By the time O’Brien had found him, Frank realized Mrs. Brandt had been locked in the basement for quite a while, more than long enough to reduce a normal female to hysterics, which was how he’d expected to find her. Not that he was looking forward to dealing with an hysterical female, but finding her sitting here looking perfectly calm was even more unsettling. The woman was positively unnatural.
“I’m sure you’ll at least find what I have to tell you interesting,” she said, just as prim and proper as you please. As if she was sitting in her own parlor instead of right where countless criminals had endured countless beatings, all in the cause of justice. He should’ve left her here for another hour before coming to rescue her. Maybe by then she would’ve started acting like a normal woman.
“All right,” he said grudgingly, pulling up a chair to the opposite side of the table and sinking down into it. “What is it, and be quick.” He rubbed his gritty eyes, half hoping that when he opened them again she’d be gone. But she wasn’t. “I’ve been awake all night, and I’d like to get a little more sleep before I get called on another case,” he warned.
“Oh, dear, they should’ve told me. I could come back another time,” she offered, annoying him even more. He didn’t want her to be thoughtful. He wanted her to be gone.
“Just spit it out and get it over with,” he snapped, wondering what evil he’d done to deserve having Sarah Brandt enter his life.
“I’ll try to hurry,” she said, folding her hands on the table in that prissy way she had that set his teeth on edge. “I called on the VanDamm family yesterday. To express my condolences,” she added when Frank scowled his disapproval. “Mina and I are old friends.”
Well, he supposed he couldn’t stop her from calling on an old friend.
“At any rate,” she continued, “she told me something that might be useful. It seems that when Alicia ran away, she took some valuable jewelry with her.”
“We didn’t find any jewelry in her room.” Frank absently began to rub the bridge of his nose. His head was starting to ache, and his eyelids felt like they were lined with gravel.
“It may have been stolen, and the thief may have been the person who killed her.”
Frank frowned again, this time because he was annoyed he hadn’t thought of that himself. He would have in another minute, of course. He was just tired. “You know what this jewelry looked like?”
“No, but I’m sure the family can give you a description. They may even have paste copies of the pieces. People sometimes have their jewelry copied so they can wear the fakes and keep the real ones safely locked up. If you find out who pawned her jewelry, you’ll probably find her killer.”
“Unless…” Frank muttered, thinking aloud.
“Unless what?”
Frank didn’t particularly want to share his thoughts with her, but he was too tired to get into an argument about it. “Unless she sold them herself. To get money to live on. Would she have had any money of her own otherwise?”
“I can’t know for sure, of course, but she probably wouldn’t have. Mina didn’t think so, and in fact, she thought Alicia had probably taken the jewelry to sell since she had no other source of money. Girls of that class don’t usually need access to money. Their families provide everything for them.”
“Even when they go shopping?”
“The family would have accounts at all the stores. And if she ever did need to buy something, she’d have a servant along to handle the transaction. It’s considered vulgar for a female to carry cash.”
The more Frank learned about the upper classes, the less he liked them, and he hadn’t liked them very much to begin with. “Which means her sister was right, she probably took the jewelry to sell, so it was probably long gone by the time she was killed.”
“Except that I also can’t imagine Alicia would have known where to sell the jewelry herself or how to go about it even if she did. Girls of her class don’t go to pawnshops, Mr. Malloy. If she did sell the jewelry, someone would have had to help her.”
“I’ll check it out,” he said, “in case she hadn’t sold all the pieces yet. If her killer did steal something, at least that would give us a reason why she was killed.”
“I think I may know who her killer was, too, Detective.”
Frank seriously doubted this, but he could use a good laugh. “And who was it?” he asked with exaggerated patience.
She bristled a little at his tone, but she said, “Hamilton Fisher. He was a lodger at the Higgins’s house, too, and-”
“And he disappeared the night she was killed,” he finished for her. Did she really think he wouldn’t know this most basic piece of information? Now Frank was bristling, too.
“Did you know that he’d been paying her particular attention?” she asked.
“A natural enough thing. She was a pretty girl.”
“And did you know he didn’t have a job? Yet he’d paid his rent a month in advance, and he moved in just a few days before she died. And he started paying Alicia marked attentions from the moment he-”
“So?” Frank’s patience was wearing dangerously thin.
“So, he was probably a cadet,” she said as blandly as if she’d just accused the fellow of being a Methodist.
“A
“Didn’t I already explain that?” she shot back.
Actually, she had. A “cadet” was a young man who used his charms to seduce naive or desperate young women into prostitution. The laws of supply and demand required a constant supply of fresh, young females to satisfy the enormous demand of a profession that used them up at an alarming rate. Young men supplemented their meager incomes by working as cadets and helping the pimps fill their need for replacements in the brothels and on the streets.
A girl as lovely and alone as Alicia VanDamm would have seemed a logical target. Maybe Fisher had grown frustrated with his failure to attract her attentions and gone to her room and been a little more forceful than he’d intended in trying to recruit her.
Not wanting to admit he’d missed all the clues, Frank said, “We’re already looking for Mr. Fisher.”
She didn’t seem cheered by that information. Maybe she guessed that Frank hadn’t exactly made Hamilton Fisher a priority in this investigation. “Perhaps now you’ll be looking for him in some different places.”
He probably would, but he didn’t want to admit it to Mrs. Brandt. “Do you think the VanDamms will offer a reward for the missing jewelry?”
“Mina seemed very anxious to get it back. Is it absolutely necessary to have a reward, though?”
“So if he’s not afraid of being arrested, your only leverage is to bribe him,” she guessed. She didn’t approve, but Frank couldn’t help that. That’s the way the world worked. Sarah Brandt could reform it on someone else’s time.
“I do what I have to do.” He only hoped she didn’t know that the customary arrangement was for the pawnbroker to split the reward with the police, too. Which, of course, gave the police an incentive for finding missing property in the first place. In fact, some thieves didn’t bother with fences at all. They just held onto the stolen goods until the reward was offered, then turned it in and split the proceeds with the cops. Easy work, but a little too uncertain for Frank’s taste.
“Has Mr. VanDamm offered a reward for the murderer?” she asked.
“I haven’t actually approached him about it yet,” Frank admitted. He didn’t like to rush into something so delicate. If you asked too soon, people thought you were unfeeling, and the VanDamms seemed like just the kind of folks who could get offended.
“I suggested he offer one,” she said, thoroughly shocking him. “I saw him when I called on Mina, and I tried to explain to him why it’s necessary. You won’t find her killer without one, will you?”
Frank didn’t think the answer to that question would do him credit, so he ignored it. “A man like that, with
