Max could barely get the words out. He was afraid the senior Mourtone might crumble before his eyes. “Last night. Before I got there, someone shot him. He was dead by the time I showed up.”
Mourtone flinched, his head jerking as if he’d been slapped. “How do you know? Maybe he was just hurt? Did you get a good look at him?”
Max spoke slowly, enunciating each word. “I’m very sorry. Yes. I did. He’d been shot, and there was no doubt. He’s definitely gone.”
Dazed, Mourtone sat down on the edge of a sofa. “You have to be certain. What am I supposed to tell his mother?”
“I can’t imagine … It’s a terrible tragedy. Here is my card. If there is anything I can do to help you….”
For a moment Mourtone stared dumbly at Max’s identification. In a bitter tone, he said, “You’re a reporter? Don’t think you’re putting this in your scurvy paper. This is hard enough.”
Then he let go a feral noise, a grunt, a growl, a moan combined, an animal expression of grief. How strange coming from such a neat, elegant man.
“I appreciate your distress, but it’s my job.” Max had never made this statement with a greater sense of shame. For an instant he saw himself, a permanent harbinger of horror sailing into the future.
Recovering a bit, Mourtone whispered, “Do me one simple kindness then. Where is the body?”
“That’s the other part. I don’t really know. He’s … the body is lost.” The empty chair, perfectly lined up under the empty table. The missing liver-colored hat. The ashtray a clean cup of air. The shape of absence. Dread crept bone by bone up Max’s spine.
“What? Lost? What do you mean? A second ago you said he was dead. Now you don’t know where he is?” Mourtone’s voice shook with rage. “Are you some kind of extortionist?”
“It’s a complicated story.” In short strokes, he explained that he had returned to Stephenson’s with Detective Stout, and that Martin’s corpse had vanished.
Mourtone set himself at the edge of an upholstered chair. “I told him to stay out of those blind pigs.”
“Well, Stephenson’s isn’t actually….”
Mourtone rocked slowly, chewing on his lips, talking to himself. “He’s dead, he’s actually dead? You wouldn’t make this up, no … it’s inconceivable. No, it’s not. He wanted to do this to us, he always wanted to….” His eyes glazed, he stared at Max. “What do you want from me? Why did you come here?”
“Well, I was the only one who saw—”
“Your newspaper, that’s why, isn’t it?”
“I thought I might quote you,” Max admitted. “All in good taste.”
“Ah, good taste. My son is murdered in a black-and-tan, you’ll smear it all over your greasy rag, but you’ll exercise good taste?”
“I liked Martin,” he mumbled, groping for sympathetic ground. “I thought it would be better than the police—”
“But the police don’t know anything about it, do they? All they have is your cock-and-bull story.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s true. I understand your distress.”
“Don’t suppose anything, whoever you are.” Straightening up, Mourtone eyed Max contemptuously. His lips unpeeled in a sardonic smile. “So it’s your word against mine, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can’t prove he’s dead, can you? Why should I accept your account?” Ashen, clearly exhausted, Mourtone was rallying.
“He’s missing, isn’t he?” Max reasoned.
“Possibly. Maybe not.”
Now Max saw a glimpse of the insurance magnate beneath the aesthete’s milk-white skin. Mourtone’s voice no longer wavered. “We won’t see a word of this in your precious paper, of course. In fact, we won’t allow it. You say you saw Martin, shot, in this Stephenson dive? I will insist I saw him afterwards. Your paper could get sued for libel, couldn’t it? Dragging a decent family’s name through that rag of yours. Not to speak of the damage to a grieving mother, assuming you have any human feelings. I think your recklessness, once it was exposed in court, would result in a nice stiff fine and drive you out of your so-called profession for good.”
Mourtone had made his priorities crystal-clear. Dying was in poor enough taste. Expiring in Stephenson’s was worse than death itself. The threat of legal action, given the insurance executive’s resources, sounded all too convincing. Max kept his mouth shut and let him go on.
“On the other hand, we could cooperate.”
“How?”
Mourtone kept Max waiting while he poured whiskey from a cut-glass decanter. When he passed the reporter his drink, his hand shook. Liquor splashed on the carpet, but Mourtone either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
“Sit down. Let’s work this out to our mutual advantage.”
Max sensed that Mourtone had used that phrase a thousand times while trimming his clients, but the scotch went down warm and smooth. “With all due respect,” Max reminded him, “you’ve already reported Martin as missing to the police. It’s a matter of public record now.”
Actually, Max had no interest in placing a squib about a missing society swell. The real story involved Martin’s murder and what he had known about the Midnight Band’s activities. And that information had probably died with him … unless Gretta knew more than she had admitted.
“Yes, but it won’t be public knowledge unless you print it. You can help our family instead of causing us pain. Don’t report the incident now. I can advance you some expenses. Meanwhile, you can keep looking… .” His voice shaking, he faltered. “Looking for him, in my employ. You saw him last. You’re a reporter. Find the boy.”
Rapidly, Max sorted out this arrangement’s merits and dangers. If the offer was high enough, he could use the money to wipe out his debt to Sim Addem. He’d have breathing room for once in his life. What had Billy Webster said? Look at Scott, the theatre critic, licking the cream off his lips. Just a little on the side … how could anybody survive on Bennett’s crumbs?
With MacNamara the bartender wandering in deepest, darkest Baltimore and the black man disappeared down a Thompson Street alley, Max had no story. So taking money not to write an article he couldn’t publish anyway made perfect sense. He didn’t see much of an ethical issue. Well, there might be one, but it was convoluted enough to ignore. And how would Stan Parnell ever find out? Still, he felt nervous. He had never before taken money on the side. But wasn’t it the way of the world? He couldn’t decide, so he stalled.
“What do I do if I find him?” Carefully, he avoided the words “body” or corpse.
“That’s precisely what I’ll be paying you for. Have some decency, for Godsakes. I have a heartbroken woman upstairs. Do you want to kill her? How much? Two, three hundred?”
Stunned by the offer—he could live for months on that kind of mazuma—he still hesitated. What if it cost him his job, was it worth it? But who would ever find out?
Mourtone wanted nothing more than to bury his son and the sorry circumstances of his demise. Two or three hundred? He went cold. The butterflies in his stomach fluttered and died. With that kind of dough he could not only pay Addem, he could live like a king for a while. Get the whole bill of fare at the Waldorf, lamb in mint sauce, canvasback duck, Lobster Victoria.
When he looked up at the Venetian painted ceiling, certainly plundered in Europe by Mourtone’s architect, he wondered if he could do better. “Five. And if there are expenses later on, you’ll advance me?”
“Would you like cash now?”
Suddenly, a febrile excitement gripped him. He allowed himself a single word. “Naturally.”
“We’ll want to work with Police Superintendent Byrnes. He’s a solid man, completely discreet.”
Superintendent Byrnes was renowned for finding and returning the possessions of the better classes. It was almost magical how he could put his finger on a pearl pendant or a gold ring the day after it was stolen. Of course, all the reporters knew how he did it, by making deals with
every dip in the city, parceling out zones in which he would tolerate pickpockets, the badger game, faro, stuss, and every twist on banco known to man. In return, the underworld granted him a cordon sanitaire, the Dead Line starting just above Wall Street. The financial district, with its immense store of stocks, bonds and bullion, and its well-heeled brokers, traders and practitioners of the darker financial arts, had become the safest place in the city.
Max didn’t even blink when Mourtone handed him Howe and Hummel’s business card. “First, go to these lawyers, and they’ll make other contacts. Do you know this firm?”
He had to suppress a laugh. In the previous year’s most celebrated trial, Howe and Hummel had defended Hattie Adams against the Reverend Dr.
Charles Parkhurst’s charges that she was running a police-protected bordello. In order to gather evidence, the minister had entered Adams’s establishment incognito, observed a can-can demonstration, and engaged in a game of naked leapfrog. On the stand, Charles Gardner, the private detective who had accompanied the Reverend Dr. Parkhurst, admitted playing the frog.
“Who doesn’t?”
“You know where they’re located?”
“Down opposite the Tombs.” In a sense, wasn’t he being paid to find Martin, rather than to keep anything out of the paper? He wasn’t taking a bribe at all. Why not take a job on the side, when half the time he raced around town for Parnell and had his copy tossed back in his face? Wouldn’t it be sweet to commandeer a Hoffman House table? He could set off a wine spree, stand the house at the mahogany-paneled bar, and take drinks in return, his right leg secured on a brass-plated foot rest. Or he could take Gretta to Delmonico’s or Sherry’s. Imagine having the simoleons to do that! He felt giddy.
A pleading note crept into Mourtone’s voice. “Maybe you saw someone else … it was dark in there, wasn’t it? I can’t tell his mother, you understand, until it’s certain. She had rheumatic fever when she was young.”
“It’s a terrible thing. I’m sorry.” What barren words, inadequate noises.
Mourtone closed the tall doors behind himself.
The insurance magnate didn’t return to the library. Instead, his manservant handed Max an envelope and then led him to the door. Proud and ashamed all at once, he slipped the money into his inside jacket pocket. His fingers kept migrating to the thick packet of bills. There they were, real to the touch. In the muffled quiet of the East Side streets, it was all he could do to keep from whooping out loud. He’d never had more than twenty dollars in his pocket in his life. Five hundred dollars, and he’d negotiated the price up from three hundred! Yes, he felt a twinge of guilt, but a flood of newly found self-respect washed it away. Why not lick some cream himself once in a while?
On his way downtown he deposited $400 in his account at the Madison Square Bank. The rest he kept in small bills. No one had to know why he occasionally dipped his hand into his inside pocket or why he was gliding across the sidewalk, lighter than air.
chapter nine
Across the three-story red brick building at 89 Centre Street, Howe and Hummel’s sign ran forty feet long and four feet high. In thick block lettering, stenciled on two windows, and on a pair of flanking columns as well, the partners’ names were repeated to numbing effect.
Above the Tombs, wispy clouds blew across a brilliant sky. For an April day, the wind was pouring in, sharp and cold off the harbor.
Max entered the stark waiting room, a pair of raw wooden benches pressed against unadorned walls. In the center of the room, a battered stove leaked a bit of smoke. Nearby stood an enormous safe. Cheek to jowl, the waiting clients had drifted in from different universes. A straight-spined man in a high beaver hat and frock coat sat next to a henna-haired woman whose generous powder, rouge, and lipstick were more mask than makeup. A man with a sun-glazed face and wild stalks of hair looked like a fishmonger. Next to him, but sitting at the farthest edge of the bench, a veiled woman in widow’s weeds held herself stock-still.
One client stood out, though, a fierce-looking young woman whose false fingernails appeared to be made of sharpened metal.
Suddenly, a tiny, warty-faced man raced into the room and began twirling the safe’s combination wheel. Fascinated, Max watched as the clerk swung the massive door wide, revealing nothing within but an old scuttle. Dashing into a storeroom, the little man, who sported a pair of shiny, pointed shoes, retrieved a shovelful of coal, dumped it in the pot-bellied stove, then locked the implement up again for safekeeping. Max managed to catch the man’s flying sleeve before he disappeared again. The Mourtone name produced a magical effect. Immediately, the clerk led Max to an inner cubicle furnished with three plain chairs and told him to wait.
Max had been reading about Howe and Hummel for years, though he had never laid eyes on them. It was common knowledge that the Five Points gang the Whyos and the monosyllabic Tammany leader Richard Croker kept Howe and Hummel on retainer. Howe had represented General Abe Greenthal’s Sheeny Mob, a pickpocket juggernaut, and Chester McLaughlin’s Valentine Gang, expert forgers. Hummel protected luminaries of the theatre as well. Max had heard that P. T. Barnum used the firm, as did Edwin Booth, Tony Pastor, John Barrymore, and, in order to guard her artistic freedom, Little Egypt.
Abe Hummel was also fond of sending subpoenas to men of substance, invoking their imaginary promises of marriage to certain carefully trained chorines and actresses. These breach-of-promise suits amounted to a genteel form of blackmail that New York’s sporting men considered a hazard of their exploits.
Yet Howe and Hummel were so well situated that The Herald once ran a laudatory article about a dinner they threw for Police Superintendent Byrnes at Delmonico’s. In that anonymously penned piece, the author referred to Howe as “the Nestor of the criminal bar.” Max was certain that he had come across other stories about the lawyers in the Worlds Sunday supplements as well.
Howe’s chief fame, however, sprang from his storied performances in hundreds of murder trials. Max knew he had represented Dr. Jakob Rosenzweig, who had earned the name the HackensackMad Monster for express-mailing parts of Alice Augusta Bowlsby south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Other bloody-minded clients included Annie Walden, the Man-Killing Racetrack Girl; Handsome Harry Carlton; and Michael McGloin, Whyo captain.
So Max knew quite a bit about William H. Howe and Abe Hummel. Even so, he wasn’t prepared for Howe in the flesh. Busy with papers, the mountainous man behind the desk barely looked up, giving the young reporter a moment to absorb the spectacle. A skinny messenger stood patiently at the lawyer’s shoulder.
Howe, in a doeskin waistcoat, a green patterned shirt, and a royal-purple suit, offered up a paean to clashing colors. Instead of a tie, a dewdrop diamond, held in place by a cloverleaf of white, pink, and black pearls, glistened at this throat. Hanging from a gold chain, stretched to breaking across his great abdomen, a diamond fob sparkled. A yachting cap with a blue brim was tipped back on his enormous head. Max tried to gauge the man’s age, perhaps sixty or so. There was something antique about his garishness, suggesting the days when lawyers attracted their clients less by their skill in the courtroom than with their flashing stones.
Finishing his subpoena with a flourish, the attorney issued orders to his messenger. “Say you’re from Western Union, you’ve got news of an inheritance. That’s a good one.” Here he turned for the first time, his blue eyes disappearing in pockets of flesh, and melted Max with a smile worthy of a Bowery comedian. There was something both captivating and grotesque about Howe’s looks. A strong nose, a high forehead, a generous mouth, but more of each than was necessary.
He continued to instruct his process server, while with a broad wink he drew Max into his conspiracy. “Say you’re the milkman, the gas man, the iceman, the butter-and-egg man. Put on a dress. But serve, man, serve!”
After his minion had darted out the door, the lawyer rose, placed his hands on his hips, arched his back and groaned. Without the slightest bit of embarrassment, he squatted slightly and p
roduced a musical fart.
With a darting finger, he directed Max’s eye to a series of framed sepia photographs that ran along the wall above a bookcase stuffed haphazardly with leather-bound volumes. “The pantheon, Mr. Greengrass, our pantheon. Have you ever seen the like? And whom do we have here? Queen Victoria. Lillian Russell. Mr. Sullivan, of course. Jake Kilrain, a tough customer but a man of unstained character. And Miss Langtry. A Hall of Fame without them would be a sham. And whom do we have here? A little man with a great spirit and a great brain. Our Mr. Hummel.”
To Max’s shock, next to the dignitaries and celebrities hung a photograph—from the same series—of the miniature man who had retrieved the coal scuttle. Less surprising was the next portrait in the collection, William H. Howe’s. The lawyer’s somber gaze under the print’s brown finish spoke of philosophical depths, a melancholy, tragic view of life strangely at odds with the man before him.
Returning to his padded seat, Howe went on. “These pictures, you may have guessed, come from the Police Gazette Hall of Fame. To members of elevated social circles they may not seem like much, but do you know how many people read the Gazette every week? They buy these pictures, sir, for a nominal fee, to dress up their living rooms and foy-ays.”
Max noted in Howe’s uncertain h’s a trace of Cockney. His tone recalled the carnival barker.
“It gives me confidence to know that when I stand before a jury, that one or two of its members has hanging in his dwelling, pictures of little Abie and me over the mantel. He knows our exploits, he knows our good deeds. Now what about this friend of yours, young Mourtone? Nasty business.”
Howe’s mercurial shift in tone jolted the reporter. “You already know?”
The lawyer nodded his leonine head.
“Apparently, he’s been murdered.” Max’s own words sounded tinny.
“You’ve been through a terrible experience, I understand. When I was only twelve, I saw a man strangled to death. A harmless man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Oh, I had hair-raising dreams for years. I understand your agitation.”
The Midnight Band of Mercy Page 9