Murder in Greenwich Village

by Liz Freeland

  “How do you know?”

  “I was at the police station.”

  His eyes narrowed on me. “What for?”

  I swallowed, considering. Should I come out and tell him the whole story?

  Guy wasn’t interested, anyway. He eyed me with a crooked smile. “By God, you’re a dark horse, aren’t you? Mousy on the outside and all the while consorting with cops and murdered people.” He sighed. “Well, I liked the book, and if the man has a colorful persona, perhaps we can exploit it.” He sank into his chair and tossed his head back, looking like an entirely different man from the one I’d discovered half dead an hour ago. He thumped his hand on the arm of his chair. “Yes—I’ll make a success of it! And then Old Gramps will have to eat his hat. When was the last time he found anything with real potential? Eighteen ninety-two or thereabouts, would be my guess. If it was up to him, this firm would publish nothing but sermon collections and quack remedy pamphlets from pickle juice pushers.”

  “I still don’t think that story’s quite—”

  A gushing, irritated sigh cut me off. “For God’s sake stop yapping and get me some coffee,” he said. “My head’s still shaky.”

  “Of course.” I took two steps before turning back around. “But about that book. I really don’t think—”

  “Never mind the book. I’ll have Jackson look it over. Big Baldy ought to be good for something.”

  I skulked out, fuming both at him and myself. Of course, I could simply march back into his office and announce that Ford Fitzsimmons had had me tossed in front of a moving train. But I didn’t have proof, and I might never have any unless Muldoon had brought Ford into the precinct last night and succeeded in making him crack, which I doubted. Ford had mendacity, and he probably hadn’t done the deed himself. There would be no witnesses who could point a finger of blame at him. If I told my tale, Guy Van Hooten would likely write me off as a hysterical woman.

  While I was making coffee, the others trickled in. Usually Jackson arrived first, but he was late this morning. A few fellow workers murmured hello and went to the offices on the second floor. John Philpott, our reader and copy editor, noticed the light from Guy’s office and blinked. Eyes bugging, he mouthed Guy’s name at me. I nodded.

  He scurried upstairs. Within moments, everyone on the second floor found an excuse to come downstairs and pass by Guy’s office on their way to the kitchen, just to see for themselves. The coffee disappeared quickly, and I was overseeing a second pot when Jackson came in.

  “I had the most extraordinary encounter this morning . . .” Before he could elaborate, his attention honed in on Guy’s office like a bird dog scenting quail. His voice lowered. “Did I hear a cough coming from there?”

  I nodded.

  “It sounded almost like Guy.”

  “It is. He slept here last night. He and Mr. McChesney had an argument, and then Guy started drinking and came back here and read a book.”

  Jackson’s dark brows leapt into his vast expanse of forehead. “Read a book?”

  When I explained what had happened, up to and including our discussion of Ford’s manuscript, Jackson became agitated. He poured himself a second cup of coffee even though there was a full cup right at his elbow. “If he wants me to look over the manuscript, he must respect my opinion.” He lifted his chin. “Well, of course he does.” He tapped his fingers nervously against his saucer, as anxious as a girl awaiting an invitation to the big dance. How heartbroken he would have been to know Guy had called him Big Baldy. “Well, well. I suppose I should go talk to him. What an extraordinary day.”

  While Jackson was closeted with Guy, I received a phone call. I answered, prepared as usual to summon a colleague to the phone.

  The familiar voice startled me. “Louise?”

  It was Aunt Irene. “Yes,” I said expectantly.

  “I wanted to let you know that everything’s all right. You know—as I said I would.”

  Guy Van Hooten’s appearance at work had taken me so by surprise that I’d almost forgotten about last night and the plan. We’d agreed Aunt Irene would send me word at the office if Walter had been successful. “Everything’s all right” meant Margaret Attinger had received a note, which Walter—in disguise, so no one would be able to trace him back to Aunt Irene—had been given the task to deliver to her door with a bouquet of flowers. The card accompanying the flowers read:

  I know you did it. You were seen, and now I have your gloves, stained with your victim’s blood. If you don’t want me to go to the police, meet me at the observation gallery on the fifty-eighth floor of the Woolworth Building at 8 p.m. tonight (Saturday). For $500, the gloves will be yours.

  So the plan had been set in motion. Across town, Margaret Attinger would be pacing. Worrying. Wondering what her bank’s Saturday hours were, or if Sawyer kept that much cash in their house’s safe. Perhaps she would have to hock a jewel or two so her husband would never know.

  I checked the clock. It wasn’t even ten in the morning yet. Ten hours to go. Time crawled. I regretted not sleeping the night before.

  Jackson finally came out of Guy’s office, and soon afterward, Guy himself emerged, spinning his bowler on his index finger. Oliver hopped up from the stool he’d been dozing off on and hurried ahead to open the door for Guy, who had that confused crinkle in his brow when he looked at the boy. We’d had several office boys this year.

  “If old McChesney finally makes it in,” he told me with a smug look, “tell him I was in this morning, early, and couldn’t wait for him.” He popped his hat on, tapped his hand to the brim in a jaunty salute, and strolled out.

  Several people had filtered down to see Guy Van Hooten again in the flesh in the office on a Saturday morning. Debts were settled to the grumbles of some and the amazed jubilation of the winners. Bob Wagner, our accountant, seemed crushed by his loss, especially when he saw that Oliver had come out on top. “The rich get richer,” he groused.

  After the excitement died down, Jackson rolled his chair near my desk.

  “I’m surprised at you, Louise. This business about the book—I know you’re just a secretary, but you can’t just go around changing your mind about things. Recommending a book one day and then unrecommending it the next. I’ve never heard of such nonsense! It’s unprofessional.”

  So was having your potential publisher’s secretary pushed off a train platform. “I decided I’d let my personal feelings get the better of me and estimated the book too highly.”

  He regarded me almost sorrowfully, like a parent catching a child in a lie. “Wasn’t the situation in fact almost the opposite?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This author, Ford Fitzsimmons, met me just outside this morning and asked to take me to breakfast. He said you’d hurled the most extraordinary accusations at him—that you’d even gone to the police.”

  “Of course I went to the police. He tried to have me killed.”

  His gaze grew several degrees more pitying. “There was no proof. Even the police said that. Just your word—after you sought the man out in his flat and he”—he hitched his throat—“rejected your advances.”

  My jaw dropped. “That’s a lie.”

  “So you didn’t go to his flat?”

  “Yes, but only because I thought—well, it was to do with Ethel’s murder. Ford was at my apartment the night it happened. He might have seen the murderer. I had to ask him about it.”

  Jackson’s face screwed up into a skeptical frown. “And while you were there you told him you meant to sabotage his chances of being published. What did that have to do with that poor woman’s murder?”

  He had me there. “Ford said he wouldn’t help me because there might be bad publicity if his name was connected to a murder case. That’s why he had me pushed off the train platform.”

  “So you say.”

  I folded my arms. “So I know.”

  Jackson clucked. “It’s hard to know whom to believe.” But it was clear he didn’t bel
ieve me. “You have to admit, it seems odd for a girl to visit an author—an attractive young man—in his flat. Twice.”

  I quaked with anger. Ford must have laid it on thick. Now I looked like the unbalanced one.

  “This has shown very poor behavior from you,” Jackson continued. “It’s a good thing Guy had me to turn to.”

  He looked so absurdly pleased to have been singled out by Guy, I almost pitied him. His already giant head had grown a few hat sizes in one morning.

  Someone else was having a good day, too. Oliver had made out like a bandit in the Van Hooten Absentee Stakes, and now he sat on his stool, counting bills and coins. If only I’d placed a hefty bet myself, I would now have a nice cushion in the Calumet bank.

  Or a little legacy to leave Aunt Sonja’s boys in case tonight’s plan went disastrously wrong.

  CHAPTER 15

  I could have left work early, but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure what to do with my afternoon. Go to the picture show? A stroll? It was too hot and humid to enjoy either activity, and walking felt especially inadvisable. I lingered at the office and read a story about a spirited girl with three sisters during the Civil War. It kept me absorbed until I realized it was Little Women with the names changed. I wrote Miss Not-Alcott a polite rejection and went home.

  Wally pounced as soon as I crossed the threshold. “You girls’ve been gone forever. Ma was convinced you skipped out, too, like Lucia.”

  Ma hoped we had skipped out, he meant. “No, we’ve both just been staying with relatives for a day or so.”

  He flicked something out from between his two front teeth with his thumbnail. I flinched left to avoid its trajectory. “Guess you girls need to remind yourselves what real homes feel like from time to time.”

  I glared at him—not that he noticed. “Is there something you want? The rent’s not due for a week yet,” I reminded him.

  “Ma just wants to know your intentions, is all.”

  “Tell your mother we’re very happy here. After all, we signed a lease till next January.” The more fools us.

  I continued upstairs, jittery with exhaustion. I regretted not sleeping last night. Of course sleeping was out of the question now, but maybe if I took a hot bath, that would relax me and help pass the time until I needed to head downtown. It would also get rid of the accumulation of perspiration and dirt I’d acquired on my way home. The sky had darkened up since this morning, and while I and everyone else welcomed the prospect of rain washing away the heat and grit of a warm June day in New York, the increasing clouds created a dome over the city, holding all the heat in. I felt washrag limp.

  One of the reasons Callie and I had rented the flat, and part of the reason we were loath to leave, was that we had our own bathroom. While the tiny room with its rattling, leaky plumbing and ancient zinc-lined tub couldn’t be labeled anything more than adequate, exquisite privacy compensated for its deficits. Having grown up in a house full of family and usually one or two boarders, I couldn’t get over the thrill of sharing facilities with only one person. To Callie, former farm girl that she was, anything that wasn’t an outhouse was opulent.

  I filled the tub partway from the tap and then started boiling water in the kettle to add to it. Firing up the kettle, of course, just made the air in the apartment more stifling. I’d planned to soak for just a little while, but I kept dozing off right there in the tub, my knees drawn halfway to my chest, my head lolling back against the hard edge. I glanced down through the water at my middle, which still seemed a little poochier than it used to. Evidence.

  Some days I could almost convince myself that I never had a baby on the 29th of December, 1912. Four and a half months before that day, Uncle Dolph had seen me off at the station and given me the knives. Aunt Sonja had found the name of a home for unwed girls outside Philadelphia, and I could think of no other solution. The route Ethel had taken terrified me, and I knew I would never have the ability to pass myself off forever as a young widow in some West Coast city. My biggest worry was that I couldn’t love a child conceived in the worst moment of my life—and that I wouldn’t be able to hide my aversion. My baby deserved love, even if his or her own mother couldn’t provide it.

  But of course he wasn’t my baby. The people who ran the home—the directress and all the staff, even the kindly doctor who attended us—were careful to emphasize this to us every day. The baby I was carrying was meant for a worthy couple who’d been carefully scrutinized for means and moral character; we girls possessing neither. It—to us, the babies in our wombs were always spoken of as it—would have nothing but the best, and I would be able to forget and to forge ahead with my own life with a clean slate.

  We were allowed to stay in the home for a week after giving birth. The directress presented this as the height of generosity, and in truth I was glad for the grudging boon. The birth had gone easier for me than for some—a month earlier, one girl had died—but I needed the time. My body needed to recuperate, but my mind needed that week even more. Some girls left as soon as they could move, intending to return to their hometowns and explain they’d been on holiday or an extended visit to relatives in far-flung places. Others spent their grace period lying in bed almost catatonic. But I was restive. I paced every inch of the old farmhouse and grounds, turning questions over in my mind. Where would I go? More important, what could I do that would make me feel as if I were of some use in the world?

  I’d had months to plan my future, yet my time in the home was remarkable for how thoroughly I’d avoided thinking about anything substantive. I’d played cards with my fellow inmates and read every novel I could lay my hands on. I’d knit the world’s longest, homeliest shawl—we girls were discouraged from knitting baby things specifically for our its, but encouraged to knit for the charity box. During those months, the constant refrain of my thoughts was that I simply wanted the ordeal over with, and to forget.

  Now I had to plan a future for myself double-quick.

  During one night’s perambulations I found the directress’s door wide open. I never considered myself a sneaky person. I’d signed an agreement and I intended to abide by it. The agreement emphasized that I renounced all rights and responsibility for my child, and that the adopting couple would remain anonymous to me. Forever. But was there really any harm in my knowing? Or in my discovering whether the baby had been a boy or girl? For that matter, would it hurt anyone if I knew who had taken the baby?

  I closed the door, turned on a lamp, and rifled through a cabinet until I found my file. And that’s where I saw what had become of it:

  Child’s date of birth: December 29, 1912

  Sex: Male

  Weight: 7 pounds 2 ounces

  Receiving family: Mr. and Mrs. Richard W. Longworth

  7 East Eightieth Street

  New York City

  How long did I stare at that sheet of paper? Perhaps a minute? I was trespassing, after all, and welshing on my agreement with the home. But that minute changed my life. I knew then where I was going. I had an aunt in the city—famous Aunt Irene. For all I knew, she lived in the same neighborhood as these Longworths.

  Six months later, I almost laughed at the naïveté of that girl who didn’t understand what living in a city of five million people meant. A brisk twenty-minute walk in Manhattan could be the equivalent of traversing several different towns in the rest of America. And as for forgetting . . . After I’d settled in New York City, all the questions and issues I’d pushed to the edges of my consciousness swirled at me in a confusing rush, like leaves picked up by a whirlwind. Had I made the right decision? With a bit more courage, I could have gone west. But could I have ever loved it, and what if I’d risked that I could and then failed? I knew what it was to be considered another mouth to feed.

  If only I could be sure I’d done right. I just wanted proof. The address was etched in my brain. But if I saw something at that house on Eightieth Street to convince me I’d made a mistake, what then? Around and around I went, trying to decid
e whether I’d been generous or selfish. Brave, or the world’s biggest coward.

  I must have fallen into a deep sleep in the tub, because a blast from below woke me, followed by the opening bars of “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam.” I jerked back to consciousness in a slosh of tepid bathwater. The Bleecker Blowers were celebrating their return with a Saturday night at home—thank heavens. Otherwise I might have slept till kingdom come.

  I dressed quickly for my rendezvous with Margaret, swallowing back my nerves as I laced, buttoned, and hooked. The apartment seemed darker than it should have been at seven in the evening, and one glance out the window showed why. While I’d slept, a roiling swamp of clouds had continued to gather and fester till the sky above Manhattan resembled a painting by El Greco.

  I debated wearing a coat—or, more accurately, borrowing one of Callie’s. But even the light waterproof coat she had would probably feel sweltering in this weather. Her yellow umbrella leaning against the door appealed to me more. It had the added benefit of heft. I wouldn’t be marching unarmed up to the top of the Woolworth Building to meet a murderess.

  Not that I imagined myself in armed combat with Margaret Attinger. The observation gallery of the Woolworth Building was a public space, the whole point of meeting there, and Margaret didn’t strike me as a woman who would make a spectacle of herself by brawling with another woman.

  Of course, she hadn’t struck me as the type of woman who would bury a butcher knife in Ethel’s back, either.

  I won’t be alone. That thought comforted me. She couldn’t very well knife me there in the middle of the Woolworth Building—Aunt Irene had been right about that. And reinforcements would arrive soon after I did. My aunt’s part was to summon the police. I might have to take the bear by the tooth, as the saying went, but my hand wouldn’t be wrapped around Margaret’s bicuspid very long.

  Otto had been for telling the police of our plan upfront, but Aunt Irene thought that was naïve, and I agreed with her. If forewarned, Muldoon would never go along with our plan and would—rightly—accuse us of criminality for blackmailing Margaret. And if he interviewed Margaret based on our speculations, she would simply deny her guilt. Only believing she was trapped might make her act rashly and give herself away. That was our hope, at any rate.