Pat O'Malley Historical Steampunk Mystery Trilogy

by Jim Musgrave

  Kennedy’s three policemen began to chuckle until their boss gave them a frown of temperance.

  “I may be a fallen Catholic, but I see how prostitution breaks-up marriages, and families are torn asunder! There is no replacement for a daughter, Miss Charming, no matter how slithery you can wriggle your God-given body!” Kennedy was getting his Irish up.

  “I think we have a difference of opinion here, and this discussion will not add to our case,” said Bessie. “I want to have my son returned to me, and this is what we are here to do. I will go to the orphanages we sponsor to see if I can arrange something. If we can’t stop these people, I want to be able to give these kidnappers what they need. My son means more to me than orphans right now, and we can always rescue the children. Agreed?”

  Kennedy looked over at Bessie and his face returned to its sober attitude of Police Superintendent. “Certainly, Missus. Today, you shall go out and attempt to contract for the private services of a child, but I don’t expect we’ll ever have to turn any orphan over to these monsters. O’Malley, use your disguise and be certain to show you have the money to make such a contract. Miss Charming, inform Doctor Foote about our plan, and be certain to tell me where he will be looking and when. I will remain at our command post to coordinate the results. Please try to get as many such appointments as you can, as we will need to plan the most advantageous location for our needs. The photographs will be our primary goal, agreed?”

  We all nodded our assent. As the kitchen staff collected our dishes, I stood with Walter and Kennedy. Becky left the room to visit Doctor Foote, and Bessie left the house to talk to the orphanages she sponsored.

  “Did you find out anything about the house staff?” I asked Kennedy.

  “No, they all passed our scrutiny. There were no arrest records on file, and they each could account for their whereabouts on the day the child was kidnapped. I am keeping this home secure. Nobody can leave unless accompanied by one of my men.” Kennedy took out a cigar from his vest pocket, bit the end off, and then held it to his lips with his left hand. He took a match from the same pocket, flicked it with his thumbnail, and it ignited. He brought the flaming end of it up to the tip of the cigar and inhaled, puffing like a steam engine until the clouds of tobacco smoke began to fill the air above us.

  “What do we do if we can get an appointment? Isn’t this a form of illegal entrapment?” I was interested in the legal ramifications of our endeavor.

  “Remember what I told you, O’Malley. This is not a normal criminal investigation. What we are collecting is a record of malfeasance and immoral behavior. If we play our cards right, we will be able to then provide enough evidence to the public to cause an uproar in the community that will put these scoundrels out of business forever!” Kennedy accented each sentence with a puff from his cigar. The room became darkened with smoke, and I hoped it was not a precursor to what we were going to experience in the coming days and hours.

  “What about this butler? I had my doubts about him,” I said.

  “No record whatsoever. I don’t think he ever leaves this house. It’s his home and harbor,” said Kennedy.

  “I knows men like him,” said McKenzie. “The world has disappeared for ‘em, and they keep to their caves like hermits.”

  As we were speaking of him, John the cotton-headed butler came into the parlor escorting one of McKenzie’s men. It was big Bill Maguire, the identical twin of the wandering Dan. He walked up to his boss and stood still. He obviously had some important news to impart because he kept looking down at his shoes and then up again to fix on Walter’s face.

  “Boss, I went up to Boston to see Irene’s aunt. She hasn’t seen either of them. I don’t know where they are,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, Billy, we’ll find ‘em. Thanks for doing that,” said Walter.

  I was thinking about Dan and Irene. Where could they have gone? The fact that they lied about their whereabouts sent them to the top of my personal suspect list. This was a list I was not going to share with Superintendent Kennedy. In fact, my list included Kennedy and his men. If he were looking for a way to gain public recognition, then he may also be willing to use us to advance his personal cause. Pride was the most inauspicious character flaw, and in the horse race of life it defeated greed by an upturned nose.

  “We’ll look for them too,” said Kennedy. “They just might be our inside connection with the kidnapping. Right, O’Malley?”

  “Right,” I said, as I moved to exit the parlor and get my disguise from the apartment on 42nd Street.

  * * *

  As I put the rubber mask on my head from the Reynolds costume, I kept thinking that I had taken about every wrong turn in this case that is imaginable. At first, I thought I could simply use the list I found inside Jane Haskins’ office safe to trap Doctor Andrew Bliss Foote in an embarrassing situation. He would then agree to admit that the Palace Theater was providing underage children as sex toys for profit, and then Bessie and her liberal journalists would do the rest to drive Jane the Grabber out of business. Now, Doctor Foote is on our side, and Becky is recruiting him to go out and do the same thing I am doing.

  In addition, I discovered that child prostitution was an acceptable enterprise because the children were poor and without any social pedigree. Thankfully, I was able to add Superintendent John A. Kennedy into my investigation, as he was quite experienced with the city’s politics, having borne the brunt of its injustice for many years. The fact that he may be able to advance in the public’s eye made me wary of his motives.

  I stood in front of my mirror and looked at the suit I wore when I portrayed British college professor Doctor Ronald Wentworth. I knew my English accent and word usage was still good because I had learned from Columbia Professor of Linguistics, and Oxford visiting scholar, Doctor Winston Graham. My Reynolds mask, combined with this new identity, should allow me to spy as one of the cultured elite without any problems.

  There must be some way to logically put these pieces together and find a common thread. The missing pieces, Irene Sanders and Daniel Maguire, made me anxious, as did the fact that all of our hopes seemed to lie in demonstrating to the public how evil Joan Haskins was. The public was as fickle as the next big murder or child abduction, and I believed that if we did not find little Seth Mergenthaler in time, this kidnapping of a rich child was the story the press would gravitate toward and no amount of compromising photographs would change the journalists’ bias.

  I needed to find something deeper and more implicating. It was my last chance to bring this group at the Palace Theater to justice and to save Seth from their clutches.

  I put on my suit coat, took up my cane, and opened the door to my apartment. The next few hours would allow me to see how good this disguise really was.

  Chapter 9: The Offers

  As I took the hackney toward the Tenderloin, I went over my list of logical relationships between the suspects and the evidence at hand. We automatically inferred that the person responsible for the kidnapping of Seth Mergenthaler was Jane the Grabber Haskins. In reality, it could have been other individuals. Starting at the top, William M. Tweed could have decided he wanted to put a stop to the entire liberal movement in New York City, and this was his first “shot across the bow” to warn the others about what would happen if they tried to cross him. Perhaps little Seth would show up at his mother’s doorstep, unharmed, and that would be the end it.

  Or, perhaps the clues pointed to some deviant gang of child slavery promoters. The note delivered through the window of Bessie’s parlor stated nothing about using these children for prostitution. It was Kennedy who immediately related the request for orphans to the prostitution ring. Children could be used for all kinds of enterprises. In fact, child labor was one of the most profitable businesses in New York. The garment factories used children to perform all sorts of dangerous jobs. Obtaining ten children a month would be an economic boon to any group who wanted to make money from child labor.

  The f
act that the note mentioned drugs was the clue I had to go on. I remembered how drugged little Irene Sanders was when we retrieved her from the Palace Theater. She kept asking for the laudanum drug, and she was caught smoking cannabis Indica with one of the house staff in Bessie’s mansion. These facts may not be relevant to find out who the informer was, but they were certainly out there to be considered.

  I was going to go down the streets in the Tenderloin and stop inside each gambling hall and tavern to ask the bartenders about the possibility of getting a child prostitute. The very idea of having to make this kind of request sent shivers of revulsion throughout my body, and I wanted to regurgitate. I knew that the bartenders were the ones who usually made these arrangements, just as the hack drivers made the appointments for the call girls who roamed the streets. However, after my brother died from an alcoholic confrontation with a Dead Rabbits gang member inside my father’s bar, I had ceased drinking any spirits. I also saw what it did to my favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe, and to many of my fellow Irish, so I suppose I was on my personal crusade against inebriation.

  I do not believe that the substance one chooses to use to get the “elated or relaxed feeling” is what causes the evil results. As with most matters in the world of sensory objects, it is the attachment to these objects which brings on the longing for them once these objects cannot be had. This, in turn, causes the anger and frustration inside the person, and this person eventually becomes deluded. Delusion leads to loss of memory and one repeats the same mistakes without learning from them until one cannot discriminate right from wrong. If a person cannot discriminate between right and wrong, one is legally insane and soon disappears from civilized society into the labyrinth of self-will running riot throughout the world. Or they become willing tools to do the bidding of more sinister masters who control them.

  I needed to find a person who had become this kind of insane worshipper of the senses. I was using the intuitive gift that Becky had taught me from her experience with Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists. One must allow the power of the Over Soul to enter one’s consciousness, and then one can plunge down deep into the collective unconscious and come up with an answer. It made little logical sense, but it was the connective ingredient that all master sleuths possessed, and I was nurturing this skill like a baby learning to walk for the first time.

  After visiting the poorer establishments in Satan’s Circus, and asking the bartenders there, I decided it would be much better to visit the more affluent bordellos. I would get curious stares or grunts from the men tending bar in the slums. In fact, when they heard my British accent, some of them suggested that I should get the hell out of there before I got beaten up and rolled for the money in my pockets.

  I began in the most affluent of these bordellos, the same row of bawdy houses I had shown Becky on our tour before all of this began. Sisters’ Row was on 25th Street near 7th Avenue. As I walked up to the portico, I had the distinct impression that I was walking into a world that catered to all the senses. It was a world where the hedonists ruled. Greek statues of Eros and Dionysius guarded the entrance to this sensory wonderland, and a tall Negro took my hat and coat at the door and wished me a “Good day, sir.”

  As I stepped inside, I could feel a softly gentle mist that smelled of lilac as it caressed my face. It was being sprayed by a large-breasted woman in red tights whose job it was to give each man who entered a welcoming spritz. Two tall, topless Amazonian women stood at the ends of the long bar waving gigantic palm fronds. There were few visitors at this hour of the early afternoon. One table had three business men talking and drinking, and at the long bar stood a couple of men at the end. I stepped up to the center brass rail where the bartender worked.

  There were big crystal bowls filled with shrimp, stuffed olives, mincemeat, caviar, and fruits all along the polished surface of the bar. Behind this great table set for the spirit-lover’s delight, was the back mirror. It was over fifteen feet high and reached the ceiling. Above the variety of every kind of liquor bottle available to the Free World, it had pictures of many dignitaries in the City of New York adorning its surface. These men in frock coats and watch-bobbed vests were dancing, drinking, smoking and gambling, gazing up at the photographer with their prodigious smiles, their ruddy complexions glowing with the mirth that only drink can bring, the smoke from their cigars and pipes clouding up around them like a visage from a jungle glen where above them a volcano smoldered nightly sending a foggy shroud down upon the cavorting natives beneath.

  “I say, barkeep, let me have a ginger ale,” I told the tall gentleman standing in front of me. I was using my British professor’s accent.

  The bartender had his hair pomaded and parted down the middle, and his mustache was waxed and twisted into semi-circles on the ends. He also wore a black vest and a white undershirt with ruffled cuffs and a red silk band around his right bicep. Upon this band there was the symbol of the Taijitu or yinyang. Becky once told me this was an ancient Chinese Taoist symbol that represented the duality of Nature. He poured the ginger ale from a long green bottle; it foamed at the top, and he pushed the glass toward me. “There you are. Fifteen cents, sir,” he said.

  I opened my vest and extracted my leather wallet. I took out a dollar bill, pausing to make certain he saw the hundred dollar bills I had along with it, and set the bill down on the bar.

  “Three years she grew in sun and shower, then Nature said, 'a lovelier flower on earth was never sown; this child I to myself will take.’ Do you know the poet?” I asked bringing the glass of soda up to my lips and sipping, daintily, as a professor would.

  The bartender curled his right eyebrow in a most conspicuous way. His gaze was one of a man whose job it was to talk about educated topics, and his reply was well rehearsed.

  “Yes, Mister Wordsworth. He is a most ingenious poet. We have a few of his poems inside plaques gracing the walls of our bedrooms upstairs. The ladies like the ambience of culture,” he smirked.

  “I believe him to be a prophet of the child of innocence. Oh, but William Blake is the true poet of the lost children! I remember this passage, for it is engraved upon my heart forever:

  Sleeping Lyca lay

  While the beasts of prey,

  Come from caverns deep,

  View’d the maid asleep.

  The kingly lion stood,

  And the virgin view’d,

  Then he gamboll’d round

  O’er the hallow’d ground.

  Leopards, tigers, play

  Round her as she lay,

  While the lion old

  Bow’d his mane of gold

  And her bosom lick,

  And upon her neck

  From his eyes of flame

  Ruby tears there came;

  While the lioness

  Loos’d her slender dress,

  And naked they convey’d

  To caves the sleeping maid.

  The bartender’s expression changed into one of bold impertinence. It was as if what I had said had triggered a switch on, and he now knew exactly with whom he was dealing.

  “It’ll cost you two hundred for an hour. What age? You like them real young, I’d wager,” he whispered, as he leaned toward me. I could smell his cheap cologne and a breath reeking of chewing tobacco.

  I feigned momentary surprise, but then I also leaned forward in resigned conspiracy. “I just want to worship them. They are the altar of innocent beauty, and I want to genuflect and touch their soft bosoms, so I can be reanimated. Like Lady Wollstonecraft’s monster, I want to live again!”

  He smirked once more. “Sure, sir, I know! But what age? I have a contact that can get you any age you need. Boy? Girl? Both at the same time?”

  “I would adore a little girl; say about six years of age. The evening after dinner would be most agreeable.” I drew a small circle in the wet dampness on the bar caused by my glass of ginger ale.

  “Good! Wednesday at eight in the evening is available. And who should I s
ay we will expect for the appointment? You will use our best boudoir, of course!” The bartender held his fountain pen above a pad of paper waiting for my response.

  “Doctor Ronald Wentworth. I shall return at that date and time. I thank you good sir! Here is a token of my pleasure,” I said, and I pushed a ten dollar bill toward him.

  He smiled and picked up the bill. He curled it inside the red silk band on his bicep and then took up a bar rag. He began wiping up my place as he looked at me. “You have a good day, Professor,” he winked, and I walked out of the Sisters’ Row to go on to the next tavern for wealthy patrons.

  I repeated my little act at three other places in the Tenderloin, the Haymarket and the Cremorne, as well as Jane the Grabber’s Palace Theater. Although I was able to make appointments at the first two taverns, John Allen, the big enforcer at the Palace, stared hard at me and frowned. I noticed he had the same red silk arm band with the yinyang symbol that the bartender at the Sisters’ Row tavern wore.