Sarah didn’t want to raise false hopes, and she wasn’t even sure what answer Mrs. Ruocco wanted to hear. “He’s strong and healthy,” she hedged. “If we can find some milk that agrees with him, he could do just fine.”
“But if you cannot?” she challenged.
Might as well say it. “If he doesn’t eat, he’ll die. The only other choice would be to try finding a wet nurse. Maybe one of the women in the neighborhood would feed him along with her own baby, to earn some extra money.”
She’d expected Mrs. Ruocco to protest such an expense, but she just stared back, her dark eyes unfathomable. After a long moment, she said, “Maria is good girl.”
“Yes, she is,” Sarah agreed, not knowing what she meant.
“She is like daughter to me. She is better daughter than my own. She is good wife to Giuseppe.”
“I’m sure she is,” Sarah said uncertainly.
“She need baby, Mrs. Brandt. Some women, they can accept. Maria cannot. She need baby.”
Sarah nodded, thinking she understood. “She’ll be very grateful if you let her keep this one.”
Mrs. Ruocco waved her words away again. “I do not do this for grateful. I do this for Maria. So she has happiness.
She has no other happiness.”
“She’ll be a good mother,” Sarah tried.
“But the baby must live,” Mrs. Ruocco said fiercely. “You will help her?”
“Yes,” Sarah promised with all her heart. “Yes, I will.”
They heard someone coming up the outside stairs, and Sarah went to see who it was. Lorenzo came in carrying a paper sack. Sarah held a finger to her lips, warning him to be quiet so he wouldn’t wake Maria, and led him into the parlor. He glanced over to where his mother sat holding the baby and almost dropped his package.
“You get milk?” she asked sharply. “Goat milk, like Mrs.
Brandt say?”
“Yes, Mama,” Lorenzo said uncertainly. He looked at Sarah, as if for an explanation for this amazing thing.
She simply smiled benignly and said, “Be sure to put the milk in the icebox when you go downstairs.”
He glanced around. “Where is Maria?”
“She sleep,” Mrs. Ruocco said. “You, go help your brothers in the kitchen. It is busy time.”
He turned to Sarah with a worried frown. “Is Maria all right?”
“She’s fine, just a little tired. I made her lie down.”
He seemed relieved, but still unhappy. He looked at his mother again, as if to verify that she was indeed holding the baby.
“Go!” Mrs. Ruocco said impatiently.
Lorenzo went.
Sarah went to where Mrs. Ruocco sat. “I’ll rock him while you eat something,” she offered.
Mrs. Ruocco was staring at the baby’s face. “In one minute.”
Frank found the sweatshop where Nainsi had worked. As he’d hoped, the girls were just taking their lunch break. Most of them would skip lunch, he knew, trying to stretch their meager wages so they’d have a nickel or a dime extra for admission to a dance in the evening. Frank found the boss, a man in his forties with thick dark hair plastered down with pomade and a perpetual scowl. For all of that, he was good looking, in a fancy-Dan kind of way.
He probably got a lot of attention from the girls who worked for him. Frank had no doubt he took advantage of his position, too.
He introduced himself and learned the fellow’s name was Richard Keith. Keith wasn’t happy to see a cop. “You won’t find nothing illegal here,” he claimed, a little too defensively.
Frank was sure he could, if he tried, but he wasn’t interested in that. “I’m here about one of your girls.”
“Which one? We don’t keep girls that get in trouble with the law.”
“This one’s dead,” Frank said.
“Then it’s not one of my girls. They’re all here today,” he said confidently.
“This one doesn’t work here anymore. She quit a while back to get married. Maybe you remember her—Nainsi O’Hara.”
Frank saw the surprise register on his smooth features, surprise and something else. Guilt? “Nainsi, you say? But she . . . I mean, that’s terrible.”
“You remember her then,” Frank said. It wasn’t a question.
“Well, yeah,” he said, a little flustered. “She was . . . a good worker.” A red flush crawled up his neck.
“Maybe she was good at other things, too,” Frank said mildly. “The girls here, they must be anxious to keep you happy so they can keep their jobs. Was Nainsi one of the girls who kept you happy?”
“I don’t run that kind of shop,” he said, his face scarlet now. His expression was definitely guilty.
“You know why Nainsi got married?” Frank asked.
He blinked stupidly. “I . . . I guess she found a fellow wanted to marry her.”
“And she was going to have a baby,” Frank said.
Keith gave a little shrug, feigning indifference. “Most of them are when they get married. That’s how they get the fellow to come around.”
“Except the fellow she married wasn’t the father,” Frank said.
Beads of sweat were forming on Keith’s forehead. “Why are you telling me this? And why are you here at all?”
“Did you know she had her baby?” Frank asked mildly.
“And that she died?”
“I . . . I didn’t,” he claimed. “Well, maybe I heard something . . .”
“Who told you she had her baby?”
“I . . . I don’t remember,” he claimed. “One of the girls told everybody in the shop. I overheard. Nobody said she died, though.”
“She didn’t just die,” Frank said. “She was murdered.”
Keith’s eyes widened and the blood drained from his face. “Who killed her?”
“I was thinking it might be the man who fathered her baby.”
Keith wasn’t a stupid man. “It wasn’t me!” he cried. “I never . . . My girls don’t get pregnant, because I don’t . . .
None of them do. If she said it was me, she was lying!”
How very interesting, Frank thought. “She didn’t say anything, Mr. Keith. I’m only trying to figure out who it might’ve been. I guess I’ll add you to my list.”
The color flooded back to his face. “It wasn’t me. I got a wife and family. I don’t need a lot of little bastards wanting money from me, too. I might have some fun with the girls, but none of them got a baby from it. I’d swear to it.”
Frank could find out easily enough what his reputation was. That wouldn’t prove he wasn’t the father of Nainsi’s baby, but at least it would give him an idea of the likelihood of it. “Thanks for clearing that up for me,” Frank said with just the slightest trace of sarcasm. “Now I’d like to talk to Brigit Murphy.”
“Why?” he challenged, assuming some of his bravado again.
“To find out more about Nainsi O’Hara,” Frank said. “If you’d like to point her out, I’d be grateful. If you don’t, I’ll have to start trying to find something illegal in your shop,” he added with a grin.
Keith looked like he wanted to punch Frank, but he pointed to a group of girls gathered in the back of the room.
“She’s the tall one with the curls.”
Frank didn’t thank him. He strolled down the length of the room to where the girls stood talking. One of them noticed his approach and motioned for the others to be quiet.
By the time he reached them, they were all staring at him in wide-eyed terror. They’d recognized him as a cop. People always did, even though he wore a suit just like any busi-nessman in the city. Maybe it was the way cops carried themselves. He’d never been able to figure it out, but people always knew.
“Hello, ladies,” he said as kindly as he could. “I’m Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy. I’m investigating Nainsi Ruocco’s murder.”
One of them made a little squeak, but the rest of them just stared.