Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Even Xavier’s firm-stated resolve that he would, through life, keep to a sort of amateur status, and be but a “consulting detective” who had the option of accepting or declining clients—depending, as the youth fervently declared, upon their moral rectitude,—did not annoy the professionals: for they quite sympathized with his desire to remain free from all compulsory entanglements. So long as Xavier enjoyed the benefit of a modest annuity, willed to him by his De Forrest grandfather, and so long as, from time to time, he might receive payment for his services,—which was wonderfully the case in his “saving” of Senator Halsey’s life—what need was there for him to put himself in harness, so to speak, and become a grim professional—? “You are quite right, Mr. Kilgarvan,” the chief inspector of Scotland Yard said, with a sigh, “to understand, so early in your career, that ours is, all sensationalist glamour aside, an accursèd profession.”)

  Nonetheless, Xavier’s spirits could not have been more buoyant, after these fertile conversations; and he wrote at length, and most eloquently, to his mother, of his secret hope for the future of mankind,—that “crime, if not the criminal heart itself, might someday be eradicated by the intelligent, pragmatic, and systematic unification of the numerous forces for Good.”

  Ah, how wondrous it would be, if this eradication might come about within his own lifetime!—yet, to be realistic, Xavier supposed he must not expect that. “It will be enough for me to know, Mother,” he said, “that I have contributed, however modestly, to the partial eradication of crime during my career. Beyond that,—why, ’tis God’s will, and not man’s!”

  So it was with dazed dismay that Xavier returned at last to Winterthurn, to learn of all that had transpired in his absence, to which his mother had not alluded: the initial surprise being sprung upon him when, shortly after disembarking from his steamship, in New York harbor, he chanced to buy several newspapers,—amongst them the excitable Journal, which gave a three-column headline, and an illustration, to the subject of an alleged “ritual murder, of secret Jewish origin,” perpetrated not a week before in Winterthurn City: nay, not a single murder as it developed, but very likely five, and all by the same man!

  Though chastising himself for so doing (as Xavier knew at first hand the cynicism of the popular papers of the day, that cared scarcely a whit for truth, but only for selling copies),—though biting his lip hard, and forbidding himself to be influenced—he did read the somewhat incoherent story; and studied the beak-nosed, thick-lipped, heavy-jawed simian likeness of the prime suspect, a “Mr. Isak Rosenfield”; and quite frustrated himself, and caused his stomach to lurch in revulsion, as he tried to extract, from the lurid columns of type, some semblance of fact, and chronological sequence. (As this early story in the Journal is replete with errors, oft of a vicious sort, there is little need for the reader to sully himself, in perusing it over Xavier’s shoulder: but it may be of interest to record that naught but a hurried mention was made, at the story’s conclusion, that other suspects were said by police to be considered: the focus being on a first-person “anonymous” account, by a fifteen-year-old mill-girl, of her having been “unspeakably and obscenely abused in ‘Rosenfield’s’ very office; and of having seen there a certain filth-and blood-encrusted towel, which, the Jew boasted, was stained with Christian blood.”)

  BY THE MORNING OF JUNE 13 it was announced by the Shaw family that Isaac Rosenwald had been “permanently relieved” of his responsibilities as general office manager for the South Winterthurn mill; by the morning of June 14, the sheriff of Winterthurn County, Frank Shearwater, announced that Rosenwald had been arrested “on suspicion of first-degree murder.” He was taken immediately to a cell in the county jail, a most unprepossessing building of gray concrete and stucco, to the rear of the Courthouse and not far distant from the county morgue,—trundled away in some haste, and with as much secrecy as possible, as, even at this early date, the law enforcement officials feared for his safety.

  Now all of the Valley newspapers, excepting the staidly conservative Winterthurn Gazette, ran three-column or banner headlines proclaiming the arrest: and speculating excitedly on the crime, or crimes. In the Nautauga Falls Bulletin it was charged against the suspect that he adhered to “an alien religious dispensation”; in the Powhatassie Union-Journal, that he had no religion whatsoever, but prided himself on a “notorious Jewish agnosticism.” While the Vanderpoel Sun blazoned forth in righteous denunciation of the Hebrew gentleman’s “predilection for young and helpless Christian virgins,” the Nautauga Falls Dispatch revealed fresh evidence of a “cornucopia of sickly, unnatural, and perverse appetites” in the suspect. As Rosenwald’s connection with Miss Eva Teal was well established, and a number of affidavits had already been sworn by witnesses placing them together on the “fatal day,” focus began to shift to relating in what ways the suspect had been involved with his earlier victims,—Miss Effie Godwit, Miss Dulcie Inman, Miss Tricia Furlow, and Miss Florette Sparks;—and if, and when, and how frequently, he had been sighted in their company. It was held against him in all the newspapers that he had “willfully deceived” a family named Liebman, whose hospitality, over the years, he had accepted; it was hinted that a “romantic betrayal” of some undefined species had taken place between Rosenwald and the eldest Miss Liebman. Even the Winterthurn Gazette pronounced it an “unlikely” explanation that, on the evening of June 7, the suspect could account for his actions only by insisting that he had “walked restlessly about” for many hours: returning to his boarding house at nine-thirty, or ten o’clock, or ten-thirty: when in truth (so the Gazette had learned, in a confidential interview with Rosenwald’s landlady) he had not returned until nearly eleven o’clock—! “He was ever a quiet, secretive man,” Mrs. Buzard said, “giving no hint of his innermost thoughts, or of his religious practices: thought oft-times revealing a most finicky appetite, in the matter of his meals, and whether they be cooked too well, or not enough; whether his mail be perused by the other boarders, or by myself,—an entirely unwarranted presumption. Many a time he returned to his room past dark; and from below one could hear him walking about,—pacing, or prowling, it seemed—with a light, stealthy step.”

  The Contracoeur Tribune interviewed Eva Teal’s sister, who charged that the suspect had forced his victim, against her will, to accompany him to the office of “an infamous local physician,” for “certain unknown services”: this, very near the time when the body of Florette Sparks (a resident of Tyre Street, which intersects with Cadwaller) was found in the Devil’s Half-Acre. “And ever afterward, until the day of her death,” Mrs. Beck said, “my sister displayed evidence of an unnatural fear, though she would not say why, or who was responsible; and oft-times I observed her saying her beads, or fingering her little gold crucifix, which she wore about her neck, in the hope it might protect her from harm.”

  The Vanderpoel Sun created something of a sensation by running a three-part feature on the history of “ritual murder, as practiced by Jews,” from medieval times to the present, with such experts as the Reverend Benjamin Tusk of the First Presbyterian Church of Winterthurn, and Professor of History at Hamilton College John Francis Flood, and Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Harvard University Cornelius Jones, amongst others, contributing. (Withal, a controversy arose as to whether blood from the victim must be let while the body is hanging upside down, a sufficient distance from the ground: or whether, in modern times, the ritual was performed more handily, with a vessel simply placed beneath the slashed throat to catch the spilling blood. Also, it was unclear amongst the gentleman experts whether a crucifix, or a cross,—or, indeed, any Christian token whatsoever—was required in the ceremony.)

  The editor of the Sun held it a curious thing that of the several thousand persons of Jewish heritage in the Valley, not one wished to make an official comment on the custom: save to deny that it existed at all, or had ever existed!

  It was reported that a grand jury was being hastily assembled to consider the evidence amassed
thus far, and to determine whether an indictment of murder in the first degree might be handed down against Isaac Rosenwald,—as public sentiment, stirred by the newspapers, and by a midnight rally in Courthouse Green under the spirited auspices of the Brethren of Jericho, ran strongly in that direction.

  THESE MATTERS XAVIER KILGARVAN FOUND most distressing: and shameful: and shameful too, the quality of the police investigation thus far,—whether that of the sheriff’s office or, more recently, that under the direction of the local chief of police, Mr. Munck, a portly and irascible gentleman with an uncommonly flushed face. Hans Deck’s coroner’s report on Eva Teal,—which was made available to Xavier only after several applications—gave evidence of having been filled out in haste; and the coroner’s jury, comprised, it seemed, of Mr. Deck’s courthouse cronies, had not a single question to ask of the witnesses, the law enforcement officers, and the coroner himself. Thus it was, no expert pathologist had been called in to examine the body: not even to determine whether sexual abuse of any sort had been involved, and semen present: or to ascertain whether the victim had met her death in the Devil’s Half-Acre, or had been carried there afterward. The vagueness of the span of time during which the girl might have been killed struck Xavier as unsatisfactory indeed, for, surely, it must be possible to fix a more specific hour,—though several persons with whom Xavier spoke, including Mr. Shearwater, expressed surprise that he should think so. “You must remember, Mr. Kilgarvan,” the sheriff said, with a neutral sort of smile, “that you are not in Manhattan at the present time, still less in Paris and London: Winterthurn works according to its own methodology, which has not, I think, very often failed us over the generations.”

  Blushing hotly, Xavier bit his tongue, for he certainly did not wish to offend: and was deeply grateful that, to his own pleased surprise, the sheriff agreed to release to him a copy of the confidential transcript of the witnesses’ interrogations, in exchange for a pledge that he would show the material to no one, and say not a word about it,—“most particularly not,” Mr. Shearwater cautioned, “to any of this drove of ‘crime reporters’ who have set upon us.”

  Xavier carried the weighty manuscript off, with immense excitement, and, within a few hours, had given it an initial cursory reading,—scarcely knowing what to think, or whether, so early in the case, he should allow himself a thought or two. (For he had learned from painstaking labor in previous cases,—not excepting his single “famous” case, of which, alas, I have not space to speak here—that it often proved a disastrous temptation to seize upon a solution too quickly: for when passion, and effort, and God’s grace of soldierly strength, rushed into a solution whereby a premise must be imagined, why, it was the very Devil to undo it—! “Nay,” he said scoldingly, “Xavier must not surmise that X, or Y, or, it may be, Z,—or, most certainly, V—is our ‘Cruel Suitor,’ for that cannot, so early, be a helpful approach.”)

  And, moreover, he did have numberless questions to ask of the law enforcement officers, that could not be answered by the transcript: nor by his initial investigation of the Devil’s Half-Acre, which, it fairly sickened him to discover, had been so trampled by the curious and the morbidly inclined, since the previous Saturday, that no evidence was to be found. Ah, what fools the police were, not to protect the area!—and what diplomacy and tact he must therefore exert to say not a word of their failure to secure fingerprints from an allegedly bloodstained rock, against which the victim had been propped: and to follow a procedure of virtual idiocy in assiduously washing the blood from off the rock, so far as they could,—that the sight of it not offend the eye!

  All courteously, however, Xavier inquired of the sheriff, and of those deputies who had been witnesses, whether, in their opinion, the boulder in question had been stained with blood,—or splattered: which question provoked both mirth and disquiet, and eventual disagreement,—for three persons swore that it had been stained, while two swore that it had been splattered, and a recalcitrant third, that it had been dabbed with blood, as if by a brush. (“Which helps me very little,” Xavier reasoned, “for doubtless I put the notion in their minds, and but reap the harvest of my own suggestion.”) Yet he concluded that it was highly probable, that the victim had been assaulted elsewhere, and brought to the Half-Acre dead, or dying. “Which would mean, then, that a considerable quantity of blood was spilled somewhere else,” Xavier thought, with a small pang of certitude, “—and not so very distant from the Half-Acre, perhaps!”

  Yet the question of precisely where,—and how he might locate it, in all of Winterthurn—quite dazzled him.

  His patience was put to a more severe test when Mr. Shearwater somewhat awkwardly informed him, in reply to yet another question, that the dead girl’s clothes had been purposely destroyed; and not a scrap of lace, or a button, remained—! “For such was Mrs. Teal’s request,” the sheriff said, “and, under the circumstances, we did not wish to upset her.”

  “Do you think it would upset her if the body were exhumed?” Xavier asked.

  “Exhumed—! When it has only just been buried—!” Mr. Shearwater exclaimed, with a sharp look at Xavier, and a marked expression of distaste. “Why, young man, I should be upset under these absurd circumstances.”

  “But it may prove necessary,” Xavier stubbornly said, “that the body be exhumed.”

  “Necessary? How might it be ‘necessary’?” the elder man inquired, with equal stubbornness. “It might be requested by the District Solicitor,—it might be requested by my office, or Munck’s,—but that it is ‘necessary,’ I cannot see. Nor can I altogether see, Mr. Kilgarvan, how this matter concerns you.”

  This quick rejoinder stung the youthful detective as much for its abrasive truth as for the insult behind it: so that he felt his face suffuse with heat, as if he were but a boy still, to be handily put in his place. Nevertheless, he thought, “Why, then, I shall make you see!—only give me time!”

  Here, Xavier rose stiffly to his feet, to shake hands in parting: and believed he could discern, in the frowning Shearwater’s manner, a begrudging sort of interest, or affection,—for how many like-minded persons might there be, after all, in Winterthurn?—in all of the Valley? Xavier had once read, and taken to heart, the principle that, since Detection is so inordinately lonely a pursuit, it therefore follows that all detectives are kin. And was there not a brotherly,—or, at the very least, an avuncular—grip in the elder man’s handshake?

  Thus it was, at the door, Frank Shearwater relented for a moment, and confided in Xavier that he was somewhat startled at the way in which the public had wished to leap to conclusions regarding the murder: for it seemed to him, as it seemed to one or two others, that Eva’s brother-in-law, the hot-tempered Beck, was a more likely suspect than Rosenwald; and there remained the nineteen-year-old Louis as well,—for this loutish and ill-featured youth could no more account for his whereabouts on the night of June 7 than Isaac Rosenwald: and his continued denial of having known Eva was outrageous, indeed: and a stable boy employed at the livery at which Louis sometimes worked, had reported to the police that, at about the time of the Furlow murder, in March, Louis had slyly hinted, or boasted, that he knew something about the Devil’s Half-Acre which he would never reveal. “And, as you will see, if you study the transcripts, there are one or two other ‘suspects’ as well,” Mr. Shearwater vaguely said, “—in a manner of speaking.”

  At this, Xavier expressed surprise that Isaac Rosenwald had been arrested at all. But, it seemed, the matter had been forcibly taken out of the sheriff’s hands; for Munck,—and, more importantly, the District Solicitor, Hollingshead—were lately convinced that Rosenwald was the murderer of the five girls, and that he would readily confess: for he was being subjected to a severe regimen of interrogation at the present time, under Munck’s direction; and showed signs (it was rumored) of wishing at last to cooperate.

  “But if he is not the murderer, what will that avail them,—or us?” Xavier exclaimed.

  Mr. Shearwater respon
ded not at all to this query, as if he had failed to hear it; but, in a somewhat weary voice, with an irritable rubbing of his chin, he reiterated his surprise,—nay, his alarm—at the way in which the “cause” of Rosenwald had been snatched up by so many divers groups: the public; and a good many of his professional colleagues,—not to mention the Mayor, and his colleagues; and Winterthurn’s Congressman Dorsey, who had already “made a study of the case,” he claimed, and would stand behind the police 100 percent; and of course the newspapers, in Albany, and New York City, and Boston, as well as in the locality: as if they should know, because the police had suggested, that Rosenwald was the “Cruel Suitor”—!

  “Yet, Mr. Shearwater, the reason for that cannot be much of a mystery,” Xavier drily said, “as Rosenwald happens to be a Jew; and, all hypocritical pretenses aside, Christendom has not been overly favorable to Jews through the centuries.”

  This too the older man failed to hear, or to acknowledge; as he continued to rub absently at his chin, in an attitude of puzzled and vexed contemplation; saying yet again that he was,—well, yes, surprised and, it may be, somewhat worried as well: for, though he had known Winterthurn had, in general, greatly feared the murderer, and prayed that he might be discovered,—though, as a law enforcement officer, he had known with what terror certain persons, young girls in particular, had lived these past months—it would not have struck him as a possibility that the law-abiding, and peace-loving, and, withal, resolutely Christian community should rouse itself to so immediate a fervor regarding this Rosenwald: who was, after all, but a suspect in the case: and not yet even arraigned by the grand jury, let alone found guilty. Mr. Shearwater confessed that he found it an embarrassing experience simply to walk along the street, as so many persons crowded about him, to shake his hand, and to thank him profusely; uttering such imprecations against the murderer,—the monster—the Jew—that he scarcely knew how to respond: and Hiram Munck was meeting with the very same phenomenon, which, beyond the initial surprise, now seemed to gratify. The Jericho Brethren were most vociferous in their thanks, and congratulations, and praise for the police; and, at their rally the other night, which one or two of the deputies felt required to attend, several speeches called for a march to the jailhouse, that Rosenwald be hanged at once, and the county spared the expense of his trial! Of course naught came of this, nor would, as the man was under arrest, and would be dealt with in a legal fashion, and would be proven guilty,—if he were guilty.