Murder on Washington Square (30 page)

Sarah could just imagine. Most likely, the “rich” man was no longer rich, nor was he spending time with Francine anymore. “Is that what you were planning to do? Find some rich man to take care of you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Catherine pointed out. “Lots of women do it!”

Lots of women in every class did it, Sarah would have to admit. Becoming a rich man’s mistress, or his wife, was one of the few opportunities women had of escaping poverty. Sarah didn’t feel like discussing this with Catherine, however. “Did Mr. Walcott court you the way he courted Anna?” she asked to change the subject.

“I don’t know what you mean.” This time the fear in her eyes was too real to mistake. “Mr. Walcott is . . . he’s a married man.”

“Married or not, he used to hang around the theater, waiting for Anna and bringing her flowers. Did he do that for you, too?”

Catherine glanced at the parlor doors. Was she worried that someone might be eavesdropping? Or was she worried about something else? “He just . . . he offered me a place to live. That’s all. He said he ran a respectable boarding house and I’d like it here.”

“Because you could entertain your gentleman callers upstairs with his approval?” Sarah asked mildly.

Catherine didn’t like these questions. “I told you, this is a respectable house.”

“Not according to the men who used to call on Anna Blake,” Sarah said. “They were both permitted above stairs with the full knowledge of the landlords. I can’t say for certain what went on in Anna’s room, but I do know that both gentlemen in question believed they had gotten Anna with child. This would indicate to me they were intimate with her.”

“That was Anna, not me,” she insisted.

Sarah decided not to press the issue. “Did you see the young man who visited Anna the night she died?”

“Yeah, but I never saw him before. He wasn’t a regular . . .” She caught herself and quickly added, “I mean, he’d never been here that I ever saw.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. Young, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Looked like a common laborer, if you ask me. Mary didn’t want to let him in, but he pushed his way past her and started shouting for Anna.”

“Didn’t you ask her who he was?”

Catherine glared at Sarah. At any moment she might realize she didn’t really have to sit here and answer these questions. Sarah had no authority at all, but she didn’t betray any hint of that. She glared right back at Catherine determinedly. Finally, she said, “Anna said he was Mr. Giddings’s son.”

“Who was Mr. Giddings?” Sarah asked, managing to conceal her feeling of triumph and hoping Catherine wouldn’t remember that Sarah had been here the morning Giddings had come looking for Anna.

“One of her . . . a friend of hers. He helped her with some . . . some business matters.”

“I see,” Sarah said, seeing more than that. “And what did the boy want with her?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t my business.”

“Did he go upstairs with her?” Sarah asked, remembering that the coroner had said she’d been with a man shortly before her death.

“Not likely! Not the way they was fighting!”

“They were arguing? What about?”

“I wasn’t listening on purpose,” she said, defensive again, “but he was shouting. It was hard not to hear what he was saying.”

“And what was he saying?”

“He wanted her to leave his father alone. He said there was no more money. I think . . . he said something about her giving the money back, I think. And he . . .”

“He what?”

“He said . . .” Catherine took a deep breath. “He’d kill her if she didn’t.”

 

 

 

S
ARAH GAPED AT HER. THIS WAS EVEN MORE INFORMATION than she’d wanted to get. “Are you sure that’s what he said?” she asked, still not wanting the Giddings boy to be guilty of the crime.

“Yeah, because Anna started laughing, and he said something like she’d better believe him or she’d be sorry.”

Sarah hadn’t been trained as a detective, but that sounded like pretty good evidence to her. “And then he left?”

“Yeah, Mr. Walcott told him to leave, and he did.”

“Did you say
Mr.
Walcott? I thought he wasn’t home that night.”

Catherine looked confused and then frightened again. “Did I say that? No, I meant to say
Mrs.
You’re right, he wasn’t home that night.
Mrs.
Walcott asked him to leave.”

“And what time was this when he left?”

“I don’t know,” Catherine complained. “Early in the evening, I guess. Right after supper.”

“And you went to bed immediately?”

“No, I told you, it was still early.”

“So Anna didn’t leave the house right after that?”

“No, we played checkers for a while, the two of us.”

Sarah managed to conceal her surprise. This wasn’t what Mrs. Walcott had said. “Did she seem upset by the argument she’d had with the boy?”

“Not a bit. Nothing much upset her, even though . . .”

“Even though what?” Sarah prodded.

“Well, Mrs. Walcott . . . She was mad about the boy coming to the house. She didn’t like disturbances. Yelling and carrying on, she says that’s low class.”

“Did she say anything to Anna about it?”

“Not that I heard. She isn’t one to air dirty linen, you know? That’s how she always says it. No use airing our dirty linen in public. She’d wait ’til I was gone to say something, if she did.”

“And you think she did that night?”

Catherine shrugged. “Like I said, I was asleep. I didn’t hear anything.” She wouldn’t meet Sarah’s eye.

Sarah was starting to get a little impatient with Catherine, but she tried not to let it show. “Did Anna get a message that evening?”

“Not that I know of.”

Sarah was confused now. “So Anna was still here when you went to bed?”

“That’s right. Anna never would go to bed until real late. Then she’d sleep late in the morning, just like when we worked in the theater. I told her it’s hard on the complexion to stay up half the night, but she wouldn’t listen. Anna wouldn’t listen to nobody.”

“Was Anna in the habit of going out alone at night?”

Catherine looked at her like she was crazy. “Only whores go out on the street at night. Anna didn’t want to be taken for no whore.”

“Then why did she go out that particular night?”

“I don’t know, I tell you! I wish I did. Then people would stop bothering me. All I can tell you is that she did, and she got herself killed.”

“And what’s going to happen to you now?” Sarah asked.

Fear flickered in Catherine’s eyes again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you going to keep entertaining your gentlemen friends the way Anna did?”

“That ain’t none of your business,” she said. At last she jumped up from her seat on the sofa. “I’ve told you everything I know. Now you’d better leave here before Mrs. Walcott gets back.”

“Why? Don’t you think she’d like to see me?”

“She don’t like talking about Anna, especially since that reporter came here snooping around the other day.”

Sarah felt a warning prickle on the back of her neck. “Was it Mr. Prescott? From the
World
?”

“I didn’t hear his name.”

“A tall fellow? Young? All arms and legs?”

“I guess,” she said with a shrug. “He was asking about Anna being in the theater and all. Mrs. Walcott sent him packing, and she told me and Mary not to let any more reporters in. There’ve been a lot of them come by, wanting to know all about Anna, but we never tell them nothing.”

“If a lot of reporters have been here, why did that particular one annoy Mrs. Walcott?”

“This one barged right in past poor Mary, without so much as a by-your-leave. Mrs. Walcott threatened to call the police on him,” Catherine said. “In fact, now that I think on it, I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. How do I know
you’re
not working for some newspaper? This could be a trick.”

“I assure you, I don’t work for a newspaper. I’m a midwife. That’s why Nelson Ellsworth brought me to meet Anna Blake in the first place,” Sarah reminded her.

Catherine waved this away. “I don’t know about any of that. All I know is, you better go now.”

Sarah rose to her feet, but she wasn’t quite finished. “Do you remember what Anna was wearing that night?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d like to find out how she was dressed when she went out the night she died. That could tell me who she was going to meet.”

“How could what she was wearing tell you anything?” Catherine asked.

“If she was dressed carefully, she was probably going to meet a lover,” Sarah said. “If she dressed hastily, she might have been in a hurry. Can you remember?”

“I only know what she was wearing last time I saw her.”

“Could you tell from looking at the clothes in her room what she wore to go out that night?”

Catherine cast one anxious glance at the door again. Could she actually be frightened at the prospect of having Mrs. Walcott catch her talking to Sarah? What kind of a relationship did she have with the landlady? Before she could pursue that thought, Catherine said, “I can look at her things. They’re all there in her room. Mrs. Walcott won’t let anybody touch them. It’s not like Anna’s going to need them or anything, is it?” she grumbled, opening the parlor doors and leading Sarah up the stairs.

Sarah followed her into Anna’s room. The shades had been drawn, and everything was just as she’d seen it last. The place was starting to have that closed-up, dusty smell to it.

“I could wear her things,” Catherine was saying. “We were the same size. I don’t know why she won’t let me have them.”

“Maybe she will when this is all settled,” Sarah suggested.

Catherine took a quick inventory. “That’s funny.”

“What?”

“Looks like she didn’t change her clothes before she went out. She was wearing her house dress that night. After the boy left, she changed into it. She didn’t like to sit around in her good clothes if nobody was coming to call. Clothes cost the earth, you know.”

Sarah knew it well. “What color was it?”

“Brown,” she said, confirming what Mrs. Walcott had said, although the landlady hadn’t mentioned what kind of a dress it had been. Women usually had a dress, usually one past its prime, they kept for doing housework and such. Although Anna wouldn’t have done much work, she would have had a shabby dress she wore to be comfortable.

“So she was wearing a house dress. What coat would she have been wearing?”

Catherine looked at everything again. “She only had this cape, and it’s still here. Her winter coat is in the trunk. It hasn’t been cold enough to get it out. Or at least it wasn’t before she died. It’s a nice coat, too. Hardly worn at all,” she added enviously.

“Did she have a shawl or something?”

Catherine looked at each garment again. “The one she wore around the house. She had it on that night when we was playing checkers. Mrs. Walcott wouldn’t light a fire. She said it wasn’t cold enough yet, but Anna was always cold.”

They could hear the front door opening, and a voice calling for Mary. Catherine’s eyes widened in alarm. “Oh, miss, could you . . . I don’t want Mrs. Walcott to know I was talking to you. Could you leave by the back stairs so she don’t see you?”

Sarah considered refusing. She wouldn’t mind seeing Mrs. Walcott again, but not if her presence would make the woman angry. She might need to come back again, and there was no use in antagonizing the landlady unnecessarily. “I’d be glad to,” Sarah assured her.

Placing her finger to her lips to signal Sarah to be silent, Catherine led her quickly down the hallway to the back staircase. Sarah stole down the steps and out through the empty kitchen to the back porch.

She wasn’t too surprised to find a couple of stray dogs in the back yard, a large brown one and a small black one. Such animals roamed the entire city, scavenging garbage and the carcasses of dead animals when they were lucky enough to find them. These were like most, mangy and scrawny and sniffing around for whatever they could find. They were sniffing at the Walcotts’ cellar door, scratching fruitlessly in an effort to get inside. Sarah remembered the maid complaining about how something had died down there. The scent must have attracted these poor creatures.

“Shoo!” she tried, shaking her skirts at them, but they barely spared her a glance before returning to their quest. Leaving them to it, Sarah made her way out of the tiny yard and into the alley, where she made her escape undetected.

 

Sarah decided to go home before returning to the hospital. She wanted to get her medical bag and take it with her this time so she could check Webster Prescott’s condition more closely. She also wanted to check on the Ellsworths. They must be nearly insane after being held prisoner in their home for so long. She couldn’t do much but try to reassure them that their ordeal would soon be over, but she couldn’t just leave them with no news at all.

But when Sarah reached Bank Street, she saw to her dismay that the reporters were back in force. A clump of young men stood gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Ellsworth house, and Sarah muttered a curse when they began to descend on her.

“Who are you?”

“Do you know Nelson Ellsworth?”

“Do you know he murdered a woman?”

The questions came faster than she could even register them. Since she had no intention of answering any of them, she didn’t even bother to try. “What are you doing here?” she demanded instead. “Haven’t you done enough?”

“None of
us
killed anybody, lady,” one of the reporters said.

“Neither did Nelson Ellsworth,” Sarah said, pushing her way through them toward her front steps.

“You know him then!” one of them shouted in triumph.