Murder in Midtown

by Liz Freeland

  Though they’d been college acquaintances in their Harvard days, Guy and Jackson were very different. Jackson was a worker bee, while Guy . . . wasn’t. “Why was he here so early?” I wondered aloud. The only time I’d seen Guy in the office so early was one morning last summer when he’d stayed overnight at the office, drinking. Maybe that had been the case this morning, too.

  “That was my very thought,” Jackson said. “‘It can’t be he,’ I told myself when the firemen informed me that there was a man in Guy’s office. I was the first one here, you know, although a neighbor had already called the fire department. A few windows had broken—the heat, I guess—and smoke was pouring out of the place. I didn’t go in, but I never dreamt there was anyone inside the building. Especially Guy. Otherwise I would’ve attempted to save him.”

  The claim struck me as more boastful than true, but who doesn’t dream of acting heroically? Especially when the danger of actually being called upon to do so has passed. “It must have been awful for you.”

  “Yes, it was. And you know what was peculiar?” He didn’t bother to wait for my response. “I thought for a moment that the person trapped in the building was you.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else ever arrives at work before I do?”

  “Not this morning.” Luckily, I didn’t need to add.

  He nodded. “How’s your tooth?”

  “Fine.” My lie about the dentist had slipped my mind. Now I felt almost guilty for this morning’s absence. It was doubtful I could have done anything to prevent the building going up in flames, but who knew? At least if I’d been where I was supposed to be, I could’ve seen what Guy was up to. Why hadn’t he been able to escape the fire?

  Jackson seemed to sense the direction of my thoughts. “Didn’t you say you found Guy once at his desk that way last summer?”

  I nodded. “He’d had an argument with Mr. McChesney and spent the night drinking.”

  “I’m sure that’s what happened this morning. Man was too drunk to get out. Maybe he never even knew the building was on fire.”

  A new thought distracted me. “Has anyone told Mr. McChesney what’s happened?”

  “I sent Oliver uptown to his flat with a note not long after the fire trucks arrived. I didn’t want to leave the premises. Someone associated with the firm needed to be on the spot, and since I’m the senior employee . . .”

  He wasn’t, though. Jackson was our editor, but he’d only been hired last year. Others had been there far longer. Bob, for instance. “It seems odd that Mr. McChesney’s not here.”

  “Only if you assume Oliver delivered the message straightaway.”

  Oliver, our office boy, had a knack for turning the simplest errand into an hours-long excursion. But Mr. McChesney might not have been at home. Or he might have been too ill to get out of bed.

  My mind returned to this morning and all the unanswered questions. “You saw no one else when you arrived?”

  Jackson shook his head. “Only neighbors. Some of them were watching from the sidewalk when I arrived. I didn’t dare step inside—I touched the front door, but the knob scorched me. The place was already an inferno. Three fire trucks came, and policemen, and neighbors gathered on the sidewalk, some with their valuables. One woman carried an oil painting in one hand and clutched the case holding the family silver in the other. It took over an hour with two hoses going full blast to get the blaze under control. And by then the street had been cut off and was jammed with people gawking as if they were watching a spectacular at the Hippodrome. Revolting, if you want my opinion.”

  Now there were just soaked sidewalks, soot, a dwindling crowd, and a sickly, smoky stench.

  “You must be exhausted,” I said.

  “I am,” he admitted. “But we can’t leave, can we?”

  I didn’t see why not. We obviously weren’t going to get work done today . . . or perhaps ever again. At least not here. “Did the police tell us to stay?”

  “No, but we can’t just abandon the building, can we, without making an attempt to salvage things?”

  My gaze swung back to the smoking ruin. Paper. Our work was all paper. What could there possibly be to salvage? The building had burned for two hours. The piles of books and manuscripts stacked on every surface had probably created a nice kindling for the fire. The effect of the blaze, followed by the flood from the fire hoses, on the office machinery and furniture was probably disastrous, too. “That might be a lost cause.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to go in and see if there’s anything we can retrieve?” he asked.

  “No one’s going into that building today except authorized city employees,” Muldoon said.

  His voice startled me. I hadn’t noticed him hovering. “Is it dangerous?” I asked.

  “The roof is going to collapse. What’s left of it.”

  Jackson gulped. “Come to think of it, I’m not sure I want to sacrifice my life for office furnishings.”

  Scorched ones, at that. “I doubt there would be much to rescue.”

  Jackson shook his head. “The poor authors.”

  The chances of a manuscript surviving the conflagration were almost nil. Authors from all over the country sent us their books, mostly typed, but some still handwritten. Who knew if, in their eagerness to send off their masterpiece, those authors had made the effort to produce a copy. Though I carefully logged the manuscripts in a ledger book on my desk, that logbook probably hadn’t survived the flames, either. In which case it would be impossible even to inform the authors of their misfortune. Dozens of dreams might have gone up in smoke this morning.

  Muldoon was thinking about authors, too. “How many writers did Guy Van Hooten work with?”

  Jackson and I exchanged a look. “Working with authors wasn’t Guy’s strong suit,” he said.

  “What was his strong suit?” Muldoon asked.

  “The name Van Hooten.” The man was dead and I shouldn’t speak ill of him, but how could the police figure out what had happened to him if they didn’t hear the unvarnished truth?

  “Guy showed scant interest in the books we published and the actual work that went into producing them,” Jackson explained.

  “He did enjoy taking one or two of the authors out for drinks, though.” I was thinking specifically of Ford Fitzsimmons. The time I’d found Guy drunk at his desk one morning, he’d passed out reading Ford’s manuscript. After that he considered Ford his literary discovery and befriended him. I strongly suspected Ford had tried to have me pushed in front of an El train, but I’d never been able to prove it. Push or no push, Ford’s book was due out in the spring . . . if there was still a Van Hooten and McChesney to publish it.

  “I’ll need the names of those authors, and of any other associates you can recall that Guy had interacted with recently,” Muldoon said.

  Jackson gaped at the detective. “You can’t think an author set fire to the building.”

  That caught the attention of Timothy and Bob. They moved toward us. “You mean it was arson?”

  Muldoon kept his expression neutral. “We can’t rule anything out at this stage. Have there been any employees fired recently?”

  “No,” I said, at the same time Bob replied, “Jacob Cohen.”

  Jacob, a few office boys back, had been slightly before my time. According to Jackson, he’d been the most inefficient, surly office boy in New York City until Mr. McChesney had fired him while Guy was on Christmas vacation. I’d heard all this just last week, when Jacob resurfaced at the office to talk to Guy. Everyone had been relieved that Oliver was there to guard against Jacob’s being hired back.

  Had Jacob been so aggrieved that he set fire to the building? I frowned, trying to remember what had happened the week before. “Last Wednesday, Jacob Cohen came by the office, and he and Guy spoke for half an hour. The door was closed, but I could hear their voices raised at times.”

  Muldoon pulled a small notebook and pencil from his coat pocket. “Did you hear what they were arguin
g about?”

  “I only caught a few snatches of words—something about a promise.”

  “Jacob probably assumed Guy would give him his old job back,” Jackson said.

  “But he wasn’t rehired?” Muldoon asked.

  “No, we have an office boy, Oliver,” I said. “No business as small as ours needs two office boys.”

  “Jacob’s getting long in the tooth for that job, anyway,” Timothy said. “He’s probably seventeen or eighteen now.”

  “He was never good at it to begin with,” Bob added, before scanning the group anxiously. Clearly, he didn’t like to malign anyone.

  Timothy backed him up. “It was always puzzling that he lasted as long as he did.”

  Muldoon chewed over the information and then turned back to me. “So you heard them arguing behind the closed door. Were either of them angry when they came out of Guy’s office?”

  That was the odd part. “They seemed to part like old chums, with Guy slapping Jacob on the back. And Guy had me clear away the whiskey glasses and cigars in the ashtray on his desk.”

  “Guy Van Hooten and a fired office boy had been smoking cigars and drinking?”

  “That’s how it appeared.”

  Jackson clucked. “That was Guy. When he showed up at all, the office was just an extension of his club. The types of people he associated with weren’t always the most upstanding, either.”

  “What kind of people?” Muldoon pressed.

  Jackson arched a brow at me. “You didn’t tell Detective Muldoon about Mr. Cain?”

  “She hasn’t told me anything more than what you’ve heard here,” Muldoon said impatiently. “You didn’t tell me about Mr. Cain, either, when I spoke to you earlier. I assume you’re talking about Leonard Cain?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jackson said.

  Muldoon’s face darkened, and he stared at me as if I’d been associating with criminals. Evidently I had, but certainly not intentionally. “Mr. Cain came by the office several times,” I explained. “I didn’t know he was notorious. Is he?”

  Skepticism, then a hint of astonishment, flashed across Muldoon’s features. My question caused a ripple of surprise in the others, too. I shifted uneasily. My becoming a detective struck me as more far-fetched than ever. I’d clearly missed a basic clue concerning Leonard Cain. “All I know is that he owns a supper club,” I said.

  “Among other enterprises.” Muldoon’s expression conveyed that these enterprises weren’t on the up-and-up. “What was his business with Guy Van Hooten?”

  “I assumed they were friends. That’s how Guy Van Hooten always greeted him—like an old pal.”

  “Whiskey and cigars?” Muldoon asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  I should have guessed Leonard Cain was disreputable. He dressed like a dandy even though he looked and spoke like a longshoreman. It was embarrassing how naïve I could still be at the ripe old age of twenty-one. I blamed Altoona. Maybe there had been sleazy supper clubs, gambling dens, and houses of ill repute back in my Pennsylvania hometown, but I hadn’t ever seen them.

  “How often did Mr. Cain come around the office?” Muldoon asked.

  I tried to remember. “Not too often—”

  “All the time,” Jackson said at the same time.

  “Maybe once a month,” I said.

  Jackson shrugged as if once per month was frequent to receive personal visits at the office. Come to think of it, no one had ever visited Jackson. “Cain came by last night, didn’t he, Louise?”

  In fact, Leonard Cain had still been there when I went home. Guy and Cain were the only ones left in the building then. I could have been the last person to see Guy alive, aside from Leonard Cain and his killer . . . who might have been one and the same.

  “I’ll have a talk with Mr. Cain,” Muldoon said.

  Frustration surged through me. I wished I could be a fly on the wall while he made his investigation. But I wasn’t a detective—not even a policewoman—and who knew if I ever would be?

  Whether I’d have a job at all after today was starting to look unlikely. If Mr. McChesney decided to let us all go, I’d have to find another position lickety-split. I certainly wasn’t going back to Altoona.

  I couldn’t worry too much about myself, though, when so many were in the same boat, if not worse off. Timothy was gazing at the building again, bereft. And poor Bob. Worry lines etched his face. He and his wife had young boys, twins, and one of them was sickly. Now he faced the prospect of being out of work. And who knew what worries Jackson had. He’d always been tight-lipped about his private life.

  I turned to the latter. “Will you be all right, Jackson?”

  He looked surprised, and a little uncomfortable, that I would ask. “Of course. I’ve put a little by for a rainy day.” A laugh snorted out of him. “Or a fiery one.”

  I acknowledged his threadbare stab at humor with a weak smile.

  His shoulders straightened. “I’ve never had trouble finding work. The world needs capable editors, and Harvard men rarely go begging for jobs.”

  He was full of himself, but I supposed it was good he was showing some pluck. “What about Oliver, and Sandy?” Sandy Novotny, our one-man sales force, charged with convincing buyers across the northeast that they should keep our meager backlist alive, was on the road in Boston. The thought of business made my head ache. There were still orders to fulfill—but our attic and basement areas had been most of our storage. And what would happen to the books in mid-production?

  I looked up and saw Ogden McChesney standing before the wreckage of the firm he and Guy’s father had given life to over thirty years ago. His lanky frame was bowed in grief, like a man walking into a strong gust. One hand was buried deep in his black overcoat, the other was leaning on his walking stick. I doubted the tears in his eyes were from the smoke.

  Forgetting Jackson, Muldoon, and the others, I hurried over to him.

  “Oh, Mr. McChesney! Isn’t this awful?” I didn’t know what else to say. His expression was so mournful.

  “I’m just so glad you weren’t hurt, or anyone else . . . besides Guy, of course.” His face darkened. “How in the world could this have happened? That poor boy . . .”

  Guy Van Hooten had been thirty at least, but he was still a boy to Mr. McChesney.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  He thumped his stick on the sooty pavement in anguish. “Why didn’t he escape the fire? Where was he?”

  “In his office—at his desk.”

  He shook his head. “Right on the first floor. Dear God! But then surely he had time—do you think he was drunk?”

  “It’s a possibility. But the police seem to suspect that someone set the fire on purpose.”

  The idea struck Mr. McChesney like a body blow. For a moment he was speechless, then questions reeled out of him. “Why would they think that? Whom do they suspect?”

  “They aren’t telling us much.”

  He glanced at the officers nearby, then at the flame-licked bricks of his old building. He sighed. “I’ll have to speak to Guy’s mother. Poor Edith. This will be an unbearable sorrow to her. Thank heavens she still has Hugh.”

  I knew little of Hugh Van Hooten, Guy’s brother. “Apparently he takes even less interest in the family business than Guy did.”

  “That was by design. Cyrus Van Hooten didn’t want two sons squabbling over the family business, and Hugh developed other interests. Or perhaps he was interested in other things because Cyrus made it clear to the lad that he wasn’t going to inherit the publishing house. It was only ever a sideline for Cyrus, you know—a gentleman’s business. An office to go to when he wasn’t at his club. Hugh understood that and never seemed to mind that the firm was destined to be Guy’s. Hugh’s a promising young man, though you can’t always tell it by looking at him. Very bright. An aviator.”

  Before I could ask more about Hugh, the others gathered round Mr. McChesney to voice their sympathy. He received them with grave nods.

&nb
sp; “I’m not sure yet what this tragedy will mean for Van Hooten and McChesney,” he announced. “I need to speak to the firemen and the police, but the building seems like a hopeless case. You can all go home, of course. I can pay you for two weeks, but after that . . .”

  Jackson frowned. “All of us? Surely—”

  “No, not all.” Mr. McChesney turned to Bob. “We should get together, Bob, and see where we are in terms of finances, and how many orders we have outstanding.”

  “But the financial books are gone,” Bob said. “Surely . . .”

  “I’ve kept some records at home,” he said with a long look at the accountant. “If you could come to my place sometime soon, we can go over them together.”

  “Yes, of course.” Bob’s expression was anxious, but that was nothing new. If anxiety ever came to life as a man, it would look like Bob.

  Mr. McChesney’s sad gaze took in the rest of us. “I’ll send word when a decision about the future of Van Hooten and McChesney has been reached.” He touched my arm. “Louise, make sure we have all their addresses.”

  The glum expressions all around said it all. We expected to receive our two weeks’ pay and then notice that we were free to consider other employment.

  “Louise Faulk! Is there a Louise Faulk here?”

  The piercing voice calling my name came from a youth of about twelve. I gestured to him and he hurried over to me.

  “Message for ya,” he said, holding out an envelope.

  I took it and tipped him five cents for his trouble, which the scamp seemed to think was no kind of tip at all.

  The note inside was from my aunt Irene.

  Louise,

  I’ve heard about the fire! Walter and I climbed to the roof to see the smoke. Is the building a complete loss? You must come to me as soon as you are finished there and fill me in on the details. Is Ogden with you? He will be heartbroken, poor man.

  Do not forget to stop by before you go home. I have a proposition for you.

  Aunt Irene

  P.S.—If you see Ogden, please give him my love and tell him that he must come by, too.