“He liked to enjoy life, that’s for sure. That’s why it was such bad luck that he croaked like that. And you say it was deliberate? Or did he take his own life?”
“If he enjoyed life, why would he want to take it?” I asked.
They looked at each other before one of them said, “Well, one did hear,” the chubbier one began, glancing around to see who might have been in earshot, “that Simon had run up gambling debts. He didn’t want to tell his old man, naturally. His father thought the sun shone out of Simon’s head, you know. Anyway, Simon tried to cadge money from a couple of our friends, but they were broke themselves.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think someone who loves life would kill himself over debts. And certainly not with cyanide. It’s a beastly painful death.”
“Cyanide, was it?” The two boys exchanged a horrified glance.
“So I understand,” I said.
One of them was looking at me cautiously now.
“That’s right, it was utterly beastly,” the other boy said. “We were sitting at our usual table in the corner here and there was suddenly this tremendous fuss—table knocked over, broken crockery, coffee everywhere, and someone thrashing around on the floor.”
“Someone said, ‘He’s having a fit,’ and then someone else said ‘He’s dead. My God, he’s dead.’”
“Tell me,” I said, “was the café really full at that time? Did you notice anyone who wasn’t usually here, anyone hanging around the tables, or anyone who left as soon as all the commotion started?”
“Why this morbid curiosity?” the one who had been eyeing me curiously now asked. “Are you a newspaper reporter? Because it’s old news now, isn’t it?”
“No, I’m a friend of Simon’s family,” I said, “and they are still angry that his killer hasn’t been apprehended.”
“I presume they’ve checked with the Italians?” the chubby one said. “The ones who run the tavern with the gambling parlor in the back, down on Bleecker Street? They’re a wild lot, and if Simon owed them money…”
“I don’t think cyanide is their chosen method,” I said. “A knife in the back, perhaps?”
The two young men were now looking at me with horror, and I realized that respectable women don’t usually go in for this type of conversation.
“So you didn’t notice anyone behaving suspiciously, or anyone leaving in a hurry? You didn’t see someone who might have been a member of the Italian underworld?”
One of them shrugged. “To tell you the truth, we were chatting with some other fellows and only turned around when we heard the crash. And it was pretty crowded at the time—fellows coming and going and waiting for tables.”
“But in answer to your question,” the other said, “I didn’t see anyone who stood out, I’m sure. Everyone looked like a regular student. I think we’d have noticed, just the way we noticed you come in, if there had been someone unusual.”
The chubby one nudged his friend. “We have to go or we’ll be late for class again.”
“Excuse us.” They nodded to me. “I hope they find the guy who did this. Everyone seemed to like Simon Grossman, even if he did enjoy his vices. Who’d do a foul thing like that?”
I wished I knew. I tried to chat with Fritz after that, but he hadn’t seen any suspicious strangers, and he told me he had been so busy pouring coffee that he too had only looked up when the table crashed over. I did take from him the names of the students who were sitting with Simon, but was told they were his regular group of pals, with whom he met at the café every morning. I suspected that Daniel would already have grilled them and discovered nothing, and I didn’t think that they’d reveal to a strange woman any incriminating facts about Simon Grossman. As I paid my bill and walked out, squeezing between tables, I saw how incredibly easy it would be to drop poison into a coffee cup while the occupants of the table were engrossed in conversation. But I had also learned that an outsider, an Italian gang member, for example, would have been noticed in the café. So whoever did this was likely one of them.
And it was only when I was crossing the street on my way home that I realized I might have been reckless to go out like this. Not because of my delicate health, but because the killer might have been watching my house and caught sight of me.
Daniel would not be pleased, and I decided to say nothing of my visit to the café, at least for now.
Twelve
There was no sign of Daniel all day. The delivery boy brought the food, and I had just finished stacking it in the pantry when a hansom cab turned into Patchin Place. It stopped only a few yards into our little backwater. Drivers didn’t like to come any farther, as it was hard to turn and even harder to back up the horse. I had been watching from the parlor window—a real lace-curtain twitching Irishwoman for once—and saw the cabby helping down my mother-in-law from the seat. Then my heart gave a leap of joy, because I saw the cabby swinging down young Bridie. She was the child I had brought from Ireland when I came to New York, and she had been abandoned by her father and brother when they went to work on the building of the canal across the Isthmus of Panama. No news had come from them in quite a while, making me wonder whether they were still alive. One heard awful things about the conditions and the diseases down in that hellhole.