by Kat Ross
I closed the dusty cover on A History of Medieval Europe and realized that more than two hours had gone by and I was absolutely famished. Right on cue, my stomach rumbled and a stout man to my left—most of the patrons were men—glanced over disapprovingly. I gave him a bright smile, set my hat at a jaunty angle, and lugged the books back to the desk. Astor was a research library so I couldn’t borrow them, but I’d picked every bit of meat from those bones anyway. If I wanted to learn more, I’d need to consult a specialist.
It was only a few blocks home with a shortcut through Washington Square Park, but I still felt thoroughly cooked by the time I got there. The midday heat was thick enough that pedestrians jostled for space on the shady side of the street, and the poor horses looked as though they’d rather be anywhere else. New York City in August may have its charms, but I’d be hard-pressed to name them. If it weren’t for the investigation, I would have been sorely tempted to catch a hansom to the Cunard pier at Forty-Eighth Street and take the next ship across the Atlantic.
But I felt that the threads of the case, which had seemed so hopelessly tangled just a day ago, were slowly beginning to unravel. I still didn’t know what pattern they would ultimately form, but at least I had the satisfaction of catching hold of the ends. So when I found John lying prostrate on the hall carpet, I gave him an impatient poke with the pointy toe of my boot.
“Go away,” he groaned. “It’s too hot.”
“I take it your sojourn to Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t pleasant,” I said.
John stared up at the ceiling, his brown eyes glassy and unfocused. “Another waste of time. The boy’s father barely spoke any English. He managed to tell me that Raffaele was pretty much the family’s sole means of support. The man was…broken. In every way. I gave him some money but it won’t last long. There were a bunch of little kids too.” John sighed. “He said his son had no enemies. He didn’t understand how such a thing could happen. Then he handed me over to a sister who seems to be the family’s official translator. She told me as much as she could about Raffaele’s routine, but I don’t think it matters. The killer was a stranger.”
I knelt beside him, my upbeat mood deflating. “We’ll find him,” I said quietly. “If it’s Straker or someone else, we’ll find him.”
John turned his face away and that’s when I noticed the dried blood. I laid a hand on his cheek, gently turning him to face me. “What happened?”
He blinked. “Oh. Right. Then I got in a fight.”
Fortunately, Mrs. Rivers was out for the afternoon. I settled John into a chair at the kitchen table and cleaned him up with a damp cloth. He had a nasty cut just below his left ear where he’d taken a glancing blow from a cane, but his other wounds appeared to be superficial. All things considered, I’d seen him in worse shape after a match with his friends at the club. Then I made us both turkey sandwiches on thick slabs of Mrs. Rivers’ homemade rye bread. The food perked him up some, and John told me how he’d been jumped by a couple of neighborhood thugs on his way back to the Ninth Avenue El.
“Guess they figured I’d be easy pickings,” he said. “Some swell from uptown slumming it for the thrills.”
“Moran’s boys?” I asked.
James Moran was a paradox: outwardly respectable, diabolically clever, and at the age of twenty, the brains behind an ugly bunch of Irish lads who specialized in extortion, robbery and murder for hire. Myrtle had been trying to catch him for two years with no success, which told you quite a bit about James Moran. He was a different breed of criminal entirely from the likes of Danny Driscoll of the Whyos, who had just been hanged in January in the Tombs prison yard at the age of thirty-three. Like most other New York gang leaders, Driscoll was a loose cannon who spent half his short life in a jail cell, and the other half either assaulting people or getting arrested for it.
Moran had committed one infamous crime. He’d served his time and now gave every appearance of being a model citizen. A gifted student of mathematics, he could be seen roaming the campus of Columbia College on 49th and Madison, dressed in an immaculate dark suit and pearl grey silk hat. Moran moved seamlessly between society and the streets, laughing off the dark rumors that swirled around him and simultaneously exuding just enough danger and intrigue that New York’s Knickerbocker matrons couldn’t resist putting him at the top of their guest lists.
John shrugged in answer to my question. “Moran’s? I don’t think so. They never move in less than packs of five, and these two struck me as minnows hoping to swim with the sharks—but more likely to be swallowed whole.”
It wasn’t John’s style to boast and add that he left them lying in the street, but I’d seen him box and knew that whatever injuries he had, he’d inflicted tenfold on his opponents.
“Well, doctor, I found out a few things too,” I said, and filled him in on my visits to Brady’s office and the Astor Library.
“Myrtle would say the uniform is interesting, but not conclusive,” he commented. “Straker could have thrown it out, or given it away.”
“Agreed. We’ll move on for now. No evidence of prior mental instability either, according to Brady. I’ve been thinking about the book.”
“A grimoire,” John said. “I’ve heard of those. Magical textbooks.”
“With a dark side. We’re talking pacts with the devil, John. Rather heavy stuff for a medium, don’t you think? We need to learn more about Becky Rickard, a.k.a., Valentina von Linden, a.k.a. Madame Catarina Santi. What she was like, who her other clients were. Someone came to her flat in the middle of the night, and if it wasn’t Straker, it could very well be someone who’d used her services before. Maybe the same who gave her the money.”
“What about other mediums?” John said. “At least a few must have known her.”
I should explain that Spiritualism, the idea that one could speak with the dead, wasn’t nearly as popular as it had been twenty years before, when Mary Todd Lincoln was holding séances in the White House (which her husband reportedly attended). The Seybert Commission had investigated dozens of claims of “rappings,” so-called automatic writing and spirit photography, concluding in 1887 that not a single case was genuine. Personally, I shared their scepticism, although I admired some of the Spiritualist organizations for their embrace of women’s rights and staunch opposition to slavery.
But while the mystical frenzy that followed the great blood-letting of the War for the Union had ebbed, it never vanished altogether. If you decided that you simply had to speak with dear Aunt Eunice, even though she’d been gone for twenty years, there were any number of ladies and gentlemen more than happy to assist you—for a small sum, of course.
I was just praising John for his excellent idea when a knock came on the front door.
Our caller was a young man, pleasant-looking and dressed in a stiff collar, checkered coat, lavender pants and high-heeled shoes with captoe buttons up the side. He removed his top hat and peered at us through rose-tinted spectacles.
“Nellie says Myrtle’s on a new murder case, but I happen to know she’s out of town,” he said with an evil smile. “So you either invite me in and tell me everything or I’ll have no choice but to—”
Before he could finish, John seized one arm and I seized the other, and we hauled Edward Dewey Dovington upstairs into the parlor, where we deposited him in an armchair and stood guard to either side.
Edward blinked once and adjusted his cravat. “No choice but to cable your parents, Harry. Not that I know where they are either. Is that iced tea?”
He made to rise and John placed a firm hand on his lapel.
“I’ll only give you some if you swear to take what I’m about to tell you to the grave,” I intoned.
“Sure,” Edward said cheerfully.
“Swear on Dirty Laundry,” John ordered, which was Edward’s favorite racehorse.
“Well, that’s serious! I’ll have to think about it.”
“Edward…”
“Oh, all right then,” he grumble
d. “I swear! But this had better be good.”
So we told him everything, from the moment I saw the Bradys walking up Tenth Street to John’s encounter with the Hell’s Kitchen hoodlums. Edward asked questions here and there, but mostly he just listened, twirling a gold pocket watch with long, elegant fingers.
“So you’re pretending to be Myrtle,” he said at last. “I hate to say it, Harry, but you’d need to grow at least four inches and color your hair black to make that remotely plausible.”
I drew myself up to my full height, which just reached John’s shoulder, and scowled. “That’s not the point,” I said. “What do you think? Will you help us?”
Edward gave a lopsided grin. “Well, there’s no point in going back to Saratoga this season. I couldn’t possibly top myself.”
Our friend owned no less than five thousand custom-made ties and several hundred pairs of pants, most of them in hues that would make a sunset blush. While some used the term “dude”—meaning a fop or dandy—as an insult, Edward embraced it.
He and John had attended school together at the elite St. Andrew’s Academy. When some of the other boys bullied Edward about his taste in clothing, John had laid them out flat (and gotten punished for it). They’d been fast friends ever since.
“I’ve never hunted a murderous fiend before, mortal or otherwise, but it sounds like you have a real dickens of a case on your hands,” Edward said. “So you can count me in. Although if Myrtle catches us, I’m denying everything.” He removed his spectacles and tucked them into a breast pocket. “May I have my iced tea now?”
I poured glasses all around while we plotted our next course of action. We needed to follow up on the gambling angle, which was really the only lead we had on what Straker had been up to in the last year. Edward volunteered that he’d been to Chamberlain’s many times and was on friendly terms with the man, so we added a visit to that opulent den of iniquity to our schedule for the following evening. Edward and I would start canvassing mediums the next morning to see what they knew about Becky Rickard. But it was still late afternoon, with hours yet of daylight, so when John proposed we examine the cellar where the séance had taken place, we all agreed it was certainly worth a look around.
The address, which I’d obtained from Brady the day before, was just around the corner from Rickard’s flat, on Worth Street. I donned my hat and changed into an old pair of shoes that I wore when I boxed with John in the garden. I didn’t know quite what to expect, but from the way Brady had described the cellar, it was a grim destination that awaited us. Mrs. Rivers had not yet returned, so we left a note saying we’d gone for a walk in Washington Square Park to look at the new bronze statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi (denounced by The New York Times as “monstrous” after the poor man’s legs had been yanked apart and strangely contorted to fit a cheaper pedestal when the project ran out of money).
I felt bad deceiving the old girl, but I could hardly tell her the truth. She didn’t understand why I needed to prove myself, why having a sister like Myrtle—who was everything I wanted to be, except better at all of it—had become so intolerable.
“Don’t worry, dear,” Mrs. Rivers had told me not long ago, when she saw I was in a brown study. “Myrtle may be famous, but you’re the pretty one. I imagine the young men will be lining up to ask for your hand.”
I knew she meant well, but it turned my depression into cold fury. That night, I’d cut all my hair off. I informed my bewildered parents that I’d rather be sent to the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island than be married off at eighteen. Six months later, it had finally grown back some and just brushed my chin. Loyal friend that he was, John insisted that it suited me perfectly, although he grew quiet when I declared that I would never be any man’s wife.
“Tell me about this séance, Harry,” Edward said as we stepped out onto Tenth Street. “I’ve been to a few myself, and I thought them no better or worse than a two-penny magic show. However, some girls of my acquaintance take these otherworldly communications so seriously, they will not make any major decision without consulting a medium first.”
“I’d be delighted to,” I said, “but unfortunately, of the three people who were there, one is dead, one missing, and the last unable to recall much beyond some mumbo-jumbo in Latin, followed by what he called a foul wind.”
Edward had inherited a fortune from his grandfather three years ago, when he was just fifteen, and his shiny black barouche and driver waited at the curb.
“Harry’s client said he felt a presence in the room,” John chimed in. “Something malignant.”
“He never actually said the word malignant,” I protested as we climbed into the carriage, which had two facing benches—John and I taking one, Edward the other.
“Oh, fine, but the clear implication was evil.” John stretched the word out into about six syllables. “She was reading from a grimoire, so she could have been trying to summon anything.”
“It seems—” Edward began.
“Don’t tell me you believe any of that eye-wash,” I cut in, addressing John to my right. “I think you’ll find our killer is a man of flesh and blood, as much as you are.” I gave his chest a little poke for emphasis. “Becky Rickard didn’t spontaneously combust, or die of some mysterious fright. She was stabbed with a perfectly ordinary kitchen knife.”
John paid me no mind, speaking to Edward, whose head swivelled between us as though he were watching a match of lawn tennis.
“Imagine,” John said as we headed east on Eighth Street toward Broadway, “just for the sake of argument, that this Madame Santi believes she has instructions to summon a demon which will make her and Straker rich beyond their wildest dreams. Both of them are in dire straits. They’d once been respectable, and if not exactly wealthy, at least comfortable. Now they’ve hit rock bottom. Santi is a fraud, Straker a bankrupt pauper. She obtains a grimoire, perhaps from a former client. Somehow, she crosses paths with Straker and entices him to join her. She didn’t count on Brady being there, but it doesn’t really matter as long as he doesn’t interfere with her plans. So she finds a place where they won’t be disturbed and starts the incantation, but she’s a chloral hydrate fiend and can’t keep it straight. Let’s say she took an extra-large dose before the ceremony to soothe her nerves. She makes a fatal mistake and unleashes something.” John paused as we entered the flow of traffic on Broadway, most of it heading uptown as the city disgorged thousands of commuters to satellite towns in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Westchester.
“Something?” Edward asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Something,” John affirmed. “It enters Straker and possesses him. Forces him to commit unspeakable crimes, for which he is then overcome with remorse.”
“Oh, that’s scientific,” I muttered.
“Arthur Conan Doyle would take my side,” he said. “Which is simply to keep an open mind to all possibilities. Don’t forget, Straker spoke of it ‘entering through the eyes.’ What else could he have meant?”
“Alright,” I said. “So where is he now?”
“I don’t know,” John conceded. “Hiding out somewhere, I suppose.”
I fanned myself with my hat as we jounced over a set of horse car tracks at Broadway and Canal Street. “Here’s an alternative theory. Someone kills Ms. Rickard, goes to Straker’s flat and washes up—hence, the bloody water in the shaving basin—and leaves with his uniform. Now, this person could be Straker himself or someone else entirely, I’m not sure yet. If the former, then I agree with you, John, that he has gone into hiding. Assuming he is still in the city, which, considering his limited means and lack of family, is quite likely, we must try to imagine where he might go. If it is the latter, then poor Straker is either abducted or dead himself.”
“But what of the organ grinder?” Edward asked, with a puzzled frown. “How does he fit into either of those theories?”
John and I looked at each other ruefully.
“Not a clue,” he said, and for once, I couldn
’t disagree.
We turned off Broadway into the twilit world of the Five Points, where Edward’s fancy carriage drew more attention from the local denizens than seemed salutary.
“Let’s make this quick,” I said, as John offered up his hand and I climbed down into the overflowing muck of Worth Street.
The building where Rickard, Straker and Brady had convened that fateful night looked ordinary, if the decrepit skeletons that lined that block could be called so. Four stories of rotting wood towered over us, but our eyes were drawn to that portion below the level of the sidewalk where our investigation had led us. I could make out a tiny ventilation space perhaps two inches high and three wide in the outer wall, but the rest of the cellar was entirely hidden from view. I tried to imagine living in such a place, as I knew tens of thousands of the city’s most unfortunate were forced to do. It suddenly occurred to me that it might not be empty. Such cellars were widely used as nightly lodging houses, a small step up from the cold comfort of the streets.
Luckily, it didn’t take long to locate the proprietress, a tall, raw-boned woman with bluish veins tracing a map across her cheeks and the strong aroma of cheap whiskey about her. I noted smallpox scars on her neck and forehead, which she had taken care to cover with a cosmetic paste. America’s last serious smallpox outbreak erupted between 1865 and 1873. It hit four cities—Philadelphia, Boston, New York and New Orleans—so she could have been from any one of those, but her broad accent placed her as a native-born resident of the Lower East Side.
At first she was suspicious, though her attitude changed when Edward pressed money into her hand.
“Oh, I knew Becky,” she said, tucking the bills into a hidden fold of her grey dress. “She used my place sometimes, when she needed privacy. Always paid up front.”
“So you rented it to her last Monday night?” I asked.
“Yeah. But I can promise you, she was still alive when she left.”