by Bill LeFurgy
“Sarah. Police Commissioner Lipp says that you went to the morgue and chopped open a skull.” The superintendent sat woodenly behind his desk. “You’re in serious trouble.”
A cold panic seized her. “I reexamined the body of Lizzie Sullivan using medical techniques that should have been employed initially as part of a proper medico-legal examination. No chopping occurred. I used a Burr drill and DeVilbiss forceps to open the frontal bone to inspect the dura—”
Commissioner Lipp pounded the floor with his walking stick. “Good gracious, girly, I don’t care if you pricked her with a sewing needle. You had no business even seeing the body. I’m ready to have you arrested for tampering with remains.” He jabbed his finger at her while speaking in a high, scratchy voice.
A sense of overwhelming chaos rendered her weightless. Language fled as she swayed from one foot to the other.
“Sarah, pay attention,” said the superintendent sternly. “Remain still.”
She forced herself motionless and, with a great act of will, recovered her ability to speak. “I am giving you my complete attention,” she said, looking at the wall behind the superintendent’s head. She took a deep breath. “You should know I have additional evidence about Lizzie Sullivan’s death. The gunshot did not kill her.”
“Superintendent, this is outrageous.” Lipp slammed his walking stick down so hard Sarah flung her arms out as she jumped. “I know that villain Shaw hired you to help him evade justice. That in itself is terrible. But if your organization is attempting to falsify the obvious fact that Shaw shot that girl with his very own gun—sir, you will pay.”
“Commissioner, I’m mortified.” The superintendent wrung his hands. “She had no instruction from me or this agency to meddle with the investigation. The girl is headstrong and has her own ideas, regrettably. Rest assured that we will not let news of this unfortunate incident leave the room. And I will drop Shaw as a client immediately.”
Sarah struggled to comprehend what was happening. Why was the superintendent so eager to disavow their client? And why was the police commissioner rejecting important new evidence about a murder? Confusion jostled with anxiety for dominance in her mind.
“See to it. I’ve already got too many difficulties.” Lipp smoothed first one of his sideburns and then the other, raising faint clouds of dried skin. “I’m working night and day on the purity voting amendment to the state constitution. We must eliminate the Negro and the immigrant from politics to safeguard our great race. Praise God for giving me strength to carry out His will.” Lipp set his walking stick against a knee and raised his arms heavenward. Then he gave the superintendent a hard look. “You need to do more to fix this, sir.”
The superintendent looked at the top of his desk. “Sarah, your services are no longer required.”
She heard the words without processing them. “Which services? Do you want me to concentrate on filing?”
“You’re fired, Sarah. Pack your things and leave the office immediately.” The superintendent kept his eyes down.
“One other thing, dearie.” Commissioner Lipp leaned forward and pointed a bony finger at her. “Keep your mouth shut about Lizzie Sullivan. Go stay with some auntie and make sure you never cause me any trouble again. If you do, I’ll have you thrown in jail. You got it?” His little eyes glinted with a dark light.
Sarah focused on the tip of Lipp’s chin as her entire body trembled. “You should wish to learn the truth behind this murder. I have pointed you to crucial evidence, but you reject it. I must conclude that you are not interested in conducting an unbiased investigation. That runs counter to your official responsibility.”
The superintendent stood and gestured to the door. “Sarah. Let’s go.”
Lipp gave a long, brittle laugh. “This is priceless. I’d heard you weren’t right in the head, and it’s true. Who do you think you are, girl? You’re nothing but a spastic little freak who’s been overeducated beyond any practical use. You should be locked in an attic instead of running around causing decent people trouble.” He leaned over on his stick. “You are a walking disaster. I heard about what happened during your internship after Hopkins—dismissed by your supervisor for insubordination. Then the Pinkerton Agency took pity on you, and you repay their kindness with an unforgivable misdeed. Such a sorry creature. Sad.” He flicked a hand at her as if she were a mosquito.
Sarah went back to her desk. As a child, she used to fling herself down and bang her head on the floor when negative emotion overwhelmed her. Now all she could do when upset was let the great gobs of fear, anger, and frustration surge within her. The experience was so powerful that she wanted to tear herself into a pile of tiny pieces and spontaneously combust.
Here she was again, suffering the consequences of her limited knowledge of—and weak appreciation for—the proper way to interact with people. Should she not have ventured to reexamine Lizzie’s body? Should she not have screamed when her internship supervisor removed his trousers, pinned her against a wall, and demanded sexual intercourse? Both actions on her part seemed entirely justified, but both actions also got her fired. She forced her numb hands to put her precious books into a canvas bag, desperate to get home. But the bag was too heavy to budge.
The edges of her vision grew cloudy as tremors ran through her body. Studying murder victims and identifying their killers—the sole focus of her life—might never be possible. If so, she had no idea what would become of her. Bad things could happen—maybe even a return to the horrible place she had escaped from seven years ago.
She would rather die than accept that fate.
Chapter 4
Jack—Monday, October 11, 1909, 2:30 p.m.
No joint in Baltimore could beat the ragtime piano players at the Silverstrike Hotel. Bob Foster, the best middleweight boxer ever and Baltimore’s native son, ran the place. He’d opened it with money won in a forty-one-round title fight in Silverstrike, Colorado, against Nils Karlsson, “The Slugging Swede.” Foster was famous citywide, cheered on even by most whites.
The hotel was dead center in the neighborhood known as The Pot—short, so it was said, for The Cauldron of Sin. Pimps, punks, pickpockets, and hop peddlers loitered on the sidewalk, along with the occasional upstanding citizen slumming for a thrill. A cocaine hustler, rain dripping from his expensive fedora, sidled up to Jack.
“Hey, bud.” The guy was taking short, nervous puffs on a cigarette. “You’re looking for some burny to blow, right? Some snow in October? Got the real thing, right here.”
“I’ll bet you sling more of that dope than Carter does Little Liver Pills. Wasting your time with me, though. Not a whiffer.”
“That’s hard to believe.” The man turned his head and gave Jack a sidelong stare. “You sure got the jumpy look of a big-time coke fiend.”
Jack waved the guy off. If only there was a drug that would make him forget, that would block out the pain. . . . He’d drunk whiskey nonstop for a stretch after getting kicked out of the army with a bobtail discharge, but boozing had only put him in a place where the ghosts pressed in closer and cried louder. Alcohol also turned him into a raging terror who got into fights, tore up barrooms, and otherwise unleashed pain on everything and everyone. It was safer to suffer sober.
The Silverstrike’s bouncer, a massive six-foot-six specimen, called out a greeting. “Last I heard you were Jack-in-the-jail-box a week ago after getting crack-brained drunk and mixing it up with the coppers,” he said. “Surprised that pretty mug of yours isn’t all bashed in.”
“Wasn’t true about being drunk. I hate the blue boys enough to fight them dry.”
“I stand corrected. You’re a plain old lunatic. What, cops let you out of the stir because they were tired of hearing you yelling about being the king of England?” The bouncer’s chuckle rumbled like a far-off thunderstorm.
Jack gave him a pained smile. It was good to have a reputation as crazy, but only up to a point. “That’s a real screamer. I’m working on a job. Snake Eye
s around?”
The man stopped laughing. “Detective’s wearing out his welcome. How much police protection can one place stand?” Worry lines crinkled his brow. “He’s at his usual table. Hey—what I said? Keep that between you and me.”
Jack nodded and went into the barroom. The place was a quarter full and smelled of unwashed bodies, cheapo hair pomade, and stale tobacco smoke.
As his eyes adjusted to the dull light, the first person he saw was a piano player talking a smooth hanky-pank to an indifferent audience. “Yes, sir, I’m playing all the raggedy tunes you love. I’ll be syncopating while you’re intoxicating.” He played a little riff to highlight the joke but no one laughed. “Say, now, it’s the top of the oyster season, right? Let’s celebrate with this little number called ‘I Don’t Care About the Rest of the World Because Baltimore’s My Oyster.’” He started pounding the piano with a springy up-and-down melody. The guy was good.
Jack scanned the crowd, mostly single men sitting with their shoulders hunched while staring into their drinks. A painted gal at a nearby table looked bored as a fading prospect jabbered on with some hard-luck story. Snake Eyes O’Toole was alone at his table in the back, working on a plate of pig’s feet, hands shiny with grease.
When Jack came to Baltimore, a friend warned him that Terrance “Snake Eyes” O’Toole was bad news. The detective was said to have started out as a smart, hard-nosed cop devoted to his mother. He’d lived with her into his thirties, and she would often telephone the station to lecture him. Sometimes she was hot about things her son hadn’t done right, such as not properly washing the dishes or leaving the trash bins in the wrong place. Other times she was angry because she felt her only child didn’t care enough about her. His fellow bulls had fun listening to the tough guy meekly apologizing over and over again.
A couple of years back, the story goes, Snake Eyes didn’t show up to work for a few days. Cops went to his house and found him, bedraggled and out of his head, telling the festering corpse of his mother that he would be a good boy from now on if she would just wake up.
Afterwards, he’d seemed to pull himself together and was back to work right away. But now his brutality and corruption knew no limits. There wasn’t a saloon or whorehouse in town that he wasn’t squeezing for graft. Despite his blatant crookedness, O’Toole was even more infamous for his savagery. He took pride in clobbering at least one person every shift—often a Negro because that was easy to get away with. Still, skin color wasn’t a crucial factor, and the detective delivered his beat-downs with a fair-minded enthusiasm.
Jack knew that O’Toole was a Detroit Tigers baseball fan, which figured. Ty Cobb, the meanest cuss in the game, played for the Tigers. Jack’s favorite player was Honus Wagner, who was just as good as Cobb—maybe better—and a decent man as well. It so happened that Wagner’s Pittsburgh Pirates were playing the Tigers in game three of the World Series that afternoon.
He walked up to the man’s table. “Detroit got great pitching on Saturday from Wild Bill Donovan, Snake. Nice job tying the Series.” O’Toole said nothing as he leisurely fished into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He picked up a matchbook with a cover advertising Peruvian Wine of Coca and lit up a stick. “Let me know if you get a pack of smokes with the Honus Wagner baseball card,” said Jack. “Know you haven’t got any use for it.”
O’Toole turned his blank, dead eyes on Jack. The man’s face was a ghastly landscape of pits, bumps, and fissures. A spongy growth abutted his left nostril, and pig grease glistened on his chin and wispy mustache. “Wagner makes zero dollars off those cards. Sucker.” He took a drag and blew a perfect smoke ring. “What?”
“Join you? Pinkertons hired me to help out Horace Shaw.”
O’Toole kept his creepy stare going for so long that Jack wondered if the guy was trying to work some sort of hoodoo spell. “Sit,” he finally said.
Jack sat on the edge of a chair. “Heard you got some evidence tying Shaw to that dead showgirl. Poor old Shaw just can’t figure how that happened.” Jack steeled himself for another hypnotizing-the-prey stare, but the other man spoke right up.
“Tell Shaw he’s wasting his money on your bag of guts. Man’s getting arrested after the inquest. He ain’t got a Chinaman’s chance of dodging it.”
“Shaw’s got the long green. He’d be more than happy to show his gratitude to someone who could put an end to this misunderstanding.”
“You trying to bribe a Baltimore city detective?” O’Toole spoke in a bored tone as he poured a drink from a bottle. “Have to arrest your ass.” He downed the glass in one quick motion. Then he put his cig on the edge of the table, picked up a pig’s foot, and chewed off the last shred of flesh sticking to the knuckle. He wasn’t even interested in considering a bribe, which had to be a first. Somebody had promised the guy something big to keep Shaw in Dutch.
“It was just an innocent question. Here’s one more: What do you know about Lizzie Sullivan?”
The lawman tossed the pig bone on the floor and then casually sucked his fingers. “Like what?”
“Like anything. Tell me: Was she close to her mother?”
O’Toole curled his upper lip, revealing a snaggly bunch of yellow teeth. A front tooth was chipped like a jagged pane of glass in a broken window. “Get lost, mope. Now.”
Jack got up and walked to the bar. He’d played that badly. Chances were slim that O’Toole would have told him anything, but the wiseass question guaranteed the brush-off. Jack needed information. He had to be smarter about getting it.
“Branch water,” he told the unenthusiastic barkeep. When the glass finally appeared, Jack found his hands were shaking worse than ever.
He looked at the line of men next to him as he sipped. Barflies and spreesters trying to dull their troubles. A paperhanger smart enough not to try to pass his phony sawbuck bills in this place. A sharp-eyed bunk artist on the make for a pigeon. Too bad for the gullible Jasper who wandered in here or, for that matter, just about any other saloon in the city—the yokel would get big-citied in a hurry.
Prints of boxers covered the walls. There were pictures of Bob Foster along with others. Paddy Ryan, with his beer gut hanging over his white tights; “Gentleman Jim” Corbett, proudly flashing his handsome mug; Jack Johnson, with his long, muscular arms and legs. Two young women were pictured slugging it out in what looked like a fancy drawing room complete with an elaborate hutch full of bone china. One dame had thrown a left jab wide, and the other looked ready to unload a killer uppercut. “Hey, Bob around?”
The bottle jockey didn’t look up from polishing a glass. “Left word not to be disturbed.”
“Send a bottle of Pikesville Rye back to him now.”
“Two bottles would get his attention faster.”
Jack tossed a ten-spot on the mahogany. “Okay; keep the change. Tell him Jack Harden wants a few minutes of his time.” The guy snatched the cash and disappeared through a back door. Jack drained his water and wished he had ordered another before sending the barman away.
“Mister, give a girl a light?” Jack turned to see a drawn woman in a low-cut dress leaning over with an unlit cigarette. He was getting a great view of her overflowing cleavage and a snootful of bargain counter perfume. The woman was so worn out, it was hard to tell if she was twenty-five or forty. The face paint didn’t do much to hide a black eye.
“Don’t smoke.”
“Sweet man, worried about my morals. For two dollars I’ll show you my full appreciation upstairs.” She stepped closer and touched his jacket arm. Her fingernails were filthy and the back of her hand covered with shiny white scars.
“I mean I don’t smoke,” said Jack. “And I’m not in the mood for company.”
“Gosh, things are slow today,” she said, leaning on the bar and gently rubbing the mouse under her eye. “Bound to pick up tonight, right?” Hope and regret twisted around each other in her voice like strands on a frayed rope.
“How old’s your baby?”
&nbs
p; The woman jerked her head up to look at him. “How’d you know I have a kid?”
“Your tits are big for your body.”
She tossed her head back and laughed. “Thank God for nature’s bounty, brother.” She tugged down at her neckline. “This gets a man’s attention every time, but congratulations. You’re the first one to notice with your brain rather than your Johnson.” The mirth faded quickly, and she stared quietly at the floor. “My boy’s three months old.”
The barkeep gestured from the rear door. Jack peeled off a ten-dollar bill from the Pinkerton money and handed it to the woman. “Go home. And quit smoking.” He made for the door, ignoring the woman’s cries of gratitude. He didn’t deserve thanks—all he’d done was throw a sop to his guilt.
Bob Foster was sitting with his chair tilted back and feet propped up on his desk. Jack always wondered how, after dozens of fights, Foster had kept his handsome face, with its smooth skin and straight nose. Unlike many seasoned fighters, his eyebrows were nearly scar-free and his ears showed no sign of deformation. He wore a fancy pink-striped shirt and a dotted red silk necktie, complete with a black pearl stickpin that cost more than Jack had made in the previous year. A bottle of Pikesville was open in front of him next to a half-full glass.
“Only thing I like more than drinking this stuff is drinking it for free,” said Foster as he poured an extra glass.
“It’s all yours,” said Jack, pushing the glass away.
Foster tossed both glasses back, one right after the other. “Fine. I’m happy to pour it down my neck for a bit and then tell you to leave.”
“Heard about Lizzie Sullivan?”
“White girl who got murdered. Awful shame. Terrible.”