Louisa spent another bad night. Now it was Newcome as well as Minnie, appearing in dreams not as themselves but as cats and dogs and old patients of Arthur’s, animals and humans she had somehow failed, losing them, trying to find her way back to them, running from somebody or something that took her farther and farther from them. Waking at midnight, she felt melancholy, futile; she dozed, twisted the bedcovers, dreamed through an agony of sex that never went anywhere, to wake and know the dream had been about Manion, although he hadn’t been in it as himself. At three, she was sitting by the window again, shivering in a wrap. Nobody came down the alley until after five, and they were only the breakfast staff.
She felt little for Newcome himself. In the end, she hadn’t liked him much. His aunt would be affected, she thought, but Mrs. Simmons was probably tougher than her soft body and her laces suggested. And perhaps she hadn’t liked Newcome much, either.
For Louisa, Minnie’s death caused Newcome’s to shrink to a dot.
Grief for Minnie had settled in as a kind of ache. She felt no pangs of the heart, no flashes of romantic loss, but the ache seemed always to be there. Grief, regret, loss. And anger, which did flash and thunder, anger not at Minnie for dying but at her murderer for killing her…
She wanted to lie in bed and sink back into sleep. She wanted to be numb. Instead, she dozed sitting up, then crawled into bed only to throw herself out of bed again at seven.
At ten, she was far downtown at Chase’s Bank on Nassau Street. She asked there whether she could draw money on her husband’s account, but no matter what documents she showed, they were terribly sorry, Mrs. Doyle, but they would need permission from her husband and his signature. Couldn’t he wire money to her?
She went back uptown to Union Square and found his publishers and then his editor, who was genial and gave her tea but couldn’t advance her money from Arthur’s royalties. He offered her a loan of twenty-five dollars of his own money; she refused, later regretted the refusal. He too suggested she wire Arthur; she murmured, “Of course,” and went away.
Back at the hotel, she found a note from Detective-Sergeant Dunne asking to meet him at the hotel at one, no answer required if she agreed. Why not? she thought. What else had she to do?
The hotel had a stunned quiet to it, as if the building had itself suffered the death. The lobby was almost empty, the pile of luggage gone—most of it, one of the boys confided, to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Not only had the new arrivals decamped, but also some of the residents. Newcome’s death had been in the morning papers, grisly in the less staid ones, where “inversion” was hinted at. The Express had it on an inner page, only a long paragraph; the first page carried a story about Minnie, who was called the Express’s “star reporter” and “the third victim of a crazed monster.” The article hinted darkly at a connection between her death and the piece she had written two days before but made no accusations—it seemed to have it both ways, that she had been “fingered by Fate itself for so horrible an end,” but also that “the explanation for the terrifying act may lie in her discoveries of only two days ago.” A separate box said that the newspaper would pay for “the finest funeral New York can offer” as soon as her body was released by the coroner and the police.
But what difference will it make? What good will it do? Louisa remained a clergyman’s daughter, for whom funerals were hollow rituals. She thought that Minnie would be forgotten as quickly as any other nine-days’ wonder; memory of her wouldn’t survive as long as the graffiti by the newsroom elevator, which might keep her name visible for another year or two.
Her ankle felt rather better. She sat in the empty lobby and drank tea and nursed her resentments: Arthur, the bank, the publisher. Money.
Well, I have to have some money. And I’m damned if I’ll ask Arthur again. I won’t beg! There would be a new bill from the hotel, certainly smaller than the last but payable on demand, regardless. There were Ethel’s wages. There would be cabs, food, things until Arthur arrived, even if he did show up tomorrow as his telegram had said. She wouldn’t let him ride in on his high horse and rescue her by paying all her bills: she wanted to pay them herself. With his money? a sneering inner voice whispered.
Then, she knew, there would be a major row, at first about the money, then about his having to return to New York when he hadn’t planned to. It would be ugly. He was already angry; now so was she. They had had few real arguments, but she knew he feared her anger. Well, he had brought it on himself.
Money. How did people get money in a hurry?
She signaled to one of the boys.
“Where is the nearest pawn shop?”
He behaved as if guests asked him about pawn shops all the time. “Closest one is Fine’s Gold on Sixt’, but don’t go there; he’s a crook. Go ta Friendly Pawn over on Sevent’, couple blocks down—sout’ a Twenny-Foist.”
She went to Reception and asked for her jewel case from the safe, grateful that she had signed it in herself and had not had Arthur do it. The same panjandrum who had registered them was on duty; he said grandly that of course he would get it immediately. When he came back with it, he murmured, “A very sad day at the New Britannic, Mrs. Doyle.” He sounded to her like an undertaker.
“I suppose Mrs. Simmons is in seclusion.”
“Dr. Strauss was with her all last evening.” He lowered his voice. “Mr. Carver is in shock.”
She supposed she had some special status because she had been there for so long; otherwise, why would he have confided in her? She said, “I don’t see Mr. Manion today.”
“He is helping the police, madame.”
She didn’t see how Manion could help the police, especially as he had seemed so cowed since Dunne had questioned him, but she pictured his going over guest lists, perhaps letting the police into rooms. What could they be looking for now?
A cross-town horse tram took her west on Twenty-Third Street, this time to Seventh Avenue. She got down and had to orient herself, then got in a queue for the downtown car of the Seventh Avenue Line. She left it at Twenty-First—it seemed ridiculous to her to take the car for so short a distance, but she was trying to save the ankle—and walked down, then back up, looking for the pawn shop, at last spotted it on the other side of the avenue.
Her mother had taught her that pawning was a sign of weakness, of failure, besides being low and common. Only people whose failures were their own fault were so morally low as to pawn.
But here she was.
She wondered if Minnie had ever had to pawn anything.
She walked past the shop three times before she could go in. The large window was filled with unrelated articles—musical instruments, clothes, suitcases, guns, fishing tackle, jewelry. She looked at the jewelry. It looked far inferior to her own. Surely they’d try to cheat her?
When she went in, a breezy-looking woman was just coming out. Her clothes were rather loud, her hair rather insistent; still, she sounded friendly as she held the door for Louisa and said, “Don’t let him Jew you, dearie.”
She found herself in a larger version of the window. The walls and even the ceiling were hung with other people’s valuables. Banjos seemed to her to abound, also men’s summer clothes. On the floor were three glass-topped cases and a pile of furniture, as if somebody were just moving in.
Nobody was in the place, or so she thought until she looked beyond the furniture and saw a barred window like a bank clerk’s till, behind it a man. He had sparse hair, a seemingly emotion-proof face like the stone ones on the tenements. He was looking at her, apparently without interest, but she thought that if she tried to steal something, he’d be on her like a tiger.
She walked to the back.
“Whatcha got, dear?” His voice was harsh and hard, somehow distant, as if he were really in another room.
“I, uh…”
“First time?”
“My first, yes, time to, uh…”
“I can always tell a first-timer. Knew it when you come through the door. In fact, when I saw you walking up and down. Whatcha got?”
She wanted to flee. “Some jewelry.”
“We can’t do business if I don’t see it, can we, dear?”
She was carrying the jewelry case in a net shopping bag. She took it out and placed it on the ledge in front of his bars and pushed it a few inches toward him. He snatched it the rest of the way and had it open before she could have second thoughts.
In the case were her mother’s diamond earrings, tiny bits of diamonds inherited from her mother; there was an opal necklace that Arthur had given her; some pavé; an emerald ring, also from Arthur; assorted jet and gold chains and bangles and pins.
The man had a loupe in one eye. He went through the jewels quickly, pushed the diamond earrings aside, then gathered all the gold pieces in his fingers and dropped them on a balance and began adding tiny weights to the other pan.
Louisa said, “One of those chains was designed by Louis of Paris.”
“Don’t make me no never-mind, dear; we pay by the weight. Gold is gold.” He wrote something down, swept the gold out of the pan and dumped it next to the now empty case. “A hunnert and sixty bucks, dear.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes.” He pushed the diamond earrings toward her. “You can keep these.”
“Those are my mother’s diamonds!”
“Paste, dear. If I had a dollar for every one of somebody’s mother’s pearls or diamonds that turned out to be paste, I wouldn’t be sitting in this cage. Hunnert and sixty.”
“I must have two hundred dollars.” She didn’t know why she chose that figure, but she thought that she was supposed to bargain.
“Give me more stuff, then, dear.”
“That sapphire ring alone is worth more!”
“It may be, dear, but we aren’t buying your things; we’re loaning you on them. They’re collateral. If we forked over full value, we’d be broke in six months. A hunnert sixty.”
“And I can have them back?”
“Thirty days, total amount plus ten percent. You don’t redeem or pay another ten percent in thirty days, we sell them.”
Ten percent would be sixteen dollars. A hundred and seventy-six dollars to pay back within thirty days! The money would have to come from Arthur. What a row that would be. She felt a glow of self-righteousness: he deserved it for being so miserly. It gave her a pleasurable pain to think that he had given her some of the things she would be pawning. Serve him right if I didn’t redeem them.
But she was looking beyond the bars, beyond the man, at the wall behind him, where something that reminded her of Victoria Woodhull had caught her eye. She said, “What is that little gun?”
“Which one, dear? This one? Oh, this.” He plucked it off the wall, constantly glancing back to make sure she wasn’t covertly retrieving some of her own property. He held the gun, looked it over, looked at the tag on it. “This is a Smith and Wesson .32 Double Action.”
“Double Action seems an odd name.”
“I didn’t name it, dear. Ask the company. That’s a very nice little revolver for a lady, fits her hand, not too much concussion of the fingers. You can have that gun for three dollars fifty.” He pushed it through to her.
She picked it up. “It’s very heavy!”
“It’s steel, dear. You get used to it.”
She handled it as if it were an explosive. She knew nothing about guns, nor why she had fixed on this one, nor why any gun at all. She hadn’t been thinking about guns. But she had been thinking about Minnie and Newcome and her fears, which, since Minnie’s death, had seemed to come closer. Before, the deaths had been terrible but separate from her; no longer. “Do you have bullets for it?”
“Of course, dear. Maybe partial boxes, you know, somebody buys the gun and shoots a few bullets and decides he doesn’t want it, but you get a bargain. That’s a fine little gun, I assure you. Three dollars fifty.”
She put the gun down on the counter. “I’ll take your offer on my jewelry if you’ll include the gun and some bullets.”
“That would be an extra five dollars, dear.”
“That’s my offer.”
He actually laughed. “I’m the one makes the offers.” He chuckled again. “You got spunk. You’re Scotch, am I right about that? You’re not planning to shoot your husband, are you, dear? I see you got a wedding ring there. And a nice ruby; I’d give you another fifteen for the ruby ring, round it up to one seventy-five?”
“No, thank you.” She couldn’t go so far as to do that to Arthur.
He smiled at her. He looked almost fatherly. “Okay, dear, because you’re a first-timer, and you got class, and you’re the first one to say ‘No thank you’ to me in about forty years. A hunnert and sixty and the gun and some ammunition.”
Her jewelry disappeared so fast she couldn’t follow it; he seemed to have swept it into a drawer she could not see. However, he was doing something down there and writing on a cardboard ticket and then in a ledger, then scribbling on much smaller tags. As if he knew what she feared—and of course he knew exactly what she feared—he said, “We tag everything with your number, which is the number of the ticket I’m gonna give you with your money. Don’t lose your ticket, dear; you can’t redeem without it.” He went on writing, finished at last and pushed the ticket through to her. “Read me the list on the back of the ticket and we’ll compare.”
His writing was almost like a penmanship example, eminently legible. She read off the items, and with each one he picked it from somewhere out of sight and put it on the counter between them. He asked her twice if that was everything, was she satisfied? and then he had her sign the ticket and sign in the ledger in which he had listed everything.
“Louisa Doyle parentheses Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle. You related to the Sherlock Holmes writer? Are you really? Don’t feel bad, dear, all kindsa people come in here and leave things. I had a duchess oncet. You’d be surprised at the politicians and their wives. Cops. Cops’ wives. Everybody gets caught short now and then.” He was counting out paper money, US gold and silver certificates. He slid them under the grille. “Count it, please.”
He opened a drawer to his left and took out two small boxes in bright blue and yellow and passed them to her. “That’s your ammunition. You notice I don’t give it to you until the very last. That’s so you won’t use it to hold me up. I don’t think you will, but we got a rule.”
“I shall need only one box, I think.”
“No, you need two. One’s .32 shorts, one’s .32 longs. The shorts you can use for practice and like that; the longs’re for getting serious. They’re more powerful. Neither box is chock full—there’s four missing from one and six from the other—but those are boxes of fifty, so you can scare a lot of husbands before you run out.”
“That was generous, to give me both boxes. I wouldn’t have known any better.”
“Believe it or not, we aren’t hairy monsters with bad breath in this business. Just don’t really shoot your husband, okay? It makes us look bad. And learn to use that gun. They’re dangerous things.”
“Thank you.”
“Thirty days, dear. No exceptions.”
“You were really very good.”
“Don’t spread it around town. Enjoy New York.”
Outside, she felt suddenly better, almost buoyant. A wintry sun had come out, and the avenue looked warmer and brighter. She was pleased with herself about the gun, which somehow was connected with Minnie. It felt dreadfully heavy in her handbag, and whatever would she do with it? She thought of what it would be like to walk along Seventh Avenue with a loaded revolver in her bag. No, no, that would be impossible. And pointless. Her fears had nothing to do with the daylight or the city; hers were night-time fears. And centreed in the hotel.
Perhaps she could put the gun on her bedside table.
Or in a shoe pushed under the bed.
Arthur will be furious.
As soon as she was back in her room in the annex, she wrote a note to Colonel Cody: “My dear Colonel Cody, I know it is an imposition but I must ask you for a favor. Is there anyone in your Wild West who could give me a few minutes to teach me to shoot a revolver? (I greatly prefer that it be a woman.) I feel so helpless because of my ankle, and this city is so dangerous. Yours sincerely, Louisa Doyle.”
***
Detective-Sergeant Dunne was there at exactly one, not in the same room as the evening before but in a small office at the back of the hotel. Louisa was led to it by one of the hotel employees, who told her somewhat dismissively that the office was “old Mr. Carver’s,” as if old Mr. Carver had disappeared a generation before and was not living five floors above them. The office was small, furnished with little more than a desk and two chairs and an oak filing cabinet, and it smelled of dust and being too long closed.
Dunne was standing at a window with his back to the door when she was shown in. The same plainclothes man she had seen at the mortuary was with him, already seated and going through the pages of a notebook; he jumped to his feet when he saw Louisa and said, “Mrs. Doyle!”
Dunne turned, looked at her, nodded several times as if her coming confirmed something. He and Louisa said, “Please sit down,” at the same time, Dunne to Louisa, Louisa to Cassidy.
Dunne was still wearing his hairy overcoat, which seemed entirely wrong; the sun was pouring down outside. A hat, presumably his, lay on the empty desktop.
Dunne glanced back at the window, then around the room at framed photographs that hung at eye level, only a few inches apart, like a belt. He gestured. “Please sit down, Mrs. Doyle.” He grasped the chair behind the desk, but instead of pulling it out so as to sit in it, he carried it around the desk and put it down facing hers so that they were a few feet apart and he could lean one arm on the desk. He pointed a finger at the other detective. “That’s Detective Cassidy. You met him at the Tombs.”
Cassidy gave her a quick smile and went back to his papers. Dunne sniffed and intertwined the fingers of his hands on his chest and looked at the floor. He said, “I want to put some things in order, Mrs. Doyle. It’s the way I do some of my thinking. It doesn’t always seem like a very good way to other people.” He went on studying the floor. “Couple of weeks ago, you were just checking into the hotel and you saw a woman with a man, and you later identified the woman as the first victim of what they’re calling the Bowery Butcher.” He raised his eyebrows. “Identified her correctly, as it turned out.” He sniffed again. “That got you a visit from two cops from the Murder Squad because you’d written to Commissioner Roosevelt about it.” He unwound his fingers and leaned his elbows on his knees and grasped his right wrist with his left thumb and forefinger, still not looking at her. “Then, I hear, you went to the morgue and tried to have a look at her there.” Now he looked up. His eyes were the pale blue of innocence, but they had finished with innocence a long time before.
“It isn’t true that I tried to see the first victim at the morgue. I tried to see the second one. That’s when you took me for the carriage ride.” She worked at making her voice bland. She looked at him and then away from him, settling on the oak filing cabinet behind him.
He said, “Sorry I got that wrong. I know better. What you did was, you got the sketch artist to verify that that was her in the newspaper.” He looked up. “One of my people talked to the sketch artist. Also the hotel Hawkshaw here, when he was telling me that he got the patrolman’s notes for you. Which, by the way, was a crime—both you and him.”
“I didn’t know that, and it seemed quite harmless.” Not quite true, of course.
“And then you managed to get into the morgue to look at the third victim. With the sketch artist again.” He waited. He said, “Looking at a corpse didn’t bother you?”
“To the contrary, it upset me a great deal. But I don’t faint, if that’s what you mean.” She made herself concentrate on the paper labels in narrow brass holders on the fronts of the oak drawers—she thought that the top one, hard for her to read because of her eyesight, said “Registers.” Something of that length, at any rate.
“So you didn’t actually see the first corpse, but you did verify that the newspaper sketch was accurate. You went to Printing House Square to make sure the sketch was accurate, and that’s how you got to know the Fitch girl—right?”
“Yes.”
“Then there was the second murder, and you tried to have a look at her. And I was there and took you for a carriage ride.”
“What are you getting at, Detective-Sergeant?” She looked back at him, allowing the look to be a challenge, then quickly swinging back to the filing cabinet. The second drawer was labeled “Menus, [something] Dinners, [unreadable].”
“And then when Miz Fitch was murdered two days ago, you were the one who identified her.” He waited. He said, “You kissed her.” He looked at her but seemed to expect no comment. He got up and put his hands behind him and paced toward the far wall, where he looked at a photograph and turned back. “You were here to see the first victim; you try to see the second victim; you identify the third victim! Now, I have a question that you may find insulting, but I have to ask it. Does any of this have to do with your husband and the books he writes?”
It didn’t insult her, because she believed he already knew that the answer would be no and would be truthful. She said, “I think you know it didn’t.” She looked again at the file cabinet and the third drawer, which was labeled “History…” and narrowed her eyes and said to herself that she thought there was a dash and then “Plans” and then something else.
He rubbed his chin, used an index fingernail to part the hairs at the middle of his mustache. He looked at another picture and said, “You do admit that you seem to be at the center of a lot of this.”
“I’m not at the center of anything! I’m on the outside, trying to see in.”
“But you do understand that there aren’t many women who will make two separate trips to look at pretty horrible corpses.”
“They were women. I wanted to know what had been done to them!”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? Why can’t men understand that it’s what this killer is doing to women that matters? He’s debasing women, he’s humiliating us, he’s…he’s…erasing us and turning us into something else. Sausages!”
“But what good does looking at the bodies do?”
She frowned. “It helps me to…reach them.” She said, “To understand what he represents.”
“What everybody says about this killer is that he’s a maniac. He doesn’t ‘represent’ anything, does he?”
She didn’t want to parrot Victoria Woodhull. She wanted it in her own words. “I want to understand whether he represents all of you.”
He frowned again. He looked at Cassidy. He looked back at Louisa. “Men?” He sounded astonished.
“You don’t believe me.”
He didn’t respond to that but sat again and put his elbow on the desk, the side of his head on that hand. “You said last night that this hotel is cursed. What’d you mean by that?”
“I suppose I meant Mr. Newcome’s murder. Do you have a suspect yet?”
“We’re looking.” He pursed his lips and stared at her. “You know that Newcome was what’s called an ‘invert.’”
“I came to understand that, yes.”
“The likeliest explanation is that the fella he brought to the hotel killed him. It’s pretty common. His pocketbook was gone, also the bureau drawers had been gone through, a box of cufflinks and studs.” He sighed as if it were depressing. To her surprise, he said, “I don’t care for coincidence.” She must have shown her surprise, because he added, “You see a murder victim here; couple weeks later, man gets murdered here. Death’s hotel, it sounds like.”
“And there’s the French maid two years ago.”
“That was a disappearance.”
“So far as you know.”
“And not something that happened in the hotel.”
“So far as you know.”
“I remember that case. The doorman saw her leave the hotel; he never saw her go back in. Neither did anybody else.”
“The hotel’s as porous as a colander, Detective-Sergeant. Look at Newcome and whoever it was who went in just before him. The French maid could have had a key to the workers’ door, just like them.”
He nodded slowly. “You’ve been thinking about this a lot, haven’t you.”
“I don’t like coincidence, either.”
“You think there’s something in the hotel?”
“I think that perhaps Newcome…recognized somebody when he was in the alley—when he looked inside. I think that you should entertain the idea that he was killed because he recognized somebody. Or is that simply a hysterical woman’s idea?” She shook her head. She told him then about the noises in her room before she’d moved to the annex; then she told him about the missing drawers, but she said “garment.”
“By which I suppose you mean a lady’s unmentionables, and if you didn’t mean that, please correct me. No? Did you report it?”
“I mentioned it to somebody.”
“Who?”
“The hotel detective.”
Dunne snorted. “He didn’t do anything about it, did he? He wouldn’t—he’d know it wouldn’t go anyplace. Well, I can see where a noise and a missing garment would worry you. Are you afraid here?”
She wanted to tell him that she was very afraid, that she was so frightened sometimes she couldn’t sleep, but to do so would be to put herself with the believers in ghosts and Marie Corelli’s archangels and Mrs. Simmons and her dog. Instead, she found herself telling him about the noises that the servants said they heard and what they thought they were.
“Is that what you’re afraid of? Ghosts?”
“Of course not! But there’s something wrong with the hotel.”
“Two deaths and a disappearance. That’s hardly a record for New York hotels.”
“Three deaths. The architect.”
“I missed that one.”
“He’s supposed to have jumped off the roof. Before the hotel was finished.”
Dunne got up and walked to one of the photographs. He looked at it very closely. After several seconds, he turned to Louisa and beckoned. “Look at this.”
She went to stand next to him. She could smell him, a mixture of tweed and man and a bit of pipe smoke. He said to her, “What d’you make of these pictures?” as if they were continuing some conversation that had been interrupted.
“I haven’t seen them before. Oh!” She was slightly near sighted but could read the white letters in the lower right corner of the closest of them, “Carver Pittsburgh.” She stood, looked at several more. “Oh, this one must be of the hotel when it was being built, don’t you think? It says ‘Carver New York.’”
“Most of them say that.” He was standing in front of one of the photographs signed “Carver Pittsburgh,” this one of an austere woman in a black dress of twenty years before. She looked as if she had never smiled. “His mother, d’you think?”
“I wonder which Carver it was who took them.”
“The old man. I asked.” Dunne looked at the hard-faced old woman. “Tougher than tripe, that woman.”
He pressed a blunt fingertip against the glass of a photograph. She put her eye closer and saw, just above the fingertip, a star-shaped, gray something. He said, “I didn’t get it the first time I saw it. Not until you mentioned the architect taking a jump.”
She looked again, then put her head back to look at the whole photo. It took her seconds to make everything out—a view looking straight down, an avenue to the left, a jumble directly below with shapes she saw resolve themselves into wagons and horses seen from above, trees, clutter. And the star shape in the middle. “It’s the hotel. And that’s a man.”
“The architect, maybe. How many jumpers have they had?” He tapped the glass again. In the lower right corner of the photograph it said “Carver New York.”
“Ghoulish,” she said.
“Ghoulish to take it and then ghoulish to put it on the wall. Have you ever seen the old man?”
“Nobody has in years, they say. He lives upstairs with a male nurse. I suppose the doctor sees him. And his son.”
Dunne tipped his head back and looked along his nose at the photograph. He said, “Maybe this place is cursed.” He put a knuckle between his teeth and chewed on it, then said suddenly, “Tell me something.”
“Yes?”
“What exactly do you believe’s going on in this hotel?”
“Something that frightens me.”
He leaned against the desk. “What?”
“I don’t know!” She sounded to herself like the archetypal hysterical woman—that is, like a man’s idea of a hysterical woman. She added, “That he’s in the hotel—what else do you think?”
“The Butcher?” He frowned at that, looked at Cassidy, who was frowning, too. Dunne said, “Anything else you haven’t told me?”
“Mrs. Simmons’s dog.” She told him about the dog and the barking. He asked if she believed it was a ghost and she said she thought that was nonsense. “But it was just after the French maid disappeared.”
He digested that. “Was there any smell?”
“Mrs. Simmons didn’t say. But old people don’t notice smells.”
“A corpse would smell.”
“I didn’t say it was a corpse!”
“But it must be what you suspect—why else would you put the dog and the disappearance together?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know! It’s this damned place!”
He made a humming sound, then took a turn to the window and back. “Mrs. Simmons is Newcome’s aunt.” He made it sound like ant. “If it wasn’t for his death, I’d march in and ask her about the dog. But you know, I’d never get a search warrant on anything that flimsy—we’d have to start taking the wall down, and there’d be a load of resistance from the hotel.”
“The walls are brick behind the wood paneling.”
“See? They’d never let me do it.” He sat and pulled his chair a few inches closer. “Look, Mrs. Doyle, I respect your feelings. You’re a smart woman and you know what’s what. But do you have anything—anything—that would kind of…focus your fears about the place? Anything?”
She shook her head. “I think about it. I even dream about it. But it’s all…” She shook her head again. “I’m a foolish woman.”
“No, that you’re not. But you’re a puzzle, because you’re connected to so many of the deaths. Connected by pretty thin threads, I admit—you saw somebody, you knew somebody, you went for a ride in the park with somebody—but you’re connected.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You could look at the men in this cursed hotel, then, if you’ve nothing better to do! Look in the register for starters, see who was staying here when the French maid disappeared and when Mrs. Harding was murdered.”
“Mrs. Doyle, time—”
“And look at all the male employees! How many men does this place employ? How many of them were here two years ago? And how many when ‘Shakespeare’ was murdered five—”
“Mrs. Doyle!”
She bent forward and hugged herself. “Maybe I’m cursed, not the hotel.”
He shook his head at that. They both waited for something more to be said. When the silence had built for too long, he said, “The idea that the Butcher is here is a pretty far reach.” Then he said he was done and she could leave. She got up and put her weight on her cane. She had been looking at the filing cabinet off and on and she was fairly sure that the third drawer said “History—Plans, Construction.”
Put there by old Carver?
“Coming, Mrs. Doyle?”
Sergeant Cassidy was holding the door for her. Dunne had already disappeared. She said, “Oh—sorry.” She moved to go around him, but he stepped out into the corridor and stood with his right hand holding the door open for her, his back to the door. She put her left hand on the edge of it to steady herself and felt the side of her hand strike projecting metal. She felt down, found the shape of a big, old-fashioned key. She said to Cassidy, “Should we lock up?”
“Yes, ma’am. Just waiting for you.” He showed her his key from Reception.
She didn’t stop to think. She slid the inside key out of its socket and closed it into her hand. It was so big that the part that went into the lock stuck out between her thumb and her palm. She turned her fist and hid it in the folds of her skirt. “Thank you so much. I’m so slow with this cane…”
“No trouble at all, ma’am. Take your time.” He was locking the door. She was limping up the corridor, wondering what she would do with the key. And wondering what doors it might open.
***
Dunne was just coming out of a booth where he’d written a telegram when Cassidy came into the lobby. Dunne handed the telegraph form in at Reception and showed his police card and said to the panjandrum, “That’s confidential police business. If you peach, I’ll have you in the Tombs.”
The eminence behind the desk looked shocked. He said something about treating every message as confidential. Dunne went away grinning, muttered “Oh, yeah” to Cassidy. When they were out on Twenty-Third Street, he said, “I wired Pittsburgh to find out what they’ve got on the Carvers out there. The old man took some of those pictures there.” He eyed the Irish doorman, who turned away. “Did you see the old man when you were asking questions last night?”
“Saw him, yeah—asleep. That’s all he does, is sleep.”
“Doctor with him?”
“No, some flunky. A nurse. A guy.”
“What’s the old man look like?”
“White hair. Something wrong with his face—real red, a lot of bumps and things.”
Dunne pushed his fists into his huge overcoat. “There’s something fishy with the Carvers.”
“The nurse guy says you can talk to the old man sometimes, but he won’t get it. He’s off his nut.”
“That’s what I’m maybe afraid of.” Dunne stared at the passers-by as if they were suspects. “I want you and Forcella to go over all the hotel staff’s statements we took yesterday about Newcome. I want to know how many men work for this hotel. Then I want to know how many of them have worked here for at least two years. If you can’t get that from the statements, come back up here and get the information from that manager.”
“You really think there’s something not kosher with the hotel?”
Dunne scowled at the street. “I don’t think Miz Doyle is loony, if that’s what you mean.”
***
Louisa knew, of course, exactly what she was going to do with the key she’d stolen. She ate a small part of the table d’hote luncheon and instead of going back to her room went down the corridor that ran toward the back of the hotel from Reception. Anybody who saw her would think, if they thought at all, that she was going to the ladies’ convenience back there. (Say toilet, Minnie had said. Oh, Minnie…) She went on past the convenience, however, and put the key into the lock of old Mr. Carver’s office—it was her notion that if you did things confidently, nobody would ask questions—and slipped inside.
She went around the desk and leaned her walking-stick on it and sat on the edge of the chair that Dunne had used. She bent forward and read the labels on the filing drawers again. Yes, the third one said “History—Plans, Construction.” She believed in history. It seemed to her to explain many aspects of life. Although not enough of them. Might it explain the New Britannic—and her fear?
The drawer was too full and opened grudgingly. Some of the papers were sticking up and caught on the top of the opening; all of them had been crammed and squeezed in so that she had to struggle to take any out.
There had once been order, she thought: gray card separators stood between inches-thick bundles of paper. She took out the entire first lot, releasing a smell of dust.
“History” meant mostly newspaper articles, along with an early version of the hotel brochure and some letters of congratulation on the hotel’s opening. Many of the newspaper things were puff pieces—“New Hotel to be Most Modern in This City,” and so on—but some were more like straightforward reporting on the building’s progress. “Cornerstone Laid for New Hotel”; “Twenty-Third Street to be Beautified by Hotel Construction”; “Center of Fashionable Caravanserais Moves Uptown to Twenty-third.” She supposed that the impetus for most of them had come from the Carvers—young Carver, then only in his twenties, was quoted in a lot of them.
Some, nonetheless, had substance. Several focused on the unique construction: double-brick walls filled with “crushed Italian volcanic stone.” That expression was used again and again; she guessed it had come from the Carvers, too. There was even a piece about the stone, “Italian Isle of Stromboli’s Volcano Erupts in New York,” which seemed to find newsworthy the purchase of seventy tons of “porous, pumice-like Italian rock from a romantic Italian island.” The rock had come by steamship to a Brooklyn dock, then had been carried in “a parade of more than a hundred wagons” to a crusher in the east Forties.
She moved to the second block of papers, the building plans. These were mostly no more help to her than hieroglyphics would have been. Most were highly detailed, therefore impossible for her to relate to the hotel as a whole. There were large drawings of a fireplace mantel to go into the bar (unseen by her, as she didn’t go into the bar), of the lion-head bosses that were to decorate the front doors (still very much there), of the brass panels on the inside of the lifts (still on display). Many plans showed construction details she couldn’t figure out—mortices, stone joints, brickwork patterns. She had had no idea that putting up a building required so much—even, in one case, specifications for the size nail and the kind of nail-head to be used.
Her eyes smarted after an hour of it, and her head was beginning to ache. Still, she didn’t put on a light, afraid that it might call attention. She folded the papers and put them back into the pile with a sigh. Only toward the back of the drawer did she finally unfold plans that showed the entire hotel, one of them a “typical floor plan” that at last gave her a grasp of how the rooms related to the famous rubble-filled brick walls.
It’s like a giant centipede. What she meant was that the double-brick walls formed a kind of many-legged shape, the body a rectangle that ran around the outside of the principal corridors, the legs projections that ran from those corridors to the outer walls. These double walls were labeled “sound-barrier walls” and in several places had instructions connected to them by beautifully curved arrows with delicate heads, such as “28-inch outer dimension” and “stone fill between.”
But it was untrue that all the internal walls had these sound barriers. In fact, none of the walls within the centipede’s body had them; in there, much of the space was taken up by two air shafts, much of the rest by the lifts and stairways and small rooms and cupboards labeled “janitorial” and “housekeeping.” The fact was, she saw, that if you stayed in one of the New Britannic’s few inner rooms, your view was of an air shaft, and your room was far from soundproof.
Outside the centipede’s body, however, it was another story. The sound-barrier walls (the legs) ran between all adjoining suites and between most adjoining single rooms, although where single rooms opened on a short corridor that paralleled the centipede’s legs, there was no double-brick wall. Sound barriers, the floor plan implied, were for those who could afford them.
The wintry light beyond the window told her it was mid-afternoon; she would have to finish soon. She turned back to something that had snagged her attention; she couldn’t find it, then did, had to put her nose almost against the dust-smelling paper to read it: “Deluxe closet.”
Closet means cupboard. She knew that because it was in a glossary of American terms in her guidebook. But what would a deluxe cupboard be? She followed the curving line down to the little arrow at its end; it pointed at—she had to go to the legend in a lower corner to find what the symbols meant—a fireplace. A gap of about eighteen inches seemed to have been left next to the fireplace for the deluxe cupboard. What would be deluxe about a cupboard only eighteen inches wide?
She pictured the sitting room in the suite she had had. There had been a fireplace. Next to it had been paneling. Were the panels eighteen inches wide? Only a foot and a half? Had their suite not been deluxe enough to have a cupboard?
Like one scene replacing another in a harlequinade, the mental picture of her former suite became one of Mrs. Simmons’s. It was exactly the same, except that there was a dog barking at the place where the deluxe cupboard should have been.
She peered again nearsightedly at the plan. Several suites had no deluxe cupboard, or at least the plan had no notation for one. But there was one with a cupboard where she thought Mrs. Simmons’s suite should be. And there was another! And another. And there was a pattern to them: they were evenly spaced around the legs of the centipede, six to a floor. Including the suite she’d occupied with Arthur.
It seemed odd to her, but odd was all it seemed just then. She sighed, stretched, looked at her watch. She hadn’t even begun the final lot of papers.
Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a goat. She set the plan aside and put the final lot of papers on it, then scooped up the newspaper articles and the other plans and put them back into the drawer. Two minutes later, she opened the door and peeped out, then sidled into the corridor with the plan and the unread papers held against her as if they might have been a fat book she was carrying back to the annex from the reading room.
***
Three floors above, Marie Corelli in her own suite had just got back from Philadelphia and was dressing to go out. She had no lady’s maid; when she needed help, she got somebody from the hotel. She didn’t like spending money on what she called “unnecessaries.” She was a lady novelist, true, but she wasn’t rich.
Marie Corelli looked not at all Italian, was instead an English type—rounded, bosomy—that was often well upholstered by its forties, but she had remained slim waisted. Her face was what was called “strong featured,” meaning she had a big nose; still, newspapers described her as “striking,” and men might have been attracted to her if she’d let them.
She had got as far as undressing, which of course was the way to start dressing. She was walking around her sitting room wearing nothing but a filmy silk scarf that was big enough to cover a grand piano but hid nothing of her. She had a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the bedside table and a cold cup of tea on the mantel, and she was humming something that only she would have recognized as the Meditation from Thaïs, and now and then she whirled and let the scarf billow out around her. She was thinking of the climactic moment when Thaïs drops her veil and shows her naked body to drive the ascetic monk mad (on the stage, her body was always covered with a flesh-colored union suit, not too ravishing on many overweight sopranos). She would love to sing Thaïs. Love to drop the veil and actually be naked!
But, of course, that would be improper.
She despised the improper.
Still…
The silk billowed and showed her naked from her rib cage down. She tried it again in front of the mirror, but if she turned enough to billow, she couldn’t see the mirror. Anyway, she thought her pubic hair was too dark and really far too much of a good thing; you could hardly play Thais with something as obvious as that hanging out. Maybe she should color it? Bleach it? Pluck it? She winced at the thought.
She hummed. She wrapped herself in the silk, then opened her arms wide, then dropped the silk to the floor.
And then she heard something. She knew it was something that was of the air, but it seemed to come from an upper corner of the room, right up against the ceiling, so she whirled, naked, and faced that corner. “Azul?”
“Ah—zool!” She sang the name, gave two notes to the final syllable. “Come to me, Azul—manifest yourself! Oh, my guide, my angel—come to me.” She picked up the silk, held it as backdrop to her nudity. “Here I am. For you, my dear one!” She pushed her pelvis forward. “For you—for you…” She made kissing noises with her lips. “Azul…!” This was not the relationship with Azul that she had described in her first book; that would hardly have been proper; but in the privacy of her room she could express what she thought of as the physical transcendence of the spiritual…
The sound from the corner was quite distinct. Marie threw her head back and shut her eyes. It was happening—actually happening! She had summoned Azul from the astral plane!
The sound changed to a bumping, coming not from the upper corner of the room now but from the fireplace. No, not the fireplace, the wall next to the fireplace. Marie opened her eyes and listened. Had the wall bulged a little? Had there really been the faintest of movements there? Was Azul about to step through the solid wall?
A monstrous oak library table stood against the wall there, its top piled with Marie’s luggage and discarded clothing. She ran forward and leaned across the library table and her pile of junk and put her spread fingers against the wood. She could feel it quiver at her touch.
Maybe the table was too heavy for Azul to move. After another bump, the sounds ended and the wall stopped quivering.
“Oh, Azul, don’t leave me!”
There was only silence.
“Oh, Azul, really…!” Marie gathered up her silk shawl and went to draw herself a bath. “Poo on you, my darling.”
***
Louisa spent two hours in her room going over the rest of the papers from old Carver’s office. Some of them were incomprehensible—engineering requirements, “load-bearing estimates,” invoices and receipts and letters to firms abroad that hired skilled workmen—all of which had to be read, understood so far as she could understand them. The exchanges of letters with the hiring agents taught her two things: that it was possible to contract for entire gangs of workmen abroad, including their housing in New York and their passage; and that the elder Carver had much preferred foreign workers. Puzzlingly, he had contracted for several construction crews in sequence, rather than together, the last arriving when the hotel had been mostly complete.
So no workman would know the whole story of the building?
At last, her eyes stinging and her back aching, she came on an invoice from an Italian building-materials company. She couldn’t make out a lot of it, but she was sure that “pietro” was stone, and Stromboli was the place from which the “porous volcanic stone” had come, according to the newspapers. The invoice was for thirty-seven tons, inglese in parentheses; she had to go down to the restaurant and ask an Italian waiter what the word meant. “Means English,” he said.
English tons, then.
She looked again at the newspaper articles. They all said seventy tons.
The large plan of the finished construction had pencil jottings in a margin. A calculation had been made, something about cubic feet, then a “per ft3” figure, and a multiplication that reached “35.17 T.” Thirty-five tons and a bit? With some extra added to get thirty-seven? So that if the seventy-ton figure given the press had been the architect’s figure to fill the gaps between the brick walls, then thirty-seven tons represented—what? For one thing, apparently, the actual tonnage bought.
She leafed through the bills again and found one from the firm that had crushed the rock after its arrival from Italy. It had billed for the crushing of thirty-eight tons.
She threw herself back in her chair. A strand of hair was hanging over her face, and she blew it away with a sigh.
About half the planned-for tonnage of rock had, apparently, actually been used. The amount given the newspapers, however, had stayed at seventy, so the actual thirty-five-plus had been kept secret.
Thirty-five to thirty-eight tons would have filled the walls about halfway.
She pictured what was left: a tunnel between brick walls less than two feet wide and perhaps five feet high. Crushed stone underfoot. Boards overhead? Some sort of flooring would have had to be put in on each story—something strong enough to bear all that weight. And what would have happened to the supposed insulating property of the stone? Would a two-foot gap without stone itself have done the job of ensuring quiet? Or would old Carver have lined the exposed brick with something to deaden sound, thus further reducing the width of the gap?
The idea of it nauseated her: a hotel honeycombed with hidden passages. And an owner, now old, who had had it built that way in secret. To do what?
Should she tell Dunne? Should she risk another opportunity to be told she was hysterical? Another hint that she was part of too many “coincidences”?
She went to her accustomed chair by the window and stared at the blank wall across the alley.
***
Late in the afternoon, there was a knock on Louisa’s door, and a woman she didn’t know said that Colonel Cody had sent her. She didn’t seem very happy about it. “About a gun,” she said when Louisa looked at her without understanding.
Then Louisa woke up. She let her in and explained about the little pistol, finding that she was embarrassed by the gun now that somebody was actually there about it. Louisa remembered the woman from the Wild West: her name was Marion McCousins and she was “The Arkansas Rifle Girl” in the show. Louisa said, “I loved your part of the Wild West. I saw it last week.” She showed her the pistol she’d got from the pawn shop.
“Well, this isn’t much of a gun, is it.”
“Oh. I only wanted it…in case. You know.”
“I wouldn’t shoot cockroaches with it, is the truth of it.” Miss McCousins took it and fitted her hand around it and aimed at a wall. “Not enough barrel on it to push the pit out of a cherry.”
Louisa felt defensive of the gun. “I was told it was right for a woman’s hand.”
“Who told you that, some man? I bet. Well, the main thing is, don’t shoot yourself with it.” She pushed a lever on the revolver and the barrel dropped and the rear of the cylinder appeared—holes spaced around the circle. She peered into it, then reversed the gun as if she were going to shoot herself and looked down the barrel. “’Bout shot out. You didn’t look it over before you bought it?”
“I didn’t know what to look for.”
Marion McCousins sighed. “Well, a babe in arms, as they say. All right, hon, let’s go through it.” They sat on the sofa and she showed Louisa how to open and close the revolver. She spun the cylinder and showed her how to load it, then how to eject the empty cartridges. She made Louisa do it and then do it again.
“All right, this here is the trigger. That’s what you pull to make it go bang. This here is the hammer, which you can pull back to cock it, or you can just pull the trigger and that’ll cock it, which is why it’s called a double action.”
“Then what good is pulling the hammer back?”
“Well, if it had a decent barrel on it, you could shoot better single action—that is, without having to cock it with the trigger. Double action is faster, but most people jerk the trigger and the barrel goes all whopperjaw and the bullet hits somebody standing ten feet from where you thought you aimed.” She had warmed a little, either to Louisa or to the task, showed that she had by saying Louisa should call her Marion. “Look, hon, this is a gun for scaring the galluses off people and hoping you never have to shoot, you understand me? The truth is, you couldn’t hit a privy from inside with this gun. This is what we call a waving-around gun.”
“You mean it’s worthless.”
“Well, no, I wouldn’t go as far as that. If you were two feet away from somebody, you could probably hit him. Better still if you put the barrel right against his vest. Who you planning to shoot?”
“I just want to feel safe.”
“Well…” McCousins sighed again. “I’d say what was safe would be to lock it in a drawer and carry a good sharp hatpin. However, if you’re determined, then load it and carry it where it won’t fall out on the floor and go off, and if you ever have to use it, try to do it in an elevator where you’re sure to be up close.”
She had Louisa pull the trigger, a task that turned out to be harder than Louisa had expected. She tried sighting the gun, difficult because there were no sights.
“Just point it like you’re pointing your finger.”
“I wish I could fire it.”
“Well, I don’t recommend it in your hotel room, hon. You find yourself a shooting range someplace and shoot up a couple boxes, and you’ll feel comfortable with it, I guess. Just remember, guns make noise, and they kick, and if it’s at night they put out enough flame so’s you think a whole box of lucifers went off.”
“You make it sound quite daunting.”
“Naw, guns aren’t nothing, really. But you got to shoot a lot to be comfortable with them. Oh, hell.” She got to her feet. “ Come on, I’ll take you where you can shoot the damned thing.”
“Oh—that isn’t necessary…”
“Bill said I was to see you’re happy. Well, you don’t look happy. Come on.”
She took Louisa to Madison Square Garden in a cab, then down into a warren of corridors under the vast building. Behind a door near the furnace rooms was a tunnel-like space with a chipped brick wall at the far end.
“This isn’t much of a shooting gallery, but it’s what they give us to use. We don’t, much—it ain’t much of a place.”
She set a metal dinner plate on a wooden chair halfway down the tunnel. The plate was battered and holed, and the chair had been splintered almost to smithereens.
Marion watched while Louisa, her hands shaking, loaded the cylinder with .32 shorts. Louisa held the loaded gun away from herself with her head turned the other way.
“It ain’t gonna bite you. Just remember, don’t ever shoot at nobody unless you mean to shoot him. Now aim at the plate and shoot.”
Louisa put her hand out in front of her, closed her eyes, and tried to pull the trigger. For what seemed to be a very long time nothing happened, and then her wrist was thrown up as an explosion echoed in the confined space, and her ears rang. Acrid smoke from the black powder heaved in front of her.
“Well, you hit one of the side walls, and I guess you had to hit something eventually. Try it again.”
“I’d really rather not.”
“If you get afraid of that gun, you might was well throw it down the outhouse right now. Now you put that hand out and sight good on that plate and shoot.”
When she had shot the five cartridges and she couldn’t hear and her wrist hurt and the tunnel was full of smoke—and she hadn’t hit the plate, or even the chair—Marion took the gun, loaded a single round into it, and fired. The plate whanged and bounced. “Well, it isn’t as bad as it could be.” She took Louisa’s wrist and swiveled it around and said “That hurt?” and decided that Louisa should shoot with both hands. “And try keeping your eyes open this time.”
The second five were not so bad as the first. The third five were better still, and she nicked the edge of the plate and felt very pleased with herself. Marion kept up a steady nagging—“Don’t hunch! Stop squinting! You flinched. You flinched again—what’re you scared of? Don’t point it at me!”
Halfway through the fourth five, Marion turned the electric lights off and told Louisa to shoot. A blinding flare of light was added to the noise and the recoil. When the lights came on again, Marion said, “Just in case you want to shoot in the dark, you know what to expect.”
“I still can’t see.”
“You’ll get over it. All right, shoot up that lot, then we’ll try some longs.”
The longs proved to be not much worse than the shorts. Or was it that she was getting used to them? Then Marion said that was enough, and there was enough smoke in there to cure a ham with, and she had to go and get her dinner before the show, and let’s get out of here.
Walking across Madison Square, as Louisa insisted on doing, Marion said, “You going to carry that thing around with you?”
“Should I?”
“Well, it won’t do any good in a drawer under your spare garters, will it.”
“A woman I met told me she always carries a gun.”
“Grand, if you know what you’re doing. Fact is, I carry one myself sometimes, depending. Purse or pocket? That’s the choice a woman’s got. A man can carry a gun in a holster up under his arm, but women’s clothes are too tight. Maybe in your handbag, hon.”
Louisa offered to pay her, but Marion McCousins declined. “Men say, ‘professional courtesy.’ I say we’re both women.”
Back in her room, Louisa tried putting the gun in one of her handbags, but her bags were all made of cloth and were small, and they sagged under the weight. She put her hand back into the pocket that each of her dresses had next to her bustle. A slit in the fabric gave access deep enough that her hand went in well above her wrist. She put the gun in, then walked around her room. She could feel the weight of it, both in the pull on her waist and in the swing of the skirt, but it was bearable. When she sat, she had to sit a little sideways so that she didn’t sit right on the unyielding chunk of steel. But it was doable.
She cleaned the barrel and the cylinder as Marion had shown her, with a rod (actually a knitting needle) and a bit of rag and a viscous fluid that Marion had provided. Then, hesitatingly, she put a .32 long into each chamber and closed the gun and put it into her pocket. She thought of what would happen if it went off there.
I’d be limping for the rest of my life. Or worse.
But were her fears any less?
Her answer at that moment would have been no, but when she saw the afternoon papers, she felt a rush of relief that was like the sweetness of cold water on a hot day.
POLICE CAPTURE
BOWERY BUTCHER
“We Have Our Man”—Roosevelt
Gigolo Confesses
Revenge on Women for Husband’s Rejection of His Demands
That was the Evening Sun. The other papers had the same story, headlines more or less lurid, depending on their tastes. “FEMALE MUTILATOR WITHOUT REMORSE AT CAPTURE,” “LOVE TRIANGLE LED TO ATROCITIES,” “MURDER SQUAD GRABS MANIAC—BUTCHER IN SHACKLES!” She went back to the Evening Sun for the details, feeling light headed, disoriented: could it really be true?
Detective-Sergeant F. B. Dunne apprehended Gerald Oppenheimer at his sordid room on the far West Side as the city finished its lunch hour and returned to work yesterday. Assisted by Detective L. Cassidy, Dunne, head of the Butcher investigation since the recent cataclysm in the Murder Squad, took along no uniformed police to make the nab.
“There was no resistance,” Dunne told us. “He came along like a lamb.” Dunne said that the arrest was the product of weeks of detective work of the most careful and detailed kind. “We mapped his movements, based on sightings before and after the murders. They led to Oppenheimer’s room.”
The suspect is now in the lock-up at 300 Mulberry Street, where, we hear, the efforts of trained police interrogators have already produced a confession. One police source said they were sure of the first “butcher” murder, that of Mrs. Roscoe Harding, and were confident that the killer would confess to murders two and three within hours. Oppenheimer’s connection with Mrs. Harding has been confirmed by two witnesses, George Manion and Daniel Gerrigan, both of the New Britannic Hotel, where they saw the pair together.
There was a lot of speculation in all the papers about what sort of man Oppenheimer was and why he had done the killings. “Gigolo” was used almost universally; certainly it seemed that Oppenheimer, described by the Times as “sleekly handsome in a reptilian fashion,” had made a profession of preying on women. To Louisa, there seemed a contradiction there (if he made money preying on women, why did he kill them?), but she wanted to believe that the killer had been caught. Arthur always made a good deal of what he called “motive” in his stories, but the police didn’t seem to care for it as much, because no motive was given. Perhaps that was the result of their experience of real criminals, as opposed to Arthur’s imaginary ones. Perhaps real criminals didn’t have motives. Or perhaps in real life motive was too obscure to unravel.
At any rate, it was over.
She could say that to herself, but the words didn’t seem to get past her tongue. Her fears, she found, were still there. She kept the revolver in her pocket.