Femme Fatale (26 page)

Mr. Green frowned politely at the gibberish Mr. Bishop had produced. The name he had in mind was Margaret Townsend.

But when Mr. Bishop’s scrawl was held up to a mirror, of course the word read “Townsend.”

A SUDDEN SWOON

The crowd applauded as one, but Mr. Bishop, always an energetic, even frenetic figure, grew suddenly agitated and in a moment the great mind reader fell mindless to the floor.

Applause turned to gasps and mutters of consternation.

CONFESSION OF CATALEPSY

“Do not worry, my friends,” said a portly fellow who stepped near the unconscious mentalist. “I am Dr. John Irwin. I’ve known Mr. Bishop for years and I am familiar with such ‘swoons’ as he may suffer. In fact, he is that most interesting and rare anomaly, a true cataleptic. Many today fear being buried alive, but Mr. Bishop has far more right than most to dread this awful fate. His disease inflicts without warning severe muscular rigidity, the suspensions of all sensation and an outward appearance of all life signs being extinguished.”

Not long after that Mr. Bishop did indeed revive and was taken to a bed upstairs to rest. Rest was not his desire, however, and soon he insisted on repeating his last trick. He demanded that the club ledger be brought to his room and that Dr. Irwin act as his assistant.

But the famed mentalist seemed past his powers. He only located the correct page with great effort, and when he stood to determine the chosen name, he collapsed, unconscious again.

COMES THE CONSULTING PHYSICIAN

Dr. Irwin called on Dr. Charles C. Lee, who had attended the mentalist before, but by 4
A.M
. the following day all his efforts to revive the fallen man had failed, and he left.

A most appalling and touching picture of the bizarre efforts to revive the dead man is available from Mr. Augustus Thomas, Mr. Bishop’s
advance man, who was intercepted while strolling along Broadway by a friend who ran up, shouting, “Your star is sick at the Lambs.”

Mr. Thomas sped to the scene, where he “found Bishop in a little hall bedroom on an iron cot where he had been for twelve hours, a tiny electric battery buzzing away with one electrode over his heart and the other in his right hand.”

Mr. Thomas, chagrined at his famous client’s circumstances and “unconscious” condition, noted the two doctors smoking in an adjacent room, worn from the watch. Mr. Thomas sat beside his most famous client, studied the handsome face of this man of thirty-three years, even though Mr. Bishop was “to all appearances dead.” Then “a deeper solemnity came over his features,” and Mr. Thomas summoned the absent doctors to point out the change he had witnessed.

PRONOUNCED DEAD

The two men of medicine immediately declared their patient dead. Mr. Thomas just as swiftly departed for Philadelphia to inform the dead man’s family. Such is the speed of rail transport in our modern day that Mrs. Bishop was at Hawkes Funeral Parlor on Sixth Avenue later that morning, gazing upon her young and handsome husband’s dead body through the glass top of a coffin.

Who can guess at the many deep feelings that crowded that poor woman’s mind? In times of such utter sorrow, often the smallest detail will assume significance. Mrs. Bishop asked the attendant to comb her husband’s hair. No doubt the physicians’ long night of attendance had disarranged it.

A GRISLY DISCOVERY

The attendant nervously drew a comb through the dead man’s hair, the eyes of his widow fresh upon him. He dropped the comb . . . and it disappeared! It had fallen, subsequent inquiry revealed, into the corpse’s empty brain cavity!

At this Mrs. Bishop wailed in despair. It was all too evident that an unauthorized autopsy had already been performed upon her husband, upon a man known to suffer from catalepsy, who always carried a note—his “life guard,” he used to say—explaining his condition and prohibiting an autopsy and also using ice or electrodes on his body. The note also listed the addresses of Mr. Bishop’s family and lawyer, to be alerted if he ever fell into a trance.

Mrs. Bishop, in that dawning moment of horror, cried out, “They have killed my husband! Those doctors slew him for his brain.”

No note was ever found, or admitted to have been found.

A MISPLACED BRAIN

The issue of Mr. Bishop’s missing brain soon became a chorus. In addition to the dead man’s wife crying “Murder” at the Lambs Club and Dr. Irwin’s office, the mother of the deceased, Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, descended on the scene and demanded a coroner’s inquest.

In no time Dr. Irwin and Dr. Lee, Dr. Ferguson and Dr. Hance, the men who had performed and witnessed the autopsy, were arrested and forced to pay bail in the princely sum of $2,000 each.

ANOTHER SHOCKING MISPLACEMENT OF AN ORGAN

For the dead man’s brain was indeed found. It had not been stolen, it had been concealed . . . in his chest cavity.

At the inquest, Mrs. Eleanor Fletcher Bishop testified to her own propensities to catalepsy, and to her son’s previous apparent deaths (erroneous and fortunately
not
followed by hasty autopsies). One occurred in 1873, when he was but a lad of seventeen. The doctors found no respiration, no pulse in his motionless form, and thus he was declared dead. Twelve hours later, young Mr. Bishop awoke “with a start” on the application of tincture of
ammonia (which has often been known to revive many a whalebone-corseted damsel from a dead swoon).

He had been pronounced dead at least two more times, according to inquest testimony, and always had emerged from his trances none the worse for wear . . . save for the autopsy following his final and ultimately fatal swoon at the Lambs Club shortly after one of his greatest triumphs.

But weep and wail as the women would, none of their pleas and cries could change the fact that the mistakenly dead man was indeed dead for good this time, irretrievably dead, bereft of breath when he had been bereft of brain. The elder Mrs. Bishop tried to prevail upon the undertaker to chisel on his headstone epitaph: “Born May 4, 1856—Murdered May 13, 1889.”

She was denied the editorial comment in the epitaph.

For despite a New York Penal Code prohibiting any dissection without permission, a jury of the late Mr. Bishop’s supposed peers (although according to his advance man, Mr. Augustus Thomas, “he had no peers”) released the doctors without penalty.

The senior Mrs. Bishop did not slacken her labors, appealing to Joseph Rinn, a renowned psychic investigator and long-time friend of the escapologist, Houdini. It is even rumored that she presented the case to an obscure British doctor who had written a mystery story involving poison pills.

The fact remains that the man, whether dead at the time of the autopsy or not, was certainly dead now, and so has remained since interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in New York City on May 20th last.

May he rest in peace, but this humble reporter inclines to the theory that he will not.

“Well, Pink.” Irene sat back after perusing this rather lurid report when I had passed it on to her. “This case appears to be almost as outré as your recent experiences in Europe trailing the Ripper. I had no idea that they told such grisly tales in the
New York World
. No wonder you were so dismayed that the Ripper story was too volatile to print in any land.”

“The real world is grisly and I tell it as it happens.”

“But what has this macabre little case to do with us?” I asked.

“Not you, Nell. Not a bit. It’s Irene. When I returned home, I found that Nell Nelson, an upstart imitator of my own undercover methods most noted for a sordid ‘slave girl story,’ had stolen this gem right out from under me whilst I was off chasing a story Whitehall and Sherlock Holmes and half the world wants to keep me from writing. I decided to follow up on the blank spots Miss Nelson leaves in her journalistic efforts. This got me to talking to the sort of folk who put on these kind of shows and shortly thereafter I came across this!”

She withdrew a larger sheet than the newspaper from the portfolio and flourished it at us like a flag.

This example of the typesetter’s art was even more emblazoned with large type in fancy faces, and words that shouted rather than whispered.

MISS MERLINDA THE MERMAID
, it as good as screamed.
SHE GLITTERS, SHE SLITHERS THROUGH THE SEA, THIS NYMPH OF THE ATLANTIC COAST BREATHES WATER NOT AIR, COLLECTING TREASURES FROM DAVY JONES’S LOCKER, BEWITCHING ALL WHO SEE HER WITH HER CURRENT-BLOWN LOCKS, SEA-GREEN EYES, AND SHINING SCALES
.

I passed it to Irene with what I believed was damning silence.

She took the playbill, and smiled. “Quite a rare souvenir by now, I should think. This I remember. Who would think that I would become more noted for my ‘shining scales’ on the international opera house stages than in the theaters of New York?” Irene yawned, like a bored shark. “Is this the shocking evidence of my past you have stumbled upon, Pink? Buffalo Bill has already recalled my long-ago performance as a Denizen of the Deep. I promised him a reprise of the act at his Wild West Show in Paris
before
l’Exposition universelle
closes this fall. He is even now constructing the water tank for me on a wagon, which should be an innovation. I was never a mermaid in motion before. Hardly a scandalous revelation, don’t you think?”

“I recognized you at once.”

At this point, I stared at the playbill she had produced as if it were a scandal sheet. The mermaid’s face and hair had been handtinted peach and auburn, with excessively pink cheeks and lips that one would think the cool and briny deep would hardly confer upon even a mermaid without cosmetic aid. I must admit relief to see that her seaweed-long tresses and danging necklaces of shells and lost Spanish jewels quite bridged the gap between her face and the skirt of scales that sufficed to depict a mermaid’s tail.

Irene certainly was far less scandalous than numerous female equestriennes, electric ladies, wire-dancers, and magician’s assistants I had seen pictured in flesh-colored tights that clung to the lower limbs all the way to their, well, corset covers, and left no detail of the female form unguessed. Irene’s colorful tail was the model of discretion compared to these!

And so I told Miss Pink in no uncertain terms.

“I don’t care if our friend Irene disported, or disports herself, in false scales,” Pink retorted. “The fact is that Mr. Bishop had a large collection of playbills upon which he . . . and our mutual friend, were featured performers.”

“Odd,” Irene put in, “I don’t remember him.”

“He, as you, was a child performer. You often appeared on the same bills. As I tried to trace the playbills missing from his assemblage, I discovered that someone was collecting these old-time souvenirs everywhere I went. The playbills were being sold to unidentified third parties, or went mysteriously missing. So as I tracked backward from Merlinda to ‘Little Fanny Frawley,’ the petite pistolera or sharpshooter of twelve (a clear predecessor of Annie Oakley), to tiny Rena the toe-dancer, I discovered that everyone recalled you, but no one knew where you had gone, or
had come from. When asked about your parents, they blithely assumed you were everybody else’s offspring.”

“So that is why you assembled the cast you did for your séance: several there remembered me, and knew me, or of me, at least. Did you really expect that exercise in Spiritualism to produce any useful results?”

“Before anything came of it, it produced what you call ‘murder,’ didn’t it?”

“And if it truly did, so much more shame on you.” Irene allowed herself to look utterly unforgiving, which I had seldom seen in our eight years of association and never directed at me, thank God. Despite her . . . unusual history . . . she had a moral center that I had to respect, even if I could not understand it. It forgave deeply personal foibles but not the smallest sins against others. “What have you stirred up, Pink, in your zeal for stories and to ‘unmask’ me? My past was eccentric, I admit. I admit that I want it to remain my past, and forgotten, but I’m not ashamed of anything I did. Can you say the same? The medium is dead.

“She was an honest fraud,” Irene added as an epitaph from a fellow showman, “and I do remember being excessively fond of her as a child, though I do not much remember being a child.” Irene’s revived emotions forced her to a long, forbidding silence, a condition I had never witnessed before.

“What have you done?” she said at long last. “And can anyone undo it?”

Pink crushed her hands together on her lap. “I don’t know. One thing I observed from the dead man’s playbills that I was able to see: the Gemini Twins were listed on them, and one of them, Sophie, was the medium who was killed. And I just noticed in the paper today an obscure notice of the death of Abyssinia, a former Egyptian dancing girl of that same era, who died bizarrely in the embrace of a former performing partner, a twenty-five-foot pet boa constrictor.”

My interest perked up. Was it possible that Madame Sarah might meet a similar fate?

“I was only pursuing the truth of your ancient history, but I seem to have stumbled over a trail of recent suspicious deaths, including Bishop’s, and possibly murders. I’m now convinced that Sophie’s death was deliberate, yet am no closer to the identity of your mother.”