Murder on Pleasant Avenue

by Victoria Thompson

  “Why not?” Maeve asked.

  “Because Esposito had bought her all new clothes.”

  “He had? How do you know?” Sarah asked.

  “Remember when Teo and I searched the flat after Esposito died? I told you we found a bunch of women’s clothes there, all expensive and brand new, according to Teo.”

  “That’s right,” Sarah said. “We wondered then if he’d been trying to win her over with them. Wasn’t there a silver dresser set, too?”

  “Yes, and one set of clothes that were old, like she’d left them behind and worn something new when she left,” Malloy said.

  “And Jane had that fancy new suit when she returned from her supposed kidnapping,” Sarah recalled. “I’d assumed it was hers, although I’d wondered why she would have dressed so well for working in the neighborhood. So all those clothes were apparently for her.”

  “So if Jane had all those clothes at the flat and didn’t need to take her old clothes with her from the settlement house when she went back there, why was she carrying a bag?” Gino asked.

  Maeve jerked in her chair. “I know! She wasn’t taking her old clothes with her. She was going to get the new clothes and bring them back with her to the settlement!”

  “Of course!” Sarah cried. “Because how could a girl who loved nice things leave all those lovely clothes behind? Why didn’t we think of that before?”

  “Because we didn’t know about the bag before,” Gino said.

  Even Malloy was nodding. “Teo and I even talked about how the woman might have wanted to take the rest of the clothes with her, but she must not have had anything to carry them in. But then we found an empty Gladstone bag in the flat, so we decided she must not have intended to leave for good.”

  “Could that have been Jane’s bag that you found?” Sarah asked. “Did Mr. McWilliam mention if she still had it with her when she ran out?”

  “She couldn’t have,” Maeve said. “I just remembered. Kate Westrop, the woman who showed me around the settlement, told me Jane threw a hissy fit the morning that Lisa Prince came to get her. Jane couldn’t find her Gladstone bag to pack her things, and she ended up taking Kate’s.”

  “There,” Gino said in triumph. “That’s proof that Jane went back to the flat that night.”

  But was it? Sarah wondered. Was it enough to prove Jane Harding killed both Esposito and his wife? “It’s enough for us, but probably not for a court of law.”

  Before anyone could argue, someone started pounding on their front door.

  “What on earth?” Sarah said, going to the parlor door. Malloy was close behind her.

  Their maid had already reached it and opened it to a well-dressed man who appeared to be in a fury. “Is this the Malloy house?” he demanded.

  “Mr. Prince,” Sarah said, hurrying out into the entrance hall. “What on earth is wrong?”

  He pushed past Hattie, stopping short when Frank stepped up beside Sarah. “Are you Malloy?”

  “Yes, I am, and you must be Joe Prince,” Malloy said, holding his own temper with difficulty at this rude invasion of his home.

  “That’s right, and I’ve come to tell you to leave my wife alone.”

  “Has something happened?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes. She told me last night about your visit yesterday, Mrs. Malloy. I must say, I do not appreciate your interference in what is a sensitive family matter. Lisa is extremely upset.”

  “I know she is, but I urged her to write to Jane Harding’s parents immediately and ask them to come and get her.”

  Mr. Prince made a visible effort to calm himself. “So my wife told me. She had already written the letter, which I mailed myself this morning, but then your telegram came and . . . Well, she’s worried herself into a state and made herself ill, so I must ask that you stop trying to involve our family in this very sordid business.”

  “Did you say your wife is ill, Mr. Prince?” Sarah asked in alarm.

  “Yes, she’s made herself physically ill with worry and—”

  “May I ask what is wrong with her? What her symptoms are?”

  “That’s really none of your business, Mrs. Malloy,” he said stiffly, which confirmed Sarah’s worst fears.

  “Have you sent for a doctor?”

  “No, it’s just a stomach upset—”

  “I must see her immediately, Mr. Prince. I’m a nurse. How did you come here?”

  Her obvious alarm had alarmed him, too. “I . . . I got a cab . . .”

  “Gino,” she called unnecessarily, since Gino and Maeve had also come into the hall. “Bring the motor around.” Gino ran out the still-opened door.

  “I’m going with you,” Malloy said.

  “What is it?” Prince asked, truly frightened now.

  “We’ll explain on the way,” Sarah said.

  * * *

  * * *

  Joe Prince gave Maeve his doctor’s name so she could telephone and have him go to their house at once. Sarah sat in the back seat with Joe and told him what she could over the roar of the engine. By the time they arrived at the Prince house, he was completely terrified for his wife.

  Gino had barely stopped the motorcar in front of his house before Prince had thrown open the door and jumped down. By the time he had unlocked the front door, Sarah had caught up with him, and Malloy was right behind her.

  Prince ran up the stairs with Sarah following. On the third floor, he reached one of the doors and pushed it open. He froze there for a moment, and Sarah could see past him into the room. Lisa was sitting up in the bed, and Jane was handing her a teacup. They had both looked up in surprise at the interruption.

  “Stop!” Sarah cried. “Don’t drink that!”

  Joe charged into the room, around the bed, and knocked Jane to the floor.

  Sarah ran to the other side of the bed and snatched the cup from Lisa’s fingers.

  “What in heaven’s name . . . ?” she cried. “Joe, what are you doing?”

  “We have to save the tea,” Sarah said, carefully cradling the cup. “So it can be tested.”

  “Tested for what?” Lisa asked, completely bewildered.

  “Arsenic,” Prince said between clenched teeth as he glared down at where Jane lay on the floor, glaring up at him. “She was poisoning you.”

  “What?” Lisa cried, staring down in horror at Jane. “Why would she poison me?”

  “I only gave her a little,” Jane said, glaring back at Lisa with hate-filled eyes. “If she was sick, she’d let me stay to take care of her instead of sending me back home. I won’t go back there, Lisa. You should know that.”

  They all stared at her in horror for a long moment. Then Prince turned to Sarah. “What shall we do with her?”

  “Is there someplace you can lock her up? We’ll need to get the police.”

  “The police?” Lisa echoed in amazement.

  “She tried to kill you, darling,” Prince said. He grabbed Jane’s arm and hauled her to her feet.

  “You’re hurting me,” Jane cried.

  “Good,” Prince said, force-marching her out of the room.

  Lisa looked up at Sarah. “Did she really try to poison me?”

  Sarah glanced at the cup she was still cradling. “We’ll soon find out, but yes, from what your husband told me, I’m sure she was. That’s how she killed Mrs. Esposito.”

  “Sarah, what’s going on?” Malloy’s voice called from downstairs.

  “I’ll be right back,” Sarah said, and hurried out.

  Joe Prince was returning from having locked Jane in her room. “Will Lisa be all right?” he asked her anxiously.

  “The doctor should be on his way. Meanwhile, I’ll get her some milk to drink. That binds the arsenic.” Sarah didn’t like to think how she’d learned this sad fact. “Go in and sit with her.”

>   He nodded and hurried back into the bedroom. Sarah walked carefully so she wouldn’t spill the tea and found Malloy waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. He knew better than to go barging upstairs and into a lady’s bedroom.

  “How is she?” Malloy said.

  “I don’t really know. Jane was giving her this tea when we arrived, so we’ll need to get it tested.”

  He took the cup from her, and they both went in search of the kitchen. Sarah got a maid to take some milk up to Mrs. Prince while Malloy asked for a container into which he could pour the tea.

  Sarah went back upstairs and sent the maid down with the teapot as well, in case Jane had poisoned it, too. “How are you feeling?” she asked Lisa.

  “I . . . I hardly know.” She turned to her husband, who had pulled a chair up beside the bed and was holding her hand.

  “When did you first start feeling sick?”

  “Right after supper last night. I’d told Joe everything when he came home, and I was very upset. Jane kept asking me what was wrong, and I finally told her I thought it was time for her to return to Saratoga.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “Yes, I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it. She was very angry of course. She was concerned that I would tell her parents she’d been abducted and others would find out and she would be ruined. I promised her that I wouldn’t, and then she seemed to calm down a little. In fact, she started being very nice. She even brought me some tea . . . Oh!”

  “And it was after you drank it that you felt sick,” Sarah guessed.

  “But why would she want to kill you, darling?” Joe Prince said. “What would that gain her?”

  “Maybe she was telling the truth,” Sarah said. “Maybe she just intended to make Mrs. Prince ill. Then she could convince you that you needed her help.”

  The doorbell rang and Prince said with some relief, “That must be the doctor.”

  “I’ll go down and tell him what we know,” Sarah said.

  The doctor was appalled, and Sarah got the impression he didn’t quite believe her wild tale of an evil cousin and poisoned tea, but he’d seen enough accidental arsenic poisonings that he knew just what to do. She left him to it.

  She found Malloy and Gino waiting in the parlor. “Have you sent for the police?”

  The two men exchanged a glance. Malloy said, “I’m not sure if the Princes would thank us for that. It will mean publicity and scandal.”

  “But we can’t just let Jane go. She’s killed two people and tried to kill a third.”

  “Yes, but unless she confesses, I don’t think we can prove any of it.”

  “We’ll have the poisoned tea, but she’ll certainly claim to know nothing about it,” Sarah sighed. “So why don’t I try to get her to confess?”

  In the end, Malloy only consented when Sarah agreed that he should wait outside Jane’s bedroom door in case she tried anything untoward.

  Sarah knocked on Jane’s bedroom door, realizing too late the irony of that courteous gesture since the door was locked. “Jane, I’d like to speak with you a moment,” she said, turning the key and opening the door.

  The room was pleasant, decorated with delicately carved furniture, light green drapes, and a matching satin coverlet on the bed. The wallpaper featured spring flowers. Quite a contrast from the spartan quarters at the settlement house.

  Jane had pulled the chair from her dressing table over so she could sit and look out the window. She didn’t even turn when Sarah came in. “It’s too far to jump. I already checked.”

  The room had no other chair, so Sarah sat down on the edge of the bed nearest to where Jane was. She let the silence stretch a bit, in case Jane had anything else to say, but she didn’t speak. Finally, Sarah said, “How did you come to know Nunzio Esposito?”

  She turned to Sarah with a sly smile. “That’s a mystery, isn’t it? How could a respectable young lady like me know a man like that?”

  “It is very hard to believe.”

  “I could hardly believe it myself,” she said a bit smugly. “It was like a fairy tale. He fell in love with me at first sight. He saw me the very first day I was in the city. That girl Kate was showing me around the neighborhood. It was my hair that he noticed first, he said.” She touched her golden hair tenderly. “He’d never known a woman so beautiful.”

  Or so blond, Sarah thought. Only women from Northern Italy had blond hair, and they would be untouchable for a man from Southern Italy, like Esposito. “That’s very romantic,” Sarah lied.

  “He arranged to encounter me when I was visiting some of the neighborhood women. He gave me a nosegay the first time.” A nosegay. Of course. Kate Westrop had told Maeve how Jane had often returned with flowers. “Do you know society girls get bouquets from their admirers before they go to a party? They take them to the party, pinned to long ribbons if they have a lot of them, to show how popular they are.”

  Sarah did know that. She’d received her share of bouquets in her day. “I’m sure you were very popular.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I was never invited to the parties,” she countered bitterly. “Because we didn’t have any money. But Nunzio didn’t care about that, and he had lots of money. He said he adored me. He said I would have everything I ever wanted.”

  “So he took you to a flat in a tenement?” Sarah asked, genuinely baffled.

  “He couldn’t take me to his house. We weren’t married yet,” she informed Sarah haughtily. “He made a place for me to stay, though, and it was lovely. And he bought me clothes. Beautiful clothes, silks and satins.”

  Sarah somehow managed to keep her voice neutral. “That was very nice of him.”

  “He loved me,” she said almost defensively. “He gave me a diamond necklace to prove it. I’d never seen anything like it.”

  When Sarah had no reply for that, Jane turned to face her defiantly. “He put it around my neck, and then he undressed me, until all I was wearing was the diamond necklace. He worshipped me. I didn’t know what it could be like when a man worshipped you like that. It was . . . amazing.”

  Sarah had to swallow down her disgust. “What went wrong, Jane? Why did you leave him?”

  Her lovely face crumpled into despair. “He was married!” she cried in anguish. “He never told me, not until after. Not until I’d spent two nights with him, and we’d done such things . . . things that could never be undone. I asked him how soon we could be married and he said he already had a wife but I would be his queen. But he’s not really a king, is he, Mrs. Malloy? What would I have been a queen of?”

  “You must have been very angry.”

  “I was furious, but I couldn’t let him see, could I? He was a dangerous man. Everyone said so. And at first I didn’t understand. I told him he could get a divorce. People do, don’t they? Even the Vanderbilts get divorced.”

  “But he was Catholic,” Sarah said.

  Jane huffed in disgust. “He said his wife would never agree. We could never marry. He wanted me to be his mistress. Can you imagine? The shame of it! People would turn up their noses and laugh at me and I would never be accepted anywhere!”

  “So you left him.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do. I saw my life, what it would be. I couldn’t bear it, so I ran back to the settlement house.”

  “And I gave you the perfect story to tell, didn’t I?”

  Jane smiled again, and the sight of it made Sarah’s skin crawl. “Yes, you did. I might have thought of it myself, but I didn’t have to. You made it so easy for me.”

  “But you couldn’t forget all the beautiful things you’d left behind at the flat, could you?” Sarah prodded.

  “Yes, all those lovely clothes. I’d never had clothes so fine, and they were mine, really. Nunzio had them made especially for me. All I had to do was go back to get them.”

  “But you couldn�
��t go in the daytime when someone might see you.”

  “No, I couldn’t, but it wasn’t far. I could be there and back before anyone even knew I was gone.”

  “Christopher McWilliam knew you were gone.”

  If her expression was any indication, she hadn’t known that. “Did he?”

  “Yes, he was at his desk, and he saw you leaving. You had your Gladstone bag with you, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, to carry the clothes. It wouldn’t hold all of them, I knew, but I could wear one outfit and take as many as would fit.”

  “Weren’t you afraid of seeing Esposito?”

  “No. Why would he be there once he realized I was gone?”

  “But he was there, wasn’t he? Waiting for you.”

  “I couldn’t believe it. He had no idea I had left him, and he didn’t even understand when I told him I’d never be his mistress. He told me that I had no choice, that I already was!”

  “Is that why you stabbed him?”

  Her face twisted with rage. “I hated him then. He wasn’t even worried. He was sure I couldn’t leave him. He didn’t realize why I was looking in the kitchen cabinets. Maybe he thought I was going to make him supper,” she said with a strange smile. “He wasn’t even concerned when I pulled out the butcher knife. He was still smiling when I stuck it in him.”

  Somehow Sarah didn’t shudder. “Do you realize you just confessed to murder?”

  “No one saw me, and if you tell anyone, I’ll call you a liar. Nunzio kidnapped me and I escaped. If anyone does accuse me of murder, I’ll say I was just defending myself against another assault.”

  “Did Mrs. Esposito assault you, too?”

  Jane’s face contorted again. How could she be so lovely one minute and so ugly the next? “That was your fault.”

  Sarah had feared as much. “I didn’t kill her.”

  “But you . . . She told you about the necklace. Nunzio said he bought it just for me, but it was hers first, wasn’t it? She wanted it back, too, because he’d told her she could use it to support herself if anything happened to him. I know he did, because he told me the same thing when he put it around my neck.”