Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Mrs. O'Malley's Midnight Mystery, Chapter six (final scene)

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1700:

Brief check-in: Yesterday I didn’t get in both walks because a longer than anticipated catch-up call with our daughter ate into the time I had for second walk, but I didn’t mind! I did get over 600 words written again, so all-in-all a good day, with more gorgeous blooms. Thought I would highlight those non-rose plants that are really producing this spring as well.

Throughout the month of April, I am offering, for free, the seventh short story in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery. These posts have come out every Tuesday and Thursday. This story, right on the border between being a short story and a novella, actually has chapters, so below is the sixth (and final) chapter. If you would like to start at the beginning of the story, click HERE.

Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery
by M. Louisa Locke
Copyright, 2020

Chapter Six:

Monday, early evening, October 10, 1881
O’Malley’s, Beale Street

“Boys, come and wash your hands before dinner. I don’t think anything more’s going to happen across the street,” Mrs. O’Malley said.

Deirdre, who had been slicing ham, went to herd the younger twins, Connor and Callum, away from the window, while Mrs. O’Malley moved the kitchen chair so they could climb up and reach the faucet over the sink.

Then she went to stand behind Bri and Bennie, who were leaning out of the open window, watching the crowd that was still milling around outside Mrs. Greeley’s lodging house. The landlady herself was leaning out of her front parlor window, regaling the neighbors with the story of how she had been woken up in the dead of the night by fifteen coppers who broke in and ransacked her home.

Mrs. O’Malley had been a witness to this event, which had consisted of two policemen politely knocking on the door around five in the morning until Mrs. Greeley came down to let them in. She wondered how many police would feature in the woman’s story by tomorrow. As far as ransacking, Mrs. O’Malley suspected that the only thing they had done was check the room where the three men were living. They must have found something, because soon after it got light, a carriage pulled up, and several more officers went into the building and very shortly came out carrying a couple of boxes. Once the carriage left, the police presence vanished as well, leading Mrs. O’Malley to conclude that the three men must be in custody.

But that was only a guess, and it appeared that Mrs. Greeley knew even less, as a good part of her complaint to the neighbors was that the police wouldn’t tell her what the men had done wrong. That hadn’t kept her from speculating, and over the course of the day, the crime the men supposedly committed had grown from petty thievery to murder. What Mrs. Greeley hadn’t mentioned was any attempted bank robbery.

“Ma, why don’t you let me and Bennie run up to Market and get a copy of the Bulletin?” Bri said. “See if there’s anything in the evening edition.”

She was sorely tempted.

“Look, isn’t that Officer McGee, the one who came by last week Friday?” Bennie asked, excitedly. “Looks like he’s coming to see us.”

Bennie had leaned so far out of the window that Mrs. O’Malley grabbed him by his belt and pulled him back in, while she peered over his shoulder.

“Yes, it is, and if you two are good and go wash up, I might even let you hear what he has to say when he gets here. So scoot.”

When she opened the door a moment later, she said, “Come in, Patrick. The children are about to eat. Would you like a plate?”

“Oh, I wish I could, but I can’t stay long. But I felt I needed to let you know what happened before you went off to work this evening. I’ve told Officer MacGowan to get a statement from you tomorrow morning, at your convenience.”

“Me? Why me?” Mrs. O’Malley asked as she ushered Patrick into the room and indicated that he take the chair by the window.

“Because your observations about the men’s comings and goings need to be part of the record. But don’t worry, ma’am, it’s unlikely you would ever have to testify.”

Mrs. O’Malley turned and asked Alice to fetch the chair from the next room and then quietly asked Deirdre, once she got the boys settled at the table, to make up a ham sandwich for Officer McGee.

When she was finally seated across from Patrick, who only sat when she did, she said, “I guess that means that the men were, indeed, up to no good?”

With evident satisfaction, Patrick said, “Yes, you were absolutely correct. They were breaking into a vault––in the Sutter Bank, and when we caught them, they were well on their way to robbing the safe and other valuables located there.”

“And they were using Heller’s building to get into the bank vault?”

“Yes, indeed. Franz Heller has his residence above his store, and the three men broke through the wall of a cupboard in his spare bedroom in order to access the storeroom on the floor above the Sutter Bank’s vault. It appears that, over the course of several weekends, they had removed a four-foot square of wood flooring in that storeroom and pried out all ten of the layers of brick and iron ties that made up the ceiling of the vault. They were already down in the vault itself when we found them last night.”

“Oh, my,” Mrs. O’Malley said, trying to imagine the scene.

Patrick went on to describe how, when he got back to Pine Street and Officer Coles said no one had left, he had run all the way up Sansom Street and over to police headquarters in the old City Hall. He finally convinced the sergeant on night duty that a bank robbery might be in progress and had him send two more officers to Pine Street so they could watch both the front and the back doors of both Heller’s place and the bank. Then he used the station telephone to call Chief Jackson in order to get permission to enter Heller’s store and the rooms above and see what was happening.

Mrs. O’Malley noticed that all of her children, who were now seated at the table, were pretending to eat, while clearly listening with immense interest to everything that was being said.

“I can tell you,” Patrick said, “I hoped to heaven the Chief wouldn’t be angry that I woke him up in the middle of the night with my story about three men and bags of bricks. Did I ever talk fast! I said I was afraid if we just stood by that they might get away. Too many windows in Heller’s building and his roof gives access to a whole city block of buildings. Too hard for three policemen to keep all those exits under observation.”

She thought about the warren of interconnecting roofs in her own block and nodded.

He continued, “Thing is, last year, bank robbers in Sacramento got plumb away, while the local police were watching the building. Very embarrassing. I argued that it would be better if we could catch them in the building, hopefully in the act of robbing the bank. I also added that if Heller wasn’t in on the plans, they might be holding him hostage…which has happened in other places. Said we needed to make sure he was all right.”

“Oh my, Patrick. What did Chief Jackson say?”

“He said I better be correct about my suspicions, but that he was going to direct Sergeant Thompson to oversee everything, so we all should sit tight until Thompson arrived. He also said he was going to notify the president of the Sutter Bank. Thompson got to us in about thirty minutes. By that time, it was already three. I’d already located a downstairs window to jimmy open so we could get in without making a fuss. Didn’t take long to locate the men’s voices, which were coming from the second floor. That’s when we found the cupboard, went through to the next room, and caught them. One man was still in the storeroom. The other two were down the hole in the vault itself.”

“Was Mr. Heller or anyone else there?”

“No, and for now, we don’t think Franz Heller was in on the plans because then the men wouldn’t have had to do all their work on weekends. Turns out that Heller goes across to Oakland to stay with his daughter and family every Saturday after he closes up shop, and he doesn’t come back until early Monday morning.”

“And that might be why Officer Furstenberg didn’t see them coming or going on Wednesday or Thursday night,” Mrs. O’Malley said, feeling slightly bad that she had suspected the man of sheer incompetence. Although he certainly had made it easy for them to avoid him on Saturdays and Sundays.

Patrick said, “That’s also why they felt they had to dispose of the bricks somewhere else, so as not to give away what they were up to over the several weeks it was going to take them to get through to the vault. We found the plaster from the cupboard wall and most of the iron ties that you mentioned in the bottom of the cupboard, covered up by boxes.”

Mrs. O’Malley thought about her own small two rooms and said, “Weren’t they taking a risk that Heller wouldn’t have a reason to look in that cupboard?”

“Given the possible reward of robbing one of the better capitalized banks, I guess they thought it worth the risk. The square of wood flooring in the storeroom they had cut out could be put back in place each night, and they had also positioned a cabinet from the storeroom in front of the hole from Heller’s cupboard. That way they could pull it back in place every time they left. That way if anyone came up to the bank storeroom during the week, nothing would look out of place. But the bricks were too bulky to hide easily.”

“So they put them in bags and brought them to Mrs. Greeley’s lodging house.” Mrs. O’Malley felt a good deal of satisfaction that her suspicion that they were up to no good proved true. She said, “How did they get into Heller’s store if he wasn’t in on the plans?”

“They had a key. The man you saw wearing the derby, who said his name was Mr. Smith, is really Jack Faith, a professional bank robber. He’s a nationally known cracksman––Sergeant Thompson recognized him right away from photographs we keep of known criminals. Evidently, Faith started his life as a skilled mechanic who worked for a safe manufacturing company for awhile.”

Mrs. O’Malley saw that Bri and Bennie had stopped even pretending to eat and were hanging onto Patrick’s every word. She decided to simply ignore them and said, “Is this man Faith from San Francisco?”

“No, as far as Thompson knew, he’d never been in the city before. Whenever he arrived, Faith probably spent some time checking out the various banks in town and noticed that Heller was gone every weekend. That would seem like a perfect opportunity. For a man with Faith’s experience, it wouldn’t be difficult to figure out how to make a copy of the key to Heller’s place, or to Mrs. Greeley’s lodging house, for that matter.”

“They probably picked Mrs. Greeley’s because it was located in easy walking distance to the bank,” Mrs. O’Malley said.

“Yes, they very well could have been in the city for a while, figuring everything out, but living somewhere else. Faith is rumored to have pulled off several successful bank robberies throughout Pennsylvania in the mid-seventies, and he and a crew of three men were caught robbing the Brooklyn Savings Bank in 1878. Got over two million dollars in registered securities that time and they were sentenced to New York’s Auburn State Prison, but Faith escaped last year. No one knows where he’s been since, although there were a couple of bank robberies in St. Louis that might be his work.”

“What about the other two men?”

“They don’t have records that we know of before now, but they might have given us false names. We’ve sent out descriptions of them to different police and sheriff departments. But I tell you one thing, they were eager to put all the blame on Faith, which I’m inclined to believe. I bet he was the brains and they were the brawn he hired to do the hard work of digging up and carrying the bricks.”

“What about Faith? What’s he saying?”

“He’s not talking. Thompson thinks he might be hoping that we’ll have to send him back to New York, because of the warrant they put out after his escape. He could be hoping that our district attorney won’t bother to contest that or try to bring him back here for trial.”

“Are you saying he could get away with the attempted robbery here?”

“Oh, I think that is unlikely. Particularly because we caught him in the bank vault, with all the equipment to blow a safe, sitting at his feet.”

“Equipment?”

“Oh, yes. Everything a professional safe-cracker needs––a crowbar, special chisels, and combination jimmies. And if none of that worked, there was also powder, dynamite, and nitroglycerin to blow the door of the safe off.”

“Saints preserve us, how would they expect to get away after making that kind of noise?”

Patrick said, “Thing is, that would been the last resort. I think the fact that I stopped them on Saturday night spooked Faith. When we checked their room, it looked like they were packed up, ready to leave. Even if they did have to blow the safe, the bank vault, with its walls made up of all those layers of brick, might have muffled the sound enough. Or at least, if anyone did report the sound, by the time the police were brought in and got someone to come open up the bank, they could have exited through Heller’s place and no one would have been the wiser.”

“Oh, Patrick, Chief Jackson must be so pleased with you!”

The young man blushed and said, “He did tell Sergeant Thompson that he wouldn’t take it amiss if I tried out for the detective branch the next time there’s an opening. But I made sure I wasn’t the only one to get credit. I told everyone about how it was your initial suspicions about the men that got me involved and how I wouldn’t have acted as quickly without you telling me about the bricks being from a vault.”

“That’s real kind of you. But most young men would have simply dismissed my suspicions as the imaginings of a silly woman. I can only imagine what would have happened if I’d gone to Officer Furstenberg with the mystery of why the three men were coming and going in the middle of a Sunday night.”

Patrick grinned at her and reached into his coat while saying, “I can tell you there’s one man who’s real glad I listened to you, and that is Mr. Archibald Kaplan, the president of the Sutter Bank. You saved him a heap of money by telling me your suspicions. And he wanted me to give you this bank note by way of thanks.”

Mrs. O’Malley, who had never held anything worth more than a dollar, looked with wonder at the piece of paper in Patrick’s hand. She took it from him, admiring the green curlicues on one side and wondering who the angry young woman with the crown was on the bottom right of the other side.

Suddenly she found herself surrounded by her children, with Bennie shouting, “Ma! It says fifty dollars on it. Can you believe it! Fifty dollars! What’ll you spend it on?”

Mrs. O’Malley said, “Bennie, my dear, I think what I’ll spend it on is beds for you and your brothers, beds to put in the new room you’ll have when we move into a three-room flat down past Sixth.”

The End

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