Oh Danny Boy (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #5)

“The hospital?”


“Because she was still alive.”

“Saints preserve us. Still alive? But I understood she was another victim of the Ripper. I saw the last of those poor girls and there was no way…”

“She died soon afterward,” I said.

“Thank God.” She paused and looked up at me. “And how did you manage to find out this?”

“Like I told you, I’m an investigator.” I smiled.

“All right, Miss Investigator,” she said, “see what you make of the crime scene.”

I looked down. It seemed to be a normal patch of New York street. Not too clean, with rotting vegetables, scraps of paper, and horse manure in the usual quantities. In fact, I saw nothing unusual until…

“Oh yes,” I said. “You can see she lay here. Those are blood spots on that cabbage leaf.”

Mrs. Goodwin nodded and picked up the leaf with tweezers, putting it into another paper bag. “But not much blood,” she commented. “Which confirms she was dumped here after being assaulted somewhere else and found almost immediately.”

The nosy youngsters had closed in on us.

“What’s youse doin’?” one of the braver boys asked.

“It’s where that lady copped it this morning,” a girl said.

“That weren’t no lady. That was one of the girls,” the boy retorted.

I looked up at the child. She was a skinny little thing with hollow cheeks and a much-patched dirty muslin dress. “Did you see the lady lying here?”

She nodded, suddenly worried that she might have said too much or somehow be in trouble. “Yeah. It was horrible. Her face was all bashed in.”

“I saw her too,” a small boy ventured. “There was blood all over.”

“How did she get here?” I asked. “Any of you see the body put on the street?”

Heads shook.

“My ma heard the noise going on outside, and we all went to the window and saw the police wagon and all. And my ma told us not to go down, but we came down here anyway and they were just picking her up and putting her in the back of the wagon. I didn’t really want to watch, but I did.”

I glanced at Mrs. Goodwin. “We should question the people who live in these tenements. Someone must have been awake between five and five-thirty and seen something.”

“Someone should question the local inhabitants, but not you or me,” she said. “This is a police investigation.”

“You’re with the police. You told me.”

She looked just slightly embarrassed. “Yes, but I’m not officially assigned to this case. In truth they only use me for undercover observation where a male officer would be too obvious. They’ve yet to trust me with a real detective’s work.”

“Then this is a good chance to prove yourself,” I said. “Look, they’ve nobody out here. What harm can there be in asking a few discreet questions before the men show up? And you’ve already nabbed the cigar butt.”

She grinned. We were fellow conspirators. “I like your style,” she said. “As I said, I’ve already checked the official brothels on the street to see if any girls are missing, so you take that tenement and I’ll take this one. Then we’ll work our way down to the end of the block. The vehicle came up from Canal, because the wheel tracks are on this side of the street. The man wouldn’t want to risk causing any kind of traffic holdup.”

“Right you are,” I said. “I’ll tackle this place then.”

“And I the one directly opposite. Report back here.”

And off I went, followed, like the Pied Piper, by a string of inquisitive children. “So who lives here?” I asked, and room by room, I made my way through the house. Many of the apartments only had windows that looked out to the back of the building, or worse, to the air well in the middle of the building. That meant another window or a brick wall, literally two feet away. I heard they had just passed a new law saying that tenements had to have better ventilation and an inside toilet, but I couldn’t see City Hall making anyone tear down existing buildings or correcting these pitiful air ducts.

At last I came to the apartment where the skinny child lived, whose name I had by now found out was Kitty. Her mother was home, stirring a huge pot of laundry over a gas ring with a big wooden spoon. Her sleeves were rolled up and her forearms red and raw from the soda in the washing tub. She scowled as the children spilled into the room, sweeping me in with them.

“What in the world—” she began, but they twittered around her like sparrows.

“Mah, she’s come about the body. You know, the woman what had her face bashed about?”