Murder on Amsterdam Avenue

by Victoria Thompson

  “Are you serious? People ask you for money?”

  “All the time. I had to move my mother and Brian here even though the house isn’t ready yet, just so they wouldn’t be bothered anymore.”

  “Where are they?” he asked, glancing around.

  “At the deaf school. Ma takes him every day and stays there, helping out.”

  “And you just sit here all by yourself?”

  “I’m supervising the workmen.” As if to illustrate his point, someone started pounding upstairs somewhere.

  “Do you miss the police work at all?”

  Frank had been asked to leave the police department when they found out he’d come into a fortune. “I miss the work. I don’t miss the rest of it.”

  Gino grinned. “Me, too. Especially after the army. If you think the department was bad, the army was ten times worse. They couldn’t even get supplies to us, and they only issued us one suit of clothes and one blanket each, so if anything happened . . .” His eyes clouded again. “I’ll never forget when we carried the wounded to the hospital tents or where the hospital was supposed to be, at least. The wounded men had lost their packs, and the doctors cut off their bloody clothes to bandage them up, and then they didn’t have so much as a shirt to put on them. The wounded were just laying in a field, right on the ground, buck naked most of them. If it hadn’t been for that lady, Clara Barton . . .”

  “I read about her in the newspapers.”

  “She sent her people out to buy bolts of fabric, and they cut it up to make sheets so the men didn’t have to lay on the bare ground. And the nurses she brought with her, well, I don’t know how many more men would’ve died if they hadn’t been there.” He stared off again, lost in the dark place Frank couldn’t see.

  “Have you talked to the chief?” Frank asked, trying to draw him back. “I’m sure he’ll give you your old job back if you want it.”

  “That’s just it. I’m not sure I do want it.”

  Frank didn’t want to point out that job opportunities for the son of Italian immigrants weren’t too plentiful in the city. “You don’t have to decide today, you know. You can take some time to get used to being home again. I’m sure things will look different to you in a few weeks.”

  “Things look different to me now, Mr. Malloy. I saw men die, men even younger than I am. They never got a chance to do anything with their lives. I feel like I owe them something because I lived and they didn’t.”

  “What do you think you owe them?”

  “I . . . I don’t know exactly, but I remember when I first joined the police, I thought I’d help make the city a better place.”

  “You thought you’d get rid of the criminals,” Frank guessed. “Lock them up and throw away the key.”

  “Yeah. It sounds stupid now, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Frank said gently. “We both know it isn’t going to happen, but that doesn’t mean we should quit trying.”

  “Are you still trying?”

  Frank sighed, suddenly realizing that he was. “As a matter of fact, I just took a new case yesterday.”

  For the first time since he’d walked in the door, Gino’s eyes lit with interest. “A case? You’re not back on the force, are you?”

  “No, of course not. One of Mr. Decker’s friends asked me to investigate his son’s death, though. We think he was poisoned.”

  “You’re a private detective, then,” Gino said. “Just like when we found those missing girls.”

  “I guess I am, at least right now.”

  “And you think he was poisoned?” Gino leaned forward, his eyes alive now in a way they hadn’t been just a minute ago. “Who do you think did it?”

  Frank leaned back in his own chair and studied the young man for a few seconds. “I’m not sure I should discuss the case with you.”

  Gino stiffened, obviously offended. “Why not?”

  “Because if you’re with the police—”

  “I’m not with the police!”

  Frank rubbed his chin, pretending to consider the matter. “On the other hand, if you worked for me, I could tell you.”

  “What do you mean, if I worked for you?”

  “Well, I’m probably going to need some help with this case, and you’re not doing anything right now . . .”

  Now he was really offended. “Wait, I didn’t come here looking for a handout or anything.”

  “I haven’t offered you a handout. I’ll pay you if you want to help me work on the case. This friend of Mr. Decker’s is going to pay me, after all. What do you think?”

  Plainly, Gino didn’t know what to think. “I . . . Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure of what? That you’re a good investigator? I know that you used to be, and unless something happened to you down in Cuba that made you forget everything you used to know, then I’m sure you’ll be able to help with this.”

  “I haven’t forgotten anything,” he insisted. “I wasn’t gone that long.”

  Frank grinned. “Well, then, you need to go home and change into some regular clothes and meet me at the coroner’s office to find out if this fellow was poisoned or not.”

  “And if he wasn’t?”

  Frank shrugged. “Then we’ll find another case to keep us busy.”

  • • •

  Gino was waiting for him outside Titus Wesley’s storefront office. He wore a brown suit, neatly pressed but a little tight in the shoulders, Frank noticed. Gino’s time in the army had put some muscle on him. His shirt collar was new and his tie neat. He even wore his bowler hat down low on his forehead instead of perched on the back of his head, as so many young men did. He was taking the private detective business seriously.

  “Why didn’t you use Doc Haynes for the autopsy?” Gino asked by way of greeting.

  “He’s too busy. Besides, when I started, I only had a dead cat. Doc wasn’t too happy about wasting his time on a cat.”

  “Why didn’t the family just go to the police in the first place?”

  Gino had clearly been thinking about the case while he’d been off changing his clothes. “The father, Mr. Oakes, didn’t want to alarm the women. There’s a wife and a mother and maybe a grandmother, too. No sense getting them all upset for no reason, at least until he’s sure.”

  Frank pushed open the door to Wesley’s shop, setting the bell to jangling. The sickening smell of death enveloped them. Frank hadn’t noticed it before, since he’d just carried a dead cat halfway across town the first time he’d been here. He’d blamed the smell on that.

  “Wesley, you here?”

  Gino, he noticed, was looking a little green.

  Wesley came out from the back room, once again wiping his hands on a filthy rag, and greeted them. Frank introduced Gino, and the young man didn’t offer to shake hands. Frank couldn’t blame him.

  “Donatelli here is going to be assisting me,” Frank explained. “Did you find out anything?”

  “Oh yes. The undertaker wasn’t too happy with me, I can tell you that, but I got the dead man’s organs. They hadn’t even removed them, thank God. They were able to sew him back up, as good as new, so no one will ever suspect that not all of him went into the ground. They complained bitterly about the extra work, though.”

  “And was he poisoned?”

  Wesley frowned. “You have to understand that coroners don’t automatically look for traces of poison. Unless it’s something obvious, like the mouth and throat are burned from something caustic, we never assume someone’s been poisoned.”

  “How do you find out, then?” Frank asked.

  “Most of the time we don’t. I suspect that there are hundreds of people poisoned every year, and the killer is never even suspected because no one looked for it at autopsy or no autopsy was even performed.”

  “Or the coroner was paid not to
notice it,” Frank guessed.

  Wesley gave him a small nod of acknowledgment. “In this case, however, someone did suspect, so I looked for it especially.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “I didn’t have much to work with, you understand. I could see the stomach and throat were irritated, but from what you described of his last hours, that’s what I would’ve expected. I didn’t see any ulcers or other damage, so if I was looking for a poison, I suspected arsenic. It’s very easy to obtain and doesn’t leave much trace unless the person has been poisoned over a long period of time. From what you told me, it sounds like this Oakes fellow was only sick for a few days, so I didn’t expect to see any traces of long-term exposure.”

  “How long would it have to be going on before you’d find that?” Gino asked.

  Frank looked at him in surprise, but Wesley was already responding. “A few weeks at least. Then I’d find it in the liver and kidneys. If it was longer, say a month or more, then I could find it in the fingernails and hair.”

  “In the fingernails?”

  “Yeah, there would be lines. The hair is the same, except there’s no lines.”

  Gino frowned. “How could somebody be taking arsenic for weeks or months and not die?”

  “Small amounts of arsenic will just make you sick. It builds up in the body over time, though, and eventually the organs begin to fail.”

  “Why would somebody give a person a dose too small to kill them, though?”

  Wesley grinned, obviously enjoying the conversation. “You’d have to ask that ‘somebody,’ but maybe they aren’t sure how much would be a fatal dose, so they don’t give the victim enough at first. Or maybe the person has a tolerance for it. Some people do, and the amount that would kill me in an hour might only make you a little sick.”

  “Or,” Frank said, glad to see his new assistant was curious but wanting to move the interview along, “the killer might want it to look like the victim had some mysterious illness the doctors couldn’t cure and eventually died of it.”

  “Oh, so no one would suspect poison,” Gino said.

  “That’s right. So was it arsenic?” Frank asked.

  “Oh yes. I did the Marsh test where you put the material on a zinc plate covered with sulfuric acid—”

  “This Marsh test,” Frank interrupted him, not interested in the details. “Is it something that’s scientifically official?”

  “You mean, would it be accepted in court?”

  “I guess that’s what I mean.”

  “Yes. It’s been around since the thirties, and the test is good on even the smallest amount of arsenic. I was also able to test the contents of the cat’s stomach, and I found arsenic there, too.”

  Frank knew he shouldn’t be pleased to hear that Charles Oakes had been poisoned. This meant a lot more heartache for the Oakes family. On the other hand, it also meant he didn’t have to spend all his days sitting in his new house, listening to the workmen pounding away.

  “If someone was getting poisoned, though, wouldn’t they notice the taste?” Gino asked.

  “With some poisons, yes, but arsenic doesn’t have a taste.”

  “So it might’ve been put into anything he drank,” Frank said.

  “Yes or anything he ate. It can take some time to work, too. Some poisons cause an immediate reaction, but with arsenic, depending on how big the dose is, the victim can go anywhere from half an hour to a whole day before they start showing a reaction.”

  “So even though our victim first got sick when he was away from home, he might’ve gotten poisoned there,” Frank said.

  “Yes, but from what we know about the milk and the dead cat, it looks like he got the final, fatal dose at home the night he died,” Wesley said.

  Frank told Wesley where to send his bill, and he and Gino stepped out onto the sidewalk and the noticeably fresher air.

  “How does he stand the stench?” Gino asked.

  “He probably doesn’t even smell it anymore.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Well, I’ve got to go tell Mr. Oakes that his son was murdered.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  Frank hated to dampen his enthusiasm, but he couldn’t bring a stranger to the Oakes house, at least not yet. “I want to see Oakes alone. There’s no telling how he’ll take the news, even if he’s expecting it, and he obviously is or he wouldn’t have hired me to investigate. Suspecting your son was murdered and finding out for sure that he was are two different things, though. Add to that the fact that he was killed in their house, so the killer must be someone close, well, Oakes might change his mind about finding out who did it. I don’t think he’d want a stranger there while we’re discussing the possibilities.”

  Gino nodded, obviously trying to hide his disappointment. “That makes sense.”

  “I’m thinking I need to tell Mrs. Brandt what we found out, though. She’ll be wondering, and I don’t want her doing anything silly, like going to call on Mrs. Oakes to find out.”

  As Frank had expected, Gino visibly brightened at the prospect of seeing Sarah. “You won’t mind if I go with you to Mrs. Brandt’s, will you?”

  “I won’t have time to see her before I go to visit Oakes. I want to get to him before the family sits down to supper. I was thinking you could go see Mrs. Brandt without me, though. You know as much as I do about the case now.”

  “I’d be happy to do that,” he said, looking more than happy to do that.

  “And maybe Maeve will give you a kiss to welcome you home.”

  “Wha . . . Why would she do that?” Gino stammered, blushing furiously.

  “No reason I can think of,” Frank confessed, “but a man can hope.”

  Frank and Sarah had more than once discussed the apparent attraction between Sarah’s nursemaid and the young policeman. Judging from Gino’s reaction just now, they’d been right about his feelings for the young lady. Her feelings were still not nearly as certain, at least not so far as Frank could tell. Knowing Maeve, though, she’d lead Gino on a merry chase, no matter what.

  “Oh well, I see,” Gino said, although he plainly didn’t see anything at all. “I’ll go right over and tell Mrs. Brandt what we know so far.”

  “You do that and tell her I’ll come by later to tell her what happened with Oakes.”

  “Should I wait there until you come?”

  “No, it’ll be late, but come to my house in the morning. We’ll all go to Charles Oakes’s funeral tomorrow.”

  3

  Sarah and Maeve were in the kitchen, discussing what to have for supper, when someone rang the doorbell.

  “Is it a baby?” Sarah’s daughter, Catherine, asked from where she’d been sitting at the kitchen table listening to their discussion.

  “I thought you were sending all your patients to other midwives now,” Maeve said.

  “I am, but you’ll remember that sometimes people just come knocking on my door with no warning because a woman went into labor and they know I’m a midwife. If it’s truly an emergency, I can’t refuse to help.”

  “I hope it’s not a baby,” Catherine said. “Because then we’ll just have sandwiches for supper.”

  Sarah was still smiling when she reached the front door. A young man’s silhouette showed through the glass, so she was very much afraid she really was being summoned to a delivery. Young men were most often the ones sent to fetch a midwife.

  When she opened the door, however, she saw that this young man was smiling much too widely to be involved in the anxiety of an imminent birth. She needed a moment to recognize him.

  “Gino! You’re back!” Without a thought for propriety, she grabbed his hand, pulled him inside, and threw her arms around him. “I’m so glad to see you,” she said as she released him to find him blushing furiously but looking very pleased. She hel
d him at arm’s length and looked him up and down. “I hardly recognized you without your police uniform. You’re thinner.”

  “That’s what my mother noticed first, too,” he said. “The army food was pretty bad.”

  “But you’re home and not wounded. That’s all that matters. Maeve! Catherine!” she called, “Gino is here.”

  But Catherine was already running through the front room, having heard Sarah greeting him. Maeve, she noticed, was close behind, coming as fast as her youthful dignity allowed.

  Catherine skidded to a stop when she reached him and frowned up at him, probably as confused as Sarah at seeing him in something other than his patrolman’s uniform.

  “Don’t I get a hug?” he asked, bending down to pick her up.

  “Are you really Officer Donatelli?” she asked.

  “Of course I am,” he said, making her smile again. She giggled and threw her slender arms around his neck.

  By then Maeve had reached him, too, and although her smile wasn’t nearly as wide as Catherine’s, her eyes were shining. “Welcome home,” she said as he set Catherine down.

  “It’s good to be home,” he replied.

  Now they were both blushing, and Sarah let them stare at each other for a minute or two before rescuing them. “Please come in, Gino, and I hope you can stay for supper. It’s nothing fancy since we weren’t expecting you, but you have to stay and tell us all about your adventures in Cuba.”

  “I’d be happy to, but Mr. Malloy actually sent me to tell you what the coroner discovered.”

  “How did you happen to be assigned that duty?” Sarah asked in surprise.

  “I called on him this morning at your new house—which looks like it will be very nice when it’s finished—and he hired me to help him on the case.”

  “Aren’t you going back to the police department?”

  “No, not . . . not right away, at least.”

  “That sounds like something else we’ll need to discuss when we’ve finished supper.” Sarah glanced meaningfully at Catherine. “Meanwhile, give me your hat and come into the kitchen while we fix us all something to eat.”