Murder on Washington Square (17 page)

“Yes,” Sarah agreed eagerly. “And if, heaven forbid, things do go badly for Nelson, you can simply apologize for indulging your foolish daughter and dragging him into it.”

“He’ll forgive you that, surely,” her mother said. “Men always understand when another man is imposed upon by a woman.”

Her father frowned. “Why do I feel I’m being imposed upon right now?”

“Because you are, dear,” her mother said with a sweet smile.

 

Sarah had just gotten back from delivering supper to the Ellsworths when someone knocked on her door. She smiled when she saw a familiar silhouette reflected through the frosted glass of the front door.

“Malloy,” she said in greeting as she opened the door, but her welcoming smile froze on her face when she saw his expression.

“I guess you haven’t seen the evening papers,” he said, holding up a copy of the
World.

“No, I—” she began, but he brushed past her, not really interested in her reply. “Is it about Nelson?” she asked as she glanced out onto the street before closing the door. At least the reporters appeared to have gone for the day. Malloy probably wouldn’t have come to her front door if they hadn’t.

“Was this your idea?” he asked, thrusting the paper at her.

She stared at the headline: WANTON WOMAN DRIVES LOVER TO MURDER.

Skimming the article, she wanted to groan aloud. Webster Prescott had completely misunderstood her plea for help.

“He calls Anna Blake everything but a prostitute,” Malloy said. “Where did he get that idea? Every other paper still has her as an innocent victim.”

“I just told him Nelson didn’t kill her,” Sarah insisted. “I asked him to help me save him from being executed!”

“He just might,” Malloy said sourly, “if he can get the other papers to turn on Anna Blake, too.” He pulled off his bowler hat and hung it on her coat rack without waiting for an invitation to stay.

“But according to this, he’s still guilty of murder,” Sarah argued. “How can that help him?”

“Because Anna Blake is no longer innocent. She’s a harlot who seduced and blackmailed him and then threatened to kill his child unless he paid her. A woman like that deserves whatever she gets, and a lot of men would think she deserves to be murdered.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Sarah exclaimed.

“Is it? Have you forgotten what people said when Charity Girls were being murdered?”

A few months ago, she and Malloy had solved the murders of several girls who were so desperately poor that they sometimes traded their favors for a few trinkets. Because they went to dance halls and associated with young men, their deaths were ignored. As far as most people were concerned, they’d gotten what they deserved for their loose behavior.

“Men kill their wives and their mistresses all the time,” Malloy reminded her. “How many of them ever go to prison, much less hang, for it? That’s because their lawyers convince the jury the women were shrews or wantons or whatever, and the men on the jury start thinking how often they’ve wanted to commit murder in their own homes with far less provocation. If the woman was immoral, she deserved to die, so how can they convict this poor fellow? So they let him go.”

Sarah did groan aloud this time. He was right, of course. Far too many women had been falsely vilified in death so that their killers could escape punishment. “I don’t care what Anna Blake did, she didn’t deserve to die!” Sarah insisted. “And even if she did, Nelson wasn’t the one who killed her!”

“What did you offer this reporter to change his story?” Malloy said, his eyes fairly crackling with rage.

“What are you suggesting?” she countered, stung by his implication.

Malloy sighed in exasperation. “You must have promised him something. Reporters are like dogs. They never let go of a bone unless they see a bigger one.”

“I simply told him the truth, that Anna Blake had other lovers, so Nelson wasn’t necessarily the father of her child, and that she’d refused Nelson’s offer of marriage in favor of blackmail.”

“That’s all?” Plainly he didn’t believe it.

“That’s
all
,” she confirmed. “What other proof did I need that Anna Blake wasn’t an honest woman when she refused an offer of marriage to give her child a name?”

“There was no child,” Malloy said.

Sarah gaped at him. “What do you mean, no child?”

“Just that. Anna Blake wasn’t expecting a child. Do you have any coffee?” He headed off toward her kitchen without waiting for a reply.

She followed in his wake, looking at the story again, trying to find even a hint that Prescott had believed her that Nelson was innocent. She found none.

Malloy sat down at her kitchen table without being invited and waited for her to serve him. She lifted the pot and judged there was enough for one cup in it. It had been sitting for quite a while, but she figured Malloy wouldn’t care. She poured it into a cup and set it before him. “Do you want something to eat?”

He waved off her offer. “I’m on my way home.”

“How is Brian doing?” she asked, instantly picturing his sweet face.

Malloy shrugged. “He doesn’t like the cast, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting him much anymore.”

Sarah smiled. “He’ll be so excited when he finds out he can walk.”

Malloy nodded, apparently too superstitious to talk about it.

She decided to let the matter drop for now and sat down in front of him. “All right, what did you mean Anna Blake wasn’t with child?” she asked him again.

“The coroner said she wasn’t, and he looked pretty close. Besides, she was wearing a . . . a thing.” He got very interested in his coffee and wouldn’t meet her eye.

“What kind of thing?” she pressed.

He made a vague gesture with his hand, still not meeting her eye. “To keep her from . . .” He waved his hand again.

“From
what
?” she asked in exasperation.

“So she wouldn’t get with child in the first place,” he said impatiently.

Sarah let this information sink in. “What was she using? A sponge?” she asked in amazement.

Was Malloy blushing? “Yeah, that’s . . . that’s what the coroner said,” he mumbled, still looking intently at his coffee.

Sarah bit back a smile. For someone who spent his life investigating the worst aspect of the human condition, he was awfully prudish. “She lied to Nelson about the baby, then.”

“She lied to Giddings, too.”

“Was she blackmailing him as well?”

“A lot more successfully than she was Nelson, from the looks of it. He lost his job when he got caught stealing from the law firm where he worked.”

“Oh, dear. Do you know what this means? She probably would have tried to get Nelson to steal from the bank, too.”

“Why would he? He didn’t have a reputation or a family to protect.”

He had a good point. “It just doesn’t make any sense for her to have been trying to blackmail Nelson, does it?”

“A lot of this doesn’t make any sense. I need to talk to her landlady and that other woman who lives there. I’m sure they know more than they’re telling, and from what the old woman next door said, that other woman might be doing the same thing Anna was, only with different men.”

“How would a neighbor know that?” Sarah asked.

Malloy gave her a pitying look. “Doesn’t Mrs. Ellsworth know everything you do?”

“She doesn’t know
everything
I do. She knows you call on me, but if I was seducing you and trying to blackmail you, she couldn’t know that unless one of us told her,” she pointed out.

He gave her one of his looks. “All right, the old woman didn’t know about
everything
, but she did see several different men coming and going at the house, more than Anna could have accommodated by herself. They never stepped out with the women, either.”

“If they were married, they couldn’t risk being seen,” Sarah guessed.

“That’s what I thought.”

“And if several men were calling on each of the women, the landlords had to know about it,” Sarah said.

“Especially if they were entertaining the men in their rooms,” Malloy pointed out.

“I thought you were going to see Mrs. Walcott today to find out about this.”

“She wasn’t home. Nobody was home when I called there this morning, and then I got a case of my own to work on. This isn’t my case, remember, and I’ve got to at least pretend I’m doing my own work. Otherwise, they might get a little annoyed with me down at Mulberry Street.”

“If it would help, I could call on her tomorrow with you,” Sarah offered. “A Sunday afternoon call would be just the thing.”

“Just the thing for what?” he asked with another of his looks.

“Just the thing to get her talking about her tenants.”

“If she’s running what amounts to a bawdy house, she’s not likely to confide it in you,” he pointed out.

“She’s even less likely to confide it in you,” Sarah pointed out right back. “And have you searched Anna’s room yet? There might be a diary or some letters or something else. And the maid probably knows a lot, too. She just wouldn’t say anything in front of that other woman, Catherine Porter. I’m sure I could get Catherine to talk, too, if I just had the chance.”

“Are you going to ask them to line up and take their turns answering your questions?” Malloy asked sarcastically.

He was right, of course. She couldn’t just show up on their doorstep and question them, one by one. Only Malloy could do that. “At least let me search her room. You know I’m good at that!”

She could see he was remembering the first time they’d met, when she’d found a vital clue for him while searching a murder victim’s room.

“What excuse will you use for turning up on their doorstep?” he asked, downing the last of his coffee.

“I’ll be coming as your assistant,” she countered.

This drew the blackest look yet, but she merely smiled serenely.

“Mrs. Brandt,” he said sternly, “you do not work for the police department, and you are not my assistant. You have no right to be investigating a murder at all. Besides, they already know you’re a midwife.”

“You know perfectly well you could bring a trained monkey along with you to question people and no one would dare challenge you. The police do whatever they want. If you say I can search the entire house and ask people whatever I want, then I can. What time should I meet you there?”

Someone started pounding at her door, a frantic sound she knew only too well.

“Sounds like someone wants to see you,” Malloy observed.

“It’s a baby. They always knock like that when it’s a baby.”

“Go ahead, then. I’ll let myself out the back. I need to talk to Nelson Ellsworth again. There’s something about this whole thing that smells bad, and maybe he can help me understand it.”

“You aren’t leaving until you tell me what time you’ll be at the boardinghouse tomorrow,” she warned when he got up and started for the back door.

His grin told her she didn’t stand much chance of stopping him, even if he didn’t tell her anything, but he said, “I’ll probably be there around one o’clock, if you’re finished with your duties by then.”

Sarah smiled with satisfaction and went to answer the anxious summons.

 

Frank stood where Mrs. Ellsworth could see him through her back window in the fading sunlight. The door opened only a few seconds after he’d knocked, and Mrs. Ellsworth greeted him as if he were the Prodigal Son.

“Oh, Mr. Malloy, how good of you to come. I dropped a knife this afternoon, so I knew a gentleman would be calling. I hoped it was you, and not another of those awful reporters. Do you have any word? Have you found the killer yet?” she asked as he came into her kitchen. Now that he had a good look at her, he realized this ordeal was taking a toll. Her eyes were shadowed from lack of sleep, and her whole body seemed to have shrunken, as if she were drawing up into herself under the weight of this terrible burden.

“Not yet, I’m afraid,” he told her, wishing he had better news. “But I have a few questions that Nelson might be able to answer.”

“I’m sure he’ll be happy to,” she said. “He’s been so upset. He hardly eats, and I have to beg him to come out of his room.”

“Maybe he’d make an exception for me,” Frank suggested.

“I’ll be sure he does,” the old woman promised. “Please, come in and have a seat in the parlor. I’ll fetch him down.”

Mrs. Ellsworth’s parlor looked exactly as Frank would have imagined it. Immaculately clean and cluttered with figurines and ornaments and crocheted doilies, it had the look of a room kept for “good,” and rarely used. Over the mantle hung a portrait of a man Frank assumed must be the elder Mr. Ellsworth. The painting made him look dyspeptic.

Frank seated himself on the horsehair sofa to wait.

A few minutes later, he heard footsteps on the stairs. Mrs. Ellsworth came down first to tell him Nelson would be following, and he did in another moment, moving as if he were the older of the two. If Mrs. Ellsworth looked tired, Nelson looked positively ill. He hadn’t shaved in days, his hair had been carelessly combed, and his clothes were rumpled, like he’d been sleeping in them. His face was the worst, though. Haggard and pale, he stared at Frank with the hopelessness of a condemned man.

“If you’ll excuse us, Mrs. Ellsworth,” Frank said, rising to usher her out of the room. Plainly she didn’t want to leave.

“Can I get you anything? Are you hungry?” she asked anxiously, looking for an excuse to return.

“No, we won’t need anything,” Frank assured her, closing the parlor door practically in her face. He hoped she wouldn’t listen outside the door. She wouldn’t want to hear the answers to the questions Frank had to ask.

Nelson had seated himself in one of the chairs and was staring up at him with resignation. “You’re here to arrest me, aren’t you?” he said.

“Not yet,” Frank replied cheerfully. “We’re still working on the case, and some questions have come up that I’m hoping you can answer.”