Manhattan Mayhem: New Crime Stories From Mystery Writers of America Read online

  Her hand shaking, Jenny put the picture back inside the album. In her delirium the day before she died, Gran had said those names: Sarah … Vincent … Barney … Or had it just been delirium?

  A large manila envelope, its bright yellow color faded with time, was next. Opening it, she found it filled with three separate files of crumbling news clippings. There’s no place to read these here, Jenny thought. With the manila envelope tucked under her arm, she walked into the dining area and settled at the table. Careful not to tear the clippings, she began to slide them from the envelope. Looking at the date on the top clipping of the three sets, she realized they had been filed chronologically.

  “Murder in Union Square” was the first headline she read. It was dated June 8, 1949. The story followed:

  The body of twenty-three-year-old Sarah Kimberley was found in the doorway of S. Klein Department Store on Union Square this morning. She had been stabbed in the back by person or persons unknown sometime during the hours of midnight and five a.m.…

  Why did Gran keep all these clippings? Jenny asked herself. Why didn’t she ever tell me about it, especially when she knew I was planning to go into criminal law? I know she must not have talked with Mom about it. Mom would have told me.

  She spread out the other clippings on the table. In sequence by date, they told of the murder investigation from the beginning. In the late afternoon, Sarah Kimberley had been modeling the dress she was wearing when her body was found.

  The autopsy revealed that Sarah was six weeks pregnant when she died.

  Up-and-coming designer Vincent Cole had been questioned for hours. He was known to have been seeing Sarah on the side. But his fiancée, Nona Banks, an heiress to the Banks department store fortune, swore they had been together in her apartment all night.

  What did my grandmother do with the dress she had? Jenny wondered. She said it was the prettiest dress she ever owned.

  Jenny’s computer was on the table, and she decided to see what she could find out about Vincent Cole. What she discovered shocked her. Vincent Cole had changed his name to Vincenzia and was now a famous designer. He’s up there with Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera, she thought.

  The next pile of clippings was about the arrest of Barney Dodd, a twenty-six-year-old man who liked to sit for hours in Union Square Park. Borderline mentally disabled, he lived at the YMCA and worked at a funeral home. One of his jobs was dressing the bodies of the deceased and placing them in the casket. At noon and after work he would head straight to the park, carrying a paper bag with his lunch or dinner. As Jenny read the accounts, it became clear why he had come under suspicion. The body of Sarah Kimberley had been laid out as though she was in a coffin. Her hands had been clasped. Her hair was in place, the wide collar of the dress carefully arranged.

  According to the accounts, Barney was known to try to strike up a conversation if a pretty young woman was sitting near him. That’s not proof of anything, Jenny thought. She realized that she was thinking like the deputy district attorney she would soon become.

  The last clipping was a two-page article from the Daily News. It was called “Did Justice Triumph?” It was about “The Case of the Five-Dollar Dress,” as the writer dubbed it. At a glance, she could see that long excerpts from the trial were included in the article.

  Barney Dobbs had confessed. He signed a statement saying that he had been in Union Square at about midnight the night of the murder. It was chilly, so the park was deserted. He saw Sarah walking across Fourteenth Street. He followed her, and then, when she wouldn’t kiss him, he killed her. He carried her body to the front door of Klein’s and left it there. But he arranged it so that it looked nice, the way he did in the funeral parlor. He threw away the knife as well as the clothes he was wearing that night.

  Too pat, Jenny thought scornfully. It sounds to me like whoever got that confession was trying to cover every base. Talk about a rush to justice. Barney certainly didn’t get Sarah pregnant. Who was the father of the baby? Who was Sarah with that night? Why was she alone at midnight (or later) in Union Square?

  It was obvious the judge also thought there was something fishy about the confession. He entered a plea of not guilty for Barney and assigned a public defender to his case.

  Jenny read the accounts of the trial with increasing contempt. It seemed to her that although the public defender had done his best to defend Barney, he was obviously inexperienced. He should never have put Barney on the stand, she thought. The man kept contradicting himself. He admitted that he had confessed to killing Sarah, but only because he was hungry and the officers who were talking to him had promised him a ham and cheese sandwich and a Hershey bar if he would sign something.

  That was good, she thought. That should have made an impression on the jurors.

  Not enough of an impression, she decided as she continued reading. Not compared to the district attorney trying the case.

  He had shown Barney a picture of Sarah’s body taken at the scene of the crime. “Do you recognize this woman?”

  “Yes. I used to see her sometimes in the park when she was having her lunch or walking home after work.”

  “Did you ever talk to her?”

  “She didn’t like to talk to me. But her friend was so nice. She was pretty, too. Her name was Catherine.”

  My grandmother, Jenny thought.

  “Did you see Sarah Kimberley the night of the murder?”

  “Was that the night I saw her lying in front of Klein’s? Her hands were folded, but they weren’t folded nice like they are in the picture. So I fixed them.”

  His attorney should have called a recess, should have told the judge that his client was obviously confused! Jenny raged.

  But the defense lawyer had allowed the district attorney to continue the line of questioning, hammering at Barney. “You arranged her body?”

  “No. Somebody else did. I only changed her hands.”

  There were only two defense witnesses. The first was the matron at the YMCA where Barney lived. “He’d never hurt a fly,” she said. “If he tried to talk to someone and they didn’t respond to him, he never approached them again. I certainly never saw him carry a knife. He doesn’t have many changes of clothes. I know all of them, and nothing’s missing.”

  The other witness was Catherine Reeves. She testified that Barney had never exhibited any animosity toward her friend Sarah Kimberley. “If we happened to be having lunch in the park and Sarah ignored Barney, he just talked to me for a minute or two. He never gave Sarah a second glance.”

  Barney was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to life without parole.

  Jenny read the final paragraph of the article:

  Barney Dodd died at age sixty-eight, having served forty years in prison for the murder of Sarah Kimberley. The case of the so-called Five-Dollar Dress Murder has been debated by experts for years. The identity of the father of Sarah’s unborn baby is still unknown. She was wearing the dress she had modeled that day. It was a cocktail dress. Was she having a romantic date with an admirer? Whom did she meet and where did she go that evening? DID JUSTICE TRIUMPH?

  I’d say, absolutely not, Jenny fumed. She looked up and realized that the shadows had lengthened.

  At the end, Gran had ranted about Vincent Cole and the five-dollar dress. Was it because he couldn’t bear the sight of it? Was he the father of Sarah’s unborn child?

  He must be in his mid-eighties now, Jenny thought. His first wife, Nona Hartman, was a department store heiress. One of the article clips was about her. In an interview in Vogue magazine in 1952, she said she had first suggested that Vincent Cole did not sound exotic enough for a designer, and she urged her husband to upgrade his image by changing his name to Vincenzia. Included was a picture of their over-the-top wedding at her grandfather’s estate in Newport. It had taken place on August 10, 1949, a few weeks after Sarah was murdered.

  The marriage lasted only two years. The complaint had been adultery.
/>   I wonder … Jenny thought. She turned back to the computer. The file on Vincent Cole—Vincenzia—was still open. She began searching through the links until she found what she was looking for. Vincent Cole, then twenty-five years old, had been living two blocks from Union Square when Sarah Kimberley was murdered.

  If only they had DNA in those days. Sarah lived on Avenue C, just a few blocks away. If she had been in his apartment that night and told him she was pregnant, he easily could have followed her and killed her. Cole probably knew about Barney, a character around Union Square. Could Vincent Cole have arranged the body to throw suspicion on Barney? Maybe he saw him sitting in the park that night?

  We’ll never know, Jenny thought. But it’s obvious that Gran was sure he was guilty.

  She got up from the chair and realized that she had been sitting for a long time. Her back felt cramped, and all she wanted to do was get out of the apartment and take a long walk.

  The charity pick-up truck should be here in fifteen minutes. Let’s be done with it, she thought, and went back into the den. Two boxes were left to open. The one with the Klein label was the first she investigated. Wrapped in blue tissue was the five-dollar dress she had seen in the picture.

  She shook it out and held it up. This must be the dress Gran talked about a couple years ago. I had bought a cocktail dress in this color. Gran told me that it reminded her of a dress she had when she was young. She said Grandpa didn’t like to see her wearing it. “A girl I worked with was wearing one like it when she had an accident,” she’d said, “and he thought it was bad luck.”

  The other box held a man’s dark blue three-button suit. Why did it look familiar? She flipped open the wedding album. I’m pretty sure that’s what my grandfather wore at the wedding, she thought. No wonder Gran kept it. She could never talk about him without crying. She thought about what her grandmother’s old friends had told her at the wake: “Your grandfather was the handsomest man you’d ever want to see. While he was going to law school at night, he worked as a salesman at Klein’s during the day. All the girls in the store were after him. But once he met your mother, it was love at first sight. We were all jealous of her.”

  Jenny smiled at the memory and began to go through the pockets of the suit, in case anything had been left in them. There was nothing in the trousers. She slipped her fingers through the pockets of the jacket. The pocket under the left sleeve was empty, but it seemed as though she could feel something under the smooth satin lining.

  Maybe it has one of those secret inner pockets, she thought. I had a suit with a hidden pocket like that.

  She was right. The slit to the inner pocket was almost indiscernible, but it was there.

  She reached in and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. Opening it, she read the contents.

  It was addressed to Miss Sarah Kimberley.

  It was a medical report stating that the test had confirmed she was six weeks pregnant.

  MARY HIGGINS CLARK’s books are worldwide best sellers. In the United States alone, her books have sold over 100 million copies. Her latest suspense novel, I’ve Got You under My Skin, was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2014. She is an active member of Literacy Volunteers. She is the author of thirty-three previous suspense novels, three collections of short stories, a historical novel, a memoir, and two children’s books. She is married to John Conheeney, and they live in Saddle River, New Jersey.

  WHITE RABBIT

  Julie Hyzy

  The young woman sitting on the bench stopped fingering a strand of her white-blonde pixie cut. Startled, she looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Excuse me?”

  “I asked if you were recapturing your childhood.” The man who had spoken reached down to tap a corner of the book lying on her lap. He had a round face and the sort of little-boy haircut most men ditch long before they hit thirty. Wearing black-framed glasses and a bushy brown beard, he carried a soft paunch and a beat-up messenger bag.

  “Interesting reading choice,” he said. “Especially considering the view. My name’s Mark, by the way.”

  Stiffening, the young woman clutched the collar of her sweater. Although most of the benches ringing the popular spot were unoccupied, this corner of Central Park was far from desolate. Tourists clambering to pose with its central attraction—an eleven-foot-tall Alice in Wonderland statue—included three young families and a group of college-age kids eagerly snapping photos and sharing results.

  “I don’t make a habit of talking to strangers,” she said, turning her attention to two toddlers in shiny neon jackets attempting to climb the giant bronze sculpture. Their father leaned against the White Rabbit and squinted at his phone.

  “I’m not strange.” Mark sat on the bench next to her, settling his bag on his lap. “But your comment makes me curious. Are you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  One of the toddlers, lying prone atop a low mushroom, lost his chubby grip and slid off sideways, landing hard. A split second later, his piercing wails jolted the father into attentiveness. He pocketed the phone and picked up the kid.

  Mark pointed and leaned close. “Shouldn’t they be in school?”

  “Too young,” she said. “Listen, I don’t want to be rude—”

  “Then don’t be.” He propped one elbow atop the bench back and settled an ankle across a knee. Exhaling loudly, he rested his other hand on the messenger bag. “Relax. We’re at a popular attraction in the middle of a busy park on a sunny October afternoon. There’s no harm in a little conversation.”

  She lifted her book. “There is if it keeps me from reading.”

  “Except you aren’t,” he said. “Reading, that is.”

  “What do you think this is?” This time when she lifted the book, she shook it. “A surfboard?”

  He drew her attention to the nearby steps, where a young woman hunched over a paperback in her left hand while biting the thumbnail of her right. “She’s reading.” He extended his arm, pointing at a pair of joggers rounding the model boat pond. “They’re not reading.” With an amused look on his face, he said, “Amazing powers of observation, coupled with deductive skill.” He spread his hands. “It’s a gift.”

  “I’d say you’re full of yourself.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first. Hang on.” He pointed again, this time skyward. Lifting his chin into the crisp, twisty breeze, he pulled in a deep breath through his nose. “Did you catch that?” He continued with barely a pause. “That familiar smell, right on time. You recognize it, don’t you? Death and new beginnings in one fragrant breath. Worn-away leaves and pristine notebooks. Every autumn it comes, right on schedule. Sometimes it lasts for days; sometimes it’s gone before you exhale.”

  “Very poetic, but that doesn’t answer—”

  He walked his fingers along the edge of her book. “You’ve been sitting here for an hour with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on your lap, but you haven’t turned a single page.”

  Her voice rose. “You’ve been watching me?”

  He scratched his neck. “ ‘Watching’ makes me sound like a stalker. Can’t have that. Let’s just say you pique my interest.”

  “If that’s supposed to be a pickup line—”

  “It’s not. Call me curious. Call me intrigued.”

  “Call you a weirdo,” she said.

  He laughed. “Touché. What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Oh, right. You’re being careful.” He smirked as he stretched the word out. “You’re afraid Mark-in-the-park might tempt you out of your comfort zone. Don’t worry,” he said with a dismissive wave, “I like knowing people’s names, is all. A quirk of mine. I thought you’d be someone who appreciated a little witty repartee.” He pushed his glasses farther up his nose. “You don’t look uptight or fainthearted. Apparently, I made the clichéd mistake of …” He touched her book again. “Judging by a cover.”

  She closed it with a thump. “I’m leaving now.”

&n
bsp; “No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re waiting for something. Or someone. Am I close?”

  “My reason for being here is none of your business.”

  “How about this, then?” He patted the messenger bag. “You won’t leave because you want to know what I have in here.”

  “Why would I care?”

  “Let’s see.” He opened the bag slowly, grinning as he unbuckled the leather strap and peeled it back. Using his thumb and index finger, he reached inside, latched onto something solid, and gently eased it out.

  “What are the chances?” he asked as he dropped a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into her lap. Blue hardcover. Gold lettering. Identical to hers.

  She jerked in surprise. “What’s going on? What are you trying to pull?”

  “Whoa, sorry,” he said. “Just thought it was a fun coincidence. Nothing more. The only thing I’m trying to pull is a little conversation. Geez.”

  “No way. What did you do? Run to the nearest bookstore and buy this? You really are a stalker.”

  “Oh, come on.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “Okay, even if I had gone to such drastic lengths, tell me: to what end? You’re streetsmart, you’re savvy. A little paranoid, perhaps, but this is New York, so that can be forgiven. What nefarious plan could possibly be served by my producing this book at this moment?”

  She traced her fingers along its gold embossed title but didn’t answer.

  “Now that you understand my reasons for chatting you up are completely benign, we can begin anew, can’t we? Hi, I’m Mark.”