Murder on Fifth Avenue: A Gaslight Mystery (29 page)

“I believe he visited her.”

“Oh, yes, he was the one who told her about the child. But I don’t think I know why he went to see her in the first place.”

“Didn’t she tell you?”

“She doesn’t like to distress me,” Garnet said with a small smile. “But you’ve never seemed to mind, so tell me.”

In spite of what Garnet thought, Sarah didn’t want to distress her either. “I’d rather wait until she comes.”

“Ring for the maid to fetch her, then. She might stay downstairs until she thinks you’ve left. I told you she really did not want to see you.”

Sarah pulled the bell rope and in a few moments, the maid came in.

“Would you ask my mother to come back up?” Garnet asked.

“Mrs. Richmond left, ma’am.”

“What do you mean, she left?”

“She left the house.”

“When?”

“Right after she came downstairs.”

“How strange.” Garnet dismissed the maid and turned back to Sarah. “I didn’t want to tell you, but she actually seemed afraid when she heard you were here to see her. Why would she be afraid?”

Sarah still didn’t want to tell her, but Garnet would find out soon anyway. “We believe your mother is the one who stabbed Devries.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“I’m perfectly serious.”

“Why would she do a thing like that? And how? She hasn’t seen him in years!”

“We believe she saw him on the day he died, and she had a very good reason to stab him. He was trying to kill her.”

“Dear God!” Garnet clamped her eyes shut and covered her mouth with both hands.

Sarah grabbed a bowl sitting on the bedside table and held it ready in case Garnet was sick, but after a moment, she
opened her eyes and lowered her hands. “Why on earth would he try to kill her?”

“We suspect he was afraid she would encourage you to leave Paul. He was desperate to keep Paul’s secret, which is why he arranged your marriage in the first place. If you left him, people would want to know why.”

“I didn’t want to leave Paul, you know. I just wanted to leave this house, to get away from
him
.”

“I know that now, and maybe that was another reason he wanted your mother out of the way. You couldn’t leave if you didn’t have a place to go.”

“Which explains why he wanted her dead, but it doesn’t explain how she could have stabbed him.”

“We don’t know for sure, but we believe that after Devries visited Angotti—”

“Who’s Angotti?”

“He’s an Italian gentleman who…uh…arranges things for people. Devries tried to hire him to murder your mother.”

“Dear God,” she murmured again.

“Mr. Angotti doesn’t do these things himself, you understand, but even so, he didn’t have much stomach for having a woman killed, so he went to see your mother. When he heard her story, he decided not to accept Devries’s offer, and he apparently gave your mother a small knife to use in case Devries decided to try to do the job himself.”

Garnet groaned. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

“I’m sure she didn’t want to distress you,” Sarah said without irony.

“You still haven’t told me how it happened.”

“As I said, we don’t know for sure, but on the day he died, Devries went to see Angotti, and Mr. Angotti told him he wouldn’t accept his offer. Devries was angry and he went someplace
for a few hours before eventually turning up at his club, where he died.”

“What makes you think he saw my mother?”

“The fact that Mr. Angotti probably gave your mother a knife that could have killed him, and the fact that she received a telegram shortly after Devries left Angotti.”

“I send her telegrams all the time.”

“Did you send her one that day?”

Garnet had no reply.

“This telegram upset her very much, and she went out and didn’t come back for a long time. We think Devries arranged to meet her someplace, intending to kill her himself perhaps.”

“Or force himself on her.”

Sarah blinked in surprise. “Do you really think…?”

“Of course I think he’d do something like that! He’d done it to me, and that morning…Well, he didn’t expect me to fight back, but I just couldn’t let him use me again, so I screamed. I’d never done that before, and of course Paul came rushing in, and…Well, he left without getting what he’d come for. He was angry, and if he did want to kill Mother, he’d want to humiliate her first. Oh, no, do you think he raped her? I couldn’t stand the thought of that! Poor Mother!”

Garnet started to weep.

“She stabbed him, Garnet. I’m sure she stabbed him to prevent him from hurting her.”

“Do you really think so?” she asked brokenly.

“Yes, I do. I’m sure of it.”

Garnet dashed the tears from her eyes. “And now Mr. Malloy has come to arrest her.”

“He just wants to find out what happened. If Devries was going to harm her, it was self-defense. She won’t be arrested for that.”

Garnet stared back at her for a long moment, absorbing the truth of Sarah’s words, but then her eyes widened. “Dear heaven, she’s going to kill herself!”

“What?”

“Kill herself! That’s what she meant! When the maid came and told us you wanted to see her, she got very maudlin, and she started talking about my father and how she’d missed him so much and how much she loved me, but she had to do the right thing and not cause me any scandal and I was hardly listening because I felt so sick, and then she kissed me. She
kissed
me! She was only going down to the kitchen, but she kissed me good-bye! Oh, Mrs. Brandt, that must be why she left. You have to stop her!”

“Of course I will. We’ll go right back to her boardinghouse—”

“No, that’s not where she’ll go. She was talking about Father and how much she missed him. She’ll go to the bridge like he did. He jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. Did I tell you that? They never found his body. She’ll just disappear like he did, so there won’t be a scandal over a suicide and no one will ever know what became of her. Please, you must stop her!”

Garnet was frantic now, nearly hysterical, and Sarah rang for the maid.

“Go!” Garnet said. “Find her! Stop her!”

Sarah ran out into the hall. The maid was coming, and Sarah shouted at her to look after Garnet before racing down the stairs. When she reached the bottom of the first flight, Paul Devries and Hugh Zeller had come out of the parlor to see what the commotion was about.

“Mrs. Brandt, what’s going on?” Paul asked.

“I don’t have time to explain it all, but we think Mrs. Richmond has gone to the Brooklyn Bridge to kill herself.”
Sarah didn’t stop. She was running down the second flight of stairs, now with Paul and Hugh in her wake.

“Why would she do a thing like that?” Paul asked.

“She’s the one who stabbed your father, and she thinks Malloy is here to arrest her for it.”

“Dear God,” Paul said. “Did she know what he’d done to Garnet? Is that why?”

Sarah didn’t have time to explain. Malloy had met her at the bottom of the stairs.

“Did you hear?” she asked him.

“Yes, but why the bridge?”

“That’s where her husband killed himself.”

“We’ll go with you,” Paul said.

Malloy was pulling their coats from the rack by the front door.

“Someone should probably go to her boardinghouse, just in case,” Sarah said. “And ask Garnet if there’s someplace else she might go, too. We need to find her and let her know she won’t go to prison.”

“I won’t let her be punished for it,” Malloy told them. “Tell her that, if you find her.”

Malloy pulled on his coat while Paul helped Sarah with hers.

“I will,” Paul promised. “Do you need the carriage?”

Zeller pulled open the front door for them.

“No, the El will be faster,” Malloy said.

“Tell Garnet we’ll bring her back here if we find her,” Sarah said.

Then they were outside, fairly running down the walk in the direction of the Third Avenue Elevated Train.

They didn’t waste breath on conversation until they’d reached the train platform two stories above the street. They
had to wait for what seemed an eternity for the next train. Sarah wanted to run back down the stairs and keep running, but she forced herself to stay there. They had a long way to go, and the train would get them there faster than any other mode of transportation.

“You’re sure about this?” Malloy asked as she paced in a circle.

“Garnet is sure. Mrs. Richmond was talking about her husband and how she didn’t want to cause a scandal. She even kissed Garnet good-bye.”

“But to kill herself …”

“She’s a proud woman. Remember what she said about doing what she must for those she loved? All she wanted was for Garnet to be happy. With Devries dead, she would have a chance at that, but not if her mother was tried and convicted for his murder.”

“I should’ve refused when your father asked me to find out what happened to Devries,” he said.

“You couldn’t know. What if he’d been a saintly man whose greedy heir had decided he wanted his inheritance sooner?”

“But he wasn’t, and your father must have known that.”

“Well, we’ll take that up with Father at a later time.”

“We?” he asked with interest.

Sarah smiled at him. “You can’t think I’d let you have all the fun.”

The slight vibration in the floor told them the train was coming. They hurried to the edge of the platform, craning and watching and willing it to hurry. They could hardly wait for the doors to be opened once it finally stopped.

At last the train was moving again, carrying them down and down to almost the very tip of Manhattan Island to where the majestic bridge stretched out across the water to Brooklyn.

“What if we’re too late?” Sarah said.

“What if this is a wild-goose chase, and Mrs. Richmond is just on a train back to Virginia?”

“Oh, Malloy, do you really think that?”

“No, and I don’t think Paul’s going to find her at the boardinghouse, either. I wish I did, but I keep thinking how Mrs. Richmond looked that first time I met her, sitting there in that shabby parlor. Devries had taken almost everything from her, but she still had her pride. She’d killed him to keep it, and she’ll never let him take it now that he’s dead.”

“What a horrible man. I wish he was still alive. I’d like to kill him myself.”

Malloy widened his eyes at her but she refused to relent.

They rode on in silence for a while, Sarah staring unseeing at the windows they passed where ordinary people lived their lives in full view of the passengers who rode the trains that ran down several of the main streets of the city. Finally, she said, “I can’t figure out how she could jump from the bridge when the walkway is in the middle.”

Unlike most bridges, where pedestrians walked along the sides, the Brooklyn Bridge had been built with an elevated walkway down the center. A jump from there would only land a person on the tracks of the train that ran along the inside traffic lanes on either side.

“You said her husband managed to jump off of it. She must know how he did it.”

“I guess that’s possible.”

“Even if she tries, she might not be able to go through with it. Lots of people think they want to jump until they get up there and see how high it is and how cold the water looks. They’re happy when the authorities come and get them down.”

Sarah remembered Mrs. Richmond’s pride and prayed they’d get there in time.

When they reached the stop closest to the bridge, they hurried off and clattered down the station stairs to the street.

“Don’t wait for me,” Sarah said, knowing Malloy could move faster than she, hampered as she was by her long skirts. “I’ll catch up.”

Grim-faced, he pushed his way through the pedestrians clogging the sidewalk and disappeared. Sarah followed as best she could, pushing and shoving as necessary and paying no heed to the shouted curses she left in her wake.

The wind on the bridge nearly took her breath as she finally made her way out onto the walkway. Below her, one of the elevated trains rumbled along, returning to Manhattan. She scanned both sides of the bridge, looking for anyone who might be Terry Richmond. How would she find her? How would she get to her? And how would she stop her from jumping?

Sarah took heart at the way the people around her were calmly going about their business. She was the only one who seemed upset or harried. Surely, if someone had jumped from the bridge, someone would have seen, and the horror of it would have caused the hundreds of people nearby to react. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary, at least not yet.

Sarah walked slowly, hugging the rail and straining to see a place down below, along the side of the bridge, where a person might get to the edge and climb up over the rails and cables and …

“Sarah!”

She turned and saw Malloy. He was on the other side of the walkway. She darted and dodged among the other pedestrians to reach him.

“Do you see her?’ she asked.

“No, but I can see how you could get out there.” He pointed to a narrow strip of pavement at the edge of the outer traffic lane, which was probably for workmen to use. They could see for a long way down the length of the bridge and saw no sign of her.

“How far would she go?” Sarah asked.

“I doubt she’d walk out very far onto the bridge. Too much chance of someone seeing her and stopping her.”

“Where is she, then?” Sarah looked again in all directions. “I’ll go back to the other side and watch from there.”

Once again she was buffeted and bumped by the heedless individuals intent on getting where they were going. When she reached the rail, she saw the same narrow access area on this side as well. The only difference was that on this side, a solitary figure hunched against the wind was making her way gingerly along it.

“M
ALLOY
!” S
ARAH SCREAMED AS SHE FRANTICALLY SCANNED
the area below, trying to figure out how to get down to where Terry Richmond was. “Mrs. Richmond! Terry!” she called, waving.

Someone grabbed her hand and pulled it down. “Don’t,” Malloy said. “If she sees us up here, she might panic and jump.”

“What can we do, then?”