Winter at Death's Hotel (24 page)

“Psyche Surprised by Bad Taste,” she said aloud.

She toweled her upper body, then sat and pivoted her legs over the side of the tub and struggled to stand again and dried her legs and the rest of her, leaving pink smudges on the towel. “Can't be helped.” The water had run out of the tub, leaving bubbles and a faint ring. Ethel or the hotel chambermaid would clean it in the morning. She felt a pang of guilt but knew she didn't want to get down and up again so as to clean it.

She got herself into the pad and the harness, had a look at herself in the bathroom mirror. The effect was decidedly erotic—straps around each thigh, the pad barely visible, pubic hair very much on display. What a glorious thing was the female body! She thought so, at least, but the thought reminded her again of the slaughtered women, and she shook her head to get rid of them.

When she went to open the door, the fear—yes, she admitted it, it had been fear—she had felt when she had heard the noise came back. What if she opened the door and there was somebody standing out there? She looked around for a weapon, thinking herself a fool, doing it anyway, found the scissors with which she trimmed the ends of her hair. She held them in her left hand and turned the knob with her right.

Nobody there, of course. Her heart pounded anyway. She felt as she had in the sanatorium in Davos, weak all over. She took two very deep breaths (deep breathing very much part of the Davos cure, the Swiss mountain air like a knife) and stepped into the room. There was the bed, the trunk, her clothes. God was in his heaven; all was right with the world.

She put the chemise in the hamper for the hotel laundry and hung up the petticoat, the bodice, and the skirt, then rolled the corset and put it in a long drawer with her other corsets. Bending to do so, she caught herself in another mirror, felt a stab of desire. For herself? Was that what the badly painted nymph always showed, self-desire—self-admiration?

She pulled a clean chemise over her head and got out a clean pair of drawers and remembered the bloodied ones she had tossed to the floor.

Where they no longer lay.

She felt breathless again, weak. She had thrown them right there, just off the corner of the bed. Had she picked them up with the other things and forgotten she'd done so? Was she that exhausted? She looked in the hamper: no. In the dresser: no. In the trunk, for no sane reason, and in the little valise: no.

What had she done with them?

She had thrown them on the floor; that was all that she had done with them.

She got on her knees and looked under the bed: no.

It
must
have
been
Ethel. She must have come back for some reason and saw the drawers and knew I was having a visit and took them away to rinse them out. That's all it can be. I'm sure it was Ethel.

Which gave her no comfort but did give her an idea, by way of a tortuous chain of associations that led from her missing and bloodied drawers to the bloodied women to the details of what had been done to them, to Minnie Fitch's failure to get her the medical reports as she'd promised. The medical reports were important, she wasn't sure why. The horrid details would tell her something. Or they would make her feel something, some affinity. Sisterhood. Like nuns sharing secrets.

That was idiotic.

She was dressing, looking over her shoulder, listening for sounds; she was like a dog that had heard distant thunder. She was pulling on stockings.

How
do
I
get
the
medical
reports
if
Minnie
won't get them?

Or
how
do
I
could
get
a
look
at
the
bodies?
That made her feel nauseated again.

She selected a tailored jacket that fastened down the front, because it was easier when she had nobody to help. It wasn't really proper for evening, but she was going only to the hotel restaurant, and she'd be early, so perhaps it wouldn't yet really be evening.

She looked at herself. She thought of the nymph. She wanted Arthur.

In the lift, the descent did something to her insides that felt a little like the effect of lovemaking, at which she giggled. The boy on duty looked at her as he might have looked at a cow, the most idle kind of curiosity.

“Thank you.”

She was a woman alone, normally a most unwelcome diner, but they knew her and the waiter looked impassive when she said her maid had the evening off. He led her to a table for one that was mostly hidden from the rest of the room. She ate what was put before her, kept thinking about the dead women, tried not to think about her missing drawers and the noise while she was in the bath.

She was barely finished with her hors d'oeuvres when Henry Irving came in. He bowed to her, smiled, then walked over but didn't sit down. “I daren't ask to join you, Mrs. Doyle; it would be too much for the hotel's sensibilities after we appeared together in that motorcar.”

“I shall forgive you, Mr. Irving. They're terrible gossips.”

He laughed. “Actually, I've put some new business into the play and I need to review it in my head as I eat. Please do forgive me.”

“I do, as I have things to think about, too.”

He strode to his own single table. Her eyes stayed on him, not a difficult thing as he was a commanding man despite his age; he gave a sense of controlled power, although she believed he was in fact quite mild-mannered. Tall, not particularly good-looking, he was yet so overpowering on a stage that some actors were afraid to work with him.

Something from the conversation at the dinner they had shared before Arthur left came back to her. He and Arthur had been talking theater talk, Arthur allowed to do so because he had written plays; Irving had said something about the absolute need for the artist to seek out reality.

“Whatever we're doing, it's reality; we don't have to seek it out,” Arthur had said.

“Yes, but that everyday reality gets stale, and it's incredibly dull. I mean reality's extremes, Doyle!” He had told them he was visiting Sing-Sing prison the next day, something about soaking up the reality of “violent men condemned to live in silence.” Arthur had said that that sounded like a hard school, and Irving had said, “We have to inure ourselves to it, Doyle. We need to know the mad, the condemned, the dead, the dying, the despairing…” It had been a long list.

Yes, the dead.
That was why she wanted to know about the women—to understand the reality of them: not her responses of nausea and horror, not what
she
felt, but what they
were.

Louisa watched Irving. She signaled to the waiter. “Might I have a piece of notepaper and a pen, please.” They came with her main course. She wrote, “Mr. Irving, will you do me the favor of stopping at my table before you go? I have something to ask.” She wrote “Mr. Henry Irving” on the other side and folded the paper and called the waiter again. “Please take this to Mr. Irving. You may read it, as it isn't sealed.”

He didn't read it, of course. Irving did, looked at her, raised his eyebrows, smiled. A fast eater, he was standing by her as she picked through a too-sweet dessert. He said, “By the time Arthur reads of this in a Midwestern newspaper, they'll have us eloping to some such exotic spot as Jersey City.”

“Oh, surely not.”

“Newark, then. What can I do for you, Mrs. Doyle?”

“You said to my husband when we dined together that you look for the extremes of life's experiences. For reality.” His expression said that he was surprised that she remembered. She went on, “I'd like to look at a corpse. With you.”

“I've seen corpses, I'm afraid.”

“Two murdered women, their insides cut out. ‘Ripp'd untimely from my mother's womb'—wouldn't that give more meaning to the lines? And their eyes removed, too—like poor Gloucester.”

“I'd never play Gloucester, Mrs. Doyle, and I feel I do the Scotsman pretty well as it is. But you have something else on your mind, I think.”

“I want to see these women who were murdered. It is important to me, Mr. Irving. I can't get permission on my own; you know why. I think you can.”

He looked down at her, serious but a little amused. “I know the right people?”

“You got into Sing-Sing without committing a crime, didn't you?”

“Yes, and out again, thank God. Well…” He stood looking away from her. He jingled something in his trouser pocket. “I suppose I could ask the mayor. I'd have to say you were my assistant, or something of that sort; would that offend you? Although I might say it was for a play Arthur was writing about Sherlock Holmes. No, that makes too much of it and drags Arthur in; let's say simply my assistant, Mrs. Doyle. Hmp?” He looked down at her. “These women were
murdered
?”

“Very much so.”

“Would Arthur object?”

“Arthur isn't here.”

“But I don't want to offend him. I wouldn't want him to think I'd encouraged you in something improper.”

“I think it's for me to decide what's improper, Mr. Irving.”

“Yes, dear lady, but you can't decide for Arthur. I tell you what; if you'll get him to telegraph me that it's all right with him, I'll do it. If not… Please do forgive me, but it simply wouldn't be right.” He gave her a fatherly, perhaps condescending smile. She said that of course she understood, but what she was thinking was that men stood together to…to do what? Keep women proper? Keep women pure? Keep women…
in
their
place
? Damn Victoria Woodhull for giving her such ideas, anyway!

She went up to her room and searched all over again for her missing drawers. Before she climbed into bed, she checked the lock on the sitting-room door, then closed and locked the bedroom door and put a chair under the knob. Nonetheless, she spent a bad night.

A note from Irving was waiting in her pigeonhole behind Reception just before eight next morning. It was over-polite and too apologetic about his refusal, but he looked forward to Arthur's telegram, so the refusal remained a refusal.

Rubbish!

But it was something to think about instead of her missing underwear, which seemed half-comic to her now, or did until Ethel told her this morning that she hadn't been in the bedroom and hadn't picked up the drawers. Pleased by her evening out with Galt, she had seemed offended by the idea that she might have come back into Louisa's rooms without telling her. Louisa had had to say, “It's nothing,” although she believed it was in fact something. But what?

To placate Ethel she had said, “I hope you had a nice time last night, Ethel.”

“
Very
nice. Supper after the theater at Planabo's restaurant, which is just up the street and quite fairly priced. Mr. Galt knew all about it and was very good and sensible about us sharing the cost.”

“The play was good?”

“Mr. Irving is a wonderful actor. Seeing him downstairs, I was hardly prepared for what came out of his mouth. I said to Mr. Galt, ‘He's a wonder of nature,' and he is.”

Louisa was on the pavement at two minutes to eight, in time to see a cab drive up with Minnie Fitch behind the driver. She jumped down before Louisa could hobble to her. When they were close enough, Minnie handed her an envelope and said, “I keep my promises, too.”

“Oh, Minnie—”

“Oh, Minnie, yourself!” She stalked off. The doorman helped her up into the cab, although either she was learning to do it or the ankle was really better, because it seemed to go much quicker and she did much of it herself. The doorman tried to tell the driver where to take her, but the driver sneered, “I awready been told, Bismarck! And I been paid, so cut dirt.” He touched the horse with a whip, turned to say to Louisa, “Dresses like a general in a operetta, thinks he can tell me my business. Stupid Mick.” As they made their way into the Fifth Avenue traffic, he said, “This is a grand ride for me, lady, but yous could do it in half the time on the El. Less than half the time.
Lots
less.”

She was trying the read the sheets in the envelope that Minnie had given her, but all she could read was Minnie's card,
A. M. Fitch, The New York Express
, and scribbled on it in pencil, “With my compliments.” She murmured to the driver, “I can't climb the stairs.”

“Sure you can.”

Exasperated, she gave up trying to read and folded the papers. As she pushed them into her handbag, she half-listened to the driver. He seemed to live in a world of his own insistence: what he asserted, was. He distracted her from the drawers for a while: he told her his idiosyncratic convictions about baseball, the Irish, blacks, the Catholic Church, New York itself. When she asked, he diverted to Bowery and took her down to City Hall that way. She wanted to see the Bowery's cheap shoddiness as it woke but found that the saloons were already open, the pavements crowded. Bowery was flashy and cheap; it abounded in signs with garish colors and crass, empty promises—Best 25-cent Dinner in New York! Prettiest Girls This Side of Broadway! 3-Cent Beer Lavish Free Lunch! Games of Skill and Chance—Every Man a Winner! Gent's Hotel Permanent Transient Cheap! She shuddered.

Above the ground floors, the buildings mostly turned into tenements; life was already awake there, too. She looked at a woman who was leaning out a window, her arms clasped over her breasts as if she were cold (and she probably was; it was a bright but nippy morning); the woman looked back at her, and they watched each other as the cab moved past. The woman gave her a small wave; Louisa waved back. It was a sign that there was normal life here among the cheap hotels and saloons and erotic shows. That pleased her, she didn't know why.

Before nine o'clock, she was at the basement entrance to City Hall. Leonard was already there and at work. “They let me in early,” he said with a wave that was too familiar for Louisa's liking. “How ya doin' this mawning?”

She bent over the files but spread in front of her the pages that Minnie had given her. They were typewritten—the two medical reports on the dead women. No real autopsy had been done, but somebody with medical knowledge had examined the bodies with some care. The language of the reports was clinical, often technical; she wished she had some of Arthur's medical books, which had taught her so much about many things, including her own body and Arthur's. Still, she could follow the words well enough to guess at the Latin terms and make some sense of them.

One of the oddities was, as she had once speculated, that the first body had been washed. It was empty of blood and had no dirt or bloodstains on it. The eyes had been gouged out with a human thumb, not with a tool; some of the wounds had been made with a “very sharp instrument, perhaps a scalpel,” but others with a “common knife” to a depth of four inches. Bruises around some of the wounds might have been made by a handle or guard.

The descriptions of the wounding of the lips and nose were sickening to her, the more so because they were so emotionless. The upper lips had been removed almost to the (Latin term that she took to mean the line of the roots of the upper teeth), the lower to the point where the chin projected. Only the flesh of the nose had been cut off, leaving the septum and bone. All this horror appeared to have been done with the same scalpel-like instrument.

The incision in the abdomen, on the other hand, had been made with the cruder, knife-like instrument, whose blade was estimated to have a thickness of an eighth of an inch. The incision was “ragged,” the cuts so deep that they had penetrated and even severed the intestines. The womb and ovaries had been cut out along with something named in Latin that she didn't understand; the upper part of the vagina had also been cut.

The examiner had done no speculating about the murderer.

The second body had been “exsanguinated
in
situ
” but was bloody and unwashed; dirt from the alley clung to its underside. As with the first corpse, the eyes had been gouged out with a thumb; the examiner posited that the killer had used the right thumb for the left eye, the left thumb for the right, starting each time at the inner corner of the eye. The breasts had been removed by cuts made by a blade seven-eighths of an inch wide and approximately an eighth of an inch thick along its backbone. These wounds, like the eyes, had bled. The breasts had not been found.

The mouth contained “one common tennis ball and a gentleman's handkerchief, the latter pushed down the throat.”

The incision in the abdomen had been made “crudely” by the same instrument, which had penetrated at times four inches and had perforated the intestines. The womb and ovaries had been removed (“forcefully”). The upper vagina had been touched randomly by the blade, but most damage to it had been done by the insertion of a “tapered wooden cylinder with lower protrusion, not unlike a common nautical pin.” This damage was described at some length using terms Louisa didn't know.

“The eyes were located outside the body but contiguous to it in a paper sack suspended from the pubic synthesis by a ‘safety' pin under the wooden cylinder described above. The arrangement may have been intended to imitate the male external sexual organs.”

When she was done reading, tears were running down along her nose. One dripped on the page. She fumbled in her sleeve for her handkerchief, blotted her eyes and blew her nose. The handkerchief was ridiculously small and lacy for the job; why couldn't she carry a good, big piece of cloth like a man's?

“You all right there, Miz D?”

“Thank you, Leonard, it's the dust.”

“Right, yeah, gets in your nose.”

She folded the reports and put them in her bag. The second woman had been brutalized while she had still been alive—she knew that now. And the first one? There was no reason to think it had been any different. Had she been alive—
alive
—while he had cut off her lips and nose,
alive
while he had hacked into her abdomen,
alive
while he—?

She put her hand over her mouth, She couldn't possibly get to the ladies' convenience in time. She made herself stop gagging. She tasted what wanted to come up, fought it, felt it in her nose, forced it down. When she had won, she put her head back and took deep breaths.

“You sure yer okay, Miz Doyle?”

She waved a hand. Oddly, he didn't come over. Leonard had a surprising tactfulness.

She forced herself to work. The women and the reports kept lurching into her mind; she pushed them aside, concentrated on the files. A disgusting taste filled her mouth; her nose and throat stung; her eyes burned. She read, read, read.

“Got one!” Leonard sang out at a little after ten.

“Good for you.”

“We oughta go out and celebrate, Miz D. How about a little lunch at Delmonico? They know me there.”

“Thank you, Leonard, but no.”

The first woman must have been killed where the murderer had facilities. All that blood, but he had washed it away somehow and he had washed the body.
Washed
it!
She shuddered. To do such things, and then to wash it the way a mother washes an infant.
Lovingly? Is that what he felt, washing his work—some perverted kind of love?
And he had had a scalpel there as well as a knife, but for the second one he had had only the knife. And he had put a ball and a handkerchief into her mouth to gag her, so that her screams…

Louisa closed her eyes, thinking about the screams that couldn't get out.

So the two murders were different. The knife was probably the same, but the killings were different. Why? Because the location was different? Was that all? Or could the second one have been an imitation, done by a different madman? Or done by the same man, but for a different reason? The first victim had been a woman who had visited an uptown hotel; the second had been a common prostitute who had probably never been near an uptown hotel in her life. What was their connection?

Of course, what connected them was their murderer. But did he simply choose at random, killing one day because he saw a woman in a hotel, killing next miles away because he saw a woman in the street? What drove him—an urge, an obsession, a cold calculation? And why need he ever have been in the New Britannic at all? Couldn't he have seen the first victim on Fifth Avenue? Or could he have passed her on the street as she made her way somewhere else?

Louisa could be stubborn. She was stubborn now about what she saw as a possible connection with the hotel, although in fact the only
known
connection was her own sighting of the woman. (Sherlock Holmes would have been contemptuous of this circularity.) The only argument she could make, and it was a feeble one, was that it would probably have been easier for the killer to kidnap a woman in a hotel (mostly empty corridors, many nooks and crannies) than on the street.

Except that clearly he had taken his second victim from the street.

***

Minnie Fitch was waiting in the corridor when she came out at noon. Louisa was pleased to see her, in fact delighted, but she said severely, “You were rude to me this morning, Minnie.”

“I meant to be.” She was leading the way up the corridor.

“I have to go to the convenience.”

“Oh, for God's sake, say
toilet
. I hate words like that. Well, go!”

Louisa wanted sympathy because she was menstruating and because of the dead women and because of her missing drawers, but she clumped away on her crutches and clumped back again, and Minnie said, “You're getting better on those things. Come on.”

When they reached the street, Minnie said, “All right, I apologize. I was sore this morning. It's over.”

Louisa thought of climbing on her own high horse but grinned instead and burbled, “I'm glad! And it was my fault, Minnie, partly my fault, because I was a prig. And I have a guest in the house; it makes me cranky. Are we friends again?”

They went into the park and sat on the same bench, but Minnie had brought sandwiches from the bakery where they'd had tea. The sandwiches were miles beyond the sausage things of yesterday, freshly baked bread with crisp lettuce and hard-boiled eggs and bits of pickle and mayonnaise, and others with slices of chicken, and sweet biscuits that Minnie called cookies, like Mrs. Simmons.

“Coffee?”

“Can't they make tea?”

“No. N-O. This isn't Blighty. Coffee or GW.”

Louisa looked at her without understanding.

“Go Without.”

“Oh. Well, I'll have the coffee.”

“You're a real sport.”

They talked as they ate—the reports, the second murder, the properties that Leonard and Louisa were finding in the files. “We have five. They're all in the slums, Leonard says. What do those places cost?”

“Maybe twenty-five thousand each. Four of 'em, that's a lot of moola for a lieutenant.”

“But none for Grady.”

“Maybe Grady spends his on women. Or gambling. Or maybe he doesn't get as big a share. I'll tell you what I think: Cleary is in The Club, which is upper-level cops at Mulberry Street; Grady's not. So Grady gets crumbs. Maybe when it's just him and Cleary, they split even, but Cleary's getting a lot more the other place.” She brushed crumbs off her lap and glared at half a dozen pigeons. “I hate those things. Rats with feathers.” She sat back and folded her arms. “Anyway, it doesn't matter. You found enough I can write the story.”

“You won't use my name!”

“How many times I gotta tell you? Monday, I'll aim for Monday. This is gonna be big, Louisa. It's gonna be a scoop, and I'm gonna fly to the moon on it.”

“What about the murdered women?”