Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (18 page)

“No jewels,” said Black Lena, and stared at Judge Stallworth.

“Madam,” said the Judge severely, “I must warn you that if you are perjuring yourself in this matter, you will be treated with the utmost severity by the law. There is nothing to be gained by an attempt at protecting this woman. The police will search your premises, and if you are found with anything that remotely resembles the jewelry that was worn by Cyrus Butterfield on the night he was murdered, you will answer for it with your freedom. You will repent of your perjury on an extended visit to one of the islands situated in the East River.”

“No jewelry,” repeated Lena, for the first time with a sly smile on her face. She turned slowly away from Judge Stallworth, and was dismissed by both attorneys.

This completed the prosecution’s case. The only witness called for the defense was Maggie Kizer herself, who approached the stand with a hesitant gait. There, the judge asked that she remove her spectacles, and she did so with a trembling hand. All the courtroom leaned forward to catch the black fleck in her green eye. Maggie Kizer turned a blank face on the jury. She seemed unaware of the intensity of the attention she commanded.

Her attorney asked her to state what had happened on the night of December
31
, and in halting but melodious speech, Maggie Kizer told the story of that night, often wandering from the narrative or trailing off altogether, so that she had to be gently prompted. Her tale, if incoherent at times, or beside the point, still left a better impression than could have been expected, for she spoke of Cyrus Butterfield with respect and some affection, spoke with indignation of the intrusion of the escaped convict and described how she had been powerless to stop the altercation that had developed between the two men.

At this point the attorney for the defense thought it best to have his client leave off, and he thanked her. Maggie unfolded her spectacles again, and was raising them to her face, when her motion was interrupted by the prosecutor: “Oh, if I might have a few words, Mrs. Kizer, before you withdraw from the box—just a few words.”

Maggie lowered the spectacles and her eye trailed listlessly to the bandy-legged prosecutor. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I will answer your questions, sir.”

“Your speech was finely wrought, Mrs. Kizer, may I say, and showed you an evilly circumstanced victim, or perhaps, considering your profession, I should say, an evilly circumstanced victimizer. You have nowhere denied, have you, that you get your living by the prostitution of your body, have you? That for you, ‘bed’ and ‘board’ are one and the same thing?”

“I am, sir, as you have yourself said, evilly circumstanced. I am an object of charity, and dependent upon the good offices of others for my sustenance.”

“And Mr. Butterfield was a kind Christian man who provided you with such sustenance out of the generosity of his heart?”

“Yes, Mr. Butterfield was a good man, as you have said, unexceptionable I think is the word you employed.”

Maggie’s speech faltered a little, and fell sometimes to an inarticulate softness. Her eyes seemed unable to maintain their focus upon any object or person.

“And you, in your gratitude, accorded Mr. Butterfield certain favors.”

“Sir,” said Maggie wearily, “I have not denied that when the convict entered my rooms, unannounced and through violence to the locks on my doors, Mr. Butterfield was lying in my bed in a state of extreme dishabille.”

“Yes,” said the lawyer, a little abashed, “thank you for that admission again. We will all do well to remember it. You have declared yourself distraught that Mr. Butterfield was murdered—”

“Certainly,” replied Maggie, “my regard for Mr. Butterfield was very high.”

“—and yet you did not hesitate to relieve yourself of his corpse, you did not hesitate to protect the murderer of this inestimable lawyer, you did not hesitate to deny Mr. Cyrus Butterfield—whom you held in such high regard—to deny him the small comfort of a Christian burial?”

“No,” replied Maggie Kizer without hesitation, “I did not. Cyrus Butterfield, much as I had esteemed him, was past my help or comfort. At that time, I became more concerned with my own safety and wished only to protect myself. I was grieved, but I was not foolish.”

Her lawyer rose to protest against these damaging admissions of his client, but Judge Stallworth waved him down.

Maggie Kizer was far away from that court in her mind and she heard the prosecutor’s questions directed at her as from a great distance. She answered with a throat and tongue that seemed to have understanding and purpose of their own. Only her eyes belonged to the being that was ineluctably herself, and with them she observed everything and everyone with equal disinterestedness. It never occurred to her all the while that she was on the witness stand, all the while that she testified in her own defense, that these words that came out of her own fair throat might bear upon the outcome of her case, or supposing that to be predetermined, the severity of her sentencing. And in one matter only had she deviated from the truth; Cyrus Butterfield’s jewelry, she said, had been thrown into the river for fear of its being traced, and the money that she had sent to the convict in Washington had been gold that was freely repaid to her by Lena Shanks. Her sister-in-law, Maggie maintained, had been in no manner involved in the death of Cyrus Butterfield, the flight of Alick Kizer, or the secretion of the dead man’s jewelry.

“And lastly,” said the prosecutor with a smile, “Mrs. Kizer, are you—as Mrs. Weale has averred—a woman of mixed blood? In short, are you an octoroon?”

“I am,” said Maggie Kizer without emotion, and she was allowed to leave the witness box.

The prosecutor cajoled the jury, and the defense attorney wooed it; Judge Stallworth addressed it in his most pleasant, least sarcastic voice. The twelve men, who at first had been swayed by Maggie’s beauty and her apparent honesty and inculpability in the crime, had been disaffected by the discovery of her mixed blood. After three minutes of deliberation, carried on in whispers in the jury box itself while the rest of the court tried in vain to hear what they said to one another, Maggie Kizer was convicted as an accessory and accomplice to the murder of Cyrus Butterfield.

Chapter
25

Judge James Stallworth postponed the sentencing of Maggie Kizer for one week, until March
13
, not because he was in any doubt as to what lawful penalty he would impose upon the octoroon for her crime, but so that Simeon Lightner might make the most of her conviction.

The
Tribune
provided a
verbatim
transcript of the trial on Tuesday morning. On Wednesday, a long piece appeared about Lady Weale, her antecedents, her history, and her character. Simeon Lightner pointed out that this sour woman was almost as reprehensible a factor in the murder of Cyrus Butterfield as Maggie Kizer had been. She had been present in the next room at the moment that the lawyer was murdered, she had helped to dispose of the body, she had not come forward with her information until more than a month had passed—the
Tribune
inferred that the reward money was then her sole motive for betraying Maggie Kizer to the authorities.

On Wednesday afternoon, to the reporter of the
Sun
,
Lady Weale retorted with a garbled story of how she had been threatened with death if she told anything of what had happened on New Year’s Eve. It was the dictates of conscience that had
forced
her, in the end, to tell her tale, no matter then the promised injury to her person.

On Thursday morning, the
Tribune
reported that Lady Weale had left New York, for parts unknown. The man who owned the house on Bleecker Street said that Lady Weale had been fearful for her life, having seen the Shanks twins loitering about before her house at late hours of the night. She had had no intention of presenting an easy mark for Lena Shanks’s revenge.

In the same paper, Simeon Lightner prepared a long essay on the methods employed by Lena Shanks in her pawnbroking business, as it was charitably called, which concluded with a list of her customers who were in jail, or had been in jail, or who were now sought by the police for various felonies. It occupied three columns and a half.

On Friday morning there was a suggestive, though not really detailed, description of Daisy Shanks’s business on the fourth floor of number
203
West Houston Street. Simeon’s imagination was assisted by the memory of a shoplifter whose cell was next to Maggie Kizer’s in the Tombs. She had availed herself of Daisy’s services twice in the past three years, but after the second essay had been laid up for two weeks with an infection. Simeon Lightner suggested that many young women never recovered at all from the ministrations of the “Laughing Abortionist.”

About Louisa Shanks, Rob, and Ella, he had little to say, though he inferred that none of them was up to any good. He gave descriptions of the aunt, the nephew, and the niece, and added what little gossip about them had been gleaned from their near neighbors who were susceptible to meager bribes.

On Saturday morning, the door to Lena’s shop, number
201
, was not opened at all. Ella hung about on the stoop all day, reading through the Testament that Helen Stallworth had meant for Charlotta Kegoe, and told all who approached that Lena Shanks had left off doing business for the time being. When asked when the operation would resume, Ella shook her curls and said, “When we can, when we can.”

A lady in distress who applied at the next door down was also turned away, but when she wandered aside, Rob surreptitiously approached her, led her around the corner, and took her into the house by the back way. Daisy explained this subterfuge: “With the papers going at it like they are, Ma can’t keep her shop open, and I have to pretend to turn my ladies away—all to take care against the cops, you know. Those who would have come to Ma may go elsewhere, but you, and my other ladies, where would you go? To a butcher with knitting needles! To a doctor with no more feeling in him than a carved stiff!”

On Monday morning, the day set for Maggie’s sentencing, Simeon Lightner noted in the
Tribune
that Lena Shanks’s shop had been closed on Saturday and Sunday both, that Daisy Shanks had left off practicing her abortions; he expressed the hope that these two women, through publicity, had been permanently stopped in their dangerous and criminal careers.

To this, Duncan Phair appended a criminal history of the Shanks family: providing brief
precis
of the trials of Cornelius Shanks, Lena Shanks, and Alick Kizer. Maggie Kizer was not the first of this family to be charged with murder. It was to be hoped that the other two now, the maleficent daughters Louisa and Daisy, would be brought before the law for their infamous crimes in the Black Triangle. Mulberry Street had begun to gather its evidence against Lena; her shop was shut up, and it was only a matter of time before she was imprisoned on the Island. The twins, if not already mired in corruption, ought to be separated, from their family and from one another, and carried out west to Minnesota or Wisconsin, where sturdy young children were wanted for farm indentures. The Shanks clan, by their viciousness, cried out to be broken and scattered.

This was the first of the lawyer’s articles to be signed not with a pseudonym, but with his true name, Duncan Phair.

“Margaret Kizer,” said Judge James Stallworth on Monday morning, March
13
, “you stand before me condemned of the crime of accessory and accomplice to murder, a heinous malefaction committed under the vicious and degrading circumstances of concupiscence and robbery. Your victim was a gentleman of great worth and admirable influence within the community; he was husband to a virtuous wife and father to three inestimable offspring, all of whom are now bereaved and destitute. You have brought total ruin upon an innocent family. . . .”

Maggie Kizer stood glassy-eyed beside her attorney. By the court’s specific direction, her amber spectacles had again been removed and lay folded on the table before her.

“Cyrus Butterfield, by what devious means known best to you and others like you, was inveigled into the indulgence of licentious pleasures; a defect surely in a gentleman striving toward civil and moral perfection, but a defect undeserving of the punishment he received—death.”

Behind Maggie Kizer, in the rows of benches reserved for spectators, sat Lena Shanks, stolid and unmoving and expressionless, but never allowing her eyes to drift from the judge’s face as he pronounced sentence. Ella sat beside her grandmother and very slowly twisted in her seat, examining carefully every face in the courtroom.

“It was not possible for the jury, not possible for me to believe that you stood idly and helplessly by, unable to interfere, unable to protest, unable to intercede for the life of Cyrus Butterfield. You were a basilisk to pity. The escaped convict, your husband, whose affections you had betrayed with all and sundry, might have succumbed to remorse, but you, Maggie Kizer, without a single kind word to be wasted upon the deceased, ordered the disposal of the corpse and directed the murderer’s escape. It is this unfrenzied imagination, this cold ingenuity we find most reprehensible.

“I have seen no reason,” continued Judge Stallworth in a slower, softer voice, “to temper my sentence. There is no urgency to compassionate a woman who herself had no compassion. In a woman less obviously educated, in a woman who had not enjoyed your early benefits, I might have attributed such wondrous salamanderlike cold-bloodedness to your mixed heritage; but with every opportunity to overcome the slight noxious tinge of tainted blood, the fact that you sunk to such depravity that crime and disease fell from you like dust from the folds of your skirts, is a proof that you voluntarily gave way to evil, that you opened your arms to wickedness and embraced corruption.”

Maggie Kizer, weary on her feet, swayed a little, was steadied by the hand that her attorney placed atop her wrist. Her eyes moved dully over the court, and only gradually drifted back to the white parchment face with the gleaming blue eyes set in it like the amethyst chips in a Roman bust.

“Maggie Kizer,” said the judge, in a light matter-of-fact voice, “it is the will of this court that the full penalty of the law be exacted for your part in the brutal murder of Cyrus Butterfield. As an accessory and accomplice in fact, and as instigator in our moral judgment, I hereby sentence you to be taken to the prison on Blackwell’s Island, and in one week’s time, to be hanged by the neck until you are dead.”

Maggie Kizer glanced vaguely around the court and, for the first time seeing Lena Shanks, nodded to her briefly in dreaming gratitude for the opium that Rob had brought the previous evening.