by Kat Ross
The article was accompanied by a sketched portrait of a blonde woman with very large eyes and a small, petulant mouth. It claimed the “fiend” had “mutilated her beauty” in some way. The police had no suspects.
Myrtle always said that a good detective ought to familiarize herself with the criminal mind, for there is nothing new under the sun that hasn’t been done already. For this reason, she had all the papers delivered every day. She would lounge around in her dressing gown and scan their pages for potentially intriguing cases, filing it all away in her photographic memory. I did my best to imitate this habit, and recalled the Rickard murder well, as it was only a few days past.
The World reported that she had been discovered in her flat on Baxter Street above the Bottle Alley Saloon, after a neighbor reported a foul odor. Apparently, the windows of the single room had been sealed and the extreme heat had hastened decomposition. Robbery was ruled out as a motive, since a gold locket was found with the body, along with two hundred dollars in a purse on the bed.
“Ms. Rickard was killed on Sunday, or more accurately the early hours of Monday, sometime after your encounter with her,” I said. “The large sum of money is certainly worth noting. Did you or Mr. Straker pay for her services?”
“Absolutely not!” Brady rejoined. “And Robert barely had two cents to rub together.”
“She must have just come into it then. It could be a coincidence. Or not.”
Brady stood and paced to the window, where he stood with his back to us, arms rigidly clasped behind him. That left me and Elizabeth, who leaned forward entreatingly.
“Please, Miss Pell, I beg you: reserve judgment until all the facts have been gathered. You don’t know Robert like I do. Lord knows he has his faults, but he is incapable of such a crime. It is simply not within his character, even if he has become…unhinged. And I worry that if the killer is still out there, Robert’s own life could be in danger!” She lowered her voice a notch. “It is I who talked Leland into coming here. He has been in an agony of indecision. If we go to the police and wind of my husband’s involvement reaches his employers, he would almost certainly lose his position. Robert’s name would be dragged through the mud however it turns out. And there’s not a shred of real evidence linking him to the murder.”
“That you know of,” I said.
She shrugged this off. “I’m aware of your reputation. That you take cases which seem on their face to be…bizarre…and unravel the truth. Perhaps it is women’s intuition—”
“I prefer the term logical deduction,” I said.
Elizabeth gave me a small smile. “Indeed, I apologize. But I think what you do is wonderful. Please, Miss Pell. Robert is an orphan, without family to aid him. There is, quite literally, no one else we can turn to.”
“Do you believe your husband’s story?” I asked.
“I believe he believes it,” she responded.
Privately, I agreed. When Brady had rubbed his forehead, it caused his coat sleeve to brush against his hair, picking up a small amount of pomade. In fact, the sleeve had a significant stain, only slightly darker than the fabric’s regular color but visible to a keen observer, indicating that he had performed this anxious gesture numerous times in recent days. He had also neglected to clean his boots, and a small white chicken feather adhered to the left sole.
Elizabeth and I looked at each other for a long moment. A rush of nervous excitement coursed through me. I could say no and send them on their way. It would certainly be the wiser course of action. The truth is I wasn’t Myrtle. I lacked her contacts, in both the police force and criminal underworld. I was still quite young and frankly, I looked it. It was a measure of the Bradys’ desperation that they believed otherwise. I supposed they wanted to believe.
I’d have to be mad to even consider taking on this case.
“My fee is payable only upon a successful conclusion, but I may require reimbursement of expenses during the investigation,” I heard myself say.
“Oh yes, that is perfectly acceptable,” Elizabeth said, eyes shining. “Thank you, Miss Pell!”
“You won’t thank me if I find your friend is indeed a murderer. And we must be clear on the terms. If I uncover evidence proving his guilt, I will take it to the police.”
“Agreed,” she said. “I only ask that you look into the matter for one week. After that, if it remains unresolved, we will break our silence to the authorities, for what it’s worth.”
“I think that’s fair,” I said. “Can I keep the photograph of Mr. Straker? I may need to show it around.”
“Of course. I’ll get it from Leland right now.”
Elizabeth ran over to the window to inform her husband they were now officially my clients, as John finished the article and started sifting through the papers to see if he could glean any additional details from the coverage.
“So they hired you,” he said under his breath. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Harry?”
“No,” I said. “Quite the opposite.”
John shook his head. He’d willingly gone along with more than one hare-brained scheme—if he wasn’t the one who’d hatched it himself. Still, this was another league entirely. I wondered, not for the last time, what I’d gotten myself into. If Myrtle found out…
Brady strode over and shook my hand and then John’s hand, expressing his gratitude, and I thought I’d better buckle down and think about how to start.
“I’ll need to see Mr. Straker’s rooms immediately,” I said. “Who knows? He could have returned.”
“I already hunted down his landlord,” Brady said. “A sour, pinch-faced man, he wouldn’t give me the time of day until I said I would pay all of Robert’s back rent plus two weeks ahead. The greedy fellow quite lit up at that.” He frowned. “It’s an outrage what they charge for such squalid lodgings. In any event, I insisted that he give me a key.” He patted his pocket. “I’ll admit, I haven’t gone yet. I was hoping you’d accompany me, Miss Pell. And you too, Dr. Weston. I suppose I’m more than a little afraid of what we might find.”
John agreed immediately. He had boxed and wrestled through high school and was physically fearless. I had seen him best men twice his age at the club where he trained.
“Would an hour from now suit you?” I said. “We can meet there, if you’ll give me the address.”
Brady scribbled it on a scrap of paper, and John escorted him and Elizabeth to the front door. He returned a few moments later with a thoughtful look on his face.
“What do you make of it, Harry?” he asked.
I should mention that my Christian name is actually Harrison, after a paternal grandfather, although no one calls me that except for my mother, and then only when she is very cross.
“It’s too early to form an opinion,” I said. “We must see his rooms, and then we must learn everything about the Rickard killing, including those facts that have not been published in the papers.”
“And how are we going to do that?”
“I’m working on it.” I returned to the window seat and flopped down, hoping vainly for a breeze. “I suppose you believe Straker was possessed by some sort of demonic entity that turned him into a homicidal maniac.”
“Well, it did cross my mind,” John replied. “If you want to work for the S.P.R., you’d better open yours a little.”
The S.P.R., or Society for Psychical Research, had been founded in 1882 to investigate paranormal phenomena. Its stated mission was “to approach these varied problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated.”
In other words, its membership was comprised of both adamant skeptics, like myself, and fervent believers, like John. My Uncle Arthur had just joined the year before. He tended toward the latter, and was also a member of the venerable Ghost Club, which, unlike the S.P.R., subscribed wholeheartedly to the occult.
> Both entities were based in London, but the Society had agents across the Atlantic. They investigated apparitions, clairvoyance, precognitive dreams, thought-reading, hauntings, mesmerism and more or less anything that seemed to defy the laws of known science. Much of it involved exposing clever fakes. The job required wit, subtlety, nerves of steel, and a firm grip on sanity. John knew I wanted nothing more in life than to work for them someday. But first I would have to prove I had what it takes.
And this case could be just the way to do it.
“I’m not jumping to any conclusions,” I said, reciting Myrtle’s mantra. “One must never make the facts fit the theory but rather vice versa. Clearly, Straker had been under a great deal of pressure for a long time. It’s hardly unthinkable that he snapped. He could easily have gone back to Rickard’s flat that night. But why?”
John shrugged. “Revenge? Brady said he seemed to blame her for his predicament.”
“Maybe. The violent nature of the attack does seem personal. Whoever the killer was, they were full of rage.” I picked up the World and scanned its pages. “Oh, Edward’s in the society column again for some stunt at Saratoga Springs. They crowned him King of the Dudes.”
“Again?” John asked, rolling his eyes.
“Again.” The first occasion had been during the height of the March blizzard, when he strolled into a bar wearing patent leather boots that went up to his hips. “Apparently, he changed clothes forty times in a single day at the racetrack. That’s got to be a new record, even for Edward.”
I tossed the article to John and quickly sorted through the rest of the papers. The New York Times complained of “filthy Europeans” taking the garment factory jobs of “American working girls” (who themselves earned about three dollars a week), while on the same page it reported that a tenement fire had killed a family of eight.
The Herald devoted half a page to a grocer who had murdered his partner and chopped the body up, stuffed the pieces into a set of luggage, and dumped them at Grand Central Depot.
I returned to the New York World, which seemed to have the heaviest coverage of the Rickard killing, when my eye caught on a familiar byline and inspiration struck. “Paper and ink, John! I need to send a message.”
I dashed off a note and left it for Connor, a street urchin in my sister’s employ. A boy of somewhere between eight and eleven (I think even he was unsure), Connor was the nominal leader of the fearsome-sounding Bank Street Butchers, although in reality they were far tamer than the other gangs that roamed the city’s streets, limiting their activities mainly to pickpocketing the elderly and infirm.
Connor would be an invaluable ally, I decided. He was a perfect mercenary, and I doubted he would care about my impersonation as long as I paid him more than Myrtle did.
“Who’s that to?” John said, trying to read over my shoulder.
“You’ll see,” I said, swatting him away. “Now, I think it’s time we went to 91 Leonard Street. Our client will be waiting.”
We hailed a hansom cab on Fifth Avenue and proceeded three blocks downtown to Washington Square Park, where we turned east toward Broadway, passing the elegant marble-fronted St. Nicholas Hotel and Theatre Comique. It was still morning, so the great mass of streetcars and wagons and horses and omnibuses was mostly flowing south. Every now and then, the whole thing would become hopelessly tangled up, and police would rush in to redirect traffic around whatever obstacle had presented itself. If you wished to cross the avenue on foot during rush hour, that was your chance to do it. Otherwise, it was a certain suicide mission.
At the intersection of Broadway and White, just a few short blocks from City Hall, we turned left towards Baxter Street. It is a true cliché that only in New York can one go from opulence and bustle to pure, undiluted misery in a matter of seconds. The buildings seemed to sag and lean against each other in weariness, as though moments away from collapsing completely. In the August heat, the stench was indescribable. This was the heart of the Five Points, whose gloomy, crooked streets housed thousands of families, mostly blacks and Irish immigrants. I asked the driver to slow as we passed the former dwelling place of Becky Rickard. It was above a hole-in-the-wall “distillery” that was already open for business at this early hour. The building was a two-story wooden shanty, and a “room to let” sign had already been placed in the upstairs window.
“We should find out if someone requested the body, or if she was sent to Potter’s Field,” John said.
Those whose families couldn’t afford a burial were sent to the paupers’ cemetery on Ward’s Island, separated from nearby Randall’s Island by a treacherous channel aptly called Little Hell’s Gate. Its forty-five acres contained hundreds of thousands of corpses. Those who could be identified were packed into mass graves, while nameless souls got their own bit of dirt, so they could be dug up if anyone ever came forward to claim them.
“We need to interview any relatives we can find,” I agreed. “They might know where the money came from. And if she had any enemies.”
Straker’s Leonard Street digs were just around the corner. Number ninety-one was a faded red-brick building in marginally better shape than its neighbors. A trio of grubby, barefoot boys played on a pile of rubble out front, while a woman with a youthful body and hard, wizened face hung washing up to dry. Flies buzzed around a dead horse that lay ignored in the gutter a few feet away, its body little more than skin and bones.
John paid the hansom driver, who cracked his whip and headed back in the direction of Broadway as fast as he could go. The children gawked at us as we entered the building but no one made a move to block our way. The heyday of truly vicious gangs like the Dead Rabbits had ended a decade before, although even the police still hesitated to enter certain parts of the Five Points, like the notorious Bandit’s Roost.
We ascended a set of rickety stairs to the third floor and found Brady waiting on the landing. He was sweating profusely in the airless shaft and looked relieved to see us.
“The family across the hall hasn’t seen Robert since Monday morning,” he said by way of greeting. “I gave them a few dollars for their cooperation. You wouldn’t believe how many people are living over there.” He produced a key and took in a shaky breath. “I don’t suppose I can put this off any longer. I just pray that Robert hasn’t…” Brady trailed off.
I shared a look with John. We both understood there was a good possibility that Straker had taken his own life in a fit of remorse, or fear of the gallows (the electric chair at New York’s Auburn Prison would get its first customer, a hatchet-murderer, almost exactly one year later). As a medical student at Columbia, John had seen his share of bodies. Myrtle, no stranger to the morgue, delighted in lecturing me on the various aspects of death by fire or water or the hand of one’s fellow man. But I’d never seen it up close before. I just hoped I wouldn’t faint or otherwise embarrass myself.
Brady turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. We all stood there silently for a moment taking in the scene. John, for whom action came as naturally as breathing, was the first to enter.
The room was small, illuminated only by a single shaft of light that filtered in through a smudged window looking onto the tenement next door. To the left was a cracked shaving basin, half-filled with murky liquid. An unmade bed occupied the far corner, while a battered dresser and chair made up the rest of the furnishings. The drawers of the former had been yanked out, their contents strewn across the floor. Next to me, Brady let out a long, pent-up breath.
“He appears to have fled,” John said, taking in everything but touching nothing.
The few belongings that remained confirmed Brady’s account of a one-time country gentleman fallen on hard times. A pair of boots stood upright at the foot of the bed. They were expensive and finely made, but the soles had been patched a dozen times and the left toe had a gaping hole. The same was true of the clothing that lay scattered about. It was tailor-made but worn nearly threadbare.
I slowly wal
ked the perimeter of the room. Brady stayed in the doorway, pale-faced and anxious. When I reached the bed, I slid my hand between the thin mattress and the frame. My fingers brushed a hard edge.
“Would you call your friend a sentimental man?” I asked, holding up an oval cameo photograph. It depicted a woman with the same striking, dark good looks as Straker. “His mother, I presume?”
Brady took the cameo and nodded. “Yes, to both counts. That was the only picture he had of her.”
“Curious that he would leave it behind, don’t you think?”
“More than curious,” Brady said thoughtfully. “It’s unthinkable.”
“Even if he was in a great hurry?” I pressed. “Could he have forgotten it?”
“When we were growing up and shared a room together, Robert looked at that picture every day,” Brady said. “More than once, I even overheard him talking to it.” He laughed at John’s expression. “Not in a morbid or disturbing way. Just a son who missed his mother. They were very close.”
“How did his parents die?” I asked.
“They drowned in an accident on Easter Sunday. Their rowboat capsized on a nearby pond and neither knew how to swim. It was a terrible tragedy. Robert was only seven.”
“May I keep this for now?” I asked, examining the cameo. The woman’s full lips were curved in a smile, but her eyes had a cool, detached quality.
“If you wish,” Brady said, handing it back. “Just keep it safe so we may return it to Robert when he is found.”
I continued my circuit of the room, taking care to note every detail, as Myrtle had trained me to do. When I reached the window, I dropped to hands and knees and took out a small magnifying glass.
“Was Mr. Straker a smoker?”
“He took the occasional pipe,” Brady replied.
“But not cigarettes?”
“No, never. He very much disliked the smell.”
