Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

by Michael McDowell

  Simeon Lightner was not entirely pleased with the manner in which the Tribune’s undertaking had proceeded. Although he couldn’t object to its sterling success, nor to the increase in prestige and salary he had gained by it, he had the uneasy unpleasant feeling that he was being led about by Duncan Phair. The articles appeared in what order and with what emphases Duncan thought best, and were of rather a different consistency and tone than what Simeon would have produced had he been on his own. But since everyone else seemed pleased and since the credit redounded on him and Duncan took none of it for himself, Simeon felt he had not the right of objection. Besides, Duncan Phair, who was at all events a pleasurable companion, never made suggestions that were not well considered or that did not tend toward the improvement of the articles. Simeon tugged at his wiry red whiskers in exasperation over the fact that he could find no real reason for the distrust he felt for the handsome young lawyer.

  Simeon arrived at Hungry Charley’s half an hour before his appointed time. The restaurant was long and narrow, with walls and floor of red-veined marble. Twenty long narrow tables, sitting six on a side, were set with one end against the wall, leaving only a pinched walk space. The high ceiling was of white tile and a single lamp was suspended over every table. In the middle of Tuesday afternoon there were no more than fifteen persons dining, and Simeon had no trouble in getting a place that commanded a view of the entrance. He ordered a chop and lager and fell to his luncheon without any nervous hope that by the coming interview he would discover the murderer of Cyrus Butterfield.

  He had finished his chop and beer, ordered coffee, finished that, and been served another beer, before the “lady” came in, some minutes late. She was short, thin, with a sallow mean-spirited face, and had—as promised—a yellow kerchief tied around her head, as if she were suffering from a toothache.

  The woman looked around her uncertainly, and it was only when she appeared in imminent danger of being shown the sidewalk by a waiter, that Simeon stood and motioned her over. The woman with the yellow kerchief nervously pointed Simeon out to the waiter who, receiving a nod from the reporter, allowed her to pass.

  Simeon directed her to a seat at the end of the table, against the marble wall. He moved himself, and they were then some distance removed from any other diners.

  “What will you have?” Simeon asked.

  “Lager,” replied the woman.

  Simeon ordered two lagers from the waiter and in a few moments they were brought, with a plate of cheese and bread.

  “Bring the money?” asked the woman.

  “What’s your name?” demanded Simeon Lightner.

  “Lady Weale,” the woman replied mistrustfully.

  “Lady Weale?”

  “That’s my name, that’s the name my ma give me, ’cause I was born a girl: Lady.”

  “Well, M’Lady, tell me what you know and then we’ll speak of money.”

  “You bring the money?” she demanded again.

  “M’Lady, you are speaking to the personification of the New York Tribune. If you’re deserving of the money that is offered in reward, you will receive the money that is offered in reward.”

  Lady Weale looked sourly away, and sipped at her lager.

  “Now,” said Simeon Lightner, “what do you know of the murder of Cyrus Butterfield?” He spoke the question as if he had no idea of receiving any answer that might be of use or interest.

  “I know who did it.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Maggie Kizer and her husband Alick.”

  “Well,” said Simeon, “is Maggie Kizer a duchess that I’m supposed to know of her?”

  “What?”

  “Who is Maggie Kizer, I said?”

  “Maggie Kizer is the lady who lodges in my house. I live on the ground floor, Maggie Kizer lives on the second story.”

  “And one evening, I suppose, Maggie Kizer and her husband strolled out, passed Mr. Butterfield on the street, who perhaps asked them for directions, and so, taking the question as an insult, they forced him to strip to the skin and then stabbed him through the heart?”

  “No,” said Lady Weale, who had not understood the ironic intent of Simeon’s imagination, “that’s not how it happened.”

  “How did it happen then?”

  “Maggie is a lady who receives gentlemen, you see what I mean?”

  Simeon nodded and Lady Weale went on: “And her husband was in jail—up at Sing Sing—and Maggie was entertaining Mr. Butterfield one night. I let him in the house myself, and she was entertaining him in the bedroom—if you see what I mean—and her husband, who was being let out of Sing Sing, came in and found ’em. . . .”

  “Yes?” prompted Simeon, who already found the tale more interesting than he had anticipated.

  “Entertaining one another in the bedroom, if you see what I mean.”

  “I do, M’Lady. Go on please. Madame Kizer then, I take it, didn’t know to expect her husband back from his extended visit in the northern provinces?”

  “She didn’t know he was to get out, if that’s what you mean, and perhaps he wasn’t, perhaps he ’scaped, if you see what I mean, so he comes a-knocking at the door, and I open the door to tell him that Maggie’s not receiving, for that’s what I’m ’bliged to say when she’s entertaining, but he pushed right on past me and goes up the stairs taking ’em three at the time and goes right through the door and I’m using my lungs, if you see what I mean, and Maggie I suppose jumps up, but Mr. Butterfield’s not quick enough and Maggie’s husband comes in—”

  “And stabs Mr. Butterfield to the heart in a fit of jealousy!”

  “No,” said Lady Weale, “not at the first. First he’s just going in, sly-like, and talks about duties of a wife and rights of a husband—”

  “You were by?” questioned Simeon, with a wry smile. “You were by for these edifying remarks?”

  “I was in the next room, it was my duty as landlady to see nothing fractious come of it.”

  “Commendable, M’Lady, go on.”

  “So,” said Lady Weale, knocking on the marble wall of the restaurant with her red knuckles, “then Maggie’s husband Alick talks about outraged honor and recompensivities and the like—”

  “Recompensivities?” repeated Simeon.

  “If you see what I mean,” nodded Lady Weale and went on: “And then he goes over to the dressing table, where all Mr. Butterfield’s clothing is hanging over the back of the chair and all his jewelry is on top of the little bench there, and Maggie’s husband Alick picks it up—all the time he’s talking about recompensivities—and he puts it in his pocket, and then Mr. Butterfield gets up out of the bed, ranting how he won’t stand for such recompensivities and he can’t take my watch and so on, but Maggie’s husband just laughs, because Mr. Butterfield doesn’t have on a thread.”

  “You saw all this?”

  “Every word.”

  By this time, though his voice when he questioned the lady in the yellow kerchief was one of bemusement, Simeon Lightner was taking quick notes in a small tablet he had pulled from his coat pocket.

  “So Mr. Butterfield—I didn’t know his name then, you understand, but I learned it from the papers—comes forward, and reaches out for Maggie’s husband, and has him by the throat, and he’s red in the face, and he starts choking Maggie’s husband—”

  “What’s Madame Kizer about all this time?”

  “She’s making sure that the curtains are drawn tight.”

  “No nonsense there,” remarked Simeon.

  “Maggie’s ’cute,” said Mrs. Weale, “but Mr. Butterfield’s choking on Maggie’s husband and Maggie’s husband picks up this needle and stabs Mr. Butterfield in the chest, and he dies.”

  “A needle?”

  “A kind of needle,” shrugged Lady Weal
e. “A Chinaman’s needle, if you see what I mean. It was gold.”

  “Opium?”

  Lady Weale nodded.

  Simeon Lightner whistled and begged the landlady to continue.

  “Maggie calls me in—she’s seen me in the next room—and she pulls a sheet off the bed, lays it out on the floor, and we roll Mr. Butterfield onto it so he won’t bleed on the carpet, but there’s not enough blood to fill a teacup. Then she turns to her husband, who’s got all that jewelry in his pocket, and she says: ‘Take it out, sir!’ and he don’t, and she turns and pulls a hair-trigger pistol out from under the pillow and says, ‘Take it out, sir!’ and he takes it out and puts it back on the dresser.”

  “A cool ’un,” remarked Simeon Lightner admiringly.

  “Then she says—Maggie talks like a lady—she says, ‘We must take him out of here. Put his clothes back on.’ So Maggie’s husband and me gets down on the floor and we put Mr. Butterfield’s clothes back on him, then Maggie says to her husband, ‘You take him out of here and don’t you come back,’ and he says how he don’t have any money and he’ll starve, and she might as well shoot him and have done with it, and Maggie says she’ll sell the jewelry and then send the money to General Delivery in Washington and he can get it there—tells him what name it’ll be under—”

  “You’re right,” said Simeon, “Madame Kizer is certainly ’cute.”

  “So then Maggie tells her husband what to do. Mr. Butterfield is dressed as best we can, though it’s a bad job to put shoes on a dead man, and we take him downstairs, and Maggie’s husband, with ten dollars in his pocket that she give him, takes Mr. Butterfield outside, holding him up like he was falling-down drunk—nobody notices, so many people on the street, most of ’em drunk too, New Year’s Eve—and Maggie’s husband Alick walks Mr. Butterfield down the street a bit and is about to leave him in an alley right around the corner, but Maggie’s sent me out after him, and I tell him he has to take Mr. Butterfield farther away, all the way down to the docks, and he says it’s too dangerous, and I tell him if he don’t, Maggie won’t send the money to Washington. So he curses me, and he curses Maggie, and he curses the dead man he’s got his arm around, but then he goes on toward the docks, and I’m watching him cross West Street, trying to stick to the dark parts, and then I get back to the house.”

  “But when he was found, Mr. Butterfield was naked.”

  “Scavengers. Ragpickers. ’Round there, they won’t leave a dead rat with its fur on.”

  “Maggie do as she promised? She sell the jewelry?”

  “Black Lena on West Houston took it, paid her a good sum for it I would think, considering how Alick Kizer is her very own brother. Maggie took the money and posted it to Washington. He’s got it by now.”

  “This all?” said Simeon Lightner, grinning for his good fortune. When Lady Weale signified yes, he went over the story once more, garnering more detail, demanding descriptions of the rooms in the history, wanting to know what Maggie’s husband looked like, asking whether Cyrus Butterfield had died with a rattle in his throat. After once ascertaining that she would almost certainly receive the reward money, Lady Weale answered all Simeon’s questions.

  They were on their third pints of lager, and Simeon’s tablets were close to being used up, when he asked, “Tell me, M’Lady, why do you tell me all this? Wasn’t Madame Kizer your friend?”

  Lady Weale shrugged uneasily: “I know she’s thinking of moving away. I heard her tell it one of her gentlemen, wanted to take a place up on Thirtieth Street. She was a good girl, and I didn’t know where I’d find the like to replace her. And if she was going away, then this reward was going to serve for my recompensivities, if you see what I mean.”

  Simeon told Mrs. Weale that when she returned home there was no need to say anything yet to Maggie Kizer, that it would be much better in fact if she were not warned. The way that Lady Weale glanced at Simeon made him realize that the old sour-faced woman had probably eased her conscience over this betrayal by promising herself that she would give Maggie Kizer enough time to escape. “You see,” Simeon smiled, “you won’t get your reward unless there’s an arrest. Of course, we’d like the police to arrest the man who actually killed Mr. Butterfield, but who knows where he is now, there’s no way of tracing him any longer, since you can’t remember under what name he had received the money in Washington. Unless Maggie Kizer is arrested and convicted, you won’t receive a penny—” He smiled, for it pleased him to prick Lady Weale, who for money had betrayed a woman who had been—by the landlady’s own admission—kind to her.

  “You—” Lady Weale tipped over the pint of lager she had just received in an effort to destroy the markings on Simeon’s tablets, but he snatched them out of the way, and hastily stood. The beer poured over his vacated chair.

  “I’ll take care of the reckoning,” he smiled. “And remember,” he said, “just as soon as Madame Kizer permanently changes her address from Bleecker Street to the Tombs, you’ll have your money. And tomorrow morning, all the Black Triangle can read about your part in her arrest.”

  At Police Headquarters, Simeon Lightner checked to see whether there were indeed, at Sing Sing, a criminal called Alick Kizer, and was pleased to learn that Alexander Keezer, with two fellow inmates, had broken out of the prison two days after Christmas. The reporter considered that any further investigation into the veracity of Lady Weale’s statement would be superfluous and possibly harmful, in that it provided Maggie Kizer with time to flee the city. After alerting the police to the name and address of the beautiful conspirator in the crime, Simeon Lightner returned to his desk in the Tribune Building and wrote the story out. It was finished by eight o’clock, and received immediate approval from the editor on duty, who decided it would appear on the front page of the morning edition.

  Simeon Lightner had not only the satisfaction of solving the case of the death of Cyrus Butterfield, when the police had been able to accomplish nothing at all, but also of just having written the most exciting article in a series that was by its nature sensational—and all had been accomplished without the assistance or knowledge of Duncan Phair. Simeon declared to himself again and again that he would pay twenty-five dollars to see the expression on Duncan Phair’s face when he heard that the woman responsible for the death of Cyrus Butterfield had been found out.

  Chapter 16

  Shortly after she heard the outer door of the house slam and saw Mrs. Weale’s yellow kerchief headed off on some errand, Maggie Kizer went into her bedroom. She put on a dress of dark green silk with black trim, an old sealskin sacque and a green hat with a heavy black veil. She wore black gloves and but the single ruby ring that Duncan had given her on the New Year. When she emerged from the house she turned her steps southward on Bleecker.

  It was Lady Weale and not Maggie who avidly read the articles that had appeared in the Tribune on the subject of Cyrus Butterfield’s murder. The octoroon did not trouble herself to be fearful of discovery. And once Maggie had explained carefully to Lady Weale that by her assistance in the disposal of the corpse on New Year’s Eve she had implicated herself in the crime, Maggie had rested assured of the landlady’s discretion in the matter. It had not occurred to her to offer Lady Weale money for her silence or to employ her sister-in-law, Lena Shanks, as a threat. For her help, Maggie had given Lady Weale several pieces of the jewelry that Cyrus Butterfield had presented her in the little time that she had known him.

  Maggie Kizer was not a common prostitute and actually refused to receive cash for her favors. Rather, she let it be known—though in a perfectly ladylike manner—that she would be pleased to accept gifts of clothing, of furnishings, and especially of jewelry. These items she kept and displayed for as long as she remained on good terms with the donor, but when, for whatever reason, he no longer kept company with her, those gifts were taken to Lena Shanks and sold. It was this money that paid M
rs. Weale, the dressmaker, and the tavern that sent up her meals three times a day.

  Maggie’s liaisons, which were invariably discreet, were carried through two and only occasionally three at the time. These multiple attachments assured that she would be well provided with gifts. She could not be expected to languish on Bleecker Street alone and unfunded if her sole protector were suddenly called away to his family on the shore of New Jersey in the summer or on business to England in the winter.

  Until recently, her primary benefactor had been a philanthropist, quiet-living but enormously wealthy, whose principal contributions were to charities staffed by or run for the purpose of alleviating the sorrow and discomforts of young unmarried females, whether they be mill workers, or streetwalkers, or the daughters of impoverished Confederate gentry. He had courted Maggie for somewhat more than four years, but since October he had been in Scotland, attending at the bedside of his dying father. This gentleman, shortly before sailing, had introduced Maggie to Cyrus Butterfield, as a man of probity and charm, who would protect her in his perhaps protracted absence.

  Duncan she had met at a select after-theater gathering at a restaurant on Fifth Avenue; Maggie was quite beautiful that night and had been so vain as not to wear her dark spectacles. In that carousing group of drunken overdressed women, giggling and accepting all sorts of amorous advances from the gentlemen present, Maggie had stood apart, not in a disapproving manner by any means, nor with the attitude that she had never witnessed such goings-on before, but simply with indifference. Duncan had offered her champagne, conversed with her, and accompanied her back to Bleecker Street.

  Since that time, in the summer of 1880, Duncan had visited Maggie two or three times a week and had rarely failed to bring her some trinket; and when he did not, Maggie knew to expect a gift-bearing messenger on the following day. In addition, Duncan had paid for the new parlor draperies and Maggie’s tavern bill for the second half of the year.