Berthe did not dance, but I did. For an hour, I fox-trotted, polka’d, and waltzed. Then, out of breath, I stood to the side and gave thanks to Otelia Brooks, wherever she was, for persuading my uncle to have the cotillion. But as I enjoyed the women’s happiness, I realized one woman was missing.
“Where’s Sadie?”
Struck by my tone, the women stopped dancing. She wouldn’t have gone upstairs, I thought. Everyone was down here, and Sadie hated to be alone. Still, I sent Sal to check.
“She’s wandered off again,” said Berthe grimly.
That was my fear—confirmed when Sal called from the stairs, “She’s not up here.”
Going to the hallway, I took my coat off the hook and said, “All of you stay here. I’m going to look for her.”
In an instant, Berthe was beside me, shrugging on her battered overcoat. “You’re not facing that hag Mrs. Pickett and her lump of a son alone.”
But as we hurried down the icy steps, I was dimly aware of a quiet absence. It seemed the Purity Brigade had decided on an early night: no cries of shame rang out; no quavering hymns strengthened at the sight of us. It was a foggy night, and it was difficult to see even across the street.
“Where do you think she goes when she wanders?” I asked Berthe.
“Back to the man who beat her, I would guess.”
“They lived on Allen near the park, didn’t they?”
She nodded. “But you can’t be getting between them. That man’s dangerous, even if she’s too big a fool to know it.”
“I don’t think she’s been gone long. Maybe I can catch up to her.”
I started in the direction of Jefferson with Berthe close behind. After a few blocks, she said, “What if she is with him? What will you say?”
“Sadie thinks she can have the refuge and Joe both. I’ll explain she has a choice to make.”
“She’ll make the wrong one, if I know her.”
I turned my head to answer, and that’s when I saw it. Them. Legs. Stockings down, skirts flung up. Pale, helpless, lifeless legs.
She lay in an alley behind a factory, a deserted place. Half in shadow, lower half exposed to the streetlight. At first I had the mad thought that perhaps the woman had passed out, even though the odd, rag-doll fall of the legs told me otherwise.
It was the shoes that told me it was Sadie Ellis, the battered leather boots she had danced in earlier. Her hand lying across her middle, her head turned slightly, she resembled nothing so much as an exhausted child who has finally collapsed. But, oh, the face. She had been … carved, and in the chancy light of the street, it seemed she had no face at all, merely a blood-soaked mass of split skin and sodden hair.
She would have suffered, I thought numbly. Every cut, every slash. How could he do such a thing? I found myself wondering. This wasn’t murder; it was butchery.
Looking again at her shoes, I thought, Something is wrong. Off balance. Then I realized one dark stocking was gone, the laces of that shoe untied, the shoe itself hanging from her foot. I was dimly aware of Berthe wailing behind me. Her howls became words—“Police! Someone call the police! There’s been a murder!”
My uncle had said Sadie was young, that she needed time to see her future. She had spent her last day on earth gazing out the window, looking for it. Spent her last hour hurrying down the street toward it. I could see her: giggling at her naughtiness, defiant as she picked up her skirts to go just that bit faster, looking back to see she wasn’t followed. At some point, I thought, she had seen him, there on the street, her Joe. Her future.
And now that silly, laughing, dancing girl was gone. Cut to pieces and left in an alley for strangers to find and wonder who she might have been.
3
The police did come. But the newspapers came first. And the ghoulish and judgmental beat them both to the scene. Berthe, wild with grief, kept them at bay while I stood with my arms uselessly extended across the alleyway to give poor Sadie some measure of privacy.
“Who is it?” one woman called. Followed hard by “What’s her name?” and “Who did it?”
“Go home,” I told them. “It’s cold. There’s nothing you can do for her.”
That prodded some of them to wander off. But then I heard another voice in the fog. “Was she one of yours?”
“What?” I blinked at the strange question.
A man stepped—or shambled—into the patch of weak light from the streetlamp. He was large, belly straining the buttons of his overcoat, beefy arms stuffed into the sleeves. The coat was grimy and had seen better days. His hair and scruff were blond. His face was reddened by cold or drink. One look at the writing hand emerging from his pocket told me this was a reporter.
“One of yours. From the refuge.”
“She was a friend. Can you step back, please?”
“How’d you know her, this friend?” His voice was a lazy growl; he would find it all out, sooner or later. But the little eyes were sharp.
“We share an interest in thoroughbreds—step back.” I had thought I was too exhausted for anger; apparently I was wrong.
Then someone yelled, “Oh, look who showed up.”
The police. I felt the crowd tense as they approached. Then I saw Mrs. Pickett walking behind them and felt myself tense in turn.
Clementine Pickett was deceptively small for a woman who had the capacity to bring a crowd to silence or screaming madness. Widely spaced gray eyes dominated her face; her nose was narrow, her mouth a thin pale scratch across the face. She wore a drab dark coat, and the hat resting on gray curls was functional. She had not been put on this earth to smile, laugh, eat, or enjoy. Her mission was to see all—and to judge that which was unworthy. I would have liked her to be stupid, but she wasn’t. She was intelligent, quick in argument, and knowledgeable about the world beyond the Bible. In short, formidable. I was not happy to see her.
Briskly, she pushed her way through the crowd. The sight of Sadie brought her up short. She gasped, her hands fluttering to her face in shock. Then, closing her eyes, she offered a brief prayer.
I said to the policemen, “Please tell these people to go home. They don’t have to be here. We knew this woman—”
“We knew this woman, too,” said Mrs. Pickett, gesturing to the crowd. “We know what she was.”
Sensing they had a defender, the crowd rumbled in support. Motioning Berthe over so she could stand guard over Sadie’s body, I approached the more senior-looking of the patrolmen. He had a graying mustache and slack cheeks, and he rested a hand on his stomach as he tried to catch his breath. I could not say he looked ready to take charge. Still, he gave me his sympathetic attention, introducing himself as Officer Nolan.
“My name is Jane Prescott. My uncle is the Reverend Tewin Prescott. He runs the Gorman—”
“He runs a house of sin,” pronounced Mrs. Pickett.
“You shut your mouth,” said Berthe.
The reporter drawled, “He runs a refuge where whores can get a bed they don’t have to put to professional use. Or so I’m informed.”
The junior policeman piped up, “She was one of the reverend’s girls?”
“She lived at the refuge. She was not his girl,” I said. “She wasn’t anybody’s girl.”
The older policeman nodded toward the alley, and his partner approached, keeping a safe distance from Berthe. I could tell the moment he laid eyes on Sadie as he clapped a hand to his mouth and stumbled backward.
“What was she doing out on the street?” The reporter indicated the cold drizzle. “Not an especially nice night for a stroll.”
I looked up at the surrounding buildings. Why had it happened here? There were few houses on this block; it was mostly factories and warehouses. I gazed up at the vast windows and saw they were dark. It was the slow season, so they were not occupied at night. Breathing in, I caught the iron tang of blood and sharp stench of bleach. There was a slaughterhouse nearby. No one would be surprised by the sight of blood on the streets here.
/> But why meet here on the Bowery, blocks from their home? There were no saloons around. Perhaps without Sadie’s income, Joe had lost their rooms. The Municipal Lodging House was uptown on Twenty-Fifth Street. And you had to work five hours a day hauling stone to stay there. I couldn’t see Joe McInerny signing on for that.
Or perhaps, as it was late, Sadie had asked him to meet her close to the refuge. That made more sense. Meeting on the Bowery, they would have headed home together. Maybe they had argued, the fight grew violent, and Joe saw his chance with the alley. I looked at the ground up and down the block. No stretch of blood; Sadie had been killed where she was.
Or had Sadie been going the other way? Had she refused to stay with Joe and he caught up to her here?
“She was going to meet a man,” cried Berthe, and her savage tone implied this was the gravest mistake any woman could make. “She was going to meet a no-good bastard of a man who hit her and sold her and now he’s butchered her.”
Officer Nolan looked to me. “Do you know the man she’s talking about?”
“I do. And when you’ve cleared this crowd, I’ll tell you who he is.”
As the policemen began waving people off, Mrs. Pickett called out, “You might ask the reverend where he’s been this night.”
At that, the crowd slowed. Heads turned. I stared at Mrs. Pickett, wondering if she had lost her mind.
“I think you know that my uncle would have nothing to say about this.”
“I do not know that,” she said.
Her calm conviction that she was in the right cost me my hold on my temper, and I took a step toward her, fist clenched. Officer Nolan stepped between us, saying, “We will want to speak with him, Miss Prescott.”
“But my uncle has nothing to do with this.”
He nodded toward Sadie. “You said she lived with him.”
“She lived at the refuge. As do many women.”
“Many women,” echoed the junior policeman. I was glad to see Nolan give him a warning look.
“The man you need to talk to is Joe McInerny,” I said. “That’s who Sadie was going to meet. He’s hurt her before. He threatened to kill her. Look at her face.” I saw the officer was in no hurry to do so. “Go look. And then tell me if you think that’s the work of anyone but a madman.”
So urged, Officer Nolan had no choice. Stepping carefully—ostensibly to avoid the blood—he gazed at the body a long moment. His expression turned grim, and he yanked his colleague back into place as sentry.
Striding back to me, he said, “You’re going to take me to your uncle.”
Alarmed, I glanced at Mrs. Pickett, who looked satisfied by this demand. “What about Joe McInerny?”
“You know where he lives?” the officer asked.
“Allen, near the park. I don’t know the building.”
“Maybe your uncle does.” He took me by the arm. “Let’s go.”
I removed my arm from his grasp; I would go, but I would not be pulled. “You stay with Sadie,” I told Berthe.
On the walk to the refuge, I offered up a prayer: Let my uncle be home, let my uncle be home, let my uncle be home. Behind me, I could sense the crowd, led by Mrs. Pickett. They followed at a distance as if they were going home as Nolan had told them to. But I knew that when we reached the refuge door, I would stop and so would they. I glanced at Nolan to see if he understood this, but his face told me nothing.
I looked down to see the faint traces of red on the pavement. There was blood on the soles of my shoes; I must have stepped too close. How long before people started to clean the streets? How long before they came for Sadie’s body? Burial, we should think about burial. Did she have family to do it? I could not remember.
Let my uncle be home, please let my uncle be home.
But he was not at home. Instead I was greeted by Sal Karlsson, who broke away from the other women who had stayed downstairs to hear word of Sadie. The punch bowl and plates were still out, the decorations hung on the walls. But the phonograph was silent, the mood of the room fractured and anxious.
Sal began to cry the moment she saw the officer. When she was ten, she had come back from work to find the neighbors gathered outside her home. That’s when she knew this was not ordinary bad, but “something real bad, something you don’t go back from.” The door to her apartment was open, the neighbors clumped together. Everyone, she said, was in the wrong place. She knew before they told her that her mother was dead and her father arrested.
Officer Nolan asked if the reverend was home, and the women slowly shook their heads. My arm around Sal, I said, “He’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”
His eyes stayed on the group of women. “Any of you know where Miss Ellis was going tonight?”
They glanced at one another; the faces went blank, arms folded. Answering a policeman’s questions was not an easy thing. They had been tricked too many times, led into implicating friends or lovers, or sometimes arrested for providing a policeman with a service that, once he was finished, he remembered was illegal. Eyes slid to Ruth Renehan, who was a little older and more assertive than some; she was chosen to speak.
“I think … we all thought … she went to see that Joe she always talked about.”
“That would be Joe McInerny?” Nolan asked me.
“Yes,” I said, thinking he would be halfway to New Jersey at this point.
There was an eruption as the crowd outside began shouting. I heard Mrs. Pickett calling for calm, of all things. Then the door opened and my uncle stepped into the foyer with the words “Jane, why is this door not locked?”
Then he noticed the policeman. “Officer.”
It was my uncle’s habit never to say more than absolutely necessary; he neither asked the reason for the officer’s presence—that would come—nor offered his assistance. I could see Nolan resented it.
Nolan tried to regain the upper hand, saying, “Are you the Reverend Prescott?” My uncle nodded. “Did a young woman named Sadie Ellis reside at this address?”
I thought I saw something flicker in my uncle’s eyes. Not wanting the women to hear the blunt details of Sadie’s death, I said, “Maybe we could continue this conversation upstairs. The hallway isn’t the place.”
My uncle glanced at the women as if he had just noticed they were there. “Yes. Will you come upstairs, Officer?”
When we were in the office with the door shut, I said, “Sadie’s dead, Uncle. She went to meet Joe McInerny, and—”
Officer Nolan didn’t let me finish, asking, “Where were you this evening, Reverend?”
“I am afraid I cannot tell you.”
“Can’t remember?”
“My memory is fine, thank you. No, perhaps I should have said, I will not tell you.”
The officer’s eyes slid in my direction. “If it’s a matter of your niece’s sensibilities…”
“Her presence makes no difference to me,” said my uncle.
My uncle was not a sentimental man, but this was offhand even for him. He was angry, I realized. Angry to be questioned by the police, angry that Sadie had disobeyed, angry that she was dead. Or … angry that it was late and he wished to go to bed, who could tell. But he had to stop this game, and if my leaving would help, so be it.
“I’ll go,” I said. “Then you and the officer can talk.”
“About what?” my uncle wondered as I left the room.
Berthe was back. I found her in the kitchen. The lights were off, but she was kneading dough in the moonlight, throwing it with concentrated rage onto the counter. She did not look up as I came in, but she sniffed harshly and knuckled her eyes to keep back tears. Pulling out a chair, I sat down at the table and pressed the heels of my hands hard into my eyes. Dear God, what McInerny had done to that poor girl.
When had she realized, I wonder? That the man on whom she put all her hopes was going to kill her? She had once said there were two Joes, the nice one who talked sweet and bought her presents, then the other—who you had to be careful
with. The one who snarled at her for the littlest thing, punched her, then hit her again harder when she screamed Don’t. Yes, they would catch Joe, and they would put him in jail or give him the chair and it would all be one big waste.
Berthe’s voice came to me in the darkness. “He’s talking to the police?”
Startled, I said, “I think so. I hope so. Did he tell you where he was going tonight?”
The briefest pause. “No.”
I took a deep breath, gazed at the table’s edge. “He’s not wandering again, is he?”
Berthe turned, I think about to speak. But then Officer Nolan knocked and came through the door. His eyes were bruised, his shoulders slumped, his aspect disappointed. Some policemen trifled with their job, thinking their mere presence—drunk or sober—deterred crime. But if you did not think that way, policing would be a thankless, heartbreaking task.
“Would you like some coffee, Officer?”
“No.” Manners beget manners, and he added, “But thank you.”
“My uncle told you where he was, I hope. I would imagine it was Mrs. Emmeline Roberts or maybe Mr.…” The name did not come, and I was left gaping.
“No. He wouldn’t tell me.” He took a seat at the table, glancing briefly toward the window to see the crowd still gathered outside, as if he did not relish having to walk through them when he left.
“Joe McInerny,” he said. “What can you tell me?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “The only jobs Sadie ever mentioned him having were ones he’d lost. Docks, factory work, a tannery, I think. He didn’t sound like a man who got on well with others.” The officer grunted, familiar with the type. “She said it made more sense for her to work; it was easier for her.”
“Can you remember any of the places he worked?” I shook my head. “What he looks like?”
I looked to Berthe, who said, “Short, blue eyes. Bald. Bandy legs. Puts you in mind of those fighting dogs they bet on.”
I added, “Carrie Biel—she was a friend of Sadie’s. She might know more about him.”
“Is she here now?”
Death of an American Beauty Page 4