Riptide (9 page)

But the man who had lodged with her was not in police custody. He had disappeared. Only his name was known, or at least the name signed in the hotel registry: C. Kniclo.

The police had surmised how Kniclo made his escape. He could not have left via the hotel’s main door, locked as it was after midnight. Apparently he opened a trapdoor in the ceiling of his room, which led to the roof; bloodstains were found on the scuttle. From the roof he descended to the street via a fire escape. Later that night a bloodstained man matching Kniclo’s description appeared in the lobby of the Glenmore Hotel a few blocks away. Told there were no accommodations, he tried to use the lavatory to wash up, but was ejected from the premises.

Kniclo must have regained consciousness only to find himself covered in blood in a room with a murdered woman. Rather then panicking as expected, he had proved distressingly resourceful.

His disappearance was bad enough. Worse was speculation in the press that Kniclo might not be the killer at all. It was suggested that he had left the hotel earlier, and that some other party had attacked Carrie Brown when she was alone in her room. Accordingly, suspicion had fallen on the other guests of the hotel that night, especially those who had lodged on the fifth floor. This included “Mr. Wilson,” the impromptu alias Hare adopted when the hostess, Mary Miniter, filled in the registry.

There was nothing to connect Hare to the name Wilson, but Mary Miniter had gotten a good look at him, and from news accounts it was obvious she was talking to the authorities. She could provide them with a good description. He had admitted to being a Brit. If the steamer records were searched, and the authorities in London were contacted...

The damnably elusive Mr. Kniclo had put a crimp in a Hare’s plans, opening the door to exactly the hysteria he had hoped to avoid.

The headline of the
New York Times
on April 25 framed the matter concisely.

Choked, Then Mutilated

A Murder Like One of ‘Jack the Ripper’s’ Deeds.

Whitechapel’s Horrors Recorded in an East Side Lodging House.

The
Herald
, not to be outdone, countered with its own headline.

Ghastly Butchery by a ‘Jack the Ripper’

Murder and Mutilation in Local Whitechapel Almost Identical with the Terrible Work of the Mysterious London Fiend

Strangled First, Then Cut to Pieces

Not only did the press trumpet this alarum, but the police seemed to take the connection to Whitechapel quite seriously. The coroner told reporters that the crime could be the work of “the fiend of London.” There were rumors of transatlantic cables flying between the New York Police Department and New Scotland Yard. A manhunt was underway throughout the city, far surpassing the effort that would be made in any ordinary slaying.

It was ironic. He had come to the States to escape the attention of the authorities, and on his first night he had stirred up a new hornets’ nest. And all for a gray-haired crone who in a saner world would never be mourned. A crone, he learned to his amusement, who was known to her few friends as “Old Shakespeare” for her habit of reciting doggerel.

It was said Old Shakespeare came to New York seeking fame on the stage; failing in this ambition, she gave herself up to drink and debauchery. Well, she occupied the limelight now.

The situation was grave. All thirty-five hundred members of the NYPD had been mobilized to search every hotel and flophouse for anyone who’d lodged at the East River Hotel on the night of April 23.

After leaving the scene of the crime, Hare took a room at a doss-house four blocks away—a safe enough distance, he thought, given the certainty of the blond foreigner’s arrest. But there was no arrest, and he had to leave the doss-house the next day, forfeiting the two bits he’d put down in advance for his second night. He had seen plainclothes detectives going from door to door in the neighborhood.

He relocated outside the Fourth Ward, believing that the dragnet would not extend beyond the precinct. But he had barely settled into a slum boardinghouse called the Anderson Inn when he heard rapping on his door. More police officers, these in uniform. He answered their questions smoothly, claiming to have arrived by ship that very day, but he wasn’t sure he persuaded them. Once they were gone, he went on the run again, surrendering another two bits.

He passed that night in an alley. On the following day he took the ferry to Jersey City, where he found another boardinghouse. There he hoped to be undisturbed, but reports appeared in the press of a possible Jersey City connection to the killing. He had no way to know if the police were on his trail, or if this new investigative avenue was merely a coincidence.

Either way, it was obvious the furor was not diminishing. The chief of police was under mounting pressure. Hundreds of possible “suspects” had been rounded up. It seemed as if every foreigner in the New York area was at risk of arrest. If he were caught up in the general melee, and then identified by that bitch Mary Miniter...

His heart was racing all the time. He could scarcely sleep. He awoke at every stray noise. He expected capture at any moment.

Every day he bought a full complement of newspapers—the
Times
, the
Sun
, the
World
, the
Herald
, the
Tribune
, the
Broadway Eagle
, the
Morning Journal.
He read and reread every article, obsessively teasing out hidden meanings.

A hunted Hare, he joked grimly to himself. That was what he was.

Matters could not continue down this road. Disaster lay in sight.

On Monday, April 27, he returned to New York City, retrieved his baggage from the storage locker, and took a taxi to Grand Central Station, where he boarded a New York Central train bound for Chicago. He carried little with him except some clothes, his London diary, and a handful of keepsakes acquired through the years. There was a white handkerchief from Polly Nichols, the first whore gutted by his knife, and a miscellany of items belonging to the others: a small tin of sugar, a comb, a pawn ticket never redeemed, and two brass rings pulled from Annie Chapman’s hand.

The train bore him north through New York state, branching west at Albany and continuing through lush valleys that bristled with the first green shoots of springtime. He passed Syracuse, Buffalo, and Detroit, heading into the nation’s great open spaces, its prairies and grain fields. An endless horizon beckoned. By the time he reached Chicago he was refreshed. The world was made anew, and all things were possible.

Even so, he kept an eye on the news from New York, less from concern than from curiosity. The case had turned amusing, and it appeared a foreigner would pay for the crime after all. Not the blond Swede or German or whatever he had been, but a different foreigner altogether. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that one was as good as another.

The suspicions of the police had fallen on a certain Algerian, Ameer Ben Ali, who had the misfortune of taking room 33, across the hall from the murder site, on the fatal night. Ali was the sort of character one encountered everywhere in dockside slums, a drifter, possibly a small-time hoodlum. It was claimed that a trail of blood led from Carrie Brown’s abattoir to Ali’s room, though more sober reports suggested that the crowd of reporters themselves had tracked the blood across the hallway.

Be that as it may, the unfortunate Ali was seized by the police and subjected to a dubious trial in which he defended himself in laughably broken English much as C. Kniclo might have done. By now all thoughts of a blond blood-spotted foreigner had been put aside, and press and public clamored for conviction of the Algerian rogue. The jury obliged, sentencing Ali to life imprisonment at a penal institution known by the peculiar nomenclature of Sing Sing.

Hare received word of the jury’s verdict in July, as he languished in Chicago, planning his next move. He took the development as a favorable omen. Life in his new country had commenced on a most promising note. He could only hope he would be so fortunate in his escapades with other victims.

For there would be others, of course.

nine

Jennifer pushed her chair away from the table and sat looking at the book.

Jack the Ripper’s diary. That was crazy. Right?

“Right,” she murmured.

But she wasn’t sure.

If somehow this book was the authentic testament of history’s most infamous serial killer, then she had to assume that the bodies in the cellar were the Ripper’s work, as well.

Jack the Ripper in California.

She ran her fingertips over a page of the diary and felt the faint rise of the lettering characteristic of iron-gall, a common 19
^th
-century ink. The ink wasn’t washed out, as it would be if it had been diluted to simulate aging. There was obvious bronzing—iron-based inks oxidized naturally within eighteen months—and significant feathering; the ink had bled into the paper, a sign of age.

The writing was smooth and showed none of the “tremble” seen in attempts to disguise one’s handwriting. In some forgeries of old documents, flourishes were added to the handwriting to produce a more antique appearance. She saw no decorative additions here.

But why would there be artificial flourishes? The diary was no conscious imitation. It was real. It might be the product of the Ripper, or of someone who believed himself to be the Ripper, but it was not written to fool her. It was not left in a tin box underneath a heap of skeletons to play mind games with a psycholinguistic analyst in the 21
^st
century.

The vault of bones was a time capsule left by the killer, whoever he was. The diary and the bodies were his message to the future, his mocking announcement that he’d gotten away with it and was forever beyond capture.

She wondered if he had murdered them here. Had lured them to the house, killed them in its confines. In a back room, perhaps, where their cries would be unheard. This room...

If she lifted the carpet, would she find bloodstains on the hardwood floor? If she peeled back the wallpaper, would she find scratches grooved by clawing fingernails? If she closed her eyes, would she hear screams...?

At the front of the house, the doorbell buzzed.

The noise startled her. She took a steadying breath, then left the study and made her way through the house to the front door. She opened it, and Maura was there.

“Oh,” Jennifer said. “What are you doing here?”

“And hello to you, too. I was coming by to check on you. And it looks like it was a good idea. You seem pretty frazzled. But at least you’re alive. You could have called to let me know.”

“Sorry.” Jennifer ran a distracted hand through her hair. “It’s been a hectic day.”

“Tell me about it. I’m showing a two-bedroom condo the size of a file cabinet to a lovely young couple who’ll soon be in debt up to their earlobes, when all of a sudden the place starts boogying. The lady had a freakout, and the last I saw of her, she was insisting they move to Seattle.”

“Seattle has earthquakes, too.”

“I mentioned that, but she wasn’t in a mood to be reasonable.”

Maura Lowell, thirty-seven, was a real estate agent who worked Venice and Ocean Park. She’d met Jennifer through Richard, back when Richard was looking for a condo of his own. She and Richard dated for a while, one of the many times when Richard went out with a woman older than himself.

“And of course,” Maura added, “right away I was worried about you. I mean, look at this place.” She rapped the doorframe. “A stiff breeze could knock the thing over. I figured a quake would do you in for certain.”

“It would take more than a quake to bring down this house.”

“Yeah, yeah, they don’t build ’em like this anymore. Well, you’re alive, and I’m hungry, so let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere food is served. It’s after six o’clock, kiddo. Chow time. Unless you’ve got something better to do?”

ten

They ate in downtown Venice at the Reality Bites Café, an offbeat little bistro where TVs suspended from the ceiling displayed movies shot locally. At their corner table Jennifer faced
Touch of Evil
, the Orson Welles classic that used Venice as a stand-in for a decaying Mexican border town. In the 1950s it hadn’t been much of a stretch.

“I love that flick.” Maura pointed to the screen behind Jennifer, where a different movie was playing. She looked over her shoulder long enough to identify it as
White Men Can’t Jump
.

When Jennifer turned back, Maura was flirting with the busboy again. He was a tanned, muscular surfer type with peroxide blond hair and a slack, goofy expression.

“You and me, we should go somewhere,” Maura was saying. “The night is young, and so are you. It’s a winning combination.”