So that’s what her mother was really concerned about! Sarah should have been angry at her lack of faith, but the thought of Malloy as a sly seducer of lonely widows was so ludicrous, she could only laugh. And when she thought of Malloy’s mother and how she’d probably given him exactly the same warning about Sarah, she laughed harder.
Her mother stared at her incredulously. “Sarah?”
“Oh, mother, if you only knew . . . Believe me, you don’t need to worry about Malloy, not for one moment. My virtue and reputation are safe. In fact, they couldn’t be safer.”
Her mother frowned in confusion, but she didn’t press the matter. Sarah had either alarmed her or reassured her, but whichever it was, she was willing to let the subject drop.
“Is Father home today?” Sarah asked when she had composed herself.
“I believe he is. Let’s find out, shall we?”
She and her mother discussed society gossip, avoiding personal topics by unspoken consent, while they waited for a servant to summon her father. A few minutes later, he knocked on the door connecting their bedrooms, and her mother bid him enter.
“Sarah, you’re out early,” he said, coming over to kiss her forehead. He wore a dressing gown and a collarless shirt. Plainly, he’d had no plans this morning. He turned to his wife. “Good morning, my dear. You’re looking lovely.” He also kissed her on the forehead.
Sarah realized she’d never seen her parents embrace. They would think displays of affection unseemly, of course, but still, she liked to think they did at least sometimes display affection, however privately. Why this thought should occur to her at this particular moment in her life, however, she had no idea.
Her father seated himself on the slipper chair that matched hers. “To what mischance do we owe the honor of your visit this morning?” he asked her with a hint of a smile.
“Father, I don’t only visit you when I need help,” she reminded him.
“No, but you rarely call at dawn on Saturday morning, either,” he replied. “This must be urgent indeed.”
“Someone has been murdered,” her mother informed him with disapproval.
“Dare I ask who? Not someone we know, I hope.”
“Not his time,” her mother said. “A female of questionable morals, it would appear.”
“Then why do you care?” her father asked Sarah, even more disapproving than her mother.
“Because my neighbor has been accused of the crime,” Sarah said. “He’s innocent, but the newspapers have already pronounced him guilty, and they’re saying terrible things about him. Untrue things, and he’s probably going to lose his job if someone doesn’t do something.”
Her father frowned. “Is this that Ellsworth fellow I read about in the papers? They said he seduced some poor woman and killed her when she demanded that he make her an honest woman.”
“None of it is true,” Sarah said, and briefly gave him the facts as she knew them. “I believe we are going to find the real killer soon, but meanwhile the reporters have been hounding Nelson’s employers, and I’m afraid they’re going to let him go, innocent or not.”
“Who is this ‘we’ you mentioned?” her father asked.
“What?” Sarah asked in confusion.
“You said ‘we’ are going to find the killer. What did you mean? You aren’t involved with that policeman again, are you?”
Sarah sighed wearily. “Mother already warned me not to let him seduce me, Father. I promise you, you have nothing to worry about on that score. I only meant that Mr. Malloy is working to find the killer, and I am working to help the Ellsworths in whatever way I can. This is why I’ve come to you,” she quickly continued, before her parents could press the issue. “If Nelson loses his position at the bank under these circumstances, he’ll never get another one. He is the sole support of his elderly mother, who also happens to be a dear friend of mine. Someone needs to speak with his employer and convince him not to dismiss him, so I thought I would try to repay the many kindnesses Mrs. Ellsworth has done for me through the years by saving her son’s job, if I could.”
Her parents exchanged a glance, and some unspoken communication passed between them without either of them so much as batting an eye. Her father turned back to her, his expression resigned. “What is it you think I can do?”
Sarah managed not to let her feeling of triumph show. It would be unseemly to gloat. “Obviously, I can’t go into the bank and beg them not to dismiss Nelson.”
“Not without making herself a scandal,” her mother added.
“I was hoping you might have some influence with someone there who could—”
“Which bank is it?” he asked.
Sarah gave him the name.
He considered for a moment, then turned to his wife. “Young Dennis is in charge there,” he told her.
“Richard?” she said, her expression brightening.
“Yes, his father thought he should have some practical experience.”
“You know him, then?” Sarah asked.
“Very well. His father and I were partners in a business venture a few years ago.”
“Oh, Father, that’s wonderful! Would you be willing to approach him? I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t so important, but poor Mrs. Ellsworth is so frightened—”
“Of course, of course,” he said, dismissing Mrs. Ellsworth’s fears with a wave of his hand. “I don’t think it would be fair for me to approach him on this subject, however. He would certainly feel an obligation to do me this favor, although he might wonder about my motives. Ellsworth is a stranger to me, after all. And if things go badly for Ellsworth, poor Dennis would believe I’d taken advantage of our friendship to get him into an awkward situation. Even worse, he’d be right.”
Before Sarah could even register disappointment, her mother said, “But Sarah could argue his case, couldn’t she? I mean, if you were to arrange for them to meet. You could summon him here on a business matter, then introduce him to Sarah. He’d realize you were just doing a favor for your daughter, indulging her in this whim even though you didn’t really approve, but he’d still feel obligated to help because of his father’s association with you.”
“Yes,” Sarah agreed eagerly. “And if, heaven forbid, things do go badly for Nelson, you can simply apologize for indulging your foolish daughter and dragging him into it.”
“He’ll forgive you that, surely,” her mother said. “Men always understand when another man is imposed upon by a woman.”
Her father frowned. “Why do I feel I’m being imposed upon right now?”
“Because you are, dear,” her mother said with a sweet smile.
Sarah had just gotten back from delivering supper to the Ellsworths when someone knocked on her door. She smiled when she saw a familiar silhouette reflected through the frosted glass of the front door.
“Malloy,” she said in greeting as she opened the door, but her welcoming smile froze on her face when she saw his expression.
“I guess you haven’t seen the evening papers,” he said, holding up a copy of the World.
“No, I—” she began, but he brushed past her, not really interested in her reply. “Is it about Nelson?” she asked as she glanced out onto the street before closing the door. At least the reporters appeared to have gone for the day. Malloy probably wouldn’t have come to her front door if they hadn’t.
“Was this your idea?” he asked, thrusting the paper at her.
She stared at the headline: WANTON WOMAN DRIVES LOVER TO MURDER.
Skimming the article, she wanted to groan aloud. Webster Prescott had completely misunderstood her plea for help.
“He calls Anna Blake everything but a prostitute,” Malloy said. “Where did he get that idea? Every other paper still has her as an innocent victim.”
“I just told him Nelson didn’t kill her,” Sarah insisted. “I asked him to help me save him from being executed!”
“He just might,” Malloy said sourly, “if he can get the other p
apers to turn on Anna Blake, too.” He pulled off his bowler hat and hung it on her coat rack without waiting for an invitation to stay.
“But according to this, he’s still guilty of murder,” Sarah argued. “How can that help him?”
“Because Anna Blake is no longer innocent. She’s a harlot who seduced and blackmailed him and then threatened to kill his child unless he paid her. A woman like that deserves whatever she gets, and a lot of men would think she deserves to be murdered.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Sarah exclaimed.
“Is it? Have you forgotten what people said when Charity Girls were being murdered?”
A few months ago, she and Malloy had solved the murders of several girls who were so desperately poor that they sometimes traded their favors for a few trinkets. Because they went to dance halls and associated with young men, their deaths were ignored. As far as most people were concerned, they’d gotten what they deserved for their loose behavior.
“Men kill their wives and their mistresses all the time,” Malloy reminded her. “How many of them ever go to prison, much less hang, for it? That’s because their lawyers convince the jury the women were shrews or wantons or whatever, and the men on the jury start thinking how often they’ve wanted to commit murder in their own homes with far less provocation. If the woman was immoral, she deserved to die, so how can they convict this poor fellow? So they let him go.”
Sarah did groan aloud this time. He was right, of course. Far too many women had been falsely vilified in death so that their killers could escape punishment. “I don’t care what Anna Blake did, she didn’t deserve to die!” Sarah insisted. “And even if she did, Nelson wasn’t the one who killed her!”
“What did you offer this reporter to change his story?” Malloy said, his eyes fairly crackling with rage.
“What are you suggesting?” she countered, stung by his implication.
Malloy sighed in exasperation. “You must have promised him something. Reporters are like dogs. They never let go of a bone unless they see a bigger one.”
“I simply told him the truth, that Anna Blake had other lovers, so Nelson wasn’t necessarily the father of her child, and that she’d refused Nelson’s offer of marriage in favor of blackmail.”
“That’s all?” Plainly he didn’t believe it.
“That’s all,” she confirmed. “What other proof did I need that Anna Blake wasn’t an honest woman when she refused an offer of marriage to give her child a name?”
“There was no child,” Malloy said.
Sarah gaped at him. “What do you mean, no child?”
“Just that. Anna Blake wasn’t expecting a child. Do you have any coffee?” He headed off toward her kitchen without waiting for a reply.
She followed in his wake, looking at the story again, trying to find even a hint that Prescott had believed her that Nelson was innocent. She found none.
Malloy sat down at her kitchen table without being invited and waited for her to serve him. She lifted the pot and judged there was enough for one cup in it. It had been sitting for quite a while, but she figured Malloy wouldn’t care. She poured it into a cup and set it before him. “Do you want something to eat?”
He waved off her offer. “I’m on my way home.”
“How is Brian doing?” she asked, instantly picturing his sweet face.
Malloy shrugged. “He doesn’t like the cast, but it doesn’t seem to be hurting him much anymore.”
Sarah smiled. “He’ll be so excited when he finds out he can walk.”
Malloy nodded, apparently too superstitious to talk about it.
She decided to let the matter drop for now and sat down in front of him. “All right, what did you mean Anna Blake wasn’t with child?” she asked him again.
“The coroner said she wasn’t, and he looked pretty close. Besides, she was wearing a . . . a thing.” He got very interested in his coffee and wouldn’t meet her eye.
“What kind of thing?” she pressed.
He made a vague gesture with his hand, still not meeting her eye. “To keep her from . . .” He waved his hand again.
“From what?” she asked in exasperation.
“So she wouldn’t get with child in the first place,” he said impatiently.
Sarah let this information sink in. “What was she using? A sponge?” she asked in amazement.
Was Malloy blushing? “Yeah, that’s . . . that’s what the coroner said,” he mumbled, still looking intently at his coffee.
Sarah bit back a smile. For someone who spent his life investigating the worst aspect of the human condition, he was awfully prudish. “She lied to Nelson about the baby, then.”
“She lied to Giddings, too.”
“Was she blackmailing him as well?”
“A lot more successfully than she was Nelson, from the looks of it. He lost his job when he got caught stealing from the law firm where he worked.”
“Oh, dear. Do you know what this means? She probably would have tried to get Nelson to steal from the bank, too.”
“Why would he? He didn’t have a reputation or a family to protect.”
He had a good point. “It just doesn’t make any sense for her to have been trying to blackmail Nelson, does it?”
“A lot of this doesn’t make any sense. I need to talk to her landlady and that other woman who lives there. I’m sure they know more than they’re telling, and from what the old woman next door said, that other woman might be doing the same thing Anna was, only with different men.”
“How would a neighbor know that?” Sarah asked.
Malloy gave her a pitying look. “Doesn’t Mrs. Ellsworth know everything you do?”
“She doesn’t know everything I do. She knows you call on me, but if I was seducing you and trying to blackmail you, she couldn’t know that unless one of us told her,” she pointed out.
He gave her one of his looks. “All right, the old woman didn’t know about everything, but she did see several different men coming and going at the house, more than Anna could have accommodated by herself. They never stepped out with the women, either.”
“If they were married, they couldn’t risk being seen,” Sarah guessed.
“That’s what I thought.”
“And if several men were calling on each of the women, the landlords had to know about it,” Sarah said.
“Especially if they were entertaining the men in their rooms,” Malloy pointed out.
“I thought you were going to see Mrs. Walcott today to find out about this.”
“She wasn’t home. Nobody was home when I called there this morning, and then I got a case of my own to work on. This isn’t my case, remember, and I’ve got to at least pretend I’m doing my own work. Otherwise, they might get a little annoyed with me down at Mulberry Street.”
“If it would help, I could call on her tomorrow with you,” Sarah offered. “A Sunday afternoon call would be just the thing.”
“Just the thing for what?” he asked with another of his looks.
“Just the thing to get her talking about her tenants.”
“If she’s running what amounts to a bawdy house, she’s not likely to confide it in you,” he pointed out.
“She’s even less likely to confide it in you,” Sarah pointed out right back. “And have you searched Anna’s room yet? There might be a diary or some letters or something else. And the maid probably knows a lot, too. She just wouldn’t say anything in front of that other woman, Catherine Porter. I’m sure I could get Catherine to talk, too, if I just had the chance.”
“Are you going to ask them to line up and take their turns answering your questions?” Malloy asked sarcastically.
He was right, of course. She couldn’t just show up on their doorstep and question them, one by one. Only Malloy could do that. “At least let me search her room. You know I’m good at that!”
She could see he was remembering the first time they’d met, when she’d found a vital clue for him while searchi
ng a murder victim’s room.
“What excuse will you use for turning up on their doorstep?” he asked, downing the last of his coffee.
“I’ll be coming as your assistant,” she countered.
This drew the blackest look yet, but she merely smiled serenely.
“Mrs. Brandt,” he said sternly, “you do not work for the police department, and you are not my assistant. You have no right to be investigating a murder at all. Besides, they already know you’re a midwife.”
“You know perfectly well you could bring a trained monkey along with you to question people and no one would dare challenge you. The police do whatever they want. If you say I can search the entire house and ask people whatever I want, then I can. What time should I meet you there?”
Someone started pounding at her door, a frantic sound she knew only too well.
“Sounds like someone wants to see you,” Malloy observed.
“It’s a baby. They always knock like that when it’s a baby.”
“Go ahead, then. I’ll let myself out the back. I need to talk to Nelson Ellsworth again. There’s something about this whole thing that smells bad, and maybe he can help me understand it.”
“You aren’t leaving until you tell me what time you’ll be at the boardinghouse tomorrow,” she warned when he got up and started for the back door.
His grin told her she didn’t stand much chance of stopping him, even if he didn’t tell her anything, but he said, “I’ll probably be there around one o’clock, if you’re finished with your duties by then.”
Sarah smiled with satisfaction and went to answer the anxious summons.
Frank stood where Mrs. Ellsworth could see him through her back window in the fading sunlight. The door opened only a few seconds after he’d knocked, and Mrs. Ellsworth greeted him as if he were the Prodigal Son.
“Oh, Mr. Malloy, how good of you to come. I dropped a knife this afternoon, so I knew a gentleman would be calling. I hoped it was you, and not another of those awful reporters. Do you have any word? Have you found the killer yet?” she asked as he came into her kitchen. Now that he had a good look at her, he realized this ordeal was taking a toll. Her eyes were shadowed from lack of sleep, and her whole body seemed to have shrunken, as if she were drawing up into herself under the weight of this terrible burden.
Murder on Washington Square Page 13
