McGlory thought he knew what Byrnes was doing, but he doubted even the experienced and jaded ex-detective Ned Hayes had figured it out. In his own way New York’s chief of detectives was as diabolical a strategist as the criminals he pursued. The way McGlory saw it, Byrnes would keep Tim Fahey and Mick McGuire in the Tombs indefinitely. He’d tied them individually to the murders of the two women, so their eventual executions should satisfy the ordinary citizen’s need for justice. In the meantime, Byrnes had his best undercover men fanned out around the neighborhoods where the bodies had been found. If a couple of them hadn’t made the mistake of trying to pump some of McGlory’s informants, he might never have known they were there. They’d been trained personally by Byrnes, which made them the best in the city. The chief liked to boast that he’d match his detectives against Pinkertons or Scotland Yard any day and come out the winner. And maybe he would.
When Ellen and Nora’s killer struck again, he’d be trapped and disposed of just as ruthlessly as he’d dealt with his victims. Whoever he was would disappear without a ripple, as forever gone as the body he would have been caught laying out. No Ripper for the newspapers to accuse Byrnes of allowing to terrorize the city, no comparison between what was happening on the streets of Whitechapel and a copycat’s introduction to New York City. Byrnes would be more powerful than ever, his reputation unbesmirched by the specter of failure. It was a supremely crafty way to handle the situation, McGlory decided. He couldn’t let him get away with it. Not if he had any intention of paying off the debt he owed Ned Hayes. Which of course he did. It was the one principle he clung to, the steel rod in his backbone.
He had information for Ned, and at first he thought he’d summon him to Armory Hall. But it wouldn’t do for Hayes to be spotted there too often by Byrnes’s undercover men. The next best thing would be to send a messenger, but Billy liked to play his cards close to the chest. The absolute worst way to handle the situation was for McGlory to corner Ned in the Hunter and MacKenzie offices. So that was what he decided to do. The area around Wall Street was Byrnes’s infamous Dead Zone, off limits to any mug with a record. He figured all the chief of detectives’ extra officers would be elsewhere. He actually couldn’t have asked for a better setup if he’d designed it himself.
And just for the hell of it, he’d take Kevin and his dog with him.
*
Josiah Gregory settled back into his desk chair and breathed a sigh of contentment. The last of Martin Parish’s workmen had left after days of continuous banging and sawing, plastering and painting. A cleaning crew was hard at work in the offices now connected to Hunter and MacKenzie’s original suite by a perfectly plumbed door that looked as if it had always been there. That was the test of whether or not something had been done right. Whatever you changed needed to look as though it had been part of the plan from the beginning. The furniture would be set in place before Josiah left for the day; he’d paid a hefty tip to make sure it happened.
Instead of the three or four days he’d suggested to Miss Prudence, it had taken two full weeks to create the office and conference room she wanted. The building’s owner had stalled and then refused to bargain over the rent of the adjacent empty office suite, and at first Josiah had refused to consider the outrageous price he was asking. He held out for a week, until Mr. Hunter told him to close the deal and get on with it. By that time Martin Parish had picked up another job, so it had cost even more to persuade the contractor to change his schedule. Mr. Hunter hadn’t flinched when his secretary laid the bill on his desk, hadn’t even blinked twice. It wasn’t the first time Josiah speculated on the difference between the rich and everyone else.
*
The man who stood over him had materialized out of nowhere. Josiah was sure he hadn’t dozed off for more than a couple of minutes, but he didn’t hear the cleaners anymore, and the light shining through the windows was coming in at an angle as though the November afternoon were well advanced.
“May I help you?” Josiah squinted, but the man had positioned himself so the window lit him from behind. His features were hard to make out.
“Tell Ned Hayes I want to see him.”
“May I ask who’s calling?” Never say the person being sought is not in the office. That wasn’t the way to get information.
“Just tell him Billy needs to talk to him. He’ll know.”
Billy? What would a man named Billy be doing calling on Edwin Hayes? And why here? Hayes certainly wasn’t a member of the firm. Knowledge hit Josiah with the force of a hammer blow. There were thousands of men named Billy in New York City, but only one Billy McGlory. Only one saloon keeper who was so much more than that.
“He’s not here. Sir.” All Josiah could think of was getting McGlory out of the office, down the corridor, out of the building, and back to Armory Hall where he belonged. Josiah read the papers every day as avidly as any other New Yorker titillated by the mayhem waged in streets far away from where civilized people lived. He knew as much about Armory Hall’s proprietor as the police. And it made him distinctly uncomfortable.
An odor of well rotted garbage suddenly hit Josiah’s delicate nose, followed within seconds by the sight of a small man and a large dog. When they crowded through the doorway to stand by his desk, the stench made his eyes water. Billy McGlory didn’t seem to notice that the atmosphere had changed.
“They’re on their way up, sir. They were in Dennis’s cab, just like I said they’d be.”
“I don’t like waiting, Kevin.” What McGlory meant was he was used to other people waiting for him, used to making the kind of entrance that left no one in doubt about who was in charge. Kevin’s miscalculation had Billy standing by a flunky’s desk like somebody who wasn’t anybody. It put a sour taste in his mouth. “What’s in there?” he demanded, pointing toward a closed door.
“That’s Mr. Hunter’s office, sir. He’s not here either.”
Before Josiah could stop him, if he’d dared, McGlory wrenched the door open, stood for a moment assessing the size and emptiness of the room, then moved with long, confident steps across the Turkish carpet and behind Geoffrey Hunter’s massive carved walnut desk. He sat down as though he belonged there, motioning Kevin and the dog to join him.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs.
“I see we have a visitor.” Ned Hayes smiled past the shocked and dumbfounded Josiah to where McGlory waited.
By this time Geoffrey had reached his office door. He paused for a moment, then stepped into the room as nonchalantly as though criminals, street people, and smelly dogs were everyday visitors. He had met Billy McGlory once before, but it had been on the saloon keeper’s turf, upstairs in Armory Hall in the retreat that was a luxurious counterpoint to the flashy tawdriness where the drinking and swiving public bought their entertainment. Every Pinkerton trained nerve alert and tingling, he knew that whatever had drawn the Irishman from his lair was vitally important.
“Mr. McGlory,” he said, extending his right hand. “Welcome. We weren’t expecting you.”
“I don’t make a habit of advertising my whereabouts, Mr. Hunter. It makes for a longer life.” McGlory stood and walked around his host’s desk, courteously vacating Geoffrey’s chair.
So this lady standing in the doorway was Victoria MacKenzie’s stepdaughter, the one whose fortune the only woman ever to get the better of Billy had tried to steal. She had the look about her of a young woman who knew who she was and where she was going. Not unlike Victoria herself, though McGlory doubted Miss Prudence would stoop to blackmail to achieve her ends.
He bowed elegantly. “Miss MacKenzie, it’s a rare pleasure to make the acquaintance of a lady like yourself,” he said, tamping down the Irish cadence of his speech just enough to keep it from grating on aristocratic ears. “My name is Billy McGlory. I had the honor of meeting your father once, a number of years ago.”
“Mr. McGlory.” Knowing what she did about him, Prudence wasn’t sure what else to say.
Blossom ambled over
to the female human whose fingers reached out automatically to scratch her itchy ears.
Kevin Carney stared mouth agape and as if turned to stone, then reached out to pull Blossom back. The fine lady smelled like the Central Park flower gardens in a warm spring. She smiled at him without shuddering and shook her head no, digging her fingers into the dog’s thick red fur. An ecstatic Blossom leaned against her skirts.
When he didn’t know what else to do, Josiah Gregory made coffee.
He carried a heavily laden tray into Mr. Hunter’s office, ceremoniously serving his employers and their visitors, including the odd little man whose aroma penetrated to every corner of the office and would no doubt imbed itself permanently into the Turkish carpet he was sitting on. The secretary poured cream into an extra saucer for the equally pungent dog.
“Josiah will stay to take notes,” Geoffrey announced in a voice that brooked no contradiction.
“No names,” McGlory stipulated.
“We’ll call you a consultant,” Prudence said. She felt slightly dizzy from the odors swirling around her and the heat of the huge dog who had come back to lean against her leg after loudly licking clean the saucer of cream. The essence of good manners is not to notice anything out of the ordinary about anyone you meet. She wondered if her father the Judge had ever been forced to share a very small room with the likes of Kevin and the dog so inappropriately named Blossom.
“Tell them about following Joseph Nolan to Madame Jolene’s,” McGlory said, cutting into Prudence’s short reverie.
“From the beginning, Mr. McGlory?”
“I’ll let you know when you can leave out something, Kevin.”
“All right then, sir.” Kevin took a deep breath and began. “Blossom and I were in an alleyway across from Saint Anselm’s a while back,” he said. “We’d built ourselves a nice little shelter of newspapers and cardboard boxes to keep the cold and the wind off.”
Josiah wrote fast and furiously, only pausing now and then to shake out his aching fingers or use a small, sharp penknife on the tip of his pencil. He looked around the room once, but didn’t dare smile at what he saw. The three detectives were following Kevin’s torturous narrative with rapt expressions on their faces. Mr. McGlory had gotten up to stare out one of the windows, and the massive red dog had gone to sleep. By the time Kevin got to the information Sally Lynn Fannon had given him, it was all Josiah could do to concentrate on good note taking instead of picturing the nun and the priest in the prostitute’s bedroom.
“That’s enough, Kevin,” McGlory interrupted when the little man embarked on a block by block description of what he had seen as he and Blossom trotted from the house of ill repute to Armory Hall. “You can stop now and drink up your coffee.”
“I had no idea,” Prudence said. “I was at the Nolan house right after they found Ellen Tierney’s body and I saw Joseph in the parlor there. The whole family was being questioned by Detective Phelan.”
“I’m sorry you had to hear all of that, Miss Prudence.” Even after years as a New York City detective, Ned Hayes still had a Southern gentleman’s exaggerated courtesy for the frail sensibilities of ladies. It didn’t matter that Prudence was breaking every mold as quickly and as completely as she could; he still thought of her as an exotic flower best displayed in a crystal vase.
“There’s something else,” McGlory said. “Get yourself together, Kevin. We’re leaving in a few minutes. We’ve been here too long as it is.” McGlory turned back to the window, glanced down at the pedestrians on the sidewalks below and the snarl of horse drawn vehicles that made getting anywhere in this city a nightmare. He was pretty sure he’d given anyone following him the slip, and he had two bodyguards standing in the lobby just in case, but he was still trespassing on territory Byrnes had declared off limits for the likes of him. He had to be on his way. “Someone else came to see me besides Ned.”
“He wants to be notified when we’ve found Nora Kenny’s killer,” Geoffrey said. He stood up and began the pacing that signaled his mind was working so rapidly he had to move his body to keep up with it. “A young Sicilian gentleman from Staten Island.”
“No names,” McGlory cautioned. “The Irish and the Italians don’t get along in this city, but we’ve staked out our territories and as long as nobody steps out of line there’s a kind of truce between us. Except for the hotheads, that’s the way we like it. Business is good, the reformers haven’t got anything new to scream about, and the coppers take their money and leave us alone. People understand a husband killing his wife or two drunks fighting until one of them goes down, but they get uneasy when they think the gangs are getting ready to declare war again.”
“So it’s in your best interest to supply the information you’ve been asked for.” Ned Hayes thought it made perfect sense and wondered why he hadn’t realized this would happen.
“I was expecting something,” Geoffrey said. “I knew he wouldn’t let it go, but I didn’t know which direction he’d go off in.”
“Keep an eye out. He’s got someone on you round the clock, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll have to send him a name. But that will be the end of it.”
“In more ways than one,” Ned confirmed.
“Byrnes won’t know what’s going on until it’s all over. His coppers will find a body with enough evidence to prove the point, and then it’s back to business as usual.”
“It’s retribution for Nora’s death,” Prudence contributed. “He can’t let it go or allow it to be carried out by anyone else.”
“Honor,” Ned agreed. “I don’t pretend to understand their code, but if your Sicilian friend considers himself a man of honor, he’ll live by it.”
“That man is carrying a knife in one of his boots,” Kevin said. He’d gotten to his feet and wandered over to the window McGlory had been looking out of. “And he’s got a gun. You can see the bulge under his arm when he turns around.” He pointed to a figure seemingly indistinguishable from anyone else on the crowded sidewalk below.
Blossom barked. She’d seen him, too. Yesterday, and then again trailing behind them today. He’d kept too far behind for her to pick up a strong scent, but a brief whiff was enough to imprint him in her brain. She liked the smell of summer sage and pine needles he used to enhance his human signature. She hoped she wouldn’t have to kill him.
*
Jerry Brophy wasn’t sure how he felt about celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow instead of the feast of the martyred Bishop Saturninus of Toulouse. Some people thought Thanksgiving too Puritan and too secular a holiday to be marked with Catholic prayers and a special sermon, but after Cardinal Gibbons ordered the observance in Baltimore, other clerics had followed his lead. The priest could wear either red or green vestments to say Mass, which Jerry thought a nice compromise since red represented the blood of martyrs.
It was part of Brophy’s daily routine to identify the feast day and the liturgy; the sacristan nun from the school checked that he’d laid everything out correctly, but Jerry almost never made a mistake. He worked from a list of things he had to do in the order they needed to be done. That way there were fewer of those terrifying moments of paralysis when he couldn’t remember who or where he was, and what he was supposed to do.
He’d never been to a proper doctor about his condition, but he knew well enough what it was. Fits. He wasn’t the only one in his family to have them. There was a long, fancy word for the malady, but he never used it, not even in his own mind. He liked fits better. It felt like what he experienced when the circles of light started dancing in front of him and then the blackness descended and he fell. He had been free of the problem for several months now, but made out his list every night just the same because a list made all the difference. Even when the words on the paper blurred into sparkling haloes he could picture the list in his mind and concentrate all of his energy on the skittering words until they settled down and made sense.
Jerry liked to arrive at Saint Anselm’s at five o’clock. AM. Precis
ely. He had his own keys to the small side doors and the massive Gothic arched main doors, which he never opened until thirty minutes before six o’clock Mass. He liked to spend the first half hour of his working day locked inside Saint Anselm’s by himself, safe from interruption, alone in the vast empty space with no one to yell at him or criticize when all he was doing was trying his best.
He ran white gloved hands over the altar rail, rubbing at the dull spots until they gleamed. Sometimes the parishioners who knelt to receive Communion smudged what he’d buffed to a high gloss. He learned the trick with the cotton gloves from a housemaid who’d seen him worrying the wood with a cloth. So much easier if you didn’t have to grip a bit of rag in your fingers. He lifted the kneeler pads to bang out the marks made in the cushioned leather by heavy knees. Jerry liked everything about his altar rail to be pristine.
A tiny smear of blood appeared on one of his white gloves. Women were always doing that, bleeding and leaving signs of their uncleanness behind wherever they went. A sudden gush of bitter gall surged into his mouth. He swallowed convulsively until the last drop of corrosive fluid had been forced back down into his stomach.
The sight of the blood thrust him into a past he had tried hard to obliterate, never to think of consciously. Father Mahoney had long ago given him absolution; his sins were not as great as those of his wife, but Jerry never felt really clean. He always wondered whether some of the blood had seeped into the skin beneath his fingernails. He looked for incriminating circles of crusty residue, wondering how long it would take them to disintegrate and disappear.
Once before, a couple of weeks ago, he’d had the disturbing feeling that someone else had been in his church during the hours Father Mahoney said it should be closed. Close a church? That didn’t seem right, but if he didn’t lock the big arched doors the alms box would be emptied of its coins, the Lost and Found pillaged, and the sacred gold on the altars stolen. It had happened. Not at Saint Anselm’s, but at other churches. Now they were all locking their doors at night. Beggars who used to sleep in the pews had to go elsewhere. Jerry felt sorry for them, but what could he do?
Lies That Comfort and Betray Page 20