An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen

by Liz Freeland

  “A job for you then,” Callie said.

  “The NYPD doesn’t agree. I was basically told to forget all about Ruthie Jones.”

  “All the more reason it sounds like a job for you. When have you ever done what anyone wanted you to?”

  After reading the news from Europe from yesterday’s paper over coffee, I bathed, dressed, and then headed uptown to my aunt’s. Walter, my aunt’s butler, answered the door, feather duster in hand. “Are you here to visit or help?” he asked. “The correct response is help.”

  “At your service.” I held out my hand, and he presented the feather duster to me like a king passing on a scepter.

  He ushered me in and led me toward the parlor. The room looked much as it always did to me. The center of my aunt’s social universe, the space was dominated by a long sofa near the front bay window, an upright grand piano, and a bar. Glass-paned double doors communicated with a smaller, darker dining room, and beyond that was the kitchen.

  “How was Thanksgiving?” I asked.

  “One young man got as drunk as a lord and broke a Waterford crystal glass.” He frowned and pointed. “Flick that duster over the walnut side table.” While I did as ordered, he continued. “Your aunt insisted on the crystal yesterday because it was a special occasion. I warned her that it’s special occasions when people act especially foolish.”

  “I’m sure Aunt Irene will survive being one glass short of a set.”

  Walter sent me an arch look. “That would be a good description for some of her guests.”

  I laughed.

  My aunt, a writer, had seen her professional fortunes wax and wane over the years, but at the moment she was doing quite well. Recently, she’d moved from writing dewy romances to mysteries. Her latest detective novel, The Curtain Falls, was giving Mary Roberts Rinehart a run for her money, and now she was finishing her third. I could hear a typewriter clacking away upstairs. My aunt had returned to doing her own typing again after losing me to the police department and her latest secretary, Miriam, to a job on a newspaper uptown, in Harlem.

  The kitchen door swung open and Bernice appeared in the dining room. She positioned a platter of sliced turkey in the middle of the table. Seeing me, she broke into a broad smile. “I told your aunt you’d be here for lunch.”

  “It’s nice someone’s glad to see me.” Apart from being an extra pair of hands.

  “I sure am. Your aunt bet me a dollar that you wouldn’t come till dinner.”

  Walter rang a bell on the hall table and Aunt Irene appeared soon after in a simple—for her—lavender dress trimmed with ivory lace around the neckline and cuffs. Her light brown hair was arranged in an artistic mound held in place by silver combs. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion when she spotted me by the dining table. “Did you tip off Bernice?”

  “No, she just knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of holiday leftovers.”

  She swept across the room and kissed my forehead. “I didn’t think so, either, but I assumed you’d enjoy a day of rest after your full week at that job.”

  “It was that job that kept me from sleeping in this morning.” I waited until Bernice and Walter joined us before giving a brief account of what had happened the night before. Even though I left out the most gruesome details, by the end of my recitation my audience had put down their forks.

  “That poor girl.” Bernice shook her head at the sad tale.

  “She must have felt desperate to have done something so terrible,” Walter said.

  “Ruthie Jones is beyond our help,” my aunt said. “It’s that poor little baby my heart goes out to. Losing a mother and a brother like that . . . and now what kind of future will he have?” She lifted her napkin to her eyes.

  “Ruthie must have left something behind that would tell who her people are,” I said. “Maybe they would take in Eddie. But I’m not sure how to go back to her flat and check without looking as if I were gainsaying my superiors at the precinct. Anyway, the landlord will probably get rid of all her belongings as soon as possible so that he can rent the flat.”

  Walter cleared his throat. “If that’s the case, then a clear way to retrieve the woman’s belongings would be to be the ones who clear out the flat for the landlord.”

  “It’s not my place to do that.”

  “No, it’s not,” Bernice agreed.

  “Would your superiors fire you for looking at the belongings of a murder victim?” Aunt Irene asked.

  “I got in trouble last year for following my own initiative. I wouldn’t want to be put back on probation again.”

  “How would anyone find out?” my aunt asked.

  I thought of Beggs. “The building manager would know me, and he’d probably mention it the next time he ran across O’Mara, the cop on that beat.”

  Walter cleared his throat. “The custodian might recognize you, but he wouldn’t know Walt the ragman and antiquarian dealer.” He smiled at me. “Or my helper, Louie.”

  * * *

  Walter, formerly an actor, had a trunk full of clothes that we dipped into for our disguises as Walt and Louie. Walter wore an old suit, wrinkled and a bit dusty. I got a check-patterned jacket and baggy trousers attached with suspenders. Luckily it was winter, so an old, battered coat covered my chest. He hid my hair beneath a boy’s floppy cap and smudged enough dirt on my face to ensure no one would want to approach close enough to get a good look at me.

  Bernice, drinking tea in the kitchen, didn’t recognize me at first. A good sign. When she realized what I was up to, though, she wasn’t impressed. “This looks like the start of something bad.”

  “We’re not going to do anything illegal,” I said.

  “If you’re hiding who you are, you’re already in trouble.” She frowned. “I know you’re thinking about that poor orphaned baby, though, so I’m not going to argue with you. Getting in trouble for a good cause is better than doing nothing at all.”

  It was as close to a blessing as we were likely to get from Bernice. My aunt, by contrast, had nothing but praise for Walter’s handiwork. She even gave us money to buy the belongings I wanted from Ruthie’s apartment. A bribe for Beggs.

  “I’ll pay you back,” I promised.

  She shook her head. “It’s for Eddie Jones. Consider it my first charitable act of the holidays.”

  I handed over the money to Walter, who pocketed it. We unearthed an old cart in the basement, and though it was laborious as well as tedious, we hauled it across the city. Walter was all for extra work in the name of dramatic believability, and in no time I was feeling authentically grungy, sweaty, and tired. My confidence in our scheme grew during our cross-town trudge, though. As we passed through a poor or commercial pocket of the city, we were ignored. In the wealthier sections, our disguises caused a few women to cross the street to avoid us.

  Walter navigated us expertly across Ninth Avenue, dodging cars and wagons as an El train screeched overhead. I rarely saw him out and about like this. It gave me an idea. “You should come over to the flat sometime.”

  “That’s kind of you to suggest,” he said, in the stiff, butlery tone he assumed when he wanted to keep someone at a distance. He called it his at-the-door voice.

  “I bet you’d enjoy meeting Callie’s theater friends,” I said. “I don’t know why I haven’t thought of inviting you before.”

  “Perhaps because I’ve been sending telepathic messages to avoid just such a circumstance.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have an inkling I’d go on my day off and then spend the whole time tidying.”

  “Callie and I aren’t slobs,” I said, offended. “At least, not by normal standards.”

  Walter’s look told me that normal standards were merely substandard.

  “This is the street, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Tenth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street looked even worse by day than at night. Old warehouses, tenements, missions, and junk stores weren’t visually pleasing, and now I noticed one lot had been
turned to rubble, probably after a fire. A man with a pushcart dawdled and clanged in front of us, selling pans and kettles. A beggar approached, only to be repulsed by Walter’s stony stare. I was glad to be in disguise, because I recognized a few of the winos and women on the street from the station house. This was their world, and how well Walter and I fit in was a testament to his costuming skills.

  I pointed. “It’s that building on the corner.” It looked as lopsided as ever.

  “You take the cart,” Walter instructed me. “Keep your head down. I’ll do the talking.”

  I was able to tell him which door belonged to Beggs, and I crossed my fingers that the custodian was in. Luckily, he was, and after a bit of finagling and handing over a couple of bucks, we were allowed into the apartment to take what we wanted, for which we would pay him more when we were done, depending on what we found. It was Beggs’s lucky day, and I would have been more resentful if I weren’t in such a hurry to see what I could retrieve from the apartment. I feared scavengers had already taken things out. I was especially eager to get my hands on the picture.

  My worries were all for nothing. The apartment appeared much the same as it had been the day before. The tub still had quite a bit of blood-stained water in it, although the razor was gone.

  Walter paled when we were left alone. “Dear God, this is horrible. That poor woman, and those children. They lived here?”

  I had seen enough places like it in the past year that I was no longer as shocked at its primitiveness as I’d been before I’d joined the police force. Of course, even the poorest of tenements didn’t usually have the stench of death that still clung to Ruthie’s rooms. Or was that my imagination?

  “I’ll open the window.” I hurried to let some air in. I also pulled the ratty curtains open, allowing more of the feeble autumn light inside.

  It helped. Gulping in a few breaths, Walter recovered his composure. Hands on hips, he inspected the rooms more closely, even running a finger along a shelf where the package of crackers sat. “No dust. Miss Jones was not a lax housekeeper.”

  “She might have been clean, but she wasn’t tidy,” I said. “The bed’s unmade, nothing in her drawers was folded, and she even left food containers open. And look at the empty milk bottle out on the fire escape.”

  “So?” he asked. “Everyone puts milk out in winter.”

  “But the bottle was empty. You noticed she was clean. Why wouldn’t she have put it by the door out in the hallway for the milkman to pick up?” That’s what Callie and I did as soon as we finished a bottle. An idea that had been tickling the back of my mind roared forward. “What if someone else caused the mess?”

  Walter frowned. “Or maybe this disorder was indicative of a disordered mind.”

  “Maybe.” A voice in my head told me not to get so carried away with my new pet theory that I refused to accept the obvious. Actually, the voice sounded an awful lot like my friend Detective Frank Muldoon. Whenever my imagination ran amok, I could usually count on Muldoon to be my brakeman. If he could see what I was doing now, he’d have a fit. It’s just for the baby, I told myself. I only needed to find out where in Nebraska Ruthie came from. I wasn’t trying to prove her death was a murder.

  Next to me, Walter frowned at the floor. “I take back what I said about Ruthie’s cleanliness. Look at the mess under the bed. Are those dust moats?”

  I followed his gaze. The clumps of fluff seemed too thick for dust. “More like cotton.”

  Walter knelt and reached under the bed. When his hand appeared again, a piece of mattress stuffing was pincered between his thumb and index finger. “Was this under the bed last night?”

  “I think so.” When I’d glanced under there last night I’d been more interested in finding a child than in Ruthie’s housekeeping skills.

  He stood again, and in silent agreement we turned the mattress over. It was cross-hatched with cuts. No wonder the batting was spilling through the slats of the bed frame.

  “Someone was looking for something,” I said.

  “Someone who thought Ruthie kept her money in her mattress, I bet.” His eyes widened. “Maybe they killed her for it.”

  Remembering the boodle bag, I shook my head. “The detectives found forty-six dollars on her, in the tub. Surely Ruthie would have handed over the money before letting someone kill her.” And what about her son? “If someone intended to kill her to find the money, they’d probably already killed Johnny as a threat. Surely she would have let the thief have the money before he killed her baby.”

  I’m not here to solve a murder, I reminded myself. I hurried over to the framed photograph. “I definitely want this. If I can only figure out where the picture was taken . . .”

  “It might have a studio stamp on it somewhere.”

  We’d brought a canvas sack to carry our loot home in, and I put the picture in it. Then I went through every drawer in the flat, hunting for a letter or some clue as to Ruthie’s hometown. As minutes ticked by without our finding more, I despaired. A lot was going to depend on that picture.

  After a half hour, Walter started to get antsy. “That man Beggs is going to wonder why we’ve been up here so long.”

  I relented. “There’s nothing more I want here anyway.”

  “We can’t leave empty-handed, though,” he said, looking around. “Ragmen aren’t picky. Grab some clothes from her trunk.”

  Thank heavens one of us was thinking straight. I took armloads of Ruthie’s clothes and put them in the bags. I could donate them to charity.

  “We’ll end up spending a lot of your aunt’s money for very little,” Walter grumbled.

  It was true. I took a last turn around the flat, then spotted the button I’d seen earlier. It was shiny brass, with a bird with spread wings, possibly an eagle, in the center. I stuffed it in my pocket. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a clue.

  Not that I was trying to solve a murder.

  CHAPTER 4

  The saxophone quintet who lived on the second floor of my building were trying out their version of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” that evening when I marched up the stairs hauling the bags from Ruthie’s. The tenor John McCormack had recently made a recording of the song, and now everyone in New York seemed to be tapping their toes to a tune that, an ocean away, men were singing as they marched off to war.

  Though unlocked, the door to our apartment barely budged until I gave it few shoves. “Sorry—the bundles for Belgium are blocking you,” Callie called out, rushing to help me.

  My friend Otto was right behind her, dressed for evening in a black wool suit with pale gray stripes, tailored to fit his already lean build. His boots were shiny black with gray canvas tops. A purple-and-yellow-check tie gave him a splash of color so that his light-haired, pale face wasn’t completely overshadowed by vertical gray-and-black darkness. Since coming to New York, Otto had made the acquaintance of some of the brightest lights of the entertainment world. My friends seemed to be enjoying glamorous lives with entertainment luminaries while I was spending holidays in Hell’s Kitchen.

  He looked slightly exasperated when I dropped my canvas sacks next to Callie’s. “Are you taking part in this madness, too?”

  Callie rounded on him. “How is it madness to help people who have been ravaged by the Kaiser’s army?”

  “Of course I feel bad for the Belgians,” he said. “But what’s the point of being neutral when we’re listening to British marching songs and our newspapers are filled with stories about Germans bayoneting babies?”

  These impromptu battles broke out all too frequently these days, and not just in our apartment. Ever since a group of German veterans had staged a march in support of the Kaiser, nearly causing a riot in Manhattan, the mayor had banned parades and the flying of foreign flags. Yet that hadn’t stopped lunch counters and even living rooms from turning into war zones from time to time.

  “I suppose we should just ignore all the war news, then.” Callie’s voice dripped sarcasm.


  “Of course not.” Otto turned to me for backup. “Louise?”

  “Helping the victims of war is a good thing,” I said, doing my best to bring about a truce. “Even if you don’t believe all the stories in the papers, which I don’t.”

  “I only wish I could do more,” Callie said.

  The Bleecker Blowers repeated their song, this time at a faster tempo. I went down the short hall to the parlor and collapsed onto the sofa. Otto sat next to me, tapping his foot in spite of himself. It was catchy.

  “Maybe I should pen a counteroffensive,” he said. “ ‘The Neutrality Waltz.’ ”

  I smiled. “The ‘Let’s Not Tear Each Other to Pieces Rag.’ ”

  “What is this stuff, Louise?” Callie had lagged behind and was rummaging through the bag I’d brought in. She pulled a few garments out and frowned, eyeing them critically.

  “Clothes belonging to the woman I told you about this morning.”

  “The suicide?” A dress slipped from her fingers and back into the sack’s gaping maw.

  Otto’s bulging eyes got bigger. “What suicide?”

  I told him Ruthie’s story and explained my hope to track down Eddie’s family in Nebraska. “There’s a picture in those bags somewhere,” I said, getting up again. “I need to check it for a photographer’s stamp.”

  “What do you intend to do with these clothes?” Callie asked.

  “I don’t really need them. Walter and I just took them to fool the landlord. You can send them to Belgium if you think they’ll do any good.”

  “I might . . . but I might take some of them to use as costumes. We lowly film actors have to provide our own. Would that be all right?”

  “Be my guest. I just need to get that picture.”

  I dug through the bags looking for it. The framed photograph lay under a cape that Callie said would be useful. She stood and tried it on while Otto and I huddled on the sofa. After I’d pried the backing off the frame and pulled the picture away from the glass, I felt a surge of hope. As Walter had predicted, the back of the photo bore a stamp in fading inked script. J. Clemsen—Elbart, Nebraska.