Murder on St. Mark's Place (2 page)

“Life is much different here than it is in Germany,” Sarah suggested. “I expect Gerda had some trouble adjusting.”

Agnes’s expression grew instantly angry. “She had no trouble! She was like an American girl at once! As soon as she started working with those other girls—they are bad ones! They got Gerda in trouble, all the time, trouble. Staying out late at night so she would be too tired to get awake in the morning for work. Going to dancing, meeting strange men.” Agnes shook her head in despair, and Sarah noticed she was rubbing her side without even realizing it. Sarah glanced at the pendant watch she wore pinned to her shirtwaist, making note of the time.

“Lars tried to tell her,” Agnes explained, desperate to make Sarah understand that they had attempted to stop her. “He told her those men would not marry a girl who goes to dancing all the time and stays out half the night, but she would not listen. She would not listen to anyone. I know something bad will happen. I tell her that.”

“And what
did
happen?” Sarah asked as gently as she could.

Agnes squeezed her eyes shut, as if she could close out the pain. “She did not come home last night. Lars, he goes out to look for her, but he cannot find her anywhere. No one can find her. I hardly sleep all night for fear. And then that police comes here. A police! To my house!” Her eyes pleaded with Sarah to understand her outrage, and Sarah had no trouble doing so. In Germany, the police would never have occasion to visit the home of a respectable family, and the same was true in America.

Then Agnes’s blotched and swollen features crumbled under the weight of her grief again. “They find her today. In an alley. She was ... Her face ...” It was all she could do to choke out the words. “The police said someone beat her.”

“She was beaten to death?” Sarah asked when Agnes hesitated, the words as painful to say as they were to hear. Only sixteen years old and beaten to death like an animal.

Agnes nodded stiffly, not trusting herself to speak. She took another sip of the water. “They could not tell ... from her face ... who she was.”

Sarah couldn’t stop herself from grasping at this last fragment of hope. “Then maybe it wasn’t Gerda at all! How can you be sure if—”

“Her shoes,” Agnes said, her voice barely a rasp.

“Her what?”

“Her shoes. She had new shoes. They were...
red.”
She said the word as if it were vile.
“Red shoes,
she repeated, silently asking if Sarah had ever heard of such a thing.

She had not. “How ... unusual.”

“She said she bought them herself. She said she saved the money by walking to work instead of taking the trolley. But she could not have saved so much money herself. Someone gave her those shoes. A man.” Agnes’s light blue eyes flared with fury. “We knew it, but we could not stop her. She would not listen, and now the police comes here to tell me my little sister is dead!”

She started to cry again, and once more Sarah saw her rubbing her side. A glance at her watch told her the contractions were only a few minutes apart. Agnes was in advanced labor.

“I think you should lie down for a while,” Sarah said. “You have to think of yourself and the new baby. Come on, I’ll help you.”

Agnes looked around as if she had suddenly remembered something important. “My children? Where are my children ?”

“Mrs. Shultz and Mrs. Neugebauer took them so you could get some rest. They’ll be fine.”

“My babies!” Agnes wailed as Sarah helped her to her feet, but the shifting of her weight resulted in a gush of fluid from beneath her skirt that succeeded in distracting her completely. Her water had broken.
“Mein Gott!”
she cried, and began to mutter hysterically in German as Sarah half led, half carried her into the bedroom.

 

T
wo HOURS LATER Sarah was washing her hands at the kitchen sink when one of the neighbor women brought over a plate covered with a napkin.

“Mr. Otto will be hungry when he comes home,” Mrs. Shultz explained, setting it down on the table. She was a short woman of ample girth who took great pride in the neatness of her appearance. “How is Mrs. Otto doing?”

“She’s fine. She had another little girl.”

“Already? I didn’t hear a thing!”

“The labor went quickly.” Sarah didn’t mention that the baby had hardly cried. That worried her. That and the way Agnes had shown hardly any interest in the child. Sarah had made sure the baby nursed before Agnes fell into an exhausted sleep, but she was very much afraid Agnes’s milk wouldn’t come in if she didn’t calm down soon. Unfortunately, Sarah couldn’t think of any way to help her, short of bringing Agnes’s sister back to life.

“Did she tell you what happened?” Mrs. Shultz asked. “To her sister, I mean.”

“A little,” Sarah admitted, wanting to hear the facts of the case from someone less emotional about them. “She said Gerda was killed.”

“Someone beat her like a dog and left her to die in some filthy alley,” Mrs. Shultz informed her righteously, folding her arms under her ample breasts. She was also of German descent, but had been in America long enough to have lost most of her accent.

“Do they know who did it?” Sarah asked, drying her hands on one of Agnes’s immaculate towels.

“No, and they will never find out, either, if you ask me. That girl, she got just what she deserved. What did she expect? Going out every night, flaunting herself at those dance houses. No decent girls go to those places, I can tell you that.”

“I’m sure she was only trying to have a good time,” Sarah said, for some reason feeling obliged to defend the dead girl. Maybe because she was so young. Sarah could remember what it was like to be so young and wish for freedom and happiness.

“A good time!” Mrs. Shultz scoffed. “Girls don’t need to have a good time. They should stay at home and help their mothers until they find a respectable man and get married. It’s not natural for a girl to get work and go out alone with no chaperon to protect her. And this is what comes when she does. She ends up dead in an alley!”

Sarah glanced at the door into Agnes’s bedroom, which she’d left open because of the heat. Fortunately, Agnes still seemed to be sleeping soundly, oblivious to the judgments of her neighbor. Still, she pushed the door closed, not wanting to cause Agnes any more pain than she’d already suffered.

“Young women
have
to work nowadays,” Sarah reminded her. “Agnes and her husband couldn’t afford to keep Gerda if she didn’t pay her share of the expenses.”

“Ach, she didn’t have to run wild, though, did she? Going out every night, wearing those fancy clothes that she couldn’t afford on her wages, not after she gave most of them to Mr. Otto for her board. And those shoes! I heard the policeman ask Agnes if her sister owned a pair of red shoes. That’s how they knew it was her. Everybody in the neighborhood knew about those red shoes. And everybody knows what kind of a girl wears red shoes!”

“Yes, a girl who is now dead,” Sarah reminded her grimly.

Mrs. Shultz huffed, plainly annoyed that Sarah wouldn’t join her in condemning Gerda. “I must get back. My own husband will be home soon.” Sarah wasn’t sorry to see her go.

Sarah looked in on her patient again and found Agnes awake, her eyes brimming with tears. She’d overheard at least part of the conversation.

“That is what they will say about my Gerda now,” Agnes moaned. “They will say she was a bad girl. They will say she deserved to be murdered, and no one will care that a poor German girl who worked in a shirt factory died in an alley. No one will bother to catch the man who did it, and no one will ever be punished.”

Sarah knew this was true, so she had few words of comfort to offer. “At least Gerda has you to mourn her,” she offered.

“She was not a bad girl,” Agnes insisted, trying to make Sarah understand. “She only wanted to be free. That is what she says, all the time. She wants to be free, with no one telling her what to do. That is why she left Germany. She did not want our father telling her what to do and what man to marry. She wanted to make a new life for herself here in America where she could decide for herself what she did.”

The same way Sarah had left her own father’s house and married the man of her own choice instead of her father’s. When Tom had died, again Sarah had decided to make her own way instead of moving back to her father’s house. She’d wanted to be free, just like Gerda. She’d found a way to make her own living and her own life, just the way Gerda had tried to do. She’d simply been more successful at it than the dead girl had, because Gerda had met a man who had stolen her choices from her.
There but for the grace of God go I,
Sarah couldn’t help thinking.

“The police, they will not care who killed my Gerda, will they?” Agnes asked.

Sarah could have lied to escape an awkward moment, to make Agnes feel better even though she knew the lie would do more harm than good. But because she did know, she told the truth. “The police might investigate if you could offer them a reward for finding Gerda’s killer.”

Agnes shook her head, tears running down her face. “We have no money for a reward.”

Of course they didn’t. And justice in New York City was only for the rich. Unless ...

“I have a friend,” Sarah heard herself saying. A small lie. She and Frank Malloy weren’t exactly friends. “He’s a police detective. I could ask him to help. He might be able to do something.”

Agnes clasped Sarah’s hand in both of hers. “Please!” she begged. “It is all we can do for Gerda now.”

 

S
OMEONE in THE building was cooking cabbage for supper. Or maybe
everyone
was. With cabbage, it was hard to tell. The thin walls were also little barrier to the sounds of life within the flats she passed as she climbed the stairs to the second floor. A baby was crying in one, a mother screamed at her child in another. Pots clanged against each other as women prepared the evening meal, and the smells of cooking combined with the smells of rotting garbage from the streets to form a miasma of decay that seemed to hang over the entire city.

Sarah remembered the door. She remembered the last and only time she’d come here, just after she and Malloy had solved the murder of a young girl Sarah had known all her life. She’d left on good terms with Malloy that day, but certainly, he’d never expected to see her again. Just as she’d never expected to see him either. Not that she was going to see him now, of course. She’d been fairly certain he wouldn’t be at home in the middle of the day. No, she just wanted to get word to him, and going to his home seemed much more sensible than going to police headquarters. The last time she’d sought him out at the Mulberry Street station, she’d found herself locked in an interrogation room!

Besides, she had another, very good reason for coming to his home: his son, Brian.

She raised her gloved hand and knocked more loudly than she’d intended to. From the other side of the door, she could hear the sound of grumbling, and then the door opened. The woman on the other side was small and sturdily built, her iron-gray hair pulled fiercely back into a bun. She looked ready for anything, but she was not ready to see Sarah Brandt. Her wrinkled face grew slack with surprise for an instant before it hardened into anger.

“He ain’t here, and he ain’t expected,” Mrs. Malloy said, turning up her nose. Or maybe she was just looking up. Sarah was much taller.

Sarah feigned surprise. “Brian isn’t here? Where is he, then?”

Now Mrs. Malloy was surprised again. And confused. “Brian? What would you be wanting with the boy?”

“I brought him a present,” Sarah informed her with a smile as genuine as she could make it, knowing full well that Frank Malloy’s mother would rather push her down the stairs than allow her inside their apartment. “Oh, here he comes!” Indeed, Brian was crawling over to where his grandmother was trying to block the door with her black-clad body.

His beautiful face was alive with happiness at having a visitor. Surely, he didn’t remember Sarah. He’d seen her only once, for a few minutes, and that had been over two months ago. And he was feebleminded, as his grandmother had explained to Sarah with perverse satisfaction on her first visit, in addition to being crippled by a clubfoot. But Brian’s life would be very uneventful, and the arrival of anyone at all would be a cause for joy.

Mrs. Malloy instinctively turned to see what Brian was doing, and Sarah took shameless advantage of her momentary distraction to slip past her guard and into the flat.

“Hello, Brian,” Sarah said, leaning over to greet him. She ignored Mrs. Malloy’s gasp of outrage. “Look what I’ve brought for you.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out a small wooden horse and rider. The horse had been fitted with a miniature leather saddle and bridle, and the rider was done up in someone’s idea of what a western cowboy would wear. It was designed to delight any little boy, and Brian was no exception.

“He don’t need no toys from the likes of you,” Mrs. Malloy tried, but Brian was already snatching the horse from Sarah’s hand, his luminous green eyes huge with wonder. He sat back on his haunches and began to examine his prize.

“It won’t make no difference,” Mrs. Malloy told her fiercely. “You can bring the boy a cartload of toys, and it won’t make no difference to Frances. He don’t have no use for any woman but Brian’s mam, God rest her soul, so don’t go thinking you’ll win him through the boy.”

Sarah was hard-pressed not to laugh out loud at the ridiculous notion that she had designs on Frank Malloy. “I’m not looking for a husband, Mrs. Malloy,” she said instead, even though the old woman plainly didn’t believe her. “But I do need the services of a police detective once again, so I thought I’d stop by and leave word for him. Would you mind telling him I need to speak with him?”

“I’ll do no such thing! I’m not some servant you can order around and—”

She stopped speaking for the same reason Sarah stopped listening to her. They were both distracted by the realization that Brian had, within seconds, figured out how to remove the toy rider from his saddle, unbuckle the saddle and remove it, and then put everything back together again.