Murder on Marble Row

by Victoria Thompson

  “How clever do you have to be to make a bomb like this?” Frank asked.

  Peterson shrugged. “Even though it seems ingenious, it isn’t very complicated. You’d just need a basic understanding of the principles. Anybody could get the pipe and the gunpowder and the nails.”

  “What about the battery?”

  “Every electrical store in the city sells them.”

  “No sane person would kill a man like this,” one of the detectives said from the doorway. “It’s got to be them crazy anarchists.”

  “Trick is to find ’em,” the other said with more than a hint of satisfaction, obviously glad that wouldn’t be his job—and his failure when the anarchists in question disappeared without a trace into the teaming slums of the city.

  At least Frank had Creighton Van Dyke to help him run them to ground. The son might well be his only salvation.

  SARAH HAD NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY TO SEE HER MOTHER. Elizabeth Decker arrived only a few minutes after they discovered Creighton had escaped. The officer had immediately gone to search the surrounding streets while Sarah used the Van Dykes’ telephone to call Police Headquarters. She pretended to be Alberta Van Dyke because too many people at Headquarters knew of her relationship with Malloy and would tease him mercilessly if they knew she was sending for him. They promised to find Malloy and deliver the message. Meanwhile, they would send some other patrolmen to help with the search.

  A useless effort, Sarah knew. If Creighton had been gone even an hour, he would be miles away by now, and he’d most certainly left the house long before daylight. He could vanish into the Lower East Side and never be seen again.

  “Sarah,” her mother demanded as she entered the parlor. “What on earth is going on? The maid who let me in was crying!”

  Before Sarah could explain, Mrs. Decker glanced around the room to find Tad drinking hard liquor even though it wasn’t near noon yet. Lilly Van Dyke was having hysterics on the sofa, and Alberta sat in a chair nearby, quietly weeping into her handkerchief.

  Sarah quickly explained about Creighton’s presence in the house and his nocturnal escape.

  “He’s going to kill us all!” Lilly wailed, but no one paid her any mind.

  “Tad, really,” Mrs. Decker said in disapproval at his choice of beverage.

  “Hair of the dog, Mrs. Decker,” he explained sheepishly, holding up his glass in a salute to her. “I’m afraid I overindulged last night, and my head’s going to split open from all this caterwauling if I don’t.”

  To prove his point, Lilly moaned pitifully, and Tad drained his glass.

  Mrs. Decker went straight to Lilly. “Stop that at once,” she commanded. “You’re not helping anything.”

  Lilly stopped in mid-moan and stared at Mrs. Decker dumbfounded.

  “Good,” Mrs. Decker said in approval. “If you feel the need to make a spectacle of yourself again, please retire to the privacy of your rooms.” She turned to Alberta, who was also staring at her, her face wet with tears. “You aren’t helping either,” she informed the young woman. “Get control of yourself.”

  Without waiting for a reply, she turned back to Tad. “You can’t be much support to your family if you’re drunk, young man. Put that glass down. Sarah, ring for some coffee, will you?”

  Sarah was only too happy to obey. By the time it came, Sarah had been able to explain once again and in greater detail exactly what had happened since yesterday.

  “He’s gone back to that woman,” Lilly informed them all. “He’s going to gather up all his anarchist friends and kill the rest of us. We’ll be blown to pieces!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Lilly,” Mrs. Decker said as Sarah poured coffee for everyone. “Even if he did kill his father—which I don’t believe for a moment—he’s intelligent enough to know he’d be the first one blamed if anything happened to any of you.”

  Sarah looked at her mother in surprise. Since when had she developed such fine detecting skills? “Mother’s right,” Sarah said quickly. “And Mr. Malloy posted a guard on the house, in case anyone does try to harm you.”

  “A lot of good that did,” Tad pointed out. “He couldn’t even keep Creighton in a third-story bedroom.”

  “I should have known he’d try to escape,” Alberta said. Her voice was hoarse from weeping, and she looked infinitely weary. “He was much too eager to be confined to his old room, but I thought it was just that he didn’t want to go to jail.”

  “Of course you did,” Sarah soothed her.

  “There’s no use in blaming ourselves, in any case,” Mrs. Decker said. “What’s done is done.”

  “That’s right,” Sarah agreed. “Now we’ve got to concentrate on what we can do to help. Alberta, do you have any idea where Creighton may have gone?”

  “Back to that woman, I’d expect,” Lilly offered with a sniff. “If it wasn’t for her—”

  “Stop it, Lilly,” Alberta snapped, a little of her former spirit returning. “Of course he’d go to her first, but that would have been hours ago. He probably wanted to warn his friends and then find a safe place to hide.”

  “Would Katya go with him?” Sarah asked.

  “Is Katya his . . . paramour?” Mrs. Decker asked, having to search for the correct description.

  “Yes,” Sarah said, still looking at Alberta. “Does he have friends who would take him in?”

  Alberta’s pale eyes were bleak with despair. “No one I’d know, I’m sure. Katya would know, but if she’s with him . . .”

  “How can we find this Katya?” Mrs. Decker asked.

  Everyone looked at her in amazement, including Sarah.

  “Why would we want to?” Lilly asked.

  Mrs. Decker gave her a withering glance. “Because it seems the only way of locating Creighton. If you’re as frightened of him as you seem to be, I’d think you’d want him found and locked safely away.”

  Properly chastened, Lilly had no answer for that. Cheeks red, she turned away from Mrs. Decker’s glare.

  “I know where they live,” Alberta said. “Or at least where they did live, but . . .”

  “I went there yesterday,” Sarah said, forgetting her mother probably wouldn’t approve of such conduct. “With Detective Malloy. If they aren’t there, they have friends in the building who may know. I met one of them. She’s also a midwife.”

  Mrs. Decker brightened at that news. Apparently, she wasn’t too shocked to hear Sarah had assisted Malloy in locating anarchists yesterday. “Do you think she’ll help you find them?”

  “Probably not willingly,” Sarah admitted. “She’s apparently an anarchist, too, but perhaps she can deliver a message to them, at least. I should probably go right away. The longer we wait, the longer they’ll have to escape.” This was true, but another motivating factor was that she didn’t want to stay another moment in this house with its oppressive inhabitants.

  “Shouldn’t you wait for that detective fellow?” Tad asked in concern. “You can’t go to that part of the city alone.”

  “I go to that part of the city quite often,” Sarah said, rising from her chair. “Besides, these people are hardly likely to confide Creighton’s whereabouts to a policeman. I’ll have a better chance without him.”

  “I’ll go with you, my dear,” Mrs. Decker said to her surprise.

  “Elizabeth!” Lilly cried in shock.

  “Mother, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sarah said, equally shocked.

  “Why not?” her mother replied. “You said yourself, you go there often.”

  “And I’m used to it.” Sarah tried to envision her mother in the tenement where Creighton and Katya lived. “I’m afraid . . . well, you’ll see things that might . . . disturb you,”

  “You underestimate me, Sarah.”

  Perhaps she did, but she wasn’t anxious to find out for sure. “We’ll have to go on the El,” Sarah tried. “Have you ever ridden on it?”

  “I’ve been thinking for a long time that I should try it,” she said.


  Sarah doubted this, but she said, “And then we’ll have to walk several blocks through the tenements. Hansom cabs don’t operate in that part of the city.”

  She feigned outrage. “Do you think I’m too old and feeble to walk?”

  “Mother, please, I’m just trying to—”

  “Protect me?” her mother finished for her. “Of course you are, dear, and I appreciate your concern, but I think I’m old enough to make my own decisions.” She rose also. “Shouldn’t we be going?”

  “What will Father say?” Sarah tried in desperation.

  Mrs. Decker gave her the same withering glare she’d given Lilly a moment ago. “What makes you think he will ever learn about it? Shall we go?”

  FRANK HAD BEEN DREADING THIS TRIP TO THE MORGUE, but he knew that sooner or later he would have to examine the remains of Gregory Van Dyke. When the attendant led him to the correct table, he was struck by the odd shape beneath the sheet covering the body.

  Seeing Frank’s expression, the young man said, “He was torn up pretty bad.” When he drew back the sheet, Frank hardly recognized what he saw as a human being.

  The attendant said, “Only good thing, he probably didn’t know what hit him. All them nails and stuff, they just tore his heart to shreds. There was some glass, too. They said the bomb was in a cabinet with lots of liquor bottles, I guess. He probably never even heard it go off.”

  Concentrating on breathing more slowly and shallowly—the body smelled of gunpowder and torn bowels and any number of other unpleasant things—Frank studied what he was seeing and tried to make some sense of it.

  From what he could tell, Van Dyke had taken the blast full in the chest, smashing the bones and pulverizing the organs beneath them. The lower part of his face was blown away, too. A few back teeth remained to indicate where his jaws had been, and one eye stared up at the ceiling in frozen surprise. His left hand was gone, and the forearm lacerated. The right arm had been severed from the body. Someone had laid it on the lower part of the gurney beside the legs.

  Below where his belt would have been, the body was remarkably unscathed. Stray shards of metal—the nails—had been driven into his thighs and abdomen, but the damage there was minimal compared to the chest. From the knees down, he was untouched.

  Lastly, Frank examined the right arm. The wound where it had torn away from the shoulder was ragged, giving Frank a clear vision of the force of the explosion. Much of the tissue had been ripped from the bones, and where the hand had been was a mass of mangled flesh and bone. Frank didn’t want to look at it too closely, but something odd imbedded in the hand caught his eye.

  “What’s that?” he asked the attendant.

  The fellow peered more closely. “Can’t tell. Doc Haynes ain’t looked at him yet. Said there was no rush since everybody knows what killed him.”

  Frank leaned down and looked very closely, much more closely than he wanted to, and he remembered what Peterson, the electrician, had said about the broken-off piece of wire—Funny things happen in an explosion. It’s around here someplace.

  “That look like wire to you?” Frank asked.

  The attendant took a turn peering at the mangled hand. “Yeah, it does. What’s it doing in his hand?”

  “That,” Frank said, “is something we might never know.”

  6

  SARAH GLANCED OVER AT HER MOTHER AS THEY CLIMBED the steps up to the Elevated Train Station. Mrs. Decker had dressed conservatively this morning, thank heaven, since she was paying a condolence call on a family in mourning. Her dove gray morning gown was free of ornamentation and almost completely concealed by her heavy, black cape. Still, no one could miss the quality of her garments or the way she carried herself. Anyone who saw her would know her instantly for exactly what she was: a lady born to old money who had never known a day of want.

  “I don’t suppose I realized how high the tracks are above the street,” she said as they finally reached the top of the stairs.

  Sarah pretended not to notice how winded her mother was. “I suppose it’s an attempt to keep some of the noise and cinders away from the people down below, but it doesn’t work very well.”

  “So I noticed,” she said, brushing some ashes from her shoulder.

  At least a dozen people were waiting for the next train, a crowd that continued to swell as more people made their way up the stairs behind Sarah and her mother. All of them, it seemed, were looking at Mrs. Decker curiously. If she noticed, she gave no indication.

  “Is this how you regularly travel around the city?” she asked Sarah.

  “When I can. The trains only go north and south, so sometimes it isn’t convenient. In that case, I either take a cab or walk.”

  “That isn’t safe. You should have your own carriage,” her mother said.

  Sarah refrained from responding to that ridiculous suggestion. The expense of keeping a horse and carriage and someone to take care of both would be horrendous. She heard a train rumbling closer to the station. “It isn’t too late to change your mind, Mother,” she said.

  “Nonsense,” she replied, peering warily down the track at the approaching train.

  Mrs. Decker was momentarily embarrassed when she realized she had no money with which to pay the fare. Ladies in her social position seldom carried cash. Wherever she shopped, she had an account, so she never needed to worry herself with actual money. Sarah came to her rescue and managed not to smirk at her mother’s dismay.

  The car was far from clean, and for a moment, Sarah feared her mother would refuse even to sit down. At last she did so, however reluctantly and only after Sarah fearlessly took her own seat. The air inside the car was cool but close, rank with the odors of many bodies crowded in day after day. Sarah discreetly ignored her mother’s reaction, and then the car jolted into motion again.

  Mrs. Decker was clutching the back of the seat in front of her rather tightly with her kid-gloved hands, which Sarah also ignored until her mother said, “Good heavens!”

  Sarah looked at her in surprise to find her staring out the window. The train ran only a few feet from the buildings on both sides of Sixth Avenue, beside the third-floor windows. “You can see right into those people’s homes!” she whispered incredulously.

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  “That’s horrible! How can people live like that, with no privacy? Strangers can see everything they do!”

  “They also pay less rent than the people on the other floors. For some, that’s more important than privacy.”

  Her mother looked at her in amazement, almost as if she were certain Sarah had to be teasing. After a moment, she said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely. I said you’d see things that would disturb you, Mother. This is probably the least shocking thing you’ll see today.”

  They rode for a few minutes in silence. Mrs. Decker kept staring at the passing windows as if unable to turn away, even though the sight horrified her. At last Sarah took pity and distracted her.

  “Mother, do you think Creighton had anything to do with his father’s death?”

  At first Mrs. Decker seemed startled by the question, and then Sarah could see her purposefully refocusing her attention. “I have no idea. He was a perfectly normal child, but I haven’t seen him in years. And he did reject everything his family stood for when he took up with those anarchists.”

  Sarah didn’t bother to point out that some people might think the determined accumulation of wealth wasn’t a particularly noble philosophy on which to turn one’s back. “What do you know about the rest of the family? Could anyone else have had a reason to want Mr. Van Dyke dead?”

  Mrs. Decker glanced around, probably afraid someone might overhear, but no one seemed particularly interested in their conversation, even if they could have overheard it above the noise of the train. “Gregory Van Dyke was a difficult man,” she said.

  “He and Father were friends, weren’t they?”

  “They’d known each other a
ll their lives,” her mother reminded her. “And a man behaves differently with his friends at his club than he does with his family at home.”

  “In what way?” Sarah asked, fascinated by this bit of information.

  “Really, Sarah, this isn’t a topic I want to discuss,” her mother said, looking cautiously around again.

  “But we need to discuss it. If Mr. Van Dyke’s family hated him, they’d also have a good reason to want him dead.”

  “I refuse to speak ill of the dead,” her mother said primly.

  “Then his murder will never be solved,” Sarah informed her. “I’m afraid the only way to solve a mystery like this is to find out all about the dead person. That means searching out the secrets he hid from the world and all the petty and mean things he did during his life.”

  “That’s just gossip!” her mother reminded her.

  “Exactly. Gossip is the key to solving any murder.”

  Mrs. Decker frowned her disapproval. “You have become remarkably knowledgeable about solving murders, Sarah.”

  “Unfortunately, I’ve had to, but the fact remains, if we intend to find Mr. Van Dyke’s killer, we must know as much as we can about him.”

  “I thought your friend Mr. Malloy was in charge of finding the killer,” her mother said.

  She’d put just the slightest emphasis on the word friend, but Sarah pretended she hadn’t noticed. “He’s doing the best he can, but you know as well as I that no one is going to tell Malloy anything unflattering about Mr. Van Dyke’s personal life. If he doesn’t have the facts, he can’t do his job.”

  “So he’s assigned you the distasteful task of uncovering these facts,” her mother said with a frown.

  “I volunteered, because I knew you’d never gossip with Mr. Malloy,” Sarah replied.

  “What kind of a man would allow a lady to be involved in something like this?” she asked, thoroughly offended.

  “The kind of man who wants to see justice done, Mother.”

  Her mother gave her a pitying look. “Everyone knows the police don’t care anything about justice, Sarah.”