The Formula for Murder (3 page)

Adding to the emotional trauma of Hailey’s death was the fact that I am still agitated by what I consider to be Mr. Pulitzer’s cavalier treatment of me after I sent the paper’s circulation figures soaring a few months ago as I raced around the world to beat the record of Jules Verne’s character in
Around the World in Eighty Days
.
³
I would have quit on the spot had my concern not been to protect Hailey’s memory. She was a wonderful person and I was not about to let another reporter trash her name or mine as her advocate.

I left his office fighting back tears, walking through the newsroom that suddenly became quiet as I entered. Reporters looked up and then back down to avoid making eye contact, while a couple of them so jealous of my success in their “old boys’ club” of reporting that they openly smirked at me. But I didn’t give them any satisfaction of witnessing a female breakdown. Instead, I walked past each and every one of them with my head held high and my features showing nothing but determination until I made it to the ladies’ powder room. Then I burst into tears.

I cried for Hailey, but I was racked with guilt. Did I drive the poor young woman to kill herself because I kept pushing her to jump hurdles that she was incapable of leaping?

I sat on a toilet, twisting my handkerchief around my right index finger until it was red and throbbing from pain. Mr. Cockerill didn’t have to
order
me to go to London. If anything, it was vital I went. I had to make sure Hailey was properly laid to rest and not thrown in a pauper’s grave, sandwiched between strangers.

I also prayed to God that I would prove that they were wrong about Hailey’s too gentle disposition, and that my insistence on pushing her into the line of fire as a reporter hadn’t so shattered her fragile disposition that she came to believe killing herself was less painful than facing life.

“Nellie.” Inspector Abberline’s voice brought me back to
this
horrible reality.

I gasp as the sheet comes off and I stare into the terrible face of death.

4

It isn’t Hailey, at least not the vibrant, happy, intelligent young woman I knew. Instead, it is
a body. Remains. Corpse. Deceased. The departed.
It is bloated, corpulent, with the bloodless pale complexion of a fish’s belly.

“
Jesus—Joseph—and Mary,
” I uncontrollably exclaim. “I’m sorry,” I tell Inspector Abberline, and the morgue assistant who has thrown the sheet back over the body. “It—it caught me by surprise.”

The inspector takes my arm. “Come, dear, we’ll talk outside.”

I shake my head and pull away from the compassionate man’s grip. “No, it’s my duty to her to see this through.” I cleared my throat. “How do we know that—she—is Hailey? For certain.”

Inspector Abberline pulls a charm bracelet out of his pocket and hands it to me. “Recognize this?”

“Yes.”

The bracelet has two dangling objects—a tag with her name scratched on it and a Statue of Liberty trinket.

“I found it curious a young woman of her status as a reporter would wear something this, uh, inexpensive,” he says.

“Cheap is a better word for it. They’re sold by street vendors at the dock where the boat to the Statue of Liberty boards. It’s tourist junk, but it had great meaning to her. You see, Hailey was an orphan. When she was eleven, she was sent to work as a household servant. She worked long hours and no matter how it was figured, what they charged her for board and room always exceeded the pittance they paid her.”

“Sounds like she was indentured.”

“Exactly, like a slave. It happens all the time because orphanages are overcrowded. She finally broke loose and moved into a settlement house for impoverished young women, picking up work wherever she could. To her that trip to Liberty Island, which she paid for with her earnings, was confirmation of her success. She took the trip after she got her first reporting job.” I choke up and can’t admit that I had gotten her the job.

Inspector Abberline pretends to busy himself, looking at the bracelet to give me a chance to compose myself.

“There was a ring, too.” I point at the other side of the shrouded form. “On the other hand, please let me have it.”

My request is to the assistant. The ring with a fake emerald made of glass is on her right hand. It is the only other piece of jewelry I knew her to wear. I had bought it for her last birthday. “I want the ring to remember her by. It’s not valuable.” That is said to assure the morgue worker that I won’t be taking something of value he could have poached off the body himself.

He gives the inspector a look and Abberline nods. The assistant pulls back the sheet just enough to expose the hand it’s on. The fingers are bloated.

“No!” I gasp as he takes his knife to cut off the finger. “No, leave it on.”

“Before we leave, snip the ring off with a cutter,” Inspector Abbeline tells the
Diener
. “You can have the band repaired by a jeweler,” he says to me.

“No, let it stay with her.” I feel queasy and weak-kneed, but regain my equilibrium. I meet the
Diener
’s eye. “I will check to make sure it’s there when she is laid to rest.”

“Are you certain that it’s her ring?” Inspector Abberline asks.

“Yes, I bought it for her. Why?”

“Just an added point of confirmation that confirms identity. We have the bracelet, ring, and a suicide note. The name on the bracelet led us to her rooming house where we found the note. She’d left out several days’ of food for her cat and asked in the note that her landlady find a good home for the cat.”

“What else did the note say?”

“It’s in the file at my desk so this isn’t verbatim, but she said … ‘I am so sorry, life is no longer worth living. He’s left me and I have nothing to live for. I feel so lost, alone. There is no way I can go back to America. The thought of prison … no, I can’t go back. I have no place to go and no one to live for. Whoever finds this note please make sure my cat is given a loving home.’ She also left money for cat food on her dresser by the note.”

Killing herself in despair over a man. I don’t know how to fit it in with my memory of Hailey. She was emotional, but I have a hard time coming to grips with her taking her own life for a romance gone sour.

“She has a birthmark.” I almost forgot about it.

“Where?”

“Behind her right ear, a red mark about the size of a shilling between her ear and hairline. She always pulled her hair forward to cover the ear.”

I turn away as the sheet is removed and turn back around after I hear the
Diener
say, “Don’t see a mark.”

“Can you show me where you remember it?”

Forcing myself, I bend down closer and look. “It’s not there!”

Inspector Abberline strikes a match and uses it to take a look. “You’re certain it was there?”

“Absolutely. She used to joke and call it the Mark of Cain.”

“Could’ve been washed away by her time in the water,” the morgue assistant says.

“Quite so,” Inspector Abberline agrees.

“I—I’ve never heard of that.” My thoughts are jumbled by the lack of a mark. “Birthmarks are imperfections in the skin, not a stain that can be washed away.”

“Quite true, but her body has been bleached as well as it might be had it been laying in a washtub. The river’s so sour it could peel the hide off a rhino.”

“I don’t know … I just don’t understand it.” I stare down at the bloated face, trying to find Hailey in it. “Wait.” I bend down to get a closer look at her head. “What is this?”

“A wound,” the
Diener
says.

“How did she get it on her head?” I look to Inspector Abberline.

“She most likely hit a rock when she threw herself into the river.”

“Or,” the
Diener
adds, “it could’ve been caused by the impact of hitting the water if she jumped from a bridge, or a passing boat could have knocked her.”

The inspector nods to the
Diener
to cover the body and takes me firmly by the arm, back down the path of the dead.

“I don’t understand it,” I repeat. “I don’t see Hailey killing herself over some man who—”

“She was pregnant.”

“What?” I stop and stare at him.

“Nellie, dear, I didn’t want to tell you and color your memory of the sweet girl. She didn’t tell you anything about it?”

“Only that she had met a man she had fallen in love with.” On my voyage to England, I had kept reading over and over the last letter I received from Hailey. She was all excited about a new beau and how much they were in love, but she had not given a clue as to who he is.

“Do you know who the father was?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Don’t know and won’t ever know. Most likely a married man. Not an uncommon situation.” He gives me a look. “Or an uncommon choice for the woman to make.”

He is right, frightfully so that it shakes me to my roots. There is nowhere for a pregnant young woman without some means of support to go except the foul conditions of a poorhouse.

I knew Hailey. She would never return to that life. She would rather die than end up back in a house for paupers or, worse, watch her baby starve.

5

A cool breeze off the waters of the broad River Thames is welcome as I come up the steps from the mortuary and into fresh air. When I arrived earlier, the air had that fouled saltwater smell of waterlogged docks, fishing boats, and coal-burning steam ships even though the great Port of London is many miles from the North Sea. After experiencing a dank taste of a place of the dead, the salty air is a perfume to me.

The hansom cab I had arrived in is waiting for me, the driver chatting and smoking with the driver of a freight wagon who is adjusting his horse bindings. I shake my head, letting my cabbie know I’m not ready to leave. I want to thank Inspector Abberline for taking the time to accompany me to the remains of Hailey. He stayed behind to fill out a form releasing the body to a mortuary he assured me would treat Hailey with respect. I will contact them to make the arrangements.

The thick gray clouds give the impression of a massive dark blanket hanging over my head like a shroud—a perfect atmosphere to fit my mood.

A sudden wind comes off the water, gathering packing materials lying outside a warehouse, sending the rubbish swirling around just like the thoughts in my head: guilt, frustration, helplessness, anger, sadness.

My thoughts are a jumble and I need to clear them.

Suicide …

I truly hate this feeling of frustration and guilt. How do people cope with suicide?

My mind still rebels at the thought that Hailey was so desperate, so alone, that she took her own life. I experienced a sense of guilt from the moment I had heard the news, but now I am also angry at myself for pushing her when she wasn’t ready to be a reporter. Infuriated, too, at the lover who stole her innocence and then cast her out.

If he had only cast her out—and hadn’t murdered her to keep her quiet
. I know where the thought comes from. It’s that old familiar voice in my head that is always far too suspicious of the dark hearts of others. I must accept the fact my friend killed herself, but paranoia is almost on the list of my faults, though I’ve found most of the paranoia I’ve experienced as simply being heightened awareness.

The fact she was pregnant and suffered a blow to the head raised the short hairs on my paranoia. Bedeviling me also is the primal instinct in my gut telling me that suicide just doesn’t fit Hailey’s excited, energetic, love-of-life personality.

Still, I have to listen to the other voice in my head, the one that I sometimes try to ignore but which is calmer and more analytical than the one in my gut, and it is saying that Hailey was gullible and impressionable, and impulsive—a young woman who would often leap first and think afterward.

That she would get emotionally involved and make love out of wedlock with the threat of pregnancy is in line with how I see her.
Even with a married man?
I ask myself. As impulsive and emotional as Hailey can be, yes, even with a married man.

Shame on any man who impregnates a woman and leaves her disgraced and a burden on our society—if they don’t end up in a river or a house of prostitution.

The more I think about it, the more tempted I am to track down the married scoundrel who destroyed her life and write an exposé on the abuse of impressionable young women by older, married men.

With my anger rising, I mosey away from the morgue, trying to separate my thoughts from what I saw in there and what I would do to the man who caused her death. I should return to New York rather than wreak vengeance on Hailey’s seducer. There is much to occupy one’s attention on the docks. Boxes of cargo are coming out of the holes of ships in great netted bundles and set down on the dock where swarms of dockworkers pack them away onto wagons and into warehouses.