Murder on Amsterdam Avenue (5 page)

“So even though our victim first got sick when he was away from home, he might've gotten poisoned there,” Frank said.

“Yes, but from what we know about the milk and the dead cat, it looks like he got the final, fatal dose at home the night he died,” Wesley said.

Frank told Wesley where to send his bill, and he and Gino stepped out onto the sidewalk and the noticeably fresher air.

“How does he stand the stench?” Gino asked.

“He probably doesn't even smell it anymore.”

“What do we do now?”

“Well, I've got to go tell Mr. Oakes that his son was murdered.”

“Can I go with you?”

Frank hated to dampen his enthusiasm, but he couldn't bring a stranger to the Oakes house, at least not yet. “I want to see Oakes alone. There's no telling how he'll take the news, even if he's expecting it, and he obviously is or he wouldn't have hired me to investigate. Suspecting your son was murdered and finding out for sure that he was are two different things, though. Add to that the fact that he was killed in their house, so the killer must be someone close, well, Oakes might change his mind about finding out who did it. I don't think he'd want a stranger there while we're discussing the possibilities.”

Gino nodded, obviously trying to hide his disappointment. “That makes sense.”

“I'm thinking I need to tell Mrs. Brandt what we found out, though. She'll be wondering, and I don't want her doing anything silly, like going to call on Mrs. Oakes to find out.”

As Frank had expected, Gino visibly brightened at the prospect of seeing Sarah. “You won't mind if I go with you to Mrs. Brandt's, will you?”

“I won't have time to see her before I go to visit Oakes. I want to get to him before the family sits down to supper. I was thinking you could go see Mrs. Brandt without me, though. You know as much as I do about the case now.”

“I'd be happy to do that,” he said, looking
more
than happy to do that.

“And maybe Maeve will give you a kiss to welcome you home.”

“Wha . . . Why would she do that?” Gino stammered, blushing furiously.

“No reason I can think of,” Frank confessed, “but a man can hope.”

Frank and Sarah had more than once discussed the apparent attraction between Sarah's nursemaid and the young policeman. Judging from Gino's reaction just now, they'd been right about his feelings for the young lady. Her feelings were still not nearly as certain, at least not so far as Frank could tell. Knowing Maeve, though, she'd lead Gino on a merry chase, no matter what.

“Oh well, I see,” Gino said, although he plainly didn't see anything at all. “I'll go right over and tell Mrs. Brandt what we know so far.”

“You do that and tell her I'll come by later to tell her what happened with Oakes.”

“Should I wait there until you come?”

“No, it'll be late, but come to my house in the morning. We'll all go to Charles Oakes's funeral tomorrow.”

S
arah and Maeve were in the kitchen, discussing what to have for supper, when someone rang the doorbell.

“Is it a baby?” Sarah's daughter, Catherine, asked from where she'd been sitting at the kitchen table listening to their discussion.

“I thought you were sending all your patients to other midwives now,” Maeve said.

“I am, but you'll remember that sometimes people just come knocking on my door with no warning because a woman went into labor and they know I'm a midwife. If it's truly an emergency, I can't refuse to help.”

“I hope it's not a baby,” Catherine said. “Because then we'll just have sandwiches for supper.”

Sarah was still smiling when she reached the front door. A young man's silhouette showed through the glass, so she was very much afraid she really was being summoned to a
delivery. Young men were most often the ones sent to fetch a midwife.

When she opened the door, however, she saw that this young man was smiling much too widely to be involved in the anxiety of an imminent birth. She needed a moment to recognize him.

“Gino! You're back!” Without a thought for propriety, she grabbed his hand, pulled him inside, and threw her arms around him. “I'm so glad to see you,” she said as she released him to find him blushing furiously but looking very pleased. She held him at arm's length and looked him up and down. “I hardly recognized you without your police uniform. You're thinner.”

“That's what my mother noticed first, too,” he said. “The army food was pretty bad.”

“But you're home and not wounded. That's all that matters. Maeve! Catherine!” she called, “Gino is here.”

But Catherine was already running through the front room, having heard Sarah greeting him. Maeve, she noticed, was close behind, coming as fast as her youthful dignity allowed.

Catherine skidded to a stop when she reached him and frowned up at him, probably as confused as Sarah at seeing him in something other than his patrolman's uniform.

“Don't I get a hug?” he asked, bending down to pick her up.

“Are you really Officer Donatelli?” she asked.

“Of course I am,” he said, making her smile again. She giggled and threw her slender arms around his neck.

By then Maeve had reached him, too, and although her smile wasn't nearly as wide as Catherine's, her eyes were shining. “Welcome home,” she said as he set Catherine down.

“It's good to be home,” he replied.

Now they were both blushing, and Sarah let them stare
at each other for a minute or two before rescuing them. “Please come in, Gino, and I hope you can stay for supper. It's nothing fancy since we weren't expecting you, but you have to stay and tell us all about your adventures in Cuba.”

“I'd be happy to, but Mr. Malloy actually sent me to tell you what the coroner discovered.”

“How did you happen to be assigned that duty?” Sarah asked in surprise.

“I called on him this morning at your new house—which looks like it will be very nice when it's finished—and he hired me to help him on the case.”

“Aren't you going back to the police department?”

“No, not . . . not right away, at least.”

“That sounds like something else we'll need to discuss when we've finished supper.” Sarah glanced meaningfully at Catherine. “Meanwhile, give me your hat and come into the kitchen while we fix us all something to eat.”

When Gino had taken a seat at the kitchen table, Catherine snuggled up in his lap. Sarah and Maeve started pulling things out of the pantry and the icebox to see what they could put together. Sarah peeled potatoes while Maeve sliced some cold ham.

“We read all about the Rough Riders in the newspapers,” Maeve said.

“Not everything they said in the newspapers was true,” he replied. He proceeded to tell them all about the charge up the hill that wasn't really San Juan Hill and how Theodore Roosevelt had carried several spare pairs of spectacles with him in case one got broken because he couldn't see a blessed thing without them. By the time he was finished, the girls were laughing, although Sarah suspected no one had thought the battle was humorous at the time. At some point in the story, Maeve had abandoned her cooking and
taken a seat across the table from him so she could hang on his every word.

Sarah chopped up some onions and fried them with the potatoes as Gino continued with his tales of the wonders he'd seen in Cuba, such as crabs as big as dinner plates that ate anything left unattended, and the incompetence of the army, which had supplied the soldiers with shoes that fell apart the instant they got wet.

By the time they'd finished eating, Gino had convinced the girls that the brief war with Spain had been little more than a lark.

When they'd cleared the dishes away, Maeve said, “I'll take Catherine upstairs now so you can talk. It's very nice to have you home again, Officer Donatelli.”

Sarah didn't miss the disappointment on Gino's face, so she said, “I'll call you back down when we're finished, Maeve, so you can say good night.”

Maeve hurried Catherine away before Sarah could judge Maeve's opinion of this plan, but at least she hadn't objected. Sarah noted that Gino watched them go until they were out of sight, then turned back to Sarah.

“Thank you for supper.”

“Thank you for coming. Now tell me why you haven't rejoined the police department.”

“I . . . I, uh, just got back to the city yesterday. I wanted to spend some time with my family first.”

“And yet here you are, not with your family, and you've already agreed to work with Malloy on a case. So obviously, you aren't reluctant to go back to work. You're just reluctant to go back to police work.”

Gino gave her a little grin. “I kept thinking about the last case I worked on with Mr. Malloy. Those women . . .
The police didn't seem to care, and what would've happened to them if Mr. Malloy hadn't gone looking for them?”

Sarah didn't want to know the answer to that question. “So you've decided to help him again.”

“When he told me what happened to your friend, well, I could see why the family didn't want to get the police involved. But I could also see why Mr. Oakes wants to find out for sure what happened to his son.”

“Malloy is only doing this because Mr. Oakes is a friend of my father's, you know. What will you do after this is over?”

Gino gave her an odd look, but before she could figure it out, it vanished. “I don't know, but maybe by then, I'll have figured it out. Mr. Malloy wanted you to know that the coroner—his name is Titus Wesley—was able to get Charles Oakes's organs . . .” He stopped, mortified. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Brandt. I just realized that's not a fit topic for you to hear about.”

Sarah smiled at his chagrin. “Don't be silly. I'm a nurse and a midwife. I know more about organs than you ever will. Just forget I'm a lady for the time being.”

“All right,” he said, although he didn't look happy about it. “Wesley got Oakes's organs from the undertaker. He was able to test what he . . . what he found in Oakes's stomach and what was in the cat's stomach, too. It was arsenic.”

“He's absolutely sure?”

“He said he did the Marsh test, whatever that is, and he's sure. He said it would be accepted in court, too.”

“Then I guess he's sure. This is terrible news, of course. It means someone poisoned poor Charles, probably on purpose.”

“Was he a good friend of yours, Mrs. Brandt?”

“Not really a friend. An acquaintance, I guess. We knew
each other because our parents were friends. He's a few years older than I, so our paths didn't cross much growing up, and of course, I haven't been in society for years.”

“I guess you and Mr. Malloy will be now that he's a millionaire.”

Sarah sighed. “My mother would like nothing better, but I can't imagine Mr. Malloy being interested in that, can you?”

“No,” he said with a grin, “but don't you want to?”

“Not really. I haven't missed it at all, if you want the truth.”

“Then what will you do if you're not a midwife and you're not doing whatever it is rich ladies do all day?”

“That, my dear Gino, is an excellent question, and like you, I hope to figure it out very soon. So what is Malloy doing right now that he had to send you here in his place?”

“Oh, he went over to see Mr. Oakes and give him the news about the arsenic. He said to tell you he'll come see you later.”

“He'd better.”

“So what do you know about the Oakes family that might help us figure out who killed this Charles?”

Sarah told him what she knew about his mother and his wife and her impressions of them.

“Did the family ever accept Mrs. Oakes? The mother, I mean,” Gino asked.

“They didn't really have a choice, did they?”

“I guess they didn't, and maybe they put on a good show for outsiders, but did they really accept her as one of their own after they got over the shock of having a Johnny Reb for a daughter-in-law?”

“Johnny Reb?”
Sarah teased. “Where did you hear that expression?”

“We learned about the War between the States in school,”
he defended himself. “The question is, do they still think of her like that?”

“I'm sure her husband doesn't.”

“What about her in-laws? Isn't the old mother still alive at least?”

“I think so. We'll find out tomorrow at the funeral. I guess she could have made life difficult for Jenny, couldn't she? But she would have had to at least tolerate her.”

“Being tolerated is almost worse than being hated outright,” Gino said. “At least when someone hates you, you know where you stand.”

“You sound like you know this from personal experience.”

Gino smiled mirthlessly. “When Colonel Roosevelt insisted on hiring men for the police force who weren't Irish, he thought he was doing a good thing. Nobody else did, though. The old-timers on the force never wanted us, but they had to accept us and work with us, at least as long as the colonel was there. That didn't stop them from assigning us the worst duties or treating us like we didn't belong, though, and sometimes they pretended not to hear when one of us sent out a call for help. They complain that you don't do a good job, and they get jealous if you do the job better than they do.”

“I think I understand why you're not happy about returning to the police.”

Gino shrugged. “It's the same most places for the Italians.”

“Just as it's that way for the Irish in other occupations.”

“That's kind of funny, isn't it?”

“I'm not sure it's funny at all, but I know what you mean. You'd think the Irish would be kind to others since they've suffered so much discrimination themselves.”

“Not many people are kind at all,” Gino said. “Which is why we need men like Mr. Malloy to set things right again.”

“Why, Gino, I think that's the nicest compliment anyone could receive.”

“It's not a compliment. It's why I want to work with him.”

“I can see that.” And Sarah was starting to see more than that, too. She understood that Gino saw this case as the beginning of something for him. Had Malloy said something to make Gino think he'd be continuing this habit he had recently developed of stepping in when people didn't trust the police to handle something? And would that be such a bad thing if he decided to fill his days helping other people find justice?

No, it would not be a bad thing at all. She wouldn't let on that she'd figured this out however. Malloy might not have figured it out himself yet, but when he did, he would have to tell her himself. She could hardly wait.

“You still haven't answered my question, Mrs. Brandt. Can you think of anybody who would've wanted to kill Charles Oakes?”

“Not yet, Gino, but I have every confidence that we will figure it out.”

•   •   •

M
r. Oakes received Frank in his library again. He had poured a whiskey for Frank, and he handed it to him the moment he sat down. Oakes had already started on his, Frank noticed.

“Thank you for giving the coroner permission to examine your son's body,” Frank said.

“I didn't tell his wife or his mother. I saw no need to distress them, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention it either.”

Frank couldn't make a promise like that. If they eventually had to prove Charles had been murdered, the truth would come out. “I can understand your concern.”

Oakes took a sip of his whiskey. Frank wondered if he always used liquor to soothe the rough edges of his life. After a moment Oakes said, “What did your man find?”

“Just as you suspected, Charles was poisoned. The coroner found traces of arsenic in him and in the cat, too.”

A spasm of pain twisted Oakes's face, but he recovered quickly. “All my life, I have taken great pleasure in being right, until now.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Oakes. I was hoping I would have better news for you.”

“Arsenic, did you say? Not some exotic poison?”

“I'm afraid not. It's so readily available, just about anyone could have access to it. Practically every home in the city has a box of it somewhere. The question is, who also had access to Charles?”

“Anyone in this house, of course. He was also away from home all day when he first fell ill, and I'm not sure we even know where he spent that time.”

Frank didn't remind him that the cat, who had died from the same poison, had never left the house. “I guess the real question is, what do you want to do now? You can always pretend you didn't know and bury your son with no scandal.”

“And let a killer go free?” he asked, outraged. “And what if Charles is just the first victim? Suppose the killer is some madman who intends to keep on killing indiscriminately? How could I live with myself if someone else died because I wanted to shield my family from gossip?”