Frank figured Sarah Brandt was hardly ever mistaken about anything.
“Come on, Mrs. Brandt. A girl has been murdered. Anything you can tell me will help catch her killer. You don’t want a killer running loose, do you? A woman like you who makes her living traveling around the city, going to strange places-”
She sighed again to let him know how put-upon she felt. “I thought she looked like someone I used to know,” she admitted. “An old friend.”
“An old friend here in the city?”
She nodded grudgingly.
“Could she have actually been who you thought she was?”
“No. She resembled an old schoolmate of mine, a woman my own age, so I know this girl couldn’t have been the same person.”
“What part of the city are you from, Mrs. Brandt?”
“Right here in Greenwich Village.”
Frank looked her over again in the better light of the parlor windows. She stiffened at his effrontery. She probably figured he was sizing up her figure, which was even better than he’d originally thought, but actually, he was sizing up her clothes. Just as he’d thought, they were quality, although she’d been wearing them for a long time. “You came from money, didn’t you?”
“I don’t think my background is any of your business, Detective Sergeant Malloy,” she said coldly.
Oh, yes, she came from money, all right. Only a rich person knew how to use that tone to put an underling in his place. But Frank wasn’t her underling, not in this situation. “At the moment, everything is my business, Mrs. Brandt. And for your information, the dead girl came from money, too.”
“How can you know that?”
“The same way I can tell about you, her clothes.”
The sound of footsteps on the stairs distracted them both, and Frank looked toward the open parlor door to see the orderlies carrying the sheet-covered body out on a stretcher. He heard Sarah Brandt’s gasp and smiled at his good fortune. Nothing like a little shock to soften up a reluctant witness. He waited until they had carried the body out of the house. The bloom had noticeably faded from Sarah Brandt’s smooth cheeks.
By then Frank had decided he would use Sarah Brandt a little, and possibly get back at her in the bargain. “Maybe you’d help me out by going up to her room and looking around. Since Mrs. Higgins is, uh, indisposed, I mean. See if anything looks out of place, and give me your opinion of her things. Maybe I’m wrong about her background after all.”
He’d figured Sarah Brandt would jump at the chance to prove him wrong about anything, but her natural reserve was apparently stronger than her need to prevail. “I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what? Snoop through her things? Make judgments about her? Mrs. Brandt, when a person is murdered, they don’t have a right to privacy anymore. Or maybe you’d rather I took you down to the station house to finish questioning you,” he added, forgetting his plan to be civil.
“Why?” she challenged, anger flashing in those marvelous eyes of hers. “So you can beat me into confessing to her murder? That would save you a lot of time, wouldn’t it? Then you wouldn’t even have to conduct an investigation.”
Frank felt a flash of anger himself. How dare she judge him like that? How dare she assume he was something he wasn’t? Understanding instinctively, however, that any attempt to defend himself would only make her more certain she was right about him-and consequently make her more obstinate-he somehow managed to swallow his own fury and sound reasonable again. “No, so I can get you to tell me what you know about this girl. What you may not even realize that you know about her,” he amended quickly when she would have protested.
“I really need to see Mrs. Higgins,” she insisted.
“As soon as we’re finished in the girl’s room. And just to put your mind at ease, I’m pretty sure you didn’t kill Alice Smith, so I won’t bother trying to beat a confession out of you,” he added.
She didn’t smile.
“You want me to catch the killer, don’t you?” he tried.
Plainly, it galled her to admit it. “All right, I’ll give you a few minutes, but then I must see Mrs. Higgins.”
“Sure,” Frank agreed amiably. A few minutes was probably all he’d be able to stand of Mrs. High-and-Mighty anyway. “Her room’s upstairs, on the right.”
She didn’t wait for a second invitation. He watched her go, wondering how a woman could convey so many opinions without uttering a word. Well, if she could give him any information at all, he would forgive her just about anything.
Frank followed her up the stairs, resisting with difficulty the temptation to fall far enough behind to possibly catch a glimpse of her ankles beneath her swishing skirt. He already knew way too much about Sarah Brandt’s figure for his own peace of mind.
Sarah couldn’t believe she was doing this. Going into a dead girl’s bedroom to give the police information about her. And what could she possibly tell them? Besides being able to look at the girl’s clothes and know if they were expensive or not. And what would that prove? Countless young women from good families found themselves suddenly penniless every day because the man who provided for them-be he husband or father-died or otherwise abandoned them. If this girl still had a family or any means of providing for herself, she would not have taken a room at the Higgins’s house.
The door to the girl’s bedroom stood open, and Sarah stopped in the opening, looking around. Everything seemed unnaturally quiet here, as if the girl’s death had muffled even the ordinary sounds of the city. The room was oddly neat for being the scene of a murder, too. Somehow Sarah had pictured overturned furniture and smashed and broken crockery. But nothing here had been disturbed at all except the plain, iron bed. The coverlet was rumpled, as if someone had laid down on it, and what appeared to be a red shawl lay casually discarded at the foot of it. Other than the bed, there was little else in the room to disturb. A stuffed chair, a dresser and a cabinet for clothes. It looked, in fact, hardly more inhabited than the unoccupied room downstairs where Sarah had delivered Mrs. Higgins’s baby the morning before.
“Go on in,” Malloy said.
Sarah bit back a sharp retort. Good breeding forbade her from speaking rudely to anyone, but good sense played a part in her self-control as well. He might not have been bluffing about taking her down to the station house. She entered the room.
The first thing she noticed was the smell. Could there be an uncovered chamber pot in here? But then she remembered that sudden death loosened control over bodily functions, adding one final humiliation to the process. She thought of the girl she had seen, dying in her own excrement, and she shuddered.
“You all right?” Malloy asked.
Sarah bristled at his feigned concern. “How did she die?” she asked, looking around reluctantly for any evidence of foul play. Mercifully, she saw no blood.
“Strangled.”
“Was it someone who broke into the house?”
“No sign of a break-in.”
The top drawer of the dresser was half-opened, as if someone had already been rummaging through it. Probably Malloy. Unable to bring herself to rummage, Sarah went over and examined the articles that were readily visible. At first she couldn’t believe her eyes, and without meaning to, she reached down and fingered the topmost garment. She hadn’t been mistaken, she realized as she rubbed the fabric between her thumb and fingers and noted the fine hand-stitching. Silk. For an instant, she pictured the cloth lying against the girl’s flawless skin and snatched her hand away.
“She’s dead,” Malloy reminded her crudely. “You can’t offend her.”
Sarah gave him what she hoped was a quelling glare. He was the kind of man her mother would have called common. A man who lacked education and refinement. Even his body seemed designed for manual labor with its broad chest and powerful shoulders. She thought of her father and the other men she’d known in her old life, slightly built men whose power came from wealth and knowledge. They were dangerous, able to crush anyone who stood in their way, but Detective Malloy was dangerous, too, in a very different way. Sarah would do well to remember that.
She glanced back at the dresser. Nothing on it but a brush, a comb and some stray hairpins. Except that the
