Hush Now, Don't You Cry(97)

“I just told you, I don’t recall a mention of any of these names.”

“When did you say you last changed the blotter?”

He frowned. “Let me see. It would have been about a week before he left to go to Newport. He had a whole slew of dictation for me the day before he went, but just ordinary business letters, nothing of note.”

“So those words were important enough to jot down within the last week that he was here.”

“I suppose so,” he agreed grudgingly.

“I’ll ask the family about them when I return to Newport,” I said. “But in the meantime, I should be getting along. I’ve a lot to accomplish in one day before I return to Newport.”

He opened the door for me then followed me to the outer office. “You will let us know as soon as you have any news, won’t you?” he said. “And please tell Mr. Joseph Hannan that we are awaiting instructions on several matters to do with the business.”

“I will tell him,” I said. “I presume he’ll be running the business now, unless the alderman left everything to another family member in his will.”

“Even if he did, they were partners,” Brady pointed out. “To be sure Mr. Joseph was the junior but he’d still be involved in the running of the company.”

I held out my hand to Brady. “Thank you for your help,” I said.

“I wish we could have come up with more,” he replied. “But he was all efficiency at the office. If anything was happening in his life outside of his work, we’d never have heard about it.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, and went down the stairs, wondering where on earth to go next.





Thirty-three

I spent a frustrating hour visiting first Alderman Hannan’s accountant and then his attorney. The former told me in a cold and patronizing voice that he did not intend to discuss Hannan company business with anyone, least of all an unknown woman. For all he knew, I could be yet another member of the press, digging for scandal.

I assured him I was not only staying at the estate at the invitation of Alderman Hannan, but that my husband was a New York policeman. Didn’t he want to help solve Mr. Hannan’s murder, I inquired? If the police came to him, naturally he would answer their questions, he replied impassively. Until then … and he personally escorted me to the door.

The attorney was even more frustrating. His clerk informed me that he was not in the office, in fact he had gone out of town, and he couldn’t say when he would return. I came out onto Pearl Street and stood, letting the commerce of the city flow around me, wondering what else I could do. So far I had come all this way and accomplished very little. Dr. Birnbaum would not visit Kathleen. If Donald Brady knew anything, he had not divulged it to me. The accountant wouldn’t even speak to me. I was tempted to go to police headquarters and find out which officers had been working with Daniel on the investigation into the tunnel collapse and whether negligence had been found, but Daniel would not be happy that I was investigating without authority, and had kept salient facts from him. Besides, I couldn’t expose him to ridicule by his peers, that he now had his wife do his work for him.

So reluctantly I turned in the other direction, toward Hester Street and the address of the former Mr. Frederick Hermann who had died in the tunnel collapse. Hester Street was all bustle and noise as usual, a jumble of pushcarts, crying babies, grubby children dodging in and out, laundry flapping. I steered my way through the crowds and entered the stairwell of a tall, grim tenement building. The smell was the same as in all those buildings—lack of good plumbing mingled with the lingering odor of various ethnic foods—garlic, cabbage, boiled fish, fried chick peas. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say to his widow when I knocked on the door of the third floor apartment, and all thoughts went from my head when the door was opened by none other than the young man I had seen at the gate in Newport.

“Yes?” he demanded. Then he squinted, frowning at me. “I know you, don’t I?” he said. “Weren’t you the woman I spoke to at the gate? Did they send you down with more bribes to keep me quiet?”

For once words failed me. I was suddenly all too aware that I might be facing Alderman Hannan’s killer and I was alone with him on a dark third floor landing that smelled of boiled cabbage and bad drains.

“I came because you might be the one who can help us,” I said. “You must have heard that Alderman Hannan was killed.”

“I did hear something about it,” he said. “Fell off a cliff, didn’t he? Good riddance to bad rubbish.”