In the Shadow of Gotham (30 page)

Alistair agreed. “I suppose you’d like us to speak with Lonny Moore, if we can.”

“Yes,” I said, “and we have the names of two women who worked closely with Sarah on women’s voting rights—Jenny Weller and Ruth Cabot. You might speak with them, if they are at home.”

“What about Dean Arnold?” Isabella asked. “Remember what Angus—”

“I know,” I said, cutting her off. “By all means speak with Dean Arnold—assuming you can find him anywhere near campus on a Saturday afternoon.”

Isabella smiled. “I’ll find him.”

“Then we’ll all meet for dinner and compare notes,” Alistair said. “How about Chinese? I know a wonderful place on Pell Street off Mott. They call it the Chinese Delmonico’s.”

Delmonico’s on Fifth Avenue was one of the city’s most elegant restaurants, and they probably did not appreciate the comparison. Given his love of fine dining, I had no doubt Alistair was a regular at the original Delmonico’s. At first his desire to visit Chinatown seemed surprising. But as he continued talking, raving about their menu, I realized his adventurous palate was prompting his request.

“What time?” I asked.

“An early dinner,” Alistair said. “Six o’clock should give us enough time.”

Alistair and Isabella hailed a cab, while I turned to pick up the Third Avenue El downtown.

“Number 24 Pell,” Alistair called after me.

But I barely heard him, for my thoughts had returned to Otto Schmidt and the investigation still before us.

It took me the better part of an hour to locate Otto Schmidt, for he had been moved to an Upper East Side station house due to overcrowding. I traveled to the Oak Street station downtown, only to have to catch the El back uptown once again. It was a ridiculous waste of time. When I finally arrived at the correct station house, I was directed to a holding cell at the far end of the hallway from the main office. I expected the officers on duty had wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from Schmidt, for his clothes reeked of alcohol and vomit.

He was a wiry, thin man with a gray stubble beard. He sat in a plain metal chair in the far corner, gripping a thin, threadbare gray blanket tightly around his chest. His wild-eyed intense stare immediately bored into me as I entered the room.

“Get away,” he called out. “Now, I said. Get out!”

He fidgeted violently, as though trying to disappear into the chair. After a particularly strenuous twist, he appeared to hurt his right arm, and began to writhe in pain.

“Otto Schmidt?” I asked as a courtesy, though there was no real indication the man was paying attention.

After grunting once more in pain, he closed his eyes tightly, now refusing to look at me. “I said go away. I will not talk with you. I promised to leave and talk with no one. I swore to it.”
Then he opened his eyes again and looked forward, wild-eyed and crazed.

While he had earlier been drunk, his behavior now smacked of something different. It wasn’t the alcohol that made him belligerent. It was fear.

Speaking more loudly, I addressed him again. “Mr. Schmidt, are you aware of why you are here?”

He shook his head. “I swear I was about to leave, just like I promised. But the pain was so bad. I just needed a little something to kill the pain. I intended to go after that, but they came and took me. That’s why I didn’t keep to my promise. Because they came and took me.”

“Who came?” I asked. “The police?”

“Yes,” he said, and nodded vigorously. “That’s why I couldn’t leave. I can’t talk with you. You need to go.”

“Mr. Schmidt, where were you going, before the police picked you up?” I asked.

He stared at me blankly. “I hadn’t decided yet. Maybe Baltimore. I had friends there once. He didn’t care, so long as I left New York.”

“Who didn’t care, Mr. Schmidt?” I asked. “Who made you promise to leave?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he replied weakly. “I’d never seen the man before. But he hurt me”—he pulled the blanket tighter around him—“and made me promise to leave and talk with no one.”

“Mr. Schmidt,” I said, trying to keep my tone calm and my words simple, as though I were talking with a child, “I can help you leave. I can help protect you from the man who hurt you. But first, you need to tell me what happened.”

“No, no,” he repeated, in a frenzy of panic. “He said you’d
say that, and I’m not to talk. Just leave.” His eyes darted around the room.

I sighed in frustration, for this conversation was spinning in circles, leading nowhere.

“You have been arrested at my request,” I said, “and I have the ability to release you. I will give you train fare to Baltimore. But I can do that only if you cooperate with me.”

Otto Schmidt looked at me for the first time, still fidgeting. “You promise you’ll help me leave? And you won’t let that man know I talked?”

“I promise.”

And in that fashion a loose agreement was reached, and I procured the details we needed. As I more or less already knew, Otto Schmidt was not the man responsible for Sarah Wingate’s murder. He had no recollection of her—only the items he had stolen from her, which had landed him in jail the first time. It had been a crime of opportunity; Sarah’s room had been the first unlocked door he had found after entering Mrs. Gardner’s roominghouse. Since his escape from jail, he had spent most of his time in Boston, returning to New York only within the last six months, where he found work he liked well enough in the kitchen of a German restaurant in the Bowery.

To hear him tell it, all was well until early this morning, when a man had accosted him and ordered him to leave town. He had been thoroughly scared by the brutal encounter, but could share few details about the man: only that he was heavyset with brown hair, wore an odd hat, and had beaten Otto Schmidt with a metal pipe. Otto had no idea why the man wanted him to leave; the man had threatened him if he talked to the police or anyone else. I had little doubt but that Schmidt would have made his way out of town immediately, had he not
wanted alcohol to numb the pain of the beating. Ironically, had he not made a spectacle of himself begging for liquor so early in the day, we might never have located him.

I pulled money out of my wallet, but did not give it to Schmidt. “I promised you train fare,” I said, “but I don’t want you to spend it on drink. The man who will release you will take care of buying your ticket.”

He was insensible again, and I got no response.

“Get the man a doctor,” I said to the clerk on duty as I exited past the main office. “I believe he has a broken arm and requires medical care. You can send the bill here.” I left Alistair’s card behind. And I handed him an envelope with Mulvaney’s name on it, containing a note and money for Otto Schmidt’s train. “Will you see that Declan Mulvaney gets this? Thanks.”

I would follow up with Mulvaney later to let him know that, for our purposes, it was okay to release Schmidt. I trusted him to put Schmidt on the train.

I boarded the Third Avenue El yet again, this time bound for Chinatown. I had wasted much of my afternoon in transit, and though it was not rational, I found myself irritated that Alistair had chosen such an inconvenient spot for dinner. Yet I was the one who had agreed, largely because it would have been so convenient to the Oak Street station where Schmidt was originally held.

Schmidt’s situation continued to perplex me. How had Sarah Wingate’s killer known Schmidt was on our list of possible suspects? The only scenario that made sense was that the killer wanted Schmidt to disappear so we would be unable to talk with him. That was important—not because Schmidt knew anything, but precisely because he did not. If Schmidt remained unavailable to us, then we could not formally clear him of suspicion
in Sarah Wingate’s murder. It was a calculated way to ensure our investigation remained hindered by many suspects we could not eliminate.

But Schmidt’s attacker had found him even before we did. How was that possible? I supposed that once Mulvaney began asking around in an effort to find Schmidt, a lot more people had became involved. Too many people, frankly. What troubled me was Alistair’s warning that the killer was likely monitoring our progress—either on his own, or through the guise of police or journalistic efforts. Whoever he was, he seemed always to be one maddening step ahead of us.

I got off the El at Chatham Square and walked along the Bowery toward Doyers Street and Chinatown. It was Saturday evening, and throngs of people made their way in and out of import shops, meat and vegetable markets, restaurants, and some of the more dangerous saloons. On Doyers, Jimmy Kelly’s Mandarin Club was already packed and, across from it, the Christian Mission house had a decent turnout. Turning onto Pell Street, I saw that Mike Saulter’s place teemed with customers, as did a typical restaurant called the Oriental. I was in the heart of Chinatown, where all manner of vices, religions, and foods coexisted.

Mon Lay Won—or, as Alistair had described it, the Chinese Delmonico’s—was on the upper floor of an import house, so I
climbed narrow steps that led up to a small dining room with red carpet, rice-paper decorations, and a handful of tables. After the chaos of Chinatown’s streets, it was a surprising oasis of calm.

Alistair and Isabella were already there, waiting for me at a front table. Apart from his fondness for Chinese food, I could see why Alistair chose this restaurant: It was a quiet place with very few tables, where we might talk undisturbed.

“We should order family style,” Alistair said. “Their chop suey is excellent, and the boneless stuffed chicken wings are the best I’ve tried outside of Hong Kong.”

I glanced at the menu. At a cost of $2.50—the most expensive item on the menu—I expected them to be.

“I’m also partial to the fried lobster in rice,” Alistair said.

Our waiter appeared at our table to take our order.

“We’ll begin with a pot of Lin Som tea,” Alistair said, “and the water nuts along with egg drop soup.” He went on to order a variety of dishes, thanking the waiter at the end in Chinese. Once he was out of earshot, Alistair went on to lament that there were not more Chinese restaurants in the city beyond Chinatown. “I suppose people are afraid the vices they associate with Chinatown would follow the restaurants.”

It was too bad for all concerned. I knew the police had shut down a Chinese restaurant near Union Square earlier this year in response to neighborhood complaints. After a two-week investigation, they learned that the restaurant had served food, nothing else. But the two weeks of lost income had bankrupted its owner.

“What did you learn this afternoon, Simon?” Isabella asked, as she poured each of us a cup of the hot Lin Som tea that had arrived.

I filled them in, and, as expected, Alistair’s primary concern was that Otto Schmidt had been threatened and assaulted.

“This killer overreacts every time we make progress—no matter how minor,” Alistair said, grim faced. “It suggests he remains nervous and far too invested in our investigation. I don’t like it.”

“Nor do I,” I said. I drank my cup of tea before asking, “How did the two of you make out today?”

Alistair was animated as he began to recount their interview with the suffragists. “First,” Alistair said, “I found Jenny Weller at home. She and Sarah were not close friends at Barnard, but both were involved in the suffragist movement there.” Alistair shuddered. “She was a dreadful woman, by the way. She had too much nervous energy and no sense of humor whatsoever. I was on edge our entire conversation. But I learned a few things of interest from her. She confirmed Sarah was active in the suffrage movement, a great worker. She also recalled an incident two or three weeks ago when she saw Sarah arguing with a young man near the 116th Street subway stop.”

He used chopsticks to help himself to the plate of water nuts that had arrived. Isabella also handled her chopsticks expertly. I, on the other hand, seemed to be all thumbs.

“Simon, a lesson in chopsticks before the lobster and chicken arrive,” Isabella said, laughing. “It’s very simple when you know what to do. Place your thumb like so and your forefinger here.” She proceeded to demonstrate the technique until I had picked it up—and if I was not as expert as they were, soon I at least exhibited basic competence.

Alistair continued his story. “I then spoke with three other former classmates of Sarah who board upstairs from Jenny Weller—Caroline Brown, Tillie Maddox, and Ruth Cabot. Caroline does the thinking for all three of them; the other two rarely open their mouth unless she asks them to. So I have to give extra
significance to something Ruth Cabot told me. They last saw Sarah at a ladies’ committee meeting at a Mrs. Llewellyn’s home. It was on”—Alistair pulled a black notebook from his jacket pocket and found his notes—“Wednesday, October 18. It was a meeting to discuss the reform platform for the mayoral election; I gather they planned to pass their concerns along to Hearst.” He finished the last water nut and moved on to the egg drop soup, which Isabella and I had already begun. “Ruth noticed that Sarah was upset, not participating in the discussion as she usually did. And she looked terrible that night, her eyes pinched up as if she had a headache. When Ruth asked about her, Sarah responded that she intended to quit her position at the dean’s office as soon as the term ended.” He paused to take another spoonful of soup.