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headquarters, the midwife looked more like a wronged woman than a suspect in a murder case. Her chair was moved over to the window, suffusing sunlight over thefashionable tulle-trimmed hat that she’d quickly donned when detectives hustled her from the apartment over Werner’s Drug Store.
    “My name is Augusta Nack,” she stated carefully for the record. “I am thirty-eight years of age. I have been living with William Guldensuppe for sixteen months.”
    She was, by her account and by her accent, a German immigrant. She’d married Herman Nack in 1883 in Lauenburg, on the Elbe. They’d moved here in 1886, whereupon Herman had squandered a series of jobs—in a pottery works, as a bologna-store proprietor, and finally as a grocer—all on account of his drinking. He was gone, their children were dead, and now she worked as a midwife and kept the occasional boarder, one of whom had been Guldensuppe.
    What, O’Brien wanted to know, had happened to Guldensuppe after their argument the previous Friday, when he’d demanded money from her?
    “The last time he was in the house Friday was about two p.m. He did not come home that night. Saturday morning between six and seven he came into the house.” Mrs. Nack continued her account steadily, carefully choosing her words. “ ‘Where did you come from?’ I asked. ‘None of your business,’ he told me. ‘Have you got that money?’ … I then went to the Franklin Savings Bank at Forty-Second and Eighth Avenue and drew fifty dollars. This was about eleven o’clock Saturday morning. From the bank—”
    Speak louder
.
    “
From the bank
I went to a confectionery store on Eighth Avenue and had some ice cream soda water. From there I went to the dry goods store of McPartland & Flaherty, and reached home about noon. I stayed until Willie came in, which was between three and four o’clock. The first thing he did was ask for the money. ‘Here itis’ I replied, throwing it on the kitchen table. Willie picked it up and went out, and I have not seen him since.”
    O’Brien and his detectives listened and took notes carefully. Home on Saturday afternoon; that was several hours after the first find in the East River. The implication was that Guldensuppe was still alive. Which, of course, he might be; after all, the body still didn’t have a head or legs, and the morgue had filled again that day with people identifying the pieces as belonging to any number of other men.
    So, can we talk with him?
    Well, she explained, that’s just it. Willie hadn’t been back home since then. He’d sent notes asking for more money, though. Just yesterday, come to think of it. Probably spending it all on a woman somewhere.
    “Monday afternoon I was convinced that Willie would not come back to me, and made up my mind to go to Europe—”
    Louder
.
    “
Go to Europe
and see my mother, who was sick. Willie had asked me to draw my money from the bank and give it to him, saying he would accompany me to Europe, but this I had refused to do.”
    The last she’d heard from him, she said, was the day before—on Tuesday.
    “About ten o’clock,” she continued, “a man came to the house with a note from Willie asking for his clothes. I wrote on the back of the note, in German,
No; if you want your clothes come and get them yourself
. About two o’clock in the afternoon two other men, who were dirty and disreputable looking, and spoke English, came and said Willie wanted his clothes.… I put them in a brown valise and gave them to the men. That was the last I heard of him.”
    The room lapsed into an unnerving silence. O’Brien motioned to a woman he had hidden just outside his office door. It wasPauline Riger, dry-goods proprietress of Astoria, and she had been listening all along.
    “This is the woman who bought the oilcloth,” Riger said as she eyed Mrs. Nack. The proprietress had a hawklike countenance, and her face was sharp and pinched in concentration. “I am sure of her.”
    “You