The Murder Squad had a big room in police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street that was no more squalid than the hallways of the average tenement. The room was forty feet on a side, matchboarded up to the height of a desk, then distempered in some color long forgotten, now more or less that of cocoa powder. Along one wall had been set wooden chairs with pressed, imitation-leather seats; the wall behind them had a smear of darker color from the heads that had rested against it. These were for witnesses and suspects. Overhead were giant fans and lights with green shades of the sort used on factory floors; the ceiling above them was filigreed with gas pipes that no longer carried gas, and the channels that carried electric wiring; and above those were sheets of pressed tin, cobwebbed and darkened by decades of tobacco smoke. In this room, murders that had proved too tough for the precincts or that involved more than one precinct were taken over and—in theory—solved.
The Squad had its own lockup just off the big room. Anybody who went in there was assumed to be a killer and would already have been “downstairs,” meaning in the basement, where detectives “softened them up,” usually with lead-filled rubber hose. As a result, the lockup smelled of urine and blood and worse. Even though the door to the two cells was kept closed, the smells came through to mingle with the smells of tobacco smoke, sweat, suits too long worn without cleaning, old dirt, floor wax, and aggression.
The reigning lieutenant had a separate office opposite a wall of windows that had remained unwashed and unopened for so long that nobody any longer tried to look out of them. They looked, anyway, at a brick wall a dozen feet away. The sky, two stories above, was long forgotten.
Lieutenant Cleary, the Squad’s commander, had called a meeting to give them his own version of what Roosevelt had told him at the mortuary, but first he was huddling in his office with a sergeant named Grady, who was, as other detectives put it, tight to Cleary’s duff. Grady was in his forties. He looked tougher than a lot of his suspects, and he stank of cigars. He wore a wrinkled double-breasted suit in a fabric that seemed to be covered with fuzz; his high collar was tight enough to cause his neck to slop over it like a pie’s crust. He had little eyes, often bloodshot, and an expression that made people of goodwill want to talk to somebody else. He was wearing a bowler hat, even though he was indoors.
Cleary kept his head low and almost whispered, even though Grady was sitting just across his desk from him. “Here’s the situation. Roosevelt tells me yesterday to go to the City Mortuary and get everybody out of the way so somebody can view the murdered whore. ‘Somebody’ turns out to be Roscoe G. Harding, who owns enough coal mines to keep the trains running for the next hunnerd years. Rich. The whore turns out to be his wife—he recognizes her from some goddam drawing in the papers.”
“What’s Roosevelt in it for?”
“Harding’s a big Republican moneybags. Roosevelt wants to be governor. Harding sees the picture in the paper, he telephones Roosevelt and says he thinks it’s her and he wants it hushed up who she is.”
“Why? She’s dead.”
Cleary sighed. “Because she’s his wife. He doesn’t want people knowing his wife had her twot cut up by some crazy who takes her for a whore! Plus he’s maybe sixty and she’s young enough to be his kid and a looker, and he doesn’t want people saying she was out looking for a little of the real meat because he hasn’t got it! See?”
“Much ado about nothing, like they say.”
“It’s all in his head, yeah, but the way it’s gotta be is, nobody knows the whore’s been identified, she isn’t somebody’s wife, she’s gone off to Potter’s Field and that’s that! Enh? Get it? We gotta say the case is dead, nothing more to come. Get me?”
“Where’s the whore at now?”
“Husband took her last night and is going to bury her someplace upstate.”
“Today?”
“Pretty quick, yeah, I think.”
Grady screwed his face around so it looked hesitant and deliberately stupid and said, “Ya know, Jack, a case like this, the husband is the obvious suspect.”
“Jeez, don’t even think it! He isn’t! There is no suspect!”
Grady shrugged. “Just thinking.”
“Don’t think!” Cleary put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Now.”
“Yeah?”
“Harding’s rich. I don’t see it yet, but I will—some gelt for you and me. He owes me.”
“Just us two.”
Cleary nodded.
Grady said eagerly, “We tell this Harding if he don’t pony up we go public.”
Cleary sighed again. “That’s why I don’t let you do the thinking. No!” He passed big fingers through his hair. “I’ll let you know when I work it out. Don’t you do anything! It’s gotta be done right.”
“What about Roosevelt?”
“Oh, fuck him. Let him go be governor; he’ll be outta our hair. He owes me one now too for doing this, but it don’t give me enough on him to squeeze, you know?” He stood. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”
He put Grady at the squad room door to keep strangers out and the detectives in, and he walked the length of the room and got up on an old ammunition box that gave him even more height than Nature had. He looked around at them. “Everybody here?” He wasn’t really asking; he knew that everybody was there. Good Cripes, he knew all their faces. He knew all their clothes. He even knew them by their smell, for God’s sake!
“All right. Now.” He looked around at them again. His look was menacing, and the menace was real. Every man there owed his job to him. Half the men there owed their extra income to him. He wasn’t standing up there to be kind.
“Good. Now, you’ve heard of a case we got, a murdered whore that the papers are full of shit about. The ‘Bowery Butcher.’ I want you all to understand that there’s interest in this case from upstairs—got it? That means I don’t want it all balled up. Get me?
“What has happened, I can say flat out right now, this case is dead. The fucking precinct cops and their tecs put their big feet all over it, and you can forget so-called clues, and you can forget what they call your ‘investigative techniques.’
“I took over the case late yesterday. I reviewed all the revelant notes and reports. I and Grady interviewed the one so-called witness, which is the cop that found the whore. There’s nothing.
“Therefore, we’re going to clean this case up and do the paperwork and pigeonhole it under ‘Unsolved.’ Are you all clear on that?” He looked around again. Every sphincter in the room tightened.
“What I want to make sure is, nobody from this squad talks to the papers about it. You got that? Not one word. Not to your wife, either, not to your girl, not to your priest, not to yourself. You hear me? I hear that one of you’s talked about this case, you’ll be back in a uniform picking drunks out of the gutter. If you’re lucky, that’s what you’ll be doing!”
Some of them glanced at each other; a few raised an eyebrow or gave the smallest smile that lips could manage. They all meant the same thing: The fix is in, and we’re not part of it.
“Dunne!”
Cleary’s voice was a harsh bark. Everybody knew that Cleary had no use for Harry Dunne, who was a detective-sergeant but who would never get any higher so long as Cleary was in charge. Dunne had the reputation of being a plodder: his nickname from the distant past was “Never,” because he was so slow: Never Dunne. He was so careful that he never finished. And, to the other cops’ disgust, he was honest. Dunne was in his forties, gray, hefty, offering a round face in which women found warmth and reliability but no excitement.
“Dunne, you’re gonna take charge of closing this Bowery Butcher case. Take Cassidy to help out. Clear?” He looked around the room once more. More smiles and raised eyebrows: it was okay to show that they were amused by Cleary’s dumping this crap case on Never Dunne, and it was okay to be relieved that they weren’t involved. “Okay, then, that’s that. Dunne—my office. Cassidy—you too. Now.”
Cleary got down. Finn, the squad arse-kisser, whisked away the ammunition box. Men impatient to do their jobs left in a hurry; others, more in love with leisure, sat at desks and put their feet up and lit cigarettes.
In his office, Cleary sat but let Dunne and Cassidy stand in front of him while Grady, hands joined over his crotch, stood by the closed door as if he thought one of them was going to try to escape. Cassidy was a smaller, younger version of Dunne, only a plainclothes detective. He, too, to everybody’s disgust, was honest.
Cleary said the same things he had said in the squad room. Then he added, frowning at Dunne, “I don’t want you getting ideas, get me? I’m giving this job to you because you’re not pulling your weight here; you’re not closing cases. This one is all closed but the paperwork. Your job is to close it and nothing else. I’m doing you a favor. Get me?”
“Who killed her?”
Cleary looked threatening. “How the fuck would I know? It’s unsolvable. Write it up that way and put it on the shelf.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“You’re supposed to do nothing! You don’t try to identify the victim, that’s a dead duck; you don’t advertise for leads; you don’t see what your snitches say. Just do the paperwork and close it out.”
“Close it out.”
“Now you’re talking. Take Finn and the Wop.”
Dunne groaned. “If there’s nothing to be done—”
“Do like I tell you and shut up. Cassidy?”
“I get you, Lieutenant.”
Cleary pushed a brown accordion file across his desk. “Then get outta here.”
Out in the squad room, Dunne walked a few steps—enough to get where Grady couldn’t hear them through the door, because he’d be listening—and he said, “It’s fixed.”
“That’s the message I get, yeah.”
Dunne and Cassidy shared the cynicism common to all cops, plus a little extra because of what they’d learned trying to stay honest. Dunne gave Cassidy a conspirator’s smile. “So what are we going to do?”
“Can’t we get rid of the Wop?” The Wop was one of the few Italians in the force, a quiet young man named Forcella. Nobody wanted him around.
“Not if Cleary says we gotta take him.”
“He’s a fucking Dago!”
“Not as bad as a rat-faced Mick like Finn.”
“Cleary puts his hand on a fly button, Finn puckers up. He’ll carry everything we do to Cleary.”
“That’s the idea. Well…” Dunne looked around the sordid room. “We’ll have a meeting every morning to feed Finn some eyewash he can peddle to Cleary. I’ll find him something to do to keep him out of our hair—maybe send him down to the Tenth to copy all their paperwork. He’ll take at least three days just to chew the rag with his pals down there. Then he’ll take two hours for the free lunch at Shankey’s, and he’ll come back sozzled and take a nap. Hell, maybe we can make it last a week.” He grinned at Cassidy. “You ever think police work was going to be important? Like…important?”
“Ha-ha.”
Dunne shook his head. “Cleary’s got some kind of boodle going, so we gotta find out what it is. If we don’t, we’re waxed. But if we do and he knows it, we’re fucked.” He opened the accordion file. Inside were two pieces of paper, one a blank form, one a copy of the patrolman’s statement. Dunne laughed. He tucked the file under an arm and headed for the door. “I’m off to the crapper to have a think. Don’t close any cases while I’m gone.”
***
“Arthur?”
She felt for his warm, comforting body with her left hand. The hand got caught in the counterpane; she whimpered. She thought she was back on the ship because she felt herself pitching slowly back and forth, but sometimes it was side to side and sometimes it was end to end, a motion that made her feel as if she would be sick.
“Mrs. Doyle?”
She tried to open her eyes. They seemed to be glued together. Sleep, she thought. That’s what her mother had always called it, that stickiness that glued the eyelids together and that became granules along the eyelids when she woke—You have sleep in your eyes. She tried to move her hand to wipe her eyes but she couldn’t, and then they seemed to open all on their own, and she was frightened by what she saw—nothing.
“Mrs. Doyle? Are you awake?”
She was looking at a ceiling, of course, which was gray and dark because there was no light. No, there was light, dim light, only a kind of glow that became no more than a stain on the darkness. Leaning over her, one side made visible by the stain, was some sort of woman. Louisa tried to ask her who she was, but although her lips and her tongue moved, no sound came.
“You’ve had morphine, Mrs. Doyle. You’re in your own bed and you’ve sprained your ankle, but you’re going to be fine. Mrs. Doyle?”
In her own bed? Was she back in London? But she’d been in New York. On her way to a train. To go to Buffalo. With Arthur! Where was Arthur? She felt panic rise in her as if it were a fluid that spread from her heart, along her arteries until a great gout of it blocked her throat. She did manage to make a sound, nonetheless: “Arthur!”
“Mr. Doyle had to take a train, remember? He got on his train and you’re back in your room. Mrs. Doyle?”
If it was London, why did the woman have that incredibly nasal accent? And it wasn’t her own room; it wasn’t at all. Her own room had a ceiling papered with flowers that she’d insisted upon, even though Arthur had been shocked by them and said that other people wouldn’t understand, but she’d said that she wanted to wake to flowers, and what would other people be doing in their bedroom? She said, “Flowers.”
“Yes, sweetie, lovely flowers from Mr. Carver and Mr. Irving and, oh, lots of people! Beautiful flowers everywhere.”
Louisa tried to move her head so that she could look around and see what flowers the woman was talking about. Or was the woman mad? Had she somehow got into a room with a madwoman? She thought through what she would say and enunciated carefully, “Where am I?”
“In your room, honey. In the New Britannic Hotel.”
The hotel. But they’d left the hotel. Arthur had staged a little scene and then that pleasant man, what was his name, had got him in to see the manager, Carver—oh, Carver had sent flowers, oh, that one, the slimy one—and they’d put all the luggage into carriages, Arthur and Ethel, and— Then she remembered.
“I tripped. On the carpet.”
“Well, you sprained your ankle, honey. Mr. Carver says it wasn’t the carpet, but that don’t matter, does it.”
“I fell.”
“Yes, and pretty bad, too, sweetie, although I wasn’t there to see it. Right down on your poor face, I heard. Have you got pain, sweetie?”
Pain? Had she pain? She didn’t think so. She wasn’t sure that she had anything, not pain and not pleasure. She felt as if she had been wrapped in something quite neutral, cloud or soft batting that nonetheless didn’t make her too warm, and the sense she usually had of her feet and her legs and her forehead had been drained away. Still, if she was back in the hotel—well, not back, because she’d never left the hotel; she remembered tripping now, a sense of terrible calamity happening, about to happen, and then nothing. She had hit the floor, presumably. Or perhaps Arthur had caught her?
“Arthur’s on the train?”
“Yes, sweetie, I was told to tell you he’d made his train in plenty of time, and he knew you’d be worried. He’s sent you two telegrams, which Doctor says you’re not to try to read yet, but I can tell you they’re both very loving and nice and he misses you. So you’re not to worry.”
She wasn’t worried, but she’d have been happier if he were here and were saying things like “to hell with the damned train; you’re my wife!” rather than sending telegrams. With that slightly depressing thought, she fell asleep again.
***
When she woke a second time, she knew where she was almost at once (the “almost” was a fraction of a second of panic)—hotel, room, Arthur-on-train, fall—and she was aware that her ankle hurt like billy-o. She tried to move her leg, and the pain caused her to make a sound, not a ladylike scream at all but a kind of guttural Aaaghh.
“Oh, thank God, you’re awake.”
“Ethel?”
“It’s me, madame.” Ethel’s bovine face loomed over her like a balloon that had floated in the window.
“I thought you were on the train.”
“Oh, no, madame! My place is with you. How are you?”
“I want to sit up.”
“Doctor said—”
“Sit me up! Aaagh! Like knives in my ankle. Is it broken?”
“Sprained, madame. Mr. Doyle and the hotel doctor had quite a set-to about it. Mr. Doyle—Dr. Doyle he is, really, isn’t he? as he reminded the hotel man—said it was only a sprain and you could recover on the train, and they’d only need a litter and two attendants to get you on and off the train, which could be done through a window, but the house doctor said it was broken and he was going to hospitalize you. And then Mr. Carver called in a specialist and he said you’d only sprained your ankle and bed rest was called for, and Mr. Carver said of course the hotel would provide the very best care without you having to move to a hospital or some such. By that time, Mr. Doyle and I had divided up the luggage again, and I got all his into one carriage and off he went to catch his train, and the boys and me brought everything back up here—one of them calling me honey again to my face, and didn’t I give him what for!—and they brought you up on a freight lift, and here you are!”
Louisa was absorbing the fact that her husband had gone away before he had known how badly she was hurt. She said in a somewhat slurred voice, “I suppose Mr. Doyle wasn’t really worried for me.”
“He was, madame, oh, he was! But you kept saying, ‘You must go, Arthur, you must,’ and telling him to go, and it was you ordered me to divide the luggage.”
“I did?” She thought how noble of her that must have been. “I must have struck my head, for I don’t remember.”
“Oh, you took a terrible crack on the noggin, madame! Head first it was, and you’ve rather a black eye, I’m afraid, although it don’t show so much if you keep that side in the dark. And your glasses broke to smithereens.”
“A black eye?” She was horrified. It seemed…unseemly. Then it seemed rather thrilling. “Get me a mirror. The hand mirror from my little case will do.”
“Oh, madame, I wouldn’t if I was you.”
“Oh, havers, Ethel! Anyway, you’re not me.” Good heavens, where did “havers” come from? That’s one of my mother’s words. “Fetch the mirror, do, please.”
Ethel’s balloon floated away, then reappeared. Hands tried to push her up in the bed; there was a lot of stacking and smacking of pillows. The mirror was put into her hand. “Doctor said not to upset you.”
It wasn’t simply a black eye. It was a swollen cheek, a cut eyebrow, and a large purple-blue bruise with rather disgusting yellow edges that went from her forehead down almost to her jawbone. Louisa stared at it. She moved the mirror so as to get different angles on it. “Well,” she said, “I’ve never looked like this before.”
“No, madame.” Ethel was almost whispering.
“I shan’t be able to go out.”
“Well, madame, with the ankle…”
“You mean I can’t go out anyway. Is that’s what meant by compensation? Or is it fortunate coincidence? There’s something called the fortunate fall, which is I suppose what it might be said I had, if getting the face and the ankle at the same time were what was wanted. I’m babbling, aren’t I. It must be the morphine.” She tried to focus, to clear her fuddled brain, but couldn’t. “Some woman was in here who said I’d had morphine.”
“That was the nurse, madame. Mr. Carver insisted on bringing her in.”
She handed the mirror back, then held on to it to have another look at herself. It made her smile, then grimace as she moved her ankle. “Vanity,” she said aloud. She remembered admiring herself in the mirror the day before. Served her right, her mother would have said.
The room began to drift away. She managed to say, “I’ll need my other eyeglasses, Ethel.”
She lay back and sighed. Oh, Arthur. What had she done now? She had worried him; she had made him almost miss his train; she had probably ruined his preparations for his first lecture. It’s all my fault. She said, “What time is it?”
Ethel’s voice came from a far place. “It’s only a little past eight in the morning, madame.”
“It was yesterday I fell, was it?” She had a hard time pronouncing “yesterday,” and by the time she got to “was it,” she was asleep again.
Then she woke and realized that Arthur’s first lecture had already been given and he must be headed somewhere else—Cleveland, was it? No, something with an Indian name—and she slept and woke, fuddled again—something about the doctor—and slept, and the windows were dark and the lamps were on and the strange woman who called her sweetie was there, and so she slept.
***
Telegram to Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle, sent from the Union Depot, Buffalo, NY:
MY DARLING DEAREST WIFE STOP RACKED WITH GUILT FOR LEAVING YOU STOP FORGIVE MY CHURLISHNESS STOP MY SELFISHNESS UNFORGIVABLE STOP HOPE RECOVERING AND WILL JOIN ME SOONEST STOP LOVE LOVE LOVE ARTHUR
Telegram sent to Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle from the Iroquois Hotel, Buffalo, NY, same day:
MISSING YOU UNBEARABLY STOP AMERICAN TRAINS PECULIAR STOP NO COMPARTMENTS STOP LECTURE HERE DISASTER STOP NO INTEREST FUTURE OF NOVEL STOP THINKING RETURN ENGLAND SOONEST STOP LOVE YOU MISS YOU STOP HAVE INSUFFICIENT UNDERWEAR STOP LOVE ARTHUR
***
And Louisa woke. Morning again. Knowing where she was but feeling muddled.
“Ethel?”
“Yes, madame.”
“He gave me more morphine, didn’t he.”
“Oh, yes, madame; you were groaning in pain.”
“Well, I don’t appreciate having been rendered unconscious for almost—good heavens, how long is it, nearly two days now—however well intentioned the physician. I want to get up.”
“Oh, no, madame! Doctor strictly forbids it!”
“Ethel, I have a call of nature!”
Ethel produced a hideous enamel pan from under the bed. Louisa looked at it. She was expected to straddle it, as she had had to do yesterday, she remembered now. For not the first time, by far, she envied Arthur for his ability to project urine to a distance. She said, “I suppose the doctor isn’t a woman.” She slowly pulled back the bedclothes and tried to move her legs to the edge of the bed. “Aaaarghhh!”
“Madame, madame—”
“Hush, Ethel! I’m not going to sit ever again on some cheap enamel object that looks as if it was made for scooping goldfish out of a pond! Give me your hand.” She gripped Ethel’s hand so tightly that Ethel made a face. “Now I’m going to hop to the WC. You’re going to hold on to me so I don’t fall and smash the other side of my face. Ready? Off we go…”
She had done a lot of hopping as a little girl, but she had not then been feeling the after-effect of morphine. It was as if she had a ten-pound weight tied to her good foot. Still, she managed to get to an armchair, on which she leaned until she’d recovered her balance and her breath, and then she hopped on and at last got to the lavatory door. “I can make it from here alone. Don’t leave.” She started to close the door, then looked out. “I want to send a telegram, so get a form. And Mr. Doyle’s itinerary. And a boy to carry the telegram to wherever they send them from. Or perhaps the hotel has its own office. Find out.” She half-closed the door again, then opened it. “And order me some breakfast. I’m ravenous. Tea, toast, a three-minute egg, some jam but not that horrible gooseberry stuff. And a cup of tea for you as well if you want some.”
Half an hour later, enthroned in a huge pile of pillows and dressed in a clean nightgown and an ecru satin bedjacket of which she was particularly fond (an almost military cut—rather a joke, even to lace epaulettes), she was finishing her breakfast and studying her right ankle, which she had left poking out of the bedcovers. It was as black-and-blue as her face but far more swollen. “Elephantiasis,” she said aloud. There was nobody to say it to: she had sent Ethel out for the newspapers—“All of them!”—because she had remembered that poor woman who had been murdered. She sighed. “You really are a clumsy juggins, Louisa.” She tried to move her foot a fraction of an inch side to side. “Aaarghh!” She reread Arthur’s two telegrams for the sixth or seventh time and thought how really sweet he was. What did he mean about the underwear, she wondered.
When Ethel came back with the newspapers, she said that the doctor and Mr. Carver were coming up. Louisa swore—or as nearly swore as she dared in front of Ethel—and tried to object but failed. She decided that the best thing was to seem busy, even to be busy; she had Ethel bring the cards from the mostly hideous flowers she could now see all around the room, and a pencil and paper for making a list.
Some of the flowers seemed to be from people she knew in the hotel—Henry Irving; the remarkable Mrs. Simmons; even her nephew, Mr. Newcome; Carver—but others were from people she had never met: “the wait staff and kitchen workers of the New Britannic,” somebody named Mrs. Alonzo Gappert, several enthusiastic lovers of Sherlock Holmes (who, she suspected, really wanted an introduction to her husband). There was a small bouquet from Marie Corelli, the novelist, whom she remembered smiling at after Mrs. Simmons had said something disparaging; she also remembered Arthur’s giving some sort of look when the name was mentioned at Reception. Well, she had this to say for the woman: hers and Newcome’s were the most tasteful flower arrangements of the lot. Both were fairly small, subtly colored—far superior to the two dozen blood-red roses of Carver’s or the three-foot-tall monstrosity of lilies and ferns from one of the Holmesians.
As she wrote her thank-you notes, she thought of poor Arthur, far away somewhere; of that dead woman, disfigured—is that what the word meant, that her face had been like Louisa’s own, bruised and discolored?—murdered, left in an alley; of her children, whom she missed and wanted with her: how lovely it would be to snuggle into the bed under the flowered ceiling, a child on either side of her, a pile of children’s books, their warm, scented small bodies—
“Mr. Carver and Dr. Strauss, madame.”
Carver was obnoxious—Uriah Heep crossed with Mary Shelley’s creature—as she saw the instant he oozed around her doorframe, as if he had no more skeleton than a leech. He said he’d come to make sure she was recovering, but what he really wanted was her signature on a “little paper” that absolved the hotel of any fault for her fall. He had a fountain pen ready in his hand. She remembered a bit of her mother’s advice: Never sign anything if they bring their own pen. It was much better than her mother’s advice about sex had been.
“No, Mr. Carver, I won’t sign. I’m afraid I’m not compos because of the drugs your doctor has given me. How would that look if it ever came to law?”
He went away, to be replaced by the doctor, a large man with a beard, his suit mostly unpressed, a gold chain crossing his waistcoat as if anchoring one side to the other, a general look of failure, and a German accent. He told her his name was Strauss; he tried to give her more morphine, which she rejected; and he said he wanted her to be seen by somebody named Galt, who took care of “old Mr. Carver upstairs.” Galt was recommended as an expert on sprains—“old people, they fall a lot”—and she said she’d see, although privately she thought that the doctor ought to be the expert on sprains, not somebody upstairs. What good was he?
***
“Not a new word in a one of them!” Louisa cried. She pushed the newspapers off her bed. She was testy because without morphine her ankle hurt, just as the doctor had said it would, and besides the pain itself she hated his being right about it. “There wasn’t a single new word about that woman in today’s papers. Nothing new at all—not a syllable! That isn’t right, Ethel. It isn’t normal. The police are supposed to find clues, witnesses, all of that! And the newspapers are supposed to report it. And it’s as if nobody’s doing anything!” She thought of the young woman in the lobby, that brilliant smile. “It’s as if she never existed! As if she’d been…” She searched for what she meant, couldn’t quite yet face the word erased.
“She was a fallen woman, madame.”
“Was she? How do we know? Did the newspapers say how they knew? ‘A lady of the pavement.’ What an expression! Who writes these things? Who makes these judgments?” She pushed herself up again, groaned, and motioned for Ethel. “I had a newspaper that had a sketch of that poor woman in it. I want a copy of that sketch.”
“Oh, dear me, madame.”
“I want…I want…I don’t know what I want! Yes, I do—I want that woman not to have been murdered!” She stared into the distance. “I want a telephone.”
“There are telephone boxes off the lobby, madame.”
“And I can’t get down to the lobby! Oh, blast!” That was a curse word of Arthur’s that he had told her would pass muster in good company. “Drat!” So was that. “Oh, dammit to hell!” That was not.
“Madame!”
“I want to know who wrote that article for that newspaper—it was the Express, I’m sure it was the Express—that had the sketch with it. He must have known something. As soon as I’m able, I shall use the telephone to talk to him.” She let herself fall back, then propped herself up again. “Although he’ll be perfectly awful. Some poorly shaven drunkard in a collarless shirt and a bowler hat, I daresay. Smoking a cigar. With his feet up on his desk and holes in the soles of his shoes. Smelling of onions. And it’s men like this whom we allow to write things like ‘lady of the pavement.’ It’s men who do that, Ethel, vulgarians like this cigar-smoking brute who wrote the piece in the Express. I must talk to him. Next time you go downstairs, Ethel, tell Reception that I particularly want a copy of two days ago’s New York Express, and they’re to send it up the instant they have it!”
She lay back and closed her eyes and waited for sleep to come, as it had come so easily throughout the day before. But morphine, which takes its name from the god of sleep, becomes a demon of wakefulness when it fades from the body: now, images chased each other like playful dogs across her brain: the lobby, that woman, the house detective, Arthur, “mutilation,” the awful Carver; that poor woman…
Erased, she thought. It isn’t right. I shall have to—to—? To what? Go to the police? What police? Did they have divisions here, as in London? Would she have to go to a division in the horrible Bowery because the murder had been discovered there?
And then a name popped into her head. A name that Arthur had mentioned: Theodore Roosevelt, whom Arthur had said something good about because he was cleansing the New York police of corruption. And he had written an admiring letter to Arthur about one of his non-Sherlock Holmes novels.
She would write to Theodore Roosevelt!
“Ethel!”
Ethel, who was sitting near by and was almost asleep, jumped up and gave a yelp.
“Ethel, pen and paper! At once! And I shall need a messenger!”
***
In his office at police headquarters an hour later, Terrible Teddy was striding up and down, smacking one fist into the palm of the other hand and dictating a memo titled “To All Officers of the Rank of Lieutenant and Above.”
“—the tidal wave of corrupt behavior that smashed upon the shores of this city years ago must be strangled at the very root!” He stopped, fist in palm. “No, strike that last part; it’s a mixed metaphor. Tidal wave—mm, ah—back to, where was I…?
“Tidal wave of corrupt behavior that smashed upon the shores of this city years ago must be—”
“Right. Yes. Must be, must be—ready?—must be driven back by an effort—make that concerted effort—by all members of this department with every fiber of their beings! No, make that singular—being. Every fiber of their being. Therefore—new sentence, got that?—Therefore, I am directing that every officer of the rank of lieutenant and above will make a full accounting each July first of all bank accounts, real estate, business holdings, mmm—let’s see, where else do they put money…?”
A mahogany door opened; a head appeared. “Can you be interrupted?”
“What now!”
A young man pushed through into the room and held up a piece of paper. “Interesting letter, sir!” He had an accent like Roosevelt’s, rather British in its dropped Rs, rather New England in its precision and its flat vowels, recognizable as probably Harvard, as his clothes were recognizable as certainly bespoke.
Roosevelt looked at the stenographer, another young man, but one who had a New York accent and inferior clothes. Roosevelt said, “Leave us, but stay handy.” Handy was a word he’d learned in the West. He thought it made him sound both manly and democratic.
When the stenographer was gone, Roosevelt said, “Well?”
“Chief, you remember the woman whose body was found in the Bowery? She’d been—”
“Of course I remember; don’t go into it!”
“Pree-cisely! Well, here’s a note to you on the stationery of the New Britannic Hotel from a woman who says she saw the victim in the hotel with a man on the day before the body was found.”
“Another crank.”
The young man grinned. “She’s the wife of Arthur Conan Doyle.”
Roosevelt frowned, then took off his pince-nez and stared at the young man. “The newspapers.”
“There’s that potential, Chief, but she’s appealing to you to ‘keep this poor woman from being erased.’ Her words.” He said, with the satisfaction only the young can know when they think they’re scoring on their elders, “Maybe she’s a crank even though she’s the wife of Sherlock Holmes.”
Roosevelt took the letter, replaced the pince-nez, and said as he was reading, “I’m attending a dinner for Doyle when he gets back from some tour he’s making. Why the devil isn’t she with him? Women have become so unpredictable.”
“I could find out.”
“No! ‘No fuss’—those are the words to go by. I don’t want any public fuss about poor Harding’s wife. I promised him that…” Roosevelt shook his head, then shook the letter. “This woman says she saw the victim with a ‘young man.’ I don’t think a man of Harding’s caliber need hear that sort of thing about his wife, and certainly not read it in the gutter press.” He handed the letter back. “Turn it over to the Murder Squad and have them deal with it. Tell them only that none of this is to come out and the watchword is ‘No fuss.’ He thought of what he’d said. “Watchwords. Are.”
The young man saluted. “Right, Chief.”
“And send back that stenographer.” He began to walk up and down, smacking a fist into a palm. Where was he when he had been stopped? Tidal wave—fiber—aha, listing assets…