Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology (25 page)

“A what? Oh, yes. A whore. I never told you. Don’t hate me, Molly.”

“Go on.”

“My mother got mad easy. She hit me when she got mad. She hit other people, too. She didn’t care if she hurt someone then. Or if she killed someone. She killed a man once, and a woman who made her mad. She never got caught. But she was a sinner. God hated her, I know!”

“Yes.”

“Her mother was the same way. Marie Dupin. That was my grandmother’s name. She was a whore, like all of us. She had a temper. She could be nice. Then in a second would hurt someone. Or kill them. I saw her kill a man once with a knife. The other whores threw him in the river so nobody found out. She didn’t remember killing him, but she did. I saw it. Oh! I had nightmares after that, Molly. I might not remember a lot of things. But I remember that.”

I clench my fists, one inside the other. I don’t want to hear this. But I have to. I am smart. I am not like my mother. I like to put information together, to figure things out. It makes me special.

“Mother...”

“Marie got a baby in her... got my mother in her... from Auguste Dupin. He didn’t visit us often at the brothel. But when he did, he liked my grandmother best.”

I feel anger stirring in my gut. It is hot like the worst of a summer’s day. “You told me my great-grandmother and Dupin were married. But now you say Dupin was only my great-grandmother’s customer?”

Mother hangs her head again. She starts to pick at a loose thread on a bodice buttonhole. “I wish they had been lovers, or married. She took his last name, anyway. Who would care what a whore called herself?”

“Mother.” I speak slowly through clenched jaws. “Did you kill Peter Garrett?”

Mother shakes her head violently. “No! No! I got my brain fixed, I told you! I
was
smart like my grandfather one time. Smart like
you
! But I was also like my mother and grandmother. I got mad like them. And when I did I didn’t always know what I was doing. I killed men who made me angry.”

Consider the facts
...

“With a chair leg that had been sharpened and tempered in fire.”

Mother grimaces. “When you were born I loved you. You were the only person I ever loved. Molly, don’t hate me, please!” She picks more furiously at her buttonhole, and I know it will need mending along with the torn stockings. I don’t know that I’ll do the mending, though. I think I hate my mother now.

“Mother, did Peter make you angry? Were you upset that I loved him? Did you think I’d leave you?”

Mother looks at me. “I didn’t know you loved him.”

My breathing grows rapid. So do my heartbeats.

Mother shakes her head. “I didn’t want to kill any more, Molly. If the Paris coppers caught me they would kill me. Chop my head clean off! What would happen to you, you were such a little thing? I found out about Dr. Burckholdt. A man who operated on brains of people to make them better. To get rid of the bad. The sin. Some of them died, but I wasn’t scared. I didn’t care if I died. Better die than kill! Dr. Burckholdt visited Paris. I went to see him. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I let him have me. A trade. He said all right. He liked me. Thought I was pretty. When it was over my memory wasn’t so good. I wasn’t so good with numbers anymore. I got lost a lot. The women at the brothel didn’t like me anymore. They made sport of me. But I never killed anybody again. I promise I didn’t.”

I get up and lean on the window.

“I never ever killed again,” Mother repeats.

I look down at the street. Light is fading fast and heavy clouds are gathering. I hear Mother, still whimpering, go into her bedroom. This time she closes the door.

Mr. Denny stands outside his shop, smoking a cigar. Mr. Bruce is beside him, talking about something I can’t quite make out. Probably about Peter Garrett’s murder and the man they arrested for the crime. A cat laps at a muddy puddle in the middle of the road. It looks like it might rain again tonight.

I hear Mrs. Anderson in her flat across the hall, fussing at Katherine for staying out so late. Katherine, the prettiest woman in our neighborhood, who flounces and tosses her head oh, so haughtily. I saw her kissing Peter a couple of days ago. He laughed and kissed her back before he drove on in his milk wagon.

A dreadful heat that has nothing to do with summer stings the back of my mind.

I go to the pie safe and look down at my shoes. They are coated in mud.

I sit in my chair, pick up my knitting, and make a row with the large wooden needles. The first few stitches of the cream colored yarn are spotted with a gray, ashy residue and dried flecks; something crusty, reddish.

Consider the facts, great-granddaughter.

How terrible for the immigrant to be imprisoned wrongly and facing certain execution.

Yes. Yes.

But how much better for me.

A NEW STORY ABOUT C. AUGUSTE DUPIN

(with apologies to E.A. Poe)

By

I have written before about my quondam friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, with whom I long ago resided in an ancient house in a retired and desolate street in Paris, yet never have I described the details of his final case. That it would be of great interest to a very wide readership I was never in doubt, for it involved a series of horrific murders that terrified the public and baffled the police, and without the intervention of Dupin and his superior powers of analytical thought, the killer would never have been found and brought to justice.

The victims were all young women, but there was no discernible connection between them; one was married, one affianced; one a
grisette,
and another the daughter of a lawyer. They were of different classes and lived in different quarters of the city. At first, therefore, the police quite naturally assumed each had been murdered by a different man. There were no suspects, and no one came forward to inform or confess, but when another woman died, the public became convinced one single, bloodthirsty monster was responsible.

Dupin had already recognized the evidence, what he called the killer’s
signature
, even while the police resisted the idea.

The problem was how to find the murderer? No matter how he searched for a connection between these disparate women (or their families), Dupin could find nothing. They had lived and died in different
arrondissements,
did not attend the same church or buy their bread from the same baker. The only thing they had in common was their sex and relative youth (the eldest was twenty-four; the youngest, seventeen), and perhaps most importantly, the fact that they did not know their killer. Dupin concluded that the man the popular press had dubbed “The Beast of Paris” was deliberately choosing his victims from a large pool of total strangers, women previously unknown to him, with whom he had no traceable connection.

But who sets out to kill strangers, outside of wartime, for no reason or benefit?

Only a madman. Indeed, the senseless cruelty of the crimes could be the very definition of insanity. Yet, apart from that, the killer did not act like one in the grip of madness. He was cool and calculating. He planned his murders in advance, and possessed sufficient self-control to resist drawing attention to himself. If he was mad, it was only now and then, at times of his own choosing—which surely is not madness at all, but an expression of pure evil. A better name for this monster than “beast” would be “devil,” I thought.

By now, some of my readers will have guessed the identity of this devil, and recall the scandal that erupted when the police, acting on the results of Monsieur Dupin’s investigations, arrested one Paul Gabriel Reclus. Monsieur Reclus was known as a respectable, wealthy, unmarried gentleman of Paris. Not himself a member of either the government or the press, he had influential friends in both, and as a result, the police found themselves obliged to release him almost immediately, with groveling apologies, for they had no evidence against him. Although convinced by Dupin’s argument, constructed from his subtle observations, it amounted to nothing more than a delicate chain of logic. There were no witnesses to any of the murders, and nothing, not a single, solid object or piece of blood-stained clothing, in the possession of Monsieur Reclus to tie him to any one of the crimes. As he showed no signs of guilt or any inclination to confess, the police had nothing with which to convict him, not even an obvious reason for arresting him.

Naturally, they blamed Dupin for leading them astray. The results were quite disastrous for my friend. He did not mind the mockery in the press (although some of the cartoons were particularly savage) and simply ignored those military friends of Reclus who challenged him to a duel (after all, dueling was illegal, however common it might have been among bantam cocks obsessed with their notion of honor), but the charges of slander and libel brought against him in court cost him most of his patrimony to defend. However, there was something far worse than all of that: the secret, subterranean vengeance enacted by Reclus against Dupin, about which my friend dared say nothing. For Monsieur Reclus continued to kill innocent young women. He must have believed himself invincible, untouchable. But now, for his victims, he chose girls who possessed some connection to the one man who had revealed he knew his secret. Because Dupin led a retired and celibate existence, the connections were necessarily remote, of a sort only
he
would be sure to recognize. The first victim worked in the shop where my friend customarily bought his daily bread. The next was the wife of his butcher. Then a bookseller’s daughter met her mysterious, violent end.

Dupin realized that unless he could deliver the killer to the police with irrefutable evidence of his crimes—or killed the clever madman himself—more women would die. In addition, he knew that he had little time to act, as he anticipated the killer’s scheme was to implicate him in his crimes, planting clews that must eventually lead to the inevitable (although false) conclusion that
Dupin
was the murderer.

The Chevalier’s analytical skills were not limited to unraveling mysteries of the past, but extended to predicting what, following a certain course of action, an individual would do next. This, he insisted, was not a matter of intuition, but of observation; it was a purely scientific exercise, and would always be successful so long as the initial observations were sufficient and correct. To me, this seemed to contradict the notion of free will, suggesting human beings were little more than mechanical objects, forced to move in a particular way once their springs had been wound, but his results were such that I could never argue. When he declared that he had worked out precisely when, where, and
who
the killer would next attack, I knew he must be right. The only problem was how to ensure that the police arrived on the scene before the girl was killed, but when Reclus’ murderous intentions were still clear enough that his arrest and subsequent conviction would prove inevitable.

To the public, Dupin’s skills could seem magical, yet he always insisted they were purely rational. And, in the past, in my previous stories about Monsieur Dupin, I have delighted in explaining the chain of reasoning that led him to feats of understanding which seemed like clairvoyance, mind-reading, or some other of those super-human skills sometimes displayed by people who have been mesmerized.

But I have never written about the case I might once have called “The Devil of Paris,” never given all the details of what was to be C. Auguste Dupin’s last case. Yes, he solved it, but at a great cost.

Of course, it was not
his
fault the police arrived too late to save the life of Dupin’s own cousin. At least they were in time to catch Reclus red-handed, and none of his influential friends were able to save him from the guillotine. In vain did I argue with my old friend that he had performed the great public service of protecting any number of young women from the ravages of “the beast”; sadly he could never allay the guilt he felt about focussing the attention of the murderer on his cousin and the other three blameless young women whose misfortune it was to be connected to men with whom Dupin had commercial dealings. In vain did I argue he could not possibly be held to blame for the actions of that evil creature. His reply was that he should have
known
how Reclus would take his revenge, that he should not have given the police the killer’s name without the evidence they needed to arrest him.

His partial failure weighed upon his conscience, and turned him away from the police. They had let him down as much as he had let down the last four victims of Reclus, and henceforth he would take no interest in contemporary crime or current affairs, but would instead dedicate all his mental capacities to questions of historic and philosophical matters. He instructed me never to write about his final case, and although I no longer feel bound by that injunction, neither do I wish to revisit those old days and write of his solving of the case of the beast—or devil—of Paris in the sort of detail I devoted to his earlier exploits. I merely raise the subject as a reminder to my readers, for its bearing on what would transpire later, the subject of this story.

Had I remained in Paris, I sometimes think things might have turned out differently for Dupin—but it was not to be. Even as my old friend was becoming more determinedly entrenched in his studies, retreating from the present day, I received a letter from my father, summoning me home with some urgency to help with the family business. With a feeling of profound melancholy, I bid farewell to the Chevalier, begging him not to forget me, and to write often.

I had, I think, half a dozen letters from him after my return to Baltimore, each one a superb, if not entirely comprehensible, essay on a subject of deepest obscurity, such as the origins of the Kartvelian languages; the meaning of the gigantic stone heads of Easter Island; the manner in which eels reproduce; and a new interpretation of the Mayan calendar. Apart from mentioning certain rare volumes he had been fortunate enough to acquire for his library, he made little reference to the details of his quotidian life, although from the regular changes of address I understood his fortunes were continuing to decline, as he moved to ever-poorer quarters.