by Liz Freeland
Worst case, we would come out looking like fools. Best case, Ethel’s killer would be off the streets for good and all.
I arrived a few minutes early and waited behind the entrance columns of the city hall post office across the street to see if I could glimpse Margaret going in. I’d never been in this part of town at night. Though the Woolworth Building was lit up like a Christmas tree, there was little traffic on the streets around it. Perhaps this business area was always a bit deserted on Saturday nights, but the weather didn’t help. Unruly winds created miniature cyclones of dirt and garbage, and a newspaper blew past my feet like a tumbleweed. As I craned my neck, the uplit heights of the Woolworth Building’s tower caused my stomach to knot. The bright summit was haloed in clouds. How could an elevator carry a person all the way to the top of that? I’d never been higher than eleven floors on an elevator, and that had been nauseating enough.
I thought longingly again of Grant’s Tomb—so compact, so not fifty-eight stories high. Too late now. I couldn’t stand across the street forever, either. Either Margaret was already inside waiting for me, or she intended to be fashionably late, or she had decided not to come at all. For all I knew, she’d torn up our blackmail note as soon as Walter had delivered it.
Finally, a clock struck eight. I squared my shoulders. Standing out here wasn’t making me any braver. The sooner I went in, the sooner it would all be over.
Once I’d passed through the arched entrance, however, I had to stop a moment to gather my breath. Though I’d read descriptions, nothing had prepared me for the lavish richness before my eyes. The veined marble, the great vaulted ceiling with its elaborate, colorful mosaic, the grand staircase with the amber glass above it made me feel as if I’d stepped into a palace. Everywhere were artistic touches—intricate carvings and tracery; rich, polished wood and gleaming metal. I couldn’t help gawking around me like a tourist.
At the bank of elevators, a crimson-uniformed man poked his head out.
“Going up, miss?”
The question goosed me forward. Gulping, I stepped in. I was his only passenger. “Observation gallery, please,” I said.
The young man stared at me as if he’d misheard. “Are you sure? Kind of blustery out, isn’t it?”
My feelings exactly. “I need to go to the fifty-eighth floor, please.”
“Customer’s always right,” he muttered.
The floor lurched upward. My tummy lurched right along with it.
“Not often a person gets a private ride,” the operator said. “Must be your lucky day.”
I tried to feel lucky instead of petrified. I regarded the young man through the mirror of the polished metal panel facing him. “Is there anyone else up there now?”
“Night like this? Not many.”
Not many people that stupid, he meant. “I’m supposed to be meeting a friend. You might have noticed her. A pretty blond woman, alone?”
He frowned. “Hasn’t been a lone rider like that in my box tonight. But I see lots of people all day. Up and down, up and down. I stop lookin’, you know?”
The climb seemed to take forever, and every creak made me queasy. Was it my imagination or was the building swaying? How strong would a wind have to be before the entire building went over like a felled tree?
One hundred and thirty feet into bedrock, I reminded myself. That was quite an anchor. No one would construct a building that couldn’t withstand a breeze or two. Of course, the Titanic had been unsinkable, yet just over a week ago I’d served sandwiches to a lady who’d spent a tooth-chattering night in one of her lifeboats.
When the elevator finally stopped and the doors slid open, the elevator boy nodded across the hall. “Take the elevator to the fifty-eighth floor.”
Another elevator? I wanted to weep, and cursed the name of Cass Gilbert, the architect of this crazy structure. What kind of lunatic designed a building that required two elevators to reach the top?
“You mean this isn’t it?” I asked, not wanting to believe it.
“This is just the fifty-fourth floor. The view’s okay from here, but the real observation gallery’s on the fifty-eighth floor. You can take the elevator, or there’s a staircase.”
I knew what my choice would be. I took a moment to look about the room here. The booths selling picture postcards, souvenirs, and ice cream were shuttered for the night, but there were still a few people scattered about. It wasn’t hard to see why. Just the sight of the city stretched out before me made me gasp. A streak of lightning lit the sky and I pivoted; then I was looking out over the lower island, the bay, and the Statue of Liberty. I swayed and stepped back, seeking the safety of the wall behind me. A man alone and a couple nearby were looking west toward the Hudson and the piers along the island’s edge. Further on a group of women faced a north view. The lights of the city stretched toward midtown, the Bronx, and beyond. I walked close enough to each to discern that none of the women was Margaret. No doubt she’d followed my instructions and was waiting upstairs.
The spiral staircase was a steep, narrow affair, without adornment. Clearly it was assumed that most visitors would opt for the elevator. The passage continued up to some unknown height, but the fifty-eighth floor was clearly marked, and I stepped off there.
The door opened onto a single room with arch-topped viewing windows. The floor was tiled in geometrical mosaic, and the rest of the finishes reflected the ornate care taken with the building’s spectacular lobby. Outside, an open walkway encircled the entire floor. The doors to the catwalk were closed tight at the moment. No one was foolish enough to go out there now—certainly not me. I doubted Margaret was lurking out there, either. As far as I could tell, I was alone.
Perhaps she had torn up the note. Or she wasn’t guilty at all and was sitting at home in her cozy parlor wondering why such a strange message had been delivered to her door this morning. It was entirely possible, after all, that Dora really had killed Ethel and I was on a fool’s errand.
With something akin to relief, I turned back, looking forward to being at ground level again. The downside to our bungled plan, and it was a big one, would be that Aunt Irene would have already alerted Muldoon, so the cavalry was coming whether Margaret was here waiting to be arrested or not. Muldoon’s ire would land squarely on my head. For all I knew, he was already in the building.
As I was mentally preparing myself for that confrontation, I glimpsed a statuesque woman watching me from the other side of the elevator. Where had she come from? Recognition set off a nervous quake inside me. I walked toward where she waited, beautiful and stone-faced. She wore a dark suit and a wide-brimmed summer straw hat to match. Not a hair or pleat was out of place. She looked tense but perfectly, eerily poised.
“Margaret?” I said.
For a fraction of a second, her eyes flared in surprise. She knew me from that brief glimpse at Sawyer’s office; clearly I wasn’t who she’d expected. Puzzlingly, her gaze fastened on a point beyond my shoulder. I wondered if she was under the influence of some narcotic. Then she nodded—more as if giving a direction than in answer to my question. My bafflement grew, until from somewhere behind me a hand reached round to cover my mouth.
I gasped and inhaled only leathery palm. The gloved hand also muffled my subsequent scream. Nothing could mask the sound of my umbrella clattering to the floor after it slipped from my fingers, but there was no one to hear. The last I saw of the fifty-eighth floor was Margaret Attinger kicking the umbrella toward the wall and strolling away to take in the view, calmly, like a tourist.
In the next instant, my own view became the narrow passage containing the spiral staircase, which my captor proceeded to drag me up. Up. Where did the stairs lead? I was almost afraid to find out.
I tried to crane my head around to see him, but he had the bend of his arm crooked around my neck, choking me, while his other arm around my torso squeezed off my breath as he dragged me backward. I kicked my legs out, which was no help since he was behind and slightly abo
ve me. I was like some dumb farm animal being dragged away to the slaughter. Again, I thought, angry at my helplessness.
So much for our—laughable, I now saw—planning. So much for cutting off routes of Margaret’s escape. All we’d done was cut off my own. As we reached a sharp turn I was able to glimpse him, and it was as I expected. “Sawyer,” I croaked into his palm. His fair cheeks were stained scarlet with the effort required to haul me up the stairs.
His elbow squeezed tighter around my neck. “Shut up! Another word out of you, you die. Do you understand? You will die.”
Did he mean that there was an iota of a chance that I wasn’t going to die? Maybe there was a way out of this. I kept my mouth shut.
It wasn’t until we finally reached another, smaller landing and Sawyer banged open a door that I realized that, threat or no threat, I should have been screaming my head off. A gust of wet air slapped my face, and Sawyer dragged me onto the slick, rain-splattered cement of a narrow walkway. This was a sort of partially open-air crow’s nest encircling the building’s copper cupola, just below the lantern at the top. The walkway area available was no more than a few paces, and rectangular open-air viewing windows were cut into the metal wall at regular intervals. My heart banged against my ribs. Get too close to those windows, and a six-hundred-plus-foot plummet to the ground would be a matter of a shove. There was no Ed Blainey to save me now, and the bottoms of those windows were low. Too low.
Another miscalculation in our brilliant plan: There was another way out of the building besides the elevator—a straight plunge down fifty-eight-plus floors. Although with any luck one might land on one of the decks below. I wouldn’t be any less dead, although perhaps marginally less gruesomely so.
I dug in my heels, desperate to scramble back to the staircase. Then the door blew shut again, and Sawyer slung me forward. I screamed, expecting to go flying over the rail, but instead I fell to ground. I scrabbled backward at once and leaned all the weight I could against the metal wall in the vain hope that I could make my body cling to it, as if I had barnacles.
He loomed over me, eyes blazing, blond locks unmoored by the wind from their Brilliantine neatness. Beyond him was an equally angry sky, the city view obscured by clouds. That’s how high up we were. A flash illuminated us. I’d never seen lightning so large before, but I’d never been so close to its source.
“The gloves,” he barked. “Give them to me.”
Thunder clapped and the sound jolted through me. “I don’t have them.”
“Liar! I saw the note you sent my wife.”
“It was a bluff.” My teeth chattered as I spoke. “T-to scare her. I thought she’d killed Ethel . . .” Had I been wrong? Right now, it was Sawyer who seemed murderous. Yet Margaret had been in the observation gallery, and had directed him with a nod. The perfect puppet master.
His face, tense and distrustful, didn’t change. Yet he didn’t deny his wife was a murderer.
“Sawyer, I know you didn’t kill Ethel. It was Margaret. She mistook Ethel for Callie, didn’t she?”
He answered mechanically, like a child who’d been too well coached in his lessons. “Callie nearly destroyed our home.”
No, you nearly destroyed it, you bastard. I gulped back my outrage. Anger wouldn’t help me here. “But now you don’t have to worry. Callie hasn’t bothered you again, has she?”
“You or she could go to the police with the gloves.”
“But we won’t. We can’t. The gloves were lost.”
“I have to protect my family,” he said, not hearing me. “I have two children.”
“Then go. Now. Leave here. The police are coming.”
His lips twisted into a sneer.
“They are,” I insisted. Unfortunately, when and if they came, they wouldn’t find me where I was supposed to be. The way things were going, they wouldn’t find me at all until I was splattered all over lower Broadway. “My aunt’s bringing Detective Muldoon. Did you think I would come up here on my own?”
He grabbed my arm in a circulation-killing grasp that had me keening in pain. “If what you say is true,” Sawyer growled close to my ear, “then when the police arrive they’ll find the first woman to commit suicide by jumping from the Woolworth Building.”
“No one will believe it. Why would I commit suicide?”
“Why not? A woman alone, depressed over her roommate’s death—no family, no children, no one to care about her at all, really. That’s what the papers will write.”
He dismissed my whole life with such conviction, I could almost believe him.
Lightning flashed again, and I shook my head in hopes that I could talk him back to sense. “The papers would be wrong. I have family, and friends who care for me.” I even have a child. Suddenly a vision of that typed form I’d glimpsed just once flashed through my mind as clear as the lightning that bolted across the sky. “Detective Muldoon knows me, and he’ll never believe I jumped.”
“The police are idiots.”
They certainly are slow. Perhaps they wouldn’t be coming at all. Maybe Aunt Irene couldn’t convince them and they’d written us all off as crackpots. Who could blame them? Muldoon wasn’t kidding when he’d warned me not to play detective.
How was I going to save myself? I had nothing to work with. A mere three feet of area between the wall and the window. I swallowed and glanced up, but there was nothing over my head but metal roof. There was nothing to grab for, or hang on to.
The door, I thought. Getting back inside was my only hope.
I lurched toward it. Sawyer grabbed my other arm and yanked. If not for the events of the night before, I might have been able to stand it. But intense pain shot through my shoulder, and I let out a mighty howl that grew even more agonized as I realized I was being dragged again toward that window. Closer to that sharp drop to oblivion. I made myself a dead weight. If Sawyer was going to kill me, I wasn’t going to let it be easy for him. He loosed a string of curses that a gust of wind carried off.
Fat drops of rain created an irregular drumbeat against the copper. Some drops blew in on us, and Sawyer’s hand slipped enough that I was able to scramble back toward the door, screaming my head off. I’d never be so foolish as to remain silent again. He seized hold of me before I reached the door, but I tried not to feel too discouraged. Delay. If I was growing tired, so was he. Every moment of delay was a little victory.
“Let me go,” I pleaded. “Please, Sawyer. This wasn’t your crime. It was Margaret.”
“She’s the mother of my children.”
“Your children need you,” I argued. “If you do this thing, you’ll both be murderers. Your children will have no one.”
We’d reached the window ledge. I leaned as far away from him as I could and tried to tuck my free hand at the metal edge on the right of the window. I gasped for air against the pelting rain. Most of all, I tried not to look at what was beyond, at that empty nothing, that drop that would be my end. Here I was at the top of the most brightly lit beacon in the most populous city in America, and my struggle might as well have been invisible. Those sailors forty miles out to sea, or however far the blazing tower could be seen on this blustery night, would have no idea they were witnessing a death scene.
Sawyer pushed my head down until I couldn’t help but see over. A slender gargoyle protruded below us. My view was northeast now, and in the distance I glimpsed the bridges draped across the East River. The cloud-blurred lights of the city stretched on and on. The whole world seemed topsy-turvy, as if I were looking down through the clouds at the stars.
I blinked, shuttering out the lights, the amorphous buildings, the distant bridges, and the fear rising inside me. Instead, my mind’s eye saw Callie laughing, and Otto in a white butcher apron, entertaining customers by making a plucked Cornish hen sing like Al Jolson. My parents’ hillside grave, Uncle Luddie’s kind old face, Aunt Irene on the sofa with the dogs. All the people I loved. Even Aunt Sonja, who I loved in spite of everything. And I sensed som
eone else, too, a young boy’s face that seemed almost like a mirror.
A last scrap of determination surged inside me. “Sawyer”—I gulped—“you can’t do this. Don’t make yourself a murderer.”
“You should have left us alone.” His face twisted in an anger that was almost despairing. “What did it matter to you? Margaret didn’t kill Callie—just that cousin Callie was always complaining about.”
Just Ethel. An old spinster. A woman without a home, one of those undesirables who seemed to be both invisible and at the same time always in the way.
“She was a human being,” I said. “She didn’t deserve to die.”
“All right!” he bellowed. “It was a mistake!”
Confusion only agitated him, making him both peevish and enraged. I wondered how far I could argue the point before he pitched me out the opening just to shut me up. It didn’t really matter. At this point, all I had left were words. “What if Margaret decides to correct her mistake and goes after Callie again?”
“She won’t. We agreed—just the blackmailer. That’ll be the end of it.”
How reasonable of them. Breakfast conversations at their house must have been interesting lately. “But Margaret assumed Callie was the blackmailer, didn’t she?” I asked. “She thought she’d be getting rid of the threat to her purse and the threat to her marriage. But Callie knows nothing about the blackmail, Sawyer.” At least, she hadn’t known about it when Aunt Irene, Otto, Walter, and I had cooked up this scheme. “Margaret will always resent her. You know that. Don’t you still care enough about Callie not to want to see her killed?”
His face twisted in anguish. Rain had plastered his hair against his temples. “God, yes. But Margaret promised.”