Louisa didn’t, as it turned out, write to Roosevelt a second time. She had lain awake much of the night, partly because of her ankle and partly because of the two awful policemen. The truth was, she admitted to the darkness, they had frightened her. They had frightened her with their size and their rudeness, which seemed to say, You’re nobody; we don’t care about your husband or your hoity-toity Limey manners; you’re in our city and we’re the police. And they had frightened her with their threat—and yes, it had been a threat—to put her in the newspapers. That would be horrible for Arthur, even unbearable. Arthur was really a shy man who liked using his books as a kind of shrubbery, from whose protection he peeked at the world. She would do anything to keep him safe in that private place.
So if she didn’t write again to Roosevelt (and what sort of man was he, anyway, to have foisted those two oafs on her?), what could she do? It had shaken her that the big one—Cleary—had said that the newspaper sketch was not of the murder victim. Could that be true? Were newspapers that cynical? She remembered that the Police Gazette had featured a drawing of what was supposed to be the murder scene, but it hadn’t had anything to do with the description of the actual scene, so that it must have been a picture they just had lying about. Would they have done the same thing for the woman’s face? The face was so personal, so very much one’s possession—would they have dared?
At three o’clock, that low hour of the night, she had admitted that of course they might have.
Now, in the flat grayness of the morning, she saw that she must find out how authentic the sketch of the woman’s face had been. She was sitting up in bed, sipping tea and waiting for her breakfast to arrive. In the chinks of her tormented thoughts about the murder and the policemen, she was also thinking of Ethel and what Ethel did for her—dressing her, waiting on her, running out on errands for her, being terrified by policemen because of her. And Ethel dressed herself and hung up her own clothes and ran her own errands. As in fact Louisa had before she married.
“We’re maun poor,” her mother had told her when she was a girl. Again and again, and then even more often after her father had died. “You might as well get used to it, as it’s our lot.”
But she never had. She loved not being poor. How did Ethel bear it?
She put the teacup in its saucer and put both on the bedside table. She sank lower in the bed, the comforter pulled up to her chin in both fists. Outside, there was no sunlight, only a leaden sky above (she had looked) and a city like a black-and-white engraving below. There was snow on the pavements.
I should go to join Arthur.
“Ethel!”
“Yes, yes…” Ethel hurried in from the sitting room. “The breakfast is on the way, madame; I ordered it when you said, but—”
“Hang the breakfast! Ethel, do I overwork you?”
“Oh, no ma—”
“Of course I do. All I can offer is more money, as I need you, especially with this ankle. Would another four shillings a week do it? Would it justify the extra work?” Ethel began to protest, blushing, confused, but Louisa was already thinking about something else. She said, “I shall have to talk to that hotel detective again. I despise him, but he will know how the newspapers operate. And the police, as well!” She was thinking that the hotel detective was every bit as rude as the two policemen, but in a different way. Not so—aggressive. Not as if he had contempt for her. In fact, as if he were playing… She dismissed that idea and swung her legs out of the bed. “Crutch, Ethel.”
“But your breakfast, madame…”
“I shall eat it in the sitting room. That way, you won’t have to carry it so far. I’ll try, Ethel, I’ll try not to demand so much of you. And I will pay you more. Will that help?”
She was making her clumsy way to the bathroom. “And I shall draw my own bath. I will!” She wished she could talk to Arthur about it. Arthur, of course, would scold her for raising Ethel’s wages. Well, they had plenty of money. Or Arthur had plenty of money; she in fact had almost none. “Ethel! Remind me to ask Mr. Doyle for some money.”
She drew her own bath and lay in it, feeling virtuous. She would talk to the hotel detective, but no longer than was absolutely necessary, and then, if he hadn’t been any help, she would find out whether that sketch had been authentic. But how? Well, somehow.
Her breakfast had arrived while she had bathed; now it was cold. She waved away Ethel’s offer to carry it back, instead asked for a telegraph blank, and wrote, a piece of cold toast in her left hand, her mouth chewing,
MY DEAREST HUSBAND STOP MONEY RUNNING LOWEST STOP PLEASE WIRE YOUR BANK NEW YORK DELIVER CASH HERE STOP HUNDRED POUNDS ADEQUATE FOR NOW STOP YOUR LOVING DOVE.
He would be most put out, she knew. Well, better that than that she and Ethel starve.
She wrote him a long letter, as well. Where would it catch up with him? Chicago? Somewhere called Cheboygan?
Of course, if she could get herself on a train she could meet Arthur somewhere…
She tried to move her ankle. She sighed. Not yet.
“Ethel, please take my telegram down to the Western Union office, and on the way stop at the hotel detective’s office and tell him that I wish to see him again.”
“Yes, madame.” Ethel hesitated, her hand in the air between them to take the wire form. “It’s Thursday, madame.”
“Is it?” She was offhand, then realized that Ethel meant something. “Oh—your half-day.”
“Yes, madame. But I can stay if you need me, of course…”
“No, Ethel, of course not. I’d forgotten, is all. You deserve your half-day. Whatever will you do? It looks frightful outdoors.”
“I thought of doing the shops, madame. What they call the Ladies’ Mile. That’s Broadway. They have shops that are ever so big—they take up a whole and entire street, some of them.”
“But Ethel…” She started to say that Ethel hadn’t any money.
Ethel, as if she knew exactly how madame’s mind worked, murmured, “It’s only looking.” She took the telegraph form. “Shall I help you dress before I go downstairs?”
Louisa wanted to say that she could do for herself, but she pictured it, standing on one foot and fastening a corset, then a bodice in the back. “I suppose you had better.”
She was ready for the newspapers to have nothing in them. Certainly, the front pages did not—nothing, at any rate, that she wanted to read. The murdered woman was gone and forgotten; the world had raced on—a blizzard in the Midwest (was that where Arthur was?), political chicanery in Albany (the state capital), canals seen clearly on Mars through a new telescope. But nothing about the copper-haired woman. It wasn’t right; it wasn’t just.
Until she got to the Express and a story halfway down an inside page: she saw that again it was by A. M. Fitch, that unshaven, beery, vulgar lout she had conjured up a day or two ago. “Where Are the Police in the Bowery Butcher Case?” It started well, challenging the police to produce results, but then it dribbled off into the same old stuff that Fitch had retailed earlier about the horrors of the crime, but in essence, that was that. The copper-haired woman was still erased.
She put the newspaper down. She thought about the visit of the two policemen. And Carver. What had Carver been doing there with the two policemen, anyway? What had he to do with Louisa’s having written to Roosevelt? Nothing. Carver had probably come with Cleary and Grady to make sure that they protected the reputation of the hotel. But if that was so, then he knew—knew why they were there, knew that they were going to tell her that her story was nonsense. No, they had been more forceful than that—he knew that they were going to shut her up!
But how could he have known unless they had told him? And why would they have told him? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Because they were worried about the good name of the New Britannic? No—it was a conspiracy.
“Mr. Manion, madame.”
“Oh? Oh, good, Ethel. You may take away the newspapers now. And perhaps Mr. Manion would like coffee.”
Manion was wearing a different suit today but of the same double-breasted cut. It looked like armor on him, as if made from something uncompromising and rigid. His face had the same look, too—closed, hard, wary. But handsome—no, not handsome: dangerous.
“Mr. Manion, I won’t get up. My ankle. Do sit, please. Coffee?”
He shook his head. “Thanks.” He asked about the ankle, hardly listened to the answer. He said, “I thought you were mad at me.”
She had to translate “mad” to mean “angry.” “We got off on the wrong foot, yes.”
“Wrong foot?” He laughed, not pleasantly. “That was as neat a piece of blackmail as I ever saw tried.”
“Mr. Manion! I had hoped this would not be unpleasant.”
“Oh, really? What now?”
She was ready to get up, crutch and all, and tell him to leave. He was as boorish as Bleary and Leary or whatever their names had been. “I thought you might be able to give me some information.”
“Without us fighting the Battle of Bull Run over it?”
“About the woman who was murdered.”
“Here we go again.”
“There was a sketch of her in the newspaper. How accurate do you think it would have been? I ask you in your professional capacity. And as a New Yorker, too.”
“What newspaper?”
“The Express.”
“Not the Police Gazette?” He laughed. She blushed. “If it’s the Express, it might have been okay. The artist there is kosher—the real article. Guy named McClurg. I’ve seen him in a couple of trials, you know, in court—he’d catch a likeness in about thirty seconds, as good as a photo.”
She had had to translate kosher; on first hearing it, she had thought he meant the artist was a Jew. However, what he seemed to mean was that the sketch would likely have been authentic.
“Are you aware that the police were here?”
He started to say something. She saw his wariness increase, as if he suspected her of something. Very slowly, drawing the word out, he murmured, “Ye-e-e-s.”
“How did you know?”
“I saw them in the lobby, didn’t I?”
“How did you know they were police?”
He laughed. “Lady, I’d know a couple of bulls at a mile and a half.”
“Did you speak to them?”
Again, he hesitated. “Let’s say I didn’t. So what?”
“What did they do? Did they go straight to the lift?”
He processed lift and said, “They maybe stopped at the office.”
“To speak to Mr. Carver?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Did you see them with Carver when they came up here?”
“I said I was in the lobby. But maybe I saw them go with him to the ‘lift.’”
Allowing a little of her annoyance to show, she said, “Your maybes are not helping me, Mr. Manion!”
“Well, maybe that’s why I use them. Maybe I don’t want to help you.”
She looked at him, found he was already looking at her. She made herself hold the look, thought that she was showing her determination, her grit, her… But the trouble was that she was showing something else. She felt herself blush but still didn’t look away. His face seemed to get more and more solemn but less and less closed, and then his lips allowed a small smile. She realized that he was looking at her as a woman, and she was looking at him as a man. Swallowing hard, she said, “I had hoped you would want to help me.”
“You didn’t give me much reason the last time.”
She looked at him again, met his eyes—gray, rather light; not so many eyes like that—and looked down at her hands and said, “I’m sorry. But I thought…you had…”
“You thought I was a dishonest D who’d laid down for five bucks. Well, you were right. Like I said, it was harmless. You said the woman smiled at you. Yeah, she was smiling. She wanted to be there, and the guy wanted to be there. What’s so terrible about that?”
“So you did see her.”
“I told you that yesterday.”
“Did you see her leave the hotel, too?”
“No.”
“The man?”
“Yeah, he left while I was still on duty. He went out the front door like he owned the place.”
She was thinking about what it might mean if the woman hadn’t left the hotel: Then she could have been murdered here. No, that couldn’t be…
She said, “Did you talk to those two policemen who came to see me, Mr. Manion?”
“What if I did?”
“What did they say?”
He hesitated. He rubbed his big hands together. “They said I didn’t see any woman that day with a guy in this hotel. She was never here. They said that Carver was sure I didn’t see anything.”
She raised her head and looked at him again. “Did they give you money?”
He returned the look. His voice was bitter. “Twenty bucks. The tall one put it in my pocket.” He put a hand over his breast pocket as if he were putting it on his heart. “Like I was some flunkey he was giving a tip.” He took his hand away. “I guess they got it back from Carver.”
“How?”
He laughed at her. “They went into the office and stayed about four minutes. They didn’t go in there to tell him what a swell hotel he’s got, did they? I expect they told him they were going to have to tell the newspapers that a witness had seen a murder victim in his lobby unless he came up with some of the old spondoolicks.” He rubbed a thumb and two fingers together. “I expect Carver paid. Through the nose.”
“Are the police so corrupt as that?”
“The New York police would pull a drowning man out of the river so’s they could take his wallet and then throw him back. That’s all the police are about, is money. Money, money, money.”
She swallowed. “Commissioner Roosevelt, too?”
“Terrible Teddy? Naw, Teddy’s straight. He lives in a fool’s paradise where he thinks he’s cleaning up the corruption. He’s a dreamer.”
“All the other police? Corrupt, I mean?”
“Root and branch.”
“So the policeman who found her body in the Bowery—he was corrupt? He lied in what he said?”
Manion shrugged. “Where’d the money be in that?”
“But you said—”
“An old footy like the guy who found the body would take a buck from a chippy not to bust her, or he’d take a free meal at a beanery or a free oyster off a pushcart. There’s cops in this city haven’t paid for a meal in twenty years. But there’s also things cops gotta do to keep their jobs, which isn’t because somebody, somewhere, is a good cop, it’s just because the system’s gotta look like it works. So the cop that found the body wrote his report. That’s what the beat cop does. Unless somebody paid him to do it wrong, he did it the best he knew. Now, it could be that in some far-fetched detective story the murderer paid him to lie, but even the dumbest Mick bull on the beat knows that he could do better by telling the truth, unless the money was so big he could share it with his sergeant and his lieutenant and keep everybody happy. But somebody give him a lot of cash to hush up the murder of a professional girl? Nah. Nah, the beat cop probably told the truth.”
“Then his report would have the things in it that the newspapers left out.”
“Like what?”
“What ‘mutilated’ and ‘disfigured’ meant.”
“Yeah, probably, but you don’t want to know stuff like that.”
She caught his eyes again. They started to hold each other’s glance, but she broke it and said, “Would he still have his report?”
“No, that goes to his sergeant. But if he’s the ignorant mackerel-snapper I think he is, he’ll have written it out a couple of times before he got it in words he could spell and could hand in. He might still have those.”
“How much?” Manion looked wary again. She said, “How much to buy his rough drafts from him?”
“What if he threw them out?”
“If he didn’t? Ten dollars? Twenty? A hun—”
“For ten bucks, the average bull would sell you his badge. For twenty he’d throw in the wife and kids. A hundred would scare him to death.”
“I’m a stranger to New York, Mr. Manion. You’re not. I don’t know the police. You do.” She let a smile touch just the corners of her mouth. “How much would you take to buy that policeman’s report for me?”
His nostrils flared. “I wouldn’t take a penny from you! What the hell do you think I am?”
“I thought you said—”
“I took that cop’s two sawbucks because I didn’t want trouble, but if you think he bought me, you’re crazy! And you’re not gonna buy me, either.”
“I’m confused.”
“I’ll say!”
Irritated again, she said, “I can hardly go to that policeman myself.”
“What difference does it make? What d’you care what happened to that woman?”
She hesitated. A picture leaped into her mind: two naked people on a bed—the joy of it, the pleasure. All she could say, however, was, “She was happy.”
Manion started to say something, then got up and walked to a window. He took out a cigarette, lit it. He blew out smoke. “You don’t know it was the same woman.”
“You know.”
“I don’t! That newspaper sketch could have been anybody.”
“You recognized her, or you wouldn’t be here.”
He turned back toward her, then lowered his head and, with the same hand that held the cigarette, rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know what ‘disfigured’ meant, but if she was all banged up, the sketch artist might have had to fake a lot. Or an editor could have pulled some old sketch from the morgue and printed it.” He drew in smoke and blew it out one side of his mouth. “Tell you what. You get the artist to say that the sketch was a good likeness of the woman, then…” He shrugged.
“Then what, Mr. Manion?”
“Then I suppose I’ll help you get the cop’s report. If it exists.”
“And then?”
“Then I hope you’ll be satisfied.” He looked around for somewhere to put out his cigarette and, seeing nothing, supported himself with one hand on the back of a chair and put it out on the sole of his shoe. “But I suppose you won’t be.”
“Given your attitude, I am surprised you would help me under any circumstances.”
His face showed disgust, apparently with himself. He said, in a voice that was dredged from somewhere that he kept old and unused things, “You might be surprised what I’d do.”
***
With Ethel gone for the afternoon, Louisa felt very daring as she maneuvered herself out through the hotel’s great bronze doors. Still uncertain on her crutches, she lurched: lacking the strength of back and shoulder to do it gracefully, she had to gather herself for each controlled fall forward, then hunch down, shrink, and lunge up again as if coming up out of water. Yet she felt that she was setting off on a great adventure—her first real journey outside the hotel, and on crutches! Stepping across the threshold into cold outdoor air was like, she thought, what a prisoner must feel when released from prison. Reality!
She had thought she would take advantage of Newcome’s offer to take her anywhere, any time, in his friend’s carriage, but Mr. Newcome was not to be found. Reception thought he was in his room, but he was not answering his door. Perhaps an indisposition. Or a late night.
Newcome, she decided, was one of those charming but insincere people who promise more than they ever mean to deliver.
The doorman wore some sort of bogus livery and a top hat, which he now tipped to her. She said, “I want you to call me a horse-cab, and when it comes I want you to help me into it, and then I want you to tell the driver that he is to help me down when we get where I want to go.”
“Indeed, indeed.” He touched the brim of the top hat again, palmed the coin she gave him in a gloved hand (more cash gone), and charged into the teeming street as if he’d been fired from a siege gun. He blew a whistle, then waved a cab toward him with a gesture that looked as if he were batting a bird out of the air. Then he stood in the middle of the street and, hand raised, held up the instantly enraged traffic until the cab had ground its iron rims against the curb. Other drivers and draymen and even some pedestrians hooted at him, but he was unmovable.
Louisa crutch-hobbled to the cab’s narrow door. She lunged forward and got her left foot on the step, then felt herself boosted under the arms into the interior, where the doorman held her until she got her left foot on the floor and could pivot and fall backward on the horsehair seat.
Breathless, she said, “Thank you,” and dove into her reticule for another coin, but he waved it away and went to instruct the driver. He seemed to assume that the authority was all on his side, for he spoke very loudly and, to Louisa, very bossily, but the driver seemed to take it without complaint, for a moment later he bent down from his seat and said to her quite meekly, “Where to, ma’am?”
She gave him the address of the New York Express and off they went, the hotel doorman now waving at the traffic—which he had stopped—to move faster. Flakes of snow were coming down; the day was dark; electric lights were on in the buildings, giving an impression of warmth, of life, close but unreachable.
It was a long trip, in fact several miles, most of the way down Manhattan. She hadn’t looked at her guidebook’s map, and she was shocked at what it would cost. When at last they arrived, the driver climbed down, opened the door, and stood there. Louisa looked at him. She realized that she had no more idea what to do than he did. She couldn’t use the crutches inside the cab; she didn’t think that she could stand on one foot at the cab’s door and put the tips of the crutches on the curb and so be able to let herself down, even with an assist from him.
Perhaps she could launch herself into the air and trust him to catch her? He was a fairly old man, and inside his ancient frock coat she suspected he was string-bean skinny; she’d probably flatten him, and there they’d both be, writhing on the pavement.
“I think,” she said, “if you would take my crutches and put them down and then put your hand under my left arm, I should be able to descend.”
“Give ’er a try,” he said. “But don’t yous do nothing rash, please.”
It was all right until she was balancing on her left foot in the cab doorway, but she realized too late that she would have to hop down to the carriage step, which was a metal plate about as big as one of her hands. She was debating how catastrophic this could be when a male voice said, “Allow me, ma’am,” and a tall man who seemed to be dressed for a costume party swept one arm behind her skirts and the other behind her shoulders and plucked her from the cab—Louisa said, “Oh!”—and put her down as gently as if he were putting down an egg; then he waited until she had her weight on her left foot, waited to make sure the crutches were placed securely under her arms, and tipped his wide hat and disappeared.
“Wild West Show,” the driver said. “Them fellas is all over town. I coulda done it m’self, if he’d waited.”
Louisa shook herself, pulled down part of her bodice that had got disarranged, and paid him off.
She was standing in front of a tall building with imitation Greek columns that went up and up, stopping at each story for a different order of capital. On her level was a more or less Gothic doorway in gray stone, inside it double doors in somewhat grubby brass, only the parts immediately around the handles looking bright. There was no doorman, but a pretty regular stream of people were coming and going, mostly male—men in suits and bowlers, boys in cloth caps and some adult’s cast-off overcoat or cut-down suit, an old man wearing a board fore and aft that advertised the very newspaper she meant to visit. Louisa tried to join the stream but was too slow; to her astonishment, one of the boys held a brass door for her. When she tried to tip him, he said, “On the house, lady!” and trotted off into the building.
There was a lobby with a terrazzo floor and a lot of dark bronze on the walls—pillars, plaques, some sort of directory—and at the far end a stairway whose steepness made her gasp. She said to one of the men who was flying past, “The Express?” and he never slowed but did turn his head and snapped, “Editorial on seven, presses in the basement!”
She couldn’t conceive why everybody was in a tearing hurry, but they were, and she had to get out of the way or be run over. Huddling against a bronze pillar (vaguely Egyptian), she said to a boy, “Is there an elevator?” She remembered not to say “lift.” The boy, who was quite different from the first boy, said, “Where yez from, Arkansas?” and hurried away.
Seeing that there was nothing for it but the stairs, she started hobbling toward the back of the building. The mob rushed past her, flung itself at the stairs, and went up mostly two stairs at a time, while another mob ran down the other way. It seemed to be like the streets outside, everything organized into one-way streams. She looked up the stairs as she got close; they were steep, their treads black, dirt and cigarette butts and paper ground into their corners. And she had to go to seven!
“Why don’t you take the elevator, little lady?”
She turned her head to see who had spoken; somebody else jostled her from the other side. The same voice shouted, “Watch what you’re doing, there!” And he raised his voice another notch to bellow, “Go easy, boy, there’s a crippled woman here!” He was a very fat man in a very loud suit, but he looked to her like Galahad in a cheap engraving. She said, “Oh, thank you!” as he piloted her to her left and into a side corridor she’d missed, and there was an elevator.
“Too slow for most of us,” he said. “Have a good day.” And then he was gone.
It was her first experience of real Americans—New Yorkers, anyway—in their native habitat, except for the news vendor next to the hotel. She concluded that they were generous, always in a hurry, vulgar, and somewhat improper in their easy dismissal of the proprieties. Yet how grateful she felt to some of them already!
The man had been right: nobody else was waiting for the lift. It was at that moment up above somewhere. She could hear a noise like iron wheels grinding on cobblestones; the noise would start, go on, then stop, and there would be a clashing sound; then it would start again, stop, and the same sound. Somebody must use the elevator, obviously.
At last the brass doors parted. Behind them was a brass grating that made the clashing noise when the adolescent at the controls threw it to the side as if he meant to smash it, and the pivoted pieces, which formed diamonds the size of her notepaper, closed up as their sides folded together and became slender verticals.
“Gongup!”
Three large men got out talking and walked off, still talking. Louisa hobbled in.
“Floor?”
“Oh—ah—oh, I think seven. Is seven—?”
“New York Express, editorial, sports, news, and ads. Publishing offices’re on eight. Wotcher want?”
“Seven.”
“You got it.”
He reached across her and grabbed the shiny brass handle of the tarnished brass gates and pulled them across her and smashed the gate against the jamb. “Gongup!” He grasped a handle that stuck out from the wall, actually part of a kind of crank that was pivoted at the level of his knees. He threw the crank over and sat on a padded stool that rose like a mushroom on a brass column from the elevator floor. They started with a lurch; Louisa gulped and felt her stomach drop to the level of her thighs.
“Three!” He flung open the gate with its usual crash. “Step back inna car, will yous, lady?” A man and a boy were waiting to enter. Louisa hadn’t practiced going backward and almost fell.
“Gongup!”
She lurched against the back wall and let her weight rest there until they reached seven and the car stopped, the gate crashed, and the boy shouted, “Seven! You wanted seven, dintchoos, lady? Seven! You getting out or aintchoos?”
The man and boy parted without looking at her. She hobbled forward, head down so she wouldn’t put a crutch in the gap between the elevator car and the seventh floor. Once she was on firm ground, she turned. The gate was already closing. She said, “You needn’t be rude, young man.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” She heard this like a fading angelic voice as the doors closed and the car ascended.
She looked around. She was in a long corridor that must have run the width of the building; others ran at right angles at its ends. Directly across the corridor from her was a grate like a theater’s ticket window, and a sign that said “Inquiries and Deliveries.” She hoisted her weight on the crutches and made her slow way over. A very young man, hardly out of adolescence, was inside the window. He was reading something, turning brilliantined hair to her.
“Excuse me?”
He held up a finger without looking up.
“Excuse—”
He whirled away from her and scribbled something on a slip of paper, jammed it into a tube the size of a cucumber, and rammed the tube upward into a brass pipe that ran up the wall—one of seven that Louisa could see. There was a whir and a sucking sound, and the tube disappeared.
“Yes, lady?”
“I am looking for a Mr. A. M. Fitch. He writes for the New York Express.”
“Newsroom.” He pointed with a pencil down the corridor. “Third door onna left.” He didn’t pause but looked away from her and said over her shoulder to somebody behind her, “Yeah?”
An urchin was standing behind her. He was so small that he had to pull himself up to talk over the window’s ledge. “Gotta packet fer da compositor.”
The pencil pointed the other way. “Second onna left.”
“Ya t’ink I doan know? Ya tink I was bawn yestiday?” The urchin looked at Louisa. “Some nerve.”
Louisa hobbled along the corridor, adding the young man and the urchin to her store of New Yorkers. Very poor manners. But a kind of essential humor. Or resilience, at any rate. She opened a door that said Newsroom and hobbled into chaos.
The room was enormous—at least the size of the New Britannic’s lobby. A waist-high fence of once-varnished wood ran its length, dividing a narrow lane where Louisa stood from a vast area full of desks. Four pillars rose to the ceiling. Smoke hung in visible layers, swirled as men and boys moved among the desks. At the far end from her, three men sat on a kind of dais with a wall around it; people, most of them boys, were handing up sheets of paper. Intermittently, a bell rang, and a different boy would run to the far corner of the room. At the other end, five telephones hung on the wall; every one had a man slouched into it as if he had been hung up there, and every man was shouting.
The place stank. It stank of men. She knew the smell—tobacco, perspiration, their maleness (not unlike the after-sex smell), old clothes—and it reminded her of Arthur, from whom this smell was a pleasant emanation of the man himself, not disgusting as it was here.
She chewed her lip and looked around for someone to help her. If anybody thought it unusual to have a woman on crutches visit the place, he kept it to himself. Finally, she approached a wooden gate set into the long, battered fence.
“Excuse me?”
A man wearing a green eyeshade was leaning over something he was reading by the light of an electric lamp.
“Excuse me?”
He never moved. He had a pencil and he was making marks on the pages in front of him. Louisa knew what he was doing; Arthur did the same thing when a book was going to the press. But Arthur was at least polite if she interrupted him. Or more or less polite.
She sighed and moved along the fence and spoke to an older man who was sitting with his feet on his desk and a glass in his hand. He swiveled his eyes to look at her but didn’t move his head. The strong odor of whiskey reached her as he swirled his glass. “What’s up?”
She thought he meant that she could interrupt him. Taking the folded newspaper article from her pocket, she said, “I should like to see your sketch artist.”
“Wouldn’t we all. I think if you look in the nearest dive, which is to say saloon, or, as they say on your native shores, ‘pub,’ you’ll find him. Keep your eyes cast down, as he’s likely to be on the floor.”
“His name is McClurg.”
“So it is. That won’t keep him from being on the floor, though.”
She quailed at the idea of going into a saloon. Even with Ethel—even with Arthur—she wouldn’t have dared go into a saloon. Her New York guidebook was very harsh about saloons. She smoothed the newspaper article with a gloved hand, supporting it with the other, and said, “Would it be possible for me to see A. M. Fitch?”
“Would it be possible?” He held up his glass and spoke to it. “Would it? It would. But I wouldn’t advise it.”
His alcoholic calm, if that was what it was, irritated her. “I should like to see A. M. Fitch!”
“Be it on your head.” He actually smiled. “Little lady.” He stood, looked into a far corner of the room, and bellowed in a voice that could have been heard on Staten Island, “Hey, Fitch! You got a visitor!”
Louisa looked where he was shouting. It was like looking through the trees in a wood, trying to see something beyond them: between her and whatever was in the far corner were male bodies, standing, leaning, hurrying, chatting. A few of them looked up at the man’s bellow; somebody laughed. Then two of them parted and she was able to see what she supposed was A. M. Fitch—a woman in leg o’ mutton sleeves and a black straw hat the size and shape of a boater. Miss or Mrs. Fitch (Louisa, shocked to find any woman there, supposed it had to be Mrs.) craned her neck and saw Louisa, studied her, looked disgusted, and waved her in.
Louisa thanked the man with the glass and went to the gate, wrestled with a bolt on the inside and finally got it open and hobbled through. Nobody offered to help, but everybody watched. She had suddenly become the most interesting thing that had happened in the newsroom that day. As she lurched forward on the crutches, she was afraid that one of them would trip her, so strong was her sense of their dislike, yet their faces were merely interested, perhaps speculative. None of them moved. Blushing furiously, wondering how one was supposed to hold one’s head up while moving on crutches for which one hadn’t the strength, she moved through the desks, tacking around them like a clumsy ship, pulling up at last at the dock of Miss or Mrs. Fitch’s desk.
Close to, the newswoman looked to be a very young and freckled woman dressed in mannish clothes. The white leg o’ mutton shirtwaist was cut mannishly; she wore a mannish necktie with it and a man’s paper cuff protectors next to her hands. Louisa supposed there was a skirt hidden under the desk, would have been horrified to find there were bloomers or even trousers. The woman had watched Louisa come toward her; now, she said in an apparently angry voice, “What have you got for me?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You got a story? A tip? What?”
“Might I sit down?”
“You might, if I had a chair. Anyway, you aren’t staying, are you?”
“Why are you all so rude?” Her opinion of New Yorkers was changing.
“It comes with the territory, honey. Anyway, you’re English and kind of hoity-toity, so I ’speck we’d seem rude no matter what. What’s a woman like you doing here?”
Angry now, Louisa said, “I thought I would be able to gather some information!”
“You kidding me? Sweetie, we’re the ones who gather information. Sorry.”
“I might even have something to contribute to your story about the woman who was murdered in the Bowery, but I suppose that wouldn’t interest you! Thank you so much for your time.”
Louisa put her right crutch behind her and prepared to turn around.
“Contribute what? D’you know something or you just shooting the squit? Hey, sweetheart, I’m talking to you!” The woman had come around her desk and caught Louisa by the arm; at least she’d revealed that she was wearing a dark skirt. She looked as if she were deciding whether to strike Louisa or shake her. “Yes or no?”
“Do take your hands off me.”
“Oh, la-di-da!”
“You are being deliberately rude. No one could be so rude by mere chance!”
The woman put her face close to Louisa’s. “In-for-ma-tion—yes or no? You spikka da English? You capisce ‘information’?”
The woman frightened her; the audience of men terrified her; but what had Arthur said? Remember that we are emissaries of Britain. She said very quietly, with not a tremor in her voice, “Good day, Mr. Fitch.”
Somebody laughed.
Fitch turned on him and said something about where he could put his laughter. She turned back to Louisa, folding her arms over the white shirtwaist. “If you know something about the murder in the Bowery that’s new and dazzling, tell me. That’s my story! It’s dead as a doornail right now, but if you got something good, I could goose it back into life. Look, lady—Miz…?”
“Doyle. I am Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle.”
“Miz Doyle, everything’s on deadline here; we’re all in a rush. I know it doesn’t look it; this bunch of vagrants are mostly asleep or telling dirty jokes or getting noodled, but that’s because the early-aft edition’s mostly in bed. Still and nevertheless, I can’t stand jawing with you all day while you make up your mind whether you got something or not. Get me?”
Louisa looked at her with a blank face. “I will tell you what I know if you will tell me what you know. And introduce me to your sketch artist. Get me?”
“But is it good?”
“I saw the murdered woman the day before the murder.”
“Where?”
Louisa smiled like the Sphinx, which she had seen on a trip with Arthur.
Fitch grabbed a chair from another desk, dragged it over and slammed it down close to her own, then signaled Louisa into it. She had placed it so that Louisa’s back would be to the vast room; now, when she spoke, she whispered. “These pissants would steal me blind if they got the chance, so keep your voice down, get me? They hate me. Because I’m a woman.” With Louisa seated, Fitch took her crutches and leaned them against a wall. “You any relation to the writer Conan Doyle?”
“I am his wife.”
“That’s a good angle. I can see it in a subhead. ‘Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.’ Get it?”
“If there is a chance of any such thing, I shall tell you nothing.”
“‘Nothing comes from nothing,’ sweetheart; it works both ways. But if you don’t like it, I’ll see they don’t use it. Promise!” She smiled a smile that said that her promises weren’t worth tuppence.
“Nor is my name or any hint of my identity to be used—no ‘wife of a famous author known for a certain English detective,’ or whatever circumlocution you would invent.”
“‘Circumlocution’! We oughta put you on the copydesk. Okay, you’re Mrs. Anonymous. But it’s a nice angle. Tell me.” But even as she said it, Fitch put up a hand and said over Louisa’s shoulder, “If your ears were any bigger, you’d fly, Musgrove! Beat it! Go on—can’t you see I got a sob story here?” She shook her head, whispered to Louisa, “This is no good.” She pushed herself halfway out of her chair and screamed “COPY!”
She stayed in that position until a boy appeared, to whom she snarled, “You took your time, you little varmint!” She grabbed a blank sheet of paper, folded it in half, and gave it to the boy, who was not unlike the urchin Louisa had seen downstairs, except that he had on a mangled necktie. Fitch handed him the folded paper and whispered to him, “Go find McClurg. He’ll be in the Aces and Eights. Tell him to meet me at Holtzer’s in five minutes or he’ll never get another loan from me as long as he lives.” She caught the boy’s shirt. “Now run with that paper like it’s something I gave you to take upstairs pronto, and if McClurg isn’t at Holtzer’s in five minutes I’ll take it outta your hide. Get me?”
The boy, unfazed, said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” and ambled away.
Fitch sat down and sneered, “‘Lo, how I fly.’”
“Shakespeare!”
“Yeah, we have him over here, too.”
“There was another woman who was murdered whom they called—”
“Can it, sweetie; the walls have ears.” Fitch was on her feet again. She grabbed a cloth coat from a hook above her desk and an umbrella from its place in the corner and then helped Louisa to her feet. “You new to the outriggers?”
“I’ve used them only last evening and today.”
“Well, do your best. We gotta haul ash here or McClurg’ll turn right around and go back to his saloon.”
“Where are we going?”
“Holtzer’s.” She tried to hurry Louisa through the newsroom, but Louisa might as well have been told to swim. Again, everybody watched her. A few men made remarks to Fitch, most of them unintelligible to Louisa, although she did hear one of them call Fitch “Lady Jam-rag.” Fitch seemed to understand them better, because she said to one, “Try it, and I’ll have your you-know-whats for oysters, Flynn,” and to another she said only, “You’ll never be that lucky, Jenks.” She didn’t slow until she reached the elevator.
Louisa came puffing along behind her and was grateful that the elevator wasn’t there—the crashing sounds were well below them—and she leaned against the wall. Immediately at her eye level, somebody had written in indelible pencil, Fitch eats the hairy banana.
She thought she knew what “banana” meant but didn’t understand the “hairy” part, although she’d seen only the one and maybe other men had hair on theirs. “Eats” was also somewhat murky; if it meant what she thought it did, eating was not what went on—no biting and chewing, she would have thought. She had never performed this act, which seemed to her particularly unappetizing, nor had Arthur ever asked her. Could she ask him about it? And about “hairy banana”? Probably not.
The elevator doors opened and the gates crashed. Two men stood at the back; both, to her surprise, removed their hats.
“Goandown!”
She was able to lean a shoulder against the wall of the car as they fell. She was already, she knew, worn out. She dreaded having to get herself a cab to go back to the hotel. Who would help her in? And out?
The two men insisted on waiting until Fitch and Louisa had left the car; then they came out and had to steer around Louisa and her crutches. Fitch said, “It isn’t far.”
“Must we walk?”
“Unless you can fly.” She held one of the heavy front doors until Louisa was on the pavement. Light snow was still coming down. Fitch said, “You mentioned Shakespeare.” She pointed to her left. “This way. Yeah, there was a murder on the Bowery six years ago, a whore who called herself Shakespeare, but it was too long ago. There’s no connection.”
“She was mutilated. One of the newspapers said there was some talk of the Ripper’s having come to New York.”
“Honey, they say that every time a woman cuts her finger with the bread knife. No, it’s got nothing to do with our murder.”
Louisa registered the “our” but said nothing. After another couple of slow steps, she said, “Is it Mrs. or Miss Fitch?”
“Call me Minnie. And it isn’t ‘Mrs.’ Not that I haven’t had offers. And I like men, don’t get me wrong—I’m not what those cretins in the newsroom call a ‘morphadite.’”
“What is a morphadite?”
Fitch laughed. “What you or I would call hermaphrodite, if we ever had a chance to use the word. A hermaphrodite—you know. Both sexes.”
“Oh—a gynander.”
“A what?” Fitch was walking almost backward, looking into Louisa’s face. “Girls who like other girls, get me? You ever hear of a Boston marriage?”
“Like a Sapphist, you mean!”
“Saffist! Gee, I never heard that one. Is it dirty?”
“It’s from the name of the Greek poetess.”
“You don’t say! That’s cute.” She had taken a notebook from some pocket in her skirt and was writing as she walked. “S-A-F-F—”
“No, it’s P-H.” She spelled Sappho.
“I’d think it’d be Sap-pho, but it’s all Greek to me.” Fitch guffawed. “Here we are.”
They had arrived in front of a narrow bakery. Fitch opened the door and showed Louisa into a long room with wooden counters on each side, glass fronted, with tray after tray of pastries and sweets and desserts, and behind them against the wall shelves full of many kinds of bread. Three tables were set in a row down the middle of the room.
Fitch pointed at a chair. “Sit. My God, those things do get in the way, don’t they.” She meant the crutches. She raised her voice at a woman behind one of the counters. “Two coffees, Mamie. And some of those cookies with the powdered sugar.” She fell into a chair opposite Louisa. “Okay, we can talk here. Shoot.”
“I haven’t seen the sketch artist yet.”
“You’re as tough a bird as I could find on the Bowery! Don’t you trust me?”
Embarrassed, Louisa murmured, “Well…no, actually.”
Fitch made a face and then reached across the table and lifted Louisa’s veil. “Hey, that’s some mouse! Your husband do that?”
“My husband adores me, and I him! I suffered a fall at my hotel.”
“It would make a great little story—‘Mrs. Sherlock Holmes Married to Wife-Beater.’ I know, I know, I’m not supposed to mention you.”
“My husband is a gentleman, Miss Fitch.”
“Call me Minnie. I guess you’d be surprised how many gentlemen use their wives to tune up for a fight with Sullivan.” Her eyebrows went up as the shop door opened. “Well, speaking of gentlemen—our sketch artist, and only a little the worse for wear. You’re late.”
Louisa saw a quite dapper little man dressed in a dark lounge suit buttoned very tight, a bowler hat, and spats; she saw, too, that he was quite drunk. Yet he was one of those drunkards who remain upright and more or less coherent even though the drinking day had started at dawn. His eyes were bloodshot, his nose red, and his breath beery.
“I hurried every step of the way, Minnie, m’dear.” True, he was puffing.
“This lady has a question for you, and get on with it so’s I can do my business with her.”
Louisa tried to give him her best smile, but he was studying her face where her veil was still up. “That’s some eye,” he said. “Your husband do that?” He pulled a chair around and more or less fell backward into it, putting himself between Fitch and Louisa. “My wife does that to me sometimes. Information?”
“I shall say once more, and once more only, my husband had nothing to do with my injuries, which were the result of an accident. I do not like rudeness, Mr. McClurg!”
“She knows my name!” He had said that to Fitch, now turned bleary eyes back to Louisa. “To put it in the plainest possible terms, Mrs.—Mrs.…?”
“Doyle.”
“Irish gal, eh? Well, I’ve always been able to get along with the Irish. I say again, what’s it worth to you?”
Louisa calculated how much was in her purse, how much pinned inside her corset, and how much more in her stocking case in the hotel. All of it together didn’t add up to much. “Two dollars,” she blurted out. A whole eight shillings! How carefully she’d have thought about spending eight shillings in London.
McClurg looked at Fitch and then at the table. “That seems fair. Shoot.” He took a small pad from a pocket, then a pencil and a bit of red stick and a lump of something white and began to move the pencil over the pad.
“You drew a sketch of the woman whose body was found in the Bowery. I want to know if the sketch was accurate.”
The pencil stopped. “Accurate? You accusing me of not being accurate?”
“I mean, Mr. McClurg, if someone thought she recognized the dead woman from your sketch, would they be justified in saying it was she?”
“’Course.” He finished whatever he was doing with the pencil and flipped the pad around for Louisa to see. Although he had been looking at her, it was a sketch of Minnie Fitch, and a very good one. McClurg laughed, showed the sketch to Fitch and turned to a new page.
Louisa said, “Did you make the newspaper sketch from the corpse itself?”
“’Course.”
“But it had been ‘disfigured.’”
“Pretty bad, too.”
“In what way? How was she disfigured, Mr. McClurg?”
He looked at Fitch. She said to Louisa, “If he tells you, you may need the convenience in a hurry. Straight back through the door and turn left.”
Louisa said, “Miss Fitch, I am a physician’s wife.” That was sheer bravado; she hated seeing other people’s blood. She looked at McClurg. “Well?”
McClurg was drawing again but raised his eyebrows. “Well, her nose had been cut off. And both lips. And her eyes were gone.” He looked up, perhaps to see if she was going to be sick.
Louisa was afraid she was. She thought she might faint, as well: the idea of having her lips cut off—it was the lips that did it, the lips—was too much for her, and she made a great effort and cleared the threat of darkness from her eyes, then fought with her stomach. She breathed deeply. “That poor woman,” she said in a strong voice.
“Hey, she’s not so bad,” Minnie Fitch said to McClurg. For answer, he spun his sketchbook so Fitch could see it, then Louisa. It was a sketch of Louisa, bruises to the fore, done in pencil with touches of red and white. Louisa shuddered. He said, “Just to show you I can be accurate.”
“But—if her nose and her l-lips were missing…”
“Sewed ’em back on in the morgue. They do a good job there, better than some taxidermists. There was swelling, and the stitches, but I know what to do.”
Louisa felt a little faint again. “The eyes?”
“They didn’t put those back. Stuffed the, you know, the cavities and sewed the lids shut in case some loved one wanted a peep at the peepers.” He was sketching again. “I didn’t show any of that stuff—the stitches, the swelling—I been at this thirty years, you think I don’t know the tricks of the trade?”
McClurg spun the pad to her again. On the new page was the recognizable face of the murder victim, but with the lines of sewing on the lips and nose. “That’s what I saw. But that doesn’t go into the paper.”
Louisa looked at Fitch. “And you didn’t mention the disfigurement in your article.”
“I tried; I always try, but they always edit me. Can’t put that stuff in a ‘family newspaper.’ I’ve actually been told that part of our job is ‘protecting the city’s women.’ You like that? You feel protected? Myself, I think a little real horror might get us down the road to helping some of those girls.”
McClurg tore the three pages from his book and distributed them as if he were dealing cards, one to Fitch and two to Louisa. “On the house,” he said.
Louisa produced a little purse. “Of course, I shall pay you more, Mr. McClurg.”
“Not for the sketches, you won’t.” He put a hand over hers, looked into her eyes; beery breath flowed past her. “For information, sure. For my art, no.” He took the two-dollar silver note she produced and smoothed it between his fingers. “Man’s best friend.” He stood. “Back to the den of alcoholic iniquity. Nice to have met you, Miz Doyle.” He nodded at Fitch. “Minnie.” He hiccuped. “Editorial knows where to find me.”
They watched him leave. Minnie Fitch said, “He’s a nice fella. And a sad case. ‘His art.’” She shook her head. “Nobody’s ever satisfied, are they.”
“I’m ready to tell you what I know.”
“At last, as they say in the mellers.”
Louisa told her about seeing the woman in the hotel, her letter to Roosevelt, then about the visit of the police. “They tried to bully me.”
Fitch was excited. “Because they were on the take and they thought you’d queer it! They know something! I wonder if Roosevelt knows. Jeez, could Roosevelt be on the take, too? That would be the greatest story of my life! Jehosephat, if I could nail that one down I could move to the World!”
“I hardly think Mr. Roosevelt the type to be ‘on the take.’”
“Honey, in this city, it’s like leprosy—they come in pure and clean, and they get down in the dirt with the lepers, and in no time they’ve lost their noses and their ears and they’ve got their stumps held out for cash like all the rest. The biggest talkers are the biggest crooks. Oh, sweetheart, if I could nail Roosevelt!” She wiggled her eyebrows and rushed on. “Cleary and Grady, huh? Cleary’s a lieutenant, big, tried to scare you to death with a look? Yeah, Cleary of the Murder Squad. He must think he died and went to heaven, making money from your hotel on a dead whore. Murder Squad doesn’t get so many chances to dip their hand in the till, y’know? It isn’t like gambling or prostitution, where the protection money rolls in like the waves at Coney Island. The whorehouses over on Twenty-Third pay by the month; it’s like having a pension.”
“My hotel is on Twenty-Third Street!”
“Yeah, but a couple of blocks away. You gotta go west of Sixth Avenue to start seeing the whores.” Fitch looked down into her cup of by then cold coffee. “This is great. You really handed me a story on a plate.” She drank half the coffee in a gulp and set the cup down hard. “What am I supposed to tell you in trade?”
“I think Mr. McClurg told me. Although I’d like to know the woman’s name, I think. To…give her reality.”
“You playing detective, Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle?”
“Certainly not!”
Fitch put a coin on the table and started toward the front, where the cashier sat behind a machine on which she had been ringing up purchases with a good deal of noise. Louisa tried to jump up to say that she would pay, but her crutches had been moved into an alcove by the door, and all she could do was signal. By the time that was straightened out, the bill was paid, Fitch had refused Louisa’s money, and they were standing on the pavement. The snow had ended.
“You gonna promise me you won’t take this anyplace else?” Fitch said.
“Why would I do that?”
“For money, most likely, but I guess you got a lot of that.”
“Will you share what you find with me, Miss Fitch?”
“Minnie.”
“Minnie, then.”
Fitch was leaning on her umbrella. She pushed out one side of her mouth and cocked an eyebrow. “I’ll share when I’ve written it into a story and it’s gone to press. I can’t do better than that. If I sit on anything, I’m gonna be doomed to spending the rest of my days in the newsroom of the lousiest paper in New York.” She grinned. “Take pity on the working girl.”
Louisa thought that Fitch needed pity about as much as a steel dreadnought did, but she said, “I think we should agree to share and share alike.”
“If I can scoop everybody else.” Fitch waved the umbrella toward the south and said that Louisa could get a cab “down there” and now she had to hurry, because she had work to do. Louisa watched her go, feeling with an odd sadness that the story of the murdered woman was going with her—as if she had let go of the woman somehow, had given her up. It was a peculiar feeling, a sense of loss, a sudden loneliness. Was that what the murdered woman had meant to her—a kind of companionship? Or, even more crassly, merely something to think about, to entertain her?
Louisa felt abandoned. She was no longer the just-released prisoner; she was a tired woman with a hurt ankle who didn’t know how to get home. She turned away, meaning to hobble to the curb and hope to see a cab. She became aware of a rising cacophony to her left, a complex and hideous noise that was increasing as she crossed to the curb. It rose and rose, threatening to deafen. She wasn’t mad; other people heard it, too; ahead of her in the street, the driver of a carriage looked behind him and whipped his horses up; two women who were crossing broke into awkward runs, their skirts lifted in their hands. A terrified dog put its tail between its legs and bolted.
The thing came near. It looked like a rather elegant carriage, with brass lamps and a leather top and shiny, spinning wheels—but no horses.
A motorcar.
She had heard of such things. Arthur had shown her a picture of one in, she thought, the Graphic. But here was one in horrible reality, shaking and coughing and rattling and growling as it pulled right in front of her and came to a stop. A tall man rose from the back and stepped down, removing his hat as he did so.
“Mrs. Doyle, how brave of you to be out! May we offer you transportation back to the hotel? It would be terrible for you to have to find a cab.”
It was Henry Irving.
Could she? What would Arthur say? What would people say?
Seconds later, she was spinning along Park Row at twelve miles an hour, frightened out of her wits. Forty-five minutes after that, she was back in her hotel room, trying to run to her bathroom to vomit because she couldn’t stop thinking of a woman without lips or eyes.
When she had cleaned herself and brushed her teeth, she dug out the two drawings McClurg had given her—herself with her bruises, the dead woman with the stitches in her lips and nose—and put them in an envelope with a note that said, “Are these accurate enough for you?” She wrote Hotel Detective on the outside and took it down to reception, despite an ankle that was now screaming for relief.
***
Detective-Sergeant Dunne had walked from police headquarters to the Tenth Precinct station, not because he liked walking—he hated it, in fact, as he hated all forms of exercise—but because it was only a few hundred feet away. It was one of the mysteries of city administration why the Tenth wasn’t housed at 300 Mulberry instead of 205, but Dunne had learned long since not to look into that sort of thing. It usually had to do with money.
“Dunne, Murder Squad.” He flashed his card. “I wanna see Jimmy Malone.”
“Down in the duty room.”
“Well, fetch him up, will you? And don’t put it in the book; this is a social call.”
He looked at the notices on the board while he waited. They were the same notices he ignored every day at 300 Mulberry. He seemed amused by what he read.
“Sure, it’s Never Dunne.”
“Hey, Jimmy; how’s the lad?” They’d known each other when both were probationers in uniform. They’d taken different paths.
“Passable but getting older. Ye’ve come up in the world, Dunne.”
“Got a few minutes, Jimmy?”
“Wouldn’t I have, and me on nights for the next week? Not going to fill me full of tales of the old days, are you?”
Dunne led him along Mulberry to a coffee stall, where they both got milky coffee in white china cups and leaned against the matchboarded side of the stall. Dunne said, “It’s the matter of the dead woman you found in the Bowery.”
“Worst thing I ever saw.”
“I’m sure it was, lad. Murder’s given me the investigation to wind up.”
“They know who done it, then?”
“O’ course not, Jimmy; you know better than that. What I meant to say was that we’re putting it on the shelf until we get some new evidence. I’m just checking the loose ends and like that.”
“I tole everything I know to that lieutenant of yours.” Malone spat. “He’s a piece of work.”
“Now, now, Jimmy, we never speak ill of our betters. What I’m after, Jimmy, is just to ask you again if you saw anybody, anybody at all, around the place where you found the poor girl.”
“Poor girl, my arse, Dunne; she was a hoor.”
“You knew her, did you?”
“’Course I didn’t, man! Never set eyes on her. But you get to know the type in our work, eh?”
“Well, as she wasn’t wearing any clothes, Jimmy, I wondered how you knew she was a working girl. Saw the wear on her back, did you?”
“Ah, ya scamp! It just figures, don’t it?”
“Anyways, did you see anybody else, Jim?”
“Nary a human soul.”
“Not all night?”
“Aw, shit, Dunne, what are you saying? ’Course I saw some folk here and there, the usual layabouts and drifters and hoors, but that was earlier. By the time I found that god-awful mess, it was time for even the bad folk to be in their beds. The town was empty.”
“So, you saw nobody near by. Now let’s see—you found the body in the alley off Elizabeth Street. You’d last passed there when?”
“Cripes, I don’t keep all that in me book! But if it was the usual night, I come by there twenty minutes before, give or take.”
“Then you went…?”
“Then I go on down Elizabeth and across Bayard to Mott, and so north for a few blocks, and then left on Broome, and so over that to Elizabeth and so start down Elizabeth again. That’s my beat.”
“And you saw nobody in all that time.”
“Not a soul. It’s God’s loneliest job, y’know, walking the beat at three in the morning. Cripes, I was even glad to see some old Jew with a wagon.”
Dunne sighed. “That was somebody, Jimmy.”
“What d’you mean by that?”
“You saw an old Jew with a wagon.”
“So I did; did I ever say I didn’t?”
“You said you saw nobody.”
“Aw, so what? He says to me, ‘Hello, Mr. Policeman,’ and I says hello and we went our separate ways.”
“And where was this?” Dunne got out a pocket street directory that was a scant two by five inches and unfolded the thin-paper map inside its cover. He held it against the wall of the coffee stall. “Now just show me where you saw him, Jimmy.”
“Well—I ain’t got me glasses with me; how did I know we was going to do reading?—but find me Elizabeth Street. Right, there it is and there’s Mott, and I guess I was coming north about here and he was going south. What of it?”
Dunne looked at the map, then made a pencil mark. “He had a horse, did he?”
“What, you think he was pulling the wagon hisself?”
“What did he look like?”
“I think he was sorta gray, maybe. You know, like a horse.”
“The man, Jimmy—the old Jew. What’d he look like?”
“Like a ragman.”
“Wearing a hat?”
“Aye, a hat, but don’t ask me what kind.”
“Gray hair, was it?”
“More white. Hanging around his face, y’know.”
“Suit? Necktie? Shawl?”
Malone waved a hand. “I hadn’t bought a ticket to study him with a glass, Dunne. He was an old Jew in a wagon; let it go, will you?”
“How did you know he was a Jew?”
“Didn’t he sound like one? He was a kike with a kike accent. Cripes, man!”
Dunne finished his coffee and slapped Malone on a shoulder. “It’s good to see you, Jimmy. Nice change from 300 Mulberry.” He put both cups on the counter of the stall. “I’ll walk you back to the station, shall I?”
“I wasn’t no help, was I.”
“Evidence is like the Almighty, Jimmy—it moves in mysterious ways. I won’t know if you were any help for weeks and weeks yet.”
But as they were walking along Mulberry, he was thinking that he’d give this to the Wop, who was proving a better cop than he’d expected. Forcella could go to the precincts that surrounded the Tenth and talk to the cops who’d been on the night beat and ask whether they’d seen an old man, maybe a Jew, with a wagon.
Because the wagon was the bit of light that showed through the trees. A wagon would explain how he’d moved the body.
***
New Brittanic Hotel, New York City
My Dearest Husband,
I have had the most exhilarating and terrifying experience of my existence! If it can be said that terror is exhilarating, which I think it is or certainly was for me! I have traveled in a motor-car! I had just stepped out of the hotel when who should happen by in this remarkably noisy monstrosity but Mr. Irving, out “for a spin,” as he put it, with his friend Mr. Clapp the theatrical producer and the owner of the machine! The machine was made entirely by hand in Germany and cost a great deal of money! I was invited to join them which I did. Oh, forgive me darling Arthur if you disapprove, but it seemed to be quite decorous to be seen in the company of Mr. Irving and his distinguished friend and in my condition of near-invalid, so anyone of any sense watching would know that a favor was being done me and nothing improper could be inferred! We went down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, which is quite nice though I am told abandoned by the better sort of people, and then up again, seeing both the Brevoort House and the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and other sights I cannot remember but which I am sure were delightful. It was a glorious interlude in my rather dreary life without you, in which nothing happens and I am able only to sit and read and think. I yearn for the day (and the night, how naughty I am) when we can be together again.
Have you wired money for me to your banker? I have not heard from him. The hotel continues to allow me to live here without payment, as is of course only proper, as if we were to sue the sum would be enormous, and that is four dollars a day saved, but I have to pay for my meals and Ethel’s (though it seems to me that they should in conscience pay for our food as well as our rooms, as we could hardly be expected to live here without eating, and our being here at all is of course their doing, as it was their carpet), but at any rate I have to pay and am running out of money. I assure you, dearest husband, that I am guilty of no extravagance, not being able to leave the hotel and so unable to “do the shops” and commit those frivolities of which I know you disapprove, and our meals are of the simplest, as I insist to Ethel, chosen from the cheapest things on the menu, and if I were able to go out and find less expensive places to eat I would, but you know I cannot.
Louisa bit the end of the hotel pen. Was she being convincing enough? Pathetic enough? Not that she meant to be at all insincere, but sometimes Arthur was rather hard-headed when it came to money. She thought guiltily of the two dollars she had given to McClurg. Arthur would explode if he heard of it. She would have to make it up somehow—small sacrifices she could cite if he ever found out. Give up desserts? She would happily give up wine with dinner, but people didn’t drink wine with dinner here; they drank ice water, and it was free. She was also spending more than thirty American cents a day on newspapers. Could she give those up? How would she ever know anything?
She thought again of the dead woman. She felt the same pang of loss, then the same nausea. Despite what she had learned from Fitch and McClurg, she was not satisfied: she had let Fitch walk off with the story, with the woman, but Louisa had been left with the story unfinished. She wanted to know.
Perhaps, she thought, Fitch would find something new. Or perhaps something would happen that would finish the story and explain everything. Perhaps, somehow, the murderer would reveal himself!
All prayers are answered, but not necessarily in the form that we prayed for.