“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.”
4
FRANK 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.