Lies That Comfort and Betray

by Rosemary Simpson

  “Is there evidence to confirm that the Whitechapel killer hasn’t left London?” Geoffrey thought with a lawyer’s bent as well as a Pinkerton’s training.

  “No evidence either way.”

  “That could be a problem when your chief of detectives issues his statement to reporters,” Geoffrey said.

  “What makes you think he’ll meet with the press?” Phelan asked.

  “It stands to reason, doesn’t it?” Ned wasn’t inclined to mince words about the police department that had treated him so badly. “He made a disparaging comment about Scotland Yard and the London Ripper when he should have kept his mouth shut, so there isn’t a reporter in New York City who won’t jump on him now. No police force in the world could catch that kind of killer in thirty-six hours. Not Scotland Yard and not the New York Metropolitan Police. Unless he manages to win them over to his side, the papers will have a field day when he has to eat his words. They’ll make him sound like a pompous fool.”

  “He’s counting on readers being more interested in details of the crimes than in a vendetta against him.”

  “Politicians always think they can hide from the press.” Ned Hayes laughed quietly and blew on the scalding liquid he’d poured from the small pot at his elbow. “Reporters dig out every bit of dirt you fancy you’ve concealed. I know that from my own experience.”

  “Our copycat’s mutilations haven’t been exactly like the London Ripper’s,” Geoffrey prodded.

  “Two slashes across the throat in Whitechapel, one here in New York,” Hayes agreed. “The crime scenes left a bloody mess there, while here the bodies are neatened up and then carried away from wherever the cutting was done. Except for Sally Lynn. She was left in place, where she was killed.”

  “The American papers reprinted some of the photos and the descriptions of how the London Ripper cut and what organs he took away with him,” Phelan contributed. “Maybe that’s all our copycat cared to imitate.”

  “I wonder why he left her in her own room. It’s different from Ellen and Nora. I don’t like an unpredictable killer,” Geoffrey mused. “It makes me nervous when a pattern is broken.”

  “The time of the killings hasn’t changed. All three done on a Saturday night or early Sunday morning.”

  “Was Sally Lynn Catholic?” Geoffrey asked.

  Phelan and Ned stared at him as if they hadn’t understood the question.

  “Was she Catholic?” he repeated.

  Ned stood up so suddenly he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting in. Blossom nudged open the door to Kevin’s sickroom and stood in the doorway with ears laid back and fur ruffled along her spine. She kept her growl low for fear of waking up her human, but she was clearly ready to protect him against whatever new threat lurked in the kitchen.

  “It’s all right, girl,” Geoffrey said. “It’s all right. Ned’s just gone to get the answer to a question, and he was a little impatient about it.”

  “She was Catholic,” Ned reported from the doorway leading to the parlors. “Big Brenda said she was as Catholic and as Irish as Paddy’s pig.”

  “With a name like Sally Lynn?” Phelan paged through his notebook. “Sally Lynn Fannon, according to Madame Jolene.”

  “I think you can be certain that at least Sally Lynn isn’t the name she was born with.”

  “Geoffrey, why did you ask if she was Catholic?” Ned eased himself back into his chair and reached for another popover.

  “I’ve been looking for a pattern that would link this new killing to the others. Why a sporting lady after two housemaids?” Geoffrey shrugged. “All three victims were female, Catholic, and Irish. Those are the only commonalities I trust.”

  “I understand slitting their throats,” Phelan said. “We see that all the time. It’s a favorite way of getting rid of someone. Quick, effective, silent. If the victim is taken by surprise it doesn’t require any extraordinary strength or skill.” He paused. “The hard part is what he’s done to the rest of their bodies. A woman shouldn’t be cut open like that. It goes against nature.”

  “Three Sundays. Three young Catholic women. What else does that suggest?” There was a gleam in Geoffrey’s eyes that told his comrades he expected to hear the right answer from them. “Think,” he urged.

  Steven Phelan, who had been born and raised Catholic, and whose mother steadfastly believed that her policeman son went to Mass every Sunday, tried to dredge up answers from the depths of his altar boy past. No use. He could still recite the Latin prayers and knew when to ring the bells, but not much of what he’d learned in catechism class had stuck.

  It was Ned who whispered the right words. “It’s a church building. That’s the location they have in common. They’ve all been in the same church recently. Whoever killed them saw them in that church, and something about them set him off. But they had to come to him to trigger the impulse to destroy. That’s it, isn’t it, Geoff?”

  “I believe so. I don’t think the killer picked them at random from the street.”

  “He couldn’t kill in the church, though,” Phelan said. “There would be blood everywhere. How would he clean it up? We always hear about it if some drunk tries to drink the holy water or piss in a collection basket. A church is the safest place anybody in this city can be.”

  “That’s the point. Look at the girls we’re talking about. Ellen Tierney—from what we’ve been told, a maid in a strict household—and a copper’s girlfriend. There’s lots of places she wouldn’t go, but she’d never hesitate about a church. Neither would Nora Kenny. Even if it wasn’t her own parish church, she’d still feel at home there. And safe.”

  “Whores don’t go to church on Sundays,” Phelan commented. “They’re usually sleeping off Saturday night.”

  “I haven’t worked out the details yet,” Geoffrey said, making honey circles on the table with his fingertip. “It’s a gut feeling I have about this. Allan Pinkerton was a demon about some things, but he always said a detective’s best friend was the feeling he got in the pit of his stomach. I’ve got one now.”

  “The only thing a girl would feel safer about than being in a church alone would be being in a church with a priest.” Ned spoke so quietly his voice was almost a whisper. “I don’t want to think too hard about that.”

  “Prudence and I have already talked to the priests at Saint Anselm’s. We came away with nothing concrete, nothing to suggest that one of them isn’t what he seems to be.” Geoffrey frowned. “I’ll look over her notes again. We might have missed something.”

  In his tiny room, Kevin raised a finger to keep Blossom from whining with joy at the sight of her human using his ferocious hearing again. It meant they’d be off trotting along the streets soon.

  Inside was comfortable, but outside meant freedom.

  *

  Prudence and Josiah Gregory waited in the carriage until the morgue wagon swung into Bellevue’s rear entrance, Josiah fidgeting with the fingers of his black leather gloves. He’d acted on impulse when he learned that Ned Hayes had sent Tyrus to bring Mr. Hunter to the scene of another killing.

  As far as Josiah knew, neither Mr. Hunter nor Mr. Hayes had thought to inform Miss Prudence, but Josiah had worked too many years for the late Roscoe Conkling not to fear the wrath of someone left out of something important, supposedly for her own good. By the time he used the new telephone to tell Miss MacKenzie that a third girl had fallen victim to whatever the police had decided to call New York City’s latest horror, he’d known the body would be on its way to Bellevue. Without a moment’s hesitation Miss Prudence told him that’s where she would be going, also. He’d had no choice but to offer to accompany her. Now all Josiah had to fear was Mr. Hunter’s displeasure… which, compared to what he imagined would have been Miss Prudence’s wrath, wasn’t worth worrying about. He resolved to sit still and stop tearing at his gloves.

  “We’ll give them time to unload and put her on a table,” Prudence said. “Did you get her name, Josiah?”

  “Sal
ly Lynn Fannon, Miss.”

  “Refresh my memory.” Prudence remembered perfectly well what he’d already told her, but she needed time to prepare herself for another visit to the bodies of the Bellevue Morgue. Accompanying the Kenny family when they’d come to identify Nora had been one of the hardest things she had ever done. She hadn’t forgotten either the sights or the smells.

  “Mr. Hayes was at an unsavory establishment,” Josiah began. Even to his own ears that sounded inappropriately culinary. “The victim in question was a young woman of dubious reputation who plied her trade in a house of ill repute.” There. He thought he’d done it rather nicely. He’d managed to replace the cruder words used by the police with two of the euphemisms to be found in any respectable newspaper article.

  “Say what you mean, Josiah. She was a prostitute working in a brothel.”

  His ears flamed red. He nodded his head miserably.

  “Shall we go?” Prudence opened the carriage door as the now empty morgue wagon reappeared on the street, lumbering along to pick up another body somewhere. No hurry. The dead had all the time in the world. “Are you coming, Josiah?”

  He’d tried to think of a way not to, but he hadn’t been able to come up with an excuse that wasn’t transparently cowardly.

  “Yes, Miss.”

  *

  The smell in the Bellevue morgue always made first time visitors gag. Buckets stood in the corners for the weak stomached. An eye watering stench of carbolic, formaldehyde, and decay hung like a miasma in the air. Cold. Damp. Acrid. As though no windows were ever opened … which they weren’t. There was a viewing room to one side of the larger space where bodies were stored before being autopsied or released for burial, but it already held its full complement of remains. Relatives were expected momentarily. They had appointments.

  Prudence approached the attendant as though he weren’t standing in front of the door trying to block their way. “The young woman in question arrived a few moments ago,” she informed him, stilling his protests with several folded bills slipped into an outstretched hand.

  He led them to a far corner where Sally Lynn’s rolling table had been wedged in between two larger and riper bodies. “Not too long,” he said, leaving them to keep watch outside this vault that was off-limits to visitors.

  “She’s beautiful,” Prudence said.

  At first glance Sally Lynn had the look of a proper young lady who’d fallen asleep over her knitting. Dreaming perhaps. Until you realized her eyelids weren’t quite closed and that something reddish black around her neck was trying to peep out from beneath the sheet that had fallen away from her face.

  “I’m going to pull the sheet down,” she murmured into the silence, “before that attendant decides to come back and send us on our way. Take notes, Josiah. This may be the only chance we have.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  Prudence tugged gently at the stained sheet covering Sally Lynn’s body. Whatever she had been wearing had been removed so that she was as naked leaving life as she had been coming into it.

  The first thing they saw was the throat. Josiah’s notebook and pencil clattered to the floor, but Prudence continued the downward movement of the sheet until the entire torso lay revealed. Neither of them had ever been this close to the kind of destruction a violently wielded knife could wreak on a human body.

  “The newspapers reprinted the photographs taken of the Whitechapel victims,” Prudence said. “They were horrible to look at, but nothing like this.”

  Sally Lynn’s skin had turned the color of ice on a frozen lake—dirty white with a tinge of blue to it. The gash from which her life’s blood had spurted was long and deep, an ugly pair of ragged lips stretched tight into an obscene smile. A small block of wood had been placed beneath the dead woman’s head to tilt it forward. With a wound as deep and vicious as this one, there was a danger that the weight of the skull would detach it from the few threads of muscle and sinew holding it on.

  Josiah Gregory retrieved his pencil and stenographer’s notebook and began to sketch frantically, his pale face set in determined lines. Somehow he would create a visual record of the dead Sally Lynn Fannon while at the same time preserving a transcription of whatever comments Miss Prudence made. Roscoe Conkling had declared more than once that Josiah was worth two ordinary secretaries; he’d prove the truth of that statement today.

  As she studied Sally Lynn’s exposed body, Prudence remembered reading in Geoffrey’s medical book about Caesarean sections, when a possibly still living child was cut out of the belly of its dead or dying mother. Slit open the abdomen, pull out the infant, close up the mother, and wash the body for burial. She had thought at the time that only a man desperate for a male heir would demand that such a procedure be performed on his wife.

  Sally Lynn had been cut from breastbone to pubic bone, scooped out like a melon, then cleansed, the incised skin folded neatly over emptiness. There was only one reason Prudence could think of to perform such an operation; the womb and its contents had to be removed. They were an affront to the killer. They ate away at the core of who he imagined himself to be. They violated all he held sacred. They catapulted him into madness.

  “Could she have been with child?” Prudence asked.

  “My understanding is that ladies of her profession who get caught rid themselves of the encumbrance. It’s bad for business.” Josiah’s writing hand trembled as he realized what he’d said.

  “What do you suppose he does with the organs he removes? He has to hide them somewhere.”

  “He may burn them, Miss Prudence. To get rid of any evidence.”

  “I’ve seen enough, Josiah. I don’t know what to make of it yet, but I won’t forget this. Are you finished with the drawings?” When he nodded and closed the cover of his notebook, Prudence drew the sheet up over Sally Lynn’s body and face.

  “Are you all right, Miss Prudence?” He took a deep breath to steady himself.

  “I should have been on the scene, informed at the same time Ned Hayes sent word to Geoffrey. I don’t think I’ll forgive Ned right away for excluding me. Or Geoffrey. Either we are partners or we are not.” Prudence glanced one more time at Sally Lynn’s remains, then turned on her heel to march resolutely out of this city of the dead.

  “He probably thought to spare you,” Josiah said.

  “Florence Nightingale proved in the Crimea that women could stand as much suffering and horror as men. Her nurses saw far worse than we did today. That was thirty years ago. We don’t seem to have made much progress.”

  Josiah knew what she meant, but it wasn’t a topic on which he wanted to express an opinion.

  As they climbed into her carriage, Prudence turned for one last look at Bellevue, site of so much of the city’s suffering. “I know she was only a whore. But I think it’s a terrible thing to waste a life. Any life.”

  CHAPTER 24

  By the time Kevin and Blossom reached Armory Hall, some of the lingering scent of Brenda’s perfumed soap had faded, but Carney’s new clothes and the dog’s shampooed fur made them almost unrecognizable to Billy McGlory’s bouncer. He was smart enough to make no comments and ask no questions.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McGlory,” Kevin apologized. He’d never before been invited into the saloon keeper’s private office. The sight and feel and smell of all that leather and sweet cigar smoke was making him dizzy. “I’d have been here sooner, but I had a little problem on the way.”

  “Big Brenda said you were flirting with pneumonia.”

  “Catarrh. I was a chesty child, always coughing and spitting up and running fevers hotter than tea water. It’ll carry me off some day, but for now the fever’s gone and I’m right as rain again.”

  “I see Brenda did well by you.”

  “By the both of us,” Kevin corrected. Talk about him and you had to talk about Blossom, also. They were inseparable; she got her feelings hurt if anyone forgot her.

  “Tell me what you learned. What made you go to Madame Jolene�
��s Saturday night?”

  “Closer to Sunday morning it was.”

  “Start at the beginning, Kevin.”

  “Blossom and I were keeping watch the way you told us, across the street from Saint Anselm’s in the alleyway there. I’d built us a shelter out of cardboard boxes and newspapers. People throw their newspapers away without hardly reading them at all. It’s a terrible waste is what it is.”

  “You and Blossom were watching Saint Anselm’s.”

  “Always one or the other of us with eyes and nose and ears fixed on it. When I went up to buy food, Blossom stayed on guard.”

  The dog thumped her tail at the sound of her name. An aroma of gardenia shampoo wafted up from the floor where she lay.

  “We had the fried potatoes and bacon again. We like to eat what we’re used to, you know, and the potatoes and bacon we get from the vendor on the corner there where Saint Anselm’s is are crispy and hot. He puts a fancy twist on a piece of newspaper and in go the potatoes and strips of bacon. You can have vinegar and salt on your potatoes, if you want. Usually I sprinkle a little of both on mine, but Blossom has hers plain. She’s not big on salt.”

  “So after you brought your food back and after you ate it …”

  “Well, that’s when we saw Miss Sally Lynn.”

  “Tell me about that, Kevin. Where did you see her and what was she doing?”

  “She was stumbling down the steps of the church. Grabbing for the rail with one hand and carrying a package.” Had he answered the question? He wasn’t sure. Best to tell everything. Mr. McGlory had a way of cutting him off if it was too much. “She came out from inside the church. Jerry Brophy was pulling her along by the arm. Roughlike.”

  Blossom obligingly sat up so her human could demonstrate how the man who liked to clean had grabbed Sally Lynn. “He shook her, too, and he was hissing at her like a snake. ‘Don’t come back. You don’t belong here. Get out.’ He said that over and over again. In between the hissing and the sputtering. You could tell she was upset, but she didn’t argue with him. Didn’t say a word. We’ve seen Miss Sally Lynn at Saint Anselm’s before, and up at Saint Patrick’s, too. Now that’s a grand church. Cathedral is what you call it when it’s that big and fancy.”