Uncle Dan’s secretary tapped on his door and entered. “Good morning, Mr. Cavanaugh. Miss Morgan isn’t here yet, but is there something I can do for you?”
“Mornin’, Miss Cassidy. Would you try to get Mrs. Cavanaugh on the telephone for me? It’s early, I know, but she isn’t sleepin’ so well these days.”
Miss Cassidy smiled. “Of course, sir. I believe the switchboard is open, so it should take only a moment.”
A few moments later the telephone on Patrick’s desk rang. He pulled it toward him, picked up the handset, and held it to his ear. “Hilda? Is that you?”
“Yes. What is the matter?”
Her voice sounded anxious and Patrick hastened to reassure her. “Nothin’s wrong. I just wanted to know—what was it Aunt Molly said to you yesterday? You said she was actin’ funny, not like herself, hintin’ things.”
“Patrick! Can this not wait? I have not yet had any coffee.”
“I need to know now, darlin’, whatever you can remember.”
Hilda sighed. Patrick could hear it even over the scratchy telephone wire. “She said that something had happened—no, that something had developed. ‘There has been a development,’ that is it. And she said she would not tell me about it.”
“And that’s all?”
“She said, over and over again, that I was not to ask any more about the troubles. ‘There is great danger,’ she said. But she would not explain.”
“Well, me dear, I can tell you what the development is. About the danger, the added danger, I mean, I don’t know. But as to what Aunt Molly wouldn’t tell you—it’s not good news, darlin’ girl.”
“Patrick! What?”
“I’m not even sure I should tell you, not like this, over the telephone. People are maybe listenin’. And I’d rather be with you.”
“You are as bad as Aunt Molly! You are teasing me, Patrick.”
“I wouldn’t tease about somethin’ this serious, You’re not goin’ to like it, Hilda, but—well, Clancy’s back.”
There was dead silence save for the crackles on the wire.
“Hilda? Hilda, you there?”
“I am here, Patrick. You are right, I do not like it. I remember what Clancy did to me, and to Uncle Dan.” Three years before, Clancy had been involved with a group of men who, among other things, had murdered a man, had kidnapped Hilda and left her to die, and had badly mistreated Uncle Dan—his own father. Granted, Clancy had not done the deeds himself, but he had known of them and had abetted the others. Hilda shivered at the memory. “He is not a good person, your cousin Clancy. Why has he come?”
“That’s what he’s not tellin’, or not tellin’ me, anyway. He came to see me in my office, just to taunt me, but he wouldn’t say what he wanted.”
“Whatever it is, it can be nothing good.” She paused. “I am afraid, a little, Patrick.”
From Hilda, that was a devastating admission. “I’m comin’ home, darlin’,” said Patrick.
“No, Patrick! Wait! Is Clancy still there, at the store?”
“He was a minute ago. I think he still is, in talkin’ with Uncle Dan.”
“Then stay and find out what you can about Clancy’s purpose. He has a purpose, Patrick. He did not come back here yoost to see his family.”
“And well I know that! He’s not sentimental, our Clancy, not like most of the Irish. Family means nothin’ to him atall. He’s out for himself, for money and more money, and if it means he has to do mischief to get it, that doesn’t bother him.”
“He likes it, I think. Mischief. Menace. He is a gambler, and a bad man. When you know what he wants, come home and tell me. I will feel safer when you are here.”
“I’ll be there the minute I can. Lock the doors, Hilda.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Dan Malloy was having a difficult interview with his son.
“I told you not to come to the store, Clancy.”
“And where else can I see you? Riggs won’t let me in the house, and I can guess by whose orders.”
“Yes, my butler is obeying my orders, and they’re for your sake as much as mine. Have you forgotten, boy, that you’re still in deep trouble in South Bend? That affair of Bishop’s murder is still an open case, and it wasn’t all that long ago. You left this city in disgrace, with the understanding that you were not to come back. I’m not the only one in town who knows how heavily involved you were.”
Clancy’s face darkened. “Yes, you and Ma and me lovin’ cousin and that meddlesome girlfriend of his! He took on a pile of trouble when he married that one.”
Dan ignored the outburst. “We had a bargain, Clancy. I refrained from turning you over to the police, and gave you enough money for a good start elsewhere. You appear to have prospered, and I’m happy for you if it was done honestly, about which I admit I have some doubt. But you haven’t kept your part of the bargain. I don’t know why you’ve come home, but you must leave immediately. If the police learn that you’re in town, I won’t be responsible for their actions.”
“I suppose you’d tell ’em. No fatted calf, just a call to the law. Some lovin’ family I’ve got.”
“No,” said Dan heavily. “No, I’ll not tell them. Not unless you get yourself into more trouble. You’re still my son. But if you remember the rest of the story you just referred to, that prodigal son returned home in rags, and repentant. I see no sign of repentance in your behavior. Quite the opposite, in fact. You’re gloating.”
“First time you’ve been right.” Clancy sprawled in his chair. “Damn right I’m gloating. I didn’t do anything so awful, and if I did I’ve paid for it. I nearly starved those first few months, until I landed on my feet.”
“I gave you plenty of money. What did—”
“None of your business what I did with it. I’m doing well now. Better than well. I’m doing just fine, thank you very much, and I can’t wait to shake the dust of this hick town off my feet. But I came here to do some business, and I’m not leaving till I’ve done it.”
“What business?” Dan’s voice was full of foreboding.
“That’s no affair of yours, either. I never meddled with your business, and I’ll thank you not to meddle with mine. The point is, I’m goin’ to be here for a few days. Do you want me to stay at the Oliver, where everyone will know who I am in five minutes, or will you tell that snooty butler to let me in to my own home?”
“It’s not your home now,” Dan said sharply. “Where did you stay last night?”
Clancy grinned. “Here. Stayed in after the place closed up for the night. There’s a nice comfortable couch in the Ladies’ Retiring Room. You need a better night watchman, Father dear. He made one round to make sure everyone was out and then curled up to sleep in his own little cubbyhole.”
“He was tired. He’d had almost no sleep the night before.”
Clancy smiled oddly, and Dan frowned. “Clancy, I’m losing my patience. You’ve put me in an impossible situation. Have you no sense of responsibility?”
“Why should I feel responsible to you? You threw me out of my home, told me I was no longer welcome under your roof, and put my cousin in the place I should have had. The hell with you! I’m responsible to my boss, and I tell you, he’ll not be happy if I don’t get my job done.”
“And if it’s an honest job, I’ll eat my hat!” Dan’s patience had snapped. He began shouting. “How did I come to have such a son? The only one who survived, and look at you! Oh, I suppose you’ll have to come to the house, but we’ll need to be discreet about it. You can come home with me, in the carriage, and go in the back way—no!” He stood and slammed his fist on the desk. “No, it won’t do. You’d be coming and going as you pleased, and someone would see. I can’t have this, Clancy!”
Dan’s face had been growing more and more purple. Now he dropped back on his chair and clapped a hand to his chest. “I don’t—I think—” His head sagged.
Clancy pulled the office door open and scuttled down the corridor toward the fir
e escape. He didn’t notice Patrick, who had been standing outside the door.
Patrick made no attempt to run after Clancy. He rushed into the office. “Uncle Dan!”
“Get—doctor—heart—”
* * *
The doctor got there in minutes, since his office was just across the street. Uncle Dan had lost consciousness by that time, and the doctor looked grave when he had finished examining him. “He is not a young man, but he has great strength. There is some hope for his recovery. He must be taken home at once and given the best of care. With rest and calm and no excitement, he’ll survive this. Otherwise...” The doctor spread his hands.
Patrick had telephoned Aunt Molly, so she was ready when Dan arrived home in the care of Doctor McNamara, a nurse, and Patrick. She ignored the mud on their shoes and the water they were dripping on her precious Persian rugs.
“Patrick,” she asked in an undertone, “was this—what brought this on?”
“Clancy,” he replied. “I’m sorry to have to tell you.”
“I thought as much.”
She turned away and gave her full attention to getting Dan settled and comfortable. Patrick helped where he could and got out of the way when he saw that he wasn’t needed.
He was about to leave the house when Riggs, the butler, approached him. “Excuse me, Mr. Patrick. Your aunt would like you to stay for a moment if you have time.”
“Of course, as much time as she wants. This is a terrible thing, Riggs.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Malloy is a very fine gentleman.” The old man’s face worked a little. He turned away.
“He’ll pull through, Riggs. Oh, and your orders about my cousin Clancy?”
“Yes, sir?”
“They stand. If you so much as see his face around here, call the police.”
Riggs nodded, looking grim. “Yes, indeed, sir.” He, too, had suffered much at the hands of Clancy Malloy.
Aunt Molly came downstairs looking tired, and shockingly to Patrick, old. It had never before been so forcefully brought home to him that his aunt and uncle would age like everyone else, and someday would die.
She sat down in her favorite chair in the drawing room, her tiny feet up on a needlepoint footstool.
Patrick knelt by her side and took her hands in his. They were ice cold, despite the little lace mitts she wore.
“How is he?”
“Comfortable, they say. He looks...” Her mouth quivered and she turned away, like Riggs.
“Aunt Molly, he’s strong. He’ll pull through this.”
Molly waved that away, her mouth firm again. “I think he will. It’s not that that’s eating away at me. His own son, Patrick! My son.” She bit her lip so hard it bled a little. She touched her handkerchief to her mouth.
“He’s changed since I knew him,” said Patrick, trying to find a way to comfort her. “Bad associates...”
“He chose his associates.” Molly had herself under full control again. “He has made his bed, and he must lie in it. I won’t turn him in to the police—not yet—but I will not, I will not allow him to harm his father anymore.” She paused. “Patrick, yesterday I went to Hilda and tried to make her promise she would go no further with this investigation. I suppose she told you?”
Patrick nodded.
“And I suppose she told you she made no such promise.”
He nodded again.
“I have changed my mind. Yet again. She will think I am as vacillating as a windmill.”
“That she will not. She knows you.”
“Well, then, tell her from me that I want her, I need her to find out anything she can. It will be difficult and very likely dangerous. You, of course, may have something to say about the matter. She’s your wife, and it’s your child she’s carrying.”
Patrick shook his head. “I won’t tell her what to do. I’ve made her promise not to do anything foolish, and to tell me before she does anything at all. Beyond that...”
“Patrick.” Aunt Molly looked at him fixedly. “You know the truth, do you not?”
“I—Aunt Molly, what do you mean?”
“Ah, Patrick, don’t try to pretend with me. I’ve been able to see right through you since you were two. You know as well as I do that Clancy is in all this, in it right up to his fool neck.” Her voice was steady, but her face wore a mask of deep pain.
11
...the committee was assured...that Mr. Debs would be here on Thursday night [July 6], and that he would be in the convention on Friday....
—Minutes of the IWW Founding Convention, 1905
Patrick went home. There were things to be done at the store, urgent things, but first he had to see Hilda, hold her.
She met him at the door, unlocking it and rushing into his arms. They said nothing for a little time, then he held her away from him. She had been crying; her eyes were red and there were tracks of tears on her cheeks.
“How is he?” she asked.
“You heard, then.”
She nodded. “Aunt Molly had Riggs call me. Will he—he will not die?”
Patrick had tried to be cheerful with Riggs and Molly. With Hilda he could only be truthful. “We don’t know yet, acushla. The doctor says he’s comfortable, whatever that means. Honestly, Hilda, if nothin’ else awful happens, I think he may be all right. He’s strong and he’s always kept himself healthy. But just now, there’s no tellin’.”
“How did this awful thing happen?”
“Riggs didn’t tell you that? Well, maybe he didn’t know. It was Clancy—you might know. He was in Uncle Dan’s office, and I was listenin’ in the hall. Clancy was bein’ just about as mean as he knows how to be, tellin’ his father he had to let him stay at the house—”
“Why? Why would Clancy even want to stay there, after all that happened?”
“I suppose so he doesn’t have to pay a hotel bill, for all he’s braggin’ about bein’ rich. I don’t know. But he does. But Uncle Dan said he couldn’t, and he’d have to leave or go to jail, and then Clancy got all highfalutin and talked about the prodigal son, and said he wasn’t leavin’ town till he’d done some business.”
“What business does he have here?” Hilda sounded a little panicky.
“He wouldn’t say, but he said somethin’ about his ‘boss,’ so I guess he’s workin’ for somebody.”
“He did not say who?”
“No. I guess he might have, maybe, but then Uncle Dan started gettin’ really mad and then Clancy hightailed it out of the office and I went in and saw Dan was bad, and—you know the rest.”
“Clancy left the office? His father was maybe dying and he left?”
“That’s Clancy for you. He never did think of anybody but himself. Hilda, if you’re goin’ to be all right, I’ve got to get back to the store. What with bein’ closed two days in a row, we’re goin’ to lose a lot of business if I don’t get meself busy.”
“Yes.” Hilda’s mind was elsewhere. Patrick dropped a hasty kiss on her nose, patted her tummy, and turned to go.
“Wait. Patrick, you will ask questions at the store, yes? Because someone may know something. We must talk to everyone we can. Or—you must, and everyone else I know. I cannot.”
“If I have time, I will, I promise.”
“And one more thing. Can you stop at the police station on your way to work, and ask Sergeant Lefkowicz to come and see me?”
Alarmed, he turned back. “You’re not goin’ to tell him about Clancy? Because Aunt Molly said we weren’t to turn him in.”
“I would like to tell him, but I will not if you say so. But I am going to tell him everything else. It is time for all this to stop, and for that I need the help of the police.”
If the matter had been less serious, Patrick would have smiled at that. The police helping Hilda, indeed! Probably the police would say that it was she who had, on occasion, been of some slight assistance to them.
But now was not the time to share the joke with her. “I’ll find Lefkowicz for you,”
he said briefly, and went back out into the rain.
The sergeant was tired when he showed up at Hilda’s door, and more than a little wary. He was just going off duty, and although he had in the past had a good deal to do with Hilda, and liked her, some of those past dealings had gotten him into trouble with his superiors. And all of them, he seemed to remember, had involved his doing quite a lot of extra work. At the end of a day that had begun with a call to a domestic fracas early in the morning and had not improved since, he wasn’t sure he wanted to listen to what Hilda had to say. He rang the bell with some trepidation.
No one had thought to tell him about Hilda’s condition, so he was covered with confusion when he was shown into her parlor and found her on the couch, her feet up and her mid-section well in evidence.
“Oh—er—how do you do, Miss Hilda—that is—Mrs. Cavanaugh. I hope you are well?” His face, normally pale, was a fiery red.
“I am quite well, thank you, but the doctor has told me to put my feet up every day, now that we are expecting an addition to the family. That is why I asked you to come to me, instead of coming to you. I am sorry if it is not a good time for you.”
“Oh, no, ma’am, I don’t mind—I mean, a lady couldn’t come to the police station.”
Hilda had gone to the police station often in the past, but she smiled to herself. Certainly it was no place for a lady, especially not a lady soon to be a mother.
“Good. Sit down, please, and would you like something to drink? Coffee, tea, lemonade?”
What the sergeant really wanted after the day he’d had was something stronger, something to warm his rain-chilled body, but he didn’t think it polite to say so. “Whatever you’re having, ma’am.”
Hilda rang for Eileen and asked for tea for two, and whispered something to her. “Now, then, Sergeant,” she said when Eileen had gone to the kitchen, “I asked you to come here to talk about serious things. About train wrecks, and fires, and who is responsible for them. You have helped me so much in the past, and as you see, I cannot go out and find out things for myself.”
Lefkowicz blushed again and murmured something inaudible.
Murder in Burnt Orange Page 8
