CHAPTER 3
When I emerged from my bedroom the next morning, I discovered my roommate, Callie, in the kitchen, humming to herself. Her blond hair was braided and pinned up in an artful pile, with her soft fringe and ringlets framing her eyes. Over an unseasonably thin cotton dress she’d wrapped a wool schoolgirl sweater that hung below her hips. “Who are you today?” I asked.
She beamed at me in greeting, and struck a pose. “Serena in June Bride. Do I look dewy and virginal?”
I staggered gratefully toward the percolator. “I’d marry you for your coffee making alone.”
She laughed.
This up-with-the-larks version of my roommate took some getting used to. When she was doing stage work, she kept Count Dracula hours, rarely rising before noon. These days, though, she put roosters to shame. Not that there were many roosters in Greenwich Village.
“I was going to wait up for you last night,” she told me, “but I conked out over The Titan by Theodore Dreiser. Your aunt loaned it to me yesterday. It’s better than a bromide. Oh, and she sent you a piece of pumpkin pie.”
That was good news. “Better breakfast than Grape-Nuts. Do you want to split it?”
“I already swallowed some burned toast. I need to hurry if I’m going to make it to 175th Street. It’s a train, trolley, and long hike to get there.”
Callie had already brought in the milk. I poured some into my coffee and then quickly opened the window and put it on the sill. Seeing the milk bottle there reminded me of the one on Ruthie Jones’s fire escape, which brought to mind the whole grisly scene at Ruthie’s apartment. There went my appetite, even for pie.
I shut the window again as fast as possible. “It’s cold out there.”
“We’re doing a picnic scene today. I’ll be shivering in short sleeves.”
After her last show closed the past summer, Callie found work in motion pictures to tide her over and had kept on making them. There were film studios all over—in Queens, in the Bronx, New Jersey, on Midtown rooftops, even. While the theater thrived at night, the picture business lived in daytime, and the hours were long. In my opinion it seemed a lot of effort for very little. I’d seen Callie in one of her pictures already, a comedy about a man with a nagging wife. Callie portrayed a shop girl the film’s hero flirted with. She’d been the best thing about it.
“You never go on auditions anymore,” I said.
“I do so. I went to one just . . .” She thought back. “Three weeks ago.”
“You used to get antsy if you’d gone even three days without making the rounds of producers’ offices.”
“It’s almost December, and the Christmas season’s a slow time for auditions and casting,” she explained. “Besides, I don’t have to worry so much now that Alfred Sheldrake at Empire State Pictures is offering me all the work I could want.”
“Movies.” I shook my head. How gratifying could that be? “You knock yourself out for a few minutes of flickering across a screen in a silly fifteen-minute story.”
“I know, you think I should be Ethel Barrymore. But guess what? Even la Barrymore’s made a picture. They’re the future.”
If the future promised nothing but pratfalls and mimed melodrama, I wasn’t sure I was ready for it.
“Last week Alfred paid me ten dollars for a movie idea, too,” Callie said.
“That’s great, but you should be lighting up Broadway.”
“Who are you, my manager? You spend a couple of days with your backside polishing benches outside producers’ offices and come back and tell me how gratifying the Great White Way is. Anyway, I’ll be back in the theater someday. Otto’s promised me a part in his new show.”
Our friend Otto, a songwriter, and the playwright he was working with had been laboring so long on this show, it was hard to believe it was actually going to come off. Elephants gestated calves more quickly than it took to get a musical comedy on its feet. “Have you spoken to Otto recently?”
“He was at your aunt’s yesterday.”
Of course. Everyone had been at my aunt’s. Except me.
“He says it’s a go just as soon as they can line up a producer,” she finished.
Which was like someone saying they’ll give you a sheet of paper just as soon as they find a seven-hundred-year-old oak tree to pulp. I held my tongue, though.
Callie checked her bracelet watch, drained the last drops of her coffee, and put the cup in the sink. “I’ve got to go. They promised I’d be finished by three so I can drop off my knitting for the Belgians.”
In the first month of the war, the stories coming from Europe had focused on the horrors and depredations committed by the Kaiser’s army upon the defiant Belgians as Germans advanced westward. Callie had joined a group of actors who gathered clothes donations and knitted for the Red Cross in the afternoons twice a week. Before the war started, I hadn’t known she could tell knitting needles from chopsticks. That fighting had now moved to the disputed territory of Alsace-Lorraine, but the knitters and bundle-gatherers soldiered on.
“I’m getting compliments on the quality of my socks,” she said. “Sure you don’t want to join us? You’re welcome.”
“Not this week.” I had plans simmering.
Her brow wrinkled as she looked at me. “I don’t mean it as an insult to you, you know.”
“Why would it be?”
“Well, you know. You’re German.”
“I’m not a German,” I said, my hackles up. “That is, yes, I’m a German-American.” Not that I actually thought of myself as what Teddy Roosevelt sneeringly called a ‘hyphenated American.’ I could speak the language, and many of my ancestors had emigrated from there, but I was two generations removed from the old country. “I’m just as American as people whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.”
“I know that.”
“Then why, whenever someone mentions that I’m German now, does it always seem as if they’re checking to see if I’m hiding a bayonet in my petticoats?”
She touched my shoulder. “Don’t get upset. Teddy says the war’ll be over in a few months anyway.”
Teddy was Callie’s boyfriend of over a year now. “Does Teddy have a crystal ball?”
“No, he has Hugh. Hugh’s convinced planes will be the key to victory for whichever side wins. Says airplanes will end the war in no time.”
Hugh Van Hooten, Teddy’s friend, owned an aeronautics business, and Teddy was his most fervent disciple. “So Hugh’s not only a fortune-teller, he’s a war strategist.”
She started putting on her coat, hat, and gloves. “What do you have planned for your day off?”
“I thought I’d go to Aunt Irene’s.”
“Speaking of fortune-tellers.” Callie smiled. “Last night she told me I’m going to meet someone who’ll change my life.”
My aunt had recently fallen prey to the occult craze. She’d even had her milliner make up a couple of turbans for her to wear when practicing her new art. “Did you tell Teddy about the mysterious stranger in your future?”
“It might not be a love interest,” Callie said. “It might be someone in the theater . . . or anybody.”
“So in a city of over four million, you might meet someone. Aunt Irene’s powers astound me.”
“You should get her to tell your fortune. We need a sampling to see how accurate she is.”
“I’m just hoping there are leftovers in my future.”
“You might get lassoed into housework. You should’ve seen the herd of people in and out of your aunt’s place yesterday. I imagine there’s a lot of cleaning up to do.”
“I don’t mind.” It was hard not to contrast the fête my aunt had hosted yesterday with my evening in Hell’s Kitchen.
“Is something wrong?” Callie asked.
“Just an unpleasant thing that happened at work last night. A woman committed suicide, and left an orphaned baby.”
“How sad.”
I didn’t mention the other baby. Saddling someone’s thoughts with that tragedy this early in the morning didn’t seem fair. “The poor woman must have had family somewhere, but no one seems interested in tracking them down.”
“A job for you then,” Callie said.
“The NYPD doesn’t agree. I was basically told to forget all about Ruthie Jones.”
“All the more reason it sounds like a job for you. When have you ever done what anyone wanted you to?”
After reading the news from Europe from yesterday’s paper over coffee, I bathed, dressed, and then headed uptown to my aunt’s. Walter, my aunt’s butler, answered the door, feather duster in hand. “Are you here to visit or help?” he asked. “The correct response is help.”
“At your service.” I held out my hand, and he presented the feather duster to me like a king passing on a scepter.
He ushered me in and led me toward the parlor. The room looked much as it always did to me. The center of my aunt’s social universe, the space was dominated by a long sofa near the front bay window, an upright grand piano, and a bar. Glass-paned double doors communicated with a smaller, darker dining room, and beyond that was the kitchen.
“How was Thanksgiving?” I asked.
“One young man got as drunk as a lord and broke a Waterford crystal glass.” He frowned and pointed. “Flick that duster over the walnut side table.” While I did as ordered, he continued. “Your aunt insisted on the crystal yesterday because it was a special occasion. I warned her that it’s special occasions when people act especially foolish.”
“I’m sure Aunt Irene will survive being one glass short of a set.”
Walter sent me an arch look. “That would be a good description for some of her guests.”
I laughed.
My aunt, a writer, had seen her professional fortunes wax and wane over the years, but at the moment she was doing quite well. Recently, she’d moved from writing dewy romances to mysteries. Her latest detective novel, The Curtain Falls, was giving Mary Roberts Rinehart a run for her money, and now she was finishing her third. I could hear a typewriter clacking away upstairs. My aunt had returned to doing her own typing again after losing me to the police department and her latest secretary, Miriam, to a job on a newspaper uptown, in Harlem.
The kitchen door swung open and Bernice appeared in the dining room. She positioned a platter of sliced turkey in the middle of the table. Seeing me, she broke into a broad smile. “I told your aunt you’d be here for lunch.”
“It’s nice someone’s glad to see me.” Apart from being an extra pair of hands.
“I sure am. Your aunt bet me a dollar that you wouldn’t come till dinner.”
Walter rang a bell on the hall table and Aunt Irene appeared soon after in a simple—for her—lavender dress trimmed with ivory lace around the neckline and cuffs. Her light brown hair was arranged in an artistic mound held in place by silver combs. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion when she spotted me by the dining table. “Did you tip off Bernice?”
“No, she just knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of holiday leftovers.”
She swept across the room and kissed my forehead. “I didn’t think so, either, but I assumed you’d enjoy a day of rest after your full week at that job.”
“It was that job that kept me from sleeping in this morning.” I waited until Bernice and Walter joined us before giving a brief account of what had happened the night before. Even though I left out the most gruesome details, by the end of my recitation my audience had put down their forks.
“That poor girl.” Bernice shook her head at the sad tale.
“She must have felt desperate to have done something so terrible,” Walter said.
“Ruthie Jones is beyond our help,” my aunt said. “It’s that poor little baby my heart goes out to. Losing a mother and a brother like that . . . and now what kind of future will he have?” She lifted her napkin to her eyes.
“Ruthie must have left something behind that would tell who her people are,” I said. “Maybe they would take in Eddie. But I’m not sure how to go back to her flat and check without looking as if I were gainsaying my superiors at the precinct. Anyway, the landlord will probably get rid of all her belongings as soon as possible so that he can rent the flat.”
Walter cleared his throat. “If that’s the case, then a clear way to retrieve the woman’s belongings would be to be the ones who clear out the flat for the landlord.”
“It’s not my place to do that.”
“No, it’s not,” Bernice agreed.
“Would your superiors fire you for looking at the belongings of a murder victim?” Aunt Irene asked.
“I got in trouble last year for following my own initiative. I wouldn’t want to be put back on probation again.”
“How would anyone find out?” my aunt asked.
I thought of Beggs. “The building manager would know me, and he’d probably mention it the next time he ran across O’Mara, the cop on that beat.”
Walter cleared his throat. “The custodian might recognize you, but he wouldn’t know Walt the ragman and antiquarian dealer.” He smiled at me. “Or my helper, Louie.”
* * *
Walter, formerly an actor, had a trunk full of clothes that we dipped into for our disguises as Walt and Louie. Walter wore an old suit, wrinkled and a bit dusty. I got a check-patterned jacket and baggy trousers attached with suspenders. Luckily it was winter, so an old, battered coat covered my chest. He hid my hair beneath a boy’s floppy cap and smudged enough dirt on my face to ensure no one would want to approach close enough to get a good look at me.
Bernice, drinking tea in the kitchen, didn’t recognize me at first. A good sign. When she realized what I was up to, though, she wasn’t impressed. “This looks like the start of something bad.”
“We’re not going to do anything illegal,” I said.
“If you’re hiding who you are, you’re already in trouble.” She frowned. “I know you’re thinking about that poor orphaned baby, though, so I’m not going to argue with you. Getting in trouble for a good cause is better than doing nothing at all.”
It was as close to a blessing as we were likely to get from Bernice. My aunt, by contrast, had nothing but praise for Walter’s handiwork. She even gave us money to buy the belongings I wanted from Ruthie’s apartment. A bribe for Beggs.
“I’ll pay you back,” I promised.
She shook her head. “It’s for Eddie Jones. Consider it my first charitable act of the holidays.”
I handed over the money to Walter, who pocketed it. We unearthed an old cart in the basement, and though it was laborious as well as tedious, we hauled it across the city. Walter was all for extra work in the name of dramatic believability, and in no time I was feeling authentically grungy, sweaty, and tired. My confidence in our scheme grew during our cross-town trudge, though. As we passed through a poor or commercial pocket of the city, we were ignored. In the wealthier sections, our disguises caused a few women to cross the street to avoid us.
Walter navigated us expertly across Ninth Avenue, dodging cars and wagons as an El train screeched overhead. I rarely saw him out and about like this. It gave me an idea. “You should come over to the flat sometime.”
“That’s kind of you to suggest,” he said, in the stiff, butlery tone he assumed when he wanted to keep someone at a distance. He called it his at-the-door voice.
“I bet you’d enjoy meeting Callie’s theater friends,” I said. “I don’t know why I haven’t thought of inviting you before.”
“Perhaps because I’ve been sending telepathic messages to avoid just such a circumstance.”
“Why?”
“Because I have an inkling I’d go on my day off and then spend the whole time tidying.”
“Callie and I aren’t slobs,” I said, offended. “At least, not by normal standards.”
Walter’s look told me that normal standards were merely substandard.
“This is the street, isn’t it?” he asked.
Tenth Avenue and Thirty-Third Street looked even worse by day than at night. Old warehouses, tenements, missions, and junk stores weren’t visually pleasing, and now I noticed one lot had been turned to rubble, probably after a fire. A man with a pushcart dawdled and clanged in front of us, selling pans and kettles. A beggar approached, only to be repulsed by Walter’s stony stare. I was glad to be in disguise, because I recognized a few of the winos and women on the street from the station house. This was their world, and how well Walter and I fit in was a testament to his costuming skills.
I pointed. “It’s that building on the corner.” It looked as lopsided as ever.
“You take the cart,” Walter instructed me. “Keep your head down. I’ll do the talking.”
I was able to tell him which door belonged to Beggs, and I crossed my fingers that the custodian was in. Luckily, he was, and after a bit of finagling and handing over a couple of bucks, we were allowed into the apartment to take what we wanted, for which we would pay him more when we were done, depending on what we found. It was Beggs’s lucky day, and I would have been more resentful if I weren’t in such a hurry to see what I could retrieve from the apartment. I feared scavengers had already taken things out. I was especially eager to get my hands on the picture.
My worries were all for nothing. The apartment appeared much the same as it had been the day before. The tub still had quite a bit of blood-stained water in it, although the razor was gone.
Walter paled when we were left alone. “Dear God, this is horrible. That poor woman, and those children. They lived here?”
I had seen enough places like it in the past year that I was no longer as shocked at its primitiveness as I’d been before I’d joined the police force. Of course, even the poorest of tenements didn’t usually have the stench of death that still clung to Ruthie’s rooms. Or was that my imagination?
“I’ll open the window.” I hurried to let some air in. I also pulled the ratty curtains open, allowing more of the feeble autumn light inside.
It helped. Gulping in a few breaths, Walter recovered his composure. Hands on hips, he inspected the rooms more closely, even running a finger along a shelf where the package of crackers sat. “No dust. Miss Jones was not a lax housekeeper.”
“She might have been clean, but she wasn’t tidy,” I said. “The bed’s unmade, nothing in her drawers was folded, and she even left food containers open. And look at the empty milk bottle out on the fire escape.”
“So?” he asked. “Everyone puts milk out in winter.”
“But the bottle was empty. You noticed she was clean. Why wouldn’t she have put it by the door out in the hallway for the milkman to pick up?” That’s what Callie and I did as soon as we finished a bottle. An idea that had been tickling the back of my mind roared forward. “What if someone else caused the mess?”
Walter frowned. “Or maybe this disorder was indicative of a disordered mind.”
“Maybe.” A voice in my head told me not to get so carried away with my new pet theory that I refused to accept the obvious. Actually, the voice sounded an awful lot like my friend Detective Frank Muldoon. Whenever my imagination ran amok, I could usually count on Muldoon to be my brakeman. If he could see what I was doing now, he’d have a fit. It’s just for the baby, I told myself. I only needed to find out where in Nebraska Ruthie came from. I wasn’t trying to prove her death was a murder.
Next to me, Walter frowned at the floor. “I take back what I said about Ruthie’s cleanliness. Look at the mess under the bed. Are those dust moats?”
I followed his gaze. The clumps of fluff seemed too thick for dust. “More like cotton.”
Walter knelt and reached under the bed. When his hand appeared again, a piece of mattress stuffing was pincered between his thumb and index finger. “Was this under the bed last night?”
“I think so.” When I’d glanced under there last night I’d been more interested in finding a child than in Ruthie’s housekeeping skills.
He stood again, and in silent agreement we turned the mattress over. It was cross-hatched with cuts. No wonder the batting was spilling through the slats of the bed frame.
“Someone was looking for something,” I said.
“Someone who thought Ruthie kept her money in her mattress, I bet.” His eyes widened. “Maybe they killed her for it.”
Remembering the boodle bag, I shook my head. “The detectives found forty-six dollars on her, in the tub. Surely Ruthie would have handed over the money before letting someone kill her.” And what about her son? “If someone intended to kill her to find the money, they’d probably already killed Johnny as a threat. Surely she would have let the thief have the money before he killed her baby.”
I’m not here to solve a murder, I reminded myself. I hurried over to the framed photograph. “I definitely want this. If I can only figure out where the picture was taken . . .”
“It might have a studio stamp on it somewhere.”
We’d brought a canvas sack to carry our loot home in, and I put the picture in it. Then I went through every drawer in the flat, hunting for a letter or some clue as to Ruthie’s hometown. As minutes ticked by without our finding more, I despaired. A lot was going to depend on that picture.
After a half hour, Walter started to get antsy. “That man Beggs is going to wonder why we’ve been up here so long.”
I relented. “There’s nothing more I want here anyway.”
“We can’t leave empty-handed, though,” he said, looking around. “Ragmen aren’t picky. Grab some clothes from her trunk.”
Thank heavens one of us was thinking straight. I took armloads of Ruthie’s clothes and put them in the bags. I could donate them to charity.
“We’ll end up spending a lot of your aunt’s money for very little,” Walter grumbled.
It was true. I took a last turn around the flat, then spotted the button I’d seen earlier. It was shiny brass, with a bird with spread wings, possibly an eagle, in the center. I stuffed it in my pocket. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a clue.
Not that I was trying to solve a murder.