Winter at Death's Hotel (6 page)

They kissed. He went back to work. She went into the bedroom.

But, dammit, that woman was the one I saw in the hotel lobby! I know what I saw!

***

A closed carriage assigned to Commissioner Roosevelt pulled up at a side entrance of the City Mortuary. Roosevelt was out the door before its wheels stopped grinding against the curb. He bustled across the pavement and yanked open the door as if he expected to make an arrest on the other side. “Well?” he bellowed.

“All clear.”

“You're Cleary, are you?”

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant Cleary. Murder Squad.” Cleary was a tall, sad-eyed man with black hair that stood up like a hog's bristles. He was in fact the commander of the Murder Squad, and if he was offended because Roosevelt didn't remember having met him twice before, he didn't show it.

Roosevelt dropped his voice. “Harding's in my carriage. Everybody's out of the way?”

“All o' them. The body's been pulled out.”

“I want you to go ahead of us and make
absolutely
sure nobody will see him. Harding's an eminent man.”

Cleary went off into the building, and Roosevelt did an about-face and marched back to his carriage and opened its door. Seconds later, a man stepped down, but he kept his shoulders hunched and his hat slightly raised and tipped so that it masked his face. The two men raced across the pavement, Roosevelt even faster than the other so that he could open the mortuary door.

They went through, then moved along a tiled corridor whose overhead electric bulbs seemed less to drive the dark away than to dilute it into some kind of gray-green soup. Both encountered, but neither acknowledged, a smell that was the odor of death: chemicals, rot. Roosevelt led the way toward Cleary, who waited at the far end; when they got close, Cleary vanished to their right. They followed; there was Cleary, holding a door; again he vanished; they hurried to the door, found a stairwell, Cleary at the bottom.

In the cellar, Cleary pointed at a chipped metal door.

The two men went through. On the other side was an enormous room with an arched ceiling. Seemingly far away, like something on a stage whose perspective has been manipulated, a table was covered with a white cloth whose undulations suggested a mountain range shaped like a female body.

Roosevelt led. Behind him, the other, no longer trying to hide his face, had straightened and revealed himself as a man of sixty or so with a deeply lined face and not much hair. Roosevelt reached the table. He grabbed a corner of the white cloth and, as if brutality were required, twitched it off so that a woman was revealed from her copper-colored hair down to the tops of her breasts.

The other man looked and then bit his lip and nodded.

Roosevelt left him alone with the body and went back up the huge room and into the corridor, where he found Cleary. He said, “This is never to come out. Can you handle it?”

“There has to be an investigation.”

“We'll leave it that an unidentified woman of the streets was murdered. It will be an unsolved case.”

Cleary was not stupid. He was not foolish, either. “Are you ordering me to end the investigation, Mr. Roosevelt?”

“I'm ordering you to keep the identity of the woman and of her husband out of the public record. Can you do that?”

The two men looked into each other's eyes for several seconds. Cleary said, “I guess I can. I just hope you appreciate what I'm doing here, sir.”

Roosevelt stared at him some more. “Mr. Harding will be grateful for your help.”

Cleary gave the faintest of smiles. “That's all any man could ask, isn't it?”

***

The departure from the hotel next morning was nerve-racking and mostly unpleasant, everything ready to go wrong, Arthur in the deep gloom he always fell into when he had to get somewhere on time. Worse, he grumbled that it was Sunday and they hadn't time to go to church. Louisa pointed out that they often didn't go to church at home. He said she was being “light.”

Ethel had been put in charge of the luggage and had commandeered two boys; they had immediately mixed everything up, grabbing the smallest things first and marching off with them, although the smallest (and most female) things were the very ones that Ethel and Louisa had meant to carry themselves so they wouldn't get left behind.

“Where's my satchel with my manuscripts?” Arthur demanded halfway through the hurly-burly that was moving them out of the suite and down to the lobby.

“Oh, I'm sure the boys have taken it already, dear.”

“I didn't see it go! If I arrive in Buffalo without that satchel, I'll be finished! Cooked! Plucked and boiled!”

Louisa ran into the bedroom and corraled Ethel. Ethel swore that the satchel had already been taken. “They grab the easy things first, the wretches! They hope I'll take the heavy ones myself.”

“It's quite all right, Ethel; don't let them upset you.”

“One of them called me ‘honey.'”

“Well, that's probably a compliment, isn't it?”

She ran back to Arthur to tell him that the satchel was safe, but he was already fulminating about something else. “The tickets! What in hell has happened to the tickets! They're not in that satchel, I hope. Dear God, if they're in that satchel and it goes into the baggage car—no, not in the baggage car, I want the satchel with me!”

He was carrying his overcoat on his arm; she lifted it and felt in the inside pocket. “There are the tickets, dear. Right where you put them.”

“Well, thank God for small favors.” He kissed her. “You are a
large
favor. I shouldn't get so exercised, should I.”

“Well, you don't want to risk apoplexy. Why don't we go downstairs? Ethel will take care of everything.”

“You
trust
Ethel?”

“Entirely.”

“If I had that damned valet, we wouldn't be having all this trouble!”

She led him toward the lift. It was her view that they weren't having any trouble. On the other hand, to be fair, he was a public man with obligations for every minute of the next month, so he had every right to be nervous. She looked at her watch, a little thing pinned above her left breast. They had two whole hours before the train left.

Arthur recoiled from the lift and trotted back toward the suite. “I'd best tell Ethel to hurry.”

Downstairs, a number of parties were leaving, perhaps taking the same train, she thought. That would be an odd and fantastic thing, if they kept meeting the same people all across America. But how exciting it was going to be, even without anything fantastic! Cleveland, Ohio, sounded as romantic to her as Timbuktoo. What places she was about to see—and what remarkable people she would meet!

“Leaving already, Mrs. Doyle? It seems unkind, that we should meet one day and part the next.” It was Mrs. Simmons's nephew, Mr. Newcome. He looked extraordinarily slender and stylish and glossy, as if somebody had gone over him with a tool and burnished him.

“Perhaps we shall meet in London,” she said.

“Perhaps we shall.” It was idle chat, meaningless; they both knew it.

Arthur came up then and she introduced them, and Newcome murmured something about “your wonderful books” (even though he didn't say which ones), but Arthur was distracted because he had to wait behind several other people at Reception. He said, “Yes, yes,” a couple of times, and then excused himself and said rather loudly that he had to catch a train, and would anyone who was not on a schedule please stand aside?

Nobody stood aside.

“This is infamous!”

Newcome touched his arm and smiled. “Allow me.” He went behind Reception and through a door, appeared seconds later to wave Arthur to him. Louisa was left standing alone. She looked about, saw Ethel with the luggage, waved. Over the shoulder of one of the men waiting near Reception she saw part of a newspaper page, a small headline, “Has Jack the Ripper Come to New York?” That would be more about that poor woman, she thought. Did she have time to run to the newsstand? No, Arthur would be furious. Perhaps there would be newspapers on the train. Not that she
deeply
cared, surely not; she was leaving it behind; perhaps she would never hear of it again…

Newcome came back and said, smiling down at Louisa, “One gets special privileges, being the nephew of the oldest resident. I've put your husband with the awful Carver.”

“Who is that?”

“The manager—a bit slimy to the touch, but otherwise all right, I suppose. It may simply be professional surface—a glossy carapace, like a beetle.”

He seemed quite brittle today; she remembered her sense yesterday that Newcome was somehow “safe.” Today, she didn't feel it, whatever she had meant by it. As if he knew what she was thinking, he said, “My aunt thinks I'm not much better than Carver, I'm afraid. She thinks that London has made me ‘a poser,' by which I suppose she means a
poseur
.”

“And are you?”

“Oh, isn't everyone?”

At that point, Arthur came out, smiling rather grandly. He shook Newcome's hand. “You saved our lives. We'd have missed that train for certain if you hadn't done what you did. Capital!” He smiled at Louisa. “Carver fixed everything in two shakes. Splendid man, splendid.” Suddenly, his face darkened. “Where is Ethel?”

Louisa turned him toward the bronze doors. “She's the woman with all the luggage piled around her.”

“Has she everything? Is my satchel there? Dammit, Louisa, if she's misplaced that—!”

He insisted on seeing the satchel and then on counting all the luggage. “Fourteen, fifteen. Or did I count this one before? Damn! I shall have to start over!”

“You didn't count it before, and there are fifteen, and that's everything. Do calm yourself, Arthur.”

“Ha! Well—are we ready? Boy!”

The same two boys had been waiting at the outer limits of the luggage; now, each picked up a suitcase in each hand and started out. There was confusion about a carriage, then about the trunks—they'd have to come in a separate vehicle—but Ethel seemed already to have commandeered both, so off the boys went. Then came Ethel with the small bags (the lady's essentials); then the boys came back, and so a kind of revolving wheel of people and luggage went in and out until suddenly the carpet was bare.

“Louisa! Into the carriage—hurry. Louisa?”

She was looking back down the lobby. “Oh, Arthur, I like this place! I shall miss it.”

“We're staying here on our way back; you'll see it again. Come—come!”

She waved at Newcome, who was still idling near Reception, and then she turned and took a step toward her husband, and then she felt a terrific pain in her right ankle as she sailed through the air, as completely free of the ground as an aerial balloon. She came crashing down on her hands and elbows and knees and eyeglasses, the breath knocked out of her. People screamed; men ran toward her. Somebody tried to pick her up, and some of her weight came on that same right ankle and it was her turn to scream, and she fell forward again.

“My ankle—I think I've broken my ankle!” She looked through tears of pain and saw Arthur standing by the bronze doors.

He said, “Louisa, how
could
you! Now we shall be
late
!”

The Murder Squad had a big room in police headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street that was no more squalid than the hallways of the average tenement. The room was forty feet on a side, matchboarded up to the height of a desk, then distempered in some color long forgotten, now more or less that of cocoa powder. Along one wall had been set wooden chairs with pressed, imitation-leather seats; the wall behind them had a smear of darker color from the heads that had rested against it. These were for witnesses and suspects. Overhead were giant fans and lights with green shades of the sort used on factory floors; the ceiling above them was filigreed with gas pipes that no longer carried gas, and the channels that carried electric wiring; and above those were sheets of pressed tin, cobwebbed and darkened by decades of tobacco smoke. In this room, murders that had proved too tough for the precincts or that involved more than one precinct were taken over and—in theory—solved.

The Squad had its own lockup just off the big room. Anybody who went in there was assumed to be a killer and would already have been “downstairs,” meaning in the basement, where detectives “softened them up,” usually with lead-filled rubber hose. As a result, the lockup smelled of urine and blood and worse. Even though the door to the two cells was kept closed, the smells came through to mingle with the smells of tobacco smoke, sweat, suits too long worn without cleaning, old dirt, floor wax, and aggression.

The reigning lieutenant had a separate office opposite a wall of windows that had remained unwashed and unopened for so long that nobody any longer tried to look out of them. They looked, anyway, at a brick wall a dozen feet away. The sky, two stories above, was long forgotten.

Lieutenant Cleary, the Squad's commander, had called a meeting to give them his own version of what Roosevelt had told him at the mortuary, but first he was huddling in his office with a sergeant named Grady, who was, as other detectives put it, tight to Cleary's duff. Grady was in his forties. He looked tougher than a lot of his suspects, and he stank of cigars. He wore a wrinkled double-breasted suit in a fabric that seemed to be covered with fuzz; his high collar was tight enough to cause his neck to slop over it like a pie's crust. He had little eyes, often bloodshot, and an expression that made people of goodwill want to talk to somebody else. He was wearing a bowler hat, even though he was indoors.

Cleary kept his head low and almost whispered, even though Grady was sitting just across his desk from him. “Here's the situation. Roosevelt tells me yesterday to go to the City Mortuary and get everybody out of the way so somebody can view the murdered whore. ‘Somebody' turns out to be Roscoe G. Harding, who owns enough coal mines to keep the trains running for the next hunnerd years.
Rich
. The whore turns out to be his wife—he recognizes her from some goddam drawing in the papers.”

“What's Roosevelt in it for?”

“Harding's a big Republican moneybags. Roosevelt wants to be governor. Harding sees the picture in the paper, he telephones Roosevelt and says he thinks it's her and he wants it hushed up who she is.”

“Why? She's dead.”

Cleary sighed. “Because she's his
wife.
He doesn't want people knowing his wife had her twot cut up by some crazy who takes her for a whore! Plus he's maybe sixty and she's young enough to be his kid and a
looker
, and he doesn't want people saying she was out looking for a little of the real meat because he hasn't got it! See?”

“Much ado about nothing, like they say.”

“It's all in his head, yeah, but the way it's gotta be is, nobody knows the whore's been identified, she isn't somebody's wife, she's gone off to Potter's Field and that's that! Enh? Get it? We gotta say the case is dead, nothing more to come. Get me?”

“Where's the whore at now?”

“Husband took her last night and is going to bury her someplace upstate.”

“Today?”

“Pretty quick, yeah, I think.”

Grady screwed his face around so it looked hesitant and deliberately stupid and said, “Ya know, Jack, a case like this, the husband is the obvious suspect.”

“Jeez, don't even
think
it! He isn't! There is no suspect!”

Grady shrugged. “Just thinking.”

“Don't think!” Cleary put his elbows on the desk and leaned forward. “Now.”

“Yeah?”

“Harding's
rich
. I don't see it yet, but I will—some gelt for you and me. He
owes
me.”

“Just us two.”

Cleary nodded.

Grady said eagerly, “We tell this Harding if he don't pony up we go public.”

Cleary sighed again. “That's why I don't let you do the thinking. No!” He passed big fingers through his hair. “I'll let you know when I work it out. Don't you do anything! It's gotta be done right.”

“What about Roosevelt?”

“Oh, fuck him. Let him go be governor; he'll be outta our hair. He owes me one now too for doing this, but it don't give me enough on him to squeeze, you know?” He stood. “Come on, let's get this over with.”

He put Grady at the squad room door to keep strangers out and the detectives in, and he walked the length of the room and got up on an old ammunition box that gave him even more height than Nature had. He looked around at them. “Everybody here?” He wasn't really asking; he knew that everybody was there. Good Cripes, he knew all their faces. He knew all their clothes. He even knew them by their smell, for God's sake!

“All right. Now.” He looked around at them again. His look was menacing, and the menace was real. Every man there owed his job to him. Half the men there owed their extra income to him. He wasn't standing up there to be kind.

“Good. Now, you've heard of a case we got, a murdered whore that the papers are full of shit about. The ‘Bowery Butcher.' I want you all to understand that there's interest in this case from upstairs—got it? That means
I
don't want it all balled up
. Get me?

“What has happened, I can say flat out right now, this case is dead. The fucking precinct cops and their tecs put their big feet all over it, and you can forget so-called clues, and you can forget what they call your ‘investigative techniques.'

“I took over the case late yesterday. I reviewed all the revelant notes and reports. I and Grady interviewed the one so-called witness, which is the cop that found the whore. There's nothing.

“Therefore, we're going to clean this case up and do the paperwork and pigeonhole it under ‘Unsolved.' Are you all clear on that?” He looked around again. Every sphincter in the room tightened.

“What I want to make sure is, nobody from this squad talks to the papers about it. You got that? Not one word. Not to your wife, either, not to your girl, not to your priest, not to
yourself.
You hear me? I hear that one of you's talked about this case, you'll be back in a uniform picking drunks out of the gutter. If you're
lucky
, that's what you'll be doing!”

Some of them glanced at each other; a few raised an eyebrow or gave the smallest smile that lips could manage. They all meant the same thing:
The
fix
is
in, and we're not part of it.

“Dunne!”

Cleary's voice was a harsh bark. Everybody knew that Cleary had no use for Harry Dunne, who was a detective-sergeant but who would never get any higher so long as Cleary was in charge. Dunne had the reputation of being a plodder: his nickname from the distant past was “Never,” because he was so slow: Never Dunne. He was so careful that he never finished. And, to the other cops' disgust, he was honest. Dunne was in his forties, gray, hefty, offering a round face in which women found warmth and reliability but no excitement.

“Dunne, you're gonna take charge of closing this Bowery Butcher case. Take Cassidy to help out. Clear?” He looked around the room once more. More smiles and raised eyebrows: it was okay to show that they were amused by Cleary's dumping this crap case on Never Dunne, and it was okay to be relieved that they weren't involved. “Okay, then, that's that. Dunne—my office. Cassidy—you too. Now.”

Cleary got down. Finn, the squad arse-kisser, whisked away the ammunition box. Men impatient to do their jobs left in a hurry; others, more in love with leisure, sat at desks and put their feet up and lit cigarettes.

In his office, Cleary sat but let Dunne and Cassidy stand in front of him while Grady, hands joined over his crotch, stood by the closed door as if he thought one of them was going to try to escape. Cassidy was a smaller, younger version of Dunne, only a plainclothes detective. He, too, to everybody's disgust, was honest.

Cleary said the same things he had said in the squad room. Then he added, frowning at Dunne, “I don't want you getting ideas, get me? I'm giving this job to you because you're not pulling your weight here; you're not closing cases. This one is all closed but the paperwork. Your job is to close it and nothing else. I'm doing you a favor. Get me?”

“Who killed her?”

Cleary looked threatening. “How the fuck would I know? It's unsolvable. Write it up that way and put it on the shelf.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“You're supposed to do nothing! You
don't
try to identify the victim, that's a dead duck; you
don't
advertise for leads; you
don't
see what your snitches say. Just do the paperwork and close it out.”

“Close it out.”

“Now you're talking. Take Finn and the Wop.”

Dunne groaned. “If there's nothing to be done—”

“Do like I tell you and shut up. Cassidy?”

“I get you, Lieutenant.”

Cleary pushed a brown accordion file across his desk. “Then get outta here.”

Out in the squad room, Dunne walked a few steps—enough to get where Grady couldn't hear them through the door, because he'd be listening—and he said, “It's fixed.”

“That's the message I get, yeah.”

Dunne and Cassidy shared the cynicism common to all cops, plus a little extra because of what they'd learned trying to stay honest. Dunne gave Cassidy a conspirator's smile. “So what are we going to do?”

“Can't we get rid of the Wop?” The Wop was one of the few Italians in the force, a quiet young man named Forcella. Nobody wanted him around.

“Not if Cleary says we gotta take him.”

“He's a fucking Dago!”

“Not as bad as a rat-faced Mick like Finn.”

“Cleary puts his hand on a fly button, Finn puckers up. He'll carry everything we do to Cleary.”

“That's the idea. Well…” Dunne looked around the sordid room. “We'll have a meeting every morning to feed Finn some eyewash he can peddle to Cleary. I'll find him something to do to keep him out of our hair—maybe send him down to the Tenth to copy all their paperwork. He'll take at least three days just to chew the rag with his pals down there. Then he'll take two hours for the free lunch at Shankey's, and he'll come back sozzled and take a nap. Hell, maybe we can make it last a week.” He grinned at Cassidy. “You ever think police work was going to be important? Like…
important
?”

“Ha-ha.”

Dunne shook his head. “Cleary's got some kind of boodle going, so we gotta find out what it is. If we don't, we're waxed. But if we do and he knows it, we're fucked.” He opened the accordion file. Inside were two pieces of paper, one a blank form, one a copy of the patrolman's statement. Dunne laughed. He tucked the file under an arm and headed for the door. “I'm off to the crapper to have a think. Don't close any cases while I'm gone.”

***

“Arthur?”

She felt for his warm, comforting body with her left hand. The hand got caught in the counterpane; she whimpered. She thought she was back on the ship because she felt herself pitching slowly back and forth, but sometimes it was side to side and sometimes it was end to end, a motion that made her feel as if she would be sick.

“Mrs. Doyle?”

She tried to open her eyes. They seemed to be glued together.
Sleep
, she thought. That's what her mother had always called it, that stickiness that glued the eyelids together and that became granules along the eyelids when she woke—
You
have
sleep
in
your
eyes.
She tried to move her hand to wipe her eyes but she couldn't, and then they seemed to open all on their own, and she was frightened by what she saw—nothing.

“Mrs. Doyle? Are you awake?”

She was looking at a ceiling, of course, which was gray and dark because there was no light. No, there was light, dim light, only a kind of glow that became no more than a stain on the darkness. Leaning over her, one side made visible by the stain, was some sort of woman. Louisa tried to ask her who she was, but although her lips and her tongue moved, no sound came.

“You've had morphine, Mrs. Doyle. You're in your own bed and you've sprained your ankle, but you're going to be fine. Mrs. Doyle?”

In her own bed? Was she back in London? But she'd been in New York. On her way to a train. To go to Buffalo.
With
Arthur!
Where was Arthur? She felt panic rise in her as if it were a fluid that spread from her heart, along her arteries until a great gout of it blocked her throat. She did manage to make a sound, nonetheless: “Arthur!”

“Mr. Doyle had to take a train, remember? He got on his train and you're back in your room. Mrs. Doyle?”

If it was London, why did the woman have that incredibly nasal accent? And it wasn't her own room; it wasn't at all. Her own room had a ceiling papered with flowers that she'd insisted upon, even though Arthur had been shocked by them and said that other people wouldn't understand, but she'd said that she wanted to wake to flowers, and what would other people be doing in their bedroom? She said, “Flowers.”