A Curtain Falls

by Pintoff, Stefanie

  “But how?” I was dumbfounded.

  “He wrote the article Friday, before the premiere. It’s an interview with the killer. A farce is what it is, but it’ll run all the same. No one else had the inside scoop.”

  No one except us.

  Sunday

  May 13, 1906

  CHAPTER 36

  Six weeks later

  Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York

  I stood quietly under the silver linden tree at Woodlawn Cemetery, looking down upon my father’s grave.

  The coroner’s office had taken several weeks to release his body, due to the ongoing murder investigation. But now, finally, he lay at peace in the ground.

  There’d been no funeral, for who would have grieved for him but me?

  Not my mother, who was in the ground herself— at a distance several plots over, for she would have objected to spending eternity by his side.

  Certainly not my sister. I had finally located her in Milwaukee and sent a cable with news of his death. Her reply had been one of polite words, nothing more.

  And not Molly, who was imprisoned at Auburn prison for life, having avoided the electric chair thanks to Alistair’s expert legal maneuvering. Mulvaney had been right: Alistair planned to interview her as part of his research into the criminal mind.

  So it was only me.

  He was out of my life— forever, this time. And I had nothing to say.

  A priest who’d just finished a funeral nearby noticed, came over, and offered his help. He was a young man, lanky and awkward, no doubt fresh from the seminary.

  I smiled my thanks. “But he wasn’t Catholic.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, adding in a conspiratorial voice, “I know others disagree— but I believe God’s mercy knows no denomination.”

  And so I’d accepted— feeling guilty because I had no words of my own.

  My father wouldn’t have cared. “Funerals are for the living,” he’d always said. “The dead pay no mind.”

  That meant this funeral was for me, and so I let the priest’s words wash over me. They were standard prayers, only half familiar to me from other funerals I’d attended.

  Words only. What gave them meaning was the priest’s kindness in saying them.

  He came to his last prayer, intoning the words I knew to be final.

  “We therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.”

  “I’m sorry for your troubles, my friend,” he said, placing a warm hand on my shoulder.

  Then he was gone.

  I looked down at the freshly dug earth below me, whispered a goodbye, and walked once more past the linden tree and down the hill to the cemetery entrance.

  There, waiting for me next to Alistair’s Ford Model B motorcar, were two figures in black. They’d respected my wish to go to the grave site alone. But Alistair and Isabella had insisted on waiting nearby. “No one should bury a father alone,” they had said.

  I rejoined them, noticing for the first time that Isabella held a small package— a book perhaps— in a brown paper wrapper.

  “We weren’t sure whether to give you this,” Isabella added nervously.

  “What is it?”

  “A condolence card and gift from Mrs. Vandergriff,” she said automatically. “It’s kindly meant, but . . .” She trailed off awkwardly.

  “She gave it to me when I returned her daughter’s ring. She had read about your father’s passing, and . . .” Alistair explained. But he likewise broke off, refusing to finish what he had wanted to say.

  Shaking my head at their reticence, I took the parcel from Isabella and ripped it open.

  A Prayer for Francine. A Volume of Poems and Verses, by Robert A. Coby.

  “Why?” was all I could manage.

  “Mrs. Vandergriff has read the papers,” Alistair said, “but she remains in denial. She simply cannot accept that Robert Coby was her daughter’s killer. So she has published his poetry at her own expense. I might add, it’s being received with great critical acclaim. It’s spawning all kinds of wild speculation about Jack Bogarty’s true identity. No one believes he and Robert Coby were one and the same.”

  I stared in disgust at the bound book of verse in my hand.

  “Why not?”

  He gave me a wry look. “Because no one can believe a vicious killer— a madman— could have composed verses of such beauty and style.”

  Jack’s body had been burned beyond recognition in the fire at the Lyceum and eventually buried in Potter’s Field. His aunt had refused to claim his body; she maintained that it was a case of mistaken identity, and that her nephew Robert was still alive, perhaps gone fishing on some distant trawler boat. Even though the bones of three female victims— including Francine Vandergriff— had been found in the woods adjacent to the Layton property.

  “I suppose there’s nothing that will convince the skeptics otherwise.”

  “No. What some cannot understand is that the potential for greatness— or evil— exists in all of us,” he said with a shrug. “In Jack’s case, he inclined to both.”

  Isabella’s expression was distant and thoughtful. “It reminds me of the Egyptian legend of the lotus flower,” she said. “Its grotesque roots thrive in muddy swampland, yet when it blooms above water once a day, it is among the most exquisite and beautiful of all plants. You would think such ugliness and loveliness couldn’t coexist within the same plant— but they do.”

  “If you were able to read these poems without knowing their author, you’d probably enjoy them,” Alistair added. “They’re quite good.”

  “But I’ll never be able to do that,” I said, and meant it. I’d never be able to appreciate anything associated with a man who had done so much evil. The same man I had killed by my own hand.

  I returned the book to its wrapper and handed it to Alistair. “For your research?”

  He beamed. “Now there’s an idea, Ziele. A capital idea.”

  Alistair approached the hand crank to restart his automobile. Now that it was springtime, he was enjoying driving it once again.

  “So what’s it to be this evening?” he called out. “Home to Dobson? Or will you join us in the city?”

  I glanced at Isabella, her brown eyes hopeful as she looked up at me.

  “Join us,” she said softly. “It’s not a time to be alone.”

  I gazed back toward the crest of the hill behind us, where my father lay at rest. What ever else might be said of him, he had always been a risk taker. Always striving for something better. I liked to think that was why, after a lifetime of failings, he had chosen a hero’s death.

  “You know,” I said, taking Isabella’s hand and helping her into the automobile, “I heard there’s a great new Italian place on Forty-ninth Street. Maybe we could try it.”

  And so we made our way south through the Bronx, past rising buildings and vacant farmland and the new factories that had sprung up near the rail lines. The Bronx, like the city, was growing rapidly— and with the planned subway expansion north, that trend was sure to continue.

  We finally crossed into Manhattan. I looked out the open window, noting that my surroundings had become grimy, filled with noisy crowds on the sidewalks: men in derby hats and women in white summer dresses, all enjoying this warm spring night. And in the distance, the darkened city skyline rose into the clouds, illuminated by a vast and brilliant red sunset that cast ribbons of purple, orange, and pink throughout the evening sky.

  I found myself thinking of the violence and corruption and senseless deaths that I’d encountered. I’d once wanted nothing more than to escape it all. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  I looked down at Isabella beside me and thought of possibilities unexplored. There was something about the city that called to me, beckoning me despite all better judgment.

  Perhaps I was my father’s son, after all.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  F
or as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by a particular type of murderer: the kind who writes about his crimes. He is present throughout history— from Jack the Ripper (who wrote to the newspapers) and Albert Fish (who wrote to his victim’s mother) to modern examples such as BTK and the Unabomber. My villain in this book draws loosely upon yet another example: Jack Unterweger, who was convicted of murdering his first girlfriend, yet went on in prison to write a memoir that earned him great critical acclaim and secured his parole. His supporters argued that his writing was itself evidence of his reform, for surely no one who wrote so beautifully could kill so viciously. He became the toast of the Austrian literary elite, writing poetry and even a novel, but it was not enough to quell his drive to kill. Still, it diverted suspicion away from him for the better part of a decade as he continued to murder prostitutes. To learn more about him, see Entering Hades: The Double Life of a Serial Killer by John Leake.

  A historical figure who appears in the book, Charles Frohman, was a theater magnate who wielded tremendous influence in the early twentieth century before dying aboard the Lusitania in World War I. In real life, he was neither a murder suspect nor the father of an illegitimate child, but he was known for his remarkable ability to develop and manage theater talent. Nevertheless, he was a controversial figure, and his detractors repeatedly argued that he created a monopoly that harmed the theater. To read more about him, see Charles Frohman: Manager and Man by Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman.

  For my understanding of how cyanide poisoning was treated at the turn of the twentieth century, no source was more helpful than Harold Schechter’s The Devil’s Gentleman.

  Finally, a note on Pygmalion. In the de cades leading up to 1906, the legend of Pygmalion was reinvented many times, culminating in W. S. Gilbert’s Pygmalion and Galatea, which debuted on Broadway in 1883. It was this version that Timothy Poe would have performed. While modern audiences may be more familiar with George Bernard Shaw’s version of Pygmalion, it did not premiere until 1916.