by Rhys Bowen
We continued along the sidewalk in silence. I was thinking about two ambitious young men, one of them prepared to take risks to get what he wanted. They had both been handed this plum assignment when Daniel was arrested. Did either of them want promotion badly enough that they were prepared to go to extreme lengths for it? And if either of those detectives had set up Daniel’s betrayal, then these dead girls were of no use to me at all. I didn’t really need to go to the morgue.
Because, to tell the truth, I was having serious second thoughts about what lay ahead. I had seen a few dead bodies in my lifetime. I hadn’t enjoyed those experiences and they had been but fleeting glances—and my stomach had been more stable in those days. To see a body laid out on a marble slab, its face badly disfigured, was something I might not be able to handle. What if I fainted or threw up in front of Sabella Goodwin and the doctor at the morgue?
As we sat at the coffee shop under the EI station I tried to come up with a plausible excuse to get me out of what lay ahead. Before I could think of anything, however, Sabella Goodwin smiled at me. “I’m so glad you’ve agreed to come to the morgue with me, because I have to confess—I’d never have summoned the nerve to go there alone.”
As I didn’t answer she went on. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to have found an ally. I’ve been trying to make those men in the police department see that we women are just as capable of carrying through an investigation as they are. We may not be strong enough to chase after crooks and arrest them, but we can do the legwork as well as any man.”
“And I’d like to see any man chase after crooks if he had to wear corsets and long skirts,” I said, and she laughed.
“We’ll show them, Molly. We’ll go to that morgue and solve their case for them.”
It looked as if I was going to the morgue, whether I wanted to or not.
TWENTY-ONE
The city morgue is on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital beside the East River. We hopped off the train at Twenty-third Street and walked up First Avenue. At first glance the hospital didn’t live up to its name. Several dreary brick buildings, chimneys belching smoke, provided more of an aspect of dark satanic mills than the beautiful vista promised in the name. Of course, I might have seen it through a prejudiced eye at this moment, because, in truth, my reluctance had grown with every step. Now my knees were positively trembling, and worse still, my stomach had started to churn. I had hoped that the coffee and bun I had just eaten would have calmed my insides for the next hour. Now the bun lay like a lead weight, refusing to be digested. I took a deep breath and attempted to pull myself together. I was going to do this. It was clear that Sabella Goodwin already admired me and thought of me as a kindred spirit. My pride wasn’t going to let that image be shattered if I could help it.
We found the main gate in the high brick wall, more prisonlike than hospital, and were directed toward the morgue with several curious and pitying glances. I expect they thought we’d come to claim the body of a dear one.
“Ah, here we are,” Sabella said, and I noticed that her voice didn’t sound too confident either.
“Why don’t you go ahead and find out if the detectives have left?” I suggested. “I don’t want to cause a scene and spoil your chances by being here.”
“All right.” She nodded briskly. I gave a sigh of relief as she pushed open the front doors and went inside. Anything to buy a few more minutes. I even eyed the path back to the main gate. Crisply starched nurses were hurrying in pairs, patients were being pushed in wheelchairs with rugs over their knees, although the day was hot. I could just melt among them, get out, and go home. Sabella Goodwin didn’t even know where I lived. I firmly dismissed the little voice whispering in my head. I had always despised weak women. I was not about to become one of them.
I turned back as Sabella Goodwin pushed open the door. “It’s all right. They’ve gone,” she said. “I showed my police badge to the clerk and asked if my fellow officers were still here. He was clearly surprised and told me I’d just missed them, but the doctor was about to do the autopsy if I wanted to go in. So we’ve been given permission. Come on. Let’s go.”
“Excellent,” I managed to say, and followed her into the gloomy interior.
There was an overwhelming smell pervading the place, sweet and cloying to the nostrils. It wasn’t the usual hospital smell, that mixture of strong disinfectant and death. I learned later that it was formaldehyde, in which body parts were preserved. My stomach lurched alarmingly. I reached for a handkerchief and put it to my nose.
“It’s not very pleasant, is it?” Mrs. Goodwin agreed, but she didn’t seem unduly distressed. In fact, she pushed open the swing doors with great confidence. I followed. We found ourselves in a big, well-lit room, dominated by three marble-topped tables. On one of them something lay, covered with a white sheet. I was so glad that the body was not fully exposed that I gave a sigh of relief. The doctor appeared from a side room, washing his hands. He was a jolly-looking man with big mustaches and a red face.
“Who have we here?” he asked. “This is the autopsy room, I’m afraid. You’ve taken a wrong turn.”
“No, we came to find you,” Mrs. Goodwin said. She produced the badge again. “Sabella Goodwin, New York Police. I understand my colleagues have already been here this morning; but I’m also investigating this case, and I wanted to take a look for myself. This is my assistant, Miss Murphy.”
“A woman police officer; now I’ve seen everything,” the doctor said.
“They even have women doctors, so I’m told,” she said sweetly.
“Quite right.” He chuckled. “And some of them do a damned fine job. I’m Dr. Hartman. Now, what can I do for you, Mrs. Goodwin?”
“The body that was brought in today. We’d like to take a look. I understand you haven’t done an autopsy yet?”
“No, only the most preliminary of findings,” Dr. Hartman said. “Cause of death strangulation and then trauma to the face with a blunt instrument as an afterthought.”
“But she lived through all this,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “She was alive when she was found.”
“So I heard. Died as she was being admitted to the hospital.”
“And that was here?” I asked, not remembering to keep quiet and let the police officer do the talking.
He shook his head. “No, that would have been Saint Vincent’s. Closest hospital to where she was found.”
“So you don’t know if she said anything before she died?” I asked.
“I’m afraid my job is to cut up the bodies after they’re dead. My patients rarely speak to me.” He gave a macabre grin. “You’d like to see the body? I’ll keep the face covered. Not a pretty sight and it won’t help you in your investigation. Not even recognizable as a face anymore, just a bloody mess. Whoever did it did a very thorough job.”
He pulled back the sheet.
“She hasn’t been here long. As you can see, we haven’t even got her cleaned up and prepped yet. Your fellow officers wanted to make a full note of her clothing and measurements to see if she matches any of your Bertillon records.”
“Bertillon? What is that?” I blurted out before I remembered that I was supposed to be attached to a police officer myself.
Mrs. Goodwin turned back to me. “It’s a system of identification based on a set of standard measurements. It’s fairly new and proving to be very useful. We take photographs and measurements when we book a criminal, and those cards are kept on file. Every person has a unique set of measurements. So if she has ever been arrested before, we’re likely to have her on file.”
As she talked I was staring at what I could see of the body. She was still wearing a tawdry blue satin skirt, which was slit all the way to the knee on one side, and above it a black-boned corset, liberally decorated with black lace. The sheet still lay over her face, exposing a swollen neck discolored with black-and-yellow bruising. I swallowed hard, repulsed, yet fascinated, by what I saw. Such a frail little thing. Dark curls escaped fr
om below the sheet, lying over one white shoulder. A slim hand lay at her side. I stared at that hand and then shook my head.
“There’s something strange here,” I said.
They both looked at me. “Look at her hand,” I said. “Her fingernails are so clean. And you say you haven’t washed her yet. She doesn’t smell.”
They continued to stare at me. “Look,” I said. “I’ve been in a jail cell with a group of prostitutes like this one. They’re not so careful about their personal habits. One thing I noticed was dirty fingernails, some of them bitten. And they mask their body smells with cheap perfumes—ashes of roses or lily of the valley.”
“Maybe this girl comes from a higher-class establishment,” the doctor suggested. “Not all prostitutes live in squalor, as I’m sure you know.”
“In which case, why is she dressed like this? These are clothes you’d expect to see on a streetwalker in the worst part of town. No man going to a high-class brothel would want his young lady to look like this.”
“She’s right, you know,” Mrs. Goodwin agreed. “She is very clean, yet her clothes are a disgrace. Look at them, about to fall apart.”
“Then I’d say she was a good girl fallen on hard times,” the doctor said. “Some of them try to keep up their old standards for as long as they can. I’ve seen it often enough before. The girl gets herself into trouble, has the baby or an abortion, and there’s nowhere left for her to go but on the streets. Tragic really—the number of them who kill themselves in despair.”
The smell had been getting to me. Now suddenly the room started to sway around. I clutched at the edge of the table and everything went black.
Someone was calling to me from the other end of a long, dark tunnel. Then I felt my head shoved forward and recoiled as a sharp smell was placed under my nose. I opened my eyes. I was sitting on a bench in the hallway of the morgue. Mrs. Goodwin was sitting beside me, holding a bottle of smelling salts.
“Don’t worry about it. It happens to the best of us,” she said. “I fainted the first time I saw a dead body. Ashamed of myself afterward, but it’s a natural reaction. And that smell, too.”
I nodded gratefully.
“The doctor is conducting a preliminary autopsy now,” she said. “He’ll let us know his findings.”
“What is there more to find?” I asked. “We know how she died.”
“I expect he’d want to know whether she was pregnant, for one thing,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “Now we’ve seen how well cared for she is, we have to assume she’s new to the game, which means someone might have reported her missing.”
“Yes, I see,” I said. I hugged my arms to me.
“Probably tried to run away from her pimp, poor soul,” she went on. “He might have killed her himself.”
“And left her in full view on the street?” I shook my head. The smelling salts had cleared my head. “No, if he’d killed her, he’d have done the same as the Eastmans. He’d have dumped her quietly in the East River, not left her for the police to find.”
“Then she was just picked up by the wrong man,” Mrs. Goodwin said. “Well, we’ve some chance of finding out who she was. We don’t know what her face looked like, but Quigley and Mclver took Bertillon measurements and we know she has pretty dark hair and fine bones. I just hope we catch this fiend before he gets his hands on any more girls.”
My brain, at least, was now fully recovered. “I wonder if the detectives went to the hospital?” I asked. “If she was still alive, she might have been able to say something that could help us.”
“I doubt it,” Mrs. Goodwin said, “but it’s worth a visit, just as soon as we’re done here.”
“Aren’t we done here?” My heart sank. There was no way I wanted to go back into that room again, especially if the autopsy was being conducted at this moment. I had no wish to add vomiting to my list of embarrassments.
Mrs. Goodwin clearly had no such squeamishness. “Oh, I’d like to know for my own curiosity whether she was in the family way. And maybe what kind of instrument was used to disfigure her. I have a feeling that those two young men really won’t put themselves out too much to solve this. It’s the general consensus among policemen that prostitutes are disposable, that they ask for what they get. I, on the other hand, feel that a society should be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable members. In fact—” She broke off as the door opened and Dr. Hartman came out. We both rose to our feet.
“The young lady has quite recovered, I see,” he said, smiling genially at me.
“Yes, thank you. I must apologize for my amateurish behavior.”
“Nonsense. Half the first-year medical students faint, and most of them are men, too.”
“Your autopsy is surely not completed?” Mrs. Goodwin asked.
“No, but I’d like you to contact the two detectives who were here this morning. They should come back right away. I’ve found something that completely changes the complexion of this case.”
He looked almost shaken. I found that my own knees were trembling.
“As I said, I have completed the most preliminary of investigations. I was looking for signs of”—he paused and coughed discreetly—“recent sexual activity.”
“And was there?” Mrs. Goodwin asked.
“There was an obvious attempt at it,” he said, still looking most uncomfortable to be discussing such a subject with women, “but the attempt was not wholly successful.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, dear lady, that this young girl was still technically a virgin.”
TWENTY-TWO
The full implications of this statement didn’t hit me until we were leaving Bellevue Hospital after Mrs. Goodwin had put through a telephone call to summon back Detectives Quigley and McIver. She was walking rather fast, and I had to break into a trot to keep up with her. I gathered she didn’t want to be anywhere in sight when the detectives showed up again. I suspected that she had exceeded her authority by a mile, but I wasn’t going to let her lose face by suggesting this. Besides, she was now my partner in crime, and I admired her pluck.
“That girl never was a prostitute then,” I blurted out, somewhat naively, as I’m sure the fact had dawned on her immediately.
“Someone dressed her up to make us think that she was, and then dumped her on a street known to be frequented by streetwalkers. What a cruel and horrible trick. Why, I wonder?”
“The man is clearly deranged,” I said. “He enjoys killing young girls. I wonder if the others really were prostitutes?”
“The doctor is applying for an exhumation order,” she said. “We may know more when they dig up the bodies of the other girls.”
“Will there be enough—left?” I asked, skirting around this distasteful subject.
“Enough to go on. Hair and height and body build. The last one was scarcely a week ago, so the body should still be pretty much intact. The others will be less well preserved, but they can match hair samples these days. If the others turn out to be young girls with no ties to prostitution, then they must have families and friends. Someone will be missing them.”
“Unless he preys on young girls who have run away from home or come alone as immigrants to the New World,” I said. “When I first arrived here, I knew nobody. Not a single person would have missed me if I had been taken off by a stranger. Maybe he promises work to new arrivals, a safe place to stay?”
She sighed. “That’s possible. But there have been five of them so far. Surely just one will have made a friend, someone who might come forward if we put a notice in the newspapers.”
“If they read English,” I said. “But there’s one thing I’m thinking—that first girl who was killed this way. The one who was found under the boardwalk at Coney Island. I understood she was indeed a real prostitute, identified by her pimp. One of her fellow streetwalkers might even have seen the man she went with that night.”
“So you think we should go out to Coney Island and inquire?” she asked.
“Definitely.”
“I’m supposed to report into the station by noon,” she said. “And then I’m ready to go home and fall asleep. I’ve been on duty all night.”
“I could do it,” I said.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t want you going out there alone. In the police force we always work in pairs. Safer that way. We have plenty to do in the meantime—placing that advertisement in the papers and seeing if any girls have been reported missing. That’s something I can do before I go home.”
I sighed. “We still seem so much in the dark. What we are really looking for is a depraved monster who preys on young girls. How will we ever find him in a city this size?”
“He’ll make one slip. They always get too cocky in the end or annoyed that the police are too slow. He’s dumping those bodies on the street to taunt us. One day he’ll dump a body where someone will see.”
“I don’t want to wait for that day,” I said. “It will mean more girls have to suffer this fate. Do you feel too tired to go on to Saint Vincent’s Hospital? Maybe she did say something—anything to give us a clue.”
She nodded. “All right. We’ve just got time if I’m to report in by noon. I don’t want them panicking and sending out search parties for me.” She almost sprinted for the El station. I had to admire her stamina. She had been on duty all night, and she was still going strong. Myself, I was already flagging under the heat of the day, and I was at least ten years her junior. I struggled to keep pace with her as she leaped aboard a departing train. The carriage was jam-packed and we had to stand, swaying in rhythm as the carriage creaked and groaned its way down First Avenue, blowing noxious smoke in through open windows. Of course we’d have to be traveling on one of the lines that hadn’t been electrified yet.
By sheer force of will I managed to keep going until we reached Saint Vincent’s Hospital. I knew my way around that somber place well enough. Bridie had almost died from typhoid here, and I had visited her every day. A pang of longing for her and her brother swept over me.
