The Cutthroat, Page 3

  Bell gave him a copy of Anna’s picture. Now that the captain had the police “involved,” as Pape had put it, he intended to recruit extra eyes.

  “Sweet-looking kid,” Coligney said. “A hopeful actress explains why your sidekick Archie Abbott is hanging out in the theatricals’ saloons. The blue-blooded Mr. Archibald Abbott IV having been a thespian before you brought him into the agency.”

  Bell remained reticent.

  The captain probed drily, “It might even explain why Harry Warren’s Gang Squad is knocking on rooming house doors, though I’m not sure how far detectives disguised as gangsters will get with rooming house landladies. But it still doesn’t explain why you are gumshoeing personally—is the lassie’s father a big wheel?”

  “Not a Rockefeller or Judge Congdon, but big enough. Truth is, I had a couple of light days and felt sorry for the poor devil. He’s self-important and self-admiring—the richest man in the Brass City—but Anna is his only child, and it became clear to me that he loves her dearly.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Not a lot. I found a stage manager who sort of remembers hearing her read for a role. Archie found a callboy who told her ‘no parts.’ Harry found a landlady who thought she’d been looking for a room, three or four weeks ago. That would fit the time she left home, but if the name she gave was hers, she changed it for the stage.”

  “So did Lillian Russell.”

  “This one’s become ‘Anna Waterbury.’”

  “Homesick.”

  Bell and Abbott had made the rounds of dance and music schools, and the cheap eateries patronized by young actors starting out and older ones on the way down, and Bell was now finishing up low-cost laundries in the theater neighborhood. They had shown Anna’s photograph to landladies, young actors and actresses, and stage door tenders; a few thought they recognized her. In a tiny dressing room crammed with chorus girls at the Broadway Music Hall, Bell had found one who recognized her picture and recalled the name Anna Waterbury. So he was reasonably sure she was in New York, but still had no clue where.

  “Hospitals?” asked Coligney.

  “No Papes, no Waterburys.”

  “Morgue?”

  “Any unidentified young women I should know about?” Bell replied, doubting there were. He was neither especially concerned about young Anna’s safety nor surprised he hadn’t located her yet. New York was a huge city, and there were thousands of jobs for actresses in the vaudeville and dramatic theaters, in musicals and burlesque, and the road shows they spawned.

  “None as of an hour ago,” said Coligney. “Good to see you again, Isaac. Congratulations, by the way. I heard you finally persuaded Marion Morgan to marry you.”

  “Thank you. If there’s a luckier man on the planet, I haven’t met him.”

  “Lord knows what she sees in you.”

  “She’s funny that way,” Bell grinned back, and they shook hands good-bye.

  “Say hello to Joe Van Dorn.”

  “Can I tell him you’ll lend a hand?”

  The captain nodded. “I’ll pin up Anna’s picture and have my sergeants mention her at roll call.”

  Two days later, running out of options and growing concerned, Isaac Bell mounted the front steps of a brick mansion on a dimly lighted cross street in the Tenderloin. The doorman stood six-four and weighed two-fifty. “Good evening, sir. It seems years since we’ve had the honor.”

  “Good evening, Skinner. Would you tell Mr. Sayers I want to see him?”

  The doorman whispered into a voice tube.

  Nick Sayers, handsome proprietor of the Grove Mansion bordello—known as the “Ritz of the Tenderloin”—kept him waiting ten minutes. He was dressed in evening clothes and reeked of top-shelf cologne.

  “Mr. Bell. Dare I ask? Business-business or pleasure-business?”

  “Advice, Nick. In your office.”

  Sayers led him up the grand staircase and into his richly appointed office. He sat at his desk and offered Bell a chair. Bell took notice of a glass display cabinet filled with remarkably specific pornographic ceramic figurines. Sayers beamed proudly. “I’ve become a collector. Turns out, not every Staffordshire potter produces statues of spaniels—what sort of advice?”

  “Who recruits girls at Grand Central Terminal?”

  “Not the Grove Mansion.”

  “I am aware that you don’t lure them personally, Nick. Who does it for you? Who ambushes pretty country girls when they step off the train? Who promises a cushy life?”

  “Mr. Bell, I’ve really never felt the need to recruit. Young ladies come to the Grove Mansion as volunteers.”

  “Nick.”

  “Why don’t I parade my girls by you? You can see with your own eyes that they could work in any house in New York. They work here because they want to.”

  “Nick. The Van Dorn Detective Agency was not founded yesterday. Cheap pimps hunt poor farm daughters who can only afford steamers and trolleys at ferry piers and trolley stops. High class resorts like your ‘Ritz of the Tenderloin’ troll Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central for the class of girls who can purchase a railroad ticket to run away from home. I am looking for one particular well-off girl. I know she came by train. I know she arrived at Grand Central because she journeyed from Connecticut. I want to know who to interview at Grand Central. And I am running out of patience.”

  “Patience?” Sayers got indignant. “Isaac! You helped me, a long time ago, and I helped you. I call us even steven.”

  “Isaac instead of Mr. Bell? Sounds like you’re paying off ever-bigger friends at Tammany Hall.”

  “It would pay you to remember how to get along in this town. How dare you barge into my house, making threats?”

  “Threats?”

  Isaac Bell stood up, draped a big hand on the glass cabinet, tipped it forward, and slammed it down to the floor, shattering glass and smashing ceramics.

  Sayers gasped in disbelief. “Do you know what those cost?”

  “That was not a threat,” said Bell. “Who is snagging girls at Grand Central?”

  Sayers reached for his voice tube.

  Bell said, “If you call Skinner, you’ll need a new doorman. That’s not a threat, either.”

  The bordello procurer at Grand Central ran his operation from Nyren’s, a fancy station shop that sold French perfume, kid gloves, and silk scarves. Exquisitely dressed and barbered, he had the kindly, twinkly-eyed manner of an unmarried uncle. “May I help you, sir? Something for a young lady friend, perhaps?”

  “I don’t have a young lady friend.”

  Nyren delivered an indulgent wink. “Well, until you get one, why not something nice for your wife?”

  “What I want,” said Isaac Bell, “is a private conversation in your back room with each of your young gents who waylay girls off the trains and steer them in here.”

  The twinkle hardened with an edge like limelight. “I don’t know what you are talking about. If you haven’t come to make a purchase, please leave my shop.”

  “But first I want to talk to you, Mr. Nyren. I’m looking for this girl.”

  He held out Anna’s picture.

  Nyren pretended to study it. “I still don’t know what you are talking about, but I never met this girl.” Then, in an act that made the tall detective believe him, he dropped his mask long enough to leer, “I can assure you I never forget a pretty face.”

  “I will watch your shop for you while you round up your young gents. One at a time.”

  “I will call a policeman.”

  “I will, too,” said Bell, “and it won’t be one of the New York Central rail dicks you paid off. It will be his boss.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “A friend of the young lady’s family. Get them in here—now!”

  Three swaggered into the shop, one at a time as Bell
ordered. They were young, well dressed, and it was not hard to imagine a frightened girl falling for their polished manners and charming smiles. Bell greeted each politely. “I’m not here to put you out of business. I’m looking for one particular young lady and I would appreciate your help. My appreciation will take the form of a monetary reward.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred dollars,” said Bell. The figure, two months’ earnings for a day laborer, captured their attention. “Have you seen this girl?”

  Two shook their heads. The third said, “I remember her.”

  “When did you see her?”

  “Let me think . . . Month ago. Maybe five weeks.”

  The time was right, and Bell asked, “Did you speak?”

  “Tried to. She wasn’t buying any.”

  “What happened?”

  “She just brushed past like I wasn’t there and kept going.”

  “Did one of the other boys accost her?”

  “No. Only me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I followed her out on the street.”

  “Did you really? Which way did she go?”

  “Across 42nd.”

  “West?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far did you follow her?”

  “Fifth Avenue.”

  “Why’d you stop?”

  “She was walking like she knew where she was going. Or knew what she wanted. So I figured, this is not a girl I could convert.”

  Bell remained silent, and the brothel recruiter added, “Want to hear something funny?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I saw her a few weeks later—last week.”

  “Where?”

  “Over on Broadway. She was strolling with an old swell. You tell me what she’s about.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Old.”

  “Stooped over? Bent?”

  “No. Tall guy like you.”

  “What color was his hair?”

  “Gray.”

  “Beard?”

  “No, just a mustache.”

  “What color were his eyes?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t that close. Say, maybe I could go now? Maybe you could give me a piece of that hundred?”

  “Maybe I could,” said Isaac Bell. “You called him a swell. What was he wearing?”

  “Homburg and a cape. Looked like he walked straight out of the operetta. Even had a gold-headed cane.”

  “Frock coat under the cape?”

  “No. More like a pinchback.”

  “Pinchback?” Bell asked. “A bit up-to-date for an operetta.”

  “I thought so, too. Maybe the young lady took him shopping.”

  Bell passed him a one-hundred-dollar bill. “Here you go. Take a week off, give some poor girl a break.”

  “If I don’t get her, some other guy will.”

  Four men followed Isaac Bell from Grand Central and paced him on the other side of 44th Street. Snappy dressers—presentable for the neighborhood, if somewhat flashy in two-tone shoes—they might have been out-of-town buyers just off the train, or junior advertising men, except for their socks. The modern breed of Gopher street gangster favored yellow hose. They were still there when he crossed Fifth Avenue. A traffic cop shot them a look, but he had his hands full sorting carriages from motor trucks.

  Bell did not expect them to make their move on the block between Fifth and Sixth. Shared by garages and carriage houses, the Yale, New York Yacht, and Harvard clubs, and the Iroquois and Algonquin hotels, there were too many people. At Sixth Avenue, he crossed quickly under the El and stopped suddenly in the shadows of the overhead train trestle with his back to a stanchion.

  4

  The Gophers cut across traffic and blocked the sidewalk. Up close, scarred faces and missing teeth left no doubt they meant business. For reasons often debated by the Van Dorn Gang Squad, the shortest Gopher always did the talking.

  “Friend of the family?”

  Isaac Bell said, “Out of my way, boys.”

  The others took up the chorus and edged closer.

  “Mr. Do-good?”

  “Friend of the family.”

  “You’re gonna learn—stay outta people’s businesses.”

  The tallest made two mistakes. He forged ahead of the others and he lowered one hand to reach for his blackjack. Bell took advantage with a one-two combination that knocked the gangster to the pavement. Guard up—left hand and forearm protecting his chin and gut, right positioned to slough off a punch or throw his own—he bloodied a nose with a lightning jab and back-stepped as fast as he had waded in.

  “Last chance, boys. Out of my way.”

  The short guy laughed. He thrust out his hand with a sharp twist and his blackjack slid from his sleeve into his palm. “Last chance? Gonna fight three of us?”

  “Not while wearing my best suit.”

  Bell flared open his coat, revealing the use-polished grips of the Colt automatic in his shoulder holster. “I will shoot two and fight the last man standing.”

  Isaac Bell headed to the Bellevue Hospital morgue late the following afternoon, where he showed Anna’s photograph to a recently appointed assistant coroner.

  “I have no Anna Pape. And no Anna Waterbury.”

  “Any unknowns?” Bell asked.

  The new assistant was working hard to modernize the obsolete institution that had been run for too many years by a commission of elected, often unqualified, and occasionally corrupt coroners. Improvements included making a record of the dead with photographs. He flipped through the file pages, and Bell agreed when he said, “No kids like this one—funny you should ask, though. We might have a younger woman coming in later. Sounded like a murder. One of the bosses went over himself.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Tenderloin.”

  Bell asked for the address, caught the trolley across 34th Street, and strode swiftly down Eighth Avenue to West 29th Street. Captain Mike Coligney was standing outside a run-down building of flats. He was talking to a coroner Bell did not know personally and ignoring shouted questions from newspaper reporters held at bay by uniformed cops. Bell walked past, exchanged a private glance with Coligney, and waited half a block away until the official drove off in a Marmon.

  Coligney greeted him gravely. “Sorry, Isaac, she could be your girl.”

  “Who found her?”

  “The actor who lives here claims he came home from a month in the Midwest. He swears he didn’t know her. We’re holding him while we check, but it looks fairly certain he only left Pittsburgh this morning—the show he was in got canceled. She’s been dead at least a day.”

  The reporters’ shouts grew insistent. At an imperious glance from Coligney, his cops herded them farther down the street. He said to Bell, “I have six daughters. I won’t have salacious speculation about a child from a good home. It’s not that she was some unfortunate streetwalker.”

  “Did the neighbors hear anything?” Bell asked.

  “Not in the flat. Not in the hallway. Not in the lobby. We’re guessing she came under her own steam. In which case, she knew her killer.”

  “Unless she was carried in.”

  “We’ve got no witnesses to that. No, it looks personal. Vicious. Jealous rage.”

  “May I see her?” asked Bell.

  Coligney hesitated. Bell said, “A fresh pair of eyes can only help.”

  “You’ll write me a report.”

  “Of course. Thanks, Mike.”

  Coligney raised a cautioning hand. “I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything. But just so you know before you go in there, Isaac. She’s really been carved up.”

  5

  Isaac Bell stood still and catalogued the location and
condition of everything in the room. Personal possessions—Shakespeare plays on a shelf by an easy chair; busts and engravings of the actors Booth, Mansfield, Irving, and Jefferson; photographs of leading ladies, signed and framed; and a glass box stacked with programs—confirmed the actor’s alibi as much as the punched train ticket he had shown Captain Coligney’s detectives. It was more a home than a rented room, and it had been left neat as a pin, drapes drawn, bed made, wardrobe closed. Dust thinly layered tabletops, and a spiderweb linked the busts, but a landlady or a neighbor must have watered the house plant, a healthy geranium, during the month he was away. The windows were shut tight, and Bell guessed the air would smell musty if it weren’t for the blood scent that lingered. He made a mental note that the killer had known the place was empty. The actor was lucky his show hadn’t closed a day earlier or he’d be dead, too.

  She was on the bed, on her back, still half in her overcoat. Her hands were positioned at her sides, open, one in a glove, the other bare. Her palms bore no cuts. She had not fended off the knife. Her face, too, was unmarked, neither cut nor bruised. But it was swollen, and her skin was tinged blue. With her cheeks rounded in death, she looked remarkably similar to the cherubic photograph taken when she was fifteen.

  A circle of horizontal bruises around her neck paralleled the deep slice in her throat that had nearly cleaved her head from her torso. The absence of cuts on her hands, her blue-tinged skin, and the bruises gave Bell hope that the killer had strangled her before he went to work with his knife.

  The tall detective moved at last and stepped deeper into the room.

  Pools of blood had soaked her coat and the bedspread, but none had fountained onto the headboard and the walls, which Bell took as further evidence that her heart had stopped beating before arteries were severed. He counted ten crescent-shaped slices on her arms and legs; they varied in length, but were all shallow and had bled very little. Puzzled and curious, he copied them in his notebook.

  He inspected her fingernails. Two were broken, but he was surprised to see neither the blood nor torn skin he would expect from her scratching her killer’s wrists as she fought to live. For fought she must have, if only at the last moment. One of her boot heels was partly torn from the sole as she kicked against the floor or the bedpost.