Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (22 page)

Duncan decided that he had done his duty by telling his father-in-law his fears; he had resolved never to be culpable again in a matter of withholding information from the old man. Helen, Benjamin, and Edward Stallworth, each of whom in turn came to visit Duncan, declared themselves disturbed not only by the violence of the attack but by its meaninglessness, its lack of motive. Duncan Phair eagerly agreed, and resignedly bemoaned his position as an unoffending victim of the harpies dressed in crimson and green.

After a week’s careful searching, the police could find no trace of the two women who had assaulted Duncan Phair. It was a mysterious thing, the police considered, and persisted in their belief that it was all a matter of personal vengeance. And, as the days passed and the members of the family remained unmolested, Duncan allowed himself to think that the murderous attack had been intended only for himself, a result of some minor portion of the Black Triangle investigations. This small deception, practiced upon himself, was far preferable to the thought that Lena Shanks might have begun to act on her fearful threat.

Chapter
31

In the second-floor chamber of number
1
King Street, where Mrs. General Taunton had spoon-fed an aged, dying married couple, Black Lena Shanks sat in a scarlet-cushioned wicker chair, and by means of a mirror that was attached to the window casement, observed the traffic that moved constantly between MacDougal and Varick streets. On this pleasantly chill Saturday morning early in October, her daughter Louisa and the pugilist Charlotta Kegoe sat stiffly in chairs a few feet distant. The children reclined on their grandmother’s bed, playing cards.

“Bad choice, I think,” said Charlotta, “to send those two girls to do it. They’re used only to drunken sailors, and when they come upon a lawyer that’s sober and strong, they can’t take him. Lena, I’m grieved I told you about ’em.”

“No matter,” replied Lena with a wave of her hand.

Louisa made signs that were readily interpretable. Next time, she and Charlotta would go out on such an errand themselves.

“No,” said Lena, “we’re not to be involved directly. Don’t want you on the street. Don’t want you to be seen, Louisa.”

“What about Duncan then, Nana?” cried Rob, knowing the man only by the name Maggie Kizer had called him.

“He’ll lie safe for a while,” replied Lena, and paused while a heavy water cart rattled noisily by. “Just for a while.”

What’s to be done now?
asked Louisa with her hands.

“Send for Pet Margery.”

Ella threw her cards down upon the sheet and hopped off the bed. From a wooden crate in the corner of the room where her clothing was kept, she extracted a ragged red dress and slipped it over her head. She tied a large yellow bonnet over her hair, taking good care to hide her side curls and, barefooted, ran out into the street.

Lena watched her granddaughter’s progress down King Street. Ella seemed an aimless hungry beggar-child, moving without purpose, and everywhere pausing. But presently her wandering took her to the unsigned facade of a gambling house on the far side of Varick Street, and she slipped inside without anyone apparently taking notice of her.

In a few minutes she swung out of the door again, munching a crust of bread and waving a beggar’s perfunctory thanks—as if she had unexpectedly obtained charity within. Her aimless peregrination then eventually brought her back to the stoop of her own building, where she played upon the lowest step for a while. Then, as if with pointless curiosity, she wandered up to the doorway and noiselessly dropped inside.

“On her way!” cried Ella a moment later, when she appeared in the doorway of Lena’s room. Yet it was a quarter of an hour before Lena Shanks saw the slight, pretty figure of Pet Margery advancing up King Street in a white dress a little the worse for mud and damp filth about the hems and cuffs, and twirling a black and white striped parasol over her shoulder. Ella had wakened the young woman from her sleep and she had wanted time to dress.

Pet Margery was a sixteen-year-old whore, whose mercenary sights were set only on those men who had made winnings in the gambling saloons of the Black Triangle. This specialization had been a natural consequence of her having been reared in the faro saloon of her father, Henry Porter, that stood on Varick Street within sight of Lena Shanks’s glass. Pet Margery had made herself the familiar mistress of all the gambling halls in the area, from the most respectable—Harry Hill’s back room—to the very lowest, where dice were tossed on a blanket laid over the muddy earthen floor. She had been for several years one of Lena Shanks’s regular customers; Pet Margery had been on the streets since she was twelve.

Charlotta Kegoe ran downstairs to meet Pet Margery and accompanied her back up to Lena’s room. “Hiding out, Lena?” squealed Pet Margery in a voice that was considerably more femininely childish than Ella’s.

“For now,” replied Lena.

“What can I do for you, then?” said Pet Margery, dropping daintily onto the edge of the bed, twirling her parasol prettily upon its bent point.

“A little work I want done. . . .” said Lena.

“By me!” cried Pet Margery, and giggled. Her hair was dyed red, but so cheaply that the color had come off on the brim of her white hat.

“
Ja
,” replied Lena solemnly, “by you.”

Lena Shanks and Charlotta Kegoe in tandem then gave the girl minute descriptions of the three men who had been touring the Black Triangle for the articles in the
Tribune
.

Quickly, Pet Margery identified them. “Always together,” she cried, “always together. Don’t gamble much except the young one; don’t drink much, always together. So they’re the ones who print the articles. Pa’ll be glad to hear, I’m sure!”

“No!” hissed Lena, “not yet. Where were they last?”

“Three nights back: Hudson Street. Hibernia Hall cellar, young one losing at schuss.”

“Want you to find ’em again, go out looking,” said Lena. “Find ’em again, and send word to me.”

“If I’m all the time looking, how’m I to work?” cried Pet Margery.

“How much do you make a night?” said Lena.

“Seven,” she replied truthfully, then thinking better for herself, added, “sometimes fifteen.”

“I give you twenty a night while you’re looking. And not a word, Pet, not a word. . . .”

On March
16
, directly after fleeing the buildings on West Houston Street, Lena Shanks and her daughter Louisa and the twins Rob and Ella had secreted themselves in the rooms of Charlotta Kegoe. They might have felt themselves safe if Lena had not recalled so well the strange appearance of Helen Stallworth in that out-of-the-way house. Lena considered it necessary that they depart the city immediately, and in fact, by the time Simeon Lightner’s account of the incident on West Houston Street had appeared in the
Tribune
, all four of the family were already to be found in a small house that they had taken in Mantoloking, New Jersey. They spent six months in this seaside resort masquerading as a bereaved and reclusive family of prosperous circumstance.

Weeping Mary had accompanied them in the guise of a superior servant, had secured the house in which they lived, had dealt with brokers and butchers and dressmakers and inquisitive neighbors. Charlotta Kegoe guarded the Shanks’s interests in New York, and each week was pleased to report that no progress had been made by the police or the newspapers toward their finding-out.

Simeon Lightner and Duncan Phair’s boast that the Shanks family, through the closing of Lena’s shop, the death of Daisy, and the suppression of Louisa, had been reduced to penury, was ungrounded. For despite these things, and even despite her family’s exile from New York, money was no difficulty for Lena. Louisa had been a wonder with the family’s finances, and their fortune was all safely invested, deposited, held in banks all over the city and in Philadelphia too. Of all that was valuable in the houses, only the account books had been taken away. After only two weeks of hiding in Mantoloking, Louisa made a foray back to Manhattan and withdrew five thousand dollars from a bank on Chambers Street. This money was for present exigencies, but it also proved that the family was financially secure; the purblind police had not discovered the talents that Louisa had buried in every part of the city, beneath a great and varied list of feminine Christian and common surnames.

However, it was not lost upon Lena that if not Daisy but Louisa had died upon the stoop of number
203
, all their funds would have been irretrievably lost. Louisa’s skill as a forger was required to withdraw their funds from the bank.

Louisa went back to New York once more, in May, to arrange for the exhumation of her sister’s corpse from the potter’s field near Eighty-fifth Street. Daisy was re-interred, by stealth and night, on the side of a hill in Greenwood Cemetery. Louisa could find no one who would undertake the removal of Maggie Kizer’s body from the graveyard on Blackwell’s Island, however, and the octoroon must remain in that desolate place.

The Shankses returned to New York on Saturday, September
16
. With funds provided by Lena, Charlotta Kegoe had purchased the two houses, number
1
and number
2
, that faced one another across King Street, almost at the corner of MacDougal. The old couple of the second-floor-front had died some weeks before and their chamber had remained vacant. Simple furnishings were moved in here for the use of Lena and the twins. Louisa stayed in Charlotta’s chambers and Weeping Mary was installed across the street. The Reverend Thankful Jones, the red-haired prostitute, and the young boy on the second-floor-back room remained as they were, and were scrupulous in their lack of curiosity about what went on in the rooms occupied by the Shankses. As Mrs. General Taunton had predicted to Helen, Mrs. Leed and her baby had not long survived their visit.

During their first week back in New York, the Shankses did not venture out of the house on King Street. Lena sat at the window upstairs and observed all that transpired in the street below. The children took turns at the door downstairs and minutely examined all who passed on the walk. At the end of seven days, Lena declared herself satisfied that their return to the city had been undetected.

Now the children and Louisa began to make expeditions about the city, always in different, concealing dress. Louisa had gone to the young boy in the second-floor-back room and he had supervised certain changes in her attire, the dressing of her hair, and the paint on her face, which made her unrecognizable as the starchily dressed, greasy-fringed Amazon who had tossed Officer Pane over a balustrade. The most anonymous of spies, these three soon discovered all there was to know of the Stallworths: their occupations, habits, habitations, servants, friends, and finances. They became studiously familiar with the chambers on Pearl Street, the Criminal Courts Building, Madison Square, Gramercy Park, and the Presbyterian manse. Lena’s former customers were approached, as Lena directed, and these women, who had been only sorry that Lena was forced to leave the city and had been incensed over Daisy’s death, promised their assistance to her in any small way that might be thought helpful. They did not have to be told that they would be well rewarded for their loyalty.

As all this was going on, Lena sat in her scarlet wicker chair on the second floor of the house, and from behind the heavy black veil of her bonnet—for she was still in deep and sincere mourning for her daughter—watched the ever-varying and grimy traffic on King Street. At last, on Saturday, September
30
, when Louisa indicated to her mother that a certain young woman, of whose many names the most commonly used was “Cyanide” Susan, had been approached and secured, Lena Shanks raised her veil slowly, and said: “They have forgotten us. They think that we’re dead.
Die Zeit ist gekommen!
Our time has come.”

The eight mourning cards were delivered to Gramercy Park on the following afternoon by Rob in a neat black suit.

Chapter
32

Simeon Lightner had long since made the rounds of all the well-known establishments in the Black Triangle, and the nights he spent there now he looked on as gleanings. His articles in the
Tribune
, rather than outraged and indignant, tended to be humorous or pathetic. He would relate interesting anecdotes of internecine wars among thieves, provide an amused account of a breakfast in a house of evil (“all oyster juice and aspirin”), or describe the deathbed of a miser.

On the night of Friday, October
13
,
1882
, Simeon Lightner and Benjamin Stallworth found themselves on West Street. Duncan Phair did not think himself sufficiently recovered from the attack of the two women to venture out at night into the Black Triangle.

West Street, at ten o’clock, was always awash with drunken sailors whose ships had docked only that day or the day before. The grog and gambling shops along this avenue had all been given names designed to entice seamen: The Sea Shanty, The Southern Cross Emporium, The Sailor’s Succour, and the like. Most of the buildings were so meager and poor that the sign painters were put to the extremity of their craft to emblazon the entire name across the front.

Just across from where Charlton merged into West Street was a grimy little gambling hall and saloon called the Jolly Tar’s Tavern. It was about twenty feet broad, a single story, with no real door, but only a dirty red curtain thrown across a rude opening cut in the clapboard walls. Two women, probably as repulsive in paint as they would have been without it, stood and beckoned sailors in, with promises of cheap plentiful liquor, cheap buxom girls, and tables of faro and pinochle and sancho pedro where no one ever lost.

Other places along the ill-lighted route being little more attractive, the two repellent shills managed to bring in a number of men, desperate for conviviality, who were just in from the sea. For no reason other than that they had not been there before, Simeon and Benjamin pulled their hats down low over their eyes and allowed themselves to be herded through the red curtain.

The entire low-ceilinged room was the color of saffron—the gaslight shining murkily through the palpable tobacco smoke. Just within the door was a large rickety piano, painted yellow, with a yellow-faced man who played with great dexterity but without expression or interest, and between every two songs, sipped at an empty glass that was kept at his side. There was a short bar to the right, presided over by an enormously fat woman wearing a bright blue dress and quantities of gold jewelry. She wore an expression which said: “When I’m sent to hell, the devil will contrive no greater punishment than to keep me behind such a bar in such a place as this. . . .” To the left were a dozen or so long tables, crowded with sailors of a dozen nationalities, all of whose varied clothing was alike stained with liquor and dirt. They growled and sang and yelled insults at one another and swore eternal friendship and made improper suggestions to the waiter-girls. These half-dozen young women, of singular coarseness, wore indecently short skirts, spangled tights, and boots with bells dangling around the high heels. In the back, several tables were set up for gambling: the promised games, plus euchre, seven-up, and sixty-fives as well.

Simeon and Benjamin, though certainly out of place in a saloon entirely given over to the entertainment of seafaring men, purchased from the sullen barkeep schooners of the best beer and took places close to a circle of Dutch sailors who, soberer than the rest of the room, were therefore probably plotting some mischief. With practiced eyes, Simeon and Benjamin observed everything. The reporter had long given over the habit of making immediate notes, for the appearance of tablets and pencils in such places was not looked on with favor.

After a little, when they had finished their beers and ordered more, Benjamin wandered to the back of the room, and for several minutes observed the games in progress there. Merely in the interests of investigation, he placed several small bets and was gratified that he did not lose all his money at once. Simeon had remained behind, and engaged one of the waiter-girls in conversation.

Neither Benjamin, intent upon his game, nor Simeon enthralled by the prevaricated narrative of the waiter-girl into whose hand he dropped a quarter dollar every few minutes, was aware of the entrance into The Jolly Tar’s Tavern of Pet Margery Porter. She wore a red jersey and a blue and white polka-dot skirt and showed herself altogether a better quality female than this place was used to entertaining.

Nevertheless, it appeared that she was acquainted with the barkeep, to whom she nodded friendlily, and from whom she accepted a glass of neat whiskey out of a bottle that had never served a sailor. Pet Margery then made a small tour of the place, airily putting off the vociferous advances of the men at the tables. When she came close to Simeon Lightner, she quickly averted her face and scanned the back of the shop.

Her eyes fell upon Benjamin. She glanced quickly around once more, then turned again to the front of the shop. “I’ll be back,” she whispered to the barkeep, and stepped outside.

She glanced sharply up and down West Street. Ella, who had been dawdling near the door in rags, scurried over and begged a coin. Pet Margery drew a nickel from her reticule, handed it to the child, and whispered: “The dopey one and the red-haired one are inside, handsome one ain’t with ’em. Run and tell Lena. Tell her I know what to do!” The child scampered off down West Street.

Pet Margery pushed inside the red curtain once more and sauntered past the bar to the back of the shop.

Benjamin Stallworth sat on the rough bench before the faro table, a rough affair itself with a much-stained green baize cover, and the playing board decipherable only by those already familiar with its configuration. Benjamin was.

Beside him sprawled a sailor, very drunk, whose sole motive for sitting there was apparently to lose all his money as quickly as possible so that he might return to the safety of his ship. His companion was a shrewd Yankee, not long a sailor, who kept a stack of silver coins in a dried eelskin and extracted them one by one to place upon the board. His goal was to make as much money as possible, but he only lost.

Benjamin had just lost twenty dollars when Pet Margery, in a sweet voice, begged room on the bench beside him. He glanced up at her, recognized her immediately for a prostitute, and nervously gave place. In the past six months, Benjamin had seen and heard much of which he had been previously ignorant, and he was often content to declare that he had really seen and done quite everything that there was to see and be done in New York; but the fact was that the noisy breath of one of these women upon his cheek still raised a copious perspiration on the inside of his collar.

“Here,” she said, handing Benjamin a five-dollar gold piece, and accompanying the action with a confiding smile, “place it on the jack to win.” The next round was about to be dealt.

Benjamin, blushing, did so.

“That’s kind of you,” she said. “What’s your bet then, sweetheart?”

“Trey to win, deuce to lose,” stammered Benjamin and placed his bet of ten dollars accordingly.

The other two men at the table scattered their coins across the board, one with as much care as the other carelessness.

“I win,” said the young woman, and drew her arm within Benjamin’s, “and I’ll buy you a sherry cobbler, but if you win you have to buy me one. How’s that?”

“Oh!” cried Benjamin, and glanced toward Simeon Lightner. But he was still occupied with the waiter-girl and Benjamin saw no reason not to imitate the reporter’s gallantry. “We needn’t wait. Order one for both of us now. . . .”

The young woman laughed gaily and nodded one of the waiter-girls over. She gave the order, just as the banker began to deal off his deck of cards.

With intense interest, Benjamin watched the cards turned up, first on the one hand and then on the other. The young woman regarded them hardly at all, though she watched the banker with considerable attention. Once or twice he lowered his eyes in a deliberate fashion in what was possibly the equivalent of a wink.

The sherry cobblers were brought and consumed, and both Benjamin and the young woman lost their bets. The shrewd Yankee sailor alone won, gathered his money, and ambled satisfied out of the saloon.

The drunken sailor took all his remaining cash and placed it atop the ace to win, while Benjamin and the young woman were more sparing in their wagers. All three lost, just as two more sherry cobblers were delivered to the table by the jangling waiter-girl.

“Oh!” said Benjamin with great reluctance, “I suppose I’m about done for tonight,” and he smiled wanly at the young woman at his side. He rose, and attempted to disengage her arm from his.

But she rose with him and pulled him over to the side, pointedly out of the hearing of the croupier. “It’s terrible!” she cried. “That’s a crooked table!”

“No!” exclaimed Benjamin, “I’ve seen crooked tables! I know crooked tables. I watched him closely—”

“And I watched closer!” cried the young woman. They stood in close conference beneath one of the yellow gas lamps, and turned their faces toward the dark wainscoted corner. “He cheated! Dealt off the bottom of the deck. And I touched one of the cards: marked with pinpricks!”

“Oh!” cried Benjamin with great disappointment.

“You was good to me,” purred the young woman, “so I want to give you some advice—”

“Yes?” said Benjamin wonderingly.

“Don’t come back in this place. Won’t get your money back, won’t do no good to make your accusations known. Your money’s lost like you had throwed it off the top of the East River bridge.”

“Yes,” said Benjamin ruefully. “It’s not likely I’ll be back here soon.”

“You like the cards, don’t you though?”

Benjamin laughed. “Yes, I suppose that I do a little.” The tête-à-tête with this young woman, who was quite pretty, was pleasing to Benjamin. Any other prostitute by this time would have urged him back to her furnished room on Chatham Street and then gone huffy away when he declined—but this young woman had said nothing about that at all.

“Well,” she said, “I know of a place where the tables are straight, least
one
of the tables is straight. . . .”

“Around here?”

The young woman nodded.

“Where is it?” demanded Benjamin.

“Nearby, I’ll take you there. . . .”

“I’m here with my friend. May I bring him too?”

“No! You come alone. . . .”

“Alone?” said Benjamin, on his guard once more.

“I like you,” said the young woman, “just the kind of fellow I’d take up a suburban residence with in New Jersey.”

Benjamin laughed. “I’m not so good-looking, you know. I know I’m not so good-looking . . .”

“Well,” said the young woman, “I seen all kinds and I been with all kinds, and you find a man who’s perfectly paralyzing in the face, and you go up and make love to him and he knocks you in the middle of next week. . . .”

“Well, I don’t strike ladies, I can assure you.”

“No,” said the young woman, “I could tell. What’s your name?”

“Benjamin. Benjamin”—he paused—“Ticknor,” giving the name of a prominent lawyer and Democrat.

“Well, Benjamin Ticknor, you meet me tomorrow night at the corner of King Street and MacDougal—you know where that is, don’t you?—and I’ll take you where there’s a straight table. There’s probably no more than two in the entire city, but I know of one.”

“How do you know it’s straight?”

“My pa runs it! And if he don’t always run it straight, least he runs it straight for me and my friends. . . .”

Benjamin laughed. “All right then, I’ll come.”

“Fine! Remember: King Street and MacDougal. Ten o’clock. And it’s a secret, you know. Scrape up what you can, grub around in all your pockets ’cause you’re sure to win!”

“I’ll be there,” said Benjamin. “What’s your name?”

“Margery,” replied the young woman, “but everybody calls me ‘Pet.’ ”

“Well, Pet, I’ll see what I can do about raising a little money. I’ve spent the last year looking for a good table, and if you can show me one I’ll be beholden to you.”

Pet Margery laughed, shook Benjamin’s hand as if she meant to pump another promise out of him, and tripped laughing out of the saloon.

“Well,” said Simeon Lightner when Benjamin had rejoined him, “you made a conquest, I think. What’d you have to pay for such a smile and laugh as that?”

“Oh,” shrugged Benjamin, with ill-concealed pride, “it was nothing. It was just that we both lost at the table. We both lost a couple of dollars, that’s all. . . .”

Just outside the red curtain of The Jolly Tar’s Tavern, Ella, in rags, sat hunched and apparently sleeping against the clapboards. However, as soon as Pet Margery appeared she jumped up and ran around the corner of the building. Pet Margery followed.

In the darkness of that alley stood a woman in a stiff black dress, with a short black bonnet drawn close down over her face.

“Meeting him tomorrow evening,” said Pet Margery, and grinned. ‘Ten o’clock, corner King and MacDougal, Lena can watch from her window. Then to my father’s. Everything’ll be set up.”

Louisa Shanks gestured impatiently, and the little girl interpreted: “Why not here? Why not now?”

“Because,” said Pet Margery, “he’s with a friend. And the place is full of sailors—can’t count on sailors. Tomorrow’ll give us time to have everything set up, time to prepare—and he’ll be alone.”