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For Arnold Grossman
My friend of a lifetime
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Sandra Dallas
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
The smell. It was always the smell that got to him. No matter how many times he’d been inside one of these wretched places, he was overwhelmed by the smell that hit him like the odor rising from a cesspool. He could smell it even in the better houses, such as this one. Others might not pick up on it, but he had spent too much time in these places not to be aware of the faint smell. It was a mixture of perfume and body powder, of cigar smoke, vomit, and unemptied chamber pots. Sweat, spilled beer and brandy, flat champagne from bottles stuck into buckets of melting ice, basins of dirty water. There was the stench of spittoons filled with chewing tobacco so harsh it gagged a man. And over it hung the woman smell of tired and used bodies, something that lingered even after the house was aired out and scrubbed before the evening clientele arrived. He’d smelled that whorehouse stench a hundred—perhaps hundreds of—times, but there was something more this time, the metallic smell of blood and, worse, the odor he always thought of as flesh beginning to rot, to decay. The smell of death.
He took out his handkerchief and held it over his nose as he walked down the hallway past the half-opened doors, sad girls peering out. They were dressed in their underwear or kimonos that were carelessly buttoned. “What happened, Mick?” one whispered in a voice that was husky from too many cigarettes, too much beer. Her face had begun to show the ravages of her life, although she was not yet halfway through her twenties.
“Hello, Elsie. You tell me,” Mick replied, putting down the handkerchief. It didn’t do any good anyway.
“How would I know? I just got back.” She sniffed and rubbed at her nose, and Mick wondered if she had a cold or was a snowbird. “I liked her. Did she do it to herself? She was kind of snooty, but she was all right. You want to come in? You’re always welcome, you know.”
“I’m on duty, honey.” Mick smiled to think what his fellow officers would say if he detoured into one of the rooms. It was tempting, just to get their reaction.
“You’ll come back and tell me, won’t you? Madam says it was suicide, that maybe she swallowed that poison, Rough on Rats, but me and some of the girls, well, we think…” Her voice trailed off.
“Think what, honey?”
“We’re not so sure.”
They never wanted to believe it was suicide, Mick thought. Maybe that was because they didn’t like the idea that they, too, might be wretched enough to take their own lives. The life of a prostitute was a short one, maybe seven years. “You got any ideas?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ll come back when I finish up, then.” A patrolman had come out of a room at the end of the hall and was beckoning to him. Mick hurried off and told the cop, “I got sidetracked.”
“I’ll bet.” The officer smirked.
Mick gave him a stern look. “Listen, hamfat, she says she might know what happened. Do you have something to say about that?”
“No, sir.”
Mick stared at the man until the cop turned and began studying one of the pictures in heavy gold frames that lined the hall. The paintings were mostly of women lying naked on beds or of satyrs romping with nubile young ladies. This particular painting was of a man with a human torso and the legs and horns and ears of a goat, chasing two naked girls whose breasts and pubic areas were hidden by tree branches. “They’re waiting for you,” the cop told Mick, without taking his eyes from the painting.
“His name is Pan.”
“Who?”
“The man in the painting.”
“I never saw anybody who looked like that. You suppose he’s real?” The patrolman hooked his thumbs over his belt.
Mick frowned, wondering if the officer were really that dumb. He was young—and hadn’t been in the force long. Mick could tell by the new coat with its gleaming brass buttons. But then all the buttons gleamed. No policeman would go on duty with tarnished buttons. He wondered how long the patrolman had worked the beat on Holladay Street, the center of Denver’s tenderloin. Maybe not long. The young officer would find out soon enough about the goats in the whorehouses.
“Mick.” An older police officer had come out of the door at the end of the hall and was gesturing to him.
Detective Sergeant McCauley put his handkerchief into his pocket, and without a glance at the rest of the pictures in the whorehouse art gallery, he entered the room.
“Cronin.” Mick acknowledged the officer who had gestured to him. Then he turned to a second man and said, “Doctor.” The coroner was tall, ascetic, his face and hands with their long fingers an unnatural white. He dressed in a long black coat, and he himself looked like death. In fact, that was what he was called, Dr. Death. The man gave a single dip of his chin to acknowledge Mick, then turned his glance to the woman lying on the bed.
Mick had seen dead whores before, seen the lifeless faces ravaged by drugs and liquor and disease, faces (and bodies) that no longer attracted men, and so the girls had ended their lives with laudanum or arsenic. Those were usually the crib girls, the lowest rank of prostitute, however, girls who might have started out in a parlor house like this one, then gone downhill. It wasn’t often that an inmate of one of the better brothels took her life, although it sometimes happened at Christmas, when she started thinking about home, a home she couldn’t go back to or maybe a home she’d never known. He’d seen the bodies of prostitutes bruised from beatings, too, scratched or sliced with knives.
But he’d never seen anything like this. When he’d been sent to investigate the death of a prostitute, he’d assumed she’d taken her own life. But this was no suicide. The woman lay on her back on an iron bed, her arms folded across her chest. She was covered with blood. Blood was everywhere—on the floor, the bed, splattered on the walls. Drops of blood were scattered across the picture of a bowl of fruit, making it appear as if one of the plums had burst and was dripping its juice. But mostly the blood was on the body of the dead whore and on the sheet beneath her. The woman was dressed in only a torn wrapper, which would have been sliced by a knife as the killer attacked her. The garment had been pulled across the woman to cover her body, although it hadn’t covered much. She was small, maybe five feet two inches, and trim, her skin firm. “Doesn’t look like a suicide,” Mick said.
“Murder, plain and simple. Eight stab wounds, not counting the ones on her hands and arms where she tried to defend herself. She got two in her neck,” Dr. Death said. “Most vicious killing of a woman I ever seen.
She looks like a pound or two of dog’s dinner.”
“She died like that on the bed?” Mick asked. He frowned. The body’s position was unnatural.
“Not like that. My guess: she fell on top of the bed and whoever done it to her put her legs up like that and crossed her arms over her. I never saw arms folded that way on a dead woman outside of a coffin. And her robe, it’s been pulled across her.”
Mick looked into the face of the woman. He’d worked Denver’s tenderloin for ten years and thought the girl looked familiar, although he couldn’t place her. That wasn’t surprising, however, since the girls came and went. She must be new, he thought, not just because he didn’t know her but because she looked fresh. Under the smear of blood, her face was soft, unlined. Her hair was a pale yellow, untouched by chemicals, and there was no trace of rouge or powder. She didn’t look like a whore, so she might have turned out recently. Mick stared into a face that was covered in blood. “Who was she?” he asked.
“Lillie.”
Mick turned to find a woman sitting behind the door. He hadn’t seen her when he came in, and he touched his hat. “Miss Hettie.”
“She said her last name was Brown.” The woman gave a soft snort. “With all the names in the world to choose from, why’s so many of them pick Brown? She’s been with me only a couple of months, maybe a little more.”
“Where is she from?”
“New York, so she said, but how would I know? She didn’t have references, but she wasn’t no innocent, I can tell you. I don’t break in young ladies. I’ve got my standards.” She raised her chin, waiting for Mick to agree, and when he didn’t, she continued. “But Lillie didn’t need no breaking in. She fell off the primrose path before she ever come here. She was real mink, as high class a girl as you’d ever find. Her death is a real loss to me.” Miss Hettie paused, as if in a moment of sorrow. “You might find something in her trunk. She kept it locked.” The woman rose and walked to a steamer trunk against the wall of the small room. Miss Hettie was short and plump, wearing black satin, her hands covered with gold rings, a diamond cross at her neck, her hair an unnatural color of red. Mick thought she might be in her sixties.
“The other girls like her?”
The madam shrugged. “She was standoffish, didn’t mix much with the others. They thought she was stuck-up. Some of ’em at any rate.”
“Enough to kill her?”
“No, my ladies aren’t nothing like that. My guess is it was a burglar. She was alone. The rest of the girls went off this morning. Lillie said she was feeling punk. I checked in on her before I left, but she was sleeping.”
“One of the others could have come back and stabbed her,” Mick mused.
“They didn’t none of them come back until later. Like I say, it was a burglar. Her diamond earbobs are gone. I saw them myself on the dresser when I left. They weren’t there when I came back. Valuable, they was, shaped like stars.”
“You checked when you found her, did you?” Mick stared at the woman, who didn’t blush but was defiant. She met his gaze.
“’Course I did. They was valuable, shaped like stars, like I say. They was unusual. I ain’t got nothing like them myself.”
“Do you now?”
“You asking if I stole from one of my own ladies?” She tried to look injured but failed.
Mick shrugged. “She didn’t have any use for them.” He pointed with his chin at the woman on the bed.
“I might have my faults, but I wouldn’t steal from a dead whore.”
“How about one of the other girls?”
“None of them’s been in here except to look through the door. I found her myself. I sent Elsie to get a copper, and I ain’t left the room since.”
Mick went over to the trunk and tried it, but the lid wouldn’t budge.
“I told you it was locked. The key ain’t around nowhere, either.”
“You looked, then. Was that before or after you sent Elsie for a copper?”
“You got no right to accuse me, Mick. You know I run an honest house, and I pay my protection money regular.” She stiffened her back. “Now can’t you get rid of her? I got a business to run, and no john’s going to want his ashes hauled in a house where there’s a stiff.” Miss Hettie turned and left the room, calling down the hallway, “Shut your doors, ladies. This ain’t your business. You got to get ready for the customers, and I’ll skin any one of you that tells what went on here. Poor Lillie died a natural death. Suicide.”
“Natural death,” Mick muttered.
The patrolman returned to the room and asked, “Was it suicide … sir?” He’d started to say “Mick” but changed it to “sir,” perhaps in deference to the older officer, who was smarter, more experienced, and had spent more time on Holladay Street.
“You think she stabbed herself eight times?” Mick scoffed, and the young man reddened.
“I didn’t count. I just saw the blood and waited for you.”
“You think it was a burglar?” Cronin asked.
“If it was, he was a peculiar chap. There’s a five-dollar gold piece on the dresser. No burglar I know would leave that behind. And if it was one of the other girls, she’d have snatched it up with the earrings.”
“I never saw a robber slice up anybody like that. A robber would stick her once or twice to shut her up, not eight times. And he wouldn’t take the trouble to leave her like that, with her arms folded over her. I’d guess it was somebody she knew,” the coroner put in.
“Like a mac?” Mick asked.
“Could be. I wonder if she had one.”
“Or a customer,” Cronin butted in.
“A whore’s not likely to admit a customer when there’s nobody else around.”
“Maybe a special customer.”
Mick nodded. “Where’s the knife?”
“Wasn’t no knife. She was stabbed with a pair of scissors.” The coroner picked up a pair of sewing scissors, the tips as sharp as a knife blade. “Hers, most likely, because her sewing box’s right there, and I couldn’t see any scissors in it.”
He handed the weapon to Mick, who tested the tip with his finger. It would pierce skin as if it were butter. “Was she tortured?” he asked softly.
Dr. Death shook his head. “Don’t look like it.”
“Raped?”
“She’s a whore.”
The patrolman went over to the bed and stared at the body, then looked frantically around the room until Mick pointed to the chamber pot, and the young man retched into it. “Sorry,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I never saw nothing like this.”
“Go outside. Get some air. You’ll get used to it. Or maybe you won’t. Pray you won’t, Officer…” Mick searched for a name, then said, “Officer Thrasher.” He glanced at the other policeman, who was pasty-faced, and added, “Cronin, you take him out, then find something to open the trunk. Doc and I’ll finish up.”
“I’m done. I’ll get somebody to haul her off,” the coroner said, and he followed the two officers down the hall, leaving Mick alone with the dead woman.
The detective listened to their footsteps, then turned back to the bed, ignoring the smell of fresh vomit. He avoided stepping in the blood as he picked up a chair that lay on the floor, pulling it to the bedside and sitting down. The room was small and the furniture filled it up—the chairs and bed and a dresser with a pitcher and washbasin on it, the trunk with a bright shawl spread over it, a wardrobe. Unlike the hallway with its erotic paintings, the pictures in the room were simple—the blood-smeared oil painting of a bowl of fruit, a pastoral scene, the portrait of a young woman with her hand on the collar of a dog. They might all have been done by the same artist, maybe the dead woman. Mick wondered if she’d been a painter. Well, if so, she hadn’t been much of one. The paintings were sentimental and poorly executed. Maybe they’d been left by another occupant.
He stood then and examined the room, looking for something that didn’t belong—a button or a watch fob that the struggling woman m
ight have snatched. A handkerchief, a hat. A calling card with a name and address would be nice. Mick got down on his knees and peered under the bed, the dresser. Scanning the rug, he looked for something that might have been dropped, but there was nothing. He examined the dresser, hoping for a cigarette butt, a cigar stub, but there was only the usual collection of brush, hairpins, hair receiver, false hair, a pair of gloves, a bottle of perfume. Mick picked it up and sniffed. The scent, lily of the valley, was too delicate for most prostitutes, and expensive.
The crime had been vicious, and the knife wounds on the dead woman’s hands showed that she’d fought back. There ought to be some hint to the killer’s identity, but if there was, Detective Sergeant McCauley couldn’t find it. He looked into the wardrobe where dresses hung on hooks. They were expensive dresses for a whore—a black velvet ball gown, a claret-colored wool suit, and a gray dress of some kind of shiny material. He thought it might be satin. Two or three shifts hung from pegs. That was what the girls wore in the whorehouses in Denver. Elsewhere, in the great brothels of Chicago and New Orleans, they might dress in fancy clothes when they met the customers downstairs in the parlor, but here, they wore shifts that were easy to put on and take off, that wouldn’t be costly to replace if they were torn.
He pushed back the curtain and peered at the windowsill, looking for handprints. The killer might have come in this way. But the sill was covered with a coat of dust. He opened the window and peered out at the darkening sky. Snow from a storm the day before had melted early, but it had frozen as the day waned. Black branches obscured a sky as dead as the woman on the bed. A chill wind blew through the window, bringing the smells of smoke and stale air and horse manure, but Mick preferred them to the whorehouse odor that lingered in the room, and he left the window open.
He pulled his coat around himself and sat down on the chair next to the dead woman, studying her face, pulling back a strand of blood-soaked hair that had fallen across her cheek. Her eyes, a blue that was almost turquoise, were open, dull, and Mick stared into them. “You knew your killer, didn’t you, honey? You let him in.” He stared at the woman’s face. She was too young to die. Pretty like that, fresh, she might have found a life outside the whorehouse. She could have married, maybe met a man right there at Miss Hettie’s, some railroad executive or perhaps a businessman from Chicago or St. Louis. Mick knew of a few whores who’d gotten out of the life that way, and they’d made good wives.
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