Gilded Needles

by Michael McDowell

  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 rope 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 th
at 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.

  The guards who were to transfer Maggie Kizer from the Tombs to Blackwell’s Island had been told of her addiction to opium, and when they came for her they were not surprised to find her in a stupor. She was brought out on her cot, lifted into a carriage, taken to the landing at the eastern end of Fifty-second Street, and set in a small boat to be rowed across.

  One of the two officers took the oars, and the other held the drooping woman up. The day was warm, though still early in the morning, and the sunlight glinted on the gentle waters of the East River.

  Just as they had come within the shade of the trees that fringed Blackwell’s Island, but before the small boat had been tied at the landing, the second officer looked closely at the woman who lay in his arms, examined carefully her face that was painted green by the sunlight that fell through the dense evergreen foliage, and remarked to his friend that the prisoner was stone dead.

  Chapter 27

  From the moment that Duncan Phair learned that Maggie Kizer had been involved in the murder of Cyrus Butterfield, he had begun to put his mistress behind him. The danger she posed to his life forced him to abandon her entirely, and each day that had passed since her arrest drew her further from his affections and his concern. He began actually to think of her as the cold murderess that Simeon Lightner described—the beautiful harpie who had lured the lawyer to his death. The quiet, saddened woman who moved with elegant lassitude room to room in her elegant apartments on Bleecker Street no longer existed.

  Duncan had not a moment of regret that he had been forced to reveal his liaison to his father-in-law. There was, to begin with, relief to be got from the very act of confession. It was with great trepidation, however, that Duncan had anticipated his next meeting with the judge; Duncan feared his father-in-law’s hot recriminations and cold scorn. The scorn was there, but the recriminations were only perfunctory. Without difficulty Maggie Kizer had been convicted, and this ease of circumstance perhaps made the judge go easier with his son-in-law. “This matter will lie dead between us, Duncan, to be resurrected only when the woman herself is dead. I am not concerned with you and your feelings; I feel no need to offer instruction and improvement to a man who would have so little care for himself and his family as to engineer a connection between himself and an opium-addicted, murderous prostitute. It is necessary now only that we come through this undetected; there is therefore no question of confession to Marian, do you understand?”

  It was with only the slightest pang to his heart that Duncan learned from Lightner of Maggie’s suicide. He commended her to God and considered that this death was better than hanging. Maggie had always found comfort in opium, and Duncan knew that she would have had no fear of laudanum.

  Duncan himself no longer had any fears. Maggie was dead, past his help; Maggie was dead, and he was past her injury. Lady Weale had conveniently left town, no one knew whither. There was no one now to connect him with Maggie Kizer; her relatives the Shanks had never seen him, and so far as he knew had never discovered his identity. And it was quite beyond them now to approach him, for they were themselves in ever-increasing tribulation. The pawnshop had been shut up, the abortion practice quashed, investigations into Louisa Shanks’s activities with forged documents and cheques initiated, watches set upon the children. It was with a mind considerably lightened that Duncan Phair went to Judge Stallworth with the news of Maggie Kizer’s death.

  “Good,” replied Judge Stallworth at the reception of this news. “I could tell that the woman had sense; she evidently had some idea of propriety as well. In taking the laudanum, so quickly after the sentencing, she actually did us a decided favor. Mulberry Street asked me to sign a warrant for the arrest of Daisy Shanks—the abortionist—but I told them I wanted to put it off a week, until we could get the Kizer woman out of the way. But now that she’s killed herself, I see no reason not to begin with the others.”

  “Tomorrow,” suggested Duncan eagerly. Now that he had got through the difficulty with Maggie Kizer that had threatened to destroy his career, he had no intention of allowing those to remain who might later bring the whole matter to the attention of the world. The Shanks would indeed be ground into the dust of the Black Triangle. “Simeon and Benjamin and I will be there. The Shanks haven’t left their house since the trial, we don’t even know how they get their food in. We’ll see what effect this arrest has. Do you think we ought to arrest Black Lena at the same time?”

  “You are too eager,” said Judge Stallworth disdainfully. “I will sign the warrant for the daughter, but there is not enough evidence against the mother yet. It is notoriously difficult to prosecute a fence. You and Simeon are going to have to dig a little, find someone who thinks she’s been cheated by the old woman, bring her forward to testify, and then we’ll announce that we’ve arrested Black Lena Shanks, the head of the wickedest family in the Black Triangle. We must put her aside for the moment, but the abortionist is no problem, no problem at all. . . .”

  It was arranged with the police that Daisy Shanks should be arrested at six o’clock in the evening of Thursday, March 16, just two days after the death of Maggie Kizer.

  A little before the appointed time, Simeon Lightner, Benjamin Stallworth, and Duncan Phair met at the Tribune Building and took a cab to the corner of King and Hudson streets. On a preliminary stroll down West Houston Street, Simeon silently pointed out the house of the abortionist. The three men purchased cigars from a tobacconist’s with a faro bank ill-concealed in the back. They gathered round a streetlamp, and tried to make out that they were interested in the painted females who passed them by. Benjamin kept his hand thrust in his jacket pocket, excitedly fingering the small pistol that he had lately taken to carrying about with him—unknown to either Simeon or Duncan. He told himself, proudly, that in some emergency he would prove himself their timely deliverance.

  The sun had fallen behind the brick buildings to the west, and the street was suffused with a soft pink light that allowed the dilapidated structures to present not so harsh or uninviting a scape as usual. A little beyond the hour of six, three policemen appeared from around the corner of the street and made their way silently toward number 203. One of them was Lincoln Pane, the officer who had arrested Maggie Kizer and testified at her trial.

  The three men dropped their cigars and followed the policemen at a little distance. Simeon Lightner skipped ahead and stood just on the other side of the stone steps; the reporter exchanged a nod of recognition and complicity with Officer Pane, and then drew his tablets and pencil from his pocket.

  Benjamin Stallworth and Duncan Phair retreated into the shadowed recess of a doorway directly across the street. Expectantly they watched the three uniformed men mount the pale stone steps of number 203. There was no response to Pane’s first knock, but a second sustained rapping at the door resulted in its being pulled open a small space by Rob, who stood silent upon the threshold.

  “Daisy Shanks,” announced Officer Pane importantly, “we’ve come for Daisy Shanks!”

  Rob answered nothing, and did not appear even alarmed by the appearance of the three policemen or the severity of Pane’s voice. He peered over the edge of the balustrade and carefully marked the presence of the reporter.

  “Daisy Shanks!” shouted the policeman, and attempted to push past the little boy. Rob scampered out of the way down the steps, slipping between the uniforms; and his place in the door was taken by Louisa. Her face bore an expression even harder than usual, and the fringe of greasy curls was raked so far down over the low forehead that it covered her brows. She wore a blue dress covered in lace-edged ruffles and green bows, that hung as if it had been plunged in a vat of glue just before she had put it on.

  “Are you Daisy Shanks?” Pane demanded.

  Louisa made no sign, but Simeon Lightner hissed, “No!”

  �
��Is Daisy Shanks within?”

  Louisa shook her head no.

  “She’s lying!” cried Simeon Lightner.

  “Well,” said Pane, speaking to Louisa with sarcastic ease, “perhaps you’ve just mislaid her, or perhaps you’re mistaken, or perhaps she’s just come in the back way. Let us in and we’ll make certain.”

  Louisa did not move. She paid little attention to the man who stood on the step just below her, but looked carefully over the other two policemen behind him and glanced for a moment at Simeon Lightner scribbling in his tablet. She even peered thoughtfully into the darkness of the recessed doorway across the street.

  Duncan Phair felt himself observed, and shrank farther into the shadows.

  At that moment, the door of the adjoining house was opened by Ella Shanks. Lena stood just behind her.

  Rob ran over to join his sister and grandmother. The three stood on the steps of number 201, and with disconcerting passivity looked on Louisa Shanks as she defended their home and Daisy within it from the three policemen.

  Officer Pane placed his hand on Louisa’s arm and tried to pull her out of the entrance, but with one swift motion she jerked herself free of his grasp and knocked his cap off. It flew and struck Simeon Lightner in the face.

  “Damn you in the teeth!” cried Officer Pane, and attempted to shove her aside. The policemen from behind him jumped up on the narrow stoop, grabbed the woman’s arms and dragged her down. She resisted and they fell over backward. But Louisa Shanks was pulled over with them and all three tumbled painfully down the stoop and were sprawled on the sidewalk.