Gaslight Mystery 03 - Murder on Gramercy Park 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

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Praise for national bestselling author VICTORIA THOMPSON and her Gaslight Mysteries:

  MURDER ON ST. MARK’S PLACE

  “Lovers of history, mystery, and romance won’t be disappointed. Exciting ... Will hold the reader in thrall.”

  —Romantic Times

  “As Victoria Thompson colorfully demonstrates in her latest Gaslight Mystery, New York City at the beginning of the twentieth century is a dangerous place for its melting pot immigrants ... [She] weaves a fine mystery for readers who enjoy solving a difficult puzzler.”

  —Harriet Klausner

  MURDER ON ASTOR PLACE

  Nominated for the Best First Mystery Award by

  Romantic Times magazine

  “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.”

  —Jill Churchill, author of The Accidental Florist

  “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.

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  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 GRAMERCY PARK

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with Cornerstone Communications, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / March 2001

  Copyright © 2001 by Victoria Thompson.

  The Edgar® name is a registered service mark of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc.

  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 : 978-1-440-67341-2

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley 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

  DEDICATION

  With thanks to Julie and Georgia and all the members of the Vicious Circle, past and future, for helping me keep my head on straight, my feet on the ground, and my sanity intact (not to mention all the plotting, character analysis, and general advice you’ve provided through the years). Couldn’t have made it without you!

  PROLOGUE

  SHE THOUGHT OF THE PAIN AS A MONSTER THAT dwelled inside of her. For long periods of time it slept, and then slowly it would begin to stir. It started with a dull ache as the beast came awake. Then it grew and grew as the monster dug his talons into her neck, squeezing and squeezing, the pain a living, breathing thing that consumed her, obliterating thought and light and even the air she breathed.

  She welcomed the monster, greeted him like a beloved friend, because he gave her the only proof that she was still alive. For a few blissful moments, from the time the monster stirred until the pain became so great she had to cry out, she was awake and aware and alive, almost the way she’d been before.

  She gritted her teeth, holding back the moan of agony that came rumbling up from the depths of her soul, stretching out those moments as long as she possibly could. Opening her eyes to see sunlight or lamplight or a human face. Drinking in every vision with the clarity only those who were denied even the most basic pleasures of life could experience.

  But sooner or later the moan or the scream or the sigh would escape, and they would know. Those who loved her. Those who could not bear to see her in pain. They would press the glass to her lips and force her to drink the bitter draft, the magic potion that would put the monster to sleep again. For a few more seconds she would revel in the beast’s assault, counting each precious one of them until she felt the talons loosening their grip, slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, one by one by one, until the pain was gone and the monster slept again beneath the golden haze of the drug.

  For long months she lay like this, watching each of the seasons pass by the window beside her bed. She had given up hope of ever tasting the outside air again, of ever walking down a gravel path or sitting a saddle or dancing a waltz or feeling the embrace of a lover. She had thought she would lie here forever, until at last the beast devoured her.

  And then he came.

  He was the only one who would
put his hands on her. The only one who dared. He knew the name of the beast, and he put his hands on her and strangled it, choking it and killing it, and setting her free. Only one man could do that, one man in all the world.

  Edmund Blackwell.

  1

  FRANK MALLOY FIGURED SOMEONE AT POLICE Headquarters must be mad at him. Why else would they send him out to investigate a suicide? Any drunken moron in the Detective Bureau could have handled this, and God knew, there were plenty of them to spare.

  Of course, as soon as he’d heard the address, he knew why he’d been chosen. Gramercy Park. Some rich swell had blown his brains out, and the family would want the matter settled quietly. Frank knew how to handle the boys from Newspaper Row. He’d done it often enough. Give them just enough to keep them happy but not enough to cause the family any hardship. No hint of scandal could escape, and Frank could be trusted to be discreet.

  As he approached the house, he glanced at the park surrounded by the high, gated fence that only residents of the streets around it could enter. The small patch of carefully tended grass and shrubbery would look like heaven to the urchins living on the Lower East Side who never saw anything green except rot. Here the swells had a fence to keep even their own kind from trampling on it.

  When he checked the address, Frank realized with a start that he knew the house. He’d been there several months before, when the previous occupant had been found murdered. Found by Sarah Brandt, a lady of Frank’s acquaintance. That’s how his mother might have explained her, if his mother could have been forced to speak of her at all. Well, at least he didn’t have to worry about Sarah Brandt getting involved in this case the way she had on previous ones. This wasn’t really a case anyway. He was just here to tie up a few loose ends and see the body taken quietly away.

  The beat cop stood guard at the front steps. He nodded at Frank and touched his round hat in a gesture of respect.

  “What’s going on here, Patrick?” Frank asked.

  “The man what lives here shot hisself in the head. His poor wife found him, and she’s in a state.” He leaned closer, so that Frank could smell the whiskey on his breath, and added in a whisper, “She’s breeding, too.”

  Frank managed not to flinch. “Breeding?”

  “About to drop it right on the floor any minute, too, if you ask me,” Officer Patrick offered, his round head nodding knowingly.

  “Nobody asked you,” Frank reminded him. “What’s the dead fellow’s name?”

  “Edmund Blackwell. He’s some kind of doctor.”

  Perfect. A pregnant woman about to give birth and a dead doctor.

  Frank forced himself to mount the front steps, ruthlessly suppressing the visions of his own wife in her dying moments, her blood soaking the mattress beneath her as it ran unchecked from her body. This woman wasn’t Kathleen. He had to remind himself of that twice before he could open the front door.

  Inside, another beat cop was doing his best to keep several servants from entering the room to the left of the entrance hall. Frank figured this was probably the room the dead man had chosen for his own execution. The officer was visibly relieved to see Frank, who drew the servants’ attention at once.

  The tallest one, a man of middle years who held himself with an unmistakable air of authority, marched over to him. “Are you in charge here?” he demanded.

  “Until Commissioner Roosevelt shows up,” Frank replied sarcastically, referring to the infamous head of the New York City Police Department. Since the commissioner came from the monied upper class of the city and had managed to alienate practically everyone in that city with his puritanical reforms and his insistence on honesty in the police department, Roosevelt’s was the one name certain to annoy if not frighten this snobby butler.

  The butler stiffened but did not back down. “I must insist that you allow me to summon Mr. Potter. He is Dr. Blackwell’s assistant. He will know what to do.”

  Frank gave him the grin that made hardened criminals sweat. “What makes you think I don’t know what to do?”

  A flush crawled up the man’s neck, but to his credit, he held his ground. “I was referring to Mrs. Blackwell, sir. She came home earlier than expected today, and she was the one who found Dr. Blackwell. I should have been the one to—” His voice broke and his face lost a bit of its stiffness for a moment before he recalled his dignity again. “She is ... very upset, and in her delicate condition ...”

  From the depths of the house, Frank could detect a pitiful moaning sound. He felt the cold sweat breaking out on his body, but he refused to so much as bat an eye. “You’d better send for a doctor, then.”

  The butler frowned his disapproval. “Dr. Blackwell doesn’t hold with medical practitioners.”

  Frank pushed his hat back and stared up at the man. “Didn’t you just say he was a doctor himself?”

  The butler drew himself up defensively. “Dr. Blackwell is a healer,” he explained with the utmost courtesy and unconsciously using the present tense. “A magnetic healer. He does not trust conventional medicine.”

  Who did? Frank wanted to ask, but he managed to restrain himself. For a second he was at a loss. A pregnant woman, obviously in labor or about to be from the shock of discovering her husband’s brains spilled out on her carpet, and they wouldn’t let him call a doctor. The irony was so great, he almost smiled. So much for his certainty that Sarah Brandt wouldn’t be involved in this case.

  Frank reached into his coat pocket and found his notebook and a pencil. He scribbled the Bank Street address on one of the pages and tore it out. He thrust it at the butler. “Send someone to this address and ask for Mrs. Brandt. She’s a midwife.”

  The butler looked at the paper as if it were a snake.

  The woman moaned again, and Frank’s patience evaporated. “Who was supposed to help her if Dr. Blackwell doesn’t believe in doctors?”

  “He ... he was going to deliver the child himself, I believe,” the butler admitted.

  Frank gave him another of his famous, bone-chilling glares. “Well, that’s out of the question now, isn’t it? So unless you want to leave her to the mercies of her maid—”

  The butler snatched the paper from Frank’s outstretched fingers and turned on his heel, summoning someone from the depths of the house.

  Frank sighed. Sarah would find this very amusing. She’d probably never let him hear the end of it either. Well, at least this wasn’t a murder case. If he let her help him with one more murder case, he’d never be able to show his face down at Police Headquarters again.

  Sending the rest of the servants scurrying away with another of his glares, he turned to the officer guarding the door. “Let’s see what we’ve got, Mahoney.”

  SARAH WASN’T SURPRISED to see an agitated young man at her front door. As a midwife, she frequently saw agitated men, young, old, and in between, who had been sent to summon her to an impending birth. This fellow looked unusually agitated, however, and his uniform marked him as the servant of a wealthy household. The instant she opened the door, he began to speak.

  “Mrs. Brandt, you’re needed right away. Mrs. Blackwell, she’s in a bad way, and the policeman says for you to come at once.” He spoke as if he’d been practicing the words all the way over from wherever he’d come.

  “The policeman?” she asked, not quite believing she’d heard him correctly.

  “Yes, ma’am. Dr. Blackwell, he’s ... well, he’s dead, it seems like, and the police come, and when he found out Mrs. Blackwell was ... well, he give me your address and told me to fetch you quick as I could.”

  “Was this policeman a detective sergeant?” she asked, managing to keep her expression suitably grave. She didn’t want the boy to see her smiling smugly when he’d just told her someone was dead.

  “I don’t rightly know, ma’am. He’s a big Irishman, and he said for you to come. Mrs. Blackwell, she needs you right now.”

  Many policemen could be called “big Irishmen,” but only one of them was likely t
o have thought of summoning Sarah Brandt to the scene of a crime. “Of course,” she said. “Just give me a moment to gather my things.”

  She left the young man on her front stoop as she went back into the house to change her clothes and get her medical bag. She changed quickly, with practiced ease, and she couldn’t help thinking how it must have galled Malloy to send for her. Someone dead and the police called must mean another murder. He wouldn’t want her involved in a murder, so he must be desperate indeed. A woman about to deliver a baby would have affected him that way, she assumed, considering how his wife had died.

  Sarah must try to hide her satisfaction at his summons and the surge of anticipation she felt at being involved in another murder investigation, however slightly. If she acted too delighted at being included, Malloy might be provoked into sending her from the house, impending birth or not.

  When she stepped outside into the early autumn afternoon, she saw the young man was on the driver’s seat of a carriage he had obviously brought to convey her. He hopped nimbly down to open the door for her.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Gramercy Park, ma’am.”

  She considered for only a moment. “I’ll walk, then. It will take over an hour to drive there from here, and only a quarter of an hour on foot.”

  “But Mr. Granger said to fetch you in the carriage,” the boy argued, alarmed by her refusal.

  “Who’s Mr. Granger?”

  “The head butler, ma’am,” the boy explained.