Murder in Greenwich Village

by Liz Freeland

  “I saw Ethel’s body, and the blood. Margaret buried a butcher knife in Ethel’s back, thinking it was Callie.”

  “Because she was so angry. She was trying to save our family.”

  “And now she’s making you do this. And what if the next time she’s angry, it’s with you? Will she bury a knife in your back?”

  “No! She loves me. She’s loyal. Nothing means more than family to her, and to me. Nothing.”

  His grip was so tight, my arm went numb. I was soaked and trembling. We were talking in circles, and I couldn’t see a way out. Sawyer’s every argument came out by rote. When he got tired of repeating what Margaret told him to say, it would be over for me.

  “Please listen to me—”

  “Shut up!”

  Behind us, a door banged open. We both tensed, me in hope, he in fear.

  “It’s me you want, isn’t it, Sawyer?”

  Callie stood in the stairwell doorway, the wind whipping her hair that had escaped its pins. She wore a light cape over her dress, and when lightning cracked across the sky I wondered if my terrified brain had conjured her. She looked like a phantom standing there. Or an angel.

  “Let Louise go.” Her voice sounded loud and authoritative, despite a slight quaver.

  Sawyer’s grip loosened, but a new panic surged through me. Is Callie crazy? Why had she come here? We might both be killed now. And where was Margaret?

  “Callie!” Sawyer’s eyes were frantic, and suddenly he gave me a shove and sent me sprawling to the flooring again. He scrambled toward her. “Callie, get out of here. Margaret’s downstairs. She might have seen you already. She’ll kill you like she did that cousin of yours.”

  “I know.” With a sad smile, Callie stepped aside.

  Muldoon emerged first, holding a revolver; then a uniformed policeman pushed Margaret forward. The little area felt too crowded. I crept as close as I could back to the wall.

  If Muldoon noticed me, he didn’t show it. All his focus was on Sawyer. “Your wife told us that you’d done the murder, Mr. Attinger. She claims you’re insane.”

  Sawyer’s face collapsed as water poured down. “Margaret?”

  Her expression hardened, and her chin notched a fraction higher. “Just confess, Sawyer. For the children’s sakes.”

  He took another step toward her, disbelief warring with anguish. “Margaret . . .”

  Hadn’t I told him so? “She’s sticking the knife in, Sawyer.”

  “Shut up!” Margaret barked at me. “You’re a filthy blackmailer.”

  “And you’re a cold-blooded killer,” I taunted back. “A woman who sacrificed her family’s future to get revenge. You couldn’t even kill the right woman.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” she said, more desperately. “He did it. Tell them, Sawyer. Would you have the mother of your children go to prison?”

  He dropped his hands to his sides and gulped in a breath. Don’t confess, I silently begged him. Don’t let her win.

  I don’t know if he heard me or not, but when his words finally came, they were barely audible over the tempest around us. “My wife killed Ethel Gail.”

  Margaret’s face filled with rage and she surged toward Callie, claws out. “It was your fault, you whore!”

  I leapt to my feet and rushed to Callie’s side. But before I could get to her, Muldoon’s hand clamped down on my arm—the bad one. I groaned. My arm would be ringed with bruises tomorrow . . . but right now I was too relieved that there would actually be a tomorrow to care.

  He nodded curtly at Margaret. “Officers, take Mr. and Mrs. Attinger into custody. Miss Gail, you’re free to go.”

  “What about Louise?” she asked.

  “I need to have a few words with Miss Faulk,” he said. “Choice ones.”

  He didn’t wait long to say them. As soon as the others had left, he rounded on me. “Have you lost your mind?”

  I edged toward the stairwell. “Would it be all right if you yelled at me where it’s dry? And safe?” Now that the danger of being hurled off the side of the building was past, the sight of that void beyond the window turned my knees to pudding. My stomach roiled as Muldoon led me back in, blasting abuse at me all the while. The words “cockeyed scheme,” “idiotic,” and “one-way ticket back to Altoona” echoed around the stairwell.

  I met every blistering word with an understanding nod. But all I could think was, It worked . . . and I’m alive. Despite everything, a glimmer of satisfaction stirred in me.

  Water dripped off his hat, and though he took it off and shook it in disgust, his diatribe didn’t stop. “I should have let that maniac Attinger push you off the building. Maybe sometime during the sixty-story drop you would have realized how imbecilic this plan you and your aunt cooked up was.”

  “And Otto,” I said.

  His face tensed, as if his jaw were the dam holding back the tide of anger he longed to unleash. “All this city needs right now is a crime-fighting songwriter-crusader.”

  “And yet you now have Ethel’s killer in custody, whereas the man you suspected has escaped.” Letting him digest that, I reached up to straighten my own hat and touched only a mane of sopping tangles and runaway pins. Heaven only knew where my hat had gone—the Statue of Liberty might be wearing it now.

  “Blackmail is a crime,” he said.

  “We weren’t really attempting blackmail, though. It was a . . . what do you call it?” I searched for a word I knew only from the papers. “A sting?”

  “God help us,” he muttered.

  “Don’t police do things like that?”

  He rubbed a hand over tired eyes. “Like what?”

  “Stings?”

  “Police do. Publishing secretaries do not.”

  I rocked on my heels. “Maybe I should be in the police, then. I caught the murderer.”

  “Did you? Funny, when I peeked out the door, it looked very much as if the murderer had caught you. Do you understand how many ways your plan could have gone catastrophically wrong? You might have ended up in a bloody heap on the sidewalk. You could have guessed the wrong culprit and ended up going to jail yourself.”

  “But I wasn’t wrong,” I insisted.

  “You were lucky.”

  “I was right.”

  He nudged me toward the stairs. “All right, Miss Sherlock. You can explain exactly how you came to all your brilliant conclusions in a formal statement at the precinct.”

  So much for dreams of dry clothes, a hot mug of tea, and bed. Muldoon marched me down to the fifty-fourth floor. I stepped away from him to look around the room again, now deserted except for a uniformed policeman who stood alert by the shuttered souvenir booth.

  I’d expected to find Otto, my aunt, and Callie here. “Where is everyone?”

  “We cleared the area. The last thing I wanted was a pack of journalists up here.”

  Journalists. I hadn’t thought about them. I made another effort to put my hair in some kind of order. My reflection in one of the windows reminded me how much work was needed. I tried to concentrate on my drowned-rat appearance and not the dizzying, magnificent panorama beyond. Rain splattered and dribbled across the vast panes, turning the city unfurling below us into a sparkling blur.

  The elevator doors slid open and Muldoon took my arm. “Some view,” he said.

  “Spectacular,” I agreed without enthusiasm. Nothing would please me more than never to have to see the city from this vantage again.

  He treated me to another fifty-four-floor harangue during the elevator ride down. After that, it was jarring to step out into the sumptuous lobby and be greeted with such joy by my aunt, Otto, and Callie. A flashbulb went off, blinding me temporarily, and Muldoon hustled over to the gathered journalists to push them back from our reunion.

  Exuberant, Aunt Irene cocooned me in a hug. “You did it, Louise!” She soon pulled back, frowning at me. “You’re dripping wet.”

  “It was raining.” As if I’d been out for a stroll in a summer shower, ins
tead of up in the clouds at the heart of a tempest.

  Aunt Irene took off her wrap, a cape of crimson crushed velvet trimmed in black fur. She snapped it over my shoulders and fastened the furry ends across my front, then pulled the hood over my messy, bedraggled hair.

  Callie looked at me gravely. “I could kick myself for having left you. Dora and Abel were at their church the night of the murder. Half the town saw them there.”

  I nodded. “Just as they said.”

  “I should have taken their word for it. I shouldn’t have gone at all. When Otto told me your plan, I was terrified Margaret would figure out some way to kill you.”

  “She did. She turned her husband into a weapon.”

  “Callie was so frantic about you, I couldn’t keep her in Little Falls,” Otto said.

  I smiled. “Nothing could ever keep her in Little Falls.”

  A hint of a smile tilted Callie’s lips, too. “When Otto and I talked our way up to the fifty-eighth floor, Muldoon was already speaking to Margaret. She denied that you were ever there, but I knew something was wrong, and I saw her glance a few times at that stairwell door—and then I spotted my yellow umbrella lying near the stairwell. I told Muldoon and after we hurried up the stairs, we could hear some of what you were saying. Muldoon was ready to run out with guns blazing, but when I saw Sawyer holding you so close to the edge, I convinced him to let me go out first and try to talk to him.”

  “I was never so glad to see anyone in my life,” I said, “except I worried he’d kill both of us. I didn’t know you had backup.”

  Otto bobbed on his heels. “I would have gone up, too, but they said there were too many people in the stairwell already. And then they shunted me off down here.”

  He looked genuinely disappointed to have been deprived of the opportunity to play the hero.

  “You can write a song about it,” I said.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and realized Muldoon had been standing behind me. His anger had given way to weariness. “Go home and get some sleep,” he said.

  “You’re letting me go?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon will be soon enough to give a statement.”

  “Thank you.” I truly was grateful. Despite the adrenaline pumping through me, I was ready to drop.

  We ran the gauntlet of the press to get to the sidewalk. My aunt reached into her bag and fished out five dollars. “You all take this and cab home.”

  I accepted the bill and gave her another long hug. Before I could break away, she held my forearms in a tight grip and pulled me aside. Thinking she probably wanted her cape back, I started to take it off, but she stopped me.

  “You should have seen that man’s face when I told him you’d gone up there to confront that woman,” she confided.

  I frowned. “What man?”

  “Detective Muldoon. He positively panicked. I thought the poor fellow was going to come unstrung.”

  “He thinks I’m an idiot, and who can blame him? Our plan was more foolhardy than foolproof.”

  Aunt Irene shrugged. “True, but it all worked out in the end. That’s what I aim for in all my books, and it’s not a bad goal in life, either.” She tilted her head and looked back at the great arched entrance through which Muldoon had disappeared again, back into the Woolworth Building. “There’s something about that man . . .”

  “Something irritating?”

  “Fascinating.” Her face brightened with a sudden notion. “Do you think you could convince him to come to one of my Thursday nights?”

  “I’ll try.” If nothing else, I wanted to see the look on his face when I asked him.

  For once, Callie and I decided not to economize and found a cab for ourselves and Otto. Inside, we all collapsed against the cushions, exhausted. Callie was silent but still tense. Maybe she was still living through that experience at the tower’s pinnacle. I didn’t doubt the horror of it would be a prominent feature of my own nightmares for years to come.

  Once we were under way, however, she rounded on me, glaring over Otto, who was squeezed between us. “Louise, you idiot! You could have been killed!”

  “I’ve heard that song before,” I said. “Muldoon sings it particularly well.”

  She exhaled in exasperation. “It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t gotten involved with Sawyer, none of this would have happened. You warned me.”

  “I warned you because I didn’t want you to be heartbroken,” I pointed out. “Not because I thought his insane wife would try to kill us all.”

  “Why be angry at yourself?” Otto asked her, his face set into a rare expression of bitterness. “It was Sawyer. You can’t blame yourself for being misled by a man.”

  “Can’t I?” she asked, without humor.

  “If he hadn’t led you astray . . .”

  “Oh, Otto.” A pained sound tore out of Callie—something between a laugh and a wail of despair. She turned to look out the window at Houston Street passing quickly by.

  Otto blinked, finally understanding that his idol had feet of clay and a heart that wasn’t his. “Oh. Well, we all make mistakes.”

  “Louise doesn’t,” Callie said.

  “Not true,” I said. “Not even remotely true.”

  He twisted and looked at me, not with his old blind devotion, but with an expression much dearer to me. The clear-eyed affection of an old friend. “You were wonderful tonight, Louise. I always said there was nothing you couldn’t do if you put your mind to it.”

  Oh, but there was. Specifically, there was one thing that heretofore I hadn’t been able to bring myself to face. I intended to remedy that at the earliest possible opportunity.

  CHAPTER 16

  Sunday dawned clear and bright. Not that I saw the dawn. I slept fitfully but woke late, finally roused by the peal of church bells and the aroma of coffee brewing in the kitchen. Callie and I ate a solemn breakfast. She announced that she was going to spend a quiet day writing letters and washing out some clothes.

  Callie staying home on a perfect Sunday in June? What a difference a few weeks could make.

  “If I don’t return to work this week I might never work again,” she said.

  “I doubt that.” But I could see how she might worry. Solomon’s probably had girls knocking on their door every day hunting for modeling work.

  “I suppose you have to go to the police station again,” she said.

  “I don’t mind. It’s starting to feel like a second home.” I sipped my coffee, watching her. Callie never looked haggard, but she had shadows beneath her eyes, and her shoulders sagged in exhaustion, or sadness. Maybe both. “But if you rather I stayed home . . .”

  “Nah,” she said. “I just need to shake this blue mood away. Maybe Otto’ll come by—if he doesn’t consider me a scarlet woman now.”

  “He doesn’t,” I said. “You’re not.”

  “Just wait and see if I have to testify at Margaret’s trial. Then the whole city will think I am.”

  “Then the whole city will be wrong,” I said. “You didn’t chase after Sawyer. It was the other way around, and he deceived you about being married. You gave him the brush-off after you found out.” When she didn’t look convinced, I said in frustration, “We can’t go trailing our mistakes and misfortunes around with us all the time. If we do, then we might as well have let Sawyer shove us off the top of the Woolworth Building.”

  Her eyes widened at the vehemence in my voice. “What’s eating you?”

  “What I mean to say is . . .” What was I trying to say? “Give yourself a break. And don’t hole up here all day on a gorgeous afternoon. If Otto comes by, you should take him to the Hippodrome, or Coney Island. The poor boy hasn’t seen anything of the city so far but police stations and the music departments of five-and-dime stores.”

  I could tell from the tilt of her head that she wasn’t averse to the idea. “Wouldn’t you like to come with us? After Muldoon’s finished with you, that is.”

  “I have someplace else to go
.” I got up to take my cup to the sink, and to hide my face. This was one errand I needed to run alone.

  The rain the night before had worked a miraculous change on the city. The very air seemed scrubbed clean. I took my time going uptown, jumping off the Sixth Avenue El and crossing over to Times Square and then to Fifth Avenue. The air in New York rarely smelled so fresh as it did after a cleansing downpour, and the morning sun had already dried the sidewalks. For a few hours, at least, the pavement would look bleached and clean.

  I wasn’t the only one who’d had the idea of a long stroll. Half of New York was out in their summer colors, parading up and down Millionaires’ Mile as if it were a second Easter parade. In my robin’s-egg-blue linen dress, my Sunday best, I didn’t feel out of place in the fashionable procession.

  Walking past the grand residences of the Astors and the Vanderbilts provided me with good mental preparation for what I assumed was ahead. I’d seen the mansions before, of course, first gaping in wonder and then later treating them as just part of the city’s landscape like my jaded fellow citizens who’d become inured to such opulence. Some of the houses spanned entire city blocks. Given the number of new churches and hotels that had sprung up around them, these great family piles seemed to serve as the generators for entire neighborhoods.

  When I’d first arrived in New York City, I’d considered my aunt’s townhouse the height of elegance and luxury. I laughed at my naïveté now, or I would have if my stomach hadn’t tightened into a ball the closer I came to Eightieth Street.

  It was almost a relief finally to turn onto that street and discover that Number Seven, the home of Richard and Julia Longworth, was a relatively modest five-story row house of white stone and beige brick in the Italianate style. Two wide windows dominated the second floor front—the living room or parlor, I guessed. Above that, each story boasted three windows of equal size. My head tipped up to eye the third and fourth floors, where the family bedrooms would be, and the nursery. Of course there was no chance of seeing a little face pressed against the pane. The son of the house was just six months—still at the crawling stage, I assumed.