Gilded Needles (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (7 page)

Chapter
7

When she left Lena Shanks’s pawnshop, Maggie Kizer went back along West Houston in the direction of Harry Hill’s place. She paid no attention to the insults that were directed at her by the gaudily dressed women who lounged in the ground floor windows of the whorehouses along the way. These prostitutes might direct a remark at anyone who came within their sight, but they seemed to take particular umbrage at this well-dressed, well-deported woman, who could pass for a lady but for the very fact of her being on such a street at such a time.

Her amber spectacles had been removed and her white-gloved hands with the numerous rings she kept tight within her muff, to deflect attention from herself, but her carriage and her habit stood forth plainly in that street of license and dishabille. She was spoken to by several gentlemen, but their flattering remarks she ignored as studiously as she had the insults. One tall, drunken, bearded gentleman in a long fur coat placed his hand on her arm and wondered thickly if she were in need of protection for the remainder of her journey home—he would be honored to serve as her escort.

“Pardon me,” replied Maggie, in a voice that charmed him when it was meant only to discourage. She broke away and continued down the street, but he lurched after, undaunted. She did not hurry her pace, but a few numbers down, turned suddenly into a small drugstore, which was placed between two of the cheapest whorehouses on the street—a favorable location since the bulk of the apothecary’s business was with the prostitutes. Women who could not afford Daisy Shanks came to him for remedies for unwanted pregnancies, and he dealt in substantial quantities of opium, chloroform, and morphia.

The gentleman hard upon Maggie’s heels did not follow her in, for he was not so drunk that he forgot the danger often attendant upon a gentleman’s entering a store alone. He crossed the street, walked a space, crossed the street again, and then lounged outside the door, waiting for Maggie to emerge. But standing there, he was so much taunted by the women hanging out the windows of the neighboring establishment that he gave over the game and stumbled away, out of reach of their shrill abuse.

In the drugstore, which was neither larger nor brighter nor appreciably cleaner than Lena Shanks’s pawnshop, three fat, gaudy whores, whose vermilion lay half a dollar deep upon their cheeks, huddled at a small low table, on which stood three large glasses of absinthe. There was a short candle jammed in the mouth of a bottle and its guttering flame shining through the liquid in their glasses cast green shadows onto their pallid, pudgy hands. Their gossip hushed when Maggie entered and they watched her closely and with evident mistrust.

The shop was run by a young man whose hair had fallen out, whose skin was scarred with the smallpox, and whose eyes worked at cross purposes.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said slyly to Maggie, “what can I get for you?”

“Powdered opiate,” replied Maggie. “Three ounces.”

“Twelve dollars,” the druggist replied and, plucking out of a little wooden box his one- and two-ounce weights, dropped them onto one side of his scales. Then from a large jar filled with white powder he measured the opium, slipped it into a pink envelope, and slid it across the counter to Maggie. “Can’t sleep?” he inquired in an oily voice. “Bad dreams? Pain in the tooth?” Mischievously he had listed the common lies of the addict.

“No,” replied Maggie, coolly, handing him the money in notes and silver, “it’s for my aged mother who is dying of a cancer of the breast.” There was some sharpness in her voice, as though she expected him to disbelieve her and did not care what he thought. The druggist’s leer abandoned him as he stared at the jewels on her white-gloved hands. But almost immediately the red and green jewels, the white hand, and the pink envelope disappeared beneath the blue cloak. Maggie plunged out of the shop, not even hesitating at the door to see whether the gentleman in the fur coat lay in wait for her.

The whispers of the three fat whores at the very small table rose suddenly in pitch and volume and they loudly debated who she was, and what she was doing on West Houston Street, and whether she really imagined that she had gouged anyone into believing that she was a real lady. Their admiration for her clothing, however, was genuine if grudging, and they listened intently when the druggist, coming over with the bottle of absinthe—Death’s Green Wine—and replenishing their tall glasses, smirkingly described the jeweled rings on her white-gloved hands.

“She’d best be careful!” cried one whore.

“She’d best stay away!” cried another.

“If she takes her dainty hands out of her muff on this street,” cried the third, “someone’ll do her the favor of chopping ’em off!”

Maggie followed the route that the twins had taken when they carried the corpse of the young girl to the medical students the night before. But she went up Bleecker in the other direction, all the way to Downing Street, where a latchkey let her into a small, well-kept brick house. She walked up a single flight of the blue-carpeted steps and with another key unlocked a large set of double doors. These she opened quietly and just enough to pass through. She slipped inside and pulled them shut behind her.

Light from the streetlamp shining through the front windows was sufficient for her to move about without
stumbling and she did not turn up the gas. Laying aside her muff, she unfastened the silver chain at her throat and folded the cloak over the back of a chair. She unpinned her hat and placed it carefully atop the cloak. The money she had got that night she slipped into the drawer of an ornamental table beside the door.

Holding the pink envelope, she was just about to move toward her bedroom, when she detected a slight movement at the far end of the room—a rustle of cloth, the fall of a foot against the double-laid carpets. Without saying anything, Maggie turned the key of the gas and brought the lights of the brass chandelier up just enough to dispel the obscurity.

The small chamber was fashionably decorated in deep rose and dark blue. The furniture was quite expensive and the fabrics and the upholstery and the papering were all sumptuous and soft and deep. At the far side of the room, on a high-backed couch covered in a heavily napped blue velvet, sat a handsome gentleman with short brown hair and a thick brown beard. He was modestly but quite elegantly dressed in a brown-checked suit.

“Hello, Maggie,” he said easily, “Mrs. Weale let me in.”

“I told her she might,” said Maggie, slipping the pink envelope beneath the lid of her desk.

“I’ve brought you something—my New Year’s gift. Look on the mantel.”

The octoroon glided to the hearth, which was of a deeply veined pink marble, and there beside the blood-red Bavarian vase which held a mass of blue campanulas, was a small red box tied up with a blue ribbon. She untied the ribbon and opened the box; it contained a gold ring set with a circle of small but brilliant rubies.

“Do you like it?” said the man, who rose from the couch and came near the cold hearth.

Maggie, with voluptuous weariness, threw her arms about his neck, kissed him, and then rubbed her cheek tenderly against his beard.

“Oh yes, Duncan, very much.” She clasped her white-gloved hands behind his neck. “I’ve a weakness for rubies, such a weakness.”

When Maggie turned her head beneath the chandelier, Duncan Phair searched out the slight flaw of blackness in each of her fine green eyes. “You seem very tired tonight,” he said.

“Oh no,” she protested, “no no, earlier I was tired, but you’re here now, and I feel that everything’s come right.” She pulled back, and smiled with a ravishing tenderness. “Everything’s come right,” she whispered.

Chapter
8

Judge James Stallworth lived alone now in his large, old-fashioned mansion on Washington Square, at the southern extremity of Fifth Avenue. This had been one of the most fashionable addresses in New York when he had built the house in
1840
; but the well-to-do of New York, always restlessly pushing northward, had paused only a couple of decades in Greenwich Village and around Washington Square. By the time of Judge Stallworth’s second marriage, to Marian’s mother, the rich had built up Fifth Avenue as far as Thirty-Fifth Street, and created for themselves the exclusivities of Madison Square and Gramercy Park. Washington Square, whose well-groomed acres had once been the burying ground for the city’s paupers and criminals, and covered the moldering bones of a hundred thousand and more of the socially insignificant, now entombed the city’s unfashionable rich.

The Stallworth family was known to be “well-fixed,” but in fact they were much more than that. During the Civil War, when he was already a well-established lawyer, James Stallworth got a great deal of money by the selling of commodities: dried meat and flour mostly, with occasional large transactions in captured cotton. At that time he was already twice widowed: his first wife had died in giving birth to their son Edward, and his second wife had succumbed to influenza when their daughter Marian was only six, in
1859
.

Now a little more than seventy years of age, Judge James Stallworth was the best-known Republican judge in a city completely controlled by Democrats. He did not take bribes, and was known for his severity in sentencing. He had never become important in the politics of the city as much because of his unyielding temperament as his political affiliation—for places were sometimes found for obliging members of the opposition—but that same inflexibility had probably also saved him from being removed from office.

Judge James Stallworth had possibly a single weakness, and that was the affection he bore his dogs—or rather, his dog, for he never had more than one at a time. This was invariably a black-and-tan, and whether male or female, it was invariably called Pompey. The first of this long succession of animals the judge had possessed when he was a law student at Columbia, and he had grieved severely when that dog had been run down in the street by a vegetable wagon. Ashamed of the depth of the feeling that had been drawn out of him, as it were by surprise, he determined never to allow himself to be so touched again. He purchased another black-and-tan as near to like the first as he could find, called it Pompey and pretended that the first had not died. This little self-deception he had carried on now for five decades, and Pompeys came and went. But whether Pompey lived three weeks or thirteen years, the judge never lamented his death, for he was certain another could be got to take his place on the morrow. Something of this feeling probably carried over into his acceptance of the death of both his wives, and the very guarantee of Pompey’s immortality made it possible for him to forgo the pleasure of a third helpmeet after Marian’s mother died.

It had been a disappointment to the judge that his son Edward has chosen the ministry as his life’s work, for he had designed for Edward a career in the law and politics. But his ambitious hopes had been fanned to life again when Marian married Duncan Phair, a young lawyer who had assisted in the prosecution at Tweed’s second trial. Judge Stallworth had encouraged this liaison, and when Marian was told of the generous settlement that her father would provide if she married Duncan Phair, she was easily persuaded to accept the man’s proposal. Judge Stallworth was too old to aspire to much higher place or greater prestige and had decided to expend his energies toward the aggrandizement of his son-in-law, who was not yet much above thirty. James Stallworth wanted to insure that, by the turn of the century, Duncan Phair would be mayor of a Republican city, perhaps even governor of a Republican state.

Judge Stallworth never felt that his trust in Duncan Phair had been proffered foolishly. The man was eager for advancement and in constant consultation with his father-in-law. As often as they dared, the two men prodded Tammany Hall with staves of law and litigation. They had no illusion however that they did more than irritate this lumbering Gulliver with their legal toothpicks, but they still must do what they could, for no Republican would advance far in New York until Tammany was razed.

When he had married Marian, Duncan Phair was perfectly willing to be subsumed into the Stallworth clan. His own family was obscure, and he had left parents, siblings, and more distant relations to shift for themselves in Baltimore. Marian and her father had never troubled themselves with Duncan’s relatives, and Duncan neither mentioned them nor appeared to be uneasy about their condition. So far as anyone knew he did not communicate at all with Baltimore. Some had suggested that Duncan Phair would have taken his wife’s name upon marriage if it could have been accomplished without ridicule.

James Stallworth had found a partner for Duncan Phair, a plodding capable lawyer called George Peerce, who handled all the workaday business that came the partnership’s way, business on which no glory was likely to redound. Anything that entailed exposure to the public or to the society of lawyers in general, Duncan Phair managed himself, with his father-in-law’s detailed advice. In this manner he received both honor and increase of reputation while enjoying the greater financial security that the less exciting work provided.

Phair and his father-in-law often took luncheon together, or spent evenings in one another’s company in the house on Washington Square or in the lawyers’ club, where in low voices they talked over projects and strategies for the overthrow of the Democrats and the promotion of the Republicans—themselves in particular.

For more than a week now, the father-and son-in-law had worked on a plan suggested to the judge by the editor of the
Tribune
—a man who also took solace in the company of black-and-tans. The
Tribune
, Judge Stallworth learned, was soon to begin a series of articles on the depravity of certain New York neighborhoods. The Guiteau trial would eventually be concluded and Oscar Wilde would soon move on to other cities—and something must be found to engage the interest of the
Tribune’
s
readership. Subscribers would therefore, in the coming months, be provided with exact descriptions of the crimes and the criminals that existed in dark profusion in lower New York, through the sufferance—if not the actual assistance of—the police and the Democratic politicians.

Judge Stallworth and Duncan realized that it would be well to work with the
Tribune
in this enterprise, for it seemed certain to attract much attention. The Democrats would be hard put to defend the accusation—perfectly true, of course—that they fostered crime because of pecuniary recompense. Judge Stallworth duly introduced Duncan to the editor of the
Tribune
, and the three men had dinner together at the house on Washington Square on the evening of January
2
,
1882
. At that time it was decided that Duncan would be the legal advisor of the paper in these matters, and would accompany Simeon Lightner—the reporter who was in charge of the investigation—down into the “purlieus of putrescent corruption” that had raised themselves thickest and rankest around police headquarters itself.

The editor of the
Tribune
noted that Simeon Lightner had only just begun his researches, was spending his evenings moving from saloon to dance hall to low theater throughout the area, only surveying that wicked country, and that Duncan might join him at any time. “The presence and corroboration of a well-known and respected lawyer,” said the editor, “will lend substance and gravity to the undertaking, and we shall be better protected against the verbal shafts of the Democrats who will claim that we exaggerate, that we monger scandal, and that we have held up a Republican magnification glass and shown two pickpockets and three whores to be an entire population of cut-throats and bank-thieves.”

“It’s a good chance,” said Duncan to his father-in-law when the editor had taken his leave. “I think I might even persuade Lightner to allow me to append ‘A Lawyer’s Judgement’ to the end of each article that he writes, explaining points of the law, lamenting the present state of the Democratically run courts, and so forth. I’ll sign myself pseudonymously—‘The Republican Advocate,’ or some such—and then have it come out later that I was the author. What do you think, Father?”

Judge Stallworth nodded sagaciously, and stroked Pompey’s back. “You be certain that you’re in control of this, Duncan. I think it would be wise if you went to talk to that reporter tomorrow. Let him know that you’re willing to assist him in anything, committing time, resources, and so forth, and then just make sure that
you
guide it through. Now, what I would suggest is that you concentrate upon a single area within the city, a single criminal neighborhood. You can say: ‘Here is a single square, a single street, and see what the Democrats have done: they’ve set up five houses of ill repute, five pawnbrokers who are in reality receivers of stolen property, two gambling halls, five saloons that remain open all the night through and even upon the Sabbath. Here are thirty-five prostitutes in residence, seventy-five thieves, and these ten houses have produced seventeen murderers and twenty-one victims of murder . . . And so on, you see.”

“Yes,” said Duncan.

“Then,” said Judge Stallworth, “we draw on what influence we have with the police and have them close down the gambling halls, shut up the whorehouses, drag the pickpockets to the Tombs, and in fact, relocate the entire street to Blackwell’s Island. Then we set up some charity in one of the vacated houses—an ‘Asylum for Infantile Prostitutes’ or some such, and then get the credit for having brushed clean the entire city. If you concentrate on the one area, Duncan, you can accomplish something. Expose the bribe-taking schemes, that’s very important, show the ways that every criminal business is indissolubly linked to Tammany.”

“But which area is best do you think, Father?”

“Well,” said Judge Stallworth, and rubbed his thin parchment fingers together, “not the Sixth Ward of course, that’s
too
depraved, and that’s the Tammany stronghold besides. It’s all right to report on it, of course—say how dreadful the tenements are, how many corpses are discovered each night in the gutter, and so forth—but the hard work should be concentrated in a single area. And I have no influence over the Tenth Ward either, for the Democrats make sure that they’re in control of the courts there, but I do have a little space that lies west of MacDougal, between say Canal and Bleecker Streets. We’re not so very far away from it as we sit here now. The judge—you wouldn’t remember him, Duncan—who had it before me, called it the ‘Black Triangle’ because of its shape and the amount of crime there.”

“The area’s not improved of late,” remarked Duncan.

“No!” laughed the old man, “and a good thing for us. You can make the point that all this horror festers within half an hour’s walk of the most fashionable houses in the city. Frighten ’em. Nobody today remembers the Draft Riots, they might as well never have taken place. Have remembrances of the trouble during the war, when houses were burnt and the niggers were hanged within sight of these very windows, when the shops were looted and gentlewomen violated. Make ’em think it could happen tomorrow if this isn’t all cleaned up by the Republicans. The Democrats are fomenting a revolution, tell ’em that!”

“Well,” said Duncan, with raised eyebrows, “don’t you think that’s a bit far to take it?”

“No,” replied Judge Stallworth, “it’s not. This is a good issue and deserves our best attention. I shouldn’t worry about other business just now—Peerce can take up your slack. It would be of considerable help if I could try the cases that came up as a result of this series of articles so you might do very well to confine your researches to the Black Triangle. Remember: west of MacDougal, south of Bleecker, north of Canal. Anyone arrested there will come up before me. You know, now I think on it I can remember: along about the time of the war there was a family there, called I don’t remember what. Husband, wife, wife’s brother, children, and the like—whole family involved in crime up to their blackened teeth. I hanged the husband and shut up the mother at the Island, sent the children away—and was applauded for it in every journal in the city. They lived in the Black Triangle, and I’m certain there are others like them today, ripe for the quashing. Listen to me, Duncan, you be on the lookout—be particularly on the lookout—for a family of criminals. Nothing goes over so well as the destruction of a whole gang—it’s as good as exterminating brigands.”

“This is a good chance for us,” said Duncan mildly.

“Yes, but particularly for you! And remember: this is not the time for half measures. First concentrate on the Black Triangle, paint it blacker than it is. Then find a family, some clan steeped in sin there, and drive ’em into the river. Hold ’em under till they drown! There’ll be a crowd a hundred thousand strong on the shore to sing your praises and crown your brow!”

Duncan scratched Pompey’s head, and though he nodded acquiescence to all that Judge Stallworth had suggested, his thoughts were of the modest brick house on the edge of the Black Triangle where there lived a beautiful young woman with a blue line under her thumbnail and a black fleck in her bright green eye.