Twenty-nine

I stood irresolute at the curb, wondering what to do next. The jar of cream should go to Daniel to be tested. And Emily needed medicine and a doctor. Nothing else would matter if Emily died, but obviously a doctor would need to know what was poisoning her before he could treat her. So Daniel first. I jumped onto a streetcar as it moved off from its stop, causing the conductor to yell at me. “Danged foolish thing to do, young woman,” he growled. “Don’t you know you could get yourself killed that way?”

“Sorry, I’m in a hurry,” I replied with a rueful smile.

I didn’t think Daniel would be at home at this hour, but there was just a chance he might have the day off or have been working all night. Besides, I’d rather face Mrs. O’Shea than police headquarters. The landlady greeted me, looking somewhat distracted and disheveled. Her hair was unkempt and her apron needed changing. “Oh, Miss Murphy. I’m sorry. I must look a sight but I’ve been up all night with the children. The captain’s not here.”

“Then I’m sorry to have bothered you,” I said. “And I’m sorry to hear the children are still sick.”

She tried to smooth down her hair. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” she said. “It’s that ringworm on top of everything else that’s driving them crazy. I’ve had to make mittens for them to stop them scratching.”

At that moment the door opened and a child came running out. It was half dressed in petticoat and camisole and the amazing thing about it was that it was almost bald.

“Geraldine, whatever are you thinking,” Mrs. O’Shea said in a shocked voice. “You can’t let people see you like that. Get back inside this instant.”

“I thought it was Captain Sullivan,” Geraldine said with a pout. “He promised he’d bring me some of that sour candy.”

“Children!” Mrs. O’Shea shook her head as she pushed Geraldine back into the room and closed the door.

“What’s happened to her hair?” I asked, staring at the closed door almost as if I could see through it.

“It’s the ringworm medicine. It makes their hair fall out. The doctor says it will grow back again just fine.”

“What’s in the medicine that has that effect?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t know, my dear. It’s what the doctor prescribed for them. I had it made up at the pharmacy on the corner of Broadway.”

“Thank you, Mrs. O’Shea.” I beamed at her.

“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” she said, looking at me oddly.

I hurried along Twenty-third to Broadway and into the pharmacy there. “You made up a ringworm medicine for the O’Shea children,” I said, realizing that the words were coming out in a torrent. “What was in it?”

The druggist stared at me as if I was a crazy person.

“My dear young woman, I could not possibly discuss a patient’s prescription with you.”

“But it’s very important,” I said. “A matter of life and death, in fact.”

“Really?” He looked almost amused.

“I have a friend whom I suspect is being poisoned,” I said. “I need to know what there is in the medicine you made up to counteract ringworm that would make the hair fall out.”

“That, young lady, would be in the inclusion of thallium.”

“And is thallium a poison?”

“Deadly. It can kill in relatively small doses. We have to make sure when we handle it that we wear gloves and a mask. It can be absorbed through the skin and inhaled too, you know.”

I looked around the dispensary. “Do you happen to have a telephone?”

“I do not. I have no interest in these newfangled ideas,” he said, and indicated that he was going back to his work.

“Do you happen to know who might have a telephone near here? One that I could use for a matter of great urgency?”

“As I said, I have no interest in these ridiculous contraptions. Now, if you will excuse me, I have orders waiting to be filled.” And he went back to his work.

I felt angry, frustrated, and so tense that I might explode any minute. I now knew that thallium was the ingredient that made hair fall out and that it was a deadly poison. I wondered how hard it would be to detect whether thallium had been added to that face cream. I jumped back on the Broadway trolley and rode it, fuming with impatience as it stopped at the corner of every city block, all the way down Broadway, until I was at police headquarters.

“I need to speak to Captain Sullivan. It’s very urgent,” I told the constable who was manning the front desk.

“I’m sorry, miss, but the captain is out on a case. Can I see what other detectives are here at the moment?”

“No. That won’t do at all,” I said. “If you can find me some paper and a pen, I’ll write the captain a note.”

“Is this to report some kind of crime?” he asked. “Or is the note of a personal nature?” His smirk implied that young women were prone to chase after Captain Sullivan. I thought about setting him straight on this, but instead I kept strictly to business.

“A crime.” I gave him a cold stare. “A case of poisoning.”

He went and produced a sheet of paper and an inkwell. I wrote,

Daniel. The poison was thallium. This jar of cream needs to be tested immediately. Emily Boswell is very sick. I’m summoning a doctor but he may not know how to treat a poison. If you know of a poisons expert, please send him immediately to Emily.

And I wrote down her address. “Please come yourself as soon as you can,” I added. Then I handed the note and the jar of cream to the policeman at the desk. “Captain Sullivan is to see these the moment he comes back. Will you keep them down here or take them up to his office?”

He looked rather surprised at the forceful way I was speaking, also that I knew where his office was. “I’ll take them to his office, miss. Don’t worry. I’ll see he gets them.”

When I came out of police headquarters, I was unsure what to do next. Find a doctor for Emily, I supposed. Would any doctor believe me if I told him she was suffering from thallium poisoning, and would he have any idea how to treat it if he did believe me? I took the El this time, knowing it to be quicker than the trolley. As I watched the second-floor windows of the buildings pass us by, some only a few feet away, I tried to make sense of everything that had happened. Someone must have bribed Ned to poison that face cream. But why kill Dorcas? And what about the opera singer Honoria? How did she come into this?

Then I thought I saw what might have happened. The poisoned face cream could have been intended only for Fanny. But Fanny had sung its praises to her friends. What if she had passed along the jar to Dorcas? And what if Dorcas had let her friend Honoria try it when she came to visit? It seemed more likely than somebody deliberately killing Dorcas and Honoria, didn’t it?

Fifi, Bella, Anson. I toyed with each of the names. How did they discover Ned, assuming that Ned had added the poison to the face creams he made. Anson might have had contact with McPherson’s drugstore, because Fanny liked the stomach mixture they made up. And Bella learned about it from Fanny. But what would induce Anson or Bella to think that Ned could be bribed to kill someone and that he would not go to the police? Unless . . .

Unless Ned were not being paid to kill Fanny. What if he had his own reason for wanting her dead? I couldn’t think what this could be, apart from a paranoid hatred of rich women. Was it possible that he was systematically killing off rich women because they had everything he had lacked growing up? It seemed rather improbable. Suddenly I thought of the first time I had been to McPherson’s drugstore. Emily had been to visit the older woman who worked with Emily behind the counter. She had become sick and died from very similar symptoms. Had she tried the face cream? Was it possible that Ned was not the good pharmacist he imagined himself to be and had created a mixture containing lethal elements? I knew that some face preparations contained arsenic. Maybe Ned had thought that thallium would be a good addition, and I had just heard from Daniel that a badly made tonic had been responsible for killing people. But then Emily had used the cream previously and suffered no ill effects. Just this current batch then.

The closely packed buildings gave way to a more genteel landscape. Out of the window I glimpsed Columbus Circle and the elegant area around the southern entrance to the park. Carriages were passing here, fashionable folk were strolling. Watching them made me think of that one particular black carriage. Who had tried to run me down? Not Ned. He would have no access to such a vehicle, and besides, it had proved rather easy to kill with a simple jar of face cream. Perhaps the carriage had been a mere accident after all, the result of a bad coachman and a great hurry and nothing to do with someone wanting me out of the way.

A good motive, that was what I needed. I toyed with the idea of Ned loving Fanny from afar—but knowing he didn’t come from the right background to ask her to marry him. But from conversation it seemed that he only knew Fanny as Emily’s rich friend. And if he loved her secretly, would he want to kill her?

Then, as the train slowed for the Seventy-third Street station and I stood to disembark, the germ of an idea started to grow in my brain. I considered Ned’s hard life, growing up in extreme poverty as an illegitimate child without a father. And I thought of Mrs. Bradley and her husband’s roving eye . . . actresses, cigar girls, she had said. Could it be possible? I had to see Mrs. Bradley and find out for myself.

So instead of going straight to Emily, I crossed the park to the Bradleys’ mansion. Mrs. Bradley had been about to go out and was fixing an enormous hat to her head with several lethal-looking pins.

“Miss Murphy!” She looked startled.

“I’m sorry to trouble you yet again, Mrs. Bradley,” I said, “but I have to ask you an important question.”

“Very well.”

“Not here.” I looked around the vast front hall with all the doors opening from it. “It’s of a rather private nature.”

“Very well,” she said again, looking both startled and annoyed now. “But I do have an appointment for which I cannot be late.”

“This will only take a minute.”

She ushered me through the nearest door into a cavernous drawing room and shut the door behind us.

“Well?”

“This may seem like an impertinent question,” I said, “and I would never have dreamed of asking it unless I thought it might unmask your daughter’s killer. You mentioned that your husband had a roving eye. To your knowledge did he ever father an illegitimate child?”

“What a preposterous thing to say. Absolutely not!” She spat out the words.

I said nothing, but continued to look at her. I saw her face twitch uncomfortably.

“The answer is that I really don’t know,” she said.

There was another long pause and I saw her expression change.

“You’ve remembered something,” I prompted.

“There was one young man, a few months ago,” she said hesitantly. “He came to see my husband. I never knew what it was about but I assumed he might have been asking for a loan, or a job. Anyway, I heard raised voices. The study door opened and the young man stalked out with my husband hot on his heels. ‘And don’t let me ever see your face again,’ my husband shouted after him. His face was almost purple with anger. I’d completely forgotten about it.”

“And what did this young man look like?” I asked.

“Personable. Well turned out. Dark hair. A good-looking boy, in fact. I was a little surprised that Mr. Bradley had been so rude to him.”

“Thank you.” I beamed at her. I turned to go. She grabbed my arm.

“Miss Murphy—my husband is not an easy man. I would advise caution about approaching him with this. He may not wish to discuss it with a stranger.”

“Of course not,” I said. “If your suspicions are true, then I can find my confirmation somewhere else.”

She was still holding onto the fabric of my coat. “Miss Murphy. You think this young man may have killed our daughter?”

“I think it’s highly possible.”

“And he may have been her half brother? But that’s monstrous, absolutely monstrous.”

“It is indeed,” I said. “Of course I may still be wrong, but I’ll know by the end of this day.”