Manhattan Mayhem (3 page)

Mary is always ready to lend a helping hand in our endeavors. In addition to many tasks performed on behalf of MWA during her more than ten years as a member of the National Board of Directors, as MWA’s national president she served as an indefatigable and peerless leader and spokeswoman for our genre. Mary also took on a small job that lasted for two years, organizing and chairing the 1988 International Crime Congress, a stellar weeklong affair hosting mystery and crime writers from all over the world.

If that were not enough for one individual to give of her time and talent, Mary has also edited three annual MWA anthologies and contributed to many more.

She is a talented and beloved writer, and her outstanding contribution to the genre was duly recognized when she was named MWA Grand Master for her outstanding body of consistently high-quality work produced over her storied career.

Much has changed since Mary first joined our ranks, but she, thankfully, has remained the same gracious, warm, and caring person she has always been, and we are all richer for knowing her. Certainly recognized worldwide as “The Queen of Suspense,” around here she is known as “The Queen of Our Hearts.”

We offer our deepest and most sincere thanks for Mary’s many years of selfless service to Mystery Writers of America and writers everywhere. We hope there are many more to come.

It was a late August afternoon, and the sun was sending slanting shadows across Union Square in Manhattan.
It’s a peculiar kind of day,
Jenny thought as she came up from the subway and turned east. This was the last day she needed to go to the apartment of her grandmother, who had died three weeks ago.

She had already cleaned out most of the apartment. The furniture and all of Gran’s household goods, as well as her clothing, would be picked up at five o’clock by the diocese charity.

Her mother and father were both pediatricians in San Francisco and had intensely busy schedules. Having just passed the bar exam after graduating from Stanford Law School, Jenny was free to do the
job. Next week, she would be starting as a deputy district attorney in San Francisco.

At First Avenue, she looked up while waiting for the light to change. She could see the windows of her grandmother’s apartment on the fourth floor of 415 East Fourteenth Street. Gran had been one of the first tenants to move there in 1949.
She and my grandfather moved to New Jersey when Mom was five,
Jennie thought,
but she moved back after my grandfather died.
That was twenty years ago.

Filled with memories of the grandmother she had adored, Jenny didn’t notice when the light turned green.
It’s almost as though I’m seeing her in the window, watching for me the way she did when I’d visit her,
she reminisced. An impatient pedestrian brushed against her shoulder as he walked around her, and she realized the light was turning green again. She crossed the street and walked the short distance to the entrance of Gran’s building. There, with increasingly reluctant steps, she entered the security code, opened the door, walked to the elevator, got in, and pushed the button.

On the fourth floor, she got off the elevator and slowly walked down the corridor to her grandmother’s apartment. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of the countless times her grandmother had been waiting with the door open after having seen her cross the street. Swallowing the lump in her throat, Jenny turned the key in the lock and opened the door. She reminded herself that, at eighty-six, Gran had been ready to go. She had said that twenty years was a long time without her grandfather, and she wanted to be with him.

And she had started to drift into dementia, talking about someone named Sarah … how Barney didn’t kill her … Vincent did … that someday she’d prove it.

If there’s anything Gran wouldn’t have wanted to live with, it’s dementia,
Jenny thought. Taking a deep breath, she looked around the room. The boxes she had packed were clustered together. The bookshelves were bare. The tabletops were empty. Yesterday she had wrapped and packed the Royal Doulton figurines that her grandmother had loved, and the framed family pictures that would be sent to California.

She only had one job left. It was to go through her grandmother’s hope chest to see if there was anything else to keep.

The hope chest was special. She started to walk down the hallway to the small bedroom that Gran had turned into a den. Even though she had a sweater on, she felt chilled. She wondered if all apartments or homes felt like this after the person who had lived in them was gone.

Entering the room, she sat on the convertible couch that had been her bed there ever since she was eleven years old. That was the first time she had been allowed to fly alone from California and spend a month of the summer with her grandmother.

Jenny remembered how her grandmother used to open the chest and always take out a present for her whenever she was visiting. But she had never allowed her granddaughter to rummage through it. “There are some things I don’t want to share, Jenny,” she had said. “Maybe someday I’ll let you look at them. Or a maybe I’ll get rid of them. I don’t know yet.”

I wonder if Gran ever did get rid of whatever it was that was so secret?
Jenny asked herself.

The hope chest now served as a coffee table in the den.

She sat on the couch, took a deep breath, and lifted the lid. She soon realized that most of the hope chest was filled with heavy blankets and quilts, the kind that had long since been replaced by lighter comforters.

Why did Gran keep all this stuff?
Jenny wondered. Struggling to take the blankets out, she then stacked them into a discard pile on the floor.
Maybe someone can use them,
she decided.
They do look warm.

Next were three linen tablecloth and napkin sets, the kind her grandmother had always joked about. “Almost nobody bothers with linen tablecloths and napkins anymore, unless it’s Thanksgiving or Christmas,” she had said. “It’s a wash-and-dry world.”

When I get married, Gran, I’ll use them in your memory on Thanksgiving and Christmas and special occasions,
Jenny promised.

She was almost to the bottom of the trunk. A wedding album with a white leather cover, inscribed with
Our Wedding Day
in gold lettering,
was the next item. Jenny opened it. The pictures were in black and white. The first one was of her grandmother in her wedding gown arriving at the church. Jennie gasped.
Gran showed this to me years ago, but I never realized how much I would grow to look like her.
They had the same high cheekbones, the same dark hair, the same features.
It’s like looking in a mirror,
she thought.

She remembered that when Gran had shown her the album, she’d pointed out the people in it. “That was your father’s best friend … That was my maid of honor, your great-aunt … And doesn’t your grandfather look handsome? You were only five when he died, so of course you have no memory of him.”

I do have some vague memories of him,
Jenny thought.
He would hug me and give me a big kiss and then recite a couple lines of a poem about someone named Jenny. I’ll have to look it up someday.

There was a loose photograph after the last bound picture in the album. It was of her grandmother and another young woman wearing identical cocktail dresses.
Oh, how lovely,
Jenny thought. The dresses had a graceful boat neckline, long sleeves, a narrow waist, and a bouffant ankle-length skirt.

Prettier than anything on the market today,
she thought.

She turned over the picture and read the typed note attached to it:

Her hand shaking, Jenny put the picture back inside the album. In her delirium the day before she died, Gran had said those names: Sarah … Vincent … Barney … Or had it just been delirium?

A large manila envelope, its bright yellow color faded with time, was next. Opening it, she found it filled with three separate files of crumbling news clippings.
There’s no place to read these here,
Jenny thought. With the manila envelope tucked under her arm, she walked into the dining area and settled at the table. Careful not to tear the clippings, she began to slide them from the envelope. Looking at the date on the top clipping of the three sets, she realized they had been filed chronologically.

“Murder in Union Square” was the first headline she read. It was dated June 8, 1949. The story followed:

Why did Gran keep all these clippings?
Jenny asked herself.
Why didn’t she ever tell me about it, especially when she knew I was planning to go into criminal law? I know she must not have talked with Mom about it. Mom would have told me.

She spread out the other clippings on the table. In sequence by date, they told of the murder investigation from the beginning. In the late afternoon, Sarah Kimberley had been modeling the dress she was wearing when her body was found.

The autopsy revealed that Sarah was six weeks pregnant when she died.

Up-and-coming designer Vincent Cole had been questioned for hours. He was known to have been seeing Sarah on the side. But his fiancée, Nona Banks, an heiress to the Banks department store fortune, swore they had been together in her apartment all night.

What did my grandmother do with the dress she had?
Jenny wondered.
She said it was the prettiest dress she ever owned.

Jenny’s computer was on the table, and she decided to see what she could find out about Vincent Cole. What she discovered shocked her. Vincent Cole had changed his name to Vincenzia and was now a famous designer.
He’s up there with Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera,
she thought.

The next pile of clippings was about the arrest of Barney Dodd, a twenty-six-year-old man who liked to sit for hours in Union Square Park. Borderline mentally disabled, he lived at the YMCA and worked at a funeral home. One of his jobs was dressing the bodies of the deceased and placing them in the casket. At noon and after work he would head straight to the park, carrying a paper bag with his lunch or dinner. As Jenny read the accounts, it became clear why he had come under suspicion. The body of Sarah Kimberley had been laid out as though she was in a coffin. Her hands had been clasped. Her hair was in place, the wide collar of the dress carefully arranged.