Tell Me Pretty Maiden

by Rhys Bowen

  “Did she have a special boy?” I asked.

  “There was some guy who came to the stage door. She liked him. She said he was a big spender and she always had a lot of fun with him, and if she played her cards right she’d be out of this crummy place and living in luxury.”

  “Did she tell you his name?”

  The two girls exchanged glances. “We kind of thought it might be that Yale guy who robbed the mansion. Anyways, the police came and asked questions about him.”

  “Do you happen to know if Annie had a date that night?”

  “She did.” The older, sharper-looking one said, “She had a dress with her, to change into after the show. She said she was going out for supper. We didn’t think much of it. She was always going out with some guy after the show.” She lowered her voice. “Mrs. Stubbs locks the front door at midnight and Annie often doesn’t show up until breakfast next day. You can guess what she’s been doing.”

  “So Annie definitely went on a date that night, but nobody saw her leave with a man?”

  The younger one frowned. “Well no. She went off with Jessie that night, didn’t she?”

  “Jessie?”

  “The other girl that’s gone missing. Jessie Edwards.”

  I gasped. “Another girl went missing that night too?”

  “Oh yes. Annie took Jessie with her. I think they were going out to supper with a couple of guys. And they didn’t show up for breakfast next morning. That must have been some supper, we said. We were kidding around, you know. Only when they didn’t come back for the show that night, there was big trouble. We thought maybe they’d run off with the rich guys and they didn’t need to be in no stinking chorus anymore.”

  “Tell me about Jessie,” I said.

  “Jessie? She was different from Annie,” the older girl said. “I don’t know why Annie liked her so much. She was fairly new. Came from somewhere out in the boonies—Massachusetts I think. And she was real shy. A good dancer, though. She’d studied classical ballet, she said. And she and Annie really hit it off. They became bosom buddies. Did everything together. So sometimes Annie would take her on dates with her and introduce her to guys. ‘She’s never going to hitch a guy by herself,’ Annie would say. Although she was pretty enough.”

  “What did she look like?” I asked although I thought I already knew.

  “Skinny, petite, dark hair . . .”

  “Little elfin face, pointed chin?”

  “That’s right. Do you know her?”

  “I think I do,” I said. “And she and Annie went off together. Did anyone happen to see a swank red automobile that night?”

  “I didn’t, but Lizzie said she’d seen that auto again and I guess that was the one she meant.”

  “So it was possible that Annie and Jessie went off in the automobile. Could we ask the other girls to find out if anyone saw them leave?”

  The older one shook her head. “The police already asked everybody that. They showed us a picture of the automobile. Real nice it was. But you know those two rushed out that night. They were off and away before we’d finished taking our makeup off.”

  “Did Jessie wear a white dress that night?”

  The younger one screwed up her face, thinking. “I believe she did. Yeah, because some wisecracker made a joke about looking like a virgin and that Annie had given up wearing white at her christening.”

  “I presume the police have been through Annie’s and Jessie’s things? Have they contacted their families?”

  “I don’t think they had families to contact,” the older one said. “I know that Annie ran away from home when she was a kid, and I believe that Jessie grew up in an orphanage.”

  “Would you happen to have a picture of them that I could take with me?” I asked.

  The younger one got to her feet. “We’ve got some playbills out in the hall. That shows all of us.” She flopped out in her slippers and came back holding out the playbill we’d seen in the manager’s office. I looked at it again, Annie, front and center, and now, as my eyes scanned the rest of it, my girl from the snowdrift smiling demurely from the back row.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  I was so mad at myself that I could scream. If only I had studied that photograph carefully when I had seen it in the manager’s office, instead of just looking at Annie, I’d have spotted Jessie then and I could have stopped those men from taking her away. An awful fear clutched at the pit of my stomach. Who were they? Why had they pretended to be her relatives? With a name like Jessie Edwards she certainly had no links to Hungary. And more to the point, what could I do now to get her back?

  I visited the local New Haven police station and reported everything that I had found. They were polite enough but I got the feeling that they weren’t taking me too seriously. “Oh yes, miss?” one of them said, barely stifling the grin. “You say she was found in a snowdrift and then kidnapped by Hungarians? Are you sure you haven’t been reading too many novels?”

  I came away angry and frustrated. I had learned nothing from them that I didn’t already know and they were not the least bit interested in helping me. It was going to be up to me to rescue the girl myself. If she’s still alive—the words flashed through my mind.

  The train trip back to New York went on forever and I tried to formulate a plan. At least I had an address. I’d have to come up with a pretext for visiting Jessie—maybe a necklace that she left behind at my house. And what then? I could hardly drag her off by myself, could I? I decided to appeal to Mrs. Goodwin for help. She’d know what to do. She may also have heard of a Hungarian gang that kidnapped girls. I felt sick inside. Mrs. Tucker had suggested that maybe the girl ran away from white slavers. Had I delivered her right back into their hands?

  I leaped off the train the moment it came into the platform in New York. I knew that Mrs. Goodwin would be sleeping, but this was a matter of life and death. I just prayed that Daniel had come back and headed straight to his house on Twenty-third Street. The wind off the Hudson was bitter as I leaned into it, hurrying toward Ninth Avenue. His landlady met me in the front hall.

  “Captain Sullivan hasn’t returned yet, Miss Murphy,” she said.

  “He’s been away all weekend, has he?”

  “That’s right. Went off on Saturday morning to visit his folks. I’ll tell him you stopped by when he returns, shall I?”

  “Yes please. Ask him to come and see me the moment he gets back. It’s urgent.”

  “All right, my dear.” She ushered me back out into the street. I walked away feeling angry and disappointed. Just how long was he going to stay away this time? What if his family persuaded him to stay with them until Christmas?

  I pushed such worries aside and decided that the only person I could turn to was Mrs. Goodwin, sleep or no sleep.

  I went home first to find the address to which the Hungarians had taken Jessie. I was in the process of opening my front door when the door across the alley opened.

  “There you are at last, Molly,” Gus called to me. “We’ve got Dr. Birnbaum here, waiting for you to come home.”

  “Dr. Birnbaum?”

  “Yes, in a very disturbed state. He has some bad news, I’m afraid.”

  I hurried across to Gus and was shown into their drawing room, where Dr. Birnbaum was sitting next to the fire. He leaped to his feet.

  “Miss Murphy. At last. These two young ladies were so kind. They invited me to stay until you returned home. I came to find you with the most disturbing news.”

  “About our girl?”

  “Of course. I decided this morning that I would go to visit her, to make sure she had settled in well and to offer my services in person. Frankly, I didn’t think that any doctor they could produce could have the skill with such a difficult case. Anyway, I went to Brooklyn and the address they gave you does not exist. There is no Brook Street.”

  “No Brook Street,” I echoed. “I suppose I’m not surprised. I have just made a discovery of my own. The girl was not Hungarian. She w
as a dancer from a theater in New Haven, Connecticut.”

  “Then why did they claim her as their relative?” Gus asked.

  “I wish I knew. I can only assume the worst—that they wanted her for some evil purpose.”

  “I wish I had been there when they came to collect her,” Dr. Birnbaum said. “I have some fluency in Hungarian. I might have been able to reason with them.”

  “We only have their word that they were Hungarian, don’t we?” I said. “I wish you’d been there, too. At least you could have told me whether they were genuine or not.”

  “Did you hear them say anything in that language?” Birnbaum asked.

  “Yes, but since I don’t speak it, it meant nothing to me.”

  “Nobody speaks it,” Birnbaum said. “It is one of the strangest languages on Earth. It bears no similarity to any other spoken language.”

  I stared at him, as an idea crossed my mind. “Then that is why they claimed to be Hungarian,” I said. “A language that nobody else speaks. They could claim that the girl didn’t communicate with anyone because she couldn’t understand them.”

  “Did the language sound like this?” Birnbaum asked and rattled off what sounded like a string of gibberish.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “And one of them said si. Is that yes in Hungarian?”

  “No, Spanish or Italian.”

  Sid entered the room at that moment. “Oh Molly, I didn’t hear you come in. What have I missed?” she asked.

  “Molly has found out that the girl from the snowdrift was really a dancer from New Haven,” Gus said breathlessly, “and she’s been kidnapped by two men who said they were Hungarian but probably weren’t. And they left a false address.”

  “Goodness,” Sid said. “So what do you propose to do now?”

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “It will be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I fear the worst for that poor girl. I can only think of one reason that those men would want her.”

  Gus frowned. “In the state she was in? She is an invalid. She requires constant attention, Molly. Who would want to undertake such a challenge? There must have been a very strong reason for hauling her off with them.”

  I nodded. “I suppose you’re right. I just hope she’s still alive.”

  “Why would anyone bother to kill her when she neither speaks nor recognizes anybody? One could say she was scarcely alive in her current state.”

  “It could be a case of mistaken identity, I suppose,” Sid said. “Perhaps she resembled strongly the real Hungarian girl they were looking for.”

  “Then why give a false address?”

  Sid couldn’t answer that one.

  “I am going to see my friend Mrs. Goodwin,” I said. “She works for the New York police. She may know what to do, because I certainly don’t.”

  “We are going to have dinner with Elizabeth,” Gus said. “We should ask her opinion. She had handled some tricky situations during her career.”

  “By all means ask her,” I said wearily.

  Gus came over to me and put her hand on my shoulder. “You did everything you could and more, Molly. If you hadn’t rescued her, she’d have been shut up in an institution by now.”

  “Perhaps she would have been better off there.” I found that I was fighting back tears. I always find it hard to take when people are kind to me.

  “And she never was your responsibility, you know,” Sid added. “You did a kindly act, but she is not yours to worry about.”

  “All the same, I feel responsible,” I said.

  Dr. Birnbaum gave an embarrassed sort of cough. “I should be going,” he said. “I am to meet some colleagues for dinner. Perhaps I shall refer the matter to them. We are a small fraternity. Surely one of us would hear if a fellow alienist was called out to treat a mute girl.”

  It was about the best we could hope for. I collected the false address from my house and then set off straight for Mrs. Goodwin. I rapped on her door until I heard slow feet coming down the stairs.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said, still bleary-eyed.

  “I’m so sorry to disturb you,” I said, “but I couldn’t think where else to turn.”

  “It’s a hazard of my profession,” she said. “You’d better come in.”

  I went through into her warm kitchen and poured out my story to her. She sat nodding gravely. “So this girl may have been part of the robbery at the Silverton Mansion,” she said. “She may have been in the red automobile when it crashed.”

  “In which case something awful happened to her. Maybe she escaped when Annie was shot.”

  “Escaped from whom? That’s the question,” Mrs. Goodwin said.

  “Is it possible that it was from those men who claimed to be her family? But why would they want to find her again?”

  “Obviously to silence her because she might be able to identify them,” she said in her matter-of-fact way.

  “Then we’d already be too late.”

  “I fear that may be the case.”

  “But where does John Jacob Halsted fit into all this?”

  “Either he was part of the gang or rival thieves got wind of his big haul and set up an ambush.”

  “In which case . . . ,” I began.

  “He’s probably also dead.”

  “This is terrible,” I said, “Is there nothing we can do?”

  “You can give me a description of the two men who came to collect the girl. I can pass it around at police headquarters and see if it rings a bell with any of our officers. I take it you’ve told Captain Sullivan. He was always closely involved with the gangs.”

  She saw me stiffen. “I’m not saying he was working with the gangs,” she said. “I think his innocence has been well proven in that matter, at least to me. But he has a better inside knowledge of the criminal classes in this city than any other officer I can think of.”

  “I can tell you right now that he’ll not be persuaded to work with anything to do with the police force,” I said. “He’s very bitter and angry. But he is helping me on the John Jacob Halsted case and it does seem that the two are linked somehow. Very well, I’ll go and speak to him this evening.” I got up, then looked back at her and smiled. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your rest. And I appreciate everything you’re doing to help.”

  “Glad to do it,” she said, “although if we are dealing with the criminal classes, I wouldn’t hold out too much hope that the girl is still alive.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But I have to keep on trying until I’m sure.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  I spent a miserable night, tossing and turning, consumed with guilt. I had had a chance to save Jessie and instead I had delivered her to men who could have no good reason for carting her away. And Daniel wasn’t around just when I needed him. A fine sort of assistant he was turning out to be—running home to his parents when we were in the middle of a case. You can see my state of mind was not quite rational. When I get upset I’ve been known to blame everybody, including myself.

  At first light the next morning I was up and pacing. How was I going to find those men again in the whole of New York City? They had given me a Brooklyn address—was at least the Brooklyn part of it genuine? And even if it was, what hope did I have of locating two men who would fit the description of half the immigrants in the city. Well, not half the immigrants—the older man especially had been well dressed, had well-manicured nails and a good quality cloth for his overcoat, and carried an expensive-looking cane. And he ran his own business, although I remembered he had skirted the question about what kind of business that was.

  I tried to make myself something to eat, but I couldn’t swallow. In the end I decided to go across the street and see if Sid and Gus were awake. Not only were they awake but their house smelled of freshly brewed coffee and Sid had already been out to get French rolls from the bakery. Of course they invited me to join their breakfast.

  “We’ve been up for hours,” Sid said. “Gus is in a painti
ng mood and went straight to her easel. I positively had to drag her away to eat breakfast. If I didn’t take such good care of her, she’d starve.”

  I had to smile at this because Augusta looked to be far from starving.

  “Sid does exaggerate,” Gus said, returning my smile. “You can tell which of us is the writer.”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your breakfast,” I said, “but I had a horrible time sleeping last night.”

  “Of course you did. You’re worried about that girl,” Gus said. “Have you passed along the details of those men to the police?”

  “To my friend Mrs. Goodwin,” I said. “I know she’ll do what she can, but how does one track down two immigrants in New York City?”

  Nobody could answer this.

  “Have a hot croissant and some coffee, you’ll feel better,” Sid said, pushing a plate in front of me. I tried to eat, but I couldn’t. The New York Times lay on the table beside me. While they ate I thumbed through the pages, glancing at the headlines. Then I paused, reading a small article on an inside page: “Police raid Italian gang headquarters. Leading Sicilian crime figure taken into custody.” And underneath was an engraving of a man who looked very like the uncle who had come to visit me.

  “That’s him,” I shouted, almost making them spill their coffee. I tapped the paper with my finger. “I’m almost sure that’s him. The older one who came to pick up Jessie.”

  Sid peered over my shoulder. “ ‘Salvadore Alessi. Known to his gang members as the Don. Ruled over a brutal gang in which disloyalty was rewarded with death. Thought to be responsible for variety of crimes in and around New York, including protection rackets, bank robberies, and contract murders.’ ” She glanced up at me. “This does not sound like a very nice man, Molly.”

  “And he’s got Jessie.”

  “Given his reputation, one should conclude that Jessie is probably no longer alive,” Sid said gently. Gus gave a little gasp.