The Stalwart Companions

by H. Paul Jeffers

  “Because,” he smiled, reaching into his breast pocket and withdrawing Tebbel’s cheap cigar, “it has the civilised amenity of a cigar stand on its premises.”

  “Obviously,” I smiled.

  “Obviously,” nodded Holmes. “Now, back to the scene of the crime, eh?”

  A wagon from Bellevue Hospital stood in the middle of the street as we approached the Tilden house once more. Hargreave, hatless against the drizzle, appeared to be in animated conversation with a young man holding an umbrella in one hand, which also held a pad upon which he was trying to write with a pencil held in his other hand. The two men paused in their discussion to observe the attendants in white coats placing the shrouded corpse of Nigel Tebbel into the wagon.

  “I see that the press has finally put in an appearance,” commented Holmes as we crossed the wet street toward Hargreave and the young man with pad and umbrella.

  “That is all I have to tell you,” Hargreave was saying firmly to the reporter.

  “May I ask who these gentlemen are?” asked the reporter as Holmes and I approached.

  “Theodore Roosevelt,” said I, “and this is...”

  “William Escott,” said Holmes abruptly.

  “Are you with the police?” asked the reporter.

  “We are not,” said Holmes.

  “We had been at dinner with Hargreave when he was called here,” I explained. I was cut off sharply by Holmes.

  “I assure you we are of no interest to you whatever, young man,” he announced, leading me by the arm away from the newspaperman.

  “All other information will have to come from Mulberry Street,” announced Hargreave, also turning away from the youth, who lingered for a few moments until he realised he would learn nothing more from us, even by eavesdropping.

  “And what have you learned by your examination of the key, Mr Holmes?” whispered Hargreave.

  “It has some interesting aspects,” said Holmes, “but forgive me if I withhold a complete answer to your question until I have had more time to consider those aspects.”

  Hargreave smiled. “A dead end, eh?”

  “In criminal investigations there is no such thing as a dead end,” replied Holmes, “there are only indications that one’s efforts ought to be directed another way. Will there be an autopsy in this case?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I be privy to its findings?”

  “I expect that we know all we need to know about how Mr Tebbel died.”

  “In all probability. Still, it would be instructive to know the pathologist’s findings.”

  “I’ll keep you informed,” said Hargreave.

  “And let me know when you have confirmation that the tin of powder is cocaine. Now, you have your duties to perform, so Roosevelt and I will bid you goodnight.”

  Holmes moved purposefully toward the nearby corner of Fourth Avenue and Twentieth Street and I hurried after him to the corner, which was familiar to me by virtue of the fact that my boyhood home was half a block distant. At the curb, Holmes turned to me with a look from his steel-grey eyes that I was beginning to recognise as his most compelling physical characteristic, far more riveting of one’s attention than that hawk nose, the thin face, the prominent chin. “Are you a day person or a night person, Roosevelt?” he asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It is getting on to midnight. I wonder if you are eagerly anticipating the embrace of Morpheus, or are you a young man who doesn’t mind an occasional late night?”

  “I sleep as little as possible, it being my belief that there is too much to accomplish in life to waste time in slumber.”

  “Bravo. I thought as much. You will accompany me, then?”

  “Where?”

  “In search of all there is to know about the late Nigel Tebbel. I assure you, before dawn breaks over this restless city, you and I will know Tebbel’s home, his haunts, the kind of man he was, the company he kept. Knowing all of this, we will soon know who killed Nigel Tebbel and why.”

  “Where do we begin?”

  “With our hack that is so rapidly approaching and telling the driver to take us to 53 Warren Street.”

  “Tell me, Holmes,” I said as we settled in the hack and moved smartly downtown through the damp and nearly deserted streets, “how can you be so certain that the powder in that tin was cocaine?”

  “I am quite familiar with the drug, Roosevelt.”

  “Is there anything you have not studied?”

  “Very little, thank you.”

  “And what are we to find at Warren Street. The number you gave to the hackie was 53, I believe?”

  “Precisely.”

  “The hotel to which that key belonged?”

  Holmes looked at me sidewise with a smile. “You give me too much credit. The location of Tebbel’s hotel remains a mystery. What we will find at 53 Warren Street is St Vincent’s Home for Newsboys, a remarkable institution established and run by one of the most fascinating men of the cloth it has ever been my pleasure to meet – Father John Christopher Drumgoole.”

  ___

  Author's notes on this chapter

  Six

  Father Drumgoole,” explained Holmes, “came to New York as an immigrant from Ireland. Like the thousands who, even today, are pouring through America’s open and welcoming door, Drumgoole was a penniless young fellow for whom his native land had lost all promise. Much of his life in New York he spent as a janitor in the many Roman Catholic churches of this city. In his adult years, he decided he had a calling to the priesthood and, after diligently applying himself at seminary, he earned his cassock. He took a particular interest in the plight of the homeless and hungry boys who were trying to keep themselves alive by selling penny newspapers. That is a hard life, Roosevelt! The lads must buy the newspapers themselves and hawk them as best they can, praying to get rid of every one, because what they buy they keep. You cannot walk the streets of this city without finding these newsboys sleeping in doorways or spending their pennies in the saloons that cater to them.”

  “Saloons for children?” I cried. “What kind of persons would sell alcoholic beverages to children?”

  “Greedy persons with no scruples whatsoever,” replied Holmes.

  “Something should be done about it!”

  “Something will be done when political men have the courage required to do the job.”

  “Father Drumgoole, then, took pity on these lads?” I asked.

  “By establishing the St Vincent’s Home to which we are going.”

  “Yet I fail to see the purpose of our visit,” I confessed.

  “I am going to enlist the aid of a few of the lads who have been helpful to me in the past on small problems that have engaged my spare time since I came to New York. One of the youngsters, who is the natural leader of my small army of irregulars in the war against crime, was especially useful in the Vanderbilt problem a few months ago. The lad is named James Wakefield. A bright fellow for whom there could be a career with the police force if he would apply himself. I have been encouraging him along those lines.”

  “You are an amazing man, Holmes – recruiting newsboys in the fight against crime!”

  “And what better assistants could there be? They are more familiar with the streets, saloons, and alleys of New York than any roundsman of Hargreave’s constabulary. These lads have the distinct advantage of being easily overlooked. They are so miserable, so far down on the rungs of the ladder of our civilisation that they are never noticed. It is as if they did not exist. As a result, things are done and said with them as witnesses that would never happen, never be said, were adults within seeing or hearing distance.”

  Presently, we arrived at Father Drumgoole’s enterprise and, inside, found ourselves surrounded by a throng of the lads who noisily and warmly greeted Holmes for the friend he seemed to be. In a moment, the extraordinary Father Drumgoole was at our sides, his ruddy Irish face aglow with pleasure, a heavy chain with a crucifix about his neck,
his cassock rakishly open at the collar. “Holmes, what a surprise to see you so soon,” he exclaimed, offering a big, calloused hand to his visitor.

  “May I introduce Mr Theodore Roosevelt?” said Holmes, directing the priest’s attention to me.

  “The Roosevelt family have been generous in their support of my work,” said the priest, “though I have not had the pleasure of meeting this member of the family.”

  “We are a large clan,” I said, taking the priest’s strong hand in mine. “I have plenty of uncles, aunts, and cousins.”

  “Is Wakefield on the premises?” asked Holmes.

  “He’ll be here in a moment,” said Father Drumgoole, leading us away from the milling throng of admiring boys to the study of the Home. Presently, we were joined by the lad Wakefield – a youth of, I surmised, fifteen years, who greeted Holmes with an admiring and bright smile beneath mischievous blue eyes. His blond hair curled over the collar of his blue jacket, which appeared about one size too small for him.

  “You’ve grown a full inch since last we met,” said Holmes, clapping the boy on his broad shoulders. “Say hello to my friend Roosevelt.”

  “Pleased to meetcha,” said the youth with a courtly bow of the head.

  “Roosevelt and I are on an interesting problem,” said Holmes, taking the youth by the arm and directing him to one of the chairs in the cosy book-lined study while Father Drumgoole stood aside, listening. “We must determine the haunts of a certain Nigel Tebbel, whom I take to be a cocaine user.”

  “There’s enough of them around,” remarked the lad with a decisive nod of his head.

  “It is vital that I know when this Tebbel fellow was last seen in his usual haunts and where I might locate persons who know him.”

  “You want me and the lads to find this Tebbel for you?” asked young Wakefield.

  “Tebbel is dead,” stated Holmes.

  “Somebody done him in?” asked the boy.

  “A short time ago in Gramercy Park,” nodded Holmes.

  “My word,” muttered Father Drumgoole. “May the Lord have mercy on his soul. I will include his name in the Mass tomorrow.”

  “I suspect Tebbel will need all the prayers he can get,” commented Holmes.

  “A cocaine user, you say,” said Wakefield.

  “He had a quantity of it in a small tin,” I ventured.

  “The fellow must have money to have his own supply of cocaine with him,” said the lad.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “Most cocaine takers do it in opium dens,” he replied with assurance. I must have exhibited on my face the surprise I felt at the lad’s intimate knowledge of so sordid a business because the youth grinned. “Mr Roosevelt doesn’t know much about these things, eh, Mr Holmes?” he commented.

  “As a matter of fact, Tebbel had a large sum of money on him when he was murdered,” Holmes said. “Yet he hardly seemed a rich man.”

  “Struck it rich lately?” asked Wakefield.

  “Apparently,” replied Holmes.

  “Rich enough to get himself a supply of cocaine. Must be some job he did for that kind of money,” Wakefield observed.

  “Good for you, lad!” said Holmes, clapping his hands with delight. “You see the point exactly! Tebbel was obviously hired to do something, paid a large amount of money for it, then either failed to do it...”

  “Or fouled it up doing it,” added Wakefield.

  “Collecting a bullet in the back as his reward and punishment,” Holmes stated coldly.

  “My word!” gasped Father Drumgoole, dropping into his spacious chair behind his cluttered desk.

  “If this Tebbel was a cocaine user there are a dozen places where he would have gone before he struck it rich enough to get his own supply,” Wakefield explained thoughtfully.

  “I believe he would have frequented a den close to the waterfront,” said Holmes. With a sidewise glance at me he added, “The key, Roosevelt. You see?”

  “The corroded condition of it,” I nodded.

  “The waterfront,” mused Wakefield, his boyish brow creased with the pondering of this information. “That narrows it down to three or four places. Shall we get to work on this right now, Mr Holmes?”

  Holmes turned to Father Drumgoole. The priest frowned, chewed his lip, drummed his fingertips upon his desktop, and noted, “I require the boys to observe a strict curfew, Mr Holmes.”

  “I understand,” said Holmes, clearly disappointed at this decision by the priest.

  “Surely this job can wait until tomorrow,” said the priest.

  “Father,” said Wakefield, “I don’t believe Mr Holmes would have come here at this hour if this wasn’t something darned important.”

  “Is that right, Mr Holmes?” asked the priest.

  “I would not be overstating the urgency, Father Drumgoole, if I were to tell you that this is a case with sinister and far-reaching implications.”

  “That important, eh?”

  “It is of the most serious nature, Father Drumgoole. Lives are at stake, one of them the life of a man of critical importance.”

  “Well, with lives at stake,” muttered the priest.

  Urgently, Holmes rose from his chair and leaned across the priest’s desk. “John, I have never come to you and your boys for assistance in anything that was not of the greatest moment, but I assure you that the importance of all those other cases dwindles to nothingness in the face of this current problem.”

  Against this astounding statement from Sherlock Holmes, Father Drumgoole stood little chance of prevailing. Indeed, who would not have acceded to Holmes in view of what he had so urgently stated – to my amazement, because I had no clue as to what had led Holmes to make these startling utterances. “Very well,” said the priest, throwing up his hands in surrender.

  “Hooray!” cried Wakefield.

  “On your way,” said Holmes. “I want you to deliver a message which I am going to write if Father Drumgoole will lend me his pen? The address is 24 State Street.”

  “Not far from here,” nodded Wakefield, taking the note and slipping it into his pocket.

  “I will be at my lodgings on Twenty-second Street,” said Holmes. “You know what it is I need to know, Wakefield?”

  “Indeed I do,” said the lad enthusiastically.

  “Off, then,” said Holmes.

  At which, Wakefield darted from the room the way an ordinary boy would have if he had been told there were cookies and cider in the kitchen. A group of his young companions joined him enthusiastically – and noisily – but in a moment’s time, the pack of irregulars was gone, disappeared into a nighttime city which they obviously knew exceedingly well.

  After a farewell to Father Drumgoole at the door, Holmes and I climbed into our cab. “I had no idea that this case was as important as you have made it seem,” I remarked as we turned north onto Broadway.

  “It is the most serious case I have yet encountered, Roosevelt, either in England or here in America.”

  Protestations that he could not leave me without an explanation of this sensational remark failed to elicit further words from him except for him to assure me that he was in dead earnest, adding, “From this point, I believe it would be best if you leave this problem to me.”

  “Really, Mr Sherlock Holmes,” I protested, “if you think you can bring me along this far and dump me at my doorstep, you are mistaken. I’m in this to the finish.”

  Holmes laughed. “Good show, Teddy! I was hoping you would say that! Very well. Be prepared for an early rising, for I believe I shall have news from Wakefield soon. Then you and I will see where the discoveries lead us.”

  “But you must get your rest,” I suggested.

  “I will not rest until this case is resolved,” he stated. “I have this night and all day tomorrow to resolve it, and, if all goes as I expect, I shall have put this case behind us in time for tomorrow evening’s performance of Twelfth Night. You seem surprised.”

  “Who would not b
e at hearing such a confident boast?”

  “It is not a boast, Roosevelt, but a promise, for this is a matter in which time is of the essence. Now, goodnight.”

  ___

  Author's notes on this chapter

  Seven

  To my astonishment, Holmes was back at my door in less than two hours’ time. “The game’s afoot! Wakefield, that remarkable boy, has located a man we must see immediately. If you wish to accompany me, dress accordingly. We are going to The Five Points section of this city, as dismal a cesspool of humanity as one may find anywhere, including my London. It is infested with thieves, murderers, rowdies of every stripe, prostitutes, drunkards, and cutthroats. It has and deserves a reputation as the most evil section of New York. Hargreave remarked that you are handy with firearms. I suggest you bring along a pistol.”

  “Really, Holmes, I don’t think even The Five Points neighbourhood is so dangerous that a pair of strong and courageous men such as we need arms. I have always believed that even if you put the best weapon that can be invented in the hands of a coward, as these persons of The Five Points surely are, he will be beaten by a brave man unarmed.”

  “Well said, Teddy, but bring along your revolver anyway.”

  In our carriage, Holmes was once more withdrawn and contemplative, the same Holmes who had sat at my side during the drive from the Hoffman House to Gramercy Park. The aquiline face was flushed with excitement, the brows drawn together into a dark line above hard eyes that glinted like cold steel. He was as taut and ready as a hound on the scent, which, I realised, was precisely the case. Presently, we turned into the dark streets of the sinister neighbourhood called The Five Points. Unlike other neighborhoods through which we had passed on our way – quiet and peaceful as the residents slumbered safely in their beds – this region was crawling with shadowy figures scurrying here and there, nighttime creatures who were alert and alive only in the dark. “What a miserable pack they are,” I muttered, nodding toward a knot of ruffians in hushed conspiracy beneath a lamp.

  Holmes stirred to glance at the men in the dim light. “Yes,” he sighed, turning away again, “they are dirty-looking rascals, but as low and loathsome as they are, each has a spark of immortality about him. You would not think it to look at them, of course, but they are men with souls. Ah, man! What an enigma he is!”