The compliment referred to metaphorical bodies—the secrets behind scandals. There wasn’t a government clerk in the city’s morgue, hospitals, and police stations who wouldn’t do the Van Dorn a favor for cash or valuable information that could be used against enemies. If flesh-and-blood bodies were what Tim Holian wanted, flesh-and-blood bodies Tim Holian would have.
He soon shambled back to the office with lists of young women who had disappeared, lists of petite blond murder victims, lists of nameless bodies, and lists of mutilations. These he coordinated with lists his detectives had compiled from interviews with homicide cops and newspaper police reporters. Even after culling the unlikely from the likely, they still had a chilling number of strangled victims—six in the past three years, four of them hopeful actresses, one prostitute, and one librarian walking home alone.
Tim Holian telegraphed the results to New York, care of Chief Investigator Isaac Bell. He followed up by composing a personal letter for Bell. He was still writing it when the company wire rattled out a query from Bell himself:
EXPLANATION
Holian wired a shortened version of his letter, wherein he speculated that the extraordinary number of possible victims might testify to the lure of the filming of movies, a fast-growing business that drew so many young people to Los Angeles. This drew a second query from Bell.
WHY NONE BEFORE 1908?
Tim Holian wired back that 1908 marked the beginning of a flood of movie makers from the East Coast. Then he speculated:
MAYBE KILLER MOVIE MAN
Bell did not reply.
Charlie Post, chief of the one-man Denver field office, took a fresh look at an awful murder that occurred only last year. The eviscerated body of a doctor’s wife had been found in a gold smelter. She was from a prominent Colorado family, and her husband had been swiftly tried, convicted, and hung for the crime. The entire incident would have been a comedy of errors if it hadn’t been tragic.
Whoever had killed her—and Isaac Bell’s All Field Offices Alert had raised new doubts in a case that Post had never liked—had thrown her body into the smelter’s charge hopper. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have boiled to oblivion. But labor and owner hatreds being ferocious as they were in Denver, saboteurs had drawn the furnace fires to ruin the smelter. The molten ore had cooled, and when the killer dumped her body, it bounced on a hardened mass of ore and slag, where it was found the next morning by scab laborers imported to break the strike.
“Clearly,” the prosecutor had told the jury, “this doctor knew less about the smelting business than he did about surgery. Having butchered the poor woman like he was taught back east in medical school, he was tripped up by his ignorance of Colorado’s most important industry.”
Convinced more than ever that the case stunk, and emboldened by Bell’s alert, Post raided his emergency expense fund to bribe a coroner’s assistant to let him see photographs of the body.
“Son of a gun.”
Her arms and legs were stippled with the shallow crescent-shaped slices that Isaac Bell had ordered him to look for. He wired New York. Then he found a saloon. The murderer was Bell’s man. The doctor was innocent. And the best Charlie Post could hope for, as he raised a glass to toast—“Right and wrong”—loudly enough to catch the attention of the floor manager, was that husband and wife were reunited in Heaven.
“Telegram from Texas Walt Hatfield on the Western Union line, Mr. Bell.”
“Texas Walt Hatfield is a movie star. He doesn’t work for us anymore.”
“Whatever you say, Mr. Bell. But he still knows the Van Dorn cipher.”
Bell looked over the typewritten lines of code and deciphered them in his head. Texas Walt—who had been masquerading as a stunt performer on the Thief case when movie makers hired him away to play cowboy parts—had not bothered to save money by reducing a telegram to a few words. The once famously terse Texan was no longer laconic, having gotten used to booming his movies in Photoplay and Motion Picture Story Magazine. As Bell read his wire, he could hear his old friend’s Texas drawl, which had grown more pronounced when he became a Western star.
Howdy, Isaac Old Son,
Rode the train to Albuquerque, New Mexico, yesterday. I had caught wind of a poor little dance hall gal cut up real bad last October. Then I caught wind of your All Field Offices Alert and it struck me she might be up your alley. Turned out, she probably is. Not only carved-up but decorated with them little half-moons you was asking about. Hope it helps.
Happy Trails.
Your good friend, Texas Walt Hatfield, former ranch hand, former Texas Ranger, former Van Dorn detective
P.S. Near as I can tell, she’s the only one in Albuquerque. I looked into the other killings in town. All stemmed plausibly from misunderstandings between tetchy acquaintances.
Horace Bronson, chief of the San Francisco field office, who had just returned home from a stint running the Van Dorn overseas outpost in Paris, was greeted by a Morkrum printed telegram from his old friend Isaac Bell. This called for a three-track investigation. Bronson sent his apprentices to San Francisco’s theaters and his seasoned operators to the Barbary Coast brothels. He himself killed two birds with one stone by visiting his friends among the police to establish that he was back in town while inquiring about missing young women and unsolved strangulations.
After wiring Bell his office’s initial assessment, Bronson, too, wrote a letter.
. . . I am somewhat amazed by how many and how long. Obviously, not every one of these girls’ murders were committed by the same person. But many at least could have been, and they go back ten years or more. And the terrible thing, my friend, is this: one or two a year adds up to relentless slaughter.
Isaac Bell forwarded the Los Angeles, Denver, Albuquerque, and San Francisco reports to the detectives of the Anna Squad with a terse cover letter.
The Anna Squad is now named the Cutthroat Squad.
13
Connections trickled in from the field offices, and Isaac Bell saw hints of patterns.
Some bodies were draped under bloodstained capes. The capes were alike, but not identical, yet all were standard factory-made items that could be purchased in ordinary department stores. The murderer could easily replace them without being traced.
Fair-haired young victims like Anna Waterbury, Lillian Lent, and Mary Beth Winthrop turned out to be mostly actresses in theater and vaudeville and the circus, but some were prostitutes. What these poor souls had in common was what he had told Van Dorn: these were girls on their own, without family or husbands to protect them.
Of the mutilated bodies, many had their necks broken.
Coroners and cops recalled strange marks carved in the girls’ skin.
Bell told Joseph Van Dorn, “I stood in with the Herkimer County coroner. The man barely noticed these cuts. When I remarked on them, he wrote them in his notes as ‘superficial stab wounds.’ It never occurred to him she was already dead before he took out his knife.”
“What do you suppose they mean?”
“I’m racking my brains. I have no idea.”
“I think they’re a calling card,” said Van Dorn.
“Some sort of message,” Bell agreed.
“Lunatic.”
“But no less dangerous for it, and too slick to get caught.”
Another pattern formed, the most disturbing yet. Some bodies had been hidden in old cellars, abandoned buildings, and deep woods.
“How many were never found?” Bell wondered aloud.
Van Dorn said, “You’ve got a monster on your hands, Isaac.”
“A monster who travels. He’s left victims in Kansas City, San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago—the list keeps growing.”
“A traveling man,” mused Van Dorn. “A salesman? Or a railroad man? How long has this been going on?”
Bell answered bleakly, “T
he Chicago field office just found one of his capes in an abandoned lake boat. Inside was a skeleton.”
“How long” became almost unbelievable when Grady Forrer brought Bell a clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle dated July 24, 1891. The paper made the usual Jack the Ripper comparison, though to be fair to the writer, this killing went so far back that it was not long after the London rampage.
“If this is him, too, he’s been killing girls for twenty years.”
“What do you suppose drives him?” Marion asked late at night. Bell had staggered in at two o’clock and sat with her in bone-weary silence.
“No motive of the sort we understand. He’s not killing for gain, or revenge, or love. He’s just doing what he feels like doing.”
“A wild animal.”
“I’ve been calling him a monster. The trouble is, believing he’s a monster doesn’t get me any closer to stopping him.”
“That would be the same as calling him evil, wouldn’t it?” Marion asked.
Bell agreed. “It’s not enough to think he is evil. In fact, it’s not even helpful.”
Marion said, “I’m beginning to understand why the newspapers keep referring to Jack the Ripper. He’s like an explanation for the unexplainable.”
“Even though we don’t know a thing about Jack the Ripper.”
“What do we know about him?” asked Marion.
Bell had already observed that the further back Research delved into newspapers, the more recent the memory of Jack the Ripper, the more their reporters invoked the connection. Now he asked Grady Forrer for information on the actual Jack the Ripper. Forrer had anticipated the request. Waiting for him was a thick packet of yellowed clippings from the Sun, the World, the Herald, and the Times. The top sheet’s headline read
CARNIVAL OF BLOOD CONTINUES
POLICE PARALYZED
“What do they boil down to?” Bell asked.
“Theories,” Grady told him, “all unfounded. Speculation, all imaginative. Conjecture, all fanciful. Guesses, all hopeless. Jack the Ripper is said to have been a nobleman or a surgeon or a Freemason, or a Polish radical, or a merchant seaman, or a leather worker, or a butcher. All that is known for sure about him is that eventually he stopped killing women in London. Although exactly when he stopped—whether 1888, or 1889, or 1891—is hotly debated. Also debated is why he stopped. Did he kill himself? Did he die of natural causes? Did he get bored? Did he immigrate to Australia? Did he flee to Brazil? Did he settle down to a quiet life in the country?”
“Do they debate whether he ever stopped at all?”
Grady shrugged. “The consensus seems to be that if he didn’t die, at some point he must have run out of steam.”
Bell slung the clippings under his arm and found an empty desk in the bull pen.
“Where is the Boss?”
“Went downstairs for supper.”
Downstairs was the palatial dining room of the Knickerbocker Hotel. An orchestra played. Every table was taken and conversation was animated. Bell waved to Enrico Caruso, who was dining with coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, but continued on a beeline toward Joseph Van Dorn, who was reading the menu at a corner table with his back to the wall. Bell eased onto the banquette, catty-corner to him, with his back to the other wall.
“Welcome,” said Van Dorn. “We haven’t broken bread in a long time. How are you?”
“Intrigued,” said Bell.
“Good Lord. We better order first.” Van Dorn looked up, and the table captain came running.
“Cocktail?” asked the Boss.
“Not yet,” said Bell.
Van Dorn ordered a Manhattan.
“With Bushmills Irish Whiskey, Mr. Van Dorn?”
“Always— You’re sure nothing for you, Isaac?”
“I am sure.”
Van Dorn ordered oysters and roast beef.
“And for you, Mr. Bell?”
“Pollo Tetrazzini.”
He waited for Van Dorn’s drink to arrive and toasted him back with water when the Boss said, “Mud in your eye.”
“O.K.,” Van Dorn said. “Spit it out. What intrigues you?”
“There are a hundred theories about Jack the Ripper.”
“At least.”
“The one I find most intriguing is that he stopped killing prostitutes in London twenty-three years ago when he escaped to America.”
“I’ve heard that.”
“What do you think? Did he come here?”
Van Dorn shook his head. “One version had him killing an old woman on the Bowery, if I recall. Didn’t make much sense. She wasn’t young and she wasn’t a prostitute.”
“I read about it,” said Bell. “It didn’t seem at all like his other crimes.”
“And yet you’re ‘intrigued.’”
“Not by that murder. No, what intrigues me is a question: Is it possible that the reason Jack the Ripper was never caught was he fled London in 1888 or 1889 and landed in America? Maybe in New York. Maybe Boston. And laid low for a while.”
“Far-fetched,” said Van Dorn. “How long do you think he laid low?”
“The first killing I’ve found that could be him was in Brooklyn in 1891. But the question is, is he killing again?”
“Now? 1911? That is far-fetched.”
Bell agreed it was far-fetched.
Van Dorn’s oysters were served on a bed of ice. He heaped a few of them on Bell’s bread and butter plate. “That’s exactly the kind of speculation we get in the newspapers.”
“Agreed,” said Isaac Bell, and challenged his own question: “Besides, wouldn’t the Ripper be too old by now?”
Joseph Van Dorn raised a bushy red eyebrow. “Too old?” he asked silkily.
“We’re talking about a murderer who committed his crimes twenty-three years ago.”
Van Dorn said, “I suppose that from your perspective, a man past forty looks ancient.”
Bell said, “You and I both know that past age forty, criminals who haven’t been jailed tend to slow down.”
Van Dorn signaled the waiter. “You see that soup ladle on the sideboard?”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Van Dorn?”
“That big long one.”
“Yes, sir. I see it.”
“Bring it here.”
The mystified waiter delivered the ladle.
Van Dorn asked Bell, “Tell me, young fellow, how would you characterize the poor devils who will soon not see the sunny side of fifty again? Decrepit? Flea-bitten? Feeble?”
With a cold smile for his Chief Investigator, the Boss hefted the heavy silver serving tool in his powerful hands and tied the handle in a knot.
“Too old?”
Bell swept to his feet in a fluid motion as swift as it was graceful.
“Thank you for your oysters,” he said, and glided from the dining room.
“Isaac!” Van Dorn called after him. “Where the devil are you going?”
“England.”
ACT TWO
LONDON (SIX DAYS LATER)
14
“Fact-based truth, Mr. Bell,” Joel Wallace told Isaac Bell. “High-and-mighty Scotland Yard never nailed Jack the Ripper.”
When Americans ran into trouble abroad—businessmen swindled, tourists with daughters excited by shady suitors, art collectors worried that bargain-priced Rembrandts and Titians might have been lifted from their rightful owners—the lucky ones landed in Jermyn Street at the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s London field office.
Joel Wallace ramrodded the outfit. He was a short, rugged man in a loud suit, and he had made the Van Dorns a formidable presence in the capital city of the British Empire. The stuffier sort of Englishmen might be put off by his cocksure manner, but his brash ways assured Americans that Wallace was an aggressive detective they could count on, a
nd word soon got around the expensive hotels and four-day ships: See Joel Wallace. The Van Dorns’ll set you straight.
“The Ripper ran circles around Scotland Yard. They won’t love a Yank reminding them.”
Which was precisely why Isaac would not want to present himself as Chief Investigator of a private detective agency. Better to let the high-and-mighty peer down their noses at a humble insurance sleuth who was indulging an eccentric hobby on his day off.
“Toyed with the coppers,” said Wallace. “Played tricks on ’em. You’re looking at his biggest joke right across the street—Metropolitan Police H.Q.”
It was a cold spring day, and the rain that greeted Bell’s ship at Southampton Docks and pelted the boat train was soaking London. Canvas topcoats were in order, for the walk past the cherry blossoms of St. James’s Park and across the Whitehall government district to the Victoria Embankment. Backs to the Thames, they faced New Scotland Yard, a double-wing, four-story building striped in horizontal rows of stone and brick. Soot-black Parliament buildings loomed just upriver. Scarlet trams rumbled on Westminster Bridge. Big Ben was striking two o’clock.
“New Scotland Yard—built the same year the Ripper started killing. One guess what the workmen found where they were laying the foundation.”
“Half a body,” said Isaac Bell. Five days steaming across the Atlantic Ocean in the Cunard liner Mauretania had been time to reread and ponder Research’s newspaper clippings and memorandums word by word. A phrase from the inquest stuck in his head. The butchered woman found in Scotland Yard’s cellar had been “well-nourished.” Hardly a description to fit the alcoholic prostitutes Jack the Ripper had murdered in the Whitechapel slum.