An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen

by Liz Freeland

“Don’t worry about that. I sleep like a log.”

  She turned off the light, and I proceeded to walk right into the Christmas tree. I stubbed my toe and let out a yelp.

  The light flicked back on and Callie emerged from her room. “What happened?”

  “Just a collision with an evergreen,” I said, wincing.

  “Oh!” Anna looked stricken. “Did I turn out the light too soon?”

  “Of course not.” Callie put her hands on her hips. “Honestly, Louise, you ought to be able to walk across a room without hitting a tree.”

  Anna and Callie looked at each other and smiled, as if this incident confirmed something they’d talked about together. Some private joke. Louise is so clumsy . . .

  I shook my head. I was being paranoid because I was embarrassed. Also, my toe was throbbing but I didn’t want to whine about something so trivial.

  “Do you think you can make it the rest of the way,” Callie asked me, “or should I escort you?”

  “I’ll make it by myself,” I said with a rueful smile. “I’ll take it slowly.”

  “All right, Granny,” Callie said.

  Anna laughed, and so did I. One of those laughs wasn’t as genuine as the other.

  CHAPTER 10

  Eileen didn’t look glad to see me standing in her doorway, but that might have had something to do with the wailing baby in her arms and the washtub of laundry I spied in her kitchen. The flat was steaming, close, and almost dizzying with the smells of lye and bleach. I was interrupting what was obviously a busy morning, and I don’t think she recognized me at first.

  “Officer Faulk of the NYPD,” I said, raising my voice to be heard above the baby’s cries. “I was here the night your neighbor Ruthie Jones was found.”

  Recognition dawned, along with unhappiness at the memory of that event. “Poor Ruthie. You know how the wee bairn’s getting on?”

  “Eddie? He’s at the foundling hospital, doing very well. He might even be adopted.”

  “That’s a mercy.” Her eyes narrowed. “What’re you here for, then?”

  “May I come in?” I asked.

  She hesitated, less the helpful neighbor now that there was no crisis afoot. “I’m very busy.”

  “I won’t be long,” I said. “Here—let me take the baby.”

  The offer was a gamble. I’d had more than one baby go from placid to arch-backed, red-faced hysteria the moment I touched them. Fortunately, little Davy had the opposite reaction. Being in unfamiliar arms shocked him into silence. Quickly I reached into my satchel for the nearest thing to a toy and came up with my key chain. His fat fingers latched on to it with a clawlike grip.

  “You’ve got a way, haven’t you?” Eileen said, hands on hips. “First peace I’ve had all morning.”

  Dumb luck, but I’d take it. “May I sit down?” I was already edging my way into the flat’s interior.

  Resigned to my intrusion, Eileen said, “I’ll put the kettle on. It can’t get any worse in here, can it?”

  I wasn’t so sure. Hard to describe how a flat could feel both steamy and dank, but this one managed it. The hot-and-cold moisture made me feel as droopy as the long johns, linens, and shirts hanging across the clothesline that bisected the kitchen. Now that I got a better look at her, Eileen also seemed to sag in her clothes. Some hair had come unpinned and hung in lifeless hanks. Her hands were red from scrubbing clothes in lye, and more troubling yet, there was a purplish bruise on one cheek.

  “You’ve been doing a lot of work,” I said, sinking into a chair at the small table. There were only two, so I doubted Eileen and Neil did much entertaining. All at once I absorbed what her life must be—caring for the baby, keeping the flat habitable, getting food on the table. Dinner, washing up, and then falling into bed with little hope that tomorrow would be any different.

  “Ay, every week seems like there’s more chores than there was before,” she lamented. “How’s that happen, I wonder?”

  “You’re lucky you’ve got your husband to help you.”

  The mention of Neil was like poking her with a stick. “Don’t make me laugh. Him’s gone at the docks from sunup to sundown, and the evenings it’s the pub, or taverns, whatever they’re called. Days I wish the whole city would slide into the harbor out where that statue is.” She laughed bitterly. “Liberty, a woman? Not a married woman.”

  I couldn’t keep my gaze away from that bruise. “Is he violent?”

  “Show me a man who hasn’t got a temper,” she said, defensive. “He’s as loving as you please most of the time. We’re expecting our second.”

  “Congratulations.” Under the circumstances, the words came out flat, but I didn’t know what else to say.

  She slapped a pitcher on the table. “There’s no sugar for tea, but I’ve got a bit of milk.”

  “Lovely, thank you.”

  “Dribble some on his highness there, so’s we might have a little more peace.”

  I dipped a cloth in the milk and Davy sucked on it happily.

  Eileen placed a cup and saucer in front of me—dainty china in a blue pattern. When I complimented it, her shoulders straightened. “A wedding present from me mam. I brought it across the ocean in a crate. One of the cups shattered when I unpacked it. I cried like Davy here an entire day.” She sighed. “What did I ever think I’d do with six?”

  I nodded and drank the tea. It was dark and bracing, even after a splash of milk had diluted it.

  Eileen regarded me across her cup, which she held with two hands as if there was no delicate handle at all. Her pointy elbows were propped on the table.

  “It’s very good,” I said.

  “The police send officers around just to drink tea, do they? What is it you’re after?”

  I set my cup carefully back down in its saucer. “I wanted to know if you could tell me any more about Ruthie.”

  “What for? She’s gone.” Her expression turned grim. “She gave up.”

  “That’s not entirely certain.”

  Something lit in her eyes for the first time since I’d entered the flat. “What, do the police think somebody done for her?”

  “Not just as yet . . .” I was wobbling on a tightrope, presenting myself as a police officer on an official investigation, when it was only official in my own head. If my snooping got back to the precinct, there would be no end of trouble. Or, rather, there might very well be an end—the end of my career in the NYPD.

  Eileen thumped the table with her bony hand. “I knew it wasn’t suicide. That first night I told Neil she wouldn’t have done for herself that way. Not Ruthie.”

  I wish she’d told me. “What did Neil say?”

  “What do you think? He said I was only wishing, on account of Ruthie and me were friendly.”

  I looked toward the door, which was left open as it had been on the night Ruthie’s body had been discovered. Sitting where I was, I had a fairly good view of the apartment’s foyer, between the entrance door and the staircase. I imagined Eileen spent a fair amount of time sitting here, as well.

  “Did you ever see any of the men who visited Ruthie?” I asked, repeating the question she hadn’t answered that night.

  Her gaze darted toward the floor. “I might’ve.”

  “Did you recognize any of them?”

  She looked at me again, her brow pinched. “Were any of them famous, do you mean? You think the mayor or someone like that was coming to this place?”

  “I mean did any of the men come here more than once, or frequently?”

  “They might’ve done.”

  Her manner had changed, as it had the other night before Neil interrupted us. That sullen expression told me she knew something, though. I was going to have to pry it out of her.

  “Was there a man who had any special characteristic you noticed, like a scar . . . or a limp?”

  Her gaze sharpened. “You think one of them men killed Ruthie and her baby?” she asked. “He would have had to drown Johnny and then made Ruthie look like
a suicide.”

  “It’s possible.” Whoever it was would have had to slash her wrists while there was still a sign of life flowing through her. There was blood, but not as much as the coroner’s man on the scene said he would have expected.

  She took a swig of tea, then set the cup down again with a clatter. “No. There would have been an unholy row if someone had hurt one of Ruthie’s boys in front of her. You think she would have stood for that without screaming the house down?”

  The question startled me. In all my thinking over Ruthie’s death, that angle hadn’t occurred to me. Of course she wouldn’t have stood for any man laying a hand on her baby, much less drowning the poor thing.

  “It couldn’t have happened that way,” Eileen continued, and I knew then she’d been thinking this over as much as I had. Of course she had. Who but Ruthie had come down to sit at this table with her and drunk tea from these precious blue china cups? Who else had sympathized with her over the trouble with the babies—there was always troubles with babies. Crying. Colic. Rashes. Two young mothers. That was a bond that not even the stigma of Ruthie’s profession would break. “Whoever it was, he would’ve had to kill her first.” Her face was hard, angry. “The demon.”

  “I want to find him.”

  Her eyes told me she wanted me to succeed, but something held her back. Neil, I assumed. He’d told her to stay out of it, to stop thinking about Ruthie, even. Ruthie’s death had been on her mind and she probably hadn’t been able to stop talking about it. Had that been the origin of Eileen’s bruise? First he’d told her to shut up, then he’d hit her.

  What if Neil himself had been Ruthie’s client? What if he’d killed her?

  “One of my colleagues”—yes, that was stretching the truth—“wondered if your husband might’ve told someone about Ruthie. Recommended her, I mean. One of the men he drinks with, for instance.”

  Eileen’s demeanor stiffened. “You think my Neil would do that?”

  “Would he?”

  “He’s no angel, but he had no time for Ruthie. He didn’t even like a woman like her living in the same building as me. He certainly wouldn’t have been drumming up trade for her.”

  “I had to ask. Any connection at all would help us.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Next you’ll be wanting to know if Neil himself visited Ruthie, and I’ll tell you straightaway that the answer to that would be no. He would never—”

  “I didn’t ask—”

  “You think I’m so daft I wouldn’t know what my own husband was doing right under my nose?”

  “He seemed very intent on your not talking to me the other night.”

  “Sure he was. And you know why?” She didn’t give me time to answer. “Because you’re with the peelers.”

  “The what?”

  “The police,” she translated. “What good’s talking to you when you’re just looking to pin the blame on someone?”

  “I want to catch a killer. Ruthie’s killer, her son’s killer. They were your neighbors. She was your friend.”

  “Catch a killer? Measure my Neil for prison stripes, you mean.” Her long, strong arms reached across the table and plucked the baby out of my arms. A chubby foot nearly knocked over a second teacup but I lunged for it in time. Eileen dislodged the keys from Davy’s little hands and tossed them at me. My sympathy with her plight might have won me this conversation, but now the finger was too close to pointing at her husband, and threatening her home. Unhelpful and violent Neil might be, but without him Eileen would be alone in a strange country with one babe in arms and another on the way.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” she said, eyeing me resentfully. “Look closer to your own home.”

  Her words brought me up short. “What?”

  “You heard me. Sure, Neil didn’t want me telling about the man I remembered seeing Ruthie with most. It never does any good pointing the finger at police. You all cover for each other.”

  “I never would,” I said.

  “Certain of that, are you?”

  “You’re saying someone from our precinct was one of Ruthie’s regulars?”

  “I don’t know one precinct from the next, and I don’t know how regular he was. All’s I know is I saw an officer going up to the third floor once, and after he’d left I rushed up to see Ruthie. I worried she was in some kind of trouble. But she just met me at the door—a little the worse for wear, if you follow me—and assured me everything was fine.”

  “Did you ever see the officer again?”

  “Didn’t I! Several times.”

  “A uniformed officer?”

  “Sure.”

  “He wasn’t the policeman I was with the other night, was he?”

  “Nah, he was a tall, skinny one. Bristly brown hair. Long face.”

  Recognition flushed through me in a wave of disgust that began in my heels and rippled up to my hairline.

  My reaction brought a scornful curl to Eileen’s lips. “Know him, do you?”

  I knew him, all right. What I didn’t know was what I was going to do about it.

  * * *

  Indignation blew me all the way back to the Thirtieth Street station. Jenks. Of course. Why hadn’t I seen it? Why else would he have been eavesdropping on me and Stevens that day? Why else would he have seemed so invested in my believing that Ruthie’s death was a suicide?

  I’d foolishly assumed he was just being a busybody because that’s what he always was—a nosey parker ready to run to Sergeant Donnelly to report any infraction. He’d been borderline hostile toward me from my first day at the precinct. I should have noticed that while everyone else referred to Ruthie as “that whore” or something equally dismissive, to Jenks she was always Ruthie. Just Ruthie.

  I marched east on Thirtieth, one hand on my satchel, the other balled in a fist at my side, preparing for a confrontation. Or should I talk to one of the detectives first? Or even the precinct captain, Captain McMartin. What exactly would I say?

  “I have evidence that Officer Jenks was a frequent client of the prostitute Ruthie Jones.”

  And what would they say? “You mean that whore who killed her baby and then herself?”

  “I believe it was a murder, not a suicide.”

  “And what is your evidence, Two?”

  “A hunch . . . and the neighbor’s hunch.”

  Half a block from the station, my outrage had been doused by reality. Feeble hunches wouldn’t carry water, not if I was going to be pointing the finger at one of our own. Especially when that man was Sergeant Donnelly’s own creature.

  My footsteps slowed. I wasn’t an innocent. A majority of the men in the precinct had probably visited a prostitute at some time in their lives. No doubt most saw nothing wrong with it. Periodically scandals broke concerning policemen who looked the other way at brothels operating in their precincts in exchange for money or sexual favors, or both. For all I knew, Jenks had some arrangement like that with Ruthie. Perhaps many of my colleagues did. The Tenderloin district had been swept clean before, but the broom that kept dirt from collecting again had yet to be invented.

  The sergeant and the captain could be part of that corruption. I didn’t want to think so, but how could I be sure? After a year as a policewoman, nothing about men surprised me.

  I looked across the street to the station house. It was an impressive edifice. Ten years old, half of gray stone more befitting a medieval castle than a modern police station, with turrets built into the design. The upper floors, though clad in a more pedestrian red brick, were topped by a crenellated roof. Only the green globe lights at the doors clearly marked it as a police station.

  Near those lights, about five feet in front of the steps, Jenks stood talking to a man wearing a black coat and a hat pulled low over his brows. Both the stranger’s hands were buried in his coat pockets. The only part of his face I could really see was his jaw jutting out of a fat neck, and a nose that looked as if it had been flattened by a few encounters with someone’s fist. I’d
seen his like before. I’d even met some thugs like him, back when I had come up against Leonard Cain. Cain was in jail now—thanks, in part, to me—but he still had associates and former henchmen looking after his business interests for him. And perhaps looking to take his revenge against me.

  I hung back in a doorway, observing them. There was no way this was a chance encounter. The beefy man in black wasn’t simply asking directions. He and Jenks were discussing something intently.

  Heretofore, I’d viewed Jenks as a nuisance, not something evil. Was he capable of murdering a woman and her child, and staging it to look as if she’d killed her own baby and herself? That required malevolence beyond what I’d given him credit for. Yet if he was associating with Cain’s men . . . They were capable of anything. They might have even done the deed for him, if they owed him.

  But why would Cain’s people owe anything to Jenks? That question worried me more than any other.

  Not that I had proof positive that this was one of Cain’s men.

  I was glad now that I hadn’t charged into the station hurling accusations like an ancient god tossing thunderbolts. Six months before I might have. Even six minutes ago. Now I sensed that my next step was going to require more calculation and finesse.

  I was getting ready to cross the street and go around to the station’s back entrance when I saw a young woman exit the police station. Male instinct made the gazes of Jenks and the man in black swing toward her, too. Neither man appeared to comment on her, but they tracked her young, shapely figure, taking in the flash of delicate ankle that peeked between her skirt and the black pumps on her feet.

  Lena. She’d come to find me, I was sure. Nothing else would have possessed her to set foot inside a police station. I hurried to the corner, hoping Jenks wouldn’t notice me crossing the street to try to catch up with her. I splashed across a puddle and practically had to sprint several yards so that I didn’t lose her. I didn’t dare call her name until we were both safely around the other side of the building and out of Jenks’s line of vision.

  “Lena!”

  She stopped and turned. “There you are—they said you wasn’t here.”