully calm considering that a prisoner had escaped just hours ago. After pushing through a glass-paned door, I didn’t get far before I was stopped by the largest policeman I’d ever seen. The man was Taft sized—a wall of walrusy flesh covered in blue wool and brass buttons.

  “What’re you doing here, miss?” he asked.

  “I wanted to find out about the escaped man, Max Freeman.”

  “What about him?” He sized me up. Wrongly. “You a reporter?”

  “No, just a friend of the family.”

  “Then you have fewer friends now than you did a few hours ago. He and his family have all run off.”

  “He hasn’t been found, then?”

  “Would I be saying he ain’t here if he had? His escape’s a black eye on all of us.”

  It certainly was. The guard was apparently more effective at keeping people out than keeping prisoners in. “Is Detective Muldoon here, by any chance?”

  “Why? Are you a friend of his, too?”

  “I just wanted to talk to him.”

  “Listen, sister, if you’re a scribbler and I pick up a paper tomorrow and read that Sergeant Flynn said Freeman’s escape was a black eye on the department—”

  “I don’t work for a newspaper,” I interrupted. “I just wanted to talk to Muldoon, if he’s here.”

  “Well, he ain’t. It’s been a busy day. No telling where he is now. Try the precinct.”

  I nodded and left. I intended to try the precinct—sooner or later. First, I needed to have a powwow with my aunt.

  * * *

  “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like that young man,” Aunt Irene said after I’d told my tale of the afternoon. Maybe I should have held my tongue about Ford, but once I’d started talking I couldn’t help venting it all.

  “I didn’t realize what he was until today,” I said.

  One sweep of her hazel eyes, the only distinct feature we shared, showed she understood all I’d felt. “Don’t let it make you miserable, Louise. The world’s full of people who are boundlessly talented and utterly despicable. It almost makes me glad to be a mediocrity.”

  “You’re not,” I said, remembering how angry I’d been when Ford insulted her.

  Her dismissive wave sent the fringe on her sleeve fluttering. “I’m no Tolstoy and we both know it. For that matter, I believe readers have grown a little weary of my plant-based heroines. Or maybe it’s I who has wearied of them. Althea might be my last.”

  “What would you do instead?”

  She stroked Trollope absently. “I’m not sure. Travel, I suppose. Isn’t that what people of leisure do these days?” She tilted her head and then grunted in amusement. “I can just see Bernice, Walter, and me ascending Pikes Peak on donkeys.”

  Give up writing? I could just as easily have imagined her traveling up the Nile on a barge à la Cleopatra, or taking up polo. Her life had been so ordered around her work, it was difficult to envision her doing anything else.

  “But let’s not get sidetracked,” she said. “You haven’t spoken to Callie, and your neighbor is now a fugitive. How do you know he didn’t murder Ethel?”

  “It was a woman. The gloves,” I reminded her, “are ladies’ gloves.”

  “Perhaps Lucia, his wife, wore them.”

  Lucia, a murderer? “I saw her the night Ethel was killed. Her horror at what happened couldn’t have been an act.” I frowned. Hunches weren’t good enough. I needed something concrete and persuasive. “Plus, her eyes are dark. Ford said the woman had light eyes.”

  “After how that man treated you, you’d believe his word?”

  “Why would he have given that detail? He didn’t have to. I think he was telling the truth at last, as grudgingly as he could.” For that reason I also put Mrs. Grimes out of my mind as a suspect. She might wear scarves, but her eyes were also dark, and that face of hers wasn’t something Ford would have forgotten.

  “We must figure out what to do with this evidence of yours,” Aunt Irene said. “You say you brought it with you?”

  She reached over, opened my satchel, and rummaged around. “Honestly, Louise, how do you find anything in this mess . . . ?” The dogs perked up, tails wagging. I was so tired, I was happy to lean back, shut my eyes, and let her fish the gloves out herself.

  My rest was short-lived. Barely had my lids closed when Aunt Irene let out a bleat of dismay. One of the dogs growled, my aunt shouted, “Bad Trollope, bad!” and by the time I opened my eyes, the small mass of fur was tearing out of the room with my aunt fluttering after him. I’d never seen her move at anything above a saunter before.

  “He has a glove!” she cried. “Stop him!”

  I leapt to my feet and chased after them. To my surprise, Aunt Irene was fast, but neither of us was a match for Trollope. Something about the scent of those gloves had revived the spirit of his long-ago ancestors, and now he was the wolf with his kill, charging up the stairs, growling ridiculously, blue satin ribbons streaming from his floppy ears.

  Aunt Irene called for Walter, and he joined the pursuit, overtaking us in the upstairs hallway. We finally cornered the little spaniel on his pillow at the foot of Aunt Irene’s bed. Walter, brave man, prized the glove from Trollope’s jaws, earning a nip. He held up the glove—it was only one—pincering it between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Bad dog!” Aunt Irene said.

  Trollope met the stern scold with an unrepentant display of panting tongue.

  “Is there a reason you wanted this . . .” The disgust on Walter’s face would have been amusing, if I hadn’t been so confused. “This object?”

  “It’s evidence,” Aunt Irene said.

  But it wasn’t. “May I have it?” I asked Walter, who gla
dly relinquished the glove.

  Aunt Irene shut Trollope in the bedroom and we all went back down. I kept staring at the glove in my hand. It was just a white glove. One I’d borrowed from Callie, I remembered now. It had no blood on it at all.

  “At least Dickens didn’t behave like a beast,” my aunt said, carefully holding her skirt as she made her way down the stairs.

  She spoke too soon. Entering the parlor, we stepped into a crime scene. The criminal, Dickens, had dug into my satchel and emptied practically everything onto the settee and the floor. In the short time we’d been gone, he’d also managed to eat the lion’s share of a pastrami sandwich on rye—the one Otto had bought for me, which I’d forgotten about—and was now gnawing on something else. One of the evidence gloves.

  Aunt Irene shrieked. Saliva had mixed with the dried blood, and now the puppy’s neat muzzle was a horror.

  Walter was already trying to tidy everything, picking up bits of sandwich and putting them on the half-chewed waxed paper, along with several pencils, scraps of paper, a comb, a toothbrush, paperclips, hairpins, a dollar and change, a library copy of the latest P. G. Wodehouse—now stained with grease—a handkerchief, a scarf, an apple, several loose lemon drops covered in lint, and the second glove covered in blood.

  I snatched the glove from his pile, studying it next to the glove that we’d rescued from the jaws of Trollope.

  My aunt, bedraggled after having fought Dickens to retrieve the half-devoured glove, stood next to me. Her nose wrinkled in disgust, but she held the bloody object, unflinching. Then she glanced at the ones in my hand. “So now we have a mystery of the third glove.”

  “The glove without the bloodstains was one that was already in my purse.”

  “I’m glad you brought the gloves here and not to the police, then. Otherwise they might have arrested you.”

  “You mean Callie.”

  “No, bunnykins, I mean you. Didn’t you notice? The glove you say is yours is a dead ringer for the ones with the blood on them.”

  We laid them out side by side on the table next to the settee. I’d forgotten the glove—no telling what had happened to its mate—was in my purse. Or that I’d had it at all. “I haven’t worn those gloves in weeks and weeks.” In summer I usually went without gloves, unless I needed to camouflage my ink-stained hands. I’d worn gloves at the funeral, black ones, but I hadn’t been carrying my satchel that day.

  Aunt Irene turned the bloody glove partially inside out. “It’s the same mark.”

  She was right. The embroidered tag, bearing the maker’s name Ogilvie, was identical.

  “I borrowed the gloves from Callie.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe . . . in April? I don’t remember. She probably forgot all about them.” As I had.

  “Until she saw the bloody pair on the floor.” Aunt Irene’s brow furrowed. “Does Callie own two pairs of identical gloves?”

  “I doubt it. She doesn’t own two of anything. She gets so many free things through modeling, and as gifts—”

  A startling thought broke off my words. These gloves had been a gift, one of the first things Sawyer had given Callie, before the bracelet and her pin. Gloves of the softest kid. She told me so when she’d lent them to me.

  My skin felt clammy.

  Aunt Irene turned to Walter, who was finishing his cleaning up. “Ask Bernice to fix us some tea. My niece is about to faint.”

  “No—I’m fine,” I said, attempting to rise. Walter gave me a skeptical once-over and then poked me back down to sitting with a stern finger on my shoulder. He skipped my aunt’s instructions and crossed straight to the brandy decanter. A moment later, he put a short glass in front of my nose. I had no intention of drinking it, until the bracing smell reached my nostrils. I needed a little reviving so I could get back downtown and talk to Callie.

  I belted down the drink and then stood up, sweeping all the gloves—bloody and clean—back into my satchel, along with most of the other items except the sandwich remains and the lint-covered lemon drops.

  “I thought you wanted me to hide those gloves here,” Aunt Irene said, seeming to forget that the dogs had almost eaten the evidence.

  “On second thought, I’d better keep them with me.” I bent down and kissed her on the cheek. “I should be going. Maybe Callie’s home by now. I’m worried about her.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to have Bernice send you home with some food?”

  Thirty minutes ago I might have welcomed some leftovers, but now impatience to get back downtown overrode even hunger.

  Walking as fast as I could without breaking into a trot, I made my way toward the El. My legs were tired—my whole body craved a good long rest—but my mind was full of questions. I had to keep going. Hopefully Callie would be back at the apartment by now.

  Hurrying up the covered steps at the El stop, I couldn’t help thinking about taking this route just a week ago with Callie, before we’d known what horror awaited us at home. That night seemed as distant now as the days when I wore pinafores and braids and begged my uncles to carry me on their shoulders. Last Thursday night I’d just met Ford and had a head full of vague romantic notions that turned my stomach now. Some weeks felt as if they could stretch on for a decade, and age a person at least that much. This had been one of those weeks.

  The platform was middling crowded—everyone wanted to get to their Friday night entertainments, or were just eager to get home after a long workday. The breezeless warmth of the evening lent the air an added hum of impatience. I was perhaps the most impatient of all. I wanted to talk to my friend—to assure myself that what seemed true in my heart was true in fact.

  The rumble of the planks beneath my feet signaled the train’s approach, and I moved toward the edge of the platform. I looked left. The train careered toward us against the third-story backdrop of the buildings along the avenue. Closer, closer. And then, with a sharp shove from behind, I felt myself falling forward, stepping off into air, right into the path of the oncoming train.

  CHAPTER 12

  How does it feel to die? I mean that moment when the will is forced to bow to the unavoidable, the inevitable. Surely that’s what we all fear most about death. It’s the jolt from our world to the next that’s so frightening—being that little mouse the instant the owl’s talons sink into its flesh. A beating of wings, a flash of terror, pain, and then . . . borne through the air toward the unknown.

  The moment after I felt the shove to my back, I was airborne yet too surprised by my predicament to feel terror. The fall to the wooden slats supporting the track was not far, so I reckoned my landing would probably result in a minor injury, at worst. The oncoming train, however, was a lethal inevitability. I saw light—not the glorious light of Heaven, but the lights of the first train car powering down the track toward me. I wish I could say I scrabbled to escape, but at best I flapped my arms as if that would somehow save me. The miracle was, it did.

  Rescue came by way of an excruciating wrench of my arm. A burly man who’d been standing next to me on the platform caught my forearm and hauled me back with such force that a blinding white pain tore through me just as warm wind from the train blasted us. In an instant, I thumped to safe ground with a shriek that almost drowned out the metal-against-metal scream of the train’s brakes.

  As I sat, dazed and hurting, the train doors opened and people coming off the cars had to veer around the startled group huddled over me. Everyone was yelling—at me, at each other, to the world at large.

  “Thief!”

  “Call a policeman!”

  “Are you all right, miss?”

  “Is she drunk?”

  “She was pushed!”

  “He took her purse! I saw it!”

  When that last exclamation registered, I gasped. My satchel, which had been looped over my right shoulder, was gone. My senses crashed back to life. Gone. My shoulder throbbed so sharply that it took my breath, but my missing satchel was like a gaping wound. The thief
must have held on to it at the same moment he’d bumped me forward. And then he’d run, taking my bag. With it went the gloves.

  I let out a yowl.

  “She needs a doctor!”

  “I saw a guy running after the man—”

  “Can you stand, lady?”

  “Is there a doctor?”

  “Did she jump?” someone from inside the car asked.

  The train’s doors were still standing open, and I could hear another voice, farther away, grumble at high volume, “Crazy woman holding up everything.”

  I wanted nothing more than to stand and sprint after whoever had attacked me, but every time I moved, my head reeled with the pain. I could only hope that the man who did run after the robber was fleet of foot. Without those gloves . . .

  “Say, that arm doesn’t look good, does it?”

  “It’s all whopper-jawed,” someone agreed.

  “You ripped her arm out, Ed!”

  “Man doesn’t know his own strength.”

  Ed, I gathered, was my rescuer. The man was built like a mountain and his craggy face, which featured a nose like the flat side of a shovel, gazed down at me apologetically.

  “Can you talk, lady?”

  I gulped, intending to use my first words to shout for them all to stop talking and pursue the thief who had run off with my bag. But when I opened my mouth, the only words that croaked out of me were, “My arm.”

  “Here comes a policeman,” someone said, and the crowd parted to let the officer through.

  The cop, a solid fellow in his forties at least, scratched at his sideburns as he looked at me. “What happened here?”

  A man in a dusty suit and a conductor’s cap came from the opposite direction. “This lady here jumped in front of my train.”

  “She was pushed,” my rescuer said, contradicting the motorman.

  “It was a thief,” someone called out.

  “Ay, I saw a man chasing him,” the cop told me. “He’s long gone by now.”

  “He has my satchel—I need to get it back.”

  The policeman shook his head. “You need a doctor, young lady. That arm of yours looks bad. Can you move it?”