The Last Nightingale

by Anthony Flacco

  Shane lay on his back, sound asleep, protected in the cool darkness of the little toolshed at the rear of the cemetery. The society pages were draped across him like a blanket. In that day's newspaper, even the usually decorative Society section was given over to crime reporting, elaborating on the scandalous story of Captain Sullivan's murder by his enraged mistress. The drama was deep—she was arrested with the murder weapon in her possession. The article took care to acknowledge the new widow Sullivan's lack of involvement.

  And while no reputable newspaper stooped to printing a sketch of Captain Sullivan's body, sprawled wide across the big scale, the scene was described in sufficient detail that the effect was the same.

  Shane had grabbed up the newspaper as soon as it hit the corner stand that day, eager to practice reading out loud as soon as he got the chance. But when he came across the Sullivan murder story, it hit him hard, wiping away all the other trivial items. Everything about the case struck him the wrong way, even though he didn't understand why.

  For an instant, he wondered if it was because he felt his hope fading for finding a class of people that he could aspire to join. That thought quickly faded. It didn't explain his feelings. This story was simply one family's tragedy, and the Nightingale family had fared no better in their place among the merchant class, especially Mrs. Nightingale.

  Something about the news story made Shane remember a time when he spied Mrs. Nightingale while she examined herself in her full-length mirror. A coincidence of geometry and a passing moment had placed him so that he caught her reflection through a carelessly closed door. And in that ambushed moment she presented her full self to him, unknowing, while he silently stared from the darkness and watched her turn this way and that before the mirror. His attention riveted itself to her troubled face and her frustrated breathing while she struggled to get a view of herself that would give her whatever she was seeking.

  Mrs. Nightingale was a full-bodied woman, by any standard. Shane knew very well how much she loved to eat, and that she considered any form of physical exercise the antithesis of refined living. But she always dressed so well and walked with such stiff pride that it never occurred to him that she was anything but delighted with herself. And yet at that moment, her principal traits were vulnerability and distress over her appearance. It opened his eyes to the depths of effort that women expended for their appearance, since appearance had a great deal to do with how well they lived. It suddenly seemed clear to Shane that if a woman suffered this hard over the shape of her body, she must be in a constant state of torment in the presence of other women. The younger ones, the prettier ones, the ones with ideal figures—what else could they be to Mrs. Nightingale except constant jabs, reminders of her own failings? Self-criticism was something that Shane knew too well.

  She stepped to the mirror and tossed a robe over it, completely blocking all reflection. She turned away in disgust. The reminder is too much, he had heard himself say out loud, just as he realized that she heard him, too. She turned in alarm, spun to face him, and locked her eyes with his.

  He felt surprised that she didn't appear angry. She simply nodded. The reminder is too much, she repeated. Holding his gaze, she gently closed the door on him.

  Then it was over. The memory dissolved and sleep carried him away.

  Shane woke up to a throbbing headache, with pains so sharp that he had to move slowly while he sat up. He pulled the newspaper blanket off of himself. The paper was open to the Society section, and as he glanced down, his eye caught the realistic pen and ink sketch of Mrs. Elsie Sullivan. She was bigger, much bigger, than Mrs. Nightingale had ever been. So that's it. The news article had prompted the strange memory as he fell asleep. He looked at it again. Yes, the accompanying sketch of Mrs. Sullivan showed that she had far more to be concerned about than Mrs. Nightingale ever did, with regard to her appearance. What was Mrs. Sullivan's stance in front of a mirror? Could she stand the view? Or did she cover her mirrors, too?

  That's when the key seemed to jump off of the page at him. The large scale in the bathroom, the one where the body was discovered—it was more like something you might find in a meatpacking house. That scale was a heavy-duty item meant to take a lot of use. Mrs. Sullivan would never have brought something like that into the house. What woman would? No, it must have been brought in by Captain Sullivan himself.

  And why would he do that? He was a fit man, hardly in need of a heavy-duty scale.

  Shane felt the answer before he had time to think it—the scale wasn't there for Captain Sullivan. It was there for her. He was the one who brought it home, but it was there for her.

  Shane had plenty of experience at being the object of taunting, and now the same familiar feel was here. What else could the big scale be, he asked himself, besides some sort of goad from Sullivan to his wife? The scale's mere presence in the house presented an ongoing insult. The contraption might as well have been screaming, This is what it takes to weigh you! In its power to inflict pain, it could laugh at her in a cruel voice that no one else heard.

  Shane wondered how long the big scale had been in the house. Surely every single one of those days held some special new humiliation for Elsie Sullivan. Each one was delivered by the sight of the scale itself, possibly along with the occasional verbal barb from her husband. Like straws on the camel's back, they built up, one after another after another, into a boiling mass of resentment and a murderous rage.

  And so she shot him, just right, so that he fell more or less across the thing. And then she left him there on purpose. This is for your oversized scale, bastard!

  Shane couldn't explain the gun, but he felt certain now that Sullivan's mistress was innocent. It hurt him to think of how terrified she had to be, locked up for this crime. The memory of Mrs. Nightingale's final screams of terror and desperation were stuck in his brain like bullet fragments, and he had to wonder if the Pairo woman's fear was any less. He found himself overwhelmed with the urge to help her. However, the force of it didn't keep him from being baffled as to what he could actually do. After all, was he supposed to go to the police with all this?

  To tell them what?

  And why should they believe anything that he told them, anyway? Worst of all, what if somebody recognized him for what he was? What if somehow these men who dealt with criminals every day could look at him and see his horrible guilt?

  But the picture might as well have been burned into his brain; Marietta Pairo's pain was now linked to the final agonies of Mrs. Nightingale. There was nobody but him to help her now. He had to ask himself if he was ready to abandon another innocent one, ready to lie quiet and piss himself instead of taking the necessary risk. Back in the kitchen pantry, his legs had been paralyzed and his throat sealed shut. But what would his excuse be now, if he kept silent about his suspicion, just to keep himself safe?

  What good was anyone's life under that kind of burden? He knew the answer to that.

  Shane picked up his newspaper and opened it to a full-page advertisement that left a good portion of the page blank. He tore off the blank part to use for notepaper and went to get a pencil from the Mission schoolroom. There, he addressed the note to the head police officer named in the newspaper article: Sergeant Randall Blackburn.

  Shane knew of no other way to try to get the images out of his head, so he began to write down his suspicions.

  The freshly minted Widow Elsie Sullivan spent her entire ride to the City Hall station fuming in outrage and plotting her ultimate revenge against that arrogant police officer, Blackman or Black-heart or whatever his name was. The man had not only committed the outrage of summoning her down to the station house, but he had sent hirelings in uniform to arrest her like some petty criminal. Fortunately, none of her friends were in attendance. Still, plenty of servants observed the spectacle of the grieving widow being escorted from her home and driven away.

  The few moments that it took to walk with the officers from her doorway to the police cart felt as if they
took half an hour. Her blood boiled inside of her all the while. She thought of French royalty being hauled to the guillotine in death wagons.

  Fine enough, gentlemen, she seethed. The policeman would play his little game of hauling her in and of flexing his great authority. She would toy with him in his "interview" until he tired of bothering her and "allowed" her to leave. With that, his power over her would be exhausted. And at that point, he would have concluded his little fishing trip with nothing.

  Then it would be time for her to demonstrate her power over him. Not the petty, niggling power of a common street bureaucrat with minimal education and excessive brawn, but that of an intelligent, college-educated, ambitious woman with access to half the people in the SFPD who ranked over him. Several were within her active social circle. Thus the more subtle but far more lethal power of her social influence was about to bear down upon this bastard sergeant, and from every direction. A plague of locusts.

  Elsie rode along in the police cart enduring simultaneous levels of discomfort. The officers had snatched her away just before she was to begin her bath, and the clothes they made her put on were the soiled ones she had just discarded.

  At first she was so taken aback by them that it was almost funny to her. It was unbelievable, the sight of these two officers blithely destroying their futures by treating her this way. They wouldn't even allow her to dress in private, insisting instead that they guard her in plain sight while she went from bathrobe to fully dressed and all phases in between. The officers refused to allow her to don her usual array of support garments: unmentionable straps and elastic wraps, layers of squeeze-tight underthings that supported her hourglass shape. Instead the men had barely given her time to put on her outer clothing.

  With her flesh unsupported, Elsie Sullivan's naked body usually felt, to her, like a bundle of moist rubber sacks. But once she was safely ensconced in her lifts and wraps and girdles, she transformed into a formidable warrior woman. Men were respectful and a little shy in her presence, and most women didn't even try to give her any sort of trouble.

  Today, however, without the needed strength that should have been supplied by her fabric exoskeleton, she found herself arriving at the station as a glob of moist and overlapping rubbery bags. Her own odor was excruciating to her. The assault on her senses caused her backbone to shiver uncontrollably several times.

  By the time they pulled into the station and escorted her inside, she was only able to maintain a ladylike composure by concentrating on her breathing and avoiding all eye contact. They have no idea what they are doing, she kept reminding herself. They have no knowledge of the sort of strings that I can pull. They are servants.

  She didn't take their actions personally, as compared to those of the sergeant himself. Elsie Sullivan held a complete grasp on the appropriate care and feeding of servants, and of the delight that their proper use delivers. She would be satisfied to simply have them fired. But she was convinced that something had to be wrong with this Blackbeard fellow. His clumsiness in dealing with her begged for retaliation, cried out for it so loudly that she felt a wave of pity for the foolish man—not that it lessened her craving for his violent destruction. That was a foregone conclusion.

  Elsie Sullivan had never entered City Hall through the police doors before, and she was shocked at how primitive and nasty things were below the station. The inner offices looked like they had been carved out of a cave, dimly lit, clouded by fresh cigar smoke, sour with the residue of old tobacco. The two officers, who did not yet realize that their careers were dead, escorted her into a small and bare office. There was nothing more than one large wooden table in the center of the room, with two hardwood chairs. The professionally doomed men sat her down at the table with a few polite, empty words, then walked out and left her there alone. She heard a key turn the door's lock.

  Elsie could only stare around the bare room in silence. A powerful knot of dread appeared inside of her, inviting her to panic. She vowed not to give in to it. Instead, she committed herself to turning its energy toward fueling her anger, and to focusing her mind while she waited for a weakness to appear in the situation. Then Elsie Sullivan, a grieving widow who had entertained most of the city's powerful citizens right inside of her home, would finally have her opportunity to turn the tables on this puffed-up little policeman. She would guarantee herself the opportunity to calmly observe him while he stood broken and publicly humiliated, all out in the open, for anyone to see. She would stand aside, coolly watching, dressed in something especially fine.

  Why do men always have to kill their enemies? It's so much better to let them live, while you torment them from a distance and prolong their suffering.

  She needed to urinate badly enough to feel concerned about it. This situation needed to be resolved before she was forced to put herself in the vulnerable position of having to ask to use the facilities. She tried to estimate when that would be. Thirty minutes? An hour? Say an hour, then. That single hour more or less defined her timetable for this encounter. No matter why they had dragged her here, it was crucial for her to get back out within that much time.

  Keys jingled on the other side of the door. Then came the clicks in the lock. When the door opened, Elsie watched the doomed police officer walk in. He was by himself. She quickly checked his name tag. Blackburn, then. Sergeant Randall Blackburn. She sat quietly and kept her face impassive while he closed the door, stepped to the table, and pulled up a chair. He sat down across from her. She decided not to give him any satisfaction by speaking first. Let him make the overture.

  The sergeant simply pulled out a torn scrap of paper with some childish handwriting penciled across it. He appeared to run his eyes over the lines again, then he set the paper down on the table and looked up at Elsie, studying her face. She felt his gaze moving around on her. Nevertheless, she fixed her eyes on the door, raised her chin, and said nothing.

  But the sergeant, instead of speaking, just picked up the scrap of paper and read it over again before he finally lowered it back to the table and returned his gaze to her face, still reading her in some fashion. She cursed herself when she felt the old hot rash blushing its way across her upper chest and throat.

  That was it. The business with the paper scrap appeared to be some sort of attempt on his part to provoke her. Elsie decided not to let him toy with her this way. She was going to speak first after all. So what? It meant nothing, to speak first. She set an ironclad control on her voice and prepared herself to lash out with quiet power. Then she turned to face him.

  “Sergeant Blackburn, I am trying to imagine what possible circumstance could arise that would cause you to have me arrested and brought here like a criminal, when all you had to do was to send word that you wanted a meeting. What could be so compelling to you that your men would deny me the right to get properly dressed before leaving my home?" She held her voice down, perfectly pitched to show calm control and absolute determination.

  “It doesn't matter what you have on," the sergeant quietly replied. "Think of Miss Pairo, sitting alone in a cell right now. What do you think she's wearing?" His voice was even softer than hers.

  Don't take the bait! Elsie matched his technique and lowered her voice even further. "Sir, perhaps a male who wears a uniform every day cannot appreciate the social expectations placed upon a woman's manner of dress, especially when she mixes with the city's most powerful and influential people. On a daily basis." She wondered if that was blatant enough for this plebeian.

  But he murmured his reply, absently tapping the scrap of paper against the tabletop. "None ofthat matters anymore.”

  “I beg your pardon! Perhaps none of it matters to you—”

  She had just yelled. A real slip. But another moment passed and the sergeant didn't make any reaction. He just kept reading over that godforsaken piece of paper. Elsie felt the air going stale. Could the man smell her? Her skin crawled with the feeling of self-consciousness.

  Officer Blackburn nearly whispered, w
ithout even looking at her. "Mrs. Sullivan, your husband wanted the prestige of a wife with a youthful figure. He chided you about losing weight until it became a major issue in your home.”

  Elsie's blood ran cold. The hot rash on her chest and throat turned to flame.

  “He bought an industrial-sized scale and brought it home as an insult to you. He probably claimed that it was to ‘remind’ you to lose weight or something, but that doesn't matter. You knew that it was there to mock you.”

  Elsie tried to recapture her confidence, or even a reasonable imitation of it. She squeezed her brain for some fiery retort that would shut Blackburn up. But her mind seemed gripped in solid ice. What was happening to her?

  How did he know these things?

  And still he kept talking. "It was a good thing," he began, "that you had the, ah, ‘arrangement’ with your husband about his mistresses. Since you were aware of when they were planning to see each other next, you knew just when to shoot him, then run to her apartment while she was still on her way to meet with him. You took his key to open her door, and then planted the gun inside." He focused his gaze directly into her eyes, but she was primed for combat and did not turn away.

  “I am impressed, Sergeant Blackburn. Did you get this information by reading my mind? If so, I think you need a few more lessons.”

  The big sergeant just sighed. He seemed to make up his mind about something before he finally spoke. "Mrs. Sullivan, have you heard of the science of reading human fingerprints to determine someone's identity?”

  “Yes. I've heard of it." Elsie felt a brief flicker of triumph. She had indeed read about fingerprinting, in a recent magazine from Great Britain. She was careful not to smile too much. "As it happens, I know that there are scientists who say it is valuable for identification, but that no police departments are using it. Too cumbersome, I think they called it.”

  “Oh, it can be a bit messy, I suppose, what with the black powder and all. But in fact the English detectives at Scotland Yard are beginning to use it, and we've been considering it here in San Francisco. Your case is one of a dozen test cases that we are running.”