Fallen Women Page 5

  “I’ll see if they’re still around,” Beret told her.

  “That’d be swell.” Elsie straightened her hat, looked around the restaurant, and smiled at a man, who reddened and looked away. She shrugged and went out.

  The two waited until the door closed, then Beret asked, “What do you think of her information?”

  Mick leaned back in his chair and shoved aside the pie, which appeared too tasteless even for a policeman. “They lie, of course, all the girls. But I don’t think she made it up about the man in front of the parlor house. Why would she? It doesn’t mean the man was her mac, of course. Maybe he was just looking for a good time. Miss Hettie said Lillie didn’t have a pimp.”

  “Do you believe Miss Hettie?”

  Mick thought about that. “Sometimes.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “We?”

  “I told you I intend to be involved in finding my sister’s killer.”

  Mick put his arms on the table and looked directly at Beret. “I guess I have something to say about that.”

  “No, Detective, you do not. As you know, my uncle is a member of the police board, and he has told me he wants this murder solved. He approves of my working with you, and if you object, then my uncle—the judge,” she added for emphasis, “will speak with the chief of police. I don’t suppose you want that, do you?”

  When Mick didn’t reply, Beret added, “No, I thought not. I am obligated to spend time with my aunt on the weekend, but I shall be at your desk on Monday morning. Shall we say at ten?” She put on her hat, then left a dollar coin on the table and stood. As she walked to the door, she wondered what her uncle would say when she told him she’d involved herself in the investigation. He’d object, of course, might even order her to stay away from Mick McCauley. But fortunately for Beret, Mick bought her story. By the time he found out any different, it would be too late.

  Outside, Beret turned to face Mick. “Thank you, Detective Sergeant,” she said, drawing on her gloves. She turned away, because she was going in the opposite direction from City Hall.

  “Just a minute, Miss Osmundsen,” Mick said, waiting for Beret to turn back to him. She looked at the officer, but Mick only stared at her.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “There’s something you ought to know.” Mick took a deep breath. He raised his chin, running his finger around the collar of his shirt, then looked out into the street at a hack driver who was whipping a nag. “Lillie, that is, Miss Osmundsen … well … you see … Dr. Death, that is, the coroner…” Mick turned back to Beret and looked her in the eye. “He said she was pregnant, your sister. She was going to have a baby.”

  Chapter 4

  Stunned, Beret left Mick and stumbled down the street in a daze, no longer able to hold in her emotions. Tears streamed down her face, and she twisted her hands together, leaving scratches on their backs. She was as shocked by the detective’s parting information as she was about her sister’s murder, and wiped her eyes with her gloved hand. Prostitutes knew how to keep from getting pregnant, and they were careful, although no preventive method was perfect. That was why so many desperate women came to the clinic begging for black pills, the reason there were so many doctors specializing in conditions “peculiar to woman,” as they put it—abortionists, they were. Beret had buried more than one woman who had tried to rid herself of an unwanted baby by stabbing herself with a knitting needle or eating rhubarb leaves.

  The chances were that Lillie’s condition was an accident, of course, but Beret couldn’t help wondering if it weren’t. The pregnancy, the dark-complexioned man. How could she not connect them? Had Lillie gotten pregnant on purpose, one more way to spite Beret? Or maybe there was indeed some gentleman who’d hoped to set her up, as Elsie had said, because he was the baby’s father. But how could anyone tell the real identity of a baby’s father? Would Lillie try to blackmail a wealthy man into thinking the child was his? A year before, Beret wouldn’t have thought it possible, but that was before she’d known about her sister’s betrayal. Nothing would have surprised her after that. But still, she thought, a baby! She wiped her damp cheeks again.

  Jonas had driven her to the police station, but Beret had dismissed him. She had not known how long she would be there and thought her aunt might have need of the carriage. Now, she hurried up Larimer Street in the twilight, past streetlamps that sent the long shadows of passersby across the sidewalk—businessmen in top hats, sleek women in sealskin cloaks, tramps shivering in their wretched clothes, their hands out. She passed restaurants with smells of rancid grease and fried meat emanating from some, fresh-baked bread and capon simmering in wine from others. The smells mixed with the odor of manure that came from the streets. Office clerks and shopgirls dressed in cheap coats and hats with tawdry bits of feathers and artificial flowers clinging to them scurried out of buildings that were tall for Denver but not so impressive when compared to the skyscrapers in New York. A man jostled her and apologized, but Beret ignored him, not caring whether his touch had been an accident or he was approaching her. Behind her, she heard “What’s your hurry, hon,” a prostitute’s come-on to a john, maybe the very man who had bumped against her. All of that washed over her in a kind of daze.

  Beret drew her coat around her. She had planned to walk to her aunt’s house, a distance of a little over a mile. But the air was chill, and she was distraught, anxious to return to the comfort of the Stanton house. Sorry that she had let Jonas go, she hurried on down Larimer to the streetcar stop and boarded a car crammed with people, leaving behind a man who had been following in her wake. She hadn’t noticed him. He paused a moment, as if to board the car himself, but changed his mind and jogged off.

  A gentleman offered Beret his seat, but before she could take it, a large woman with an umbrella and a basket containing potatoes and cabbages plopped herself down and gave Beret a smug smile as she set the basket on her lap and wrapped her arms around it. Beret wanted to protest but saw the woman was dressed in black and white, her ankles swollen, and knew she was a domestic who needed the seat more than Beret did. She rode for a few blocks, but the swaying of the car, the crowd pushing against her, the smells of wet wool combined with sweat and tobacco smoke, nauseated her, and as soon as the car reached Broadway, she got off to walk the remaining half-dozen blocks to her uncle’s house.

  The cold hit her then. It had been almost spring in New York when she’d left, and she did not consider that Denver was in sight of the mountains, that the cold from the high peaks swept down into the city. So she had not brought a winter coat. But she spent her days among the dregs of humanity at the mission and was used to discomfort. It would not have occurred to Beret to wear furs or even a fashionable warm cloak to the mission. She was used to the drafty building, the floors that were black from the slush and dirt and coal dust that the women tracked in. So she folded her arms around herself to keep out the cold and walked on, grateful for something to distract her from her grief, if only for a moment or two.

  As she grew used to the wind, Beret found herself hating Lillie and thinking her sister deserved what she’d gotten, then loving the golden child who had once looked at her with awe and trust. Beret had loved Lillie more than anyone else in the world, more than herself even. But she had hated her sister, too, although even in her despair, she would not have hurt the girl, not physically.

  Who could have hated her more than Beret? She shuddered as she thought of the scissors cutting into Lillie’s flesh, six, seven, eight thrusts, of the blood spurting out onto Lillie’s white breasts, splattering her hands as she tried to protect herself. Lillie’s skin was as white as a lily. That was where she had gotten her name. Her parents had wanted to call her Martha Brown Osmundsen, after a friend, but Beret had insisted on another name, had said that with her pale skin and white-blond hair, the infant looked like a lily, and so she had become Lillie Osmundsen, no middle name because Beret said that “Brown” was too ugly to follow “Lillie.” But Lillie
must not have thought so, because when she’d turned out, she had taken the name Lillie Brown.

  Beret walked east to Grant Avenue, then turned south. Night had come on, and the street was dark, lit only by the gaslights whose crystal shades glittered with fire through the leaded-glass windows of the mansions of Millionaires’ Row. The street was lined with brick-and-stone castles, their spires and crenellated towers, porches and balconies and cast-iron fences, evidence that their occupants were the newly wealthy of a new city. The houses were not as overblown as those along New York’s Fifth Avenue. Nonetheless, they were designed to impress, which they did with their paneling of rare woods, their gilt, their profusion of stained-glass and crystal windows peeking out from behind velvet curtains held stiffly in place by golden cord tiebacks. Beret knew, because on previous trips to visit her relatives, she had been entertained in those houses.

  Judge John Stanton’s house was less ponderous, less extravagant, more graceful than its neighbors on Grant Avenue, thanks to his wife’s good taste, but it was impressive and every bit as expensive—a Palladian-style brick mansion of three stories, fronted by a porch and tall white columns. The house seemed a little at odds with its neighbors, more Southern in style than nouveau riche Denver, more classical. A two-story stable stood beside and a little to the rear of the house, for her uncle was a man who appreciated horseflesh and employed two men to care for his animals—the rodentlike Jonas and an assistant. She looked up, expecting to see the house, and was confused. Deep in thought, she had turned down the wrong street, and it was unfamiliar. So were the houses. Perhaps they had been built since her last trip to Denver. Lost and feeling wretched for causing her aunt to worry, she looked up and down the street, until she spotted a man coming toward her and asked for directions. He explained she had gone blocks out of her way, and now she retraced her steps until, at last, she recognized the Stanton mansion.

  Beret stood just a moment to admire it. The house was as fine as the home in which she and her sister had once lived with their parents and in which Beret lived now, alone except for servants, for the judge was as rich as Beret’s father, perhaps richer since much of the Osmundsen money had gone to good works.

  The two men, who had been as close as their wives, had had much in common. John Stanton was a fatherless boy from Fort Madison, Iowa, who quit school to work as a stableboy. A local banker had taken a liking to the lad and offered him a menial job. The boy worked hard and had been promoted—and promoted again, until not yet in his twenties, he was made assistant cashier at the bank. Too ambitious to stay in the Mississippi River town, John had migrated to Chicago, where he found further financial success. But his sights had been set higher than even Chicago, and so he had joined the Colorado gold rush in 1859, not to prospect for precious metals but to set up a bank on Larimer Street, the most important financial avenue between St. Louis and the West Coast. Using it as a base, he had financed the town’s growth, speculating in city blocks and ranchland. It wasn’t long before he was one of Denver’s first millionaires.

  After a time, he tired of the financial world, for he had made as much money as he would ever need. So he turned to politics. He’d had himself appointed judge, and there was talk that he would be named a senator. Beret’s aunt had written that it was all but certain that they would be going to Washington soon. Beret was sure that the meetings her aunt had mentioned were toward that end.

  Varina had met John, then living in Chicago, when he was on a trip to New York and Henry Osmundsen, a business associate, had invited him home for dinner. Varina Eliason, who was Marta Osmundsen’s younger sister, was not so much to look at, but she matched John in both ambition and hard work. John delayed his trip, and the two were married before he left New York. Beret remembered the wedding—Varina’s satin dress and a veil that fell from a crown of white roses, the tiny white slippers, because Varina was vain about her small feet, the ring, an elegant circle of yellow diamonds that Varina herself had picked out.

  In New York and then in Chicago, Varina had studied the houses and the hostesses, noting what was elegant and tasteful and discarding the ostentatious and the garish, and when the Stantons moved to Denver, she set herself up as one of the city’s society leaders. While John built his financial empire, Varina established a fashionable domestic world. And although she had no intention of setting up a mission as her sister, Marta, had done in New York, Varina nonetheless lent her support to the city’s fledgling charities. The Stantons had no children of their own, and they adored Beret and Lillie. So it was only natural that when Lillie left New York, she went to Denver to live with her aunt and uncle.

  As she climbed the wide steps to the front door of the house, Beret wondered what Lillie had told them about the sisters’ estrangement. Surely she would not have told them the truth.

  The door opened just as Beret reached it, and the judge himself welcomed his niece, grasping her hands so tightly that he all but squeezed the blood out of them. “Beret. Our dear Beret,” he said, then choked and could not speak for a moment. He took a breath and let go of Beret’s hands and, affecting a lighter tone, said, “I’ve arrived only a moment ahead of you. What a worthless old man I am not to have greeted you earlier. Your aunt, I assume, told you it couldn’t be helped. This Senate appointment is damn complicated business. Everyone involved must be satisfied.” He shook his head, then his face fell. “I can’t say as I mind it so much. It must be done, and we tell ourselves we have to go on. Dear Lillie…” His voice trailed off, and Beret took his arm and let him escort her into the house.

  * * *

  They did not talk about the murder of Lillie Osmundsen at dinner. “The servants,” Varina Stanton muttered when her husband broached the subject. She gave Beret a knowing look. Beret thought the warning unnecessary, because little escaped servants. Still, the three waited until they had retired to the library, which served as the judge’s study, before discussing the tragedy.

  “Will you join your aunt in a sherry?” the judge asked, taking a crystal decanter from a cabinet built into the wall.

  “No, but I will join you in a brandy,” Beret said.

  Her uncle smiled. “I had forgot you like the stronger stuff.”

  “I like sherry well enough, but I remember that you have very good brandy.”

  The judge nodded his approval, and Beret observed that he looked much older than the last time she had seen him, two years before. She wondered if the changes were recent and had been caused by Lillie’s death. After all, the Stantons had been responsible in a way for Lillie, just as Beret had been. Her uncle’s hair had turned gray, almost silver. There was a sadness about his mouth, and he stooped a little, although he was still an imposing man, a man who looked like a senator. He would be a good one, Beret thought, with affection.

  She rose to accept the glass from her uncle, but instead of sitting down again, she went to the fireplace and stared into the fire, at the logs that had burned down, for the fire had been lit in the early evening. Lillie would have stared at the library fire, Beret thought. Lillie had always lit up a room like a bright flame, attracting moths, and now one of them had killed her, extinguishing that light. How could anyone have hated—or loved—her enough to do that?

  The wood would have to be replenished if the fire was to continue much longer. Beret was looking at the ashes, as dirty gray as the snow on a New York street, when her uncle said, “I understand you have taken it upon yourself to join the investigation of the murder of your sister.”

  Beret turned and glanced at her aunt, who shrugged. “I’ve told him nothing, Beret.”

  “No, it was Detective Sergeant McCauley. He visited me in my chambers early this evening, saying he had left you only moments before. That explains why I was so late in arriving home. Detective McCauley said you were intruding and asked me to call you off. It seems he believed you had my support.” John chuckled.

  Beret turned to face her uncle. “And what did you tell him?”

  “What d
id you tell him?”

  Beret sipped the brandy, which was indeed very good. “I told him that you approved of my joining the investigation, were much in favor of it, in fact. I led him to believe my involvement might even have been your idea.”

  Varina set down her sherry glass. “Beret, how could you? Your sister’s murder is a horrid, ugly thing. Your uncle and I don’t want you mixed up in it. That’s why we advised you to stay in New York, so you wouldn’t have to know about the last months of her life. Dear Lillie’s death is a tragedy, but it’s best if the whole tawdry business is put behind us. You can’t bring her back.”

  “I want to know why Lillie left here to become … a prostitute.” Beret could not bring herself to look at her aunt.

  “I can’t talk about it, Beret.” Varina paused a moment. “Think of your uncle’s future.”

  John shook his head as if to wave away the objection. “That’s of no consequence here.”

  “You have worked so hard for it,” his wife said.

  Beret was appalled that her aunt was more concerned about the judge’s ambition than Lillie’s murder and that she would not discuss what had caused Lillie to turn out, as the papers put it. She watched Varina wring her hands and thought that Lillie’s death had been hard on her aunt. Not only had she lost a beloved niece, but the killing had upset the world she had made for herself and her husband. She didn’t deserve the sorrow, nor the notoriety. Perhaps that was why she put social concerns ahead of finding her niece’s killer. But that didn’t make it right. Beret knew that she herself would sacrifice anything to find out who had murdered Lillie. But perhaps that was to assuage her guilt. Should she honor her relatives’ wishes and return to New York, letting the Denver police find Lillie’s killer? No. She would not do such a thing. She wanted to chide her aunt, but before she could find the right words, her uncle interrupted her thoughts.

  “Our duty is to Lillie, Varina, and if Beret can help find justice for the poor child, I have no objection to it.” He drank his brandy in a single swallow and poured more into the glass. “I admit I was surprised and not in the least pleased when Detective Sergeant McCauley told me you had interfered”—he turned to Beret—“and, my dear, I very nearly decided to forbid you to continue. But I know how like a mother you were to Lillie. You knew her better than anyone. And I was sure my opposition would have no effect on you. Besides, I believe you might actually help find your sister’s killer.”