“You’re sure it was Saint Anselm’s?”
“No, I’m not sure, Detective. It could have been Saint Patrick’s because she liked to go there, too, but I’m thinking it was Saint Anselm’s that day.”
“Then what happened?”
“Mr. Nolan came at around nine o’clock, like he always did. You could have set your pocket watch by that man. What was different about that night, and why I remember it, was he paid to buy Sally Lynn’s time for the whole night. That’s expensive. He’d only done it a couple of times before. Sally Lynn didn’t much like the idea, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Clients make that kind of arrangement with Madame, and she doesn’t allow for any arguing.”
“Go on.” Hunter’s voice betrayed suppressed excitement. Ned Hayes hadn’t taken another bite out of his hot cross bun since Big Brenda mentioned Saint Anselm’s.
“He spent the night, just like he paid for, and there wasn’t any trouble. Sally Lynn came down to the kitchen to take him up a tray the next morning. Coffee, eggs, and toast. I put a dish of marmalade I make from Seville oranges on the tray.”
“What time did he leave?”
“Earlier than most gentlemen who buy a girl for the night. About eight o’clock. Sally Lynn said he had to be at Saint Patrick’s before the rest of his family got there. She was angry about something, and it wasn’t like her to get riled up over nothing. I think she was trying to get up the courage to talk to Madame Jolene about him again, but I don’t believe she ever did. I’d have heard.”
“Are you sure he was here all night on November tenth?”
“He paid for it.”
“Are you positive?”
“Mr. Hunter, if you don’t believe me, you just go ask Madame if you can take a look at her ledger. She writes down every client’s name and who he sees and what he pays for. When he comes and how long he stays. I’ve seen her mumbling and muttering over her accounts, as she calls them, and I know she never leaves anything or anybody out. You just ask her for the ledger. I doubt she’ll let you see it, but there’s no harm trying.”
*
Madame Jolene wouldn’t hand over her ledger, but she did open it to the page that listed the house’s clients and receipts for November 10, 1888, running her finger down the entries until she found what she was looking for.
“May we see that entry?” Ned Hayes requested.
Jolene shrugged her shoulders, but complied. “There,” she said, pointing to a notation midway down the page. “Joseph Nolan arrives at nine in the evening, pays for a night with Sally Lynn, and leaves the next morning, November eleventh.”
“Were there any other overnight clients that Saturday?” Before she could refuse to answer his question, Ned reached out and covered one of her hands with his own. “I know you don’t give out clients’ names, Jolene, but this is a murder I’m not sure we’ve solved yet. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t have to. And it may be that whatever you tell me doesn’t have to go any further.” He kept his hand on hers as she struggled to make up her mind. “You can trust me,” he promised.
“Only the banker’s boy, John Landers.” The finger skipped to another name. “Here he is. Spanish Lola. All night. Not the first time, either.” She tapped her polished fingernail on the page. “Here he is again last week, the night of December first into the next morning. He’s the one who fell against Sally Lynn’s door and burst it open. We wouldn’t have found her until the afternoon if he hadn’t tripped over the damn dog. We got him out of here before the police came. He hasn’t been back.”
“Can you show us November twenty-fourth? That’s another Saturday.” Hunter’s face settled into the mask all the best Pinkerton operatives learned to wear when a case began to jell. Wait, Allan had always counseled. Wait until you’re sure.
This time Madame Jolene relinquished the precious ledger, handing it to Ned Hayes before she leaned back against the small rolltop desk whose key she always wore in a hidden pocket sewn into her corset. “He didn’t do them all, did he?” she asked, though it wasn’t really a question. “Nolan was here the night the first girl was killed, so it had to have been someone else. He was with Sally Lynn two weeks later, too, though not for the whole night. That was a quick one. He was gone by eleven.”
“Don’t show this to anyone else,” Ned Hayes said. “Not yet.”
Madame Jolene took the ledger from him, reached behind her for the pot of black ink that stood beside a gold pen holder. Before they could stop her, she’d spilled enough ink on the November tenth page to blot out most of the entries. The proof that Joseph Nolan was almost certainly innocent of Nora Kenny’s murder was gone forever.
*
“I divided her clothes up among the rest of the girls. There’s nothing unusual about that. We do it whenever someone leaves or there’s a problem with paying what’s owed.” Madame Jolene was getting impatient. She had a sense of what Ned Hayes and Geoffrey Hunter were trying to prove, but they’d already taken up too much of her time and she didn’t see how looking through Sally Lynn’s wardrobe would help. Unfortunately, she knew Ned well enough from the old days to be sure he wouldn’t give up until she caved in and gave him what he wanted.
“How many girls got her clothes?” Ned asked.
“Four of them are the same size. Sweet Linda, Dotty, Marguerite, and Zelda. The rest took turns picking from Sally Lynn’s perfumes and jewelry and handkerchiefs, things like that. Nobody was greedy, Detective. Everyone liked Sally Lynn. It was more wanting a keepsake than anything else.”
“We’ll talk to the girls who got the clothing,” Geoffrey said. “Then we’ll work our way through the rest of them.”
“What exactly are you looking for?”
“I don’t think we know, Jolene,” Ned confessed. “But we’ll recognize it when we see it. If we do.”
“You can go sit at Big Brenda’s kitchen table. I’ll send them in to you one by one.”
“Tell them each to bring everything they have that belonged to Sally Lynn. No matter what it is. They’re not to leave anything out.”
Ned Hayes’s hearing wasn’t acute enough to register what Madame Jolene whispered under her breath. It was just as well.
Dotty was a well-built blonde with a broad, sincere-looking smile and a vacuous look in her beautiful blue eyes. She took a few moments to arrange a pile of nightgowns and stockings on the scrubbed wood of the table. “No one else wanted these,” she explained. “They’re a little worn, but I like that. The silk feels soft on my skin.” She ran a plump white hand over the topmost gown, sighing with pleasure as the silk rippled beneath her fingers. “We only ever had cotton where I grew up. Real cheap cotton with stickers in it that scratched something fierce.”
“Where are you from, Dotty?” Geoffrey asked softly. He thought her accent told the whole story, but he wanted to be sure.
“Alabama.”
“Sharecroppers?”
Dotty shrugged her shoulders. “That’s why I left.”
“Did Sally Lynn ever tell you whether she bought all these gowns herself or if someone gave them to her?” Ned asked. He’d recognized the accent, too, but he’d heard too many stories like Dotty’s.
“She never said anything to me about them. Sally Lynn could be closemouthed when she wanted to.”
“Is there anything you can remember that she might have said about any of her clients?” Geoffrey looked at each gown’s label, shook it out, held it up, refolded it.
“Madame Jolene has a rule about that. We don’t talk about them unless we want to find ourselves out in the street. Nobody is stupid enough to fancy that.”
It was the same with Sweet Linda and Zelda, piles of clothing that told them nothing. Sally Lynn was friendly with everyone who worked in the house, but she confided in no one.
“You’d be surprised,” Sweet Linda said, “how many whores don’t ever tell the truth about themselves. When you get a curious client, and especially if he’s a big tipper, you just make up whatever you think he wan
ts to hear. It’s a lot easier that way, and it gives you something to think about while he’s getting on with it.”
“I’m beginning to think this is a waste of time, Geoff,” Ned said. They were alone for a few minutes, waiting for the last of the four girls who had been given Sally Lynn’s clothing. Big Brenda had left the coffee pot on the stove for them and he poured himself another cup. It didn’t taste anything like the Louisiana coffee Tyrus brewed, but at least it was keeping him awake.
“I only picked out a couple of things,” Marguerite declared as soon as she came into the kitchen. She deposited a black and white bundle on the table. “Well, three actually, though they all go together.” She unfolded a black, high necked, long sleeved dress, a white apron edged with lace, and a small, frilly cap that was obviously meant to be pinned atop a bun of piled up curls. “It’s new. She bought it for a client, but I don’t think she ever wore it.”
“Do you know the name of the client?” Geoffrey asked. Something about the maid’s costume was making the hairs on the back of his neck tingle.
“We never talk about clients,” Marguerite said. “Madame Jolene has a rule about that, and she’s real strict about enforcing it.”
“What makes you think this maid’s outfit is new?” Ned was running his fingers into the skirt pockets, but finding nothing.
“Sally Lynn did tell me she’d gotten it the day before Thanksgiving. She was afraid she’d ripped or dirtied the apron because she said someone pushed her down some steps and the paper it was wrapped in broke open. I was going to help her with the sewing, if she needed it, but when we looked, everything was all right. There weren’t any tears.”
“Do you remember if she said where she was when she got pushed?”
“She went there all the time.”
“Where is that?”
“Saint Anselm’s.”
“And did she tell you where she bought the uniform?”
“I didn’t ask her, but there’s only one shop around here that sells domestic service uniforms and does the alterations right on the premises. She had to have it let out around the waist.”
“Do you know the name of the shop?”
Marguerite stood up and gathered together the three pieces of the maid’s uniform they’d been examining. “I can’t tell you any more than I already have.” Her face flushed red and her fingers were trembling.
“She knows the name and location of the shop, but she won’t tell us.” Ned stared at Marguerite’s retreating back. When she’d reached for the uniform, he’d put his hand on top of it, and she’d backed away, leaving it behind as she spun on her heel and walked quickly out.
“She may have availed herself of the special services performed in the back room,” contributed Big Brenda, bringing a basket of root vegetables into the kitchen from the winter larder. “I heard enough to know that you frightened her. She won’t answer any more questions.”
“What is it, Miss Brenda?” Geoffrey asked.
“Girls in this profession always need the help of a certain kind of woman, no matter how careful they are. I can’t think of a one who hasn’t got caught sooner or later.”
“Are you saying the uniform shop is a front for an abortionist?”
“No, it’s a genuine business right enough,” Big Brenda said. “A mother and son run it, but I heard rumors that the mother passed on not too long ago. She was the one who took care of the girls who came to her. She had a daughter who did the same, but I don’t know where the daughter lives. Or even what her married name is. It’s a dangerous profession for everyone involved. If there’s ever even a hint the coppers might be getting ready to pay a visit, they shut down or move.”
Ned handed Big Brenda his notebook and a pencil.
“Madame Jolene isn’t going to like this,” she muttered, but she wrote a name and an address. “Take the uniform with you. See those two letters stitched into the seam of the skirt? That’s their mark.”
Big Brenda wasn’t foolish enough to mislead Ned Hayes with phony information, but she thought it was a shame to set him and Mr. Hunter on the trail of someone who really only ever helped girls who got caught and had no other alternative.
Helped or killed them. The poor creatures were willing to take the risk, so where was the crime in that?
CHAPTER 30
Alice Nolan’s confession did not go as she had planned. Five decades of the rosary and the Stations of the Cross. That was it. She was too embarrassed to argue and too upset to be coherent. She’d done the best she could to make the priest believe she was contemplating the heinous crime of ending the life growing in her womb, but he hadn’t taken her seriously. He’d cut her off in mid-sentence, scolded her severely, and made her begin again. She hadn’t confessed properly, he told her. She hadn’t waited for the prayers that began the ritual, and then what she’d told him was a pack of lies. That invalidated the sacrament.
When she’d calmed down, they started over, and this time she made no mention of the fruits of fornication. The penance was for the great lie she had made up and her abuse of the sacrament; it wasn’t a fitting way to behave in church.
“Think of Our Saviour’s suffering as you make the Stations,” the priest said. “Place yourself beside His Blessed Mother at the foot of the cross. Make a firm resolution to sin no more.” He raised his hand in the ritual blessing. “Now make a good Act of Contrition.”
Just before the priest slid back the wood panel separating him from the penitent, he leaned closer to the screen that wasn’t fine meshed enough to conceal a sinner’s identity.
“Are you all right, Alice?” Father Brennan asked solicitously.
Too startled to hear herself called by name to be able to answer, Alice merely nodded.
“Don’t forget to make your Stations.”
*
Jerry Brophy gathered up the half dozen altar boy cassocks and surplices that needed mending or alterations. Every two weeks he put together a bundle for his brother-in-law to pick up when he delivered the previous order. The nuns who taught in the parish school saw to the priestly vestments. Made of pure silk and embroidered by skilled, dedicated fingers, they were not to be trusted to a lay person. But Neil always did a good job, and Bridget had insisted that her brother get the work instead of someone else. She’d always said that family could be counted on when nobody else could be trusted.
Father Brennan had stayed late today, but he was always slower than any other priest in the confessional. Jerry poked his head out of the sacristy. There came Brennan, skirts swishing along the red carpet that ran up the altar steps and pooling around him as he genuflected before the Host. Jerry approved of this Anglo-Irish priest. He was severe and short tempered enough to be worthy of his vocation and just on the ragged edge of going over into the kind of ecstatic and painful religious fervor you read about in The Lives of the Saints.
Jerry caught a glimpse of Alice Nolan huddled in one of the pews. Now what on earth did that timid little nothing of a girl have to confess?
“All ready then?” Father Brennan asked him, pointing to the neatly wrapped bundle on one of the chairs.
“Neil will be here in a few minutes, Father. He’s a very precise kind of person, never late.”
Father Brennan stepped back out onto the altar, just far enough to be able to look into the nave. He shook his head despairingly, then came back into the sacristy.
“Is it poor Alice Nolan, Father? She doted on her brother. What a terrible thing to have happen.”
“Father Mahoney has signed her papers to the Visitation and written a letter attesting to the sincerity of her intention, but I’ve got my doubts.”
“She acts more like a nun than some of the nuns over at the school.”
“She’ll have to stop pretending she’s someone she’s not if she’s going to make it at the Visitation.”
“What do you mean, Father?”
“Now she’s saying she’s pregnant when you and I both know it’s impossible,” Fat
her Brennan burst out. He was furious at Alice for trying to put one over on him and it wasn’t like he was revealing a sin told him under the sacred seal of the confessional. The girl had blurted it out before he’d made the sign of the cross to start the formal confession and then she’d continued babbling something about abortion until he finally told her to stop, catch her breath, and start again. “That wasn’t a confession, Alice,” he’d said. “It was a silly story you made up and I won’t dignify it by pretending to believe a word you said.”
The girl had told a lie, not a real sin, though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. He wondered if she’d snapped, the way women did sometimes when they couldn’t bear to face reality. He laid it all at Joseph Nolan’s door, and though he quickly said a prayer for the repose of that wicked soul, he couldn’t help but hope he was roasting away on the hottest griddle in Hell.
“It’s a joke she’s playing on you, Father.”
“If she tries something like that at the Visitation, they’ll send her home in a straitjacket, and then where will she be?” Father Brennan stormed off to the rectory, furious at himself for mentioning Alice Nolan at all to Jerry Brophy. He’d skated close to violating the sacred seal, but he was certain he hadn’t actually done it. He examined the circumstances again as he remembered them, decided he was blameless, and determined to put the whole incident out of his mind.
He had to watch his step in the underground passage that led to the rectory from the basement of the church where the crypt was. He was the only one of the three priests who used it regularly. Since he’d been brought up in Ireland, the damp and the darkness didn’t bother him. It was preferable to having to raise a hand in blessing to the red-haired man and his monster of a dog who seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the alleyway across the street.
*
“What did you tell them, Davey?”
“Just that the uniform they brought in was definitely from this shop, but they figured that out themselves from the initials on it. I don’t know why they bothered asking. They even knew who bought it.”
Lies That Comfort and Betray Page 31