She picked up her needle and began to sew again, letting him know she wasn’t happy to be interrupted. He knew she’d earn only about fifty-cents a dozen for sewing the ties, and a dozen was a good day’s work. She wouldn’t want to waste any time in social pleasantries with him.
“I’m working on figuring out who killed your daughter, Mrs. O’Hara, but I need to know more about her first.” He pulled up the only other chair and sat down across the table from her. She spared him a skeptical glance.
“All you need to figure out is which of them dagos killed her,” she said, stitching the fabric with practiced ease. “It had to be one of them.”
He glanced around the flat. Through the doorway he could see a large stack of bedding in the other room. “You have lodgers, Mrs. O’Hara?”
“Of course I got lodgers,” she said. “You think I can keep myself by making ties?”
Many people in the tenements rented floor space for a few cents a night to those even less fortunate than themselves.
Frank pictured the flat as it would be when they were here, the floor filled with men and Nainsi sleeping only a short distance away. “Must’ve been hard, keeping the lodgers away from your daughter,” he remarked, remembering they hadn’t yet solved the mystery of who had fathered her baby.
He still entertained a small hope that the father might be involved in her death.
“Wasn’t hard at all,” Mrs. O’Hara snapped. “My Nainsi, she didn’t want nothing to do with them bums. She was smart, that one. Knew better than to waste herself on a man couldn’t give her nothing. Wanted to better herself, she did.”
“How did she plan to do that?” Frank asked mildly.
Mrs. O’Hara glared at him, her faded eyes narrow with hatred. “Not what you’re thinking!”
“I’m not thinking anything,” Frank insisted. “I’m trying to figure out how she ended up in Little Italy with Antonio Ruocco.”
“I don’t know. To this day, I don’t know. It started when she got herself a job at a sweatshop, sewing men’s shirts.
They didn’t pay her hardly anything, but it was more than she ever made helping me do this.” She gestured at the stack of ties.
Frank knew what happened when a girl like Nainsi suddenly got a taste of freedom and a little money in her pocket. “She made new friends at the shop, I guess.”
Mrs. O’Hara snorted. “Silly little biddies, every one of them.”
“Did she have a special friend? Somebody she’d want to know about the baby?” Frank asked. He already knew the answer, but he wanted to see what Mrs. O’Hara would say.
“Funny you should ask,” Mrs. O’Hara said in surprise.
“She did want me to tell Brigit Murphy right away.”
“This Brigit is somebody she worked with?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you tell her about the baby, like Nainsi wanted?”
“Well, I wasn’t gonna go out of my way, but I saw her right when I was coming home—she lives downstairs—so I did. She was coming home from work, and I told her.”
Frank wanted to know more about Brigit, but he’d get that information from the girl herself. “I guess Brigit and Nainsi went out in the evenings.”
“Nainsi was a good girl,” Mrs. O’Hara insisted angrily.
“She never walked the streets or anything like that!”
“I didn’t think she did. I’ll bet she liked to go out and have a good time, though. Maybe she went to dance houses with her friends.”
She sewed a few stitches, paying more attention than necessary to the tie she was working on.
“Lots of girls do that, Mrs. O’Hara. You can’t blame them for wanting to have fun. Maybe that’s where she met Antonio.”
She shrugged one shoulder, still not looking up. “Maybe.
Like I said, she didn’t tell me. All I know, she comes home one day to get her stuff and tells me she’s married. Says she’ll never be poor again. This boy’s family, they got a business, she says. A restaurant. At least I know she’ll eat regular. But then I see Antonio, and I know them dagos don’t take to outsiders. I know she’s in for misery.”
She reached up quickly to dash a tear from her eye, but she never missed a stitch.
“Antonio wasn’t the only man she knew,” Frank reminded her. “He wasn’t the father of her baby.”
“That’s what them dagos say, but my Nainsi was a good girl,” she repeated.
Frank didn’t bother to point out that good girls didn’t get pregnant before they got married. “Did she ever mention any other man to you? Someone she liked before she met Antonio?”
“She never said nothing to me. Why’re you wasting your time here? I didn’t kill Nainsi, and I don’t know who did.
You should be talking to them Ruoccos.”
“All right, which one of them do you think did it?” he asked.
“How should I know? I wasn’t there.”
“How did she get along with them? Was there one she fought with a lot?”
“The girl, Valentina. She and Nainsi fought like cats and dogs. The girl was jealous of everything Nainsi got. I guess she’s spoiled, being the youngest and the only girl, but she’s just plain mean. No call to be like that.”
“What about the others?”
“She didn’t like any of them, you ask me. Never had a kind word to say about them anyhow. Maria, she was nice enough, I guess. Always acted polite when I was there, and she treated Nainsi all right. But the mother . . . she’s a bitch, that one.”
“How did Nainsi get along with Antonio? Did he ever hit her?”
Now he had her full attention. “You think he did it?
Makes sense, don’t it? He thought she lied to him, and a man don’t like to be tricked that way.”
“Did he ever hit her?” he asked again.
She considered the question. “I don’t think so. She never said if he did, and I guess she would’ve. She complained about everything else he did and didn’t do. She didn’t have much patience with him.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean them Italian boys, they’re handsome all right, but their mamas spoil ’em something awful. Big babies, the lot of them.”
Frank remembered Sarah had said the same thing about Antonio. “Joe and Lorenzo, too?”
Mrs. O’Hara made a disgusted face. “They wouldn’t piss without asking Mama’s leave. You want to know who killed my Nainsi, you ask the old woman. If she didn’t do it, she ordered it done.”
Sarah couldn’t help staring at Mrs. Ruocco holding the baby.
“He woke up,” she said. She seemed a little defensive, as if she were afraid Sarah might think she’d changed her mind about the child.
Sarah tried not to let her amazement show. “I didn’t think he’d sleep very long. His tummy hurts, poor little fellow.” She set the tray down on the table with the magazines.
Mrs. Ruocco looked at the baby. “The water in the bottle is cold,” she said, pointing to where she’d set the hot water bottle on the floor beside the rocker.
“I’ll take care of it,” Sarah said, going over to get it.
The baby had been crying, but Mrs. Ruocco had managed to soothe him. She would have had lots of experience, and a woman never forgot how to hold a baby.
“He’s pretty, isn’t he?” Sarah said as she picked up the bottle. “Look at those curls.”
Mrs. Ruocco looked down at the baby as if to verify Sarah’s opinion. “My boys, they had curls,” she remembered.
She didn’t look happy at the memory. Or maybe she didn’t like making a comparison between her sons and this baby.
Sarah started to walk away, but Mrs. Ruocco caught her by the sleeve. When Sarah looked down at her, she saw fear in her dark eyes.
“Will he live?” she asked.