He looked down at his boots, as if seeking wisdom. When his gaze met hers again, his eyes were bleak. “I think I’ve found out who this Will character is.”
“Who?”
He didn’t reply. Instead he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a cheap cardboard photograph cover. It looked just like the one she’d found among Gerda’s things, the one that held the picture of her on the Shoot-the-Chutes ride. He handed it to her.
She opened the cover, and for a moment she thought it was the same picture. In the dim light of the church, it might well have been. The boat was the same, and it was filled with people, just like the other photograph. But closer inspection revealed that the occupants of the boat were different. She tilted the picture, trying to catch the light. After a moment she found Lisle. She was trying to look frightened but anyone could she was having the time of her life. She was clinging to a man’s arm, and unlike the man in Gerda’s photograph, this fellow was looking up, his face full to the camera.
He was Dirk Schyler.
12
“IT’S DIRK,” SHE SAID STUPIDLY. HER MIND couldn’t quite grasp the significance.
“Yeah, it’s him all right. And he’s with that girl, Lisle.”
She still wasn’t certain what it meant.
“Turn the picture over,” he suggested.
She turned the cover over and found nothing on the back. He took it impatiently from her hands, pulled the photograph from its frame, and handed it back to her. She recognized Lisle’s handwriting from the note she had left with Mrs. Elsworth. The words were scrawled in pencil, but they might as well have been written in blood: Me and Will at Coney Island.
“Dear heaven,” Sarah breathed, and then she couldn’t breathe anymore. She felt as if all the air in the church had suddenly evaporated.
She could see Dirk’s face, laughing and smirking at her efforts to find the man named Will out at Coney Island. She remembered how he’d stood there winking at the photographer when she’d inquired about him. Had the photographer recognized him and just pretended not to?
Then she remembered how he’d kissed her, pressing his mouth against hers so insistently, and how angry he’d been when she’d resisted his advances. Someone made a small, moaning sound, and she vaguely realized it was she.
“Sit down,” Malloy said gruffly, laying one of his beefy hands on her shoulder and forcing her down onto the pew.
Dirk had touched her. Dirk had kissed her. She felt unclean. She scrubbed the back of her hand across her lips in a vain effort to wipe away the memory of him.
Malloy, who missed nothing, said, “Did you kiss him?” His voice held equal measures of disbelief and disgust.
“Not willingly,” she informed him, equally disgusted.
“He tried to force himself on you?” Was that outrage? Malloy hardly seemed capable of such a thing, so Sarah must be imagining it.
“He tried to steal a kiss when we were in the tunnel on one of the rides,” she recalled, feeling sick to her stomach at the memory. “I pushed him away and told him to stop, and he did.”
“He didn’t get angry?” Malloy was sitting beside her now, leaning close, watching her face as if for clues.
Sarah tried to remember every detail. “I couldn’t see his expression because it was dark, but he sounded angry, at least at first. Not for long, though. He said something about my being a lady, and how he didn’t encounter many real ladies. He’d forgotten himself, he said.” She looked into Malloy’s dark eyes, searching for some reassurance. “I made him angry, Malloy. If he was the killer, then he would have killed me, too, wouldn’t he?”
She wanted so desperately to be right. She needed to be right, because if she wasn’t, then a man she’d known all her life was a killer.
But Malloy shook his head. “All the other girls let him have his way. He didn’t even have to force them. That’s when he beat them to death.”
“But we still don’t know for certain that Dirk is the one who killed them,” Sarah reminded him almost desperately, “even if he really is the man they all knew as Will.”
“I believe I’ve mentioned that before,” Malloy reminded her, although she could see it gave him no pleasure to be right. He wanted Dirk to be the killer, and not just because he wanted the killer caught. He wanted Dirk especially to be the guilty one, because he didn’t like him. “We need some proof.”
Sarah remembered what she’d learned yesterday. “I met with Bertha and Hetty yesterday. They said Lisle knew a man named Will, but she’d stopped seeing him because he hit her.”
“When was this?”
“It must have been earlier this summer, just after Coney Island opened on Memorial Day,” she guessed, glancing at the photograph she still held. “They said she let him ... let him have his way. Then he got angry and called her a whore, and he hit her. She fought back, though. Apparently, she’s stronger than she appears. Was stronger,” she corrected herself, her voice catching. “Somehow she managed to get away.”
“Did Gerda know about this?”
“That’s the strange part. They said she did, which should have made her wary of him, but they also said she was the kind of girl who’d think something like that would never happen to her. She may not have told the others the name of her new benefactor because she didn’t want a lecture from Lisle.”
Malloy considered this for a moment. “It fits what we know about the killer. Maybe he gets mad at women who give in to him because he thinks they’re immoral or something and deserve to die. But why would he have gone after Lisle again? He must’ve known she’d be wary of him.”
“Oh, dear heaven!” Sarah exclaimed, covering her mouth as if she could stop the words that may have led to Lisle’s death.
“What is it?” he demanded, his voice too loud for a church.
“I... I led him to her!”
“What do you mean?”
“I ... He was asking me about the crimes. I thought he was just interested!” she cried in her own defense.
Malloy nodded. “Go on. What did you tell him?”
“He asked me ... No, he told me! He was the one who came up with the theory that Gerda hadn’t told anyone her new beau’s name because she wanted to keep the others from knowing who he was. He suggested they might want to steal him or maybe that Gerda had already stolen him from one of the others. He knew that’s what had happened!”
“Maybe,” Malloy reminded her. “What else?”
“He asked me ... He wanted to know which of Gerda’s friends was most likely to have had a beau that Gerda would want to steal. I told him Lisle. Oh. Malloy, I led him right to her!” she wailed.
“We don’t know that for sure,” Malloy said with a kindness that surprised her. He was trying to assuage her guilt, but it wasn’t working.
“Yes, we do! I killed her, Malloy, just as surely as if I beat her myself!” The tears were welling in her eyes, hot as lava, burning and stinging and begging to be shed.
“Don’t be a fool! He would’ve figured it out himself eventually. Or else he would’ve just killed every girl who might’ve led us to him. You probably saved some lives by giving him Lisle’s name.”
She couldn’t bear his vindication, and she certainly didn’t deserve it. She’d caused Lisle’s death, and she would carry the knowledge to her grave. The only hope she had for retaining her sanity was to put a noose around the killer’s neck.
“What can we do now?” she asked. “Will you take him in and question him?”
“Not likely, a man in his position,” Malloy said. “If I did and couldn’t prove he was the killer, he’d have my job. More important, he’d be free to keep on killing, because he’d know the other detectives wouldn’t dare detain him again either, for fear of what he’d do to them.”
“Then we need some proof,” Sarah said, her mind racing as she considered and rejected one idea after another. “Maybe some of the other friends of the dead girls would recognize him.”
“And what
if they did? We already know he knew the victims. Unless one of the friends saw him committing a murder, which we know they didn’t, then he’d still go free.”
Sarah felt the old frustrations welling up, the helpless, powerless feeling she’d had when her husband Tom was killed and no one could find his murderer. Behind that came the wave of guilt and shame for her part in all this. “Then I’ll get him to confess,” she said.
Malloy reared back at that. “And exactly how will you do that?” he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
“I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out. I was thinking maybe I’d take him back to Coney Island. He’s never killed anyone out there, so I should be safe.”
“Are you crazy?” Plainly, he believed she was. She’d never heard that tone in his voice before. It sounded almost like panic.
“I assure you, I’m perfectly sane. You’ve already said the usual methods won’t work with Dirk. He’s too rich and powerful for you to take him into the Mulberry Street cellar and beat him into confessing. He isn’t likely to come to you voluntarily to clear his conscience, either. That leaves us no other choice but to trick him.”
“Mrs. Brandt, you’re not a detective,” he reminded her with more than a hint of condescension. “You couldn’t trick a man like that.”
She gave him a disdainful glance. “Women of my social class are trained to trick men like Dirk Schyler from the time we can talk, Mr. Malloy. All I need is some time to decide the best method to use.”
He was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before. “And exactly how will you do that?”
He still didn’t believe her capable of such a deception. He obviously knew far too little about upper-class society.
“First of all, I have to figure out why he’s doing these terrible things.” She waited a moment while the ideas formed in her mind. “Unfortunately, it’s not all that difficult to imagine. Dirk has been a slave to social conventions all his life. That sort of constraint can drive people to do strange things. It drove me to become a midwife,” she confessed with a shrug. “I think it’s probably the reason he chose to spend his time with shop girls. With them he didn’t have to worry about all the rules that he’d been taught to obey, and he certainly didn’t have to observe any sexual restraint,” she went on, thinking aloud.
“Why not just go to a prostitute then, if that’s all he’s interested in?”
Sarah considered. “Possibly he has some compunction about using the services of prostitutes. Perhaps he doesn’t like the lack of romance he encountered with them. But the shop girls were different. They actually liked him, or at least pretended to, and they willingly granted their favors in exchange for trinkets instead of money. This would remove some of the taint. That was what he wanted, but when he got what he wanted, for some reason he couldn’t accept it. Perhaps he felt he had to punish these girls for not adhering to the stringent rules of morality he’d been taught. He might even believe they deserved to die. If I could get him to admit that ...”
“And what if you can’t? What if he decides you know too much and kills you, too?” He was furious or outraged or perhaps simply exasperated. She was too distracted to figure it out, and besides, it didn’t matter.
“He won’t kill me, Malloy, because you’ll be following us, ready to arrest him the instant he admits what he’s done.”
THIS WAS CRAZY. The whole idea was crazy. Sarah Brandt was crazy for thinking of it, and Frank was crazy for agreeing.
Not that he’d had any choice. She was going ahead with her plan whether Frank helped her or not. Guilt was a terrible thing, and he knew she felt guilty for causing Lisle’s death. Maybe it was even a little bit her fault, but she didn’t deserve a death sentence for it. If Dirk Schyler really was the killer, that was what she might very well get, too.
Frank had gone over and over it in his mind. He didn’t like Schyler. He rarely liked men of that class, probably because men of that class usually treated him like Irish scum. Schyler was less discreet about it than most, which made it even easier to hate him.
And then there was the matter of him taking liberties with Mrs. Brandt. She wasn’t the kind of woman men took liberties with. He’d known that the first time he’d set eyes on her, and his opinion had been confirmed many times since then. When he thought of Schyler forcing himself on her, he wanted to commit murder himself.
Frank wanted Schyler to be the killer so he could cart him off to prison and watch the bastard sizzle in that fancy electrical chair. What he didn’t know was whether he was letting his personal feelings color his professional judgment. Was he overlooking some important clue in his quest to lock Schyler up? Was he damning an innocent man just because he happened to be obnoxious?
Frank had a lot of time to consider all this while he paced at the Coney Island trolley station and waited for Sarah Brandt to appear with Schyler. They’d discussed various methods of surveillance, and they’d quickly discarded the idea of having Frank follow them out from the city. Dirk knew what he looked like, and he’d be hard to miss in the close confines of the trolley. So Frank had assigned Broughan the task of overseeing their trip out. He only hoped Broughan was sober enough not to lose sight of them. Frank didn’t think Schyler had any reason to kill Sarah Brandt just yet, but he hadn’t really had any understandable reasons to kill anyone else, either. Frank didn’t want to take any chances.
He scratched absently at the false beard he wore in an effort to keep Schyler from recognizing him. He doubted the beard would fool anyone, though. His best bet was simply to stay out of sight, which was what he planned to do most of the time. Now, if Mrs. Brandt could be trusted not to go looking for him in the crowds and tip Schyler off that they were being followed, he would be fine.
He’d been pacing for over an hour, watching trolleys arrive and disgorge their passengers without seeing his quarry. Another one was approaching the station, and Frank stepped back inside the building, where he could watch without being seen.
He saw her at once, even before she got off. He’d seen her wear that hat many times, but he probably would have recognized her no matter what she was wearing. She was the kind of woman who stood out in a crowd. Something about the way she carried herself. He’d never known another like her. Not even Kathleen, with all her sass, would have gone after a killer all alone. At what point did courage become folly? Frank only knew he was not the proper person to judge such a distinction.
Schyler looked the part of gentleman-about-town. He was dressed as if he was going to the races with his society friends. Sarah Brandt looked just as she always did. Was her smile too bright? Perhaps a little strained? Would Schyler notice? If he was the killer, he’d miss nothing. Frank had to resist the urge to rush out there and confront him, which told him more than he wanted to know about his feelings for Mrs. Brandt. Usually, he had all the patience in the world waiting for the trap to spring on his prey. But usually, he didn’t particularly care about the fate of the bait. Today he cared very much indeed.
Another reason to hope Schyler was the killer. As soon as they locked up the man who’d been murdering all these young women, Frank would no longer have to encounter Sarah Brandt. He could return to his solitary existence and everything would be as it was before.
He only wished he believed that.
He watched the two of them as they made their way out of the trolley and onto the platform. Schyler offered her his arm, and Frank felt his hackles rise. But she pretended not to notice and pointed at something instead of tucking her arm into his. They started off toward the park. Did Schyler look suspicious? Had she given herself away already? Frank no longer trusted his instincts.
Waiting until they were almost out of sight, Frank finally stepped out of the station. That’s when he saw Broughan stumbling down the steps of the trolley. He was drunk and making no effort to hide it. Frank wanted to thrash him. What if Sarah had needed help? What if she’d asked the wrong question and angered Schyler? What use would a drunk have be
en?
Frank wanted to slam Broughan up against the wall and ask him those questions rather forcefully, but if he did, he’d lose Sarah in the crowd. He settled for giving him a black look before setting out after them.
They had paid their admission and gone into the park. Frank waited until he saw what direction they were headed before doing the same. The laughter and screams of delight from the crowd mocked him as he made his way into the throng. He’d never felt less carefree in his life.
SARAH SMILED AT Dirk, although her face felt stiff. She hadn’t expected to be frightened. Not that she was afraid exactly. Dirk wouldn’t harm her here, not with hundreds of people around, and certainly not with Malloy nearby. But she was nervous. Anxious. Unable to relax. Her mission was so important, and one false word could spoil everything. She should have let Malloy talk her out of this. He’d certainly tried hard enough. He was probably right, too. Even if Dirk was the killer, he was hardly likely to confess it to Sarah, no matter how clever she might be.
“What are we looking for today?” Dirk asked pleasantly as they strolled through the park. “Do you have more information on this fellow you think killed the girl ... ? What was her name? Gilda?”
“Gerda,” Sarah supplied, wondering if he could really have forgotten. “No,” she said. “Today I want to forget all about killers and their victims. I just want to have a good time.”
“You chose an odd destination for our outing, then,” Dirk pointed out. “I could have taken you to a museum or to dinner or a show or—”
“Don’t you ever get tired of doing the proper things, Dirk?” she asked, hoping she sounded as rebellious as she should. “I do. Sometimes I think I’Il scream if I have to sit through another dinner party.” Not that she attended many anymore, but Dirk wouldn’t know that.
He arched an eyebrow at her. “Most women I know would faint to hear one of their own talking like that.”
“Most women you know?” she repeated skeptically. “Probably not that girl I saw you with that day we first met here.”
Murder on St. Mark's Place Page 22