Katie made no reply.
“Search her pockets,” said Hannah then.
Katie did so, and after a moment brought out thirty-six dollars and some odd silver.
Hannah and John grimaced. “Not much,” said John. “Certain there’s not more hid?”
“There’s no more,” said Katie. “I wanted to show the sandbags didn’t do the job.”
For this Katie was scolded. They weren’t so far from the law that they could afford to murder for the pleasure of it. The sandbags and the hammer ought to be carefully reserved for those young women who had substantial amounts of money on them.
“One hundred dollars, Katie,” said Hannah. “Make a limit.”
“How do I know how much they’re carrying? I don’t see the money till I’ve emptied their pockets.”
“You know,” said John. “Do as Hannah says, Katie.”
In order to make their operation less liable to discovery, John Slape purchased the adjoining house, which had been unoccupied for about eighteen months. Its windows were boarded over.
He knocked a hole in the fourth-floor wall common to the buildings, thereby giving them access to the newly purchased house without the necessity of entering it from without. It had been John’s first thought to leave the bodies of the women there until the time for disposing of them in the North River was propitious. But he discovered, in a little ramble through his new property, that the cellar of the house had an earthen floor. Experimentally, he turned that earth with a spade, and found it dense and wet, but workable. Against the next victim he dug out a hole approximately five feet long, a foot-and-a-half wide and four feet deep. It was the most work that he had done since the War.
The next victim was a prostitute, a tall, handsome girl with auburn hair and deep brown eyes, who had received a proposal of marriage from a gentleman and wanted to know if she ought to accept.
“He has a wife in New Haven,” Katie replied, and hit the woman over the head with a sandbag.
Katie administered but one blow, with the intention of showing her parents the ultimate inefficiency of that method.
The prostitute slipped out of her chair to the floor, and Katie took from her one hundred and seven dollars.
John and Hannah came into the parlor. Katie handed over the money with a sneer. “She’s still alive,” she said.
“Out cold,” said Hannah, eyeing the woman on the floor.
John shrugged, lifted the woman on his shoulder, and with Katie and Hannah following, carried her up to the fourth floor, ducked her through the hole in the wall, and descended with her to the cellar.
With some difficulty he squeezed her into the grave – Katie’s previous victims had never been of so great a stature.
Katie and Hannah stood to the side and watched with interest and admiration.
Hannah had brought the sandbag with her. “I should hit her again,” she said to her husband. “She’s still breathing.”
“Don’t bend down,” said John to his wife, whose girth would have made such an operation awkward. “You might slip in.” He motioned Hannah and Katie to step back, then began to shovel in the damp earth over the living woman.
Chapter 29
COUSIN PRINCE AND HIS GIRL SUE
No one discovered what was happening within No. 251 Christopher Street and its unoccupied neighbor to the west. Many in this neighborhood of transients were of more recent vintage than the Slapes, who had arrived there on the last day of March. It was known, generally, that a single family dwelt in what had previously been a rooming house and that the daughter told fortunes. In this there was no mystery. Certainly there was no neighbor with either sufficient time or interest to compare the number of women who went into the house with the number who came out again.
Katie, through her legal efforts, had made somewhat over five hundred dollars in three months. By murder and robbery she had made a little over two thousand dollars, and eight young women were dead. Of the four who had been slipped into the North River, only Maud Merrill had been found. Three bodies had been washed out into the sea. No one was likely to discover anytime soon the four bodies buried in the cellar of No. 253.
Dozens of young women disappeared each year from the streets, rooming houses, and carpet salesrooms of New York. The cartes de visite of these young ladies – truly a spectrum of beauty – filled three boxes at the Missing Persons Bureau down on Centre Street. Even had all Katie’s victims been reported missing – and not all of them were – eight more young women lost in the three months of April, May, and June of 1871 would scarcely have been noticed. It was assumed that any missing young woman was most likely to have run off with a handsome young man; if that were not the case, it was most probable that she had descended to a life of infamy and had voluntarily renounced her former connections; although, it was finally acknowledged, there were a few true victims – of robbery, of rape, of the abortionist’s knife.
The papers, finding this so common an item, did not even bother to print three lines announcing “Young Lady Missing in Twenty-first Street.” However, should her interesting corpse be washed up onto the shore of Staten Island, to be discovered in horror by a boating-breakfast party, she might rate a full column, which would invariably end with a moralizing paragraph execrating the villain who seduced her, murdered her, and threw her into the water, and drawing our attention once again to that “fair young form lying in the sad-colored robes, which proved its grave-clothes below the gurgling waters, its beautiful ringlets matted with sand and its cheeks empurpled by a death of violence.”
All such items Hannah read aloud to her husband and daughter, and John and Katie nodded sagaciously for their length. A number of plays then on the Bowery recounted the plights of young female victims, and over the second-act terrors of these young women, Hannah and Katie and John would weep into their handkerchiefs.
It was characteristic of the Slapes that they never thought of the past. John Slape actually couldn’t remember the time when he had been married to Katie’s mother, and in truth, nothing remained of that alliance but the girl and John’s infatuation with the theater. Hannah might have been able to remember her childhood if she had bothered, but why should she? Katie’s memory was purely sensate: of the actions of the previous week she could recall only those moments when she’d taken the hammer and sandbags from the desk drawer in her parlor.
The time, so recently past, when they’d lived in Goshen, when old man Parrock had been alive, when they’d angled for his cash, were scenes vague and confused in their minds – even Hannah’s. They were even more than half convinced that it was Philo Drax who had murdered her grandfather. Sometimes Katie would say, “Wonder what’s come of her? Wonder if they’ve strung her up yet?”
And John would say, “Who?”
And Hannah would reply, “Hired girl. Should have done away with her in Goshen.”
“I wanted to,” Katie would say. “I wanted to hit her over the head with my hammer.”
“Didn’t have a hammer then,” Hannah would point out.
And a week later, the same conversation would be repeated.
In a peculiar way, they were very happy.
A single incident disturbed the equanimity of the Slapes, and that occurred on the evening that they attended Tony Pastor’s Theater on the Bowery to see Fanny Herring in The Female Detective – they had much enjoyed, earlier that week, her performance as The Dumb Girl of Genoa. The Slapes generally took box seats, though these were the most expensive in the house. Their dress and their manners would have made anyone think that they would get no higher than the pit – or no lower than the gallery – so in the boxes they appeared a distinct anomaly. Though they did not realize it, they had come to be known by managers, actors, and other regular patrons.
But Hannah and Katie and John liked the privacy of the boxes, they liked the superb view of the stage, and during the intermissions and before the play began – no fashionable lateness for the Slapes – they
liked to look over the crowds.
On this particular evening early in June, Hannah grew suddenly agitated and pulled at her husband’s sleeve, at the same time drawing back into the shadows that the box afforded.
“What is it?” said John.
“Down there,” said Hannah. “It’s Cousin Prince and his girl Sue.”
John and Katie peered over the edge.
“No!” hissed Hannah. “Don’t want to be seen!” And she drew Katie quickly back.
Prince Jepson was from Camden. His father and Hannah’s father had been brothers, and he had known Hannah from childhood. His daughter Sue was perhaps fourteen years of age.
“He don’t know Katie and me,” John pointed out.
“No,” said Hannah, “guess he don’t.” However, she stayed hidden at the back of the box.
The Slapes remained for the play and the afterpieces, but Hannah didn’t enjoy herself as usual. Afterwards she hurried John and Katie outside the theater, and they went directly home.
“He was visiting,” said John, “I don’t doubt. He didn’t come looking for us.”
“Suppose not,” said Hannah. “But, John, tell you the white truth, did scare me to see him there.”
At that very moment there was a knocking at the street door, and Little Dick set up a ferocious howling. John and Hannah retreated quickly into the darkened parlor.
The knocking grew louder.
Katie crept up the stairs.
Hannah whispered to her husband, “Sure to be Cousin Prince. Saw me, followed me here. Saw us come in the house. Knows we’re inside.”
“He can’t break in,” said John consolingly. “There’s the law.”
The knocking suddenly left off, and Hannah heard her name called loudly several times: “Hannah! Hannah Slape!”
Hannah did not answer, and presently the knocking and the calling left off.
Hannah and John remained as they were.
Katie came down and said, “It was your cousin, Mar, and his girl. They went off down the street.”
“Angry?”
“No,” said Katie. “Like they wasn’t sure of something. Went away just talking.”
That night the Slapes did not light any lamps or candles in the house. They hoped that Hannah’s Cousin Prince had become convinced he had mistaken either Hannah or the house. But if he had taken up a post of observation in the neighborhood, they wanted to make certain that he did not see that the house where he had knocked so persistently was inhabited.
They were not visited again that night, nor the next night either. Hannah refused to leave the house for three days altogether. Katie wanted to know if she should ready the hammer and the sandbags for Cousin Prince and his girl Sue, but to this Hannah would give no answer.
After a week, even Hannah allowed herself to become convinced that Cousin Prince and his girl Sue had returned to Camden and given over their sighting of Cousin Hannah Slape as a mystery of mistaken identity.
Ten days later, however, a letter arrived at No. 251 Christopher Street addressed to Hannah Slape and bearing the mark of the postmaster of Camden, New Jersey. This letter Hannah refused to accept of the postman, and it was returned marked “Recipient Unknown.”
There was no way for the Slapes to know how very serious an error this was to prove.
PART VII
WEST THIRTEENTH STREET
Chapter 30
THE FASHION IN HOOPS
Philo felt a fool to have left so great a sum of money in her room, which did not have a lock on the door, in a house of whose inhabitants she now realized she knew nothing. She had instinctively trusted Ida Yearance because she had never been taught to distrust. And Ida Yearance had taken advantage of Philo’s gullibility by instructing her to leave her scanty fortune somewhere in the room, where at the first opportunity Ida had searched it out and carried it off.
Philo did not know what to do. Her first thought was to go to Henry Maitland and explain that she had suddenly lost all her money – all, except for the fifteen dollars that she had carried about with her that day – and was nearly destitute. But then she reflected that although Henry Maitland knew where she lived, she had no idea where to find him. And if she did not see him this evening there would be no point in trying, for tomorrow morning he would sail for Brazil, there to remain for several months.
She did not even suspect that Mrs. Classon kept a City Directory in the parlor which contained the address of Henry Maitland’s lodgings less than two miles distant.
Philo sat despondently in the single chair of the room, which she had drawn up close to the door. She peered out into the dim hallway and waited for her friend Ella to return.
In the main, Philo was a sturdy girl, not prone to self-pity. She could spend hours turning a thing this way and that until she had found its brightest side, and thereafter it was this aspect that she kept always before her. But this night, while she waited for Ella LaFavour, Philo was at a loss to discover any bright side at all to her predicament. She was without family, she was without money, her only employment – of itself insufficient to keep her in lodging – was in a place of doubtful morality, and the single friend who possessed the wherewithal to aid her was sailing in the morning for South America.
Philo listened to the noises of the house: the young women’s muffled laughter in shared rooms, the shutting of doors, the occasional loudness of a cab in the street outside, cats on the roof of the carriage house just outside her own window, and Mrs. Classon’s promised snoring in the next room. Every noise seemed alien. These were not the noises she had been accustomed to hear in New Egypt. At night, New Egypt was so still she could hear the cows chewing their cuds in the pasture beyond the kitchen garden.
She would never hear her mother’s voice again.
She dropped her face into her hands and wept, and it was thus that Ella LaFavour found her.
Philo told her story.
“Ida Yearance came in last week,” said Ella with a knowing nod. “Never told what she did. I’m not a bit surprised. There’s a kind of girl goes rooming house to rooming house looking out for what she can find. She finds it, takes it, and goes away, and tomorrow takes up lodging somewhere else.”
“But isn’t she recognized?” cried Philo, finding a spot of hope that Ida Yearance might be apprehended.
Ella shrugged. “New York, it’s so big . . .”
Philo sighed and nodded.
“From now on,” said Ella, “I’m going to call you Miss Green.” This epithet referred to the ease with which Philo had been taken in. “Miss Green, I’m going to put you up to a wrinkle or two. Have you ever been in a saloon?”
“No!”
“There’s a sign over the bar in every one, no matter how high, no matter how low.”
“Yes?”
“The sign reads: No Trust.”
Philo understood. “Miss Green is the name I deserve,” she admitted grimly. “Let me tell you about the dollar store.” And to Ella, she told with indignation what she had discovered of the ways and means of young women employed on Eighth Avenue.
Ella didn’t appear in the least surprised, but just before Philo finished, she interrupted. “Miss Green, you’re on a very high horse.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean,” said Ella, “that you’re looking down on me from a height.”
“Looking down on you?” cried Philo, realizing suddenly that Ella’s income might be got from sources as equivocal as the counter of the dollar store.
Ella was silent a few moments. She looked at Philo earnestly. “I came to the city in ’sixty-six,” said Ella, all the jocularity by which Philo knew her suspended. “I’ve been here six years, and now I’m twenty-two. I got honest employment. I made hoops for ladies’ skirts. We worked down in the basement below H. F. Claflin’s. There were forty girls who were older than me, and forty girls who were younger. Ten of us worked on hoops. I was never lonesome, that much I’ll say. We worked by gasl
ight, but there wasn’t a breath of air, and it was so hot that by nine o’clock my whole head felt as if I’d left it overnight in an oven. We had a slow season – that is, from spring until fall, when all the fashionable ladies are out-of-town – and then we worked seven hours a day. The other six months we worked eleven hours, and at holiday time we worked from seven in the morning until eleven at night. And another good thing – when you’ve been through a day like that, you sleep like the dead. Oh, Lord, I sat and I bent wire for the hoops, and I dreamed someday I’d be the height of fashion. I wore a tin dog collar around my neck, because on Sixth Avenue they were selling them in gold. My shoe had a French heel even though it made my legs ache. I went without my dinner sometimes so that I could buy a manicure set. Then hoops went out of fashion, and as I didn’t know how to do anything else, I was let go.”
Philo reflected that her own life in New Egypt had been not nearly so straitened.
“What did you do then?” she asked.
“I had a friend,” said Ella, “who advised me to advertise in the paper. I said I did not know anything but hoop-making, and now hoops were out of fashion. She smiled and said it did not matter. I was to advertise all the same, and I did so. I had,” said Ella delicately, “many replies.”
Philo didn’t quite understand and said so.
“I had many offers,” said Ella. “But none for employment at hoop-making.”
Philo now understood. “And did you—” She paused in consternation.
“Fall?” said Ella grimly. “Give in? Destroy at once my character and my chance at salvation?”
Philo was silent.
“Don’t speak to me of morality as if you was a big bug’s wife in a mansion on Madison Avenue!” warned Ella. “You’ll soon enough find what it is to be a lone girl in New York, without family and without friends, and you’ll be glad enough it’s summer so’s you don’t have to pay for coals for your Morning Glory stove!”
“There’s no excuse for immorality,” said Philo softly.