Winter at Death's Hotel (5 page)

Arthur, a little to her disappointment, hadn't missed her; he was happily reading his lecture on the future of the English novel, with which he was going to entertain people all over America. He looked up when she came in, grunted, and went back to admiring his own work.

She didn't quite dare take the
Gazette
out of the wastebasket right then, but she did as soon as he'd gone off to visit his publishers. His American publishers, that is. He was published first in London, then in America. He'd never met the Americans and wanted to get on with them; as he'd reminded her before he went off, they were paying the expenses of his lecture tour. “But not mine,” she'd said, and he'd delighted her by saying, “Not yours, but those I gladly pay because I can't do it without you. If you weren't with me, Louisa, I'd…I don't know what I'd do.”

That had been very nice. It made up for his reprimand about the lobby and the
Gazette
, which of course she knew was trash and which of course she'd been ashamed to have the detective see her carrying, so of course Arthur had been right.

Still, she wanted to know more about that murder.

She and Ethel took all her clothes out of the trunks and shook them out and hung them up to get the wrinkles out, although the clothes would all have to go back the next day because they'd be leaving. She and Ethel gossiped; she told Ethel about the murder. Ethel seemed to be frightened and said she would never go out of the hotel's doors again until they were headed to the train. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

Louisa didn't see what there was to be frightened of. Ethel was not, after all, a lady of the pavement, and Louisa thought uncharitably (and, she admitted to herself, perhaps inaccurately) that murderous fiends surely preyed on better-looking women than Ethel.

***

Arthur had come back rather late from his luncheon with his publishers, and then he had rested (she had thought he was just a bit tipsy) and now he was working on his lecture. It appeared that the real purpose of the luncheon had been to tell him that although it was perfectly fine to talk about the future of the novel, what people really wanted to hear from him was what Sherlock Holmes ate for breakfast, so he had to spice up his talk with some Holmesiana. This had caused Arthur to wake in a foul mood and with a headache, as he looked upon Sherlock Holmes and what he called “detective stories” as an unfortunate means to the end of writing “real” books, and, very much to that point, he had killed Holmes off and hoped to have nothing more to do with him.

Louisa got out on the pretext of taking Ethel with her to have a little walk. His last words were, “No farther west than Broadway or east than Fifth Avenue! Mind, Louisa…!”

Now, without Ethel, she went out into the pale sunshine of Twenty-Third Street, where the noise of the city was as abrupt and surprising as a blow. Hack drivers were shouting at each other; carriages were going by; horses' hooves and wheels hammered and ground the pavement; workmen with trash barrels on wheels were sweeping dung and trash and slamming it into their barrels; men and women were almost trotting along the pavements, their shoes clicking like watchmen's rattles.

She turned left, as much to go with the stream of the nearest walkers as because she had any destination that way. She had thought she might walk to Broadway (and beyond?) and have a peek at it: she was after all a married woman and so entitled to a little independence. Ethel had walked about; why couldn't she? She got, however, no farther than the newsstand at the corner of the hotel.

The afternoon newspapers were lying in piles in front of the stand, which was only a small wooden structure with a front that opened outward to make two wings that were festooned with magazines. Inside, a wizened man was watching as people threw down coins and snatched up newspapers. He grabbed the coins and dumped them into a shallow canvas apron. If he had to make change, a hand dove into one of the apron's pockets and distributed pennies as if he were planting seeds.

Louisa found that she was hoping to see another “extra” of the
Police
Gazette
, but she didn't see its pink newsprint anywhere. She had a bad feeling that in fact she would have to ask for it, and the wizened man would produce it from somewhere under the stand's narrow counter. Is that what the boy had done that morning?
Gimme
a
Gazette
, will ya, Jimmy?
With a wink? How sordid. And yet, how thrilling.

She tried to stand in the middle of the pavement to look at the various newspapers, but she immediately became an obstacle to the city's foot traffic. She moved closer and got in the way of the newspaper buyers. She tried to stand at one end of the piles of newspapers, and the wizened man looked at her between wary glances at the coins the customers were tossing down—a sidelong look at her, a glance at the newspapers; a look at her, a look toward the piles. After some seconds, he said, “Djou want somet'ing er dontcha?”

“I was…looking for a newspaper.”

“Jeez Cripes, whyntcha try a newsstand?” He was interrupted by somebody who was making off with a newspaper of great value: “Hey, dat dere's fi' cents not t'ree. Hey, you—!”

The man had got only a step away. He looked a perfectly respectable businessman to Louisa, but the newsstand operator talked to him as if he were a criminal. “Djou want me to call a cop? You t'ink ya can steal da bread off my plate? Dat's two more cents, Alfonse, or it's da Tombs fer yous!”

“I'm sorry!”

“Hey, sorry don't bring my two cents back! Fork it over!”

“I thought it was a three-cent paper!” Both men were shouting now.

“Where ya from, Cleveland? Go on!”

Two more pennies were thrown down on the counter; the wizened man shouted another insult; but Louisa missed all this. She had just seen a newspaper lifted from a pile, already falling half open in a practiced hand that was swinging it up to read as he walked. She saw “murder” and “horrible” and a sketch of a woman's face. Was it the same crime? Would it tell her exactly what had happened to this woman? (And did she want to know
exactly
?)

“I'd like this one, please.”

“So take it. Gimme t'ree cents—dey're da little ones, not like da big pennies you got back home, right, Limey? Am I right?” He laughed, showing desperate teeth. She opened the paper and tried to read and he shouted, “Get outta the way, lady—where djou t'ink you are, Bucking-ham Castle?”

Blushing, she moved quickly toward the shelter of the hotel, feeling embarrassed and bruised. How Arthur would have scolded the man if he'd been there! But better he wasn't, better by far; bad enough that she'd gone out into the street alone, and then to be scolded in public! And yet there was something about it…like seeing the hotel detective…something—
vibrant.

She slowed as she approached the hotel's awning. She held the newspaper so she could read. There were the sketch and the article. “Woman's Mutilated Corpse Found.”

Her attention was caught by the sketch. Her first thought was that there was no disfigurement; the
Police
Gazette
must have had that wrong. Her second was that the conventionally pretty face looked familiar. But from where? Then she thought it was from a hundred similar newspaper sketches “by our artist,” the face in fact the fashionable face of the moment, almost an abstraction of the idea of prettiness.

She was walking slowly. She stubbed her toe on the low stone step of the hotel, caught herself, thought as usual how clumsy she was, turned into the doors that were opened in front of her by a doorman, and passed into the lobby with a copy of the
New
York
Express
held up in front of her as if she were trying to hide.

“In the darkest hours of the morning, a grisly discovery was made by…” Well yes, she already knew that. And she knew Officer Malone and his years on the force. “Unspeakable outrages were wrought on the body of this poor creature…” That was more like it, but as she read on she saw that there was no more detail than there had been in the
Gazette
's extra. “Lady of the evening as she may have been, the unidentified victim…” That was no help.

She turned to page five and read on, but the story seemed to be structured on some principle of diminishing returns: the farther she got into it, the less there was. The beginning was sensation; the end was gas: “The Metropolitan Police are working on the matter and hope to make an arrest soon.”

She sat in one of the lobby's leather chairs and went back to the beginning of the article and read more slowly. Malone, shock, mangled (that was new), unidentified—aha! “Our reporter and our sketch artist penetrated to the bowels of the City Mortuary to actually see the body. (See sketch.) What they returned with is a once-beautiful face, rendered horrible by maniacal violence, but reconstructed by the specialists of the city morgue and our artist for the express purpose of aiding the authorities, in hopes that someone in the great public will recognize her. Our reporter adds that she was of middle stature and had luxuriant hair the color of a new-minted penny. Neither he nor our artist was able to see more than…”

New-minted penny. That meant copper. Copper-colored hair, not “flaming red,” therefore…

It was as if it had fallen on her from the ceiling. She remembered where she had seen the face.

It was the woman she had seen in the hotel when they had arrived. A woman who had been with a good-looking young man. A woman there for a tryst, the hotel detective bought off. The woman's radiant smile.
A
lady
of
the
night? A fallen flower?
No, she didn't believe that, wouldn't believe that. And even if she was…?

Good God! She, Louisa Doyle, was the member of the great public who could identify the murder victim!

She was upstairs as fast she could push herself into a lift and cause the boy to make the thing go. She burst into their sitting room and shouted, “Arthur! Arthur!”

He was in a corner, working by the light from a window. His forehead was on his left hand; he barely moved when he said, “Not now, Louisa.”

“Arthur! I know who the murdered woman was!”

“Louisa, please! Tell me over dinner. Can't you see I'm working?”

“But, Arthur—
please.
This is so important…”

“And what I'm doing is not, I suppose.” He threw his papers to the floor. “All right! Now that you've successfully interrupted me,
what
is
it
?”

“Oh—oh, I needn't discuss it just now—I'm so sorry, my love—”

“Louisa, tell me.”

“No, you're quite right; I was thoughtless.”

“You will drive me mad!” He showed her by pulling at his somewhat sparse hair. “Are you my wife or are you not?”

“Of course I'm your wife, Arthur.”

“Then I order you to tell me whatever nonsense you have to say about a murder! So that I can go back to work!”

She considered being angry, perhaps weeping. She was hurt, no doubt of that; on the other hand, he was the man and he
had
been working. She settled for a somewhat girlish chagrin and utter simplicity. “I found a picture of the murder victim in a newspaper. The murder in the Bowery that I told you about. I
recognize
her. I saw her in the hotel lobby yesterday.”

At least he didn't ask her where she'd got the newspaper; she'd have had to lie again. Instead, he asked for details of the murder, which he'd quite forgotten; he asked to see the newspaper sketch; he asked her to explain why she remembered the woman. Then he tore the newspaper sketch to bits and told her that she was being utterly silly and he never wanted to hear about the matter again.

“I have a duty to report it.”

“Duty to whom? To report what? I forbid you to do such a thing.” His voice fell back to the level of a patient father's explaining life to a child. “What you think you know about the woman is pure surmise. And what in the world do you know about trysts and assignations? You know nothing about why she was in the hotel; you know nothing about the man. In fact, your ‘recognizing' her is pure female romancing and wouldn't stand up in a court of law for ten seconds. Louisa, what can you be thinking of? I think you are exhausted and have overexcited yourself. Remember that you have been ill! Low fever can lead women to hysterical invention—you have woven an entire tapestry of cobwebs, my dove!” He took her hands and sat them both down. “My dearest wife, think how it would look if you went to the police with this tale. What would a sharp detective make of a perhaps non-existent encounter in a hotel lobby, and a newspaper hack's sketch that could be any of a hundred thousand women in New York? My love, think!”

“You always say that police detectives are the stupidest men in the world.”

“Don't throw my words back at me, Louisa! It's not becoming to you. I ask you to
think
. Think of what it means if Mrs. Arthur Conan Doyle tells the police she has a clue in a murder case. Do you know what the newspapers would call you? ‘Mrs. Sherlock Holmes.' That's what they'd call you. ‘Mrs. Sherlock Holmes Finds Novel Clue.' Do you see? My dove?”

She drew her hands away. “You think I'm imagining things.”

“No, dove, no—you're too bright and too much my shining star for such a thing! I mean you don't have
facts
.”

And of course, he was right. She didn't have any real facts, if by “facts” one meant something like the date of Magna Carta. “Of course you're right, Arthur. Please forgive me for interrupting you.”

He kissed her. “You should always be able to interrupt me. I was rude and churlish to you. Forgive me?”