“She wouldn’t have needed to kill her husband either, which would eliminate her and Dudley as suspects. Do you think she knew?”
“If she did, she’s done a remarkable job of hiding it.”
“She did a remarkable job of hiding the morphine, too,” Malloy pointed out. “And she would have had to be an accomplished liar to keep her secret from her husband all that time.”
He was right, of course. A woman as desperate and unhappy as Letitia might be guilty of anything, innocent face or not. “So if she knew her marriage was bigamous, then she and Dudley probably didn’t kill Blackwell,” she reasoned.
“Unless the money was just as important to them as being together. If she wasn’t really married to Blackwell, she wasn’t entitled to anything he owned, either. Killing him while she was still his recognized wife would ensure she’d get his estate. And there wouldn’t be the messiness of a scandal, either.”
“So either way they have a motive for killing him,” Sarah realized.
A tap on the back door distracted them, and as Malloy had predicted, it was Mrs. Ellsworth bearing a pie.
“Mrs. Brandt said you enjoyed the one I sent over yesterday,” she explained to Malloy when she stepped into the kitchen.
“I did,” he admitted, doing his best to be gracious, even though Sarah could tell it was a strain.
“It’s the least I can do. If you can find Dr. Brandt’s killer, you will have done a great service.”
“I told you not to get your hopes up,” Malloy reminded her gently, for him. “There really isn’t much chance after all this time.”
“You can do it, if anyone can,” she said confidently. “It’s apple and raisin,” she added, setting the pie on the table. “There aren’t any good berries left this late in the year.”
“I’m sure it’s delicious,” Sarah said.
After some more meaningless conversation, Mrs. Ellsworth reluctantly left, wishing Malloy success in his quest.
“I didn’t realize that coming over here could be so dangerous,” Malloy remarked, looking admiringly at the pie. “If I’m not careful, I’ll be as big as a barn.”
“You don’t have to eat it,” Sarah said with a grin.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to eat it,” he replied, grinning back.
SARAH BRANDT STILL needed some training in being a cop, Malloy mused the next morning as he made his way down Essex Street toward the rooming house where Calvin Brown was staying. She’d met Peter Dudley, but she had no idea where he lived or how to find him. He worked at a bank somewhere was all she could tell him. Letitia Blackwell was hardly likely to be forthcoming with the information he needed either, even if he could get her to see him, which seemed still more unlikely. Short of waiting on the Blackwells’ front steps until Dudley showed up again, Frank had no other means of locating him. He was once again going to have to send Sarah Brandt on police business to obtain the necessary information.
Mrs. Zimmerman answered his knock at the rooming-house door. She patted her carelessly dressed hair, as if making sure she looked her best for her visitor. “Mr. Malloy, how nice to see you,” she said with a smile so broad, it showed her missing molars. Frank thought she might be trying to flirt with him, so he played along.
“It’s very nice to see you, too, Mrs. Zimmerman. How’s young Calvin doing?” he asked, stepping into the house.
“The same as always. He’s been quiet as a mouse this morning. Didn’t even come down for breakfast.”
“Is that like him?” Frank asked, a little disturbed by this news. She hadn’t seen Calvin this morning and hadn’t checked to see if he was still there. Maybe Potter was right, and the boy had finally fled. He didn’t like the idea of explaining that to Potter.
“No, come to think of it, it isn’t like him at all,” she admitted with a frown. “I just thought ... He gets up real early. Maybe he was down and got something before I was up this morning. He does that sometimes ...”
Frank didn’t wait for her to show him upstairs. He took the steps two at a time, instinct telling him something was wrong. If the boy had escaped, Potter would be furious with him, and rightly so.
He knocked on the door. “Calvin?” he called, and received no answer.
The knob turned easily in his hand, and he threw the door open. To his great relief, he saw Calvin still curled up beneath his covers on the bed, fast asleep.
“Calvin, wake up!” Malloy called pleasantly, going over to shake him. But when he touched the boy’s shoulder, he felt the chill and stiffness of his body.
Calvin Brown was dead.
10
“IT’S NO MYSTERY HOW HE DIED,” THE CORONER explained, having given Calvin’s body only a cursory examination. “The arsenic is sitting in plain sight and see how yellow his face is? That’s always a sure sign of arsenic poisoning.”
Frank had to admit he was right. Calvin had left the box of rat poison out on the dresser. An empty bottle of sarsaparilla sat on the table and had apparently been mixed with the poison to kill the taste.
“There’s the suicide note, too,” the coroner pointed out. “That’s usually enough to convince most people it’s a suicide.”
Frank ignored his sarcasm. He just didn’t want to make a mistake. Or rather, he just didn’t want to be wrong about Calvin Brown. He’d been so certain the boy was innocent, and truth to tell, he’d wanted the boy to be innocent. But here it was, a confession written with his own hand right before he’d taken his own life.
“Dear Mother,” he’d written. “I can’t live with this no more. I shot father and tried to make it look like he killed himself. He refused to help us or even to admit he was my father. I couldn’t stand thinking that he was living so rich while you worked so hard to support us. I’m sorry I did this, and I don’t want to bring more shame on the family by being arrested for it. I love you and the girls.” He’d signed it, “Calvin.”
Frank swore silently as he stuffed the note into his pocket. This didn’t make sense. The boy hadn’t acted a bit guilty, and Frank considered himself an expert in judging such matters. He also hadn’t run away, which would have been the only sensible thing to do if he’d killed his father. And certainly far less drastic than killing himself. There was an irony here, he supposed. Calvin had tried to make his father’s death look like a suicide, and now he’d committed suicide himself.
“He went awful quick,” the coroner said, as if offering Frank comfort. “It’s a mercy. Sometimes they suffer for days.”
Frank had seen the results of such suffering, and he could only be glad Calvin had given himself a large enough dose so that he succumbed almost immediately. “Tell them they can take the body away,” Frank said. “I’ll get his things together to send back to his mother.”
He could have left this for the landlady, but for some reason he felt he had to do it himself. It would be a penance of some sort, to help assuage the guilt he was feeling for his own mistakes. If he’d arrested Calvin, at least the boy would still be alive.
As he collected Calvin’s meager belongings and laid them into the cheap suitcase he’d carried with him from Virginia, Frank couldn’t help thinking how gratified Amos Potter would be to have been proved right. Collecting the reward for solving this case would give Frank no pleasure, though.
While he was putting away the last of Calvin’s things, the orderlies came to fetch the body. They had a time of it, since Calvin was still stiff. When they’d gotten him on the stretcher, lying on his side because he was fixed in a fetal position, he looked small and vulnerable under the sheet, like a child curled up for warmth or safety. It didn’t seem fair that a boy so young should have cut his life short because of a man like Edmund Blackwell. But then, as Frank had learned only too well, life was seldom fair.
When all trace of Calvin Brown had been removed from the room, Frank started down the steps after the orderlies, carrying the boy’s suitcase. He should write Mrs. Brown a letter, explaining what had happened, he thought. That
was when he realized he didn’t know Mrs. Brown’s address. Calvin had carelessly not written it on his note, either.
Frank stopped at the bottom of the stairs and saw Mrs. Zimmerman, the landlady, sitting in the parlor, weeping softly into her handkerchief.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said.
She looked up, her red-rimmed eyes brimming. “Oh, Mr. Malloy, I’m so glad you was the one who found him. That sweet boy, I don’t know if I could’ve stood it or not. I should’ve knowed something was wrong, though. I should’ve gone up to check when he didn’t come down to breakfast. Maybe if I had—”
“The coroner said he died real quick,” Malloy said by way of comfort. No use in the woman torturing herself. “There was nothing you could’ve done.”
“I wish he’d come and talked to me if he was feeling poorly. Maybe I could’ve said something to stop him.”
“I wish he’d come to me, too,” Frank said, “but he didn’t. Sometimes, you just can’t help, Mrs. Zimmerman. If someone is determined to kill themselves, they’ll do it. There is something I’d like to ask you, though.”
“Oh,” she said, as if remembering. “You’ll be wanting a refund on the rent you paid for him. There’s three days left, I think. I’ll get—”
“No, it’s not that,” Frank said. “You keep the money, for your trouble. It’s just ... I packed his things to send them home, but I don’t know his address. I was wondering if you had any idea—”
“Oh, my, yes! I’d almost forgot. He give me a letter to mail to his dear mother just yesterday. Wait right here, I’ll fetch it.”
Calvin had written to his mother yesterday. He’d made his decision quickly, then. He wouldn’t have bothered with a letter if he’d known he was going to be leaving a suicide note so soon. What could have caused him to decide to do something like that when he seemed to be getting away with the crime? Certainly, he had every reason to believe he’d fooled Frank, at least.
Before Frank could make any sense of it, Mrs. Zimmerman was back. She held out an envelope to him with one hand while she dabbed a damp handkerchief at her nose with the other.
The envelope was cheap, and the address had been printed in a bold, childish scrawl in pencil. Frank stared at the address for a long moment, trying to identify what was wrong. Finally, it all came together in his mind. He ripped open the envelope.
“What are you doing?” Mrs. Zimmerman cried. “That’s the last thing he wrote to his dear mother! Don’t you have any respect at all?”
Frank ignored her. He pulled the folded paper out of the envelope and scanned its contents. “Dear Ma,” it began, and that’s when Frank knew the truth.
“Did Calvin have any visitors yesterday?” he asked, interrupting the landlady, who was still expressing her outrage.
“Visitors?” she scoffed angrily. “He didn’t know nobody in town but you! Nobody ever come to see him.”
“Are you sure? Could someone else have let a visitor in without you knowing it? One of the other tenants, maybe?”
Mrs. Zimmerman stared at him for a long moment, trying to make sense of his question. “Why do you think he had a visitor?”
“Because Calvin didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.”
“CALVIN WAS MURDERED?” Sarah exclaimed in horror as she admitted Malloy to her house. She’d known the moment she saw him that something terrible had happened, and he’d been eager to unburden himself. “When? How?”
“The killer tried to make it look like a suicide again,” he said, taking off his hat and hanging it on the stand by the door. It occurred to her that he was becoming very comfortable in her home, but for some reason, the knowledge didn’t bother her as it should have.
“The boy was shot?” Sarah asked. “Didn’t someone hear it?”
“No, he was poisoned. Arsenic.”
“Oh, my.” She felt sick to her stomach. “I hardly knew him, but he was so young. He seemed like such a nice boy. And his poor mother ...”
“Yeah, this is going to be real hard on her. She’ll probably blame herself for letting him come here in the first place.”
“Of course, we’re assuming she’s the kind of woman who would blame herself,” Sarah said.
“Calvin was pretty fond of her, so she must’ve been a good mother. Don’t forget, she supported the family alone after her husband left her.”
“You’re right, of course. I guess I was just hoping that she’d be the kind of person who wouldn’t take her son’s death so hard. I know the pain she’ll feel.”
Malloy didn’t say anything to that. He understood that pain, too, but he wasn’t going to discuss the subject with her. She realized they were still standing by the front door.
“Come in and sit down. Can I get you some coffee?”
A few moments later they were sitting in her kitchen. She cut him a slice of the cake Mrs. Ellsworth had brought over that afternoon to have along with the coffee she was boiling. When she set the plate in front of him, she saw that he’d spread two pieces of paper out on the table for her to see.
“Look at these, and tell me what you think. This is the suicide note.” He slid one over to her as she took her seat opposite him.
She winced as she read the words, and tears stung her eyes. She’d hardly known the boy, but he’d been far too young to die under any circumstances. “If you found this, why do you think he was murdered?” she asked when she’d finished.
He slid the other piece of paper over to her. It was the kind of letter a boy would write to his mother, telling her what he’d been doing and about the people he’d met. Malloy had made a big impression on the boy. He was a little afraid of the police detective, but Malloy had been very kind to him, even paying the rent so he could stay in his rooming house. Of course, Sarah knew this had been a ploy to make sure Calvin didn’t disappear, but even so, it was a kind one. He could have locked the boy up instead. Locking him up would have ensured he didn’t leave town, while leaving him in the rooming house was a gamble. The boy’s homesickness was palpable through his simple words, as was his love for his mother and sisters. One other thing was also obvious.
“Calvin didn’t write the suicide note,” she realized.
“What makes you think so?” he asked.
“The handwriting, for one thing,” she said, comparing the two letters. The letter to Mrs. Brown was written in a large childish hand, the letters formed carefully but awkwardly, as if by one to whom writing was an unwelcome chore. “Whoever wrote the suicide note was trying to make it look like a young person wrote it, but the printing is too small and neat to be Calvin’s.”
“How about what he wrote?”
Sarah compared the two letters more closely. “He calls his mother ‘Ma’ in the one and ‘Mother’ in the other. His grammar is much better in the suicide note, too.”
“That’s what I thought. I noticed the ‘Ma’ thing right away. And the handwriting. But if he hadn’t written the letter to his mother the day before, I might never have figured it out.”
“Or if he’d mailed it before you got to see it,” Sarah added. “I’m surprised the killer didn’t dispose of it.”
“I’m sure he would have, if he was clever enough or if he’d seen it at all, but Calvin had given it to his landlady to mail.”
“Thank heaven she hadn’t mailed it yet,” Sarah said with a sigh, laying the letters back down on the table. “Now you have two murders to solve. Do you have any idea who would have wanted to kill both Blackwell and his son?”
“We know it had to be someone who knew about Blackwell’s first family. Out of those, just about anybody who wanted Blackwell dead, and probably all of them had a good reason to.”
“That probably eliminates Letitia and Dudley,” she guessed, “since they didn’t know about Blackwell’s other family.”
“Not necessarily. We assumed Letitia didn’t know about Calvin, but we could be wrong. As you pointed out, she wouldn’t have needed a divorce to marry Dudley if her marriage to B
lackwell was bigamous, but she would need to be a widow to inherit his imaginary fortune to support her and Dudley.”
“And to escape any hint of scandal,” Sarah pointed out. “Even if she was an innocent victim of the bigamy, her reputation would be tarnished. That would have been a motive for anyone who cared about Letitia, too.”
“Do you mean her father?” Malloy asked with raised eyebrows.
“Her father or her lover,” Sarah said. “Or even Amos Potter, if he hadn’t already eliminated himself by offering a reward for Blackwell’s killer.”
“You’re going to have to forgive him for that, Mrs. Brandt,” Malloy said with just a ghost of a smile as he took a bite of Mrs. Ellsworth’s cake.
“I’ll try,” Sarah promised. “Calvin’s killer must have gone to his room. Didn’t anyone see him?”
“Not that I could find,” he said. “One of the other tenants did remember someone out on the street asking if Calvin lived in the house, but that was earlier in the day, and the man didn’t go inside.”
“What did he look like?” Sarah asked eagerly. “That should tell us something.”
Malloy just shook his head. “Mr. Snively doesn’t remember. He’s quite elderly, and his memory and his eyesight aren’t too good anymore.”
Sarah sighed in disappointment. “And nobody saw or heard the killer going in or coming out?”
“Not that they remember. He must have gotten in earlier in the evening, before the doors were locked, and he could have sneaked out later, after everyone was in bed. My guess is he brought Calvin a bottle of sarsaparilla that had been laced with arsenic. The boy drank it down, then started to feel sick. The killer probably helped him to bed and maybe even fussed over him a bit, to prevent him from calling for the landlady. The killer would have left the box of rat poison sitting in plain sight and put the suicide note out on the table, and then sneaked out. A pretty good plan, and I would’ve believed it if it wasn’t for the letter the boy had just written to his mother.”
Murder on Gramercy Park Page 19
