"Murder on St. Mark’s place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Victoria)

1

SARAH HEARD THE WAILING WHEN SHE WAS STILL halfway down the street. She knew the sound only too well, the howl of a grief too great to bear, and she was certain she had arrived too late.

A midwife by trade, she had been summoned to deliver the third child of Agnes Otto, a strong, healthy young woman whom Sarah had seen only a few days earlier. Everything had seemed fine then, but if Sarah had learned nothing else from her years of midwifery, she knew that things sometimes went terribly wrong when a baby was making its way into the world, no matter how strong and healthy his mother might appear to be.

Certain of what she would find and praying she wasn’t too late to save at least one of them, Sarah picked up her heavy skirts and tucked her medical bag under her arm. Dodging the puddles left from the freak rainstorm yesterday that had dropped over an inch of rain in a hour’s time, she hurried down the sidewalk, past the neat row of tenement buildings here on St. Mark’s Place, in the heart of Little Germany, until she reached the one where Agnes Otto lived. The front door stood open to catch what little air stirred in the early July heat, and Sarah was up the stoop and through it in an instant. Inside, the dark hallway was deserted, but the sound of weeping echoed down the stairwell. She followed it unerringly and found several women gathered on the landing above, just outside the door to the Ottos’ flat. They were crying and wringing their hands and sobbing into their aprons. That was when Sarah began to suspect that whatever was wrong was not what she’d been expecting at all.

Then she saw the policeman.

He stood just inside the flat, the brass buttons of his uniform straining over his big belly, sweat streaming off his face in the oppressive heat, and his expression oddly panicked. His presence relieved her on one level. Nobody called the police because a baby or a mother died in childbirth. But the police didn’t just show up for no reason, either. Something terrible had happened, even though it wasn’t the thing Sarah had most feared.

“Oh, look, Mrs. Brandt has come,” one of the neighbor women said, seeing Sarah. “Thank heaven you’ve come.”

The policeman turned to look at her, and his sweaty face brightened. “The midwife’s here now, missus,” he said to someone inside, someone who was crying more loudly than any of the women in the hallway. “I’ll just be on my way. Someone will let you know when you can claim the body.”

The body? Good heavens, what was he talking about? Had something happened to Agnes’s husband? No wonder everyone was hysterical.

“What’s going on here?” Sarah demanded of the policeman, but he was in too much of a hurry to leave. He tipped his hat as he passed, but he did pass, as quickly as he could push his way through the group of women and squeeze by Sarah, and then he hustled his bulky frame down the dark stairwell and was gone.

“It is Mrs. Otto’s sister, Gerda,” one of the women obligingly explained, dabbing at her eyes with the comer of her apron. “Somebody has murdered her!”

The words brought back ugly memories that Sarah had worked very hard to store away forever. Her own husband had been murdered a little more than three years ago, and just last April, Sarah had helped solve the murder of another unfortunate young woman. Although she sometimes had to deal with death in the course of her work, that at least was natural. She’d hoped never again to encounter the kind that came unnaturally, from the violent hand of another.

Sarah didn’t have to push her way into the Ottos’ flat. The women parted to allow her to enter, apparently as grateful for her arrival as the policeman had been.

Agnes Otto sat at the table in her small kitchen with her head on her arms, sobbing as if her heart would break. Plainly, Sarah would get no straight answers from her.

She turned to the women still hovering in the doorway. “Is she in labor?”

“We do not know,” one of them said. “But we were afraid, with the shock of it…”

Sarah nodded. Shock had a way of hurrying things along, and Agnes was due anytime now. Sarah set her medical bag on the table and started to unbutton the jacket that fashion dictated she wear out in public, in spite of the heat. From the front room of the flat, the one facing the street, Sarah could hear the cries of a young child. That would be Agnes’s daughter, who was about two. Looking around, she found Agnes’s son, a boy of about four. He was huddled in the comer, practically under the sink, and staring at his mother with wide, terrified eyes.

“Would one of you take care of the children, please?” Sarah asked as she rolled up her sleeves. “They shouldn’t be here.”

Two of the women hurried to do her bidding, removing the children from the flat and leaving her alone with Agnes. “Do you want me to send for your husband?” Sarah asked, gently stroking the other woman’s shoulders in a gesture of comfort.

Agnes didn’t hesitate. She shook her head vehemently, then made an effort to raise her head. Her usually pale face was swollen and blotched with weeping. She brushed at her running nose with the cuff of her sleeve, and said, “He will not come. He would lose his day’s wages.”

Some men would count that a small cost to be able to comfort a pregnant wife, but Agnes knew her husband better than Sarah did. “How are you feeling? Are you having any pains?”

“Pains?” As if she’d forgotten for a moment that she was pregnant, Agnes sat up in the chair and wrapped her arms protectively around her distended belly. Then she looked at Sarah and seemed to recognize her for the first time. “Nein, I don’t think so. Why have you come?” she asked in alarm.

“One of the neighbor boys came for me. I thought it must be your time.”

“I did not send for you. I did not think of anything but-” Her voice broke as she remembered her sister, and she covered her face with her hands.

“I guess your neighbors thought you might need me.” Sarah pulled out a chair and sat down beside Agnes. “Can you tell me what happened?”

For a long moment Sarah was afraid Agnes wouldn’t be able to speak, but she continued to stroke her back and croon meaningless phrases of comfort until at last she was rewarded for her patience.

Slowly, Agnes lowered her hands, revealing eyes filled with so much pain, Sarah had to force herself not to look away. “It is Gerda. My little sister. You remember her?”

Sarah nodded. Gerda was a lively young girl of about sixteen, with blond hair and sparkling blue eyes who had come to America less than a year ago to live with her married sister. Her parents hoped she’d do as well as Agnes had, find a suitable husband and a good life here. She had a job in one of the sweatshops, where she would have earned enough to pay Agnes and her husband, Lars, for her keep, but not much more. Sarah vaguely recalled Agnes’s concern for her.

“You were worried about her, weren’t you?”

Agnes nodded, shuddering under a fresh onslaught of tears. “She would not listen. She would not stay home like a good girl. She was only sixteen…” Once again, the tears choked her, and Sarah had to wait, her own eyes welling with tears as she thought of a life so young being snuffed out. As much to distract herself as to help Agnes, she got up and fetched a glass of water from the pitcher and helped her patient drink it when she was calm again.

“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.

Two 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.”

SOMEONE 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.

“Aren’t you clever, Brian,” Sarah told him, expecting him to beam his glorious smile at her. Instead he didn’t even look up. He had already started working on removing the horse’s delicate bridle.

Perhaps he was simply engrossed in his project, but Sarah didn’t think so.

“That’s a horse, Brian. You probably see them in the street when you look out the window,” she tried.

“That’s right, Bri, don’t pay her no mind,” Mrs. Malloy said, and the boy paid her no mind either. “He won’t talk to you,” she told Sarah with just a trace of satisfaction. “If he won’t talk to me in three years, he ain’t going to talk to you just because you brought him a present.”

Sarah didn’t acknowledge her. She was too busy studying the boy. His tiny hands were nimble as he worked the intricacies of the horse’s tack. He’d needed no more than a moment of study to figure out how to remove and replace it. And yet his grandmother claimed he’d never uttered a word.

“Has he always been mute?” Sarah asked as the tiny seed of an idea sprouted in her mind.

“Mute? What’s that, a fancy name for simple?” Mrs. Malloy demanded.

“No, it means someone who doesn’t speak. Did he cry when he was a baby?”

“Hardly at all,” she bragged. “He was the best baby on earth. Never gave his old Nana a second of trouble, did you, Bohyo?”

Brian didn’t deign to reply. He was moving the horse along the floor, as if the cowboy were going for a ride across the wooden planks. He turned away as the horse rode over toward the sofa. He seemed oblivious to the conversation going on around him. Or maybe not oblivious at all.

“Hah!” Sarah shouted as loudly as she dared.

Mrs. Malloy squeaked in shock, her hand going instantly to her heart. “Whatever is the matter with you?” she cried, outraged at Sarah’s bizarre behavior. “You scared me out of ten years’ growth!”

Indeed, the woman had fairly jumped when Sarah shouted, but the boy hadn’t moved a muscle. He hadn’t so much as hesitated in his determination to take his cowboy on the ride of his life all around the parlor. He hadn’t even noticed.

Which made Sarah think that she knew the real reason why Brian never spoke, and it had nothing at all to do with him being feebleminded.

“He seems very clever with his hands. Did you see how quickly he figured out how to work the saddle?” she asked.

“He’s always been good at figuring things out,” Mrs. Malloy said defensively, as if Sarah had somehow insulted him by hinting his brain might not be as damaged as she had been led to believe.

She glanced at Mrs. Malloy, then back at the boy. Dare she voice her suspicion? No, not to the old woman. She wouldn’t be interested in Sarah’s theories about her grand-son, not from a woman she had decided was out to usurp her position in Frank Malloy’s life. Malloy might not be interested either, but at least he would listen. And if Sarah was wrong, as well she might be…

“Next time I come, I’ll bring you some cookies, Brian,” she tried. The boy was riding his horse up the side of the sofa and didn’t respond.

“Next time!” Mrs. Malloy huffed. “What makes you think you’d be welcome?”

Sarah smiled sweetly. “Not a thing,” she admitted. “But I would appreciate it if you would tell Mr. Malloy that I stopped by. If you do, I won’t have to come back again.”

There, that might be just the motive the old woman needed. But probably she wouldn’t have been able to resist venting her spleen on Malloy over Sarah’s brazenness in calling on a man without so much as an invitation. Whatever her reason, Mrs. Malloy was sure to complain to her son about Sarah, which would, in turn, bring him right to her door. Satisfied that she had accomplished her mission in coming, she took her leave. Brian hardly noticed.

SARAH WAS GLAD she’d bought an extra chop and a loaf of bread at the Gansevoort Market a few blocks away when she saw the man sitting on her doorstep. He didn’t look particularly pleased to be there, but Sarah had expected that. She was pretty sure she could coax him out of his bad mood if she cooked for him, though. It had worked once before.

“Mrs. Brandt!”

The familiar voice distracted Sarah from Malloy’s glowering expression, and she turned to see her neighbor peering at her through her partially opened window. Nothing happened in the neighborhood that Mrs. Elsworth didn’t see and note, and someone as large and formidable as Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy was certainly noteworthy.

“I knew someone would be coming today. I had bubbles in my teacup this morning,” she reported.

“Bubbles?” Sarah echoed in amusement.

“Yes, a sure sign that visitors are coming. Or at least one visitor, in this case. I didn’t think you’d mind if he waited, or I would have told him to be on his way. It’s that police detective, isn’t it? He hasn’t been around in a while.”

The question Mrs. Elsworth was too well bred to ask was fairly screaming for an answer, but Sarah felt compelled to discourage her nosiness since she hadn’t been able to do a thing to quell her superstitions. “No, he hasn’t been around in a while,” Sarah confirmed, “and it’s perfectly fine that he waited for me. I need to speak with him. But maybe you just had some soapsuds in your cup. Did you ever think of that?”

Not waiting for a reply, Sarah strolled on down the sidewalk to where Malloy now stood beside her front stoop, glowering furiously.

“Good evening, Mr. Malloy,” she said. “It was so good of you to come.”

He looked as if he’d like to throttle her, but she was fairly certain he wouldn’t, at least not with Mrs. Elsworth watching.

“What did you think you were doing this afternoon?” he asked, his voice rough but pitched low, so he couldn’t be overheard.

“I was visiting your son, and a delightful boy he is, too.” She’d passed him and gone on up the steps, leaving him no choice but to follow unless he wanted to shout at her.

“My mother almost had a stroke, she was that upset,” he told her as she unlocked her front door.

Sarah could believe it. “She thinks I’ve set my cap for you, Malloy,” she informed him wickedly, pushing the door open.

“What?” he asked, but he was talking to himself because she’d gone into the house. Left with no other choice, he followed her inside.

“Your mother thinks I’m looking for a husband,” Sarah explained, closing the door behind him, “and she obviously believes you’re a good catch, so naturally, she wasn’t very happy to see me, but you can assure her I am no threat to your independence.”

Malloy planted his hands on his hips and made every attempt to intimidate her. She had to admit, he almost succeeded. Malloy could be horribly intimidating when he set his mind to it. “That’s not what she was going on about,” he informed her. “She said you upset the boy.”

“Brian?” she asked, genuinely shocked. She should have guessed Mrs. Malloy would lie to make her look bad to her son. “He wasn’t upset. In fact, he was very happy when I left. Did he show you the horse I gave him?”

“He didn’t show me anything. He was sitting in a corner, banging his head on the wall when I got home, and the old woman was screaming like a banshee.”

“Oh, my.” Sarah frowned, trying to figure this out. Brian had been blissfully happy when she left, and would have remained so as long as he had his new toy to play with. Was it possible? Could the old woman have been cruel enough to take the toy away to upset the boy for his father’s sake? Of course she could, if she believed she was protecting her family from a she-devil, which she obviously did. “Well, then, you’d probably enjoy having your supper in some peace and quiet. Lucky for you I got some extra meat.”

“Mrs. Brandt!” he called after her as she made her way into the kitchen.

Sarah turned back just before disappearing through the doorway. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about why I went to the trouble to get you over here?”

Frank swore under his breath as he watched her go. What on earth had possessed him to come here tonight? He should have remembered what an infuriating piece of baggage Sarah Brandt could be. Oh, she was smart and a damn fine-looking woman, but Frank had never considered intelligence a particularly attractive trait in a female, and beauty is as beauty does, as his mother would have said. He couldn’t have cared less why she wanted to see him, and he felt obliged to tell her so. Besides, she’d left him standing in her office with its strange instruments and equipment, and the mere sight of those things made his flesh crawl.

He found her stoking the fire in her stove. “Mrs. Brandt-”

“It’s too hot in here. Why don’t you go sit on the back porch and wait. I have a little table set up out there to catch the breeze, and I poured you some beer.” She nodded toward a tall glass of amber liquid sitting on her table. “My neighbor makes it,” she explained with one of her sly grins when Frank registered surprise.

Maybe he was being too hasty. He’d tell her whatever it was he intended to tell her after he’d had the beer. And maybe he’d let her feed him, too. She wasn’t a bad cook, if he remembered correctly. And then… Well, then he’d make sure she understood she was never to show her face in his mother’s presence again.

By the time she set his plate in front of him, he’d mellowed somewhat. Maybe it was the beer or maybe it was the peacefulness of his surroundings. Her back porch overlooked the tiny patch of ground that passed for a yard in the city. Sarah Brandt had filled that patch of ground with flowers of every description. Their beauty and fragrance disguised the stench and bleakness that stretched in every direction outside the boundaries of her fence.

She’d fried up a pork chop and some potatoes and onions. Bakery bread completed the meal, and Frank realized he was starving. She sat down opposite him at the small wicker table she’d placed on the porch, still smiling the way she did when she thought she knew something he didn’t.

“Somebody’s been murdered,” he guessed, trying to wipe that grin off her face. He found it far too disturbing.

To his relief, she frowned. “The sister of one of my patients, a girl named Gerda Reinhard. She was only sixteen. Her family doesn’t have any money, and her sister is afraid her murder will never be solved.”

“She’s probably right,” Frank said before allowing himself to taste the meat. It was juicy and tender, not fried to shoe leather the way his mother would have done.

That really made her frown. “I thought maybe you could help.”

He gave her a look that usually turned hardened criminals into quivering, terrified jelly, but she didn’t bat an eye.

“I promised her sister that I’d find out what I could, at least,” she said. “Can you at least tell me if there are any suspects? If the police think they know who did it or something?”

Frank took another bite of the meat and told himself he was only asking for trouble. There was nothing he could do for this girl’s family, and it was cruel of Sarah Brandt to let them think otherwise. Still, he heard himself say, “What happened to her?”

“They found her in an alley. Someone had beaten her and-”

“Oh, the red shoes,” he said knowingly.

“What?”

“She was wearing red shoes, wasn’t she?”

“Yes. How did you know?” She seemed pleased that he’d guessed so quickly.

“Everybody at Mulberry Street was talking about it,” he said, referring to the offices of police headquarters on Mulberry Street. “And you’re wasting your time. They’ll never find out who killed her without offering a reward… and not for the police,” he added when she would have interrupted him. It was common knowledge that the New York City police only investigated crimes for which they would receive a reward. “You’d need a reward to get a witness to come forward. They’ll never find her killer unless somebody saw him do it. There’s just too many possible suspects.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this is no society girl this time,” he said, reminding her of the murder the two of them had solved last spring. “Gerda Reinhard was pretty free with her favors, if you know what I mean. Out every night, different men each time, she was just asking for trouble. Got what she deserved, if you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you!” she cried, outraged. “Are you saying that a girl who tries to have a little fun deserves to have the life beaten out of her?”

How could he have forgotten how unreasonable she could be? He swallowed down the last bite of his chop, which no longer tasted quite so delicious. “I’m saying that when a girl takes up with strange men the way this one did, night after night, she’s bound to find a bad one sooner or later.”

“And you think this bad one should be allowed to go out and kill another unsuspecting young woman because this girl’s family is too poor to pay a reward to catch him?”

Frank’s dinner was turning into a molten ball in his stomach. “I’m saying that it’s not very likely he’ll be caught.”

“Isn’t it worth a try, though? Things are changing in the police force. You’re bound to get noticed if you solved a case like this.”

“Noticed by who? Your friend Teddy Roosevelt? Haven’t you been reading the newspapers?”

“I certainly have! His testimony is going to get that corrupt Commissioner Parker removed from office, and then he’ll finally be able to accomplish the reforms he wants. That will mean excellent officers-and detectives-will be promoted.”

He shook his head. “Not likely. Parker is a Platt man,” he said, naming the Democratic party boss who ran the city by pulling the strings of elected politicians. “The governor would have to approve his removal, and that won’t ever happen, no matter what the mayor decides. So if you think I’ll waste my time trying to impress the likes of Roosevelt-the man who offended every man who likes a Sunday afternoon beer in this town-then you’re out of your mind.”

She sighed in disgust and stabbed at her meat with her fork without making any attempt to eat it. Another man might have thought she’d given up, but Frank knew Sarah Brandt better than that. She never gave up. He braced himself for her next angle of attack, but even still, she caught him on his blind side.

“I also wanted to talk to you about Brian.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Frank informed her. “My mother takes care of him, and she knows what’s best for him. Seeing you upsets him, so I’m going to have to insist that-”

“Your mother told me he’s feebleminded,” she said baldly, without the slightest regard for the pain this would cause him.

And it did cause him pain, the kind of agony someone like Sarah Brandt with her privileged background could never understand. “You must have noticed that yourself,” he said, his teeth gritted in an attempt to control himself.

“I don’t think he is,” she said, laying down her fork and crossing her arms over her well-padded bosom. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with his mind at all.”

Now Frank was really sorry he hadn’t throttled her earlier. He could have spared himself this, at least. “My son’s mind is none of your concern,” he tried, but she was having none of it.

“I told you I gave him a horse when I visited him today. It was a fancy carved thing I picked up from a street peddler. It had a real leather saddle and bridle, and Brian had them off that horse in seconds. Your mother said he’s very clever at figuring things out, even though he’s only three years old.”

Frank had to grip the edge of the table to hold himself in check. “Maybe she also told you he doesn’t talk. Doesn’t make a sound, and he can’t understand a damn thing you say to him.” He was fairly shouting now, but even that didn’t seem to bother her. She just stared back at him, cool as you please.

“Of course he doesn’t understand what you say to him. That’s because he’s deaf.”