The Lunatic Fringe: A Novel Wherein Theodore Roosevelt Meets the Pink Angel
Page 4
It hadn’t been a good night for the captain. He and most of the boys had been busy on a raid on a bawdy house a few blocks away (just in time for the Sunday editions), and who had been hauled in but the captain’s wife’s brother? That was the last time he led a raid, at least until there was a change in administrations. In his good old days, when he’d had a nice juicy slice of the Tenderloin, brother-dear would have been no problem. Hell’s bells, the whole bawdy house would have been no problem.
Not any more, though, damn all do-gooders. There had been too many witnesses around to let brother-dear go, so he’d been booked with the rest. When the alarm had come from Mrs. Sturdevant, Herkimer had been glad to take a few of the boys and go, just as an excuse to delay the inevitable reckoning with his wife.
He left Muldoon for a moment, and walked in a small circle around the sitting room, mumbling to himself. In the process, he very nearly stepped on the corpse. The Police Surgeon looked up at him, but said nothing.
The end of the trip had him beard to moustache with Muldoon again. The patrolman noticed that the captain was no longer yelling, but somehow that failed to make him feel any better.
“Why do you still have your shield, Muldoon?” the captain asked.
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Why did you bother to keep possession of your shield? You gave away your whistle and your truncheon. You abandoned your helmet, didn’t even hang it up, just left it on the floor for me to trip on when I tried to keep you from escaping out the window.”
“Captain, I swear—”
“Quiet! God alone knows what’s become of your revolver. So I wondered why you didn’t get rid of the tin. Not to say you mightn’t yet, eh?”
Muldoon could feel himself turning red. He clenched his right hand, while the left covered the shiny metal rectangle on his heart as though to protect it. He mumbled something.
“I can’t hear you, Officer Muldoon,” the captain said. “Speak up.”
“The woman took me flamin’ gun!” Muldoon snapped.
“There was no woman!” the captain roared in return.
Over the captain’s shoulder, Muldoon could see a round-eyed Mrs. Sturdevant peering around the frame of the open door. Some of her tenants stood behind her. Muldoon wanted to die. It was bad enough to be yelled at, without the public’s making a free entertainment of it.
Herkimer spotted the landlady and waved her into the room.
“Now then, Mother,” he said, “you were here when this officer found the body, were you not?”
“I was.” She looked at Muldoon and nodded at him. “And I saw him trying to save poor Mr. Crandall’s life. I think instead of bedeviling the poor boy, you should be out looking for that little hussy that stole his gun. That’s what I would do.”
The captain smiled a deadly smile. “Would you now? Isn’t that nice? Well, it so happens, Mother, we have been looking for her. Had men asking questions all over the neighborhood. But nobody saw or heard her, any more than you did.”
Though the captain’s voice remained calm, even sweet, a curious thing was happening to his face. A tide of red was climbing it from the neck up, like a thermometer, or a burning fuse. Muldoon recognized it, even through his own anger. When the red reached the top, the captain was going to explode.
It wasn’t quite time yet—his voice was still sweet as he said, “That is the way of it, isn’t it, Mother? You didn’t actually see or hear this unclad woman, now did you?”
Herkimer didn’t know it, but he was making a fiercer and fiercer enemy of Mrs. Sturdevant every time he called her “Mother.” The landlady set her jaw. “If Dennis says she was here, then she was here.”
Muldoon winced.
The Captain exploded. “That’s not all Dennis says, Mother! Dennis implies some things about you, too!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, but she wore a dubious look.
“Well, Mother, Dennis says she ran off wrapped in a sheet. That would mean she’d left her clothes behind her, wouldn’t it? Yes! But there are no woman’s clothes in this flat! I have a higher regard for the character of your establishment, Mother, than to believe Muldoon’s implication that you rent apartments to single gentlemen who keep naked women the way some people keep canary-birds!”
Mrs. Sturdevant gasped in horror. “How dare you ...”
Herkimer ignored her. Muldoon suffered in silence.
“Dennis says there was a painting of the woman, but she took it with her. Really, now. Dennis also says that she ran around the corner of the building. You know your building, Mother—the only place she could have gone from there was back to the street, where, you’ll recall, a crowd had gathered to watch you make a spectacle of yourself.”
That was enough for Mrs. Sturdevant. She opened her mouth, decided words would be inadequate, clamped it shut, then gave the captain a resounding slap on the face with a right arm made strong by years of floor-scrubbing and bread-kneading. She stamped angrily from the room, slamming the door behind her.
The captain was rubbing his face, and scowling at Muldoon, who was having the battle of his life, trying to keep the smile he felt in his soul from appearing on his face.
“No one saw a naked woman on the street, Dennis” the captain said. Muldoon was beginning to hate the sound of his own name. “We knocked on doors. No one in any of the other buildings took her in, and believe me, Muldoon, people would remember if they’d taken in a naked woman carrying a pistol and an oil painting!”
Muldoon decided that either he or the world had gone mad. He had no great love for his superior, but he knew him to be a shrewd, and—when he wanted to be—thorough investigator. The captain seemed to have covered every possibility.
Still, he had to say it. “I saw her, Captain, that’s all there is to it.” It was more of a vote of confidence in his own sanity than a gesture of defiance.
“I won’t stand for these lies, Muldoon.”
Muldoon started to shake. No one had ever before called Dennis Patrick Francis-Xavier Muldoon a liar without suffering for it. Muldoon said not a word; his jaw muscles no longer existed, only the ones that swung his fists, and he was controlling them. But just barely.
Herkimer took the silence for an admission. He assumed a fatherly air. “Now look, Muldoon. This is a suicide. You’ve seen dozens of them. Word is, the man recently lost his job. Naturally, he’d be blue. The surgeon says he died from the coal-gas. There isn’t a mark on him, just a bruise on the back of his neck that was undoubtedly caused by his head’s lolling over the back of that chair.
“Now, you say this woman, this beautiful, naked woman, whom nobody can find, told you it was murder, stole your revolver, and fled into oblivion.
“You know what I say? I say losing his gun is something that can get a young patrolman in a lot of trouble, and a bright young man would know that. Even the most honest of young men might be tempted to sort of call on his imagination to account for the loss. Doesn’t that sound logical to you, Muldoon?”
Muldoon chewed on his moustache, ruining its beautiful symmetry.
“Of course,” the captain went on, “the patrolman might not realize that his little flight of fancy could change a nice, simple closed case into a messy, unsolved murder that would reflect badly on the whole precinct.”
So that was it, Muldoon thought grimly. Ambition had reared its head. It was no secret that the Police Board was to meet soon to decide which of the city’s police captains was to be promoted to inspector. Herkimer evidently wanted to be among them.
“No one would want to make trouble for the precinct, now, would he, Muldoon?” The captain was beaming at him with a smile that could charm the gold from a leprechaun’s teeth.
It was an easy way out of his predicament, and Muldoon was tempted, but virtue and honesty had been instilled in him by means of numerous clouts on the head, and just the thought of telling a lie, for insufficient reason, seemed to raise lumps on his noggin once again.
“And that’s all I can say about the matter. Sir.”
“Oh, it is, is it?” Herkimer said between strong-looking dentures. “Well, I can say a good deal more than that.” He sniffed the air. “There’s the smell of liquor on your uniform, Officer.”
Muldoon had expected that particular accusation a good deal earlier, and was ready for it. “Yes, sir. I’ll wager that every patrolman who’s ever walked a beat with a saloon on it of a Saturday night has finished off the tour smellin’ of liquor. It’d be impossible to avoid—if a man was doin’ his duty.”
The captain looked at him with utter contempt. “That’s as may be. We shall discuss this further in my office, tomorrow at noon. Until then, you may consider yourself off duty, as of this moment.”
“But it can’t be later than nine o’clock,” Muldoon protested. “I’m on me beat till midnight!”
Herkimer pulled an ornate gold watch from his pocket and snapped it open. Muldoon saw a portrait daguerrotype that had been pasted in back, of a stern, light-eyed woman, who was probably Herkimer’s rich wife.
“It is ten minutes past the hour,” Herkimer said. “I shall tell the paymaster to adjust your wages for the time you miss.”
“But Captain!”
“You may go, Muldoon. Must I have you thrown into the street?”
Muldoon was burning. That would have been the ultimate humiliation, to be pitched out by his brother officers. He’d kill Herkimer if he stayed in the room another minute, so he gathered up his helmet, his whistle and his nightstick (which Mrs. Sturdevant had returned) and fled. But not before he’d taken a silent oath that somebody, he wasn’t sure who, was going to regret making this happen to him.
V.
Muldoon would have liked to think it over a little longer, but he didn’t have enough time. He had to decide now.
On the one hand, if it really had been a murder he’d stumbled into, every second lost would take that poor girl deeper and deeper into danger. On the other hand, one did not lightly break the chain of command of the Police Department of the City of New York, no matter how insulting a superior had happened to be.
Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, President of the Police Board, wasn’t a good man to have for an enemy. And he had a lot on his mind these days, what with that string of Mansion Burglaries and all. Muldoon was happy his beat wasn’t in one of the rich precincts—the boys there had been hearing some harsh words. Some had even had to give up the tin.
Muldoon didn’t want that to happen to him—it had been too long in the getting for him to look on the possibility of losing his shield with anything short of pure horror.
It wasn’t that Muldoon had any objection to Mr. Roosevelt’s hewing to the straight line of the rules. To the young man’s mind, that was the main point in the Commissioner’s favor; it was what had made it possible for Muldoon to join the Force in the first place.
Prior to 1895, if you wanted to be a cop, someone with pull had to do you a favor—which you could be a lifetime paying back. But Roosevelt, as Mayor Strong’s Police Commissioner, had held out for impartial competitive examinations like the ones he’d instituted when he was Civil Service Commissioner in Washington, D.C.
But he brooked no nonsense. One night, on one of his periodic street-prowling expeditions (the newspapers sometimes referred to him as Haroun-al-Roosevelt), the Commissioner spotted Officer Blinky Meyers taking a harmless beer near the back window of a convenient saloon, shouted at him, chased him, ran him down, put him under arrest, and threw him from the Force. Muldoon wondered what a man like that would do to a cop who’d lost his gun. Hang him? Shoot him and have him stuffed? Roosevelt was always getting written up about his big-game hunting out West.
For a cop who stood by his duty, though, Roosevelt would go the limit. At least that’s what Ed Bourke had told Muldoon, and he ought to know. Bourke broke up the party at “King” Calahan’s place one Sunday afternoon. Calahan was New York’s foremost gentleman-crook, and he sicced every mug, grafter, shyster, and tame judge in the city on Bourke. Roosevelt not only kept his man healthy and working, but by God, he’d made Calahan keep the Sabbath and like it.
Bourke, naturally, had been astounded. “Dennis,” he’d told Muldoon over a (perfectly permissible) off-duty beer, “this Roosevelt is something I never thought I’d live to see—a rich man as likes an honest cop.”
That was the problem in a sentence. Could Muldoon make the Commissioner believe he was honest? If he could, things would be jake. Or at least a lot more jake than they seemed at the moment. But if he couldn’t make the Commissioner accept his story, Roosevelt would surely have Muldoon’s hide for shoe-leather.
Muldoon sighed over his indecision, looked up, and discovered to his surprise that the question had become irrelevant. His feet had decided for him, bringing him, without his knowledge, to the door of the Manhattan New Christian Fellowship.
That name was a surprise, too, but Muldoon checked the chipped gilt number on the door with the one on the scrap of paper in his hand, and they matched.
Wonderful, he thought, he’d have to interrupt the Commissioner while he was singing his psalms, or whatever Dutchman Protestants would do of a Saturday night.
A feeling of calm fatality came over the young officer. He took off his helmet and gloves, the way any God-fearing man would do on entering a church, and pushed open the carved-wood-and-glass door.
He found himself not in a vestibule, as he had imagined, but in something very like a hotel lobby, complete with a desk clerk wearing a green eyeshade. He was somewhat younger and more wholesome looking than most desk clerks of Muldoon’s experience, true, but he said the same words every last mother’s son of them used as a greeting: “Yes, Officer? Nothing wrong, I hope.”
“Ah, no,” Muldoon said, then cleared his throat to push that little lie away. “That is, I want to see Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, and someone at Headquarters down on Mulberry Street told me this is the address where I’d be findin’ him. It’s probably some sort of mistake, I’m sure, and ...”
“No, there’s no mistake,” the clerk told him. “Is it a police matter?”
Muldoon tilted his head to think about it. “You might say so,” he said at last. “I’ll be wantin’ to talk to him, and I’m a policeman, after all.” For the moment, anyway, he thought.
“Very well,” the clerk said. “He’s in the assembly room. Follow me.”
“Now ...” Muldoon was very embarrassed. “There’s no need to hurry, mind. I can wait. I don’t want to be breakin’ up his prayer meetin’.”
The clerk laughed. “Prayer meeting? Oh, no, sir. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is content to leave the prayers to me and the rest of the professional prayer-makers.” He laughed again. “Prayer meeting,” he sighed. “No, Mr. Roosevelt is holding a meeting, right enough, but I don’t think he’s leading the boys in prayer.”
By now thoroughly bewildered, Muldoon followed meekly as the man showed him through a swinging door, up a flight of stairs, and down a long hallway. He was only halfway up them when he started hearing the noise, and the closer he came to the assembly room, the louder it was. Whatever was going on, it was too noisy and too happy to be any kind of prayer meeting Muldoon had ever heard of any white people having.
The noise was coming from about thirty boys, evenly divided into two groups. The fair ones with the freckles were easy to recognize as Irish—practically any of them might have been Muldo
on ten years ago. The swarthy young fellows were Southern Europeans of some sort, Italians, probably. Scrapes, bruises, and black eyes were distributed more or less uniformly among them. Muldoon guessed, rightly, that there had been a discussion over who had wandered onto whose territory.
That, however, had been forgotten. The boys were looking from their benches at a one-man melodrama, and responding accordingly.
The cast of this melodrama was Mr. Theodore Roosevelt. At this moment, he was a roaring grizzly bear. He did not especially resemble a grizzly bear; to Muldoon’s mind, there was more of the walrus to him, with that squint, the large white teeth, and the drooping brush of a moustache the editorial cartoonists had so much fun with.
“GrrraaAARRrrr,” said the President of the Police Board of the City of New York. The boys laughed nervously; some of the younger ones gasped.
The grizzly bear made a swipe with his paw. He was a bit small for a grizzly—five foot eight, reared up on his hind legs the way he was, but he was an imposing figure just the same. He weighed about a hundred fifty pounds, practically all of it compact muscle. He was a vigorous thirty-eight years of age, which is old indeed for a grizzly bear, but practically infancy for a politician.
“And there I was,” the Commissioner said, leaving the grizzly looming in the boys’ (and Muldoon’s) imagination. “My horse was dead, I was lame with a twisted ankle, and the beast was set to make a meal of me.” The Commissioner’s voice was high, but he lent it force and urgency by emitting it in the clipped barks of an agitated terrier.
“I grasped the handle of my bowie knife—I’d lost my gun, you see ...” Now the Commissioner leaned back across the speaker’s rostrum, depicting himself, the hapless frontiersman awaiting death. Again, he created his illusion despite the drawbacks of setting and costume. The dingy little meeting room had windows that offered a splendid view of the tenement neighborhood, but it was unlike the Great Plains as anything Muldoon could imagine. And no cowboy who ever lived could have gotten away with the outfit the Commissioner had on.