Murder in Murray Hill (Gaslight Mystery) (27 page)

“Why did you stop me?” she demanded.

“You don’t have to kill yourself, Joanna. We’ve got a plan that will save you.”

• • •

M
alloy,” Sarah called. “What are you—?” She stopped when she saw Joanna emerge from the cab behind him. This wasn’t right. They were supposed to take Joanna to Police Headquarters, not here.

Malloy took Joanna’s arm, and Sarah realized she was limping as they made their way across the sidewalk to the Mission’s front steps.

“What is this place?” Joanna asked with a suspicious frown.

“A refuge for homeless girls,” Malloy said with a trace of irony.

Joanna rolled her eyes.

“What happened?” Sarah asked. Behind her Grace and Rose stared down at Joanna in openmouthed wonder.

“Joanna set the house on fire and escaped,” Malloy said.

This couldn’t possibly be true, of course, since Joanna was standing right in front of them. Or, more accurately, was limping her way up the front steps. Sarah herded Rose and Grace back inside, and whispered, “I think we may have our chance to speak with Joanna after all.”

Hearing the disturbance, Mrs. Keller and some of the girls came to see what was going on. “Mrs. Keller, perhaps Mr. Malloy and our new guest would like some refreshments,” Sarah said, sending her off to the kitchen while Malloy assisted Joanna inside and into the parlor.

“How did you hurt yourself?” Sarah asked, giving Malloy a chastening glance.

“Don’t look at me,” he said, seating Joanna in the closest chair, an old wing-backed relic with stuffing protruding from the arms. “I told you. She set the house on fire. Well, the bedroom anyway. She’d gone up to change her clothes, and then she climbed out the window to escape. She figured the fire would slow us down.”

“You climbed out a window?” Rose asked in amazement.

“That copper was going to arrest me for killing Pendergast,” Joanna said crossly. “What was I supposed to do?”

“And you hurt yourself climbing out the window,” Sarah guessed.

Joanna’s lip curled in disgust. “I sprained my ankle when I dropped off the edge of the porch roof.”

“Oh my,” Grace said.

“She couldn’t run away with the bad ankle,” Malloy added. “So she went back in the house and hid. But we all thought she’d run off, so I sent Broghan to the train station to see if he could catch her before she left town. Neth went with him. Then I found her.”

“Did you tell her about our plan?” Sarah asked Malloy.

“It’s a wonderful plan,” Grace said.

“It’s an excellent plan,” Rose added.

Joanna looked up at the four people hovering over her, and Sarah saw the anger and bitterness melt away into something that looked very much like amazement. “You were telling the truth,” she said to Malloy.

“Yes, I was.” He turned to Sarah and the others. “I told her all about the plan, but she didn’t believe me.”

“Why would you lie for me?” Joanna demanded of Rose and Grace.

“Let’s sit down and explain everything, shall we?” Sarah suggested.

They did just that after Sarah had closed the parlor doors.

Rose spoke first. “We’re not really doing it for you.”

“Well, we don’t want you to be punished, of course,” Grace said quickly. “You may have saved my life.”

“Both our lives,” Rose said. “And nobody should be punished for killing those two bounders.”

Grace smiled apologetically. “But we’re mostly concerned about ourselves, you see.”

“If someone is charged with killing Pendergast,” Sarah explained, “the newspapers will report the story. They’ll send reporters to find out everything that happened in that house, and what they can’t find out they’ll make up. They’ll accuse the three of you of all sorts of horrible things.”

“They’ll make us out to be trollops,” Rose said.

Grace nodded. “And everyone in the city will know what happened to us and believe the very worst.”

“We’ll be ruined,” Rose added. “And so will you.”

“No, I’ll be in prison,” Joanna said.

“Which is even worse than being ruined,” Grace said.

Joanna frowned. “But if you claim you were the one who killed Pendergast—”

“And Andy, too,” Rose said.

“And Andy, too, won’t that ruin you just as much?”

All of the women turned to Malloy. “The police aren’t going to charge any of you with murder or bring any of you to trial if you all claim to be guilty.”

“The police can do anything they want,” Joanna scoffed.

Malloy shrugged, conceding the point. “But the district attorney is the one who decides what cases go to trial, and he isn’t going to want to look like a fool when three women all claim to have committed the same crime.”

“You seem pretty sure of all this,” Joanna said.

“My sister-in-law has hired an attorney,” Rose said. “He’s the one who thought of this, so he’ll be sure the district attorney understands and makes the right decision.”

“And then they’ll just let me go?”

“They’ll let all of us go,” Rose said.

Joanna stared at each of them in turn, as if trying to judge their trustworthiness. Finally, she shrank back in the chair, closed her eyes, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

Sarah was up in a moment. “Are you in pain? I almost forgot about your ankle.”

Mrs. Keller arrived at that moment with more tea and cake, and Sarah sent her for some bandages. She checked Joanna’s ankle and determined it was probably just sprained, as she had said. She wrapped it and found a stool for her to rest it on. If tears were leaking from her eyes during this process, everyone chose to think it was because of the pain.

Malloy had taken the opportunity of Mrs. Keller’s arrival to slip out and walk down to Police Headquarters to have someone get word to Broghan that he could stop watching the train station and that all his suspects were gathered conveniently in one place.

“I didn’t believe him when he first told me,” Joanna told Sarah as she wrapped the bandage around her ankle. Rose and Grace had gone to the kitchen with Mrs. Keller to give Joanna some privacy.

“I’m sure,” Sarah said. “It’s difficult to believe, but then everything about this situation has been difficult to believe.”

“He told me you’d come up with this plan and I wouldn’t be arrested for killing those men, but I knew no one would do that for me. People only do things to help themselves.”

“That’s not always true,” Sarah said. “Many people are unselfish and generous.”

“They are when it suits them, but what would Mr. Malloy get out of helping me? Or you? Or those other girls?”

Sarah wanted to argue with her, but Joanna didn’t give her the opportunity.

“No, nobody does something like that for a complete stranger, and when I asked him why, he told me it was because he’d been hired to do it.”

“That’s right,” Sarah said. “Miss Livingston’s father hired him to find her.”

“So then I started to believe him because that made sense. Someone was paying him.”

“Oh, Joanna, I hope you don’t think that people only help others when they’re paid to.”

Joanna smiled grimly. “And I hope you don’t think they do it out of the goodness of their hearts.”

• • •

A
little more than an hour later, Malloy returned with an exasperated Broghan in tow.

“Where have you been?” he demanded of Joanna, who gazed up at him with remarkable calmness.

“I was hiding in the pantry until you’d gone, but this one found me before I could get away,” she told him, unrepentant.

“That’s a fine thing. You set the house on fire and then leave. You could’ve burned down the whole city.”

Joanna simply shrugged.

Only then did Broghan glance around to see Grace and Rose standing nearby with Sarah. “Well, Miss Livingston,” he said. “I thought you’d left town.”

To Sarah’s delight, Grace lifted her chin in silent defiance. “My father thought I needed some time to recover from my ordeal,” she said.

“You should’ve told me where you were going,” he said, holding his temper with difficulty.

“Why?”

The guileless question left him speechless. In desperation, he turned to Rose. He seemed to resent having to look up to meet her eye. “And who are you?”

“Rose Wolfe.”

“Oh, the woman in the cellar.”

A reaction flickered across her face, but she didn’t flinch.

“You ran away, too, just like this one.” He flicked a hand in Joanna’s direction.

“I didn’t run away. I simply went home.”

“You should’ve waited until I got there to question you.”

“Why?”

Broghan obviously didn’t like being questioned in return. “So I’d know where to find you.”

“Mr. Malloy didn’t have any trouble finding me.”

Broghan turned to Malloy. “Am I supposed to put up with this?”

“I thought you wanted to question these ladies about what happened when Pendergast was killed. Oh, and Andy, too.”

“They’re more than willing to talk to you,” Sarah said.

Broghan ran a hand over his face. “All right. Who’s first?”

“Since she’s injured, let’s let Joanna go first,” Rose suggested. “Miss Livingston and I will wait in the kitchen until you’re ready for us.”

The two of them went out, closing the parlor door behind them. Broghan cast Sarah a questioning look.

“Joanna has asked me to stay with her while you question her,” she said.

“And I’m staying because I want to,” Malloy said.

Broghan glowered at him, but not for long. After glancing around, he retrieved a straight-backed chair from the corner and set it right in front of the chair where Joanna sat resting her injured ankle on a stool.

“Where’s Neth?” she asked before Broghan could speak.

“He’s kicking his heels at Police Headquarters. He thinks we’re in the basement questioning you.”

She nodded, satisfied.

“Now Miss . . . What
is
your name? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.”

“That’s because no one knows it,” she replied.

“I need to know it,” Broghan said.

“No, you don’t. Even Neth doesn’t know it.”

“Why all the secrecy?” Broghan asked, exasperated.

“I don’t want my family to find out what became of me.”

Sarah’s heart ached for her, but Broghan just snorted his disgust. “They’ll get your name when you go to the Tombs,” he said, using the nickname for the city jail. “So, how’d you end up at Pendergast’s house the day he was killed?”

She drew a deep breath, as if to fortify herself. “I was at home. At Neth’s house. He’d gone out for a walk, he said. It was Sunday afternoon.”

“I know what day it was.”

She ignored his interruption. “There was a commotion, someone pounding on the door, and when I opened it, a crazy man came in saying all kinds of things. That’s when I realized that his daughter had been kidnapped, and he thought she was in Neth’s house.”

“And you knew about this because you’d once been kidnapped yourself.”

“Yes.”

He waited, but she said nothing else.

“All right, then. What happened next?”

“These people came in.” She indicated Sarah and Malloy with a wave of her hand. “They had a girl with them. She said Neth had invited her here to meet his mother.” Her lip curled again.

“What’s wrong with that? Besides the fact that Neth’s mother doesn’t live there?”

“Because that’s how Pendergast got women to go into his house. He invited them to have tea with his mother, so they thought he wanted to marry them.”

“And Neth does this, too?”

“No!” she snapped, angry now. “Neth never did it, or at least he never did it before that day, but I guess he’d met this girl and he’d brought her to his house. He’d run off when he realized he’d been tricked, and I could guess he’d gone to Pendergast to complain, so I went there, too.”

“To kill Pendergast?”

“That’s not why I went, but when I got there, I heard him upstairs with a woman.”

“What woman?”

“I don’t know. But I heard him. She was crying and begging him not to hurt her. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t let him hurt anybody else ever again, so I grabbed the big knife from the kitchen and I ran upstairs. He was in the parlor with this girl, shaking her like a dog and saying horrible things to her.”

“What kind of things?” Broghan asked with interest.

She just glared at him in contempt. “So I went up behind him and grabbed him by the hair and sliced his throat open.”

Broghan jerked back a little at her vehemence. “What made you do that? Cut his throat instead of just stabbing him, I mean.”

“Because that’s what he always said to us. He always said he’d cut our throats if we didn’t do what he wanted. It would be easy, he’d say. Just one slice with a very sharp knife. So that’s what I did to him.”

Broghan considered her words for a moment. “Then what did you do?”

“I ran out. I didn’t want anyone to see me.”

“What did you do with the knife?”

“I didn’t realize I was still carrying it until I got out in the backyard. I didn’t want to go back, so I stuck it in the ground behind the ash can out in the alley, where nobody would see it.”

Broghan nodded as if this made perfect sense. “Why did you kill Andy?”

“He sent Neth a note. He said he knew who’d killed Pendergast. I thought he’d try to blackmail Neth. Neth might’ve paid him not to betray me, or he might not. I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to take the chance, so I went to Pendergast’s house and I killed him.”

“You got the knife from behind the ash can?”

“Yes. I went to the back door so no one would see me.”

“Why were his pants undone?”

She did flinch at that. “He wanted me to . . . to pleasure him one more time, so I pretended to go along. I figured he’d be distracted if he thought he was going to have some fun. He never thought for a minute I’d hurt him. He was pretty surprised.”

That left Broghan speechless for a few seconds. “And you took the money that Andy had on him?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, although Frank was pretty sure she was lying about that. “I didn’t see any money, and I certainly didn’t go through his pockets after I stabbed him. He wasn’t even dead when I left. I had to go out the front door because he was in the kitchen and I didn’t want to try to get by him.”