Murder in Greenwich Village

by Liz Freeland

  As I freshened up for what was sure to be a long night, I filled Otto in on all that had happened since I saw him that afternoon. He was distressed about my encounter with Ford, and even more upset about what happened on the El platform.

  “Who did it?” he asked. “It can’t just be a coincidence that you were shoved while you were running around with those gloves.”

  “Of course it wasn’t. Like an idiot, I told Ford I’d be at my aunt’s. He probably sent that goon next door to get rid of me.”

  Otto thought about that. “Then he has the gloves. He could use them to incriminate Callie.”

  “He’d have no luck with that. I’ve already told Muldoon about them. The police believe the gloves were stolen by someone who wanted to kill me, so Ford’s having them would make him a suspect in my attack.”

  “But he could decide not to go to the police and blackmail Callie with them instead.”

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t have that chance. Muldoon sent an officer to his apartment while I was talking to him, I’m fairly certain. He sent one after Callie, and probably another after you, too.”

  “Good.” He shook his head. “I mean about his sending someone to get that Ford fellow.”

  “Even if Muldoon interrogates him, I doubt he’ll be any closer to finding Ethel’s killer when he’s done. Ford didn’t kill her.”

  “But he engaged some goon of a neighbor to push you in front of a train. Why would he have done that if not to cover up evidence of his crime?”

  “He saw me as an obstacle.”

  That was what gave me chills. Ford hadn’t threatened my life to save his skin. He’d only wanted to safeguard his career. Anything that got between himself and a book contract needed to be eliminated—even if that something was me, the fool who’d recommended his book in the first place. There was writerly gratitude for you.

  Otto reddened. “I hope Muldoon locks him up. He deserves the electric chair.”

  I shook my head. “Ford will deny everything, and I didn’t see the man who pushed me.”

  “But what about the night of the murder? He was the man I was mistaken for. The killer! Wally saw him.”

  “Ford wasn’t the killer.” It would have been so satisfying if only I could have convinced myself that he was. At this point, there was no one I would rather see behind bars.

  Except for the real killer, of course.

  Otto tossed himself onto the couch in frustration. “Life was simpler in Altoona.”

  No. Even now—even after a murder and an attempted murder—I wasn’t willing to concede that point. Bad things happened everywhere. I hadn’t been safe in Altoona, in my own home. In sleepy Little Falls, a sordid melodrama had played out that had ended in Ethel’s murder. Sure, she’d been killed in New York City, but it had all started in a quiet upstate burg, with a forbidden love affair and a jealous woman.

  I straightened. A forbidden love affair and a jealous woman. “Good Lord.”

  Otto blinked. “What is it?”

  “I’ve been such a dunce. I understand it all now.”

  “You’re too understanding, Louise. Taking the psychological view is one thing, but sympathizing with a man who had you flung off a train platform is taking compassion too far.”

  “It’s not the train platform I’m thinking of,” I said.

  It was a jealous woman. And I didn’t mean Dora.

  * * *

  I brought my aunt around to my way of thinking before I was able to convince Otto.

  “A respectable woman would never do anything so awful, or so cold-blooded,” he argued, his mouth full of cake. “Would she?”

  Bernice had made one of her unforgettable coconut cakes, and Otto and I were on our way to demolishing a quarter of it. I’d been famished, and was so energized now by having put my finger on the culprit that I was stuffing forkfuls into my mouth without even thinking.

  My aunt watched us chow down with a considering look on her face. “Margaret Attinger.” She said the name slowly, as if trying it out as a possible character in one of her books.

  “Whenever I thought about who might have killed Ethel, what puzzled me most was lack of motive,” I said. “Maybe Sawyer could have killed Callie for his own twisted reasons—passion, guilt, and jealousy can create a monster—but he wouldn’t have mistaken Ethel for Callie, not in a million years. And although Ford disliked Callie’s type, that alone didn’t seem to justify killing a woman he’d never spoken to, unless he were a true maniac like Jack the Ripper.”

  Otto put down his empty plate with a clatter of fork on china. “What exactly is your definition of a maniac, if not someone who would have a woman shoved in front of several tons of rolling metal?” he asked.

  “For starters, it would be someone who doesn’t hesitate to commit a crime with his own hands.”

  “But you said yourself you didn’t see the man who pushed you, so for all you know it was him.”

  Aunt Irene interrupted us. “The police have been looking for a butcher-knife-wielding maniac. A man. But a woman who came to confront her rival and was met by a hapless woman who denied everything while playing dress-up in a risqué negligee might be frantic enough to grab the nearest weapon she could think of—a kitchen knife—and run her down.”

  That memory of the bedroom came back to me in all its horror. Had it happened the way Aunt Irene imagined?

  She continued. “Ethel wasn’t Callie—but their family resemblance has distracted us because anyone who would have wanted to kill Callie specifically would have been able to distinguish between the two.”

  “Unless they wanted to kill her but hadn’t actually met her,” Otto said, understanding.

  My aunt nodded. “Exactly.”

  “A woman who knew that her husband had cheated on her, who perhaps had only glimpsed the other woman from afar, might have been fooled by the similarities between the cousins,” I said. “Especially since Ethel had used our absence from the apartment to engage in an activity she seemed to have developed a secret fetish for—dressing up in Callie’s clothes. She’d put on Callie’s most alluring nightgown and even her slippers. Perhaps she’d fallen asleep accidentally and only woke when Margaret Attinger had knocked on the door.”

  “She needn’t have knocked at all,” my aunt reminded me. “Didn’t you say you girls kept the door unlocked when you were in?”

  “That’s right. Poor Ethel. From the way her body was positioned on the bed, she’d flung herself toward the bedroom window to cry out for help, but she received the fatal stab in the back before she could reach it. The Bleecker Blowers would have drowned out the sound to all but Lucia, who was directly above.”

  “Very likely,” Aunt Irene said. “That also explains the matter of the glove, which worried me all evening. To be frank, I’d begun to wonder if Callie was as innocent as she claimed to be.”

  Otto’s eyes bugged. “You thought Callie was the murderer?”

  “Well, not really.” Aunt Irene pursed her lips. “She’d been here the night of the murder. I saw her with my own eyes. Nevertheless,” she continued, “one thing puzzled me—those gloves. I assumed they were Callie’s, but how had Callie’s gloves ended up with blood on them? They aren’t the kind of gloves Ethel would have worn with a negligee—unless they’re even more backward in Little Falls than Callie has led us to believe. And, of course, a murder victim wouldn’t stop to take off her gloves as she’s dying. So we know Ethel wasn’t wearing them. But even if Louise was wrong and Callie did own two pairs of the same style and make, why would a killer have taken the time to go through a bureau to find gloves? Especially a man for whom the gloves would have been too small.”

  “Margaret must have been given a duplicate pair by Sawyer,” I said.

  A tut of disapproval accompanied my aunt’s nod of agreement. “Men are so lacking in imagination. And so calculating. Sawyer might even have bought both pairs at once—one to give to his wife, and the other for his girlfriend. Imagine.” She seemed to fin
d the duplicating of gifts almost as distasteful as the murder.

  Did Margaret know about Callie’s pair? After she’d plunged the knife into Ethel’s back and dropped the bloodied gloves, did she realize she was leaving a clue that would create such confusion?

  Of course not. Because at that moment she’d assumed her rival was dead.

  “Poor Callie.” Aunt Irene snapped open a fan and twitched it vigorously. “She hid those gloves fearing they implicated her. Instead, hiding them simply camouflaged the actual murderer.”

  Margaret Attinger. I was still trying to square the elegant woman I’d seen at Attinger and Beebe with the kind of maniac I’d imagined the killer to be.

  I could almost pity Sawyer. He’d been terrified when his relationship with Callie threatened to bring bad publicity down on him. Being the husband of a convicted murderess would be even worse for business. Did he have any idea what a monster he was living with? He’d spoken so proudly and pompously about being a family man, but his family needed protecting from an enemy within.

  Otto crashed his coffee cup down in its saucer. “We need to go to the police and tell them about Mrs. Attinger.”

  Had he lost his mind? “I spent much too long with the police already, thank you.”

  “But they need to know about her. She could kill again. She might want to attack Callie—the real Callie.”

  Another reason to be glad Callie was in Little Falls.

  “Haven’t the police already spoken to Sawyer?” my aunt asked. “And presumably his wife, too?”

  I tried to remember. “They interviewed Sawyer at his office. Muldoon told me he had an alibi from drinking at a nearby tavern. They never seemed to suspect him at all, unless he was working in cahoots with Callie. And they had no cause to suspect Mrs. Attinger because Sawyer probably pleaded with them not to let his wife know about the other woman.”

  Margaret had the perfect blind—a husband trying desperately to hide his own secret. By asking—probably begging—the police not to tell his wife of his infidelity, he’d unknowingly given her cover. If the police assumed Margaret was ignorant of her husband’s mistress, they wouldn’t think she had a motive to kill anyone.

  “But when they interviewed Sawyer, the police didn’t know about the gloves,” Otto said. “It’s different now. The gloves point to a woman being the killer.”

  “Muldoon knows about the gloves,” I said, “but instead of thinking of Margaret, he suspects Callie.”

  Worry clouded Otto’s features. “We need to warn Callie to stay in Little Falls.”

  That wasn’t a bad idea, but how could I let her know she was better off where she was? “She’s checking to find out whether Dora and Abel were in Little Falls the night of the murder, so I doubt she’s staying with them. Trouble is, I don’t know her family’s address. Or even her father’s name.”

  “Can’t you send a telegram to her care of The Gail Family, Little Falls, New York?” Aunt Irene suggested.

  I considered this. “Dora and Abel are also part of the Gail family, through Dora. In a small town where everyone knows one another, there’s a chance the message might be passed to them.”

  My aunt sipped her tea thoughtfully as she mulled over the problem. We seemed to have run out of ideas, unless I were to go back to the apartment and rifle through Callie’s things in hopes of finding an address.

  “I’ll go,” Otto piped up.

  “To the apartment?” I asked, still following my own line of thought.

  “To Little Falls,” he said. “It’s only a few hours away by train. And if I need to stay over a night, what of it? If Little Falls doesn’t have a hotel, I’m sure Callie’s family could put me up. It’s not as if I have to report to an office.” He bounded to his feet. “If I hurry, perhaps I can make it to the station before the last train leaves.”

  My aunt stopped him. “Don’t go scudding off quite yet, young man. You can leave just as easily tomorrow morning. We still need your help here.”

  He stopped, taken aback. “With what?”

  “Formulating a plan,” she said.

  “What kind of plan?” Otto asked.

  I immediately grasped what she meant. “How to catch a murderer,” I said.

  The plan took us hours to hatch, develop, and sort out. At first I was all for charging right up to the Attingers’ door and pointing an accusing finger. But as Aunt Irene suggested, all that would do would be to make the woman deny any involvement and then clam up defensively. And if we were to do something that unsubtle, Margaret might convince Sawyer they needed a vacation; then the Attingers would soon be summering in some exotic locale, far from the reach of the NYPD.

  “We should let Muldoon handle it,” Otto suggested, after my idea of going in guns blazing was struck down. “He’s a right type.”

  I did give that possibility some consideration. But Muldoon had never taken my ideas seriously before now. And he’d warned me off playing detective. I didn’t want to be told I was playing at anything. I wanted to deliver a murderer right to the precinct.

  Aunt Irene seemed to be of the same mind. “First we must find incontrovertible evidence that Margaret Attinger is our murderess. Then we can go to the police.”

  “But we have evidence,” Otto said. “The gloves.”

  “We don’t have them anymore,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, right.” His face fell. “I keep forgetting.”

  It was all my fault. My instinct to protect Otto and then accuse Ford had done nothing but complicate matters. Not to mention, running around with those gloves had almost gotten me killed. Perhaps I should have gone to Muldoon straightaway. But all the what-ifs in the world couldn’t change how things stood now.

  “I keep thinking that having right on my side means I’ll prevail,” I said. “But it doesn’t. The important thing is to find some way to prove Margaret killed Ethel.”

  Otto’s face fixed into a painful study of concentration, and I’m sure mine looked similar.

  Walter sailed into the room to refill coffees. “What’s needed, if you don’t mind my saying so, is a little invention.”

  It didn’t surprise me that Walter would know what we were talking about—Walter always knew everything. But what did he mean? “Invention?”

  “Isn’t someone in the room a fiction writer?” he asked.

  All eyes turned to my aunt, who steepled her fingers and smiled in approval at her butler. “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Walter. We need to be as crafty as the killer was herself.”

  Hope budded inside me again. “But she wasn’t crafty, was she? She dropped an incriminating piece of evidence, and she allowed herself to be seen.”

  Otto, slumped in his chair, sat up straighter. “By whom?”

  “First by Wally, the troll. He’s a great one for staring up skirts, but he obviously wasn’t looking clearly at Margaret. He told me that Ethel had been out earlier in the evening because he’d glimpsed her going upstairs just a short while before he saw Ford on the stairs. My guess is that he actually saw Margaret going up, but he missed her coming back down again because she probably slipped out in a big hurry.”

  “Wally’s not a reliable witness anyway,” Otto pointed out. “He thought I was that writer.”

  I nodded. “But there was another person who saw Margaret, and that was Ford. He was lucky he didn’t end up another fatality. Although Margaret probably judged that she would do better by brazening out her encounter with Ford at the door than by attempting to commit a second impromptu murder in the hallway.”

  “So Ford Fitzsimmons is a witness,” Otto said. “All we have to do is have him confront Margaret—”

  I stopped him before he could become too invested in that idle hope. “He’s already shown what lengths he’ll go to in order to avoid becoming involved. An evening at the precinct isn’t bound to make him feel any more cooperative toward helping me or Callie.”

  “Then it’s hopeless,” Otto said. “Our witnesses are no good, and we�
�ve lost our evidence.”

  I’d despaired over that, too. But all at once another possibility struck me. “Margaret doesn’t know we’ve lost our evidence.”

  My aunt’s breath caught. “Of course!” She smiled at Walter, who was still standing by, arms crossed, practically bobbing on his heels.

  An idea formed rapidly in my mind. “Do you think it could work?”

  Otto glanced from me to my aunt to Walter. “Could what work?”

  “Using a little pretend crime to catch a murderer,” Walter said.

  Otto sat up, alarmed. “You want us to pretend to murder somebody?”

  “Not murder,” I said. “Blackmail.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I spent the night in Aunt Irene’s spare bedroom, where I’d passed my first weeks in New York six months earlier. All through the night, I didn’t sleep more than twenty minutes at a stretch, and that was usually followed by an equal amount of time lying wide awake, blinking at the ceiling, and worrying about the scheme we’d hatched. Among other things.

  That spare room had a strange effect on me. The last time I’d slept here I was new to the city, traumatized by recent experiences, and unsure what my future would be. Now, half a year later, my subconscious was telling me how little I’d progressed. Nightmares yanked me out of sleep. I dreamed of being in a free fall, arms whirling frantically as a train barreled toward me. In another dream I found a body on a bloody bed, only it wasn’t Ethel lying there, it was Callie. Several times a baby’s crying woke me, but when I sat up, tensed, to listen, the only sound in my aunt’s house was the intermittent chiming of the grandfather clock in the downstairs hall.

  Daylight creeping through the windows came as a relief. I popped out of bed and changed from the frill- and lace-bedecked nightgown my aunt had lent me into my clothes from the day before. My shoulder ached, but I left the bandage the hospital had given me looped over the back of the dainty armless chair in the corner. With so much to accomplish today, I didn’t want to be encumbered by a sling and the questions it would raise. Fresh clothing would have been nice, but going downtown to the flat would take too much time. I was eager to get to the office before anyone else. I did as much freshening up of my skirt as I could with gentle sponging and brushing. Its uneven hem reminded me of Muldoon, and our taxi ride.