“How’s the baby doing?” Sarah asked, determined not to spread any gossip about Alicia VanDamm and her sad history. The infant was sleeping on the bed beside his mother, and Sarah carefully unwrapped his blanket to examine him. She was pleased to note that he had filled out nicely. His little cheeks were rounding, and his arms and legs were growing plump. He stirred a little, his small mouth making sucking motions, as if he dreamed he was suckling, and Sarah quickly re-covered him before he could awaken. “He seems to be doing well,” she remarked. “Have you decided on a name?”
“Harry after Mr. Higgins’s father,” Mrs. Higgins said almost absently. “But that wasn’t the worst of it. That man-that employee-he wanted to know if we’d stolen Alicia’s jewels! Can you imagine? He practically accused us to our faces! This is a respectable house, I told him. If she had any jewels, I never knew anything about them, and if they’re gone missing, he’d do better to be asking the police about it.”
“I’m sure he didn’t really think you’d taken them,” Sarah soothed her. Sarah could just see the VanDamm’s butler looking down his nose at the Higginses and telling them they’d better turn over Alicia’s jewelry or else.
“If anybody took them, it was that Hamilton Fisher. From the day he moved in, he was always hanging around her room. Not that she ever left it, except to eat, mind you. I used to wonder what she found to do all alone up there all day. Just stared out the window, I expect. But whenever she did come out, he was right there, trying to make her talk to him. Or just notice him, I expect. Never saw a young man so taken with a girl. He’d sit at the table with her and say all kinds of wild things, trying to make her smile. She never did, though. I think she was a little afraid of him. And who could blame her? She just wanted to mind her own business, and there he was, bothering her all the time. But maybe it wasn’t her he was after at all. Maybe he really wanted to steal her things. Do you think that was it, Mrs. Brandt? Do you think he might’ve finally decided just to go into her room and take what he wanted, and when she put up a fuss, he-”
“I’m sure that wasn’t it at all. Please, Mrs. Higgins, you mustn’t upset yourself. It’s not good for you or the baby. I’m very glad you were able to rent out your rooms after all.”
Mrs. Higgins sniffed derisively. “Not to the kind of lodgers I’m used to. They’re a very rough sort of men, I can tell you. That’s what happens when I leave things to Mr. Higgins. He can’t see what people look like, so he isn’t as careful as I would be. But I doubt they’ll be here long. That kind never stays anywhere very long. And when they leave, I’ll be sure to get a better class of lodgers. For full price, too.”
Sarah was hardly listening. She was too busy thinking about Hamilton Fisher and wondering why he’d been so intent on making the acquaintance of Alicia VanDamm. It could be as simple as a young man wanting to be noticed by a pretty girl. But it seemed like more than that, from what Mrs. Higgins described. And of course, he’d vanished the night she died. Had Malloy asked about him? Did he know how interested Fisher had been in Alicia? “Did that young man, that Mr. Fisher, did he have a job?”
“Not that I ever knew,” Mrs. Higgins said, apparently undisturbed by the change of subject. “I was worried he might not be able to pay, but he gave me a month’s rent in advance, so I couldn’t complain, now could I?”
“And then he ran off after Alicia was killed, after only living here a week, when his room was paid for a month?”
“Makes him sound guilty, don’t it?” Mrs. Higgins said, with a worried frown.
“Have you told the police all this?”
Mrs. Higgins gave her a pitying look. “That fellow they sent over, that detective, he hardly asked me any questions at all. Acted like he couldn’t be bothered. Oh, I know nobody’s going to care if some orphan girl gets herself murdered, but if Alicia’s family is really rich, wouldn’t they at least offer a reward? Something to get the police interested?”
“I’m sure they will,” Sarah said, mentally cursing Frank Malloy. Well, he might not appreciate her help in the case, but she had far too much information now to even consider keeping it to herself. Like it or not, she’d have to track him down and make him listen to her. And then she’d have to find out if the VanDamms were going to offer a reward. And if they weren’t…
Well, she’d decide what to do next when she found out. If Alicia’s own family didn’t care enough to find her killer, Sarah wasn’t sure what she could do, but she would do something. Or die trying.
SARAH LOOKED OUT of the hansom cab and frowned up at the slightly tawdry, marble-fronted building on Mulberry Street that served as police headquarters for the city of New York.
“Here you are, ma’am,” the driver called down from his perch above her. Quickly, she paid him through the window overhead and climbed out. The driver wasted no time in clucking his horse into motion again and moving out into the early morning traffic, leaving her standing alone on the sidewalk. Oddly enough, police headquarters was located in a rather rough neighborhood, one in which Sarah didn’t feel comfortable walking unescorted, which was why she’d taken a cab. The hansoms, which were one-seated carriages with the driver mounted above and behind the passenger compartment, were a relatively new addition to the streets of New York, although they had been popular in England for over fifty years. Sarah had felt perfectly safe inside the cab, but as she watched it pull away, her sense of well-being evaporated, and she began to regret her decision to confront Detective Malloy.
She shouldn’t have felt so very uneasy. The tenement buildings around her were just the kind of buildings she frequently visited to deliver babies. The women hanging out of the windows, gossiping and arguing, were the kinds of women who had those babies. And the children playing in the streets, the vendors pushing their cards and shouting for customers, and all the other sights and smells of poverty were only too familiar. No, it wasn’t the neighborhood that worried her, but rather the building that should have provided a sanctuary amid the squalor of the tenements.
Well, what was the worst that could happen to her? Malloy had already said he didn’t consider her a suspect, so she most likely wouldn’t be arrested. Smiling grimly at this small comfort, she looked up at the fanlight window over the green, double entry doors and read the words, “New-York Police Headquarters.” Pretty forbidding. Walking in and brazenly asking for Malloy would also be embarrassing, but Sarah had been embarrassed before and survived. Thinking of poor Alicia renewed her courage, and ignoring the stares of the suspicious looking characters loafing nearby, she made her way up the steep stairs to the front door. Then she had to explain her mission to the doorkeeper who only grudgingly admitted her.
The place smelled of unwashed bodies and tobacco juice. The floor was littered with battered spittoons, but no one seemed able to hit them with their streams of juice because the floor was brown with it. Before her stood a high desk, and behind it sat an enormously fat man in a police uniform. His bald head gleamed brightly in the early morning sunlight.
Sarah tried to ignore the men seated on the benches that lined the walls, all of whom were shackled and some of whom bore signs of a recent beating, but they had most certainly noticed her.
“Hey, O’Shaughnessy, you got the whores making house calls now?” one hollered.
“Is this one of them reforms that Roosvelt’s making?” another cried. “No wonder he wanted to get rid of Byrnes,” he added, naming the recently resigned chief of police.
“If I gotta get measured, I want her to do it!” another called, making reference to the newly instituted Bertillion system of identifying criminals by taking measurements of various body parts and keeping them on file along with their photographs for identification purposes.