His eyebrow shot up. “I?”
I couldn’t look at him. “I found her intestines in the tea kettle. Mary Kelly’s intestines.”
“Intestines?” I could hear the distaste in his voice. “What is this, Beatrice? And who is Mary Kelly?”
“She’s the woman you killed last night!” I cried. “Surely you knew her name!” I turned to confront him…and saw a look of such loathing on his face that I took a step back. “Oh!” I gasped involuntarily. “Please don’t…” Edward? Jack?
The look disappeared immediately—he knew, he knew what he was doing! “I killed someone last night, you say?” he asked, his rational manner quickly restored. “And then I put her intestines…in the tea kettle? Why don’t you show me, Beatrice?”
Distrustful of his suggestion, I nevertheless led the way to the kitchen. As I’d half expected, the tea kettle was empty and spotlessly clean. With a heavy heart I pulled the piece of brown plaid cloth out of my pocket. “But here is something you neglected to destroy.”
He scowled. “A dirty rag?”
“Oh, Edward, stop professing you know nothing of this! It is a strip from Mary Kelly’s petticoat, as you well realize! Edward, you must go to the police. Confess all, make your peace with God. No one else can stop your nocturnal expeditions—you must stop yourself! Go to Inspector Abberline.”
He held out one hand. “Give me the rag,” he said expressionlessly.
“Think of your soul, Edward! This is your one chance for salvation! You must confess!”
“The rag, Beatrice.”
“I cannot! Edward, do you not understand? You are accursed—your own actions have damned you! You must go down on your knees and beg for forgiveness!”
Edward lowered his hand. “You are ill, my dear. This delusion of yours that I am the Ripper—that is the crux of your accusation, is it not? This distraction is most unbefitting the wife of the vicar of St. Jude’s. I cannot tolerate the thought that before long you may be found raving in the street. We will pray together, we will ask God to send you self-control.”
I thought I understood what that meant. “Very well…if you will not turn yourself over to the police, there is only one alternate course of action open to you. You must kill yourself.”
“Beatrice!” He was shocked. “Suicide is a sin!”
His reaction was so absurd that I had to choke down a hysterical laugh. But it made me understand that further pleading
would be fruitless. He was hopelessly insane; I would never be able to reach him.
Edward was shaking his head. “I am most disturbed, Beatrice. This dementia of yours is more profound than I realized. I must tell you I am unsure of my capacity to care for you while you are subject to delusions. Perhaps an institution is the rightful solution.”
I was stunned. “You would put me in an asylum?”
He sighed. “Where else will we find physicians qualified to treat dementia? But if you cannot control these delusions of yours, I see no other recourse. You must pray, Beatrice, you must pray for the ability to discipline your thoughts.”
He could have me locked away; he could have me locked away and then continue unimpeded with his ghastly killings, never having to worry about a wife who noticed too much. It was a moment before I could speak. “I will do as you say, Edward. I will pray.”
“Excellent! I will pray with you. But first—the rag, please.”
Slowly, reluctantly, I handed him the strip of Mary Kelly’s petticoat. Edward took a fireplace match and struck it, and the evidence linking him to murder dissolved into thin black smoke that spiralled up the chimney. Then we prayed; we asked God to give me the mental and spiritual willpower I lacked.
Following that act of hypocrisy, Edward suggested that I prepare our tea; I put the big tea kettle aside and used my smaller one. Talk during tea was about several church duties Edward still needed to perform. I spoke only when spoken to and was careful to give no offense. I did everything I could to assure my husband that I deferred to his authority.
Shortly before six Edward announced he was expected at a meeting of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. I waited until he was out of sight and went first to the cupboard for a table knife and then to the writing table for a sheet of foolscap. Then I stepped into the pantry and began to scrape up as much of the arsenic from the rat holes as I could.
23 February 1892, Whitechapel Charitable Institute for Indigent Children.
Inspector Abberline sat in my office, nodding approval at everything he’d seen. “It’s difficult to believe,” he said, “that these are the same thin and dirty children who only months ago used to sleep in doorways and under wooden crates. You have worked wonders, Mrs. Wickham. The board of trustees could not have found a better director. Are the children learning to read and write? Can they learn?” “Some can,” I answered. “Others are slower. The youngest are the quickest, it seems. I have great hopes for them.” “I wonder if they understand how fortunate they are. What a pity the Reverend Mr. Wickham didn’t live to see this. He would have been so pleased with what you’ve accomplished.” “Yes.” Would he have? Edward always believed the poor should care for their own.
The Inspector was still thinking of my late husband. “I had an aunt who succumbed to gastric fever,” he said. “Dreadful way to die, dreadful.” He suddenly realized I might not care to be reminded of the painful method of Edward’s passing. “I do beg your par-don—that was thoughtless of me.”
I told him not to be concerned. “I am reconciled to his death now, as much as I can ever be. My life is here now, in the school, and it is a most rewarding way to spend my days.”
He smiled. “I can see you are in your element.” Then he sobered. “I came not only to see your school but also to tell you something.” He leaned forward in his chair. “The file on the Ripper is officially closed. It’s been more than two years since his last murder. For whatever reason he stopped, he did stop. That particular reign of terror is over. The case is closed.”
My heart lifted. Keeping up my end of the conversation, I asked, “Why do you think he stopped, Inspector?”
He rubbed the side of his nose. “He stopped either because he’s dead or because he’s locked up somewhere, in an asylum or perhaps in prison for some other crime. Forgive my bluntness, Mrs. Wickham, but I earnestly hope it is the former. Inmates have been known to escape from asylums and prisons.”
“I understand. Do you think the file will ever be reopened?”
“Not for one hundred years. Once a murder case is marked closed, the files are sealed and the date is written on the outside when they can be made public. It will be a full century before anyone looks at those papers again.”
It couldn’t be more official than that; the case was indeed closed. “A century…why so long a time?”
“Well, the hundred-year rule was put into effect to guarantee the anonymity of all those making confidential statements to the police during the course of the investigation. It’s best that way. Now no one will be prying into our reports on the Ripper until the year 1992. It is over.”
“Thank Heaven for that.”
“Amen.”
Inspector Abberline chatted a little longer and then took his leave. I strolled through the halls of my school, a former church building adapted to its present needs. I stopped in one of the classrooms. Some of the children were paying attention to the teacher, others were daydreaming, a few were drawing pictures. Just like children everywhere.
Not all the children who pass through here will be helped; some will go on to better themselves, but others will slide back into the life of the streets. I can save none of them. I must not add arrogance to my other offenses by assuming the role of deliverer; God does not entrust the work of salvation to one such as I. But I am permitted to offer the children a chance, to give them the opportunity to lift themselves above the life of squalor and crime that is all they have ever known. I do most earnestly thank God for granting me this privilege.
/> Periodically I return to Miller’s Court. I go there not because it is the site of Edward’s final murder, but because it is where I last saw Rose Howe, the young girl who helped me deliver the
Macklin baby. There is a place for Rose in my school. I have not found her yet, but I will keep searching.
My life belongs to the children of Whitechapel now. My prayers are for them; those prayers are the only ones of mine ever likely to be answered. When I do pray for myself, it is always and only to ask for an easier place in Hell.
Ghost Station
CAROLYN WHEAT
Carolyn Wheat (b. 1946), was a New York legal aid attorney for twenty-three years and later an administrative law judge. When she introduced Brooklyn lawyer Cass Jameson in Dead Men’s Thoughts (1983), the torrent of lawyer novelists (male and female) that would be unleashed by the success of Scott Turow and John Grisham had not yet begun. That first novel was well received, receiving an Edgar nomination, but Wheat proved the opposite of prolific, the second Jameson novel appearing three years later, the third not for another eleven. When she stepped up production with books like Mean Streak (1996) and Troubled Waters (1997), a novel that looked back on radical 1960s activism much more briefly but just as effectively as Turow’s Laws of Our Fathers (1996), it became obvious that Wheat ranks near the top not just among lawyer novelists but contemporary crime writers generally. After leaving the practice of law, she became a valued teacher of writing, including a stint as Writer in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma.
Wheat’s short stories, collected in Tales Out of School (2000), display a variety nearly as remarkable as their uniform excellence. Some of them have the expected legal background, including the chilling jury-room tale “Cruel and Unusual” and a rare Sherlock Holmes court-room story, “The Adventure of the Angel’s Trumpet,” but many of them do not. “Ghost Station,” about a New York transit cop, she credits to her experience working for the NYPD.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk. The words burned my memory the way Irish whiskey used to burn my throat, only there was no pleasant haze of alcohol to follow. Just bitter heartburn pain. It was my first night back on the job, back to being Sergeant Maureen Gallagher instead of “the patient.” Wasn’t it hard enough being a transit cop, hurtling beneath the streets of Manhattan on a subway train that should have been in the Transit Museum? Wasn’t it enough that after four weeks of detox I felt empty instead of clean and sober? Did I have to have some rookie’s casually cruel words ricocheting in my brain like a wild-card bullet? Why couldn’t I remember the good stuff? Why couldn’t I think about O’Hara’s beefy handshake, Greenspan’s “Glad to see ya, Mo,” Ianuzzo’s smiling welcome? Why did I have to run the tape in my head of Manny Delgado asking Captain Lomax for a different partner? “Hey, I got nothing against a lady sarge, Cap,” he’d said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that if there’s one thing I can’t stand…” Et cetera. Lomax had done what any standup captain would—kicked Delgado’s ass and told him the assignment stood. What he hadn’t known was that I’d heard the words and couldn’t erase them from my mind. Even without Delgado, the night hadn’t gotten off to a great start. Swinging in at midnight for a twelve-to-eight, I’d been greeted with the news that I was on Graffiti Patrol, the dirtiest, most mind-numbing assignment in the whole transit police duty roster. I was a sergeant, damn it, on my way to a gold shield, and I wasn’t going to earn it dodging rats in tunnels or going after twelveyear-olds armed with spray paint.
Especially when the rest of the cop world, both under- and aboveground, was working overtime on the torch murders of homeless people. There’d been four human bonfires in the past six weeks, and the cops were determined there wouldn’t be a fifth.
Was Lomax punishing me, or was this assignment his subtle way of easing my entry back into the world? Either way, I resented it. I wanted to be a real cop again, back with Sal Minucci, my old partner. He was assigned to the big one, in the thick of the action, where both of us belonged. I should have been with him. I was Anti-Crime, for God’s sake, I should have been assigned—
Or should I? Did I really want to spend my work nights prowling New York’s underground skid row, trying to get information from men and women too zonked out to take care of legs gone gangrenous, whose lives stretched from one bottle of Cool Breeze to another?
Hell, yes. If it would bring me one step closer to that gold shield, I’d interview all the devils in hell. On my day off.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk.
What did Lomax think—that mingling with winos would topple me off the wagon? That I’d ask for a hit from some guy’s short dog and pass out in the Bleecker Street station? Was that why he’d kept me off the big one and had me walking a rookie through routine Graffiti Patrol?
Was I getting paranoid, or was lack of alcohol rotting my brain?
Manny and I had gone to our respective locker rooms to suit up. Plain clothes—and I do mean plain. Long johns first; damp winter had a way of seeping down into the tunnels and into your very blood. Then a pair of denims the Goodwill would have turned down. Thick wool socks, fisherman’s duck boots, a black turtleneck, and a photographer’s vest with lots of pockets. A black knit hat pulled tight over my red hair.
Then the gear: flashlight, more important than a gun on this assignment, handcuffs, ticket book, radio, gun, knife. A slapper, on oversize blackjack, hidden in the rear pouch of the vest. They were against regulations; I’d get at least a command discipline if caught with it, but experience told me I’d rather have it than a gun going against a pack of kids.
I’d forgotten how heavy the stuff was; I felt like a telephone lineman.
I looked like a cat burglar.
Delgado and I met at the door. It was obvious he’d never done vandal duty before. His tan chinos were immaculate, and his hiking boots didn’t look waterproof. His red plaid flannel shirt was neither warm enough nor the right dark color. With his Latin good looks, he would have been stunning in an L. L. Bean catalog, but after ten minutes in a subway tunnel, he’d pass for a chimney sweep.
“Where are we going?” he asked, his tone a shade short of sullen. And there was no respectful “Sergeant” at the end of the question, either. This boy needed a lesson in manners.
I took a malicious delight in describing our destination. “The Black Hole of Calcutta,” I replied cheerfully, explaining that I meant the unused lower platform of the City Hall station downtown. The oldest, darkest, dankest spot in all Manhattan. If there were any subway alligators, they definitely lurked in the Black Hole.
The expression on Probationary Transit Police Officer Manuel Delgado’s face was all I could have hoped for. I almost—but not quite—took pity on the kid when I added, “And after that, we’ll try one or two of the ghost stations.”
“Ghost stations?” Now he looked really worried. “What are those?”
This kid wasn’t just a rookie; he was a suburbanite. Every New Yorker knew about ghost stations, abandoned platforms where trains no longer stopped. They were still lit, though, and showed up in the windows of passing trains like ghost towns on the prairie. They were ideal canvases for the aspiring artists of the underground city.
I explained on the subway, heading downtown. The car, which rattled under the city streets like a tin lizzie, was nearly riderless at
1:00 a.m. A typical Monday late hour.
The passengers were one Orthodox Jewish man falling asleep over his Hebrew Bible, two black women, both reading thick paperback romances, the obligatory pair of teenagers making out in the last seat, and an old Chinese woman.
I didn’t want to look at Delgado. More than once I’d seen a fleeting smirk on his face when I glanced his way. It wasn’t enough for insubordination; the best policy was to ignore it.
I let the rhythm of the subway car lull me into a litany of the A.A. slogans I was trying to work into my life: EASY DOES IT. KEEP IT SIMPLE, SWEETHEART. ONE DAY
AT A TIME. I saw them in my mind the way they appeared on the walls at meetings, illuminated, like old Celtic manuscripts.
This night I had to take one hour at a time. Maybe even one minute at a time. My legs felt wobbly. I was a sailor too long from the sea. I’d lost my subway legs. I felt white and thin, as though I’d had several major organs removed.
Then the drunk got on. One of the black women got off, the other one looked up at the station sign and went back to her book, and the drunk got on.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk.
ONE DAY AT A TIME. EASY DOES IT.
I stiffened. The last thing I wanted was to react in front of Delgado, but I couldn’t help it. The sight of an obviously intoxicated man stumbling into our subway car brought the knowing smirk back to his face.
There was one at every A.A. meeting. No matter how nice the neighborhood, how well-dressed most people attending the meeting were, there was always a drunk. A real drunk, still reeling, still reeking of cheap booze. My sponsor, Margie, said they were there for a reason, to let us middle-class, recovery-oriented types remember that “there but for the grace of God…”
I cringed whenever I saw them, especially if the object lesson for the day was a woman.
“Hey, kid,” the drunk called out to Delgado, in a voice as inappropriately loud as a deaf man’s, “how old are you?” The doors closed and the car lurched forward; the drunk all but fell into his seat.
“Old enough,” Many replied, flashing the polite smile a wellbrought-up kid saves for his maiden aunt.
The undertone wasn’t so pretty. Little sidelong glances at me that said, See how nice I am to this old fart. See what a good boy I am. I like drunks, Sergeant Gallagher.
To avoid my partner’s face, I concentrated on the subway ads as though they contained all the wisdom of the Big Book. “Here’s to birth defects,” proclaimed a pregnant woman about to down a glass of beer. Two monks looked to heaven, thanking God in Spanish for the fine quality of their brandy.
A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Page 40
