An Orphan of Hell's Kitchen

Book 3: Louise Faulk Mystery

by Liz Freeland

Genres: Historical Mysteries; Private Investigators

Synopsis

In 1914, Hell’s Kitchen is an apt name for New York City’s grittiest neighborhood, as one of the city’s first policewomen, Louise Faulk, is about to discover when the death of a young prostitute leads her on a grim journey through the district’s darkest corners . . .
 
Filthy, dangerous, and deadly—Hell’s Kitchen is no place for a lady, but Louise Faulk is no ordinary woman. The amateur investigator turned rookie policewoman is investigating the death of young prostitute, Ruthie, who leaves behind a baby boy. Although detectives are quick to declare it a suicide, Louise is less certain after she discovers clues implying murder while attempting to find a caretaker for Ruthie’s orphaned son.
 
Uncovering the truth won’t be easy, especially since Louise is struggling to make a name for herself amid the boys’ club of the New York City Police Department. But Ruthie’s case keeps tugging at Louise, luring her beyond the slums’ drawn curtains and tenement doors, into an undercover investigation that often seems to conceal more than it reveals. Louise is convinced Ruthie’s secrets got her killed, but can she prove it before they catch up to her too?

Release date: February 25, 2020

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

November 1914

The Thirtieth Street police station was no place to spend Thanksgiving. Across town, my aunt’s house would be filled with music, laughter, and the warm companionship of friends and family. Thursday evenings chez Irene Livingston Green were always an event, with guests both invited and uninvited filtering through the house on Fifty-Third Street, but Thanksgiving was the zenith of her social calendar. Here, on the other hand, my company in the chilly basement where I worked consisted of two gum-smacking prostitutes and a woman hauled in on vagrancy and public inebriation charges who was currently on the cot in the second cell, snoring like a bulldog with adenoids. My thankfulness was at its lowest ebb.

The bell above the stairwell door clanged, raising a snort from Sleeping Beauty before she resumed her buzz-saw wheezing. That bell was my summons to go upstairs, most likely to bring down another prisoner for the women’s cells. I stood.

“Her master’s voice,” one prostitute cracked to the other, with an especially loud snap of Beech-Nut gum on molars.

At least going upstairs would get me away from the nerve-jarring basement serenade. I was stiff from cold and sitting too long in the same position. “I’ll be right back with a new friend for you.”

“Hope she has cigarettes,” one of the women said.

“Hope she don’t snore,” the other wished.

I was definitely going to demand Christmas off. Would I get it? Probably not. I’d been working in this precinct over a year, but I was still the lowest policewoman in the pecking order. Fiona, Evelyn, and Margaret had been with the NYPD since the days when female police officers were called police matrons. Compared to them I was still as fresh as spring’s first jonquil, even if at the age of twenty-two I was feeling wind-battered and wilted.

I marched up to the main floor, expecting acerbic Sergeant Donnelly to nod me toward one of the rooms where my new charge would be waiting. Instead, two men standing beside him drew my attention. One, O’Mara, was a constable from our precinct. Burly, freckled, with red hair peeking out from under his hat, he stood beside a reedy old man in a worn overcoat, whose gray pants were frayed at the cuff above unpolished shoes. The older man, slight and runtish, was holding his battered hat, and his unkempt, greasy hair flopped forward. He combed it back nervously with his fingers.

Catching sight of me, Sergeant Donnelly scowled. “You got rocks in your feet, Two?” Long ago I’d made the mistake of bragging about my second-rank finish on the civil service exam, and few around the precinct were inclined to let me forget it in this century. “Grab your hat and coat. You’re needed to accompany O’Mara and this man on an errand.”

“Yes, sir.” That quickly, my spirits lifted. I could have performed a balletic jeté across the precinct hall and danced down the stairs to my basement. Yes, it was a wet, cold November night, but anything that got me out of the station house was a godsend in my book. Though policewomen were no longer called matrons, most of our work still consisted of playing nursemaid to the women in the cells. To be out and about like my male brethren—like a real officer, I couldn’t help thinking—was a treat.

“Where’s our new friend?” the gum-snapper shouted down the hall when she heard me rummaging around the closet where we policewomen stowed our things.

“I have to go out. The sergeant’ll send someone else down.” Most likely Schultzie, our oldest officer, who at this moment was probably catching a few winks upstairs in the officers’ dormitory. Sometimes I wondered if he ever went home, or even had a home to go to.

I shrugged on my coat, popped on my hat, and was winding my muffler around my neck as I took the stairs two at a time. The wool was still damp from my trip uptown to work, hours ago.

Only on the way out the door did Officer O’Mara introduce me to his companion. “Mr. Beggs here’s the custodian of an apartment building over on Tenth. Sounds like trouble with one of the tenants.”

Beggs, who had anxious, bulging eyes and a breathy voice, nodded at me. “There’s a bad smell on the fourth floor, and Ruthie’s not answering her door. It’s locked.”

My footsteps faltered. I understood what was suspected, but I didn’t see why I was needed. This sounded like a job for the coroner, and maybe a homicide detective.

Noting my confusion, O’Mara explained, “Woman’s got two kids.”

“Babies,” Beggs said. “Twins.” He was practically skipping to keep up with O’Mara. I was having to move fast, too. “Poor little bastards.”

“You’ll have to take’em to the foundling hospital,” O’Mara told me. He added, “Depending on what we find, of course.”

Until I became a policewoman, I’d never realized how often infants came into contact with the police. Most New Yorkers would be shocked at how frequently the most helpless among us were abandoned, and where—in hospitals, in the alley by the precinct, in the grand concourse of Penn Station, or in the ladies’ washroom of Macy’s department store. Some babies were brought to us when their mothers were arrested, or when a neighbor or landlord reported that a family had cleared out of their flat, leaving the smallest, newest member behind. I was always stunned to be handed one of these tiny discarded beings, whom life had already put at the most grievous disadvantage. For a few hours, I would look after them, and think of another baby—abandoned, too, but now as lucky as a child could be—until we could deliver them to the New York Foundling Hospital on Sixty-Eighth Street.

“It was on account of the babies I couldn’t make myself kick Ruthie to the street,” Beggs told us between labored breaths. “It’s obvious what she is, and having twins didn’t help her none. But those poor fatherless babies. I let the unpaid rent pile up, for months. And not like I asked anything in return, like some would’ve.” Frowning, he held his hat against a sharp gust. “These past few weeks, though, I thought Ruthie was doing a little better. Paid her back rent, seemed almost cheerful.”

“If she hasn’t answered the door, why didn’t you just open it with your key?” I asked the man.

He shivered, and I doubted it was just from the cold. “I-I-I must’ve lost it.”

Lost his key or lost his nerve? The latter, I suspected.

O’Mara’s long strides brought us quickly to Tenth Avenue, an area of flophouses and illegal barrooms, called blind pigs, selling dregs to winos. I picked my way around the sleeping body of one who’d sampled too much of what was on offer at these dubious taverns. Not too many blocks in any direction, a person could be in the plush velvet-and-gilt interior of a Broadway theater, or dining among millionaires in one of the finest restaurants in America, or stepping onto a luxury liner bound for any of the world’s most exotic ports. But in Hell’s Kitchen, luxury was ten cents for a night on a mildewed mattress. To afford rent for a flat, by this neighborhood’s standards, was to be living high.

Beggs’s building had the look of other tenements I’d seen—built on the cheap at the end of the last century before the city had settled on any standards. The edifice was deceptively ornate, fashioned from brick and some kind of light stone that seemed to be as sturdy as chalk. Two cherubs above the arched doorway were chipped, and the whole building had an off-kilter look. The fire escape listed across the front like a zigzagging, rusting scaffold. Inside, the building was airless and dark, the staircase lit only by a weak bare bulb on each landing near a communal washroom. The air reeked of bad plumbing and poverty.

On the fourth floor, a more disturbing smell began to hit us. I took a breath and held my damp muffler over my mouth and nose. Death lay on the other side of the locked door we stopped at, of that I had no doubt. I braced myself. A year and a half ago, I’d seen my roommate’s cousin’s body after she’d been stabbed to death in our flat. It still gave me nightmares.

“You all right?” O’Mara asked me. He looked a little green himself.

I nodded. There was no sound but the dripping of the faucet at the washroom sink behind me. “I don’t hear a baby,” I said. Much less two.

The superintendent, who’d stopped at his apartment on the first floor, came up behind us. He handed O’Mara an iron crowbar.

O’Mara made an artless job of cracking the door open. I couldn’t blame him. The sooner we got in there, the sooner we could leave. Even the cold, wet air outside was better than this. After a few strong whacks and a swift kick, the door banged open in a spray of splintered wood. A cyclone of putrid air took my breath; my stomach began to heave. Behind my scarf, I tried not to breathe and at the same time swallowed repeatedly against the rising bile in my throat. Beggs fell to his knees. I stepped around him to enter the dark flat.

O’Mara felt along the wall until he found a switch that turned on the bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling. I almost wished he hadn’t. At the moment of illumination, my eyes fastened on the large metal tub in the corner, in which a woman slumped forward, her hair covering half her face like a limp, brown curtain. Blood had spilled on the floor, along with filthy water. The woman had drawn a deep bath, a real Saturday nighter. The source of the blood was the woman’s thin right arm, which was thrust over the edge of the tub. From wrist to elbow there were multiple slash marks.

Neither O’Mara nor I drew too close to the tub. The woman was obviously gone. Days gone. I sent up brief thanks that this was November. Bad as this was, if it had been July and the body had been sitting in the heat, I would have probably passed out by now.

“Is this her?” O’Mara asked Beggs. The man had pulled himself back to his feet and was leaning against the doorway.

He nodded. “Ruthie.”

“Ruthie what?”

“Jones. Anyhow, that’s the name she gave me.”

I scanned the small room, which was actually the first of two rooms that had been fashioned out of an attic space. Low ceilings slanted down toward the windows, requiring a person of any height to duck a little on that side of the flat. Next to the tub was a stove with a basin leaning against it—probably what had been used to carry water from the washroom tap. Apartments were supposed to have water, but inspectors looked the other way, especially in places like this. Ruthie’s wall had several shelves, mostly empty but for a few cans and a tin of crackers, which had been left open. A table and two cane-back chairs were the only furnishings, aside from a traffic-flattened braided rug on the floor. On the table was an unlabeled bottle of liquor, almost empty, and a single glass.

“Where are the babies?” I wondered aloud.

O’Mara and I continued into the even smaller back alcove room, no more than eight-foot square, which two people barely had room to move around in. A cot with a trunk at the foot of it took up one wall, and a dresser with a mirror was wedged in the corner. In one of its opened, disheveled drawers, a baby lay, wan and weak, its tiny limbs barely moving. The stench of soiled diaper added to the already wretched funk. O’Mara lurched to the window and yanked it open.

“Oh, you poor tiny thing.” I approached the baby, touching him gently. To my relief, the skin was warm. “He needs food.” I turned. “But didn’t Mr. Beggs say there were twins?”

Beggs’s face, sallow and drawn, peered in from the doorway. “That must be the dummy. Lord only knows what’s become of the other.”

“He can’t speak?” I asked.

“Born that way. They were two boys. Johnny and . . .” His face twisted in thought. “Eddie? Or Teddy. Something like that.”

“Who would this one be?”

“How should I know?”

“Eddie,” I tried, in a low voice. The baby opened his eyes, which were a startling blue. He sucked in a breath and worked his mouth tentatively, as if testing whether all this were real—whether I was real. Then his face contorted in a silent wail. “You can hear me,” I said. “Poor baby.”

O’Mara looked puzzled and mournful in equal measure. “I guess he’s been alone as long as his ma’s been dead. And that seems to be some time.”

Alone. Where was his brother? It didn’t make sense. I looked again around the room, but there was no place to conceal a baby. I hurried back to the other room, searching all around. But there was nothing to see. Not far from the tub along the wall I spotted a stray brass button that looked as if it belonged to a man’s coat, but that wasn’t a clue to where the second baby was. God help me, I even opened the oven door. Putting a baby in there would be the work of a madwoman; then again, so would cutting one’s wrists. But it was empty, thank heavens. I straightened, put my hands on my hips, and turned in a circle. How could a baby disappear?

“The other one’s normal,” Beggs said. “Cries louder than a steamship horn. Wakes up the whole blame building sometimes. If he was here, we’d know it.”

Could one of the twins have died without anyone knowing? That might account for his mother being distraught enough to kill herself. But in doing so she would have abandoned her other child.

“Maybe the baby was kidnapped,” I said, thinking aloud.

O’Mara laughed. “Last thing anyone around here wants or needs is another brat.”

“What should we do?” I asked him.

“I’ll telephone in.” He frowned, itemizing all the things he would have to tell Donnelly. “We’ll need the patrol wagon for the baby, and the coroner, and I guess detectives to look at the scene. Though there’s not much question what happened.”

Suicide. There was even a razor, a barber’s straight edge, on the ground with bloody streaks across it. The dull glint of that steel in the bare bulb’s glare made my skin twitch.

“I’ll run down the street to the call box,” O’Mara said. “You see to that baby.”

It was hard to know where to begin. Obviously he needed nourishment. But first I had to get him out of his soiled clothes. “I’ll need some water.” I nodded at the chipped, blue-white basin leaning against the stove. “I suppose it’ll be all right if I use that?”

“Don’t see what difference it would make.” O’Mara reached down and picked it up.

When he handed it to me, my nose wrinkled. “What is that?”

“What?”

“That smell.” I sniffed the chipped metal surface.

“Probably perfume. I saw a lot of little bottles on the table in the bedroom.”

I nodded. Technically we shouldn’t be taking items from the room before the coroner and the detectives got here, but that baby needed tending desperately. First, though, I took a moment to look for milk, on the off-chance that there was any that hadn’t gone bad. There was no icebox, but my roommate, Callie, and I kept our milk on the fire escape in winter and Ruthie probably did the same. I poked my head out the front window, sucking in a lungful of air. A milk bottle was on the fire escape, all right, but it was empty. Upright, but empty.

The sound of O’Mara’s footsteps receded. Ducking back in, I crossed to the stove, picked up the basin, then checked the shelves to see if Ruthie had left any powdered or canned milk. I tried to avoid looking at the tub, but out of the corner of my eye I noticed something sticking up out of the reddish-brown bath water. It resembled a tiny fist.

I dropped the tin basin, creating a metallic clatter that made both Beggs and me jump. Dear God, no. With a shaking hand, I pressed the dead woman’s doughy shoulder until she slumped against the back of the tub. My legs turned to jelly and I fell back. It wasn’t just the horror of the woman’s frozen green stare that transformed me into a quivering mass. It was the infant that bobbed to the surface of the water.

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 eye. . .