Oh Danny Boy (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #5)

“And if they came from one of the houses around here, you would have heard?”


“Yeah, I’d have heard.”

“And what if they weren’t from one of the brothels, if they were real streetwalkers who took men to one of the cheap hotels?”

He stared at me, as if seeing me for the first time. “Nice girls like you ain’t supposed to know about things like dat. It ain’t good for you.”

“I’m an investigator, Kid. I know about many things that aren’t good for me.”

He eyed me warily. “Investigating what? Who’s killing whores? What for—some kind of newspaper story?”

“Something like that,” I said. I didn’t think he’d be overly helpful about saving Daniel’s skin. “And I imagine you’d want this case solved as quickly as possible, too. It can’t be too healthy for Monk to have his territory crawling with police day and night.”

He looked at me in surprise, then he grinned. “You can say that again.”

“Okay. So if they were real streetwalkers, not part of a brothel, would Monk have heard when one of them disappeared?”

“There ain’t much that gets by Monk on his own turf. All the girls have their protector, and dose guys pay their protection money to Monk. So do dose hotels you’re talking about. Yeah, he’d have heard.”

“So I’m wondering”—I took a deep breath—“and I’m not accusing you of anything, you understand. Just curious. If a girl wasn’t behaving properly, if she wanted to escape from that kind of life, might somebody make sure that she didn’t?”

His eyes narrowed. “You’re asking me whether Monk would order to have a girl killed because she didn’t do what she was told?”

“That’s exactly what I’m wondering,” I said.

He laughed. “Dat’s not how it works. Dose girls, they’re our assets. We want them alive, well, and working.”

“If they were trying to run away?”

“Where would they run to? When they land up here, it’s at the bottom of the heap. There’s nowhere left to run. And if they needed teaching a lesson, one of the boys would slap them around a bit, without damaging the assets, you understand.” He paused then said thoughtfully, “And if she don’t listen good after that, then maybe she’d wind up floating in the East River. But I don’t know nobody who would be dumb enough to dump a body in full view on the street. What’s the sense in it?”

He was right. What was the sense in it? The only answer was that the killer was getting an added thrill from knowing he was baffling the police. Maybe he had been close by and watching…. I felt my skin prickle when I remembered that we had been into those tenement buildings. Had he been watching us then? Still there was no point in asking the children if they’d seen a strange gentleman on the street. There must be a steady procession of them, night after night.

“Listen, Mr. Twist,” I said, “if the Eastmans find out anything about these girls, would you let me know? The sooner we catch this man, the better for all of us. Young Malachy knows where I live. You can send a message with him.”

His eyes narrowed. “You working with da cops?”

“Not at all. You could say I’m working in competition with the cops.”

“Then you better watch your own skin, girl. Cops around here don’t take kindly to having their toes stepped on.”

“I’ll be careful. So will you tell me like I asked?”

He nodded. “All right. Monk certainly ain’t too thrilled about having the police in his backyard.”

I gave him my most winning smile. “Thank you. I really appreciate our little talk.”

“My pleasure, ma’am.” He tipped his bowler.

I almost skipped back across the street.

“Well, that’s taken care of,” I said, trying not to look too pleased with myself. “The Eastman gang knows nothing about these girls.”

“So he tells you,” Sabella Goodwin snapped. “They’re a bunch of low-down, dirty scum, the lot of ’em. They’d swear on the body of their grandmother and look you full in the face and lie.”

I put my hand on her arm. “Look, I can understand how you feel about them. I’m no champion of them myself. I almost got kidnapped by them once. God knows where I’d be now if the police hadn’t raided at that moment. But they are the ideal ones to help us if we want to solve this.”

We started to walk toward the Bowery.

“Monk Eastman has a finger in every kind of criminal pie in the Lower East Side,” I continued. “If one of his girls had wound up dead, he’d want to know who did it, wouldn’t he? Someone would be messing with his assets, as Kid Twist so nicely put it. So I wanted to find out if they were Monk’s girls.”

“And are they?”

“That’s the odd thing. Kid says they haven’t heard of any girls going missing, which must mean they’re brought in from somewhere else.”