Through the Window: A Molly Murphy Story (Molly Murphy Mysteries)

by Bowen, Rhys

  “Molly, you’re up. How wonderful,” Sid said. “And how well you look too. Are you going for a little walk? It’s a glorious day.”

  “We could put our shopping inside and come with you,” Gus said. “We’ve just been to the market. Look at these apples and pears. Aren’t they just perfect at this time of year?” Then she added, “Is something wrong? You keep staring down the street.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m keeping an eye out for Daniel. He’s searching the Emorys’ house for clues. Mrs. Emory has gone missing.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Sid said. “I’d have run away ages ago if I were she.”

  “You didn’t happen to see her leaving, did you?” I asked. “It would have been two days ago now.”

  Sid looked at Gus and then shook her head. “We haven’t seen her at all recently. Poor thing. If she’s found her freedom, I’m glad for her.”

  I nodded, not daring to tell them my fears. At that moment one of the constables came out of the Emorys’ house, followed by Daniel.

  “I think this is our cue to depart, Molly,” Gus said. “Come over and have coffee now that you are ambulatory again. And we must see that adorable baby of yours.”

  I left them and went down the street to join Daniel.

  “Did you find anything?” I asked.

  He looked grim. “It certainly seems that foul play was involved,” he said. “Remember he said that Mrs. Emory cut herself and went upstairs to dress the wound?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, there was a first aid kit in the kitchen, above the sink. Bandages, ointment, the lot. So why would she go all the way upstairs? And one more thing—we found a bloody handkerchief stuffed down behind a dresser in the bedroom. A man’s handkerchief, behind his dresser. The only thing we didn’t find is any trace of a body. Their backyard is paved. Nowhere to bury one. So the question is, if he killed her, how did he dispose of the body?”

  “The only way out is through the front door,” I said, “And I’m sure I would have noticed if—” I broke off as the thought struck me. “The laundry cart. They never send out their laundry usually, but there was a laundry cart on the street two days ago. And a big basket was carried out.”

  “Interesting,” Daniel said. “Was it possible that the so-called laundryman was Mr. Emory in disguise?”

  I thought for moment. “I suppose it is possible,” I said. “I didn’t pay too much attention, but I think he was tall and dark. With a big mustache.”

  “Mustache. Perfect disguise. Put one on and people only remember the mustache. I think I need to talk to Mr. Emory. Maybe a night in the Tombs will make him want to confess. And Barker—” He addressed the waiting constable. “Go down to the morgue. I want a report on the bodies of any young women recovered in the past two days—especially from one of the rivers. Emory should have left a photograph of his wife at headquarters.” He turned to me. “I’m going to wait here and catch Mr. Emory by surprise as he comes home. Let’s hear what he’s got to say for himself. Good work, Molly. Very observant of you.”

  It was one of the few times that he had complimented me on my detective skills, and I allowed myself a smug little smile as I walked back to the house. Aggie was changing Liam in the small bedroom that was now the nursery.

  “Oh there you are, Mrs. Sullivan,” she said. “He’s been hollering for some time. Getting hungry more often, isn’t he?” She finished swaddling him and handed him to me. “Not surprising the way he’s growing. My, but he’s a big boy, isn’t he?”

  I took him from Aggie, and his dark blue eyes stared up at me with such intensity that I was sure he could now focus on my face and recognize me. His lips quivered and without warning he let out a lusty bawl, his little fists fighting to free themselves from his blanket. I laughed, hoisted myself onto the bed and hastily unbuttoned my blouse.

  “All right, young man. You’ve made your feelings very clear,” I said.

  As I nursed him I kept watch on the street. Sure enough, the moment Liam had finished nursing and I was burping him over my shoulder, I espied the gaunt figure of Mr. Emory turning onto Patchin Place. As he reached his front door I saw him stop and look up in surprise. Daniel was walking toward him with a constable in tow. I saw them speak, then the constable took Mr. Emory’s arm. Mr. Emory didn’t attempt to struggle or to protest. He stared at Daniel and there was a look of utter bewilderment on his face. For a second he seemed to look up at my window, and although I knew I was not visible from the street below, it felt as if his eyes locked with mine before he was led away to a waiting police wagon.

  I was feeling quite strange as I handed Liam back to Aggie and she went off to change his diaper. Something about Mr. Emory’s expression made me feel uneasy. I had come across murderers before. In my limited experience they had looked either cocky or defiant, or shown no emotion at all—their faces stony masks of arrogance. But bewilderment? Either that meant he was a very good actor, or…. I toyed with the words that formed in my head. It meant he hadn’t killed his wife after all.

  Of course, we didn’t exactly know she was dead, as we’d found no body. But something strange had definitely happened. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared out of the window at the now-deserted street. A flock of pigeons fluttered down to the cobbles, their wings sounding like flapping paper. They were only there for a moment before a cat leaped out to scatter them again—a small moment proving that drama could happen on the peaceful backwaters like Patchin Place.

  Then who might have killed her? I asked myself. The butcher boy and the laundry man had come to a door that had probably been the Emorys’, but they had only stayed for a moment. Surely not long enough to gain entrance to the house, kill Mrs. Emory, and dispose of her body. I was fairly sure nobody else had come to the house after Mr. Emory left for work early that morning. Not that I had observed him leaving for work…..

  I made myself analyze the clues one by one. What had made me decide that Mr. Emory might have committed murder? The smear of blood on the washbasin. The drops of blood on the carpet. The strange deliveries to a house that never had them, especially the laundry cart and the basket being loaded onto it. Then there was the unlikely choice of mismatched clothing missing from the bedroom, the important clothes left behind. To these could be added Daniel’s discovery of the first aid kit above the kitchen sink and the blood-soaked handkerchief behind the dresser.

  If I had committed murder, I thought, would I not be sure to clean up meticulously after myself? Would I have invited a stranger to see the very room with the blood evidence in it? Mr. Emory appeared to be a meticulous sort of man. Would he stuff a bloody handkerchief behind a dresser? Wouldn’t he have wiped the basin clean? So either it was an unknown stranger who had somehow disposed of Mrs. Emory, or…I paused in mid-thought again as something more preposterous struck me: it was just possible that Mrs. Emory had staged the whole thing.

  Five

  I toyed with this idea and the more I thought about it, the more plausible it became. Perhaps Mrs. Emory knew her husband pretty much left the bedroom to be her boudoir, shaving and washing himself in the outdoor bathroom. He was not likely to check on the state of the bedroom washbasin.

  But did all that blood really come from a cut while peeling potatoes? Enough to soak a handkerchief? Then another thought struck me. The butcher’s boy. It would be interesting to see what he had delivered and who had placed the order. And the laundry cart. I created a new scenario for myself. Mrs. Emory, clearly unhappy and dissatisfied with her life, makes the decision to run away. But she doesn’t just want to make a clean break. She wants her husband to be punished for the way he has treated her.

  So what made her decide to run away now, leaving her warm coat and most of her clothes behind? And where could she have gone, now that her family home was no more and her stepmother hadn’t wanted her around in the first place? Then I found my thoughts drifting to the handsome young mulatto man I had seen on Patchin Place. When I first met Mrs. Emory, she h
ad spoken of a hopeless romance, a romance that could never be. Was it possible that her former lover had come into her life again, and persuaded her to run away with him? Now that I thought about it, I realized that her own striking dark features might also indicate what was insultingly called “a touch of the tar brush.” Was that why her stepmother couldn’t wait to get rid of her and had tricked her into marrying Emory?

  But the big question remained. How had she escaped two days ago? In that laundry basket, perhaps? But the laundry man had clearly been middle-aged and fair skinned. So how was he part of the plot, and why should she need to be smuggled out of her house when her husband already believed she was going to visit friends that day? Then I realized that I knew the answer to that too. Old Mrs. Konigsberg going out again at dusk, without her dog. Did she ever go out without her dog?

  I couldn’t wait to find out. I re-buttoned my blouse, found my shawl and let myself out of the front door before Mother Sullivan could try to prevent me. Mrs. Konigsberg opened her door warily in response to my tap. “Ja?” she said.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Konigsberg,” I said.

  “Gut morning,” she replied, nodding as she recognized me.

  We had hardly spoken more than a few words and I hoped her English was good enough to understand me. “I hope you can help me,” I said. “Two days ago you went out in the early evening. Without your dog?”

  “In the evening?” she said, frowning as she concentrated. “I go wizzout my dog? No. I go out eleven o’clock, every day and my Fritzi comes with me. Every day.”

  “But two days ago you went out again. About six o’clock?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No, this is not true. I do not like to walk in the dark. It is too dangerous. At six o’clock I prepare my dinner and Fritzi’s dinner.”

  “So it wasn’t you I saw on the street?”

  “No,” she said. “It was not me.”

  I thanked and left her looking puzzled, wondering, I’m sure, what on earth my reason had been for my question. But at least I had one small piece of evidence now. If Mrs. Konigsberg had not walked down Patchin Place in the early evening, then it had to have been someone disguised as her. And I remembered Mrs. Emory telling me how she had loved charades and amateur dramatics. I had spotted a box of makeup in a drawer of her vanity, and I realized now that the long, old-fashioned cape that the false Mrs. Konigsberg had worn was of dark gray serge.

  ***

  I couldn’t wait to tell Daniel. I knew I wasn’t yet feeling strong enough to walk all the way to police headquarters or to fight my way onto a trolley. So I went home and wrote a note.

  Daniel, I think we may have been deceived. I have uncovered some more evidence on the disappearance of Mrs. Emory. Can you have one of your men find out who placed the order with the butcher, and who summoned the laundry? And could someone check the Emory’s garbage can?

  Then I sent Aggie down to the police station at the Jefferson Market with instructions that the letter should be delivered to Daniel as soon as possible. Aggie shot me a worried look.

  “Me? Go to the police station? What if they think I’ve done something wrong?”

  I smiled at her anxious little face. “The letter is addressed to Captain Sullivan, Aggie. You just have to hand it to one of the officers and say that it is urgent. That’s all.”

  I had been trying to teach her to read without too much success. She took the letter from me and off she went. I waited, impatiently. Mr. Emory’s bewildered face hovered in front of me. I kept telling myself that one day in a jail cell wouldn’t do him too much harm, but in truth I felt horribly guilty because it was I who had put him there. What if Daniel didn’t believe my second hypothesis? The clues all pointed so firmly to Mr. Emory as his wife’s killer. Then I reassured myself that if no body was found, the police wouldn’t have much of a case. Surely they’d be forced to let him go.

  I ate my lunch with one eye on the street, but Daniel didn’t return. When I’d finished my meal Mrs. Sullivan came to take it away. She looked at me critically. “You’re looking quite pale and washed out, my dear. All that gallivanting around has not been good for you. Two weeks of bed rest, that’s what I said. Now if you’ll take my advice you’ll have a good sleep this afternoon.”

  Unfortunately I realized she was right. I was not as strong as I thought I was, and a nap did seem like a good idea. I let her help me into bed and fell asleep almost immediately. I awoke to the sound of the front door slamming and then Daniel’s deep voice in the hallway.

  “No, nothing’s wrong, Mother. I just called in to see Molly. Is she upstairs? She’s feeling all right, isn’t she?”

  I couldn’t hear my mother-in-law’s reply but it was probably something along the lines of “If she will get up before she should she only has herself to blame.”

  I sat up hastily, smoothed down my hair and tried to look awake and alert as Daniel came up the steps. “Ah, there you are,” he said. “Gone back to bed then?”

  “Just taking a little rest after lunch,” I said, “but I’m fine. You got my note then. I’m glad you came. Did you find out about the butcher and the laundry?”

  “I did, but what is all this about? I’m not quite sure how they apply to our investigation.”

  He perched on the bed beside me.

  “I think I might have made a horrible error, Daniel,” I said. “I don’t think that Mr. Emory killed his wife after all.”

  “What?” Daniel snapped. “But you were the one who suggested this in the first place. You yourself pointed out the bloodstains, the wrong assortment of clothes.”

  “I know I did. But I saw Mr. Emory’s face when you led him away. He looked completely bewildered, as if he couldn’t comprehend what was going on. So that started me thinking: if you’d just killed your wife, wouldn’t you make sure you got rid of any trace of evidence? If you had a bloodstained handkerchief, wouldn’t you have disposed of it? Burned it? Not stuffed it behind a dresser where it could be easily found by the police. And would you really have invited the police into the room where the evidence was so noticeable?”

  Daniel ran his hand through his thick curls. “So what are you suggesting now? That it was an intruder who killed her? The butcher’s boy, maybe?” His voice had a hint of sarcasm to it.

  “First answer me this—who ordered the deliveries? Did you find that out?”

  “Strangely enough, it was Mrs. Emory.”

  “Aha-!” I wagged a triumphant finger at him. “And did she order something like a nice, juicy steak?”

  He looked surprised. “She did. How did you know that?”

  “Because I think she wanted a nice bloody piece of fresh meat to provide the blood stains. If you test, I think you’ll find it isn’t human blood on that handkerchief or the basin.”

  Daniel frowned at me, digesting this. “You are trying to tell me that she wanted it to look as though she had been murdered?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.” I laid my hand on his arm. “The more I think about it, the more sense it makes, Daniel. When I first met her she was clearly unhappy in her marriage. She was trapped in a loveless, childless relationship with a man who was a controlling bully. She was living a life that was so different from what she had hoped for, so different from her childhood in New Orleans…. AND she told me she had been suffering a broken heart from a hopeless romance when she met Mr. Emory.”

  “What has that to do with it?” Daniel asked.

  “What if her former love showed up to take her away and she finally had a chance to escape?”

  Daniel was staring at me now. “You saw such a man?”

  “Last week Sid, Gus and I saw a young negro standing on Patchin Place staring up at the houses on our side. He clearly wasn’t staring at Mrs. Konigsberg’s. We wondered what he was doing here. What if he had come to find Mrs. Emory again?”

  Daniel frowned. “A negro?”

  “He was light skinned and very handsome, Daniel. I could well und
erstand a young girl falling for such a man.”

  “But such a relationship could never be sanctioned, surely. Especially not in the South.”

  “That’s why it was a hopeless romance,” I said, warming to my subject. “But what if the young man had made good, financially. He was finally able to provide for her. What if she decided that she’d rather risk happiness with him, even if they were rejected by society.”

  “Then why not just run away, instead of setting up an elaborate hoax like this?”

  “Because she wanted to pay back her husband for the misery he had caused her.”

  “But he could face the electric chair, or a lifetime in Sing Sing. Had she no conscience?”

  I shrugged. “Perhaps she wasn’t thinking of the ramifications and was only thinking of herself. While he was under suspicion of murder she knew that nobody would be looking for her. They’d be looking for her body.”

  Daniel reached across and stroked back my hair from my cheek. “My wife never fails to astonish me,” he said. “I have to admit it does make sense. But what about the laundry cart—did she escape in the laundry basket?”

  “No,” I said. “I suspect the laundry cart was just to suggest to the police how Mr. Emory might have carried out the body. But she walked out on her own two feet.”

  “She did? You saw her?”

  “She was disguised as Mrs. Konigsberg. She used to love amateur dramatics and charades. But Mrs. Konigsberg is a creature of habit. She takes her walk at eleven o’clock every day and she never goes out without her dachshund. When I saw her going out in the early evening I thought it odd, so I went to visit her and she confirmed she had not left her house that evening.”

  Daniel laughed. “And I thought you were supposed to be resting and recovering. Not running around the neighborhood. I’ll never hear the last of it from my mother.”

  “I didn’t do much running around,” I said. “Most of it was observed from right here, through the window.”

  Postscript