Murder in Greenwich Village

by Liz Freeland

  Seeing me, he grabbed my elbow. “Poor Louise! You shouldn’t be here. Take the week. There’s nothing here for you to do that can’t be put off, surely?”

  “I’ll be back this afternoon,” I assured him. “I just have a bit of police business.”

  Police business was a magic phrase. I probably could have told him I needed a two-year paid vacation and received it as long as I claimed it on behalf of police business. Unfortunately, it was a lie. I was going to see not the police, but Sawyer Attinger.

  When I emerged from the subway thirty minutes later into the canyons of Wall Street, how little I knew of the island I now called home became clear to me. Here was a place mere minutes by subway from my flat in Greenwich Village, but it was an entirely different world. Austere buildings of granite grayed with coal soot loomed close and imposing, temples of finance and insurance modeled in the Greek revival fashion. At first glance, I couldn’t see that there was any life here besides finance—no homes, no schools, no groceries—yet it was teeming with people, mostly men. Only the old spire of Trinity Church seemed to remind one that there was any purpose to the world apart from business.

  I’d hunted down Sawyer’s business, Attinger and Beebe, in our office’s city directory earlier that morning, and after meandering the wrong way down one street, I found the correct building. I tried to practice what I was going to say in the elevator up to the seventh floor, but the truth was I was unsure. I had no authority to question Sawyer, even as Callie’s friend. She would kill me if she found out what I was up to. But I had to know if he was involved in the strange goings-on of the past few days.

  Upon pushing the brass bar to let myself through the oak doors of Attinger and Beebe, I was confronted by a roomful of desks, most empty, with men clustered around a clacking stock ticker, watching the tape with the avidity of eagles circling a fish pond. A few men held desk phones and bellowed instructions into them. I approached one of them and asked for Mr. Attinger.

  “Over there.” He rolled a shoulder toward some double doors at the end of the room.

  Going through those doors felt like passing from chaos to sanctuary. The sound from outside was muffled by the private office’s reception room. A thick Turkish carpet lay on the floor, and on the dark walls hung paintings of tall ships on turbulent seas.

  Sawyer’s secretary, a round-faced man no older than me, frowned when I told him I needed to speak to Mr. Attinger. He gave me a cautious up-and-down look and then slid an anxious glance toward the closed door to his right. “Mr. Attinger is very busy.”

  “As am I,” I replied. “But it’s imperative I see him today.”

  He gestured to a leather upholstered chair in the corner and advised me to take a seat. I did, and as the minutes ticked by on the clock behind the secretary’s desk, I grew more restless. The secretary made no move to inform Sawyer that I was waiting. When the inside office door swung open at last, I stood to remind the secretary of my existence. Sawyer appeared, more handsome than ever in a perfectly tailored suit the gray hue of a pigeon’s back, guiding a handsome blonde in her thirties out of his private office. He caught sight of me and his eyes flashed in momentary alarm. He then steered the woman more forcefully toward the outer door, although she glanced back at me in curiosity.

  “We’ll talk more about it this evening, Margaret.”

  Margaret. Sawyer’s wife. I knew her name from Callie. Margaret Attinger was very striking, with ash-blond hair peeping from under a voluminous hat that looked as if half a rainforest of birds had been defeathered to adorn it. She resembled Callie a bit. A slightly older, richer version.

  After escorting his wife through the outer office and to the elevator, Sawyer returned and greeted me almost as if I were a stranger. As if his wife were still watching. “Miss—?”

  “Faulk,” I said, playing along.

  His genial smile was more for the secretary’s benefit than mine. “What a pleasure to see you. Come in, come in.” He kept a formal distance as he led the way into his private sanctum.

  My gaze strayed around the room lined in rich walnut wainscoting. Behind the desk hung a portrait of a man who resembled an old, whisker-laden Sawyer—father or grandfather Attinger, no doubt. The view from the high windows was blocked by inside awning shades covering the bottom pane. Through the upper half I caught sight of a seagull swooping past. I always forgot how close we were to the ocean, and frankly I’d never felt farther from it than in this austere, manly room in the ventricle of America’s financial heart.

  Sawyer gestured to a chair opposite his desk and shut the door. Then, crossing the room, he growled in low tones, “You fool! Have you lost your mind? What in God’s name brought you here?” His eyes snapped with irritation and suspicion. The mask of civility had dropped.

  “Don’t people come to see you in your office?” I asked, sitting.

  “Clients do. And friends. Are you either of those?”

  He had me there. “I’m here as Callie’s friend.”

  He circled to the other side of his desk and seated himself. “She sent you, too?”

  “No . . .” Too? Who else had been by? “She’d probably have my hide if she found out I was here.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “To tell you to call off whatever goon you’ve hired to follow Callie.”

  His hostility faded. “What goon?”

  His voice struck just the right note of alarm, but I doubted his sincerity. “A short man, with a mustache, usually wearing an ill-fitting brown suit?”

  If he knew whom I was talking about, he did a good job of concealing it. “I have no idea who you mean. If there’s someone following her, why doesn’t she tell the police?” He added petulantly, “She obviously has no qualms about talking to them.”

  Whatever was meant by that remark escaped me. I crossed my arms. “The night Ethel was murdered, you were following Callie.”

  “I most certainly wasn’t. I was waiting for her.”

  “Lurking around the corner from our apartment,” I reminded him. “Lying in wait for her.”

  His face crimsoned in irritation. “All right. I lost my head. I’ve got it screwed on again now. I might have been crazy about Callie once, but that’s done with. Completely over. And I just told the police all this, so you don’t have to go blabbering about it to them.”

  His words threw me. “You went to the police?”

  “The police came here—as if you didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t.” Why would the police have come to see Sawyer? How would they even have known of his existence? “Was it a detective?”

  “Yes—two fellows named Robinson and Mulrony.”

  “Muldoon.”

  His face darkened. “You know them well, then. I might have guessed. They were waiting for me when I arrived this morning, like cats stalking a mouse. They knew Callie and I . . . well, they assumed we had a liaison. You know how the minds of that type of men work.”

  “You think Callie told the police about you?” I was sure she hadn’t.

  “How else could they have found out about us?”

  “Not through Callie, or me. From the very first, we agreed not to mention you.”

  He didn’t look convinced. No wonder he’d seemed so rattled when he’d spotted me in his outer office. I’d assumed it was because he hadn’t wanted his wife to see a young woman waiting on him, and maybe that was part of it. But he obviously believed Callie or I had sent the police after him. And then Margaret had appeared.

  “Did the police speak to Mrs. Attinger? Is that why she was here?”

  “Good heavens, no. Margaret knows nothing about—well, about anything. She only happened to come downtown this morning by chance. Unhappy chance. At least the detectives had already left.” Judging from the film of sweat beading on his brow, the prospect of the police telling his wife that there was cause for suspicion in Sawyer’s activities—activities involving an attractive young blonde—was what he dreaded most. “There’s
no reason for those damned detectives to bother Margaret. No reason at all,” he continued. “I’ll tell you what I told them. I lost my head over Callie for a few weeks.”

  “Months,” I corrected.

  “Well—all right. Yes, Callie is very pretty, very charming. Even the detectives allowed how a man might forget himself over her. I’m hardly the first man to behave foolishly over a pretty smile. But she never meant anything to me, and now it’s over. Completely over.”

  “Just like that?” I was offended on Callie’s behalf. Thursday night he had been professing undying love.

  “You heard Callie give me the gate. I’m not going to make an ass of myself. I’m a happily married man.”

  “Good of you to remember.”

  “A family man,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard me. “I’ve got two lovely children. You think I would really jeopardize their happiness for a girl like Callie?”

  “I think you did.” His tone riled me more than his words. He made it sound as if Callie were some bug under his boot, to be scraped off and flicked into the gutter. “Last week you claimed to love Callie.”

  “She bewitched me.”

  The more he explained himself, the more I disliked him. “And now the spell’s been broken?”

  “I was out of my head,” he confessed, “and last Thursday I was a little worse for drink. It wasn’t until the next morning when I read about the murder that I realized what a sordid element Callie was mixed up with.”

  “The murder had nothing to do with Callie.”

  He shook his head. “Someone in that apartment brought a murderer to the door. If it wasn’t Callie, then who? You?”

  I sputtered in anger.

  He lifted his hands. “Never mind. It’s of no matter to me. I’m well out of it. As I said, I’m a family man. I’ve learned my lesson—and by the way, I told the detectives all of this. I confessed all that happened last Thursday night to them, and they believed me.”

  Wonderful. Now Muldoon and Robinson knew Callie and I had been shielding Sawyer.

  “Did you confess to your wife?” I asked.

  “Confess what?” he asked with a straight face. “Evenings at restaurants, a few cheap gifts, some words thoughtlessly spoken? There’s not a man in my position who hasn’t made a bigger fool of himself over a woman than I did with Callie. Besides, my wife is a wise woman. Doesn’t ask too many questions. She knows a henpecked husband is more apt to stray permanently than one who’s given a little freedom.”

  My jaw clenched tight enough to crack Brazil nuts. The man had a heart as hard and cold as the granite blocks this building was made of. And poor Margaret Attinger. How many more times would that unquestioning attitude result in Sawyer’s pursuing women who were a fresher version of the woman she’d once been?

  I stood to go. I’d heard enough. “I won’t waste any more of your time.”

  Sawyer escorted me to the door—or rather trailed after me as I stomped out. Family man, my eye.

  Before we reached the beehive of the outer office, he caught up and stopped me with a hand to my elbow. Unless I wanted to make a scene in front of his secretary, I had no choice but to turn and face him. I braced myself for the expected warning to stay away from his place of business from here on. But that wasn’t what he said.

  “Is she all right, Louise?”

  The misery and worry in his expression nearly knocked me on my heels. So much for the dedicated husband and father. The family man. I shook my head in disgust. Was there anything more pitiful than a man who didn’t know his own mind? “She’ll be fine. Callie’s strong.” Unlike you, I added silently.

  As I rode down in the elevator, I shook off my annoyance with Sawyer and sifted through our conversation for whatever useful nuggets I could glean. Why had the police gone to Sawyer this morning? They’d found out all about his relationship to Callie, but how?

  Callie had been on edge all weekend, which was perfectly understandable given that her cousin had just been murdered and a strange man was following her. And yet, there had been absences she hadn’t explained. I knew she hadn’t gone to the police—not to talk about Sawyer, at any rate. She’d never do that. But I was beginning to sense that there was something she had neglected to tell me. Something had led the police to Sawyer.

  The single bell tolling from Trinity Church told me that it was time to go back to work. Mr. McChesney might not care if I returned or not, but Jackson would be watching the clock and noting every minute I was gone. And yet my feet didn’t take me back in the direction of Van Hooten and McChesney. I needed to talk to Muldoon.

  * * *

  This time I wasn’t kept waiting forever. After ten minutes, a policeman with ginger red hair appeared to escort me up to see Muldoon. As we were walking up the stairs, we met the policewoman I’d seen before on her way down. She was tall, and her long legs made brisk work of the steps.

  “Afternoon, Cliff,” she said with a breezy smile.

  My escort beamed genially. “Hello, Mary.”

  As soon as the woman was out of earshot, I asked, “What does Mary do?”

  “She’s a police matron.”

  She didn’t look very matronly. “How did she get a job here?”

  “Her father died, so the poor thing was forced to find something to help feed what was left of the family.”

  He made it sound as if having to work for the police was an ongoing tragedy for Mary, but she’d looked perfectly happy to me. “But how did she get the job?”

  It took him a moment to understand me; then he just shrugged. “Same as the rest of us.”

  “And how is that?” I persisted. “I really want to know.”

  “First, there’s an examination. No piece of cake, that. And then, if you’ve done well on the test, you’re told to come back.”

  That was it? Just a test? I’d assumed there were all sorts of cronyism and corruption even in the lower levels of the police force. Most of the policemen I’d met looked as if they’d been recruited from the same Irish county, which couldn’t be a coincidence. But if it really was all predicated on a test . . .

  I was good at test taking. “Are there any female detectives?”

  “Ay, one.” He shook his head. “Though what the use of that is, I’ll never know.”

  A female detective. Being paid to do what I was doing . . .

  I gave myself a shake. You have a job. A good one. Reading books and working in a publisher’s office was much more desirable than being around cops and criminals all day. And night.

  Still, I asked, “Do you enjoy being a policeman?”

  From his expression, you’d think I’d asked how he liked breathing. “It’s my life.”

  “Yes, but do you like the work?”

  “My da wore the blue. And three of my uncles.”

  “But haven’t you ever dreamed of being anything else?”

  “What, I’d like to know.”

  I thought of my uncles. “Well, just for instance, you might have become a butcher.”

  The suggestion, which didn’t seem at all outrageous to me, nettled my escort. “Nobody in my family was a butcher.”

  “That doesn’t mean you couldn’t have been.”

  He frowned at the unthought-of possibility, then admitted warily, “I had an uncle once who ran a grocery.”

  “There,” I said. “Wasn’t he just as contented as a policeman?”

  “He died.” Cliff shook his head, as if shopkeeping had been responsible for the man’s demise.

  We approached the room where I’d spoken to Muldoon before, but as Cliff reached for the doorknob, my gaze strayed back to the cage where Otto had been held that day. And now I saw someone else I recognized—Max.

  With a gasp, I broke away from Cliff and threaded my way through chairs and desks to reach the cell. As I closed in on the cage, my outrage grew. Max was slumped against the wall, and his face was a mess. A busted lip bloomed with dried blood, and his head sported a lump the size of a goose
egg.

  “Max!” I said the name forcefully, both from shock at his condition and to wake him up.

  His eyes opened, bloodshot and wary. At the sight of me standing there, they blinked. “Louise?”

  At least he was still in good enough shape to recognize me. The state he was in and his rasping voice brought me to a boil. “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Since last night.” He lurched to his feet, none too steadily, and gripped the bars. “I didn’t do it, Louise. I never harmed Ethel Gail. I barely knew her.”

  So he was now the police’s pet suspect in the murder. “I know.”

  “I never was down in your apartment that night until you girls came home and Lucia heard all the ruckus. But now they’ve got all sorts of ideas, because of my paintings . . .”

  What did his paintings have to do with anything? That head wound obviously had him rattled. “Why did you run away?”

  “Because of that other time,” he said. “I worried I’d get blamed.”

  Worried rightly, as it turned out.

  Cliff the policeman grabbed my arm and attempted to steer me away, but I planted myself. “Does Lucia know you’re here?”

  Max’s expression hardened. “You tell her not to come, you hear? Especially not with the children.”

  “But someone needs to straighten this out.”

  He shook his head. “I won’t have my children in a police station, or a jail.”

  “Come on, miss,” the policeman insisted.

  I shook him off. “I’m a citizen. I have a right to talk to this man.”

  His eyes widened in shock. “That’s the one who murdered your friend.”

  “In a pig’s eye, he did,” I said.

  The other policemen who’d been eavesdropping laughed, and even some of Max’s fellow detainees chuckled. It was hard to tell what amused them more—a young woman standing up to a policeman, or the policeman’s face blazing red.

  I steamed back across the room to Muldoon’s office and stormed in without knocking. Cliff puffed in behind me. “The young lady, sir.”