Winter at Death's Hotel (20 page)

Forty-five minutes later, they were walking out of the Authors Club on West Twenty-Fourth Street with smiles on their faces.

***

At ten minutes after one, a boy came up with the message that Miz Doyle had a telephone call in Booth One. Ethel was home by then, very proud of the bargains she had found at Mr. Stern's emporium on Sixth Avenue. Louisa, sure she would miss the call because she was so slow, sent Ethel down to hold the caller until Louisa could get there. Ethel was unhappy about talking to a stranger but dutifully went off; she would do it, Louisa knew, on manner—the voice of the perfect servant, even if she was seething inside.

When Louisa finally hobbled to the telephone booth, Ethel jumped out, handed over the earpiece, saw Louisa safely seated, and bolted back to her dry goods. Louisa put the device to her ear and leaned into the horn and said, “This is Louisa Doyle speaking. Whom have I the pleasure of addressing?”

“Wow, that ‘whom' really knocks me over.”

“Miss Fitch!”

“Whom else would it be?”

“I've been thinking of you so much, it's as if I know you. About the murders, I mean. Oh, Miss Fitch, I read your—”

“Look, Miz Doyle—I'm in a telephone exchange; time is money. Can I come to see you?”

“Now?”

“Not tomorrow.”

“I thought you're due at the paper at two.”

“Sure, sure, but they know I'm on a story. Can you see me?”

“Yes! The New Britannic.”

“Tell them I'm coming, but don't tell them I'm a reporter or they'll throw me out.”

Louisa left the booth, her face flushed, a feeling that she had to call excitement making her feel light headed.
Something
was
happening!
Well, she hoped it was that. And perhaps the prospect of a female friend.

“Ethel, I shall have a lady calling shortly, a Miss Fitch.”

“Was she the one on the telephone, madame?” Ethel looked severe. “She tried to pump me.”

“
Did
she? About what?”

“About you, madame. And the hotel. I hope she is not a particular friend, madame, because I found her presumptuous.”

“Oh.” Louisa thought it was rather bad of Minnie Fitch. But it was her profession, after all. “What did she ask about me?”

“It wasn't quite
asking
, Mrs. Doyle. After I identified myself, she said things like, ‘I suppose Mrs. Doyle is easy to work for,' and ‘I suppose Mrs. Doyle has a great many friends.' I said I was sure I didn't know.”

“What did she ask about the hotel?”

“If I'd heard ‘things' from the other servants. I wasn't hardly about to pass on gossip, even if I had heard things! Which I haven't.” She pressed her hands together. “Much.”

“I shall tell her that she presumed, Ethel. She's American, after all—we shouldn't expect too much.”

“I like Americans. But sometimes they carry friendliness too far, don't they. Shall I order tea for the two of you?”

“Yes, please.” Louisa's pleasant bubble of excitement had been pricked. Minnie was vulgar, she had to admit she had thought that yesterday. Now Minnie had behaved vulgarly to Ethel. It really was too bad of her.

Yet when Minnie Fitch came into her sitting room, it was Louisa who was beaming, and Louisa who embraced her guest, not the other way round. Minnie looked rather startled and settled her hat as if she thought it had been knocked loose.

“Oh, do take off your hat.”

“I can't stay. And call me Minnie.”

“And you must call me Louisa. Oh, please stay. I've ordered tea. I'm dying for company. And for information about this second horror.”

Minnie Fitch looked her over, then began pulling out hatpins. “I was up all night,” she said. She handed the hat to Ethel, then her coat. She was wearing a rather mannish wool jacket over another white shirtwaist and a bustled navy-blue skirt, this time without a necktie but with a flouncy jabot instead. She looked rather smarter, and in fact close to pretty. She fell into a chair with a loud groan. “This second murder is a beaut.”

“How did you know about it?”

“Money. There's a sort of slush fund in the newsroom for snitches and cops. I've got a guy at Mulberry Street.”

“You said you haven't a telephone.”

“He sends a beat cop to bang on my door. The cop gets a cut, too.” She put her head back and squeezed her temples with both hands. “My God, I'm tired!”

“Was it awful?”

“It was mysterious, was what it was. They wouldn't let us near the body. It was in an alley again, Clinton Street, a lot of similarities to last time. But differences too. Blood, for one thing. There was gallons of it. You could see the cops wiping it off their feet when they came out. So she'd been killed in there, which is different.”

Shyly, because she was proud of herself, Louisa said, “I have the policeman's report on the first one.”

“Yeah, I had it, too, but I couldn't use it, so what good is it?”

“Oh, Minnie! And I thought I'd done so well! However did you get it?”

Minnie, still not looking at her, held out a hand and rubbed the thumb and fingers together, the old sign for lucre. She said, “This place is really nice. It must cost tons.”

“Minnie! I want information! Don't talk to me about my rooms.”

“Oh? Oh. Well, what can I tell you?”

“Was she disfigured? Was she—oh.”

It was a boy with the tea. He trundled in a mahogany tea cart and made a lot of useless to-do about what had hot water and what had tea, and he whisked a white cloth off a plate of biscuits as if he meant to produce a rabbit. Louisa got a coin from her dwindling stock and sent him on his way.

Minnie said, “This one had the eyes done the same, only they were done differently with. I can't put this in the paper, and I didn't see it myself, so it isn't gospel, Louisa. But my source said—this is nasty, so stop me if it's too much for you—the eyes were in a paper sack that had been wet somehow so that the eyes, you know, hung down, and it looked like—you know, like a man's
pair.
You know?”

“Why?”

Minnie sighed. She took the tea that Louisa handed across and said, “Do you know what a belaying pin is? It's a wooden thing that sailors use to tie off ropes to, and it's got a shape that's like a man's—you know? So what this maniac had done was put a belaying pin up…inside her, so it stuck down, and then he tied the sack with her eyes in it just where, you know, men's onions—”

“He turned her into a man!”

“There's more. Can you take it?”

“Tell me!”

“He cut her bosoms off. They haven't found them. He did the same damage to her abdomen as the first one.”

“Cut her womb out.”

“That's what he did.”

“Was it there?”

“No.”

Louisa looked at the biscuit she'd picked off the plate and put it down. Bile was rising in her throat, yet she felt mentally calm, in fact quite focused. “That would be to turn her into a man, too. Had he cut her hair?”

“Not that I was told.”

“So she was superficially a woman, and that was the joke.”

“Jeez, Louisa, some joke!”

“I meant in a grisly way. Not a ha-ha joke, but a horrifying joke that shows how much he disdains the things we usually associate with death. Or with women, for that matter.” Absentmindedly, she picked up the biscuit again and bit into it. “Tell me what you know about the woman who was called ‘Shakespeare.'”

“That was years ago.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Oh, Cripes—what do I know? She was a prostitute who was murdered five-six years ago, name of Carrie Brown. She was old for the trade. There was a detective named Byrnes, he sent up the guy he collared for it. Called ‘Frenchie,' although he was African or something. What the talk is now is that Frenchie didn't do it and Byrnes framed him to get a conviction.”

“Were the injuries at all the same?”

“I think she was just stabbed. A lot.”

Louisa frowned and took another bite of biscuit. “Is this Byrnes with the Murder Squad now?”

“Nah, Byrnes's gone; he was a hell of a cop in his way, but he got too big for his britches. The Lexow Commission was all over him last year—by then he was Chief of Police, worth half a million, they say, on a cop's salary, ha-ha—and Roosevelt gave him the boot first chance he got.” She reached for the biscuits, stopped. “Hey! That's an angle! I was going to tell you, the reason I telephoned, I'm working on what you gave me about the two cops in the Murder Squad coming here and trying to push you around. You thought they maybe got money from the hotel to keep quiet about you seeing the woman here. Well, maybe I could tie that into Byrnes and jake-legging the evidence to get a conviction on ‘Shakespeare.' Wha'dya think?”

“But one's corruption and the other's something different. If there's a connection with ‘Shakespeare' it's—”

“They're both corruption. One for money, one for fame. I can make that work, trust me. Hey, I like it. I'm trying to get a line on how much moolah Cleary and Grady got socked away. They don't use banks much, cops—they've invested in whorehouses and saloons all over the city, real estate—Byrnes had some big mansion upstate. Could be Cleary and Grady are doing stuff on their own, so they might have put money where it'll show up under their own names—real estate, maybe. I want to do a search at City Hall, which is a bugger, but a guy down there will do some of it for me. Want to help?”

Louisa frowned. “I'm interested in the women victims, not the police.”

“Louisa, it's sitting-down work; you go through property records. It's dirty and it's dusty and it's boring as pig dirt, but I need the help!”

“I have trouble getting about.”

“I'll get you there and back, and there's only a few stairs. All you'll be doing is sitting! Louisa, please!” She frowned. “How come I get to call you Louisa?”

“I call you Minnie, don't I? I want a friend!”

“How about doing this work for me, then,
friend
?”

Minnie was so earnest that she had taken Louisa's hand. But what Louisa said was, smiling to soften the words, “I'll trade you for the medical reports on both women.”

“I don't have 'em. What good would they be to me—my editor won't print that stuff!”

“Get them. You can, Minnie, I know you can. Can't you?”

Minnie began to smile back. “You look like butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, but you're a dinger, you are!” She still had hold of Louisa's hand. The smiles widened; the eyes locked. They squeezed each other's hand. “I'll have a cab waiting outside the hotel at eight a.m. tomorrow morning. Okay?”

***

She was going out of the hotel next morning as Manion was coming in. Seeing him, she backed clumsily into the lobby and shook her head at the doorman, who was gesturing for her to come through. She was afraid she was blushing again.

“Mr. Manion.”

“Yeah, good morning. You're looking lots better.”

“I wanted to thank you for the papers you sent me. And to apologize—I thought you'd given me—it—up.”

He shrugged. He had taken off his soft hat. He always wore rather good clothes, she thought, dressed this morning in a dark brown, double-breasted suit with a faint stripe, a wool overcoat worn open. He looked respectable, she thought. He said, “I thought it was important to you.”

“However did you get the report?”

“I told you, beat cops need cash.”

She reached toward her handbag, thinking that she would have to give him money and she would soon run out. “How much was it?”

He touched her arm to stop her. “Forget it. I used the two sawbucks those coppers gave me. Glad to get rid of them. My treat.”

She looked at him, moved her hand away from her bag; he took his hand away from her arm. There was a silence. She said, “You know there's been another murder.”

“Hard not to know. It takes the load off the hotel, anyway.”

“What ‘load'?”

“You seeing her here, if that got out. Carver was sweating bricks about it. Now it's out there.” He waved vaguely to include all of the city.

A question roamed around her brain but wouldn't settle—something about whether the second murder had been committed to take attention away from the hotel. But that would mean that the hotel was involved… She dismissed it, said, “Whoever did it is very dangerous, Mr. Manion.”

“A real lunatic. You going out?”

“I have an appointment.” She started to turn away, thought better of it. “Mr. Manion, while I have you here—the first murder victim, the woman with the copper-colored hair—you said you saw the man leave the hotel, but not her. Is it possible that she never left the hotel?”

“Judas Priest, don't say a thing like that! Carver'd split his britches!”

“I think an objective person ought to consider every possibility.”

“That's all we'd need, for one of the papers to get hold of that idea.”

“‘We'? I suppose you mean you and Mr. Carver. I hardly think that's worthy of you, Mr. Manion,” She sounded severe because she was disappointed in him and because—she had to admit it—he flustered her. She made her voice pleasant. “Good morning, Mr. Manion.”

She moved; he jumped to the doors to open them for her.

***

Detective-Sergeant Dunne got down from the El at Twenty-Third Street and tumbled down the stairs and waited for the cross-town horse-tram. He hardly noticed the scene around him, although he saw it all and in fact would have been able to describe it if a crime had been committed. He was thinking, however—thinking about the small irony of finding that the wife of an author of detective stories was a possible witness in a murder investigation. Dunne didn't read mystery stories—didn't read much of anything except police news, in fact—but he knew what they were.