to go through that, too. She made me swear I’d never touch that horrible stuff, and after seeing what it did to Letitia, I never wanted to.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Frank scoffed. “You spend half your life in a place where you have to buy the stuff as the price of being there at all, and you never even try it?”
“Letitia bought the morphine. No one there cared who used it,” Dudley explained frantically. He was sweating now, even though the evening was cool. “They never paid any attention to what we did at all!”
“I guess when you pay for a private room and close the door, you can do anything you want, no matter how depraved or immoral it is. Tell me, Dudley, does the morphine make a woman more willing? Is that why you helped her get it?”
“How dare you speak of Letitia that way!” he cried, outraged. “And I didn’t help her! She was already going to that place when I found her here. She couldn’t keep morphine at the house. Blackwell searched her rooms to make sure she wasn’t hiding it anywhere. She lived in constant terror of being found out.”
“And how tragic it would be for a woman’s husband to insist that she stop using morphine. Blackwell must have been a monster to want his wife free of that poison.”
“You can’t possibly understand! Letitia isn’t strong. She can’t bear things the way the rest of us can.”
“Is that why you picked her, Dudley? Because you thought she was weak?” Frank asked contemptuously.
“I didn’t
“I mean when you decided that you’d like to marry a woman with money so you wouldn’t have to work as a schoolmaster anymore. You saw pretty little Letitia Symington and figured if you seduced her, she’d have to marry you. Her father might not like it, but he’d come around once you were married and he didn’t have any other choice.”
“I love Letitia! I never thought… How could someone like you understand?” he asked, righteously indignant.
“You’re right, I can’t understand how a man could take advantage of a young woman’s innocence to trick her into betraying her family and running away in the middle of the night like a criminal.”
“She wanted to be with me! We were going to be married. That’s what she wanted. It was all her idea!”
“Of course she wanted it, after you’d ruined her for any other man. How could she want anything else?”
Dudley covered his face with his hands. If Frank hadn’t despised him so much, he might have felt sorry for him.
“What do you want from me?” Dudley asked brokenly, his voice muffled behind his fingers.
“I want you to tell me that you killed Edmund Blackwell so I can go back to investigating important crimes,” Frank said wearily.
“But I didn’st!” he cried, looking up again. “I’m not sorry that he’s dead, but I certainly would never have murdered him. I could never do such a thing!”
“Where were you the afternoon he died?” Frank asked.
He thought for a moment. “I was with Letitia. We were at Mr. Fong’s. He’ll vouch for us!”
“I already asked him. He never heard of you. He never heard of any of his clients. That’s how he stays in business.”
“But we were there! If he knows we want him to tell you that, he will. He must!”
“No, he doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t know if you were there or not. And even if you came in, he wouldn’t know how long you stayed or when you left. You could have gone out, killed Blackwell, and then come back.”
“But I didn’st!”
“I probably wouldn’t have been so annoyed with you for killing Blackwell if you hadn’t killed Calvin, too. That was stupid.”
Something that might have been recognition flickered across his face, but Frank couldn’t be sure. “Calvin? Calvin who?” he asked in apparent confusion.
“Calvin Brown,” Frank said, watching Dudley’s face closely in the lamplight for any more signs of recognition. “Eddie Brown’s son.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, defensive now. “What does this Calvin have to do with Blackwell and Letitia?”
“A lot, but I don’t think I have to tell you anything about it, do I?”
“Not unless you want me to know what it’s all about. Who is Eddie Brown? Was he one of Blackwell’s patients?”
Frank resisted the urge to remind him they were called “clients.” He doubted Dudley would find it amusing. “Let’s just say that he and Blackwell were very close, but I think you knew all about him, Dudley. I think that’s why you tried to make it look like Calvin had killed Blackwell.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he insisted again. “I’ve already told you everything I know. I have to go now. I have… an appointment. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you, Mr. Malloy.”
“So am I, Dudley,” Frank said. “But that’s all right. I’m sure I’ll see you again real soon.”
Dudley looked sickly again, but he didn’t let that slow him down. His long legs carried him quickly away, into the shadows of the night. He’d gotten off lucky, and he knew it. Frank could have slapped him around at the very least. At worst, he could have taken him to the station house and locked him up and given him the third degree until he was willing to confess to anything. In the past, Frank would have thought nothing of doing either of those things. In fact, he would have felt justified, whether he was convinced Dudley was the killer or not. But he no longer had the stomach for it. Now he was actually concerned about making a mistake and punishing an innocent person. If he’d been a little more certain that Dudley was the killer, he wouldn’t have hesitated. But he wasn’st, so he’d let Dudley walk away.
He was right. Sarah Brandt
12
SARAH WAS TIRED AS SHE MADE HER WAY DOWN Bank Street back to her home the next afternoon. She’d had a difficult morning.
“Hello, Mrs. Brandt!” her neighbor Mrs. Ellsworth called as she came out onto her front porch. She was dressed for the street, in her bonnet and gloves, and carrying a shopping bag. “Looks like summer is trying to come back. How are you this fine day?”
“Better now that two little boys have made it safely into the world,” Sarah replied with a smile.
“Twins?” Mrs. Ellsworth asked, her wrinkled face brightening.
“Yes,” Sarah said. “One was breech. I was afraid for a while he wasn’t going to make it.”
“Oh, my, twins are so dangerous. I had a friend once who lost both of them. The cords got tangled or something.”
Sarah nodded. She’d seen her share of tragedies. “These are fine now, though, and their mother, too.”
“I’ll wager she’s hoping about now that these will be her last,” Mrs. Ellsworth predicted with a smile.
Sarah thought she was probably right, although the tragedy was that women couldn’t make such a choice for themselves. The secrets of preventing pregnancy were passed around in guilty whispers, but anyone who tried to teach modem methods was subject to fines and even arrest.
“I did want to warn you,” Mrs. Ellsworth said, distracting Sarah from her unpleasant thoughts. “I found some mouse droppings in the pantry this morning. And a mouse had been nibbling at my flour bag. You know what that means.”
“That the mouse was hungry?” Sarah guessed good-naturedly.
Mrs. Ellsworth shook her head, despairing that she would ever teach Sarah anything at all about the mysteries of life. “It means something evil is going to happen. Nibbling the flour bag means that.”
Sarah felt reasonably certain something evil was happening at any moment of the day in a city the size of New York, but she didn’t want to be unkind to Mrs. Ellsworth by pointing that out.
“The mouse droppings just mean that we have mice, of course,” Mrs. Ellsworth went on. “I set some traps, and you’d best do the same. They may go over to your place, too.”
Mice were a continual problem in the city, where the waste from thousands of people was piled up in such a
