An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen

by Liz Freeland

  “Better tuck yourself away.”

  Muldoon stepped into the small closet where the locked cabinets for our things were. I stood waiting, but not for long. Jenks wasn’t far behind me, and within seconds he was snuffling into my hair again. I’d need to wash it tonight.

  “Call me Mel,” he panted into my scalp. “Only my mother calls me Melvin.”

  “That’s enough, Melvin.” Muldoon stepped out of the closet, looking like doom.

  Jenks, turning, flung me aside. He shrank away from Muldoon, then looked from him to me. “You bitch.”

  Muldoon’s hand shot out, quick as an adder, slapping him with a sharp crack that made me jump. “Watch yourself, Jenks. I asked her to bring you here so I could talk to you away from the brass. To save you embarrassment, if possible.”

  “Save me from embarrassment?” he repeated, touching his cheek and eyeing me resentfully. “That’s not how it seems.”

  “We know about you and Ruthie,” I said.

  His eyes widened. “Know what?”

  “That you visited her. Often. You were seen going up to her flat on multiple occasions.”

  “So?”

  “Prostitution is against the law, Officer,” Muldoon reminded him.

  Jenks laughed. “So’s baseball on Sundays. Show me the man who’s never gone to a park and played a game.”

  At the flip answer, Muldoon’s scowl deepened. “Officer Faulk gave you the passports found at Ruthie Jones’s flat to hand over to Stevens or King. You didn’t.”

  “I forgot.” His eyes were beginning to register worry. “Anyone could forget a thing like that. What difference did it make anyways?”

  “We think Ruthie stole those passports. She might even have been killed for them.”

  “Ruthie committed suicide,” Jenks said.

  “And now one of her passport theft victims appears to have turned up dead in the Bowery. That makes two suspicious deaths surrounding those passports,” Muldoon said. “I can bring you downtown for questioning in this matter, or you can clear it up right here and now.”

  I held my breath. Muldoon was tossing the dice. Jenks could refuse to talk and then go running to Sergeant Donnelly. The link between the passports and the dead man downtown was tenuous, but if my tactics and Muldoon’s high-handedness were aired, it could cause more of a stink than my shaky position in the NYPD could weather. Men were already leery of policewomen; having one around who’d tried to snitch on a fellow officer wouldn’t go over well.

  Like a balloon deflating, Jenks sank onto the cot. “I knew her,” he confessed. “She . . . well, I won’t say I loved her, but we were close. She was a fun girl.”

  “When did you last see her?” I asked.

  “Nearly a week before Thanksgiving.” His face paled. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard what happened to her. And when they told me about the baby . . .”

  “Were the twins yours?” I asked.

  “No.” Alarm squeezed his voice a pitch higher. “At least, she never said. Who knows whose they were? Ruthie didn’t seem to care. As far as she was concerned, they were all hers. She was blooming.”

  “She loved them that much, then,” I said.

  “Yeah, she did,” Jenks said. “You can say what you want about Ruthie. She was no saint, but she was a pretty good mother to those boys.”

  “Do you think Ruthie would have killed her baby?”

  He shuddered. “I couldn’t believe it. But . . . well, people do all sorts of things you don’t expect, don’t they?”

  “Did she ever mention another man who might’ve had a grudge against her? A client? A relative?”

  “She didn’t have any relations here. Those were all back west. Ruthie said her sister wrote to her, but she didn’t think they’d want her back. Especially not after the babies came. She burned the letter. Burned her bridges. She never wrote back, as far as I know.”

  “So Ruthie could write,” I said.

  He sent me a contemptuous look. “Sure. I just told you she couldn’t to throw you off the scent.”

  For some reason, this made me even angrier on Ruthie’s behalf than on my own.

  “Why did Ruthie steal passports?” Muldoon asked.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Jenks said. “Weeks ago, a man came here and said she’d stolen his passport and money. I assumed she’d just been stealing the money, and the passport was just by the bye.”

  “You never asked her?”

  “I asked her about the money, of course. I told her she needed to cut that out. She swore she hadn’t stolen money, and maybe she didn’t. The man said he’d spent a night on a park bench. Anybody could’ve taken his money.”

  “You didn’t ever talk to any of her other clients?”

  “It wasn’t my business. I wasn’t going to marry her or anything, so it wasn’t like I could ask her to give up her living.”

  Muldoon sighed. “So you don’t know anyone who would’ve wanted to kill her. And you don’t know why she would’ve had three stolen passports sewn into a cape?”

  Jenks rubbed his jaw. “No idea.”

  I squinted at him. He really did seem not to know what she’d been up to. “You don’t know how she’d saved forty-six dollars?”

  He frowned. “A while back, she told me she was onto easy money. I thought maybe she’d found a good regular customer—and like I said, I wasn’t jealous. I was happy for her. She’d been destitute there for a while, waiting for the babies. I’d had to spot her some money myself, and paid for a nurse to go see her once or twice.”

  Muldoon shook his head. “If you didn’t know anything about the passports, why bother hiding them when Officer Faulk brought them to you?”

  “I didn’t want the detectives poking into Ruthie’s life and finding out I’d been going to see her, especially if she’d been up to something. I tried not to leave anything there, but I couldn’t be sure. If they went over the place with a fine-tooth comb, some little something tied to me might turn up. I didn’t want the brass to wonder if I was involved in some whore’s death. I’ve been waiting two years to get a promotion.” Looking at Muldoon, he sighed. “I guess I’ll never get it now.”

  “You might,” Muldoon said, “if you’ll swear this is all you know about those passports and the death of Ruthie Jones.”

  What? I gaped at him. We couldn’t just cover this up now, could we? We needed to drag Jenks up to King and Stevens and let them decide whether or not he should be turned over to Captain McMartin.

  Jenks nodded violently. “I swear it on my mother’s life. I don’t know anything more about Ruthie’s death than either of you do.”

  “Then you can forget you’ve spoken to us,” Muldoon said. “But I’d like to have those passports.”

  Bullets moved slower than Jenks shooting out of that basement.

  I rounded on Muldoon, unable to hide my incredulity. “You’re just going to take his word for it?”

  “Didn’t you believe him?”

  “It’s you I don’t believe. You’re the one always telling me to let detectives handle matters.”

  “I am a detective.”

  “Not on the Ruthie Jones case.”

  “There is no Ruthie Jones case,” he replied. “Not according to King and Stevens. She committed suicide. Having Jenks confess to having known her isn’t going to change their minds about anything.”

  “But he was lying and covering things up.”

  “To protect his career. Any cop would understand that.”

  “Any guilty person would, too.” I crossed my arms.

  “Antagonizing Jenks further isn’t going to help you, Louise. You’re not a detective. If you stick your neck out about Ruthie Jones on flimsy evidence, and try and fail to bring down a fellow officer, your career will be dead in the water.”

  I lifted my arm, pointing down the hallway that led to the women’s cells. “I’ve been cooped up here for a year now. I’m dead already.”

  “You knew what th
e job was.”

  I’d known, somewhat. And yet I’d had hopes that I could do more. Now I looked at my fellow policewomen and it felt as if we were being wasted. There was work we could be doing besides babysitting female prisoners. We could be out policing communities in ways that men couldn’t. The brass thought brawn was all that mattered in police work. They were wrong.

  “You have to deal with reality,” Muldoon said, making me wonder if he could read my mind. “Not how you want the police department to be.”

  He was right, of course. My male colleagues would take a dim view of my insinuating that Jenks had been involved in Ruthie’s death. A ragged, resentful sigh tore out of me. “All right. I see your point.”

  “I’ll go upstairs and have a word with Jenks,” Muldoon said, “and see if I can smooth over his ruffled feathers.”

  The idea that he was concerned with Jenks’s ruffled feathers aggravated my sense of injustice. “What about the passports? You’ll tell me if the Bowery victim was Holmgren, won’t you?”

  “If we can make an identification from the information in the document,” he agreed. “It might not be possible.”

  He was getting what he came for while I’d hit a brick wall, but I couldn’t dwell on that or I’d end up mired in resentment. “I’m grateful for your help,” I forced myself to say. “I might not always show it, but I am.”

  “It’s the least I can do, given that you’ve been putting up with my sister for so long.”

  “How is Anna?”

  Muldoon, who’d already been turning to go upstairs, pivoted back. “You tell me. She’s staying with you.”

  “Not for the past two nights,” I said.

  Muldoon stood frozen. “She hasn’t been at your apartment? You haven’t seen her?”

  Uh-oh. I’d stepped into something. “Perhaps we just missed each other.”

  Muldoon wasn’t convinced. “Damnation, Louise. I thought she’d be safe with you.”

  “Who said she isn’t safe?”

  “From what you’re saying, my little sister could be anywhere in the city.” He slapped his hat against his thigh. “I should’ve known better than to entrust her to you and that flighty roommate of yours.”

  It felt as if he’d slapped me. “Flighty?”

  “What would you call it? Running around with men all the time, working with stage people. Everyone knows what actors are.”

  “I only know the actresses and actors I’ve met. They’re not flighty.” Unlike that sister of yours, I barely kept myself from adding.

  His lips tightened. “Of course. You’re such a grand judge of character.”

  His words stunned me so, I could barely choke out a sentence. “Why would you say that?”

  “For one thing, this refusal of yours to believe a degraded woman like Ruthie Jones would kill herself.”

  My mouth dropped open. I’d thought we were on the same page about Ruthie, but now he was dismissing her . . . and dismissing my concern. I was so mad I was starting to see spots. “You think I’m deluded?”

  “I think you’ve spent so much of the last two years stewing in the worst elements of society that you’ve lost perspective.”

  I tossed my head back. “You also spend your life ‘stewing’ in bad society—how is it Anna is only in danger of being polluted when she stays with Callie and me?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.

  “That’s how it sounded. My ears aren’t faulty, although you seem to think my judgment is.”

  “No one’s judgment is always right all the time. But you’re so prickly about criticism.”

  “Only when I’m criticized for doing my job.”

  “Your job.” He shook his head in frustration. “Why does it matter to you so much? Why can’t you be like normal women?”

  My first instinct was to strangle him, my second was to laugh. I opted for the second, which made him flinch. “Because there is no such thing. I don’t mean to frighten you, Lieutenant, but there are millions upon millions of women, and we’re all different, with different dreams and ambitions—some modest, some outrageous. You might have an imagined ideal of a normal woman in your head, but believe me, that’s the only place she lives.”

  He was scowling. “I can’t figure you out. You’re so single-minded, sometimes it seems as if you’re on a quest to right a wrong. Has your life been so bad?”

  I wavered. I could confide everything about my past to him, relive the horrible moment of being attacked and then the months of feeling shunned by my own family, culminating in the shock of giving away my own flesh. Maybe Muldoon would understand and offer some comfort. But there was also the chance, especially given the things he’d just said to me, that he wouldn’t sympathize; the chill of his distancing himself from me and my past and the emotional tangle it had left me in was a possibility I wasn’t ready to face here and now. I’d rather him think me irrational than recoil from me.

  “This isn’t about me,” I said. “This began with your sister. She latched herself on to Callie, and Callie’s done a lot for her. If you object to Anna’s choices, you should speak to her. Better yet, find yourself a time machine like H. G. Wells wrote of and travel back to three weeks ago, before she caught the mania for acting. I don’t think there’s any stopping her now.”

  “Right now all I care about is finding her.” He put his hat back on this head and turned to go. “I’ll worry about the rest later.”

  After he’d left, I stood unmoving until his footsteps were no longer discernible from the rest of the foot traffic above. What the hell had happened? One minute we were on the same side, and the next minute it had all blown up. I grabbed a broom and marched over to the cells. Myrtle was just waking up and pulled a package of cigarettes out of her blouse. “Noisy in here today,” she complained, yawning. She offered me a cigarette. “Smoke, Officer?”

  We weren’t supposed to, but I snatched the proffered cigarette. “Thanks.” I leaned in and she lit it through the bars. Matches were considered contraband, but I let that pass, too. I sighed and exhaled a cloud of noxious smoke as I picked up the broom again. Tobacco never did much for me, but I felt better exhaling smoke—less like a lowly police drudge, more like a dragon.

  And evidently nothing like a normal woman.

  Stewing in the worst elements of society. What a thing to say. I thought Muldoon and I were friends. More than friends—colleagues, and . . . well, I didn’t like to acknowledge it, but there had been times when I thought I detected something more. Like the jealousy in his eyes when he’d seen Gerald Hughes and me at the top of the stairs. Apparently he’d just been marveling at me—a sponge of immorality and licentiousness.

  “You’re sweeping that dust around the floor like my ma used to before she’d give me a blistering,” Myrtle croaked. “What’s got you bothered?”

  “Men,” I said.

  “Say no more, sister.” With a wave of her hand, she shuffled back to a bench seat in the back of the cell. “I always say, don’t waste your thoughts on men. They usually show you how shady they are right off the bat. But fool women have been taught to doubt ourselves and give them the benefit of a doubt. Quite a racket the males of the species have going, if you ask me.”

  Another thing women were taught was to shun women like Myrtle. Yet during my year on this job, I’d heard more hard-won, useful wisdom coming out of the mouths of “degraded” women than I had from my Aunt Sonja in Altoona in twenty years. Maybe that was stewing in the worst elements, but so be it. If the world truly wanted to arm young girls with knowledge about what to watch out for, they should sit them down for an hour with the Myrtles of the world.

  * * *

  At the flat that evening, I found Callie in her homeliest robe and slippers, cupping a piping hot mug of tea in her hands like an invalid. She was ensconced on the sofa, next to the still-undecorated tree. Hard to tell which looked droopiest—her or that sad, neglected evergreen weeping needles onto our floor.

  I sea
ted myself in a chair near her. “Are you sick?” I asked, alarmed.

  “Not physically.”

  So what was the problem? I took a shot in the dark. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Teddy?”

  Her body sank further into the sofa. “No, he’s probably still bobbing somewhere over the ocean, or across the English Channel. Who knows.”

  I wondered if that was what was bothering her. Thanks to the Kaiser’s submarines, ocean travel was less safe now than it used to be. Another reason to hate the war. Not only did transatlantic passengers have to worry about hitting icebergs, warring countries were now threatening to launch torpedoes at ocean liners as well as warships.

  “I’m thinking of becoming a Red Cross nurse,” Callie said, tapping a cigarette out of a packet and lighting it. “Or maybe I should just go to California. That’s what Mary Pickford did—and now look at her. She’s a bigger star even than when she was the Biograph Girl. She’s got her name up in lights on theater marquees.”

  “Movie theaters,” I said dismissively.

  “Someday there won’t be a difference.”

  I doubted that. At any rate, someday wasn’t now. “I don’t think you should go to California, and I certainly don’t see you as a nurse.”

  “Why not? I’d like to do something useful for a change. Something where my fate didn’t rest in the hands of men. Fickle men.”

  Now I understood. “You’ve spoken to Otto.”

  “You knew?”

  Heat filled my face. “He mentioned something about a producer wanting a star . . .”

  “Agnes the chambermaid!” She blew out a long stream of smoke. “I can just see it now. Me knocking the audience cockeyed in my maid uniform and feather duster. If I do great, I’ll get a line of praise in a paper or two like I did in my last Broadway show. Then, when the show closes, I’ll be just as unemployed as I was before. Nothing’s adding up.”

  It was no use my counseling patience and perseverance. I’d left publishing because so much of the work seemed thankless. And that had been a steady job—at least until the publishing house burned down. But an actress’s life could be unstable as well as unrewarding.