Victoria Thompson - Murder on St. Mark’s place

Sarah could believe that. She wrote “George Smith” with a question mark. “What else do you know about him?”

“He sells ladies notions to the stores in town. Siegel-Cooper, Ehrichs, Simpson-Crawford, Adams & Co., and O’Neils,” Hetty said, naming all the big department stores on Sixth Avenue. “At least he claimed he did,” she added.

“He had nice things in his sample case, that’s certain,” Lisle said. Sarah thought she sounded wistful.

“Have you seen him lately?” Sarah asked.

The girls tried to remember. “I don’t think so,” Bertha finally decided. The others agreed.

“He ain’t been around since Gerda…” Lisle didn’t have to finish the thought.

“Please let me know if you see him in any of the dance halls, won’t you?” Sarah asked. “And it wouldn’t hurt to ask around and find out if anyone knows more about him.”

They looked grim now. Plainly, they didn’t relish the role of detective the way Sarah did.

“Do you know any of the other girls who were killed?” she asked. “Well enough to know who their male companions might have been?”

They considered.

“I used to see Luisa at the dances sometimes,” Hetty allowed.

The others weren’t sure. Obviously, they weren’t too interested in which other females attended the dances.

“Do you know any of their families?” Sarah asked. “Maybe you could introduce me.”

“Why would you want to meet them?” Lisle asked.

“To find out what men they knew in common.”

The girls looked at her pityingly. “Their families ain’t likely to know such a thing,” Lisle said. “You’d best ask their friends. Like us, that’s who’d know.”

They were right, of course.

“Do you know any of their friends, then?” she asked with a smile.

Two MORE DAYS passed before Malloy came in response to the note she’d sent him. She was sitting in her backyard, savoring the cooler evening breeze and feeling awful because she’d lost a baby that afternoon. The cord had been wrapped around his throat, and he’d suffocated before ever seeing the world. Sarah knew there was nothing she could have done, no way she could have known or prevented it from happening, but she still hated failure. The mother had been inconsolable. She’d lost another one before this, too, a baby born before its time and too small to live. She had placed all her hopes on this one since she’d managed to carry it to term. The babe had been perfectly formed, too. All his fingers and toes and a face like an angel. But dead. Sarah had tried every trick she knew to revive him, but to no avail.

When she heard someone knocking on her door, she rose wearily, praying it wasn’t someone summoning her to another birth. She didn’t think she could face another possible tragedy today. Which made her actually happy to see Malloy on her front stoop.

He looked as formidable as ever in his wrinkled suit and bowler hat. His shirt needed a fresh collar. She thought of her father, always impeccably dressed. Felix Decker considered himself a force in the city, a man to be reckoned with because he had money and power. Sarah imagined he wouldn’t last five minutes if Malloy decided to give him the third degree. The thought cheered her a little.

“Malloy, come in, and you’d better have some information. You kept me waiting long enough.”

“It’s always a pleasure to see you, too, Mrs. Brandt,” he replied, and she thought she caught a twinkle in his eye as he passed her.

“I hope you let Mrs. Elsworth see you coming in here,” she said, closing the door behind him. “She’s a great admirer of yours.”

“I doubt anybody comes in here without that old bat seeing them,” Malloy said sourly, removing his hat. His dark hair was mussed, and he made an attempt to smooth it with his fingers, making it worse.

“Let’s sit outside where it’s cooler,” she suggested. “I didn’t have a chance to get any lemons today, so all I’ve got to offer is water or coffee.”

“Water,” Malloy said, probably thinking as she did that it was too hot for coffee, even though a freak storm the day before had dropped the temperature sixteen degrees in just a short while.

When they were seated at the table on her back porch, he reached into his coat and pulled out a small notebook. Sarah already had her notes in front of her.

“These girls knew a lot of men,” he said.

“All we have to do is figure out which ones they all knew,” Sarah reminded him.

“Except they might not have known the man’s real name. Or maybe their friends didn’t know they’d met the fellow or-”

“Stop being so discouraging, Malloy! Just show me the names you’ve gotten.”

“I wouldn’t think I’d need to show you anything, Mrs. Brandt. You’ve probably done more investigating than I have on this case.”

“What do you mean?” Sarah asked, trying to sound innocent.

“You know what I mean. By the time I found some of these people, they’d already talked to you.”

“I was only trying to help. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to find all the girls’ friends.”

“You could’ve just told me who they were.”

“I was also trying to save you some time.”

He gave her one of his looks. “Then you should’ve told me to stop investigating. I wasted a lot of time following in your footsteps.”

He didn’t seem too annoyed, though. He was only pretending. How and when she had become an expert on Malloy’s moods, she had no idea. “Stop complaining, Malloy. I know you talked to a lot of people I didn’t. Just as I talked to people you didn’t. Let’s see your list.”

Malloy opened his notebook and handed it to her, then slid her papers over so he could look at them in turn.

Malloy’s handwriting was surprisingly small and neat. “You wrote descriptions of the men,” Sarah observed.

“A lot of them don’t tell the girls their last names. Do you know how many men there are in the city named Frank? I didn’t want you thinking I was the killer just because my name turned up on the list.”

Sarah looked at him in amazement. His expression was bland, and he was pretending to study her list. Since when had he developed a sense of humor?

“That’s a good idea,” she admitted. “The descriptions, I mean. That way we’d know immediately if any of these fellows with the same names are the same men.”

“Except there aren’t a lot of men with the same names.”

Sarah had noticed this also. “I made a chart, you see?” she said, pointing to a piece of paper on which she had made four columns, one for each of the dead girls. In each column, she had listed the names of all the men their friends had mentioned. She hadn’t done as thorough an investigation as Malloy, of course. She hadn’t questioned any friends of Eva Bower, for instance, because the girls hadn’t known her. Luisa Isenberg had been fairly easy since she worked at Faircloths and the girls knew her friends. She’d found only a few people who knew Fredrika Lutz. Sarah picked up a pencil and began filling in her chart with the names Malloy had gleaned from his interviews. When she was finished, she made a startling discovery.

“There isn’t one single name that appears on all four lists!”

“That would make this job easy, Mrs. Brandt. If it was that easy, they wouldn’t need someone with my abilities to solve cases,” he told her smugly.

Sarah had to admit he was probably right, even though she could see it gave him great satisfaction that she knew it. “All right, Mr. Detective Sergeant, what do we do now?”

He gloated for a moment, but only for a moment. “We pick out the names that occur most often. Then I find the men-or as many of them as I can-and ask them where they were when these girls were murdered.”