FEMME FATALE

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Nor should I upraise it on the backs of others. I respect the talents and the hard work of these novelty performers, Nell. I must. I grew up amongst them.”

  “Ah! Is this what that nasty Nellie Bly knows?”

  “Pink knows. It is not so hard to trace when you look. Even Buffalo Bill recalled my Merlinda the Mermaid act. Quite a compliment from a master showman like himself.”

  “Merlinda? The Mermaid? I know nothing of such things. You would not take me to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show encampment at L’exposition universelle in Paris, but only Pink, who now repays you by turning your past into a riddle to lay before her readers. What is this about mermaids?”

  “I’d forgotten you weren’t there when Colonel Cody brought it up. That was the first time my American past raised its head.”

  “Your American past was being an inquiry agent for the Pinkerton’s.”

  “But before that, I was a prodigy in . . . assorted areas.”

  “Like Tiny Tim! That was what he was blathering about! I thought him mildly demented, to tell the truth. You actually danced some hornpipe on the stage at the age of three?”

  “Sailors dance hornpipes. I jigged.”

  “No! You would never perform some low Hibernian jig.”

  “I did, and a hornpipe later, in a cunning little sailor suit.”

  “You were barely past a babe in arms. Who would sell you into such servitude at so early an age?”

  “The mother I did not have, apparently.”

  This silenced me. I saw then that Pink’s quest to unearth Irene’s origins truly might be less of a galloping girl’s reporter’s ambition and more of a threat to all I thought sensible and stable in my life, and Irene’s.

  “Does Godfrey know?”

  “Know what, Nell?”

  “About mermaids, and . . . jigs?”

  “No. No one knows, except those I knew then, and Pink perhaps, a bit. And now you.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Oh, dear what?”

  “I do so hate secrets. I am not good at keeping them.”

  “But don’t you keep a few yourself?” She smiled knowingly, yet gently enough to have me writhing in shame.

  She couldn’t know, of course, where the root of my secrets lay, in herself and the private papers of a physician named (so pedestrianly) Watson. But she guessed another one, with a less pedestrian name: Stanhope. Oh, to think of it is to blush and then to bite my lip and stiffen my spine. And then to despair. And anger.

  “Nell.” Her gloved hand tightened on my forearm. “I’m glad you’re here with me. Events are forcing me back into a past I did not so much escape as fold away into a trunk in the attic of a house I never expected to return to. I could stand company.”

  “Events are not forcing you, Nellie Bly is.”

  “ ‘Nellie Bly’ is a pseudonym, as ‘Salamandra’ is. It has been adapted for the presenting of mysteries to the public. It is the manifestation of an art form, or a craft, at least. I cannot condemn her, our Miss Pink, but neither need I assist her, especially not in the unraveling of my own past. We must anticipate her, Nell.”

  “I will truly be useful in this matter, not some burden who must be hied off to America to forget certain events in Transylvania?”

  “Ah. Godfrey gave you that impression, did he?”

  “He gave me the impression that the only reason he is not here is that I need a change of scenery more.”

  “The reason you are here,” she said, her grip on my forearm tightening to painful intensity, “is that I need you more than anyone. You knew me before Godfrey did. Somehow, I feel, that you can better know me before I knew myself. Godfrey understands that without even thinking it. Which is why I married him, and why you worked for him. But he is not here now. We are.”

  We. I felt a flare of guilty secrets, and then a certain pride. Were we not the match of Nellie Bly and her eternal nose for news? Were we not the match of Sherlock Holmes, and his endless omniscience? Were we not friends, before either of them had darkened our doors or our doubts or our necessities?

  “I will go where your past takes us,” I vowed. “And try not to complain.”

  “That would be appreciated.” Irene stamped out her cigarette on the cobblestones as we thumped down from the hansom cab in front of our hotel. “And the next place my past takes us is to the New Fourteenth Street Theater tonight, for a performance of the remarkable incendiary illusions of the incredible Salamandra.”

  Oh, dear.

  14.

  Curtains!

  You know my method. It is founded on the observation

  of trifles.

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES, “THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY,” 1891,

  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  FROM NELLIE BLY’S JOURNAL

  It was clear as consommé that Irene was determined to snub my reporter’s investigative help, so I settled for second-best: an expedition with Sherlock Holmes to the site of the lethal séance.

  When he discovered that it was within walking distance of his hotel, if one were accustomed to walking, he immediately set out.

  I had to trot a bit to match his pace but he was occupied with studying the street scene all around us and never noticed my staccato pace. Or perhaps he did, and didn’t care to accommodate it. Englishmen are so impossibly self-absorbed, and he worse than most!

  Still, my mind could not help drafting headlines for a story:

  STRIDING MANHATTAN WITH SHERLOCK HOLMES

  BRITISH SLEUTH OBSERVES CRIME SCENES ON THE

  STREETS OF NEW YORK

  “Tsk,” he said of a sudden.

  I scurried to come abreast and see what had spurred that disdainful syllable.

  “Pickpockets are as plentiful here as anywhere.” His stick pointed at a woman with her hands tucked into an affected muff of rose-strewn chiffon as she bustled down the crowded street.

  In a moment the cane tip had slid through the opening of the large fluffy muff as efficiently as a letter opener through the daily mail, stopping her as thoroughly as would a sword across her path.

  “A bit warm for muffs, Madam,” he noted, nodding at a man she had just passed. “Sir, you may now retrieve your money clip from this lady’s muff, where it no doubt caught itself during the press of pedestrians.”

  The woman had frozen in place the moment his cane had intercepted her. I saw a thick fold of bills appear from her cape above the muff.

  Her gloved hand swiftly passed the money to the stunned passerby.

  Only from the vantage of myself and Mr. Holmes could one notice that the lady’s arms remained lost in the muff and that to return the money she had to produce a third hand!

  This apparition disappeared as soon as the money was reclaimed and the frowning man rushed on, looking annoyed with all three of us. I frowned, recalling a fatal séance.

  The woman, a perfectly respectable-appearing matron in her middle years, also glared at us and sailed on with hardly a stutter in her step, so speedy had the transaction been.

  “It is not only buildings,” Sherlock Holmes observed in the manner of a professor, “that use ‘false fronts.’ ”

  He was striding along again so briskly that I could barely gasp out, “There’s a policeman half way down the next block. Surely—”

  “None of the parties involved will want their time wasted. I can see that New York puts most metropolises to shame with its dedication to Yankee industriousness. It’s no wonder, then, that the bizarre murder you mention has not become the public equivalent of the Ripper’s Whitechapel depredations last autumn.”

  I was pleased to be able to stop and announce, like a tram car conductor, “We are here.”

  He spun to examine the building before us. It was an ordinary brownstone of four stories, with a half-basement.

  “This was the scene of the first murder?” he inquired.

  “It depends.”

  “The first murder that you believe is related to your inquiries into Ir
ene Adler’s past?”

  “No. It is the first murder that I mentioned to her, since I had learned that there was some likelihood she had known the victim.”

  Pausing had made us into a resented island in the stream of pedestrians parting to rush around us. Mr. Holmes took my elbow like a proper gentleman and escorted me up the building’s front steps.

  “Perhaps we could discuss this indoors. The rooms of the late medium have not been rented, you say?”

  “Word of the death has gone round the neighborhood. The rooms are now reputed to be haunted and no one wants to rent them.”

  “Haunted! I am ever amazed by the gullibility of the human mind. At such times I am tempted to believe that we are descended from apes, as Watson and Darwin would have it, and that the banana has not fallen far from the family tree.”

  I almost found myself laughing. “You dare to dispute the latest scientific theories of our times?”

  “I dare nothing but to express my benighted opinion. Show me incontrovertible proof in a test tube and I am a convert. Spout grand theories about the content of the universe and its beings and I am bored beyond stupefaction. I am a specialist, Miss Cochrane, and also a generalist. That makes me a contradiction but it is contradiction that intrigues me, such as a spirit choking its medium, surely a form of psychic murder-suicide. The landlady expects us, you say.”

  “She has become quite used to my importing people to the scene.”

  “Had you troubled to learn anything of my methods, you would realize that you have irrevocably spoiled the site with your guided tours,” he said in disgust.

  He looked so put out that I half expected him to demand to be taken to the nearest boat dock.

  “Only Mrs. Norton with the ever-present Miss Huxleigh,” I said, “and Irene came to some astounding conclusions.”

  He held up his gloved hands imperiously enough to stop traffic on Broadway, which is saying something. “No more spoiling the scene, Miss Cochrane, I beg you. I am interested in no one’s conclusions but my own. I must admit that these ladies previously showed some slight respect for the hidden tales to be read in a murder scene or two in Paris, but here the authorities have been all over it first as well, and unlike the London police they have not been trained by me to tread softly.”

  What gall! “Trained” indeed. I’d like to see him “train” a New York City policeman. Not even Tammany Hall could do it.

  Despite his reservations, he nodded at the brownstone’s door and I was encouraged to ring the bell.

  Mrs. Titus soon answered, her apron coughing clouds of flour as she wiped her hands on it. “Why, it’s Miss Nellie Bly again, this time with a gentleman. I keep hoping for lodgers, but my advertisements go unanswered. I’m thinking of turning the tables on things and advertising for a medium, though I don’t like what happened to the last one on my premises. Who would you be, sir? This is a respectable house and I expect gentlemen to give their names.”

  “This is,” I put in quickly, “the renowned British consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Well, he’s not renowned enough for me to know him from a coal scuttle, but if you say he’s useful, I’ll go along with it. Perhaps he’ll like the look of my rooms and rent them.”

  By this time Mr. Holmes had tipped his hat and murmured his thanks, ignoring the rest.

  So we entered and he doffed his hat for the nonce, glancing around the wide foyer with its white-tiled floor and wooden bank of boarder post boxes.

  “I take it that the rooms in question,” he asked Mrs. Titus, “are on the main floor behind the right bay window.”

  “Why, yes! Did you spy a ghost in the window, Mr. Holmes?”

  “I saw that the curtains have not been pulled back in several days. There is dust on the sills that would have been disarranged by the daily act of drawing and closing them. And, of course, they are closed now. Since they are the only means of light for the front rooms, it’s extremely unlikely that anyone resides there.”

  Mrs. Titus gave me a conspiratorial look. “Makes one shiver, doesn’t it? Downright uncanny how a man from England can know so much about our New York ways on one visit.”

  I myself found Mr. Holmes’s deductions no more than common sense, but call a woman a medium or a man a detective and people will make all sorts of wrong assumptions about them.

  That fact made me wonder whether Mr. Holmes was no more of a wonder worker than the average spiritualist. Quite a joke it would be on me if I had lured a fraud to our shores.

  Mr. Holmes seemed used to such skepticism, for he bowed to Mrs. Titus and offered to inspect the premises and perhaps declare them ghost-free so that she could rent them.

  It was as if he had said “Open sesame.”

  She dredged a ring of keys from a skirt pocket beneath her apron and once again I stood on the threshold of the death chamber, my third visit.

  This time I was instructed to remain there while Mr. Holmes quizzed me about the arrangement of the various people and pieces of furniture during various stages of the séance.

  He then began to search high and low, a magnifying glass he had produced from a coat pocket in hand. It was like watching a party of one play some silly parlor game in search of a hidden object. Or, perhaps more vividly, it was like watching some slow, gigantic insect about its mysterious rounds.

  First he crawled on his hands and knees around the entire room, examining the rugs and planking, the bottoms of the table and chairs. Then his inspections moved up the walls, recalling his recent macabre explorations of blood-spattered cellar walls in Paris.

  It still infuriated me that I was silenced from announcing the deliciously gory trail and astounding solution to the new and recent Jack the Ripper murders on the Continent in the public press. From Whitechapel in the London fall of 1888, Saucy Jack had moved his bloody dalliance to the Continent, to Paris, Prague, and beyond in the spring of 1889. I could have revealed every appalling detail in the public press that employed me, the New York World. How Mr. Pulitzer would have rewarded a coup like that! Not that he treated me shabbily, but he was new to the ownership and determined to win the stunt reporting sweepstakes.

  The gagging of Nellie Bly in this vital regard was owed to two people, two blasted Englishmen who believed they served the larger cause of their own infernal government: Sherlock Holmes and Quentin Stanhope. Sherlock Holmes I would tolerate as long as he served some purpose of my own, as now. Quentin Stanhope I would tolerate because he was a remarkably attractive gentleman, far too much so to waste on the mousy Nell Huxleigh. In a way I am as wary as she of remarkably attractive gentleman, for a different reason. My work comes before any man. In another way I am convinced that a modern woman may have her cake and eat it, too.

  But eating cake was not a pleasant thought when it came fast behind memories of blood-spattered cellar walls in Paris.

  At least these walls were papered, and the only likely looking “blood” was the dye in the crimson cabbage rose.

  Finally Mr. Holmes turned his attention to the bay window and the velvet draperies that sequestered it from the room.

  Here he paused to eye me where I stood as patiently as any soldier at his post. “I see that you were making merry with the draperies. I presume that was during a visit after the mischief had been done at the séance.”

  The easy blush that had given me the childhood nickname of “Pink” suffused my face with heat. “Irene wanted me to examine the rods from a chair. I lost my balance and fell. How did you know that?”

  “The scuff marks on the planks and wrinkles in the velvet are unmistakable.”

  “Proof that the draperies fell down recently, yes. But how did you guess that I was involved?”

  “I never guess, Miss Pink; I deduce. Remember that Miss Huxleigh recorded the footprint you had left in the murder room in Paris? Another of that size leaves a perfect impression on the edge of the carpet, there. No doubt that is the last step you took, all your weight on that one foot and the
drapery fabric, before the rod slipped its anchor. The rings pulled off and you fell forward into the material, which was heavy and plentiful enough to cushion your tumble. Miss Huxleigh and Madam Irene came to your rescue and you all three reinstated the draperies, but in your haste missed securing one ring on the restored rod.” He held up the loose ring he had found. Wouldn’t you know it was a brass one?!

  I sighed heavily, not much impressed by his mastery of a simple household accident that had no bearing on the crime.

  His pale eyes narrowed at the now subdued draperies. “A pity you were so clumsy. That set of curtains is the key to the entire séance and, indeed, the murder, and you managed to blur the evidence as effectively as any murderer could wish.”

  “All I have imported from across the Atlantic so far is criticism.”

  His dark brows lifted. “That is not criticism, that is fact. I deal in facts. Among them here are these: the fabrics in the room are heavy and thick, as ideal to take impressions as soft sand. When you waltzed with the falling curtains you were also waltzing with a ghost: the former presence of the man who murdered Madam Sophie.”

  “It was a man, then?”

  “A tall man, something over six feet, with either a deformity or arthritis in at least his left hand, that was not severe enough to prevent a swift garoting. He moved so quietly in the dark because both his shoes were muffled in a sort of flannel mitten, and he wore loose clothing all in black, also a sort of flannel, for I have found the tiny pills such fabric sheds. They litter the carpet, planks and especially the velvet curtains, whose nap traps threads and other bits of lint, as soft Brie does caviar.”

  “He was dressed to murder unseen!”

  “He was expressly and expertly dressed to deceive, and could have been the medium’s accomplice and had been before this, or he would not have been so dressed. As for murder, I can’t yet say what turned him to killing his partner in bogus spiritualism, although it’s possible someone else substituted for him.” He stopped regarding the curtains and frowned at the tiny notebook and pencil I had removed from my coat pocket, on which I was recording as many details as I could remember.