Murder on St. Mark's Place

by Victoria Thompson

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not like George was in love with her or anything,” Lisle explained. She sounded almost as if she were defending him. “He just ... he wanted to...”

  “She’d let him do it,” Hetty said baldly when Lisle couldn’t find the proper words. “He wanted to do it some more, but Gerda was finished with him once she got the hat.”

  “Was Gerda fickle?” Sarah asked.

  The girls gave her a blank stare, not understanding.

  “Did she often change her mind about which man she liked best?” Sarah tried.

  “She never liked any of them,” Bertha said. “Not really.”

  Lisle nodded her agreement. “She never cared for anybody much. She just went with anyone who could show her some fun.”

  “She liked a man who’d treat her,” Hetty added. “The more he’d spend on her, the better she liked him.”

  “And she’d found someone more generous than George, so naturally, he was angry,” Sarah said. “Do you know George’s last name or where he lives?”

  “He wouldn’t kill anyone,” Lisle said too quickly, and Sarah remembered that Lisle had also taken a gift from him. That meant she’d had a relationship with him, too. Did Lisle have tender feelings for him? If so, she’d better tread softly.

  “I didn’t say I thought he was the killer,” Sarah said. “But maybe he would remember who the other man was or know his name. We need to question everyone who might know anything at all. It’s the only way we’ll find Gerda’s killer before he kills someone else.”

  This sobered them instantly. After a moment Lisle said, “I never heard George’s last name.”

  “I think he said Smith, but that’s probably a lie,” Hetty said. “Sometimes they don’t tell you their real names.”

  Sarah could believe that. She wrote “George Smith” with a question mark. “What else do you know about him?”

  “He sells ladies notions to the stores in town. Siegel-Cooper, Ehrichs, Simpson-Crawford, Adams & Co., and O’Neils,” Hetty said, naming all the big department stores on Sixth Avenue. “At least he claimed he did,” she added.

  “He had nice things in his sample case, that’s certain,” Lisle said. Sarah thought she sounded wistful.

  “Have you seen him lately?” Sarah asked.

  The girls tried to remember. “I don’t think so,” Bertha finally decided. The others agreed.

  “He ain’t been around since Gerda...” Lisle didn’t have to finish the thought.

  “Please let me know if you see him in any of the dance halls, won’t you?” Sarah asked. “And it wouldn’t hurt to ask around and find out if anyone knows more about him.”

  They looked grim now. Plainly, they didn’t relish the role of detective the way Sarah did.

  “Do you know any of the other girls who were killed?” she asked. “Well enough to know who their male companions might have been?”

  They considered.

  “I used to see Luisa at the dances sometimes,” Hetty allowed.

  The others weren’t sure. Obviously, they weren’t too interested in which other females attended the dances.

  “Do you know any of their families?” Sarah asked. “Maybe you could introduce me.”

  “Why would you want to meet them?” Lisle asked.

  “To find out what men they knew in common.”

  The girls looked at her pityingly. “Their families ain’t likely to know such a thing,” Lisle said. “You’d best ask their friends. Like us, that’s who’d know.”

  They were right, of course.

  “Do you know any of their friends, then?” she asked with a smile.

  Two MORE DAYS passed before Malloy came in response to the note she’d sent him. She was sitting in her backyard, savoring the cooler evening breeze and feeling awful because she’d lost a baby that afternoon. The cord had been wrapped around his throat, and he’d suffocated before ever seeing the world. Sarah knew there was nothing she could have done, no way she could have known or prevented it from happening, but she still hated failure. The mother had been inconsolable. She’d lost another one before this, too, a baby born before its time and too small to live. She had placed all her hopes on this one since she’d managed to carry it to term. The babe had been perfectly formed, too. All his fingers and toes and a face like an angel. But dead. Sarah had tried every trick she knew to revive him, but to no avail.

  When she heard someone knocking on her door, she rose wearily, praying it wasn’t someone summoning her to another birth. She didn’t think she could face another possible tragedy today. Which made her actually happy to see Malloy on her front stoop.

  He looked as formidable as ever in his wrinkled suit and bowler hat. His shirt needed a fresh collar. She thought of her father, always impeccably dressed. Felix Decker considered himself a force in the city, a man to be reckoned with because he had money and power. Sarah imagined he wouldn’t last five minutes if Malloy decided to give him the third degree. The thought cheered her a little.

  “Malloy, come in, and you’d better have some information. You kept me waiting long enough.”

  “It’s always a pleasure to see you, too, Mrs. Brandt,” he replied, and she thought she caught a twinkle in his eye as he passed her.

  “I hope you let Mrs. Elsworth see you coming in here,” she said, closing the door behind him. “She’s a great admirer of yours.”

  “I doubt anybody comes in here without that old bat seeing them,” Malloy said sourly, removing his hat. His dark hair was mussed, and he made an attempt to smooth it with his fingers, making it worse.

  “Let’s sit outside where it’s cooler,” she suggested. “I didn’t have a chance to get any lemons today, so all I’ve got to offer is water or coffee.”

  “Water,” Malloy said, probably thinking as she did that it was too hot for coffee, even though a freak storm the day before had dropped the temperature sixteen degrees in just a short while.

  When they were seated at the table on her back porch, he reached into his coat and pulled out a small notebook. Sarah already had her notes in front of her.

  “These girls knew a lot of men,” he said.

  “All we have to do is figure out which ones they all knew,” Sarah reminded him.

  “Except they might not have known the man’s real name. Or maybe their friends didn’t know they’d met the fellow or—”

  “Stop being so discouraging, Malloy! Just show me the names you’ve gotten.”

  “I wouldn’t think I’d need to show you anything, Mrs. Brandt. You’ve probably done more investigating than I have on this case.”

  “What do you mean?” Sarah asked, trying to sound innocent.

  “You know what I mean. By the time I found some of these people, they’d already talked to you.”

  “I was only trying to help. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find all the girls’ friends.”

  “You could’ve just told me who they were.”

  “I was also trying to save you some time.”

  He gave her one of his looks. “Then you should’ve told me to stop investigating. I wasted a lot of time following in your footsteps.”

  He didn’t seem too annoyed, though. He was only pretending. How and when she had become an expert on Malloy’s moods, she had no idea. “Stop complaining, Malloy. I know you talked to a lot of people I didn’t. Just as I talked to people you didn’t. Let’s see your list.”

  Malloy opened his notebook and handed it to her, then slid her papers over so he could look at them in turn.

  Malloy’s handwriting was surprisingly small and neat. “You wrote descriptions of the men,” Sarah observed.

  “A lot of them don’t tell the girls their last names. Do you know how many men there are in the city named Frank? I didn’t want you thinking I was the killer just because my name turned up on the list.”

  Sarah looked at him in amazement. His expression was bland, and he was pretending to study her list. Since
when had he developed a sense of humor?

  “That’s a good idea,” she admitted. “The descriptions, I mean. That way we’d know immediately if any of these fellows with the same names are the same men.”

  “Except there aren’t a lot of men with the same names.”

  Sarah had noticed this also. “I made a chart, you see?” she said, pointing to a piece of paper on which she had made four columns, one for each of the dead girls. In each column, she had listed the names of all the men their friends had mentioned. She hadn’t done as thorough an investigation as Malloy, of course. She hadn’t questioned any friends of Eva Bower, for instance, because the girls hadn’t known her. Luisa Isenberg had been fairly easy since she worked at Faircloths and the girls knew her friends. She’d found only a few people who knew Fredrika Lutz. Sarah picked up a pencil and began filling in her chart with the names Malloy had gleaned from his interviews. When she was finished, she made a startling discovery.

  “There isn’t one single name that appears on all four lists!”

  “That would make this job easy, Mrs. Brandt. If it was that easy, they wouldn’t need someone with my abilities to solve cases,” he told her smugly.

  Sarah had to admit he was probably right, even though she could see it gave him great satisfaction that she knew it. “All right, Mr. Detective Sergeant, what do we do now?”

  He gloated for a moment, but only for a moment. “We pick out the names that occur most often. Then I find the men—or as many of them as I can—and ask them where they were when these girls were murdered.”

  “They’re hardly likely to remember,” Sarah pointed out. “Except for Gerda, the killings happened weeks and even months ago.”

  “You’re right. The average person won’t remember where he was on a particular evening even just a week ago, at least not without giving the manner some serious thought. But the killer will know exactly where he was on those evenings. Unless he’s very clever, he’ll make up alibis for those evenings. He’ll pretend to remember exactly where he was those nights and give me an elaborate story to explain it.”

  Sarah was amazed. “So being clever can be a trap in itself.”

  “If the police are even more clever.”

  He was enjoying this too much. “But what if the killer is very smart, too. What if he’s smart enough to know he shouldn’t be able to remember where he was on a particular night three months ago?”

  “Killers aren’t that smart, Mrs. Brandt. If they were, they wouldn’t be killers.”

  Sarah certainly hoped he was right, but so far the killer had behaved with unusual intelligence. He’d chosen girls whose deaths would excite no interest in the police and who moved in social circles where they encountered numerous unfamiliar males. He’d killed them far enough apart that no one noticed the connection between the deaths until now, and that was only by accident. He may even have given his victims a false name or made certain the victims’ friends didn’t see them together. If no one knew they were acquainted, then no one could name him as a suspect. But Malloy had said killers weren’t that smart, or they wouldn’t be killers in the first place. She clung to that.

  Looking over the list, she saw the name George was on three of the lists. “I don’t know what he looks like, but remember I told you that Gerda’s friends said a man name George was the one who gave her a new hat right before she died. I just found out he also got angry when she danced with another man right before she was killed.”

  “Jealousy is sometimes a motive for murder, but in this case, I’m not so sure.”

  “This man must have some reason for killing these girls. Maybe he imagines himself in love with them, and when they take up with someone else, he gets insanely jealous and kills them out of revenge.”

  “Maybe,” was all Malloy would give her. “Do you know this George’s last name?”

  “The girls said they thought it was Smith. They did say they weren’t sure it was his real name, though,” she added at his skeptical expression.

  “George Smith. That narrows it down to about a thousand men in the city.”

  Sarah ignored his sarcasm. “He sells ladies’ notions to the big department stores. He has a sample case, and from what I understand, when a girl allows him, uh, certain liberties, he offers her a gift from its contents.”

  She’d embarrassed him, although he was trying valiantly not to show it. The flush crawled up his neck, however, betraying him. “Is that all it takes now? A bit of ribbon or a pair of gloves?” He was appalled.

  “I’m sure it takes more than that. Gerda got a hat, don’t forget.”

  “And a pair of red shoes. Did this George buy them for her?”

  “The girls didn’t think so. Seems Gerda took up with another man right before she died, but they never saw him. He spent money on her rather freely, so she gave George the gate. That’s when George got angry. I think you’d do well to question him, at least.”

  Malloy just grunted and continued to look over the list. Sarah wished she’d gotten descriptions for the men on her list. She hadn’t even thought to ask for a description of George. It seemed so obvious now that she’d need to know what he looked like. Or rather that Malloy would.

  He was making a new list of the names that occurred on three of the lists. A good place to start, she reasoned, when she heard the gate open.

  “Oh, Mrs. Brandt, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you had company.” Mrs. Elsworth didn’t look a bit sorry. In fact, she looked as satisfied as a cat with its head in the cream pitcher. “Good evening, Detective Sergeant.”

  Malloy rose reluctantly to his feet as Mrs. Elsworth made her way through the flowers to the back-porch steps. “Good evening,” he replied without the slightest trace of warmth.

  “Oh, Mrs. Brandt, you’ll think me such a ninny, but this message came for you this morning, and I completely forgot about it.” She had a piece of paper in her hand that Sarah longed to snatch, but there was no point in being rude. Mrs. Elsworth would give it to her in due time. “I should’ve known,” she was saying. “I dropped a fork this morning. You know that saying, ‘knife falls, gentleman calls; fork falls, lady calls.’ ”

  Sarah didn’t know the saying, but she nodded anyway. “Are you saying a lady called for me?”

  “Oh, gracious, yes. I thought I’d said that. And she left this message.”

  “I hope it isn’t a message about a baby being born.” That would be a disaster.

  “Oh, no, of course not. I told her right away that you were out on a delivery, and heaven only knew when you’d return. Babies keep their own schedule, don’t you know. But she said it wasn’t about a baby, and she just wanted to leave a message. She didn’t look like the sort of person who usually calls on you, if you don’t mind my saying so, but she was such a little thing, I didn’t believe her to be dangerous. I let her come in and write you a note, and then I forgot all about it until just this moment.”

  At last she handed over the missive to Sarah, who unfolded it quickly. The spelling was poor, but she had no trouble deciphering the message. It was from Lisle. “One of Gerda’s friends saw George at a dance hall last night,” she told Malloy.

  When she looked up, Mrs. Elsworth was waiting expectantly. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Elsworth. This is a very important message. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss receiving it.”

  “I hope its being late didn’t do any damage,” she said with a worried frown.

  “None at all,” Sarah assured her. “Thank you so much for delivering it. You’ve been a big help.”

  Sarah was trying to dismiss her, but she didn’t want to be dismissed. She wanted to know what they were talking about, and she kept trying see what was on the papers scattered over Sarah’s table.

  “We don’t want to keep you from anything, Mrs. Elsworth,” Malloy said. His tone was unmistakable. He wanted her gone.

  Her face fell, making Sarah sorry. Mrs. Elsworth was lonely, and her life held little pleasure and absolutely no excitement. Shar
ing Sarah’s life was one of her few enjoyments. But Sarah couldn’t share this part of it. “If I don’t get a call tomorrow, perhaps you’ll come over for lunch,” she suggested, softening the rejection.

  That seemed to placate her somewhat. “I’ll make a pie,” she offered. “I’ll go to the market first thing tomorrow and see what fruit they have. Good night, Detective Sergeant. Such a pleasure to see you again.”

  Malloy did not return the compliment. He waited a few minutes after the gate had closed behind her to say, “Let me see the note.”

  The message was brief. Plainly, Lisle wasn’t used to writing formal letters. She had seen George at Harmony Hall the previous night and had come by before going to her job at Faircloths this morning to let Sarah know.

  “She says she told him to meet her again tonight,” Sarah said. “There’s a dance at the same place.”

  “Do they have dances every night?” Malloy asked, unable to comprehend such a thing.

  “It appears they do. And that’s just one hall. There are others all over the city.”

  Malloy looked up from the note. “You think this George is the killer, don’t you?”

  Sarah hoped he was. She wanted the killer caught quickly, before he could harm anyone else. “I think he may know something,” she allowed. “He was angry because Gerda had taken up with another man. Maybe he knows who that man was, at least.”

  Malloy sighed. “I suppose you want to go out right now and find him.”

  Sarah smiled sweetly. “Oh, no. The dance won’t start for at least another hour.”

  “YOU CAN’T GO in with me, you know,” Sarah said as they approached Harmony Hall. The usual assortment of flashily dressed young men were gathered on the walk at the bottom of the steps, surveying the young women as they arrived.

  Malloy cast her an impatient glance. “How am I supposed to question this George fellow if I don’t?”

  “I’m not sure. I think perhaps we should get Lisle to lure him outside. In any case, he can’t see you first. I’m afraid you’re just too intimidating, Malloy, and besides, you don’t look like you belong in a place like this. You’ll frighten away all the patrons.”