“The man you mentioned earlier. Can’t say that I have.”
“He works for Chick Tricker. Tonight at the Acme, I saw him assault a woman.”
“You’ve got no business being in a place like that.”
My presence anywhere was hardly the point. But I wanted to stay on Bill Danvers.
“It’s in Chick Tricker’s interest that the refuge close. If women have nowhere safe to go, they’ll be more frightened and more docile. Danvers works for him, even as he pretends to be an ally of Mrs. Pickett’s. Isn’t that odd behavior?”
“Odd behavior.” Officer Nolan gestured to two men across the street, drunkenly circling each other with broken bottles; every so often, one lunged at the other and stumbled.
“I think it’s Danvers’s job to keep the women in line. Why else would he stand on the street all day with the likes of Clementine Pickett, unless Chick Tricker was paying him to? Doesn’t it stand to reason that Sadie and Carrie were killed as a warning: You can quit, but we will find you?”
“Did either woman know Mr. Danvers?”
“Sadie did, but not Carrie.”
“Then why didn’t anybody hear screams tonight?”
“It’s the Lower East Side. People ignore screaming all the time.”
“They ignore brawls, couples fighting. Screams for help, screams of terror—that they usually remember. I talked to a lot of people in the area. No one heard a thing. Your man doesn’t sound like the type to inspire trust.”
I considered. “Maybe he took them somewhere. It looked to me like Carrie had been moved. There wasn’t nearly as much blood as there was with Sadie.”
“But Sadie was killed where we found her. And I think it was by someone she thought she had no reason to fear.”
“Officer Nolan, my uncle is not young. Sadie and Carrie were healthy young women, not easily overpowered.”
“They wouldn’t necessarily have to be overpowered, not if approached by a man they trusted. We think…”
He hesitated, not wanting to share grisly details with a young woman, then realized the young woman had already seen everything he had seen.
“We think he cut the throats first,” he said shortly. “Everything else came afterward.”
I said a quiet prayer of thanks that neither woman had suffered too much. But it made me think of another point in my uncle’s favor.
“The man who killed them, he would have had blood all over him, wouldn’t he?”
“Nearby, you’ve got tanneries, slaughterhouses, butcher shops. How many times have you passed a man with blood down his front and not thought twice, Miss Prescott?”
“But you saw my uncle’s clothes were perfectly clean the night Sadie was killed.”
“I also saw he had a bag with him. Not so hard to bring a change of clothes, then dispose of the rest.”
“And he changed in the middle of the Bowery with not a single witness?”
“Plenty of dark, secret spots in the city, Miss Prescott. Unfortunately for Carrie Biel and Sadie Ellis.”
I couldn’t tell if he meant to have an answer for every objection I raised as a matter of professional pride or whether he truly believed my uncle was guilty.
“And are you looking for Sadie’s stocking and Carrie’s bracelet?”
He looked wary. “Why do you ask?”
“Carrie Biel had a rope bracelet. It was left her by her father, and she never took it off. I saw her with it the day she died, but it was gone when we found her body. It’s not the sort of thing anyone would have stolen; it had no value. And surely you noticed one of Sadie’s stockings was missing.”
He shook his head.
“Well, it was. It was black, darned in two places. Just the sort of thing Danvers would show Chick Tricker to prove he’d done the job.”
We were at the refuge. Standing by the front steps, I thought it had grown much colder.
“The day after Sadie was killed, someone called the refuge. He said he knew I was—‘coming after him’ was the way he put it. And that if I came after him, he’d come after me. Earlier that day, I accused Bill Danvers of talking to Sadie. I think he took it that I was accusing him of her murder.”
“Were you?”
“I wasn’t then. I am now.”
His shoulders slumped. I was making more work for him—in his eyes, for nothing—and I wondered: Did he really care if Sadie and Carrie’s killer was caught?
I said, “You must get tired.”
“In what way?”
“You catch one criminal, there’s always another. Or he gets out. When does Joe McInerny get out?” I knew I sounded childish and discouraging. But I felt childish. And discouraged. And scared.
“I like to think of it as one less,” he said, his tone apologetic.
“I’m sorry, I must sound brattish and ungrateful. But I can’t help feeling somehow the killer’s already gotten away with it. Just by doing it. Carrie and Sadie, they can’t ever get their … selves back. Their faces, they … I’m not making any sense. I just feel that’s why he did it.”
“What do you mean?”
“To make them look like he wanted. Turn them into things. Good night, Officer. Thank you again. I hope I will see my uncle back here tomorrow?” Today, I thought. It was already today.
“I hope so, too, Miss Prescott. You let us handle this.”
“He’s the only family I have in the world, Officer Nolan. I don’t think I can do that.”
“Well, there’s not much you can do.”
Gentle. Patronizing. I smiled politely. But he was wrong. There was something I could do.
I could find Otelia Brooks.
10
I had decided to find Otelia Brooks. But I did not have the first idea of how. One woman in a city of five million. A woman known to only one other person I knew, and he refused to help me. Not to mention, a woman who would probably rather not be found.
She would not have stayed on the Lower East Side, I felt sure of that. Having been attacked, she would probably want to go to a neighborhood where she would not be conspicuous. In the neighborhood where I worked, Otelia Brooks would have been conspicuous. Ten years ago, she might have found work in service; now the fashion was for immigrants—the paler, the more preferred. And while the Tenderloin was home to poor people of all colors, I could not quite see her there. She had too many skills, too large a sense of purpose—her path.
Where had that path taken her?
I had to discount the possibility that she had returned to Mississippi. The trip would have required money, and she had said she brought everything she cared about when she came north. I didn’t remember her as a woman who went back, only forward. She had named the cotillion for Southern Baptists, but that may or may not have been her personal faith. Looking in the telephone directory, I found nothing under Brooks.
There were two neighborhoods where I could imagine a skilled seamstress and hairdresser might have set up shop: San Juan Hill in the low Sixties and the top of the Tenderloin in the low Fifties, where poverty was giving way to more middle-class families. I wandered San Juan Hill for a pointless hour—unnerving several people by gazing too long or peeking in salon windows. Then I made my way down to Fifty-Third Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, a stretch known as Black Bohemia, where famous musicians, actors, dancers, and writers gathered. I had a perfectly good reason for going; it made sense that Otelia Brooks might have found work as a dresser in a theater. I also had a selfish reason for going. I wanted to see the Marshall Hotel.
Located in two brownstones at 127 and 129 West Fifty-Third, the Marshall Hotel was the gathering place for the fashionable and theatrical who were not allowed in the city’s white establishments. Both a hotel and a club, it was said to have the best live shows in the city. Bert Williams and George Walker had played there. The bandleader James Reese Europe stayed there when he was in town. So did the Johnson Brothers. It wasn’t inconceivable, I thought, that one of them might take a stroll just as I
was passing by.
But as I loitered outside, the only man to join me was a man carrying a bucket of water and a broom. Setting the bucket down, he set to sweeping away the refuse of last night’s revelers. He did the work with minimal fuss, and I imagined this was just one of a hundred jobs he did at the hotel.
After a moment, I got up the nerve to say, “Excuse me, may I ask you a question?”
“No, I don’t know Mr. Williams, and I’ll be sure to tell Mrs. Castle you think she’s wonderful.”
“I’m so sorry. I’m actually looking for a woman called Otelia Brooks.”
“Haven’t heard of her. Dancer?”
“Maybe a dresser. Hairstylist?”
He shook his head with a smile, experienced in disappointing people. “And I know most people who work around here.”
“I’m sure. Thank you anyway.”
“My pleasure.”
Before leaving I gazed up at the building, imagining what it would be like to listen to Europe’s band or see the Castles dance.
Then I heard, “You better get in quick if you want to see it. They’re trying to close us down.”
“Why?” Many of the city’s clubs were vermin-infested firetraps, but not the Marshall. Florenz Ziegfeld went there, for heaven’s sake.
“Apparently, we’re ‘disorderly.’”
Thinking of the many saloons and clubs on the Lower East Side for whom “disorderly” would be high praise, I said, “I’m sure they’ll never close it down.”
“Well, as long as you’re sure.”
I turned to go, then impulsively turned back. “You’ve never met Mr. Joplin, have you?”
“A few times. I hear he’s working on an opera.”
“Opera?”
“That seems to be most people’s reaction. Have a good day, miss.”
Armed with the dispiriting awareness that I had wasted time—and that Scott Joplin had turned to opera—I walked to the trolley stop. How did people find people when they could not afford private detectives? I didn’t know.
But, I realized, I did know someone who might. And his offices were only a mile away.
When I presented myself at the Herald, the gentleman at the front desk said, “Oh, no. I remember you. I’m under orders: you don’t get upstairs.”
For a moment I was dumbfounded. Then I remembered I had been guilty of a lapse in decorum the last time I was here.
“I promise you, I only want to place an advertisement.”
The gentleman gestured to a security guard, who started walking toward me with purpose. Pointing to the phone, I said, “Will you please call Michael Behan and tell him I’m here? Miss Jane Prescott.” I put my hands up, said to the security guard, “I’ll stay right here.”
Given a choice between lethargy and exertion, the guard found the former more attractive and sank back into his chair. A few minutes later, Michael Behan came trotting down the stairs. “Good work, Jim, keeping this madwoman out. I’ll show her the door.”
I protested as he took my arm, but under his breath, he said, “Don’t.”
When we were outside, he said, “Harry Knowles took a tumble last night after doing a lengthy interview in Murphy’s Saloon. Knocked out two teeth. The Herald accepts a certain level of inebriation in its staff, but he’s pushing it. So he’s implying it happened when you took after him with the rolled newspaper, calling you a menace and a danger to the free press.”
“Does that mean I can knock out two more teeth?”
“It does not. Now, what’s this about an ad?”
“I need to find a woman named Otelia Brooks.”
When I had explained who she was and why I wanted to find her, Behan asked, “And you want to place an ad? Saying what?”
Between dancing and my uncle’s arrest, I had had very little sleep and was not thinking clearly. Wanted: One Otelia Brooks. Or anyone with knowledge of her whereabouts. No, it wasn’t likely to get much of a response.
This was also Michael Behan’s opinion, although he put it gently. Then he said, “Anyway, the Herald’s probably not the paper they read.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, just like Il Progresso or Der Amerikaner, they’ve got their own papers.”
There was something odd about his explanation; Il Progresso or Der Amerikaner existed for readers who didn’t speak English. Otelia Brooks spoke English perfectly well. But then so did the Irish, most of the time, and they had their own papers, too.
“What are their papers?”
“There’s one I remember takes ads. Called…” He snapped his fingers. “… Street name, called it after the place he lives. Amsterdam News.”
“All right. Thank you.”
That was the end of it, I knew. But I didn’t want it to be the end. I wanted to sit down—fall down, actually—on a bench in wretched Herald Square and talk until breath ran out. I wanted to tell Michael Behan about Carrie, how it felt to see her last night. Wanted to ask all the questions I hadn’t dared ask myself: What was my uncle hiding? How could Sadie’s and Carrie’s lives be over, just when they were starting fresh? What kind of animal did this to women?
He broke into my thoughts to say, “I was sorry to hear about the young woman who got killed last night.”
I stared at him. “How did you know about that?”
He pulled a newspaper out of his coat pocket. “Early edition.”
Taking it, I read:
SECOND WOMAN FOUND SLAIN OUTSIDE REFUGE REVEREND CALLED IN FOR QUESTIONING BY POLICE
In the early hours, a scream rang out on the East Side as the body of a second young woman was discovered outside the Gorman Refuge. The victim, Carrie Biel, was a resident of the refuge.
Was, I thought. Not had been. Convenient grammatical error.
Like the previous victim, Miss Biel had been killed with a slash to the throat. Her face was hideously disfigured …
I read just enough to know that Harry Knowles had either seen poor Carrie himself or spoken to someone who had.
Witnesses report seeing Miss Biel in the company of the Reverend Tewin Prescott earlier that evening. The two were heard arguing on the street, with Miss Biel repeatedly telling the Reverend Prescott to stop molesting her. One resident overheard the dead woman say, “Take your hands off me.”
Feeling in the neighborhood is running high. In an effort to maintain calm, the authorities brought the controversial clergyman in for questioning late last night.
I crumpled up the paper and threw it on the ground.
“I’m sorry,” said Behan.
I thought to say, You tell Harry Knowles that if he comes within a mile of me, it won’t be just teeth he’ll lose. But threats weren’t going to stop these articles or get my uncle out of jail, and neither was lolling around on park benches with Michael Behan.
“Amsterdam News.”
“Amsterdam News,” he confirmed. “Just moved their offices to Harlem.”
* * *
When my first employer, Mrs. Armslow, became bedridden, her relatives, hopeful of postmortem bounty, would come to visit her. One of the chief topics of conversation was the history of their celebrated family, especially its follies. The story of Walter Armslow was a favorite, often reducing the gathering to helpless laughter and gasps of “But the cows!” A gentleman farmer by aspiration, Walter had bought property by the Harlem River and started a dairy farm. He had the novel approach of choosing livestock by attractiveness rather than ability to give milk, and his farm prospered accordingly. The cows were charming to look at and came in handy whenever Walter—a history buff—decided to reenact Washington’s victory and needed docile Redcoats to chase. The story of Walter charging a herd of bovine British soldiers across the plains of Harlem, waving a saber and shouting, “For liberty!” was a cherished family memory, even for those who had never witnessed it. Sadly, the crash of 1873 had acted on the farm much as the returning Redcoats had acted on Harlem, demolishing it entirely. Which, as the Armslows pointed out,
was just as well because once the IRT extended its line, Italians had come, and Jews—“taking advantage of misfortune the way they always do”—and Walter certainly could not have stayed through that. Opera House by Oscar Hammerstein or no Opera House.
But if the neighborhood’s boom-and-bust fortunes were woe to the Armslows, they were an opportunity to Philip Payton Jr., who saw desolate landlords unable to lure tenants and so founded the Afro-American Realty Company. Attracted by the chance to live in homes with marble fireplaces and actual closets, people began moving uptown. White newspapers had sorrowfully predicted that Mr. Payton’s success would mean the downfall of the neighborhood. Some stores closed rather than serve the new arrivals. John G. Taylor, who had made his fortune in saloons, had launched a Save Your Property campaign, demanding that the elevated be resegregated and that a fence should be built along 136th Street to keep out the “colored invasion.” But it hadn’t worked, and so far as I could see, Harlem was thriving. As I came off the train, I was surrounded by voices—Jewish, Italian, Spanish, West Indian, and southern. Some familiar, some new, and for a moment I stood, just listening.
It was still a place where mansions on the west butted up against the coal-dust-covered shacks on the east. But attractive six-story apartment buildings now lined pleasingly wide boulevards, their window boxes filled with geranium and tomato plants. Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages sped down to the Riverside Drive Viaduct. In 1911, the Polo Grounds—where no polo had ever been played to my knowledge—had burned down. But they had been rebuilt in time for the Giants to win the pennant, as they always seemed to. Businesses flourished along 135th Street, where signs for Italian tailors and kosher butchers vied with newer dress shops and cafés. Nickelodeons crowded 125th Street. On a single street corner, I saw three men standing on soapboxes, surrounded by crowds. One was talking about slavery, another socialism, the third the French Revolution. As they spoke, other men handed out literature.
When the people moved uptown, their chroniclers followed. As Michael Behan had said, the majority of city newspapers dutifully recorded the births, weddings, and deaths of many of its citizens. But black lives were seldom seen on their pages. The New York Times did note the passing of Edward Sharps, negro, who claimed to be 123 years old. The outrages in the South sometimes found their way into the news. The speeches of Booker T. Washington were duly noted. But when Aida Walker, the Queen of the Cakewalk, performed her celebrated interpretation of Salome or sixteen-year-old R. W. Overton of Stuyvesant High School won the long-distance record for model aeroplanes in greater New York—greater New York took no notice.
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