Untitled Mystery
an excerpt

The good old days they call it now. Neighbor helped neighbor. You could leave your door unlocked. The kiddies could go to the corner store without getting their pictures on a milk carton. Yeah? Where were you livin'? 'Cause that ain't the New York I remember!

Take my first day on the job. I'm walking a beat down on Delancey when this little old lady comes running up, flailing her arms and screaming as how some guy's killing one of her tenants. I go charging up to the third floor, like Roosie up San Juan Hill. Turns out it's Mugs Maguire beating the Hell out of one of his 'ladies of the evening' and doing a right thorough job of it, as I recall. I break it up, give 'em a talking to, and pretty soon they're making nice like nothing ever happened. I figure my job's done. Right?

No sooner do I get back down to the sidewalk than here comes Maguire flying out the third floor window with a kitchen chair right behind him. Breaks his neck landing face first into Old Man Rosenbloom's potato cart. Now, as I seen it, she done the community a service, but what could I do? I had to run her in. I mean, somebody had to pay for the damn window. Last I heard, she married some salesman from Jersey and went legit. Sings in the choir at church now. Go figure.

But, that's not what you want to hear about, is it? You want to know about what happened in '28. There's been alot of talk about that case. Some of it true. First thing, forget about what you read in the papers back then. I'm not saying reporters lie, exactly, but they sure have a way of improving the truth. There's only two people know the whole story, and I'm one of them. So, maybe it's time to set the record straight.

Arthur Mayhew and I, we didn't travel in the same social circles. I knew who he was, alright. He owned those ice cream parlors; the ones with the red and white awnings. You remember, 'Arthur's ... where the customer is king'. He had his name in the papers at least a dozen times: 'Arthur Mayhew donates ice cream to the orphans asylum', 'Arthur Mayhew donates big bucks to the Boys' Opportunity Home' and such like that. He was a popular guy that Mayhew.

The shop on East 86th was the first Arthur's location. I can't tell you how long it had been there. I took my kids there for ice cream when they were little and that's been awhile. I'd never had a reason to go upstairs to the main offices until that Tuesday in June.

It wasn't a big outfit, just Mayhew, his secretary and a couple of bookkeepers. His secretary was a slender woman in her late forties. Her dark hair was sparsely streaked with gray. Her features were set with that indefinable look of a woman who could run the office, whether the boss was there or not, and could set the most confident salesman to flight with no more than a glance.

She looked up from her paperwork when I strolled in, and a warm smile swept across her lips. "Frank O'Neill!"

I gave her my best smile. "Hiya, toots. Long time, no see."

"What's it been? Two years? Three? How's Eileen?" She capped her pen, laid it aside, and gave me her full attention. Gladys had a way of looking at you like you were the only other person in the world.

"Has it been that long?" On the way over, I had tried to remember the last time the wife and I had had her over for dinner. It hadn't come to me. We used to play pinochle with her and Harv on a fairly regular basis.

I picked up the oak-framed 5X7 on her desk and took a gander at it. There, in black and white, was a much younger Gladys and the love of her life, Harvey Barlow. They were standing in front of a wooden fence with a beach in the background. She was tall and thin and wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and a blousy sundress. He was a few inches shorter than her, even with the panama hat cocked on his head. He had that kind of smirk on his lips like he was remembering a funny joke. You could always count on Harv for a good joke, most of them you couldn't tell the wife. Well, not my wife, anyhow. "Where was this taken?"

"Atlantic City. We went there on our tenth anniversary, the year before he passed." Her smile faltered for a moment. "John tells me that Frankie joined the force."

"Yeah. Maybe six months ago." Her brother, Lt. John Mulvaney, was my boss at the Thirteenth Precinct, up on East 104th. He had sent me over to talk to her that afternoon. I set the photograph back on her desk and watched her adjust it into exactly the same position it had been in before I picked it up. "So, Gladys, I hear your boss is missing. You wanna tell me about it?"