The memory sickened her. The girl wasn’t a toy, she’d had a name—Maria—a mother and father, maybe a sister. She leaned for a moment against the side of the empty Kansas Cyclone building, trying not to think that Henry might be a murderer, trying not to throw up.
Outside the Cyclone’s utility room she paused again before ducking inside. She made her way past mops and stacks of empty film cans, until she found the metal sink that occupied most of one wall. She turned on the cold-water tap—there was no hot water—and grabbed the sliver of harsh carbolic soap she kept hidden. She stripped and hauled herself into the sink, which was deep enough to serve as a bathtub. She covered the drain with one foot, gasping at the cold water. When it reached her knees, she crouched and washed herself, trying not to lose the bit of soap. Her chest stung where the awful elastic truss had chafed it, but the water felt wonderful against her sore skin. She let the dirty water drain, filled the sink again, and washed her hair.
At last she clambered out. She retrieved her once-white shirt, scrubbed it vigorously with the soap, and did the same thing with her socks, which were so filthy she was glad she couldn’t see them.
Finally, she wrung out her shirt and socks and stood, dripping, to savor the novelty of being clean. With a sigh she pulled on her trousers, grabbed the wet shirt and socks and her shoes. She nudged the door open and stood warily, listening, before stepping back into the alley.
For a few seconds she stood there, bare chested and exhilarated, all the tiny hairs on her arms stirring. Her nipples tingled where the warm air touched them, and for the first time she was aware of her breasts not as cankers that ached and burned beneath a filthy elastic band but as part of her body, as bound to her as her hands and feet. She touched one nipple, half expecting lightning to jolt from it as punishment. But of course nothing happened.
What would it be like to live like this? Boys and men did it every day, swimming or stripping off their shirts if they were workmen. They never needed someone else to button them into their clothes, never needed someone to peel off their dresses like dead snakeskin. Their heads didn’t ache beneath straw nests heaped with plumes and fake flowers and entire dead birds. They didn’t have to pile their hair atop their heads like another hat, clamped in place by metal combs.
Men could shave their faces and even their heads as often as they pleased—twice a day in New York City, according to Max. They could shuck their clothes as easily as they shucked their jobs. Even a Negro man could do up his own clothes, except when he had to do up some white man’s first.
She started at the sound of voices—male voices, somewhere near the Lagoon—and quickly headed for the shack. Her exhilaration faded: All she wanted to do was sleep. All she wanted was to be back on the horsehair sofa in Lenore’s apartment with Abriana’s arms around her as they huddled beneath the scratchy wool blanket and their mother whispered at them to hush, she still had work to do, she couldn’t hear herself think why couldn’t they just…
“Pin!”
Her mother stood in the doorway, her face pale and eyes red, lips stained by the patent medicine she drank when she was restless. “Pin, where in God’s name were you? Are you—”
“I’m fine, Ma. I’m just fine,” Pin yelled, and pushed past her into the shack, so her mother wouldn’t see she was crying.
Chapter 61
FRANCIS WAS RELIEVED to see that Gilda Belascu’s parents were no longer among the crowd inside the station house. He saw no sign of Cabell or any reporters. Thank God for small favors, he thought. Most of the Riverview force was there, along with at least a dozen men from Robey Street. At the desk, O’Connell looked up wearily.
“Bacon. Thought you went home.”
“I need to talk to Hickey.” O’Connell sighed and cocked a thumb toward Hickey’s office. “Are the girl’s parents with him?”
“Nope. Someone from St. Procopius came for them, that Bohemian church on the South Side. But the coroner’s in there—”
Francis thanked him and hurried down the hall, where several of Cabell’s men stood chatting in a cloud of cigar smoke.
“Sergeant Bacon,” one of them called. “How’s the freak show?”
Francis ignored him. He rapped at Hickey’s door, didn’t wait for a reply before entering. Hickey was slumped behind his desk, with Dr. Phipps, the Cook County coroner, seated across from him.
“Francis,” said Hickey, bleary eyed. Rusty stubble shaded his jaw; he appeared more haggard than Francis had ever seen him. “Why the hell are you here?”
Francis held up the open notebook and set it in front of Hickey. “Read that.”
Hickey glanced at the page. “‘Hellgate.’” He looked up. “What is this?”
“Go to the beginning,” Francis urged him. He turned to acknowledge Dr. Phipps, a melancholy, reedlike man with a wispy mustache, black hair parted neatly in the middle, and small keen eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses.
Dr. Phipps nodded in response. “I remember you from the city force. We met after that row at the Shamrock when the Irishman took a knife to his brother’s throat. You were a detective then—Bacon, right?”
“That would be correct,” said Francis.
Hickey started thumbing through the book. His expression grew even more grim. “Shut that door,” he ordered Francis. “And lock it.”
Francis pulled a chair up alongside Phipps and watched as Hickey continued to flip through the notebook’s pages. The room was unpleasantly warm, air and furniture alike permeated by the smoke from Hickey’s cigars, one of which smoldered in the large marble ashtray on the captain’s desk. It was not until Francis removed his derby and ran a finger beneath his collar, loosening it, that he noticed the small form, now covered with a white sheet, still laid out in the back of the room.
“Francis.” Hickey held the notebook at arm’s length, as though it were on fire. “Where did you find this? What is it?”
“The Gypsy fortune-teller on the Pike. One of her customers left it yesterday.”
“How did you come by it?”
“I dropped by her booth this afternoon to ask her out to dinner. I noticed it and said I’d bring it by here, to be kept with the lost items.”
“And you waited till now to do that?”
“I didn’t read it until a few minutes ago. I returned to question her, then came here straightaway.”
Hickey scanned the pages again. “Who is this woman? How do you know it’s not hers?”
“Her name’s Gina Maffucci. She never looked inside it.”
“How do you know that?”
Francis’s jaw tightened in irritation. “Because she would have told me if she had.”
Hickey stared at the notebook. “Maffucci. She’s the mother of the boy who found the body?”
“The boy had nothing to do with it. She said the man who left it was white, thirty-five or thereabouts. Boater hat and seersucker suit, clean shaven. He sounds like the same man her son described going into Hell Gate with the Walewski girl.”
“May I?” broke in Dr. Phipps. At Hickey’s nod, he leaned across the table, picked up the notebook, and slowly read through it. Francis sank back in his chair, regretting that he’d mentioned Gina at all.
“He’s describing various murders.” Dr. Phipps looked at Francis, then Hickey. “But the man who wrote these—he sounds quite calm. Businesslike. There’s no frenzy.”
Hickey frowned. “Meaning?”
“I don’t know.” Phipps spoke with care. “I would say that he has a very disordered mind—it’s like he’s writing a grocery list, describing the order in which these events occurred. He seems preoccupied with burying people alive. Not just people—”
He licked a finger and turned several pages. “Here he mentions walling up a cat. He sounds quite demented.”
“Who’s to say the boy didn’t write this?” demanded Hickey. “He claims to have discovered the Walewski girl’s body, but he may have killed her. The mother might be trying to protect him.”
Francis’s face darkened, but before he could reply, Dr. Phipps broke in.
“What about Mr. Smithson? He’s still being held at Robey Street, am I correct?” He waved his hand, indicating the sheet-covered body. “This proves his innocence.”
“One would think so,” said Hickey. “But what if we have two killers now, and not just one?”
Dr. Phipps winced. “God forbid.”
Hickey held out his hand, and Phipps returned the notebook. “Show Mr. Bacon what you found.”
The coroner stood and walked to the back of the room, motioning for Francis to join him. The girl’s underclothes had been neatly folded and set on a chair beside a black leather medical bag.
“I told the undertaker I’d oversee delivery of the body myself when we were finished.” Dr. Phipps gently pulled down the white sheet, as though unwilling to awaken a sleeping child. “I wanted to compare it with the Walewski girl.”
There lay Gilda Belascu, black hair fanned around her face. Her skin had the bluish pallor of skim milk. Her lips had a darker, purple tinge. Francis glanced at Dr. Phipps. “Did she—was she killed the same way as the other girl?”
“Yes. Or, well, in a similar manner. She was suffocated, probably by a hand or piece of cloth, but also there are signs of strangulation. The other girl didn’t put up a fight. Gilda Belascu did.”
“Why?” Francis frowned. “I mean, why wouldn’t the other girl have fought, too?”
“I’m not certain. For whatever reason, Maria Walewski doesn’t appear to have struggled. She was asphyxiated—smothered—and in both cases, the girls’ outer clothing was removed. Their dresses and pinafores. But Gilda—”
He picked up the girl’s pale hand, turning it so that Francis could see what looked like dirt under her ragged fingernails. “She scratched him. Quite badly, I imagine—this is blood.”
Francis grimaced as the coroner pulled a slender metal rod from his pocket and pointed at one of the girl’s nails. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she bit him, too. She put up quite a fight, this brave little girl,” Dr. Phipps murmured. “That’s why there’s more evidence of trauma to her windpipe and throat.”
“Yet no one heard this?” Francis shook his head. “Where the hell was Paterno?”
Captain Hickey bristled. “One sergeant in a theater that accommodates a thousand people? Paterno’s job is to keep kids from sneaking in. The usher might have prevented this, if he hadn’t been shooting craps in a storage room.”
“This is what I find most interesting,” said Dr. Phipps.
He opened his medical bag and withdrew a small, flat wooden box, opened it to remove a pair of tweezers, and reached into his pocket for a stoppered glass vial. He prized the cork loose and tilted the vial, using the tweezers to grasp something inside it.
“Here.” He moved to the end of the table where Gilda lay, and from another pocket removed a small square of black cloth. He smoothed this onto the table and beckoned Francis to come closer. “Take a look. I’ve already shown the captain.”
Dr. Phipps opened the tweezers, and something dropped onto the cloth. Francis stooped to scrutinize what resembled a bead of hardened pine resin, murky yellow, the size and roughly the same shape as a beetle’s carapace. He looked up at the coroner.
“What is it?”
“A lemon drop. I found it lodged in the back of her throat.” Dr. Phipps used the tweezers to pick it up again and held it out to Francis. “Smell it.”
Francis complied. It smelled of lemons, but also something he couldn’t place. “Do you think she might have choked on this?”
“No.” The coroner dropped the lozenge back inside the vial and corked it. Turning to Gilda Belascu’s corpse, he pointed at her lips.
“See how her mouth has turned purple? I thought at first that was because she’d been smothered. Blood pooling in her lips and face. But after I found the lemon drop, I checked again, and…”
He lowered his head to sniff delicately at the dead child’s mouth, then gestured for Francis to do the same. “You’re a detective. Tell me what you think.”
Francis leaned down until his face almost grazed the dead girl’s. A distinct odor of something sweet hung about her mouth. It reminded him of cherry compote. He looked at Dr. Phipps. “Another kind of candy? Ice cream?”
“No. It’s some kind of anodyne syrup. The government’s outlawed them, but they still end up on the market because some pharmacists refuse to pull them from their shelves. The chemical agents are always a form of opium—codeine, morphine. Sometimes chloral hydrate or chloroform.”
“You think she was poisoned?”
“I think she was doped, and Maria Walewski as well. I noted the same purple hue in her lips, but I mistakenly attributed it to the fact that she’d been in the water. Maria’s parents have already taken possession of her body, so there’s no way for me to be certain now. But I think the killer did the same thing with both children—gave them candy treated with some kind of opiate elixir.”
“Were they both—” Francis looked away from the girl’s body. “Were they interfered with?”
Phipps nodded. “He kept their dresses. Perhaps he feared they could be used as evidence. He may not have intended to kill them—he might have panicked. I’ve seen that before. Women killed by their husbands, what starts out as one thing ends as something else.”
“He’s not panicked.” Francis turned to Hickey. “Haven’t you told him about the other? The girl in Boston?”
Hickey shook his head. “He’s only just finished his examination. And it still seems too odd a coincidence.”
“You need to tell him now.”
Phipps tugged the sheet back over Gilda’s face, pulled out a chair, and sat. “You tell me, Mr. Bacon.”
Francis did. When he finished, Dr. Phipps tapped a cigarette from a silver case and lit it. He smoked thoughtfully, at last said, “Two young girls murdered at the same attraction at two different amusement parks, hundreds of miles apart. You’re right, Mr. Bacon. This certainly doesn’t sound like someone operating out of panic. And the notebook doesn’t suggest that, either. Is Captain Cabell aware of this other killing? The commissioner?”
“I informed Cabell,” said Hickey. “I have no idea whether he told the commissioner yet. I doubt it. He sure will tell him now that there’s been another murder. But you know they’ll do whatever they can to keep the parks open. Not just Riverview, all the parks—White City, Bismarck Garden. They don’t want a panic.”
“Amusement parks.” Dr. Phipps made a face. “I can’t stand them. All that noise! And they’re the perfect vectors for disease, especially for children.”
“The streets aren’t safer,” said Hickey. “In summertime, with two hundred thousand kids out of school? Vagrants everywhere, and half those kids’ parents don’t know what they get up to. Look at the Paroubek girl. And that other one last year—the Gypsy girl. And there was another girl the year before that.”
“Perhaps this would be a good time to reopen those investigations,” suggested Phipps.
“There’s nothing to investigate. Gyppo girls run away, and I don’t blame them. What’s waiting for them if they stay?”
“One of those girls was Italian, not a Gypsy,” said Francis.
“Does it matter?” Hickey ground out his cigar in the ashtray. “Here at least the children have some supervision. And a twenty-man police force.”
Phipps exhaled a plume of grey smoke. “Better train them to do more than watch for boys sneaking into the nickelodeon. These murders are in Cabell’s jurisdiction, so God help us all, we may be murdered ourselves.” The coroner’s disdain for the Robey Street captain was well known. He leaned over to tap his cigarette against Hickey’s ashtray. “How’s Mr. Baumgarten taking this?”
“As you might imagine,” said Hickey. “But I agree with him—closing
the park will do more harm than good. Panicky mothers, bad publicity…remember Holmes and the world’s fair?”
“Like it was yesterday. I was still in medical school, I assisted on several of the examinations of the victims. Worst thing I ever saw, until Eastland last month.”
Hickey nodded. “Another reason we don’t want to close the park—there’s been enough terrible news this summer. Working people need someplace to enjoy themselves.”
“Yes, but someplace safe,” countered Francis.
“Safe?” Hickey gazed at Francis as though he were a truculent boy. “What’s safe, Francis, when you have a lunatic strangling children? Last night Baumgarten told me to go ahead and hire up to twenty independent security men. Bring in the Pinkertons if we can. Wasserman was here, too—Baumgarten’s agreed to put up a thousand-dollar reward.”
“Who’s Wasserman?” asked Phipps.
“The park’s press agent—James Wasserman.” Hickey leaned heavily back in his chair. “Tomorrow we’ll open and operate as usual. Baumgarten wants enough men on patrol that people feel safe, but not so many that it keeps everyone from enjoying themselves. So there’ll be new hires here at Riverview, and a rotation of plainclothesmen from the city force. And some overtime for you, Francis, and everyone else.”
He turned to the coroner. “I hope the same won’t be true for you, Dr. Phipps.”
Francis fought to keep his voice even. “If the park’s open, Captain, you’ll be inviting the fox right back into the henhouse.”
“I’m well aware of that. But who’s to say he hasn’t already moved on?”
“He may well have,” agreed Dr. Phipps. “Two killings within two days? It’s unusual in my experience. If this is the same man who murdered that girl back East, he waited four years before killing Maria Walewski and the Belascu girl. He may have committed other murders during those four years, but if he did, they weren’t in amusement parks. If they had been, we’d know about them.
“And he’s not necessarily a vagrant,” Phipps continued. “He might be a professional man, like Dr. Holmes. Or a salesman who could arrive and leave town without attracting notice. He could be someone who works in this park. A member of the police force, for instance,” he ended dryly.
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