This was what the Slapes wanted out of life, and this was why they had murdered Richard Parrock. Now that they had his money – and Hannah calculated that so large a sum as they possessed in the carpetbag would keep them for many years to come – they need never trouble themselves again with thoughts of employment or financial prudence. They had all sat back comfortably in life. John spent his days at the barbershop, Hannah walked the streets and looked in shop windows, and Katie waited patiently for customers. In the evening they went to the theater. They weren’t wanted by the police for the murder of the old man, they were far removed from Goshen and Philadelphia, they weren’t even known by their former names.
Only Philo Drax could interfere with them, for only she knew their faces and their crimes – but no doubt the girl was in hiding herself. And the Slapes had long before determined that if ever she came near enough to recognize them, she wouldn’t long survive that recognition.
It happened that one fine spring afternoon, when Hannah and John Slape had gone out with the intention to stroll through City Hall Park and Katie was alone in her room, Ann Clayton knocked hesitantly on Katie’s partially open door. Ann was the newlywed wife of Charles Clayton, who was employed in a Wall Street firm. They occupied the room across the hall from Katie’s parlor.
“Miss Katie,” said Ann, “are you much taken up just now?”
Katie grinned and shook her head. She motioned Ann Clayton inside the room. Ann closed the door carefully behind her. She was a short, handsomish sort of woman, whose dress, if always neat and tasteful, was noted by the other inmates of the house to possess scant variety.
Ann sat down. After a moment of looking about the room with curiosity – her curiosity was soon satisfied, for there was nothing in it but a table, three chairs, a stack of newspapers in the corner, and a greasy pack of cards on the mantel – she asked, “How is your little business going along?”
Katie did not reply. She threw her arm across the table toward Ann Clayton. The cheap rings on her hand rapped loudly against the wood. The fingers opened and closed clawlike.
Ann Clayton, with some little trepidation, placed her hand in Katie’s. Katie clutched it so hard that Ann cried out in surprise and pain.
“Twenty-five cents?” said Katie. “Or fifty?”
“Twenty-five!”
Katie let go her hand, rose and fetched the pack of cards from the mantel. She sat again at the table and began to turn the cards over one by one, stacking them neatly again, in an unvarying rhythm.
“Why did you marry Mr. Clayton?” she asked in an insinuating voice.
Ann was too surprised to reply.
“You married him because you thought he had money,” said Katie. “You thought he made sixty-two dollars a week. A friend of his with red hair told you that.”
She looked up at Ann and smiled.
She looked down again at the cards and went on: “And he thought you had money. That’s why he married you. Your friend in the blue hat told him that you had inherited six thousand dollars from your aunt in Vermont.”
To these statements, perfectly true, Ann Clayton could say nothing. She was hot and embarrassed. “Who told you this?” she demanded. “They were lying.”
“It was your friends that lied. Mr. Clayton makes seventeen dollars a week. He won’t be raised until February next. He’ll have nineteen dollars then. Your aunt in Vermont is not yet dead. She’ll die watching a parade. You’ll get two hundred dollars from her.”
Ann Clayton hurried out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Katie continued to turn over the cards. She was still doing so when Ann Clayton returned a quarter of an hour later. The woman put two quarter-dollars on the table and sat down again.
“How can Charles and I get more money?” she said in a low voice.
Katie paused in the turning of the cards, clapped her palm over the coins, and drew them toward her.
“Write to the aunt in Vermont. Tell her you’re with child. Tell her that if it’s a girl, you’ll call the child Maria.”
Ann Clayton drew in her breath sharply. Maria was the aunt’s given name.
“If it’s a boy,” said Katie, “you’ll call him Woodfin.”
And that was her aunt’s family name.
To her husband Ann Clayton said nothing of her interview with Katie, but the letter to her aunt Maria Woodfin was duly dispatched, and she awaited eagerly some reply to it. In the meantime the invisible financial resources of the Slapes had begun to arouse more and more curiosity in the mind of Ann’s husband. Charles Clayton was a clerk in a brokerage house with three clerks under him; these three young men made only six dollars a week. But they of course hadn’t wives to support on their earnings.
There was some strain between Ann and Charles Clayton on account of their lack of money. It was in Battery Park, on the afternoon following their wedding, that they had discovered that neither the one nor the other was possessed of anything approaching ample means. A friend, hoping to expedite Ann’s marriage, had misrepresented to her future husband the size of her dowry, and friends of Charles, only as a joke, had given his salary out to Ann as five times its actual figure, unable to conceive that anyone could really credit a clerk with making sixty dollars a week. The first month of the Claytons’ marriage had been spent in recriminations, but these failing of themselves to bring in any money, the couple had declared a truce on the matter: both had been cruelly deceived, and that, unfortunately, was all that could be said. They determined to put a brave front on the matter before their acquaintances – Ann and Charles were not the sort of persons to cultivate actual friendships – being of the opinion that only those who have money, or have the appearance of it (which in New York is the same thing), are apt to get more.
It was obvious to Charles Clayton that the Slapes did not depend on Katie’s occult powers to keep them beneath the Christopher Street roof, for her income would not even have kept them in theater tickets or carfare. Therefore he assumed that John Jepson had money put away somewhere, and with this thought in mind he set about to cultivate the man. This was a difficulty, for John Jepson seemed inordinately fond of the company of his family. Yet one Saturday afternoon, when he had returned from Wall Street, Clayton found John Jepson sitting on the stoop of the house, cracking walnuts with his teeth and every few seconds glancing up and down the street.
“Waiting for Mrs. Jepson?” Clayton asked.
John Slape nodded.
“Is she late?”
John Slape shook his head.
Though he could see that his company was not particularly desired, Clayton seated himself on the step just above John Slape and leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees. “May I have a walnut?”
John Slape handed him one over his shoulder and without looking back. Clayton had nothing to crack it with and feared to employ his teeth – which were rotten – to such a purpose, so he contented himself with turning it over and over between his fingers.
“I’m in a brokerage firm, you know.”
“That so? What’s that?”
Clayton was momentarily shocked by such ignorance in a man who evidently had money, but reflecting that the ignorant were soonest duped, he went on with energy: “Oh, we’re an office that transacts business in stocks, and bonds, and at the Market. On ’Change, you know. For rich people, for people who have money and don’t want to put it in the savings bank.”
John Slape looked up. “Why don’t they want to put it in the bank?”
“Four percent interest. That’s why. Four percent interest is nothing! They come to us and give us their money, and we buy stocks, and shares, and interests, and then in a few months we give them back twenty or thirty percent, that’s why!”
“How do the savings banks stay in business then?” asked John Slape with a canny leer.
Clayton shrugged. “Savings banks are for small investors. Bootblacks and grocers. Small investors will never make anything. A man with money g
oes to Wall Street. We – I have one investor, he’s doubled his money in seven months. Never saw anything like it. We – I have—”
“What’s ‘a man with money’?” John Slape interrupted.
Clayton thought for a moment. Evidently John Jepson was going to compare any figure he named with the amount of capital he was possessed of; if Clayton named too high a figure, then Jepson would be discouraged. So at the slight risk of underestimating Jepson’s holdings, he said, “About a thousand is the least I’ll take on. . . .”
John Slape looked thoughtful at this, and Clayton leaned forward to peer into his face.
“Tell me what it means,” said Jepson.
Clayton was confused. “What what means?”
“I take a thousand dollars down to Wall Street . . .” John began.
“No,” said Clayton quickly. “You give a thousand dollars to me, and I take it to the brokerage office and invest it for you. I decide what stocks and bonds look best right now, that is, which ones are most likely to rise in value, and I purchase those to the amount of one thousand dollars. Then in a few months, when it appears that the investments may decrease in value, I’ll sell them, and bring you your thousand dollars and the profit besides.”
“Generous,” remarked John.
“Oh, of course we take a commission,” said Clayton.
“What’s that?”
“You have to pay me a certain percentage.”
Clayton could see that this meant little to his friend and was glad that he asked no more questions on that point.
“And I make a deal of money?” was all John said.
Clayton shrugged. “Depends on the market. Could make a great deal, could make only a little, but you’ll always get better than your four percent that you take at the bank.”
This was of course an outright lie, for there was always risk of loss on the Market, but Jepson’s ignorance of finance was so profound that Clayton felt safe in speaking it.
John Slape sat very still for a minute or two. When he looked up it was to see Hannah and Katie not fifty feet away on the street. They had paused at a little cart that was selling hard candies. John Slape turned round on the stoop, and said quickly and quietly to Clayton: “What if I had more than a thousand . . . ?”
Chapter 18
INVESTMENTS
Charles Clayton took John Jepson’s one thousand dollars to his employers, giving out that the sum had been entrusted to him by his wife’s aunt in Vermont. The money was invested in Canadian silver mining stock, which fortuitously paid off in only eleven days, netting a profit of almost thirty-five percent, or $342. Two hundred of this sum Clayton brought back to John Jepson and asked his permission to keep the principal invested. John Slape, who regarded the two hundred dollars with astonishment – at least after he was made to understand that the original one thousand dollars was his as well – hurried to the barbershop at the corner of Charles and Washington streets, where he had taken to spending the greater part of his afternoons.
Here he retired to a corner near the unlighted stove and gave himself over to some deep thinking on the subject of investments and large returns. He came to the conclusion that he had discovered, through the agency of Charles Clayton, something to do with old man Parrock’s fortune.
In 1871 a variety of ways existed for women whose husbands worked in other parts of the city to occupy the leisure that sometimes was theirs in the afternoon. Some paid calls, some patrolled the demi-fashionable streets like sentries, some leaned on their elbows across the counters of dry-goods stores until they had memorized the very nails there, some sat on the stoop watching their children and speculating on their neighbors’ secrets, some performed charitable work, the most venturesome conducted affairs with various lovers in discreet houses of assignation that abounded on Bleecker and Clarkson streets, and not a few cultivated an interest in spiritualism.
These last, many of whom were known to one another through meetings at the houses of various mediums then in vogue, gossiped not about their weak sisters, but about elevated spiritual planes, clairvoyant demonstrations, prophecy, manifestations of the departed, table-tippings, rappings, and a sounding trumpet, draped in black, that had appeared near the ceiling of Mme. Kornfeldt’s drawing room.
One of these ladies, a Mrs. Benjamin Crowninshield of West Sixteenth Street, had visited a dollar store on Eighth Avenue in search of a cheap shawl for a sister-in-law she detested, and had fallen into conversation with one of the young women who lived in the same rooming house as the Slapes in Christopher Street. The girl behind the counter, who had heard from Ann Clayton of Katie’s powers, told the woman in front of the counter of the extraordinary new tenant, a young woman with black hair and wild eyes, who “can read your heart just by taking one look at the nails of your fingers.”
Mrs. Crowninshield asked directions to the house and appeared that very afternoon in the threadbare parlor on the second floor, sitting at the table across from Katie Slape.
What Katie Slape told Mrs. Crowninshield, Mrs. Crowninshield never revealed, but whatever secret was known to Katie about her customer was sufficient to prove her prowess in the matter of divination. Mrs. Crowninshield refused to return to Christopher Street, but she sent all her friends; and within the week Katie had doubled her prices, receiving not one complaint for the increase.
Upon first entering the room and seeing Katie, the ladies would be disappointed. The chamber had none of the amenities they were used to: thick draperies, plush carpets, heavy dark furniture, panelled walls. And Katie was dressed in bright, vulgar colors, with too much ornament about her. She wasn’t polite, her grin was almost insulting, and there was no delicious mystery to the process of her clairvoyance.
Katie looked at you, demanded your money, looked at you again, touched your hand or fingered the material of your sleeve – and then told the secrets of your heart.
“You have a lover on Morton Street,” she told one woman. “And your husband has found out his name.”
“Your sister,” she told another, “was killed by an abortionist in West Houston Street. Her corpse was sold to a medical student.”
“If your stair carpet were to become loose,” she told a third, “your husband’s father would fall and break his back. You thought he had one hundred thousand dollars, but he has double that.”
Katie enjoyed her work, and her parents were happy to see her occupied. The money she obtained in silver and small pieces of gold seemed of more value to the Slapes than that which was hidden away, in such large notes, in Philo’s carpetbag.
They began to look for a way to squeeze more from Katie’s profession.
“Katie,” said her stepmother one evening when the three of them were eating in a German restaurant on Second Avenue, “these ladies that come to see you – do they have money?”
Katie nodded. “Some,” she said. “Some have a lot.”
“I’ve seen ’em well dressed,” said John, nodding.
“Do they bring the money with them?” asked Hannah.
“Some,” said Katie. “I saw a woman carried five hundred dollars in her pocket.”
“Five hundred dollars!” exclaimed John Slape.
“Oh, Katie!” Hannah laughed. “We’ll coin you, turn you into dollars!”
One afternoon, when Katie was downstairs with one lady and three more waited in the ground-floor parlor, and Hannah was absent with the landlady on an expedition to the aquarium at Battery Park, John Slape pried open the locked trunk in which the carpetbag was kept and extracted from it all of Philo’s fortune but perhaps a thousand dollars. He placed the bills in a little tin box and that evening handed over the little tin box to Charles Clayton. John Slape did not even know to ask for a receipt.
Chapter 19
THEFT
With John Jepson’s twenty-eight thousand dollars in his possession, Charles Clayton hesitated. He ought perhaps to do with that sum what he had done with Jepson’s thousand dollars
– invest it under his own name and from the profits take a large commission for himself. But how to explain at the brokerage house the abrupt acquisition of so large a sum? If he claimed it as his own, through the death of, say, his wife’s uncle, then his employers would justifiably question him: “If you are possessed of such a fortune, why do you remain in menial employment?”
Neither could he say, “This money belongs to a fellow lodger,” for with such a sum to be invested, his employers would insist upon meeting John Jepson and making much of him. And if Jepson talked with the head of the brokerage house, he would learn to what extent Clayton had cheated him.
To deal with another brokerage house would necessitate the further deception of using a false name, and what with constant traffic along Wall Street among brokers, their clerks, and messenger boys, he was certain to be found out.
The simplest solution was probably to steal the money.