Gilded Needles

  Officer Pane rushed inside the house.

  One of the policemen had knocked his head against the sidewalk bricks and lay dazed; his compatriot was tangled in that man’s legs. Louisa Shanks was held fast at the waist by the second policeman. She struggled to disengage herself by smashing her elbows into his face. When this proved insufficient, Louisa pulled a small knife from her pocket and sliced the policeman’s knuckles open.

  With an anguished cry he released her, shouted out in pain, and wrung his bloody hands together. Louisa immediately rose and rushed into the house after Officer Pane.

  The policeman whose hands had been cut struggled to his feet and was about to give chase to Louisa when Black Lena, who had made her slow way forward from the stoop next door, thrust her cane between his legs and tripped him up. He fell at her feet, and she jammed the cane as hard as she could into his mouth, pushed, and then drew it out bloody.

  These actions had occupied no more than about fifteen seconds in the quiet street. Not only to have a better view but to be well out of the way, Simeon Lightner had drawn back when Louisa and the two policemen were precipitated down the steps. Now he had disappeared, evidently to fetch other policemen. Duncan and Benjamin were so shocked by the drawing of the knife and by Black Lena’s vicious attack with her cane, that they had not the presence of mind to try to interfere in the altercation.

  The second policeman writhed on the sidewalk at Black Lena’s feet, his mouth foaming up blood and a thick gurgle filling his throat. He tried to grab at her feet, but she jammed her cane into his eye and he twisted away in screaming pain.

  The first policeman, who had been dazed, struggled into consciousness. But Rob and Ella together had lifted a loose coping stone from the balustrade of number 201 and brought it over to where he lay. They held it squarely over his forehead, and just as he flicked open his eye, they dropped it. The sharp corner smashed directly against his temple as he instinctively jerked his head out of the way.

  “Oh my God!” cried Benjamin, and rushed forward into the street, his pistol held out tremulously before him. Although Benjamin had visited the Black Triangle nightly for almost three months, this was the most vicious fighting that he had ever seen. It was not such as he had witnessed before: hot-blooded quarrels among men who were momentarily angry with one another, drunken arguments got up over the fall of a card or the price of a drink or the imputation of theft. The hard-visaged woman who had rushed back into the house was surely bent on the suppression of Officer Pane, Benjamin considered—and his was now the responsibility of preserving that policeman’s life.

  Benjamin’s saw a woman’s figure in the open doorway of number 203 and heard her voice: “No, Ma! No, Ma!” she cried: “Stop! I’m—”

  Benjamin fired the pistol into the black doorway. A moment later, a young woman staggered out. Her long blond hair was tied up with blue ribbons; she wore a voluminous yellow skirt and a short-waisted green bodice beneath a tight green jacket. She held a red hand against her throat. Her mouth was frozen in a wide smile. She turned her head slightly in the direction of Lena Shanks and the twins and then collapsed at the top of the stoop. Blood gushed out of the hole in her neck over the shallow steps.

  The twins screamed and—this time in their heedless grief—once more dropped the coping stone on the head of the policeman.

  “Daisy! Daisy!” cried her bereaved mother.

  Grappling with one another, Louisa Shanks and Officer Pane emerged from the doorway of the house together. Both were stopped by the sight of Daisy sprawled on the steps before them, her blood flowing in a little murky stream onto the brick sidewalk. Louisa was the first to recover her surprise—she stooped, grabbed Officer Pane by the waist, and flipped him over the balustrade onto the brick pavement. Louisa’s mouth opened wide, but no sound was emitted; her entire face was contracted and distorted with anguish. Her face locked in its tragic mask, she tenderly lifted Daisy’s corpse. Blood spilled over her dress as she cradled Daisy’s head against her breast. She mounted the steps again and carried Daisy into the house. The twins followed a moment after.

  Lena Shanks, oblivious to the heap of policemen beside her, slowly mounted the steps after them.

  In the street, Benjamin stood aghast—that he had just shot and killed a woman, and the wrong woman at that. Duncan had come forward out of the shadowed doorway and taken the gun from him. Together, and both unthinking, they had watched the body of the dead woman carried into the house.

  At the door of number 203, Lena Shanks turned to Duncan and Benjamin, who had stepped forward and stood now on the brick walk before the house.

  “Your name is Phair,” Lena said to Duncan, in a voice that faltered only upon the first word, “but you’re a Stallworth. And you too,” she said, pointing her cane at Benjamin. “You I’ve seen before. Noch einer Stallworth.” She paused, as if expecting either Duncan or Benjamin to deny his identity, then went on with an astonishing placidity: “Twenty years ago, Stallworth—the old man—killed Cornelius, meinen Mann. Sent me to the Island. Took away Daisy and Louisa. Put Alick in Sing Sing. I came off the Island, got my girls again. Alick is gone from Sing Sing. And I have the rope that hanged meinen Mann. Twenty years ago,” she whispered.

  Suddenly she raised her cane and swung it violently before her. “Now you come back!” she hissed. “Stallworths! Stallworths put Maggie in jail. Stallworths close my shop. Stallworths keep Daisy from her medicine.”

  She stopped, rubbed one shaking hand over the other on the head of the cane. Then she resumed, in a voice that was barely audible to the two men she addressed: “Now Maggie is dead. Now Daisy is dead.”

  She bowed her head and wept. She raised her head and then savagely, with the tip of her cane, stirred her daughter’s blood that lay in a congealing pool on the stoop, black in the gathering evening.

  “Stallworths! You killed Maggie,” she said pointing at Duncan, “and that’s one. And there’s you,” pointing at Benjamin, “you killed Daisy, and that’s two. The old man: three. A wife to you: four. Ein prediger: five. Eine Schwester: six. Six Stallworths, und zwei Kinder!”

  Duncan was frightened. Not only had the old woman discovered their family, but she had known of his connection with Maggie as well.

  “I had six too,” said Lena. “Cornelius and me, Alick and Maggie, Louisa and Daisy. Und zwei Kinder. Aber: three of mine are dead. Cornelius is dead. Maggie is dead. Now Daisy is dead.”

  Lena Shanks smiled a grim and ghastly smile and pointed to the policemen beside the stoop, dead and dying, their groans providing the burden and bass of her curse: “Go hide,” she said to Duncan and Benjamin, “and hide your family and your Kinder. This is what will come of you,” said she, glancing at the policemen, dead and dying. “We’ll see it done,” she said: “Vergisse nicht: there’s three of us dead. . . .”

  She retreated into the blackness of the doorway through which her dead daughter had just been carried. “We’ll see it done,” she said again, and the door was pushed silently shut.

  Part II: The Female Gang

  Chapter 28

  For the Tribune of Friday, March 17, 1882, Simeon Lightner prepared an extensive account of the terrible incident that had taken place before the houses belonging to Black Lena Shanks. Considering the sensational nature of the case and the luck of his having been a witness to it, Lightner composed the paragraphs in the first person. He began with the history of the two buildings at numbers 201 and 203 West Houston Street, which had been disreputable for more than two decades; appended biographies of their inhabitants, and reminded readers of Black Lena Shanks’s appearance and testimony at the trial of her sister-in-law, Maggie Kizer; told of the events within the Mulberry Street headquarters of the New York police that had led up to the attempted arrest of Daisy Shanks, and then presented a detailed ledger of the altercation on the sidewalk before the house.

  Simeon Lightner concluded:

  The presence of mind and daring of Mr. Benjamin Stallworth are entirely to be
credited. When Daisy Shanks, the ‘Laughing Abortionist,’ emerged from No. 203, intent on finishing the job begun by her mother and her offspring, he halted her murderous progress with a courageous and well-timed bullet.

  By the time that I had returned to that part of West Houston Street, having secured the assistance of two other officers, the injured woman had already been removed into the house and Mr. Phair and Mr. Stallworth had advanced to the succor of the three endangered policemen. Officer Pane, who had been in charge of the expedition, lay in a heap beside the balustrade of No. 203, dazed and inarticulate. The second officer, Thomas Raven of No. 30 East Third Street, jerked convulsively against the bricks. Blood poured from wounds in his mouth and his eye. He was pronounced dead upon his arrival at the Hospital of the City of New York. The third policeman, Richard Scoggins, of No. 77 Second Avenue, lay stone dead, the victim of two nine-year-old children.

  Officer Pane owes Mr. Stallworth a large debt of gratitude for his very survival.

  Mr. Phair informed us that no movement had been apparent within the house for at least five minutes. While Mr. Stallworth was dispatched to find a doctor in the neighborhood, the two officers cautiously entered the door of No. 203.

  The policemen made a thorough search of the premises, but discovered no one. The four malefactors, Lena Shanks, Louisa Shanks, and Rob and Ella Shanks (the twins), murderers all, had gathered their specie and their jewels and walked out the back door of No. 203. They slipped through an alley to King Street, and disappeared from human sight.

  The corpse of the abortionist was found on a couch in a magnificently appointed gold parlor on the ground floor of No. 203. Every piece of furniture, every scrap of cloth, and every morsel of decoration in the chamber was gold.

  The dead abortionist lay with her hands folded neatly over her breast. Her injured neck and bruised head were draped with a gold lambrequin that had been snatched from the mantelpiece. All the ornaments that had stood before the great gold-tinted mirror lay in fragments of gold pottery and gold glass upon the hearth of gold tiles. By her side was a purse containing a handful of emeralds, and a note in a fine but hurried hand which read: “These jewels are to be redeemed for cash. The money is intended for burial expenses. The marble marker is to read: DAISY SHANKS. WELL-BELOVED. 1859-1882.”

  It was the opinion of the doctor who first examined the corpse that, had the absconding family paused to secure medical assistance for Daisy Shanks, she might well have recovered from the bullet wound. The criminal mother, intent only upon her own safety, had abandoned her daughter without compunction and torn the children away from their mother’s corpse.

  The Commissioner of Police has registered a protest with the Mayor’s Office against the raising of a monument to the memory of an abortionist. He wishes rather that the receipts of the sale of the jewels be expended on obsequies intended for the two dead police officers, Thomas Raven and Richard Scoggins.

  A close watch will be kept on the two houses, although the police admit that it is unlikely that the murderers will return. Altogether about $15,000 worth of merchandise, almost all certainly stolen, has been recovered from the cellars of the two buildings. This amount does not include the furnishings of the rooms of the houses, which in most cases were splendid and costly. In addition, besides the surgical instruments found in a bedchamber on the fourth story, there was a printing press in one of the rooms on the second floor. Also found were counterfeit plates for the printing of bogus $10-bills, and a supply of paper similar in quality and texture to that employed by the Government Printing Office.

  The Police Department has issued descriptions of the four murderers, and declares itself confident that they will soon be brought to justice. Twenty-eight officers have been assigned to the search. In so desperate a case as this, the zeal of the police is laudable, and we must only hope that their sanguine confidence is justified.

  Duncan Phair, writing above his own name again, eulogized the dead officers, execrated the Shanks, and concluded:

  Yet, even if this strange family of more than incredible wickedness is never found, never brought into a court of law, the citizens of New York may rest assured that they will do no more harm upon this island. Their identities and aspects are too well known to remain undiscovered here, and they dare not revert to their former criminal ways. From these, if not entirely from others like them, we are safe.

  Chapter 29

  Lena, Louisa, Rob, and Ella, whose descriptions and murderous offenses were tacked up in police courts all across the country, were not to be found. At six p.m. on Thursday, March 16, 1882, they had entered the house at number 203 West Houston Street bearing the corpse of Daisy Shanks—and never been seen again. In succeeding months there came to be rumors of them, such rumors as invariably arise when there is a matter of substantial reward. Lena was known to be running a house of prostitution in Montreal, the twins were picking pockets on a Mississippi steamboat, Louisa was in California, affianced to a state legislator who knew nothing of her past.

  Yet the fact was that the Shankses had disappeared quite as effectively as if the door to number 203 West Houston Street had momentarily opened onto Hell and they been swallowed into perdition, as they deserved.

  But all of New York knew what had become of the Stallworths in the six months following the death of Daisy Shanks. They had risen—not spectacularly; for too rapid a rise would have been inconsistent with the Stallworth sense of propriety; but with a most respectable sureness and complacency.

  The campaign in the Tribune had proved a splendid success. After it had been revealed that Duncan Phair was the author of the articles that had been signed “A Republican Counselor” and “A Friend to Virtue,” much business of a prestigious and highly remunerative nature had been thrown the way of the firm of Phair & Peerce. Duncan was even commended by the bar for his researches in the Black Triangle.

  The Stallworths could point proudly to the Black Triangle as a blasted area now, where vice remained in-of-doors. The most notorious places of gambling, illegal liquors, and prostitution were shut up, and those wishing to dissipate themselves must do it in dark and secret places within the Black Triangle—or else in the numerous other parts of the city where depravity kept an open shop.

  The Tribune had been the most widely read of the papers detailing the moral corruption of the city; and the police department thought to do itself most good by following up on that paper’s discoveries. It seemed at times that the police dogged the footsteps of Simeon Lightner, Benjamin Stallworth, and Duncan Phair through the Black Triangle. Each dusty window those three men peered into was soon boarded over. Every threshold they crossed was sealed the next day. Any rouged lady who spoke to the three men on the street would be forced to remove her lodgings to the Tombs.

  Judge Stallworth had not been behindhand either. Trials in the venue of his court were dispatched with a rapidity that astonished even the public prosecutors and public defenders, who had thought themselves calloused to the summary nature of trials within the Criminal Courts Building. Criminals arrested in the Black Triangle paid large bribes to their arresting officers to say that they had been picked up in another street, so that they would not come before Judge Stallworth. Sentencing was harsh, and the Tribune faithfully reported his remarks on lengthy prison sentences as undeniable deterrents to crime.

  Marian Phair’s Committee of the Suppression of Urban Vice had not returned to the Black Triangle, but its strongly worded letters, numerous petitions, frequent subscriptions, and weekly and very fashionable meetings, did not go unnoticed. Membership on the committee was exclusive and sought after. The women of Marian’s class begged their friends to take them along or wrote Marian long letters in apparently irresistible adulation of her efforts to render the city safe and decent. Marian was gratified to find that descriptions of her ensemble, worn at Monday’s meeting, appeared in Saturday’s Tribune, article for article, in the column, “Fashion Hints for the Week.”

  Helen Stallworth had
continued at Marian’s meetings and took embarrassingly brief minutes of the inconsequential proceedings. But she no longer complained to her father or even to Marian, for she now was convinced that she was doing some real good for the unfortunates condemned to live in the Black Triangle. She went there almost daily, sometimes in the company of Mrs. General Taunton, but of late even by herself, wearing her simplest black dress, with a large basket of foods and necessaries on her arm. She could call a hundred beggars and petty criminals by their cant names.

  Her second life—as she thought it—apart, so different, so worthy, wholly unsuspected by her family, brought a smile to Helen’s countenance at odd times, so that the others wondered at her happiness. Helen, who before had always considered lying a sin only slightly less reprehensible than “enforced adultery” (what she called rape), now delighted in the panoply of deceit with which she kept her charitable work hidden from her family.

  Benjamin, on his part, was happy also. The many months of expeditions into the Black Triangle, the slight but constant attention that was afforded him because of his supplementary endeavors and his unexampled heroism in having shot the Houston Street abortionist before she slit the throats of the three injured policemen, raised him in his own and others’ estimation. He was no longer merely tolerated. His grandfather, for instance, now and then spoke a word to him which was not unkind; and Marian, when no one else was by to take her attention, sometimes condescended to converse with him. His father no longer demanded to know the hour of his coming in at night, and had a latchkey fashioned for his use. His presence was no longer required in the offices of Phair & Peerce, and altogether Benjamin’s existence was less onerous to him than it had ever been before.

  He had not entirely left off gambling, for it was too great a pleasure to him: real excitement in what was still, despite its increased amiability, a fairly dull life. But all his wagering now was justified as investigation, and he never put down on a table more than he could afford to lose. Benjamin’s only debt remaining was that owed to Duncan and his father for payment of his losses on New Year’s Day; but as neither of them had ever mentioned the circumstance again, Benjamin had begun to assume that it was forgotten or forgiven.