Murder in Greenwich Village

by Liz Freeland

  Her nightly coffee was more than an eccentricity. Despite what I’d told Ford, I’d spent my first two weeks in New York City with Aunt Irene, so I knew her routine. As soon as we were gone, she would hole up in her study to work as late as 3:00 a.m. At night she wrote at her rolltop desk with pen and paper, Dickens and Trollope snoozing in their baskets nearby. While the city slumbered, she focused without interruption on her imaginary melodramas and rigorously paced herself by the gilded bronze mantel clock with cherubs that struck each quarter hour. The next morning she would wake up late, have breakfast, and then type her pages from the night before. Her output usually amounted to eight pages, give or take a page. Though Aunt Irene projected a fluttery femininity to the world at large, at her core she was a hard worker who kept to her hours as sharp as any miner punching a time clock.

  As my aunt waited for the coffee to percolate, she turned to the food. Bernice always prepared too much, and the leftovers were our weekly reward. “You girls were too, too kind to help out.” She wrapped a wedge of cheese in waxed paper. “Callie, I could tell you made a few conquests.”

  Callie, collapsed in a chair by the kitchen table, let her tired legs sprawl out before her. Even in that relaxed pose, she resembled some impossibly elegant creature, like a ballerina, or a giraffe. She blew out a breath of exhaustion that disturbed the blond helix curls of her fringe. “I’ve never encountered so many gropers in one place. Even buyers in the showroom are less handsy when they check out the goods.”

  Aunt Irene shook her head at her guests’ naughtiness. I suspected there would be a young model being pawed in the next Irene Livingston Green novel.

  “What did you think of Ford Fitzsimmons?” I asked my aunt.

  “You mean that sad fellow in the dining room?” Her lips formed a moue of displeasure. “Drinking too much is never becoming in a young man. It’s rather coarse.”

  I preferred to think of him as a diamond in the rough. “I read a book he wrote. It was grand.”

  My aunt stilled before a plate of cookies. “What kind of book?”

  “A coming-of-age story. Very tragic.”

  She relaxed a bit and slid the cookies into a tin. The word tragic dissipated any fear of competition. Happy endings, not tragic ones, were her specialty. In Irene Livingston Green’s world, unhappy endings only befell villains who deserved a by-gosh good comeuppance. “What became of the book?”

  “It was rejected.”

  She sighed, either in relief at having one less title to compete with, or commiseration, or both. “Poor boy. Well, he’s still young. Not long out of college, by the look of him. Plenty of time for him to make his name.” Her gaze sharpened on me. “But I wouldn’t get involved with a writer if I were you. Especially a struggling one. Artist types make interesting friends, but disastrous husbands.”

  “I’m not looking for a husband.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Every girl is looking for a husband, unless she’s a fool.”

  “You didn’t,” I pointed out.

  She aimed a sharp look at me. “Now, how would you know that? Maybe I looked but didn’t find.” She laughed. “For all you know, I’m still looking. I’ve even considered writing a book on the topic. Never Too Old. What do you think of that title?”

  Callie’s gaze met mine across the kitchen, and we smiled. Aunt Irene might pine for love, but if she never found it she would compensate herself by using her own private yearnings as fictional fodder.

  Walter, who lived in Irene’s basement, came back in from walking the dogs. He arched a brow at Callie’s and my relaxed postures. “Looks like we’re down to the last two scavengers,” he told my aunt.

  She laughed and let him take over the food wrapping and coffee preparation. Born plain Irma Mayer and raised with my mother and Aunt Sonja by a widowed scrubwoman, Aunt Irene was still too tickled to be in the position of having a butler to take offense at anything he did. To her, Walter was as much the embodiment of her success as her shelf of published books, her healthy bank account, or even this house.

  Callie and I knew Walter’s return was our cue to leave, so we dutifully got to our feet. I looped my leather satchel over my shoulder, causing Walter to shake his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That bag.” He all but shuddered. “It always makes me think of the postman.”

  “You should see the inside,” Callie said. “It’s a magpie’s nest in there.”

  I bristled a little at the criticism of my bag, which I’d found at a leather goods shop near Sheridan Square and for which I’d paid the incredible sum of eight dollars. It was made of handsome golden leather and was big enough to hold everything I could need while I was out and about. I didn’t know how I’d survive in the city without it. Callie never carried anything bigger than a tiny purse she could slip over her wrist, so she never had a spare handkerchief, or a pencil and paper, or a book.

  My aunt laughed. “Never mind, Louise. I think it’s very modern. Makes you look like a girl prepared for anything.”

  “Or like someone about to knock on the door and say, ‘Special Delivery,’” Walter said.

  At the door, my aunt handed us an extremely generous five dollars for cab fare. There ensued a scene so predictable we all might have been reciting from a script.

  “It’s too much,” I protested.

  “We’re just going downtown,” Callie chimed in, “not to California.”

  Aunt Irene held firm. “If there’s any left over, split it and have a little splurge on me. Or put a little something in your hope chests. You girls still have hope chests now, don’t you? Althea does.”

  “Who’s Althea?” Callie asked.

  “My current heroine.” She might be standing at the front door with us, but her mind was already at her desk.

  Waved off in a flurry of lace and feathers, Callie and I headed toward Second Avenue, where we could pick up the elevated railway on Fifty-seventh. Neither of us could bear to spend the five dollars on a cab on a fine summer night when legging it to a train would leave us so much richer.

  Once out of sight of Aunt Irene’s windows, Callie snatched the five dollars from my hand.

  “Hey, we’re supposed to split that,” I said. “For our hope chests, remember?”

  My protest was met with amused refusal. “My hope chest needs replenishing now, after you spilled ink on that shirtwaist you borrowed.”

  This was news to me. “When?”

  “Last week.” She clucked her tongue. “I swear, you’re becoming a hopeless wardrobe marauder. This morning one of my skirts showed flecks of dried mud, and I’d just cleaned it.”

  “I borrowed your skirt?”

  She gave me an exasperated side eye.

  It was true that I made too free with her clothes sometimes. She had so much—many of the items samples given to her at work, or purchased at a deep discount—and she was always generous in lending me things. But I needed to take better care. I silently vowed to mind myself around inkwells and puddles.

  “What happened to you earlier?” I asked. “I waited at my office for ages before giving up on you.”

  “Did you?” I was expecting an apology. Instead, she skipped a step ahead of me and then turned back to face me as we walked. Pent-up excitement bubbled out of her. “What do you think, Lou? A producer came in today. Marvin Sanderson! I recognized him on sight, and if I’d vamped any harder around that showroom I would’ve dislocated a hip. The old goat”—she cleared her throat—“I mean, the dear fellow asked me to come round to his office this evening to audition as a replacement in a show of his.” She wheeled in glee at the thought and practically skipped to the corner. “It’s just a chorus part, but it would be a beginning.”

  Her face beamed as if she could already feel the heat of the footlights.

  It was hard not to be swept away by her optimism, but to me the setup smelled as off as three-day-old fish. “I’ve never heard of evening auditions.”

  Her lips twisted
into a wry smile. “You really did just fall off the turnip truck, didn’t you?”

  I caught the gist, and revulsion roiled inside me. In an instant I was back to my top floor room at Aunt Sonja’s. Frantic. Unable to breathe. Stuffy. It had been a gorgeous afternoon, yet in that room with its cheerful cabbage rose wallpaper, the air was close and fetid. The windows had been shut. That was the detail that made the incident seem diabolical to me now. Had they been closed on purpose, or had I left them that way before I’d gone to work that morning?

  “Louise?” Something of the disturbance I felt must have shown on my face, because she took my arm. “It was just a little canoodling. Every girl has to make a few little compromises to get ahead. You don’t have to look as if I’d defiled myself.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was judge anyone. Callie often mistook my worry for prudishness. Now, for instance. “I swear,” she continued, “sometimes you’re as bad as Ethel.”

  At the name, a troubled silence settled between us.

  Ethel. Callie’s cousin from Little Falls. The bane of our existence. A month ago she’d arrived for a short visit to the big, sinful city, and was still with us. Why she stayed was a mystery. From the beginning she’d declared Manhattan to be noisy, smelly, filthy, and corrosive to moral hygiene. She was suspicious of all the inhabitants of our building, particularly Max, the painter who lived above us on the fourth floor with his Italian wife. Despite their having three small children, Ethel was certain the couple remained unmarried, and the patter of little feet overhead seemed to torment her all the more because of their unwed origins.

  The trouble was, while Ethel never expressed anything but distaste for the city, she showed a maddening inclination not to leave it. In the first flush of hospitality, Callie had offered Ethel her own bedroom, our best. Now the woman was a permanent installation in Manhattan, like the Flatiron Building. She devoured our food, planted herself in the bathroom half the morning, and did so little housework we might have been her maids. She claimed to be in ill health, and some days truly looked frail and never got out of bed at all. But all my sympathy for her was neutralized by her tendency to sermonize nonstop on the evils of the city. The woman was Cotton Mather in a petticoat, and we were her unwilling congregation of two.

  Another sore point was money. Ethel had chipped in very little for expenses. We’d been understanding at first, until in a rare moment alone in the apartment a week into Ethel’s visit, Callie had run across a wad of bills in one of Ethel’s spare boots.

  “It might have been a hundred dollars,” she’d told me excitedly that evening as we huddled in bed. “Maybe more.”

  I suggested we confront her with the fact that she was holding out on us, but Callie had demurred. To tell Ethel we knew about the money, she would have to admit that she’d been snooping. “She’s got to pony up sometime,” she’d insisted.

  “Better yet, she’s got to leave sometime,” I said.

  But days and then weeks had gone by, and neither sometime had come to pass.

  In our rare moments of privacy, Callie and I wondered what Ethel did all day while we were at work.

  “Maybe she’s working on a new Methodist women’s manifesto,” Callie suggested once. Going to church on Sunday was one of Ethel’s few regular outings.

  “Or maybe she sneaks out and takes dance lessons.” We’d dissolved into whoops at the idea of rigid, spinsterish Ethel ballin’ the jack and turkey trotting when no one was watching.

  The joking had been a couple of weeks ago, when Ethel seemed more humorous and less of a long-term irritant. When Ethel announced that her sister was coming to visit her, we’d rejoiced that our travails were almost ended. Surely Dora, the married sister with whom Ethel had lived most of her life, was coming to fetch Ethel home. But she arrived early one weekday morning, and by the time Callie and I returned from work that evening, Dora was gone and Ethel was still with us, locked in the best bedroom, weeping. Perhaps the sisters had argued. Ethel never said. The slightest mention of her sister’s visit threw her into hysterics.

  We weren’t only tired of her, we were just plain tired. All this time that Ethel had indulged in splendid privacy, Callie and I had been sharing my tiny, airless bedroom. Callie snored, and she claimed I kicked. Neither of us had managed a good night’s sleep in a month.

  We stopped at Second Avenue and climbed the covered steps to the El platform. “Far be it from me to blame anybody for not wanting to go back to Little Yawns,” Callie said, “especially if she and Dora had some kind of falling out. But why our apartment? I’ve got to get rid of her somehow.”

  “Anything short of murder will be fine with me.”

  “If she won’t leave, she could at least give us some money,” Callie said once we were clattering southbound on the train. “Why should I be responsible for her upkeep?”

  We got off at Eighth Street and descended the platform. My worries about growing old and gray with Ethel were interrupted when I looked south at the tower of the Woolworth Building, glowing like a beacon. The nearly finished skyscraper had been a looming presence downtown when I’d arrived in New York, but now it had opened, electrified by a flick of a switch by Woodrow Wilson in Washington, DC, and its cathedral summit haloed in white lights made the stars and moon seem dim, unimaginative things in comparison. It was the tallest building in the world. Gorgeous. Audacious. And to me, terrifying.

  Callie followed my gaze. “They’ve opened the observation gallery up at the top. We could go this Sunday.”

  Few things in this world frightened me, but heights did. I wasn’t wild about elevators, either. “To the top of that thing?” I was still recovering from a ride on The Tickler in Coney Island the previous weekend. “Aren’t there any pastimes in this city that don’t involve machinery hurling us away from solid ground?”

  She laughed, and we zigzagged south on Fifth and then west on Washington Square, facing the magnificent arch. We didn’t go through the park but skirted its north end. The late hour meant most businesses were closed except a few restaurants, the corner newsstand, and taverns. The sidewalks were sparsely populated and puddled periodically in darkness where the streetlamps weren’t sufficient. Callie and I instinctively linked arms as we strolled. As two women walking alone at night, we attracted a few speculative stares and at least one whistle from a stoop across the street.

  Annoyed, Callie muttered “fresh” under her breath, but I hadn’t been paying much attention. At every watering hole we passed, I wondered if it was the tavern Ford had planned to visit.

  Two blocks from our apartment, someone waited at the corner. Callie’s footsteps slowed, but the man, seeing her, rushed toward us. In the dim illumination cast by the streetlamps, his eyes held a feverish gleam.

  “Sawyer,” Callie said as he stopped in front of us. His appearing out of the blue had robbed her of the usual knowing tone she took with men.

  Then again, this man left me a little breathless myself. Sawyer Attinger was a perfect specimen. His tall, broad-shouldered frame had made him a hero on the playing fields of Yale, but his chiseled features and golden hair no doubt would have made him the hero of women’s hearts everywhere, regardless of his athletic prowess. In addition to those assets nature provided, he wore the finest tailored clothes and possessed the aristocratic bearing of a man accustomed to the world’s bending in his favor. Callie summed it up best: Sawyer Attinger was rolling in dough.

  As far as I could tell, the man possessed only one defect, but it was a fatal one. A certificate of marriage.

  He reached out and held Callie’s shoulders. “I’ve just been to your apartment. Nobody answered my knock. Where were you?”

  Callie, more collected, let go of my arm and drew herself up in a regal stance. In looks, she was more than a match for the blueblood Sawyer—her fine-boned face betrayed nothing of her dairy farm origins. “I was out with Louise. Not that it’s any business of yours.”

  He cut a dismissive glance my way and continued as i
f I weren’t there. “Meeting men?”

  Callie’s brows drew together, a sure sign that her anger was roused. She slapped his hands away. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “Don’t torture me,” Sawyer pleaded.

  Her rigid posture gave a fraction. “Then don’t be a dope. We were at Louise’s aunt’s house.”

  “I was worried,” he said.

  “We didn’t have a date,” Callie reminded him.

  “I know, but I was working late, so I thought I’d . . .” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have presumed, my darling. Of course a girl like you would seek out company.”

  Out of awkwardness I began to edge away from them, feigning curiosity in a bill someone had posted announcing an upcoming rally for women’s suffrage in Union Square. Not that I wasn’t interested in gaining the vote, or in seeing Lucy Burns and Alice Paul—suffragists I’d read about in newspapers—in the flesh, but I was much more concerned with Callie at the moment.

  She darted out a hand and clamped it around my arm. “Stay, Louise. Mr. Attinger won’t be escorting me home. It’s late, and I’m sure his wife will be worried.”

  His gaze filled with longing. “My wife has nothing to do with my feelings for you.”

  Callie only laughed.

  “I’ve told you that I’ll always take care of Margaret,” he said.

  She lifted her chin. “How generous! Pledging to me to take care of a woman you’ve already pledged before God to take care of till death do you part.”

  “Why can’t you believe that Margaret and I are no longer in love? We’re like two strangers rattling around under the same roof, both lonely.”

  “Not too lonely. I seem to recall there are two small children rattling around with you.” She linked her arm through mine again. “It’s late, and Louise and I have to work in the morning. Good night, Mr. Attinger. And good-bye.”