The brass nails flicked against his throat in what was almost a playful gesture, but a moment later he felt the warm trickle of blood down his collar. When he raised his hand to protect himself, the brass nails sliced across his knuckles, drawing rivulets of thick blood.
The brass nails were poised together, and then poked clawlike into Duncan’s mouth where they gouged with dizzying pain into his gums. His mouth filled with blood.
He gagged, and the nails jabbed again, shredding his lower lip.
The woman in the green dress drew back, and Duncan stared at her with stupefaction. He was lifted higher from behind.
Holding her third finger and forefinger close together before her face to form a prong of brass sharper than a meat fork, the woman smiled.
She advanced slowly and Duncan stood stock-still. Instead of swallowing the blood that gathered in his mouth, he held it in his cheeks.
The woman raised her hand before his face, and with a graceful circular gesture, pointed the brass prong at his right eye.
Duncan lifted his right foot and brought it down with as much force as he could gather onto the foot of the woman who held him. Her grip faltered and he pulled away from her.
The woman in green lunged at him, and the two fingers plunged into his bearded cheek, piercing it through. Duncan gasped in pain and jerked away, tearing the nails from her fingers. She turned on him with a vicious cry, and dug her hands into his shoulders.
He spat a mouthful of blood in her face and she stopped, blinded.
Duncan threw the weight of his body against the double doors. He crashed through, tumbled down the steps, and with the two brass spikes embedded in his cheek, ran as fast as he could down dark, deserted Pearl Street.
The two policemen dispatched to Duncan Phair’s offices found no evidence of the struggle but splattered blood about the base of the staircase and a length of fringe that the lawyer identified later as being from the reticule—he thought—of the woman in green. The two brass nails, once they were dug out of Duncan’s cheek, were curiously and minutely examined by the police. One old officer, now relegated to desk duty at Mulberry Street, said that he recalled a young woman during the Draft Riots who had affected these long brass nails on both hands and had inflicted great injury. “Don’t think it could have been the same one though, she’d be past sixty now, I’d think, had her teeth filed too—incisors like steel drills, plant ’em in your arm and fill her mouth with blood. Maybe it’s her daughter. . . .”
None of the injuries Duncan had sustained—on his face, in his mouth, and upon his hands—was of any real seriousness, but all required time and leisure to heal. He was advised to rest in bed at least a week.
Marian Phair had been shocked and indignant when her husband was returned to Gramercy Park in so disreputable a condition. She considered that victims of crime deserved as little sympathy as the perpetrators; there was something in one’s physiognomy, she contended, that invited victimization; something, she was certain, that all the Stallworths lacked, and that others—Cyrus Butterfield for instance—possessed in large measure.
“What happened, Duncan?” demanded Marian sternly, sitting at her husband’s bedside, just after the physician had left the house.
“I was attacked, Marian, by two women in the hallway of my offices. Just within the front door.”
“Why did they attack you? Did they want money?”
“No,” said Duncan, turning his face, “evidently not.”
“Duncan,” she said, “does this have anything to do with the cards that we received on Sunday? Are you keeping this from me? You and Father? Not telling me that we’re in danger?” Her voice became increasingly shrill. “May I expect to be set upon in the street by two harpies, dragged from my carriage, and trampled upon in the mud! Is that what you’ve cut out for me!”
“No, of course not, Marian,” he said uneasily. “This is unconnected with the cards that were sent on Sunday. That was a joke, this was serious business, but with the careful descriptions that I gave to the police, those women are likely to find themselves at the Island if they come near me again.”
“I don’t believe you,” snapped Marian, and walked out of the room.
Duncan was anxious to speak to his father-in-law, for despite his protestations to Marian, he was certain that this attack had been initiated by Lena Shanks. To his surprise, Judge Stallworth declined to take that view.
“No,” said the judge, standing at the foot of his son-in-law’s bed, and holding a docile Edwin by the hand. “Depend upon it, Duncan, these women were after money—”
“No,” protested Duncan.
“—or,” he went on, over Duncan’s objection, “they mistook you.”
“Father,” said Duncan, “they called me by my name. Before they attacked, they made certain of my identity!”
“Well,” said Judge Stallworth, unperturbed by Duncan’s reasoning, “I will admit that it is possible that the women sought revenge of some sort. You helped to jail their father, or their sons, or their husbands, their lovers—or sent them to jail themselves. You say you didn’t recognize them, but you can’t remember every petty criminal that passes through the courts and neither can I.”
“These wounds I wouldn’t call ‘petty,’ ” said Duncan peevishly. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to take a mouthful of food without discomfort.”
“Doubtless, Duncan, this was merely an unfortunate consequence of your researches into the Triangle. We needn’t concern ourselves more with it. These women—whatever their motives for their attack were—are satisfied now.” Judge Stallworth lifted Edwin onto his shoulder, tenderly rubbed the child’s belly with his bony hand and, warning the child not to knock his head against the doorjamb, walked out of the room without another word to Duncan.
Duncan decided that he had done his duty by telling his father-in-law his fears; he had resolved never to be culpable again in a matter of withholding information from the old man. Helen, Benjamin, and Edward Stallworth, each of whom in turn came to visit Duncan, declared themselves disturbed not only by the violence of the attack but by its meaninglessness, its lack of motive. Duncan Phair eagerly agreed, and resignedly bemoaned his position as an unoffending victim of the harpies dressed in crimson and green.
After a week’s careful searching, the police could find no trace of the two women who had assaulted Duncan Phair. It was a mysterious thing, the police considered, and persisted in their belief that it was all a matter of personal vengeance. And, as the days passed and the members of the family remained unmolested, Duncan allowed himself to think that the murderous attack had been intended only for himself, a result of some minor portion of the Black Triangle investigations. This small deception, practiced upon himself, was far preferable to the thought that Lena Shanks might have begun to act on her fearful threat.
Chapter 31
In the second-floor chamber of number 1 King Street, where Mrs. General Taunton had spoon-fed an aged, dying married couple, Black Lena Shanks sat in a scarlet-cushioned wicker chair, and by means of a mirror that was attached to the window casement, observed the traffic that moved constantly between MacDougal and Varick streets. On this pleasantly chill Saturday morning early in October, her daughter Louisa and the pugilist Charlotta Kegoe sat stiffly in chairs a few feet distant. The children reclined on their grandmother’s bed, playing cards.
“Bad choice, I think,” said Charlotta, “to send those two girls to do it. They’re used only to drunken sailors, and when they come upon a lawyer that’s sober and strong, they can’t take him. Lena, I’m grieved I told you about ’em.”
“No matter,” replied Lena with a wave of her hand.
Louisa made signs that were readily interpretable. Next time, she and Charlotta would go out on such an errand themselves.
“No,” said Lena, “we’re not to be involved directly. Don’t want you on the street. Don’t want you to be seen, Louisa.”
“What about Duncan then, Nana?” cried
Rob, knowing the man only by the name Maggie Kizer had called him.
“He’ll lie safe for a while,” replied Lena, and paused while a heavy water cart rattled noisily by. “Just for a while.”
What’s to be done now? asked Louisa with her hands.
“Send for Pet Margery.”
Ella threw her cards down upon the sheet and hopped off the bed. From a wooden crate in the corner of the room where her clothing was kept, she extracted a ragged red dress and slipped it over her head. She tied a large yellow bonnet over her hair, taking good care to hide her side curls and, barefooted, ran out into the street.
Lena watched her granddaughter’s progress down King Street. Ella seemed an aimless hungry beggar-child, moving without purpose, and everywhere pausing. But presently her wandering took her to the unsigned facade of a gambling house on the far side of Varick Street, and she slipped inside without anyone apparently taking notice of her.
In a few minutes she swung out of the door again, munching a crust of bread and waving a beggar’s perfunctory thanks—as if she had unexpectedly obtained charity within. Her aimless peregrination then eventually brought her back to the stoop of her own building, where she played upon the lowest step for a while. Then, as if with pointless curiosity, she wandered up to the doorway and noiselessly dropped inside.
“On her way!” cried Ella a moment later, when she appeared in the doorway of Lena’s room. Yet it was a quarter of an hour before Lena Shanks saw the slight, pretty figure of Pet Margery advancing up King Street in a white dress a little the worse for mud and damp filth about the hems and cuffs, and twirling a black and white striped parasol over her shoulder. Ella had wakened the young woman from her sleep and she had wanted time to dress.
Pet Margery was a sixteen-year-old whore, whose mercenary sights were set only on those men who had made winnings in the gambling saloons of the Black Triangle. This specialization had been a natural consequence of her having been reared in the faro saloon of her father, Henry Porter, that stood on Varick Street within sight of Lena Shanks’s glass. Pet Margery had made herself the familiar mistress of all the gambling halls in the area, from the most respectable—Harry Hill’s back room—to the very lowest, where dice were tossed on a blanket laid over the muddy earthen floor. She had been for several years one of Lena Shanks’s regular customers; Pet Margery had been on the streets since she was twelve.
Charlotta Kegoe ran downstairs to meet Pet Margery and accompanied her back up to Lena’s room. “Hiding out, Lena?” squealed Pet Margery in a voice that was considerably more femininely childish than Ella’s.
“For now,” replied Lena.
“What can I do for you, then?” said Pet Margery, dropping daintily onto the edge of the bed, twirling her parasol prettily upon its bent point.
“A little work I want done. . . .” said Lena.
“By me!” cried Pet Margery, and giggled. Her hair was dyed red, but so cheaply that the color had come off on the brim of her white hat.
“Ja,” replied Lena solemnly, “by you.”
Lena Shanks and Charlotta Kegoe in tandem then gave the girl minute descriptions of the three men who had been touring the Black Triangle for the articles in the Tribune.
Quickly, Pet Margery identified them. “Always together,” she cried, “always together. Don’t gamble much except the young one; don’t drink much, always together. So they’re the ones who print the articles. Pa’ll be glad to hear, I’m sure!”
“No!” hissed Lena, “not yet. Where were they last?”
“Three nights back: Hudson Street. Hibernia Hall cellar, young one losing at schuss.”
“Want you to find ’em again, go out looking,” said Lena. “Find ’em again, and send word to me.”
“If I’m all the time looking, how’m I to work?” cried Pet Margery.
“How much do you make a night?” said Lena.
“Seven,” she replied truthfully, then thinking better for herself, added, “sometimes fifteen.”
“I give you twenty a night while you’re looking. And not a word, Pet, not a word. . . .”
On March 16, directly after fleeing the buildings on West Houston Street, Lena Shanks and her daughter Louisa and the twins Rob and Ella had secreted themselves in the rooms of Charlotta Kegoe. They might have felt themselves safe if Lena had not recalled so well the strange appearance of Helen Stallworth in that out-of-the-way house. Lena considered it necessary that they depart the city immediately, and in fact, by the time Simeon Lightner’s account of the incident on West Houston Street had appeared in the Tribune, all four of the family were already to be found in a small house that they had taken in Mantoloking, New Jersey. They spent six months in this seaside resort masquerading as a bereaved and reclusive family of prosperous circumstance.
Weeping Mary had accompanied them in the guise of a superior servant, had secured the house in which they lived, had dealt with brokers and butchers and dressmakers and inquisitive neighbors. Charlotta Kegoe guarded the Shanks’s interests in New York, and each week was pleased to report that no progress had been made by the police or the newspapers toward their finding-out.
Simeon Lightner and Duncan Phair’s boast that the Shanks family, through the closing of Lena’s shop, the death of Daisy, and the suppression of Louisa, had been reduced to penury, was ungrounded. For despite these things, and even despite her family’s exile from New York, money was no difficulty for Lena. Louisa had been a wonder with the family’s finances, and their fortune was all safely invested, deposited, held in banks all over the city and in Philadelphia too. Of all that was valuable in the houses, only the account books had been taken away. After only two weeks of hiding in Mantoloking, Louisa made a foray back to Manhattan and withdrew five thousand dollars from a bank on Chambers Street. This money was for present exigencies, but it also proved that the family was financially secure; the purblind police had not discovered the talents that Louisa had buried in every part of the city, beneath a great and varied list of feminine Christian and common surnames.
However, it was not lost upon Lena that if not Daisy but Louisa had died upon the stoop of number 203, all their funds would have been irretrievably lost. Louisa’s skill as a forger was required to withdraw their funds from the bank.
Louisa went back to New York once more, in May, to arrange for the exhumation of her sister’s corpse from the potter’s field near Eighty-fifth Street. Daisy was re-interred, by stealth and night, on the side of a hill in Greenwood Cemetery. Louisa could find no one who would undertake the removal of Maggie Kizer’s body from the graveyard on Blackwell’s Island, however, and the octoroon must remain in that desolate place.
The Shankses returned to New York on Saturday, September 16. With funds provided by Lena, Charlotta Kegoe had purchased the two houses, number 1 and number 2, that faced one another across King Street, almost at the corner of MacDougal. The old couple of the second-floor-front had died some weeks before and their chamber had remained vacant. Simple furnishings were moved in here for the use of Lena and the twins. Louisa stayed in Charlotta’s chambers and Weeping Mary was installed across the street. The Reverend Thankful Jones, the red-haired prostitute, and the young boy on the second-floor-back room remained as they were, and were scrupulous in their lack of curiosity about what went on in the rooms occupied by the Shankses. As Mrs. General Taunton had predicted to Helen, Mrs. Leed and her baby had not long survived their visit.
During their first week back in New York, the Shankses did not venture out of the house on King Street. Lena sat at the window upstairs and observed all that transpired in the street below. The children took turns at the door downstairs and minutely examined all who passed on the walk. At the end of seven days, Lena declared herself satisfied that their return to the city had been undetected.
Now the children and Louisa began to make expeditions about the city, always in different, concealing dress. Louisa had gone to the young boy in the second-floor-back room and he had supervised certai
n changes in her attire, the dressing of her hair, and the paint on her face, which made her unrecognizable as the starchily dressed, greasy-fringed Amazon who had tossed Officer Pane over a balustrade. The most anonymous of spies, these three soon discovered all there was to know of the Stallworths: their occupations, habits, habitations, servants, friends, and finances. They became studiously familiar with the chambers on Pearl Street, the Criminal Courts Building, Madison Square, Gramercy Park, and the Presbyterian manse. Lena’s former customers were approached, as Lena directed, and these women, who had been only sorry that Lena was forced to leave the city and had been incensed over Daisy’s death, promised their assistance to her in any small way that might be thought helpful. They did not have to be told that they would be well rewarded for their loyalty.
As all this was going on, Lena sat in her scarlet wicker chair on the second floor of the house, and from behind the heavy black veil of her bonnet—for she was still in deep and sincere mourning for her daughter—watched the ever-varying and grimy traffic on King Street. At last, on Saturday, September 30, when Louisa indicated to her mother that a certain young woman, of whose many names the most commonly used was “Cyanide” Susan, had been approached and secured, Lena Shanks raised her veil slowly, and said: “They have forgotten us. They think that we’re dead. Die Zeit ist gekommen! Our time has come.”
The eight mourning cards were delivered to Gramercy Park on the following afternoon by Rob in a neat black suit.
Chapter 32
Simeon Lightner had long since made the rounds of all the well-known establishments in the Black Triangle, and the nights he spent there now he looked on as gleanings. His articles in the Tribune, rather than outraged and indignant, tended to be humorous or pathetic. He would relate interesting anecdotes of internecine wars among thieves, provide an amused account of a breakfast in a house of evil (“all oyster juice and aspirin”), or describe the deathbed of a miser.