The Formula for Murder (2 page)

I put it in my lace hankie but don’t put it up to my nose. I am here for a dear friend and I don’t want my senses muted.

Butcher-block slabs are set out in two rows, a dozen on each side, like beds in a hospital ward. Wood is a cheap but an unfortunate choice for morgue tables because it stains. White sheets, many stained with blood and other body fluids, are tossed haphazardly over bodies not being worked on.

Inspector Abberline had entered before me to “prepare” the room for my visit—covering the naked dead lest they offend my fragile feminine constitution. I could have told him that I had already seen things in my life that no woman—or man—should have seen.

From the appearance of the bodies that are not covered, most of them had been pulled from the river already in an advanced state of decomposition. Like New York City’s waterways, the Thames is not a gentle environment for human flesh. One wonders how the poor fish survive.

I’m grateful that most of the bodies are sheeted, hiding the cruelties of man, machine, or that done by their own hand. I have been in morgues where bodies are left uncovered, lined up like dead fish ready to be gutted.

A woman dressed in widows’ black from bonnet to shoes is sitting next to a male body on the first slab in the room. Her head drifts down and then jerks back up as she fights dozing off. A bell tied to the man’s wrist tells me that she’s his wife or other close relative there for “the waiting.” The procedure occurs when the morgue attendants are not entirely certain that the man is dead. Rather than risk burying him alive, the bell is placed on his wrist for twenty-four hours. If it rings, he will be transferred to a hospital rather than the cemetery.

My heart goes out to the woman. She is a lonely figure, full of hope that has little promise.

Two tables down from her an attendant wearing a white cloth apron is scrubbing a male body, dipping his bloody rag into a bucket and bringing it back, bloodred water flying off the rag as it is pulled out of the pail, splashing on the floor and draining through the slats into the river.

Against the back wall are wood shelves with knives, scalpels, saws, and other medical instruments and supplies. A small cart next to it is piled high with dirty, bloody rags and clothing.

As a crime reporter I have been in morgues before, so as my eyes sweep this room I recognize that it’s not a fully functional coroner’s examination room, despite some of the “tools of the trade” on the shelves. Rather than doctors with saws and knives cutting into bodies or testing vials of blood for poisons in a hunt for a cause of death, I see only
Dieners,
morgue assistants, whose duties are to handle and clean the bodies.

Inspector Abberline catches my look at the
Dieners
and reads my thought. “If there’s a serious issue about the cause of death, the body is taken to the central morgue for examination. Most of the poor souls in here gave up the ghost voluntarily or were hastened to their maker by a blunt instrument in a dark alley, so there’s no reason for further investigation.”

Kind man that he is, he avoids using the word suicide. But that is why I am in this chilly purgatory that is a temporary repose for bodies fished out of the river before finding a permanent place six feet under.

Something about the
Dieners
with their white cloth aprons stained with blood is familiar to me, but my thoughts are too crowded with keeping my feelings under control to put it together. The cloth aprons are something of a puzzle because the morgue attendants I’ve seen in the past had worn rubber ones.

“The remains of Hailey McGuire are at the end of the line,” Inspector Abberline says.

The remains of Hailey McGuire.

A few weeks ago I knew a lovely young woman with that name, full of life and spirit. The spirit has escaped for what I hope is a better place and now her name is simply the inscription on a morgue toe tag attached to a “body” that constitutes the “remains” she left behind.

I can see at a glance that almost all of the bodies in the room are male, which is to be expected for a morgue on the docks. I imagine mostly sailors, fishermen, and dockworkers, along with an occasional prostitute, are brought here. Hailey was none of these, but people driven to end their lives not infrequently find their way to water.

Hailey. Suicide.
How sad that is. How hard it is to believe.

The inspector gives me another concerned look and gently takes my arm. “We’re almost there.”

I give him an “I’m okay” smile as we make our way down the path of the dead.

A gruesome thought that comes to mind is unavoidable: One day the gray corpse of Nellie Bly, linked to the name by only a toe tag, will be an empty carcass in a place like this. I just hope my spirit will have moved on to what I sincerely pray is a better place and not hot as
hell
—if you know what I mean.

The inspector hadn’t wanted me to view the body, not even after it is transferred to a funeral home. “These cases where the body has been in water are best laid to rest with a closed casket viewing,” he’d said. But I feel that I would be cowardly if I avoided seeing my friend and holding her hand as I say good-bye. She has no one else.

We pass a man, who I take from his mackintosh and high rubber boots to be a fisherman, as he bends over a male body, perhaps that of a shipmate whose last port of call was Davy Jones’s locker. The fisherman is putting coins on the eyelids of his mate.

“Paying toll to the ferryman,” Inspector Abberline says.

I know the superstition. “A payment to Charon, the boatman who ferries the souls of the dead across the River Styx in the Underworld, is how my mother explained it to me when my father died. I was six and an old friend of his bent over the coffin before it was lowered into the ground to place coins on my father’s eyes.”

“I’m sorry.”

I can only nod my head in thanks for I still miss my father dearly and the memory of his interment hits me hard as I see the fisherman placing the coins. It had been a rainy gray day with a deep-bone chill in the air, not unlike the funeral atmosphere I find today in London. Seeing the cold, stiff pallor on my father’s face scarred me, making it difficult for me to deal with death.

The coarse, brutal man my poor mother married in desperation to keep us children fed after my father’s untimely death had made the scar a permanent open wound when he forced me to watch a cow being slaughtered when I was a young teenager. “I’m making you tough,” is what he said. But I knew he was being cruel and mean because he found pleasure in playing the bully.

I try to put aside those bitter memories as we come to a covered body on the last slab in the line.

A
Diener
wearing a fouled white apron stands by on the other side of the table waiting for us. He’s overweight, with large jowls that quiver as he purses his lips. He slaps a fly off his cheek and looks to the inspector for permission to remove the sheet.

My knees start shaking and my heart jumps into my throat.

3

Just a few weeks ago I was in Manhattan covering a story about the sex trafficking of young girls from the Orient when Mr. Cockerill, the managing editor of Mr. Pulitzer’s newspaper, called me into his office.

“You need to sit down,” was the first thing he told me. This proclamation, coming in the tone that something was desperately wrong, alarmed me. My first thought was that something had happened to my mother, who lives with me.

“Hailey McGuire committed suicide.”

He had been right. I needed to be sitting when I heard the news.

Hailey was not just a dear friend, but a young woman who, like me, had struggled hard to get a job in the male dominated world of newspaper reporting. A product of an orphanage, without even a high school diploma, Hailey had been destined for work as a household servant or worse, the terrible life of a prostitute. Having fought tooth and nail to break into reporting, and having left high school myself before completion because of a heart problem,
²
I empathized with Hailey’s struggles.

Actually, I was the person who first directed her toward working as a reporter after watching her testify at a court trial I was covering two years ago.

The criminal case was against a man who owned a service that referred household servants. He was accused of raping a young girl who had applied for servant work. Hailey had also applied through the agency and testified in court that the man had indecently touched her and she had fought back to avoid being raped.

As I watched her on the witness stand, reading from a narration giving the precise time, date, and details of the incident, I realized her description of what had happened sounded like the newspaper articles I write—even down to the “rocky grammar” my first editor said I had.

I spoke to her after court and began giving her small assignments to help me gather information and was delighted when she came back with not just what I had asked her for, but information that showed she had a nose for the news.

Expending no less energy and determination than Hercules had done in performing his twelve labors, I managed to get Mr. Pulitzer to take Hailey on as a cub reporter running errands in the newsroom and finally getting her own beat at the criminal courts building.

Both Cockerill and Pulitzer, with their instinctively negative view of women in the workplace, had been hesitant first about hiring and then promoting Hailey, finding her too “soft-hearted” for crime reporting. I disagreed and didn’t want to see her pigeonholed into reporting about weddings and funerals, the only jobs open for women in news reporting—and even then, few were filled by women.

“She gets too emotionally involved with people she’s reporting about,” Cockerill complained.

“That’s what makes her a good reporter,” I said, knowing it was only partly true. Injustices needed to be reported with an impassioned appeal for the victims, but a reporter has to remain a neutral observer while gathering the story. I admit that I don’t have a talent for keeping my feelings to myself at any stage of the process, but I didn’t see her getting worked up emotionally when dealing with wrongs.

“She knows how victims of crimes hurt because of her own background,” I reminded Cockerill.

Hailey had not been born an orphan. She became parentless at the age of five when her stepfather bludgeoned her mother to death in front of her, hitting her mother over and over with a short club until the woman’s face was a bloody pulp and Hailey had passed out on the floor after begging and screaming for him to stop.

I rejected Cockerill’s accusation that my experience with my own stepfather, against whom I had testified in court about the cruel treatment he gave to my mother and us children, was affecting my judgment.

“She can do the job,” I said.

I was right—and I was sadly mistaken.

Yes, like me she had a nose for the news and was instinctively drawn to battle injustice, but I was able to remain impartial while doing a story, never stepping over the boundaries and getting emotionally involved, even though I might cry into my pillow at night for what I saw and reported during the day.

Unfortunately, Hailey stepped over the line when interviewing a woman on trial for stabbing her abusive husband as he was beating her. The police commissioner approached Mr. Pulitzer with suspicion that after Hailey had interviewed the woman a number of times in jail, he believed she aided the woman by retrieving the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, from where the woman had hidden it. “She dropped it in the East River during a ferry ride,” the commissioner said—but couldn’t prove it.

Hailey denied the allegation, but Mr. Pulitzer wasn’t 100 percent convinced of her innocence because the battered woman’s situation was too close for comfort to Hailey’s own trauma. I wasn’t convinced, either.

If Hailey had crossed the line, she would end up in prison for her näïveté. I didn’t believe she would lie to me if I asked her right out, so I didn’t ask and refused to discuss the situation with her when she appeared ready to take me into her confidence.

To avoid very bad publicity if one of his reporters ended up in jail for aiding and abetting a murder, Mr. Pulitzer, whose heart beats with exactly the same rhythm as the circulations of his newspapers, decided to take no chances. He buried the problem by sending Hailey off to London to temporarily fill the shoes of the paper’s London correspondent when the man returned to New York with a medical problem.

The correspondent’s job was mostly to cable home stories reported by British papers rather than hoofing it to Old Bailey and Parliament to find news, so there was little opportunity for her to get personally involved in a story. There was also little chance that Hailey would find her job waiting for her when she returned to New York after the heat over the murder case had cooled.

After telling me that Hailey had killed herself, Cockerill had gotten to his feet and began pacing. He does not have an easy job. Mr. Pulitzer is a ruthless taskmaster, even going to the extreme of employing two men to do the same job to see which one would pass Mr. Darwin’s test of survival of the fittest.

“He wants you to get over to London and make sure that your friend didn’t leave any dirty laundry behind.”

Still stunned by Hailey’s death, I just stared at him. “He” of course was Mr. Pulitzer. And by calling Hailey “my friend” meant that any dirty laundry I couldn’t clean up would be dumped at my door.

“I warned him not to send her to London,” he continued. “Who knows what happened over there to cause her to kill herself? She wasn’t quite balanced; the job was too big for her to handle, being raw in the business and all. This is your fault, you know, she was your protégé.”

All but his last words had to fight their way through the haze I’d fallen into when he told me Hailey was dead.
Your fault
were hot, burning words that made me want to cry.