Belle Cora: A Novel (57 page)

XL

THE BLOOMINGDALE TONTINE WAS BY NO MEANS
the fashionable establishment its name attempted to suggest. On the ground floor there were tables, and also curtained booths where one could meet in private. Rooms upstairs could be rented by the hour or the night. My plan was to rent a room, and have London waiting in it—he must get into it without being seen. Then I would wait for Cutter in one of the booths on the ground floor, telling the proprietor to direct him toward it when he arrived and asked for Olivia. If Cutter wondered about my efforts at concealment, I would explain that I could not risk being recognized so near to my grandfather’s house. Though I had told him I was afraid to be alone with him, I did not think I would have much trouble persuading him to come upstairs with the promise of my flesh, and then London would deal with him. If I decided that Cutter was not too dangerous, I would not take him up to the room. I would simply pay him the money.

Signing the register with a name I had never used before and have never used since, I took the room for myself, the night before Cutter and I were to meet. I made London wait until after dark and come around the back of the tavern, where I let down the rope for him. He made a great deal of noise coming up, but no one came to see what was going on. Then he wanted to have his way with me in the bed, and seemed to consider it an outrage to his manhood to be asked to spend the night with me chastely. If he had thought I had the money with me, he would probably have killed me instead of Cutter, and congratulated himself for doing the smart thing. But I had paid him a little on account, and the rest of the money was not on my person but was promised for performance. Thus I had influence on him; at least this was my hope. Eventually, with much grumbling, he bedded down on the floor.

The next day, there was a lot of waiting. London, like most such men, was not good at waiting. I let him drink a little. We played cards. He was impressed with my skill in shuffling and dealing. I showed him card tricks Charley had taught me, and while I watched him attempt them, I noticed his hands. The nails were very dirty and cracked, the thumbs exceptionally long and strong, and not as clumsy as they looked. Stains
were dyed into his skin. One could not help imagining that blood had made a contribution to them. He chewed tobacco and had brown teeth and spat a lot. He also picked his nose. The dried mucus was black.

In the afternoon, I went downstairs and waited for Cutter in a curtained booth. I had a bottle of whiskey and two glasses brought to me. My terror grew as the time of our meeting approached. Fear this great could not be hidden. I could only hope that Cutter would think it natural for me to look frightened.

There weren’t many customers in the tavern at that time of day. I heard Cutter come in, and I heard him talking, and then nothing, and then he was pulling aside the curtain. He looked confident, but his confidence looked misplaced. His clothes hung loose. His cheeks were sunken; he had been ill, maybe seriously.

I gave him a timid, ingratiating smile. I poured the whiskey for both of us. He waited for me to drink first, as a blackmailer should, and then he said with satisfaction, “Well, well, not so high and mighty,” and in general spoke like a villain in a melodrama, except in a Bowery accent and with a profanity unsuitable for the stage, and with more self-pity. He asserted several times that his luck was changing. Things were going to be different now. Certain people were going to be sorry for the way they had treated him. He took his shot and poured another and started telling me what he was going to do to me.

“Business first,” I said. I told him that before we could agree on a price I had to know exactly what he knew. He replied that I was in no position to bargain. “Very well,” I agreed meekly, “tell me what you want to tell me.”

“I know you’re after your grandpa’s money and he thinks you’re an honest woman with a dress shop. I’m going to California to make a new start. Pay me two thousand dollars and be shut of me.”

We argued, and finally I told him that I might find the money but that he was still asking too much. At that price, it would be worth more to me to keep my old life.

“What about your little brother?”

“What about him?”

“Oh, that’s right, I didn’t tell you about that,” he said, and looked at me; a sick feeling in my stomach said that at last he was about to tell me.

And so he did. Back in 1845, before the two of them had visited me in Cohoes, they had been involved in an argument with two canal drivers in Lockport. Lewis had pitched a stone, and one of the drivers had not gotten up. Lewis and Tom had run away. They saw later in Albany newspapers that the one Lewis had hit had died, that the other driver had recognized Lewis as Lewis Buckley—the name Lewis had gone by at the time—and someone had written anonymously to tell the paper that Lewis Buckley was really Lewis Moody.

There had been many hints of something like this, one or two from Cutter when I knew him first in Cohoes, and later from Lewis, who had a way of reminiscing right up to the point of his crime and then skirting clumsily around it.

“Why didn’t you use it earlier?”

“You know why. You said I was in it, too. But now I’m going to California with your money. They won’t chase me to California for what I did.”

Now, this did not quite make sense. If Cutter had to be in California in order to use his blackmail against my brother, wasn’t that a reason not to give him the money to go to California? It was foolish of him to say this. I might have argued with him if money were my sole concern, if I had been as willing as I had claimed I was for him to unmask me as Harriet Knowles.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll meet your terms.” I told him that I would have to give it to him in installments. I would have to sell property; I would have to earn some of it. All I had brought was a hundred. We discussed our future arrangement. Then, predictably, he told me to give him the hundred. I told him I had it in a room upstairs.

“You took a room here?”

“I thought that was part of our bargain.”

He smiled, took another drink, stood up, and grabbed the bottle by the neck, while I put on the hat and the scarf. I walked with my head down, my knees weak; with each beat of my heart, my whole body seemed to vibrate like a sheet of iron struck by a sledgehammer. There was a moment of extra panic at the top of the stairs when I forgot which room it was. There was a moment when I decided to pay him: anything was better than this; this was damnation if anything was, to kill a man just
because he is an inconvenience to you. But if I paid him, he’d go to California, and he’d still have what he had on Lewis, and he was the kind of man to use it just for spite.

I opened the door. He followed me in, and, as drunk as he was, he suspected a trick immediately. He sniffed. “You’ve got a man in here.” He looked under the bed, and then he went to the closet door and jerked it open. London, who had been waiting in the small, dark, hot closet for two hours, lunged at him with the knife, but his eyes had no time to adjust to the light, and Cutter was able to evade the knife and grab the wrist that held it. They fought over the knife and Cutter took it from him. They rolled over on the floor, London trying to pin Cutter’s arm, Cutter jabbing wherever he could and finally thrusting upward repeatedly just beneath London’s ribs. Then, with London gasping and shuddering, Cutter pulled out the blade, and swiftly but somehow deliberately, like the journeyman butcher I suddenly remembered he was, he grabbed London by the hair and slashed him across the throat.

My emotions were etherized, they existed but they belonged to someone else, as I looked down at Jack Cutter, that very inconvenient man, who sat gasping beside the killer he had slain. My carpetbag lay under the bed, a few feet behind me. Turning my back on Cutter, I took a step and bent down and found the bag. As I rose, I caught a glimpse of my face, flecked with Tom London’s blood, in an oval mirror in an elaborate brass frame on the wall just inside the door. Smiling at Cutter—as if I could fool him now!—I jerked the bag open, reached into it, and for a despairing second could not find Mrs. Robinson’s pepper-box pistol. Cutter was rising to his feet. To explain the noise the people downstairs were about to hear, I shouted, “Put the gun away, Harry, you fool! You’re gonna hurt somebody!” For a second, Cutter wore a puzzled look, and then I shot him. I had seen guns used but had never used one myself, and the recoil surprised me. As for what happened to his face, my mind could not make sense of it. “You fool!” I shouted. “You’re crazy! You can’t do that in here!” He fell forward. I stepped away.

I grabbed the bedsheet, spat on a corner of it, and walked to the mirror to wipe my face.

I had planned carefully to make sure that I would be far away before the body was discovered—I had planned so that there would be time, and
there was no time. Trying to keep from getting bloody, and succeeding, except for my hands, which shook along with the rest of me as if I were freezing, I emptied Cutter’s pockets and London’s pockets, stuffed everything into a pillowcase, and put it in my carpetbag. By that time, men were knocking on the door and shouting at me to open it up. I could barely stand on my feet. I was quite sure that it was hopeless, but I was going to do what I could, until the very last minute, to get away safe.

“It’s all right!” I called back. “I’m sorry. We’re very sorry! There was a pigeon! He shot at some pigeons out the window!”

“You can’t shoot in here!”

“We’re sorry! Nothing is broken! I told you, Harry! As if you could hit anything in your condition!”

“Are you all right?”

“It’s all right. I told you. It was just a pigeon. Leave us be. He won’t do it again!” I shouted as I hurried to the window. I stood there, looking out and down and around. They weren’t talking. They weren’t ramming the door down. With luck, they had gone away. I climbed out the window and let myself down by the rope. I ran through an empty field and into a wood, carrying the carpetbag, which contained a skirt, a blouse, a shawl, a bonnet, all clean and different from those the men in the Bloomingdale Tontine had seen me wearing. I did not look back to see if I was pursued until I was in the trees. The loudest sound was the pulse in my head. I spat on my hands and cleaned them with my handkerchief. I changed my clothes, stuffing the ones I’d discarded into the carpetbag. I put on a pair of white gloves and walked, holding the carpetbag, through the woods, to the road, and down the road to Broadway, where I opened my parasol and strolled down the street until I took an omnibus downtown.

The pepper-box pistol was in the bag along with the bloody clothes and the contents of London’s and Cutter’s pockets. For a moment, I had considered wrapping London’s hand around it. Then I had reflected that men shot in the head cannot cut throats, and men with their throats cut cannot shoot pistols. Even New York City’s metropolitan police would probably realize that.

At home, in my room, I poured the contents of Cutter’s and London’s pockets onto my bed. It was a curious collection—dirty pawn tickets,
and folded handbills, and sundry scraps of paper bearing names and addresses. My letter to Cutter was not there. There was a clipping from the Albany newspaper, with the name of the dead man and the name of my brother Lewis.

I HAD LIED WHEN I TOLD CUTTER
that I was invited to my grandfather’s house that evening. There was to be a gathering, with me and Jeptha and Agnes and Edward and Robert and the members of the California Missionary Committee, but not for another three days. I spent most of the intervening time in my bedroom, every so often sending out for a newspaper. The murders were recognized as a mystery, and the fact that at least one of the killers had been a woman—or maybe a small man dressed as a woman—gave the story added interest. It shared the front page of the
Sun
, the
Herald
, and the
Courier
with headlines about the cholera and California gold. Ragged newsboys shouted: “ ‘He was shooting at pigeons,’ cried the murderess!” The
Courier
called it “a conundrum worthy of the skills of Monsieur Vidocq,” Vidocq of France’s Sûreté Nationale having at that time a reputation for crime solving similar to that Scotland Yard enjoys today.