“For her blood,” he said. Then he held the doors for her and waited until she’d disappeared beyond the first turn in the staircase.
Sarah moved slowly and carefully so she wouldn’t spill anything. Relieved that she arrived at the third floor with most of her load intact, she made her way quietly down the hall to the parlor. When she stepped into the room and looked around, she almost dropped the tray.
Mrs. Ruocco had moved. She now sat in a rocking chair on the far side of the room, and in her arms she held the baby.
6
When Frank Malloy left Sarah’s, he went to see Nainsi Ruocco’s grieving mother. He would put off visiting the Ruoccos as long as he could.
He was furious at Mrs. O’Hara for going to the newspapers with her story, but he had to admit, from her point of view, it was a wise move. As he’d told Sarah yesterday, no one would be interested in finding out who’d killed Nainsi if Mrs. O’Hara hadn’t made the girl’s death a public scandal.
Seeing her side of it didn’t help Frank’s temper, though. He was still stuck with the thankless and probably impossible task of finding Nainsi’s killer.
Mrs. O’Hara lived in a rear tenement a few blocks from Mama’s Restaurant. The rear tenements got little sunlight and less air, so they were cheap. Those few blocks were also a world away. The Irish and the Italians didn’t mix much.
Frank found Mrs. O’Hara in her fourth-floor flat.
“I suppose you’re here to tell me you ain’t found out who killed my Nainsi,” she grumbled when she opened the door, and she immediately went back inside, letting Frank find his own way in. She’d been sewing men’s ties by the feeble light from a window that faced a narrow alley. A bundle of fabric lay at one end of her kitchen table and a pile of finished ties lay at the other. He closed the door behind him.
She picked up her needle and began to sew again, letting him know she wasn’t happy to be interrupted. He knew she’d earn only about fifty-cents a dozen for sewing the ties, and a dozen was a good day’s work. She wouldn’t want to waste any time in social pleasantries with him.
“I’m working on figuring out who killed your daughter, Mrs. O’Hara, but I need to know more about her first.” He pulled up the only other chair and sat down across the table from her. She spared him a skeptical glance.
“All you need to figure out is which of them dagos killed her,” she said, stitching the fabric with practiced ease. “It had to be one of them.”
He glanced around the flat. Through the doorway he could see a large stack of bedding in the other room. “You have lodgers, Mrs. O’Hara?”
“Of course I got lodgers,” she said. “You think I can keep myself by making ties?”
Many people in the tenements rented floor space for a few cents a night to those even less fortunate than themselves.
Frank pictured the flat as it would be when they were here, the floor filled with men and Nainsi sleeping only a short distance away. “Must’ve been hard, keeping the lodgers away from your daughter,” he remarked, remembering they hadn’t yet solved the mystery of who had fathered her baby.
He still entertained a small hope that the father might be involved in her death.
“Wasn’t hard at all,” Mrs. O’Hara snapped. “My Nainsi, she didn’t want nothing to do with them bums. She was smart, that one. Knew better than to waste herself on a man couldn’t give her nothing. Wanted to better herself, she did.”
“How did she plan to do that?” Frank asked mildly.
Mrs. O’Hara glared at him, her faded eyes narrow with hatred. “Not what you’re thinking!”
“I’m not thinking anything,” Frank insisted. “I’m trying to figure out how she ended up in Little Italy with Antonio Ruocco.”
“I don’t know. To this day, I don’t know. It started when she got herself a job at a sweatshop, sewing men’s shirts.
They didn’t pay her hardly anything, but it was more than she ever made helping me do this.” She gestured at the stack of ties.
Frank knew what happened when a girl like Nainsi suddenly got a taste of freedom and a little money in her pocket. “She made new friends at the shop, I guess.”
Mrs. O’Hara snorted. “Silly little biddies, every one of them.”
“Did she have a special friend? Somebody she’d want to know about the baby?” Frank asked. He already knew the answer, but he wanted to see what Mrs. O’Hara would say.
“Funny you should ask,” Mrs. O’Hara said in surprise.
“She did want me to tell Brigit Murphy right away.”
“This Brigit is somebody she worked with?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell her about the baby, like Nainsi wanted?”
“Well, I wasn’t gonna go out of my way, but I saw her right when I was coming home—she lives downstairs—so I did. She was coming home from work, and I told her.”
Frank wanted to know more about Brigit, but he’d get that information from the girl herself. “I guess Brigit and Nainsi went out in the evenings.”
“Nainsi was a good girl,” Mrs. O’Hara insisted angrily.
“She never walked the streets or anything like that!”
“I didn’t think she did. I’ll bet she liked to go out and have a good time, though. Maybe she went to dance houses with her friends.”
She sewed a few stitches, paying more attention than necessary to the tie she was working on.
“Lots of girls do that, Mrs. O’Hara. You can’t blame them for wanting to have fun. Maybe that’s where she met Antonio.”
She shrugged one shoulder, still not looking up. “Maybe.
Like I said, she didn’t tell me. All I know, she comes home one day to get her stuff and tells me she’s married. Says she’ll never be poor again. This boy’s family, they got a business, she says. A restaurant. At least I know she’ll eat regular. But then I see Antonio, and I know them dagos don’t take to outsiders. I know she’s in for misery.”
She reached up quickly to dash a tear from her eye, but she never missed a stitch.
“Antonio wasn’t the only man she knew,” Frank reminded her. “He wasn’t the father of her baby.”
“That’s what them dagos say, but my Nainsi was a good girl,” she repeated.
Frank didn’t bother to point out that good girls didn’t get pregnant before they got married. “Did she ever mention any other man to you? Someone she liked before she met Antonio?”
“She never said nothing to me. Why’re you wasting your time here? I didn’t kill Nainsi, and I don’t know who did.
You should be talking to them Ruoccos.”
“All right, which one of them do you think did it?” he asked.
“How should I know? I wasn’t there.”
“How did she get along with them? Was there one she fought with a lot?”
“The girl, Valentina. She and Nainsi fought like cats and dogs. The girl was jealous of everything Nainsi got. I guess she’s spoiled, being the youngest and the only girl, but she’s just plain mean. No call to be like that.”
“What about the others?”
“She didn’t like any of them, you ask me. Never had a kind word to say about them anyhow. Maria, she was nice enough, I guess. Always acted polite when I was there, and she treated Nainsi all right. But the mother . . . she’s a bitch, that one.”
“How did Nainsi get along with Antonio? Did he ever hit her?”
Now he had her full attention. “You think he did it?
Makes sense, don’t it? He thought she lied to him, and a man don’t like to be tricked that way.”
“Did he ever hit her?” he asked again.
She considered the question. “I don’t think so. She never said if he did, and I guess she would’ve. She
