An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen Read online

  CHAPTER 2

  While O’Mara and I waited for the coroner’s men and the detectives, I busied myself trying to clean up the surviving baby. I carried cold water in from the hall tap, warmed it on the stove, and poured it into the basin. Meanwhile, the baby took a little water. I bathed him as quickly but thoroughly as I could manage, dried him, and wrapped him in the warmest blankets I could find among Ruthie’s things.

  Half the building’s residents, along with bystanders from the street, lined the hallways and staircases, retreating as we shooed them away and then creeping back out of ghoulish curiosity. One of the crowd turned out to be a godsend, though. A woman approached me, tears in her eyes, and introduced herself as Eileen Daly, from an apartment on the first floor. Her Irish accent made it sound as if she’d stepped off the boat yesterday. “If you’ll come with me,” she said, “I’ve got some milk for the bairn in my flat.”

  O’Mara gave my visual plea the nod, and I followed her.

  We edged down past the onlookers. “Poor little mite,” was the verdict of most of them. Word of what had happened was now common knowledge, thanks probably to Beggs.

  Eileen’s flat was bigger than Ruthie’s, with a higher ceiling. A plump, older baby lay in a crib on the floor. “My Davy’s eight months,” Eileen said. While I cradled Ruthie’s child, she got a bottle ready, mixing milk, water, cod liver oil, and a bit of sugar in a saucepan. After the bottle was filled and tested on her wrist to her satisfaction, the baby took it eagerly.

  “Do you know his name?” I asked, watching his tiny mouth eagerly latch on to the nipple.

  “Eddie.” She sniffled. “The other one was Johnny.”

  “Your baby and Ruthie’s must be close in age.”

  “Eddie’s a hair under three months.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “I don’t suppose he’ll remember any of this, do you?”

  I looked down into his little face, which was crinkled in his concentration of taking the milk. “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s a mercy. Though it’s a hard thing to hope a babe won’t remember his mam. What’ll become of him?”

  I didn’t have the answer to that. “Did you know Ruthie well?”

  “Passing well. I’d go up for a cup of tea, that sort of thing.”

  “Maybe something harder than tea?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Never saw her touch a drop of the stuff. Said she liked to keep her wits about her.”

  I frowned, remembering the bottle and the glass on her table. That liquor hadn’t drunk itself.

  “At first my Neal didn’t like me visiting with her, on account of what she was,” Eileen continued, “but I told him, ‘Who else am I supposed to talk to in this godforsaken place?’ Neal’s a docker.”

  “A what?”

  “He loads ships at the dock. Got arms like granite boulders. Still and all, it was harder for me to be too friendly with Ruthie after the babes came, because of the hours she kept. I didn’t want to bother her during the day. I should’ve popped up more often, though.”

  “Did she tell you anything about herself? Where she was from, maybe?”

  “Somewhere in the midlands, I think.”

  It took a moment to guess what that meant. “The Midwest?”

  Her face brightened. “That’s it. She mentioned a state once.” Her face tensed again. “Nebraska? That’s a state, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “I don’t suppose she mentioned a city, or town.”

  Her face pinched in frustration. “If she mentioned a city, it’s escaped me. She didn’t talk of home much, you know. Just that she’d been unhappy there. I’m thinkin’ it couldn’t have been much of a place if she preferred this life to the other.”

  “It must’ve been hard for her, with the babies.”

  “Ay. Poor lass was probably at her wit’s end.” Tears spilled down. “I should’ve done more to help.”

  “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “To be honest, I thought maybe she was doin’ a little better just lately. Last time I saw her she had a new dress. I told her she looked smart, and asked where did she buy it. She said she’d gone to one of the big stores, and that she was doing all right. She was even thinking of getting out of here.” Eileen gasped. “You don’t think she was tellin’ me she was going to kill herself, do you?”

  “Doesn’t sound like it.”

  “And poor Johnny. How could Ruthie have done such a wicked thing? She couldn’t have been in her right mind. She was so fond of those bairns, and especially protective of Eddie.”

  “This baby?”

  Head nodding, she said, “I offered once to watch them for her—just in case she needed to go out—but she told me she didn’t like to leave Eddie with anyone else, on account of only she understood him.” She lifted her apron to her face and sobbed into it.

  Why would a woman who wouldn’t leave a baby with a neighbor have killed herself and left him behind, alone, forever?

  Eileen’s account of Ruthie’s improved financial circumstances jibed with what Beggs had told me on the walk over—that in past weeks, Ruthie had been doing better. Paid her rent, seemed almost cheerful. I could see why financial security could only result in “almost” cheerfulness in this place. The building wasn’t just dark, it was dirty and in ill repair. Built before air shafts and other modern improvements had entered the city’s building code, the inside felt stuffy and unhealthy. The odor of one-pot dinners, tobacco, and sweat permeated the plaster walls and the cracks of the wood floors. Not a happy place.

  My thoughts must have shown in my face as I looked about the room, because Eileen, gathering herself, bristled. “It’s not so bad a place if you take care,” she said, nodding to the clean, ironed cloth on the table, and her curtains, and the spic-and-span floors. “It’s convenient for Neal.”

  For a longshoreman, that made sense. New York Harbor was the busiest in the world, with goods coming in from all over the United States being loaded on freighters and steamships headed for every port of the globe, and vice versa. Manhattan had just shy of a hundred piers, and across the Hudson, New Jersey had almost as many more. Now, because of the months-old war in Europe, the harbor had never been so crowded. Wilson’s so-called neutrality policy banned merchant and military ships docked in United States ports from joining the war effort. Britain had ruled the waves at the time of the announcement of the policy, so German vessels, as well as their crews, were trapped on this side of the Atlantic for the duration. Even the battleship Frederick the Great had been towed over to Hoboken. The streets and alleys along the docks swarmed with more than the usual numbers of ship crews, merchant seamen, stevedores, and every other kind of person who fed off the shipping trade. Including prostitutes.

  A year in the NYPD had taught me more about prostitution than I’d ever expected to know. Ladies of the evening were practically a policewoman’s stock in trade, from the streetwalkers of the docks, alleys, and avenues to the ladies plying their trade in houses with madams providing protection along with a little bit of extortion. Ruthie was obviously the former, which was a tougher life. Yet if she’d managed to pull herself out of debt, she must have attracted a steady clientele, and had managed to find a way to evade the law. She hadn’t been arrested during my time in the precinct.

  “At heart, she was a good sort, Ruthie,” Eileen said. “What would’ve made her do such a terrible thing?”

  It didn’t make sense to me, either. If Ruthie loved her sons as Eileen said she did, yet had been unable to take care of them, why hadn’t she left them on the doorstep of a hospital before taking her own life? She hadn’t written a note and had even locked her door, so she had to have known it could be days before Eddie would be found. She must have been so distraught that she couldn’t reason at all anymore. But distraught about what?

  “Ruthie didn’t mention any specific family members here or back in Nebraska?” I asked.

  “No. I got the feeling she was all alone in the world.” She sucked in a breath.
“She did say once that her father was a strict man. Or stepfather, maybe he was. ‘Papa wasn’t one for sparing the rod,’ she told me. That sounds like he’s dead, though, don’t it?”

  “Maybe when we go through her things, we’ll find out.” I spoke as if I would be part of this search, but as soon as I took Eddie to the foundling hospital, my involvement in the investigation into Ruthie Jones’s death would be finished.

  “Why wouldn’t she have gone back to her family instead of killing herself?” Eileen wondered aloud. “What would’ve made her prefer to die?”

  Maybe that rod she’d mentioned.

  I knew a little about running from home and never returning. I’d left a family I’d lived with since I was a child—uncles, aunts, and young cousins—because they were ashamed of me. Nothing would persuade me to go back, either.

  Eileen frowned down at the baby and my inattention to him. “You oughtn’ta feed him too much at once. Here, give him to me.” I complied and watched as she laid him at her shoulder and gently patted his back until he burped. “I expect you don’t know much about bairns.”

  My jaw clenched, but I couldn’t deny the truth. I’d given birth, but I knew little about babies.

  Eileen fussed over Eddie, who seemed more animated since his meal. His limbs kicked, showing a little vigor.

  “Did you notice any of Ruthie’s visitors?” I asked Eileen.

  “Men, you mean?” Her brows drew together, but then she shook her head. “I tried not to pay attention. Poor lamb.”

  I glanced back at the door to the building’s foyer, which stood wide-open. My guess was that it often did. “You never saw anybody, or maybe someone who came back several times?”

  She bit her lip. “Well . . .” Her eyes widened, and a shadow fell over me.

  When I pivoted to follow Eileen’s gaze, a hulking wall of a man stood by the table, frowning at me. Or maybe that scowl was for Eileen. “Engaging in tittle-tattle after the death of that unfortunate woman?” he said.

  She nodded at me. “It’s a policewoman, Neal.”

  I stood. “I need to know if your wife remembers any of the men who visited Ruthie Jones.”

  His face darkened, sending a shiver of fear through me. I realized too late that I had asked the wrong question. Arms with muscles like granite boulders. They were, too.

  “My wife had nothing to do with that woman beyond the courtesy one neighbor owes another. She certainly didn’t pay attention to her customers. Bad enough a decent woman like Eileen had to live in the same building with all that going on.”

  “I understand. It’s just if she remembered anyone, anyone at all—”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “Poor Ruthie,” Eileen said. “She was never anything but kind to me.”

  “That doesn’t mean you knew her business.” The man was adamant about his wife not having seen anything. But presumably he was gone most of the day, so how would he know? He just didn’t want me asking questions.

  A knock sounded. From outside the door, O’Mara called my name. “Detectives want to see the little one.”

  I thanked Eileen, nodded at her red-faced husband, picked up the baby, and made my way upstairs past the dwindling number of curious neighbors. Since I’d left, Ruthie’s cramped flat had become more crowded. Another policeman had arrived to guard the door, and inside, coroner’s men were going through her belongings and sketching the scene. A pale fog of cigarette smoke hung in the room.

  The coroner’s man was kneeling by the tub, inspecting the pool of blood. “Not as much as you’d expect from gashes like that. But maybe the cold . . .”

  His photographer was preparing to take pictures of the victims. At least Johnny had been pulled out of the water and was lying on a blanket someone had pulled from the bed. His diaper was stained red, and I reeled toward the open window, appreciating the cold slap of air. I held Eddie close, making sure the blanket covered his head.

  The first detective I saw was one I knew. Lieutenant King was round, with a chubby face now sporting a horseshoe mustache, like a strip of fur forming an exaggerated pout around his lips. King had always struck me as one of the more polite men at the precinct, though I’d had little to do with him up to now.

  “Hello, Faulk.” The greeting was cheerless, but I appreciated his using my actual surname. “How’s our survivor?”

  “As well as can be expected, under the circumstances. He took a little milk.”

  He peered at the baby. “Hm. Guess it’s lucky she didn’t kill them both.”

  “Lucky for who?” Another man emerged from the second room. King’s partner was a new addition to the detectives’ ranks. I’d seen him but hadn’t met him yet. He had a medium, athletic build and thick wheat-colored hair with a curl that vats of pomade couldn’t quite flatten, giving him the look of an overgrown, mischievous boy. He didn’t introduce himself, but approached me and eyed the baby with a curled lip. “O’Mara tells me he’s a dummy.”

  “Are you saying he’d be better off dead?” I asked, incensed.

  “He’ll be put in an orphanage. What’s he got to look forward to?”

  “A lifetime,” I said.

  “Sure, he may learn some kind of trade when he gets older. Like rolling cigars, or sewing, like a woman. He’ll never be normal, will he?”

  The rules of seniority and precinct politics dictated that I swallow my anger and keep my mouth shut. But I never did like politics. “If a man without a heart can become a detective,” I said, “I’m sure a child without a voice will turn out all right.”

  “That’s telling him.” King laughed. “Stevens, have you met Officer Louise Faulk?”

  Stevens glared at me and tapped his cigarette. Ash drizzled onto the floor. He didn’t say it was a pleasure to meet me.

  “Poor kid’s got a hard road ahead of him though, no doubt about that.” King sighed as the coroner’s camera flashed. “Not much of a beginning, is it?”

  I’d been trying to avoid looking at the tub again, but my gaze was drawn that way. I made myself focus one last time on the scene. Ruthie’s torso was not bare, but covered in a thin, armless shift.

  “Look at this,” the coroner’s man said. He reached around the woman’s neck and lifted something out of the foul water. It was a little pocket attached to a string. My aunt called those boodle bags—a small bag a person could wear around her neck or waist to carry and conceal money. “It’s got dough in it.”

  The detectives gathered around to count wet bills and a few coins. “Almost forty-six dollars.”

  For a woman like Ruthie, or anyone in this corner of Hell’s Kitchen, that was a fortune.

  “Guess she thought she could take it with her,” Stevens said.

  While the men laughed, I tried to put myself in Ruthie’s place. Why hadn’t she left the money near Eddie? If I’d been in Ruthie’s shoes, even distraught I would have wanted to make sure that forty-six dollars, my only legacy, went toward the care of the child I was leaving behind. I couldn’t shake the feeling we were missing something.

  Or perhaps it was impossible to second-guess a woman so deranged that she could have done something like this in the first place.

  Wrapping the blanket over the baby’s head, which still only had wisps of dark hair, I took another turn around the apartment, looking for any other treasure Ruthie might have left behind. There didn’t seem to be much. Her clothes filled the pine box at the foot of the bed. Personal items were few. Some combs. Old bottles of perfume and hair lotion, all of which seemed almost used up.

  On the top of the dresser stood a picture in a wood frame, half covered by what looked to be a torn envelope, so that all I could see was a woman. I carefully pulled the paper away to reveal a man, too. The middle-aged couple were in their Sunday best, unsmiling. The woman’s dark blond or light brown hair was pulled back tight from her face. There was an echo of a onetime beauty in her somber eyes and slightly upturned nose, and she wore a fitted checked dress that emphasized her still
-trim figure. The man—her husband, I guessed—was older, and sat next to her in an ornately carved chair that had probably been supplied by the photographer’s studio. The man’s slate-looking eyes were fixed in a stern, grim expression, and one of his eyes appeared rather cloudy. His caterpillar eyebrows were drawn together in a frown for posterity. He’d donned his most funereal clothes for the portrait: black suit, black vest, black tie, starched white collar. If these were Ruthie’s parents, they looked as if they were already in mourning for her.

  She’d covered the man’s likeness. I wouldn’t have wanted to look at him, either, but I assumed Ruthie’s reasons were more personal than aesthetic.

  “Faulk and I will leave as soon as the wagon arrives,” O’Mara informed the detectives.

  I hoped it would come soon. There were too many people in too small a space, and I wanted to get Eddie out of there.

  “You’re not needed here,” Stevens said. “For that matter, neither are we. There’s no doubt it’s suicide.”

  King’s mouth twisted at his partner’s pronouncement, but he didn’t disagree.

  “What about the babies?” I asked.

  Both detectives blinked at me.

  “Why would Ruthie kill one and not the other?”

  King considered my question, then shrugged. “She was suicidal. Not in her right mind.”

  “But the neighbor said she was very protective of Eddie, the mute baby. Why would she have left him behind?”

  “Isn’t killing one of them bad enough?” Stevens said. “You wish she’d killed them both?”

  “No, of course not. But the woman downstairs, who knew Ruthie, said Ruthie was a loving mother. She didn’t like leaving Eddie with strangers.”

  “So she loved him enough to let him live,” King explained.