by Ed Gorman
Anna took the magazine, opened to the page Trace had marked, then exploded into laughter. “Listen to this,” she said, smiling. “The title is ‘The Art of Tidying.’ Here goes, Mrs. Goldman. ‘One of the few anecdotes intended to prove a warning to my heedless youth, which I can now remember, related to the homely subject of tidying up. It was to this effect, and was short and sour. Miss Smith had long been engaged to be married to Mr. Jones. That gentleman was invited to sleep a night at Mr. Smith’s house, and coming down to breakfast, he passed his intended wife’s bedroom, from which she had gone down, leaving the door wide open. There he saw such a scene of confusion that he felt sure his home would not be a comfortable one under Miss Smith’s management, and so he broke off the match.’ “
By now, Mrs. Goldman was laughing, too. Once or twice a week Trace Wydmore dropped off some magazine or pamphlet aimed at convincing Anna that she was a most peculiar woman—one who wanted a full-time job, one who wanted a job that properly belonged to a man, one who believed that women were right in wanting the vote, and one who felt no sympathy for the upper classes when their workers asked for better pay. “Being rich isn’t as easy as it seems,” Trace Wydmore always said plaintively. “Yes,” Anna always laughed, “it does sound like a terrible burden, doesn’t it?”
“I’m going up early tonight,” Mrs. Goldman said now. “I think I’m coming down with my annual spring cold.”
She nodded and left, leaving Anna to sit there and close her eyes and think again of Stephanie Muldaur’s sweet aggrieved face. Unless she soon escaped her father’s clutches, the girl’s life would become just as mean and narrow as those of the evangelicals surrounding her. She wished there were something she could do for the girl. And then Stephanie’s face faded, replaced by that of the handsome young crippled man who had looked shocked and grief-stricken, as he stole a glance at Rachael Muldaur’s corpse every few moments. Who was he? And why was he more distraught-looking than either Muldaur or Stephanie? And, come to think of it, why hadn’t Muldaur and Stephanie seemed more heartbroken than they had? And if Anna hadn’t been mistaken, hadn’t she seen vomit all over Rachael’s dress? The body had been carted away, Anna had given Chief Ryan a complete report on the death, and then the police had waited for the county coroner to return by train from Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he had attended a wedding.
She was thinking of all these things when the telephone rang in the kitchen. Telephones, with all their wires and bells, still intimidated her. She lifted the receiver and recognized Chief Ryan’s voice immediately. “Just thought I’d tell you, Anna. Doc McWilliams got back tonight and had a look at Rachael Muldaur. He said he found vomit all over her, so he’s wondering if a snakebite killed her after all.” So Anna had been right about the vomit. But what did it mean? They talked a few minutes more, and then hung up.
Almost without realizing it, Anna went to the hall closet, took down her denim jacket, and went out the front door. It was time to pay John Muldaur a visit.
The people of Cedar Rapids took pride in how well lit they kept the city. They wanted to keep the crime rate low. At dusk lamplighters set about putting their matches to more than three hundred streetlamps. In the morning the same lamplighters set about turning the lamps off.
Anna’s destination was the southwest side of town, near where the large Czechoslovakian population had settled. Last year this stretch along the river would have been raucous with player piano music and the drunken laughter of men who should have been home with their families. A group of temperance women had tried in vain to shut down the two most egregious taverns. Then two elderly sisters named Tomlin devised the idea of going into the taverns themselves to do all their knitting and darning. The owners objected, of course, but the women were careful to buy one small glass of beer each hour and to hide themselves at a corner table. The women intimidated the men. The drunkards felt they couldn’t swear or fight or tell dirty stories. And so they soon sought other places to drink. The owners demanded that the city council force the women to leave—but ultimately it was the owners who left, sixty miles east to Dubuque, where they opened taverns on the more hospitable Mississippi River.
As she thought about all this, Anna moved through an alley that moonlight cast in deep shadow. She could smell the clean, chill river a hundred yards away. The windows in Muldaur’s shack-like little house showed flickering kerosene light. On the road behind her, a hansom cab rolled on toward the city. The spring night smelled of apple blossoms.
Muldaur appeared suddenly in his doorway. He turned back and said, “You get to bed now, Stephanie, you hear me?” As usual, there was a threat in his voice. He slammed the door behind him, walked upslope from the river, and then started moving quickly along the main road.
Anna followed, staying one hundred feet behind him at all times and never once stepping into the road. She moved from tree to tree, the way Indians always did in the yellowback novels her older brother had always read.
Muldaur walked for fifteen minutes and then stopped in front of a cabin. No lights shone. No sound carried from the darkness inside. Muldaur strode up to the front door of the cabin. He raised a mighty foot and kicked the door in clean. Then he half dove into the shadows inside. A man’s scream could be heard—not Muldaur’s—and then, the sounds of punches being thrown and landing. Suddenly, a small man was thrown out of the cabin and onto the grass. He tried to scramble to his feet, but even from Anna’s position his crippled leg was obvious. Before the crippled man could quite find his balance, Muldaur raced out and kicked him in the stomach. The man folded in half, collapsed to the ground. Muldaur kicked him three more times. The man screamed twice. Lights came on in a nearby house. In moments a woman in a nightgown and robe appeared, carrying a formidable shotgun. Muldaur got in one more savage kick and then ran away, lost in the midnight moon and the train whistle up in the bluffs surrounding the city.
Anna did not sleep well that night. She lay abed wondering why Muldaur had kicked the crippled man. Surely it had something to do with his wife’s murder.
“You’re determined to go and get me in trouble, aren’t you, Anna?” Chief Ryan said. But he smiled as he said it.
“Well, you can always say that since I was the one who saw the body first, you think it’s only right that I follow up on it,” Anna said. The chief ‘s smile vanished. With his white hair and big Irish face he would have been grandfatherly except for the scar that stretched from his cheekbone to his jawline.
Chief Ryan hadn’t been a very exemplary cop in his younger days. It was said that he’d occasionally lock himself in a cell with a criminal who had done something particularly onerous and give the man a chance to defend himself in a fistfight. It was safe to assume that Ryan had won most of those fights.
The chief shook his head. “Anna, I’ve got two detectives in there who’re just waiting for you to make a mistake so they can go running to the mayor. Those two can make all the mistakes they want and nobody’ll bother ‘em. But if you make a mistake—I won’t have any choice, Anna. The mayor, the sonofabitch—and please excuse my French—the mayor’ll make me fire you.”
“I won’t make any mistakes, Chief. I promise.” He smiled again and, despite the scar, looked just the way grandfathers should always look.
Stephanie Muldaur answered on the fourth knock. Instead of a dress, today she wore a man’s work shirt and corduroys.
“Is your father home?”
Stephanie shook her pretty head. “No.”
“Do you know where I could find him?”
“He’s at the quarry today, I expect.” Muldaur’s religion did not believe that white men should have anything to do with any other race. This included work. There was a quarry on the edge of town run by a man of Muldaur’s faith. Muldaur worked there whenever the owner needed an extra hand.
Anna looked past Stephanie into the jumble of the shack. “Mind if I come in and we talk for a minute?”
“About what?”
“About your
mother and father.”
“My dad said you’re violating God’s law by bein’ a policewoman.”
Anna smiled. “I expect I’ll leave that for God to decide.” The girl frowned. “That’s blasphemy, talkin’ like that.” Anna went inside. The main room consisted of a potbellied stove; a sad, cheap, three-piece parlor suite of upholstered sofa, rocker, and armchair; and enough pictures of a brooding Jesus to cover a dozen walls. But the smell was what held Anna—the high, sour odor of vomit. Anna again felt sorry for the girl. She lived like an animal here, with no idle pleasures in her young life, just the dark, harsh world of a malevolent God.
Anna sat on the edge of the armchair. “When did the snake bite your mother?”
“How come you’re askin’ the same questions Chief Ryan did yesterday?”
“We just need to make sure of things.”
The girl looked down at her hands. “It bit her yesterday when she was out back.”
“Out back?”
“Snake pit. Dad keeps ‘em down there and brings ‘em when we need ‘em.”
“How many snakes?” Anna said. She wanted to shudder.
“A dozen or so, I guess.”
“Would you show it to me?”
The girl looked up. “The snake pit?”
“Yes. Please.”
So Stephanie took her out to the snake pit. The backyard was just as cluttered and dirty as the main room, a junkyard in the making. Stephanie led Anna to the pit, which was covered with a grate and anchored with bricks. The river ran past less than ten feet away.
Even before she saw them, Anna heard them, the rattlesnakes with their sleek, sickening skin and their murderous noises. She peered down through the grate and saw them entangled, heads darting upward as they shot fangs at her. The smell was unclean. Their eyes seemed to glow and glare.
“How did your mother get the snakes out of there?”
Stephanie shrugged. “Used a stick. They’ll wrap around it.”
“When did she take them out?”
“Real early. Then she let ‘em set in the sack so they’d get good and mean. That’s the way God wants ‘em to be.”
“How many snakes did she take out?”
“Three, I guess.”
“And took them to where the baptism was being held?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you see her get bit?”
Stephanie stared at her a long time. “You don’t think she got bit?”
“Stephanie, I’m just asking you a question. No need for you to get mad.”
Stephanie sighed. “You’re gonna get me whipped, I hope you know that. My father, if he finds out I talked to you—”
She looked down at the snakes. “I guess I didn’t actually see her get bit.”
“But you’re sure it was a snakebite that killed her?”
Stephanie raised her eyes and stared hard at Anna. “What else would it have been?”
She waited for him on the corner, the handsome young crippled man she’d seen John Muldaur beat last night. In the afternoon light his face looked grim, bruised and puffy. He had the kind of gentle good looks that bring out the maternal in some women. He worked at an awning company—the day shift—and was just now getting off work. He had a clubfoot and every time he stepped down on his right leg, his whole body jerked a little.
“Mr. Ames?”
“Yes.” He did not seem happy about seeing her.
“Mind if I walk home with you?”
“What if I did mind? Would you leave me alone?”
She smiled. “No, I guess I wouldn’t.”
He glared at her. “You’re a sinner, lady. I hope you know that.”
“We’re all sinners, Mr. Ames. Even you.”
They walked half a block. Downtown Cedar Rapids was busy, almost festive on this warm, early spring afternoon. Ladies in big picture hats and formidable bustles strolled the sidewalks. Young couples in fancy bicycle costumes rode by on tandem bikes. And horses of every description trotted by.
“I saw him beat you up last night.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Mr. Ames. John Muldaur came to your place and beat you up. I want to know why.”
Ames shrugged. “I owed him some money and didn’t pay him back.”
She thought of how Ames had been the only one with tears in his eyes as Rachael Muldaur lay dead yesterday. She made an assumption. “He beat you up because you made love to his wife.”
“He tell you that?”
“No, Mr. Ames, but you just did.”
He didn’t say anything, though he did look as if he were going to cry again. Trust your instincts, the great criminologist Marie Francois Goron always said. And so she had. Reasonable to assume that a woman would be involved with the kind of violence she’d seen last night between Muldaur and this man. “I didn’t want it to happen and neither did she. It just…happened is all.”
“And Muldaur found out?”
He shook his head. “No, Stephanie found out. There was a spot where her mother used to take her out in the woods. That’s where Rachael and I always went when we…you know. Anyway, Stephanie went walking out there by herself a couple of weeks ago and stumbled on us.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
He shook his head. “Rachael got dressed and ran after her, but Stephanie wouldn’t say anything to her at all.”
“But she told her father?”
“Not for a week or so. It was terrible—us just waitin’ for her to let him know about it and all. But we knew soon as he found out because he came in the house one day and picked Rachael up and threw her against the stove—knocked the whole thing down—and then he started kickin’ her the way he kicked me last night.”
“Did she come to you?”
“She tried. But he followed her. He kicked her around some more and then dragged her back home.” He paused, looking mad for the first time. “I went out and got drunk that night. I couldn’t stand the thought of what he was doin’ to her. Then I came home and found out that he was plannin’ on payin’ me back, too.”
“Paying you back?”
“Like I said, I was drunk, so I wasn’t too swift that night. I got inside and laid down without lightin’ a lantern and then I heard them.”
“Them?”
“Rattlesnakes. He’d dumped half a dozen of them in my place.”
“You didn’t get bit?”
“No. But it took me till dawn to find every one of ‘em.”
“You think he really wanted to kill you?”
Ames snorted. “Sure he did. Half a dozen rattlers? Sure he did.”
“When was the last time you saw Rachael alive?”
“Yesterday, just as she was goin’ to the river. I decided to go to the baptism. He couldn’t keep me from that. But I went early so I could speak to Rachael.”
“And did you?”
“I tried but she was sick. Couldn’t swallow right or something. Kept kind’ve grabbin’ her throat.”
“She’d already been bitten, probably.”
“I never saw no snake-bit person act like that. She kept throwin’ up. I had to hold the snakes for her while she got sick.”
“Did she tell you a snake had bitten her?”
“No. She just kept sayin’ she was sick and didn’t know why.”
They had reached Ames’s cabin. By now tears stood clearly in Ames’s eyes. “I don’t think it was no snakebite. I think he killed her some other way.”
“What other way?”
“I don’t know. You’re supposed to be the high and mighty police-woman. Why don’t you figure it out?”
And with that Ames took his limp and his tears and his petulant anger and went into his cabin.
“No marks?”
“None whatsoever,” Doc McWilliams said.
“Are they usually easy to spot?”
“Oh, sur
e. They get infected. You can’t miss ‘em.”
“Does that mean she wasn’t bitten by a snake, then?”
“Not absolutely. I mean, I suppose there’s a way to get bitten without it showing. But after you telling me what that feller Ames said, I’m more doubtful than ever.”
“Then how did she die?”
“Well, if she was throwing up and having trouble swallowing, that sounds like she might have been fed some strychnine.”
“Isn’t that what they use for rat poison?”
“Uh-huh.”
Doc McWilliams’s office smelled of his pipe and the peppermint candy he was always giving youngsters. McWilliams was a sixty-year-old widower who could be seen in his fez leading the Shriner parade every year.
“How many places in town sell rat poison?”
McWilliams thought a moment. “Oh, probably two, three at most.”
Anna stood up, straightening her pinafore and inhaling the peppermints. “They always smell so good.”
Doc McWilliams laughed. “You always manage to get one of these, don’t you?”
Anna smiled and accepted the peppermint. “Yes, and I appreciate it every time, too.”
She had just left Doc McWilliams’s office when John Muldaur appeared before her on the sidewalk. “You stay away from my daughter!” he shouted. Several people standing in front of the Greene Opera House turned to watch the two.
“I was only investigating your wife’s death.”
“There’s nothing to investigate. She died of a snakebite and you can’t prove otherwise.”
By now Anna was almost as angry as Muldaur. “Maybe I can, Mr. Muldaur. Maybe I can.” And with that she turned and headed toward Second Street, where the two stores she wanted were located. Muldaur did some more shouting but she hurried on, blocking out his rage. She kept thinking about what he’d just said: “You can’t prove otherwise.” That was something a guilty man might say. Fifteen minutes later, she left the second store, clutching a small dark box in her right hand. Dusk was just starting to fall. The lamplighters were already at work. Mothers called children in for supper.
