Murder on Astor Place

by Victoria Thompson

  “I can’t know for sure, of course, but she probably wouldn’t have. Mina didn’t think so, and in fact, she thought Alicia had probably taken the jewelry to sell since she had no other source of money. Girls of that class don’t usually need access to money. Their families provide everything for them.”

  “Even when they go shopping?”

  “The family would have accounts at all the stores. And if she ever did need to buy something, she’d have a servant along to handle the transaction. It’s considered vulgar for a female to carry cash.”

  The more Frank learned about the upper classes, the less he liked them, and he hadn’t liked them very much to begin with. “Which means her sister was right, she probably took the jewelry to sell, so it was probably long gone by the time she was killed.”

  “Except that I also can’t imagine Alicia would have known where to sell the jewelry herself or how to go about it even if she did. Girls of her class don’t go to pawnshops, Mr. Malloy. If she did sell the jewelry, someone would have had to help her.”

  “I’ll check it out,” he said, “in case she hadn’t sold all the pieces yet. If her killer did steal something, at least that would give us a reason why she was killed.”

  “I think I may know who her killer was, too, Detective.”

  Frank seriously doubted this, but he could use a good laugh. “And who was it?” he asked with exaggerated patience.

  She bristled a little at his tone, but she said, “Hamilton Fisher. He was a lodger at the Higgins’s house, too, and—”

  “And he disappeared the night she was killed,” he finished for her. Did she really think he wouldn’t know this most basic piece of information? Now Frank was bristling, too.

  “Did you know that he’d been paying her particular attention?” she asked.

  “A natural enough thing. She was a pretty girl.”

  “And did you know he didn’t have a job? Yet he’d paid his rent a month in advance, and he moved in just a few days before she died. And he started paying Alicia marked attentions from the moment he—”

  “So?” Frank’s patience was wearing dangerously thin.

  “So, he was probably a cadet,” she said as blandly as if she’d just accused the fellow of being a Methodist.

  “A cadet?” Frank didn’t know what was more shocking, that he hadn’t thought of it himself or that Sarah Brandt even knew what a cadet was. “What makes you think so?”

  “Didn’t I already explain that?” she shot back.

  Actually, she had. A “cadet” was a young man who used his charms to seduce naive or desperate young women into prostitution. The laws of supply and demand required a constant supply of fresh, young females to satisfy the enormous demand of a profession that used them up at an alarming rate. Young men supplemented their meager incomes by working as cadets and helping the pimps fill their need for replacements in the brothels and on the streets.

  A girl as lovely and alone as Alicia VanDamm would have seemed a logical target. Maybe Fisher had grown frustrated with his failure to attract her attentions and gone to her room and been a little more forceful than he’d intended in trying to recruit her.

  Not wanting to admit he’d missed all the clues, Frank said, “We’re already looking for Mr. Fisher.”

  She didn’t seem cheered by that information. Maybe she guessed that Frank hadn’t exactly made Hamilton Fisher a priority in this investigation. “Perhaps now you’ll be looking for him in some different places.”

  He probably would, but he didn’t want to admit it to Mrs. Brandt. “Do you think the VanDamms will offer a reward for the missing jewelry?”

  “Mina seemed very anxious to get it back. Is it absolutely necessary to have a reward, though?”

  Oh, yes, Frank wanted to say, but instead he said, “Without it, I doubt we’ll see the jewelry again. If it was pawned, the pawnbroker will want his investment back. Even though it’s illegal to buy stolen goods, I won’t be able to prove he did unless he tells me. Since he’s not likely to do that, I can’t arrest him for it.”

  “So if he’s not afraid of being arrested, your only leverage is to bribe him,” she guessed. She didn’t approve, but Frank couldn’t help that. That’s the way the world worked. Sarah Brandt could reform it on someone else’s time.

  “I do what I have to do.” He only hoped she didn’t know that the customary arrangement was for the pawnbroker to split the reward with the police, too. Which, of course, gave the police an incentive for finding missing property in the first place. In fact, some thieves didn’t bother with fences at all. They just held onto the stolen goods until the reward was offered, then turned it in and split the proceeds with the cops. Easy work, but a little too uncertain for Frank’s taste.

  “Has Mr. VanDamm offered a reward for the murderer?” she asked.

  “I haven’t actually approached him about it yet,” Frank admitted. He didn’t like to rush into something so delicate. If you asked too soon, people thought you were unfeeling, and the VanDamms seemed like just the kind of folks who could get offended.

  “I suggested he offer one,” she said, thoroughly shocking him. “I saw him when I called on Mina, and I tried to explain to him why it’s necessary. You won’t find her killer without one, will you?”

  Frank didn’t think the answer to that question would do him credit, so he ignored it. “A man like that, with plenty of money, I guess he’ll do whatever it takes to catch the killer.”

  To Frank’s surprise, she frowned as if she didn’t agree.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “He didn’t say anything, one way or the other, when I mentioned it to him,” she admitted, “and I didn’t want to press him. He was still very upset.”

  “How could you tell?” Frank asked, honestly wanting to know.

  She shrugged one shoulder, a distinctively feminine gesture that Frank found far more appealing than he should have. “He’s very reserved by nature. Most men are, I think, but men in his position must be even more so. Cornelius VanDamm probably wouldn’t shout if his house was on fire, but when I saw him the other day, he looked as if he hadn’t been sleeping at all, and his eyes were... well, they were haunted. There’s no other word for it.”

  “Then he’ll pay whatever it takes to find the man responsible.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Why?” Frank challenged, not liking her theories at all. “You can’t think he doesn’t want the killer found.”

  To his surprise, she didn’t protest. “It’s not that so much as... He might be afraid of the scandal.”

  “How much more scandal could there be? His kid was murdered.”

  “Does anyone know that? Anyone except you and I and the police, I mean? I haven’t seen anything about it in the papers, have you?”

  Frank really hadn’t had time to look. “So?”

  “So he’s been able to keep the circumstances of her death a secret. He probably has a story he’s been telling to explain her death, a tragic accident perhaps, since the truth would be too awful to admit. The funeral will be private and no one will ever know the truth... unless the killer is caught.”

  This made absolutely no sense to Frank. “What’s the shame in getting murdered?”

  “The shame is in the circumstances. She had run away from her home, which is bad enough, but the reason she ran away is even worse. I’m assuming that she really was with child.”

  Frank nodded grudgingly. The medical examiner had confirmed that at once.

  “How far gone was she?”

  Frank shifted uneasily in his chair. He’d never get used to discussing such topics with a female he hardly knew. “Almost six months, they said.”

  “Then her family must have known. That’s why they sent her to Long Island, to keep her out of sight since her condition would soon be obvious.”

  “But they wouldn’t’ve been able to keep it a secret once she had the baby,” Frank pointed out.

  “Of course they wou
ld. They’d simply spirit the child away someplace and return Alicia to society as if nothing had happened.”

  “Their own grandchild?” Frank scoffed. Nobody could be that heartless. “What would become of it?”

  “Maybe a servant would adopt it, or maybe they would give out some story about a distant relative who died and left her child in their care. Who knows? The important thing is that no one would ever know the truth. Alicia’s reputation would be safe so she’d still be able to marry well, and the family wouldn’t lose their place in society. But with her running away, they’d have a much more difficult time making up a story. They’d have to invent excuses for her disappearance, which would be hard to explain, and now with her death, the situation is even more delicate. If the truth came out, that she was pregnant and living in a boardinghouse alone and her parents didn’t even know where she was, they’d become a laughingstock. I’m very much afraid they might think that was too high a price to pay for justice.”

  “Are you saying they’d let their daughter’s killer go free just to protect their reputation?” She must be exaggerating, he thought. “I know rich people are a little strange, but that’s not human.”

  For a long moment, she didn’t speak, and Frank thought his skepticism must have shown her how ridiculous her theories were, but then she said, “In some ways, rich people aren’t human, at least some of them aren’t.”

  “You know this for a fact?” He very much doubted it, but she nodded.

  “From my own personal experience. With my own father. He’s a close friend of Cornelius VanDamm.”

  Well, he’d known she came from money. He’d known she and Mina VanDamm were friends. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but still, he had a difficult time believing she’d come from the same stock as the VanDamms. “What’s his name?”

  “Felix Decker.”

  Frank tried not to show his surprise. Felix Decker was definitely one of the Four Hundred socially elite in the city. His family had been here since before the flood, and he was probably richer than God. Was it possible Decker’s daughter could be sitting here with him in a filthy room in the basement of police headquarters? “Felix Decker’s daughter is a midwife?” he asked in disbelief. Surely, that alone proved the lie.

  She leaned back in her chair and smiled at him. It was a bitter smile, full of pain and wisdom dearly earned, and suddenly, Frank knew things about Sarah Brandt he had no desire to know.

  “I had a sister,” she began, telling him a story he knew he didn’t want to hear. “Her name was Maggie. She was three years older than I, and I adored her. She was beautiful and smart and so strong. Too strong, as it turned out. She didn’t approve of the way our father treated his workers. He was too cruel, she thought, but she couldn’t convince him to adopt more humane methods. She began spending time at the shipyards. She was especially interested in proving to my father that it would be in his own best interest financially to treat his workers better. Since my father’s only concern was his financial best interest, she stood a good chance of changing his mind if she could prove her theories. But while she was going over his books, she met one of the clerks and fell in love with him.

  “Peter was a beautiful young man, and I think he truly loved my sister in return. He must have, because he stayed with her even after... But I’m getting ahead of myself. Maggie and Peter fell in love, and they wanted to marry, but of course my father refused to allow it. His daughter would never be allowed to marry a penniless clerk. She was to be the bride of some millionaire’s son or perhaps even of an English Lord. My father had great hopes. He simply failed to realize that Maggie could be as stubborn as he.

  “She refused to stop seeing Peter, so my father fired him, turned him out without a reference and blackened his name everywhere, so the only work he could find was as a common laborer. He thought this would be the last he’d hear of Peter, but Maggie had conceived a child. She thought when she told our father about the baby, he would relent and allow her to marry, but instead, he tried to send her off to Europe. In fact, we thought she did go to France, but she’d manage to escape from the ship before it sailed, and she found Peter. They were married, and by the time we discovered what had happened, she’d vanished.

  “I begged my father to find her and at least help Peter find a decent job, but he said she’d made her choice, and she could live with it. I think he expected that once Maggie had a taste of poverty, she would come crawling back to him and beg forgiveness, but of course, she didn’t. The next we heard was one night when Peter sent us word to come to her because she was dying. My parents were out for the evening, but I went. They were living in a rear tenement on the Lower East Side. On the fifth floar.”

  Frank winced. This would be about the cheapest lodging available. The rear tenements were built in the court-yards behind the regular tenements, cut off even from what little light and air were available in the crowded streets of the city.

  “I found her in a back bedroom, a room with no windows, hardly bigger than a closet. She was lying on a straw mattress on the floor, and she was bleeding to death.”

  For a moment, Frank thought he was going to be sick, but he swallowed down the bitter bile and forced himself to listen to the rest of Mrs. Brandt’s story without betraying his weakness.

  “The baby had come, but they were too poor for a doctor or even a midwife. Most of the time Peter couldn’t find work, so they were surviving by renting out the other room of their tiny flat to lodgers who slept in rows on the floor. Five of them. They were all there that night, snoring in the front room while Maggie died in the back. I don’t know how she stood it, the filth and the grinding poverty and the lack of privacy. Nothing in her life had prepared her for that, but she bore it all somehow. Perhaps it was her pride that kept her going.

  “But even her pride couldn’t protect her anymore. I was just a girl then, only seventeen, so I didn’t know how to help her or what to do. Nothing would have helped by then, though. She was so weak, she could hardly speak, but she begged me to take care of her baby. I promised I would, even though her baby was already dead. And then she was gone, too.”

  Frank didn’t like the way her eyes shone. If she started crying, he wasn’t exactly sure what he should do. Fortunately, she blinked several times and regained her composure.

  “Detective, Malloy, my sister died because my father didn’t want to be embarrassed. He thought more of his good name than her happiness, and when he couldn’t force her to his will, he abandoned her. I don’t think he planned to lose her forever, or at least I hope that’s true, but that’s what happened nevertheless.”

  “And was his good name ruined when word of her death got out?”

  Mrs. Brandt gave him a pitying look. “Don’t you understand yet? Word didn’t get out. He made up a story about her catching a fever in France. He said she died over there and was buried there, too. Oh, some people knew. There was gossip, but because my family told them a story they could pretend to believe, no hint of scandal ever touched us. My father didn’t even put her in the family plot. She and the baby are buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery on Long Island. And Peter, too. He hanged himself the day after she died.”

  “Good God.” Why had Frank assumed that having money would encourage finer feelings in people? Felix Decker was one of the wealthiest men in the city, and yet he had treated his daughter as cruelly as the drunken immigrant who sends his daughters out to prostitute themselves so he won’t have to work.

  “So you see, Detective, the VanDamms might decide they don’t want the killer found. It won’t bring their daughter back and will only cause them harm.”

  “If they don’t want the killer caught, why should you care? You said yourself, you hardly even knew the girl.”

  She thought this over for a few seconds. “I want to see justice done, Detective. I want someone punished for snuffing out Alicia’s life and the life of her child. I don’t want to watch another young woman vanish into a web of secrets and lies.�
�

  Frank’s head was throbbing now. “But if her own family doesn’t want her murder solved...”

  “The police force is changing Mr. Malloy. I know what’s going on, how men are finally being promoted on merit rather than on how big a bribe they can afford. If you bring this killer to justice, you’ll be noticed. Noticed for something good. Don’t you want to be Superintendent someday?”

  “I’m not that ambitious, Mrs. Brandt,” he assured her sourly. “Captain is all I’m aiming for.”

  “I have friends in government, Mr. Malloy. I’ll make sure they notice you.”

  Frank wished he believed this. “The reformers won’t last long. Don’t you read the papers? Roosevelt’s stupid plan to enforce the law and keep the saloons closed on Sunday is already making all the wrong people mad. He won’t last, and when he’s gone, things will be the way they’ve always been.”

  “Then I’ll pay you a reward,” she said, startling him yet again. “I have some money of my own, and I, can’t think of a better way to use it.”

  The thought of taking Sarah Brandt’s money was unsettling, and Frank didn’t like the feeling one bit. Since when had he gotten so particular? Money was money, and that’s what he needed if he ever wanted to make Captain, Teddy Roosevelt and his reforms be damned. And he had to make Captain, because he had a story of his own, a story just as awful as Sarah Brandt’s, but one that he had no intention of ever telling her or anyone else.

  “If the VanDamms don’t cooperate, I won’t get very far, no matter how big the reward is or who pays it. Nobody else is likely to tell me anything useful or even know anything useful,” he pointed out.

  “The servants will know. The servants know more than anyone. And if you need to bribe them, I’ll be happy to provide the funds for that, too.”

  Frank was pretty sure he would’ve thought of the servants eventually. He was just groggy from not enough sleep. And maybe that was why he said, “Keep your money, Mrs. Brandt. I won’t be needing it.” He couldn’t think of any other reason why he would say something so foolish.