A Promise of Ruin

by Cuyler Overholt

  I heard the sound of a boot on wood, and then the hallway door flew open. A flush-faced man in rolled-up shirtsleeves stood on the threshold, holding a foaming growler in each hand. “The reserves have arrived!” he announced in a brogue as muscular as his forearms.

  “Patrick! Good man,” said Simon, emerging from the kitchen. “I was afraid you’d forget.”

  “You’re payin’ for it,” Patrick said with a grin. “The least I can do is carry it upstairs.” Though he was shorter and stockier than Simon, he had the same dark, wavy hair and square-cut features. He also had the same twinkle in his eye, I noticed, which I was beginning to think was an Irish birthright.

  Simon was striding toward him, reaching for the pails of beer, when Patrick moved aside to allow a young woman to enter. Simon stopped short on sight of her.

  “Hello, Simon,” she said, stepping into the room. She was black-haired and fair-skinned, with brilliant blue eyes that flashed when they lit on him.

  Patrick shot Simon an apologetic glance. “When she found out I was having supper with you, she insisted I bring her along.”

  “I had to see for myself that you were still alive,” the woman said to Simon, with an Irish lilt nearly as pronounced as Patrick’s. “You’ve been so scarce these past few months, I could hardly believe it.” She slid off her wrap and held it out to him, holding on for a moment longer than was necessary when he reached for it. Fluttering her dark lashes, she added, “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Always glad to see an old friend,” Simon said, removing the wrap from her grasp. He gestured toward me. “Kitty, Patrick, this is Genevieve.”

  I extended a hand to Kitty. “How do you do?”

  She shook my hand limply, looking me coolly up and down. Her dress was very flattering, if more revealing than current fashion dictated, with a shirred, off-the-shoulder bodice in sapphire-blue taffeta that matched the brilliant color of her eyes. I suddenly wished I hadn’t chosen the dull, gray costume I was wearing. I had thought it would put me on equal footing with our company, but with Kitty’s arrival, I’d only ended up looking dowdy in comparison.

  “The boys’ll be arriving soon for the festivities, so if we want any peace, we’d better get to it,” Simon said, ushering our guests toward the table. He took charge of the beer, while I set out another plate for Kitty and went to fetch our dinner. A few moments later, we were all seated at the table, Patrick and Kitty across from Simon and me. When our plates were full and the beer had been poured, Patrick raised his glass in my direction. “To new friends,” he said.

  I lifted my glass with a smile.

  “And to old ones,” Kitty added, leaning forward to raise her glass toward Simon, revealing an impressive expanse of bosom in the process.

  Simon glanced at me over his glass, looking uncharacteristically sheepish. I cocked an eyebrow and sipped my beer.

  “I heard it was you who pulled that girl out of the river today,” Patrick said, wagging his fork at Simon.

  Simon put down his glass. “I’m sorry to say you heard right.” He shook his head. “It’s a shame. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Does Norton have any idea who she is yet?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Now why do you boys want to talk about a dead girl when you’ve got two live ones right here?” Kitty protested.

  I too would prefer to speak about something else. It wasn’t just the drowned girl I wanted to forget; young Rosa’s face kept popping up in my mind, wide-eyed and imploring, waiting for me to shed light on her friend’s disappearance. As I’d expected, my request that Detective Norton do something with the missing girl’s picture had fallen on deaf ears. A missing person’s report would have to be filed, the busy detective had told me, before any action could be taken. As I’d already told Rosa the same thing, I believed I’d discharged any duty I might owe her. And yet, those pleading eyes wouldn’t leave me alone…

  “All right, what should we talk about instead?” Simon asked, settling back in his chair.

  “Why don’t you tell us how you two met?” Kitty suggested.

  Simon and I glanced at each other. After two beats of silence, I answered, “I sought Simon out last winter when a patient of mine got into legal trouble. I knew he was the captain of the election district where my patient lived, and I thought he might be able to help.” It was the stock answer I’d come to rely on whenever I was asked this question.

  “A patient?” Kitty asked with a frown. “You’re a nurse, then?”

  “Genevieve’s a doctor,” Simon said, smiling in my direction.

  “Get off,” Kitty scoffed.

  “No, it’s true, I am,” I told her. “A medical psychologist, to be exact. Which means I treat functional disorders of the mind.”

  She sat back, her eyes narrowing as she digested this information. “You must have had a lot of schooling,” she said finally.

  “Well, yes, I suppose I have. I was lucky to be able to attend Johns Hopkins Medical School.”

  She sniffed. “I’ve never cared much for book learnin’, myself. S’pose I’ve been too busy learnin’ about life firsthand.”

  I nodded, sensing she believed we were in some sort of competition but refusing to take the bait. “You would have liked my old anatomy professor, I think. He always said that learning from books was no substitute for real life experience.”

  She smiled thinly and sipped her beer.

  Patrick draped a beefy hand over the back of her neck. “Kitty works in a white goods factory. But she’s aiming to set up a shop of her own one day.”

  “That’s right,” Katie confirmed, lifting her chin. “It’s going to be the best lingerie shop in all of New York, sellin’ only the finest silks and trimmings.” She turned to stroke Patrick’s cheek with her forefinger. “And Patrick’s going to help me, aren’t you, Pat?”

  Apparently, whatever Kitty’s past with Simon had entailed, she had since moved on to Patrick, who appeared unperturbed by this chain of events. He grinned in response, pulling her toward him to give her a lusty kiss. She broke away and chucked him playfully under the chin. “Mind your manners, lovey,” she murmured. “Dinner before dessert.”

  I didn’t know where to look, unaccustomed to such open displays of affection. I glanced down at my plate, and then over their heads, and finally to my right, toward Simon. My heart sank as I saw that he was watching Kitty with a mix of amusement and…not admiration, exactly, but…appreciation. Yes, he was enjoying the way she purred and pouted and kept Patrick effortlessly enthralled. Is that what Simon found attractive? A woman who wore her sexuality like a luxurious fur coat? If so, he must find me very prim and constrained indeed.

  But if that was true, I wondered, trying not to choke on the lump of mashed potato in my mouth, why was he bothering to spend time with me? We could have gone our separate ways, once my patient’s case was resolved and I no longer required his help. Why had Simon decided to pursue our unconventional acquaintance if he wasn’t even attracted to me? God knew he didn’t owe me anything; I was the one in his debt, several times over. Perhaps, I thought, he’d felt an initial attraction, but it had faded as we’d spent more time together, and now he regretted his decision. With women like Kitty at his beck and call, I couldn’t really say that I blamed him.

  “Is that right, Pat?” Simon was asking. “You’re goin’ into the ladies’ undergarment business?”

  Patrick grinned. “Why not? I’ve never been one to turn down a sure investment.”

  “Investment, is it?” Simon chortled. “Police work must be paying more than I realized these days.”

  “Pat’s been promoted to roundsman,” Kitty informed him, wrapping a possessive hand around Patrick’s bicep. “And he’s been puttin’ in lots of extra hours.”

  “Promoted!” Simon said, laying down his fork. “Why didn’t you tell me?”


  Patrick shrugged.

  “He doesn’t like to talk himself up,” Kitty answered for him. “But they know a good man when they see one.”

  “Well, this calls for a toast,” Simon declared. He raised his glass toward Patrick. “May your pockets be heavy, and your heart be light—”

  “And good luck pursue you each morning and night!” Kitty finished for him. They all laughed and quaffed their beer, while I smiled along and tried not to feel like an outsider.

  “How’s your ma doin’, Simon?” Kitty asked when the gaiety had subsided. “I haven’t seen her in a month of Sundays.”

  I held my breath, shooting a glance at Simon. He hardly ever mentioned his mother in my presence, a fact I suspected reflected a continuing animosity toward me on her part. I couldn’t fault her for blaming me for her dismissal all those years ago, but I did think it important to attempt a reconciliation if Simon and I were to have any hope of a future together. Last month, I’d suggested he bring me along to Sunday dinner at his mother’s sometime—a suggestion he had studiously ignored, making me fear things were even worse than I’d imagined.

  “She’s well enough,” he answered Kitty. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Still reading the cards?”

  “Only for friends and family. She gets tired if she overdoes.”

  Kitty turned to me. “Has she done a reading for you yet?”

  “A reading?”

  “Has she told your fortune?” she spelled out impatiently, as if I were being deliberately obtuse.

  “Oh…no, not yet,” I said, both embarrassed by my ignorance of Mrs. Shaw’s abilities and irrationally jealous of Kitty’s familiarity with them.

  “You’re in for a treat then,” she said with a knowing nod. “She’s got the gift, she does.”

  I was glad when Simon changed the subject a moment later, although I found myself once again relegated to the sidelines as the conversation moved from a recent boxing match, to a cinder-blinded fire horse, to a popular local bartendress known as Buttermouth Bel. Only when the discussion turned to Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham, a colorful and contentious figure about whom I was relatively well informed, did I finally see an opportunity to join in.

  “I hear Mayor McClellan is being pressured to fire him,” I said, passing Simon more potatoes. “Because of the transfers.” General Bingham’s first promise when he took office eighteen months earlier had been to root out police graft. Graft, of course, depended on long-standing relationships between the city’s political machine, the gangs who helped keep it in power by perpetrating fraud at the polls, and the police who allowed those gangs to operate. It also depended on each police captain’s intimate knowledge of the illegal drinking, gambling, and disorderly resorts within his precinct, from which he could, if he was so inclined, extract a monthly protection fee. The previous fall, to sever these lucrative connections, our bold commissioner had taken the unprecedented step of transferring all but one of his eighty-six police captains to new precincts. The reaction had been predictable, with much gnashing of teeth by all parties concerned.

  “McClellan’s not going to fire him,” Patrick said. “It’d only make him look as crooked as the rest. Besides, Bingham’s too popular. People like the way he’s going after the Black Hand.”

  The commissioner’s second promise had been to crush the mushrooming Italian criminal organization, whose ruthless activities were creating hysteria among even the city’s non-Italian residents, who feared they would eventually become targets.

  “Speaking of which,” Simon said, “has anyone been arrested for the bombings on 107th Street?”

  “Not yet,” Patrick replied.

  Simon shook his head. “Does Hurley even have a plan?”

  “There’s not much the captain, or anyone, can do,” Patrick said. “Not without witnesses willing to come forward. The damned dagoes would rather stick knives in their own throats than squeal on one of their own. It makes it impossible for us to do our job.”

  As newspaper commenters liked to tell us, the Italian immigrants had brought a deep distrust of police and the legal process to America, born of centuries of abuse in their homeland at the hands of those in power. They lived, accordingly, by a code that required victims of crime to seek their own justice, and even to shield their assailants from the law.

  “Couldn’t they talk to you in private, like?” Kitty asked.

  “They’re too scared,” Patrick said. “They think these crooks have magical powers. They cross themselves if you even mention the Black Hand.”

  “I thought the Italian squad was making inroads,” I ventured. Our previous police commissioner had taken the first step toward addressing the “Italian problem,” creating a squad of six Italian-speaking men tasked with infiltrating the immigrant colonies, forming alliances, and gathering intelligence on suspected criminals. But it was Commissioner Bingham who had given the squad real teeth, enlarging it to thirty-five men, renaming it “the Italian Legion,” and promoting its head, the quick-fisted but incorruptible Joseph Petrosino, to the rank of lieutenant.

  “They’ve made some big arrests, to be sure,” Patrick said, “but for every thug they put in jail or deport, another three spring up. We’ve had more kidnappings in the last six months than we did all last year.”

  “Detective Norton thinks the girl they found in the river might have been a Black Hand kidnapping victim,” I told him.

  He cocked an eyebrow. “That would be a first. Far as I know, they’ve only ever taken young children before. And only boys at that.”

  “Well, I think it’s disgraceful, stealing little children right off the streets,” Kitty joined in. “Isn’t there anything you can do to stop it, Pat?”

  “Not if the victims won’t even show us the letters or let us in on the ransom exchange.”

  “What about the ‘secret service’ Bingham keeps asking for?” Simon asked.

  I waited with interest for Patrick’s answer. I knew that, in what some considered an overreach of authority, Commissioner Bingham was agitating for the creation of a special unit modeled on the federal Secret Service, which would have unlimited discretion in dealing with Italian crime and report only to him.

  “I wouldn’t hold your breath,” Patrick said, refilling his glass. “He’s been asking the Board of Aldermen for funding ever since he took office, but they just keep turning a deaf ear.”

  “Well, someone better do something,” Simon said, “or things could get ugly around here. There’s no love lost between the Irish and Italian gangs. With public opinion at their back, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Duffy Hills and Red Peppers start lynching every Italian they can catch south of 102nd Street.”

  “We don’t want a repeat of New Orleans,” I agreed.

  “Why? What happened in New Orleans?” Kitty asked.

  “The lynching of those Italian prisoners?” I prompted.

  When her face remained blank, I elaborated. “An angry mob attacked and killed eleven Italian prisoners charged with murdering an Irish police chief. The king of Italy demanded immediate punishment of the attackers and reparations for the victims’ families, but our government refused, saying the American legal system had to establish the guilt or innocence of the parties first. The Italians recalled their foreign minister in response, and introduced resolutions in their parliament calling for a punitive naval strike on our shore.”

  “Wait a minute,” Patrick said. “Are you telling me the dagoes were threatening to attack the United States?”

  “Well, yes,” I said, warming to my subject. “It was a matter of national pride for them, you see. Of course, there was no attack, but that’s why we started building up our navy, to protect against future threats. Before it happened, we didn’t have a single modern battleship, but when the Spanish-American War broke out a few years later, we had a whole fleet.” I took a sip of my
beer, proud to have had something of interest to contribute at last, and waited for their response. My little riff, however, seemed to have brought the conversation to a halt.

  Finally, Patrick, who’d been watching me with a bemused expression, turned to Simon and said, “She’s a smart one, ain’t she?”

  “That she is,” he agreed with a wry smile.

  I smiled back uncertainly. I hadn’t meant to sound like a stuffy schoolmarm.

  I was relieved when the clock on the mantel struck the half hour a few moments later. “I’d better get dessert,” I said, rising to my feet.

  “I’ll help,” Kitty said.

  Before I could protest, she was out of her chair and lifting the two nearest plates. “It’ll give us a chance for some girl talk,” she added.

  As I could think of only one subject that we had in common, it was with some reluctance that I cleared the remaining plates and followed her into the kitchen.

  Chapter Four

  Kitty deposited the dishes in the sink, then leaned back against the table and watched me with a speculative air while I fetched bowls of strawberries and whipped cream from the icebox.