Murder on St. Nicholas Avenue

by Victoria Thompson

  No one answered Maeve’s first knock, even though she’d worked the brass knocker with some authority. “I wonder if the servants decided to leave after all,” she said with a frown, and tried the knocker again.

  “Surely they wouldn’t go off without a reference,” he said. “Or did you give them one?”

  “Not yet,” she said. Then the door opened a crack to reveal part of a face and a maid’s uniform. “Do you remember me? I was here yesterday.”

  The door opened wider, and the maid’s face reflected relief. “Yes, miss, I remember you.”

  “We’re here to pack up the rest of Mrs. Pollock’s things.”

  “Oh, miss, I don’t know about that,” the maid said in some distress. “We’ve had some trouble here.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Decker demanded, startling the maid, who backed up a step, her eyes widened in alarm.

  “This is Mr. Decker,” Maeve said quickly, taking advantage of the maid’s retreat to move into the foyer. “He came along to help. What’s happened?”

  “Oh, miss, we don’t have no idea. It was like this when we come down this morning.”

  “What was? Show us,” he said.

  With an uncertain glance at him, the maid indicated they should follow her down the hallway. He closed the door behind them and caught up with Maeve. The maid led them to a door that stood open. Maeve got there first, and her surprised gasp almost prepared him for the sight of the room.

  It was, he saw at once, an office of sorts, with a desk and some upholstered chairs. Or it had been. Now it was a mess. The desk drawers had been pulled out and dumped, their contents scattered on the floor. The chairs had been overturned and their cushions slashed open. The stuffing lay in heaps. But the centerpiece of the mayhem was the squat little safe with its door hanging wide open.

  He caught Maeve’s eye. “Did you . . . ?”

  She shook her head, then turned to the maid. “Who did this?”

  “We don’t know,” the girl cried, wringing her hands. “We was all asleep. Or at least we figure it must’ve happened in the night sometime. Everything was fine when we went to bed, and it was like this first thing this morning.”

  “Didn’t anyone hear something?” he asked.

  “No, sir. We never heard a thing.”

  “Have you sent for the police?”

  “Oh no, sir! We was scared to do that!”

  “Were any of the other rooms disturbed?” Maeve asked.

  “No, miss. Not that we could tell. What should we do?”

  Maeve gave him a questioning look.

  “Let me check this room, and then we’ll decide what to do. Maeve, why don’t you pack up Mrs. Pollock’s things while I look around?”

  “Come along,” she said to the maid, ushering her out. “Mr. Decker will take care of everything,” she added, glancing back to give him a little grin. He wasn’t sure he appreciated her confidence in him.

  * * *

  Mrs. Decker had told Maeve that they’d found an empty trunk in Una Pollock’s bedroom, so she hadn’t brought one with her. Sure enough, the small trunk sat in a corner of the bedroom that Una had apparently shared with her husband.

  “We need to pack up all of Mrs. Pollock’s belongings,” Maeve told the maid. “We can put them in this trunk, and we’ll get the coachman to carry it downstairs for us.”

  “Yes, miss. I guess Mrs. Pollock won’t be coming back, will she?”

  “I can’t imagine she’ll want to live here after what happened, can you?”

  “Oh, I . . . I guess not. But I was thinking she’ll be in jail.”

  Maeve had pulled open one of the dresser drawers to begin gathering the clothes, but she stopped and turned to look at the girl. “Do you think Mrs. Pollock killed her husband?”

  The girl’s eyes widened in alarm. “Oh, I . . . I wouldn’t want to say, miss. I’m sure I don’t know anything about it.”

  And Maeve was sure she knew a lot about it. “I understand you heard an argument before Mr. Pollock was killed. Did the Pollocks argue a lot?”

  The girl glanced anxiously at the open bedroom door. Maeve hurried over and shut it. “It’s important to find out exactly what happened to Mr. Pollock,” she said. “It would be horrible if the wrong person were punished for killing him, wouldn’t it? Not to mention how awful it would be for a killer to get away.”

  “Oh, I never thought of that, miss.”

  “That’s why we need to find out the truth of what happened that day.”

  The maid frowned. “But how can you help, miss? You’re not with the police, are you?”

  Smart girl, Maeve thought. “No, but I work for a private investigator that Mrs. Pollock’s mother has hired to help her.”

  “A private investigator?”

  Plainly, this was a new concept to the girl. “Yes, we help the police in situations like this.” The girl didn’t look as if she really believed Maeve’s lie, but she also had no reason to doubt it either. Maeve decided that was good enough. “So, did the Pollocks argue a lot?”

  “Not what you’d call arguing, no,” she said with a frown.

  “Then what would you call it?”

  The girl’s frown deepened.

  “It’s all right to tell me,” Maeve said. “I won’t tell anybody where I heard it.”

  “Well, Mr. Pollock, he was very particular about . . . about everything.”

  “What do you mean, particular?”

  “He liked everything just a certain way, and if it wasn’t that way, he . . . Well, he got real mad.”

  Maeve carefully schooled her expression so her excitement didn’t show. “Did he get angry with the staff?”

  The girl wrung her hands and wouldn’t meet Maeve’s eyes.

  “Did he hit you?” Maeve asked.

  “Oh no, miss, not me,” she said quickly.

  “Did he hit someone else?”

  She hesitated, chewing her bottom lip as if uncertain how to reply. “He never hit the staff. Not once.”

  Maeve saw it then, the whole ugly picture. “But he did hit Mrs. Pollock, didn’t he?”

  “Only when she deserved it, miss,” she hastily explained. “I told you he was particular, and she tried, she really did, but she couldn’t always please him. She wasn’t brought up in a nice house, and she didn’t know how to conduct herself, you see.”

  Fury roiled in Maeve’s stomach, but she kept her voice level. “Is that what he said?”

  “Yes, miss. We could hear him, you see. He’d tell her how . . .” She caught herself and stopped, dropping her gaze to the floor.

  “How stupid she was?” Maeve guessed. “And worthless and ugly?” How often had she heard men shouting those words in the tenements? And how silly she’d been to think that men who lived in houses like this would be gentlemen and treat their women with respect.

  The girl looked up in surprise. “How did you know?”

  “And did he hit her?” Maeve asked.

  She nodded jerkily, then lowered her gaze again.

  “Did he hit her that day? The day he died?”

  She looked up in surprise. “I don’t know.”

  “But they were arguing . . . or at least he was yelling at her that day.”

  The girl bit her lip again. “I don’t know. I mean, yes, he was yelling, but I don’t know if he was yelling at her or not.”

  “Why not, if you could hear him?”

  “We were downstairs in the kitchen. That’s where we always went when it started. We just wanted to stay out of his way, I guess. And we didn’t want to know about it.”

  “So you didn’t actually see him hitting her?”

  “I . . . I saw him slap her once, but after that, he was more careful. I guess he saw how shocked I was. He never did it in front of us again.”

&nbs
p; “How do you know he hit her, then?”

  “Because . . . I was her maid. She never had a lady’s maid before, so she had to get used to me helping her dress, and . . . after a while, she tried to dress herself and tell me she didn’t need me, but sometimes she did, and then . . .”

  “Then what?”

  “I’d see the bruises. He didn’t hit her in the face, except for that one time I know of. He didn’t want the marks to show.”

  Maeve sighed. Men in the tenements didn’t care if the bruises showed. They thought beating up their women made them more manly or something. That was a difference between uptown and the tenements, she supposed. “Did Mrs. Pollock ever fight back?”

  The girl seemed shocked. “Why would she do that?”

  Why, indeed? That was only asking for a worse beating, Maeve supposed. “Did you hear anyone else come into the house the day Pollock was killed?”

  She hesitated again. Was she trying to remember or trying to decide what to say? “I always open the door for visitors. I didn’t open the door that morning. Please, miss. We’re scared to stay here now. When can we get paid and leave?”

  “I’ll see what I can do for you. In the meantime, let’s get Mrs. Pollock’s things packed up.”

  * * *

  When Maeve and the maid were gone, Decker took the precaution of closing the door behind them, then looked around again at the damage. Whoever had broken in last night had been thorough. They must have also known that Pollock kept his money and his records in this room, which explained why they had confined the search here. He would have to compliment Maeve for having the foresight to remove the money and the ledger yesterday, or whoever had broken in would have it all now.

  The safe was empty, of course. Maeve had cleaned it out herself, but the thief hadn’t known that. Did he know the combination or had he discovered it the same way she had? He found an appointment diary on the floor beneath some of the scattered stuffing from the chairs. Flipping through, he saw the combination written just as Maeve had described it. The thief must have also found the diary in the desk, located the combination, and then dropped the diary here. Finding the safe empty, he had then ransacked the rest of the room.

  He went to the pile of papers that had been dumped from the desk drawers and quickly went through them. Maeve was right, he found very little of importance until he came to a packet of papers that he recognized as copies of a prospectus for an investment opportunity. They had been professionally printed on expensive, watermarked paper. He slipped one of them out of the packet, folded it carefully, and tucked it into his pocket.

  Only when he was finished with his search did he realize he had made a neat stack of the desk’s contents, which he probably shouldn’t have done. Of course, he shouldn’t have even come here today, but since he had, he felt obligated to do as little damage as possible, so he rearranged the papers to look as much like they originally had as he could.

  When he was satisfied with his efforts, he opened the office door to find the remainder of Pollock’s servants standing anxiously in the hallway. A middle-aged woman in an apron, who was probably the cook, another maid, and a handsome youth of about sixteen gaped at him.

  “Can I help you?” he asked, recognizing the irony of asking if he could help servants.

  “Oh, sir,” the older woman said, “we can’t stay here, not with people breaking in all hours of the night. You can’t ask us to do that!”

  “You’re certainly free to leave if you want to,” he said.

  “But what about references?” the maid asked. “Mrs. Decker said she’d write us references.”

  This was interesting. “When did Mrs. Decker say that?”

  “Yesterday, when she was here.”

  Yes, this was very interesting. No wonder Elizabeth had been acting so oddly last night. He should have known she’d never let Maeve come here alone.

  “And our pay, sir,” the boy added. “She said we’d get our pay.”

  “And you shall. I’ll see that you have it all by tomorrow.” He couldn’t wait to see Elizabeth’s face when he told her. “In the meantime, let’s take a look around and see if we can figure out how the intruder got in last night.”

  * * *

  “Did you find anything?” Maeve asked Mr. Decker when they were back in the carriage and driving away.

  “I found a broken window in the basement.”

  “That explains how the burglar got in, I guess.”

  “And I found this.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her.

  She unfolded it and tried to read it, but it didn’t make much sense to her. “What is it?”

  “It’s a proposal to build a railroad across Panama.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s in Colombia.”

  “Is that in New York?”

  She thought he was trying not to smile at her ignorance. “No, it’s in South America. Well, really, Panama is in Central America. It’s on the narrow strip of land that connects North and South America.”

  “Why would someone here want to build a railroad all the way down there?”

  “According to this explanation, the railroad would carry goods and passengers across this area of land where the distance between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans is the shortest. It would save time and money because the goods wouldn’t have to be shipped all the way around the tip of South America, the way they are now. They could just be unloaded from a ship on one side, carried across the land by train, then loaded onto a ship on the other side. The railroad would be enormously profitable.”

  “What’s this about a canal?” She pointed to a paragraph that talked about a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, whatever that was.

  “The French have been trying to build a canal in that area for years.”

  She hated showing her ignorance again, but she said, “What’s a canal?”

  This time he didn’t smile. “It’s basically a huge trench that runs through the land from one ocean to the other so ships could just sail right through.”

  “That sounds like a better idea. Then they wouldn’t have to load and unload the ships.”

  “Exactly, but the company trying to build the canal went bankrupt because the land is all jungle, and their equipment kept rusting in the tropical climate and their workers kept dying from tropical diseases. According to this”—he pointed to the paper she still held—“the canal will never be built, so the railroad is the best solution.”

  “So Pollock really did have a good plan for people to invest in,” she said in surprise.

  “Yes, it’s an excellent idea, except for one small detail. The French built this railroad fifty years ago.”

  “Oh!”

  “Yes, oh.”

  “And people are using it?”

  “Yes, as they have been for fifty years.”

  “Then wouldn’t everybody know about it?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I’m just a nursemaid,” she reminded him. “You knew about it.”

  “Because I own a shipping company. I’m guessing the men whose names are in Pollock’s ledger do not.”

  “But they must have lots of money.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re knowledgeable about these things.”

  “Oh, you mean they’re bouncers.”

  He did smile at that. “They may have made their fortunes recently, yes, but whatever their circumstances, they most likely don’t know a lot about transporting goods around the world. They may also have just moved to New York from the western United States, where people are more . . . trustworthy.”

  Maeve knew exactly what he meant. Her grandfather had made his living cheating bumpkins who came to New York expecting to outsmart the city slickers. Pollock, it seemed, had simply discovered a new way to do it.

&n
bsp; “One of these men must have heard about his murder,” he was saying, “and come to the house last night in search of his investment.”

  But that didn’t sound right to Maeve. “If they thought he was investing their money in a railroad, they wouldn’t expect to find it in his house, would they?”

  He stared at her for a long moment, obviously impressed by her reasoning. “You’re right. If he’d invested their money, it would still be safely invested, even if Pollock died. They’d just be trying to find out who was managing the scheme with Pollock dead.”

  “But somebody knew the money was at the house, and they came for it,” Maeve mused. “They came for it in the middle of the night, too, when nobody would see them. Who would’ve known the money was there?”

  “Maybe Pollock had a partner,” Mr. Decker said.

  “A partner who wanted to get the money and disappear before anybody else found it and started asking questions.”

  “How did he find out Pollock was dead, though?”

  Maeve thought this over. “I don’t know. It hasn’t been in the newspapers yet. Someone must have told him. Or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “Or maybe the person who killed him is the one who came back last night for the money. That person wouldn’t need anybody to tell him Pollock was dead.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” Mr. Decker said. “So all we need to do is find out who this person is.”

  Maeve decided not to point out to Mr. Decker that he had just included himself in the investigation.

  * * *

  Decker had fully expected to go straight to his office after dropping Maeve and the trunk full of clothing at his daughter’s house. After learning of his wife’s involvement, however, he decided he couldn’t wait to discuss that with her, so he returned to his own home instead. Elizabeth was at her desk, writing letters, when he found her.

  “Felix, is something wrong?” she asked, rising instantly and coming to greet him.