Oh Danny Boy

by Rhys Bowen

  “The conditions here in the slums are deplorable,” he said in a low voice. “Such crowding can only lead to disease and violence. When you put too many rats together in the same cage, they start to eat each other.”

  I looked up at him. “So are you suggesting that our mass murderer might be from these streets himself? Not necessarily an outsider who hired the streetwalkers and then lured them to their deaths?”

  He looked surprised at my suggestion. “All things are possible,” he said, “although the murderer would need some privacy and time to kill and disfigure his victims. That would make an attack on these streets almost impossible. You see for yourself that there is much activity here. And in such crowded quarters it is necessary to sleep in shifts. I suspect that someone is awake and alert for most hours of the night.” He paused as we had reached the square brick building that housed police headquarters. “We shall know more when we meet the officers. Until then, idle speculation is pointless.”

  As we entered through the main doors and stood in the foyer, I was assaulted by my memories, some pleasant, some not so—Daniel questioning me here when I was still a suspect in the murder on Ellis Island, my first meeting with Arabella in Daniel’s office, Daniel giving me a good ticking off after my first encounter with Monk Eastman—Daniel’s presence was so much a part of the very walls of this place, I half expected to see him come running down the stairs as I looked up.

  Instead a very different young man was coming to meet us. He was tall, immaculately dressed in a summer suit, light brown hair parted in the middle, a pleasant, well-bred face. You’d never have taken him for a policeman in a month of Sundays. He was hurrying down the stairs with an expression of worried concentration on his face. A few paces behind him was a second man, more like Daniel in his appearance. He was good-looking in a dark, brooding sort of way, rather like drawings I had seen of the romantic poets. He was dressed in an official dark blue police uniform, which made him look rather dashing.

  “Dr. Birnbaum?” The first of the officers held out his hand, even before he reached us. “How good of you to come. I am Detective Quigley. This is my fellow detective Jock McIver. We have been assigned together to this wretched case, in the hope that we can put a stop to it before there is flat-out panic on the Lower East Side. So any help or insight that you can give us will be much appreciated. However, I’m afraid that something rather pressing has come up. A fifth body was discovered on Elizabeth Street early this morning. McIver and I are actually on our way to the morgue. Will you accompany us? Your opinion on what you see will be most valuable.”

  Dr. Birnbaum gave an embarrassed cough and half turned to me. “I hope you don’t mind, but I have brought my assistant with me, to help me by taking notes. Miss—”

  “Fraulein Rottmeier,” I said, having given some thought to a name this time, then imitating the doctor in the curt little bow. “I study in Vienna with Dr. Birnbaum.”

  Detective McIver was looking at me with half-amused interest. “A lady doctor,” he commented, as if I was a strange specimen.

  Quigley shook his head sadly. “I regret, fraulein, that I couldn’t possibly allow a young lady to accompany us to the morgue, however qualified she is. What she would see there would be too disturbing.”

  “I assure you I am not of delicate disposition,” I said, in an accent as close to Birnbaum’s as I could muster. I had practiced before the mirror the previous night.

  “No matter. Even bringing in an outside doctor is likely to cause raised eyebrows,” Quigley continued. “I apologize, fraulein, but I’m sure Dr. Birnbaum will give you a detailed account later. Now, if you will excuse us, we have a carriage waiting.”

  He nodded in his refined, serious manner. McIver was still eyeing me with not entirely wholesome interest. So these were the two men that Daniel had mentioned. Both of them good cops who were also ambitious and might not want to jeopardize their careers by sticking their necks out on his behalf. I was furious that I wouldn’t be present to observe and ask the occasional question, although in a way I was relieved that I was not going with them to the morgue. I wasn’t at all sure my insides would hold up to what I might see there.

  “This latest victim follows the pattern of the others?” Birnbaum fell into step beside Quigley as they made for the front door.

  “So we are to understand. We were both off duty last night and unfortunately the body had been removed to the morgue by the time we were called in.”

  “The only difference is that this one was still alive,” McIver added, lowering his voice as if he didn’t want me to hear.

  “Still alive? But she was mutilated like the others?”

  “So we understand,” McIver went on. “The constable who found her noticed she was still breathing and had her rushed to the nearest hospital.”

  “And was she able to speak—to name her killer?”

  “Unfortunately no,” McIver muttered. “She muttered some word and then died. Mercifully, of course.”

  They emerged onto the street and Quigley snapped his fingers at a waiting black police carriage.

  “I will report back to you later, fraulein,” Dr. Birnbaum said, turning back to me.

  “Very well, Doctor.”

  He clicked his heels, bowed, and climbed into the waiting vehicle. I watched them go, seething with frustration. Yet another occasion on which my sex had barred me from participating. The two detectives had not even bothered to ask if I was a fully qualified doctor, and I don’t think it would have made any difference if I had been. I was not to be allowed to join in their men’s world.

  I left police headquarters and began to wander aimlessly up Mulberry Street. I didn’t even know where Dr. Birnbaum was staying. I would just have to wait until he reported back to me—and patience wasn’t one of my stronger virtues, if indeed I possessed any virtues at all. Then it occurred to me that I could, at least, take a look for myself at the scene of the crime. If the body had been whisked away to a local hospital, then evidence might have been left behind where she had lain.

  I changed course and set off down Broome Street for Elizabeth. It was only when I actually reached Elizabeth Street and wondered whether to turn left or right that I stopped to ask myself what I was doing. I wasn’t a police officer, investigating a crime. I was grasping at the thinnest of straws, hoping somehow, somewhere to find the link between Daniel Sullivan and the man who had plotted his downfall.

  Elizabeth Street was relatively quiet, compared to the hustle and bustle of Mulberry and Canal. I knew that this street was known as a den of vice, and I supposed that most members of that profession slept in late. Even so, there were the usual housewives, shaking out linens from upper windows, and children playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, giving the scene an air of respectability and even tranquility. Nothing seemed to be happening to the north, toward Houston. So I turned to the south, back to Canal. I couldn’t see any unusual police presence, only an ordinary constable standing on the corner, swinging his baton and looking around with disinterest.

  I was going to approach him, then thought better of it. He wasn’t likely to direct a thrill seeker to the scene of the crime, was he? So I made a careful inspection of the street, looking for goodness knows what, and came upon a woman down on her hands and knees among the filth, clearly looking for something.

  “Can I help you?” I asked. “Have you lost something?”

  She looked up at me. She wasn’t young anymore, even though she still had a trim figure, with sharp features made even sharper by wire-rimmed spectacles. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a bun, and she was wearing a severe, high-necked, dark blue costume.

  “Thank you. I don’t need any help,” she said, and her voice was more pleasant than her appearance.

  I pretended to move on, then stood watching her from the shadows as she went back to work. After a while she lifted something with tweezers and dropped it into a small paper bag. Then, to my delight, she took out a tape measure and laid it across the
street. That was enough for me. I went back to her.

  “Forgive me for asking, but this is where the young woman was found this morning, isn’t it?”

  “It’s no concern of yours,” she said. “Just run along and let me get on with my work.”

  “Are you a relative of the poor girl?” I asked. “Such a terrible, tragic thing to have happened.”

  She eyed me appraisingly. “What are you, a reporter?”

  “No, an investigator,” I said.

  “Looking into a criminal case? That’s the business of the police.”

  “You appear to be doing some investigating yourself,” I suggested.

  “That’s because I’m a member of the police force myself.”

  You could have knocked me down with a feather. I stared at her in surprise and delight. “A woman? In the New York police?”

  “Officially I’m a matron,” she said.

  “Oh, I see.” I had come across such matrons when I spent a night in a police shelter once.

  “But now they use me in undercover work,” she continued. “It just happened that I was assigned to patrol this area last night. We’ve had people constantly on the alert since the second girl was killed.”

  “Then you saw—” I began excitedly.

  She shook her head. “That’s just it. I didn’t see a thing. I was on this very street several times. I’m so angry with myself. How could I have missed seeing the body dumped here?”

  “When do you think it was put here?”

  She frowned. “I heard a church clock chiming five as I turned onto Elizabeth Street. I walked down to Canal and turned right. By five-thirty the woman had been found and I was two streets away. I might even have seen the carriage as it passed with her in it. I could just kick myself. So near—what a chance that would have been for us women.”

  I squatted beside her, since she remained on her knees. “You say a carriage. What makes you think the girl was not brought down from a room in a nearby brothel and merely left outside the door?”

  “Because I have asked at nearby brothels and none of them reports missing one of their girls.” She looked a trifle smugly at me. “And because of this”—she drew an outline with her finger above the surface of the street—“the poor young woman lay approximately here; and if you’ll look about a foot away, there’s the clear imprint of a wheel in that patch of manure, and over there, a matching wheel imprint. Now that wheelbase is too wide to be a hansom cab; the wheel too delicate to be a draught wagon. Hence we’re dealing with some kind of carriage. He drove here, opened the door, pushed her out, then drove on.”

  I stared at her in admiration. I had stumbled blindly through most of the cases I had investigated, coming to the right conclusion more through luck than skill. Here I was watching a trained, skilled detective at work. It reminded me how much of an amateur I was. But of course I wasn’t going to let her know that.

  “I’ve done some undercover work for the police myself,” I said.

  “Really?” She sounded skeptical.

  “I was the one who went to the Flynn mansion and found out the truth about Senator Flynn’s kidnapped son.”

  “Is that so? Who sent you?”

  “Captain Sullivan.”

  Her face became stony again. “Ah yes, Captain Sullivan. You’ll probably have heard. He’s no longer with the police. He left in disgrace.”

  “Because somebody plotted his disgrace,” I said, angrily. “He’s innocent of the charges against him. He has never accepted a bribe, nor worked in the pay of a gang. Never.”

  “I wish I could believe that,” she said.

  “It’s all lies! Someone has been spreading false rumors. Circumstantial evidence.”

  “Not all circumstantial,” she said, and her voice was now ice cold. “My husband was one of the officers sent to raid a meeting between two rival gangs that was going to get ugly. But someone had tipped the gangs off. They were waiting for our men. My husband was beaten up and later died of his wounds.”

  Without thinking I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so terribly sorry,” I said, “but it wasn’t Daniel who tipped off the gang, I swear that. He swears it, and I believe him. I’m doing everything I can to prove his innocence.”

  “You’re a relative, are you?” she asked.

  “Just a friend.”

  She nodded with the understanding that always exists between us women and rose to her feet. She was a big woman, maybe five foot six or seven. Tall, angular, bony. Certainly not what you’d ever call a beauty. “Well, Miss—?”

  “Murphy,” I said, giving my real name for once. “Molly Murphy.”

  “Well, Miss Murphy,” she went on, “I don’t know how you think that poking around at the scene of a sordid crime can help prove Captain Sullivan’s innocence.”

  “Because there has to be a reason somebody wanted him disgraced and arrested. The details of his arrest were so well plotted. Money was slipped into an envelope delivered by a gang member, and the police commissioner just happened to arrive on the scene at exactly the right moment to witness this handing over of a bribe.”

  “It sounds almost too well plotted to be true to me,” she said. “Did it ever occur to you that he may just be guilty? Men aren’t always straight with us women. He may not have wanted to diminish himself in your eyes.”

  “Oh, I know all about Daniel Sullivan’s failings. But he’s never out-and-out lied to me, and I believe him this time. He’d never want to send me on a wild-goose chase if he didn’t believe I could come to the truth. What would be the point in it?”

  She looked at me, long and hard, then she nodded. “And you think that this series of crimes is somehow linked to Captain Sullivan?”

  I shook my head. “Not really, but I’m leaving no stone unturned. Someone has a motive for wanting him off the force and out of the way. He can’t think what that motive might be, but someone must have a grudge against him, or somebody must have been worried he was coming too close to solving a case. At the time of his arrest he was lead officer in a horse-doping scandal out at Coney Island, and he had just been put in charge of this case. Hence my interest.” I paused, looked at her, then put my hand up to my mouth as I realized it might have gotten me into trouble yet again. I’ve never known when to shut up. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. You’ll probably go straight back to police headquarters, report what I’ve told you, and thus make somebody aware that I’m snooping around.”

  “Not me, my dear,” she said. “Contrary to popular belief, we women can hold our tongues when necessary, and one thing we can do very well is stick together. I shouldn’t like you. I shouldn’t trust what you say. But I do.” She held out her hand. “The name’s Goodwin, Sabella Goodwin.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Goodwin,” I said. “You don’t know how pleased I am to meet you. And if there’s anything I can do to help you, I’d be only too happy to assist.”

  “Get away with you. I’ve been around enough Irish blarney in my life,” she said, but she was smiling.

  NINETEEN

  I’d better let you get back to your work,” I said, noticing that a group of children had gathered to watch us. “If we’re not careful they’ll spoil any clues you might have picked up. May I ask what you put in a bag?”

  “A cigar butt,” she said. “It may just be coincidental, but then it might have been discarded at the same time as the body. Cigar butts don’t usually last long on these streets. Those last shreds of tobacco are too precious to waste. The urchins would have pounced on it. And that’s about all I’ve got to go on.” She sighed. “Too bad they rushed her to the morgue this time. I hope the detectives managed to have photographs taken.”

  “They rushed her to the hospital, not the morgue,” I said.

  “The hospital?”

  “Because she was still alive.”

  “Saints preserve us. Still alive? But I understood she was another victim of the Ripper. I saw the last of those poor girl
s and there was no way…”

  “She died soon afterward,” I said.

  “Thank God.” She paused and looked up at me. “And how did you manage to find out this?”

  “Like I told you, I’m an investigator.” I smiled.

  “All right, Miss Investigator,” she said, “see what you make of the crime scene.”

  I looked down. It seemed to be a normal patch of New York street. Not too clean, with rotting vegetables, scraps of paper, and horse manure in the usual quantities. In fact, I saw nothing unusual until…

  “Oh yes,” I said. “You can see she lay here. Those are blood spots on that cabbage leaf.”

  Mrs. Goodwin nodded and picked up the leaf with tweezers, putting it into another paper bag. “But not much blood,” she commented. “Which confirms she was dumped here after being assaulted somewhere else and found almost immediately.”

  The nosy youngsters had closed in on us.

  “What’s youse doin’?” one of the braver boys asked.

  “It’s where that lady copped it this morning,” a girl said.

  “That weren’t no lady. That was one of the girls,” the boy retorted.

  I looked up at the child. She was a skinny little thing with hollow cheeks and a much-patched dirty muslin dress. “Did you see the lady lying here?”

  She nodded, suddenly worried that she might have said too much or somehow be in trouble. “Yeah. It was horrible. Her face was all bashed in.”

  “I saw her too,” a small boy ventured. “There was blood all over.”

  “How did she get here?” I asked. “Any of you see the body put on the street?”

  Heads shook.

  “My ma heard the noise going on outside, and we all went to the window and saw the police wagon and all. And my ma told us not to go down, but we came down here anyway and they were just picking her up and putting her in the back of the wagon. I didn’t really want to watch, but I did.”

  I glanced at Mrs. Goodwin. “We should question the people who live in these tenements. Someone must have been awake between five and five-thirty and seen something.”