Victoria Thompson: Murder On Astor Place

“How are you feeling?” Sarah asked solicitously, pulling up the only chair in the room, a straight-backed chair with a hole in the caning. The Higginses saved their good furniture for the paying guests.

“How do you think I feel? There was a woman murdered in my own house!”

The newborn babe lay on the bed beside his mother, fretting but not really crying yet. Sarah picked him up and unwrapped him carefully, lovingly. The sight of new life always awed her, this promise of tomorrow, a promise she herself would never fulfill.

Fortunately, the baby looked healthy enough. No sign of dehydration. But if Mrs. Higgins’s milk dried up, he wouldn’t do nearly as well as if she was able to feed him. And the Higginses probably couldn’t afford canned milk, either. While Sarah’s main job was to get the babies safely delivered, she also took great pride in making sure they thrived afterwards, too.

“This is a terrible thing, I know, and you must be very upset, but try to remember that none of your family was harmed. Whatever happened, you and yours were spared. And now you have a baby to think of. He needs you to be calm.”

As if to prove her point, the baby began to wail. Mrs. Higgins frowned, probably annoyed by having her diatribe interrupted, but she took the baby when Sarah handed him over and bared a swollen breast for him. This was her sixth child, after all, and she knew exactly what to do.

He latched onto the engorged nipple greedily, but after a few moments of avid sucking, he let go of it and wailed again.

“My milk won’t let down,” Mrs. Higgins said, wailing, too. “And is it any wonder? I’m beside myself!”

“There now, just relax. Lean back against the pillow, take some deep breaths and let them out slowly. Close your eyes, that’s right.”

As Mrs. Higgins did as Sarah instructed, she also coaxed the now-screaming baby to take the nipple again. After only a few more moments of frustration, he was rewarded with a gush of milk that had him gulping to keep up with it.

When the baby had settled in, Mrs. Higgins opened her eyes. Sarah realized she looked unutterably weary and a lot older than Sarah knew her to be. And why shouldn’t she? Burdened with a nearly blind husband and a houseful of children and the care and feeding of her lodgers, and now a girl had been murdered in her house. She didn’t need to add an infant into the bargain, but she had one. Sarah would see that they both weathered this storm and came through all right.

“I’m going to prescribe beer for you, Mrs. Higgins,” Sarah said. “Two big glasses a day.” The brewer’s yeast would strengthen her and the alcohol would relax her. “I’ll send someone out for it right now. How about that fellow who came for me the other night? Is he around?”

Mrs. Higgins moaned in anguish. “He’s gone! Moved out in the night! Without a word! One room already empty, and now two more, and who will live here, where there’s been a murder? And with no lodgers, we’ll starve to death! All of us! What’s to become of us now?”

Postpartum depression, Sarah judged, although anyone in Mrs. Higgins’s circumstances could be excused for being depressed. She would bear close watching to ensure she didn’t do something untoward. Women in her condition sometimes harmed themselves or others, even their newborns. She’d have a talk with Mr. Higgins and make sure some of the neighbor women came in to help. And she’d come by often to check the baby for signs he was failing to thrive. Short of removing Mrs. Higgins’s problems, it was all Sarah could do.

Only after she left the house, once she’d gotten Mrs. Higgins to drink her glass of beer and extracted promises from her husband and neighbors, did Sarah recall one vital piece of information Mrs. Higgins had given her: Ham Fisher had moved out. In the night. The night in which Alicia VanDamm was murdered.

For a moment she considered going back to tell Detective Malloy. He’d probably be very interested in that bit of news. But then she remembered his arrogance and his rudeness, and she knew he wouldn’t thank her for helping him do his job. No, surely he’d find out for himself that Fisher had moved out. And he’d probably also figure, as Sarah had, that his sudden departure was too coincidental not to have some relation to Alicia’s murder.

No, she’d leave Detective Malloy to his investigation. And meanwhile, she’d do a little investigating of her own.

FRANK WALKED OVER the one block from the Sixth Avenue elevated train station to Fifth. The trains, which ran on elevated tracks along various avenues in the city, were a godsend for getting from one end of the congested city to the other in a reasonable time. Traffic in the unregulated streets clogged to impassability at major intersections during busy times of the day, so a trip uptown could take hours by cab or trolley. Of course the noise the trains caused and the dirt and cinders they dropped on hapless pedestrians below were a scourge of major proportions, too, inspiring talk of building a railroad underground instead. Frank agreed with those who claimed the only people who would ride such a thing were those who didn’t want to be seen riding a train.

As he studied the enormous mansions that graced Fifth Avenue at its northern end, he could hardly believe they existed in the same city as the Lower East Side with its crowded, filthy tenements. Up here in the fifties, the rich lived in houses that sometimes filled entire city blocks and which probably contained enough treasure to support the whole population of the ghettos for years. Another block farther up stood the elegant Plaza Hotel, named for the plaza on which it was built, and across the street from it was one of the Vanderbilt mansions. Frank thought the place looked like a museum, but people rarely asked his opinion about such things.

Frank could remember when this whole area was open ground. When he was a boy, the only people living at this end of Manhattan Island were vagrants and bums who had constructed a shantytown on the outskirts of the park some city fathers with foresight had begun up here. But when the park was finished, they ran off the bums and sold the lots to millionaires who wanted to live away from the noise and smells and heat of the city itself. Now the city had spread upward to meet them, so if they really wanted to get away, they had to escape the city altogether, to mansions in the country. The poor, of course, had Coney Island.

But Frank had given up railing against the inequities of the world. Now he concentrated on getting as much of those treasures for himself as he could. Other people were depending on him.

The VanDamm house was only slightly less pretentious than some of the others, a stately town house on the block of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-Seventh and Fifty-Eighth streets called “Marble Row.” It had marble steps, of course, and a shiny brass door knocker. A butler in a uniform that probably cost as much as Frank earned in a month opened the door for him. It was clear he thought Frank should have used the service entrance.

“Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy,” he told the butler before the man could order him around to the back. “I’d like to see Mr. and Mrs. VanDamm. It’s about their daughter.”

There, if that didn’t get him in to see the girl’s parents, he’d need dynamite.

Frank figured the butler was trained not to show any emotion, but he’d also probably never had a policeman come to the door, either. He seemed to blanche a little at the mention of the girl.

“Please wait in the front parlor,” the butler instructed stiffly as he grudgingly allowed Frank to enter. “I’ll see if Mr. VanDamm is at home.”

Nice trick the rich had, Frank mused. If they didn’t want to see somebody, they’d just tell the servant to report that they weren’t at home. Frank had a feeling the VanDamms would be home to him, though, at least for today.