“And also, the biggest scoop, right?” he asked.
“You are a good detective, aren’t you?” she said with a smile. “Yes, it’s true that I am interested in the story. How could I not be? It’s in my bones, detective—I can’t help myself. And it’s such a great mystery, isn’t it? It excites the senses and sends chills up one’s spine. Jack the Ripper in New York City? It could be the greatest story ever to hit this town. I had to investigate, and that’s how I came to you.”
“Well, that’s interesting,” he said, “because I’m not officially investigating any series of attacks on these women for the police department—I was taken off the Carrie Brown case long ago by the Central Office.”
“Yes, but you have been snooping around on your own time, haven’t you?” she asked. “And receiving help from that college professor of yours? The one who gave that scintillating lecture this evening?”
“You were there?” Falconer asked.
“Absolutely,” she replied, as if offended. “How could I not be? I have been following the activities of you two for some time now, detective—that must be obvious to you by now.”
“Yes, I can see that,” he said.
“And then there’s that other man,” she pointed out. “The British gentleman with whom you were sitting this evening.”
“You are very good, Miss Bly,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “A true detective in your own right.”
“Why, thank you, Detective Falconer. That is a tremendous compliment to a girl who, frankly, feels a bit lost at the moment.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Miss Bly,” he said, “but I don’t have a story for you.”
“And why not?” she asked.
“Why not?” he said. “Because there’s no suspect, no real leads, and no clues linking these attacks—that’s why not. Yes, it’s true that I had my suspicions after Ali was indicted, but you should also know that I’ve gotten nowhere with this, and if there is another killer out there who’s playing with everyone, I have no way of getting to him. He’s a ghost, Miss Bly.”
“Well then,” she said, “let’s pool our resources and find him, shall we?”
“Pool our resources?” he asked, puzzled by her remark. “Pardon me, but what’s that supposed to mean?”
“I can be of help to you, detective,” she stated calmly. “I have sources around town—many of them, more than you would know about—and I also have that little bit of currency that is so very rare in our society but that is so valuable in all sorts of human endeavor: celebrity.”
“Celebrity?” he asked. “How can your celebrity find a killer, Miss Bly?”
“It can gain me admittance into places of power and influence that another person would not otherwise even know about, let alone be allowed into, Detective Falconer. I’m Nellie Bly, the woman who beat Phileas Fogg’s record for circumnavigating the globe, and, despite my confessions to you tonight about my own personal struggles and self-doubts, people still clamor to see me, and toy manufacturers still make board games and dolls and puzzles about me. That’s worth something, detective.”
Falconer leaned back in his chair again, confused with her latest bit of salesmanship. “Miss Bly,” he then said, “I’m a police detective in the Fourth Ward with no real pull on the force. I’m not officially assigned to a case of a supposed killer of multiple victims in this city, and, in fact, I imagine the Central Office right now views me as someone with an overly active imagination. I’m just not the man who can help you solve this so-called mystery. I’m sorry.”
He moved to grab his billfold from his jacket to pay the bill, but Bly quickly held out her hand and grabbed his arm, catching him by surprise. “Wait,” she said. “At least let me do some quiet asking around, see if anyone in my business knows anything that might help you—with nothing promised from you in return, of course.”
Falconer hesitated, not sure what to make of this petite woman dressed as a man and full of pluck and derring-do sitting in front of him in the dark, dingy bar. He had never met someone like this—at least, not a woman like this—in all his travels and perambulations around the city. He considered for a moment her open-ended offer, and then, thinking that nothing could hurt his stunted investigation at this point in time, he slowly held out his other hand, as if to shake on a bargain. She glanced down at his open hand and smiled, and they shook hands over the small, round table in the corner of the saloon.
“Thank you, Detective Falconer,” she said, still holding his hand. “And nice to meet you, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you, Nellie Bly,” he said, gazing back at her.
47
Penwill sat quietly in a corner of the squalid saloon on 30th Street and looked over at the harried barmaid running from table to table. She was gaunt and hollow-eyed, and she had the look of a desperate opium-eater being enveloped by the dirty streets around her.
Probably under the heel of the bastard that runs the place—selling herself for the quick fix when not running around handing out pints to everyone.
He watched her saunter up to the end of the bar holding a round tray and set it down, uttering something to the sullen bartender, who then reached under the bar for a couple of wet glasses and poured out the ales. The girl took the drinks and flitted away over to a table encircled by a group of unsavory-looking card players.
Penwill glanced around the room from his position over in the corner. The place was a cheap, sodden beer joint, like so many others in the Tenderloin, and the girl was running back and forth between the tables and the bar, obviously dealing with innumerable vile comments and entreaties. Over at the front entrance stood the doorman, who, too, looked like a simpleton with a couple of strong, meaty hands that would be useful for knocking heads about. Then, behind the bar, the bartender morosely divvied out the alcohol and the dinner fare that wasn’t even passable in these parts.
But Penwill could tell that they weren’t the only strong-arm types employed by the still-unseen man who ran the place: several other large louts were also loitering about the place, quietly scanning the tables for any miscreants who were acting out, or were sitting together over in another corner, probably conniving to increase the owner’s personal wealth—and thus, their own—through various scams and shake-downs.
Penwill looked again at the young barmaid: she had just dropped off the glasses of ale at the table of rude card players and she turned, as if to take a survey of the other tables in the room, looking for any empty glasses that needed filling or plates that needed removing. None of the people in the beat-up old saloon took notice of her as she stood in the middle of the room doing this, none save the inspector, who quietly sipped his beer, away from the multitude of loudmouths and braggarts slowly squandering what little money they possessed.
He leaned back in his chair with his bowler tipped slightly down over his brow, hiding his eyes somewhat. For the past twenty minutes, he had been silently observing the girl very closely—studying her, in fact—and also taking care to notice which other men she would consort with in her nightly duties in the noisy, smoke-filled room. As she went about the area, bringing glasses of ale to the customers or wiping clean a table that had been recently abandoned, Penwill kept filing away little mental notes in his mind, notes to relate to his friends at a scheduled meeting over the coming weekend.
Yes, that is definitely her, he first noted, gazing surreptitiously upon the girl as she headed to the bar. Then he scanned the other employees who were present in the room and counted. One…two…three…and four…yes…but not that one—he wasn’t there that night—but where is the leader now? Where is the short man with the whisky-soaked voice? Come out, good sir, come out and show yourself….
But the man he was looking for never showed his face, and after an hour or so of spying on the coarse, rude people who spent their evenings in this awful little corner of the world, he finally stood up, left a healthy tip for the young girl, and departed, probably unseen and unnoticed by the rabble that
still yelled and swore heartily, drinking deeply from their mugs and spitting profusely upon the old, wooden floor in this dank, decrepit section of the Tenderloin.
48
The Saturday morning following Eli Levine’s presentation at Cooper Union, eleven-year-old Michael McCabe stood next to his younger brother, Arthur, better known in the neighborhood as Artie, on Maiden Lane down on the Lower East Side. They stood watching with a gang of street urchins as a young salesman held aloft a gizmo that could supposedly cut an onion without subjecting the cook to the tear-inducing vapors and stench. Michael listened intently as the skinny huckster with the slightest trace of a goatee announced the miracle of the thing and vouched for its reliability and effectiveness. Growing bored with the man’s representations, however, Michael turned to Artie. “Come on,” he said, “let’s head back to the bridge.”
Artie protested, but Michael grabbed him by his shirt collar and dragged him away down the block. Several other youngsters saw them leaving and joined them, for oftentimes on these carefree, wild days down on the East Side, the boys wandered in gangs, looking for amusement or mischief, or food to steal, or simply another adventure. It was still early, and Michael, one of the oldest and thus, a leader of this particular troop, urged the boys to follow him down Pearl Street and back to their normal area of operations, past Franklin Square and into the shadow of the great bridge that spanned the East River to Brooklyn. The boys followed Michael’s suggestion and started running with him, and on the way, they shouted happily and kicked over buckets standing in their way on the sidewalk, to the great consternation of the market men who shouted after them feebly before picking up the overturned contents and heading back into their stores.
Passing through the busy Franklin Square with the great bridge rising over their heads on its way over the river, the boys ran down Cherry Street and disappeared down Mullen’s Alley to their left, a typical haunt of theirs on these wild excursions through the neighborhoods. The alley—a long, slim path approximately ten feet across with tall, brick tenements on either side and littered with trash bins and water buckets lying empty near the community water spigot—was a favorite stopping place for these gangs of abandoned children, “street Arabs” in the local parlance.
Upon arriving down in the middle of the dank alley on this day, Michael stopped suddenly and announced a game of hide-and-seek. The boys, now joined by several young girls in their dirty cotton dresses, eagerly accepted the challenge, and, after the seeker was selected, they all took off down the alley in search of crannies and nooks in which to disappear.
Michael ran for several seconds, looking for a spot, but then, just as he was about to crouch down underneath a tilted wagon, he heard Artie’s voice shrieking out back towards the entrance to the alley. Stepping out from under the wagon, he immediately ran back as fast as he could, and, upon arriving at the scene, slowly approached Artie near a barrel. “What is it, Artie?” he asked. “What happened?”
“There…in the barrel,” Artie replied, unable to suppress tears dropping from his eyes. He pointed at the large barrel into which he had just been peering. “A lady…she’s all bloody!”
Michael turned and carefully approached the old barrel standing quietly in the corner. The other children, now gathering back where the game had started, waited in a semi-circle near Artie. Standing up on the stool that Artie had been using to enter the top of the barrel, Michael slowly looked over the edge and into the container. He stood there for a moment, looking down into the barrel, and then slowly stepped off the stool and gathered the boys and girls around in a closer circle, quickly looking around as if to make sure no one else was snooping about the area.
“Listen,” he said carefully, “I have to run and get a cop. There’s a lady in there who’s been hurt bad, and I need you all to keep quiet about this, understand? Not a word to anyone. I’ll be back real soon, so don’t touch her and don’t tell no one! Artie, you stay here with Frank and Dave. You guys,” he said, looking over at a pair of ruffians standing on the edge of the circle, “you watch over Artie and the other younger ones here. I’ll be right back!”
He then sprinted to the alley’s entrance and turned left down Cherry Street, running like the wind as he desperately searched for the police.
49
Michael ran swiftly down the sidewalk, jostling with pedestrians as he bounced through the crowd on his way to the local precinct. Tuning left onto Roosevelt, he ran down the block to the intersection with Oak, where the police station stood just a couple of dozen yards away. He was quite familiar with this building, having been trundled into its interior many times over the past few years for a variety of offenses, including pick-pocketing, larceny, simple assault, and trespassing. The authorities would always place him briefly into a cell there, and then the juvenile court would swiftly pronounce him a delinquent and send him off to a reformatory, or to a foster home for abandoned children, from whence he would eventually escape again and journey back to his haunts on the Lower East Side. It was his way of life.
On this day, he ran past several people loitering near the entrance to the station and headed up the front stairs into the lobby, where he encountered a beefy-faced officer sitting quietly behind the large front counter that stood tall against the back wall of the room. “What is it, kid?” the officer gruffly inquired, looking down at him.
“There’s a lady, officer,” Michael quickly blurted out, “in a barrel.”
“A lady?” the officer asked with a puzzled look on his face. “In a barrel? What lady?”
“A lady who I think is dead, sir,” Michael replied feverishly. “We just found her in Mullen’s Alley around the corner—inside a barrel.”
“You found a dead lady in a barrel?” the officer asked again, standing up now behind the counter. “What’s this all about?”
“We found a dead girl in a barrel over there!” Michael said, a little louder this time. “She’s all bloody!”
“Where is this girl?” a voice suddenly asked from over to Michael’s left. He turned and saw a tall man with a badge on his coat striding up to him with a very serious look on his face. The man placed his hand on Michael’s shoulder and spoke again: “Where did you find her, son?”
Michael looked up into the man’s face and felt his fear ebb away. “Over in Mullen’s Alley around the corner on Cherry Street,” he said to the man. “We were just playing hide-and-seek, and my brother, Artie—he tried to hide in a barrel over there and he saw the girl all cut up and bloody, sir. We didn’t do nothing wrong, officer, I swear.”
“That’s okay, kid,” the man said. “Just bring me to the girl, okay?” Michael nodded and watched as the man looked at the officer behind the desk. “I’ll handle this—just get Captain O’Connor upstairs and tell him Falconer needs him quickly on a dead body over in Mullen’s Alley—and keep this quiet, all right?”
“Sure thing, detective,” the officer replied, and Michael saw him move from behind the desk and quickly run upstairs to the station house’s administration offices. The man with the badge then looked back down at Michael. “What’s your name, kid?” he asked.
“Michael, sir.”
“All right, Michael,” the man said. “I’m Detective Falconer, and you’re not in any trouble here, all right? Let’s go take a look.”
50
Falconer and the boy walked swiftly down to Cherry Street and over to the alley where the children had seen the body. When they arrived, Falconer saw a group of grubby children standing quietly by the wooden barrel. He looked down at Michael, who then pointed over to the barrel standing against a wall. “She’s in there,” Michael said, and Falconer then walked carefully up to the wooden container and peered inside. Inside he saw a young woman—perhaps twenty years old or so—curled up at the bottom. She had blood smeared about her neck and upper chest area, and her legs appeared to be covered with blood, as well. Clearly, she had expired. After a moment, he looked back at the children.
“Has a
nyone else been by here and seen this?” he asked, looking from face to face. The kids looked at each other as if not knowing how to respond, and then they collectively shook their heads slowly from side to side. “What about the lady?” he asked again. “Any of you see how she got in here?” Again, they all shook their heads from side to side.
He walked over to the group and placed his hand on Michael’s shoulder again. “Listen up,” he said to the assembled kids. “I’m a detective with the police over on Oak Street. I’m going to need you to do something for me. I’m going to need you to keep this as our secret because this is a police investigation now, and if we all go and tell the neighborhood about this, the bad guy is probably going to know that we’re on his trail, and he’s going to get away, do you understand?” The kids all nodded in assent.
“Good,” Falconer said. “My name is Detective Falconer, and if any of you ever have anything to say about this, you come directly to see me, and only me, at the station house. I’m going to ask Michael here and his brother to stay for a bit so that we can take a report from them, so you other kids can all head out now, as long as you promise to keep this as our official police business and don’t tell a soul about it—do you understand that?” The other children looked back at Falconer and nodded in agreement, but then one of the boys in the back of the group spoke up: “Are we going to go to jail for this?”
“No, not a chance,” Falconer replied. “I know you’re not the right suspects, so don’t worry about it. You just keep this quiet, you hear?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy responded, and then, after a few goodbyes and handshakes, the gang of kids slowly melted away from the scene, out the alley and into the labyrinthine Lower East Side neighborhood that pulsed with activity beneath the bridge that spanned the river between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
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