have the power to bring you in for official questioning.”
Nothing but silence.
“If I take you in for questions, you may end up in the Tombs. And in the Tombs, one never knows what may happen. It’s very unpleasant, I hear—especially if one stays for an extended period of time.”
She was unmoved. “Do what you will. I have no more to say to you.”
She raised her dark green eyes to mine, and there was no mistaking their determined look. And then she was gone, leaving us to see ourselves out.
Outside, I seethed with frustration, pacing angrily back and forth. “She knows something—something substantive that she refuses to tell us,” I said. I had threatened her with everything I could, and she still defied me. The reasonable explanation—the only possible explanation—was that she feared Fromley more than me. And I resolved to find out why.
Isabella tried to be optimistic. “Perhaps it was just the shock of it,” she said. “She may come around. She will know how to contact you.”
But Mamie Durant would not contact me. Of that I was certain, from the way her face had hardened with some bitter, private resolve upon seeing Michael Fromley’s picture. I could punish her by bringing her to the local police station for questioning. But to do so would accomplish just that and no more; it would not yield me the information I sorely needed.
Suddenly the door to Mamie’s home opened and a skittish girl hurried outside. “Mamie said to give you this, sir”—she pressed a piece of paper in my hand—“but not to bother her no more. She don’t want your questions.”
As I glanced back at Mamie’s town house, I thought I saw a curtain move behind the third-floor window. I looked down at the paper. Scrawled in blue ink was an address on West Forty-first Street near Eighth Avenue and a number for a landlady named Mrs. Addison. Fromley’s address.
It was the address I had wanted, had been searching for so diligently the past two days. But I felt a surge of anger that I was expected to take this scrap of information and be thankful, when she obviously knew so much more.
That was apparent from the fact that she was in possession of Michael Fromley’s current address—when even Alistair and his aunt Lizzie were not.
It would be several days before we finally learned the reason Mamie refused to talk about Fromley.
And the truth, when we learned it, would be even worse than I imagined.
Friday, November 10, 1905
CHAPTER 13
It was difficult to shake the frustration Isabella and I both felt as we left Mamie Durant’s home; we judged indefensible the fact that Mamie obviously had information that she refused to tell us. I was grateful for Fromley’s address, assuming she had given me his most recent one. With luck, it would lead us to the man himself. But her reasons for not sharing all she knew mattered little to me; Whatever they were, they paled in comparison to the importance of solving Sarah Wingate’s murder.
The landlady, Mrs. Addison, was at home when we arrived at Michael Fromley’s rented rooms on West Forty-first Street. She confirmed the identity of her boarder when we showed her his picture, but she was adamant that he had not been around since mid-October. Her description of his habits was sketchy, but at least she willingly granted us access to his room. Her young housemaid escorted us up to the third floor.
“This is as far as I go,” she announced when we approached the top landing. “He gives me the shivers, that one does,” was her brief explanation—and when we pressed her for details, she merely retorted she had brains enough “to stay far away from the likes of him.” She was gone before we could ask anything more.
Isabella reached for the brass doorknob of Fromley’s room, but I placed my hand over hers before she opened the door. “What if he’s inside?” I whispered.
“Oh,” she said and backed up, her eyes suddenly large as she noticed my left hand clenched around a Colt revolver.
Isabella retreated several feet down the hall, and I proceeded to turn the doorknob. The door swung open with a loud creak. I gingerly stepped into the room and ascertained the space was empty. That much was a relief, so I poked my head back into the hallway and indicated Isabella could enter.
“What a horrid place,” she said, recoiling from the room’s musty smell as much as its dingy appearance. Orange floral wallpaper was