Oh Danny Boy (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #5)

I left police headquarters and began to wander aimlessly up Mulberry Street. I didn’t even know where Dr. Birnbaum was staying. I would just have to wait until he reported back to me—and patience wasn’t one of my stronger virtues, if indeed I possessed any virtues at all. Then it occurred to me that I could, at least, take a look for myself at the scene of the crime. If the body had been whisked away to a local hospital, then evidence might have been left behind where she had lain.

I changed course and set off down Broome Street for Elizabeth. It was only when I actually reached Elizabeth Street and wondered whether to turn left or right that I stopped to ask myself what I was doing. I wasn’t a police officer, investigating a crime. I was grasping at the thinnest of straws, hoping somehow, somewhere to find the link between Daniel Sullivan and the man who had plotted his downfall.

Elizabeth Street was relatively quiet, compared to the hustle and bustle of Mulberry and Canal. I knew that this street was known as a den of vice, and I supposed that most members of that profession slept in late. Even so, there were the usual housewives, shaking out linens from upper windows, and children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, giving the scene an air of respectability and even tranquility. Nothing seemed to be happening to the north, toward Houston. So I turned to the south, back to Canal. I couldn’t see any unusual police presence, only an ordinary constable standing on the corner, swinging his baton and looking around with disinterest.

I was going to approach him, then thought better of it. He wasn’t likely to direct a thrill seeker to the scene of the crime, was he? So I made a careful inspection of the street, looking for goodness knows what, and came upon a woman down on her hands and knees among the filth, clearly looking for something.

“Can I help you?” I asked. “Have you lost something?”

She looked up at me. She wasn’t young anymore, even though she still had a trim figure, with sharp features made even sharper by wire-rimmed spectacles. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a bun, and she was wearing a severe, high-necked, dark blue costume.

“Thank you. I don’t need any help,” she said, and her voice was more pleasant than her appearance.

I pretended to move on, then stood watching her from the shadows as she went back to work. After a while she lifted something with tweezers and dropped it into a small paper bag. Then, to my delight, she took out a tape measure and laid it across the street. That was enough for me. I went back to her.

“Forgive me for asking, but this is where the young woman was found this morning, isn’t it?”

“It’s no concern of yours,” she said. “Just run along and let me get on with my work.”

“Are you a relative of the poor girl?” I asked. “Such a terrible, tragic thing to have happened.”

She eyed me appraisingly. “What are you, a reporter?”

“No, an investigator,” I said.

“Looking into a criminal case? That’s the business of the police.”

“You appear to be doing some investigating yourself,” I suggested.

“That’s because I’m a member of the police force myself.”

You could have knocked me down with a feather. I stared at her in surprise and delight. “A woman? In the New York police?”

“Officially I’m a matron,” she said.

“Oh, I see.” I had come across such matrons when I spent a night in a police shelter once.

“But now they use me in undercover work,” she continued. “It just happened that I was assigned to patrol this area last night. We’ve had people constantly on the alert since the second girl was killed.”

“Then you saw—” I began excitedly.

She shook her head. “That’s just it. I didn’t see a thing. I was on this very street several times. I’m so angry with myself. How could I have missed seeing the body dumped here?”

“When do you think it was put here?”

She frowned. “I heard a church clock chiming five as I turned onto Elizabeth Street. I walked down to Canal and turned right. By five-thirty the woman had been found and I was two streets away. I might even have seen the carriage as it passed with her in it. I could just kick myself. So near—what a chance that would have been for us women.”

I squatted beside her, since she remained on her knees. “You say a carriage. What makes you think the girl was not brought down from a room in a nearby brothel and merely left outside the door?”

“Because I have asked at nearby brothels and none of them reports missing one of their girls.” She looked a trifle smugly at me. “And because of this”—she drew an outline with her finger above the surface of the street—“the poor young woman lay approximately here; and if you’ll look about a foot away, there’s the clear imprint of a wheel in that patch of manure, and over there, a matching wheel imprint. Now that wheelbase is too wide to be a hansom cab; the wheel too delicate to be a draught wagon. Hence we’re dealing with some kind of carriage. He drove here, opened the door, pushed her out, then drove on.”