directed to a holding cell at the far end of the hallway from the main office. I expected the officers on duty had wanted to distance themselves as much as possible from Schmidt, for his clothes reeked of alcohol and vomit.
He was a wiry, thin man with a gray stubble beard. He sat in a plain metal chair in the far corner, gripping a thin, threadbare gray blanket tightly around his chest. His wild-eyed intense stare immediately bored into me as I entered the room.
“Get away,” he called out. “Now, I said. Get out!”
He fidgeted violently, as though trying to disappear into the chair. After a particularly strenuous twist, he appeared to hurt his right arm, and began to writhe in pain.
“Otto Schmidt?” I asked as a courtesy, though there was no real indication the man was paying attention.
After grunting once more in pain, he closed his eyes tightly, now refusing to look at me. “I said go away. I will not talk with you. I promised to leave and talk with no one. I swore to it.” Then he opened his eyes again and looked forward, wild-eyed and crazed.
While he had earlier been drunk, his behavior now smacked of something different. It wasn’t the alcohol that made him belligerent. It was fear.
Speaking more loudly, I addressed him again. “Mr. Schmidt, are you aware of why you are here?”
He shook his head. “I swear I was about to leave, just like I promised. But the pain was so bad. I just needed a little something to kill the pain. I intended to go after that, but they came and took me. That’s why I didn’t keep to my promise. Because they came and took me.”
“Who came?” I asked. “The police?”
“Yes,” he said, and nodded vigorously. “That’s why I couldn’t leave. I can’t talk with you. You need to go.”
“Mr. Schmidt, where were you going, before the police picked you up?” I asked.
He stared at me blankly. “I hadn’t decided yet. Maybe Baltimore. I had friends there once. He didn’t care, so long as I left New York.”
“Who didn’t care, Mr. Schmidt?” I asked. “Who made you promise to leave?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he replied weakly. “I’d never seen the man before. But he hurt me”—he pulled the blanket tighter around him—“and made me promise to leave and talk with no one.”
“Mr. Schmidt,” I said, trying to keep my tone calm and my words simple, as though I were talking with a child, “I can help you leave. I can help protect you from the man who hurt you. But first, you need to tell me what happened.”
“No, no,” he repeated, in a frenzy of panic. “He said you’d say that, and I’m not to talk. Just leave.” His eyes darted around the room.
I sighed in frustration, for this conversation was spinning in circles, leading nowhere.
“You have been arrested at my request,” I said, “and I have the ability to release you. I will give you train fare to Baltimore. But I can do that only if you cooperate with me.”
Otto Schmidt looked at me for the first time, still fidgeting. “You promise you’ll help me leave? And you won’t let that man know I talked?”
“I promise.”
And in that fashion a loose agreement was reached, and I procured the details we needed. As I more or less already knew, Otto Schmidt was not the man responsible for Sarah Wingate’s murder. He had no recollection of her—only the items he had stolen from her, which had landed him in jail the first time. It had been a crime of opportunity; Sarah’s room had been the first unlocked door he had found after entering Mrs. Gardner’s roominghouse. Since his escape from jail, he had spent most of his time in Boston, returning to New York only within the last six months, where he found work he liked well enough in the kitchen of a German restaurant in the Bowery.
To hear him tell it, all was well until early this morning, when a man had accosted him and ordered him to leave town. He had been thoroughly scared by the brutal encounter, but could share few details about the man: only that he was heavyset with brown hair, wore an odd hat, and had beaten Otto Schmidt with a metal pipe. Otto had no idea why the man wanted him to leave; the man had threatened him if he talked to the police or anyone else. I had little doubt but that