In the Shadow of Gotham

by Pintoff, Stefanie

  “Surely you exaggerate,” I said. But I was listening with no small measure of concern.

  “Ask him about Moira Shea sometime—then you’ll see,” Horace said knowingly. “Mention her name just once and see what he says. It will surprise—no, it will shock you, the lengths he has gone to in the name of scientific progress. And you will understand why you should think twice before you trust him.” His tone was now hushed.

  I looked him full in the eye, not knowing what to make of him. I accepted that Horace was opinionated and unmannerly, but now he was making a serious allegation against the man who employed him and supported his graduate research. To his credit, he seemed almost ashamed by it.

  “I don’t have time for riddles now,” I said. “We are in the middle of a difficult murder investigation. Either you have something to tell me—or you don’t.”

  “You’re right.” He drew himself up. “You should know it, and you may as well hear it from me. Moira Shea is the first girl Michael Fromley murdered. He stabbed her fourteen times. It happened two months before the attempted-murder charges he faced in Catherine Smedley’s case. The police never connected him to the Shea murder. But Alistair Sinclair knew—and did nothing. He aided and abetted Fromley by covering it up, when justice should have sent Fromley to the electric chair.”

  He paused a moment to let this information sink in. “Ask him why during the Smedley case, Hogart, the most experienced prosecutor at the DA’s office, was replaced with a rookie just before trial. It has even been rumored”—he bent toward me confidentially—“that the professor bribed Judge Hansen, a close family friend, to lean on the prosecution. The charges were dropped abruptly—and the case dismissed. I’d like to think what I’m telling you isn’t true. But the facts raise a lot of questions.”

  I was silent. Horace gave me a final, embarrassed glance. “Better be careful, Detective.”

  As soon as he said it, he was gone.

  And I was left standing alone at the corner of Broadway and 114th Street, stomach churning, completely aghast that this allegation could have any truth to it.

  CHAPTER 15

  I began to walk briskly, my feet keeping pace with my turbulent emotions. My anger seethed red-hot, and as I made my way over to Riverside Drive, the peaceful sight of the Hudson glistening in the moonlight did nothing to assuage the raw emotions that had taken hold of me. By instinct, I walked downtown. The shock of betrayal stung sharply: My anger toward Alistair intermingled with disgust at my own failure to recognize his duplicity. If Horace were right, then I had been lied to and taken advantage of in a manner that was completely self-serving. And worse, Alistair had been derelict in duties both ethical and professional. Why hadn’t I questioned him more? Had I been so blinded by his learning that I forgot every instinct I usually followed?

  After some twenty blocks, my rage had calmed and cold logic prevailed. The allegations Horace had let slip were serious—and before I could evaluate them, I needed to look Alistair in the eye and hear his response. He was at the opera tonight, Mrs. Leab had said. And for Alistair, attending an opera was a social event as much as a musical one. He maintained a box there, which he had no doubt filled with society friends this evening. It was a tangible reminder that he had been born into a stratosphere of class and wealth I did not fully understand. That, I accepted. But had it created in Alistair a sense of entitlement, of being above the law? That, I could never abide.

  I walked back to Broadway and grabbed a cab down to Thirty-ninth Street where the Metropolitan Opera House was located. Fortunately, I arrived just prior to the first intermission—for though the flash of my police credentials yielded information about Alistair’s regular box, it did not persuade the recalcitrant house manager to let me enter during the performance.

  “If it’s not a matter of life or death, I can’t do it. Especially during Caruso’s solo—Mr. Conreid would have my job,” the man said stubbornly, referring to the general manager at the Met who was notorious for indulging his newest star. “You’ll have to wait.”

  I could have forced the issue, I supposed, but it did not seem worth the fight. From the lobby, I listened to Enrico Caruso’s full-throated tenor as it reached the solo’s crescendo, and found myself hoping that Horace Wood had been mean-spirited or grievously mistaken. Anything but right.

  The moment the curtain fell and the lights came up, I made my way to Alistair’s box, pushing against the crowd of well-dressed patrons making their way to the bar. Alistair, luckily, was still seated, casually sipping a glass of champagne as he chatted with a woman wearing a green gown and glistening jewelry. He did not notice me until I interrupted him.

  “Alistair. It’s urgent that I speak with you. Please come downstairs with me.” My voice sounded false and oddly formal, even to my own ears.

  “Ziele! What on earth are you doing here?” he said in surprise as he rose halfway out of his seat. “Is something wrong?”

  “I need to talk with you,” I said again. “Outside, where we can speak in private.”

  “I’ll be downstairs in a moment, then—I’ll meet you outside the lobby. I need a minute here.”

  Turning to leave, I overheard Alistair as he made his excuses.

  “Valeria, can I get you anything while I’m up?” He addressed the woman beside him.

  “Alistair,” she said, pouting, “must you leave right now? With that ill-bred man? Why, he came storming in here, not even dressed in appropriate evening clothes! But I suppose I’ll forgive you if you’ll be so good as to bring me another champagne when you return.” The peal of her flirtatious laugh was the last sound I heard as I left the box.

  I had never liked society women. At least, what I had seen of them; after all, I had never known any of them personally. But the ones with whom I had crossed paths, however obliquely, seemed to be stiff and artificial. This lady was certainly no exception.

  “Well, Simon,” Alistair said, sounding jovial as he joined me downstairs. “What is so important that you had to pull me away from good music and company in such dramatic fashion?” His cheeks were tinged red from the champagne, and I reflected he would have done well to refuse his last drink.

  “Moira Shea,” I said, and the name was an accusation. “I want to hear what you have to say about Moira Shea.”

  He flinched ever so slightly, but his tone when he replied remained smooth. “Where did you hear about her? She died over three years ago, and her death has no relevance to our present case.”

  Our case indeed. I resented him more for reminding me of how closely we had partnered together these last crucial days.

  “It doesn’t matter where I heard about her. And on this subject, I alone decide what’s relevant to my case.” The words came out even more forcefully than I intended, and he looked at me in surprise.

  “Come.” He gestured toward Fortieth Street where fewer people were congregated. “I believe we require more privacy for this conversation.”

  Halfway down the block, we ducked into a small Irish pub by mutual agreement. We found a small table in the corner, far from the crowd at the bar. Alistair promptly ordered two pints of stout that neither of us wanted.

  I stared at him, waiting for him to begin, and trying to ignore the sick gnawing sensation in my gut.

  “I had hoped never to tell you this,” he said. “I have kept what I’m about to say secret from all but my closest associates at the research center. Which of them told you?” His expression was grim. “I assume it was Horace, who is notoriously loose-lipped. Besides, I cannot believe Fred would have betrayed my confidence.”

  I did not even acknowledge his question. “I need to know about Moira Shea,” I said.

  He moistened his lips and, with his napkin, wiped away some foam from the beer that had got onto his mustache. “When I came to you this past Wednesday morning, I told you some background about my decision to work with Michael Fromley.”

  “Yes, I believe you said you facilitated a plea bargain that release
d him to your custody because he had not yet ‘crossed the line,’ so to speak. Despite his violent tendencies, he had not yet committed murder. That was the single reason why I understood you to believe that your research, particularly your work with Fromley, was so important. But that wasn’t the truth, was it?” My eyes bored into him as I waited to hear his answer.

  “You gave me a hard time then, because you didn’t see much distinction between attempted and actual murder,” he said. “Yet I came to you because I had heard about the way you responded to new ideas. My contacts in the police department said you had quite a reputation for it, and were willing to learn in a way more seasoned members of the force would not. I felt you would be capable of understanding why the things I wanted to learn from Michael Fromley were so important.”

  “Yes,” I said, impatient with his flattery. “But I would never sacrifice justice for the sake of knowledge. And I would never endanger the life of another human being for it. Tell me that is not exactly what you have done here!” I knew I sounded judgmental and I could not help myself. “Tell me the truth about Moira Shea,” I demanded, “the full story, with nothing omitted this time.”

  He banged his fist on the table in response, jostling our glasses of beer. “Simon, don’t be so damned single-minded. You have the capacity to see and understand the moral complexities here—I know you do, because I chose you for it.”

  “What do you mean, that you ‘chose me’ for it?” I demanded. “You couldn’t possibly have chosen me for anything. A young woman had the misfortune to be murdered within my jurisdiction. You contacted me only some hours after the murder. If you had relevant information, then you had no choice but to deal with me.”

  Yet the thought occurred to me: Was it possible the man had manipulated me to an even greater extent than I already recognized?

  Alistair was adamant. “Absolutely not true. For a man with my contacts, a couple of hours were sufficient to learn all I needed to know about you. I could have gone to Chief Healy, though his suspicions of me are probably worse than your own. And given my contacts in Yonkers—a larger jurisdiction than yours that has aided you with the case—I could certainly have handpicked someone there. But I chose you. Because I was told you had the intellectual capacity to understand the importance of my work. And my work is not so far from your own interests. Why, our paths might have crossed naturally, had you not had to leave Columbia.”

  I simply stared. I had no idea how he had managed to learn of that part of my life, and I resented him the more for knowing it. Somehow it seemed a double betrayal: that he had taken advantage of me both professionally and personally by withholding information he knew to be important.

  “Yes,” he continued, “I know all about how your father gambled away everything and left your mother. You had to leave college to support her and your sister, didn’t you? Pity—it was a damned waste of a fine opportunity, if you ask me.” He took another sip from his beer. “I even know what happened the day of the Slocum steamship disaster. You had business uptown at the Thirty-fourth Precinct. When the call came in, you joined a group of police-commandeered rescue boats. I hear you helped rescue many survivors. But your fiancée didn’t make it; she was among the thousand who perished.”

  It was private information he should not have had, and I felt myself shaking with rage as unwanted flashes of memory distracted me. Alistair was partially right; I had been meeting with another officer from the Thirty-fourth Precinct to discuss a rash of robberies that spanned our jurisdictions. An officer walking his beat had called in with news of the burning steamship. I joined a number of others who sped to the waterfront near 138th Street to help. We had saved a number of people, but I had pushed to get closer and closer to the burning ship. Pushed too hard, those with me said—because I risked destroying our boat and the lives of everyone on it.

  I took a series of deep breaths and forced myself to refocus on the present. Alistair wanted only to distract me and change the subject—something I would not allow.

  “Enough of this talk. Either tell me about Moira Shea now, or I will go straight to my old precinct and find out from them. And I will be sure to share everything I have heard tonight about your role in suppressing information you obtained about her murder.”

  It was not an empty threat, and he knew it.

  He drummed his fingers on the table, glancing over toward the crowd at the bar as if to ascertain whether anyone was listening. But the assorted men gathered there had taken little if any notice of us; they were fully occupied in singing various Irish tunes in even more varied keys.

  I looked at Alistair, waiting expectantly. After a moment, he cleared his throat and at last began to tell me what I wanted—yet dreaded—to hear.

  “You must believe me, I didn’t know about Moira Shea when I first made the arrangements for Michael Fromley in the Smedley case. When I spoke with Fromley’s half brother Clyde Wallingford, when I argued that the prosecutor should drop all charges, and even during our first few months working with Michael—I never heard a word about Moira Shea. The Catherine Smedley case was weak, and the other crimes of which he had been accused were minor.”

  “Did you bribe or otherwise influence the judge in the Smedley case?”

  “No,” Alistair said heatedly. “Who told you that lie?”

  “Judge Hansen is a close friend of yours, however,” I said.

  “Our families have known each other for years but that does not mean I acted unethically. The attempted-murder charge was dismissed because it was weak. And Michael’s plea on the lesser charges—the plea that released him to my custody—was perfectly aboveboard.”

  I persisted. “I understand the original prosecutor was removed from the case against his will.” I looked at my notes. “That would have been Frank Hogart, with a stellar record of convictions and a reputation for tenacity. I believe you found the second-year rookie from the DA’s office to be more amenable to dismissing the major charge.”

  Alistair looked at me with a pained expression. “The district attorney’s office shuffles schedules all the time. Personally, I think for all his bluster and complaints, Hogart didn’t want the case. Had it gone to trial, it might have blemished his perfect conviction record, for the evidence simply wasn’t there. And it would have hurt his tougher-than-nails image if he himself permitted the dismissal.”

  He sighed deeply. “Michael did not confess to the Shea murder for nearly a year. He told Fred during a session in October 1903. Fred came to me at once, worried about the legal implications for us.” He leaned in even closer to my ear. “If we believed his ‘confession,’ then we were concerned we may have had an ethical obligation to report it.”

  “May have had?”

  “Yes,” Alistair repeated firmly, “may have had. It is difficult to explain without going over the entire case history, but Michael Fromley is a young man who maintains a very fragile distinction between fantasy and reality. Just because he says a thing, why should we believe it? How could we be certain that what he confessed to us about murdering Moira Shea was the truth—and not simply another instance of his active fantasy life?”

  “Is a dead body not certainty enough?” I said. “All you needed to determine the truth was to consult whatever police ‘source’ was so forthcoming about the Wingate case in Dobson. The source could have confirmed whether a murder victim named Moira Shea ever existed.”

  “And I did just that,” Alistair said, defensive now, “but what you fail to grasp is that such knowledge did not resolve the issue. Of course, I consulted the police. And I reviewed the crime logs of the Times and the World. There was nothing the police told me—and nothing Michael told me—that was not also public knowledge, reported in the pages of every press in the city. A girl named Moira Shea had been slashed to death in an empty warehouse by the river. And she had last been seen getting onto the subway. Were these circumstances in keeping with Michael’s disturbing fantasies? To be sure. And yet”—he leaned into the table
again, his voice dropping as he realized he had been talking rather loudly—“how could Fred and I say with any certainty that Michael had not simply borrowed his confession from the pages of the Herald? He was constantly feeding his imagination with clippings from the newspapers and magazines. Could we be sure he had actually committed this crime? Or—had he merely wished he had done so, imagined he had done so, because it so perfectly complemented his fantasies?”

  “How about physical evidence?” I was angry now, too. “Or witnesses. Anything that may have placed Fromley at the scene. The police might have figured it out, had you properly reported what you knew.”

  “Please,” Alistair said, “give me some credit for thinking through these issues. When he confessed to us in October 1903, it was well over a year after Moira Shea was killed in August 1902. You know perfectly well how ill preserved most crime scenes are, even a day after the crime occurs.”

  He was right. The time span was a long one, and the lack of interest in physical evidence had been my greatest frustration at the department.

  “But you might have given it a chance,” I argued. “There may have been other physical evidence to link him to the crime that was preserved. It could have been reexamined in light of what you knew.”

  “You are missing an important point,” Alistair said, going on to explain. “There were discrepancies between Michael’s account and certain details about the Shea murder. He convinced us of his motivation, and certainly Moira Shea’s death was consistent with his choice of weapon. But he kept changing the details: the time of day the attack occured; what Miss Shea was wearing. These are important details the murderer should have known. It was established that she had taken a one o’clock train, and she had worn a yellow shirtwaist and dark skirt. Michael should have been clear about these details—and yet he was not. That led us to doubt the veracity of his confession.”