There were plenty of developments to take my mind off of that prospect. Detective Sergeant Marcus and Mr. Moore did eventually locate the widow of the contractor Henry Bates, and the news they brought back from Brooklyn was disturbing: Bates’s wife declared that he’d never had a sick day in his life, and that his heart had been as strong as an ox’s. On top of that, he hadn’t died a day or two after completing his job for Nurse Hunter—he’d died that very day, some six months ago, and at Number 39 Bethune Street. He’d been struck just after taking a cup of tea—fortified with some whiskey—what’d been offered by the mistress of the house. Nurse Hunter herself had apparently reported all this to the coroner, and had gone on to say that Bates’s attack had occurred as he picked up a heavy sack of tools on his way out of the house. The coroner had told Mrs. Bates that such things did happen, and that Bates could have had some hidden heart defect that didn’t make itself known until the very end. He’d asked Mrs. Bates if she wanted him to do an autopsy to confirm this; but she was a superstitious and fanatically religious woman, who had some strange notions about what would happen to her husband’s soul if his heart was removed from his dead body.
This slightly demented attitude made it tougher for Mr. Moore and Marcus to buy the next theory what Mrs. Bates shared with them—that her husband had been seduced by Nurse Hunter—even though they wanted very much to. Her statement that Mr. Bates had been directed by his boss at Number 39 Bethune Street to hire and fire construction crews on a regular basis, on the other hand, seemed to make sense: Nurse Hunter would want as few people as possible to know the complete details of what she was building. The only man who wound up with such knowledge was Mr. Bates; and it was the Doctor and Detective Sergeant Lucius’s belief that if we checked around the Hunter household carefully enough, we’d probably find some dried purple foxglove. Nurse Hunter might even have it growing in her yard; wherever she obtained it, the flower—source of the powerful drug digitalis, what could stop even the strongest man’s heart—could easily have been mixed into that last fatal cup of tea, and any unusual odor covered up by the smell of whiskey.
This might seem to’ve been so much of what the Doctor called “hypothetical” thinking—and so, in fact, it was. But nobody who’d ever seen the cold glare that could come into Elspeth Hunter’s golden eyes would’ve doubted for a second that she was capable of such an act. Still, the thought that we were up against somebody we now had good reason to believe had killed not only a whole group of infants but at least one full-grown adult male was more than a little frightening. In fact, it seemed like every day or two we were coming across some new revelation about the woman what proved her to be dangerous in a way we hadn’t anticipated. Such didn’t make preparing for our break-in to her house any easier. But other than carrying more and bigger firearms, there really wasn’t much of a way to improve on the plan itself; and when Miss Howard showed up on Thursday morning with one of Ana Linares’s little nightgowns, my part in that plan became more pressing: I now had to spend long hours making sure Mike was properly trained, being as an awful lot was riding on his nose.
Along with the nightgown, Miss Howard brought confirmation of what the Doctor had speculated about during and after his trip to the Museum of Natural History: Señor Linares did in fact have a Filipino aborigine in his employ. He was a spooky little character who gave the señora goose bumps and who she wouldn’t allow to sleep in their house, forcing the little man instead to pass his nights out in the yard. The pygmy, known only as “El Niño,” had been a Linares family servant for many years, but the señora was unclear about exactly what his duties were—though when Miss Howard told her about our encounters with the man, she was able to put together a much better idea. Miss Howard’s revealing this information had only put another strain on the Linareses’ marriage, which, it seemed, was close to falling apart: the señora’d told Miss Howard that if she hadn’t been a good Catholic, she would’ve already left her husband.
To top all this off, we had the now-daily headlines in the Times about the “mystery of the headless body,” following the case as it began to dissolve, before the Police Department’s helpless eyes, into the kind of boring domestic murder what Detective Sergeant Lucius had originally predicted it would turn out to be. By Tuesday the theory that the victim was one of the escaped lunatics from Long Island had been pretty well exploded, and the police were instead putting up the idea that the deed had been done by the same crazy butcher who had similarly killed and dismembered a young girl, Susie Martin, in a famous case a few years back. This theory, handed to the cops like a Christmas present by the pathologist who’d investigated the Martin case, took all of about two minutes to fall apart: various people with missing loved ones had shown up at the morgue to view the headless body parts, and by Wednesday no fewer than nine of these visitors had positively identified the things as being the remains of one William Guldensuppe, a masseur at the Murray Hill Turkish Baths.
The cops had (reluctantly, I was betting) pursued this lead, and by Thursday they had discovered not only that Guldensuppe had been living for a long time with a lady friend, a certain Mrs. Nack, in a house in Hell’s Kitchen, but that said lady friend had recently developed an attachment to another man in their building, Martin Thorn. Guldensuppe, Nack, and Thorn had been seen and heard by other residents of their neighborhood openly fighting about the situation. Mrs. Nack was quickly found by the bulls and given a dose of the old third degree: she confessed, after twenty-four straight hours of brutal treatment, that she and Thorn had killed Guldensuppe together and then chopped up his remains. Thorn, however, was nowhere to be found, and the only way for the police to keep the matter interesting was to set up checkpoints at railroad stations and shipping piers all over the city, and to call for first a cross-country and then an international manhunt.
“He’s still here,” was Detective Sergeant Lucius’s reaction to all the noise coming out of Mulberry Street. “You mark my words, Stevie, the man never left and never will leave this city.” Only time, again, would tell; but I wasn’t betting against the detective sergeant, that was for sure.
Friday brought word from Kat, saying that she’d secured one of Libby Hatch’s jackets and was ready to turn it over; but she had a feeling that maybe Ding Dong knew that she was up to something, so she wanted to make the delivery somewhere other than at the Seventeenth Street house: apparently the Dusters knew I lived and worked there. I told her to bring the jacket that night to Number 808 Broadway, where the detective sergeants had set up their equipment and were ready to perform their tests—tests what would tell us, once and for all, whether Nurse Hunter had taken Ana Linares and was holding her in some deep recess of Number 39 Bethune Street.
CHAPTER 22
Kat showed up just after nightfall, and I went down in the big elevator to fetch her. She was shuffling from foot to foot on the marble floor of the building’s lobby, humming a little tune and jerking her body around in time to it. At the elevator’s approach she spun to face me, and even from that distance I could tell that she’d been at the burny again.
“Stevie!” she called, with a big, disturbing sort of smile. “I got the goods!” She held up a medium-sized parcel, plain brown paper tied with some twine.
As I dragged the grate open, she jumped inside and threw herself against me, laughing out loud at nothing at all. “Kat,” I said, trying not to sound as disappointed—even angry—as I felt, “get a grip on yourself, okay? This is serious.”
She frowned, mocking me. “Oh. Sorry, Inspector.” Then I closed the grate, and as we started up in the near darkness she threw her arms around me, moving her lips close to my ear. “Want to have another go, Stevie? Right here in the elevator? Been a long time …”
I slammed the control handle of the machine into the STOP position, so hard that Kat was jerked away from me. She gave out a little squeal as she fell backward.
“Kat!” I said, still trying to control myself. “Why the hell did you have to show up in
this kind of condition?”
The blue eyes turned mean, a meanness made all the worse by the cocaine. “Don’t you take that tone with me, Stevie Taggert! Ain’t I spent the whole week risking my neck to get you and your friends what you wanted? If I allow myself to celebrate a little, now that it’s over, then I hope I can be forgiven by your high-minded self!”
Letting out a frustrated burst of air, I nodded at the package. “Maybe you should just let me take it,” I said. “I’ll meet you later, bring you the money and the ticket.”
“Oh, no,” Kat shot back, holding the package away from me. “I know that deal! I’m gettin’ paid now, and I’m gettin’ paid in person! If you’re so damned embarrassed by me, don’t worry, I won’t stick around long! Who’d want to? Bunch of mighty strange types, is what you all are, and I mean to celebrate my good fortune tonight with them what knows how!”
I grabbed the elevator handle and threw the thing back into motion. “All right,” I said, “if that’s how you want it.”
“How I want it? That’s what you want, ain’t it?” She faced the elevator grate and tried to fix her hair. “Damn me … the airs some people take on, just because they find themselves on the other side of the tracks …”
The rest of Kat’s visit didn’t go much better. Her anger made her keep her words to a minimum, but it was still obvious to me—and, I’m sure, to everybody else—that she was loaded with burny and that hers was no chippy (which is to say, irregular) habit. Oh, she had the goods she’d promised, all right: we opened the parcel up on the billiard table next to the detective sergeants’ vials of fingerprint powder and their comparison microscope, and found that it contained one tight-fitting, bloodred satin jacket—with, to order, large, flat black buttons. Kat wanted to get paid right there and then, and her temper wasn’t improved when the Doctor said that she’d have to wait for the detective sergeants to verify that the jacket belonged to the woman we knew as Elspeth Hunter. Kat declared that she’d wait for the fingerprinting to be done, but no longer—she couldn’t imagine what else we wanted the thing for, and she wasn’t going to wait to find out. The deal she’d struck required her to show up with one jacket belonging to Libby Hatch, she said; after we’d all agreed that she’d lived up to her side of the bargain, she’d take her leave. Having said this, she threw herself sullenly into one of the big easy chairs.
The process of lifting the prints didn’t take long. The buttons being black, Marcus used a camel’s-hair paintbrush to dust them with some fine, grey-white aluminum powder, which he then blew away, revealing a clear set of waving lines what he held up against a photograph of the lead pipe they’d found in Central Park for comparison. Nodding to the Doctor, Marcus said only, “It’s a match,” at which point Kat, figuring that was her cue, got to her feet and marched up to the Doctor.
“We all square?” she said to him, a little frantically.
The Doctor—who, I could see, was worried by both Kat’s physical state and her attitude—attempted to be cordial. “We are indeed all square, Miss Devlin. Can we offer you anything by way of thanks? Some coffee, or tea, perhaps—”
“My money and my ticket,” Kat said, holding out a hand. Then she thought to add, “Thank you very much, sir.” Looking my way, she narrowed her eyes and spat out, “I wouldn’t want to overstay my welcome, or make anybody uncomfortable.”
The Doctor glanced from her to me and back again. I think he was on the verge of saying something more, but finally he just nodded and took an envelope from his breast pocket. “Three hundred dollars in cash,” he said with a smile, “and one ticket to San Francisco. Valid at any time during the next six months. Oh,” he added, as Kat near grabbed the envelope, “and the ticket is for a first-class compartment. To show our appreciation.”
That melted her a bit, toward him if not me. “That’s—very decent of you, sir. Thank you.” She glanced at the envelope and smiled just a little. “I ain’t never traveled first class. My papa, he used to say—” Seeming to catch herself, she went rigid again. “I’ll be on my way now, sir. If that’s all.”
The Doctor nodded. “I’m sorry you can’t stay.” She’d just turned when he added, “Miss Devlin—” He took a business card from another pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. “I operate a—school, of sorts, downtown. For young people who want or need to make a change in their lives. Here is the address and the telephone number. Should you ever find yourself in New York again and be interested in such—assistance, please do not hesitate to telephone or stop by.”
Kat looked at the card, and her face went wicked again; but she forced herself to smile. “Yeah. I heard about your place, Doctor.” She looked up at him. “I heard you ain’t runnin’ it no more, is what I heard.”
At that I stepped in fast. “Kat, come on,” I said, pushing her toward the door.
“So who’s to say, Doctor,” she called over her shoulder, “which one of us needs the—assistance?”
I got her wriggling form back into the elevator, slammed the door shut, and closed the grate with a bang. Fairly tearing the control handle off, I started us back down. “You had no call to talk that way,” I said through my teeth. “He was only tryin’ to help, dammit all, Kat. What’s wrong with you? Can’t you ever let anybody help?”
“I don’t want nobody’s help!” she hollered back. “I want to take care of myself, if that’s all right with you!”
“Yeah? Well, you’re doin’ a hell of a job!”
“Maybe you don’t think so—but I ain’t no servant, and I ain’t yet fallen into the river dead stinkin’ drunk! So just leave me alone, can’t you, Stevie? Leave me be!” She turned away again, and choked back some tears as she tried to catch her breath. Glancing down at the envelope in her hands, she tore it open. “I’m countin’ this,” she said, just looking for more ways to sting me. She scooped out the envelope’s contents, coming first across the train ticket. “Hunh. First class. Hell, I could sell this and buy three tickets …” Her eyes made out some small print at the edge of the thing. “What’s this—‘non … transferable … non … refundable.’ What’s all that mean?”
I was still pretty hot myself, so I just laid it out: “It means you can’t sell it to anybody else and you can’t cash it in, that’s what it means.”
The words were meant to hurt, and it was clear they did. “You mean, if I was lyin’ all along about my aunt and just wanted some more money for burny, is that it?”
We’d reached the ground floor. I grabbed the handle of the grate, but before opening it I remembered one last detail. “We need to know when the woman’s gonna be at the Dusters’. At night, and for sure.”
“All right,” Kat answered quietly, her own teeth grinding. “Since that’s all you care about. They’re havin’ a big to-do tomorrow night. It’s Goo Goo’s birthday. She’ll be there. I won’t. Can I go now?”
I pulled the grate open for her without answering. She just looked at me and shook her head for a moment, then stormed on out. “Good-bye, Stevie,” she said, still fuming quietly.
Ordinarily, I would’ve run after her; but that night I just didn’t have it in me. There were a lot of reasons why, some of which I’d come to understand in the near future, some of which would take me years to really get. But to this day I still wonder how things might’ve turned out if I had gone …
I gave myself a few minutes and then headed back upstairs. Miss Howard was waiting for me when I stepped out of the elevator, and while the others were all clustered around the billiard table, watching Detective Sergeant Lucius as he peered through the comparison microscope, she pulled me over to the front window.
“Stevie,” she said quietly, “is everything all right?”
Struggling to keep down a rush of irritation at the thought that everyone in the room had been let in on my personal dealings, I just threw up my hands, then wiped sweat from my forehead. “Yes, miss,” I said. “Will be, anyway …”
Being as I kept my eyes to the floor, I couldn
’t swear to it, but I felt that Miss Howard was searching my face. “I was right about you,” she said, causing me to look up and find her smiling. “You wouldn’t fall for a fool.”
“No, miss,” I answered. “Too busy being one, I guess.”
“Don’t,” Miss Howard answered quickly, touching my arm. “How she behaves doesn’t make you a fool. She’s a clever girl, your Kat—clever and independent in a world that wants her to be stupid and submissive. And pretty, too. Pretty enough to be able to take serious risks, trying to make a life for herself—and clever enough to think that she can manage the dangers that come with those risks. But she can’t. No one can. And so her schemes end up hurting her worst of all—much as they may hurt you, too.”
I knocked my fist against the window frame and, out of sheer frustration, asked a question I already knew the answer to: “But—she could choose another way to go if she wanted to, couldn’t she?”
“Theoretically, yes,” Miss Howard said with a nod. “But ask yourself this, Stevie: If the Doctor hadn’t offered you another way, would you have chosen one?”
I looked away, not wanting to give an honest answer but not knowing what else to say. Fortunately, Detective Sergeant Lucius made further conversation unnecessary: