Murder in Greenwich Village

by Liz Freeland

  I had determination, but my vision for my future was fuzzy at best. I wasn’t sure where whatever talents I had could best be applied. Van Hooten and McChesney certainly didn’t seem eager to make use of them. I only knew that I wanted—no, needed—to be here. But not as a sponge. My aunt’s generosity and patience wouldn’t last forever.

  She was still dressed in her house robe and slippers when Walter showed me into her office. Of course, Aunt Irene’s robe was a garment more splendid than any dress in my wardrobe. It was sewn from a crushed plum velveteen with black piping, and a collar and cuffs of some kind of dark fur. Ermine hadn’t been available, apparently, but not even Catherine the Great could have looked as queenly as my aunt did perched on her Stickley swivel chair before her hulking black Remington typewriter.

  Her office was a cozy room on the second floor of her house with no window of its own. Illumination came from several lamps with lead-and-glass shades—one on the rolltop desk that dominated one side of the room, and another standing lamp next to a simple drop-leaf table holding the typewriter. An armchair draped with her favorite shawl dominated one corner, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookcases crowded with titles. This was her lair, her sanctum, and I’d rarely interrupted her while she was in it.

  She didn’t look particularly pleased to see me, but the memory of Otto behind bars gave me courage. He needed help, and I was all he had.

  “I’m sorry to crash in on you like this, but I must speak to you.”

  One eyebrow arched a little, and my aunt swiveled away from her typewriter, not without reluctance. From the clackety racket I’d heard as Walter led me toward the study, I knew she’d been busy. My aunt in the fever of creation could manipulate typewriter keys with the dexterity of Josef Hofmann playing a Chopin impromptu on the Steinway at Carnegie Hall. On her typing table a cup of coffee in a saucer served as a makeshift paperweight to a short stack of papers, that day’s output.

  “I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important,” I added.

  She studied me and then looked up at Walter. “Have you offered Louise a refreshment?”

  “She only just arrived.” His tone made clear that he doubted Aunt Irene would want me to stay.

  “Bring us both some fresh coffee, then, and ask Bernice if she has any more of those cheese biscuits left over from this morning.”

  “You ate a plate of those already,” Walter reminded her.

  She drew up straighter. “Not for me, you old nag. For Louise—look at her. Pale as bread dough and clearly about to expire from hunger.”

  I was hungry, come to think of it. Apparently Walter agreed with Aunt Irene’s assessment of my physical condition, because he gave me a brief once-over and said, “I’ll bring them.” Then he added, “For Louise.”

  Her gaze tracked him as he left the room; then my aunt leaned back in her chair with a mild huff. “I made the mistake of telling that man I needed to watch my figure, and now he’s my self-anointed diet despot. Never allow servants the upper hand, Louise. First they start talking back to you, then bossing you, and soon you’ve lost all control. Some days I think I’m just some lunatic woman scribbling away in order to support Walter and Bernice.” She grabbed a few sheets from the stack of clean paper and fanned herself with them. “Hot, isn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Sit down. You look as if you expect me to bite you. What’s happened? Something terrible happen at work?” Her eyes narrowed. “Ogden McChesney hasn’t been chasing you around his desk, has he?”

  The idea of old Mr. McChesney chasing me or anyone around a desk was so strange and unlikely that I frowned in confusion. I sank down into the armchair, because it was the nearest seat available. “No, of course not.”

  My aunt laughed. “Ogden chased me a few times—around that rolltop desk as a matter of fact. But he was too slow even a decade ago, and his rheumatism probably hasn’t gotten any better.”

  “Worse, according to him.”

  “Poor Ogden.” She sighed. “But never mind him. You said you had something important to tell me?”

  “It’s about the man who came by this morning looking for me. Otto Klemper.”

  “Ah.” Her eyes brightened and she scooted her chair closer to me. “I sensed a love story there.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s more of an unrequited love story turned murder mystery.” I then began to relate all the events that had happened since Callie and I had left her house the night before. My aunt listened, completely absorbed, so much so that I felt almost like an actress performing for an audience of one. Two, rather. Halfway through my tale, Walter came back in with the coffee and the promised plate of biscuits. Aunt Irene grabbed his arm before he could leave. As I told them about Callie and me sleeping in what might have been the bed of Ethel’s murderer, Walter wheeled the chair from the desk over and sank into it. Both he and Aunt Irene gobbled a couple of biscuits apiece by the time I’d related my distress at leaving poor Otto in the cage back at the police precinct.

  She swiveled toward him. “Ring Abraham Faber. We need to get that young man out of the clutches of the police.”

  I could have kissed her. I could have kissed Walter, too, because he jumped up at once and made for the door. “I’ll tell Bernice to make sandwiches,” he announced before hurrying away.

  Within ten minutes, this was all accomplished. As I sat in the office eating sandwiches, my aunt descended to talk to the lawyer, Faber, at high volume on the phone installed in the hallway below. I could hear her relating the story all over again through the floorboards. Then she ordered Walter to fetch the papers. Finally, she came up again.

  “Don’t worry, Abe Faber is on the job. He promises to have Otto out of that place by suppertime.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” I said. “I wouldn’t have bothered you if I could have found another way.”

  My aunt’s eyes widened as if I’d offended her. “Why shouldn’t you come to me at first, instead of at last?”

  “Because you’ve done so much for me already.”

  “Nonsense. I’ve done little enough for my sister’s family. And after poor Greta died, Sonja took you in, when it might just as easily have fallen to me to adopt you. But I was just starting out then. I wasn’t entirely polite in the manner I left that town, either, to tell you the truth. Of course I was provoked. Sonja said some horrible things to me—you’d have thought I was moving to New York to become a fancy woman. But I shudder at some of the things I said to her, too. The phrases ‘ignorant hausfrau’ and ‘backward Podunk town’ crossed my lips, I’m ashamed to admit. It wasn’t my finest hour.”

  “I’m sure Aunt Sonja doesn’t remember it,” I lied. She’d never mentioned their fights to me, but the woman had the memory of an elephant.

  Aunt Irene’s lips twisted knowingly. “Oh, I’m sure she does. Still, I feel better for helping you because I wasn’t very kind all those years ago. But it’s not just about making amends, or the memory of your mother. I’m happy to help you for your own sake.”

  I wondered if she would have been as eager to help if she knew my entire story. That she hadn’t heard the entire truth was another testament to my aunt Sonja’s tight-lipped character. Or perhaps she was too ashamed to speak of me anymore.

  “But you’re not just helping me, you’re helping Otto,” I said. “And you barely know him.”

  “We Altoona refugees have to stick together. Besides, he seems a very worthy young man. Imagine having worked at a butcher’s shop and then writing a song that Billy Murray’s going to put on a phonograph record. I’ve invited Otto to my next Thursday evening to play it for us all. Do you think he will?”

  “Try and stop him. He was telling me about your invitation even at the police station.”

  Aunt Irene sat back, pleased. “I approve of him.”

  “I’m not in love with him,” I told her, before she could get any wrong ideas.

  She laughed. “Of course you aren’t. No woman should be—he’s as
green as grass and probably doesn’t even know his own mind yet.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. I might not have been in love with Otto, but it was a little blow to my ego to think the one devotee I’d managed to attract was simply a case of erroneous, premature affection.

  She leaned toward me. “But you show good instinct caring for him. Knowing character has served me well, and will be essential if you’re going to get to the bottom of this mess.”

  She’d lost me. “What mess?”

  “Of who killed Ethel,” she answered, as if it should be obvious.

  “Me? But you said Mr. Faber—”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “Abe Faber will get Otto out of the NYPD’s clutches, if possible. He’ll make the best legal case he can for keeping him out of jail. But if he’s going to prove Otto didn’t commit that horrible murder—and no one with an iota of sense would believe he did—someone must find out who did kill Ethel.”

  “And you think I could?” For all my bluster about hunting down the killer myself in front of Muldoon, I hadn’t really thought out what finding a murderer would entail.

  “The police solve crimes every day, and have you ever met a policeman who struck you as a genius? Of course not. They’re just normal men doing a job. You’re probably brighter than the lot of them. You just need to understand character and motive, and any niece of mine should know something about that.”

  She made it sound as if finding a murderer should be as simple as dreaming up a plot for Myrtle in Springtime. “I don’t know where to start,” I said.

  “With Ethel.”

  I shook my head. “You never met her. She was just an ordinary woman.” I frowned. Ordinary didn’t really tell the tale. “A moral woman,” I added, “and something of a scold. She never talked about herself. I lived with her for a month, but I feel as if I barely knew her.”

  While I spoke, my aunt nodded at me, and as I looked into her eyes, the contradictions my simplistic statements raised came to me as clearly as if she were asking them aloud. How myopic I’d been. So far, I’d only thought about Ethel from my own perspective—that of the aggrieved roommate. Now questions leapt to my mind, familiar questions both Callie and I had asked before the murder but had never taken seriously.

  What had made a woman like Ethel stay so long in New York City, a city she likened to Sodom and Gomorrah? Why hadn’t Ethel gone home long before she was murdered?

  * * *

  A clutch of journalists loitered outside our building, smoking and talking, but when they spotted me, they became alert and swarmed.

  “Miss—”

  “You live here, miss?”

  “Tell us about last night’s murder?”

  “Did you know Ethel Gail?”

  I batted them away and pushed my way in the front door, then ran up the stairs as if they were chasing me. Inside our flat, Callie was draped across the lumpy sofa with one arm flung over her eyes, like a Victorian lady on her fainting couch. I deposited the pot of soup Bernice had sent home with me onto the nearest table and hurried to her. “What’s wrong?”

  Her breast heaved, and for a moment I thought she was weeping. Then I glimpsed her even white teeth and realized she was laughing hysterically. “How bad have our circumstances become that you can ask ‘What’s wrong?’ the day after a murder occurred in our apartment?”

  She was right. After the murder, and Otto’s arrest, I was now prepared for at least one new calamity every few hours. “Did those journalists bother you?”

  “Oh—yes. They’re monsters, and . . .” Her voice trailed off; then she shook her head. “It was nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she insisted. “After last night, my imagination is running wild.”

  Understandable. I looked around, trying not to let my gaze rest too long on the closed bedroom door down the hall. To be honest, I’d expected to find Callie upstairs, at Lucia’s. Our place still bore the signs of the police’s search—everything was slightly askew. Knickknacks stood in different places, the furniture was at odd angles, and a lot of objects were dusted with a powder the police had used to find fingerprints. I wasn’t even sure we were supposed to be in the apartment, although no one had commanded us to stay out. “Should we be here?”

  “Where else can we go?” she asked. “I certainly don’t want to spend another night with Lucia, do you?”

  “No.” With all the trouble over Otto, I hadn’t given a thought to where Callie and I were going to sleep tonight. Lucia had been kind to us, but with Max gone and under a cloud of suspicion, it didn’t seem right to accept her hospitality.

  Callie sat up and pulled her knees to her chest to make more room on the sofa for me. “Where were you? Is your friend all right?”

  I scooched over. “My aunt sent a lawyer to get him out of police custody, if possible.” I studied her face. “Otto didn’t do it, you know.”

  “I never thought he did. You’re a better judge of people than I am—I doubt your oldest friend would be a murderer.”

  Tears spilled from her eyes, and I put my hand on her arm. “I’m so sorry.”

  Lacking a handkerchief, she nudged her slender shoulder up to her cheek to wipe her tears. “I called Cousin Dora,” she said. “It seemed to take hours to get hold of her. First I called the drugstore in Little Falls, and then they sent someone out to Dora and Abel’s place to get Dora back. By the time they called me back at the candy store, I’d read every magazine in the place and had eaten two Hershey bars out of sheer boredom and nerves. I wish Mrs. Grimes would put in a telephone downstairs.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “Oh, I know, but it’s such a nuisance. If Wally would just—”

  “What did Dora say?” I interrupted before we could get distracted by our dislike of our landlady and her son. “It must have been awful, telling her about Ethel.”

  “Awful doesn’t begin to describe it. I didn’t know how to break the news to her, and I made a hash of it. I expected her to burst into hysterics or faint dead away. By that time a crowd had gathered around in the candy store, listening.”

  “Ghouls.”

  “But you know the worst part? Dora didn’t break into hysterics. She didn’t even sound upset. I couldn’t hear her crying or anything. I was crying.”

  “Telephones,” I said. “It’s like talking at someone on the other end of a long culvert.”

  She shook her head. “It wasn’t the connection, it was Dora. She wasn’t broken up at all. All she said was, ‘Thank you for letting us know. I’ll tell Abel.’ And that was it. I might have been calling to tell her that Ethel had stubbed her toe. I was shocked speechless for a few moments, and then I worried she was going to hang up on me, so I quickly blurted out a question about what kind of funeral arrangements we should make once the coroner releases Ethel’s body. I just assumed Dora would want her final rest to be in Little Falls. But she said to me, ‘You just make any arrangements down there that you want. Abel and I’ll come for the service.’”

  “Come for the service,” I repeated. “That’s all?”

  She nodded. “Can you beat that? Her own sister! Listening to her, you’d have thought I was talking about some woman she barely knew. And didn’t like.”

  “Poor Ethel.” To not be wanted back in Little Falls, the town she’d lived in all her life. What had happened?

  “Ethel never mentioned to me that they’d had a falling out, but that’s sure how it seems to me after talking to Dora.”

  Of course. We should have guessed that from Dora’s brief visit. “Aunt Irene was right.”

  Callie looked puzzled.

  “She hinted there was more to Ethel than we knew,” I told her. “Think of it. Ethel must’ve had some motive for staying here so long. Maybe that’s why she was killed.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Her brows drew together. “Why would anyone want to kill her?”

  “We keep saying that. But someone did kill her.” I drumme
d my fingers. “And what about that missing money? It was the only thing stolen. So whoever took it must have known about it beforehand.”

  “We were the only ones who knew,” Callie said. “I certainly didn’t tell anyone else about the money, did you?”

  “No, but maybe Ethel did.”

  “Who?” Her voice rose. “She didn’t know anybody here. Just us, and she didn’t even tell us about her stash. The only other people she would’ve talked to at all were—”

  “People in the building,” I finished for her.

  The implications of that settled uneasily in Callie’s expression. “This could drive a person batty. Everybody I know is starting to look suspicious. My neighbors, my family . . .” She didn’t go on. She didn’t have to. I knew she was thinking of Sawyer. “I want to escape this, but there is no escape.” She shot a glance back toward the back bedroom. “Honestly, what are we going to do with this place? We can’t stay here, not in the state it’s in now. Would your aunt put us up?”

  “I’m sure she would if we asked.” But I was reluctant to do that for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on yet.

  Callie sensed my hesitation. “Or maybe we could go back to the Martha Washington.”

  “We could . . . if a room were available, and if we had the means to pay for it. How much money do you have?”

  She sagged. “At the moment? About two dollars and thirty cents. Oh—and the five dollars your aunt gave us . . . minus the charge for the candy bars and the calls this morning.”

  “There’s three dollars in the Calumet Municipal Bank.” It wasn’t enough.

  “I’ve always liked your aunt’s place,” she said hopefully.

  “But if we leave, we might miss something.”

  “Like what?”

  “What if the murderer is someone we know? He might come back.”

  “All the more reason not to be here.” The afternoon was warm, but she shivered. “Have you forgotten that Ethel was killed wearing my nightgown? I haven’t. The murderer might have thought she was me. And if he can read the newspapers he’s figured out by now that he stabbed the wrong girl. He might come back to correct his error.”