Look out for yourself above all others. It was rule number one for a reason, and even if it meant Deidre ended up on Blackwell’s Island serving a life sentence for murder, Una was ready to use it. Never mind that her mouth was suddenly parched and her stomach roiling as if she’d swallowed a bucket of ash. She paced as she waited for the detective to return with pen and paper to take down her statement.
Marm Blei could get Deidre out of this. She had half the city’s prosecutors and judges in her pocket. Not to mention the police. It was just a matter of throwing enough brass the right way. Una plunged her hands into her pockets to keep from worrying her skin off. If need be, they could stage a prison break. Marm Blei knew all the right people for that too. Not even the Tombs was impenetrable. She fingered her matchbook and Barney’s pin and the cool brass knuckles. They hadn’t bothered to frisk her again before throwing her in the cell. She had a quick jab and mean uppercut, but this didn’t seem like the kind of situation she could fight her way out of. No, she’d tell the detective whatever he wanted to hear, then go straight to Marm Blei.
When the detective returned, he wore a strange smile. As he reached into his pocket for something, Una realized he hadn’t brought a pen or paper.
“Do you want my statement or not?” she said, trying for more confidence than she felt.
Again that strange smile. He withdrew his hand from his pocket and held out something shiny for her to see. The ruby cuff links. “Tell me about these.”
“I’ve never seen those before in my life.”
“No? Officer Simms said he found them in your pocket when he frisked you in the alley.”
It was all Una could do not to snicker. How convenient that the cuff links suddenly reappeared in Officer Simms’s pocket now that a murder investigation was afoot. Clearly he found a lousy commendation more
enticing than the cash he could have gotten by selling them. Stupid lug didn’t know how much rubies were worth.
The detective continued, still holding out the cuff links. “The same alley, may I remind you, where Mr. Sheeny, a known fence, was murdered only moments before you were apprehended.”
The clink of keys and whine of metal sounded outside her cell. The detective stepped aside so she could see out through the bars of her door. Deidre’s cell was open, and she was being released.
“But I . . . you haven’t heard . . .”
“We won’t be needing a statement from you, Miss Davidson. Your friend already told us everything we need to know. Unless, of course, you’d like to corroborate her accounting of the murder.”
Una brushed past him and clutched the bars of her cell door. Her heart seemed to have taken wings and was beating frantically at the back of her throat. “Deidre!”
Her friend winced and gave an apologetic shrug as she passed. “It ain’t personal, Una. You’d’ve done the same thing.”
“I most certainly would not have!” Una called after her. Deidre mounted the cellar steps and didn’t turn around.
When the door to the main hall slammed shut, Una turned back to the detective. “Whatever she told you was a lie.”
“And the yarn you were gonna spin is the truth?” He laughed. “You crooks are all the same. You’d stab a knife into your own mother if it meant saving your skin.”
His sour breath reached clear across the cell. Give her a knife, and she’d show him what she could do. Rearranging that smug smile into a permanent frown would be just the start. Men like him believed themselves above their animal instincts. Men who’d never been cold or hungry or left to scramble out of the gutter on their own. Give him a few nights alone in the Tenderloin or Hell’s Kitchen or Mulberry Bend without his warm wool coat and shiny pistol, and he’d meet another side of himself. The side who’d steal another man’s boots right off his feet. Who’d snatch a crust of bread from a child. Who’d rat out his own friend.
Besides, he’d gotten it wrong. It was Una’s mother who’d betrayed her.
He tucked the cuff links back in his pocket. “Here’s what I think happened . . .”
Thanks to Deidre’s loose tongue, the version of events he’d concocted had snatches of the truth. But when it came to Traveling Mike’s murder, it was as outlandish as snow in July. Una countered with her version of events. Yes, she’d sought out Mr. Sheeny in the hopes of selling him the cuff links—cuff links she’d found, mind you, not stolen. No, she hadn’t bullied Deidre into coming along. In fact, it was Deidre who’d suggested the fence in the first place. No, the bargaining hadn’t ended in an argument. And no, she most certainly had not killed Mr. Sheeny over it. Here, Una told the truth. She described the darkness of the yard. The flare of light from the match. The shadowy figure she’d seen crouching beside Traveling Mike’s body.
“What did he look like, this shadowy figure?” the detective asked in a sniggering tone.
“I don’t know. It was too dark to see. That’s the whole point.” She closed her eyes and thought back to the moment Deidre’s match had flared. “He wore a suit and cap. Black, maybe navy blue . . . and buttons. I remember the light glinting off them.”
“Was he a Negro? An Oriental? A white man?” “A white man . . . I think.”
“Tall, short, fat, thin?”
Una opened her eyes. “I don’t remember.”
“I see. So we should be on the lookout for a white man of nondescript build wearing a dark-colored suit and cap. Do I have that right?”
“Yes.”
“So approximately half the men of this city.” He snorted. He’d seated himself on the bench in her cell, legs outstretched as if he were lounging before a fire, as if she’d been sharing banal pleasantries and not the description of a killer.
Una continued to pace. She reached inside her pocket again and slipped her fingers through the holes of her brass knuckles. She’d ruled out fighting as a way free of this mess, but it was nice to imagine, just for a moment, clocking the detective upside the head.
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“Forgive me, Miss Davidson—or whatever your real name is—if I’m a bit skeptical of your version of the truth.”
“You think it’s more likely that I—a mere woman—killed Mr. Sheeny all on my own?” Una hated being thought of as weak and helpless on account
of her sex. If she had a mind to do it, killing a man—even one as tall and able as Traveling Mike—was not outside her means. But she also wasn’t above playing into the detective’s prejudices if it meant saving her own skin.
“It takes surprisingly little pressure to strangle a man. Under the right circumstances, that is.”
Una remembered the belt she’d seen around Traveling Mike’s neck before the murderer fled, then she recalled what Barney had said about Big- nosed Joe and Martha Ann. They had been strangled in the same way.
“It’s the same man,” she said aloud to herself. “Same man as what?”
Una glanced at the detective. “There’ve been two other killings lately. Both in poor parts of the city. Both strangled. I think the man who killed Traveling Mi—er—Mr. Sheeny, murdered them too.”
The detective laughed so hard he nearly slid off the bench. Una gripped her brass knuckles tighter. He didn’t care about the truth or solving the murder. Not when he had so tidy a suspect already in custody. One crook was as good as another to him.
“You’re not lis—”
He held up his hand and stood. “Save your cockeyed stories for the judge. Though I’ll warn you, he doesn’t take any kindlier to your ilk than I do.”
