“He’s killed girls in twenty cities,” said Harry Warren. “How does he get around?”
“Precisely what we will focus on,” said Bell. “How does he travel? Why does he travel? What line is he in?”
“A drummer,” said Archie Abbott. “Who travels more than a traveling salesman?”
“He’s an executive,” said Helen. “He travels city to city visiting his company’s factories.”
“He’s a bank robber,” said Harry Warren. “The new breed that cross state lines in autos.”
Bell shook his head. “He’s been murdering since 1891. How’d he cross state lines before autos?”
“Covered wagon.”
Isaac Bell did not smile. The detectives exchanged wary glances. The stateroom fell so silent, they could hear stewards hustling luggage in the corridor and the faint piping of pilot whistles as Lusitania crept toward Quarantine.
“Sorry, Isaac.”
“A circus performer,” said Archie Abbott. “They’re always on the move. Or a vaudevillian.”
Now Bell had his people where he wanted them—the best minds in the agency, working full steam at turning speculation into facts. He looked at Abbott. “If he had been a London music hall actor, could he play vaudeville here?”
“Why not? Music is music, and the jokes work the same: Set-up. Premise. Punch line. Was he on the bill?”
“I have no playbills or programs from back then. The music hall isn’t even a theater anymore.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jack Spelvin.”
“Sounds like he had a sense of humor. Spelvin’s a pseudonym.”
“The Ripper liked his games.” If the crescent cuts were the murderer’s idea of a joke, thought Bell, what was the punch line?
“He could be a hobo,” said Harry Warren. “Stealing rides on freight trains.”
“Except,” said Helen Mills, “where does a hobo get cash in hand to show the girl?”
“But what if he isn’t stealing rides? What if he’s a railroad man?” said Warren. “They’re on the move. Brakemen invented the red-light district with their red lanterns.”
Bell said, “I find it difficult to imagine a railroad man dressing in a cape and homburg to convince Anna Waterbury he was a Broadway producer. Though he could be an express agent.” The well-paid operators who guarded the express cars could afford to dress like dandies, and often did.
“Union organizers travel,” said Harry Warren.
“An engineer,” said Helen Mills. “They travel for work. So do specialist doctors and surgeons. So do actors. As we just said.”
“A private detective.”
Everyone stared at Archie Abbott.
Bell nudged them back on track. “There are three or four hundred thousand commercial travelers in the country. If he is a traveling salesman, then he’s probably a commission man. They make their own schedules. Union organizers, engineers, and specialists who travel might number in the low thousands. Archie, how many actors are there?”
“All told? Maybe thirty thousand.”
“All men?”
“Men, maybe twenty thousand.”
“Not exactly what I’d call narrowing down,” said Harry Warren.
That was followed by a deep silence. Helen Mills broke it. “Speaking of a cape and homburg, how did Jack the Ripper dress in London?”
“That was a long time ago, and it depends on who thinks they saw him. The illustrators mostly agreed on a gentleman’s cape and top hat, but that was the image they expected of a man who could afford to pay a prostitute.”
“In other words, we don’t know what he does, and we don’t know how he gets around.”
“We can assume,” said Bell, “that he must be of some means to afford to dress well and travel. Unless he is wealthy and doesn’t have to work, whatever his job, it almost certainly requires him to travel.”
“Right back where we started,” said Harry Warren.
“Not quite,” said Isaac Bell. “We’re miles ahead of where we started.” He looked at Grady Forrer, who remained silent through the speculation.
“We have a pattern,” said the Research chief. “We can match our pattern to the travels.”
“What pattern?”
“His route,” said Isaac Bell. “Tell them, Grady.”
Forrer ticked cities off on his enormous fingers. “New York, Boston, Springfield, in the order petite blond girls were murdered. Albany, Philadelphia, Scranton, Binghamton, Pittsburgh, Columbus, in the order girls disappeared. Ten days ago, a girl was reported missing in Cleveland.”
“He’s back to doing an expert job hiding bodies,” said Bell. “Or luck’s on his side, again.”
Grady Forrer tugged a map from the folds of his tent-size coat and unrolled it on the stateroom bed. The route was marked in red. Looping north from New York to Boston, the red line meandered over the densely populated northeastern section of America, crossing each other occasionally, the size of the cities diminishing as it progressed westward.
“Why did you circle Cincinnati?”
The big manufacturing and trading city on the Ohio River nudged the Indiana and Kentucky borders a hundred miles beyond the westwardmost Columbus.
“Cincinnati breaks the pattern. There’s a girl missing in Cincinnati who resembled his other victims. But she disappeared months before Anna was murdered. A singer at the continuous vaudeville house. Happy in her job, according to the other performers. No hint that she was about to run, nor any reason why she would.”
Bell gestured at the map. “Before all these?”
“An anomaly,” said Grady Forrer. “But anomalies sometimes make a point. So I circled her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Rose Bloom.”
“There’s a stage name,” said Archie Abbott.
“Actually, she was born with it, a pretty little Irish girl— There you have it, gents,” Forrer said. “And lady,” he added with a courtly bow to Helen Mills. “Two questions for you to contemplate: What takes our man on this route? Which is to ask, what’s his line? And where is he headed next?”
“Three questions,” said Isaac Bell. “Can the Cutthroat Squad detect where he is headed next before he kills some poor girl when he gets there?”
31
Prospering for a century on a big bend of the Ohio River, Cincinnati was accustomed to spectacular arrivals. Eight thousand steamboats had landed in the single year of 1852, with priceless cargo, and with ambitious passengers eager to share in her boomtown riches. In the dark days of the Civil War, Cincinnatians improvised a pontoon bridge of coal barges for fifty thousand Union troops who had arrived in the nick of time to block a Confederate Army invasion. And when the Kaiser’s brother—the much-loved Prince Henry of Prussia—arrived on his American tour, the police had to shoo adoring mobs off the roofs of his train cars while the United German Singing Societies serenaded him.
But no arrival could prepare Cincinnati for the Jekyll & Hyde Special.
For days in advance, newspaper writers described the show train in awed detail—Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan’s private cars, decorated to the actor-managers’ personal taste; the leading actors’ and actresses’ lavish staterooms; the dormitory cars, stacked with Pullman berths, for players, stagehands, carpenters, electricians, clerks, publicists, accountants, and musicians; the dining car, “the heart of the train that serves mouthwatering repasts all round the clock”; the freight cars that carried the elaborate sets; and the express/baggage car, with its monumental steel safe for the box office receipts, guarded by a heavily armed, ice-eyed agent of Van Dorn Protective Services, the trusted subsidiary of the famous detective agency that furnished house detectives for first class hotels, and as jewelers’ escorts, bodyguards, and for discreet assistance to William Howard Taft’s Secret Service squad w
hen the president ventured from the White House—ten gleaming red cars in all—cannonballed from city to city by a high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2 Deaver-built locomotive that was, her engineer confided to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “a good steamer and rides easy.”
Telegraph operators relayed its progress as it thundered south through Detroit. Would the Jekyll & Hyde Special deliver actors, scenery, and musicians in time to stage the show for their first-night curtain?
No one knew that Barrett and Buchanan had deliberately scheduled a close-run arrival to build suspense and encourage the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad to clear tracks for their special rather than risk the wrath of a city that loved its theaters. Betting pools sprang up in saloons, beer gardens, and gentlemen’s clubs, and fortunes changed hands for side bets on the precise moments it would tear past intervening stations.
Suddenly, when it was ten miles out and no greater excitement could be imagined, a blood-red biplane—the spitting image of the airplane everyone had heard was in the play—soared over the city, skimmed the river, and swooped under the Roebling suspension bridge.
The most unlikely event tripped up the Cutthroat.
This sweet little dancer’s upturned nose was as sensitive as his.
“I smell spirit gum.”
He had stuck to his rules. He had practiced self-discipline and restraint. He had planned. He had anticipated. He had hoped. But still he was tripped up: Little Beatrice’s nose was as sensitive as his. In Cincinnati, of all places, despite laying extraordinarily elaborate groundwork.
“Is that a false beard?”
She actually reached up to tug it. He recoiled, jerked his head away from her hand.
“It is, isn’t it?” She laughed, and stood on tiptoe to inspect it closely. “That’s the best one I’ve ever seen.” Her laughter died as she considered the oddity.
He was quick, he reminded himself. He had better be. The suspicion of danger had narrowed her eyes. Still, he was confident that he held the advantage. She was only operating on instinct. He had at his command decades of know-how.
“Why are you wearing a false beard?”
“To hide . . .” he said, then cast his eyes down as if too dismayed to complete his thought. He could still control her.
“From what?” she asked sharply. Her voice had an unpleasant edge, a grating noise that he longed to silence. But he couldn’t silence her before he coaxed her to join him inside his cottage. It was next to the river at the end of a dark lane. The last girl he had brought here, Rose—Rose Bloom—had entered willingly. But Rose had not smelled spirit gum, nor noticed anything to trip him up.
It was all too easy to imagine how the cottage would look to a girl who was already wary: remote, tucked away in a storehouse district, the only dwelling on the lane. He had had the front porch painted a warm yellow so that it looked welcoming and had installed an electric light on the front porch, and had left another burning inside. Pleasant, lived-in, welcoming, a cosy cottage on the outskirts of town, with a rowboat dock convenient to the Ohio.
“For you,” he answered.
“I don’t understand.”
She stopped walking abruptly and looked around as if noticing for the first time that the street was devoid of people. They had just reached the storehouses at the corner of his lane. They could smell the river. “What do you mean from me?”
“Not from you,” he stammered. “To protect you. To hide my face.”
“From what?”
“Scars. I was wounded horribly in the Spanish War.” The false beard was so gray, it was nearly white, which would make him rather too old to have fought in the 1898 War. But hopefully for a girl so young, a war of thirteen years ago could have been fought a hundred years in the past. Ancient history. Civil War. Revolutionary War. War of 1898.
She said, “Oh.” Still standing there, still gazing around—looking for help, he feared—she said, “Well, so am I.”
He searched her pretty face by the streetlamp. “Scarred?”
“From a fire.”
“Where?”
“Where you can’t see.”
“Can’t see? I saw you dance on the stage.”
“The corset covers it. A lamp exploded when I was a little girl. It looks horrible. I’ll never let anyone see.”
“You poor thing.”
“Well, you’re a poor thing, too.”
“Aren’t we a pair?”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so. And I promised you supper. My housekeeper will be quite put out if we let it get cold.”
“Is she there now?”
“She better be. Who do you think serves supper and washes the dishes?”
Still, she hesitated.
He took a chance and went for broke. “You know, Beatrice, in all my days of booking national tours, I’ve never met a dancer who wasn’t famished after her show.”
That got him a grin that wrinkled her pretty nose, and suddenly they were friends.
“I’m starving!”
He shrugged his cape off one shoulder and offered his arm.
“Step this way.”
Late that night, he propped Beatrice in a kitchen chair while he ate a cold supper. Just before dawn, he tied his cape around her, gathered her in his arms, and climbed down the steep stairs to the dock. The river smelled rank. The fierce current was so loud, he could barely hear her splash.
“Good night. You were lovely.”
How wrong he was about that.
32
Isaac Bell jumped off the extra-fare St. Louis Limited at Cincinnati and headed straight to the morgue in City Hospital. The talkative coroner, who greeted him on the front steps, started apologizing for the condition of the old building. “Dates back to the 1860s. We’re building a fine new hospital across town.”
“May I see the girl?”
A barge hand had spotted her butchered body jammed under an Ohio River wharf. The Van Dorn field office had already reported a dancer missing from the continuous vaudeville house where she worked, the same theater where the singer Rose Bloom had disappeared months earlier.
Beatrice Edmond had told a friend she was trying to land a part in a road company, but she had not said which one. The field office chief had found no one who had seen her at any of the Cincinnati theaters where tours were playing—not Tillie’s Nightmare, the Marie Dressler show at the Bethel, nor Alias Jimmy Valentine at the Lyric, nor Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Clark, and surely not Salome at the German.
“Her cape snagged on a wharf,” said the coroner, “or she’d have drifted to New Orleans before anyone noticed.”
“May I see her?” Bell asked again. Twenty-to-one, “her cape” was a standard department store item and twice the size a tiny girl would wear.
“Not much to see. The current banged her around, and the city sewage is as corrosive as you’d ex—”
A racket in the sky cut him off in the middle of a sentence.
BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT!
Isaac Bell looked up, astonished. He recognized the sound instantly, but the last thing he expected to hear over Cincinnati was the staccato blast of a rotary airplane engine at full throttle. A red streak of lightning shot past the hospital fifty feet above the Miami Canal and vanished in the direction of the Ohio River.
“Bet you don’t know what that is,” said the coroner.
Bell was an avid airman and knew exactly what it was. “A new Breguet Type IV tractor biplane with a Gnome rotary engine. But what’s he doing here?”
“Advertising! That’s—”
BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! BLAT! drowned him out again.
The Breguet skimmed the mansard roof of the four-story hospital so close, it sent tiles flying, and Isaac Bell could not help grinning in envy of the lucky pilot. Then he saw the advertisement
painted on the underside of the wings touting the show that Anna Waterbury had hoped would have a place for her:
JEKYLL
on the left wing and
AND HYDE
on the right.
The red plane flashed by trailing castor oil smoke that smelled like someone had blown out candles.
“First airplane that ever flew over Cincinnati,” said the coroner. “Booming Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Tickets are going like hotcakes. I’m taking the wife on Saturday.
“Come on in,” said the coroner. “I have her on the table.”
Later, Isaac Bell wandered Cincinnati’s theater district, reading marquees and playbills and collecting programs. He stopped in front of the vaudeville house. Beatrice Edmond’s name was still on the bill. Her cape had been too big.
He took the theater programs to the two-room Van Dorn field office on Plum Street. The chief—Sedgwick, an eager young detective they had hired away from the Police Department and who had gained a reputation in New York for snappy telegrams in the middle of the night—was working late. Bell spread the programs on a table and opened his notebook.
He juggled the symbols in his mind, inverted the crescent moons, angled some horns, and tried to group them in patterns. Then he took out his fountain pen. He was sketching freehand in the margins of the theater programs when, reaching for another, he suddenly saw the crescent shapes as Jack the Ripper carved them.
“I need your private wire.”
“Want me to send for you?”
The Cutthroat Page 18