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by Sean Moynihan


  “Thanks!” Falconer yelled back. “You go handle the train!”

  The conductor nodded, and Falconer then turned and gripped the first rung of the metal ladder fastened to the side of the car. The train was rumbling swiftly down the tracks now, and any slip would mean almost certain death down on the street below. He carefully lifted himself up and off the plates between the two cars and started to climb up the ladder, careful to watch the top in case his suspect was to suddenly appear there. Reaching the top rung, he flung himself onto the roof and looked back towards the rear of the train. The light of the earlier sunny afternoon had slowly turned to a darkened gray of dusk now, and he had to strain to perceive any movement in the distance.

  Peering down the line of cars, he saw the suspect slowly traipsing down the middle of the last car’s roof, obviously attempting to find a spot near the back of the train where he could hide until the train came to a stop. Falconer took out his revolver and crouched down low as he began to slowly walk down the roof of the car towards the back of the train. The man was nearing the middle of the fourth and last car, and Falconer was currently traveling on top of the second one, so he had some distance to close before he could confront him. Falconer looked briefly to his left and saw the people and the carriages down on the street far below, rushing by like the little toy soldiers he used to play with as a boy. The view from his position up so high and moving so fast almost sickened him with dizziness, and he quickly returned his focus to the end of the train, where the man could now be seen carefully crouching down and apparently waiting for the train to stop.

  Falconer came to the space between the second and third cars and, judging the distance across, leaped across the chasm. Landing on the third car, he looked up and saw the man was still resting at the end of the last car, gazing back at the track upon which the train had just traveled. Falconer walked as quietly as he could, even though he realized the absurdity of this effort given the great noise that engulfed them up on top of the roof. He felt that the man would surely look back any second now and realize that he was being stalked, but for now, the man remained unaware of his presence, and so Falconer kept moving back towards the last car, slowly closing on his quarry.

  When at last he came to the gap between the third and fourth cars, he steadied himself and decided to holster his revolver before making the jump. The man did not appear to be armed, and Falconer didn’t want to risk losing his gun in a struggle on top of the roof. Stepping back a few steps, he ran swiftly toward the edge of the car and jumped, landing hard onto the last car. He looked up and saw that the man had not heard him in the tumult and roar of the train here outside on the roof, and so he slowly moved forward, trying to catch the man by surprise. The train continued to chug its way rapidly down the tracks, getting closer now to the next station at Houston Street. Falconer approached the man gingerly, hoping to ambush him with a blow to the head with his blackjack. He reached inside his jacket and removed the weapon and gripped it hard now as he got to within ten feet of the man.

  Just as he was about to run the last few steps and strike his blow, however, the man turned suddenly and caught sight of him and quickly got to his feet with a wild-eyed look on his face. The man looked back over his shoulder, apparently trying to see if he could access the ladder on this end of the train, and then he looked back at Falconer again with hands raised in a fighting position. Falconer approached him and feigned a couple of moves to catch the man off-balance, but the man did not overreact and stood his ground steadily. Then, as Falconer considered what do next in this precarious position, the man suddenly turned and scrambled over to the top of the ladder, swinging himself down onto the rungs.

  Falconer followed, throwing his blackjack back into his jacket. The man got to the bottom of the ladder just as Falconer was beginning to climb down behind him, and Falconer could see him hop down to the landing on the end of the car and reach for the door leading back into the car. Falconer quickly got to the bottom of the ladder, though, and swung himself into the man’s body before he could fully open the door, knocking him against the metal railing that surrounded the end of the train. The man turned back to face Falconer, and now Falconer could see that he was armed, in fact, holding a knife in his hand. The man swung out at Falconer and came close to cutting him across his face, but Falconer managed to lean back far enough and avoid the blow. The man then swung again, swiftly and violently, but Falconer caught his arm in his grip and pushed the man back against the metal railing.

  The two men struggled against each other, and Falconer could hear the man groaning and growling in an almost animalistic way, until, without warning, the man butted Falconer in his face with his own hard skull, and Falconer staggered back, blinded momentarily with pain and blood that started to seep down his face. The man then came at Falconer quickly in the enclosed little space, and tried to slash at him with the knife, but Falconer, blinking desperately through the blood, managed to ward off the knife blows with his arms.

  Faced with a barrage of slashing attacks, Falconer took a guess and tried to time a blow just at the right moment, and then lashed out at the man with his fist. The punch landed just below the man’s nose, square on his mouth, and now the man staggered back a bit, holding one of his hands up to his bleeding mouth. Falconer quickly wiped his face with a sleeve, trying to get the blood away from his eyes, and was about to reach inside his jacket for his gun when the man rushed at him with a raging scream. Falconer moved to the side and the man ran into the metal railing, and then Falconer swung out at his head again with a hammer blow from his fist. It glanced off the back of the man’s head, though, apparently not inflicting much damage, and the man moved to grab Falconer by his jacket.

  The men both stumbled down onto the metal floor of the landing, and Falconer could hear the loud clickity-clack sound of the train’s wheels rolling violently over the tracks below them as he looked up and saw the man raise the knife again. Falconer raised his arms to block the coming strike, but the attack never happened, as the man suddenly lurched backward and fell to the floor, gripping his forearm with a hand. Falconer scrambled up to his feet, confused about the man’s convulsions and groans down on the floor. And then he saw the blood trailing down the man’s arm as he gripped the wound and moaned loudly in pain. Something just happened to him, Falconer thought. Did my gun go off accidentally?

  Unsure of what had just happened and utterly confused at the moment, Falconer turned and looked down to the street, and then he saw a sight that he would not forget for the rest of his days: the figure of Penwill galloping on a horse alongside the train down below and holding in his hand one of his Bulldog revolvers. And as Falconer gazed down at his friend in wonderment, the British inspector raised the hand holding the gun up to his brow and nodded slightly. Falconer could only stand and smile back at him as he felt the train slowly reduce in speed, apparently now under the control of the conductor. And in that moment, when Falconer knew that he had survived the incident without a train wreck, and without any innocent fatalities, and knew also that he had his suspect finally in custody, he looked down at the man who had just shot the suspect in the arm from a position on a galloping horse, and he thought he could perceive the slightest bit of a grin on that man’s face, as well.

  He turned around and moved over to where the suspect was grimacing in pain on the floor, still gripping his bleeding arm. Leaning down and extracting a pair of handcuffs that he always had attached to his belt, Falconer gently locked one of the cuffs around the man’s wrist, and then locked the other to his own. “You are under arrest,” he said to the man over the slowing but still loud chug-chugging steam engine, “for the murder of several women in the city.”

  The man looked up at him and appeared to want to say something, but no words came out of his mouth.

  62

  Bly picked up the morning edition of The World and scanned the front page as she sat with her breakfast of coffee and toast in the dining room of the three-story walk-up sh
e shared with her mother on 35th Street. She hadn’t worked for the World for some time, but she still had an affinity for the publication and its workers, and she liked to keep up with happenings around the city and the world by looking over her old paper every now and then.

  On the far left of the page, below the large heading, “EXTRA,” printed in bold lettering, was a particularly intriguing little headline down at the bottom: “Suspect Captured After Commandeering Third Ave El.”

  “Commandeering of a train?” she mused to herself, looking more closely at the story. “How very thrilling.”

  She began to read the details provided by The World’s crime beat reporter, and her sparkle of interest became a glowing flame when she saw a certain name appear in the second paragraph:

  The suspect, a shifty-eyed rogue named Jack Spotsky who is known to frequent the worst dens of crime in the city and has been arrested numerous times for vagrancy, pick-pocketing, and assault, struck the engineer from behind but then was confronted by an intrepid roundsman from the Fourth Precinct, Detective Falconer, who just happened to be on the train at the time. After a terrible chase within and above the train amongst the many shocked and frightened passengers, the determined detective managed to arrest the deviant, who apparently suffered a gunshot wound to the forearm in the process. It is not clear, however, how Spotsky came to be shot because the indication is that the detective did not use his revolver during the arrest. Several bystanders below the scene, though, strongly asserted that a mysterious horseback rider shot the suspect while galloping on his steed far below and alongside the runaway train. Thus far, the World has not been able to confirm the veracity of this stunning report or an identity of the reputed Wild West gunslinger.

  Well, well, she thought, as a smile spread on her face. Falconer…now what were you up to on that train, I wonder? Bly read on until the end of the story, and then put the newspaper down and started to formulate a plan in her churning mind as she sipped the last of her coffee.

  63

  Falconer turned and saw the two detective sergeants drag the handcuffed, wincing figure of Jack Spotsky into the chief inspector’s office by his arms. It was the morning after the chase on the train, and Falconer and Penwill now stood inside the ornate office with the chief and several of his top lieutenants in the Detective Bureau: McCloskey, Von Gerichten, Frink, McNaught, and the barrel-chested Clubber Williams. Captain O’Connor from the Oak Street station stood over to the side as Detective Sergeants Brady and Westervelt ushered Spotsky over to the front of Byrnes’ desk, where a wooden chair sat empty. They didn’t offer the chair to him, however, and instead, stood him up roughly in front of the chief, who lingered behind his desk smoking a cigar.

  Falconer looked over at the injured man and saw him look up and squint at the silent chief puffing on the cigar behind the desk. Byrnes reached down and grabbed a pair of black leather gloves on the desk and pulled them onto his hands. He then walked slowly around his desk until he stood only a foot away from the prisoner. Drawing a healthy drag from the cigar, he exhaled the smoke right into Spotsky’s face, and the man coughed and wheezed as the detective sergeants held him up. Byrnes then placed his cigar down onto a large, crystal ashtray on the desk, and faced the man again.

  “We have all the letters you’ve sent to Detective Falconer here,” he began. “All of them. You didn’t realize that the post office would put a postmark on them identifying the place where you dropped them, did you?”

  Spotsky looked at the chief with a befuddled expression on his face before glancing around the room at the other men, who stood still and stone-faced like a collection of life-sized monoliths etched out of granite a millennium before by some long-forgotten tribal people.

  “Well, that’s what they do, you know—the post office people,” Byrnes continued. “They stamp each letter with a special stamp, and it tells people where the letter was dropped. And that’s what you did. That was your mistake, sir—you should have dropped the letters in different places. But now…”

  Byrnes stopped and picked up his cigar again, taking another long drag before placing it back down on the crystal tray. “But now it’s too late for you, and you’re caught. So, tell me, Mister Spotsky, why did you do it?”

  Spotsky stared at Byrnes with the look of a man who had just been thrown into a cage full of wild wolves, and then finally spoke up. “Do what?”

  Byrnes smiled and looked around at his fellow policemen in the room. “You want to play a little game with us?” he asked. “All right, then, we can do that. Why did you go after those women?”

  “What women?” the prisoner asked.

  “Let’s start with the woman you grabbed near the Imperial Hotel back in April,” Byrnes said. “Remember her? How she kicked you and got away”

  “I didn’t try to grab no woman near the Imperial Hotel in April,” Spotsky stated flatly.

  “You did try to take her that night, Spotsky,” Byrnes insisted. “And then you killed the woman you left in the barrel down off Maiden Lane.”

  “Killed?” Spotsky sputtered. “I never killed no one.”

  Byrnes stood and looked at the man, and then briefly looked at his men standing in a small semi-circle around the room. Turning back to the prisoner, he suddenly swung his right hand up at the man’s face and slapped him sharply across the cheek. Spotsky’s head recoiled from the blow and he staggered while being held by Westervelt and Brady.

  Falconer had heard of Byrnes’ notorious “Third Degree” interrogations but had never experienced them first-hand. As he stood by over on the side of the room, he thought to himself that the act of coercing a confession out of a suspect through physical abuse and intimidation was not the right thing to do. But then he remembered his own behavior out in the streets or in the Oak Street station, how he had roughed up suspects who needed roughing up in the past, and how he was not above reproach when it came to the treatment of men in custody, and he remained quiet as he observed the chief’s interrogation of Spotsky.

  “Do you think we are stupid, Spotsky?” Byrnes asked the man who stood recovering from the pain in his face. “Do you think that, sir?”

  Spotsky shook his head slowly from side to side but did not look up at Byrnes when he answered him. “Nah…I don’t think that. But I’m tellin’ you: I’m no killer. I just dropped those letters for a gentleman who paid me, all right?”

  Falconer looked at the suspect intently now, and the room fell silent with the man’s last words. Byrnes stepped closer to the prisoner and, being taller than the man, peered down at his face from only a few inches away. “What gentleman?” he demanded. “Are you saying you didn’t write those letters, Spotsky?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m sayin’,” Spotsky replied, almost sneering at his inquisitor. “I didn’t write nothin’. I just got paid for droppin’ ‘em.”

  “And who is this gentleman, boy?” Byrnes said through almost gritted teeth.

  Spotsky tried to move back slightly away from Byrnes’ peering face, but the men still held his arms tightly and thus, he could only stretch his head backwards while his body was held firmly in place. “I don’t know his name,” he said, grimacing where he stood. “He’s just some rich guy—stays at the Hoffman House over on Twenty-Fifth. Hangs out in the fancy saloon over there.”

  “What’s this man’s name?” Byrnes quickly asked. Spotsky hesitated, though, and only stared back at the chief. Byrnes then threw a hard punch at the man’s ribs, and Falconer winced as the man crumbled to the floor in pain. The detective sergeants picked him up again, though, and raised him up so that his face was level again with Byrnes’. Spotsky was groaning as his head rolled from side to side with his eyes shut tightly as if it would shut off all pain in his side. Byrnes grabbed the man’s jaw fiercely and held his face still in his gloved hand as he moved closer to him. “I asked you, man, what this mysterious gentleman’s name is. Now out with it!”

  “I don’t know his damned name, I swear,” Spotsky sputtered
through his constricted lips as he hung limply in the policemen’s grasp. Byrnes released the man’s jaw and stepped back. “He must have seen me deliver something over there once,” Spotsky continued. “I do that sometimes for extra cash, and one day he grabbed me as I walked by his table and said he’d pay me to drop some letters, and so I did it. I never got the guy’s name—I just drop by every week to see if he wants somethin’ delivered and he pays me a fiver every time I do it. That’s it.”

  “I want the man’s name, Spotsky,” Byrnes said as he moved closer to him, and Spotsky flinched slightly. “If you want to help yourself at all here, you’d better give it up.”

  “Pardon me, chief inspector,” Falconer suddenly interjected from the side of the room.

  “Yes, Falconer?” Byrnes said, turning to him.

  “I believe this man is telling the truth and he doesn’t know our writer’s name, sir,” Falconer said. “But we don’t need the name—we just need a good description and we can find him over at the Hoffman House.”

  Byrnes paused, and the men waited for him to speak. He then turned back to Spotsky and stepped in front of him. “What of it, Spotsky?” he asked. “What’s this man look like? At least you know that much.”

  Spotsky looked up at the chief inspector as he swayed slightly in the tight grip of the two detective sergeants by his side. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess he’s maybe fifty, fifty-five years old. Dark hair with some gray. Same with the mustache. Wears fancy clothing. Speaks with an accent. And he’s got all the fancy rings and such. You know—a real bang-up rich guy.”

  Byrnes turned back to Falconer. “What do you think, Falconer? It matches our man.”

  “Yes, it does, sir,” Falconer answered. “I can go over there and try to spot him and haul him in.”

 

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