Murder in Midtown

by Liz Freeland

  “It’s from Aunt Irene.” I showed Mr. McChesney the paper.

  He scanned it. “Dearest Irene.” For the first time since he’d arrived, a smile trembled on his lips. He and my aunt were old friends. It was for her sake that he had offered me a job. “I’d like to go with you to see her,” he said, “but I must speak to this detective first. Then I need to visit the Van Hootens and give Edith my condolences.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said.

  To my surprise, he grabbed both my arms as if he was suddenly afraid that I would leave him. “Come with me, Louise.”

  “To the Van Hootens?” The family house was uptown, I knew, near Central Park. Beautiful as the area was, I tried to refrain from going up there. One of those rarified addresses was tattooed in my mind, and I’d discovered that indulging the habit of visiting it became as dangerous as the lure of an opium den on an addict. And yet part of me burned with curiosity to see the Van Hooten family manse and to learn if I could why Guy was at the office so early this morning.

  I glanced over at Muldoon, who had his eye on Mr. McChesney. Someone had obviously told him who the older man was, and I could see suspicion in his gaze. “I’ll stay with you,” I said, feeling protective of my remaining boss. Detectives had to suspect everyone, I knew, but Mr. McChesney was not a criminal. Unfortunately, I’d seen last summer how police could treat an innocent man.

  But that was only half the reason I wanted to stay with Mr. McChesney. I also wanted to meet the Van Hootens. A condolence call on Guy’s family might be a first step toward figuring out who’d set that fire, and why.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Van Hooten house, a four-story mass of gray stone in the French Empire style, was located one expansive mansion over from Central Park, on Sixty-seventh Street. Carvings of shells, women’s faces, or floral flourishes embellished every cornice, ledge, and colonnette. Iron fencing enclosed both the entrance and several outsized, geometrically pruned shrubs that lined the front like sentinels. Ten months in New York had taught me what status went with possessing greenery.

  Mr. McChesney expelled a long breath before pushing the doorbell, which was embedded in a brass lion’s head that itself was a miniature of the knocker on the door.

  “I never dreamed . . .” He leaned heavily on his stick. “Never dreamed.”

  It wasn’t the first time this morning he’d said this, or something similar. “No one could have dreamed all this would happen,” I said.

  The door swung open and a grave-looking butler appeared. It wasn’t just that his demeanor was somber; his ghostly pallor gave him the look of a man who was fading away. His head bowed in acknowledgment of Mr. McChesney.

  “This is a sad day, Pinter,” Mr. McChesney said.

  “A very sad day,” the butler agreed in a whispery soft voice. If he ever lost his butlering job, he’d make an excellent undertaker.

  “Is Edith in?” Mr. McChesney asked.

  “Mrs. Van Hooten is not receiving visitors, sir, but I’m certain she will want to speak with you.” Pinter flicked an uncomfortable glance toward me. But not the interloper, those pale gray eyes said.

  “This is Miss Faulk,” Mr. McChesney explained. “She was Guy’s secretary.”

  After a pointed hesitation, the butler stepped back. With that, I passed into another world, one where family houses boasted rotundas, stained glass windows worthy of minor cathedrals, and chandeliers the size of automobiles. Every surface around me glistened, from the marble beneath my feet to the wood moldings overhead and along the impressive staircase, which appeared to be carved with scenes of some ancient battle. Imagine parading past the Peloponnesian war every time you forgot something upstairs.

  Pinter took our coats and left us waiting next to a reproduction of Bernini’s statue of Hades and Persephone. At least, I assumed it was a reproduction. Both the violence of their pose in the silent luxury of the front hall and the ostentatious extravagance of the piece were disconcerting.

  “Did Van Hooten and McChesney pay for all this?” I whispered.

  Mr. McChesney coughed. “All this paid for Van Hooten and McChesney. Cyrus had the money, and married into wealth. Oil. The publishing business was never more than a place to park himself while his wife’s money accrued interest. He didn’t take the book business too seriously. An attitude he passed on to Guy, unfortunately.”

  Double doors parted in one motion like raptor wings taking flight. Pinter held them for us. “This way, please.”

  On a deep green velvet Queen Anne sofa perched Mrs. Van Hooten, regal and swathed in black from head to toe. Her gown was high necked, out of which her firm jaw and chin poked out like a dagger. Her pale blue eyes had a metallic glint, emphasized by white-silver hair. Her head was crowned by a mantilla-style comb to which a flowing black length of lace was attached. Either she’d had mourning clothes at the ready or she’d never stopped wearing black for her late husband. From the woman’s stony demeanor, I suspected the latter. She looked like someone who hadn’t smiled for a very long time. A fire blazed in the cavernous fireplace, but the room still felt frigid.

  “Edith.” Mr. McChesney rushed forward, but once he reached her he stopped short, overcome with emotion.

  She squeezed his outstretched hand. “So good of you to come to me, Ogden.” She flicked a cool glance at me.

  Mr. McChesney didn’t notice. His eyes were filled with tears, and his voice rasped out, “I had to tell you how sorry I am. So very sorry. It’s heartbreaking.”

  “Tell me what happened to my poor boy.” She searched his face and gestured to the empty space next to her, beckoning him. “The police told us so little, I’m still bewildered. Thank heavens Hugh was still here when they came by. He said he was going to Thirty-eighth Street to find out more. Did you not see him?”

  “We must have just missed each other,” Mr. McChesney said, seating himself next to her.

  “The officer who came by said Guy died in the fire. How is that possible?”

  “I know very little myself. Just that Guy was found in his office, at his desk.”

  “I always told him he worked too hard,” Mrs. Van Hooten said. “ ‘You mustn’t overdo,’ I counseled him. Now not heeding my advice has cost him his life.”

  She thought overwork had led to Guy’s death?

  To his credit, Mr. McChesney managed not to choke, but my own gulp of incredulity did not go unnoticed. Mrs. Van Hooten’s steely gaze swept my way for the second time, and the temperature in the room dropped from chilly to arctic. It was as if Mrs. Van Hooten and the fireplace were canceling each other out.

  “I don’t recognize your young companion, Ogden.”

  I stepped forward. “My name is Louise Faulk, ma’am. I was your son’s secretary.”

  She gave me a more thorough up-and-down look and then glanced at Mr. McChesney for confirmation. “This isn’t the type of girl Guy would have hired.”

  She knew her son that well, at least.

  “I took Louise on last winter,” he said. “She’s Irene Livingston Green’s niece.”

  “Is she.” Mrs. Van Hooten’s expression conveyed exactly what she thought of my pedigree. Being a famous authoress’s niece rescued me from being beneath her notice, but only by a degree.

  I was left standing. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Van Hooten.”

  “It’s a loss for the world,” she said. “Guy, I always said, had enormous potential. Everyone speaks of Hugh as the brilliant one, but I never thought so. Guy . . .” Her voice trailed off in mournful silence.

  I struggled to find something to say. “The office will be a very different place without him,” I managed, forgetting that the office was no more.

  Mrs. Van Hooten lifted a black-bordered handkerchief to prevent a tear from showing the bad taste of actually spilling over. “My son was a wonderful man to work for, I’ve no doubt. Always a kind thought and a helping hand toward the little people. Of course, I warned him against careless altruism. He never heeded that ad
vice, either.”

  I actually could have reassured her on that score—I doubted Guy had possessed a charitable bone in his body—but I held my tongue, following Mr. McChesney’s example. Mrs. Van Hooten was more than happy to interpret our silence as respectful, sensible agreement.

  Moments stretched, with only the muted crackling of the fire and the relentless movement of a grandfather clock’s pendulum making any sound. Mr. McChesney had fallen into a funk, and Mrs. Van Hooten fixed her gaze on the Turkish carpet. I shifted impatiently. I wasn’t there, to be honest, out of respect so much as curiosity.

  Uninvited, I dropped into the nearest stiff-backed chair. “Mrs. Van Hooten, we were a little surprised that Guy was the first person at the office this morning. He usually . . . makes a later appearance.” When he showed up at all. Last summer the office had taken bets on how long one of his extended absences would last. “Did he happen to mention why he left so early today?”

  Her eyes widened—though whether more in shock at the audacity of my having made myself comfortable or at my probing question, it was hard to tell. I’d caught her off guard, enough so that an answer sputtered out of her. “When would he have mentioned such a thing to me? It’s been many years since my sons have required a nanny, and I never served that role.”

  No, she wouldn’t have. Edith Van Hooten would have been the type of mother who reigned supreme in her parlor while a nanny presented two boys scrubbed within an inch of their lives and togged out in well-pressed suits. She would have expected and received a kiss on the cheek from both, smiled impatiently at their childish babbling for five minutes until she was bored, and then waved them away until their bedtimes.

  The scorn that filled me was followed by a chaser of discomfort. How could I condemn her? Not a year ago, I’d sacrificed everything so that a child could be brought up in just these circumstances.

  The lady was blinking at me. “Well?” she asked impatiently.

  Focus, Louise. “I thought perhaps if you had seen Guy this morning, he might’ve mentioned whether he was meeting anyone at the office.”

  “If he had, surely there would have been two people found in the fire.”

  I bit my lip. The important thing with someone like Edith Van Hooten was not to seem as if I was interrogating her. She wouldn’t stand for that—especially not from a mere female secretary.

  “He didn’t mention anything to me, young woman.” She sniffed. “Of course, I never come down before ten.”

  My gaze finally caught Mr. McChesney’s. He must have read my thoughts. “So you don’t know what time he left?” he asked.

  “I do not.”

  “Do you know if he slept here at all last night?”

  The question rushed out before I could stop it, and it immediately hit the forbidding stone wall that was Mrs. Van Hooten’s thin-lipped scowl. “Are you insinuating that my son was a reprobate?”

  Now that you mention it....

  Mr. McChesney squeezed her hand. “Louise was only asking because . . . well . . .” His eyes filled with panic as he groped for words. Footsteps sounded in the marble hallway, and hearing them, he visibly welcomed the prospect of being interrupted. “Is this Hugh?”

  The doors opened again. Hugh Van Hooten was brown haired and brown eyed like his brother, but there the resemblance ended. Hugh was tall and angular, while Guy had been more compact, buffed, and polished. My late boss would never have let his hair flop in his eyes, or have worn a brown tweed coat that made him look like a stage actor’s impersonation of a professor. With what appeared to be an oil stain on his jacket sleeve, no less.

  He rushed toward Mr. McChesney and didn’t even stop at a handshake, but jerked the older man up to his feet for an embrace. “So good of you to come see Mother,” Hugh said, gripping the man’s forearms.

  “I’m so sorry, my boy.” Mr. McChesney was on the verge of losing his composure again.

  Hugh acknowledged his words with a sober nod. Then he glanced over at me.

  “This is Louise Faulk,” Mr. McChesney said. “Guy’s secretary.”

  Hugh greeted me with a warmer expression than his mother had. “Kind of you to come, Miss Faulk. I’ve been to the building. The fire inspector told me it’ll have to be demolished. God only knows what will become of the business.”

  “Time enough to consider all that in the coming days.” Mr. McChesney’s mouth turned down. “But I’m not optimistic.”

  Hugh looked down at me. “Hard luck for you and your colleagues.”

  “What does that matter when Guy is dead?” Mrs. Van Hooten’s eyes flashed. “What kind of people would be concerned for their own self-interest at a time like this?”

  People who’d worked with Guy. None of us had loved him. Still, it galled me to think that the woman could consider us all completely heartless. “Please don’t think that way, Mrs. Van Hooten. We all considered Guy”—my brain searched frantically for a complimentary word—“unforgettable.”

  “So true.” Did I detect something in Hugh’s eyes just then, in the instant that he turned from me to his mother? “Unforgettable. That is the perfect description of Guy, wouldn’t you agree, Mother?”

  Her lips tightened again, and that handkerchief returned to the bridge of her nose.

  Mr. McChesney stood, and I followed his example. “I’ll leave you now, Edith,” he said, “but please send for me if there’s the slightest service I can perform for you. I’ll be thinking of you constantly, my dear.”

  “Cyrus always insisted you were a good man.” Her words left the impression that this had been a point of debate between the couple.

  “Rest here, Mother,” Hugh said. “I’ll see them to the door.” He spoke as if she had been making a motion to see us out herself, which she had not.

  In the hallway, Hugh closed the double doors, motioned us a few steps toward the Persephone statue, and lowered his voice. “Does either of you have a guess where my fool of a brother was last night?”

  It wasn’t until he asked that question that it struck me what a strain it had been humoring Mrs. Van Hooten’s delusion that Guy was a responsible man who had ever considered the needs of anyone besides himself.

  “Guy didn’t sleep here?” I asked.

  “As far as I know, he hasn’t been home since yesterday morning.”

  Mr. McChesney nodded. “Then perhaps he wasn’t early to work, after all.”

  Hugh snorted. “Guy was never early in his life, except in managing to get himself born before me.”

  “Then he might never have left the office after I saw him last night,” I said. Or he might have left for a short time, perhaps with Leonard Cain, and returned.

  Mr. McChesney’s face set in a puzzled frown. “What would he have been doing there all that time?”

  “Passed out drunk at his desk?” Hugh guessed. He seemed to know his brother.

  “Why didn’t he come back here, or go to a hotel?” I wondered.

  “The very question those damned police detectives will be asking,” Hugh said. “I talked to two of them while I was at Thirty-eighth Street, but I’m sure they’ll descend on the house again soon enough. That’s why I came back so quickly. I need to prepare Mother to put off all inquiries in no uncertain terms. No doubt she’ll agree. Guy’s always been her angelic boy. If there’s evidence to the contrary, she’ll want it contained.”

  His words baffled me. “Why wouldn’t you want the police to look into the matter?”

  For the first time, the Van Hooten haughtiness showed in Hugh’s expression. “Why would a family wish vermin to invade their home?”

  He was comparing the police to vermin? “There’s a chance an arsonist killed your brother. Don’t you want to find out who it was?”

  He raked a hand through his unruly hair. “Guy is dead. Heaven only knows what he was involved in, or what happened this morning. It won’t do the family any good to be bothered by a police investigation and have the lurid details of his life dragged through the damned new
spapers.”

  “Are there lurid details to be found?” I asked.

  “Surely not,” Mr. McChesney said, adding in a lower voice, “not too lurid.”

  “Hopefully the evidence of whatever Guy was involved in burned with the fire.” Hugh dug his hands in his pockets. “My brother was never good at cleaning up his own messes—but I’d rather the mess was kept from spreading, if at all possible. My mother is old, and frailer than she appears, and Guy was her favorite son.”

  Mr. McChesney stared with strange intensity at Persephone’s shapely calf. “The police can be so invasive. And then there’s the coroner . . .”

  “I’ll have a word with Ardolph Kline about that,” Hugh said.

  When our last mayor had died at sea in August, Ardolph Kline, President of the Board of Aldermen, became Acting Mayor of New York until an election could be held. It startled me that a man with grease stains on his sleeves could toss out his name so casually. “You know Acting Mayor Kline?”

  “He was at Phillips Andover with my father. I’m sure he’ll put a stop to any coroner business if I ask him to. Letting Guy’s body be subjected to further degradation and having his private life poked into by the police, as well as by the journalists who follow them like buzzards, will serve no purpose.”

  “If a relative of mine died, I’d want to know why,” I said.

  Hugh stared down his long nose at me. “If a relative of yours died in a fire, it wouldn’t sell newspapers, would it? Also, you wouldn’t have a fledgling business at risk, with investors who’d bolt at the first whisper of impropriety or scandal.”

  “Are you saying you care more for your business than—”

  Mr. McChesney took my arm and squeezed it strongly enough to cut off my circulation as well as my words. “Time for us to go, Louise.” He held out a hand to Hugh. “We promised to pay a visit to Louise’s aunt, and we’ve intruded on your grief too long already. Take care, my boy.”

  “Certainly. Pinter will see you out.”

  Hugh left us to return to his mother, while Mr. McChesney and I waited for our coats. After the butler shooed us out the door, I couldn’t help grumbling my displeasure. “Why did you stop me? Didn’t you hear him? He cares more about his investors than justice.”