The Gilded Hour (65 page)

They sat in a quiet corner of the hotel’s main lobby. Liljeström cleared his throat, wiped his face with a sodden handkerchief, straightened his shoulders, and looked Jack in the eye.

Jack decided that the direct approach would be best. He said, “There was a postmortem. Your wife died of blood loss following an operation.” He waited, watching Liljeström’s expression. He was a man like a thousand others in the city, someone Jack might have walked past every day and never noticed. But there was a dignity about him, and when he spoke his tone was even and unapologetic.

“We have two children,” he said. “Healthy, beautiful children. A boy and a girl. But the first confinement was hard, and the second even worse. Our doctor said that she was unlikely to survive a third pregnancy.”

“So you are aware of the operation she had.”

The man had very pale blue eyes, almost colorless. “Yes. She missed
twice, you see, and we decided together that it was the right thing to go to a doctor who could bring her courses on. I wanted to come with her but she refused. It wasn’t the first time, and she thought she had nothing to fear.”

Jack said, “She had the procedure done previously? By the same doctor?”

“She had it done once before, but that doctor died, and she decided she didn’t want to approach anyone else near home. We’ve heard of women being blackmailed, you see.”

Jack sat back. “Well, no, I haven’t run into that before. Does it happen often?”

“I don’t know,” said Liljeström. “I only know of one case, a lady who goes to our church. Her daughter was in trouble and so they went to a doctor who could fix the problem. Afterward his nurse threatened the lady that she’d tell everybody about her daughter’s shame if she didn’t give her money.”

“How do you know this?” Jack asked.

“Because the lady is a close friend of my wife’s. Was a close friend.”

His eyes filled with tears. Jack concentrated for a moment on his notebook, and then in an even tone he said, “Do you know the doctor’s name, the one your wife came to see? Anything about him?”

“I only know that she was confident about his qualifications, and that his office is here in the city in a safe neighborhood.”

“To be clear, we believe that what happened to your wife might have been done with malice aforethought. Any information you have could be helpful in bringing the responsible party to account,” Jack said.

Color flooded the man’s face, rising from his neck like mercury in a thermometer. “You mean to say this wasn’t a simple error by the surgeon?”

“We have reason to believe that it may well have been premeditated. It’s still under investigation. And so perhaps you’ll understand why any information at all is important.”

“I would tell you if I knew. All I can say with certainty is that he charged two hundred fifty dollars, and was supposed to provide nursing care for up to three days, or until she was ready to come home.” He let out a harsh laugh, then pressed his handkerchief to his eyes. “He put her in a cab and sent her to a hospital. I know that I’d kill him with my own two hands, if he were standing here with me, and if it meant going to the gallows.”

“Would your sister-in-law know more about your wife’s arrangements?”

Liljeström’s head came up quickly. “No. She had no idea that Abigail was here. She wouldn’t have approved.”

“So it wasn’t Mrs. Liljeström’s sister who gave her the name of the doctor. Did she have other close friends in the city?”

“No. I really don’t know how she found him. Believe me, if I knew who was responsible, I wouldn’t keep it to myself. Are we almost done? I have arrangements to make. I want to take her home. The children and her parents—” He closed his eyes briefly, and then let out a long sigh.

“Just one more question,” Jack said. “They gave you her things at the morgue, and you’ve been through her room here. Is anything missing? Jewelry, anything of value?”

“She didn’t bring jewelry with her when we traveled,” Liljeström said. “It’s still at home in the safe. Her wedding ring was on the bedside table in her room.”

He stood abruptly. “You have my address if you have more questions.”

Jack shook Liljeström’s hand. “I’m very sorry for your loss. Would you like to be notified when we find the responsible party?”

“I want to know when he’s dead,” said Harry Liljeström. “I want to know that he’s burning in hell.”

•   •   •

A
NNA
SOMETIMES
WOKE
suddenly in the middle of the night, her heart hammering, sure that something crucial had been forgotten and left undone. Most usually Jack went right on sleeping. She wondered if it should irritate her that he was so impervious to her sleeplessness, and decided that it did not. It would be unfair, and beyond that, these short episodes provided her with the rare opportunity to study his face without embarrassing either of them. He teased her about her inability to accept compliments, but he disliked being studied and would go to lengths to distract her when she did it. Extreme lengths, on occasion.

In the dimmest light she saw that his eyes were moving behind closed lids. Scanning for trouble, even in his dreams.

Almost a week had passed and they had made no progress with Mrs. Liljeström’s case. There was still no indication of where she had gone the morning she died, or how she had found the person who operated on her.
Apparently a case like this one became more difficult to solve with every passing day.

Oscar and Jack were still convinced that there was a connection between Janine Campbell and Abigail Liljeström, something they had missed. Anna wished—as she did every day—that Sophie were here to talk through this with her. Sophie had always been the better diagnostician, able to jump with dexterity from fact to fact, weaving them together until she had spun an answer.

Now Jack turned on his side and gave her his back, broad and high and hard as a wall. As if he had heard her thinking and was irritated with her inability to see something so obvious. She moved so her face almost touched the back of his head, better to draw in his smell, soap and shaving cream and something peppery, the very essence of Jack Mezzanotte himself. She drifted back to sleep, just exactly in that position.

With the first light she woke again. Jack was talking, but not to her. He sometimes had long conversations in his sleep, always in Italian. Another thing on her list as yet not even begun. Italian lessons. At least, Italian lessons that she could put to use in company. Everything Jack taught her was very much focused on the personal. It made her blush to think of it, and then she was irritated with herself for blushing. A trained physician familiar with every aspect of human anatomy and physiology, and he could make her blush. He delighted in making her blush.

She would learn Italian, if for no other reason than to scold him when he was being outrageous. Somehow she would make room in her day, one more difficult but not impossible task on a long list, with Vittorio Russo and Father McKinnawae at the top. For the sake of the little girls, but also for her own sake she needed to make a plan, come to some kind of resolution.

The problem was that she didn’t really know what she wanted, what was best for Vittorio or Rosa and Lia, the Mullens, and everyone else. The subject was never very far from her mind. Just a few days ago Jack had made an observation that had struck her to her core, though he didn’t seem to realize it.

For Rosa, he had said, losing a brother was like losing a part of herself. She had failed him in her own mind, if nobody else’s, and would never forgive herself.

It wasn’t often that Anna allowed herself to think about her own brother. Even after so much time it was almost too painful to bear. One day soon she would need to talk about Paul, pull out the few memories she had, and explain it all to Jack. The last person she had told about him was Rosa, standing in the basement of a Hoboken church with her youngest brother held protectively to her heart.

A
T
THE
DINNER
table on Saturday evening the little girls were more excited than usual. A long summer afternoon out of doors, running between Roses and Weeds, had not slowed them down at all. They fidgeted and giggled and whispered, waiting impatiently for Jack to come to the table. He came in late, almost twenty-four hours since he had been called out on a robbery.

He went around the table kissing cheeks, something he had done one evening not realizing he was initiating a routine he would never be allowed to forsake. He ended with Anna and slid into his place with a sigh.

Margaret said, “Go on, girls, or you’ll burst with the news.”

Lia jumped in place.
“Il palazzo delle erbacce è finito!”

“No,” Rosa corrected her sister. “We shouldn’t call it Weeds anymore because there are no more weeds, not one.”

“Too late,” Jack said. “Once a name sticks, it’s stuck for good. Ask Anna about that, she’ll tell you.”

Rosa wrinkled her whole face, trying to decide whether to argue. Then she set the subject aside.

“It is finished,” she repeated. “Your sisters put up the last curtains and Georgio and—” She hesitated.

“Mario.” Chiara supplied her with the name she was missing. Anna was continually surprised that Rosa remembered as much as she did, given all the Mezzanotte cousins who had been in and out during the renovation. She herself didn’t remember exactly where Mario and Georgio fit into the family tree.

Rosa was saying, “And Mario finished with the gaslights and now it’s ready.”

Anna turned to Jack. “Really? It’s ready?”

One eyebrow peaked. “I’m as surprised as you are.”

Chiara said, “Just in time for the picnic.”

Now Jack’s look of surprise was more genuine. “That’s tomorrow?”

Anna said, “Jack, we’ve been talking about it all week.” And saw that he was grinning.

“We’re all going,” added Margaret.

“Unless you have to go chase robbers again,” Rosa said to Jack.

“Or Auntie Anna needs to sew somebody back together,” Lia added. Her small face took on a troubled look, as if she imagined that possibility for herself.

Anna tried not to smile as the girls related the plans for the next day in a manner that was worthy of a stage production. Every Italian in the whole United States, as Lia understood it, would be coming to their own park, just down the street, to eat and sing and dance and listen to music by the Seventh Regiment Band. Under the direction, Chiara added with considerable pride, of Uncle Cappa.

Margaret sat up straighter at this and directed an incredulous look directly at Jack. “Carlo Cappa is your uncle?”

“Not exactly,” Jack said. “His daughter Susanna is married to my brother Matteo. He’s my—I don’t know. What do you call your sister-in-law’s father?”

“Uncle,” said Lia, in a decisive tone.

“You call everybody aunt or uncle,” said Rosa.

Lia looked both furious and terribly affronted.

Anna said, “I’m happy to be called Aunt. Or Uncle, if you prefer, Lia.”

The girls gaped, and then all of them, Elise included, burst into laughter.

Jack held up a hand as if he were directing traffic, and the laughter cut off. “I can’t allow that,” he said in his most serious tone. “No Uncle Anna here, unless I can be Aunt Jack.”

Aunt Quinlan was smiling, but her eyes were damp. “Yes,” she said. “That’s the house rule. Aunts and uncles and grandmas and grandpas, all around. For anyone who needs one, at any time.”

•   •   •

A
FTER
DINNER
J
ACK
wanted to go for a walk, Anna suspected because he had something to talk about that he didn’t want others to hear. They started out in the direction of Washington Square, passing a group of
young men coming out of New York University in high spirits, charwomen on their way home, and Mr. Pettigrew, a neighbor. He stopped right in front of them, all but demanding an introduction that was, strictly speaking, overdue. They should have gone to see all the neighbors as a newly married couple, but as they had done everything unconventionally, the visits had been put off.

Jack was attentive and friendly to Maynard Pettigrew, but his smile was a little strained. When they had finally extracted themselves and crossed the street to enter the park, Jack took her hand and pulled her arm through his so they were walking as close as they could without tripping over each other’s feet.

He said, “Tell me about your day.”

“It wasn’t very good.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She thought for a long moment and told him about the fourteen-year-old girl with syphilis, a mouth full of suppurating ulcers, and ascites.

“Ascites is a condition where a lot of fluid builds up in the abdomen so that it looks bloated. It can be very uncomfortable.”

“And what causes that?”

“Nothing very good. Possibly cancer, more likely liver failure, as she spends most of her time at the Grand Duke’s Theater and lives off nothing but stale beer. Why is it the police keep closing that place down only to have it open again a few days later?”

With his free hand Jack rubbed his thumb against his fingers in the universal signal for hard cash.

Anna, expecting nothing less, shook her head. “I aspirated a half gallon of exudate to give her some relief, but she’ll probably be back again before long. If she stops drinking immediately her liver could recover. I sent inquiries to some of the missions, see if anyone has room for her. If she comes back, of course.”

“You’re right,” Jack said. “You didn’t have a very good day.”

“And I only gave you the highlights. But then neither did you, by the face you’re making. No progress with the Liljeström case?”

“Just the opposite,” he said. “Another case a lot like it.”

They came to the bench where they had once sat together, when they had barely known each other. She tugged, and he sat down. There was a
lovely evening breeze, and from not very far off the sound of children romping with a very excited dog. From an open window came something that Anna thought was supposed to be music, an oboe being played, very badly but with real enthusiasm.

“I’m listening,” she said.

“A woman called Eula Schmitt was found dead in her hotel room this morning.”

“Not the Gilsey House again.”

“The Windsor. A lot of valuable jewelry and a wardrobe full of expensive clothes. Better off than Mrs. Liljeström.”

“What did the coroner have to say?”

“At first he thought it was”—he paused to take a notebook out of his jacket pocket—“an ectopic pregnancy, but they did a postmortem at Bellevue this afternoon.”

“Abortion, then.”

He inclined his head. “Maybe two days ago. She died of the same thing as Janine Campbell, peritonitis. Did I get that word right?”

Anna nodded.

He said, “But all we have on her is a name, and that may not even be real. No identification, not even a monogram on a handkerchief or a label on her luggage. A few dollars in her purse, no train or steamer tickets, nothing. I asked the doctor who did the autopsy—McNamara is his name—if there was any sign of previous pregnancies, and he said yes, ample evidence. The hotel staff doesn’t know anything about her except that she paid for her room a week in advance, four days ago. She hasn’t stayed there before, that anybody remembers.”

Anna closed her eyes to think for a moment. It was getting harder to dismiss the idea that the cases were related. “What does your captain think?”

“He gave us a couple days to look into it. Oscar is already going through the newspaper ads; he’s got a couple of the new patrol officers working with him.”

“The newspaper advertisements? There must be hundreds of them.”

“Try to stop him when he gets an idea in his head. Anyway, the man never sleeps.”

Anna said, “I can’t imagine why somebody would be doing this. There’s no logic to it.”

“No logic that you see, or I see. But whoever it is, he’s settling in now for the longer haul.”

Longer haul.
The phrase struck her as particularly brutal, the idea that someone had set himself a lifelong task that involved condemning women to terribly painful deaths.

Jack was saying, “It’s the worst kind of situation. He’s dedicated. He doesn’t rush.”

He was still assuming the guilty party was a man, which was likely, after all. Women killed with poison; men made a science of inflicting pain.

“Do you know other cases like this one?”

He glanced at her. “It’s not something the police are proud of, but there are at least a couple others, and not just here. There’s an unsolved case in Texas with five dead over two years, and a couple in England; one of those has been going on for five years at least. Men who get a taste for a certain very specific kind of crime. The ones who can control themselves and stick to a plan are almost impossible to catch. Unless they get sloppy, most of them will live to a ripe old age and die in their beds. The scientists working on fingerprints seem to think they can come up with a way to identify and keep track of suspects, but nobody knows when that will be.”

She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “So you’ll be working tomorrow.”

He read her thoughts, as he did so often, and leaned over to kiss the corner of her mouth. “Just in the morning. Couldn’t miss the June picnic. Even if you didn’t mind, Oscar would. So where do we sleep tonight, Mrs. Mezzanotte?”

“I don’t mind,” Anna said. “But we do have a lot to move, clothes and all the rest.”

“Then not tonight.” He kissed the other corner of her mouth, nibbling softly until she laughed and pushed him away.

“Also, there’s the small matter of food. We need to talk about a housekeeper, Jack. I don’t have the time for cooking or any of the rest of it.”

He sat back. “I promised your aunt that we’d have supper with them, every evening.”

There was nothing to do about that but laugh. “And she made me promise her that we’d eat breakfast with them.”

“She’s determined,” Jack said.

Anna hummed. “I could think of a few other words that might serve better. And still, we will need someone for the laundry and cleaning and all the rest of it. Really, this is something we should have thought of to start with.”

“Anna,” Jack said, slipping his hand to the nape of her neck, threading his fingers into the twist of her hair and tugging, so that gooseflesh ran down her spine. “It won’t take much effort to find a solution, and think what we’re getting in return. A place of our own. Family close by, but real privacy, the kind we haven’t had yet, not even on Staten Island, with maids coming and going and walls too thin for your—enthusiasm.”

“Why, you—”

He caught her hands to protect himself, pulled her closer to put his arms around her shoulders and hold her still. Laughing like a boy very satisfied with a prank.

An older couple walked by, the lady making her disapproval known by clucking her tongue. A spasm of irritation passed over Jack’s face and she felt him tense, and so Anna did the logical thing, damn the disapproval on a beautiful summer evening. She kissed him, and, getting up, she pulled him onto his feet.

“Let’s go try out the privacy. See if it lives up to your expectations and my enthusiasms.”

Jack said, “Did you notice the size of the bathtub?”