Murder in Midtown

by Liz Freeland

  He wasn’t so lost in her charms that he forgot his manners, however. “Here, let me help you.” He reached for the box Bernice had sent me home with.

  “What did you bring?” Callie asked.

  “Sandwiches and coconut cake.”

  Rapture overcame her. “There’s dinner taken care of.”

  Teddy’s face collapsed into a pout. “I wanted to take you to Delmonico’s.”

  “Once you’ve tasted this coconut cake, you’ll forget all about Delmonico’s,” Callie assured him. “Besides, I can’t leave Louise tonight. Not after all that she’s been through.”

  Teddy regarded me with furrowed brow and then blinked, remembering. “Of course. That fire in midtown this morning. Callie was telling me about it earlier. Your office?”

  “Yes.”

  He clucked in sympathy, while Callie took my arm and guided me over to our most comfortable chair. “Was it as awful as Detective Muldoon said it was?” she asked.

  I collapsed into the well-worn upholstery, shocked at how bone-weary I felt. I hadn’t realized it until just that moment. “The building’s a burnt shell. After the firemen put the blaze out, policemen canvassed the neighborhood to find out if anyone had witnessed anything suspicious.”

  “It was arson, then?” Teddy asked.

  “That’s what the police seem to assume. Arson, possibly with intent to murder.”

  Callie, who had gone to the kitchenette to begin arranging the delicacies I’d brought home, poked her head back into the room to admonish Teddy, “I told you a man died.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, clearly having forgotten. “Dreadful.” He sank onto our lumpy sofa and swung a leg, fidgeting. “Know the man well, did you?”

  “He was my boss.”

  “Ah.” He blew out a breath, at a loss for what else to say. I doubt he had much experience with either fires or bosses.

  Rather than dwell on what had been preoccupying my mind all day long, I tried to remember something of what Callie had told me about Teddy Newland. He was an investor in her show, but he was also interested in racehorses and airplanes. I struggled to find a conversation starter on either of those topics.

  It was obvious from his facial contortions that he was straining as hard as I was. “Dead, you say,” he murmured. “That’s hard lines for the poor fellow. Death is so . . . final.”

  I agreed that it was.

  “Older man, I suppose?” he asked.

  “No, quite young still. Just past thirty.”

  “Good Lord.” Teddy sat up straighter. “I’m almost thirty.”

  His alarm was clear: If one thirty-year-old man could be caught in a fire, who was to say that we all wouldn’t be engulfed in flames soon?

  “You probably don’t have many enemies, though,” I pointed out.

  “Your boss had enemies?”

  I’d said too much. Blabbing about a case that I was being paid to look into wasn’t politic or discreet. I had a lot to learn.

  Hoping to correct my blunder, I waved a hand tiredly. “Oh, you know how office colleagues gossip.” Teddy probably knew nothing of the kind. The only office he’d ever stepped foot in most likely belonged to the attorney who handled his family trust. “In any event, you’ll learn more from reading the afternoon papers than from me. The journalist buzzards were already descending on the Van Hooten house this afternoon.”

  My words, meant to dispel interest, produced the exact opposite effect. His eyes blinked wide open and he gripped the seat at his sides as if to brace himself against a zephyr whipping through the apartment. “The Van Hootens? This place where you worked . . . was it by any chance Van Hooten and McChesney?”

  I nodded.

  “And your boss was Guy Van Hooten?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dear God!” He bolted to his feet. “Guy gone?”

  Callie rushed in from the kitchenette, balancing a tray of sandwiches. “You knew Callie’s boss?”

  “Know him?” He rounded on her, spluttering at her almost accusingly, “Why didn’t you tell me Guy was dead?”

  “I did,” she said. “That is, I told you Louise’s boss had died.”

  “But I didn’t know who that was.” He was rushing for the door now, grabbing hat and coat off the rack in our hallway. First, he snatched my hat by mistake, which didn’t fit, obviously. In replacing it and taking his own, he nearly tipped over the hall tree.

  Callie trailed after him. “You’re leaving?”

  “Of course,” he said, finally triumphing in his scuffle with the coat rack. “I need to go uptown and call on the Van Hootens. At once. Poor Hugh! Guy was his brother.”

  Callie paled. “Oh no.”

  Teddy flew out the door, and in the next instant hurried back to kiss her cheek and grab a sandwich off her tray. Then he was off again at a gallop. Callie and I stood staring at each other in amazement until we heard the front door slamming behind him two floors below.

  “Teddy knows Hugh Van Hooten?” Hugh, distracted of appearance but sharp of mind and tongue, did not strike me as a likely candidate for bosom friend to the man I’d just met.

  Callie dropped into the seat Teddy had just vacated. “They attended Exeter together.”

  That explained it. School ties were the glue that bonded wealthy men in this town.

  “Teddy has money invested in Hugh’s business, too.” She bit into a sandwich. “Hugh’s infected Teddy with his enthusiasm about planes. He’s some kind of aeronautical genius. Next to him, someday the Wright Brothers will seem what a man doing duck calls is to Caruso.”

  Callie tended to be overly enthusiastic about her friends’ talents and abilities. Not that I was complaining, since I was, after all, one of them. If I were to take up street cleaning, she’d declare that no one in a white coat in the entire city scooped waste as well as her roommate.

  “What’s Hugh like?” I was being a little cagey here, withholding my own first impression of the man. But I had my investigator hat on, and I didn’t want to influence Callie’s opinion.

  Her brow pillowed as she considered her answer. “I’ve only met him a couple of times. He’s handsome, although the first time I saw him he was so messy I mistook him for one of those socialists. When I said as much to Teddy, he laughed and told me he wasn’t a socialist, only a mechanic. Well, he did have oil beneath his nails, so I assumed he was there as someone’s chauffeur, which caused some embarrassment when we left the club and all got into a car. I asked Hugh why he wasn’t driving. Once that was straightened out, I found him a little blunt but pleasant enough, dirty nails and all. He even laughed at my mistake, can you imagine?”

  “Guy wouldn’t have found it amusing to be mistaken for a chauffeur.”

  “Well, that’s about all I know of Hugh, except that he has an aerodrome somewhere in New Jersey where he tinkers with planes. And that Teddy has given him money to work on some kind of aeronautical invention that’s going to be the biggest thing since cornflakes. It’s thrilling, isn’t it? Teddy promised to teach me to fly someday. Wouldn’t you like to soar like a bird?”

  I shuddered. One thing in life that terrified me was heights. “The only birds I envy are penguins at the aquarium—they have a cushy life on solid ground with a clean, shark-free pool to splash around in.”

  “Teddy told me Hugh says that soon we’ll all be flying around as casually as we take taxis now.”

  Heaven help us. “Did Hugh ever mention Guy?”

  “Even if he did, I doubt I would’ve put it together. I never knew Hugh’s last name until tonight. He was just Hugh, or Old Hugh, or sometimes Hoots.” She frowned. “I might’ve guessed from Hoots who he was, but for all I knew it had to do with owls or something.”

  Callie’s knowing Hugh was a piece of luck for me. She was a point of connection with the Van Hooten family, no matter how casual. Perhaps through her I’d manage to talk to him again and learn more about Guy’s life.

  “Why all the questions about Hugh?” Her gaze sharpened. �
��What are you up to?”

  I told her what had happened at my aunt’s, and how I was charged to find out who, if anyone, had started the fire at the office.

  Callie sat back and regarded me with amazement. “So you’re going to be your own one-woman police force.”

  “I might have to be.” I’d almost forgotten the exam that morning, but now I related how badly I thought I’d done and how crowded the room had been with hopeful candidates.

  She waved a hand, dismissing my pessimism. “I bet you did better than any of those other women. Look at you—you’re already detecting and you don’t even have a badge yet.”

  “I doubt that would endear me to the brass. It surely didn’t to Detective Muldoon. You should have caught the look on his face when he saw me leaving the Van Hooten house today.”

  “I can just imagine. He nearly scared the daylights out of me when he pounded on the door this morning. I worried he was going to drag you off to the hoosegow.”

  “It’s too bad he’s involved in the investigation of Guy Van Hooten’s death,” I said.

  “Why? You might be able to get good information out of him. He knows you.”

  “Knows me enough to mistrust me. I’d just as easily get information from that plate of sandwiches.”

  “You need to turn a little charm on him,” she suggested.

  That brought a laugh—both at the idea of that glowering bear being bedazzled by feminine wiles, and that I would be the one performing the role of bedazzler.

  “You could be as alluring as a siren if you chose to be,” Callie said.

  “If I were to send out a come-hither signal, I don’t think Frank Muldoon would be the one I’d want to receive it.”

  “But that’s the beauty of knowing your powers.” She smiled. “You can lure whichever target you choose. Perhaps one day that will be Muldoon . . . or perhaps there’ll be someone else.”

  Please, God, let there be someone else. In any case, I wasn’t in any hurry to have a romance in my life. There was too much I wanted to accomplish on my own without the added worry of being the pillar supporting a man’s daily cares. Anyway, what man would be interested in a policewoman, or a disappointed want-to-be policewoman turned typist-investigator? More troubling still, I wasn’t sure many men would want me how I was—damaged goods, my aunt Sonja in Altoona had ungraciously called me—and to find out I would have to explain my past to a potential romantic partner. The prospect of doing so was a good dousing of ice water on any romantic dreams I might harbor.

  Callie, unaware of the tempest she’d set off in my mind, jumped to her feet again and scurried back to the phonograph. She restarted the tango record.

  “Here.” She beckoned me with open arms.

  I groaned. “Didn’t you dance enough at rehearsals today?”

  “That was hours ago.” She tugged me up on my feet. “Let me teach you. It’s so much fun.”

  I’d been a diligent, if not particularly gifted, student at Miss Nestor’s Dancing School in Altoona, where I’d become proficient in polkas, two-steps, and waltzes. Prim Miss Nestor would have fainted if she could have seen me now. Callie, playing the man, gripped me in a tight embrace and pushed me around the room, her forehead locked on mine with such a serious expression of concentration that I couldn’t help giggling.

  “You’re not trying,” she said. “Think about passion.”

  My experiences of passion weren’t the best. I did try to imagine how it would be if I were in the strong arms of Detective Muldoon, staring close range into his brooding dark eyes. How it would be if they were fixed at me in desire instead of irritation, as was usually the case. My imagination worked well enough that I was able to throw myself into the moment and follow Callie even as she dipped me into a backward swoop. Suddenly I found myself closer to the floor than I was comfortable with.

  “What the Sam Hill?”

  At the unexpected exclamation, Callie and I both turned toward the door, where Wally, our landlady’s troll-like son, was staring open-mouthed at us.

  “I never expected that you girls were that way!” he said.

  “What way?” Callie asked in a cool voice.

  His lip curled. “You know. That way.”

  “Oh, yes,” Callie said. “Louise and I have been this way forever.”

  Apparently she had hit upon the only thing that would repulse the repulsive Wally, because he backed away from the door as if what we had was catching. “I only was going to tell you to keep the racket down.”

  His footsteps thundered down the stairs.

  Two things happened at once: Callie began to laugh, and my stockinged foot slipped on the wood floor, upsetting my precarious balance. I dropped to the floor, which only made Callie whoop harder. When my friend Otto discovered us moments later, we were both wheezing with laughter.

  “What’s going on?” he called out over the music. “I was almost crushed coming up the stairs by that moose Wally.”

  “I told him”—Callie fanned a hand in front of her face, trying to sober up—“that Louise and I were lesbians.”

  Otto’s face screwed up. “What?” He scooted over to the phonograph player and turned down the volume. “What’d you do that for?”

  “Because he gives me the willies.”

  “You’ll be lucky if you aren’t evicted.”

  “And luckier if we are,” I said.

  “The tango doesn’t involve falling to the floor, does it?” Otto said, giving me a hand up.

  On my feet again, I rubbed my bruised hip. “Not usually.”

  “I’m sorry,” Callie said. “I didn’t mean to drop you. Only that oaf looked so comical.”

  “He did.”

  We started laughing again.

  “Good glory,” Otto said, put out. “I came rushing over because I heard Van Hooten and McChesney burned to the ground, and that someone had died. I was worried sick—only to find you two dancing and laughing without a care in the world.” He froze, as if a lightning bolt had struck his cerebral cortex. “That sounds like a song, doesn’t it?”

  Otto, a butcher’s assistant-turned-songsmith, was always trying to dream up the next Tin Pan Alley sensation. One tune he’d written this past summer had sold surprisingly well, although the fact that his name was connected to a famous murder case could have accounted for at least some of its popularity. He wasn’t Chauncey Olcott by a long stretch, but he wasn’t writing home to beg for money, either.

  “ ‘Dancing with No Care in the World,’ ” he said, trying it out as he took a small notebook and pen out of his breast pocket. “No . . .”

  “ ‘Dancing with My Clumsy Roommate,’ ” I suggested.

  A fringed throw pillow sailed through the air at me from Callie’s direction. “Who was the one who fell on her caboose?”

  “I slipped. You were supposed to be leading.”

  Otto brightened and scribbled away. “ ‘My cares took a tumble, and I danced away.’ This might be even better than my ‘Income Tax Rag.’ ”

  “Tell me that’s not your latest,” I said.

  “Why not? Folks love songs ripped straight from the headlines.” His brows drew together. “Maybe I should make it the ‘Income Tax Tango,’ though. What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure the ratification of a tax act will make people pop on their dancing shoes,” I said. The prospect of the government taking a one percent cut off our wages didn’t fill us with joy.

  “You’re right.” He frowned. “How about ‘The Sixteenth Amendment Blues’?”

  Callie and I shook our heads.

  Otto looked away and his gaze fastened on the table. “Is that coconut cake?”

  Five minutes later we were all settled in seats with plates of cake balanced on our laps. “I need to save a piece for Teddy,” Callie said.

  Otto’s mood sank at the mention of the name. Five months ago he’d come to New York to profess undying love for me, but changed his mind almost as soon as he’d laid eyes on my roommate. I c
ouldn’t blame him—and I certainly wasn’t jealous. Otto and I had been friends since we were kids, and I hoped we always would be. As a friend to both, however, I couldn’t help worrying. Callie was young, pretty, and talented, and she seemed no more ready to settle on one man than a hummingbird was to hang around one flower when a whole garden awaited it. And so tenderhearted Otto had discovered that he was yesterday’s daisy.

  “Why would Teddy know anything about Bernice’s coconut cake?” he asked.

  “He left just before you arrived.”

  “Oh.” He sagged a little more in his chair.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, “if you want more coconut cake, you can come with me to Aunt Irene’s house party next week and Bernice will stuff you full of it.”

  A cake shortage wasn’t the real issue, yet the prospect of an evening at my aunt’s cheered him somewhat. Otto was a favorite there.

  “But what about the fire, Louise?” he asked. “I hope you weren’t in any danger.”

  I gave him a rundown of my day, from the police exam right down to falling on my rump when he came into the apartment.

  When I finished, he sat slack-jawed with incredulity. “Have you gone stark stirring mad? You shouldn’t get involved in another murder. Last time you almost got yourself killed.”

  “But we cleared your name,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Last summer there was a life at stake—mine—so it made sense for you to risk life and limb. But to put yourself in danger for money?” He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

  “But what about Teddy?” Callie asked. “He’s such good friends with Hugh—and maybe the person who wanted Guy dead will go after Hugh next. And then Teddy might be in danger, too.”

  “I’d worry more about those airplanes Teddy buzzes around in than murderers,” I said.

  Callie shook her head. “Teddy says he won’t give up flying, so there’s no getting rid of that risk. But if you could manage to catch the Van Hooten killer, Louise, that would at least eliminate one possible danger.”