Murder On Gramercy Park

9

“MRS. BRANDT,” MRS. BLACKWELL SAID WHEN SHE could find her tongue. “I… I… Peggy should have announced you.” Her tone was unmistakably angry, and her glare was directed at her servant.

The poor maid paled. “I’m that sorry, Mrs. Blackwell,” she said anxiously. “I didn’t know… I guess I forgot. I never was trained about answering the door, I wasn’st, and with Mr. Granger sick and all…”

“Hush, you stupid girl,” Mrs. Blackwell snapped. “Never mind about that now. You may go.”

The girl hastily withdrew and closed the doors behind her with an unseemly bang.

Mrs. Blackwell winced, then turned an obviously insincere smile on Sarah. “I didn’t know you were coming today, Mrs. Brandt.”

“I was in the neighborhood,” Sarah lied brazenly, somehow managing to tear her interested gaze from the young man. “I thought I’d stop in and check on you. You must be feeling very well, however. I was sure I’d cautioned you about getting up too soon, so I’m a little surprised to see you up and entertaining visitors.” She smiled expectantly at the young man, awaiting an introduction.

Had Mrs. Blackwell been more sophisticated, she would have known she could snub Sarah and send her on her way without that introduction. Sarah was, after all, just hired help and here without an invitation at that. But the young woman was either unfamiliar with the more subtle nuances of social etiquette, or she was simply too kind to snub someone who had been so helpful to her, no matter how annoying her presence might be at the moment.

Although she was plainly reluctant to do so, she said, “Mrs. Brandt, this is Mr. Dudley. He… he’s an old friend of mine… from home. Mrs. Brandt is my midwife,” she hastily added to Dudley.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Dudley,” Sarah said, giving him her best smile.

He didn’t return it. He was still too flustered. If Mrs. Blackwell was unsophisticated, he was artless. He managed only to bob his head in acknowledgment. His face was still extremely red. Even redder than his hair.

“I’m sorry to have interrupted your reunion,” Sarah said. “You must have a lot to catch up on.” She should, of course, have offered to leave at this point, but instead, she sat down uninvited. Mrs. Blackwell apparently had no idea how to rid herself of an unwelcome guest, and Sarah was going to take shameless advantage of this to find out exactly who Mr. Dudley was and if he could possibly be responsible for the color of the Blackwell baby’s hair. “How long will you be in town, Mr. Dudley?” she asked innocently.

Dudley sat down beside Letitia again, but this time he left a respectable distance between them. “I… well, that is…” He gave Letitia a desperate glance.

“Mr. Dudley actually lives in the city now,” she replied for him, her voice brittle with strain. “We… that is, I… I mean…” This time she gave him a desperate glance.

“I saw the notice about Dr. Blackwell’s death,” he said too loudly, with the confidence of one who has, at just the right moment, invented the perfect excuse for something. “I thought it my duty to call on Letitia… uh, Mrs. Blackwell. To express my condolences, that is.”

“How very kind of you,” Sarah assured him, pretending to believe his every word. “I’m sure Mrs. Blackwell appreciates seeing a familiar face at this sad time.”

“I know I shouldn’t have gotten up,” Letitia said anxiously, “but I felt I had to receive Mr. Dudley.”

“Of course you did,” Sarah said obligingly. “I know you’ll be very careful not to exert yourself too much for at least another week.”

“Is Mrs. Blackwell’s health in danger?” Dudley asked with a worried frown. “Because you may be assured I would never do anything to harm her.”

“I’m certain of that,” Sarah said with false sincerity. “Mrs. Blackwell is the best judge of how well she feels, and I’m sure she will feel better for having seen you, since you were such close friends. Tell me, Mr. Dudley, what brought you to the city?”

“I… Well, I thought being here would be good for me,” he said uncertainly, glancing at Letitia once more, as if for guidance.

Plainly, there was more to the story.

“I suppose your family has a business here and wanted you to take your place in it,” she guessed, even though she’d already ascertained that he could not possibly be of the same social class as the Symingtons, unless he’d fallen on very hard times indeed. His clothes were cheap and ill-fitting, the crease in his pants betraying that they had been bought ready-made off a store shelf.

“Oh, no, I don’t…” He glanced at Letitia again.

She finally took up the challenge. “Mr. Dudley is a very educated man, but the only suitable position he could find was as a schoolmaster until he came to the city,” she explained, giving him a reassuring smile. “Here he has a chance to better himself that he never had in a small country town.”

“He certainly does,” Sarah agreed, managing not to react to the word “schoolmaster.” As she had suspected from the moment she saw him, Mr. Dudley was Letitia’s former lover, and he was very clearly still involved with her. Sarah couldn’t wait to inform Malloy that she’d already found the redheaded father of Letitia’s child. And, of course, an excellent suspect in Dr. Blackwell’s murder. On the other hand, Dudley’s reappearance pretty well proved Mr. Symington hadn’t had Letitia’s lover killed, thereby eliminating a good reason to consider Letitia’s father as a suspect. She had so wanted him to be the killer. “What kind of employment have you found here, Mr. Dudley?”

“Oh, I’m just… I’m a clerk at a bank at the moment,” he said.

“But he has excellent prospects,” Letitia quickly explained. The glance she gave him could only be called adoring.

Sarah tried to see what might have attracted her to Dudley in the first place. He was, as she had already noted, very ordinary looking. Unlike most redheads, he didn’t have freckles, which was one thing in his favor. But his skin was pale, almost pasty, and his eyes were a washed-out blue. His hair was striking in color, but he wore it slicked down against his head in an unflattering style. His arms and legs were long and bony, and he seemed not to know exactly what to do with them. Perhaps he was utterly charming when he hadn’t been caught by a stranger in his mistress’s parlor, but Sarah couldn’t imagine it. On the other hand, his very ingenuousness might have been what attracted Letitia, since most of the men of her class would have been overbearing and arrogant and probably overwhelming to a girl as retiring as she had probably been.

Sarah had been taught from birth how to conduct a meaningless and socially acceptable conversation, and she called upon those skills now. She chatted about the weather and the neighborhood and the city in general, asking Mr. Dudley what he thought about this or that, and of course he never had an opinion. Finally, she accomplished her mission, which was to make him understand that she wasn’t leaving before he did.

“I… I suppose I should be going,” he said in defeat after what seemed an age to Sarah. Letitia looked stricken.

She glanced at Sarah, probably wishing her in Hades, but her social skills had not included training in how to handle someone as rudely determined as Sarah. “I… I hope you’ll be able to call again soon,” she said to him at last, her eyes suspiciously moist.

“Oh, certainly,” he quickly assured her. “I…I’ll make a point of it.”

She gave him her hand. “Thank you for coming. It was so very nice to see you. To see a familiar face, that is,” she amended, remembering Sarah’s presence.

He had to swallow before he could say, “It was very nice to see you, too. I hope I haven’t hindered your recovery in any way.”

“Oh, no! In fact, I’m sure you’ve helped it tremendously!”

Sarah somehow managed not to choke. “It was lovely meeting you, Mr. Dudley,” she said in an effort to get him going. “Perhaps we’ll encounter each other again.”

“I…I’d like that,” he said without conviction, releasing Letitia’s hand with obvious reluctance.

“I’ll ring for the maid to see you out,” Letitia said. “Mrs. Brandt, will you be leaving, too?” she added almost hopefully.

Sarah smiled serenely. “I’d like to speak with you privately, if you don’t mind. I need to find out how you’re feeling.”

Letitia frowned. She wasn’t very adept at concealing her true emotions, and now she wanted Sarah even farther away than Hades. They sat in uncomfortable silence until the maid appeared in the doorway, and Dudley took his leave again.

It was painful to watch the two of them unable to say what they wanted to say because of Sarah’s presence, but she steeled herself to the ordeal. When at last the door had closed behind him, she turned to Mrs. Blackwell.

“He seems like a very nice young man,” Sarah ventured, and Mrs. Blackwell burst into tears.

Sarah hurried to her side. “I was afraid that entertaining a visitor might be too much of a strain for you,” she said, searching for her handkerchief.

Before she could find it, Letitia pulled one from her sleeve and began to weep into it. “You don’t understand!” she insisted.

“Oh, I believe I do,” Sarah said. “You’ve known Mr. Dudley for several years, haven’t you?”

Letitia cried harder.

“You obviously care deeply for one another. Anyone could see it in the way you look at each other, which makes me suspect that Mr. Dudley was the young man with whom you attempted to elope the night you were injured.”

Letitia’s head came up. Her lovely eyes were full of unshed tears, but she had been shocked into horrified silence. “Who told you that?” she whispered.

“You know how servants gossip,” Sarah excused herself.

“They couldn’t… He’s never been to the house before! They’ve never even set eyes on him!”

Sarah didn’t remind her that her maid had known him well. “But you have been seeing him elsewhere, haven’t you?”

“No! Certainly not! That would be immoral. I’m a married woman. I mean I was! I was a married woman. Now, of course, I’m a widow, and it’s perfectly proper for an old friend to call-”

“Mrs. Blackwell,” Sarah said, out of patience, “you don’t have to make excuses to me. I have no wish to judge you. But it’s obvious that you must have been seeing Mr. Dudley. He most certainly is the father of your child.”

She gasped in feigned outrage. “How can you even suggest such a thing? He couldn’t be. I haven’t seen him in years! You heard him, he only saw the notice of Edmund’s death in the paper and came to offer his condolences.”

Her porcelain cheeks were splotched with red now, and her eyes were wild. She wasn’t a pretty liar.

“I’m not the only one who will suspect that he’s the baby’s father,” Sarah said. “One look at your child… I assume your father knows what Dudley looks like. He’ll guess immediately.”

This time Letitia practically wailed, sobbing uncontrollably into her now-soggy handkerchief.

Although she could not condone adultery, Sarah also couldn’t bear to see such misery, and Letitia was her patient. She took the weeping woman into her arms. “There now, there’s nothing you can do about the past. You can only do something about the future.”

This made Letitia cry even harder, but Sarah patted and soothed, and after a few moments, with no encouragement at all, Letitia began to bare her soul.

“We never meant for it to happen,” she insisted between sobs. “Peter left after the accident. My father had him discharged from his job, and he had no choice but to leave town. He found work here in the city, and we never saw each other again until… until I was already married to Edmund.”

“That must have been a shock, seeing him again,” Sarah suggested tentatively, worried about saying the wrong thing and stopping the flow of confidences.

“He came… he came to one of Edmund’s lectures. He’d seen my name on the poster, and he came to see me. Just to find out how I was,” Letitia added, and Sarah nodded her comprehension. “You have to understand, I was hurt when we… You see, Peter and I eloped one night. I knew my father would never allow us to marry, so what else could we do? But my horse stumbled in the darkness, and I was horribly hurt.”

“So your father ran Peter out of town, and then Dr. Blackwell came to cure you,” Sarah said, hurrying the story along. She already knew this part.

“But Peter saw my name on the poster, and he just wanted to make sure I was well. He still loved me, you see, and he hadn’t been able to make any inquiries about me without drawing my father’s attention to him. He only wanted to make sure I had recovered!”

Sarah nodded again. “Of course he did.”

“When I saw him in the audience, I almost fainted. I could hardly finish my speech. He told me later that’s when he knew I still loved him. I was desperate to see him privately, but I had no idea how to find him. But I didn’t have to worry about that because he was able to find me.”

“I’m sure that wasn’t too difficult. Dr. Blackwell was famous.”

Letitia ignored the mention of her dead husband. “Peter sent me a note and asked me to meet him somewhere. He just wanted to talk to me, to find out if I had forgiven him. He’d felt so guilty for leaving me and for having caused my accident. Or at least he always blamed himself, even though it wasn’t really his fault.”

“And so you met him. Weren’t you worried about being seen?”

“Of course! That’s why we…”

“Why you what?” Sarah asked when she hesitated.

“I couldn’t risk Edmund finding out, and it was the only place we could meet without being seen,” she said defensively.

“And where was that?”

“The… Mr. Fong’s establishment,” she admitted reluctantly.

“An opium den?” Sarah asked in surprise.

“They’re very discreet,” Letitia insisted.

“I’m sure they are,” Sarah said.

“After that…” Letitia began, but her voice broke again.

“I know you must have been very lonely and unhappy,” Sarah said, remembering what the nurse had told her. “I understand that Dr. Blackwell was very busy and was hardly ever at home.”

“It wasn’t that. He just never loved me,” she informed Sarah indignantly. “Not at all! He only married me so that I would have to keep speaking at his lectures.”

“He told you that?” Sarah asked in surprise.

“Not in so many words, but I’m not completely stupid. It was obvious. He never even… after the first few months he didn’t… I had my own room, you see, and he didn’t ever come to visit me…”

“I understand,” Sarah said, trying to imagine how a man could neglect a wife as lovely as Letitia. And there was one other thing she didn’t understand. “If that was the case, wasn’t he the least bit suspicious when he found out you were with child?”

Her face twisted with a grief Sarah could only imagine. “That’s what proves how little he cared for me! I was so frightened for him to find out. I was certain he would know the truth and that he would throw me out of the house in disgrace. But he didn’t even suspect! He had no idea how long it had been since he’d shared my bed or that he couldn’t possibly be the baby’s father. He was only annoyed because my condition would make it impossible for me to appear at the lectures for several months. That was the worst part of all! He never even dreamed I’d been unfaithful to him!”

Sarah found herself sympathizing with Letitia a little, although she knew many women who had far more unhappy lives and who still didn’t feel the need for either morphine or adultery to escape them. Sympathy would get her more information, however, so she allowed herself to feel it.

“Were you just going to allow Dr. Blackwell to believe the baby was his and go on as you had been, seeing Dudley secretly?” she asked doubtfully.

“I didn’t know what else to do!” she wailed, dissolving in tears again. “I was afraid Edmund wouldn’t divorce me. He still wanted me to speak at the lectures, and if he knew I wanted to leave him… Well, if we’d divorced, he could have kept the baby, even though he wasn’t the father. Or at least he would have used that threat to keep me from leaving him. I know he would, just to punish me and force me to do what he wanted.”

Sarah was very much afraid he might have. The law certainly allowed him to. A woman could be divorced and put out in the street, with nothing but the clothes on her back, and never allowed to see her children again. At the very least, Blackwell could have used the child as leverage to keep Letitia in line. He believed he needed her to promote his cures, and he wouldn’t have let her go easily.

Letitia was sobbing again, and Sarah didn’t have the heart to press her any further. She’d already learned what she needed to know anyway.

When the sobs died down to sniffles, Sarah asked, “Would you like me to call your maid?”

“No, I… Let me get myself under control first,” she said, dabbing at the last vestiges of her tears. “Oh, Mrs. Brandt, what am I going to do now?”

“Well, as you pointed out, you are no longer a married woman. You are free to do whatever you wish, and if you wish to marry Dudley, there is nothing to stop you.”

“But my father would never allow-”

“Your father really has no control over you anymore,” Sarah reminded her.

“But Peter is practically penniless,” she pointed out. “How could we live?”

Plainly, Letitia had grown more practical with the passage of time. She probably hadn’t even considered this the first time she’d eloped with Dudley. “I’m sure Dr. Blackwell must have left you some money,” Sarah said, managing to conceal her disapproval. How could Letitia even think about money? But perhaps she was only being critical of Letitia because she herself had turned her back on wealth and social position to marry a “penniless” doctor.

Clearly, Letitia hadn’t thought of having a possible legacy. “Of course! And there’s this house, too. I never liked it, and Peter and I won’t need anything so grand, in any case. I could sell it and buy something smaller.”

Sarah bit her tongue. No one had yet told Letitia that the house had merely been a loan from a grateful patient, a patient whose husband wanted the widow to vacate the property immediately. “You don’t need to make any decisions just yet,” Sarah said. “I believe Mr. Potter has been taking care of your husband’s business affairs. I’m sure he can tell you exactly what your situation is.” Better he than I, she added silently.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Potter is very capable,” Letitia recalled, and Sarah was glad Potter couldn’t see the indifference in her eyes when she spoke of him. “He’ll take care of everything, I’m sure. He always does.”

And meanwhile, Sarah would make sure Malloy took care of questioning Peter Dudley to find out if he had an alibi for the afternoon when Dr. Blackwell was murdered.

WHEN SARAH TURNED down Bank Street, she could see Mrs. Ellsworth sweeping her front stoop. She called out a greeting when she was close enough, and Mrs. Ellsworth pretended to be surprised to see her.

“Hello, Mrs. Brandt! Have you been delivering a baby?”

“Not today,” Sarah replied with a smile.

“That’s good,” she said as Sarah stopped beside her porch. “I dropped my scissors this morning, and they landed point down and stuck in the floor!”

“That’s too bad,” Sarah said. “I hope it didn’t leave a bad mark.”

“Oh, my, that’s the least of it! Don’t you know that when scissors stick in the floor, it’s an omen of death? Dear me, the last time I had an omen like that, some poor girl you knew died.”

Sarah remembered and shivered. “I’m sure it was just a coincidence,” she said, as much to convince herself as to reassure Mrs. Ellsworth. “In a city this size, people die every day, you know.”

“That’s true, of course,” Mrs. Ellsworth agreed. “And I’m always happy to be wrong about something like that. Are you and Mr. Malloy working on another case together? I saw him coming to visit you last night.”

“Yes, and he enjoyed your pie very much,” Sarah told her. “Actually, he’s trying to find out who killed my husband.”

“Is he?” she exclaimed, excitement lighting her wrinkled face. “Does he have new evidence?”

“I’m afraid not, but he’s looking through Tom’s old files to see if he can find someone who might have been angry with Tom or had a reason to want him out of the way.”

“I’m sure he won’t find anything like that,” Mrs. Ellsworth said. “Dr. Brandt was such a fine man. How could anyone not wish him well?”

“That’s nice of you to say,” Sarah said, but she couldn’t help thinking that while Tom truly had been a fine man, he was also dead, and someone had killed him. It might have been a random act of violence. Such things happened in the city frequently. But if it was, then there was little possibility anyone would ever be brought to account for the crime. Sarah didn’t like to think herself vindictive, but she wanted someone to pay for having ended her husband’s life.

“That reminds me, did you see that article in the Sunday magazine?” Mrs. Ellsworth asked. “The one about that new photography called X ray? It made me wonder what Dr. Tom would have thought of such a thing.”

“Yes, I saw it. I’ve heard about it, too. I suppose it would be very helpful to be able to see inside someone’s body.” She thought about Brian Malloy’s foot and wondered what an X-ray photograph of it would show.

“Although,” Mrs. Ellsworth said, “I think some things are better off left a mystery. If there was something bad inside of me, I don’t think I’d want to know about it.”

“X-ray photography isn’t likely to be able to do that anyway,” Sarah said. “It’s not very exact and the pictures aren’t very clear. It may very well be just an experiment that has no practical purpose.”

“I hope you’re right,” Mrs. Ellsworth said. “It seems kind of indecent to go looking inside of people like that.”

Sarah bit back a smile.

“Will Mr. Malloy be coming back soon?” Mrs. Ellsworth said, catching her by surprise. “I’d be happy to donate another pie for his enjoyment.”

“I’m sure he would appreciate that. He may stop by later, if he can. Like me, he can’t always be sure when he’ll be free.”

“I guess crimes and babies make their own schedules, don’t they?” Mrs. Ellsworth observed.

“That they do,” Sarah said. “You have a lovely evening,” she added as she made her way to her own front porch.

After eating her supper, Sarah was sitting by her front window, mentally composing a note to Malloy telling him she had some important information and needed to meet with him right away, when she saw him coming down the street.

Mrs. Ellsworth saw him, too, and he had to stop and make small talk with her for a few minutes. Ever since Mrs. Ellsworth had saved Sarah’s life, she had taken a great interest in hearing about the crimes Malloy was working on. Unfortunately, Malloy studiously avoided telling her about any of them, which Mrs. Ellsworth found extremely frustrating.

As soon as he could, Malloy extricated himself from her and made his way to Sarah’s door. She was waiting for him as he came up the steps. “Did she offer you some pie?” Sarah asked as he entered the house.

“No,” he said, removing his hat. “She’s probably going to bring it over later. She thinks I’m a saint for trying to solve your husband’s murder. Did you have to tell her that?” He was pretending to be annoyed.

“It was either that or let her think you’re courting me. Which would you prefer, Malloy?” she asked with some amusement.

He frowned as he pretended to consider his options. “If she thought I was courting you, she might not come over and bother us,” he pointed out.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Sarah replied. “Come in and have some coffee before you get started. I’ve got something very interesting to tell you.”

He rolled his eyes, but he followed her into the kitchen and sat down obediently at the table.

“I found the redheaded lover,” she told him smugly when she’d poured his coffee.

He almost dropped the cup. “You what?”

“That’s what you told me to do,” she reminded him. “The only problem is that he’s the same fellow she eloped with before-Peter Dudley. They were running away together when her horse threw her, and she was injured.”

“He’s the schoolmaster, then?”

“That’s right. It appears that Mr. Symington didn’t have him killed, just discharged. I’m sure he figured Letitia would never encounter him again, so having him murdered was a needless expense.”

Malloy ignored her sarcasm. “How did she encounter him again?”

“He went to one of Blackwell’s lectures. He apparently saw Letitia’s name on the poster and wanted to see how she was. He must have felt terribly guilty because she’d been hurt, and then he hadn’t been able to find out if she’d ever recovered. He’d lost his position and come to the city, so he hadn’t had any contact with her at all until then, according to Letitia. He works in a bank or something now.”

“And he has red hair,” Malloy said, sipping his coffee thoughtfully.

“Extremely red hair. But even if he didn’st, Letitia admitted he was the baby’s father.”

“She just told you, right out?” Malloy marveled. “I know priests who can’t get confessions like that!”

Sarah tried to look modest. “I think she just needed to confide in someone. Someone who wouldn’t judge her, that is.”

“She deserves to be judged,” Malloy said flatly.

“Perhaps, but Blackwell wasn’t without guilt either. He only married her because she wanted to stop doing the lectures. He pretended to be in love with her, and he used his considerable charms to convince her he was. But as soon as they were safely married, he didn’t even bother to… uh… to share her bed.”

Malloy choked on his coffee. She should have waited until he wasn’t drinking to tell him that. She knew he didn’t like discussing such things, especially with her.

“Are you all right?” she asked as he coughed.

He nodded and kept coughing for a few more minutes. Finally, he was able to speak again. “She told you that, too?” he asked incredulously.

“As I said, she needed to unburden herself. The strangest part is that when Letitia turned up with child, Dr. Blackwell didn’t even realize he couldn’t be the father. That’s how little attention he paid to her. She must have been terribly lonely and unhappy.”

“I guess committing adultery made her feel better,” Malloy scoffed.

“I’m not excusing her, Malloy. I’m just explaining.”

“All right, then explain why she didn’t leave Blackwell for the schoolmaster after he found her again and they discovered they were still in love.”

“That’s easy. Divorce is extremely difficult and expensive. Letitia’s father was hardly likely to finance one for her, and she and Dudley had no means of their own to do so. Besides, if she did divorce Blackwell, he could keep her child.”

“Why would he want a baby that wasn’t his?” Malloy asked skeptically.

“He probably wouldn’st, but he could legally keep the child, and even the threat of that would be enough to prevent Letitia from leaving him. Then he could make her life even more miserable than it already was, and she wouldn’t dare complain. And Blackwell could force her to continue appearing at his lectures.”

Malloy needed no more than a moment to see the significance of this information. “But if Blackwell was dead, the lovers could be together with no other problems.”

“I believe you already pointed that out to me,” Sarah reminded him, “which is why you assigned me the task of finding the redheaded lover in the first place.”

“I didn’t really expect you to find one,” he admitted.

“I didn’t either,” she admitted right back. “But now that I have, you have another suspect in Blackwell’s death.”

“Do you think this Dudley could have done it?”

Sarah considered. “He’s certainly devoted to Letitia. And he wasn’t above bedding another man’s wife. Did I tell you they met at an opium den for their trysts?”

“Good God.”

“He also eloped with an innocent young girl against her family’s wishes. I think he’s extremely foolish, maybe even foolish enough to commit murder and try to make it look like suicide, especially if he thought it was the only way to protect Letitia.”

“A schoolmaster might be smart enough to think of the suicide thing, too. A good way to avoid suspicion. If there’s no murder, nobody will be looking for a killer, and he can come courting the widow afterward with no one the wiser.”

“Murder would solve another problem as well,” Sarah said. “Letitia was concerned about living on a bank employee’s salary until I reminded her she would inherit her husband’s estate. She wouldn’t have gotten anything at all if she divorced him.”

“She won’t get anything now, either,” Malloy said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean Blackwell didn’t leave any estate.”

Sarah frowned. “I know he didn’t own the house, but surely he had something put aside.”

“Not a penny, according to Mr. Potter, who seemed pretty upset about it himself. Turns out he was supposed to be a partner in the business and get half of everything. He even thought he owned half of the house.”

“Oh, my,” Sarah said, giving herself a moment to absorb this. “If Dudley and Letitia didn’t know this, as they apparently didn’st, then it wouldn’t rule them out as suspects, but it also gives Potter another reason to murder Blackwell, besides being in love with Letitia. He thought he would inherit some money, too.”

“Money that he’d use to pay me a reward for finding the killer,” Malloy suggested mildly.

“Oh, yes, I keep forgetting about that. I guess I’m going to have to give up on making Mr. Potter the killer,” Sarah said.

“I understand the temptation,” Malloy said with a grin. “He’s a hard man to like, especially when he keeps insisting poor Calvin Brown killed his father.”

“That is tactless of him,” Sarah agreed. “Oh, wait, I just thought of something else. If Letitia’s marriage to Blackwell wasn’t valid, then she wouldn’t have needed a divorce to marry Dudley.”

“She wouldn’t have needed to kill her husband either, which would eliminate her and Dudley as suspects. Do you think she knew?”

“If she did, she’s done a remarkable job of hiding it.”

“She did a remarkable job of hiding the morphine, too,” Malloy pointed out. “And she would have had to be an accomplished liar to keep her secret from her husband all that time.”

He was right, of course. A woman as desperate and unhappy as Letitia might be guilty of anything, innocent face or not. “So if she knew her marriage was bigamous, then she and Dudley probably didn’t kill Blackwell,” she reasoned.

“Unless the money was just as important to them as being together. If she wasn’t really married to Blackwell, she wasn’t entitled to anything he owned, either. Killing him while she was still his recognized wife would ensure she’d get his estate. And there wouldn’t be the messiness of a scandal, either.”

“So either way they have a motive for killing him,” Sarah realized.

A tap on the back door distracted them, and as Malloy had predicted, it was Mrs. Ellsworth bearing a pie.

“Mrs. Brandt said you enjoyed the one I sent over yesterday,” she explained to Malloy when she stepped into the kitchen.

“I did,” he admitted, doing his best to be gracious, even though Sarah could tell it was a strain.

“It’s the least I can do. If you can find Dr. Brandt’s killer, you will have done a great service.”

“I told you not to get your hopes up,” Malloy reminded her gently, for him. “There really isn’t much chance after all this time.”

“You can do it, if anyone can,” she said confidently. “It’s apple and raisin,” she added, setting the pie on the table. “There aren’t any good berries left this late in the year.”

“I’m sure it’s delicious,” Sarah said.

After some more meaningless conversation, Mrs. Ellsworth reluctantly left, wishing Malloy success in his quest.

“I didn’t realize that coming over here could be so dangerous,” Malloy remarked, looking admiringly at the pie. “If I’m not careful, I’ll be as big as a barn.”

“You don’t have to eat it,” Sarah said with a grin.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to eat it,” he replied, grinning back.

SARAH BRANDT STILL needed some training in being a cop, Malloy mused the next morning as he made his way down Essex Street toward the rooming house where Calvin Brown was staying. She’d met Peter Dudley, but she had no idea where he lived or how to find him. He worked at a bank somewhere was all she could tell him. Letitia Blackwell was hardly likely to be forthcoming with the information he needed either, even if he could get her to see him, which seemed still more unlikely. Short of waiting on the Blackwells’ front steps until Dudley showed up again, Frank had no other means of locating him. He was once again going to have to send Sarah Brandt on police business to obtain the necessary information.

Mrs. Zimmerman answered his knock at the rooming-house door. She patted her carelessly dressed hair, as if making sure she looked her best for her visitor. “Mr. Malloy, how nice to see you,” she said with a smile so broad, it showed her missing molars. Frank thought she might be trying to flirt with him, so he played along.

“It’s very nice to see you, too, Mrs. Zimmerman. How’s young Calvin doing?” he asked, stepping into the house.

“The same as always. He’s been quiet as a mouse this morning. Didn’t even come down for breakfast.”

“Is that like him?” Frank asked, a little disturbed by this news. She hadn’t seen Calvin this morning and hadn’t checked to see if he was still there. Maybe Potter was right, and the boy had finally fled. He didn’t like the idea of explaining that to Potter.

“No, come to think of it, it isn’t like him at all,” she admitted with a frown. “I just thought… He gets up real early. Maybe he was down and got something before I was up this morning. He does that sometimes…”

Frank didn’t wait for her to show him upstairs. He took the steps two at a time, instinct telling him something was wrong. If the boy had escaped, Potter would be furious with him, and rightly so.

He knocked on the door. “Calvin?” he called, and received no answer.

The knob turned easily in his hand, and he threw the door open. To his great relief, he saw Calvin still curled up beneath his covers on the bed, fast asleep.

“Calvin, wake up!” Malloy called pleasantly, going over to shake him. But when he touched the boy’s shoulder, he felt the chill and stiffness of his body.

Calvin Brown was dead.