“All our lives are in danger,” said the woman. “There is a man in this town murdering helpless women & the Law is doing nothing about it. I suppose I should be glad someone is looking into this, even if it is just a child.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “a child can go where other people can’t.”
“True,” she said. “Very true.” She smiled & put the little cigar in her mouth & stepped forward & held out her hand. “My name is Gertrude Holmes, but everybody calls me Big Gussie. I own the Boarding House next door.” She was breathing heavily but I learned later that was just her way. I decided she was more wheezy than raspy. “What did you say your name was again?” she said.
“P.K. Pinkerton,” I replied. “Everybody calls me P.K.”
I do not like people touching me but I stretched out my hand politely. She nearly crushed it with her gloved hand.
“Well, P.K.,” she said in her wheezy voice, “I could use a stiff drink. How about you?”
“I am partial to black coffee,” I said, shaking the blood back into my hand. “I also like soda water with sarsaparilla syrup. It purifies the blood.”
She said. “I find whiskey purifies my blood just fine.” She dropped the butt of her slender cigar & shmooshed it out with the toe of her boot.
I bent over and picked up the stub end of the small cigar.
“What is this?” I asked. “I have never seen one like this.”
“That? That there’s a cigarrito. I buy mine by the dozen up at Bloomfield’s Tobacco Emporium.”
“What brand?” I said.
“It’s called ‘Lady Lilac,’” she said. “I love lilac.”
I sniffed the stub. Sure enough, the tobacco did have a tincture of lilac to it. I put it in my pocket.
Big Gussie was watching me with narrowed eyes & her head tilted to one side. “Why did you do that?”
“I am starting a Tobacco Collection,” I said. “A Big Tobacco Collection.”
She said, “You are a very peculiar person.”
I did not know what to say to that so I said nothing.
She looked at me and I looked at her.
“I reckon I can sweep up later,” she said. “Why don’t you come on over and take some refreshment with me and my girls? I have information that might be of use to you, including the names of about two dozen possible Suspects.”
I studied her posture. Her feet were pointed straight towards me and she did not show any signs of lying or deception.
I said, “Thank you, ma’am. Anything you could tell me about Suspects in this case would be mighty useful.”
Ledger Sheet 19
NORTH D STREET HAS lots of small whitewashed, pointy-roofed houses called cribs. Each has a door & window & a little porch with an overhang so the Ladies can sit outside in fine weather. Some of the cribs lean a little to the left or right.
Big Gussie called her place the “Brick House.” It was two stories tall & made of red brick & it stood smack dab in the middle of those cribs. It reminded me of a mother hen with all her little chicks lined up either side, some of them leaning over to be near her.
It was even nicer inside. She led me into a big, bright parlor with a flowery Brussels Carpet & a high ceiling. On the facing wall was a big mirror that reflected back light & seemed to double the size of the room as well as the plump couches & dark wood furniture. There were four little polished tables with lace doilies & vases full of flowers & china ornaments & fancy ashtrays & cut-glass decanters.
There was a piano against one wall & a fiddle on top.
At a big, long table in the middle sat four women playing a Card Game & drinking coffee. It was past 3 p.m., but they were still in their undergarments.
“Girls,” said Big Gussie, “say howdy to P.K. Pinkerton, Virginia’s smallest detective.”
“Howdy, P.K.,” said the four girls. I touched my hat, then remembered myself and removed it.
“P.K. is investigating the death of poor Sal,” explained Big Gussie, as she placed two china teacups full of coffee on one end of the polished table. She gestured for me to sit. “Sally used to take her meals here,” added Gussie, “until we disagreed about runaways. She had no truck with them.”
“Runaways?” I said, thinking of Martha. “Do you mean runaway slaves?”
“Bless my stockings, no! I mean Leg Cases. Skedaddlers. Absquatulaters. Runaway Rebs.”
“Beg pardon?” I said, as mystified as ever.
Gussie rolled her eyes. “Deserters,” she said. “Especially Confederate deserters. We been getting quite a few of them recently. I reckon we’ll get more over the next few weeks on account of that terrible battle back east. Sally said we should turn them cowards in. But I believe most of them just crave the company of soft and gentle women after all that blood and killing.”
Big Gussie did not look soft or gentle but I nodded for politeness.
“After our disagreement Sal stopped eating with us. Then she seceded from our profession, too.”
I got out my Detective Notebook and pencil. “Can you tell me the names and descriptions of her Gentlemen Callers?” I said. “For my list of Suspects?”
“Well,” said Gussie, taking a deep pull on her cigarrito, “as I just said, she hadn’t had none for a while. She was setting up to be a seamstress.”
“You mean she stopped having Gentlemen Callers?” said I.
“That is exactly what I mean,” said Gussie.
“But she used to have some?”
“Up till about a month ago.”
“I believe one of those Gentlemen Callers killed her,” I said. “Can you tell me any of their names?”
“Sure I can,” said Big Gussie. “You gals can help, right?”
One of the girls at the other end of the table said, “Sure. We knew most of ’em.”
Big Gussie introduced me to the four girls.
One girl was called Irish Rose. She had freckles and reddish-brown hair and an Irish accent. So her name was easy to remember.
Big Mouth Annie had a little rosebud mouth so that was easy to remember for her being the opposite of her name.
The one they called Spring Chicken did not look like a chicken but her corset was grass-green and she was young with fluffy yellow hair, so I thought of a baby chick in the springtime grass.
Honey Pie was plump & had honey-colored hair so I made a picture in my head of her eating pie filled with honey & remembered her that way.
They all gave me names & descriptions & as much other information as they could remember. I wrote them all down in my Detective Notebook.
At the end of our first session I had 23 Suspects, all men who were known to have visited Short Sally up till about a month ago.
23 Suspects! I had to narrow it down some.
Although Martha was short-sighted, she had been able to give me a basic description of the Killer: tall & slim & blond with a billy goat beard. With the help of Big Gussie and her Girls, I crossed off the names of all the men who did not fit that description.
That left me with only eight names.
Then I asked if they knew whether any of the men had been out of town or busy elsewhere on the night when Short Sally was killed, viz: Friday September 26.
One man was known to have gone to Carson City for two days. Another had been in a drunken stupor all night in an upstairs room right there at the Boarding House. So we crossed off two more names.
That left me with a list of six likely suspects in the Murder of Short Sally.
SUSPECTS IN THE MURDER OF SALLY SAMPSON
(Tall, Slim Men with Fair Hair & Smallish Beards Known to Have Frequented Sally)
Ludwig Hamm, barkeeper, German
Pierre Forote, barber, French
John Dennis, miner, American
Yuri Ivanovich, telegraph operator, Russian
Isaac E. Brokaw, policeman, American
Isaiah Coffin, photographer, English
I was surprised to hear Isaiah Coffin’s name come up as a Gent
leman Caller of Sally’s, but I am pretty sure I did not show it. My face rarely betrays what I am feeling.
One of the other names sounded vaguely familiar.
I am good at remembering names if I see them written down, but not so good if I only hear them.
“John Dennis?” I said. “Where have I heard the name John Dennis?”
“He likes to put on airs,” said Big Gussie. “Sometimes calls himself El Dorado Johnny.”
Then I remembered. He was the yellow-haired, white-toothed, silver-spurred youth who wanted to be either Chief of the Comstock or a Good-Looking Corpse.
Big Gussie took a fresh Lady Lilac cigarrito out of a silver box. “Of course,” she said, “the man who killed Sally might have been a Gentleman Caller we did not know about. One not on the list.”
I nodded. “Would anyone else know anything?” I asked.
“Her best friend, Zoe, might,” said Gussie, blowing out smoke.
I remembered the Notice in the paper. The Administratrix of Sally’s estate had been named as Mrs. Zoe Brown.
“Mrs. Zoe Brown?” I asked. “The Administratrix of Sally’s estate?”
They all laughed. “You’re the only one who can get right through that word,” explained Gussie, tapping her ash. “None of us can get our tongue round it.”
“What does that long word mean, anyways?” asked the girl they called Spring Chicken. She was sucking her thumb.
“Means she got named in Sally’s will and will get proceeds from the sale,” said Gussie. She got up and went to a table & brought back the morning’s copy of the Daily Territorial Enterprise. It was folded open at the Notice of the Sale of Sally’s goods. The Girls looked at it, all except the thumb sucker.
I remembered that a few of the items on the list had puzzled me.
“What is a ‘Mahog Whatnot’?” I asked.
Gussie pointed to a kind of triangular table that fit neatly into one corner of the parlor. It had three shelves & was made of dark polished wood.
“That is a Whatnot,” she said. “And I guess ‘Mahog’ is short for mahogany.”
“That is a kind of wood,” said Big Mouth Annie. “Expensive, like black walnut.”
I said, “So Zoe Brown inherited all Sally’s property?”
“No idea,” said Big Gussie, tapping ash into a little silver ashtray. “You have to ask Zoe.”
I made a note of that.
I said, “Was her jewelry stolen? I noticed there was no jewelry on the list of items to be auctioned.”
Honey Pie—the plump one—looked up from the newspaper. “He’s right,” she said. “Sally had that topaz necklace and some pearls, too.”
Spring Chicken removed her thumb from her mouth. “And a real tortoiseshell hair comb,” she said. “That ain’t mentioned neither.”
“You’d best ask Zoe about the missing jewelry, too,” said Big Gussie.
I said, “Where can I find this Zoe Brown?”
“Zoe lives down there at Number Thirty,” said Honey Pie. “Little white crib with a red door.”
Big Gussie tipped her head to one side and regarded me with an expression I could not read. “I thought you would of knowed that. Warn’t she the one who hired you?”
“I cannot tell you who hired me, but thank you very much for the coffee and the information,” I said politely. I closed my Detective Notebook & stood up.
“You ain’t going yet, are you?” rasped Big Gussie, and her eyebrows went up. “Don’t you want to hear how I found the body?”
I sat down again. “Yes,” I said. “Please tell me how you found the body.”
Ledger Sheet 20
BIG GUSSIE TOOK a deep pull of her cigarrito. “Short Sally used to board here,” she said. “Breakfast and dinner. Like I told you.”
“Why?” I asked.
Big Gussie shrugged. “No kitchens in them little cribs. Anyways, Sally was high class. Exclusive. Expensive. She usually only entertained one man per night. She would give them her undivided attention. She served them pastries, along with rum or brandy. She would sing and tell stories and be charming. They paid her ten dollars for the night.”
“Ten dollars?” I said. That was a lot of money.
“Yes,” said Gussie, taking another drag. “She had to pay for the spiritous liquors and sweets herself, but even so, she was doing very well. Recently she bought that team of horses and the gig.”
“Sissy and Sassy,” said Big Mouth Annie.
“Those were the names of the horses,” said Spring Chicken, without taking her thumb from her mouth.
“She kept them up at the Flora Temple Livery Stable,” said Honey Pie.
“She was going to drive that team over the mountains to San Francisco before the winter snows,” said Big Mouth Annie. “It was her dream.”
“Not a very practical dream,” said Gussie. “It takes about four days with your own gig and those steep mountains tire out the horses something awful. Plus there’s the ferry from Sacramento. Sally would have done better to sell the gig and team and buy passage on a stagecoach.”
Honey Pie said, “She told me once she had a vision of driving that pretty white pair right into Frisco and everybody would stare at her all admiring like.”
“We all have our dreams,” said Big Mouth Annie. “Don’t mean they’ll ever come true.”
“After Sally stopped taking her meals here,” said Gussie, “she had a Chinaman deliver breakfast every morning along with her wood. I heard she started dining up at Barnum’s Restaurant and brought the leftovers back to Martha. So we had not seen her in a while. Only sometimes driving by in that new gig of hers, with or without Martha.”
Big Gussie stubbed out her cigarrito & continued her account. “Saturday morning early, the Chinaman banged at my door. He said he had brought the breakfast and wood as usual but the door was open and Martha was nowhar and Miss Sally would not stir from bed. So I went over there. Sure enough, the front door was ajar. So I went on in.”
“I heard Gussie scream,” said Big Mouth Annie. “It was horrible. Made my blood run cold as snowmelt.”
Big Gussie said, “Poor Sal was stone dead, staring bug-eyed at the ceiling with her mouth open. She was real beautiful but she did not make a good-looking corpse.” Gussie stared at the table for a moment and then gave herself a little shake. “Course once I closed her eyes and tied her jaw shut with a handkerchief she looked more peaceful.”
“At first, we thought Martha might of done it,” said Big Mouth Annie.
“Because she didn’t come to us for help or nothing, just run off…,” said Irish Rose.
“Li’l Martha was her slave girl,” said Honey Pie.
“She warn’t no slave girl,” said Big Mouth Annie. “You ain’t allowed no slaves in the Territory. That’s why she came here. She told me that once.”
Spring Chicken took her thumb out of her mouth. “That true?”
“Yep,” said Big Mouth Annie. “Short Sally rescued her. Poor little runaway orphan slave girl.”
“Treated her harsh, though,” said Honey Pie.
“Not that harsh.” Irish Rose turned to me. “Made her do chores, like sweeping the crib every morning till it was speckless. But sometimes Sal took her for rides in the gig. Wish someone would take me for a ride.”
“Anyhow,” said Big Gussie. “It wasn’t little Martha that strangled Sally. That little gal wouldn’t hurt a fly. Plus Doc Green said the marks on Sally’s neck showed it must of been a man. I reckon Martha saw him do the deed and skedaddled.”
I said, “Doc Green saw the body?”
“Yes,” said Gussie. “He comes round to see us regular. He said she must have been kilt the night before I found her, because she was cold as yesterday’s porridge. But none of us heard any noise, did we?” She looked round at her Girls. They all shook their heads & stared at the table.
“Where does Doc Green live?” I asked.
“South D Street.” Gussie sipped her coffee. “Other side of the church. He
told us it would all come out at the inquest,” she said.
I said, “What did the Coroner say when you told him this? Or the Marshal?”
Big Gussie looked at the girls, then at me. “Nobody ever asked us,” she said. “They never held no investigation nor inquest.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Gussie shrugged. “Last week we was ‘between’ Coroners. The Marshal was sick and that Deputy Marshal don’t like our kind. He is often tight.”
“That old Coroner was usually tight, too,” said Big Mouth Annie. “Better no inquest than one by him.”
“What is ‘tight’?” I asked.
“Means ‘drunk,’” she replied.
“The new Coroner ain’t much better,” said Gussie. “I had words with him t’other day and find him to be a son of a—” She looked at me and caught herself just in time. “Well, he ain’t a kindly man. So I, for one, am mighty glad to have someone fighting on our side.” Here Gussie lifted her coffee cup towards me in a toast. “Even if it is just a pint-sized Private Eye like P.K. here. If ever you need anything,” she added, “you just call on Big Gussie and her gals. We will be there for you.”
I thanked her and the four girls & stood up & put my hat on my head.
Back outside I saw that the sun was dropping down towards Mount Davidson. I judged it to be a quarter past 4 o’clock. I turned right & found Zoe Brown’s crib with no trouble.
It was one of the nicer ones: not too crooked, with a cherry-red door & the No. 30 painted on it.
I knocked on that door.
There was no reply at first but then I saw a curtain twitch & a few moments later the door opened up.
I guessed Mrs. Zoe Brown had some Negro blood. She had big brown eyes with long eyelashes. Her skin was the color of milky coffee. Her dark hair was soft & curly. Her features were very symmetrical & she smelled like honeysuckle.
“Can I help you?” she asked in a pleasant accent that I recognized as Southern.
“My name is P.K. Pinkerton,” I said. “I am a Private Eye investigating the brutal Murder of Sally Sampson. Will you help me?”
The Case of the Petrified Man Page 7