Sacred Evil

by Heather Graham

Page 11

 

  “I think so,” she said. “Directors don’t have their pictures out there all that often, and I don’t think he’s been nominated for an Academy Award yet. ”

  Jude edged her ahead of him and she walked toward the booth. “Mr. Avery?” she asked.

  He looked up and waved a finger at her, pointing at his phone. She held still politely.

  Jude did not.

  He flipped out his badge, and reached for Angus Avery’s phone, snapping it shut and returning it.

  “Sorry, Mr. Avery. I know that time is money in your line of work, but time could mean someone’s life in mine. I’m Detective Crosby, and this is Agent Tremont. ”

  Avery took the closure of his phone with little more than a frown, but he seemed perplexed by Whitney’s appearance. “Agent?”

  “Agent Tremont is with a special unit of the FBI, Mr. Angus,” Jude explained, urging Whitney into the booth and taking the seat beside her. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” he said.

  Angus Avery nodded, and then shook his head sadly. “Hey. This is horrible. But, I have to tell you, I think it’s almost my fault. ”

  “You killed Miss Rockford?” Jude asked.

  “No! No, of course not!” Avery protested. “No, no—I should have stayed away from that location. I should have shot anywhere else in Manhattan—or Brooklyn, the Bronx, New Jersey or Hollywood, for that matter. It’s that damn location. It’s haunted—and it’s cursed. And God knows—the creature haunting the place might just be Jack the Ripper—the real Jack the Ripper!”

  He leaned forward. “Don’t you understand? Jack the Ripper left London and came to the United States. And when he did, that’s where he lived!”

  4

  Film people.

  Great. He couldn’t help it, he glanced at Whitney.

  She smiled. “Surely, Mr. Angus, you don’t believe that Jack the Ripper has lived all these years and that he’s just starting out to murder women again? At age one hundred plus. ”

  “I knew all about the history of the location. I just doubted all that mumbo-jumbo ghost stuff, just the way you do. ”

  “I heard something about the location this morning, but I don’t really know much about it,” Whitney said. She smiled at him. “I went to the film school at NYU, Mr. Angus. I loved living and working up here, but somehow, I never learned about the location you were using for the film shoot yesterday. ”

  “Well, let me tell you about it,” Avery said, leaning toward Whitney.

  Maybe the young woman would turn out to be an odd asset, Jude decided. Angus Avery seemed to like her. She was encouraging him to talk. He did believe—gut feeling—that the movie had something to do with it all. Maybe her background was going to be a good thing.

  “The building they just tore down had no history. The Darby Building. It was an ugly old thing—built in the 1920s. No character, no class whatsoever. It should have been torn down. But what was on the site before—that’s where all the trouble comes from. ”

  “And what was there before?” Whitney asked. “A friend of mine told me that it had been some kind of spiritualist church. ”

  “An offshoot group of some whacked-out folks—now, I suppose it would be some kind of nondenominational thing—started out building a church. Plain church. Simple pews, no statues, no stained-glass windows. They began in the 1840s, but it was too close to St. Paul’s and Trinity to make the powers that be happy. Anyway, it became a ‘home. ’ But it was a home for believers. I think it spent about twenty years becoming an old-fashioned halfway house for the homeless, immigrants, addicts, you name it. But by the end of the last decades of the nineteenth century, spiritualism was coming heavily to the fore, and along with spiritualism, you had devil worshippers, pagan cults and all that rot. So, imagine, you’ve got the House of Spiritualism here, and the Five Points area just blocks away. Slums and a cesspool. So. They start to clean up the Five Points area, and where do you think the real crackpots are going to come? Why, right over to the House of Spiritualism. ”

  Angus Avery sat back, looking pleased with himself, as if he’d solved everything.

  “And the so-called American victim of Jack the Ripper was killed in the Bowery, and again, we’re talking about a matter of blocks,” Whitney said.

  Jude spoke up. “Carrie Brown was killed in an old hotel. ”

  They both looked at him, as if surprised that he was in on their conversation.

  “Yes, she was killed in a hotel room. But Jack the Ripper killed Mary Kelly in her apartment. He was better—in his own mind, I’m sure—at his task of ‘ripping’ when he had time and privacy on his side. Well, here’s the thing—and, Detective Crosby, I believe you’ll find this in old police records or in memoirs of the officers of the time—they believed that the Jack the Ripper mimic or Jack the Ripper himself found lodging at the House of Spiritualism. ”

  “So you believe that by renting the location for your film shoot you awakened the ghost of Jack the Ripper—or Jack the Ripper himself,” Jude said, trying very hard to keep his tone low and even.

  Angus Avery shook his head unhappily. “We were finished with the site after that day’s shoot—we’d broken down. We were already planning on moving. But I called off all shooting for today—everywhere in the city. Can you even begin to imagine what that will do to my budget?”

  “What made you choose the location?” Jude asked.

  “Ah, well, the real shots we could get. And the fact that the financial district is actually shaped more like the Five Points that once was than the area that was Five Points! The movie takes place in the late eighteen hundreds. Shooting there, we could use the streets with some editing and CGI. And I had a great, almost barren landscape for the set designers to create facades. You’d be surprised at what you have when you black out modern additions to downtown. ”

  “There’s a giant pit at the location—dangerous,” Jude said.

  Avery waved a hand in the air. “We had it barricaded during the filming, and all kinds of people keeping watch. Production assistants and city engineers. We had a permit that included working a large section of Broadway,” Avery said. “I knew about the location, but, as I said, I thought it was all a bunch of hogwash. ”

  “And right next door, you had Blair House. It’s pristine—you could have done some great shooting there,” Whitney said. “I—”

  Jude squeezed her hand beneath the table; he didn’t want her announcing that the team was staying at Blair House. Especially since the team wasn’t all here yet. As the day went by, he found himself more concerned that they had Whitney Tremont housed at Blair House—alone—for tonight.

  “Blair House is under federal jurisdiction at the moment. I don’t know exactly which historical association is in charge, but it’s on the national list of historic places. I don’t believe that a permit would have been given out for the use of it right now, no matter what was promised to the city,” he said.

  “Precisely,” Avery said with a sigh. He brightened. “But, we did get some great footage of the facade. In fact, the Blair House facade—cleaned up, CGI—will be the house of ill repute where our movie prostitutes were settled. ”

  “Just what was the movie you were making?” Jude asked.

  “Am making. O’Leary’s. I’m afraid the loss of an extra doesn’t stop the giant wheels of a movie turning forever. And don’t think badly of me, please. Movies have been completed when the featured stars have died. Everyone can’t take the hit. Lord knows, in this country, we have to keep people employed and the money moving these days. ”

  “You’re a humanitarian,” Jude said.

  Whitney kicked his ankle.

  “And the movie is?” Jude asked.

  “A love story,” Avery said. “A love story set amidst the squalor of the final days of the Five Points region of New York City. I mean, seriously, it’s hard to imagine what it was like. Tenements
were so crowded that the living often walked over the dead. Gangs were kings…politics were crooked. Sewage was a real killer—disease ran rampant. My movie, O’Leary’s, is about two young people who rise above the horror and corruption to make it to the top. ”

  “Ah. They moved to Gramercy Park!” Jude said.

  Finally, he’d managed something that the filmmaker could seize upon. “Precisely!” Avery said with pleasure.

  “Mr. Avery, what time did you leave the set yesterday?” Jude asked him.

  Avery was thoughtful. Many people immediately shrank suspiciously from the question, aware that it was not harmless. But the man seemed to be remembering his day. “I left by five. One of my assistant directors worked on a few last shots with the prostitutes. I headed to midtown. I gave a speech to a class from the fashion institute at their dinner at six. ”

  Jude didn’t ask Avery if there were witnesses; he’d check on it himself.

  “Mr. Avery, we have a witness who saw a man in costume on the street—a nineteenth-century cloak and tall hat, like a stovepipe hat,” Jude said.

  “Was your witness a wino living on the streets? Or was your witness the killer?” Avery asked.

  “You have nineteenth-century costuming on your cast, Mr. Avery,” Whitney said. “Perhaps the killer is stealing from your wardrobe department?”

  Avery shook his head. “You may speak to my costume designer and the wardrobe mistress. I insist on all costumes being returned at the end of the day. If a costume wasn’t returned, I’d have known it. I might be making a movie, but any half-baked costume shop in town might have a cloak and a stovepipe hat! Look, please, check my alibi—and check my work record. It couldn’t have been me, and I guarantee you, my wardrobe mistress would have been fired if there had been anything missing. ”

  Avery’s alibi didn’t actually clear him. He might have given a speech—and returned, Jude thought. New York traffic—always a major “if” factor in the city. And, still, by the time Virginia Rockford had been killed, there had been very little traffic downtown. Avery could have well done everything exactly as he had said—and still arrived back on Broadway in time to commit murder.