Murder on St. Mark's Place Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  PRAISE FOR VICTORIA THOMPSON and MURDER ON ASTOR PLACE, THE FIRST IN THE GASLIGHT MYSTERY SERIES

  “Victoria Thompson is off to a blazing start with Sarah Brandt and Frank Malloy in Murder on Astor Place. I do hope she’s starting at the beginning of the alphabet. Don’t miss her first tantalizing mystery.”

  —Catherine Coulter, author of Double Take

  “A marvelous debut mystery with compelling characters, a fascinating setting, and a stunning resolution. It’s the best mystery I’ve read in ages.”

  —JiM Churchill, author of The Merchant of Menace

  “Fascinating ... Sarah and Frank are appealing characters ... Thompson vividly re-creates the gaslit world of old New York.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Spellbinding. A bravura performance that will leave you impatient for the next installment.”

  -Romantic Times

  “An exciting first in a series which will appeal to Anne Perry fans.”

  —Mystery Scene

  Gaslight Mysteries by Victoria Thompson

  MURDER ON ASTOR PLACE

  MURDER ON ST. MARK’S PLACE

  MURDER ON GRAMERCY PARK

  MURDER ON WASHINGTON SQUARE

  MURDER ON MULBERRY BEND

  MURDER ON MARBLE ROW

  MURDER ON LENOX HILL

  MURDER IN LITTLE ITALY

  MURDER IN CHINATOWN

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  MURDER ON ST. MARK’S PLACE

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime edition / March 2000

  Copyright © 2000 by Victoria Thompson.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67343-6

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  PRIME CRIME Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Roselyn O’Brien and all the staff and volunteers

  of the March of Dimes, in appreciation for all you

  do to save babies.

  1

  SARAH HEARD THE WAILING WHEN SHE WAS STILL halfway down the street. She knew the sound only too well, the howl of a grief too great to bear, and she was certain she had arrived too late.

  A midwife by trade, she had been summoned to deliver the third child of Agnes Otto, a strong, healthy young woman whom Sarah had seen only a few days earlier. Everything had seemed fine then, but if Sarah had learned nothing else from her years of midwifery, she knew that things sometimes went terribly wrong when a baby was making its way into the world, no matter how strong and healthy his mother might appear to be.

  Certain of what she would find and praying she wasn’t too late to save at least one of them, Sarah picked up her heavy skirts and tucked her medical bag under her arm. Dodging the puddles left from the freak rainstorm yesterday that had dropped over an inch of rain in a hour’s time, she hurried down the sidewalk, past the neat row of tenement buildings here on St. Mark’s Place, in the heart of Little Germany, until she reached the one where Agnes Otto lived. The front door stood open to catch what little air stirred in the early July heat, and Sarah was up the stoop and through it in an instant. Inside, the dark hallway was deserted, but the sound of weeping echoed down the stairwell. She followed it unerringly and found several women gathered on the landing above, just outside the door to the Ottos’ flat. They were crying and wringing their hands and sobbing into their aprons. That was when Sarah began to suspect that whatever was wrong was not what she’d been expecting at all.

  Then she saw the policeman.

  He stood just inside the flat, the brass buttons of his uniform straining over his big belly, sweat streaming off his face in the oppressive heat, and his expression oddly panicked. His presence relieved her on one level. Nobody called the police because a baby or a mother died in childbirth. But the police didn’t just show up for no reason, either. Something terrible had happened, even though it wasn’t the thing Sarah had most feared.

  “Oh, look, Mrs. Brandt has come,” one of the neighbor women said, seeing Sarah. “Thank heaven you’ve come.”

  The policeman turned to look at her, and his sweaty face brightened. “The midwife’s here now, missus,” he said to someone inside, someone who was crying more loudly than any of the women in the hallway. “I’ll just be on my way. Someone will let you know when you can claim the body.”

  The body? Good heavens, what was he talking about? Had something happened to Agnes’s husband? No wonder everyone was hysterical.

  “What’s going on here?” Sarah demanded of the policeman, but he was in too much of a hurry to leave. He tipped his hat as he passed, but he did pass, as quickly as he could push his way through the group of women and squeeze by Sarah, and then he hustled his bulky frame down the dark stairwell and was gone.

  “It is Mrs. Otto’s sister, Gerda,” one of the women obligingly explained, dabbing at her eyes with the comer of her apron. “Somebody has murdered her!”


  The words brought back ugly memories that Sarah had worked very hard to store away forever. Her own husband had been murdered a little more than three years ago, and just last April, Sarah had helped solve the murder of another unfortunate young woman. Although she sometimes had to deal with death in the course of her work, that at least was natural. She’d hoped never again to encounter the kind that came unnaturally, from the violent hand of another.

  Sarah didn’t have to push her way into the Ottos’ flat. The women parted to allow her to enter, apparently as grateful for her arrival as the policeman had been.

  Agnes Otto sat at the table in her small kitchen with her head on her arms, sobbing as if her heart would break. Plainly, Sarah would get no straight answers from her.

  She turned to the women still hovering in the doorway. “Is she in labor?”

  “We do not know,” one of them said. “But we were afraid, with the shock of it ...”

  Sarah nodded. Shock had a way of hurrying things along, and Agnes was due anytime now. Sarah set her medical bag on the table and started to unbutton the jacket that fashion dictated she wear out in public, in spite of the heat. From the front room of the flat, the one facing the street, Sarah could hear the cries of a young child. That would be Agnes’s daughter, who was about two. Looking around, she found Agnes’s son, a boy of about four. He was huddled in the comer, practically under the sink, and staring at his mother with wide, terrified eyes.

  “Would one of you take care of the children, please?” Sarah asked as she rolled up her sleeves. “They shouldn’t be here.”

  Two of the women hurried to do her bidding, removing the children from the flat and leaving her alone with Agnes. “Do you want me to send for your husband?” Sarah asked, gently stroking the other woman’s shoulders in a gesture of comfort.

  Agnes didn’t hesitate. She shook her head vehemently, then made an effort to raise her head. Her usually pale face was swollen and blotched with weeping. She brushed at her running nose with the cuff of her sleeve, and said, “He will not come. He would lose his day’s wages.”

  Some men would count that a small cost to be able to comfort a pregnant wife, but Agnes knew her husband better than Sarah did. “How are you feeling? Are you having any pains?”

  “Pains?” As if she’d forgotten for a moment that she was pregnant, Agnes sat up in the chair and wrapped her arms protectively around her distended belly. Then she looked at Sarah and seemed to recognize her for the first time. “Nein, I don’t think so. Why have you come?” she asked in alarm.

  “One of the neighbor boys came for me. I thought it must be your time.”

  “I did not send for you. I did not think of anything but—” Her voice broke as she remembered her sister, and she covered her face with her hands.

  “I guess your neighbors thought you might need me.” Sarah pulled out a chair and sat down beside Agnes. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  For a long moment Sarah was afraid Agnes wouldn’t be able to speak, but she continued to stroke her back and croon meaningless phrases of comfort until at last she was rewarded for her patience.

  Slowly, Agnes lowered her hands, revealing eyes filled with so much pain, Sarah had to force herself not to look away. “It is Gerda. My little sister. You remember her?”

  Sarah nodded. Gerda was a lively young girl of about sixteen, with blond hair and sparkling blue eyes who had come to America less than a year ago to live with her married sister. Her parents hoped she’d do as well as Agnes had, find a suitable husband and a good life here. She had a job in one of the sweatshops, where she would have earned enough to pay Agnes and her husband, Lars, for her keep, but not much more. Sarah vaguely recalled Agnes’s concern for her.

  “You were worried about her, weren’t you?”

  Agnes nodded, shuddering under a fresh onslaught of tears. “She would not listen. She would not stay home like a good girl. She was only sixteen ...” Once again, the tears choked her, and Sarah had to wait, her own eyes welling with tears as she thought of a life so young being snuffed out. As much to distract herself as to help Agnes, she got up and fetched a glass of water from the pitcher and helped her patient drink it when she was calm again.

  “Life is much different here than it is in Germany,” Sarah suggested. “I expect Gerda had some trouble adjusting.”

  Agnes’s expression grew instantly angry. “She had no trouble! She was like an American girl at once! As soon as she started working with those other girls—they are bad ones! They got Gerda in trouble, all the time, trouble. Staying out late at night so she would be too tired to get awake in the morning for work. Going to dancing, meeting strange men.” Agnes shook her head in despair, and Sarah noticed she was rubbing her side without even realizing it. Sarah glanced at the pendant watch she wore pinned to her shirtwaist, making note of the time.

  “Lars tried to tell her,” Agnes explained, desperate to make Sarah understand that they had attempted to stop her. “He told her those men would not marry a girl who goes to dancing all the time and stays out half the night, but she would not listen. She would not listen to anyone. I know something bad will happen. I tell her that.”

  “And what did happen?” Sarah asked as gently as she could.

  Agnes squeezed her eyes shut, as if she could close out the pain. “She did not come home last night. Lars, he goes out to look for her, but he cannot find her anywhere. No one can find her. I hardly sleep all night for fear. And then that police comes here. A police! To my house!” Her eyes pleaded with Sarah to understand her outrage, and Sarah had no trouble doing so. In Germany, the police would never have occasion to visit the home of a respectable family, and the same was true in America.

  Then Agnes’s blotched and swollen features crumbled under the weight of her grief again. “They find her today. In an alley. She was ... Her face ...” It was all she could do to choke out the words. “The police said someone beat her.”

  “She was beaten to death?” Sarah asked when Agnes hesitated, the words as painful to say as they were to hear. Only sixteen years old and beaten to death like an animal.

  Agnes nodded stiffly, not trusting herself to speak. She took another sip of the water. “They could not tell ... from her face ... who she was.”

  Sarah couldn’t stop herself from grasping at this last fragment of hope. “Then maybe it wasn’t Gerda at all! How can you be sure if—”

  “Her shoes,” Agnes said, her voice barely a rasp.

  “Her what?”

  “Her shoes. She had new shoes. They were... red.” She said the word as if it were vile. “Red shoes, she repeated, silently asking if Sarah had ever heard of such a thing.

  She had not. “How ... unusual.”

  “She said she bought them herself. She said she saved the money by walking to work instead of taking the trolley. But she could not have saved so much money herself. Someone gave her those shoes. A man.” Agnes’s light blue eyes flared with fury. “We knew it, but we could not stop her. She would not listen, and now the police comes here to tell me my little sister is dead!”

  She started to cry again, and once more Sarah saw her rubbing her side. A glance at her watch told her the contractions were only a few minutes apart. Agnes was in advanced labor.

  “I think you should lie down for a while,” Sarah said. “You have to think of yourself and the new baby. Come on, I’ll help you.”

  Agnes looked around as if she had suddenly remembered something important. “My children? Where are my children ?”

  “Mrs. Shultz and Mrs. Neugebauer took them so you could get some rest. They’ll be fine.”

  “My babies!” Agnes wailed as Sarah helped her to her feet, but the shifting of her weight resulted in a gush of fluid from beneath her skirt that succeeded in distracting her completely. Her water had broken. “Mein Gott!” she cried, and began to mutter hysterically in German as Sarah half led, half carried her into the bedroom.

  Two HOURS LATER Sarah was washing her
hands at the kitchen sink when one of the neighbor women brought over a plate covered with a napkin.

  “Mr. Otto will be hungry when he comes home,” Mrs. Shultz explained, setting it down on the table. She was a short woman of ample girth who took great pride in the neatness of her appearance. “How is Mrs. Otto doing?”

  “She’s fine. She had another little girl.”

  “Already? I didn’t hear a thing!”

  “The labor went quickly.” Sarah didn’t mention that the baby had hardly cried. That worried her. That and the way Agnes had shown hardly any interest in the child. Sarah had made sure the baby nursed before Agnes fell into an exhausted sleep, but she was very much afraid Agnes’s milk wouldn’t come in if she didn’t calm down soon. Unfortunately, Sarah couldn’t think of any way to help her, short of bringing Agnes’s sister back to life.

  “Did she tell you what happened?” Mrs. Shultz asked. “To her sister, I mean.”

  “A little,” Sarah admitted, wanting to hear the facts of the case from someone less emotional about them. “She said Gerda was killed.”

  “Someone beat her like a dog and left her to die in some filthy alley,” Mrs. Shultz informed her righteously, folding her arms under her ample breasts. She was also of German descent, but had been in America long enough to have lost most of her accent.

  “Do they know who did it?” Sarah asked, drying her hands on one of Agnes’s immaculate towels.

  “No, and they will never find out, either, if you ask me. That girl, she got just what she deserved. What did she expect? Going out every night, flaunting herself at those dance houses. No decent girls go to those places, I can tell you that.”