I wanted to crumple that paper into a ball as tight as a rock, into a bomb I would hurl at the heart of the island. But Poe was strangely calm. The tiniest of smiles graced his lips.
I blinked back the sting from my eyes. My cheeks felt aflame. There on that page, laid out for all of Manhattan to read, was spewage from my own mouth, all my loose talk in Hobbs’s kitchen. Someone from Hobbs’s house had fed my vomitus to Neely.
I was too ashamed and frightened to confess. Poe was all I had left in the world. I could not endure to be orphaned from him as well.
And so I asked, blinking, “Why would that Neely fella print such a thing? I thought you and him was friends.”
“Friends?” he said and smiled again. “Mr. Neely is a journalist. His only friend is misfortune.”
“So what do we do about this then?”
“We refute his delineation of the facts.”
“And how do we do that?”
“We put our ear to the ground.”
“Huh?”
“Did you not tell me once that within your circle of acquaintances—among your former acquaintances, that is—braggadocio is the norm?” He saw the wrinkles in my forehead and continued. “Misdeeds are bragged about, are they not? Within the circle at least?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s how you get to be important.”
“So then. We have a dishonest constable, now deceased but whose past affiliations must yet remain. We have Hobbs’s manservant, an individual of rather distinct physiognomy, who is knowledgeable, it would appear, of the less savory institutions in town. We have a roadhouse in Weehawken employed as a rendezvous for Lieutenant Andrews and Miss Rogers. Information concerning any one of these principals, information no matter how trivial, might lead us in turn to more revelatory material.”
“So what you’re saying is we got to start asking questions of anybody who might know anything.”
“But carefully. I for one must remain especially circumspect. And you, Augie—I will not allow you to place yourself in any danger.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” I told him. “You think we should split up then?”
“The less conspicuous, the better.”
“We need a place where we can meet up later on.”
“The woods again. Beyond the cottage.”
“Okay, yeah. But listen, we can be hiking back and forth the rest of our lives if that’s what you want. Point is, I don’t see no point in it. They’ll be looking for you out there sooner or later anyway. Don’t you think it’s better if we find some other place?”
“What other place?” he asked.
“Someplace where even the leatherheads won’t go.”
He thought for a moment. “Five Points,” he said.
“Tell you what. You meet me back here, right here in this same doorway, about three this afternoon. I’ll have us a place to stay by then.”
“We could meet at the Velsor Club,” he said.
“You just stay out of the Velsor Club. You don’t belong in that place any more than I do.”
“We might happen upon an informant there.”
“The only thing you’ll happen upon is more of what got you in trouble the first time. I think you liked that place too much.”
“I only thought—” he said.
“Yeah, I know. Just meet me back here, all right?”
Something had shifted in our roles with each other, some subtle reversal at the mention of Five Points. I confess that I reveled in it.
“Promise me,” I said.
His smile this time was wistful. “You have my word.”
And so we parted. I had no idea where Poe was headed and did not ask. As for me, I strolled the lower end of the island without specific goal in mind, keeping a sharp eye out for leatherheads, the other eye in search of a friendlier face.
Near the corners of Broadway and Wall Street, I spotted a corn-girl I knew only as Princess. She was called this because of her most prominent possession, a cheap tiara rescued from a trash heap or picked up on the street the morning after a Fifth Avenue costume ball. A half crown constructed of soft wood and gold paint, it sat always atop her head, at least when she was plying her barefoot trade, pushing up and down the street a battered perambulator in which sloshed a kettle of boiled corn.
She was twelve or thirteen years of age, her skinny legs getting longer every year, long ago outgrowing her threadbare dress. All of which was no doubt good advertisement for the other facet of her trade, for it was not only ears of boiled corn being hawked when she and the other corn-girls sang out, “Fresh and hot, fresh and hot, sweet and tender from the steaming pot!”
She broke into a wide smile when she saw me coming. She picked up her corn fork as she always did at my approach, ready to dip into the kettle for my free lunch. But this time she paused.
“I hear you been moving up in the world. Maybe I should start making you pay.”
“Give it,” I said and held out a hand. My mouth was already watering.
“Not so fast. All you muckety-mucks gotta pay double.”
“I don’t know who you been talking to about me, but he’s a liar.”
“Jakey Mott,” she said. “You want me to tell him you said so?”
“Can’t say I ever heard of him.”
“They call him Jakey Swipes. Or sometimes just Swipes. ’Cause he’s got such quick hands, or used to anyway, seeing as how he don’t do that anymore. Hardly ever. Except when he gets the chance.”
“There’s a fella named Swipes at the place I’m staying.”
“That’s him. He’s a boyfriend of mine. Told me all about you.”
“I never even talked to the guy.”
“He’s seen you coming and going. Says some muckety-muck got you in. You don’t have to sell the papers or nothing. He says everybody’s wondering what kinda deal you got going with this fella. ’Cause he’s got a peculiar look in his eyes, Jakey says.”
“I’m his valet,” I told her.
“Which means what?”
“I sorta take care of him.”
“That’s what Jakey thought.”
“Not that way I don’t. He’s a writer, and I kind of like keep track of things for him.”
“Why don’t he just write them down for hisself if he’s a writer?”
“Some things ain’t so easy to put into words.”
She thought about this for a moment, then finally shrugged and lifted the lid off the kettle and speared a fat yellow ear of corn and held it out to me. It was still hot, so I held it by one tip and then the other, passing it from hand to hand as I gnawed on it.
Between bites I managed to keep the conversation going. “How’s things been at your end?”
She became very still all of a sudden. “There was a fire in the building,” she said.
I paused, my teeth on the cob.
“You didn’t hear?” she asked.
How to feign innocence when you are painted black with guilt? “Hear what?”
“It was at your place, Augie.”
I lowered the corn from my mouth. “It was?”
She nodded. Her eyes were wet. She was feeling something for me I could not feel myself, and I knew why: fire, the great concealer. Defiler of the truth.
I turned the corn in my hand, looked at the gnawed kernels. “Was she in it?”
Princess nodded again.
“She get out?”
This time her head moved from side to side, just as I had known it would. “She was on her bed and must’ve been drinking and smoking, must’ve passed out they think and spilled the rum all over herself. And that pile of rags she was sleeping on, they didn’t help matters much.”
And so, I thought, this is the way life will be from now on. One horror piled on top of another. My stairway to Hell.
First I see my mother’s throat spilled open, and now, next picture, an image of her body roasting.
“I’m sorry, Augie. I really am.”
I shrugged, though stiffly. “Wasn’t your fault, was it?”
“Wasn’t nobody’s but her own, I guess.”
“That’s right.”
“Even so.”
I lifted my head away from the corn, stood as straight as my fluttering stomach would allow.
Princess put her hand on my arm. “Truth is, Augie, if you want to be honest about it, it’s no less than what she had coming to her. She didn’t have to be as mean as she was.”
“So what’d they do with her?” I asked.
“Same as with everybody else.”
So she was buried in the basement. Buried under two feet of damp earth. Strangely, it was a comforting thought. The basement was cool, the darkness a blessing.
Princess squeezed my arm. “Good riddance,” she said.
I nodded and swallowed hard. “They got the fire out though, huh? Before it spread?”
“Pissed on it, spit at it, threw their slop buckets on it, whatever. Musta worked, I guess.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
She nodded. Fifteen seconds passed. “Anyway,” she said.
“Anyway.”
“You and this muckety-muck. He don’t need another valet, does he? I could take care of him too. We could take turns with him. Give each other a day off now and then.”
“He ain’t no big bug; he’s a writer for the newspaper. He’s the one wrote the piece about that girl got washed up out of the river.”
“I heard about that. He’s the one, huh?”
“I’m the one found her.”
“Get out.”
“I did.”
“What I heard was a couple of oarsmen found her. Over across the river.”
“Yeah but before that she was stuck under the dock over here. I showed her to this writer, and he worked her loose. And then she floated on over to New Jersey all by herself.”
Princess laughed so hard that she bounced on the balls of her feet. “You’re gonna make me pee myself.”
“Believe it or not.”
“Stranger things have happened,” she said.
“He’s still trying to figure out who it was done her in. Been running into some fairly suspicious types.”
“Anybody I know?”
“A fella named Hobbs,” I said. The name elicited no response from her, so I continued. “Another fella works for him, looks like death warmed over. Big, spooky-looking fella, goes by Careys.” Again, no more than a lift of one eyebrow, no sign of recognition. “Plus a lieutenant in the navy, name of Andrews.” Nothing. “Plus a fella supposed to be an oarsman over near Weehawken.”
“Not one of the Burachs,” she said.
“Says his name’s Tarr. Poe, this writer I’m working for, he thinks it’s Lehnort.”
At the mention of Lehnort, her eyes widened momentarily and she quickly averted her gaze.
“That’s a name you know,” I said.
“I’ve heard it maybe, that’s all.”
“Over in Weehawken.”
“That’s what you said already.”
“So what do you know about it?”
“Nothing you need to know.”
“Something about the Red Onion, I’ll bet.”
“Never you mind. Just finish your corn and move along now.”
“Corn’s cold,” I said.
“Whose fault is that?”
“Tell me about the Red Onion, Princess.”
“You’re way too young to know that kinda stuff.”
“I grew up in the Brewery same as you. I ain’t too young for nothing. So come on; what’s going on over at that place?”
“Nothing you need to worry about. Not for a few more years anyway. And maybe not even then if you watch what you’re doing.”
“Is that supposed to make sense?” I asked.
“It’s a woman’s problem, all right? That’s all you need to know.”
“I need to know a lot more than that, Princess.”
“I gotta get busy,” she told me, “or else all the corn’s gonna be cold. I’ll see you around, Augie.” She wheeled her perambulator upstreet and, turning away, gave me a playful bump with her hip.
“Fresh and hot!” she cried out. “Sweet and tender from the steaming pot!”
I headed up toward Five Points then, taking my time because of a piece of corn or something that seemed stuck halfway down to my stomach. I kept trying to swallow it, working up gobs of spit to wash it down with, but it wouldn’t go. In fact it got bigger and bigger; it started swelling inside of me. Burning my chest. It hurt so much that I finally came to a stop and closed my eyes, but that was a mistake, because then all I could see was my mother with her head pulled up by the hair and a long gash like a grinning mouth opening up along the side of her neck, and when I squeezed my eyes tighter, I saw an orange curtain of flames with my mother still there inside them, still grinning at me while the skin curled brown and bubbled on her face. I scarcely had enough time to duck behind a low hedge before I doubled over, retching.
Five minutes later I was on my way again, wobbly and blurry-eyed. That corn, I kept telling myself, a chant to squeeze off all nauseating thoughts, that damn corn Princess gave me was bad.
39
We met at the agreed-upon time in the Pearl Street doorway. There was no sign of Poe’s former calmness now; he constantly fidgeted or fussed with his collar, stroked his chin, leaned out the doorway, and peeked up and down the street as we exchanged our stories. He was not animated by fear but by a restless energy to keep moving, keep building upon what we had learned.
I told him about Princess’s recognition of the name Lehnort and her refusal to discuss specifics; he found the news intriguing. He told me of how his first call of the day had been on Van Rensselaer, to thank him for Glendinning’s assistance the day before and to request additional support. But Poe had made it no closer to Van Rensselaer’s office than the opposite street corner.
“Positioned outside the building,” Poe told me, “was the very same Bank of New York watchman I had dealt with earlier. The moment he spotted me across the street, he hastened to intercept me. I could not make up my mind whether to run or wait. I waited. It soon became clear to me that he had been positioned there in anticipation of just such an encounter, for he warned me in very measured tones that I must under no circumstances call on Van Rensselaer in public. I asked to see Glendinning and this too was refused. He then pressed two gold eagles into my hand, but with the implication that if I failed to abide by this dictum, my fate would not be a pleasant one.”
“He gives you twenty dollars and threatens you at the same time?” I said. “What do you make of that?”
“It was he who accompanied us—more accurately, led us—in our discovery that my witness from the Velsor Club had been silenced. I suspected then and even more so now that the watchman himself was responsible for the murder. I learned today that this watchman is in the employ of Van Rensselaer. In other words, he does Van Rensselaer’s bidding.”
“But that witness of yours was the one person who could put the lieutenant with Mary Rogers on the day she disappeared. Why would Van Rensselaer want to shut him up?”
“My question precisely,” Poe said. He leaned out the doorway, looked up the street and down, then ducked back inside. “Next I made my way to Mrs. Rogers’s boardinghouse,” he told me. “She being engaged with her kitchen chores, and the house being otherwise empty, I chose not to disturb her as I availed myself of another investigation of the girl’s room.”
I almost squealed with delight. “You sneaked inside?”
He hushed me with an upraised finger. “The girl’s room was exactly as before, wit
h but one exception.”
“Let me guess,” I said.
He smiled and waited.
“That angel pin was gone.”
“The brooch and the statuette both,” he said.
“You think her mother maybe put them away somewhere?”
He shook his head. “Mrs. Rogers would want nothing there disturbed, want nothing changed from the way her daughter left it. No, Augie, those items were purloined by someone who came and left as secretly as did I.”
“The lieutenant.”
“The logical assumption. But one not substantiated by a search of his own quarters. A rather hasty search perhaps, but thorough nonetheless.”
“Did you check out Payne’s room too?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“So where to now?”
He rubbed his chin. “You found us quarters for the night?”
“I have a place in mind, it’s on Rivington Street. It’s a free Presbyterian church is what it is, but they take people in at night who don’t have nowhere else to go and let them sleep down in the basement.”
On Night's Shore Page 27
