The Blackest Bird (2 page)

T
wo days passed as usual for one in the position of high constable.

With stultifying summer heat stifling the metropolis, crime boiled out of the dank Five Points, bubbled from the polluted colored enclaves along Minetta Creek, spewed along the moist docks of the fetid and unwholesome waterfront.

On Rose Street a sallow-faced barrowman was murdered by a cutthroat for his wheeled cart, four puncheons of rhum disappeared off the wharf at James Slip, three autumn morts were discovered strolling uneasily east on the Fourteenth Street, fully swathed beneath their dresses in bolts of watered silk, pilfered not five minutes before from the Endicott dry goods emporium. A young doctor from the City Hospital, accused by a medical colleague of buying the bodies of a diseased mother and child out of the bowels of that rank harborer of human distress, the Old Brewery, was found dissecting his victims’ corpses in a basement operating theater on Hester Street. Three toughs affiliated with the Charlton Street gang, out for a night of pirating, drowned in the Hudson River (here called, as it often was, the North River) when their stolen dory was struck and capsized by an oceanbound three-masted bark.

S
O FOR
O
LD
H
AYS
went the inimitable current of the city, the daily and nightly course of the constabulary, leading him to that Thursday morning, some minutes before ten, when a nervous young man in a plexus of high agitation, giving his name as Daniel Payne, his profession corkcutter, appeared at the Tombs’ gate and asked for High Constable Jacob Hays.

“I am the fiancé of Mary Cecilia Rogers,” the sallow-faced cull, escorted in by Sergeant McArdel, announced to Hays in a voice thin and much tinged by anxiety.

Until that moment the high constable had barely given second thought to Mary Rogers and her newest disappearance, having judged the girl to be enjoying another assignation with another beau.

As soon as the corkcutter introduced himself, however, Hays knew he had been mistaken.

“I am informed my rival, Mr. Arthur Crommelin, has visited here yesterday to inform you of certain circumstances surrounding my intended, and probably to implicate me,” Payne continued. “No matter. She has been found.” He did not look at Hays, but at the floor. A tremor passed through his body, and his words caught in his throat. “I fear she is d-dead,” he stammered.

A cold hand crept up from the high constable’s bowels to seize his intestines. “Dead?” he demanded. “How so, sir?”

“Mr. Crommelin is a onetime lodger at the Rogerses’ rooming house, where I myself am a lodger. Before my arrival, he was Miss Rogers’ intended, although I have now supplanted him. Yesterday, after coming here, Mr. Crommelin took it upon himself to launch a search for her. He went to Hoboken after having received news in a grog shop on Dey Street of a young woman fitting Mary’s description having been seen on the ferry. Once in New Jersey, he stumbled on a crowd surrounding a body by the riverbank near the Sybil Cave, and it proved to be she for whom he was looking.”

He began to sob her name, “Mary.”

“She had drowned?” Hays asked, studying the man as he choked and murmured.

“Something more, I fear.”

“More?”

“Mr. Crommelin attests she has been murdered.”

Old Hays looked upon the corkcutter intently. “And Mr. Crommelin is quite sure he is not mistaken, that Miss Rogers was not merely the victim of a terrible accident, a tragic drowning?”

“No, no,” Payne said almost indignantly. “Crommelin said murder. He admitted the water had taken a terrible toll on her face and body, and at first, he said, he had not been confident it was even her, but now he is sure. He returned at first light this morning, delayed, he said, due to his late testimony in front of the coroner’s inquest. He carried with him several bits of ribbon, a swatch of fabric cut from Mary’s dress, flowers plucked from her hat, a garter, and the bottom hem from her pantalette—all given him, he said, by the coroner, Dr. Cook, in order to show to Mrs. Rogers in hope of ascertaining positive identification of her daughter. Additionally, he said he took it upon himself to take a lock of Mary’s hair and one of her shoes, which he thought telling because of her unusually small feet.

“All have been identified by Mrs. R. as Mary’s.” Payne began again to sob. “It is undoubtedly her, sir.”

E
arly that afternoon, having boarded the ferry at the Barclay Street pier, Old Hays crossed the Hudson River to arrive within an hour’s time at the office of the Hudson County coroner, Dr. Richard Cook.

Dr. Cook, a tall, lean man, took a seat and indicated one for Hays. He intertwined his long, bony fingers in a sort of steeple in front of him as he settled down to the business at hand.

He told Hays that on the previous evening he had testified in front of the Hoboken Board of Inquiry to the following effect:

The body in question was that of Mary Cecilia Rogers, aged twenty-one years, resident of 126 Nassau Street, New York City, New York. Miss Rogers was victim of murder by person or persons unknown.

“The remains were found by two fishermen,” Dr. Cook said, referring to his notes, “Jimmy Boulard and Henry Mallin, over on the steam ferry from Manhattan for a day’s outing.”

About noon, while heading north on the footpath from the Elysian Fields, the pair had spotted what they took as a bundle of rags bobbing in the river a few hundred feet from shore. They waded out to get
a better look, upon which they realized what they were seeing was a bloated and hideously disfigured corpse, floating in the shallows, half in the water, half out. Following this discovery, they ran back to the Elysian dock, where they commandeered a skiff and rowed out to the spot where the body remained adrift, caught between two tides.

“She had been killed most brutally,” Dr. Cook told Hays, “the crime committed without question by more than one person. It is my feeling that this young woman was most likely attacked by a gang of wretched blackguards. In all probability, soon after being set upon, she fainted, and before she was able to recover, her murderers had tightly tied not only restraints around her wrists, but also a piece of fine lace trimming around her neck. This lace alone would have prevented her from breathing again.”

“Was there any foam, as might be the case with the drowned?”

“I observed no foam. About the throat were bruises and impressions of fingers. In evidence was an ecchymose mark, about the size and shape of a man’s thumb on the right side of the neck, near the jugular vein, and two or three more marks on the left side resembling the shape of a man’s fingers. The arms were bent over on the chest and rigid, so tight and stiff I had to use force to straighten them. The right hand was clenched; the left partially open. It appeared as if the wrists had been tied together. On both the left and right wrists were circular excoriations, apparently the effect of ropes. The hands had probably been tied while the body was violated, and untied before being discarded. All indications are she had been bound, gagged, throttled, and then raped before being thrown in the water.”

“Is there any sign that she had been drugged beforehand?” Hays asked.

“There were none. The face was suffused with dark blood, some of which issued from the mouth. Her flesh and features were swollen. The veins highly distended.”

“I knew her,” Hays sighed deeply. “I buy tobacco at the store in which she once worked. She was a vibrant young woman.”

Cook glanced up from his notes. “You would never know it now,” he said. “A crime of this nature, it is all very disturbing. It makes you wonder the state in which we live in our society.” The coroner shook his head in sadness before proceeding. “Her dress was much torn in several places and otherwise disordered. From the outer dress a long slip, say a foot wide, had been torn upward, extending from the bottom of the frock hem to the waist, but not wholly torn off. Instead, it was wound around her waist a few times and secured by a slipknot. Not a lady’s knot, mind you, but a sort of buntline hitch secured in the back, reminiscent of that tied by a sailor.”

“A sailor?” Hays muttered. “To what effect do you surmise this arrangement, Doctor?”

“As far as I can tell, the knotted strips formed a sort of handle, used to transport the body.”

“Then she was not killed by the riverbank?”

“No, she was not.”

“I see,” said Hays. “Do we know where she was killed?”

“Not as of yet. There was considerable excoriation upon the top of her back and along both shoulder bones, and excoriation also at the base of the back, near the hips. In my estimation, these were produced by the victim struggling to get free while being held down to effect her violation. This act was without doubt carried out while she was laid down upon some hard surface: a hardboard floor, the bottom of a boat, or somewhere similar.”

“But not, for example, on a bed?”

“Absolutely not.”

Cook returned to his notes once more. He squinted at his own cramped handwriting for some seconds before returning his attention to Hays. “Her dress, immediately beneath the frock and between the upper petticoat, was made of fine muslin. One piece, about eighteen inches in width, was torn clean from the garment. This piece was used to cover her mouth, again utilizing a sailor’s hard knot at the back part of the neck; I suspect this was done to smother her cries and that the
gag was in all likelihood held tightly in place over her mouth by one of her ravishers. Again, the flesh of the neck in this general area was much swollen. I must say the piece of fine lace trimming of which I before spoke very nearly escaped my attention. I found this length so tightly, so severely tied about the neck as to be virtually hidden from sight; it was completely buried in the flesh, again fastened by a sailor’s hard knot, which lay just under the left ear. Around it her flesh was much distended. I only came upon it by observing a deep crease encircling her neck. Passing my hand behind her ear, I accidentally felt, rather than saw, the small knot, which I supposed to have been the trimming of her collar, so deeply buried as to have been initially obscured from view.”

“From such description, would this arrangement alone not have sufficed to produce death?”

“It would have exactly. I would calculate she had been sexually attacked several times before expiring. Perhaps by as many as three men.”

“And previous to that?” Hays asked.

Dr. Cook hesitated almost imperceptibly. “I found her to have been a person of kerrect habits and chaste character,” he said.

A sudden sharp pain shot from the high constable’s right knee to his buttock, very nearly making him squirm. His physician, Dr. John Francis, had informed him he suffered from poor circulation and chronic arthritic dysfunction of the leg joints, particularly the knee, ankle, and hip, among other varied ailments associated with advancing years. Sitting or standing in one position for any prolonged length of time often resulted in excruciating discomfort for the high constable, although it was not in Jacob Hays’ constitution to complain. “Where is the body now?” he asked. “I’d like to view her.”

Dr. Cook frowned. “Because of the heat, I have found it necessary to inter her in a temporary grave. I’m afraid the state of her was untenable.”

“Yet you are convinced this is Mary Rogers? There is no question? Despite the profound decomposition of her features, you are sure?”

“I am sure. All circumstances point to it, and she has been positively identified.”

“By the law clerk and ex-suitor Crommelin?”

“Yes, by Mr. Crommelin. He and his friend came upon the body while I was making my preliminary examination.”

“His friend?”

“A gentleman giving his name as Archibald Padley, also an ex-lodger, also a law clerk.”

“What exactly did these two gentlemen do and say?”

“A curious crowd had gathered. They pushed through the throng for a closer look. At some point, Mr. Crommelin voiced alarm to my colleague, Gilbert Merritt, the Hudson County justice of the peace, that he feared he and his friend knew the identity of the corpse. After closer scrutiny, however, the companion backed off from his statement. He claimed, given the state of the facial features, he could not be sure. But this Crommelin knelt and took the arm of the corpse in his own hands, and carefully pushed up the fabric of her dress sleeve, proceeding to minutely study the hair on the forearm beneath, seemingly its quality and quantity. Following some moments of his examination in this manner, tears welled in his eyes. ‘I know her,’ he stated. ‘With certainty I know her! This is Mary Cecilia Rogers, and I am fearful this blow will kill her mother.’”

“Her mother?”

“Yes.”

“Those were his exact words?”

“Yes, that is what he said.”

“And you took his identification as fact.”

“I might have preferred a blood relative, the mother called in to question, for example, but frankly, the condition of the body was appalling, especially for such a relatively short time in the water. In this heat, her dissolution was of such rapid and profound nature, I feared to subject the mother, who I understood to be quite old and infirm, to any more anguish, or compromise the body any further, unless evidence be lost before being corroborated by another.”

“The New York coroner, for example?”

Dr. Cook smiled sheepishly and shrugged. His blue eyes sparkled. “If you will.”

“So you are hopeful to see the City of New York taking over this investigation, Dr. Cook?”

“My superiors are reluctant to take jurisdiction. After all, the victim is a resident of your metropolis, High Constable, not New Jersey. True, the poor girl’s body washed up here, but this outrage, you cannot possibly argue, very likely took place within the confines of your fair city, not ours. So in the end, I have to agree. Who, sir, better able to see this criminal atrocity to its logical end than a man of your remarkable skills and acumen?”