Fallen Women (2 page)

“You think she stabbed herself eight times?” Mick scoffed, and the young man reddened.

“I didn’t count. I just saw the blood and waited for you.”

“You think it was a burglar?” Cronin asked.

“If it was, he was a peculiar chap. There’s a five-dollar gold piece on the dresser. No burglar I know would leave that behind. And if it was one of the other girls, she’d have snatched it up with the earrings.”

“I never saw a robber slice up anybody like that. A robber would stick her once or twice to shut her up, not eight times. And he wouldn’t take the trouble to leave her like that, with her arms folded over her. I’d guess it was somebody she knew,” the coroner put in.

“Like a mac?” Mick asked.

“Could be. I wonder if she had one.”

“Or a customer,” Cronin butted in.

“A whore’s not likely to admit a customer when there’s nobody else around.”

“Maybe a special customer.”

Mick nodded. “Where’s the knife?”

“Wasn’t no knife. She was stabbed with a pair of scissors.” The coroner picked up a pair of sewing scissors, the tips as sharp as a knife blade. “Hers, most likely, because her sewing box’s right there, and I couldn’t see any scissors in it.”

He handed the weapon to Mick, who tested the tip with his finger. It would pierce skin as if it were butter. “Was she tortured?” he asked softly.

Dr. Death shook his head. “Don’t look like it.”

“Raped?”

“She’s a whore.”

The patrolman went over to the bed and stared at the body, then looked frantically around the room until Mick pointed to the chamber pot, and the young man retched into it. “Sorry,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I never saw nothing like this.”

“Go outside. Get some air. You’ll get used to it. Or maybe you won’t. Pray you won’t, Officer…” Mick searched for a name, then said, “Officer Thrasher.” He glanced at the other policeman, who was pasty-faced, and added, “Cronin, you take him out, then find something to open the trunk. Doc and I’ll finish up.”

“I’m done. I’ll get somebody to haul her off,” the coroner said, and he followed the two officers down the hall, leaving Mick alone with the dead woman.

The detective listened to their footsteps, then turned back to the bed, ignoring the smell of fresh vomit. He avoided stepping in the blood as he picked up a chair that lay on the floor, pulling it to the bedside and sitting down. The room was small and the furniture filled it up—the chairs and bed and a dresser with a pitcher and washbasin on it, the trunk with a bright shawl spread over it, a wardrobe. Unlike the hallway with its erotic paintings, the pictures in the room were simple—the blood-smeared oil painting of a bowl of fruit, a pastoral scene, the portrait of a young woman with her hand on the collar of a dog. They might all have been done by the same artist, maybe the dead woman. Mick wondered if she’d been a painter. Well, if so, she hadn’t been much of one. The paintings were sentimental and poorly executed. Maybe they’d been left by another occupant.

He stood then and examined the room, looking for something that didn’t belong—a button or a watch fob that the struggling woman might have snatched. A handkerchief, a hat. A calling card with a name and address would be nice. Mick got down on his knees and peered under the bed, the dresser. Scanning the rug, he looked for something that might have been dropped, but there was nothing. He examined the dresser, hoping for a cigarette butt, a cigar stub, but there was only the usual collection of brush, hairpins, hair receiver, false hair, a pair of gloves, a bottle of perfume. Mick picked it up and sniffed. The scent, lily of the valley, was too delicate for most prostitutes, and expensive.

The crime had been vicious, and the knife wounds on the dead woman’s hands showed that she’d fought back. There ought to be some hint to the killer’s identity, but if there was, Detective Sergeant McCauley couldn’t find it. He looked into the wardrobe where dresses hung on hooks. They were expensive dresses for a whore—a black velvet ball gown, a claret-colored wool suit, and a gray dress of some kind of shiny material. He thought it might be satin. Two or three shifts hung from pegs. That was what the girls wore in the whorehouses in Denver. Elsewhere, in the great brothels of Chicago and New Orleans, they might dress in fancy clothes when they met the customers downstairs in the parlor, but here, they wore shifts that were easy to put on and take off, that wouldn’t be costly to replace if they were torn.

He pushed back the curtain and peered at the windowsill, looking for handprints. The killer might have come in this way. But the sill was covered with a coat of dust. He opened the window and peered out at the darkening sky. Snow from a storm the day before had melted early, but it had frozen as the day waned. Black branches obscured a sky as dead as the woman on the bed. A chill wind blew through the window, bringing the smells of smoke and stale air and horse manure, but Mick preferred them to the whorehouse odor that lingered in the room, and he left the window open.

He pulled his coat around himself and sat down on the chair next to the dead woman, studying her face, pulling back a strand of blood-soaked hair that had fallen across her cheek. Her eyes, a blue that was almost turquoise, were open, dull, and Mick stared into them. “You knew your killer, didn’t you, honey? You let him in.” He stared at the woman’s face. She was too young to die. Pretty like that, fresh, she might have found a life outside the whorehouse. She could have married, maybe met a man right there at Miss Hettie’s, some railroad executive or perhaps a businessman from Chicago or St. Louis. Mick knew of a few whores who’d gotten out of the life that way, and they’d made good wives.

Miss Hettie had said the dead woman hadn’t been a beginner, but that didn’t mean anything. She could have turned out after being seduced, raped maybe, then thrown out by her family, with no place to go. For many women, whoring was a better job than taking in laundry or scrubbing floors. Poor kid with nobody to look out for her.

He’d seen dead whores before, but this one was different. The others were suicides, used-up women with no life ahead of them, many of them glad for a release. But this Lillie hadn’t wanted death. She’d fought her killer. She’d fought to live. He picked up her hand and turned the palm up, studying a cut covered by dried blood. “He isn’t going to get away with it. I’m going to find out who did this to you, Lillie,” he muttered. And then he corrected himself. “Miss Brown.”

Chapter 1

The woman stood in the doorway of the police department, looking over the room, her face tight. She was slender, tall, and might have been attractive if her hair under the drab hat had not been pulled back into a tight knot, making her forehead too high. She was dressed in a severe black suit, a traveling costume without a bustle or any of the absurd embellishments that women were affecting in 1885. At first glance, she might have looked a little like one of those dreadful mission solicitors, the sour women who held out their tambourines, demanding donations for the poor. But she was too poised, too neatly groomed, and she did not have the self-righteous look of a salvation peddler.

Most decent women who found themselves alone in the precinct with its tobacco-stained floors, its cigar-fouled air, amid Denver’s snouts and boosters and other lowlife, were timid, uneasy. They stood nervously, red-faced, eyes downcast, sometimes shaking, until one of the detectives looked up and asked what they wanted. But Beret held herself erect, businesslike, as she scanned the room, daring anyone to question her presence. The truth was, she was a little unnerved at being in a place that was so distasteful to her, knowing as she did how squalid police stations were, how corrupt the inmates on both sides of the law might be. But it couldn’t be helped, Beret told herself.

“Help you, miss?” A policeman spoke up at last.

Beret was startled by the question and almost blanched at the way the man looked her over, but she had had long experience in holding herself together and didn’t flinch. “I am looking for Detective Sergeant Michael McCauley.” Her voice was low and rather pleasant and had not one hint of her unease.

A man at a desk glanced up as the policeman waved Beret in his direction. Ignoring the stares from the other lawmen in the room as well as the reprobates, Beret walked quickly to the desk and said, “Detective Sergeant McCauley.” It was a statement, not a question. She had learned that was the best way to approach a policeman—or almost anybody, for that matter.

She did not appear to be a miscreant or the wife of some poor scapegrace come to beg for leniency for her husband. Perhaps that was why Mick stood up and nodded. “I am. What can I do for you, miss?”

“I’ve come about the death of Lillie Osmundsen.”

“You’re her mother?”

“Her sister.”

“Oh, sorry, ma’am. The light’s poor in here.”

Beret did not respond. Ten years older than her sister, Beret was used to being taken for Lillie’s mother.

“I wouldn’t have guessed you were sisters,” Mick said, after an awkward silence.

“You mean I am not a beauty like my sister.”

“I wouldn’t say that at all.” His reply was too hearty.

“Then I hope you are more observant when it comes to searching for my sister’s killer. It is obvious by far to anyone with a brain that she is beautiful, and I am unremarkable even on my best day.” She should not have been so touchy. Then she added, “
Was
beautiful.”

Beret’s voice was strident, and Mick frowned. “Yes, ma’am. I’m real sorry she passed over.”

“Yes. Thank you. I believe the term is ‘murder.’” Beret had repeated the word over and over in her mind, but she found it difficult to say it out loud, and she bit her lip to keep it from quivering. What an awful thing to have to say about one’s sister.

“Murder,” Mick repeated. “That’s what it is, all right.”

Beret felt her knees grow weak and asked, “May I sit down?”

“Sure.” Mick pulled a chair from a nearby desk and placed it beside his own. Both seated themselves.

They stared at each other until Mick broke the silence. “If you’ve come for your sister’s effects, the judge has them. There wasn’t much, a few trinkets. We had to break into her trunk because we couldn’t find a key. That’s when we learned her identity. I hoped there might be something there that … well … would have helped us, but there wasn’t. Hettie Hamilton, she’s the, uh, the … owner—”

“The madam, you mean.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s right, the madam. She said your sister had some diamond earrings that were missing. I guess you’d like to have them if we find them.”

Beret did not want the detective sergeant to think she was mercenary. “I’ve not come here for diamond earrings.”

“No.” Mick waited her out.

“I came to ask what success you have had in finding the man who killed my … my unfortunate sister.” Beret took a deep breath and held it.

Mick nodded. “We’ve sure been working on it. We’re doing our best.”

“Does that mean there’s been no progress?”

“You can rest easy that we’ll leave no stone unturned—”

Beret interrupted. “My sister is dead, my only sister. I did not come here for platitudes. Nor do I wish to be coddled. I want to know if you are close to finding Lillie’s killer. And if you are not, why not. You may speak plainly.” She detested men who treated her like an imbecile. Such straightforwardness in a woman was not a redeeming quality in most men’s eyes, but Beret did not care. Lillie had been the carefree one, the flirt, the one who drew men like cats to cream, just as Beret had always been drawn to her.

She wondered if the detective was competent or if he was simply some political appointee. He was nice looking, tall, with reddish-blond hair, not gone to fat from too much free food and drink like so many officers she had encountered. Most detectives were untrained, she knew, and their appointment was political. It was unlikely this man knew much about investigating serious crime. She stared at Mick until he looked away.

“We have some ideas, men she might have known,” he said.

“And they are?”

“I can’t say just now.” Mick looked at two men sitting nearby who were listening in on the conversation. He smirked and pointed with his chin at one of them. “That pickpocket with the copper tried to lift the wallet of the Reverend Tom Uzzell, no less. He must be new in town or else he’d have known that the Reverend Uzzell would have given him the money if he’d asked but would come down hard on any poor thug who tried to steal it.”

“I am not here to discuss pickpockets,” Beret said, glancing around the room and taking in the stares, the silence as the policemen as well as the malefactors tried to determine her business in the station. “I see that this is not a place conducive to conversation. Well, Detective, I have not had luncheon. Is there somewhere I can get a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup, a place where we can have a private conversation?”

Mick pulled out his pocket watch as if to show he was pressed for time, but he nodded. He stood, and Beret let him take her elbow and propel her back through the room to the door. “There’s a restaurant down the street, if you’re not too choosy. The food isn’t the best, but it’s cheap.” The two went up the stairs from the basement of City Hall, where the station was located, Beret raising her skirt to keep it away from the vermin and the wads of chewing tobacco that repelled even the rats. Out on the street, Mick pointed to a little café a few doors away.

“I imagine you would rather have a drink, but I am not fond of coffee in saloons,” Beret said, and Mick’s mouth dropped in surprise. Beret saw that and smiled to herself. She did like shocking people—sometimes, at any rate. She and Lillie had had that in common. She felt a stab of pain at the thought of her sister.

The two walked down Larimer Street, Denver’s major thoroughfare, past an undertaker’s parlor, a clothing store, a drugstore, without talking, until they reached the Parr Café. Mick opened the door, and Beret preceded him into the restaurant, glancing around the room at the wooden tables bare of any cloths, the mismatched chairs, at the black-and-white marble floor that was chipped and stained. She headed for a table in the back.