Murder on Washington Square (8 page)

“But if she was from a small town, maybe she
didn’t
know that,” she offered. “Is it possible she just decided to go for a walk? Could she have been that naive?”

Ellsworth’s shoulders sagged with despair, and he covered his face with his hands. “I don’t know.”

But all this conjecture had given Frank an idea. “Do you think she would have gone out to meet
you
?”

Ellsworth looked up. “But I never would’ve asked her to meet me someplace after dark!” he objected.

“She might not have known that, though. Suppose someone sent her a message and said it was from you. Would she have gone out to meet you?”

“I don’t know. She might have,” he conceded.

Frank checked the serving bowl and kept the last scoop of potatoes from going to waste.

“Do you think someone lured her out that night to kill her?” Mrs. Brandt asked him while he was refilling his plate.

Frank shrugged one shoulder. “It’s possible. I’m just trying to figure out how it might’ve happened. We know she was out there and someone killed her. If it wasn’t Nelson here—”

“And it wasn’t!” Ellsworth cried.

“Then it had to be someone else. Was it a stranger? If so, why was she there in the first place, where she was easy prey? Prostitutes work in the Square after dark. Why would she risk being mistaken for one by some drunken customer?”

“Which means she must have had a good reason for being there,” Mrs. Brandt guessed. She was getting much too good at this sort of thing. “And that could only mean she was expecting to meet someone. Someone important to her.” She turned to Ellsworth. “If you were her only friend in the city, she must have thought she was meeting you.”

“But why wouldn’t he have just come to the house, the way he always did?” Frank asked. “Or at least wait until morning to meet her? Why would he ask her to do something dangerous?”

“Please, I can’t . . .” Ellsworth begged, dropping his head into his hands again. “I can’t think anymore. Isn’t it dark enough for me to go home yet?”

Frank sighed. He wouldn’t mind being rid of Ellsworth. He wouldn’t get any more from him tonight. “I’ll check to see if the reporters are still there.”

A quick trip to the front room told him that only two of the more persistent reporters remained, and they were standing across the street under the gaslight which had recently been lit, not paying much attention to the house.

“I think you could make it now if you’re quiet,” he told Ellsworth when he got back to the kitchen.

“Malloy will go with you,” Mrs. Brandt said, without bothering to consult him. He shot her an irritated look, but she didn’t pay any attention. “Try to get a good night’s sleep.”

“And don’t try to go to work in the morning,” Frank warned him.

“But Mr. Dennis will be expecting me!” Ellsworth protested. “If I don’t go, I could lose my job.”

“If the bank fills up with reporters who write stories that say a killer works there, you’ll
definitely
lose your job,” Frank pointed out.

“It’s just for a few days, until we find the real killer,” Mrs. Brandt added reassuringly. “I’m sure Mr. Dennis will understand when he hears what happened.”

Frank wanted to challenge her on the “we,” but he refrained. He preferred getting Ellsworth home as quickly as possible. Arguing with Sarah Brandt could wait a few more minutes.

Ellsworth looked like he might pass out, but Frank got him to his feet and helped him out the back door. Mrs. Brandt’s garden was pitch dark. Even though the street out front was lighted, not a beam of it could penetrate the row of houses in between. The two men made their way carefully down her walk and opened the back gate. Frank winced when it squeaked, but he waited a moment, and when the noise didn’t seem to have aroused any alarm, he led Ellsworth into the alley and around to his own yard.

Frank knocked lightly on the back door, and in a moment, the curtain in the window beside it moved and a shadowed face peered out. A second later, they heard a cry of recognition, and the back door flew open.

“Quiet!” Frank warned, before the old woman started screaming at the sight of her son. “Get him inside and turn out the lights and don’t either of you go outside until you hear from me. Do you understand?”

“I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Malloy,” Ellsworth stammered.

“Thank me later. Now get inside before someone hears us.” He shoved Ellsworth into the house and pulled the door shut. In another minute he was back at Sarah Brandt’s back door.

He wasn’t surprised to see her waiting there, watching to make sure everything went all right. He’d been planning to bid her good night, but she stepped aside for him to enter, which he was more than happy to do.

“What’s going to happen now?” she asked when he was inside again.

“I guess I’ll have to find out if there was anyone else who might’ve wanted to kill Anna Blake. Otherwise, Nelson is in a lot of trouble.”

“He didn’t do it. You know that, don’t you, Malloy?”

“I don’t think it’s very likely,” he admitted, “but that might not be enough to keep him from frying.”

She winced. “Then we have to find out who really killed her. Are you investigating the case?”

“No, Broughan has it.”

“Oh.” Her expression fell. She knew Broughan. He’d helped Frank out one time on a case she’d been involved with. “He won’t be much help, will he?”

“He won’t be
any
help. I had to promise I’d get Ellsworth to confess before he’d let me take him home.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Yes, oh dear,” Frank agreed. Then he remembered one more thing he needed to deal with before he left. “Were you just teasing me before or do you really know something about this case that I need to know?”

“Oh, I’d almost forgotten. Sit down, and I’ll tell you about my meeting with Anna Blake.”

Frank pushed the dirty dishes away and sat back down at the table. “I’d been meaning to ask you about that,” he said in a tone that should have warned her he was angry, but she didn’t seem to notice. Or else she didn’t care.

“Nelson sent me a note and asked me to meet him at Washington Square.”

“Wait, stop right there,” Frank said. “He sent you a note? Why didn’t he just come to your front door if he wanted to talk to you?”

“Because his mother would have wanted to know why he was talking to me. You know she doesn’t miss a thing that happens on this street. So I met him at the Square on Monday afternoon.”

“Where in the Square?” Frank asked, thinking this sounded too familiar.

She hesitated. “By the hanging tree,” she finally admitted.

“Right where this Anna died.”

“So it appears.”

“That’s interesting. Go on.”

“We met, and he told me about Anna and how she thought she was expecting a baby. He thought maybe I could help her.”

Frank frowned. “Did he want you to do something to the baby? To get rid of it?”

“Oh, no! I think perhaps he was hoping she wasn’t expecting at all. That would have solved all his problems. But if she was, he wanted me to offer her assistance and reassure her, I think. Maybe even convince her to marry Nelson.”

“Now that’s the part I don’t understand. Why would a woman in her position
not
want to marry the man who’d ruined her?”

“I didn’t understand that either,” she said, “until I met Anna. You see, she wasn’t at all what I was expecting.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I thought she’d be young and innocent and frightened out of her wits. Instead, she wasn’t nearly as young as Nelson seemed to think. She tried hard to look young. Her clothes and her hair and her manner were designed to make her appear so, but I could see she was way past the blush of youth. She was a very good actress, but her eyes gave her away. They weren’t innocent at all.”

“But Ellsworth was fooled.”

“Oh, yes, completely. And when Nelson introduced me, she became hysterical. At first she insisted on believing that I was Nelson’s fiancée who had come to denounce her. He finally convinced her I was a midwife, and then she started accusing him of bringing me there to kill her baby! Can you imagine? She wouldn’t listen to anything he said, so finally, I left him there to comfort her and went home.”

“You’d think she’d be happy to find out you weren’t Nelson’s fiancée,” Frank said.

“Yes, you would, but she actually seemed disappointed. It was as if she
wanted
me to stand in the way of their love.”

“If she didn’t want to marry Nelson, what
did
she want?”

“She wanted money. A thousand dollars, so she could go away and not bother Nelson again.”

“Where on earth would Nelson get a thousand dollars?” Frank had been saving for years to amass enough money to pay the $14,000 bribe necessary to get promoted to Captain, and he knew how difficult it was to come by an extra $1,000. That was a goodly portion of Nelson’s annual salary, and no one paid him rewards for doing his job well, the way they did Frank.

“I don’t think he could have gotten that much money without a great deal of sacrifice,” she said, “but that doesn’t matter now.”

“Oh, it matters a great deal, Mrs. Brandt,” he contradicted her. “Because if she was blackmailing him and he couldn’t pay, he had a perfect motive for murder.”

 

 

 

F
RANK WALKED SLOWLY FROM WASHINGTON SQUARE TO Anna Blake’s boardinghouse on Thompson Street, ignoring the brisk morning chill that warned of winter’s coming. He was trying to get a feel for the neighborhood and judge how long it might have taken Anna to walk from her rooming house to the Square where she died. He looked carefully around, seeing what she would have passed on her way and who might have had an opportunity to see her. The people who might have seen her or her killer weren’t here now. They’d crawled back into their hidey-holes until the sun set again.

The first thing he usually did when investigating a crime was to ask the neighbors what they saw and heard and if they knew any gossip that might help identify the guilty party. In this case, the people who might have seen Anna Blake or her killer that night weren’t the kind who’d feel any civic duty to aid the police. In fact, they’d evade him or lie if they had to, just to keep from getting involved with the police. So coming back here to question the nighttime denizens of the Square was a waste of time.

The house where Anna Blake had lived looked no different from the others on the street. Formerly a family home, it had long since been converted into cheap lodging for those who couldn’t afford a flat of their own but who earned enough to keep a decent roof over their head. Less fortunate folks would find refuge in flop houses where they could get a bed for a nickel a night or space on the floor for a few pennies. No decent woman would go into a flop house, though, and only the lowest of prostitutes frequented them. So Frank knew a lot about Anna Blake just from seeing where she lived.

Although she’d been unable to find suitable employment, she’d managed to find the three to five dollars a week she would need for room and board here, or else they would have thrown her out of the house. Frank already knew Nelson Ellsworth had been paying her rent, but she’d lived in this house before he came along to rescue her. This meant she’d had some source of income before Nelson. Supposedly, she and her mother had been penniless and unable to find work. Then the mother needed an operation, for which Nelson loaned Anna money. Had she been living on that loan? And what had happened to the mother? Buried in a pauper’s grave? Or had she ever existed at all? Interesting questions. Perhaps Anna’s landlady could shed some light on them.

But the person who answered the door wasn’t the landlady or even a lady at all. The man was of medium height, thin but with a slight paunch underneath a stylish waist-coat. A short, neat beard covered the lower half of his face. He wore a well-fitted suit, as if he had just been going out.

“Another policeman,” he said with disgust. People always seemed to know Frank was a cop.

“Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy,” Frank said by way of introduction. “And who would you be?”

“Oliver Walcott,” he replied with a long-suffering sigh. “And I’ve already told the police everything I know about poor Anna.”

“Then it’ll all be fresh in your mind,” Frank said pleasantly, forcing his way past Walcott into the front hallway. The place was well furnished and cleaner than most such houses.

“I was just going out,” Walcott protested.

“I won’t keep you long.” Frank wandered into the parlor, glancing around and taking in every detail.

Left with no choice, Walcott followed but pointedly did not offer Frank a seat. He took one anyway, on the sofa.

“You’re the landlord, I take it,” Frank said.

“My wife and I, yes,” Walcott said.

“Is your wife in?”

“No, she’s shopping, I believe. I don’t know when she’ll be back. Mrs. Walcott can spend the entire day shopping if she sets her mind to it.”

“Then I’ll come back later and talk to
her,
” Frank said. “Now why don’t you tell me everything
you
know about Anna Blake?”

Walcott surrendered with bad grace, seating himself on a chair opposite Frank, but perching on the edge, as if only planning to stay there a few moments. “Anna only lived here a few months. Three or four, I believe, although I can’t be sure. My wife could tell you exactly.”

“How long did her mother live here with her before she died?” Frank asked casually.

Walcott’s forehead creased into a frown. “Her mother?” he echoed uncertainly. “I don’t . . . her mother never lived here at all. She’s dead, or so I was led to believe.”

“Do you know how long ago she died?”

Walcott considered a moment. “I’m sure I don’t know exactly, but I gathered she’d been gone for a long while. Anna was all alone in the world and had been for some time.”