“This where it happened, then?” Flip asked. “Where you found the bodies?”
“Some people—later—they put down oil to get rid of the blood,” said Salazar. “To cover it up. I don’t know why.”
“Did you find them?” Flip pressed.
“That’s right,” Salazar said. “Early in the morning. I came here and saw both boys. I thought they were sleeping at first and yelled at them. Then I saw their heads were cut off. The police came and looked, only then we saw they had stakes down their necks, and the heads were switched.”
The bald man stepped up.
“As I told the officers, these boys were not members of our crew—or of anybody’s crew. They were just hanging around. Hoping to be hired, I guess. There’s lot of people out here. Folks come and go.”
“Uh huh,” Flip said, turning back to Salazar. “And how did you know the heads were switched? The boys were supposed to be true identicals.”
“It was little things,” Salazar answered. “One boy had a scar on his lip; looked like a dog had bit him. The other one had a swollen ankle and a broken shoe. We stood there looking, and someone noticed one had both the busted lip and the broken shoe . . . and the other had neither.”
“They switched the heads, and sent all the faults to the one twin,” the bald foreman pronounced. “Made the other more perfect, yeah? Hahaha!”
This time, nobody else laughed. The looky-loos began to drift off.
Flip considered the oily spot in the dirt. He got down on his knees and took a scoop with his hand. From his pocket he produced an empty tin for shoe polish. He put the handful of dirt inside and sealed it.
“Anybody know their first names?” Flip asked, rising.
“We didn’t truly know their last names,” Salazar said. “Horner was a guess. Somebody’s guess. I forget who. Boss man, did you know?”
The bald man shook his head.
“Well somebody said it,” Salazar continued. “Somebody said the boys had an uncle around here. I never met him. I bet it was a lie. People come to Chicago and say they’re related to somebody local, just to get a job.”
“Is there any man named Horner on your work crew?” Flip asked.
The bald man said there wasn’t.
“You know that off the top of your head?” Flip challenged him. “Without checking? You’re sure?”
The bald man’s face processed a string of emotions. The first was outrage over being questioned at all, and then a greater outrage over being questioned by a Negro policeman from the city. Then, when it seemed his anger would boil over, his face showed that he remembered his new friend had already handed him enough money for a down payment on a Model T. . . and that there might be more where that came from.
“I suppose I could take a look at the rolls,” said the bald man. “Might take some time, though. Be a hell of a lot of work.”
Flip diagnosed the situation perfectly, but the envelope of hundreds stayed in his coat.
“No,” Flip said. “No need for that. I believe I have what I came for.”
Flip headed back into the city as dusk fell. The sun turned to a savage orange fireball that hung lazily in the sky and waited there for a while, as if it had no place to go.
Flip, to the contrary, had plenty of places to visit before the evening ended.
He reached Miss Heloise’s home for orphan girls just before the sun set. It was a three flat on the southeast corner of a city park. The park was strewn with trash and debris, and several bums were already settling down to camp for the night. A pair recognized Flip and worried he might have come to roust them. When he did not, they smiled to one another as if some great catastrophe had passed them over.
Decrepit, broken toys made of metal and wood littered the stone porch of the orphanage. It took Flip a while to realize they were indeed toys; most looked like rejected scraps from a carpenter’s bench. The lights within the home were bright, and Flip could hear children’s voices and the clink of silverware. He could also smell the unique odor of a place filled to bursting with children who did not particularly like to bathe.
Flip knocked on the thick wooden door.
For a moment, there was nothing but the continued sounds of children. Then a heavy tread came, punctuated by squeaking wooden floorboards. It grew louder, and then the door swung wide.
The woman revealed could not be bothered to look immediately at Flip.
“I said to stay in the kitchen!” she barked into the chaos behind her.
Down the hallway, Flip could see fifteen or twenty children seated, standing, or playing around a long wooden table. A small child who had toddled after the woman thought twice and retreated back down the passage.
“Yes?” Miss Heloise said, her eyes finally training upon the guest on her porch.
She was heavyset, light skinned, and might have been forty years old. She had black rings under her eyes—probably from a thousand nights kept sleepless by little ones—but was not unattractive. She wore a brown shawl and a flowing, stained skirt.
Flip displayed his star.
“Miss Heloise?”
“That’s right,” she answered.
“I’m here about Doreen and Netty,” Flip said.
The woman’s lips closed tight. Her eyes narrowed. Something in the expression indicated that Flip had said something distasteful. For a moment, he could not imagine what it was.
“And Katherine,” Miss Heloise said with grim insistence. “There was a third girl too. Or doesn’t she matter to the police?”
“Yes,” Flip said. “She matters. Her too.”
Flip noticed that Miss Heloise was holding a dishrag in her hands. She worked it back and forth anxiously between her fingers. She looked up into Flip’s eyes, wondering if the police officer was being genuine.
“You all been here several times,” Miss Heloise stated, working the rag. “You any closer to finding who done this? What do I have left to tell you that you don’t already know?”
“I only need to take a look at the room,” he told her. “Shouldn’t take but a moment. I could come back in a few hours if that would be easier.”
“In a few hours the children will be asleep,” Miss Heloise answered, as though he was being impossible.
“Then I suppose I ought to do it now?”
She regarded Flip hesitantly, then let him inside.
Miss Heloise retreated to the kitchen, where little girls of all ages played and shouted to one another. She quickly deputized an older child to hold the fort until she returned, then conducted Flip to the foot of a winding wooden staircase that smelled like many small, bare feet. Miss Heloise heaved and groaned as she took the steps two at a time. She seemed to know them like the back of her hand. Flip, on the other hand, had to watch his footing and use the rail. At the top was a large space that might have originally been a family living room. The floor was wood and the walls were plaster. There was a large fireplace set into the wall that Flip recognized from the crime scene photo.
“The girls. . .” he began. “The twin girls. . .were found here and here, yes? The heads switched and reattached with barbed twine?”
Miss Heloise nodded back.
“Was there much blood?” Flip asked.
The woman thought for a moment.
“For Doreen and Netty? No. For Katherine, yes. There was a pool underneath her. It leaked down through the floorboards. Started coming through the ceiling. Scared the children something awful.”
Flip walked to the center of the room. He stood in the shadow of the great fireplace, right where the twins had been found. There was nothing there. No sign that a murder had taken place. No indication that mutilated bodies had once been left in this spot. Flip ran a naked finger across the floorboard. No dirt. No grime. Nothing at all.
Flip then headed to the fireplace, to the spot where Katherine’s body had been left hanging. There was a deep hole in the plaster where the poker had run her through. It would take a man of great strength to do
such a thing.
Beside the fireplace was a metal container for the fireplace tools, including—it appeared—the offending implement. Across the room, Miss Heloise followed Flip’s gaze.
“I had to put it back—after I’d cleaned it, of course,” she said. “Otherwise the children would notice. They don’t know the details of what happened. They know the girls died, but not the details. I’m hoping to keep it that way. I didn’t want to leave any clues that might make little minds wander. Every child in this house has already been through enough. They understand something bad took place in this room. That’s plenty.”
“You yourself saw nothing, heard nothing?” Flip asked.
“How could we?” Miss Heloise answered. “We weren’t home. I had taken the children to play on the beach. Kathrine wasn’t feeling well, and the twins were both scared of water. But they were good girls; they knew my rules and obeyed me. I had left them alone before, with no problems.”
Flip smiled and nodded.
“Of course they were good girls,” he said. “How long were you away at the lake?”
“Three hours for the entire trip,” answered Miss Heloise.
Flip picked up the fireplace poker and tested its weight in his hands.
“Doreen and Netty, what can you tell me about them?” he asked, swinging the poker slowly through the air.
“Showed up a couple years ago with no explanation,” said Miss Heloise. “Half of the girls come that way. Someone drops them on my doorstep because they know we take care of the lost. I don’t press the girls for details if they don’t wanna talk, and they seldom do. Doreen and Netty said they were from South Carolina, which I told the police. Said they had no mother or father anymore. Said a man had brought them here to Chicago in a railcar, and then he disappeared. They said they were eleven years old. That was all they said.”
“How did you tell them apart?” Flip asked, gripping the poker now like baseball player trying a new bat.
Miss Heloise paused for a moment. Flip realized her mind was processing something very terrible indeed.
“They came branded,” Miss Heloise said soberly. “I don’t know in what circumstances they were birthed and raised, but it must have been awful—a place where such things were done. You see, someone had burned a D into Doreen’s back, and an N into Netty’s. Just below the right shoulder. Course, I didn’t have to use the marks to tell. The girls had their own personalities. Their own souls.”
“Anybody ever threaten them? They make enemies?”
Miss Heloise shook her head no.
“How’s a child supposed to have ‘enemies’ in the first place? It’s a child.”
“And you said they were good? Obeyed your rules?”
Miss Heloise nodded.
“They were some of the best,” she said quietly. “Two perfect little girls. Not selfish. Played good with the others. They were a blessing. Our Father above made the one so perfect, he had to use the mold a second time. That’s how I look at it.”
Flip took another slow swing through the air with the fireplace tool, chasing a lazy, invisible curveball.
“Do you mind if I borrow this?” he asked, pivoting; he gripped the tool by the center of the shaft, and held it up to her face. “I can bring it back before the children notice, I expect.”
Miss Heloise grew annoyed.
“Are you really going to catch whoever did this?” she said, placing a hand on her substantial hip.
Flip smiled.
“Maybe,” he said. “But please . . . can I take the poker?”
“Yes, fine,” Miss Heloise said sternly. “Will there be anything else?”
“No,” Flip said, lowering the implement. “That should be everything.”
Miss Heloise gazed at him with great suspicion.
On his way out of Miss Heloise’s house, Flip lingered at the edge of the park across the street. He looked over the trees and shrubs, and at the familiar forms of the sleeping bums. He thought to himself that there would be a lot of places where you could kill somebody and not be seen in a park like that.
Places where blood could be spilled on the ground, with nobody ever the wiser.
FIVE
South State Street was fully, gloriously arrayed for the night. Every doorway of every bar was open to admit the warm summer air. All manner of sights, smells, and sounds flowed from out of those doorways to entice passersby. Electric light glowed in the tonier establishments, and mystical, seductive gaslight hummed in the rest. Musicians played. Motorcars and horses occasionally appeared, but most of the traffic was on foot—almost all men, and all of them crossing in the middle of the street without looking.
It was far from the weekend, but any visitor from the country would have sworn this was a Saturday night.
There were thirty long blocks along South State from 55th up to 25th—thirty long blocks that mattered—and Flip knew every saloon-keep and storefront proprietor by name. Yet on this night, Flip found himself pausing to stare at a group of outsiders whom he knew not at all. There was a long, somber parade of them—serious-looking people, mostly white, but with a few Negroes and other races sprinkled in—marching due south. They moved slowly and purposefully, carrying lanterns and singing dreary songs in a minor key. A few held up placards announcing they advocated for a “Capital-T Total” ban on alcoholic beverages. They wore crosses and other religious signs.
Before they got too close, Flip stopped and raised the fireplace poker. He pointed it toward the interlopers and made a sound with his mouth like a cannon firing. Then he lowered the implement and continued on his way.
Flip paused again only when he had reached the front of the Palmerton House, the finest and most expensive Negro brothel in the city. The proprietor, Sally Battle, sat in a divan on the raised front porch balcony. Beside her was a sporting girl wearing a black velvet eye patch. Set into the center of the patch were sparkling green jewels. Sally waved a familiar, unhurried hello to Flip as he avoided the brothel entrance and picked his way around the side of the building, passing into the shadows.
Behind the Palmerton, Flip found a staircase. At first glance, it seemed to lead down into utter nothingness. Few who glimpsed it in the evening hours—or even during the day—guessed that anything other than a grimy boiler room could be found on the other side of whatever door huddled in the darkness below.
Flip started down the staircase, taking each ancient step by memory. The step at the bottom was broken, and Flip avoided it, hopping down to the concrete landing. He knocked hard against the metal door.
The woman who dealt within did not advertise her services as openly as the women in the front of the building (and they did not exactly hang up a sign). There was nothing to indicate what visitors might hope to find on the other side . . . nothing save a single emerald stripe of paint across the door. It was haphazard and not straight, and looked possibly accidental.
When no answer came, Flip knocked even harder.
“Ursula?” he called.
No answer.
He hung his head.
“This early for her,” a female voice called as Flip emerged back at the front of the Palmerton.
Flip shrugged to say it had been worth a shot.
He headed up the front steps and joined Sally Battle on the elevated porch. The sporting girl beside Sally stood, curtseyed, and headed back inside.
Sally wore an evening gown and long white opera gloves—her standard “on duty” uniform. Her age was almost impossible to guess. Flip understood that many madams (as well as their girls) often represented themselves as years younger than they actually were. This was especially true for madams who gave the impression that, for a certain price, they might still be on the menu.
Flip had no idea how old Sally Battle actually was, or if she still entertained men. On this fragrant summer evening, in this light, at this moment, he might have said she was in her early thirties.
“That patch on your girl looks fine indeed,” Flip said,
placing his hand on the railing and looking down into the street. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say those were real emeralds. Did she lose the whole eye, or-”
“Whole eye,” Sally replied, following Flip’s gaze to the pedestrians below.
“You girls are some brave souls,” Flip told her.
“Police are brave too,” Sally answered. “We all stand to lose things in the line of duty. Why you got that poker?”
“Have Ursula take a look,” Flip replied.
Sally nodded thoughtfully.
In front of the brothel was a hitching post for horses and, directly adjacent, a parking area for automobiles. Usually both were empty; the majority of Sally’s clients reached South State by streetcar or on foot. On this night, however, there was one conspicuous exception. An enormous Pierce touring car—its black exterior polished to a gleam—sat on the street in front of the Palmerton. A liveried driver relaxed behind the wheel, reading a Chicago Herald and smoking a cheroot.
Flip turned halfway to Sally and lifted an eyebrow.
The madam smiled coyly.
“Adolf Graf,” she said quietly, eyes never leaving the car.
“The beer baron?” asked Flip.
“Down from Milwaukee for meetings,” Sally said with an almost imperceptible nod.
Flip considered this.
After great effort, the Chicago Vice Commission had, a few years prior, finally summoned the temerity shut down the Everleigh Club—the finest and most expensive brothel in Chicago, if not the world. It was a place where visiting kings and princes made sure to stop, and where the wealthiest men in the Midwest mingled. Yet even with the Everleigh shuttered, there were still many options for a man with the means of Adolf Graf that would not require him to travel all the way to South State.
“Have no doubt, the man likes Negro girls,” Sally explained. “There may be other houses in Chicago slightly finer than mine. Slightly. And yes, those houses may keep one or two Negro girls on staff for the enthusiast. But there is no finer establishment where he can choose from twenty. Mr. Graf knows what he likes, and he knows where to find it.”
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