“It’s Adam Worth, of course,” said the tiny man, staring at the autopsy photographs of the Minetta Lane bog man’s wounds. He tossed the sheaf of pictures down onto his already cluttered desk and leaned back in his old wooden office chair.
He took a bent old pipe out of the pocket of his ratty green cardigan, clamped it between his teeth and lit it with an enormous table lighter in the shape of Daffy Duck. When he thumbed down the tail, flame spurted out of Daffy’s beak. Carrie stared, fascinated. She tried to imagine what an archaeologist of the future would make of such an artifact a thousand years from now. After a few seconds she gave up; it was just too bizarre. The little man put down the lighter and puffed up huge clouds of smoke that wandered up toward the clusters of pipes and electrical conduits in the ceiling above his shiny bald head.
His name was Dr. Ennio Morricone, and according to him he was absolutely no relation to the music composer of the same name, although he could whistle the entire The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme without missing a note—which he ably demonstrated to Carrie and Slattery within two minutes of their first entering his basement office in Schermerhorn Hall on the Columbia University campus in Morningside Heights.
Schermerhorn was one of four buildings making up a pleasantly treed quadrangle just east of the Low Memorial Library. The other three buildings were Saint Paul’s Chapel to the south, Avery Hall to the west and Fayerweather Hall to the east, directly on Amsterdam Avenue. All the buildings were brick and dated from the late nineteenth century. Morricone looked as though he came from roughly the same period. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme. The world’s best-known music associated with the American Wild West with the possible exception of the William Tell Overture.” He whistled a few bars of the Lone Ranger theme and snorted. “Imagine that, the American West musically defined by two Italians, Morricone and Rossini.” He smiled.
“Then there’s ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ of course; Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics, but the tune was stolen from a drinking song composed by a Brit named John Stafford Smith.” He shook his head. “How very proud we all are about our Americanness.” He gave another snort. “Even the word ‘America’ is Italian.” Morricone put a finger in one ear as though he was afraid facts were going to come leaking out all over the floor.
His face was cracked and seamed like a road map folded once too often. What little hair he had was nicotine white and stuck up on his temples and made him look like some sort of infuriated rodent. He was dressed in a pair of corduroy pants from another dimension, a swamp green cardigan, a checked shirt and a pair of bedroom slippers in Macintosh plaid.
Ennio Morricone, vaguely rumored by Diddy’s father to have some connection to the Mafia, looked about a hundred years old and was professor emeritus of urban history at Columbia University, having received his first degree while Hitler was still alive and his last, an honorary doctorate from Harvard, just after the death of James Brown, who, according to Morricone, was far more important than Hitler when it came to historical significance since they’d be playing James Brown albums long after der Führer’s rather dull and fatuous speeches were forgotten. Morricone was the world’s leading expert on the history of New York City and he’d written three dozen books to prove it. The professor, however, emeritus or otherwise, had a certain difficulty in getting to the point.
“This whole place used to be an insane asylum—did you know that?” said Morricone, puffing more smoke. “Some people would say it still was.” He gave a little hooting laugh around the stem of his pipe. “The Bloomingdale Asylum. No relation to the department store.” He glanced up at the pipes above his head.
“It’s all radioactive, too, of course.” He smiled. “They didn’t call it the Manhattan Project for nothing. The original bits for the first cyclotron are still down here in the tunnels somewhere.” He grinned again. “History never really goes away, you know. It just gets mislaid. I can think of presidents who would have done well to remember that.” He let out his hooting laugh again, and Carrie began to see the connection to Daffy Duck.
“Who was Adam Worth?” Slattery asked.
“Good Lord, you don’t know who Adam Worth was?”
“If we did, we wouldn’t be here, would we?” Slattery said patiently. He’d interviewed thousands of witnesses and suspects in his time, and the professor was just another in a very long line of eccentrics and weirdos who had crossed the big policeman’s path.
“No, I suppose not,” said Morricone. He rubbed the bowl of his pipe against his old, leathery cheek. “The Napoleon of Crime? The man Conan Doyle based his Moriarty on?”
“I thought he was English,” said Carrie. “The Napoleon of Crime.”
“German, actually. ‘Werth’ with an E. Changed it when he landed in Boston. 1849. Then to Cambridge. His father was a tailor, if I remember correctly. Left Cambridge at thirteen, came to New York and went to work for Brooks Brothers down by Schermerhorn Row. Named for Paul Schermerhorn. Same as the building we’re in, as a matter of fact…. New York’s very much like Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, when you get right down to it…just a village. Everything interconnected and intertwined. You know Miss Marple, surely, Agatha Christie. Mystery writer?”
“Adam Worth,” said Slattery. Carrie marveled at the even tone in his voice. He was handling the little professor far better than she could have.
“Ah, yes. Mr. Worth.”
“Brooks Brothers,” the cold case detective reminded him.
“Quite.” Morricone nodded. He picked up Daffy, clicked his tail and relit his pipe. More clouds wafted to the ceiling. The crowded basement office was beginning to smell like a cherry orchard on fire.
“Something happened while he was working there. A clerk, I believe. Something to do with the wife of one of their customers. Came a cropper in some mysterious way. Worth was blamed. Fired. Vanished briefly. Turned up again in the army.” Morricone lurched forward in his chair and began to rummage through the pile of books and papers piled on his desk. He finally found what he was looking for, read it and tossed it back into the general pile.
“Interesting subject,” he murmured. He closed his eyes and seemed to be falling asleep. He blew smoke up at the overhead pipes.
“What is?” Carrie asked.
“Military crime. Fascinating, really. Wonderful environment for a serial killer, don’t you think?”
“You’re saying Adam Worth was a serial killer?” Slattery asked.
“I’m a historian, not a policeman, but if pressed I would say it’s a definite possibility.”
“Why?” Carrie asked.
“Worth joined the Second New York Heavy Artillery. Battery L, to be specific. They were a detached battery and served in and around Washington, D.C. During the time Worth was with the battery, there were six identical murders of Washington prostitutes. They all had their throats ripped out, just like your friend in the pictures.”
The professor tapped the photographs on his desk with the stem of his pipe. “And they all had their lips sewn shut, just like your man.”
“When was this?” Slattery asked.
“June and July 1862,” said Morricone. “On August thirtieth he fought in the Second Battle of Bull Run. The night before the battle, a black steward named Pinckney was murdered in camp. His throat was torn out. People were suspicious of Worth by then, but an investigation was put off until after the battle. During the fight, Pinckney’s friend and the only witness to the murder, another steward, named Jedediah Hoseason, went missing and was presumed dead. Worth was wounded in the arm and was sent to Georgetown Hospital.
“There was a bureaucratic mix-up and he was listed as killed in action. He left the hospital and reenlisted in five separate regiments in three days, picking up the fifty-dollar signing bonus every time. Then he vanished. He turned up in New York in January 1863 and started working as a high-end pickpocket and burglar. Not surprisingly, that’s when the murders began again. Eleven of them in five months that fit his profile. Nobody made the connection to Worth. There was no real reason why they should, not to mention the fact that army records had him listed as killed in action. He had the perfect alibi. He was dead.”
“What happened after that?”
“He put together his own gang. Some people say he went to work for the Assassin’s Club; others say he was on his own. Anyway, by 1869 things got too hot for him in New York and he fled to London. The rest is history and Sherlock Holmes. You’ll even find a few obsessive types who think Adam Worth was Jack the Ripper. The timing fits. He was living in London by then. Pinkerton’s followed him around for years. They caught him for a mail robbery, and after he served his sentence he retired. Died in London, supposedly. No one knows for sure.”
“There was no record of him knowing this Barnabus Coffin?” asked Carrie.
“Your victim?” Dr. Morricone said. “No. I checked the big Civil War databases. As you mentioned, Dr. Norton, Coffin simply never showed up for his assignment to the USS Keokuk. He was listed as a deserter. There was no reason to connect him to the New York murders in the spring and summer of 1863, and no reason to connect him to Adam Worth.”
“You mentioned something called the Assassin’s Club,” said Carrie. “What was that?”
“They were a group of rich men, mostly young, mostly involved with stock trading. They made ‘killings’ on the stock market—hence the name. I think Jay Gould and some of his nastier cronies were members. They were also rumored to get their information in rather dubious and even illegal ways. A man like Adam Worth could very well have been useful to them.” The gnomish history professor puffed on his pipe and squinted up at the ceiling. “Did I mention that the murders here in New York were called the Double Eagle Killings? One presumes it has something to do with the lips being sewn shut. Harper’s Weekly ran quite a lurid illustration at the time by that scallywag Thomas Nast.”
“Why were they called that?” Carrie asked.
The old professor smiled. “Because after the victim had his throat torn out, the killer forced a twenty-dollar gold piece down his esophagus. A double eagle.”
Slattery frowned. He leaned forward, about to ask a question. Carrie’s cell phone warbled. She excused herself and took the call. She snapped the phone shut a few moments later.
“That was my friend at the Museum of Natural History. They’ve got Barnabus Coffin over there so they can keep the body in a climate-controlled environment. They ran a CAT scan because they weren’t satisfied with the X-rays from the medical examiner’s office.”
“And?” Slattery asked.
“They found something in the gut. It looks like a coin.”