Manhattan Mayhem (4 page)

According to the accounts, Barney was known to try to strike up a conversation if a pretty young woman was sitting near him.
That’s not proof of anything,
Jenny thought. She realized that she was thinking like the deputy district attorney she would soon become.

The last clipping was a two-page article from the
Daily News.
It was called “Did Justice Triumph?” It was about “The Case of the Five-Dollar Dress,” as the writer dubbed it. At a glance, she could see that long excerpts from the trial were included in the article.

Barney Dobbs had confessed. He signed a statement saying that he had been in Union Square at about midnight the night of the murder. It was chilly, so the park was deserted. He saw Sarah walking across Fourteenth Street. He followed her, and then, when she wouldn’t kiss him, he killed her. He carried her body to the front door of Klein’s and left it there. But he arranged it so that it looked nice, the way he did in the funeral parlor. He threw away the knife as well as the clothes he was wearing that night.

Too pat,
Jenny thought scornfully.
It sounds to me like whoever got that confession was trying to cover every base. Talk about a rush to justice.
Barney certainly didn’t get Sarah pregnant. Who was the father of the baby? Who was Sarah with that night? Why was she alone at midnight (or later) in Union Square?

It was obvious the judge also thought there was something fishy about the confession. He entered a plea of not guilty for Barney and assigned a public defender to his case.

Jenny read the accounts of the trial with increasing contempt. It seemed to her that although the public defender had done his best to defend Barney, he was obviously inexperienced.
He should
never
have put Barney on the stand,
she thought. The man kept contradicting himself. He admitted that he had confessed to killing Sarah, but only because he was hungry and the officers who were talking to him had promised him a ham and cheese sandwich and a Hershey bar if he would sign something.

That was good,
she thought.
That should have made an impression on the jurors.

Not enough of an impression,
she decided as she continued reading.
Not compared to the district attorney trying the case.

He had shown Barney a picture of Sarah’s body taken at the scene of the crime. “Do you recognize this woman?”

“Yes. I used to see her sometimes in the park when she was having her lunch or walking home after work.”

“Did you ever talk to her?”

“She didn’t like to talk to me. But her friend was so nice. She was pretty, too. Her name was Catherine.”

My grandmother,
Jenny thought.

“Did you see Sarah Kimberley the night of the murder?”

“Was that the night I saw her lying in front of Klein’s? Her hands were folded, but they weren’t folded nice like they are in the picture. So I fixed them.”

His attorney should have called a recess, should have told the judge that his client was obviously confused!
Jenny raged.

But the defense lawyer had allowed the district attorney to continue the line of questioning, hammering at Barney. “You arranged her body?”

“No. Somebody else did. I only changed her hands.”

There were only two defense witnesses. The first was the matron at the YMCA where Barney lived. “He’d never hurt a fly,” she said. “If he tried to talk to someone and they didn’t respond to him, he never approached them again. I certainly never saw him carry a knife. He doesn’t have many changes of clothes. I know all of them, and nothing’s missing.”

The other witness was Catherine Reeves. She testified that Barney had never exhibited any animosity toward her friend Sarah Kimberley. “If we happened to be having lunch in the park and Sarah ignored Barney, he just talked to me for a minute or two. He never gave Sarah a second glance.”

Barney was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life without parole.

Jenny read the final paragraph of the article:

I’d say, absolutely not,
Jenny fumed. She looked up and realized that the shadows had lengthened.

At the end, Gran had ranted about Vincent Cole and the five-dollar dress. Was it because he couldn’t bear the sight of it? Was he the father of Sarah’s unborn child?

He must be in his mid-eighties now,
Jenny thought. His first wife, Nona Hartman, was a department store heiress. One of the article clips was about her. In an interview in
Vogue
magazine in 1952, she said she had first suggested that Vincent Cole did not sound exotic enough for a designer, and she urged her husband to upgrade his image by changing
his name to Vincenzia. Included was a picture of their over-the-top wedding at her grandfather’s estate in Newport. It had taken place on August 10, 1949, a few weeks after Sarah was murdered.

The marriage lasted only two years. The complaint had been adultery.

I wonder
 … Jenny thought. She turned back to the computer. The file on Vincent Cole—Vincenzia—was still open. She began searching through the links until she found what she was looking for. Vincent Cole, then twenty-five years old, had been living two blocks from Union Square when Sarah Kimberley was murdered.

If only they had DNA in those days. Sarah lived on Avenue C, just a few blocks away. If she had been in his apartment that night and told him she was pregnant, he easily could have followed her and killed her. Cole probably knew about Barney, a character around Union Square. Could Vincent Cole have arranged the body to throw suspicion on Barney? Maybe he saw him sitting in the park that night?

We’ll never know,
Jenny thought.
But it’s obvious that Gran was sure he was guilty.

She got up from the chair and realized that she had been sitting for a long time. Her back felt cramped, and all she wanted to do was get out of the apartment and take a long walk.

The charity pick-up truck should be here in fifteen minutes. Let’s be done with it,
she thought, and went back into the den. Two boxes were left to open. The one with the Klein label was the first she investigated. Wrapped in blue tissue was the five-dollar dress she had seen in the picture.

She shook it out and held it up.
This must be the dress Gran talked about a couple years ago. I had bought a cocktail dress in this color. Gran told me that it reminded her of a dress she had when she was young. She said Grandpa didn’t like to see her wearing it. “A girl I worked with was wearing one like it when she had an accident,” she’d said, “and he thought it was bad luck.”

The other box held a man’s dark blue three-button suit. Why did it look familiar? She flipped open the wedding album.
I’m pretty sure that’s what my grandfather wore at the wedding,
she thought.
No wonder Gran
kept it. She could never talk about him without crying.
She thought about what her grandmother’s old friends had told her at the wake: “Your grandfather was the handsomest man you’d ever want to see. While he was going to law school at night, he worked as a salesman at Klein’s during the day. All the girls in the store were after him. But once he met your mother, it was love at first sight. We were all jealous of her.”

Jenny smiled at the memory and began to go through the pockets of the suit, in case anything had been left in them. There was nothing in the trousers. She slipped her fingers through the pockets of the jacket. The pocket under the left sleeve was empty, but it seemed as though she could feel something under the smooth satin lining.

Maybe it has one of those secret inner pockets,
she thought.
I had a suit with a hidden pocket like that.

She was right. The slit to the inner pocket was almost indiscernible, but it was there.

She reached in and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. Opening it, she read the contents.

It was addressed to Miss Sarah Kimberley.

It was a medical report stating that the test had confirmed she was six weeks pregnant.

MARY HIGGINS CLARK
’
s books are worldwide best sellers. In the United States alone, her books have sold over 100 million copies. Her latest suspense novel,
I’ve Got You under My Skin,
was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2014. She is an active member of Literacy Volunteers. She is the author of thirty-three previous suspense novels, three collections of short stories, a historical novel, a memoir, and two children’s books. She is married to John Conheeney, and they live in Saddle River, New Jersey.

The young woman sitting on the bench stopped fingering a strand of her white-blonde pixie cut. Startled, she looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Excuse me?”

“I asked if you were recapturing your childhood.” The man who had spoken reached down to tap a corner of the book lying on her lap. He had a round face and the sort of little-boy haircut most men ditch long before they hit thirty. Wearing black-framed glasses and a bushy brown beard, he carried a soft paunch and a beat-up messenger bag.

“Interesting reading choice,” he said. “Especially considering the view. My name’s Mark, by the way.”

Stiffening, the young woman clutched the collar of her sweater.
Although most of the benches ringing the popular spot were unoccupied, this corner of Central Park was far from desolate. Tourists clambering to pose with its central attraction—an eleven-foot-tall Alice in Wonderland statue—included three young families and a group of college-age kids eagerly snapping photos and sharing results.