Murder on Astor Place

by Victoria Thompson

  “I’m sure that wasn’t it at all. Please, Mrs. Higgins, you mustn’t upset yourself. It’s not good for you or the baby. I’m very glad you were able to rent out your rooms after all.”

  Mrs. Higgins sniffed derisively. “Not to the kind of lodgers I’m used to. They’re a very rough sort of men, I can tell you. That’s what happens when I leave things to Mr. Higgins. He can’t see what people look like, so he isn’t as careful as I would be. But I doubt they’ll be here long. That kind never stays anywhere very long. And when they leave, I’ll be sure to get a better class of lodgers. For full price, too.”

  Sarah was hardly listening. She was too busy thinking about Hamilton Fisher and wondering why he’d been so intent on making the acquaintance of Alicia VanDamm. It could be as simple as a young man wanting to be noticed by a pretty girl. But it seemed like more than that, from what Mrs. Higgins described. And of course, he’d vanished the night she died. Had Malloy asked about him? Did he know how interested Fisher had been in Alicia? “Did that young man, that Mr. Fisher, did he have a job?”

  “Not that I ever knew,” Mrs. Higgins said, apparently undisturbed by the change of subject. “I was worried he might not be able to pay, but he gave me a month’s rent in advance, so I couldn’t complain, now could I?”

  “And then he ran off after Alicia was killed, after only living here a week, when his room was paid for a month?”

  “Makes him sound guilty, don’t it?” Mrs. Higgins said, with a worried frown.

  “Have you told the police all this?”

  Mrs. Higgins gave her a pitying look. “That fellow they sent over, that detective, he hardly asked me any questions at all. Acted like he couldn’t be bothered. Oh, I know nobody’s going to care if some orphan girl gets herself murdered, but if Alicia’s family is really rich, wouldn’t they at least offer a reward? Something to get the police interested?”

  “I’m sure they will,” Sarah said, mentally cursing Frank Malloy. Well, he might not appreciate her help in the case, but she had far too much information now to even consider keeping it to herself. Like it or not, she’d have to track him down and make him listen to her. And then she’d have to find out if the VanDamms were going to offer a reward. And if they weren’t...

  Well, she’d decide what to do next when she found out. If Alicia’s own family didn’t care enough to find her killer, Sarah wasn’t sure what she could do, but she would do something. Or die trying.

  SARAH LOOKED OUT of the hansom cab and frowned up at the slightly tawdry, marble-fronted building on Mulberry Street that served as police headquarters for the city of New York.

  “Here you are, ma’am,” the driver called down from his perch above her. Quickly, she paid him through the window overhead and climbed out. The driver wasted no time in clucking his horse into motion again and moving out into the early morning traffic, leaving her standing alone on the sidewalk. Oddly enough, police headquarters was located in a rather rough neighborhood, one in which Sarah didn’t feel comfortable walking unescorted, which was why she’d taken a cab. The hansoms, which were one-seated carriages with the driver mounted above and behind the passenger compartment, were a relatively new addition to the streets of New York, although they had been popular in England for over fifty years. Sarah had felt perfectly safe inside the cab, but as she watched it pull away, her sense of well-being evaporated, and she began to regret her decision to confront Detective Malloy.

  She shouldn’t have felt so very uneasy. The tenement buildings around her were just the kind of buildings she frequently visited to deliver babies. The women hanging out of the windows, gossiping and arguing, were the kinds of women who had those babies. And the children playing in the streets, the vendors pushing their cards and shouting for customers, and all the other sights and smells of poverty were only too familiar. No, it wasn’t the neighborhood that worried her, but rather the building that should have provided a sanctuary amid the squalor of the tenements.

  Well, what was the worst that could happen to her? Malloy had already said he didn’t consider her a suspect, so she most likely wouldn’t be arrested. Smiling grimly at this small comfort, she looked up at the fanlight window over the green, double entry doors and read the words, “New-York Police Headquarters.” Pretty forbidding. Walking in and brazenly asking for Malloy would also be embarrassing, but Sarah had been embarrassed before and survived. Thinking of poor Alicia renewed her courage, and ignoring the stares of the suspicious looking characters loafing nearby, she made her way up the steep stairs to the front door. Then she had to explain her mission to the doorkeeper who only grudgingly admitted her.

  The place smelled of unwashed bodies and tobacco juice. The floor was littered with battered spittoons, but no one seemed able to hit them with their streams of juice because the floor was brown with it. Before her stood a high desk, and behind it sat an enormously fat man in a police uniform. His bald head gleamed brightly in the early morning sunlight.

  Sarah tried to ignore the men seated on the benches that lined the walls, all of whom were shackled and some of whom bore signs of a recent beating, but they had most certainly noticed her.

  “Hey, O’Shaughnessy, you got the whores making house calls now?” one hollered.

  “Is this one of them reforms that Roosvelt’s making?” another cried. “No wonder he wanted to get rid of Byrnes,” he added, naming the recently resigned chief of police.

  “If I gotta get measured, I want her to do it!” another called, making reference to the newly instituted Bertillion system of identifying criminals by taking measurements of various body parts and keeping them on file along with their photographs for identification purposes.

  “Shaddup,” the desk sergeant commanded, but the suggestive banter kept on anyway. Sarah simply ignored it.

  “I’d like to see Detective Sergeant Malloy, if he’s in,” she told the desk sergeant over the din.

  “Malloy, is it?” He peered down at her, turning his double chin into a triple. “He expecting you?”

  Not likely, she thought, but she said, “Yes, I have some information for him about a case he’s working on.”

  He didn’t seem to believe her. Probably, the usual police informants looked nothing like Sarah. “I ain’t sure he’s here,” he said skeptically.

  “Perhaps you could check and see. Or send someone to find him. My information is very important. He won’t want to miss it.” There, if that didn’t make Malloy furious with her, nothing would. Sarah didn’t particularly care, however, so long as he listened to what she had to tell him when he got here.

  The desk sergeant was scowling at her now, his face a lot redder than it had been, and it had been pretty red before. Plainly, he didn’t like having a woman tell him what to do, no matter how gently she phrased it.

  For a moment, she thought he was going to vent his wrath on her, but suddenly, his fury faded into something more sinister. “O’Brien!” he shouted without warning, startling her.

  A scrawny young man who hardly looked old enough to shave but who nevertheless wore a police uniform, appeared from a nearby doorway. “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “Take this here lady downstairs to one of the waiting rooms.” He used the word “lady” as if he didn’t really mean it.

  O’Brien looked Sarah over in surprise. His eyes were very blue and a little frightened, and his pale blond hair was plastered to his skull with hair tonic. “Downstairs?” he echoed uncertainly.

  “That’s right, O’Brien, downstairs. She’s waiting for Malloy. Maybe when you’re done, you can go find him for her.”

  “Where is he?”

  “How the hell... ? Oh, sorry, ma’am,” the sergeant said, not sounding sorry at all. “How should I know? If he’s expecting her like she says, he won’t be far now, will he? And in the meantime, the lady can wait for him downstairs.”

  Sarah wasn’t sure she wanted to find out what was “downstairs,” but she also didn’t want to leave without seeing Malloy since she had
no illusions he would ever come to her, no matter how much information she promised him.

  “I’ll be happy to wait, Officer O’Brien,” she assured him.

  For a long moment, O’Brien seemed torn between doing his duty and obeying some higher instinct, but in the end, duty won. Or perhaps the Sergeant won. He certainly looked intimidating. Sarah wouldn’t want him angry with her, or at least no angrier than he already was.

  “Come with me, then,” Officer O’Brien said, not letting himself look at Sarah again. Sarah knew she was probably making a terrible mistake by going with him, but she’d already come this far. Her chances of getting Malloy to her place were probably nil, she reminded herself, unless she killed someone herself, so this was her only option.

  Determined not to show any hesitation, she followed Officer O’Brien down the long, dingy hallway. The walls were painted dark green beneath layers of dirt, and even though the sun shone brightly outside the many windows, the exterior awnings kept the interior dim.

  O‘Brien led her down some rickety stairs that were littered with decades of dirt and refuse. Holding the rail, Sarah was glad she’d kept her gloves on. As they reached the basement, new and fouler odors assailed her, the origins of which she didn’t want to know. She was beginning to understand why O’Brien hadn’t wanted to bring her down here.

  Through another hall, this one dirtier than the one upstairs, past several doors. Sarah thought she heard the sound of moaning coming from behind one, but she didn’t let herself think about it. Finally, they reached a door that Officer O’Brien opened and indicated she should enter. Unfurnished except for a small table and several wooden chairs, the brick-walled room was illuminated by a single gas jet that cast strange shadows into the corners. Although the sergeant had called this a “waiting room,” Sarah was pretty sure it wasn’t typically used for waiting.

  “I’ll try to find him quick as I can,” O’Brien told her apologetically. “And I’d better lock you in. So nobody can bother you,” he added when Sarah widened her eyes in alarm.

  Before she could change her mind and beg him to take her back outside where she could hail a cab and flee, forgetting the insane impulse that had brought her here in the first place, he was turning the key in the lock outside.

  4

  THIS WAS A MISTAKE, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE. SARAH knew that now. Her only hope was that Malloy wasn’t so furious with her that he’d leave her here to rot. Or that the desk sergeant upstairs wasn’t so annoyed that he didn’t bother to send for Malloy at all. But surely, someone would come for her sooner or later. This was a police station, after all, and she was an honest citizen who was only trying to help.

  If only she didn’t know how little good that would do her if they simply decided to forget about her entirely.

  But it was now too late to change her mind. Forcing herself to sit in the cleanest of the chairs, she drew a few deep breaths and managed not to panic. Once she had her control back, she concentrated on her surroundings. This must be one of the rooms they used to interrogate prisoners, she decided. To give them the “third degree,” a term developed by Thomas Byrnes, the longtime chief of the Detective Bureau and until recently the superintendent, whose methods of questioning prisoners were equally violent and effective. He had, they said, actually invented the “third degree.”

  As awful as this room was, however, Sarah knew that those on the floor below would be even worse. There, prisoners were held in dank cellar rooms a floor below street level where no ray of sunlight or breath of fresh air ever permeated. They said that after a few hours in one of those cells, a man would confess to anything just to get out.

  Until recently, the cellar had also provided housing to the homeless who were too poor even to manage the few cents required for floor space sleeping in a Bowery flophouse. So awful was this space that few people ever actually took advantage of the free lodging except in the worst weather. Still, it was the only place in town where a homeless woman who was not actively engaged in prostitution could stay. But Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt had closed the police department homeless shelters a few months ago, on the advice of newspaper reporter and self-appointed reformer Jacob Riis. Riis seemed to think the shelters were a breeding ground for vice and sin. Sarah wondered if he realized that the people who had once used the shelters now had to sleep in the very streets instead. What kind of a breeding ground would that be?

  Having satisfied herself that she had adequately proved Riis wrong, for a while Sarah passed the time by imagining what Malloy would say when he found her here, assuming he ever did. She could even picture the expression he’d have on his face when he came through the door, please God, let him come through very soon. He’d be furious and impatient and even a little smug, thinking she’d gotten herself into a fine fix and wasn’t it just what she deserved for sticking her nose into things that weren’t her business?

  When she was finished with that, she rehearsed what she’d say to him, refining and clarifying what she had to tell him, so he wouldn’t have time to cut her off before he’d heard the most important information. He could be a little short, and she was certain he wouldn’t be in the mood for lengthy explanations when he finally arrived, which had better be soon. And when she was satisfied that her speech was perfect, she simply waited, imagining she heard rats scurrying and men moaning and cursing, and trying not to imagine that the spots she saw on the far wall were blood.

  More than an hour passed before she finally heard a key turning in the lock, and the door was flung open to reveal Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy. He looked exactly the way she’d expected, which was not at all happy to see her.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  Thank heaven he had no idea how genuinely thrilled she was to see him. To see anybody, in fact, who might rescue her from this hellhole. Resisting the impulse to jump up and throw her arms around him in gratitude and carefully keeping all trace of elation from her voice, she said, “Didn’t they tell you? I have some information about Alicia VanDamm’s murder.”

  Malloy ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of exasperation. Hair, Sarah noticed, that appeared to be uncombed. Just as his cheeks appeared to be unshaven. And his tie was crooked. Indeed, he looked as if he’d just gotten up and had dressed in a very big hurry. It was early in the morning, but not that early.

  “This better be something really important,” he warned her, closing the door behind him with a decisive slam.

  Frank couldn’t believe it. Sarah Brandt was sitting in an interrogation room. Had actually been locked in an interrogation room, and for quite a while, if what O‘Brien told him was true. O’Brien was an idiot. He’d been looking all over town for Frank when he’d been right here in the building, sleeping in the officer’s dormitory upstairs after having been up half the night investigating a warehouse robbery. A warehouse robbery that promised to add substantially to Frank’s savings, if he played it right, and he most certainly would.

  By the time O’Brien had found him, Frank realized Mrs. Brandt had been locked in the basement for quite a while, more than long enough to reduce a normal female to hysterics, which was how he’d expected to find her. Not that he was looking forward to dealing with an hysterical female, but finding her sitting here looking perfectly calm was even more unsettling. The woman was positively unnatural.

  “I’m sure you’ll at least find what I have to tell you interesting,” she said, just as prim and proper as you please. As if she was sitting in her own parlor instead of right where countless criminals had endured countless beatings, all in the cause of justice. He should’ve left her here for another hour before coming to rescue her. Maybe by then she would’ve started acting like a normal woman.

  “All right,” he said grudgingly, pulling up a chair to the opposite side of the table and sinking down into it. “What is it, and be quick.” He rubbed his gritty eyes, half hoping that when he opened them again she’d be gone. But she wasn’t. “I’ve been aw
ake all night, and I’d like to get a little more sleep before I get called on another case,” he warned.

  “Oh, dear, they should’ve told me. I could come back another time,” she offered, annoying him even more. He didn’t want her to be thoughtful. He wanted her to be gone.

  “Just spit it out and get it over with,” he snapped, wondering what evil he’d done to deserve having Sarah Brandt enter his life.

  “I’ll try to hurry,” she said, folding her hands on the table in that prissy way she had that set his teeth on edge. “I called on the VanDamm family yesterday. To express my condolences,” she added when Frank scowled his disapproval. “Mina and I are old friends.”

  Well, he supposed he couldn’t stop her from calling on an old friend.

  “At any rate,” she continued, “she told me something that might be useful. It seems that when Alicia ran away, she took some valuable jewelry with her.”

  “We didn’t find any jewelry in her room.” Frank absently began to rub the bridge of his nose. His head was starting to ache, and his eyelids felt like they were lined with gravel.

  “It may have been stolen, and the thief may have been the person who killed her.”

  Frank frowned again, this time because he was annoyed he hadn’t thought of that himself. He would have in another minute, of course. He was just tired. “You know what this jewelry looked like?”

  “No, but I’m sure the family can give you a description. They may even have paste copies of the pieces. People sometimes have their jewelry copied so they can wear the fakes and keep the real ones safely locked up. If you find out who pawned her jewelry, you’ll probably find her killer.”

  “Unless...” Frank muttered, thinking aloud.

  “Unless what?”

  Frank didn’t particularly want to share his thoughts with her, but he was too tired to get into an argument about it. “Unless she sold them herself. To get money to live on. Would she have had any money of her own otherwise?”