by Kat Ross
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s all right. Now I know we went over this yesterday, but I’d like you to think back once more. Are there any more details you can recall about the ceremony itself? Words or phrases the medium used? I’m hoping to track down the book she had.”
Brady shuffled his papers into a neat pile, then laid them down with a sigh. “I’ve thought about that night many times since, wondering if I really heard and saw what I did, and if so, what it all means. It hardly seems real, and yet part of me is certain it was.” He gave an embarrassed chuckle. “I was never much of a church-going man, but recently—well, our little village chapel is the only place I truly feel at peace. I prayed for Robert there, prayed for his eternal soul…” Brady trailed off, then shook himself and picked up a fountain pen. “I’m sorry. You were asking if I remember any details, other than the wind and…what came after. I’m afraid the answer is no. The whole thing was in Latin, and while I studied it a bit in school, that was many years ago.”
He said this casually, unaware of the significance of his words.
“Could it have been backwards Latin?” I asked, thinking of the message in blood left by Becky Rickard’s killer.
Brady frowned. “I really don’t know. It sounded like Latin, but as I said, she was clearly intoxicated. It struck me as unintelligible. So…yes. I suppose it’s possible.”
I decided to try a new tack. “Did your friend ever suffer from episodes of lost time?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Did he complain of finding himself places with no memory of going there? Did he ever seem to forget conversations or experiences? Or simply behave in a manner that was markedly different from his usual personality?”
Brady didn’t need to consider question this long. “No, never. Not that I can recall.”
“You said you hadn’t seen Mr. Straker in more than a year before he approached you last week, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“So you have no idea what other friends and acquaintances he may have made since moving to the city?”
“None.”
“Places he went regularly?”
“I’ll be honest. Since we parted ways, Robert’s life is a perfect blank to me. He spoke in vague generalities about his finances, and referred to a business deal gone sour, but he provided no details and I didn’t press him. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help.” Brady glanced at his watch. “I hate to be abrupt, Miss Pell, but I have a business meeting in just a few minutes. And it’s best if, er, I don’t introduce you.”
“I understand perfectly.” I retrieved my hat, a confection of black silk with a daring spray of glossy ebony feathers that I’d bought for myself on the Ladies’ Mile, and set it on my head. “You’ve been more helpful than you might imagine.”
I turned toward the door, then stopped as if I’d just thought of something. “Oh, one last question. Do you happen to recollect what Mr. Straker did with his uniform after he left the army?”
Brady perked up at this, his oversized ears making him look like a kid hoping to please a favorite teacher. “Well, that’s one I can answer with certainty!” He scribbled on a document with great flourish and tossed it to the side. “Robert kept it. I believe he thought it would impress the ladies.”
“Have you seen it recently?”
“Oh, not recently. Not since we lost touch.” Brady looked up with a musing expression. “Now that I think of it, we didn’t see it among his effects, did we?”
“No, we didn’t,” I replied with a smile. “Good day, Mr. Brady.”
As I stepped out into the late morning sunshine, I briefly wondered if my client realized that the noose was tightening around his friend’s neck. I also wondered if he was being entirely forthcoming in his assertion that he knew nothing about Straker’s activities in the past year, and what had led his friend down such a dark path. I wasn’t quite ready to break my promise about going to the police, not yet, but my conscience was starting to whisper that it might not be such a bad idea. Deep down, I found the prospect of Straker’s guilt disappointing. I’d hoped my first case would present more of a challenge.
Perhaps it was a technicality, but I’d told Elizabeth that I would wait for proof and in my view, there were still loose threads to follow. The book, for example. I wanted to know where Rickard had gotten it, and why she had the princely sum of $200 in her miserable flat. So while I waited to hear about John’s trip to the Forsizis’ apartment, I headed over to the best place in the city to conduct research: The Astor Library.
Built at Lafayette Place by the immensely rich fur trader turned real estate magnate John Jacob Astor, the library contained more than two hundred thousand volumes on history, art, science and literature. I passed through the elegant entrance hall, with its Italian marble pedestals supporting busts of ancient sages, and found a librarian. A young man with a bushy mustache that turned up at the ends like the grin of the Cheshire Cat, he seemed slightly taken aback at my request, but dove into the stacks and returned a short while later with three books.
“I don’t know about that symbol you showed me, but you can try these. It’s all we have on grimoires,” he said, as I filled out the required slips.
“Grimoires?”
“Yes, I presumed that’s what you wanted when you said it was used at a séance.” He lowered his voice a fraction and leaned across the counter. “You know, books of magic. How to communicate with angels, devils, spirits, that sort of thing. I’m afraid we don’t have much on the occult, but perhaps these will be of some use.”
I thanked him and settled into a chair in the main reading room, which had large rectangular tables arranged in the middle of a double-height gallery topped with a glass skylight. Not surprisingly, none of the books were grimoires themselves. Two were tomes of history, with a few paragraphs devoted to folklore and witchcraft, and one was a biography of the eccentric English metaphysician Francis Barrett. But I managed to learn a few things.
Most grimoires promised spells or incantations to make the user wealthy, or to construct items of black magic such as a Hand of Glory (the dried and pickled paw of a criminal who had died on the gallows). They often, but not always, involved a pact with the devil or his chief minister, Lucifuge Rofocale. And the most popular grimoires, at least in the last century, were the Key of Solomon, the Dragon Rouge, and the Black Pullet.
Could the book Becky Rickard read from have been one of those three? And what exactly was she trying to accomplish? Did she think the ceremony would lead to a great treasure? Or was she attempting to raise a demon? Perhaps it was both. And what of the wind Brady described? Did Rickard have a confederate whose job was to create the impression of a supernatural presence? And if so, to what end? Brady insisted they hadn’t paid her any money for the performance. She was already disgraced, with no hope of returning to her former life. What was the point of it all? And why had she chosen Straker?
I closed the dusty cover on A History of Medieval Europe and realized that more than two hours had gone by and I was absolutely famished. Right on cue, my stomach rumbled and a stout man to my left—most of the patrons were men—glanced over disapprovingly. I gave him a bright smile, set my hat at a jaunty angle, and lugged the books back to the desk. Astor was a research library so I couldn’t borrow them, but I’d picked every bit of meat from those bones anyway. If I wanted to learn more, I’d need to consult a specialist.
It was only a few blocks home with a shortcut through Washington Square Park, but I still felt thoroughly cooked by the time I got there. The midday heat was thick enough that pedestrians jostled for space on the shady side of the street, and the poor horses looked as though they’d rather be anywhere else. New York City in August may have its charms, but I’d be hard-pressed to name them. If it weren’t for the investigation, I would have been sorely tempted to catch a hansom to the Cunard pier at Forty-Eighth Street and take the next ship across the Atlantic.
But
I felt that the threads of the case, which had seemed so hopelessly tangled just a day ago, were slowly beginning to unravel. I still didn’t know what pattern they would ultimately form, but at least I had the satisfaction of catching hold of the ends. So when I found John lying prostrate on the hall carpet, I gave him an impatient poke with the pointy toe of my boot.
“Go away,” he groaned. “It’s too hot.”
“I take it your sojourn to Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t pleasant,” I said.
John stared up at the ceiling, his brown eyes glassy and unfocused. “Another waste of time. The boy’s father barely spoke any English. He managed to tell me that Raffaele was pretty much the family’s sole means of support. The man was…broken. In every way. I gave him some money but it won’t last long. There were a bunch of little kids too.” John sighed. “He said his son had no enemies. He didn’t understand how such a thing could happen. Then he handed me over to a sister who seems to be the family’s official translator. She told me as much as she could about Raffaele’s routine, but I don’t think it matters. The killer was a stranger.”
I knelt beside him, my upbeat mood deflating. “We’ll find him,” I said quietly. “If it’s Straker or someone else, we’ll find him.”
John turned his face away and that’s when I noticed the dried blood. I laid a hand on his cheek, gently turning him to face me. “What happened?”
He blinked. “Oh. Right. Then I got in a fight.”
Fortunately, Mrs. Rivers was out for the afternoon. I settled John into a chair at the kitchen table and cleaned him up with a damp cloth. He had a nasty cut just below his left ear where he’d taken a glancing blow from a cane, but his other wounds appeared to be superficial. All things considered, I’d seen him in worse shape after a match with his friends at the club. Then I made us both turkey sandwiches on thick slabs of Mrs. Rivers’ homemade rye bread. The food perked him up some, and John told me how he’d been jumped by a couple of neighborhood thugs on his way back to the Ninth Avenue El.
“Guess they figured I’d be easy pickings,” he said. “Some swell from uptown slumming it for the thrills.”
“Moran’s boys?” I asked.
James Moran was a paradox: outwardly respectable, diabolically clever, and at the age of twenty, the brains behind an ugly bunch of Irish lads who specialized in extortion, robbery and murder for hire. Myrtle had been trying to catch him for two years with no success, which told you quite a bit about James Moran. He was a different breed of criminal entirely from the likes of Danny Driscoll of the Whyos, who had just been hanged in January in the Tombs prison yard at the age of thirty-three. Like most other New York gang leaders, Driscoll was a loose cannon who spent half his short life in a jail cell, and the other half either assaulting people or getting arrested for it.
Moran had committed one infamous crime. He’d served his time and now gave every appearance of being a model citizen. A gifted student of mathematics, he could be seen roaming the campus of Columbia College on 49th and Madison, dressed in an immaculate dark suit and pearl grey silk hat. Moran moved seamlessly between society and the streets, laughing off the dark rumors that swirled around him and simultaneously exuding just enough danger and intrigue that New York’s Knickerbocker matrons couldn’t resist putting him at the top of their guest lists.
John shrugged in answer to my question. “Moran’s? I don’t think so. They never move in less than packs of five, and these two struck me as minnows hoping to swim with the sharks—but more likely to be swallowed whole.”
It wasn’t John’s style to boast and add that he left them lying in the street, but I’d seen him box and knew that whatever injuries he had, he’d inflicted tenfold on his opponents.
“Well, doctor, I found out a few things too,” I said, and filled him in on my visits to Brady’s office and the Astor Library.
“Myrtle would say the uniform is interesting, but not conclusive,” he commented. “Straker could have thrown it out, or given it away.”
“Agreed. We’ll move on for now. No evidence of prior mental instability either, according to Brady. I’ve been thinking about the book.”
“A grimoire,” John said. “I’ve heard of those. Magical textbooks.”
“With a dark side. We’re talking pacts with the devil, John. Rather heavy stuff for a medium, don’t you think? We need to learn more about Becky Rickard, a.k.a., Valentina von Linden, a.k.a. Madame Catarina Santi. What she was like, who her other clients were. Someone came to her flat in the middle of the night, and if it wasn’t Straker, it could very well be someone who’d used her services before. Maybe the same who gave her the money.”
“What about other mediums?” John said. “At least a few must have known her.”
I should explain that Spiritualism, the idea that one could speak with the dead, wasn’t nearly as popular as it had been twenty years before, when Mary Todd Lincoln was holding séances in the White House (which her husband reportedly attended). The Seybert Commission had investigated dozens of claims of “rappings,” so-called automatic writing and spirit photography, concluding in 1887 that not a single case was genuine. Personally, I shared their scepticism, although I admired some of the Spiritualist organizations for their embrace of women’s rights and staunch opposition to slavery.
But while the mystical frenzy that followed the great blood-letting of the War for the Union had ebbed, it never vanished altogether. If you decided that you simply had to speak with dear Aunt Eunice, even though she’d been gone for twenty years, there were any number of ladies and gentlemen more than happy to assist you—for a small sum, of course.
I was just praising John for his excellent idea when a knock came on the front door.
Our caller was a young man, pleasant-looking and dressed in a stiff collar, checkered coat, lavender pants and high-heeled shoes with captoe buttons up the side. He removed his top hat and peered at us through rose-tinted spectacles.
“Nellie says Myrtle’s on a new murder case, but I happen to know she’s out of town,” he said with an evil smile. “So you either invite me in and tell me everything or I’ll have no choice but to—”
Before he could finish, John seized one arm and I seized the other, and we hauled Edward Dewey Dovington upstairs into the parlor, where we deposited him in an armchair and stood guard to either side.
Edward blinked once and adjusted his cravat. “No choice but to cable your parents, Harry. Not that I know where they are either. Is that iced tea?”
He made to rise and John placed a firm hand on his lapel.
“I’ll only give you some if you swear to take what I’m about to tell you to the grave,” I intoned.
“Sure,” Edward said cheerfully.
“Swear on Dirty Laundry,” John ordered, which was Edward’s favorite racehorse.
“Well, that’s serious! I’ll have to think about it.”
“Edward…”
“Oh, all right then,” he grumbled. “I swear! But this had better be good.”
So we told him everything, from the moment I saw the Bradys walking up Tenth Street to John’s encounter with the Hell’s Kitchen hoodlums. Edward asked questions here and there, but mostly he just listened, twirling a gold pocket watch with long, elegant fingers.
“So you’re pretending to be Myrtle,” he said at last. “I hate to say it, Harry, but you’d need to grow at least four inches and color your hair black to make that remotely plausible.”
I drew myself up to my full height, which just reached John’s shoulder, and scowled. “That’s not the point,” I said. “What do you think? Will you help us?”
Edward gave a lopsided grin. “Well, there’s no point in going back to Saratoga this season. I couldn’t possibly top myself.”
Our friend owned no less than five thousand custom-made ties and several hundred pairs of pants, most of them in hues that would make a sunset blush. While some used the term “dude”—meaning a fop or dandy—as an insult, Edward embraced it.
; He and John had attended school together at the elite St. Andrew’s Academy. When some of the other boys bullied Edward about his taste in clothing, John had laid them out flat (and gotten punished for it). They’d been fast friends ever since.
“I’ve never hunted a murderous fiend before, mortal or otherwise, but it sounds like you have a real dickens of a case on your hands,” Edward said. “So you can count me in. Although if Myrtle catches us, I’m denying everything.” He removed his spectacles and tucked them into a breast pocket. “May I have my iced tea now?”
I poured glasses all around while we plotted our next course of action. We needed to follow up on the gambling angle, which was really the only lead we had on what Straker had been up to in the last year. Edward volunteered that he’d been to Chamberlain’s many times and was on friendly terms with the man, so we added a visit to that opulent den of iniquity to our schedule for the following evening. Edward and I would start canvassing mediums the next morning to see what they knew about Becky Rickard. But it was still late afternoon, with hours yet of daylight, so when John proposed we examine the cellar where the séance had taken place, we all agreed it was certainly worth a look around.
The address, which I’d obtained from Brady the day before, was just around the corner from Rickard’s flat, on Worth Street. I donned my hat and changed into an old pair of shoes that I wore when I boxed with John in the garden. I didn’t know quite what to expect, but from the way Brady had described the cellar, it was a grim destination that awaited us. Mrs. Rivers had not yet returned, so we left a note saying we’d gone for a walk in Washington Square Park to look at the new bronze statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi (denounced by The New York Times as “monstrous” after the poor man’s legs had been yanked apart and strangely contorted to fit a cheaper pedestal when the project ran out of money).
I felt bad deceiving the old girl, but I could hardly tell her the truth. She didn’t understand why I needed to prove myself, why having a sister like Myrtle—who was everything I wanted to be, except better at all of it—had become so intolerable.
