“Poor fellow. That’s no way to do a person. They just threw him in the bushes like he was trash they didn’t want anymore.”
“I was hoping you’d answer a few questions for me.”
Quincy shrugged. “Don’t know much, but I’ll be happy to help.”
“Could you show me where you found him?”
Quincy sighed. Plainly, he didn’t relish the idea of leaving the relative warmth of the sanctuary. “Let me get my coat.”
When Quincy had bundled himself against the wintry winds, he led Frank through some hallways and out a door that was probably seldom used by worshippers.
“This here’s the back of the church,” Quincy said as Frank took his bearings. “That street there is Trinity Place.”
Without waiting for a reply, he led Frank to a clump of bushes and pointed. “That’s where I found him. We was cleaning up the grounds that morning. Them people who come on New Year’s Eve to hear the bells, they don’t care a wit that this is God’s house. They throw their trash everywhere. Liquor bottles mostly. And beer. And heaven knows what else. Filthy. We can’t just leave it. What would people think? So we had everybody out that morning, picking up. I was working back here and saw his legs sticking out.”
“Do you usually find a lot of drunks sleeping it off?”
Quincy shook his gray head. “Not in this weather. If somebody passed out, they’d freeze to death by morning. In fact, that’s what I figured had happened, except for him being in the bushes, stuffed in like. Nobody would do that to themselves. I tried to pull him out, to see if he was still alive, but he was too stiff. I knew then there was no hope so I went to get help.”
“Did you notice his shoe was missing?”
“Shoe?” He scratched his head. “I guess I did. Didn’t think much about it, though.”
“Has anyone found it?”
“I don’t know. I can ask the other men.”
“Would you?”
They started back to the door so Quincy could question the other men who cleaned the church. “I’m told he hadn’t been robbed,” Frank said as they walked.
“Oh no. Still had his watch and everything. I made sure nobody bothered him until the police took him away, too.”
“I’m sure his family appreciates it.”
Back inside, Quincy instructed Frank to have a seat in the back pew while he questioned the other men. Frank took the time to appreciate the soaring beauty of the sanctuary with its enormous stained glass windows. Even without the music and the candles and the fancy robes and the hundreds of congregants that must gather here on Sunday, the place was impressive.
A few minutes later, Quincy returned with a younger man who looked more than a little frightened.
“Allan here found the shoe,” Quincy reported.
“I didn’t know it was important or that it had anything to do with the dead man,” Allan said, glancing nervously between Frank and Quincy.
“Of course you didn’t,” Frank said. “What did you do with it?”
“I gave it to the church secretary. I figured somebody had lost it during the bell ringing and they’d be back to look for it when they sobered up.”
“Do you remember where you found it?”
Allan glanced at Quincy again, who nodded his encouragement. “By one of the benches.”
Frank had noticed the benches on his first trip outside. “Can you show me which one?”
He did. The church had placed some benches around the grounds, where people could sit and rest or do whatever people did outside a church. “It was just laying there. It was a nice shoe. If there was two of them, I might’ve kept them myself.” He glanced guiltily at Quincy, who had accompanied them, but Quincy didn’t chasten him. “I didn’t know the dead man was missing a shoe.”
“That’s all right. Thanks for your help, both of you.”
“Do you know who he was?” Quincy asked.
“Oh yes. Mr. Clarence Pritchard. He owned the Pure Milk Dairy.”
“Really?” Allan said. “I see them wagons out all night long. Who killed him?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” Frank said.
* * *
• • •
As he had promised the day before, Gino returned to the Pure Milk Dairy late that morning. The place was bustling with activity as the deliverymen were still unloading their wagons from the morning run. The milk was delivered in glass bottles, and customers would leave their empty milk bottles out on the stoop. The drivers would leave full bottles and collect the empty ones to be returned to the dairy, washed and refilled. The clink and clatter of hundreds of empty glass milk bottles rattling in their wire carriers and wooden crates was deafening, although the weary horses in their stalls nearby didn’t seem to mind. Since none of the deliverymen looked interested in chatting, Gino made his way upstairs to the offices.
Once again the fellow at the desk stopped him, but after a reminder of who Gino was, he gave him permission to pass. Gino found Harvey Pritchard sitting at his father’s desk again and looking even more bewildered than before.
“What are you doing here?” Harvey demanded.
“I came back to get the names of your friends, remember? You were going to make sure they were willing to vouch for you.” Which wasn’t exactly what Gino had asked for yesterday but what they both knew the friends would be doing. If they were good friends, they’d give Harvey an alibi for the time of his father’s murder. Gino’s job would be to find out if they were telling the truth.
Harvey’s expression was momentarily panicked, but then he remembered something. “And you wanted the name of that dairy in Brooklyn, the one selling swill milk.”
“That’s right. Do you have it?”
Harvey began shuffling through the papers scattered across the desk and finally found the one he was looking for. “Here it is. Green Hills Dairy.” He handed the paper to Gino. Someone had written the name and address of the dairy on it and nothing more.
Gino folded the paper carefully and put it into his pocket. “And the names of your friends?”
“You don’t need to speak to all of them,” Harvey said with a confidence he obviously did not possess. “One should be enough. Amelio Bruno. He’ll tell you we were together that whole night.”
“All right. Where can I find Mr. Bruno?”
“That’s easy. He’s right outside. Bruno!” he added, shouting.
After a few moments, during which Harvey fidgeted nervously, a young man a few years older than Harvey came to the office door. Even without knowing his name, Gino would have recognized a fellow Italian. He wore a clerk’s green eyeshade, and like the other clerks, he had removed his suit coat and had paper cuff protectors on his wrists. Oddly, his expression said he deeply resented the summons. “Yeah?” Which was hardly an acceptable response when speaking to your employer.
“Mr. Donatelli, this is Amelio Bruno. Tell Mr. Donatelli what we did on New Year’s Eve, Amie.”
He smiled grimly. He had apparently been prepared for this encounter. “Oh yeah. Me and Harvey went out to celebrate together.”
Gino made a show of taking out his notebook and pencil and opening the notebook to a clean page. “And where did you go to celebrate?”
Bruno blinked in surprise. He obviously had not been prepared to be challenged. “What?”
“You said you went out to celebrate. Did you go to a party? To a saloon? Someplace else?”
Bruno glanced at Harvey but got no help there. “I . . . To a saloon. To more than one saloon, in fact.”
“Which ones?” Gino asked pleasantly, pencil poised to write down the names.
“I . . . I’m not sure.”
“If you can’t remember the name of the saloon, maybe you could just tell me where you were and then we can figure out which ones.”
�
�We started out near Harvey’s house, didn’t we, Harvey?”
Plainly, Harvey was unprepared as well. “I . . . I think so.”
Bruno shrugged and smiled a little sheepishly. “It’s hard to remember. We were drinking a lot.”
Gino nodded wisely. “I understand. Maybe we could go out together and retrace your steps.”
“Why do you need to know where we were?” Harvey asked petulantly. “Amie told you we were together. That’s all you need to know.”
But Gino shook his head. “You might think so, but Mr. Bruno works for you, doesn’t he?”
Harvey seemed surprised at that idea. “Well, I guess he does now.”
Bruno seemed surprised as well, and not exactly pleased. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
“So he’d want to stay on your good side, and if you asked him to say you were together, he would probably do it, even if it wasn’t true and he knew he might be charged with perjury or even as an accessory to murder for doing it.”
“What?” Bruno cried.
“He’s not an accessory to anything because I didn’t kill my father!” Harvey tried.
“Is that what this is about?” Bruno asked. “Because you didn’t say anything about murder!”
“So are you saying that you really weren’t with Harvey on New Year’s Eve?”
Bruno gave Harvey an oddly superior grin. “We were together, but not until later. A few of us were at this saloon, but Harvey didn’t join us until after one o’clock.”
Gino showed no reaction to this at all. He merely turned back to Harvey, who was glaring at Bruno in return. “Maybe you can tell me where you were before you joined up with Mr. Bruno and his friends.”
“Yeah, where were you?” Bruno asked, his tone still much too disrespectful for an employee.
Harvey needed another long minute to come up with an answer. “I was here.”
Gino frowned. “Here? At the dairy?”
“Sure. People need milk every day, and we deliver every day except Sunday.”
“Do you deliver the milk yourself?” Gino asked, happy to hear his voice sounded completely innocent.
“Of course not!” Because he was the owner’s son, his tone said.
“Then why did you have to be here at that time of night? And even if you did deliver it yourself, I thought you delivered milk early in the morning, not at midnight.”
Harvey opened his mouth to reply but nothing came out. He cast Bruno a frantic glance, but Bruno just shrugged. Finally, Harvey said, “They have to get the wagons loaded.”
Gino gave them both a puzzled frown. “When do they start doing that?”
Harvey winced, but Bruno said, “Around four o’clock.”
“In the morning?” Gino asked.
“That’s right,” Bruno confirmed, again a little smugly, proving Harvey a liar.
“If you don’t do deliveries yourself,” Gino said to Harvey, “and they don’t even start until four o’clock in the morning, why were you here before midnight that night?”
Harvey looked hopefully at Bruno, who only shook his head. “All right, I was . . .” Harvey sighed in disgust. “I lied . . . I was out looking for my father.”
Now, wasn’t that interesting? “Why would you do that?”
“Can’t you guess? You heard how he goes on about the turn of the century. I knew he’d be out there trying to convince everybody they were wrong and making a fool of himself, so when I found out he was going down to the bell ringing, I thought I’d go find him and bring him home before he got himself into trouble.”
“That was very, uh, noble of you,” Gino said, although noble wasn’t the word he was thinking. “And did you find him?”
“No, I did not. I couldn’t believe how many people were there, and I couldn’t very well ask people if they’d seen an old man trying to convince everyone this was the beginning of the twentieth century.”
“Were you alone?”
“Except for the thousands of other people there, you mean?” he asked bitterly. “Yes, I was alone.”
“But nobody can confirm that you never found your father.”
Harvey turned his murderous glare on Gino. “No, but I can promise you that if I had found him, I would’ve dragged him home and he’d still be alive.”
Or maybe he did find Pritchard and that’s why he’s no longer alive, although why would Harvey have killed his father? Sons and fathers often didn’t get along, but few of those sons resorted to murder. True, Harvey would apparently inherit the dairy, but was that enough motive? They’d need to learn more about Harvey before they could know for sure.
“Thanks for your help,” Gino told the two men, closing his notebook and stuffing it back into his pocket. “I’ll go check on this Green Hills Dairy.”
“Green Hills? What for?” Bruno asked with a frown.
“Pop discovered they’re selling swill milk,” Harvey told him.
“And you think somebody there might’ve killed the old man over that?” Bruno scoffed.
“Don’t you?”
Bruno merely shrugged.
Gino glanced at Harvey, who was glaring at Bruno again. “Harvey seems to think his father was going to report this Green Hills Dairy to the authorities.”
“He was,” Harvey confirmed defiantly. “And maybe they had somebody kill Pop before he could.”
Bruno seemed to have a sudden change of heart. “Oh, I see. Yeah, that’s probably it. If Mr. Pritchard reported them, they could get shut down.”
But he didn’t sound really convinced. Gino would have to come back and talk to Bruno alone. He might very well have something more interesting to say without Harvey around. Gino thanked the two men again and took his leave.
When he reached the first floor, he found that the activity had slowed significantly. The wagons had all been emptied and the drivers had gone home. A few boys were still grooming the horses and mucking out the stalls. Gino wandered around, looking for the man who had been willing to talk to him before or really anyone who might be willing to chat, but oddly, no one would even meet his gaze. They all just continued their work as if he weren’t even there.
The warning he’d received yesterday echoed in his mind and the strange reactions of the stable boys confirmed his suspicions. Something was going on here that he needed to know more about.
* * *
• • •
Frank made it home in time for lunch with Sarah and Maeve. His mother was at Brian’s school, but Maeve’s duties ended when she dropped Catherine off at Miss Spence’s School and did not begin again until she picked her up in the afternoon. They were going to have to find something to fill Maeve’s time now that Catherine didn’t need a nursemaid all day, because heaven knew what Maeve might get up to if they didn’t.
They ate in the breakfast room, which was much more practical for three people than the dining room, and their cook, Velvet, served them a delicious Welsh rarebit.
Sarah described her visit with Mrs. Ellsworth and Theda that morning.
“How romantic,” Maeve said when Sarah had told them about Mrs. Pritchard and Otto Bergman’s thwarted plans.
“You think it’s romantic that they weren’t allowed to get married?” Frank asked, confused.
“No, that they’ve been in love all these years, in spite of everything.”
“And murdered Mr. Pritchard so they could finally be together?” Sarah asked archly.
Maeve waved that theory away with both hands. “If they were willing to do that, why didn’t they do it years ago?”
“Maybe because he never suspected them until recently,” Sarah said. “If he just found out about the affair, he might have told Mrs. Pritchard she could no longer see Bergman.”
Maeve shook her head this time. “You mean he told her that she couldn’t see Bergman or else? Or
else what? He’d divorce her? That’s exactly what she wanted!”
“True, but he may have threatened her with something else.”
“Like what?”
“Who knows? But Mr. Pritchard would have known what she cared about.”
“Maybe, but I still think it’s romantic.”
Frank cleared his throat to remind them he was still there. “Well, I don’t think it’s romantic at all. I think it’s sad. All of those people were miserable for over twenty years.”
“He’s right,” Sarah told Maeve. “Mrs. Pritchard and Bergman might have enjoyed their stolen moments, but they would have lived in constant fear of being found out.”
“I guess so, but you have to admit they must really love each other, and at least they can be together now.”
“Unless one or both of them killed Pritchard,” Frank reminded them. “And let’s remember, we aren’t even certain they were having an affair.”
Maeve sighed in defeat. “Do we at least know where Bergman was that night?”
Frank exchanged a chagrined glance with Sarah. “No. We didn’t even ask him.”
“But only because we didn’t know he might have a reason to want Mr. Pritchard dead,” Sarah reminded him. “And Mrs. Pritchard claims she was at home in bed.”
Maeve smiled wickedly. “Maybe Bergman was with her. Then they’d both have an alibi.”
“An alibi we couldn’t believe,” Sarah pointed out.
“So we need to question Bergman a little more thoroughly,” Frank said.
“And find out if Mrs. Pritchard really was home,” Sarah said.
“Who can tell you that?” Maeve asked. “If she was alone . . .”
“The servants,” Frank and Sarah said in unison.
“The servants always know everything,” Sarah added.
“Sounds like a job for Gino,” Frank said. “Maids love him. He’ll need to go when Mrs. Pritchard isn’t home, though.”
“How about during the funeral service?” Sarah said.
“Do you know when it is?”
Murder on Trinity Place Page 9
