Winter at Death's Hotel (32 page)

How very
peculiar. She will think the wrong thing about me. Or about herself? What did she think? No, she didn't think at all. Surely she did what she wanted to do. To kiss me that way. It wasn't as if we were…

Were what?

We
weren't going to
do
anything.

But Minnie had been frightened. Perhaps they were going to do something.

Louisa shrugged and went back inside. It was cold out there. She pictured Minnie's heading home on one of the tramcars, looking out through a dirty window but seeing not the street but Louisa's hotel room, two women on a sofa.

Louisa sighed.
I
prayed
to
have
my
loneliness
lifted
from
me. Well?

CORRUPTION IN POLICE
“MURDER SQUAD”

How Far Does It Go?
Witnesses Suppressed, Bribes Taken

ARE THE BOWERY BUTCHER
MURDERS PART OF IT?

by
A. M. Fitch

The Municipal Police have a “Murder Squad” of supposedly crack detectives whose job it is to solve the often grisly murders that afflict this great city. Of late, we have seen two particularly horrific examples of same, namely those committed by the so-called “Bowery Butcher.” Those crimes remain unsolved by the “crack” Murder Squad. Recent discoveries by this reporter, which we will reveal today and in subsequent days, demand answers to urgent and vital questions about these “stars” of our Municipal Police.

We have learned that a witness made herself known to the police immediately after the first of these gruesome killings, telling the “coppers” that she had
seen
the
victim
in the New Britannic Hotel in the company of a “good-looking young man.” Did the New York Police applaud her willingness to help them? They did not! What they did was send two officers of the Murder Squad, Lieutenant John Cleary and Sergeant Thomas Grady, to visit the witness in order to intimidate and humiliate her!

Did Cleary and Grady use the witness's information to look for the “good-looking young man”? They did not! They were too busy hunting down the victim's husband to fish for a “reward” for keeping his name and his wife's identity out of the newspapers and off the police blotter.

It can now be told that the husband of the first victim, who was mistakenly identified
by
the
police
as a “lady of the night”—an allegation that the police have never retracted—is in fact the wealthy industrialist Roscoe G. Harding, whose Murray Hill townhouse is one of the showplaces of that part of the city. Interviewed by this reporter, Harding admitted that he paid Sergeant Grady one thousand dollars to hide the fact, attested to by a reliable witness, that his lovely young second wife had been in the New Britannic Hotel with another man.

As if this was not enough, Cleary and Brady also visited the manager of the New Britannic Hotel and received money from him to keep the hotel's name out of the investigation of the Bowery Butcher murders, even as a witness was connecting the first victim of those murders to his hotel.

Lieutenant Cleary may be too busy with managing his properties in New York to bother unduly with the cases of the Murder Squad. This reporter has uncovered at least five tenements in the names of Cleary's wife and his two brothers, not to mention Cleary's own handsome brownstone dwelling in Brooklyn Heights and a summer “cottage” in Far Rockaway that we are told rivals some of our better uptown villas in its palatial accoutrements. The estimated value of these properties—not to speculate about others that may yet be found scattered around Manhattan and Brooklyn—is more than two hundred thousand dollars. Where, Lieutenant Cleary, does an honest policeman find that kind of money on a detective's salary?

In tomorrow's edition, we will look deeper into the methods of crooked cops. We will show the brazenness with which Grady demanded money of tycoon Harding. We will quote the manager of the New Britannic Hotel directly to reveal how threatened he felt when Cleary and Grady held him up for an additional five hundred dollars. We will look into a mysterious entity within the police called “The Club” to see how, and how far, corruption has spread through certain offices of 300 Mulberry Street despite the recent Lexow Commission report on cleaning up this malodorous piece of moldy cheese.

And we will ask—and answer—other questions: How close is the connection between the New Britannic Hotel and the Bowery Butcher's murders? Is it because the murderer himself is so close to the hotel that the manager has tried to conceal its association with the crimes? (Remember: the first murder was not committed in the Bowery! The body was carried there from another place. Could that place be a certain hotel? Remember that the first victim's body was washed! Where better to wash a corpse than the farther recesses of a metropolitan hotel?)

What do the police know that they are not telling us, and why? What do they know about certain organs that were missing from both victims? What have they learned from the murderer's grisly clues—especially the victims' eyes? Or are they not investigating these murders at all, for reasons of their own?

Read about it tomorrow.

Louisa folded her hands on the newspaper. Minnie had indeed triumphed—the story on the front page, the headline “above the fold,” which Minnie had told her was the preferred spot. But had she gone too far in suggesting so strongly a connection between the murderer and the hotel? In accusing Cleary and Grady by name?

Oh, Minnie, Minnie.

She went to the lift and downstairs and put herself into one of the telephone closets while Reception connected her with the Express switchboard. When she reached the newsroom, she said, “A. M. Fitch, please.”

“Not here. Too early.”

“Can I reach her at—” But he had already rung off. And of course she couldn't reach Minnie where she lived, because Minnie had said that she didn't have a telephone. And Louisa didn't even know where Minnie lived.

She called again and asked the newspaper switchboard to leave a message on Minnie's desk to call Mrs. Doyle as soon as possible.

Louisa pushed herself up and opened the door and found Manion standing there. They looked at each other; he looked away, back. He said, “I saw you come down.”

“Yes, good morning.”

“You seen the papers?”

“Of course.”

He shuffled, seemed unsure of himself. “How have you been?”

“I've been fine, Mr. Manion.”

“Using the cane now.”

“Yes.”

“Nice cane.”

She waited, out of politeness, then said, “I have to go.”

“Oh, for God's sake!” He turned away and vanished into the lobby. She went back to her room in the annex, the ankle as painful again as if it had been kicked.

***

“Who the fuck is A. M. Fitch? I'll fucking kill him!”

“It's a girl, Jack.”

“A girl! What the fuck!” Cleary picked up a brass ashtray with a brass-plated female nude on it and threw it against his office wall. “How did she find out this shit? Who talked?”

“I dunno, Jack, I dunno—”

“It's all about me! Not you; she didn't touch you! For Christ's sake, Grady, she's put a hot poker up my arse. Jesus H. Christ. I'll fucking kill her, I mean it.”

“Jack, Jack, you gotta think. It's in the paper; they can't take it back. It's too late for all that.”

“Some cunt ramrods me, and I'm supposed to sit on my thumb?”

“It's Roosevelt we gotta worry about. We gotta have a story for him.”

“Story, shit! She's got my tenements in there, my house, the place in Rockaway! I told that shyster we oughta put them in phoney names, he says, oh no, that's trouble down the road. I'll bet everything I got that that cunt was into the records, looking for my family's names. How come she didn't find anything a yours?”

“I put it where they can't find it.”

“Where's that, between your buns? Well, they'll find it there soon enough, Roosevelt'll have you bend over while he shines a dark lantern up your hole. Jesus!”

“Jack, we gotta have a story.”

“Yeah, great. So make up a story.” Cleary threw himself into his desk chair. “What are those fucks out in the office doing, laughing at me? They better not. I'll have their nuts.”

“I thought if we said we took the money from Harding and Carver because we were trying to see who was bribing cops—”

“We gotta find a way to make that rag retract the whole thing. The New York Express! Who ever heard a them doing a story like this? Who d'they think they are, fucking Joseph Pulitzer? Somebody must have something on them—or maybe on this cunt, what's her name? Fitch. Jesus. I want her fired. I want every word taken back. You got me? You got what I want?”

“Jack, Jack—”

“Tell ya what. I'll go to Byrnes. He's tight with Tammany. They know all the dirt. What we'll do is—”

There was a knock on the door. Through the frosted glass, they could see the pink blur of a face, the dark column of a suit. Cleary and Grady looked at each other. Cleary shouted, “Not now! Later!”

The knock came again. “You stupid shit, I said not now!”

The door opened. The young Harvard graduate who served Roosevelt stood in the doorway. “Commissioner Roosevelt wants to see you.”

“Hey, ah, I didn't know it was you. Sorry. We were—”

“Now.”

Cleary looked at him as if he were readying himself to kill him. Then he tightened the knot of his tie and pulled back his shoulders. “Sure. Come on, Grady.”

***

Detective-Sergeant Dunne came out of the City Mortuary and stood on the pavement to wait for Cassidy, who was always behind. When Cassidy had joined him, Dunne said, “I don't like to be told by a flunky to get a warrant. Especially a flunky who works for the same City of New York that I do.”

“Can we get a warrant?”

Dunne pulled deeper into his overcoat. “Maybe. If that newspaper isn't lying, Harding must have been here to identify her, so his name should be on the release certificate. But they won't let us see the certificate, or the visitors' book, or the death certificate. How do you suppose that newspaperman—Fitch?—got his information? Or is it all lies to sell newspapers?”

“I hope you noticed that threatening the flunky that you'd tell Roosevelt didn't exactly make him shit himself.”

“More like he knows something about Roosevelt that I don't. He laughed!”

“So what d'we do?”

“We get a warrant. Then we go ask Harding himself.”

An hour later, Dunne walked down the brownstone steps of Roscoe G. Harding's house on Thirty-Fourth Street. Cassidy was leaning against the police carriage. He looked up, his face asking the question for him.

Dunne said, “I didn't even get in the front door. Roscoe G. ‘isn't in to the police.' Make an appointment, was the word.” Dunne's jaw came out. “I don't like to be stiffed, Cassidy.”

“So what do we do?”

Dunne sighed. “Find ourselves a crapper and have a think.”

***

Terrible Teddy was in full enraged-bull fettle. His eyes were wide; his pince-nez flashing; he smelled of sweat and testosterone. His high voice was, at its quietest, a bark, at its loudest a roar. His office was a jungle, and he was the king.

“Corruption!” He smacked his fist into a palm. “You stink of corruption! I have made fighting corruption the hallmark of my time in this office, and you
stink
of it! A lieutenant! A man with the responsibility of an entire squad on his shoulders—a man who should be an example, a model, a
paragon
! And you sink to the level of the lowest patrolman in the poorest ward in this corruption-riddled city! I could have found a more honest man among the vagrants of Chatham Square!

“And you, Grady. A sergeant. Eighteen years on the Metropolitan Police. How many of those years have you had your palm out for the bribe? How many years have you held the bag open so they could pour the money in? Thieves, both of you! Crooks!
Criminals!
You are worse than the malefactors you are paid to pursue. A hundred times worse. A thousand! Because you are paid to be
honest
. A word, I am sure, that has no meaning for you.

“Well? Well? Speak up. Tell me how you came to this desperate place.”

Cleary made a sound in his throat like the wheezing of a frightened deer. His eyes met Roosevelt's dead on, as if he were the most honest man in the world and had nothing to hide. He made his voice strong as he said, “Mr. Roosevelt, it was this way. It's all lies.”

Roosevelt had his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets. His belly rounded a little as he leaned backward. “What's all lies?”

“The newspapers. They'll print anything. The
Express
is the worst of the bunch. That's how she got away with it—they'll print anything.”

“Who is ‘she'?”

Cleary made the sound in his throat again. “That was a woman wrote those lies, sir. Her name is Fitch. She uses initials—what are they again, Grady?”

“A. M.”

“Anne-Marie. Yes. Annie Fitch. Now, I have a confession to make, Mr. Roosevelt, but I ask that it never leave this room.”

Roosevelt simply stared at him.

“The way it is, Mr. Roosevelt, me and Annie Fitch had a…well, you know, people being what they are, we had a—”

“Are you trying to hint at an illicit liaison, Cleary?”

“The very words, sir. Yessir, and I made a fool of myself over her, and then we had a falling-out, y'see, and she swore vengeance. And you see it in this morning's newspapers.”

“Are you saying that a hundred and fifty years ago, Peter Zenger went to trial so that your paramour could print lies about you, Cleary?”

“I don't know Zenger, sir, but I know she printed lies, yessir.”

Roosevelt looked at Grady. “How about you? Did you have an affair with this woman, too?”

“Uh, no, sir. But she musta just drug me in for ballast, like. For the weight.”

“Weight! There isn't a moral balance in the world that you'd tip down a fraction of a degree!” Roosevelt went behind his desk. He stood looking down on them, his thumbs now in the armholes of his vest. He said, “You are both suspended without pay effective this morning at eight o'clock. This has already been cleared with the Chief of Police. You will both consider yourselves under house arrest while a thorough investigation is made of everything that was printed in the
Express
newspaper. Until I learn otherwise, I will continue to think that you are both a disgrace to the Municipal Police. Now get out of my sight.”