Murder In Chinatown

by Victoria Thompson

  Frank gave her a murderous look, which she ignored. “Mrs. Brandt,” he said through gritted teeth, “why don’t you see that the family gets home?”

  He saw the understanding reluctantly reflected in her eyes, which meant he didn’t have to remind her of her promise to stay out of this investigation in front of all these people.

  “There’s nothing more you can do here,” she said to Mrs. Lee. “I’m sure Mr. Malloy will let you know if he needs anything from you.”

  To Frank’s surprise, this earned him a black look from the Chinaman. He probably wouldn’t get anything from Lee no matter how much he needed it. Without waiting for another invitation, Lee turned and walked away with as much dignity as a man who’d just been lying flat on his back in the dirt could muster. His son followed, but Mrs. Lee hesitated. She turned back to Frank one more time.

  “Please find out who killed my girl, Mr. Malloy. She didn’t do nothing to deserve this, and whoever killed her should pay.”

  Frank didn’t know how to answer without making a promise he might not be able to keep. This time when Sarah rescued him, he almost didn’t mind. “Come on, Minnie, and give Mr. Malloy a chance to do his job.”

  Reluctantly, Mrs. Lee let Sarah lead her away. When they were gone, Frank turned to where the crowd of neighbors still stood, watching with avid interest. “All right, everybody, clear out now. There’s nothing more to see.” He gestured to the beat cops, who took the hint and began to encourage people to be on their way with some gentle nudges from their locust clubs.

  “Can I get up now?”

  Frank looked down to where O’Neal still lay beneath the weight of his foot. “If you promise to behave yourself,” he said and released the young man.

  O’Neal scrambled to his feet and began to dust himself off. “You should’ve let me finish what I started,” he told Frank. “I would’ve got him to confess to what he done.”

  Frank had learned long ago never to waste time arguing with stupidity. “Let’s go back inside. I need to ask you some questions.”

  His young face twisted in dismay. “I really don’t know who killed her.”

  “Then I’ll ask you something else,” Frank promised. “Let’s go.”

  Malloy pushed the boy ahead of him back to the porch and up the steps and into the dim interior of the tenement. The family lived several floors up. The rents declined with each flight of stairs, and the O’Neals lived pretty cheaply.

  The whole building smelled of cooked cabbage and garbage, and refuse lined the hallways and the stairwells. The O’Neal flat was pretty much what Frank had expected. He’d seen hundreds just like it. The furniture was old and worn, scarred from use. No pictures hung on the walls, no carpets covered the floors. Each family member would own no more than two sets of clothes and few items of comfort. They’d live from day to day, never sure if they’d have enough from that day’s earnings to ensure that no one in the family went to bed hungry. Morning would bring a brand-new struggle with the same goal, a cycle repeated endlessly and not always successfully.

  The rest of the O’Neal family had apparently remained downstairs. Frank pointed to one of the rickety, mismatched chairs gathered around the kitchen table. “Sit,” he told O’Neal. He did.

  Frank pulled up a chair opposite him. “So tell me, how’d you come to marry a Chinese girl?”

  O’Neal bristled instantly. “She ain’t Chinese!”

  “That was her father down in the yard, wasn’t it?” Frank challenged.

  “She was born in America,” he said stubbornly. “She’s American.”

  He noticed O’Neal spoke of her as if she were still alive. “All right, how did you come to marry her then?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. It was the color of dry leaves, and Frank noticed his eyes had filled with tears. “We just did.”

  Frank considered giving the boy a smack to induce him to improve his responses, but he decided to try kindness first. If he could get the boy to break down, he’d blubber everything he knew. “She’s pretty young,” Frank said. “How did you meet her?”

  “She…at the market. Gansevoort. She used to go there with her friends.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “I get work there when I can,” he said sadly. “I help unload wagons for anybody who’ll pay me.”

  “Did you pick her because she was Chinese?”

  “I didn’t know she was when I met her!” he exclaimed indignantly. “I just thought she was pretty, that’s all. I couldn’t tell…I never saw a half-Chinese girl before. She and her friends, they just looked…different.”

  “All right, you saw her at the market. Then what happened?”

  “I talked to them a little, being friendly. She was pretty, like I said. She…she told me later that they looked for me the next time they went. So I talked to her some more when I saw her again. After that, she’d tell me when they were coming back, and I’d make sure I was there.”

  “You started meeting her other places, I guess.”

  “Yeah, after the weather got cold. I…Sometimes I work at the pawn shop down the street, cleaning up, things like that. The owner, he thought it was funny I liked a Chinese girl. He let me take her in the back.”

  Frank doubted the man did so out of the goodness of his heart, but he let that go for now. “So you’d take her in the back and have your way with her.”

  “No!” he almost shouted. “It wasn’t like that! She was a nice girl. I just…We didn’t do nothing like that.”

  “So she wasn’t in a family way when you got married?”

  “No! I told you, she was a nice girl. She let me kiss her and…and other things, but we never did nothing wrong.”

  The coroner would tell him if there was a baby or not. “If she wasn’t in a family way, why did you run off and get married?”

  “She…Her father wanted her to marry some old Chinese man,” he explained, leaning forward in his chair. “She was scared to death. She didn’t want that, and neither did I. I told her to refuse, but she said her father would make her do it anyway. He didn’t care if they lived in America. He still did things like they did in China, she said.”

  “So you decided to be a hero and rescue her,” Frank guessed.

  “You should’ve seen her! She was crying and carrying on like she was gonna die. I couldn’t let them do that to her. I told her we could get married, and then she’d never have to worry about it no more.”

  “Who married you?”

  “My priest. She’s Catholic, too, so he didn’t fuss too much. We had to say she was…that there was a baby, but it was a lie, like I said. I didn’t like to lie to a priest, but he wouldn’t’ve done it without her parents’ approval otherwise.”

  Frank figured that was probably true. “How’d you plan to keep a wife with what you earn cleaning out stores and unloading wagons?”

  He had the grace to flush. “I didn’t think about that. I just figured we’d manage like everybody else does.”

  Frank knew how everybody else “managed.” It was no way to live, especially for a girl who’d been raised in comfort and never wanted for anything. “So then you brought her here. What did your family think of her?”

  “They all liked her,” he said quickly. He was a poor liar.

  “I guess they weren’t too happy that you brought home a Chinese girl,” Frank said.

  “I told you—”

  “I know, she’s not Chinese. Your family thought she was, though, didn’t they? They probably didn’t want her here, eating their food and taking up space, especially because she wasn’t earning any money. Did they want you to turn her out to earn a few dollars on the street?”

  O’Neal’s face flushed scarlet. “You can’t talk about her like that!”

  “I wasn’t talking about her,” Frank pointed out. “I was talking about your family. A pretty girl like Angel could earn a lot on her back. Is that what they told you?”

  “I’d never do that to her!”<
br />
  Frank noticed he didn’t deny that his family had suggested it, though. He glanced appraisingly around the modest flat. “Who lives here with you?”

  “My mother,” he said defensively. “My two brothers and my sister, and my brother Donald’s wife and their baby.”

  Frank glanced around again, this time in disapproval. “Not much room for so many people.”

  “That’s none of your business!”

  Frank shrugged. “It is if it made somebody mad enough to kill Angel,” he pointed out.

  “Nobody was mad. I told you, they all liked her. Her and Keely was thick as thieves, always going off together someplace and talking.”

  “Who’s Keely?”

  “My sister. I’m telling you, they all treated her like she was one of us.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Tell me, where was everybody today?”

  O’Neal sat up straight in his chair. Obviously, he recognized this as an important question. “I don’t know. I don’t keep track of them.”

  “Then how do you know one of them didn’t kill Angel?”

  “Because I do!”

  “Well, I don’t, so tell me where they all were today.”

  He ran a hand over his face. “Ma was here. She was watching the baby while Iris went to deliver the vests they made.”

  Women in the tenements frequently did piecework at home to earn extra money. Jobs for females were scarce, and women with children couldn’t leave home to take them, anyway.

  “Who’s Iris?”

  “My brother Donald’s wife.”

  “Where were your brothers?”

  “Out. I don’t know where. They go looking for work most days.”

  Or for cheap beer, Frank thought. “Why weren’t you with them?”

  “I worked yesterday,” O’Neal defended himself. “Angel was upset today, so I stayed with her.”

  “Why was she upset?”

  He bristled at the question, defensive again. “She gets scared when she’s here without me.”

  “Who’s she scared of?”

  “Nobody!” he snapped, then caught himself. “I mean, she gets homesick. She’s still just a kid, and she misses her family.”

  They heard a commotion in the hallway, and then the door opened. A woman came in carrying a grubby toddler in a threadbare gown on her hip. Frank figured she was probably in her forties, although she looked older. Life had worn her out, and everything about her looked faded—her hair, her eyes, her skin, her dress. She stopped in her tracks when she saw Frank sitting at her kitchen table, and he watched the various emotions play across her face. She feared him because he was with the police and could only bring trouble to her family, but she also hated him for having such power.

  “What’s he doing here?” she asked the boy.

  “Asking me questions about Angel,” he told her.

  “Wasting his time,” she sniffed, shifting the baby she carried to her other hip. He stared at Frank with vacant eyes. His nose was running. “You want to know who killed her, you should be asking her family. They was the ones who was mad.”

  “What were they mad about?” Frank asked.

  “Because she married my boy,” Mrs. O’Neal said in a tone that said she thought Frank stupid for not having figured that out himself. “You ask me, they shoulda been happy a white boy would have her. Not many would.”

  “How about you, Mrs. O’Neal?” Frank asked casually. “Were you happy your boy married her?”

  She gave him a hateful look. “He’s too young to be getting a wife. Can’t even keep himself, and here he is, bringing home this girl we never even saw before.”

  “And a Chinese girl at that,” Frank remarked. “That must’ve been a shock.”

  “I’ll tell you it was!” Mrs. O’Neal said, warming to the subject. “I didn’t even know he knew any Chinese, much less one he wanted to marry.” She glared at Quinn, who dropped his gaze. “I hope you’re happy now,” she scolded. “I told you that girl’d be nothing but trouble! Always thought she was too good for us and crying all the time.”

  “You son said she was homesick,” Frank said.

  “Homesick? I guess she was. Nothing we had was good enough for her, and do you think she’d turn her hand to help out? Not a bit of it! Expected us to wait on her, she did.”

  “That’s not true,” the boy protested. “She’d help when you told her what to do!”

  His mother made a rude noise. “You mean when I taught her what to do! I don’t know how that girl got to be as old as she was. Didn’t hardly know how to feed herself when she come here.”

  “Ma!”

  “It’s the God’s truth. Lazy and worthless, like the rest of them Chinamen.”

  “Where were you when Angel was killed, Mrs. O’Neal?” Frank asked mildly.

  She looked at him in surprise, as if she’d forgotten he was there for a moment. Then her face turned an unbecoming shade of purple. “I was right here, taking care of Baby.”

  “Anybody else with you?”

  “No, why should there be?” she asked belligerently, although he could see the fear in her eyes. She knew Frank could arrest her or anyone in her family and charge them with murder and make it stick.

  “No reason,” Frank said. “I was just wondering where Quinn was.”

  “Oh, he was here, too,” she said too quickly. “I forgot about that.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” the boy said.

  “Shut up!” his mother warned him. “Of course you was. You was here with me when they come to tell us she was dead in the yard.”

  So neither of them had an alibi, Frank noted. “When was the last time you saw Angel?”

  The two exchanged a look, but Frank couldn’t read their expressions. “I don’t remember,” Mrs. O’Neal claimed.

  “I took her downstairs to buy her something to eat around noontime,” Quinn said. “From a street vendor.”

  “What did you do after that?”

  Quinn looked a little sheepish. “We sort of…We had a little argument. I went for a walk to cool off.”

  Frank looked at Mrs. O’Neal. “Did she come back up here?”

  Mrs. O’Neal didn’t look happy. “I guess she did, for a while. Next thing I know, she’s gone again, though.”

  “What time was it?”

  “How should I know?” Mrs. O’Neal asked. “I was working.”

  “Did she go off with Keely?” Frank asked, remembering what Quinn had said about the two girls.

  The question seemed to startle Mrs. O’Neal. “No, she…Keely wasn’t…Angel went off by herself.”

  “Why did she go outside again?” Frank asked.

  The two of them exchanged another look. The boy had realized he needed to get his story straight with his mother’s or else keep his mouth shut. He chose silence.

  “Who knows?” she said. “She was a strange girl, always going off by herself. Hiding,” she decided, “so nobody’d ask her to do anything.”

  “That ain’t true!” the boy claimed, but his mother silenced him with a sharp look, and this time he took the hint.

  The door to the flat still stood open, and a younger woman came in, looking bewildered. She was dressed for the street in a ratty hat and cape. Her hair was untidy, as if she’d just stuck a few pins in it this morning without bothering with a comb or brush. “They said Angel’s dead,” she said before she noticed Frank. When she saw him, she made a small sound of distressed surprise.

  “She got herself killed,” Mrs. O’Neal said. “Outside in the yard. Where’ve you been, and where’s the goods?”

  “They didn’t have any work for us,” she replied angrily.

  “What do you mean, no work?” Mrs. O’Neal demanded in alarm.

  “They said they’d have some tomorrow. The cloth didn’t come in yet.”

  “I knew I should’ve gone myself,” Mrs. O’Neal moaned. “You can’t believe them. They gave the work to somebody who’ll do it cheaper.”

  “But the
y said they didn’t have any cloth!” she protested.

  “You stupid bitch!” Mrs. O’Neal cried, raising her free hand to strike her, but the girl dodged out of the way.

  Quinn jumped to his feet to intervene, grabbing his mother’s arm and yelling, “Ma!”

  “You must be Iris,” Frank said, surprising all of them.

  Iris looked at him with renewed terror. “That’s right.” She kept glancing over at Mrs. O’Neal and back again to Frank, as if trying to judge which was the bigger threat.

  “What did you think of Angel?”

  “Why does that matter now?” she asked in dismay.

  “I don’t know that it does, but tell me anyway.”

  She gave the matter a few seconds of consideration. “She was all right, I guess,” she allowed. “Didn’t have much to say for herself. You’d hardly even know she was here except…” She caught herself, glancing over at Mrs. O’Neal again.

  “Except what?” Frank prodded.

  He watched as Iris weighed her options. Refuse to answer and risk his wrath or answer and risk Mrs. O’Neal’s. After a few seconds, a slow, cunning smile creased her plain face. “Except when Quinn was trying to poke her. Then she’d scream like a banshee. Didn’t like it much, I guess,” she added with a sneer at her brother-in-law.

  Quinn cursed and lunged to his feet. He would’ve come across the table at her if Frank hadn’t clapped a hand on his shoulder and shoved him back down in the chair. “Now, now, nothing to get riled up about,” he cautioned.

  Quinn called her a few choice names, but she just grinned back at him.

  “Mrs. O’Neal,” Frank said, “where were your other children today?”

  “I already told you,” Quinn reminded him indignantly, but Frank silenced him with a pinch to a particular spot on his shoulder that he knew would cause excruciating pain. It did, and Quinn’s howl made the women flinch.

  When he was quiet again, Frank said, “Your other children, Mrs. O’Neal?”

  She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she claimed. “The boys, they usually go out in the morning looking for work. Nobody’s offering steady work, so they got to do whatever they can find.”