The Midnight Band of Mercy

by Michael Blaine

  Max had the eerie feeling that Howe really did know about his own cat-clawing nightmares. It was hard to resist the man’s honeyed sympathy. He did feel agitated, and he hadn’t confided in anyone.

  “But what makes you think he was murdered?” Howe pressed him.

  “Well, I saw him. He’d been shot in the head.”

  “You saw it happen?”

  “No, I got there afterwards.”

  “So you’re not a witness to the crime?”

  “He’d been shot in the head. The back … a piece of his head was missing.”

  Suddenly, Howe leaned forward and bore down on him. “But how close did you get to the body? How dark was it in that dive? Do you have a medical background? Did you perform an examination? Did you find a bullet? The murder weapon?”

  “Well, no….”

  Howe rocked back and offered an avuncular smile. “Don’t worry. I’ve defended hundreds of witnesses.”

  What did that mean? Was the lawyer threatening him in some obscure way? “I didn’t….”

  “Ahh, you’re not a witness? Then considering the ambiguous circumstances you’ve described, your friend could have passed on because of the bleeding white lung, pleurisy, brain fever, any number of foul diseases.”

  This leap in illogic had a dizzying quality, the more so since Howe spoke with so much authority. At one moment the lawyer’s tone was warm, in the next accusatory. Or, paradoxically, by some theatrical trick, he struck both notes at the same time.

  “I saw Martin recently, he didn’t complain ” Wary, Max withdrew into his own skin. However charming, William H. Howe was not his friend.

  “He could have been found anywhere. In a lending library. Under a pleasant tree. In his own bed. I’ve done a study of this. The number of men who claim to have died in their own beds is suspect. On the other hand, spiritually speaking, we ought to have the right to die anywhere, don’t you think? Our dead friends need our protection, otherwise who will take up their cause?”

  Now Max’s suspicions became fully aroused. The payment to him was a sham. The insurance tycoon must have instructed Howe to keep Max out of any real investigation. “How, exactly, do you mean that?”

  “Mr. Mourtone’s been a client of mine for many years. Don’t worry. No harm will come to you.”

  “Why should it?” he shot back. Reflexively, he balled his fists.

  “Oh, don’t take it the wrong way. We’re working together on this.”

  Before Max could sort out Howe’s equivocal hints and veiled threats any further, the great man seized a scrap of paper from the chaos on his desk, scrawled on it, folded it up, and handed it to him.

  “Call this number tomorrow. We’ll see if we can find your poor friend.”

  Perhaps he had jumped to conclusions. Mourtone must want to find his son’s remains, if only to resolve the tragedy in a decorous way. Why not use the last man to see Martin alive? A payoff in return for discretion might be exactly what it seemed.

  Max waved the scrap of paper. “Whose number is it?”

  A golden smile blossomed on the lawyer’s face. “Every day they change them. Who can keep track?”

  chapter ten

  The wind kicked up, the dust from dry horse apples swirling down the funnel of Centre Street. Then he heard the ancient cry. “Rrrraggggs! Bo-ones! Rrrrags! Bo-ones!” Drawn by a hollow-ribbed nag, the wagon rolled toward him, its swollen cargo threatening to spill out onto the street. “Rrrrags! Bo-ones! Rrrrags! Bo-ones!” The timeless entreaty gave him gooseflesh. Used winding sheets and foul blankets. Soup bones and pigs’ knuckles. The hair, the piss, the shit, the phlegm, the blood of the dead stuck to faded scraps of muslin. What were these vehicles but ferries to the netherworld? His throat tightened. Then the driver’s stovepipe hat came into view.

  There was something wrong with it, the tilt, the height, the proportions, its dull surface. It was a rubber hat, attached to a rubber mug. The face of J. P. Morgan himself. The great financier, with his Dutch burgher eyes and his magnificent, carbuncled nose, peered back at him. A Wall Street baron plying a junk wagon. The driver’s rubber mask seemed to grin as it drifted by. “Rrrrags! Bo-ones! Rrrrags! Bo-ones!” Issuing from Morgans lips, the primitive call sounded so incongruous that Max almost fell over laughing! New York. Everybody had to be a wise guy.

  For a moment he lingered in Howe and Hummel’s doorway.

  What had happened back there? The attorney had told him, in no uncertain terms, that wherever Martin’s corpse turned up, Stephenson’s would never be mentioned again. And that being a witness was a dangerous occupation. Not only that, Howe had managed to deliver the message in such a light and circuitous way that he could never have been accused of delivering it at all. Max had to be hardheaded. He’d taken the money, and now he had to forget seeing Martin at the Bleecker Street black-and-tan unless the police drew him into an investigation. Somehow, he doubted there would be an inquiry of any sort.

  This time he wouldn’t ask the wrong people the wrong questions. He’d lay forty bucks on Faye out of the blue. What “surprise” was she about to spring? Danny had made a joke of it, but his sister surprised him all too often. In the back of his mind he was always on edge, waiting for the next wicked twist in the melodrama featuring Fabulous Faye and Her Latest Fling.

  He’d slip his mother some cash too, but he didn’t worry about her that much. She always had a new scheme. Planting vegetables in a neighbor’s yard. Giving English classes to greenhorns, despite the fact that she’d never gone beyond third grade in Austria. She took fearful immigrants to doctors for a few cents, and when she returned home she acted out their symptoms. Faye had gotten her inspiration from dramas starring typhus and pneumonia.

  What did bother him was the way his mother worked. At the crack of dawn, she was swabbing the halls of the four-family house, dragging refuse to the curb, sweeping the sidewalk, turning down the gas fixtures, and polishing the front door’s brass doorknob. From the more recent Polish and Russian immigrants, she’d caught the property mania. Once the old man picked up some work, she claimed, she would put a few dollars away and buy a building herself. His father had said she was dreaming, and, for once, Max concurred. Still, he admired the tiny ball of energy, too. While the old man was wandering around the flat, bound in leather phylacteries and muttering the ancient mumbo-jumbo, she was out in the real world, scratching for a living.

  Cockroach landlords, they called them. Immigrants willing to live in their own windowless cellars just to collect one extra rent. He wished she’d come down with a different obsession, but he didn’t mind nurturing his own illusions. One day, when he was pulling down Harding Davis-type dough, he’d slap a down payment on her kitchen table. Just to see the expression on her face.

  But he had more pressing problems.

  What could he say to Gretta now? In the morning he had been dedicated to unraveling Martin’s disappearance. Now he had to fend off her questions and do his best to drop the subject entirely. That might look strange to her, though. He’d have to make a pretense of investigating. Yet he couldn’t help wondering what Martin had intended to reveal about the cat killings. What was the “vicious joke” he had been burning to impart?

  To quiet his feverish self-examination, Max stroked the soothing packet of bills in his pocket again.

  He had to make an appearance at the office. Perhaps Parnell had something new on the Midnight Band, or a fresh assignment for him as a reward for his good work. He also wondered who had written The Heralds encomiums to Howe, and whether, without revealing his own brush with the law firm, he might get some deeper insight into its workings.

  From the throne, Parnell beckoned.

  The sphinx-like editor seemed a shade friendlier. Or was it Max’s imagination? How could anyone tell? Shifts in ParneU’s moods were barely perceptible. Max climbed onto the platform and approached his boss’s rolltop desk. Paint flakes drifted down from the ceiling. Fresh cobwebs hung around the glowing light bowls. The up
town Herald building was nearing completion; here, dust balls incubated in the old office’s nooks and crannies, tobacco juice wreathed battered spittoons, three-legged chairs multiplied, and stuck drawers stayed that way.

  Parnell didn’t even bother to say hello. “Anything new with the cat business?”

  “I’ve got some interviews, but—”

  “We’re still getting mail on your last one. You stirred them up with that malarkey. Half of our readers want to hang your little biddies, and half of them want to join the party. Stay on it.”

  “Great.” While he still had a chance, Max thought he’d take a flyer on William H. Howe. “Mr. Parnell, can I ask you a question?”

  Parnell just stared at him.

  “Who wrote those articles about those lawyers, Howe and Hummel? Is the man still working here?”

  “Right over there. Biddle covers them most of the time.”

  Max gazed across the room at Nicholas Biddle, an aging dandy who always carried a gold-tipped cane, even to the most grisly assignments. Whether he was a Biddle of the Philadelphia Biddies, or an interloper, he had never made clear. It was enough, his elegant manners implied, to act like a Biddle. His limp gray hair, which fell to his shoulders, and his long yellow teeth implied a careless aristocratic pedigree.

  Not certain what he was after, Max approached him. Biddle was more than happy to suspend his labors and discuss his fabled subject.

  “No, I can’t say that I keep the old articles. So you met Willy the Weeper, eh? I saw him once—it’s hard to believe when you consider the size of the man—but I once watched him deliver an entire closing statement on his knees. It lasted,” Biddle paused for effect, “two and a half hours. The last half hour he used up three handkerchiefs.”

  “I don’t doubt it. I suppose I could look up your pieces if you remember the dates ”

  “Ahhh, the morgue’s a wreck. Don’t bother with them. Here’s what you need.” Biddle rummaged through a series of pigeonholes, finally extracting a dog-eared pamphlet. “I think they came out with this in ’88. It will tell you everything you need to know.”

  Gretta wouldn’t get back to Mrs. DeVogt’s for a couple of hours, so Max repaired to Logan’s on Chambers Street, where the free lunch stretched out into the late afternoon. He chose from a smattering of sardellen, a pair of summer sausages, spring onions, dried herring, crackers, dill pickles, and pretzels, then settled down with his plate at the bar and began reading Biddies pamphlet.

  Howe and Hummel’s opus was entitled In Danger, or Life in New York. A True History of a Great City’s Wiles and Temptations.

  After he drained his first schooner of beer, his tense muscles loosened. Halfway through his second, he had a metaphysical insight. Logan’s shining mahogany bar was Mecca, and he was a Mohammedan, down on his knees in supplication.

  Howe and Hummel’s pamphlet declared, in full-throated piety, “It had been well for many an honest lad and unsuspecting country girl that they had never turned their steps cityward nor turned from the simplicity of their country home toward the snares and pitfalls of crime and vice that await the unwary in New York.”

  The lawyers sounded like Comstock’s Society for the Prevention of Vice itself. Reverend Weems, Holy Trinity Church’s minister, would have been comfortable with In Dangers tone. Puzzled, Max gulped down more beer to kill the salty sardellen. Those last few sausages tasted a shade mealy. He read on.

  In Danger shifted to a different note quickly, as it described the city’s “elegant storehouses, crowded with the choicest and most costly goods, great banks whose vaults and safes contain more bullion than can be transported by the largest ships, colossal establishments teeming with diamonds, jewelry and precious stones gathered from all the known and uncivilized portions of the globe, all this countless wealth, in some cases so insecurely guarded.”

  Evidently, according to the authors, New York’s criminals were employing the most scientific methods to separate these indescribable riches from their owners. A detailed passage explained how to construct a shoplifter’s muff. By tearing out the handwarmer’s lining and inserting a wire frame, “shoplifting is so easy as to be successfully practiced by novices.” Out of charity, the authors offered the mathematical formulas needed to beat the ponies and a way to make an invisible pinhole in a faro deck that would guarantee the last winning hand.

  Soon Max began to understand the true purpose of the handbook, especially when In Danger dwelt on the mixed motivations of the New York police: “Instead of surrounding thieves with a network to convict them, the New York headquarters detectives furnish them with all the facilities for escape known to modern criminal practice.”

  The technical and helpful descriptions of “the traveling bag with false, quick opening sides” and “lady thieves’ corsets” only served to cement his conviction: In Danger was a criminal’s handbook. When Howe and Hummel expressed their moral outrage at the practices of nightlife establishments such as Harry Hill’s Dance House, Billy McGlory’s and the French Madame’s on Thirty-Fourth Street, where “the performance is of such a nature as to horrify any but the most blase roue,” they didn’t neglect to include addresses.

  The treatise concluded with a warning that those who drifted to the wrong side of the law would be foolhardy to hire anyone but the distinguished and compassionate Howe and Hummel. One client for whom they had won a hung jury later retained other counsel and was quickly hung himself. When a Miss Blanchette was wronged by a cad named Theodore, she hired Howe and Hummel and “proceedings were taken which brought the contumacious Theodore to a very satisfactory arrangement as far as Miss Blanchette was concerned.” As for their client Mrs. Hazzard, her “lawyers carried all before them like the flood.”

  Max didn’t even realize how loud he was laughing until a barfly asked, “What’re you readin’, bub? A joke book?”

  “You could call it that,” he replied. In fact, In Danger was the most hilarious piece of self-promotion he’d ever seen. It also made him more wary of William H. Howe than ever.

  Max saw Gretta scanning the street in front of Mrs. DeVogt’s. He rushed up to her, hoping the cloves he’d chewed had killed the booze on his breath. In a rose-and-yellow-striped overskirt and a hat trimmed with artificial lilacs, she looked anything but the grieving lover. Her somber expression suggested otherwise though.

  “Good. I was hoping to catch you here. Would you come to Staten Island with me? Mother’s still ill. We can talk on the ferry.” Her voice had a strangled quality, but she spoke to him directly, holding his gaze.

  He couldn’t help admiring her control. “We’d better hurry. South Ferry will be a madhouse around now.”

  “You’ll get to see the cottage.”

  Unfortunately, rush hour was at its height, so he and Gretta had to press hard into the tightly packed mass of riders just to get onto the train. Max felt painfully embarrassed for Gretta, whose body had to bear the intimate weight of a snickering young man in a straw boater and a bloated character with an irritated wen on the tip of his nose. He also wished fervently that he were the one crushed against her, helplessly and without blame.

  The train squealed and rocked on to Fourteenth, then Ninth, and Houston. At Franklin Square, the conductor could barely get the doors closed again.

  “Sardines are better off,” he said over the straw boater to Gretta.

  Out on the river, a Long Island ferry blew its steam whistle.

  Her expression remained frozen until they left the train. The ferry terminal smelled of ammonia and saltpeter. A merciless wave of humanity drove them down its length. At the slip, the flat-bottomed boat was already taking on passengers. In a moment they found themselves packed onto an outdoor bench.

  Quietly, Max said, “I’m so sorry about Martin.”

  She replied with a stiff nod. Out in the harbor, a wooden, double-ended side-wheeler paddled toward Ellis Island. Beyond, a four-masted schooner drifted toward the Narrows. She took his hand. “Let’s go over to the side
.”

  They stood together silently as the ferry made its clumsy way into the harbor. A sharp wind rose, and they were enveloped in salty spray. Max shivered, but Gretta seemed oblivious, so he hung on to the wide, polished rail. Gulls sailed gracefully alongside the boat, then, screeching wildly, skimmed the water. A tug dragged a low-slung coal barge past. Further out, near the mouth of the harbor, the gray shape of a brig materialized.

  Cutting through the choppy bay, a steam yacht sailed by. The wind, the salty air, the spray, the sight of ships suspended on the horizon, the soft rocking of the boat were soothing, hypnotic.

  Gazing out at the bay, Gretta spoke in a halting, disconnected way.

  “I know you probably thought he was a dilettante … he was, I suppose, but he was a very dear person. Sometimes he seemed light, I know … this may be meaningless to you, but Martin had a very sympathetic soul. He could have sat back and wasted his money, but that’s not what he did. He was quite generous. He had a charitable side. He could also be completely ridiculous, silly….”

  She had a searing headache. Her eyes were dry as sand. It was so hard to make the words say what she felt. She wished she could come out with passionate speeches like Belle Rose, but how could she explain her emotions when she felt so foreign to herself? Grief didn’t feel like grief at all. It was more of a distant ache, a dreamy disbelief. Then there was the money. She had never been sure how she felt about Martin, but she knew how she Felt about his fortune. She’d never lied to herself about that. Was she supposed to live in a rooming house the rest of her days? What was she mourning? Martin, yes. She had sincerely cared for him. But she also mourned that lovely studio he was going to build for her, and the lot on East Seventy-First Street where McKim and Meade were supposedly going to build them a modest chateau.

  “I understand,” Max said, though in fact he heard her damning the dead nan with faint praise.