Secret of the White Rose

by Stefanie Pintoff

  “Detective Simon Ziele,” Alistair supplied.

  “Yes, exactly. I would like Detective Ziele and my dear friend to have these letters for a brief period of time,” she said. “When they have finished, you may take them.”

  And so when I had hoped only to help out a friend in need, I found myself in exactly the place I had wanted to avoid: the crosshairs of a political disagreement. It did not bode well for my future with the New York City Police Department.

  Mrs. Jackson turned to us with instructions. “You’ll find privacy in the upstairs parlor. And of course you may look at these other items if you like. I assure you they were not here earlier tonight.” She indicated the black-leather-bound Bible as well as the long-stemmed white rose—also bloodstained—lying at the center of the desk.

  “We don’t need that nonsense,” Saunders said with a dismissive glance as he stalked from the room. “Gentlemen, you may have twenty minutes with those letters—under official supervision.”

  He went into the hallway, and we overheard him instruct one of the officers to keep tabs on us.

  “I believe the rose and the Bible are more important than the deputy commissioner thinks,” Alistair said in a rush. “May we borrow them for a few days?”

  She agreed, and so I wrapped both the Bible and the rose in a clean cloth and laid them gently just inside my satchel, where they were protected yet hidden—lest the deputy commissioner change his mind.

  “Those items are indeed bizarre, but your best clues will be in those letters,” she said. “Hugo has been receiving death threats ever since the day Al Drayson set foot in his courtroom. He saved them all.” She took a deep breath. “Please, Alistair,” she said, and for the first time tonight her eyes softened and filled with tears. “I need your help. I’m counting on you to do whatever is necessary to find the monster who has taken Hugo from me.”

  “Of course,” he said. “We’ll make sure the police get it right. I promise you.”

  But such promises, while well-meant, were often hard to keep.

  * * *

  Within moments, we were in the upstairs parlor under the supervision of Harvey, the officer I had recognized upon entering. He seemed as uncomfortable in his role as we were in ours—so he kept a discreet distance near the doorway. The parlor itself, obviously reserved for Gertrude Jackson’s use, was a formal ladies’ room of rococo rose wallpaper and blue floral furniture. We pulled two chairs near a small table at the window, where the rising dawn cast a faint pink light through the window. There, we read the letters and drank the hot tea that Marie had brought up.

  Mrs. Jackson was right: many of the letters contained vile threats that must have shaken the judge throughout all the weeks of this trial. Each one was markedly different in grammar and style, handwriting, and even paper choice. The authors themselves were split among Drayson’s enemies and his fellow anarchists: the former believed the judge was being too lenient with Drayson; the latter just the opposite.

  “We don’t want no judge who lets child-killers go free,” read one letter.

  But another countered: “If you send Drayson to the chair at Sing Sing, he’ll become a martyr to our cause. More of us will rise up, throwing bombs and raining hellfire on this modern-day Sodom. We’ll kill all capitalist scum like you. Your death will be just the beginning.”

  “The judge couldn’t win,” I said, shaking my head. “He was damned if he did—and damned if he didn’t.”

  Alistair’s reply was thoughtful. “Hugo tried his best to be a fair judge. He always sympathized with the prosecution, for he believed that every victim’s story should be heard. Yet last week he also allowed the defense team to present mitigating evidence about Drayson’s childhood during the pogroms of Russia—before his family escaped and came here.”

  I remembered the news reports summarizing that day’s testimony: Drayson had witnessed unspeakable horrors as a child. But the press had not been kind; rather, their coverage had emphasized that, despite his Americanized name, he was not a true American. They painted him as the epitome of a Russian Jewish immigrant anarchist.

  We continued reading. One writer used pencil and cheap notebook paper to threaten: “Why don’t we stick dynamite into your mouth and send you into eternity with Louis Lingg? You’re no better than these damn anarchists.”

  Alistair’s brow furrowed. “Lingg was one of the Haymarket anarchists who killed all those policemen and was sentenced to hang, I believe. Specifically the one who committed suicide by dynamite the day before he was to die. So the letter-writer remembers; he got that part correct. Though it was in Chicago twenty years ago.”

  Of course I knew Haymarket; it had been our country’s most violent anarchist attack to date.

  There were plenty more letters, but the threats ran together. One that contained no verbal threat was perhaps the most disturbing: inside an envelope, we found the single picture of a child, an adorable little girl of about six with ringlet curls and a gap-toothed smile. Underneath the picture was an address on East Sixty-sixth Street. It was attached by paper clip to the popular newspaper clipping that depicted only the child victim’s shoe.

  Alistair grew positively white when he saw it.

  “But Drayson’s child victim was a boy…” I said aloud.

  Alistair swallowed hard. “I believe this is a photograph of the judge’s own granddaughter, together with her address. The implied threat must have wounded him deeply.”

  “Surely he went to the police with these letters,” I said, spreading my hands wide over the table. “Why didn’t he receive protection? He should have been given an escort to and from judge’s chambers, as well as a police guard here at his home.”

  Alistair’s face filled with regret. “He likely reported all threats. But Hugo Jackson was an independent man, loath to accept help from others. And that was how he would have seen police protection.”

  I passed him the final letter, marked by finer quality paper than the rest.

  Alistair turned it over twice, noted its lack of a postmark, and then frowned.

  A look of amazement spread over his face.

  “What is it?”

  Stunned, he seemed not to have heard me. I moved my chair closer, peered over his shoulder, and saw—music.

  He handed the sheet to me, still lost in thought.

  It was a musical score of four bars, written on thick cream paper. The bars of the grand staff as well as the individual notes were handwritten with precision.

  “The judge was a musician?” I asked.

  “He played the piano. This was likely mixed with the others by mistake.”

  Alistair stood. “We’d better return these letters to the deputy commissioner, and we’ll request copies. I’d like to keep this one, though.” He motioned to the musical score, adding with a sideways wink, “I daresay he’ll never miss it.”

  I groaned inwardly, for Alistair’s willingness to bend the rules of procedure always sat uneasily on my conscience.

  I grabbed the letter, saying only, “For this one, it’s easy enough to get permission.”

  I approached Harvey, assuming my most confident manner. “Say, would it be all right if we kept just this?” I flashed the letter in front of him. “We’re returning all the others, but as you can see, this one is unrelated.”

  He eyed me warily weighing his decision. “Are you officially part of the case now?”

  “As soon as the paperwork is signed in the morning,” I said to reassure him, adding, “If you prefer, I can ask Mrs. Jackson or the deputy commissioner for permission.”

  His eyes flickered with doubt. He had witnessed the deputy commissioner’s disagreement with Mrs. Jackson earlier, and fortunately for me, he decided it was not something he wished to risk repeating. If he incurred the deputy commissioner’s censure, it could derail his career entirely.

  “If it’s just music, then I guess it won’t make a difference,” he said finally.

  I smiled broadly. “We’ll retu
rn it to Mrs. Jackson when we finish with it.”

  I watched him breathe a sigh of relief, since the final disposition wouldn’t involve him. I stuffed the letter into my pocket and motioned to Alistair, and we left in haste before Harvey could change his mind—or Deputy Commissioner Saunders could intercept us.

  As the pink glow in the eastern sky announced the dawn of a new day, we found a public hack to carry us uptown to a change of clothing and breakfast before our investigative efforts truly began.

  It was only once I was home, unpacking the items Mrs. Jackson had given us, that I noticed something unusual about the music.

  I frowned. It was odd that Alistair had missed observing it himself—or had he? Of course, Alistair had not been himself last night.

  At the bottom of the score on the last bar, where the bass clef normally appeared, was, instead, a different image: a solitary white rose.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Nineteenth Precinct, West Thirtieth Street. 8:30 A.M.

  “If it isn’t himself, sure as the devil. Not like you to sleep half the morning, Ziele.” A man with a smile as broad as his six-foot frame and a thick brogue turned in surprise as I walked into the overcrowded and dilapidated precinct station house on West Thirtieth Street.

  Declan Mulvaney, the burly Irishman who had been my partner when I was a patrolman on the Lower East Side, was now my captain here at the Nineteenth Precinct. And while official department hours started at nine, he knew that I usually arrived at my desk well before seven each morning.

  “If you consider half past eight to be late, you can take it out of the overtime I never put in for,” I returned good-naturedly.

  As was typical, Mulvaney was not shuffling paperwork in his cramped office just off the entrance; instead, he circulated throughout the main room, arranging patrol duties and checking with each of his officers on the status of open cases. By now, Mulvaney had no doubt finished a meeting or two, completed a half-dozen telephone calls, and downed at least three cups of coffee.

  And coffee was what I required, after a late night with little sleep. I must have looked as exhausted as I felt, for Mulvaney flashed me a wicked grin.

  “I suppose there’s no chance you were out ’til wee hours with that lass you fancy, is there?”

  I followed him into his makeshift office, ignoring his obvious reference to Isabella Sinclair—Alistair’s widowed daughter-in-law, with whom I had settled into an easy friendship that defied all norms of social convention. Like me, she was rebuilding her life following a devastating loss: in her case, her husband, Teddy; in my own, my fiancée, Hannah, who was among the thousand victims killed in the General Slocum steamship disaster of 1904. Now Isabella assisted Alistair with his criminological research.

  And if I enjoyed her company more than I should, I remained mindful of the vast difference in wealth and class between us. The Sinclair family, with its impeccable social pedigree, counted themselves among the Astor Four Hundred. I, on the other hand, had grown up in a derelict tenement in the German immigrant section of the Lower East Side. The Sinclairs had a passionate interest in the criminal mind that drew us together when there was a case to investigate. But I was not one to forget the pronounced differences between us when there was no investigation at hand.

  “Have you seen the latest drawings?” Mulvaney momentarily switched topics, handing me a large blueprint plan. “Our proposed new building. They say we’re going to be the first precinct to have an all-automobile patrol. See”—he pointed to a large archway near the main entrance—“the vehicles will come and go through here.” He chortled. “’Course, I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  The plans Mulvaney had just shown me—for a new, modern station house to be built across the street from our current one—had been subject to one delay after another for so many years that most of us no longer truly believed new quarters would ever be built. No precinct needed space more than we did: Mulvaney’s station had jurisdiction over an area running from Fourteenth Street all the way to Forty-second, stretching from Park Avenue to Seventh Avenue. We were responsible for the Tenderloin as well as a tough area of Sixth Avenue dubbed Satan’s Circus—and our jurisdiction competed with the Lower East Side for the dubious honor of being the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhood. But crime here took a form I understood. The robberies, killings, kidnappings, and rapes might be brutal and ugly—but the criminal motives behind them were simple to understand. Greed and anger didn’t require much analysis.

  Unlike the murder scene last night.

  “I was out late on a case,” I said, taking the wooden chair opposite the massive oak desk covered with papers. “Unofficially, of course.”

  Mulvaney raised his eyebrows.

  “It will be all over today’s papers. A judge was killed. And not just any judge: the presiding judge of the Al Drayson case.”

  Mulvaney whistled under his breath. “You don’t say. And why did they call you?” He put out a hand. “No—let me guess. It had to be Alistair.”

  “It was,” I admitted. Alistair had a talent for involving himself in the more controversial and baffling cases of the day. Though, to be fair, during our most recent case investigating a series of theater murders, I’d been the one to involve him. His understanding of the criminal mind was unparalleled—a resource I had learned to take advantage of when more traditional methods of investigation failed.

  “Alistair always ends up stuck in the middle of some controversy. So do you, apparently.” Mulvaney didn’t miss a beat. “I got two calls already this morning: one from Deputy Commissioner Saunders, then another from Commissioner Bingham himself.”

  I shot him a look of annoyance. “So you already knew about the judge’s death last night. When, exactly, were you planning on telling me?”

  “Sorry,” he said with a rueful smile. “I wanted your version of it, not what the big brass have to say. Their primary concern is the threat of a larger anarchist plot. You’re going to be working under the man himself.”

  “You mean Bingham?” I was incredulous. It was a dubious honor, for Bingham was notoriously difficult to work with. But I wasn’t blind to the fact that this presented a rare opportunity to work with the city’s chief officer.

  Mulvaney put it more bluntly. “This opportunity with Bingham will either make or break your career—and you’ve got no choice in the matter. In fact, you’ve got a meeting with him this afternoon at one o’clock.”

  I stared at him blankly for some moments before recovering myself.

  “I knew Alistair planned to make my involvement official,” I said in a low voice, “but not at this level.”

  Mulvaney chuckled. “Your professor has his share of influence, I’m sure. But he isn’t responsible for your current predicament. You’ve the judge’s widow herself to thank for this.”

  “But I barely exchanged a word with her last night,” I said with a frown.

  “Then you otherwise made an impression—or Alistair secured her request. I take it they’re acquainted.”

  “Alistair went to law school with Judge Jackson. I understand they grew apart over the years, but their wives remained friends.”

  “Alistair’s wife?” Mulvaney’s eyes widened. “I thought they were divorced.”

  “I don’t think so,” I hastened to say. I knew little of Alistair’s estranged wife, except that she now resided permanently abroad—and had, ever since their son Teddy was killed while on an archeological expedition in Greece three years earlier. Though I wasn’t privy to the details, I knew it wasn’t uncommon for the loss of a child to cause an irreparable rift between the parents. I also suspected that Alistair’s womanizing had something to do with it.

  “Is the Nineteenth going to be involved in some capacity?” I asked.

  “Not yet. The commissioner hopes it will be a simple case, since the judge had more than his share of death threats on record—many of them from known anarchists. He believes that with enough men making the necessary inquiries, th
e judge’s murderer—and any anarchist conspiracy—will readily come to light.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re off to a good start on this case, if you already disagree with the commissioner.” A look of exasperation crossed Mulvaney’s face. “Out with it, Ziele. Either something you learned last night troubles you—or else you’re being hoodwinked by your professor’s malarkey.”

  I smiled, knowing that Mulvaney never had much tolerance for Alistair’s criminal theories. Alistair believed we needed to understand why particular criminals behaved as they did if we were to apprehend them more efficiently—and ultimately rehabilitate them. Once we understood more about the criminal mind, Alistair argued, then we would solve crimes faster—and one day stop them altogether.

  But for the more pragmatic Mulvaney, the why was unimportant; what mattered was ensuring that the criminal couldn’t strike again. And he believed that was best accomplished by jail cell bars—not education and understanding.

  Once, I had been of the same mind as Mulvaney. But time—not to mention a handful of tough cases—had taught me to recognize there was value in understanding the enemy we faced. I’d learned that the behavior criminals exhibited at their crime scenes revealed important information—sometimes with more clarity than traditional clues. In two very different cases, I had made use of Alistair’s teachings to solve a brutal crime—and if I wasn’t a true believer in criminal theory, I at least considered it one of many valuable tools at my disposal. What I’d learned was that few people—however well educated—had all the right answers. Success hinged on formulating the right questions.

  And I had many questions about Judge Jackson’s case.

  I briefly filled Mulvaney in on the crime scene at the judge’s home, sharing all the relevant details about the Bible and the white rose found by the judge’s body. “Plus, there was a rose drawn on a sheet of music found among his death-threat letters. I think Alistair saw the rose, too,” I said, “and is holding back what he knows.” I had an uncomfortable sensation in the pit of my stomach as I said it.