Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

  “I was in the next room, it was my duty as landlady to see nothing fractious come of it.”

  “Commendable, M’Lady, go on.”

  “So,” said Lady Weale, knocking on the marble wall of the restaurant with her red knuckles, “then Maggie’s husband Alick talks about outraged honor and recompensivities and the like—”

  “Recompensivities?” repeated Simeon.

  “If you see what I mean,” nodded Lady Weale and went on: “And then he goes over to the dressing table, where all Mr. Butterfield’s clothing is hanging over the back of the chair and all his jewelry is on top of the little bench there, and Maggie’s husband Alick picks it up—all the time he’s talking about recompensivities—and he puts it in his pocket, and then Mr. Butterfield gets up out of the bed, ranting how he won’t stand for such recompensivities and he can’t take my watch and so on, but Maggie’s husband just laughs, because Mr. Butterfield doesn’t have on a thread.”

  “You saw all this?”

  “Every word.”

  By this time, though his voice when he questioned the lady in the yellow kerchief was one of bemusement, Simeon Lightner was taking quick notes in a small tablet he had pulled from his coat pocket.

  “So Mr. Butterfield—I didn’t know his name then, you understand, but I learned it from the papers—comes forward, and reaches out for Maggie’s husband, and has him by the throat, and he’s red in the face, and he starts choking Maggie’s husband—”

  “What’s Madame Kizer about all this time?”

  “She’s making sure that the curtains are drawn tight.”

  “No nonsense there,” remarked Simeon.

  “Maggie’s ’cute,” said Mrs. Weale, “but Mr. Butterfield’s choking on Maggie’s husband and Maggie’s husband picks up this needle and stabs Mr. Butterfield in the chest, and he dies.”

  “A needle?”

  “A kind of needle,” shrugged Lady Weale. “A Chinaman’s needle, if you see what I mean. It was gold.”

  “Opium?”

  Lady Weale nodded.

  Simeon Lightner whistled and begged the landlady to continue.

  “Maggie calls me in—she’s seen me in the next room—and she pulls a sheet off the bed, lays it out on the floor, and we roll Mr. Butterfield onto it so he won’t bleed on the carpet, but there’s not enough blood to fill a teacup. Then she turns to her husband, who’s got all that jewelry in his pocket, and she says: ‘Take it out, sir!’ and he don’t, and she turns and pulls a hair-trigger pistol out from under the pillow and says, ‘Take it out, sir!’ and he takes it out and puts it back on the dresser.”

  “A cool ’un,” remarked Simeon Lightner admiringly.

  “Then she says—Maggie talks like a lady—she says, ‘We must take him out of here. Put his clothes back on.’ So Maggie’s husband and me gets down on the floor and we put Mr. Butterfield’s clothes back on him, then Maggie says to her husband, ‘You take him out of here and don’t you come back,’ and he says how he don’t have any money and he’ll starve, and she might as well shoot him and have done with it, and Maggie says she’ll sell the jewelry and then send the money to General Delivery in Washington and he can get it there—tells him what name it’ll be under—”

  “You’re right,” said Simeon, “Madame Kizer is certainly ’cute.”

  “So then Maggie tells her husband what to do. Mr. Butterfield is dressed as best we can, though it’s a bad job to put shoes on a dead man, and we take him downstairs, and Maggie’s husband, with ten dollars in his pocket that she give him, takes Mr. Butterfield outside, holding him up like he was falling-down drunk—nobody notices, so many people on the street, most of ’em drunk too, New Year’s Eve—and Maggie’s husband Alick walks Mr. Butterfield down the street a bit and is about to leave him in an alley right around the corner, but Maggie’s sent me out after him, and I tell him he has to take Mr. Butterfield farther away, all the way down to the docks, and he says it’s too dangerous, and I tell him if he don’t, Maggie won’t send the money to Washington. So he curses me, and he curses Maggie, and he curses the dead man he’s got his arm around, but then he goes on toward the docks, and I’m watching him cross West Street, trying to stick to the dark parts, and then I get back to the house.”

  “But when he was found, Mr. Butterfield was naked.”

  “Scavengers. Ragpickers. ’Round there, they won’t leave a dead rat with its fur on.”

  “Maggie do as she promised? She sell the jewelry?”

  “Black Lena on West Houston took it, paid her a good sum for it I would think, considering how Alick Kizer is her very own brother. Maggie took the money and posted it to Washington. He’s got it by now.”

  “This all?” said Simeon Lightner, grinning for his good fortune. When Lady Weale signified yes, he went over the story once more, garnering more detail, demanding descriptions of the rooms in the history, wanting to know what Maggie’s husband looked like, asking whether Cyrus Butterfield had died with a rattle in his throat. After once ascertaining that she would almost certainly receive the reward money, Lady Weale answered all Simeon’s questions.

  They were on their third pints of lager, and Simeon’s tablets were close to being used up, when he asked, “Tell me, M’Lady, why do you tell me all this? Wasn’t Madame Kizer your friend?”

  Lady Weale shrugged uneasily: “I know she’s thinking of moving away. I heard her tell it one of her gentlemen, wanted to take a place up on Thirtieth Street. She was a good girl, and I didn’t know where I’d find the like to replace her. And if she was going away, then this reward was going to serve for my recompensivities, if you see what I mean.”

  Simeon told Mrs. Weale that when she returned home there was no need to say anything yet to Maggie Kizer, that it would be much better in fact if she were not warned. The way that Lady Weale glanced at Simeon made him realize that the old sour-faced woman had probably eased her conscience over this betrayal by promising herself that she would give Maggie Kizer enough time to escape. “You see,” Simeon smiled, “you won’t get your reward unless there’s an arrest. Of course, we’d like the police to arrest the man who actually killed Mr. Butterfield, but who knows where he is now, there’s no way of tracing him any longer, since you can’t remember under what name he had received the money in Washington. Unless Maggie Kizer is arrested and convicted, you won’t receive a penny—” He smiled, for it pleased him to prick Lady Weale, who for money had betrayed a woman who had been—by the landlady’s own admission—kind to her.

  “You—” Lady Weale tipped over the pint of lager she had just received in an effort to destroy the markings on Simeon’s tablets, but he snatched them out of the way, and hastily stood. The beer poured over his vacated chair.

  “I’ll take care of the reckoning,” he smiled. “And remember,” he said, “just as soon as Madame Kizer permanently changes her address from Bleecker Street to the Tombs, you’ll have your money. And tomorrow morning, all the Black Triangle can read about your part in her arrest.”

  At Police Headquarters, Simeon Lightner checked to see whether there were indeed, at Sing Sing, a criminal called Alick Kizer, and was pleased to learn that Alexander Keezer, with two fellow inmates, had broken out of the prison two days after Christmas. The reporter considered that any further investigation into the veracity of Lady Weale’s statement would be superfluous and possibly harmful, in that it provided Maggie Kizer with time to flee the city. After alerting the police to the name and address of the beautiful conspirator in the crime, Simeon Lightner returned to his desk in the Tribune Building and wrote the story out. It was finished by eight o’clock, and received immediate approval from the editor on duty, who decided it would appear on the front page of the morning edition.

  Simeon Lightner had not only the satisfaction of solving the case of the death of Cyrus Butterfield, when the police had been able to accomplish nothing at all, but also of just having written the most exciting article in a series that was by its nature sensational—and all ha
d been accomplished without the assistance or knowledge of Duncan Phair. Simeon declared to himself again and again that he would pay twenty-five dollars to see the expression on Duncan Phair’s face when he heard that the woman responsible for the death of Cyrus Butterfield had been found out.

  Chapter 16

  Shortly after she heard the outer door of the house slam and saw Mrs. Weale’s yellow kerchief headed off on some errand, Maggie Kizer went into her bedroom. She put on a dress of dark green silk with black trim, an old sealskin sacque and a green hat with a heavy black veil. She wore black gloves and but the single ruby ring that Duncan had given her on the New Year. When she emerged from the house she turned her steps southward on Bleecker.

  It was Lady Weale and not Maggie who avidly read the articles that had appeared in the Tribune on the subject of Cyrus Butterfield’s murder. The octoroon did not trouble herself to be fearful of discovery. And once Maggie had explained carefully to Lady Weale that by her assistance in the disposal of the corpse on New Year’s Eve she had implicated herself in the crime, Maggie had rested assured of the landlady’s discretion in the matter. It had not occurred to her to offer Lady Weale money for her silence or to employ her sister-in-law, Lena Shanks, as a threat. For her help, Maggie had given Lady Weale several pieces of the jewelry that Cyrus Butterfield had presented her in the little time that she had known him.

  Maggie Kizer was not a common prostitute and actually refused to receive cash for her favors. Rather, she let it be known—though in a perfectly ladylike manner—that she would be pleased to accept gifts of clothing, of furnishings, and especially of jewelry. These items she kept and displayed for as long as she remained on good terms with the donor, but when, for whatever reason, he no longer kept company with her, those gifts were taken to Lena Shanks and sold. It was this money that paid Mrs. Weale, the dressmaker, and the tavern that sent up her meals three times a day.

  Maggie’s liaisons, which were invariably discreet, were carried through two and only occasionally three at the time. These multiple attachments assured that she would be well provided with gifts. She could not be expected to languish on Bleecker Street alone and unfunded if her sole protector were suddenly called away to his family on the shore of New Jersey in the summer or on business to England in the winter.

  Until recently, her primary benefactor had been a philanthropist, quiet-living but enormously wealthy, whose principal contributions were to charities staffed by or run for the purpose of alleviating the sorrow and discomforts of young unmarried females, whether they be mill workers, or streetwalkers, or the daughters of impoverished Confederate gentry. He had courted Maggie for somewhat more than four years, but since October he had been in Scotland, attending at the bedside of his dying father. This gentleman, shortly before sailing, had introduced Maggie to Cyrus Butterfield, as a man of probity and charm, who would protect her in his perhaps protracted absence.

  Duncan she had met at a select after-theater gathering at a restaurant on Fifth Avenue; Maggie was quite beautiful that night and had been so vain as not to wear her dark spectacles. In that carousing group of drunken overdressed women, giggling and accepting all sorts of amorous advances from the gentlemen present, Maggie had stood apart, not in a disapproving manner by any means, nor with the attitude that she had never witnessed such goings­-on before, but simply with indifference. Duncan had offered her champagne, conversed with her, and accompanied her back to Bleecker Street.

  Since that time, in the summer of 1880, Duncan had visited Maggie two or three times a week and had rarely failed to bring her some trinket; and when he did not, Maggie knew to expect a gift-bearing messenger on the following day. In addition, Duncan had paid for the new parlor draperies and Maggie’s tavern bill for the second half of the year.

  Duncan knew that Maggie had other attachments, though of their identities he was ignorant. That he was not her sole support was rather a boon to him—he forwent the febrile pleasure of jealousy but was untroubled by the tiresome burden of Maggie’s complete dependence on him. So far as Duncan was concerned, Maggie Kizer was the ideal of womanhood: quiet, intelligent, undemanding, beautiful, kind, pleasant, and desirable—not the less either for her bearing the telltale marks of the racially impure.

  Maggie Kizer’s father had been a mulatto, a slave brought up as a superior servant in a fine house in Virginia. Some years before the Civil War, he had escaped to the North and, passing for white in society, had married the only woman who knew the secret of his birth—a girl from Maine who was heiress to the fortune of an Abolitionist family. The young couple lived in Kennebunkport and Maggie was raised with her two brothers in the city’s finest house. A tutor lived in the attic and a dancing master was around the corner; Maggie learned the pianoforte, recitation, and painting on velvet. But in her third year in a ladies’ seminary in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when she was sixteen, it was made public by her father’s chance meeting on the street with the brother-in-law of his old master, that Joseph Conway was half Negro. Immediately after, Maggie’s mother was disinherited by her family, and the grandchildren disavowed. Maggie was removed from the school in ignominy and went to live with her parents in a village in Vermont. Her two brothers went to sea at that time and she had never heard from them since. After a year of penury in Vermont, Maggie’s parents died in the explosion of a paddleboat on Lake Champlain, where they had been employed as maid and waiter, and a gentleman of the town took Maggie under his care. Soon, Maggie became pregnant, and was ejected from the village. She made her way to New York in the back of a cart carrying large blocks of marble for the students at the National Academy of Fine Arts, and shortly after her arrival made a visit to Daisy Shanks in her professional capacity as abortionist.

  Maggie became addicted to opium during her period of wandering indigence in New York. It was not only that the drug-­induced dreams mercifully occluded the misery of her destitution, but that opium killed the appetite—and it was cheaper than food. If one got a very little money somewhere, the piecemeal purchase of the sticky globes gave one the right to remain all the day upon the bunks in the joint; and on those soft pallets in the darkened rooms of a blind cellar, days collapsed into hours and whole weeks passed as if they had been no more than a few sulfurous days. Once, she had trekked to the joint through foot-deep snow, and when she came out again it was to find that spring was full-blown in Washington Square and Battery Park.

  But one day, in that place that did not know time, a man on the neighboring mattress shared a sandwich and coffee with Maggie—food that had been ordered in from a nearby saloon—and asked if he might not take her back to his apartments. Maggie, grateful for his offer, accepted and accompanied the man to his flat on First Street. She remained with him for two months and they indulged their habit in the bedchamber rather than in the unhealthful cellar on Mott Street. But then he was arrested for the robbery of a clergy­man who was doing charitable work in Five Points and sentenced to seven years at Sing Sing. Maggie once more was alone, and supported herself and her opium habit by selling off the gifts that the thief, who had been enchanted with her, had stolen for her sake. On one of her expeditions to Lena’s pawnshop, Maggie was introduced to Alick Kizer. She soon removed to his apartments in the house let by Lady Weale, and sometime later was married to him.

  Her opium habit had abated over the years, for she was no longer a miserable woman. She had no wish any longer to be respectable, for she had learned at great expense that respectability was a bubble easily pricked. She wanted only a modicum of comfort, security, and ease—and those she had achieved. But the poppy dreams were delicious, and her system still craved the drug. She smoked at home now, but occasionally had to make trips to the drugstore or to her old joint for more opium, though she purchased the drug in such quantity that these errands were infrequent. But now she must also replace her yen hock, the sharp length of steel with which the gumlike opium is prepared for burning in the pipe. The flattened darning needle she had employed for the p
ast few weeks was imperfect and she liked to have the proper article; her fine yen hock of gilded steel, which had served her for eight years, was the metal finger that had pressed the catch of Cyrus Butterfield’s life; and in her haste to be rid of the corpse, Maggie had not thought to extract it from his body. She rather wondered at the rapaciousness of the scavengers that had taken the murdered man’s clothes, that they had even discovered the golden nail hidden in the lawyer’s breast.

  Maggie walked down Bleecker Street to Mott and then turned south. After only a couple of streets, the number of Chinamen to be seen was marked. They all wore long queues sticking out beneath round-crowned hats with cartwheel brims, wide shapeless breeches, and blue blouses beneath colorful quilted jackets. None appeared to take notice of Maggie as she approached, though she stood out easily enough on that poor street. However, when she stopped beside a group of four, lounging before a small wooden house and talking Chinese in low voices, one of them said sharply, “Who?”

  “En she quay,” Maggie replied, words which meant “opium smoker.”

  “Who en she quay?”

  “Dark Glass,” she said, and lifted her black veil so that the Chinaman might see the spectacles beneath. The Chinaman nodded to a slatternly Irishwoman with moth-eaten eyebrows who blocked the doorway of the house, and the Chinaman’s wife moved aside to allow Maggie entrance.

  At the end of a dark hallway whose walls were papered with letters that had been received from relations in China, Maggie knocked at a rickety door. A panel flew open, and a flat yellow face peered out at her. “En she quay,” she repeated, and the door opened. Maggie stepped through onto a little platform raised high above the cellar, which was filled with drowsy layers of acrid blue smoke, palpable and—at least to the devotees of opium—delicious. The Chinaman who had allowed her entrance stood obsequiously out of the way and Maggie looked over the room. It was about thirty feet long and fifteen wide, illuminated by a single lantern suspended from the ceiling; the glass in the lantern was of blue and green, and the place was but dimly lighted. On either side of an aisle running down the center of the room was a low platform, just wide enough for a man to lie at full length. It was roughly covered with a motley collection of bolsters, pillows, blankets, cushions, and mattresses. About six feet above this platform, and reached by short attached ladders, was another platform just like it, similarly cushioned. At the far end of the aisle was a doorway, boarded up on the bottom and barred at the top. The small room behind was better lighted and two Chinamen sat in there, playing a game with many ivory counters. In a large pottery jar between them were two dozen or so long narrow pipes and on shelves behind them were sets of the opium lay-outs—the apparatus required by addicts.