“If you don’t take your hands off me, Mr. Lockwood, I will floor you.”
He reached toward her blouse with one hand while attempting to get up her skirt with the other. “You can’t floor me. I’m bigger than you are.”
She could hear Isaac Bell. “You’re a strong girl, Helen. Never give up. Go straight at him.”
“What if he’s too big to fight?”
“Feint. Throw him off.”
Helen laughed loudly.
“Are you laughing at me?”
Lockwood suddenly got a mean look on his face. He raised a hand to slap her.
That left him wide open.
“Thank you for reading, gentlemen,” said Henry Young. “We will be in touch.”
Four actors smiled gamely, thanked the stage manager, and headed up the aisle of the empty theater.
“Mr. Abbott, could you stay a moment longer?”
Archie Abbott approached the stage.
Henry Young, tall and rangy as a stork—a powerful stork—stood in front of the stylish Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde set. One eye was twitching with anxiety. A role had opened up when a Jekyll and Hyde actor was lured back to New York to read for a new play by Paul Armstrong—the toast of the town for his Jimmy Valentine and glad to do Joseph Van Dorn a favor. The stage manager needed a replacement desperately or he would be going on himself.
“More than only a moment, I hope,” Abbott said, with a professional smile that projected cheerful confidence in his talent, sober habits, and a willingness to work hard.
“Mr. Abbott, I remember you from some years back, do I not?”
“You have an astonishing memory, sir. It was back in aught two. I read for you for a road tour of Mr. Belasco’s The Heart of Maryland.”
“The Midwestern spring tour, I believe it was.”
“I didn’t get the part.”
“You were too young. As you might be, I fear, for this role. Keep in mind that Mr. Pool has been Mr. Hyde’s butler for over twenty years.”
“As much as it pains me to say it, sir,” said Archie Abbott, “I sincerely believe I can play a man in his fifties.”
“I have other reservations.”
“May I hear them,” asked Archie Abbott, “that I might put them to rest?”
“The way you just ‘elocuted’ that statement is my next reservation. You do call up the impression of being to a high manner born. Will we be asking too much of the audience to believe that you are a butler?”
“The best butlers I know can more easily pass for a gentleman than most so-called gentlemen. Granted, some in the audience may not know from personal experience that a gentleman’s butler is expected to bring a cool head and a keen eye to his tasks, but all will appreciate his positive attitude.”
When Henry Young still looked dubious, Abbott promised, “But I have no doubt I can give the impression of servility.”
The stage manager remained silent.
Abbott decided this conversation would have ended already if he weren’t a serious contender for the part. “You mentioned other reservations, sir?”
“I find it difficult to believe that you really want the part.”
“I want it very much, sir. I need this job.”
“But,” the stage manager said, “I’ve heard that you married well.”
“An heiress,” said Abbott.
“Extremely well.”
“A lovely heiress,” said Abbott. “Kind, generous, intelligent, extraordinarily beautiful, and destined to inherit many railroads from a doting father, who is an old man with a weak heart.”
“Then why do you want a small role in a play that is leaving godforsaken Cincinnati for ever more godforsaken points west?”
“She came to her senses.”
“The girls in the Jimmy Valentine company told me that Mr. Vietor claims he entered boarding school in Bedford in 1888,” Helen Mills reported to Isaac Bell.
“Bedford’s seventy miles north of London. Hour and a half on the train.”
“The trouble is, Mr. Bell, Vietor says he was twelve at the time.”
“Twelve?”
“He was still in school in ’ninety-one, age fifteen. Which would make him thirty-five today. Not in his forties.”
“When did he come to America?”
“First time was ’ninety-seven.”
“At twenty-three.”
“He made a name for himself in London first. Back and forth ever since, touring.”
Bell said, “I’ll cable Joel Wallace to check at the Bedford School, but it could take forever. He must be lying about his age. If Mapes was right, Vietor’s got to be in his forties.”
“And there is something else, Mr. Bell. He’s coaching Lucy Balant for a bigger part. I warned her not to be alone with any man. Including him. I’m not sure she’ll listen.”
Bell said, “I’ll tell Harry Warren to keep a close watch on him. Who else in the Valentine cast?”
“The actor who plays Detective Doyle is definitely lying about his age. He claims thirty-two. A girl who knew him well swears he’s fifty-two. And he told me he was born in Jersey City, not London.”
“How do you rate him?”
“He sounds English to me, but, like Archie says, most of them do. But he’s nowhere as young as thirty-two. Fifty, if he’s a day.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“His slow reflexes.”
38
A life in the theater, both on the stage and behind the scenes, had taught Henry Booker Young the protocol for conducting a reading for a part to be won by an angel’s protégée. An air of business as usual was expected of the stage manager. But brusque impatience was to be leavened with kindness. And talent, no matter how sparse, was to be noted and somehow praised. Particularly when the angel—the tall, handsome, and, to Young’s eye, dangerous-looking Mr. Bell—was sitting on the edge of his seat in the front row of the otherwise empty house, watching like a mother falcon.
“Can you tell me about your work on the stage, Miss Mills?”
Helen Mills answered in a rush. “I was Nora in A Doll’s House, Gwendolen Fairfax in The Importance of Being Earnest, Candida in Candida, and—”
“Where did you perform these roles?”
“Bryn Mawr.”
“The college.”
“Yes, Mr. Young.”
“Have you performed with any legitimate companies?”
“This will be my first.”
“Have you ever read for any legitimate companies?”
Helen looked flustered.
“Well, have you?”
“I read for Jimmy Valentine.”
“How did you make out there?”
“I decided against taking the part.”
Young smiled thinly. “That would jibe with a story making the rounds about Mr. Lockwood’s broken nose. Was it you, Miss Mills, who socked the star?”
“I’m afraid I lost my temper.”
Young sounded sympathetic: “It is not easy to be an attractive girl in the theater. However, I would caution you to ponder precisely how much you are willing to sacrifice to go on the stage.” He was stepping so far beyond the unspoken boundaries of awarding a job to an angel’s protégée that the angel himself stiffened visibly.
Isaac Bell made him nervous. While seemingly typical of the wealthy men who pursued actresses, something about him seemed off. He was so much more fit and alert than layabouts like the Deaver brothers. And Bell seemed truly concerned for the girl’s well-being, almost a fatherly concern—though if he were her actual father, he would have been no more than nine or ten years old when she was born. Maybe it was true that Helen Mills was the niece of one of his investors. Maybe Tennyson was thinking of stage managers when he wrote: “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.�
��
He plowed ahead, determined for some perverse and unsafe reason he could not quite put his finger on, to shield her from disappointment. “Women of privilege rarely make a go of it in the theater. Give me a shopgirl for the ferocious ambition and hard work the stage demands.”
“Don’t worry about privilege, Mr. Young. I was a scholarship girl in college. I grew up in a mill town without a pot to— I mean, a penny to my name.”
“Excellent,” said Henry Young. He had been misled by the young woman’s striking poise. “The general business you will read for will include occasionally appearing as a housemaid, wielding a feather duster, in Mr. Hyde’s library, and standing by to be strangled on a regular basis. See if you can put this over.”
He handed her a page of playscript. “Take your time. Tell me when you’re ready.”
“I’m ready.”
“Go on, then.”
She rolled the paper into a cylinder, which she held like a feather duster, lowered her eyes as if timid or dazzled by her employer, and read, “‘Mr. Hyde hasn’t come home yet, Dr. Jekyll.’”
“You’ll do.”
“Do you mean I get the role?”
“You will be paid twenty dollars per week, take your meals on the train, occupy an upper berth in the Pullman car, and buy your own clothes.”
Isaac Bell cleared his throat. It sounded like a growl.
“All right, Mr. Bell, we’ll provide costumes, and she may descend to the first lower berth that becomes available.”
James Dashwood talked his way into the Clark Theatre and wandered around asking for Henry Young until he found him.
“Detective Dashwood.”
“You remember me?”
“I’m a stage manager, I can never forget a face even when I want to. It was in Boston. You were wondering whether Anna Waterbury read for me, and you thought you had seen me before. Did you figure out where?”
“Syracuse. Obviously, I didn’t ‘see’ you: I was still a kid out west when you were the Syracusan Stock Company’s treasurer.”
“You must have seen an old wanted poster.”
“Do Barrett and Buchanan know?”
“All of it. The ticket fraud. The gambling that drove me to the fraud. The foolish going on the run. The arrest. The prison sentence.”
“Why did they hire you?”
“They say I learned my lesson.”
“So they trust you.”
“I’ve never given them reason not to.”
Dashwood raised a skeptical brow.
Young said, “They are decent men, Detective— Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to load eighty people and two sensational scenic effects featuring the height of mechanical realism onto a railroad train.”
Isaac Bell gathered the Cutthroat Squad in his car.
“We’ve infiltrated both tours and narrowed the field of suspects. Harry Warren and Grady Forrer exonerated the Alias Jimmy Valentine head rigger, Bill Milford, and scenic designer, Roland Phelps, who grew up in New York and were definitely living in the city during the Ripper’s rampage in England—Milford in the Tenderloin, Phelps in his family’s Washington Square town house.
“Helen Mills has eliminated the actor Lockwood, from Alias Jimmy Valentine, by establishing that he is neither strong enough nor quick enough to overwhelm his victims. On the other hand, she has learned that Lucy Balant is getting ‘coached’ by the star of the show, Mr. Vietor. Her roommate, Anna Waterbury, was coached by the Cutthroat. So we keep the book open on Mr. Vietor. Fortunately, Jimmy Valentine will catch up with us in St. Louis the day after tomorrow.
“Meanwhile, Grady discovered the Deaver brothers spent their college years, in the late eighties and early nineties, in England after being kicked out of schools in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. But the time I spent with them convinced me that neither Joe Deaver nor Jeff Deaver has the brains not to trip himself up for twenty minutes, much less never get caught in twenty years.”
“Are you sure it’s not an act, Mr. Bell?”
“Edwin Booth could not put over such an act. Now, what about Mr. Rick L. Cox, the lunatic writer?”
“Cox,” said Forrer, “was locked up in a Columbus asylum before Beatrice Edmond was murdered in Cincinnati.”
Bell said, “Scudder and I couldn’t pry much out of Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan.”
“Opaque,” Smith interrupted. “No clue that either’s from London.”
Dashwood relayed Henry Young’s claim that Barrett and Buchanan trusted their stage manager not to defraud them.
“Go back and find out what he has on them. What’s his leverage? Somehow they have each other by the short hairs.”
Archie Abbott said, “Gossip says Henry Young rarely leaves the theater ’til it’s time to board the train to the next city.”
Bell wrapped it up. “We are down to Barrett, Buchanan, Vietor, and Young— Back to it, everyone! See you tomorrow in St. Louis!”
They were trooping out of the car when an explosion rattled the windows.
“That was close.”
Isaac Bell said, “Better see if we can help. Go first, James, you’re the detective. The rest, remember to act like regular helpful citizens.”
They hurried into the station hall, Dashwood in the lead.
People were crowding out the front entrance. From there, they saw a pillar of smoke lit orange by flames rising several blocks over. They joined the mob running toward it. Bell forged ahead, with a sinking feeling it was on Plum Street. He caught up with Dashwood, and they reached Plum just as teams of wild-eyed fire horses pulling steam pumpers thundered toward the smoke. It was gushing from the field office’s shattered front door and windows and from the building next door.
“Our chief works late most nights.”
Bell shoved through the crowds. He skirted the firemen, who were stringing their hoses and raising ladders to the next-door windows, and cut down the side alley. The back door had been blown open. He ran into the dark, shouting for the chief.
“Sedgwick! Jerry Sedgwick!”
No one answered. Bell soaked a hand towel in the lavatory, covered his mouth and nose, and ran up the hall to the front office. The interior was demolished. Plaster had fallen from the ceiling. The cellar door was open. Flames were leaping from the stairs.
He pushed into the front room, where a wall of smoke and flame stopped him short. Through it, he thought he could see a figure slumped over the desk. At that moment, the firemen finished tying into the city hydrants. Hose water blasted through the windows, scattering glass and dropping flames to the floor. The smoke shifted. Jerry Sedgwick was there, coughing violently and trying to stand.
Bell got halfway to him before the water stopped. By the time he reached the chief’s desk, flames were jumping to the ceiling again, and the wet towel he pressed to his face had dried stiffly in the heat. Bell slung Sedgwick over his shoulder and tried to retrace his steps. But the smoke was suddenly so dense, he could not see the way. The water streams sprayed again, knocking down smoke. The respite was brief, the smoke thicker. He was running out of air.
“Mr. Bell!”
Dashwood was calling.
“Mr. Bell! Isaac!”
Bell staggered toward the sound of his voice.
He saw Dashwood reaching for him and, behind the young detective, the alley door. He pushed Sedgwick into Dashwood’s arms. In the alley, half a dozen deep breaths of cool, fresh air had the eager chief gasping, “I’m O.K. I’m O.K.”
“Hospital,” said Bell.
“No! I’m O.K. I gotta talk to you.”
“Talk in the ambulance,” said Bell.
The Cutthroat Squad had swung into action, quietly bribing an ambulance crew for their help and the police to clear a path. Once inside the motor wagon, Bell asked, “You sure you’re O.K.?” Sedgwick had lost
his eyebrows and most of his hair.
“I mined coal when I was a kid. This was nothing compared to that. Mr. Bell, he blew us up.”
“Who blew us up?”
“Gas fitter said he was from Cincinnati Gas and Electric, and I fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. Little while ago, I smelled something funny and went down to check. He had unhooked the meter and laid a slow fuse. That’s what I smelled. I went to put it out, but I was too late. It blew me back up the stairs. What I don’t know is, who he was and why he did it.”
Bell exchanged a glance with Dashwood.
Dashwood said, “Sounds like he knows we’re here?”
“Not the Cutthroat Squad,” Bell said after a moment’s reflection. “More likely, our wanted poster set him off. And now we know something else about him.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s a counterpuncher.”
When the Jekyll & Hyde Special started out for St. Louis, Bell joined the closing-night cast party in the dining car. While pretending to trade small talk, Archie Abbott explained the gas-fitter connection to the Cutthroat.
“If we’re right that he’s had backstage experience, it’s no coincidence that he’s a gas fitter. These days, lighting effects are all electrical. But theater electricians also manage water effects, like rain and floods. That’s because plumbing and gas fitting are similar trades and used to fit pipes to light theaters with gas.”
“He’s an actor, first and foremost,” said Isaac Bell. “It’s one thing to know how to be a gas fitter, but to impersonate a fitter—to costume himself and portray himself as a workman so believably that he could fool an operator as sharp as Jerry Sedgwick, inside our field office, which has his face on a wanted poster—the Cutthroat has got to be one heck of an actor.”
39
ST. LOUIS
The Cutthroat Page 22