“I know he has something to do with the Black Hand.”
Frank glanced back to see if any of Ruocco’s boys had followed. “Keep walking,” he told her, steering her toward Mulberry Street.
This time she came along without protest.
“Ruocco runs the Black Hand,” Frank said just loud enough for her to hear. “He collects protection money from all the Italians, and if somebody refuses to pay, they get beat up or killed or their store gets bombed, or maybe even all three.”
“I know all that,” she reminded him.
“Then you should also know he wouldn’t hesitate to kill a lowly midwife who annoyed him.”
He was glad to see she looked a little bit chastened, but only a little. “What if we’re right, and Nainsi was murdered? What will happen?”
“Probably nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
He should’ve known she’d be outraged. “I mean if Ruocco pays off the right people, no one will care if she was murdered or not.”
That silenced her, but not for long.
“I don’t suppose he’d want his family accused of murder,”
she said.
“To Italians, family is everything,” he explained. “They don’t trust anybody who isn’t a blood relative, and they stick by family to the death.”
“Patrizia Ruocco doesn’t seem to like Ugo much,” she observed.
“Maybe she doesn’t, but she still sent for him when she thought her family was in trouble.”
She thought this over for a minute or two. “Poor Nainsi,”
she mused. “And her mother . . . I can’t imagine how awful it would be to lose a child like that, and then to lose your grandchild, too.”
“I couldn’t believe Mama Ruocco let her daughter-in-law keep the boy,” Frank said in wonder.
“I couldn’t either. Everybody knows how much Maria wanted a child of her own, though, and the Ruoccos can probably give him a better home than Mrs. O’Hara.”
“Mrs. O’Hara won’t see it that way,” he reminded her.
“I know.” She sighed. “But the law is against her. Even if she had the means to fight them, she’d still lose.”
They’d reached the Prodigal Son Mission, where Sarah volunteered, and she stopped. “Malloy, I’m going into the mission while I’m here to see if they need anything. Will you let me know what the coroner finds out about how Nainsi died?”
He nodded reluctantly. “For all the good it will do. And don’t start thinking about justice for this girl,” he warned.
“She shouldn’t have gotten mixed up with the Italians in the first place, and nobody but her mother is going to care what happened to her.”
She frowned, hating what he said but knowing he was right. “Thank you for coming anyway.”
He just shook his head. “Be careful. And stay away from the Ruoccos.”
She smiled a little, and Frank felt a familiar catch in his chest. “I’ll try,” she said and started up the front steps to the mission.
When she was safely inside, he headed for police headquarters in the next block to make his report.
Sarah hadn’t intended to stay so long at the mission, but they were having a problem with one of the girls and needed her help. Now she’d have to hurry if she wanted to get home before the streets became completely jammed with people returning from the day’s work. She’d missed another afternoon with Aggie, too. Thank heaven she had Maeve and didn’t have to worry about whether Aggie was safe.
She was skirting the south edge of Washington Square when she heard the first newsboy calling out the headlines.
“Irish girl murdered in Little Italy!” he cried, waving a penny newspaper to attract the attention of the pedestri-ans.
Sarah started at the coincidence. She knew he couldn’t be talking about Nainsi’s death. The penny papers only cared about sensational stories, and Nainsi’s wouldn’t qualify. As Malloy had said, only her mother would care if she’d been murdered or not.
She reached the corner and turned up the west side of the Square. On the next corner stood another newsboy selling a different paper.
“Dagos slit Irish girl’s throat and steal her baby!” he was crying, waving the papers. People were passing him coins and snatching the papers from him as quickly as they could press within reach.
This was too much of a coincidence. Sarah waded into the crowd and emerged with a slightly wrinkled copy of the scandal sheet. Stepping into the square where she could read without blocking anyone’s way, she quickly scanned the story. They’d given Nainsi’s name the American spelling of Nancy, and they said her throat had been cut, but otherwise, it was her story, all right. According to the paper, Nainsi had been practically kidnapped by the Ruoccos and kept a prisoner until she gave birth. Then she’d been murdered so they could have her baby. The paper had included a drawing of a voluptuous young girl sprawled on a bed in a skimpy nightdress. With one arm she clutched an infant and with the other she tried to ward off a large, dark man wielding a knife.
When Sarah looked up, she realized many others had stopped to read the story, just as she had, and they were murmuring in outrage. Sarah and Mrs. O’Hara were no longer the only ones in the city who cared if Nainsi had been murdered.
Frank had spent most of the day investigating a suspicious warehouse fire. He stank of smoke and only wanted to get home and have a hot bath, but when he stopped by headquarters to make his report, he found Gino Donatelli waiting for him.
“Pew,” the young officer said as Frank approached.
“Warehouse fire,” Frank explained. “Was she smothered?”
Donatelli nodded.
“Come with me.” Frank led him back to the detectives’
area and sat down at a battered desk. Donatelli pulled up a rickety chair beside it.
“Did you stay for the whole autopsy?” Frank inquired knowingly.
Donatelli smiled a little sheepishly. “Didn’t have to. Doc Haynes didn’t have time for it today anyway. Lorenzo wasn’t going to leave without an answer, though, so he started looking the body over to see what he could find.”
“He noticed the red dots on her face?”
“Yeah, and he explained to Lorenzo what they meant. He looked at the pillow and the girl’s cut lip and the blood on her teeth, and showed Lorenzo how she was smothered, just like you did back in her room.”
“Did that convince him?”
Donatelli shook his head. “He was still arguing, so Doc pried the girl’s mouth open and started looking down her throat.”
“Down her throat?” Frank repeated. “For what?”
“He gets these long pincher things and sticks them in her mouth and pulls out this feather.”
“How’d she get a feather in her throat?”
“It was a feather pillow,” Donatelli said grimly. “Doc says she must’ve sucked it right through the pillowcase when she was fighting real hard to breathe.”
In the normal course of things Frank knew, feathers fre-quently worked free of the loose pillowcase ticking. His mother collected them carefully, probably intending to have enough someday to make a new pillow or at least to stuff back into the old one. He’d never inhaled one, though. Now he felt a tickle in his throat and had an unreasonable urge to cough. His discomfort must have shown on his face.
“Yeah, that’s how Lorenzo acted, too,” Donatelli said with a grin. “He even started gagging. Doc said he could watch while he cut open her chest, just to make sure, and that’s when Lorenzo bolted.”
“So he’ll report back to Mama and Uncle Ugo that she was smothered.”
“Doc isn’t really going to do the autopsy until tomorrow, but he was pretty sure what he’d find,” Donatelli
