Winter at Death's Hotel (26 page)

“The East River Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge, most of us call it. It's really something.”

She asked him where her hotel was and he pointed behind them and to the left, told her how many miles away it was. She said, “We shall be hours!”

“Nah.” He maneuvered the carriage to the middle of the roadway just before they reached a line of toll booths. He stopped, causing other drivers to shout and curse. He held up a wooden sign from the dash that said “POLICE.”

“Isn't that about the grandest thing you ever saw?”

The view downtown was spectacular, the first lights coming on along both banks of the great river, the sun down but its pinks and greens in the sky and reflected in the water below. Despite her annoyance, she was moved: natural landscape was sublime, she had been taught, but so was this, surely—a human landscape made sublime by the moment and the light and the great bridge whose cables soared up in great arcs like hope itself.

Dunne began to recite:

“Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!

Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg'd waves!

Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and

women generations after me!

Cross over from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!

Stand up, tall masts of Manhattan! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!”

He looked at Louisa and grinned. “Whitman.”

“You astonish me.”

“I learned it so's I'd know it if I ever took a girl for a ride across the bridge.”

“And did you?”

“I did, but I couldn't recite it. I was too embarrassed. She married me anyway.”

He moved the carriage across into the lines of traffic heading back to Manhattan, and they started down again. “Now you've seen the Brooklyn Bridge,” he said.

When they came off the approach to the bridge, he turned right and then partly right again as the street made a bend. “Now we're in Mulberry Street.” He sounded pleased.

She saw tenements rising on each side like cliffs; many had decorated façades all the way to the top, where stone faces looked down. Inexplicable names—Barbara, Halston, Meyerbeer, Grace—were carved in large letters. Dunne said, “Don't be fooled by the fronts. Inside, it's a half-dozen families to a floor and one convenience per story if they're lucky. If they're double-deckers, there's no windows in the middle flats. The weather's good, they live in the street.” Late in the day as it was, pushcarts lined both sides of the street, and women with baskets pressed themselves against them. They were dark, often tough-looking women, some with the popping eyes and almond-shaped faces of Renaissance paintings, others with aggressive noses and shrewd, hard eyes.

“They must be difficult customers,” she said as she watched a woman lift, appraise, and put down an apple. “You grew up here?”

He shook his head. “I'm Irish. These are all Dagos now.”

“But you're a New Yorker.”

“Born and bred. All Irish then; not so much now. People move uptown when they get some money. Now this is Little Italy—one of the Little Italies.”

In the fading light, people were leaning from windows and iron fire escapes; chairs were out on the pavement despite the chill, leaving hardly room for a single line of pedestrians between them and the pushcarts.

She said, “I never see any colored people.”

“We drove them out. We used to have gang fights with them when I was a kid. The coloreds lost, so they moved way over west and uptown—the forties. Now we're up there and moving them out again.”

“Why?”

“Because if you're Irish, you got to show you're better than somebody.” He smiled. “And the coloreds aren't better than anybody.” The smile took up only one side of his mouth.

They jogged along. People were calling in a foreign language; shirtsleeved men and boys were playing a card game on the pavement. She heard music, a singing voice, a sentimental melody. She was aware of cooking smells, baking bread, the usual city stench of horses and dust and people and the rivers.

“There are so many of them,” she said.

“Isn't London the same?”

“Parts of it, but it isn't the same. We don't have so many Italians, for one thing. Perhaps the truth is I don't go into those parts of the city.”

“Same thing here. Most New York people never come down here. These are the slums. This is just a place you try to get out of.”

“As you did?”

He nodded. “As I did.”

He jerked his head toward a big, once-white building. “Police headquarters. There's Cassidy, just walking in.” He laughed. “He must have stopped for a pailful someplace.”

He turned the carriage to the right. “Here we are in Bowery again. Not ‘the Bowery,' but Bowery, which is a street. ‘The Bowery' is a state of mind, meaning cheap everything, crooked everything, sleazy everything, the last resort of the down-and-out, a place to get fleeced, a place to get chloral in your drink, a place to get rolled, taken, flim-flammed, killed.”

“I can't imagine living here.”

“You'd do all right.”

He turned again and went to the next street and turned down it. “This is Elizabeth. You want to see where the first woman was found?” He went another street and pointed at a dark opening between buildings. “In there.”

She looked in. Its ordinariness frightened her. In there, a man had posed a dead woman, arranged parts of her face on a pile of manure where her womb had been. She shuddered. “How did he do it?”

“Without getting caught, you mean? This place is dead at night. Until midnight, one in the morning, it's alive; then everything closes up, they lock all the doors and put out the lights. You could do anything in an alley like that, three in the morning.”

“But he had to bring her here.”

“Maybe not. Maybe he killed her in a flat upstairs, dumped her out the window.”

“You know he didn't.”

“Wasn't it you told me to consider every possibility?”

“Nobody mentioned any marks of the kind she'd have had if she'd been dropped. And there's been nothing about the buildings here, people hearing or seeing anything.”

“People around here don't hear or see things—even when they hear and see things.”

She sat up as tall as she could and looked back up the street, then down, then again into the alley. “You can't just carry a dead woman on your shoulder, Detective-Sergeant. And the policeman said her legs were stiff. Could you move a stiff body in a pushcart?”

“You can move a lot in a pushcart. Though I wouldn't want to do it for much distance, I can say.”

“Or a wagon! A horse and wagon could carry a lot.”

He started their horse going again. “You use a wagon, you gotta own a wagon. Or steal one. A lot easier to steal a pushcart—you come down here after dark, you see pushcarts chained to lamp-posts and things all over the place. You steal one, though, you better know what you're doing, because the owner'll kill you.”

He showed her where the second body had been found; there was little to see there, little enough where the first had been.

He crossed on Canal to Broadway and turned up.

She said, “I thought you were going to question me.”

“I just wanted to get to know you.”

“I'm no longer improper for wanting to see the bodies?”

“That still bothers me.”

“What did that oaf at the morgue mean by saying that the first victim's body had been identified and taken away?”

“Just what it sounds like.”

“Did you know about it?”

He didn't answer, seemed to concentrate more on the horse.

“Detective-Sergeant Dunne, did you know that the body had been taken away?”

“I can't discuss police business.”

“So you didn't! What kind of police do you have here? I thought you were in charge of the investigation!”

He made some movement with his shoulders, perhaps a shrug. “There's layers upon layers.”

“Of what—lies? If the body has been taken away and buried, and you don't know about it, then who identified her? And who
was
she?”

He flicked the horse and sighed. “I don't know.”

That silenced both of them.

It was past the time when she wanted to be at the hotel, but she said nothing: what good would it do? The horse and the traffic were moving as fast as they could. She found herself almost asleep, then abruptly awake as the brightly lighted mass of Madison Square Garden appeared, a huge sign for the Wild West across its façade, and Dunne turned left into Twenty-Third Street and they were at her hotel. “I've made you late,” he said.

The doorman had appeared to help her down. Had she a coin?

Dunne jumped down. “I'll help the lady” He made a sign toward the doorman as if he were wielding a small broom and the doorman were dust. He reached up for her. She hesitated, then leaned down, allowed his hands to grip her under her arms, aware of his hands so close to her breasts, and her good foot was on the pavement and she was steadying herself on his shoulder. “I wonder what gossip the doorman will spread about
that
,” she said.

“Nothing, or he knows I'll have him for breakfast.” Dunne retrieved her crutches. “And I hope you enjoyed the Municipal Police deluxe tour.”

She thanked him quite formally. Her annoyance with him had dissipated, but she felt disappointed in him because of the first woman's having been taken from the morgue and his apparently knowing nothing about it.

She went up the steps and looked back as Gerrigan opened the doors for her. Dunne was still in the carriage, looking at her. She gave him a little gesture and a smile despite herself.

In the hotel, she went straight to Reception and then the telephone booth and left a message for Minnie at the
Express
to say that the first victim had been identified and the body taken away, but it was all very fishy and she thought something was being hushed up.

***

She lay down on her bed still dressed. It amused her that Dunne had been flirting with her (what else could the poetry have been?), then annoyed that he had been doing it so as to “know” her—meaning to satisfy his suspicions of her. Why couldn't he understand that she wanted to see the corpses
because
of the horror of them, because of the awfulness that he seemed to think was improper for her? Did he think the horror was improper for the two victims? For the next victim?

What was there to be done? Except for Dunne, the police seemed to be doing nothing: the newspapers had reported nothing that suggested progress, except that the vagrant who had been held “for his own protection” had now been charged with the second murder. Everybody must have known he hadn't done it, couldn't have done it, but he was charged anyway and the police said that they had a confession. Beaten out of him, she supposed. But they hadn't found a knife, and he couldn't have done the first murder because at that time he'd been in the city jail in Jersey City, just across the North River. Hopeless. A dead end. A very dead end.

She sat up. She would look at the railway schedules and consider joining Arthur. He was still in the Midwest; she could be with him late tomorrow. It was foolish of her to go on in New York. She could get about on the foot now. She would be walking on a cane in a few days. What had she been thinking of—that she would find the murderer herself? Avenge the women?

Then she heard the sound.

***

“It was a kind of click, Ethel—like the closing of a wooden box.”

“I can't imagine, madame.” It was the next morning, and Ethel had recovered from her evening out.

“I told you about the other sound. While I was in the bath.”

“Well, old buildings are full of funny sounds.”

“This is hardly an old building.”

“It could have been the wind. Or a bird hitting the window.”

“No, it didn't sound like that. It was a
click.
”

“Well, madame, those women upstairs hear all sorts of things.” The women upstairs were the other personal servants. “You'd think they've nothing to do but frighten themselves with hearing things and chattering about it. I had a good laugh at them with Mr. Galt, I must say.” Ethel was going over Louisa's clothes to see what needed pressing or laundering, as she did once a week.

But Louisa was thinking again about the noise, which had so frightened her that she had slept on a sofa in the sitting room with the bedroom door locked, although the night before, she'd slept in the bedroom and locked herself in against the sitting room.
I'm being very silly
, she thought, and she said, “I'm thinking of joining Mr. Doyle.”

There was a moment, but only a moment, of silence, then, “Leaving New York, you mean, madame?”

“I'm thinking about it.”

“Then I oughtn't send out the clothes, ought I.”

“It isn't certain yet, Ethel.”

“We wouldn't want to leave anything behind.” Though what she seemed to be saying, except for that instant's hesitation, was that she would be leaving Galt behind, but that was life. She went on taking clothes out of the cupboard and the drawers, holding them up, smoothing them, putting some back in and laying others in two piles on the bed.

After several minutes, Louisa said, “What do the women upstairs think they hear?”

“Oh, madame! They say they hear ghosts.” She sounded scornful.

“What ghosts?”

“Oh, they're full of tales. ‘Full of wind and whiskers, like a barber's cat,' my Aunt Emmeline used to say. The ones of them that have been here the longest, that work for ladies who live here, I mean, tell a great tale they've made up of a male and a female ghost, and they don't like each other, and so you can hear the female one running. It's quite ridiculous.” She held up the gray silk dress and turned it to look at the other side, found something she didn't like and took a pin from her bodice and pinned it into the dress. “You've put a little tear into your gray silk.”