Winter at Death's Hotel (16 page)

Louisa felt abandoned. She was no longer the just-released prisoner; she was a tired woman with a hurt ankle who didn't know how to get home. She turned away, meaning to hobble to the curb and hope to see a cab. She became aware of a rising cacophony to her left, a complex and hideous noise that was increasing as she crossed to the curb. It rose and rose, threatening to deafen. She wasn't mad; other people heard it, too; ahead of her in the street, the driver of a carriage looked behind him and whipped his horses up; two women who were crossing broke into awkward runs, their skirts lifted in their hands. A terrified dog put its tail between its legs and bolted.

The thing came near. It looked like a rather elegant carriage, with brass lamps and a leather top and shiny, spinning wheels—but no horses.

A motorcar.

She had heard of such things. Arthur had shown her a picture of one in, she thought, the
Graphic
. But here was one in horrible reality, shaking and coughing and rattling and growling as it pulled right in front of her and came to a stop. A tall man rose from the back and stepped down, removing his hat as he did so.

“Mrs. Doyle, how brave of you to be out! May we offer you transportation back to the hotel? It would be terrible for you to have to find a cab.”

It was Henry Irving.

Could she? What would Arthur say? What would
people
say?

Seconds later, she was spinning along Park Row at twelve miles an hour, frightened out of her wits. Forty-five minutes after that, she was back in her hotel room, trying to run to her bathroom to vomit because she couldn't stop thinking of a woman without lips or eyes.

When she had cleaned herself and brushed her teeth, she dug out the two drawings McClurg had given her—herself with her bruises, the dead woman with the stitches in her lips and nose—and put them in an envelope with a note that said, “Are these accurate enough for you?” She wrote
Hotel
Detective
on the outside and took it down to reception, despite an ankle that was now screaming for relief.

***

Detective-Sergeant Dunne had walked from police headquarters to the Tenth Precinct station, not because he liked walking—he hated it, in fact, as he hated all forms of exercise—but because it was only a few hundred feet away. It was one of the mysteries of city administration why the Tenth wasn't housed at 300 Mulberry instead of 205, but Dunne had learned long since not to look into that sort of thing. It usually had to do with money.

“Dunne, Murder Squad.” He flashed his card. “I wanna see Jimmy Malone.”

“Down in the duty room.”

“Well, fetch him up, will you? And don't put it in the book; this is a social call.”

He looked at the notices on the board while he waited. They were the same notices he ignored every day at 300 Mulberry. He seemed amused by what he read.

“Sure, it's Never Dunne.”

“Hey, Jimmy; how's the lad?” They'd known each other when both were probationers in uniform. They'd taken different paths.

“Passable but getting older. Ye've come up in the world, Dunne.”

“Got a few minutes, Jimmy?”

“Wouldn't I have, and me on nights for the next week? Not going to fill me full of tales of the old days, are you?”

Dunne led him along Mulberry to a coffee stall, where they both got milky coffee in white china cups and leaned against the matchboarded side of the stall. Dunne said, “It's the matter of the dead woman you found in the Bowery.”

“Worst thing I ever saw.”

“I'm sure it was, lad. Murder's given me the investigation to wind up.”

“They know who done it, then?”

“O' course not, Jimmy; you know better than that. What I meant to say was that we're putting it on the shelf until we get some new evidence. I'm just checking the loose ends and like that.”

“I tole everything I know to that lieutenant of yours.” Malone spat. “He's a piece of work.”

“Now, now, Jimmy, we never speak ill of our betters. What I'm after, Jimmy, is just to ask you again if you saw anybody, anybody at all, around the place where you found the poor girl.”

“Poor girl, my arse, Dunne; she was a hoor.”

“You knew her, did you?”

“'Course I didn't, man! Never set eyes on her. But you get to know the type in our work, eh?”

“Well, as she wasn't wearing any clothes, Jimmy, I wondered how you knew she was a working girl. Saw the wear on her back, did you?”

“Ah, ya scamp! It just figures, don't it?”

“Anyways, did you see anybody else, Jim?”

“Nary a human soul.”

“Not all night?”

“Aw, shit, Dunne, what are you saying? 'Course I saw some folk here and there, the usual layabouts and drifters and hoors, but that was earlier. By the time I found that god-awful mess, it was time for even the bad folk to be in their beds. The town was empty.”

“So, you saw nobody near by. Now let's see—you found the body in the alley off Elizabeth Street. You'd last passed there when?”

“Cripes, I don't keep all that in me book! But if it was the usual night, I come by there twenty minutes before, give or take.”

“Then you went…?”

“Then I go on down Elizabeth and across Bayard to Mott, and so north for a few blocks, and then left on Broome, and so over that to Elizabeth and so start down Elizabeth again. That's my beat.”

“And you saw nobody in all that time.”

“Not a soul. It's God's loneliest job, y'know, walking the beat at three in the morning. Cripes, I was even glad to see some old Jew with a wagon.”

Dunne sighed. “That was somebody, Jimmy.”

“What d'you mean by that?”

“You saw an old Jew with a wagon.”

“So I did; did I ever say I didn't?”

“You said you saw nobody.”

“Aw, so what? He says to me, ‘Hello, Mr. Policeman,' and I says hello and we went our separate ways.”

“And where was this?” Dunne got out a pocket street directory that was a scant two by five inches and unfolded the thin-paper map inside its cover. He held it against the wall of the coffee stall. “Now just show me where you saw him, Jimmy.”

“Well—I ain't got me glasses with me; how did I know we was going to do reading?—but find me Elizabeth Street. Right, there it is and there's Mott, and I guess I was coming north about here and he was going south. What of it?”

Dunne looked at the map, then made a pencil mark. “He had a horse, did he?”

“What, you think he was pulling the wagon hisself?”

“What did he look like?”

“I think he was sorta gray, maybe. You know, like a horse.”

“The man, Jimmy—the old Jew. What'd he look like?”

“Like a ragman.”

“Wearing a hat?”

“Aye, a hat, but don't ask me what kind.”

“Gray hair, was it?”

“More white. Hanging around his face, y'know.”

“Suit? Necktie? Shawl?”

Malone waved a hand. “I hadn't bought a ticket to study him with a glass, Dunne. He was an old Jew in a wagon; let it go, will you?”

“How did you know he was a Jew?”

“Didn't he sound like one? He was a kike with a kike accent. Cripes, man!”

Dunne finished his coffee and slapped Malone on a shoulder. “It's good to see you, Jimmy. Nice change from 300 Mulberry.” He put both cups on the counter of the stall. “I'll walk you back to the station, shall I?”

“I wasn't no help, was I.”

“Evidence is like the Almighty, Jimmy—it moves in mysterious ways. I won't know if you were any help for weeks and weeks yet.”

But as they were walking along Mulberry, he was thinking that he'd give this to the Wop, who was proving a better cop than he'd expected. Forcella could go to the precincts that surrounded the Tenth and talk to the cops who'd been on the night beat and ask whether they'd seen an old man, maybe a Jew, with a wagon.

Because the wagon was the bit of light that showed through the trees. A wagon would explain how he'd moved the body.

***

New Brittanic Hotel, New York City

My Dearest Husband,

I have had the most exhilarating and terrifying experience of my existence! If it can be said that terror is exhilarating, which I think it is or certainly was for me! I have traveled in a motor-car! I had just stepped out of the hotel when who should happen by in this remarkably noisy monstrosity but Mr. Irving, out “for a spin,” as he put it, with his friend Mr. Clapp the theatrical producer and the owner of the machine! The machine was made entirely by hand in Germany and cost a great deal of money! I was invited to join them which I did. Oh, forgive me darling Arthur if you disapprove, but it seemed to be quite decorous to be seen in the company of Mr. Irving and his distinguished friend and in my condition of near-invalid, so anyone of any sense watching would know that a favor was being done me and nothing improper could be inferred! We went down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square, which is quite nice though I am told abandoned by the better sort of people, and then up again, seeing both the Brevoort House and the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and other sights I cannot remember but which I am sure were delightful. It was a glorious interlude in my rather dreary life without you, in which nothing happens and I am able only to sit and read and think. I yearn for the day (and the night, how naughty I am) when we can be together again.

Have you wired money for me to your banker? I have not heard from him. The hotel continues to allow me to live here without payment, as is of course only proper, as if we were to sue the sum would be enormous, and that is four dollars a day saved, but I have to pay for my meals and Ethel's (though it seems to me that they should in conscience pay for our food as well as our rooms, as we could hardly be expected to live here without eating, and our being here at all is of course their doing, as it was their carpet), but at any rate I have to pay and am running out of money. I assure you, dearest husband, that I am guilty of no extravagance, not being able to leave the hotel and so unable to “do the shops” and commit those frivolities of which I know you disapprove, and our meals are of the simplest, as I insist to Ethel, chosen from the cheapest things on the menu, and if I were able to go out and find less expensive places to eat I would, but you know I cannot.

Louisa bit the end of the hotel pen. Was she being convincing enough? Pathetic enough? Not that she meant to be at all insincere, but sometimes Arthur was rather hard-headed when it came to money. She thought guiltily of the two dollars she had given to McClurg. Arthur would explode if he heard of it. She would have to make it up somehow—small sacrifices she could cite if he ever found out. Give up desserts? She would happily give up wine with dinner, but people didn't drink wine with dinner here; they drank ice water, and it was free. She was also spending more than thirty American cents a day on newspapers. Could she give those up? How would she ever know anything?

She thought again of the dead woman. She felt the same pang of loss, then the same nausea. Despite what she had learned from Fitch and McClurg, she was not satisfied: she had let Fitch walk off with the story,
with
the
woman
, but Louisa had been left with the story unfinished. She wanted to
know
.

Perhaps, she thought, Fitch would find something new. Or perhaps something would happen that would finish the story and explain everything. Perhaps, somehow, the murderer would reveal himself!

All prayers are answered, but not necessarily in the form that we prayed for.

BOWERY BUTCHER SLAYS AGAIN

Louisa stared at the morning's naked headline. It was right there on the front page, taking up the width of the newspaper. She felt as if she had been plunged underwater, realized she was holding her breath. What had she written to Arthur? That terror was exhilarating? But this was not exhilarating, it was exhausting and horrible, and yet she knew that what she felt was terror.

BOWERY BUTCHER SLAYS AGAIN

Second Victim's Body Found

“Revolting”—Murder Squad

How Many More Will He Murder and Maim
Before Our Police Stop Him?

By A. M. Fitch

This correspondent was on the scene when members of the Municipal Police removed the second butchered woman's body from a filthy alley in that notorious precinct, The Bowery. Found in a noxious passageway between Hester and Canal Streets, the nude corpse had suffered the same egregiously horrific woundings as that of the red-haired beauty discovered five nights ago.

Members of the Murder Squad were present as the violated female remains were removed to the coroner's horse-van for transport to the City Mortuary. They would say only that they were pursuing every avenue of investigation and that their determination is absolute. “We will rid the city of this fiend!” Commissioner Roosevelt assured the public.

To date, no hint has been given of any “leads” in the first murder, although this correspondent has it on the authority of a reliable witness that the victim was seen in an uptown hotel only hours before her death. Up to the time of this writing, however, the police have remained silent as to what they know.

The second victim is believed to be another broken blossom of the heartless city streets. One “copper” in fact declared that he recognized her as “Lina,” an habituée of a corner not two blocks from where her stab-riddled body was discovered by a wakeful pavement-sleeper.

This writer was able to interview the discoverer, a man of no known address who called himself “Tipple.” He was, he said, making his way along the aforesaid alley for purposes of nature when he stumbled and almost fell and found himself staring into the lifeless eyes of the murdered miss. “My heart was in my mouth,” he said. “She was a horrible sight. I've seen some things in my time, but this was the worst.”

Police arrested “Tipple” on the spot because the skirts of his ragged coat were bloody, as were his shoes. We are told, however, that other pavement-sleepers of his acquaintance were able to support in Mulberry Street Police Court his contention that until the moment he had encountered the corpse, he was lying on a grating in Clinton Street and sharing a “jug” with them. They had seen him make his way into the alley; and they had heard his scream of terror and alarm. Police are continuing to hold him in the Mulberry Street lockup, nonetheless, although the magistrate refused to allow a charge of murder to be placed. “Tipple” is being held “for his own protection,” said Lieutenant John Cleary of the Murder Squad.

If “Tipple” is not the slayer of two women, who is? Who takes such vicious pleasure in disfiguring and mutilating women? And are only ladies of the night his targets, as were those of the well-remembered Ripper of London?

The
Express
demands answers. In order to encourage those who have knowledge to come forward, this newspaper offers a reward of one thousand dollars to anyone who gives information that will aid us in bringing this madman to justice.

In the meantime, it is our understanding that the police are working on the case, under the direction of Detective-Sergeant Harry Dunne, in a very methodical fashion.

She skipped through it again. Minnie must have been up in the middle of the night to have been on the spot. Was it a sign, a gift, a curse, this second killing? Maybe the police would solve it at once; maybe there would be new evidence, some lucky happenstance that would put him into their hands.

“I must get up!”

“You haven't had your breakfast.”

“Help me into the gray wool; I haven't time to bother with a corset—stockings, of course; they'll have to hold themselves up. Oh, damn the bodice! Not you, Ethel—well, fasten it any old way. Oh, hell! Why are women's clothes so
slow
! That'll do, that'll do, stop fussing. I'm only going downstairs for a moment and then I shall be back.”

“Mr. Galt is coming at half-eight.”

“Is he? Oh, yes. Well, tell him to wait.”

She could maneuver a bit better on the crutches now, although as soon as she swung herself forward she felt the soreness in her upper back and her arms.
I
shall
turn
into
a
strongman
from
it. Strongwoman.
She smiled at that, thought of herself pulling on Arthur's chest expander, lifting huge dumb-bells.
I
should
have
to
grow
a
mustache
.

She hobbled to Reception and asked to use the telephone.

“In Booth Two, please, Mrs. Doyle. The number?”

“Oh—I don't know—it's the
Express
newspaper.”

“I can find that, thank you, ma'am.”

She backed herself into Booth Two and sat rather awkwardly on the triangular wooden seat fastened across a corner. There was hardly room for herself and the crutches, but she managed to close the door on all of them. The booth was made of a lovely dark wood, she thought mahogany, with an electric lamp that had a shade that was supposed to look, she supposed, like antique vellum and had tassels hanging from it. The telephone was an enormous, already antiquated thing that stuck its snout out of the wall like some sort of reptile. The earpiece was on a separate cord. She had used a telephone in London and so recognized the device's parts. Still, when she picked up the earpiece, she heard nothing; she blew into the reptile's circular snout and still heard nothing; she said, “Hello?”

She waited. Then there was a pop and a sizzle and a male voice shouted, “
New
York
Express
, what can I do for you?”

“A. M. Fitch, please.”

“That's the newsroom.”

“Will you connect me, please?”

“There's a separate number; do you want that?”

“Can't you connect me?”

“Oh…I suppose, all right. Hold on…”

More sizzling sounds—electricity running through the wires, she thought—and another male voice, very young. “Newsroom, whatcha want?”

One of the urchins, she thought. “A. M. Fitch, please.”

The voice got faraway and muffled. “
Fitch! Fitch! You here?
She what?” His voice returned to normal. “She ain't here. She was out on a story all night. Woman murdered in the Bowery. Read it on page one.”

“When will I be able to find her there, please?”

“Try 'er after two.” The line went dead. Not even a sizzle. Louisa looked at the earpiece, sighed, hung it up. Back at Reception, she said, “Could you put my telephone call on the bill, please?”

“Sure can, Mrs. Doyle.”

She felt deflated. Was it only not being able to get Minnie Fitch? No, much more—she wanted to get
on
with the…was it a story? An experience? How horrible, to turn another woman's death into an “experience.” Something to tell, a creepy tale. No, it wasn't that. It was that she wanted to take part in helping to avenge the dead women. And surely telling their story was helping? “Live to tell my tale aright.” She envied Minnie Fitch her privileged place in it, able to see the scene of the crime, even the corpse itself. Or had she made all that up?

If
I
don't learn more about it soon, I shall scream!
And what good would that do?

Back in her room, Louisa read the article twice more with even hungrier haste than she was downing pieces of cinnamon toast. Sitting up in bed, the newspapers around her like carelessly dealt cards, she took in Minnie Fitch's words as if they were a new gospel. When she reached for her teacup, she didn't take her eyes off the page; when she set the cup down, she missed the saucer and the cup fell to the carpet.

“Oh, madame.” Ethel was sponging up the spilled tea with a towel.

“Oh—I'm so sorry—oh, Ethel, leave it—it isn't your job…”

“It's somebody's, madame.”

Louisa let Ethel's annoyance wash over her and recede. Ethel was right, of course. Louisa poured herself more tea and reached for another piece of toast.

Who was this “reliable witness” of Fitch's? It must be Louisa herself—or had Fitch moved so fast that she'd found somebody else? She certainly had “made tracks,” as Louisa had heard somebody say yesterday in the lobby. And how had she managed to be on the spot when the body was found? Well, not when it was found, but soon after. A third, more careful reading of the article suggested that Fitch had got there after the first policemen and after the Murder Squad (who were, she gathered, some sort of separate entity). Did this mean that Fitch bribed somebody at police headquarters? Probably so, if what Manion had said about police venality was true.

The article also seemed to hint that Fitch knew more than she was telling. Again, whatever she knew was probably what she had got from Louisa, but suppose she had tracked down the identity of the first victim?
Oh, Minnie, why don't you telephone me? Or come to see me because you can't wait to tell me everything?

Louisa started to jump out of bed but got only as far as touching her injured foot to the floor.

“Agh!”

Ethel appeared in the bathroom door. “Madame?” The tone meant, “What now?”

“I'm sorry, Ethel. I was thoughtless.”

Ethel disappeared back into the bathroom, where she was wringing out the tea-stained towel. Had Louisa heard a grunt—the kind that meant “Of course you were thoughtless”? She would have to placate Ethel somehow. How? Perhaps give her the tickets to the Wild West. But whom would she go with?

“Ethel.”

“Madame?” Same tone.

“Ethel, do you remember that Colonel Cody gave me tickets to his show last night after dinner?”

“Yes, madame.”

“Would you like to have them? I'm sure you must have friends upstairs you could enjoy them with.”

Ethel was holding the stained towel across her arms as if she were performing some rite that had perhaps involved animal sacrifice. She looked rather ecclesiastical, Louisa thought, although not at all Christian. To her surprise, Ethel said, “If they're included in the offer, I'd rather have the other ones, madame.”

“Mr. Irving's?”

“It's only that I saw the Wild West in London, and I've never seen Mr. Irving.”

“Well—of course. I suppose.” That left her with the tickets to the Wild West, and of course no one to go with her, as it didn't seem now that Ethel would go unless ordered. “And you have somebody else who would like to see Mr. Irving?”

“I think I could hunt somebody up, madame. Thank you for your very kind offer.” Ethel reached behind herself and hung the towel in the bathroom. “More tea? More toast?” She began to straighten the newspapers, her good humor (or whatever that was) apparently restored.

“I'd like the gray silk today, Ethel, without the bustle because it gets in the way of my ankle. And lay out my waterproof cloak, which of course isn't waterproof, is it? I may go out and I see rain on the window.”

“Madame, you can't.”

“I can and I will. Just so you'll know, Ethel, I went out yesterday.”

“So I heard, madame.” Ethel sounded severe again.

“Did you! From whom?”

“The doorman, madame. He says you arrived in a
motorcar
.”

Louisa was instantly angry, turned herself into a woman she didn't like: “I didn't realize that I was the subject of gossip among the hotel servants, Ethel. I am disappointed in you.”

“Madame, I discourage gossip at every opportunity. I do not engage in gossip. But everyone has heard of your accident—some witnessed it—and they are concerned about you. The doorman wanted me particularly to tell you that he thought your recovery was ‘real brave.' I don't believe that that can be called gossip, madame.”

Louisa said nothing but regretted the coin she had given the doorman. The busybody. Then it occurred to her that he must have seen the murdered woman come into the hotel,
and
the man with her. If he was such a busybody, perhaps he would tell her what he remembered. And, now she thought of it,
when
the woman had left the hotel and with whom, because that might give them (she meant herself and Minnie Fitch, not the police) something useful to go on with.

It occurred to her, too, rather astonishingly, that she hadn't really thought so far about who had killed the women. If it had been the good-looking young man, why had he done it? A lover's quarrel? But in that case, wouldn't he have done some violence to her in the hotel? And if he had killed her there—meaning, perhaps, only a blow struck in anger to hurt, not to kill, although so much more had been done to the poor woman than a single blow—then how had he got her body out of the hotel? She had a mental picture of him, carrying the body through the lobby. Ridiculous. And colorful as imaginative stratagems were (putting the body in a laundry hamper; holding the body upright and walking it out to the street as if alive; putting it in a trunk and taking it down in the freight lift), they were the stuff of fiction and not of life.

As she dressed, she thought about Minnie Fitch. She realized that she liked her—no, that was the wrong word;
was
attracted
to
her—and then she remembered that she had been dreaming just before she woke, dreaming about something that had put Minnie's name in her mouth when she swam up out of sleep. (Like a trout? To capture what fly on the surface of wakefulness?) She couldn't remember what she had dreamed. Yes—no; it was gone. Something pleasant. Like—like
being
young
. Whatever that meant.