by Erin Lindsey
“Luck can do that?” Mr. Burrows’s words came back to me then, in perfect clarity: What would people make of what Rockefeller can do, or Van den Berg or even Roosevelt? At last I was beginning to truly grasp what he meant. And it was horrifying.
“In theory, luck can do just about anything. And to think—it’s weaker now than it’s ever been.”
“What do you mean?”
“Luck dims a little with each successive generation. The difference is minute from one cohort to the next, but over the centuries, families with luck have seen their powers diminish greatly. A thousand years ago, people with luck must have seemed like gods, or at least powerful sorcerers. One shudders to think what such people might have been capable of.”
“No one knows?”
“Tales survive, of course, but it’s terribly difficult to separate fact from myth. Was Hercules lucky, or merely legend? What about Merlin, or Gilgamesh, or even Jesus? Impossible to say.”
For the first time, I felt genuinely afraid. Until that moment, I suppose I’d thought of luck as some sort of elaborate parlor trick. Impressive—eerie, even—but nothing that would keep me awake at night. But this … “I don’t understand. I mean, I thought I did, but … What is luck?”
“Some of the greatest minds in history have devoted themselves to that question, and we’ve still barely scratched the surface.”
“But what Drake did to us—you’re sure it was luck?”
“It’s the most plausible explanation. Regardless, we must consider our position compromised. I doubt we’ll get anything from the rest of the Brotherhood now. We’ll have to deviate from the plan.”
“Deviate how?”
Leaning out the carriage window, Mr. Wiltshire called, “The Tenderloin, please. Twenty-Eighth and Broadway.”
The address tweaked something in my memory, but it took me a moment to place it. “One-Eyed Johnny’s.”
“You’re … familiar with it?” He looked faintly aghast.
I scowled, every bit as offended as the last time someone had asked me that question. “Only because I followed Mr. Burrows there the other day.”
“Did you?” Mr. Wiltshire hummed a thoughtful note. “You’d said he seemed concerned, but I had no idea. I’m touched.”
“What could he possibly have been looking for in a place like that?”
“The same thing we’re looking for,” Mr. Wiltshire said. “A bounty hunter.”
CHAPTER 19
THE BLOODHOUND—HARLEM’S HOUSE OF HAUNTINGS—THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
“I’m afraid I must warn you,” Mr. Wiltshire said as we stepped out of the brougham, “it is not a pleasant establishment.”
As though I needed to be told. I’d wandered into my share of rum shops growing up. Looking for my da, usually, or the husband of a neighbor. I’d even taken a turn or two as a rusher when I needed some pocket money, though Mam would’ve had a stroke if she’d known. (Good Catholic girls did not set foot in saloons, and they certainly didn’t run around peddling growlers to any local bum with a few coins to rub together.) Even so, it had been a long time since I’d seen the inside of a place like this, and I’d never done so in the company of a high society gentleman. It made the experience doubly awkward, not unlike our visit to Mam’s flat the night before.
One-Eyed Johnny’s smelled like stale beer and a dozen more unpleasant things, but at least it had the virtue of being dark. There were no windows, and the mismatched lamps and candles strewn here and there were barely enough to light a pathway to the bar. It being a Saturday, the place was crowded; Mr. Wiltshire picked his way through the human driftwood with great care, using his walking stick to clear a corridor through the thicker piles of straw. His oxfords fairly glowed in the lamplight, by far the shiniest thing in the room.
“Sir Thomas,” said a deep voice, and I looked up to find a big fellow grinning at us from behind the bar. He wore a patch over his left eye; an angry scar ran from the side of his nose to the gleaming crown of his bald black head. The eponymous Johnny, I presumed.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that, Johnny. I’m quite sure I’ve mentioned that I’m not a knight.”
“You English, ain’t you? Close enough.” Johnny hefted a dark bottle questioningly, but Mr. Wiltshire shook his head. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is my associate, Miss Gallagher.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “Nice joint you got here.”
“Five Points girl. I like her already.”
I winced inwardly. I’d worked hard to scrub my accent clean, but apparently traces of the slum remained. “Good ear,” I said with a weak smile.
“Better than the eye, anyways. Lookin’ for Annie, I s’pose?”
“Indeed,” Mr. Wiltshire said. “Is she here?”
Johnny gestured with a filthy glass. “She’s in a mood, though. Best watch yourself.”
“How unusual,” Mr. Wiltshire said dryly, grabbing a lamp and heading toward a heap of rags slumped at the end of the bar. As the lamplight drew nearer, the rags resolved themselves into a woman—or at least, a womanlike creature. She was about forty, judging from the lines on her face, though it was hard to tell how much of that was age and how much a lifetime of hard drinking. Her frame, too, showed the ravages of the bottle, and she had a head of hair that might once have been curly but now resembled the dead thistles clinging to the walls at the gasworks. She wore a man’s jacket and trousers, and had the nub of a cigar jammed into a corner of her mouth. All in all, she looked like something the cat had coughed up—yet when she reached for her bottle, the light caught a glitter of jewels on her fingers.
“Miss Harris,” Mr. Wiltshire said. “It’s been a long time.”
The woman looked him up and down with a bleary frown. “Thought you was s’posed to be dead.”
“Missing.”
“Missing is usually dead in your line of work, Pinkerton.” She said the word Pinkerton much as I’d done yesterday, as if it tasted sour on her tongue.
He glanced over his shoulder, but nobody was paying us the least attention, and besides, it was too loud in there for casual eavesdropping. “How did you hear about my being missing?”
“Not every day Goldilocks Astorbilt descends from on high to ask after ol’ Annie. Traipsed all over Five Points looking for me, I hear. Pity he didn’t find me. I do so love gazing into those pretty blues.”
“You were on the hunt, I take it?”
“If you could call it that. Rat trapping, more like.”
“And did you find your quarry?”
“The Bloodhound always finds her quarry, love.” Annie flashed a rotten-toothed smile.
“Yes, well, that’s what brings us here. I’ve a job for you, if you’re willing.”
Annie considered him with a shrewd eye. “Fee’s gone up.”
“How surprising.”
“Sure you can afford it, Pinkerton?”
“You needn’t concern yourself with that. Will you come or not?”
“What, now?”
“Immediately. The crime scene is still fresh, but with the police plying their trade as we speak…”
Annie made a face. “Coppers’ll stink up the whole joint.”
“Something like that. We’ll wait for you outside, shall we?” He was so eager to be gone from the place that he didn’t even wait for her answer, herding me toward the door with a meaningful look.
“That woman is a bounty hunter?” I asked incredulously as we climbed the steps to the sidewalk.
“The best on the eastern seaboard,” Mr. Wiltshire said. “Difficult to credit, I know, but Miss Harris is possessed of a particularly potent brand of luck.”
“Luck? Her?”
“Yes, indeed. She can track a man as easily as a hound tracks a fox—hence her nom de guerre. All she needs is a scent. That”—his mouth twisted sourly—“and a great deal of money.”
“A scent. In New York.”
“It’s a wonder, isn’t it? Like trying
to isolate the sound of a single voice amid a screaming rabble, and yet she manages it. It helps, I think, that she perceives smells as much visually as in the traditional sense.”
I tried to imagine what that would be like, but it was quite a stretch. “If her skills are worth so much, what’s she doing in there?”
“Heaven knows. With what she charges, she ought to be lounging in the lobby of the Park Avenue Hotel sipping something aged in a barrel.”
“She’s drinking from barrels, all right—straight from the hose.”
“She does enjoy the bottle. Not to mention expensive cigars, games of chance, and a dozen more dangerous vices. But she gets the job done—when you can find her. As often as not, she’s passed out in an alley somewhere. Such a waste of her talent.” He started to say more, but a shrill voice in the distance caught his attention. “Did you hear that?”
“What, the newsie?” I glanced up the block, where a boy of about ten had just stationed himself with a stack of afternoon papers.
“Harlem’s House of Hauntings! Read the terrifying tale, straight from the coppers themselves!”
Mr. Wiltshire was striding up the street before the boy had even finished the headline, and by the time he returned with the paper, his mouth was set in a grim line. “Listen to this. At least three boarders confirm having seen the specters. These persons are not as a rule superstitious, yet each recounts his own blood-curdling tale of visitations in the dark of night.” Frowning, he added, “It looks as though this isn’t the first story they’ve printed on the subject, either. One wonders how many others I missed while I was being held at the gasworks.”
“Is that unusual? Ghost stories in the newspapers, I mean?”
“With such frequency, yes. There’s been a rash of them recently, even in the more reputable papers.”
“What does it mean?”
He glanced away. “Hopefully we’ll learn more when we consult the medium tonight,” he said evasively.
Apparently, he’d decided to take a page from Jonathan Burrows’s book. “If your being slippery is supposed to spare me worry, you should know it’s doing just the opposite.”
In reply, he inclined his head subtly; the Bloodhound stood at the bottom of the steps, looking even more frightful by daylight than she had by lamplight. “This your carriage, Pink?”
As though there were likely to be another such conveyance parked outside One-Eyed Johnny’s.
“Hurry up, then,” she said, hoisting herself into the brougham. “I got a schedule to keep.”
* * *
The ride uptown was about as comfortable as you’d expect. The brougham is a carriage built for two elegant persons, and perhaps a lapdog. We were two people and a very large Bloodhound in dire need of a bath. Mr. Wiltshire and I rode with our knees tucked into opposite corners of the carriage, Annie wedged between us like a burr. We gave her as much space as the seat allowed, but it wasn’t nearly enough—especially when she fell asleep, leaving us to suffer the exhaust from her gaping mouth. When we finally reached the Crowe residence, I flung myself from the carriage with such enthusiasm that I must have seemed distastefully eager to the pair of uniformed coppers flanking the door.
Then again, maybe they took one look at Annie and understood. I wondered how Mr. Wiltshire intended to explain her presence—or for that matter, our own—but he was spared the trouble, for no sooner had he descended from the carriage than the front door opened to reveal the familiar figure of Sergeant Chapman.
“Miss Gallagher. What brings you here?” Then he noticed my companions, and his eyes narrowed. “Well, well. Thomas Wiltshire, I presume? Just the man I was looking for.”
“I fully intend to give you a statement, Sergeant,” Mr. Wiltshire said, “but I’m afraid now isn’t a good time.”
Chapman leaned against the doorframe, putting himself directly in our path. “Your convenience ain’t really my top priority. And if you’re looking to get inside, you’ll need my say-so.” He lifted his eyebrows, as if to say, Your move.
“I’ve been engaged by the family,” Mr. Wiltshire said.
“So I hear. Only I couldn’t find any record of Locke, Banneker & Associates with the paper pushers downtown. Small practice, is it?”
Mr. Wiltshire’s mouth tightened. He drummed his fingers against the griffin head of his walking stick, eying the two uniformed police officers unhappily. “Inside, perhaps?”
Chapman stood aside and motioned us in.
“I suggest we speak in the parlor,” Mr. Wiltshire said. “In the meantime, would you mind terribly if my colleague took a look around?” He gestured at Annie.
Chapman scanned the Bloodhound with an unreadable expression. “Long as she don’t touch nothing.”
“That should be fine,” Mr. Wiltshire said. As for Annie, she just rolled her eyes and wandered off.
“So,” Chapman said when the three of us were alone. “Pinkerton, I’m guessing.”
Mr. Wiltshire sighed. “Perhaps I ought to just have it printed on my card.”
“Thought you was the family attorney at first, but he’s in the other room, so…” Chapman shrugged. “Not much of a stretch from there. Why the secrecy, anyway?”
“It’s a long story, and as you know time is of the essence in these cases. That’s why I kept things brief with your colleagues this morning.”
“That’s putting it mildly. Gave ’em about two words, is what I heard.”
“I gave them what I had, which is regrettably little. Hopefully, my colleague will be able to gather something more useful.”
“Your colleague.” Chapman threw a skeptical glance down the hallway where Annie had retreated. “And what about Miss Gallagher here? How does she come into it?”
“Miss Gallagher is assisting me in my investigation.” He didn’t elaborate.
Chapman sucked at a tooth, his customary cool giving way to irritation. “Let me explain something here. I’m fully within my rights to bring you in to the station, both of you. So why don’t you save us all some trouble and stop giving me the stone wall?”
“What exactly is it that you think I’m not telling you, Sergeant?”
“Let’s start with the gasworks. Ward and O’Leary headed down there this morning, on your say-so. What’re they gonna find?”
“Very little, I should think. If the men who took me captive have any sense at all, they’ll have cleared out the moment Miss Gallagher and I escaped.”
“They the ones who did this?” He cocked his head over his shoulder, indicating the crime scene.
“I wish I knew.”
Chapman’s watery eyes narrowed, and a vein stood out in his forehead, like the fuse on a stick of dynamite.
I figured I’d better step in. “Excuse me, Mr. Wiltshire, may I have a word?” Drawing him aside, I said, “I think we should trust him.”
“With what? We have nothing solid.”
“But you have a theory.”
“To the extent that I do, it’s not the sort of thing a police detective is likely to credit.”
“He believes in ghosts, doesn’t he?”
“So you’ve said, but…”
“Do you trust me?”
He sighed. “It’s not a question of—”
“Please, just … Do you trust my judgment?”
Pale eyes scanned mine. “I trust your judgment,” he said, if a little warily.
“Then follow my lead.” Without waiting for a reply, I walked back to Sergeant Chapman. “So it’s like this: When Frederick Crowe hired Mr. Wiltshire to look into his brother’s murder, he said he thought Jacob had been killed by a shade. That’s like a ghost.”
“I see.” Chapman’s gaze flicked to Mr. Wiltshire, as if measuring his reaction to this talk of ghosts. “So when the Arbridge kid gives his story to the papers, you figure maybe there’s a connection.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Wiltshire said cautiously.
“And?”
“He may have exaggerated some of the
details, but I believe his story to be genuine.”
“I got the same impression when I spoke to him this morning,” Chapman said.
Mr. Wiltshire seemed to relax a little at that. I wondered if this was the first time he’d met a copper who believed in ghosts. “Even so, I ruled out any direct connection between the incidents. There was nothing paranormal about Mr. Crowe’s death—either of them.”
“That so?”
“Indeed. For one thing—”
“Uh-uh.” Sergeant Chapman crooked his finger. “Show me.”
“What, the coroner hasn’t arrived yet? Good Lord.” Mr. Wiltshire drew out his watch, mildly appalled.
“Busy day.” Chapman escorted us from the parlor to the third floor, where we found the Bloodhound poking around outside Frederick Crowe’s bedroom. “You should wait out here,” the detective told me in his grandfatherly growl. “Not a pleasant sight.”
I hadn’t come this far to swoon at the sight of a corpse. “I can manage, thank you. I’ve seen dead bodies before.” Drunks and lungers, mostly, but still.
“Your call.” Chapman stood aside.
Actually, the sight wasn’t all that bad, considering, except that the poor fellow on the floor was certainly dead. He could almost have passed for sleeping were it not for the mottling of his skin where it met the carpet.
“Who pulled the sheet off his face?” Scowling, Chapman leaned out into the hallway. “Thought I told you not to touch nothing?” I didn’t catch the Bloodhound’s reply, but its brevity suggested it wasn’t all that polite.
“So.” Mr. Wiltshire approached the body. “Rigor had already set in by the time I arrived, which was shortly before nine o’clock. No marks on the body.”
“Smothered, I figure,” Chapman said.
“I concur, though the killer has gone to some trouble to make it look as if a shade were involved. For my benefit, presumably, though frankly I’m offended if they thought I’d been taken in by it.”
