by Sara Donati
The married lady in question was born to well-to-do parents of eminent respectability. She was a debutante of ethereal beauty and elegant manners, her coming-out ball so great a success that it is described still as sine qua non. Shortly thereafter she married into a family as prominent as her own. When tragedy struck and her husband died in a riding mishap, the wealthy young widow turned all her attention to her infant son. She mourned for a year and then married for a second time. Her second husband was a much sought-after bachelor, admired for connections, fortune, good looks, and the popularity that came to him as a result of his droll sense of humor and witty critique of all things theatrical.
The lady seemed very happy in her second marriage, celebrated as a great beauty and for her clever repartee, a socialite who patronized the opera and theater and who gave extravagant dinner parties and set fashion trends. The couple traveled often and brought home treasures to display in their beautiful homes on Park Place and in Provincetown.
The announcement of her death in childbed came as a great shock, even to those who knew her best. The private interment was also remarked upon as unusual, and soon enough questions began to circulate.
From sources once close to the family came the first hint that the lady might have died not in childbed but because she did not care to bear another child. In seeking a remedy she put her trust in a doctor who was not the respected and experienced practitioner he claimed to be, but a charlatan. The unfortunate lady underwent surgery performed so badly that she suffered a prolonged and excruciating death. She was attended only by her husband and mother, for she could not call her friends to her side for fear that the true nature of her illness would be made clear. As a result, the criminal who performed the illegal operation that ended her life has gone unnamed and unpunished.
As once noted by a respected physician, “Pride and Vanity have built more Hospitals than all the Virtues together.” To this we add the adage: caveat emptor.
7
JACK HAD ALWAYS been a good sleeper, quick to drift off, hard to rouse. A howling dog or a thunder strike at three in the morning and he slept on quite peacefully. A few things could wake him quickly: Anna’s voice or her touch, or someone knocking at the front door.
This morning someone at the door woke him. A message before seven was never a good thing; it meant he had to go into headquarters or Anna had an emergency with a patient and would be off to the New Amsterdam. One of them would go, and the other would eat breakfast alone.
He was pulling his bathrobe closed as he stepped into the hall just as Mrs. Cabot got to the top of the stairs. The housekeeper was sixty years old at least but nimble as a youngster. He touched his brow in thanks for the folded note, but neither of them spoke for fear of waking Anna.
And of course, it made no difference.
“You or me?” Anna’s voice came muffled through her pillow.
“Me.” He sat down with his back against the headboard and read.
She peeked up at him, blinking owlishly. “It was past midnight when you got in.”
“True. But three Italian sailors got jumped by the Whyos.”
She lifted her head, yawned, and sat up. “I thought once they hanged McGowan—”
“McGloin,” Jack corrected. “Mike McGloin.”
“That’s the one,” Anna agreed. “Wasn’t the idea that once he was gone the Whyos would disappear?”
“An overly optimistic projection,” Jack said. “They’re still raising hell. So for example, these Italian sailors. One of them dead, two at Bellevue and still half-alive. We need to get statements.” He leaned over and kissed her temple. “Don’t you have an early surgery?”
“You can’t fool me, Jack Mezzanotte.” She climbed out of bed, frowning. “You just don’t want to eat breakfast alone. I’m coming. We need to talk about the trip to Greenwood. You know, we could go for your birthday. Would that be enough time to prepare?”
Reaching for his trousers he said, “I’ll talk to Aunt Philomena and get word to Mama today, see what we can work out. But my guess is, Mama will like the idea.”
She crossed the room to hug him. Warm still and smelling of her sleeping self, soft curves pressed into his chest. The idea of climbing back into bed came to him, but she read his mind and slipped away, smiling at him over her shoulder.
“Tonight,” she said. “Whenever you get home.”
* * *
• • •
WHEN HE WAS first promoted to detective, Jack had been partnered with Oscar Maroney for one obvious reason: the two of them were the only Italian speakers on the force. Oscar had his name and build from his Irish father, but he had been raised by his Calabrese grandfather and then a Neapolitan stepfather, in a household of Italian women. It was the name and the Irish uncle attached to it that got Oscar onto the police force, but his connections to the city’s growing Italian population made his career.
Because, he told Jack when they had been working together for a while, their countrymen were too crafty and quick for the dumb Mick coppers. It took a Dago to catch a Dago.
And there was a lot of crime among the poor contadini who were flooding the city in a rising swell. They worked like slaves for pennies and lived crowded into tenements as narrow and hot as ovens that stank of sewage and mold. It was no surprise that they were short tempered and quick to take offense. Especially with the Irish, who were better established in the city and showed newcomers even less charity than they themselves had been shown.
“Nobody should wonder at my cantankerous nature,” Oscar was fond of saying. “The mean-spirited Mick half of me and the sly Dago half of me, always at odds.”
Together he and Oscar kept an eye on the Italian neighborhoods; they tended their network of informants with money and favors, and never turned away somebody with a tale to tell. The typical story was half lies, a quarter wishful thinking, and, if they were lucky, a quarter useful observations.
On the days when their schedules allowed, they met first thing at the diGiglio Brothers barbershop in the Ingalls building on the Bowery. Barbers were gossips of the most useful kind, and Italian barbers stood above the rest.
Now Jack took the stairway to the basement, a warren of shops and services and a world unto itself. The low ceilings were lined with clanking, sweating pipes, the tiled walls and floors always slick to the touch, warm in winter and cool in summer.
Oscar claimed a man could live down here like a mole and never show his face aboveground. He had made a personal study of it: you could get a steak and eggs for twelve cents at Martha’s Diner, leave your shirts at the Jet-White-No-Chinese steam laundry and have the Russian tailor turn your cuffs and mend your collars. There was Little Mo’s newsstand for papers and Smitty’s for cigars. Best of all, there was diGiglio’s.
For a quick moment Jack paused outside the barbershop. The gilt lettering arching across the window was so elaborate that a newcomer needed a minute to sort through the curlicues:
DIGIGLIO BROTHERS HAIR EMPORIUM
MASTER BARBERS
ROME, FLORENCE, NEW YORK
The window was lined with tall glass jars filled with mysterious liquids in deep jewel colors, reds and blues and greens, all glittering in the gaslight. The whole place seemed to glow: heavy mirrors in gilded frames, brass fittings, ivory combs, polished spittoons, even the bald heads of all three barbers, the diGiglio brothers.
Jack always looked forward to a half hour in one of the barber chairs, the deep leather cushions so comfortable that reclining, feet up, face and neck swathed in steaming damp towels, a man could fall asleep.
If he happened to be deaf, Jack remarked to himself as he went in. Oscar was sitting in the small waiting area, his nose buried in a newspaper. The barbers were arguing in a combination of Toscano, Romanesco, and English about nothing at all, which was their specialty.
Jack drew in a deep breath. Wal
king into diGiglio’s was like going to the fights wrapped in warm Turkish towels and a cloud of pleasant smells: sandalwood, cedar, talcum, rich soap lather, tobacco.
As soon as he sat down Oscar leaned toward him with a question. “How is Sophie?”
“Quiet. Withdrawn. Trying not to be either. Just about what you’d expect.”
Oscar looked thoughtful. “I’d like to stop by there to say hello, would that be fitting, do you think?”
Jack said, “Give her one more day. Right now we need to get up to Bellevue to see a couple of sailors out of Palermo.” He handed over the note and watched Oscar’s expression shift from irritation to resignation.
“Your turn,” Jack said, jerking his chin toward Aldo, who was showing a customer out with every gesture of gratitude he could muster.
Oscar lowered his voice. “Which one is this?”
Jack grinned. “You’ve been coming here for years, and you still can’t tell them apart.”
“All three of them are as bald as boiled eggs,” Oscar said. “If they’d stop fussing with their beards maybe I’d have a chance.”
In compensation for their identical pates, all three brothers had grown beards and mustaches, which they sculpted and waxed and dressed with equal parts imagination and professional pride.
“They could at least wear name tags,” Oscar grumbled as he headed for the empty chair.
Jack picked up the newspaper, keeping his smile to himself. A half hour in Aldo’s chair would put Oscar in a better mood, which was where he should be when they were starting a new investigation.
* * *
• • •
THEY WALKED TO Mulberry Street, dodging peddlers and clerks, delivery wagons and newsboys, until they met Connie, a match girl who had been selling on this corner for well over a year. Her nose ran freely and her eyes were red-rimmed; she smiled at Jack, showing a jumble of small brown teeth.
He handed her a nickel, waved away the pennies she offered in return, and pocketed the matchbox. If he tried to engage her in conversation she would slip away into the crowd; the children who worked the Bowery were cautious down to the marrow, or they didn’t survive.
Saloons and dance halls clustered like blowflies on every corner up and down the Bowery. Even this early in the morning the air smelled of stale beer, overflowing sewers, and vomit. Perfume, compared to what it would be like in August. Overhead an elevated train screeched past like a hundred scalded cats. When it passed Oscar said, “Tell me what happened with the woman, the one who came off the wrecked steamer.”
“It wasn’t in the papers?”
“The rescue was, sure. But there wasn’t much about the lady who died at the New Amsterdam.”
Oscar wanted the facts, Jack was very much aware, for a specific reason: when the gossip started, he wanted to be able to counter it. And there would be gossip about anything and everything having to do with Sophie, because the newspapers had made a lot of money off her last year and would be looking to make more. So Jack recited what he knew, focusing on the details that would interest his partner: a young woman recently widowed, a brother who had come to escort her back home to France, a wrecked steamer, and a rescue that had come too late for the lady, who had died and then been delivered of a live child by means of surgery.
“Her name?”
“Catherine Bellegarde.”
Oscar pulled up short. “This is a French girl married to a Bellegarde? That’s got to be Denis Bellegarde. You should recognize that name.”
“It rings a bell,” Jack admitted.
“Denis Bellegarde is the nephew and the heir of the mayor of the French Quarter.”
All the areas dominated by one group or another had honorary mayors, men who knew everything about everybody, and who looked out for their own. As long as the interests of their constituents didn’t get in the way of profit, that much was understood. He and Oscar didn’t spend a lot of time in the French Quarter, which was why Jack hadn’t made the connection immediately.
“Marcel Roberge, from the Greene Street Boulangerie?”
“That’s him, the uncle. Denis is his sister’s son. And you say he’s dead?”
Jack realized now that they only had the brother-in-law’s word on that. “That’s what the dead woman’s brother told Sophie.”
Oscar frowned. “Something’s off. I was in the boulangerie yesterday. No black crepe hanging anywhere. No death book on the door.”
One of the odder customs of the French, in Jack’s opinion, was leaving a book at the front door when there was a death in the family. Friends and relatives were meant to write their condolences in it, a practice that seemed out of place in a neighborhood where half the population could not read or write.
But Oscar did have a point. If there was nothing on display to signify that a family member had died, that could only mean one of two things: nobody was dead, or the family hadn’t yet been told.
“Odder still,” Oscar went on, “if Denis and his wife are dead, his family would have taken in the child. The brother-in-law must have known that. Did he lie about it?” This wasn’t really a question; nobody was more familiar with the human capacity for lies than a copper.
“Something is off,” he said again.
“We’ve got these Italian sailors to sort out,” Jack said. “Then maybe we can look into the boulangerie.”
* * *
• • •
THE MORNING REVIEW was just starting when they reached headquarters. Detectives and patrolmen lined the hall waiting for the new prisoners to be marched down the hall and past the Rogues’ Gallery, hundreds of tintypes posted for coppers to consult. Most of the prisoners would already be on that wall, along with their compatriots in crime.
The gallery had been the invention of the chief of detectives, an innovation even Oscar couldn’t complain about; criminals were far easier to catch if you knew what they really looked like.
Oscar’s left eyebrow jerked up in the direction of the desk sergeant. “Schmidt,” he said. “Can’t remember the last time I saw this kind of turnout. Somebody important forget to grease the wheels? Somebody lay mitts on Marm?”
He just could not resist winding up Pete Schmidt, who was the smallest man at headquarters, maybe half the size of the infamous Marm Mandelbaum, the city’s most notorious fence. Thus far Marm and her husband had been sly enough to avoid a prison sentence, but the day would come. It always did.
“Here they come now,” Schmidt said. “Figure it out for yourself, you dumb Mick.”
“Never mind the mystery,” Oscar said. “Just hand over the paperwork on the Italian sailors the Whyos went after last night.”
“You’ll be hoofing it uptown,” Pete said with a satisfied grin as he pushed the file across the desk toward them. “All the rigs already signed out for the day.”
* * *
• • •
JACK HAILED A cab and they started uptown in a snarl of traffic.
“It’s all the construction,” Oscar said. “If I were in charge—”
“You’d shut it all down,” Jack finished for him.
“Somebody has to show some common sense. They’ll go on piling buildings on top of each other until we live like rats in tunnels.”
As that was almost certainly true, Jack left his partner to his mood. For the rest of the ride Oscar frowned out the window, remarking on which buildings were being torn down, and which were going up, the folly of people with too much money, and the idiots in City Hall who looked the other way when it came to building permits. So long as their palms were appropriately greased.
At the corner of Twenty-sixth and First Avenue traffic came to a standstill. They paid the cabby and got out to walk the rest of the way.
“Something big is up,” Oscar said. “That’s the mayor’s carriage, and Carnegie’s right next to it.” He tapped the shoul
der of a man walking by, a hospital orderly by the smear of blood on his jacket, and jerked his thumb toward the intersection.
“What’s going on here?”
“Breaking ground,” said the man. “Another new laboratory or some such. Not enough sheets for the beds, but another laboratory.”
“I read about this,” Oscar told Jack. “A new laboratory for a—what is it called, with the microscopes and dead bodies.”
“There’s Nick Lambert,” Jack said. “I bet he could tell you.”
Lambert had seen them and raised a hand in greeting as he approached. He was always carefully groomed, but today he looked like he had an appointment with the president, and Jack said as much.
“Who gives a damn about the president when Andrew Carnegie is passing out money?” Lambert said. “We’re getting a pathology laboratory, the first in the country.”
“Pathology,” Oscar said. “That’s the word.”
“Today it is,” Lambert agreed. “What brings you to Bellevue?”
“The dead,” Oscar said. “Or better said, the survivors, this time.”
Lambert glanced over his shoulder at the photographers fussing with tripods. Reporters were milling around, and a lot of passersby had stopped to have a look. Jack picked out three pickpockets he had arrested multiple times, and they had seen him too because they were drifting away and melting into the crowd.
“It will be a while before they get started,” Lambert said. “There’s a Jane Doe I’d like you to see if you can spare a half hour.”
Oscar’s brows went up, a question he didn’t need to put into words.
“It might be related to the multipara homicides,” Lambert said, his tone a little off. Almost embarrassed.
Jack said, “Post-mortem?”
“Tomorrow, I’m hoping.”
