Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  “Yes,” replied Edward Stallworth blandly to Duncan’s eloquence, “we are in the midst of great iniquities.”

  “Now, I know that you write articles, editorial articles for the Christian Dawning and the Presbyterian Advocate on occasion, and it would possibly not be amiss if you composed a short essay supporting our work in this area or simply pointed out the value of the Tribune articles.”

  “Yes,” said Edward reflectively, “perhaps I could.” He paused, then went on in a manner which suggested that these plans had been the moral center toward which all his thoughts for the past year had irresistibly tended. “The financial support of the African missions is, of course, a worthwhile ideal,” said Edward Stallworth, “and one which has been treated much of late in the Advocate, and the congregation here has raised several substantial special collections, but it might be well to turn now to a cause which is closer to our homes. Such a cause might draw considerable attention to . . . to . . .” He tried to think of a word other than myself but could not.

  “Yes,” said Duncan quietly, “it certainly would. Now,” he continued, in a voice that was no longer eloquently persuasive, but businesslike with a casual fraternity: “Marian is to form a committee as well, a ladies’ Committee for the Suppression of Urban Vice, or some such, and will enlist all her friends. You might urge certain ladies of your congregation to join as well—those whose husbands have some sort of power within the city government, or influence in other spheres. Or who, for that matter, are simply rich.”

  “What is this committee’s purpose?” asked Edward with a little ironic smile of satisfied conspiracy. “Does Marian intend to nail boards across the doors of houses of ill-fame? Will she smash pipes in the opium dens of Mott Street?”

  “No,” laughed Duncan Phair, “the committee won’t really do much of anything, but noise themselves about and write letters and cry out their indignation against the vicious Democrats who permit and promote vice in this city.”

  “Well,” said Edward, “so long as I can assure the ladies that they won’t have to see any of the objects of their charitable work, I think I might manage to persuade several or more into Marian’s committee. That is, if she can guarantee at least one afternoon a week for the ladies to gather and knit little woolen caps and boots for the babies who are nightly abandoned in the district. Perhaps, if Helen became part of such an organization,” he mused wryly, “it would take her mind off the inconsistencies in the Gospels.” Edward Stallworth’s dry tone of voice was with him always, except for the couple of hours a week when he actually stood in the pulpit. Then he was quite boomingly sincere.

  “Thank you, Edward,” said Duncan, “I was certain that you would prove invaluable in these tasks.”

  “Yes,” said Edward, “we shall all do what we can. Helen will assist Marian, and Benjamin, as you say, will doubtless play the part of the gull to perfection. And I assure you I shall not be behindhand either. On Sunday, when I see Father, I will talk to him myself of these plans. It was not necessary for you to act as intermediary, Duncan, I—”

  “Oh,” cried Duncan deprecatingly, “that is certainly not the case. Your father is in court today, and he has asked that for the time being I devote my energies to this. He’d like to see me up for the city councillor race in ’83. He was much disappointed by my showing last year, but of course only blames it on the Democrats. He doesn’t intend for me to be beaten again.”

  “I trust that you won’t be. I pray that you won’t be,” said Edward Stallworth, “but be that as it may, I will do what I can to further these laudable schemes. I trust that the entire family will find profit in them. Spiritual profit, I mean, of course.”

  That afternoon Duncan Phair spent on Bleecker Street, on the second story of a certain small, well-kept brick house. Mrs. Lady Weale, an old woman with a flat, sour gray face and a yellow kerchief tied around her head, had opened the door to him, and allowed him entrance without question. She preceded him upstairs and unlocked the double doors. Inside, he found Maggie Kizer, in elegant dishabille, seated by the window, with a book of Jean Ingelow’s poetry open in her lap.

  “I hadn’t expected you,” said Maggie with a smile, “but I’m glad that you’ve come.” She held out her hand to him. It was bare but for the single ring of rubies on it.

  Duncan Phair came forward and gallantly kissed the proffered hand, turning the blemished thumbnail sweetly beneath his bearded lips.

  “I’ve come for more than one reason,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve come to warn you . . .”

  Maggie’s smile faded altogether. “To warn me concerning what?”

  He held up his hands reassuringly. “Nothing in particular, nothing that need really concern you. I want only to warn you to be careful, to carry yourself with even more discretion than is usual with you, for the time being.”

  “I am always discreet,” replied Maggie. She motioned him to take the chair near her.

  “Yes,” said Duncan, sitting, “but this area, the area in which this house stands, will shortly come under scrutiny.”

  “The police? I have no business with the police, Duncan.” A woman with less polish than Maggie would have shrugged her shoulders in irritation.

  “Not the police. The papers, other interested groups. It won’t be safe for . . . those who are indiscreet.”

  Maggie looked at her lover closely. Maggie Kizer, though she had been intimate with Duncan Phair for more than a year and saw him three times a week or oftener, knew neither his surname nor his occupation. He had not offered to tell and she had not troubled herself to ask. Maggie’s deportment as a lady was in fact unflawed, and she asked no explanations of him now.

  “I just want you to remember, Maggie,” he said soothingly, “that this house stands on the edge of a very dangerous neighborhood. Saturday night a gentleman was murdered within a single street of here. He was a lawyer whose offices were directly around the corner from Trinity Church. A knife of some sort was stuck up under his ribs and pierced his heart. He was left naked in an alleyway off Leroy Street, and identified by a policeman who knew him by sight.”

  “Were you acquainted with him?” asked Maggie, with something of harshness or a slight choking in her throat.

  “I had met him only. We knew one another only to speak in passing.”

  “Because a man is murdered and left naked in an alley is no reason I should be confined to these rooms,” cried Maggie. “There have been murders before. A woman was hacked to death in the house directly across the way and the pieces packed into a china crate. And a newsgirl was struck down in the street by a carriage-and-four which did not even halt for her. But such things have nothing to do with me, Duncan.”

  “No,” said Duncan, shaking his head, “I suppose they do not. But circumspection is a virtue in us all, Maggie, and I wish only to advise you toward maintenance of that circumspection in yourself. There,” he cried, reaching his arms around her waist and abandoning the pompous solemnity in his voice, “I’ll say no more of it—not a single word more, not a syllable, not a letter. . . .”

  Chapter 10

  Although the Tribune had already reported the vicious murder of Cyrus Butterfield under the headline FIRST CRIME OF THE NEW YEAR, and told who the victim was and how he had died, Simeon Lightner decided to take Duncan Phair’s advice and exploit the story. A few days after the lawyer’s corpse was found near the North River docks, the paper provided a highly colored account of the man’s last day upon earth. It followed him to work on the morning of Saturday, December 31, threading with him his legal way among associates and clients, watched him at luncheon at a small eatery on Murray Street—even providing the menu—and spoke of his last appointment at a quarter of six in the afternoon with the representative of a firearms factory in Connecticut. The testimony of a minor clerk in his law office provided
the last sight of Mr. Butterfield alive, as he climbed into a cab just outside his building. Eighteen hours later the article picked up again with the report, quoted at length, of a policeman on beat near Dock 42, who found the naked corpse of Cyrus Butterfield wedged up between two barrels, a small but deep wound in his left breast.

  No member of Mr. Butterfield’s family—his wife nor his sister nor his brother-in-law nor his children—could account for his being anywhere near the West Street docks, when his home was far up in the country on East Eighty-fifth Street. They could not have been more surprised if his corpse had turned up in Singapore or Liverpool. No one denied that the portion of New York demarcated by Canal Street, MacDougal Street, and slanting Bleecker Street was dangerous, but no one could say what had taken Mr. Butterfield to the Black Triangle on the last evening of the year—this was the first time that memorably and sinisterly descriptive designation had been brought before the public.

  Cyrus Butterfield’s practice was exclusively given over to the legal concerns of large New England manufacturies, and certainly none of his clients was of the common criminal class. Thus, there was some mystery attached to his presence there, and Simeon Lightner—writing anonymously—stated that the Tribune meant to find out what it was; the Tribune meant to bring those responsible for the bereavement of so estimable a family as the Butterfields to summary justice; the Tribune meant to show that the lassitude of the Democratically controlled police force was in some measure responsible for this gifted man’s shocking and sudden demise. And Duncan Phair, writing as “A Bereaved Colleague” of Mr. Butterfield, quoted alarming figures on the number of murders committed in the same precinct over the most recent year, the number of unidentified corpses that had been taken from those streets to the city morgue, and—in appalling contrast—the infrequent arrests and even rarer convictions for those crimes.

  The article excited much notice, and the following day Simeon Lightner came back with a description of the murdered man’s clothing and jewelry. This was provided by Mrs. Butterfield, who was a meticulously observant lady. Her grief had not caused her to forget that her husband had worn his sapphire studs and stickpin on the day he left the house never to return. The Tribune announced that all its sources would be thrown into the task of searching out every second-hand dealer in the length and breadth of the city, to trace these items that had been stripped from Cyrus Butterfield, possibly even while he was still struggling for life in the cold black alley between barrels that had been packed with salted cod.

  On the third day, the paper carried a full half-page account of the funeral of Cyrus Butterfield at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, where the family had worshipped before moving so far north of the city. Edward Stallworth’s stern sermon was printed at length. A circumstantial account of the progress of the funeral procession and Edward Stallworth’s quiet remarks at the graveside closed with an affecting comparison of the quiet rural charm of Greenwood Cemetery and the shrill wretchedness of the Black Triangle. “Here,” said the minister, spreading wide his arms to encompass the bleak winter beauty of the graveyard, “in the garden of graves, death is made to seem gentle, almost enviable; while there, in those unfortunate streets which collectively we may call ‘The Black Triangle,’ life its very self is hideous and insupportable. Here, Cyrus Westen Butterfield, surrounded by the happy dead, will be forever at rest; and there, those responsible for the death of our beloved brother, will never cease from trouble.”

  By the fifth day, when a reward of fifteen hundred dollars was offered for information leading to the capture and arrest of those responsible for this infamous crime, the entire city knew of the death of the lawyer. The police, who at first had seen no reason to distinguish this homicide from any of the several dozen murders of respectable persons that occurred in the city every year, doubled their efforts under the pressure exerted by the excited public. They examined the stock of the second-hand dealers (saving the Tribune the trouble), grilled pawnbrokers, called in their informants, delved into hellholes to question proprietors and known criminals, stopped persons in the street all but at random—but no one could tell anything of the circumstances of the death of Cyrus Butterfield.

  At the height of this clamor, after printing a large selection of outraged letters which demanded to know why such things were allowed to happen in the greatest city in the country, the Tribune announced that it was instituting a series, to appear twice weekly, which would expose that very Triangle of corruption and crime in which Cyrus Butterfield had lost his life. It warned that the revelations would be shocking, but guaranteed the truthfulness and impartiality of their reporters in recording the vice that slunk and caroused within a pistol shot of Washington Square. Simeon Lightner looked on Duncan Phair now with some respect, for his suggestions on how to exercise the Butterfield murder to best advantage had been astute.

  Every night now forays were made into the Black Triangle by three men banded together for protection: Simeon Lightner, Duncan Phair, and Benjamin Stallworth. They could not, of course, disguise themselves as denizens of the place, for their bearing and their speech would have betrayed them immediately; but it was not difficult to pretend that they were only three boon companions, intent on gaming away their funds, filling their heads with liquor, and searching out the best places in which to give way to temptation. Benjamin, if he were good for nothing else, at least lent the group an air of bumbling inconsequence.

  This common recreation of gentlemen amusing themselves in the haunts of the lower classes was called “shooting the elephant.” Criminals never disapproved of it, for such men became easy marks; they rarely failed to become drunk, and so were easy to rob or cheat or dupe. They were, in fact, the easiest money to be had, for there was no need for the criminal to sneak uptown and crawl through the cellar windows of fine houses, when the masters of those houses themselves were so obliging as to take a cab down to West Houston Street and present themselves as ambulatory victims. And men who were victimized did not always complain to the police, for shame was attendant not only upon admitting that one had been tricked, set upon, or robbed, but that one had been in such a place to begin with.

  The Tribune, which was the principal voice for Republican sentiment not only in New York but across the country, had decided to conduct its researches without the help of the police. It was feared that the strong connections between Police Headquarters and Tammany Hall might cast doubt upon the integrity of the investigation. Therefore, until the greatest part of the series had appeared, Simeon Lightner had decided to remain anonymous, so that he might not be observed or subverted by the department. The three men disported themselves in one low hall after another, night after night. They roamed the streets, stopped to talk with prostitutes, and hired girls to dance with them at Harry Hill’s and Bill McGrory’s. Benjamin was even allowed, within strict limits, to exercise his gambling vice at one crooked table after another. He never won, of course, but all his wagers were subsidized by Duncan Phair.

  The first article appeared on Monday, January 16, when for a week the Tribune had had no new information with which to fan public furor over the murder of Mr. Butterfield. It was a description of a panel house on Hudson Street where gentlemen, who resorted there with street prostitutes, were surreptitiously robbed. While the young woman kept the gentleman’s attention with some amorous play, a confederate crept through a panel in the wall and purloined the wallet from the gentleman’s coat—which the prostitute had placed on a chair conveniently near the panel.

  The Tribune stated that it could confirm the existence of over twenty-five such houses in the Black Triangle alone, each building housing an average of seven prostitutes who not only afflicted their partners with disease—and charged them for it—but robbed their pockets as well. The gentleman thus robbed did not dare protest for fear it would become known that he had lain the night in the arms of such a woman; and if in dismay of the sudden discovery of the theft
he did raise a cry, it might well be stifled with a knife below the ribs. Mrs. Butterfield did not take kindly to this last inference, which sneakingly suggested that her husband had met his death in such a manner, and she did not cooperate further with Simeon Lightner or any other representative of the Tribune.

  At the end of the article, Duncan Phair gave the police department’s estimates of the number of prostitutes in that area, the number of houses of ill fame—both lower than the Tribune’s own figures—and compared these numbers with the records of arrests and convictions. The police department’s performance was distressingly poor.

  Many of the letters the Tribune received commenting on this article it printed over the following two days. Then came time for the second article, which described the depravities of Harry Hill’s place: the wild, inebriate dancing, the assignations engineered with scandalous forwardness, the obscene Punch and Judy shows, the illegal and bloody fights in the back rooms. And thus the Tribune kept up: an article on Mondays and letters the next two days, another article on Thursday, and letters on Friday and Saturday. Fashionable New York was fascinated by this information, which for the first time appeared in a well-respected journal and had been written in a tone of voice that declared, “No one has ever plumbed these depths of iniquity before. . . .” The National Police Gazette printed a sarcastic editorial article which pointed out that it had been writing of the Black Triangle for many years and had presented the same information that the Tribune was now claiming for its own. But the gentlemen and ladies who had never seen the articles in the Police Gazette did not see the editorial either and imagined that the Tribune was breaking new ground, tearing apart the sidewalks to expose the hot-walled red-lighted hell that, swarming with repulsive shrieking monsters, surged beneath their feet.