“What name did he give?” Geoffrey asked.
“Vincent Reynolds. He didn’t look like a Vincent, and he wasn’t no Reynolds neither.”
“How do you know?”
“Only Swede boys has that kind of yellow hair. Thick like summer hay. Blue eyes, too. I reckon he took him a walk through a graveyard and picked a name he liked off a tombstone.”
“What else can you tell us, Mama?” Ned scribbled in his notebook.
“He’s in Bellevue, stretched out naked on a slab.”
The pencil he was writing with fell out of Ned’s hand onto the floor.
“They hauled him out of the river a couple of days ago. Head all smashed in and enough knife holes to make him look like a pincushion. So I was told.”
“Who did it?” Ned knew there was always speculation on the street. And if the victim had been stupid enough to venture onto gang territory, the body would be marked.
“Nobody knows,” Mama Oshia said. “He’s going into a pauper’s trench on Hart Island, so nobody much cares.” She blew out the black candle she’d lit before the small altar and handed Ned the corn husk doll propped up there. “Cain’t use ’em but once.”
“Did you ever hear Reynolds’s name linked to an uptown jewelry store?” Geoffrey asked. With someone like Mama Oshia, unless you came up with exactly the right questions, the information you were looking for stayed locked away forever.
“They’s a sweeper boy claims to have seen Reynolds up around Eighteenth Street,” Mama Oshia said.
“Is that all?”
“Rumor has it the boy was keeping an eye on him for the Broken Fingers Gang. Your Mister Reynolds had a debt to work off.”
“Will they talk to us?” Geoffrey asked.
“Not unless you want a knife in the gullet.” Ned Hayes cut off Mama Oshia before she could answer.
“You got that right,” she said. “Whatever he was into, your dead man was at the bottom of the heap. Not making enough to carry him out of the Five Points, and with that squint, he wasn’t never goin’ to make it. Too easy to recognize. It didn’t take you long to find out about him, did it?”
“Nobody on Mulberry Street would own up to knowing him,” Geoffrey said.
“Wouldn’t expect them to. Not in daylight. Sooner or later somebody would have slipped you a word, but not while there was anybody around to hear it.”
“When are you going home, Mama?” Ned asked. It was a question he’d been raising for years.
“Not till I find my girl,” she answered. “I didn’t come all this far and stay as long as I have to go back empty-handed.”
“She might not be where you can get at her,” Ned said gently. Meaning that the grieving voodoo woman’s daughter was more likely dead than alive.
“I know that, Mister Ned. But it don’t make no difference. Like I said, I ain’t going home without her. One way or the other.”
* * *
Danny Dennis collared the sweeper boy as soon as he ran full tilt around the corner and nearly into Mr. Washington’s broad hindquarters. Grabbing him by the back of his jacket, he slung him against the hansom cab’s tall spoked wheel and held him there until the boy gave up and ceased struggling.
“I didn’t do nothing, Mister Dennis,” he protested.
“You followed us down here,” Danny said. “Don’t try to deny it.”
“I just wanted to find out why you was asking about the yellow-haired fellow with the squint.”
That was a bald-faced lie. He already knew. “Talk to me, boy. You don’t want Mr. Washington here stepping on you.”
The boy took one horrified look at the size of the white horse’s steel shoes and began blubbering. He squirmed and hiccupped and blurted out everything he knew until Danny Dennis was satisfied he’d get no more out of him. “Next time I see you, it better be with a broom in your hands.”
“Yessir. I promise. Yessir.”
“He didn’t know much more than he’d already told me,” Danny told Geoffrey and Ned. He would have given a lot to have been able to follow them to Mama Oshia’s, but the danger to Mr. Washington had been too great. The deeper you got into the Five Points, the less likely it was you’d come out alive. And healthy horse meat was too tempting for a determined gang of starving street urchins to resist. “He knows Reynolds went back and forth from this area to Carpenter’s store and that he must have been working there. Odd hours, nothing regular. But that’s all he could figure out. I did the best I could with him, but I think the chances are good he was telling the truth.”
“He didn’t seem to know the man is dead?” Geoffrey asked.
“Dead?”
“Mama Oshia says he’s lying on a table in the Bellevue morgue.”
“Timmy is the sweeper boy’s name. I’d lay odds he had no idea.”
“Our dead man went by the name of Vincent Reynolds,” Ned said. “Not his real name, of course.”
Danny Dennis unfastened Mr. Washington’s feed bag. He knew where Mr. Hunter would tell him to go next.
CHAPTER 8
Vincent Reynolds’s body waited to be released from the Bellevue morgue and loaded aboard a barge that carried deceased indigents to the Potter’s Field burial pits of Hart Island.
“Day after tomorrow,” the morgue assistant told Geoffrey and Ned. “Friday.”
“Is that a regular run?” Geoffrey asked. He realized he’d never given much thought to where the bodies of those who couldn’t pay for burial plots in cemeteries ended up. Potter’s Field, yes, but he guessed that most New Yorkers knew nothing about the mechanics of getting them there. And couldn’t have cared less.
“Regular as clockwork. They pile up, you know, and we’re always strapped for space.”
“We’d like to see the body.” Ned Hayes slipped a generous bribe into the attendant’s outstretched hand. He’d learned long ago that coins were more persuasive than arguments. On the force or off it, money greased the wheels that made the system run.
Vincent Reynolds had been in the debris-choked water of the East River for at least a day and a night before being pulled out. His skin was pallid with death, leached of blood, and puckered into fine wrinkles by the long soak. The fish had gotten to what remained of his face after a heavy, blunt object shattered and rearranged the bones into a horror mask facsimile of human features. They could just make out the heavy droop of one eyelid—the squint everyone who described him had mentioned. The other eye was missing. But the thick yellow hair was undamaged, matted with tiny bits of debris, stiff and straight as a board.
“The body hasn’t been washed,” Geoffrey commented.
“Enough so’s the doc could certify the cause of death,” the attendant said, pointing to crimped slashes on the torso where river mud had been scrubbed off. “Eleven stab wounds. Count ’em, if you want to.” Ned’s generosity had put him in an expansive mood.
“Do you still have the clothes he was wearing?” Ned asked.
The hand came out again. Ned complied.
“They usually sell the clothes for whatever they can get unless there’s family to notice and object,” Ned told Geoffrey as the attendant disappeared into another room.
Geoffrey handed over the loose bills he kept in his pocket. “This should be enough.”
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to try to make him unrecognizable.” Ned added more bills to what Geoffrey had given him. “And I don’t think our killer expected the corpse to be found as soon as it was.” He’d seen many a body pulled out of New York City’s rivers that a layman would be hard pressed to identify as a fellow human being.
“A blow to the back of the head to bring him to his knees,” Geoffrey said, pointing to abraded skin that looked like a deeper wound than the fish-nibbled layers around it. “He went down on rough pavement of some kind. And to rub that much skin off his knees, he must have tried to crawl away before he passed out or died.”
“So the killer hit him from behind, then came around to beat him on the face.”
“Kicked him in the chest to lay him out on the ground.” Geoffrey nodded toward a midchest bruise that could have been made by a heavy boot. “Finished the job with a knife.”
“Eleven stab wounds,” Ned mused. “He was either an amateur wanting to be sure he’d gotten the job done or unable to control himself once he started.”
“Not crazy, though. We’re not dealing with a madman here. These are stab wounds, not frenzied slashes. And if Reynolds was already dead when most of them were made, there wouldn’t have been much blood.”
“In an alleyway? That would account for the knees and the fact that nobody interrupted what was happening. Plenty of places like that down by the river.”
Eyes assessing every feature of the body lying exposed before them, Geoffrey and Ned waited for the attendant to return with the clothes they were purchasing for many times what they were worth. No autopsy had been performed on the dead man because the cause of death was obvious. No point taking up more of the medical examiner’s time than necessary. There were always more corpses to be examined than the city’s badly stretched resources could cover. Bodies like this one were shunted aside as soon as possible. Nobody cared.
They took the bundle the attendant gave them. Wrapped in brown paper and tied with butcher’s string, it was heavy enough to contain water-soaked boots. “Is this everything?” Ned asked as he handed over the bills he and Geoffrey had fished out of their pockets.
The attendant shrugged. If the stiff had been wearing a watch or ring, that would have been stolen by the stretcher bearers. They weren’t his responsibility. He only claimed a cut of whatever arrived at the morgue. “You’ve got what he was wearing when we laid him on the table.” He pulled up the spotted sheet that covered Bellevue corpses until they were stitched into their canvas burial shrouds.
Time to go.
* * *
Josiah laid a protective oilcloth on the polished surface of the long oak conference table. Mr. Hunter and Miss MacKenzie didn’t usually bring back evidence as dirty and smelly as the clothes tumbled in a damp heap atop stained brown paper, but Josiah believed in being prepared for all eventualities. And he’d learned from past experience that when Mr. Ned Hayes was involved in a case, anything was liable to happen.
Geoffrey sorted belt, pants, socks, and underwear from jacket, shirt, and cravat. The leather boots were cracked and scuffed. There wasn’t a cap or a hat. No handkerchief, either. “What do you think, Josiah? Would you like to make a guess about the quality of the clothes our dead man was wearing?”
Josiah’s black suit was always impeccably pressed, his shirt starched and gleaming white, shoes buffed to a mirror shine. The Hunter and MacKenzie secretary was both vain and secretly addicted to the men’s fashion magazines he kept hidden in one of his desk drawers. If anyone could deduce a man’s character or financial state from what he wore, it was Josiah.
“They’re all secondhand,” he sniffed, waving a dismissive hand over the garments worn by the man who called himself Vincent Reynolds. “But the socks are silk and the shirt is definitely bespoke.”
“How can you tell?” Ned asked. Josiah’s quirks fascinated him.
“By the stitching,” Josiah said, running a manicured finger along the seams of what was hardly recognizable as a gentleman’s custom sewn garment. “The owner’s initials are often embroidered along the hem if he doesn’t want them displayed on the pocket or one of the cuffs. That’s especially important for the laundresses if there are several gentlemen in the house. When a shirt like this one is given to the gentleman’s valet, the initials are picked out before the valet sells it.” He bent over the mud and bloodstained piece of clothing that had been pierced by violent thrusts of a single-bladed knife. “Here. You can just make out the marks where the threads were cut and pulled out.”
“Can you tell what the initials were?” Geoffrey asked, leaning over the shirt to see for himself what Josiah was pointing to.
“The shirt was worn too many times after the valet sold it to be able to tell. There’s no clear track left, just enough needle marks to be sure something was there at one time.”
“How long ago?” Ned asked.
Josiah shrugged. “Months, at least. The thing is, a shirt of this quality wouldn’t sit very long in a secondhand store before somebody bought it. The same for the socks. It looks like they’re a mix of cashmere and silk. Very expensive. Probably imported from England.”
“But you don’t think the rest of the clothes are of that same quality?” Geoffrey hefted the thick tweed jacket and matching pants.
“Bulky, cheaply woven, and sewn on a machine with a too thick needle to reduce the incidence of breakage,” Josiah pronounced. “The suit may or may not be secondhand, but it’s not anything a gentleman would wear. It’s a workingman’s Sunday best, perhaps, but that doesn’t make it any the less objectionable.” He smoothed the fine wool of his own bespoke suit. The money left him in his late employer’s will had made Josiah a rich man. It was purely by choice that he had opted to continue running the renamed firm that the former Senator Roscoe Conkling had bequeathed to Geoffrey Hunter.
Neither Prudence nor Geoffrey could imagine the office without him.
“I thought for a moment you’d brought a corpse back from the Five Points,” Prudence said from the doorway. Her cheeks were red from the December cold and she carried a large white envelope in her gloved hands.
“Tea, Miss MacKenzie?” Josiah asked, turning from the debris on the table.
“As hot as you can make it,” she answered. “I sent Aunt Gillian back to the house in the carriage while I followed a hunch and then caught a hansom down here. The leather curtains wouldn’t stay closed, so my face feels like it’s been bombarded with ice pellets.” She rubbed more red into her cheeks. “What is that mess you’re looking at? And what is that smell?”
“It’s Vincent Reynolds’s clothes,” Ned told her. “We bought them at Bellevue.”
“Bought them?”
“Better not to ask,” Geoffrey said, slipping off her gloves and taking both her hands in his own to knead some warmth back into them. The soft skin against his palms sent fiery sparks up his spine. How much longer would he have to wait?
“That’s enough,” Prudence said briskly, snatching her hands away and reaching for the envelope she’d dropped on the table. “I do have some information that might be of use.” She ran one finger under the flap of the envelope and withdrew a sheet of paper covered with what appeared to be a neatly inscribed list of names.
“Lena De Vries uses the Wentworth Domestic Employment Agency to staff her household,” she explained. “Coincidentally, so do I. The MacKenzies have been clients for years.” There was a ring of triumph in her voice. “I thought it would help at this stage of the investigation to know the names and employment histories of everyone working for the De Vries family during the period of time when the stones might have been pried from their settings.” Geoffrey hadn’t pointed her in that direction; she’d decided entirely on her own to do more than ask Lena the obvious questions about her staff.
“Bravo, Prudence!” Ned Hayes clapped lightly and executed a fanciful bow in her direction.
“I’ve only glanced at it,” she began, “but what’s interesting is that there appears to be more recent turnover among the younger female staff that I would have expected to see.” She didn’t have to say anything more explicit. There was only one reason why maids voluntarily left positions that were hard to come by and offered regular wages. Whether the molestation came from the master of the house, his sons, or senior male servants, it only ended badly for the girls who had been violated. Pregnancy meant instant dismissal without a reference or an agonizing death at the hands of an abortionist.
“Anyone in particular?” Geoffrey asked.
“No,” Prudence answered, gratefully accepting the cup of tea Josiah had brewed and poured. “Just a general pattern. But it tells me that there is someone in that house whose mor
al compass is not pointing true north.”
“The obvious one is your client, William De Vries,” Ned decided. “That kind of man is a law unto himself. As a banker and investor he answers to no one. He inherited a fortune and he’s increased it many times over. He’s more than twenty years older than his wife, which means he may be choosing to meet his needs with partners who don’t dare refuse him or suggest that they find his performance lacking in any way.” It was a remarkably frank statement to make, but Ned frequently paid Prudence the compliment of ignoring the social niceties of female exclusion from the realities of daily life.
Prudence sipped her tea as she pictured the William De Vries she’d seen at the Assembly Ball and sitting here in the Hunter and MacKenzie office. Of average height. Portly, as were most wealthy men of his age. Exquisitely clothed and groomed to conceal a belly devoted to the pleasures of the table and rivers of imported wine and liquor consumed in a nearly constant haze of cigar smoke.
William was, she recalled, the same age her father would have been, had Judge MacKenzie lived. Well past sixty. His hair had silvered, pouched wrinkles sprouted beneath his cold blue eyes, his skin had developed the reddish hue of someone whose doctor repeatedly counseled moderation and exercise without much hope of convincing his patient to change his ways.
De Vries must have been handsome in his younger years, Prudence decided, but as an older man he was both compelling and attractive in ways that had little or nothing to do with the physical attributes of a man in the springtime of his life. Perhaps it was the aura of power that hung about him like an expensive opera cloak.
Death, Diamonds, and Deception Page 7