“He’s yours now to look after, Tyrus,” the mistress had said. Once in a while she’d inquire after her son, but not often enough for it to count.
“She’s just like what was done to the other two,” Ned said quietly, folding back the layers of filmy bed curtains that hid the horror of Sally Lynn’s throat and belly. “Almost exactly like the others.”
“Now how can you know that, Mr. Ned? You never did see them for yourself.”
“Mr. Hunter described them to me, Tyrus.”
“Then how come Miz Jolene called you to come when she got the police and a Pinkerton man? It don’t make sense to me.” Tyrus began picking up and folding the pieces of clothing that lay around the room.
“Tyrus, I need you to do three things for me,” Ned instructed, knowing Tyrus would neaten and straighten and clean until there wasn’t a clue left. “Go to the Fifth Avenue Hotel and wake up Mr. Geoffrey Hunter. Tell him what’s happened here and that I need him as fast as he can make it. Then go to this address and pound on the door until Mr. Russell Coughlin answers it. He’s a newspaper reporter. Tell him Ned Hayes is sitting on the story of a lifetime at Madame Jolene’s Gentlemen’s Retreat. He knows where it is. When you get back here, help Miss Brenda tend to Mr. Carney.”
“I can do that, Mr. Ned. I can do that.” Mr. Geoffrey Hunter was second only to Mr. Ned in Tyrus’s estimation. With him on the scene, Tyrus wouldn’t need to worry so much about what the sight and smell of all that blood was doing to his master. Mr. Geoffrey had a way about him that calmed his friend and focused him on something other than the liquor and the drugs. Tyrus didn’t know much about newspaper people, but he had to trust Mr. Ned’s instincts.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel was only a few minutes away. The sooner he got there and back, the sooner he’d be able to help Miss Brenda because there was nothing in the world Tyrus liked better than caring for sick folk. He’d pulled Edwin Hayes out of death’s clutches more times than either he or Death could count. That street fellow needed a boiling hot bath to steam out the pneumonia or catarrh or whatever chest devil was ailing him. It wouldn’t hurt to take off a few layers of dirt in the bargain. Tyrus didn’t believe in coddling his patients. It only made them linger in their illnesses longer than they needed to. Best be on his way.
“Why did you send for me, Jolene?” Ned asked when they were alone.
The madam had shut Sally Lynn’s door behind the departing ex-slave, shushing the horrified whores whispering in the hallway, waving them back off to their beds with hands that left no room for argument.
“I couldn’t very well send for himself,” she said. “He doesn’t like it when there’s trouble not of his making.”
“You mean you were afraid you’d get the blame for this. Billy McGlory might shut you down if he thought you couldn’t handle your clients and your girls. Shut the house down for a while, deal with its madam in a way that neither one of us cares to contemplate, then open it up again under new management. That’s why you didn’t send for him to come get rid of the body so nobody would know what happened to it. No body, no crime.”
“I couldn’t, Ned. One of my clients spent the night. That young banker family idiot who thinks he’s in love with Spanish Lola. He’s the one who broke the door down. He saw everything. He knows it was a murder, and he’s the kind who believes you have to call the police when someone gets killed. I’d never be able to count on his silence if I tried to keep it quiet. He’ll blabber it all out the first chance he gets.”
“All right. So you play it legit. That should make for a nice change.”
“That’s not the kind of house I run. You know it from the old days, Detective.” It wouldn’t hurt to flatter the man kneeling beside the corpse that used to be Sally Lynn.
“Have you sent for the police?”
“George has gone down to the precinct. My bouncer,” she explained. “He doesn’t have a police record.”
“You’re not on the telephone?”
“I am. But not the house. The operators listen in to every call they put through. Some people forget that, but I don’t.”
“McGlory needs to know, Jolene. He won’t take it well if one of his informants has to tell him.”
“I’m scared, Ned. I’ve been in houses before where a girl got beaten up real bad or messed with herself to get rid of something and bled to death. I’ve seen a lot, but I’ve never seen anything like this.” Jolene tried and failed to stifle a sob that came from somewhere deep inside, where the human heart was supposed to be. Madams couldn’t afford sentimentality; successfully running a business like theirs meant they grew hard scabs over all the soft spots. Sally Lynn had been a good whore, taking what came her way without complaint, getting on with servicing the clients whose hungers kept food on the table and a roof over their heads. This shouldn’t have happened to her. She didn’t deserve it. “I really am scared, Ned.”
“J’ai très peur,” he said absentmindedly, wondering if the stroke that had slit Sally Lynn’s throat had come from the left or the right. If he unwound the bed curtain from her neck again, Jolene was liable to faint. He’d wait.
“What does that mean?”
“It’s French for I’m really afraid.”
“I knew that.” But of course she hadn’t.
CHAPTER 22
“The police say to lock the door to her room and not let anybody in,” reported George Bright. Unlike most of the bouncers who worked in brothels, George never mistreated a girl or demanded favors. Madame Jolene frowned on the practice of breaking in a new whore by violence and intimidation, and wouldn’t allow it in her establishment. She’d hired George because he was exceptionally even-tempered, extraordinarily muscled, and indifferent to the sexual attractions of women.
“How long?” she asked. Sally Lynn’s body needed to be out of the house before the evening’s clients began arriving.
George shrugged his massive shoulders. “It didn’t look to me like they were in a hurry.”
“Did you tell them it was a mutilation?”
“I said she’d been killed and cut up real bad.”
“Are you worried about your johns being scared off?” Ned Hayes came up the stairs from the kitchen floor, a coffee cup in one hand and a honeyed popover in the other.
Behind him trailed a tall, dark man a whore might be tempted to accommodate without the usual charge, just for the welcome change of it. A younger man followed, rumpled, wrinkled, and moving as though he hadn’t had enough sleep to absorb the whiskey he’d drunk the night before.
Jolene recognized the type. She wasn’t sure she approved of Ned bringing a newspaper reporter into her house. “I do run a business.”
“I know you do. Better than most. And you’re good to your girls. That counts for a lot, Jolene. The police won’t be out to give you a hard time.” Ned smiled to reassure her. “I want you to meet the best ex-Pinkerton in New York City. You couldn’t have anyone better on your side than Geoffrey Hunter.”
Madame Jolene raised one eyebrow in silent query.
“Hunter and I have been working together. Sally Lynn isn’t this killer’s first victim,” Ned explained. “And unless we catch him, she won’t be his last.” He turned to the shabby younger man who’d pulled a narrow notebook and chewed pencil stub from his pocket. “This is Russell Coughlin. He’s a reporter for the Tribune. We need him if we’re going to force Chief of Detectives Byrnes to admit what’s really happening in his city.”
“Go get yourself some breakfast, George,” Jolene ordered, turning to the bouncer. “I’m sure you did the best you could.” She watched him skip down the staircase like a boxer working his legs. Docile and dumb. Ideal husband material for someone. Too bad it wouldn’t be a woman. “We need a few minutes of privacy before the police arrive.” She unlocked the door to the room where Sally Lynn lay stiffening. “Nobody will look for us in here.”
It smelled like a butcher’s shop where someone had used the wrong kind of soap to scrub down the cou
nters. Heavily perfumed instead of laced with lye or carbolic. The blood smell tended to settle near the floor while the perfume floated toward the ceiling. No one had blown out the candles; a few continued to burn in overheated air and widening pools of wax. Sally Lynn lay on the floor in her filmy cocoon.
Geoffrey Hunter stood over the body, eyes taking in the blood spattered walls, the pool of red beneath the murdered woman’s neck and head. He was like Jacob Riis’s camera on a tripod, snapping photographs to preserve what the eye saw and the mind might forget. “There are differences,” he said. “Significant differences.”
“That’s why I sent Tyrus in such an all-fired hurry to get you here before the police could mess up the scene,” Ned Hayes agreed.
“He’s either escalating or he exploded in a fit of anger he couldn’t control. The other killings were ritualistic acts; this one was personal.”
Russell Coughlin circled the room, his pencil scribbling furiously over the pages of his notebook. He’d go straight to the Tribune offices to write the string of stories this murder deserved. Graphic, shocking, accusatory. If his editor had the guts to let him do it, he’d point a finger of blame directly at Chief of Detectives Byrnes. Demand on behalf of his readers to know why two innocent men had been subjected to the third degree and left to languish in the gloom and damp of the Tombs. Ned Hayes had filled him in on condition of remaining deep background. He didn’t want his name in the papers again. He’d had enough of that kind of notoriety.
Coughlin had agreed; he’d do anything a source wanted as long as the facts checked out and the story flowed.
“There’s a lot no one knows about Sally Lynn and one of her clients, Detective,” Madame Jolene said, edging closer to Ned Hayes.
Hunter stepped back away from the corpse. He would watch and listen, interrupt only when necessary. Coughlin did the same. Both men remained within earshot, both understood the importance of what was about to be revealed. Madame Jolene clearly had something on her mind she wanted Ned Hayes to hear. She’d called him Detective, so whatever lay between them went back to his days with the Metropolitan Police. Despite his being a former copper, she seemed to trust him.
But she had no confidence in a newspaperman. “You’ve got enough to write your story, Coughlin. It’s time for you to go. You don’t want the coppers to catch you here.”
“I might have some questions,” he protested.
“I don’t want to have to call George to escort you out. It’s not a pleasant experience.”
Coughlin understood his role in the drama being enacted in front of him. He’d been privy to the secrets of New York’s underbelly long enough to know when to pull back. He flashed an appreciative grin at Madame Jolene then made himself scarce. She hadn’t told him not to interview the whores. He figured he had a good fifteen or twenty minutes before the coppers arrived. He needed to be out the door as they came in.
“Did Joseph Nolan come to see Sally Lynn?” Ned Hayes nodded toward Sally Lynn’s body as the door closed behind Russell Coughlin.
“He was one of her regulars,” Madame Jolene answered.
“And she came to you with a complaint.” It wasn’t a question because Ned could read people’s faces as easily as he did a newspaper.
“Sally Lynn wasn’t a whiner. She was a good girl. Worked hard and gave her clients fair value for their money. Nobody ever had a word to say against her.”
“Something was bothering her. You wouldn’t have that look in your eyes unless something was going bad.”
“He brought her a costume to dress up in. Wore one himself, too.”
“All the time?” Ned asked.
“Lately, yes. She told me it didn’t start out that way … the dressing up and the rest of it.”
“Don’t drag it out, Jolene. It doesn’t make it easier.”
“Sally Lynn didn’t mind it too much at first. She said she kind of liked what she saw in the mirror.”
“What was that?”
“A nun. A barefoot nun,” Jolene said.
Hunter had listened attentively while Ned questioned Madame Jolene. Now his eyes fixed themselves on the body wrapped in its filmy bed curtains. He was imagining Sally Lynn dressed as a nun, slipping that likeness into the mental images he’d carried out of Saint Anselm’s rectory. The three priests in their cassocks, narrow white collars encircling their throats. It was a suspicion he wouldn’t share with Coughlin, though he understood why Hayes had decided to let the reporter in on the investigation. There was always, in every case, a delicate moment when confidentiality warred with the need to force an action. He had known the scale to tip both ways.
“Makes a change from the upstairs maid or a lollipop girl,” Ned commented. He knew Geoffrey wanted him to keep Madame Jolene talking.
“I told her it wasn’t all that unusual. I’ve seen it before. They cry and beg forgiveness and then get on with it.”
“What was different this time?” Ned pressed.
“It got so he didn’t want anything else,” Madame Jolene explained. “He’d bring the nun’s habit with him in a small satchel, then take it away again. After a while, he added a priest’s collar and cassock. So they’d both be dressed up. He’d chant prayers in Latin, bless Sally Lynn like she was receiving a sacrament, sing hymns.”
“What else? That’s not all, Jolene. You know better than to try to hide anything from me. It never worked in the old days and it won’t work now.”
Hunter turned his attention back to Madame Jolene. Ned was as skilled as any interrogator he’d ever worked with at bringing a witness around to what was important.
“He used a whip. A small cat-o’-nine-tails with wicked little hooks on the ends of the tails.”
“I thought you didn’t allow that kind of thing in your house,” Ned remarked.
“I don’t, when it’s one of the girls who might get hurt. But this was him. Mr. Nolan. He’d beat on his own back until he couldn’t lift the whip anymore, then he’d make Sally Lynn do it. He wouldn’t let her stop until there was blood.” Madame Jolene’s lips tightened in a grimace of distaste.
“Did anyone else see it happen?” Hunter asked. Selling time at a peephole was only one of the clandestine ways a house made extra money.
Madame Jolene shook her head. “My clients know they don’t have to worry about that.”
“When did she come to you?” Hayes continued. The question Hunter had asked was an important one, but Ned had already known the answer.
“Just this week, Detective. Not more than a few days ago. I told her not to worry, to go along with what he wanted and I’d have a word with him first chance I got.”
“What did he say?”
“I never got to talk to him.”
“Somebody killed her,” Ned insisted.
“Whoever it was sneaked into this house after we’d all gone to bed. I always check on my girls last thing at night. They’re sound sleepers, George and Big Brenda, too. I’ve never had trouble like this before. Never.”
“You didn’t hear anything? Didn’t wake up in the night and not know why?”
“Nothing until that dog started howling. That woke all of us up. Whoever came in the house was long gone. Brenda said the kitchen door was open, but that was because Kevin’s legs were blocking the doorway.”
“Does she remember locking it?” Ned asked.
“She’s conscientious. I’ve never known her to forget.”
“We need to look at Sally Lynn before the police get here.” Hunter said.
Ned nodded agreement. “Are you sure you want to stay for this, Jolene?”
She stared at him, comprehension slowly draining the color from her face. But she stood her ground, fists clenched at her sides. Sally Lynn was still one of her girls; she’d face whatever was necessary to make sure the dead woman was done right by. And if Ned Hayes meant what she thought he did, she wouldn’t faint or otherwise disgrace herself, no matter how bad it was.
“Check the door. Make sure it
’s locked. We don’t want someone walking in on us,” Hunter said.
Madame Jolene rattled the doorknob, then returned to stand beside the two men. “Can you lift her onto the bed, Detective? I can’t bear looking at her lying there on the floor. It’s so hard.”
“She doesn’t feel it, Jolene,” Ned said reassuringly. “But I don’t see any harm in putting her where she belongs.” He knew this murderer had left nothing of himself behind.
Together Hunter and Hayes placed the dead woman on the bed where she had earned her living. Wherever the first blow had been struck, whether it rendered her unconscious or killed her outright, there was enough blood smeared on the walls and on the floorboards to disguise where the gutting had taken place. The entire room had served as her abattoir.
“Let me,” Jolene said softly. Her long fingers with their buffed and polished nails were deft, swift, and as gentle as if the girl were still alive. She’d closed her eyes earlier when Ned had done a brief examination of Sally Lynn’s remains before he’d sent for Mr. Hunter. Now she gasped once when the girl’s poor throat was revealed, then ground her teeth together until the pain of it shot through her cheeks to the top of her head. Tears formed and dropped from her eyes, but she didn’t pause for a moment. She knew that if she stopped, she might not be able to start again.
Sally Lynn’s body had been young and beautifully formed; she hadn’t been in the life long enough for the hours of abuse she suffered each night to have marked her. Now she lay exposed and sliced open like a rag doll readied for new stuffing. She’d been washed and wiped dry after the cutting had been done, perfume from her dressing table poured liberally over the slashed skin. She stared back at the woman who had ruled her life in this house, unseeing blue eyes filmed over and beginning to sink in their sockets. Jolene coaxed the lids down, but they would not stay. Sally Lynn’s body could not be persuaded to close the windows to her soul.
Lies That Comfort and Betray Page 23