Murder on Washington Square (35 page)

“All right,” he said, pretending to be reasonable, “if Mrs. Giddings didn’t do it, then who did?”

“The same person who tried to kill Mr. Prescott.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Yes, I do! The person who stabbed him promised him information about Anna Blake’s killer. And why would anyone else want to kill him?”

“A hundred reasons! He’s a newspaper reporter!” Malloy was shouting now.

“Keep your voice down,” she cautioned. “You don’t want Mrs. Ellsworth to hear you. She’d be over here in a second to find out what’s wrong.”

He looked like he might explode, but he drew a deep breath, let it out on a long sigh, and forced himself to sit down at the kitchen table.

Sarah started making coffee while Malloy got his temper under control.

As she set the pot on the warming stove, he said, “Just because the person—and I’m glad you’re willing to admit it might not have been a female—who stabbed Prescott lured him with a promise of information about Anna Blake, that doesn’t mean he—or she—had any or even knew anything about the murder at all. It just means that person knew this was a sure way to get Prescott to a private meeting.”

Sarah didn’t like this. He was starting to make sense. “Maybe you’re right, but maybe I’m right, too. What if the person who killed Anna was afraid Prescott was getting too close to the truth?”

“How would he—or she—know that?”

“Because of Prescott’s stories in the paper,” she reminded him impatiently. “He was the one who discovered that Anna was an actress and—”

“
You
were the one who discovered that. Prescott just happened to be the only reporter we told.”

“Fair enough, but still, he was the first one to write about it. If someone was afraid of what he was finding out, they could have decided the safest thing to do was kill him.”

“Wait a minute,” Malloy said, holding up his hand. “How would they know it was Prescott writing the stories?”

Sarah had been rummaging around in her cupboard, looking for something to eat, but this brought her head up sharply. She opened her mouth to reply, but no words came for a moment while she thought this through. “You’re right!” she said finally. “
We
knew Prescott was writing the stories, but no one else would.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Malloy said. “It’s not like they put the reporter’s name on his stories or anything. So it had to be someone who knew Prescott was the one writing them, or who at least had heard of him.”

“The Walcotts knew Prescott,” she remembered. “He’d been to the house that day we told him Anna was an actress. Then he went back later, right before he was attacked, after he’d talked to her friends at the theater. He was asking a lot of questions, and Mrs. Walcott got very upset.”

“Did Prescott tell you this?”

“No, Catherine Porter did.”

He frowned, surprised and not happy about it. “When did you talk to Catherine Porter?”

“Yesterday. She told me a lot of things, and that’s why I was looking for you. I thought you needed to know them, too.”

“You went to the boarding house?”

“Yes. I just couldn’t make sense of what had happened that night, and I thought Catherine might be able to answer a few of my questions.”

Malloy rubbed a hand over his face wearily, although what he had to be weary about, she had no idea. “Why don’t you sit down and tell me everything Catherine Porter told you?” he suggested tightly.

“I want to get something to eat first,” she said. “You promised Mrs. Ellsworth you’d take care of me, but I can see you have no intention of it.” Turning her full attention to the cupboard for a few seconds, she finally found a tin of peaches and started prying it open with the can opener.

Malloy sighed again, this time in martyrdom, and rose to his feet. “Sit down,” he commanded her.

“But—”

“
Sit down!
Or I’ll get Mrs. Ellsworth over here to make you.”

That was an effective threat. Sarah sat, mystified as to what might happen next. To her surprise, Malloy finished opening the can of peaches, poured them out into a bowl, and set it in front of her.

Sarah looked up at him, still not quite certain what to make of this. “I’ll need something . . . a fork,” she ventured.

To her amazement, he located one without fumbling and put it on the table beside her. “Eat,” was all he said.

So she did. And while she did, he found some eggs in her icebox, which was still fairly cool even though she hadn’t replenished the ice in several days. Then he located a piece of cheese that was too hard to eat and a dried-up onion. In a few minutes, he’d chopped the onion and put it in a pan to sizzle in some bacon grease he’d spooned from the container by the stove. Then he broke up the cheese and threw it into the pan with the eggs, and before Sarah could quite comprehend what was happening, Malloy set the finished concoction down in front of her.

While he was pouring them each a cup of coffee, she looked up at him in awe and asked, “When did you learn to cook?”

“This isn’t cooking,” he said. “This is basic survival. How do you think men keep from starving when they don’t have a woman to do for them? Now eat.”

Sarah had forgotten to finish eating the peaches while she’d watched him, and the aroma of the frying onions had set her mouth to watering. She tucked into the omelet with shameless enthusiasm, not pausing until every bite of it was gone.

“That was delicious,” she said, a little chagrined at her gluttony.

“You were hungry,” he demurred.

She looked at the bowl of peaches. “Do you want some of these? I don’t think I can eat them all after that.”

“Try. Then tell me what you found out from Catherine Porter.”

Sarah had been so sure she’d be able to recall every detail, but now it seemed days had passed since she’d been at the Walcotts’ house. Fatigue made her memory even more sluggish. Maybe she should just try to put things in order. “The night Anna died, the Giddings boy came to see her.”

“We knew that.”

“They had an argument. He threatened to kill her if she didn’t give back the money Giddings had paid her.”

“I know, I know,” he said impatiently. “Then he left, and she got a message and went out and—”

“No, she didn’t!”

“What?”

“She didn’t get a message, not that Catherine knew of, and they were together all evening. Also, Anna didn’t go out, not right away, at least. The two of them played checkers or something until Catherine went to bed much later.”

“But the landlady said she went out right after Harold Giddings left,” Malloy protested.

“Then one of them is wrong. I think Catherine was telling the truth, though. Remember she said she was asleep when Anna left the house. She said that long before we knew anything different. She also thought Mrs. Walcott was angry about the boy coming to the house. She doesn’t like unpleasantness, Catherine said. Maybe Mrs. Walcott and Anna argued about it after Catherine went bed. Maybe Anna left the house in a huff and got herself killed and now Mrs. Walcott feels guilty, so she made up the story about her getting a message.”

“It would’ve had to be a pretty nasty fight for her to go out alone after dark,” Malloy observed. “Would Mrs. Walcott have been that upset about the Giddings boy’s visit?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should ask her,” Sarah suggested, earning a frown from Malloy. “Or maybe they argued about something else,” she tried. “Remember what that actress Irene said about Mr. Walcott courting the girls to get them to move into his house? Maybe his wife was jealous of Anna.”

“I guess you want me to ask Mrs. Walcott about that, too,” Malloy asked sarcastically.

“Oh, and I almost forgot. Anna was only wearing her housedress when she left that night. No woman would go out in her housedress under ordinary circumstances. She didn’t wear a jacket or a cape, either, and it was cold enough that she would’ve needed one.”

“She had a shawl,” Malloy said. “I told you the coroner said she’d tried holding it against her wound to keep it from bleeding too much.”

“Catherine said she had a shawl on when they were playing their game,” she remembered, “because it was chilly in the house. Mrs. Walcott wouldn’t light a fire. That means she didn’t change anything she was wearing before she went out. Probably, she didn’t even go up to her room. She just ran out without any preparation at all. A woman as vain about her appearance as Anna Blake wouldn’t do that unless she was very upset. Or desperate. Whatever she was feeling, she certainly wouldn’t go out like that if she were meeting someone.”

Malloy sipped his coffee, considering all she’d told him. “You’ve been wondering why she was out alone so late. All right, maybe she had an argument with Mrs. Walcott, but that still doesn’t explain why she’d leave the house so suddenly.”

“Maybe Mrs. Walcott threw her out,” Sarah suggested.

“Even so, wouldn’t she have at least packed her things and gotten properly dressed?”

He was right, of course.

“She might have just been going to stay with a friend for the night,” Sarah said, still thinking out loud, “until she and the landlady had time for their tempers to cool. Or maybe she was planning to return for her things later, when Mrs. Walcott wasn’t home.”

“Then that means a stranger killed her while she was walking the streets by herself. Actually, that’s more likely, considering what the coroner said.”

“Malloy, I’m getting very annoyed with you,” Sarah said, frowning because today was the first time he’d bothered to mention that the coroner had told him a lot more about Anna’s death than he’d bothered to share with her. “What else did the coroner say?”

Malloy obviously felt no guilt over his omissions. “He said she walked for a distance that night after she was stabbed.”

“A
distance
?” she echoed incredulously. “How far?”

“Maybe a few blocks,” he said with a shrug. “She must’ve been trying to get back home after she was attacked.”

“If only she’d made it,” Sarah sighed. “Maybe she could have at least told someone who stabbed her.”

“If she even knew,” he pointed out. “If a stranger killed her, then that still means Prescott’s attack didn’t have anything to do with Anna’s murder, and my chances of catching the real killer aren’t very good. And don’t forget, I still have Mrs. Giddings locked up. No matter what you think, she claims she killed Anna.”

“She couldn’t have,” Sarah pointed out. “Even if she’d followed her son to Anna’s house, she wouldn’t have stood around on the street waiting for hours in case Anna came out so she could follow and murder her. Why would she expect Anna to come out at all? And she especially wouldn’t have stayed there on the street until after dark, for the same reasons it’s so strange that Anna went out herself. That’s just impossible to believe.”

Malloy didn’t look happy, and Sarah couldn’t blame him. He’d thought he’d solved the case, and now she was proving he hadn’t. “Impossible or not, Mrs. Giddings still confessed. And you also haven’t convinced me that the same person who killed Anna also stabbed Prescott.”

“That’s probably because I’m not sure myself anymore. If Anna was killed by a stranger who was trying to rob her or attack her, then there’s no reason for there to have been a connection.”

“Even if Mrs. Giddings killed Anna, she didn’t have any reason to kill Prescott either. In fact, who among the people who knew Anna did? Were her friends at the theater angry about him snooping around?”

“Not at all,” Sarah said. “Theater people probably love publicity. Catherine said Mrs. Walcott was angry, though.”

“Rightly so. She didn’t want bad publicity for herself or her boarding house. But murder is a pretty drastic solution to that problem. You might as well say the Ellsworths stabbed him because he was writing all those stories about Nelson.”

Sarah rubbed her temple where a headache was forming. “I’m afraid I’m too tired to figure any of this out right now.”

“Then get some sleep. I’ve got to go back to work myself before somebody notices I’m spending all my time on someone else’s case.”

He got up and carried her dishes to the sink.

“For heaven’s sake, don’t wash them,” she cried in mock horror. “I don’t think my heart could take the shock!”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her with one of his rare grins. “I had no intention of it.” The grin transformed him, banishing the pain and the years that had hardened him and giving her a glimpse of the boy he once had been. For an instant, she even saw a trace of Brian in him.

Something inside of her warmed and began to melt, a part of her that had been frozen for a very long time. She rose, responding to an instinctive need to be closer to him. Closer to his warmth.

“Thank you for taking such good care of me,” she said and impulsively gave him her hand.

His fingers closed over hers, strong and sure, and his grin faded. For along moment, their gazes locked and held, and Sarah saw something in his dark eyes she’d never seen before. A longing. A need. An emptiness she instantly understood because it matched her own. An emptiness he could fill if only . . .

Suddenly, the place where his hand touched hers began to burn, as if his flesh were searing her, and she snatched her hand back in alarm. And when she looked into his eyes again, she saw only the Malloy she knew, the one who allowed nothing and no one past his barriers. Had she only imagined that moment?

She covered her embarrassment with a forced laugh. “I’ll be sure to tell Mrs. Ellsworth you were as good as your word about feeding me.”

“She probably won’t believe you,” he said gruffly, turning toward the back door. He was leaving, and Sarah didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

“What are you going to do about Mrs. Giddings?” she asked for something to say.

He gave her one of his looks over his shoulder as he reached for his hat. “You’re like a dog with a bone, aren’t you?”