Femme Fatale (20 page)

Curtains!

You know my method. It is founded on the observation
of trifles
.

—SHERLOCK HOLMES, “THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY,” 1891,
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

F
ROM
N
ELLIE
B
LY
’
S
J
OURNAL

It was clear as consommé that Irene was determined to snub my reporter’s investigative help, so I settled for second-best: an expedition with Sherlock Holmes to the site of the lethal séance.

When he discovered that it was within walking distance of his hotel, if one were accustomed to walking, he immediately set out.

I had to trot a bit to match his pace but he was occupied with studying the street scene all around us and never noticed my staccato pace. Or perhaps he did, and didn’t care to accommodate it. Englishmen are so impossibly self-absorbed, and he worse than most!

Still, my mind could not help drafting headlines for a story:

STRIDING MANHATTAN WITH SHERLOCK HOLMES
BRITISH SLEUTH OBSERVES CRIME SCENES ON THE
STREETS OF NEW YORK

“
Tsk
,” he said of a sudden.

I scurried to come abreast and see what had spurred that disdainful syllable.

“Pickpockets are as plentiful here as anywhere.” His stick pointed at a woman with her hands tucked into an affected muff of rose-strewn chiffon as she bustled down the crowded street.

In a moment the cane tip had slid through the opening of the large fluffy muff as efficiently as a letter opener through the daily mail, stopping her as thoroughly as would a sword across her path.

“A bit warm for muffs, Madam,” he noted, nodding at a man she had just passed. “Sir, you may now retrieve your money clip from this lady’s muff, where it no doubt caught itself during the press of pedestrians.”

The woman had frozen in place the moment his cane had intercepted her. I saw a thick fold of bills appear from her cape
above
the muff.

Her gloved hand swiftly passed the money to the stunned passerby.

Only from the vantage of myself and Mr. Holmes could one notice that the lady’s arms remained lost in the muff and that to return the money she had to produce a
third
hand!

This apparition disappeared as soon as the money was reclaimed and the frowning man rushed on, looking annoyed with all three of us. I frowned, recalling a fatal séance.

The woman, a perfectly respectable-appearing matron in her middle years, also glared at us and sailed on with hardly a stutter in her step, so speedy had the transaction been.

“It is not only buildings,” Sherlock Holmes observed in the manner of a professor, “that use ‘false fronts.’ ”

He was striding along again so briskly that I could barely gasp
out, “There’s a policeman half way down the next block. Surely—”

“None of the parties involved will want their time wasted. I can see that New York puts most metropolises to shame with its dedication to Yankee industriousness. It’s no wonder, then, that the bizarre murder you mention has not become the public equivalent of the Ripper’s Whitechapel depredations last autumn.”

I was pleased to be able to stop and announce, like a tram car conductor, “We are here.”

He spun to examine the building before us. It was an ordinary brownstone of four stories, with a half-basement.

“This was the scene of the first murder?” he inquired.

“It depends.”

“The first murder that you believe is related to your inquiries into Irene Adler’s past?”

“No. It is the first murder that I mentioned to her, since I had learned that there was some likelihood she had known the victim.”

Pausing had made us into a resented island in the stream of pedestrians parting to rush around us. Mr. Holmes took my elbow like a proper gentleman and escorted me up the building’s front steps.

“Perhaps we could discuss this indoors. The rooms of the late medium have not been rented, you say?”

“Word of the death has gone round the neighborhood. The rooms are now reputed to be haunted and no one wants to rent them.”

“Haunted! I am ever amazed by the gullibility of the human mind. At such times I am tempted to believe that we are descended from apes, as Watson and Darwin would have it, and that the banana has not fallen far from the family tree.”

I almost found myself laughing. “You dare to dispute the latest scientific theories of our times?”

“I dare nothing but to express my benighted opinion. Show me incontrovertible proof in a test tube and I am a convert. Spout
grand theories about the content of the universe and its beings and I am bored beyond stupefaction. I am a specialist, Miss Cochrane, and also a generalist. That makes me a contradiction but it is contradiction that intrigues me, such as a spirit choking its medium, surely a form of psychic murder-suicide. The landlady expects us, you say.”

“She has become quite used to my importing people to the scene.”

“Had you troubled to learn anything of my methods, you would realize that you have irrevocably spoiled the site with your guided tours,” he said in disgust.

He looked so put out that I half expected him to demand to be taken to the nearest boat dock.

“Only Mrs. Norton with the ever-present Miss Huxleigh,” I said, “and Irene came to some astounding conclusions.”

He held up his gloved hands imperiously enough to stop traffic on Broadway, which is saying something. “No more spoiling the scene, Miss Cochrane, I beg you. I am interested in no one’s conclusions but my own. I must admit that these ladies previously showed some slight respect for the hidden tales to be read in a murder scene or two in Paris, but here the authorities have been all over it first as well, and unlike the London police they have not been trained by me to tread softly.”

What gall! “Trained” indeed. I’d like to see him “train” a New York City policeman. Not even Tammany Hall could do it.

Despite his reservations, he nodded at the brownstone’s door and I was encouraged to ring the bell.

Mrs. Titus soon answered, her apron coughing clouds of flour as she wiped her hands on it. “Why, it’s Miss Nellie Bly again, this time with a gentleman. I keep hoping for lodgers, but my advertisements go unanswered. I’m thinking of turning the tables on things and advertising for a medium, though I don’t like what happened to the last one on my premises. Who would you be, sir?
This is a respectable house and I expect gentlemen to give their names.”

“This is,” I put in quickly, “the renowned British consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

“Well, he’s not renowned enough for me to know him from a coal scuttle, but if you say he’s useful, I’ll go along with it. Perhaps he’ll like the look of my rooms and rent them.”

By this time Mr. Holmes had tipped his hat and murmured his thanks, ignoring the rest.

So we entered and he doffed his hat for the nonce, glancing around the wide foyer with its white-tiled floor and wooden bank of boarder post boxes.

“I take it that the rooms in question,” he asked Mrs. Titus, “are on the main floor behind the right bay window.”

“Why, yes! Did you spy a ghost in the window, Mr. Holmes?”

“I saw that the curtains have not been pulled back in several days. There is dust on the sills that would have been disarranged by the daily act of drawing and closing them. And, of course, they are closed now. Since they are the only means of light for the front rooms, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone resides there.”

Mrs. Titus gave me a conspiratorial look. “Makes one shiver, doesn’t it? Downright uncanny how a man from England can know so much about our New York ways on one visit.”

I myself found Mr. Holmes’s deductions no more than common sense, but call a woman a medium or a man a detective and people will make all sorts of wrong assumptions about them.

That fact made me wonder whether Mr. Holmes was no more of a wonder worker than the average spiritualist. Quite a joke it would be on me if I had lured a fraud to our shores.

Mr. Holmes seemed used to such skepticism, for he bowed to Mrs. Titus and offered to inspect the premises and perhaps declare them ghost-free so that she could rent them.

It was as if he had said “Open sesame.”

She dredged a ring of keys from a skirt pocket beneath her apron and once again I stood on the threshold of the death chamber, my third visit.

This time I was instructed to remain there while Mr. Holmes quizzed me about the arrangement of the various people and pieces of furniture during various stages of the séance.

He then began to search high and low, a magnifying glass he had produced from a coat pocket in hand. It was like watching a party of one play some silly parlor game in search of a hidden object. Or, perhaps more vividly, it was like watching some slow, gigantic insect about its mysterious rounds.

First he crawled on his hands and knees around the entire room, examining the rugs and planking, the bottoms of the table and chairs. Then his inspections moved up the walls, recalling his recent macabre explorations of blood-spattered cellar walls in Paris.

It still infuriated me that I was silenced from announcing the deliciously gory trail and astounding solution to the new and recent Jack the Ripper murders on the Continent in the public press. From Whitechapel in the London fall of 1888, Saucy Jack had moved his bloody dalliance to the Continent, to Paris, Prague, and beyond in the spring of 1889. I could have revealed every appalling detail in the public press that employed me, the
New York World
. How Mr. Pulitzer would have rewarded a coup like that! Not that he treated me shabbily, but he was new to the ownership and determined to win the stunt reporting sweepstakes.

The gagging of Nellie Bly in this vital regard was owed to two people, two blasted Englishmen who believed they served the larger cause of their own infernal government: Sherlock Holmes and Quentin Stanhope. Sherlock Holmes I would tolerate as long as he served some purpose of my own, as now. Quentin Stanhope I would tolerate because he was a remarkably attractive gentleman, far too much so to waste on the mousy Nell Huxleigh. In a way I am as wary as she of remarkably attractive gentleman, for a different reason. My work comes before any man. In another way
I am convinced that a modern woman may have her cake and eat it, too.