Victoria Thompson - Murder on Washington Square

“You’re much better at that than I am,” Mrs. Brandt remarked.

“I’m louder,” he said.

“And bigger,” Mrs. Ellsworth added.

They reached the rear of their houses without further incident. “We’ll wait here until you’re safely inside,” he told the old woman.

Mrs. Ellsworth wasn’t eager to be dismissed, however.

“Mrs. Brandt, you need to get some rest immediately,” she said. “I’ll be happy to come in and fix you something to eat so you don’t have to exert yourself.”

Frank opened his mouth to protest, but Sarah Brandt beat him to it.

“Thank you so much for the offer, but I’m afraid I must consult with Mr. Malloy before I can even think of resting. I have a lot of things to tell him… and to ask him, too,” she added with a meaningful look he didn’t even try to interpret.

“But you must eat,” Mrs. Ellsworth insisted. “You probably haven’t even had any breakfast.”

“I’ll fix her something,” Frank said, earning an amazed look from both women. “And if anyone comes looking for Mrs. Brandt to deliver a baby, tell them she’s already out on a call,” he added to Mrs. Ellsworth.

“Malloy!” Mrs. Brandt protested, but Frank wasn’t going to argue that point.

“Don’t you want to hear all about Mrs. Giddings’s confession?” he asked provocatively, taking her by the elbow and steering her toward her back gate.

“Thank you for your help,” she called over her shoulder to the old woman. “I’ll check on you this afternoon.” Then she said, “Ouch!” because Frank was squeezing her elbow pretty tightly.

But he didn’t let her go until he was sure she was safely in her yard with the gate closed behind them, away from Mrs. Ellsworth.

As soon as they were inside her house and the back door was shut, she said, “You better not have used the third degree on Mrs. Giddings.”

Frank pulled off his bowler hat and hung it on a hook by the back door before trusting himself to respond to that. “I didn’t lay a hand on the woman, or on her son either, for that matter. I figured out from what he told me that he didn’t kill Anna Blake. I wasn’t even going to arrest him, but I guess his mother didn’t know that, which is why she decided to confess.”

She pulled off her gloves and then her hat, jabbing the lethal-looking hat pin back into it with far more force than necessary. “Something’s not right about this, Malloy,” she insisted, making her way into the kitchen without bothering to invite him to follow. He did anyway.

“I don’t know why you can’t just accept that the woman killed Anna Blake,” he tried. “She had every reason to, and she admitted it.”

“How did she even know where Anna lived?”

“She followed her son there that night. The boy had followed his father before, so he knew where the house was. Harold wanted to confront her. He wanted her to give back the money she’d taken from his father.”

She was stuffing kindling into the stove. “I’m sure Anna found that amusing.”

“The boy said she laughed at him, if that’s what you mean. Then he left, but his mother waited for a while, so the boy wouldn’t see her, and when she saw Anna leave the house, she realized this was her chance. She followed her to the park and stabbed her.”

Mrs. Brandt had lit the kindling and looked up while she waited for it to catch. “She stabbed her in broad daylight?” she asked.

“They were standing off by themselves. No one paid them any attention.”

“And Anna just lay there until morning?” She was feeding small sticks into the growing flames. “No one noticed her?”

“She must’ve walked a bit, trying to find some help. But if anyone saw her, they probably just thought she was drunk.”

“Wouldn’t they have seen the blood?”

“The coroner said she covered the wound with her shawl, probably trying to stop the bleeding.”

“And what about the man?”

“What man?”

“The man the coroner said Anna had been with before she died. The sponge, remember?”

He’d been trying not to think about it. “She probably had a liaison with somebody we don’t know anything about,” Frank suggested.

“Malloy, this doesn’t make any sense.”

“Murder doesn’t have to make sense,” he reminded her in exasperation. “In fact, it hardly ever does!”

“I’m not talking about the why. I’m talking about the how . Mrs. Giddings couldn’t have killed Anna Blake.”

“She confessed!” Frank reminded her angrily. “Why would she do that if she didn’t kill her?”

“You said it yourself, she thought you were going to arrest her son. She might have done it to protect him. But whatever her reason, she was lying. Mrs. Giddings did not kill Anna Blake.”

SARAH STUCK A LOG INTO THE STOVE AND SLAMMED THE door shut more loudly than necessary. Malloy was glaring at her, but she didn’t care. She was right, and she knew it.

“All right,” he said, pretending to be reasonable, “if Mrs. Giddings didn’t do it, then who did?”

“The same person who tried to kill Mr. Prescott.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Yes, I do! The person who stabbed him promised him information about Anna Blake’s killer. And why would anyone else want to kill him?”

“A hundred reasons! He’s a newspaper reporter!” Malloy was shouting now.

“Keep your voice down,” she cautioned. “You don’t want Mrs. Ellsworth to hear you. She’d be over here in a second to find out what’s wrong.”

He looked like he might explode, but he drew a deep breath, let it out on a long sigh, and forced himself to sit down at the kitchen table.

Sarah started making coffee while Malloy got his temper under control.

As she set the pot on the warming stove, he said, “Just because the person-and I’m glad you’re willing to admit it might not have been a female-who stabbed Prescott lured him with a promise of information about Anna Blake, that doesn’t mean he-or she-had any or even knew anything about the murder at all. It just means that person knew this was a sure way to get Prescott to a private meeting.”

Sarah didn’t like this. He was starting to make sense. “Maybe you’re right, but maybe I’m right, too. What if the person who killed Anna was afraid Prescott was getting too close to the truth?”

“How would he-or she-know that?”

“Because of Prescott’s stories in the paper,” she reminded him impatiently. “He was the one who discovered that Anna was an actress and-”

“ You were the one who discovered that. Prescott just happened to be the only reporter we told.”

“Fair enough, but still, he was the first one to write about it. If someone was afraid of what he was finding out, they could have decided the safest thing to do was kill him.”

“Wait a minute,” Malloy said, holding up his hand. “How would they know it was Prescott writing the stories?”

Sarah had been rummaging around in her cupboard, looking for something to eat, but this brought her head up sharply. She opened her mouth to reply, but no words came for a moment while she thought this through. “You’re right!” she said finally. “ We knew Prescott was writing the stories, but no one else would.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Malloy said. “It’s not like they put the reporter’s name on his stories or anything. So it had to be someone who knew Prescott was the one writing them, or who at least had heard of him.”

“The Walcotts knew Prescott,” she remembered. “He’d been to the house that day we told him Anna was an actress. Then he went back later, right before he was attacked, after he’d talked to her friends at the theater. He was asking a lot of questions, and Mrs. Walcott got very upset.”