Her lawyer rose to protest against these damaging admissions of his client, but Judge Stallworth waved him down.
Maggie Kizer was far away from that court in her mind and she heard the prosecutor’s questions directed at her as from a great distance. She answered with a throat and tongue that seemed to have understanding and purpose of their own. Only her eyes belonged to the being that was ineluctably herself, and with them she observed everything and everyone with equal disinterestedness. It never occurred to her all the while that she was on the witness stand, all the while that she testified in her own defense, that these words that came out of her own fair throat might bear upon the outcome of her case, or supposing that to be predetermined, the severity of her sentencing. And in one matter only had she deviated from the truth; Cyrus Butterfield’s jewelry, she said, had been thrown into the river for fear of its being traced, and the money that she had sent to the convict in Washington had been gold that was freely repaid to her by Lena Shanks. Her sister-in-law, Maggie maintained, had been in no manner involved in the death of Cyrus Butterfield, the flight of Alick Kizer, or the secretion of the dead man’s jewelry.
“And lastly,” said the prosecutor with a smile, “Mrs. Kizer, are you—as Mrs. Weale has averred—a woman of mixed blood? In short, are you an octoroon?”
“I am,” said Maggie Kizer without emotion, and she was allowed to leave the witness box.
The prosecutor cajoled the jury, and the defense attorney wooed it; Judge Stallworth addressed it in his most pleasant, least sarcastic voice. The twelve men, who at first had been swayed by Maggie’s beauty and her apparent honesty and inculpability in the crime, had been disaffected by the discovery of her mixed blood. After three minutes of deliberation, carried on in whispers in the jury box itself while the rest of the court tried in vain to hear what they said to one another, Maggie Kizer was convicted as an accessory and accomplice to the murder of Cyrus Butterfield.
Chapter 25
Judge James Stallworth postponed the sentencing of Maggie Kizer for one week, until March 13, not because he was in any doubt as to what lawful penalty he would impose upon the octoroon for her crime, but so that Simeon Lightner might make the most of her conviction.
The Tribune provided a verbatim transcript of the trial on Tuesday morning. On Wednesday, a long piece appeared about Lady Weale, her antecedents, her history, and her character. Simeon Lightner pointed out that this sour woman was almost as reprehensible a factor in the murder of Cyrus Butterfield as Maggie Kizer had been. She had been present in the next room at the moment that the lawyer was murdered, she had helped to dispose of the body, she had not come forward with her information until more than a month had passed—the Tribune inferred that the reward money was then her sole motive for betraying Maggie Kizer to the authorities.
On Wednesday afternoon, to the reporter of the Sun, Lady Weale retorted with a garbled story of how she had been threatened with death if she told anything of what had happened on New Year’s Eve. It was the dictates of conscience that had forced her, in the end, to tell her tale, no matter then the promised injury to her person.
On Thursday morning, the Tribune reported that Lady Weale had left New York, for parts unknown. The man who owned the house on Bleecker Street said that Lady Weale had been fearful for her life, having seen the Shanks twins loitering about before her house at late hours of the night. She had had no intention of presenting an easy mark for Lena Shanks’s revenge.
In the same paper, Simeon Lightner prepared a long essay on the methods employed by Lena Shanks in her pawnbroking business, as it was charitably called, which concluded with a list of her customers who were in jail, or had been in jail, or who were now sought by the police for various felonies. It occupied three columns and a half.
On Friday morning there was a suggestive, though not really detailed, description of Daisy Shanks’s business on the fourth floor of number 203 West Houston Street. Simeon’s imagination was assisted by the memory of a shoplifter whose cell was next to Maggie Kizer’s in the Tombs. She had availed herself of Daisy’s services twice in the past three years, but after the second essay had been laid up for two weeks with an infection. Simeon Lightner suggested that many young women never recovered at all from the ministrations of the “Laughing Abortionist.”
About Louisa Shanks, Rob, and Ella, he had little to say, though he inferred that none of them was up to any good. He gave descriptions of the aunt, the nephew, and the niece, and added what little gossip about them had been gleaned from their near neighbors who were susceptible to meager bribes.
On Saturday morning, the door to Lena’s shop, number 201, was not opened at all. Ella hung about on the stoop all day, reading through the Testament that Helen Stallworth had meant for Charlotta Kegoe, and told all who approached that Lena Shanks had left off doing business for the time being. When asked when the operation would resume, Ella shook her curls and said, “When we can, when we can.”
A lady in distress who applied at the next door down was also turned away, but when she wandered aside, Rob surreptitiously approached her, led her around the corner, and took her into the house by the back way. Daisy explained this subterfuge: “With the papers going at it like they are, Ma can’t keep her shop open, and I have to pretend to turn my ladies away—all to take care against the cops, you know. Those who would have come to Ma may go elsewhere, but you, and my other ladies, where would you go? To a butcher with knitting needles! To a doctor with no more feeling in him than a carved stiff!”
On Monday morning, the day set for Maggie’s sentencing, Simeon Lightner noted in the Tribune that Lena Shanks’s shop had been closed on Saturday and Sunday both, that Daisy Shanks had left off practicing her abortions; he expressed the hope that these two women, through publicity, had been permanently stopped in their dangerous and criminal careers.
To this, Duncan Phair appended a criminal history of the Shanks family: providing brief precis of the trials of Cornelius Shanks, Lena Shanks, and Alick Kizer. Maggie Kizer was not the first of this family to be charged with murder. It was to be hoped that the other two now, the maleficent daughters Louisa and Daisy, would be brought before the law for their infamous crimes in the Black Triangle. Mulberry Street had begun to gather its evidence against Lena; her shop was shut up, and it was only a matter of time before she was imprisoned on the Island. The twins, if not already mired in corruption, ought to be separated, from their family and from one another, and carried out west to Minnesota or Wisconsin, where sturdy young children were wanted for farm indentures. The Shanks clan, by their viciousness, cried out to be broken and scattered.
This was the first of the lawyer’s articles to be signed not with a pseudonym, but with his true name, Duncan Phair.
“Margaret Kizer,” said Judge James Stallworth on Monday morning, March 13, “you stand before me condemned of the crime of accessory and accomplice to murder, a heinous malefaction committed under the vicious and degrading circumstances of concupiscence and robbery. Your victim was a gentleman of great worth and admirable influence within the community; he was husband to a virtuous wife and father to three inestimable offspring, all of whom are now bereaved and destitute. You have brought total ruin upon an innocent family. . . .”
Maggie Kizer stood glassy-eyed beside her attorney. By the court’s specific direction, her amber spectacles had again been removed and lay folded on the table before her.
“Cyrus Butterfield, by what devious means known best to you and others like you, was inveigled into the indulgence of licentious pleasures; a defect surely in a gentleman striving toward civil and moral perfection, but a defect undeserving of the punishment he received—death.”
Behind Maggie Kizer, in the rows of benches reserved for spectators, sat Lena Shanks, stolid and unmoving and expressionless, but never allowing her eyes to drift from the judge’s face as he pronounced sentence. Ella sat
beside her grandmother and very slowly twisted in her seat, examining carefully every face in the courtroom.
“It was not possible for the jury, not possible for me to believe that you stood idly and helplessly by, unable to interfere, unable to protest, unable to intercede for the life of Cyrus Butterfield. You were a basilisk to pity. The escaped convict, your husband, whose affections you had betrayed with all and sundry, might have succumbed to remorse, but you, Maggie Kizer, without a single kind word to be wasted upon the deceased, ordered the disposal of the corpse and directed the murderer’s escape. It is this unfrenzied imagination, this cold ingenuity we find most reprehensible.
“I have seen no reason,” continued Judge Stallworth in a slower, softer voice, “to temper my sentence. There is no urgency to compassionate a woman who herself had no compassion. In a woman less obviously educated, in a woman who had not enjoyed your early benefits, I might have attributed such wondrous salamanderlike cold-bloodedness to your mixed heritage; but with every opportunity to overcome the slight noxious tinge of tainted blood, the fact that you sunk to such depravity that crime and disease fell from you like dust from the folds of your skirts, is a proof that you voluntarily gave way to evil, that you opened your arms to wickedness and embraced corruption.”
Maggie Kizer, weary on her feet, swayed a little, was steadied by the hand that her attorney placed atop her wrist. Her eyes moved dully over the court, and only gradually drifted back to the white parchment face with the gleaming blue eyes set in it like the amethyst chips in a Roman bust.
“Maggie Kizer,” said the judge, in a light matter-of-fact voice, “it is the will of this court that the full penalty of the law be exacted for your part in the brutal murder of Cyrus Butterfield. As an accessory and accomplice in fact, and as instigator in our moral judgment, I hereby sentence you to be taken to the prison on Blackwell’s Island, and in one week’s time, to be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”
Maggie Kizer glanced vaguely around the court and, for the first time seeing Lena Shanks, nodded to her briefly in dreaming gratitude for the opium that Rob had brought the previous evening.
Chapter 26
On the morning of March 14, only shortly after the dim sun had touched the tower of the bridge over the East River, Lena Shanks and her grandson appeared at the entrance of the Tombs. A small bribe administered the day before secured them entrance at this early hour, and once inside, Rob led his grandmother to the cell of Maggie Kizer. At nine o’clock the octoroon was to be transported to Blackwell’s Island.
Lena Shanks and Rob stood at the barred door of the cell for a few moments, staring into the dim chamber where the condemned woman lay in a black dress upon the gray cot. Their whispers did not rouse her, and it was necessary at last for Rob, taking Lena’s cane, to strike smartly the soles of Maggie’s boots.
Maggie waked, twisted her head about, stared for a moment at her visitors, and then slowly raised herself on the cot. “Thank you,” she whispered in general gratitude for all that Lena Shanks had done for her over the past week.
“We found your Duncan,” hissed Rob at a signal from Lena, “we found his name, we found his address, where he works and where he lives.”
“Thank you,” repeated Maggie Kizer listlessly, fearful of hope. “I’m certain that he won’t come.”
“Nein,” said Lena grimly, “kommt nicht.”
Maggie looked up for an explanation of the certainty in the old woman’s voice.
Rob’s eyes grew wide, and he explained: “Won’t come, ’cause he’s married to the daughter of the judge. The judge that said you’re to hang.”
“Stallworth!” hissed Lena Shanks.
Maggie Kizer laughed softly, a weary choking laugh, and fell back against the damp stone wall. “So he knew, did he, knew what trouble I was under? So he knew. . . .”
“Stallworth!” hissed Lena Shanks: “all of ’em Stallworths!”
“The judge is his father-in-law,” said Maggie to Rob. “He won’t come, he won’t even send word. He said nothing to the judge, though the judge sentenced me to death. Perhaps,” she mused, “it was Duncan suggested the sentence. Duncan, with his wife, the judge’s daughter, by his side. Duncan stood before the mantelpiece and suggested to his father-in-law the judge that Maggie Kizer be executed, suggested that Maggie Kizer be hanged by the neck until she was dead, suggested that the tongue of Maggie Kizer be ripped out of her head so that she couldn’t tell of him. Perhaps,” she smiled at Rob, “perhaps that’s what he said to his father-in-law as he stood leaning against the mantelpiece.”
Maggie rose slowly from her cot, stood straight and tall and held out her hands to Rob. “Pull off my ring, child.”
Rob eagerly thrust his tiny hands between the bars and twisted off the only ring that Maggie Kizer had kept during her imprisonment, the ruby ring that had been Duncan’s New Year’s gift. She removed her gloves and tossed them into a corner of the cell.
Maggie spoke to her sister-in-law: “My attorney, who was good for nothing else, at least was capable of drawing up a paper for me.” From her pocket she took a bulky envelope and slipped it through the bars to Black Lena. “All my things will be yours legally when I’m dead. There will be no difficulties. You’ve done all in your power to make this time easy for me, and it is little enough that I do in return!”
Lena said nothing at all.
“One more thing though, just one more thing,” said Maggie. The double dose of opium she had administered to herself to get through the sentencing the day before had finished in an eighteen-hour sleep; just waked from it, her mind was preternaturally clear. Her feelings, more mercifully, remained withered and unbeating. She smiled, all the while that she spoke: “Knowing that I am to die for a crime that was not committed by my connivance, by my wish, by my abetting, I cannot find it in my heart to forgive the man who sentenced me to it, nor exculpate the man who would not intercede for me. Duncan might have spoken a word to his father-in-law, the judge, requesting lenient sentencing in my case; or, not daring to betray his interest in a murderous prostitute, he might at least have vouchsafed me the reasons for his decision to abandon me. I am not overly bitter, for I would not have wanted him to sacrifice his life for mine; and I could not wish for my sentence to be abrogated from death to a term in prison. Hanging is preferable to the oblivion represented by these damp walls. . . .”
The women in the cells around them had begun to stir in the early morning, and Maggie had to speak a little louder to be heard above their raucous sleepy calls.
“But it is impossible to forgive that Duncan should have left me without a word, without indication that he regretted his helplessness, without the kindness of laying my hopes in the dust. Therefore,” she said, stepping forward and gripping the bars in her bare white fingers, and staring hard at Lena with her black-flecked eyes, “I want you to avenge me. I don’t ask for his death, nor his ruin, nor his overthrow from whatever position in the world he has attained—I knew so little about him, really—but only that he be conscience-pricked about me, that he fall for a space and know that it was over the corpse of Margaret Kizer that he stumbled.”
Lena Shanks nodded slowly and smiled a ghastly smile.
“Sicher, sicher,” she whispered.
Maggie sighed. “Then there is nothing more you can do for me.”
“Doch,” said Lena, “ ’was mehr.”
Maggie had retreated to her cot, and sat on the edge of it, her face composed and peaceful. “More?” she said lightly, “what more? I’m to die in a week’s time and have dope enough to last me until then. . . .”
Black Lena touched her grandson on the shoulder. He reached into a pocket of his jacket and retrieved two small blue-glass bottles with cork stoppers. One in each hand, he thrust his slender arms through the barred door. Maggie took the bottles from him.
“The ro
pe is painful,” said Rob. “Drink these. No pain in laudanum.”
Maggie Kizer stared at the bottles. “Yes of course,” she said, glancing up at Lena. “Yes of course,” she whispered, plucked out the corks and drank away the contents immediately.
She handed the bottles back to Rob. “How long?” she asked. “I require a powerful dose you know.”
“Two hours,” replied Lena. “You’ll sleep.”
“Thank you,” she replied. She reached around the cot and took her bag and the small packages she had accumulated in her sojourn in the Tombs. “Take them away with you,” she said to Rob, setting them before the slot in the door, “take everything.”
Reaching through, Rob gathered up the last of Maggie’s possessions.
“Take these also,” she said, removing the rings from her ears. “When the warders find me dead, I’ll be stripped anyway.”
Lena Shanks took the earrings and dropped them into the pocket that held Maggie Kizer’s will. “Lie down,” said Lena, weeping, “Schlaf, schlaf, mein Kind.”
Maggie Kizer stretched herself upon the cot. “Remember,” she said softly, “make them tumble, make them tumble.”
“Ja, ja,” said Lena Shanks soothingly. Then she and her grandson walked slowly away from the cell and left Maggie Kizer to her final sleep.
Soon, the rising cacophonous voices of the women imprisoned along that corridor melted into a harmony in Maggie Kizer’s softening, deadening brain. But what she heard was so distant, it became like the mere memory of sound, no more than a dream of voices.
Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Page 20
