Death in Saratoga Springs

by Charles O'Brien

  When Harry arrived late in the afternoon, Pamela and Prescott went to his office.

  “I was amused,” he began. “The detective department is like a cage of scared rabbits. The state government in Albany is questioning them about corruption. Most of them are guilty, but they try to shift the blame to each other and suspect that I spy for the reformers. The clean ones are afraid to talk to me for fear of reprisals. Fortunately, I found an old friend who would speak in strict confidence.

  “He said that when the Crawfords first reported the Colt girl missing late in January, Inspector Williams told him to look into the matter. His initial search of refuges, jails, brothels, and the morgue yielded no sign of her.”

  Pamela remarked, “Isn’t it strange that she would disappear without a trace, as if she’d fallen off the edge of the earth?”

  “My friend thought so,” Harry agreed. “He’s a conscientious detective, so he checked the files on other missing children for similar patterns of place, time, and other circumstances. A few petite young women, apparently prostitutes, vanished without a trace on the city’s West Side between Fourteenth and Twenty-third streets. He also found a similar pattern of attempted abductions. One of those girls worked at Crake’s meatpacking plants and claimed that Crake, wearing a false beard, had tried to seize her in the evening near the plants. His voice and arthritic gait gave him away. My friend reported his findings to Inspector Williams, who saw Crake’s name and said, ‘Leave this affair to me. You’re off the case. Don’t speak about it to anyone or I’ll have your hide.’ ”

  Pamela knew and disliked Alexander Williams. From his brutal methods of interrogation, he had earned the nickname “Clubber.” He had also become rich from the blackmail of gambling dens and brothels in Chelsea’s notorious Tenderloin district. Last year, she had quarreled with him over the custody of Brenda Reilly, one of her foster children.

  She asked Harry, “Would the inspector obstruct my investigation of Crake?”

  “Crake pays Williams for protection. Enough said.”

  “Why do you suppose your friend confided in you?” Prescott asked Harry.

  “He finally realized that the inspector had walked away from the problem, perhaps because Crake had paid him off. Now that reformers are investigating the department, my friend fears that the inspector might shift the blame for corruption in the Colt case onto him. I think he’s also bothered that Crake walks about at night, still free to prey on young women.”

  Pamela asked, “Have you found a room that Crake might have secretly used?”

  “No, I haven’t. In the packinghouse area there must be hundreds of possibilities.”

  She pressed on. “The address might be a combination of 14414, the mysterious numbers I found in the missing Colt girl’s room.”

  “Then begin on Fourteenth Street,” said Prescott to Pamela. “Harry will help you.”

  “Let’s hope this isn’t a fool’s errand,” said Harry.

  Thursday morning, after a tedious search of the area, Pamela and Harry approached number 414 on West Fourteenth Street, a decrepit, five-story brick building. At the street level was a small butcher shop. A bald, shriveled old man was behind the counter, sharpening a knife.

  Pamela asked, “Do you have rooms to rent upstairs?”

  The old man studied her and Harry with a cynical eye. “By the hour?”

  Pamela replied evenly, “It’s not for us but for a friend and for a longer period. Could we see a room on the first floor?” With his arthritis, Crake wouldn’t have wanted to climb any higher.

  “I can’t leave the shop.” He turned toward a back room. “Peter,” he shouted. “Come here.”

  A young man appeared at the door, wiping his hands on a blood-smeared apron.

  “Show these people the first-floor room.”

  Peter took off his apron, pulled a ring of keys from a rack on the wall, and beckoned the visitors to follow. They climbed a rickety stairway to the first floor into a dark, narrow corridor. At the far end was another stairway. Crake could use it to come and go unobserved. Harry asked where it went.

  “Down to the alley behind the building where they haul the trash.” Peter opened the door to the room and let them in. “It’s the only room we rent on this floor.”

  It was surprisingly large, furnished with a table and a couple of chairs. A bed was fitted into an alcove. There were no obvious signs of Crake. A clothes cabinet stood against a wall.

  “I want to look inside,” said Harry.

  “It’s locked,” said Peter.

  “I can open it. I just want to look.” Harry held out a coin and gazed at the young man.

  For a few moments, he just stood there, his eyes dancing between Harry and the money. Finally, he took the coin and mumbled, “Yes.”

  Harry quickly picked the lock and opened the cabinet door. Pamela looked over his shoulder. A businessman’s suit hung on a hanger. A workman’s clothes hung on a hook. The beard was in a box on a shelf. A small traveling bag stood on the floor. Pamela fingered through underclothing until she came to a small, loaded pistol and a sheathed knife. She held up the weapons.

  Harry turned to the young man, who had begun to perspire. “Tell us about the man who rents this room.” Harry offered him another coin.

  He took it with a trembling hand. “He’s tall, broad in the shoulders, walks like he’s stiff in the hips, and calls himself Mr. Anderson. He’s used to bossing people. From time to time, he comes in the evening dressed up like a gentleman, changes his clothes, and goes out again. He comes back late and sometimes brings a young woman with him.” He hesitated. “Are you police?”

  Pamela spoke gently to him. “We’re only private investigators asking questions, not police. Just forget we were here and you won’t get into any trouble.”

  She put the traveling bag back in order. Harry locked the cabinet. As they were leaving, Pamela went back for a closer look at the bed. Nothing was hidden in the mattress. But when she pulled the bed from the wall, she found a fancy pink purse.

  “Crake could have overlooked it when he was leaving,” said Pamela, opening the purse. Inside were coins, a kerchief, and a photograph of a young, light-complexioned black woman.

  There was writing on the back side of the photograph. Harry read aloud, “ ‘Ruth Colt, Christmas 1893.’ It proves she’s been here after she left the Crawford household.”

  “We’ll take the purse with us,” said Pamela to the young man. “It belongs with her aunt.”

  He started to object, then thought better of it.

  On the way out, Harry told the old man downstairs that their friend wouldn’t be interested in the room.

  In a quiet coffee shop nearby, Pamela remarked to Harry, “That dressed-up gentleman who calls himself Mr. Anderson is certainly Crake. In his business clothes he is also the Mr. Johnson of the fictitious Madison Square address.”

  “And Ruth Colt was with him in that room.” He shook his head. “But we saw no blood, no other signs of struggle.”

  “Crake could have used his hands to strangle her or kill her with a single blow,” Pamela insisted.

  Harry looked irritated. “We need to find a body, or at least solid evidence of her murder. Otherwise, we have no case to give to the police. Where could she have gone?”

  Pamela offered a likely scenario. “Late at night, Ruth and Crake quarreled in the secret room and he strangled her. He wrapped her in a bedsheet, carried her down the back stairs to the alley, threw her into a cart, and pulled it through the alley to a side street off Fourteenth.”

  “Plausible, so far,” Harry agreed. “But, to avoid a police investigation, he had to permanently hide or destroy the corpse.”

  “That would be difficult,” agreed Pamela. “He was alone, short of time, and probably unprepared—he might have killed Ruth on an impulse. Wouldn’t he go to a familiar place that was nearby?”

  “Right,” Harry replied. “I think he’d pull the cart west on Fourteenth Street, perhaps to
his meatpacking plants or, a little farther on, to the Hudson River at the Fourteenth Street ferry to Hoboken.”

  “Let’s test that theory,” said Pamela. “Karl Metzger, the German butcher, might help us. I know him from St. Barnabas Mission. He worked for years in Crake’s plants on West Fourteenth Street until he opened a small shop nearby. As the union’s business agent, he protested against dangerous working conditions, low wages, arbitrary hiring and firing, and other abuses in Crake’s plants. The management ignored him. The union then began a strike.”

  “I recall the strike,” said Harry. “Crake fired the union members and hired scabs, mostly penniless Italian immigrants willing to work for low pay and in poor, unsafe conditions. The strike collapsed. What happened to Metzger?”

  “Crake’s thugs harassed Metzger’s employees and spread false rumors that his meat was bad. The police closed his shop. Crake blackballed him from the New York meatpacking business. Destitute, he came to St. Barnabas Mission. I found part-time work for him and his wife, Erika.”

  “Metzger owes you a favor, Pamela, and should be hungry for justice. Pay him a visit.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Missing Body

  Friday, February 16

  The next morning, Pamela met the Metzgers in their tiny room near the mission. They seated her at a table and served her coffee and German sweet bread. Karl had a broad smile on his face and could hardly contain himself. “We have good news, Mrs. Thompson. A friend has found summer work for us at the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs. I’ll be cutting meat; Erika will do laundry.”

  “Congratulations. Is your friend a meat cutter or in the laundry?”

  “Neither,” Erika replied, smiling. “He’s a bellboy at the hotel.”

  “Jason Dunn,” added Karl. “He used to work with me in Crake’s meatpacking plants on Fourteenth Street. During the strike he got a job in a restaurant and then in a hotel. He’s been at the Grand Union for a year. We’ve kept in touch.”

  Pamela congratulated them, wished them well, then turned to Karl. “A client of mine needs information about Crake’s plants. Can you help?”

  He frowned at Crake’s name, but he finished his coffee and said, “I’ll try.” He told her that the plants operated at full capacity from dawn to dusk six days a week. At night, they shut down, and a small shift of workers cleaned and repaired machinery and tools, and did other maintenance. The main entrance was locked. Workers and deliveries used a service entrance in the rear. Since the strike and the union’s collapse, only a few guards were needed to protect the plants.

  “How shall I get inside?” asked Pamela.

  “Contact the head manager, Mr. Jeffrey Porter.” Metzger warmed to his topic. “Porter’s a heartless bastard, but smart and efficient. Pretend you’re an important person. He will guide you himself and tell you that the noise, stench, and offal are the signs of profit and progress. The Italians will smile and look happy at their work. You may see enough to judge for yourself.”

  Monday morning, Pamela and Harry took a cab to the pork-processing building, a large, brick, three-story, boxlike structure. Passageways connected it to several other buildings belonging to Crake’s company, but it was the one closest and most convenient to his secret room. Disguised with a beard, Harry posed as a philanthropic businessman and Pamela’s escort.

  In a letter to Porter she claimed to be a social worker and needed to see where her clients worked or might find work. She assured him that she wasn’t squeamish and knew the difference between a packing plant and a music hall. Mrs. Helen Fisk, an influential patron of St. Barnabas Mission, supported her request for a tour.

  Porter’s office was in a corner of the building’s ground floor and consisted of a suite of rooms, all of them clean, well-lit and well ventilated, and fully insulated from the noises, sights, and smells of the adjacent factory floor. A female clerk in a spotless white frock showed them into Porter’s private office. He wore a dark gray suit and tie, his hair slicked back and parted in the middle, and he sat at a gleaming gray writing table. Neat stacks of business paper lay before him. A white telephone was off to one side. Uniform rows of gray file boxes stood on white shelves covering the gray walls behind him. There were no colorful flowers or bright pictures in the room, only unrelieved grays and whites, in striking contrast to the gore throughout the rest of the building.

  For a moment, Porter scrutinized his visitors with steel gray eyes, then greeted and seated them in simple upholstered chairs. He gave them a brief description of the company, the largest and most modern meatpackers in the New York area.

  Pamela made a sweeping gesture over the room. “Does the strikingly efficient appearance of your office make a statement about your industry?”

  “Yes, indeed, Mrs. Thompson.” He pursed his lips and waved a hand toward the files. “This office expresses the rational spirit that governs the modern meatpacking process. We are among the leaders. Efficiency in the service of profit, that’s our motto. I’m proud of our packing plants and happy to show you through one of them. You will see the most productive meat processing east of Chicago.”

  Porter took them to the stockyard adjacent to the main plant. More than 500 hogs had come in by train overnight. As Pamela and Harry arrived with their guide, men were forcing the hogs up a chute into the third floor at the western end of the plant. The visitors watched from a gallery as hogs entered the building and were hoisted by their rear legs onto a moving overhead trolley. Amid ear-splitting squeals and shrieks, swarthy men in blood-soaked aprons slit the animals’ throats as they passed by. Blood flowed in rivulets to drains in the floor. Other men dropped the still-twisting and turning animals into a large vat of boiling water.

  Pamela tore her eyes away from the carnage and exchanged glances with Harry. His face was pale. Through gritted teeth, he murmured, “This is like war. The hogs are losing.” Nearby, Porter gazed at the scene, detached and calm, his mind apparently fixed on the process.

  A machine scooped the hogs from the vat and sent them through a scraping machine to remove their bristles. They were hooked up to yet another trolley and passed rapidly between two lines of men.

  With a hint of awe in his voice, Porter said, “The proprietor, Captain Jed Crake, a remarkable man, has personally put on an apron and performed most of the tasks that you are observing. Watch closely. This is a crucial moment in the process. Each man has a specific task in the second or two as the carcass goes by him: One severs the head, and it falls through a hole in the floor; another slits the body; a third widens the opening; and a fourth pulls out the entrails, which fall through a hole in the floor; and so it goes on until the carcass is completely stripped of its ‘waste’ parts. It’s then cleaned and sent on to the chilling room, where it hangs for twenty-four hours.”

  He led them to the floor below. In one room, men were scraping and cleaning the entrails for sausage casings; in another, they were boiling and pumping away grease from scraps to make soap; in a third, a stamping machine was pulverizing bones for fertilizer; and so on.

  The stench was unbearable. Pamela held a perfumed kerchief to her nose, but to no avail. Her stomach was roiling dangerously. Harry stiffened. Even Porter began to wilt. He quickly moved his visitors on to the cutting room, where giant men with huge cleavers neatly dismembered the carcasses into hams, forequarters, and sides of pork.

  The smells, the noise, the violence of the scene excited Pamela. She recalled Jed Crake’s powerful body and imagined him wielding a cleaver and splitting a carcass with a single blow. The butchered pieces slid down chutes to the ground floor for pickling, smoking, boxing, wrapping in oilcloths, or packing in barrels. Porter explained, “The finished products will be trucked out the doors into refrigerated boxcars and carried away to meat shops throughout the Northeast.”

  At the end of the tour, Pamela and Harry stood for a minute in the doorway gulping breaths of fresh air. Porter seemed unfazed.

  He turned to them. “In the process you wi
tnessed, I challenge you to find a single unnecessary movement by man or machine or a wasted second. Every bit of the hogs we buy is turned into money for the company. To borrow the tired saying: We use everything but the squeal. We apply a similar process to cattle, sheep, and chickens in adjacent buildings.”

  Pamela asked, “How can the workers sustain the fast pace that you set?”

  Porter seemed to relish the opportunity to reply to her question. “To reduce fatigue and inattention, we calculate the capacity of workers for different tasks and rotate them accordingly. To avoid accidents, the workspace is kept clean and well lighted, and tools in good condition. The discipline here exceeds, by far, that of an elite regiment in Napoleon’s army. If a man faints, the men around him pick up his work until a replacement is brought in.”

  Pamela and Harry thanked Porter quite sincerely for an instructive tour, then retired to a nearby coffee shop. They ordered only strong tea. It would be hours before their stomachs could take food.

  While waiting, they sat still and reflective, then Pamela said, “We’ve just witnessed a preview of how American industry will develop in the near future toward division of labor and the mechanization of production. But that aside, have we come any closer to figuring out how Crake disposed of Ruth’s body—assuming that we rightly suspect that he killed her?”

  Harry stroked his beard, then nodded. “Crake knew personally that the packing process could destroy a human body as thoroughly as an animal’s. But he also realized that the process was tightly controlled and he couldn’t easily slip a cadaver into it.”

  “Could he nonetheless have bribed or persuaded Porter to help him try?”