Goodfellowe House Read online

  I hung up and surveyed the scene. These were the kind of people who were so quintessentially self-assured that they couldn’t imagine uncertainty—not until today. Quite possibly, they’d never known a moment of fear in their lives and most certainly they’d never been cowed before, but they were cowed now. They huddled behind upended tables, the faux columns and overturned chairs or flat against the floor along the periphery of the room. An auburn-haired woman in a royal blue satin gown stood in one corner, weeping. She leaned on the shoulder of an older gentleman. He was holding her and patting her on the shoulder, but he was about ready to topple over himself. Mrs. Goodfellowe sat slumped in a chair, her midriff stained with Mrs. Gray’s blood. Someone had found a white tablecloth and placed it over the dead woman. The cloth was a pristine white, except for the dark red flower soaking its center. The air was heavy with the smell of blood, gun smoke and vomit. A young man leaning on a table surreptitiously wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. He caught me looking at him and turned away.

  Violence, I thought, is a grim but efficient social leveler.

  Chapter 5

  Detective Jack Ritchie joined Frank Bellamy on the case. Ritchie and Bellamy were in their late fifties and two of the most experienced investigators in the New York Police Department. They were built like football players and liked to say they hit a case like fullbacks. The newspaper reports were confident. The Goodfellowe heist would be solved within a fortnight.

  Bellamy and Ritchie wanted to know who was privy to information about Mrs. Goodfellowe’s jewels and safes. There were her servants, of course. And there was Esther—Esther, who’d disappeared with Mrs. Goodfellowe’s car only days before. A theory quickly developed that Esther had spied on her patron and either sold her knowledge or helped plan the caper outright, then disappeared well in advance of it.

  To be sure, the rest of the servants were interviewed, but they’d all been in service in the house for many years. The most recent had joined her staff four years prior. They were beyond reproach.

  Esther stood out as an obvious choice.

  The suspicions dealt her family a bitter blow. To have lost her and now hear her accused of treachery added salt to an already excruciating wound.

  “We’re trying to stay hopeful,” Ruth told me. “At least the cops are really looking for her now. We keep telling ourselves that it don’t matter why they’re looking, as long as they look.”

  Bellamy and Ritchie assembled a task force. They tore into Esther’s life, hunting for indications she kept company with thieves. They found none.

  On December 30, one week after the robbery, the Todds received a typed letter. It contained three words: I’ve got her. Esther’s family and friends offered it as proof that a maniac had kidnapped her. The police were skeptical. They speculated that Esther herself had sent the note.

  Mrs. Goodfellowe offered a standing reward: $2,500 for information on the robbery and/or the whereabouts of Esther Sue Todd. Publicly, she flat-out denied that her protégée’s disappearance and the auction heist were in any way connected.

  But the wording of the reward implied otherwise.

  The Todds now begged the police to investigate Esther’s case apart from the inquiry into the robbery. The detectives working the case, the Todds argued, saw Esther only as a perpetrator, not a victim. With that attitude, they would ignore any evidence to the contrary. Bellamy and Ritchie refused, countering that they had an open mind. They said Esther stood a better chance of being found as part of the larger investigation than if investigated on her own. The Todds were unconvinced. They were certain their beloved daughter would have had nothing to do with robbery. Ruth told me in confidence that she almost wished that Esther had been a part of it.

  “Then at least we’d be sure she was alive. Now we don’t know. And we’ll never have peace till we do—till we can bring her home, to where she belongs.”

  A second note followed on January 7. Like the first, it carried the chilling message, “I’ve got her.” It also taunted the Todds with a description of what Esther had been wearing that night. It was specific, right down to the earrings she wore.

  The Todds turned this second note over to the police, as they had the first. They felt it bolstered the contention that Esther was being held captive, but it only served to increase police suspicion that she herself was part of a conspiracy.

  Events apparently bore out this suspicion three weeks later.

  On January 20, Mrs. Goodfellowe’s Packard was spotted in Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York. Police stopped the car and interviewed the driver. Geoffrey Coleman, age 74, told police that he’d bought the car for cash two weeks earlier from a young woman. Coleman described the seller as a Negro in her twenties. He said she was of medium height and very pretty, except for a nasty-looking scar that ran from her left eye down across her cheek. The description fit the missing young woman to a T. The police were now certain that Esther Sue Todd was alive and trying to cover her tracks.

  City newspapers reported heavily on the new developments. The notes to the Todds stopped. When asked to comment, Bellamy openly speculated that Esther Sue now knew that sending notes would be of no more use in trying to support her alleged innocence. The Negro establishment, which had been proud of Esther and supportive of the Todd family, quietly distanced itself from the grieving relatives. Esther’s relatives felt themselves alone and abandoned.

  For all intents and purposes, they were.

  I too had left them on their own. Personal circumstances had intervened. Only six months earlier, my husband, Hamp, had died of a heart attack. He was just thirty-six and appeared to be in perfect health. The ache over losing him was still so strong it sometimes cut my breath off. But by that December at least I could go whole weeks, instead of days, without seriously contemplating whether to join him. One of the concerns that stayed my hand was my mother. She’d suffered the loss of her husband too, and yet she’d boxed her way through, kept on going, raising me alone. Now, after struggling all those years, she was frail and elderly. I was her only child. Losing me would kill her.

  Such thoughts had always drawn me back from the edge. Now it they wouldn’t plague me anymore. She wasn’t losing me.

  I was losing her.

  The problems of Esther and her family receded to the background. Sitting at Mama’s bedside in Virginia, I was only dimly aware of the events in New York. A fog of fear and grief muffled any news from Gotham, made everything there seem unreal and irrelevant.

  My mother lingered for three months and then passed in her sleep. With no brothers or sisters, I felt drained and alone. When I returned to New York, I was out of a job and nearly out of money. But I did have a house and I had friends, all of whom were kind enough to welcome me back with open arms.

  Trying to pick up the threads of my old life, I checked in with the Todds. They told me that Mrs. Goodfellowe’s reward still stood. She had yet to receive a single useful response. They also said that no one was investigating the case anymore, and they told me why.

  In their time, Bellamy and Ritchie had made touchdown after touchdown in case after case, but they slammed into a wall with this one. As the weeks turned into months, the tenor of the news changed. The reports that had lionized them began to peck at them.

  At one point, the two cops did get a lucky break, but they botched it, and what could’ve been a moment of triumph turned into one of defeat. It was their first and last break on the case. A wave of humiliating publicity followed.

  After the uproar died down, they quietly moved on to other assignments. The file remained open formally, and Bellamy still made inquiries when he had time, but basically the case was dead in the water.

  Then came the day when Ritchie took a bullet. An escaping prisoner got hold of Ritchie’s gun and turned it on him. Bellamy shot the prisoner, but Ritchie was already down. He was DOA at St. Luke’s. The next day, Bellamy retired.

  “Ritchie and me, we was partners for more than thirty years,” Bella
my said in one newspaper report. “I’m too old and too tired to start over again with someone new.”

  The Todd case had become an obscure footnote to the much larger, sexier riddle of the Goodfellowe heist. Without fresh developments to keep the story alive, the newspapers moved on and both crimes soon slipped to the dark recesses of the public mind. I wished I could’ve helped the Todds, but I was at a loss. I no longer had the one weapon I could wield in their favor, the power of the press.

  While searching for a job, I received a note from John Baltimore, my old boss at the Harlem Age. He told me the newspaper had an opening and would be happy to take me back. But it struck me that I didn’t want my old beat. I was tired of writing about loss and death.

  That June, I joined the Chronicle and convinced them to let me write society news. Harlem society was hopping. It was a fun job and I was grateful to have it.

  The years went by. My contentment eroded. I became restless. My life had become my job. When my attitude toward it changed, the dissatisfaction went deep. Needless to say, I received little sympathy. I was lucky to have a job at all, associates said, especially such a dream one. I had a nice home, nice clothes. I was young and healthy. No, I didn’t have a man, but I didn’t want one, not after Hamp.

  What did I want, then?

  Something … indefinable. That’s what.

  I felt like a sleepwalker, distant and detached. It was getting increasingly harder to smile at the inane jokes so prevalent at Strivers’ Row gatherings, to gush at the right moment and to the right degree. I was living in a cage and didn’t know how to break out of it.

  Then Ruth Todd came to see me.

  Chapter 6

  Bellamy lived in a scruffy little house in Bayside, Queens. It was a two-story, with white shingles. Small, but nice. At least it would’ve been, if it had been kept up. Unfortunately, the exterior showed signs of neglect. The paint was chipped and peeling; the stoop was cracked and needed sweeping. Two large planters held dead plants on either side of the door, and a thin Christmas wreath, less than a foot in diameter, decorated the front door.

  It was bright and early and I had an appointment. I checked my watch—saw that I was exactly on time—and went up the steps leading to his front door. I rang the bell and waited. A long minute dragged by. I rang again and another forty seconds crawled past. I glanced at my watch again. This was the time I’d said I’d be there. Maybe, Bellamy had stepped out.

  Or maybe, he was inside, watching.

  I’d ring one more time. If he didn’t answer, I’d leave.

  I pressed the button. Again, no answer. I turned to go and felt, rather than heard, the door open behind me.

  “Mrs. Price?”

  It was a scratchy voice. Not unpleasant. And somehow young, much younger than I would’ve expected from a cop of retirement age.

  I turned to face him.

  His watery blue eyes were dark with amusement. I could just about read his thoughts.

  Back then, a lot of white folk were taken aback by the very notion of a colored reporter, much less the sight of one. Actually, they were surprised to see black folk at all. We were usually invisible—servants, domestics, cleaning men, laundry women, handymen, and the like. We never spoke and were rarely spoken to. And when we did speak, it was only because we had been spoken to. So it was obvious what Bellamy was thinking: what kind of colored woman would have the audacity to think she could question a white man?

  He ushered me in with a tobacco-stained grimace that passed for a smile. He had a bulbous nose with prominent veins and used a walking stick. His wild salt-and-pepper eyebrows needed trimming, and so did his gray nose hairs. He had a little paunch and dirty fingernails, but he wasn’t totally unkempt. His white shirt was pressed and spotless and so were his gray pants. His wavy silver hair was combed and his black leather shoes were worn but polished. So he’d made some kind of effort—but was it out of respect or merely vanity?

  He led me into a small square living room, crowded with lace-draped furniture, surprisingly fussy for a man. He gestured toward a small armchair upholstered in worn green velvet. A red-and-green plaid shawl was folded neatly and thrown over the chair’s back.

  “Here, take a seat. Never had a spade in here before. Mom would be rolling in her grave if she knew. But I always say, why not? Ain’t nothing wrong with you people. Nothing that a little hard work wouldn’t cure.”

  I let the insult slide—it would’ve been counterproductive to challenge it—but I promised myself to get his information and get out.

  “Interesting place,” I said, sitting down.

  “Oh, you like it?”

  The place was neat, outwardly as clean as a whistle. But it stank of stale smoke and it gave off a heavy underlying funk, a mixture of unwashed clothes, hidden dust and hidden memories.

  “Looks like you’ve been here awhile.”

  “All my life. Took it over when my mom died.” He gripped the cane with one hand and made an expansive gesture with the other. “A place like this is hard to come by. See that old buffet?” He pointed to the large piece just outside what appeared to be the entry to his kitchen. “Solid mahogany. Came with Gramps from Ireland. Some people say I should get rid of it. But not me. Why throw that out, then go and get something half as good? I never been a man to waste money. Didn’t waste the department’s when I was on the force. Don’t believe in wasting mine now.”

  Bellamy eased down in the armchair opposite, a large wingback covered with thinning blue brocade. A worn pack of cigarettes lay on a round wooden table nearby. He leaned forward, folded his hands on the handle of his cane and regarded me with puzzled interest.

  “You’re really here about the Esther Todd case? You can’t be serious.”

  “But I am.”

  “That case is … what? Three, four years old? Nobody’s thinking about it anymore.”

  “I am.”

  He looked me over and then relaxed back in his chair. “What’s your name again?”

  A man like Bellamy, someone with thirty years on the force … he’d started having me checked out the minute we hung up the phone. He knew my name, all right, and a whole lot more. If he wanted to play dumb, I could play along. But if he wanted to annoy me, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  “Lanie,” I said. “Lanie Atkins Price. I write a column for the Harlem Chronicle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A weekly newspaper.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  He gave a wicked little smile and a raised eyebrow. He was good at this, the game of provocation. But I was even better at resisting it. I had to be. In those days, for a black person dealing with a cop, even a retired one, knowing when and how to yield was a matter of survival.

  “Well,” I smiled back, “take my word for it. It exists. Has a good circulation, too. At least 20,000.”

  “Just among shines, though, huh?”

  I worked hard to keep the irritation in check. “Just in Manhattan, some parts of Brooklyn and New Jersey.”

  “Basically wherever you people are found? I mean, in the New York City area?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  He tapped his cane on the floor. He had a white canary in a small cage sitting in the window. The bird gave a pretty chirp, spread its little wings and made an attempt to fly. But it hit the top of the cage with a hard thump and fluttered back to the little wood stick that served as a perch. Sad little thing ... Frustrated. I pulled my gaze away, went into my purse and took out my pad and pencil.

  “So are you interested in the robbery or the kidnapping?” he asked.

  “I’m writing about the kidnapping. But the kidnapping and the heist have been tied together.”

  “That’s right. No way of dealing with one without the other.”

  “So the police say.”

  His smile turned cynical and he gave a little nod, as though I’d just confirmed a suspicion.

  “What you’re here for,” he said
, “what you’re really here for is to do another hatchet job on the department. Or is it just on me?” He touched his chest.

  “No. Not at all.”

  He gave a skeptical grunt.

  “You wouldn’t be the first one. The papers printed some nasty stuff about us. Me and Ritchie, we were busting our guts and all we got was grief. Everybody took shots at us. At first you colored said we weren’t doing enough to find her. Then you said we were doing too much for the wrong reason. As for that Park Avenue crowd … Bah!” He gave a dismissive wave. “I used to tell Ritchie to forget about all of you. I used to say, ‘You can’t keep one eye on the evidence and the other on the papers.’”

  “With a high profile case like that, that’s what happens. You either solve it or sink it, before it sinks you.”

  He didn’t like that. We both knew what the case had done to his career.

  “All I know is, you guys made a bad situation worse.”

  The bird in the cage made another attempt to fly. Once more, it thumped against the roof and came down. I’ve seen birds go crazy like that, banging their heads and beating their wings against bars until they were stark raving mad.

  “Why the sudden interest? After all this time? You digging for some Christmas change, the reward money?”

  “Let’s just say I’m doing a favor for a member of the family.”

  “Oh,” he nodded. “You mean Ruth Todd? She’s still around? Yeah, I guess she would be. She’s something, isn’t she? Man, oh man, was she a pest. But I guess I can understand it. No doubt, I’d be the same way if it was my sister disappeared like that.”

  “Quite honestly, Detective, you surprise me. At the time of Esther’s disappearance, the police showed little empathy for her or her family. All they wanted to do was blame her for the heist.”