by Kat Ross
I removed an envelope from a hidden pocket in my dress and brushed a small amount of ash into it. “Well, someone was here smoking Turkish Elegantes. He—or she—stood at the window, probably for at least eight minutes. It’s clear from the indentation in the mattress that Mr. Straker was in the habit of sleeping on the right side of the bed, with his feet toward the door. The ash is in an area he would naturally walk through when he awoke, and yet it is undisturbed. Therefore, it was deposited recently.”
Brady clapped his hands. “Brilliant, Miss Pell! So someone else was here.”
“Indeed.”
“But are you really able to pinpoint the exact brand that was smoked?” he asked incredulously.
“She has made a study of tobacco ash,” John replied, grinning. “Miss Pell can distinguish thirty-seven different types, isn’t that so?”
I caught his eye and smiled back. “Thirty-nine, John. But who’s counting?”
“Perhaps this stranger also cut himself shaving?” Brady said faintly.
He had finally ventured into the room and was standing before the basin. He was looking down and I could see his forehead and bat-like ears reflected in a mirror mounted on the wall, no doubt the same that Straker had gazed into when he ranted that it comes through the eyes.
John and I crowded around the basin. What I had initially taken for dirty water was in fact a distinctly pinkish color. John bent down and sniffed it. He said nothing but nodded when I looked at him questioningly.
Someone had washed blood from their hands in this very room.
3
My nerves thrummed at this discovery and I was forced to stifle a small scream when at that exact moment the door banged open and Connor came bounding up to us.
“I delivered yer message,” he said, his bright copper hair curling at the ends from the damp heat. He was at the gangly stage, all knees and elbows, but he carried himself with the self-possessed air of a kid for whom adult supervision had been all but non-existent. “What’s in there?”
John moved hastily to block the basin from view.
I’d given him the address in the note I’d left with Mrs. Rivers. Now I was having second thoughts about the wisdom of this decision.
Connor surveyed the room with exaggerated disdain. “Boy, this place is a dump!” he muttered under his breath. Then his sharp eyes fixed on a small blue disc that must have spilled from one of the dresser drawers and rolled half under the bedclothes. Before I could stop him, Connor had snatched it up. He gave a low whistle. “Chamberlain’s,” he said with reverence. “He’s a real class act. Wonder what one of his checks is doing in a joint like this?”
John held out a hand and Connor reluctantly handed it over.
“Mr. Chamberlain’s establishment is one of the finest in the city, even if it is entirely illegal,” John remarked dryly. “Did you know Mr. Straker was a gambler?”
Brady shook his head. “Robert was never a betting man, not even for a friendly card game.”
There was silence for a moment.
“Circumstances may have led him to change his mind,” I said. “And if he had racked up debts, he would have been under a great deal of pressure. Even more than we know of.”
“I don’t see as how he’d even get in the door,” Connor said, scratching his head. “Like I said, Chamberlain’s is a class act. Judges and senators and bankers and what have you. Not no Five Points riff-raff. They’d laugh him right down the front stairs.”
Brady gave the boy a once-over, and didn’t appear impressed at what he saw. Although Connor prided himself on keeping up appearances (his shoes were remarkably clean), he drew the line at soap and water and I had to stop myself from reaching out and swiping at the sooty smudges on his face and ears. In his world, I think that would have been a hanging offense.
“Who is this lad?” Brady demanded coolly.
I groped for an appropriate response. All I knew of Connor’s background is that his mother had died of yellow fever. Myrtle caught him in the act of stealing her billfold two years back, and now paid him quite handsomely to relay the gossip on the streets and find people who didn’t want to be found.
Connor had been sleeping in the gutter or, if he was lucky, flophouses far worse than this one. Now he stayed at Tenth Street most nights. I didn’t know what happened to his father. He never spoke of it and I didn’t press him. There was darkness in Connor’s past, but children can be remarkably resilient, and he was a cheerful kid, even if he did love to play the devil for poor Mrs. Rivers.
“He’s a…free-lance consultant,” I said at last.
“Oh, I like that!” the little cutthroat exclaimed. “Very swank. Think I’ll use it myself.”
“Did you receive an answer to my message?” I asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Yeah. Miss Bly will meet you at noon. Atlantic Garden.”
“Excellent,” I said. “I’m starving. You’ll join us, won’t you, John?”
He nodded, as Brady’s whole countenance altered from anxiety at our discovery to one of awe.
“Nellie Bly?” he asked. “The reporter?”
“Yes, she’s a dear friend of my…” I caught myself just in time. “Of mine.”
Thankfully, Brady didn’t seem to notice the slip.
“I admire her stories very much,” he exclaimed. “Very much indeed! Such a courageous young lady. Elizabeth simply adores her. Ten Days in a Madhouse…Absolutely shocking.” He fiddled with the key to Straker’s flat. “Do you think I might…come along and meet her?”
I smiled regretfully. “I’m sure she would be delighted, but I think it best if we exercise the utmost discretion. Our appointment is related to the case.” I cast a significant look at the basin. “Which has acquired a particular urgency, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Perhaps another time?”
“Oh yes. Certainly.” Brady swallowed his disappointment. “I should be getting back to the office anyway.” His eyes landed on Connor with no small measure of distaste. “May we speak? In private?”
“Of course.” I gave my messenger fifty cents, which cheered him up considerably, and sent him back to his usual haunts in Greenwich Village with the task of putting the word out to the Bank Street Butchers that there was a considerable reward for the first boy who found Mr. Straker. Then I turned to my client. “You’re wondering if I’m going to go to the police now.”
He nodded.
“I agree that things appear to be more complicated than I first imagined. But I remain unconvinced of your friend’s guilt. So the answer is no. Not yet.”
Brady’s shoulders sagged a little. “Thank you, Miss Pell. I know it looks bad. But the picture…He would have taken it if he’d been able, I just know it! There’s someone else involved, some enemy of Robert’s, and by God, when I find him!” Brady clenched his fists.
“I have to ask for the purposes of elimination, so please don’t take offense,” I said. “But are you by any chance a smoking man?”
“Absolutely not! You can ask anyone.”
“Alright then,” I said. “There are several threads I plan to follow. I will pay you a visit tomorrow morning with an update on what I have found.”
And so we all departed Straker’s sad and rather ominous lodgings, Brady heading downtown for Maiden Lane, and John and I for our luncheon appointment on the Bowery.
“Nellie!” John said as we emerged onto Canal Street, its energetic hubbub and bright sunlight seeming like another world entirely. “Good thinking, Harry. She must be pals with all the police reporters in the city.”
“Yes, and since they’ll never give us the time of day—the police, I mean—we’ll just have to go around them. Oh, I’d give my eyeteeth for five minutes at the crime scene when it was still fresh! What clues did those fools overlook? But it’s too late now. We’ll just have to hope someone took decent notes.”
“And the ash?” John said. “Do you really think there was another person there?”
“I’m sure of it,”
I answered. “Turkish Elegantes is a specialty brand. You can visit the Bedrossian Brothers and see if they recall any recent customers. Their shop is at 23 Wall Street. Think of it as a nice after-lunch walk.”
“And what will you be doing?” John demanded.
“That depends on what Nellie says,” I replied, slipping my arm through his. “Come on, I’ll buy you a bratwurst.”
The Third Avenue Elevated, which ran from South Ferry to Harlem, clattered overhead as we entered the cavernous, block-long space of the Atlantic Garden. Had it been a Sunday, nearly a thousand revellers would have packed the two-tier hall, mostly German families with all their children, brothers and sisters, cousins and neighbors. To the dismay of New York’s Puritans, beer drinking was the principal pursuit. But the place had none of the dissolute atmosphere of the city’s dance halls and concert saloons. It was clean and neat, with an ornately frescoed ceiling and lifelike mural that at first glance appeared to depict a tranquil rural scene, but which on closer inspection revealed itself to be a cemetery—an apt motif for our meeting, I thought.
Groups of men played cards and dominoes as they enjoyed a leisurely lunch. One could usually hear live music, anything from a quartet to a full orchestra, but as it was a Thursday afternoon, the place was quieter than usual. John and I bought sausages and sauerkraut at a counter near the door and pushed past the teenaged serving girls (all in extremely short skirts and red-topped boots with tinkling bells) until we spotted a familiar figure waiting at a quiet table near the rear stage.
“Harry! John! It’s good to see you both again,” Nellie called out, a smile lighting up her face, which never failed to strike me with its youth and prettiness. At the ripe old age of twenty-three, Nellie had gained notoriety as Joe Pulitzer’s new star reporter when she got herself committed to the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island. The resulting articles she wrote for The New York World described it as a “human rat-trap,” with dozens of women bathing in the same ice-cold tub until the water turned black, rancid food, and some fourteen hours of the day spent sitting on hard benches, with inmates not permitted to speak or move.
This bit of so-called stunt reporting led to a grand jury investigation and sealed her reputation as the foremost woman journalist in the country—a profession that was still very much a boys’ club. She and Myrtle had that in common, both refusing to be bound by convention and pushing the limits of what women could accomplish. It solidified their friendship, which I had imposed upon by asking Nellie to meet us here. It was a risk, but one I had to take.
“So you’re interested in the von Linden murder,” she said, her wide brown eyes sparkling with curiosity. “Is Myrtle on the case?”
“You could say that,” I replied cagily, tearing into my sausage with a vengeance.
“I asked Fred for his notes. He wrote up the story and got a copy of the full police report.” She pulled a notebook out and began riffling through the pages. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“Well then, let’s start with the official cause of death: exsanguination. She bled to death. Not surprising since she had thirty-one stab wounds.”
“Did they find the murder weapon?” John asked.
“A kitchen knife belonging to the victim. So perhaps a crime of impulse?” Nellie speculated.
“Perhaps,” I said. “What else?”
Nellie read for a moment. When she finally spoke, her voice was subdued. “It also says she was…bitten. About the face and neck. Incisal biting—that’s the front teeth.” Nellie looked up at us. “We’re not talking about teeth marks. We’re talking actual removal of the flesh. He took pieces out of her.”
“How do you know it’s a he?” John asked, laying his fork down. Both of us were rapidly losing our appetites.
“With crimes like this, it’s always a he,” Nellie responded flatly. “Here’s something…the police found a good quantity of chloral hydrate in the room. It seems she was an addict.”
I glanced at John. “Brady said she was slurring her words. He thought she was drunk.”
“It’s a powerful sedative,” John confirmed.
“Who’s Brady?” Nellie asked.
“Myrtle’s client,” I said. “He has a personal interest in discovering the murderer. Have the detectives got any leads?”
“Not yet.”
“Does it say if they found a book?”
“A book?” She scanned the notes. “What’s the title?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know.”
She looked at me strangely. “No, that’s not mentioned. But here’s something bizarre. The killer appeared to have an attack of conscience. He wrote on the wall, ignosce mihi deus. Seems the police had quite a time figuring it out at first.”
“Because it was Latin?” I asked.
“No, because it was written backwards.”
I could see John struggling to conjugate the verb and took pity on him. Latin was never his best subject. “It means, God forgive me,” I said.
“He probably did it after he covered the face, since there were blood drips from his fingers on the pillowcase,” Nellie murmured, scanning the notes.
I leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
Nellie looked up. “Oh, he covered her up. I suppose he didn’t like looking at his own handiwork. Her features had been nearly obliterated.”
John frowned. “Doesn’t that strike you as more than a bit contradictory? On the one hand, the killing is frenzied, vicious. But then he takes the time to cover her up. It’s almost a twisted act of kindness.”
“Or remorse,” Nellie said.
“What is it, Harry?” John prompted. “You know something.”
I looked up from my reverie. A tall blonde serving girl approached the table but Nellie waved her away.
“Today’s Herald has a small item on page six. An organ grinder, fourteen years old. He was strangled Tuesday night.” I looked down the length of the hall, at all the people eating and drinking, and thought of the teeming crowds in the streets outside, nearly a million and a half strong, oblivious to the fact that among them walked a killer. “The boy’s death only merited a few paragraphs. He wasn’t famous, like Becky Rickard, a.k.a. Valentina von Linden. But I remember one detail: a rag was placed over his face.”
John and Nellie were silent.
“Male. And asphyxiated rather than stabbed. You’ve got to admit, the crimes are different,” John said at last.
“I know. But we can’t ignore it,” I responded. “There could be other similarities we don’t know about.”
“I’m heading over to the World right now to meet with my editor,” Nellie said. “You can come along if you like. See if any of the crime beat boys are around.”
“And I’ll run down to the Bedrossian Brothers,” John said, adding wryly, “Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll remember a sinister fellow buying Turkish Elegantes who considerately left his calling card.”
We made plans to meet later at Tenth Street and I accompanied Nellie to her offices at 32 Park Row. Mr. Pulitzer had grand plans to build a new headquarters that would be the world’s tallest building at twenty-six stories, but this dream wouldn’t be realized until the following year. For now, the popular newspaper occupied a nondescript five stories across from City Hall Park, in what was called Printing House Square because it was home to nearly all the city’s presses.
Nellie led me through the bustling newsroom to a desk occupied by a young man with ginger hair and an easy-going grin. This was the same “Fred” she had poached the notebook from and, once she’d dropped the name of the illustrious Myrtle Fearing Pell, he was happy to share the few facts he had gleaned about the latest murder.
“I’d been called to cover a fire in the Tenderloin or I would’ve written something,” he explained. “Still might, if I can get some quotes from the family. It’s a bit of a shocker. Probably a mugging gone bad, poor kid, though I don’t know who’d want to rob an organ grinder,
most of ‘em rent their instruments because they can’t even afford to own them. It’s not much of a living, and this one was no exception.”
“Where did it happen?” I asked.
“Broadway and Fourteenth Street. The body was found at the base of the George Washington statue, by the slave market.”
Union Square was the city’s theater district, and the phrase was jokingly used to describe the south end of the park, where out-of-work actors would hang around hoping to catch a break from managers and agents who often cast their plays from the throngs of hopefuls.
“It must have been after midnight, as the area is crowded until quite late in the evening,” Fred said. “The sick bastard killed the kid’s monkey too, can you believe it?” He shook his head at the seemingly limitless depravity of New York City—depravity that was helping The World’s circulation grow by leaps and bounds. “There’s your headline.”
“What about the state of the body? I read that the face had been covered.”
Fred nodded. “I heard it was a handkerchief.”
“The Herald said a rag.”
Fred shrugged. “Does it really matter? Oh yeah, my friend at the Times said there was a weird symbol burned into the grass at the base of the statue. No way of telling if it’s related. His editor passed on the story, so he gave me his sketch.” Fred dug through the mountain of loose paper on his desk and pulled out a scrap with a bunch of squiggly lines that I copied into my own notebook. “Anyway, I can’t tell you much more. No witnesses have come forward with anything useful. The kid’s name was Raffaele Forsizi, family fresh off the boat from Italy. Seems he was on his way home from Central Park. He’d been playing there all day.” He lowered his voice. “I did get one piece of information they haven’t published yet.”
He told us, and then jumped to his feet in a sudden burst of energy. “Sorry, ladies, but I’ve got to run. I’m on deadline, and my editor will have my hide if I’m late. Hey, if your sister solves it, do I get an exclusive interview?”
“If my sister solves it, I swear she won’t talk to anyone else,” I said with a smile. “Do you happen to have the family’s address?”