He did look genuinely sorry, but Frank wasn’t sorry at all. Letitia Blackwell and her lover had no alibi at all for the murder.
FRANK WOULD HAVE preferred being at Sarah Brandt’s house that evening, eating something her neighbor Mrs. Ellsworth had baked, instead of standing on a gaslit street corner waiting for Peter Dudley to come out of the bank where he worked. A discreet inquiry had told him that the clerks would be finished at nine o’clock.
The junior-level clerks in this establishment were scheduled to work in the mornings and then to return in late afternoon to count money and do the bookkeeping after closing. It was a schedule that left little time for amusements, Frank supposed, unless you spent your free afternoons in an opium den with someone else’s wife.
A group of young men all dressed similarly in cheaply made suits and straw boaters came out of the building as the night watchman locked the doors behind them. They started off in the other direction, on their way someplace together, probably to have a few beers and some fun. Frank called Dudley’s name, and one of the men stopped and turned.
“Who is it?” he asked in alarm. “Who’s there?”
“I’d just like a word with you, Mr. Dudley. It’s about Mrs. Blackwell,” Frank said, knowing that would draw him.
“Who’s Mrs. Blackwell?” someone asked with interest. “Some rich widow you’re romancing?”
Others joined the teasing, hooting and making fun. Dudley didn’t even acknowledge them.
“I’ll see you fellows tomorrow,” he said, leaving them and coming cautiously toward Frank.
“Give Mrs. Blackwell our love,” one of them called, and the rest of them laughed uproariously as they went on their way.
Dudley approached cautiously, drawn by the mention of Letitia but still concerned for his own safety. When he was close enough for his features to be seen, Frank stared in amazement. He’d expected someone traditionally handsome, a man who could easily attract the attention of a romantic schoolgirl. Dudley was gangly and graceless, his face no more than ordinary. In the dim light, Frank couldn’t even make out the notorious red hair, which was mostly hidden under the straw boater.
“Who are you?” Dudley demanded when he was close enough to speak quietly but still out of arm’s reach. His fear was palpable.
“Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy,” he said. “I want to ask you some questions about Edmund Blackwell’s murder.”
“I don’t know anything about Edmund Blackwell,” he said, not reassured. Policemen could be even more dangerous than crooks if they took a dislike to you. “I never even met the man. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
He started to turn away, but Frank stopped him with a word. “You know his wife pretty well, though, don’t you?”
Dudley stopped and half turned back. “I don’t believe I do,” he tried, forgetting that it had been her name that drew him in the first place.
“She’ll be mighty surprised to hear that,” Frank said. “What with her having that red-haired baby and all.”
“Look, Mister…” He gestured helplessly.
“Malloy,” Frank supplied.
“Malloy. I will admit that I know Mrs. Blackwell. We met years ago, when I was teaching school in her hometown.”
“You more than know her, Dudley. She told me all about those visits to Mr. Fong’s opium den.”
Dudley gasped, his face a sickly color in the gaslight. “She told you about that? I don’t believe it!”
“I know everything except exactly how you killed Blackwell,” Malloy tried.
“I didn’t kill him!” Dudley exclaimed. “Who told you I did? They’re a liar!”
“No one had to tell me. You were the one with the most reason to want him out of the way. His wife, too. Did you plan it at the opium den? Tell me, did she talk you into it, or was it your own idea?”
“I didn’st! I swear it!”
“Are you saying you didn’t want him dead?” Frank asked in disbelief.
“Of course I did! We both did. But we couldn’t kill him, no matter how much we might’ve wanted to. That’s a sin!”
“Adultery is a sin, too, last I heard,” Frank said.
Dudley was visibly trembling. “We couldn’t help ourselves. You don’t know what it was like. We’ve loved each other for years, long before she even met Blackwell. And he was a terrible man. He treated her very badly.”
“He beat her, do you mean?” Frank was enjoying this. He hadn’t even had to lay hands on Dudley, and the man couldn’t tell him enough.
“Well, no, not beat her,” Dudley admitted reluctantly, “but he ignored her. He never took her anywhere or even spoke to her most of the time.”
“Some women would appreciate that in a husband,” Frank said wisely. “But not Mrs. Blackwell, I guess. It’s sure easy to see how she could be unhappy, though. Blackwell just made her live in that big fancy house, with servants to wait on her hand and foot, and gave her anything she wanted. And the only time she got out was to visit her lover every afternoon at an opium den.”
“It wasn’t like that!” Dudley protested.
“What was it like, then? Is there something I don’t know?” Malloy was more than willing to listen, although he doubted Dudley had anything of substance to add to his current knowledge.
“He drove her to use the morphine again! He forced her to appear at those lectures of his so he could lure people into taking his treatments. All he thought about was money. He didn’t care that she was terrified of speaking in public. She begged him not to make her do it anymore, but he wouldn’t listen. The only way she could bear it was to use the morphine.”
“And how about you? Did you use the morphine with her? Was that why you met her at the opium den?”
“No! She wouldn’t let me. She’d gone through hell trying to stop using it the first time, and she didn’t want me to go through that, too. She made me swear I’d never touch that horrible stuff, and after seeing what it did to Letitia, I never wanted to.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Frank scoffed. “You spend half your life in a place where you have to buy the stuff as the price of being there at all, and you never even try it?”
“Letitia bought the morphine. No one there cared who used it,” Dudley explained frantically. He was sweating now, even though the evening was cool. “They never paid any attention to what we did at all!”
“I guess when you pay for a private room and close the door, you can do anything you want, no matter how depraved or immoral it is. Tell me, Dudley, does the morphine make a woman more willing? Is that why you helped her get it?”
“How dare you speak of Letitia that way!” he cried, outraged. “And I didn’t help her! She was already going to that place when I found her here. She couldn’t keep morphine at the house. Blackwell searched her rooms to make sure she wasn’t hiding it anywhere. She lived in constant terror of being found out.”
“And how tragic it would be for a woman’s husband to insist that she stop using morphine. Blackwell must have been a monster to want his wife free of that poison.”
“You can’t possibly understand! Letitia isn’t strong. She can’t bear things the way the rest of us can.”
“Is that why you picked her, Dudley? Because you thought she was weak?” Frank asked contemptuously.
“I didn’t pick her,” Dudley insisted. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean when you decided that you’d like to marry a woman with money so you wouldn’t have to work as a schoolmaster anymore. You saw pretty little Letitia Symington and figured if you seduced her, she’d have to marry you. Her father might not like it, but he’d come around once you were married and he didn’t have any other choice.”
“I love Letitia! I never thought… How could someone like you understand?” he asked, righteously indignant.
“You’re right, I can’t understand how a man could take advantage of a young woman’s innocence to trick her into betraying her family and running away i
n the middle of the night like a criminal.”
“She wanted to be with me! We were going to be married. That’s what she wanted. It was all her idea!”
“Of course she wanted it, after you’d ruined her for any other man. How could she want anything else?”
Dudley covered his face with his hands. If Frank hadn’t despised him so much, he might have felt sorry for him.
“What do you want from me?” Dudley asked brokenly, his voice muffled behind his fingers.
“I want you to tell me that you killed Edmund Blackwell so I can go back to investigating important crimes,” Frank said wearily.
“But I didn’st!” he cried, looking up again. “I’m not sorry that he’s dead, but I certainly would never have murdered him. I could never do such a thing!”
“Where were you the afternoon he died?” Frank asked.
He thought for a moment. “I was with Letitia. We were at Mr. Fong’s. He’ll vouch for us!”
“I already asked him. He never heard of you. He never heard of any of his clients. That’s how he stays in business.”
“But we were there! If he knows we want him to tell you that, he will. He must!”
“No, he doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t know if you were there or not. And even if you came in, he wouldn’t know how long you stayed or when you left. You could have gone out, killed Blackwell, and then come back.”
“But I didn’st!”
“I probably wouldn’t have been so annoyed with you for killing Blackwell if you hadn’t killed Calvin, too. That was stupid.”
Something that might have been recognition flickered across his face, but Frank couldn’t be sure. “Calvin? Calvin who?” he asked in apparent confusion.
“Calvin Brown,” Frank said, watching Dudley’s face closely in the lamplight for any more signs of recognition. “Eddie Brown’s son.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, defensive now. “What does this Calvin have to do with Blackwell and Letitia?”
“A lot, but I don’t think I have to tell you anything about it, do I?”
“Not unless you want me to know what it’s all about. Who is Eddie Brown? Was he one of Blackwell’s patients?”
Frank resisted the urge to remind him they were called “clients.” He doubted Dudley would find it amusing. “Let’s just say that he and Blackwell were very close, but I think you knew all about him, Dudley. I think that’s why you tried to make it look like Calvin had killed Blackwell.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he insisted again. “I’ve already told you everything I know. I have to go now. I have… an appointment. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you, Mr. Malloy.”
“So am I, Dudley,” Frank said. “But that’s all right. I’m sure I’ll see you again real soon.”
Dudley looked sickly again, but he didn’t let that slow him down. His long legs carried him quickly away, into the shadows of the night. He’d gotten off lucky, and he knew it. Frank could have slapped him around at the very least. At worst, he could have taken him to the station house and locked him up and given him the third degree until he was willing to confess to anything. In the past, Frank would have thought nothing of doing either of those things. In fact, he would have felt justified, whether he was convinced Dudley was the killer or not. But he no longer had the stomach for it. Now he was actually concerned about making a mistake and punishing an innocent person. If he’d been a little more certain that Dudley was the killer, he wouldn’t have hesitated. But he wasn’st, so he’d let Dudley walk away.
He was right. Sarah Brandt was ruining him.
12
SARAH WAS TIRED AS SHE MADE HER WAY DOWN Bank Street back to her home the next afternoon. She’d had a difficult morning.
“Hello, Mrs. Brandt!” her neighbor Mrs. Ellsworth called as she came out onto her front porch. She was dressed for the street, in her bonnet and gloves, and carrying a shopping bag. “Looks like summer is trying to come back. How are you this fine day?”
“Better now that two little boys have made it safely into the world,” Sarah replied with a smile.
“Twins?” Mrs. Ellsworth asked, her wrinkled face brightening.
“Yes,” Sarah said. “One was breech. I was afraid for a while he wasn’t going to make it.”
“Oh, my, twins are so dangerous. I had a friend once who lost both of them. The cords got tangled or something.”
Sarah nodded. She’d seen her share of tragedies. “These are fine now, though, and their mother, too.”
“I’ll wager she’s hoping about now that these will be her last,” Mrs. Ellsworth predicted with a smile.
Sarah thought she was probably right, although the tragedy was that women couldn’t make such a choice for themselves. The secrets of preventing pregnancy were passed around in guilty whispers, but anyone who tried to teach modem methods was subject to fines and even arrest.
“I did want to warn you,” Mrs. Ellsworth said, distracting Sarah from her unpleasant thoughts. “I found some mouse droppings in the pantry this morning. And a mouse had been nibbling at my flour bag. You know what that means.”
“That the mouse was hungry?” Sarah guessed good-naturedly.
Mrs. Ellsworth shook her head, despairing that she would ever teach Sarah anything at all about the mysteries of life. “It means something evil is going to happen. Nibbling the flour bag means that.”
Sarah felt reasonably certain something evil was happening at any moment of the day in a city the size of New York, but she didn’t want to be unkind to Mrs. Ellsworth by pointing that out.
“The mouse droppings just mean that we have mice, of course,” Mrs. Ellsworth went on. “I set some traps, and you’d best do the same. They may go over to your place, too.”
Mice were a continual problem in the city, where the waste from thousands of people was piled up in such a small area. Things were better since last year when the city had formed a street cleaning department that regularly attended to all the city streets. Until then, only wealthier neighborhoods that could hire private cleaners were regularly kept free of refuse and garbage. Some of the streets had been piled more than a foot deep with animal droppings and trash and the carcasses of dead animals. The street cleaners in their white uniforms and pith helmets looked like something out of an operetta, but they pushed their carts around the city at night and worked miracles with their brooms and shovels. So now the mice came inside, looking for richer territory to plunder.
“Thanks for the warning,” Sarah said. “I’ll do that. Where are you heading?”
“To the market,” Mrs. Ellsworth said, referring to the Gansevoort Market several blocks away where farmers brought their produce and meat to sell to the city’s residents. “Can I get anything for you?”
Sarah thought of Malloy and wondered if she would see him tonight. They did have a lot of things to discuss. Or rather she had a lot of things she wanted to find out from him, since he’d probably been to the opium den by now. “I’d like to have a chicken, if you see any nice ones,” Sarah said.
Mrs. Ellsworth smiled knowingly. “I’ll pick a nice plump one for Mr. Malloy. Do you need any potatoes to go with it?”
“I think I have enough,” Sarah said, returning her smile.
“Will you be home this afternoon? In case someone calls for you,” she added, lest Sarah think she was merely being nosy.
Sarah started to say she would, but thought better of it. “I might go out in a little while,” she said. “To visit some friends, but I’ll be back by suppertime.”
WHEN SHE’D FRESHENED up from her labors of the morning, Sarah put on her gray serge suit and a hat that was reasonably fashionable, and made her way across town once again to Gramercy Park.
As always, she was struck by how lovely the square was. The houses surrounding it were a little ornate for her taste, but unquestionably comfortable and well tended. Edmund Blackwell must have felt that he’d finally achieved success whe
n he moved his bride here. Never mind that he wasn’t paying for the house and couldn’t have dreamed of doing so. No one else knew that. As far as everyone was concerned, he was an equal to his wealthy and socially prominent neighbors.
A maid opened the door, the same one who had admitted her before. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Brandt,” she said, dropping a small curtsy. “Were you wanting to see Mrs. Blackwell today?”
“If she isn’t sleeping,” Sarah said.
“Oh, no, she’s receiving visitors in the parlor,” the maid assured her. “I’ll show you right in.”
“Is Granger ill again?” Sarah asked with some concern. The butler hadn’t seemed particularly grief-stricken over his employer’s murder at the time, but perhaps the strain of the past days had taken a toll.
“He got better, but then he got worse again,” the girl told her. “Mrs. Wilson says it’s the dyspepsia.”
“Does he get it often?” Sarah asked.
“Not that I ever heard,” the girl said. “He never was sick a day that I knew of until poor Dr. Blackwell died.”
Sarah had been right to suspect the strain was telling on the man to whom the responsibility of running the entire household would have fallen. “Do you know if he’s seen a doctor?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. Mrs. Wilson, she’s the housekeeper, she told him to, but she says he’s too stubborn to go.”
Sarah knew Mrs. Wilson would probably have a fit if she knew how freely the little maid was sharing the private business of the household with a stranger. Still… “I’d be happy to speak with Mr. Granger and see if perhaps I can’t give him something to help his stomach.”
“Can a midwife take care of a man?” the girl asked in confusion.
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